Personally, no, I don't see that a patent is so important that I should break not only the law, but also the trust and confidence other people have in me, simply to defend my rights to some obvious "invention". I may be a little behind the times here, but I can't say I would be overly tempted, no.
Not to mention that when it comes to a fight between you and Microsoft, you're going to lose. Not smart. (If the allegations are true, that is).
I think one very telling sentence in the report is this one:
The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.
Although there may have been other sources of bias too, if the Democratic columnists love Obama but the Republican ones are cool on McCain, that's bound to introduce a bias in editorial comment on its own.
It is not a planetarium. It is an IMAX movie. You sit, watch a film, and leave. There is no talk about constellations, or where in the sky you should look to see features. The movie has a lot of narration about saving the environment, man-made waste products, deforestation, and other topics completely unrelated to the solar system. In fact a large chunk of it is devoted to discussing extra-terrestrial life and the size of solar system as far as man has explored it.
I've been to the show, and I don't think this is a fair criticism. As well as being visually spectacular, I thought it gave a reasonable overview of the universe from the earth outwards.
I was put off by the title of the show (Fragile Planet), but actually it had far less boring environmental preaching than I imagined. Most of it was about exoplanets and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. My one complaint would be that it got a bit speculative, even if it's based on the best science that we have at this time.
It sounds to me like you have a rather narrow view of what is acceptable subject matter for a planetarium. Admittedly if I were writing it for Slashdotters, I would have gone into a bit more depth. But for a general audience, I thought it was actually pretty good and not too "dumbed down". I was pleasantly surprised.
One of the rules of direct debit is that the company making the withdrawl *has* to tell the account holder the amount they're taking out 2 weeks beforehand (unless it's completely fixed).
Not just that. If the company making the withdrawl, or the bank, makes an error, they are required to give you a full and immediate refund. Look up "direct debit guarantee" on your favourite search engine.
The main problem is that this puts the onus on you to notice the mistake. Still, you get three years to notice it. It sounds from the New York Times article as if Americans only get fifteen days to notice it, which is way too little.
The article's "Sky is Falling" tone rests on a single factoid. "30 to 55% of users delete cookies" therefore current analytics products are out by "at least 30 percent, maybe more".
That is of course complete nonsense. [...] I can accept that a significant number of users might delete cookies at some point, but what percentage of [...] users are deleting cookies between page requests to a single site in a single session? If it is 30%, then I will eat my hat.
The author clearly knows that even the most primitive of tools also use other metrics to group page requests into sessions, so even if 30% of users were deleting cookies, it would not result in a 30% inaccuracy.
While I don't want to defend the article, you're missing one crucial point here. Grouping requests into sessions with "good enough" accuracy is easy even without cookies. What companies find cookies essential for is to measure latent conversion. For example: which Google ads best convert into sales, even if the sale doesn't happen for several days? For this sort of analysis, cookie deletion is a problem, and becomes a bigger problem the longer there typically is between lead and sale.
On the Netflix question, what he didn't say was that amazon.co.uk is already offering that service. I didn't realise that the US branch wasn't, actually. I'm sure they will do it in the US soon.
He's probably right that Amazon wouldn't need to market it, and in the UK, it's much cheaper than the competing services (£7.99 per month for up to four rentals, two at a time; or £9.99/six/three).
Due to the electoral college, people voting for the losing candidates in each state have wasted their vote. Imagine a situation where Republicans nearly beat Democrats in the state of California. Let's say it is 45/55 in favor of the Democratic candidate. California is a huge state, and that represents a very large number of votes, but all those Republican votes are worthless. It doesn't matter if the Dem wins California by 1 vote or 1,000,000 votes.
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but this is not strictly due to the electoral college, but to the way (most) states decide to send delegates to the electoral college. There's nothing to stop states allocating their delegates in a fairer way. Unfortunately the biggest states have a disincentive to do so, because if they do, they will only swing half a dozen votes instead of twenty, thirty, or more.
Because the democratic process exists to safeguard our rights. Sacrificing freedom of the press for fair elections negates the whole point for having the elections.
