5. No statement ascribing a mental predicate can be derived from any set of purely physical descriptions.
Meh. Hume's Law doesn't really apply to that statement. That's the same as the Chinese Room argument against strong ai. It is more wishful thinking than a valid thesis. It is very easy for a collection to have properties that its individual elements do not. A simple example is that a set of objects can be assigned a number corresponding to the number of objects in the set, whereas that property isn't meaningful for a single object. Once the collective property is defined, it is very easy to logically derive it from the collection of individual objects. So a particular mental state can be assigned to a particular set of neurons firing and, assuming that you have a good neurological model of the mind, you can therefore derive mental states from physical descriptions in the same way you derive results in calculus once you have defined concepts like limits.
To come back to the point of the thread, attempting to save humanity is meaningful even if it may ultimately be unsuccessful.
The TiddlyFox plug-in for FireFox is supposed to work on Android, I have used the AndTidWiki app on Android with the older version. The main problem is getting it to save the file as browsers work to prevent that for security reasons.
TiddlyWiki is a self-contained app stored in an HTML file that you can store on a USB, Dropbox, or elsewhere. People have written GTD add-ons for it and it is easy to write your own customizations. There is an Android app to help run it on Android systems and the new version uses HTML 5 with option to use node.js to make it even more powerful.
There are many threats to our life and health in the modern environment. Cars, electricity, toxic compounds under the sink, industrial machinery, and so on. It takes intelligence to navigate these dangers and accidents are a significant cause of death for people of reproductive age, thus evolutionary selection for intelligence. Granted, most modern humans would be ill suited for surviving on the savannah, but the article's assumption that Athenians would be better suited for rapidly reading road signs and adjusting for oncoming traffic is a bit much.
Google should look into the case of Loglan versus Lojban. The creator of the constructed language Loglan sued and lost against the creators of Lojban, a derivative language with similar grammar but with different words. Especially relevant since Loglan/Lojban was designed to be easily read and interpreted by computers.
Line of sight overlays as you describe would be very hard to implement in glasses because the camera would have to track eye position as well as doing object recognition. So process the image, identify the road or billboard to be overlaid, and then place the overlay on the glasses in a position that will correspond to the objects location for you eye's current position--all in real time. Those overlays they do for video of sporting events are for fixed cameras pointing at known objects with plenty of computing horsepower that doesn't have to worry about eye position.
Yeah, theory aside, the speaker was just multiplying by 3 modulus 89 so values less than 30 will always be followed by a higher value, a pattern that was easy to hear in the music. The speaker confused a lack of repetition of distances between notes as being a total lack of pattern.
This is a well-studied "Who watches the watchers?" web of trust type issue. While there is no perfect solution, there are a number of good approaches. This page on Advgato describes a good trust metric for reducing the impact of spam and malicious attacks. It wouldn't be that big of a deal for FaceBook to incorporate some such system. However, it would require FaceBook to actually care about about being fair to its users, which it doesn't. FaceBook exploits for financial gain the tribal desires of people to band together and be part of a group. So FaceBook's really uses its abuse policy as a way to force people to follow the rules of the bigger and more aggressive tribes. Such battles actually help FaceBook to be successful because it strengthens the tribal behaviors that benefit FaceBook's bottom line.
So all in all, no matter what brilliant, cost-effective, robust moderation/abuse system you design or crowd source, the very, very best that you can hope for is that somebody at FaceBook might pat you on the head and thank you for your efforts and say that they aren't interested in your contribution at this time.
Well, the images do have to be an integer number of pixels wide, but if the ratio between lengths approximated an irrational number you would expect long periods. Even relatively prime numbers would work. Tiles of length 7, 15, and 16 won't repeat for 1,680 pixels. Basically, if you want to create a nice, non-repetitive pattern of overlayed tiles, make certain that the smallest common multiple for all of the tile sizes is larger than your expected screen width.
I really like BitCoin, But the biggest problem is the "goldrush" is over.
Yeah, BitCoins are something of a fad like Beany Babies where an artificially restricted supply allows early adopters to make money off of late comers who foolishly think that they can make money off of people coming after them. From an economic standpoint, BitCoins are simply collector's items. Collecting BitCoins isn't much different than, say, collecting 1973 pennies. There are a limited number of them and their value is primarily determined by the demand for them from other collectors.
