I'm not sure what year the real cutoff should be, but (conservatively) most cars built before 2000 should be safe.
Funny you should use the word "safe" in this context. Cars with built-in networking can send an alert to emergency services in the event of a rollover, air bag deployment, seat belt pre-tensioner activation, or other indication of a crash, all without driver assistance. The quick response means rescuers may arrive in time to save your life.
Your odds of dying in a car accident are about 1:88. Have you computed the odds that your car's betrayal of your location will cause you to personally suffer? Have you weighed the two together in a meaningful way?
My Ford has all of the above, but it has one downgrade that i consider a feature in this case. It can only communicate using a Bluetooth phone as a modem. If i get in an accident, it will auto-dial into an emergency reporting service. But it does not ever dial my phone outside of that, and never sends my location anywhere else. I like that.
Seriously, simply by trying to avoid conflict minerals, they are already helping to stop fueling those regional wars. Does that make them "good guys"? It makes them "better than they were before." Which is a good thing.
Nobody's always perfect, so we should at least celebrate a little when someone improves.
The libel laws state that you have to have a falsehood, but there are gray areas surrounding opinions. Posting "Joe's Carpets sucks, 1/5 stars" is pretty much an opinion, and is not likely enough to earn you a lawsuit. Posting "Joe's Carpets came to my house, and their cleaner kicked my dog, and dumped five pounds of poop on my carpets and I had to hire another service to clean up their mess, 1/5 stars and you're an idiot if you ever hire them" would be actionable libel.
Unless the Joe's Carpets guy actually did kick your dog, and dumped poop on your carpets, in which case you're in the clear. The truth is an absolute defense.
That's not uncommon. Instead of providing the data to the business, it could be provided to an outside expert who agrees not to reveal the true identities unless they turn up to not be customers. Yelp would have to pay for it, of course.
I just read the first few pages of the study, and it seems the authors tried to control for the "fame of the author" aspect as much as they could, with things like excluding a second text by the same author in the same genre, that sort of approach. And as suspected, the study is much more modest than the article titles suggest. They are looking for "success" as defined by their own criteria, not "money" or "bestsellers".
But it was the marketing hype that got me to read a study by some random researchers. That's got to say something.
I wasn't blaming Grandma. I'm simply pointing out reality: a lot of boxes are never going to be updated by their owners because they don't see the need. Asking them to see the need will get you nowhere, too.
I'm with you: it's not her fault. But somehow we have to deal with this. And Microsoft is walking away from the problem they caused.
I was commenting based on the title of the articles discussing the study: "Algorithm aims to predict fiction bestsellers"; and "Computer Algorithm Seeks to Crack Code of Fiction Bestsellers". The strong implications are that the algorithm is designed to unlock the secret of making money by writing books that contain certain words or linguistic structures. I'm arguing that a book's financial success has much less to do with any ephemeral "bestsellerness" quality, and has a much stronger association with "marketing campaigns".
Now, that may or may not be the basis for why the researchers performed their study, or even what they hoped to learn, but it's how their study is being perceived by the media. Which is ironically making my point: it isn't the facts or the content of the study that's important, it's the coverage of the story that's put the slant on what they found. If the [marketing|reporting] for this study had instead said "Researchers develop algorithmic approach to search for linguistic commonalities in Project Gutenberg texts", it probably wouldn't even have merited notice on Slashdot.
However, the sample's study makes exactly the same mistake. They used Project Gutenberg as the source, and download counts as a substitute for sales. Sales has one measure: the number of dollars in the cash box at the end of the day. They should be measuring books on the NY Times bestseller list, or the Amazon Top 10 list, which have actually sold for money and are actually popular (fraudulently placed books aside.) And they should be comparing them against books from their own genres, or at least books that had similar attributes.
I think what they'd really find is that "books that sell well are those that are marketed well", regardless of the words they contain.
Maybe they could focus on a specific key reviewer: what does Oprah like and not like? Maybe when they cross compile the data from all the books, they will find they've only discovered Oprah's tastes. Which isn't a bad outcome, if they are ultimately trying to discover what kinds of books will be better positioned to make the author money. But I don't think they've come close to predicting fiction "best-sellers" yet.
Keep in mind these are his memoirs, and he didn't whine like this while in office.
And he's right - it's impossible to make a change when your multiple bosses don't want you to change anything, or issue you conflicting requirements. The only way to effectively get something done is to step outside of the existing bureaucracy. Successful people know this, and often succeed by creating a new system where they're the one person in charge, and make things happen. Unfortunately for the rest of the environment, where they used to have 99 bureaucracies, they now have a hundred, and the problem overall gets worse. And when you're the guy in charge of the 99 bureaucracies, each successfully being managed by a successful person, they will fight attempts to change their area, even when the whole system is collectively dysfunctional.
