Honestly, a phone is designed for social interaction, you can't have 100% privacy while audibly conversing with someone, they are bound to at least know the sound of your voice...
You want a phone that doesn't have a GPS built in to track you, a camera to be logged, or a microphone to listen in on, go to a shady pawn shop, find a flip phone from 2001, call your telco about setting up the new phone, it might be as simple as moving the sim card over and having them change the device ID they have listed.
Seriously, strong privacy options are out there but most people want to be able to snap a pic and upload to facebook right away - so of course you don't get phones designed with privacy in mind.
Catch up! Manufacturers and retailers have realised that there's a market for simple phones that are just phones. I bought one a few weeks ago for UK£0.99.
It does. And I assumed that it was all kinds of legalese...
No, it isn't. If you follow the link you'll find (as long as you can read French) that it is quite informally written. It takes so many pages because there's a lot of whitespace, lots of pictures, and lots of supplementary material explaining the reasons for the dresscode and showing different ways of tying a tie. It does essentially define a uniform (white shirt, charcoal, black or dark blue suit, plain black shoes and company tie for men), but the content that does that could probably be condensed to less than a single page.
Time to stop eating tomatoes, broccoli, and spinach
Irrelevant. There was never any correlation between antioxidants in the diet and antioxidants in the bloodstream. The whole "superfoods" thing was only ever a marketing thing, never anything to do with science. Vegetables are good for you, but it's not because they contain antioxidants.
A guideline would be to interpret the output of FKRI as the grade level for which a given book would be appropriate. A guideline would say "an FKRI of 1-3 is appropriate for beginning readers, and an FKRI of 28 is appropriate for doctoral candidates."
That's what I understand by a guideline too, and I think that in practice it's a bad thing. If somebody says "This is intended for beginning readers, so if anything has an FKRI of higher than 3 we will refer it to a human checker to assess its readability" then it wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunately what happens in practice is that they say "This is intended for beginning readers, so if anything has an FKRI of higher than 3 will be automatically rejected" (because (a) that's cheaper and (b) the FKRI is an objective measure, never mind of what, and we have to be objective, don't we?).
The beginning readers are thereby restricted to the blandest of possible material and their reading experience suffers as a result. And so on all the way up the reading scale. And excellent authors don't get their material published (without it being dumbed down), to everybody's loss.
It was dyinobal who said it was useless, not me. I questioned in what sense it is a guideline. A guideline is something one is supposed to follow. Looking at FKGI and considering the implications of it (such as checking passages with poor FKGI to see how readable they really are) is reasonable, setting targets and rejecting/filtering text is more questionable. But apparently even questioning a measure is enough to get modded "troll" by those who worship at the altar of pseudo-objectivity.
A reading index is just like a measuring tape. It can't tell you that you built a crappy house with crooked walls and a leaky roof; it can only tell you that something is 40 feet long by 30 feet wide.
No it isn't, and the difference is pretty basic. A measuring tape gives a direct measure of distance, a readability index gives an indirect measure of readability that is only as good as the model relating the measure to the thing you want to measure. And the model relating readability indexes to readability is really very poor indeed. They are widely used because of a near-religious obsession with supposed "objectivity", irrespective of whether what's being objectively measured is what actually matters. The result is that people write in such a way as to get the scores right instead of writing well.
The biggest problem is that few if any of the tests take sentence construction into account. A long sentence that is long because of a lot of coordinated clauses is usually easily readable. One that has a lot of subordinate clauses much less so, and even less if those subordinated clauses are embedded. Young children are particularly prone to producing long sentences that are perfectly readable at a low grade level. A child might well produce a sentence like "The man went to the bus stop and he got on the bus and he paid the driver and he went upstairs and sat down and he stayed on the bus until it came to the library and he went downstairs and he got off the bus and he went into the library and got the book he wanted then he got on another bus and went home and read the book." (Fleisch-Kinkaid grade index: 26.2.) Whatever is wrong with that sentence -- and there's a lot -- it's not that it's not readable by anybody without a postgraduate education.
Sure, measurement is a good thing if the measurement is right. Wrong measurements, though, push people into conforming with the measurement instead of doing the thing right. It's the sort of mentality that leads to buses not stopping to pick up passengers because the drivers are measured on adherence to timetables and hospitals abandoning patients that have waited more than a designated time because they've already lost their performance point for that patient. Indirect measures need a lot of care in their application, and very few people understand (or care) enough to take that care. And that makes them dangerous.
You can get those breads in stick form, they just don't call them baguettes. It doesn't quash innovation, it just means the customer knows what they're getting.
