I heard a story about how a store called to reveal how some girl was pregnant just from her shopping patterns.
It was Target, and they didn't call. They sent coupons for pregnancy products to her by mail.
They figured this out by data mining, and her father was pissed. These companies say they can figure out stuff like this. That means they can figure out that you have AIDS and you're gay, or that you have cancer or herpes or whatever.
Yeah, I know. But first, this entirely new, it's case of old things becoming new again. Think about the situation of a small town where everybody knows everybody else. Now a young girl walks in to buy a pregnancy test. The drug-store owner knows her, and now he has information she might be pregnant.
Either way, Target figured out this type of direct targeted advertisement freaks people out, so they're kind of hiding they have the knowledge. For example, when they figure out somebody is pregnant, they'll send them coupons for pregnancy products along with coupons for something someone pregnant would not buy, such as wine. This makes it seem random. It also prevents the father from finding out from the store, instead of from his daughter (although that particular story was never confirmed by the journalists. Target can figure out somebody is pregnant by what they buy, but the whole 'father got upset' thing could be apocryphal).
That information is sold around and then insurance companies and drug companies can exclude you from clinical trials that would save your life because they think you'll mess up their numbers or cost them too much.
And that is a problem. I agree with you when a company sells that information to anyone else, that is highly unethical, and should be illegal. By purchasing things from a company, you chose to give them data about you. If you wanted to avoid that, you can always buy it with cash, and not use any discount cards. However, you didn't authorize them to give that data to anybody else, and I think there's a much greater privacy violation when companies can get a complete picture of everything you've purchased from different stores.
That's kind of tracking for profit is unethical.
No, I think the tracking is fine. The selling of information is unethical.
Because my fellow man (which is what government in the US is supposed to be, the whole 'we the people' thing) spying on me willy-nilly using Monopoly on Violence is not the same thing at ALL as the shopkeeper next door keeping records of what i buy to use in his marketing and optimization research.
Really? You need to take a broader view, then. Let's start with your shopkeeper's surveillance of your spending habits. He knows what you buy, when you buy it, and exactly how much you spend in his shop, along with all of your other neighbors. Some simple analysis allows him to predict quite accurately what you are going to buy and when you are going to buy it. So he jacks up those prices on D-1 and lowers them again on D+1. The Walmart grocery store in my neighborhood appears to be already doing this; the variance I get in the price of a Red Baron pizza correlates too strongly with payroll dates for the lower middle class neighborhood I live in for it to be a coincidence. But hey, according to you, it's *different* -- I guess you believe the monopoly on violence only includes armed force, and not the "Monopoly on the only grocery store within miles" kind of violence. FWIW, boutique retailers have been doing this for millenia -- each customer gets a unique price, determined by the shopkeeper's ability to assess the depth of the customer's pockets. Thanks to your benign "marketing and optimization research" the guy who sells you food is going to be able to do the same damn thing...
Why is that bad? That seems rather smart.
Here's what I find unacceptable. When companies sell the information they gathered from their business relationship with me to others. As long as they keep it to themselves, what they do with the information they acquired from me should be used to increase their profits. That's certainly what I'd do.
0.1s flashes of products...Now you at least know when you are being advertised something. Then you won't, but your mind will, subliminally.
Someone in the advertising industry should know that that particular type of subliminal advertising has been proven in every experiment to not work. If its too fast for the viewer to notice consciously, he has not noticed it period. So be my guest and waste your client's money.
Moves like this will only introduce more subtle advertising, using...product placement. Is that better then?
YES. A thousand times yes. Product placement can even make a show BETTER. Ever seen a character in a movie order a "soda" at a restaurant? Or walk into a bar and tell the bartender, "give me a beer"? That has always annoyed the crap out of me. If you do that in real life, you'll be asked, "what beer do you want, moron?"
Does it bother me that in Spider-Man, Parker pulled a can of Dr Pepper with his web while practicing? No, I have cans of soda around in my room, I'm not weirded out that Parker drinks that particular soda. I watch tv shows and see that prop departments make cereal boxes and soda cans with fictitious brands that have a similar look to real brands. Why instead of wasting money just not get paid to display the real stuff?
It's like the difference between those annoying flash ads and the google texts ads. The tv ads are like the flash ads. They block the content you want to see, are loud and obnoxious. The product placement is just there in the background, and you get to continue watching your show, like the google text ads are, just to the side in the sidebar. The first type, I will block every time. The second is absolutely fine with me.
Classic Fritz the Cat, and maybe some of the S. Clay Wilson stuff with motorcycles.
OK. Wait until he's 7.
Seriously? Read real books with him. The comics will come on his own, without encouragement.
I don't remember not being able to read. My parents tell me I learned when I was 2, as they read comic books to me.
I had an uncle who was into them, and seeing him read them made me very interested. My parents then bought comics that we're more appropriate for children so they could read them to me. The end result is that I got so hooked, it made me extremely motivated to learn to read so that I'd be able to read the stories when my parents didn't have the time (they read to me every day, but I asked them to read constantly.
Moral of the story: read anything to your kids that gets them hooked, even comic books if that's what's doing the trick. Help them to learn to read when they get interested and other stuff will will come later, when they're able to read for themselves.
As for recommendation, in my case they were "Uncle Scrooge" Disney comics. I have no idea if they're still published.
Fifty years later my left-handed writing still looks like a first-grader
I didn't have a teacher or anyone else force me to stop writing with my left hand, but I've arrived at similar results through a different path. In Brazilian schools they drilled cursive handwriting on you right up until 4th grade or so. I would typically choose my right hand because when writing left-to-right, it's easier to see what you're doing. However, when my wrist got tired, I'd switch. Eventually they stopped giving us so many handwriting practice assignments, and as a result, I stopped getting tired, and stopped switching the hand I write with, and just used my right hand all the time. I can still write with my left hand now, but my handwriting looks exactly the same as the handwriting in my 4th grade notebooks that my parents kept around.
