Yeah, but is that better or worse than random selection? Random selection is going to produce a ton of false positives and a lot of false negatives.
In other words: if they randomly select 10% of the passengers and 1 out of 1,000 is a terrorist or drug mule, it means that 90% of all "bad guys" will get through without a problem (90% false negative rate), and it means that virtually everyone (999 out of every 1000 people) who gets searched will be innocent (99.9% false positive rate).
If people can pickout people for screening, and they do better than random, then using a random system would be worse.
BTW, I recently listened to a Scientific American podcast where they did some "lab" tests to figure out whether or not someone was carrying a contraban package. They had five people walk through a room. One of the five had a contraban package. Random selection would produce a 20% rate of success. I believe they had a "hit" ratio of 30% using ordinary college students - which is slightly higher than random. (They also did a test with college students who tested high on the "psychopath test" and they were actually 70% accurate.) My main point, though, was that people do slightly better than random.
> "Either way I'd quite like $5000 for work I did last year."
You have to count up all the payments. Would you rather get paid $60,000 a year (and get your paychecks every two weeks for your previous two weeks of work), or would you rather get paid $10,000 this year, then $5,000 next year, $2,000 the year after that, and then $1,000 the following year? My point is that "getting paid for work you did last year" is completely irrelevant if the total amount you got paid was quite low to begin with. In my example, I contrast earning $60,000 immediately with $18,000 dragged out over four years. Obviously, it's not always better to get paid for work you did x years ago, even though "getting paid for work you did last year" makes it sound like you're unfairly reaping lots of cash.
Keep in mind the fact that Radiohead said that they won't repeat that, which makes me wonder how successful it really was.
Radiohead won't repeat 'In Rainbows' giveaway
"I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation," the band's lead singer Thom Yorke told The Hollywood Reporter. "It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don't think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time."
Many music fans had hoped that the band's now famous pay-what-you-want promotion was an attempt by the group to discover a new way to sell music. Now it appears Radiohead at best was after publicity.
Radiohead has never revealed the promotion's sales figures but there was speculation that the money wasn't very good.
I'd like to see some data to backup your claim about "incomes plummeting because of the hollowing out of available work", because I don't believe for a second that the average person is any worse off in their ability to earn an income than they were ten or twenty or thirty years ago.
You know that a significant minority of people pirated the Humble-Indie-Bundle, right? That was "pay what you want", and they still argued that the public has a right to free copies of everything.
The idea that you can base the cost of an item on the per-unit production costs is wrong. There is an overhead cost associated with developing the item in the first place. If a game costs $10 million to make, and you're going to get 200,000 sales, then you're only going to break-even at $50 each. You have to factor that overhead cost into the pricing and expected sales numbers. (Yes, yes, I know that decreasing the price can increase sale numbers, but there is a curve there. Where the optimal price is located, I don't know, but I do know that consumers always argue that the optimal price is lower than whatever the current price is.)
Extra! Extra! GrammarNazi demands that no words are allowed to have more than one definition. Demands that one billion English speakers alter how they use tens of thousands of words. News at 11.
Not to take away from your argument, but being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize isn't actually that difficult.
The statutes of the Nobel Foundation specify categories of individuals who are eligible to make nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. These nominators are:
Members of national assemblies and governments and members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union
Members of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Court of Justice at the Hague
Members of Institut de Droit International University professors of history, social sciences, philosophy, law and theology, university presidents and directors of peace research and international affairs institutes
Former recipients, including board members of organizations that have previously won the prize
Present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee
Former permanent advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Institute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize#Nomination
Merely being a university professor in history, social sciences, philosophy, law or theology qualifies a person to nominate someone for a Nobel Peace Prize.
To be fair, the public can have one of two attitudes: it can say, "Well, google's priorities (or the priorities of any particular corporation) are different than mine, and I respect their right to their own opinion" which gives corporations the ability to act that way, or the public can say, "There are certain lines we don't want you to cross, and you'll face social disapproval (and potential revenue loss) when you do those things (whether those things are 'cynically support anti-global warming politicians', 'enable US government spying' or whatever)". With the first attitude, you cede your power to the corporations because you can't muster enough outrage to actually do anything. In the second situation, you generate enough anger that it changes the equation of what's in the corporation's best interest. For example, outrage over blood diamonds, sweatshops, or apartheid can cause corporations to change their behavior. It's important not to give up your own power, because that affects the equation that determines whether an action is in the corporation's best interest.
