Recent Posts

6051

Living Room / Re: Google Publishes Government Take Down Requests

« Last post by IainB on October 28, 2011, 03:56 PM »

Ruddy heck.
(Thanks for the explanation @Stoic Joker.)

6052

General Software Discussion / Re: Product Key Finder (Excellent & Free)

« Last post by IainB on October 28, 2011, 03:54 PM »

+ 1 for what @ha14 wrote.
Belarc Advisor will tell you almost everything you might care to know about your system, and seems to be able to find any and every registration key you may have on your system. (Though I didn't get it for that purpose.)
And it's FREE as well.    

There are some others that I have previously tried out - including NirSoft Produkey and Magic JellyBean, and others that I don't recall the names of now.

6053

Living Room / Re: Private Censorship of the Internet? Seriously... Like WTF?!?

« Last post by IainB on October 28, 2011, 03:22 PM »

Please... God... Strike down all the politicians and lawyers and deliver us from evil. Amen.

-Renegade (October 28, 2011, 08:26 AM)

Well, if you pedantically reword:

...all the politicians and lawyers...

and make it:

...all the lawmakers and lawyers...

- then you may be hitting the nail on the head with greater accuracy.
Actually, you could probably do away with the word "lawyers" as it is redundant in this context. It's not them that are involved in changing this law, though they may be lobbying for it on behalf of whoever's pocket they are paid from.

I'm just supposing, of course, but this proposed new law could actually make a lot of sense if it was designed to create an impossible situation that could only be resolved by ... State control and regulation of the Internet.

This, at any rate, is where the UK Government seems to be heading.

6054

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extension "Download Statusbar" Now Adware - Maybe Malware

« Last post by IainB on October 28, 2011, 03:04 PM »

@J-Mac: Many thanks for this heads-up.
Fortunately I still had v0.9.8.
So, I went to Mozilla's site and it said somewhat informatively (NOT):

Download Statusbar no longer hosted here.

Anyway, as a result of reading this thread, and because I am paranoid, I first disabled and then uninstalled the add-on and restarted FF just to be sure.

The more striking part of the problem is how this version made it through mozilla's review.

-eleman (October 28, 2011, 01:19 PM)

Yes, there's an unspoken potential criticism of Mozilla there - exactly how rigorous is their review process?
I always trusted them as a source, but I shall downgrade that trust now, until they make explanation. If they don't, then I would theink they probably don't properly understand their responsibilities.

6055

Living Room / Re: Google Publishes Government Take Down Requests

« Last post by IainB on October 28, 2011, 02:47 PM »

Picture of police medic using truncheon with caption:
Does anybody else see something
fundamentally WRONG with this image?

-40hz (October 28, 2011, 02:35 PM)

Yes, he's not wearing a hard-hat like the other truncheon-wielders. Could be risky from a H&S perspective. 

6056

Living Room / Re: Google Publishes Government Take Down Requests

« Last post by IainB on October 28, 2011, 02:39 PM »

Meh... Maybe that's not the best example in the US considering how many people they lock up.

-Renegade (October 28, 2011, 08:31 AM)

Eh? Could you explain for me please? No sure I Understand this.

6057

Living Room / Re: Google Publishes Government Take Down Requests

« Last post by IainB on October 27, 2011, 05:54 PM »

Yes, and it is chillng, but, if nothing else, Google's reporting on this matter provides some chilling and potentially very useful social comment. A sort of wake-up call.

It looks as though it is finally(?) some credible, objective and verifiable statistical (hard) data to prove conclusively that in some so-called Western democracies, governments and government agencies are sometimes not only not protecting the hard-won privacy and liberty and freedoms of the people (as they should be doing), but eroding them, sometimes with the apparent desire to exercise self-serving State control over the people who elected their representatives into those governments to act on their behalf. The State can thus exercise an inherent tendency to become the enemy of the people, and, like rust, it never sleeps.
The signatories to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights would have understood this only too well.

Fascism is apparently alive and well.
Maybe it is related to entropy.

