A quick Google search confirms that I have not. Most every link I could find confirmed, more or less, that your average hard drive lasts roughly 5 years. As I said, I've had some that last longer, but they show their age with the noises they make and poor performance they demonstrate. A hard drive older than 5 years old that still performs like a new one is a rarity.
You can find the others on your own. I saw an interesting graph in a Google Study which broke down failure rates by the age of the hard drive. It looked like there was roughly an 8% chance per year (on the average, it varied) for a given hard drive to fail. That seems to sync up pretty well with the "5 years is typical" that I saw most other places.
Cost is huge. What other issues do you see? The capacity limitations are more a function of cost than technology. They seem to crush magnetics in every performance benchmark imaginable. They last longer, use less power, and seem have very high data integrity.
I know you can only flip each bit so many times, effectively guaranteeing that an SSD won't last forever, but even with frequent reading/writing they still last for 5+ years which is more than can be said of your typical magnetic drive. In my experience, your typical hard drive lasts anywhere from 2-5 years before failing -- and if you have one older than that its probably making grinding noises reminiscent of a 2400 baud modem connecting. Moving parts suck. They are the #1 point of failure for any computer system. When a computer has a hardware issue, it's almost always that a hard drive dies, a cd/dvd drive dies, or a fan dies and something overheats.
Hard drives are not only one of the least reliable components in any given system, they're also the biggest bottleneck in a wide-array of computing operations. The only thing keeping these dinosaurs from going extinct is the high cost of the alternatives -- not technological limitations.
Well, strictly speaking, no it isn't. Choosing with any bias is in fact very much the opposite of the definition of the word random. If you view your random sample solely within the the context of the non-random subset it was selected from, then those numbers are indeed random. But if you broaden your perspective to the entire set of potential numbers, then your numbers are no longer random.
It's fine to, for instance, look at 50 random NBA basketball players as a representative sample of NBA players. The problem occurs when you then look at them as a representative sample of Americans and conclude the average American is 6'7 and makes 1.2 million dollars a year.
"A random selection of top-seeded torrents" works fine as an accurate accounting of their methodology, but not so much as an accurate way of analzying bit torrent.
Aw, horseshit. That's exactly what Slashdot has been arguing for years - "it's a method of sharing files that just happens to also be used for illegitimate purposes by some" is how the argument has long been phrased. Just look at the highly rated comments in the discussion, like yours, each one arguing how it's just not possible that they study is accurate. It must be spin. Etc... Etc...
Show me *ONE* post where someone is arguing that there is no piracy whatsoever on Bittorrent. This study is asserting, more or less, that its *all* piracy. This is what we're taking issue with. I don't see anybody denying that there is indeed at least *some* piracy.
You're a couple of decades behind on copyright law - copyright attaches at the moment of creation, submission to the Library of Congress isn't required.
You're a couple of decades behind on copyright law - copyright attaches at the moment of creation, submission to the Library of Congress isn't required.
I'm aware that submission isn't required, the distinction that submission makes is "old media style distribution" vs "new media style". The old Dead-Tree/RIAA/MPAA model views their copyrighted materials and their control over them in a very different way. When their works show up on Bittorrent, you can safely assume they did not want them there. When new media works show up there, there's a very good chance they were self-published there by their creators in an attempt to be seen.
If you self-publish your works to bit torrent, then you intend for them to be distributed in that manner. This is why the DMCA is structured in the manner that it is. It is the copyright holder's burden to issue a take down notice because it's often nearly impossible to tell what copyright material was placed in a public context by its owner and which were placed there by unauthorized parties.
Congratulations. I should probably add that the rules are probably different for IT jobs or jobs in the tech sector. If you're among geeks, you can get it all hang out. But you can also probably see how an investment banker might find his hobby a bit embarrassing amongst his peers.
You are correct to suggest that was a common argument against the idea, but an equally, if not more common argument was "What if I apply for a Job and someone Googles my name and finds me talking about Warlocks on these forums? I won't be taken seriously."
