>>Also note: If you understand statistics you would _never_ use the phrase 'statistically impossible'
He just means it is very very unlikely, of course (but you knew that).
I think what he was trying to say, was that any result you end up with can be argued to be very implausible. For example, any 52-choose-5 hand of cards you ended up with... well, it was very very unlikely you would have gotten those exact cards (about 1 out of 2.5 million), so a wag could claim the deck was stacked since there was only a one-out-of-2,500,000 chance that you would have drawn those cards. (The key point being, of course, that any hand of cards is equally likely in respect to each other.)
Not saying if the author in TFA was right or not. It's Slashdot - I haven't read it, of course.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone had to pay for metered internet (ala Australia)?
Do you think that sites like Youtube would have ever taken off had it cost $277 to watch a single video (at a rate of 2 cents per kilobyte, which is what I pay for metered data on my cell phone right now)?
In a very real sense, the amazing innovation we've seen in the last decade or two has been the result of relatively cheap flat-rate internet.
America is still far behind other countries in bandwidth costs and availability, but things like the RUS grant help with the latter, but our existing oligopoly doesn't help with the former. My choices where I live are: AT&T DSL ~$20/month for 1.5mbps - though I live in the middle of the suburbs, we've got a lot of copper between us and their central office, so we can only get 768k and 1.5mbps service here, and the 1.5mbps crapped out so often I had to downgrade to 768kbps. AT&T U-Verse ~$50/month for 18mbps service. My apartment building has funky wiring, so even though it's available to the other apartments even in my complex, they couldn't wire me for U-Verse where I live. Comcast Cable Modem ~$44/month for theoretical 12m/1m service or $25/month for 1m/384k. I hate Comcast (more than I hate AT&T even). Virgin Mobile Data or Verizon Mobile Broadband service - One dollar buys you around 16MB of data within the next 30 days. Not suitable for the home office. Verizon data ~$45/month + phone service for unlimited data using a tethered blackberry. Plus it's not really suited for networking my home office. I also hate Verizon with a passion. (Noticing a trend? =) Verizon FIOS, if it were available, would be around $50/month. If they could install it in my apartment, which is doubtful.
The sad thing is that in 1995, we had pretty damn fast ethernet connections in my college dorm, and residential broadband STILL hasn't caught up with what I had there 14 years ago.
>>It would be hard to get it implemented, because it would harm the existing 2 parties (not so much because they will instantly become unable to gain a majority, but becuase other parties will become more relevant), and so hey would block it.
Yeah. The chances of it getting implemented nationwide are somewhere between slim and none.
Also, instant runoff systems and the like would still not give us a Libertarian president, Libertarian fantasies aside (everyone would vote Libertarian if it didn't mean they were throwing their vote away!) or even a congress-critter. Maybe in some state legislatures you'd get some 3rd party representatives.
Also, no election with more than 2 candidates is immune to strategic voting. I proved that once, I think.
>>We cannot say that the hypothesis (the vaccine works) is 95% likely to be true; it either is or isn't. What we can say is how *unlikely* we would be to observe this result purely by luck, in the absence of any actual difference.
Well, it depends if you subscribe to the Bayesian model of statistical truth or not. This is actually a fairly significant philosophical point.
Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.
Due to ethical reasons, they couldn't do a proper study by administering the vaccine and then trying to infect people with HIV, and observing the results. Instead they sort of turned people loose into the wild, and an unknown number of those were actually exposed to the HIV virus in each group. Perhaps the incidence of HIV exposure is a random process, perhaps not. There could be unseen biases between the two groups which could account for the 10 or so person difference in infection rates. The vaccine might actually be 0% effective.
>>Well yes, of course- that's exactly what I said, some optimisation is still entirely relevant, but that's not the sort of optimisation being discussed here.
Sure, fair enough. And I do think network protocols are one of the areas where it's still really justified. Even in this era of high speed internet (sorta), the difference in responsiveness and speed of a well done network protocol, like Quakeworld's, and the alternative, is quite apparent.
