In certain cultures, the suggested way to lose weight is to stay in the couch/bed. If you are active, it sparks appetite. If you stay in bed, it kills your appetite.
There was an interesting argument that we are fat because lipids were unfortunately named fats. So, people easily took the association that fats make you fat. If they had been called lipids, then lipids makes you fat would take a bit of convincing.
You say sugar but any forms of carbs also act as sugar. Starch turns into sugar very very quickly with enzymes. But, people have been eating starchy foods for a long time.
The other thing is the vegetarian movement. A local doctor on TV keeps saying "eat less animals and more plants". Animal fat, a major source of fat 50 years ago which was used for deep frying, has been replaced by corn/soyabean oil. The only way to get animal fat now is to collect bacon fat. The first association people make with bacon is artery-clogging.
Traffic analysis can be easily foiled by data poisoning. For each valid e-mail, generated 10,000 fake e-mails that are sent at random (or some other criteria).
After the receiver decrypts the messages, the fake e-mails will say they are fake and the client discards it. Add in some forwards too to make the problem harder.
Getting a list of e-mail addresses to send to is the problem. But, can be done with a client side solution.
So, even if the server is compromised, there is still possibility of secure e-mail.
Gah, the point of the article is that what is in the 12 steps don't matter. The steps could be "impersonate an orangutan in heat". What works is that people hang out together and fulfill a social need.
It's like people who say my Toyota is a foreign car. It's 85% value added in the US - a lot more American than almost any Ford or GM model.
This is the bullshit that foreign car companies came up with after the domestic went full on patriotic heart-tugs to sell cars.
They are assembled in the US. You can measure value added in any wonky way and come up with 85% value in the US.
The fact is they are engineered, designed outside the US and the main operations of the company are done outside the US. That is the true value of the company. Putting parts together is not the main part.
Anyone says anything bad about China/Chinese and some PC do-gooder brings up race.
It isn't about race, it's about the proven track record of a government tainting their country's products with viruses, trojans and backdoors.
It is about race. We don't like the Chinese but we justify it to ourselves in weird ways. It is our rational mind trying to come in terms with our unconscious feelings of racial hate.
Same with Indians. People froth at the mouth with rage when they see Indian H1Bs. However, when there are German H1Bs in the auto industry or British H1Bs in the financial sector, nobody bats an eye.
All I'm saying is be honest with yourself and consider it a possibility. Our brains naturally tends to classify things by race and only with extensive training (and maybe experience) does one perhaps overcome that.
At least it will save you a lot of mental anguish of contorting facts to fit your view.
And, remember the German Untermesh? Even if you are white, maybe you're not quite white white or Misching? Even if you are a shoe in for the Aryan certificate, maybe there is age, weight, height, posture, demeanor, clothes, accent or anything that will classify you as something less. We have to guard against the unconscious mind making spurious correlations (and the mind can be trained in just a few samples) and our rational mind coming up with serpentine arguments to justify what is essentially a faulty classification rule in the brain.
It is always easier to work with someone in the same office.
But, if there aren't any H1B slots left, companies will give their work to another contracting company who then specializes in sending that work overseas. We are a capitalist country and cheap labor will find its way.
It is cheaper to send work overseas but then there is overhead to doing that.
It's not the H1B that's making them indentured servants, it's a different part of immigration law.
Over 90% of the H1B are consumed by India and China but the US only allows 7% to be from a particular country to preserve diversity. So, workers in H1B from India and China tend to be on the wait list for years.
H1B is also an immigrant visa and a path to permanent residency is possible within 9 months of starting a job.
There have been attempts to clear the queues of Indian/Chinese but so far hasn't been done.
There is a different class of visa for that - employees of multinational companies going from one country to another. H1B is for filling technical positions that cannot be filled locally. Even if the entire H1B visa was scrapped tomorrow, then your scenario of developers in the US coordinating with their counterparts elsewhere would still work.
The price difference in labor is too great for the companies to simply ignore it. At the same time, the entrepreneurs in the 3rd world countries are building up the infrastructure to make a lot of things possible.
The H1B quota was highest around 2000ish during the.com bubble. It is in the Wikipedia article. It was around 120,000 then.
When the cost savings justify something, people will invest in the technology to make a lot of things possible. You can dismiss it as bull but this is exactly what happened when the H1B quotas were slashed.
Last time there was a major backlash against H1Bs, it resulted in outsourcing. If the workers couldn't come to the US, then the job would go to the worker.
In the end, H1B or no-H1B, eliminating local competition doesn't mean salaries will blow through the roof.
