Armageddon tired of these apocalyptic prophesies. Price is the intersection of supply and demand, nothing more, nothing less. If you think you can't sell your app unless it's at a $1 price point, then you're admitting that it offers only a trivial benefit to your users or that it's a piece of crap. Either improve it to where it's worth what you'd like to make, or drop out of the competition.
As someone who has worked at a university I have to let you know that after the grade/degree is final it is final. There are no consequences of finding out afterwards, and the potential for blackmail here is minimal.
Sorry, but that's not true. I knew somebody whose PhD was rescinded due to plagiarism. The guy basically chucked away ten years of his life, because he can't do anything related to the field he studied - nobody will write recommendations for him.
The whole point of my comment was that stock prices is not "News For Nerds" as Slashdot claims to be.
I have news for you -- Nerds are not one big homogeneous mass, and you're not the sole arbiter of nerd taste.
But regardless, how can anybody be so blind as to not see the significance when a computer company that was nearly dead a dozen years ago now has a bigger market cap than Microsoft or Walmart, and is closing in on Exxon? No matter what your personal feelings are about their products, they've clearly tapped into something that's getting large numbers of people to fork over their hard-earned money.
Whether you're interested in the money aspects or not, a company's success in the stock market is a measure of what is selling in the marketplace. Success breeds imitators, so it's a harbinger of what we can probably expect to see from other companies in terms of products, processes, and market strategies.
As much as I personally agree with the finding of human-induced global warming, your statistics only show what people who work in the field believe, not what ground truth is. If you surveyed the members of a homeopathic society they would probably believe in overwhelming numbers that homeopathy works, but that doesn't constitute proof that it does. Ditto for astrology.
The strength of science is its openness, but the drawback is that understanding it takes more work than most people are willing to invest. From my perspective, who is better equipped to deal with scientific questions than somebody who has spent their whole life studying those questions? On the other hand, people who don't like the answers can always claim that the scientists have a vested interest in certain answers, or have bought into group think. And sometimes that's true, as with homeopaths and astrologers. The scientific method deals with this - it's perfectly okay to question anything as long as you're willing to use data and evidence to judge the validity. However, the religious right and other anti-intellectuals have learned to use this to their advantage by doing the questioning but ignoring the validation side.
The White House submits a preliminary budget proposal, the House and Senate formulate legislation, the two separate versions get reconciled, and then the president signs (or doesn't). Reagan always claimed that the ballooning deficits on his watch were due to Congress, but most of his proposals were unbalanced to begin with and he always signed, claiming he had no choice. Clinton proved Reagan's claims of powerlessness to be hollow in 1995, vetoing the Republican-controlled Congress' proposed budget and thereby shutting down the government for almost a week until Newt Gingrich caved.
So Congress has sole power to pass the legislation but the White House can play a very significant role if they have the will to do so. It always has seemed ironic to me that Reagan and Reaganites claim the mantle of deficit reduction while the facts are that the ration of Debt / GDP (i.e., what we owe relative to our aggregate income) dropped pretty much continuously from WWII to Reagan and then skyrocketed under all subsequent administrations except Clinton's. Republicans try to claim credit for the Clinton years, ignoring the fact that Clinton stared them down.
To be uber-pedantic they are not claiming proof of consistency. They are claiming the same thing you are, ie: their test rules out nutrino flux as a possible cause for the observations.
Not quite, it doesn't rule it out. The observed changes are not large enough to be considered inconsistent with the hypothesis that neutrino flux has no role. With a larger sample or better control of variability, it's still possible that future experiments could reject the hypothesis.
Yup, that's the nature of statistics. In order to "call" the result with a reasonable level of certainty the sample size requirements increase with smaller signal/noise ratios.
Most truck drivers are way more competent than your average driver, and they stay to the right for the most part on the 65/55 roads. On top of that, differences in speeds cause far more trouble than speed itself, and a 25mph difference is huge compared to a 10mph difference. Think of the last time you got caught behind someone who wanted to merge onto the highway at or below 40 mph.
Teach them that e-mail is like sending a postcard, and encryption is required to give it a protective envelope. Teach them that all network connections and authentication should be done with SSH/SSL/VPNs - show them what can be done with a packet sniffer. Teach them about checksums and digital signatures, and how they should be used to confirm download integrity and confirm that sources for files or e-mail are who they say they are - show them man-in-the-middle attacks. Teach them to secure their hard drives, or at least their personal files.
Actually, with really hard-core crypto systems there are three traditional ways to break them: 1) rubber hose; 2) dumpster diving; or 3) box of chocolates/bouquet of roses.
