I think a replica rifle is liable to cause some consternation at your average sporting event.
Or your average airport - don't take one on holidays with you.
It's not only legal, but common, to take firearms on plane trips. They must be in checked baggage, must be unloaded and in a locked case -- with a "non-TSA" lock, so TSA personnel can't open them -- and must be "declared" during check-in. The counter agent just gives you an orange tag which you sign and date, certifying that the gun is unloaded and in a locked container. Some of the agents also check the unloaded state of the gun themselves. Where the orange tag goes and what happens after that varies widely across airports.
In the case of this, you wouldn't likely be allowed to carry it on, but you could easily check it. It might be a good idea to declare it as a "non-firearm", just so the luggage screeners don't see what appears to be an undeclared rifle when they X-ray your bag.
Just waiting for a shareholder initiative to kill the 20% developer personal research time off. To soon be followed by demands of a new CEO that will outsource and reduce staff to improve sagging profits.
Be careful when talking about Google shareholders - because that's only (IIRC) about 200 odd people. All those shared being tossed around on the NYSE are class 'B' shares - with no voting rights, no right to dividends or profit distribution, no nothing but a few bits on a computer somewhere.
You are correct that Google has a dual-class stock, but not that the class B stock has no voting rights, etc. Google class A shares have 10 votes, class B shares have one vote.
You spent years masturbating while taking the life of innocent animals
I generally just ignore statements like this, because they typically indicate a completely irrational attitude of a sort which no rational response can enlighten, but since the rest of your post is almost rational, I'll make an exception this time.
Your comment indicates a complete misunderstanding of hunting and hunters -- at least all the hunters I know. There is no joy in killing, and there's certainly no sexual component to it. The joys of hunting are many, and the feeling of success at taking your quarry is a big part of it, but not because it's a kill. In fact, I find that I enjoy hunting just as much with a camera as I do with a bow, and I enjoy both of them much more than I do with a rifle. The truth is that other than taking my son bird hunting, all of my hunting for the last few years has been with a camera.
I enjoy being out in nature. I enjoy watching, tracking and learning about the animals. Being a successful hunter requires a great deal of understanding of the habits, instincts abilities and preferences of wildlife. I enjoy testing my skill against theirs, seeing if I can predict their actions well enough to position myself on their path, and if I can move quickly and silently enough to sneak up on them. I also enjoy eating them. If it weren't for that, I would only hunt with a camera, because getting good photos is even more challenging, and because cleaning, dressing, hauling and butchering is hard work.
I obviously have no problem with killing them; it's the natural order of things and, as I said, I like the meat. But your theory about why hunters hunt and what we get out of it is completely wrong.
It doesn't really take me that long to reply to you. Sometimes I'm taking a break, or waiting for Houdini to fnish a render pass, or whatever.
So you're a HWOPS SRE? FWIW, it's blaze builds that motivate me to read and post on slashdot.
The reason why you bother me is because you feel the need to comment in every goddamned Google story.
I comment on whatever I find interesting. That generally means stories about software development, security, cryptography, some politics (especially anything related to the TSA), and stuff about my current and previous employers. It just happens that there are a lot more stories about Google than the rest... and the comments posted about Google are more wrong than the rest. Yes, I do have the disease.
Like I explained to you already, there is no real internal communication.
Have you ever worked anywhere other than Google? I may have an advantage here, in that I spent 20 years in the industry, working for/with dozens of large corporations (I was a consultant for much of my career). I've seen a lot, and I'll tell you that Google is incomparably better.
There was a long internal debate about the Real Names policy and the Vic Gundotra asshole just ignored it.
You're wrong. Vic didn't ignore it, he explained it. You apparently didn't agree with his rationale, and neither did many others, but that doesn't mean it wasn't provided, nor that the debate wasn't real. I personally agreed with the Real Names policy. I think pseudonymity/anonymity is very important, but it also provides huge potential for abuse which would really lower the value of Google+. I think pseudonymity can be done in a way that works no Google+, but I agree with Vic that it has to be done carefully. It's better not to allow it than to allow it and then screw it up -- and trying to make sure that a pseudonymous account's real identity never leaks, across all of the Google properties, is definitely not trivial.