There are other reasons, of course. A big problem seems to be developers over-complicating problems. Sometimes going so far as to write an interesting problem that solves the problem they've been tasked with as a side-benefit. I replaced an 81k (1700 line) component with an 8k (300 line) component a couple weeks ago. Was the developer of the old component incompetent? Not at all. He just made the problem significantly harder than it was. I'd guess that it was to keep the otherwise dull project interesting -- or because he found the problem space interesting and wanted to explore it.
Do you realize that solving a problem and reducing a known solution to something simpler after the system is operational are two completely different problems. When the original problem was being formulated, there were probably many uncertainties and unknown relationships.Once the system is running, some relationships become clear and reductions are possible. I hate these smart/competent tags that people like to put on other people. The nature of the problem changes with time and obvious solutions are not obvious before.
As a vague example, would you call the design of a 30" CRT monitor bad because it weighs maybe 20 times more than the LCD one? Maybe during that LCD technology wasn't available. I know it's a weak example but the point I'm trying to make is that without looking at the conditions that the code was written in, it is impossible to make judgements that you are making.
You are part of the problem - trying to normalise everyone. In the UK there has been a theory of socialist origin that everyone has exactly the same ability, but opportunities differ. So they abolished Grammar schools (which were selective) and put all kids in the same "comprehensive" schools with, like your theory, the idea that the [apparently] bright kids would pull the [apparently] slow kids up to the same high level. What has happened is that everyone has ended up mediocre. Goes a lot to explain why the UK has fallen from being world technical leader to just saying "wow" when they see a new gadget from Taiwan.
There have been a gazillion experiments done and statistical analyses done regarding these matters.
The high IQ children will make the top leaders, scientists, artists etc of the future has been shown to be false over and over again.
You know what is the best predictor for latter success in life? Family. Successful parents produce mostly successful kids. The opportunities are not dictated by the school but by the parents themselves.
One experiments examined boarding school students before and after holiday breaks. They found out the largest differences between good students and bad students were during the holidays where the parents had influence.
This whole genetic/Darwinian/bell curve explanation for intelligence is a very nice theoretical one. While it may have some influence, in modern society the genetic factors are not the major influencing factors. The genetic gifts pale to the environmental gifts that one gets, especially from your home environment.
Humans aren't born with an ability for science or math or whatever else. They all have to be learned by using the tools that we have. While some may have slightly lower this or that, in the end, there is no way to know exactly the next stroke of genius will come from.
These discussions always remind me of an Einstein anecdote. Take 4 years out of the life of Einstein and you will find a man who has failed miserably.
This is silly. If they had luck back then, it would be wrong to assume they haven't improved their skills. Remember the Matthew effect. By getting that luck, they are now professional writers who spend all day honing their skills while the other mundane details are taken care by others. Those who didn't have luck have to find other way to make money and on top of that manage everything else in life which leaves very little time for developing their writing skills.
The main problem is that large parts of science and math are skills. But, they are taught as other subjects with a lecture and homework. You wouldn't learn swimming by listening to someone talk about it for an hour or learn to play the guitar by looking at someone playing it for an hour.
Seriously, there is even a saying among people that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Sitting in class and listening to lectures is the wrong way to learn something.
Before facebook was seen as the fuel for the social revolutions, twitter the next media platform but now because of all the NSA snooping revelation, it has made all our software companies look like snitches.
Furthermore, it was a lone whistle blower rather than the powerhouse companies that fought against this, it has the made the software companies look placid and complaint to questionable data gathering.
XBox One unveiling response was that it looked like a perfect spying machine not a gaming machine, new cellphones or OSes will be thought to be full of back doors and websites to be perceived to be constantly monitoring data and handing them over to the authorities.
This might drive customers away from US software industry products.
The real reason people are scared of big data is because the more and more we study it, the more and more it is proven that most people are very, very predictable. It's gotten to the point that companies optimize the color placement of objects in the background of their advertising to appeal to people they are targetting.
People are very predictable until they are not.
Taking the example of movies, some movies become huge hits even when they aren't that good. For example, Hangover. Now, Hangover 2 and 3 are essentially the same movie remade and it doesn't have the same impact.
If you see something as a predictor and start using it, there is no guarantee that it will last. We have no idea of what the predictor really means and it could be wiped out by exploiting the predictor even the smallest bit.
I find it hard to believe that a company like Microsoft would not have known this reaction was coming. Any trivial study of online sentiment data would have shown this in advance.
