Is it really that much of a stretch that the credit card companies are going to use this data to provide targeted advertising?
Everyone seems to raise targetted advertising as a privacy concern - I really, really can't see how it could be harmful to me. Worst case, they manage to figure out that I have a desparate need for widget X, and show me an ad for discounted widget X's. I spend less time trying to find the doohickey I want, and they get a sale. Win win.
Even building a purchasing profile of me is only bad if I have a legitimate reason to buy a bag of nitrous fertilizer and a hundred litres of diesel. Seriously, who CARES if I buy Subway or Nandos for lunch? Unless you think someone's going to steal my purchase history and use that to say "oh he bought a $1200 computer, let's break into his house and make $500 bucks by hocking it", and in that case, anyone who can hack into those sort of systems can probably make $500 in two hours' consulting.
I think the problem is that we have two strongly conflicting design criteria here. The device needs to be both small enough to put in a pocket (ie. around the size of one of your hands) while simultaneously being big enough to type on (ie. at least as wide as both of your hands put together with fingers slightly spread).
Maybe a rollup keyboard would be suitable but the third constraint (that of convenience) kinda dictates that the device not be multiple parts that you have to assemble. Until we have an e-paper plus rolly keyboard arrangement for a fully flexible subnotebook-sized device that rolls up to fit in a pocket, it's going to be hard to fit the bill.
8 years of silence? You must be forgetting that during the whole "Saddam Hussein might maybe be thinking of building some nukes if only he had some Uranium, so let's invade Iraq" period, lil' Kim was bouncing up and down on his soap box yelling "WE HARV NUKREAR WEAPORNS". And G.W.'s response was "yeah whatever".
But seriously - it depends what they want to do. An iPhone/iPod Touch is great for reading mail but anything smaller than the Eee is absolutely useless for entering any more text than you'd put in an SMS. If you want something that's ultra-convenient apart from input, I don't think you can beat the iPhone style devices.
To my mind, any reasonable definition of understanding a subject includes the ability to reason based on information about the subject. In the case of a question, this would include the ability to say, at the very least, whether a given answer is a correct answer for the question.
From this, we can see that if we can build a reasoning engine that can determine if a given answer is correct for a question, hypothetically we can iterate over a large set of answers and apply our filter to each one. This provides us with a machine to answer questions (although depending on the size of the set of answers, "I don't know" might be a frequent response) which (by my definition, at least) 'understands' the question.
Yeah, every time that cute girl from Accounting walks by and you give her a smile, you skip back to the start of the song you're listening to? That'll get old quickly.
For sitting in a wifi coffee shop, I'd say my Eee 900 is a great compromise. Then again, having watched my friend playing with his iPhone I'd have to say that, for ultraportable / ultraconvenient / always with you access, the iPhone (or iPod touch) are probably the best you can get.
Well, actually my shiny new 24" monitor plays a DVD at the same picture size as, and much nicer resolution than, my old 68cm CRT TV. One thing no-one's mentioning is that these days, computer monitors are approaching bigscreen TV sizes.
Like the guy said above, the last thing you wanna see in 1080p is someone's butt crack. No matter how fine she looks at VHS quality, humans (yes, even porn star chicks) are pretty disgusting when viewed at massive magnification.
That doesn't explain how comparing across people in the same positions, doing the same jobs with the same hours, we still find a massive inequality in pay rates (an average of 17%, in the UK at least).
That is certainly a discrepancy but doesn't sound like it fits the description of a glass ceiling to me. A glass ceiling (as I see it) would be if, say, at $20k - $40k per year, gender numbers were roughly equal but above $40k per year men outnumbered women by some significant percentage. (Not saying this isn't the case, I'd be interested to see stats).
What he said wasn't particularly extraordinary, and in fact can be at least partially supported by anyone who cares to observe the society they live in.
The first rule of any topic that deals with statistical differences between different groups of people is to never, EVER, say that there's any difference between them. Mate, you could have said "Women as a whole have fewer penises than men (excepting special cases)" and you'd still be shot down as some kind of misogynist.
I might be able to get away with saying that "on average, women are more likely to stay at home at least part-time looking after the children, and as a result, ON AVERAGE work fewer hours over the course of their lifetime" and that "in general, if one partner in a relationship is staying home looking after the children, the other has to be working full time to support the family as a sole earner". Maybe. But if anyone realises that if you put the two together it says "often it is the man in the relationship who supports the woman financially" the femi<oh noes! wrath of Godwin!> will drag me out back and shoot me.
And yet somehow, when you're sitting there with your eyes closed and a handful of yourself, the pictures in your head are always just that bit brighter and more vivid, they have warmth and touch and you can hear every little sound. Whereas some crappy low-rate video of two strangers doing each other is so... I don't know, mechanical.
Where are my mod points? The distance between two physical objects which approximate fractals ('fractoids', which by a strange noncoincidence is my nick;) is also fractal-esque. Very interesting, I'd be interested to hear the opinion of someone more versed in the mathematics of all this. I'm afraid to say I've wasted my time on women, wine and song (well ok cars and computers) and this kind of deep stuff is a bit beyond me.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Is it really that much of a stretch that the credit card companies are going to use this data to provide targeted advertising?
Everyone seems to raise targetted advertising as a privacy concern - I really, really can't see how it could be harmful to me. Worst case, they manage to figure out that I have a desparate need for widget X, and show me an ad for discounted widget X's. I spend less time trying to find the doohickey I want, and they get a sale. Win win.
