Seems like Gmail only filters approx. 50% of spam.
Keep in mind that his account is getting raped the shit out of in terms of incoming spam, much more so than most people's accounts are likely to be. This probably adversely affects performance.
When I first got a gmail account the filtering was mediocre... but now it's very good... in about a month I've had only 3 or so false negatives (apart from one really basic fake bounce that it would not accept as spam no matter how hard I tried, so I just set up a filter to trash them based on a specific string), and one false positive (which is a bit alarming! but still). That's out of not that many total emails (I'm not about to count), but certainly no worse than Mozilla's filter which I used for some time before gmail. Also, I had to train Mozilla's filter for a lot longer to get the good accuracy (both Type I and II) it has now.
Why use checksums? Surely some clever algorithm is possible which picks up if the messages are similar enough? And if anyone can write such an algorithm effectively, it's the Google crew. See this post for clarification if you don't get what I'm talking about.
When I finished KOTOR, I didn't remember a damn thing about any of my characters' stats or class. For an RPG, that's unusual.
All I remembered was it crashing persistently, even after I updated my video card drivers (a 25mb or so download, on dialup no less).
But bitter whinging aside, from the ~15 minutes of gameplay I managed to squeeze out of it before giving up (it's very frustrating when a game takes soo long to start up on a system that loads Photoshop 7 in under 5 seconds.. although it got faster since it was crashing so often most of the loading sequence was staying cached), I found the game pretty.... nondescript. I'd rate something like Planescape: Torment way way waaaay higher than KOTOR in the RPG market. And no, it's definitely not an adventure game - how many times did you find yourself picking which weapon has better stats or counting your XP in Monkey Island?
Just my 0.02: KOTOR was second-rate both as an RPG and certainly as an adventure game, and I'd give my money to a Sam and Max sequel over KOTOR in a heartbeat.
Yup, you get what you pay for. Dell makes some cheap laptops, but they have this tendency to fall apart in about a week. That doesn't happen with powerbooks.
That statement borders on blatant trolling! However, since I have faith in your high moral caliber and good intentions, I'll assume what you meant to say was "Dell laptops have higher rates of failure (or lower MTBF) than powerbooks, and here are the statistics to back it up. You can clearly see that the dramatic difference in failure rates justifies the 2x price difference (or some portion thereof, the rest being accounted for by superior features, etc).". That would be a convincing argument. Unfortunately, I've yet to see it phrased that way. Moreover, if your Dell laptop does happen to fail in a week, there is this thing called warranty, which I hear Dell is pretty good about.
And as for their music player, it's rediculous. They make you pay extra for "enhanced" (i.e. non-crippled) software, and I'm sure the hardware isn't as good as Apple's.
I'm not going to deny that Dell's music player isn't the best. In fact, the iPod is much better, but I would make that choice based on the individual products involved (ie. the iPod, vs. the Dell player), not based on the companies' track records at making some other product (although you could argue that inability to make good laptops is correlated with inability to make good portable mp3 players... but to that I say that just because a company makes better laptops doesn't mean it will make good mp3 players either). Similarly, when the MS player comes out, I'll judge it against the iPod based on the characteristics of those two specific gadgets - not the quality of Windows against Mac OS, nor the quality of MS mice over Apple mice, or some other equally irrelevant benchmark.
For instance, read any review of MP3 players and you'll find that Apple's sound output hardware (DA converters, amp, etc.) is the best.
I would dispute this. The iPod hardware has nothing over, say, the hardware used by the Creative Jukeboxen (except, maybe, size, which is a separate category to sound quality when comparing mp3 players). The Jukebox produces sound that is no less clean and vibrant, and also supports things like 4 channel output and a whole heap of EAX post-processing (a small fraction of which, believe it or not, is actually useful!! I know, I had a hard time believing it too.). Not only have I read reviews that say this, but I've compared the sound from an iPod and a Jukebox too. Even if the iPod hardware is better by some absolute measurement of fidelity, it is not a difference 99.8% of the population would pick up in a blind listening test.
