How did you get involved, originally? My first guess (having known a few scientologists) is that your parents were/are members and you were raised in it. Second guess: One of the substance abuse programs. Third guess: One of their entrepreneurial outreach programs.
Any hits? Just curious--I'm always happy to see somebody leave the CoS. it's a terrible, hurtful thing, and I've seen it ruin peoples' lives while making them feel it's their own fault.
Also, out of curiosity, have you ever been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, or at least seen the symptoms in yourself?
Personally, I think there's substantial co-morbidity between substance abuse problems and scientology for a very specific reason: Undiagnosed (or untreated) ADHD, mostly the "inattentive" kind (which is pretty substantially under-diagnosed, since the kids aren't unruly or acting out). It tends to breed feelings of worthlessness in afflicted adults, and opens up a lot of psychological vulnerabilities. Many suffers either self-medicate (hence the substance abuse issues), and/or get attracted to cults that promise direction, motivation, and self-improvement. Scientology, in particular, has substance-abuse outreach and treatment programs, which makes a handy recruiting strategy for the larger cult.
Of all the scientologists I've met (~2 dozen), almost all of them seem like classic ADHD cases. That is partly based on observing behavior, and partly on what people have said about their life histories, and partly on what they say about their relatives (ADHD is highly inheritable). I've also met a lot (~100s) of 12-steppers (mostly AA)--the proportion of them showing ADHD symptoms or personal/family histories isn't quite as high, but it's still enormous, far more than the normal population.
(Interesting side-note: According to my psychiatrist uncle (who performed a lot of criminal insanity consultations, and is borderline ADHD, himself), American prison populations also show substantial ADD/ADHD over-representation, possibly as high as 70-80% of all prison inmates. As an adult with ADHD, I have to suppress a chuckle at that little trifecta: Prison, addiction, or scientology--take your pick, kids, so many ways to ruin your life.)
For the general Slashdot audience: If you or your family have symptoms of ADHD or inattentive (no-H) ADHD, I'd recommend reading Nancy and John Ratey's books, and then going to see a psychiatrist, in that order. Even if you decide not to try the drugs (which can be helpful, but aren't a magic cure by themselves), there is a LOT you can do to improve your life. It's cheaper than a cult, too.
Yeah, total agreement, here. This stupidly transparent, self-serving quote says it all:
"...but they is vital for websites to know how people are accessing the sites so they can work out how to improve the experience for the user."
User experience? WTF? Sorry,but the only reason you need invisible-to-the-user cookies is so you can monetize them without them realizing just how much privacy/anonymity they're giving up. Because that might give users pause before they accept your cookies, if they had an informed choice.
And everybody here knows that. The quoted jackass in TFS is just trying to make his industry look like a victim, to drum up support from civil-liberties sympathizers on Slashdot. Too bad we're not that dumb...
As an employee of the advertising industry, I have zero problems with monetizing Internet traffic, or with using cookies to track user behavior, etc., etc. But I hate liars, and I hate people who try to manipulate me.
Any existing 2nd-level domain registrant automatically gets assigned a new TLD equivalent to the current 2nd-level name minus the TLD suffix. Collision priority scheme is.edu, then.com, then.org and.net, then.gov, and finally.mil. Ignores ccTLDs.
First, take care of the.edu sites: Automatically register a new TLD for each registered.edu name, such the that new TLD is the 2nd-level part of the existing.edu name. For example, Harvard U. currently owns 'harvard.edu.', so they would automatically receive the new 'harvard.' TLD.
Second, it seems reasonable to assume that the.com names have higher visibility than the.net/.org names, but not quite as over-riding as the grant to the existing.edu holders. Autoregister the new TLD and give it to the.com holder, but allow a weighted bidding process if the current.net or.org holder wants to try to buy the rights: During some designated 6-month period before open TLD registration starts, the.org/.net holder puts a bid of X dolllars in trust, and the.com holder has 60 days to match 20% of X (single-round bid, weighted at 0.2). That weighting is pretty arbitrary--it doesn't really matter what the actual weight is.
Third, whatever's left in the TLD space gets assigned to.gov and.mil names, on the same basis as.edu.
It's not perfect--it totally ignores ccTLDs, and the weighting is arbitrary, and who am I to say that a.com name is more of a claim on the new TLD than a.net/.org name?
But do you think an unqualified, disorganized "land rush" would be somehow better? At least this way, you're limiting the number of trademark/squatting cases that have to be litigated.
And yeah, point B isn't actually proven by point A. But we're talking about the neurological and cultural prejudices of Home Sapiens, here, so we're pretty far from what I'd call "logical". As long as "swift-boating" and "borking" are effective political tactics, we really ought to admit that.
Sigh. It's a very common misconception that the term "mother fucker" (two words, not one) denigrates a man who has sex with his own mother. Fuck Wikipedia, and fuck the ignorant idiots who spin whole fictions, and especially fuck the lazy dipshit readers who just assume that WP is correct, because it's easier than following up with their own research. Yeah, you heard me--Jimmy Wales can suck a fattie, while we're at it.
In reality, the term "mother fucker" refers to a man who has sex with SOMEONE ELSE'S MOTHER, specifically with a woman in some kind of tight spot (e.g., economically) who agrees to sex with that man only out of desperation. The woman doesn't really want to sleep with this man, and she isn't a prostitute in the professional sense, but this man presents an alternative to watching her children go hungry.
The term gained tremendous traction during WWII, originally amongst black American GIs, and was applied literally to American soldiers (black, white, or otherwise) in war-torn Europe who would trade food, money, or anything of value (cigarettes, chocolate, booze) for sex with desperately poor or starving French and German women. Many of these women were home-makers whose husbands had been conscripted away, killed, or imprisoned, leaving the women to support the couple's children alone. Many lacked trade skills, and the war damaged the local economies so badly that they had few, if any, alternatives.
So calling a man a "mother fucker" meant that he was A) taking advantage of poor and downtrodden people with no options, and B) incapable of seducing non-desperate women. Anyone with experience growing up in desperate poverty, or who saw his own parents humiliated by circumstances beyond his control, would probably consider that kind of behavior to be a pretty low thing.