Leeching, as in bloodletting, draining "bad blood" from the body, has been re-introduced? I think not. The use of leeches for other purposes, yes, but that's not what the term meant 100 years ago.
I think you're wrong there as well. 100 years ago, doctors were also financially incented to perform unnecessary procedures, etc. because they got paid for work performed. I'll grant that they didn't have as much debt and insurance pressure, but countering that is the fact that given the vastly lower efficacy of their work, it was much harder for patients to evaluate how much benefit they were receiving, and much easier for doctors to push all sorts of pure quackery, such as patent medicines, since not even the doctors knew what worked and what didn't.
Remember that the phrase "snake oil" derives from medical practices of the 18th and 19th century, and that state of affairs continued into the early 20th century.
It's tempting to think that the idealized model of the country doctor, making house visits, black bag in hand, was an inherently more honest and trustworthy person. But I don't think there's any evidence of that.
there was a report a few years ago about an entrepreneur who *refused* to employ computer science majors. he only employed english language majors. the reason was he said that it was easier to communicate with english language majors in order to teach them programming, and they were more effective and also worked better when introduced into teams, than the people who had been taught programming at university.
I think there's a reason we don't all know this entrepreneur's name and abbreviated life history.
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Would you trust a doctor from 100 years ago today?
More than a doctor today, much more so.
You're insane. 100 years ago, leeching was still practiced, antiseptic surgery was still a relatively new concept, useful antibiotics didn't exist, blood transfusions were just barely being made practical on a significant scale, and organ transplants (other than skin) were still 40 years away.
If you're so far gone that modern doctors might be tempted to call you done for even though there's a very slim chance that modern medicine could bring you back, then you're so far gone that the doctors of 100 years ago would already have given their condolences to your family and headed home. And they wouldn't have given up prematurely because at that point, without modern life support equipment you're absolutely, positively gone.
I'll take modern medicine, thanks. It's imperfect, and the financial incentives for the physicians don't align all that well with the interest of the patients, but in large part it works, and you can't say the same for what passed for medicine in 1912 -- though it was orders of magnitude better than what we had in 1812.
It's definitely a complex question, and one that I don't think anyone really understands. What I do know is that seismologists do talk about big quakes being "overdue". Not so much in the sense that there's some increased expectation of having a quake, but that there's good reason to expect that when the next quake hits it's likely to be a big one.
Thanks. It doesn't bother me much, though. One side effect of dealing regularly with the mentally ill is that you develop a very thick skin. I've had far more vicious things screamed at me by my daughter, and I care about her, so some random troll doesn't faze me.
I do really wonder what motivates a person to spend their time spewing anonymous hate. This particular troll has been stalking me for months now, so he's really invested a great deal of time and effort into it. He rarely resorts to canned resplies, either. I can't even imagine ever wanting to do something like that, and certainly not putting the kind of effort into it that he has.
I mean, I get that some people find the notion of hunting abhorrent (though most think nothing of eating meat that was raised and slaughtered in an industrial operation), and my bio says I like to hunt -- though in fact it's been years since I actually got out. But if the goal is to protest hunting, surely there are more effective outlets for his efforts. And the sort of personal venom he spews will make anyone automatically discount him, in fact he gives his own cause a bad name. I can only conclude that he's dealing with his own serious emotional issues and I'm just a convenient target for his attempts to relieve his own pain.
If that's really what's going on, I suppose spewing profanity at me on-line is better than a lot of other things he could be doing. If he finds it therapeutic, I'm okay with that. I wish there were some way I could help him. I've tried responding, but I knew even before I did that it would just make him even more vicious. I think he really needs professional help, but obviously there's no way I can convince him of that.
So, I just read his posts and shake my head. It's sad.
Also, kids that get in a lot of legal trouble tend not to be able to finish a high school diploma. Juvenile detention centers do teach classes, but the credits end up being so fragmented as kids jump between detention and regular school that it's difficult for them to actually fulfill the requirements -- and that assumes they don't just fail their classes anyway.
