It's funny how we get 2 camps of anti-conspiracy-theory excuses.
One is that these groups are too incompetent to pull off any meaningful conspiracy.
The other their is that these groups are so Elite that if they pulled off a conspiracy, we'd never have any idea.
The truth is, of course, somewhere in between. Some groups are competent, some not. Some conspiracies are pure coincidence, some are actual conspiracies.
I think it's very reasonable that one of these groups could have him under surveillance and be coercing people in his Real Life to testify against him.
That's a lot easier and more watertight than faking an encounter and risking him having an alibi or having evidence exonerating him. Or risking getting themselves in trouble for doing something (even more) unconscionable like actually raping or killing someone just to try to set him up.
No access to the research here, of course, but these sitting studies make me wonder if looking at sitters is selecting for health problems, rather than the other way around.
I see from your post they excluded some major illnesses at least. But then:
"time spent sitting and physical activity were more strongly associated with mortality among lean persons".
If more obese people sit regardless of other health problems, you would have a weaker correlation between sitting and mortality in obese people, and a higher correlation in lean people who are less likely to sit without a secondary illness forcing it.
Sensational reporting aside, at least the publicity may lead to more detailed research into what is going on here.
We're not talking about gaming consoles here, we're talking about PCs. People more often put in a disc to peruse files on the disc than to run any executable at all. There is also no way to know if a disc has an executable on it before you put it in. Running one automatically is a truly terrible idea.
It's right up there with "hide file extensions" as one of the most boneheaded things Windows does (BritneySpears.jpg.exe anyone?). And Microsoft steadfastly refuses to fix those flaws despite their constantly resulting in security vulnerabilities and serious user errors.
It's also available on WiiWare for $5 or $7 or somewhere around there. Great if you prefer a TV+controller and sending a few $$ to the makers of an excellent game.
Everyone agrees that developers should never have access to production...Unless they're the developer, in which case it's different.
More like "unless they're the ones being held over the fire". It doesn't matter how many rules are in place, when someone's add is on the line, sometimes to as little an extent as "I might have to work late", those rules will get broken.
I was recently given read access to a production DB because the DBA had his own work to get done and didn't feel like being my query bitch all day.
I got access to the java container server's admin because there IS no server admin for that project, and the higher-up devs who double as admins didnt feel like being available to restart the node.
If it were up to me, I'd always have a QA process between my bug fixes and production. But once again, someone else's code broke earlier this week, and they were off-site in meetings. The boss' boss wanted the thing fixed yesterday. Instead of taking the flak for being another day late, the manager asked me to fix the code, test it myself, and deploy it to production. No QA or server admins anywhere in there.
But then again, practically speaking, the fix was out in 1-2 hours instead of 1-2 days, it worked fine, and even in the worst case it's a robust AND non-critical process that could have been reverted to a backup if I had somehow totally screwed prod. Sometimes the risks just aren't that high compared to the risk of NOT fixing the code right away.
You don't think people try the company's website first? Eg. if you're looking for store locations, would you go to the app store, or go to their website? I assume everyone would go to the website first rather than looking for an app to install.
Yep, make it a Shuttle-sized mini-pc with 1 PCI-E slot and 1 PCI slot, that'd be more than enough. When the options are a mac mini or a Mac Pro, the answer is Windows for gaming.
Any remotely serious gamer is going to buy their own video card and already has their own monitor.
He said their market share dropped, and the Android is #1. The OP probably was confusing sales with market share and thought there are more Androids out there than iPhones. But that's not an unusual mistake considering the breathless reporting of those stats.
The market share stats are great for putting things back in perspective. From what I can tell, Android sales are largely Verizon customers who have been waiting a long time for a half-decent smart phone. The battle won't REALLY get interesting until the iPhone comes to Verizon and we can see them compete directly. I still know quite a few people holding out from getting an Android in the hope of iPhone coming to Verizon soon. But Android still has a big advantage in having multiple diverse devices to choose from in terms of size, features, and price.
Ultimately when both are on Verizon, customers are going to be the ones who win.
It's a good question, but you might want to add in there:
"It sounds good on paper, but can you explain why every major business feels the need to write their own native iApp that does nothing that can't be done more easily in cross-platform HTML and javascript?"
