The bandwidth distance product is useful if they're planning to compete with Seagate. The line storage capacity would increase nicely if they stretched it out to one full earth circumference, with the benefit of bringing the stored data back to its point of origin. With a 200ms rotational latency, the IOPs would suck, but the parallelism would be great with a deep request queue exploiting deterministic access times.
I never thought of this before, but with control of a large enough bot farm, you could keep a pretty large information store in-flight at all times. The flying gmail box. It would take a redundancy algorithm to make Google proud.
The interesting case is where the in-flight capacity is an order of magnitude greater than aggregated node buffer capacity, and the nodes have a short hold window for any given packet. It would take an immense excess of transmission to make this work, but that's there to squander due to the fine engineering work of Alca-Luc and their witless promotion of distance bandwidth products.
All you have to do is detect how many lolcat/txting words are in their essay and mark accordingly. Anybody who can put two sentences together without using any is "advanced".
Allow me to pee on your fantasy world with actual knowledge.
Clive Thompson on the New Literacy "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions. ... The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
In that case, what should they do? Keep quiet and leave the slander unanswered, or take out full-page ads to claim their innocence, or what?
There were some pretty stupid comments in the discussion thread there to the effect of what SVLLC should do to proclaim maximal innocence. Where do people get these cockamamie notions about what innocence looks like? If J Random statistician accuses me of something with a tantalizing yet dubious argument, what obligation am I under to respond? But no, we have this notion that dates to elementary school: them's fighting words. Failing to rebuke an insult (preferably with a physical altercation) is a violation of grade school social norms. Then as adults, no matter how stupid the allegation, or how insignificant the low-life who makes them, if you don't respond immediately with the whipsaw puppet dance of innocence... pretty suspect (what's he hiding?) Sometimes I think the lawyers egg this behaviour on: sleeping on your rights == responding with silence when silence is the better option. There is something cult-like in our social norms of how to best protest one's innocence.
That said, anyone publishing poll results to sway public opinion without full disclosure of their polling methods lives under the presumption of scrutiny. If greater society was less innumerate, such a firm would hold no reputation at all. IMO society would be well served to adopt the position that there is no such thing as a credible polling result which does not disclose its methodology.
One way to unwittingly bias polling results (for feeble values of unwittingly) is to decide not to publish uninteresting polling results, where uninteresting is defined as a 49-51 split. No, let's repeat that poll until it produces an interesting result.
Sounds kind of dumb, but the pharmaceutical industry eats that strategy for breakfast, and the toothless FDA has let them get away with it.
You begin to care once you get the Rofecoxib gripper.
And people can still google it and it can still ruin your life.
Do you feel beholden to the idiots who make snap judgments of others based on indirect or second hand information? These McCarthyists with their lists of Facebook URLs have the power to ruin your life? How so? Why is it you've delegated this power to others who lack the wits to exercise considered judgment? Or is it instead the case that the photos from your personal life present you doing things that no reasonable person would do?
There's an element of chicken shit to take the anonymous court of public opinion quite so seriously. It often stems from the desire to substitute dignity with irreproachableness. Part of the deal with dignity is accepting that you can't force others to draw the right conclusions. If you take the opposite approach and try to control what people conclude about you, you'll discover one of two things: a) you're sucking up to the rich and powerful, or b) the people whose opinions you have successfully shaped have no significance. Option (a) works, if that's what you want.
I'm personally looking forward to the generation where when you look for someone on the web, and find nothing at all, you judge what that person might be hiding more seriously than you judge the ordinary defects of those who fear less to make themselves known.
Getting rich in America obviously means adding another zero. Does it really need to be an exponential feedback relationship to get an enterprising American (or Brit) off the couch? A linear feedback relationship couldn't achieve the same purpose? Why not? How about a slightly smaller power-law coefficient? No chance?
At what magnitude does the power-law wealth coefficient cease to be about entrepreneurial motive, and instead become more about power elites? Anyone in America interested in funding a study to determine this? Hmmm, no one with enough money to fund this wants to know the answer.
Excess concentration of wealth hasn't been a complete disaster over the past 100 years. You can argue the merits: we have in fact enjoyed a spectacular rise in wealth pretty much all around, if you look at it through lenses with a logarithmic slant.
One can argue it has been a complete disaster, lately. When the elites bungle, we all pay. Kinda sucks as a system, actually.
If you go back 100 years, there were many untapped resources, it was a growth scenario. For the next 100 years we'll have to work very hard to relearn our current standard of living with respect to an increasingly finite resource base.
But oh no, even a sensible initiative--which is likely nothing but a good thing in terms of managing California's over stressed electrical grid--is going to put an imperceptible dent in our precious exponential wealth incentive coefficient. How will we ever live?
Re:Basic game theory: *always* publish tactical co
on
DragonFly 2.4 Released
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If you define "basic game theory" as game theory reduced to whatever extent necessary to yield a single dominating strategy against all eventualities, then I agree with you.
It has been a presumption of intellectual property law that no intellectual property claim endures forever (at least until Mickey Mouse discovered the non-convergence of infinite series). I know very few claims to IP that lapse in less than a century. So, clearly, over a sufficiently long term, a company that continues to invest in the maintenance of a software base that is necessarily commoditized in the world around them, is unlikely to declare much profit.
All of your claims are asymptotically true. That's just dressing up what everyone already knows in a new notation.
I guess then that non-basic game theory is figuring out precisely *when* each of these moves make sense. I bet over the mid term (three years to a decade) it looks a lot more like the Texas Hold'em game tree than slot-machine simple scenario you portray.
You're completely right: the story here is beginning with disordered data. However, if Hans Rosling did an animated graphic of where all the photos in Rome are taken, it would look more organized than most African countries, and might put some ant hills to shame.
