There's no such thing as bad thinking. There's such a thing as not following the train of thought to conclusions. Thought experiments and sking "what if" is great, and we need that, but it needs to be followed with scientific discipline, like attempts at establishing a null hypothesis, whether this can lead to a falsifiable theory, and what steps can be taken to mitigate bias. As this is presented, it smells of veiled theism, published without the scientific precautions in place. That's bad, but asking "what if" is not.
IQ tests aren't meaningless, they're just not the solution to every question about intelligence. They're mainly useful in measuring things relevant to formal education before all the new changes.
Actually, no. IQ is a measure of how good you are, compared to your age group, at solving unfamiliar problems applying common knowledge all test takers are expected to have, or knowledge given by the test itself. The education level should not influence the score at all - if it does, the test is flawed.
What's expected common knowledge differs for age groups. A six year old can be expected to know that water flows downwards, while a sixteen year old can be expected to know about exceptions like siphons and capillary actions. The individual tests should reflect this, and a test for a six year old might ask which way wooden shingles should be put on a roof, while a test for a sixteen year old might ask which edge of wooden shingles is most important to seal.
Ideally, a test subject should flag all tests that they already know the answer to, and it should be excluded from the result. So someone whose father is a roof layer should not have the answer count. Unfortunately, people (shock!) cheat and don't flag questions that they get for free, so generally this is not done, and more theoretical question are used instead of practical ones, which introduces a bias.
All that said, there is a correlation between higher education and IQ score, with people with a higher than average IQ score being more likely to attend higher education. But that does not mean that the education level is the cause. External factors that affect both IQ score and education level, like nutrition, health care and wealth/poverty are more likely causes. For people who test to the same score as young, when tested later in life, after adjusting for external factors like alcohol/drug use and health issues, there should not be a significant difference in score on the later test based on education level. Education generally doesn't change a person's intelligence, it just gives more resources that the intelligence can be applied to.
Minnesota had a gubernatorial election in 1962 that wasn't decided until May. Paper ballots were used, but there were still many ambiguous ballots that were disputed by the two sides.
That's a legislative problem, not a voting counting problem. Instead of allowing party observers to hold up an election, they should be observers only. The count should be done at least twice - one at the polling station, and one at a central location by different people who won't know the origin of the urn. If the two counts for any urn match, the urn is approved. If they don't match, it's sent to a third location for a recount, and if that result matches any of the two preceding results, the urn is approved. The minute the the number of approved urns are enough that the remaining urns don't affect the results, the election result are officially declared. Only if the three results are different, will there be a delay from the streamlined process, and then only for those urns. The observers can use their collected evidence to sue for change in the voting process and re-election, but not the election result itself. The voting process must be free from political interference.
First, machine counting is more accurate than hand counting.
No, it is not. With hand-counting, the votes are always counted multiple times by different people. That gives greater accuracy than a machine that will make the same errors over and over again.
Your comparisons to other countries are not valid (you didn't even cite a single example to compare).
That's deliberate. If I did mention a single country, someone would jump in and say "oh, but country X is different because it has [fewer people|more people|bigger districts|smaller districts]". It won't take you long to find countries where machine voting is illegal, and election results are still available the same night.
And the onus should be on those who claim that machine voting increases speed to provide evidence for that, because not counting with a machine is the baseline.
Look at the time needed just to hand count a few counties in Florida in Bush v. Gore.
That was hand counting machine votes, you dolt. "Dimpled chads" or misplaced optically readable stamp marks is not a problem where the votes are designed for human and not machine parsing.
No, they don't. Manual counting works quite well. Observers who oversee (but cannot inferfere with) the counting and double counting works great in many countries. And they even get their results quicker than the US, both for small and large districts.
A panopticon approach penalizes some of the best workers. Those who can do more in less time get penalized for "goofing off" when taking the breaks which is what makes them capable of doing more and better work in the first place. While someone who works slower but all the time is seen as more productive, even if doing less, or not getting a "mind clear" between tasks. Employers need to realize that they don't get to dictate every aspect of a person's life while at work - they're not slaves. They buy their work. If two people do the same work by the same company deadline, they deserve the same pay. If one finishes early and then goofs off, or can multitask and do his job just as well or better while at the same time reading news, that doesn't hurt the company. If the company wants more work because the employee appears to have spare time, they need to negotiate that with a proportionally higher pay compared to other, slower workers. Not just crack the whip, or the best workers will leave and you end up with the worst.