I would say, based on the responses I read, more people were concerned about out real-life people associating them with World of Warcraft than they were World of Warcraft players finding out their real names. Yes there were "stalker is going to knife me cause I ganked him" scenarios, but they didn't seem very probably or even to represent the most often voiced concerns.
No, those are the typical sorts of things you find on "pirate" trackers that are, despite the nature of the tracker, intended for distribution by their creators. That is not to be confused with private trackers created by companies that solely and exclusively are used to distribute their content, legally, using bittorrent.
I don't think anybody will argue that Bittorrent is not a vector for piracy. It most certainly is. I think most will even go further and concede that its primarily used for that purpose -- but these studies try to convince us that this is the *only* reason that Bittorrent exists and that is just plain silly. There are so many biases at play in this "research" that I almost don't know where to begin.
I am not familiar with the prior Princeton study so much, but this more recent one is problematic in that they used a "random" selection of the "most actively seeded files". These are actually contradictory terms. Either the sample is random, or its comprised of the most actively seeded files -- to say that its a random sampling of a non-random subset is misleading at best.
Anyone who's ever looked around on a tracker knows the real percentage is much higher. There's TONS of self-published material all over bit torrent particularly in the music and ebooks categories. While most of the ebooks might well be what most of us would consider "spam" ("Make $10,000 dollars in 7 days!"), they are almost certainly not copyrighted material in the sense that we would think of it. There may actaully be some copyright asserted, but I doubt any of these have been properly submitted to the library of congress and their authors quite clearly intend for you to distribute them.
Speaking of files you are intended to distribute, you also see quite a few game patches, service packs and other large files hosted on bittorrent. For instance, there's probably 100 torrents on the Pirate Bay right now that are just iPhone firmwares. While these may be technically still copyrighted material, they are *intended* for distribution. Simply being under copyright does not mean a file is not meant to be shared. In fact, some companies distribute their patches via bittorrent directly, such as Blizzard, but the trackers they use are almost certainly not included in this study. In fact, there are trackers that deal exclusively in legal-to-distribute content and they are clearly excluded from these sorts of studies. This further increases the bias in the results.
Moreover the are the more murkier issues of international laws. What is copyrighted in the United States can easily be public domain somewhere else. The internet does not know geographic boundaries, so establishing the legality of a file is almost never going to be a black or white issue.
Maybe the free cases do solve the issue, but this story isn't the press bring it back up. Instead, it's Apple bringing it back up by continuing to throw more mud on competitors instead of simply letting the issue lie. Apple doesn't seem to understand that the more mud they throw, the bigger the hole they'll have dug for themselves becomes. All its doing at this point is generating more ill-will and beating a dead horse.
If nothing else, you have to admit that Apple is going about this is in a childish way (and that's being generous). Rather than just admitting their problem and moving on, they gave a press conference where Steve might as well have said "We're going to give you free cases -- not because there's a problem, but because we just want you to be super happy."
Since then, they persist in saying "Look over here! These guys aren't perfect either!"
It's just silly. Admit your problems and move on. We all know other phones have this problem but not to the same degree.
It can help your career skills! If anyone actaully finds out that you play, it can seriously harm your career. Regardless of what real-life benefits it might confer, it still comes with a huge stigma. This is the main reason why Blizzard recent efforts with RealID were uniformly rejected by the community. Many gamers, especially MMO-gamers, are still in the "closet" to their friends and co-workers.
Saying that the phone dropped an average of less than 1 per 100 additional dropped calls is potentially a very misleading stat. What percentage did the 3gs drop? 1 in 100? If so, then that's potentially as much as a 100% increase in dropped calls. And ignoring dropped calls, sometimes you can't even dial the call in the first place if you're holding it. At least a dropped call indicates you were able to start the call to begin with.
Sure, kids can use guns safely under parental supervision, but that's a pretty far stretch allowing them to carry loaded weapons for self-defense at all times.
