In psychohistory, the past effects the future, so if you predict a city falling,
A point, but it's more complex than this. The world is a jumble of dependent and independent events, and it's often hard to tell the difference. My principle can be applied to some.
My coin principle doesn't help me if I want to predict when will city X fall. It will help me if I want to estimate how many cities will fall in the next 100 years.
Most important is statistical probability. Even if you base all your decisions on 95% probability results, the probability of you being right every time gets lower as you go along. In fact, after just 14 decisions like that, the probability is less than 50%.
You don't have to be right every time to predict trends. If we are flipping a coin, I have only a 50% of predicting the next flip. But I can be quite confident saying that after 200 flips, you are going to get about 100 heads. More repetitions work in my favor, and I can predict more accurately.
Statistics supports your first statement, it doesn't detract from it.
Too often on/. people tend to have a predetermined response to everything. "EMAIL ADVERTISEMENTS?!?!?! BAD. CORPORATIONS?!?!?! BAD. Both together T E R R I B L E!" and it's that kind of thinking that's only keeping things where they are.
Hey, reading through all your other posts, I recognize the possibility that you might be some kind of "honorable" spammer. Maybe you honor removal requests, and really do some opt-in thing.
So, assume this is true, and this is not just part of your spammer mind control. Surely you must empathize with everyone here when they react badly towards the spam situation. I mean, I guess you are right, there is some "good" spam. But when the hardcore nasty spam outnumbers the good stuff 100-1, I think people can be forgiven for making the generalization.
"Classic" spammers? I'm sure I hate them as much as you do... my point still stands, though, that if the whole "email marketing" gig were cleaned up, spam would not create the same level of outrage that it does now.
Yeah sure, I never objected to your main point. I only objected to your implied comparison between spam and TV commercials. I think we've covered that now.
Sure, it would be great if we could have responsible spammers who loose sleep worrying if they send dildo ads to some teens, and carefully selected email addresses to prevent bandwidth abuse. I don't see that happening anytime soon though.
But you missed the point of the comparison... it was not meant to be a comparison between two symbiotic business arrangements. It was meant to illustrate the point that people (in general) will deal with TV commercials, but get super-annoyed by spam?
Because 1. TV commercials are targeted (your point which you mentioned before). 2. TV commercials help pay for my TV watching (my point which I just said). If TV commercials did not contribute financially to the process, I would be damned pissed when I saw a commercial.
As an aside, if you want to make an issue of the negligible effect that spam has on your wallet, let's calculate all the money you COULD have earned while you were watching commercials. Someone making $20 an hour would "lose" about $3.33 an hour by watching 10 minutes of commercials. That's a far cry from the $0.001 it might cost you to receive a spam. Do you get 3,300 spams a day?
I suspect you underestimate the cost of spam, but still, I can easily manage it. I would believe spam support would be 3-5% of my ISP bill. However, it is more than the dollar amount that is an issue. The point is, it's massively insulting. It's like I'm walking along the street and people are reaching into my pockets and pulling out 10 cent coins and running. Hey, they could do that all day and I would survive, but it's a slap in the face and I would not tolerate it.
Then there is the issue that sexual products are being marketed to children through spam. That is just inexcusable, and even the most responsible parents are hard pressed to defend against that.
I have heard of people getting thousands of spams per day, although not me. I seem to be quite lucky and only get about 10/day. I think it is due to my name (and thus email address) being unusual. However remember that I not only pay for the email I receive, but for the billions that are bounced during spammer dictionary attacks. Sure, they get bounced at my ISP, but somebody is still paying for that bandwidth.
As far as internet marketing goes, there are alternatives which I appreciate -
Google's ads are brilliant. They are highly targeted, and I often click on them. Plus they are unobtrusive, and they help to support Google! Everybody wins!
Banner ads can be quite annoying, however I tolerate them because they help support the websites I am going to. Plus, I'm not going to see offensive banner ads at a site like CNN or something. I would compare these to TV commercials. I occasionally click on them.
Ever wonder why you don't see commercials for Gerritol & Depends on Cartoon Network at 2:00am? No old people are up watching it because the advertisers have a well-defined and mature methodology of knowing where and how to promote their products on TV and they don't have to worry about their audience getting annoyed by ads for things that they don't want.
Don't compare spam email with television ads, there is a fundamental difference.
TV ads help pay for my TV experience.
