Haselton needs an article about basic statistics. The 95% confidence interval on the difference between the two proportions is 6% +/- 17%, i.e. the range from about -11% to +23%. This (a) demonstrates that the sample is indeed underpowered to distinguish the sort of effect sizes that Haselton appears to be interested in, and (b) demonstrates that a +20% difference in proportion, contrary to Haselton's assertion, absolutely falls within the range of true values that can't be ruled out at a standard level of statistical confidence given the outcome of this experiment.
see http://www.kean.edu/~fosborne/bstat/06d2pop.html for the basic statistics.
Unfortunately I don't have the superior powers of the autistic mind to catalog and recollect all this detail about arcane topics, be they movie producers or minor bugs in cellphone software.
Recently I met a gentleman whose profession was gathering up shopping carts in the supermarket parking lot, and he treated me to an extended discourse about the relative merits of the producers of the different Muppet movies. I recognized the classic signs of an autism spectrum disorder ("For example, a person with AS may engage in a one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic, while misunderstanding or not recognizing the listener's feelings or reactions, such as a wish to change the topic of talk or end the interaction."), and for some reason, my thoughts turned to our old friend, Bennett Haselton.
One thing that does it (nexus 4/chrome) is a "fling" quickly followed by a touch. Normally the second gesture "catches" the inertial scroll and stops it, but in the slashdot mobile site it tends to be registered as a touch on whatever was scrolling past the finger. I think the same thing sometimes happens for two flings in a row (when it seemed like the first didnt register, but it was just laggy) or a fast fling followed by a touch & hold or slow drag.
Sam Wang is a professor of neurobiology, not statistics. Also, the article does not refer to his predictions but to those of Nate Silver, who predicts only an 86% chance of Obama winning, notwithstanding the incorrect calculations using his data in the random anonymous script linked to the story.
The 538 website publishes the marginal probabilities of each state's outcome. The random anonymous script that is linked in this story just takes the product of these to compute the joint probability of Obama winning a particular set of states. This is of course a mistake. The probability that Obama wins Pennsylvania and Ohio is not the product of the probability that he wins each state separately, unless those two events are statistically independent. Of course, in reality and in the 538 model, they are not -- if Obama loses Pennsylvania he is also more likely to lose Ohio. I think this mainly accounts for the difference between the 538 prediction and the "prediction" of the random anonymous crap that the story links.
Admittedly I was trying to do email using pine/ssh and it probably would have been more bearable if I had been using a caching IMAP client rather than an interactive shell one. But not all that much better I think. And no, browsing the web didn't work for me at all. As I said, the connection seemed to be going up and down for minutes at a time, and when it was routing at all it was really too slow to even load a webpage.
Those prices might be bearable if the service worked. The real problem was that it didn't. I used it on Lufthansa. It was the worst laggy modem-speed mess, totally unusable. If you're paying by the hour for something, it's pretty infuriating when it stops working completely for five minutes at a time.
I suspect the real reason they weren't doing business was because of the performance, not the price.
I have no problem with giving a URL link as a reward for posting a story. But they should all be marked nofollow -- whether from abusers or not. Regular people don't care about pagerank, but it is clearly what motivates the spammers and abuse. So it's a simple solution, keeps CT's basic quid pro quo scheme but eliminates the incentive for abuse.
Nothing prevents content producers from protecting their creations in a free market. I'd say you have a good argument up to 1995 or so, but with the Internet, content producers can completely control their own content with zero laws. All they have to do is create stronger encryption standards, get together and make hardware that follows it, and they're there. That's what they're doing here. I am completely fine with content creators doing this -- I don't believe in copyright so I don't believe in fair use.
All fine and good, except only half the project is content producers banding together to create stronger technical protections and hardware to enforce it. The problematic half is them banding together to pressure for the passage of laws mandating that every TV contain these technologies, criminalizing hacking them etc etc. So the libertarian "let the market decide if it wants DRM" dream is, well, a dream.
I don't believe in copyright either, but, due to its legal side, DRM is like copyright only worse. You may not believe in fair use, but copyright with fair use is less repugnant than copyright without it.
See the thing about phones in the US that you don't understand is that for the most part, they don't have SIM cards. I know it sounds crazy. So you can't just swap your service between phones, or your phone between services. The US doesn't have a single cellphone standard like GSM -- the providers all use different and incompatible (and mostly lousy) technologies. Only very recently is GSM service available (on frequencies nonstandard in the rest of the world) from one (or two?) providers.
