Right now this idea is outside of what we can observe, the easier path is to state that it is an anomaly in the brain. In science the easiest solution that fits the model, is the one taken to be the one to use.
You can ask whether the information has predictive value.
The brain is an elaborate goal-setting mechanism coupled to a prediction engine. If the schizophrenic can use his extra information in some way that allows them to predict future actions or consequences, then we can say that the extra information is likely to be real.
We do this all the time; for example, predicting that we will get run over if we step off the curb, based on information from our visible inputs about cars in the street.
It's very easy to "get inside someone else's mind". If we step off the curb and someone says "watch out", we're effectively making use of their neural inputs as an adjunct to our own. Simply painting a picture in someone's mind through stories or college lectures is a form of mind sharing.
Set up an experiment using schizophrenics as "sensor" - telling us what the voices are saying and/or what the people are doing - and see if that information has any predictive value. For example, ESP tests with information (card reading) hidden from the test subject.
If the information is completely disjoint from our own universe and has no predictive value, it's indistinguishable from made-up fantasies.
So what you're saying is you're totally not an astroturfer from the other side, and from now on you'd like us to be automatically suspicious of all comments that argue in favor of something you're not in favor of / argue against something you're in favor of (and totally not hoping to shut down any conversation before it starts), and they're probably just comments from people being employed by big evil corporations, but you're totally not astroturfing in the name of net neutrality? And there are totally not any logical fallacies in your argument?
Actually, I'm a big fan of cogent, reasoned responses (to my posts) that put forth a contrary position. They are so rare that I sometimes post a "thank you" in response.
Just saying "this doesn't track with my experience" ("I've taken 200+ cab rides in my life and not once encountered a bad experience", yeah, right), or "you're wrong about that", or "how dare you say the emperor has no clothes" doesn't quite cut it.
So tell me: instead of insinuating that there are logical fallacies in my argument, what exactly *are* the logical fallacies in my argument?
The National Smoker’s Alliance The 50 Cent Party Center For Consumer Freedom Al Gore’s Penguin Army Microsoft Save Our Species Alliance Working Families For Wal-Mart The Big Ten Network Comcast GOP
(NB: The companies listed come from an article titled: "Ten Horrible Examples Of Astroturfing")
We know that the big companies hire agencies to send fake letters of support to government agencies, letters purported to come from everyday people in support of whatever the big company wants to do at the time.
We also know that the big companies hire agencies to send fake letters of support from politicians that support whatever the big company wants to do at the time. We know that political campaigns do the same thing.
I've been interested in ghostwriting/astroturfing for awhile now. It seems reasonable that if a company has enough money to mount a fake grassroots campaign, then some of that money would be put towards shaping public opinion on public boards.
Especially a highly popular board frequented by all the smart people in the country.
Looking at one previous article about network access I can't help but get the impression that people are reaching around backwards to make their point. The plight of all those poor, twisted arguments brings a tear to my eye.
Really - watch the commentary on these articles and see if any of the arguments seem weak or contrived.
For the answer on why we don't reveal this information read up on the 1929 bank failures. For the tl;dr crowd: There's a very good reason that we don't say which banks are having problems because they get ran out of business quickly (often within hours) and everyone that didn't make it in time looses their money. It happened in 1929 in the U.S. and it destroyed our economy for a decade.
Are you saying people would actually lose money if their bank went under? That there's no FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) or other safeguards? Are you saying that the federal reserve wouldn't overnight a truckload of cash if there was a run on the bank?
Are you saying that banks can do a slip-shod job, have no repercussions, and this is a *good* thing?
Just as GM can lose business by making a faulty ignition switch, banks should lose business when they lose the public trust.
well to be fair, i had one of those GM cars with the ignition switch issue. the only thing is to me it was not a bug but a feature. I could start my car, lock it back up with it running and keep the key on me. this is great on days like today that are -20 with the wind. (not as nice as a remote start obviously but still)
If you cant drive and focus on driving simply because they key pops out of the ignition, well you got bigger problems in life anyway
Whether it's a bug or feature is certainly a fair argument.
To my mind, if you can't predict when the key will pop out then it's a bug.
Automotive electronics developers would say the same thing about consumer communication protocols. It is a mess that can't guarantee anything for even a simple control setup.
Avionics engineers (and I am one, retired) would say "what's your point?"
