Much charitable donation comes from moral balckmail (you have to sponsor your friend if they're going to run a marathon to raise money to nuke the gay whales for jesus).
Much also comes from a personal reason to want progress in the direction being collected for. E.g. children and grandchildren of those who died from cancer, and thus who even subconsciously think they are at elevated risk, will donate to the Imperial Cancer Relief Fund, etc. . You may substitute "personal" with "selfish" in the above with little or no change in meaning.
So on the input side, the idea that money is given to charity for purely selfless reasons is naive, it's rarely the case.
However, the egress side you're right - the charity should be focussed on directing that money into the helping of others, not profit-making. Pay yourself a fair wage, and if need be employ professionals who can manage projects and money well, sure, but if the thought "I could retire soon" goes through your mind, you've been milking the charity, and the generosity of those who've been donating.
Oh, man, that sucks. At least it's a/former/ employer.
I remember a job 10 years ago when the "metrics" were rolled out one year. I had basically taken over the work from ~8 student workers, and had spent almost all of my time rewriting clumsy buggy code with tight maintainable code. In so doing, I was working at about -5 kloc/year. Therefore I was the "least productive" person remaining on the team. My manager laughed as he delivered the news. We laughed. However, my request for them to "stop even taking meaningless metrics" was met with "sorry, ain't ever gonna happen".
I've just finished a job with what used to be a great company and more importantly with a great team with common sense (immediate) management (so no bullshit metrics). The whole atmosphere in the team was to share all knowledge, 100% cooperation, no competition. Holes in knowledge were filled very quickly, everyone loved work, and everyone ended up an over-performer. (So kudos to the recruiters for getting the right kinds of people who thrive in that kind of environment in on the project.)
I suspect I'll not find a company like that again, which is a real shame. (Having said that, the seeds of a start-up are forming...)
Given that you commend only schemes which are not the one recommended by xkcd, I do not see any disagreement between us. In fact, given that you say "let them chose", we are in strong agreement. Different people will be most comfortable with different types of password, and a password that they're not comfortable with and is stored in a record in their cell phone, or is on a piece of paper in their wallet, is nowhere near as strong as one they can keep in their head.
Most of my passwords have had a several-unconnected-words base for well over 20 years now, but always decorated so baroquely that most of the entropy's been in the decoration.
I'm not sure I've seen any independent study which investigates such questions satisfactorily. (You may interpret that as [citation needed].) And looking in from the opposite direction, I've also yet to see someone build a 4-simple-english-word rainbow table to directly attack the claim of security. Given that rainbow tables have made password recovery over much larger saerch-spaces possible, I think it's a worthwhile attack, even if purely from the theoretical standpoint (I mean, nobody actually uses 4 moderately common words as their password, do they?).
Certainly, in the field of memory, I am prepared to believe I am far from the norm. I have an exceptionally poor memory for almost everything. During my academic career I could never remember high level theories or identities, and had to repeatedly derive them from basic principles before using them. Yet I have eidetic memory for several senses (but not the visual one). The brain is a funny thing.
"Evidence"? Odd that you should metion that word, as that's one of the most significant failings of that video. I think they are loons because they all confused hearsay for evidence. Not one bit of evidence was reported in that whole video, only hearsay (I may have missed a few minutes occasionally, I was doing other things as it played). They all presented themselves as not being trustworthy in the delivery of evidence.
And to say there's indirect trust as the government trusted them us absurd. Neither I (non-US) nor my g/f (US citizen, born to a USAF engineer and a USAF scientist) have or would ever express any trust in the US government, then or now.
Snigger - "Zero Point Energy" - I'm so glad one of them mentioned that, that was the fall-off-the-chair moment. I suggest you read Gardner's/Science: Good, Bad and Bogus/. That presents some real evidence. Into the fact that these people are not performing anything that could be called "science".
true donkey charge pin [fail] right mule pinch cell [fail] accurate energy ass probe [fail - locked out]
Quite why people think that 'correct horse battery staple' is more memorable, in particular because of the visual imagery it evokes, than something that isn't 4 simple words, I will never understand. You have a fashion, that's all, but you will grow out of it.
In the words of the person who worked for the traffic planning division of the local council where I lived for about a quarter of my life: "because roundabouts keep traffic flowing, where traffic lifght stop traffic".
And they work. As a pedal cyclist and motorcyclist I know I was *very* glad that I could rely on a break in traffic to the right implying that I could dive into the roundabout, and the 4-wheeled death machines to my left would be *obliged* to let me go past. And of course the break in traffic to the right was guaranteed because the traffic to my left would cause those to my right to stall.
In other words, the *same fucking point as roundabouts*.
Hahah, watching on, one of them admits that the reports just stayed on his desk until he retired until he retired, when they came home with him.
