Err... you do know how statistical sampling works, don't you? If a bin holds a thousand widgets, and 50 of the first 100 randomly selected widgets are defective, you can by 95% certain that the number of defective widgets in the bin is between 450 and 550.
41,000 households is not a small sample. The big question is to what degree the sampling methods are biased rather than random. But unless the sampling method is astonishingly and probably obviously bad, the inescapable conclusion is that a lot of households are sufficiently worried enough about privacy to curb their online shopping.
On the other hand -- half of all households who do shop online is still a lot of households. Plenty to support a lot of online retailers.
I used to spend almost half my time on the road. I used to have nightmares about air travel, but it was never about plane crashes, it was about horrible mess-ups on the ground -- delayed or canceled flight causing me to miss my connection. That kind of thing.
Then a funny thing happened: sooner or later all of my nightmares ended up coming true.
I've missed key meetings with clients because the airlines couldn't get me to my destination on the appointed day. I've spent the night trying to sleep sitting up at Chicago Midway. I once spent 23 hours and 53 minutes in the loving embrace of the air travel system, just to cross the continental United States. I've flown across the continent sandwiched between two sweaty three hundred pound men, and I'm no lightweight myself. I've flown to Chile on a ten hour flight that allowed smoking. I was supposed to be on the flight that flew into the South Tower of the WTC on 9/11, but my trips was cancelled at the last minute so I could attend a bullshit meeting at Oracle in Nashua NH, which of course didn't happen because we spent the whole day glued to the TV in the conference room.
After having had almost every kind of bad air travel thing that can happen short of a crash or a hijacking, and having dodged one very major bullet, I just take all the crap air travel throws at me in stride. Flying will always be unreliable and inconvenient. Oh, you can learn the tricks of the trade, like "Never book an itinerary that involves Newark in any way," but there's no way to get around the fact that flying will always be inconvenient and unreliable, because the airlines will always promise more than they can deliver. So you show up ridiculously early in case of security snafus, bring plenty of stuff to read, and roll with the punches. It's like Hamlet said: there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. A screwed up itinerary is just an opportunity to catch up on my reading.
The poster is right: if you have any option other than flying, choose that instead. I'll even take a four hour bus ride over a one hour flight, provided it's a non-stop bus. But if you have to fly, you just have to put up with it, because it'll never get much better than it is now. Sure, the TSA should fix their manpower problem, but even if they do flying will never be like what airlines promise it will be.
Err... the whole point of email is that it is asynchronous communication medium. I know because I'm old enough to remember what things were like before email. Stuff was either handled immediately in real time by phone call, or by letter (or telex, and later fax). So for the most part you had two time response frames: right away, and a week or so.
One thing I've noticed about technology over the years is that it isn't so much a productivity amplifier as a general human proclivity amplifier. So technology amplifies laziness as much as anything else, and the lazier you are, the harder you work in the long term. Back when you had to get your work done in 35 hours, you had to be focused; you had to be tactical; you had to plan things out to make good use of your time.
Back when I was an engineering manager I used to have strict comp time policy. If you pulled an all-nighter, fine, but I want you to take a short day the next day or take it off entirely. It's not because I'm a nice guy; it's because when you work for me I expect you to work harder than you can keep up for fifty or sixty hours a week. I expect you to use your time intelligently and selectively.
As a manager I view needing to have routine unrestricted access to your employees' time as laziness. Undisciplined management leads to unstructured work time. You also have to be assertive with customers. I also never allowed customers to take out their insecurities on my staff. If we said something will be done by X, it'll get done by X; and no you cannot call my engineers directly to see how things are coming. They will report progress to you at the intervals we agree upon. The "give the customers 7x24 access" is a the lazy manager's response to bad customer service. You have to train your customers to expect success from you.
It also makes the remaining workers more marginally productive. This opens up many, many possible scenarios, some of which are dystopic, others of which are not.
Consider this question: do you think the phone companies would employ more people if they still relied upon low-paid labor (i.e., women) to route and direct calls? Or would they simply sell far less service at far higher prices?
I think many low-paid workers will in the short term, but not quite as many as the hoped-for force-multiplier effect of the technology would suggest. I think the restaurants will be more financially efficient, as as the cost of the investment is recouped additional restaurants will get opened. A lot also depends on the ability of competitors to field similar systems. Do you put them out of business, or does competition expand?
The geography of store-siting complicates matters too.
Basically, I think the result of this is beyond the ability of any armchair philosophe to predict using his personal toy model of the world. It requires serious economic study, and even that is only as good as it's ability to predict human ingenuity under pressure. That pressure is important, because people don't innovate when it's easy to make money.
