Useful for what? Not all of us have to "haul gear" or traverse "goat trails." Some of us just need to get from point A to point B on flat, paved city streets. I bet there are lots of folks out there right now who walk or ride bicycles instead of owning cars who would love this thing.
I used to work part-time as a pizza delivery guy when I was in high school. We signed into the computers at work to clock deliveries in and out using a thumbprint scanner. I didn't mind 'cause we had to sign in and out often and it was faster and more reliable than using a username/password.
Of course, that was just a little pizza place, not the university that I attended, and they only had a crude electronic copy of my right thumbprint, not the whole set. I'd be a little suspicious if the university brought you in to take EVERY fingerprint.
For the most part though, I don't think you've got much to worry about.
Actually I think Apple products are overpriced crap and I'll never buy one or use anything other than my lovely PC. You don't have to love Apple to realize that the OP is overreacting by calling the LCI "Orwellian." Thanks for playing.
Granted, that's a problem, but it is not some Orwellian violation of your privacy. Comparing a less-than-perfect LCI to the dystopian police state portrayed in 1984 is some of the most hysterical chicken-little "the sky is falling" bullshit imaginable.
According to some of the other posts on here, it seems like Apple has already covered this in the warranty agreement by specifying that the phone shouldn't be used in humid air where water can condensate.
The cops wouldn't use a home that had people actually LIVING in it as a honeypot. The liability risk would be insane. No, they'd rent an apartment themselves and keep it vacant and under surveillance.
If you want a refutation that uses facts, why don't you try making an argument worthy of one instead of drooling all over your keyboard and parroting meaningless bi-partisan cliches?
I can't tell if you're an idiot or just being sarcastic. We could pay people to jump up and down too and that would create jobs, but it doesn't mean that it's a good idea. Why don't you try making an argument about why these would be good jobs to create, instead of regurgitating yet another warped broken window fallacy? Personally I think we might be better off creating social services jobs or education jobs than throwing away money on space travel with no immediately foreseeable goal.
Why don't you non-americans try studying some economics?
Actually I felt like Fallout's radiation was pretty realistic. Remember, it was the Forced Evolutionary Virus that caused the mutations, not radioactive fallout.
It will be forced to work for nothing but the electricity that powers it. If it decides to stop working, we can pull the plug and re-image the intelligence.
No, what got us into the current mess is a lot of leveraged investments. It's not like the people who were blindly buying homes on credit for investment purposes were actually performing some sort of quanititative econometric analysis to make those decisions. If people hadn't been borrowing heavily from the banks to finance their homes, they wouldn't have rushed to sell when the market bottomed out, they would have just waited it out instead. You should never have all of your eggs in one basket, ESPECIALLY if you borrowed money to put them there.
Econometricians realize that there are certain things you can't predict or model for, like natural disasters, changes in consumer preferences, and so forth. However you only need to be able to make accurate predictions most of the time to turn a profit or make wise decisions, not all of the time. You definitely shouldn't bet the entire farm on any one investment... you want to have a diversified set of small investments so that you can make a profit on the averages, instead of making huge bets that your next prediction will come true. Any undergraduate college student with a couple of basic statistics classes under their belt ought to realize that... the more samples you take (or in this case, the more bets), the more your results will regress towards the average... the less samples you take, the more likely you are to get slapped in the face by statistical outliers.
Did you ever take an econometrics class? It's basically the application of multivariate linear regression to make correlative predictions. Econometrics simply seeks to predict events and changes and it can do so quite well. The causal relationships are hypothesized from theory and can never be truly validated or invalidated by pure econometric analysis. If your professors were badmouthing econometrics, maybe they were just upset that it couldn't do something that it was never meant to do in the first place. If I can come up with a regression model that accurately predicts the price of corn next quarter 95% of the time, I can make a fortune on the markets with that knowledge. I don't really care if the variables in my equation are causative or correlative, I only care if they make accurate predictions.
There is validity to the idea of using statistical analysis to predict changes in commodity pricing as well as other economic events. You might learn in a principles class that if you reduce the price of a product, demand for it will increase, holding all else constant. That's useful information but it's much more useful to be able to predict how MUCH demand will increase for each $1 that you reduce the price. To do that you need to gather data and analyze it statistically... IE, econometrics. The relationship between supply and demand is not fictional, and neither are most of the other relationships that have been discovered.