I have personal experience with this. My daughter is very bright and capable, but suffers from a severe emotional disorder which leads her to make a lot of dumb decisions. Even though she typically does very well in school, her time in treatment centers, trouble with the law, expulsions from schools, etc., mean that she's chronically behind on credits. For example, she completed much of the first semester of Calculus this year (as a junior), but then got in trouble and ended up getting no math credit at all. She's now in a residential treatment center and taking dum-dum math because it's all they offer, but won't get any credit for it because she's already done it.
In her case, because she's so bright, the solution will likely be to take the GED as soon as the state will let her, and she'll pass it handily. Or else I'll pay for summer school classes, or something similar. She's smart enough, and has involved parents, so she has a chance to be able to make it. Kids with similar issues but without similar advantages are really screwed. Of course, if she can't learn to manage her mental illness -- which is very, very hard to do -- she's going to be screwed, too. We try to help every way we can, but we can't live her life for her, and as she becomes an adult the consequences of bad decisions are going to become even more severe.
You put them in prison and they come out and still can't get a job (especially now that they have a record), so what do they do? Commit more crimes. Give them some useful skills, and they see that they do have a choice.
This presumes that having skills gives them a choice. Unfortunately, their record means getting a job is still basically impossible. Perhaps the best education we could give them is to teach them how to start and run successful small businesses, because people don't check the records of those they do business with. Of course, the ex-con had better not need a bank loan. And an education in business administration may just make an ex-con a more effective/efficient drug dealer.
I don't know that there's a better way. If I were an employer, I wouldn't want to hire an ex-con. But the way the system works now means that people who do one stupid thing can be screwed for life.
That's only true when the annual probabilities are independent. In the case of asteroids, that's probably a reasonable approximation. But tsunamis are generated by earthquakes, and the probability that you have a large earthquake in year n is not independent of whether you had a large earthquake in year n-1. When, specifically, a quake is going to happen is pretty random, but energies build over time until released.
Zero censorship and lots and lots of internal comunication? Thanks for the good laugh, dude. Explain to me why certain teams like social and Android are isolated from the rest of the company and why there is zero transparency on how the Google+ metrics are created.
Those teams are more isolated than the rest of the company, true, but in comparison with the way most large corporations are structured, Google is a wide-open book. The notion that every engineer has access to basically every line of code in the company (other than Android) is really, really unusual. And that doesn't really have any relation to what I was talking about. When I say there's zero censorship, I mean it. Anyone can post anything on eng-misc and it will not be censored. Anyone in Mountain View can go to TGIF and ask questions directly of the top management, in full view of the entire company. Anyone can e-mail any part of the leadership structure and get responses.
Now, obviously, there are some items which are held close. Raw data on almost everything, for example. And I honestly think that isn't because management feels it needs to hide the information from employees, it's because Google is too big to be leakproof.
As for the Google+ metrics, what you say simply isn't true. It's been made quite clear how they're calculated. Many people dispute whether the chosen metrics are the most useful -- and there's a great deal of open discussion about that. It derives from a difference of opinion about what Google+ is supposed to be. I can't explain in public what the different factions think; if you're a Googler, e-mail me and I'll give you my perspective on it.
Anyway, I stand by my claim. Google is a company that allows and to a degree even encourages dissent, and it's a company where employee opinions matter. And something like ignoring the do-not-track settings would create a firestorm.
I didn't dig at all. I copied the link directly from one of the other posts that responded to you. It's certainly consistent with my personal experience.
FWIW (not much, I know, since (a) you don't know me and (b) I'm a Google employee), I know one of the engineers who works on the "do not track" stuff, and they are pretty ferocious about making sure that no data gets recorded about queries with the do-not-track cookies set. Google's culture is such that if it turned out the do-not-track cookies weren't being honored, and that information became known in the company (and there's basically zero censorship and lots and lots of internal communication so it *would* become known), it would create a firestorm of internal protest. Fully half of Google employees are engineers, and engineers tend not to like deceptive practices.
You mean the one that Google stopped doing when it was called to their attention? That's not a good example, either, because it's a case where the user has given Google two conflicting messages. By being logged into a Google+ account, the user has expressed an interest in being able to use the +1 buttons scattered around the web. By setting the Safari privacy option, the user has indicated the user does not want to be able to use the +1 buttons scattered around the web. Which is it? The truth is that the user is unlikely to realize that the Safari privacy option will have a result of breaking the +1 buttons, so it's not that unreasonable to believe that the user really does want them to work.