The rigid nature of the BitCoin supply is very appealing in today's economy as people want to acquire assets that retain value. Unfortunately, most people have a hard time understanding that value is not determined just by supply, but by demand as well. The very fact that the cash value of BitCoins is going up right now is evidence of this. Most of this demand, however, is not from people who want to use BitCoins, but from people who see them as an investment. After a while the number of new investors will peak, demand will go down, early investors will cash out, supply will go up, and the market will crash.
I doubt that BitCoins will ever see much mainstream use for conducting transactions, primarily because of the complexity of using them and because their unregulated nature will prevent them from being a stable currency. The fact that all transactions are public will discourage shadier operations from using them. They might see some use in online games where BitCoins could be used as the in-game currency.
Which is really the way it should be broken out. Computer Science should be about the math, theories, and algorithms that make up computation, and computer software engineering should be more about building applications. Sort of like how traditional engineering relates to physics.
Uhm, if the average price of goods goes down relative to the currency, that is, by definition, deflation. While you can argue that it is justified by a higher standard of living, it is still deflation and it will still have all of the problems that deflation has, namely discouraging borrowing and spending.
The real issue here for you seems to be that you want to be assured that whatever currency you manage to accumulate will have the same purchasing power tomorrow as it does today. The only way to do that with currencies subject to inflation is to put the money in a savings account or other investment vehicle whose interest rate compensates for inflation. You think that using BitCoins as a currency would get around that problem, but it doesn't. Assuming that somehow, some way the value of your BitCoins is the same tomorrow as today, then they will be worth more in inflated dollars and you will be taxed on the difference so that you will still end up with less. In fact, in any well-regulated free market, you can expect that if the demand for a fixed, nonrenewable commodity, be it BitCoins or Picasso paintings, remains the same, then its value in an inflated currency will be about the same as it would be if you had started a savings account instead.
It's all fine and dandy to not to trust the government to regulate the money supply, but I fail to see what BitCoins do to avoid the problem. If the government wanted to, it could buy up a lot of BitCoins, decreasing the supply available for market functions, and then the government could dump in BitCoins from its reserves to increase the supply. If the government is having a hard time getting enough BitCoins to build up its reserves, it could just tax people. Even if the government stayed completely out of the BitCoin market, there is nothing preventing a group of individuals getting together and doing the same thing for their own benefit.
Deflation is also a problem because it discourages spending since your BitCoin will buy more tomorrow than it does today. Moreover, if enough people used BitCoins then there will be people who loan and borrow BitCoins, thus the debt problems of deflation will arise as well.
BitCoin enthusiasts seem to fall into the same category as gold standard promoters. You can't run a modern global economy with financial instruments based on a rare commodity. Only 21 million BitCoins will be generated, which will cause deflation once that limit is reached. The only way a government could use BitCoins is the same way they used to use gold, ie. buy up enough of it to have reserves that can be used to pump money into the economy when it needs it. BitCoins won't be more stable than modern fiat currencies because they will have all the problems associated with gold, such as hoarding and dumping. BitCoins are interesting as an attempt to create an electronic form of cash, but hoping to build a stable economic platform on them is foolish.
Spammers can just load up the Bing toolbar, search on the terms that they want to point to their site, and then click on their site where ever it shows up in the results. They can write a script to do it from multiple computers multiple times to create a strong signal, strong enough to bump up their site in Bing's results, especially in searches where other signals are weak or conflicting. Even legitimate sites would be tempted to use this approach to see if they could bump up their rankings from the second page to the first page.
This does not guarantee both anonymity and security. The public database must reveal the true vote of each receipt, otherwise there is no way for third parties to verify that the public vote totals match the ballots. In that case, there is no need for icons or colors or encryption. Just give each voter a certified copy of their uniquely numbered ballot and publish a copy of all ballots after the election. Third parties can verify vote totals, voters can verify that their votes were counted, and anyone wanting to remain anonymous can shred their copy at the voting booth, losing the ability to verify their vote.
