Yeah, amber screens were the prime choice back in the day, when they first became available. I'm surprised that so many youngsters here are choosing to code in green on black, thinking that there is some ancient wisdom behind it. When the truth is that there were no other choices at that time.
I am SO glad that we've gotten beyond those old wood-burning computers!
Most people get increasingly far-sighted from about age 35 onward, and it might start younger than that for some. The lens in the eye becomes less pliable with age, so the muscles that change its shape to bring close things into focus have to work harder, and this can cause headaches if they need to do so for hours on end.
A vision check can help, but a surer and less expensive technique is to buy or borrow some inexpensive reading glasses. Check out three pair at +1.25, +1.50, and +1.75 (I think these measures are "diopters"), and see if you lose the headaches when you use these for several hours. (The problem with an optometric check up is that it won't go on for hours so it is easy to unconsciously "cheat" and force into focus something that you would not be able to comfortably keep in focus for any length of time).
If you wear prescription glasses, talk to your optometrist about graduated lenses, and be sure to tell him how much of your time you spend at the keyboard, what the monitor to eye distance is, and whether you have the monitor at eye height, or lower.
I've been profoundly nearsighted (myopia) since grade school. I'm currently using contact lenses for distance correction with +1.25 reading glasses for computer work and most reading. I've got a pair of +2.25 for detail work, like threading needles and such. My backup glasses are graduated lenses, optimized on the close-up side for computer work at 24", rather than a more typical 18" (for reading). I prefer to have my monitor below eye height (so I can easily look directly over it).
Not yet mentioned but often a problem are reflections.
Turn the monitor off and look at the dark screen as if it were a mirror. If you can see anything recognizable, or there are definite fuzzy brighter areas, then reflection might be the culprit.
that I don't see why a browser should be expected to perform well against your criteria.
FF is open source, so it would be a simple enough thing for you to either fork it yourself or hire someone with the skills to do so, and build a variant that could be left running for days on end, with hundreds of tabs left open.
But I'm not sure that the community needs a browser that meets these requirements. Maybe I'm wrong, in which case I expect this post to get soundly trounced.
That was the best! The very pinnacle of that particular OS! Then it went increasingly downhill. Sometimes in a thrilling sort of way, like a rollercoaster goes downhill.
</reminisce>
I don't understand why there is a problem here. Simply shut down FF when you aren't using it, then let the tabs repopulate when you start again.
Heck, that isn't even a workaround, since it is a best practice for users anyway. Why expose your system to possible attacks from a freshly compromised web site, when you aren't actively browsing?
In the more general case, why keep any software running for hours in an idle mode when you aren't using it? Memory that is being hogged by a PIBKAC could be used by the background system diagnostics and tuning routines.
Alot of people in McCains age group are racist, religious, sexist, homophobic and hold hatred toward countries for things that occured 70years ago.
Interesting. Yet parent post offers no evidence, citations, or examples to back up this assertion. It is a value judgment placed upon a societal segment without being encumbered beforehand by any facts.
Can you say "prejudice"?
Very good!
Now, can you say "ageist"??
BTW, I will be voting for Obama. In one of those weird ironic twists, I think Obama has a better handle on how to fix this country's age prejudice than McCain does, even though Obama hasn't been on the carousel for anywhere near as many go-rounds.
Javascript v2.x and higher. Please include as an option typed datafields and standard inheritance (this prototype inheritance is too weird— some great ideas should never be implemented).
More modular construction: the ability to upgrade different parts of the browser at different times. Should be possible to upgrade the HTML parser separately from the DOM manager, and either separately from Javascript. Etc.
Extensibility, like XUL, ideally implemented in an agnostic fashion.
SVG or an equivalent. Should support embedded HTML within SVG objects.
A larger set of standardized widgets for gathering user input.
Improved mechanisms/protocols for linking with external client-side and server-side software. Aim at making the browser the primary output from other software.
Probably other stuff. I plan on visiting TFA tonight, at a quieter time, when they maybe have recovered from the meltdown.
Oops! I had forgotten that. I wonder what else we haven't covered?
don't forget that my post was full of self-deprecating humor
Dang, I hope I wasn't too heavy-handed. I did appreciate your humor, but I hadn't yet finished the first pot of coffee for the day, and I don't write at my best until I'm well into the second pot.
