Ah...yes. The (mostly) succesful straw man argument. It is funny how well it works in politics. I know it is just too hard to resist to use it -- it's got just that right dose of sarcasm and at the same time it is supposed to shoot down the other argument.
I guess I'm the same way. One of my inconsistencies is that I enjoy a refreshing rain shower, I like to see the plants turn green and flowers bloom. But I get all upset at flooding. I'm just weird. I like water, so more water is better, right? If more is better, too much is just right.
And how much mercury would you like to shower with? When you talk about selling light bulbs with Hg in it that has enough to increase the 6x the norm for safe Hg environmental concentration, it is not a matter of a "little is good, but more is bad" but "That little ammount of Hg is already bad enough. If you advocate the ban of a plant that produces Hg why would stand behind adopting and promoting the sale of a product that contains a dangerous amount of Hg"?
But, I understand, the straw man argument is just so appealing I can hardly resist to use it myself sometimes....
I don't care what somebody else says you're capable of - I care what you ARE capable of, and would rather put in the effort to judge for myself rather than rely on the opinion of professors who've seen only a narrow aspect of the applicant's abilities.
I am capable of building a time machine, hire me, pay be $200,000/year and in 5 years we might have a time machine and we can sell rides to people.
So would you hire me? How would you know what a new college grad is capable of? Sure they'll say they a capable of many things. Nobody will tell you "yeah, I'm kind of lazy, and I get bored and give up easily..." or "I could have gotten an 'A' if I'd worked harder but I just wanted to party and slide by with a 'C' ".
In order to know what an applicant is capable of you need to also look at what others say about them. GPA is the result of a large, 4-5 year project that this person accomplished. It included doing boring grunt work, as well as learning exciting new stuff and the GPA is the most objective index you have of the result of that project. I would definetly look at that index. Otherwise you are left guessing and gambling.
...who also is proficient in his hobbies/extracurricular activites And how can you tell how proficient they are in fishing? Would you ask them about the biggest fish they caught. Again, hobbies might be interesting but I don't think I would want a person with 10 different hobbies and a GPA of "2.0".
bureaucratic administrators or professors who believe rote parroting == learning
Here I would do what you said and look at the classes and the school. Someone who can get a 4.0 in a local community college is different than someone with a 4.0 from Yale. There is a different learning environment at different schools. It is not clear cut and I would never rely on GPA alone but combined with the school and the major it can be a good, fairly objective indicator of that hiree's potential.
I like this one: Greenpeace also recommends CFLs while simultaneously bemoaning contamination caused by a mercury-thermometer factory in India.
This is how schizophrenic our society is. People in different camps, all with their little agendas, bark at each other without realizing how inconsistent and stupid they are. It is like the convservative republican pro-lifers who wouldn't think twice about putting someone on the death row, or the liberal pro-choicers who campaign to save the hungry dying children in Africa but could give a rat's ass about a child who is not born yet. Most of all individuals just take the easy way out and allign themsevles with a big horde of others for the protection and the comfy feeling of belonging and being able to think of things in terms of 'us' as opposed to 'I'. That means unquestionably addopting the default agenda without thinking about. And by 'horde' I mean not just a political party but also a company, organization or in fact, any community. (Yes... slashdot is also one such 'horde' with {linux, google, cowboyneal} = good, {sco,microsoft} = bad, {everything else} = funny / irrelevant).
Was it really hard for EPA to think, "Hmm, we are recommending this new product, it is easily breakable, I wonder what happens if someone breaks it...?" isn't that what they are payed to to do. Ironically enough, I wouldn't blame Wal-Mart. I know they don't give a shit about environment or other stuff like that, they just want to make an extra buck _now_ and with each one of those bulbs costing around $5, that is more than just an 'extra' buck. At least they are consistent...
Oh how wrong. I have heard that phrase a countless number of time from every one who didn't to do well in school and just gave up and dropped out. You see, your GPA also shows how well you can get stuff done even if you are not terribly interested in it. It is not likely that everyone will enjoy Literature,Math, Biology, Psychology all at the same time, BUT if they can still get an 'A' in it that says a lot about that person's work ethic. Because in a work place not every single day and every single project is going to be 'fun' there is a plenty of times where you'd rather be doing something else so the employer will think 'will he drop out and leave when he gets bored here as well?'