But you can't really market that.
You're saying that in a device the purpose of which is to play music, you can't market the quality of the sound that comes out? If it's not marketable, why do the very reviews you speak of mention it? Tell you what, just send me some of whatever you're smoking and we'll call it even.
Microsoft's business practices (and OS) make me want to blow up their headquarters on a daily basis. I'm sure others agree with me:)
What I really need, however, is to have all external links (email, trillian, url files) open in a new TAB.
Have you tried Multizilla? It has exactly the option you describe, as well as an option to redirect popups to new tabs (on sites that you want to allow popups for, but still don't want new windows), and generally pretty good tab management. I've never used TBE, but I can't think of any potential tab-related features that aren't in Multizilla. It has a lot of other options too. Also not sure if it supports Firefox... I use the full Mozilla suite...
A recent article [anandtech.com] showed that the DL write speeds at 2.4x. So you can spend 45mins burning 1 DL DVD, or 2x 15min burning two DVDs at 8x.
15 min at 8x? In my experience, 4x ~= 13-14 mins, 6x ~= 10 mins (8x = too unstable on my cheap blanks;p)
4) Single Layer option 3: (2 DVD-R's)
backup, separate, edit IFO files + reauthor + burn + burn (~2 - 3 hrs, most of it interactive)
I assume you meant to say "select split point in CloneDVD2, click "go", come back 25 mins later to swap discs, and another 10 mins later to collect the second DVD". That's about 35 mins in total, but let's round up and say 40. Compared to ~1hr for DL option by your own calculations.
All that remains to compare is whether the price difference between an 8x SL and a DL burner is more than the cost of a license for CloneDVD2 (IIRC about USD30, and a bargain at twice the price;p)... so when DL burner becomes cheaper and/or faster than (SL burner + CloneDVD2), it will be viable.
Re:Whoa... that's a lot of accounts for sale
on
Gmail Addresses For Sale
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Too many false positives. There are such things as mailing lists, not to mention various automated alerts for bill payment, etc that you do want to receive, and which might vary only in a few details from thousands of others sent simultaneously -- with the obfuscation standard in spam you can't just look for identical messages.
The combination of that and a whitelist for all your mailing lists (how many are you subscribed to for which spammers use the source address as well?), and everyone who sends you bill payments (come on, there can't be too many of those), might well be the best solution to spam I've heard yet. At least, I'd be willing to give it a try.
Methinks the grandparent is underrated at +3... now if only I hadn't wasted all my mod points;p
Refer to my comment here, I'm not going to repeat it all.
The "change ISPs if you don't like it" argument is weak - most ISPs don't advertise what their policy (which may be fickle) regarding spam filtering is. By the time I change ISPs after I realise they're blocking my legitimate emails, I've already lost all the email I should have received over however many days it takes to change.
You really have no idea how smtp and spam blacklist's work at all do you?
"When you have no argument, attack the plaintiff" - Cicero
If we are having an effect or not, it doesn't really matter to me.
You said it. Essentially, you're saying that some innocent users might lose some of their legitimate email, but that's a sacrifice you're willing to make.
All I do know is that we are taking a stance and asking others to support us.
I'll support you the day I stop losing legitimate emails as a result of your actions.
Nope, only *you* can block email to *your* server.
I recently lost about 5 days' email (most of it would be spam, but I care more about the 1-2 messages that probably weren't) because my email was being forwarded through mydomain.com (a free forwarding provider), and my ISP blindly uses the SPEWS RBL. I was very suprised to discover that they do, and I have no control over it, except to change ISPs... but ISPs here don't advertise whether they use SPEWS or not, so choosing a new one might be harder than it seems (not to mention the fact that I had no idea why I wasn't receiving any email...).