That is the exact opposite of trustworthy. The guy steals from his work? He takes restricted files home with him? I'd believe him more if he had a bottle of OldE 800 in his hand.
I have never trusted any of those people. I don't know anyone who has trusted any of those people. Using what metric are you calling these people "the most trusted in the world"? Absolutely nothing that I've heard so far even begins to enter into the realms of trustworthiness. I think the word "loon" came to mind several times.
SETI is the most stupid waste of time and energy Sagan ever got involved in, a horrifically huge chink in an otherwise pristine character. I'm proud to say that not once did I contribute anything but my derision to the project. I'm glad many who did contribute have now seen the light.
No need to be anonymous - put your name to your expression.
But you're forgetting channel coding. 8 bits of data is never sent as just 8 bits. It's always expanded into something that is resilient to the noise on the channel. I.e. made error-correcting and hence redundant.
E.g. DTMF sends 4 bits out by using only 2 of the 8 possible frequencies. You could send a random-looking signal with an entropy-rate of 4-bit-per-symbol, and it would be very quickly obvious that out of the 255 possible non-empty combinations of 8 frequencies, 16 of them occured much more frequently than out of pure chance, and 239 of them occured much less frequently (never at all, unless the noise level is very high). If you were sending a random-looking stream of digits 0-9 rather than the full 0-15 range, then it would look even more redundant, even if the digit stream itself was from a provably random source
But look at how the MP3s are stored or transmitted. They're in much more redundant streams of bits.
Consider an MP3 on a CD. 8 bits are converted to 14 bits in order to minimise the maximum run length (to enable self-clocking), and maximise the minimum run length (to reduce interference), and then 3 glue bits are added to maintain those extrema across words. So 8 bits has become 17 bits. When forming those into frames, they increase by more than a third. So that's 8 bits to 24+ bits already. This is highly redundant data.
Any communication on noisy channels (wifi, for example) will have redundant physical encoding too, even if transmitting unity-entropy-rate data. If you're perceiving it as noise, you're not looking at it the right way. The fact that you can find the HD radio carriers in the spectrum already implies that they don't look like background noise, their spectral footprint should be obviously artificial.
"Euro's like to go on and on about how high density their cities are but their monster roundabout things turn a simple little stop sign into a civil engineering project the size of a shopping mall."
Erm, did you not get the memo about us having mini-roundabouts? Some are nothing more than a 1m-wide circle of white paint in the middle of a junction. The 2 photos that came up in a google search are in my experience _huge_ for mini roundabouts, and clearly from low-population-density towns or suburbs.
Faked studies are only detected if someone attempts to reproduce them. People will only try to reproduce them if journals adopt a policy of publishing papers that are either confirmations or refutations of prior studies. On the whole this isn't the case.
I'd like to know how many of the studies could have been detected as fake through thorough enough statistical analysis of results - humans are notorious bad at faking data, even when they're trying their hardest to make it believable (as they then make it too believable).
Good point. Even if x is small, you can't ignore O(x^2). I was exagerating slightly, I do use vipw occasionally. I suspect I would use vipw on any system that had more than a handful of users all of whom were in the same office as me at the time. (I'd also use it out of laziness, as vipw's shorter to type.)
Then again, I'm pretty sure you can cause confusion and perhaps inconsistency from two admins doing a nested vipw and vipw -s combo. There will always need to be some out-of-band human communication to make sure such situations don't occur.
Measures of weight have been measures of mass for thousands of years. A minority of physicists cannot come in and change the long established meaning of the word. Significant proportions of scientists use weight correctly (as in referring to mass), for example government metrologists who work in legislation pertaining to weights and measures (do you see the clue in the name - they aren't defining laws which only work at sea level and when you're not close to mountains).
Don't believe me? How about NIST Special Publication 811 (1995 ed.),/Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI)/ by Barry N. Taylor: In commercial and everyday use, and especially in common parlance, weight is usually used as a synonym for mass. Thus the SI unit of the quantity weight used in this sense is the kilogram (kg) and the verb "to weigh" means "to determine the mass of" or "to have a mass of".
Stop attempting to be clever by thinking you have a modern, scientific, abd useful definition of "weight" that makes you stand out against the uneducated masses. You don't, you simply have a misconception that you ought to drop.
Slashdot Mirror
Much charitable donation comes from moral balckmail (you have to sponsor your friend if they're going to run a marathon to raise money to nuke the gay whales for jesus).
Much also comes from a personal reason to want progress in the direction being collected for. E.g. children and grandchildren of those who died from cancer, and thus who even subconsciously think they are at elevated risk, will donate to the Imperial Cancer Relief Fund, etc. . You may substitute "personal" with "selfish" in the above with little or no change in meaning.
So on the input side, the idea that money is given to charity for purely selfless reasons is naive, it's rarely the case.
