This can be easily tested by anyone: "Dress up" for a week at work and see if your interactions with folks change. Sure you'll spend the first day or two being asked if you've got an interview - smile it off. But notice how folks respond to you once the shiny new outfit wears off & you become just another person to deal with. Many folks report that their words gain weight, their opinions suddenly become worth more, and random folks in the halls are more deferential. Oftentimes people find themselves behaving somewhat differently too, being more "businesslike."
I feel really sorry for you if you've had to work in environments populated by such blithering morons that this held even the vaguest amount of truth.
Fortunately, in any workplace where there's been enough mental stimulation to make it worth showing up in the morning, I have not seen this to be the case. The people who get a hush when they "Um..." in a meeting are the people who have traditionally been right and demonstrated insight and knowledgeability. You may wish to try finding a job where these attributes are valued and where people are able to pick up on them. It can be quite rewarding.
Theoretically,.com and.org are universal and beyond national governments.
So you expect them to be run by the International Non-Denominational Council of Flower-Wearing Happy People? Somebody has to organize things, and I don't see a whole lot of viable alternatives. The ITU/UN would be a thousand times worse than even the most depraved US government, as anyone who has worked with the International Technology Obstruction Organizations would readily attest.
It's a bummer that the US has messed this up so bad, but all this tells us is that we need to be getting on the US government's case to learn the realities of the technology and do a better job.
Just maybe one or two people who are not United Statesians are getting a little upset that the US seems to treat the entire world as its private fief. This is just another example.
Nope, this is an example of the opposite: That the United States quite often gets to do what it wants, just because it wants to, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea.
The Pequistes who began rewriting French to be free of foreign influence (e.g., the state declared "web" to be, henceforth, "oueb") don't seem to be aware that enforcing the insular nature of Quebec French is the most efficient way they could possibly kill the language. No lingua franca, spoken by a large majority within its region, as is French, ever died because of foreign signage and loan-words.
Never in all my years have I so wished I could take back all my posts on a topic so that I could instead mod someone else up.
Excuse me? One thing that keeps me confident that the US government has not yet taken leave of its senses is that it has not participated in the language wars.
In fact, the government produces materials in as many languages as necessary to serve various populations.
Spanish is rapidly on the rise, and there have been no serious efforts (aside from the occasional redneck crackpot) to check it. This is excellent news: If people want to speak Spanish, let them speak Spanish. If it works out for them, great. If not, they'll have to learn English. It's THEIR choice.
If you have decided that you want to protect your language, then what's insane about being specific
If you have decided that you want to protect your language, then you have already committed yourself to insanity.
"Protecting" a language in this fashion is like declaring with force of law that a certain joke is funny or that a given piece of art is beautiful.
The apex of this idiocy, of course, is France's Academie Francaise, 40 white-haired and morally bankrupt old farts who determine which words shall or shall not be permitted to enter the French vocabulary, based on their presumed consistency with contrived principles of linguistic purity.
Where do people come up with this sort of thing? Do they think the French language was handed down from God in one piece on a silver platter? Do they not realize that all languages are the product of mixing and swirling and borrowing and growing?
Language is a tool. People use it to communicate with each other, and built upon that, the rest of society functions. There are advantages to maintaining a modicum of consistency in a language, because this reduces ambiguities and makes it easier for people to understand each other. But nobody is arguing that the introduction of foreign words or the use of English is making it hard for people to understand each other. They are arguing that the purity of the language is being compromised.
Leaving aside from the fallacious presumption that the language is magically "pure" today despite the fact that it's changed considerably over the years, this is fundamentally a sentimental issue. Some people like the language the way it is. That's fine. But sentiment neither requires nor deserves force of law. If it is important to people, they'll find ways to assist it. If they don't care, then it deserves all the government protection that the US gives to the sanctity of a bad '70s movie: A cultural product whose time has come and gone.
This is nothing more than one more form of the most childish and destructive of humankind's many throwback urges: nationalism. And any government that coddles or encourages this nonsense is doing a grave disservice to its people.