HTML has become fairly easy. Google for "character entity" and search among the lists for one that suits your needs well. The mnemonics are now recognized by all major browsers, like —, € (€), so there is no need to mess about with the numeric codes.
I got my tech-writer job based not only on the quality of my experience on my resume (put little lines above the e's for me), but also because I used En-dashes in my date ranges;-)
Please tell me where you got your job because I might want to send my résumé there, that is, if I resume looking for tech-writing jobs. As you can see, I'm sure to get a job.
Those "little lines above the e's" are accent marks— in this case, acute accents. The character entity is, naturally enough, é.
The emdash is an acceptable a substitute for semi-colons, but also for commas— yet I have never heard of, nor can I imagine, using an emdash as a substitute for a colon. That would be wierd. An emdash rule of thumb: if you are building a complex sentence with lots of phrases set off with commas and/or semicolons, and if some of those phrases are subordinate to another subordinate, then consider strategic use of the emdash to help the reader disambiguate your intended meaning from other possible meanings.
Second rule of thumb for emdashes: If you are writing to a bunch of semiliterates— and want to fit in— use lots of emdashes.
Third rule is simil.... OMG!! PONIES!!! Like— Wow! In ValleySpeak it is —like— posilutely and absitively necessary— Hey! You just can't do VS without emdashes? You_know_what_I_mean???
Ndashes are easy. In dates, in SSNs and similar dash-separated numeric codes, and in phone numbers (except the european style dot separator is becoming more common). Might also want to use the ndash in place of a hyphen when working with systems that do not have a good "non-breaking hyphen".
I don't agree with several aspects of parent post, but I do agree that TFA's introduction of "free will" into the discussion is a red herring.
The experiments show some very interesting things about the mind's mechanisms, in particular about the relationship of the self-aware, language-using part— call it "ego"— to the parts that do not have direct access to language and might not directly interact with the world. But author of TFA seems to be working with an outdated, simple model that places the ego at the top of the decision hierarchy. Which raises the question of free-will since with this model it appears that the top of the pyramid is being dictated to by mechanistic events happening in lower parts of the mind.
Bob Newhart had a show in the 1980s (Newhart) which introduced the comedic trio of Larry, and his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl. Larry was the only one who spoke or directly interacted with the other characters: Darryl and Darryl were always hanging back, witnessing the action but never participating (although the audience was able to see their reactions to events). But when a decision was called for, the three would go into a quick huddle and then Larry would state what the decision was. IIRC, at least once in the series he said something like "I like the idea, but my brother Daryl didn't like it so we won't do it."
There are good reasons to believe that our minds are organized the same way: that the part of the self we are conscious of is the spokesman for very close siblings who happen to share a single body, and our decisions are all group decisions. There is no restriction on the possibility of free will in this: whether the group is constrained in its choices cannot be determined (at least at this time). The spokesman is of course constrained by the group's decision, and that part may or may not understand all the factors that led to a given decision. But that doesn't negate the free will of the group.
This model supports the research findings, where instrumentation was able to deduce something about the non-verbal deciders seconds before the spokesman had finished polling his sibs. It also can explain the way someone astute in reading non-verbal cues can make very good guesses about what an individual will decide to do, sometimes before that person is himself aware of his decision.
The discussion needs to bring in some other terminology.
Mapping: Google creates the largest and most detailed mappings of some subjects that we have ever seen. Further, it provides a number of map manipulation tools that are incredibly fast and easy to work with.
Territory: The map is not the territory; what Google delivers is always suggestive of the way the world actually is, but should never be mistaken as reality. The data Google draws on is abstracted from reality, and there may be several metadata processes in between the Real World and what is provided to Google users. This becomes more of an issue as one approaches the frontiers of human endeavor. And of course science is often done on those very frontiers.
Algorithm: In the context of this discussion, the highly specific, technical definition needs to be used, rather than the way the term is bandied about in casual conversations. See this definition, whose first paragraph should be sufficient for this thread while remaining accessible to all of slashdot's readership.
Heuristic: Basically, any problem solving strategy that might provide an adequate solution to a class of problems. See this description, whose first section should be good enough for this discussion. All algorithms are heuristics, but not all heuristics are algorithmic. A heuristic may lead to a wrong answer and still be considered good, if the cost of working with a wrong answer is low compared to other benefits, like speed or ease of use.
