About 60 million people in the UK, sample size of 1,176, confidence interval of 96% gives a margin of error of 2.99%. So, it's 96% likely that they got within 2.99% of the right answer (to the question of how many people admit to it).
Yes, but 11.6% +- 2.99% covers quite a wide range of values. Using the same process to inflate the figures and rounding up as in the original reporting, you get a figure of between 5 million and 9 million. Without guessing at how many people are lying and using the more accurate figures for number of Internet users the range becomes 2.9 million to 4.9 million, which is somewhat different to 7 million.
It doesn't really make sense to claim "sample size is small" for an 1,100-person sample. If the sampling was done in a random, unbiased manner, that size sample gives a margin of error of +/- 3%.
Yes, it does, because the size of the result is too small. A 3% error on an 11.6% result is over 30% of the result. When scaled up to the whole population and rounded (as done with the figure when it was used) the error bars on the result become "between 5 million and 9 million people" which is somewhat different to the 7 million claimed.
Only because the EU can only make money by suing large corporations and levying huge fines on them
The US has just issued Pfizer with a fine that dwarfs anything the EU has ever done. And, you know what...? This is a good thing. These companies have been __breaking the law__ in order to sell more of their products. Yes, let's take some of that money away from them so that they don't have incentive to do it again.
I think this is at least one of the Science articles to which the post (almost) refers.
Useful. Because, you know, I'm really going to go and pay $15 to read a single article online, when I could alternatively just buy the magazine for $10.
Actually, all of his authority with respect to this network come from his supervisor/manager. He only has the authority to "do what's best for the network" as long as it's still granted to him by his supervisor. As soon as his supervisor revokes that authority, he no longer has the privilege of deciding what is best for the network.
Yes. The issue is, however, that none of the people who informed he had been fired and demanded he handed over the passwords _were actually his supervisor_. AIUI, a subordinate had been promoted over him, and he hadn't been notified of this.
Look at it this way: you're in charge of a network and have the passwords that can be used to do just about anything with it. One day your assistant comes to you and says, "I've just been promoted to your job, and you've been fired. Hand over the passwords." Wouldn't you think maybe you were in some kind of social engineering attack, and want to confirm it with somebody you knew to be your superior? That's all Childs did.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that something functional cannot constitute a trademark? Surely an imitation duck call is functional, and therefore is outside of the scope of valid trademarks...?
Well "bankonit.se" is pretty fishy, seeing that "bank on it" is meaningless in Sweedish. I suspect that some of your other examples probably break when subjected to the translation.
I've seen quite a few Swedish-run web sites whose content and/or name is in English. Examples:
* Name and content in English, but.se domain name: 123 * Only name in English: 45
English usage is common in Sweden. Most Swedish people are able to speak the language, often very well. It's no surprise, therefore, that Swedish people often run web sites that are written in English (to broaden their potential readership) or use English phrases in their business names (I believe this is an artifact of large chunks of popular culture being available only in English).
I believe the conclusion you drew is incorrect because it was based on the faulty assumption that Bell Labs tried to commercialize and profit off its products, when in fact it could not.
Indeed. And the same point should probably be made about Xerox PARC; a lot of really good basic research went on there, but the management of the company had little clue what to actually do with it. The graphical user interface, the WYSIWYG word processor, object-oriented programming -- all of these were PARC innovations, and Xerox did almost nothing to commercialise them. In the end, Xerox was simply content with being a photocopier manufacturer. Laser printers were close enough to that core business to fit in; graphical networked workstations, operating systems and programming langauges weren't.
I don't know why anyone would be disappointed to learn this. Pen and paper isn't worse, it's a different medium
I think the point GP was trying to make is that there's no shortage of innovative and different pen & paper games, but an almost total dearth of them in the MMO market.
the word is banned unless for banks or if it is otherwise clear that the name in question can not lead to misunderstandings.