Additionally, despite the claim that the main aim of the filter is to block child pornography, only 313 of the 977 total sites blocked is on the basis of child porn.
If the other 666 sites are all in a singular satanic bucket, then you could maybe justify the wallet and freedom wrenching "only". If the other 666 sites are divided up into ten groups of 66.6 site each, then there is no need to put this forlorn tin-foil spin on "main aim". (My math presumes two sites exploring a cross-over genre.)
If you set up an HIV clinic, you're going to prescribe for other common infections, unless you deliberately turn a blind eye to prevent having your main aim called into disgrace by the strategically innumerate.
That's not the deepest post ever, but at least it circles around the right point: the "official" designation carries a lot of clout, both inside and outside IBM, even if the decree is more honoured in the breach. What it amounts to is the declaration within IBM that "no one will ever get fired for using ODF". Less job security for anyone who creates a Word document with embedded Silverlight, or other embrace and distend shenanigans.
Canada has been officially metric since the 1970s. In the local grocery store, the meat package labels display the price per kg. Deli meats are ordinarily purchase in multiples of 100g. Very few people use kg verbally. We all cook with recipes in cups and pounds.
The display sign-age is another matter altogther. For fruit, price per pound "as advertised" or "manager's special" or "everyday low price" (the later catches the reading impaired who purchase based on its similarity to the other two).
On the roads, speed limits are posted in km/h, odometers read distince in km, but we normally discuss fuel efficiency in MPG. I've only recently internalized litres/100km. The stickiness of MPG baffles me. The international vagaries of the gallon is one of the reasons we switched to metric in the first place. Maybe one person in ten knows the precise relationship of the American and Canadian gallon off the top of their head. Fortunately you can Google "UK gallon in US gallon". Interesting: it now accepts "UK gallon", "British gallon", and "Imperial gallon" as synonyms. I don't think it used to be quite so forgiving.
Google translates "Irish gallon" to 0.0775 kegs. No, just kidding.
I'm just saying that Canada is now forty years into sanctified ambivalence. It's time to stop being surprised that not all policies contain pitchforks, or that compliance is often arms-length.
For the younger generation who have never known anything different, I get the feeling that the imperial system has become a kind of "folk measurement" completely unlike the classical measurement you study in school.
Clinton perjured himself answering questions that would have been better left to judgement day. If the questioning had stuck to whether he compromised his presidential duty (more than a finger wagging), then I would take the perjury charge a lot more seriously. Most of the major institutions of America contain men at the top ruling their institutions while concealing their extra-marital activities or their Percocet habit.
If Alan Turing had been in a situation where no hard evidence had been found, would he have perjured himself to have lied about his orientation and activities? Does McCarthy automatically hold the trump card: guilt by evasion, no matter how inappropriate the question?
Doesn't this play into the whole outwardly irreproachable, inwardly corrupt meme, aka you get what you deserve?
I really like this guy. He cracks me up. Mighty fond of his leviathan, but I can overlook that.
America has forgotten how to ask the right question. The right question for Bush V2 was "suppose you kick royal ass once you get there, then what?" That was a rather large fill-in-the-black to be left lying around for a rainy day. Win the peace? We would have had to spell that word out to the commander in chief of act now, think later.
It's sad that politics has devolved to mouse-traps in cookie jars. Ah, we never did that, the mouse traps were too expensive. A bit like Gimli's remark "It's a little tight across the chest." or "We dwarves are natural sprinters. Very dangerous over short distances." He's my favourite character for creative self-representation.
Warning: don't ever Google "Gimli chest" to word a quote correctly. I got a multiple dose of fanfic brain-sear from the Google summaries alone. I love what Turing accomplished, glad I don't have to read his late night fictional musings. Some things should not be recorded.
I read Spycatcher a long while ago. Wright seemed like a guy who made many solid technical contributions to the geekdom of spy craft. Clearly, later in life he had some axes to grind. One of which is the terrible way the Official Skinflint Act was used to deny benefits to long serving members of the secret service. Like what they say about Area 51: the only secret there is the massive waste of taxpayer dollars.
Because of the interest and because of the rancour following the pension, in 1985, he decided to publish his memoirs in Australia in order to make ends meet. The British government did all it could to suppress publication, under the pretext that such a publication would be in violation of the Official Secrets Act. They brought an injunction against Wright in Sydney. The Australian court, however, ruled against the British government, thus turning a book that might have had moderate success into an international best seller. Furthermore, the verdict not only vindicated Wright but also represented a victory for press freedom. The publication of Spycatcher temporarily unlocked the doors of official secrecy as far as former intelligence officers were concerned. With the enactment of the 1989 Official Secrets Bill, an absolute prohibition on revelations by serving or former intelligence officers was imposed.
The British governing class always seemed to care a lot more about that stiff upper lip thing, than rewarding those who toil in mandatory obscurity.
The other aspect that boggles the mind is the "gays are communist pinkos" circularity. If you castrate your war heroes, I think you might just be priming the pump for defection. It's not gays as such who are unreliable, but anyone who fears arbitrary persecution by their own government.
Another thing I've sometimes wondered: notwithstanding the official secrets act, where was Churchill when Turing could have used a solid character witness, such as "the official secrets act prohibits me from discussing the details, but in my opinion, if you do this, you'll shame the British empire for 100 years" or some distinctly British harrumph to that effect.
The real shame here is the amount of power held by the people who knew better.
Perfect. 98 MP is equivalent to 68 square inches at 1200 DPI. Finally, a pixel precise page preview for a 7.5"x9" content region. But I think you'd want this display oriented in portrait mode.
Yet, Vista still has achieved a 30% market share, apparently.
