My problem with this is the use of the phrase "right to privacy." Clinton is a brilliant lawyer, and I know that she understands what "right to privacy" means in the legal sense. The "right to privacy" is the (supposedly) constitutionally protected right for a person to make decisions intimately affecting their own lives. This "right to privacy" allows a person to raise and educate their children as they see fit (allowing Amish people to educate their kids at home despite laws mandating public education for all), have an abortion prior to the time the fetus is viable, marry across racial lines, use birth control, cohabitate, and a few other like things.
This "right to privacy" does not apply to personal information out there on the internet. There might be laws protecting some aspects of this information, but it isn't a constitutional thing.
Clinton knows this. Non-lawyer tech geeks don't know this. She's using this lack of knowledge about what the legal term "right to privacy" means, intentionally allowing techies to confuse it with their concept of right to privacy, trying to attract votes.
Don't be fooled. The right to have information about yourself be private is purely statutory (without such a statute, there is no such right). This is not a constitutional right. It is fleeting. Don't let Clinton convince you that judges would extend this "right to privacy" to personal information (the judges know better, just like Clinton does).
I was thinking when I saw the pictures--it's all single seats, no couches. That's only useful if you're planning to not invite any girls over for the movie!...Then I realized--girls? This guy just transformed his home theater to some Star Trek thing; there aren't likely to ever be girls in that room for which a couch would be needed.
I browse through sites like/. on a daily basis and I always come across these half-assed posts.
Well, if it's bothering you to such a high degree, I should tell you--you don't have to browse Slashdot everyday. You could go to a similar site with stricter content requirements. Or, you could supply Slashdot with higher quality content yourself. Or, make a couple bucks starting your own Slashdot competitor, but advertise it as being "Better than Slashdot, because we have English majors on staff who throw out badly written posts." I'm afraid, though, with so many computer-oriented people interested the the Slashdot material, you aren't likely to find many who actually care about badly written content. Just a lot of people complaining as if they really care...but still checking the site out on a daily basis....
"There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
"But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
"Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
"Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially....
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
"It's a series of tubes.
"And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
"Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?
"Do you know why?
"Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people."
This quote (more fully found here; there is also a link to the audio recording on that page) doesn't actually get at what the Senator was talking about--how corporations clog the "tubes," causing them to be unavailable to the average consumer for sending "internets," and therefore telephone companies should be allowed to charge fees to content providers to discourage clogging the "tubes."
[and this is why we should probably hand decisionmaking authority with regard to this type of regulation to an expert body, rather than leaving it to congresspeople who don't even know the proper use of the word "email."]
I use Office 2007, and actually, I think it is better than Office 2003. It isn't harder to understand than 2003. The "ribbon" isn't some difficult concept, it's just a menu turned sideways that always open (unless you turn it off). The menue-like buttons allow you to easily switch to different ribbons depending on what you're doing. Basically, the ribbon just has all of the most commonly used buttons for a given task right up front. And they're done in a way that makes more sense than the mini-ribbon in Office 2003 (they're arranged according to purpose, so there isn't just a nonsensical mass of buttons), plus the full preferences are available with a single click without going into a menu.
As for the transparent box that comes up when you highlight text--what is your intention when highlighting text? Generally when you highlight text it is because you're about to change the font, color, style, size, color, or something along those lines. In Office 2007, when you highlight text, if you move your mouse up, a box appears with right next to the highlighted text with several oft-used formatting choices, far reducing the amount of mouse travel needed to make minor alterations. I found this extremely valuable when making many small changes in a document. You can turn it off if you don't like it.
So personally, I like Office 2007--it is definitely an upgrade over 2003. I don't think it's enough of an upgrade to be worth the money, and I don't think people should put out money for it when there is something like OOo available, but still, it's pretty good.
Hey--allow us to be skeptical. A formula determining procrastination? Seriously.... (keep in mind that I'm not willing to pay the money to read the full article, and that the "formula" sounds awfully similar to this)
However, one commenter above actually said something useful in response to my skepticism (as opposed to your useless rant). He noted that the equation isn't meant to be an input of precise measurements with an output of a meaningful numerical value, but rather a mere visual method of depicting the relationship of the variables involved. That, I believe is how Slashdot works--I expressed skepticism, and explained why; the responder answered my skepticism with a reasonable explanation. What a good way to run a discussion board! Try not to clog it with your rants.