I moved from the US to the UK, and while I hate a lot of things here (like the royal family), one thing that's clearly better is the technology environment, presumably due to better regulation. People in the US have no idea how convenient is the combination of a single cellular standard with things like pay-as-you-go contracts -- so everyone has backup phones and phones for houseguests, and can swap the handsets between services at will. Even upgrading your handset in the US is a hassle -- it involves a lot of waiting on hold to talk to someone at your carrier and waiting hours for the change to be recognized by the system, and they usually charge you a big fee for the privilege. DSL and digital terrestrial TV are similarly way more flexible, competitive, standardized and useful here than in the US.
Paranoid is really only half of it; it's part of this exaggerated and self-aggrandizing worldview in which he stars as a sort of gun-toting messiah figure who is unfairly punished for his vast contributions to mankind by getting periodically nailed to a cross.
Maybe he was not drunk but forgot to take his haldol.
What if the next version of WMA encryption were as secure as AES? It's certainly not likely, but I wouldn't say it's impossible either. I understand that there are fundamental differences between DRM and plain encryption, but the point is that uncrackable systems are possible.
This is nonsense. Encryption systems may be practically uncrackable. Encryption systems that have to decrypt the "protected" contents for you so that you can listen to them will never be in the least bit secure. If you can hear it you can record it. There is no getting around this. The entire idea of DRM is, on the face of it, futile.
You can also switch allegiances (at least from light to dark) quite near the end so you can see both endings without playing all the way through twice. Is the rest of the game all that different? It looked like the dark side path was the same with more fighting.
This is an extremely important point. I have a (maxi) ipod, which I love, but it is totally inappropriate for jogging. (It runs for 15 minutes till the buffer drains and then crashes, and I have tried belt clips, arm bands, holding it in my hand.) My old 32MB 1st gen rio is preferable for running.
I think exercising (well, that and extremely low-end cheaper toy players) is basically the only market for flash-based players. They have the advantage of no moving parts, and their main disadvantage (lousy capacity) is irrelevant in this context: who exercises for longer than a couple hours?
From this perspective, the mini ipod is the worst of both worlds. It has relatively small capacity, but due to the moving parts it is inappropriate for exercising.
I can't believe all of these Apple apologists. The point is, the press has been selling the iTunes music store as god's gift to music retailing, the legitimate alternative to free music downloading, with DRM so transparent and unrestrictive that you wont even know it's there.
But as this story demonstrates even friendly DRM can screw you totally and unexpectedly, and systems that use it are NOT a good deal. Should the guy have read the fine print? Sure. In fact, he shouldn't have had to read the fine print, he should have just known that buying DRM-crippled music (even with that happy Apple gloss) was likely to get him screwed down the line. His story is useful because it demonstrates this point, and demonstrates that the iTunes friendly-DRM model is NOT the answer to the future of music distribution, period. At least not from the customer's perspective.
Theo specifically says in the news article that this money comes without any direction. It was taken only on the conditions that no strings were to be attached. DARPA wasn't paying OpenBSD to do X. It was paying them to do the same thing they've always done.
Oh come on. The fact that he gave this impression is probably exactly why they canceled his ass. That's not how DARPA grants work. It's not the fucking MacArthur genius award. They don't just say, "Hey! We like you! Here's $3 million in taxpayer money! Knock yourself out!"
Come on! Grants have deliverables, lists of what you're going to spend the money on, schedules of what you're going to accomplish every year, etc. etc. Excruciating detail, negotiated in several back-and-forth rounds before anything is ever funded. I guarantee you this grant had all that too. And if the funders read in the newspaper that their money was instead being funneled to some foreign asshole who was claiming it was his personal nest egg and promising literally to give nothing back for it and just instead do what he pleased, then of course they cut it off.
This obviously had zero to do with Theo's view of the war in Iraq. If you read the article, he had about two words to say about that, and the rest of the article was devoted to him saying many irresponsible things about how he was squandering our money.
This little hack enables the old antialiased renderer, which was a sort of homebrew kludge using freetype linked in directly, and was never all that satisfactory. The builds posted above use the new XFt/fontselect renderer and the XRender extension, which is vastly superior in every way -- it looks way better (on LCDs it supports subpixel sampling); it is more efficient (thanks to its use of the Render extension, when available, which may even have some hardware optimization); and (assuming you are on RedHat 8) it uses the same font selection and rendering paths as the rest of the system, for a much more consistent experience.