Even building a purchasing profile of me is only bad if I have a legitimate reason to buy a bag of nitrous fertilizer and a hundred litres of diesel. Seriously, who CARES if I buy Subway or Nandos for lunch? Unless you think someone's going to steal my purchase history and use that to say "oh he bought a $1200 computer, let's break into his house and make $500 bucks by hocking it", and in that case, anyone who can hack into those sort of systems can probably make $500 in two hours' consulting.
Thank god the most unusual requests I ever had were fried chicken and doughnuts.
Hey waaaaait...
I think the problem is that we have two strongly conflicting design criteria here. The device needs to be both small enough to put in a pocket (ie. around the size of one of your hands) while simultaneously being big enough to type on (ie. at least as wide as both of your hands put together with fingers slightly spread).
Maybe a rollup keyboard would be suitable but the third constraint (that of convenience) kinda dictates that the device not be multiple parts that you have to assemble. Until we have an e-paper plus rolly keyboard arrangement for a fully flexible subnotebook-sized device that rolls up to fit in a pocket, it's going to be hard to fit the bill.
8 years of silence? You must be forgetting that during the whole "Saddam Hussein might maybe be thinking of building some nukes if only he had some Uranium, so let's invade Iraq" period, lil' Kim was bouncing up and down on his soap box yelling "WE HARV NUKREAR WEAPORNS". And G.W.'s response was "yeah whatever".
P.S. Go the iPod touch. Srsly.
And when it answers "That was just a movie. Mankind would never win a war against us."?
I'm pretty sure its response would be along the line of:
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
Wait, there's a summary? O.o
But seriously - it depends what they want to do. An iPhone/iPod Touch is great for reading mail but anything smaller than the Eee is absolutely useless for entering any more text than you'd put in an SMS. If you want something that's ultra-convenient apart from input, I don't think you can beat the iPhone style devices.
"You should have one more bone in your body... want me to help?" ;)
To my mind, any reasonable definition of understanding a subject includes the ability to reason based on information about the subject. In the case of a question, this would include the ability to say, at the very least, whether a given answer is a correct answer for the question.
From this, we can see that if we can build a reasoning engine that can determine if a given answer is correct for a question, hypothetically we can iterate over a large set of answers and apply our filter to each one. This provides us with a machine to answer questions (although depending on the size of the set of answers, "I don't know" might be a frequent response) which (by my definition, at least) 'understands' the question.
How about "a 1-axis analogue input plus a button"? ;)
Yeah, every time that cute girl from Accounting walks by and you give her a smile, you skip back to the start of the song you're listening to? That'll get old quickly.
For sitting in a wifi coffee shop, I'd say my Eee 900 is a great compromise. Then again, having watched my friend playing with his iPhone I'd have to say that, for ultraportable / ultraconvenient / always with you access, the iPhone (or iPod touch) are probably the best you can get.
Sorry to be a git, but are you really suggesting it matters what brand your night vision goggles are if you're trying to run 'em on solar power? :P
I wonder what would happen if we took a Norton 360 box and strapped buttered toast to one side, and duct taped a cat to the other side?
Well, actually my shiny new 24" monitor plays a DVD at the same picture size as, and much nicer resolution than, my old 68cm CRT TV. One thing no-one's mentioning is that these days, computer monitors are approaching bigscreen TV sizes.
Like the guy said above, the last thing you wanna see in 1080p is someone's butt crack. No matter how fine she looks at VHS quality, humans (yes, even porn star chicks) are pretty disgusting when viewed at massive magnification.
Actually the GP was a throbbing shaft of sarcasm, plunged into the moaning mounds of slashdot comments.
That doesn't explain how comparing across people in the same positions, doing the same jobs with the same hours, we still find a massive inequality in pay rates (an average of 17%, in the UK at least).
That is certainly a discrepancy but doesn't sound like it fits the description of a glass ceiling to me. A glass ceiling (as I see it) would be if, say, at $20k - $40k per year, gender numbers were roughly equal but above $40k per year men outnumbered women by some significant percentage. (Not saying this isn't the case, I'd be interested to see stats).
What he said wasn't particularly extraordinary, and in fact can be at least partially supported by anyone who cares to observe the society they live in.
YOU CAN'T SAY THAT!!!
The first rule of any topic that deals with statistical differences between different groups of people is to never, EVER, say that there's any difference between them. Mate, you could have said "Women as a whole have fewer penises than men (excepting special cases)" and you'd still be shot down as some kind of misogynist.
I might be able to get away with saying that "on average, women are more likely to stay at home at least part-time looking after the children, and as a result, ON AVERAGE work fewer hours over the course of their lifetime" and that "in general, if one partner in a relationship is staying home looking after the children, the other has to be working full time to support the family as a sole earner". Maybe. But if anyone realises that if you put the two together it says "often it is the man in the relationship who supports the woman financially" the femi<oh noes! wrath of Godwin!> will drag me out back and shoot me.
That's all very... um, sorry, I'm stuck for adjectives and all I can come up with is "groovy (but probably not), baby!"
And yet somehow, when you're sitting there with your eyes closed and a handful of yourself, the pictures in your head are always just that bit brighter and more vivid, they have warmth and touch and you can hear every little sound. Whereas some crappy low-rate video of two strangers doing each other is so... I don't know, mechanical.
"Suck, Irma, suck! 'Blow' is merely a manner of speech!!"
Actually, if I understand him right, Bessel functions fit into round holes OK but have problems with square holes. And, I presume, meeting women.
Where are my mod points? The distance between two physical objects which approximate fractals ('fractoids', which by a strange noncoincidence is my nick ;) is also fractal-esque. Very interesting, I'd be interested to hear the opinion of someone more versed in the mathematics of all this. I'm afraid to say I've wasted my time on women, wine and song (well ok cars and computers) and this kind of deep stuff is a bit beyond me. :P