Out of all the geeks I know, only a few run their own email servers (on co-lo boxen or whatever), but most depend on their ISP's email service, and have no control over what gets blocked over and above choosing their ISP, which is pretty weak since it takes time to change, and all that time you'll be losing email.
So, in short, your statement, while superficially correct, is not relevant except to the few people who have *their own* servers.
Also, it doesn't surprise me that someone blacklisted Spain... SPEWS have also blacklisted entire countries before. Oddly enough, the amount of spam I receive hasn't decreased signifcantly due to their (or AHBL's) existence.
While I'm definitely against spam, and I appreciate that their cause is noble, I just can't help get the feeling that their efforts are more to appease their own sense of justice than for anything else. They have to realise that they are doing more harm than good. To me, I would rather receive 10,000 spam messages than miss one important email such as an interview invitation or some such from a potential employer (coincidentally, that 5 days of email I lost was right after having sent out a round of job applications), but I guess people have different preferences.
Besides that, your email already gets transmitted across the net in plaintext. At several points along the way your email could get stored in a log somewhere.
Good point. If anyone has any logs containing the emails that were sent to me from about last Thursday till Tuesday, which my ISP conveniently vanished for me because a mail forwarding server got added to SPEWS, I'd like copies.
Seriously though, the parent is right. If you're that worried, nothing is stopping you from routinely encrypting all your email with PGP, and having all those in regular correspondence with you similarly encrypt email addressed to you. Since not many people follow this practice (at least, not nearly as many as are now making noise about Gmail), I'd say it's more of a pretext than a genuine concern.
A company usually nearly-depletes its cash reserve before going IPO
Is there a particular strategic reason for this?
Yes. An IPO will dilute the value of existing shares. So if a company does too many IPOs, it will undermine investor confidence (ie. investors won't believe that the value of their shares will be maintained), and drive their share price into the ground.
That's the "first tier" strategy - because of that, companies don't do an IPO unless they really need the cash (and it would be unwise to get it through debt financing). This means that companies who do an IPO are seen to be short of cash. If investors believe that shortness of cash will adversely affect their business, this will drive share price down even more than the dilution.
Of course as with any such "rules", they're more guidelines than actual rules - google managers have demonstrated many times that they aren't stupid, so they may have some reason for doing an IPO while they have lots of cash that is a little more advanced than the bare 'basics' I've outlined here. One such reason may be that they have too much debt, and want to fix their D/E ratio with an IPO... this isn't uncommon, but I don't know how much debt (if any) Google currently has.
I know several teenage girls that think they are not very good at math. They get C's in high school level math classes and say its just because they aren't good at it.
They aren't. I bet you also know some teenager who can get straight A's without putting in any more work than these girls do.
And why should they put more effort into maths, if they enjoy clothes shopping more? Don't tell me you spent your time at school doing what you objectively considered important, rather than what you enjoyed (you probably either just happened to enjoy maths, or said exactly the same thing as these girls).
he completly missed his point, whats wrong with rewarding students for doing good?
No, I think you completely missed the point of his post. We already have a standardised system of rewards called grades. When a student does sufficiently goo^H^H^Hwell, they are rewarded with high grades, and ultimately, the privelege of advancing to the next grade, and of graduating. When a student does badly, these rewards are withheld from them.
If by "rewards" you mean chocolate bars, or money, or things that kids seem to care about - it will degenerate to the same thing. Kids who routinely do well will begin to expect these rewards, and making a mistake that leads to not getting a chocolate bar one time will be a crushing blow to their ego.
Other kids will decide that an easier way to get the chocolate is to ambush the smart kids outside the classroom and take it off them by force (hell, they were going to ambush them for lunch money anyway, might as well take the chocolate too).
The smart kids will then stop participating in class, and try to avoid getting the "rewards", because not getting the chocolate means they don't get beaten. At least grades can't be taken away by a bully.
The bullies will decide that doing their homework is nevertheless not worth it for a chocolate bar. So, we're back to noone doing their homework, except a few smart people, but these people now don't even participate in class, whereas before at least someone did.
