Yes, actually. Everyone should be able to pursue a career based on their abilities, and companies should be able to hire the best person for the job.
Women's brains must be wired up in a way that makes them better at certain things.
That's not the explanation given in the article, so I'm not sure where you're getting your persecution complex from. I mean... if you want to go hunting for extremist positions that taint the overall endeavors of feminism, I'm sure you can find plenty to help you dismiss the concept. As with any movement, they've got their own misconceptions and there's a lot of bullsh*t around the edges, but it does not seem so unreasonable to me that our wives and daughters can aspire to more in law than simply being incubators. (And kid yourself not, there a lot of folks who want to take us in that direction.)
Doesn't PI contain all finite sequences as substrings? Show the judge that--under this note-assignment scheme--every possible song appears somewhere in PI. And every possible movie, picture, software or other digital artifact also occurs on PI. Everything's a derivative of PI!!
They don't. Gold definitely undergoes supply changes (what do you think happens when a company finds and opens a new gold mine?), and even land undergoes supply changes: land is lost and gained from the sea, becomes unusable due to natural and man-made disasters, and has its use changed due to social and regulatory changes.
I assumed such minor fluctuations (<2% for gold) were understood to be relatively constant in economic terms. You're not going to have the amount of land (or gold) grow (or shrink) by 25+% per annum unless someone gets quite, quite crazy with a fleet of nuclear bombs (and/or reactors). (And if they do, your society has bigger issues to grapple with.:O)
I agree that an all-digital economy makes electronic robbery of various forms much easier and much more invisible. But that's where regulations and laws can help. The question is: are we willing to support the laws necessary to have a smoothly running digital economy, or are we going to throw our hands up, say "government is evil" , and have the worst of both worlds?
Hmm... I don't know enough to take a position on that today. There are certainly examples of central banks that have successfully managed economies over the long haul. Once it becomes a vector for social policy and political agendas though, it seems like you'd need some really strong laws [constitutional amendments] to limit congressional imaginations to the same order of magnitude we have with a cash-based society.
True and good post, but gold and land do have a constant scarcity, which speaks to cpu6502's point... that modern currencies can be inflated out of existence by bad governmental decision-making. This phenomenon is not rare, so it's easy to see the intuitive appeal of using a natural resource that governments can't inflate. (There would undoubtedly be some, ah, challenges to managing an economy in this fashion too, but that's a different story...)
Going digital seems to be stepping in the opposite direction: governments could start tinkering with economies in real time via a number of vectors. Cpu6502 was concerned that this would make it easier and more tempting to print money (since you don't have to wait for the presses), but I think it's potentially much scarier than that, because you give governments a whole bunch of control they don't currently have. Want to apply a retroactive penalty tax to people who bought cigarettes in the past year? Want a dynamic VAT to penalize imported goods in proportion to this week's trade imbalance? Want to bump up the TSA risk score for all 20-40 year old handgun owners who haven't donated to a religious institution during the past 90 days? Cut a bill (or executive order or secret classified memo), throw it the IT guys at the IRS, and *boom*, your bank account will be adjusted accordingly during tonight's batch run.
For some reason, I often think about programming teams as if they were sports teams. The way most teams are run, you have a manager who knows little about the game you are trying to play and never watches a game. There are no coaches. You performance is loosely evaluated on whether or not your team wins games, but even then the manager usually tries to make it appear that the team won every game whether they did or not. When they try to get new players, they don't bother looking at the success of the player on their previous teams, or even watch them play. At most they set up some artificial 5 minute drill and evaluate that, but usually they base their decisions on a feel-good interview.
Hate to throw in a "me too" response, but wow... I know exactly what you are talking about. Our interviews have like 1 or 2 questions that vaguely touch on technical expertise, but it's a total joke. The whole interview is only 9-10 questions long, and any schmoozer without an ounce of skill can dance right thru it.
Part of the problem is HR keeps an iron grip on interview formats out of fear of discrimination suits. You can't give out a quiz that--for example--sees if the candidate is capable of writing SQL statements (like they'd have to do EVERY DAMN DAY if they're hired), because the quiz hasn't been certificated as anti-discriminatory.