Competition is clearly good. I usually try to buy AMD processors even when the Intel offering is slightly better for the money for exactly the same reason. We'll be worse off if Intel is the only CPU manufacturer, and if Google is the only search engine.
However, I have to say that your decision to use MS instead of Google because Google is "just too large" really made me chuckle.
That's what comes from using "social" signals in search. "Social" is very easy to spam. Fake reviews, fake "likes", fake "+1s"... [sitetruth.com] The social networks even host the spam for free - no expensive link farm to host and update.
That's crap, John, and you've been corrected on it many times and yet still keep saying the same thing. Google's social-enhanced search only applies social signals from people that you personally have identified as your friends (have circled). Unless you've circled spammers, you'll get no spam signals. Why do you keep insisting otherwise?
There's also a setting to turn off search tracking, but I don't entirely trust Google to obey it.
If Google didn't obey it, it would be fairly obvious, unless perhaps they didn't actually use it for anything. But if either ads or searches were ever personalized based on it, people would notice, and complain. You can test it yourself: Stay logged in, but turn off all personalization and tracking, and do some searches. Then do the same search in an incognito window -- or even better, in an incognito window (or a clean browser) on a different machine on a different IP address (though not too far away, so that localization won't be different). The results may not be identical, because I believe there is a little randomization of results, to help tune the results based on clicks, but they shouldn't be very different, either.
FWIW (not much, I know, since (a) you don't know me and (b) I'm a Google employee), I know one of the engineers who works on the "do not track" stuff, and they are pretty ferocious about making sure that no data gets recorded about queries with the do-not-track cookies set. Google's culture is such that if it turned out the do-not-track cookies weren't being honored, and that information became known in the company (and there's basically zero censorship and lots and lots of internal communication so it *would* become known), it would create a firestorm of internal protest. Fully half of Google employees are engineers, and engineers tend not to like deceptive practices.
is based on a proper, randomized survey of 2000 households nationwide. The numbers of "loyal" users for Apple (83%) and Android (81%) are statically the same, because they're within the margin of error of the study, and both are very high.
To put it another way, your cite is crap. Both Apple and Android users are very happy with their devices. Personally, I've had both, and really enjoyed both. When I switched from an iPhone 4 to a Nexus S (because for Google employees there are a number of useful internal apps which are Android-only, and because I was going to be doing some work on Android-related stuff) I did it with some trepidation. I really liked my iPhone and I was afraid the Android phone was going to be a step down, since I'd always heard it was much less polished. Within a week I was very glad I'd made the switch.
I didn't find Android 2.2.3 to be significantly less polished than iOS, in fact in many areas I found it to be more usable. For example, I liked the Android home screens better than the Apple approach, and I was very pleased to note that when listening to an audio book or music and using the navigation app, the book/music were automatically paused whenever the navigation app gave directions, and then automatically resumed. A trivial issue, but one that had annoyed me for quite some time with my iPhone.
And all of that was before I started digging into how I could tweak the behavior of the system to fit my preferences. When I started doing that, there was just no comparison, Android was so much more flexible -- and that's even without rooting (I have the phone connected to my corporate e-mail, so security policy disallows rooting or modified ROMs). So for me, Android is clearly better, and the upgrades to Android 4 and iOS 5 have widened the gap.
That said, when I pick up my old iPhone (my wife has it now), I still find it quite nice to use. Both systems are, IMO, very usable and very powerful. I give the edge to Android, but I know others (including Google employees) who prefer iOS. It's a matter of taste, and the divide isn't even as large as Windows vs OS X, or either of those versus any flavor of Linux.
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I think a replica rifle is liable to cause some consternation at your average sporting event.
Or your average airport - don't take one on holidays with you.
It's not only legal, but common, to take firearms on plane trips. They must be in checked baggage, must be unloaded and in a locked case -- with a "non-TSA" lock, so TSA personnel can't open them -- and must be "declared" during check-in. The counter agent just gives you an orange tag which you sign and date, certifying that the gun is unloaded and in a locked container. Some of the agents also check the unloaded state of the gun themselves. Where the orange tag goes and what happens after that varies widely across airports.