That's what's wrong with "rewarding" students for doing well... hopefully I've answered your question adequately
This seems like a great idea where there are traffic lights every 50m. (Actually, no, not really... it doesn't seem like a good idea at all now that I think about it). However, in my 22km drive to uni every day (I live in Australia), I have to go through exactly 4 lights. And 3 of those in the last 1km of the journey. So with this system I can still speed for most of the way without losing time.
The system we have here, which is much more effective, is sign-posted automatic speed cameras in places where speeding is a serious safety issue. For example, in the centre of town, there are some nightclubs that open out onto a major road near a traffic light. Drunk people often walk out onto the road without a care, and would frequently be run down by speeding motorists until the traffic light got fitted with a speed camera. As a result, anyone who speeds through the light knows that they will get a ticket in the mail (and since there are warning signs as you come up to the light, people tend to just slow down.) It also fines you if you run a red light.
This seems like a much more logical system than wreaking havoc with the lights' shift patterns - if drivers believe they can speed without being caught, simply increase the chance of getting caught for speeding through the light to 100%. Getting where you want to be 3 minutes later may be an effective deterrent, but not as effective as a certain $200 fine (of which you can only get so many before you run out of demerit points and lose your license).
Why does this device need to be both wired and wireless? Most users will use the device either by the wire, or as part of a purely WiFi network... who would use both interfaces? Seems like this device could be cheaper if it came in two different versions, one with the wired ports and the other with the WiFi parts.
Maybe so you can get the convenience of wireless access for small files, but can wire it up if you need to quickly copy across several dozen gb?
For example, having accounts on multiple sites isn't a big problem at all.
The problem isn't remembering your passwords (you have local password managers for that, such as the one built into Mozilla, which are much more secure simply because your home PC would need to be compromised to even begin cracking at the password list... that is assuming you keep your home PC reasonably secure). The problem is signing up to all those sites. Each time you have to fill out a form, wait for an activation email, then activate your account, etc. etc.
If your sole purpose for creating an account was to post a comment on some forum, which you more than likely will never want to post on again in your life, then there's a good chance that you'll just say "fuck it" and whatever you wanted to say will go unposted. But if instead of going through that pain you can just click the "Log me in with Passport" button and then post your message, it's a lot more likely to end up posted.
I've found myself in this situation on several software support forums, where I was looking for a solution to some problem, and someone else had already posted the same problem, but it had not been answered. After I work out how to solve it by myself, often I want to be nice and post the solution, but the effort of creating an account essentially for someone else's gain is simply too much (I'm not an altruist;p)
The reason Passport failed (apart from the ones cited already) is simple: trust. In order for such a service to work people have to trust the organisation they're giving their personal info to. This already rules out Microsoft as a viable implementor of such a program - how many people genuinely trust MS enough?
If you are using something like MultiZilla, you can disable referrer sending from the QPrefs menu (about 3 clicks), then enable it again later (or just keep it off if you're that way inclined, but some sites use it to stop deep-linked downloads, such as doom9.org).
Working as a cook helped me out more than you can imagine.
Better yet, he could get a job as a cook and take up a martial art (specifically, aikido). After many years of this, grow out his hair and start wearing it in a pony tail, and start writing screenplays. It may not develop great acting (or for that matter, social) skills, but at least he'll be able to randomly kiss women on battleships with impunity.
Profit should be the first and foremost goal of any company.
Why?
Because, a company is owned by shareholders. When people buy shares, they're buying a portion (a 'share';p) of the profits of that company. Once the company makes a profit, it must distribute it as dividends to its shareholders.
Shareholders want dividends (not strictly true, but to explain that would require too much typing - read a 1st year finance textbook - and it has no effect on the follwing arguments), so if they believe that a company won't make any profits, and that they won't be getting dividends, they'll be wanting to sell those shares (no reason to keep them).