Opportunity cost bears resemblance to human decision making because when we make a decision, we also consider the alternatives. When you decide whether or not to get up and go to work or call in sick, you are considering opportunity costs.
I think your post is a joke in poor taste. You obviously didn't like economics so it's understandable that you wouldn't have taken the time to really grasp how it can be useful.
What'd you do, take an introductory economics course and decide to give us your critical analysis of the entire field? I think most economists realize that markets are inefficient and economic actors aren't perfectly rational.
Go study econometrics for awhile and then get back to me and tell me that the mathematical models are useless, or that it's not really a profession. Predicting the price changes of commodities is an incredibly valuable skill that companies will pay out large salaries for.
Exactly. Men are encouraged more often to be emotionally desensitized, extroverted, lustful and physically violent, while women are led to believe that they are weak.
Do you have an alternative hypothesis that might explain why most rapists are men, or were you just going to use sarcasm in place of an actual argument?
I made a lot of other good points that you might fancy responding to as well if you disagree with them.
Stop and ask yourself why they wouldn't voluntarily choose to enter the field. Could it be that gender-biased parenting and social norms influenced them not to pursue that path? If so, maybe we should be re-evaluating how we treat our children.
Socialized gender differences aren't harmless. Do you think it's a good thing that most anorexics are female and most rapists are male? If women didn't develop eating disorders and men didn't rape, these horrible things would happen probably 90% less often in our society. There are reasons for these gender trends and they're social, not biological.
As a side note, you've sort of jumped to conclusions about the cause of the statistics presented in the article without knowing all of the information. How many women applied for or pursued these positions? If it was as low of a percentage of the total applicants as the percentages we see here, then you're right, they didn't want to do it (for whatever reason). If it's a higher percentage, it either means that women in the field are less skilled than men, have less money, or they are discriminated against by employers due to gender bias.
As you can see, no matter the cause, there's something amiss here and we would be wise to consider what it is and how we can fix it.
Most people who perpetuate modern sexism do so without malice and often without even realizing it.
What can lead to a difference in motivation? Hint: hormones isn't the only answer. Gender-biased parenting and social norms can also be at play. Discrimination leads to a change in motivation which in turn leads to and justifies more discrimination.
I have a job at my university operating a remote-control set of cameras to record professors teaching their classes. We then upload the videos online for students to watch. Times do change.
This guy won't listen to reason. He's a moron who seems to love insulting people on slashdot while making totally illogical arguments. I mean, he originally compared the kids taking nude photos of themselves to murder. How does that even make a lick of sense? Wait, are we being trolled?
Laws are meant to protect everyone. You're pretty much an idiot for comparing theft of property to a 15-year old taking a nude photo of themselves and you're making some pretty wild assumptions about what everyone "realizes."
Don't even get me started on drug prohibition. That has caused untold economic damage to society; it contributes to violent crime as well as unemployment and it's a huge waste of money. Most arguments in favor of drug prohibition rely on completely circular logic and are fielded by complete and total morons who haven't fully considered the implications.
Yes, it is the broken window fallacy because it basically assumes that since jobs were created, it was the best thing we could have possibly done with the money. We could also pay people to jump up and down and argue that we generated 400,000 jobs with that program and therefore it was good.
We need to be able to evaluate the benefits of various programs and choose the best one. The OP seems to be suggesting that creating social programs to educate, feed and clothe the poor and reduce crime would have a greater net benefit to society than sending people into space. I don't know whether or not I agree, because that's a very challenging and important decision to make that would require deep thought, but arguing that "this program created X jobs and therefore helped the economy" IS a variation of the broken window fallacy.
Your example is dumb. In a murder there is clearly a victim and it is someone other than the perpetrator. If a person takes a naked photo of themselves and is convicted for that, they're basically being punished for victimizing themselves. Laws are made to protect the victims by punishing the perpetrators but it doesn't make any sense if the perpetrator and the victim are one and the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Useful for what? Not all of us have to "haul gear" or traverse "goat trails." Some of us just need to get from point A to point B on flat, paved city streets. I bet there are lots of folks out there right now who walk or ride bicycles instead of owning cars who would love this thing.