Internet radio is so special for two main reasons:
I. They got the fact wrong that since Internet radio is digital it means that it reproduces exact copies of the originals and thus it is threatening. That is the argument they probably presented in court to stupid lawmaker in Washington who would use thier optical drive tray as a cupholder. You see, back in the day they presented the same argument for the overpricing digital tapes and limiting their addoption. It wasn't that the tapes were expensive it was because they could have been used to created perfect copies of digital music. Today Internet radio station of course downsample and encode their streams at about 128kbps or so, that is far from even CD quality.
II. The real reason is that RIAA and friends see the Internet radio as the new hot emerging market and they want a share of it. As simple as that....
Yeah, I remember when they started showing their little anti-piracy clips before the movies in the movie theaters in U.S. The "funniest" one was of a set designer that looked like a regualar blue colar worker with a flannel shirt and suede boots (live in a blue color town, so they hoped it would "resonate" with the locals) , sad marimba musing came on and the voice over was saying how the poor set designer needs to put food on the table and pirating takes food away from his family. I started laughing! In my mind I had the more truthful version of it:
It start by panning around a rich mansion on the coast of the Pacific with 2 pools, a 5 car garage and a yaht on. A very rich family of a CEO of EMI lives there and he is having a conversation with his 15 year old daughter, he sadly tells her that unfortunately she will have to settle with just a Mercedes sports car for her next birthday instead of having a Ferrari, because those evil pirates downloaded movies for free.... Sad marimba music comes on and the daughter start crying, throws herself on the ground and start having a hysterical fit. The screen fades to black and a marque scroll by with the words "LOOK WHAT THE PIRATES HAVE DONE!". The end.
Maybe someone would want to make such a clip and put it on Youtube...
doctor worth their salt has to have excellent social & communication skills
Yeah, so do used car salesmen.
doctors are treated above everyone else primarily because people respect them for having the sheer balls to make decisions that *will* drastically affect someone's life, and be accountable for those decisions afterwards.
Oh, that's why? Well how about the civil engineers that build bridges. A doctor screws up once, one patient dies, an engineer screws up and hundreds could die. Obvously that is not the reason. It is not as if in other countries doctors are stupider or kill people every day on average they are just as good as American once, except that they don't behave like Gods. Whenever you put a pricetag on a curing a human illness you will get a situation where you end up with most doctors just wanting to make money. I have heard countless times of parents wanting their offspring to be either doctors or lawyers, not because the parents have a strong sense of justice and want to "root the evil from this world" or want their child to dig through people's guts because somehow they are very altruistic, but because they want them to make more $$$$$. So I think more than half of the people in medical school are there because of the money. If it would be a profession where only people who really want to help would go into, everyone would be better off. As I said, I lived in the ex-Soviet Union and went to the doctors there, had surgery, and other minor procedures. I grew up healthier and better taken care of and I didn't have to get into debt up to my ears because of it.
Hmm, this sounds just like a letter I got the other day
Hello dear Sir or Madam, This is Mugu Maccaca The III, the son of the late Mugu Maccaca The II, the prime minister of Nigeria. I respectfully request your assistance in transfering a sum of $65,000,000.00 from the bank account of my father who has past away. For your assitance you will get 25% of the total sum. To initiate the transfer we will need your help to pay a $7,345.34 fee to unfreeze my father's money. Please help me as the rebels are coming closer and closer to taking control of my inheritance. Your help will be aboundantly rewarded.
Thank you and God bless. Mugu Maccaca The III, the son of the late Mugu Maccaca the II
Of course, if you do come down with something nasty, you are going to be well and truly screwed
That is a problem with healthcare in this country. If you let companies make a profit off of anyone's illness, everyone will be screwed (except the CEO's of those healthcare companies). I lived in the Soviet Union and I can confirm that as bad as the Soviets were they had very good basic healthcare. It didn't matter what you had who you were, you could get treatment. You just had to walk into a hospital tell them what 'hurts', show them your medical history record (a paper notebook ) and you would get treatment. You didn't have to sell your house and get in dept up to your ears just because you had to have surgery.
Here you will die if you cannot pay. This is in a country were supposedly human life is more valued that in those other "barbaric" countries. I think I would trust Uncle Sam with my healhcare and pay higher taxes than pay the same taxes and more to get the CEO of healthcare conglomerates rich. At least with the government there could be some transparency and more accountablity.
