That's assuming that the camera wouldn't error out for some reason if it can't detect anything other than the electrical tape. From the sounds of the presentation they gave, the microphone would have to be on when the Xbox One is plugged in for the voice activated âoeinstant onâ to work correctly so I'm assuming that it's always listening.
The bigger question would be if it can record anything or if there is a backdoor to access it.
This is a #firstworldproblem, those who are worrying if they will find food tomorrow have no time to worry about existential pain and philosophy.
I'm going to have to disagree with that one, depending upon who you talk to, one of the arguments why religion was developed was to explain to people why their lives sucked. Hunter-gather societies where you spend a fair amount time looking for food still gave rise to philosophical explanations for the big "Why?" question. Ultimately, the evidence seems to be that if you are alive long enough eventually you are going to ask yourself the question.
What exactly are they going to use the money for anyway? As near as I can tell they don't have a full time core development team and most of the donations are used to sponsor sending developers to the conference. If you are going to start working on major changes and new feature sets you are going to need full time staff to work on things which would require full staff.
Maybe those creative professionals should contribute to the development of gimp by coding and contributing the features that they want? Every feature gimp has is a feature that someone decided they wanted and then wrote and shared. That is how it works. The graphic designers are just to lazy to do it themselves, instead they demand that you do it for them for free.
As the other have already said, that argument doesn't work when the target audience for an application are people that don't know how to write software. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason why some of the software hasn't even been written into the Gimp is because the algorithms involved are extremely difficult and more often than not have patent protection.
In all honestly, the only way there is going to be a good competitor to Adobe is if someone with some fairly deep pockets comes along and sets up to specifically develop a competitor to Adobe since the code involved is hard and time consuming to write and test.
I guess it depends upon how much photo manipulation and post-processing your wife and son are doing but Adobe Lightroom has pretty much all of the digital darkroom tools that you would want and has a couple neat features that are much easier to use in Lightroom than they are in Photoshop. In all honesty, outside of a occasionally having to remove logos from images for stock photography, I haven't found much need for anything more advanced myself.
Such things are always handled much more efficiently by the private market. If we had single payer, every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be going to the doctor every time they got a sniffle and the bill would be Trillions. If you are successful and smart you will go to the doctor only when you need to, and you will be able to pay with cash you have earned previously. I maintain my own insurance and everyone else should do the same.
Is this opposed to the current system where everyone without insurance goes to the ER when they have a sniffle instead? Remember that ERs cannot deny service in the United States due to lack of insurance so tax dollars are paying for them now as it is. If people went to their primary care physician instead meaning better service at the ER when people really need the ER.
Exactly as I said but you seemed to want to argue against it. You argued that there was a population makeup where the outliers had a significant impact, but you cannot actually produce one.
You keep ignoring when I'm talking about standard deviation which leads me to believe that you don't know what it is or why it is important to this conversation. This also proves that there is no point in arguing with you. So fine, you win, I bow to your superior intellect and clearly doing the simple mean is the best way to approach this problem and the lack of raw data or standard deviation information clearly has no use.
It would take 7 packages each with 37 days extra (the largest extra delay observed) to explain the 3 days average extra shipping time..
First, I'm not saying that the vast majority of the packages where delivered on time as it is really hard to get a three day difference like that without a significant quantity of packages being delivered after the plain taped packages. Also, considering that the authors didn't mention that there were a number of packages arriving outside of that three day delivery window, I'm assuming that most of them arrived within that three day delivery window. Thus, the following would work to give you an average of 3.025 days:
1 Day - 5
2 Days - 42
3 Days - 12
4 Days - 20
37 Days - 1
However, that also gives a standard deviation of 3.933 days which implies that the outlier is having a significant impact upon the results. Removing that outlier (dropping it completely) gives us an average of 2.59 days and a standard deviation of 0.93 which is in line with what we would expect. Granted this would still clearly indicate that there is a discrepancy from the plain tape package.
You do know that outliers are samples that are far from the population, right? If there are 7 or more out of 80 or 89, then they are not far from the population. At that point they are representative of the population.
Yes, I know that and I believe that I just demonstrated why it is important to know the standard deviation when discussing this data as well.