Well, we take the speed of light to be constant because any other explanation of our present observations fails Occam's razor. But Occam's razor doesn't necessarily tell us what is the case, it tells us what the most practical working hypothesis is likely to be. In other words, we choose the simplest explanation because it makes the calculations easier (and we have no reason to complicate them).
Trouble is, nobody seems to have invented a weapon yet that can tell if it's being used by the good, civilised, law-abiding person defending himself or by the other guy. And when it comes to international relations, things rarely divide along such tidy lines anyway.
In an armed conflict, both sides attack and both sides defend. Assuming there is a side not at fault, it's just as likely to be the one attacking as defending.
Hanging around here too long, one would begin to think that Apple forces people to buy iDevices, forces them to buy content from them, and implants some sort of mind-control device that keeps their customers from doing anything not sanctioned from some imaginary bond super villain.
You mean they don't? Why do people buy iPhones, then?
Open or closed source is not a programming decision, its a business decision.
That's true of a few of them, actually. The balance between usability and security should be a business decision too, for example. So reserving programming mistake #14 for the complement to #13 (assuming nothing is a web app? Nobody seems to be making that one) we have programming mistake #15: taking decisions that are outside your competence or responsibility.
Really? So input validation, usability and the decision whether to be open or closed source are only relevant to web programming? Good grief, all those hours it turns out I've wasted...
True, although Java is a particularly extreme example. Nothing on that list is a necessary feature of a high-level language except arguably garbage collection, or at least some form prevention of memory leaks. And the assembly programmer should be dealing with that too.
By "lower level" I was thinking of the native code that the message I replied to mentioned. Yes, the fastest is probably a couple of steps behind the leading edge. C used to be consistently slower than assembly. By the time C optimisers fixed that, C++ was out and everybody was complaining about the performance drag of exceptions. Now that C++ is pretty much up to speed we have managed code which, yes, presents a performance drag. At the moment. Expect that to be fixed in a couple of years, but expect the latest languages then to have something else that hits performance.
Slashdot Mirror
Try doing Set Theory and Numbro (Numbro?) theory without logic.
I had teachers with a passion and enthusiasm for maths all the way through school. Condolences for your experience.
Yes. It's called a brick.
Honestly, a phone is designed for social interaction, you can't have 100% privacy while audibly conversing with someone, they are bound to at least know the sound of your voice...
You want a phone that doesn't have a GPS built in to track you, a camera to be logged, or a microphone to listen in on, go to a shady pawn shop, find a flip phone from 2001, call your telco about setting up the new phone, it might be as simple as moving the sim card over and having them change the device ID they have listed.
Seriously, strong privacy options are out there but most people want to be able to snap a pic and upload to facebook right away - so of course you don't get phones designed with privacy in mind.
Catch up! Manufacturers and retailers have realised that there's a market for simple phones that are just phones. I bought one a few weeks ago for UK£0.99.
It does. And I assumed that it was all kinds of legalese...
No, it isn't. If you follow the link you'll find (as long as you can read French) that it is quite informally written. It takes so many pages because there's a lot of whitespace, lots of pictures, and lots of supplementary material explaining the reasons for the dresscode and showing different ways of tying a tie. It does essentially define a uniform (white shirt, charcoal, black or dark blue suit, plain black shoes and company tie for men), but the content that does that could probably be condensed to less than a single page.
Time to stop eating tomatoes, broccoli, and spinach
Irrelevant. There was never any correlation between antioxidants in the diet and antioxidants in the bloodstream. The whole "superfoods" thing was only ever a marketing thing, never anything to do with science. Vegetables are good for you, but it's not because they contain antioxidants.
A guideline would be to interpret the output of FKRI as the grade level for which a given book would be appropriate. A guideline would say "an FKRI of 1-3 is appropriate for beginning readers, and an FKRI of 28 is appropriate for doctoral candidates."
That's what I understand by a guideline too, and I think that in practice it's a bad thing. If somebody says "This is intended for beginning readers, so if anything has an FKRI of higher than 3 we will refer it to a human checker to assess its readability" then it wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunately what happens in practice is that they say "This is intended for beginning readers, so if anything has an FKRI of higher than 3 will be automatically rejected" (because (a) that's cheaper and (b) the FKRI is an objective measure, never mind of what, and we have to be objective, don't we?).
The beginning readers are thereby restricted to the blandest of possible material and their reading experience suffers as a result. And so on all the way up the reading scale. And excellent authors don't get their material published (without it being dumbed down), to everybody's loss.
It was dyinobal who said it was useless, not me. I questioned in what sense it is a guideline. A guideline is something one is supposed to follow. Looking at FKGI and considering the implications of it (such as checking passages with poor FKGI to see how readable they really are) is reasonable, setting targets and rejecting/filtering text is more questionable. But apparently even questioning a measure is enough to get modded "troll" by those who worship at the altar of pseudo-objectivity.
