A complex decision is a whole bunch of trade-offs, profit-and-loss variables. Each variable has a probability associated with it, and they can cascade together. I use a system of "expected value" summations, and it works pretty well.
For instance, in buying a car there is the price (and the 100% likelihood that you'll have to pay it), a set of features, and a set of unknown costs (maintenance), and a set of emotional value points (prestige, convenience, dependability). Each of the costs has a probability that you'll incur it, and each of the values has a probability that you'll receive it. Some of them are related, and may need to be refactored to make the math work out for you.
You multiply each of the costs and outcomes (positive and negative) with their value to you (on some scale of your choosing) and their probability of occurring, and sum them all up. That choice gets a score.
Compare the score from all of the other choices you could make, and your decision is made.
The nice thing about this system is that by breaking down the fuzzy-factor "value" for each outcome and pairing it with a probability, you see the real cost for each while simultaneously hiding the answer from yourself. Subconciously you will tend to favor the choice you want to make, but be careful that you don't fudge the probabilities.
As a simple example, consider recreational sky-diving. The value you get from jumping -- a rush, some prestige, and maybe some sex out of it somehow -- compares with a (call it) 99% probability of landing safely and a (call it) 1% probability of landing with a splat.
For me, I assign a pretty high value to keeping my skin intact. How much would I pay someone not to flatten my skull?
stay on ground = free + 0 (death from falling) + 0 (fun)
= 0 skydiving = -$50 +.01 (death from falling) +.99 (fun)
= -$50 - 1/100 (very big number) +.99 (small number)
= (probably something negative, and I have to pay 50 bucks).
As a side note, you can see that the resultant costs of a decision and the cost to make it happen are just two labels for the same thing. That is, whether something is a cost or benefit is just the sign on the term.
While what you describe might be occurring, I refer you to a basic lifesaving mantra:
Stop the bleeding
Start the breathing
Protect the wound
Treat for shock
ATI may just be stopping the bleeding, that is, first taking steps not to deceive any other potential customers. In fact, if they were to do anything else there would be a situation where they'd be saying "Sorry, we were wrong" while continuing to allow customers to get the wrong idea.
Watch their public statements and what they do next before rushing to judgement.
The reason I labeled your arguments straw was that you set up them up to knock them down. You tried to present a false dichotomy between either boycotting evil completely or embracing it totally. It's not that simple, and so your arguments blow away in the slightest puff of air.
And I never said I agreed with Google, just that I think I understand their position. It's a reasonable one for them to take. World domination is incomplete without owning China.
The logical flaw with your post is even more glaring. If the best way to deal with countries that do evil is to completely avoid doing business with them, then:
[...straw men...]
"Evil" for countries is not the same as "evil" for individuals. The rules for conduct among nations, and even between a government and the governed, are different. People often label governmental action "evil" or "good" when the motivations and results of a given governmental action are much more complex than that.
For example, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Were either or both of those just intended to mollify an angry domestic population, to show the government was doing something to fight terrorism, or were they really intended to protect liberty against and spread liberty to those wishing to destroy it? Were either or both about oil, geopolitical intrigue, or personal vendettas? Depends who you ask.
Or the minimum wage: some people consider the minimum wage an altruistic fight on behalf of the downtrodden to provide the good life for all. Others say it's a cynical attempt to buy votes which ends up making some jobs unprofitable, thus throwing people onto the dole or into homelessness. It's not as simple as good vs. evil, yet people cast it that way.
In Google's case, they've decided they're doing their part to spread the light of knowledge. It's what they do. How can that be evil, they ask? I don't know if it's evil, but I hope they don't find themselves on a slippery slope, on which the Chinese start demanding that they implement ever more accurate content controls.
As they pointed out they have to follow the laws of the country they're in.
The logical flaw there is question-begging. The point is, they get to choose the countries they're in, and China need not be one of them.
It's really an age-old question: do you shun the evildoers so that they don't influence you, or do you go out and mingle with the evildoers so that you can be a positive influence?