Vista didn't achieve anything. Market channel manipulation achieved this result. One needs to be careful with words like "achieved" since it sometimes proclaims a consensus where none exists.
I know a guy who runs a bike store. He says about 2/3rds of his customers don't actually ride the shiny new bikes they purchase. How does he know? Because anyone who rides a new bike hard comes back in a month or two for some significant adjustments, such as index shifters completely out of whack, or improperly tensioned wheels trending toward a Pringles chip.
Any survey which doesn't qualify the participants between the two groups (those who ride enough to care, and those who don't) is suspect right off the blocks.
More than half of all bikes sold become garage ornaments. These bikes have nothing at all to tell us about the difference between a good bike and a bad bike, or any figure of consumer merit apart from shiny paint and status-appropriate price tag.
A lot of people who think they are going to commute buy full suspension bikes (or at least a full suspension saddle). But you don't see a lot of people who actually do commute riding those kinds of bikes.
If you told me "60% of bikes purchased for commuting to work are full suspension" I would response "yeah, whatever". I certainly wouldn't call it an achievement. Nor for a dreadfully oversprung OS.
How about we just leave out the burning need to posit that God exists? It's debatable how well this has served the human race and we certainly don't understand it well enough to play with fire.
It's not clear that intelligence directly implies navel gazing. Maybe sexual reproduction implies naval gazing. If so, we don't need to cross that bridge until we have his and hers androids complete with PMS and ADHD.
This is a great example of why it's important to choose your starting point wisely. Otherwise, there's no limit to the crap that ensues.
An educated consumer is a dangerous consumer. You want to be able to trump up a product to sell it. But, you can't trump up a product if your buyer is an expert.
Yes, but theory of the beneficent invisible hand is based on voluntary transactions between informed parties. It seems to me that most American businessmen are capitalist, except for than annoying bit about informed consumers. Instead we have a giant industry to manufacture overwhelmed consumers who purchase on color preference.
You comment about trumping up a product is valid as an inference from how the system actually works, but has no point of contact to the philosophical system (capitalism) that we use to justify having structured the system in this way.
What you end up is the profit motive shorn of the invisible hand responsible--in the philosophical sense--for weeding out inefficient producers.
In this case, the informed consumer has good cause to conclude we're being bamboozled by too much manufactured choice. The video card industry is the epitome of this. Models come and go faster than one can establish a reference point from reliable review.
On another note, the Toms Hardware article (a fairly decent one) made the usual blunder comparing the three channel i7 configuration to various two channel alternatives.
With three channels you can load more RAM into your system before filling the second pair of slots on each channel (which results in a small RAM performance loss). The number I would like to see is six sticks in three channels vs eight sticks in two channels. The other benefit of the third channel, which they neglected to point out, is that it increases your maximum RAM build by 50%.
I'm using R fairly heavily these days. Great statistics language, but doesn't cope especially well with serializing data off disk. You get better results with your entire data set loaded into memory. I don't have to image a very large data set before 24GB starts to seem attractive.
int a = 0, b = 0; if (x == 14) { a = 2; b = 7; } else if (x == 15) { a = 3; b = 5; } if (a == 0)
printf ("%s\n", "more funds required"); else
printf ("%d, %d\n", a, b);
This is not fully appreciated: the I-don't-want-to-turn-up-to-work-smelling-of-sweat crowd are one of the major lock-ins on full planet destruction. We could solve the environmental crisis if only people were willing to show up not smelling like roses.
I'm only being mildly facetious. These details matter.
I can get to most of my appointments in this town by bicycle in twenty minutes, but I can't get hardly anywhere dry. I'm not out of shape. The human body only converts about 25% of caloric energy into propulsion (this is the coefficient on the Concept II rowing machine, which I've seen supported elsewhere such as Tour de France VO2 max estimates). The other 75% streams out my pores.
CHRT has no teeth... If [CHRT] was a real court... [immune to] actual laws of the land... pisses me off
Surprised you find the mechanism of the court so perfect in every way that no other judicial mechanism should even exist, even ones sanctioned by parliamentary legislation.
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) was created in 1977 by an Act of Parliament. _... Parliament finally enshrined the Tribunal's independence in law and the Canadian Human Rights Act was amended to formalize the CHRT's independence. _... As an administrative tribunal, the CHRT has more flexibility than regular courts.
One of the reasons given for this is that the defendant does not need to follow rules of evidence in his/her defence. Following the rules of evidence is an expensive process, maybe more so than the fines if convicted.
Between routine government policy decision-making bodies and the traditional court forums lies a hybrid, sometimes called a "tribunal" or "administrative tribunal" and not necessarily presided by judges.
These operate as a government policy-making body at times but also exercise a licensing, certifying, approval or other adjudication authority which is "quasi-judicial" because it directly affects the legal rights of a person.
This authority does not amount to hard biting surfaces?
Mr. Hadjis received his Bachelor Degree in Civil Law together with his Bachelor Degree in Common Law from McGill University in Montreal, in 1986. He was called to the Quebec Bar in 1987.
That's as much training as most judges prior to their appointment. How many lawyers have equal training in both of Canada's legal traditions?
When I was eight years old I rode my bike on my way to school across the corner of someones lawn which in my small town was rather indistinct from the gravel boulevard which surrounded it. An elementary school classmate witnessed this and and yelled at me "get off my lawn or my dad will sue you".
That has ever since been my psychological template for people who regard human rights as a "shout off my lawn" free card.
I believe in absolute protection against unpopularity. In my eyes "abortion should be permitted until halfway through the third trimester" is protected speech. "Jews are verminous scum and should be gassed by the millions" is not.
Somehow we need to define a line between these speech acts. It's not going to be an easy task, we'll make many mistakes, and there will be much wailing and outrage.
