Not that I don't completely agree with you, but I think that's a bit offtopic. Coincidentally, as I'm started to write this, the "Naked Trucker and T-Bones" show that I have on in the background started to play a song about how anything can be a weapon. It's true that the a large portion of the public is scared because they think that anything can and will hurt them, which is obviously a large part of the problem here. The real problem isn't that people are afraid of terrorists or something similar, because terrorists are scary and no one wants to die because they inhaled anthrax on a subway. The real problem is that many people put too much weight into the wrong fears.
I was just looking at some of these statistics the other day, and found that roughly 100 people die by choking on ball point pens every year while under 150 die in plane crashes. I think that the pen statistic was for the world while the planes was for the US, so that means you are roughly 30 times more likely to die in a plane crash then you are by choking on a ball point pen. Any rational person who hears that statistic shouldn't be afraid to fly anymore (assuming that the only reason for their fear was dieing and that they aren't now afraid of ball point pens). As most people know, you can find more statistics that will show that driving in a car is immensely more dangerous than flying, yet there are many more people who are afraid of flying than riding in a car. Why bring up flying and driving? Because this fear has nothing to do with what the people in power are saying. This fear exists entirely because those people are irrational. Instead of basing their fears on logic, they, well, I don't know what they do because its completely irrational.
Getting back to the terrorists, the same problem arises. I remember reading somewhere that you are more likely to be struck by lightning twice then you are to win the lottery, and that you are more likely to win the lottery twice then you are to be killed in a terrorist attack. I have told people who are afraid of terrorists about this probability, and it doesn't matter to them. They still cling to these beliefs that terrorists need to be stopped at all costs or else they won't be safe. I don't think that the atmosphere in America would change even the slightest if President Bush came on the air tomorrow and told everyone that there are no more terrorists so they don't have anything to worry about anymore. The administration might be trying to use fear to control people, but the people are afraid anyway because they won't think about it logically.
The point is, if people think that flashing lights in the form of an creature modelled after 8-bit games is a bomb, then they're already so retarded that it doesn't matter what the people in power tell them.
I think he meant that by quitting a job you've been working at for years and starting in a somewhat new field, you would take a pay cut. It's a 15 year business programming veteran's salary versus a 15 year business programming veteran's salary starting out in a system's programming field, or at least that's how I understood it.
Kinda like when I was in High School and they banned backpacks (but not purses, which is a whole other story) from classrooms because bombs could be hidden in them, which, according to the administration, would make for a lot more effort for a bomb squad to find a bomb in case a bomb threat was called in. Of course, this just meant that the bombs would be left in lockers for the bomb squad to search, which I don't see as making things any easier. The high school wasn't being cautious, it was being retarded.
As some other people said, this is just a media event (unless of course, the people involved really are retarded). I hate to break it to people, but there is very little that we can do to stop dedicated terrorists, whether those terrorists are Muslim fundamentalists, the next Timothy McVeigh, or a group of teenagers who are pissed at their classmates. If we try to prevent terrorism from happening by jumping at shadows or taking away freedom, we aren't going to make any progress and will probably just create more terrorists. Does anyone else think that there will be a minor backlash of ATHF graffiti and copycat light ads now that this happened? Hell, I'd almost expect a terrorist to make a bomb in the shape of these ads, but that would be kinda counter productive because it would prove these security freaks right.
So if there's a log on the company's server of someone brute force hacking my account password, they shouldn't do anything about it? What if someone announces specifics of an illegal action they plan to perform during a large online event and then the next day you read about such an action in the paper, should someone report the character who announced the action?
Anyway, the initial question is stupid. It is entirely too broad for something so complicated. It's like asking "if someone kills someone else, should the person be punished?" You can't say "yes" because then what do you do with soldiers or the guy who flips the switch at a death sentence. There is no simple answer without knowing specifics. In the majority of circumstances, I agree that the company should stay out of things, but besides the circumstances of the action, the company's policies come into play as well. If a company (like Blizzard) claims that they own everything the game, then certain actions would require them to take legal action outside of the game. Games like Second Life have other problems because they actually pay people for material created in the. Old school Ultima Online shouldn't have any problems because they have never seemed to care whether people sold gold or accounts online, so as far as they are concerned, nothing outside of the game has anything to do with them at all. The point is, there is no simple answer, and (at least IMO) slashdot shouldn't be posting such thoughtless, naive, simple questions.