I'm not sure that I can really think of good examples of this happening - at least not on a global scale. Sure, there was a regression in Europe after the Greeks and Romans. There were quite a few works lost. And it seems that there was a very early civilization around India that was abandoned (apparently due to crop failures). But the main protection for lost knowledge seems to be to spread knowledge around the world. The world has never simultaneously regressed (the Middle East and China weren't doing so bad during the European dark ages). The works of the Greeks wouldn't have been lost if their writings had larger distribution (instead of being confined to a relatively small area, which makes the fate of those earlier works dependent on the local conditions). As long as people keep writing and reading books, I don't see how much knowledge is going to be lost. There wasn't even much knowledge lost in Europe during the Black Plague - and that killed off 1/3rd of the people in Europe.
Perhaps the concern over "lost knowledge" says a lot about people's perception that some massive apocalyse is going to happen. I think, in general, people tend to grab onto ideas about "apocalypse" (which necessarily results in some massive social rearrangement) because they're not happy with the state of the world. Apocalyptic thinking is a little bit of a fantasy about starting over.
I'd be surprised if the European governments aren't bugging US embassies. Afterall, the French were doing stuff like this:
"The Boeing Co. was among the targets of a French government plan for a massive spying effort to learn U.S. technological secrets and trade strategies, according to classified documents. The plan targeted 49 high-tech companies, 24 financial institutions and six U.S. government agencies with important roles in international trade, the French documents show... At least a dozen allied countries, including France, Japan, Italy, Taiwan and West Germany, have stepped up spying on U.S. businesses since the end of the Cold War, analysts say. These countries are particularly interested in electronics, defense and aerospace." http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930418&slug=1696416
It seems bizarre, given the history of the 20th century, that you would see the europeans as dealing with each other like fine, upstanding gentlemen.
What are you even talking about? The US has never used nukes since 1945, therefore "it doesn't need them either". My point is that China can either do the hard work of developing things themselves, or it can leapfrog ahead by spying - which costs less. This whole argument that China is "too busy" with it's own economic development to spy is nonsense. It uses spying to boost it's economic development. Economic development and spying aren't mutually exclusive. Spying enhances economic development. I don't understand what's so hard to understand about my argument.
> "I don't think any of you currently have [any proof that the other side is doing it] by the way."
WASHINGTON - The Boeing Co. was among the targets of a French government plan for a massive spying effort to learn U.S. technological secrets and trade strategies, according to classified documents.
The plan targeted 49 high-tech companies, 24 financial institutions and six U.S. government agencies with important roles in international trade, the French documents show.
The plan focused on research breakthroughs and marketing strategies of leading-edge U.S. aerospace and defense contractors that compete directly with French firms.
The French also sought advance knowledge of the bargaining positions of American negotiators in trade talks involving France. The 21-page assignment sheet, prepared by the French equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, is considered authentic by senior U.S. experts.
A French Embassy spokesman in Washington, after conferring with officials in Paris, responded: "There is nothing in this document to indicate that it was released by French government offices."
At least a dozen allied countries, including France, Japan, Italy, Taiwan and West Germany, have stepped up spying on U.S. businesses since the end of the Cold War, analysts say. These countries are particularly interested in electronics, defense and aerospace....
Your post makes no sense. China has every incentive to get an advantage in the economic and research realms by spying. By stealing the designs for US nukes, for example, they can bypass the expensive process of doing the design work themselves.
Oh, really? Everybody's doing that? Well, perhaps the USSR did, but do you honestly believe that close Western allies of the US are systematically bugging US embassies and spying on US politicians on a massive scale?
Yes. I've read elsewhere that the French are particularly zealous about spying on businessmen from the US.
Here's an example:
WASHINGTON - The Boeing Co. was among the targets of a French government plan for a massive spying effort to learn U.S. technological secrets and trade strategies, according to classified documents.
The plan targeted 49 high-tech companies, 24 financial institutions and six U.S. government agencies with important roles in international trade, the French documents show.
The plan focused on research breakthroughs and marketing strategies of leading-edge U.S. aerospace and defense contractors that compete directly with French firms.
The French also sought advance knowledge of the bargaining positions of American negotiators in trade talks involving France. The 21-page assignment sheet, prepared by the French equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, is considered authentic by senior U.S. experts.
