Pointing out that people have bias is a lot like pointing out that polynomial approximation has an error function. This is situation normal until people start to claim A) there is no error function, or B) the error function contains violently immodest sub-domains which people fail to restrict in practical application.
The largest component of my legal bias against Microsoft is their wilful and voluntary introduction of false evidence in the DOJ anti-trust trial. It's pretty much the normal bias term I apply to all brazen and self-serving liars with billions and billions of dollars. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft likely suspected the false video tape wouldn't play well in the court of public opinion on the off chance someone clever suspected they might try such a ploy.
If Microsoft gave a rat's ass about bias, they would behave better. But why waste your time cultivating favorable public opinion when you're the 800 lb gorilla? Anyone not biased against Microsoft wasn't paying attention.
Perhaps the classic "legal" definition of chutzpah is the closest; a person who kills his parents and pleads for the court's mercy on the ground of being an orphan.
I greatly appreciate what PJ has accomplished in the battle against SCO, but I've never enjoyed reading her site as much as I thought I would, mostly because she wears her bias on her sleeve, 24x7. She believes that powerful interests game the legal system with incredible displays of chutzpah.
Apple has long been such a corporation: any previous incarnation of an invention never existed, because the previous incarnation wasn't cool. A general-purpose Apple patent claim template: Invention A of prior inventor B, but this time more cool, and with people actually willing to buy it. Apple believes that the proper domain of invention is coolness. They've been trying to beat this down our hatch for thirty years.
Amazon believes the proper domain of invention is consumer convenience, where convenience is measured by Stephen Hawking's mouse reflex after 24 hours deprived of his medications.
Microsoft believes the proper domain of invention is backward-compatible (hence irreversible) integration into the borg-ship.
None of them use the slogan "Invention is what we do." The copyright infringement suits would aground on the irreconcilable meanings and bankrupt them all.
Spoken like a born polarizer. The use of "passing a test" is also bogus, if you bother to think. A scientific test can only clear you of cheating the test is designed to detect. Metal detectors don't prove you're not carrying a gun, they just prove you're not carrying a gun made of metal. I'm sure it's not easy to procure a gun made of anything else, but if the stakes are high enough the entrepreneurial spirit will find a way.
For that matter, even if witnesses say Lance lurking in dark bathrooms and sticking his buttocks with needles, that doesn't prove he's injecting a performance enhancing drug. Many assumptions.
It's also an assumption that if he cheated to win his third tour, he cheated to win his first and second. Maybe he could win at his best without cheated, and only resorted to cheating to make up the difference when he wasn't quite at his best. Or perhaps only when one of his competitors was better than best.
When we discover that sleeping around is "performance enhancing" are we going to strip Tiger of all his tour wins?
There's no way around it: a culture of adulation around the "win at all cost" mentality involves a large amount of sweeping history under the carpet. Absolute incentive corrupts absolutely.
The real solution is less hero worship in the first place.
It was drop dead obvious that talking on the phone isn't vastly more dangerous than not doing so. It's so prevalent that a "vast" difference in danger would have been clearly reflected in the overall accident statistics.... and it hasn't been.
That's because those of us not distracted by talking on phones are taking evasive action. I can clearly tell that my situational awareness is diminished by the demands of a difficult conversation. My driving remains adequate, but much of my ability to compensate for the errors of other drivers goes out the window. I'm not anticipating three steps ahead.
I wonder if people who often talk on cell phones while driving habituate themselves to lower standards of care and attention, whether on the phone or not.
Often I spot some guy with total non-awareness of the dynamics of a parking lot blocking half a dozen cars then suddenly I realize the guy is on his phone. He's not causing accidents, but he's also sure as hell not helping people mitigate friction.
I have a few people I know well enough to respect my silences who wouldn't distract me when driving at all, on the phone or in the passenger seat. But there are also pushy people who keep you on your guard in the conversation when your guard should be elsewhere if you are behind the wheel of two tons of metal hurtling down a highway.
Once we get the driverless cars, a certain type of person will be free to treat their car as a rolling phone booth at no hazard to anyone else.
If we encourage everyone to talk on their cell phones while driving, we just might see that accident spike after all.
You know you've messed up big time when someone related to the development of one of the first graphical interfaces for computers thinks you've messed up.
Lisp was one of the first computer languages and the Lisp fanatics believe that every language since was a wrong turn, so we all know we've messed up regardless of whether a Mars probe runs for 200 extra innings or Google serves a billion search responses per hour for a decade running.
The new Slashdot: A little bit of knowledge times a whopping cliche equals the bikeshed of Babylon.