In the last sixty or so years, the term has entered the popular slang as a term of derision ("That Richard Nixon is a real mother fucker, you know?"). More recently, it's been used as an indicator of extraordinary intensity, not necessarily in a derisive sense, but usually still carrying some implications of harshness ("I fell asleep out in my lawn chair, yesterday, and got a mother fucker of a sunburn.") or intimidating awesomeness ("That Shaft, he's one baaaad mother fucker.").
That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard. So the CEO has the most CRITICAL, SUPER-SECRET information on his laptop, the stuff that represents the company's lifeblood, and which can't be trusted to anybody else.
And this data isn't backed up on company file servers? What happens if the CEO's laptop gets dropped, or smashed by clumsy airport security, or stolen from him?
And you think they run a multi-billion dollar, Fortune 500 company this way? Seriously?
Actually, what I did there was the opposite of "polarize", because I smooshed everything into one big group, in the middle. I don't know what the right word would be, though.
What I also did, more importantly, was take the piss out of Google, and apparently offend one of their fans (you).
I'm curious what basis you have to believe that "the people in charge at Google have more 'moral' business ethics than most'. Did you take a sample of businesses and rate the ethical practices of each? Or have you worked there, and seen how Google Sausage is made, and compared it to other companies for which you've worked?
I'm going to wear my colors, here, and guess that you're responding to the hard work that Google's brilliant PR department has but into their carefully polished corporate image.
But let's make this fun, I'll going to and make this simple challenge:
What evidence can you provide to support your claim that Google is ethically superior to most other businesses?
and if you're game, you show me what you've got. (Feel free to define those terms however you want, it's your assertion, anyway.)
First, there's the outages. Google NEVER used to go down, it was part of their "mystique"--their engineering was SOOO amazing, and so well designed. The Cloud could NEVER go down!
Second, there's the Evil. I feel like I saw this one coming, years ago, having spent a good portion of my career in the advertising industry. It's a simple equation, right? Google is a publicly-traded company, and their core business is selling advertisements, which means their REAL business is selling your eyeballs+buying habits to anybody and everybody with cash. Eventually, there had to be some visible, significant conflicts between the basic reality and their high-concept, geek-chic PR fantasy.
Finally, and this is more personal, there's the lack of responsiveness from developers, and the perception of a "one-way street". Go look up the API for Google Tasks, and you'll see what I mean: Not only doesn't it exist, despite a lot of begging from interested users/developers, but Google keeps responding (when they do respond, which isn't often) that they have a corporate policy of not discussing pending release schedules. I understand that they have finite resources and have to make their own development roadmap, but their attitude seems to be "we're not going to acknowledge the gripes of our base". Which basically is the same attitude that any Big Software Company takes.
So, I'm not saying that Google is a crap company, or that I'm going to stop using Gmail, or that they're the new Evil Empire. But they're not really fundamentally different from every other Evil Corporation that we like to villify, here on Slashdot. There are no "good guys" and "bad guys"--there's just an open field of self-interested actors, each with a shitload more money, engineers, and lawyers than you.
"... no, 500 is not a large enough sample size to draw MEANINGFUL correlations."
Your statement is mathematically incorrect. Also, the way you misuse 'meaningful' suggests that you know nothing about probability and statistical inferences. Any 101-level, intro stats class at virtually any college will teach sample size calcuation in the first month or two. Honestly--it's so easy, they make Poli Sci majors take it.
"MEANINGFUL": How big is a "big enough" sample to be able to extrapolate to the larger population? It's a pretty straightforward math question, and it's been settled by proof for well over a century. The answer depends on three things:
1) Higher levels of confidence require larger samples.
2) Extremely small category sizes (e.g., 5% depression incidence) require larger sample sizes.
3) Larger population sizes require larger samples.
#3 is the real bitch to understand, for most people. (WATCH CLOSELY HERE!) It's true that you need a larger sample to extrapolate to a larger population (all else being equal), BUT it's not a *directly* proportional relationship--the required sample size is proportional to a root of the population size. As in, if you double the population size, you DO NOT need double the sample size--you might only need to increase it slightly, by 1/10th or 1/100th.
Do you understand, yet? We're reaching the limits of what I can teach you, in this forum, so I would encourage you to take this up in a school setting and maybe learn a little more. But you know, I don't even think we've uncovered the real issue, yet.
I'm guessing that the study's results make you feel uncomfortable about yourself (this is Slashdot, after all). Is that what makes you get defensive and hostile, because you want to deny the study's implied judgement that YOU are fat, depressed, and such, because you're a gamer?
Sorry, man--if you're fat and sad, I feel bad for you, because I know that you didn't choose to be either of those things. It doesn't seem fair. But the fact is, life ain't fair, and denying it won't make you skinny or happy.
Wow, you kind of missed the point. The study actually makes 2 claims:
1) The average BMI, age, mental health index, etc. for the "gamer" population are ~ X, Y, Z, etc., and for the non-gamer population, they're ~ A, B, C, etc. (I don't know the exact values and standard error values, they aren't quoted in the article. But I'm sure that the researchers did calculate and publish them.)
2) The gamer and non-gamer populations truly differ W.R.T. BMI and mental health index. That is, the gamer/non-gamer samples differ enough for us to be confident that X>A, ZC, etc., and that any sample variations aren't just due to randomness.
You could certainly calculate the BMI, age, mental health index, etc. for the whole population. In fact, I'm sure that they DID this, in their study--you just take the weighted average of the gamer and non-gamer samples.
(Now, you might ask "What's the big deal about #2? After we've computed the gamer and non-gamer sample averages for each attribute, can't we just compare them and observer that gamers are sad-sack fatties?" But it's not quite that easy, unfortunately--the two sample averages might differ just due to random chance, so we have to use a statistical test to check how likely it is that the observed sample difference is due to random chance, alone.)
Sigh... It's not just you--vast swathes of other people, certainly the majority of the Western world, are ignorant of basic statistical concepts, just like you (no disrespect!). A sample size of 500 is almost certainly big enough for this kind of study.