Automobiles have obvious life-threatening failure modes, duh, and probably should be held to a high standard of safety, derp, just like they are in physical aspects such as crash-worthyness, *Timmer*!
Oh, I see. You're arguing that it's OK to have shitty software because, well, everyone does!.
Speaking of GM ignition switch problem, it perhaps affected one person or at most a few and they had to do multi-billion dollar recall. [...]
I keep looking for astroturfers on this forum. Is this one obvious, or are there more perfect examples I haven't found?
Yea, that's not a defense to anything. If I'm an accountant, and my boss tells me to do the books, I'm still committing a felony if I do it, and actually could be committing a felony if I don't immediately report the request to the relevant authorities. TFA clearly states that the defendant knew that what his employers were asking him to do was illegal, and he did it anyway.
Round one of "devil's advocate", now it's my turn.
Suppose you're a sysadmin for the NSA and you discover they are committing a felony. Should you then report it to the relevant authorities?
I just want to mention that I agree with your points overall.
The article was dashed off in a hurry, and on reflection pretty-much everything you mentioned occurred to me after the fact. In particular, I glossed over lots of nuanced specifics for brevity. The examples were only meant to tack down the idea in the reader's mind.
Nothing so simply put can be taken at face value. I hope the parent realizes "what I meant" and will use his judgement to take a more nuanced action.
"Likewise, as a data scientist, I've learned to be suspicious of models that are too accurate, or individual variables that are too predictive."
I know just how you feel!
One way around this problem is to round down to the next significance level and reduce it to a yes/no assessment.
For example, instead of reporting the actual significance, say "p<.05" and instead of citing the correlation as a number, say "we therefore reject the null hypothesis".
Works a peach, required in most journals, and reduces the workload of the reviewers.
Scheduling playdates for your son is a recipe for bitterness and disappointment. Without feedback or direction for what the proper behaviour is, the end result will be ridicule and ostracism. Over and over. And this will continue into his adult life.
Since your son has no "feel" for interaction, the best you can get is an "intellectual appreciation" for correct behaviour. He has to learn the skill that everyone else will pick up naturally.
The first half is to get him to want to learn. You do this by rewards and other incentives, as outlined by any of a number of teaching methods. Sit down with him at regular scheduled intervals, be sure to show appreciation when he does things correctly, and show disappointment when he screws up. When he screws up, do the disappointment thing *quickly* and move on. Promise him a big reward at the end of a semester of these if he does well, and follow up on it (take him to an arcade, get him a specific toy, take him snorkeling in Hanauma bay, whatever.) Little rewards at intervals is good too (take him out for ice cream, his special time with his dad &c).
Make him want to change.
The second half is being able to recognize his behaviour *yourself* and communicate to him instantly. I cannot describe how incredibly difficult this is, you have to be alert for specific patterns and people are just not wired to do this. People go through their daily lives on autopilot, and don't normally evaluate what they're hearing/seeing/doing on a continual basis. It's s a difficult skill that needs to be developed through discovery and practice.
The problem with therapists is that the feedback isn't immediate. The therapist might be able to analyze and correct and connect with your son, but your son will tend to forget outside the session. Like I said, most people are on autopilot and changing the autopilot programming is hard.
When you get the ability to recognize his behaviour, simply say "ding!" when you see it.
It's immediate feedback, and when he hears it he should stop to consider what he's doing and change his behaviour. That's all it takes.
Be very clear that saying "ding!" doesn't mean you're angry with him or that he should stop or that he's being punished. It's simply a signal, and it's not meant to get him to stop, it's meant to get him to *think*. Also be very clear that he can ask you why you said it, and that there's no penalty for doing this.
Start with small, obvious behaviours such as repetitive habits or sentence construction, then slowly work into tactical advice (always look someone in the eye, always ask how they are doing, always remember their name), then into strategic advice ("never lie to a friend", "never tell something told to you in confidence"), then into planning advice (see what other people do and imitate them, dress like them, try to act like them).
Get a copy of "How to Make Friends and Influence People" (Dale Carnegie) and use it as a syllabus for what to teach. Also check out "Influence, the science of persuasion" as a guide for what to watch out for (so that others don't take advantage of him).
Hey! If a product isn't popular enough, it's because it doesn't have enough features!
The more features you have, the more likely someone will want to use the product for that feature. Look at Mozilla, for example.
Were you asleep in your "marketing for engineers" class?