A reading index is just like a measuring tape. It can't tell you that you built a crappy house with crooked walls and a leaky roof; it can only tell you that something is 40 feet long by 30 feet wide.
No it isn't, and the difference is pretty basic. A measuring tape gives a direct measure of distance, a readability index gives an indirect measure of readability that is only as good as the model relating the measure to the thing you want to measure. And the model relating readability indexes to readability is really very poor indeed. They are widely used because of a near-religious obsession with supposed "objectivity", irrespective of whether what's being objectively measured is what actually matters. The result is that people write in such a way as to get the scores right instead of writing well.
The biggest problem is that few if any of the tests take sentence construction into account. A long sentence that is long because of a lot of coordinated clauses is usually easily readable. One that has a lot of subordinate clauses much less so, and even less if those subordinated clauses are embedded. Young children are particularly prone to producing long sentences that are perfectly readable at a low grade level. A child might well produce a sentence like "The man went to the bus stop and he got on the bus and he paid the driver and he went upstairs and sat down and he stayed on the bus until it came to the library and he went downstairs and he got off the bus and he went into the library and got the book he wanted then he got on another bus and went home and read the book." (Fleisch-Kinkaid grade index: 26.2.) Whatever is wrong with that sentence -- and there's a lot -- it's not that it's not readable by anybody without a postgraduate education.
Sure, measurement is a good thing if the measurement is right. Wrong measurements, though, push people into conforming with the measurement instead of doing the thing right. It's the sort of mentality that leads to buses not stopping to pick up passengers because the drivers are measured on adherence to timetables and hospitals abandoning patients that have waited more than a designated time because they've already lost their performance point for that patient. Indirect measures need a lot of care in their application, and very few people understand (or care) enough to take that care. And that makes them dangerous.
In what sense is it a "guideline"? Perfectly clear text can get a poor readability index, incomprehensible text can get good readability.
You can get those breads in stick form, they just don't call them baguettes. It doesn't quash innovation, it just means the customer knows what they're getting.
Remind me. What were all those "The south will rise again" bumper stickers I saw when I visited the USA?
49 feet seems quite big for a cubicle. But what's the other horizontal dimension?
Well, we take the speed of light to be constant because any other explanation of our present observations fails Occam's razor. But Occam's razor doesn't necessarily tell us what is the case, it tells us what the most practical working hypothesis is likely to be. In other words, we choose the simplest explanation because it makes the calculations easier (and we have no reason to complicate them).
They get married in secret and spend the night together. I doubt they would have spent the whole night playing Farmville.
Frankly, I wish he'd just lose it somewhere.
Or at least do the decent thing and shout stuff like "Wingardiam Leviosa!" as he uses it.
Heck, even my traditional screwdriver emits sonic waves when I graunch the screw head and start hitting things with it.
The video mashup has been done already, notably with Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.
Trouble is, nobody seems to have invented a weapon yet that can tell if it's being used by the good, civilised, law-abiding person defending himself or by the other guy. And when it comes to international relations, things rarely divide along such tidy lines anyway.
In an armed conflict, both sides attack and both sides defend. Assuming there is a side not at fault, it's just as likely to be the one attacking as defending.
Weapons aren't evil when used to defend oneself.
Not so simple. What if the "oneself" is a mass-murderer in a police shootout?
Hanging around here too long, one would begin to think that Apple forces people to buy iDevices, forces them to buy content from them, and implants some sort of mind-control device that keeps their customers from doing anything not sanctioned from some imaginary bond super villain.
You mean they don't? Why do people buy iPhones, then?
Open or closed source is not a programming decision, its a business decision.
That's true of a few of them, actually. The balance between usability and security should be a business decision too, for example. So reserving programming mistake #14 for the complement to #13 (assuming nothing is a web app? Nobody seems to be making that one) we have programming mistake #15: taking decisions that are outside your competence or responsibility.
Really? So input validation, usability and the decision whether to be open or closed source are only relevant to web programming? Good grief, all those hours it turns out I've wasted...
True, although Java is a particularly extreme example. Nothing on that list is a necessary feature of a high-level language except arguably garbage collection, or at least some form prevention of memory leaks. And the assembly programmer should be dealing with that too.
By "lower level" I was thinking of the native code that the message I replied to mentioned. Yes, the fastest is probably a couple of steps behind the leading edge. C used to be consistently slower than assembly. By the time C optimisers fixed that, C++ was out and everybody was complaining about the performance drag of exceptions. Now that C++ is pretty much up to speed we have managed code which, yes, presents a performance drag. At the moment. Expect that to be fixed in a couple of years, but expect the latest languages then to have something else that hits performance.