Well, improbable failures x widespread deployment = many instances of failure.
Also, high testing cost / widespread deployment = reasonable per unit safety cost.
So clearly for commercial medical devices, it makes sense to judge the risk of a treatment against the prevalence of the disease. About 350,000 people use them; probably more might if they were improved but let's go with that. As an individual you might accept a 0.1% chance of a fatal accident as acceptable given the benefits of an improved device; but if you're a manufacturer that translates to 350 deaths. That's a lot of people for a medical device to kill.
So clearly it's worthwhile to invest quite a bit of money to reduce that death rate by an order of magnitude or two. If you could drop that rate to 0.001% for, say, a hundred million dollars, amortized over 350,000 users that $286/device. You'd have saved 347 lives at an approximate cost of $290k/life, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Personal tinkering is a different story. You might find the 0.1% chance of killing your child to be acceptable, and you almost certainly don't have 100 million bucks to spend on it. So maybe it's an acceptable bet for an individual, but that level of risk would be unacceptable for a product that is deployed on this scale. If you were talking about a device that only had a thousand users in the world, that level of risk would be acceptable.
Reddit's pathetic politically correct SJW policy of censorship and shadowbanning is driving more and more to fight back and deface what they can in the name of freedom of speech.
Which is plain juvenile. The correct (and more effective) strategy is to take your eyeballs elsewhere. Engaging a site that you disagree with actually helps the site.
Social media is essentially porn. The people who use it the most aren't out to engage other people, they're looking for a quick and easy hit of stimulation; the only difference is that it's outrage, not horniness that gets titillated. Do I have to spell this out? You act out your outrage and get paid in attention; some of that attention reacts with outrage and in turn gets attention, including from you. So you react, and the cycle goes on, the outrage market makers milk homeopathic quantities of revenue from each act of outrage. And integrated over the sheer volume out there, those fractions of penny per flame post add up to real money.
It literally doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe it as obnoxiously as possible. You are, to social media companies, nothing but an outrage milk-cow.
Porn is actually better for you than social media, and better for society as a whole because horniness is a less harmful drive to titillate than outrage.
There's nothing wrong with wild-ass flights of speculation as long as you don't insist the facts fit. And while everyone should learn the time-tested, scholarly consensus, the fun in science comes in where things everyone has good reason to believe don't quite fit the facts. DNA is used to assemble RNA, which in turn is used to generate proteins; it's so simple and compelling, it's been called the "fundamental dogma of molecular biology"; but once you have that dogma, the really interesting stuff is where the dogma doesn't fit -- e.g., retroviruses.
So while you want to train young scientists not to make wild-ass claims, you don't want to train them to ruthlessly reject ideas that are unorthodox. So it seems to me the right response isn't to say "You got it WRONG, you ignorant kid, go back and study the standard theory for how the Maya sited their cities," it's "Nice try, kid. Go and study the standard theory for how Maya sited their cities and maybe you'll have better luck next time."
Personally, sure. I don't smoke pot, and nobody I associate with uses around me.
But avoiding pot as an entire society? Nope. Can't be done. Such a big fraction of the population has decided pot laws are stupid (which I agree with) and that they'll ignore those laws, it's just spitting into the wind. The futility of of our pot policy is probably biggest single corrupting factor our law enforcement.
Well, when contemplating all the distinctly peculiar mathematicians in history one can always take comfort in Euler, who was as brilliant as any of them but led a normal, successful, and happy life.
Funny how people "know" all kinds of untrue stuff. There is no section in the US code which says "computer hacking" is illegal. Many activities so described in common parlance are illegal of course, but that's not the same thing.
What's more there can't be any law that outlaws reading or writing about illegal activities. Or to be more precise any such law targeting such writings must be so narrowly drawn as to be readily circumvented.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Anyone can be a "criminal", if the government decides its advantageous to call you one. Pot smoker? Criminal. Sell your buddy a few of your joints? You're a dealer. Live in the same house as someone who sold a joint to someone? You're an accessory. In fact your the most pitiful kind of accessory there is: somebody with nobody valuable to rat on. Guys who sell marijuana by the bale will get less time than you do.
Texas of course has taken this to a new low.
I did a little Google searching and found out that the Travis County Correctional facility is the largest mental health provider in its region. Why? Because as mental health beds are disappearing the county is shifting those people to its prison. And now they're trying to turn mental patients and recreational pot smokers into a profit center.
I went to MIT so I've known a lot of smart people. And oddly enough they seem to be nearly as prone to stupid behavior as stupid people.