You're right, it is different, which was part of my point. I agree that most people on slashdot have just as much of a problem with the Google situation as they do with some of my examples, but I wonder how many people would say the same thing when information is actually a matter of national security. I'm not talking about the bullshit that is classified as national security nowadays, but stuff that the majority of people would agree would be better kept secret (which, of course we wouldn't know about, but there are a few examples in history where I think most people would agree that the information was best left unknown to the public for a while). The reason I brought that up is that the statement "Censorship is wrong" is a poor statement because it is not that black and white.
Ok, I can see where you're coming from for the most part. But if you want bring up the fact that China had access to the regular Google site 90% of the time, then what difference does it make if Google gives a censored version the other 10% of the time? 90% of the time, the people who had access to Google's regular site still have access to it, but the 10% of the time that they don't they have access to a censored version. This is still more information than if there is only the regular Google version.
As far as the priest comparison, the only two options I saw for Google was to either create Google.cn or not (and therefore not have a censored version in China), so there were only two options. This isn't to say that the priest only had two options. He could have tried to grab one of the Nazis guns and kill all of them, or a variety of other scenarios just like there are really a lot of scenarios for the Google situation, but it isn't worthwhile to try to list every one of them.
How about, like not using a condom because you ran out? The GP said "sometimes" as you can see from the quote you used in your post.
I personally feel any company assisting in keeping the oppressed from disseminating their beliefs is not one I choose to do business with. You might not be American, but if you feel that way, then what are you doing to stop our government's censorship of information? Even worse than Google, the information we are being provided with is not just censored but doctored. Compare a US high school history book to one in another country, and you'll find a lot of differences. How about the teacher who was suspended for comparing Bush to Hitler? What about all the denied applications for information under the FOIA? If you want to say that these are all different situations with different considerations, you're absolutely right because censorship isn't black and white. Claiming that since Google censored some information in China means that they did something evil and horrible is a naive approach (and usually a hypocrytical one as well) to a complicated problem.
Now that's about the dumbest thing I've heard, and yet I keep hearing it. Do you really think that doing something good does not provide a company with positive PR? Can't positive PR lead to better brand recognition and loyalty? Can't brand recognition and loyalty lead to increased sales / popularity / use by customers? On the opposite side, the idea that doing something evil leads to money is just as ridiculous. If corporations are motivated by money, and doing good deads leads to more customers leading to more money, then why can't corporations be motivated by doing good things? I guess when you hear "corporations are only motivated by money" enough times, you start to believe it without even thinking about what that could mean.
I completely agree with you that the grandparent's quote was pretty ridiculous. However, I still don't think that what Google did was morally wrong (or evil, if you prefer to use that word).
Here's my reasoning: for an action to be "morrally wrong", you must first have a choice in whether or not to do the action, and Google obviously had a choice. Furthermore, for an action to be morally wrong, there must be a choice which is more morally right than the the alternative/s. One of the Exorcist remakes had a scene where a priest was forced by Nazis to choose a few people out of large group to die, and if he did not choose, then they would all die. I would argue that by choosing people to die, the priest did not do anything morally wrong because the alternative was worse (not to mention selfish because he is avoiding the pain of knowing that he killed the people he picked). IMO, this was analogous to the situation Google was in. Google could either choose to give some information to the Chinese people or none. By not providing the service, the Chinese people would could not get around the great firewall would be worse off, so Google's choice was the morally right decision.
Saying this does not mean that I advocate censorship. I think censorship is horrible, but it was the better option in this case since complete freedom of information was not a choice.
As others have said, if students decide to use wikipedia as a reference (incorrectly, since there are occasions where it would be a valid resource) after you have explicitly told them to not do it, then you take points, serious points, off their grade. Better yet, treat it as any other invalid source. If a student cites his/her uncle Joe as a reference, you wouldn't give any credit for that reference. I had an English class where the teacher told us that for every citation that didn't strictly follow MLA guidelines, our papers would be dropped two letter grades. I turned in a paper with a citation that I thought was an internet article but she believed was an internet database entry (or something like that, I don't remember anymore), so I got a C on the paper. I was angry. I bitched and moaned, but in the end, it wasn't up to me so I accepted it and moved on. As a teacher, you have to make decisions on what is important to your class. If teaching students that wikipedia is not a valid source is something that they need to learn in your class, then make sure that they understand that. It isn't your fault if your students can't follow directions. This isn't about telling your students to "just do the right thing," its about setting ground rules and enforcing them.
Not contrary to your statement, FTA: All faculty members will be telling students about the policy and explaining why material on Wikipedia -- while convenient -- may not be trustworthy.
They will be explaining why material on Wikipedia may not be trustworthy. If they do this, then why do they need to ban Wikipedia from being used as a source. Shouldn't explaining Wikipedia's role and saying, "There are very few situations where it is acceptable to use Wikipedia, so if you want to be safe, just don't cite it as a source," be good enough to stop this so-called "problem"?