Besides, why are the doctors so freaking rich in this country and have this status of "gods". It seems like most of them only go into the profession to make money rather than care for the patients. In other countries doctors are just like everyone, just like the teachers, programmers, engineers and accountants. It only takes memorization to become a doctor, they don't have to develop or invent a new process or theory like the PhD's. Why the fuck are they treated above everyone else?
Exactly. Just do a search for Epic Systems employment and you'll find plenty info Epic. I am sure your "sigh" means that you already do know. I wouldn't wish even my enemy to work for Epic Systems. That place is so messed up, it is scary. Their CEO and founder Judy Faulkner is crazy, she decorated the place with bright yellow and blue walls, crazy wierd "art" pieces and she never shows up to interact with anyone and just hides for days on end. That is still the best part. They hire naive fresh grads, promise them work in an "exciting upstart company" (even though it was started in the early 80's) and then gives them a fixed salary and makes them work 60 hour weeks. And they really love to hire H1B workers, they pay for their visas but them make them slave for the company for 5 years minimum. And MUMPS, they use MUMPS! Oh, my God...(I wanted to apply to work there, actually saw their job add on Slashdot and thought I'd give it a try) when I read the description of MUMPS it made Cobol look new and exciting.
I don't know how Epic ever managed to scam Kaiser to secure a contract with them, I am sure Kaiser learned their lesson after this...
That figures. I applied to work for Epic and they couldn't even keep up with managing my phone number, contact info and interview appointment times. Then they had me take a test and one of the possible languages to write the test in was Cobol. Yeah, a paper and pencil programming test in Cobol. Sure they had C, C++ and Java but they also had Cobol for goodness' sake.
Then I asked the recruiter what database systems they use and they mentioned CACHE and the MUMPS language. MUMPS is some archaic pre-C language and I'd rather eat razor blades than use it.
As if that wasn't enough, I did some more research about Epic and found all kinds of dirt on it. The founder and CEO, Judy Faulkner is crazy and doesn't appear in public for weeks at a time. Epic loves to hire recent grads from out of town (that keeps them isolated), give them a medium salary but work them 60 hrs/week. I said screw it and stopped replying to their email and picking up their phone calls. These people are crazy.
This whole mess with Kaiser P. just validates it. It was very stupid of Kaiser to pay hundreds of millions to Epic, it seems like they are reaping the "benefits."
Not if free software == open source software for you. Do you use NVidia's binary driver or a wifi binary only driver? Well, NVidia could then include anything in there...
Well you make a very good point. In a certain respect, I wish they would legalize this stuff so companies will start installing load of spyware on every windows computer out there. Eventually some will turn to open source software.
A major success for Linux operating systems is because not only is Linux great (and it is.../special remark to keep the Slashdot horde from lynching me) but because Windows sucks so much. If Window was OS X all this time, I am not sure if Linux would have gained as much popularity....
...open source software. Even in the Linux world that means not using binary drivers. Who knows perhaps Nvidia or other binary drivers have a backdoor installed at the request of NSA. Is that probable - No. Possible? - Maybe. AT&T for example was diverting (still is?) a lot of the their data to NSA, if they wrote drivers, don't you think they would be willing to include a backdoor for U.S. government to use? For all we know such a backdoor exists in Windows. After a high number of cyber attacks on.mil, I am sure Uncle Sam can ask Microsoft to install a small code fragment that would allow access to any machine after say a pre-determined pattern of socket connection attempts or something like that.
Hmm, I have been running TMN for many months now and so far so good. If my IP gets banned I guess I'll drag my mouse over to another script link on my desktop and waste a whole second of my life changing my MAC address on my router and consequently getting a new IP from my ISP -- I could live with that. If others want a copy of the script I can put it up for download...
Or I could waste another second of my life and change the 1 per 2 seconds rate to something like 1 / 10 seconds. If they ban every browser that sends in a query more then 1 per 10 seconds they won't have any more users soon except highschool dropouts who cannot read fast enough
Well then we should all search for that as often as possible. How many vans does Chan 4 have? If 1 million people generate wierd suspicious queries, do you think they'll have enough vans, prisons, procecutors, CIA flights to Egypt? Because if they do, then we are really in trouble, we might have to re-evaluate the kind of country we are living in...
