Of course the Pew poll showed a majority in favor. I mean, how do you think they conducted this poll? Over the PHONE! (cue dramatic music)
So basically this means that 56% of the people surveyed either believe that this is OK, or believe that their answers to the pollster are being monitored and may be used to target them.
The problem I see is that if you're in a rental car or cab, there is some incentive to not abuse it. For the rental car, that's the guy inspecting it when you turn it in, for the cab it's the cabbie who at some point will kick you out for screwing up his cab. Remove those people and those checks, and the inside of a shared car will get pretty nasty pretty quick, and people will not want to sit in that shared car. For a car shared within a carpool group, there's the social pressure exerted because everyone knows all the people in the group and doesn't want to be the one who left the big stain on the seat when they spilled their soda. The problem there is that the smaller your carpool size, the higher the probability that there will be a scheduling collision where Alice needs to be on one side of town at noon, but Bob needs to be on the other side of town. The question is, what's the lowest you can get the number of cars/people before scheduling collisions become overwhelmingly problematic, and what's the highest number of people you can have before people start thinking "Do I really want to get in that car? Why is this seat kind of sticky?" If you can't make those two numbers overlap, you're going to have problems.
You probably can make it work, but it would take some logistics, and people would need to have some trust in those logistics. So maybe have 2-3 cars that are closely bound to maybe 10 people, then maybe 5 groups of 10 people that have a sharing agreement where a car can be borrowed when there's a scheduling collision, then 3 groups of 50 that share some roaming spares. That way you know all the people who share "your" car, and you won't be in a car outside "your" group of 150.
The downfall there is that while it's efficient, efficiency is actually detrimental to overspending on transportation as a status symbol. Though shared ownership does work for some things, I know there are working shared ownership setups for private planes and helicopters, boats, country clubs, etc. So maybe shared ownership would work if it meant that you could own a third of a car that's thrice what you could afford.
This sounds like quite an interesting discovery, and definitely has the potential to lead to some truly amazing dystopian science fiction. I'm thinking the movie will be named "Death Farm"
I've got to wonder what they boot this supercomputer from. Because if it's optical media, then that means that somewhere there's an xk6cd. And that's got to be just a little confusing for the geeks who get to work on it.
What dyslexic idiot made up that acronym? They're clearly SCAMP of Canada, though I'd personally prefer SCAM Publishers of Canada, but I could see SCAMP-Can as well. In order to arrive at SOCAN, you have to completely ignore most of the words and then either cherry-pick letters from the middle of the remainder, or give preference to the minor parts of speech that are usually left out when constructing acronyms (unless they're needed to flesh out the word you're trying to spell).
So they violated all rules of sanity to achieve the acronym SOCAN. Really? SOCAN? I mean, I'd give some leniency to an agency that managed to make their acronym something like Awesomeflonium or Lazerpants or something, but SOCAN?
So I guess breaking the rules to achieve a mediocre end that no one actually really wants is a foundational part of their institutional composition... which makes this action a whole lot less surprising.
You will know that distracted driving activists are serious, and seriously not just targeting youth, when you start seeing calls for LATCH systems to be installed exclusively in the trunks of cars. I've never had a text message throw something at my head.
I'll third this, my wife's had an M17 for several years, and it rocks. The only other caveat is that it *is* massive, but if you're OK carrying around some ballast or plan to mostly leave it on a desk, it's very solid and does have a great keyboard.
What I find really amazing is the amount of people who look at news stories and appear to think "Wow, look at how horribly misinformed the popular news media is on the handful of subjects that I'm an expert on. They've got nearly everything completely wrong. How fortunate that I'm an expert in those fields and can clearly see their errors. And how doubly fortunate that I can trust them to be completely correct concerning the facts of every field in which I'm not an expert."
This is most amusing when it happens to someone whose field of expertise is logic.
The real tragedy here is to think of how many cold symptoms could have been avoided if that meth had been allowed to remain unadulterated in its beautiful unsullied pseudophedrine form.
Meth must really be a hell of a drug. People are willingly converting PSE into meth, which logically leads to the conclusion that meth is even better than NyQuil. I didn't think such a thing was possible.
Both mean and median can be misleading here. Mode may be somewhat more useful, but could be flawed as well (while probably somewhere in the 70's for quite some time, it's very possible that there have been times when the modal life expectancy was 1 year, which misses just as much, if not more, important information about the statistic.)
I guess what I'm trying to say is that by boiling down a deep rich quantity of information to a single number, be it mean, median, or mode, you lose a lot of the usefulness that existed in the source data, and that leads to misunderstandings of what it means. So you get people baffled by why average life expectancy keeps going up but people aren't living to 150, because they're used to averages being used with nice normal distributions and don't realize that we've been thinking of the children for so long that they hardly ever die these days. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it doesn't help their great grandparents live much longer.
