Oh, come on. "Stuff that matters" used to be 90% case mods. That's why so many sites were "slashdotted" back in the day -- they were all people's personal Web sites where they had posted their leet case mods.
The immune system is not an on-or-off sort of thing. As a transplant patient required to take immune suppressants, let me tell you that I do not want to get the flu. While it will (probably) not kill me, I could easily be in bed for weeks or end up hospitalized. Influenza is pretty common, but it's also a pretty badass virus, certain variations of which have killed millions of perfectly healthy people.
I'm not sure that disinfecting a laptop is necessary, and I'm very sure that Slashdot would be a bad forum for AIDS treatment advice, as you say. I'm just saying that the trained medical professionals have advised me to be very careful with handwashing/etc, and I'm far from living in a bubble.
Economics makes claims about demand driving up efficiency and thus correcting prices as if it can go on forever
That's extremely ignorant of you. Even the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand has a graph right at the top which shows increases in supply as being progressively more expensive. This notion you have that economics fails to account for fundamental scarcity is extremely foolish.
But it's not nearly that simple. For almost all commodities, higher prices do in fact increase the supply. It's not like we can create things out of nothing, but in the real world there are ores of varying richness, in places that are more or less difficult to reach, etc. This means that an increase in price makes it economically feasible to mine more of the stuff.
As for food -- we'll never have an infinite amount of it, but in the modern world we devote a relatively small percentage of our resources to the production of food. We could use central planning to determine the correct amount of food to produce and who is going to produce it, but we've had better luck using price as a mechanism. At no point in our history have we found a global cure for starvation.
I've been taking this drug for years. I'll tell ya, having three or four mouth sores at all times helps you lose weight! And when you can't come to work for a month because of a raging... common cold, your idiot boss totally understands!
Sigh... luckily, these days, I'm on a lower dosage (and with a different boss).
The usability and simplicity of a schema which means nothing? Because that's what we have now. Commercial sites with.org are all over the place, like right here. Non-profit sites with.com are everywhere. Nobody knows what.net is even supposed to mean..edu is probably the last remaining holdout of sanity.
Personally I've had pretty good luck simply avoiding airlines that have caused me problems in the past (like ATA or Delta for instance). It seems that many people assume that the "US Airline Industry" is some homogenous blob, but I have not found this to be the case. Of course, I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where I typically have a choice of which airline to fly.
As for the US versus Europe angle, the worst airline I have ever flown on, by a huge margin, was British Airways.
Indeed -- leave it to OS hackers to dream up a worthless technological solution to a UI problem. If the interface was designed to give users the faintest notion of what was happening on their computers, we would see progress. Instead we give people interfaces that pretend to simplify complexity while really just glossing over important details, and then we whine about users being uneducated about the details that we've glossed over.
I experienced that problem once, when I broke my arm and had to wear a cast for a long period of time. It sucked, and I didn't even get to go to space.
It's too bad, I guess, that the actual constitution isn't written in such a way as to "grant" rights; rather, it's written as a restriction on what the US Government can do. As the Government's charter, the Constitution applies to all actions of the federal government, regardless of where they are performed or who is involved.
Of course, the parts of the Constitution that talk about voting rights extend such rights only to citizens. That is a different part of the document.
Well of course. It doesn't even require them to change their position. The whole "micro-evolution versus macro-evolution" argument has always been about accepting that 1+1=2 while denying that 1 * 1000000 = 1000000 because it "hasn't been observed and can never be observed". Now that somebody managed to get to a million, they'll claim we have to count up to a billion to prove anything. Same argument, different scale.
It seems much more likely to me that these problems get fixed when people call Apple support (especially since you get a free support period with the OS upgrade) and the support tech opens a ticket that makes its way up the chain. Seems more productive than having some employee read a forum post that says "WFT APPLE MY WIRLESS DOESNTT WORK" and forwarding that to a Divination Engineer to determine what the problem is.
It's the same "fiasco" that the Tiger release was, according to people on the Internet. For every major Mac OS release, some people have problems, some of them quite serious, and these dominate Mac discussion forums for months. Nobody ever collects any statistics from the general user population that would allow us to determine whether one release was better or worse than another, and the general user population is not well-represented in Mac discussion forums.
On a side note, I have personally found it very interesting to watch the way people on Mac forums approach problems versus Windows or Linux users. Often there is an implicit assumption that any problem encountered is an OS bug (sometimes even if nobody else can be found who is experiencing the same problem) and you see demands that it be fixed in the next release. Possibly this is because a high proportion of the problems experienced by Mac users are indeed OS bugs.
