Are you a plaintiff? Do you have to take time from work to testify, talk with lawyers, sign things, video deposition, or do any number of things that these people have had to do?
After a while, "Fuck this, gimme the 2 grand" also means "I can't fight for the moral side anymore"
If it were you, you would have given in a long time ago, statistically speaking. If you are 1 in 100, you would have given in before this appeal started. You would have to be 1 in 1000 at least to get this far. Basic stats means I don't believe you. And you shouldn't believe you until you have been through this.
Fighting for the right side takes more effort than most people have. It seems like once a year we get the odd "I lost $25k or more even though I won the lawsuit" story. One per year, in my unscientific anecdote, which might sound like a lot. But it's not enough to win any ground.
Do you want to bankroll the losers? You already are, so that's a trick question. But if it were you, you would really appreciate someone kicking in a few bucks so you and your unemployed ass could take time to fight the good fight. And when the donations don't add up, you give in and live your life.
Hence the legal concept of a class action lawsuit where a small set of named plaintiffs represent the rest of the class and taken on the time and resource burdens of presenting the case to the court. I'm not part of the certified class, but if I were, I'm not sure if I'd be willing to be one of the named plaintiffs, but I'm pretty sure I'd be willing to participate as part of the class. Yes, I know, very selfish of me.
Of course, despite your protestations, the only motivational consideration is whether the lawyers are willing to bankroll the lawsuit and that depends on their assessment of the payout. It has very little to do with how much any of the plaintiffs expect as payment or how justified their case is. And, no, I don't feel any pity for the majority of the class (almost no effort expended), the lawyers (no explanation needed), or the named plaintiffs (usually have emotional stakes in the process if not the outcome).
But that's all generalized mumbo-jumbo. The pertinent particulars of this specific case are (1) most of the class would benefit only marginally from the $1-2k settlement since they are as a class highly paid hi-tech workers that were sought out by successful tech companies (e.g., a $1-2k bonus for these workers would be a cause for complaint) and (2) the plaintiffs' case is strong, as has been mentioned by the judge when she rejected the settlement.
What significant harm? The allegation is that they agreed not to recruit one another's employees. We were still free to apply where we wanted, they just wouldn't call us. Frankly, it bothers me not at all that I got less spam from douche bag recruiters.
For you and me, there was only indirect harm in that the high end of the salary spectrum was depressed for some workers, which in turn might have had some effect on the entire salary distribution. There was no direct harm because you and I (well, definitely me and probably you) were not in the select set of workers that were directly harmed by the collusion. So, our harm is minimal. However, for those who were affected, they either didn't get a promised job (like the guy in France) or didn't get the raises or increased benefits due to decreased employer competition. The harm for each affected worker can be monetarily quantified and is likely in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Good question. If it were me, I would definitely go for the 1-in-a-million chance for $100k versus a guaranteed $2k now.
I would love to play any game of chance with you. 1 in a million chance of $100k (expected value of $0.10) is preferable to a 100% chance of $2000?
Well, I wouldn't choose to play the $100k vs. $2k game at all, but these folks didn't have the choice to be mistreated by their employers. But given that these folks by the nature of their lawsuit class (i.e., "prized" hi-tech employees) are not poor, $2k should not be that significant to them.
Assuming that the $2k (or whatever the lower value is) is indeed noise and that I don't really need it now, absolutely I would take the chance for the higher payout. The choice is between an improbable, significant payout versus a guaranteed, insignificant payout. Another way of looking at this is that I would consider a $100 million powerball ticket to be much more worthwhile than a $50 scratch-off lottery ticket. One has a chance to affect my life, and the other doesn't help me that much even if I win.
Do you want a new TV now, or a very(!) small chance to get a new car 5-10 years from now? That's what it comes down to.
Good question. If it were me, I would definitely go for the 1-in-a-million chance for $100k versus a guaranteed $2k now. The $2k is noise and makes no difference in my life. If I lose it, I lose nothing of significance. The significant harm has already been inflicted, so the additional $2k is lost compensation is irrelevant. The $100k can actually affect my life. So, this decision from the point of the victims is a no-brainer.
That's just the personal economic decision. Not even the larger $100k (or whatever it turns out to be) will adequately compensate for the past economic harm, but the satisfaction of a legal penalty may be more rewarding.
It will be interesting to see if even Apple is able to change user habits. Visa and Mastercard might have signed on, but that's not important. Retailer support is the critical factor.
You clearly don't know the first thing about accepting credit and debit cards. Without the payment networks, NOTHING happens at point-of-sale.
Retail lives and dies by the Payment Card Industry standards and audits. Without Visa / MC / Discover / Amex, you are a cash-only business. Period.
I'm probably more ignorant that you realize, but that's beside the point. Visa/Mastercard support is necessary but not sufficient. The historical challenge for electronic but non-credit card systems has been placing readers at the point of sale locations. Without those readers, Apple Pay is useless. Someone has to pay for those readers. The stores don't want to do it unless they are convinced they can recover the cost.