That is incorrect. The median is most certainly a type of average. The mean is another type of average, and the mode is yet another type of average. Most of the time, when people say "average", they are referring to the mean, but all three of those are averages.
In addition, it's generally a good assumption that productivity at a company will follow a normal distribution, in which case the median and the mean have the same value.
Um, no you can't. Human thought and emotion, by definition, is outside the realm of scientific inquiry.
Human thought and emotion evolved as a result of environmental pressures, like everything else. It's a very active field of scientific inquiry. For example, did you know that if you take an average of faces from people you find less attractive, you will arrive at an attractive face? Which makes perfect sense, as things we perceive as blemishes tend to disappear.
Why? Why would Apple want to do this, aside from some insane take over the world theory? They are certainly pushing for signed applications running in nice sandboxes and they're using the Mac store as one way to do it, but why would they want to disable other applications entirely?
To charge their customary 30% for every Mac OS X application?
I don't think Apple is using malware to push for the walled garden (It's bad PR, it's more likely to push people away from the OS entirely. They'd much rather continue their "You don't have to worry about viruses with our super-secure OS!" marketing approach. That said, I do believe they'd love to have Mac OS X as controlled as iOS, if they could figure out how to get away with it.
You earn $5 today. You set your goal at $6 tomorrow. You manage to earn $5.99 - failure?
I'll start by saying that I think we're actually in agreement, and I misinterpreted your position in the first post. This is just semantics, and what you call an "analog criteria" I call "degrees of success" and "degrees of failure." Obviously being short one cent is a small failure. Similarly, if you expected to make $6 and ended up making $6,000, your success is worth a lot more than if you had just achieved your goal of $6. That said, the reason I still like to define your $5.99 as failure is because when you see it that way, you realize that you're setting your goals too high. If you worked your ass off to make $6 today and was still short, it's likely your current plan is unlikely to consistently make you $6 a day. So don't count on that and either re-adjust your goals to something more achievable or adjust your strategy. Being close doesn't mean you succeeded, it means you were close to succeeding, but still failed.
Very few things in the real world really are clearly distinguishable as "success" or "failure". So we introduce arbitrary criteria, but these fail us as often as they are useful. A lot of innovations came out of "failures".
You set up goals. If you've accomplished your goals, you succeeded. If you did not accomplish them you failed. It's not arbitrary, it's as simple as asking, "what did I intend to accomplish when I started, and did I or did I not accomplish it?"
Maybe, while you failed, you stumbled upon something that was actually far more rewarding than your original objective. That doesn't mean you didn't fail. You failed at accomplishing your stated goal. However, you also learned from your failure and achieved success elsewhere.
I point this out because I'm tired of the PC world, especially when teaching children, where we tell everyone that nobody fails, just concentrate on whatever it is that you managed to get done! That's a horrible attitude and it leads to people being happy with mediocrity. There is failure, there is failure all around us all the time. If you try to do anything of any consequence you will eventually fail. And when you fall down, you can either get up or stay down. If you get up you can either dust yourself off and try again or give up. Before you try again, you can either take the time to figure out why you've failed and make adjustments, or you can repeat the same mistake and fail again.
Being successful is about not being discouraged by your failures. It's about learning from your failures. It's NOT about redefining failures as successes, and it's certainly not about believing success is an illusion, or otherwise unachievable.
Science makes no claim on truth, science is a conceptual paradigm used to create tools.
Correct.
Reality does not need these tools to function - humans need the tools to relate to reality.
Also correct.
As long as the standard model, upon which most nature science is built, remains incomplete there is no plausible support for a 1:1 correspondence between scientific explanatory frameworks and the inner workings of nature...
Blah, blah, blah, technobabble, we don't know everything, therefore everything we know is wrong...
You started off ok, but then went off in an unimportant tangent. Here's what you miss: Science makes no claim on truth, but truth is irrelevant in dealing with reality. Tools are what we need. The tools work whether the principles we believe are behind how they work are true or not, and that is how science works: consistency.
Newton gives us the laws of motion. Einstein tells us things actually appear to behave a bit differently. Everybody screams, "Newton was wrong!" and you'd use that as an example that we don't know everything. Except we used Newton's laws to put humans on the moon. Because relativity wasn't known in the 60's? Obviously not. Because relativity doesn't matter for this task. A theory can be wrong about the fundamentals of reality while still being an excellent tool at predicting reality's behavior. Newton's laws are not suitable to design GPS, but they're NEVER going to cease being useful just because we discovered more information about the universe around us.
Similarly you're here complaining that the Standard Model can be wrong. And yet here we are typing on a computer only possible because we have an understanding of quantum mechanics. Go look up how a transistor works. Is it possible that the Standard Model is incomplete? Of course it's incomplete. Will we ever discover something that will make it less useful in the cases where its prediction ability has already been shown to shine? Of course not. As a tool, it's already useful, it will never cease being useful, and whether or not we gather more knowledge will have no effect on how good a tool it is.
Truth doesn't matter. Models do. As long as our models have prediction abilities that are accurate, who the fuck cares if they're true or not? And that's why we will eventually construct cars that will remove all human error from the equation. The tools will be good enough without the need for us to know everything.
He has called the police on many blacks under the same circumstances because that behavior is often associated with scoping out houses for robbery.
Your friend should be fined for tying up police phones with something that is not an emergency. They could be scoping out houses for robbery, or they could also be someone who is innocently walking down a public street. That's not illegal and it doesn't warrant being harassed over.
Neighborhood watch should call the police when there's a crime in progress, not when they think the person "might" be up to no good, because they're walking around at night wearing a hoodie or sporting a mirror universe evil goatee.