The study seems to demonstrate "Putting a playstation in a house that didn't have one before causes decreased learning ability relative to not putting in a playstation"
Still room to quibble with that conclusion. The study artificially changed the environment of a house by putting a Playstation in it. The residents of the house would be well aware that they were part of a study, and would attach some importance to the use of the Playstation. They might even allow homework and other academic pursuits to slide in an effort to "do well" in the study of Playstation usage.
This "Observer Awareness" affect is a real problem in studying human behavior. Television rating companies have to deal with the fact that people change their viewing habits when they know they are being studied. Anthropologists have to deal with people acting differently when they know that they are being observed.
Additionally, people treat objects that they get as a gift differently than they treat something they purchase. Perhaps most parents who purchase a Playstation do so well aware of what gaming is and how to incorporate it into their children's lives without affecting their studies, whereas parents who receive a Playstation out of the blue may not know the pitfalls.
So, while this study is not without merit, I would hesitate to say that it establishes anything more than the obvious--that playing video games can distract from academic work. A more thorough study would look into the actual amount of time spent playing video games and the types of games played. It might also look into the affects of video gaming on non-traditional academic skills like hand-eye coordination and general problem solving ability.
What the article doesn't appear to take into account is the difference between quantum computing and conventional computing. A quantum computer doesn't carry out conventional binary operations so comparing the two is tricky. Doubling the number of q-bits a quantum computer can process effectively squares the number of equivalent binary operations it can carry out in one computation, but quantum computers are limited in what kinds of binary operations they can compute simultaneously. So saying that a there is a fundamental limit on the number quantum operations per second doesn't necessarily give you a meaningful limit on the number of binary operations per second. You need more information, such as the number of linked q-bits and the types of binary operations being performed.
Hands also get cold because they have a much higher surface area to volume ratio than your torso and hence lose heat faster. Because of this your hands might be cold even when you are sweating if the outside temp is cold enough. Circulation in your hands also depends on oxygen need, so if the muscles in you hands aren't doing much work, there won't be as much blood flow to them and they can get cold even when the rest of the body is doing fine. To see this, just clench and unclench your fist repeatedly when your hands start getting cold, and they should start feeling warmer. The work itself will also warm the hands somewhat. Some people have poor circulation all the time from smoking, injury, or other reasons and will get cold hands even in temperate weather.
In other words, peripheral vaso constriction as a mechanism to protect the core body temp is just one of several reasons why your hands might be cold, and so the relatively small amount heat lost by these gloves is unlikely to increase the risk of severe hypothermia for most people in most common situations.
This sort of economic philosophy doesn't foment economic growth.
I wasn't promoting a particular economic philosophy, I was merely pointing out that it was reasonable for consumers to dislike price differentiation. But since you bring the subject up...
There's no profit motive, little growth of life-saving or bettering technology...It's almost communist. people should actually be willing to pay close to the full utility value...for the good of the economy.
I wonder if you realize how disturbingly similar these statements are. Both communism and your approach expect people to make sacrifices for the good of the economy/country.
Behaving as though the producer has no right to profit is fundamentally more selfish than rampant profiteering.
But producers don't have a "right" to make a profit. They have a right to try. Who has the greater claim to make or save money, the producer or the consumer? Neither. For they are one and the same. A furniture company should try to get the best price for the lumber it buys while the lumber company should try to get the best price for its office furniture. Throwing more money at a company in the hopes that the company will spend it on R&D as opposed to ski junkets is just as foolish as giving it to the government in the hopes that it will be spent wisely. The money I save by not paying my full utility value means that I have more disposable income to buy more products with and higher production drives growth more certainly than R&D does, to counter your static-growth example
The matter of the producer's profit is immaterial to me;
Many people hate to negotiate, and oftentimes the amount saved doesn't pay for the increased effort.
These people are easy to target with price differentiation, and they probably won't complain as long isn't too obvious that they are being ripped off. And the company makes a nice profit on the few cents these people didn't bother to quibble over, and hopefully it uses the profit to improve production efficiency. But the consumers who fight for every last dime are the ones that force companies to lower production costs to survive. Unfortunately, the average individual consumer doesn't have enough skill or clout to negotiate prices effectively, and so one is left hoping that the big corporate consumers do a good job for the rest of us, or that there is strong enough competition to keep the prices down.