For the most part, Google relies on non-algorithmic heuristics to generate its results.
The scientific method can be described as a set of algorithms designed to select among all possible hypotheses the few that seem to best model real world events. These models are in turn used to suggest new hypotheses that can be tested with the scientific method; it is iterative. The (possibly unreachable) goal is to eventually find connections that tie all the separate models into one universal supermodel; a strong secondary desire is to simplify each model as much as can be done while preserving its ability to predict real world events.
Note that implicit to the above is the core of the Copenhagen Convention: science is all about our intellectual models of reality, and is not about reality itself, which might or might not be humanly understandable. We stay within the scope of what we know we can comprehend, which comprises the models that our minds have built. Reality is separate from that: we test our models against reality, but reality is external to our modeling space.
In these terms, what Google presents us with is another view of reality that may or may not be distorted by the viewing process, but which is very easy to manipulate. However Google is not part of the scientific modeling process, and cannot replace those activities.
Google is however very good for engineering things, where the elegance of scientific models is often trumped by the pragmatics of Getting Things Done.
Maybe the competent MS employees have long ago committed harakiri in shame, and whoever's left Just Don't Care...
It's much more likely that the competent MS employees of yesteryear have all gone to new and more interesting jobs with Google, IBM, Sun, and Yahoo, and the dregs that were left behind have no idea how to do the work or manage the processes. Those left behind might be very dedicated and responsible workers, but if they don't have the necessary talents, at best their small projects will be mediocre and their large products will be highly polished turds.
Bill Gates did try to lobby the Feds into easing up restrictions on H-1B visas, claiming that there weren't enough capable American software engineers to get the work done. That's a strong piece of corroborating evidence: if Microsoft had the talent it needed, it wouldn't need to bring in H-1B visas to make Visa.
Does Word have a greater Gross National Productivity Cost than Excel? It seems like they are about the same, except Excel might be worse since it is more likely to cause collateral damage (bad business decisions because the numbers were crunched wrong).
But there is software that has an even higher GNPC than either of these two: PowerPoint.
MS Office: the corporate equivalent of multiple sclerosis. Gets your business into the wheelchair races real quick.
If only all it took to develop a good OS was deep pockets.
Microsoft has lost the fight to prevent brain drain: Vista and Office 2007 have shown that they no longer know how to do innovation any more. They can't even put a new shine on the old shoes. It's sadly pathetic, really. Watching Microsoft attempt to do anything that requires corporate smarts is like watching a Dean of World History with Alzheimers try to hold up his end of the conversation at a dinner party. He's still the Dean, until he can be shuffled into retirement, so you kind of have to pay attention to him. But as to the future of the Department, well, he's just not that relevant any more.
All the bright young programmers are now seeking opportunities at Google, IBM, and even Yahoo, where there are new horizons and cutting edge stuff happening. All those armies of developers developers developers are now doing gee-whiz things with Javascript (!), the DOM, PHP, and MySQL. The state of affairs at Microsoft has gotten so bad and depressed that it's hardly worth the effort to toss a chair.
Clearly there's a fine line between insightful and funny. At least today.
The line between the two is almost always non-existent. "Eureka!" moments are times of great laughter. Many scientific breakthroughs begin with the words "Now, that's funny...." Humor is one of the higher level irrational behaviors, and the ability to see the humor of a situation ranks right up there besides insight as a rare and wonderful capacity.
Of course, none of this explains slashdot phenomena. What happens on slashdot belongs only to slashdot, and any semblance to the real world is, uh... Go ask Cowboy Neal. He'll tell ya.
Whether parent is a troll or not, the question raised deserves some kind of answer.
Getting into space is not the long term goal.
The long term goal is to get back into The Garden. The way to do that is to move all the factories (and most of the engineers) into space. This is all spelled out in the Ecological Manifesto. Which you can find written in the reflection of the clouds on any stillwater lake where you've got solitude surrounded by a few acres of wilderness.
Nuclear power is the leftist crackpots "Intelligent Design".
Interesting sound bite.
But the attempt to spin doctor the anti-nuclear position into an anti-science or Luddite position is going to fail. Since it doesn't address the core concerns.
The telling arguments against nuclear power boil down to these assertions:
We have the technology. We could build nuclear power plants easily.