Everyone's commenting on whether this is patentable or not, but I'd be interested in discussing whether it is useful or not. Outside of some very narrow use cases (recognizing letters/symbols or maybe chemical structures?), will people actually find this useful? When we know the name of something, it seems easier to type that in (or speak it) instead of trying to sketch it. When we don't know the name... hmm, well it still seems easier to type in related words instead of trying to draw a sketch.:-\
as Linus is on the warpath this week, I think he should shoot whomever came up with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Beta 1
So tenths aren't enough we must go to hundreds then have abbreviatiations and silly names and then Beta (isnt that what the 0.0X is for?) and the cheery on top, "1". Ubuntu has jumped the naming shark
Ubuntu releases are named after date. The "04" represents the fourth month of the year. You have to zero-pad it to get things to sort correctly. The "1" on the end is to distinguish this beta from the next one leading up to the official release. So the naming shark is happy. Trust me, I am the naming shark, and I like naming conventions that pay attention to the lexical sort and avoid ambiguity (which is the whole point of names, after all).
(The naming shark always uses YYYY-MM-DD format when writing dates, and you should too.)
And do you really think this problem arose because they didn't write code to deal with leap years?
Come on man. If they had written code that accounted correctly for leap years, they wouldn't have had an outage. Do you think it's just a coverup?
And what's that nonsense about date logic? Use tried-and-true library functions for date manipulation, that's it. If you're doing embedded systems, you might have an excuse...and these days, not even then, given the amount of memory and the clock speeds. Bah, in my days all we had was a wirewrapped system built from a Motorola 68k, and we liked it!
(except when one of the address bus wires got loose and we spent countless hours debugging it)
I'm saying that they almost certainly did use a tried-and-true library for date manipulation, but that doesn't protect you against incorrect usages/inferences in a particular system, and it doesn't ensure consistency between two different systems that need to talk to each other about date-related stuff.
Given how many DECADES leap year calculations have had to be done and how many years it's been since we fixed the Y2K issues (at great expense, I might add), it is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE for someone to blame a leap year calculation for down time.
The DIRECTOR of the service division at Microsoft should be FIRED for this failure.
Expect lawsuits from customers, Microsoft. Because this was a problem you KNEW about and should have written code to deal with.
What a pathetic excuse for planning and testing on Microsoft's part.
(Sigh.) Another internet commentator gets righteous on a subject in which he is not an expert. How did this get modded insightful? What new information did it contribute other than blind rage? And firing the director, really? Management is responsible for specifying risk tolerance and enforcing a testing process, but technical folks should be making decisions about what's efficient and strategic to test.
And do you really think this problem arose because they didn't write code to deal with leap years? I'm sure they are using an extremely well-tested base library of code that deals with exactly this, but date logic is used everywhere, and deciding what to test (to what depth) requires discernment. Oh yeah... maybe they could have squashed this bug by spending 2 or 3 days adjusting server clocks and creating fake test data across multiple subsystems and doing a full integration test at various set points. But what you don't see is that those 3 days cost them the time to find such-and-such 15 other bugs. Or that the testing schedule would have to extend by 6 months to test both the leap day concern and all other concerns deemed more risky than the leap-day concern but below the level of risk they were actually testing for.
I'm not saying Microsoft has clean hands here. But it's definitely possible because even though we've known about leap years for centuries (excuse me... "DECADES"... got to use all caps to punctuate one's infuriation), because all software testing is a sequence of calculated gambles, and you can't judge the competence of a testing group by the occurrence of a single rare bug.
HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management. The "Browser" is an extremely silly concept-- a window for looking sequentially at a large parallel structure. It does not show this structure in a useful way.
It's funny that Ted's project derides HTML for "simulating paper", when it was this very simplicity that enabled it to evolve and spread quickly. It's not the first time that dumb-and-simple won out over a lofty intellectual approach, but it's especially awkward that the guy has stuck with it for several decades (see this June 1995 Wired article, for instance).