The difference is that there is no natural right to eat fancy food. There [b]is[/b] a natural right to freedom of expresion. If my site is being blocked by a major backbone provider, then that is arguably infringing on my right to freedom of expression, and also damaging the rights of the provider's customers
People get really confused about freedom of expression.
They think it means that they have the right to say whatever they want, anywhere they want, any time they want, to anyone they want.
They think it means that everyone has to allow the use of their resources for anyone who wants to say anything, or who associates with someone else who wants to say anything.
Well, it doesn't.
Freedom of expression (at least the constitutional law construct in the USA) simply means that you can say what you want. It doesn't mean you can say it as loudly as you want, because you can't. It doesn't mean you can say it wherever you want, because you can't. And it certainly doesn't mean that any private party is obligated to let you say your piece when doing so causes them material harm.
Nobody is stopping anyone from saying anything. Not even above.net. Above.net makes very clear the terms under which they will facilitate the communication of third parties, and (at least for the purposes of this discussion) these terms have nothing to do with content, and therefore freedom of expression is not at issue.
Say I'm a landlord. One of my tenants runs a radio station. You have a show on that station. The tenant's antenna keeps falling down and the damage costs me lots of money. Finally I get sick of it and tell the tenant they ain't broadcasting anymore. Have I compromised your freedom of expression? Not at all. You can continue saying whatever you want. You just can't do it through my tenant anymore, because they failed to live up to the business obligations necessary for them to facilitate communication.
Use the time! You're getting paid to sit in front of a computer.
Write a book. Write some software. Learn something. Do something.
Most people count the hours until they're away from the workplace, so they can finally have some time to themselves to get their own thing done. And here it's being handed to you on a silver platter, with a paycheck to boot!
Reminds me of the kids who'd get bored two days into summer vacation. A whole world out there and nothing to do. Sheesh.
Porn sites will probably always exist in regular domains. But if they can avoid persecution by the government by switching to a different domain, I think that most would do so. The rest would be left to fend for themselves against whatever legislation Congress dreams up.
"The government"? There are 200-some independent (or independent-except-for-the-Queen) jurisdictions out there, many of them happy to have porn operators' business if it becomes too much trouble in the US (which I don't anticipate).
Porn is one of those things that, without complete universal disapproval, will always be around. Too many people want it, and they're all willing to be sneaky about it. When I was growing up, there was always a kid in every class who had a dirty magazine in his locker. Not much has changed, and I doubt much will. All the fretting and hand-wringing is a waste of time and, of more concern to me, all-too-frequently serves as an entrée for sweeping censorship that impacts my ability to conveniently get information I do want (like health and political info). Let's focus energy on positive things and let the merely tawdry sort itself out.
If you were a smart porn operator, you would. One of the biggest problems the porn industry faces is legislation to "protect the children." If porn were easily filterable, then the protecting the children is easy, and no longer a good reason to persecute the purvayors of porn.
Please explain www.whitehouse.com in the context of your pie-in-the-sky theory.
The porn industry has a (rather large) least-common-denominator segment which will attempt to gain market share using any and all means possible.
The existence of your "smart porn operator" is meaningless in the face of the existence of all the others; ".xxx" or ".sex" only has a use if all porn is there, and that ain't happening.
The only good one i hurd was.porn so it could be easily filtered.
That's the dumbest one of all. If you were a porn operator, you wouldn't want to be easily filtered. So you'd keep another address as well. So nothing is achieved.
Well, I am not so sure that it needs to be that statistical (except for reporting purposes to the porject managers for monitoring purposes). How about listing the 10 most common recommendations, or the the top 10%?
Yes, that would be trivially easy, but that's not what was being asked for here.
To my reading, the poster was looking for a system that would provide the most desirable items for a given user, based on that user's past ratings of other items.
So you need to model what that person likes and figure out how that correlates to what other people like.
