You're right, we should remove all of the amendments to the US Constitution, then change the rules to disallow further amendments. Wait, I think one of us is confused.
What is war, if not killing human beings without charge or trial?
Assassination is not a just or legitimate part of war. In war, a person must be engaged in combat in order to be considered a legitimate target. Any person who is a danger when not engaged in combat is either a criminal—and should be treated as such: attempt to capture for trial—or an important military or political figure—and should be treated as such: attempt to capture for the duration of hostilities. This is an important moral and practical boundary, and it was devised to help to prevent abuse of force and to encourage international affairs that produce improved results. It may be that there is a better moral or practical arrangement that includes assassination, but it is not in evidence. The outcomes of military strategy without rules are well known and atrocious and we should all be prepared to reject them; and when we pick and choose rules according to what the public and the international community is willing to accept without effective resistance, the difference is only a matter of degree.
Personally, I prefer targeted killings to the alternatives. If there is person Y in country X planning to kill citizens of country Z, there are only so many ways to handle it. [Snip your list of alternatives]
There is another alternative, but it requires a sobering, honest appraisal of the grievances motivating person Y (or those who support or appease person Y). Given such an appraisal, it is often, maybe usually, possible to address the grievances in a productive manner and undermine person Y's motivations. Given the actual outcomes of the approaches you listed, the approach I'm suggesting should be pretty attractive. It's impossible to predict the future, but it's difficult to imagine that the outcomes of the approaches you listed will differ from those of previous applications of those same approaches. We shouldn't forget that the events which precipitated our war in Afghanistan-Pakistan involved nearly 3,000 civilian deaths in surprise attacks. We also shouldn't forget that those attacks, just like the ones which are no doubt being planned now, didn't occur in a vacuum.
We should end our support for the colonization of Muslim societies and land (Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Palestine were detailed in explaining the 9/11/2001 attacks; we can add Afghanistan and Pakistan to the list now, and while we're at it all of the other little dictatorships and fiefdoms we support). Not to appease terrorists, but because in an honest and moral analysis, it's the right thing to do, for ourselves and for those Muslims who are so enraged by it. It would truly advance our own security, and it would be a much more moral choice than even the naive picture of "kill person Y, and only person Y", especially when considering the murder and misery of our broader foreign policy.
That such an approach isn't even considered betrays the fact that none of our approaches are aimed at security, but rather at an agenda that sacrifices security in favor of hegemony and global privilege.
I am not disputing this, because I don't attend these sorts of events and I'm not aware that Apple even has a presence, but are you saying that Apple hires women to wear demeaning dress in order to attract a male audience? Or are you talking about the generally attractive hipsters—both male and female—who staff their retail stores and are assigned a dress code of a blue t-shirt—the same dress code for males and females? If you're talking about the former I'm honestly very surprised, as it's far from Apple's typical marketing approach, but I would believe it given some documentation. If you're talking about the latter, while I definitely think it's worth discussing the hiring practice, the labor practice is qualitatively different, and the marketing tactic is at least quantitatively different to a significant degree.
On your other points, I've resisted responding to similar comments throughout this post and I'm hesitant to get involved because I think I'd become physically ill. But I can't ignore one point because it's a question more of fact than of values:
The problem with boycotting is you wouldn't be able to buy much from food to computers.
You're enormously overstating this. Electronics, being inherently a high-cost volume industry, is certainly vulnerable to being dominated by trends like degradation of women, but few other sectors share this problem. Your only other example—food—is among* the worst you could choose. Food is not a high-cost volume industry (nor even necessarily industrial) by its nature, despite the fact that it has become so dominated. In most places that humans live, it's possible to supply one's own food with one's own efforts, without any social interaction. In most places, there are also food suppliers across the spectrum (farmers, hunters, butchers, you name it) who don't even have a marketing budget much less a marketing campaign of this nature. There is certainly a huge opportunity for choice in food. I can't speak to the universality of that opportunity economically, but I do know that where I live a farmer's market diet is at least as affordable as a Safeway diet, and a meager effort at gardening makes it a clear advantage. This is a dynamic that higher-technology industries doesn't share, and on that you have a point: it's certainly tough if not impossible to make a truly ethical choice for electronics, and I might even argue that's an inherent flaw in higher technology.
* I wish wish wish you'd chosen beer—another industry for which "sex sells" has become a sad reality at least on the largest scale—as your other example, so I could rattle about its history as a craft primarily done by women, until usurped by men.
I think the captcha on Coding Horror used to always be "orange". I don't know how much time Atwood spent deleting spam, but I certainly never saw any (besides his own).
i propose first we start with a simple new federal law. if you take food stamps, WIC, SNAP, etc., you are required to be surgically sterlized. start with the negligent parents who can't afford children. if they start to prosper they can afford to reverse the surgery. till then, i don't give a damn who feels "offended" by this - if you can barely afford to feed yourself and you want to have children who are going to go hungry, you don't deserve to have children you selfish fuck. anybody wanna calmly, with logic, tell me why that is faulty?
I dont know why the above comment was moderated negatively.
Can't speak for the mods, but perhaps one of the things that prompted a negative reaction (despite many glowing responses) is an education about the harmfulness of eugenics and the enormous logical flaws in its reasoning. And maybe bonus points for following a tremendously selfish proposal with "you selfish fuck" followed by "calmly, with logic".
Aside from the generic eugenics critique, the specific idea promotes a value that childbearing is earned; it promotes a value that people who have been harmed by the economy are less worthy; it promotes a value that social programs are a burden on the most powerful in society and a handout to the most powerless, rather than a benefit to the entire society; it promotes the ludicrous idea that bearing children is a net burden on either the family or the society; it imposes a set of additional costs in money and management bureaucracy on the social programs the beneficiary has, in aggregate, already paid for; it shifts those costs away from the entire society which benefits from the programs and onto the people least able to carry the burden; it sets up a regime where some people get to determine whether other people can bear children; the regime that determines eligibility for childbearing is designed by those actually responsible for the economic harm to the people affected by the proposed law; this regime is implemented by bureaucrats who, among other things, cannot be elected or recalled; and it completely fails to reason with the fact that poor people, on the whole, have children for the important reason that mouths to feed are attached to hands to help.
It's true that a growing population can be a burden on the ecosystem, and that we're facing that burden now. It doesn't follow that the most elementary and ignorant proposal—a proposal with the rigor of 1930s fascism but none of its famed efficiency—is the appropriate solution. And it's fascinating but unfortunately unsurprising that the supposedly "rational" among us are accelerating the rhetorical war against the most powerless in society while powerlessness is being showered on us. It's cowardly and anything but rational. And if it goes unchallenged, it becomes increasingly likely that we'll see this sort of eugenic ethic find a comfortable sea in which to swim in a revival of that 30s-era fascism.