>>Oh, to be an (telecommuting) operator. Sitting at a bar in Georgetown, gunning down bad guys with your own killer-flying-elephant, half a world away.
If the operators was like my group of friends, all the flying elephants would end up shooting each other, with the resultant exploding mess falling on a baby factory in downtown Kabul.
>>There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done. Putting features in front of the user rather than 3 to 4 deep in a menu system is far more intuitive
You mean how things have text names instead of incomprehensible symbols, that are hidden behind who knows what ribbon? It's faster to locate something under a nested menu than it is to hunt through one ribbon after another, trying to figure out why your "insert" command isn't under the "insert ribbon". (Which it isn't.)
I'd call ribbons a horrible abortion of a UI decision, but, unfortunately, they came to term in Office 2007.
>>I think the office ribbon layout is due to a massive amount of consumer research on Microsoft's Behalf. (I cant find a reference for that right now).
I give tech workshops around the country. Just to satisfy my mordant curiosity, I've asked probably around 1,000 people in the last year if they prefered menus or ribbons, and I don't think I've had more than 10 prefer ribbons. The best that I've heard said about the Office 2007 UI is that "it's not soooo bad..."
>>In my opinion this is a really, really dumb move. While its all eye-candy and nice, it brings down the usability a lot.
Indeed. When I give tech workshops, out of curiosity I ask how many people like the ribbon thing versus traditional menus. If I get more than one person in 30 actually prefering the ribbons, I'm shocked.
I recommend we all tag this with "nooooooo" - that's seven o's.
>>I doubt for a second they really handcrafted it, else they'd never have got any patches done as they had to unmangle everything so they could even make changes. Saving bandwidth costs is one thing, but this level of optimisation would kill the product as it would be unmaintainable.
Uh, no. You can certainly change your protocol and not break everything, since you require clients to always be up to date - you don't need backwards compatibility. The point of the talk was exactly that - they didn't send any unnecessary data out over the line. I'm sure they compressed it as well as doing the bit packing and other tweaks they talked about.
I think NVIDIA has some sort of asymmetrical SLI mode available on its mobos with built-in video cards. It allows the weak built in card to help a little bit with the big video card installed in the main PCI-E slot.
>>No, you do. While all taxes are a disincentive to production, taxing people on what they spend instead of what they earn encourages savings.
As much as I like savings (I've been running positive deposits into my savings for the last 6 years), they're not especially good for the country. The lower the savings rate, the more a dollar gets spent in a year, and the more money everyone ends up making.
>>This is not to say games don't need optimisation at all, of course they do, there is still plenty of scope for that, but to hand craft each byte of content and machine code? Not worth it.
I remember going to a talk held by the SOE people in San Diego back in the Everquest days, and they said that just saving one byte off one of their status updates would save them X millions of dollars every year in bandwidth costs. So they really did inspect and handcraft every bit that went out over the network.
>>He wasn't an engineer, he was a technician. Basically, the spaceship version of a chief auto mechanic.
Which is called... an engineer. A "ship's engineer", in the current parlance.
And I'd say he was pretty close to what you'd see modern day mechanical engineers doing during their spare time. Jury rigging parts to work together, building spaceships out of cardboard, that sort of thing. There's lots of different types of engineers - not all of them are EEs.
>>but a matter of the stereotype of the scientist being a dork like Frink or evil like Baltar.
You're talking about the original Baltar, right? Because the new Baltar, as per the topic of the thread, was a geeky science guy who got it on with various hot lady 'bots. That's as pro-science as it comes.
Hell, even their chief engineer had his cute asian girlfriend for a while.
>>So the FCC has started looking into unfair business practices of cell providers.
All 20 of the people that care about this issue will be overshadowed by the dollars donated to the government by the telcos.