Good points. But they ignore the fact that there are two values associated with a product or service:
Production value - The actual cost of bringing the product or service to the consumer.
Utility value - The amount a customer is willing to pay to obtain a good or service.
Assuming that the utility value is higher than the production value, what is best for the consumer is to pay as close to the production value as possible, whereas what is best for the vendor is for them to pay as close to the utility value as possible.
The techniques that you mention are all effective ways of hiding the production value and inducing consumers to pay the utility value and hence are "good for business". But a wise consumer will find out the production value of a product and refuse to pay much more regardless of technique used or personal utility value. Price targeting hurts those who can't find the production value, either because they don't have the time, aren't sufficiently educated, or are locked into a particular vendor--which is why customers tend to get angry with businesses that price differentiate.
Price differentiation basically allows companies to maximise profits from ill-informed consumers when there isn't much competition or comparison shopping to undercut the inflated prices. While it might be easy to be unsympathetic with people who don't take the time to get the best price, the fact is that it is very hard to find good, reliable information on production costs, especially when companies are able to target far more resources to keeping that information hidden than consumers are able to bring to bear on finding that information.
In other words, customers aren't being irrational or illogical by opposing price discrimination. They are merely trying to ensure that they get the best value for their dollars. The fact that some price discrimination techniques generate less rancor than others doesn't change the fact that it is in the consumer's best interest to oppose price discrimination in general.
I agree that Freenet has the potential to replace the web. Just imagine if Google started pointing to Freenet documents, and spidered Freenet documents as well as regular web pages. Freenet would would become the new web with load balancing and built-in traffic encryption.
> if your tracks are clean, there's nothing
to cover.
A few counter-points: Profiling
Yeah, maybe you haven't done anything wrong, but few months ago you bought a Teletubby video for your nephew, and statistics show that within your demographic, child molesters also tend to buy Teletubby videos. So the next time a kid gets molested in your neighborhood, the cops come knocking on your door looking for suspects. But hey, you're innocent, so no big deal right? As long it doesn't happen every time, and as long as you have a good alibi, and as long as some detective doesn't get it in his head that you are the guilty one and plants some evidence to make a conviction easier.
Myth of Infallability
Data gets corrupted, errors get made during entry, records get crossed, identities get swiped. What do you do when a computer glitch mixes your data with that of a serial killer?
>The objections should have been raised long ago, then. If not, then what's the problem?....Speak up when it _matters_.
Bit of a contradiction there, which illustrates why it is so important to speak up now. Otherwise the slippery slope will eat up our rights with no definite point at which to complain. GPS locator planted in your body sounds bad, right? Well, what about criminals on parole? - there are some places where they have ankle straps that do exactly that. So maybe we should do it for people who are charged but out on bail as well. And surely it would be OK for parents to do that in order to keep track of their kids. And by extension, we should do the same for mentally ill patients and other wards of the state. And speaking of such things, there is no reason why your employer shouldn't be able to require you to wear one on the job to make sure you aren't slacking off. After all, trucking companies already have something like that in place. And don't forget that they can keep track of you pretty well right now pretty well using your cell phone anyway. The point being, the government isn't going to stupidly cause a mass uprising by forcing this down our throats in one big dose, it will break it down into smaller ones that few people will get worked up about until you have an entire generation used to the fact that their entire personal life is on the government record. Heck, people will begin to feel frightened and vulnerable if they aren't constantly tracked.
Your concern over tracking anti-government demonstrations is a good and realistic example, however. Here in Denver, Colorado we recently had a major flack over the police keeping a surveillance database on people people who attended demonstrations. While such behavior is 'legal', having police follow you home has a definite chilling effect on freedom of speech.
The fact is that government surveillance is 'harmless' for law-abiding citizens except in rare cases where a person in a position of trust abuses it. But that presumes that the laws are popular and just. For example, a significant percentage of the US population flagrantly violates various drug control laws. You could argue that better enforcement of these laws would be a good thing, or you could argue that these laws are unrepresentive and enforcement would result in the unfair subjugation of a large minority. Feel free substitute the hot-button issue of your choice, such as abortion, sexuality, race, etc.