However, the egress side you're right - the charity should be focussed on directing that money into the helping of others, not profit-making. Pay yourself a fair wage, and if need be employ professionals who can manage projects and money well, sure, but if the thought "I could retire soon" goes through your mind, you've been milking the charity, and the generosity of those who've been donating.
Oh, man, that sucks. At least it's a /former/ employer.
I remember a job 10 years ago when the "metrics" were rolled out one year. I had basically taken over the work from ~8 student workers, and had spent almost all of my time rewriting clumsy buggy code with tight maintainable code. In so doing, I was working at about -5 kloc/year. Therefore I was the "least productive" person remaining on the team. My manager laughed as he delivered the news. We laughed. However, my request for them to "stop even taking meaningless metrics" was met with "sorry, ain't ever gonna happen".
Agreed. The only way to win is not to play.
I've just finished a job with what used to be a great company and more importantly with a great team with common sense (immediate) management (so no bullshit metrics). The whole atmosphere in the team was to share all knowledge, 100% cooperation, no competition. Holes in knowledge were filled very quickly, everyone loved work, and everyone ended up an over-performer. (So kudos to the recruiters for getting the right kinds of people who thrive in that kind of environment in on the project.)
I suspect I'll not find a company like that again, which is a real shame. (Having said that, the seeds of a start-up are forming...)
Given that you commend only schemes which are not the one recommended by xkcd, I do not see any disagreement between us. In fact, given that you say "let them chose", we are in strong agreement. Different people will be most comfortable with different types of password, and a password that they're not comfortable with and is stored in a record in their cell phone, or is on a piece of paper in their wallet, is nowhere near as strong as one they can keep in their head.
Most of my passwords have had a several-unconnected-words base for well over 20 years now, but always decorated so baroquely that most of the entropy's been in the decoration.
I'm not sure I've seen any independent study which investigates such questions satisfactorily. (You may interpret that as [citation needed].) And looking in from the opposite direction, I've also yet to see someone build a 4-simple-english-word rainbow table to directly attack the claim of security. Given that rainbow tables have made password recovery over much larger saerch-spaces possible, I think it's a worthwhile attack, even if purely from the theoretical standpoint (I mean, nobody actually uses 4 moderately common words as their password, do they?).
Certainly, in the field of memory, I am prepared to believe I am far from the norm. I have an exceptionally poor memory for almost everything. During my academic career I could never remember high level theories or identities, and had to repeatedly derive them from basic principles before using them. Yet I have eidetic memory for several senses (but not the visual one). The brain is a funny thing.
"Evidence"? Odd that you should metion that word, as that's one of the most significant failings of that video. I think they are loons because they all confused hearsay for evidence. Not one bit of evidence was reported in that whole video, only hearsay (I may have missed a few minutes occasionally, I was doing other things as it played). They all presented themselves as not being trustworthy in the delivery of evidence.
/Science: Good, Bad and Bogus/. That presents some real evidence. Into the fact that these people are not performing anything that could be called "science".
And to say there's indirect trust as the government trusted them us absurd. Neither I (non-US) nor my g/f (US citizen, born to a USAF engineer and a USAF scientist) have or would ever express any trust in the US government, then or now.
Snigger - "Zero Point Energy" - I'm so glad one of them mentioned that, that was the fall-off-the-chair moment. I suggest you read Gardner's
We come in peace; sue to kill?
true donkey charge pin
[fail]
right mule pinch cell
[fail]
accurate energy ass probe
[fail - locked out]
Quite why people think that 'correct horse battery staple' is more memorable, in particular because of the visual imagery it evokes, than something that isn't 4 simple words, I will never understand. You have a fashion, that's all, but you will grow out of it.
In the words of the person who worked for the traffic planning division of the local council where I lived for about a quarter of my life: "because roundabouts keep traffic flowing, where traffic lifght stop traffic".
And they work. As a pedal cyclist and motorcyclist I know I was *very* glad that I could rely on a break in traffic to the right implying that I could dive into the roundabout, and the 4-wheeled death machines to my left would be *obliged* to let me go past. And of course the break in traffic to the right was guaranteed because the traffic to my left would cause those to my right to stall.
In other words, the *same fucking point as roundabouts*.
Why did you expect otherwise?
"most trusted"
Hahah, watching on, one of them admits that the reports just stayed on his desk until he retired until he retired, when they came home with him.
That is the exact opposite of trustworthy. The guy steals from his work? He takes restricted files home with him? I'd believe him more if he had a bottle of OldE 800 in his hand.
I have never trusted any of those people. I don't know anyone who has trusted any of those people. Using what metric are you calling these people "the most trusted in the world"? Absolutely nothing that I've heard so far even begins to enter into the realms of trustworthiness. I think the word "loon" came to mind several times.
But this negative result carries a-value-almost-indistinguishable-from-zero bits of information.
