To play devil's advocate: what is this incredibly sensitive personal information that Facebook has that could not be obtained by anyone else very easily?
You know that is is actually trivial to find the sexual orientation of people, even for those that has not
disclosed it? And who knows what else that might be possible to pick out from such a system.
That you're a virgin? That you pick your nose? That you actually like "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley?
For individuals or groups putting effort into data mining there are undoubtly information to be found that someone would prefer to be private.
There is a paradigmic difference in everyone in the whole world can find out you are gay compared to just a few of your closest friend (and other gay men you meet).
What a bizarre article. My first thought was "how old is this article?", because the computer have a 5.25" floppy drive and the screen is quite small, perhaps 13-14". So the computer is from the eighties, but then the article mentions amazon and ebay, so it cannot be that old.
My personal experience indicates that like so many things, social life is a matter of training, experience and desire. The people who have one actually make the effort and put the time into it, and unsurprisingly, get results. I'm fairly certain that geeks simply consider other things more important.
This is consistent with Paul Graham's essay Why Nerds are Unpopular:
Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?...
The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.... Of course I wanted to be popular.
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart.
Your sentence contains 10 words and two punctuations. It would be comparable to a 12 character password, given that the words and word order have a lot of dependencies.
Citation please? Combining just two or three English words would be equivalent of a rather large number of characters. I do not remember any reference to where I heard/read this first, but let's do some quick calculations:
Assuming 30,000 possible words (not sure what number to use here, but it is around 1/10 of the number of main entries in the Oxford English Dictionary). Combining three words will give 30,000^3 = 27,000,000,000,000 combinations.
Assuming a character alphabet of the 'abcdefg...[]/=;,.:' given above with 83 different characters. log_83(27000000000000) is mathematically equivialent to ln(27000000000000)/ln(83) = 6.9988..., i.e. 7 characters.
So 3 words corresponds to 7 characters given my assumptions above. Of course just combining random words is magnitudes better than combining words to form a meaningful sentence, but I have very hard to buy that it lowers the ratio down to approximately 1-to-1. Do you have any supporting reference for this?
(Maybe the limiting factor is that few people have a daily vocabulary as large as 30,000?)
I do not understand what you think the problem is. Would you try to explain to me? Many times using a problem solving matrix is a useful tool to discuss problems and to find solutions with.
If you imagine a piece of paper with the following four coloums:
What is the problem?
What is the cause?
What could be done to solve the problem?
Who should do that?
What would you fill in in those? If I understand you correctly, you would fill inn "forbid the voters to get information about candidate party relation from the vote" in the solution coloumn, right? But what is it really you consider to be the problem and what is that caused by??
To any non-trivial problem there is more than one point to fill in for at least the two first coloums, so please do not stop at only the first thing that pops into your mind.
there shouldn't be a "fill in this bubble for a straight party ticket" option, and the parties of the candidates should not be mentioned on the ballot.
I see no problem with this, and actually I would consider it to be a big problem if this information was lacking. Your opinion seems to be "I want to check out all candidates and make my own individual selections, the way I think is best", and you welcome to have and practice this. However "I trust the parties to make a good enough selection of candidates" is also by all means also a valid opinion, and you should not try to forbid this just because you disagree with it.
Yes, I can second this. I even have directories like/download/2010/10_oct etc that I by default download stuff into, and unless I have somewhere else I want to move it into it stays there, "automatically" cleaning up itself every month (since I then start on a new directory).
No, the CDC ACM class is not that new; it has been used for mobile phones for several years. It is at least present in the "Wireless Mobile Communications Devices" document dated
February 9, 2007. See http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/CDC1.2_WMC1.1.zip for full details.
A candidate who wins election by 50.1% percent isn't popular even though he won.
You are limiting your own imagination if you only assume two candidates when talking about an election. I hope that is not the case, that you just worded yourself so that it possible to interpret it that way.
I totally agree that B would be the best candidate, but I do not think ranking is the best solution. Any ranking system is relatively complex compared to the triviality of one single selection. And you definitely do not want to add complexity to voting systems.
