It worked for Ender in Ender's Game with Jane. She was the artificial intelligence brought into existence through the video game that Ender played while on the Battle School, and later made him zillions of dollars.
I need to start playing this game and hope for the best.
It is fraud. But it was fraud that benefitted me without my fore-knowledge, so I did not report it.
(It was on a visa application for a trip I took through my college. The leader collected all our signatures, had the university notarize them all (!?!) and then submitted them to the appropriate embassy. I only found out about the notarization after I got the visa back with a copy of the notarized form...)
Right, because Notaries Public are always scrupulous, have high standards and ethics training, and never notarize documents signed outside of their presence.
I have signed documents and later found that someone had them notarized without my knowledge. Legal? No. Does it happen? Without a doubt.
This is a bit off-topic, but given the discussion about the Kindle, I thought it close enough.
The Google ad that was served to me was for...you guessed it! The Amazon Kindle.
I always think it's interesting how Google can pick up on key words and serve a proper ad, but it can't pick up that those key words are associated with other negative words. Is someone visiting a website about '$Product sucks' really interested in seeing an ad for $Product?
Do you suppose they could exclude such sites, but don't want to because of the loss of revenue it might be associated with? I wonder how much advertising revenue is generated by ads served to people who are expressly against a given product?
I agree with you--Chicago is corrupt. But Blagojevich was the State governor, not the City's. For that, you'd have to turn to Daley and his corrupt cronies (convictions pending). If you're going to point out the corruptionpresent in my greatstate, please at least point at the right people.:)
Second, you're right about the assumption that people who aren't willing to pay for insurance aren't likely to pay a citation mailed to them. However, in Chicago, it is now possible for your car to get booted with two outstanding parking tickets. My assumption would be that these insurance citations would apply to that total. And since the Chicago Department of Revenue (yes, they don't even pretend it's for public safety...) can access outstanding tickets much more easily than they can insurance records, the probability of getting the Boot would be higher. Perhaps more people would pay.
I can see how many people would be put off by EBM when all they really want is to 'feel better' or 'feel taken care of.' But seriously, aren't there people out there with more sense than that?
Now we say, "It's likely that you have this, although I can't say for certain. Here are the pros and cons of the treatments. Now what would you like to do?"
I, for one, would welcome being part of the process of deciding my own treatment in the way you describe here. I would hope there are others like me.
Seriously, where do you practice medicine, and are you accepting new patients?
Late post, so this will likely never see the light of day. But nevertheless...
The Consumerist offers 3 options that seem to work well: 1) Chargeback on your Credit Card. 2) Launch an Executive Email Carpet Bomb (EECB) to get their attention and get a response. They even offer information on Michael Dell's email address. 3) File a suit in small claims court. This probably doesn't work if you're still stationed overseas.
To insure the reliability of our feeds, we rate our reviewers based on performance, expertise, transparency and recommendations from our staff and other members. We then weigh their ratings accordingly, so that trusted member ratings count more than new member ratings. The weights used in rankings are posted on our site, and you're most welcome to test the math used by our sophisticated computer algorithms.
and
When we find reviewers who systematically rate stories in a partisan manner, we contact them and politely remind them of our nonpartisan mission, encouraging them to adjust their review style, so we can increase their member level accordingly. Until they do, we keep their member levels low, so their ratings have little influence on our service
These are not diametrically opposed, but show that the NewsTrust system is also open to significant bias. The representative claims that the "trusted" reviewers are given more weight, but then admits that some member levels can be kept artificially low.
While this power can be used beneficently, there is also great opportunity for abuse. The leadership could decide that someone was showing 'partisan bias' compared to the prevailing reviewers, and down-mod them for it.
What prevents this from becoming a more systemic, detrimental problem? Our trust of the system administrators?
Everyone so far seems to have been skirting the issue here. If Comcast now has a staff of people tasked with surfing teh interwebs and responding to comments about their service in blog postings, that's fine. Perhaps a misguided use of resources (how about some actual customer service instead of lip service responses to people you've already lost as customers?), but that's their choice.