Do yourself a favor and upgrade to the new renderer. This might be tricky if you are using nightlies, but you can probably just bring over libgfx_gtk.so as you upgrade.
I don't think this was meant to be ironic at all. Remember that the Weekly Standard is a far-right publication and Pinochet was a far-right dictator (crack down on those communists etc). Not to throw around the term "facist" lightly, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had some real sympathy for him.
I think it is exactly to head off this sort of criticism that AOTC has all this silly business about the former Queen Amidala having been democratically elected. This, of course, makes no sense at all (why would the daughter of an elected i.e. non-hereditary ex-"queen" be a princess?) except that it makes the rebels seem a little less totalitarian.
Here's to that: I used to read gamecenter (which ended up owned by the same people when CNET/ZDNet merged). I was shocked when they shut down the clean, easy to read site, and kept open the ugly, hard to use, generally crappy site. As I'm still bitter about that, I certainly wouldn't ever pay them any money.
Also, most of the stuff they want payment for I couldn't care less about -- downloads, movies etc. The only thing I use gamespot as is an archive of reviews, and it's a shame they're going to disable (free) access to this one useful feature in order to make money to pay for the bandwidth to host an ftp site with a bunch of pointless game demos and movies that you can get elsewhere.
You might check out ign.com. I used to use it to keep track of dreamcast games. Don't know how it is for PS2.
It's true, disabling hinting is just plain stupid. The real problem is that TrueType font hinting is patented (by Apple!) and so though the freetype library (used by Xft for font rendering) has the code to do it properly, it's disabled by default in favor of an "automatic hinting engine" that probably makes things worse. So I'm not surprised that disabling hinting in a default build of freetype makes things look better. But it's a really dumb way to proceed.
The right solution is to recompile freetype with the patented hinting turned ON, and the automatic hinting engine turned OFF. It really looks good, way better than either of that guy's screenshots.
Slashdot Mirror
Haselton needs an article about basic statistics. The 95% confidence interval on the difference between the two proportions is 6% +/- 17%, i.e. the range from about -11% to +23%. This (a) demonstrates that the sample is indeed underpowered to distinguish the sort of effect sizes that Haselton appears to be interested in, and (b) demonstrates that a +20% difference in proportion, contrary to Haselton's assertion, absolutely falls within the range of true values that can't be ruled out at a standard level of statistical confidence given the outcome of this experiment.
see http://www.kean.edu/~fosborne/bstat/06d2pop.html for the basic statistics.
Unfortunately I don't have the superior powers of the autistic mind to catalog and recollect all this detail about arcane topics, be they movie producers or minor bugs in cellphone software.
Recently I met a gentleman whose profession was gathering up shopping carts in the supermarket parking lot, and he treated me to an extended discourse about the relative merits of the producers of the different Muppet movies. I recognized the classic signs of an autism spectrum disorder ("For example, a person with AS may engage in a one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic, while misunderstanding or not recognizing the listener's feelings or reactions, such as a wish to change the topic of talk or end the interaction."), and for some reason, my thoughts turned to our old friend, Bennett Haselton.
You are overlooking the interesting bit, though:
Um yeah, I think this is easy to explain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
One thing that does it (nexus 4/chrome) is a "fling" quickly followed by a touch. Normally the second gesture "catches" the inertial scroll and stops it, but in the slashdot mobile site it tends to be registered as a touch on whatever was scrolling past the finger. I think the same thing sometimes happens for two flings in a row (when it seemed like the first didnt register, but it was just laggy) or a fast fling followed by a touch & hold or slow drag.
Sam Wang is a professor of neurobiology, not statistics. Also, the article does not refer to his predictions but to those of Nate Silver, who predicts only an 86% chance of Obama winning, notwithstanding the incorrect calculations using his data in the random anonymous script linked to the story.
The 538 website publishes the marginal probabilities of each state's outcome. The random anonymous script that is linked in this story just takes the product of these to compute the joint probability of Obama winning a particular set of states. This is of course a mistake. The probability that Obama wins Pennsylvania and Ohio is not the product of the probability that he wins each state separately, unless those two events are statistically independent. Of course, in reality and in the 538 model, they are not -- if Obama loses Pennsylvania he is also more likely to lose Ohio. I think this mainly accounts for the difference between the 538 prediction and the "prediction" of the random anonymous crap that the story links.
