No just a company that tries to block things that are not work-related. I guess Slashdot doesn't count because it has news stories about programming?:)
The tea party started as an anti-government (i.e. anti-Bush at the time) organization that was derided by Fox News when it started to gain prominence. In 2008 after Obama was elected, conservatives no longer saw it as a threat once the anti-government sentiment shifted to Obama, and the tea party became easily co-opted.
Within a pretty short time, every sensible person left the movement. Once Sarah Palin became to poster child,the transformation was complete.
That's not true. It counts in the vote totals. It just doesn't add points to any candidates total. If a lot of people did this, you might see an election result like Democrat 20% Republican 20% Total = 40%. That would represent no mandate and show to the voting public how ripe for change the system is. Obviously we are not there yet.
That's a good point. Primaries are in my opinion, the most important elections. But I think it makes more sense to join the party whoe primary matters more, rather than just joining the dominant party in your state. In california democrats have open primaries (meaning democrats and independents can vote in democrat primaries) and republicans have closed primaries (meaning only republicans can vote in the republican primary), so I switch between independent and republican in order to keep my options open.
I might vote for Hillary over some person typical dumb hypocrite republican if I lived in a swing state, but let me pose this suggestion:
If you don't live in a swing state, a vote for the lesser of 2 evils doesn't really come with a benefit. I live in california. We haven't been a swing state in a long time. I very much preferred Obama to McCain, but I felt quite free in voting for a someone that was not going to continue the wars in iraq and afghanistan without any guilt that I was adversely affecting the outcome of the election.
I think it's important to vote for something other than the status quo, especially when your vote doesn't really matter in terms of deciding the winner. None of my votes have ever really mattered in this way, and therefore every vote I have every cast has not been for the winner. Luckily it's not a horse race.
In the San Diego mayoral race, my vote probably did have a pretty good chance of counting, but I was so disgusted with both candidates that I wrote in "None of the above", even though there was no spot to write someone in. I made my own "write in spot" filled in my "none of the above" and checked it.
I don't know how productive this was, but it sure made me feel better than voting for either candidate or simply not voting.
I am quite familiar with the work of Mr. Searle. I am firmly in the camp of people who think he is absolutely wrong. In fact I have this comic strip on the wall in my office.
The problem is that once the human graders go away the random essay generator can be designed to specifically exploit the computer grader's evaluation criteria while completely ignoring human readability.
You are describing a scenario where the computer grader is not as good as the human grader. It exactly this scenario I was not talking about.
I said:
Once we are able to make computer software that can actually understand essays as well as a human it will be should be perfectly competent to grade an essay.
and...
I am all for the automated essay graders, but only after they can be proven to be as competent as a human.
In other words I am saying that when the computer is able to detect a random essay just as good as a human (i.e. it is no more exploitable than a human), then it's totally fine to use them.
Yes Hillary Clinton is a liar.... But Benghazi? seriously? If ever there was an example of republicans trying to make a controversy out of essentially nothing, this is it.
One of the most corrupt administrations in US history? You must have a very short attention span.
I'm sure by the time we have another democrat president, that administration will be the most corrupt in US history. Have you ever heard of "The boy who cried wolf". These claims that the current administration is the most X in US history start to get pretty old especially when they are obviously false to anyone who has any sense of history.
And I will state for the record that I am not a democrat.
This has nothing to do with the tea party. If you are a rich person who wants to spend his money on advocating for a particular political cause by buying tv spots, printing signs, etc, I don't see how a free society can make this illegal.
Money is not speech. Money is money. But forbidding someone from spending their own money on bringing their message to more people is a limiting their freedom of speech.
If, for example, someone tried to destroy baseball by making it illegal to purchase all baseball equipment. They might say, I'm not limiting people's freedom to play baseball, I am only regulating how people spend their money. Money isn't baseball. It's trivially true that money isn't baseball. Preventing people from spending their own money on baseball equipment is nonetheless a limitation on people's freedom to play baseball.