Yeah. Same boat here. I bought a bumper to fix it, but had to wait like 2 weeks to get it. During those weeks, holding the phone in pretty much any natural-feeling manner would result in signal loss. Maybe its a left-handed issue for people with small hands, but even with my right hand the only way I could avoid the issue was to extend my pinky finger as if I was the Queen of England enjoying a sip of tea.
They shut down skype support due to bandwidth issues after the launch of their own video chat service. They then went to re-enable support and found that Skype had blocked their access to API. Now skype says "they chose to remove Skype" but it seems like a pretty obvious half-truth at best and lie at worst.
Hopefully this will break you of the habit of leaving valuable electronics in your car. Certainly you have the right to do that and shouldn't have to fear the items being stolen, but aside from that risk, it's just plain not good for the electronics. You're meant to be able to go through a thousand charge cycles on a Lithium Ion battery before you lose ~20% of your battery's overall capacity. Making a habit of leaving them out in a potentially hot car will seriously cut into that life span. It's a particular problem if you're talking about something without a user replaceable battery like an iPhone.
We've been genetically modifying our food for thousands of years now and now that we're suddenly able to do it with a scalpel instead of a hatchet, "Ooh, it's scary." I won't speak in support of Monsato, their legal practices are indefensible. But, for the life of me, I can't understand the urge to separate out GM foods for "special" research in the first place. What do you think makes them different?
Look at our banana crop. It's almost entirely made up of Cavendish bananas. At one point you could walk into a store and choose from several varieties, but when Panama disease nearly wiped bananas off the face of the earth back in the 50's, the cavendish was discovered to be immune and it became the banana we all know today. So the genes that make it immune to panama disease is fine, if we eat it in the Cavendish -- but if we were to say use GM to move it to the Gros Michel and reintroduce it, suddenly we should be concerned? Why? "Because we just don't know what's going to happen" is not a good answer. There has to be reason to suspect something would go wrong.
That's odd. Perhaps it was on the whitelist when I installed it (well over a year ago) but isn't anymore. I recall it being whitelisted by default then, but I suppose I could be crazy.
The wisdom of crowds is sort of like the free market. Both inspire a lot of misplaced blind faith, but ultimately both are just tools that have to be harnessed in a very particular way in order to work.
You read what I posted very selectively. It's an anecdote in that it describes the FIRST time a certain experiment was performed. It was not the LAST time. I was very clearly in mentioning that this experiment is repeated frequently these days with "Guess the number of Jellybeans in a jar" and almost always the average of all guesses is closer to the true number than any single guess is.
It's repeatable. There's a statistically significant phenomenon in effect. In other words, it's science.
If you'd like my personal philosophy, which is not at all scientific, I'd suggest that crowds simply amplify humanity. Humans are all the things you accuse crowds of being *and* intelligent. And when you get lots of humans they do get more intelligent, but also more restless, more emotionally unstable, more juvenile, etc. Crowds are a lot of everything all at once, and figuring out how to harness just the intelligence is tricky business, but it can be done.
I think you should perhaps do a bit of research on the subject. The "wisdom of crowds" is a very real scientifically demonstrable phenomenon. I'll try to give you a quick explanation:
When you're referring to a crowd, you're talking about a mob and about the human psychology of the mob mentality. When people refer to the "Wisdom of the crowd" they are hardly talking about the same thing.
Basically, around 100 years ago, give or take, there was a Eugenicist named Francis Galton. He happened to be at a County Fair. He came upon a barker taking guesses on the weight of an Ox for some prize or another. You typically see the same sorts of contests at county fairs these days where you try to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar or something similar.
Being a Eugenicist, Galton was curious about the results of this contest. He figured that since most people are stupid, that combined they should be *really* stupid. So he asked for the slips that the numbers had been written on, took them home, and added them up and found the average. He was astonished. The average of all the guesses was only 1 pound off the *exact* weight of the Ox. It was closer than the actual winning guess.
Even though this flew in the face of the values he knew to be true as a Eugenicist, he published it anyways. It was, after all, interesting.