Is this something which we have any control over or can change?
Well, yes, maybe - at any rate, I reckon we can exercise control and create change if we wish to.
However, it will not be easy, because it is arguably something within ourselves that needs to be changed.

Here's my ten cents' worth:
Fascism seems to be such a common feature, often intrinsically present in our thinking and our use of language, and prevalent in most aspects of human society. For example, arguably or potentially including many religions, governments (QED) of different political persuasions, and protest movements/ideologies and religio-political ideologies such as greenism, climatism, nuclear disarmament, peace movements, socialism, communism, Marxism, capitalism, Islamism, Roman Catholicism, and all the other 'isms(?).
It seems to be accepted as a fact of life.
This makes me wonder whether Fascism isn't just a name given to what might in fact be a fundamental trait of human nature.

Fascism seems to stem from the tendency of one person or group of persons, for whatever reason, to want to argue to the death or force their opinions/paradigms/beliefs/ideology on another person or group of persons. The reasons or the -isms can thus often be quite irrational (e.g., belief), but whether rational or not they usually seem to be perceived as being "for the greater good". They are usually promulgated by people who would consider themselves egotistically as being good and "right-thinking" people, individually or as a group.
This would seem to be quite natural. Research apparently shows that many criminals in prisons are apparently unable to perceive/accept that they have done anything wrong. We cannot accept that we are necessarily a "bad" person, so we rationalise whatever we believe/do into the egotistical illusion that we are implicitly "good" and thus "right", thus maintaining the ego-illusion unchanged.

It's as though, if a second group holds an opposing/different view to the first, then there comes into existence a psychic tension - and if neither side can adjust to the other's view, then that tension may easily build up until it has to be expressed as irrational verbal abuse/language and then real violence by either side towards the other - even, for example, by members of a movement for peace.
In many cases, the first group regards as - and may even say this - the second group as being stupid/mentally defective or acting in a manner akin to people like (say) Hitler/Mussolini. The second group then, as likely as not, may return a "Tu quoque" (Latin: "you also") and thus rational discussion goes out the window and the discussion degenerates and is dragged down into the gutter.

In such situations, violence may become the ultimate answer to substantiate one's argument and force it's acceptance by fear of death or harm, through fear/submission, on the other person/group - however stupid/irrational or biased or however "bad" the argument may be. The truth of the matter is irrelevant.

The outcome of the irrational verbal abuse/language or real violence effectively thus becomes the de facto determinant of who has the "strongest" argument.

This is arguably characteristic of what and who we are. Irrational creatures by nature. The good news is that we don't have to stay in an intellectual gutter of thought processes, living in harmony with our personal kind of Fascism, but can do something about it.

However, just as an alcoholic has to internally understand/accept that he/she has a problem before rehabilitation can succeed, so we have to accept that "we are doing it wrong" when we are thinking, before we can develop our thinking skills (De Bono, et al), which will help us to then climb out of that gutter. The greatest levers amongst the thinking skills are probably critical thinking, imagination, and the ability to apply these to your own thinking skills/processes and beliefs.

This requires significant strength of will, as it could reperesent a dreadful threat to one's ego - which will not let go. (It is probably a survival mechanism.)
I therefore gain some personal satisfaction and hope for my future in that I at least am still climbing...

6058

Living Room / Re: Apple Patents Unlocking Touchscreen

« Last post by IainB on October 27, 2011, 04:02 PM »

I love the picture of the sliding bolt. Very apposite.   

What Apple have done here is simply characteristic of exactly the sort of thing that they should be doing as a legal corporate identity which has been set up under, and is operating according to the statutes/laws of the US. They can not do otherwise without breaching their legal obligations to stockholders to ensure that they maximise corporate profit.
The lawyers didn't create this situation, they are just feeding off of it - that's their role and legal duty.
We created it. We must accept responsibility for fixing it, if we don't like what we have created. The trouble is, what we have created has a will of its own.

Like I have said elsewhere - in the context of Coca Cola Corp.:

And don't be too hard on Coca Cola.
We created that.
[...Inset here the name of any Corporation or legal corporate entity...] is just another psychopathic Frankenstinian monster our society has created. It's a very efficient psychopath too. So, it should not surprise us to find that [Corporation name] are apparently doing something like [...insert here any reprehensible beaviour, death caused, or damage done by a corporation...]. Those actions would be typically characteristic of an efficient psychopathic corporation.