I'd say the answer here is fairly simple, we haven't put much effort into keeping 100+ year olds alive, relative to the amount of effort to keep, for instance, 5 year olds alive. As I understand it, a huge amount of the gains in average life length have come from squeezing the bottom of the graph, not extending the top of it. Here's an interesting, though somewhat morbid, exercise. Go to a very old graveyard and look at the stones on the family plots. You'll often see a family with 12 children, half of whom died in childhood, and the other half lived to their 90's. So in that family the average life length was around 50, but that doesn't mean that a 50 year old should be looking for the grim reaper around the corner, quite the opposite in fact. As I understand it, the life expectancy of a 25-year old has been fairly stable for a fairly long time. Once you've survived the fragility of youth and the stupidity of adolescence, the following decades are a cake-walk, morbidity-wise.
Does it worry anyone else that this satellite shares a name with a unit of ionizing radiation?
I mean, sure, probably the sat was named after WIlhelm just like the unit, but this is definitely a case where absorbing just one roentgen would almost certainly be fatal.
Assuming that the cure/infestation could spread, then sure, it's a serious threat, and I wouldn't want to take it lightly. Even a single zombie should be taken seriously (/wave Clairvius). But if you take the worst case scenario that a few million cancer patients suddenly become infectious zombies, then yes, it's a serious threat, a huge disaster, and the premise for an interesting sci-fi story.
On the other hand, if you take the best case scenario of a non-transferable zombification resulting as a side effect from a preventative measure, then you're likely to have a handful of the world's poor, remote, and those with a religious or cultural bias against modern medicine all engulfed in a sea of billions of the walking dead. That's converting your story/movie from a sci-fi horror disaster movie into a post-apocalyptic survival movie.
A subtle distinction between this and the whatever-it-was in the I Am Legend movie is that the drug in the movie was a preventative measure, while this is a curative measure. It's important because preventative measures need to be applied to everyone who might ever get cancer (which would be everyone, unless it's possible to predict cancer, which would be its own major breakthrough), while curative measures are applied to those who already have cancer.
From a societal standpoint, if everyone who has cancer suddenly turns into brains-craving zombies, that's a relatively small fraction of the population and it's a threat that can be dealt with. If, on the other hand, everyone who doesn't want to get cancer turns into a zombie, that's pretty much it for the human race.
From a personal standpoint, a 1E-9% chance of turning into a zombie and being detonated by a crack government anti-zombie squad is fairly easily offset by an alternative of near-certain death by cancer. It's at least a little bit harder to swallow if, like most of the US, your chances of getting cancer and dying of it are more like 25%.
Another thing that I would love to see is this: take the time that the yellow lasts, and multiply it by the speed limit to get a distance. Then put a marker on the road that distance back from the end of the intersection. That way, if you're going the speed limit and you've passed that mark when the light turns yellow, you know you can just keep going. And if you haven't passed the mark, you know you need to stop. There are too many places where topography and different sized and timed street lights make it hard to judge if you should stop or go.
here's my idea for a solution to this: Make a home movie. Play it on the TV. Sue the TV manufacturer for violating your copyright to your home movie by creating and distributing a derivative work. Profit.
You never know. The anti-nuke crowd doesn't seem to be up in arms about americium smoke detectors in everyone's house, and that suffers from the triple threat of 1) being a radioactive isotope, 2) being about as un-natural and man-made as it's possible to be, and 3) reeking of nationalism.
Apparently radium watch hands have largely been replaced by tritium, which is both radioactive and actually used in thermonuclear bombs.
So if there is a big hoopla about this, I think it will come from anti-nuke environmental activists being funded by big oil... which, in its own way, could be kinda fun to watch, and frighteningly reminiscent of so many games of Illuminati
I'm right with you there, that's kind of what I was interested in as well. I could definitely imaging a pirate feeling more justified in downloading a game they expected to be crappy.
But it really is a shame, they have the piracy data (or at least their estimation of it), and the sales data is reasonably freely available, all they need to do is see if sales or piracy has a tighter correlation to reviews, and it could be fascinating.
That's my first thought exactly. Because fundamentally, a panel van with "Free Candy" spray painted on the side is a social engineering attack, and it would be very useful to teach children to recognize it as such.
And if they fail to recognize that sort of Social Engineering, those lockpicking skills may be coming in handy real soon now.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the Pew poll showed a majority in favor. I mean, how do you think they conducted this poll? Over the PHONE! (cue dramatic music)
So basically this means that 56% of the people surveyed either believe that this is OK, or believe that their answers to the pollster are being monitored and may be used to target them.
