In the Victorian era, pink was considered a color for boys—it was a lighter version of red, which was considered a very masculine color.

There's absolutely nothing biological about the current trend of girls liking pink. It's entirely a product of our culture, which says "girls should like pink."

Similarly, any research that shows differences in job or academic field preferences by gender had damn well better show some kind of controlling for cultural factors, or it's got absolutely no value in showing what girls "naturally" like.

Dan Aris

You don't have to have your stuff on their subscription services. It is up to the author (or publisher, whoever controls the copyright). You can have all, some or none of your stuff on their subscription services. However, many choose to have stuff on subscription because it helps people discover your stuff, and while you may not make a lot per view/listen, you make some and it can add up.

Pay per page view actually makes sense, as it helps reward authors that release stuff worth reading. If you do pay per book, then someone can release a book that look interesting, but has no substance. However if people have started reading, well they got their money, and they are done. With page views counting, then it is the stuff that is quality that people read to the end that gets rewarded.

It's the whole Shannon-Hartley theorem. The data rate you can get is limited by the frequency range and SNR you have. Well with stuff over the air the SNR is fixed by transmission power (which needs to be kept low to keep battery life up) and background noise. Frequency range is licensed since not all frequencies are created equal and everyone wants a piece. So the throughput you can get is limited. You can't do like with a wire and just add more wires, in a given area everyone has the same bandwidth to share.

So, you have to play nice. "Just increase the bandwidth" isn't a possibility. They can't magic around the laws of physics. What that means is if people play nice, and use their mobile bandwidth only as needed, it can be fast for everyone. However if people want to try and use it 24/7 and slam it, the speed will suck.

So one way or another, you have to keep people from using too much. I agree that total use isn't the best way, but it is one of the easiest to meter and understand, hence it gets used. Regardless of what method is used, something has to be. Otherwise you are going to have poor wireless speeds and nothing can be done to improve it.

I think I see where you're coming from better now, though I'm not entirely sure I agree :-)

Part of what I'm not sure about is that you seem to be positing a singularity of will—of thought, intent, and desire—that I think is an oversimplification of how humans actually operate.

I think that what you're saying is that a "moral decision" is a decision that you make to do what you believe is best in the circumstances, according to whatever heuristic you're using for "best"—whether that's "it will make me happiest," "it will bring the greatest good to the greatest number," or "it will make the people I care about happy (even if it makes my life more difficult)". (As an aside, I would dispute that definition of a "moral decision," but I think that's getting into semantics, rather than the actual issue of free will.)

What, then, do you do when, within your own decision-making process, whatever you want to call it, there are two or more heuristics weighted close enough to the same as to be effectively indistinguishable? "I really, really want this, but taking it would be bad, and I want to be a good person" would be a nice, (possibly deceptively) simple example. In such a case, the selfish heuristic, "what will make me happiest right now," is in conflict with (for the sake of argument) a genuine desire to be good, as society defines good. So, if I'm understanding your argument correctly, even though both desires and intentions are strong and clearly formed, the person's decision would not be highly predictable.

On a separate note, I am interested in the characterization of people who let the judgment of others strongly guide their actions as lacking (strong) free will of their own. I can actually think of two people I know personally for whom that's true, though they're very different in nature. One has an almost slavish devotion to her particular idea of religion, even though I'm fairly sure that she doesn't actually like doing most of what she feels she's supposed to do—and if she allowed herself to really think about it, she's certainly got enough critical thinking faculties that she'd see that the specific things she feels are required of her make little sense, even within the context of the stated doctrine of her church. But thinking about it, questioning it, is one of the things she's not allowed to do, so she doesn't. The other person is strongly driven to please his significant other, and I see him frequently tell her that she should make a decision—and he's genuinely fine with the decisions she makes either way. He's just an easygoing person who enjoys doing a lot of different kinds of things, and is happy to leave that decision-making to her when she's got a firm opinion and he doesn't.

So while I suspect that you would say that both of these people similarly lack strong free will, I feel that labeling them in the same way is unnecessarily—and perhaps even unhelpfully—reductionist. In this case, one feels that she has an unshakable obligation to follow certain rules in her life—and is unhappy even while fulfilling it—while the other has made a conscious decision to put another's happiness first—and that makes him happy. So, in the end, while this has been somewhat rambling, perhaps I'm coming back around to the same argument as before—that human brains and their decision-making processes are more complex than your definitions can account for.

Dan Aris

My sister and her boyfriend live in London and they love the city, but don't really like living there. Both make reasonable money, but a massive chunk of it goes to pay for their housing which is not great. They are hoping to be able to move farther away which will be a pain commute wise, but allow them to live some place nicer that doesn't eat up most of their cash.

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something; I never studied philosophy formally. But shouldn't free will also include the ability to judge which of two choices is the more moral—and then choose the other one? It sounds like you're saying that "free will" necessarily implies an increase in moral action, when it should imply nothing of the kind. (From my view of it, it should, in fact, imply less ability to predict whether someone will take a moral action when an immoral one is also an option.)