I read many comments and I didn't see one addressing the main point: for the kind of person who is by nature extremely aggressive about making informed purchasing decisions viewing any advertisement (however innocuous) is a dominated outcome. It doesn't benefit the advertiser, since it doesn't influence your future purchasing behaviour, and to the degree the viewer's brain even notices it on your screen, the viewer's brain has absorbed useless and irrelevant information. Is what we put into our minds less harmless than what we put into our bodies? I wouldn't be too quick to judge.
Well, the advertiser wants everyone to view the ads anyway, even in the individual cases where the viewer won't respond. Why? They'll say ads influence people below their conscious threshold. This is true, of course. But this still doesn't profit the advertiser unless subconscious influences manifest themselves in purchasing decisions. If your purchasing style is aggressively analytic, there isn't much soil for this weed to grow.
No, the real battle is over the group of people who are presently engaged in passive consumption (with an impulsive component influenced by ad impressions) who might decide it is greener on the other side of the fence if they put their impulsive ways behind them. No ads! That would make the grass look greener, wouldn't it. So they want people who aren't influenced by ads to be subjected to ads so that people who are influenced by ads don't change their stripes.
This is similar to the game theory matrix in the tobacco wars: the tobacco industry wished to impose upon people inhaling second hand smoke to just sit there and suck it up. We receive no benefit from doing so: it smells bad, it makes our clothes smell bad, we don't get a high, and maybe it kills us. Nice deal. But to have the non-smokers sitting in the pubs sucking it up has a psychological spin-off in helping the smokers committing slow (and expensive) suicide continue to do so.
I admit there is some information conveyed to the rational consumer by an expensive ad campaign. Either A) the company really believes they have a compelling product, or B) the company's price structure builds in extremely fat margins.
I've learned that the aggregate cost of discrimination between these two signals (one negative, one positive) greatly exceeds the value of the information I ultimately obtain having gone to the trouble.
If you're the kind of person who believes that true capitalism is based on information parity in rational transactions (and you have the mental capacity to step up to the plate) there's almost no way to construct the game-theoretic matrix where not using an ad-blocker is a sane decision.
It is wise to avoid disparaging what you do not use. You may simply be ignorant.
I personally refer to this syndrome as "use case blindness".
We five-digit Hamlets give this lecture a lot to the seven-digit Horatios. That's what made Hamlet so deadly famous for procrastination: don't mess with use cases outside your ken, without pondering the consequences first.
On choosing a lap to lie in: "No, good mother, here's metal more attractive."
I highly regret the 3 minutes of my life I wasted on that hand-wavy TFA. It's an important enough concept to warrant a TFA with meat on its bones.
I simply trust now that Amazon has the lowest price. And I think they know that we are lazy. And as long as they fight to stay the cheapest they know we won't bother shopping somewhere else. When they get greedy and started exploiting our laziness they won't lose enough sales from people shopping around at competitors with only a vestige of their former power.
The only business plan the truly greedy pursue: 1) obtain clout 2) milk it
The first step is 90% perspiration and 10% profit. The second step is 90% profit and 10% perspiration. Personally, I find the accumulation of clout repugnant to liberal society and I never participate in closed markets when I can avoid it. Not Microsoft then, not Apple now, not Amazon in the future. (I feel no shame on cherry-picking loss leaders when the opportunity arises, but I never sign up for the "loyalty" card that comes along with it. If the cherry is sour and only the loyalty is sweet, run run run as fast as my fingers will carry me.)
So you're content for now to trust the unsinkable nature of Amazon's price competitiveness, and of course you have you eye on the life raft should Amazon flounder on an iceberg of greed. Good luck to you when that day comes.
Postgres support is typically volunteer-maintained by one person
This would double overnight if MySQL were declared pariah non grata, which is precisely the negotiation taking place in this kind of discussion thread.
Speaking of PNG, you do recall the Unisys GIF debacle? When MySQL dies, may its tombstone read G.I.F.
While you're reading Wikipedia, look up "Gambler's fallacy". The fact that such an event occurred relatively recently has no effect on the probability that will happen in the near future.
You yourself might wish to read the fine print: this only applies to a memoryless process. The Sun is a lot bigger than an elephant... or an ocean. An ocean remembers a lot.
Most of my typos tend to be whole word substitutions. I tend to catch the ones where two or three letters are jumbled. The single letter substitutions from one valid word to another with similar letter shape are the most likely to squeak through.
Go ahead. Develop a unique essay question. Just one. Post it in reply.
Thick much? It's easier by the trillion. Suppose we have a body of 1000 short stories, each of about 30 pages in length.
Using the vocabulary of source A, the imagery of source B, the structure of source C, write a five page story in the style of source D. Follow this with a two page essay on the challenges posed and the opportunities discovered in combining these sources.