Admittedly I was trying to do email using pine/ssh and it probably would have been more bearable if I had been using a caching IMAP client rather than an interactive shell one. But not all that much better I think. And no, browsing the web didn't work for me at all. As I said, the connection seemed to be going up and down for minutes at a time, and when it was routing at all it was really too slow to even load a webpage.
Those prices might be bearable if the service worked. The real problem was that it didn't. I used it on Lufthansa. It was the worst laggy modem-speed mess, totally unusable. If you're paying by the hour for something, it's pretty infuriating when it stops working completely for five minutes at a time.
I suspect the real reason they weren't doing business was because of the performance, not the price.
I have no problem with giving a URL link as a reward for posting a story. But they should all be marked nofollow -- whether from abusers or not. Regular people don't care about pagerank, but it is clearly what motivates the spammers and abuse. So it's a simple solution, keeps CT's basic quid pro quo scheme but eliminates the incentive for abuse.
Nothing prevents content producers from protecting their creations in a free market. I'd say you have a good argument up to 1995 or so, but with the Internet, content producers can completely control their own content with zero laws. All they have to do is create stronger encryption standards, get together and make hardware that follows it, and they're there. That's what they're doing here. I am completely fine with content creators doing this -- I don't believe in copyright so I don't believe in fair use.
All fine and good, except only half the project is content producers banding together to create stronger technical protections and hardware to enforce it. The problematic half is them banding together to pressure for the passage of laws mandating that every TV contain these technologies, criminalizing hacking them etc etc. So the libertarian "let the market decide if it wants DRM" dream is, well, a dream.
I don't believe in copyright either, but, due to its legal side, DRM is like copyright only worse. You may not believe in fair use, but copyright with fair use is less repugnant than copyright without it.
See the thing about phones in the US that you don't understand is that for the most part, they don't have SIM cards. I know it sounds crazy. So you can't just swap your service between phones, or your phone between services. The US doesn't have a single cellphone standard like GSM -- the providers all use different and incompatible (and mostly lousy) technologies. Only very recently is GSM service available (on frequencies nonstandard in the rest of the world) from one (or two?) providers.
I moved from the US to the UK, and while I hate a lot of things here (like the royal family), one thing that's clearly better is the technology environment, presumably due to better regulation. People in the US have no idea how convenient is the combination of a single cellular standard with things like pay-as-you-go contracts -- so everyone has backup phones and phones for houseguests, and can swap the handsets between services at will. Even upgrading your handset in the US is a hassle -- it involves a lot of waiting on hold to talk to someone at your carrier and waiting hours for the change to be recognized by the system, and they usually charge you a big fee for the privilege. DSL and digital terrestrial TV are similarly way more flexible, competitive, standardized and useful here than in the US.
Paranoid is really only half of it; it's part of this exaggerated and self-aggrandizing worldview in which he stars as a sort of gun-toting messiah figure who is unfairly punished for his vast contributions to mankind by getting periodically nailed to a cross.
Maybe he was not drunk but forgot to take his haldol.
What if the next version of WMA encryption were as secure as AES? It's certainly not likely, but I wouldn't say it's impossible either. I understand that there are fundamental differences between DRM and plain encryption, but the point is that uncrackable systems are possible.
This is nonsense. Encryption systems may be practically uncrackable. Encryption systems that have to decrypt the "protected" contents for you so that you can listen to them will never be in the least bit secure. If you can hear it you can record it. There is no getting around this. The entire idea of DRM is, on the face of it, futile.
You can also switch allegiances (at least from light to dark) quite near the end so you can see both endings without playing all the way through twice. Is the rest of the game all that different? It looked like the dark side path was the same with more fighting.
This is an extremely important point. I have a (maxi) ipod, which I love, but it is totally inappropriate for jogging. (It runs for 15 minutes till the buffer drains and then crashes, and I have tried belt clips, arm bands, holding it in my hand.) My old 32MB 1st gen rio is preferable for running.
I think exercising (well, that and extremely low-end cheaper toy players) is basically the only market for flash-based players. They have the advantage of no moving parts, and their main disadvantage (lousy capacity) is irrelevant in this context: who exercises for longer than a couple hours?