This sort of experiment gets repeated all the time these days and always with the same results. Ask a bunch of people to guess the number of Jelly Beans in a jar, and almost every time the *average* of all the guesses is closer than any individual guess. There is an obvious and stastisticially significant phenomenon in effect here, and that's what people are referring to when they talk about the wisdom of crowds.
Now if course, if you simply look at a list of guesses, you see many are far, far from accurate. In fact, knowing the real number you would conclude that most of the guesses are "Stupid" and only a few have any value. In other words, there's a high degree of noise, but being a math problem, noise drops out naturally.
Think of this way, each "guess" contains a tiny element of knowledge, and a tiny element of true randomness. Maybe I know my Uncle ways 400 pounds, and the ox looks at least 3 times heavier. So I guess 1400 pounds. My guess is not quite random, it was a random guess constrained by my assumption that its should be a number 1200 or higher.
The thing is, if you average enough *completely* random numbers (that is, negative or positive), the most likely average is 0 (that is from negative x to positive x). So what happens when you average these numbers together is that all the random parts of the guesses more or less cancel out. My +200 pounds is *likely* canceled out by someone else's -200 pounds randomly applied. What you end up with is all the collective knowledge being applied and all the noise simply canceling itself out.
And so in this mathematical context, the wisdom of crowds is obvious, undeniable, and easily demonstrated.
The problem, of course, comes in when you have non-mathematical noise such as these Slashdot comments. There you need a different approach to canceling noise out. It can be difficult, but this task is often itself crowd-sourced with decent results (such is as the case here in Slashdot). Sure, some noise seeps through, but overall we get relatively intelligent discussion and analysis that exceeds the capacity of any single one of us to generate by ourselves. This is not claiming intelligence is cumualative. I'm not saying that all of us is as smart as "all of us put together", but just that "all of us" ends up being smarter than the smartest of us. The trick is trying to figure out a way to harness that intelligence when its lost in the midst of so much noise.
And yes, when it's strictly a numbers game, you can try to manipulate it if there's incentive. Nobody intentionally tries to skew the guesses on Jelly Beans because there's nothing in it for them, whereas linkfarms can b
He's clearly missing the point behind the concept, but I can't tell if he's doing it on purpose to try to make a joke out of it, or if he simply doesn't understand the term. Since this is the internet, and it's traditional, I'll respond under the assumption that all his comments were intended to be taken at literal face value.
The idea is that the crowd, as a whole, is smarter than the smartest individual within it. If you attract a dumb crowd, you're not necessarily setting a high bar. And, even with a smart crowd, you get a lot of noise. You need a way to filter out all the noise, you can have just one "editor" do it, but that's not really the best way. When the information you want the crowd to process for you can be broken down completely into mathematics, you're in luck because the noise will simply drop out naturally -- as is the case when you, for instance, have everyone guess the weight of an Ox and then simply average the guesses or when you write a search engine that uses links as "votes". Back in the days when Google was new and link farms didn't exist, it was orders of magnitude more effective at returning relevant results (even if you only got a relevant result say 85% of the time, other serach engines could only deliver them maybe 10-20% of the time) simply because it harnessed the "wisdom" of the crowd. It put every other search engine at the time to absolute shame, and that's why it became dominant practically over night. Clearly there is something there.
On the other hand,when its written text like Slashdot or even Fark comments, then you need a good system in place to do it. Yes, you need something akin to editing, but as Wikipedia and Slashdot show us, you can crowd source the editing as well. When you look at the collected moderated-up analysis on Slashdot on any given article, you end up with content that is overall more thoughtful, comprehensive and thorough than any given individual within the crowd could have produced.
Yes, Slashdot could have a single editor in place moderating all the forums, but that would neither be realistic or as effective. Once again, a crowd can do the job better than an individual.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, "Cool!"
