These guys have lost their focus. I'm a business owner myself ( a bit smaller than Sun and HP, though ) and I would never encourage my employees to act or think like this. Beating your competition is the side effect that you derive from pleasing customers. It is not the goal.
They don't know. At least in this study they had the integrity to admit it.
But until we know, most of these studies are meaningless; we can't act on the information. If we knew for sure that we humans are causing changes, then we should mend our ways rapidly. But when history shows larger fluctuations than the current one, it could be easily inferred that the changes are all due to mother nature, and all our actions would be noise. And very expensive noise...
If you swap adjectives for nouns ( use 'canadian' and 'japanese' etc, instead of 'canada' and 'japan' etc ) then the trend is not there. There is not a trace of it. I think that the trend for the word 'Canada' is a bizarre artifact. If we knew why it was there then we might know a lot more about how google trends relly works - or fails.
Oh yeah, I can't see this being abused at all. Especially by teenagers just screwing around.
No we can't trust the teenagers to do this properly. The will screw around with it, either out of ignorance, or just for kicks. Protecting the children is too important to be left up to them, so expect to see new software that scans incoming and outgoing streams for certain words, then makes the online report itself.
Initially, such software will be optional.
[/sarcasm]
Re:Remember Vulcan? ( no, not startrek vulcan )
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I wasn't being hyperbolic. The facts are as I stated them. Vulcan was a solid scientific theory of the day. The concept of Vulcan was invented by a French astronomer named Le Verrier. He was no quack. He was the dicoverer - or as his detractors claim, codiscoverer - of Neptune. He was as much a real scientist in his day as the folks in TFA. He didn't merely suggest that there was a planet; he did the math.
He calculated that Vulcan must have a revolution period of 33 days, an orbit 18 1/2 million miles from the Sun, inclined 12 degrees to the ecliptic. And by Newtonian cosmology, he was right.
And people did see it. As much as, or more so, than they have seen dark matter. The first sighting was made by Dr. Lescarbault, a doctor - and amateur astronomer - from the town of Orgenes on March 26th, 1859. It was right where Le Verrier said it would be.
More than 30 people claimed to have seen it over the next decade or two. Many of them were serious scientists, such as James Watson, director of the Ann Arbor Observatory.
So much for the facts. I was going to elaborate on the logical structure of my previous post, but donaggie03 already did it better than I could.
Remember Vulcan? ( no, not startrek vulcan )
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Remember Vulcan, the planet with an orbit inside of Mercury? It was PROVEN to exist in the late 1800s. The calculations showed that Mercury's orbit required a smaller planet to make Mercury's orbit precess as it did. People even went looking for it with the finest telescopes of the day. And they saw it.
Then some smart aleck who worked in a patent office came along and showed that space is warped and that Mercury's orbit fits perfectly. Vulcan disappeared, never to be seen again.
Vulcan had more data in favor of its existence back then than dark matter does now. Pardon me, but I'm as skeptical as parent.
And you Slashdot libertarians can wait until your family member has chronic pain - so you can wonder why republicans don't want them addicted.
We don't need to wait. We already understand the republicans' failure to protect personal choice. That's one of the reasons that we are libertarians.
Lighten up; we libertarians are on your side in this fight, even if you are a democrat:)
So, in some way every browser toolbar is a malware.
Not quite. The most one can conclude is that every toolbar writer had an incentive to make his toolbar malware. Some, presumably, resisted the temptation. This guy did not. And his argument ( 'everybody else was doing it' ) was something that most of us learned was an insuficient excuse back in kindergarten.
Good idea, but wrong order. Give Verizon a chance to be the good guy. Call their publicity department first. If they make excuses, then call local media.
"And don't get me started on the fact that plastics only last 1000 years in a dump if you bury it like an idiot. Plastics are photosensitive and will decay rapidly if just left where they can get sunlight."
Sorry, but even in sunlight, they don't decay fast enough.
There is a giant ( twice the size of Texas ) pile of floating plastic in the north eastern Pacific know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. An unfourtunate combination of wind and currents causes most anything dropped into the northern Pacific to get trapped there. There are millions of pounds of trash. And most of it is plastic, because everything else has been broken down.
Anybody recall the Bucky Fuller quote? Something to the effect that pollutants are resources that we are to ignorant to harvest...?
Monopolies are dangerous
on
Tibet's Mesh
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
" I would love to see a free wireless mesh that's not dependent on any government or corporation take over the world."
Then it would be a de-facto government. A bunch of overlaping competeting wireless meshes would be safer.
It is truly bizarre that someone who is smuggling drugs is grouped in with terrorists as having a "hostile intent". True, both are breaking laws, but drug smugglers have a motive for being non-hostile - they don't want to get caught. They just want to get from point A to point B without interference. Which, paradoxically, gives them the same motive as the TSA.