If I like cheese and tomatoes, and you like cheese, tomatoes, and spinach, then presumably I might like spinach too. The system's confidence that I would like spinach grows in line with the following:
The number of people who have also expressed an affinity for cheese, tomatoes, and spinach
The number of people who have expressed that affinity but have not expressed a strong dislike for something else I do like
The strength of my indicated affinity for cheese and tomatoes (as expressed through multiple ratings or a particular strong rating)
My trustworthiness and predictability as a rater
Your trustworthiness and predictability as a rater
Alignment between your and my rating bias (do both of us tend to rate everything fairly high or low)
... and so on...
Not an easy problem at all. Especially when you want to optimize it for rapid matching.
It can't be that hard. I am sure that I could design a basic scheme pretty fast. Backend code would probably take me 4 to 8 hrs at most using PHP and MySQL...
I don't know about that...
Last time I got involved in a project like this I was knee-deep in stats books before I knew it. Brought in some statisticians who were scratching their heads tuning formulas more than a page long. Finally the funding came through for something else and it all got shelved.
In order to have a workable system, you have to account for all sorts of scoring biases, results significance that changes with sample size, variations in attribute preference, and of course troublemakers who want to fuck with the ratings for one reason or another.
Oh blather. You attribute to malice what is obviously explainable through incompetence.
No, I am pointing out that what you say is sufficiently common "wisdom" that it is easily abused. Therefore, it is not prudent to assume either until more information is available. Anyone who runs off in a conjectural sprint based on their preferred flavor of the conventional wisdom is not being productive in the service of the truth.
It would be pathetically illogical to believe there was a Microsoft conspiracy to introduce back doors to all their software.
History gives us plenty of precedents. Backdoors are nothing new, in both commercial and custom software. What is illogical is the assumption of perfect rationality on the part of unknown others (such as various Microsoft employees), as there is in fact no strong historical record of rational behavior.
The Holocaust trials held after WWII were extraordinary circumstances. Germany had just lost a war and had no respectable legal infrastructure. This is by no means the norm.
It most certainly is the norm to bring action in any jurisdiction where you can get traction.
Another point (and yes, IANAL) is that if you receive a piece of spam from a Taiwanese company selling products/services in Taiwan (and these are more and more common in reality), you have no legal recourse. After all, what are you gonna do? Have Taiwanese courts hold them responsible? What do they care? The company hasn't broken any Taiwanese laws. Have US courts intervene? This sets a bad precedent. Does this then mean that China can sue US citizens and companies over web pages that criticize Chinese policies? After all, in China, they would surely be illegal.
That you ANAL is clear. But do you at least read the news?
There is a list as long as my schlong of foreign companies and individuals who have had suits brought against them in absentia in US courts, and whose assets will be confiscated if those assets should ever turn up within US borders.
Remember the freezing of Iranian assets following the revolution there? Remember all the judgments against Cuba paid from US-located Cuban assets?
Any company that has so much as an old wet shoebox on US soil is exposed to US legal jurisdiction. The same goes for any other country.
Is a Taiwan-only company selling goods out of Taiwan going to be particularly scared by this? Perhaps not, unless the company's owner decides to vacation at Disneyland, or they decide to invest some of their spam money in a US brokerage account, or they engage in a financial transaction that even momentarily has a US institution as an intermediary. Then they damn well better be scared, because any judgment against them can legally be collected. It's happened thousands of times, and it'll happen again. And I for one would be thrilled to watch.
Wow, I think maybe your tin foil hat needs some adjustment today
I'm not saying that Microsoft does in fact have such a policy (i.e., to introduce backdoors). I am saying that it is pathetically naïve to assume that just because they deny it, it isn't so.
I'm a CISSP and I have been bound to an ethical agreement that I cannot perform any illegal or shady activities in the computer industry.
A cultlike yet entirely pointless genuflection before feel-good crap like nebulous self-enforced ethics agreements is one of the many reasons why I have forever given up on hiring anyone whose resume contains any of these certification acronyms.
Are you really so stupid as to think an unethical person will change their moral character because they have signed some insipid pledge? Thank God you have nothing to do with my network's security.