The media's handling of this event is deplorable. Starting from the old pictures in an attempt to make it seem like a kid was shot to the deceptive editing of this 911 call, it was clearly an attempt to create outrage for the sole purpose of increasing ratings. That said:
Martin, a stranger to the neighborhood
I'm sure you've been a stranger in quite a few neighborhoods, unless you've absolutely never left your parents home since you were born. Being a stranger someplace isn't even unusual, you can't argue it's suspicious.
wandering around the neighborhood in the middle of the night
You never go out at night?
in the rain wearing a "hoodie" instead of rain gear or carrying an umbrella is suspicious behavior.
I don't own an umbrella or other rain gear. I've always found it pointless. Unless there's zero wind, which is unusual, I get completely wet anyway thanks to the horizontal movement of the rain. One thing I've absolutely never considered while making this decision to not carry umbrellas is that it would make me appear "suspicious" and cause idiots to start stalking me.
Martin engaging in this suspicious behavior is what started this chain of events.
Here's something else that could be seen as starting this chain of events: idiots trying to be heroes in neighborhood watches. If you're a member of a neighborhood watch and you see someone doing something illegal, like trying to break into someone's home, you call the police. If you see someone who is walking in public space, which is not an illegal activity, you don't go paranoid and start freaking out. You don't call 911 and waste the time of a dispatcher (he should have been fined for that). You don't start following or otherwise stalking them. Because think of this from an innocent's perspective: you're walking along in the dark, and some person you don't know starts following you. How safe do you feel? I wouldn't know their intentions, I would fear they might be planning to attack and rob me. The very act of following the "suspicious" individual escalates the situation into a potential conflict.
The job of a neighborhood watch isn't to be some type of Minority Report-like pre-crime police where you try to detect people who are about to commit crimes and follow them around until they do. It's to watch for crimes in progress and call for backup when you see it happening. I'm not saying Zimmerman wasn't acting in self defense, I wasn't there and don't know what happened. However, there's no doubt he shouldn't have been following Trayvon in the first place, and his poor decision-making warrants a full investigation and a trial, at which point he may be declared not guilty if there's evidence he was being attacked.
If you read all Linus' comments in that bug, he actually covers that angle. He says that either the thing should "just work", or else it should make it really clear that it's broken when inappropriately used. And that's the problem with backwards copy - it doesn't fast-fail the process or anything like that, it just produces garbage output. If you're lucky, this might crash. If you're less lucky, this might output garbage to the user (as in this case), with no easy way to diagnose it. If you're particularly unlucky, it may actually output some private information (say, a password?), or be otherwise exploitable.
That's sound software development advice, I don't disagree with it. I'm not defending reverse memcpy, I'm merely saying that "flash doesn't work when we implement memcpy like this" isn't a good enough reason to change the implementation if the bug is on the flash side. There were other good reasons to do the copy forward pointed out in that thread, and I'm ok with that, but that's the difference between writing good code and being "practical" about it, ie, grandfathering in bad code just to make things work short-term.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of leaving a change in place because it renders subtle bugs in crappy code visible, but to an end user it looks like your change broke his web browser for no reason.
I think we're on the same page here. I think the way to go here, when you have a clash between high profile software such as flash and glibc would have been for the glibc developers to get in touch with adobe and explain, "look, you have a bug in your software, how long will it take you to release a fix? If you give us an estimate, we can revert our changes to get you working again for now, but be aware that we will change it again at the end of the agreed-upon time period, so you really need to have a fix on your side.
If the reverse memcpy (not malloc, thanks gnasher719) was faster it would make sense, but Torvalds' testing showed that it appeared to be slower.
And that's a good reason not to not do the reverse memcpy, I agree. All I'm saying is that I'm weary of compromises that allows bad code to survive just to keep things running. I think that it works great in the short term, and gets your users happy that things are working again, but it just makes it more likely to break something else in the future as you make unrelated changes in the code. If the library user depends on implementation details instead of the API contract, you can inadvertently break him with routine maintenance. The end user certainly doesn't appreciate software that breaks with every six-month update. Like I said above, I would not be against a temporary compromise, as long as the actual bug gets fixed instead of grandfathered in.
When I wrote about pragmatism I was thinking of this problem where a modification to glibc's malloc() implementation broke the Adobe flash player. It is worth contrasting the attitude of Linus Torvalds in that thread with that of the glibc maintainers. I think most reasonable people would agree there is a trade off between supporting broken applications and ensuring things are done right. In this case, it would have cost glibc nothing to make a minor concession.
I understand your point, that it doesn't break anything else to make the concession. That said, this is exactly what I mean by "we need less pragmatism." The way I see it, overlapping memcpy is a bug, so that's what needed to be fixed. You code according to an API, and the moment that applications start depending on how you implement that API internally, you're asking for trouble. Pragmatically, you'd get flash working, but I'd actually be in favor of leaving the backwards copy in there even if it serves no other purpose than to expose bugs in people's code using your library.
I think doing things the right way is more important than getting things working for now, because it prevents things from breaking in the future. More long term planning and less short-term concessions is the way to go. That said, "this doesn't work at all on arm" problem was an actual bug on glibc's side. If he thinks the new way of doing things hurts performance in other architectures, then he can provide the different code paths with optimizations if he cares to do so.
Ahahaha, really? That's hilarious. Damn, I remember Drepper. I was told "he's quite nice in person", but you'd never know it from how he acted over email.
Heh...I read through the summary and thought, "actually, we could do with less pragmatism and more with just doing what is right regardless of what the people keep requesting. Design by committee is the path to bloat. Then I clicked the links and saw this comment by Drepper in response to a bug report on arm:
It's working fine everywhere but this carp architectures. I'm not going to make the code perform worse just because of Arm. Providing your own copy of that file if you care.
That's not lack of pragmatism, that's lack of professionalism. In fact, this is a good time to point out that "nice in person" is code for "asshole, but too much of a coward to behave like one if the other person is within punching distance."