Hmmmm...that gives me an idea. Drug smugglers could be useful allies in the war on terror. I suggest a new TSA policy. Let one dealer through on each flight. Grant him the right to carry, say, 5 kilos of drugs exempt from the law. Let him also carry a gun - uh, no - REQUIRE that he carry a gun as part of the deal. You can be sure he will not let a plane get highjacked without a fight. And a terrorist organization would think twice about highjacking a plane - even if they could overpower the dealer - knowing that the Medellin or some other international drug cartel would then be out for revenge. Not only would flights be safer, but this is a very profitable policy for the TSA; they save the cost of hiring air marshalls, and the dealer would pay a bunch of money for the privilege.
What the heck - let's take this idea to its logical conclusion. Let the cartels run their own flights. I'd feel safer on Medellin airlines that I do on American or United, etc. ( I'll bet that they could also put the fun back in flying: "Would you like some coffee, senor? Cocaine? Hashish?" )
"The basic theory...is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program."
In a finite discrete environment ( like Shurdlu: put the red cylinder on top of the blue box ) that may be possible. But in the real world the problem is knowing that one's observations are all - or even a significant percentage - of the possible observations.
This - in humans, at least - can lead to the cyclic reinforcement of one's belief system. The belief system that explains observations initially is used to filter observations later.
TFA is a neat idea theoreretically, but it's progeny will never be able to leave the lab.
--
I figured out how to get a second 120-byte sig! Mod me up and I'll tell you how you can have one too.
Disclaimer: I've never been in a gaming cafe. But I've run a small business for 20 years, so the following advice is mostly about the business side of it.
1) Your job is NOT running your cafe. Your job is improving it. Owning a small business is a red queen affair: you have to be constantly improving just to stay even with the competition. Do every job in your cafe just long enough to know how to do it well. ( This will be anything from doing taxes to fixing hubs to cleaning the toilet. ) Then DELEGATE.
2) Your territory does not end at the door. OK, legally maybe it does, but you must treat the area immediately around your business as your territory. Clean up trash, cover grafitti ( immediately ), get rid of panhandlers. If something goes wrong immediately outside your business, it is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Get to know your neighbors. They can be helpful, or they can hurt you. ( This is especially important in your case, for many of them may initially view your clientele as troublemakers )
Join your local business association. Get to know your local cops.
3) You may have drug dealers and hookers of both sexes trying to use your place as a base of operations. Get rid of them. Not only do they give the cops a reason to cause you problems, but they will be competing for your customers' money.
4) Decide exactly what your business is. Yes, it sounds silly, but many owners don't really know what line of work they are in. In your case, you are not just in the business of offering games. As several posters have noted, most people can get that at home. You have to offer them an experience that they can't get at home.
A) Coffee and food will help. It does not have to be great food + coffee, but decent and reliably so. ( which many people don't have at home because they are too busy playing games. )
B) Have at least one hot babe working for you. ( Most gamers don't have one of those at home ) It helps if she is not an idiot, too.
C) Create a social scene ( most gamers don't have that at home, either ) This means catering to women. Keep them happy, and they will hang around, and then the guys will hang around too. Find out what kind of games women prefer. Have plenty of them. Keep the bathrooms clean.
D) Have a clear statement of expected behavior ( no smoking, no fighting, no booze, etc - whatever rules you think will do best ) Be very, very clear about what standards you expect of your customers, and then stick to them. Be prepared to explain why those particular rules are important to you. A large number of gamers play games because they find the rest of the world to be confusing, irrational, and hypocritical. Very few of them have a social environment that makes sense at home.
E) Keep asking yourself 'What can I do for my customers that they can't get at home?"
Don't use them all yet. There is another obnoxious troll near the bottom that needs to be modded down. ( Yes, this post has nothing to do with it's parent; posting here was the only way to get this post near the top )
All this talk about 64 bits...on wires, for god's sake!! In my day we had to push the eletrons around by hand. And it was uphill... both ways. And when it snowed, the gates froze up and we had to execute the same instruction over and over until spring thaw. 64 bits?? You youngsters have it easy!!!
Pattern recognition can be done without translating it into something audible. The pattern is there, regardless of the frequency range. This sounds like BS to me...
--
I now have two 120-byte sig spaces. Mod me up and I'll tell you how to get your second sig space.
Slashdot Mirror
These guys have lost their focus. I'm a business owner myself ( a bit smaller than Sun and HP, though ) and I would never encourage my employees to act or think like this. Beating your competition is the side effect that you derive from pleasing customers. It is not the goal.
They don't know. At least in this study they had the integrity to admit it.
But until we know, most of these studies are meaningless; we can't act on the information. If we knew for sure that we humans are causing changes, then we should mend our ways rapidly. But when history shows larger fluctuations than the current one, it could be easily inferred that the changes are all due to mother nature, and all our actions would be noise. And very expensive noise...