They already engage in oligopolic anti-competitive behavior resulting in phone plans in America costing around 5x as much as in other countries, and neither the FCC nor other federal agencies have shown much backbone into prosecuting them for price fixing.
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
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· Score: 1
Trying to distract an argument is an old tired trick of people who've lost arguments. I recognize it, since I have some annoying friends that do it too.
Of course, sure, I shouldn't have to say that I'm not a racist. But it IS important to point out that it is possible to be against immigration in the general without being against immigrants in the specific. I studied issues of culture and integration in college, and there's something to be said for neither totally isolating a country culturally, nor for allowing complete and open immigration. While the PC crowd celebrates cultural heterogeneity ("Diversity is wonderful!"), it can actually be quite damaging to a country in a real sense.
Hmm, "collaboration between Chris Mooney, writer and author of The Republican War on Science, and scientist..."
So it's a book between a political hack and a real scientist. I don't think that's how you make science "cool" again (i.e. with more of this bullshit polarization we've been going through in the last ten years).
>>Muni-WiFi angered the telecom gods, and they rained storms of money up on the legislatures to prevent the airwaves from this abomination.
Not only that, but got some "judges" to rule that it was unconstitutional for a city to put up a municipal wifi network (in some states, at least).
Because, heaven forfend, anyone challenge the oligopoly that is our telecom industry. Competetion? Bah. I'm paying more for cell phone service now than I did ten years ago. I also used to have free tethering. Now, data access is something like three bucks a megabyte without a data plan!
>>I'd be interested to hear your proposal for alternative ways for banks should manage risk without mathematical models. Wet finger in the air? Lottery numbers? Astrology?
Essentially, the root of the problem according to Taleb, at least, was the use of gaussians in mathematical models, that resulted in a number of safe risks being quantified in such a way that a crash would only occur after the entropic heat death of the universe. He proposes various alternatives that have fat tails (i.e. greater chance of extreme movements).
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
>>And that is another typical right-wing idiots' gambit.
Typical ploy of someone who has lost an argument. Change the topic or attack the poster.
>>In the face of actual existing and growing racism in the public arena, it makes you at least a sympathiser
I have no sympathy for racism. In fact, I think that my posts have made that fairly clear. Racism is no longer an acceptable attitude to have in the public sphere.
Your claim that someone who is not for open immigration is a racist "sympathizer" is risible. While most racists are against open immigration, not all people who are against open immigration are racists. There are legitimite reasons to not want open immigration that does not include racism. Only idiots would always conflate the two issues.
>>Unfortunately, Google's mission "Don't be evil" fundamentally conflicts with Verizon's "Be evil".
Very true.
But as Churchill famously said, "Verizon is the worst cell phone carrier in America, except for all the others."
When I first got a cell phone in the 90s, I was paying $40ish a month for service. Now it's up to $120 a month for around double the minutes (but no roaming charges, I guess) and two lines (my wife and I share a pool of minutes). If I were to make use of Verizon's 2-for-1 blackberry offer (still paying $80 or so for the second blackberry, since they charge sales tax on the "free" one, somehow), it would go up to $180/month, or $210/month with tethering.
And, oh yeah, my first phone had free tethering through Verizon as well (it wasn't supposed to be free, I suppose, but it was).
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
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· Score: 1
>>The problem is that I never said the things you say.
What, you didn't say the things I quoted? Lol. I don't think I attributed to you anything else.
>>Your vehement defensiveness
I'm not defensive in the slightest, I simply consider it an interesting issue.
>>If you use the terminology of the racists, don't be a pussy if you get called a racist yourself.
Since when have I ever been called a racist? Does the claim that racism has been defeated in the public arena make one a racist? Your argument is so circular it's fucking laughable.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Also note: If you understand statistics you would _never_ use the phrase 'statistically impossible'
He just means it is very very unlikely, of course (but you knew that).