For any given sample-extrapolation experiment, you can calculate a "conservative" sample size that will be "big enough" to meet your criteria for confidence level, confidence interval, etc. I just Googled this guy up, if you want to play around with some values, to see how big of a sample you need if you want to extrapolate to a population of 300,000,000:
Wikipedia has an explanation of what/how/why, but I'll warn you ahead of time, unless you already took a stats class and just need a refresher, you won't understand (no disrespect!):
For those too lazy to FTFL (no disrespect!), it takes somewhere around 1,000-2,000 sample members, if you want to get a 95% confidence level and a confidence interval of 5%, given a p/q split of ~.5/.5. So assuming these researchers did their math correctly when they formally stated the results of their significance tests.
(NOTE: I'm NOT saying the study is valid--that's a whole 'nother Oprah. I'm just making a general statement about how big of a sample size a study needs to obtain a certain amount of probabalistic reliability.)
The article doesn't go into how the researchers coded gamers vs nongamers, it just says 'differentiated adult video-game players from nonplayers', which suggests a pretty hard distinction: Do you play video games AT ALL? If so, you're a gamer.
Does the exact definition have serious implications on the quality of the results, though? Unless there are some really counter-intuitive confounding conditions at work, no.
For example: What if, for some oddball reason, people who play an *occasional* video game (but not more, and so could be coded either way, depending on your exact definition of "gamer") have a high rate psychological problems compared to the rest of the population? If that sort of people made up a large proportion of your sample size, and/or if their psych problems were severe enough, then the exact definition of "gamer" would matter a hell of a lot. Depending on precisely where you drew the line in your study, you might see no correlation, or a positive correlation, or a negative correlation.
Unfortunately, the study's methodology doesn't allow us to determine the likelihood of such a situation, so you can't say much. I would have suggested coding each participant's "gamer-ness" as a discrete ordinal variable with more than 2 possible values, as in "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a gamer is this person?" Or, you could use the number of hours played, per week. Either way, you can use a bootstrap-like technique, calculating T statistics with various monotonically incrementing values of your "gamer-ness" variable, and verifying that the T values do increment monotonically (or close to it) along with "gamer-ness".
But these changes would require a larger sample size, so if you can't draw a bigger crowd (budget, time, opportunity), so it's a trade off.
OK, how the hell did the parent poster get modded to +5, informative? He has the wrong facts on virtually EVERY important point. He could have read yesterday's Slashdot. article, or just Googled the damn story, but I guess he didn't have the time.
Let's correct his factual problems, shall we?
1) The CENTOS organization is not a "company", nor is the distro a "product". It's an informally-organized open source project, and the Linux distro they produce isn't sold or supported for profit by the project, itself. (There are many other companies that do provide CENTOS support contracts, though, and some of the developers may own/work for some of those companies.)
2) The health of the CENTOS distro and organization were never "absolutely dependent" on Lance Davis. He controlled the project's domain name registration, the Google AdWords account, and a few other important resources. But these were inconveniences, at worst: Had Lance not responded to the open letter, the rest of the developers would simply have registered a new domain name, set up new repos/wikis/blogs, and copied the project data over. Lance would have been forgotten as the speed bump that he was. (And if Lance breaks his promises AGAIN and fails meet the latest deadlines, this is what we'll see happen.)
3) Lance Davis didn't "screw off for a few days"--over the course of a year, he repeatedly made and broke promises, and failed to either provide accounting for the project's finances or to turn the relevent logins over to other group members. Then, he just stopped returning phone calls and emails, and he quit attending real-life and IRC meetings. Meanwhile, the Google AdWords account was raking in a few thousand dollars per month, and to all outward appearances, it looked a lot like Lance was just taking it for himself.
THE REAL STORY:
The lack of a formal structure (a la nonprofit incorporation, like Fedora or Debian) seems to be CENTOS's biggest problem, and the community's perception of this dispute does cloud the project's future. But like any open-source project, it's impossible for one person to be anything more than an inconvenience.
* The source code repos and packages are globally mirrored by dozens of independent organizations, and Lance Davis never had control over any of them.
* Domain registration, hosting, and such are cheap--even if some of the AdWords money were misappropriated, the developers could still pass the hat and/or offload bandwidth to the mirror providers. Hell, they could always move to SourceForge for free, if they were really desperate.
* As long as the CENTOS core community learns its lesson, here, they can recover and grow stronger than before. They need to incorporate as a not-for-profit foundation, establish a board of directors, executive roles, accounting practices, and all the other structural crap that goes with it. It's not a trivial amount of work (in the US, at least--I don't know about the UK), but this episode demonstrates why successful, influential, long-lived F/OSS groups like the GNU, Debian, etc. have all decided to go this route.
Finally, on a personal note, I would like to ask yttrstein why he feels compelled to burden the rest of us with his un-informed opinions on this topic. He could have easily researched the issue, in about 5 or 10 minutes, and perhaps contributed something worth reading.
This statistical extrapolation is not valid (AT ALL, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, NEVER EVER). For this kind of analysis to mean anything, you have to conclusively demonstrate that you collected a representative sample of the population. That means: A random sample, drawn in a non-biased (or bias-controlled) fashion, from the whole underlying population. Ask a real statistician, and (s)he'll tell you: Your extrapolations are only as good as your sampling methodology.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that you're somehow, magically, exempt from this mathematical fact because you are making relative comparisons between two subsets of your sample. Where the hell did you get that idea?
To understand why, try considering this hypothetical: What if the subset of the population that is drawn to answer your MechTurk question is biased in more than one way? For instance, it could contain a larger-than-normal proportion of highly-intelligent social misfits who sympathize with outcasts, as well as a larger-than-normal proportion of under-educated Moral Orals. It could easily generate similar results to yours, as could an infinity of other hypothetically biased samples.
Statistically, then, how do you differentiate between your pet theory and the infinity of alternatives? YOU CAN'T. Methods of statistical extrapolation obtain their effectiveness from their relationship with the law of large numbers (probability, basically). Your poor sampling method has completely discarded that link, leaving zero support for your conclusions.
