Apparently some folks don't know the difference between average and unique. Granted, the average intelligence of the second million folks to sign up _may_ be less than the intelligence of the first million but
1. It is unlikely that the averages would be the same (check your assumptions and expectations first)
2. Averages say nothing about the individuals or the end points. If the second million has a larger standard deviation than the first million, then chances are the single smartest user (and/or dumbest user) would be in the second group, not the first one;-)
Actually, generally virulence goes down as a virus adapts to a novel host. See e.g. the myxomatosis example in Australian rabbits.
It's part of the problem with words and definitions. An EPIDEMIC is when a disease spreads faster than EXPECTED.
As we find out more, our expectations change. Some of the drop in rate of infection is due to the population itself now self-inoculating so-to-speak. The Black Plague killed millions in Europe but it didn't kill everyone. The folks it didn't kill were either naturally immune, developed an immunity or were never exposed.
The kill rate of small pox in Europeans during the 1500s wasn't bad at all. The kill rate for North American Natives was someplace between 90 and 95% (what they call the difference between high-counters and low-counters in historical circles).
Exactly FUD.
Ferret != Human.and Conditions ferrets in != usual human conditions.
There’s no guarantee the virus will spread similarly from person to person, says Ana Fernandez-Sesma, a viral immunologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. In the experiment, ferrets are together for hours with forced airflow under temperature and humidity conditions that favor viral transmission, she says. “I don’t think this is what happens in real life.”
Exactly SCIENCE. We now have evidence of a deadly bird flu that can spread thru the air between mammals.
I guess if you believe evolution has stopped in the past few months, then there is nothing at all to worry about.
Well, that's nice. And a court of law decides whether he did or did not do so. That's the way justice works.
That's the way _society_ works. Justice is something else entirely and usually outside The Law
The Magna Carta was an illegal attempt to enjoy justice for nobles. The US Revolution and current constitution was an _illegal_ attempt to enjoy justice for all white males in the country.
Don't confuse The Law with Justice. Most of our heroes were anti-law revolutionaries. Most of the major events in history were illegal.
The reason the feminist bumper sticker is true has nothing to do with feminism:
Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History is true because history is not the record of good, legal behavior.
That's my take too. The backend calculations can be programmed as is. Those _are_ the requirements.
The front end should use an agile methodology like any game or web site designed for the random user.
However, I have done US govt public web sites and they have lots of bizarre requirements. Necessary for serving _any_ citizen but bizarre nonetheless. Serving up a static web page to a blind person or someone without hands is one thing. Serving up a dynamic web page with buttons and options is something else entirely.
Design is the only part of the process where it is _possible_ to add value faster than you add costs.
Every other piece of the development process incurs more costs than value.
Perhaps more 'unpaid time' developing better specifications (design) would be a solution.
sorry, I forgot, the OP's specs are always perfect. Must be something else going wrong.
Or what if it is some rocket specced to land on Mars but someone mixed up the meters and yards (USA/Burma measuring system).
The rocket actually landed on Mars but not at a speed that kept it in one piece.
After reading all the house-building analogies, here's some more facts to think about:
How many houses have been built? How many of those have no problems whatsoever? (I too am an analyst).
ditto.
That's the first thing I thought of, some cowboy programmer that 'always' wrote perfect, bug-free code and now he has moved ahead to writing perfect, bug-free specifications. ha ha ha (I'm a mathematician. Want me to validate your specs? It will cost you and I'll bet they aren't bug-free).
McAfee is this year's version of Howard Hughes.
Just because a bunch of people make you rich buying your product doesn't mean you are particularly adept or smart. It just means you tapped into a vein of current popularity.Oprah isn't any smarter than she would be without $80 billion.
McAfee OTOH doesn't even appear to have the smarts he started with. He is correct to be paranoid because people _are_ out to get him.
He owes them money.
OK, so this vaccine needs a booster every decade or so. Lots of vaccines are like that. The vaccines against tetanus and hepatitis A and B all need to be re-administered every few years. No big deal.
Which is pretty much the same as diseases. You don't get AIDS from a single instance of a virus. You get it from thousands of them invading the body all at once.
