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Comment Re:Accepting Responsibility (Score 1) 352

How is this not their fault? They clearly didn't test their software properly.

They may have tested it with hundreds or thousands of photos available on Picasa and not had it tag anyone "Canus Lupus Homus Sapius Chimpanzeeus", and then released it and in a week had someone take a picture at their wedding and get tagged "Chimpanzees". If your face is hard, deeply-wrinkled, and sporting a bolt-on pair of enormous, leathery ears, it might tag you as a monkey; I think I've encountered exactly one person in my life who looked like that, so it's not surprising it'd miss him in testing. Maybe they're not Aerosmith or International prison fans.

You sound like the kid who demands a trophy for participation.

You mean like someone who found a software do something unexpected and demanded it get bandied about the news while a multi-billion-dollar company makes an apology? "I took a picture with my phone and it went OOK! OOK! at me lol I should be famous now!"

Cat detected. Stop being such a pussy.

Comment Re:Accepting Responsibility (Score 2) 352

Hm, so, you're saying if you wrote some software that has undesired, incorrect behavior that could easily be considered deeply insulting and someone told you about it or even-gasp-complained,

I would assume they're ridiculous. There's a difference between, "Oh, that's not quite right" and "OMG LOOK AT THIS HORRID! YOU MUST APOLERGIZE!" This is an unremarkable bug, not a sleight against anyone; an apology has no context, aside from patting someone on the head and placating them for being retards.

I'm sure that when a bad outcome comes about, despite your behavior and decision-making clearly having been perfect, your response will be polite and professional.

It might be, but it won't be an apology. When people start rallying and screaming on my Facebook page because 85% of people who watched Planet of the Apes also watched a Martin Luther King documentary and my auto-recommender paired "Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream" with "Planet of the Apes", I'm of course going to tell them they're all idiots.

Comment Re:Accepting Responsibility (Score 5, Insightful) 352

...NO IT ISN'T, YOU ASSFACE!

Let's see, we'll do this completely-innocent thing, which is hard, but helps society. Suddenly, hard thing does some harmless,amusing, not-entirely-predicted thing, and people whine about it. OMG, LET'S LEGITIMIZE THEIR STUPIDITY AS A VALID OPINION!

No, you're admitting fault here for something that is NOT YOUR FAULT. You're admitting bad behavior and bad decisions for something that was good behavior and good decision-making, but produced a bad outcome.

THIS IS WHY WE HAVE SHIT SCHOOL SYSTEMS!!! If we have 60% success rate and improve the school system by broad, visible measures to give a better education and improve to an 85% success rate, 15% OF PEOPLE WILL CRY THAT OUR NEW EDUCATION SYSTEM FUCKED OVER THEIR KIDS! Someone will point to all the failures, create a collage, and claim we're totally incompetent!

The appropriate response to bitchwhining about this non-issue is to tell people to stop fucking whining.

Comment Re:Goodbye free speech (Score 1) 210

Crimes of passion: by definition these cannot be deterred, a crime of passion is an emotional act done in the moment, it doesn't include any rational thought

False.

When you have a hard-on, why don't you sleep with a gay dude? What pushes you away when you have that emotional feeling of "I need to bone"? Something is embedded deep in your brain to reject that thought right out.

Inside the brain, all rational thought goes through the prefrontal cortex. This is where you reason. Actions flow through areas such as the basal ganglia, which associates memory together--smells, sounds, visual images, facts. Encountering facts conflicting with other facts shuts the PFC down and causes the Amygdala to power up, because the basal ganglia finds a conflict and attempts to avoid reconciliation (energy-demanding).

It's a lot more complex than just that; the short of it is that the brain employs many automatic reasoning centers. One such center is the reasoning of trained consequence: if you do X, some consequence Y will occur. Without thinking about it, you have a fear for your life if you commit a certain crime, because you will have this secret that threatens to tear away freedom or even life. This subconscious impulse overrides your other subconscious impulses until they become demanding enough to, in turn, override it.

This is why people are sharply against killing other people, yet will murder the fuck out of you if you try to kill their child, and then have a psychotic episode as they come to terms (poorly) with having killed someone. The immediate need overrides the other, more established feelings. A trained fear of state execution--created merely by its presence with a sharp lack of other ways you might die today--will intrude on emotional impulses to kill at all levels, right up until the impulse to kill carries such a powerful driver as to smash those other impulses flat.

Deterrent doesn't mean a 100% cure.

Comment Re:And ticket prices? (Score 1) 117

That's because the price isn't "Costs plus a markup", it's "Whatever the market will bear"

"The Market" is the magical part. Price is absolutely not less than cost--you can't stay in business spending $1000 to build computers that you sell for $10, although strategic undercutting happens (10 million volume manufacturer sells at a loss to put 10 thousand volume manufacturer out of business), as well as loss-leader strategies (sell the coffee maker cheap; overcharge on the coffee).

Competition forces the price down to the former by giving the market a choice

Which means if you have the means to produce at a lower cost than any competitor, competition will not lower prices; indeed, you can undercut competition below their costs, driving them out of business.

That means competitive markets are strange beasts, especially with rising costs: if the producers charge $1000 for a product that costs $300, $500, and $700 to produce, rising costs can push you up to $350, $580, $820, and yet the price can stay around $1000 because Mr. $350 doesn't see a need to raise prices yet, and Mr. $820 is trying to cut his costs back by any means necessary. Soon Mr. $820 will have costs over $1000, and will sell his business to a competitor--Mr. $350 will have the most spare capital, and be able to make the best bid.

Let the $820 guy find out how to make shit for $500, and he might undercut the market in a bid to get more market share and attempt a hostile take-over of the $580 business. Maybe not. In any case, a fourth player can make the product for $1100, but market price is $1000, so he can't enter the market.

Comment Re:Goodbye free speech (Score 1) 210

Well yes. People are insane, and have all kinds of ludicrous arguments, especially those which see the world as a single absolute. I often compare ghettos to suburbs in death penalty arguments: in the ghetto, so many murders and so much gang crime make it hard to investigate and identify murderers, and, besides, the murderers are like 99% likely to die by gang rival murder, and 1% likely to even get arrested by police for murder; whereas in suburbs, people aren't as exposed to crime, and reflect on themselves as criminals in terms of "the police will find me, and they will give me the chair", and so encode deep into the core of their subconscious that committing murder means death by state execution. People want to argue that human psychology doesn't contain any such thing that would identify, interpret, and react to the threat of execution for a crime, or that it's absolutely a deterrent.

Ludicrous people are ludicrous.

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