If you swap adjectives for nouns ( use 'canadian' and 'japanese' etc, instead of 'canada' and 'japan' etc ) then the trend is not there. There is not a trace of it. I think that the trend for the word 'Canada' is a bizarre artifact. If we knew why it was there then we might know a lot more about how google trends relly works - or fails.
a n%2C+American%2C+Chinese%2C+Canadian&ctab=1&geo=al l&date=all
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Japanese%2C+Europe
But it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. So many alleged trends are actually propped up by something else.
+ %22paris+hilton%22%2C+%22tour+de+france%22&ctab=1& geo=all&date=all
http://www.google.com/trends?q=france%2C+paris%2C
http://www.google.com/trends?q=france%2C+england%2 C+germany%2C+Canada&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all
It's truly scary when you realize why the parent trend looks that way.
September? August? Why quibble? Let's have a month-long celebration. That way we are sure to cover the corect date.
http://dustyfeet.com/evil/enemy.html
Oh yeah, I can't see this being abused at all. Especially by teenagers just screwing around.
No we can't trust the teenagers to do this properly. The will screw around with it, either out of ignorance, or just for kicks. Protecting the children is too important to be left up to them, so expect to see new software that scans incoming and outgoing streams for certain words, then makes the online report itself.
Initially, such software will be optional.
[/sarcasm]
I wasn't being hyperbolic. The facts are as I stated them. Vulcan was a solid scientific theory of the day. The concept of Vulcan was invented by a French astronomer named Le Verrier. He was no quack. He was the dicoverer - or as his detractors claim, codiscoverer - of Neptune. He was as much a real scientist in his day as the folks in TFA. He didn't merely suggest that there was a planet; he did the math.
He calculated that Vulcan must have a revolution period of 33 days, an orbit 18 1/2 million miles from the Sun, inclined 12 degrees to the ecliptic. And by Newtonian cosmology, he was right.
And people did see it. As much as, or more so, than they have seen dark matter. The first sighting was made by Dr. Lescarbault, a doctor - and amateur astronomer - from the town of Orgenes on March 26th, 1859. It was right where Le Verrier said it would be. More than 30 people claimed to have seen it over the next decade or two. Many of them were serious scientists, such as James Watson, director of the Ann Arbor Observatory.
So much for the facts. I was going to elaborate on the logical structure of my previous post, but donaggie03 already did it better than I could.
Remember Vulcan, the planet with an orbit inside of Mercury? It was PROVEN to exist in the late 1800s. The calculations showed that Mercury's orbit required a smaller planet to make Mercury's orbit precess as it did. People even went looking for it with the finest telescopes of the day. And they saw it.
Then some smart aleck who worked in a patent office came along and showed that space is warped and that Mercury's orbit fits perfectly. Vulcan disappeared, never to be seen again.
Vulcan had more data in favor of its existence back then than dark matter does now. Pardon me, but I'm as skeptical as parent.
...given a large enough stack. I think I could write a perfect Sudoku program in about 30 lines of code. Most of it would be a reursive routine.
And you Slashdot libertarians can wait until your family member has chronic pain - so you can wonder why republicans don't want them addicted.
:)
We don't need to wait. We already understand the republicans' failure to protect personal choice. That's one of the reasons that we are libertarians.
Lighten up; we libertarians are on your side in this fight, even if you are a democrat
So, in some way every browser toolbar is a malware.
Not quite. The most one can conclude is that every toolbar writer had an incentive to make his toolbar malware. Some, presumably, resisted the temptation. This guy did not. And his argument ( 'everybody else was doing it' ) was something that most of us learned was an insuficient excuse back in kindergarten.
Good idea, but wrong order. Give Verizon a chance to be the good guy. Call their publicity department first. If they make excuses, then call local media.
"And don't get me started on the fact that plastics only last 1000 years in a dump if you bury it like an idiot. Plastics are photosensitive and will decay rapidly if just left where they can get sunlight."
Sorry, but even in sunlight, they don't decay fast enough.
There is a giant ( twice the size of Texas ) pile of floating plastic in the north eastern Pacific know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. An unfourtunate combination of wind and currents causes most anything dropped into the northern Pacific to get trapped there. There are millions of pounds of trash. And most of it is plastic, because everything else has been broken down.
Anybody recall the Bucky Fuller quote? Something to the effect that pollutants are resources that we are to ignorant to harvest...?
" I would love to see a free wireless mesh that's not dependent on any government or corporation take over the world."
Then it would be a de-facto government. A bunch of overlaping competeting wireless meshes would be safer.
I never got any viruses when using mine...