1000^4. Done. For the grading system, you need to send four to six papers with the vocabulary of source A to peers intimate with source A; and likewise with the other three axes.
Or you could find peers strong in any of the six pairwise subsets of the four attributes (AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD) for grading on whether that pair of attributes is well combined. If every student is expected to be strong in 30 randomly chosen stories out of the 1000 stories in inventory to act as a peer grader, it won't be hard to find evaluation peers for any pair of stories in a well-subscribed online course (concurrent enrolment of 10,000 students).
One of those can be from your personal base of 30 stories. The other three attributes can be stories you haven't been assigned before. You'd only have to read 90 pages per assignment.
"Most" of the bankers who are "good people" are hanging around enabling those who aren't by not demanding effective change at the levels that matter (governance, regulatory oversight).
Apologies aren't good enough. Point us to some real change that bites the psychopaths who rise to the top.
Suggestions: smaller institutions, less opaque financial instruments, fewer ex-bankers crossing the floor to work inside government.
I don't see why any person who has held an executive position at Goldman Sachs should be welcomed into any U.S. government agency with real power. At best they should be allowed to work inside some toothless intermediary and reporting to other agencies with no personal loyalties to Goldman whatsoever.
If the argument is "we need these people because no-one else understands how the system works" then Plan A is to simplify the system with extreme prejudice.
But the political-axis framework gives us a familiar set of ideas and terms for identifying areas of fundamental disagreement. This can lead to faster problem resolution.'"
Never in all my days have I seen two sentences hitched together with less in common. Agreement is reached... by latching onto calcified metaphors of conflict.
I'm encouraged to see people commenting on slashdot's decline as they slam the door on the way out.
I never came here to juggle giant slabs of bullshit for amusement and page views.
Hint to slashdot editorship: We can do that anywhere, so what's your value-add at the end of the day? Legacy appeal among the slow to adapt?
Careful when you call a Vonnegut device implausible. As I recall he lifted the notion of undiscovered crystalline conformations of a common chemical from a working scientist, then gave it the ocean make-over. The implausible part is that the substance is water. Wasn't it just in the last month that a new conformation of carbon made the news with diamond-like properties? I recall reading that the new diamond is hard enough to scratch the old diamond.
No-one I know of regards The Sirens of Titan as lesser than Cat's Cradle and generally I would say opinion is the other way around among Vonnegut fans. Vonnegut as I recall grades his own works in Palm Sunday and I'm fairly sure he gave Sirens the same A he gave to Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse. He gives a much lower mark to Breakfast of Champions, but it was an early Vonnegut for me and I'm strangely nostalgic for it.
Cat's Cradle isn't really about its SF premise anyway. Every chapter has a kind of trick to it, which Vonnegut himself described as an effort to get a mousetrap to snap just the right way. It was never my favorite, for all that.
If said "hippie" didn't care about obtaining credit for something this significant 40+ years ago, care to tell me why the internet masses care so much about this today?
Does the subject line ring a bell for you? Why bother going back and getting the story right after we've already buried him with a tribute at a football game, with a military fly-by, against his own wishes, against the wishes of the men he fought beside, and against the wishes of his own family—if you count their concerted objections to the halo of North Korean symbolism.
It's the other way around, buster. The technology is here to permit me to organize my work flow however I see fit, without constraining myself to whatever it is that fits into your small mind.
Long ago I've seen people told "there's no reason to put 300 files into one file folder". Yes, indeed, this would cause performance problems on some systems during the death throes of DOS.
There's no reason a modern computer should have problems with 300 tabs any more than a DOS computer should have problems with 300 files in one directory. But every large DOS application included its own custom "file management" screen (you couldn't task switch to a finder), and often these screens performed some kind of sort, and often the coding was so horrific that keyboard response was N^2 in the number of files in the folder viewed.
FF didn't pull the horrific coding stunt, but they did pull off the horrific API stunt, where extension authors had a hell of a time identifying lapses in their API conformance. Apparently this is somewhat fixed now circa FF 15.
Good grief, sonny boy, if you come around these parts telling me to size my tasks to the incompetence of the platform provider, I'll give you a kick in the pants with a wind-up all the way back to the stone age, passing the Concorde mid-swing.
Makini Brice, I know you can write better... if only someone would deliver the sad news: you have no brain, or your choose not to use it. You can't even come up with "bell the cat" or "free rider problem" while you pussy-foot through the bullshit slough? Not even the five-bell go-to cliches handed out as black-tie MSM fig leaves of faux decorum by the maitre-d' at the Michelin-rated nudist resort? Shame on you.