The only answer I've come up with so far is that higher-ups in companies want to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. Apparently their tech leads aren't sufficiently explaining to them the lack of any function improvement combined with the app excluding the majority of their audience.
Or even more likely, they're going to a contractor or consultant who is happy to make a buck creating an iphone-specific web ap. And then pitching a need for an Android app. And a generic mobile site. All in addition to their main website which most likely works fine on both Apple and Android devices, or could have had the needless Flash removed and replaced with (non-HTML5) javascript much more easily than creating 3+ additional mobile apps/sites. .
I was going to say that programming is pretty unique in that there isn't much room for fudging the code to be wrong. But then I thought about some of the stuff I've seen at work as far as bad code that got by because it "worked right" in the most basic test cases, and yeah - you're right:)
Another poster pointed out plausible ways the *sound* could be different even if the data is correct, in the case of poorly shielded components causing interface. THAT is a good reason to do a double blind test on the actual sound coming out of the speakers.
But as far as checking if the data is the same or not, that is entirely binary, and wouldn't make sense to double blind.
Thermometer readings, like sounds from a speaker, are notoriously unstable and subject to approximation and interpretation.
I believe his point is that a computer will be doing the comparisons using the same processor and code. There is no human influence over where an equals operator returns true or false between different trials.
They intend to gut proposed legislation? They're the only ones proposing legislation! They're extremely clear that were it up to them, the legislation would go a lot further. But instead of taking the luxury and complain about anything that isn't consummate and perfect, they're actually making progress by working with Verizon.
"We’re not saying this solution is perfect, but we believe that a proposal that locks in key enforceable protections for consumers is preferable to no protection at all."
They've convinced Verizon to back up legislation to have themselves regulated. You think they could do that without compromises?
If adopted, this proposal would for the first time give the FCC the ability to preserve the open Internet through enforceable rules on broadband providers.
Is there anything in here stopping legislators from coming back and expanding net neutrality to include wireless networks in the future?
If you read the article, instead of just TFS, the wireless "FACT" section includes this statement left out of the summary:
In our proposal, we agreed that the best first step is for wireless providers to be fully transparent with users about how network traffic is managed to avoid congestion, or prioritized for certain applications and content. Our proposal also asks the Federal government to monitor and report regularly on the state of the wireless broadband market. Importantly, Congress would always have the ability to step in and impose new safeguards on wireless broadband providers to protect consumers’ interests.
Google is making it clear that it wants congress to keep a close eye on wireless and step in if abuse is occurring.
TFS also leaves out Google's point that 4G includes openness provisions (again, created by Google), and is of course coming Very Soon(tm) to replace the current 3G networks:
Verizon will begin rolling out its 4G network this fall under openness license conditions that Google helped persuade the FCC to adopt.
What exactly did Google do that makes you ignore all of this very clear writing on the wall to instead somehow interpret this as Google lying, deceiving, and being EVIL?
Most of the MYTH is explaining why they had to give in to Verizon on wireless, for now. At worst it's poorly written. Trying to ascribe evil intent to it is not supportable by the statements nor by Google's actions.
For the plan to eliminate net neutrality over wireless, there would have to BE net neutrality over wireless. There is not. They've failed to negotiate net neutrality for wireless with Verizon, but that in no way prevents futures deals from being sticken, or of course, for the government to step in and regulate it. In case you forgot, Google is not the government, and is not responsible for forcing every ISP to obey net neutrality.
I think this is the article I read recently, although it seems awfully speculative and actually amounts to "different regions have different allergy rates, and we have no clue why":P
Another theory is that children need to get exposed to common allergens, such as nuts and shellfish, from a much earlier age, to avoid developing allergies. [...]
An oft-cited 2008 study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology compared peanut allergies among Jewish children living in Israel and the United Kingdom. Peanut allergies were more common among the children in the U.K. than in Israel. This was associated with the fact that 69 percent of the Israeli children received peanuts by 9 months of age, compared with 10 percent of the infants in the U.K.
This pitfall, however, is that it was not a controlled experiment [...]
People spending $2500 on a PC these days are an extremely small minority. As OP suggested, it's nearly impossible to spend that much on a gaming PC unless you're equally as clueless as the $300 wal-mart PC buyer.