If Apple can get either the stores or the banks to pass for the readers, then I will admit that Apple is an amazing magician. With the iPhone, Apple convinced AT&T et al. to subsidize the phones because the carriers were guaranteed to recover their investment through contracts with early termination fees. iPads don't come with such subsidies and are not as profitable for Apple. With Apple Pay, unless Apple swallows the cost of the readers, how will they convince the stores or banks for pay for the infrastructure without any guarantee of coming out ahead?
Getting Visa and MasterCard to agree to process transactions is a necessary first step but doesn't mean much by itself. Banks don't give out readers for free. That upfront and monthly cost will be hard for many small retailers and may not be worthwhile even for larger stores. The only game changer is if Apple can somehow get the banks to subsidize the cost of the readers. Apple got the cell phone carriers to agree to this subsidy, but I imagine the banks will be a harder sell. It remains to be seen if the retailers will feel the need to swallow the monthly and per-transaction costs to the banks plus to Apple. Small retailers and restaurants already complain about paying the bank tax. Would they agree to another tax? Would there be any benefit for the stores? Would iPhone users actually avoid a store just because it didn't have an Apple Pay reader, especially given that they could always just pay with a credit card add they have always done?
Now, what remains to be seen is whether Apple allows others to play in the Apple Pay sandbox or not. If they don't, they might successfully corner the phone market for the average person with Apple Pay and an iPhone 6C provided the POS vendors elect not to integrate other mobile payment schemes into their terminals.
It will be interesting to see if even Apple is able to change user habits. Visa and Mastercard might have signed on, but that's not important. Retailer support is the critical factor. Even though Apple has signed up "200,000 retail locations" including "Bloomingdale’s, McDonald’s, Subway, Walgreens, and Apple Stores", and users and use Apple Pay "inside a store’s mobile apps, such as Target’s or Starbucks’", I'm guessing the number of retailers is a very small percentage of potential retailers and a small percentage of a typical user's purchases. If that's the case, then it's very likely that there are almost no people who can use Apple Pay exclusively without continuing to carry traditional credit cards. And if I'm carrying a credit card anyway, what's the point of Apple Pay? Yes, I whip out my phone instead of my wallet and credit card, but is that an improvement in my life?
No, the phone is shown at exactly right angles, and they're right, the lens is photoshopped out. Meanwhile, it's 1 mm. What is that, the thickness of 2 business cards?
2 business cards makes it sound insignificant. Meanwhile 1mm / 6.9 mm is about 15%, which makes it sound more significant.
Does this 15% matter? If you want an Apple phone, it doesn't matter. If you don't care for Apple phones, it does.
The statement "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith" presents a false dichotomy. Science as depicting scientific thought and experimentation via the scientific process is orthogonal to religious belief. I can believe in God and still apply the principles of the scientific process.
In fact, the scientific process itself is even orthogonal to scientific belief. The sleight of hand occurs when science is used to represent both the scientific process as well as scientific belief. For example, there is a huge difference between trust in experimentation to test hypotheses and the belief that humans evolved from single-celled organisms. The case of evolution (and pretty much most of past history) is poorly suited to testing via the scientific process. That doesn't meant that human evolution isn't true, but it does mean that it shouldn't be held in the same regard as other results that have been subjected to double-blind, independently repeatable experiments that are the gold standard of science.
Since when is collecting samples and cataloging them not hard science? Not particularly difficult, but most definitely hard science.
It is part of hard science, but it's the technician part. The scientist part is figuring out what problem to address, thinking of hypotheses to test, designing a methodology to test the hypotheses, and then executing the experiment and analyzing the gathered data.
Finding a kid who has executed some scientific project is not rare. However, finding a kid who has done that without having the problem set up or at least directly motivated by a mentor (often a parent) is rare. Furthermore, it's even more rare to find a kid who has finished the experiment without resources provided by that mentor, often resources that are not readily available to most kids.
The idea that regular people will curate the advertising data used to profile them is a huge non-starter.
Somehow the geekboy bias of slashdot thinks it's a great idea to make the effort to do Amazon's or Google's job of making targeted ads non-annoying. For normal people, configuring ads on Amazon's behalf is obviously annoying and is obviously a non-starter.
Of course, the real solution is not to do Amazon's job for them. The real solution is to block ads. No, the websites won't go away. Corporations are hooked on money and will find another way to stay in business.
Right, because people understand and care about that.
So much that they've flocked by the billions to closed, centralized platforms.
People may not necessarily understand or consciously care for open platforms, but they at least subconsciously cling to it. Of those that have flocked to closed messaging systems, how many have given up email? How many of us know even a single person that has given up email?
Pro-metric folks talk about the ease of metric conversions, but that's mostly useless. Few calculations are of the shift the decimal place around. Rather, most calculations require more arithmetic than most people can comfortably handle without paper or a calculator.
But, even more important, the most relevant aspect of using either any system of measurement, be it metric or English, is gut feelings. That's what used daily over and over again. I have a gut feel for how big 100 miles, 1 gallon, 160 lbs, etc. are, but I have to do the conversion from metric quantities to understand metric units. I can do the conversions, and I understand the math, but it's the intuitive understanding of the quantities that is useful. It is this one quality of measurement systems that allows the English system to continue to flourish despite its mathematical limitations.