At what point do you admit that you arent actually educated enough to have been equipped with the skills necessary to make reasonable arguments?
Likely around the same time that you admit that I might actually know what I'm talking about, although I if I mention the fact that I work with hidden Markov models will you at least give me the benefit of the doubt that I've had a couple math courses in my day?
Well, considering that you can't ship from an international destination into the United States without having an attached customs form, yes, I'm assuming that they attached declarations to the packages. You have to have a customs declaration when shipping internationally - full stop, no arguments. However, different countries allow you to attach different styles of forms and when shipping via USPS there is actually a version that has to TO and FROM fields as part of the form so that you can quickly print all of them out the same way you print out a bunch of mailing labels.
Looking at their page again that might be what they are doing and they just used and undersized label I the mockup, but still, these things matter when trying to figure out why things get lost in the mail.
I remember reading or hearing something about placebos awhile back where they were discussing that the efficacy of placebo was apparently directly tied to the amount of time that was spent preparing the placebo for use by the patient. They actually tied this back to homeopathy and why it has persisted for as long as it has by pointing out that if you go to practitioner that they are going to sit with you for a couple minutes, get to know your problem, and then prepare the tincture for you to take. The argument was that all of this reinforces the placebo effect with the patient (i.e. "I want to be better, they want me to be better, this treatment will make me better") which could lead to better outcomes than getting a quick script from a harried doctor along with a bill which might not have the same mental impact as the approach that homeopathy takes.
TFA has a picture of the packages, they were both the same box except one had Atheist-branded packing tape, and the other didn't.If those are the exact packages then they never would have been accpeted for post - there are no customs forms on them. That's why I'm curious to see an exact package.
No. Thats not how math works. Even using only 80 packages, the most impact on the average delay that the 37 day delay for a single package could cause is 0.46 days per package.
Actually, the reporting said that the raw numbers were for 3.03 so if it were not for that outlier the actual average would be 2.57 days which is right on that cusp were another outlier could have thrown things off.
Which brings things back around to my original point: without the original data or at least a reported standard deviation we are grasping at straws. If they came back a report of 3.03 days with a standard deviation of 0.2 then we can safely conclude that the outlier didn't have much of an impact. However, if the standard deviation was 1 or more then it would have had a significant impact and would indicate skewed results.
This is the problem with the current generation right here. You don't even have a basic math foundation in which to filter yourselves from making extremely stupid comments.
Stupid question, but how would you even know what generation I belong to let alone what my mathmatical background is?
So what's your theory on why the Athiest-branded packages were lost or delayed significantly more than the non-branded packages? If everything is chaotic and random then wouldn't they be delayed and lost in statistically equal numbers? I can understand any pair of packages arriving within one day of each other, but an average of 3 days longer? 10 times more likely to not arrive at all? That doesn't sound very random or chaotic to me, it sounds deterministic.
Actually, now that I've had some time to think about it, I'm inclined to wonder if it wasn't the USPS that held things but US Customs instead when the packages were brought into the country. The USPS is too busy and too automated for the most part for them to be grabbing batches of packages because of the labeling. Customs on the other hand would also explain the three day delay since someone might be opening things up to inspect them.
We really need to see what the packages looked like and the tracking information for them.
As you would know if you were actually paying attention and not simply complaining for the sake of complaint, they performed similar studies against other postal systems.
First, I did read the article, well, infographic in this case, and I can't seem to find any links for where they did similar studies. Can you supply those links because I would like to read those studies as well. Furthermore, my point on how do we know that the delayes or lost packages being due to USPS is still valid. Someone in Deutsche Post could be to blame, or even someone else within in the UPU since we don't know things were routed. All we definitively know is that at somepoint between when the packages were mailed and when they were expected to arrive, something happended which may or may not have involved human intervention. If they were shippped surface they could have litteraly have fell off a boat which a bunch of other mail.
With regards to your comments on peer review, quit acting so pedantic.
We're not talking about peer review, just the study. Peer reviewers must decide if the appearance of a conflict of interest is indicative of an actual one.