There is evidence that children exposed to gluten, peanuts, etc. too early in life are significantly more likely to develop an allergy to them.
I've been hearing the opposite recently, that they recommend exposing children to peanuts, shellfish, etc. at a young age, and even think the delay in exposure may be part of the cause for increase in allergies.
I don't personally have a strong feeling either way, just wanted to point out that early exposure to peanuts and other potential allergens is apparently no longer considered dangerous. Although I think all would agree it's prudent to closely supervise first exposures to these in case of allergies.
Not exactly. They said the software made the antenna problem look worse than it is. They didn't claim the only problem was the software, they said the software was responsible for telling you that you have a good signal when you really don't.
But then, admitting to lying about signal bars in software sounds just as bad or worse than having a badly designed antenna.
I guess they went that route because you can push out a software fix a lot more easily than you can redesign and re-release your hardware.
It's easy to compare the evolutionary algorithm to a completely random algorithm. If the evolutionary algorithm finds the best pattern significantly faster than the random algorithm, that is a meaningful and interesting result.
You may as well have said that Shakespeare's works (or Einstein's) aren't amazing because enough monkeys would eventually achieve the same result by banging on typewriters.
Of course, perhaps a grocery shopping list isn't important enough to be that worried about. But this sort of issue bears thinking about for other information that is that important.
Agreed with both parts - it's important to understand, but for most data it's not that important of a risk.
Those are also risks that are very very hard to mitigate by anything short of living cash-only. Or in the internet version, by constantly changing IP addresses, mac addresses, clearing cookies (including flash cookies) between each website you visit, etc.
I think that may be Schmidt's point, too. You can sign up anonymously, but if the government subpoena's a few sites (ah heck, who needs a subpoena these days?) they can piece together your activity anyway.
Do they sell that information to 3rd parties in (clearly) identifiable form? I'm guessing they only sell it in aggregate reports, although I'm not sure if there are laws restricting them.
Slashdot Mirror
You lost me at "Digg went from a great site..." :)
It's funny how we get 2 camps of anti-conspiracy-theory excuses.
One is that these groups are too incompetent to pull off any meaningful conspiracy.
The other their is that these groups are so Elite that if they pulled off a conspiracy, we'd never have any idea.
The truth is, of course, somewhere in between. Some groups are competent, some not. Some conspiracies are pure coincidence, some are actual conspiracies.
I think it's very reasonable that one of these groups could have him under surveillance and be coercing people in his Real Life to testify against him.
That's a lot easier and more watertight than faking an encounter and risking him having an alibi or having evidence exonerating him. Or risking getting themselves in trouble for doing something (even more) unconscionable like actually raping or killing someone just to try to set him up.
Yep, just like the WTC bombers represent all muslims!
No access to the research here, of course, but these sitting studies make me wonder if looking at sitters is selecting for health problems, rather than the other way around.
I see from your post they excluded some major illnesses at least. But then:
"time spent sitting and physical activity were more strongly associated with mortality among lean persons".
If more obese people sit regardless of other health problems, you would have a weaker correlation between sitting and mortality in obese people, and a higher correlation in lean people who are less likely to sit without a secondary illness forcing it.
Sensational reporting aside, at least the publicity may lead to more detailed research into what is going on here.
No.
We're not talking about gaming consoles here, we're talking about PCs. People more often put in a disc to peruse files on the disc than to run any executable at all. There is also no way to know if a disc has an executable on it before you put it in. Running one automatically is a truly terrible idea.
It's right up there with "hide file extensions" as one of the most boneheaded things Windows does (BritneySpears.jpg.exe anyone?). And Microsoft steadfastly refuses to fix those flaws despite their constantly resulting in security vulnerabilities and serious user errors.
It's also available on WiiWare for $5 or $7 or somewhere around there. Great if you prefer a TV+controller and sending a few $$ to the makers of an excellent game.
Everyone agrees that developers should never have access to production...Unless they're the developer, in which case it's different.
More like "unless they're the ones being held over the fire". It doesn't matter how many rules are in place, when someone's add is on the line, sometimes to as little an extent as "I might have to work late", those rules will get broken.
I was recently given read access to a production DB because the DBA had his own work to get done and didn't feel like being my query bitch all day.