A wise man once said: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
The point of that saying is that governments should be easily overthrown (which is actually the entire point of having elected officials. When they start pulling crap like asking citizens to be fingerprinted, you overthrow the government by electing a brand new one. The newly elected officials would then fear introducing similar legislation and then no longer being re-elected. In practice, the people are far too apathetic for the system to work that well, but as Churchill put it, "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.")
Btw, I, as a brazilian, must say that the quote "Imagine this happening in the US" was VERY offensive to me.
As a fellow Brazilian, I can tell you that Brazilians have an unfortunate tendency to be very easily offended for no reason at all. In fact, the fact that I pointed this out probably offended you.
I grew up here in the US, South Carolina to be exact, and all the statement is accurate. You're just missing some cultural background on the American thought process. People here are, in general, very anti-government. All that was meant is that If the federal government suggested fingerprinting everyone here, there would be a huge backlash. In fact, not too long ago there was a federal law passed (the REAL ID Act that would require state identification cards and driver's licenses to pass certain requirements to function as a federal ID card (we don't have a carteira de identidade as in Brazil, there is no federal ID card). The backlash was such that 25 states have passed some type of legislation vowing to not participate in the program. And they don't even require fingerprints, just full name, signature, date of birth, gender, a unique identification number (which was the cause for most of the backlash), address, and a photograph.
There's a lot of things I don't agree with in American culture (like the general lack of interest and trust in science), but I do wish Brazilians would adopt some of the very, very healthy distrust of government.
Oh, and english is not my native language, but come on, the topic is just wrong: "1.9 billion digits" does not make sense.
It's digits as in "digitais". The population of Brazil is approximately190 million, assuming everyone has 10 fingers (or digits), you arrive at that number.
My sympathies lie entirely with CBS. The law is on their side, the basic fairness of "they paid for it, they should be able to control what they paid for" applies, and the behavior of people saying "we will take anything we want anytime we want" is infantile.
I would be inclined to agree, had it not been so long since the script was written. One of the collective gripes among most here in slashdot is the length of copyright, and I see no reason why a script written more than ten years ago (and this case much more than ten years) should not be public domain by now.
Sounds like an excellent opportunity for the government to gather fingerprints of all its citizens "for their own good". After all, election fraud is bad...almost "It's for the children!" bad.
Of course, a smarter government would find a way to require DNA samples, rather than simple fingerprints, "to prevent election fraud".
It is an escalation, but Brazil already had fingerprints on all citizens. I remember my ID card, the one the article mentioned their replacing with the new biometric stuff, had my thumbprint. (Contents of the card)
Now I'm older, and I grew up in the US and actually care about this kind of stuff as a result of the culture shift. That said, I can tell you that Brazilians tend to not give much thought to the government having that information. At least my mother and her family don't, and I'm under the impression they're representative of the general population in that regard.
Anecdote:
I ahve watch sone go througbh cancer several time in my life.
Twice in the 1970s
You have cancer, 6 months later dead.
Once in the 80s. Treamentr with horrible side effects. nasty, nasty side effects. Survived for 4 years.
twice again in the 90s:
bad side effects, one died 4 years later, the other is still alive.
My mother in 2010.
Treatment was nasty, but cause early enough and she is still alive. Her cancer is a cancer that only 5% of peopel who get cancer get.
The anecdote is just that, and anecdote, however it does coincide with the constant betterment of treatments. Less harsh, more specific, less amount of time.
You're absolutely right, surviving cancer today is far more likely than even ten years ago, and it's only getting better. Chemo is still a bitch. My grandmother went through it in the late 90's, and did not survive.
I'm glad your mother made it through. The one thing I learned from my experience watching my grandmother is that the people who choose to fight have to be strong and courageous. Going back for another treatment in a week after they've experienced what the first one did to them? Takes a very strong desire to live to make yourself do that. I did not in any way mean to imply people shouldn't choose to fight, or that a cancer diagnosis is a death sentence. Just that the path to becoming a cancer survivor is a tough one, and I'm not sure if I'm personally that tough. Depending on the situation, I might just give up right away and enjoy the time I've got left as much as possible. That said, nothing makes me happier than knowing there are people like your mother out there, who fight it out and beat that damned disease, and I hope the number of survivors keeps going up.
Test your idea in a handful of sick humans. If it works better than existing treatments, continue. (This is going to be awkward. Ethical clearance is an important part of any medical testing; there's little chance of getting ethical clearance of using this in place of existing treatments for cancer patients because if it doesn't work, you've delayed them treatment that could have worked. You could possibly use it in conjunction with, or in patients for whom existing treatments haven't worked, but then there's the question of is the treatment more/less effective when the cancer's progressed that far? Or if it's given in conjunction with existing treatments? Sure you can devise tests to deal with these issues, but they won't be as simple as "administer drug, keep a list of who's had it and what the results were".)
There are patients who refuse chemo because they prefer death to the side effects. They would gladly volunteer for an alternative treatment with less extreme side-effects. I have seen my grandmother go through chemo, and I hope I never have to make this decision, but if I were diagnosed with non-operable cancer, I'm not sure I'd opt to be treated. I suppose it would depend on survival chances. 80% survival rate, I'd probably think it's worth a try. 50% survival rate or worse? I'd probably opt to take the time I have left to enjoy life a bit instead of spending it going through the horrors of chemo. No objections to trying a treatment that would still let me enjoy that time, even if it doesn't work.
Both the Today programme and the web site were demonstrating that the relevant BBC people are themselves mathematically illiterate - they go on about how people "can't do maths" but illustrate this with examples of arithmetic!
Of course everybody here will be aware that there is a difference between mathematics and arithmetic, but how to get this through to the arts graduates at the Beeb?
I find it ironic that your post demonstrates you don't understand sets.
Slashdot Mirror
People love their soap operas...that's all SGU was...
Somebody liked SGU???