XBox 360 suffered from massive piracy because they could be modded easily. PS3 can now be modded but it enjoyed at least 4-5 years of relatively no modding. The phone home every day policy seems perfectly justifiable to combat modding.
I agree with you that people think China have somewhat a lower level of ability and are scared of the fact that one day they might just out-innovate us. American exceptionalism and such.
Companies from Taiwan have shown a glimpse what is possible and now with Chinese companies like Huawei and such coming forward, there is no question that China is now developing and innovating their own companies.
Just look at the computer. LCD screens, motherboards were refined and their costs cut from companies in Taiwan, US focused on software and microprocessors and so on. Look at a device like iPhone and it's an amalgam of worldwide innovation in harmony and symbiosis and technologies come from every part of the world.
When the billion strong China and India finally come to the party, the pace of science and technology will be staggering.
Science and technology isn't something finite that either can be here or in China. It can be both places or we can specialize in different fields. There is so much that needs to be in the done in the fields of science and so many places to for technology to go that there's plenty to go around if we could just stop bickering and get working. It's almost frustrating sometimes how glacial some improvements are. If you had a billion or two more in the sphere of science and technology development, just imagine how fast things would progress.
Every step of the way, China has defied the laws that economists have set down. China is the big fat exception to everything we say economies should do and behave. I know we all want to bring out examples from history to solidify our views but where economies go is as big a question mark. There is absolutely no guarantee that big things will work out the way we think it will looking at little things. Yes, we might have lost our pen manufacturing expertise but who is to say that we won't replace it with nano-technology expertise?
Also, you might be completely wrong that science and technology moves with manufacturing in the modern era, maybe it will work out the opposite. Freed from the humdrum of manufacturing, people might go heavily into research and innovation. Another scenario, if there is a breakthrough in robotics where factories can be automated, manufacturing will not pull science and technology, but the exact opposite will happen.
When Netflix furor broke out about being able to identify a person by the ratings they gave, it turns out that it was only possible when a person had rated an obscure movie (and had cross rated the same movie over different websites).
When Target furor broke out out predicting pregnancy, it was based largely on if you bought a certain type of cream.
I know data mining and such is an attractive but most times it just boils down to some obscure identifier over all the data. Optimizing this and balancing hundreds of factors, does that even work?
Where the manufacturing goes, so does the science and engineering. And that's what the Chinese want. They want what we had and we're giving it to them hand-over-fist for short term profits.
Everybody wants science and engineering. Name one country that will say no to advancing science and technology.
We're giving them that hand-over-fist? You'd rather have China stay a third world country? Wouldn't you want to add a billion more to the first world, creating new products, producing innovation and advancing science and technology? Or, would we rather find devious ways to keep a billion people in squalor so that we can enjoy whatever it is that you think you're enjoying from that.
Maybe the user data like what games they played for how long, what stuff they did with their XBox is really valuable data?
What if you're a publisher and you get instant feedback on how many people and how people are playing your games. They could test out different advertising strategies and immediately understand the impact of it.
Slashdot Mirror
In certain cultures, the suggested way to lose weight is to stay in the couch/bed. If you are active, it sparks appetite. If you stay in bed, it kills your appetite.
I wonder why we have the exact opposite belief.
There was an interesting argument that we are fat because lipids were unfortunately named fats. So, people easily took the association that fats make you fat. If they had been called lipids, then lipids makes you fat would take a bit of convincing.
You say sugar but any forms of carbs also act as sugar. Starch turns into sugar very very quickly with enzymes. But, people have been eating starchy foods for a long time.
The other thing is the vegetarian movement. A local doctor on TV keeps saying "eat less animals and more plants". Animal fat, a major source of fat 50 years ago which was used for deep frying, has been replaced by corn/soyabean oil. The only way to get animal fat now is to collect bacon fat. The first association people make with bacon is artery-clogging.
Sure, sounds really convincing. Profile of an RPG (however you want to define what an RPG profile is) equals license to kill children.
And your explanation is the perfect example of spin. Yeah, there was an RPG profile in there somewhere and so everything is legit.
Traffic analysis can be easily foiled by data poisoning. For each valid e-mail, generated 10,000 fake e-mails that are sent at random (or some other criteria).
After the receiver decrypts the messages, the fake e-mails will say they are fake and the client discards it. Add in some forwards too to make the problem harder.
Getting a list of e-mail addresses to send to is the problem. But, can be done with a client side solution.
So, even if the server is compromised, there is still possibility of secure e-mail.
Gah, the point of the article is that what is in the 12 steps don't matter. The steps could be "impersonate an orangutan in heat". What works is that people hang out together and fulfill a social need.