The problem I see is that if you're in a rental car or cab, there is some incentive to not abuse it. For the rental car, that's the guy inspecting it when you turn it in, for the cab it's the cabbie who at some point will kick you out for screwing up his cab. Remove those people and those checks, and the inside of a shared car will get pretty nasty pretty quick, and people will not want to sit in that shared car. For a car shared within a carpool group, there's the social pressure exerted because everyone knows all the people in the group and doesn't want to be the one who left the big stain on the seat when they spilled their soda. The problem there is that the smaller your carpool size, the higher the probability that there will be a scheduling collision where Alice needs to be on one side of town at noon, but Bob needs to be on the other side of town. The question is, what's the lowest you can get the number of cars/people before scheduling collisions become overwhelmingly problematic, and what's the highest number of people you can have before people start thinking "Do I really want to get in that car? Why is this seat kind of sticky?" If you can't make those two numbers overlap, you're going to have problems.
You probably can make it work, but it would take some logistics, and people would need to have some trust in those logistics. So maybe have 2-3 cars that are closely bound to maybe 10 people, then maybe 5 groups of 10 people that have a sharing agreement where a car can be borrowed when there's a scheduling collision, then 3 groups of 50 that share some roaming spares. That way you know all the people who share "your" car, and you won't be in a car outside "your" group of 150.
The downfall there is that while it's efficient, efficiency is actually detrimental to overspending on transportation as a status symbol. Though shared ownership does work for some things, I know there are working shared ownership setups for private planes and helicopters, boats, country clubs, etc. So maybe shared ownership would work if it meant that you could own a third of a car that's thrice what you could afford.
I know! I mean, he's a professor of meteorology, so I'd guess he probably as some idea of when winter is coming.
This sounds like quite an interesting discovery, and definitely has the potential to lead to some truly amazing dystopian science fiction. I'm thinking the movie will be named "Death Farm"
"If I have not seen further, it is because the giants sued me when I tried to stand on their shoulders."
-Modern day Isaac Newton
If there's confirmation, they get to republish their results. If there isn't, they get to republish in the JIR
I've got to wonder what they boot this supercomputer from. Because if it's optical media, then that means that somewhere there's an xk6cd. And that's got to be just a little confusing for the geeks who get to work on it.
What dyslexic idiot made up that acronym? They're clearly SCAMP of Canada, though I'd personally prefer SCAM Publishers of Canada, but I could see SCAMP-Can as well. In order to arrive at SOCAN, you have to completely ignore most of the words and then either cherry-pick letters from the middle of the remainder, or give preference to the minor parts of speech that are usually left out when constructing acronyms (unless they're needed to flesh out the word you're trying to spell).
So they violated all rules of sanity to achieve the acronym SOCAN. Really? SOCAN? I mean, I'd give some leniency to an agency that managed to make their acronym something like Awesomeflonium or Lazerpants or something, but SOCAN?
So I guess breaking the rules to achieve a mediocre end that no one actually really wants is a foundational part of their institutional composition... which makes this action a whole lot less surprising.
You will know that distracted driving activists are serious, and seriously not just targeting youth, when you start seeing calls for LATCH systems to be installed exclusively in the trunks of cars. I've never had a text message throw something at my head.
I'll third this, my wife's had an M17 for several years, and it rocks. The only other caveat is that it *is* massive, but if you're OK carrying around some ballast or plan to mostly leave it on a desk, it's very solid and does have a great keyboard.
What I find really amazing is the amount of people who look at news stories and appear to think "Wow, look at how horribly misinformed the popular news media is on the handful of subjects that I'm an expert on. They've got nearly everything completely wrong. How fortunate that I'm an expert in those fields and can clearly see their errors. And how doubly fortunate that I can trust them to be completely correct concerning the facts of every field in which I'm not an expert."
This is most amusing when it happens to someone whose field of expertise is logic.
{snnnooorrrttt} "Hey, this stuff smells like-" BOOM! you're in a coma.
(Dennis Leary FTW)
The real tragedy here is to think of how many cold symptoms could have been avoided if that meth had been allowed to remain unadulterated in its beautiful unsullied pseudophedrine form.
Meth must really be a hell of a drug. People are willingly converting PSE into meth, which logically leads to the conclusion that meth is even better than NyQuil. I didn't think such a thing was possible.
Both mean and median can be misleading here. Mode may be somewhat more useful, but could be flawed as well (while probably somewhere in the 70's for quite some time, it's very possible that there have been times when the modal life expectancy was 1 year, which misses just as much, if not more, important information about the statistic.)