You cannot fix this problem with math: If your sample is not a truly random sample, drawn from the full underlying population in a non-biased (or bias-controlled) fashion, your numbers don't mean shit W.R.T. the population, and they never will. PERIOD.
(As an aside, there are methods that can control for sampling bias in certain LIMITED circumstances, when the nature of the bias can be quantified. But you aren't using this method, AND it doesn't apply to your situation, because you can't make reliable quantifying statements about how your sample is biased.)
You are officially part of the problem. Either learn more stats, or STOP MISLEADING YOURSELF AND OTHERS by mis-applying them.
"Tort money"? You mean FIAT money, right?. As in, the money has value because the government decrees it so (paper notes), not because the money has any independent value (e.g., gold coins, sacks of grain, etc.).
I was recently diagnosed (and am now taking amps for) the "inattentive" kind of ADHD. I grew up around guns: My family owned several and we liked to shoot, and I spent a lot of time at the rifle range at Boy Scout camp. I live in New York City, now, so guns are pretty much a no-no, but I miss it.
I never had any problems with guns, specifically, but I sure as hell had impulse-control issues, especially as a teenager. I remember doing a lot of absurdly dumb, destructive things, not out of anger or malice, but just "hmm, this would be interesting."
My stepfather made the difference, I think, around guns. Handling a firearm without him being present, or even opening the locks on the gun cases, was a hanging offense. Before I was allowed to shoot, I had to clean unloaded guns, with him watching over me the whole time. Before that, I had to memorize safe gun handling and explain to him why each rule existed. He never tried to scare me, but I developed a sense that you cannot act your normal, unthinking self around guns--you need to think carefully about every single action you take.
I doubt that the particular military the OP mentioned lacks a strict disciplinary hand, though. And I know people have ADHD much worse than mine, and weren't lucky enough to at least get some smarts, too. I think that the people who know a kid (or adult, I guess) need to make an individual determination: Is this person mature and self-controlled enough to handle a firearm? If not, ADHD or no, don't let them.
You're probably right, but I think the OP's point stands, nonetheless. A non-citizen, possibly lacking the right language skills, and maybe not the most sophisticated person in the world, might get railroaded. In the US, at least, juries tend to give overwhelming weight to scientific or expert testimony of any kind, regardless of how certain or flawed the science is. Even if not, that woman's life would still go to hell the minute the cops found her.
Police and the scientific method are like politicians and economic theory: They talk about the principles, they often appear to use and apply the academic insights, but they tend to throw anything out that doesn't match their pre-existing bias, without a second thought.
I'm not saying that all cops just think "The cuffs are on her: Therefore, she must be guilty." But police work tends to reward and glamorize a dogged pursuit of a conclusion based on a hunch. If a scientific researcher:
* becomes emotionally involved in the outcome of his or her work, developing a substantial personal need to see it succeed, AND
* eschews open, independent peer review and only seeks collaborative opinions from people likely to sympathize with the researcher, generally,
it's a recipe for disaster--cold-fusion, antigravity, perpetual motion machines, etc. Academia has a LOT of braking mechanisms to prevent bad science from getting to the publishing stage, and more mechanisms designed to suppress whatever happens to slip through. Police departments have far fewer checks.
Historically, bad police work hasn't carried much of a risk to the cops who did it--you could railroad a poor, ignorant, minority defendant on a sensational charge without much worry that he would somehow exonerate himself, later. That's starting to change (Project Innocence being the big example), but old attitudes and methods are deeply ingrained in police culture, and won't change quickly.
Anyway, the point is, that these cops devoted hundreds of police and several years of investigations to this case--millions of dollars in costs. But since police labs don't try to have independent outsiders replicate and repeat their experiments, nobody caught this before it turned into a circus.
"Oil, gas, coal, and every other fuel would be valueless."
Energy production (by burning them) is only one of their many competing uses. Petrochemicals are an important source of bulk raw chemical compounds that nearly every industry uses. Oil- and coal-derived chemicals are used to create plastics, crop fertilizers, cleaning products, pharmaceuticals--you name it. Even if everybody switched overnight to non-fossil fuel sources, there would still be a thriving industry digging black stuff out of the ground.
(And before you go trying to claim that their value will be so low as to be meaningless, think again: In the 1990s, world crude oil prices hit $10/barrel--that's an 80% reduction from today's prices. Did that cause the end of civilization?)
Even more importantly, though, the entire world can't possible switch off fossil fuels overnight, or even in a single decade, even IF tabletop cold fusion were discovered tomorrow. You'd have to replace or convert ALL of the the running cars, airplanes, and ships (100s of millions of engines) that use fossil fuels. And you'd have to replace all our utility plants. Do you have ANY idea how long it takes to build a power plant?
And are all-electric airliners even possible? How about container shipping freighters? The most energy-dense modern batteries and supercapacitors still can't get even close to gasoline, in terms of the work/weight ratio. Engineers have been working on contained fusion for about 50 years, now--you think they can solve all these other issues overnight?
So not valueless, and not overnight. Therefore, no catastrophe. This is what's called "creative destruction", where new technologies gradually supplant old ones, over time. As for the oil companies, they'll be first in line to fund this kind of development, because they'd know better than anyone that it's the only way to survive.
Looks like you're still gonna be stuck with all those crates of canned pork-n-beans you bought for Y2K.
Slashdot Mirror
MrMista, do they make "jokes" on your planet?
http://www.google.com/search?q=+missing+the+joke
Since the GP is getting modded "funny", you may be the ONLY person on Slashdot who didn't get it. Congratulations, you're an idiot.
How did you get involved, originally? My first guess (having known a few scientologists) is that your parents were/are members and you were raised in it. Second guess: One of the substance abuse programs. Third guess: One of their entrepreneurial outreach programs.
Any hits? Just curious--I'm always happy to see somebody leave the CoS. it's a terrible, hurtful thing, and I've seen it ruin peoples' lives while making them feel it's their own fault.