I agree that the,uanti-vaccine argument is claptrap. However, I also wonder what percentage of the increase in measles has been due to immigrants from countries where measles still exists. Due to the way Germany set up the EU 'borders,' England, Greece and Italy end up with far more immigrants than Germany does. Read Fortress Europe.
There are probably some more accuracies we can derive using statistics between Germany and the lesser European countries;-)
Death of the unvaccinated and susceptible increases herd immunity. It's called 'biology.'
Don't use the disease analogy; use predator/prey relationships to analyze it.
Too bad stupidity is not a disease we can vaccinate against.
Yahoo's promise seems a lot like Shultz' in Hogan's Heroes. "I know nothing."
Yahoo seems to operate under a binary system of choices. either they will do nothing at all to the site, including no maintenance (geocities, flickr) or else they will add stuff such as advertising. Yahoo's problem is that their internal bureaucracy has only those two options.
Changing something to make it better is just not in their DNA. I even wonder how many of their own employees use Yahoo as their home page.
And if they're at work, the firewall probably prevents Yahoo employees from "wasting" time reading Tumblr.
I'm trying to figure out what the actual legal issues are between google glass and a tape recorder or film camera.
Seems like the technology makes things appear more different than they really are. Taping or photoing people already has laws.
Posting it on the internet could be exactly the same as publishing in a paper if they want. Or not.
But there isn't anything new to discuss. It will be the same old discussion: why can I take a picture of anyone in public or a photo of a house from a drone aircraft but I cannot record the words they use unless they give me permission?
The current laws are totally screwed up. Google glass has nothing to do with that.
And you should use this same argument against.Net and any other enterprise-level, we-can-do-it-all, kind of snake oil system presented by salesmen writing articles for airline magazines. If.NET was supposed to make things easier, then the ease ought to be measurable by now. Same with SAP or any other ERP system.
The reason Java is used so extensively in the enterprise is because managers want bells and whistles.
We built a basic html app and one yahoo wanted rounded corners because they looked nice.
We said "No" due to performance issues. Then he tried to get it in thru the standard backdoor of 'standardization' and we used our strategy of defensive paperwork--the first criteria for standardization was performance, not looks. We couldn't get the other departments to stop using Java to develop apps with rounded corners but eventually, they realized their employees were avoiding the apps at every opportunity. And it broke every time Windoze was updated or we bought new laptops. That sort of canceled out the whole 'enterprise java makes updates and changes easier' idea.
Prove it now that you've got 5 years of data.
Meanwhile, our section has years of useful data and users who defend 'their app' against bureaucratic interference.
Shades of E.O.Wilson saying not every college grad needs to understand high-level math; that in fact you're better off partnering with an expert mathematician than trying to become an expert yourself. I guess it depends on whether you want a single, all-in-one employee or a team of employees.
I didn't RTFA, but I don't think the story is about programmers. I believe this guy is saying that any college grad regardless of major should know how to program.
Forcing grads to understand programming makes about as much sense as expecting commenters to read the articles they comment on.
What is this world coming to?
Remember MySpace and GeoCities and AOL. It is ez to leave.
I think it's even easier to leave active friends because they get tiresome after a while by posting too much stuff.
You suddenly realize the only people left are spammers (even tho you went to high school with them. All they do is forward lame political messages and ancient jokes).
Patenting algorithms is patenting mathematics itself. That makes about as much sense as patenting biological processes.
Oh wait. Never mind. Now I see why Monsanto will push the USA to jump all over NZ.
As someone said earlier, if Henry Ford had asked, the people would have said they want a faster horse.
Win8 is a faster horse than Win7. I see engineering occurring, not creativity.
Anybody read about the gigantic data center being built in Utah? It is being used to store all electronic communications between embassies and foreign governments, most of them encrypted. The plan is that decryption will occur in a few years and they can decrypt the files and gain insight into the thinking of foreign governments.