"Money is speech" is a trivially false statement if taken literally and is different than "Freedom of speech entails the freedom to spend your money own money on spreading your message". I think it's unfortunate that this is how the debate is framed (or rather misframed), because it discourages people from examining the real issue, and encourages them to simply take a straw man position without realizing it.
I am not in the tea party. I have problems with the citizens united ruling as it pertains to the personhood of corporations, but this oversimplification of "Money != speech" I find very disturbing.
We already lived in that system, we're simply no longer pretending that we don't. I am certainly in favor of transparency. Now it is transparent that our system is corrupt. This is a vast improvement over when it was possible to argue that corruption wasn't a big problem because it was illegal.
I think about $10 from everyone would probably do it. I don't think it's easy to get $10 from everyone, but it's not that much money per person.
The problem is not that there isn;t enough money to go against the Koch brothers. The problem is that for the average person, they'd rather have whatever they were going to buy with that $10 than the potential to destroy super PACs.
What would be cool is if this super PAC returned everyone's money if they don't raise the critical mass of dollars to make a difference. Ultimately that's my main worry. I'd rather donate $1000 to a cause that would give me my money back if it failed to raise enough money to make a real difference, than donate $10 that was gone forever regardless of whether it is used effectively.
Most of my charitable donations go to Doctors without borders because every little bit goes a long way. I don't want to donate money to a political campaign that is only going to raise like half a million dollars for the same reason I don't want to donate to a new charity that may or may not get off the ground.
Even my cousin who worked for a small charity said my money was better spent at doctors without borders or oxfam than at his small charity organizations.
She was going to be president in 2008 too. Luckily enough voters saw through her race baiting tactics the first time around. She might be president in 2016, but I don't think it's a sure thing. It's possible voters may actually elect an honest liberal with integrity as their nominee instead.
I think that people rich and poor donate money to political campaigns for the purpose of making this country better. Thinking that the vast majority of money spent in politics isn't self interested is naive.
I personally think the influence of money over politics is a symptom rather than a cause for the problems we have. But it's pretty clear that some huge percent of the money spent in politics is basically corruption.
If you think Hillary Clinton is going to do anything beyond furthering the status quo, you're dreaming. Even if you wanted liberal judges, there are lots of people who would do a far better job than Hillary Clinton.
She is a dishonest person willing to lie, and mislead for personal gain. Remember when she circulated pictures of Obama in a "muslim outfit" to get racist democrats to vote for her in the primary? Remember when she claimed that she was under sniper fire in bosnia to try to inflate her foreign policy credentials?
I am not religious, but I will be praying that she does not win the democratic nomination for 2016.
If we want real change, we'll stop voting for the lesser of 2 evils, and break out of this democrat vs. republican false dichotomy. Surely this is easier than a constitutional amendment to stop people from spending their own money how they see fit.
Because going looking strictly at monthly expenses, it is cheaper than paying for a phone outright, even in installments while still paying for a cell phone plan that would cost exactly the same whether you provided your own phone or wanted the provider to subsidize it.
I am saying that consumers don't need to sign up for plans where they are paying for their phone to be subsidized (i.e. lots of companies offer alternatives), and you are saying that the consumers that choose plans that force them to pay for phone subsidies regardless of whether they actually get a "free" phone have no choice.
This is like if I said "Why would anybody buy books at barnes and noble when they can get them cheaper online at Amazon", and you said "For the people who are barnes and noble customers, the online prices at barnesandnoble.com are actually more expensive than buying the books in the store because of shipping costs.
I'm sure there are good reasons why people choose verizon over T-mobile, but the question is not why people who have already decided to be verizon customers on a regualr 2 year plan are not buying their own phones. We already know why they aren't once you make that assumption.
The question isn't "Are smartphones tied to contracts?", the question is "Why are smartphones still tied to contracts". Companies *can* (and some do) separate the smartphone from the service contract, and this fact shows that it is possible. The question is "Now that everyone knows it is possible to decouple these things, why do some customers still sign up for traditional contracts with subsidized phones.