The fix in the large is pretty much the same as fixing it in the small: create a new bureaucracy outside of the old one, then migrate the existing functions into the new one where it's understood that he's the guy in charge. But at some point those smaller functionaries have so much power they can resist such changes.
Instead of a "fix", it seems desirable to throw the whole thing away and start fresh. It's what we do with computer software that's become encrusted with poor architecture decisions over time - we migrate to version 2.0. But it doesn't work that easily with people instead of classes. And there's the matter of keeping things running while you try to make such a change. It's not like we can shut down the Pentagon for a year while it's torn apart and rebuilt.
So he knows what's wrong, and he even knows how to fix it, but doesn't wield the authority to actually do that. I feel for the guy,.
I'm no vulcanologist, but I've been intrigued with super volcanoes for over ten years now, and in everything I've read or seen I don't recall anyone saying that some sort of external trigger was needed to "light the fuse", so to speak.
Any good vulcanologist knows all you need is a cold fusion device to stop a volcano.
Any good vulcanologist would use logic to solve the problem, instead of approaching it with emotions.
Because sometimes they actually work. They attract customers and investors. They put you in front of people who might not otherwise see you.
They aren't trying to sell to you personally, Mr. alphatel. They are trying to sell to 1% of the people who will walk past their booth. Or maybe they are going after the 0.01% of people walking past their booth who are looking to invest.
Advertising doesn't have to be on target to 100% of the people out there. It just has to get enough of the message to enough of the right people, at the right time. Trade shows put two out of three of those within the grasp of anyone who can afford to present at one.
I have "inside dogs" that have very tender paws. They don't have the calluses that wild dogs or outside dogs have. A part-time outside dog also may not have the insulation needed, either. Just watch your beast for signs of discomfort when it's this cold out: lifting their paws is what I usually see.
I had a WRT54G for many years, but finally had to replace it after the last of the internal Ethernet ports died. A router with only one network interface is not particularly useful to me.
I replaced it with one of the nice Linksys/Cisco E4200 home routers (before they released their insanely stupid "management in the cloud" V2 firmware, which I refuse to install.) However, I've never completely trusted that it was backdoor free. Now, with the NSA revelations, as well as some recently discovered Cisco backdoors, I'm thinking this one may just have to go on eBay, and I'll swap to something that can actually run OpenWRT or Tomato. While I'm not particularly worried about the NSA spying on me, any holes they can exploit can also be discovered and exploited by the bad guys.
The drawback is that I don't particularly trust Belkin hardware, either. Jeez, they've made a lot of fall-apart-in-a-month crappy junk over the years.
It's right up there by Tower and Soudan. If you get the chance, go. The Soudan Underground State Park is an old iron mine that is now home to several high energy particle physics experiments. Be sure to take the extra tour guided by one of the researchers, and not only the mine tour. It's one of the few places on the planet where you can go 1/2 mile underground.
However, I recommend visiting in July instead of January. Camping in the north woods is a lot more fun in the summer. And while the mine is a constant 48 degrees (or so) the travel to get there is not.
Wow, it's -15F in WI this morning. Last week it as -9F, so the fuck what? Oh look, we're all still alive. Everyone needs to grow some balls, stop calling it life threatening, and put on a coat.
Not everyone living here now has experienced this weather before. The first winter our neighbors had moved in (emigres from Nigeria) an ice castle formed behind their house, because they didn't know to shut the water off at the tap instead of the garden hose. Someone that new to a Minnesota winter could send their unprepared child to school on a day like today, and it could be a fatal mistake.
For that matter, the TV news announced there have already been 13 deaths attributed to this cold snap.
I'm glad you're a seasoned vet at this stuff. I'm glad you aren't risking your life, or that of your dog, or of your kids. But you're not the one who needs this message.
And Ron White stole it, too. "We were in a trailer doing a show at a casino in Connecticut, and it was zero degrees outside. My wife asked me what the temperature was. I said 'there ain't one.'"
I live in Minnesota, and instead I'm cheering the cold: Yay, all the damn insects that hitched rides up here on trucks from the south are dying!
(While I'm very serious about freezing those pests to death, I'm glad the local homeless shelters have added capacity for this incident. I like bug suffering, but not people suffering.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what year the real cutoff should be, but (conservatively) most cars built before 2000 should be safe.
Funny you should use the word "safe" in this context. Cars with built-in networking can send an alert to emergency services in the event of a rollover, air bag deployment, seat belt pre-tensioner activation, or other indication of a crash, all without driver assistance. The quick response means rescuers may arrive in time to save your life.
