I have enough downtime to actually sit and watch a whole hour a day
The definition of "watching" used for TV ratings is "in the same room as a TV when it is switched on". So your amount of viewing would come to more than the one hour per day you think of as "watching".
And much of the evidence that might be advanced to show that they are going away can be misleading. People might watch many YouTube videos on their tablets and smart-phones, but all those videos are very short. Looking at the total amount of viewing, in minutes, shows that tablet and smort-phone viewing is much less important than many think.
Just how stupid are British officials that they can't see the obvious route is to sue and fine the company directly for false advertising
Because requiring consumers to sue a company, with all the hassle and legal costs, provides consumers with no effective protection. That is why Britain has consumer protection legislation. It provides an easy route for consumers to get redress.
Zero Tolerance: A regulatory philosophy that administrators hide behind to avoid having to make decisions and subsequently defend those decisions.
And also, zero tolerance = zero justice. By replacing human judgement with an inflexible rule, we replace the justice that come from judgement (being judicious) with a mechanical tyranny.
In the context of school bullying, this will disproportionately fall on the victims of bullying.
The bullies are good at bullying. From practice they know just how much they can get away with
without crossing the line of official sanction.
Frustrated and angry victims are not so practiced, so when they snap, they are more likley to cross the line that gets them punished.
The guy that spends a week finding a five year old memory bug, that no one has every been able to find is now ineffective, whereas a dweeb performing trivial refactoring is classed as a genius?
Heaven forbid that you should RTFA, or even the summary, so plow on with your prejudice. Nowere does its say that frequent check-ins would be used as indicating a good programmer. Quoth the patent:
The data analysis component 433 may also include a comparison component 435 for comparing analyzed profile attributes of more than one developer... Determine any other valid statistical comparison between this user profile and other user profiles to find the standard deviation of a profile from the mean profile values. This finds users who may be at the extreme side of the average who may need to be highlighted for support or acclaim
So, Alice and Bob are good programmers and check-in once a week. Charlie is a bad programmer and checks-in ten times a day. Perhaps his manager says to him Why don't you work more like Alice and Bob? They make less frequent changes. Perhaps you need to slow down a little?. Once you have data to analyse, you will be able to find correlations. This is how spam filters work, after all. They do not a priori decide that Viagra indicates spam: the data indicates that is so.
DVR makes this MUCH more difficult because fast-forward/rewind vastly increases the number of datasets you need to compare against. Also, while in theory you could identify a DVD, the selection of possible DVDs is so great and the amount of noise in the measurements is such that you're never in practice going to be able to identify someone's watched content reliably.
Welcome to my world. I write software for computing TV ratings, including for DVR and VOD use, and capable of being used for DVDs. It already exists.
Once, we did understand. Twenty-five years ago, Independent science correspondent Steve Connor and I wrote a tome about Britain's Databanks and the effect of growing data processing on civil society. Steve had located Britain's first ever vehicle Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) device, a washing-machine-sized contraption planted on a motorway bridge near St Albans. It heralded the potentially tyrannical ultimate development of a nationwide movement surveillance. We both reached for and proclaimed words from early reviews of data protection laws that had warned that new sensors and new software such as free text retrieval (FTR) raised "new dimensions of unease".
A quarter-century on, these words are all but unsayable. The thoughts no longer fit the world.
a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century
Christianity has already done that. The problem is not Christians, but fundamentalist Christians. I'm an aetheist, but if I were a Christian I would be enraged at the way that fundamentalist Chrisitains identify their particular sect as Christianity in toto, labelling everyone else who also calls themselves a Christian as not Christian.
In this context, "terrorist" means "fundamentalist Islamic terrorist", so we might well ask "why are disproportionately many engineers fundamentalist Muslims"? And hence "why is anyone a religious fundamentalist at all"?
I've seen it suggested that fundamentalism, despite its apparent traditionalism, is actually a very modern phenomena. It is actually a religions reaction against characteristics of the modern world. Islamic fundamentalism is therefore more prevalent among people who have been exposed to the (undesired) characteristics of western culture and capitalism. Perhaps Muslim engineers have more contact with western culture and capitalism that other Muslim students?
Or move to Europe, where it seems we do not have home wiring and power companies as poor as they are in the US. I've been told that not all US homes have a ring-main.
Heresy! Paying consumers $5/month for their personal data would give them the dangerous notion that they own it and have some right to control how it is used.
Your ignorance highlights the emptiness of your cynicism. Knowing which TV programs were being shown at which time is not so useful, because it does not indicate how many people were watching, nor does it provide any demographic information about those viewers. Getting hold of that information requires the cooperation of the viewers, and thus payment to them.