(My personal foible: I stop and start videos a lot, and hunting with the slider to find out where I left off is a royal pain, so I googled "how to make VLC remember position". Big mistake.
VLC doesn't implement this simple feature, but you can get a plugin that does. Download and install the plugin (copy a DLL library to the install directory? That's totally something the end user should be doing in a mature product!)
The plugin creates a checkbox which you can then check to save your place when you stop viewing a movie. Woohoo!...except that now VLC won't run at all, and you have to forcefully delete the plugins and reboot your system just to go back to the old version.
Who implements some of the obscure, little-used, weird options in VLC but doesn't give the user the option of saving their place?
VLC is totally something Franz Kafka would design.)
That consuming cholesterol actually causes an increase in someone's cholesterol level was never well founded.
It has always fallen in the sympathetic category from any evidence I've ever seen. Tropical oils, which have no cholesterol seem to cause far more problems than butter and eggs.
Vitamin D is produced in the body from the action of sunlight on cholesterol.
I've often wondered if high cholesterol is a symptom of low vitamin D caused by lack of sunlight in our daily lives. High cholesterol could be the body's response to low vitamin D levels, its attempt to get more production from a low-sunlight environment.
I am all for punishing hard people who use weapons during crimes. Using weapons during a crime increases the chances of people being hurt. It is so obvious that I wonder if you are trolling.
Apropos of nothing, how does possession of a firearm in an illegal mail order business increase the chances of people being hurt?
I don't think I've ever user recursion in my professional career. Sure, if I ever need to code a BNF grammar I might, but it's just never come up in the real world.
Whether you use it or not, recursion plays an increasing role in our daily lives.
If it weren't for recursion, you wouldn't have that computer! Or that chair you're sitting on. Or that coffee...
Your "secret" life? Don't post it to social media.
So because someone is socially different they have to forego socializing and connecting with others?
One good thing about the internet is that it allows people to be who they really want to be - by actions, words, and accomplishments - without it threatening their personal welfare. One bad thing about the internet is that it allows many people to put undue pressure on the few who stand out.
If Facebook bridges that gap, so that our anonymous personae are always connected to our real selves, then we all become subject to enormous societal pressure. It'll be the equivalent of the "old boys club" everywhere and in everything we do. You mist be the right type, have the right behaviour or you won't succeed.
It will be impossible for (for example) a secret cross-dresser to hold down a job. I know lots of people in the scene who would absolutely be fired if their employers found out, and they take great pains to keep their private lives separate from their public ones. I know people who play LARP who are in the same boat; for example, a Connecticut supreme court judge and at least 2 policemen.
One only needs to go back 30 years (some of us can actually do that) and note how society dealt with homosexuals, non-violent deviancy, even communism and long hair. Even further back was how we (the US) dealt with the Japanese, although Islamics are probably in that position right now. If someone wanted to be heard without being identified as Islamic, shouldn't they be allowed to do that?
On the flip side, is it possible to create a program that replaces faces in images with other faces? If such a program existed, and if there was enough interest we might create a movement to make facial recognition unreliable. Sort of like how "AdBlock" extensions fought against advertizing, we could have a Facebook app that grabs random faces off of other pictures and pastes them into the "gay bar" image mentioned in the summary.
This is a troubling development. I'm not a big fan of government regulation, but I think there's a clear need for delineating the privacy of people who *want* to keep themselves private.
People who do not have an account shouldn't have to deal with Facebook's particular brand of evil.
Crap, I'm moving to Hudson, NH and my two wired choices are FairPoint or Comcast. Should I really choose Comcast over FairPoint (I only care about Internet, not phone or TV)? FairPoint doesn't have any prices listed anywhere on their website. I really hate businesses like that.
No. Go with Fairpoint and avoid Comcast.
I live in NH (about 3 towns over from Hudson) and have used both. While Fairpoint is annoying, it's manageable and they don't fuck up too badly or very often. If you can manage your own computer configuration you can generally keep them at a distance and just reboot your modem once or twice a week.
Comcast is completely and totally interested in what you do, how you do it, and whether it violates their TOS. They will silently do lots of shit to prevent you from doing things, at random intervals. Also, Comcast oversells their bandwidth on what is effectively a shared line, so you won't ever get those "blazingly fast" XFinity speeds they advertize.
Comcast is "not a lot of benefit" for "whole lot of hassle".
The problem with "rich user experience" is that there are so many of them.