Because they and other advertisers must honor the DNT flag in order for it to work. Since they don't have a natural incentive to do so, the question becomes: how much media attention, public pressure, and legislative action can you muster to force them? Answer: enough to get them to agree to an opt-out approach, but nowhere near enough to get them to agree to an opt-in approach... the latter would have them fighting tooth-and-nail because you'd basically be cutting off a major revenue stream and threatening their survival.
Mailinator can achieve high compression rates because most people use it for registration emails. Those mails differ from each other in only a few words, making the data set highly redundant, and easily compressible.
The accomplishment here is that he determined a very tactical set of strategies for solving a real world problem of large scale. No, it didn't take a math PhD with some deep understanding of Fourier analysis to invent this algorithm, but it most certainly took a software developer who was knowledgeable, creative, and passionate for his task. So yeah... it's not the 90% compression that's impressive, it's the real-time performance that's cool.
the floor managers got to see what the mechanics rated an issue. While I'm sure they didn't like their problems being downgraded, it gave better feedback, and if they felt an issue was truly a 4/5 then they could take it up with someone higher
Interesting... how quickly (and how completely) did you see the ratings discrepancies dissipate? Could you see a definite change in the distribution of floor manager ratings?
I think that's a great illustration of the problem here - Target and all the other companies that are using "targeted advertising" are going beyond simply providing a service to actively trying to manipulate people. Advertising to inform is good, advertising to convince people spend money on products they wouldn't otherwise purchase is bad.
Most advertising is manipulative. If "informative" is how you draw the line between good and bad, you'll find very, very little on the good side.
Do this... next time you're watching a TV commercial, open your eyes and then--to paraphrase Terry Pratchet--open your eyes again and look at the subtle "identity logic" of each commercial. Such-and-such deodorant will make you irresistible to girls (but only the hot ones!). Such-and-such truck* shows that you're a weathered, gritty man who's self-reliant and tough to the core. Such-and-such consulting firm shows that you're a savvy business veteran who understands the complexities of a global interwoven economy. Such-and-such cleaning product shows that you're a smart, has-it-together woman who can deftly orchestrate the family schedule and still have time for herself**. Such-and-such pill lets you live your sunset years playing with your grand-kids and walking beaches with your well-preserved spouse.
Look for it... those commercials that present a picture of who you want to be and tie it to a product. You'll be amazed.
---
* Or Chrysler, as the case may be.
** And staying at home to play nurse/janitor/chef 24/7 was so much smarter and more fulfilling than having some high-paying corporate job like your sellout friends did.
In "real life" students will have access to all those things. Perhaps it isn't cheating but rather utilizing tools that they would have access to in "real life".
Assume they'll use every tool at their disposal- and write the tests in such a way that they can't copy the question into a search bar and google the answer.
What's funny is that you appeal to "real life" but don't seem to realize that designing a test is itself a thorny real life problem that must satisfy multiple constraints--such as cheatability, fairness, realism, and the costs to prepare, administer, score, and adjudicate the test--all while meeting the goal of accurately evaluating the student's understanding of some material.
Evaluation under real world conditions ("realism") is not always feasible, and it's not always a priority. For instance, the Goog will do elementary arithmetic for you, but everybody should really learn to do this in their head. There are some levels of effectiveness you just can't reach unless you have internalized the prerequisite knowledge, and it's not always feasible to test for this internalization with approaches that are cheater-immune to open book / open internet test-taking.
Replying to myself now that I've read the protocol. Their design isn't an issue for the host, because it is the client that determines the callback URL.
To make the spec viable*, it seems like you would need a third party service (possibly run by Mozilla or Verizon, Sprint, etc.) that your browser would talk with to get internet-visible callback URL's for. The service would aggregate your notifications, and you'd either poll for them periodically or maintain an always-on TCP/IP connection. It requires much more browser support than they're actually talking about, and it seems to be a pretty dumb arrangement for receiving notifications from a handful of sites, but perhaps the designers of this spec see a world where you have hundreds or thousands of websites sending you notifications.
*E.g., to deal with NAT and firewalls, to enable encryption of notifications (HTTPS callback URL's), to centrally manage spam/malware filtering, and to receive notifications uninterrupted as you join/disconnect from different networks and as you open/close your browser.