I've heard this argument before, but I don't buy it, if only because most countries with free elections and a free press come down the other way. In most democracies, a tiny restriction on the rights of the press for a few hours is seen as a small price to pay for a fairer election. So I don't think you can make such definitive statements.
Publishing results while voting continues
on
Election Day Discussion
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'd like to hear what Americans think about results and exit polls for eastern states being published before polls in western states have closed.
In the rest of the democratic world, as far as I know, this is illegal. It seems to us that it goes against having a fair election. And yet in America it is normal practice. Why?
You're mostly right, but I wouldn't call the LibDems centrist. I don't think they've been so for about the last ten years. In terms of tax, they propose a higher tax regime than either of the two main parties. In terms of Europe, they're strongly pro-European, as opposed to a mostly hostile Conservative Party, and a very mixed Labour Party.
Another factor in their relative success is simple disillusionment with either of the two main parties, both of which have had a chance to spoil their reputations by being in power nationally in recent times.
However, in an attempt to wrench this back on topic, it's interesting that we don't have election debates in the UK. There was talk about having one last time, but one of the sticking points was whether to include the LibDem leader or not. And if so, what about the even smaller parties that are still putting up candidates in most of the seats? We'll see what happens at next year's General Election, but I doubt we'll have a televised debate.
If you need to move the data from the old drive to the new drive, I recommend a product called EZ-GIG from Apricorn. [1]
This is basically just a cradle for holding a laptop drive, with a cable and a PCMCIA card [2] to turn the drive into an external drive. The idea is:
Plug the new drive in as an external drive;
Use the supplied software to copy the old drive to the new drive;
Swap the drives over;
You now have a laptop with a larger drive, and a smaller drive which you can use for backups.
It's pretty reasonably priced, as I recall, and it saves finding a large backup device and copying everything twice, and/or reinstalling the OS. Also, you have a large backup disk at the end of it.
This is beginning to sound like a shill, but I'm just a satisfied customer!
-----
[1] There may be other similar products, I don't know.
[2] I think there may be a USB version too.
The parties only picked people that they thought could get elected. Maybe you should blame the electorate instead of the parties for the quality of the candidates.
That was my point. Maybe I didn't express it very clearly. I was trying to point out to all the people who oppose cameras that the majority of people in the UK seem to want them.
What you have to understand about these cameras, is that the vast majority of people in Britain -- Slashdot readers excepted -- think that they are a good thing, and believe that they help keep towns safer.
Now you can argue about whether the population is naive, or misled. But you also have to wonder about what democracy means.
Read the article. They are complaining that one user may read the content from work and from home, and so count as two users. One might also point out that sometimes two people may use the same computer, and only count as one person.
You can't measure the exact number of human visitors to a website, any more than you can measure the exact number of people who read a magazine. With a magazine, two people may read one magazine. With a website, one person may come from two computers, or two people from one computer. The problem is only that people, especially advertisers, seem to expect that exact numbers are somehow possible. But they really need to match their metrics to the medium, and not try and force the medium to fit print-media analogies.
Anyway, the exact numbers don't really tell you anything. You really need to know the differences between two sub-populations (are visitors from pay-per-click ads or visitors from standard search results more likely to buy?). A program which makes this sort of comparison easy will give you far more insight than one which tries to get the total number of visitors closer to some mythical "true" number.
(I am the author of analog and CTO of ClickTracks, but I'm writing in a personal capacity).
It's cute but is it useful? Has anyone tried it? I suspect that it doesn't really yield any insight, once you've got past the "Wow" factor. But I'd be interested to hear if anyone has found out anything using it.
That reminds me of something that happened when I was at college. I got back one day to find that some other maths students had filled my room with screwed up balls of newspaper. And I mean filled. I couldn't even open the door more than a crack. It took a couple of hours and lots of black bags to clear that one up.
I highly recommend these books too, but I thought The Well of Lost Plots was better than Lost in a Good Book. There's not as much plot, but for me the political edge and introduction of real-world issues more than made up for that.