If you want to fix it, then fix the legal system that created it, not the creation itself - i.e., address the causal problem rather than the symptomatic problem. Meanwhile, that system continues to robotically create and support these licenced psychopathic legal entities, and teaches our society to value them highly as "successful corporations".

If you watched the movie "The Corporation", then you would have seen towards the end that they show how whole communities have daringly banded together to control these monsters in their midst, and make them less harmful and more beneficial to the community, humans and the environment.

-IainB (October 25, 2011, 11:00 PM)

6059

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS: New Formatting Dialog

« Last post by IainB on October 27, 2011, 03:32 PM »

+1 for what @cranioscopical said. Many thanks for the explanation of that. Sorry if I had missed it elsewhere.   

6060

General Software Discussion / Re: Photo managers with face recognition?

« Last post by IainB on October 27, 2011, 03:29 PM »

I just thought I'd mention in this thread that I have been using Picasa pretty heavily and relying on it as my main IMT (Image Management Tool) ever since it was released. Formerly, my favourite IMT was ACD-See, but I have stopped using that now.
One of the things that Picasa introduced was face recognition. It seemed to be a bit quirky at first, but by now Picasa has been steadily improved to the stage where any of its shortcomings seem to have been pretty much been addressed.

The OP (Original Post) by @JavaJones listed several deficiencies of Picasa. I have listed them below, and added comments as to current status.
Face recognition:

• Unpredictable and hard to fully control the scan process. Any faces that are detected are easy to deal with, the problem is that scanning doesn't always detect all faces and it seems there's no way to force a rescan without losing all your existing tagged faces in that folder. [Currently: Picasa periodically rescans folders for unscanned/new images, and you can force Picasa to rescan images in one or more folders, and a nested set of folders]
• There's also no way to resume a scan that may have stopped for some reason. So while I have a great catalog of about 100 tagged faces/people and 1000's of photos of them labeled, I know there are many more that aren't tagged yet and I don't want to manually tag them. [Currently: As above, face rescans are not an issue. As for tagging in general, photos can be selected to the working tray and tagged en masse as a group. Picasa enquires whether you really want to tag that large a number of images, and then tags them if you tell it to go ahead. Tagged groups can be treated as an album, so that you can show them all together, even if the members of that group also belong to other tagged groups or albums.]
• There's also no way that I can see to organize people into groups, which would be nice. Currently: You can select all the photos pf a person, tag them en masse (as above) to a tag - e.g., "Friends". I have not seen a way to cause subsequent scan/recognition of a new photo to associate the face in that photo with the same tag group(s) as an already recognised photo of the same face.[i/]
• Perhaps worst of all Picasa doesn't use standard meta data tags for face data, so the info is not portable to other apps. [What international data exchange standards for this metadata should Picasa be using?]
• More generally speaking I also find Picasa's editing functionality rather limited, especially compared to higher-end (non-free) apps like Lightroom. [This may still be the case. Perhaps if Picasa emulated Photoshop, it could be even better, but it may never happen as Picasa was probably created for a specific market as a general-purpose tool to build and maintain family albums and post them to Picasa albums on the Internet for sharing.]

6061

Living Room / Re: Steve Jobs is dead.

« Last post by IainB on October 27, 2011, 12:37 AM »

I don't think Ellison or Gates have croaked yet, have they?

6062

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS: New Formatting Dialog

« Last post by IainB on October 26, 2011, 09:27 PM »

@cranioscopical: Thanks for pointing that out. Actually, I'm not sure what that is.
My settings say "Max X*Y area (Kb) 1000" - I presume that relates to Kb of data, but I am not certain.
I guess I need to understand what it is first.

One of the smaller images that CHS stored in its database was a .JPG file of size 41.9kB, and 900x750 pixels on display.
One of the larger images that CHS did not store in its database was a .PNG file size of 172.4kB, and 1349x1766 pixels on display.