Maybe I am completely naive about this, but it doesn't seem like that hard of a problem to solve. Nielsen should work with cable box and satellite box manufactures/ and embed a viewing habit collection program to collect and send information back to whoever happens to care.
And this is one way of improving coverage. And it has already been done. For years. By the competition. Nielsen, however, has a domestic (USA) monopoly, and has effectively kept out competitors using business tactics that would seem familiar to Slashdot-ers who criticise Microsoft.
That great new SF show that just rocked your socks off? If you're not in a Neilsen household, then they don't even know that you watched it, and buying the DVD box set 2 years later won't save it. The fat welfare whore next door with the Neilson box and the seven kids who watch re-runs of America's Fattiest Fatty 24/7? They're the people driving the content provision.
It does not work like that. Audience measurement panels (what Neilson runs in the US) are balanced. That means they select a set of demographic factors that describe the population (age, sex, social-class being only three of them), and try to recruit a panel of households that cover those demographics in the about the same proportions as the full population. Next, they apply a weighting step; rather than computing the ratings by simply multiplying by the ratio of population to panelists, they include a weight for each household (ideally, close to 1.0), which reflects how close the panel is to an ideally balanced panel. So, if many more geeks were panelists, all that would happen is that the weight of each geek panelist would be reduced.
False. We discussed here on slashdot the new Nielsen system which is capable of performing face recognition of registered participants.
Maybe some Nielsen researchers were evaluating some technology like this, but I doubt it is in production use. I work for the competition, and I know that People-Meters relying on button pushes are the norm.
but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer.
What utter crap. As if you can't write mathematical expressions in any other language. Tell me, what features does FORTRAN have to assist transition from paper-n-pencil to computer, that other languages do not? FORTRAN has NO useful features that other general purpose high level languages lack. It also has vast quantities of legacy cruft that rot the brains of those who learn and use it.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest of inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens).
This is the view of Epicurean philosophy, which pre-dates Christianity.
I have a friend who had to go on short term disability, and the manager piled on 37 individual objectives in his annual review for him to meet. He was given 22 work days to meet that. Of those 22 days, he was already approved and scheduled 10 days off for surgery and shit.
37 individual objectives, one of which took another person over a year to work on without success.
IANAL, but in civilized countries (you're in the USA?), that would be "constructive dismissal". The employer could find themselves at the sharp end of a tribunal. They would have to compensate the employee.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. The definition of "watching" used for TV ratings is "in the same room as a TV when it is switched on".
The definition of "watching" used for TV ratings is "in the same room as a TV when it is switched on". So your amount of viewing would come to more than the one hour per day you think of as "watching".
And much of the evidence that might be advanced to show that they are going away can be misleading. People might watch many YouTube videos on their tablets and smart-phones, but all those videos are very short. Looking at the total amount of viewing, in minutes, shows that tablet and smort-phone viewing is much less important than many think.
She didn't impose her expectations. She complained. Then when nothing improved, she left.
Because requiring consumers to sue a company, with all the hassle and legal costs, provides consumers with no effective protection. That is why Britain has consumer protection legislation. It provides an easy route for consumers to get redress.
I can't see that working well, unless they mean no heavy-weight processes, which have their own address space.
Zero Tolerance: A regulatory philosophy that administrators hide behind to avoid having to make decisions and subsequently defend those decisions.
And also, zero tolerance = zero justice. By replacing human judgement with an inflexible rule, we replace the justice that come from judgement (being judicious) with a mechanical tyranny.
In the context of school bullying, this will disproportionately fall on the victims of bullying. The bullies are good at bullying. From practice they know just how much they can get away with without crossing the line of official sanction. Frustrated and angry victims are not so practiced, so when they snap, they are more likley to cross the line that gets them punished.
But TFA Says
The guy that spends a week finding a five year old memory bug, that no one has every been able to find is now ineffective, whereas a dweeb performing trivial refactoring is classed as a genius?
Heaven forbid that you should RTFA, or even the summary, so plow on with your prejudice. Nowere does its say that frequent check-ins would be used as indicating a good programmer. Quoth the patent:
The data analysis component 433 may also include a comparison component 435 for comparing analyzed profile attributes of more than one developer... Determine any other valid statistical comparison between this user profile and other user profiles to find the standard deviation of a profile from the mean profile values. This finds users who may be at the extreme side of the average who may need to be highlighted for support or acclaim
So, Alice and Bob are good programmers and check-in once a week. Charlie is a bad programmer and checks-in ten times a day. Perhaps his manager says to him Why don't you work more like Alice and Bob? They make less frequent changes. Perhaps you need to slow down a little?. Once you have data to analyse, you will be able to find correlations. This is how spam filters work, after all. They do not a priori decide that Viagra indicates spam: the data indicates that is so.