If Comcast is using some sort of automatic filtering on their users' accounts that indicate whenever a user types the word "Comcast", and then responds with an email to that person's X&%YZ@comcast.net address, then there's an issue.
What we don't know, and what the article doesn't say, and what we have no way of knowing, is which of these two methods Comcast is using. A lack of transparency regarding what you pay for what you get, and a lack of transparency regarding service is already a PR issue (nightmare) for Comcast. This simply compounds that issue.
An obvious concern related to the parent--as more and more transactions happen over the internet, do I want a single password for all of them?
Personally, I keep a different password and login for every place I sign in that either (1) contains personal information about me, or (2) on which I transact financial business (like a bank account).
For social sites and blogs, I guess, this wouldn't be a big deal to me. But as soon as PayPal or EBay sign up, I start to get real unsure of this as a concept.
Anne McCaffery has some good ones, but they are generally dragon & space oriented. Pretty good reads, and there's quite a few in the series.
Orson Scott Card has Ender's Game (and several more in that series). These are definately classic.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle, and the follow-ups are all very well written, though some of the deeper themes might be a bit above your kids depending on how sharp they are.
CS Lewis' Space Trilogy is excellent, though it gets pretty violent, and might be a bit advanced for pre-teens.
Terry Pratchett's books are funny, but they tend to spoof the politics and happenings of the US and the UK, so your kids might not grasp all the jokes. Much better would be Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the (increasingly misnamed) Hitchhiker's Trilogy (there are five books there).
If you like, you might even start them on JRR Tolkien, which is more fantasy than sci-fi, but definitely a classic. You also have the advantage of the movies once they're done with the books. (Books are better though.)
Those are my picks, and that should be enough reading for at least this summer, if not longer. You can also walk into your local Borders and ask someone. There's tons of great kids books in Sci-Fi...
Because most of the questions came from a peer-moderated forum filled with curious, generally-politically-unmotivated (on this topic anyway), technically astute citizens.
When politicians get in front of people, it's all they can do to spew talking points rather than listening to honest questions and offering frank answers. Put that through the further filtering, spin, and analysis of the media, and you get CNN/MSNBC/FOXNews. Heck, even C-SPAN is just coverage of the politicians themselves spinning statistics for political gain in front of an empty Chamber.
Find a way to allow unbiased, technically astute (for their field), peer-moderated people to ask relevant questions in an open forum, and you have something most people would LOVE to see. I just can't think of a way to do this on a mass scale. If anyone else has an idea, I'd love to hear it!
The [second world] war affected everyone in America. If you put this in perspective of a future war in cyberspace, I think the best question is what will be the nation's response to cyber war? Are cyber threats, cyber terrorism, cyber attacks, cyber war purely the province of the military or the entire nation? The ways in which we answer this question will determine our future priorities and funding.
This raises an interesting question as to the nature of military/civilian coordination in the future, especially as conflicts arise more and more often out of financial and ideological, rather than territorial, causes.
When does stopping spyware on your parents' computer become a means of encouraging solidarity rather than a personal privacy concern? (When) Will American companies realize that security vulnerabilities they introduce may impact the viability of the market that sustains them?
From a technical perspective, one that is concerned with transfer protocols and knows what "http" "CSS" "ISP" and "FTP" stand for and why it matters, I suppose that the current uses of our series of tubes no longer fits that rudimentary definition of The Web.
From my mother's perspective, my boss's perspective, and 90% of people who are not concerned about the actual way data is transferred, it will be The Web until something supplants it on a wholesale basis. It doesn't matter if they think they're Surfing, Instant Messaging, FTPing, AJAXing, or.Com-ing, so far as they know, they're using the web. (Don't SMSs travel on teh internets?)
So it depends. Given our forum, yes, the web is probably not the same as it was. For the majority, they don't know the difference.
So the question is, could we continue to have this interoperability if we more frequently used different protocols, technologies, and backbones for different uses? (eg. if we took AJAX/online apps off the "Web" and put them on their own infrastructure to keep the "Web" fully indexable/searchable)
Slashdot Mirror
It worked for Ender in Ender's Game with Jane. She was the artificial intelligence brought into existence through the video game that Ender played while on the Battle School, and later made him zillions of dollars.