In which of these perfectly reasonable proposed domain names is it clear that no misunderstandings are possible?
westbank.se (a domain that might concern a region of a city that is divided by a river running north-south) bankright.se (a domain for pilots, named after something they do on a regular basis) bankonit.se (a domain concerning events that are considered likely to happen) cloudbank.se (a domain concerning meteorological formations) doggerbank.se (a domain concerning a sandbank found in the North Sea)
See, and I've worked for the Military, the State of Idaho, and currently a software company. They all required drug tests to start and the military tested regularly (nearly every month). All of the employers have in the contract that I could be tested at any time with or without reason. My current employer also states that if I am ever convicted of drug use or I test positive, that it is grounds for immediate termination. So, I'm not sure where you live; Amsterdam? And yeah, I have known people being terminated by the military and state for drug use. This company is rather small, so I'm not sure anyone here partakes in such activities.
You see, that's part of the problem of the lax employment laws in the USA. Here in the UK, for example, while your employer can require you to take a drugs test (as long as they included it in your employment contract), they can't automatically dismiss you if you fail. They have to be able to give a tribunal reasonable grounds for believing that your use of the drug you were using compromises your ability to do your job. Which means that if you can demonstrate that you have been doing your job reasonably well, they'll be SOL.
The only outcry I heard was Israel screaming "ANTI-SEMITISM!!" when the reports surfaced.
Which, to be fair, it almost certainly was. There is no sign of any real evidence that support the reports.
What is, to my mind, totally unreasonable was the Isreali government's stance of blaming the entire country for the behaviour of a single independent newspaper.
Assuming that the execution method does not damage the organs in question.
Of course, this leaves the question of whether the execution method should be selected so as to minimize damage to the organs that are needed, and whether this affects the level of cruelty involved in the punishment. Clearly, it is quite important that cruelty (i.e. pain and/or panic felt by the subject) is minimized, and this could be at odds with selecting an execution method to preserve organs (eg. poison gas is probably completely out of the question).
I've long suspected similar code is the reason for those "You can't have more than 8 characters in your password..." limitations on some websites.
Chances are this is because they're using the original Unix 'crypt' function to hash passwords, which works by encrypting a base string with a 56-bit DES key derived from the password by taking the least 7 significant bits of each of the first 8 characters, ignoring the rest of them. By limiting the length to 8 chars, you avoid the security problem caused by people who think that 'password498+!%' is a strong password because it's got digits and symbols in it... except it hasn't, because they're ignored.
my favorite hack is doing object click detection by rendering objects in a function pointer (4 byte pointers, rgba colour buffer.... ) -- when you click, a render pass is done with no lighting, effects,... , and with each object coloured according object->onClick. To act on a click, read of the colour of the pixel under the mouse, and call it:)
That's just... fucked up. You should be using the 16-bit (or smaller if possible) index into a table of objects in the scene, of course. Pack it into the most significant bits of the r, g and b fields. That way you'll be resilient to any rounding errors produced during rendering (as long as you round back to the nearest valid value rather than truncate when you read the ID back in), will work on hardware that doesn't support alpha correctly (which isn't limited to Sun machines, either; I once had a PC with an early ATI card that fucked up alpha channels more often than not), and will even continue to work if some fool decides to use a hacked driver that forces offscreen buffers to 16-bit for performance reasons (I've never encountered this happening, but have heard that it does from time to time when people are trying to game rendering benchmarks).
Also, remember that once you've found which object was clicked, you can repeat the render but using vertex index as the colour rather than the object id. Just remember to set the shading mode to flat...
Finite State Machines. They really are quite difficult to implement without goto logic
int state = BEGIN_STATE; while (state != EXIT_STATE) {
switch (state)
{...
case SOME_STATE_OR_OTHER:... do something...
state = NEXT_STATE;
break;...
} }
I fail to see the problem. Or there are table driven solutions that are much more amenable to automatic code generation.
Slashdot Mirror
About 60 million people in the UK, sample size of 1,176, confidence interval of 96% gives a margin of error of 2.99%. So, it's 96% likely that they got within 2.99% of the right answer (to the question of how many people admit to it).
Yes, but 11.6% +- 2.99% covers quite a wide range of values. Using the same process to inflate the figures and rounding up as in the original reporting, you get a figure of between 5 million and 9 million. Without guessing at how many people are lying and using the more accurate figures for number of Internet users the range becomes 2.9 million to 4.9 million, which is somewhat different to 7 million.