A quick Google search confirms that I have not. Most every link I could find confirmed, more or less, that your average hard drive lasts roughly 5 years. As I said, I've had some that last longer, but they show their age with the noises they make and poor performance they demonstrate. A hard drive older than 5 years old that still performs like a new one is a rarity.
Here's one such link:
http://www.neowin.net/news/study-hard-drive-mtbf-ratings-highly-exaggerated
You can find the others on your own. I saw an interesting graph in a Google Study which broke down failure rates by the age of the hard drive. It looked like there was roughly an 8% chance per year (on the average, it varied) for a given hard drive to fail. That seems to sync up pretty well with the "5 years is typical" that I saw most other places.
Cost is huge. What other issues do you see? The capacity limitations are more a function of cost than technology. They seem to crush magnetics in every performance benchmark imaginable. They last longer, use less power, and seem have very high data integrity.
I know you can only flip each bit so many times, effectively guaranteeing that an SSD won't last forever, but even with frequent reading/writing they still last for 5+ years which is more than can be said of your typical magnetic drive. In my experience, your typical hard drive lasts anywhere from 2-5 years before failing -- and if you have one older than that its probably making grinding noises reminiscent of a 2400 baud modem connecting. Moving parts suck. They are the #1 point of failure for any computer system. When a computer has a hardware issue, it's almost always that a hard drive dies, a cd/dvd drive dies, or a fan dies and something overheats.
Hard drives are not only one of the least reliable components in any given system, they're also the biggest bottleneck in a wide-array of computing operations. The only thing keeping these dinosaurs from going extinct is the high cost of the alternatives -- not technological limitations.
Random with a bias, is still random."
Well, strictly speaking, no it isn't. Choosing with any bias is in fact very much the opposite of the definition of the word random. If you view your random sample solely within the the context of the non-random subset it was selected from, then those numbers are indeed random. But if you broaden your perspective to the entire set of potential numbers, then your numbers are no longer random.
It's fine to, for instance, look at 50 random NBA basketball players as a representative sample of NBA players. The problem occurs when you then look at them as a representative sample of Americans and conclude the average American is 6'7 and makes 1.2 million dollars a year.
"A random selection of top-seeded torrents" works fine as an accurate accounting of their methodology, but not so much as an accurate way of analzying bit torrent.
Aw, horseshit. That's exactly what Slashdot has been arguing for years - "it's a method of sharing files that just happens to also be used for illegitimate purposes by some" is how the argument has long been phrased. Just look at the highly rated comments in the discussion, like yours, each one arguing how it's just not possible that they study is accurate. It must be spin. Etc... Etc...
Show me *ONE* post where someone is arguing that there is no piracy whatsoever on Bittorrent. This study is asserting, more or less, that its *all* piracy. This is what we're taking issue with. I don't see anybody denying that there is indeed at least *some* piracy.
You're a couple of decades behind on copyright law - copyright attaches at the moment of creation, submission to the Library of Congress isn't required.
You're a couple of decades behind on copyright law - copyright attaches at the moment of creation, submission to the Library of Congress isn't required.
I'm aware that submission isn't required, the distinction that submission makes is "old media style distribution" vs "new media style". The old Dead-Tree/RIAA/MPAA model views their copyrighted materials and their control over them in a very different way. When their works show up on Bittorrent, you can safely assume they did not want them there. When new media works show up there, there's a very good chance they were self-published there by their creators in an attempt to be seen.
If you self-publish your works to bit torrent, then you intend for them to be distributed in that manner. This is why the DMCA is structured in the manner that it is. It is the copyright holder's burden to issue a take down notice because it's often nearly impossible to tell what copyright material was placed in a public context by its owner and which were placed there by unauthorized parties.
Congratulations. I should probably add that the rules are probably different for IT jobs or jobs in the tech sector. If you're among geeks, you can get it all hang out. But you can also probably see how an investment banker might find his hobby a bit embarrassing amongst his peers.
You are correct to suggest that was a common argument against the idea, but an equally, if not more common argument was "What if I apply for a Job and someone Googles my name and finds me talking about Warlocks on these forums? I won't be taken seriously."