Once everyone wants to sell, the share price will be driven down. Now, owning >50% of the shares gives you control of the company. The company also has assets, which have a market value if sold. If the value of the shares becomes less than the value of the assets, then anyone with enough money can do the following:
Buy a controlling portion (or more) of the shares, that is, just over 50%.
They now control the company, so just sell all the assets (and fire all the employees), and take the money. It will be more than what you paid for the shares, hence...
Profit!
As you can see, that's a sure profit scheme without that ubiquitous and annoying "???". It's called "corporate takeover". So, to recap:
Companies don't want to be victims of corporate takeover. Hence they want to maintain the value of their shares to be above the value of their assets.
In order to do that, people must want to own their shares. People won't want that unless they know they will receive dividends (*handwave*, but justified - prove me wrong, I dare you;p). Hence companies need to pay dividends to their shareholders.
In order to have money with which to pay dividends, companies must make profit.
Hopefully that answers your question... because of it, I can no longer moderate in this thread. I hope you're happy. Grr.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that his account is getting raped the shit out of in terms of incoming spam, much more so than most people's accounts are likely to be. This probably adversely affects performance.
When I first got a gmail account the filtering was mediocre ... but now it's very good ... in about a month I've had only 3 or so false negatives (apart from one really basic fake bounce that it would not accept as spam no matter how hard I tried, so I just set up a filter to trash them based on a specific string), and one false positive (which is a bit alarming! but still). That's out of not that many total emails (I'm not about to count), but certainly no worse than Mozilla's filter which I used for some time before gmail. Also, I had to train Mozilla's filter for a lot longer to get the good accuracy (both Type I and II) it has now.
Why use checksums? Surely some clever algorithm is possible which picks up if the messages are similar enough? And if anyone can write such an algorithm effectively, it's the Google crew. See this post for clarification if you don't get what I'm talking about.
All I remembered was it crashing persistently, even after I updated my video card drivers (a 25mb or so download, on dialup no less).
But bitter whinging aside, from the ~15 minutes of gameplay I managed to squeeze out of it before giving up (it's very frustrating when a game takes soo long to start up on a system that loads Photoshop 7 in under 5 seconds .. although it got faster since it was crashing so often most of the loading sequence was staying cached), I found the game pretty .... nondescript. I'd rate something like Planescape: Torment way way waaaay higher than KOTOR in the RPG market. And no, it's definitely not an adventure game - how many times did you find yourself picking which weapon has better stats or counting your XP in Monkey Island?
Just my 0.02: KOTOR was second-rate both as an RPG and certainly as an adventure game, and I'd give my money to a Sam and Max sequel over KOTOR in a heartbeat.
They certainly did popularise pressing the reset button "...multiple times within a short period of time..." ...
That statement borders on blatant trolling! However, since I have faith in your high moral caliber and good intentions, I'll assume what you meant to say was "Dell laptops have higher rates of failure (or lower MTBF) than powerbooks, and here are the statistics to back it up. You can clearly see that the dramatic difference in failure rates justifies the 2x price difference (or some portion thereof, the rest being accounted for by superior features, etc).". That would be a convincing argument. Unfortunately, I've yet to see it phrased that way. Moreover, if your Dell laptop does happen to fail in a week, there is this thing called warranty, which I hear Dell is pretty good about.
And as for their music player, it's rediculous. They make you pay extra for "enhanced" (i.e. non-crippled) software, and I'm sure the hardware isn't as good as Apple's.I'm not going to deny that Dell's music player isn't the best. In fact, the iPod is much better, but I would make that choice based on the individual products involved (ie. the iPod, vs. the Dell player), not based on the companies' track records at making some other product (although you could argue that inability to make good laptops is correlated with inability to make good portable mp3 players ... but to that I say that just because a company makes better laptops doesn't mean it will make good mp3 players either). Similarly, when the MS player comes out, I'll judge it against the iPod based on the characteristics of those two specific gadgets - not the quality of Windows against Mac OS, nor the quality of MS mice over Apple mice, or some other equally irrelevant benchmark.