What we are engaging in right now is peer review! Just because we aren't looking at the study to decide whether or not it should be published doesn't mean it isn't peer review. It also doesn't matter if the original author is present or not, the study is being reviewed and judged based upon its merits or lack there of. As everyone has noted, there is a dearth of detailed data on how they arrived at their conclusions in addition to the fact that the authors need to ensure that their perceived bias doesn't show. For that matter, how do they know that USPS is to blame and not Deutsche Post or someone else involved in the delivery?
Simple! The bins fill up from time to time and need to be exchanged for an empty one. Also, there are sometimes more than one bin that things can be thrown into for the same destination just due to how the sorting is setup. Also, which is a bit clearer from this video if things need to be hand sorted then it doesn't just dump everything on the same person but balances things out so that each person that is doing the sorting gets a single peice of mail before it cycles back around to the first person. So two packages on the convyerbelt are going to go to two different people which means two different bins and so forth.
That's only at the origin office though. Unless they were mailed from a hub the bins are going to go to a hub where they are going to be dumped and sorted again into new bins and even then when the packages arrive at USPS they are going to be stored again. Remember, the odds of the packages sitting in the same bin for the entire trip are effectively zero unless you are paying lots of money to ship things on a pallet.
You clearly don't know what you are talking about.
37.0 D / 89.0 P = 0.4157 D / P
Another way to look at it that avoids your silly mistake: 89 packages each with 3 days average delay time is 89.0 P * 3.0 D = 267 DP. Now compare 37 to 267. Does it still look 'massive' as you so ignorantly claim?
Wait, why are you using 89 packages when nine of them were lost in the mail? That means we don't have delivery time information for them and should be using 80 packages for the math. Also, without having the raw data that they used the best we can conclude is that the 37 days may have had a significant difference on the total, but the extent is currently unknowable.
Coward. Yes, yes it is. Because the appearance of conflict of interest is irrelevant. Only an actual conflict is relevant. It is in their own best interest to be scrupulous if they are attempting to call someone else out for unscrupulous behavior.
Actually, when it comes to peer review, the appearance of conflict of interest is in fact extremely relevant and you need to be especially careful to make sure you guard against confirmation bias and are extremely clear in how you arrived at your conclusions. Lets put if this way, would you trust a company that puts out a study saying that their product is better than a competitors?
How is it that two packages mailed on the same day and sent to the same address suffer different weather conditions?
If you go behind the counter at a post office you will see that there are a number of bins that letters and packages are placed into. Similar bins appear throughout the entire process. The packages might travel together for awhile but each time they are sorted and placed into bins there is a chance they will be separated. As soon those packages are separated there is a chance that they will travel on different trucks, planes, or just not be sorted before close of business. Once that happens all bets are off that they will get to the same place at the same time.
No, the problem atheists suffer from is that they are a minority. If a minority insists on not conforming to the majority's views, it's considered obnoxious.
No, the problem is that brining up something that people don't care about (e.g. wrong place, wrong time, or they just don't care) is going to be considered obnoxious. Try bringing up something that people don't care about (i.e. the dream you had last night at work) and see what the general opinion is. Odds are pretty good that people will find it obnoxious. The same applies for the vast majority of situations where people want to bring up religion or their lack their of.
Maybe, but from the looks of the boxes in the article it looks like you can't tell what is in the box per se, but there is a very clear "Atheist" label on it.
Their evidence suggesting the USPS discriminates against atheism is a hell of a lot stronger than any religion has for the existence of their Gods.
Depends on what tracking data looks like for the packages. If all of them are routed through the same hub then I'd say the evidence is that there is one person at USPS that discriminates against atheism as opposed to an organization of something like 574,000 employees. With that many people the odds are pretty good that a couple of them are atheists as well.
Two things though: the first is that the USPS uses a lot of automatic sorting these days so there aren't as many people that see the packages and that is the second point, the odds are very good that these all went through the same hub when they arrived in the US. I'd say the odds are very good that this isn't some systemic "The USPS has a problem with atheists" but more of a "Hey, someone at USPS has a problem with atheists." Without seeing the raw tracking data though, it's really hard to know what is going on.