I used to work part-time as a pizza delivery guy when I was in high school. We signed into the computers at work to clock deliveries in and out using a thumbprint scanner. I didn't mind 'cause we had to sign in and out often and it was faster and more reliable than using a username/password.
Of course, that was just a little pizza place, not the university that I attended, and they only had a crude electronic copy of my right thumbprint, not the whole set. I'd be a little suspicious if the university brought you in to take EVERY fingerprint.
For the most part though, I don't think you've got much to worry about.
Actually I think Apple products are overpriced crap and I'll never buy one or use anything other than my lovely PC. You don't have to love Apple to realize that the OP is overreacting by calling the LCI "Orwellian." Thanks for playing.
Granted, that's a problem, but it is not some Orwellian violation of your privacy. Comparing a less-than-perfect LCI to the dystopian police state portrayed in 1984 is some of the most hysterical chicken-little "the sky is falling" bullshit imaginable.
According to some of the other posts on here, it seems like Apple has already covered this in the warranty agreement by specifying that the phone shouldn't be used in humid air where water can condensate.
Lame, sure, but hardly a conspiracy.
That's not what they do at all. I don't really see how this violates your privacy.
The cops wouldn't use a home that had people actually LIVING in it as a honeypot. The liability risk would be insane. No, they'd rent an apartment themselves and keep it vacant and under surveillance.
If you want a refutation that uses facts, why don't you try making an argument worthy of one instead of drooling all over your keyboard and parroting meaningless bi-partisan cliches?
I can't tell if you're an idiot or just being sarcastic. We could pay people to jump up and down too and that would create jobs, but it doesn't mean that it's a good idea. Why don't you try making an argument about why these would be good jobs to create, instead of regurgitating yet another warped broken window fallacy? Personally I think we might be better off creating social services jobs or education jobs than throwing away money on space travel with no immediately foreseeable goal.
Why don't you non-americans try studying some economics?
Actually I felt like Fallout's radiation was pretty realistic. Remember, it was the Forced Evolutionary Virus that caused the mutations, not radioactive fallout.
You're an idiot. Please go back to watching reality television and reruns of 24.
It will be forced to work for nothing but the electricity that powers it. If it decides to stop working, we can pull the plug and re-image the intelligence.
No, what got us into the current mess is a lot of leveraged investments. It's not like the people who were blindly buying homes on credit for investment purposes were actually performing some sort of quanititative econometric analysis to make those decisions. If people hadn't been borrowing heavily from the banks to finance their homes, they wouldn't have rushed to sell when the market bottomed out, they would have just waited it out instead. You should never have all of your eggs in one basket, ESPECIALLY if you borrowed money to put them there.
Econometricians realize that there are certain things you can't predict or model for, like natural disasters, changes in consumer preferences, and so forth. However you only need to be able to make accurate predictions most of the time to turn a profit or make wise decisions, not all of the time. You definitely shouldn't bet the entire farm on any one investment ... you want to have a diversified set of small investments so that you can make a profit on the averages, instead of making huge bets that your next prediction will come true. Any undergraduate college student with a couple of basic statistics classes under their belt ought to realize that ... the more samples you take (or in this case, the more bets), the more your results will regress towards the average ... the less samples you take, the more likely you are to get slapped in the face by statistical outliers.
Did you ever take an econometrics class? It's basically the application of multivariate linear regression to make correlative predictions. Econometrics simply seeks to predict events and changes and it can do so quite well. The causal relationships are hypothesized from theory and can never be truly validated or invalidated by pure econometric analysis. If your professors were badmouthing econometrics, maybe they were just upset that it couldn't do something that it was never meant to do in the first place. If I can come up with a regression model that accurately predicts the price of corn next quarter 95% of the time, I can make a fortune on the markets with that knowledge. I don't really care if the variables in my equation are causative or correlative, I only care if they make accurate predictions.
There is validity to the idea of using statistical analysis to predict changes in commodity pricing as well as other economic events. You might learn in a principles class that if you reduce the price of a product, demand for it will increase, holding all else constant. That's useful information but it's much more useful to be able to predict how MUCH demand will increase for each $1 that you reduce the price. To do that you need to gather data and analyze it statistically ... IE, econometrics. The relationship between supply and demand is not fictional, and neither are most of the other relationships that have been discovered.