We don't know how to manage them. Every nuclear power plant accident that has led to the permanent shutdown of a facility has been caused by managerial errors: staff not properly trained to handle exceptional conditions; deliberate failures to follow established procedures; failure to develop adequate procedures for complex, but not unlikely, events, and so on. Not one of these has been caused by bad engineering or inadequate quality control of materials or a natural disaster. Just catastrophically bad management decisions, often in multiple cascades where no single decision of itself seems more than a little bit wrong...
We don't know how to manage them, part 2: our bookkeeping and accounting systems are built upon 200+ years experience with the extraction, production, and service industries, all of which load the bulk of costs in front of revenue. But with nuclear power, the far greater costs come after revenue is received. Our fiscal modeling systems do not know how to handle this, resulting in management decisions based on blue-sky appraisals of future costs, such as shutdown costs and long term waste handling. Even if we learn how to handle the safety aspects of having workaday humans managing nuclear power, the approach will be a long term financial disaster until we develop a new system of accounting that can reliably handle future cost assessments.
Some of these concerns can be mitigated by improving the technology, which in this case means dumbing it down to a level that is more in line with what management can actually handle. The pebble bed reactors make a lot of sense in this respect. As does an intelligently designed (pun somewhat intended) breeder reactor program to reduce after-costs. But these are just mitigations.
What is really needed is the development of management systems that can handle dangerous systems with look-ahead modeling that is reasonably accurate for 100+ years, and institutions designed to function for 1000+ years. This means establishing new fields of study in accounting theory and long term institutional management. I haven't heard anyone talking about putting up the seed money for that.
One way Obama's campaign could counter McCain's 45 new nuclear plants would be to propose funding post graduate Schools of Nuclear Power Management at US universities, that would offer Ph.D.s related to the pragmatics of actually setting up and running a sane nuclear industry. The first graduates would be available for overseeing the late planning and implementation stages of building those 45 new nuclear plants. If Obama proposed something along these lines, it would go a long way to assuring my vote.
There is no problem with nuclear technology. It is much like advanced aeronautics: just like we can design and build fighter planes that are faster and more maneuverable than any human pilot can safely handle, we know how to design and build nuclear power plants that are more complex than any series of managers can safely handle. So the problem is in our heads, not in nuclear power. We gotta dumb it down, boys, before we can let it out the door.
If I received your email I'd believe you're a dishonest business person actively engaged in a lie. Which is made obvious by the fact that you received his email and were able to determine it was spammed to many people but somehow you're not bright enough to realize that the email you are sending is also going to the same list of people. To be dishonest and lie in a more convincing manner I think you need to avoid the mention of spam at all;-)
You make your case very well.
However I believe most people who started to think along these lines would soon reach the conclusion that this was so silly that it had to be a joke, and most of them would get a chuckle out of it.
The ones who took it so seriously they'd not consider doing business with the author... WOW! This approach is also a good screening tool that would decrease the number of troublesome and expensive customers the business has to deal with! In every service industry, 80% of the cost of fulfillment is spent on 20% of the clients. So if a tool like this would attract a few more prospects who have a good sense of humor and are easy to get along with, while simultaneously steering away a few of those whose costs of service are going to exceed the revenues they generate, then this is a double plus good technique! The business might end up with 17% of its clients responsible for 70% of its cost of fulfillment! That's like, tres kewl!
Oh, definitely do something like the "accidental 'reply all'" strategy:
Hi George! I see that you decided to go ahead with the spam advertising approach despite the risks. More power to you. We've definitely dropped that idea... it is too likely to piss off our core of loyal clients.
We're still doing the 'traditional quality' thing: trying to arrange the best possible tour packages for each price point. It is not a 'get rich quick' approach, but we're all making a good living at doing what we like to do, and that counts for a lot.
Our company has decided to back off on those talks about some kind of partnership with your company. We think that our corporate values are too different from yours for that to work out, at least for now.
Looking forward to seeing you again at next year's trade show! If they have it in the same place, we could share lunch again at that italian restaurant with the excellent menu.
[Sign with title, company name, etc]
Also definitely move the mailing list into a database of some kind, so you can cross reference it with your client lists. If a significant portion of your clients are on their mailing list, then you might have a problem of some kind. You might also use this as one source for building targeted mailing lists, but it wouldn't be wise to use it directly. See next point.
