Sure but we weren't debating limited liability, I was just pointing out that calling libertarians pro-corperate is like saying the jews and muslims must be great friends because they both refuse to eat pork.
Of course, the name is the only reason I checked out the comments, as I have been looking to grow some elder trees in my yard, and the berries are currently in season (mmmm). Of course, trying to get some from my pagan friends turned out to be too much hassle (important tree, need some rituals or some such).... so we just ordered some seeds, got them yesterday actually.
Well the thing is names make it easier to distinguish and actually talk about them. If I compared ExTrojA.1234 with CERT-2001-19 you probably have no clue what I am refering to. In this case that probably works to my favor, since if I tried to compare this to code red, I would instantly look foolish.
Where I do agree is when it can corrupt a deliberative process and make hash of people's arguments. What I am thinking of is congress. Remember the "clean air act" that reduced air pollution standards? What kind of thing is that? Leaving people in favor of clean air trying to argue against the clean air act?
Or the truly low move of naming a bill after a murdered kid. I can think of few things so small and yet so corrosive to the very spirit of a deliberative process to force a person who disagrees with a policy to make him argue against something so unfairly titled.
However, since worm and trojan names don't enter into such deliberative processes and public opinion of them is irrelevant.... I say let them have the names.
Oh.... and keep this one out of your mouth.... elderwood is poisonous.
> Meanwhile the libertarians argue that they can somehow create an economic utopia by unleashing a > sociopathic social order in which corporations are free to do whatever they want without oversight by > the government.
I have to disagree with this chracterization as a bit too simplistic. Corps are legal fictions created through the power of the state. They are fictional entities which stand in the place of a person, to convey limited liability on the actual corp owners.
In fact, many libertarians are against limited liability at all. How this could, in any way, be described as pro-corperate, I just don't see. In fact, I can think of few things that would be less pro-corperate than elimination of limited liability.... it guts the entire concept of a corp.
Personally, as something of a libertarian myself (not entirely), I am not against its eliminatuon nor for it, because I see it as a useful pact with the government, and one which legitimizes regulation...afterall, they are fictional non-person entities, and are recieving a benefit for becoming such.... seems the government which offers this priviledge should be free to put whatever restrictions that they like on it.
In my view, I tend to say taxes are theft and extorition, not so with corp taxes...for that very reason.
> You can easily not qualify to be able to drive, in the states its so easy it's not a 'privilege' anymore.
If you mean in terms of driving skill...absolutely. However, they are more than happy to remind you of this should you miss renewal on your license expiration date. They will be more than happy to penalize you for it.... because people who don't pay them on time are far more dangerous than shitty drivers, and they have to prioritize.
Nobody seems to care if you drive around with your high beams on (even in the middle of the city), or if you get in the left lane just to sit there and create a huge line behind you, or have your low beams adjusted up into people's eyes....
but... if you don't pay them on time.... holy hell, they will nail your ass.
Add that to research that suggests that many people drive at the speed they feel comfortable at, regardless of the posted limit, and it really is a very good question.
What is the point? Personally, I think its because some people like the idea of being able to pull over any car at will. Just keep the rules in that area where most people break a few as a matter of course, but not so egregious that its obvious thats what you are doing, and its both a money source and a source of arbitrary abuse of power.
I have heard it directly from cops mouths.... if they want to pull someone over, the standard wisdom is, all they have to do is watch them for a few minutes and they will find a reason. What does that say about the standards that are set?
I thought the same thing, and have had thoughts along the same lines.
Actually, I like the idea of this working while standing thing, in fact, I used to often work from a kneeling position, (which is much less comfortable when it comes time to stand up).
My main issue with really adjusting my workspace is that I really want to be able to switch off between sitting and standing.... do part of the day standing, part sitting....
So far the transition seems like more work than its worth,
Well bitcoins are like wire transfers...its all just meaningless account numbers, but.... the movement has to be consistent. So if I give you X bitcoins, I can see the account they go to when you spend them.... but its just another meaningless account number.
Where things get interesting is, that they mix.... so, if I see a transfer to another account, I can then trace any other transfers to or from that account, or other ones it is associated with.
If alice the crook uses her coins to buy a service from bob, then bob mixes her coins with others of his when he spends them, maybe from some tips he recieved from posting a tip bitcoin account on some web forum.... then he becomes easy to link.... and question. its "old fashioned police work" from there.
Of course, if they are careful, and only use those coins for relatively anonymous transactions which they can turn into cash or unassociated bitcoins.... that trail could go cold fast.
These days? I think this has been true for quite a while. I have found similar things. Hell, one of the first tasks in my entire career was to investigate a similar incident...