6063

Living Room / Re: Steve Jobs is dead.

« Last post by IainB on October 26, 2011, 07:57 PM »

This is an interesting thread, as it shows that many people seem to have applied a lot of their mental attention and cognitive surplus to the subject (Steve Jobs). It may be true, as @wraith808 says:

apparently his 'reality distortion field' goes both ways, as it seems that some can't see the negative, and some can't see the positive.  Few are completely either, and IMO, he doesn't fall into that few.

I am embarrassed to admit that I know virtually nothing about SJ except that he seems to have been involved with Apple, was probably a millionaire, and was highly regarded as an entrepreneur/marketing guru for Apple.

I learned more about him only lately though. I was surprised to read in a post elsewhere yesterday that someone had died (I forget who, but he was apparently a well-known programmer) and that this was the "2nd loss of a great programmer in a week" or something like that - referring to Steve Jobs, anyway. I had not known that SJ was a great programmer, though that seems to be a subject of some debate in this thread.

I was also surprised to read in some of the market hype that has been released/leaked preceding the publication of his biography that his biographer claimed that SJ was quite happy to rip people (customers) off from a monopoly position, and hated Android/Google and said he "would fight Android with his last dying breath" - OWTTE.
If that was all true, then it sounds like the poor guy was not in a happy place in his head. I can only try to imagine what it must feel like to have that sort of greed, aggression, hate and anger boiling up inside me. Not healthy at any rate. Probably all useful characteristics in a businessman though, I suppose.
I also read that the litigation v. Android is already underway. Apple will certainly miss his driving force. SJ's death seems to have  left a sort of psychic vacuum, and Apple may find it more difficult to carry his legacy of that litigation forward without the impetus of his psychogenic and emotional energy.

6064

General Software Discussion / Re: custom reminder

« Last post by IainB on October 26, 2011, 07:13 PM »

@delwoode: OIC. Though I thought that Keybreeze was rather good, I couldn't see that it was better than what I already use - i.e., FARR, whch seems to have the same and a lot more functionality than Keybreeze.

That's why I said "it looks as though the development of Keybreeze stopped on 2010-03-01" - I suspect it needs updating/improving, to keep up with users' emerging (new) needs.
I shall give Keybreeze a longer trial and see if I was missing anything special about it.

6065

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS: New Formatting Dialog

« Last post by IainB on October 26, 2011, 06:57 PM »

Not sure if this is news to you, but I noticed last night that the CHS copy/paste functionality is different when you copy/paste an image as opposed to copy/paste text.

For example:
With .PNG/.JPG/.GIF image files: (and this is repeatable with consistent results):

• Open a .PNG image file in Irfanview. Press Ctrl+c (for Copy). If the file is a smaller file, then a Copy "ping" sound occurs, or if a larger file, then No Copy "ping" sound occurs. (It should always sound.)
• CHECK #1: Open CHS and look at last clipped record - If the file is a smaller file, then the image you just copied is there, or if a larger file, then the image you just copied is not there. (It should always be there.)
• Open a page in MS OneNote or MS Word (the following steps work the same in either proggy).
• Press Ctrl+v - the image is pasted OK.
• CHECK #2: Press Ctrl+Shift+V - nothing is pasted (which is what I would expect, as that should only paste unformatted text).
• Press Ctrl+v - the image is pasted OK. (This proves that the buffer holding the image has not been cleared.)
• CHECK #3: Open CHS again and look at last clipped record - the image is either there/not there consistent with CHECK #1.

Clearly, the image is retained in a buffer somewhere, but apparently if it is over a certain size, then it never gets stored in the CHS database.
User requirements not met:
   1. The "ping" sound should sound on each Copy, if a sound has been selected/enabled in CHS for this.
   2. The image copied should always be stored in the database. (At least, that's what I would presume the user requirement to be.)

(I couldn't recall whether you had set a max upper size limit for the image size that could be stored in a CHS database.)

6066

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 26, 2011, 02:45 AM »

Another view on this: The 6 Shifts of a Kindle Dominated Marketplace

There's obviouly lots of different ways to look at these changes.