When the machine's behind a NATing router that isn't configured for port forwarding or a DMZ?
When the machine's behind a firewall that blocks all incoming connections that aren't associated with an outbound connection?
It's a problem on the host side too... the origin IP will be hidden by the firewall and/or load balancer. There are some workarounds, but will your infrastructure department support them? And can you get the workaround to play nice with your developer tools / website SDK's / vendor products / etc. that have come to depend on this push feature?
The problem with Apple is there is no customization in either hardware or software. Lets say I want a phone with a physical keyboard running iOS. I can't have it. On the other hand, I can have a wide variety of phone form factors on Android and even Windows Phone 7. Want a really thin phone with no keyboard? They've got it. Want a phone with a sliding keyboard? They've got it. Want a keyboard just on the face of the phone? They've got it.
I'm not an Apple fan, and even I am tired of seeing this one-sided argument. Yes, Android has device-diversity, but Apple has accessory-diversity. You've got a much much much broader aftermarket selection for iPhone (and in the tablet world, iPad) then you do for Android. It's not just cases and docks either... there are a lot of neat gizmos that can only exist because Apple has forced a standard connector and case size on its third of the market. I'm not saying that the two benefits are equivalent--different consumers will value different choices--but don't pretend that all the customization/choice is in the Android camp.
I really like how the timeline is presented out-of-order (over half this stuff is from the 60's and 70's), how items with varying levels of scientific consensus are presented as equivalents (global cooling/warming), and how unrelated issues are juxtaposed (sustainability vs obesity). Throwing in non-scientific issues (employment, sexual promiscuity) was a bit over the top though, at least for a troll of your caliber.
Is it possible to plan a counteroffensive? You know... get a constitutional amendment going or something that would swing the attack the other way? The MPAA/RIAA has no incentive to back down and say "oh shucks you're right, we were trying to break the internet to protect our business model at the expense of the public good and civil liberties... sorry about that, we won't try it again".
"Holding out" the firestorm isn't enought... if we don't take it the other way, all this talk of "balance" will ultimately mean... big business and big government win.
Piracy is a real problem. I find it interesting that people want to kill PIPA and SOPA, and not change it to allow protection against piracy while still allowing people freedom to use the web.
And what if you decided to host user-generated content in your game? This is a proven strategy for driving growth and creating unique spaces people really like to be in. Legislation like SOPA/PIPA makes it possible for any one malcontent to "poison" your space with infringing content and get it shutdown by the federal government. Heck the same thing applies to any comment section, user forum, or wiki that you host to let players talk about your game. Legislative approaches are a threat to YOU, not to Mr. Russian guy or the fifty thousand leaches. Instead of asking the taxpayer to do the impossible [and dangerous, etc., etc.], I'd adjust your business model to incorporate some form of online interaction that lets you limit content to licensed users (either something in-game with other players or something more prosaic such as subscription-based updates).
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Here's rationality: the more people who help your cause, the more likely it is to be successful. It's reasonable to ask: how can we make it easier for (members of large underutilized group) to participate? Making this 50/50% isn't what it's about.
I do agree that in some cases the difference is due to some kind of discriminatory behavior, but in others its just simply due to differences in interest. Has either situation been confirmed in this case?
Look to history: videogames use to be an exclusively male hobby, now it's close to achieving parity (depending on which stats you look at). Those firms who were "bothered" by the gender imbalance did the research and took the risks to bring games to an entirely new market segment that others had written off. Think that's a different situation? Not really... marketing goods and marketing volunteerism/causes are pretty similar endeavors.
Our mindset--if we care about the causes of Free and Open Source Software--should not be focused on intrinsic differences (though some of those exist, statistically) or the reasons that women will never want to join us en masse. Instead, we should be thinking about how to attract and leverage all the talent we can get.
Slashdot Mirror
Women's brains must be wired up in a way that makes them better at certain things.