In the case of this, you wouldn't likely be allowed to carry it on, but you could easily check it. It might be a good idea to declare it as a "non-firearm", just so the luggage screeners don't see what appears to be an undeclared rifle when they X-ray your bag.
Be careful when talking about Google shareholders - because that's only (IIRC) about 200 odd people. All those shared being tossed around on the NYSE are class 'B' shares - with no voting rights, no right to dividends or profit distribution, no nothing but a few bits on a computer somewhere.
You are correct that Google has a dual-class stock, but not that the class B stock has no voting rights, etc. Google class A shares have 10 votes, class B shares have one vote.
You spent years masturbating while taking the life of innocent animals
I generally just ignore statements like this, because they typically indicate a completely irrational attitude of a sort which no rational response can enlighten, but since the rest of your post is almost rational, I'll make an exception this time.
Your comment indicates a complete misunderstanding of hunting and hunters -- at least all the hunters I know. There is no joy in killing, and there's certainly no sexual component to it. The joys of hunting are many, and the feeling of success at taking your quarry is a big part of it, but not because it's a kill. In fact, I find that I enjoy hunting just as much with a camera as I do with a bow, and I enjoy both of them much more than I do with a rifle. The truth is that other than taking my son bird hunting, all of my hunting for the last few years has been with a camera.
I enjoy being out in nature. I enjoy watching, tracking and learning about the animals. Being a successful hunter requires a great deal of understanding of the habits, instincts abilities and preferences of wildlife. I enjoy testing my skill against theirs, seeing if I can predict their actions well enough to position myself on their path, and if I can move quickly and silently enough to sneak up on them. I also enjoy eating them. If it weren't for that, I would only hunt with a camera, because getting good photos is even more challenging, and because cleaning, dressing, hauling and butchering is hard work.
I obviously have no problem with killing them; it's the natural order of things and, as I said, I like the meat. But your theory about why hunters hunt and what we get out of it is completely wrong.
It doesn't really take me that long to reply to you. Sometimes I'm taking a break, or waiting for Houdini to fnish a render pass, or whatever.
So you're a HWOPS SRE? FWIW, it's blaze builds that motivate me to read and post on slashdot.
The reason why you bother me is because you feel the need to comment in every goddamned Google story.
I comment on whatever I find interesting. That generally means stories about software development, security, cryptography, some politics (especially anything related to the TSA), and stuff about my current and previous employers. It just happens that there are a lot more stories about Google than the rest... and the comments posted about Google are more wrong than the rest. Yes, I do have the disease.
Like I explained to you already, there is no real internal communication.
Have you ever worked anywhere other than Google? I may have an advantage here, in that I spent 20 years in the industry, working for/with dozens of large corporations (I was a consultant for much of my career). I've seen a lot, and I'll tell you that Google is incomparably better.
There was a long internal debate about the Real Names policy and the Vic Gundotra asshole just ignored it.
You're wrong. Vic didn't ignore it, he explained it. You apparently didn't agree with his rationale, and neither did many others, but that doesn't mean it wasn't provided, nor that the debate wasn't real. I personally agreed with the Real Names policy. I think pseudonymity/anonymity is very important, but it also provides huge potential for abuse which would really lower the value of Google+. I think pseudonymity can be done in a way that works no Google+, but I agree with Vic that it has to be done carefully. It's better not to allow it than to allow it and then screw it up -- and trying to make sure that a pseudonymous account's real identity never leaks, across all of the Google properties, is definitely not trivial.
Ditt
So I should have used the term "bloodletting", to satisfy pedants.
Glad you can laugh at facts... "just too large" is in relation to search, not operating systems or software packages.
I interpreted it as being in relation to company size.
Leeching, as in bloodletting, draining "bad blood" from the body, has been re-introduced? I think not. The use of leeches for other purposes, yes, but that's not what the term meant 100 years ago.