That makes a lot more sense (because it will never work as planned. same old same old). By the time we decrypt the files, there will be new governments in place, both here and there. But for now, no one has enough computing power to both store and analyze everything communicated digitally.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently some folks don't know the difference between average and unique. Granted, the average intelligence of the second million folks to sign up _may_ be less than the intelligence of the first million but ;-)
1. It is unlikely that the averages would be the same (check your assumptions and expectations first)
2. Averages say nothing about the individuals or the end points. If the second million has a larger standard deviation than the first million, then chances are the single smartest user (and/or dumbest user) would be in the second group, not the first one
Actually, generally virulence goes down as a virus adapts to a novel host. See e.g. the myxomatosis example in Australian rabbits.
It's part of the problem with words and definitions. An EPIDEMIC is when a disease spreads faster than EXPECTED.
As we find out more, our expectations change. Some of the drop in rate of infection is due to the population itself now self-inoculating so-to-speak. The Black Plague killed millions in Europe but it didn't kill everyone. The folks it didn't kill were either naturally immune, developed an immunity or were never exposed.
The kill rate of small pox in Europeans during the 1500s wasn't bad at all. The kill rate for North American Natives was someplace between 90 and 95% (what they call the difference between high-counters and low-counters in historical circles).
Exactly FUD. Ferret != Human.and Conditions ferrets in != usual human conditions. There’s no guarantee the virus will spread similarly from person to person, says Ana Fernandez-Sesma, a viral immunologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. In the experiment, ferrets are together for hours with forced airflow under temperature and humidity conditions that favor viral transmission, she says. “I don’t think this is what happens in real life.”
Exactly SCIENCE. We now have evidence of a deadly bird flu that can spread thru the air between mammals.
I guess if you believe evolution has stopped in the past few months, then there is nothing at all to worry about.
Well, that's nice. And a court of law decides whether he did or did not do so. That's the way justice works.
That's the way _society_ works. Justice is something else entirely and usually outside The Law
The Magna Carta was an illegal attempt to enjoy justice for nobles. The US Revolution and current constitution was an _illegal_ attempt to enjoy justice for all white males in the country.
Don't confuse The Law with Justice. Most of our heroes were anti-law revolutionaries. Most of the major events in history were illegal.
The reason the feminist bumper sticker is true has nothing to do with feminism:
Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History is true because history is not the record of good, legal behavior.
That's my take too. The backend calculations can be programmed as is. Those _are_ the requirements.
The front end should use an agile methodology like any game or web site designed for the random user.
However, I have done US govt public web sites and they have lots of bizarre requirements. Necessary for serving _any_ citizen but bizarre nonetheless. Serving up a static web page to a blind person or someone without hands is one thing. Serving up a dynamic web page with buttons and options is something else entirely.
Design is the only part of the process where it is _possible_ to add value faster than you add costs.
Every other piece of the development process incurs more costs than value.
Perhaps more 'unpaid time' developing better specifications (design) would be a solution.
sorry, I forgot, the OP's specs are always perfect. Must be something else going wrong.
Or what if it is some rocket specced to land on Mars but someone mixed up the meters and yards (USA/Burma measuring system).
The rocket actually landed on Mars but not at a speed that kept it in one piece.
After reading all the house-building analogies, here's some more facts to think about:
How many houses have been built? How many of those have no problems whatsoever? (I too am an analyst).
ditto.
That's the first thing I thought of, some cowboy programmer that 'always' wrote perfect, bug-free code and now he has moved ahead to writing perfect, bug-free specifications. ha ha ha (I'm a mathematician. Want me to validate your specs? It will cost you and I'll bet they aren't bug-free).
... he escaped with his life, and should forget about it and move on.
Which is more than can be said for the person McAfee killed in the US: Robert Gilson.
McAfee is this year's version of Howard Hughes.
Just because a bunch of people make you rich buying your product doesn't mean you are particularly adept or smart. It just means you tapped into a vein of current popularity.Oprah isn't any smarter than she would be without $80 billion.
McAfee OTOH doesn't even appear to have the smarts he started with. He is correct to be paranoid because people _are_ out to get him.
He owes them money.
OK, so this vaccine needs a booster every decade or so. Lots of vaccines are like that. The vaccines against tetanus and hepatitis A and B all need to be re-administered every few years. No big deal.
Which is pretty much the same as diseases. You don't get AIDS from a single instance of a virus. You get it from thousands of them invading the body all at once.