I think what he was trying to say, was that any result you end up with can be argued to be very implausible. For example, any 52-choose-5 hand of cards you ended up with... well, it was very very unlikely you would have gotten those exact cards (about 1 out of 2.5 million), so a wag could claim the deck was stacked since there was only a one-out-of-2,500,000 chance that you would have drawn those cards. (The key point being, of course, that any hand of cards is equally likely in respect to each other.)
Not saying if the author in TFA was right or not. It's Slashdot - I haven't read it, of course.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone had to pay for metered internet (ala Australia)?
Do you think that sites like Youtube would have ever taken off had it cost $277 to watch a single video (at a rate of 2 cents per kilobyte, which is what I pay for metered data on my cell phone right now)?
In a very real sense, the amazing innovation we've seen in the last decade or two has been the result of relatively cheap flat-rate internet.
America is still far behind other countries in bandwidth costs and availability, but things like the RUS grant help with the latter, but our existing oligopoly doesn't help with the former. My choices where I live are:
AT&T DSL ~$20/month for 1.5mbps - though I live in the middle of the suburbs, we've got a lot of copper between us and their central office, so we can only get 768k and 1.5mbps service here, and the 1.5mbps crapped out so often I had to downgrade to 768kbps.
AT&T U-Verse ~$50/month for 18mbps service. My apartment building has funky wiring, so even though it's available to the other apartments even in my complex, they couldn't wire me for U-Verse where I live.
Comcast Cable Modem ~$44/month for theoretical 12m/1m service or $25/month for 1m/384k. I hate Comcast (more than I hate AT&T even).
Virgin Mobile Data or Verizon Mobile Broadband service - One dollar buys you around 16MB of data within the next 30 days. Not suitable for the home office.
Verizon data ~$45/month + phone service for unlimited data using a tethered blackberry. Plus it's not really suited for networking my home office. I also hate Verizon with a passion. (Noticing a trend? =)
Verizon FIOS, if it were available, would be around $50/month. If they could install it in my apartment, which is doubtful.
The sad thing is that in 1995, we had pretty damn fast ethernet connections in my college dorm, and residential broadband STILL hasn't caught up with what I had there 14 years ago.
>>It would be hard to get it implemented, because it would harm the existing 2 parties (not so much because they will instantly become unable to gain a majority, but becuase other parties will become more relevant), and so hey would block it.
Yeah. The chances of it getting implemented nationwide are somewhere between slim and none.
Also, instant runoff systems and the like would still not give us a Libertarian president, Libertarian fantasies aside (everyone would vote Libertarian if it didn't mean they were throwing their vote away!) or even a congress-critter. Maybe in some state legislatures you'd get some 3rd party representatives.
Also, no election with more than 2 candidates is immune to strategic voting. I proved that once, I think.
>>We cannot say that the hypothesis (the vaccine works) is 95% likely to be true; it either is or isn't. What we can say is how *unlikely* we would be to observe this result purely by luck, in the absence of any actual difference.
Well, it depends if you subscribe to the Bayesian model of statistical truth or not. This is actually a fairly significant philosophical point.
Due to ethical reasons, they couldn't do a proper study by administering the vaccine and then trying to infect people with HIV, and observing the results. Instead they sort of turned people loose into the wild, and an unknown number of those were actually exposed to the HIV virus in each group. Perhaps the incidence of HIV exposure is a random process, perhaps not. There could be unseen biases between the two groups which could account for the 10 or so person difference in infection rates. The vaccine might actually be 0% effective.
>>Well yes, of course- that's exactly what I said, some optimisation is still entirely relevant, but that's not the sort of optimisation being discussed here.
Sure, fair enough. And I do think network protocols are one of the areas where it's still really justified. Even in this era of high speed internet (sorta), the difference in responsiveness and speed of a well done network protocol, like Quakeworld's, and the alternative, is quite apparent.
>>Oh, to be an (telecommuting) operator. Sitting at a bar in Georgetown, gunning down bad guys with your own killer-flying-elephant, half a world away.