Literally the smartest person I know is a woman who had an affair with a married man because he assured her is wife would be OK with it -- and she believed him.
So when there's something that only a idiot will do, there will be a fair share of smart people doing it. I come to think of this as a distinction between "constitutional" stupidity and "functional" stupidity. Constitutionally smart people can be functionally stupid because they're so used to be right when everyone else around them are wrong, they start to think they're infallible. In my experience there is no dumb like smart person dumb.
Actually, for some reason I find voice actors much more interesting people than regular actors. They tend to be funnier, quirkier, a bit more self-effacing.
The politicians then pay for what they need by (a) raising taxes now on people who can't afford to evade them and (b) raising taxes later on people who can't afford to evade them by borrowing.
Taxation does not present any demonstrable limit on the politicians' ability to spend.
A friend of mine spent a few years as an IRS auditor. He says for 99% of people an audit is no big deal, because there was literally nothing anyone who's making less than a couple hundred thousand dollars can do to hide their income from him. So this kind of stuff is only for very rich people who are hiding large quantities of income. The result is that the government borrows more and raises taxes on the honest people.
People *have* been trying to pay as little tax as possible, by both legal and illegal means. And, from your perspective, how well has that been working out?
Well, when "they" get in power, taxes go down but spending doesn't. I take that as a sign that their opposition to spending isn't as sincere as their opposition to taxes.
and you don't have MS Office, Windows 10 will start popping up adds in the desktop UI encouraging you to buy office.
Do they think that people are somehow unaware that Office exists and is available for purchase? Or that you'll fork over the money to buy office to make the stupid pop-ups go away? Or do they just want people to think they're sleazy, obnoxious assholes?
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody should talk to that child's parents.
Err... you do know how statistical sampling works, don't you? If a bin holds a thousand widgets, and 50 of the first 100 randomly selected widgets are defective, you can by 95% certain that the number of defective widgets in the bin is between 450 and 550.
41,000 households is not a small sample. The big question is to what degree the sampling methods are biased rather than random. But unless the sampling method is astonishingly and probably obviously bad, the inescapable conclusion is that a lot of households are sufficiently worried enough about privacy to curb their online shopping.
On the other hand -- half of all households who do shop online is still a lot of households. Plenty to support a lot of online retailers.
I used to spend almost half my time on the road. I used to have nightmares about air travel, but it was never about plane crashes, it was about horrible mess-ups on the ground -- delayed or canceled flight causing me to miss my connection. That kind of thing.
Then a funny thing happened: sooner or later all of my nightmares ended up coming true.
I've missed key meetings with clients because the airlines couldn't get me to my destination on the appointed day. I've spent the night trying to sleep sitting up at Chicago Midway. I once spent 23 hours and 53 minutes in the loving embrace of the air travel system, just to cross the continental United States. I've flown across the continent sandwiched between two sweaty three hundred pound men, and I'm no lightweight myself. I've flown to Chile on a ten hour flight that allowed smoking. I was supposed to be on the flight that flew into the South Tower of the WTC on 9/11, but my trips was cancelled at the last minute so I could attend a bullshit meeting at Oracle in Nashua NH, which of course didn't happen because we spent the whole day glued to the TV in the conference room.
After having had almost every kind of bad air travel thing that can happen short of a crash or a hijacking, and having dodged one very major bullet, I just take all the crap air travel throws at me in stride. Flying will always be unreliable and inconvenient. Oh, you can learn the tricks of the trade, like "Never book an itinerary that involves Newark in any way," but there's no way to get around the fact that flying will always be inconvenient and unreliable, because the airlines will always promise more than they can deliver. So you show up ridiculously early in case of security snafus, bring plenty of stuff to read, and roll with the punches. It's like Hamlet said: there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. A screwed up itinerary is just an opportunity to catch up on my reading.
The poster is right: if you have any option other than flying, choose that instead. I'll even take a four hour bus ride over a one hour flight, provided it's a non-stop bus. But if you have to fly, you just have to put up with it, because it'll never get much better than it is now. Sure, the TSA should fix their manpower problem, but even if they do flying will never be like what airlines promise it will be.
Err... the whole point of email is that it is asynchronous communication medium. I know because I'm old enough to remember what things were like before email. Stuff was either handled immediately in real time by phone call, or by letter (or telex, and later fax). So for the most part you had two time response frames: right away, and a week or so.