There are far better ways to address population growth, the most obvious two being the elimination of poverty and the empowerment of women. Remarkably, in so doing we will have also established the political will to address the problems of a declining and aging population as well: we will have a public policy of solidarity, health and wellbeing rather than ignorance, division and blame. And we can do it with less cost and less risk.
"Long" is a relative measurement, and in the sense of "old" a "long time" tends to be relative to normal lifespan. By definition, a 6 month baby is "old"... relative to a mayfly.
I think we are both arguing the same point here. I'm not against accurate labelling of food - I think it is essential. What I am against is forcing a label that has been tainted onto current and all future GM foods.
I don't think we're arguing the same point. You're contradicting yourself by dismissing accurate labeling because you're worried that the accurate labeling would discourage purchases. No one is asking for a warning that says "GMO may be harmful", at least I'm not. I'm promoting "made with genetically engineered ingredients" or something similar. Even better, the individual ingredients should be called out.
That is why I chose the Dasani example - the brand was tainted and stopped selling. If Coke were to bring that product back to the UK they certainly wouldn't call it Dasani again (or release any new product under that name).
But the example is ludicrous. They were selling carcinogenic water! Customers have a right to know that! And they have a right to avoid the product! And Coca-cola has no right to withhold that information to protect their brand! This is the way a market is "supposed" to work!
The problem would be if a regulator forced them to put a label on the bottle that said "this product is Dasani".
That is in no way analogous, in no way whatsoever. They should be required to list the ingredient—carcinogenic water. It doesn't matter what brand label they choose.
We need a term that has not been trashed by the anti-GM crowd, that's all.
Why? As I've said in other comments, I'm perfectly open to choosing a term that is more informative and less confusing. But I don't see any particular reason to choose a term on the basis that it hasn't been a target of public awareness campaigns—right or wrong.
I'm not arguing for obfuscation at all.
The hell you aren't. You justexplicitly argued for choosing a term that is not associated with an ongoing public discourse around the topic. That is obfuscation.
I just don't think it's fair that the only option for labelling is effectively "you must now label any GM product with 'warning, this is a franken-food!' label".
I don't think that's true of the term GM, GMO or "genetically engineered" or "biologically engineered", the options I've heard promoted so far. But even if it is true, the label doesn't explicitly say that. It's a product of public discourse. No producer is entitled to choose not to inform their customers because the information might evoke negative reactions. This is why we have informational labeling mandated by law: so people can choose to buy the products which meet their needs or desires, and avoid the products which don't.
Your opinion isn't very convincing, particularly without any supporting argument. There are plenty of reasons a person would want to know if their food is GMO, and many of them have absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the science behind GMO per se. I might want to avoid crops grown using monoculture, I might want to avoid contributing to the commercial success of companies I dislike for other reasons, I might even want to go out of my way to buy GMO products. Why should I not be allowed to know whether my food was genetically engineered? Why are those claiming I'm "not informed" promoting institutionalized ignorance?
No, it's clearly a value-based term when discussing the information you consider when buying a food product.
Knowing if something has peanuts or gluten or soy is essential.
This is because informed consent about consuming common allergens is a value we've built into our labeling regime.
It isn't being a market worshiper to say that rules and regulations should be based on what makes sense, not whoever shouts the loudest.
It's being a market worshiper to say that those dominant in the market should be able to determine what information they withhold from their customers rather than their customers being able to determine what information they choose to base their purchase decisions on.
Haram food m might send you to hell. Don't people deserve to know that about their food?
Yep! People do deserve to know about their food. All of the details they choose to know.
Some people think that vaccines cause autism
And people should be able to make an informed decision about how and what to vaccinate. That includes knowing whether or not a vaccine uses mercury or any other ingredient they would base this decision on.
and some people want textbooks to carry warning labels for evolution
This is hardly analogous, as "ingredients" in textbooks can be easily discovered by reading the textbook.
Hey, some people believe it, or doesn't democracy mean that your ignorance is just as good as my knowledge?
Er, I'm saying that democracy should be able to promote knowledge—you're the one insisting that GMO food producers should be entitled to use their market weight to ensure ignorance by preventing informed consent.
Just because one does not seek it out does not meet that it should be forced onto products.
You cannot discover the information unless it is labeled. There's nowhere to seek it out. You're promoting a labeling regime that reinforces this, I'm promoting a labeling regime that allows customers to seek out the information.
You are just playing the lazy victim and trying to scare people about a non-issue.
You are just trying to justify irrationally singling out a single aspect of food because anti-science assholes have spend years demonizing it and now want to give their nonsense validity by requiring special warning labels.
In the post you're replying to, I reiterated a list of aspects of food that I want to know about. You ignored it twice. I'm not singling out anything. And I'm not making any comment about the science of GMO, nor calling it "bad", nor asking for "warning" labels. I'm promoting an effort of customers to be better informed about the products they're purchasing. Your characterization is entirely your own making, it reveals your extremely irrational bias—to the point that you're using all sorts of strawman argumentation to avoid admitting that you're promoting corporate-driven ignorance over informed consent.
Informed consent. It's a principle of a functioning market and a functioning democracy. Stop avoiding the concept and deal with it on its merits. Stop putting words into my mouth.
No, they are not entitled to successful food sales, but they are entitled to fair treatment. That is the point of the argument.
That seems to be the point of agreement, at least from what I can tell. They're entitled to fair treatment, and so are customers. (Unless the point of the argument is that only the producers, and only the producers of GMO, are entitled to "fair" treatment, which stinks of "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" to me.) No one has attempted to demonstrate that being required to label facts is "unfair". GMO may (it remains to be seen) suffer poor public perception, and awareness of fact may lead to customers deciding that GMO food products should fail. But that is, again, a question of informed consent. Hiding the fact to protect GMO market success is not "fair", it's preferential treatment. And it creates a condition where consumers are unwittingly buying products they, apparently, would prefer not to buy—because they don't know.
GM food's commercial failure might turn out to be a "problem" in the long run, or it might not be. We have no idea how things will play out as the population increases.
That sounds like something GMO food producers could advocate, if they weren't so busy trying to prevent informed consent among their customers.
They're not asking for special treatment, they're just asking to not be treated unfairly.