[...] Nowadays Bayesian calculations usually involve thousands of iterations[...]. The simulation then converges to the right answer.
The convergence you refer to is asymptotic. In practice it takes about 10000 iterations to get around a 1% bound on a single probability point estimate, and a factor of a hundred for each order of magnitude improvement. On top of that, if you're dealing with multiple distributions the overall expectation is not just a simple function of the component expectations unless the whole system is linear, you need to use convolution to combine results. And on top of that, lots of interesting problems are based on order statistics, not means/expectations. Having hardware that correctly manipulates distributional behavior in a few CPU cycles would blow the doors off of MCMC.
No, college is about starting to take responsibility for learning. At any halfway decent school you're surrounded by opportunities. If you didn't take advantage of them, it's your loss but nobody else's fault.
We need more regulation to lower these, what do you call them, "barriers to entry." That should fix the problem.
Yes and no. If the barriers to entry are systemic, legislation won't lower them. Examples of this are roads and telecommunications infrastructure, where it doesn't make sense to build duplicate/parallel systems; or the airlines, where there are a fixed number of gates and landing and takeoff slots at airports combined with stringent maintenance minimums before you can even consider being a player. Those are facts of the operating environment, just like the necessity of the planes themselves to obey the laws of physics. Regulation can be used to try to avoid monopolies and collusion, to limit the excesses monopolies and oligopolies where they do exist, or to force decoupling of pieces of the system (for example, consumers would be better off if cable companies had to share their copper & fiber the way phone companies do).
Since the airlines got deregulated, it looks to me like we've seen a steady pace upward in prices and downward in services. Unregulated free markets can be a very good thing, but only when the market forces encourage competition. In reality, barriers to entry, externalities, and path dependence can all screw up the theoretically beautiful model of free market advocates.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the apocalypse was scheduled for 2012, not 2011!
Armageddon tired of these apocalyptic prophesies. Price is the intersection of supply and demand, nothing more, nothing less. If you think you can't sell your app unless it's at a $1 price point, then you're admitting that it offers only a trivial benefit to your users or that it's a piece of crap. Either improve it to where it's worth what you'd like to make, or drop out of the competition.
When the Uhura-Kirk kiss came on, CBS waited for a firestorm of protest calls. They received just one.
And no wonder—Star Trek was an NBC program.
As someone who has worked at a university I have to let you know that after the grade/degree is final it is final. There are no consequences of finding out afterwards, and the potential for blackmail here is minimal.
Sorry, but that's not true. I knew somebody whose PhD was rescinded due to plagiarism. The guy basically chucked away ten years of his life, because he can't do anything related to the field he studied - nobody will write recommendations for him.
Really? The unemployment rate in November of 2008 was 6.9%. Today, it's at 9.6%. So are you telling me that -2.7% is ADDING jobs?
Yes, I'm telling you it was adding jobs. However, the labor force grew faster than the pool of new jobs.
Verbal contracts are all well and good...
Verbal contracts aren't worth the paper they're written on.
or "miada". In Spanish that would make it Bee Pee.
There are already enough sons of bees in the field.
Because Dell had huge supplier contracts with the government.
The whole point of my comment was that stock prices is not "News For Nerds" as Slashdot claims to be.
I have news for you -- Nerds are not one big homogeneous mass, and you're not the sole arbiter of nerd taste.
But regardless, how can anybody be so blind as to not see the significance when a computer company that was nearly dead a dozen years ago now has a bigger market cap than Microsoft or Walmart, and is closing in on Exxon? No matter what your personal feelings are about their products, they've clearly tapped into something that's getting large numbers of people to fork over their hard-earned money. Whether you're interested in the money aspects or not, a company's success in the stock market is a measure of what is selling in the marketplace. Success breeds imitators, so it's a harbinger of what we can probably expect to see from other companies in terms of products, processes, and market strategies.
As much as I personally agree with the finding of human-induced global warming, your statistics only show what people who work in the field believe, not what ground truth is. If you surveyed the members of a homeopathic society they would probably believe in overwhelming numbers that homeopathy works, but that doesn't constitute proof that it does. Ditto for astrology.
The strength of science is its openness, but the drawback is that understanding it takes more work than most people are willing to invest. From my perspective, who is better equipped to deal with scientific questions than somebody who has spent their whole life studying those questions? On the other hand, people who don't like the answers can always claim that the scientists have a vested interest in certain answers, or have bought into group think. And sometimes that's true, as with homeopaths and astrologers. The scientific method deals with this - it's perfectly okay to question anything as long as you're willing to use data and evidence to judge the validity. However, the religious right and other anti-intellectuals have learned to use this to their advantage by doing the questioning but ignoring the validation side.