And on that note, what makes a school changing its citation policy newsworthy? English departments do this from time to time and citation policies can change drastically from one professor to the next. Just because the source in question here is Wikipedia doesn't make it special. The students at this school have not been taught how to use sources properly, so the school needs to teach them instead of making a publicity stunt out of it.
You're right about that part, but I'd say 18% might be a little high due to bandwidth. Broadband is so poor in the US that I can't imagine a lot of people downloading movies often, but of course this statistic refers to downloading at least 1 movie, not 1 movie a month or something like that. I think that this number is off a bit because a lot of people will try to download a movie for free, but most of those won't continue to do it. A better statistic would be one that shows frequent downloaders.
The other logical leak would be during transmission to stations, if that is still what FOX does. There is a post in another thread about how this happens, but the basically the studio (or another middle man after the studio who holds the finished episode) sends the episode out to all of the affiliates before the show airs. This episode doesn't contain any commercials (although some contain a few global commercials) so that the affiliates can fill the episode with local or regional commercials. This is why I see commercials for O'Brian's Auto Park in Champaign and my cousin sees an add for Hooters in Miami. If the leaked episodes didn't contain any commercials, then they almost definitely weren't leaked from an affiliate, so they were probably leaked on the DVD chain or in transmission to an affiliate. The problem with the transmission interception scenario is that from what I understand, most studios send the episodes out the day before or within a few days of airing, not a week in advance (which would have to be the case since FOX found out about the video 6 days before it aired). Anyway, I'd agree with you that a leak on the DVD chain is the most likely scenario.
Obviously they didn't press and ship a million DVDs in a day, but that doesn't mean that the leak came from the supply chain. They could have been snatched out of the airwaves since a lot of networks send their shows to their affiliates early so that local commercials can be added in before airing.
First off, I think you missed the grandparent's point. In the spirit of the parent, who's to say that the next storage medium will be a hard drive? What if someone comes up with a cheap way to manufacture a storage medium that plugs directly into an ethernet port or something similar (or for that matter, completely different). The point here is that we don't know what the next storage medium will be.
Finally, I think you're wrong about consumers thinking long-run. First off, I think consumers do look in the long run for a lot of cases. Granted, when I'm in the supermarket line deciding whether or not to buy a pack of gum, I'm not thinking in the long run. However, when my TV start getting old and unreliable and I decide to upgrade to a new one, I think about how long it will last, which formats it will support, and how much things will be chaning over the next few years among a variety of other factors before I buy it. The same thing happens when buying cars or houses. But I see that you were trying to argue that the failure of Blu-ray or HDDVD isn't due to consumers thinking in the long-run but instead due to the lack of significant benefit (or new features, or new capabilities, or whatever you want to call it) provided by HD compared to revolutionary things like TiVo. I can definitely agree that that is a factor, but it isn't the only factor by any means, and consumers' long term thinking plays a role. Furthermore, TiVo, or DVRs in general, didn't happen quickly either. In 2005, there were under 8 million DVR users in the US, which is 8 years after TiVo was founded. The DVD format was agreed upon in 1995 (which I'll use as the start of DVDs, even though that isn't necessarily true). In 2003, 48 million homes in the US had DVD players, which obviously blows away TiVo 2 year later. I understand that DVDs really aren't an incremental upgrade in a lot of consumers' minds, but it is to others. As far as my parents were concerned, they could watch a video on a VHS player or they could buy a new player to watch the same videos. In a lot of ways, that is the same as the difference between DVDs and High Def DVDs. The point is, whether or not something is revolutionary doesn't necessarily dictate its popularity, neither does a consumer's tendency to think in the long run or how shiny something is. There are a lot of factors.
In Brian Greene's book The Elegant Universe (1999), he claimed that the LHC would be able to find the existence of superparticles that were predicted by string theory. I'm unable to explain a lot of the details there, but this new article seems pretty similar. 8 years ago we were waiting for the LHC to come along and have a chance of confirming string theory, and now some scientists tell us to wait for the LHC to be able to prove string theory. It's not like we ran out of ways to prove/disprove string theory and that these new guys have had some miraculous insight into the problem (which they may have had anyway); other scientists have just been waiting for the same thing they are waiting for to be able to show it.
maybe consumers should start lobbying or just stop buying.., which is why there are a lot of people who download illegally. I just bought a game that has StarForce encryption on it, which I didn't realize when I bought it. I decided to give it a try since I just reformatted recently and won't lose too much information if StarForce destroys my computer. It took me a half-dozen emails with their tech support to get StarForce to allow my game to play on my machine, even though it was a legal copy of the game. Adding to that, now my graphics are tearing (I'm not really sure the correct word for what's going on) whether I'm running the game or not. I could have just downloaded a cracked version of the game (which I still might do since I actually want to play this game and am unable to do so) which wouldn't have required StarForce and could have avoided all the problems I had while saving me the cash I payed for the game. Then the companies wonder why there is so much pirated software.