Nevertheless, suck it up: it must be done. The only question is how to do it better rather than worse. The courts surely aren't perfect, and neither are tribunals. A tribunal leaves more scope for fine tuning than the formal court system.
If a person is cursing the scope for fine tuning the system (the flexibility of the tribunal) in my experience it's likely because the person doesn't wish to see the job done right in the first place. It's a bit of a straw man tactic. Once you lock this up with the inflexibility of the courts under the rubric of fairness, it becomes a simple matter to advance the case that the courts in their rigidness can't ever get this right. And that would likely be true in a generational time frame.
The fallacy of the slippery slope is the presumption that objects only ever slide down hill. If nothing ever went up the hill, we'd have no traditions worth respecting whatsoever.
If anything is important enough to push uphill, for as long as it takes, this would be it.
Re:Most people simply don't think about security
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The Myths of Security
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"Think about how careless the median person is. Now, realise that half of them are carelesser than that." - George Carlin amended
Strangely I had just finished reading a PDF by Allison Randall about tagmemics when I stumbled across the line
A security model that allows users to be their usual flaky selves and still work reasonably well is what's called for.
If you make zero effort to distinguish faux news from a rigged demonstration, I sincerely hope you aren't investing in any technology IPOs.
Microsoft provided a rigged demonstration of the interdependence of Windows and IE on videotape to the U.S. supreme court. There's what the profit motive gets you.
Neither does a padded resume doesn't render a prospective hire incompetent. In fact, we're often judged negatively for failing to put the best face forward, even if the best face involves creative omission, and the right kind of slant might even be judged a virtue. How else did Microsoft get that video made in the first place? By hiring young missionaries with a George Washington implant?
NBC's "help it roll over" story manipulation was unethical and embarrassing, but hardly worse than what CNN or F/X News accomplishes with deliberate imbalance. I mean, is it even possible to conduct ethical journalism filming from the deck of an operational U.S. aircraft carrier?
How many Americans could correctly answer how many of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks were of Saudi origin?? If less than 50%, that's irresponsible journalism of the highest magnitude. I would take any dart landing in double digits as an essentially correct answer.
For those with Aspergers or other difficulties picking up on these kind of things, I am being completely, 100%, totally, absolutely facetious;-)
Fortunately, it's easy to multitask facetiousness sitting outside on the desk with your laptop and a parasol in your drink.
Few of the reasons for wireless involve a sustained effort to get some real work done, unless your portable setup involves dual displays at eye level with the keyboard at elbow level.
For a lot of people a wireless router is the indoor complement of taking your textbooks on a beach vacation, for those who can't handle being 100% certain which one they're doing.
Add to my previous post masturbation and nocturnal emission: it turns out that a small amount of fresh sperm is more effective than a larger quantity of stale spumen.
And female orgasm: the cervix mashes down on a little pocket where semen pools.
And the bulbous bowhead of the male member: turns out to be good at removing stale/foreign semen from the vaginal tract.
I knew I had more material, but it was locked away in another file.
Years ago I read an article about stress and the immune system. The claim was that under stress, the immune cells leave the blood stream and enter into the skin cells. Hence the collapse of immune levels in the blood stream. Stress is often associated with physical confrontation. Perhaps under this circumstance the body is more concerning about fighting off infection from skin trauma than whether the last meal was a mite tainted, or some child has picked up a sneeze.
I haven't seen this followed up, but does it really make sense that body's response to stress is to shut down the immune system? Never to me, it didn't.
Another great one is the doctors instructing you that "whatever your itch system conveys, ignore it".
So we have an entire nervous subsystem devoted to itch, and our only response is to not listen?
I read an article that the appendix is now believed to act as a pocket of gut bacteria to restart the gut after a core dump.
And then there was the whole thing about "junk DNA" where junk is apparently a scientific word meaning "you can't write a successful grant to study this". From another perspective, at the original sequencing cost of $1 per base pair, I can feel their pain.
I get mighty tired of the scientific meme "functionless until proved grantable". Were the scientists originally responsible for this, or the surgeons?
How many doctors does it take to change a light bulb? Three, but while they're at it, they'll change the socket too.
I have to laugh at the echoes of Victorianism here. It's one step better than maintaining the public pretence that we don't have genitals, but somehow it all seems rather childish. Then again, if a guy has gone trawling to discover just how bad it can get, I don't think, if I were that guy, that I'd want the brain-sear popping up at random in my Awesome Bar.
Ten years ago I spend a couple of hours on rotten.com. Without seeing much of anything, I got enough brain-sear to inoculate me for the rest of my life. I'm a pussy. I like activities where I can return to normal when the activity is done.
For art's sake, it would be fun to equip a Roomba with a webcam broadcasting in real time everything it finds under your bed on an open wifi channel.
What people sometimes get confused about is that the maintenance of privacy is not necessarily the primary thing. We judge people severely on their ability to maintain and navigate these real (or sometimes artificial) privacy gradients.
If a person can't keep their sex life out of casual conversation in a coffee shop, are you going to whisper to them in the dark of night who the KGB most recently picked up?
Maybe Clinton got himself into so much real hot water because he was afraid to install his porn loader in the white house.
If I were the world's most powerful man with only Hillary and the palm sisters to choose between, I'd be signing up for Botox injection directly into the perineum.
Slashdot Mirror
The bandwidth distance product is useful if they're planning to compete with Seagate. The line storage capacity would increase nicely if they stretched it out to one full earth circumference, with the benefit of bringing the stored data back to its point of origin. With a 200ms rotational latency, the IOPs would suck, but the parallelism would be great with a deep request queue exploiting deterministic access times.