The White House submits a preliminary budget proposal, the House and Senate formulate legislation, the two separate versions get reconciled, and then the president signs (or doesn't). Reagan always claimed that the ballooning deficits on his watch were due to Congress, but most of his proposals were unbalanced to begin with and he always signed, claiming he had no choice. Clinton proved Reagan's claims of powerlessness to be hollow in 1995, vetoing the Republican-controlled Congress' proposed budget and thereby shutting down the government for almost a week until Newt Gingrich caved.
So Congress has sole power to pass the legislation but the White House can play a very significant role if they have the will to do so. It always has seemed ironic to me that Reagan and Reaganites claim the mantle of deficit reduction while the facts are that the ration of Debt / GDP (i.e., what we owe relative to our aggregate income) dropped pretty much continuously from WWII to Reagan and then skyrocketed under all subsequent administrations except Clinton's. Republicans try to claim credit for the Clinton years, ignoring the fact that Clinton stared them down.
To be uber-pedantic they are not claiming proof of consistency. They are claiming the same thing you are, ie: their test rules out nutrino flux as a possible cause for the observations.
Not quite, it doesn't rule it out. The observed changes are not large enough to be considered inconsistent with the hypothesis that neutrino flux has no role. With a larger sample or better control of variability, it's still possible that future experiments could reject the hypothesis.
Yup, that's the nature of statistics. In order to "call" the result with a reasonable level of certainty the sample size requirements increase with smaller signal/noise ratios.
My response was more "son of obituary".
Most truck drivers are way more competent than your average driver, and they stay to the right for the most part on the 65/55 roads. On top of that, differences in speeds cause far more trouble than speed itself, and a 25mph difference is huge compared to a 10mph difference. Think of the last time you got caught behind someone who wanted to merge onto the highway at or below 40 mph.
Teach them that e-mail is like sending a postcard, and encryption is required to give it a protective envelope. Teach them that all network connections and authentication should be done with SSH/SSL/VPNs - show them what can be done with a packet sniffer. Teach them about checksums and digital signatures, and how they should be used to confirm download integrity and confirm that sources for files or e-mail are who they say they are - show them man-in-the-middle attacks. Teach them to secure their hard drives, or at least their personal files.
If Powerpoint is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb.
It's not dead, Oracle just told them to go fork themselves.
Actually, with really hard-core crypto systems there are three traditional ways to break them: 1) rubber hose; 2) dumpster diving; or 3) box of chocolates/bouquet of roses.
[...] Nowadays Bayesian calculations usually involve thousands of iterations[...]. The simulation then converges to the right answer.
The convergence you refer to is asymptotic. In practice it takes about 10000 iterations to get around a 1% bound on a single probability point estimate, and a factor of a hundred for each order of magnitude improvement. On top of that, if you're dealing with multiple distributions the overall expectation is not just a simple function of the component expectations unless the whole system is linear, you need to use convolution to combine results. And on top of that, lots of interesting problems are based on order statistics, not means/expectations. Having hardware that correctly manipulates distributional behavior in a few CPU cycles would blow the doors off of MCMC.
No, college is about starting to take responsibility for learning. At any halfway decent school you're surrounded by opportunities. If you didn't take advantage of them, it's your loss but nobody else's fault.
At first I thought POS meant "Point of Sale", but as I read through your post I realized it actually stands for "Piece of..."
We need more regulation to lower these, what do you call them, "barriers to entry." That should fix the problem.
Yes and no. If the barriers to entry are systemic, legislation won't lower them. Examples of this are roads and telecommunications infrastructure, where it doesn't make sense to build duplicate/parallel systems; or the airlines, where there are a fixed number of gates and landing and takeoff slots at airports combined with stringent maintenance minimums before you can even consider being a player. Those are facts of the operating environment, just like the necessity of the planes themselves to obey the laws of physics. Regulation can be used to try to avoid monopolies and collusion, to limit the excesses monopolies and oligopolies where they do exist, or to force decoupling of pieces of the system (for example, consumers would be better off if cable companies had to share their copper & fiber the way phone companies do).
Since the airlines got deregulated, it looks to me like we've seen a steady pace upward in prices and downward in services. Unregulated free markets can be a very good thing, but only when the market forces encourage competition. In reality, barriers to entry, externalities, and path dependence can all screw up the theoretically beautiful model of free market advocates.
Real economists, not the political panderers most people think are economists, have three words for you. "Barriers to entry."