A few other "dramatic" possibilities:
Crime ring breaks or bribes its way into the database to rob your home while you are away.
Coincidence and bad luck place you and a suspected terrorist at the same place at the same time often enough that you get flagged as a possible sympathizer.
Tracking becomes so common that it becomes compulsory, evading it becomes suspicious or even illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
5. No statement ascribing a mental predicate can be derived from any set of purely physical descriptions.
Meh. Hume's Law doesn't really apply to that statement. That's the same as the Chinese Room argument against strong ai. It is more wishful thinking than a valid thesis. It is very easy for a collection to have properties that its individual elements do not. A simple example is that a set of objects can be assigned a number corresponding to the number of objects in the set, whereas that property isn't meaningful for a single object. Once the collective property is defined, it is very easy to logically derive it from the collection of individual objects. So a particular mental state can be assigned to a particular set of neurons firing and, assuming that you have a good neurological model of the mind, you can therefore derive mental states from physical descriptions in the same way you derive results in calculus once you have defined concepts like limits.
To come back to the point of the thread, attempting to save humanity is meaningful even if it may ultimately be unsuccessful.
The TiddlyFox plug-in for FireFox is supposed to work on Android, I have used the AndTidWiki app on Android with the older version. The main problem is getting it to save the file as browsers work to prevent that for security reasons.
TiddlyWiki is a self-contained app stored in an HTML file that you can store on a USB, Dropbox, or elsewhere. People have written GTD add-ons for it and it is easy to write your own customizations. There is an Android app to help run it on Android systems and the new version uses HTML 5 with option to use node.js to make it even more powerful.
There are many threats to our life and health in the modern environment. Cars, electricity, toxic compounds under the sink, industrial machinery, and so on. It takes intelligence to navigate these dangers and accidents are a significant cause of death for people of reproductive age, thus evolutionary selection for intelligence. Granted, most modern humans would be ill suited for surviving on the savannah, but the article's assumption that Athenians would be better suited for rapidly reading road signs and adjusting for oncoming traffic is a bit much.
Google should look into the case of Loglan versus Lojban. The creator of the constructed language Loglan sued and lost against the creators of Lojban, a derivative language with similar grammar but with different words. Especially relevant since Loglan/Lojban was designed to be easily read and interpreted by computers.
Line of sight overlays as you describe would be very hard to implement in glasses because the camera would have to track eye position as well as doing object recognition. So process the image, identify the road or billboard to be overlaid, and then place the overlay on the glasses in a position that will correspond to the objects location for you eye's current position--all in real time. Those overlays they do for video of sporting events are for fixed cameras pointing at known objects with plenty of computing horsepower that doesn't have to worry about eye position.
Yeah, theory aside, the speaker was just multiplying by 3 modulus 89 so values less than 30 will always be followed by a higher value, a pattern that was easy to hear in the music. The speaker confused a lack of repetition of distances between notes as being a total lack of pattern.
This is a well-studied "Who watches the watchers?" web of trust type issue. While there is no perfect solution, there are a number of good approaches. This page on Advgato describes a good trust metric for reducing the impact of spam and malicious attacks. It wouldn't be that big of a deal for FaceBook to incorporate some such system. However, it would require FaceBook to actually care about about being fair to its users, which it doesn't. FaceBook exploits for financial gain the tribal desires of people to band together and be part of a group. So FaceBook's really uses its abuse policy as a way to force people to follow the rules of the bigger and more aggressive tribes. Such battles actually help FaceBook to be successful because it strengthens the tribal behaviors that benefit FaceBook's bottom line.
So all in all, no matter what brilliant, cost-effective, robust moderation/abuse system you design or crowd source, the very, very best that you can hope for is that somebody at FaceBook might pat you on the head and thank you for your efforts and say that they aren't interested in your contribution at this time.
Well, the images do have to be an integer number of pixels wide, but if the ratio between lengths approximated an irrational number you would expect long periods. Even relatively prime numbers would work. Tiles of length 7, 15, and 16 won't repeat for 1,680 pixels. Basically, if you want to create a nice, non-repetitive pattern of overlayed tiles, make certain that the smallest common multiple for all of the tile sizes is larger than your expected screen width.