This of course applies to music and movies as well. In a lot of cases, the pirated media is actually more reliable and versatile than the official versions. If I have a Blu-Ray movie and want to go overseas, you better believe I'll bring my pirated copy because that one might play in foreign machines. You have an HD-DVD player and want to watch your new HD-DVD movie on your computer instead but don't have a drive there? Rip it and watch it wherever you want. Back to the parent's point, consumers should stop buying inferior products.
Full of tolls? I live south of chicago and travel to the city only a few times a year, but even I know how to get around without paying tolls if I don't want to. A lot of times it isn't even faster to get on the tollways, and they don't always help that much. Here's a map of Chicago's tollways, and I don't see how that is "full of tolls". There are only 4 major toll roads (if you consider 80/294 to be a part of either 90 or 94, which it kind of is), so getting on a road in Chicago does not mean you will be paying tolls. There are also plenty of other highways that are not tollroads. Futhermore, is your complaint about stopping for tolls or paying them? I-Pass pretty much ends the stopping argument. The paying of tolls has already been addressed by a couple other people.
Exactly. One of the main reasons that taxes work is that people pay for things that don't need or want so that other people will pay for things that they do. That's not really clear, so consider a family with and a single older man on medicare. The older man doesn't want to pay taxes that fund the schools while the family doesn't want to pay the taxes that give the old man his medicine, but they both have to anyway. This way, both get what they need even though they are both unhappy for paying for things they don't want.
But that's not really the point since this is supposed to be about net neutrality.
I can't seem to find a thread that addresses the issue of what this means to groups of people. I'd assume that if I was trying to protect highly classified and sensitive information and was using a form of this scheme that it would be a big deal, but that's not me. I run a website that requires users to log in and uses MD5 to encrypt their password (I'm not really even that sure if that is the correct terminology to describe what happens; I only understand encryption on a basic level), is this something I should be worried about? I don't want my user's personal information to be stolen, but I'm not storing anything sensitive like credit card or social security numbers. Basically, who should care about this development, from the developers point of view?
You're probably right about that, but what do you want them to do? Now it just seems like you are just going to blame them for anything that they do. There are almost as many Google-haters out there now as there are MS-haters (not really, but there sure are a lot).
Google is bad for censoring the internet in China, but when they try to create an agreement to stop censoring the internet in China, you think its just a PR stunt. If Google pulls out of China, you say that there will be others who just fill the void that they left. - What would you like them to do? Do you have a solution to this system that doesn't end in Google being evil? You are looking at this as a lose-lose situation, which it is in a lot of ways, but in that case then there must be a best way to lose. I don't agree with censorship at all, but I can also recognize that sometimes some censorship is better than receiving no information at all, or that censorship by companies like Google might be a lot better than censorship provided by the Chinese government (I know that the government told Google what to censor, but I'm pretty sure there were some comprimises there).
Do you read every reference to an article before posting a comment about the article? What about the references to the references? Oh wait, you don't even register...
It's a question of law and deserves to be decided. Precedent has to be determined somehow.
That's a really good point. As much as it disgusts me to see parents blaming others or expecting other people to protect their children, a precedent has to be set at some point. Hopefully this case will find in favor of MySpace, so maybe (crosses fingers) we won't have to hear the people with the largest mouths but least common sense bitch so much.
Surely, as a voter, you should be voting based upon your own opinion and not just voting the way the crowd is voting.
Yes, you should. However, most people don't. If you really stop to consider the influences on a person's vote, including your own, you'll find that the majority of people cast most of their votes based on the opinions of others. This is less true for the major offices in an election because people think they know more about those. But again, I was trying to give an incredibly simplified system to show an possible example of why paid political speech needs regulation. I can definitely admit that the 10 random people scenario isn't great.
I can't see there is even much point in voting if you're just going to follow the crowd - as the crowd will be the majority anyway, why waste time voting?
Do you really believe that? So if you live in a red state you should only vote if you are voting for a Democrat?
if an opinion's arguments don't seem to ring true then they won't affect the direction of your vote.