I agree that the ,uanti-vaccine argument is claptrap. However, I also wonder what percentage of the increase in measles has been due to immigrants from countries where measles still exists. Due to the way Germany set up the EU 'borders,' England, Greece and Italy end up with far more immigrants than Germany does. Read Fortress Europe.
;-)
There are probably some more accuracies we can derive using statistics between Germany and the lesser European countries
Death of the unvaccinated and susceptible increases herd immunity. It's called 'biology.'
Don't use the disease analogy; use predator/prey relationships to analyze it.
Too bad stupidity is not a disease we can vaccinate against.
Yahoo's promise seems a lot like Shultz' in Hogan's Heroes. "I know nothing."
Yahoo seems to operate under a binary system of choices. either they will do nothing at all to the site, including no maintenance (geocities, flickr) or else they will add stuff such as advertising. Yahoo's problem is that their internal bureaucracy has only those two options.
Changing something to make it better is just not in their DNA. I even wonder how many of their own employees use Yahoo as their home page.
And if they're at work, the firewall probably prevents Yahoo employees from "wasting" time reading Tumblr.
I'm trying to figure out what the actual legal issues are between google glass and a tape recorder or film camera.
Seems like the technology makes things appear more different than they really are. Taping or photoing people already has laws.
Posting it on the internet could be exactly the same as publishing in a paper if they want. Or not.
But there isn't anything new to discuss. It will be the same old discussion: why can I take a picture of anyone in public or a photo of a house from a drone aircraft but I cannot record the words they use unless they give me permission?
The current laws are totally screwed up. Google glass has nothing to do with that.
And you should use this same argument against .Net and any other enterprise-level, we-can-do-it-all, kind of snake oil system presented by salesmen writing articles for airline magazines. If .NET was supposed to make things easier, then the ease ought to be measurable by now. Same with SAP or any other ERP system.
One ring to rule them all is fiction, not fact.
The reason Java is used so extensively in the enterprise is because managers want bells and whistles.
We built a basic html app and one yahoo wanted rounded corners because they looked nice.
We said "No" due to performance issues. Then he tried to get it in thru the standard backdoor of 'standardization' and we used our strategy of defensive paperwork--the first criteria for standardization was performance, not looks. We couldn't get the other departments to stop using Java to develop apps with rounded corners but eventually, they realized their employees were avoiding the apps at every opportunity. And it broke every time Windoze was updated or we bought new laptops. That sort of canceled out the whole 'enterprise java makes updates and changes easier' idea.
Prove it now that you've got 5 years of data.
Meanwhile, our section has years of useful data and users who defend 'their app' against bureaucratic interference.
Shades of E.O.Wilson saying not every college grad needs to understand high-level math; that in fact you're better off partnering with an expert mathematician than trying to become an expert yourself. I guess it depends on whether you want a single, all-in-one employee or a team of employees.
I didn't RTFA, but I don't think the story is about programmers. I believe this guy is saying that any college grad regardless of major should know how to program.
Forcing grads to understand programming makes about as much sense as expecting commenters to read the articles they comment on.
What is this world coming to?
fb comments are only marginally less retarded than YouTube comments.
No they aren't ;-)
Remember MySpace and GeoCities and AOL. It is ez to leave.
I think it's even easier to leave active friends because they get tiresome after a while by posting too much stuff.
You suddenly realize the only people left are spammers (even tho you went to high school with them. All they do is forward lame political messages and ancient jokes).
Patenting algorithms is patenting mathematics itself. That makes about as much sense as patenting biological processes.
Oh wait. Never mind. Now I see why Monsanto will push the USA to jump all over NZ.
As someone said earlier, if Henry Ford had asked, the people would have said they want a faster horse.
Win8 is a faster horse than Win7. I see engineering occurring, not creativity.
Anybody read about the gigantic data center being built in Utah? It is being used to store all electronic communications between embassies and foreign governments, most of them encrypted. The plan is that decryption will occur in a few years and they can decrypt the files and gain insight into the thinking of foreign governments.
That makes a lot more sense (because it will never work as planned. same old same old). By the time we decrypt the files, there will be new governments in place, both here and there. But for now, no one has enough computing power to both store and analyze everything communicated digitally.