Time and time again, the holders of the multi-kilobuck laser-printed certificates demonstrate that the only reason they got them was because their general idiocy was preventing them from achieving advancement the old-fashioned way: by showing competence.
if you read the article, it states that microsoft has stated publically that the code was not there as "an implementation of corporate policy", but rather, produced by some engineers on their own during the netscape vs. microsoft times. i don't like microsoft either, but it's not as if this was some massive conspiracy by microsoft
Happy birthday! Sorry I'm a day late.
If you were Microsoft, and someone had discovered your evil plan to backdoor IIS, and you were confronted by reporters, would you:
A) Say "Yes, we had an evil plan to backdoor IIS, you got us! Nice catch!", or
B) Say "It was all the action of a rogue programmer who has been dealt with appropriately and it will never happen again. We find this sort of thing unacceptable and it is completely against Microsoft policy."
Hear, hear -- (many of) the Y2K enthusiasts deserve congratulations for speaking their mind and contributing greatly to the smooth transition that actually took place. (Anyone besides me have lots of water on hand that New Year's Eve?)
Oh hallelujah, it's another of the (admittedly few and far between in these wiser times) opportunities for Y2K wackos to congratulate themselves on their remarkable foresight in replacing their backyards with giant holes full of baked beans.
Y2K was the most egregious scam in my lifetime, and I'll probably still be able to say that the day I die.
The alarmists running around like freshly-beheaded chickens most certainly did not help the situation. They diverted resources from the few isolated situations where programmers actually were required, and caused programming services to be bid up to the point where the handful of legitimately at-risk institutions had a hard time managing the costs.
Nobody was more obstructive to effective resolution of the Y2K issue than the chirping hordes of Gary North acolytes, trousers soggy with thrill at the prospect of finally facing a catastrophe of such banality that even people of their chilling stupidity could get their heads around it. Nobody, that is, except for the opportunists, with their Y2K readiness shamware, their PowerPoint-and-doomsday consulting services, and their little green Y2-OK stickers. I can only quietly cheer at the fact that they're all now wholly and resoundingly discredited, hopefully for the remainder of their days.
"Suppose I show up, give them the demo of the exploit, impress the hell out of them, walk out the door at 5:30 with their CTO for a beer to talk about how to fix it. How am I gonna explain it to them if some skr1pt k1dd13 wanders by and hax0rz the living shit out of them tonight?"
Well, since you were out having a beer with their CTO, you probably have a pretty good alibi.
You'd be surprised at how many buildings actually have showers. Talk to your building engineer/super and see if there are any surprises.
Alternatively, you can probably get a free health club membership if you talk three or four of your co-workers into joining. Or just claim to have talked them into joining, even if they were already planning on it.
Move out of the city and I'd die of catastrophic brain hemorrhage within hours.
A little podunk one-horse farming town like DC is already enough to keep me pretty edgy. Once I get back to New York I can stop wasting my time on Slashdot and start living again.
What? I have to store crap on my computer because you want to know if I've been there before? What do I get out of it?
No, you don't have to, but the cost to you is nil in terms of time and disk space and any other resources, so in the general case there's no particular reason not to unless you get intrinsic reward from being a curmudgeon.
The question says "we know we have a larger number of anonymous users" [than people who register], a majority of the people who turn off cookies are going to be in this group.
But you can count the number of cookie-refusers and account for them by extrapolation. This way the confounding effects of IP-based tracking only affect the minority of your users who won't accept your ginger snaps.
There are too many confounding factors that can mess with your conclusions if you use IP numbers.
Depending on your target audience, the bias can correlate with geography (people in areas without vibrant independent ISP culture are more likely to use services like AOL that run users through proxies, and some countries - such as New Zealand - have almost everyone behind them), it can correlate with specific large institutions (if half your market is Time-Life, you'll only get one unique IP in the logs), it can correlate with almost anything.
Cookies are easy and painless and the small number of crackpots who are afraid of them are more likely to cut evenly across various demographics than are the entanglements created by assumptions about IP-human correspondence.