Also, out of curiosity, have you ever been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, or at least seen the symptoms in yourself?
Personally, I think there's substantial co-morbidity between substance abuse problems and scientology for a very specific reason: Undiagnosed (or untreated) ADHD, mostly the "inattentive" kind (which is pretty substantially under-diagnosed, since the kids aren't unruly or acting out). It tends to breed feelings of worthlessness in afflicted adults, and opens up a lot of psychological vulnerabilities. Many suffers either self-medicate (hence the substance abuse issues), and/or get attracted to cults that promise direction, motivation, and self-improvement. Scientology, in particular, has substance-abuse outreach and treatment programs, which makes a handy recruiting strategy for the larger cult.
Of all the scientologists I've met (~2 dozen), almost all of them seem like classic ADHD cases. That is partly based on observing behavior, and partly on what people have said about their life histories, and partly on what they say about their relatives (ADHD is highly inheritable). I've also met a lot (~100s) of 12-steppers (mostly AA)--the proportion of them showing ADHD symptoms or personal/family histories isn't quite as high, but it's still enormous, far more than the normal population.
(Interesting side-note: According to my psychiatrist uncle (who performed a lot of criminal insanity consultations, and is borderline ADHD, himself), American prison populations also show substantial ADD/ADHD over-representation, possibly as high as 70-80% of all prison inmates. As an adult with ADHD, I have to suppress a chuckle at that little trifecta: Prison, addiction, or scientology--take your pick, kids, so many ways to ruin your life.)
For the general Slashdot audience: If you or your family have symptoms of ADHD or inattentive (no-H) ADHD, I'd recommend reading Nancy and John Ratey's books, and then going to see a psychiatrist, in that order. Even if you decide not to try the drugs (which can be helpful, but aren't a magic cure by themselves), there is a LOT you can do to improve your life. It's cheaper than a cult, too.
Yeah, total agreement, here. This stupidly transparent, self-serving quote says it all:
"...but they is vital for websites to know how people are accessing the sites so they can work out how to improve the experience for the user."
User experience? WTF? Sorry,but the only reason you need invisible-to-the-user cookies is so you can monetize them without them realizing just how much privacy/anonymity they're giving up. Because that might give users pause before they accept your cookies, if they had an informed choice.
And everybody here knows that. The quoted jackass in TFS is just trying to make his industry look like a victim, to drum up support from civil-liberties sympathizers on Slashdot. Too bad we're not that dumb...
As an employee of the advertising industry, I have zero problems with monetizing Internet traffic, or with using cookies to track user behavior, etc., etc. But I hate liars, and I hate people who try to manipulate me.
Any existing 2nd-level domain registrant automatically gets assigned a new TLD equivalent to the current 2nd-level name minus the TLD suffix. Collision priority scheme is .edu, then .com, then .org and .net, then .gov, and finally .mil. Ignores ccTLDs.
First, take care of the .edu sites: Automatically register a new TLD for each registered .edu name, such the that new TLD is the 2nd-level part of the existing .edu name. For example, Harvard U. currently owns 'harvard.edu.', so they would automatically receive the new 'harvard.' TLD.
Second, it seems reasonable to assume that the .com names have higher visibility than the .net/.org names, but not quite as over-riding as the grant to the existing .edu holders. Autoregister the new TLD and give it to the .com holder, but allow a weighted bidding process if the current .net or .org holder wants to try to buy the rights: During some designated 6-month period before open TLD registration starts, the .org/.net holder puts a bid of X dolllars in trust, and the .com holder has 60 days to match 20% of X (single-round bid, weighted at 0.2). That weighting is pretty arbitrary--it doesn't really matter what the actual weight is.
Third, whatever's left in the TLD space gets assigned to .gov and .mil names, on the same basis as .edu.
It's not perfect--it totally ignores ccTLDs, and the weighting is arbitrary, and who am I to say that a .com name is more of a claim on the new TLD than a .net/.org name?
But do you think an unqualified, disorganized "land rush" would be somehow better? At least this way, you're limiting the number of trademark/squatting cases that have to be litigated.
Don't know about that. But you could certainly start calling yourself "celibate", at that point.
...and those who can't be bothered to RTFA, while rushing madly to post first, are doomed to look like morons (or trolls, at best).
In the immortal words of Jeff Lebowski, "Obviously, you're not a golfer."
I've seen a lot of Slashdotters mistake humor or irony for a serious post. But you, sir, have distinguished yourself, even amongst that august house.
+1 Futurama!
And yeah, point B isn't actually proven by point A. But we're talking about the neurological and cultural prejudices of Home Sapiens, here, so we're pretty far from what I'd call "logical". As long as "swift-boating" and "borking" are effective political tactics, we really ought to admit that.
Sigh. It's a very common misconception that the term "mother fucker" (two words, not one) denigrates a man who has sex with his own mother. Fuck Wikipedia, and fuck the ignorant idiots who spin whole fictions, and especially fuck the lazy dipshit readers who just assume that WP is correct, because it's easier than following up with their own research. Yeah, you heard me--Jimmy Wales can suck a fattie, while we're at it.
In reality, the term "mother fucker" refers to a man who has sex with SOMEONE ELSE'S MOTHER, specifically with a woman in some kind of tight spot (e.g., economically) who agrees to sex with that man only out of desperation. The woman doesn't really want to sleep with this man, and she isn't a prostitute in the professional sense, but this man presents an alternative to watching her children go hungry.
The term gained tremendous traction during WWII, originally amongst black American GIs, and was applied literally to American soldiers (black, white, or otherwise) in war-torn Europe who would trade food, money, or anything of value (cigarettes, chocolate, booze) for sex with desperately poor or starving French and German women. Many of these women were home-makers whose husbands had been conscripted away, killed, or imprisoned, leaving the women to support the couple's children alone. Many lacked trade skills, and the war damaged the local economies so badly that they had few, if any, alternatives.
So calling a man a "mother fucker" meant that he was A) taking advantage of poor and downtrodden people with no options, and B) incapable of seducing non-desperate women. Anyone with experience growing up in desperate poverty, or who saw his own parents humiliated by circumstances beyond his control, would probably consider that kind of behavior to be a pretty low thing.