I heard a story about how a store called to reveal how some girl was pregnant just from her shopping patterns.
It was Target, and they didn't call. They sent coupons for pregnancy products to her by mail.
They figured this out by data mining, and her father was pissed. These companies say they can figure out stuff like this. That means they can figure out that you have AIDS and you're gay, or that you have cancer or herpes or whatever.
Yeah, I know. But first, this entirely new, it's case of old things becoming new again. Think about the situation of a small town where everybody knows everybody else. Now a young girl walks in to buy a pregnancy test. The drug-store owner knows her, and now he has information she might be pregnant.
Either way, Target figured out this type of direct targeted advertisement freaks people out, so they're kind of hiding they have the knowledge. For example, when they figure out somebody is pregnant, they'll send them coupons for pregnancy products along with coupons for something someone pregnant would not buy, such as wine. This makes it seem random. It also prevents the father from finding out from the store, instead of from his daughter (although that particular story was never confirmed by the journalists. Target can figure out somebody is pregnant by what they buy, but the whole 'father got upset' thing could be apocryphal).
That information is sold around and then insurance companies and drug companies can exclude you from clinical trials that would save your life because they think you'll mess up their numbers or cost them too much.
And that is a problem. I agree with you when a company sells that information to anyone else, that is highly unethical, and should be illegal. By purchasing things from a company, you chose to give them data about you. If you wanted to avoid that, you can always buy it with cash, and not use any discount cards. However, you didn't authorize them to give that data to anybody else, and I think there's a much greater privacy violation when companies can get a complete picture of everything you've purchased from different stores.
That's kind of tracking for profit is unethical.
No, I think the tracking is fine. The selling of information is unethical.
Because my fellow man (which is what government in the US is supposed to be, the whole 'we the people' thing) spying on me willy-nilly using Monopoly on Violence is not the same thing at ALL as the shopkeeper next door keeping records of what i buy to use in his marketing and optimization research.
Really? You need to take a broader view, then. Let's start with your shopkeeper's surveillance of your spending habits. He knows what you buy, when you buy it, and exactly how much you spend in his shop, along with all of your other neighbors. Some simple analysis allows him to predict quite accurately what you are going to buy and when you are going to buy it. So he jacks up those prices on D-1 and lowers them again on D+1. The Walmart grocery store in my neighborhood appears to be already doing this; the variance I get in the price of a Red Baron pizza correlates too strongly with payroll dates for the lower middle class neighborhood I live in for it to be a coincidence. But hey, according to you, it's *different* -- I guess you believe the monopoly on violence only includes armed force, and not the "Monopoly on the only grocery store within miles" kind of violence. FWIW, boutique retailers have been doing this for millenia -- each customer gets a unique price, determined by the shopkeeper's ability to assess the depth of the customer's pockets. Thanks to your benign "marketing and optimization research" the guy who sells you food is going to be able to do the same damn thing...
Why is that bad? That seems rather smart.
Here's what I find unacceptable. When companies sell the information they gathered from their business relationship with me to others. As long as they keep it to themselves, what they do with the information they acquired from me should be used to increase their profits. That's certainly what I'd do.
0.1s flashes of products...Now you at least know when you are being advertised something. Then you won't, but your mind will, subliminally.
Someone in the advertising industry should know that that particular type of subliminal advertising has been proven in every experiment to not work. If its too fast for the viewer to notice consciously, he has not noticed it period. So be my guest and waste your client's money.
Moves like this will only introduce more subtle advertising, using...product placement. Is that better then?
YES. A thousand times yes. Product placement can even make a show BETTER. Ever seen a character in a movie order a "soda" at a restaurant? Or walk into a bar and tell the bartender, "give me a beer"? That has always annoyed the crap out of me. If you do that in real life, you'll be asked, "what beer do you want, moron?"
Does it bother me that in Spider-Man, Parker pulled a can of Dr Pepper with his web while practicing? No, I have cans of soda around in my room, I'm not weirded out that Parker drinks that particular soda. I watch tv shows and see that prop departments make cereal boxes and soda cans with fictitious brands that have a similar look to real brands. Why instead of wasting money just not get paid to display the real stuff?
It's like the difference between those annoying flash ads and the google texts ads. The tv ads are like the flash ads. They block the content you want to see, are loud and obnoxious. The product placement is just there in the background, and you get to continue watching your show, like the google text ads are, just to the side in the sidebar. The first type, I will block every time. The second is absolutely fine with me.
Classic Fritz the Cat, and maybe some of the S. Clay Wilson stuff with motorcycles.
OK. Wait until he's 7.
Seriously? Read real books with him. The comics will come on his own, without encouragement.
I don't remember not being able to read. My parents tell me I learned when I was 2, as they read comic books to me.
I had an uncle who was into them, and seeing him read them made me very interested. My parents then bought comics that we're more appropriate for children so they could read them to me. The end result is that I got so hooked, it made me extremely motivated to learn to read so that I'd be able to read the stories when my parents didn't have the time (they read to me every day, but I asked them to read constantly.
Moral of the story: read anything to your kids that gets them hooked, even comic books if that's what's doing the trick. Help them to learn to read when they get interested and other stuff will will come later, when they're able to read for themselves.
As for recommendation, in my case they were "Uncle Scrooge" Disney comics. I have no idea if they're still published.
Fifty years later my left-handed writing still looks like a first-grader
I didn't have a teacher or anyone else force me to stop writing with my left hand, but I've arrived at similar results through a different path. In Brazilian schools they drilled cursive handwriting on you right up until 4th grade or so. I would typically choose my right hand because when writing left-to-right, it's easier to see what you're doing. However, when my wrist got tired, I'd switch. Eventually they stopped giving us so many handwriting practice assignments, and as a result, I stopped getting tired, and stopped switching the hand I write with, and just used my right hand all the time. I can still write with my left hand now, but my handwriting looks exactly the same as the handwriting in my 4th grade notebooks that my parents kept around.
average != median. Woosh !