A French Embassy spokesman in Washington, after conferring with officials in Paris, responded: "There is nothing in this document to indicate that it was released by French government offices."
At least a dozen allied countries, including France, Japan, Italy, Taiwan and West Germany, have stepped up spying on U.S. businesses since the end of the Cold War, analysts say. These countries are particularly interested in electronics, defense and aerospace.
Thank God that Stallman is around to tell us this novel and enlightening idea. Or maybe he was just repeating what a million other people have already said.
How about this: open source software would've fixed NOTHING. The spying that's going on is on the network, it's not because you kept using Microsoft Word.
Also, I hope they've got some sort of approval method where a human looks at a picture of the key to see if it's marked "do not duplicate" before a copy is made. That's something I wouldn't trust to OCR.
My local Walmart has a key-making machine. Last year, I made myself a duplicate of a key that had "Do Not Duplicate" stamped on it. The new key works perfectly fine. No, machines don't (and can't) check if they keys are marked "Do Not Duplicate". And, yes, these machines have been around a while.
Just an FYI: Walmart has key-making machines. I lost one of the keys to my building's main gate (but I still had my second copy). Even though these keys have "Do Not Duplicate" stamped on it, I went ahead and made myself an extra key. It was no problem at all. Now I have a duplicate key, and the new key doesn't even have "do not duplicate" stamped on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but is that better or worse than random selection? Random selection is going to produce a ton of false positives and a lot of false negatives.
In other words: if they randomly select 10% of the passengers and 1 out of 1,000 is a terrorist or drug mule, it means that 90% of all "bad guys" will get through without a problem (90% false negative rate), and it means that virtually everyone (999 out of every 1000 people) who gets searched will be innocent (99.9% false positive rate).
If people can pickout people for screening, and they do better than random, then using a random system would be worse.
BTW, I recently listened to a Scientific American podcast where they did some "lab" tests to figure out whether or not someone was carrying a contraban package. They had five people walk through a room. One of the five had a contraban package. Random selection would produce a 20% rate of success. I believe they had a "hit" ratio of 30% using ordinary college students - which is slightly higher than random. (They also did a test with college students who tested high on the "psychopath test" and they were actually 70% accurate.) My main point, though, was that people do slightly better than random.
Here's the podcast (jump to 2 minutes in): http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=psychopathys-bright-side-kevin-dutt-12-12-29
Because radio is a promotional vehicle to drive record sales, while Spotify cannibalises album sales?
> "Either way I'd quite like $5000 for work I did last year."
You have to count up all the payments. Would you rather get paid $60,000 a year (and get your paychecks every two weeks for your previous two weeks of work), or would you rather get paid $10,000 this year, then $5,000 next year, $2,000 the year after that, and then $1,000 the following year? My point is that "getting paid for work you did last year" is completely irrelevant if the total amount you got paid was quite low to begin with. In my example, I contrast earning $60,000 immediately with $18,000 dragged out over four years. Obviously, it's not always better to get paid for work you did x years ago, even though "getting paid for work you did last year" makes it sound like you're unfairly reaping lots of cash.
I'd like to see some data to backup your claim about "incomes plummeting because of the hollowing out of available work", because I don't believe for a second that the average person is any worse off in their ability to earn an income than they were ten or twenty or thirty years ago.
You know that a significant minority of people pirated the Humble-Indie-Bundle, right? That was "pay what you want", and they still argued that the public has a right to free copies of everything.
> "music 10c/track"
You mean that they should lower the price so much that they'd go bankrupt?
The idea that you can base the cost of an item on the per-unit production costs is wrong. There is an overhead cost associated with developing the item in the first place. If a game costs $10 million to make, and you're going to get 200,000 sales, then you're only going to break-even at $50 each. You have to factor that overhead cost into the pricing and expected sales numbers. (Yes, yes, I know that decreasing the price can increase sale numbers, but there is a curve there. Where the optimal price is located, I don't know, but I do know that consumers always argue that the optimal price is lower than whatever the current price is.)
Extra! Extra! GrammarNazi demands that no words are allowed to have more than one definition. Demands that one billion English speakers alter how they use tens of thousands of words. News at 11.
American laws apply in the EU? If that were true, the PirateBay would've been gone a long time ago.
Merely being a university professor in history, social sciences, philosophy, law or theology qualifies a person to nominate someone for a Nobel Peace Prize.