We found that a professor, who was known to telnet in from international IPs while on break, had SOMEHOW had his password stolen (gee I wonder if it could have been because he used telnet even though we had ssh available? sigh...)
Someone had installed an IRC proxy, and so I got the job of running packet sniffers and watching the IRC channel for the day to collect info. It quickly became evident what I was dealing with as one of the channel members was complaining about how the internet has been ever since dad switched ISPs:)
Nothing ever came of it... but we collected logs....
That debt was issued by the same congress that is supposed to be the fund's trustee. What other trust fund allows the trustee to write himself loans from the trust?
It was setup as seperate for a reason, they didn't change the setup, they went in the back door and raided it.
SS should hold exactly $0 of US debt. If they wanted to find some other investment fine, if they wanted to hold it in gold, fine... but... not IOUs....not when it was specifically setup as a seperate fund so that money taken it wouldn't be used elsewhere.
What makes it wrong exactly? Potentially illegal sure but, wrong?
Thats like saying its wrong to smoke pot.
I don't recognize the wrongness of crimes with no victim. Even pollution can make a case for their being a world full of victims, but.... data copying? Copying using ones own hardware, own internet connection etc?
I don't see it. Frankly, I think its wrong to make laws like that. If you wanna talk about wrong, talk to the people who did that.
And Democrats would lose one of their most powerful ploys to pull their base toghether. Just try to talk to a progressive democrat about Ron Paul and all you hear about is abortion rights, and how he votes against funding Planned Parenthood etc etc.... they don't even get that he votes against everything.
Abortion is a big silly issue. Its a 50/50 split in popular polls, and the arguments for why it should remain legal are quite strong from a constitutional perspective (if you don't know why the life of the mother and due process are intimately intertwined then you should really go read roe)
So in the end...its a big settled issue thats going to go nowhere at all. If the GOP stopped pretending, then it would go away and reduce stability on both sides...which would be a good thing.
Is that before, or after you account for the fact that SS is taxed on is own. There is no "military tax". SS is taxed seperately, and supposed to be run out of a seperate fund from the federal budget.
Now I know this has become all messed up but...SS tax is still being collected seperately. It shouldn't be counted from the same till just because the trustee broke the trust by borrowing against it.
We were going out to some shitty nightclub one night. Was in Boston, over by "Giliians", which I don't think is there anymore, back when Axis and Avalon were still around. I was looking for parking down the main parking drag, and see an open spot...with a sign... it looked like a legitimate city posted temporary "No Parking" sign....
except... the center part said "fridays" with no date... and it was attached to the parking meter with string....poorly...
We just laughed, parked there, and tossed the sign under the car, which was probably the plan of whoever put it there.
I have always thought that companies that advertise unlimited, but still put on a cap are underhanded and deserve some smack down. I will never get how that isn't false advertising.
Care to explain why? It was intended to be silly, because it illustrates the point. If you give something away for free, you relinquish any and all control over what a person does with it, and leave them free to do what they want, which may be benficial to you, or not. I see no reason why this should suddenly be different online.
Furthermore, its only a slight exageration. There is, in fact, a woman near us who sits by the train station offering up roses and asking for donations. My wife took a rose and dropped a $5 in the donation box, to which the woman had the gall to reply "Don't you have a twenty?"
> As part of the tacit agreement you make as a reader
Tacit agreement? What are the terms of this tacit agreement? So if a site has no ads today, and I seek it out tomorow, does that mean they have changed the agreement?
Thats the probolem with implied agreements, anybody can claim they exist and claim what their terms are. Sounds entirely unreasonable to me. Just because they based their business model on unwarranted assumptions about what my client, running on my machine would do with their data.
Certainly, implied agreement makes sense in many case. If I go to a resteraunt and order food, I am agreeing to pay the price on the menu. If I make a doctors appointment, i am agreeing to pay his fees for said appointment.
This is no such thing... a website may or may not link elsewhere, may or may not get paid for some of those links depending on technical details of how they load etc. I have no way of knowing, before I request it, where it is linking, what data it is going to ask me to send to whom, whether the people I am sending it to are tracking me etc.
On top of that, there are already several EXPLICIT agreements, known as RFCs. They indicate how data is sent, the format of the data, etc. Its pretty clear from the explicit agreements that the browser is responsible for the rendering, and for deciding what elements to render and how to render them.
I say those explicit agreements trump any implict ones, especially when those implicit ones ask for nearly unlimited trust.
> It is technically possible for me to obtain and use your credit card information for my own benefit. Is > it legal? Is it ethical? Absolutely not.