From the audio player app with graceful curves instead of square corners, the circle/bar (poweroff symbol) somewhere instead of "X" in the corner to close, shelves that open when you hover over a specific part of the app... you have to learn a new way of doing things, and it's only for that one app.
Download images from a camera or phone, but it doesn't identify as a "disk", it requires an install disk so that it appears as a separate something in the disk listing, at the end, with a different icon. With no "plus sign to open". And I can copy images from camera to disk, I can delete images from camera, but I can't "cut/paste" images from camera to disk.
The original "Mac Paint" was awesome because the icons represented what the program actually did. Flood fill was a paint can spilling paint, select (the icon) looked like the selection box, and so on. Now everyone uses different icons to mean the same things.
"Customize and control" is three horizontal bars (Chrome), or a gear-like thingy (GMail) a little arrow (Facebook) or a sometimes a wrench. It's not hidden under a menu any more, because customization is something we need to do frequently, of course. And menus are out of style, no more pesky named categories of things you might want to do.
Whenever a new app is installed, the user has to spend time rummaging around the system figuring out where everything is, and they have to do this for every application. There can be no muscle memory, and little or no reliance on previous experience.
(For a particularly awful user experience, install Anki sometime. And then try to work with it.)
The solution to every problem is to google "how do I do $action in $application", follow the obtuse and labyrinthine instructions, and forget about it. For Mozilla, it's always an obscure flag in about:config.
Most of the time these are differences for the sake of being different (a marketing advantage, apparently) - there's no advantage or utility or even consensus on what is best. Why is three horizontal bars better than a gear, or a wrench? Why does customization even need to be at the top level?
I realize that as a developer you want to provide me with a rich user experience, but there's significant advantage in making it the user experience I'm familiar with in my OS and in my other apps.
I've been following with interest the debate about government-regulated taxis versus free-market Uber.
So far as I can tell, the argument for Uber is that it's cheaper, and the rides are nicer and more convenient, but otherwise it's the same service. In particular, the service has not been a statistically significant source of crime.
The arguments against are that 1) it's illegal, and 2) Uber drivers don't have enough (or the right kind of) insurance.
The first argument seems contrived. Up here in NH the Portsmouth taxi commission decided that Uber is a better solution, then voted to disband. (As the Free State project points out, "where else would this happen?")
And as to the insurance argument, the Boston Globe reports that "Passengers hurt in accidents often run into denial and evasion by poorly insured firms".
Uber is a good service, people seem to like and want it.
Are there any objections I've missed? Besides "predictions", of course(*). Anyone can predict anything and sound just like an economist.
(*) Predictions are invalid because both solutions are in play right now. There's no need to predict what will happen because we can just look to see if it's happening.
Second, the article shows that operating costs are over $11 million per year and that revenues aren't enough to cover those costs.
That puts revenues at nearly $170/month/subscriber and still money must be taken from the general fund to help pay for the system.
I've been over the article front-to-back and could not find anything about the operating costs.
The article *does* mention the projected prices and tiers:
Greenlight provides Internet-only service ranging from 40 Mbps for $39.95 per month to 1 Gbps for $104.95 per month. There are also package bundles available that add TV and phone service.
In short, you're lying. The article says no such thing.
First, spending this borrowed money might employ a few people in town, but it also means less money is available to employ other people in the town (demand is reduced for some jobs while increased for others).
Secondly, your objection is the "broken window fallacy" and it doesn't apply to this situation.
Ask yourself: does your argument also apply to road and bridge maintenance? By foregoing the buildout and repair of roads, and by avoiding maintenance for bridges one could employ other people doing other town duties such as the fire station and police.
If your argument is valid for internet service then it's valid for roads and bridges, yes?
Also, you're relying on an emotional frame by referring to the money as "borrowed money". Borrowing and being in debt is baaaad! (But let's ignore the fact that all municipal projects of any stripe are built using borrowed money.)
Slashdot Mirror
Right now this idea is outside of what we can observe, the easier path is to state that it is an anomaly in the brain. In science the easiest solution that fits the model, is the one taken to be the one to use.
You can ask whether the information has predictive value.
The brain is an elaborate goal-setting mechanism coupled to a prediction engine. If the schizophrenic can use his extra information in some way that allows them to predict future actions or consequences, then we can say that the extra information is likely to be real.
We do this all the time; for example, predicting that we will get run over if we step off the curb, based on information from our visible inputs about cars in the street.