I would say, based on the responses I read, more people were concerned about out real-life people associating them with World of Warcraft than they were World of Warcraft players finding out their real names. Yes there were "stalker is going to knife me cause I ganked him" scenarios, but they didn't seem very probably or even to represent the most often voiced concerns.
No, those are the typical sorts of things you find on "pirate" trackers that are, despite the nature of the tracker, intended for distribution by their creators. That is not to be confused with private trackers created by companies that solely and exclusively are used to distribute their content, legally, using bittorrent.
I don't think anybody will argue that Bittorrent is not a vector for piracy. It most certainly is. I think most will even go further and concede that its primarily used for that purpose -- but these studies try to convince us that this is the *only* reason that Bittorrent exists and that is just plain silly. There are so many biases at play in this "research" that I almost don't know where to begin.
I am not familiar with the prior Princeton study so much, but this more recent one is problematic in that they used a "random" selection of the "most actively seeded files". These are actually contradictory terms. Either the sample is random, or its comprised of the most actively seeded files -- to say that its a random sampling of a non-random subset is misleading at best.
Anyone who's ever looked around on a tracker knows the real percentage is much higher. There's TONS of self-published material all over bit torrent particularly in the music and ebooks categories. While most of the ebooks might well be what most of us would consider "spam" ("Make $10,000 dollars in 7 days!"), they are almost certainly not copyrighted material in the sense that we would think of it. There may actaully be some copyright asserted, but I doubt any of these have been properly submitted to the library of congress and their authors quite clearly intend for you to distribute them.
Speaking of files you are intended to distribute, you also see quite a few game patches, service packs and other large files hosted on bittorrent. For instance, there's probably 100 torrents on the Pirate Bay right now that are just iPhone firmwares. While these may be technically still copyrighted material, they are *intended* for distribution. Simply being under copyright does not mean a file is not meant to be shared. In fact, some companies distribute their patches via bittorrent directly, such as Blizzard, but the trackers they use are almost certainly not included in this study. In fact, there are trackers that deal exclusively in legal-to-distribute content and they are clearly excluded from these sorts of studies. This further increases the bias in the results.
Moreover the are the more murkier issues of international laws. What is copyrighted in the United States can easily be public domain somewhere else. The internet does not know geographic boundaries, so establishing the legality of a file is almost never going to be a black or white issue.
Maybe the free cases do solve the issue, but this story isn't the press bring it back up. Instead, it's Apple bringing it back up by continuing to throw more mud on competitors instead of simply letting the issue lie. Apple doesn't seem to understand that the more mud they throw, the bigger the hole they'll have dug for themselves becomes. All its doing at this point is generating more ill-will and beating a dead horse.
If nothing else, you have to admit that Apple is going about this is in a childish way (and that's being generous). Rather than just admitting their problem and moving on, they gave a press conference where Steve might as well have said "We're going to give you free cases -- not because there's a problem, but because we just want you to be super happy."
Since then, they persist in saying "Look over here! These guys aren't perfect either!"
It's just silly. Admit your problems and move on. We all know other phones have this problem but not to the same degree.
It can help your career skills! If anyone actaully finds out that you play, it can seriously harm your career. Regardless of what real-life benefits it might confer, it still comes with a huge stigma. This is the main reason why Blizzard recent efforts with RealID were uniformly rejected by the community. Many gamers, especially MMO-gamers, are still in the "closet" to their friends and co-workers.
Saying that the phone dropped an average of less than 1 per 100 additional dropped calls is potentially a very misleading stat. What percentage did the 3gs drop? 1 in 100? If so, then that's potentially as much as a 100% increase in dropped calls. And ignoring dropped calls, sometimes you can't even dial the call in the first place if you're holding it. At least a dropped call indicates you were able to start the call to begin with.
Sure, kids can use guns safely under parental supervision, but that's a pretty far stretch allowing them to carry loaded weapons for self-defense at all times.