The quote I presented was IMO a good rationale for why "Some people can't pay for a phone up front" is not a good explanation, because they have the option to not pay up front without signing a 2 year phone subsidized contract.
When cell phones started to permeate the market, somehow they all ended up being subsidized by plans. I'm sure there are reasons why this happened (I have some ideas), but I'm not going to speculate.
It started to become apparent to some people that this was not actually a good deal for the customer, and some consumers and companies have negotiated a new mutually beneficial deal (e.g. T-mobile gets more customers, and it's customers get a cheaper more rational experience).
I think the main force at work here is just momentum. There was a lot of people who were just used to 2 year contracts and free cell phones. It wasn't the optimal solution, but it requires no mental effort to stick with what you know. Unless you have a really bad experience, the inertia of laziness is pretty influential.
As more and more people switch to T-mobile, the other telecoms start offering similar plans, and it requires less mental effort to switch. I switched as soon as T-mobile announced their new system. I was fed up. I didn't know if I would like it. Now my friends have the benefit of having me as a guinea pig, and switching to a plan without subsidies is less of a mystery.
I don't think that phone contracts were exceptionally hard to understand if one really takes the time to analyze them, but mpst people just have better things to spend their time on than exploring the intricacies of phone contracts.
Did you even read what he said? He directly addresses exactly what you just said.
And it can't be as simple as "Some people don't have the money to pay for the phone up front," because most places you enter into a cell phone service contract, will also let you buy the phone outright and set up an installment plan to pay it off (which of course is basically the same thing as paying it off over your two-year contract). You have to get a credit check to get on an installment plan, but you have to get a credit check to get on a cell service contract too. So that can't be the complete explanation either.
Nobody. That's why they attach a paycheck by the end of the week to that activity. If you think that's not fair, you can forego your paycheck at any time.
I think you missed my point. It's also boring to calculate logarithms by hand. Before we had digital computers, skilled human computers (usually women) were paid to tediously do this work. It wasn't fair or unfair. It was a waste of human effort to do something so tedious. With the advent of computers, that human effort could be spent on much more interesting things, like programming computers to perform more tedious tasks.
ON AVERAGE. It happens that it is the outstanders the ones that have more potential and you are just conciously throwing all them by the bathtub.
If a computer can score an essay between where all the human graders scored the essay, it is the humans that are incorrectly failing to recognize the outlier as the standout.
If 4 humans score a paper 4 5 7 9, and a computer scores it a 6, and it turns out the paper is actually brilliant, it is the human graders that performed the worst, not the computer.
Humans can detect outstanders, computers do not.
Computers do what humans program them to do. If computers cannot do something that humans can do, it is just a matter of humans failing to understand how their own faculties work. All it takes is for 1 human to realize how he is doing what he is doing and then translating that into a computer program to make the program capable of the same thing.
By saying "computers can never play world class chess", what you are really saying is, "humans will never be able to understand how they themselves play world class chess"
BZZT! Wrong. Thanks for playing. We were specifically talking about writing style not content. Grammar is predictable which is why your word processor can help to correct you. Try reading the actual content of the post next time.
Also saying shit like "BZZT! Wrong. Thanks for playing." just makes you look like a pretentious asshole.
If it becomes the case that writing style is able to be analyzed and produced by a computer algorithm, it seems to me that having a good writing style will become like having good arithmetic skills (i.e. less importance is placed on these skills as they become trivial for machines to replicate), and ironically this ability to automatically test and reproduce skills drives those very skills into obscurity.
It seems like the skills that computers can't do yet are the only ones that it is worthwhile for humans to do.
Slashdot Mirror
No just a company that tries to block things that are not work-related. I guess Slashdot doesn't count because it has news stories about programming? :)
The tea party started as an anti-government (i.e. anti-Bush at the time) organization that was derided by Fox News when it started to gain prominence. In 2008 after Obama was elected, conservatives no longer saw it as a threat once the anti-government sentiment shifted to Obama, and the tea party became easily co-opted.