Exactly. TMN works then. I would never be interested in that, I am not from Britain and I am not a teen anymore. TMN does its job. If the query was about Python or C++ or realtime systems I would be worried;-)
Random phrases might get you in trouble if they make it look as though you're searching for kiddie porn, for example.
Why? Are you saying that we live in a 1984 world? Well that is our real problem not some Firefox extension. The government and big corps will eventually read our thoughts and either convict us or try to sell us services based on what we think. What we search is an extension of what we think. It is an even better reason to install and run TMN not just quietly block Doubleclick and cookies. You need to make their data 'bad' not just deny it to them.
Here is how TMN works from the website of the guy who created it:
Given that I search for equaly crazy word combinations that Google engineer would have to have extrasensory abilities to pull my strange query out of 100 others generated by TMN. Figuring out what makes sense semantically is worth a Noble prize in science. Trust me, we will see other applications of that before it will be used to find out bogus searches generated by TMN.
In addition to adblock, try installing the TrackMeNot extension. It takes a different approach to this whole spying situation, it floods Google with bogus searches periodicly. If you just block Google from getting the info, they won't mind, but if you everyone will send bogus queries it will actually skew their results. Here are a couple of queries TMN sent while I typed this:
"exclusive fire roasting process"
"business relations win"
"crazy meds explains"
"moat encourages young" -- what ?
and so on. It is pretty fun just to watch what it will come up with. I send about 1 per 2 seconds, and then perhaps a 'real' query once per hour. Let Google try to figure out which is which, they are pretty smart so I'll leave it up to them as an exercise...
I learned to program on Speccy. I remember besides BASIC it has a C compiler, a Pascal compiler and I wrote my own simple assemly compiler. I also made a special keyboard for it (my Speccy model was an old Soviet one with a rubber keyboard that stopped working after a couple of months). I found an old soviet fax machine that had some nice keys with magnetting contacts and little plastic windows in each key were you could put a piece of paper with the symbol for the key. So I spent two days soddering the new keyboard to my speccy. It still work I believe all my tapes are useless though....
Alexa toolbar and IE/Windows are installed by the user voluntarily after they agree to the license. Same old, same old
Well you acutally gave an example why my post is true. Exactly because "Alexa toolbar....." is insalled by the user _voluntarily_ the web statistics data it collects is not representative of all the website visits out there. Do you see why? -- Because somehow only certain kinds of people would _choose_ to install Alexa and those people in all likelyhood would choose to visit only certain websites (like MSN, or OMGPonies.com and so on.). In other words, the same characterstics that make me want to volunatirily install Alexa crap will make me also go to certain websites that others will not go to.
Take yourself as an example, you use OS X, Linux and Firefox. You probably don't go very often to MSN.com do you? Well, that might skew Alexa's statistics then because they claim that they represent the whole population of web users out there.
To have representation you have to sample your population in a random manner. Otherwise you get all kinds of biases. For example, if a study a out illegal drug use in U.S. somehow only sampled college students, that would not be very random. The results would not be representative of the whole U.S. population. Contrary to common sense it is in fact very difficult to get a truly random sampling without having any cohort effect. A good way to do random sampling is to sample from a fairly uniform ID database that most members if your population would have, for example. If researchers had access to the social security database, they could randomly choose ssn's from it and use that sample in their study.
As an extremely simple example, you want in the sample to have the same proportions of age, gender, income, professions etc (some of those categories may not matter in certain studies).
Wrong, or rather the wrong response to the post. What you are describing is how you know one choice is a member of your population or not. That is a different problem then selecting a small and representative sample out of that _whole_ population such that it would represent that population up to a certain degree (that you specify). In the hypothetical example of drug use study, you would have already identified a way to select only individuals in U.S. that have been here for long enough to consider them part of the "population of U.S.", now you don't have an unlimited resources to go ask everyone of those individual about their drug use, what you do is you try to randomly sample enough individuals from your population to be representative, publish the results in a reputable journal and 'bam' you got your PhD, well... maybe...
From an excerpt in the article titled "Reasons to like Alexa" a response to the claim that Alexa's data is not representative was Statistical significance is attainable with only a small subset of the population - ask a pollster or a high school math teacher..