That's what cookies are for. If you know the problems with IP numbers, why try to use them for something that's clearly inappropriate and fraught with error?
Slashdot Mirror
I feel really sorry for you if you've had to work in environments populated by such blithering morons that this held even the vaguest amount of truth.
Fortunately, in any workplace where there's been enough mental stimulation to make it worth showing up in the morning, I have not seen this to be the case. The people who get a hush when they "Um..." in a meeting are the people who have traditionally been right and demonstrated insight and knowledgeability. You may wish to try finding a job where these attributes are valued and where people are able to pick up on them. It can be quite rewarding.
So you expect them to be run by the International Non-Denominational Council of Flower-Wearing Happy People? Somebody has to organize things, and I don't see a whole lot of viable alternatives. The ITU/UN would be a thousand times worse than even the most depraved US government, as anyone who has worked with the International Technology Obstruction Organizations would readily attest.
It's a bummer that the US has messed this up so bad, but all this tells us is that we need to be getting on the US government's case to learn the realities of the technology and do a better job.
Nope, this is an example of the opposite: That the United States quite often gets to do what it wants, just because it wants to, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea.
Never in all my years have I so wished I could take back all my posts on a topic so that I could instead mod someone else up.
The French language is thousands of years old???
Is this what they teach in the schools up there?
Excuse me? One thing that keeps me confident that the US government has not yet taken leave of its senses is that it has not participated in the language wars.
In fact, the government produces materials in as many languages as necessary to serve various populations.
Spanish is rapidly on the rise, and there have been no serious efforts (aside from the occasional redneck crackpot) to check it. This is excellent news: If people want to speak Spanish, let them speak Spanish. If it works out for them, great. If not, they'll have to learn English. It's THEIR choice.
If you have decided that you want to protect your language, then you have already committed yourself to insanity.
"Protecting" a language in this fashion is like declaring with force of law that a certain joke is funny or that a given piece of art is beautiful.
The apex of this idiocy, of course, is France's Academie Francaise, 40 white-haired and morally bankrupt old farts who determine which words shall or shall not be permitted to enter the French vocabulary, based on their presumed consistency with contrived principles of linguistic purity.
Where do people come up with this sort of thing? Do they think the French language was handed down from God in one piece on a silver platter? Do they not realize that all languages are the product of mixing and swirling and borrowing and growing?
Language is a tool. People use it to communicate with each other, and built upon that, the rest of society functions. There are advantages to maintaining a modicum of consistency in a language, because this reduces ambiguities and makes it easier for people to understand each other. But nobody is arguing that the introduction of foreign words or the use of English is making it hard for people to understand each other. They are arguing that the purity of the language is being compromised.
Leaving aside from the fallacious presumption that the language is magically "pure" today despite the fact that it's changed considerably over the years, this is fundamentally a sentimental issue. Some people like the language the way it is. That's fine. But sentiment neither requires nor deserves force of law. If it is important to people, they'll find ways to assist it. If they don't care, then it deserves all the government protection that the US gives to the sanctity of a bad '70s movie: A cultural product whose time has come and gone.
This is nothing more than one more form of the most childish and destructive of humankind's many throwback urges: nationalism. And any government that coddles or encourages this nonsense is doing a grave disservice to its people.
People get really confused about freedom of expression.
They think it means that they have the right to say whatever they want, anywhere they want, any time they want, to anyone they want.
They think it means that everyone has to allow the use of their resources for anyone who wants to say anything, or who associates with someone else who wants to say anything.
Well, it doesn't.
Freedom of expression (at least the constitutional law construct in the USA) simply means that you can say what you want. It doesn't mean you can say it as loudly as you want, because you can't. It doesn't mean you can say it wherever you want, because you can't. And it certainly doesn't mean that any private party is obligated to let you say your piece when doing so causes them material harm.
Nobody is stopping anyone from saying anything. Not even above.net. Above.net makes very clear the terms under which they will facilitate the communication of third parties, and (at least for the purposes of this discussion) these terms have nothing to do with content, and therefore freedom of expression is not at issue.