One thing I've noticed about technology over the years is that it isn't so much a productivity amplifier as a general human proclivity amplifier. So technology amplifies laziness as much as anything else, and the lazier you are, the harder you work in the long term. Back when you had to get your work done in 35 hours, you had to be focused; you had to be tactical; you had to plan things out to make good use of your time.
Back when I was an engineering manager I used to have strict comp time policy. If you pulled an all-nighter, fine, but I want you to take a short day the next day or take it off entirely. It's not because I'm a nice guy; it's because when you work for me I expect you to work harder than you can keep up for fifty or sixty hours a week. I expect you to use your time intelligently and selectively.
As a manager I view needing to have routine unrestricted access to your employees' time as laziness. Undisciplined management leads to unstructured work time. You also have to be assertive with customers. I also never allowed customers to take out their insecurities on my staff. If we said something will be done by X, it'll get done by X; and no you cannot call my engineers directly to see how things are coming. They will report progress to you at the intervals we agree upon. The "give the customers 7x24 access" is a the lazy manager's response to bad customer service. You have to train your customers to expect success from you.
It also makes the remaining workers more marginally productive. This opens up many, many possible scenarios, some of which are dystopic, others of which are not.
Consider this question: do you think the phone companies would employ more people if they still relied upon low-paid labor (i.e., women) to route and direct calls? Or would they simply sell far less service at far higher prices?
I think many low-paid workers will in the short term, but not quite as many as the hoped-for force-multiplier effect of the technology would suggest. I think the restaurants will be more financially efficient, as as the cost of the investment is recouped additional restaurants will get opened. A lot also depends on the ability of competitors to field similar systems. Do you put them out of business, or does competition expand?
The geography of store-siting complicates matters too.
Basically, I think the result of this is beyond the ability of any armchair philosophe to predict using his personal toy model of the world. It requires serious economic study, and even that is only as good as it's ability to predict human ingenuity under pressure. That pressure is important, because people don't innovate when it's easy to make money.
... have trouble selecting and interpreting medical tests.
And it turns out cops with no medical training whatsoever are even worse. Who'd have thunk it?
Well, improbable failures x widespread deployment = many instances of failure.
Also, high testing cost / widespread deployment = reasonable per unit safety cost.
So clearly for commercial medical devices, it makes sense to judge the risk of a treatment against the prevalence of the disease. About 350,000 people use them; probably more might if they were improved but let's go with that. As an individual you might accept a 0.1% chance of a fatal accident as acceptable given the benefits of an improved device; but if you're a manufacturer that translates to 350 deaths. That's a lot of people for a medical device to kill.
So clearly it's worthwhile to invest quite a bit of money to reduce that death rate by an order of magnitude or two. If you could drop that rate to 0.001% for, say, a hundred million dollars, amortized over 350,000 users that $286/device. You'd have saved 347 lives at an approximate cost of $290k/life, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Personal tinkering is a different story. You might find the 0.1% chance of killing your child to be acceptable, and you almost certainly don't have 100 million bucks to spend on it. So maybe it's an acceptable bet for an individual, but that level of risk would be unacceptable for a product that is deployed on this scale. If you were talking about a device that only had a thousand users in the world, that level of risk would be acceptable.
Reddit's pathetic politically correct SJW policy of censorship and shadowbanning is driving more and more to fight back and deface what they can in the name of freedom of speech.
Which is plain juvenile. The correct (and more effective) strategy is to take your eyeballs elsewhere. Engaging a site that you disagree with actually helps the site.
Social media is essentially porn. The people who use it the most aren't out to engage other people, they're looking for a quick and easy hit of stimulation; the only difference is that it's outrage, not horniness that gets titillated. Do I have to spell this out? You act out your outrage and get paid in attention; some of that attention reacts with outrage and in turn gets attention, including from you. So you react, and the cycle goes on, the outrage market makers milk homeopathic quantities of revenue from each act of outrage. And integrated over the sheer volume out there, those fractions of penny per flame post add up to real money.
It literally doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe it as obnoxiously as possible. You are, to social media companies, nothing but an outrage milk-cow.
Porn is actually better for you than social media, and better for society as a whole because horniness is a less harmful drive to titillate than outrage.
Actually she's a Republican... Which explains her cavalier attitude towards intellectual property when she's the one doing the infringing.
Well, sure. But you can't blame him for trying.
There's nothing wrong with wild-ass flights of speculation as long as you don't insist the facts fit. And while everyone should learn the time-tested, scholarly consensus, the fun in science comes in where things everyone has good reason to believe don't quite fit the facts. DNA is used to assemble RNA, which in turn is used to generate proteins; it's so simple and compelling, it's been called the "fundamental dogma of molecular biology"; but once you have that dogma, the really interesting stuff is where the dogma doesn't fit -- e.g., retroviruses.