On the other hand, spam emailers make me pay for receiving their emails, through higher ISP bills.
One of these situations is a mutually beneficial business agreement, and the other is exploitation. Can you guess which is which?
This is good for slashdotters. Currently, you have to haul your lazy ass down to the voting station, and lots don't want to do this. Voting results are thus skewed towards the will of the politically active. The politicians surely know this, and pander to them.
Online voting will allow the lazy of ass to participate, and thus skew the results more towards the technologically aware individuals. Again, the politicians will be aware of this, and would start taking technological issues more seriously, to pander to us!
Am I totally off base here, or does anyone else agree?
Sort of. I relate where the web is right now to where windows was in version 3.0. It can kind of do some basic stuff, but you wouldn't trust it for something serious.
Now, after MS poured 100 billion into it to get to Win2K, it is capable of being a serious platform. I think the same thing will happen to the web, or a closely related internet technology.
I suppose, however, that some would say Win2K can kind of do some basic stuff, but you wouldn't trust it for something serious:)
Well, that's fine and dandy for a small company, but that seems to assume that any given company will grow without bounds pretty much forever.....What do you do with a successful company that produces a flat amount of profit each year, and does not seek to grow?
That is why "growth" companies, where you want the stock price to grow, tend to be smaller companies. If the company approaches a point where further growth becomes increasingly unlikely, the company starts to rely on dividends to support it's share price. You can see this with a lot of large banks. A huge bank probably isn't going to grow 7% a year, but they still justify their share price with a dividend. Between future growth potential and dividends, everything can make sense.
On a related note, Microsoft recently announced their first ever dividend!
...some country have a scientific comitee (*cough* US *cough*) use this as an argument there isn't global warming due to pollution and that one don't really have to reduce CO2 emission or other Serre-effect gas ?
The US government ALREADY doesn't take global warming seriously. Bush was pretty quick on the draw to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol when he entered office. I guess Kyoto and pumpin oil don't mix.
Rather than just a "strike under way" story, why not something about the tech that's being used this time around? That would be "News for Nerds."
OK how about this. Check out one of the newest weapons in the US arsenal, the e-Bomb or the high power microwave bomb. Takes out electronics like how they used in the Matrix. Would be ideal for eliminating Iraqi command and control capabilities, without killing too many people.
1) Know the air base where operations are started from.
2) Have a guy/gal near there.
3) Binoculars.
4) Stopwatch.
5) Radio.
6) Type of plane.
7) Average cruising speed.
8) Guess the intended target.
9) Distance to target from base/avg cruising spd = time to start shooting blindly in the air.
That is a lot of variables to get just right in order to have a chance. I can add a few more:
10) Guess the waypoints of the incoming strike. (Strike aircraft tend to randomize their route somewhat, to avoid prediction by enemy).
11) Guess the altitude profile for the mission. A high-low-high profile will have a different time-on-target than high-high-high for example.
12) Guess if inflight refuelling will occur. Then guess how long that takes.
In the end, the chance of a kill with this strategy is pretty close to 0.
CNN reported this morning that there is concern that Iraq knew our F-117 Stealths were coming and started anti-aircraft fire. This is a huge concern, as they are supposed to be undetectable (a.k.a. "stealthy").
If this is true, there is no way the technology to detect our stealths was developed in Iraq. It begs the question: did one of the countries that opposes the war pass this advanced technology, obviously developed since the 1991 Gulf War, to Iraq as an underhanded way of flipping the bird to the US and Bush?
During Gulf War 1, the Iraqis liked to pepper the sky with AAA (anti-aircraft artillery) when it was clear there were strike aircraft in the area. You know there are strike aircraft in the area when your buildings start blowing up. It doesn't mean they can track individual aircraft, or hit them.
As well, there is no "perfect stealth" Even stealth aircraft can be detected if they fly close enough to the radar emitter. Various countries started developing more sensitive radar in an attempt to counteract new stealth technology.
Even if the 117s were dectected by Bagdhad, they probably couldn't be targeted by AAA. AAA is limited to about 10,000ft effective altitude. The 117s should be above that. It is doubtful the Iraqis have SAM missile technology to knock down a stealth fighter.
The biggest risk here is to the ground troops when they hit Bagdhad. If the Iraqi's dig in and fight, it could be bloody. It took about 1/2 million Russians to take Berlin in WWII.