You'd owe some cash -- the entire metroplex is estimated at 6.1 million persons, many of whom do not have weapons. China alone has 7 million soldiers (incl. reserves); the US has nearly 3 million. According to Wikipedia, at least, which is probably more accurate than your guess.
Nonsense -- it's the LACK of a plural second-person pronoun in "proper" English that is disgusting (and inefficient). "Y'all" is the best hope we have for fixing this bug, and y'all should start using it as much as possible.
I'm arguing that the statistics you have presented are not capable of supporting the premise that Hillary has a dramatically better chance of winning the election versus McCain. That is not a refusal to acknowledge your statistics; it's a refusal to agree with your statistics without critical analysis.
Back then polls were predicting a Kerry win by a large margin. In this year's race, there have been times when Obama was stronger against McCain, and times when Hillary was stronger. There has never been a difference dramatic enough to support the notion that the sky is falling now that Obama is the nominee. If you did Kucinich vs McCain, for instance, you would see a much clearer picture, but that is just not the case here.
Up to this point, I've stuck to the case that the polls as they stand are not sufficient statistical evidence to make this claim, but you could go much further than that. Currently we are polling a split Democratic party versus a united Republican one, and I think that creates an inherent bias that favors Republican candidates. As it is unlikely that Hillary will still be campaigning for the nomination in November, these polls are not really representative of the likely political environment on Election Day.
It's not "misinformation" that the site predicted 298 the day before the vote; that's very true. Yes, the next day the numbers changed by 30 electoral votes.
What this shows is, even that close to the election, using polls to predict electoral votes turned out to be useless and unreliable, with large swings on a daily basis. Right now we are five months away; explain to me why we should expect those kinds of numbers (on any site) to be more useful now than they were that day.
Please explain what part of this is misinformation.
Yes but, if you look at his "Win Percentage Tracker", this is true only of the last few weeks. Which does not support the poster's hand-wringing, "oh noes, we could lose now!" rhetoric. Polls will move around over time.
Your cynical post seems smart to the casual observer. It is not.
First of all, unless you cherry-pick polls, there is no statistical evidence that Hillary (or some other candidate) would be more successful against McCain. This is a talking point of the Clinton campaign only. You can go on about how names "ring", but without statistical evidence you are frankly spouting nonsense. Your gut feeling that Americans care about someone's name is simply not supported by real facts.
Your "learn from history" canard reminds us of 2004, when Democratic primary voters chose John Kerry on this cynical view that he was the most likely to "win". Well, he lost. So much for that. The refrain you might have heard from moderate voters four years ago was that they didn't know what Kerry was about, and that his campaign seemed more anti-Bush than pro-anything.
Obama is not going to win the votes of right-wingers; he will win as all Democrats win, by appealing to the middle and the left. The moderates in this country are smarter than you seem to think.
Isn't this experiment an expansion and continuation of that sort of research? Not really so much something that's "Been Done"? Are you saying that the previous work has already answered all these questions?
The story mentions that this guy has worked with smaller simulations before, so it's not as if we're being told that this is some brilliant new idea. It's just sort of cool that somebody built such a large sphere for this purpose.
I think you're being a little too hard on Slashdotters in general. For one thing, a lot of us have had to support Windows systems of all shapes and sizes, and we've all collected various frustrations over the years. It's natural to see some people letting off steam when the topic comes up.
As for the pattern you've noticed, I seem to recall that there was a lot of praise around here for Windows 2000 upon release, and looking back it's obvious that Microsoft accomplished a whole lot with that particular release. Since then they've used a huge amount of programmer time (with smart programmers, no doubt) and the tangible accomplishments seem very small. Maybe Vista is not so bad (haven't used it myself), but does it really represent what we should expect from a programming organization as well-funded as Microsoft?
Personally, I'm reminded of Intel's mis-steps in the 90s, with Itanium. It's not that Itanium was the worst project ever -- it just seemed like so much talent had managed to produce not very much product. I would argue that Linux and OSX have made comparatively great strides in the same period, and there is room to seriously raise the question of what is wrong with Windows development.
But the camera being "there" is useless if nobody is watching it. Why do you "feel" 100x safer (surely not based on statistical evidence) if you're not paying taxes to have someone watch the video feed real-time?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on. "Stuff that matters" used to be 90% case mods. That's why so many sites were "slashdotted" back in the day -- they were all people's personal Web sites where they had posted their leet case mods.