Google appears to be saying that since content filters are not as good as their search engiine, they can be a more positive influence on the culture in China than cooperating with the Chinese harms them.
Putting together a machine like that is an amazing feat. Using other people's ideas is the hallmark of great engineers. Taking credit for other people's ideas is the hallmark of great losers.
As TFA says, whether you think of Eckert and Mauchly as the first to build a computer or not, ENIAC is the "watershed event". A lot of people in the U.S. think of Henry Ford as the inventor of the automobile, even though if you press them they probably remember that he was not, by many years and an ocean.
Dan Bricklin, inventor of the electronic spreadsheet, was sued by Lotus Corp. for violating the 'look and feel' of their 1-2-3 product with his Visicalc. Never mind that their entire product was based on his beautiful idea, he got sued out of business for copying their menu structure.
What the courts decide and what actually happened are often not entirely in sync.
... pretend that you're just doing the same thing the West...
This is not some spin-meister from a lying regime from the West; this is the government of the People's Republic of China, where freedom is a way of life, and protecting the People from harmful ideas is a sacred trust fulfilled lovinggly by a wise, caring, benevolent government. What possible motive could they have for dealing falsely with the Western media?
No, it is obvious that the whole Chinese Internet censorship furor is a coverup and smokescreen used by the American government and their allies at CNN to divert attention away from the hordes of jack-booted thugs in unmarked vans eavesdropping on wiretaps of Americans who google for news of the occupation of Iraq or the vendetta against the great hero Osama Bin Laden.
I (independent of this) go to a lot of auctions and garage sales. In my area, a lot of what's there is tools and other things that were made Before.
Ask older salespeople. They generally know where something is made and how good it is. Sometimes a higher-quality item that lacks fancy features will be less expensive than a cheap one with lots of bells and whistles.
It's just a different mindset. The time I don't spend looking at price tags and trying to get a bargain, I look at labels and figure which one of the choices will last forever, versus needing to be replaced in a year.
I cringe when I have to buy something at Wal-Mart, because almost everything there comes from China. It's not just Wal-Mart, but that's where I notice it the most.
Some of the Chinese-made stuff is of decent quality, but mostly it's not. I don't like the sweatshop image I get when I look at the poorer-quality items. As a result, I've changed my buying habits to try to avoid things from China.
When I'm shopping now I look for the very best item in a given cateogory. I ignore the price, unless I know the item is disposable. Most of the time, the best item will come from (in no particular order) the U.S., Japan, Europe, or Korea.
In David Brin's book "Earth" he talks about a future society with zero privacy. However rather than the Orwellian 1984 version of no privacy, he talks about a world where everyone, from the farmer in the field, to the president of the united states having zero secercy.
One trouble with that, as with all utopian visions, is that implementation never follows design. As Communism inexorably devolves into dictatorial oligarchy, a select few would have privacy while the rest lived as slaves to the Eye.
Even if that weren't to happen, democratic tyranny would be unavoidable. If everyone knows what everyone else is doing, a sheeplike uniformity would be the result, with any oddballs subjected to public disgrace. "You painted your bathroom what color? Weirdo!" "Look, he's got a flashlight under the covers! He's doing something private under there! Pervert!" "You spanked your child? Abuse! Abuse!"
Some of the greatest joys in life are private. A quiet conversation with a spouse. Reading a bedtime story to a wide-eyed child. Singing off-key in the car. Posting anonymous trolls on Slashdot.
The right to privacy is not just an invention of the courts to justify abortion, though some read Roe v Wade that way. Privacy is infused in the Bill of Rights, from the right to practice religion as we see fit, the right not to have troops in our homes, the right to own weapons, and the right to be secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects".
Whether abused by the powerful or not, the world Brin proposes is a totalitarian hell.
On the other hand, perhaps carrying a child to term helps prevent some cancers.