Tell your boss that the people on this list have already seen junk email from the competitor and are likely to regard anything you send out as just more junk email, so normal spamming would actually be counter productive. This is especially true since undoubtedly other businesses are harvesting these addresses, and will be pumping out spam to these people.
Additionally, "Firefox" is a neat play on "foxfire", which is a ghostly luminescence in the forest at night, and has also become associated with grassroots efforts to preserve and enhance Appalachian folk craft. Whether this was intentional or not, it adds another layer of nuance to the name.
I think that's the biggest problem with saying that Google is making us stoopid -- by which definition of intelligence?
I fully agree with your criticism of my argument. I never defined either "intelligence" or "stupidity" yet I used them as key terms. By pointing this out, you have punctured the bubble and totally collapsed the argument. Which is as it should be: it was pure silliness from the get-go.
Congratulations! Yours is one of the very few responses that demonstrates critical thinking skills in action! I salute you!
<quote> is a good and useful way to set off quoted material. I join many others on slashdot in recommending its appropriate usage. It is so much more precise than <i>, which has many other uses.
GP post attempted to lay out the significant differences between 'mean', 'median', and 'average'. "Average' is less precise, and its usage is often appropriate when neither 'mean' nor 'median' would be correct. As in the original post.
I use statistics mostly in the realm of quality assurance studies, and over the last couple of decades, mostly in the health care setting. In this rather narrow but somewhat important scope, we tend to be careful to not imply that we somehow have more precise information than the often fuzzy data supports. Perhaps in other realms like maybe rocket science or the design of airliners this isn't consider so important.
Not all statisticians are the same. Your milage may vary. Your variance may vary...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, amber screens were the prime choice back in the day, when they first became available. I'm surprised that so many youngsters here are choosing to code in green on black, thinking that there is some ancient wisdom behind it. When the truth is that there were no other choices at that time.
I am SO glad that we've gotten beyond those old wood-burning computers!
Most people get increasingly far-sighted from about age 35 onward, and it might start younger than that for some. The lens in the eye becomes less pliable with age, so the muscles that change its shape to bring close things into focus have to work harder, and this can cause headaches if they need to do so for hours on end.
A vision check can help, but a surer and less expensive technique is to buy or borrow some inexpensive reading glasses. Check out three pair at +1.25, +1.50, and +1.75 (I think these measures are "diopters"), and see if you lose the headaches when you use these for several hours. (The problem with an optometric check up is that it won't go on for hours so it is easy to unconsciously "cheat" and force into focus something that you would not be able to comfortably keep in focus for any length of time).
If you wear prescription glasses, talk to your optometrist about graduated lenses, and be sure to tell him how much of your time you spend at the keyboard, what the monitor to eye distance is, and whether you have the monitor at eye height, or lower.
I've been profoundly nearsighted (myopia) since grade school. I'm currently using contact lenses for distance correction with +1.25 reading glasses for computer work and most reading. I've got a pair of +2.25 for detail work, like threading needles and such. My backup glasses are graduated lenses, optimized on the close-up side for computer work at 24", rather than a more typical 18" (for reading). I prefer to have my monitor below eye height (so I can easily look directly over it).
Not yet mentioned but often a problem are reflections.
Turn the monitor off and look at the dark screen as if it were a mirror. If you can see anything recognizable, or there are definite fuzzy brighter areas, then reflection might be the culprit.
It seems your usage is so far removed from both
that I don't see why a browser should be expected to perform well against your criteria.
FF is open source, so it would be a simple enough thing for you to either fork it yourself or hire someone with the skills to do so, and build a variant that could be left running for days on end, with hundreds of tabs left open.
But I'm not sure that the community needs a browser that meets these requirements. Maybe I'm wrong, in which case I expect this post to get soundly trounced.
3.11
That was the best! The very pinnacle of that particular OS! Then it went increasingly downhill. Sometimes in a thrilling sort of way, like a rollercoaster goes downhill.
</reminisce>
I don't understand why there is a problem here. Simply shut down FF when you aren't using it, then let the tabs repopulate when you start again.
Heck, that isn't even a workaround, since it is a best practice for users anyway. Why expose your system to possible attacks from a freshly compromised web site, when you aren't actively browsing?
In the more general case, why keep any software running for hours in an idle mode when you aren't using it? Memory that is being hogged by a PIBKAC could be used by the background system diagnostics and tuning routines.
Alot of people in McCains age group are racist, religious, sexist, homophobic and hold hatred toward countries for things that occured 70years ago.