Your odds of dying in a car accident are about 1:88. Have you computed the odds that your car's betrayal of your location will cause you to personally suffer? Have you weighed the two together in a meaningful way?
My Ford has all of the above, but it has one downgrade that i consider a feature in this case. It can only communicate using a Bluetooth phone as a modem. If i get in an accident, it will auto-dial into an emergency reporting service. But it does not ever dial my phone outside of that, and never sends my location anywhere else. I like that.
Hooray, activism works.
Seriously, simply by trying to avoid conflict minerals, they are already helping to stop fueling those regional wars. Does that make them "good guys"? It makes them "better than they were before." Which is a good thing.
Nobody's always perfect, so we should at least celebrate a little when someone improves.
The libel laws state that you have to have a falsehood, but there are gray areas surrounding opinions. Posting "Joe's Carpets sucks, 1/5 stars" is pretty much an opinion, and is not likely enough to earn you a lawsuit. Posting "Joe's Carpets came to my house, and their cleaner kicked my dog, and dumped five pounds of poop on my carpets and I had to hire another service to clean up their mess, 1/5 stars and you're an idiot if you ever hire them" would be actionable libel.
Unless the Joe's Carpets guy actually did kick your dog, and dumped poop on your carpets, in which case you're in the clear. The truth is an absolute defense.
That's not uncommon. Instead of providing the data to the business, it could be provided to an outside expert who agrees not to reveal the true identities unless they turn up to not be customers. Yelp would have to pay for it, of course.
+++++ 5 bars, will no doubt be asked to stay again.
How dare you question the legitimacy of my spokesperson in a lab coat? I'll have you know that was a Genuine Lab Coat. Genuine.
I just read the first few pages of the study, and it seems the authors tried to control for the "fame of the author" aspect as much as they could, with things like excluding a second text by the same author in the same genre, that sort of approach. And as suspected, the study is much more modest than the article titles suggest. They are looking for "success" as defined by their own criteria, not "money" or "bestsellers".
But it was the marketing hype that got me to read a study by some random researchers. That's got to say something.
I wasn't blaming Grandma. I'm simply pointing out reality: a lot of boxes are never going to be updated by their owners because they don't see the need. Asking them to see the need will get you nowhere, too.
I'm with you: it's not her fault. But somehow we have to deal with this. And Microsoft is walking away from the problem they caused.
I was commenting based on the title of the articles discussing the study: "Algorithm aims to predict fiction bestsellers"; and "Computer Algorithm Seeks to Crack Code of Fiction Bestsellers". The strong implications are that the algorithm is designed to unlock the secret of making money by writing books that contain certain words or linguistic structures. I'm arguing that a book's financial success has much less to do with any ephemeral "bestsellerness" quality, and has a much stronger association with "marketing campaigns".
Now, that may or may not be the basis for why the researchers performed their study, or even what they hoped to learn, but it's how their study is being perceived by the media. Which is ironically making my point: it isn't the facts or the content of the study that's important, it's the coverage of the story that's put the slant on what they found. If the [marketing|reporting] for this study had instead said "Researchers develop algorithmic approach to search for linguistic commonalities in Project Gutenberg texts", it probably wouldn't even have merited notice on Slashdot.
Tl;dr: marketing wins.
Actually, it's syntactically perfect PostScript. :-)
People who do this aren't hackers, they're degenerate criminals.
What exactly is a generate criminal, and how do they differ from degenerate criminals?
It certainly won't get Grandma to update her Windows XP box. "You mean the emails and internets machine? I don't do anything with that."
A million zombies strong - and growing.
However, the sample's study makes exactly the same mistake. They used Project Gutenberg as the source, and download counts as a substitute for sales. Sales has one measure: the number of dollars in the cash box at the end of the day. They should be measuring books on the NY Times bestseller list, or the Amazon Top 10 list, which have actually sold for money and are actually popular (fraudulently placed books aside.) And they should be comparing them against books from their own genres, or at least books that had similar attributes.
I think what they'd really find is that "books that sell well are those that are marketed well", regardless of the words they contain.
Maybe they could focus on a specific key reviewer: what does Oprah like and not like? Maybe when they cross compile the data from all the books, they will find they've only discovered Oprah's tastes. Which isn't a bad outcome, if they are ultimately trying to discover what kinds of books will be better positioned to make the author money. But I don't think they've come close to predicting fiction "best-sellers" yet.
No, just that to happen it would have to come from the Commander-in-Chief, and not his lackey, no matter how well beribboned he is.
Keep in mind these are his memoirs, and he didn't whine like this while in office.