Say I'm a landlord. One of my tenants runs a radio station. You have a show on that station. The tenant's antenna keeps falling down and the damage costs me lots of money. Finally I get sick of it and tell the tenant they ain't broadcasting anymore. Have I compromised your freedom of expression? Not at all. You can continue saying whatever you want. You just can't do it through my tenant anymore, because they failed to live up to the business obligations necessary for them to facilitate communication.
In sum: Get some perspective.
Use the time! You're getting paid to sit in front of a computer.
Write a book. Write some software. Learn something. Do something.
Most people count the hours until they're away from the workplace, so they can finally have some time to themselves to get their own thing done. And here it's being handed to you on a silver platter, with a paycheck to boot!
Reminds me of the kids who'd get bored two days into summer vacation. A whole world out there and nothing to do. Sheesh.
"The government"? There are 200-some independent (or independent-except-for-the-Queen) jurisdictions out there, many of them happy to have porn operators' business if it becomes too much trouble in the US (which I don't anticipate).
Porn is one of those things that, without complete universal disapproval, will always be around. Too many people want it, and they're all willing to be sneaky about it. When I was growing up, there was always a kid in every class who had a dirty magazine in his locker. Not much has changed, and I doubt much will. All the fretting and hand-wringing is a waste of time and, of more concern to me, all-too-frequently serves as an entrée for sweeping censorship that impacts my ability to conveniently get information I do want (like health and political info). Let's focus energy on positive things and let the merely tawdry sort itself out.
Please explain www.whitehouse.com in the context of your pie-in-the-sky theory.
The porn industry has a (rather large) least-common-denominator segment which will attempt to gain market share using any and all means possible.
The existence of your "smart porn operator" is meaningless in the face of the existence of all the others; ".xxx" or ".sex" only has a use if all porn is there, and that ain't happening.
That's the dumbest one of all. If you were a porn operator, you wouldn't want to be easily filtered. So you'd keep another address as well. So nothing is achieved.
Yes, that would be trivially easy, but that's not what was being asked for here.
To my reading, the poster was looking for a system that would provide the most desirable items for a given user, based on that user's past ratings of other items.
So you need to model what that person likes and figure out how that correlates to what other people like.
If I like cheese and tomatoes, and you like cheese, tomatoes, and spinach, then presumably I might like spinach too. The system's confidence that I would like spinach grows in line with the following:
Not an easy problem at all. Especially when you want to optimize it for rapid matching.
I don't know about that...
Last time I got involved in a project like this I was knee-deep in stats books before I knew it. Brought in some statisticians who were scratching their heads tuning formulas more than a page long. Finally the funding came through for something else and it all got shelved.
In order to have a workable system, you have to account for all sorts of scoring biases, results significance that changes with sample size, variations in attribute preference, and of course troublemakers who want to fuck with the ratings for one reason or another.
No, I am pointing out that what you say is sufficiently common "wisdom" that it is easily abused. Therefore, it is not prudent to assume either until more information is available. Anyone who runs off in a conjectural sprint based on their preferred flavor of the conventional wisdom is not being productive in the service of the truth.
History gives us plenty of precedents. Backdoors are nothing new, in both commercial and custom software. What is illogical is the assumption of perfect rationality on the part of unknown others (such as various Microsoft employees), as there is in fact no strong historical record of rational behavior.
It most certainly is the norm to bring action in any jurisdiction where you can get traction.
That you ANAL is clear. But do you at least read the news?
There is a list as long as my schlong of foreign companies and individuals who have had suits brought against them in absentia in US courts, and whose assets will be confiscated if those assets should ever turn up within US borders.
Remember the freezing of Iranian assets following the revolution there? Remember all the judgments against Cuba paid from US-located Cuban assets?
Any company that has so much as an old wet shoebox on US soil is exposed to US legal jurisdiction. The same goes for any other country.