From an evolutionary perspective, which is more likely? If there were any effect, it seems to me unlikely that having children would give you cancer. It seems reasonable that interrupting the process would be worse for the mother than continuing it, in general.
Another way to look at it is that the scale is missing. To say that something is "ten times thinner" you have to know what unit of thinness is being used. Same with "ten times quicker" or "ten times slower", as you say. It's backwards construction.
Marketers love to use this mangling, because it sounds better to the untrained ear than "one tenth as [thick, far, fast]". More is always better, so ten times something is better than one tenth of something.
People respond with some form of the "rose is a rose" argument. This is not a simple case of naming, but once someone adopts the view that it's idiomatic it's hard to get them to think about it further.
Google is simply the most prominent of many companies riding the wave of history. They appeared with good tools at a time when people were just starting to really depend on such tools. They still have a lot of work to do, but the basics (their search engine and business model) are good enough to keep them on the wave.
The U.S. is in a transition, for better or worse, from the manufacturing economy we've had since 1900 or so to an information economy. I put the date at 1900 since that was about the time the country was mostly settled and people started to buy cars and appliances. The connectedness of everything, in which the primary means of communication is the Internet, spells fabulous riches for those who can take advantage of it.
The culture and legal micro-management of companies which encourages them to extract the highest short-term profit, at the expense of the long-term health of the company, is destroying our manufacturing base. Everything except weapons will soon be built overseas, since weapons have to be built in a Congressman's home district or they don't get his vote. Most such are built in as many different districts as possible, at the expense of efficiency and quality.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and others will be the new GEs and GMs. The hardware companies will continue to make money, but with lower and lower margins, as more and more capability to access the network gets built into different appliances. Wal-Mart will suck up all the retail business, buying up all the corner grocery stores.
Wrap all of this together and you see that it's pointless to fight the information wave. Google isn't inventing new, illegal uses for other people's information; they're applying old principles to the new connectedness. Others will copy their model, to varying success. The folks in suits had better get in the boat, or be washed away.
I know this is Slashot, so painting with a broad brush and taking things out of context is the norm. Maybe PP was supposed to be funny, but if so you missed the mark a bit.
[...] demanding that law enforcement agencies obtain warrants (even retrospectively) makes the country unsafe, and helps terrorists? I know this, because no less an authority than The President said while talking about NSA wiretaps [...]
It is said that prior to the attacks of September 11th, our government failed to connect the dots of the conspiracy. We now know that two of the hijackers in the United States placed telephone calls to al-Qaida operatives overseas. But we did not know about their plans until it was too late. So to prevent another attack -- based on authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute -- I have authorized a terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al-Qaida operatives and affiliates to and from America. Previous presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have -- and Federal courts have approved the use of that authority. Appropriate Members of Congress have been kept informed. This terrorist surveillance program has helped prevent terrorist attacks. It remains essential to the security of America. If there are people inside our country who are talking with al-Qaida, we want to know about it -- because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.
That has nothing to do with librarians, unless members of al-Qaida have overdue books or something. You're making the same mistake the FBI apparently does, confusing the need to fight foreign terrorists with the need to fight domestic crime. Maybe you knew that, though.
Most people think calling an al-Qaida phone number is probable cause to have your phone records searched and even to have your very own wiretap. Most people would also insist that domestic crime be fought with traditional due process. Lumping the two together is a mistake, both politically (whichever side you're on) and for its actual results.
Seizing the computers is a move driven by forensics. You want to keep the evidence from becoming tainted by further use of the computers. The trouble is that the FBI doesn't have the authority to seize the evidence, and they're bureaucratic nimrods. So they try to bully their way along, without realizing that if they explained the process to the librarian she'd probably have been of immense help. If there's one thing librarians are good at, it's knowing where things are. Getting the library to cooperate, instead of pushing them around, actually would have resulted in tighter control of the evidence, since the computers would not have had to move.
When I was a young adult, I thought how I acted, such as my personal morality and being a law-abiding citizen, was what was important. I generalized that to others, forming my opinion of them based on that.