I need to start playing this game and hope for the best.
It is fraud. But it was fraud that benefitted me without my fore-knowledge, so I did not report it.
(It was on a visa application for a trip I took through my college. The leader collected all our signatures, had the university notarize them all (!?!) and then submitted them to the appropriate embassy. I only found out about the notarization after I got the visa back with a copy of the notarized form...)
Right, because Notaries Public are always scrupulous, have high standards and ethics training, and never notarize documents signed outside of their presence.
I have signed documents and later found that someone had them notarized without my knowledge. Legal? No. Does it happen? Without a doubt.
It's going to be hilarious when the LonPen 15 is introduced...
This is a bit off-topic, but given the discussion about the Kindle, I thought it close enough.
The Google ad that was served to me was for...you guessed it! The Amazon Kindle.
I always think it's interesting how Google can pick up on key words and serve a proper ad, but it can't pick up that those key words are associated with other negative words. Is someone visiting a website about '$Product sucks' really interested in seeing an ad for $Product?
Do you suppose they could exclude such sites, but don't want to because of the loss of revenue it might be associated with? I wonder how much advertising revenue is generated by ads served to people who are expressly against a given product?
Anyone else wonder if, just a mere two thousand years from now, some future country will discover this and wonder what it is?
Just look at the Antikythera Machine.
Two quick amendments.
:)
I agree with you--Chicago is corrupt. But Blagojevich was the State governor, not the City's. For that, you'd have to turn to Daley and his corrupt cronies (convictions pending). If you're going to point out the corruption present in my great state, please at least point at the right people.
Second, you're right about the assumption that people who aren't willing to pay for insurance aren't likely to pay a citation mailed to them. However, in Chicago, it is now possible for your car to get booted with two outstanding parking tickets. My assumption would be that these insurance citations would apply to that total. And since the Chicago Department of Revenue (yes, they don't even pretend it's for public safety...) can access outstanding tickets much more easily than they can insurance records, the probability of getting the Boot would be higher. Perhaps more people would pay.
2g1c
I highly recommend How to Ruin your Life by Ben Stein.
Excellent read and somewhat motivational. And, of course, it has Ben Stein's great wit throughout.
Now we say, "It's likely that you have this, although I can't say for certain. Here are the pros and cons of the treatments. Now what would you like to do?"
I, for one, would welcome being part of the process of deciding my own treatment in the way you describe here. I would hope there are others like me.
Seriously, where do you practice medicine, and are you accepting new patients?
Since it's already /.'ed, here's the Google Cache so you can at least read the text.
As for the WMDs, there were lies about yellow cake.
The yellow cake is a lie...
What nobody (especially the terrorists) seems to get is that you get 72 Virgins in Paradise.
And they STAY virgins!
Late post, so this will likely never see the light of day. But nevertheless...
The Consumerist offers 3 options that seem to work well:
1) Chargeback on your Credit Card.
2) Launch an Executive Email Carpet Bomb (EECB) to get their attention and get a response. They even offer information on Michael Dell's email address.
3) File a suit in small claims court. This probably doesn't work if you're still stationed overseas.
Good luck fighting the evil corporate overlords!
Sounds like the right time for WikiLeaks, if ever there was one.
and
These are not diametrically opposed, but show that the NewsTrust system is also open to significant bias. The representative claims that the "trusted" reviewers are given more weight, but then admits that some member levels can be kept artificially low.
While this power can be used beneficently, there is also great opportunity for abuse. The leadership could decide that someone was showing 'partisan bias' compared to the prevailing reviewers, and down-mod them for it.
What prevents this from becoming a more systemic, detrimental problem? Our trust of the system administrators?
...and when I first tried to RTFA, I thought that the DHS goon squad had beaten me to it!
Google's usefulness aside, I like having a dead-tree reference sitting on my shelf for ease of use.
However, in this case I think the best part of this whole review is the link to the SitePoint CSS Reference website.
That website is a useful tool all by itself!