That's not the explanation given in the article, so I'm not sure where you're getting your persecution complex from. I mean... if you want to go hunting for extremist positions that taint the overall endeavors of feminism, I'm sure you can find plenty to help you dismiss the concept. As with any movement, they've got their own misconceptions and there's a lot of bullsh*t around the edges, but it does not seem so unreasonable to me that our wives and daughters can aspire to more in law than simply being incubators. (And kid yourself not, there a lot of folks who want to take us in that direction.)
Doesn't PI contain all finite sequences as substrings? Show the judge that--under this note-assignment scheme--every possible song appears somewhere in PI. And every possible movie, picture, software or other digital artifact also occurs on PI. Everything's a derivative of PI!!
but gold and land do have a constant scarcity,
They don't. Gold definitely undergoes supply changes (what do you think happens when a company finds and opens a new gold mine?), and even land undergoes supply changes: land is lost and gained from the sea, becomes unusable due to natural and man-made disasters, and has its use changed due to social and regulatory changes.
I assumed such minor fluctuations (<2% for gold) were understood to be relatively constant in economic terms. You're not going to have the amount of land (or gold) grow (or shrink) by 25+% per annum unless someone gets quite, quite crazy with a fleet of nuclear bombs (and/or reactors). (And if they do, your society has bigger issues to grapple with. :O)
I agree that an all-digital economy makes electronic robbery of various forms much easier and much more invisible. But that's where regulations and laws can help. The question is: are we willing to support the laws necessary to have a smoothly running digital economy, or are we going to throw our hands up, say "government is evil" , and have the worst of both worlds?
Hmm... I don't know enough to take a position on that today. There are certainly examples of central banks that have successfully managed economies over the long haul. Once it becomes a vector for social policy and political agendas though, it seems like you'd need some really strong laws [constitutional amendments] to limit congressional imaginations to the same order of magnitude we have with a cash-based society.
Gold and land do not have a constant value.
True and good post, but gold and land do have a constant scarcity, which speaks to cpu6502's point... that modern currencies can be inflated out of existence by bad governmental decision-making. This phenomenon is not rare, so it's easy to see the intuitive appeal of using a natural resource that governments can't inflate. (There would undoubtedly be some, ah, challenges to managing an economy in this fashion too, but that's a different story...)
Going digital seems to be stepping in the opposite direction: governments could start tinkering with economies in real time via a number of vectors. Cpu6502 was concerned that this would make it easier and more tempting to print money (since you don't have to wait for the presses), but I think it's potentially much scarier than that, because you give governments a whole bunch of control they don't currently have. Want to apply a retroactive penalty tax to people who bought cigarettes in the past year? Want a dynamic VAT to penalize imported goods in proportion to this week's trade imbalance? Want to bump up the TSA risk score for all 20-40 year old handgun owners who haven't donated to a religious institution during the past 90 days? Cut a bill (or executive order or secret classified memo), throw it the IT guys at the IRS, and *boom*, your bank account will be adjusted accordingly during tonight's batch run.
For some reason, I often think about programming teams as if they were sports teams. The way most teams are run, you have a manager who knows little about the game you are trying to play and never watches a game. There are no coaches. You performance is loosely evaluated on whether or not your team wins games, but even then the manager usually tries to make it appear that the team won every game whether they did or not. When they try to get new players, they don't bother looking at the success of the player on their previous teams, or even watch them play. At most they set up some artificial 5 minute drill and evaluate that, but usually they base their decisions on a feel-good interview.
Hate to throw in a "me too" response, but wow... I know exactly what you are talking about. Our interviews have like 1 or 2 questions that vaguely touch on technical expertise, but it's a total joke. The whole interview is only 9-10 questions long, and any schmoozer without an ounce of skill can dance right thru it.
Part of the problem is HR keeps an iron grip on interview formats out of fear of discrimination suits. You can't give out a quiz that--for example--sees if the candidate is capable of writing SQL statements (like they'd have to do EVERY DAMN DAY if they're hired), because the quiz hasn't been certificated as anti-discriminatory.