Interesting. Yet parent post offers no evidence, citations, or examples to back up this assertion. It is a value judgment placed upon a societal segment without being encumbered beforehand by any facts.
Can you say "prejudice"?
Very good!
Now, can you say "ageist"??
BTW, I will be voting for Obama. In one of those weird ironic twists, I think Obama has a better handle on how to fix this country's age prejudice than McCain does, even though Obama hasn't been on the carousel for anywhere near as many go-rounds.
TFA is already slashdotted.
Things I'd like to see:
Probably other stuff. I plan on visiting TFA tonight, at a quieter time, when they maybe have recovered from the meltdown.
Don't forget n-dashes for page number ranges!
Oops! I had forgotten that. I wonder what else we haven't covered?
don't forget that my post was full of self-deprecating humor
Dang, I hope I wasn't too heavy-handed. I did appreciate your humor, but I hadn't yet finished the first pot of coffee for the day, and I don't write at my best until I'm well into the second pot.
HTML has become fairly easy. Google for "character entity" and search among the lists for one that suits your needs well. The mnemonics are now recognized by all major browsers, like —, € (€), so there is no need to mess about with the numeric codes.
I got my tech-writer job based not only on the quality of my experience on my resume (put little lines above the e's for me), but also because I used En-dashes in my date ranges ;-)
Please tell me where you got your job because I might want to send my résumé there, that is, if I resume looking for tech-writing jobs. As you can see, I'm sure to get a job.
Those "little lines above the e's" are accent marks— in this case, acute accents. The character entity is, naturally enough, é.
The emdash is an acceptable a substitute for semi-colons, but also for commas— yet I have never heard of, nor can I imagine, using an emdash as a substitute for a colon. That would be wierd. An emdash rule of thumb: if you are building a complex sentence with lots of phrases set off with commas and/or semicolons, and if some of those phrases are subordinate to another subordinate, then consider strategic use of the emdash to help the reader disambiguate your intended meaning from other possible meanings.
Second rule of thumb for emdashes: If you are writing to a bunch of semiliterates— and want to fit in— use lots of emdashes.
Third rule is simil.... OMG!! PONIES!!! Like— Wow! In ValleySpeak it is —like— posilutely and absitively necessary— Hey! You just can't do VS without emdashes? You_know_what_I_mean???
Ndashes are easy. In dates, in SSNs and similar dash-separated numeric codes, and in phone numbers (except the european style dot separator is becoming more common). Might also want to use the ndash in place of a hyphen when working with systems that do not have a good "non-breaking hyphen".
Why the hell would you model an asteroid with some improbable shape like a cube?
Borg.
I don't agree with several aspects of parent post, but I do agree that TFA's introduction of "free will" into the discussion is a red herring.
The experiments show some very interesting things about the mind's mechanisms, in particular about the relationship of the self-aware, language-using part— call it "ego"— to the parts that do not have direct access to language and might not directly interact with the world. But author of TFA seems to be working with an outdated, simple model that places the ego at the top of the decision hierarchy. Which raises the question of free-will since with this model it appears that the top of the pyramid is being dictated to by mechanistic events happening in lower parts of the mind.
Bob Newhart had a show in the 1980s (Newhart) which introduced the comedic trio of Larry, and his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl. Larry was the only one who spoke or directly interacted with the other characters: Darryl and Darryl were always hanging back, witnessing the action but never participating (although the audience was able to see their reactions to events). But when a decision was called for, the three would go into a quick huddle and then Larry would state what the decision was. IIRC, at least once in the series he said something like "I like the idea, but my brother Daryl didn't like it so we won't do it."
There are good reasons to believe that our minds are organized the same way: that the part of the self we are conscious of is the spokesman for very close siblings who happen to share a single body, and our decisions are all group decisions. There is no restriction on the possibility of free will in this: whether the group is constrained in its choices cannot be determined (at least at this time). The spokesman is of course constrained by the group's decision, and that part may or may not understand all the factors that led to a given decision. But that doesn't negate the free will of the group.
This model supports the research findings, where instrumentation was able to deduce something about the non-verbal deciders seconds before the spokesman had finished polling his sibs. It also can explain the way someone astute in reading non-verbal cues can make very good guesses about what an individual will decide to do, sometimes before that person is himself aware of his decision.