This is patently absurd. It is special treatment to be able to sell food in the US without proper labeling. It's not unfair to be required to label all ingredients. Corn and GMO "corn" are different ingredients (the latter contains properties of a bacteria used for pesticide, the former does not), but currently the labeling regime does not allow customers to distinguish them. It is customers who are being treated unfairly.
Coke had to stop selling Dasani bottled water here in the UK because it was found to contain higher-than-average (but still tiny) quantities of carcinogenic water, at higher levels than the tap water it's made from, earning it the nickname "cancer water". Unsurprisingly the sales tanked, and never recovered and it was withdrawn from sale.
That's great! Notwithstanding my feelings about the Coca-cola corporation*, this is how informed consent is supposed to work. Coca-cola sells a product with carcinogenic ingredients; customers reject carcinogenic ingredients; product fails. How is that "unfair"? Coca-cola is not entitled to market success for Dasani, nor to sell carcinogenic ingredients to customers, even in tiny quantities, without their consent. I am completely baffled that this is an example you chose. Am I supposed to conclude that Coca-cola should have been able to sell their carcinogenic water to customers, and that they should have been able to do so without the customers' consent?
* Their labor and environmental practices are astoundingly bad.
The "GM" label has taken on the same negative connotations - just look at some of the other descriptions in this very thread, like "franken-food" and so on. It certainly wasn't the food manufacturers who categorised GM foods in this way.
It doesn't matter. "Contains GMO ingredients" (or "genetically engineered" or "biologically engineered" or any other factual and meaningful labeling) is a statement of fact, and it's a factor that customers want to consider when purchasing food. If they have a negative bias against GMO products, for whatever reason, they won't buy the products when labeled, but won't be able to avoid those products when not labeled. You are arguing that it's unfair for people to be able to avoid a product they don't want to purchase. That makes no sense, unless you really do believe that these producers are entitled to market success by preventing informed consent.
I already posted this as a response to another of your comments (which you ignored) but I'll repost it for the benefit of context.
There are tons of things that are not known to be unsafe but must be labeled in food products. Just taking for granted that it's safe even though it hasn't been proven safe doesn't preclude labeling. I want to know about the food that I eat, including (but not limited to):
- use of biological engineering - use of chemical (petroleum) fertilizer - use of chemical (petroleum) pesticide - labor conditions - animal husbandry conditions - how many miles the food traveled - which corporations' products were used in production - which corporations' influence affected policy around all of the above
You may not want to know those things, but what appropriate motive is there to prevent me from knowing them?
Not being a market worshipper, but wanting to be a member of a democratic society, I recognize that the state is the apparatus we've placed in charge of ensuring that contracts and commerce are based on informed consent. You are not the arbiter of what factors people consider "essential" when buying a product. If a polity comes together and decides that it wants to know these sorts of facts about their food, the correct way to implement that is by law. Because it's a question of informed consent.Then and only then can GMO experience legitimate market success or failure. It's bewildering to hear it suggested that market demand should be determined based on ignorance about a product feature that customers want to know about.
Would you guys stop saying this about EVERY. DAMN. THING. please?
Not until people stop complaining about speech rights of corporations. They have no such rights. But you'll notice that I addressed the issue from the perspective that the rules apply to human people as well.
The rule is a matter of informed consent, and that's true whether the rule applies to corporations (who have no right to protected speech) or to human people (who do).
Makes sense to me. Broccolini isn't broccoli or kale. A mule isn't a donkey or a horse. Something that has some of the properties of corn and some of the properties of a bacteria used as pesticide... is not corn.
Who cares whether it's been demonized or not, or whether the demonization is valid or not? GM food producers are not entitled to successful GM food sales, and they certainly don't have a right to obstruct informed consent to secure those sales, and GM food's commercial failure as a result of factual information is not a "problem".
I'm perfectly happy to find the best semantic representation for labeling that retains the property of "informative to potential customers". If that's "genetically engineered", so be it, and I don't know anyone else who objects to that term. The point is that we need to be informed in order to consent, and I see no reason to be married to any particular terminology as long as "informed" isn't lost.
If simple statement of fact of the contents of the food product ("contains GMOs") produces fear, uncertainty or doubt (and apparently the absence of such information does not produce uncertainty or doubt), then they shouldn't be selling it. Notification is not the same thing as warning.
Speech isn't relevant, corporations are not people. Moreover, mandatory labeling is a requirement of informed consent. It is what enables me to avoid buying "cheese food" that is neither cheese nor food. Food producers are not entitled to mislead customers about the contents of their products in order to boost sales.
There are tons of things that are not known to be unsafe but must be labeled in food products. Just taking for granted that it's safe even though it hasn't been proven safe doesn't preclude labeling. I want to know about the food that I eat, including (but not limited to):
- use of biological engineering - use of chemical (petroleum) fertilizer - use of chemical (petroleum) pesticide - labor conditions - animal husbandry conditions - how many miles the food traveled - which corporations' products were used in production - which corporations' influence affected policy around all of the above
You may not want to know those things, but what appropriate motive is there to prevent me from knowing them?
I replied to some of the points in this post in the other post, so I'll refer to that response rather than repeating myself. I am not dodging, just adhering to DRY principles!
Well, that's my point
And you conveniently omitted the context where I explained the absurdity of your point. Being a contrived example, I pointed out that yes, while "very little functionality is lost", there is still no benefit to arbitrarily excluding clients which are perfectly capable of that functionality.
You can't just say "always use feature detection" because that is not always necessary
Yes, I can, and yes, it is. You still have to do the feature detection to support your known environments. There's no reason to do additional work for no benefit.
there are cases where the simple site is not significantly less functional than the full-featured site, and limiting your test configurations at the expense of browser support becomes economically viable.
I'm not advocating adding test configurations, so I don't know what you're talking about. Using proper development techniques, there's no reason to add test configurations.
I disagree. Screening for UA is very, very simple. I'd hesitate to call it "work" except that you will probably get paid to do it.
1 > 0. It's not a matter of fucking opinion.
If someone handed me a pile of old code and told me to make it work with IE6-9, Firefox 3-11, and the latest Chrome, I'd probably jump to the UA solution initially.
Then they should hand someone else the code.
Feature detection is not something that would easily bolt-on to legacy code.
You're right. That's one huge reason that UA-sniffing as a legacy is so fucking harmful. Properly written code from 10 years ago (that is, using feature detection) will not have this trouble.
If I were writing from scratch, I would probably use feature detection, but then I'd still do a UA check against my test configurations and warn the user if they are unsupported. So either way, I'd have to do the UA check.
Write code which properly requests client features, and warn for unsupported configurations? Sounds like exactly what I've been suggesting this whole time. Gee whiz!