It's kinda like being the admin for a server farm, only that you don't get paid, but in return, neither do you have to pay for anything, you're not responsible for anything you do to the computers and you can do with the software and data on them whatever you please.
Oh, you still pay for it. The fees include both hardware, operating costs and administration (done by largely unqualified people, but still administration of sorts). It's just cheaper due to scale. And you're still responsible - the contracts tend to have clauses that you must not interfere with the hosting or other services. So if you deliberately break the hardware through software (quite doable, alas), don't expect them to blindly replace broken gear forever.
This strikes me as being a very poor source to use if you're interested in overall desktop statistics. People visit government domains much more often from work than from home, and government workers visit government sites more often than non-government workers do. Alternative OSes are less common in government jobs than non-government positions, and there's probably a skew one way or the other in generic home vs. work statistics.
Not to mention government sites that throw up a warning that you're using an unsupported browser or won't let you do certain functions unless you use "approved" browsers.
I wonder what amazon.com's numbers are. They're probably a better reflection of browser use.
Probably not. You then count consumers, which is not the same as desktop users.
At any rate, Linux is probably underreported because of some big companies that throw up "Unsupported browser" warnings or even block access unless the user sets the browser identity string to match one of the common Windows browsers. Some Linux browsers even have an easy button to do just that.
they removed the seeding feature, I can't get it to not play the same 5 bands over and over, there are dozens of bands in the genre that I like, but the damn thing only plays the same 5.
That's a mixed blessing. There were also too many idiots who had no clue what genre music belonged to, or even what a genre was, and used it as a personal grouping system. So you could listen to hard rock and get heavy metal, country or even rap presented as hard rock. It's still a partial problem, in that those who now do assign genres tend to work by an uneducated guess system and over-assignment, so some genres are full of stuff that just doesn't belong there, while other genres are almost empty.
There's far too much rap and people don't want to support it.
I think there might even be a correlation between liking rap and not being willing to pay for services.
But the main problem is not being able to exclude rap. You have to include all the other genres, and still get plenty of rap results because they're also marked as belonging to other genders - some clueless marketing guy (sorry, I repeat myself) probably thinks this increases listening and ad exposure... So no matter what you do, if you happen to dislike the most popular genre these days, you're going to drown it it.
- Too many devices that can't play the music. - Too many places you can't play the music. - No support for premium quality. - No support for turning off loudness compression. - No support for gapless playback (which is a big deal for some genres). - A search system that doesn't have exclusions, making searches worthless because you drown in what you don't want. (This is not just a problem with Pandora, but quite a few product search engines. That isn't a mitigating factor, though.) - Ads becoming more intrusive over time, and not being throttled when bandwidth is low enough to barely support the music. - Too expensive compared to going to youtube.
I'm surprised that it has as many users as it does.
by looking only at a portion of the low results you're achieving absolutely nothing.
3 star and 4 star are not low results. In a five star system, 3 is average, i.e. no worse than the average competition, and 4 is better than average. 2, 3 and 4 star scores are mostly results from people who actually though before submitting, unlike most of the 5 star scores and some of the 1 star scores, which are binary scores.
IMBD knows this too, and their ranking algorithm takes into account that scores of 10, and to a lesser extent 1, carry far less information useful for ranking[*], and especially when a movie is new. [*]: They carry other useful information, like fad trend information or how love and hatred of companies or individuals reflect on products. But for ranking purposes, top scores in particular are too tainted to be of much value.
And what makes you think there's nothing to compare it against? Are you telling me the many millions of apps on the Play Store are all 100% unique in terms of functionality? Have you never abandoned one music player in favour of another?
That there are apps to compare against for most apps doesn't mean that the reviewers have something to compare it against. Most consumers try something, and if they like it, they'll give it 5 stars. Even worse, they are more likely to rate an app that's new to them than one that they continue to use over a long time.