The immune system is not an on-or-off sort of thing. As a transplant patient required to take immune suppressants, let me tell you that I do not want to get the flu. While it will (probably) not kill me, I could easily be in bed for weeks or end up hospitalized. Influenza is pretty common, but it's also a pretty badass virus, certain variations of which have killed millions of perfectly healthy people.
I'm not sure that disinfecting a laptop is necessary, and I'm very sure that Slashdot would be a bad forum for AIDS treatment advice, as you say. I'm just saying that the trained medical professionals have advised me to be very careful with handwashing/etc, and I'm far from living in a bubble.
Economics makes claims about demand driving up efficiency and thus correcting prices as if it can go on forever
That's extremely ignorant of you. Even the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand has a graph right at the top which shows increases in supply as being progressively more expensive. This notion you have that economics fails to account for fundamental scarcity is extremely foolish.
But it's not nearly that simple. For almost all commodities, higher prices do in fact increase the supply. It's not like we can create things out of nothing, but in the real world there are ores of varying richness, in places that are more or less difficult to reach, etc. This means that an increase in price makes it economically feasible to mine more of the stuff.
As for food -- we'll never have an infinite amount of it, but in the modern world we devote a relatively small percentage of our resources to the production of food. We could use central planning to determine the correct amount of food to produce and who is going to produce it, but we've had better luck using price as a mechanism. At no point in our history have we found a global cure for starvation.
I've been taking this drug for years. I'll tell ya, having three or four mouth sores at all times helps you lose weight! And when you can't come to work for a month because of a raging... common cold, your idiot boss totally understands!
Sigh... luckily, these days, I'm on a lower dosage (and with a different boss).
The usability and simplicity of a schema which means nothing? Because that's what we have now. Commercial sites with .org are all over the place, like right here. Non-profit sites with .com are everywhere. Nobody knows what .net is even supposed to mean. .edu is probably the last remaining holdout of sanity.
Personally I've had pretty good luck simply avoiding airlines that have caused me problems in the past (like ATA or Delta for instance). It seems that many people assume that the "US Airline Industry" is some homogenous blob, but I have not found this to be the case. Of course, I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where I typically have a choice of which airline to fly.
As for the US versus Europe angle, the worst airline I have ever flown on, by a huge margin, was British Airways.
Indeed -- leave it to OS hackers to dream up a worthless technological solution to a UI problem. If the interface was designed to give users the faintest notion of what was happening on their computers, we would see progress. Instead we give people interfaces that pretend to simplify complexity while really just glossing over important details, and then we whine about users being uneducated about the details that we've glossed over.
Of course they are. Why else would anyone want to work in HR? Do you ever hear a sixth grader say they want to be in HR when they grow up?
I experienced that problem once, when I broke my arm and had to wear a cast for a long period of time. It sucked, and I didn't even get to go to space.
It's too bad, I guess, that the actual constitution isn't written in such a way as to "grant" rights; rather, it's written as a restriction on what the US Government can do. As the Government's charter, the Constitution applies to all actions of the federal government, regardless of where they are performed or who is involved.
Of course, the parts of the Constitution that talk about voting rights extend such rights only to citizens. That is a different part of the document.
Well of course. It doesn't even require them to change their position. The whole "micro-evolution versus macro-evolution" argument has always been about accepting that 1+1=2 while denying that 1 * 1000000 = 1000000 because it "hasn't been observed and can never be observed". Now that somebody managed to get to a million, they'll claim we have to count up to a billion to prove anything. Same argument, different scale.
Everyone knows that REAL data centers are dressed up to look like office buildings... perhaps with a conspicuous lack of parking.
It seems much more likely to me that these problems get fixed when people call Apple support (especially since you get a free support period with the OS upgrade) and the support tech opens a ticket that makes its way up the chain. Seems more productive than having some employee read a forum post that says "WFT APPLE MY WIRLESS DOESNTT WORK" and forwarding that to a Divination Engineer to determine what the problem is.
It's the same "fiasco" that the Tiger release was, according to people on the Internet. For every major Mac OS release, some people have problems, some of them quite serious, and these dominate Mac discussion forums for months. Nobody ever collects any statistics from the general user population that would allow us to determine whether one release was better or worse than another, and the general user population is not well-represented in Mac discussion forums.
On a side note, I have personally found it very interesting to watch the way people on Mac forums approach problems versus Windows or Linux users. Often there is an implicit assumption that any problem encountered is an OS bug (sometimes even if nobody else can be found who is experiencing the same problem) and you see demands that it be fixed in the next release. Possibly this is because a high proportion of the problems experienced by Mac users are indeed OS bugs.