And that's if marketing lets me ugly-up their site with a warning. If they don't, I might still have to fall back to a basic version of the site to be conservative.
If your code is written properly, the warning is excessive insurance, and the fallback will happen automatically. Marketing would surely prefer better functionality than worse functionality, yes? The warning can be in your terms, on your support page, or any discreet place you wish. And it doesn't require a single line of UA-sniffing code, it can be in plain HTML.
I imagine it would increase their tech support costs.
How the fuck would it do that? They don't bloody support Opera at all.
That's just a design choice.
Yes, a code design choice! It's a code design that does not arbitrarily block unknown configs that are perfectly capable of identifying the features they support.
Any good solution would still require the user to click to acknowledge the warning - you don't want to just pop up a box for a few seconds and auto-hide it, and there's no reason to ugly-up the page with a permanent warning.
A better solution would be to provide an unobtrusive but present-until-acknowledged warning that goes away until its acknowledgment cookie expires. An even better solution would be to write safe code in the first place, providing a notice in some discreet location as extraneous insurance if you're paranoid.
The risk is that your site will fail in a way that you did not anticipate.
The hell it will! It's quite obvious you don't know the first thing about progressive enhancement. The entire purpose is to anticipate failures, and to accommodate them by falling back to a simpler version; this is effectively what you would expect in your supported environments as well. In some cases, there simply is no simpler version (the example I used is canvas), in which case the API correctly anticipates this and allows a fallback message—the same fucking message you would present with an arbitrary and overly broad UA-based block. In the absolute worst case scenario, you get the same outcome you're promoting. Everything else is improved functionality for every user of a modern browser you didn't test. There is literally no risk in this approach that isn't inherent in web development, and there's substantially less risk of putting off customers/clients/users than the use of arbitrary UA-sniffing.
You can't possibly state that without knowing the starting condition of the code and the ultimate complexity of the site you are coding.
Yes, I can! I know it from experience, both from inheriting existing code bases and from building extremely complex web applications. The existing code bases that depend on arbitrary UA-sniffing are by definition incomplete for future browser releases, and require either tedious and labor-intensive maintenance or a complete rewrite as they age; the existing code bases that depend on feature detection effectively work the same or improve with future browser releases, and require little to no maintenance for existing features; the complex web applications I built in the past that depended on UA-sniffing or other naive browser-based branching were much the same as inherited UA-sniffing code bases; the complex web applications I built with progressive enhancement required none of this addition complexity or effort.
Sure, that's all anecdotal. Okay, let's just look at the code and its implications. Understand that I'm writing simplified pseudo-code for the sake of brevity and digestibility.
// Here we determine whether fullscreen can be entered, if so we enter it, else we provide a fallback if(someNode.requestFullScreen) {
someNode.requestFullScreen(); } else {// Fail gracefully }
// Here, knowing that IE versions through 9 don't support fullscreen, so we detect IE version and attempt to enter fullscreen if(!$.browser.ie || $.browser.ie >= 10) {
someNode.requestFullScreen(); } else {// Fail arbitrarily }
(Note that the second example is abusing pseudocode, as presumably your UA-sniff would be outside the script entirely and restrict access to the entire script. But it's fundamentally the same approach.)
Do you see the problem? Obviously, being simplified, the actual list of arbitrary browsers (whether a whitelist or blacklist) would be much more ridiculous and arbitrary and error-prone. But, to simplify, what if IE10 doesn't support fullscreen? Runtime error, failure to execute code below. Well, suppose we exclude IE10 as well. We're then adding the additional cost and labor (including tracking this as a task to do, and the mental cost of revisiting a particular implementation detail potentially months later) of going back and correcting if IE10 does support fullscreen, or even more likely simply forgetting to do so and leaving all IE10 users in the lurch, potentially some dozens of percentage of your users.
The first example simply lacks any of this cost or potential for failure, and is much simpler to implement.
There's a third approach—combining the two—and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is what you'd a
I see it as an additional risk and an added complication.
I've already addressed risk in another post, but I'll ask again: what risk? You already don't support the configuration, what is the risk in letting the user's browser use the features it supports?
As far as complication, I can assure you that you're wrong. Progressive enhancement greatly simplifies web development. It simplifies testing. It simplifies cross-browser fixes. It simplifies your code, and ensures a greater degree of correctness from the outset.
Can you honestly say that the meager difference between unsupported Google search and supported Google search merits this kind of system?
Yes, absolutely. The difference between the two isn't at issue, what's at issue is the harmful approach of wrongheaded development approaches:whitelisting browsers based on name rather than safely using features as they are available. Even the simplest site merits progressive enhancement, because it's the correct approach to arrive at a universally usable site without making arbitrary and ignorant guesses about things you can't possibly know.
Keep in mind that there are new browsers coming out pretty frequently, and being prepared for them is better than not. Progressive enhancement provides that kind of forward-compatibility. UA-sniffing by definition does not.
You are correct - but there is less risk in the first place if you offer those untested configurations the simplest site that is acceptable to marketing.
No, there isn't! There's no risk at all of providing more features to an unsupported environment.
It's all about tradeoffs... If we return to the Google example, they use both strategies. On their main search page, the parts that require a modern web browser are mostly fluff - the auto-search-as-you-type, the animated logo, the Google+ integration, the preview sidebar... Very little actual functionality is lost by just showing a simple, old-fashioned Google search page to unknown clients.
Sure, it's a contrived example. But even so, Opera is capable of all of those features, and if the code is written properly in the first place it would require no extra work on Google's part. Actively blocking access to those features requires more work.
Now surf on over to Google Docs and try to use that with an unsupported browser. First it tests for JavaScript and warns you about that. Then it does some kind of UA check, directs you to a link showing what platforms are supported, but tells you that you can still use the page by adding ?browserok=true to the url (along with a shortcut link that does this for you). At this point, it gives it the ol' college try.
So, imagine a scenario where your browser just adds "&browserok=true" to every Google URL. How does this harm or increase risk to Google?
I think that is a very reasonable balance of the two methods, because it lets a knowledgeable user try without resorting to UA spoofing, but lets you know that your configuration is untested and the functionality is not guaranteed. I contend that their search page is simple enough that it wouldn't make any sense to burden the user with these extra steps.
Why not just provide the notice and be done with it? Why require any step from the user?
Slashdot Mirror
How do you figure IE9 fits into that?
Well I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.
You're right, we should remove all of the amendments to the US Constitution, then change the rules to disallow further amendments. Wait, I think one of us is confused.
What is war, if not killing human beings without charge or trial?