That is incorrect. The median is most certainly a type of average. The mean is another type of average, and the mode is yet another type of average. Most of the time, when people say "average", they are referring to the mean, but all three of those are averages.
In addition, it's generally a good assumption that productivity at a company will follow a normal distribution, in which case the median and the mean have the same value.
Um, no you can't. Human thought and emotion, by definition, is outside the realm of scientific inquiry.
Human thought and emotion evolved as a result of environmental pressures, like everything else. It's a very active field of scientific inquiry. For example, did you know that if you take an average of faces from people you find less attractive, you will arrive at an attractive face? Which makes perfect sense, as things we perceive as blemishes tend to disappear.
Why? Why would Apple want to do this, aside from some insane take over the world theory? They are certainly pushing for signed applications running in nice sandboxes and they're using the Mac store as one way to do it, but why would they want to disable other applications entirely?
To charge their customary 30% for every Mac OS X application?
I don't think Apple is using malware to push for the walled garden (It's bad PR, it's more likely to push people away from the OS entirely. They'd much rather continue their "You don't have to worry about viruses with our super-secure OS!" marketing approach. That said, I do believe they'd love to have Mac OS X as controlled as iOS, if they could figure out how to get away with it.
You earn $5 today. You set your goal at $6 tomorrow. You manage to earn $5.99 - failure?
I'll start by saying that I think we're actually in agreement, and I misinterpreted your position in the first post. This is just semantics, and what you call an "analog criteria" I call "degrees of success" and "degrees of failure." Obviously being short one cent is a small failure. Similarly, if you expected to make $6 and ended up making $6,000, your success is worth a lot more than if you had just achieved your goal of $6. That said, the reason I still like to define your $5.99 as failure is because when you see it that way, you realize that you're setting your goals too high. If you worked your ass off to make $6 today and was still short, it's likely your current plan is unlikely to consistently make you $6 a day. So don't count on that and either re-adjust your goals to something more achievable or adjust your strategy. Being close doesn't mean you succeeded, it means you were close to succeeding, but still failed.
Very few things in the real world really are clearly distinguishable as "success" or "failure". So we introduce arbitrary criteria, but these fail us as often as they are useful. A lot of innovations came out of "failures".
You set up goals. If you've accomplished your goals, you succeeded. If you did not accomplish them you failed. It's not arbitrary, it's as simple as asking, "what did I intend to accomplish when I started, and did I or did I not accomplish it?"
Maybe, while you failed, you stumbled upon something that was actually far more rewarding than your original objective. That doesn't mean you didn't fail. You failed at accomplishing your stated goal. However, you also learned from your failure and achieved success elsewhere.
I point this out because I'm tired of the PC world, especially when teaching children, where we tell everyone that nobody fails, just concentrate on whatever it is that you managed to get done! That's a horrible attitude and it leads to people being happy with mediocrity. There is failure, there is failure all around us all the time. If you try to do anything of any consequence you will eventually fail. And when you fall down, you can either get up or stay down. If you get up you can either dust yourself off and try again or give up. Before you try again, you can either take the time to figure out why you've failed and make adjustments, or you can repeat the same mistake and fail again.
Being successful is about not being discouraged by your failures. It's about learning from your failures. It's NOT about redefining failures as successes, and it's certainly not about believing success is an illusion, or otherwise unachievable.
Science makes no claim on truth, science is a conceptual paradigm used to create tools.
Correct.
Reality does not need these tools to function - humans need the tools to relate to reality.
Also correct.
As long as the standard model, upon which most nature science is built, remains incomplete there is no plausible support for a 1:1 correspondence between scientific explanatory frameworks and the inner workings of nature...
Blah, blah, blah, technobabble, we don't know everything, therefore everything we know is wrong...
You started off ok, but then went off in an unimportant tangent. Here's what you miss: Science makes no claim on truth, but truth is irrelevant in dealing with reality. Tools are what we need. The tools work whether the principles we believe are behind how they work are true or not, and that is how science works: consistency.
Newton gives us the laws of motion. Einstein tells us things actually appear to behave a bit differently. Everybody screams, "Newton was wrong!" and you'd use that as an example that we don't know everything. Except we used Newton's laws to put humans on the moon. Because relativity wasn't known in the 60's? Obviously not. Because relativity doesn't matter for this task. A theory can be wrong about the fundamentals of reality while still being an excellent tool at predicting reality's behavior. Newton's laws are not suitable to design GPS, but they're NEVER going to cease being useful just because we discovered more information about the universe around us.
Similarly you're here complaining that the Standard Model can be wrong. And yet here we are typing on a computer only possible because we have an understanding of quantum mechanics. Go look up how a transistor works. Is it possible that the Standard Model is incomplete? Of course it's incomplete. Will we ever discover something that will make it less useful in the cases where its prediction ability has already been shown to shine? Of course not. As a tool, it's already useful, it will never cease being useful, and whether or not we gather more knowledge will have no effect on how good a tool it is.
Truth doesn't matter. Models do. As long as our models have prediction abilities that are accurate, who the fuck cares if they're true or not? And that's why we will eventually construct cars that will remove all human error from the equation. The tools will be good enough without the need for us to know everything.
He has called the police on many blacks under the same circumstances because that behavior is often associated with scoping out houses for robbery.
Your friend should be fined for tying up police phones with something that is not an emergency. They could be scoping out houses for robbery, or they could also be someone who is innocently walking down a public street. That's not illegal and it doesn't warrant being harassed over.
Neighborhood watch should call the police when there's a crime in progress, not when they think the person "might" be up to no good, because they're walking around at night wearing a hoodie or sporting a mirror universe evil goatee.