Everyone so far seems to have been skirting the issue here. If Comcast now has a staff of people tasked with surfing teh interwebs and responding to comments about their service in blog postings, that's fine. Perhaps a misguided use of resources (how about some actual customer service instead of lip service responses to people you've already lost as customers?), but that's their choice.
If Comcast is using some sort of automatic filtering on their users' accounts that indicate whenever a user types the word "Comcast", and then responds with an email to that person's X&%YZ@comcast.net address, then there's an issue.
What we don't know, and what the article doesn't say, and what we have no way of knowing, is which of these two methods Comcast is using. A lack of transparency regarding what you pay for what you get, and a lack of transparency regarding service is already a PR issue (nightmare) for Comcast. This simply compounds that issue.
The book is not worth the price though. Go sit in your local Borders and read it, or borrow it from the library.
It duplicates most of the video, with little else besides some things that Mr. Pausch wanted to include for his family.
Besides, the video has the laugh track...
An obvious concern related to the parent--as more and more transactions happen over the internet, do I want a single password for all of them?
Personally, I keep a different password and login for every place I sign in that either (1) contains personal information about me, or (2) on which I transact financial business (like a bank account).
For social sites and blogs, I guess, this wouldn't be a big deal to me. But as soon as PayPal or EBay sign up, I start to get real unsure of this as a concept.
Anne McCaffery has some good ones, but they are generally dragon & space oriented. Pretty good reads, and there's quite a few in the series.
Orson Scott Card has Ender's Game (and several more in that series). These are definately classic.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle, and the follow-ups are all very well written, though some of the deeper themes might be a bit above your kids depending on how sharp they are.
CS Lewis' Space Trilogy is excellent, though it gets pretty violent, and might be a bit advanced for pre-teens.
Terry Pratchett's books are funny, but they tend to spoof the politics and happenings of the US and the UK, so your kids might not grasp all the jokes. Much better would be Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the (increasingly misnamed) Hitchhiker's Trilogy (there are five books there).
If you like, you might even start them on JRR Tolkien, which is more fantasy than sci-fi, but definitely a classic. You also have the advantage of the movies once they're done with the books. (Books are better though.)
Those are my picks, and that should be enough reading for at least this summer, if not longer. You can also walk into your local Borders and ask someone. There's tons of great kids books in Sci-Fi...
Because most of the questions came from a peer-moderated forum filled with curious, generally-politically-unmotivated (on this topic anyway), technically astute citizens.
When politicians get in front of people, it's all they can do to spew talking points rather than listening to honest questions and offering frank answers. Put that through the further filtering, spin, and analysis of the media, and you get CNN/MSNBC/FOXNews. Heck, even C-SPAN is just coverage of the politicians themselves spinning statistics for political gain in front of an empty Chamber.
Find a way to allow unbiased, technically astute (for their field), peer-moderated people to ask relevant questions in an open forum, and you have something most people would LOVE to see. I just can't think of a way to do this on a mass scale. If anyone else has an idea, I'd love to hear it!
This raises an interesting question as to the nature of military/civilian coordination in the future, especially as conflicts arise more and more often out of financial and ideological, rather than territorial, causes.
When does stopping spyware on your parents' computer become a means of encouraging solidarity rather than a personal privacy concern? (When) Will American companies realize that security vulnerabilities they introduce may impact the viability of the market that sustains them?
From a technical perspective, one that is concerned with transfer protocols and knows what "http" "CSS" "ISP" and "FTP" stand for and why it matters, I suppose that the current uses of our series of tubes no longer fits that rudimentary definition of The Web.
.Com-ing, so far as they know, they're using the web. (Don't SMSs travel on teh internets?)
From my mother's perspective, my boss's perspective, and 90% of people who are not concerned about the actual way data is transferred, it will be The Web until something supplants it on a wholesale basis. It doesn't matter if they think they're Surfing, Instant Messaging, FTPing, AJAXing, or
So it depends. Given our forum, yes, the web is probably not the same as it was. For the majority, they don't know the difference.
So the question is, could we continue to have this interoperability if we more frequently used different protocols, technologies, and backbones for different uses? (eg. if we took AJAX/online apps off the "Web" and put them on their own infrastructure to keep the "Web" fully indexable/searchable)