And he's right - it's impossible to make a change when your multiple bosses don't want you to change anything, or issue you conflicting requirements. The only way to effectively get something done is to step outside of the existing bureaucracy. Successful people know this, and often succeed by creating a new system where they're the one person in charge, and make things happen. Unfortunately for the rest of the environment, where they used to have 99 bureaucracies, they now have a hundred, and the problem overall gets worse. And when you're the guy in charge of the 99 bureaucracies, each successfully being managed by a successful person, they will fight attempts to change their area, even when the whole system is collectively dysfunctional.
The fix in the large is pretty much the same as fixing it in the small: create a new bureaucracy outside of the old one, then migrate the existing functions into the new one where it's understood that he's the guy in charge. But at some point those smaller functionaries have so much power they can resist such changes.
Instead of a "fix", it seems desirable to throw the whole thing away and start fresh. It's what we do with computer software that's become encrusted with poor architecture decisions over time - we migrate to version 2.0. But it doesn't work that easily with people instead of classes. And there's the matter of keeping things running while you try to make such a change. It's not like we can shut down the Pentagon for a year while it's torn apart and rebuilt.
So he knows what's wrong, and he even knows how to fix it, but doesn't wield the authority to actually do that. I feel for the guy,.
Right, because the seals along the rotor don't do exactly the same thing as piston rings, only less effectively.
I'm no vulcanologist, but I've been intrigued with super volcanoes for over ten years now, and in everything I've read or seen I don't recall anyone saying that some sort of external trigger was needed to "light the fuse", so to speak.
Any good vulcanologist knows all you need is a cold fusion device to stop a volcano.
Any good vulcanologist would use logic to solve the problem, instead of approaching it with emotions.
Why do people pay for booths at trade shows?
Because sometimes they actually work. They attract customers and investors. They put you in front of people who might not otherwise see you.
They aren't trying to sell to you personally, Mr. alphatel. They are trying to sell to 1% of the people who will walk past their booth. Or maybe they are going after the 0.01% of people walking past their booth who are looking to invest.
Advertising doesn't have to be on target to 100% of the people out there. It just has to get enough of the message to enough of the right people, at the right time. Trade shows put two out of three of those within the grasp of anyone who can afford to present at one.
I have "inside dogs" that have very tender paws. They don't have the calluses that wild dogs or outside dogs have. A part-time outside dog also may not have the insulation needed, either. Just watch your beast for signs of discomfort when it's this cold out: lifting their paws is what I usually see.
I had a WRT54G for many years, but finally had to replace it after the last of the internal Ethernet ports died. A router with only one network interface is not particularly useful to me.
I replaced it with one of the nice Linksys/Cisco E4200 home routers (before they released their insanely stupid "management in the cloud" V2 firmware, which I refuse to install.) However, I've never completely trusted that it was backdoor free. Now, with the NSA revelations, as well as some recently discovered Cisco backdoors, I'm thinking this one may just have to go on eBay, and I'll swap to something that can actually run OpenWRT or Tomato. While I'm not particularly worried about the NSA spying on me, any holes they can exploit can also be discovered and exploited by the bad guys.
The drawback is that I don't particularly trust Belkin hardware, either. Jeez, they've made a lot of fall-apart-in-a-month crappy junk over the years.
It's right up there by Tower and Soudan. If you get the chance, go. The Soudan Underground State Park is an old iron mine that is now home to several high energy particle physics experiments. Be sure to take the extra tour guided by one of the researchers, and not only the mine tour. It's one of the few places on the planet where you can go 1/2 mile underground.
However, I recommend visiting in July instead of January. Camping in the north woods is a lot more fun in the summer. And while the mine is a constant 48 degrees (or so) the travel to get there is not.
Wow, it's -15F in WI this morning. Last week it as -9F, so the fuck what? Oh look, we're all still alive. Everyone needs to grow some balls, stop calling it life threatening, and put on a coat.
Not everyone living here now has experienced this weather before. The first winter our neighbors had moved in (emigres from Nigeria) an ice castle formed behind their house, because they didn't know to shut the water off at the tap instead of the garden hose. Someone that new to a Minnesota winter could send their unprepared child to school on a day like today, and it could be a fatal mistake.
For that matter, the TV news announced there have already been 13 deaths attributed to this cold snap.
I'm glad you're a seasoned vet at this stuff. I'm glad you aren't risking your life, or that of your dog, or of your kids. But you're not the one who needs this message.
I sincerely hope you put boots on your dog's feet.
And Ron White stole it, too. "We were in a trailer doing a show at a casino in Connecticut, and it was zero degrees outside. My wife asked me what the temperature was. I said 'there ain't one.'"
I live in Minnesota, and instead I'm cheering the cold: Yay, all the damn insects that hitched rides up here on trucks from the south are dying!
(While I'm very serious about freezing those pests to death, I'm glad the local homeless shelters have added capacity for this incident. I like bug suffering, but not people suffering.)