For example, today I yet again didn't see any invisible pink unicorns. By your metric, that's a result.
SETI is the most stupid waste of time and energy Sagan ever got involved in, a horrifically huge chink in an otherwise pristine character. I'm proud to say that not once did I contribute anything but my derision to the project. I'm glad many who did contribute have now seen the light.
No need to be anonymous - put your name to your expression.
Good riddance SETI.
But you're forgetting channel coding. 8 bits of data is never sent as just 8 bits. It's always expanded into something that is resilient to the noise on the channel. I.e. made error-correcting and hence redundant.
E.g. DTMF sends 4 bits out by using only 2 of the 8 possible frequencies. You could send a random-looking signal with an entropy-rate of 4-bit-per-symbol, and it would be very quickly obvious that out of the 255 possible non-empty combinations of 8 frequencies, 16 of them occured much more frequently than out of pure chance, and 239 of them occured much less frequently (never at all, unless the noise level is very high). If you were sending a random-looking stream of digits 0-9 rather than the full 0-15 range, then it would look even more redundant, even if the digit stream itself was from a provably random source
But look at how the MP3s are stored or transmitted. They're in much more redundant streams of bits.
Consider an MP3 on a CD. 8 bits are converted to 14 bits in order to minimise the maximum run length (to enable self-clocking), and maximise the minimum run length (to reduce interference), and then 3 glue bits are added to maintain those extrema across words. So 8 bits has become 17 bits. When forming those into frames, they increase by more than a third. So that's 8 bits to 24+ bits already. This is highly redundant data.
Any communication on noisy channels (wifi, for example) will have redundant physical encoding too, even if transmitting unity-entropy-rate data. If you're perceiving it as noise, you're not looking at it the right way. The fact that you can find the HD radio carriers in the spectrum already implies that they don't look like background noise, their spectral footprint should be obviously artificial.
* Traffic spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.
-- Bill Gates (BBC News, 24 January 2004)
"Euro's like to go on and on about how high density their cities are but their monster roundabout things turn a simple little stop sign into a civil engineering project the size of a shopping mall."
Erm, did you not get the memo about us having mini-roundabouts? Some are nothing more than a 1m-wide circle of white paint in the middle of a junction. The 2 photos that came up in a google search are in my experience _huge_ for mini roundabouts, and clearly from low-population-density towns or suburbs.
Indeed. It comes pre-installed, so you don't need to install it. And even better - it is marked as non-removable.
At least that's true of every smartphone I've seen in the last 3 years.
It would be, were it to have happened. It's a disease iWeenies have, that's certainly true.
My employed life there's ended - meaning independence!
(and you may read between the words to deduce what I was working on.)
linux tycoon!
I left Nokia about 7 years ago too! (And 11 years ago too.) I must be like one of those beaten wives who keeps returning to their abusive husband!
Do they have any left after selling so many off to patent trolls?
Apparently so, if they're turning into litigious patent trolls themselves.
Ahhhhh, feels good to be able to use the third person to refer to them - now Nokia-free for 2 days! (But still a dedicated n900 fan.)
Faked studies are only detected if someone attempts to reproduce them. People will only try to reproduce them if journals adopt a policy of publishing papers that are either confirmations or refutations of prior studies. On the whole this isn't the case.
I'd like to know how many of the studies could have been detected as fake through thorough enough statistical analysis of results - humans are notorious bad at faking data, even when they're trying their hardest to make it believable (as they then make it too believable).
Good point. Even if x is small, you can't ignore O(x^2).
I was exagerating slightly, I do use vipw occasionally. I suspect I would use vipw on any system that had more than a handful of users all of whom were in the same office as me at the time. (I'd also use it out of laziness, as vipw's shorter to type.)
Then again, I'm pretty sure you can cause confusion and perhaps inconsistency from two admins doing a nested vipw and vipw -s combo. There will always need to be some out-of-band human communication to make sure such situations don't occur.
> pounds measure weight
/Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI)/ by Barry N. Taylor:
correct
> not mass
false
Measures of weight have been measures of mass for thousands of years. A minority of physicists cannot come in and change the long established meaning of the word. Significant proportions of scientists use weight correctly (as in referring to mass), for example government metrologists who work in legislation pertaining to weights and measures (do you see the clue in the name - they aren't defining laws which only work at sea level and when you're not close to mountains).
Don't believe me? How about NIST Special Publication 811 (1995 ed.),
In commercial and everyday use, and especially in common parlance, weight is usually used as a synonym for mass. Thus the SI unit of the quantity weight used in this sense is the kilogram (kg) and the verb "to weigh" means "to determine the mass of" or "to have a mass of".
Stop attempting to be clever by thinking you have a modern, scientific, abd useful definition of "weight" that makes you stand out against the uneducated masses. You don't, you simply have a misconception that you ought to drop.