The discussion needs to bring in some other terminology.
For the most part, Google relies on non-algorithmic heuristics to generate its results.
The scientific method can be described as a set of algorithms designed to select among all possible hypotheses the few that seem to best model real world events. These models are in turn used to suggest new hypotheses that can be tested with the scientific method; it is iterative. The (possibly unreachable) goal is to eventually find connections that tie all the separate models into one universal supermodel; a strong secondary desire is to simplify each model as much as can be done while preserving its ability to predict real world events.
Note that implicit to the above is the core of the Copenhagen Convention: science is all about our intellectual models of reality, and is not about reality itself, which might or might not be humanly understandable. We stay within the scope of what we know we can comprehend, which comprises the models that our minds have built. Reality is separate from that: we test our models against reality, but reality is external to our modeling space.
In these terms, what Google presents us with is another view of reality that may or may not be distorted by the viewing process, but which is very easy to manipulate. However Google is not part of the scientific modeling process, and cannot replace those activities.
Google is however very good for engineering things, where the elegance of scientific models is often trumped by the pragmatics of Getting Things Done.
It's much more likely that the competent MS employees of yesteryear have all gone to new and more interesting jobs with Google, IBM, Sun, and Yahoo, and the dregs that were left behind have no idea how to do the work or manage the processes. Those left behind might be very dedicated and responsible workers, but if they don't have the necessary talents, at best their small projects will be mediocre and their large products will be highly polished turds.
Bill Gates did try to lobby the Feds into easing up restrictions on H-1B visas, claiming that there weren't enough capable American software engineers to get the work done. That's a strong piece of corroborating evidence: if Microsoft had the talent it needed, it wouldn't need to bring in H-1B visas to make Visa.
Does Word have a greater Gross National Productivity Cost than Excel? It seems like they are about the same, except Excel might be worse since it is more likely to cause collateral damage (bad business decisions because the numbers were crunched wrong).
But there is software that has an even higher GNPC than either of these two: PowerPoint.
MS Office: the corporate equivalent of multiple sclerosis. Gets your business into the wheelchair races real quick.
If only all it took to develop a good OS was deep pockets.
Microsoft has lost the fight to prevent brain drain: Vista and Office 2007 have shown that they no longer know how to do innovation any more. They can't even put a new shine on the old shoes. It's sadly pathetic, really. Watching Microsoft attempt to do anything that requires corporate smarts is like watching a Dean of World History with Alzheimers try to hold up his end of the conversation at a dinner party. He's still the Dean, until he can be shuffled into retirement, so you kind of have to pay attention to him. But as to the future of the Department, well, he's just not that relevant any more.
All the bright young programmers are now seeking opportunities at Google, IBM, and even Yahoo, where there are new horizons and cutting edge stuff happening. All those armies of developers developers developers are now doing gee-whiz things with Javascript (!), the DOM, PHP, and MySQL. The state of affairs at Microsoft has gotten so bad and depressed that it's hardly worth the effort to toss a chair.
The line between the two is almost always non-existent. "Eureka!" moments are times of great laughter. Many scientific breakthroughs begin with the words "Now, that's funny...." Humor is one of the higher level irrational behaviors, and the ability to see the humor of a situation ranks right up there besides insight as a rare and wonderful capacity.
Of course, none of this explains slashdot phenomena. What happens on slashdot belongs only to slashdot, and any semblance to the real world is, uh... Go ask Cowboy Neal. He'll tell ya.
Whether parent is a troll or not, the question raised deserves some kind of answer.
Getting into space is not the long term goal.
The long term goal is to get back into The Garden. The way to do that is to move all the factories (and most of the engineers) into space. This is all spelled out in the Ecological Manifesto. Which you can find written in the reflection of the clouds on any stillwater lake where you've got solitude surrounded by a few acres of wilderness.
Uh, just two points that really need correction:
Harvard commas rule. For the cost of a byte, they help you look erudite.
Interesting sound bite.
But the attempt to spin doctor the anti-nuclear position into an anti-science or Luddite position is going to fail. Since it doesn't address the core concerns.
The telling arguments against nuclear power boil down to these assertions:
Some of these concerns can be mitigated by improving the technology, which in this case means dumbing it down to a level that is more in line with what management can actually handle. The pebble bed reactors make a lot of sense in this respect. As does an intelligently designed (pun somewhat intended) breeder reactor program to reduce after-costs. But these are just mitigations.