Assassination is not a just or legitimate part of war. In war, a person must be engaged in combat in order to be considered a legitimate target. Any person who is a danger when not engaged in combat is either a criminal—and should be treated as such: attempt to capture for trial—or an important military or political figure—and should be treated as such: attempt to capture for the duration of hostilities. This is an important moral and practical boundary, and it was devised to help to prevent abuse of force and to encourage international affairs that produce improved results. It may be that there is a better moral or practical arrangement that includes assassination, but it is not in evidence. The outcomes of military strategy without rules are well known and atrocious and we should all be prepared to reject them; and when we pick and choose rules according to what the public and the international community is willing to accept without effective resistance, the difference is only a matter of degree.
Personally, I prefer targeted killings to the alternatives. If there is person Y in country X planning to kill citizens of country Z, there are only so many ways to handle it. [Snip your list of alternatives]
There is another alternative, but it requires a sobering, honest appraisal of the grievances motivating person Y (or those who support or appease person Y). Given such an appraisal, it is often, maybe usually, possible to address the grievances in a productive manner and undermine person Y's motivations. Given the actual outcomes of the approaches you listed, the approach I'm suggesting should be pretty attractive. It's impossible to predict the future, but it's difficult to imagine that the outcomes of the approaches you listed will differ from those of previous applications of those same approaches. We shouldn't forget that the events which precipitated our war in Afghanistan-Pakistan involved nearly 3,000 civilian deaths in surprise attacks. We also shouldn't forget that those attacks, just like the ones which are no doubt being planned now, didn't occur in a vacuum.
We should end our support for the colonization of Muslim societies and land (Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Palestine were detailed in explaining the 9/11/2001 attacks; we can add Afghanistan and Pakistan to the list now, and while we're at it all of the other little dictatorships and fiefdoms we support). Not to appease terrorists, but because in an honest and moral analysis, it's the right thing to do, for ourselves and for those Muslims who are so enraged by it. It would truly advance our own security, and it would be a much more moral choice than even the naive picture of "kill person Y, and only person Y", especially when considering the murder and misery of our broader foreign policy.
That such an approach isn't even considered betrays the fact that none of our approaches are aimed at security, but rather at an agenda that sacrifices security in favor of hegemony and global privilege.
Apple uses nice looking females too I noticed
I am not disputing this, because I don't attend these sorts of events and I'm not aware that Apple even has a presence, but are you saying that Apple hires women to wear demeaning dress in order to attract a male audience? Or are you talking about the generally attractive hipsters—both male and female—who staff their retail stores and are assigned a dress code of a blue t-shirt—the same dress code for males and females? If you're talking about the former I'm honestly very surprised, as it's far from Apple's typical marketing approach, but I would believe it given some documentation. If you're talking about the latter, while I definitely think it's worth discussing the hiring practice, the labor practice is qualitatively different, and the marketing tactic is at least quantitatively different to a significant degree.
On your other points, I've resisted responding to similar comments throughout this post and I'm hesitant to get involved because I think I'd become physically ill. But I can't ignore one point because it's a question more of fact than of values:
The problem with boycotting is you wouldn't be able to buy much from food to computers.
You're enormously overstating this. Electronics, being inherently a high-cost volume industry, is certainly vulnerable to being dominated by trends like degradation of women, but few other sectors share this problem. Your only other example—food—is among* the worst you could choose. Food is not a high-cost volume industry (nor even necessarily industrial) by its nature, despite the fact that it has become so dominated. In most places that humans live, it's possible to supply one's own food with one's own efforts, without any social interaction. In most places, there are also food suppliers across the spectrum (farmers, hunters, butchers, you name it) who don't even have a marketing budget much less a marketing campaign of this nature. There is certainly a huge opportunity for choice in food. I can't speak to the universality of that opportunity economically, but I do know that where I live a farmer's market diet is at least as affordable as a Safeway diet, and a meager effort at gardening makes it a clear advantage. This is a dynamic that higher-technology industries doesn't share, and on that you have a point: it's certainly tough if not impossible to make a truly ethical choice for electronics, and I might even argue that's an inherent flaw in higher technology.
* I wish wish wish you'd chosen beer—another industry for which "sex sells" has become a sad reality at least on the largest scale—as your other example, so I could rattle about its history as a craft primarily done by women, until usurped by men.
I think the captcha on Coding Horror used to always be "orange". I don't know how much time Atwood spent deleting spam, but I certainly never saw any (besides his own).
i propose first we start with a simple new federal law. if you take food stamps, WIC, SNAP, etc., you are required to be surgically sterlized. start with the negligent parents who can't afford children. if they start to prosper they can afford to reverse the surgery. till then, i don't give a damn who feels "offended" by this - if you can barely afford to feed yourself and you want to have children who are going to go hungry, you don't deserve to have children you selfish fuck. anybody wanna calmly, with logic, tell me why that is faulty?
I dont know why the above comment was moderated negatively.
Can't speak for the mods, but perhaps one of the things that prompted a negative reaction (despite many glowing responses) is an education about the harmfulness of eugenics and the enormous logical flaws in its reasoning. And maybe bonus points for following a tremendously selfish proposal with "you selfish fuck" followed by "calmly, with logic".
Aside from the generic eugenics critique, the specific idea promotes a value that childbearing is earned; it promotes a value that people who have been harmed by the economy are less worthy; it promotes a value that social programs are a burden on the most powerful in society and a handout to the most powerless, rather than a benefit to the entire society; it promotes the ludicrous idea that bearing children is a net burden on either the family or the society; it imposes a set of additional costs in money and management bureaucracy on the social programs the beneficiary has, in aggregate, already paid for; it shifts those costs away from the entire society which benefits from the programs and onto the people least able to carry the burden; it sets up a regime where some people get to determine whether other people can bear children; the regime that determines eligibility for childbearing is designed by those actually responsible for the economic harm to the people affected by the proposed law; this regime is implemented by bureaucrats who, among other things, cannot be elected or recalled; and it completely fails to reason with the fact that poor people, on the whole, have children for the important reason that mouths to feed are attached to hands to help.
It's true that a growing population can be a burden on the ecosystem, and that we're facing that burden now. It doesn't follow that the most elementary and ignorant proposal—a proposal with the rigor of 1930s fascism but none of its famed efficiency—is the appropriate solution. And it's fascinating but unfortunately unsurprising that the supposedly "rational" among us are accelerating the rhetorical war against the most powerless in society while powerlessness is being showered on us. It's cowardly and anything but rational. And if it goes unchallenged, it becomes increasingly likely that we'll see this sort of eugenic ethic find a comfortable sea in which to swim in a revival of that 30s-era fascism.