In the last sixty or so years, the term has entered the popular slang as a term of derision ("That Richard Nixon is a real mother fucker, you know?"). More recently, it's been used as an indicator of extraordinary intensity, not necessarily in a derisive sense, but usually still carrying some implications of harshness ("I fell asleep out in my lawn chair, yesterday, and got a mother fucker of a sunburn.") or intimidating awesomeness ("That Shaft, he's one baaaad mother fucker.").
Do your part--fight the ignorance!
That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard. So the CEO has the most CRITICAL, SUPER-SECRET information on his laptop, the stuff that represents the company's lifeblood, and which can't be trusted to anybody else.
And this data isn't backed up on company file servers? What happens if the CEO's laptop gets dropped, or smashed by clumsy airport security, or stolen from him?
And you think they run a multi-billion dollar, Fortune 500 company this way? Seriously?
Do they have these things called "jokes" where you're from, guy? Or did you remove the part of your brain that understands figurative language?
Actually, what I did there was the opposite of "polarize", because I smooshed everything into one big group, in the middle. I don't know what the right word would be, though.
What I also did, more importantly, was take the piss out of Google, and apparently offend one of their fans (you).
I'm curious what basis you have to believe that "the people in charge at Google have more 'moral' business ethics than most'. Did you take a sample of businesses and rate the ethical practices of each? Or have you worked there, and seen how Google Sausage is made, and compared it to other companies for which you've worked?
I'm going to wear my colors, here, and guess that you're responding to the hard work that Google's brilliant PR department has but into their carefully polished corporate image.
But let's make this fun, I'll going to and make this simple challenge:
What evidence can you provide to support your claim that Google is ethically superior to most other businesses?
and if you're game, you show me what you've got. (Feel free to define those terms however you want, it's your assertion, anyway.)
First, there's the outages. Google NEVER used to go down, it was part of their "mystique"--their engineering was SOOO amazing, and so well designed. The Cloud could NEVER go down!
Second, there's the Evil. I feel like I saw this one coming, years ago, having spent a good portion of my career in the advertising industry. It's a simple equation, right? Google is a publicly-traded company, and their core business is selling advertisements, which means their REAL business is selling your eyeballs+buying habits to anybody and everybody with cash. Eventually, there had to be some visible, significant conflicts between the basic reality and their high-concept, geek-chic PR fantasy.
Finally, and this is more personal, there's the lack of responsiveness from developers, and the perception of a "one-way street". Go look up the API for Google Tasks, and you'll see what I mean: Not only doesn't it exist, despite a lot of begging from interested users/developers, but Google keeps responding (when they do respond, which isn't often) that they have a corporate policy of not discussing pending release schedules. I understand that they have finite resources and have to make their own development roadmap, but their attitude seems to be "we're not going to acknowledge the gripes of our base". Which basically is the same attitude that any Big Software Company takes.
So, I'm not saying that Google is a crap company, or that I'm going to stop using Gmail, or that they're the new Evil Empire. But they're not really fundamentally different from every other Evil Corporation that we like to villify, here on Slashdot. There are no "good guys" and "bad guys"--there's just an open field of self-interested actors, each with a shitload more money, engineers, and lawyers than you.
Oh, and you checked alll of Google's server to be sure? Or did you randomly sample from a couple of hundred different points on the Internet?
Not to belittle the parent poster, but I think he thinks the world revolves around him.
"...code an app to use the modem as a phone..."
Like, a VOIP client, perhaps? I wonder whether anybody's ever bothered trying to write such an app...
"... no, 500 is not a large enough sample size to draw MEANINGFUL correlations."
Your statement is mathematically incorrect. Also, the way you misuse 'meaningful' suggests that you know nothing about probability and statistical inferences. Any 101-level, intro stats class at virtually any college will teach sample size calcuation in the first month or two. Honestly--it's so easy, they make Poli Sci majors take it.
"MEANINGFUL": How big is a "big enough" sample to be able to extrapolate to the larger population? It's a pretty straightforward math question, and it's been settled by proof for well over a century. The answer depends on three things:
1) Higher levels of confidence require larger samples.
2) Extremely small category sizes (e.g., 5% depression incidence) require larger sample sizes.
3) Larger population sizes require larger samples.
#3 is the real bitch to understand, for most people. (WATCH CLOSELY HERE!) It's true that you need a larger sample to extrapolate to a larger population (all else being equal), BUT it's not a *directly* proportional relationship--the required sample size is proportional to a root of the population size. As in, if you double the population size, you DO NOT need double the sample size--you might only need to increase it slightly, by 1/10th or 1/100th.
Do you understand, yet? We're reaching the limits of what I can teach you, in this forum, so I would encourage you to take this up in a school setting and maybe learn a little more. But you know, I don't even think we've uncovered the real issue, yet.
I'm guessing that the study's results make you feel uncomfortable about yourself (this is Slashdot, after all). Is that what makes you get defensive and hostile, because you want to deny the study's implied judgement that YOU are fat, depressed, and such, because you're a gamer?
Sorry, man--if you're fat and sad, I feel bad for you, because I know that you didn't choose to be either of those things. It doesn't seem fair. But the fact is, life ain't fair, and denying it won't make you skinny or happy.
Wow, you kind of missed the point. The study actually makes 2 claims:
1) The average BMI, age, mental health index, etc. for the "gamer" population are ~ X, Y, Z, etc., and for the non-gamer population, they're ~ A, B, C, etc. (I don't know the exact values and standard error values, they aren't quoted in the article. But I'm sure that the researchers did calculate and publish them.)
2) The gamer and non-gamer populations truly differ W.R.T. BMI and mental health index. That is, the gamer/non-gamer samples differ enough for us to be confident that X>A, ZC, etc., and that any sample variations aren't just due to randomness.
You could certainly calculate the BMI, age, mental health index, etc. for the whole population. In fact, I'm sure that they DID this, in their study--you just take the weighted average of the gamer and non-gamer samples.