From Wikipedia, "Of the 43,000 Apple employees in the United States 30,000 work at Apple Stores." Because of this, none of Apple's numbers are comparable to other tech companies. What would be interesting to see is the breakdown for the 13,000 non-store employees. Non-tech vs. tech is not a valid point of comparison unless other tech companies provide numbers using the same criteria, since it's not always entirely obvious who is tech vs. non-tech.
Of course, the real questions are (1) whether the aggregate statistics are of any use to represent current fairness or to drive future policy and (2) if and to what extent specific individuals are disadvantaged due to certain demographic characteristics. I think the aggregate statistics are useless because target numbers do not exist. Sure, the media and CEOs happily decry the current numbers, but then they cowardly balk at stating what the desired targets are. Also, they try to portray that their sense of "fairness" may be focused on individuals, but they selectively pick and choose which individuals are worthy of fairness and which are not. It may be true that it's not fair that a certain black woman doesn't have a tech job, but does the fact that lots of other white men have tech jobs make it any more fair that a specific white man doesn't have a tech job?
Long run (maybe, even near-long-term) this does not bode well for China's prospects, because when one is sealed off from outside ideas and innovation, one will ultimately fall behind and adapt only in suboptimal ways. What results is a waste of social and intellectual capital.
China is only refusing to buy some foreign products. There is no policy of isolation. I imagine there will still be a great deal of reverse engineering and other data gathering activities (interpret that how you wish). So, the idea is to negatively impact competitors financially while at the same time benefiting from their innovations.
Yes, the kids love them and yes, they probably do have educational value...
Actually, the question of educational value is the big elephant in the room. It is completely questionable and absolutely not obvious that these tablets have educational value. Do the kids learn more, faster, or in different ways? Can this be quantified or even vaguely estimated? There are huge IT capital and operational costs involved, and such large expenditures must be justified in terms of return.
It's telling that the article and even the discussion on Slashdot centers on technical questions because those issues are all tangential. If the main goals focus on avoiding the theft of machines and the bypass of parental controls, then the entire project is misguided. How are the children learning, and how does that learning compare to the previous system of learning? What did the $20 million buy?
Unfortunately, these MS employees are likely to be unceremoniously dumped with minimal chance of re-employment.
It depends. It could very well be that the main reason for this mass layoff is not that Microsoft carries more deadweight than another company, say Google or Apple, for example. Many of Google's employees are not necessary, but it can afford to pay them due to its money spigot. Financial metrics, such as operating profit or more importantly projected stock price appreciation, quickly turn non-deadweight employees into deadweight. It's obvious that Microsoft (or any other company) does not execute layoffs in response to an appraisal of the quality or necessarily even the usefulness of employees but rather the financial implications of the cost centers that these employees represent.
I've never made any concerted effort for "environmental reasons," but I do notice that I don't use nearly as much energy as most people do, which is a side effect of how cheap I am.
Yes, energy usage moderation is a matter of economics and not religion. Rich people with big houses use lot of energy regardless of their views on the environment. Similarly poor people tend to try their best to minimize their energy usage, not because they necessarily care about the environment but because that is what they can afford. This is what I've seen in my life from my experience as part of the bottom 10% as well as the top 5%.
Academic publishing would be a much fairer process of reviews would be truly double blind, and if there were a severe penalty for breaking the rules. In the absence of that, people win Nobel prizes and will continue to do so. But that's because those people are outliers, not because the system is sane.
Outstanding papers for the most part will continue to be published. That's not the issue. The problem is that the overwhelming portion of submitted papers are not seminal papers, and it's these papers that are subjected to the defects in the review process, including the following: (1) Not all reviewers are equally competent for their assigned papers. (2) Not all reviewers are equally committed to spending the minimum amount of time needed for a thorough review. I have seen reviews submitted by well-known and regarded individuals that were obviously hastily written with a cursory reading of the submission. (3) The assignment of papers to reviewers is mostly random. Explicit conflicts are filtered, but the assignment is mostly random, even if some sort of bidding process is used, as is done for some conferences. (4) The number of reviewers is often minimal. For journals, often two reviewers are used. For conferences, 2-5 reviewers may be involved. However, that number includes the less competent and apathetic reviewers. (5) Decisions are often swayed by a few very opinionated individuals. Especially on a PC, it is not at all rare to see political motivations determine the fate of a paper.
Double-blind reviews are idealistic but not practical. For many/most papers, it's almost trivial to figure out who the authors are based on the title, the subject material, and the references. Most authors will self-reference their own papers.
Fourteen years ago I carried a phone and a PDA. The PDA had wifi, office apps, games, etc., and when needed I could use the phone as a data modem. I eventually migrated to a single device with both phone and PDA functionality, and I've gotten used to the convenience of a single device with the same functionality. I would not want to go backwards in time to once again carrying two devices for the same functionality.
I consider bio-sensors to be gimicky. I imagine most of the people who would find those sensors to be a positive have already bought existing sensor devices.
Using a watch as a convenient but significantly crippled interface to a phone seems like a huge step backwards. I would only accept that huge loss of interface functionality if I could leave the phone behind, i.e., if the phone migrated to the watch. Now, that is something that I would buy in an instant. Anything else is just Pebble++, even if it happens to have a fruit logo on it.