I think you're wrong there as well. 100 years ago, doctors were also financially incented to perform unnecessary procedures, etc. because they got paid for work performed. I'll grant that they didn't have as much debt and insurance pressure, but countering that is the fact that given the vastly lower efficacy of their work, it was much harder for patients to evaluate how much benefit they were receiving, and much easier for doctors to push all sorts of pure quackery, such as patent medicines, since not even the doctors knew what worked and what didn't.
Remember that the phrase "snake oil" derives from medical practices of the 18th and 19th century, and that state of affairs continued into the early 20th century.
It's tempting to think that the idealized model of the country doctor, making house visits, black bag in hand, was an inherently more honest and trustworthy person. But I don't think there's any evidence of that.
there was a report a few years ago about an entrepreneur who *refused* to employ computer science majors. he only employed english language majors. the reason was he said that it was easier to communicate with english language majors in order to teach them programming, and they were more effective and also worked better when introduced into teams, than the people who had been taught programming at university.
I think there's a reason we don't all know this entrepreneur's name and abbreviated life history.
Would you trust a doctor from 100 years ago today?
More than a doctor today, much more so.
You're insane. 100 years ago, leeching was still practiced, antiseptic surgery was still a relatively new concept, useful antibiotics didn't exist, blood transfusions were just barely being made practical on a significant scale, and organ transplants (other than skin) were still 40 years away.
If you're so far gone that modern doctors might be tempted to call you done for even though there's a very slim chance that modern medicine could bring you back, then you're so far gone that the doctors of 100 years ago would already have given their condolences to your family and headed home. And they wouldn't have given up prematurely because at that point, without modern life support equipment you're absolutely, positively gone.
I'll take modern medicine, thanks. It's imperfect, and the financial incentives for the physicians don't align all that well with the interest of the patients, but in large part it works, and you can't say the same for what passed for medicine in 1912 -- though it was orders of magnitude better than what we had in 1812.
It's definitely a complex question, and one that I don't think anyone really understands. What I do know is that seismologists do talk about big quakes being "overdue". Not so much in the sense that there's some increased expectation of having a quake, but that there's good reason to expect that when the next quake hits it's likely to be a big one.
So many horrible ac-trolls... Feel for you
Thanks. It doesn't bother me much, though. One side effect of dealing regularly with the mentally ill is that you develop a very thick skin. I've had far more vicious things screamed at me by my daughter, and I care about her, so some random troll doesn't faze me.
I do really wonder what motivates a person to spend their time spewing anonymous hate. This particular troll has been stalking me for months now, so he's really invested a great deal of time and effort into it. He rarely resorts to canned resplies, either. I can't even imagine ever wanting to do something like that, and certainly not putting the kind of effort into it that he has.
I mean, I get that some people find the notion of hunting abhorrent (though most think nothing of eating meat that was raised and slaughtered in an industrial operation), and my bio says I like to hunt -- though in fact it's been years since I actually got out. But if the goal is to protest hunting, surely there are more effective outlets for his efforts. And the sort of personal venom he spews will make anyone automatically discount him, in fact he gives his own cause a bad name. I can only conclude that he's dealing with his own serious emotional issues and I'm just a convenient target for his attempts to relieve his own pain.
If that's really what's going on, I suppose spewing profanity at me on-line is better than a lot of other things he could be doing. If he finds it therapeutic, I'm okay with that. I wish there were some way I could help him. I've tried responding, but I knew even before I did that it would just make him even more vicious. I think he really needs professional help, but obviously there's no way I can convince him of that.
So, I just read his posts and shake my head. It's sad.
Also, kids that get in a lot of legal trouble tend not to be able to finish a high school diploma. Juvenile detention centers do teach classes, but the credits end up being so fragmented as kids jump between detention and regular school that it's difficult for them to actually fulfill the requirements -- and that assumes they don't just fail their classes anyway.
I have personal experience with this. My daughter is very bright and capable, but suffers from a severe emotional disorder which leads her to make a lot of dumb decisions. Even though she typically does very well in school, her time in treatment centers, trouble with the law, expulsions from schools, etc., mean that she's chronically behind on credits. For example, she completed much of the first semester of Calculus this year (as a junior), but then got in trouble and ended up getting no math credit at all. She's now in a residential treatment center and taking dum-dum math because it's all they offer, but won't get any credit for it because she's already done it.