It is truly bizarre that someone who is smuggling drugs is grouped in with terrorists as having a "hostile intent". True, both are breaking laws, but drug smugglers have a motive for being non-hostile - they don't want to get caught. They just want to get from point A to point B without interference. Which, paradoxically, gives them the same motive as the TSA.
Hmmmm...that gives me an idea. Drug smugglers could be useful allies in the war on terror. I suggest a new TSA policy. Let one dealer through on each flight. Grant him the right to carry, say, 5 kilos of drugs exempt from the law. Let him also carry a gun - uh, no - REQUIRE that he carry a gun as part of the deal. You can be sure he will not let a plane get highjacked without a fight. And a terrorist organization would think twice about highjacking a plane - even if they could overpower the dealer - knowing that the Medellin or some other international drug cartel would then be out for revenge.
Not only would flights be safer, but this is a very profitable policy for the TSA; they save the cost of hiring air marshalls, and the dealer would pay a bunch of money for the privilege.
What the heck - let's take this idea to its logical conclusion. Let the cartels run their own flights. I'd feel safer on Medellin airlines that I do on American or United, etc. ( I'll bet that they could also put the fun back in flying: "Would you like some coffee, senor? Cocaine? Hashish?" )
"The basic theory...is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program." In a finite discrete environment ( like Shurdlu: put the red cylinder on top of the blue box ) that may be possible. But in the real world the problem is knowing that one's observations are all - or even a significant percentage - of the possible observations.
This - in humans, at least - can lead to the cyclic reinforcement of one's belief system. The belief system that explains observations initially is used to filter observations later.
TFA is a neat idea theoreretically, but it's progeny will never be able to leave the lab.
--
I figured out how to get a second 120-byte sig! Mod me up and I'll tell you how you can have one too.
I disagree. The important news is that they have finally overestimated a threat.
"The difference in price represents the "cost" that you paying for tough, enforced regulations and for higher ethical standards."
Not quite. That difference is enlarged by many other factors such as unions, bribery, and unenforced monopoly laws.
Disclaimer: I've never been in a gaming cafe. But I've run a small business for 20 years, so the following advice is mostly about the business side of it.
1) Your job is NOT running your cafe. Your job is improving it. Owning a small business is a red queen affair: you have to be constantly improving just to stay even with the competition. Do every job in your cafe just long enough to know how to do it well. ( This will be anything from doing taxes to fixing hubs to cleaning the toilet. ) Then DELEGATE.
2) Your territory does not end at the door. OK, legally maybe it does, but you must treat the area immediately around your business as your territory. Clean up trash, cover grafitti ( immediately ), get rid of panhandlers. If something goes wrong immediately outside your business, it is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Get to know your neighbors. They can be helpful, or they can hurt you. ( This is especially important in your case, for many of them may initially view your clientele as troublemakers )
Join your local business association. Get to know your local cops.
3) You may have drug dealers and hookers of both sexes trying to use your place as a base of operations. Get rid of them. Not only do they give the cops a reason to cause you problems, but they will be competing for your customers' money.
4) Decide exactly what your business is. Yes, it sounds silly, but many owners don't really know what line of work they are in. In your case, you are not just in the business of offering games. As several posters have noted, most people can get that at home. You have to offer them an experience that they can't get at home.
A) Coffee and food will help. It does not have to be great food + coffee, but decent and reliably so. ( which many people don't have at home because they are too busy playing games. )
B) Have at least one hot babe working for you. ( Most gamers don't have one of those at home ) It helps if she is not an idiot, too.
C) Create a social scene ( most gamers don't have that at home, either ) This means catering to women. Keep them happy, and they will hang around, and then the guys will hang around too. Find out what kind of games women prefer. Have plenty of them. Keep the bathrooms clean.
D) Have a clear statement of expected behavior ( no smoking, no fighting, no booze, etc - whatever rules you think will do best ) Be very, very clear about what standards you expect of your customers, and then stick to them. Be prepared to explain why those particular rules are important to you. A large number of gamers play games because they find the rest of the world to be confusing, irrational, and hypocritical. Very few of them have a social environment that makes sense at home. E) Keep asking yourself 'What can I do for my customers that they can't get at home?"
Don't use them all yet. There is another obnoxious troll near the bottom that needs to be modded down. ( Yes, this post has nothing to do with it's parent; posting here was the only way to get this post near the top )
All this talk about 64 bits...on wires, for god's sake!! In my day we had to push the eletrons around by hand.
And it was uphill... both ways.
And when it snowed, the gates froze up and we had to execute the same instruction over and over until spring thaw.
64 bits?? You youngsters have it easy!!!
Pattern recognition can be done without translating it into something audible. The pattern is there, regardless of the frequency range. This sounds like BS to me...
--
I now have two 120-byte sig spaces. Mod me up and I'll tell you how to get your second sig space.