Fifteen years ago, you opened the yellow pages for the same information. Did you say then, who controls this book? Did you worry about all the power being in the hands of a single phone company?
Likely not, and for two reasons. If the phone company abused it, they'd lose the trust and goodwill that makes the very product valuable, and if it was no longer accurate someone else would come alone and make an accurate version.
Why is that not the same for Google? If their maps become unreliable, won't people move to Bing? If not, why not?
The problem with "hacking" is the openness and crowd sourcing aspect of Google Maps. Wikipedia has the same problem, and the answer was to decrease the openness for editing. Maybe Google will have to adopt a similar strategic decrease in openness for certain parts of Maps.
Will people move to an alternative if Google Maps becomes unreliable? Well, maybe but probably not. If I'm misdirected to a competitor but I'm still able to complete my transaction, then I probably don't care or maybe I don't even realize the misdirection. If a small percentage of the links I click on fail, but most links continue to work and the rest of Maps functionality remains intact, then I won't switch. The losers are not the browser users but the businesses trying to get free advertising. I imagine Google will take care of paid advertising businesses, but they probably don't care as much for the "freeloaders", i.e., Google wants the freeloaders to populate their database, but they don't really care if they benefit or are hurt.
One interesting study would be the correlation between the characteristics of the hiring manager and team members. In my experience the correlation is strong, especially in terms of race and ethnicity. At Bell Labs in the 90's, one out of the three research area organizations had a very high representation of Indian managers and researchers. At Sun, the same was true except that most managers and researchers were white (Americans, Europeans, Australians, etc.). I worked at another company where the manager was Serbian and two other researchers were Serbian.
This is a hypothesis that can be fairly easily corroborated with statistical studies. I'm fairly certain that the bias exists. Of course, whether that bias is good or bad is a separate question.
(1) How did the researchers account for operational language profiles? Language A may have more negative words than positive words, but maybe the one happy word is used 80% of the time. To me, the incidence of positive vs. negative usage is much more important than the histogram of the available vocabulary.
(2) How did the researchers compare the same word in different languages? Is this comparison possible without the introduction of bias in the selection of words for each of the two languages. From the paper authors' website, "This is a comparison between the average user reported happiness scores between several languages. The "happiness" of each word is rated by 50 distinct users on a scale of 1(sad) to 9 (happy). Words from each row language are then translated into each column language and intersected with each other corpora."
So, how much are the results a reflection of the experimenter's biases and skills in translation to the 2nd language. I'm suspicious of this type of comparison. From the article (not the paper), "For example, on a scale of 1 to 9 with nine being the happiest, Germans rate the word “gift” as 3.54. That’s slightly negative. By contrast, English speakers rate “gift” as strongly positive at 7.72." As a somewhat fluent German speaker, I know that the German word "gift" means poison, and I would consider it not just slightly negative but extremely negative. If the experimenters actually presented the German speakers with the German translation of the English word "gift", e.g., something like "Geschenk", then I imagine the German response would have been very positive.
Some people many find it offensive because it sounds like an offensive word. However, that does not make their offence legitimate.
Now, if people started to get cute and "niggardly blacks" came into common usage as an euphemism for the notorious N-word it could become offensive, but that would be based on the facts around the usage and not the feelings of a black person.
The problem is with the concept of a "legitimate" offense, as though some quintessential characteristic of an action or statement should outlaw personal feelings. How one feels is reality. For those of who are married, try telling your wife that she shouldn't feel offended because you didn't mean to hurt her, so that should make her feel better.
This entire discussion of "legitimate" offenses boils down to whether one cares about what others feels. If I care about the listener and that listener feels offended, then I would address their feelings, regardless of my personal feelings about the offense. If I don't care about the listener, then I either ignore the listener, or if I feel the sting of societal condemnation, I attack the "legitimacy" of the offense or the morality or intelligence of the listener.
The person it's deriding gets to decide if it's offensive. That's kind of how it works. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Nigger is a bad word. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Chink is a bad word. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Redskin is a bad word. Etc etc etc... This is plain common sense, and everyone arguing against it is an ass.
I completely disagree. It's common sense that the person using the word decides if it's offensive. If someone says "negro" referring to the color of a couch, it's not offensive even if a black person takes offense at it. If a child calls the black paymates he adores "niggers" because that's the only word he's ever known for them, that's not offensive. His black friends may request that he use a different word because they take offense at the term, but the child meant no offense by using the word and it'd be a serious miscarriage of justice for him to be chastised for using the word.
It's much more nuanced than that. There's this incorrect aggregation of the notion of offense, as though something is either offensive to everyone or offensive to no one. A speaker can offend without intention to offend. It should be obvious that each individual is the only person who has not only the right but the ability to determine personally felt offense. The right and ability to determine offense for oneself should not be confused with the legal or moral right to determine the resulting societal actions.
That is, each person gets to decide if the term "redskin" is personally offensive. However, just because one or more people take offense doesn't necessarily grant that group or society as a whole to impose sanctions for that offense. But, likewise, the lack of societal sanction should not be extended to prohibit personal feelings or thoughts. In fact, in my opinion, hearing "You have no right to be offended!" is much more hurtful than the original offense.