(Now, you might ask "What's the big deal about #2? After we've computed the gamer and non-gamer sample averages for each attribute, can't we just compare them and observer that gamers are sad-sack fatties?" But it's not quite that easy, unfortunately--the two sample averages might differ just due to random chance, so we have to use a statistical test to check how likely it is that the observed sample difference is due to random chance, alone.)
Sigh... It's not just you--vast swathes of other people, certainly the majority of the Western world, are ignorant of basic statistical concepts, just like you (no disrespect!). A sample size of 500 is almost certainly big enough for this kind of study.
For any given sample-extrapolation experiment, you can calculate a "conservative" sample size that will be "big enough" to meet your criteria for confidence level, confidence interval, etc. I just Googled this guy up, if you want to play around with some values, to see how big of a sample you need if you want to extrapolate to a population of 300,000,000:
* http://www.surveysystem.com/sample-size-formula.htm
(PROTIP: It's smaller than you think.)
Wikipedia has an explanation of what/how/why, but I'll warn you ahead of time, unless you already took a stats class and just need a refresher, you won't understand (no disrespect!):
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size#Estimating_proportions
For those too lazy to FTFL (no disrespect!), it takes somewhere around 1,000-2,000 sample members, if you want to get a 95% confidence level and a confidence interval of 5%, given a p/q split of ~ .5/.5. So assuming these researchers did their math correctly when they formally stated the results of their significance tests.
(NOTE: I'm NOT saying the study is valid--that's a whole 'nother Oprah. I'm just making a general statement about how big of a sample size a study needs to obtain a certain amount of probabalistic reliability.)
The article doesn't go into how the researchers coded gamers vs nongamers, it just says 'differentiated adult video-game players from nonplayers', which suggests a pretty hard distinction: Do you play video games AT ALL? If so, you're a gamer.
Does the exact definition have serious implications on the quality of the results, though? Unless there are some really counter-intuitive confounding conditions at work, no.
For example: What if, for some oddball reason, people who play an *occasional* video game (but not more, and so could be coded either way, depending on your exact definition of "gamer") have a high rate psychological problems compared to the rest of the population? If that sort of people made up a large proportion of your sample size, and/or if their psych problems were severe enough, then the exact definition of "gamer" would matter a hell of a lot. Depending on precisely where you drew the line in your study, you might see no correlation, or a positive correlation, or a negative correlation.
Unfortunately, the study's methodology doesn't allow us to determine the likelihood of such a situation, so you can't say much. I would have suggested coding each participant's "gamer-ness" as a discrete ordinal variable with more than 2 possible values, as in "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a gamer is this person?" Or, you could use the number of hours played, per week. Either way, you can use a bootstrap-like technique, calculating T statistics with various monotonically incrementing values of your "gamer-ness" variable, and verifying that the T values do increment monotonically (or close to it) along with "gamer-ness".
But these changes would require a larger sample size, so if you can't draw a bigger crowd (budget, time, opportunity), so it's a trade off.
OK, how the hell did the parent poster get modded to +5, informative? He has the wrong facts on virtually EVERY important point. He could have read yesterday's Slashdot. article, or just Googled the damn story, but I guess he didn't have the time.
Let's correct his factual problems, shall we?
1) The CENTOS organization is not a "company", nor is the distro a "product". It's an informally-organized open source project, and the Linux distro they produce isn't sold or supported for profit by the project, itself. (There are many other companies that do provide CENTOS support contracts, though, and some of the developers may own/work for some of those companies.)
2) The health of the CENTOS distro and organization were never "absolutely dependent" on Lance Davis. He controlled the project's domain name registration, the Google AdWords account, and a few other important resources. But these were inconveniences, at worst: Had Lance not responded to the open letter, the rest of the developers would simply have registered a new domain name, set up new repos/wikis/blogs, and copied the project data over. Lance would have been forgotten as the speed bump that he was. (And if Lance breaks his promises AGAIN and fails meet the latest deadlines, this is what we'll see happen.)
3) Lance Davis didn't "screw off for a few days"--over the course of a year, he repeatedly made and broke promises, and failed to either provide accounting for the project's finances or to turn the relevent logins over to other group members. Then, he just stopped returning phone calls and emails, and he quit attending real-life and IRC meetings. Meanwhile, the Google AdWords account was raking in a few thousand dollars per month, and to all outward appearances, it looked a lot like Lance was just taking it for himself.
THE REAL STORY:
The lack of a formal structure (a la nonprofit incorporation, like Fedora or Debian) seems to be CENTOS's biggest problem, and the community's perception of this dispute does cloud the project's future. But like any open-source project, it's impossible for one person to be anything more than an inconvenience.
* The source code repos and packages are globally mirrored by dozens of independent organizations, and Lance Davis never had control over any of them.
* Domain registration, hosting, and such are cheap--even if some of the AdWords money were misappropriated, the developers could still pass the hat and/or offload bandwidth to the mirror providers. Hell, they could always move to SourceForge for free, if they were really desperate.
* As long as the CENTOS core community learns its lesson, here, they can recover and grow stronger than before. They need to incorporate as a not-for-profit foundation, establish a board of directors, executive roles, accounting practices, and all the other structural crap that goes with it. It's not a trivial amount of work (in the US, at least--I don't know about the UK), but this episode demonstrates why successful, influential, long-lived F/OSS groups like the GNU, Debian, etc. have all decided to go this route.
Finally, on a personal note, I would like to ask yttrstein why he feels compelled to burden the rest of us with his un-informed opinions on this topic. He could have easily researched the issue, in about 5 or 10 minutes, and perhaps contributed something worth reading.
This statistical extrapolation is not valid (AT ALL, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, NEVER EVER). For this kind of analysis to mean anything, you have to conclusively demonstrate that you collected a representative sample of the population. That means: A random sample, drawn in a non-biased (or bias-controlled) fashion, from the whole underlying population. Ask a real statistician, and (s)he'll tell you: Your extrapolations are only as good as your sampling methodology.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that you're somehow, magically, exempt from this mathematical fact because you are making relative comparisons between two subsets of your sample. Where the hell did you get that idea?