I've belled more than my fair share of cats in my day, including some with a history of emergency admission into psychiatric care. What happens when you offer a concerned a thoughtful glimmer of reality to a person who knows, deep down, that their own reality is a little thin on the ground? In simple terms, the person usually goes binary: either you have to sign up to provide the reality augmentation service 24x7 or they want you to fuck off as promptly as possible. These people crave little windows onto a stable system of reality like Heroin junkies. They aren't in it for a once-a-week booster shot. All or nothing, not much in between.
I've done this, too, at the other end of the spectrum: with fantastically sane and competent people who might have some bright ember of self-destruction that turns a small removable discontinuity--a pinhole of infernal blackness--into a swollen vortex of life sucking creosote-toffee. In this world, as you approach the center, the shortest distance between any two points is a spiral of infinite length. You kind of have to make a fire break by cutting down a lot of healthy trees and tossing them into the inferno, which will surely curl your toe hairs in response to the insult. Bonus: if you don't flinch, they come back for more. You have to stand there in the cross-hairs of the flame thrower attached to a gasoline pumper truck and go: let's get rid of the knife. What knife? The folded knife in your back pocket. What pocket? The back pocket that prevents your ass from bursting right through those insanely tight jeans. When dealing with the flame-thrower that burns like hell, you need to bear in mind that even a small penknife can cut your balls off. The trick is to fight over the knife and not the flame thrower. This is difficult and fraught--you need to dial your asbestos underwear up to 11 and keep it there for weeks at a time. At the end of the day your affection is carried off to the burn ward with 3rd degree burns over 80% of its body, but sometimes after it all blows over, a very nice memorial wreath is erected in your honour at Vimy Ridge.
I'm a bit of a writer at heart, so I sometimes dabble in the occult arts where "what's in it for me" has no answer a sane person would recognize. A sane person laughs at water-cooler Joe's latest bad joke and gets the hell out.
Stupid physicists. The given information (which particles are entangled) is a thermodynamic asset. I guess they decided not to count this, since there isn't an experiment (which I'm aware of) to test particles for entanglement. I think you have to know they were stamped out with the same vintage code.
This whole thing smells more of violating presumptive accounting categories than real physics. But then I'm an even stupider arm-chair physicist.
Why? This is a nonevent (even if it is true.) It's like proving that 80% of TV ads air when people are out of the room. It does nothing to change the basic equation of how advertisers decide whether to place ads, which is: place some ads, see if your sales go up enough to justify the cost; if so, buy more... and so forth.
And your competitors can invent extra TVs in all your extra, unoccupied rooms, and when they do, your ad bill escalates. These scenarios are so identical you need a scanning electron microscope with the gain set to 11 just to tell them apart. Apparently.
So if Alan Turing posted about homosexuality which was illegal in his time
Homosexuality wasn't illegal ya stupid cocksucking hayseed, it was homosexual acts that were illegal. Oops, did I cross the line with my word selection there? Sorry about that.
I was reading Borges' The Immortal the other night.
Taught by centuries of living, the republic of immortal men had achieved a perfection of tolerance, almost of disdain. They knew that over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men. As reward for his past and future virtues, every man merited every kindness—yet also every betrayal, as reward for his past and future iniquities. Much as the way in games of chance, heads and tails tend to even out, so cleverness and dullness cancel and correct each other.
I loved the old McCarthy update to the Socratic method "have you ever..." as if single-instance statistics define everything you need to know about a person. "Have you ever called someone a cocksucker?" Why, yes. Yes I have. Once in 40 years, as a segue to Borges, ya stupid cocksucker. And YOU know who I mean.
God forbid anyone would foolishly deprive themselves of the opportunity to blow $1500 on a drive recovery from the grand masters of service fee obfuscation.
I recovered one drive using the freezer method. Another one didn't come back to life and we did end up paying the extravagant recovery fee, which succeeded despite my freezer attempt.
Sad story: I identified the recovered drive before it failed as a catastrophe waiting to happen based on a combination of age/uniqueness of contents. It died seat-belted upright into the back seat of a plush sedan in a mild-mannered 15m drive en route to a site with full network backup facilities. In this case, the mountain should have gone to Mohamed. This was circa 2000 where high capacity external USB drives were not exactly a dime a dozen, and people still thought time was money ("have mountain will travel" is so post-recession 2009).
PS. Don't ever eat anything contaminated with Jerry Germ. Really.
PPS. Jerry Germ was my first childhood experience with post-war paranoia, disguised as Hun-hating Hand-i-Wipe brain washing for young children.
While Microsoft was once the hippest company on earth, its beginnings could be traced to the Holy Bible for nerdsâ"Popular Electronics.