And you say my analogy is silly.... what does downloading and rendering of publically available information have to do with obtaining access to privileged information that you are not authorised to have?
Funny because when I pointed it out to her, even she conceeded that her view was based on some very biased samples.
She certainly knew the extreme cases. However, thats what they are... extreme. The VAST majority of drug use and the experience of users does not involve being admitted to the ER on an OD (contrary to what TV would have you believe),
The thing is, we were discussing policy. The extreme cases don't really inform policy since they are rare, and they don't happen in a vaccuume. Its easy to say drugs shouldn't be legal and point to heroin or meth. Its less obvious to see that heroin and meth are so popular because of prohibitionist policy making them the prefered drugs to traffic in.
In any case, those changes in policy wouldn't change her world...she will always see the most extreme cases, and there will always be extreme cases, even if a policy reduced the overall number of them, they would still be distilled through people like her.
Did people who bought refridgerators hurt the ice men?
Just because somebody comes up with a scheme for monetizing what he does, which is based on what he expects me to do, doesn't mean I am somehow required to do what he expects me to do.
Its up to my browser how a page is rendered, what elements get loaded, what don't, what the format is. That was the agreement from day 1 on the web. Its how the entire client-server model works. They exchange data, and either side does with it as he pleases.
Advertising is based on commonly correct, but utterly unfounded ideas about how clients will render websites, including that they will load just anything they are pointed to. Clearly a falsehood, in this day.
Its wrong to conflate liking someoneone or liking what they do, with having some obligation to help them do it in the way that they want. Maybe my business model is to hand out free roses to people by the side of the road, in exchange for which I expect people to freely donate to me all of their worldly wealth and posessions. Will you comply with my expectation just because I handed you a flower?
Why is that absurd but its not absurd to think you can continually give people content they don't want, and expect them to look at it? Would we say the same about the people who skip the ads in the newspaper? Or people who use the grocery circulars that are mailed to them to line bird cages instead of reading them?
These people have decided to fund themselves based on unwarranted assumptions.... then complain when their assumption doesn't pan out.
Personally tho...I don't block ads execpt what noscript + requestpolicy blocks (which is alot) but, when i see ads, I take a whole different take. I figure, I should click on the ads I don't like...that way the people running them get to pay more to support the sites that i like....
Then they target me for more ads that offend me.... more clicks...more support. Support Obama? Click! Support Romney? Click.
> It may have tweaked my view of people in retrospect, basically it was a really long course in human psychology.
The fact that you think that, I view, as evidence that it may have tweaked your view of people.
One of the most interesting drug policy debates that I ever had was with a toxicologist at a major hospital. I don't remember the meat of the debate so much as the ending, her view was just...so dark. Thats when it hit me.... her only experience in this area, is in seeing the worst of the worst. She doesn't see the guy who gets stoned and eats some munchies. She sees the guy who tried to kill himself. She sees the guy who injected himself with an unknown dose of an unknown white powder in a bag, produced by god knows who, and is now having a life threatening reaction.
In short, the sample size that she has may be large, but, its all highly biased towards the absolute worst. A large portion of her professional career is dealing with people having serious issues beyond what even most drug users ever experience.
It is like you are looking at information thats coming through a filter. Its like sitting behind a big red gel filter...all you ever get is red light. Everything is shades of red. Its a distillation process....and you are sitting in the condenser. You make the boiling pot bigger and bigger, fill it with more of the same.... and what happens to the output? It goes up. The more you put in to distill, the more distillate you get out.... even if the overall rate of it is the same as it was before.
It doesn't say anything about the population as a whole except to help define the extremes in excruciating detail.... but the vast majority of "people" is not the extremes at all. Though, in many real ways, this is hardly unique. News is all rare events. Multiple murders, heinous crimes, anything that happens rarely for the size of our population. In fact, there is almost an inverse relationship to how many people are effected by something and how big of a story it can be.
> Uh, the other guy who DIDN'T think that regulations were needed was - also a doctor.
Well saying that one person or groups recomendation is self-interested doesn't make any specific claim about every member of the group or profession. It can be self interested, and still not supported by everyone who would benefit. (this is what always perplexes me about people who simplify down to "why should they be against welfare, they recieve it, they would lose out if it went away".... yes... but that doesn't mean that they think its a good policy... totally different issue)
> Personally, I don't think you should regulate these. Who's going to do it? How many friggin 'lawyer' > screens are you going to create (hint: more than we already have)?
I MOSTLY agree. However, I do think there could be a few sensible ones... mostly having to do with claims. I do think it quite valid to say... you can make any software you want, but you have to comply with regs X, Y, and Z if you want to claim that results in positive medical outcomes.
So, if I write a program that helps you track what you eat, set targets for calories, nutrients etc.... fine. If I want to claim it "helps you track your consumption" or "helps organize your attempts to lose weight" fine.... but.... to claim that it "helps you lose weight" is a specific claim on the outcome... and I think its reasonable to put some requirements on such a claim.
Frankly, thats all I would want to see. Otheriwse, its too stifiling, people own their devices, I would hate to see them not able to run apps or people writting apps just for themselves for fear of releasing them to others.
Totally unrelated... except to show how relative a term "slow" can be.
This reminds me of reading the docs for a Perl DNS module once when I was writting an internal app that needed to do a lot of DNS lookups. The docs said it was "pure perl" and "slow". So, if the docs said it was slow....I figured I would use the system resolver instead.
I wrote my app, came to test it.... and DOSd my own system as my program began trying to slam the system resolver with 6 parallel workers (batch resolving IPs based on logs)...each of which had to open several files (nsswitch.conf, hosts, hosts.allow, resolv.conf.....and I think a few others if memory servers) for EACH LOOKUP.... my poor system was no match for it (this was back in the single core days)
I switched to the "slow" dns module, and maybe it was slow by some standards, but compared to the system resolver...it was lightweight and fast.
If his claim were factually accurate, and 100% effective, then, indeed he is correct and the implication is also correct. If such a mechanism exists, AND its as close to 100% effective as we can figure... THEN the implication that a pregnancy implies no rape would, indeed be true...and there would be no problem with his statement.
However, the problem begins with the fact that these statements are not true. Either there is no such mechanism (no data I have seen rules it out entirely), or if it exists, then its not very effective, and is a rather weak effect.
In fact, one thing missed here.... the often quoted study of pregnancy and rape says 11% spontaneously miscarried.... but I just looked up other sources for the overall miscarriage rate... its closer to 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 pregnancies!
So in fact, this hypothesis is doing even worst, as now.... if a raped woman's body will reject a pregnancy from the rape....then why are their spontaneous miscarriage rates so LOW?
In fact, we should now be looking for a mechanism to explain the exact opposite of this idiot politicians assertion.
They did such a great job with this, but, for one dot they failed to connect. Yes they show that rape can result in pregnancy, and 5% is definitely high for the type of claims being made as casting doubt on the need for abortion.
However, they don't actually address (in the summary I read) the issue of whether their appears to be such a mechanism at work. I say this because they ignored any investigation of non-rape sexual contact.
Lets say the average for non-rape contact was 10%, or nearly double (I know its not that high). Then we could say there is some credibility to the claim, and the problem is a matter of degree. (the numbers are still too high for what the anti-choicers want to justify).
On the other hand, if the non-rape encounters were in the 4-6% range, then hey.... no effect.... if they are more like 1% then...we may have a totally opposite effect going on!
Of course...this gets hard because we then need to take into account the fact that people having sex by choice may (or may not!) be more likely to use birth control of some form.... so that needs to be addressed to really start comparing apples to apples. (I imagine you do that by throwing out all rape cases where any form of birth control was being used, or treat them as a second category for evaluation)
> " A magic spell that "lets you repel evil" is, I would say, slightly > more assuring of a definite effect. " > The only difference is you are more used to one then the other.
That's not the only difference, there is also the wording here, at least in these examples. Their claims are so general as to be meaningless. What does it mean to 'repel evil'? Its so open to interpretation. Hell you could be killed, while tossing the holy water in the face of your serial rapist murder, and I could still spin that.
However, if you claim someone is going to fall madly in lust with me... aside from any ethical issues that may develop from how it may be administered (lets assume not, I drink it myself and it does its magic....keep it simple) well... I may miss the odd signal or two, but if the claim is someones love, or powerful lust... I may not be able to objectively prove it didn't work as intended, but, I definitely have some expectations (you know, assuming I...heh... believed in magic)
In the end, I agree, it really is the same thing... but I can see why they get less complaints. Its much easier to feel good about your purchase when its not making overly specific claims, which is clearly why they got the pass.
Really, the Christians are not new. They have been at this selling dreams game a long time and they are good at it...and THAT is the other real difference.
I bet you the creative ones will find their way back onto ebay, and will refine their game a little too....so they don't piss off ebay.
Sufficient for you maybe. I have much bigger issues with the union than whether the people of some states want to ruin their educational systems or not. This is more like icing on the shit cake than a major issue.
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Sure but we weren't debating limited liability, I was just pointing out that calling libertarians pro-corperate is like saying the jews and muslims must be great friends because they both refuse to eat pork.
Of course, the name is the only reason I checked out the comments, as I have been looking to grow some elder trees in my yard, and the berries are currently in season (mmmm). Of course, trying to get some from my pagan friends turned out to be too much hassle (important tree, need some rituals or some such).... so we just ordered some seeds, got them yesterday actually.
Well the thing is names make it easier to distinguish and actually talk about them. If I compared ExTrojA.1234 with CERT-2001-19 you probably have no clue what I am refering to. In this case that probably works to my favor, since if I tried to compare this to code red, I would instantly look foolish.
Where I do agree is when it can corrupt a deliberative process and make hash of people's arguments. What I am thinking of is congress. Remember the "clean air act" that reduced air pollution standards? What kind of thing is that? Leaving people in favor of clean air trying to argue against the clean air act?
Or the truly low move of naming a bill after a murdered kid. I can think of few things so small and yet so corrosive to the very spirit of a deliberative process to force a person who disagrees with a policy to make him argue against something so unfairly titled.
However, since worm and trojan names don't enter into such deliberative processes and public opinion of them is irrelevant.... I say let them have the names.
Oh.... and keep this one out of your mouth.... elderwood is poisonous.
> Meanwhile the libertarians argue that they can somehow create an economic utopia by unleashing a
> sociopathic social order in which corporations are free to do whatever they want without oversight by
> the government.
I have to disagree with this chracterization as a bit too simplistic. Corps are legal fictions created through the power of the state. They are fictional entities which stand in the place of a person, to convey limited liability on the actual corp owners.
In fact, many libertarians are against limited liability at all. How this could, in any way, be described as pro-corperate, I just don't see. In fact, I can think of few things that would be less pro-corperate than elimination of limited liability.... it guts the entire concept of a corp.
Personally, as something of a libertarian myself (not entirely), I am not against its eliminatuon nor for it, because I see it as a useful pact with the government, and one which legitimizes regulation...afterall, they are fictional non-person entities, and are recieving a benefit for becoming such.... seems the government which offers this priviledge should be free to put whatever restrictions that they like on it.
In my view, I tend to say taxes are theft and extorition, not so with corp taxes...for that very reason.
> You can easily not qualify to be able to drive, in the states its so easy it's not a 'privilege' anymore.
If you mean in terms of driving skill...absolutely. However, they are more than happy to remind you of this should you miss renewal on your license expiration date. They will be more than happy to penalize you for it.... because people who don't pay them on time are far more dangerous than shitty drivers, and they have to prioritize.
Nobody seems to care if you drive around with your high beams on (even in the middle of the city), or if you get in the left lane just to sit there and create a huge line behind you, or have your low beams adjusted up into people's eyes....
but... if you don't pay them on time.... holy hell, they will nail your ass.
Add that to research that suggests that many people drive at the speed they feel comfortable at, regardless of the posted limit, and it really is a very good question.
What is the point? Personally, I think its because some people like the idea of being able to pull over any car at will. Just keep the rules in that area where most people break a few as a matter of course, but not so egregious that its obvious thats what you are doing, and its both a money source and a source of arbitrary abuse of power.
I have heard it directly from cops mouths.... if they want to pull someone over, the standard wisdom is, all they have to do is watch them for a few minutes and they will find a reason. What does that say about the standards that are set?
I thought the same thing, and have had thoughts along the same lines.
Actually, I like the idea of this working while standing thing, in fact, I used to often work from a kneeling position, (which is much less comfortable when it comes time to stand up).
My main issue with really adjusting my workspace is that I really want to be able to switch off between sitting and standing.... do part of the day standing, part sitting....
So far the transition seems like more work than its worth,
Well bitcoins are like wire transfers...its all just meaningless account numbers, but.... the movement has to be consistent. So if I give you X bitcoins, I can see the account they go to when you spend them.... but its just another meaningless account number.
Where things get interesting is, that they mix.... so, if I see a transfer to another account, I can then trace any other transfers to or from that account, or other ones it is associated with.
If alice the crook uses her coins to buy a service from bob, then bob mixes her coins with others of his when he spends them, maybe from some tips he recieved from posting a tip bitcoin account on some web forum.... then he becomes easy to link.... and question. its "old fashioned police work" from there.
Of course, if they are careful, and only use those coins for relatively anonymous transactions which they can turn into cash or unassociated bitcoins.... that trail could go cold fast.
These days? I think this has been true for quite a while. I have found similar things. Hell, one of the first tasks in my entire career was to investigate a similar incident...
We found that a professor, who was known to telnet in from international IPs while on break, had SOMEHOW had his password stolen (gee I wonder if it could have been because he used telnet even though we had ssh available? sigh...)
Someone had installed an IRC proxy, and so I got the job of running packet sniffers and watching the IRC channel for the day to collect info. It quickly became evident what I was dealing with as one of the channel members was complaining about how the internet has been ever since dad switched ISPs :)
Nothing ever came of it... but we collected logs....
Which is exactly what I was complaining about.
That debt was issued by the same congress that is supposed to be the fund's trustee. What other trust fund allows the trustee to write himself loans from the trust?
It was setup as seperate for a reason, they didn't change the setup, they went in the back door and raided it.
SS should hold exactly $0 of US debt. If they wanted to find some other investment fine, if they wanted to hold it in gold, fine... but... not IOUs....not when it was specifically setup as a seperate fund so that money taken it wouldn't be used elsewhere.
What makes it wrong exactly? Potentially illegal sure but, wrong?
Thats like saying its wrong to smoke pot.
I don't recognize the wrongness of crimes with no victim. Even pollution can make a case for their being a world full of victims, but.... data copying? Copying using ones own hardware, own internet connection etc?
I don't see it. Frankly, I think its wrong to make laws like that. If you wanna talk about wrong, talk to the people who did that.
And Democrats would lose one of their most powerful ploys to pull their base toghether. Just try to talk to a progressive democrat about Ron Paul and all you hear about is abortion rights, and how he votes against funding Planned Parenthood etc etc.... they don't even get that he votes against everything.
Abortion is a big silly issue. Its a 50/50 split in popular polls, and the arguments for why it should remain legal are quite strong from a constitutional perspective (if you don't know why the life of the mother and due process are intimately intertwined then you should really go read roe)
So in the end...its a big settled issue thats going to go nowhere at all. If the GOP stopped pretending, then it would go away and reduce stability on both sides...which would be a good thing.
Is that before, or after you account for the fact that SS is taxed on is own. There is no "military tax". SS is taxed seperately, and supposed to be run out of a seperate fund from the federal budget.
Now I know this has become all messed up but...SS tax is still being collected seperately. It shouldn't be counted from the same till just because the trustee broke the trust by borrowing against it.
We were going out to some shitty nightclub one night. Was in Boston, over by "Giliians", which I don't think is there anymore, back when Axis and Avalon were still around. I was looking for parking down the main parking drag, and see an open spot...with a sign... it looked like a legitimate city posted temporary "No Parking" sign....
except... the center part said "fridays" with no date... and it was attached to the parking meter with string....poorly...
We just laughed, parked there, and tossed the sign under the car, which was probably the plan of whoever put it there.
I have always thought that companies that advertise unlimited, but still put on a cap are underhanded and deserve some smack down. I will never get how that isn't false advertising.
> Silly analogy.
Care to explain why? It was intended to be silly, because it illustrates the point. If you give something away for free, you relinquish any and all control over what a person does with it, and leave them free to do what they want, which may be benficial to you, or not. I see no reason why this should suddenly be different online.
Furthermore, its only a slight exageration. There is, in fact, a woman near us who sits by the train station offering up roses and asking for donations. My wife took a rose and dropped a $5 in the donation box, to which the woman had the gall to reply "Don't you have a twenty?"
> As part of the tacit agreement you make as a reader
Tacit agreement? What are the terms of this tacit agreement? So if a site has no ads today, and I seek it out tomorow, does that mean they have changed the agreement?
Thats the probolem with implied agreements, anybody can claim they exist and claim what their terms are. Sounds entirely unreasonable to me. Just because they based their business model on unwarranted assumptions about what my client, running on my machine would do with their data.
Certainly, implied agreement makes sense in many case. If I go to a resteraunt and order food, I am agreeing to pay the price on the menu. If I make a doctors appointment, i am agreeing to pay his fees for said appointment.
This is no such thing... a website may or may not link elsewhere, may or may not get paid for some of those links depending on technical details of how they load etc. I have no way of knowing, before I request it, where it is linking, what data it is going to ask me to send to whom, whether the people I am sending it to are tracking me etc.
On top of that, there are already several EXPLICIT agreements, known as RFCs. They indicate how data is sent, the format of the data, etc. Its pretty clear from the explicit agreements that the browser is responsible for the rendering, and for deciding what elements to render and how to render them.
I say those explicit agreements trump any implict ones, especially when those implicit ones ask for nearly unlimited trust.
> It is technically possible for me to obtain and use your credit card information for my own benefit. Is
> it legal? Is it ethical? Absolutely not.
And you say my analogy is silly.... what does downloading and rendering of publically available information have to do with obtaining access to privileged information that you are not authorised to have?
Funny because when I pointed it out to her, even she conceeded that her view was based on some very biased samples.
She certainly knew the extreme cases. However, thats what they are... extreme. The VAST majority of drug use and the experience of users does not involve being admitted to the ER on an OD (contrary to what TV would have you believe),
The thing is, we were discussing policy. The extreme cases don't really inform policy since they are rare, and they don't happen in a vaccuume. Its easy to say drugs shouldn't be legal and point to heroin or meth. Its less obvious to see that heroin and meth are so popular because of prohibitionist policy making them the prefered drugs to traffic in.
In any case, those changes in policy wouldn't change her world...she will always see the most extreme cases, and there will always be extreme cases, even if a policy reduced the overall number of them, they would still be distilled through people like her.
Did people who bought refridgerators hurt the ice men?
Just because somebody comes up with a scheme for monetizing what he does, which is based on what he expects me to do, doesn't mean I am somehow required to do what he expects me to do.
Its up to my browser how a page is rendered, what elements get loaded, what don't, what the format is. That was the agreement from day 1 on the web. Its how the entire client-server model works. They exchange data, and either side does with it as he pleases.
Advertising is based on commonly correct, but utterly unfounded ideas about how clients will render websites, including that they will load just anything they are pointed to. Clearly a falsehood, in this day.
Its wrong to conflate liking someoneone or liking what they do, with having some obligation to help them do it in the way that they want. Maybe my business model is to hand out free roses to people by the side of the road, in exchange for which I expect people to freely donate to me all of their worldly wealth and posessions. Will you comply with my expectation just because I handed you a flower?
Why is that absurd but its not absurd to think you can continually give people content they don't want, and expect them to look at it? Would we say the same about the people who skip the ads in the newspaper? Or people who use the grocery circulars that are mailed to them to line bird cages instead of reading them?
These people have decided to fund themselves based on unwarranted assumptions.... then complain when their assumption doesn't pan out.
Personally tho...I don't block ads execpt what noscript + requestpolicy blocks (which is alot) but, when i see ads, I take a whole different take. I figure, I should click on the ads I don't like...that way the people running them get to pay more to support the sites that i like....
Then they target me for more ads that offend me.... more clicks...more support. Support Obama? Click! Support Romney? Click.
> It may have tweaked my view of people in retrospect, basically it was a really long course in human psychology.
The fact that you think that, I view, as evidence that it may have tweaked your view of people.
One of the most interesting drug policy debates that I ever had was with a toxicologist at a major hospital. I don't remember the meat of the debate so much as the ending, her view was just...so dark. Thats when it hit me.... her only experience in this area, is in seeing the worst of the worst. She doesn't see the guy who gets stoned and eats some munchies. She sees the guy who tried to kill himself. She sees the guy who injected himself with an unknown dose of an unknown white powder in a bag, produced by god knows who, and is now having a life threatening reaction.
In short, the sample size that she has may be large, but, its all highly biased towards the absolute worst. A large portion of her professional career is dealing with people having serious issues beyond what even most drug users ever experience.
It is like you are looking at information thats coming through a filter. Its like sitting behind a big red gel filter...all you ever get is red light. Everything is shades of red. Its a distillation process....and you are sitting in the condenser. You make the boiling pot bigger and bigger, fill it with more of the same.... and what happens to the output? It goes up. The more you put in to distill, the more distillate you get out.... even if the overall rate of it is the same as it was before.
It doesn't say anything about the population as a whole except to help define the extremes in excruciating detail.... but the vast majority of "people" is not the extremes at all. Though, in many real ways, this is hardly unique. News is all rare events. Multiple murders, heinous crimes, anything that happens rarely for the size of our population. In fact, there is almost an inverse relationship to how many people are effected by something and how big of a story it can be.
> Uh, the other guy who DIDN'T think that regulations were needed was - also a doctor.
Well saying that one person or groups recomendation is self-interested doesn't make any specific claim about every member of the group or profession. It can be self interested, and still not supported by everyone who would benefit. (this is what always perplexes me about people who simplify down to "why should they be against welfare, they recieve it, they would lose out if it went away".... yes... but that doesn't mean that they think its a good policy... totally different issue)
> Personally, I don't think you should regulate these. Who's going to do it? How many friggin 'lawyer'
> screens are you going to create (hint: more than we already have)?
I MOSTLY agree. However, I do think there could be a few sensible ones... mostly having to do with claims. I do think it quite valid to say... you can make any software you want, but you have to comply with regs X, Y, and Z if you want to claim that results in positive medical outcomes.