I never thought of this before, but with control of a large enough bot farm, you could keep a pretty large information store in-flight at all times. The flying gmail box. It would take a redundancy algorithm to make Google proud.
The interesting case is where the in-flight capacity is an order of magnitude greater than aggregated node buffer capacity, and the nodes have a short hold window for any given packet. It would take an immense excess of transmission to make this work, but that's there to squander due to the fine engineering work of Alca-Luc and their witless promotion of distance bandwidth products.
All you have to do is detect how many lolcat/txting words are in their essay and mark accordingly. Anybody who can put two sentences together without using any is "advanced".
Allow me to pee on your fantasy world with actual knowledge.
Clive Thompson on the New Literacy
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
...
The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
In that case, what should they do? Keep quiet and leave the slander unanswered, or take out full-page ads to claim their innocence, or what?
There were some pretty stupid comments in the discussion thread there to the effect of what SVLLC should do to proclaim maximal innocence. Where do people get these cockamamie notions about what innocence looks like? If J Random statistician accuses me of something with a tantalizing yet dubious argument, what obligation am I under to respond? But no, we have this notion that dates to elementary school: them's fighting words. Failing to rebuke an insult (preferably with a physical altercation) is a violation of grade school social norms. Then as adults, no matter how stupid the allegation, or how insignificant the low-life who makes them, if you don't respond immediately with the whipsaw puppet dance of innocence ... pretty suspect (what's he hiding?) Sometimes I think the lawyers egg this behaviour on: sleeping on your rights == responding with silence when silence is the better option. There is something cult-like in our social norms of how to best protest one's innocence.
That said, anyone publishing poll results to sway public opinion without full disclosure of their polling methods lives under the presumption of scrutiny. If greater society was less innumerate, such a firm would hold no reputation at all. IMO society would be well served to adopt the position that there is no such thing as a credible polling result which does not disclose its methodology.
One way to unwittingly bias polling results (for feeble values of unwittingly) is to decide not to publish uninteresting polling results, where uninteresting is defined as a 49-51 split. No, let's repeat that poll until it produces an interesting result.
Sounds kind of dumb, but the pharmaceutical industry eats that strategy for breakfast, and the toothless FDA has let them get away with it.
You begin to care once you get the Rofecoxib gripper.
And people can still google it and it can still ruin your life.
Do you feel beholden to the idiots who make snap judgments of others based on indirect or second hand information? These McCarthyists with their lists of Facebook URLs have the power to ruin your life? How so? Why is it you've delegated this power to others who lack the wits to exercise considered judgment? Or is it instead the case that the photos from your personal life present you doing things that no reasonable person would do?
There's an element of chicken shit to take the anonymous court of public opinion quite so seriously. It often stems from the desire to substitute dignity with irreproachableness. Part of the deal with dignity is accepting that you can't force others to draw the right conclusions. If you take the opposite approach and try to control what people conclude about you, you'll discover one of two things: a) you're sucking up to the rich and powerful, or b) the people whose opinions you have successfully shaped have no significance. Option (a) works, if that's what you want.
I'm personally looking forward to the generation where when you look for someone on the web, and find nothing at all, you judge what that person might be hiding more seriously than you judge the ordinary defects of those who fear less to make themselves known.
This is one of the more peculiar forms of populist ideology: I can't think of anything the average American understands less well than wealth.
Pareto distribution
New evidence for the power-law distribution of wealth
Getting rich in America obviously means adding another zero. Does it really need to be an exponential feedback relationship to get an enterprising American (or Brit) off the couch? A linear feedback relationship couldn't achieve the same purpose? Why not? How about a slightly smaller power-law coefficient? No chance?
At what magnitude does the power-law wealth coefficient cease to be about entrepreneurial motive, and instead become more about power elites? Anyone in America interested in funding a study to determine this? Hmmm, no one with enough money to fund this wants to know the answer.
Excess concentration of wealth hasn't been a complete disaster over the past 100 years. You can argue the merits: we have in fact enjoyed a spectacular rise in wealth pretty much all around, if you look at it through lenses with a logarithmic slant.
Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset
One can argue it has been a complete disaster, lately. When the elites bungle, we all pay. Kinda sucks as a system, actually.
If you go back 100 years, there were many untapped resources, it was a growth scenario. For the next 100 years we'll have to work very hard to relearn our current standard of living with respect to an increasingly finite resource base.
But oh no, even a sensible initiative--which is likely nothing but a good thing in terms of managing California's over stressed electrical grid--is going to put an imperceptible dent in our precious exponential wealth incentive coefficient. How will we ever live?
If you define "basic game theory" as game theory reduced to whatever extent necessary to yield a single dominating strategy against all eventualities, then I agree with you.
It has been a presumption of intellectual property law that no intellectual property claim endures forever (at least until Mickey Mouse discovered the non-convergence of infinite series). I know very few claims to IP that lapse in less than a century. So, clearly, over a sufficiently long term, a company that continues to invest in the maintenance of a software base that is necessarily commoditized in the world around them, is unlikely to declare much profit.
All of your claims are asymptotically true. That's just dressing up what everyone already knows in a new notation.
I guess then that non-basic game theory is figuring out precisely *when* each of these moves make sense. I bet over the mid term (three years to a decade) it looks a lot more like the Texas Hold'em game tree than slot-machine simple scenario you portray.
You're completely right: the story here is beginning with disordered data. However, if Hans Rosling did an animated graphic of where all the photos in Rome are taken, it would look more organized than most African countries, and might put some ant hills to shame.
Additionally, despite the claim that the main aim of the filter is to block child pornography, only 313 of the 977 total sites blocked is on the basis of child porn.