I was there. Let me [w]rack my brains all the way back to PC DOS. Cool. Microsoft. Used in the same sentence. [Petrifies into the shape of Rodin's Thinker] Nope, not happening. The closest they ever came in my books was acquiring the creative output of Ensemble Studios. I really liked Age of Empires. I had a friend who liked Microsoft Flight Simulator. The word "cool" might have been used.
"Sucks less". Sure, I used that phrase a lot--practically wore it out in my enthusiasm for the giant wake of crud displacement by the great Borg ship Microsoft. (Nothing makes a GUI-centric OS less cool than the lack of demand-paged virtual memory under the hood.)
âoeThey used to point their finger at IBM and laugh,â said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. âoeNow theyâ(TM)ve become the thing they despised.â
The same thing is also happening among the 1% in America. America used to be proud of how it broke away from the British class system. Now anyone with money and power can't find the slightest flaw in the ways of their ancestral oppressors.
Slashdot Mirror
Pointing out that people have bias is a lot like pointing out that polynomial approximation has an error function. This is situation normal until people start to claim A) there is no error function, or B) the error function contains violently immodest sub-domains which people fail to restrict in practical application.
The largest component of my legal bias against Microsoft is their wilful and voluntary introduction of false evidence in the DOJ anti-trust trial. It's pretty much the normal bias term I apply to all brazen and self-serving liars with billions and billions of dollars. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft likely suspected the false video tape wouldn't play well in the court of public opinion on the off chance someone clever suspected they might try such a ploy.
If Microsoft gave a rat's ass about bias, they would behave better. But why waste your time cultivating favorable public opinion when you're the 800 lb gorilla? Anyone not biased against Microsoft wasn't paying attention.
I greatly appreciate what PJ has accomplished in the battle against SCO, but I've never enjoyed reading her site as much as I thought I would, mostly because she wears her bias on her sleeve, 24x7. She believes that powerful interests game the legal system with incredible displays of chutzpah.
Apple has long been such a corporation: any previous incarnation of an invention never existed, because the previous incarnation wasn't cool. A general-purpose Apple patent claim template: Invention A of prior inventor B, but this time more cool, and with people actually willing to buy it. Apple believes that the proper domain of invention is coolness. They've been trying to beat this down our hatch for thirty years.
Amazon believes the proper domain of invention is consumer convenience, where convenience is measured by Stephen Hawking's mouse reflex after 24 hours deprived of his medications.
Microsoft believes the proper domain of invention is backward-compatible (hence irreversible) integration into the borg-ship.
None of them use the slogan "Invention is what we do." The copyright infringement suits would aground on the irreconcilable meanings and bankrupt them all.
Spoken like a born polarizer. The use of "passing a test" is also bogus, if you bother to think. A scientific test can only clear you of cheating the test is designed to detect. Metal detectors don't prove you're not carrying a gun, they just prove you're not carrying a gun made of metal. I'm sure it's not easy to procure a gun made of anything else, but if the stakes are high enough the entrepreneurial spirit will find a way.
For that matter, even if witnesses say Lance lurking in dark bathrooms and sticking his buttocks with needles, that doesn't prove he's injecting a performance enhancing drug. Many assumptions.
It's also an assumption that if he cheated to win his third tour, he cheated to win his first and second. Maybe he could win at his best without cheated, and only resorted to cheating to make up the difference when he wasn't quite at his best. Or perhaps only when one of his competitors was better than best.
When we discover that sleeping around is "performance enhancing" are we going to strip Tiger of all his tour wins?
There's no way around it: a culture of adulation around the "win at all cost" mentality involves a large amount of sweeping history under the carpet. Absolute incentive corrupts absolutely.
The real solution is less hero worship in the first place.
Short leash. (In case of emergency, brandish at Ruprecht the genital cuff.)
That's because those of us not distracted by talking on phones are taking evasive action. I can clearly tell that my situational awareness is diminished by the demands of a difficult conversation. My driving remains adequate, but much of my ability to compensate for the errors of other drivers goes out the window. I'm not anticipating three steps ahead.
I wonder if people who often talk on cell phones while driving habituate themselves to lower standards of care and attention, whether on the phone or not.
Often I spot some guy with total non-awareness of the dynamics of a parking lot blocking half a dozen cars then suddenly I realize the guy is on his phone. He's not causing accidents, but he's also sure as hell not helping people mitigate friction.
I have a few people I know well enough to respect my silences who wouldn't distract me when driving at all, on the phone or in the passenger seat. But there are also pushy people who keep you on your guard in the conversation when your guard should be elsewhere if you are behind the wheel of two tons of metal hurtling down a highway.