For instance, read any review of MP3 players and you'll find that Apple's sound output hardware (DA converters, amp, etc.) is the best.I would dispute this. The iPod hardware has nothing over, say, the hardware used by the Creative Jukeboxen (except, maybe, size, which is a separate category to sound quality when comparing mp3 players). The Jukebox produces sound that is no less clean and vibrant, and also supports things like 4 channel output and a whole heap of EAX post-processing (a small fraction of which, believe it or not, is actually useful!! I know, I had a hard time believing it too.). Not only have I read reviews that say this, but I've compared the sound from an iPod and a Jukebox too. Even if the iPod hardware is better by some absolute measurement of fidelity, it is not a difference 99.8% of the population would pick up in a blind listening test.
But you can't really market that.You're saying that in a device the purpose of which is to play music, you can't market the quality of the sound that comes out? If it's not marketable, why do the very reviews you speak of mention it? Tell you what, just send me some of whatever you're smoking and we'll call it even.
Microsoft's business practices (and OS) make me want to blow up their headquarters on a daily basis. I'm sure others agree with meWhat a concise summary of the rest of your post!
Have you tried Multizilla? It has exactly the option you describe, as well as an option to redirect popups to new tabs (on sites that you want to allow popups for, but still don't want new windows), and generally pretty good tab management. I've never used TBE, but I can't think of any potential tab-related features that aren't in Multizilla. It has a lot of other options too. Also not sure if it supports Firefox ... I use the full Mozilla suite...
It already exists! 2 team kills and you get banned . . .
15 min at 8x? In my experience, 4x ~= 13-14 mins, 6x ~= 10 mins (8x = too unstable on my cheap blanks ;p)
4) Single Layer option 3: (2 DVD-R's) backup, separate, edit IFO files + reauthor + burn + burn (~2 - 3 hrs, most of it interactive)I assume you meant to say "select split point in CloneDVD2, click "go", come back 25 mins later to swap discs, and another 10 mins later to collect the second DVD". That's about 35 mins in total, but let's round up and say 40. Compared to ~1hr for DL option by your own calculations.
All that remains to compare is whether the price difference between an 8x SL and a DL burner is more than the cost of a license for CloneDVD2 (IIRC about USD30, and a bargain at twice the price ;p) ... so when DL burner becomes cheaper and/or faster than (SL burner + CloneDVD2), it will be viable.
The combination of that and a whitelist for all your mailing lists (how many are you subscribed to for which spammers use the source address as well?), and everyone who sends you bill payments (come on, there can't be too many of those), might well be the best solution to spam I've heard yet. At least, I'd be willing to give it a try.
Methinks the grandparent is underrated at +3 ... now if only I hadn't wasted all my mod points ;p
Refer to my comment here, I'm not going to repeat it all.
The "change ISPs if you don't like it" argument is weak - most ISPs don't advertise what their policy (which may be fickle) regarding spam filtering is. By the time I change ISPs after I realise they're blocking my legitimate emails, I've already lost all the email I should have received over however many days it takes to change.
You really have no idea how smtp and spam blacklist's work at all do you?"When you have no argument, attack the plaintiff" - Cicero
You said it. Essentially, you're saying that some innocent users might lose some of their legitimate email, but that's a sacrifice you're willing to make.
All I do know is that we are taking a stance and asking others to support us.I'll support you the day I stop losing legitimate emails as a result of your actions.
I recently lost about 5 days' email (most of it would be spam, but I care more about the 1-2 messages that probably weren't) because my email was being forwarded through mydomain.com (a free forwarding provider), and my ISP blindly uses the SPEWS RBL. I was very suprised to discover that they do, and I have no control over it, except to change ISPs ... but ISPs here don't advertise whether they use SPEWS or not, so choosing a new one might be harder than it seems (not to mention the fact that I had no idea why I wasn't receiving any email...).