I really like BitCoin, But the biggest problem is the "goldrush" is over.
Yeah, BitCoins are something of a fad like Beany Babies where an artificially restricted supply allows early adopters to make money off of late comers who foolishly think that they can make money off of people coming after them. From an economic standpoint, BitCoins are simply collector's items. Collecting BitCoins isn't much different than, say, collecting 1973 pennies. There are a limited number of them and their value is primarily determined by the demand for them from other collectors.
The rigid nature of the BitCoin supply is very appealing in today's economy as people want to acquire assets that retain value. Unfortunately, most people have a hard time understanding that value is not determined just by supply, but by demand as well. The very fact that the cash value of BitCoins is going up right now is evidence of this. Most of this demand, however, is not from people who want to use BitCoins, but from people who see them as an investment. After a while the number of new investors will peak, demand will go down, early investors will cash out, supply will go up, and the market will crash.
I doubt that BitCoins will ever see much mainstream use for conducting transactions, primarily because of the complexity of using them and because their unregulated nature will prevent them from being a stable currency. The fact that all transactions are public will discourage shadier operations from using them. They might see some use in online games where BitCoins could be used as the in-game currency.
Which is really the way it should be broken out. Computer Science should be about the math, theories, and algorithms that make up computation, and computer software engineering should be more about building applications. Sort of like how traditional engineering relates to physics.
Uhm, if the average price of goods goes down relative to the currency, that is, by definition, deflation. While you can argue that it is justified by a higher standard of living, it is still deflation and it will still have all of the problems that deflation has, namely discouraging borrowing and spending.
The real issue here for you seems to be that you want to be assured that whatever currency you manage to accumulate will have the same purchasing power tomorrow as it does today. The only way to do that with currencies subject to inflation is to put the money in a savings account or other investment vehicle whose interest rate compensates for inflation. You think that using BitCoins as a currency would get around that problem, but it doesn't. Assuming that somehow, some way the value of your BitCoins is the same tomorrow as today, then they will be worth more in inflated dollars and you will be taxed on the difference so that you will still end up with less. In fact, in any well-regulated free market, you can expect that if the demand for a fixed, nonrenewable commodity, be it BitCoins or Picasso paintings, remains the same, then its value in an inflated currency will be about the same as it would be if you had started a savings account instead.
It's all fine and dandy to not to trust the government to regulate the money supply, but I fail to see what BitCoins do to avoid the problem. If the government wanted to, it could buy up a lot of BitCoins, decreasing the supply available for market functions, and then the government could dump in BitCoins from its reserves to increase the supply. If the government is having a hard time getting enough BitCoins to build up its reserves, it could just tax people. Even if the government stayed completely out of the BitCoin market, there is nothing preventing a group of individuals getting together and doing the same thing for their own benefit.
Deflation is also a problem because it discourages spending since your BitCoin will buy more tomorrow than it does today. Moreover, if enough people used BitCoins then there will be people who loan and borrow BitCoins, thus the debt problems of deflation will arise as well.
BitCoin enthusiasts seem to fall into the same category as gold standard promoters. You can't run a modern global economy with financial instruments based on a rare commodity. Only 21 million BitCoins will be generated, which will cause deflation once that limit is reached. The only way a government could use BitCoins is the same way they used to use gold, ie. buy up enough of it to have reserves that can be used to pump money into the economy when it needs it. BitCoins won't be more stable than modern fiat currencies because they will have all the problems associated with gold, such as hoarding and dumping. BitCoins are interesting as an attempt to create an electronic form of cash, but hoping to build a stable economic platform on them is foolish.
Spammers can just load up the Bing toolbar, search on the terms that they want to point to their site, and then click on their site where ever it shows up in the results. They can write a script to do it from multiple computers multiple times to create a strong signal, strong enough to bump up their site in Bing's results, especially in searches where other signals are weak or conflicting. Even legitimate sites would be tempted to use this approach to see if they could bump up their rankings from the second page to the first page.