It's very easy to "get inside someone else's mind". If we step off the curb and someone says "watch out", we're effectively making use of their neural inputs as an adjunct to our own. Simply painting a picture in someone's mind through stories or college lectures is a form of mind sharing.
Set up an experiment using schizophrenics as "sensor" - telling us what the voices are saying and/or what the people are doing - and see if that information has any predictive value. For example, ESP tests with information (card reading) hidden from the test subject.
If the information is completely disjoint from our own universe and has no predictive value, it's indistinguishable from made-up fantasies.
So what you're saying is you're totally not an astroturfer from the other side, and from now on you'd like us to be automatically suspicious of all comments that argue in favor of something you're not in favor of / argue against something you're in favor of (and totally not hoping to shut down any conversation before it starts), and they're probably just comments from people being employed by big evil corporations, but you're totally not astroturfing in the name of net neutrality? And there are totally not any logical fallacies in your argument?
Actually, I'm a big fan of cogent, reasoned responses (to my posts) that put forth a contrary position. They are so rare that I sometimes post a "thank you" in response.
Just saying "this doesn't track with my experience" ("I've taken 200+ cab rides in my life and not once encountered a bad experience", yeah, right), or "you're wrong about that", or "how dare you say the emperor has no clothes" doesn't quite cut it.
So tell me: instead of insinuating that there are logical fallacies in my argument, what exactly *are* the logical fallacies in my argument?
Question is: Who is lobbying on behalf of Joe Six Pack and family?
Lots of groups!
Here's a list:
The National Smoker’s Alliance
The 50 Cent Party
Center For Consumer Freedom
Al Gore’s Penguin Army
Microsoft
Save Our Species Alliance
Working Families For Wal-Mart
The Big Ten Network
Comcast
GOP
(NB: The companies listed come from an article titled: "Ten Horrible Examples Of Astroturfing")
Fellow readers, beware of astroturf comments.
We know that the big companies hire agencies to send fake letters of support to government agencies, letters purported to come from everyday people in support of whatever the big company wants to do at the time.
We also know that the big companies hire agencies to send fake letters of support from politicians that support whatever the big company wants to do at the time. We know that political campaigns do the same thing.
I've been interested in ghostwriting/astroturfing for awhile now. It seems reasonable that if a company has enough money to mount a fake grassroots campaign, then some of that money would be put towards shaping public opinion on public boards.
Especially a highly popular board frequented by all the smart people in the country.
Looking at one previous article about network access I can't help but get the impression that people are reaching around backwards to make their point. The plight of all those poor, twisted arguments brings a tear to my eye.
Really - watch the commentary on these articles and see if any of the arguments seem weak or contrived.
We may be infested with astroturfers.
For the answer on why we don't reveal this information read up on the 1929 bank failures. For the tl;dr crowd: There's a very good reason that we don't say which banks are having problems because they get ran out of business quickly (often within hours) and everyone that didn't make it in time looses their money. It happened in 1929 in the U.S. and it destroyed our economy for a decade.
Are you saying people would actually lose money if their bank went under? That there's no FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) or other safeguards? Are you saying that the federal reserve wouldn't overnight a truckload of cash if there was a run on the bank?
Are you saying that banks can do a slip-shod job, have no repercussions, and this is a *good* thing?
Just as GM can lose business by making a faulty ignition switch, banks should lose business when they lose the public trust.
Banks SHOULD lose business if they screw up.
The theory behind "not naming banks" is that if named, people would leave the bank and go to another one.
Why are banks allowed to do this? This completely negates the "vote with your wallet" power that the public should have.
well to be fair, i had one of those GM cars with the ignition switch issue. the only thing is to me it was not a bug but a feature. I could start my car, lock it back up with it running and keep the key on me. this is great on days like today that are -20 with the wind. (not as nice as a remote start obviously but still)
If you cant drive and focus on driving simply because they key pops out of the ignition, well you got bigger problems in life anyway
Whether it's a bug or feature is certainly a fair argument.
To my mind, if you can't predict when the key will pop out then it's a bug.
Also, it appears to have killed 38 people.
Automotive electronics developers would say the same thing about consumer communication protocols. It is a mess that can't guarantee anything for even a simple control setup.
Avionics engineers (and I am one, retired) would say "what's your point?"
Automobiles have obvious life-threatening failure modes, duh, and probably should be held to a high standard of safety, derp, just like they are in physical aspects such as crash-worthyness, *Timmer*!