Slashdot Mirror
In psychohistory, the past effects the future, so if you predict a city falling,
A point, but it's more complex than this. The world is a jumble of dependent and independent events, and it's often hard to tell the difference. My principle can be applied to some.
My coin principle doesn't help me if I want to predict when will city X fall. It will help me if I want to estimate how many cities will fall in the next 100 years.
Most important is statistical probability. Even if you base all your decisions on 95% probability results, the probability of you being right every time gets lower as you go along. In fact, after just 14 decisions like that, the probability is less than 50%.
You don't have to be right every time to predict trends. If we are flipping a coin, I have only a 50% of predicting the next flip. But I can be quite confident saying that after 200 flips, you are going to get about 100 heads. More repetitions work in my favor, and I can predict more accurately.
Statistics supports your first statement, it doesn't detract from it.
Too often on /. people tend to have a predetermined response to everything. "EMAIL ADVERTISEMENTS?!?!?! BAD. CORPORATIONS?!?!?! BAD. Both together T E R R I B L E!" and it's that kind of thinking that's only keeping things where they are.
Hey, reading through all your other posts, I recognize the possibility that you might be some kind of "honorable" spammer. Maybe you honor removal requests, and really do some opt-in thing.
So, assume this is true, and this is not just part of your spammer mind control. Surely you must empathize with everyone here when they react badly towards the spam situation. I mean, I guess you are right, there is some "good" spam. But when the hardcore nasty spam outnumbers the good stuff 100-1, I think people can be forgiven for making the generalization.
"Classic" spammers? I'm sure I hate them as much as you do... my point still stands, though, that if the whole "email marketing" gig were cleaned up, spam would not create the same level of outrage that it does now.
Yeah sure, I never objected to your main point. I only objected to your implied comparison between spam and TV commercials. I think we've covered that now.
Sure, it would be great if we could have responsible spammers who loose sleep worrying if they send dildo ads to some teens, and carefully selected email addresses to prevent bandwidth abuse. I don't see that happening anytime soon though.
But you missed the point of the comparison... it was not meant to be a comparison between two symbiotic business arrangements. It was meant to illustrate the point that people (in general) will deal with TV commercials, but get super-annoyed by spam?
Because 1. TV commercials are targeted (your point which you mentioned before). 2. TV commercials help pay for my TV watching (my point which I just said). If TV commercials did not contribute financially to the process, I would be damned pissed when I saw a commercial.
As an aside, if you want to make an issue of the negligible effect that spam has on your wallet, let's calculate all the money you COULD have earned while you were watching commercials. Someone making $20 an hour would "lose" about $3.33 an hour by watching 10 minutes of commercials. That's a far cry from the $0.001 it might cost you to receive a spam. Do you get 3,300 spams a day?
I suspect you underestimate the cost of spam, but still, I can easily manage it. I would believe spam support would be 3-5% of my ISP bill. However, it is more than the dollar amount that is an issue. The point is, it's massively insulting. It's like I'm walking along the street and people are reaching into my pockets and pulling out 10 cent coins and running. Hey, they could do that all day and I would survive, but it's a slap in the face and I would not tolerate it.
Then there is the issue that sexual products are being marketed to children through spam. That is just inexcusable, and even the most responsible parents are hard pressed to defend against that.
I have heard of people getting thousands of spams per day, although not me. I seem to be quite lucky and only get about 10/day. I think it is due to my name (and thus email address) being unusual. However remember that I not only pay for the email I receive, but for the billions that are bounced during spammer dictionary attacks. Sure, they get bounced at my ISP, but somebody is still paying for that bandwidth.
As far as internet marketing goes, there are alternatives which I appreciate -
Google's ads are brilliant. They are highly targeted, and I often click on them. Plus they are unobtrusive, and they help to support Google! Everybody wins!
Banner ads can be quite annoying, however I tolerate them because they help support the websites I am going to. Plus, I'm not going to see offensive banner ads at a site like CNN or something. I would compare these to TV commercials. I occasionally click on them.
Ever wonder why you don't see commercials for Gerritol & Depends on Cartoon Network at 2:00am? No old people are up watching it because the advertisers have a well-defined and mature methodology of knowing where and how to promote their products on TV and they don't have to worry about their audience getting annoyed by ads for things that they don't want.
Don't compare spam email with television ads, there is a fundamental difference.