Everyone's commenting on whether this is patentable or not, but I'd be interested in discussing whether it is useful or not. Outside of some very narrow use cases (recognizing letters/symbols or maybe chemical structures?), will people actually find this useful? When we know the name of something, it seems easier to type that in (or speak it) instead of trying to sketch it. When we don't know the name... hmm, well it still seems easier to type in related words instead of trying to draw a sketch. :-\
as Linus is on the warpath this week, I think he should shoot whomever came up with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Beta 1 So tenths aren't enough we must go to hundreds then have abbreviatiations and silly names and then Beta (isnt that what the 0.0X is for?) and the cheery on top, "1". Ubuntu has jumped the naming shark
Ubuntu releases are named after date. The "04" represents the fourth month of the year. You have to zero-pad it to get things to sort correctly. The "1" on the end is to distinguish this beta from the next one leading up to the official release. So the naming shark is happy. Trust me, I am the naming shark, and I like naming conventions that pay attention to the lexical sort and avoid ambiguity (which is the whole point of names, after all).
(The naming shark always uses YYYY-MM-DD format when writing dates, and you should too.)
And management may be truly at fault, but it could just be a fluke too. You need more info to make that judgement.
And do you really think this problem arose because they didn't write code to deal with leap years?
Come on man. If they had written code that accounted correctly for leap years, they wouldn't have had an outage. Do you think it's just a coverup? And what's that nonsense about date logic? Use tried-and-true library functions for date manipulation, that's it. If you're doing embedded systems, you might have an excuse. ..and these days, not even then, given the amount of memory and the clock speeds. Bah, in my days all we had was a wirewrapped system built from a Motorola 68k, and we liked it!
(except when one of the address bus wires got loose and we spent countless hours debugging it)
I'm saying that they almost certainly did use a tried-and-true library for date manipulation, but that doesn't protect you against incorrect usages/inferences in a particular system, and it doesn't ensure consistency between two different systems that need to talk to each other about date-related stuff.
Given how many DECADES leap year calculations have had to be done and how many years it's been since we fixed the Y2K issues (at great expense, I might add), it is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE for someone to blame a leap year calculation for down time.
The DIRECTOR of the service division at Microsoft should be FIRED for this failure.
Expect lawsuits from customers, Microsoft. Because this was a problem you KNEW about and should have written code to deal with.
What a pathetic excuse for planning and testing on Microsoft's part.
(Sigh.) Another internet commentator gets righteous on a subject in which he is not an expert. How did this get modded insightful? What new information did it contribute other than blind rage? And firing the director, really? Management is responsible for specifying risk tolerance and enforcing a testing process, but technical folks should be making decisions about what's efficient and strategic to test.
And do you really think this problem arose because they didn't write code to deal with leap years? I'm sure they are using an extremely well-tested base library of code that deals with exactly this, but date logic is used everywhere, and deciding what to test (to what depth) requires discernment. Oh yeah... maybe they could have squashed this bug by spending 2 or 3 days adjusting server clocks and creating fake test data across multiple subsystems and doing a full integration test at various set points. But what you don't see is that those 3 days cost them the time to find such-and-such 15 other bugs. Or that the testing schedule would have to extend by 6 months to test both the leap day concern and all other concerns deemed more risky than the leap-day concern but below the level of risk they were actually testing for.
I'm not saying Microsoft has clean hands here. But it's definitely possible because even though we've known about leap years for centuries (excuse me... "DECADES"... got to use all caps to punctuate one's infuriation), because all software testing is a sequence of calculated gambles, and you can't judge the competence of a testing group by the occurrence of a single rare bug.
Ted Nelson.... was unimpressed with HTML
HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management. The "Browser" is an extremely silly concept-- a window for looking sequentially at a large parallel structure. It does not show this structure in a useful way.
It's funny that Ted's project derides HTML for "simulating paper", when it was this very simplicity that enabled it to evolve and spread quickly. It's not the first time that dumb-and-simple won out over a lofty intellectual approach, but it's especially awkward that the guy has stuck with it for several decades (see this June 1995 Wired article, for instance).
Ok, but why Firefox would care about Google?