Later, I decided that attention to the letter of the law was less important than doing what I thought was right in the higher sense. My opinion of others followed.
Still later, I realized that giving to others of my money, my time, and personal kindness was the key to being a good person. Still, that's how I began to judge.
Now, I don't care about being a "good person" in anyone else's eyes, and I tend to be a lot less judgy than before.
Anonymously helping others, showing kindness when you can, taking care of your responsibilities, and being a good citizen are all faces on the same multisided die.
Giving a trunk full of cash to the needy is no more important than dealing fairly with your customers, your employer, or your employees. An overflowing generosity in public doesn't make up for churlish behavior in private, nor do kind words and clean hands cover stingyness.
It's all the same.
So tip the waitress the price of the meal, and tell her she's great. Hug a child. Vote well. Be virtuous, and you know exactly what I mean.
Life is sweeter if you play nice.
Ok, for those of you who don't know what I mean by virtue: you're not trying.
... for the first time, they're releasing the chip for a stable OS first.
It used to be that testers only had an unstable testbed OS (designed primarily to run the same company's office suite) to use for validatation. Testers were never quite sure before where the blue screens, lockups, funny noises, and billowing smoke actually originated.
Do I push the article to the top of the page (hearing 50 readers post DUPE as they cry in their soup!) or expand it and let it continue to slide down...
Hmmm, I don't know. I was only thinking about how verbose the story references were.
Personally I'd prefer not to have stories sort by popularity, but only by time as it is done now. That might be a per-user preferences selection. I can see that kind of sorting being a real problem, as one story could explode and dominate the attention of users and moderators, artificially aided by the sorting system.
Part of the implemenation also has to guard against trolls. You could score each story based on the sum of each comment's mod points times its age, or some similar formula. That might be slow:-).
I figured it out when the storyless stories started moving down the page. It's nice, but I have a suggestion.
The verbosity of a story on the main page should be a function of its activity, moderation, and timeliness. In other words, stories appear as a single line, then gradually get more page space as people reply, and less as they fade away, until finally you have a bunch of one-liners at the end. Sort of like the way threaded postings work with but with 'newest first'.
Done right, the code would be simpler.
Or maybe not. As I said, I like the new feature/design.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sort of.
.01 (death from falling) + .99 (fun) .99 (small number)
A complex decision is a whole bunch of trade-offs, profit-and-loss variables. Each variable has a probability associated with it, and they can cascade together. I use a system of "expected value" summations, and it works pretty well.
For instance, in buying a car there is the price (and the 100% likelihood that you'll have to pay it), a set of features, and a set of unknown costs (maintenance), and a set of emotional value points (prestige, convenience, dependability). Each of the costs has a probability that you'll incur it, and each of the values has a probability that you'll receive it. Some of them are related, and may need to be refactored to make the math work out for you.
You multiply each of the costs and outcomes (positive and negative) with their value to you (on some scale of your choosing) and their probability of occurring, and sum them all up. That choice gets a score.
Compare the score from all of the other choices you could make, and your decision is made.
The nice thing about this system is that by breaking down the fuzzy-factor "value" for each outcome and pairing it with a probability, you see the real cost for each while simultaneously hiding the answer from yourself. Subconciously you will tend to favor the choice you want to make, but be careful that you don't fudge the probabilities.
As a simple example, consider recreational sky-diving. The value you get from jumping -- a rush, some prestige, and maybe some sex out of it somehow -- compares with a (call it) 99% probability of landing safely and a (call it) 1% probability of landing with a splat.
For me, I assign a pretty high value to keeping my skin intact. How much would I pay someone not to flatten my skull?
stay on ground = free + 0 (death from falling) + 0 (fun)
= 0
skydiving = -$50 +
= -$50 - 1/100 (very big number) +
= (probably something negative, and I have to pay 50 bucks).