If the other 666 sites are all in a singular satanic bucket, then you could maybe justify the wallet and freedom wrenching "only". If the other 666 sites are divided up into ten groups of 66.6 site each, then there is no need to put this forlorn tin-foil spin on "main aim". (My math presumes two sites exploring a cross-over genre.)
If you set up an HIV clinic, you're going to prescribe for other common infections, unless you deliberately turn a blind eye to prevent having your main aim called into disgrace by the strategically innumerate.
That's not the deepest post ever, but at least it circles around the right point: the "official" designation carries a lot of clout, both inside and outside IBM, even if the decree is more honoured in the breach. What it amounts to is the declaration within IBM that "no one will ever get fired for using ODF". Less job security for anyone who creates a Word document with embedded Silverlight, or other embrace and distend shenanigans.
Canada has been officially metric since the 1970s. In the local grocery store, the meat package labels display the price per kg. Deli meats are ordinarily purchase in multiples of 100g. Very few people use kg verbally. We all cook with recipes in cups and pounds.
The display sign-age is another matter altogther. For fruit, price per pound "as advertised" or "manager's special" or "everyday low price" (the later catches the reading impaired who purchase based on its similarity to the other two).
On the roads, speed limits are posted in km/h, odometers read distince in km, but we normally discuss fuel efficiency in MPG. I've only recently internalized litres/100km. The stickiness of MPG baffles me. The international vagaries of the gallon is one of the reasons we switched to metric in the first place. Maybe one person in ten knows the precise relationship of the American and Canadian gallon off the top of their head. Fortunately you can Google "UK gallon in US gallon". Interesting: it now accepts "UK gallon", "British gallon", and "Imperial gallon" as synonyms. I don't think it used to be quite so forgiving.
Google translates "Irish gallon" to 0.0775 kegs. No, just kidding.
I'm just saying that Canada is now forty years into sanctified ambivalence. It's time to stop being surprised that not all policies contain pitchforks, or that compliance is often arms-length.
For the younger generation who have never known anything different, I get the feeling that the imperial system has become a kind of "folk measurement" completely unlike the classical measurement you study in school.
I won't miss the Imperial Word one bit.
Clinton perjured himself answering questions that would have been better left to judgement day. If the questioning had stuck to whether he compromised his presidential duty (more than a finger wagging), then I would take the perjury charge a lot more seriously. Most of the major institutions of America contain men at the top ruling their institutions while concealing their extra-marital activities or their Percocet habit.
If Alan Turing had been in a situation where no hard evidence had been found, would he have perjured himself to have lied about his orientation and activities? Does McCarthy automatically hold the trump card: guilt by evasion, no matter how inappropriate the question?
Doesn't this play into the whole outwardly irreproachable, inwardly corrupt meme, aka you get what you deserve?
Thomas Barnett draws a new map for peace
I really like this guy. He cracks me up. Mighty fond of his leviathan, but I can overlook that.
America has forgotten how to ask the right question. The right question for Bush V2 was "suppose you kick royal ass once you get there, then what?" That was a rather large fill-in-the-black to be left lying around for a rainy day. Win the peace? We would have had to spell that word out to the commander in chief of act now, think later.
It's sad that politics has devolved to mouse-traps in cookie jars. Ah, we never did that, the mouse traps were too expensive. A bit like Gimli's remark "It's a little tight across the chest." or "We dwarves are natural sprinters. Very dangerous over short distances." He's my favourite character for creative self-representation.
Warning: don't ever Google "Gimli chest" to word a quote correctly. I got a multiple dose of fanfic brain-sear from the Google summaries alone. I love what Turing accomplished, glad I don't have to read his late night fictional musings. Some things should not be recorded.
I read Spycatcher a long while ago. Wright seemed like a guy who made many solid technical contributions to the geekdom of spy craft. Clearly, later in life he had some axes to grind. One of which is the terrible way the Official Skinflint Act was used to deny benefits to long serving members of the secret service. Like what they say about Area 51: the only secret there is the massive waste of taxpayer dollars.
Peter Wright - Wikipedia
Because of the interest and because of the rancour following the pension, in 1985, he decided to publish his memoirs in Australia in order to make ends meet. The British government did all it could to suppress publication, under the pretext that such a publication would be in violation of the Official Secrets Act. They brought an injunction against Wright in Sydney. The Australian court, however, ruled against the British government, thus turning a book that might have had moderate success into an international best seller. Furthermore, the verdict not only vindicated Wright but also represented a victory for press freedom. The publication of Spycatcher temporarily unlocked the doors of official secrecy as far as former intelligence officers were concerned. With the enactment of the 1989 Official Secrets Bill, an absolute prohibition on revelations by serving or former intelligence officers was imposed.
The British governing class always seemed to care a lot more about that stiff upper lip thing, than rewarding those who toil in mandatory obscurity.
The other aspect that boggles the mind is the "gays are communist pinkos" circularity. If you castrate your war heroes, I think you might just be priming the pump for defection. It's not gays as such who are unreliable, but anyone who fears arbitrary persecution by their own government.
Another thing I've sometimes wondered: notwithstanding the official secrets act, where was Churchill when Turing could have used a solid character witness, such as "the official secrets act prohibits me from discussing the details, but in my opinion, if you do this, you'll shame the British empire for 100 years" or some distinctly British harrumph to that effect.
The real shame here is the amount of power held by the people who knew better.
Perfect. 98 MP is equivalent to 68 square inches at 1200 DPI. Finally, a pixel precise page preview for a 7.5"x9" content region. But I think you'd want this display oriented in portrait mode.
Yet, Vista still has achieved a 30% market share, apparently.
Vista didn't achieve anything. Market channel manipulation achieved this result. One needs to be careful with words like "achieved" since it sometimes proclaims a consensus where none exists.