Is a Taiwan-only company selling goods out of Taiwan going to be particularly scared by this? Perhaps not, unless the company's owner decides to vacation at Disneyland, or they decide to invest some of their spam money in a US brokerage account, or they engage in a financial transaction that even momentarily has a US institution as an intermediary. Then they damn well better be scared, because any judgment against them can legally be collected. It's happened thousands of times, and it'll happen again. And I for one would be thrilled to watch.
I'm not saying that Microsoft does in fact have such a policy (i.e., to introduce backdoors). I am saying that it is pathetically naïve to assume that just because they deny it, it isn't so.
A cultlike yet entirely pointless genuflection before feel-good crap like nebulous self-enforced ethics agreements is one of the many reasons why I have forever given up on hiring anyone whose resume contains any of these certification acronyms.
Are you really so stupid as to think an unethical person will change their moral character because they have signed some insipid pledge? Thank God you have nothing to do with my network's security.
Time and time again, the holders of the multi-kilobuck laser-printed certificates demonstrate that the only reason they got them was because their general idiocy was preventing them from achieving advancement the old-fashioned way: by showing competence.
Happy birthday! Sorry I'm a day late.
If you were Microsoft, and someone had discovered your evil plan to backdoor IIS, and you were confronted by reporters, would you:
A) Say "Yes, we had an evil plan to backdoor IIS, you got us! Nice catch!", or
B) Say "It was all the action of a rogue programmer who has been dealt with appropriately and it will never happen again. We find this sort of thing unacceptable and it is completely against Microsoft policy."
Get your head out of the sand, please.
Oh hallelujah, it's another of the (admittedly few and far between in these wiser times) opportunities for Y2K wackos to congratulate themselves on their remarkable foresight in replacing their backyards with giant holes full of baked beans.
Y2K was the most egregious scam in my lifetime, and I'll probably still be able to say that the day I die.
The alarmists running around like freshly-beheaded chickens most certainly did not help the situation. They diverted resources from the few isolated situations where programmers actually were required, and caused programming services to be bid up to the point where the handful of legitimately at-risk institutions had a hard time managing the costs.
Nobody was more obstructive to effective resolution of the Y2K issue than the chirping hordes of Gary North acolytes, trousers soggy with thrill at the prospect of finally facing a catastrophe of such banality that even people of their chilling stupidity could get their heads around it. Nobody, that is, except for the opportunists, with their Y2K readiness shamware, their PowerPoint-and-doomsday consulting services, and their little green Y2-OK stickers. I can only quietly cheer at the fact that they're all now wholly and resoundingly discredited, hopefully for the remainder of their days.
Well, since you were out having a beer with their CTO, you probably have a pretty good alibi.
You'd be surprised at how many buildings actually have showers. Talk to your building engineer/super and see if there are any surprises.
Alternatively, you can probably get a free health club membership if you talk three or four of your co-workers into joining. Or just claim to have talked them into joining, even if they were already planning on it.
Move out of the city and I'd die of catastrophic brain hemorrhage within hours.
A little podunk one-horse farming town like DC is already enough to keep me pretty edgy. Once I get back to New York I can stop wasting my time on Slashdot and start living again.
No, you don't have to, but the cost to you is nil in terms of time and disk space and any other resources, so in the general case there's no particular reason not to unless you get intrinsic reward from being a curmudgeon.
But you can count the number of cookie-refusers and account for them by extrapolation. This way the confounding effects of IP-based tracking only affect the minority of your users who won't accept your ginger snaps.
There are too many confounding factors that can mess with your conclusions if you use IP numbers.
Depending on your target audience, the bias can correlate with geography (people in areas without vibrant independent ISP culture are more likely to use services like AOL that run users through proxies, and some countries - such as New Zealand - have almost everyone behind them), it can correlate with specific large institutions (if half your market is Time-Life, you'll only get one unique IP in the logs), it can correlate with almost anything.
Cookies are easy and painless and the small number of crackpots who are afraid of them are more likely to cut evenly across various demographics than are the entanglements created by assumptions about IP-human correspondence.
That's what cookies are for. If you know the problems with IP numbers, why try to use them for something that's clearly inappropriate and fraught with error?