It doesn't really make sense to claim "sample size is small" for an 1,100-person sample. If the sampling was done in a random, unbiased manner, that size sample gives a margin of error of +/- 3%.
Yes, it does, because the size of the result is too small. A 3% error on an 11.6% result is over 30% of the result. When scaled up to the whole population and rounded (as done with the figure when it was used) the error bars on the result become "between 5 million and 9 million people" which is somewhat different to the 7 million claimed.
Only because the EU can only make money by suing large corporations and levying huge fines on them
The US has just issued Pfizer with a fine that dwarfs anything the EU has ever done. And, you know what...? This is a good thing. These companies have been __breaking the law__ in order to sell more of their products. Yes, let's take some of that money away from them so that they don't have incentive to do it again.
I think this is at least one of the Science articles to which the post (almost) refers.
Useful. Because, you know, I'm really going to go and pay $15 to read a single article online, when I could alternatively just buy the magazine for $10.
2001 seemed clean and plot-driven to me.
Of course, that plot could have been turned into a film that was only about half the length...
There must be some functionality that is patented, so I doubt the patent is just "a search box with a couple buttons".
It's a design patent, not a patent. That is, a patent on visual arrangement of elements.
Actually, all of his authority with respect to this network come from his supervisor/manager. He only has the authority to "do what's best for the network" as long as it's still granted to him by his supervisor. As soon as his supervisor revokes that authority, he no longer has the privilege of deciding what is best for the network.
Yes. The issue is, however, that none of the people who informed he had been fired and demanded he handed over the passwords _were actually his supervisor_. AIUI, a subordinate had been promoted over him, and he hadn't been notified of this.
Look at it this way: you're in charge of a network and have the passwords that can be used to do just about anything with it. One day your assistant comes to you and says, "I've just been promoted to your job, and you've been fired. Hand over the passwords." Wouldn't you think maybe you were in some kind of social engineering attack, and want to confirm it with somebody you knew to be your superior? That's all Childs did.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that something functional cannot constitute a trademark? Surely an imitation duck call is functional, and therefore is outside of the scope of valid trademarks...?
Except all of your examples are not in Swedish. That's a pretty basic mistake on your part.
Not really. As I point out above, English use is common in Sweden. Many Swedish people run web sites that are written, or at least titled, in English.
Well "bankonit.se" is pretty fishy, seeing that "bank on it" is meaningless in Sweedish. I suspect that some of your other examples probably break when subjected to the translation.
I've seen quite a few Swedish-run web sites whose content and/or name is in English. Examples:
* Name and content in English, but .se domain name: 1 2 3
* Only name in English: 4 5
English usage is common in Sweden. Most Swedish people are able to speak the language, often very well. It's no surprise, therefore, that Swedish people often run web sites that are written in English (to broaden their potential readership) or use English phrases in their business names (I believe this is an artifact of large chunks of popular culture being available only in English).
I believe the conclusion you drew is incorrect because it was based on the faulty assumption that Bell Labs tried to commercialize and profit off its products, when in fact it could not.
Indeed. And the same point should probably be made about Xerox PARC; a lot of really good basic research went on there, but the management of the company had little clue what to actually do with it. The graphical user interface, the WYSIWYG word processor, object-oriented programming -- all of these were PARC innovations, and Xerox did almost nothing to commercialise them. In the end, Xerox was simply content with being a photocopier manufacturer. Laser printers were close enough to that core business to fit in; graphical networked workstations, operating systems and programming langauges weren't.
I could be wrong. I would never doubt anything the Computer had told me.
I think this is more like Paranoia would be if you _were_ the Computer. And there were *other* Computers trying to achieve the opposite of your goals.
I don't know why anyone would be disappointed to learn this. Pen and paper isn't worse, it's a different medium
I think the point GP was trying to make is that there's no shortage of innovative and different pen & paper games, but an almost total dearth of them in the MMO market.
the word is banned unless for banks or if it is otherwise clear that the name in question can not lead to misunderstandings.