I know a guy who runs a bike store. He says about 2/3rds of his customers don't actually ride the shiny new bikes they purchase. How does he know? Because anyone who rides a new bike hard comes back in a month or two for some significant adjustments, such as index shifters completely out of whack, or improperly tensioned wheels trending toward a Pringles chip.
Any survey which doesn't qualify the participants between the two groups (those who ride enough to care, and those who don't) is suspect right off the blocks.
More than half of all bikes sold become garage ornaments. These bikes have nothing at all to tell us about the difference between a good bike and a bad bike, or any figure of consumer merit apart from shiny paint and status-appropriate price tag.
A lot of people who think they are going to commute buy full suspension bikes (or at least a full suspension saddle). But you don't see a lot of people who actually do commute riding those kinds of bikes.
If you told me "60% of bikes purchased for commuting to work are full suspension" I would response "yeah, whatever". I certainly wouldn't call it an achievement. Nor for a dreadfully oversprung OS.
How about we just leave out the burning need to posit that God exists? It's debatable how well this has served the human race and we certainly don't understand it well enough to play with fire.
It's not clear that intelligence directly implies navel gazing. Maybe sexual reproduction implies naval gazing. If so, we don't need to cross that bridge until we have his and hers androids complete with PMS and ADHD.
This is a great example of why it's important to choose your starting point wisely. Otherwise, there's no limit to the crap that ensues.
An educated consumer is a dangerous consumer. You want to be able to trump up a product to sell it. But, you can't trump up a product if your buyer is an expert.
Yes, but theory of the beneficent invisible hand is based on voluntary transactions between informed parties. It seems to me that most American businessmen are capitalist, except for than annoying bit about informed consumers. Instead we have a giant industry to manufacture overwhelmed consumers who purchase on color preference.
You comment about trumping up a product is valid as an inference from how the system actually works, but has no point of contact to the philosophical system (capitalism) that we use to justify having structured the system in this way.
What you end up is the profit motive shorn of the invisible hand responsible--in the philosophical sense--for weeding out inefficient producers.
In this case, the informed consumer has good cause to conclude we're being bamboozled by too much manufactured choice. The video card industry is the epitome of this. Models come and go faster than one can establish a reference point from reliable review.
On another note, the Toms Hardware article (a fairly decent one) made the usual blunder comparing the three channel i7 configuration to various two channel alternatives.
With three channels you can load more RAM into your system before filling the second pair of slots on each channel (which results in a small RAM performance loss). The number I would like to see is six sticks in three channels vs eight sticks in two channels. The other benefit of the third channel, which they neglected to point out, is that it increases your maximum RAM build by 50%.
I'm using R fairly heavily these days. Great statistics language, but doesn't cope especially well with serializing data off disk. You get better results with your entire data set loaded into memory. I don't have to image a very large data set before 24GB starts to seem attractive.
int a = 0, b = 0;
if (x == 14) { a = 2; b = 7; }
else
if (x == 15) { a = 3; b = 5; }
if (a == 0)
printf ("%s\n", "more funds required");
else
printf ("%d, %d\n", a, b);
This is not fully appreciated: the I-don't-want-to-turn-up-to-work-smelling-of-sweat crowd are one of the major lock-ins on full planet destruction. We could solve the environmental crisis if only people were willing to show up not smelling like roses.
I'm only being mildly facetious. These details matter.
I can get to most of my appointments in this town by bicycle in twenty minutes, but I can't get hardly anywhere dry. I'm not out of shape. The human body only converts about 25% of caloric energy into propulsion (this is the coefficient on the Concept II rowing machine, which I've seen supported elsewhere such as Tour de France VO2 max estimates). The other 75% streams out my pores.
CHRT has no teeth ... If [CHRT] was a real court ... [immune to] actual laws of the land ... pisses me off
Surprised you find the mechanism of the court so perfect in every way that no other judicial mechanism should even exist, even ones sanctioned by parliamentary legislation.
From About the CHRT
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) was created in 1977 by an Act of Parliament.
_...
Parliament finally enshrined the Tribunal's independence in law and the Canadian Human Rights Act was amended to formalize the CHRT's independence.
_...
As an administrative tribunal, the CHRT has more flexibility than regular courts.
One of the reasons given for this is that the defendant does not need to follow rules of evidence in his/her defence. Following the rules of evidence is an expensive process, maybe more so than the fines if convicted.
From Legal Definition of Administrative Tribunal
Between routine government policy decision-making bodies and the traditional court forums lies a hybrid, sometimes called a "tribunal" or "administrative tribunal" and not necessarily presided by judges.
These operate as a government policy-making body at times but also exercise a licensing, certifying, approval or other adjudication authority which is "quasi-judicial" because it directly affects the legal rights of a person.
This authority does not amount to hard biting surfaces?
From About the CHRT - The Vice-Chairperson
Mr. Hadjis received his Bachelor Degree in Civil Law together with his Bachelor Degree in Common Law from McGill University in Montreal, in 1986. He was called to the Quebec Bar in 1987.
That's as much training as most judges prior to their appointment. How many lawyers have equal training in both of Canada's legal traditions?
When I was eight years old I rode my bike on my way to school across the corner of someones lawn which in my small town was rather indistinct from the gravel boulevard which surrounded it. An elementary school classmate witnessed this and and yelled at me "get off my lawn or my dad will sue you".
That has ever since been my psychological template for people who regard human rights as a "shout off my lawn" free card.
I believe in absolute protection against unpopularity. In my eyes "abortion should be permitted until halfway through the third trimester" is protected speech. "Jews are verminous scum and should be gassed by the millions" is not.
Somehow we need to define a line between these speech acts. It's not going to be an easy task, we'll make many mistakes, and there will be much wailing and outrage.