As a side note, you can see that the resultant costs of a decision and the cost to make it happen are just two labels for the same thing. That is, whether something is a cost or benefit is just the sign on the term.
While what you describe might be occurring, I refer you to a basic lifesaving mantra:
ATI may just be stopping the bleeding, that is, first taking steps not to deceive any other potential customers. In fact, if they were to do anything else there would be a situation where they'd be saying "Sorry, we were wrong" while continuing to allow customers to get the wrong idea.
Watch their public statements and what they do next before rushing to judgement.
Actually, I do personally boycott China.
The reason I labeled your arguments straw was that you set up them up to knock them down. You tried to present a false dichotomy between either boycotting evil completely or embracing it totally. It's not that simple, and so your arguments blow away in the slightest puff of air.
And I never said I agreed with Google, just that I think I understand their position. It's a reasonable one for them to take. World domination is incomplete without owning China.
[...straw men...]
"Evil" for countries is not the same as "evil" for individuals. The rules for conduct among nations, and even between a government and the governed, are different. People often label governmental action "evil" or "good" when the motivations and results of a given governmental action are much more complex than that.
For example, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Were either or both of those just intended to mollify an angry domestic population, to show the government was doing something to fight terrorism, or were they really intended to protect liberty against and spread liberty to those wishing to destroy it? Were either or both about oil, geopolitical intrigue, or personal vendettas? Depends who you ask.
Or the minimum wage: some people consider the minimum wage an altruistic fight on behalf of the downtrodden to provide the good life for all. Others say it's a cynical attempt to buy votes which ends up making some jobs unprofitable, thus throwing people onto the dole or into homelessness. It's not as simple as good vs. evil, yet people cast it that way.
In Google's case, they've decided they're doing their part to spread the light of knowledge. It's what they do. How can that be evil, they ask? I don't know if it's evil, but I hope they don't find themselves on a slippery slope, on which the Chinese start demanding that they implement ever more accurate content controls.
The logical flaw there is question-begging. The point is, they get to choose the countries they're in, and China need not be one of them.
It's really an age-old question: do you shun the evildoers so that they don't influence you, or do you go out and mingle with the evildoers so that you can be a positive influence?
Google appears to be saying that since content filters are not as good as their search engiine, they can be a more positive influence on the culture in China than cooperating with the Chinese harms them.
And there's money there.
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/softwar
Taking the "%20" away from the final "/" made it work.
(There should be no spaces in the URL.)
Perhaps someone should write an article on how to write robust AJAX code. Oh, wait...
Putting together a machine like that is an amazing feat. Using other people's ideas is the hallmark of great engineers. Taking credit for other people's ideas is the hallmark of great losers.
As TFA says, whether you think of Eckert and Mauchly as the first to build a computer or not, ENIAC is the "watershed event". A lot of people in the U.S. think of Henry Ford as the inventor of the automobile, even though if you press them they probably remember that he was not, by many years and an ocean.
Dan Bricklin, inventor of the electronic spreadsheet, was sued by Lotus Corp. for violating the 'look and feel' of their 1-2-3 product with his Visicalc. Never mind that their entire product was based on his beautiful idea, he got sued out of business for copying their menu structure.
What the courts decide and what actually happened are often not entirely in sync.
This is not some spin-meister from a lying regime from the West; this is the government of the People's Republic of China, where freedom is a way of life, and protecting the People from harmful ideas is a sacred trust fulfilled lovinggly by a wise, caring, benevolent government. What possible motive could they have for dealing falsely with the Western media?
No, it is obvious that the whole Chinese Internet censorship furor is a coverup and smokescreen used by the American government and their allies at CNN to divert attention away from the hordes of jack-booted thugs in unmarked vans eavesdropping on wiretaps of Americans who google for news of the occupation of Iraq or the vendetta against the great hero Osama Bin Laden.
>how do you avoid
I (independent of this) go to a lot of auctions and garage sales. In my area, a lot of what's there is tools and other things that were made Before.