To understand why, try considering this hypothetical: What if the subset of the population that is drawn to answer your MechTurk question is biased in more than one way? For instance, it could contain a larger-than-normal proportion of highly-intelligent social misfits who sympathize with outcasts, as well as a larger-than-normal proportion of under-educated Moral Orals. It could easily generate similar results to yours, as could an infinity of other hypothetically biased samples.
Statistically, then, how do you differentiate between your pet theory and the infinity of alternatives? YOU CAN'T. Methods of statistical extrapolation obtain their effectiveness from their relationship with the law of large numbers (probability, basically). Your poor sampling method has completely discarded that link, leaving zero support for your conclusions.
You cannot fix this problem with math: If your sample is not a truly random sample, drawn from the full underlying population in a non-biased (or bias-controlled) fashion, your numbers don't mean shit W.R.T. the population, and they never will. PERIOD.
(As an aside, there are methods that can control for sampling bias in certain LIMITED circumstances, when the nature of the bias can be quantified. But you aren't using this method, AND it doesn't apply to your situation, because you can't make reliable quantifying statements about how your sample is biased.)
You are officially part of the problem. Either learn more stats, or STOP MISLEADING YOURSELF AND OTHERS by mis-applying them.
"Tort money"? You mean FIAT money, right?. As in, the money has value because the government decrees it so (paper notes), not because the money has any independent value (e.g., gold coins, sacks of grain, etc.).
I was recently diagnosed (and am now taking amps for) the "inattentive" kind of ADHD. I grew up around guns: My family owned several and we liked to shoot, and I spent a lot of time at the rifle range at Boy Scout camp. I live in New York City, now, so guns are pretty much a no-no, but I miss it.
I never had any problems with guns, specifically, but I sure as hell had impulse-control issues, especially as a teenager. I remember doing a lot of absurdly dumb, destructive things, not out of anger or malice, but just "hmm, this would be interesting."
My stepfather made the difference, I think, around guns. Handling a firearm without him being present, or even opening the locks on the gun cases, was a hanging offense. Before I was allowed to shoot, I had to clean unloaded guns, with him watching over me the whole time. Before that, I had to memorize safe gun handling and explain to him why each rule existed. He never tried to scare me, but I developed a sense that you cannot act your normal, unthinking self around guns--you need to think carefully about every single action you take.
I doubt that the particular military the OP mentioned lacks a strict disciplinary hand, though. And I know people have ADHD much worse than mine, and weren't lucky enough to at least get some smarts, too. I think that the people who know a kid (or adult, I guess) need to make an individual determination: Is this person mature and self-controlled enough to handle a firearm? If not, ADHD or no, don't let them.
You're probably right, but I think the OP's point stands, nonetheless. A non-citizen, possibly lacking the right language skills, and maybe not the most sophisticated person in the world, might get railroaded. In the US, at least, juries tend to give overwhelming weight to scientific or expert testimony of any kind, regardless of how certain or flawed the science is. Even if not, that woman's life would still go to hell the minute the cops found her.
Police and the scientific method are like politicians and economic theory: They talk about the principles, they often appear to use and apply the academic insights, but they tend to throw anything out that doesn't match their pre-existing bias, without a second thought.
I'm not saying that all cops just think "The cuffs are on her: Therefore, she must be guilty." But police work tends to reward and glamorize a dogged pursuit of a conclusion based on a hunch. If a scientific researcher:
* becomes emotionally involved in the outcome of his or her work, developing a substantial personal need to see it succeed, AND
* eschews open, independent peer review and only seeks collaborative opinions from people likely to sympathize with the researcher, generally,
it's a recipe for disaster--cold-fusion, antigravity, perpetual motion machines, etc. Academia has a LOT of braking mechanisms to prevent bad science from getting to the publishing stage, and more mechanisms designed to suppress whatever happens to slip through. Police departments have far fewer checks.
Historically, bad police work hasn't carried much of a risk to the cops who did it--you could railroad a poor, ignorant, minority defendant on a sensational charge without much worry that he would somehow exonerate himself, later. That's starting to change (Project Innocence being the big example), but old attitudes and methods are deeply ingrained in police culture, and won't change quickly.
Anyway, the point is, that these cops devoted hundreds of police and several years of investigations to this case--millions of dollars in costs. But since police labs don't try to have independent outsiders replicate and repeat their experiments, nobody caught this before it turned into a circus.
"Oil, gas, coal, and every other fuel would be valueless."
Energy production (by burning them) is only one of their many competing uses. Petrochemicals are an important source of bulk raw chemical compounds that nearly every industry uses. Oil- and coal-derived chemicals are used to create plastics, crop fertilizers, cleaning products, pharmaceuticals--you name it. Even if everybody switched overnight to non-fossil fuel sources, there would still be a thriving industry digging black stuff out of the ground.
(And before you go trying to claim that their value will be so low as to be meaningless, think again: In the 1990s, world crude oil prices hit $10/barrel--that's an 80% reduction from today's prices. Did that cause the end of civilization?)
Even more importantly, though, the entire world can't possible switch off fossil fuels overnight, or even in a single decade, even IF tabletop cold fusion were discovered tomorrow. You'd have to replace or convert ALL of the the running cars, airplanes, and ships (100s of millions of engines) that use fossil fuels. And you'd have to replace all our utility plants. Do you have ANY idea how long it takes to build a power plant?
And are all-electric airliners even possible? How about container shipping freighters? The most energy-dense modern batteries and supercapacitors still can't get even close to gasoline, in terms of the work/weight ratio. Engineers have been working on contained fusion for about 50 years, now--you think they can solve all these other issues overnight?
So not valueless, and not overnight. Therefore, no catastrophe. This is what's called "creative destruction", where new technologies gradually supplant old ones, over time. As for the oil companies, they'll be first in line to fund this kind of development, because they'd know better than anyone that it's the only way to survive.
Looks like you're still gonna be stuck with all those crates of canned pork-n-beans you bought for Y2K.