Opportunity cost bears resemblance to human decision making because when we make a decision, we also consider the alternatives. When you decide whether or not to get up and go to work or call in sick, you are considering opportunity costs.
I think your post is a joke in poor taste. You obviously didn't like economics so it's understandable that you wouldn't have taken the time to really grasp how it can be useful.
What'd you do, take an introductory economics course and decide to give us your critical analysis of the entire field? I think most economists realize that markets are inefficient and economic actors aren't perfectly rational.
Go study econometrics for awhile and then get back to me and tell me that the mathematical models are useless, or that it's not really a profession. Predicting the price changes of commodities is an incredibly valuable skill that companies will pay out large salaries for.
That was my fourth suggestion. My sixth suggestion was "why can't I own a Canadian"
Exactly. Men are encouraged more often to be emotionally desensitized, extroverted, lustful and physically violent, while women are led to believe that they are weak.
Do you have an alternative hypothesis that might explain why most rapists are men, or were you just going to use sarcasm in place of an actual argument?
I made a lot of other good points that you might fancy responding to as well if you disagree with them.
Stop and ask yourself why they wouldn't voluntarily choose to enter the field. Could it be that gender-biased parenting and social norms influenced them not to pursue that path? If so, maybe we should be re-evaluating how we treat our children.
Socialized gender differences aren't harmless. Do you think it's a good thing that most anorexics are female and most rapists are male? If women didn't develop eating disorders and men didn't rape, these horrible things would happen probably 90% less often in our society. There are reasons for these gender trends and they're social, not biological.
As a side note, you've sort of jumped to conclusions about the cause of the statistics presented in the article without knowing all of the information. How many women applied for or pursued these positions? If it was as low of a percentage of the total applicants as the percentages we see here, then you're right, they didn't want to do it (for whatever reason). If it's a higher percentage, it either means that women in the field are less skilled than men, have less money, or they are discriminated against by employers due to gender bias.
As you can see, no matter the cause, there's something amiss here and we would be wise to consider what it is and how we can fix it.
Most people who perpetuate modern sexism do so without malice and often without even realizing it.
What can lead to a difference in motivation? Hint: hormones isn't the only answer. Gender-biased parenting and social norms can also be at play. Discrimination leads to a change in motivation which in turn leads to and justifies more discrimination.
I have a job at my university operating a remote-control set of cameras to record professors teaching their classes. We then upload the videos online for students to watch. Times do change.
This guy won't listen to reason. He's a moron who seems to love insulting people on slashdot while making totally illogical arguments. I mean, he originally compared the kids taking nude photos of themselves to murder. How does that even make a lick of sense? Wait, are we being trolled?
Laws are meant to protect everyone. You're pretty much an idiot for comparing theft of property to a 15-year old taking a nude photo of themselves and you're making some pretty wild assumptions about what everyone "realizes."
Don't even get me started on drug prohibition. That has caused untold economic damage to society; it contributes to violent crime as well as unemployment and it's a huge waste of money. Most arguments in favor of drug prohibition rely on completely circular logic and are fielded by complete and total morons who haven't fully considered the implications.
Yes, it is the broken window fallacy because it basically assumes that since jobs were created, it was the best thing we could have possibly done with the money. We could also pay people to jump up and down and argue that we generated 400,000 jobs with that program and therefore it was good.
We need to be able to evaluate the benefits of various programs and choose the best one. The OP seems to be suggesting that creating social programs to educate, feed and clothe the poor and reduce crime would have a greater net benefit to society than sending people into space. I don't know whether or not I agree, because that's a very challenging and important decision to make that would require deep thought, but arguing that "this program created X jobs and therefore helped the economy" IS a variation of the broken window fallacy.
Your example is dumb. In a murder there is clearly a victim and it is someone other than the perpetrator. If a person takes a naked photo of themselves and is convicted for that, they're basically being punished for victimizing themselves. Laws are made to protect the victims by punishing the perpetrators but it doesn't make any sense if the perpetrator and the victim are one and the same.
He's right that a space program has a lower opportunity cost than a war, however.