Good stuff. Philosophy 101 includes not confusing arguments about things with arguments about the meanings of words.
Welcome to my world. I write software for computing TV ratings, including for DVR and VOD use, and capable of being used for DVDs. It already exists.
I'll quote The Register on why it is sad that you don't think there is anything wrong in this:
Christianity has already done that. The problem is not Christians, but fundamentalist Christians. I'm an aetheist, but if I were a Christian I would be enraged at the way that fundamentalist Chrisitains identify their particular sect as Christianity in toto, labelling everyone else who also calls themselves a Christian as not Christian.
Replying to remove faulty moderation.
Replying to kill moderation.
In this context, "terrorist" means "fundamentalist Islamic terrorist", so we might well ask "why are disproportionately many engineers fundamentalist Muslims"? And hence "why is anyone a religious fundamentalist at all"? I've seen it suggested that fundamentalism, despite its apparent traditionalism, is actually a very modern phenomena. It is actually a religions reaction against characteristics of the modern world. Islamic fundamentalism is therefore more prevalent among people who have been exposed to the (undesired) characteristics of western culture and capitalism. Perhaps Muslim engineers have more contact with western culture and capitalism that other Muslim students?
Or move to Europe, where it seems we do not have home wiring and power companies as poor as they are in the US. I've been told that not all US homes have a ring-main.
Heresy! Paying consumers $5/month for their personal data would give them the dangerous notion that they own it and have some right to control how it is used.
Your ignorance highlights the emptiness of your cynicism. Knowing which TV programs were being shown at which time is not so useful, because it does not indicate how many people were watching, nor does it provide any demographic information about those viewers. Getting hold of that information requires the cooperation of the viewers, and thus payment to them.
Maybe I am completely naive about this, but it doesn't seem like that hard of a problem to solve. Nielsen should work with cable box and satellite box manufactures/ and embed a viewing habit collection program to collect and send information back to whoever happens to care.
And this is one way of improving coverage. And it has already been done. For years. By the competition. Nielsen, however, has a domestic (USA) monopoly, and has effectively kept out competitors using business tactics that would seem familiar to Slashdot-ers who criticise Microsoft.
That great new SF show that just rocked your socks off? If you're not in a Neilsen household, then they don't even know that you watched it, and buying the DVD box set 2 years later won't save it. The fat welfare whore next door with the Neilson box and the seven kids who watch re-runs of America's Fattiest Fatty 24/7? They're the people driving the content provision.
It does not work like that. Audience measurement panels (what Neilson runs in the US) are balanced. That means they select a set of demographic factors that describe the population (age, sex, social-class being only three of them), and try to recruit a panel of households that cover those demographics in the about the same proportions as the full population. Next, they apply a weighting step; rather than computing the ratings by simply multiplying by the ratio of population to panelists, they include a weight for each household (ideally, close to 1.0), which reflects how close the panel is to an ideally balanced panel. So, if many more geeks were panelists, all that would happen is that the weight of each geek panelist would be reduced.
False. We discussed here on slashdot the new Nielsen system which is capable of performing face recognition of registered participants.
Maybe some Nielsen researchers were evaluating some technology like this, but I doubt it is in production use. I work for the competition, and I know that People-Meters relying on button pushes are the norm.
but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer.
What utter crap. As if you can't write mathematical expressions in any other language. Tell me, what features does FORTRAN have to assist transition from paper-n-pencil to computer, that other languages do not? FORTRAN has NO useful features that other general purpose high level languages lack. It also has vast quantities of legacy cruft that rot the brains of those who learn and use it.
Quoth the poster:
This is the view of Epicurean philosophy, which pre-dates Christianity.
I recommend Java Concurrency in Practice
As do I. The emphasis on documenting synchronization rules is very good, and the suggestion of using Java annotations to do so is cool.
I have a friend who had to go on short term disability, and the manager piled on 37 individual objectives in his annual review for him to meet. He was given 22 work days to meet that. Of those 22 days, he was already approved and scheduled 10 days off for surgery and shit.
37 individual objectives, one of which took another person over a year to work on without success.
IANAL, but in civilized countries (you're in the USA?), that would be "constructive dismissal". The employer could find themselves at the sharp end of a tribunal. They would have to compensate the employee.