In which of these perfectly reasonable proposed domain names is it clear that no misunderstandings are possible?
westbank.se (a domain that might concern a region of a city that is divided by a river running north-south)
bankright.se (a domain for pilots, named after something they do on a regular basis)
bankonit.se (a domain concerning events that are considered likely to happen)
cloudbank.se (a domain concerning meteorological formations)
doggerbank.se (a domain concerning a sandbank found in the North Sea)
See, and I've worked for the Military, the State of Idaho, and currently a software company. They all required drug tests to start and the military tested regularly (nearly every month). All of the employers have in the contract that I could be tested at any time with or without reason. My current employer also states that if I am ever convicted of drug use or I test positive, that it is grounds for immediate termination. So, I'm not sure where you live; Amsterdam? And yeah, I have known people being terminated by the military and state for drug use. This company is rather small, so I'm not sure anyone here partakes in such activities.
You see, that's part of the problem of the lax employment laws in the USA. Here in the UK, for example, while your employer can require you to take a drugs test (as long as they included it in your employment contract), they can't automatically dismiss you if you fail. They have to be able to give a tribunal reasonable grounds for believing that your use of the drug you were using compromises your ability to do your job. Which means that if you can demonstrate that you have been doing your job reasonably well, they'll be SOL.
Sure, samba would be great for a universal file system if USB drives had Ethernet ports.
You mean like this one? NAS FTW.
Real geeks decrypt their mail by hand.
Quoted-printable =3D=3D fun!=20
"communicating through the backdoor port" == "talking out of your ass"?
The only outcry I heard was Israel screaming "ANTI-SEMITISM!!" when the reports surfaced.
Which, to be fair, it almost certainly was. There is no sign of any real evidence that support the reports.
What is, to my mind, totally unreasonable was the Isreali government's stance of blaming the entire country for the behaviour of a single independent newspaper.
On the other hand, when there is smoke... ...there's usually a right-wing media reporter fanning the flames somewhere.
Assuming that the execution method does not damage the organs in question.
Of course, this leaves the question of whether the execution method should be selected so as to minimize damage to the organs that are needed, and whether this affects the level of cruelty involved in the punishment. Clearly, it is quite important that cruelty (i.e. pain and/or panic felt by the subject) is minimized, and this could be at odds with selecting an execution method to preserve organs (eg. poison gas is probably completely out of the question).
I've long suspected similar code is the reason for those "You can't have more than 8 characters in your password..." limitations on some websites.
Chances are this is because they're using the original Unix 'crypt' function to hash passwords, which works by encrypting a base string with a 56-bit DES key derived from the password by taking the least 7 significant bits of each of the first 8 characters, ignoring the rest of them. By limiting the length to 8 chars, you avoid the security problem caused by people who think that 'password498+!%' is a strong password because it's got digits and symbols in it... except it hasn't, because they're ignored.
I really wish snprintf was available on my C implementation.
What platform are you working on that doesn't have snprintf or an equivalent?
my favorite hack is doing object click detection by rendering objects in a function pointer (4 byte pointers, rgba colour buffer .... ) -- when you click, a render pass is done with no lighting, effects, ... , and with each object coloured according object->onClick. To act on a click, read of the colour of the pixel under the mouse, and call it :)
That's just... fucked up. You should be using the 16-bit (or smaller if possible) index into a table of objects in the scene, of course. Pack it into the most significant bits of the r, g and b fields. That way you'll be resilient to any rounding errors produced during rendering (as long as you round back to the nearest valid value rather than truncate when you read the ID back in), will work on hardware that doesn't support alpha correctly (which isn't limited to Sun machines, either; I once had a PC with an early ATI card that fucked up alpha channels more often than not), and will even continue to work if some fool decides to use a hacked driver that forces offscreen buffers to 16-bit for performance reasons (I've never encountered this happening, but have heard that it does from time to time when people are trying to game rendering benchmarks).
Also, remember that once you've found which object was clicked, you can repeat the render but using vertex index as the colour rather than the object id. Just remember to set the shading mode to flat...
Finite State Machines. They really are quite difficult to implement without goto logic
int state = BEGIN_STATE;
while (state != EXIT_STATE)
{
switch (state)
{
case SOME_STATE_OR_OTHER:
state = NEXT_STATE;
break;
}
}
I fail to see the problem. Or there are table driven solutions that are much more amenable to automatic code generation.