That is a mistake, or rather a mistaken response to the claim. Yes, statistical significance is attainable but only if the sample is representative (i.e.) is random. The critics' claim is that Alexa's data is not representative, in other words the sites that choose to give Alexa their data are somehow don't represent a random sample of all the websites out there. It isn't a question of size but rather of quality.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I'm the same way. One of my inconsistencies is that I enjoy a refreshing rain shower, I like to see the plants turn green and flowers bloom. But I get all upset at flooding. I'm just weird. I like water, so more water is better, right? If more is better, too much is just right.
And how much mercury would you like to shower with? When you talk about selling light bulbs with Hg in it that has enough to increase the 6x the norm for safe Hg environmental concentration, it is not a matter of a "little is good, but more is bad" but "That little ammount of Hg is already bad enough. If you advocate the ban of a plant that produces Hg why would stand behind adopting and promoting the sale of a product that contains a dangerous amount of Hg"?
But, I understand, the straw man argument is just so appealing I can hardly resist to use it myself sometimes....
I am capable of building a time machine, hire me, pay be $200,000/year and in 5 years we might have a time machine and we can sell rides to people.
So would you hire me? How would you know what a new college grad is capable of? Sure they'll say they a capable of many things. Nobody will tell you "yeah, I'm kind of lazy, and I get bored and give up easily..." or "I could have gotten an 'A' if I'd worked harder but I just wanted to party and slide by with a 'C' ".
In order to know what an applicant is capable of you need to also look at what others say about them. GPA is the result of a large, 4-5 year project that this person accomplished. It included doing boring grunt work, as well as learning exciting new stuff and the GPA is the most objective index you have of the result of that project. I would definetly look at that index. Otherwise you are left guessing and gambling.
bureaucratic administrators or professors who believe rote parroting == learning
Here I would do what you said and look at the classes and the school. Someone who can get a 4.0 in a local community college is different than someone with a 4.0 from Yale. There is a different learning environment at different schools. It is not clear cut and I would never rely on GPA alone but combined with the school and the major it can be a good, fairly objective indicator of that hiree's potential.
This is how schizophrenic our society is. People in different camps, all with their little agendas, bark at each other without realizing how inconsistent and stupid they are. It is like the convservative republican pro-lifers who wouldn't think twice about putting someone on the death row, or the liberal pro-choicers who campaign to save the hungry dying children in Africa but could give a rat's ass about a child who is not born yet. Most of all individuals just take the easy way out and allign themsevles with a big horde of others for the protection and the comfy feeling of belonging and being able to think of things in terms of 'us' as opposed to 'I'. That means unquestionably addopting the default agenda without thinking about. And by 'horde' I mean not just a political party but also a company, organization or in fact, any community. (Yes... slashdot is also one such 'horde' with {linux, google, cowboyneal} = good, {sco,microsoft} = bad, {everything else} = funny / irrelevant).
Was it really hard for EPA to think, "Hmm, we are recommending this new product, it is easily breakable, I wonder what happens if someone breaks it...?" isn't that what they are payed to to do. Ironically enough, I wouldn't blame Wal-Mart. I know they don't give a shit about environment or other stuff like that, they just want to make an extra buck _now_ and with each one of those bulbs costing around $5, that is more than just an 'extra' buck. At least they are consistent...
I. They got the fact wrong that since Internet radio is digital it means that it reproduces exact copies of the originals and thus it is threatening. That is the argument they probably presented in court to stupid lawmaker in Washington who would use thier optical drive tray as a cupholder. You see, back in the day they presented the same argument for the overpricing digital tapes and limiting their addoption. It wasn't that the tapes were expensive it was because they could have been used to created perfect copies of digital music. Today Internet radio station of course downsample and encode their streams at about 128kbps or so, that is far from even CD quality.
II. The real reason is that RIAA and friends see the Internet radio as the new hot emerging market and they want a share of it. As simple as that....
It start by panning around a rich mansion on the coast of the Pacific with 2 pools, a 5 car garage and a yaht on. A very rich family of a CEO of EMI lives there and he is having a conversation with his 15 year old daughter, he sadly tells her that unfortunately she will have to settle with just a Mercedes sports car for her next birthday instead of having a Ferrari, because those evil pirates downloaded movies for free. ... Sad marimba music comes on and the daughter start crying, throws herself on the ground and start having a hysterical fit. The screen fades to black and a marque scroll by with the words "LOOK WHAT THE PIRATES HAVE DONE!". The end.