TV ads help pay for my TV experience.
On the other hand, spam emailers make me pay for receiving their emails, through higher ISP bills.
One of these situations is a mutually beneficial business agreement, and the other is exploitation. Can you guess which is which?
This is good for slashdotters. Currently, you have to haul your lazy ass down to the voting station, and lots don't want to do this. Voting results are thus skewed towards the will of the politically active. The politicians surely know this, and pander to them.
Online voting will allow the lazy of ass to participate, and thus skew the results more towards the technologically aware individuals. Again, the politicians will be aware of this, and would start taking technological issues more seriously, to pander to us!
Am I totally off base here, or does anyone else agree?
:)
Sort of. I relate where the web is right now to where windows was in version 3.0. It can kind of do some basic stuff, but you wouldn't trust it for something serious.
Now, after MS poured 100 billion into it to get to Win2K, it is capable of being a serious platform. I think the same thing will happen to the web, or a closely related internet technology.
I suppose, however, that some would say Win2K can kind of do some basic stuff, but you wouldn't trust it for something serious
Well, that's fine and dandy for a small company, but that seems to assume that any given company will grow without bounds pretty much forever.....What do you do with a successful company that produces a flat amount of profit each year, and does not seek to grow?
That is why "growth" companies, where you want the stock price to grow, tend to be smaller companies. If the company approaches a point where further growth becomes increasingly unlikely, the company starts to rely on dividends to support it's share price. You can see this with a lot of large banks. A huge bank probably isn't going to grow 7% a year, but they still justify their share price with a dividend. Between future growth potential and dividends, everything can make sense.
On a related note, Microsoft recently announced their first ever dividend!
Microsoft Dividend
The US government ALREADY doesn't take global warming seriously. Bush was pretty quick on the draw to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol when he entered office. I guess Kyoto and pumpin oil don't mix.
G Dubya withdraws from Kyoto
Rather than just a "strike under way" story, why not something about the tech that's being used this time around? That would be "News for Nerds."
OK how about this. Check out one of the newest weapons in the US arsenal, the e-Bomb or the high power microwave bomb. Takes out electronics like how they used in the Matrix. Would be ideal for eliminating Iraqi command and control capabilities, without killing too many people.
Da Bomb
Steps to dealing with Stealth Technology(tm):
1) Know the air base where operations are started from.
2) Have a guy/gal near there.
3) Binoculars.
4) Stopwatch.
5) Radio.
6) Type of plane.
7) Average cruising speed.
8) Guess the intended target.
9) Distance to target from base/avg cruising spd = time to start shooting blindly in the air.
That is a lot of variables to get just right in order to have a chance. I can add a few more:
10) Guess the waypoints of the incoming strike. (Strike aircraft tend to randomize their route somewhat, to avoid prediction by enemy).
11) Guess the altitude profile for the mission. A high-low-high profile will have a different time-on-target than high-high-high for example.
12) Guess if inflight refuelling will occur. Then guess how long that takes.
In the end, the chance of a kill with this strategy is pretty close to 0.
CNN reported this morning that there is concern that Iraq knew our F-117 Stealths were coming and started anti-aircraft fire. This is a huge concern, as they are supposed to be undetectable (a.k.a. "stealthy").
If this is true, there is no way the technology to detect our stealths was developed in Iraq. It begs the question: did one of the countries that opposes the war pass this advanced technology, obviously developed since the 1991 Gulf War, to Iraq as an underhanded way of flipping the bird to the US and Bush?
During Gulf War 1, the Iraqis liked to pepper the sky with AAA (anti-aircraft artillery) when it was clear there were strike aircraft in the area. You know there are strike aircraft in the area when your buildings start blowing up. It doesn't mean they can track individual aircraft, or hit them.
As well, there is no "perfect stealth" Even stealth aircraft can be detected if they fly close enough to the radar emitter. Various countries started developing more sensitive radar in an attempt to counteract new stealth technology.
Even if the 117s were dectected by Bagdhad, they probably couldn't be targeted by AAA. AAA is limited to about 10,000ft effective altitude. The 117s should be above that. It is doubtful the Iraqis have SAM missile technology to knock down a stealth fighter.
The biggest risk here is to the ground troops when they hit Bagdhad. If the Iraqi's dig in and fight, it could be bloody. It took about 1/2 million Russians to take Berlin in WWII.