Oh, I see. You're arguing that it's OK to have shitty software because, well, everyone does!.
Speaking of GM ignition switch problem, it perhaps affected one person or at most a few and they had to do multi-billion dollar recall. [...]
I keep looking for astroturfers on this forum. Is this one obvious, or are there more perfect examples I haven't found?
Yea, that's not a defense to anything. If I'm an accountant, and my boss tells me to do the books, I'm still committing a felony if I do it, and actually could be committing a felony if I don't immediately report the request to the relevant authorities. TFA clearly states that the defendant knew that what his employers were asking him to do was illegal, and he did it anyway.
Round one of "devil's advocate", now it's my turn.
Suppose you're a sysadmin for the NSA and you discover they are committing a felony. Should you then report it to the relevant authorities?
Robert Cialdini.
My bad - should have included it.
Here's a free PDF version.
I just want to mention that I agree with your points overall.
The article was dashed off in a hurry, and on reflection pretty-much everything you mentioned occurred to me after the fact. In particular, I glossed over lots of nuanced specifics for brevity. The examples were only meant to tack down the idea in the reader's mind.
Nothing so simply put can be taken at face value. I hope the parent realizes "what I meant" and will use his judgement to take a more nuanced action.
"Likewise, as a data scientist, I've learned to be suspicious of models that are too accurate, or individual variables that are too predictive."
I know just how you feel!
One way around this problem is to round down to the next significance level and reduce it to a yes/no assessment.
For example, instead of reporting the actual significance, say "p<.05" and instead of citing the correlation as a number, say "we therefore reject the null hypothesis".
Works a peach, required in most journals, and reduces the workload of the reviewers.
Scheduling playdates for your son is a recipe for bitterness and disappointment. Without feedback or direction for what the proper behaviour is, the end result will be ridicule and ostracism. Over and over. And this will continue into his adult life.
Since your son has no "feel" for interaction, the best you can get is an "intellectual appreciation" for correct behaviour. He has to learn the skill that everyone else will pick up naturally.
The first half is to get him to want to learn. You do this by rewards and other incentives, as outlined by any of a number of teaching methods. Sit down with him at regular scheduled intervals, be sure to show appreciation when he does things correctly, and show disappointment when he screws up. When he screws up, do the disappointment thing *quickly* and move on. Promise him a big reward at the end of a semester of these if he does well, and follow up on it (take him to an arcade, get him a specific toy, take him snorkeling in Hanauma bay, whatever.) Little rewards at intervals is good too (take him out for ice cream, his special time with his dad &c).
Make him want to change.
The second half is being able to recognize his behaviour *yourself* and communicate to him instantly. I cannot describe how incredibly difficult this is, you have to be alert for specific patterns and people are just not wired to do this. People go through their daily lives on autopilot, and don't normally evaluate what they're hearing/seeing/doing on a continual basis. It's s a difficult skill that needs to be developed through discovery and practice.
The problem with therapists is that the feedback isn't immediate. The therapist might be able to analyze and correct and connect with your son, but your son will tend to forget outside the session. Like I said, most people are on autopilot and changing the autopilot programming is hard.
When you get the ability to recognize his behaviour, simply say "ding!" when you see it.
It's immediate feedback, and when he hears it he should stop to consider what he's doing and change his behaviour. That's all it takes.
Be very clear that saying "ding!" doesn't mean you're angry with him or that he should stop or that he's being punished. It's simply a signal, and it's not meant to get him to stop, it's meant to get him to *think*. Also be very clear that he can ask you why you said it, and that there's no penalty for doing this.
Start with small, obvious behaviours such as repetitive habits or sentence construction, then slowly work into tactical advice (always look someone in the eye, always ask how they are doing, always remember their name), then into strategic advice ("never lie to a friend", "never tell something told to you in confidence"), then into planning advice (see what other people do and imitate them, dress like them, try to act like them).
Get a copy of "How to Make Friends and Influence People" (Dale Carnegie) and use it as a syllabus for what to teach. Also check out "Influence, the science of persuasion" as a guide for what to watch out for (so that others don't take advantage of him).
Best of luck to you.
...fix the totally cluttered preferences please.
Hey! If a product isn't popular enough, it's because it doesn't have enough features!
The more features you have, the more likely someone will want to use the product for that feature. Look at Mozilla, for example.