The problem here is that these people are payed to convince you of something, so there is a good chance that they will provide a better argument than the average voter.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I don't completely agree with you, but I think that's a bit offtopic. Coincidentally, as I'm started to write this, the "Naked Trucker and T-Bones" show that I have on in the background started to play a song about how anything can be a weapon. It's true that the a large portion of the public is scared because they think that anything can and will hurt them, which is obviously a large part of the problem here. The real problem isn't that people are afraid of terrorists or something similar, because terrorists are scary and no one wants to die because they inhaled anthrax on a subway. The real problem is that many people put too much weight into the wrong fears.
I was just looking at some of these statistics the other day, and found that roughly 100 people die by choking on ball point pens every year while under 150 die in plane crashes. I think that the pen statistic was for the world while the planes was for the US, so that means you are roughly 30 times more likely to die in a plane crash then you are by choking on a ball point pen. Any rational person who hears that statistic shouldn't be afraid to fly anymore (assuming that the only reason for their fear was dieing and that they aren't now afraid of ball point pens). As most people know, you can find more statistics that will show that driving in a car is immensely more dangerous than flying, yet there are many more people who are afraid of flying than riding in a car. Why bring up flying and driving? Because this fear has nothing to do with what the people in power are saying. This fear exists entirely because those people are irrational. Instead of basing their fears on logic, they, well, I don't know what they do because its completely irrational.
Getting back to the terrorists, the same problem arises. I remember reading somewhere that you are more likely to be struck by lightning twice then you are to win the lottery, and that you are more likely to win the lottery twice then you are to be killed in a terrorist attack. I have told people who are afraid of terrorists about this probability, and it doesn't matter to them. They still cling to these beliefs that terrorists need to be stopped at all costs or else they won't be safe. I don't think that the atmosphere in America would change even the slightest if President Bush came on the air tomorrow and told everyone that there are no more terrorists so they don't have anything to worry about anymore. The administration might be trying to use fear to control people, but the people are afraid anyway because they won't think about it logically.
The point is, if people think that flashing lights in the form of an creature modelled after 8-bit games is a bomb, then they're already so retarded that it doesn't matter what the people in power tell them.
I think he meant that by quitting a job you've been working at for years and starting in a somewhat new field, you would take a pay cut. It's a 15 year business programming veteran's salary versus a 15 year business programming veteran's salary starting out in a system's programming field, or at least that's how I understood it.
Kinda like when I was in High School and they banned backpacks (but not purses, which is a whole other story) from classrooms because bombs could be hidden in them, which, according to the administration, would make for a lot more effort for a bomb squad to find a bomb in case a bomb threat was called in. Of course, this just meant that the bombs would be left in lockers for the bomb squad to search, which I don't see as making things any easier. The high school wasn't being cautious, it was being retarded.
As some other people said, this is just a media event (unless of course, the people involved really are retarded). I hate to break it to people, but there is very little that we can do to stop dedicated terrorists, whether those terrorists are Muslim fundamentalists, the next Timothy McVeigh, or a group of teenagers who are pissed at their classmates. If we try to prevent terrorism from happening by jumping at shadows or taking away freedom, we aren't going to make any progress and will probably just create more terrorists. Does anyone else think that there will be a minor backlash of ATHF graffiti and copycat light ads now that this happened? Hell, I'd almost expect a terrorist to make a bomb in the shape of these ads, but that would be kinda counter productive because it would prove these security freaks right.
So if there's a log on the company's server of someone brute force hacking my account password, they shouldn't do anything about it? What if someone announces specifics of an illegal action they plan to perform during a large online event and then the next day you read about such an action in the paper, should someone report the character who announced the action?
Anyway, the initial question is stupid. It is entirely too broad for something so complicated. It's like asking "if someone kills someone else, should the person be punished?" You can't say "yes" because then what do you do with soldiers or the guy who flips the switch at a death sentence. There is no simple answer without knowing specifics. In the majority of circumstances, I agree that the company should stay out of things, but besides the circumstances of the action, the company's policies come into play as well. If a company (like Blizzard) claims that they own everything the game, then certain actions would require them to take legal action outside of the game. Games like Second Life have other problems because they actually pay people for material created in the. Old school Ultima Online shouldn't have any problems because they have never seemed to care whether people sold gold or accounts online, so as far as they are concerned, nothing outside of the game has anything to do with them at all. The point is, there is no simple answer, and (at least IMO) slashdot shouldn't be posting such thoughtless, naive, simple questions.
You're right, it is different, which was part of my point. I agree that most people on slashdot have just as much of a problem with the Google situation as they do with some of my examples, but I wonder how many people would say the same thing when information is actually a matter of national security. I'm not talking about the bullshit that is classified as national security nowadays, but stuff that the majority of people would agree would be better kept secret (which, of course we wouldn't know about, but there are a few examples in history where I think most people would agree that the information was best left unknown to the public for a while). The reason I brought that up is that the statement "Censorship is wrong" is a poor statement because it is not that black and white.