Within a pretty short time, every sensible person left the movement. Once Sarah Palin became to poster child,the transformation was complete.
Writing "none of the above" is not voting.
That's not true. It counts in the vote totals. It just doesn't add points to any candidates total. If a lot of people did this, you might see an election result like Democrat 20% Republican 20% Total = 40%. That would represent no mandate and show to the voting public how ripe for change the system is. Obviously we are not there yet.
That's a good point. Primaries are in my opinion, the most important elections. But I think it makes more sense to join the party whoe primary matters more, rather than just joining the dominant party in your state. In california democrats have open primaries (meaning democrats and independents can vote in democrat primaries) and republicans have closed primaries (meaning only republicans can vote in the republican primary), so I switch between independent and republican in order to keep my options open.
I was wondering if this was the case. I would have looked for myself, but the link was blocked from my work computer. Thanks for the info.
I might vote for Hillary over some person typical dumb hypocrite republican if I lived in a swing state, but let me pose this suggestion:
If you don't live in a swing state, a vote for the lesser of 2 evils doesn't really come with a benefit. I live in california. We haven't been a swing state in a long time. I very much preferred Obama to McCain, but I felt quite free in voting for a someone that was not going to continue the wars in iraq and afghanistan without any guilt that I was adversely affecting the outcome of the election.
I think it's important to vote for something other than the status quo, especially when your vote doesn't really matter in terms of deciding the winner. None of my votes have ever really mattered in this way, and therefore every vote I have every cast has not been for the winner. Luckily it's not a horse race.
In the San Diego mayoral race, my vote probably did have a pretty good chance of counting, but I was so disgusted with both candidates that I wrote in "None of the above", even though there was no spot to write someone in. I made my own "write in spot" filled in my "none of the above" and checked it.
I don't know how productive this was, but it sure made me feel better than voting for either candidate or simply not voting.
I am quite familiar with the work of Mr. Searle. I am firmly in the camp of people who think he is absolutely wrong. In fact I have this comic strip on the wall in my office.
http://www.visuallanguagelab.c...
The problem is that once the human graders go away the random essay generator can be designed to specifically exploit the computer grader's evaluation criteria while completely ignoring human readability.
You are describing a scenario where the computer grader is not as good as the human grader. It exactly this scenario I was not talking about.
I said:
Once we are able to make computer software that can actually understand essays as well as a human it will be should be perfectly competent to grade an essay.
and...
I am all for the automated essay graders, but only after they can be proven to be as competent as a human.
In other words I am saying that when the computer is able to detect a random essay just as good as a human (i.e. it is no more exploitable than a human), then it's totally fine to use them.
Yes Hillary Clinton is a liar.... But Benghazi? seriously? If ever there was an example of republicans trying to make a controversy out of essentially nothing, this is it.
One of the most corrupt administrations in US history? You must have a very short attention span.
I'm sure by the time we have another democrat president, that administration will be the most corrupt in US history. Have you ever heard of "The boy who cried wolf". These claims that the current administration is the most X in US history start to get pretty old especially when they are obviously false to anyone who has any sense of history.
And I will state for the record that I am not a democrat.
This has nothing to do with the tea party. If you are a rich person who wants to spend his money on advocating for a particular political cause by buying tv spots, printing signs, etc, I don't see how a free society can make this illegal.
Money is not speech. Money is money. But forbidding someone from spending their own money on bringing their message to more people is a limiting their freedom of speech.
If, for example, someone tried to destroy baseball by making it illegal to purchase all baseball equipment. They might say, I'm not limiting people's freedom to play baseball, I am only regulating how people spend their money. Money isn't baseball. It's trivially true that money isn't baseball. Preventing people from spending their own money on baseball equipment is nonetheless a limitation on people's freedom to play baseball.