6067

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 25, 2011, 11:00 PM »

Ah thanks for the searches/links - but that's not "fresh air" is it? -  it's apparently oxygen.
I think there has long been a market for oxygen - I recall that it's recognised as being a harmless pick-me-up when you are tired or suffering from hangover. I had a neighbour with MS who breathed oxygen whilst she sat in a hyperbaric chamber. It apparently worked very well to increase the oxygen uptake and alleviate the symptoms she suffered from.

And don't be too hard on Coca Cola.
We created that.
Coca Cola Corp. is just another psychopathic Frankenstinian monster our society has created. It's a very efficient psychopath too. So, it should not surprise us to find that Coca Cola are apparently doing something like taking the water away from impoverished communities and packaging it to be sent to America and Europe. Those actions would be typically characteristic of an efficient psychopathic corporation.

If you want to fix it, then fix the legal system that created it, not the creation itself - i.e., address the causal problem rather than the symptomatic problem. Meanwhile, that system continues to robotically create and support these licenced psychopathic legal entities, and teaches our society to value them highly as "successful corporations".

If you watched the movie "The Corporation", then you would have seen towards the end that they show how whole communities have daringly banded together to control these monsters in their midst, and make them less harmful and more beneficial to the community, humans and the environment.

I found it fascinating stuff to watch. I learned a lot. Showed it to my daughter Lily when she was 9. In discussion, it later became evident that she had thoughtfully absorbed the film in rather a balanced fashion. We still discuss it from time to time.

6068

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 25, 2011, 07:49 PM »

The other point about bottled water is that the water quality standards and health standards are much lower for bottled water (at least in the EU - don't know about other places) allowing more bacteria and greater chemical content than utility supplied water,

-Carol Haynes (October 25, 2011, 07:13 PM)

Yes, the same (low water quality standards and health standards) is true for "pure" New Zealand bottled water. I wouldn't touch any of it with a bargepole anyway, for a whole raft of reasons, regardless of its supposed source.
I think it was a year or so ago that one NZ manufacturer of bottled water was found to be just bottling tap water and selling it as "pure NZ spring water".

Come to think of it, the only bottled water that I would consider buying would be mineral waters, but only where it came in glass bottles and where I personally have checked out the bona fides of the source - e.g., from Trefriw Wells Spa (the old Roman mineral water caves) in North Wales, and Malvern Water from the springs in the Malvern hills (bottled originally by Schweppes, now part of the Coca-Cola Corporation).

6069

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 25, 2011, 07:35 PM »

It already is in some Japanese cities and has been for some time.

-Carol Haynes (October 25, 2011, 07:13 PM)

Seriously?
I have seen air sold in cans as a joke/gimmick from different parts of the world, but not as a "for-real-breathe-this" commodity, like bottled water is definitely intended for repeated human consumption.

Come to think of it, I have also seen plastic bags of water sold with Christmas cards as a gimmick, with the words "Real snow from the North Pole" on the card.

6070

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 25, 2011, 07:03 PM »

A valid question that could be raised here is:
Would corporations actually try to push their new product/technology and attempt to wipe out the de facto existing (competitive) technology, if the latter actually had some value to consumers?


Following on from an earlier quote:

another quote springs to mind from the same song:

They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum
And then they charged all the people twenty-five bucks just to see 'em

If eBooks don't become the standard I can see large corporations seeing deforestation as a solution to the marketing problem!

-Carol Haynes (October 22, 2011, 07:03 PM)

Carol's comment (above) might not seem quite so far-fetched as one might think if you look at what has been described as "the obscenity of selling bottled water":

• it's done in competition to perfectly good chlorinated tap or rain water supplies.
• at least one of the manufacturers has declared (from memory) that "to increase our market share we must regard tap water as the enemy and destroy the public perception that tap water is OK to drink" (OWTTE).
• in the Philippines they have already achieved that perception.
• the manufacture of bottled water leaves a trail of waste due to discarded plastic bottle littering.
• many of the plastic bottles contain the BPA toxin, which is released into the "pure" water.