Ask older salespeople. They generally know where something is made and how good it is. Sometimes a higher-quality item that lacks fancy features will be less expensive than a cheap one with lots of bells and whistles.
It's just a different mindset. The time I don't spend looking at price tags and trying to get a bargain, I look at labels and figure which one of the choices will last forever, versus needing to be replaced in a year.
I cringe when I have to buy something at Wal-Mart, because almost everything there comes from China. It's not just Wal-Mart, but that's where I notice it the most.
Some of the Chinese-made stuff is of decent quality, but mostly it's not. I don't like the sweatshop image I get when I look at the poorer-quality items. As a result, I've changed my buying habits to try to avoid things from China.
When I'm shopping now I look for the very best item in a given cateogory. I ignore the price, unless I know the item is disposable. Most of the time, the best item will come from (in no particular order) the U.S., Japan, Europe, or Korea.
One trouble with that, as with all utopian visions, is that implementation never follows design. As Communism inexorably devolves into dictatorial oligarchy, a select few would have privacy while the rest lived as slaves to the Eye.
Even if that weren't to happen, democratic tyranny would be unavoidable. If everyone knows what everyone else is doing, a sheeplike uniformity would be the result, with any oddballs subjected to public disgrace. "You painted your bathroom what color? Weirdo!" "Look, he's got a flashlight under the covers! He's doing something private under there! Pervert!" "You spanked your child? Abuse! Abuse!"
Some of the greatest joys in life are private. A quiet conversation with a spouse. Reading a bedtime story to a wide-eyed child. Singing off-key in the car. Posting anonymous trolls on Slashdot.
The right to privacy is not just an invention of the courts to justify abortion, though some read Roe v Wade that way. Privacy is infused in the Bill of Rights, from the right to practice religion as we see fit, the right not to have troops in our homes, the right to own weapons, and the right to be secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects".
Whether abused by the powerful or not, the world Brin proposes is a totalitarian hell.
On the other hand, perhaps carrying a child to term helps prevent some cancers.
From an evolutionary perspective, which is more likely? If there were any effect, it seems to me unlikely that having children would give you cancer. It seems reasonable that interrupting the process would be worse for the mother than continuing it, in general.
are 30 years old and still living in the basement.
>ten times thinner
Another way to look at it is that the scale is missing. To say that something is "ten times thinner" you have to know what unit of thinness is being used. Same with "ten times quicker" or "ten times slower", as you say. It's backwards construction.
Marketers love to use this mangling, because it sounds better to the untrained ear than "one tenth as [thick, far, fast]". More is always better, so ten times something is better than one tenth of something.
People respond with some form of the "rose is a rose" argument. This is not a simple case of naming, but once someone adopts the view that it's idiomatic it's hard to get them to think about it further.
Google is simply the most prominent of many companies riding the wave of history. They appeared with good tools at a time when people were just starting to really depend on such tools. They still have a lot of work to do, but the basics (their search engine and business model) are good enough to keep them on the wave.
The U.S. is in a transition, for better or worse, from the manufacturing economy we've had since 1900 or so to an information economy. I put the date at 1900 since that was about the time the country was mostly settled and people started to buy cars and appliances. The connectedness of everything, in which the primary means of communication is the Internet, spells fabulous riches for those who can take advantage of it.
The culture and legal micro-management of companies which encourages them to extract the highest short-term profit, at the expense of the long-term health of the company, is destroying our manufacturing base. Everything except weapons will soon be built overseas, since weapons have to be built in a Congressman's home district or they don't get his vote. Most such are built in as many different districts as possible, at the expense of efficiency and quality.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and others will be the new GEs and GMs. The hardware companies will continue to make money, but with lower and lower margins, as more and more capability to access the network gets built into different appliances. Wal-Mart will suck up all the retail business, buying up all the corner grocery stores.