So while you want to train young scientists not to make wild-ass claims, you don't want to train them to ruthlessly reject ideas that are unorthodox. So it seems to me the right response isn't to say "You got it WRONG, you ignorant kid, go back and study the standard theory for how the Maya sited their cities," it's "Nice try, kid. Go and study the standard theory for how Maya sited their cities and maybe you'll have better luck next time."
Personally, sure. I don't smoke pot, and nobody I associate with uses around me.
But avoiding pot as an entire society? Nope. Can't be done. Such a big fraction of the population has decided pot laws are stupid (which I agree with) and that they'll ignore those laws, it's just spitting into the wind. The futility of of our pot policy is probably biggest single corrupting factor our law enforcement.
Well, when contemplating all the distinctly peculiar mathematicians in history one can always take comfort in Euler, who was as brilliant as any of them but led a normal, successful, and happy life.
Funny how people "know" all kinds of untrue stuff. There is no section in the US code which says "computer hacking" is illegal. Many activities so described in common parlance are illegal of course, but that's not the same thing.
What's more there can't be any law that outlaws reading or writing about illegal activities. Or to be more precise any such law targeting such writings must be so narrowly drawn as to be readily circumvented.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Anyone can be a "criminal", if the government decides its advantageous to call you one. Pot smoker? Criminal. Sell your buddy a few of your joints? You're a dealer. Live in the same house as someone who sold a joint to someone? You're an accessory. In fact your the most pitiful kind of accessory there is: somebody with nobody valuable to rat on. Guys who sell marijuana by the bale will get less time than you do.
Texas of course has taken this to a new low.
I did a little Google searching and found out that the Travis County Correctional facility is the largest mental health provider in its region. Why? Because as mental health beds are disappearing the county is shifting those people to its prison. And now they're trying to turn mental patients and recreational pot smokers into a profit center.
Meme parroter.
Who the hell under 70 reaches for a metphor and comes up with ... Club Med?
I went to MIT so I've known a lot of smart people. And oddly enough they seem to be nearly as prone to stupid behavior as stupid people.
Literally the smartest person I know is a woman who had an affair with a married man because he assured her is wife would be OK with it -- and she believed him.
So when there's something that only a idiot will do, there will be a fair share of smart people doing it. I come to think of this as a distinction between "constitutional" stupidity and "functional" stupidity. Constitutionally smart people can be functionally stupid because they're so used to be right when everyone else around them are wrong, they start to think they're infallible. In my experience there is no dumb like smart person dumb.
The woman's name is Gladys Pugh and she is from Wales.
I'm conflicted about that.
On one hand... Yay! The person acting like a jackass isn't an American this time!
On the other hand... It seems the whole world is full of jackasses.
Sounds good.
Would you rather be bankrupt, or dead? If you prefer dead, then maybe we shouldn't put too much stock in your judgement to begin with.
Actually, for some reason I find voice actors much more interesting people than regular actors. They tend to be funnier, quirkier, a bit more self-effacing.
The politicians then pay for what they need by (a) raising taxes now on people who can't afford to evade them and (b) raising taxes later on people who can't afford to evade them by borrowing.
Taxation does not present any demonstrable limit on the politicians' ability to spend.
A friend of mine spent a few years as an IRS auditor. He says for 99% of people an audit is no big deal, because there was literally nothing anyone who's making less than a couple hundred thousand dollars can do to hide their income from him. So this kind of stuff is only for very rich people who are hiding large quantities of income. The result is that the government borrows more and raises taxes on the honest people.
People *have* been trying to pay as little tax as possible, by both legal and illegal means. And, from your perspective, how well has that been working out?
Well, when "they" get in power, taxes go down but spending doesn't. I take that as a sign that their opposition to spending isn't as sincere as their opposition to taxes.
Still seems strange. Who's mission in life is it to help all governments collect more taxes?
Do I really have to spell this out for you? When rich people hide their taxable income, it means everyone else has to pick up the slack.
No thinking person should be against taxes. If you don't like government, you should be against spending. Taxes are simply the corollary of spending.
Invading Poland had absolutely nothing to do with it.
and you don't have MS Office, Windows 10 will start popping up adds in the desktop UI encouraging you to buy office.
Do they think that people are somehow unaware that Office exists and is available for purchase? Or that you'll fork over the money to buy office to make the stupid pop-ups go away? Or do they just want people to think they're sleazy, obnoxious assholes?