Never mind corporations manufacturing e-books v. hardcopy, what about the basic necessities of life?
Monsanto has already secured copyright over a large swathe of one of the world's staples with GM corn, and is ruthlessly working to exercise and expand that control.
Maybe it's not going to be too long before the air we breathe is going to be packaged and sold to us as "pure" air, with the same marketing BS being trotted out as for water.

Would this be meeting a need?
Do we need to have "options" such as these forced down our throats by corporations so as to become the only option for us to survive?
Some people might say that the direction that things have already been pushed towards in the marketplace, by psychopathic corporations, appears potentially ominous and quite frightening.

6071

Living Room / Re: Wikileaks says financial 'blockade' could put it out of business

« Last post by IainB on October 25, 2011, 09:53 AM »

You may shut down Wikileaks but you can't stop the leaks.

-nosh (October 24, 2011, 11:41 PM)

Don't be too sure.

As long as the leaks continue to fall on largely deaf ears - and the penalties inflicted on those who choose to go public continue to increase - a point will be reached where 'leaking' is no longer an effective tool. At which point it will follow, into oblivion, so many other forms of non-violent protest.

It's a shame, really. 

-40hz (October 24, 2011, 11:57 PM)

Fair enough.

Social media has been around for what? 10 years? The internet (in its mass-reach avatar) for a little longer. I'm guessing all these unrelated concerns: organizations violating personal privacy, rampant online piracy, wikileaks and similar organizations exposing state secrets, botnets for sale, organized CC theft, etc - are pushing us all in one direction -> serious internet regulation. I wonder what things will be like in another 50-60 years...

-nosh (October 25, 2011, 12:12 AM)

+ 1 for both of these.

We have the RIAA example, and now the UK Government is reportedly floating the idea of enforcing "trust-based computing" to the Intenet, so that access control would be governed by a unique ID chip on your computer.

What could go wrong?

6072

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 25, 2011, 09:32 AM »

What an e-reader can't give you.

-wraith808 (October 24, 2011, 11:10 AM)

Is that nostalgia? I wonder.

It does seem to me that each new technological advance - where it makes further cost-efficiencies possible - seems to have the potential or actual capacity to diminish the value of the human experience of what was there before.
Unless that value can be converted into revenue/profit, then it will be threatened by and likely to get washed away by the unrelenting drive for increasing corporate profitability.

The expunging of the real ale brands in the UK in the late '70s was a case in point.
CAMRA - the Campaign for Real Ale - and its effect in restoring the beers and that which had value to the human experience - is a good example of how a suffciently well-organised market force was able to respond to the threat.

6073

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on October 25, 2011, 09:16 AM »

Elsevier has been a pet peeve of mine for years. As each year goes by I see more and more formerly web accessible academic papers disappearing behind paywalls.

-40hz (October 24, 2011, 06:55 AM)

I had always been impressed by Elsevier as an experiment. It was an example of a huge worldwide corporation re-creating itself along totally new lines. The corporation was Reed International (mostly manufacturing pulp, paper, newsprint paper and packaging, and some decorating products, with some publishing).
It was a mess of acquisitions, and the bottom was falling out of what had originally been its largest market sector - pulp and paper.
So they took a huge risk and sold off a lot of the basic stuff, becoming a publishing company called Reed-Elsevier, then evolved into the current Elsevier.
A real psychopathic monopoly corporation?

Impressive, but a bit scary.

6074

Living Room / Re: What the heck has happened to Google search?

« Last post by IainB on October 25, 2011, 07:13 AM »

Any suggestions for good alternatives?

-Carol Haynes (October 25, 2011, 06:59 AM)

Well I just did a search for "best search engines" on mamma.com and got a wall of the sort of rubbish that you referred to, but there were a couple of specific hits that at least had titles that reflected the query, though I didn't look at them in detail as I was in a hurry.
So, you might find an answer to your Q there.

6075

Living Room / Re: Beyond Gamification. Designing up Maslow’s Pyramid.