Wrap all of this together and you see that it's pointless to fight the information wave. Google isn't inventing new, illegal uses for other people's information; they're applying old principles to the new connectedness. Others will copy their model, to varying success. The folks in suits had better get in the boat, or be washed away.
I know this is Slashot, so painting with a broad brush and taking things out of context is the norm. Maybe PP was supposed to be funny, but if so you missed the mark a bit.
What he said, according to the C-SPAN transcript was:
That has nothing to do with librarians, unless members of al-Qaida have overdue books or something. You're making the same mistake the FBI apparently does, confusing the need to fight foreign terrorists with the need to fight domestic crime. Maybe you knew that, though.
Most people think calling an al-Qaida phone number is probable cause to have your phone records searched and even to have your very own wiretap. Most people would also insist that domestic crime be fought with traditional due process. Lumping the two together is a mistake, both politically (whichever side you're on) and for its actual results.
Seizing the computers is a move driven by forensics. You want to keep the evidence from becoming tainted by further use of the computers. The trouble is that the FBI doesn't have the authority to seize the evidence, and they're bureaucratic nimrods. So they try to bully their way along, without realizing that if they explained the process to the librarian she'd probably have been of immense help. If there's one thing librarians are good at, it's knowing where things are. Getting the library to cooperate, instead of pushing them around, actually would have resulted in tighter control of the evidence, since the computers would not have had to move.
The notion that "information wants to be free" seems more valid all the time.
And in her husband's case, not without some unique anatomical features.
When I was a young adult, I thought how I acted, such as my personal morality and being a law-abiding citizen, was what was important. I generalized that to others, forming my opinion of them based on that.
Later, I decided that attention to the letter of the law was less important than doing what I thought was right in the higher sense. My opinion of others followed.
Still later, I realized that giving to others of my money, my time, and personal kindness was the key to being a good person. Still, that's how I began to judge.
Now, I don't care about being a "good person" in anyone else's eyes, and I tend to be a lot less judgy than before.
Anonymously helping others, showing kindness when you can, taking care of your responsibilities, and being a good citizen are all faces on the same multisided die.
Giving a trunk full of cash to the needy is no more important than dealing fairly with your customers, your employer, or your employees. An overflowing generosity in public doesn't make up for churlish behavior in private, nor do kind words and clean hands cover stingyness.
It's all the same.
So tip the waitress the price of the meal, and tell her she's great. Hug a child. Vote well. Be virtuous, and you know exactly what I mean.
Life is sweeter if you play nice.
Ok, for those of you who don't know what I mean by virtue: you're not trying.
... for the first time, they're releasing the chip for a stable OS first.
It used to be that testers only had an unstable testbed OS (designed primarily to run the same company's office suite) to use for validatation. Testers were never quite sure before where the blue screens, lockups, funny noises, and billowing smoke actually originated.
(Relax, it's just a joke).
Google Groups
....
Oops, my bad. I guess if I ever RTFA
That's really good news.
Now all my old, embarrassing cross-posts to alt.flame, alt.fan.warlord, and alt.sex.nice.ass.paulina will be preserved for eternity.
And you wonder why I use a pseudonym? I learned a late lesson.
Hmmm, I don't know. I was only thinking about how verbose the story references were.
Personally I'd prefer not to have stories sort by popularity, but only by time as it is done now. That might be a per-user preferences selection. I can see that kind of sorting being a real problem, as one story could explode and dominate the attention of users and moderators, artificially aided by the sorting system.
Part of the implemenation also has to guard against trolls. You could score each story based on the sum of each comment's mod points times its age, or some similar formula. That might be slow :-).
I figured it out when the storyless stories started moving down the page. It's nice, but I have a suggestion.
The verbosity of a story on the main page should be a function of its activity, moderation, and timeliness. In other words, stories appear as a single line, then gradually get more page space as people reply, and less as they fade away, until finally you have a bunch of one-liners at the end. Sort of like the way threaded postings work with but with 'newest first'.
Done right, the code would be simpler.
Or maybe not. As I said, I like the new feature/design.