There are far better ways to address population growth, the most obvious two being the elimination of poverty and the empowerment of women. Remarkably, in so doing we will have also established the political will to address the problems of a declining and aging population as well: we will have a public policy of solidarity, health and wellbeing rather than ignorance, division and blame. And we can do it with less cost and less risk.
"Long" is a relative measurement, and in the sense of "old" a "long time" tends to be relative to normal lifespan. By definition, a 6 month baby is "old"... relative to a mayfly.
I think we are both arguing the same point here. I'm not against accurate labelling of food - I think it is essential. What I am against is forcing a label that has been tainted onto current and all future GM foods.
I don't think we're arguing the same point. You're contradicting yourself by dismissing accurate labeling because you're worried that the accurate labeling would discourage purchases. No one is asking for a warning that says "GMO may be harmful", at least I'm not. I'm promoting "made with genetically engineered ingredients" or something similar. Even better, the individual ingredients should be called out.
That is why I chose the Dasani example - the brand was tainted and stopped selling. If Coke were to bring that product back to the UK they certainly wouldn't call it Dasani again (or release any new product under that name).
But the example is ludicrous. They were selling carcinogenic water! Customers have a right to know that! And they have a right to avoid the product! And Coca-cola has no right to withhold that information to protect their brand! This is the way a market is "supposed" to work!
The problem would be if a regulator forced them to put a label on the bottle that said "this product is Dasani".
That is in no way analogous, in no way whatsoever. They should be required to list the ingredient—carcinogenic water. It doesn't matter what brand label they choose.
We need a term that has not been trashed by the anti-GM crowd, that's all.
Why? As I've said in other comments, I'm perfectly open to choosing a term that is more informative and less confusing. But I don't see any particular reason to choose a term on the basis that it hasn't been a target of public awareness campaigns—right or wrong.
I'm not arguing for obfuscation at all.
The hell you aren't. You just explicitly argued for choosing a term that is not associated with an ongoing public discourse around the topic. That is obfuscation.
I just don't think it's fair that the only option for labelling is effectively "you must now label any GM product with 'warning, this is a franken-food!' label".
I don't think that's true of the term GM, GMO or "genetically engineered" or "biologically engineered", the options I've heard promoted so far. But even if it is true, the label doesn't explicitly say that. It's a product of public discourse. No producer is entitled to choose not to inform their customers because the information might evoke negative reactions. This is why we have informational labeling mandated by law: so people can choose to buy the products which meet their needs or desires, and avoid the products which don't.
Your opinion isn't very convincing, particularly without any supporting argument. There are plenty of reasons a person would want to know if their food is GMO, and many of them have absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the science behind GMO per se. I might want to avoid crops grown using monoculture, I might want to avoid contributing to the commercial success of companies I dislike for other reasons, I might even want to go out of my way to buy GMO products. Why should I not be allowed to know whether my food was genetically engineered? Why are those claiming I'm "not informed" promoting institutionalized ignorance?
Essential has a pretty clear definition.
No, it's clearly a value-based term when discussing the information you consider when buying a food product.
Knowing if something has peanuts or gluten or soy is essential.
This is because informed consent about consuming common allergens is a value we've built into our labeling regime.
It isn't being a market worshiper to say that rules and regulations should be based on what makes sense, not whoever shouts the loudest.
It's being a market worshiper to say that those dominant in the market should be able to determine what information they withhold from their customers rather than their customers being able to determine what information they choose to base their purchase decisions on.
Haram food m might send you to hell. Don't people deserve to know that about their food?
Yep! People do deserve to know about their food. All of the details they choose to know.
Some people think that vaccines cause autism
And people should be able to make an informed decision about how and what to vaccinate. That includes knowing whether or not a vaccine uses mercury or any other ingredient they would base this decision on.
and some people want textbooks to carry warning labels for evolution
This is hardly analogous, as "ingredients" in textbooks can be easily discovered by reading the textbook.
Hey, some people believe it, or doesn't democracy mean that your ignorance is just as good as my knowledge?
Er, I'm saying that democracy should be able to promote knowledge—you're the one insisting that GMO food producers should be entitled to use their market weight to ensure ignorance by preventing informed consent.
Just because one does not seek it out does not meet that it should be forced onto products.
You cannot discover the information unless it is labeled. There's nowhere to seek it out. You're promoting a labeling regime that reinforces this, I'm promoting a labeling regime that allows customers to seek out the information.
You are just playing the lazy victim and trying to scare people about a non-issue.
Lazy? Victim? Scare? Whut. I'm promoting informed consent.
You are just trying to justify irrationally singling out a single aspect of food because anti-science assholes have spend years demonizing it and now want to give their nonsense validity by requiring special warning labels.
In the post you're replying to, I reiterated a list of aspects of food that I want to know about. You ignored it twice. I'm not singling out anything. And I'm not making any comment about the science of GMO, nor calling it "bad", nor asking for "warning" labels. I'm promoting an effort of customers to be better informed about the products they're purchasing. Your characterization is entirely your own making, it reveals your extremely irrational bias—to the point that you're using all sorts of strawman argumentation to avoid admitting that you're promoting corporate-driven ignorance over informed consent.
Informed consent. It's a principle of a functioning market and a functioning democracy. Stop avoiding the concept and deal with it on its merits. Stop putting words into my mouth.
No, they are not entitled to successful food sales, but they are entitled to fair treatment. That is the point of the argument.
That seems to be the point of agreement, at least from what I can tell. They're entitled to fair treatment, and so are customers. (Unless the point of the argument is that only the producers, and only the producers of GMO, are entitled to "fair" treatment, which stinks of "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" to me.) No one has attempted to demonstrate that being required to label facts is "unfair". GMO may (it remains to be seen) suffer poor public perception, and awareness of fact may lead to customers deciding that GMO food products should fail. But that is, again, a question of informed consent. Hiding the fact to protect GMO market success is not "fair", it's preferential treatment. And it creates a condition where consumers are unwittingly buying products they, apparently, would prefer not to buy—because they don't know.
GM food's commercial failure might turn out to be a "problem" in the long run, or it might not be. We have no idea how things will play out as the population increases.
That sounds like something GMO food producers could advocate, if they weren't so busy trying to prevent informed consent among their customers.
They're not asking for special treatment, they're just asking to not be treated unfairly.
This is patently absurd. It is special treatment to be able to sell food in the US without proper labeling. It's not unfair to be required to label all ingredients. Corn and GMO "corn" are different ingredients (the latter contains properties of a bacteria used for pesticide, the former does not), but currently the labeling regime does not allow customers to distinguish them. It is customers who are being treated unfairly.