Ok, I can see where you're coming from for the most part. But if you want bring up the fact that China had access to the regular Google site 90% of the time, then what difference does it make if Google gives a censored version the other 10% of the time? 90% of the time, the people who had access to Google's regular site still have access to it, but the 10% of the time that they don't they have access to a censored version. This is still more information than if there is only the regular Google version.
As far as the priest comparison, the only two options I saw for Google was to either create Google.cn or not (and therefore not have a censored version in China), so there were only two options. This isn't to say that the priest only had two options. He could have tried to grab one of the Nazis guns and kill all of them, or a variety of other scenarios just like there are really a lot of scenarios for the Google situation, but it isn't worthwhile to try to list every one of them.
How about, like not using a condom because you ran out? The GP said "sometimes" as you can see from the quote you used in your post.
I personally feel any company assisting in keeping the oppressed from disseminating their beliefs is not one I choose to do business with.
You might not be American, but if you feel that way, then what are you doing to stop our government's censorship of information? Even worse than Google, the information we are being provided with is not just censored but doctored. Compare a US high school history book to one in another country, and you'll find a lot of differences. How about the teacher who was suspended for comparing Bush to Hitler? What about all the denied applications for information under the FOIA? If you want to say that these are all different situations with different considerations, you're absolutely right because censorship isn't black and white. Claiming that since Google censored some information in China means that they did something evil and horrible is a naive approach (and usually a hypocrytical one as well) to a complicated problem.
Doing good has no value.
Now that's about the dumbest thing I've heard, and yet I keep hearing it. Do you really think that doing something good does not provide a company with positive PR? Can't positive PR lead to better brand recognition and loyalty? Can't brand recognition and loyalty lead to increased sales / popularity / use by customers? On the opposite side, the idea that doing something evil leads to money is just as ridiculous. If corporations are motivated by money, and doing good deads leads to more customers leading to more money, then why can't corporations be motivated by doing good things? I guess when you hear "corporations are only motivated by money" enough times, you start to believe it without even thinking about what that could mean.
I completely agree with you that the grandparent's quote was pretty ridiculous. However, I still don't think that what Google did was morally wrong (or evil, if you prefer to use that word).
Here's my reasoning: for an action to be "morrally wrong", you must first have a choice in whether or not to do the action, and Google obviously had a choice. Furthermore, for an action to be morally wrong, there must be a choice which is more morally right than the the alternative/s. One of the Exorcist remakes had a scene where a priest was forced by Nazis to choose a few people out of large group to die, and if he did not choose, then they would all die. I would argue that by choosing people to die, the priest did not do anything morally wrong because the alternative was worse (not to mention selfish because he is avoiding the pain of knowing that he killed the people he picked). IMO, this was analogous to the situation Google was in. Google could either choose to give some information to the Chinese people or none. By not providing the service, the Chinese people would could not get around the great firewall would be worse off, so Google's choice was the morally right decision.
Saying this does not mean that I advocate censorship. I think censorship is horrible, but it was the better option in this case since complete freedom of information was not a choice.
As others have said, if students decide to use wikipedia as a reference (incorrectly, since there are occasions where it would be a valid resource) after you have explicitly told them to not do it, then you take points, serious points, off their grade. Better yet, treat it as any other invalid source. If a student cites his/her uncle Joe as a reference, you wouldn't give any credit for that reference. I had an English class where the teacher told us that for every citation that didn't strictly follow MLA guidelines, our papers would be dropped two letter grades. I turned in a paper with a citation that I thought was an internet article but she believed was an internet database entry (or something like that, I don't remember anymore), so I got a C on the paper. I was angry. I bitched and moaned, but in the end, it wasn't up to me so I accepted it and moved on. As a teacher, you have to make decisions on what is important to your class. If teaching students that wikipedia is not a valid source is something that they need to learn in your class, then make sure that they understand that. It isn't your fault if your students can't follow directions. This isn't about telling your students to "just do the right thing," its about setting ground rules and enforcing them.
Not contrary to your statement, FTA: All faculty members will be telling students about the policy and explaining why material on Wikipedia -- while convenient -- may not be trustworthy.
They will be explaining why material on Wikipedia may not be trustworthy. If they do this, then why do they need to ban Wikipedia from being used as a source. Shouldn't explaining Wikipedia's role and saying, "There are very few situations where it is acceptable to use Wikipedia, so if you want to be safe, just don't cite it as a source," be good enough to stop this so-called "problem"?