This does not guarantee both anonymity and security. The public database must reveal the true vote of each receipt, otherwise there is no way for third parties to verify that the public vote totals match the ballots. In that case, there is no need for icons or colors or encryption. Just give each voter a certified copy of their uniquely numbered ballot and publish a copy of all ballots after the election. Third parties can verify vote totals, voters can verify that their votes were counted, and anyone wanting to remain anonymous can shred their copy at the voting booth, losing the ability to verify their vote.
The study seems to demonstrate "Putting a playstation in a house that didn't have one before causes decreased learning ability relative to not putting in a playstation"
Still room to quibble with that conclusion. The study artificially changed the environment of a house by putting a Playstation in it. The residents of the house would be well aware that they were part of a study, and would attach some importance to the use of the Playstation. They might even allow homework and other academic pursuits to slide in an effort to "do well" in the study of Playstation usage.
This "Observer Awareness" affect is a real problem in studying human behavior. Television rating companies have to deal with the fact that people change their viewing habits when they know they are being studied. Anthropologists have to deal with people acting differently when they know that they are being observed.
Additionally, people treat objects that they get as a gift differently than they treat something they purchase. Perhaps most parents who purchase a Playstation do so well aware of what gaming is and how to incorporate it into their children's lives without affecting their studies, whereas parents who receive a Playstation out of the blue may not know the pitfalls.
So, while this study is not without merit, I would hesitate to say that it establishes anything more than the obvious--that playing video games can distract from academic work. A more thorough study would look into the actual amount of time spent playing video games and the types of games played. It might also look into the affects of video gaming on non-traditional academic skills like hand-eye coordination and general problem solving ability.
What the article doesn't appear to take into account is the difference between quantum computing and conventional computing. A quantum computer doesn't carry out conventional binary operations so comparing the two is tricky. Doubling the number of q-bits a quantum computer can process effectively squares the number of equivalent binary operations it can carry out in one computation, but quantum computers are limited in what kinds of binary operations they can compute simultaneously. So saying that a there is a fundamental limit on the number quantum operations per second doesn't necessarily give you a meaningful limit on the number of binary operations per second. You need more information, such as the number of linked q-bits and the types of binary operations being performed.
Hands also get cold because they have a much higher surface area to volume ratio than your torso and hence lose heat faster. Because of this your hands might be cold even when you are sweating if the outside temp is cold enough. Circulation in your hands also depends on oxygen need, so if the muscles in you hands aren't doing much work, there won't be as much blood flow to them and they can get cold even when the rest of the body is doing fine. To see this, just clench and unclench your fist repeatedly when your hands start getting cold, and they should start feeling warmer. The work itself will also warm the hands somewhat. Some people have poor circulation all the time from smoking, injury, or other reasons and will get cold hands even in temperate weather.
In other words, peripheral vaso constriction as a mechanism to protect the core body temp is just one of several reasons why your hands might be cold, and so the relatively small amount heat lost by these gloves is unlikely to increase the risk of severe hypothermia for most people in most common situations.
I wasn't promoting a particular economic philosophy, I was merely pointing out that it was reasonable for consumers to dislike price differentiation. But since you bring the subject up...
There's no profit motive, little growth of life-saving or bettering technology...It's almost communist.
people should actually be willing to pay close to the full utility value...for the good of the economy.
I wonder if you realize how disturbingly similar these statements are. Both communism and your approach expect people to make sacrifices for the good of the economy/country.
Behaving as though the producer has no right to profit is fundamentally more selfish than rampant profiteering.
But producers don't have a "right" to make a profit. They have a right to try. Who has the greater claim to make or save money, the producer or the consumer? Neither. For they are one and the same. A furniture company should try to get the best price for the lumber it buys while the lumber company should try to get the best price for its office furniture. Throwing more money at a company in the hopes that the company will spend it on R&D as opposed to ski junkets is just as foolish as giving it to the government in the hopes that it will be spent wisely. The money I save by not paying my full utility value means that I have more disposable income to buy more products with and higher production drives growth more certainly than R&D does, to counter your static-growth example
The matter of the producer's profit is immaterial to me;
Many people hate to negotiate, and oftentimes the amount saved doesn't pay for the increased effort. These people are easy to target with price differentiation, and they probably won't complain as long isn't too obvious that they are being ripped off. And the company makes a nice profit on the few cents these people didn't bother to quibble over, and hopefully it uses the profit to improve production efficiency. But the consumers who fight for every last dime are the ones that force companies to lower production costs to survive. Unfortunately, the average individual consumer doesn't have enough skill or clout to negotiate prices effectively, and so one is left hoping that the big corporate consumers do a good job for the rest of us, or that there is strong enough competition to keep the prices down.