Because they and other advertisers must honor the DNT flag in order for it to work. Since they don't have a natural incentive to do so, the question becomes: how much media attention, public pressure, and legislative action can you muster to force them? Answer: enough to get them to agree to an opt-out approach, but nowhere near enough to get them to agree to an opt-in approach... the latter would have them fighting tooth-and-nail because you'd basically be cutting off a major revenue stream and threatening their survival.
Who gets to keep the guns?
Forget that... who gets to keep the nukes? Does North Dakota still have them all?
(Hmm... come to think of it, The Hunger Games trilogy peripherally mentions this problem.)
Mailinator can achieve high compression rates because most people use it for registration emails. Those mails differ from each other in only a few words, making the data set highly redundant, and easily compressible.
The accomplishment here is that he determined a very tactical set of strategies for solving a real world problem of large scale. No, it didn't take a math PhD with some deep understanding of Fourier analysis to invent this algorithm, but it most certainly took a software developer who was knowledgeable, creative, and passionate for his task. So yeah... it's not the 90% compression that's impressive, it's the real-time performance that's cool.
the floor managers got to see what the mechanics rated an issue. While I'm sure they didn't like their problems being downgraded, it gave better feedback, and if they felt an issue was truly a 4/5 then they could take it up with someone higher
Interesting... how quickly (and how completely) did you see the ratings discrepancies dissipate? Could you see a definite change in the distribution of floor manager ratings?
I think that's a great illustration of the problem here - Target and all the other companies that are using "targeted advertising" are going beyond simply providing a service to actively trying to manipulate people. Advertising to inform is good, advertising to convince people spend money on products they wouldn't otherwise purchase is bad.
Most advertising is manipulative. If "informative" is how you draw the line between good and bad, you'll find very, very little on the good side.
Do this... next time you're watching a TV commercial, open your eyes and then--to paraphrase Terry Pratchet--open your eyes again and look at the subtle "identity logic" of each commercial. Such-and-such deodorant will make you irresistible to girls (but only the hot ones!). Such-and-such truck* shows that you're a weathered, gritty man who's self-reliant and tough to the core. Such-and-such consulting firm shows that you're a savvy business veteran who understands the complexities of a global interwoven economy. Such-and-such cleaning product shows that you're a smart, has-it-together woman who can deftly orchestrate the family schedule and still have time for herself**. Such-and-such pill lets you live your sunset years playing with your grand-kids and walking beaches with your well-preserved spouse.
Look for it... those commercials that present a picture of who you want to be and tie it to a product. You'll be amazed.
---
* Or Chrysler, as the case may be.
** And staying at home to play nurse/janitor/chef 24/7 was so much smarter and more fulfilling than having some high-paying corporate job like your sellout friends did.
In "real life" students will have access to all those things. Perhaps it isn't cheating but rather utilizing tools that they would have access to in "real life". Assume they'll use every tool at their disposal- and write the tests in such a way that they can't copy the question into a search bar and google the answer.
What's funny is that you appeal to "real life" but don't seem to realize that designing a test is itself a thorny real life problem that must satisfy multiple constraints--such as cheatability, fairness, realism, and the costs to prepare, administer, score, and adjudicate the test--all while meeting the goal of accurately evaluating the student's understanding of some material.
Evaluation under real world conditions ("realism") is not always feasible, and it's not always a priority. For instance, the Goog will do elementary arithmetic for you, but everybody should really learn to do this in their head. There are some levels of effectiveness you just can't reach unless you have internalized the prerequisite knowledge, and it's not always feasible to test for this internalization with approaches that are cheater-immune to open book / open internet test-taking.
Replying to myself now that I've read the protocol. Their design isn't an issue for the host, because it is the client that determines the callback URL.
To make the spec viable*, it seems like you would need a third party service (possibly run by Mozilla or Verizon, Sprint, etc.) that your browser would talk with to get internet-visible callback URL's for. The service would aggregate your notifications, and you'd either poll for them periodically or maintain an always-on TCP/IP connection. It requires much more browser support than they're actually talking about, and it seems to be a pretty dumb arrangement for receiving notifications from a handful of sites, but perhaps the designers of this spec see a world where you have hundreds or thousands of websites sending you notifications.