And on that note, what makes a school changing its citation policy newsworthy? English departments do this from time to time and citation policies can change drastically from one professor to the next. Just because the source in question here is Wikipedia doesn't make it special. The students at this school have not been taught how to use sources properly, so the school needs to teach them instead of making a publicity stunt out of it.
You're right about that part, but I'd say 18% might be a little high due to bandwidth. Broadband is so poor in the US that I can't imagine a lot of people downloading movies often, but of course this statistic refers to downloading at least 1 movie, not 1 movie a month or something like that. I think that this number is off a bit because a lot of people will try to download a movie for free, but most of those won't continue to do it. A better statistic would be one that shows frequent downloaders.
The other logical leak would be during transmission to stations, if that is still what FOX does. There is a post in another thread about how this happens, but the basically the studio (or another middle man after the studio who holds the finished episode) sends the episode out to all of the affiliates before the show airs. This episode doesn't contain any commercials (although some contain a few global commercials) so that the affiliates can fill the episode with local or regional commercials. This is why I see commercials for O'Brian's Auto Park in Champaign and my cousin sees an add for Hooters in Miami. If the leaked episodes didn't contain any commercials, then they almost definitely weren't leaked from an affiliate, so they were probably leaked on the DVD chain or in transmission to an affiliate. The problem with the transmission interception scenario is that from what I understand, most studios send the episodes out the day before or within a few days of airing, not a week in advance (which would have to be the case since FOX found out about the video 6 days before it aired). Anyway, I'd agree with you that a leak on the DVD chain is the most likely scenario.
Obviously they didn't press and ship a million DVDs in a day, but that doesn't mean that the leak came from the supply chain. They could have been snatched out of the airwaves since a lot of networks send their shows to their affiliates early so that local commercials can be added in before airing.
First off, I think you missed the grandparent's point. In the spirit of the parent, who's to say that the next storage medium will be a hard drive? What if someone comes up with a cheap way to manufacture a storage medium that plugs directly into an ethernet port or something similar (or for that matter, completely different). The point here is that we don't know what the next storage medium will be.
Finally, I think you're wrong about consumers thinking long-run. First off, I think consumers do look in the long run for a lot of cases. Granted, when I'm in the supermarket line deciding whether or not to buy a pack of gum, I'm not thinking in the long run. However, when my TV start getting old and unreliable and I decide to upgrade to a new one, I think about how long it will last, which formats it will support, and how much things will be chaning over the next few years among a variety of other factors before I buy it. The same thing happens when buying cars or houses.
But I see that you were trying to argue that the failure of Blu-ray or HDDVD isn't due to consumers thinking in the long-run but instead due to the lack of significant benefit (or new features, or new capabilities, or whatever you want to call it) provided by HD compared to revolutionary things like TiVo. I can definitely agree that that is a factor, but it isn't the only factor by any means, and consumers' long term thinking plays a role. Furthermore, TiVo, or DVRs in general, didn't happen quickly either. In 2005, there were under 8 million DVR users in the US, which is 8 years after TiVo was founded. The DVD format was agreed upon in 1995 (which I'll use as the start of DVDs, even though that isn't necessarily true). In 2003, 48 million homes in the US had DVD players, which obviously blows away TiVo 2 year later. I understand that DVDs really aren't an incremental upgrade in a lot of consumers' minds, but it is to others. As far as my parents were concerned, they could watch a video on a VHS player or they could buy a new player to watch the same videos. In a lot of ways, that is the same as the difference between DVDs and High Def DVDs. The point is, whether or not something is revolutionary doesn't necessarily dictate its popularity, neither does a consumer's tendency to think in the long run or how shiny something is. There are a lot of factors.
Right, I didn't mean to sound like they were exclusive to string theory.
In Brian Greene's book The Elegant Universe (1999), he claimed that the LHC would be able to find the existence of superparticles that were predicted by string theory. I'm unable to explain a lot of the details there, but this new article seems pretty similar. 8 years ago we were waiting for the LHC to come along and have a chance of confirming string theory, and now some scientists tell us to wait for the LHC to be able to prove string theory. It's not like we ran out of ways to prove/disprove string theory and that these new guys have had some miraculous insight into the problem (which they may have had anyway); other scientists have just been waiting for the same thing they are waiting for to be able to show it.
maybe consumers should start lobbying or just stop buying.., which is why there are a lot of people who download illegally. I just bought a game that has StarForce encryption on it, which I didn't realize when I bought it. I decided to give it a try since I just reformatted recently and won't lose too much information if StarForce destroys my computer. It took me a half-dozen emails with their tech support to get StarForce to allow my game to play on my machine, even though it was a legal copy of the game. Adding to that, now my graphics are tearing (I'm not really sure the correct word for what's going on) whether I'm running the game or not. I could have just downloaded a cracked version of the game (which I still might do since I actually want to play this game and am unable to do so) which wouldn't have required StarForce and could have avoided all the problems I had while saving me the cash I payed for the game. Then the companies wonder why there is so much pirated software.