Once we get the driverless cars, a certain type of person will be free to treat their car as a rolling phone booth at no hazard to anyone else.
If we encourage everyone to talk on their cell phones while driving, we just might see that accident spike after all.
Lisp was one of the first computer languages and the Lisp fanatics believe that every language since was a wrong turn, so we all know we've messed up regardless of whether a Mars probe runs for 200 extra innings or Google serves a billion search responses per hour for a decade running.
The new Slashdot: A little bit of knowledge times a whopping cliche equals the bikeshed of Babylon.
I read many comments and I didn't see one addressing the main point: for the kind of person who is by nature extremely aggressive about making informed purchasing decisions viewing any advertisement (however innocuous) is a dominated outcome. It doesn't benefit the advertiser, since it doesn't influence your future purchasing behaviour, and to the degree the viewer's brain even notices it on your screen, the viewer's brain has absorbed useless and irrelevant information. Is what we put into our minds less harmless than what we put into our bodies? I wouldn't be too quick to judge.
Well, the advertiser wants everyone to view the ads anyway, even in the individual cases where the viewer won't respond. Why? They'll say ads influence people below their conscious threshold. This is true, of course. But this still doesn't profit the advertiser unless subconscious influences manifest themselves in purchasing decisions. If your purchasing style is aggressively analytic, there isn't much soil for this weed to grow.
No, the real battle is over the group of people who are presently engaged in passive consumption (with an impulsive component influenced by ad impressions) who might decide it is greener on the other side of the fence if they put their impulsive ways behind them. No ads! That would make the grass look greener, wouldn't it. So they want people who aren't influenced by ads to be subjected to ads so that people who are influenced by ads don't change their stripes.
This is similar to the game theory matrix in the tobacco wars: the tobacco industry wished to impose upon people inhaling second hand smoke to just sit there and suck it up. We receive no benefit from doing so: it smells bad, it makes our clothes smell bad, we don't get a high, and maybe it kills us. Nice deal. But to have the non-smokers sitting in the pubs sucking it up has a psychological spin-off in helping the smokers committing slow (and expensive) suicide continue to do so.
I admit there is some information conveyed to the rational consumer by an expensive ad campaign. Either A) the company really believes they have a compelling product, or B) the company's price structure builds in extremely fat margins.
I've learned that the aggregate cost of discrimination between these two signals (one negative, one positive) greatly exceeds the value of the information I ultimately obtain having gone to the trouble.
If you're the kind of person who believes that true capitalism is based on information parity in rational transactions (and you have the mental capacity to step up to the plate) there's almost no way to construct the game-theoretic matrix where not using an ad-blocker is a sane decision.
Is this a prelude to a dental inspection or a penis handshake? Either way you're requesting a little bit too much on the part of your reader.
I personally refer to this syndrome as "use case blindness".
We five-digit Hamlets give this lecture a lot to the seven-digit Horatios. That's what made Hamlet so deadly famous for procrastination: don't mess with use cases outside your ken, without pondering the consequences first.
On choosing a lap to lie in: "No, good mother, here's metal more attractive."
Always a hacker at heart.
I highly regret the 3 minutes of my life I wasted on that hand-wavy TFA. It's an important enough concept to warrant a TFA with meat on its bones.
The only business plan the truly greedy pursue:
1) obtain clout
2) milk it
The first step is 90% perspiration and 10% profit. The second step is 90% profit and 10% perspiration. Personally, I find the accumulation of clout repugnant to liberal society and I never participate in closed markets when I can avoid it. Not Microsoft then, not Apple now, not Amazon in the future. (I feel no shame on cherry-picking loss leaders when the opportunity arises, but I never sign up for the "loyalty" card that comes along with it. If the cherry is sour and only the loyalty is sweet, run run run as fast as my fingers will carry me.)
So you're content for now to trust the unsinkable nature of Amazon's price competitiveness, and of course you have you eye on the life raft should Amazon flounder on an iceberg of greed. Good luck to you when that day comes.
This would double overnight if MySQL were declared pariah non grata, which is precisely the negotiation taking place in this kind of discussion thread.
Speaking of PNG, you do recall the Unisys GIF debacle? When MySQL dies, may its tombstone read G.I.F.
You yourself might wish to read the fine print: this only applies to a memoryless process. The Sun is a lot bigger than an elephant ... or an ocean. An ocean remembers a lot.
Most of my typos tend to be whole word substitutions. I tend to catch the ones where two or three letters are jumbled. The single letter substitutions from one valid word to another with similar letter shape are the most likely to squeak through.