Were you asleep in your "marketing for engineers" class?
(My personal foible: I stop and start videos a lot, and hunting with the slider to find out where I left off is a royal pain, so I googled "how to make VLC remember position". Big mistake.
VLC doesn't implement this simple feature, but you can get a plugin that does. Download and install the plugin (copy a DLL library to the install directory? That's totally something the end user should be doing in a mature product!)
The plugin creates a checkbox which you can then check to save your place when you stop viewing a movie. Woohoo! ...except that now VLC won't run at all, and you have to forcefully delete the plugins and reboot your system just to go back to the old version.
Who implements some of the obscure, little-used, weird options in VLC but doesn't give the user the option of saving their place?
VLC is totally something Franz Kafka would design.)
That consuming cholesterol actually causes an increase in someone's cholesterol level was never well founded.
It has always fallen in the sympathetic category from any evidence I've ever seen. Tropical oils, which have no cholesterol seem to cause far more problems than butter and eggs.
Vitamin D is produced in the body from the action of sunlight on cholesterol.
I've often wondered if high cholesterol is a symptom of low vitamin D caused by lack of sunlight in our daily lives. High cholesterol could be the body's response to low vitamin D levels, its attempt to get more production from a low-sunlight environment.
Any biochemists care to comment on this?
I find it hard to believe that there's an uncanny valley in voice recognition.
Did you mean voice synthesis?
Is it house trained, or am I going to find a pile of batteries in odd corners of my house?
I am all for punishing hard people who use weapons during crimes. Using weapons during a crime increases the chances of people being hurt. It is so obvious that I wonder if you are trolling.
Apropos of nothing, how does possession of a firearm in an illegal mail order business increase the chances of people being hurt?
I don't think I've ever user recursion in my professional career. Sure, if I ever need to code a BNF grammar I might, but it's just never come up in the real world.
Whether you use it or not, recursion plays an increasing role in our daily lives.
If it weren't for recursion, you wouldn't have that computer! Or that chair you're sitting on. Or that coffee...
Here's a suggestion you may not have considered.
Your "secret" life? Don't post it to social media.
So because someone is socially different they have to forego socializing and connecting with others?
One good thing about the internet is that it allows people to be who they really want to be - by actions, words, and accomplishments - without it threatening their personal welfare. One bad thing about the internet is that it allows many people to put undue pressure on the few who stand out.
If Facebook bridges that gap, so that our anonymous personae are always connected to our real selves, then we all become subject to enormous societal pressure. It'll be the equivalent of the "old boys club" everywhere and in everything we do. You mist be the right type, have the right behaviour or you won't succeed.
It will be impossible for (for example) a secret cross-dresser to hold down a job. I know lots of people in the scene who would absolutely be fired if their employers found out, and they take great pains to keep their private lives separate from their public ones. I know people who play LARP who are in the same boat; for example, a Connecticut supreme court judge and at least 2 policemen.
One only needs to go back 30 years (some of us can actually do that) and note how society dealt with homosexuals, non-violent deviancy, even communism and long hair. Even further back was how we (the US) dealt with the Japanese, although Islamics are probably in that position right now. If someone wanted to be heard without being identified as Islamic, shouldn't they be allowed to do that?
On the flip side, is it possible to create a program that replaces faces in images with other faces? If such a program existed, and if there was enough interest we might create a movement to make facial recognition unreliable. Sort of like how "AdBlock" extensions fought against advertizing, we could have a Facebook app that grabs random faces off of other pictures and pastes them into the "gay bar" image mentioned in the summary.
This is a troubling development. I'm not a big fan of government regulation, but I think there's a clear need for delineating the privacy of people who *want* to keep themselves private.
People who do not have an account shouldn't have to deal with Facebook's particular brand of evil.
Crap, I'm moving to Hudson, NH and my two wired choices are FairPoint or Comcast. Should I really choose Comcast over FairPoint (I only care about Internet, not phone or TV)? FairPoint doesn't have any prices listed anywhere on their website. I really hate businesses like that.
No. Go with Fairpoint and avoid Comcast.
I live in NH (about 3 towns over from Hudson) and have used both. While Fairpoint is annoying, it's manageable and they don't fuck up too badly or very often. If you can manage your own computer configuration you can generally keep them at a distance and just reboot your modem once or twice a week.