What is really needed is the development of management systems that can handle dangerous systems with look-ahead modeling that is reasonably accurate for 100+ years, and institutions designed to function for 1000+ years. This means establishing new fields of study in accounting theory and long term institutional management. I haven't heard anyone talking about putting up the seed money for that.
One way Obama's campaign could counter McCain's 45 new nuclear plants would be to propose funding post graduate Schools of Nuclear Power Management at US universities, that would offer Ph.D.s related to the pragmatics of actually setting up and running a sane nuclear industry. The first graduates would be available for overseeing the late planning and implementation stages of building those 45 new nuclear plants. If Obama proposed something along these lines, it would go a long way to assuring my vote.
There is no problem with nuclear technology. It is much like advanced aeronautics: just like we can design and build fighter planes that are faster and more maneuverable than any human pilot can safely handle, we know how to design and build nuclear power plants that are more complex than any series of managers can safely handle. So the problem is in our heads, not in nuclear power. We gotta dumb it down, boys, before we can let it out the door.
You make your case very well.
However I believe most people who started to think along these lines would soon reach the conclusion that this was so silly that it had to be a joke, and most of them would get a chuckle out of it.
The ones who took it so seriously they'd not consider doing business with the author... WOW! This approach is also a good screening tool that would decrease the number of troublesome and expensive customers the business has to deal with! In every service industry, 80% of the cost of fulfillment is spent on 20% of the clients. So if a tool like this would attract a few more prospects who have a good sense of humor and are easy to get along with, while simultaneously steering away a few of those whose costs of service are going to exceed the revenues they generate, then this is a double plus good technique! The business might end up with 17% of its clients responsible for 70% of its cost of fulfillment! That's like, tres kewl!
Oh, definitely do something like the "accidental 'reply all'" strategy:
Hi George! I see that you decided to go ahead with the spam advertising approach despite the risks. More power to you. We've definitely dropped that idea... it is too likely to piss off our core of loyal clients.
We're still doing the 'traditional quality' thing: trying to arrange the best possible tour packages for each price point. It is not a 'get rich quick' approach, but we're all making a good living at doing what we like to do, and that counts for a lot.
Our company has decided to back off on those talks about some kind of partnership with your company. We think that our corporate values are too different from yours for that to work out, at least for now.
Looking forward to seeing you again at next year's trade show! If they have it in the same place, we could share lunch again at that italian restaurant with the excellent menu.
[Sign with title, company name, etc]
Also definitely move the mailing list into a database of some kind, so you can cross reference it with your client lists. If a significant portion of your clients are on their mailing list, then you might have a problem of some kind. You might also use this as one source for building targeted mailing lists, but it wouldn't be wise to use it directly. See next point.
Tell your boss that the people on this list have already seen junk email from the competitor and are likely to regard anything you send out as just more junk email, so normal spamming would actually be counter productive. This is especially true since undoubtedly other businesses are harvesting these addresses, and will be pumping out spam to these people.
Additionally, "Firefox" is a neat play on "foxfire", which is a ghostly luminescence in the forest at night, and has also become associated with grassroots efforts to preserve and enhance Appalachian folk craft. Whether this was intentional or not, it adds another layer of nuance to the name.
I fully agree with your criticism of my argument. I never defined either "intelligence" or "stupidity" yet I used them as key terms. By pointing this out, you have punctured the bubble and totally collapsed the argument. Which is as it should be: it was pure silliness from the get-go.
Congratulations! Yours is one of the very few responses that demonstrates critical thinking skills in action! I salute you!
<quote> is a good and useful way to set off quoted material. I join many others on slashdot in recommending its appropriate usage. It is so much more precise than <i>, which has many other uses.
GP post attempted to lay out the significant differences between 'mean', 'median', and 'average'. "Average' is less precise, and its usage is often appropriate when neither 'mean' nor 'median' would be correct. As in the original post.
I use statistics mostly in the realm of quality assurance studies, and over the last couple of decades, mostly in the health care setting. In this rather narrow but somewhat important scope, we tend to be careful to not imply that we somehow have more precise information than the often fuzzy data supports. Perhaps in other realms like maybe rocket science or the design of airliners this isn't consider so important.
Not all statisticians are the same. Your milage may vary. Your variance may vary...