I guess what I'm trying to say is that by boiling down a deep rich quantity of information to a single number, be it mean, median, or mode, you lose a lot of the usefulness that existed in the source data, and that leads to misunderstandings of what it means. So you get people baffled by why average life expectancy keeps going up but people aren't living to 150, because they're used to averages being used with nice normal distributions and don't realize that we've been thinking of the children for so long that they hardly ever die these days. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it doesn't help their great grandparents live much longer.
I'd say the answer here is fairly simple, we haven't put much effort into keeping 100+ year olds alive, relative to the amount of effort to keep, for instance, 5 year olds alive. As I understand it, a huge amount of the gains in average life length have come from squeezing the bottom of the graph, not extending the top of it. Here's an interesting, though somewhat morbid, exercise. Go to a very old graveyard and look at the stones on the family plots. You'll often see a family with 12 children, half of whom died in childhood, and the other half lived to their 90's. So in that family the average life length was around 50, but that doesn't mean that a 50 year old should be looking for the grim reaper around the corner, quite the opposite in fact. As I understand it, the life expectancy of a 25-year old has been fairly stable for a fairly long time. Once you've survived the fragility of youth and the stupidity of adolescence, the following decades are a cake-walk, morbidity-wise.
Does it worry anyone else that this satellite shares a name with a unit of ionizing radiation?
I mean, sure, probably the sat was named after WIlhelm just like the unit, but this is definitely a case where absorbing just one roentgen would almost certainly be fatal.
Assuming that the cure/infestation could spread, then sure, it's a serious threat, and I wouldn't want to take it lightly. Even a single zombie should be taken seriously (/wave Clairvius). But if you take the worst case scenario that a few million cancer patients suddenly become infectious zombies, then yes, it's a serious threat, a huge disaster, and the premise for an interesting sci-fi story.
On the other hand, if you take the best case scenario of a non-transferable zombification resulting as a side effect from a preventative measure, then you're likely to have a handful of the world's poor, remote, and those with a religious or cultural bias against modern medicine all engulfed in a sea of billions of the walking dead. That's converting your story/movie from a sci-fi horror disaster movie into a post-apocalyptic survival movie.
A subtle distinction between this and the whatever-it-was in the I Am Legend movie is that the drug in the movie was a preventative measure, while this is a curative measure. It's important because preventative measures need to be applied to everyone who might ever get cancer (which would be everyone, unless it's possible to predict cancer, which would be its own major breakthrough), while curative measures are applied to those who already have cancer.
From a societal standpoint, if everyone who has cancer suddenly turns into brains-craving zombies, that's a relatively small fraction of the population and it's a threat that can be dealt with. If, on the other hand, everyone who doesn't want to get cancer turns into a zombie, that's pretty much it for the human race.
From a personal standpoint, a 1E-9% chance of turning into a zombie and being detonated by a crack government anti-zombie squad is fairly easily offset by an alternative of near-certain death by cancer. It's at least a little bit harder to swallow if, like most of the US, your chances of getting cancer and dying of it are more like 25%.
Either that, or it's an ADD-less app that isn't easily distracted.
Or maybe it *does* add, but it adds less.
Another thing that I would love to see is this: take the time that the yellow lasts, and multiply it by the speed limit to get a distance. Then put a marker on the road that distance back from the end of the intersection. That way, if you're going the speed limit and you've passed that mark when the light turns yellow, you know you can just keep going. And if you haven't passed the mark, you know you need to stop. There are too many places where topography and different sized and timed street lights make it hard to judge if you should stop or go.
here's my idea for a solution to this: Make a home movie. Play it on the TV. Sue the TV manufacturer for violating your copyright to your home movie by creating and distributing a derivative work. Profit.
You never know. The anti-nuke crowd doesn't seem to be up in arms about americium smoke detectors in everyone's house, and that suffers from the triple threat of 1) being a radioactive isotope, 2) being about as un-natural and man-made as it's possible to be, and 3) reeking of nationalism.
Apparently radium watch hands have largely been replaced by tritium, which is both radioactive and actually used in thermonuclear bombs.
So if there is a big hoopla about this, I think it will come from anti-nuke environmental activists being funded by big oil... which, in its own way, could be kinda fun to watch, and frighteningly reminiscent of so many games of Illuminati
I'm right with you there, that's kind of what I was interested in as well. I could definitely imaging a pirate feeling more justified in downloading a game they expected to be crappy.
But it really is a shame, they have the piracy data (or at least their estimation of it), and the sales data is reasonably freely available, all they need to do is see if sales or piracy has a tighter correlation to reviews, and it could be fascinating.
That's my first thought exactly. Because fundamentally, a panel van with "Free Candy" spray painted on the side is a social engineering attack, and it would be very useful to teach children to recognize it as such.
And if they fail to recognize that sort of Social Engineering, those lockpicking skills may be coming in handy real soon now.
They won't even let you change the battery, changing the secret is right out. :)