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Are you a plaintiff? Do you have to take time from work to testify, talk with lawyers, sign things, video deposition, or do any number of things that these people have had to do?
After a while, "Fuck this, gimme the 2 grand" also means "I can't fight for the moral side anymore"
If it were you, you would have given in a long time ago, statistically speaking. If you are 1 in 100, you would have given in before this appeal started. You would have to be 1 in 1000 at least to get this far. Basic stats means I don't believe you. And you shouldn't believe you until you have been through this.
Fighting for the right side takes more effort than most people have. It seems like once a year we get the odd "I lost $25k or more even though I won the lawsuit" story. One per year, in my unscientific anecdote, which might sound like a lot. But it's not enough to win any ground.
Do you want to bankroll the losers? You already are, so that's a trick question. But if it were you, you would really appreciate someone kicking in a few bucks so you and your unemployed ass could take time to fight the good fight. And when the donations don't add up, you give in and live your life.
Hence the legal concept of a class action lawsuit where a small set of named plaintiffs represent the rest of the class and taken on the time and resource burdens of presenting the case to the court. I'm not part of the certified class, but if I were, I'm not sure if I'd be willing to be one of the named plaintiffs, but I'm pretty sure I'd be willing to participate as part of the class. Yes, I know, very selfish of me.
Of course, despite your protestations, the only motivational consideration is whether the lawyers are willing to bankroll the lawsuit and that depends on their assessment of the payout. It has very little to do with how much any of the plaintiffs expect as payment or how justified their case is. And, no, I don't feel any pity for the majority of the class (almost no effort expended), the lawyers (no explanation needed), or the named plaintiffs (usually have emotional stakes in the process if not the outcome).
But that's all generalized mumbo-jumbo. The pertinent particulars of this specific case are (1) most of the class would benefit only marginally from the $1-2k settlement since they are as a class highly paid hi-tech workers that were sought out by successful tech companies (e.g., a $1-2k bonus for these workers would be a cause for complaint) and (2) the plaintiffs' case is strong, as has been mentioned by the judge when she rejected the settlement.
What significant harm? The allegation is that they agreed not to recruit one another's employees. We were still free to apply where we wanted, they just wouldn't call us. Frankly, it bothers me not at all that I got less spam from douche bag recruiters.
For you and me, there was only indirect harm in that the high end of the salary spectrum was depressed for some workers, which in turn might have had some effect on the entire salary distribution. There was no direct harm because you and I (well, definitely me and probably you) were not in the select set of workers that were directly harmed by the collusion. So, our harm is minimal. However, for those who were affected, they either didn't get a promised job (like the guy in France) or didn't get the raises or increased benefits due to decreased employer competition. The harm for each affected worker can be monetarily quantified and is likely in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Good question. If it were me, I would definitely go for the 1-in-a-million chance for $100k versus a guaranteed $2k now.
I would love to play any game of chance with you. 1 in a million chance of $100k (expected value of $0.10) is preferable to a 100% chance of $2000?
Well, I wouldn't choose to play the $100k vs. $2k game at all, but these folks didn't have the choice to be mistreated by their employers. But given that these folks by the nature of their lawsuit class (i.e., "prized" hi-tech employees) are not poor, $2k should not be that significant to them.
Assuming that the $2k (or whatever the lower value is) is indeed noise and that I don't really need it now, absolutely I would take the chance for the higher payout. The choice is between an improbable, significant payout versus a guaranteed, insignificant payout. Another way of looking at this is that I would consider a $100 million powerball ticket to be much more worthwhile than a $50 scratch-off lottery ticket. One has a chance to affect my life, and the other doesn't help me that much even if I win.
Do you want a new TV now, or a very(!) small chance to get a new car 5-10 years from now? That's what it comes down to.
Good question. If it were me, I would definitely go for the 1-in-a-million chance for $100k versus a guaranteed $2k now. The $2k is noise and makes no difference in my life. If I lose it, I lose nothing of significance. The significant harm has already been inflicted, so the additional $2k is lost compensation is irrelevant. The $100k can actually affect my life. So, this decision from the point of the victims is a no-brainer.
That's just the personal economic decision. Not even the larger $100k (or whatever it turns out to be) will adequately compensate for the past economic harm, but the satisfaction of a legal penalty may be more rewarding.
It will be interesting to see if even Apple is able to change user habits. Visa and Mastercard might have signed on, but that's not important. Retailer support is the critical factor.
You clearly don't know the first thing about accepting credit and debit cards. Without the payment networks, NOTHING happens at point-of-sale.
Retail lives and dies by the Payment Card Industry standards and audits. Without Visa / MC / Discover / Amex, you are a cash-only business. Period.
I'm probably more ignorant that you realize, but that's beside the point. Visa/Mastercard support is necessary but not sufficient. The historical challenge for electronic but non-credit card systems has been placing readers at the point of sale locations. Without those readers, Apple Pay is useless. Someone has to pay for those readers. The stores don't want to do it unless they are convinced they can recover the cost.