In my opinion the best voting system is to give one vote to every candidate you approve of. This has two very important properties:
This is so trivially simple that anyone will get it intuitively, there is no reason to explain anything.
It is extremely familiar to the most used voting system that people already are used to (it really is a generalization of "give 0 or 1 vote" to "give 0 to N votes" (0 meaning voting blank)).
This will fully support the objective of
If 50%-something would like A to win, are ok with B, but definitely don't want C, and if the 50%-something others are the exact opposite, then the best candidate should be B, not A or C where it's only down to little percentage different.
With a system of one vote per candidate you approve, then 50% would give one vote to A and one vote to B. The other 50% gives one vote to B and one vote to C. So (with 3 candidates) B would end up with 50% of the total number of votes, and A and C with 25% each.
As an author you receive one free copy, not five. The list price on my book is $73 on amazon, which is not cheap but it is not hundreds of dollars. Truely I will not receive any cash payment unless the book sells above some threshold, but hey - for me just having my own book published is very cool.
And if the book sells below the payout threshold you can use the earned amount to buy other books from VDM. There are many to chose from and one that is on my list of books I would like to buy then is Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.
I did get the joke. However my approach to when somebody obviously didn't get it
(like my parent post)
is to be constructive and share. While I cannot tell if you
had a childish "haha, what a looser that didn't get it" motivation for writing
your post, I have a hard time interpreting it as something other than a product of win/loose
mentality.
You and people you interact with will be better off if you go for win/win.
I want to scream every time some idiot says that we "just" need to eat less/different/exercise more/not be so lazy/etc. It is possible to lose weight and get healthy, because some people do it, but it is by no means easy, and no one really knows how to do it.
Your frustration (which I share) is caused by people's general piss poor ability to
reason inductive.
It's only temporary, for the olympics. They opened up all of those sites, like wikipedia and bbc, a couple of months ago. I expect them to slam the door shut again, immediately after all of the foreign media leave china, after the games.
I believe so as well. I can confirm that when I visited Beijing in the Eastern last year, neither wikipedia, bbc nor amnesty was accessible.
If you do not understand Norwegian the following is probably not of interest, but they covered this in the populat science radio program
Verdt å vite yesterday and you can still listen to the podcast.
You should be concerned about those yellow dots only if you planning to violate the law.
I am concerned with this because I care about privacy and anonymity,
both vital factors in a free society.
If you have not already read the paper 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
I really recommend you to do that. The increasing attac on privacy and anonymity are sadly making similarities to
1984 more frequent.
I think you are just getting a dose of turn about is fair
play.
I would rather call this unfair play.
The CIA and NSA have tampered with electronics being
sold to America's adversaries for years.
I hate USA for forcing the yellow
dots "feature" on all colour laserjet printers, making it (almost?)
impossible to buy one without, even when I do not live in USA.
I mean, one thing is what a government does to its own citicents; it
sort of have authority to do whatever it wants except as limited by
international agreements. But one country should not be able to force
its own politics upon other countries. Just recently usage of
wi-fi has been restricted in Russia. What if a country, say Burma,
made usage of wi-fi illegal, should then other countries suddenly be
forced to make it illegal as well?
As my old HP Laserjet 6L is clearly showing its age on the printouts,
I am currently actively searching for a replacement and would like to
have a colour laserjet. Does anyone have tips for getting an affordable
one, without the yellow dots?
This test was as far as I can see performed in the following way:
after the participants comes directly from whatever stressful or stress less daily life they have,
start by asking some questions. Then let them play for two hours and then re-ask
the questions.
My guess is that just letting someone sit down and do something
shutting off the "outer world" for two hours will reduce stress.
I would have found this study much more interesting if they had
split the participants and compared with for instance reading
a book for two hours.
Hi. I am currently learning Chinese and when reading this I thought that
maybe speech recognition software could be useful (or maybe not, but at
least I would like to try). Does anyone have any tips on what I need to
get of software (for Linux) that supports recognition of Chinese?
I am not interested in learning the computer to recognize my terrible
pronunciation, but rather to have some program expect to hear standard
Chinese which I could practice with.