Maybe someone would want to make such a clip and put it on Youtube...Yeah, so do used car salesmen.
doctors are treated above everyone else primarily because people respect them for having the sheer balls to make decisions that *will* drastically affect someone's life, and be accountable for those decisions afterwards.
Oh, that's why? Well how about the civil engineers that build bridges. A doctor screws up once, one patient dies, an engineer screws up and hundreds could die. Obvously that is not the reason. It is not as if in other countries doctors are stupider or kill people every day on average they are just as good as American once, except that they don't behave like Gods. Whenever you put a pricetag on a curing a human illness you will get a situation where you end up with most doctors just wanting to make money. I have heard countless times of parents wanting their offspring to be either doctors or lawyers, not because the parents have a strong sense of justice and want to "root the evil from this world" or want their child to dig through people's guts because somehow they are very altruistic, but because they want them to make more $$$$$. So I think more than half of the people in medical school are there because of the money. If it would be a profession where only people who really want to help would go into, everyone would be better off. As I said, I lived in the ex-Soviet Union and went to the doctors there, had surgery, and other minor procedures. I grew up healthier and better taken care of and I didn't have to get into debt up to my ears because of it.
Hmm, this sounds just like a letter I got the other day
Hello dear Sir or Madam, This is Mugu Maccaca The III, the son of the late Mugu Maccaca The II, the prime minister of Nigeria. I respectfully request your assistance in transfering a sum of $65,000,000.00 from the bank account of my father who has past away. For your assitance you will get 25% of the total sum. To initiate the transfer we will need your help to pay a $7,345.34 fee to unfreeze my father's money. Please help me as the rebels are coming closer and closer to taking control of my inheritance. Your help will be aboundantly rewarded.
Thank you and God bless.
Mugu Maccaca The III, the son of the late Mugu Maccaca the II
That is a problem with healthcare in this country. If you let companies make a profit off of anyone's illness, everyone will be screwed (except the CEO's of those healthcare companies). I lived in the Soviet Union and I can confirm that as bad as the Soviets were they had very good basic healthcare. It didn't matter what you had who you were, you could get treatment. You just had to walk into a hospital tell them what 'hurts', show them your medical history record (a paper notebook ) and you would get treatment. You didn't have to sell your house and get in dept up to your ears just because you had to have surgery.
Here you will die if you cannot pay. This is in a country were supposedly human life is more valued that in those other "barbaric" countries. I think I would trust Uncle Sam with my healhcare and pay higher taxes than pay the same taxes and more to get the CEO of healthcare conglomerates rich. At least with the government there could be some transparency and more accountablity.
Besides, why are the doctors so freaking rich in this country and have this status of "gods". It seems like most of them only go into the profession to make money rather than care for the patients. In other countries doctors are just like everyone, just like the teachers, programmers, engineers and accountants. It only takes memorization to become a doctor, they don't have to develop or invent a new process or theory like the PhD's. Why the fuck are they treated above everyone else?
I don't know how Epic ever managed to scam Kaiser to secure a contract with them, I am sure Kaiser learned their lesson after this...
Then I asked the recruiter what database systems they use and they mentioned CACHE and the MUMPS language. MUMPS is some archaic pre-C language and I'd rather eat razor blades than use it.
As if that wasn't enough, I did some more research about Epic and found all kinds of dirt on it. The founder and CEO, Judy Faulkner is crazy and doesn't appear in public for weeks at a time. Epic loves to hire recent grads from out of town (that keeps them isolated), give them a medium salary but work them 60 hrs/week. I said screw it and stopped replying to their email and picking up their phone calls. These people are crazy.
This whole mess with Kaiser P. just validates it. It was very stupid of Kaiser to pay hundreds of millions to Epic, it seems like they are reaping the "benefits."
A major success for Linux operating systems is because not only is Linux great (and it is.../special remark to keep the Slashdot horde from lynching me) but because Windows sucks so much. If Window was OS X all this time, I am not sure if Linux would have gained as much popularity....