Dan Aris

No, because I don't think it's a valid/relevant question. First of all, it was never about being in the same house, it's about being physically (if not legally) in a place where you are within and surrounded by the territory of the United States, which is governed by its laws, and thus, as I described, benefiting from its resources and infrastructure. (You'll note that I charitably assumed that you were, in fact, going to be taking your libertarian commune off to the wilds of Montana or some similar place where you would never actually interact directly with the people or infrastructure of the USA, since that would open up enormous additional ways in which you would be benefiting from the taxes we pay.)

To (perhaps obliquely) address the point you raise, yes, if you lived in Mexico or Canada you would, indeed, feel some of the same kinds of "halo" benefits from American laws on clean air and water, for instance. However, you would not benefit from them to the same degree as if you lived within the bounds of the country.

Now, if we take your original statement of the "experiment" at its face value, it indicates that you would not isolate yourselves from us: rather, you would live among us, simply "choosing to associate only with" those who agreed with you. In that case, you would benefit from all the physical infrastructure of the United States. Depending how strictly you define your association-by-choice (i.e., if you do not completely avoid all contact, including commerce, with those who do not share your values), you would also benefit from public schools, labor laws, restrictions on food and drug sales, and a plethora of other important benefits of living in the civilized society that is the modern United States of America.

I note that you haven't addressed a single one of the points I raised, instead replying only with a somewhat snarky attempt to deflect the criticism of your plan with a purely rhetorical quibble. If you do wish to continue this discussion, please address these points in a meaningful way. From where I sit, they indicate fatal flaws in any hypothetical attempt to have people who live in this country fairly "opt out" of any of its laws or taxes, whether due to libertarian principles or otherwise.

Dan Aris

You benefit from the clean water and air that result from our environmental regulations. You benefit from the police and fire services—even if you personally never interact with them. You benefit from the defense offered by our military—imagine living your libertarian utopia on an island somewhere in the Pacific, and suddenly China says, "Nope, we own this island now!" What would you be able to do?

Just because you're not personally, directly benefitting in an obvious way from the services paid for by taxation doesn't mean you aren't benefitting from them at all. A lot of the things taxes get us in the USA are either subtle enough, or so much taken for granted, that they've become invisible to the average person.

Dan Aris

Master reel-to-reel tape was fucking expensive. So small time bands didn't keep the masters, or intermediate multi-track recordings. They instead reused tape that had already been used, and was then used again.

Even these days, plenty of time master recordings aren't kept. For professional productions they usually are but for others stuff often not. At work I do recordings some times and they are AVCHD recorded to internal flash in the camera. That gets erased and reused of course. When I dump the data, I keep it long enough to edit down the video and make sure the result is good, then purge it. It is too large to be worth keeping around. We could buy storage for it, but we don't.

Anyone with a bit of sense understands the difference. The reason the US can indict these FIFA officials is because they made the mistake of committing financial crimes that involved the US in some way. Either using US banks, or with US citizens/companies, or in the US. That makes it something the US can prosecute for, and obviously Interpol agrees.

Investigating the US space program. Ummm, well I mean you can "investigate" in terms of "Collect whatever evidence you can get your hands on and release a report," but that's all. No criminal case can be brought for anything since it is all in the US. They can't declare jurisdiction, the US would never agree (nor would international law) and the US has a big enough army that they can make that decision.

Problem is, by living in the same physical space as us, you benefit from what our tax dollars buy. This even extends to living out in the wilderness of Montana somewhere or a similar idea, even if it is to a lesser extent.

This is why such an experiment only works on an island-continent: because only there can you be truly isolated from the effects of other people's attempts to actually have a civilized society, rather than an anarchist free-for-all.

Dan Aris

I see you're not up to date with current german politics. We are.

Merkel doesn't give a flying fuck because she really doesn't give a fuck about anything. She was trained very well how to get into and stay in power, and that's the only thing she's doing. Every move of her makes sense if you analyze it from that perspective. This is no different - big trouble with the USA is not a career-improving path, but the people of Germany are too forgiving and will let her and her party get away with all this shit.

The limitation of the consumer nVidia cards is double precision floating point. He may not need that. There are plenty of problems that need only single precision math, the extra precision is wasted. In that case, you don't see much benefit going to the pro cards, certainly not enough to justify the price.

They created new rules very recently about reddit being a "safe space". This is something that is, of course, extremely vague. What the hell is a "safe space"?

So suddenly some long time subreddits are getting banned for violating that. They are all shitty splaces, but then other shitty places seem to get left alone. As such people are rightly saying "What the fuck?"

Basically the rule is an arbitrary one. They are saying "We can ban you if you say things we don't like." Now its their site, they can do that if they wish, of course, but that is why users are reacting so negatively. It isn't a clear rule that is being consistently applied, rather it is deliberately vague and being targeted in a scattershot fashion.

"Oh look at me, I'm so awesome, I don't need that high end technology! I'm just so great and productive that this old stuff is excellent!"

The reason I say that is because I've always seen it on Slashdot. Many people here seem to take pride in using old systems. Even back in the P2 days when a brand new system was still "slow" for a lot of things you'd have people humblebraging on how they were using a 486 and it was fine.

While I'll certainly agree that machines have WAY more life these days (a 5 year old machine is perfectly serviceable at work for most things) it has always been something I've observed on Slashdot. Rather than a bunch of people bragging on the high end hardware they have, as you tend to see on gaming forums, you have a bunch of people bragging on the low end hardware they have.