Nevertheless, suck it up: it must be done. The only question is how to do it better rather than worse. The courts surely aren't perfect, and neither are tribunals. A tribunal leaves more scope for fine tuning than the formal court system.
If a person is cursing the scope for fine tuning the system (the flexibility of the tribunal) in my experience it's likely because the person doesn't wish to see the job done right in the first place. It's a bit of a straw man tactic. Once you lock this up with the inflexibility of the courts under the rubric of fairness, it becomes a simple matter to advance the case that the courts in their rigidness can't ever get this right. And that would likely be true in a generational time frame.
The fallacy of the slippery slope is the presumption that objects only ever slide down hill. If nothing ever went up the hill, we'd have no traditions worth respecting whatsoever.
If anything is important enough to push uphill, for as long as it takes, this would be it.
"Think about how careless the median person is. Now, realise that half of them are carelesser than that." - George Carlin amended
Strangely I had just finished reading a PDF by Allison Randall about tagmemics when I stumbled across the line
A security model that allows users to be their usual flaky selves and still work reasonably well is what's called for.
Now, finally, I understand etic and emic.
If you make zero effort to distinguish faux news from a rigged demonstration, I sincerely hope you aren't investing in any technology IPOs.
Microsoft provided a rigged demonstration of the interdependence of Windows and IE on videotape to the U.S. supreme court. There's what the profit motive gets you.
Neither does a padded resume doesn't render a prospective hire incompetent. In fact, we're often judged negatively for failing to put the best face forward, even if the best face involves creative omission, and the right kind of slant might even be judged a virtue. How else did Microsoft get that video made in the first place? By hiring young missionaries with a George Washington implant?
Dilbert impedes
NBC's "help it roll over" story manipulation was unethical and embarrassing, but hardly worse than what CNN or F/X News accomplishes with deliberate imbalance. I mean, is it even possible to conduct ethical journalism filming from the deck of an operational U.S. aircraft carrier?
How many Americans could correctly answer how many of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks were of Saudi origin?? If less than 50%, that's irresponsible journalism of the highest magnitude. I would take any dart landing in double digits as an essentially correct answer.
s/desk/deck
My turlexia is acting up again: replacing current words with prospective future words.
For those with Aspergers or other difficulties picking up on these kind of things, I am being completely, 100%, totally, absolutely facetious ;-)
Fortunately, it's easy to multitask facetiousness sitting outside on the desk with your laptop and a parasol in your drink.
Few of the reasons for wireless involve a sustained effort to get some real work done, unless your portable setup involves dual displays at eye level with the keyboard at elbow level.
For a lot of people a wireless router is the indoor complement of taking your textbooks on a beach vacation, for those who can't handle being 100% certain which one they're doing.
Add to my previous post masturbation and nocturnal emission: it turns out that a small amount of fresh sperm is more effective than a larger quantity of stale spumen.
And female orgasm: the cervix mashes down on a little pocket where semen pools.
And the bulbous bowhead of the male member: turns out to be good at removing stale/foreign semen from the vaginal tract.
I knew I had more material, but it was locked away in another file.
Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm
Ruminant depression is a different order of magnitude from end-of-universe major depression. Which do they mean?
Sherwin Nuland on electroshock therapy
At the other end of the spectrum, it's just a mood disorder (and working title of Annie Hall).
Anhedonia
Years ago I read an article about stress and the immune system. The claim was that under stress, the immune cells leave the blood stream and enter into the skin cells. Hence the collapse of immune levels in the blood stream. Stress is often associated with physical confrontation. Perhaps under this circumstance the body is more concerning about fighting off infection from skin trauma than whether the last meal was a mite tainted, or some child has picked up a sneeze.
I haven't seen this followed up, but does it really make sense that body's response to stress is to shut down the immune system? Never to me, it didn't.
Another great one is the doctors instructing you that "whatever your itch system conveys, ignore it".
'Itchy' neurons tell mice when to scratch
So we have an entire nervous subsystem devoted to itch, and our only response is to not listen?
I read an article that the appendix is now believed to act as a pocket of gut bacteria to restart the gut after a core dump.
And then there was the whole thing about "junk DNA" where junk is apparently a scientific word meaning "you can't write a successful grant to study this". From another perspective, at the original sequencing cost of $1 per base pair, I can feel their pain.
I get mighty tired of the scientific meme "functionless until proved grantable". Were the scientists originally responsible for this, or the surgeons?
How many doctors does it take to change a light bulb? Three, but while they're at it, they'll change the socket too.
I have to laugh at the echoes of Victorianism here. It's one step better than maintaining the public pretence that we don't have genitals, but somehow it all seems rather childish. Then again, if a guy has gone trawling to discover just how bad it can get, I don't think, if I were that guy, that I'd want the brain-sear popping up at random in my Awesome Bar.
Ten years ago I spend a couple of hours on rotten.com. Without seeing much of anything, I got enough brain-sear to inoculate me for the rest of my life. I'm a pussy. I like activities where I can return to normal when the activity is done.
Yesterday, I read this about an art installation.
An installation with a big impact
For art's sake, it would be fun to equip a Roomba with a webcam broadcasting in real time everything it finds under your bed on an open wifi channel.
What people sometimes get confused about is that the maintenance of privacy is not necessarily the primary thing. We judge people severely on their ability to maintain and navigate these real (or sometimes artificial) privacy gradients.
If a person can't keep their sex life out of casual conversation in a coffee shop, are you going to whisper to them in the dark of night who the KGB most recently picked up?
Maybe Clinton got himself into so much real hot water because he was afraid to install his porn loader in the white house.
If I were the world's most powerful man with only Hillary and the palm sisters to choose between, I'd be signing up for Botox injection directly into the perineum.