When looking at reviews, I discard all 5 star reviews as unreliable, and then subtract 1 and finally multiply by 2.5, and I get a more believable 0-10 score. Similar for scoress on other sites with different numbers - discard the top and normalize to a 0 based scale.
These are the member projects of SFC. An attack on SFC is an attack on these members as well.
No, it isn't. That's binary thinking, Bruce. Members can, and often do disagree to greater or lesser extent with the organizations they are members of, and the organizations do not automatically speak for them.
I can only presume that your strong feelings about the subject clouded your objectivity for a bit here. You can be righteous or you can be right, and most of the time you're right. This time, however, my perception is that you paint this a bit more black and white, us and them, than it really is.
and right now only blackhats will want to know the technical details.
That is so not true. In technical detail, we call this a big fat lie.
I understand why the details are not disclosed, but I certainly don't agree with the pareto rationale of better protecting the large number of non-technical users at the expense of the security minded who can use the information in a productive way.
Those with little money can't afford those shops because the prices are higher to cover all the returns. That's a problem - not for the haves, but for the have-nots.
It is selfish in the same way as using the fitting room in a store. "the rent of the floor space has to be paid from the sales. All customers pay the same, even the ones who do not use the fitting room".
It's different in that what has been tried on in a changing room can still be sold as new, while what has been returned in an online purchase cannot. The seller cannot know the extent of use, and have to assume that it has been used.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no such thing as bad thinking. There's such a thing as not following the train of thought to conclusions. Thought experiments and sking "what if" is great, and we need that, but it needs to be followed with scientific discipline, like attempts at establishing a null hypothesis, whether this can lead to a falsifiable theory, and what steps can be taken to mitigate bias.
As this is presented, it smells of veiled theism, published without the scientific precautions in place. That's bad, but asking "what if" is not.
IQ tests aren't meaningless, they're just not the solution to every question about intelligence. They're mainly useful in measuring things relevant to formal education before all the new changes.
Actually, no. IQ is a measure of how good you are, compared to your age group, at solving unfamiliar problems applying common knowledge all test takers are expected to have, or knowledge given by the test itself. The education level should not influence the score at all - if it does, the test is flawed.
What's expected common knowledge differs for age groups. A six year old can be expected to know that water flows downwards, while a sixteen year old can be expected to know about exceptions like siphons and capillary actions. The individual tests should reflect this, and a test for a six year old might ask which way wooden shingles should be put on a roof, while a test for a sixteen year old might ask which edge of wooden shingles is most important to seal.
Ideally, a test subject should flag all tests that they already know the answer to, and it should be excluded from the result. So someone whose father is a roof layer should not have the answer count.
Unfortunately, people (shock!) cheat and don't flag questions that they get for free, so generally this is not done, and more theoretical question are used instead of practical ones, which introduces a bias.
All that said, there is a correlation between higher education and IQ score, with people with a higher than average IQ score being more likely to attend higher education. But that does not mean that the education level is the cause. External factors that affect both IQ score and education level, like nutrition, health care and wealth/poverty are more likely causes.
For people who test to the same score as young, when tested later in life, after adjusting for external factors like alcohol/drug use and health issues, there should not be a significant difference in score on the later test based on education level.
Education generally doesn't change a person's intelligence, it just gives more resources that the intelligence can be applied to.
Minnesota had a gubernatorial election in 1962 that wasn't decided until May. Paper ballots were used, but there were still many ambiguous ballots that were disputed by the two sides.
That's a legislative problem, not a voting counting problem.
Instead of allowing party observers to hold up an election, they should be observers only.
The count should be done at least twice - one at the polling station, and one at a central location by different people who won't know the origin of the urn. If the two counts for any urn match, the urn is approved. If they don't match, it's sent to a third location for a recount, and if that result matches any of the two preceding results, the urn is approved.
The minute the the number of approved urns are enough that the remaining urns don't affect the results, the election result are officially declared.
Only if the three results are different, will there be a delay from the streamlined process, and then only for those urns.