...open source software. Even in the Linux world that means not using binary drivers. Who knows perhaps Nvidia or other binary drivers have a backdoor installed at the request of NSA. Is that probable - No. Possible? - Maybe. AT&T for example was diverting (still is?) a lot of the their data to NSA, if they wrote drivers, don't you think they would be willing to include a backdoor for U.S. government to use? For all we know such a backdoor exists in Windows. After a high number of cyber attacks on .mil, I am sure Uncle Sam can ask Microsoft to install a small code fragment that would allow access to any machine after say a pre-determined pattern of socket connection attempts or something like that.
Or I could waste another second of my life and change the 1 per 2 seconds rate to something like 1 / 10 seconds. If they ban every browser that sends in a query more then 1 per 10 seconds they won't have any more users soon except highschool dropouts who cannot read fast enough
Well then we should all search for that as often as possible. How many vans does Chan 4 have? If 1 million people generate wierd suspicious queries, do you think they'll have enough vans, prisons, procecutors, CIA flights to Egypt? Because if they do, then we are really in trouble, we might have to re-evaluate the kind of country we are living in...
Why? Are you saying that we live in a 1984 world? Well that is our real problem not some Firefox extension. The government and big corps will eventually read our thoughts and either convict us or try to sell us services based on what we think. What we search is an extension of what we think. It is an even better reason to install and run TMN not just quietly block Doubleclick and cookies. You need to make their data 'bad' not just deny it to them.
Here is how TMN works from the website of the guy who created it:
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/#how
Given that I search for equaly crazy word combinations that Google engineer would have to have extrasensory abilities to pull my strange query out of 100 others generated by TMN. Figuring out what makes sense semantically is worth a Noble prize in science. Trust me, we will see other applications of that before it will be used to find out bogus searches generated by TMN.
"exclusive fire roasting process"
"business relations win"
"crazy meds explains"
"moat encourages young" -- what ?
and so on. It is pretty fun just to watch what it will come up with. I send about 1 per 2 seconds, and then perhaps a 'real' query once per hour. Let Google try to figure out which is which, they are pretty smart so I'll leave it up to them as an exercise...
I learned to program on Speccy. I remember besides BASIC it has a C compiler, a Pascal compiler and I wrote my own simple assemly compiler. I also made a special keyboard for it (my Speccy model was an old Soviet one with a rubber keyboard that stopped working after a couple of months). I found an old soviet fax machine that had some nice keys with magnetting contacts and little plastic windows in each key were you could put a piece of paper with the symbol for the key. So I spent two days soddering the new keyboard to my speccy. It still work I believe all my tapes are useless though....
I second that. My friend had one of those and he could load his games really fast. I would start game loading then go make myself a cup of tea...
Well you acutally gave an example why my post is true. Exactly because "Alexa toolbar....." is insalled by the user _voluntarily_ the web statistics data it collects is not representative of all the website visits out there. Do you see why? -- Because somehow only certain kinds of people would _choose_ to install Alexa and those people in all likelyhood would choose to visit only certain websites (like MSN, or OMGPonies.com and so on.). In other words, the same characterstics that make me want to volunatirily install Alexa crap will make me also go to certain websites that others will not go to.
Take yourself as an example, you use OS X, Linux and Firefox. You probably don't go very often to MSN.com do you? Well, that might skew Alexa's statistics then because they claim that they represent the whole population of web users out there.
As an extremely simple example, you want in the sample to have the same proportions of age, gender, income, professions etc (some of those categories may not matter in certain studies).
Wrong, or rather the wrong response to the post. What you are describing is how you know one choice is a member of your population or not. That is a different problem then selecting a small and representative sample out of that _whole_ population such that it would represent that population up to a certain degree (that you specify). In the hypothetical example of drug use study, you would have already identified a way to select only individuals in U.S. that have been here for long enough to consider them part of the "population of U.S.", now you don't have an unlimited resources to go ask everyone of those individual about their drug use, what you do is you try to randomly sample enough individuals from your population to be representative, publish the results in a reputable journal and 'bam' you got your PhD, well... maybe...
You need to review some statistics material ....
That is a mistake, or rather a mistaken response to the claim. Yes, statistical significance is attainable but only if the sample is representative (i.e.) is random. The critics' claim is that Alexa's data is not representative, in other words the sites that choose to give Alexa their data are somehow don't represent a random sample of all the websites out there. It isn't a question of size but rather of quality.