Comcast is completely and totally interested in what you do, how you do it, and whether it violates their TOS. They will silently do lots of shit to prevent you from doing things, at random intervals. Also, Comcast oversells their bandwidth on what is effectively a shared line, so you won't ever get those "blazingly fast" XFinity speeds they advertize.
Comcast is "not a lot of benefit" for "whole lot of hassle".
Go with FairPoint.
The problem with "rich user experience" is that there are so many of them.
From the audio player app with graceful curves instead of square corners, the circle/bar (poweroff symbol) somewhere instead of "X" in the corner to close, shelves that open when you hover over a specific part of the app... you have to learn a new way of doing things, and it's only for that one app.
Download images from a camera or phone, but it doesn't identify as a "disk", it requires an install disk so that it appears as a separate something in the disk listing, at the end, with a different icon. With no "plus sign to open". And I can copy images from camera to disk, I can delete images from camera, but I can't "cut/paste" images from camera to disk.
The original "Mac Paint" was awesome because the icons represented what the program actually did. Flood fill was a paint can spilling paint, select (the icon) looked like the selection box, and so on. Now everyone uses different icons to mean the same things.
"Customize and control" is three horizontal bars (Chrome), or a gear-like thingy (GMail) a little arrow (Facebook) or a sometimes a wrench. It's not hidden under a menu any more, because customization is something we need to do frequently, of course. And menus are out of style, no more pesky named categories of things you might want to do.
Whenever a new app is installed, the user has to spend time rummaging around the system figuring out where everything is, and they have to do this for every application. There can be no muscle memory, and little or no reliance on previous experience.
(For a particularly awful user experience, install Anki sometime. And then try to work with it.)
The solution to every problem is to google "how do I do $action in $application", follow the obtuse and labyrinthine instructions, and forget about it. For Mozilla, it's always an obscure flag in about:config.
Most of the time these are differences for the sake of being different (a marketing advantage, apparently) - there's no advantage or utility or even consensus on what is best. Why is three horizontal bars better than a gear, or a wrench? Why does customization even need to be at the top level?
I realize that as a developer you want to provide me with a rich user experience, but there's significant advantage in making it the user experience I'm familiar with in my OS and in my other apps.
it is now run by rouge Al's
I can't help but wonder what our foreign readership, who view this site using google translate, thinks of the conversation.
Red AI's indeed!
I've been following with interest the debate about government-regulated taxis versus free-market Uber.
So far as I can tell, the argument for Uber is that it's cheaper, and the rides are nicer and more convenient, but otherwise it's the same service. In particular, the service has not been a statistically significant source of crime.
The arguments against are that 1) it's illegal, and 2) Uber drivers don't have enough (or the right kind of) insurance.
The first argument seems contrived. Up here in NH the Portsmouth taxi commission decided that Uber is a better solution, then voted to disband. (As the Free State project points out, "where else would this happen?")
And as to the insurance argument, the Boston Globe reports that "Passengers hurt in accidents often run into denial and evasion by poorly insured firms".
Uber is a good service, people seem to like and want it.
Are there any objections I've missed? Besides "predictions", of course(*). Anyone can predict anything and sound just like an economist.
(*) Predictions are invalid because both solutions are in play right now. There's no need to predict what will happen because we can just look to see if it's happening.
You're missing a few things:[...]
Second, the article shows that operating costs are over $11 million per year and that revenues aren't enough to cover those costs.
That puts revenues at nearly $170/month/subscriber and still money must be taken from the general fund to help pay for the system.
I've been over the article front-to-back and could not find anything about the operating costs.
The article *does* mention the projected prices and tiers:
Greenlight provides Internet-only service ranging from 40 Mbps for $39.95 per month to 1 Gbps for $104.95 per month. There are also package bundles available that add TV and phone service.
In short, you're lying. The article says no such thing.
First, spending this borrowed money might employ a few people in town, but it also means less money is available to employ other people in the town (demand is reduced for some jobs while increased for others).
Secondly, your objection is the "broken window fallacy" and it doesn't apply to this situation.
Ask yourself: does your argument also apply to road and bridge maintenance? By foregoing the buildout and repair of roads, and by avoiding maintenance for bridges one could employ other people doing other town duties such as the fire station and police.
If your argument is valid for internet service then it's valid for roads and bridges, yes?
Also, you're relying on an emotional frame by referring to the money as "borrowed money". Borrowing and being in debt is baaaad! (But let's ignore the fact that all municipal projects of any stripe are built using borrowed money.)