The observers can use their collected evidence to sue for change in the voting process and re-election, but not the election result itself. The voting process must be free from political interference.
First, machine counting is more accurate than hand counting.
No, it is not. With hand-counting, the votes are always counted multiple times by different people. That gives greater accuracy than a machine that will make the same errors over and over again.
Your comparisons to other countries are not valid (you didn't even cite a single example to compare).
That's deliberate. If I did mention a single country, someone would jump in and say "oh, but country X is different because it has [fewer people|more people|bigger districts|smaller districts]".
It won't take you long to find countries where machine voting is illegal, and election results are still available the same night.
And the onus should be on those who claim that machine voting increases speed to provide evidence for that, because not counting with a machine is the baseline.
Look at the time needed just to hand count a few counties in Florida in Bush v. Gore.
That was hand counting machine votes, you dolt. "Dimpled chads" or misplaced optically readable stamp marks is not a problem where the votes are designed for human and not machine parsing.
However ballots have to be machine countable.
No, they don't. Manual counting works quite well.
Observers who oversee (but cannot inferfere with) the counting and double counting works great in many countries. And they even get their results quicker than the US, both for small and large districts.
This may be worth 0.02 or less but I believe the vulnerabilities can be mitigated somewhat by using disk encryption.
And what do you use to encrypt and decrypt that data, so it never passes through the CPU or south bridge?
A panopticon approach penalizes some of the best workers.
Those who can do more in less time get penalized for "goofing off" when taking the breaks which is what makes them capable of doing more and better work in the first place. While someone who works slower but all the time is seen as more productive, even if doing less, or not getting a "mind clear" between tasks.
Employers need to realize that they don't get to dictate every aspect of a person's life while at work - they're not slaves. They buy their work. If two people do the same work by the same company deadline, they deserve the same pay. If one finishes early and then goofs off, or can multitask and do his job just as well or better while at the same time reading news, that doesn't hurt the company.
If the company wants more work because the employee appears to have spare time, they need to negotiate that with a proportionally higher pay compared to other, slower workers. Not just crack the whip, or the best workers will leave and you end up with the worst.
It's kinda like being the admin for a server farm, only that you don't get paid, but in return, neither do you have to pay for anything, you're not responsible for anything you do to the computers and you can do with the software and data on them whatever you please.
Oh, you still pay for it. The fees include both hardware, operating costs and administration (done by largely unqualified people, but still administration of sorts). It's just cheaper due to scale.
And you're still responsible - the contracts tend to have clauses that you must not interfere with the hosting or other services. So if you deliberately break the hardware through software (quite doable, alas), don't expect them to blindly replace broken gear forever.
and everyone forgeting that Pandora is only available in the U.S.
The parent post covered that: "- Too many places you can't play the music."
This strikes me as being a very poor source to use if you're interested in overall desktop statistics. People visit government domains much more often from work than from home, and government workers visit government sites more often than non-government workers do. Alternative OSes are less common in government jobs than non-government positions, and there's probably a skew one way or the other in generic home vs. work statistics.
Not to mention government sites that throw up a warning that you're using an unsupported browser or won't let you do certain functions unless you use "approved" browsers.
I wonder what amazon.com's numbers are. They're probably a better reflection of browser use.
Probably not. You then count consumers, which is not the same as desktop users.
At any rate, Linux is probably underreported because of some big companies that throw up "Unsupported browser" warnings or even block access unless the user sets the browser identity string to match one of the common Windows browsers. Some Linux browsers even have an easy button to do just that.
Chrome and Android are Linux hosted, much like an appliance running a Linux kernel where a user can neither see it nor access it.
That is true for most GNU/Linux distributions too. In very few of them will the user interact with the Linux kernel, nor want to.
Maybe it blows your mind that there's no discrepancy between 3 and 4 stars not being low results and 5 stars meaning someone liked it?
they removed the seeding feature, I can't get it to not play the same 5 bands over and over, there are dozens of bands in the genre that I like, but the damn thing only plays the same 5.