If the operators was like my group of friends, all the flying elephants would end up shooting each other, with the resultant exploding mess falling on a baby factory in downtown Kabul.
>>There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done. Putting features in front of the user rather than 3 to 4 deep in a menu system is far more intuitive
You mean how things have text names instead of incomprehensible symbols, that are hidden behind who knows what ribbon? It's faster to locate something under a nested menu than it is to hunt through one ribbon after another, trying to figure out why your "insert" command isn't under the "insert ribbon". (Which it isn't.)
I'd call ribbons a horrible abortion of a UI decision, but, unfortunately, they came to term in Office 2007.
>>I think the office ribbon layout is due to a massive amount of consumer research on Microsoft's Behalf. (I cant find a reference for that right now).
I give tech workshops around the country. Just to satisfy my mordant curiosity, I've asked probably around 1,000 people in the last year if they prefered menus or ribbons, and I don't think I've had more than 10 prefer ribbons. The best that I've heard said about the Office 2007 UI is that "it's not soooo bad..."
>>In my opinion this is a really, really dumb move. While its all eye-candy and nice, it brings down the usability a lot.
Indeed. When I give tech workshops, out of curiosity I ask how many people like the ribbon thing versus traditional menus. If I get more than one person in 30 actually prefering the ribbons, I'm shocked.
I recommend we all tag this with "nooooooo" - that's seven o's.
>>I doubt for a second they really handcrafted it, else they'd never have got any patches done as they had to unmangle everything so they could even make changes. Saving bandwidth costs is one thing, but this level of optimisation would kill the product as it would be unmaintainable.
Uh, no. You can certainly change your protocol and not break everything, since you require clients to always be up to date - you don't need backwards compatibility. The point of the talk was exactly that - they didn't send any unnecessary data out over the line. I'm sure they compressed it as well as doing the bit packing and other tweaks they talked about.
>>Finally, we can have asynchronous GPU pairing?
I think NVIDIA has some sort of asymmetrical SLI mode available on its mobos with built-in video cards. It allows the weak built in card to help a little bit with the big video card installed in the main PCI-E slot.
IIRC, it gives a 10% boost or so to performance.
Ah, here it is...
http://www.nvidia.com/object/hybrid_sli.html
>>No, you do. While all taxes are a disincentive to production, taxing people on what they spend instead of what they earn encourages savings.
As much as I like savings (I've been running positive deposits into my savings for the last 6 years), they're not especially good for the country. The lower the savings rate, the more a dollar gets spent in a year, and the more money everyone ends up making.
>>This is not to say games don't need optimisation at all, of course they do, there is still plenty of scope for that, but to hand craft each byte of content and machine code? Not worth it.
I remember going to a talk held by the SOE people in San Diego back in the Everquest days, and they said that just saving one byte off one of their status updates would save them X millions of dollars every year in bandwidth costs. So they really did inspect and handcraft every bit that went out over the network.
>>So they nerfed your class and then you got pissed off and decided to stop playing.
Thanks to this thread, it reminded me to cancel my account. 50 DK nerfs was enough for me. Thanks! =)
>>The University Of Phoenix education is a complete and utter joke.
The majority of teachers in California have credentials from the University of Phoenix.
>>He wasn't an engineer, he was a technician. Basically, the spaceship version of a chief auto mechanic.
Which is called... an engineer. A "ship's engineer", in the current parlance.
And I'd say he was pretty close to what you'd see modern day mechanical engineers doing during their spare time. Jury rigging parts to work together, building spaceships out of cardboard, that sort of thing. There's lots of different types of engineers - not all of them are EEs.
>>but a matter of the stereotype of the scientist being a dork like Frink or evil like Baltar.
You're talking about the original Baltar, right? Because the new Baltar, as per the topic of the thread, was a geeky science guy who got it on with various hot lady 'bots. That's as pro-science as it comes.