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That's assuming that the camera wouldn't error out for some reason if it can't detect anything other than the electrical tape. From the sounds of the presentation they gave, the microphone would have to be on when the Xbox One is plugged in for the voice activated âoeinstant onâ to work correctly so I'm assuming that it's always listening.
The bigger question would be if it can record anything or if there is a backdoor to access it.
This is a #firstworldproblem, those who are worrying if they will find food tomorrow have no time to worry about existential pain and philosophy.
I'm going to have to disagree with that one, depending upon who you talk to, one of the arguments why religion was developed was to explain to people why their lives sucked. Hunter-gather societies where you spend a fair amount time looking for food still gave rise to philosophical explanations for the big "Why?" question. Ultimately, the evidence seems to be that if you are alive long enough eventually you are going to ask yourself the question.
What exactly are they going to use the money for anyway? As near as I can tell they don't have a full time core development team and most of the donations are used to sponsor sending developers to the conference. If you are going to start working on major changes and new feature sets you are going to need full time staff to work on things which would require full staff.
Maybe those creative professionals should contribute to the development of gimp by coding and contributing the features that they want? Every feature gimp has is a feature that someone decided they wanted and then wrote and shared. That is how it works. The graphic designers are just to lazy to do it themselves, instead they demand that you do it for them for free.
As the other have already said, that argument doesn't work when the target audience for an application are people that don't know how to write software. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason why some of the software hasn't even been written into the Gimp is because the algorithms involved are extremely difficult and more often than not have patent protection.
In all honestly, the only way there is going to be a good competitor to Adobe is if someone with some fairly deep pockets comes along and sets up to specifically develop a competitor to Adobe since the code involved is hard and time consuming to write and test.
I guess it depends upon how much photo manipulation and post-processing your wife and son are doing but Adobe Lightroom has pretty much all of the digital darkroom tools that you would want and has a couple neat features that are much easier to use in Lightroom than they are in Photoshop. In all honesty, outside of a occasionally having to remove logos from images for stock photography, I haven't found much need for anything more advanced myself.
Such things are always handled much more efficiently by the private market. If we had single payer, every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be going to the doctor every time they got a sniffle and the bill would be Trillions. If you are successful and smart you will go to the doctor only when you need to, and you will be able to pay with cash you have earned previously. I maintain my own insurance and everyone else should do the same.
Is this opposed to the current system where everyone without insurance goes to the ER when they have a sniffle instead? Remember that ERs cannot deny service in the United States due to lack of insurance so tax dollars are paying for them now as it is. If people went to their primary care physician instead meaning better service at the ER when people really need the ER.
Off hand I'm pretty sure those two guys are some sort of police that are trying to keep a low profile.
Exactly as I said but you seemed to want to argue against it. You argued that there was a population makeup where the outliers had a significant impact, but you cannot actually produce one.
You keep ignoring when I'm talking about standard deviation which leads me to believe that you don't know what it is or why it is important to this conversation. This also proves that there is no point in arguing with you. So fine, you win, I bow to your superior intellect and clearly doing the simple mean is the best way to approach this problem and the lack of raw data or standard deviation information clearly has no use.
It would take 7 packages each with 37 days extra (the largest extra delay observed) to explain the 3 days average extra shipping time..
First, I'm not saying that the vast majority of the packages where delivered on time as it is really hard to get a three day difference like that without a significant quantity of packages being delivered after the plain taped packages. Also, considering that the authors didn't mention that there were a number of packages arriving outside of that three day delivery window, I'm assuming that most of them arrived within that three day delivery window. Thus, the following would work to give you an average of 3.025 days:
1 Day - 5
2 Days - 42
3 Days - 12
4 Days - 20
37 Days - 1
However, that also gives a standard deviation of 3.933 days which implies that the outlier is having a significant impact upon the results. Removing that outlier (dropping it completely) gives us an average of 2.59 days and a standard deviation of 0.93 which is in line with what we would expect. Granted this would still clearly indicate that there is a discrepancy from the plain tape package.
You do know that outliers are samples that are far from the population, right? If there are 7 or more out of 80 or 89, then they are not far from the population. At that point they are representative of the population.