In her case, because she's so bright, the solution will likely be to take the GED as soon as the state will let her, and she'll pass it handily. Or else I'll pay for summer school classes, or something similar. She's smart enough, and has involved parents, so she has a chance to be able to make it. Kids with similar issues but without similar advantages are really screwed. Of course, if she can't learn to manage her mental illness -- which is very, very hard to do -- she's going to be screwed, too. We try to help every way we can, but we can't live her life for her, and as she becomes an adult the consequences of bad decisions are going to become even more severe.
You put them in prison and they come out and still can't get a job (especially now that they have a record), so what do they do? Commit more crimes. Give them some useful skills, and they see that they do have a choice.
This presumes that having skills gives them a choice. Unfortunately, their record means getting a job is still basically impossible. Perhaps the best education we could give them is to teach them how to start and run successful small businesses, because people don't check the records of those they do business with. Of course, the ex-con had better not need a bank loan. And an education in business administration may just make an ex-con a more effective/efficient drug dealer.
I don't know that there's a better way. If I were an employer, I wouldn't want to hire an ex-con. But the way the system works now means that people who do one stupid thing can be screwed for life.
While I appreciate what you are trying to say here, probability doesn't work like this.
Probability doesn't, but earthquakes do.
That's only true when the annual probabilities are independent. In the case of asteroids, that's probably a reasonable approximation. But tsunamis are generated by earthquakes, and the probability that you have a large earthquake in year n is not independent of whether you had a large earthquake in year n-1. When, specifically, a quake is going to happen is pretty random, but energies build over time until released.
Zero censorship and lots and lots of internal comunication? Thanks for the good laugh, dude. Explain to me why certain teams like social and Android are isolated from the rest of the company and why there is zero transparency on how the Google+ metrics are created.
Those teams are more isolated than the rest of the company, true, but in comparison with the way most large corporations are structured, Google is a wide-open book. The notion that every engineer has access to basically every line of code in the company (other than Android) is really, really unusual. And that doesn't really have any relation to what I was talking about. When I say there's zero censorship, I mean it. Anyone can post anything on eng-misc and it will not be censored. Anyone in Mountain View can go to TGIF and ask questions directly of the top management, in full view of the entire company. Anyone can e-mail any part of the leadership structure and get responses.
Now, obviously, there are some items which are held close. Raw data on almost everything, for example. And I honestly think that isn't because management feels it needs to hide the information from employees, it's because Google is too big to be leakproof.
As for the Google+ metrics, what you say simply isn't true. It's been made quite clear how they're calculated. Many people dispute whether the chosen metrics are the most useful -- and there's a great deal of open discussion about that. It derives from a difference of opinion about what Google+ is supposed to be. I can't explain in public what the different factions think; if you're a Googler, e-mail me and I'll give you my perspective on it.
Anyway, I stand by my claim. Google is a company that allows and to a degree even encourages dissent, and it's a company where employee opinions matter. And something like ignoring the do-not-track settings would create a firestorm.
I didn't dig at all. I copied the link directly from one of the other posts that responded to you. It's certainly consistent with my personal experience.
FWIW (not much, I know, since (a) you don't know me and (b) I'm a Google employee), I know one of the engineers who works on the "do not track" stuff, and they are pretty ferocious about making sure that no data gets recorded about queries with the do-not-track cookies set. Google's culture is such that if it turned out the do-not-track cookies weren't being honored, and that information became known in the company (and there's basically zero censorship and lots and lots of internal communication so it *would* become known), it would create a firestorm of internal protest. Fully half of Google employees are engineers, and engineers tend not to like deceptive practices.
You mean like Google's Safari cookie trick?
You mean the one that Google stopped doing when it was called to their attention? That's not a good example, either, because it's a case where the user has given Google two conflicting messages. By being logged into a Google+ account, the user has expressed an interest in being able to use the +1 buttons scattered around the web. By setting the Safari privacy option, the user has indicated the user does not want to be able to use the +1 buttons scattered around the web. Which is it? The truth is that the user is unlikely to realize that the Safari privacy option will have a result of breaking the +1 buttons, so it's not that unreasonable to believe that the user really does want them to work.