The media's handling of this event is deplorable. Starting from the old pictures in an attempt to make it seem like a kid was shot to the deceptive editing of this 911 call, it was clearly an attempt to create outrage for the sole purpose of increasing ratings. That said:
Martin, a stranger to the neighborhood
I'm sure you've been a stranger in quite a few neighborhoods, unless you've absolutely never left your parents home since you were born. Being a stranger someplace isn't even unusual, you can't argue it's suspicious.
wandering around the neighborhood in the middle of the night
You never go out at night?
in the rain wearing a "hoodie" instead of rain gear or carrying an umbrella is suspicious behavior.
I don't own an umbrella or other rain gear. I've always found it pointless. Unless there's zero wind, which is unusual, I get completely wet anyway thanks to the horizontal movement of the rain. One thing I've absolutely never considered while making this decision to not carry umbrellas is that it would make me appear "suspicious" and cause idiots to start stalking me.
Martin engaging in this suspicious behavior is what started this chain of events.
Here's something else that could be seen as starting this chain of events: idiots trying to be heroes in neighborhood watches. If you're a member of a neighborhood watch and you see someone doing something illegal, like trying to break into someone's home, you call the police. If you see someone who is walking in public space, which is not an illegal activity, you don't go paranoid and start freaking out. You don't call 911 and waste the time of a dispatcher (he should have been fined for that). You don't start following or otherwise stalking them. Because think of this from an innocent's perspective: you're walking along in the dark, and some person you don't know starts following you. How safe do you feel? I wouldn't know their intentions, I would fear they might be planning to attack and rob me. The very act of following the "suspicious" individual escalates the situation into a potential conflict.
The job of a neighborhood watch isn't to be some type of Minority Report-like pre-crime police where you try to detect people who are about to commit crimes and follow them around until they do. It's to watch for crimes in progress and call for backup when you see it happening. I'm not saying Zimmerman wasn't acting in self defense, I wasn't there and don't know what happened. However, there's no doubt he shouldn't have been following Trayvon in the first place, and his poor decision-making warrants a full investigation and a trial, at which point he may be declared not guilty if there's evidence he was being attacked.
If you read all Linus' comments in that bug, he actually covers that angle. He says that either the thing should "just work", or else it should make it really clear that it's broken when inappropriately used. And that's the problem with backwards copy - it doesn't fast-fail the process or anything like that, it just produces garbage output. If you're lucky, this might crash. If you're less lucky, this might output garbage to the user (as in this case), with no easy way to diagnose it. If you're particularly unlucky, it may actually output some private information (say, a password?), or be otherwise exploitable.
That's sound software development advice, I don't disagree with it. I'm not defending reverse memcpy, I'm merely saying that "flash doesn't work when we implement memcpy like this" isn't a good enough reason to change the implementation if the bug is on the flash side. There were other good reasons to do the copy forward pointed out in that thread, and I'm ok with that, but that's the difference between writing good code and being "practical" about it, ie, grandfathering in bad code just to make things work short-term.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of leaving a change in place because it renders subtle bugs in crappy code visible, but to an end user it looks like your change broke his web browser for no reason.
I think we're on the same page here. I think the way to go here, when you have a clash between high profile software such as flash and glibc would have been for the glibc developers to get in touch with adobe and explain, "look, you have a bug in your software, how long will it take you to release a fix? If you give us an estimate, we can revert our changes to get you working again for now, but be aware that we will change it again at the end of the agreed-upon time period, so you really need to have a fix on your side.
If the reverse memcpy (not malloc, thanks gnasher719) was faster it would make sense, but Torvalds' testing showed that it appeared to be slower.
And that's a good reason not to not do the reverse memcpy, I agree. All I'm saying is that I'm weary of compromises that allows bad code to survive just to keep things running. I think that it works great in the short term, and gets your users happy that things are working again, but it just makes it more likely to break something else in the future as you make unrelated changes in the code. If the library user depends on implementation details instead of the API contract, you can inadvertently break him with routine maintenance. The end user certainly doesn't appreciate software that breaks with every six-month update. Like I said above, I would not be against a temporary compromise, as long as the actual bug gets fixed instead of grandfathered in.
When I wrote about pragmatism I was thinking of this problem where a modification to glibc's malloc() implementation broke the Adobe flash player. It is worth contrasting the attitude of Linus Torvalds in that thread with that of the glibc maintainers. I think most reasonable people would agree there is a trade off between supporting broken applications and ensuring things are done right. In this case, it would have cost glibc nothing to make a minor concession.
I understand your point, that it doesn't break anything else to make the concession. That said, this is exactly what I mean by "we need less pragmatism." The way I see it, overlapping memcpy is a bug, so that's what needed to be fixed. You code according to an API, and the moment that applications start depending on how you implement that API internally, you're asking for trouble. Pragmatically, you'd get flash working, but I'd actually be in favor of leaving the backwards copy in there even if it serves no other purpose than to expose bugs in people's code using your library.
I think doing things the right way is more important than getting things working for now, because it prevents things from breaking in the future. More long term planning and less short-term concessions is the way to go. That said, "this doesn't work at all on arm" problem was an actual bug on glibc's side. If he thinks the new way of doing things hurts performance in other architectures, then he can provide the different code paths with optimizations if he cares to do so.
Ahahaha, really? That's hilarious. Damn, I remember Drepper. I was told "he's quite nice in person", but you'd never know it from how he acted over email.
Heh...I read through the summary and thought, "actually, we could do with less pragmatism and more with just doing what is right regardless of what the people keep requesting. Design by committee is the path to bloat. Then I clicked the links and saw this comment by Drepper in response to a bug report on arm:
It's working fine everywhere but this carp architectures. I'm not going to make the code perform worse just because of Arm. Providing your own copy of that file if you care.
That's not lack of pragmatism, that's lack of professionalism. In fact, this is a good time to point out that "nice in person" is code for "asshole, but too much of a coward to behave like one if the other person is within punching distance."