Many characters from the "standard" English classics -- Shakespeare, Dickens, Bronte, Austen and the like -- appear in this series. So while a casual knowledge of this sort of literature is not essential for reading the series, it certainly increases the humour. Potential readers should be warned that The Eyre Affair contains Jane Eyre spoilers.
For fans of the books, Jasper Fforde's website is very good. I think I read there that the fourth Thursday Next book is due out this summer and will tie up the loose ends.
The problem is that these commissions are made up of people who are inevitably partisan, so what you end up with is only the illusion of independence, when in fact the party with the most adherents on the commission effectively draws the district boundaries to the benefit of its members
This is an argument I've heard before from Americans, but all I can say is, it's really not like that.
Maybe it's that we don't assume that everyone is partisan. We have a long tradition of an independent civil service, which pretty much works most of the time. The members of the Electoral Commission are doing it as a career, they're not elected, or appointed by politicians. Keeping their jobs relies on them being non-partisan -- if they were elected or appointed they would have an incentive to be partisan.
The Boundary Committee publishes draft proposals and consults widely before finalising them. Of course, political parties try and persuade it to draw the districts one way or another, but they seem to be immune to that sort of pressure. They base their decisions purely on which are the natural clumps into which the population falls.
I don't hear people suggesting that the committee is biased. If this were widely believed, there would be an enormous scandal. The idea that there was any partisanship in the drawing of boundaries would in our eyes completely undermine the integrity of the election.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, no, I don't see that a patent is so important that I should break not only the law, but also the trust and confidence other people have in me, simply to defend my rights to some obvious "invention". I may be a little behind the times here, but I can't say I would be overly tempted, no.
Not to mention that when it comes to a fight between you and Microsoft, you're going to lose. Not smart. (If the allegations are true, that is).
Although there may have been other sources of bias too, if the Democratic columnists love Obama but the Republican ones are cool on McCain, that's bound to introduce a bias in editorial comment on its own.
Sorry, I didn't see any indication of that. As you probably know, it's only been open a month at this point anyway.
It is not a planetarium. It is an IMAX movie. You sit, watch a film, and leave. There is no talk about constellations, or where in the sky you should look to see features. The movie has a lot of narration about saving the environment, man-made waste products, deforestation, and other topics completely unrelated to the solar system. In fact a large chunk of it is devoted to discussing extra-terrestrial life and the size of solar system as far as man has explored it.
I've been to the show, and I don't think this is a fair criticism. As well as being visually spectacular, I thought it gave a reasonable overview of the universe from the earth outwards.
I was put off by the title of the show (Fragile Planet), but actually it had far less boring environmental preaching than I imagined. Most of it was about exoplanets and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. My one complaint would be that it got a bit speculative, even if it's based on the best science that we have at this time.
It sounds to me like you have a rather narrow view of what is acceptable subject matter for a planetarium. Admittedly if I were writing it for Slashdotters, I would have gone into a bit more depth. But for a general audience, I thought it was actually pretty good and not too "dumbed down". I was pleasantly surprised.
If readers sometimes look to it for truth, well, they're misusing it.
One of the rules of direct debit is that the company making the withdrawl *has* to tell the account holder the amount they're taking out 2 weeks beforehand (unless it's completely fixed).
Not just that. If the company making the withdrawl, or the bank, makes an error, they are required to give you a full and immediate refund. Look up "direct debit guarantee" on your favourite search engine.
The main problem is that this puts the onus on you to notice the mistake. Still, you get three years to notice it. It sounds from the New York Times article as if Americans only get fifteen days to notice it, which is way too little.
That's strange because Lovefilm, the dominant DVD-by-mail company in the UK, has only recently introduced this feature.
No they didn't. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_genera l_election_2005#Total_seats_for_each_party
On the Netflix question, what he didn't say was that amazon.co.uk is already offering that service. I didn't realise that the US branch wasn't, actually. I'm sure they will do it in the US soon.