One extremely useful program I have found which
is able to decode and show the tones is Wavesurfer. For those
of you that do not know, tones play a very important part in Chinese
speech, and it is kind of difficult to learn as a foreigner.
A free marked is NOT the same as an unregulated marked.
If we by the term "free marked" mean a marked with the characteristics
of the classical supply/demand curves, notice that this model has some
prerequisites that needs to be fulfilled (free flow of information,
no barriers to entry, that any single actor is insignificant compared
to the rest of the marked, etc).
And to the degree that these prerequisites are not fulfilled the marked
is correspondingly less free than ideal. Any regulations intended to make sure
that the marked stays close to the ideal (anti-trust, anti-cartel,
anti-competition, etc) are good (of course provided that the given
regulation works as intended; good intentions does not always bring
good results).
It can of course be argued that there can be regulations that
are "bad", but that does not imply that regulations are bad per se.
And by all means, notice that this is a
model, not some kind of economic "law".
"All models are wrong but some models are useful."
-- George Box
Slashdot Mirror
You know that is is actually trivial to find the sexual orientation of people, even for those that has not disclosed it? And who knows what else that might be possible to pick out from such a system. That you're a virgin? That you pick your nose? That you actually like "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley?
For individuals or groups putting effort into data mining there are undoubtly information to be found that someone would prefer to be private. There is a paradigmic difference in everyone in the whole world can find out you are gay compared to just a few of your closest friend (and other gay men you meet).
What a bizarre article. My first thought was "how old is this article?", because the computer have a 5.25" floppy drive and the screen is quite small, perhaps 13-14". So the computer is from the eighties, but then the article mentions amazon and ebay, so it cannot be that old.
My personal experience indicates that like so many things, social life is a matter of training, experience and desire. The people who have one actually make the effort and put the time into it, and unsurprisingly, get results. I'm fairly certain that geeks simply consider other things more important.
This is consistent with Paul Graham's essay Why Nerds are Unpopular: Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests? ...
The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular. ... Of course I wanted to be popular.
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart.
Citation please? Combining just two or three English words would be equivalent of a rather large number of characters. I do not remember any reference to where I heard/read this first, but let's do some quick calculations:
Assuming 30,000 possible words (not sure what number to use here, but it is around 1/10 of the number of main entries in the Oxford English Dictionary). Combining three words will give 30,000^3 = 27,000,000,000,000 combinations.
Assuming a character alphabet of the 'abcdefg...[]/=;,.:' given above with 83 different characters. log_83(27000000000000) is mathematically equivialent to ln(27000000000000)/ln(83) = 6.9988..., i.e. 7 characters.
So 3 words corresponds to 7 characters given my assumptions above. Of course just combining random words is magnitudes better than combining words to form a meaningful sentence, but I have very hard to buy that it lowers the ratio down to approximately 1-to-1. Do you have any supporting reference for this? (Maybe the limiting factor is that few people have a daily vocabulary as large as 30,000?)
I do not understand what you think the problem is. Would you try to explain to me? Many times using a problem solving matrix is a useful tool to discuss problems and to find solutions with.
If you imagine a piece of paper with the following four coloums:
What would you fill in in those? If I understand you correctly, you would fill inn "forbid the voters to get information about candidate party relation from the vote" in the solution coloumn, right? But what is it really you consider to be the problem and what is that caused by??
To any non-trivial problem there is more than one point to fill in for at least the two first coloums, so please do not stop at only the first thing that pops into your mind.
TIA
there shouldn't be a "fill in this bubble for a straight party ticket" option, and the parties of the candidates should not be mentioned on the ballot.
I see no problem with this, and actually I would consider it to be a big problem if this information was lacking. Your opinion seems to be "I want to check out all candidates and make my own individual selections, the way I think is best", and you welcome to have and practice this. However "I trust the parties to make a good enough selection of candidates" is also by all means also a valid opinion, and you should not try to forbid this just because you disagree with it.
Bruce Schneier calls it CYA security ("Cover Your Ass" security).
Yes, I can second this. I even have directories like /download/2010/10_oct etc that I by default download stuff into, and unless I have somewhere else I want to move it into it stays there, "automatically" cleaning up itself every month (since I then start on a new directory).