Yeah. Same boat here. I bought a bumper to fix it, but had to wait like 2 weeks to get it. During those weeks, holding the phone in pretty much any natural-feeling manner would result in signal loss. Maybe its a left-handed issue for people with small hands, but even with my right hand the only way I could avoid the issue was to extend my pinky finger as if I was the Queen of England enjoying a sip of tea.
They shut down skype support due to bandwidth issues after the launch of their own video chat service. They then went to re-enable support and found that Skype had blocked their access to API. Now skype says "they chose to remove Skype" but it seems like a pretty obvious half-truth at best and lie at worst.
Hopefully this will break you of the habit of leaving valuable electronics in your car. Certainly you have the right to do that and shouldn't have to fear the items being stolen, but aside from that risk, it's just plain not good for the electronics. You're meant to be able to go through a thousand charge cycles on a Lithium Ion battery before you lose ~20% of your battery's overall capacity. Making a habit of leaving them out in a potentially hot car will seriously cut into that life span. It's a particular problem if you're talking about something without a user replaceable battery like an iPhone.
We've been genetically modifying our food for thousands of years now and now that we're suddenly able to do it with a scalpel instead of a hatchet, "Ooh, it's scary." I won't speak in support of Monsato, their legal practices are indefensible. But, for the life of me, I can't understand the urge to separate out GM foods for "special" research in the first place. What do you think makes them different?
Look at our banana crop. It's almost entirely made up of Cavendish bananas. At one point you could walk into a store and choose from several varieties, but when Panama disease nearly wiped bananas off the face of the earth back in the 50's, the cavendish was discovered to be immune and it became the banana we all know today. So the genes that make it immune to panama disease is fine, if we eat it in the Cavendish -- but if we were to say use GM to move it to the Gros Michel and reintroduce it, suddenly we should be concerned? Why? "Because we just don't know what's going to happen" is not a good answer. There has to be reason to suspect something would go wrong.
That's odd. Perhaps it was on the whitelist when I installed it (well over a year ago) but isn't anymore. I recall it being whitelisted by default then, but I suppose I could be crazy.
In fact, taking that idea a bit further, the free market itself is just an implementation of "the wisdom of crowds".
The wisdom of crowds is sort of like the free market. Both inspire a lot of misplaced blind faith, but ultimately both are just tools that have to be harnessed in a very particular way in order to work.
Youtube is on Noscript's whitelist by default.
You read what I posted very selectively. It's an anecdote in that it describes the FIRST time a certain experiment was performed. It was not the LAST time. I was very clearly in mentioning that this experiment is repeated frequently these days with "Guess the number of Jellybeans in a jar" and almost always the average of all guesses is closer to the true number than any single guess is.
It's repeatable. There's a statistically significant phenomenon in effect. In other words, it's science.
If you'd like my personal philosophy, which is not at all scientific, I'd suggest that crowds simply amplify humanity. Humans are all the things you accuse crowds of being *and* intelligent. And when you get lots of humans they do get more intelligent, but also more restless, more emotionally unstable, more juvenile, etc. Crowds are a lot of everything all at once, and figuring out how to harness just the intelligence is tricky business, but it can be done.
I think you should perhaps do a bit of research on the subject. The "wisdom of crowds" is a very real scientifically demonstrable phenomenon. I'll try to give you a quick explanation:
When you're referring to a crowd, you're talking about a mob and about the human psychology of the mob mentality. When people refer to the "Wisdom of the crowd" they are hardly talking about the same thing.
Basically, around 100 years ago, give or take, there was a Eugenicist named Francis Galton. He happened to be at a County Fair. He came upon a barker taking guesses on the weight of an Ox for some prize or another. You typically see the same sorts of contests at county fairs these days where you try to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar or something similar.
Being a Eugenicist, Galton was curious about the results of this contest. He figured that since most people are stupid, that combined they should be *really* stupid. So he asked for the slips that the numbers had been written on, took them home, and added them up and found the average. He was astonished. The average of all the guesses was only 1 pound off the *exact* weight of the Ox. It was closer than the actual winning guess.