He's probably right that Amazon wouldn't need to market it, and in the UK, it's much cheaper than the competing services (£7.99 per month for up to four rentals, two at a time; or £9.99/six/three).
In the rest of the democratic world, as far as I know, this is illegal. It seems to us that it goes against having a fair election. And yet in America it is normal practice. Why?
You're mostly right, but I wouldn't call the LibDems centrist. I don't think they've been so for about the last ten years. In terms of tax, they propose a higher tax regime than either of the two main parties. In terms of Europe, they're strongly pro-European, as opposed to a mostly hostile Conservative Party, and a very mixed Labour Party.
Another factor in their relative success is simple disillusionment with either of the two main parties, both of which have had a chance to spoil their reputations by being in power nationally in recent times.
However, in an attempt to wrench this back on topic, it's interesting that we don't have election debates in the UK. There was talk about having one last time, but one of the sticking points was whether to include the LibDem leader or not. And if so, what about the even smaller parties that are still putting up candidates in most of the seats? We'll see what happens at next year's General Election, but I doubt we'll have a televised debate.
This is basically just a cradle for holding a laptop drive, with a cable and a PCMCIA card [2] to turn the drive into an external drive. The idea is:
It's pretty reasonably priced, as I recall, and it saves finding a large backup device and copying everything twice, and/or reinstalling the OS. Also, you have a large backup disk at the end of it.
This is beginning to sound like a shill, but I'm just a satisfied customer!
-----
[1] There may be other similar products, I don't know.
[2] I think there may be a USB version too.
The parties only picked people that they thought could get elected. Maybe you should blame the electorate instead of the parties for the quality of the candidates.
Just remember, it's from the Latin "annus", not "anus".
That was my point. Maybe I didn't express it very clearly. I was trying to point out to all the people who oppose cameras that the majority of people in the UK seem to want them.
Now you can argue about whether the population is naive, or misled. But you also have to wonder about what democracy means.
Read the article. They are complaining that one user may read the content from work and from home, and so count as two users. One might also point out that sometimes two people may use the same computer, and only count as one person.
Anyway, the exact numbers don't really tell you anything. You really need to know the differences between two sub-populations (are visitors from pay-per-click ads or visitors from standard search results more likely to buy?). A program which makes this sort of comparison easy will give you far more insight than one which tries to get the total number of visitors closer to some mythical "true" number.
(I am the author of analog and CTO of ClickTracks, but I'm writing in a personal capacity).
It's cute but is it useful? Has anyone tried it? I suspect that it doesn't really yield any insight, once you've got past the "Wow" factor. But I'd be interested to hear if anyone has found out anything using it.
That reminds me of something that happened when I was at college. I got back one day to find that some other maths students had filled my room with screwed up balls of newspaper. And I mean filled. I couldn't even open the door more than a crack. It took a couple of hours and lots of black bags to clear that one up.
Many characters from the "standard" English classics -- Shakespeare, Dickens, Bronte, Austen and the like -- appear in this series. So while a casual knowledge of this sort of literature is not essential for reading the series, it certainly increases the humour. Potential readers should be warned that The Eyre Affair contains Jane Eyre spoilers.
For fans of the books, Jasper Fforde's website is very good. I think I read there that the fourth Thursday Next book is due out this summer and will tie up the loose ends.
Maybe it's that we don't assume that everyone is partisan. We have a long tradition of an independent civil service, which pretty much works most of the time. The members of the Electoral Commission are doing it as a career, they're not elected, or appointed by politicians. Keeping their jobs relies on them being non-partisan -- if they were elected or appointed they would have an incentive to be partisan.
The Boundary Committee publishes draft proposals and consults widely before finalising them. Of course, political parties try and persuade it to draw the districts one way or another, but they seem to be immune to that sort of pressure. They base their decisions purely on which are the natural clumps into which the population falls.
I don't hear people suggesting that the committee is biased. If this were widely believed, there would be an enormous scandal. The idea that there was any partisanship in the drawing of boundaries would in our eyes completely undermine the integrity of the election.
By the way, here are their web pages: Electoral Commission, Boundary Committee