Out of all the geeks I know, only a few run their own email servers (on co-lo boxen or whatever), but most depend on their ISP's email service, and have no control over what gets blocked over and above choosing their ISP, which is pretty weak since it takes time to change, and all that time you'll be losing email.
So, in short, your statement, while superficially correct, is not relevant except to the few people who have *their own* servers.
Also, it doesn't surprise me that someone blacklisted Spain ... SPEWS have also blacklisted entire countries before. Oddly enough, the amount of spam I receive hasn't decreased signifcantly due to their (or AHBL's) existence.
While I'm definitely against spam, and I appreciate that their cause is noble, I just can't help get the feeling that their efforts are more to appease their own sense of justice than for anything else. They have to realise that they are doing more harm than good. To me, I would rather receive 10,000 spam messages than miss one important email such as an interview invitation or some such from a potential employer (coincidentally, that 5 days of email I lost was right after having sent out a round of job applications), but I guess people have different preferences.
Good point. If anyone has any logs containing the emails that were sent to me from about last Thursday till Tuesday, which my ISP conveniently vanished for me because a mail forwarding server got added to SPEWS, I'd like copies.
Seriously though, the parent is right. If you're that worried, nothing is stopping you from routinely encrypting all your email with PGP, and having all those in regular correspondence with you similarly encrypt email addressed to you. Since not many people follow this practice (at least, not nearly as many as are now making noise about Gmail), I'd say it's more of a pretext than a genuine concern.
Yes. An IPO will dilute the value of existing shares. So if a company does too many IPOs, it will undermine investor confidence (ie. investors won't believe that the value of their shares will be maintained), and drive their share price into the ground.
That's the "first tier" strategy - because of that, companies don't do an IPO unless they really need the cash (and it would be unwise to get it through debt financing). This means that companies who do an IPO are seen to be short of cash. If investors believe that shortness of cash will adversely affect their business, this will drive share price down even more than the dilution.
Of course as with any such "rules", they're more guidelines than actual rules - google managers have demonstrated many times that they aren't stupid, so they may have some reason for doing an IPO while they have lots of cash that is a little more advanced than the bare 'basics' I've outlined here. One such reason may be that they have too much debt, and want to fix their D/E ratio with an IPO ... this isn't uncommon, but I don't know how much debt (if any) Google currently has.
They aren't. I bet you also know some teenager who can get straight A's without putting in any more work than these girls do.
And why should they put more effort into maths, if they enjoy clothes shopping more? Don't tell me you spent your time at school doing what you objectively considered important, rather than what you enjoyed (you probably either just happened to enjoy maths, or said exactly the same thing as these girls).
No, I think you completely missed the point of his post. We already have a standardised system of rewards called grades. When a student does sufficiently goo^H^H^Hwell, they are rewarded with high grades, and ultimately, the privelege of advancing to the next grade, and of graduating. When a student does badly, these rewards are withheld from them.
If by "rewards" you mean chocolate bars, or money, or things that kids seem to care about - it will degenerate to the same thing. Kids who routinely do well will begin to expect these rewards, and making a mistake that leads to not getting a chocolate bar one time will be a crushing blow to their ego.
Other kids will decide that an easier way to get the chocolate is to ambush the smart kids outside the classroom and take it off them by force (hell, they were going to ambush them for lunch money anyway, might as well take the chocolate too).
The smart kids will then stop participating in class, and try to avoid getting the "rewards", because not getting the chocolate means they don't get beaten. At least grades can't be taken away by a bully.
The bullies will decide that doing their homework is nevertheless not worth it for a chocolate bar. So, we're back to noone doing their homework, except a few smart people, but these people now don't even participate in class, whereas before at least someone did.