This of course applies to music and movies as well. In a lot of cases, the pirated media is actually more reliable and versatile than the official versions. If I have a Blu-Ray movie and want to go overseas, you better believe I'll bring my pirated copy because that one might play in foreign machines. You have an HD-DVD player and want to watch your new HD-DVD movie on your computer instead but don't have a drive there? Rip it and watch it wherever you want. Back to the parent's point, consumers should stop buying inferior products.
Full of tolls? I live south of chicago and travel to the city only a few times a year, but even I know how to get around without paying tolls if I don't want to. A lot of times it isn't even faster to get on the tollways, and they don't always help that much. Here's a map of Chicago's tollways, and I don't see how that is "full of tolls". There are only 4 major toll roads (if you consider 80/294 to be a part of either 90 or 94, which it kind of is), so getting on a road in Chicago does not mean you will be paying tolls. There are also plenty of other highways that are not tollroads. Futhermore, is your complaint about stopping for tolls or paying them? I-Pass pretty much ends the stopping argument. The paying of tolls has already been addressed by a couple other people.
Exactly. One of the main reasons that taxes work is that people pay for things that don't need or want so that other people will pay for things that they do. That's not really clear, so consider a family with and a single older man on medicare. The older man doesn't want to pay taxes that fund the schools while the family doesn't want to pay the taxes that give the old man his medicine, but they both have to anyway. This way, both get what they need even though they are both unhappy for paying for things they don't want.
But that's not really the point since this is supposed to be about net neutrality.
I can't seem to find a thread that addresses the issue of what this means to groups of people. I'd assume that if I was trying to protect highly classified and sensitive information and was using a form of this scheme that it would be a big deal, but that's not me. I run a website that requires users to log in and uses MD5 to encrypt their password (I'm not really even that sure if that is the correct terminology to describe what happens; I only understand encryption on a basic level), is this something I should be worried about? I don't want my user's personal information to be stolen, but I'm not storing anything sensitive like credit card or social security numbers. Basically, who should care about this development, from the developers point of view?
You're probably right about that, but what do you want them to do? Now it just seems like you are just going to blame them for anything that they do. There are almost as many Google-haters out there now as there are MS-haters (not really, but there sure are a lot).
Google is bad for censoring the internet in China, but when they try to create an agreement to stop censoring the internet in China, you think its just a PR stunt. If Google pulls out of China, you say that there will be others who just fill the void that they left. - What would you like them to do? Do you have a solution to this system that doesn't end in Google being evil? You are looking at this as a lose-lose situation, which it is in a lot of ways, but in that case then there must be a best way to lose. I don't agree with censorship at all, but I can also recognize that sometimes some censorship is better than receiving no information at all, or that censorship by companies like Google might be a lot better than censorship provided by the Chinese government (I know that the government told Google what to censor, but I'm pretty sure there were some comprimises there).
Do you read every reference to an article before posting a comment about the article? What about the references to the references? Oh wait, you don't even register...
It's a question of law and deserves to be decided. Precedent has to be determined somehow.
That's a really good point. As much as it disgusts me to see parents blaming others or expecting other people to protect their children, a precedent has to be set at some point. Hopefully this case will find in favor of MySpace, so maybe (crosses fingers) we won't have to hear the people with the largest mouths but least common sense bitch so much.
Surely, as a voter, you should be voting based upon your own opinion and not just voting the way the crowd is voting.
Yes, you should. However, most people don't. If you really stop to consider the influences on a person's vote, including your own, you'll find that the majority of people cast most of their votes based on the opinions of others. This is less true for the major offices in an election because people think they know more about those. But again, I was trying to give an incredibly simplified system to show an possible example of why paid political speech needs regulation. I can definitely admit that the 10 random people scenario isn't great.
I can't see there is even much point in voting if you're just going to follow the crowd - as the crowd will be the majority anyway, why waste time voting?
Do you really believe that? So if you live in a red state you should only vote if you are voting for a Democrat?
if an opinion's arguments don't seem to ring true then they won't affect the direction of your vote.
The problem here is that these people are payed to convince you of something, so there is a good chance that they will provide a better argument than the average voter.