I got access to the java container server's admin because there IS no server admin for that project, and the higher-up devs who double as admins didnt feel like being available to restart the node.
If it were up to me, I'd always have a QA process between my bug fixes and production. But once again, someone else's code broke earlier this week, and they were off-site in meetings. The boss' boss wanted the thing fixed yesterday. Instead of taking the flak for being another day late, the manager asked me to fix the code, test it myself, and deploy it to production. No QA or server admins anywhere in there.
But then again, practically speaking, the fix was out in 1-2 hours instead of 1-2 days, it worked fine, and even in the worst case it's a robust AND non-critical process that could have been reverted to a backup if I had somehow totally screwed prod. Sometimes the risks just aren't that high compared to the risk of NOT fixing the code right away.
You don't think people try the company's website first? Eg. if you're looking for store locations, would you go to the app store, or go to their website? I assume everyone would go to the website first rather than looking for an app to install.
Yep, make it a Shuttle-sized mini-pc with 1 PCI-E slot and 1 PCI slot, that'd be more than enough. When the options are a mac mini or a Mac Pro, the answer is Windows for gaming.
Any remotely serious gamer is going to buy their own video card and already has their own monitor.
There is no mac offering whatsoever for a gamer.
He said their market share dropped, and the Android is #1. The OP probably was confusing sales with market share and thought there are more Androids out there than iPhones. But that's not an unusual mistake considering the breathless reporting of those stats.
The market share stats are great for putting things back in perspective. From what I can tell, Android sales are largely Verizon customers who have been waiting a long time for a half-decent smart phone. The battle won't REALLY get interesting until the iPhone comes to Verizon and we can see them compete directly. I still know quite a few people holding out from getting an Android in the hope of iPhone coming to Verizon soon. But Android still has a big advantage in having multiple diverse devices to choose from in terms of size, features, and price.
Ultimately when both are on Verizon, customers are going to be the ones who win.
It's a good question, but you might want to add in there:
"It sounds good on paper, but can you explain why every major business feels the need to write their own native iApp that does nothing that can't be done more easily in cross-platform HTML and javascript?"
The only answer I've come up with so far is that higher-ups in companies want to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. Apparently their tech leads aren't sufficiently explaining to them the lack of any function improvement combined with the app excluding the majority of their audience.
Or even more likely, they're going to a contractor or consultant who is happy to make a buck creating an iphone-specific web ap. And then pitching a need for an Android app. And a generic mobile site. All in addition to their main website which most likely works fine on both Apple and Android devices, or could have had the needless Flash removed and replaced with (non-HTML5) javascript much more easily than creating 3+ additional mobile apps/sites.
.
I was going to say that programming is pretty unique in that there isn't much room for fudging the code to be wrong. But then I thought about some of the stuff I've seen at work as far as bad code that got by because it "worked right" in the most basic test cases, and yeah - you're right :)
Another poster pointed out plausible ways the *sound* could be different even if the data is correct, in the case of poorly shielded components causing interface. THAT is a good reason to do a double blind test on the actual sound coming out of the speakers.
But as far as checking if the data is the same or not, that is entirely binary, and wouldn't make sense to double blind.
Thermometer readings, like sounds from a speaker, are notoriously unstable and subject to approximation and interpretation.
I believe his point is that a computer will be doing the comparisons using the same processor and code. There is no human influence over where an equals operator returns true or false between different trials.
They intend to gut proposed legislation? They're the only ones proposing legislation! They're extremely clear that were it up to them, the legislation would go a lot further. But instead of taking the luxury and complain about anything that isn't consummate and perfect, they're actually making progress by working with Verizon.
"We’re not saying this solution is perfect, but we believe that a proposal that locks in key enforceable protections for consumers is preferable to no protection at all."
They've convinced Verizon to back up legislation to have themselves regulated. You think they could do that without compromises?
If adopted, this proposal would for the first time give the FCC the ability to preserve the open Internet through enforceable rules on broadband providers.
Is there anything in here stopping legislators from coming back and expanding net neutrality to include wireless networks in the future?