That's what's wrong with "rewarding" students for doing well... hopefully I've answered your question adequately
This seems like a great idea where there are traffic lights every 50m. (Actually, no, not really ... it doesn't seem like a good idea at all now that I think about it). However, in my 22km drive to uni every day (I live in Australia), I have to go through exactly 4 lights. And 3 of those in the last 1km of the journey. So with this system I can still speed for most of the way without losing time.
The system we have here, which is much more effective, is sign-posted automatic speed cameras in places where speeding is a serious safety issue. For example, in the centre of town, there are some nightclubs that open out onto a major road near a traffic light. Drunk people often walk out onto the road without a care, and would frequently be run down by speeding motorists until the traffic light got fitted with a speed camera. As a result, anyone who speeds through the light knows that they will get a ticket in the mail (and since there are warning signs as you come up to the light, people tend to just slow down.) It also fines you if you run a red light.
This seems like a much more logical system than wreaking havoc with the lights' shift patterns - if drivers believe they can speed without being caught, simply increase the chance of getting caught for speeding through the light to 100%. Getting where you want to be 3 minutes later may be an effective deterrent, but not as effective as a certain $200 fine (of which you can only get so many before you run out of demerit points and lose your license).
Let me guess ... it's in Nigeria right?
Maybe so you can get the convenience of wireless access for small files, but can wire it up if you need to quickly copy across several dozen gb?
The problem isn't remembering your passwords (you have local password managers for that, such as the one built into Mozilla, which are much more secure simply because your home PC would need to be compromised to even begin cracking at the password list... that is assuming you keep your home PC reasonably secure). The problem is signing up to all those sites. Each time you have to fill out a form, wait for an activation email, then activate your account, etc. etc.
If your sole purpose for creating an account was to post a comment on some forum, which you more than likely will never want to post on again in your life, then there's a good chance that you'll just say "fuck it" and whatever you wanted to say will go unposted. But if instead of going through that pain you can just click the "Log me in with Passport" button and then post your message, it's a lot more likely to end up posted.
I've found myself in this situation on several software support forums, where I was looking for a solution to some problem, and someone else had already posted the same problem, but it had not been answered. After I work out how to solve it by myself, often I want to be nice and post the solution, but the effort of creating an account essentially for someone else's gain is simply too much (I'm not an altruist ;p)
The reason Passport failed (apart from the ones cited already) is simple: trust. In order for such a service to work people have to trust the organisation they're giving their personal info to. This already rules out Microsoft as a viable implementor of such a program - how many people genuinely trust MS enough?
If you are using something like MultiZilla, you can disable referrer sending from the QPrefs menu (about 3 clicks), then enable it again later (or just keep it off if you're that way inclined, but some sites use it to stop deep-linked downloads, such as doom9.org).
Damnit, there goes my plan to leech off their p2p network...
Better yet, he could get a job as a cook and take up a martial art (specifically, aikido). After many years of this, grow out his hair and start wearing it in a pony tail, and start writing screenplays. It may not develop great acting (or for that matter, social) skills, but at least he'll be able to randomly kiss women on battleships with impunity.
Because, a company is owned by shareholders. When people buy shares, they're buying a portion (a 'share' ;p) of the profits of that company. Once the company makes a profit, it must distribute it as dividends to its shareholders.
Shareholders want dividends (not strictly true, but to explain that would require too much typing - read a 1st year finance textbook - and it has no effect on the follwing arguments), so if they believe that a company won't make any profits, and that they won't be getting dividends, they'll be wanting to sell those shares (no reason to keep them).
Once everyone wants to sell, the share price will be driven down. Now, owning >50% of the shares gives you control of the company. The company also has assets, which have a market value if sold. If the value of the shares becomes less than the value of the assets, then anyone with enough money can do the following:
As you can see, that's a sure profit scheme without that ubiquitous and annoying "???". It's called "corporate takeover". So, to recap:
Hopefully that answers your question ... because of it, I can no longer moderate in this thread. I hope you're happy. Grr.
You sure got that right, what with the way it spins really fast and all ...