So, if I write a program that helps you track what you eat, set targets for calories, nutrients etc.... fine. If I want to claim it "helps you track your consumption" or "helps organize your attempts to lose weight" fine.... but.... to claim that it "helps you lose weight" is a specific claim on the outcome... and I think its reasonable to put some requirements on such a claim.
Frankly, thats all I would want to see. Otheriwse, its too stifiling, people own their devices, I would hate to see them not able to run apps or people writting apps just for themselves for fear of releasing them to others.
Totally unrelated... except to show how relative a term "slow" can be.
This reminds me of reading the docs for a Perl DNS module once when I was writting an internal app that needed to do a lot of DNS lookups. The docs said it was "pure perl" and "slow". So, if the docs said it was slow....I figured I would use the system resolver instead.
I wrote my app, came to test it.... and DOSd my own system as my program began trying to slam the system resolver with 6 parallel workers (batch resolving IPs based on logs)...each of which had to open several files (nsswitch.conf, hosts, hosts.allow, resolv.conf.....and I think a few others if memory servers) for EACH LOOKUP.... my poor system was no match for it (this was back in the single core days)
I switched to the "slow" dns module, and maybe it was slow by some standards, but compared to the system resolver...it was lightweight and fast.
"Slow" is always a relative term.
Yes and no.
If his claim were factually accurate, and 100% effective, then, indeed he is correct and the implication is also correct. If such a mechanism exists, AND its as close to 100% effective as we can figure... THEN the implication that a pregnancy implies no rape would, indeed be true...and there would be no problem with his statement.
However, the problem begins with the fact that these statements are not true. Either there is no such mechanism (no data I have seen rules it out entirely), or if it exists, then its not very effective, and is a rather weak effect.
In fact, one thing missed here.... the often quoted study of pregnancy and rape says 11% spontaneously miscarried.... but I just looked up other sources for the overall miscarriage rate... its closer to 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 pregnancies!
So in fact, this hypothesis is doing even worst, as now.... if a raped woman's body will reject a pregnancy from the rape....then why are their spontaneous miscarriage rates so LOW?
In fact, we should now be looking for a mechanism to explain the exact opposite of this idiot politicians assertion.
They did such a great job with this, but, for one dot they failed to connect. Yes they show that rape can result in pregnancy, and 5% is definitely high for the type of claims being made as casting doubt on the need for abortion.
However, they don't actually address (in the summary I read) the issue of whether their appears to be such a mechanism at work. I say this because they ignored any investigation of non-rape sexual contact.
Lets say the average for non-rape contact was 10%, or nearly double (I know its not that high). Then we could say there is some credibility to the claim, and the problem is a matter of degree. (the numbers are still too high for what the anti-choicers want to justify).
On the other hand, if the non-rape encounters were in the 4-6% range, then hey.... no effect.... if they are more like 1% then...we may have a totally opposite effect going on!
Of course...this gets hard because we then need to take into account the fact that people having sex by choice may (or may not!) be more likely to use birth control of some form.... so that needs to be addressed to really start comparing apples to apples. (I imagine you do that by throwing out all rape cases where any form of birth control was being used, or treat them as a second category for evaluation)
> " A magic spell that "lets you repel evil" is, I would say, slightly
> more assuring of a definite effect. "
> The only difference is you are more used to one then the other.
That's not the only difference, there is also the wording here, at least in these examples. Their claims are so general as to be meaningless. What does it mean to 'repel evil'? Its so open to interpretation. Hell you could be killed, while tossing the holy water in the face of your serial rapist murder, and I could still spin that.
However, if you claim someone is going to fall madly in lust with me... aside from any ethical issues that may develop from how it may be administered (lets assume not, I drink it myself and it does its magic....keep it simple) well... I may miss the odd signal or two, but if the claim is someones love, or powerful lust... I may not be able to objectively prove it didn't work as intended, but, I definitely have some expectations (you know, assuming I...heh... believed in magic)
In the end, I agree, it really is the same thing... but I can see why they get less complaints. Its much easier to feel good about your purchase when its not making overly specific claims, which is clearly why they got the pass.
Really, the Christians are not new. They have been at this selling dreams game a long time and they are good at it...and THAT is the other real difference.
I bet you the creative ones will find their way back onto ebay, and will refine their game a little too....so they don't piss off ebay.
> You'd throw the sane people in the community to the wolves by letting the ignorant call the tune.
Of course not, if they came to live in my community, I would welcome them with open arms.
However, its not "the community". Its their community, not mine. I don't live in their community.
Sufficient for you maybe. I have much bigger issues with the union than whether the people of some states want to ruin their educational systems or not. This is more like icing on the shit cake than a major issue.