Yes, I know that and I believe that I just demonstrated why it is important to know the standard deviation when discussing this data as well.
At what point do you admit that you arent actually educated enough to have been equipped with the skills necessary to make reasonable arguments?
Likely around the same time that you admit that I might actually know what I'm talking about, although I if I mention the fact that I work with hidden Markov models will you at least give me the benefit of the doubt that I've had a couple math courses in my day?
Well, considering that you can't ship from an international destination into the United States without having an attached customs form, yes, I'm assuming that they attached declarations to the packages. You have to have a customs declaration when shipping internationally - full stop, no arguments. However, different countries allow you to attach different styles of forms and when shipping via USPS there is actually a version that has to TO and FROM fields as part of the form so that you can quickly print all of them out the same way you print out a bunch of mailing labels.
Looking at their page again that might be what they are doing and they just used and undersized label I the mockup, but still, these things matter when trying to figure out why things get lost in the mail.
I remember reading or hearing something about placebos awhile back where they were discussing that the efficacy of placebo was apparently directly tied to the amount of time that was spent preparing the placebo for use by the patient. They actually tied this back to homeopathy and why it has persisted for as long as it has by pointing out that if you go to practitioner that they are going to sit with you for a couple minutes, get to know your problem, and then prepare the tincture for you to take. The argument was that all of this reinforces the placebo effect with the patient (i.e. "I want to be better, they want me to be better, this treatment will make me better") which could lead to better outcomes than getting a quick script from a harried doctor along with a bill which might not have the same mental impact as the approach that homeopathy takes.
TFA has a picture of the packages, they were both the same box except one had Atheist-branded packing tape, and the other didn't.If those are the exact packages then they never would have been accpeted for post - there are no customs forms on them. That's why I'm curious to see an exact package.
No. Thats not how math works. Even using only 80 packages, the most impact on the average delay that the 37 day delay for a single package could cause is 0.46 days per package.
Actually, the reporting said that the raw numbers were for 3.03 so if it were not for that outlier the actual average would be 2.57 days which is right on that cusp were another outlier could have thrown things off.
Which brings things back around to my original point: without the original data or at least a reported standard deviation we are grasping at straws. If they came back a report of 3.03 days with a standard deviation of 0.2 then we can safely conclude that the outlier didn't have much of an impact. However, if the standard deviation was 1 or more then it would have had a significant impact and would indicate skewed results.
This is the problem with the current generation right here. You don't even have a basic math foundation in which to filter yourselves from making extremely stupid comments.
Stupid question, but how would you even know what generation I belong to let alone what my mathmatical background is?
So what's your theory on why the Athiest-branded packages were lost or delayed significantly more than the non-branded packages? If everything is chaotic and random then wouldn't they be delayed and lost in statistically equal numbers? I can understand any pair of packages arriving within one day of each other, but an average of 3 days longer? 10 times more likely to not arrive at all? That doesn't sound very random or chaotic to me, it sounds deterministic.
Actually, now that I've had some time to think about it, I'm inclined to wonder if it wasn't the USPS that held things but US Customs instead when the packages were brought into the country. The USPS is too busy and too automated for the most part for them to be grabbing batches of packages because of the labeling. Customs on the other hand would also explain the three day delay since someone might be opening things up to inspect them.
We really need to see what the packages looked like and the tracking information for them.
As you would know if you were actually paying attention and not simply complaining for the sake of complaint, they performed similar studies against other postal systems.
First, I did read the article, well, infographic in this case, and I can't seem to find any links for where they did similar studies. Can you supply those links because I would like to read those studies as well. Furthermore, my point on how do we know that the delayes or lost packages being due to USPS is still valid. Someone in Deutsche Post could be to blame, or even someone else within in the UPU since we don't know things were routed. All we definitively know is that at somepoint between when the packages were mailed and when they were expected to arrive, something happended which may or may not have involved human intervention. If they were shippped surface they could have litteraly have fell off a boat which a bunch of other mail.
With regards to your comments on peer review, quit acting so pedantic.
We're not talking about peer review, just the study. Peer reviewers must decide if the appearance of a conflict of interest is indicative of an actual one.