No, the CDC ACM class is not that new; it has been used for mobile phones for several years. It is at least present in the "Wireless Mobile Communications Devices" document dated February 9, 2007. See http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/CDC1.2_WMC1.1.zip for full details.
A candidate who wins election by 50.1% percent isn't popular even though he won.
You are limiting your own imagination if you only assume two candidates when talking about an election. I hope that is not the case, that you just worded yourself so that it possible to interpret it that way.
When code and comments disagree, both are probably wrong. -- Norm Schryer
I totally agree that B would be the best candidate, but I do not think ranking is the best solution. Any ranking system is relatively complex compared to the triviality of one single selection. And you definitely do not want to add complexity to voting systems.
In my opinion the best voting system is to give one vote to every candidate you approve of. This has two very important properties:
This will fully support the objective of
With a system of one vote per candidate you approve, then 50% would give one vote to A and one vote to B. The other 50% gives one vote to B and one vote to C. So (with 3 candidates) B would end up with 50% of the total number of votes, and A and C with 25% each.
As an author you receive one free copy, not five. The list price on my book is $73 on amazon, which is not cheap but it is not hundreds of dollars. Truely I will not receive any cash payment unless the book sells above some threshold, but hey - for me just having my own book published is very cool.
And if the book sells below the payout threshold you can use the earned amount to buy other books from VDM. There are many to chose from and one that is on my list of books I would like to buy then is Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.
This whole story gives me associations of George Bush and Jane Harman with Napoleon and Squealer from Animal Farm.
I did get the joke. However my approach to when somebody obviously didn't get it (like my parent post) is to be constructive and share. While I cannot tell if you had a childish "haha, what a looser that didn't get it" motivation for writing your post, I have a hard time interpreting it as something other than a product of win/loose mentality. You and people you interact with will be better off if you go for win/win.
Actually he spelled it perfectly.
Your frustration (which I share) is caused by people's general piss poor ability to reason inductive.
I believe so as well. I can confirm that when I visited Beijing in the Eastern last year, neither wikipedia, bbc nor amnesty was accessible.
If you do not understand Norwegian the following is probably not of interest, but they covered this in the populat science radio program Verdt å vite yesterday and you can still listen to the podcast.
I mean, one thing is what a government does to its own citicents; it sort of have authority to do whatever it wants except as limited by international agreements. But one country should not be able to force its own politics upon other countries. Just recently usage of wi-fi has been restricted in Russia. What if a country, say Burma, made usage of wi-fi illegal, should then other countries suddenly be forced to make it illegal as well?
As my old HP Laserjet 6L is clearly showing its age on the printouts, I am currently actively searching for a replacement and would like to have a colour laserjet. Does anyone have tips for getting an affordable one, without the yellow dots?
My guess is that just letting someone sit down and do something shutting off the "outer world" for two hours will reduce stress. I would have found this study much more interesting if they had split the participants and compared with for instance reading a book for two hours.
(Aargh, why are headings limited to 50 chars?)
I am not interested in learning the computer to recognize my terrible pronunciation, but rather to have some program expect to hear standard Chinese which I could practice with.
One extremely useful program I have found which is able to decode and show the tones is Wavesurfer. For those of you that do not know, tones play a very important part in Chinese speech, and it is kind of difficult to learn as a foreigner.
Request: Can any of you with knowledge within this field please contribute a little to update http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Speech-Recognition-HOWTO/index.html, it is a bit dated.
If we by the term "free marked" mean a marked with the characteristics of the classical supply/demand curves, notice that this model has some prerequisites that needs to be fulfilled (free flow of information, no barriers to entry, that any single actor is insignificant compared to the rest of the marked, etc).
And to the degree that these prerequisites are not fulfilled the marked is correspondingly less free than ideal. Any regulations intended to make sure that the marked stays close to the ideal (anti-trust, anti-cartel, anti-competition, etc) are good (of course provided that the given regulation works as intended; good intentions does not always bring good results). It can of course be argued that there can be regulations that are "bad", but that does not imply that regulations are bad per se.
And by all means, notice that this is a model, not some kind of economic "law".