This is the bullshit that foreign car companies came up with after the domestic went full on patriotic heart-tugs to sell cars.
They are assembled in the US. You can measure value added in any wonky way and come up with 85% value in the US.
The fact is they are engineered, designed outside the US and the main operations of the company are done outside the US. That is the true value of the company. Putting parts together is not the main part.
It is about race. We don't like the Chinese but we justify it to ourselves in weird ways. It is our rational mind trying to come in terms with our unconscious feelings of racial hate.
Same with Indians. People froth at the mouth with rage when they see Indian H1Bs. However, when there are German H1Bs in the auto industry or British H1Bs in the financial sector, nobody bats an eye.
All I'm saying is be honest with yourself and consider it a possibility. Our brains naturally tends to classify things by race and only with extensive training (and maybe experience) does one perhaps overcome that.
At least it will save you a lot of mental anguish of contorting facts to fit your view.
And, remember the German Untermesh? Even if you are white, maybe you're not quite white white or Misching? Even if you are a shoe in for the Aryan certificate, maybe there is age, weight, height, posture, demeanor, clothes, accent or anything that will classify you as something less. We have to guard against the unconscious mind making spurious correlations (and the mind can be trained in just a few samples) and our rational mind coming up with serpentine arguments to justify what is essentially a faulty classification rule in the brain.
It is always easier to work with someone in the same office.
But, if there aren't any H1B slots left, companies will give their work to another contracting company who then specializes in sending that work overseas. We are a capitalist country and cheap labor will find its way.
It is cheaper to send work overseas but then there is overhead to doing that.
It's not the H1B that's making them indentured servants, it's a different part of immigration law.
Over 90% of the H1B are consumed by India and China but the US only allows 7% to be from a particular country to preserve diversity. So, workers in H1B from India and China tend to be on the wait list for years.
H1B is also an immigrant visa and a path to permanent residency is possible within 9 months of starting a job.
There have been attempts to clear the queues of Indian/Chinese but so far hasn't been done.
There is a different class of visa for that - employees of multinational companies going from one country to another. H1B is for filling technical positions that cannot be filled locally. Even if the entire H1B visa was scrapped tomorrow, then your scenario of developers in the US coordinating with their counterparts elsewhere would still work.
The price difference in labor is too great for the companies to simply ignore it. At the same time, the entrepreneurs in the 3rd world countries are building up the infrastructure to make a lot of things possible.
The H1B quota was highest around 2000ish during the .com bubble. It is in the Wikipedia article. It was around 120,000 then.
When the cost savings justify something, people will invest in the technology to make a lot of things possible. You can dismiss it as bull but this is exactly what happened when the H1B quotas were slashed.
Last time there was a major backlash against H1Bs, it resulted in outsourcing. If the workers couldn't come to the US, then the job would go to the worker.
In the end, H1B or no-H1B, eliminating local competition doesn't mean salaries will blow through the roof.
Do you realize that solving a problem and reducing a known solution to something simpler after the system is operational are two completely different problems. When the original problem was being formulated, there were probably many uncertainties and unknown relationships.Once the system is running, some relationships become clear and reductions are possible. I hate these smart/competent tags that people like to put on other people. The nature of the problem changes with time and obvious solutions are not obvious before.
As a vague example, would you call the design of a 30" CRT monitor bad because it weighs maybe 20 times more than the LCD one? Maybe during that LCD technology wasn't available. I know it's a weak example but the point I'm trying to make is that without looking at the conditions that the code was written in, it is impossible to make judgements that you are making.
There have been a gazillion experiments done and statistical analyses done regarding these matters.
The high IQ children will make the top leaders, scientists, artists etc of the future has been shown to be false over and over again.
You know what is the best predictor for latter success in life? Family. Successful parents produce mostly successful kids. The opportunities are not dictated by the school but by the parents themselves.
One experiments examined boarding school students before and after holiday breaks. They found out the largest differences between good students and bad students were during the holidays where the parents had influence.
This whole genetic/Darwinian/bell curve explanation for intelligence is a very nice theoretical one. While it may have some influence, in modern society the genetic factors are not the major influencing factors. The genetic gifts pale to the environmental gifts that one gets, especially from your home environment.
Humans aren't born with an ability for science or math or whatever else. They all have to be learned by using the tools that we have. While some may have slightly lower this or that, in the end, there is no way to know exactly the next stroke of genius will come from.
These discussions always remind me of an Einstein anecdote. Take 4 years out of the life of Einstein and you will find a man who has failed miserably.