Hell, even their chief engineer had his cute asian girlfriend for a while.
>>So the FCC has started looking into unfair business practices of cell providers.
All 20 of the people that care about this issue will be overshadowed by the dollars donated to the government by the telcos.
They already engage in oligopolic anti-competitive behavior resulting in phone plans in America costing around 5x as much as in other countries, and neither the FCC nor other federal agencies have shown much backbone into prosecuting them for price fixing.
Trying to distract an argument is an old tired trick of people who've lost arguments. I recognize it, since I have some annoying friends that do it too.
Of course, sure, I shouldn't have to say that I'm not a racist. But it IS important to point out that it is possible to be against immigration in the general without being against immigrants in the specific. I studied issues of culture and integration in college, and there's something to be said for neither totally isolating a country culturally, nor for allowing complete and open immigration. While the PC crowd celebrates cultural heterogeneity ("Diversity is wonderful!"), it can actually be quite damaging to a country in a real sense.
Hmm, "collaboration between Chris Mooney, writer and author of The Republican War on Science, and scientist..."
So it's a book between a political hack and a real scientist. I don't think that's how you make science "cool" again (i.e. with more of this bullshit polarization we've been going through in the last ten years).
>>Muni-WiFi angered the telecom gods, and they rained storms of money up on the legislatures to prevent the airwaves from this abomination.
Not only that, but got some "judges" to rule that it was unconstitutional for a city to put up a municipal wifi network (in some states, at least).
Because, heaven forfend, anyone challenge the oligopoly that is our telecom industry. Competetion? Bah. I'm paying more for cell phone service now than I did ten years ago. I also used to have free tethering. Now, data access is something like three bucks a megabyte without a data plan!
>>I'd be interested to hear your proposal for alternative ways for banks should manage risk without mathematical models. Wet finger in the air? Lottery numbers? Astrology?
Essentially, the root of the problem according to Taleb, at least, was the use of gaussians in mathematical models, that resulted in a number of safe risks being quantified in such a way that a crash would only occur after the entropic heat death of the universe. He proposes various alternatives that have fat tails (i.e. greater chance of extreme movements).
>>And that is another typical right-wing idiots' gambit.
Typical ploy of someone who has lost an argument. Change the topic or attack the poster.
>>In the face of actual existing and growing racism in the public arena, it makes you at least a sympathiser
I have no sympathy for racism. In fact, I think that my posts have made that fairly clear. Racism is no longer an acceptable attitude to have in the public sphere.
Your claim that someone who is not for open immigration is a racist "sympathizer" is risible. While most racists are against open immigration, not all people who are against open immigration are racists. There are legitimite reasons to not want open immigration that does not include racism. Only idiots would always conflate the two issues.
>>Unfortunately, Google's mission "Don't be evil" fundamentally conflicts with Verizon's "Be evil".
Very true.
But as Churchill famously said, "Verizon is the worst cell phone carrier in America, except for all the others."
When I first got a cell phone in the 90s, I was paying $40ish a month for service. Now it's up to $120 a month for around double the minutes (but no roaming charges, I guess) and two lines (my wife and I share a pool of minutes). If I were to make use of Verizon's 2-for-1 blackberry offer (still paying $80 or so for the second blackberry, since they charge sales tax on the "free" one, somehow), it would go up to $180/month, or $210/month with tethering.
And, oh yeah, my first phone had free tethering through Verizon as well (it wasn't supposed to be free, I suppose, but it was).
>>The problem is that I never said the things you say.
What, you didn't say the things I quoted? Lol. I don't think I attributed to you anything else.
>>Your vehement defensiveness
I'm not defensive in the slightest, I simply consider it an interesting issue.
>>If you use the terminology of the racists, don't be a pussy if you get called a racist yourself.
Since when have I ever been called a racist? Does the claim that racism has been defeated in the public arena make one a racist? Your argument is so circular it's fucking laughable.