*E.g., to deal with NAT and firewalls, to enable encryption of notifications (HTTPS callback URL's), to centrally manage spam/malware filtering, and to receive notifications uninterrupted as you join/disconnect from different networks and as you open/close your browser.
It's a problem on the host side too... the origin IP will be hidden by the firewall and/or load balancer. There are some workarounds, but will your infrastructure department support them? And can you get the workaround to play nice with your developer tools / website SDK's / vendor products / etc. that have come to depend on this push feature?
It's like saying you just have to deal with spam emails. No, you don't. That's what spam filters, whitelists, etc. are for.
Umm... email spam is only kinda half-solved, and that's after throwing millions of dollars at it.
The problem with Apple is there is no customization in either hardware or software. Lets say I want a phone with a physical keyboard running iOS. I can't have it. On the other hand, I can have a wide variety of phone form factors on Android and even Windows Phone 7. Want a really thin phone with no keyboard? They've got it. Want a phone with a sliding keyboard? They've got it. Want a keyboard just on the face of the phone? They've got it.
I'm not an Apple fan, and even I am tired of seeing this one-sided argument. Yes, Android has device-diversity, but Apple has accessory-diversity. You've got a much much much broader aftermarket selection for iPhone (and in the tablet world, iPad) then you do for Android. It's not just cases and docks either... there are a lot of neat gizmos that can only exist because Apple has forced a standard connector and case size on its third of the market. I'm not saying that the two benefits are equivalent--different consumers will value different choices--but don't pretend that all the customization/choice is in the Android camp.
I really like how the timeline is presented out-of-order (over half this stuff is from the 60's and 70's), how items with varying levels of scientific consensus are presented as equivalents (global cooling/warming), and how unrelated issues are juxtaposed (sustainability vs obesity). Throwing in non-scientific issues (employment, sexual promiscuity) was a bit over the top though, at least for a troll of your caliber.
Is it possible to plan a counteroffensive? You know... get a constitutional amendment going or something that would swing the attack the other way? The MPAA/RIAA has no incentive to back down and say "oh shucks you're right, we were trying to break the internet to protect our business model at the expense of the public good and civil liberties... sorry about that, we won't try it again".
"Holding out" the firestorm isn't enought... if we don't take it the other way, all this talk of "balance" will ultimately mean... big business and big government win.
Piracy is a real problem. I find it interesting that people want to kill PIPA and SOPA, and not change it to allow protection against piracy while still allowing people freedom to use the web.
And what if you decided to host user-generated content in your game? This is a proven strategy for driving growth and creating unique spaces people really like to be in. Legislation like SOPA/PIPA makes it possible for any one malcontent to "poison" your space with infringing content and get it shutdown by the federal government. Heck the same thing applies to any comment section, user forum, or wiki that you host to let players talk about your game. Legislative approaches are a threat to YOU, not to Mr. Russian guy or the fifty thousand leaches. Instead of asking the taxpayer to do the impossible [and dangerous, etc., etc.], I'd adjust your business model to incorporate some form of online interaction that lets you limit content to licensed users (either something in-game with other players or something more prosaic such as subscription-based updates).
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Here's rationality: the more people who help your cause, the more likely it is to be successful. It's reasonable to ask: how can we make it easier for (members of large underutilized group) to participate? Making this 50/50% isn't what it's about.
I do agree that in some cases the difference is due to some kind of discriminatory behavior, but in others its just simply due to differences in interest. Has either situation been confirmed in this case?
Look to history: videogames use to be an exclusively male hobby, now it's close to achieving parity (depending on which stats you look at). Those firms who were "bothered" by the gender imbalance did the research and took the risks to bring games to an entirely new market segment that others had written off. Think that's a different situation? Not really... marketing goods and marketing volunteerism/causes are pretty similar endeavors.
Our mindset--if we care about the causes of Free and Open Source Software--should not be focused on intrinsic differences (though some of those exist, statistically) or the reasons that women will never want to join us en masse. Instead, we should be thinking about how to attract and leverage all the talent we can get.