« Last post by IainB on October 25, 2011, 12:34 AM »

Just thought I'd note what seems to be an unintentionally highly amusing and classic example of action with no basis in proven theory: Effect of One-Legged Standing on Sleep
It seems to me to be a fatuous post and discussion, and looks to be similar to the sort of thing you would be achieving (i.e., nothing) by trying to have a rational discussion where I said:

Thus the thesis of  Nikki Chau's post is definitely invalid to start with, so why waste time discussing an invalid proposition unless it is to explore the reasons why it is invalid? That's arguably likely to be the only useful thing (analysis of reasoning as to why the argument is invalid) that could be gained from discussing it. Otherwise we might be better off - and have more fun - debating (say) the existence of winged fairies (because everyone already knows that the wingless variety exists as pixies).

-IainB (October 21, 2011, 05:48 AM)

It reminds me of something from a few years back, when I was working on a contract in a country-regional office in the Asia-Pacific region of one of the biggest worldwide IT corporations. At the time, they were were in a big cost-reduction drive. As part of that drive, the CEO had put them on a crash downsizing schedule of 20% headcount reduction worldwide.

The personnel in the country offices I was in were to be moved to newer premises - more modern, and with a smaller square footage and hence lower lease costs - because they were not likely to be needing all that existing space for too long (the 20% reduction).

The trouble was in the timing: they had to vacate the old leased premises they were in before renewal date, and move to the new smaller/cheaper leased premises as soon as possible after taking up the new lease (to avoid paying overlapping annual leases for an extended period). They knew they wouldn't need all the personnel they currently had, in the new site, because they planned to downsize by 20% after moving to the new site (they couldn't complete the downsizing before the move.)

Problem: How were they going to accommodate all those people in the new site, before the planned downsizing and without causing employees to become fearful of losing their jobs? (Experience tells us that, when culling a herd, it is always best not to spook the animals as they can become uncooperative or resisting, and where the animals are humans and can get litigious, it would be downright foolhardy to spook 'em. The management and psychological practices employed in Hitler's notorious mass-extermination death camps have demonstrated some good management lessons in this regard.)

What to do?

They hit on the clever idea of compulsorily introducing stand-up desks and desk-sharing for a large number of personnel/roles, in the existing (old) offices. This was not announced as "being good" for the staff, just that they were "beneficial" and that the office was "being updated to the modern business trend" - and it was true that they were the modern business trend, because businesses had already recognised that stand-up desks helped reduce square-footage lease costs.

The management also cleverly engaged the cooperation of the staff by getting them to view the new site and put forward their views as to how their offices were to be laid out. "Staff representatives" for this were appointed, who gathered their colleagues' views on the matter. It was going to be such fun being involved!
The management used the language of bullshit/ambiguity rather than tell an outright lie and say that it was "ergonomically proven to improve such-and-such" - that would have been a lie because there was no proof.
Ergonomic and work-study research carried out in the '60s and '70s in factory and office environments showed that keeping people on their feet all day long is pretty much guaranteed to produce a range of otherwise avoidable health problems (never mind its effect on productivity), just as packing people/desks into offices as per the old "bull-pens" was unhealthy - and counterproductive. (Fortunately, cattle cannot read and have no sense of history.)

So the stand-up desks were slowly introduced to the old semi-open plan offices, and the offices progressively became a visibly more roomy without all those big ergonomically-designed desks and cubicles cluttering up the place.
And when the move was made to the new and smaller premises, though the packing density of the stand-up desk arrangement was noticeable, it was not nearly so noticeable as it would have been had they retained the old sitting desk arrangement. In any event, no-one seemed to complain, probably because not long after the move, the 20% downsizing plan started to bite and the staff had more important things on their minds than office layout.

The moral of this story is that wherever you find people using the irrational (QED) "the Emperor's new clothes" argument, then beware and hold onto your sense and your wallets.
The probability is that such people are either just plain stupid/ignorant, or - more likely - they are con-merchants wanting to manipulate your perception into accepting/believing whatever they are taking about is valid and a "good" thing to to do.
This may be done unscrupulously, neither knowing nor caring that you ordinarily might not be gullible enough to accept such nonsense, though real conmen are more unscrupulous and know very well that is the case. The motivation is likely to be financial gain on the part of the conman.

Anyway, that's my take on it, after my alien abduction experience.