Thick much? It's easier by the trillion. Suppose we have a body of 1000 short stories, each of about 30 pages in length.
Using the vocabulary of source A, the imagery of source B, the structure of source C, write a five page story in the style of source D. Follow this with a two page essay on the challenges posed and the opportunities discovered in combining these sources.
1000^4. Done. For the grading system, you need to send four to six papers with the vocabulary of source A to peers intimate with source A; and likewise with the other three axes.
Or you could find peers strong in any of the six pairwise subsets of the four attributes (AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD) for grading on whether that pair of attributes is well combined. If every student is expected to be strong in 30 randomly chosen stories out of the 1000 stories in inventory to act as a peer grader, it won't be hard to find evaluation peers for any pair of stories in a well-subscribed online course (concurrent enrolment of 10,000 students).
One of those can be from your personal base of 30 stories. The other three attributes can be stories you haven't been assigned before. You'd only have to read 90 pages per assignment.
That took me longer to type than to figure out.
"Most" of the bankers who are "good people" are hanging around enabling those who aren't by not demanding effective change at the levels that matter (governance, regulatory oversight).
Apologies aren't good enough. Point us to some real change that bites the psychopaths who rise to the top.
Suggestions: smaller institutions, less opaque financial instruments, fewer ex-bankers crossing the floor to work inside government.
I don't see why any person who has held an executive position at Goldman Sachs should be welcomed into any U.S. government agency with real power. At best they should be allowed to work inside some toothless intermediary and reporting to other agencies with no personal loyalties to Goldman whatsoever.
If the argument is "we need these people because no-one else understands how the system works" then Plan A is to simplify the system with extreme prejudice.
Never in all my days have I seen two sentences hitched together with less in common. Agreement is reached ... by latching onto calcified metaphors of conflict.
I'm encouraged to see people commenting on slashdot's decline as they slam the door on the way out.
I never came here to juggle giant slabs of bullshit for amusement and page views.
Hint to slashdot editorship: We can do that anywhere, so what's your value-add at the end of the day? Legacy appeal among the slow to adapt?
Careful when you call a Vonnegut device implausible. As I recall he lifted the notion of undiscovered crystalline conformations of a common chemical from a working scientist, then gave it the ocean make-over. The implausible part is that the substance is water. Wasn't it just in the last month that a new conformation of carbon made the news with diamond-like properties? I recall reading that the new diamond is hard enough to scratch the old diamond.
No-one I know of regards The Sirens of Titan as lesser than Cat's Cradle and generally I would say opinion is the other way around among Vonnegut fans. Vonnegut as I recall grades his own works in Palm Sunday and I'm fairly sure he gave Sirens the same A he gave to Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse. He gives a much lower mark to Breakfast of Champions, but it was an early Vonnegut for me and I'm strangely nostalgic for it.
Cat's Cradle isn't really about its SF premise anyway. Every chapter has a kind of trick to it, which Vonnegut himself described as an effort to get a mousetrap to snap just the right way. It was never my favorite, for all that.
Does the subject line ring a bell for you? Why bother going back and getting the story right after we've already buried him with a tribute at a football game, with a military fly-by, against his own wishes, against the wishes of the men he fought beside, and against the wishes of his own family—if you count their concerted objections to the halo of North Korean symbolism.
It's the other way around, buster. The technology is here to permit me to organize my work flow however I see fit, without constraining myself to whatever it is that fits into your small mind.
Long ago I've seen people told "there's no reason to put 300 files into one file folder". Yes, indeed, this would cause performance problems on some systems during the death throes of DOS.
There's no reason a modern computer should have problems with 300 tabs any more than a DOS computer should have problems with 300 files in one directory. But every large DOS application included its own custom "file management" screen (you couldn't task switch to a finder), and often these screens performed some kind of sort, and often the coding was so horrific that keyboard response was N^2 in the number of files in the folder viewed.
FF didn't pull the horrific coding stunt, but they did pull off the horrific API stunt, where extension authors had a hell of a time identifying lapses in their API conformance. Apparently this is somewhat fixed now circa FF 15.
Good grief, sonny boy, if you come around these parts telling me to size my tasks to the incompetence of the platform provider, I'll give you a kick in the pants with a wind-up all the way back to the stone age, passing the Concorde mid-swing.
Makini Brice, I know you can write better ... if only someone would deliver the sad news: you have no brain, or your choose not to use it. You can't even come up with "bell the cat" or "free rider problem" while you pussy-foot through the bullshit slough? Not even the five-bell go-to cliches handed out as black-tie MSM fig leaves of faux decorum by the maitre-d' at the Michelin-rated nudist resort? Shame on you.