Even though this flew in the face of the values he knew to be true as a Eugenicist, he published it anyways. It was, after all, interesting.
This sort of experiment gets repeated all the time these days and always with the same results. Ask a bunch of people to guess the number of Jelly Beans in a jar, and almost every time the *average* of all the guesses is closer than any individual guess. There is an obvious and stastisticially significant phenomenon in effect here, and that's what people are referring to when they talk about the wisdom of crowds.
Now if course, if you simply look at a list of guesses, you see many are far, far from accurate. In fact, knowing the real number you would conclude that most of the guesses are "Stupid" and only a few have any value. In other words, there's a high degree of noise, but being a math problem, noise drops out naturally.
Think of this way, each "guess" contains a tiny element of knowledge, and a tiny element of true randomness. Maybe I know my Uncle ways 400 pounds, and the ox looks at least 3 times heavier. So I guess 1400 pounds. My guess is not quite random, it was a random guess constrained by my assumption that its should be a number 1200 or higher.
The thing is, if you average enough *completely* random numbers (that is, negative or positive), the most likely average is 0 (that is from negative x to positive x). So what happens when you average these numbers together is that all the random parts of the guesses more or less cancel out. My +200 pounds is *likely* canceled out by someone else's -200 pounds randomly applied. What you end up with is all the collective knowledge being applied and all the noise simply canceling itself out.
And so in this mathematical context, the wisdom of crowds is obvious, undeniable, and easily demonstrated.
The problem, of course, comes in when you have non-mathematical noise such as these Slashdot comments. There you need a different approach to canceling noise out. It can be difficult, but this task is often itself crowd-sourced with decent results (such is as the case here in Slashdot). Sure, some noise seeps through, but overall we get relatively intelligent discussion and analysis that exceeds the capacity of any single one of us to generate by ourselves. This is not claiming intelligence is cumualative. I'm not saying that all of us is as smart as "all of us put together", but just that "all of us" ends up being smarter than the smartest of us. The trick is trying to figure out a way to harness that intelligence when its lost in the midst of so much noise.
And yes, when it's strictly a numbers game, you can try to manipulate it if there's incentive. Nobody intentionally tries to skew the guesses on Jelly Beans because there's nothing in it for them, whereas linkfarms can b
He's clearly missing the point behind the concept, but I can't tell if he's doing it on purpose to try to make a joke out of it, or if he simply doesn't understand the term. Since this is the internet, and it's traditional, I'll respond under the assumption that all his comments were intended to be taken at literal face value.
The idea is that the crowd, as a whole, is smarter than the smartest individual within it. If you attract a dumb crowd, you're not necessarily setting a high bar. And, even with a smart crowd, you get a lot of noise. You need a way to filter out all the noise, you can have just one "editor" do it, but that's not really the best way. When the information you want the crowd to process for you can be broken down completely into mathematics, you're in luck because the noise will simply drop out naturally -- as is the case when you, for instance, have everyone guess the weight of an Ox and then simply average the guesses or when you write a search engine that uses links as "votes". Back in the days when Google was new and link farms didn't exist, it was orders of magnitude more effective at returning relevant results (even if you only got a relevant result say 85% of the time, other serach engines could only deliver them maybe 10-20% of the time) simply because it harnessed the "wisdom" of the crowd. It put every other search engine at the time to absolute shame, and that's why it became dominant practically over night. Clearly there is something there.
On the other hand,when its written text like Slashdot or even Fark comments, then you need a good system in place to do it. Yes, you need something akin to editing, but as Wikipedia and Slashdot show us, you can crowd source the editing as well. When you look at the collected moderated-up analysis on Slashdot on any given article, you end up with content that is overall more thoughtful, comprehensive and thorough than any given individual within the crowd could have produced.
Yes, Slashdot could have a single editor in place moderating all the forums, but that would neither be realistic or as effective. Once again, a crowd can do the job better than an individual.