You'd owe some cash -- the entire metroplex is estimated at 6.1 million persons, many of whom do not have weapons. China alone has 7 million soldiers (incl. reserves); the US has nearly 3 million. According to Wikipedia, at least, which is probably more accurate than your guess.
Nonsense -- it's the LACK of a plural second-person pronoun in "proper" English that is disgusting (and inefficient). "Y'all" is the best hope we have for fixing this bug, and y'all should start using it as much as possible.
I'm arguing that the statistics you have presented are not capable of supporting the premise that Hillary has a dramatically better chance of winning the election versus McCain. That is not a refusal to acknowledge your statistics; it's a refusal to agree with your statistics without critical analysis.
Consider as another example the polls back in June 2004: http://electoral-vote.com/evp2004/jun/jun04.html
Back then polls were predicting a Kerry win by a large margin. In this year's race, there have been times when Obama was stronger against McCain, and times when Hillary was stronger. There has never been a difference dramatic enough to support the notion that the sky is falling now that Obama is the nominee. If you did Kucinich vs McCain, for instance, you would see a much clearer picture, but that is just not the case here.
Up to this point, I've stuck to the case that the polls as they stand are not sufficient statistical evidence to make this claim, but you could go much further than that. Currently we are polling a split Democratic party versus a united Republican one, and I think that creates an inherent bias that favors Republican candidates. As it is unlikely that Hillary will still be campaigning for the nomination in November, these polls are not really representative of the likely political environment on Election Day.
It's not "misinformation" that the site predicted 298 the day before the vote; that's very true. Yes, the next day the numbers changed by 30 electoral votes.
What this shows is, even that close to the election, using polls to predict electoral votes turned out to be useless and unreliable, with large swings on a daily basis. Right now we are five months away; explain to me why we should expect those kinds of numbers (on any site) to be more useful now than they were that day.
Please explain what part of this is misinformation.
Ah, electoral-vote.com, the same site that predicted 298 electoral votes for Kerry on Nov. 1, 2004.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2004/nov/nov01.html
Yes but, if you look at his "Win Percentage Tracker", this is true only of the last few weeks. Which does not support the poster's hand-wringing, "oh noes, we could lose now!" rhetoric. Polls will move around over time.
Your cynical post seems smart to the casual observer. It is not.
First of all, unless you cherry-pick polls, there is no statistical evidence that Hillary (or some other candidate) would be more successful against McCain. This is a talking point of the Clinton campaign only. You can go on about how names "ring", but without statistical evidence you are frankly spouting nonsense. Your gut feeling that Americans care about someone's name is simply not supported by real facts.
Your "learn from history" canard reminds us of 2004, when Democratic primary voters chose John Kerry on this cynical view that he was the most likely to "win". Well, he lost. So much for that. The refrain you might have heard from moderate voters four years ago was that they didn't know what Kerry was about, and that his campaign seemed more anti-Bush than pro-anything.
Obama is not going to win the votes of right-wingers; he will win as all Democrats win, by appealing to the middle and the left. The moderates in this country are smarter than you seem to think.
Isn't this experiment an expansion and continuation of that sort of research? Not really so much something that's "Been Done"? Are you saying that the previous work has already answered all these questions?
The story mentions that this guy has worked with smaller simulations before, so it's not as if we're being told that this is some brilliant new idea. It's just sort of cool that somebody built such a large sphere for this purpose.
I think you're being a little too hard on Slashdotters in general. For one thing, a lot of us have had to support Windows systems of all shapes and sizes, and we've all collected various frustrations over the years. It's natural to see some people letting off steam when the topic comes up.
As for the pattern you've noticed, I seem to recall that there was a lot of praise around here for Windows 2000 upon release, and looking back it's obvious that Microsoft accomplished a whole lot with that particular release. Since then they've used a huge amount of programmer time (with smart programmers, no doubt) and the tangible accomplishments seem very small. Maybe Vista is not so bad (haven't used it myself), but does it really represent what we should expect from a programming organization as well-funded as Microsoft?
Personally, I'm reminded of Intel's mis-steps in the 90s, with Itanium. It's not that Itanium was the worst project ever -- it just seemed like so much talent had managed to produce not very much product. I would argue that Linux and OSX have made comparatively great strides in the same period, and there is room to seriously raise the question of what is wrong with Windows development.
But the camera being "there" is useless if nobody is watching it. Why do you "feel" 100x safer (surely not based on statistical evidence) if you're not paying taxes to have someone watch the video feed real-time?