"Money is speech" is a trivially false statement if taken literally and is different than "Freedom of speech entails the freedom to spend your money own money on spreading your message". I think it's unfortunate that this is how the debate is framed (or rather misframed), because it discourages people from examining the real issue, and encourages them to simply take a straw man position without realizing it.
I am not in the tea party. I have problems with the citizens united ruling as it pertains to the personhood of corporations, but this oversimplification of "Money != speech" I find very disturbing.
We already lived in that system, we're simply no longer pretending that we don't. I am certainly in favor of transparency. Now it is transparent that our system is corrupt. This is a vast improvement over when it was possible to argue that corruption wasn't a big problem because it was illegal.
I think about $10 from everyone would probably do it. I don't think it's easy to get $10 from everyone, but it's not that much money per person.
The problem is not that there isn;t enough money to go against the Koch brothers. The problem is that for the average person, they'd rather have whatever they were going to buy with that $10 than the potential to destroy super PACs.
What would be cool is if this super PAC returned everyone's money if they don't raise the critical mass of dollars to make a difference. Ultimately that's my main worry. I'd rather donate $1000 to a cause that would give me my money back if it failed to raise enough money to make a real difference, than donate $10 that was gone forever regardless of whether it is used effectively.
Most of my charitable donations go to Doctors without borders because every little bit goes a long way. I don't want to donate money to a political campaign that is only going to raise like half a million dollars for the same reason I don't want to donate to a new charity that may or may not get off the ground.
Even my cousin who worked for a small charity said my money was better spent at doctors without borders or oxfam than at his small charity organizations.
She was going to be president in 2008 too. Luckily enough voters saw through her race baiting tactics the first time around. She might be president in 2016, but I don't think it's a sure thing. It's possible voters may actually elect an honest liberal with integrity as their nominee instead.
I think that people rich and poor donate money to political campaigns for the purpose of making this country better. Thinking that the vast majority of money spent in politics isn't self interested is naive.
I personally think the influence of money over politics is a symptom rather than a cause for the problems we have. But it's pretty clear that some huge percent of the money spent in politics is basically corruption.
If you think Hillary Clinton is going to do anything beyond furthering the status quo, you're dreaming. Even if you wanted liberal judges, there are lots of people who would do a far better job than Hillary Clinton.
She is a dishonest person willing to lie, and mislead for personal gain. Remember when she circulated pictures of Obama in a "muslim outfit" to get racist democrats to vote for her in the primary? Remember when she claimed that she was under sniper fire in bosnia to try to inflate her foreign policy credentials?
I am not religious, but I will be praying that she does not win the democratic nomination for 2016.
If we want real change, we'll stop voting for the lesser of 2 evils, and break out of this democrat vs. republican false dichotomy. Surely this is easier than a constitutional amendment to stop people from spending their own money how they see fit.
And a PAC groups all the money from these small individual sources into 1 large source of money to pay to politicians with...
Because going looking strictly at monthly expenses, it is cheaper than paying for a phone outright, even in installments while still paying for a cell phone plan that would cost exactly the same whether you provided your own phone or wanted the provider to subsidize it.
I am saying that consumers don't need to sign up for plans where they are paying for their phone to be subsidized (i.e. lots of companies offer alternatives), and you are saying that the consumers that choose plans that force them to pay for phone subsidies regardless of whether they actually get a "free" phone have no choice.
This is like if I said "Why would anybody buy books at barnes and noble when they can get them cheaper online at Amazon", and you said "For the people who are barnes and noble customers, the online prices at barnesandnoble.com are actually more expensive than buying the books in the store because of shipping costs.
I'm sure there are good reasons why people choose verizon over T-mobile, but the question is not why people who have already decided to be verizon customers on a regualr 2 year plan are not buying their own phones. We already know why they aren't once you make that assumption.
Who doesn't have time to read a whole article? It's not like Bennett needs to learn to be more brief or anything.
You should read the whole text. It's not like Bennett's posts could have been summarized. There were probably lots of great insights in there.
The question isn't "Are smartphones tied to contracts?", the question is "Why are smartphones still tied to contracts". Companies *can* (and some do) separate the smartphone from the service contract, and this fact shows that it is possible. The question is "Now that everyone knows it is possible to decouple these things, why do some customers still sign up for traditional contracts with subsidized phones.
The quote I presented was IMO a good rationale for why "Some people can't pay for a phone up front" is not a good explanation, because they have the option to not pay up front without signing a 2 year phone subsidized contract.
When cell phones started to permeate the market, somehow they all ended up being subsidized by plans. I'm sure there are reasons why this happened (I have some ideas), but I'm not going to speculate.
It started to become apparent to some people that this was not actually a good deal for the customer, and some consumers and companies have negotiated a new mutually beneficial deal (e.g. T-mobile gets more customers, and it's customers get a cheaper more rational experience).
I think the main force at work here is just momentum. There was a lot of people who were just used to 2 year contracts and free cell phones. It wasn't the optimal solution, but it requires no mental effort to stick with what you know. Unless you have a really bad experience, the inertia of laziness is pretty influential.
As more and more people switch to T-mobile, the other telecoms start offering similar plans, and it requires less mental effort to switch. I switched as soon as T-mobile announced their new system. I was fed up. I didn't know if I would like it. Now my friends have the benefit of having me as a guinea pig, and switching to a plan without subsidies is less of a mystery.
I don't think that phone contracts were exceptionally hard to understand if one really takes the time to analyze them, but mpst people just have better things to spend their time on than exploring the intricacies of phone contracts.
And it can't be as simple as "Some people don't have the money to pay for the phone up front," because most places you enter into a cell phone service contract, will also let you buy the phone outright and set up an installment plan to pay it off (which of course is basically the same thing as paying it off over your two-year contract). You have to get a credit check to get on an installment plan, but you have to get a credit check to get on a cell service contract too. So that can't be the complete explanation either.
Nobody. That's why they attach a paycheck by the end of the week to that activity. If you think that's not fair, you can forego your paycheck at any time.
I think you missed my point. It's also boring to calculate logarithms by hand. Before we had digital computers, skilled human computers (usually women) were paid to tediously do this work. It wasn't fair or unfair. It was a waste of human effort to do something so tedious. With the advent of computers, that human effort could be spent on much more interesting things, like programming computers to perform more tedious tasks.
ON AVERAGE. It happens that it is the outstanders the ones that have more potential and you are just conciously throwing all them by the bathtub.
If a computer can score an essay between where all the human graders scored the essay, it is the humans that are incorrectly failing to recognize the outlier as the standout.
If 4 humans score a paper 4 5 7 9, and a computer scores it a 6, and it turns out the paper is actually brilliant, it is the human graders that performed the worst, not the computer.
Humans can detect outstanders, computers do not.
Computers do what humans program them to do. If computers cannot do something that humans can do, it is just a matter of humans failing to understand how their own faculties work. All it takes is for 1 human to realize how he is doing what he is doing and then translating that into a computer program to make the program capable of the same thing.
By saying "computers can never play world class chess", what you are really saying is, "humans will never be able to understand how they themselves play world class chess"
BZZT! Wrong. Thanks for playing. We were specifically talking about writing style not content. Grammar is predictable which is why your word processor can help to correct you. Try reading the actual content of the post next time.
Also saying shit like "BZZT! Wrong. Thanks for playing." just makes you look like a pretentious asshole.
If it becomes the case that writing style is able to be analyzed and produced by a computer algorithm, it seems to me that having a good writing style will become like having good arithmetic skills (i.e. less importance is placed on these skills as they become trivial for machines to replicate), and ironically this ability to automatically test and reproduce skills drives those very skills into obscurity.
It seems like the skills that computers can't do yet are the only ones that it is worthwhile for humans to do.