A wise man once said: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
The point of that saying is that governments should be easily overthrown (which is actually the entire point of having elected officials. When they start pulling crap like asking citizens to be fingerprinted, you overthrow the government by electing a brand new one. The newly elected officials would then fear introducing similar legislation and then no longer being re-elected. In practice, the people are far too apathetic for the system to work that well, but as Churchill put it, "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.")
Btw, I, as a brazilian, must say that the quote "Imagine this happening in the US" was VERY offensive to me.
As a fellow Brazilian, I can tell you that Brazilians have an unfortunate tendency to be very easily offended for no reason at all. In fact, the fact that I pointed this out probably offended you.
I grew up here in the US, South Carolina to be exact, and all the statement is accurate. You're just missing some cultural background on the American thought process. People here are, in general, very anti-government. All that was meant is that If the federal government suggested fingerprinting everyone here, there would be a huge backlash. In fact, not too long ago there was a federal law passed (the REAL ID Act that would require state identification cards and driver's licenses to pass certain requirements to function as a federal ID card (we don't have a carteira de identidade as in Brazil, there is no federal ID card). The backlash was such that 25 states have passed some type of legislation vowing to not participate in the program. And they don't even require fingerprints, just full name, signature, date of birth, gender, a unique identification number (which was the cause for most of the backlash), address, and a photograph.
There's a lot of things I don't agree with in American culture (like the general lack of interest and trust in science), but I do wish Brazilians would adopt some of the very, very healthy distrust of government.
Oh, and english is not my native language, but come on, the topic is just wrong: "1.9 billion digits" does not make sense.
It's digits as in "digitais". The population of Brazil is approximately190 million, assuming everyone has 10 fingers (or digits), you arrive at that number.
My sympathies lie entirely with CBS. The law is on their side, the basic fairness of "they paid for it, they should be able to control what they paid for" applies, and the behavior of people saying "we will take anything we want anytime we want" is infantile.
I would be inclined to agree, had it not been so long since the script was written. One of the collective gripes among most here in slashdot is the length of copyright, and I see no reason why a script written more than ten years ago (and this case much more than ten years) should not be public domain by now.
Sounds like an excellent opportunity for the government to gather fingerprints of all its citizens "for their own good". After all, election fraud is bad...almost "It's for the children!" bad.
Of course, a smarter government would find a way to require DNA samples, rather than simple fingerprints, "to prevent election fraud".
It is an escalation, but Brazil already had fingerprints on all citizens. I remember my ID card, the one the article mentioned their replacing with the new biometric stuff, had my thumbprint. (Contents of the card)
Now I'm older, and I grew up in the US and actually care about this kind of stuff as a result of the culture shift. That said, I can tell you that Brazilians tend to not give much thought to the government having that information. At least my mother and her family don't, and I'm under the impression they're representative of the general population in that regard.
Anecdote: I ahve watch sone go througbh cancer several time in my life.
Twice in the 1970s You have cancer, 6 months later dead.
Once in the 80s. Treamentr with horrible side effects. nasty, nasty side effects. Survived for 4 years.
twice again in the 90s: bad side effects, one died 4 years later, the other is still alive. My mother in 2010. Treatment was nasty, but cause early enough and she is still alive. Her cancer is a cancer that only 5% of peopel who get cancer get.
The anecdote is just that, and anecdote, however it does coincide with the constant betterment of treatments. Less harsh, more specific, less amount of time.
You're absolutely right, surviving cancer today is far more likely than even ten years ago, and it's only getting better. Chemo is still a bitch. My grandmother went through it in the late 90's, and did not survive.
I'm glad your mother made it through. The one thing I learned from my experience watching my grandmother is that the people who choose to fight have to be strong and courageous. Going back for another treatment in a week after they've experienced what the first one did to them? Takes a very strong desire to live to make yourself do that. I did not in any way mean to imply people shouldn't choose to fight, or that a cancer diagnosis is a death sentence. Just that the path to becoming a cancer survivor is a tough one, and I'm not sure if I'm personally that tough. Depending on the situation, I might just give up right away and enjoy the time I've got left as much as possible. That said, nothing makes me happier than knowing there are people like your mother out there, who fight it out and beat that damned disease, and I hope the number of survivors keeps going up.
Test your idea in a handful of sick humans. If it works better than existing treatments, continue. (This is going to be awkward. Ethical clearance is an important part of any medical testing; there's little chance of getting ethical clearance of using this in place of existing treatments for cancer patients because if it doesn't work, you've delayed them treatment that could have worked. You could possibly use it in conjunction with, or in patients for whom existing treatments haven't worked, but then there's the question of is the treatment more/less effective when the cancer's progressed that far? Or if it's given in conjunction with existing treatments? Sure you can devise tests to deal with these issues, but they won't be as simple as "administer drug, keep a list of who's had it and what the results were".)
There are patients who refuse chemo because they prefer death to the side effects. They would gladly volunteer for an alternative treatment with less extreme side-effects. I have seen my grandmother go through chemo, and I hope I never have to make this decision, but if I were diagnosed with non-operable cancer, I'm not sure I'd opt to be treated. I suppose it would depend on survival chances. 80% survival rate, I'd probably think it's worth a try. 50% survival rate or worse? I'd probably opt to take the time I have left to enjoy life a bit instead of spending it going through the horrors of chemo. No objections to trying a treatment that would still let me enjoy that time, even if it doesn't work.
So? How many titles do you watch more than once?
If I liked it, all of them, except for the ones that that I haven't watched again yet, but guarantee you that I will.
Both the Today programme and the web site were demonstrating that the relevant BBC people are themselves mathematically illiterate - they go on about how people "can't do maths" but illustrate this with examples of arithmetic!
Of course everybody here will be aware that there is a difference between mathematics and arithmetic, but how to get this through to the arts graduates at the Beeb?
I find it ironic that your post demonstrates you don't understand sets.