To be fair, the public can have one of two attitudes: it can say, "Well, google's priorities (or the priorities of any particular corporation) are different than mine, and I respect their right to their own opinion" which gives corporations the ability to act that way, or the public can say, "There are certain lines we don't want you to cross, and you'll face social disapproval (and potential revenue loss) when you do those things (whether those things are 'cynically support anti-global warming politicians', 'enable US government spying' or whatever)". With the first attitude, you cede your power to the corporations because you can't muster enough outrage to actually do anything. In the second situation, you generate enough anger that it changes the equation of what's in the corporation's best interest. For example, outrage over blood diamonds, sweatshops, or apartheid can cause corporations to change their behavior. It's important not to give up your own power, because that affects the equation that determines whether an action is in the corporation's best interest.
I'm not sure that I can really think of good examples of this happening - at least not on a global scale. Sure, there was a regression in Europe after the Greeks and Romans. There were quite a few works lost. And it seems that there was a very early civilization around India that was abandoned (apparently due to crop failures). But the main protection for lost knowledge seems to be to spread knowledge around the world. The world has never simultaneously regressed (the Middle East and China weren't doing so bad during the European dark ages). The works of the Greeks wouldn't have been lost if their writings had larger distribution (instead of being confined to a relatively small area, which makes the fate of those earlier works dependent on the local conditions). As long as people keep writing and reading books, I don't see how much knowledge is going to be lost. There wasn't even much knowledge lost in Europe during the Black Plague - and that killed off 1/3rd of the people in Europe.
Perhaps the concern over "lost knowledge" says a lot about people's perception that some massive apocalyse is going to happen. I think, in general, people tend to grab onto ideas about "apocalypse" (which necessarily results in some massive social rearrangement) because they're not happy with the state of the world. Apocalyptic thinking is a little bit of a fantasy about starting over.
Um, you remember that the revelations happened because Paula Broadwell was sending threatening messages and phonecalls to Jill Kelley, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Petraeus#Extramarital_affair_and_resignation
You must be reading a different article than me because the one linked to talks about spying on embassies.
I'd be surprised if the European governments aren't bugging US embassies. Afterall, the French were doing stuff like this:
"The Boeing Co. was among the targets of a French government plan for a massive spying effort to learn U.S. technological secrets and trade strategies, according to classified documents. The plan targeted 49 high-tech companies, 24 financial institutions and six U.S. government agencies with important roles in international trade, the French documents show... At least a dozen allied countries, including France, Japan, Italy, Taiwan and West Germany, have stepped up spying on U.S. businesses since the end of the Cold War, analysts say. These countries are particularly interested in electronics, defense and aerospace." http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930418&slug=1696416
It seems bizarre, given the history of the 20th century, that you would see the europeans as dealing with each other like fine, upstanding gentlemen.
What are you even talking about? The US has never used nukes since 1945, therefore "it doesn't need them either". My point is that China can either do the hard work of developing things themselves, or it can leapfrog ahead by spying - which costs less. This whole argument that China is "too busy" with it's own economic development to spy is nonsense. It uses spying to boost it's economic development. Economic development and spying aren't mutually exclusive. Spying enhances economic development. I don't understand what's so hard to understand about my argument.
There is evidence that the countries are doing the same, you know: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930418&slug=1696416
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930418&slug=1696416
Your post makes no sense. China has every incentive to get an advantage in the economic and research realms by spying. By stealing the designs for US nukes, for example, they can bypass the expensive process of doing the design work themselves.
Yes. I've read elsewhere that the French are particularly zealous about spying on businessmen from the US.
Here's an example:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930418&slug=1696416
Thank God that Stallman is around to tell us this novel and enlightening idea. Or maybe he was just repeating what a million other people have already said.
How about this: open source software would've fixed NOTHING. The spying that's going on is on the network, it's not because you kept using Microsoft Word.
My local Walmart has a key-making machine. Last year, I made myself a duplicate of a key that had "Do Not Duplicate" stamped on it. The new key works perfectly fine. No, machines don't (and can't) check if they keys are marked "Do Not Duplicate". And, yes, these machines have been around a while.
Just an FYI: Walmart has key-making machines. I lost one of the keys to my building's main gate (but I still had my second copy). Even though these keys have "Do Not Duplicate" stamped on it, I went ahead and made myself an extra key. It was no problem at all. Now I have a duplicate key, and the new key doesn't even have "do not duplicate" stamped on it.