If Apple can get either the stores or the banks to pass for the readers, then I will admit that Apple is an amazing magician. With the iPhone, Apple convinced AT&T et al. to subsidize the phones because the carriers were guaranteed to recover their investment through contracts with early termination fees. iPads don't come with such subsidies and are not as profitable for Apple. With Apple Pay, unless Apple swallows the cost of the readers, how will they convince the stores or banks for pay for the infrastructure without any guarantee of coming out ahead?
Getting Visa and MasterCard to agree to process transactions is a necessary first step but doesn't mean much by itself. Banks don't give out readers for free. That upfront and monthly cost will be hard for many small retailers and may not be worthwhile even for larger stores. The only game changer is if Apple can somehow get the banks to subsidize the cost of the readers. Apple got the cell phone carriers to agree to this subsidy, but I imagine the banks will be a harder sell. It remains to be seen if the retailers will feel the need to swallow the monthly and per-transaction costs to the banks plus to Apple. Small retailers and restaurants already complain about paying the bank tax. Would they agree to another tax? Would there be any benefit for the stores? Would iPhone users actually avoid a store just because it didn't have an Apple Pay reader, especially given that they could always just pay with a credit card add they have always done?
Now, what remains to be seen is whether Apple allows others to play in the Apple Pay sandbox or not. If they don't, they might successfully corner the phone market for the average person with Apple Pay and an iPhone 6C provided the POS vendors elect not to integrate other mobile payment schemes into their terminals.
It will be interesting to see if even Apple is able to change user habits. Visa and Mastercard might have signed on, but that's not important. Retailer support is the critical factor. Even though Apple has signed up "200,000 retail locations" including "Bloomingdale’s, McDonald’s, Subway, Walgreens, and Apple Stores", and users and use Apple Pay "inside a store’s mobile apps, such as Target’s or Starbucks’", I'm guessing the number of retailers is a very small percentage of potential retailers and a small percentage of a typical user's purchases. If that's the case, then it's very likely that there are almost no people who can use Apple Pay exclusively without continuing to carry traditional credit cards. And if I'm carrying a credit card anyway, what's the point of Apple Pay? Yes, I whip out my phone instead of my wallet and credit card, but is that an improvement in my life?
No, the phone is shown at exactly right angles, and they're right, the lens is photoshopped out. Meanwhile, it's 1 mm. What is that, the thickness of 2 business cards?
2 business cards makes it sound insignificant. Meanwhile 1mm / 6.9 mm is about 15%, which makes it sound more significant.
Does this 15% matter? If you want an Apple phone, it doesn't matter. If you don't care for Apple phones, it does.
The statement "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith" presents a false dichotomy. Science as depicting scientific thought and experimentation via the scientific process is orthogonal to religious belief. I can believe in God and still apply the principles of the scientific process.
In fact, the scientific process itself is even orthogonal to scientific belief. The sleight of hand occurs when science is used to represent both the scientific process as well as scientific belief. For example, there is a huge difference between trust in experimentation to test hypotheses and the belief that humans evolved from single-celled organisms. The case of evolution (and pretty much most of past history) is poorly suited to testing via the scientific process. That doesn't meant that human evolution isn't true, but it does mean that it shouldn't be held in the same regard as other results that have been subjected to double-blind, independently repeatable experiments that are the gold standard of science.
Since when is collecting samples and cataloging them not hard science? Not particularly difficult, but most definitely hard science.
It is part of hard science, but it's the technician part. The scientist part is figuring out what problem to address, thinking of hypotheses to test, designing a methodology to test the hypotheses, and then executing the experiment and analyzing the gathered data.
Finding a kid who has executed some scientific project is not rare. However, finding a kid who has done that without having the problem set up or at least directly motivated by a mentor (often a parent) is rare. Furthermore, it's even more rare to find a kid who has finished the experiment without resources provided by that mentor, often resources that are not readily available to most kids.
The idea that regular people will curate the advertising data used to profile them is a huge non-starter.
Somehow the geekboy bias of slashdot thinks it's a great idea to make the effort to do Amazon's or Google's job of making targeted ads non-annoying. For normal people, configuring ads on Amazon's behalf is obviously annoying and is obviously a non-starter.
Of course, the real solution is not to do Amazon's job for them. The real solution is to block ads. No, the websites won't go away. Corporations are hooked on money and will find another way to stay in business.
Right, because people understand and care about that.
So much that they've flocked by the billions to closed, centralized platforms.
People may not necessarily understand or consciously care for open platforms, but they at least subconsciously cling to it. Of those that have flocked to closed messaging systems, how many have given up email? How many of us know even a single person that has given up email?
Pro-metric folks talk about the ease of metric conversions, but that's mostly useless. Few calculations are of the shift the decimal place around. Rather, most calculations require more arithmetic than most people can comfortably handle without paper or a calculator.
But, even more important, the most relevant aspect of using either any system of measurement, be it metric or English, is gut feelings. That's what used daily over and over again. I have a gut feel for how big 100 miles, 1 gallon, 160 lbs, etc. are, but I have to do the conversion from metric quantities to understand metric units. I can do the conversions, and I understand the math, but it's the intuitive understanding of the quantities that is useful. It is this one quality of measurement systems that allows the English system to continue to flourish despite its mathematical limitations.
From Wikipedia, "Of the 43,000 Apple employees in the United States 30,000 work at Apple Stores." Because of this, none of Apple's numbers are comparable to other tech companies. What would be interesting to see is the breakdown for the 13,000 non-store employees. Non-tech vs. tech is not a valid point of comparison unless other tech companies provide numbers using the same criteria, since it's not always entirely obvious who is tech vs. non-tech.
Of course, the real questions are (1) whether the aggregate statistics are of any use to represent current fairness or to drive future policy and (2) if and to what extent specific individuals are disadvantaged due to certain demographic characteristics. I think the aggregate statistics are useless because target numbers do not exist. Sure, the media and CEOs happily decry the current numbers, but then they cowardly balk at stating what the desired targets are. Also, they try to portray that their sense of "fairness" may be focused on individuals, but they selectively pick and choose which individuals are worthy of fairness and which are not. It may be true that it's not fair that a certain black woman doesn't have a tech job, but does the fact that lots of other white men have tech jobs make it any more fair that a specific white man doesn't have a tech job?
Long run (maybe, even near-long-term) this does not bode well for China's prospects, because when one is sealed off from outside ideas and innovation, one will ultimately fall behind and adapt only in suboptimal ways. What results is a waste of social and intellectual capital.
China is only refusing to buy some foreign products. There is no policy of isolation. I imagine there will still be a great deal of reverse engineering and other data gathering activities (interpret that how you wish). So, the idea is to negatively impact competitors financially while at the same time benefiting from their innovations.
Yes, the kids love them and yes, they probably do have educational value...
Actually, the question of educational value is the big elephant in the room. It is completely questionable and absolutely not obvious that these tablets have educational value. Do the kids learn more, faster, or in different ways? Can this be quantified or even vaguely estimated? There are huge IT capital and operational costs involved, and such large expenditures must be justified in terms of return.
It's telling that the article and even the discussion on Slashdot centers on technical questions because those issues are all tangential. If the main goals focus on avoiding the theft of machines and the bypass of parental controls, then the entire project is misguided. How are the children learning, and how does that learning compare to the previous system of learning? What did the $20 million buy?
Unfortunately, these MS employees are likely to be unceremoniously dumped with minimal chance of re-employment.
It depends. It could very well be that the main reason for this mass layoff is not that Microsoft carries more deadweight than another company, say Google or Apple, for example. Many of Google's employees are not necessary, but it can afford to pay them due to its money spigot. Financial metrics, such as operating profit or more importantly projected stock price appreciation, quickly turn non-deadweight employees into deadweight. It's obvious that Microsoft (or any other company) does not execute layoffs in response to an appraisal of the quality or necessarily even the usefulness of employees but rather the financial implications of the cost centers that these employees represent.
I've never made any concerted effort for "environmental reasons," but I do notice that I don't use nearly as much energy as most people do, which is a side effect of how cheap I am.
Yes, energy usage moderation is a matter of economics and not religion. Rich people with big houses use lot of energy regardless of their views on the environment. Similarly poor people tend to try their best to minimize their energy usage, not because they necessarily care about the environment but because that is what they can afford. This is what I've seen in my life from my experience as part of the bottom 10% as well as the top 5%.
Academic publishing would be a much fairer process of reviews would be truly double blind, and if there were a severe penalty for breaking the rules. In the absence of that, people win Nobel prizes and will continue to do so. But that's because those people are outliers, not because the system is sane.
Outstanding papers for the most part will continue to be published. That's not the issue. The problem is that the overwhelming portion of submitted papers are not seminal papers, and it's these papers that are subjected to the defects in the review process, including the following:
(1) Not all reviewers are equally competent for their assigned papers.
(2) Not all reviewers are equally committed to spending the minimum amount of time needed for a thorough review. I have seen reviews submitted by well-known and regarded individuals that were obviously hastily written with a cursory reading of the submission.
(3) The assignment of papers to reviewers is mostly random. Explicit conflicts are filtered, but the assignment is mostly random, even if some sort of bidding process is used, as is done for some conferences.
(4) The number of reviewers is often minimal. For journals, often two reviewers are used. For conferences, 2-5 reviewers may be involved. However, that number includes the less competent and apathetic reviewers.
(5) Decisions are often swayed by a few very opinionated individuals. Especially on a PC, it is not at all rare to see political motivations determine the fate of a paper.
Double-blind reviews are idealistic but not practical. For many/most papers, it's almost trivial to figure out who the authors are based on the title, the subject material, and the references. Most authors will self-reference their own papers.
Fourteen years ago I carried a phone and a PDA. The PDA had wifi, office apps, games, etc., and when needed I could use the phone as a data modem. I eventually migrated to a single device with both phone and PDA functionality, and I've gotten used to the convenience of a single device with the same functionality. I would not want to go backwards in time to once again carrying two devices for the same functionality.
I consider bio-sensors to be gimicky. I imagine most of the people who would find those sensors to be a positive have already bought existing sensor devices.
Using a watch as a convenient but significantly crippled interface to a phone seems like a huge step backwards. I would only accept that huge loss of interface functionality if I could leave the phone behind, i.e., if the phone migrated to the watch. Now, that is something that I would buy in an instant. Anything else is just Pebble++, even if it happens to have a fruit logo on it.
Fifteen years ago, you opened the yellow pages for the same information. Did you say then, who controls this book? Did you worry about all the power being in the hands of a single phone company?
Likely not, and for two reasons. If the phone company abused it, they'd lose the trust and goodwill that makes the very product valuable, and if it was no longer accurate someone else would come alone and make an accurate version.
Why is that not the same for Google? If their maps become unreliable, won't people move to Bing? If not, why not?
The problem with "hacking" is the openness and crowd sourcing aspect of Google Maps. Wikipedia has the same problem, and the answer was to decrease the openness for editing. Maybe Google will have to adopt a similar strategic decrease in openness for certain parts of Maps.
Will people move to an alternative if Google Maps becomes unreliable? Well, maybe but probably not. If I'm misdirected to a competitor but I'm still able to complete my transaction, then I probably don't care or maybe I don't even realize the misdirection. If a small percentage of the links I click on fail, but most links continue to work and the rest of Maps functionality remains intact, then I won't switch. The losers are not the browser users but the businesses trying to get free advertising. I imagine Google will take care of paid advertising businesses, but they probably don't care as much for the "freeloaders", i.e., Google wants the freeloaders to populate their database, but they don't really care if they benefit or are hurt.
One interesting study would be the correlation between the characteristics of the hiring manager and team members. In my experience the correlation is strong, especially in terms of race and ethnicity. At Bell Labs in the 90's, one out of the three research area organizations had a very high representation of Indian managers and researchers. At Sun, the same was true except that most managers and researchers were white (Americans, Europeans, Australians, etc.). I worked at another company where the manager was Serbian and two other researchers were Serbian.
This is a hypothesis that can be fairly easily corroborated with statistical studies. I'm fairly certain that the bias exists. Of course, whether that bias is good or bad is a separate question.
Two questions about this research:
(1) How did the researchers account for operational language profiles? Language A may have more negative words than positive words, but maybe the one happy word is used 80% of the time. To me, the incidence of positive vs. negative usage is much more important than the histogram of the available vocabulary.
(2) How did the researchers compare the same word in different languages? Is this comparison possible without the introduction of bias in the selection of words for each of the two languages. From the paper authors' website, "This is a comparison between the average user reported happiness scores between several languages. The "happiness" of each word is rated by 50 distinct users on a scale of 1(sad) to 9 (happy). Words from each row language are then translated into each column language and intersected with each other corpora."
So, how much are the results a reflection of the experimenter's biases and skills in translation to the 2nd language. I'm suspicious of this type of comparison. From the article (not the paper), "For example, on a scale of 1 to 9 with nine being the happiest, Germans rate the word “gift” as 3.54. That’s slightly negative. By contrast, English speakers rate “gift” as strongly positive at 7.72." As a somewhat fluent German speaker, I know that the German word "gift" means poison, and I would consider it not just slightly negative but extremely negative. If the experimenters actually presented the German speakers with the German translation of the English word "gift", e.g., something like "Geschenk", then I imagine the German response would have been very positive.
Niggardly...
Some people many find it offensive because it sounds like an offensive word. However, that does not make their offence legitimate.
Now, if people started to get cute and "niggardly blacks" came into common usage as an euphemism for the notorious N-word it could become offensive, but that would be based on the facts around the usage and not the feelings of a black person.
The problem is with the concept of a "legitimate" offense, as though some quintessential characteristic of an action or statement should outlaw personal feelings. How one feels is reality. For those of who are married, try telling your wife that she shouldn't feel offended because you didn't mean to hurt her, so that should make her feel better.
This entire discussion of "legitimate" offenses boils down to whether one cares about what others feels. If I care about the listener and that listener feels offended, then I would address their feelings, regardless of my personal feelings about the offense. If I don't care about the listener, then I either ignore the listener, or if I feel the sting of societal condemnation, I attack the "legitimacy" of the offense or the morality or intelligence of the listener.
I completely disagree. It's common sense that the person using the word decides if it's offensive. If someone says "negro" referring to the color of a couch, it's not offensive even if a black person takes offense at it. If a child calls the black paymates he adores "niggers" because that's the only word he's ever known for them, that's not offensive. His black friends may request that he use a different word because they take offense at the term, but the child meant no offense by using the word and it'd be a serious miscarriage of justice for him to be chastised for using the word.
It's much more nuanced than that. There's this incorrect aggregation of the notion of offense, as though something is either offensive to everyone or offensive to no one. A speaker can offend without intention to offend. It should be obvious that each individual is the only person who has not only the right but the ability to determine personally felt offense. The right and ability to determine offense for oneself should not be confused with the legal or moral right to determine the resulting societal actions.
That is, each person gets to decide if the term "redskin" is personally offensive. However, just because one or more people take offense doesn't necessarily grant that group or society as a whole to impose sanctions for that offense. But, likewise, the lack of societal sanction should not be extended to prohibit personal feelings or thoughts. In fact, in my opinion, hearing "You have no right to be offended!" is much more hurtful than the original offense.