What we are engaging in right now is peer review! Just because we aren't looking at the study to decide whether or not it should be published doesn't mean it isn't peer review. It also doesn't matter if the original author is present or not, the study is being reviewed and judged based upon its merits or lack there of. As everyone has noted, there is a dearth of detailed data on how they arrived at their conclusions in addition to the fact that the authors need to ensure that their perceived bias doesn't show. For that matter, how do they know that USPS is to blame and not Deutsche Post or someone else involved in the delivery?
Simple! The bins fill up from time to time and need to be exchanged for an empty one. Also, there are sometimes more than one bin that things can be thrown into for the same destination just due to how the sorting is setup. Also, which is a bit clearer from this video if things need to be hand sorted then it doesn't just dump everything on the same person but balances things out so that each person that is doing the sorting gets a single peice of mail before it cycles back around to the first person. So two packages on the convyerbelt are going to go to two different people which means two different bins and so forth.
That's only at the origin office though. Unless they were mailed from a hub the bins are going to go to a hub where they are going to be dumped and sorted again into new bins and even then when the packages arrive at USPS they are going to be stored again. Remember, the odds of the packages sitting in the same bin for the entire trip are effectively zero unless you are paying lots of money to ship things on a pallet.
You clearly don't know what you are talking about.
37.0 D / 89.0 P = 0.4157 D / P
Another way to look at it that avoids your silly mistake: 89 packages each with 3 days average delay time is 89.0 P * 3.0 D = 267 DP. Now compare 37 to 267. Does it still look 'massive' as you so ignorantly claim?
Wait, why are you using 89 packages when nine of them were lost in the mail? That means we don't have delivery time information for them and should be using 80 packages for the math. Also, without having the raw data that they used the best we can conclude is that the 37 days may have had a significant difference on the total, but the extent is currently unknowable.
Coward. Yes, yes it is. Because the appearance of conflict of interest is irrelevant. Only an actual conflict is relevant. It is in their own best interest to be scrupulous if they are attempting to call someone else out for unscrupulous behavior.
Actually, when it comes to peer review, the appearance of conflict of interest is in fact extremely relevant and you need to be especially careful to make sure you guard against confirmation bias and are extremely clear in how you arrived at your conclusions. Lets put if this way, would you trust a company that puts out a study saying that their product is better than a competitors?
How is it that two packages mailed on the same day and sent to the same address suffer different weather conditions?
If you go behind the counter at a post office you will see that there are a number of bins that letters and packages are placed into. Similar bins appear throughout the entire process. The packages might travel together for awhile but each time they are sorted and placed into bins there is a chance they will be separated. As soon those packages are separated there is a chance that they will travel on different trucks, planes, or just not be sorted before close of business. Once that happens all bets are off that they will get to the same place at the same time.
No, the problem atheists suffer from is that they are a minority. If a minority insists on not conforming to the majority's views, it's considered obnoxious.
No, the problem is that brining up something that people don't care about (e.g. wrong place, wrong time, or they just don't care) is going to be considered obnoxious. Try bringing up something that people don't care about (i.e. the dream you had last night at work) and see what the general opinion is. Odds are pretty good that people will find it obnoxious. The same applies for the vast majority of situations where people want to bring up religion or their lack their of.
Maybe, but from the looks of the boxes in the article it looks like you can't tell what is in the box per se, but there is a very clear "Atheist" label on it.
Their evidence suggesting the USPS discriminates against atheism is a hell of a lot stronger than any religion has for the existence of their Gods.
Depends on what tracking data looks like for the packages. If all of them are routed through the same hub then I'd say the evidence is that there is one person at USPS that discriminates against atheism as opposed to an organization of something like 574,000 employees. With that many people the odds are pretty good that a couple of them are atheists as well.
Two things though: the first is that the USPS uses a lot of automatic sorting these days so there aren't as many people that see the packages and that is the second point, the odds are very good that these all went through the same hub when they arrived in the US. I'd say the odds are very good that this isn't some systemic "The USPS has a problem with atheists" but more of a "Hey, someone at USPS has a problem with atheists." Without seeing the raw tracking data though, it's really hard to know what is going on.