Coke had to stop selling Dasani bottled water here in the UK because it was found to contain higher-than-average (but still tiny) quantities of carcinogenic water, at higher levels than the tap water it's made from, earning it the nickname "cancer water". Unsurprisingly the sales tanked, and never recovered and it was withdrawn from sale.
That's great! Notwithstanding my feelings about the Coca-cola corporation*, this is how informed consent is supposed to work. Coca-cola sells a product with carcinogenic ingredients; customers reject carcinogenic ingredients; product fails. How is that "unfair"? Coca-cola is not entitled to market success for Dasani, nor to sell carcinogenic ingredients to customers, even in tiny quantities, without their consent. I am completely baffled that this is an example you chose. Am I supposed to conclude that Coca-cola should have been able to sell their carcinogenic water to customers, and that they should have been able to do so without the customers' consent?
* Their labor and environmental practices are astoundingly bad.
The "GM" label has taken on the same negative connotations - just look at some of the other descriptions in this very thread, like "franken-food" and so on. It certainly wasn't the food manufacturers who categorised GM foods in this way.
It doesn't matter. "Contains GMO ingredients" (or "genetically engineered" or "biologically engineered" or any other factual and meaningful labeling) is a statement of fact, and it's a factor that customers want to consider when purchasing food. If they have a negative bias against GMO products, for whatever reason, they won't buy the products when labeled, but won't be able to avoid those products when not labeled. You are arguing that it's unfair for people to be able to avoid a product they don't want to purchase. That makes no sense, unless you really do believe that these producers are entitled to market success by preventing informed consent.
The situatio
I already posted this as a response to another of your comments (which you ignored) but I'll repost it for the benefit of context.
There are tons of things that are not known to be unsafe but must be labeled in food products. Just taking for granted that it's safe even though it hasn't been proven safe doesn't preclude labeling. I want to know about the food that I eat, including (but not limited to):
- use of biological engineering
- use of chemical (petroleum) fertilizer
- use of chemical (petroleum) pesticide
- labor conditions
- animal husbandry conditions
- how many miles the food traveled
- which corporations' products were used in production
- which corporations' influence affected policy around all of the above
You may not want to know those things, but what appropriate motive is there to prevent me from knowing them?
Not being a market worshipper, but wanting to be a member of a democratic society, I recognize that the state is the apparatus we've placed in charge of ensuring that contracts and commerce are based on informed consent. You are not the arbiter of what factors people consider "essential" when buying a product. If a polity comes together and decides that it wants to know these sorts of facts about their food, the correct way to implement that is by law. Because it's a question of informed consent. Then and only then can GMO experience legitimate market success or failure. It's bewildering to hear it suggested that market demand should be determined based on ignorance about a product feature that customers want to know about.
Would you guys stop saying this about EVERY. DAMN. THING. please?
Not until people stop complaining about speech rights of corporations. They have no such rights. But you'll notice that I addressed the issue from the perspective that the rules apply to human people as well.
The rule is a matter of informed consent, and that's true whether the rule applies to corporations (who have no right to protected speech) or to human people (who do).
Makes sense to me. Broccolini isn't broccoli or kale. A mule isn't a donkey or a horse. Something that has some of the properties of corn and some of the properties of a bacteria used as pesticide... is not corn.
Who cares whether it's been demonized or not, or whether the demonization is valid or not? GM food producers are not entitled to successful GM food sales, and they certainly don't have a right to obstruct informed consent to secure those sales, and GM food's commercial failure as a result of factual information is not a "problem".
I'm perfectly happy to find the best semantic representation for labeling that retains the property of "informative to potential customers". If that's "genetically engineered", so be it, and I don't know anyone else who objects to that term. The point is that we need to be informed in order to consent, and I see no reason to be married to any particular terminology as long as "informed" isn't lost.
If simple statement of fact of the contents of the food product ("contains GMOs") produces fear, uncertainty or doubt (and apparently the absence of such information does not produce uncertainty or doubt), then they shouldn't be selling it. Notification is not the same thing as warning.
I'm not for compelled speech (mandatory labeling)
Speech isn't relevant, corporations are not people. Moreover, mandatory labeling is a requirement of informed consent. It is what enables me to avoid buying "cheese food" that is neither cheese nor food. Food producers are not entitled to mislead customers about the contents of their products in order to boost sales.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/03/24/2122231/high-fructose-corn-syrup-causes-bigger-weight-gain-in-rats
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/07/167230/colony-collapse-disorder-linked-to-pesticide-high-fructose-corn-syrup
http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/07/14/2257216/fructose-as-culprit-in-the-obesity-epidemic
The problem in CCD of course is not inherently the fault of HFCS but rather imidacloprid, but I see no reason not to avoid imidacloprid as well.
There are tons of things that are not known to be unsafe but must be labeled in food products. Just taking for granted that it's safe even though it hasn't been proven safe doesn't preclude labeling. I want to know about the food that I eat, including (but not limited to):
- use of biological engineering
- use of chemical (petroleum) fertilizer
- use of chemical (petroleum) pesticide
- labor conditions
- animal husbandry conditions
- how many miles the food traveled
- which corporations' products were used in production
- which corporations' influence affected policy around all of the above
You may not want to know those things, but what appropriate motive is there to prevent me from knowing them?
I replied to some of the points in this post in the other post, so I'll refer to that response rather than repeating myself. I am not dodging, just adhering to DRY principles!
Well, that's my point
And you conveniently omitted the context where I explained the absurdity of your point. Being a contrived example, I pointed out that yes, while "very little functionality is lost", there is still no benefit to arbitrarily excluding clients which are perfectly capable of that functionality.
You can't just say "always use feature detection" because that is not always necessary
Yes, I can, and yes, it is. You still have to do the feature detection to support your known environments. There's no reason to do additional work for no benefit.
there are cases where the simple site is not significantly less functional than the full-featured site, and limiting your test configurations at the expense of browser support becomes economically viable.
I'm not advocating adding test configurations, so I don't know what you're talking about. Using proper development techniques, there's no reason to add test configurations.
I disagree. Screening for UA is very, very simple. I'd hesitate to call it "work" except that you will probably get paid to do it.
1 > 0. It's not a matter of fucking opinion.
If someone handed me a pile of old code and told me to make it work with IE6-9, Firefox 3-11, and the latest Chrome, I'd probably jump to the UA solution initially.
Then they should hand someone else the code.