If you read the article, instead of just TFS, the wireless "FACT" section includes this statement left out of the summary:
In our proposal, we agreed that the best first step is for wireless providers to be fully transparent with users about how network traffic is managed to avoid congestion, or prioritized for certain applications and content. Our proposal also asks the Federal government to monitor and report regularly on the state of the wireless broadband market. Importantly, Congress would always have the ability to step in and impose new safeguards on wireless broadband providers to protect consumers’ interests.
Google is making it clear that it wants congress to keep a close eye on wireless and step in if abuse is occurring.
TFS also leaves out Google's point that 4G includes openness provisions (again, created by Google), and is of course coming Very Soon(tm) to replace the current 3G networks:
Verizon will begin rolling out its 4G network this fall under openness license conditions that Google helped persuade the FCC to adopt.
What exactly did Google do that makes you ignore all of this very clear writing on the wall to instead somehow interpret this as Google lying, deceiving, and being EVIL?
Most of the MYTH is explaining why they had to give in to Verizon on wireless, for now. At worst it's poorly written. Trying to ascribe evil intent to it is not supportable by the statements nor by Google's actions.
Because Google couldn't convince Verizon to obey net neutrality on Verizon's wireless network, this makes Google "more evil"? What?
For the plan to eliminate net neutrality over wireless, there would have to BE net neutrality over wireless. There is not. They've failed to negotiate net neutrality for wireless with Verizon, but that in no way prevents futures deals from being sticken, or of course, for the government to step in and regulate it. In case you forgot, Google is not the government, and is not responsible for forcing every ISP to obey net neutrality.
I think this is the article I read recently, although it seems awfully speculative and actually amounts to "different regions have different allergy rates, and we have no clue why" :P
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/08/03/food.allergies.er.gut/?hpt=C2
Another theory is that children need to get exposed to common allergens, such as nuts and shellfish, from a much earlier age, to avoid developing allergies. [...]
An oft-cited 2008 study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology compared peanut allergies among Jewish children living in Israel and the United Kingdom. Peanut allergies were more common among the children in the U.K. than in Israel. This was associated with the fact that 69 percent of the Israeli children received peanuts by 9 months of age, compared with 10 percent of the infants in the U.K.
This pitfall, however, is that it was not a controlled experiment [...]
People spending $2500 on a PC these days are an extremely small minority. As OP suggested, it's nearly impossible to spend that much on a gaming PC unless you're equally as clueless as the $300 wal-mart PC buyer.
There is evidence that children exposed to gluten, peanuts, etc. too early in life are significantly more likely to develop an allergy to them.
I've been hearing the opposite recently, that they recommend exposing children to peanuts, shellfish, etc. at a young age, and even think the delay in exposure may be part of the cause for increase in allergies.
I don't personally have a strong feeling either way, just wanted to point out that early exposure to peanuts and other potential allergens is apparently no longer considered dangerous. Although I think all would agree it's prudent to closely supervise first exposures to these in case of allergies.
Not exactly. They said the software made the antenna problem look worse than it is. They didn't claim the only problem was the software, they said the software was responsible for telling you that you have a good signal when you really don't.
But then, admitting to lying about signal bars in software sounds just as bad or worse than having a badly designed antenna.
I guess they went that route because you can push out a software fix a lot more easily than you can redesign and re-release your hardware.
It's easy to compare the evolutionary algorithm to a completely random algorithm. If the evolutionary algorithm finds the best pattern significantly faster than the random algorithm, that is a meaningful and interesting result.
You may as well have said that Shakespeare's works (or Einstein's) aren't amazing because enough monkeys would eventually achieve the same result by banging on typewriters.
Of course, perhaps a grocery shopping list isn't important enough to be that worried about. But this sort of issue bears thinking about for other information that is that important.
Agreed with both parts - it's important to understand, but for most data it's not that important of a risk.
Those are also risks that are very very hard to mitigate by anything short of living cash-only. Or in the internet version, by constantly changing IP addresses, mac addresses, clearing cookies (including flash cookies) between each website you visit, etc.
I think that may be Schmidt's point, too. You can sign up anonymously, but if the government subpoena's a few sites (ah heck, who needs a subpoena these days?) they can piece together your activity anyway.
Do they sell that information to 3rd parties in (clearly) identifiable form? I'm guessing they only sell it in aggregate reports, although I'm not sure if there are laws restricting them.