Crowd-sourced !=Social
Competition is clearly good. I usually try to buy AMD processors even when the Intel offering is slightly better for the money for exactly the same reason. We'll be worse off if Intel is the only CPU manufacturer, and if Google is the only search engine.
However, I have to say that your decision to use MS instead of Google because Google is "just too large" really made me chuckle.
Both of you should post the searches you tried, so others can judge.
That's what comes from using "social" signals in search. "Social" is very easy to spam. Fake reviews, fake "likes", fake "+1s"... [sitetruth.com] The social networks even host the spam for free - no expensive link farm to host and update.
That's crap, John, and you've been corrected on it many times and yet still keep saying the same thing. Google's social-enhanced search only applies social signals from people that you personally have identified as your friends (have circled). Unless you've circled spammers, you'll get no spam signals. Why do you keep insisting otherwise?
Try turning on verbatim search mode.
There's also a setting to turn off search tracking, but I don't entirely trust Google to obey it.
If Google didn't obey it, it would be fairly obvious, unless perhaps they didn't actually use it for anything. But if either ads or searches were ever personalized based on it, people would notice, and complain. You can test it yourself: Stay logged in, but turn off all personalization and tracking, and do some searches. Then do the same search in an incognito window -- or even better, in an incognito window (or a clean browser) on a different machine on a different IP address (though not too far away, so that localization won't be different). The results may not be identical, because I believe there is a little randomization of results, to help tune the results based on clicks, but they shouldn't be very different, either.
FWIW (not much, I know, since (a) you don't know me and (b) I'm a Google employee), I know one of the engineers who works on the "do not track" stuff, and they are pretty ferocious about making sure that no data gets recorded about queries with the do-not-track cookies set. Google's culture is such that if it turned out the do-not-track cookies weren't being honored, and that information became known in the company (and there's basically zero censorship and lots and lots of internal communication so it *would* become known), it would create a firestorm of internal protest. Fully half of Google employees are engineers, and engineers tend not to like deceptive practices.
i.e. you have no counter argument. If there's any delusion, it's yours. The point about most Android owners not wanting to buy another in future is fact. Thus "continue to get what they want" will be bad news for Android. http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-08-01/tech/29974966_1_android-iphone-owners-gene-munster
Your article is based on a semi-formal survey of 217 smartphone users in Minneapolis.
This article:
http://allthingsd.com/20111212/youth-is-wasted-on-the-young-and-so-are-consumer-electronics/
is based on a proper, randomized survey of 2000 households nationwide. The numbers of "loyal" users for Apple (83%) and Android (81%) are statically the same, because they're within the margin of error of the study, and both are very high.
To put it another way, your cite is crap. Both Apple and Android users are very happy with their devices. Personally, I've had both, and really enjoyed both. When I switched from an iPhone 4 to a Nexus S (because for Google employees there are a number of useful internal apps which are Android-only, and because I was going to be doing some work on Android-related stuff) I did it with some trepidation. I really liked my iPhone and I was afraid the Android phone was going to be a step down, since I'd always heard it was much less polished. Within a week I was very glad I'd made the switch.
I didn't find Android 2.2.3 to be significantly less polished than iOS, in fact in many areas I found it to be more usable. For example, I liked the Android home screens better than the Apple approach, and I was very pleased to note that when listening to an audio book or music and using the navigation app, the book/music were automatically paused whenever the navigation app gave directions, and then automatically resumed. A trivial issue, but one that had annoyed me for quite some time with my iPhone.
And all of that was before I started digging into how I could tweak the behavior of the system to fit my preferences. When I started doing that, there was just no comparison, Android was so much more flexible -- and that's even without rooting (I have the phone connected to my corporate e-mail, so security policy disallows rooting or modified ROMs). So for me, Android is clearly better, and the upgrades to Android 4 and iOS 5 have widened the gap.
That said, when I pick up my old iPhone (my wife has it now), I still find it quite nice to use. Both systems are, IMO, very usable and very powerful. I give the edge to Android, but I know others (including Google employees) who prefer iOS. It's a matter of taste, and the divide isn't even as large as Windows vs OS X, or either of those versus any flavor of Linux.