I've belled more than my fair share of cats in my day, including some with a history of emergency admission into psychiatric care. What happens when you offer a concerned a thoughtful glimmer of reality to a person who knows, deep down, that their own reality is a little thin on the ground? In simple terms, the person usually goes binary: either you have to sign up to provide the reality augmentation service 24x7 or they want you to fuck off as promptly as possible. These people crave little windows onto a stable system of reality like Heroin junkies. They aren't in it for a once-a-week booster shot. All or nothing, not much in between.
I've done this, too, at the other end of the spectrum: with fantastically sane and competent people who might have some bright ember of self-destruction that turns a small removable discontinuity--a pinhole of infernal blackness--into a swollen vortex of life sucking creosote-toffee. In this world, as you approach the center, the shortest distance between any two points is a spiral of infinite length. You kind of have to make a fire break by cutting down a lot of healthy trees and tossing them into the inferno, which will surely curl your toe hairs in response to the insult. Bonus: if you don't flinch, they come back for more. You have to stand there in the cross-hairs of the flame thrower attached to a gasoline pumper truck and go: let's get rid of the knife. What knife? The folded knife in your back pocket. What pocket? The back pocket that prevents your ass from bursting right through those insanely tight jeans. When dealing with the flame-thrower that burns like hell, you need to bear in mind that even a small penknife can cut your balls off. The trick is to fight over the knife and not the flame thrower. This is difficult and fraught--you need to dial your asbestos underwear up to 11 and keep it there for weeks at a time. At the end of the day your affection is carried off to the burn ward with 3rd degree burns over 80% of its body, but sometimes after it all blows over, a very nice memorial wreath is erected in your honour at Vimy Ridge.
I'm a bit of a writer at heart, so I sometimes dabble in the occult arts where "what's in it for me" has no answer a sane person would recognize. A sane person laughs at water-cooler Joe's latest bad joke and gets the hell out.
Stupid physicists. The given information (which particles are entangled) is a thermodynamic asset. I guess they decided not to count this, since there isn't an experiment (which I'm aware of) to test particles for entanglement. I think you have to know they were stamped out with the same vintage code.
This whole thing smells more of violating presumptive accounting categories than real physics. But then I'm an even stupider arm-chair physicist.
And your competitors can invent extra TVs in all your extra, unoccupied rooms, and when they do, your ad bill escalates. These scenarios are so identical you need a scanning electron microscope with the gain set to 11 just to tell them apart. Apparently.
Homosexuality wasn't illegal ya stupid cocksucking hayseed, it was homosexual acts that were illegal. Oops, did I cross the line with my word selection there? Sorry about that.
I was reading Borges' The Immortal the other night.
I loved the old McCarthy update to the Socratic method "have you ever ..." as if single-instance statistics define everything you need to know about a person. "Have you ever called someone a cocksucker?" Why, yes. Yes I have. Once in 40 years, as a segue to Borges, ya stupid cocksucker. And YOU know who I mean.
God forbid anyone would foolishly deprive themselves of the opportunity to blow $1500 on a drive recovery from the grand masters of service fee obfuscation.
I recovered one drive using the freezer method. Another one didn't come back to life and we did end up paying the extravagant recovery fee, which succeeded despite my freezer attempt.
Sad story: I identified the recovered drive before it failed as a catastrophe waiting to happen based on a combination of age/uniqueness of contents. It died seat-belted upright into the back seat of a plush sedan in a mild-mannered 15m drive en route to a site with full network backup facilities. In this case, the mountain should have gone to Mohamed. This was circa 2000 where high capacity external USB drives were not exactly a dime a dozen, and people still thought time was money ("have mountain will travel" is so post-recession 2009).
PS. Don't ever eat anything contaminated with Jerry Germ. Really.
PPS. Jerry Germ was my first childhood experience with post-war paranoia, disguised as Hun-hating Hand-i-Wipe brain washing for young children.
I was there. Let me [w]rack my brains all the way back to PC DOS. Cool. Microsoft. Used in the same sentence. [Petrifies into the shape of Rodin's Thinker] Nope, not happening. The closest they ever came in my books was acquiring the creative output of Ensemble Studios. I really liked Age of Empires. I had a friend who liked Microsoft Flight Simulator. The word "cool" might have been used.
"Sucks less". Sure, I used that phrase a lot--practically wore it out in my enthusiasm for the giant wake of crud displacement by the great Borg ship Microsoft. (Nothing makes a GUI-centric OS less cool than the lack of demand-paged virtual memory under the hood.)
The same thing is also happening among the 1% in America. America used to be proud of how it broke away from the British class system. Now anyone with money and power can't find the slightest flaw in the ways of their ancestral oppressors.