- Production value - The actual cost of bringing the product or service to the consumer.
- Utility value - The amount a customer is willing to pay to obtain a good or service.
Assuming that the utility value is higher than the production value, what is best for the consumer is to pay as close to the production value as possible, whereas what is best for the vendor is for them to pay as close to the utility value as possible.The techniques that you mention are all effective ways of hiding the production value and inducing consumers to pay the utility value and hence are "good for business". But a wise consumer will find out the production value of a product and refuse to pay much more regardless of technique used or personal utility value. Price targeting hurts those who can't find the production value, either because they don't have the time, aren't sufficiently educated, or are locked into a particular vendor--which is why customers tend to get angry with businesses that price differentiate.
Price differentiation basically allows companies to maximise profits from ill-informed consumers when there isn't much competition or comparison shopping to undercut the inflated prices. While it might be easy to be unsympathetic with people who don't take the time to get the best price, the fact is that it is very hard to find good, reliable information on production costs, especially when companies are able to target far more resources to keeping that information hidden than consumers are able to bring to bear on finding that information.
In other words, customers aren't being irrational or illogical by opposing price discrimination. They are merely trying to ensure that they get the best value for their dollars. The fact that some price discrimination techniques generate less rancor than others doesn't change the fact that it is in the consumer's best interest to oppose price discrimination in general.
I agree that Freenet has the potential to replace the web. Just imagine if Google started pointing to Freenet documents, and spidered Freenet documents as well as regular web pages. Freenet would would become the new web with load balancing and built-in traffic encryption.
A few counter-points:
Profiling
Yeah, maybe you haven't done anything wrong, but few months ago you bought a Teletubby video for your nephew, and statistics show that within your demographic, child molesters also tend to buy Teletubby videos. So the next time a kid gets molested in your neighborhood, the cops come knocking on your door looking for suspects. But hey, you're innocent, so no big deal right? As long it doesn't happen every time, and as long as you have a good alibi, and as long as some detective doesn't get it in his head that you are the guilty one and plants some evidence to make a conviction easier.
Myth of Infallability
Data gets corrupted, errors get made during entry, records get crossed, identities get swiped. What do you do when a computer glitch mixes your data with that of a serial killer?
>The objections should have been raised long ago, then. If not, then what's the problem?....Speak up when it _matters_.
Bit of a contradiction there, which illustrates why it is so important to speak up now. Otherwise the slippery slope will eat up our rights with no definite point at which to complain. GPS locator planted in your body sounds bad, right? Well, what about criminals on parole? - there are some places where they have ankle straps that do exactly that. So maybe we should do it for people who are charged but out on bail as well. And surely it would be OK for parents to do that in order to keep track of their kids. And by extension, we should do the same for mentally ill patients and other wards of the state. And speaking of such things, there is no reason why your employer shouldn't be able to require you to wear one on the job to make sure you aren't slacking off. After all, trucking companies already have something like that in place. And don't forget that they can keep track of you pretty well right now pretty well using your cell phone anyway. The point being, the government isn't going to stupidly cause a mass uprising by forcing this down our throats in one big dose, it will break it down into smaller ones that few people will get worked up about until you have an entire generation used to the fact that their entire personal life is on the government record. Heck, people will begin to feel frightened and vulnerable if they aren't constantly tracked.
The fact is that government surveillance is 'harmless' for law-abiding citizens except in rare cases where a person in a position of trust abuses it. But that presumes that the laws are popular and just. For example, a significant percentage of the US population flagrantly violates various drug control laws. You could argue that better enforcement of these laws would be a good thing, or you could argue that these laws are unrepresentive and enforcement would result in the unfair subjugation of a large minority. Feel free substitute the hot-button issue of your choice, such as abortion, sexuality, race, etc.
A few other "dramatic" possibilities: