"The money isn't much as a pure trade for privacy, but I suspect that many people would like to have their preferences be among those that shape how Google — and other companies, too — actually organize their interfaces."
Here's my proposed experiment. Make 2 offers: (A) We track what you watch for a year, we will NOT use it to shape any interfaces, you get $25. (B) We track what you watch for a year, we WILL use it to shape any interfaces, you get $0.
My bet would be that the ratio of acceptances would be at least 10:1 in favor of (A). I only see "being tracked is great as long as I get more targeted advertising" as a claim from Slashdotters.
"By April 12, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, sending dark smoke billowing over the capital that day."
That sounds a lot like one of the scariest scenes in Earth Abides.
"Looters ransacking universities - oh, that's the fault of the US. Oh, Iranians being cantankerous - well, that's the fault of the US for proviking them."
Those first two are pretty easy cases to make, considering that the U.S. demonstrably overthrew both of their governments at least once apiece in the past 60 years or so (and at least some domestic calls to re-invade both of them again soon).
High-technology functions by reducing the manpower need for such jobs over time, not expanding then. I quote the previous Slashdot article on the subject:
"Optimists says that if only America produced more companies like Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook, the country's economic problems would be fixed — America could retrain its vast, idle construction-and-manufacturing workforce, and our unemployment and inequality problems would be solved. But Apple's $1 billion new data center in North Carolina has been a disappointing development for many residents, who can't comprehend how expensive facilities stretching across hundreds of acres can create only 50 new jobs, especially after thousands of positions in the region have been lost to cheaper foreign competition... we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking they're going to solve our unemployment or inequality problems.'"
My rough calculation is that it's analogous to about one-millionth of a square millimeter of a flake of paint being blown off your car every second. (About the same scale as the Nimitz compared to the surface of the Earth.) It's going to take some time.
What I'm a little wierded out by is that this difference is noticeable by the transit light-detection.
"You have to feel sorry for the police officers who are required to frisk people for guns or knives..."
Actually, I really don't. (a) People should have the right to be educated and carry the means to defend themselves. This should not be considered ipso facto a threat to law enforcement, it should be seen as support for it. (b) The types of "terry stop" frisks mentioned here are almost uniformly used as a fraudulent means to search for drugs, which of course don't directly threaten anyone. This is yet more propaganda to ratchet up the Drug War that the majority of Americans do NOT want.
End the Drug War, end the quotas for cop frisks/arrests/rights violations, and both citizens and cops will be more stable and secure.
I would just like to point out that Joel Spolsky in NYC is claiming that there is a weeping abyss needing a huge number of software engineers. Which is pretty damned hard to rationalize, but that's the argument:
"OMG do we ever need more software engineers. The US post-secondary education system is massively failing us: it’s not producing even remotely enough programmers to meet the hiring needs of the technology industry. Not even remotely enough." [FTA]
"NYC, a school system notorious for having 'teachers' who are shut up in a room doing nothing, pulling down six figure salaries because union rules don't let the government fire them."
Union rules permit teachers to be fired -- you just have to show a reason for it. Administrators (PHBs) are such poor stewards of the institution, and so poorly incentivized to care, that they find it easier to put teachers they don't like in a "dummy" room and not bother with the termination procedure.
I've found that fellow teachers are a lot more critical of my work (in a constructive way) than any non-teaching administrator. Case studies show that when made part of the process, union teachers are a lot more aggressive in wanting to fire bad teachers than administrators are.
If you convert union teaching into at-will employment, then the end result will be no one with experience over age 40, because administrators will let them all go as soon as they can hire someone younger at a lower bottom-line cost. And more CYA behavior, less advocating for students, for lack of job security. A lot like the non-unionized software engineering industry today.
Of course, in general public-school tuition is just set by T = O - S (T tuition, O overall cost, S state funding). Overall cost hasn't changed much over the years. What's changed radically in the last decade or so is state funding: dropping from, like, 80% to 20% in some states, and so the tuition necessarily rises to make up the difference. So textbooks prices, nor pretty much anything at the college itself, will serve to determine tuition; only state funding will.
As a college math teacher, my gut instinct is that this is the only damn thing that really makes any sense. Math books are probably ground-zero in that they have no need or right to change very much from year-to-year. They ought to be written once, and released for free for anyone to download and use (and modify and improve if you need to). If there's any more compelling use of computing technology to distribute knowledge, I frankly don't know what it is.
What I see happening currently is one of two options: (a) Use a mass-market book that the publisher churns with a not-quite-compatible edition every year or two. The statistics text used in my classes (picked by department, not me) is excellent, but a new copy costs $180 to students, which kind of breaks my heart (multiply that by all their classes each year, holy damn!). (b) Use an in-house written textbook custom to the department (done in a lot of lower-level classes) which will be cheaper, lets the department recoup some of the money, but is of much lower quality (fewer exercises by an order-of-magnitude, no proofreading for errors, no graphic design, no color, hand-drawn sketches, etc.) And this work is probably repeated thousands of times at schools across the country.
Just write the damn thing once, somehow, and give it away free to everyone. Seems inevitable, and I'm eager to see it.
I would call this a crazy conspiracy theory -- except for Dave with a V's really strange entangling of outrage, with simultaneous unending praise and desire for the product. I'm having a really hard time making sense of that part of it.
Actually, just recently I've started to use this as a low-risk opportunity for negotiation/assertiveness practice for myself (a tiny bit "Boiler Room"-esque, perhaps). The last call where I went "no.. no... no" to the same question about 6 times I felt was not bad exercise. Also scratches my curiosity about exactly how long their script is before they hang up on me.
Wow; for some reason your comment generated a whole helluva lot of Anonymous Coward objections. Your point is, of course, demonstrably correct. Regardless of how supernova-crazy Christoforo turned out to be afterwards.
This sounds a bit like road rage -- if someone cuts me off, my goal becomes "get them away from me because they're potentially damaging to me", not "time to teach them a lesson".
From Wikipedia (Psycopathy) -- "It should be noted that not all psychopaths are smooth charmers. Often due to poor upbringing, some lack the necessary social grace and education to impress people. Such psychopaths tend to rely more on intimidation, coercion, and violence to get their way.[48]"
The footnote refers to "Hare, Babiak. Snakes in Suits. pg 39"
"First the kid emails saying "Hey the promised delivery date was two weeks ago, what's up?" and he gets "17th" as the entire response with no explanation at all. That was when the PR dude's failure began... PR dude failed at his very job title PUBLIC RELATIONS."
Just to roll it back another step, but he probably can't feasibly do any more explaining than that because he's apparently set himself up as the sole employee of a company that allegedly does marketing, public relations, business deals, and customer support... and it's really just him alone (likely unknown by the business partner), dealing with hundreds of customer support emails and phone calls on a daily basis, with no organized system to do it whatsoever. So judging from all his other messages which are similarly misspelled, incorrect grammar, no caps, and sentence fragments... responses on the order of "17th" are quite likely all he has time for (on average) throughout the day.
Of course, that's his fault, too, because he's a scam artist who's convinced a company to give him a job that he has absolutely no capacity to follow through on. And the end result is that he's writing 32-bit support replies, intensely frustrating customers, and still bitching and moaning that he's being harassed and bullied with the unmanageable amount of work that he's brought on himself.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for sharing that.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 1
"American Exceptionalism". We're in the lead, so everyone else must be behind us.
I assume that this is a feature of imperialism on the cusp of decline.
Re:I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my Da
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 1
Eh, that's sounds pretty anecdotal, doesn't it? Coincidentally, I picked the following article as an example for my statistics class about a month ago: http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/304/13/1447.short
In short: Arizona set up a 5-year program to educate people in CCOPR (chest compression-only CPR). Comparing victims who got CPR from non-medical professional bystanders, to those who got CCOCPR, the latter had almost double the chance of surviving to discharge from a hospital (7.8% to 13.3%). However, when looking at multiple randomized trials for dispatcher-assisted CPR over the phone, there was no statistical difference between the techniques. (P-values 0.18, 0.09, and 0.16; p. 1452-3). The sociology factor is suggested, but it's at the bottom of the list:
"There are multiple reasons COCPR might have advantages over conventional CPR techniques. These include the rapid deterioration of forward blood flow that occurs during even brief disruptions of chest compressions,8,31 the long ramp-up time to return to adequate blood flow after resuming chest compressions, 8,31 the reduction of cardiac venous return with the use of positive pressure ventilation,32 the complexity of conventional CPR,21,33 the significant time required to perform the breaths,28,33,34 the critical importance of cerebral and coronary circulation during arrest,8,31,35,36 the reduced time required for emergency medical dispatchers to instruct a bystander over the telephone how to perform COCPR, 6 and the reluctance to perform mouth-to-mouth ventilation on strangers.25,26,28,37" [p. 1453]
Slashdot Mirror
"The money isn't much as a pure trade for privacy, but I suspect that many people would like to have their preferences be among those that shape how Google — and other companies, too — actually organize their interfaces."
Here's my proposed experiment. Make 2 offers:
(A) We track what you watch for a year, we will NOT use it to shape any interfaces, you get $25.
(B) We track what you watch for a year, we WILL use it to shape any interfaces, you get $0.
My bet would be that the ratio of acceptances would be at least 10:1 in favor of (A).
I only see "being tracked is great as long as I get more targeted advertising" as a claim from Slashdotters.
"By April 12, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, sending dark smoke billowing over the capital that day."
That sounds a lot like one of the scariest scenes in Earth Abides.
"Looters ransacking universities - oh, that's the fault of the US. Oh, Iranians being cantankerous - well, that's the fault of the US for proviking them."
Those first two are pretty easy cases to make, considering that the U.S. demonstrably overthrew both of their governments at least once apiece in the past 60 years or so (and at least some domestic calls to re-invade both of them again soon).
"What a spin doctor."
No, he was always more known for his fastball. Slider and curveball were only so-so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_schilling
High-technology functions by reducing the manpower need for such jobs over time, not expanding then. I quote the previous Slashdot article on the subject:
"Optimists says that if only America produced more companies like Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook, the country's economic problems would be fixed — America could retrain its vast, idle construction-and-manufacturing workforce, and our unemployment and inequality problems would be solved. But Apple's $1 billion new data center in North Carolina has been a disappointing development for many residents, who can't comprehend how expensive facilities stretching across hundreds of acres can create only 50 new jobs, especially after thousands of positions in the region have been lost to cheaper foreign competition... we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking they're going to solve our unemployment or inequality problems.'"
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/11/30/0517258/why-america-doesnt-need-more-tech-giants-like-apple
First rule of Call-to-Kill-Hollywood -- do not talk about Call-to-Kill-Hollywood.
My rough calculation is that it's analogous to about one-millionth of a square millimeter of a flake of paint being blown off your car every second. (About the same scale as the Nimitz compared to the surface of the Earth.) It's going to take some time.
What I'm a little wierded out by is that this difference is noticeable by the transit light-detection.
"You have to feel sorry for the police officers who are required to frisk people for guns or knives..."
Actually, I really don't. (a) People should have the right to be educated and carry the means to defend themselves. This should not be considered ipso facto a threat to law enforcement, it should be seen as support for it. (b) The types of "terry stop" frisks mentioned here are almost uniformly used as a fraudulent means to search for drugs, which of course don't directly threaten anyone. This is yet more propaganda to ratchet up the Drug War that the majority of Americans do NOT want.
End the Drug War, end the quotas for cop frisks/arrests/rights violations, and both citizens and cops will be more stable and secure.
I would just like to point out that Joel Spolsky in NYC is claiming that there is a weeping abyss needing a huge number of software engineers. Which is pretty damned hard to rationalize, but that's the argument:
"OMG do we ever need more software engineers. The US post-secondary education system is massively failing us: it’s not producing even remotely enough programmers to meet the hiring needs of the technology industry. Not even remotely enough." [FTA]
"NYC, a school system notorious for having 'teachers' who are shut up in a room doing nothing, pulling down six figure salaries because union rules don't let the government fire them."
Union rules permit teachers to be fired -- you just have to show a reason for it. Administrators (PHBs) are such poor stewards of the institution, and so poorly incentivized to care, that they find it easier to put teachers they don't like in a "dummy" room and not bother with the termination procedure.
I've found that fellow teachers are a lot more critical of my work (in a constructive way) than any non-teaching administrator. Case studies show that when made part of the process, union teachers are a lot more aggressive in wanting to fire bad teachers than administrators are.
If you convert union teaching into at-will employment, then the end result will be no one with experience over age 40, because administrators will let them all go as soon as they can hire someone younger at a lower bottom-line cost. And more CYA behavior, less advocating for students, for lack of job security. A lot like the non-unionized software engineering industry today.
"They may ask you for your ID so you should know if you are legally required to give it (in NY you are)."
Skeptical. Citation needed.
"Are Brain Teasers Good Hiring Criteria?" will be precisely the brain teaser that I put forth to my next prospective hire.*
(*Note: I have never hired anyone.)
Of course, in general public-school tuition is just set by T = O - S (T tuition, O overall cost, S state funding). Overall cost hasn't changed much over the years. What's changed radically in the last decade or so is state funding: dropping from, like, 80% to 20% in some states, and so the tuition necessarily rises to make up the difference. So textbooks prices, nor pretty much anything at the college itself, will serve to determine tuition; only state funding will.
As a college math teacher, my gut instinct is that this is the only damn thing that really makes any sense. Math books are probably ground-zero in that they have no need or right to change very much from year-to-year. They ought to be written once, and released for free for anyone to download and use (and modify and improve if you need to). If there's any more compelling use of computing technology to distribute knowledge, I frankly don't know what it is.
What I see happening currently is one of two options: (a) Use a mass-market book that the publisher churns with a not-quite-compatible edition every year or two. The statistics text used in my classes (picked by department, not me) is excellent, but a new copy costs $180 to students, which kind of breaks my heart (multiply that by all their classes each year, holy damn!). (b) Use an in-house written textbook custom to the department (done in a lot of lower-level classes) which will be cheaper, lets the department recoup some of the money, but is of much lower quality (fewer exercises by an order-of-magnitude, no proofreading for errors, no graphic design, no color, hand-drawn sketches, etc.) And this work is probably repeated thousands of times at schools across the country.
Just write the damn thing once, somehow, and give it away free to everyone. Seems inevitable, and I'm eager to see it.
I would call this a crazy conspiracy theory -- except for Dave with a V's really strange entangling of outrage, with simultaneous unending praise and desire for the product. I'm having a really hard time making sense of that part of it.
Actually, just recently I've started to use this as a low-risk opportunity for negotiation/assertiveness practice for myself (a tiny bit "Boiler Room"-esque, perhaps). The last call where I went "no.. no... no" to the same question about 6 times I felt was not bad exercise. Also scratches my curiosity about exactly how long their script is before they hang up on me.
Wow; for some reason your comment generated a whole helluva lot of Anonymous Coward objections. Your point is, of course, demonstrably correct. Regardless of how supernova-crazy Christoforo turned out to be afterwards.
This sounds a bit like road rage -- if someone cuts me off, my goal becomes "get them away from me because they're potentially damaging to me", not "time to teach them a lesson".
This here deserves modding up.
"Anyone that has basic skills of google will never hire him again."
Of course, he's already demonstrated willingness to act under a different name -- even when it's another real person:
http://kotaku.com/5871400/cut-paul-oceanmarketting-christoforo-a-breakhe-probably-just-has-roid-rage
From Wikipedia (Psycopathy) -- "It should be noted that not all psychopaths are smooth charmers. Often due to poor upbringing, some lack the necessary social grace and education to impress people. Such psychopaths tend to rely more on intimidation, coercion, and violence to get their way.[48]"
The footnote refers to "Hare, Babiak. Snakes in Suits. pg 39"
"First the kid emails saying "Hey the promised delivery date was two weeks ago, what's up?" and he gets "17th" as the entire response with no explanation at all. That was when the PR dude's failure began... PR dude failed at his very job title PUBLIC RELATIONS."
Just to roll it back another step, but he probably can't feasibly do any more explaining than that because he's apparently set himself up as the sole employee of a company that allegedly does marketing, public relations, business deals, and customer support... and it's really just him alone (likely unknown by the business partner), dealing with hundreds of customer support emails and phone calls on a daily basis, with no organized system to do it whatsoever. So judging from all his other messages which are similarly misspelled, incorrect grammar, no caps, and sentence fragments... responses on the order of "17th" are quite likely all he has time for (on average) throughout the day.
Of course, that's his fault, too, because he's a scam artist who's convinced a company to give him a job that he has absolutely no capacity to follow through on. And the end result is that he's writing 32-bit support replies, intensely frustrating customers, and still bitching and moaning that he's being harassed and bullied with the unmanageable amount of work that he's brought on himself.
Thanks for sharing that.
"American Exceptionalism". We're in the lead, so everyone else must be behind us.
Here are the current top two contenders to the U.S. Presidency attacking the sitting President because he "simply does not understand the concept of American exceptionalism": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerome-karabel/american-exceptionalism-obama-gingrich_b_1161800.html
I assume that this is a feature of imperialism on the cusp of decline.
Eh, that's sounds pretty anecdotal, doesn't it? Coincidentally, I picked the following article as an example for my statistics class about a month ago: http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/304/13/1447.short
In short: Arizona set up a 5-year program to educate people in CCOPR (chest compression-only CPR). Comparing victims who got CPR from non-medical professional bystanders, to those who got CCOCPR, the latter had almost double the chance of surviving to discharge from a hospital (7.8% to 13.3%). However, when looking at multiple randomized trials for dispatcher-assisted CPR over the phone, there was no statistical difference between the techniques. (P-values 0.18, 0.09, and 0.16; p. 1452-3). The sociology factor is suggested, but it's at the bottom of the list:
"There are multiple reasons COCPR might have advantages over conventional CPR techniques. These include the rapid deterioration of forward blood flow that occurs during even brief disruptions of chest compressions,8,31 the long ramp-up time to return to adequate blood flow after resuming chest compressions, 8,31 the reduction of cardiac venous return with the use of positive pressure ventilation,32 the complexity of conventional CPR,21,33 the significant time required to perform the breaths,28,33,34 the critical importance of cerebral and coronary circulation during arrest,8,31,35,36 the reduced time required for emergency medical dispatchers to instruct a bystander over the telephone how to perform COCPR, 6 and the reluctance to perform mouth-to-mouth ventilation on strangers.25,26,28,37" [p. 1453]