That's a mixed blessing. There were also too many idiots who had no clue what genre music belonged to, or even what a genre was, and used it as a personal grouping system. So you could listen to hard rock and get heavy metal, country or even rap presented as hard rock.
It's still a partial problem, in that those who now do assign genres tend to work by an uneducated guess system and over-assignment, so some genres are full of stuff that just doesn't belong there, while other genres are almost empty.
There's far too much rap and people don't want to support it.
I think there might even be a correlation between liking rap and not being willing to pay for services.
But the main problem is not being able to exclude rap. You have to include all the other genres, and still get plenty of rap results because they're also marked as belonging to other genders - some clueless marketing guy (sorry, I repeat myself) probably thinks this increases listening and ad exposure...
So no matter what you do, if you happen to dislike the most popular genre these days, you're going to drown it it.
- Too many devices that can't play the music.
- Too many places you can't play the music.
- No support for premium quality.
- No support for turning off loudness compression.
- No support for gapless playback (which is a big deal for some genres).
- A search system that doesn't have exclusions, making searches worthless because you drown in what you don't want. (This is not just a problem with Pandora, but quite a few product search engines. That isn't a mitigating factor, though.)
- Ads becoming more intrusive over time, and not being throttled when bandwidth is low enough to barely support the music.
- Too expensive compared to going to youtube.
I'm surprised that it has as many users as it does.
from people who actually though before submitting
Which shouldn't be confused with people who actually proofread before submitting.
Mea culpa.
by looking only at a portion of the low results you're achieving absolutely nothing.
3 star and 4 star are not low results. In a five star system, 3 is average, i.e. no worse than the average competition, and 4 is better than average.
2, 3 and 4 star scores are mostly results from people who actually though before submitting, unlike most of the 5 star scores and some of the 1 star scores, which are binary scores.
IMBD knows this too, and their ranking algorithm takes into account that scores of 10, and to a lesser extent 1, carry far less information useful for ranking[*], and especially when a movie is new.
[*]: They carry other useful information, like fad trend information or how love and hatred of companies or individuals reflect on products. But for ranking purposes, top scores in particular are too tainted to be of much value.
And what makes you think there's nothing to compare it against? Are you telling me the many millions of apps on the Play Store are all 100% unique in terms of functionality? Have you never abandoned one music player in favour of another?
That there are apps to compare against for most apps doesn't mean that the reviewers have something to compare it against.
Most consumers try something, and if they like it, they'll give it 5 stars. Even worse, they are more likely to rate an app that's new to them than one that they continue to use over a long time.
When looking at reviews, I discard all 5 star reviews as unreliable, and then subtract 1 and finally multiply by 2.5, and I get a more believable 0-10 score. Similar for scoress on other sites with different numbers - discard the top and normalize to a 0 based scale.
The absence of a microphone is the main reason I would allow BD players network access before I would allow access to a TV.
These are the member projects of SFC. An attack on SFC is an attack on these members as well.
No, it isn't. That's binary thinking, Bruce.
Members can, and often do disagree to greater or lesser extent with the organizations they are members of, and the organizations do not automatically speak for them.
I can only presume that your strong feelings about the subject clouded your objectivity for a bit here. You can be righteous or you can be right, and most of the time you're right. This time, however, my perception is that you paint this a bit more black and white, us and them, than it really is.
The saying is "Like Saturn, Revolution devours its children".
Another law that's pertinent is that legal pursuits will always cause exactly as much harm as good.
and right now only blackhats will want to know the technical details.
That is so not true. In technical detail, we call this a big fat lie.
I understand why the details are not disclosed, but I certainly don't agree with the pareto rationale of better protecting the large number of non-technical users at the expense of the security minded who can use the information in a productive way.
Those with little money can't afford those shops because the prices are higher to cover all the returns. That's a problem - not for the haves, but for the have-nots.
It is selfish in the same way as using the fitting room in a store. "the rent of the floor space has to be paid from the sales. All customers pay the same, even the ones who do not use the fitting room".
It's different in that what has been tried on in a changing room can still be sold as new, while what has been returned in an online purchase cannot. The seller cannot know the extent of use, and have to assume that it has been used.