This is silly. If they had luck back then, it would be wrong to assume they haven't improved their skills. Remember the Matthew effect. By getting that luck, they are now professional writers who spend all day honing their skills while the other mundane details are taken care by others. Those who didn't have luck have to find other way to make money and on top of that manage everything else in life which leaves very little time for developing their writing skills.
The main problem is that large parts of science and math are skills. But, they are taught as other subjects with a lecture and homework. You wouldn't learn swimming by listening to someone talk about it for an hour or learn to play the guitar by looking at someone playing it for an hour.
Seriously, there is even a saying among people that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Sitting in class and listening to lectures is the wrong way to learn something.
Before facebook was seen as the fuel for the social revolutions, twitter the next media platform but now because of all the NSA snooping revelation, it has made all our software companies look like snitches.
Furthermore, it was a lone whistle blower rather than the powerhouse companies that fought against this, it has the made the software companies look placid and complaint to questionable data gathering.
XBox One unveiling response was that it looked like a perfect spying machine not a gaming machine, new cellphones or OSes will be thought to be full of back doors and websites to be perceived to be constantly monitoring data and handing them over to the authorities.
This might drive customers away from US software industry products.
- possess enormous titanium balls
People are very predictable until they are not.
Taking the example of movies, some movies become huge hits even when they aren't that good. For example, Hangover. Now, Hangover 2 and 3 are essentially the same movie remade and it doesn't have the same impact.
If you see something as a predictor and start using it, there is no guarantee that it will last. We have no idea of what the predictor really means and it could be wiped out by exploiting the predictor even the smallest bit.
XBox 360 suffered from massive piracy because they could be modded easily. PS3 can now be modded but it enjoyed at least 4-5 years of relatively no modding. The phone home every day policy seems perfectly justifiable to combat modding.
I agree with you that people think China have somewhat a lower level of ability and are scared of the fact that one day they might just out-innovate us. American exceptionalism and such.
Companies from Taiwan have shown a glimpse what is possible and now with Chinese companies like Huawei and such coming forward, there is no question that China is now developing and innovating their own companies.
Just look at the computer. LCD screens, motherboards were refined and their costs cut from companies in Taiwan, US focused on software and microprocessors and so on. Look at a device like iPhone and it's an amalgam of worldwide innovation in harmony and symbiosis and technologies come from every part of the world.
When the billion strong China and India finally come to the party, the pace of science and technology will be staggering.
Science and technology isn't something finite that either can be here or in China. It can be both places or we can specialize in different fields. There is so much that needs to be in the done in the fields of science and so many places to for technology to go that there's plenty to go around if we could just stop bickering and get working. It's almost frustrating sometimes how glacial some improvements are. If you had a billion or two more in the sphere of science and technology development, just imagine how fast things would progress.
Every step of the way, China has defied the laws that economists have set down. China is the big fat exception to everything we say economies should do and behave. I know we all want to bring out examples from history to solidify our views but where economies go is as big a question mark. There is absolutely no guarantee that big things will work out the way we think it will looking at little things. Yes, we might have lost our pen manufacturing expertise but who is to say that we won't replace it with nano-technology expertise?
Also, you might be completely wrong that science and technology moves with manufacturing in the modern era, maybe it will work out the opposite. Freed from the humdrum of manufacturing, people might go heavily into research and innovation. Another scenario, if there is a breakthrough in robotics where factories can be automated, manufacturing will not pull science and technology, but the exact opposite will happen.
When Netflix furor broke out about being able to identify a person by the ratings they gave, it turns out that it was only possible when a person had rated an obscure movie (and had cross rated the same movie over different websites).
When Target furor broke out out predicting pregnancy, it was based largely on if you bought a certain type of cream.
I know data mining and such is an attractive but most times it just boils down to some obscure identifier over all the data. Optimizing this and balancing hundreds of factors, does that even work?
Everybody wants science and engineering. Name one country that will say no to advancing science and technology.
We're giving them that hand-over-fist? You'd rather have China stay a third world country? Wouldn't you want to add a billion more to the first world, creating new products, producing innovation and advancing science and technology? Or, would we rather find devious ways to keep a billion people in squalor so that we can enjoy whatever it is that you think you're enjoying from that.
Maybe the user data like what games they played for how long, what stuff they did with their XBox is really valuable data?
What if you're a publisher and you get instant feedback on how many people and how people are playing your games. They could test out different advertising strategies and immediately understand the impact of it.
They would rent it in that case. It would cost less than $30 for sure to rent a game for a break. That would be 15 days on RedBox.