From this perspective, the mini ipod is the worst of both worlds. It has relatively small capacity, but due to the moving parts it is inappropriate for exercising.
I can't believe all of these Apple apologists. The point is, the press has been selling the iTunes music store as god's gift to music retailing, the legitimate alternative to free music downloading, with DRM so transparent and unrestrictive that you wont even know it's there.
But as this story demonstrates even friendly DRM can screw you totally and unexpectedly, and systems that use it are NOT a good deal. Should the guy have read the fine print? Sure. In fact, he shouldn't have had to read the fine print, he should have just known that buying DRM-crippled music (even with that happy Apple gloss) was likely to get him screwed down the line. His story is useful because it demonstrates this point, and demonstrates that the iTunes friendly-DRM model is NOT the answer to the future of music distribution, period. At least not from the customer's perspective.
Unlike the hand-drawn Star Wars one, it seems to have been made by some kind of automatic transformation of a ripped video stream.
Agreed. Why would they release a font without real italics? And treat it as the savior of the linux desktop... Kinda ruins the whole thing.
Oh come on. The fact that he gave this impression is probably exactly why they canceled his ass. That's not how DARPA grants work. It's not the fucking MacArthur genius award. They don't just say, "Hey! We like you! Here's $3 million in taxpayer money! Knock yourself out!"
Come on! Grants have deliverables, lists of what you're going to spend the money on, schedules of what you're going to accomplish every year, etc. etc. Excruciating detail, negotiated in several back-and-forth rounds before anything is ever funded. I guarantee you this grant had all that too. And if the funders read in the newspaper that their money was instead being funneled to some foreign asshole who was claiming it was his personal nest egg and promising literally to give nothing back for it and just instead do what he pleased, then of course they cut it off.
This obviously had zero to do with Theo's view of the war in Iraq. If you read the article, he had about two words to say about that, and the rest of the article was devoted to him saying many irresponsible things about how he was squandering our money.
This little hack enables the old antialiased renderer, which was a sort of homebrew kludge using freetype linked in directly, and was never all that satisfactory. The builds posted above use the new XFt/fontselect renderer and the XRender extension, which is vastly superior in every way -- it looks way better (on LCDs it supports subpixel sampling); it is more efficient (thanks to its use of the Render extension, when available, which may even have some hardware optimization); and (assuming you are on RedHat 8) it uses the same font selection and rendering paths as the rest of the system, for a much more consistent experience.
Do yourself a favor and upgrade to the new renderer. This might be tricky if you are using nightlies, but you can probably just bring over libgfx_gtk.so as you upgrade.
I don't think this was meant to be ironic at all. Remember that the Weekly Standard is a far-right publication and Pinochet was a far-right dictator (crack down on those communists etc). Not to throw around the term "facist" lightly, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had some real sympathy for him.
I think it is exactly to head off this sort of criticism that AOTC has all this silly business about the former Queen Amidala having been democratically elected. This, of course, makes no sense at all (why would the daughter of an elected i.e. non-hereditary ex-"queen" be a princess?) except that it makes the rebels seem a little less totalitarian.
Here's to that: I used to read gamecenter (which ended up owned by the same people when CNET/ZDNet merged). I was shocked when they shut down the clean, easy to read site, and kept open the ugly, hard to use, generally crappy site. As I'm still bitter about that, I certainly wouldn't ever pay them any money.
Also, most of the stuff they want payment for I couldn't care less about -- downloads, movies etc. The only thing I use gamespot as is an archive of reviews, and it's a shame they're going to disable (free) access to this one useful feature in order to make money to pay for the bandwidth to host an ftp site with a bunch of pointless game demos and movies that you can get elsewhere.
You might check out ign.com. I used to use it to keep track of dreamcast games. Don't know how it is for PS2.
It's true, disabling hinting is just plain stupid. The real problem is that TrueType font hinting is patented (by Apple!) and so though the freetype library (used by Xft for font rendering) has the code to do it properly, it's disabled by default in favor of an "automatic hinting engine" that probably makes things worse. So I'm not surprised that disabling hinting in a default build of freetype makes things look better. But it's a really dumb way to proceed.
The right solution is to recompile freetype with the patented hinting turned ON, and the automatic hinting engine turned OFF. It really looks good, way better than either of that guy's screenshots.