Feature detection is not something that would easily bolt-on to legacy code.
You're right. That's one huge reason that UA-sniffing as a legacy is so fucking harmful. Properly written code from 10 years ago (that is, using feature detection) will not have this trouble.
If I were writing from scratch, I would probably use feature detection, but then I'd still do a UA check against my test configurations and warn the user if they are unsupported. So either way, I'd have to do the UA check.
Write code which properly requests client features, and warn for unsupported configurations? Sounds like exactly what I've been suggesting this whole time. Gee whiz!
And that's if marketing lets me ugly-up their site with a warning. If they don't, I might still have to fall back to a basic version of the site to be conservative.
If your code is written properly, the warning is excessive insurance, and the fallback will happen automatically. Marketing would surely prefer better functionality than worse functionality, yes? The warning can be in your terms, on your support page, or any discreet place you wish. And it doesn't require a single line of UA-sniffing code, it can be in plain HTML.
I imagine it would increase their tech support costs.
How the fuck would it do that? They don't bloody support Opera at all.
That's just a design choice.
Yes, a code design choice! It's a code design that does not arbitrarily block unknown configs that are perfectly capable of identifying the features they support.
Any good solution would still require the user to click to acknowledge the warning - you don't want to just pop up a box for a few seconds and auto-hide it, and there's no reason to ugly-up the page with a permanent warning.
A better solution would be to provide an unobtrusive but present-until-acknowledged warning that goes away until its acknowledgment cookie expires. An even better solution would be to write safe code in the first place, providing a notice in some discreet location as extraneous insurance if you're paranoid.
The risk is that your site will fail in a way that you did not anticipate.
The hell it will! It's quite obvious you don't know the first thing about progressive enhancement. The entire purpose is to anticipate failures, and to accommodate them by falling back to a simpler version; this is effectively what you would expect in your supported environments as well. In some cases, there simply is no simpler version (the example I used is canvas), in which case the API correctly anticipates this and allows a fallback message—the same fucking message you would present with an arbitrary and overly broad UA-based block. In the absolute worst case scenario, you get the same outcome you're promoting. Everything else is improved functionality for every user of a modern browser you didn't test. There is literally no risk in this approach that isn't inherent in web development, and there's substantially less risk of putting off customers/clients/users than the use of arbitrary UA-sniffing.
You can't possibly state that without knowing the starting condition of the code and the ultimate complexity of the site you are coding.
Yes, I can! I know it from experience, both from inheriting existing code bases and from building extremely complex web applications. The existing code bases that depend on arbitrary UA-sniffing are by definition incomplete for future browser releases, and require either tedious and labor-intensive maintenance or a complete rewrite as they age; the existing code bases that depend on feature detection effectively work the same or improve with future browser releases, and require little to no maintenance for existing features; the complex web applications I built in the past that depended on UA-sniffing or other naive browser-based branching were much the same as inherited UA-sniffing code bases; the complex web applications I built with progressive enhancement required none of this addition complexity or effort.
Sure, that's all anecdotal. Okay, let's just look at the code and its implications. Understand that I'm writing simplified pseudo-code for the sake of brevity and digestibility.
if(someNode.requestFullScreen) {
someNode.requestFullScreen();
} else {
}
if(!$.browser.ie || $.browser.ie >= 10) {
someNode.requestFullScreen();
} else {
}
(Note that the second example is abusing pseudocode, as presumably your UA-sniff would be outside the script entirely and restrict access to the entire script. But it's fundamentally the same approach.)
Do you see the problem? Obviously, being simplified, the actual list of arbitrary browsers (whether a whitelist or blacklist) would be much more ridiculous and arbitrary and error-prone. But, to simplify, what if IE10 doesn't support fullscreen? Runtime error, failure to execute code below. Well, suppose we exclude IE10 as well. We're then adding the additional cost and labor (including tracking this as a task to do, and the mental cost of revisiting a particular implementation detail potentially months later) of going back and correcting if IE10 does support fullscreen, or even more likely simply forgetting to do so and leaving all IE10 users in the lurch, potentially some dozens of percentage of your users.
The first example simply lacks any of this cost or potential for failure, and is much simpler to implement.
There's a third approach—combining the two—and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is what you'd a
I see it as an additional risk and an added complication.
I've already addressed risk in another post, but I'll ask again: what risk? You already don't support the configuration, what is the risk in letting the user's browser use the features it supports?
As far as complication, I can assure you that you're wrong. Progressive enhancement greatly simplifies web development. It simplifies testing. It simplifies cross-browser fixes. It simplifies your code, and ensures a greater degree of correctness from the outset.
Can you honestly say that the meager difference between unsupported Google search and supported Google search merits this kind of system?
Yes, absolutely. The difference between the two isn't at issue, what's at issue is the harmful approach of wrongheaded development approaches:whitelisting browsers based on name rather than safely using features as they are available. Even the simplest site merits progressive enhancement, because it's the correct approach to arrive at a universally usable site without making arbitrary and ignorant guesses about things you can't possibly know.
Keep in mind that there are new browsers coming out pretty frequently, and being prepared for them is better than not. Progressive enhancement provides that kind of forward-compatibility. UA-sniffing by definition does not.
You are correct - but there is less risk in the first place if you offer those untested configurations the simplest site that is acceptable to marketing.
No, there isn't! There's no risk at all of providing more features to an unsupported environment.
It's all about tradeoffs... If we return to the Google example, they use both strategies. On their main search page, the parts that require a modern web browser are mostly fluff - the auto-search-as-you-type, the animated logo, the Google+ integration, the preview sidebar... Very little actual functionality is lost by just showing a simple, old-fashioned Google search page to unknown clients.
Sure, it's a contrived example. But even so, Opera is capable of all of those features, and if the code is written properly in the first place it would require no extra work on Google's part. Actively blocking access to those features requires more work.
Now surf on over to Google Docs and try to use that with an unsupported browser. First it tests for JavaScript and warns you about that. Then it does some kind of UA check, directs you to a link showing what platforms are supported, but tells you that you can still use the page by adding ?browserok=true to the url (along with a shortcut link that does this for you). At this point, it gives it the ol' college try.
So, imagine a scenario where your browser just adds "&browserok=true" to every Google URL. How does this harm or increase risk to Google?
I think that is a very reasonable balance of the two methods, because it lets a knowledgeable user try without resorting to UA spoofing, but lets you know that your configuration is untested and the functionality is not guaranteed. I contend that their search page is simple enough that it wouldn't make any sense to burden the user with these extra steps.
Why not just provide the notice and be done with it? Why require any step from the user?