Ummm, I did RTFA, and I just read it again to see what you were talking about. There's no mention in there of standardized tests for any of the factors. Additionally, if the formula was intended to be precise, it would have to take into account the degree that one factor matters in comparison to another. I didn't however read the actual paper; perhaps there is more in the paper.
Steel has also come up with the E=mc2 of procrastination, a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (G) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D).
It looks like this and uses the Greek letter G (capital gamma [except I changed the gamma to a G since slashdot wouldn't take the gamma]): Utility = E x V / GD
Here's my problem with psychology types coming up with formulae--the results of the calculation depend heavily on the scale used for measurement of the variables. I don't know of any standard scale for "expectancy of succeeding with a given task" or any of the other variables. Further, it seems that these variables would depend on self-evaluation, which we all know is not particularly useful--particularly in this area.
In other words--why did this guy claim to make a formula? Formulae are for people looking for a result that is reasonably precise; but in this case the extremely imprecise input will result in useless output.
I should preface this post with the fact that I'm in the US. When I took physics and chemistry in college we barely discussed English units. There was one class period that we talked a little about conversion from English to metric units (I don't believe we even did the opposite), and that was about it. It was just assumed that we knew metric very well already. If I graduated and went to work for NASA and had to use English measures, I think I would have to almost relearn some of the physics--it would be awkward for me to work with the non-SI units, and even more awkward to have to learn new constants (I learned the constants in metric units). So I assumed that NASA had moved away from English units long ago since it hasn't been taught in so long.
On his latest page regarding this topic, Dean listed four sites that he says he happend upon that wrote blogs about his experience. I looked at all four of those sites, and they truly were all blogging about his "experience." However, if you go to the main page of each linked site, they are ALL internet marketing sites. My suspicion is that he is either affiliated with those sites (something he does himself, in fact) or they are his clients that paid him to increase their web traffic.
I suppose it's too bad that we can fall for things like this so easily. But you've gotta admit--that's pretty darn tricky; tough to avoid...
I think that you don't get much control over the format of the page, judging from the tour. Why wouldn't googlepages or blogspot work for your purposes? They're both free and appear to give a little more leeway in the format. In fact, I think this is a little different from what you want, because it looks like it isn't only the "owner" of a site that gets to write articles on his site (I'm not sure of this though; the tour wasn't totally clear) and I'm not sure if pictures get to be posted.
Option 1: Set up a web cam pointed in your living room, and put a thermometer in view. Then you'll see if there's a broken pipe, and you can read the thermometer.
But how do you make the "mu" character show up on Slashdot? I tried, but it didn't work. Taking the "mu" out of the name removes the meaning from the name of the client (I think the idea is to play off "mu" being used as a prefix meaning "micro-" in SI; uTorrent being much lighter than Azureus).
It isn't like people just get DVRs just to skip ads. And people don't download the Google toolbar just because it blocks popups (actually, I bet more do this than buy DVRs to skip ads--before switching to Opera, I used to use the Google toolbar to block popups, but I would not actually show the toolbar, so I was actually only using it for its popup blocking ability, not for its search features. But I bet the majority of users download it for the search function).
The article could more correctly say that "people are fed up with ads" if it were showing that people are going out of their way to block them. Instead they're showing that a lot of people downloaded the Google toolbar and discovered that it also blocks ads, and a lot of people bought DVRs so they could watch shows whenever they want, and discovered they can also fast forward through commercials.
A better measure of people's "fed-upness" with ads would be keeping track of the increase in use of products like ad-block in Firefox, or see if there's a major increase in the use of products that block ads that cost money (far fewer people would use such a product, but a dramatic increase in usership could likely be extrapolated to the general attitude of a population).
I have an Intelligent Stick--mine's served me quite well and fits inside my wallet (I don't like things on my keychain).
In case you look at it and think it isn't a USB drive--it is. You can get an adapter to make it look more like a normal USB drive, but then it doesn't fit in your wallet!
I heard someplace that the Zune comes preloaded with music, so wouldn't that justify the royalties being paid. I suppose it would only justify if Universal owns the copyrights the the preloaded music. I don't know what labels Universal owns. Maybe someone could check that out--does universal own any of these songs?
The iPod doesn't come preloaded with music (as far as I know; I don't have one. Though I've heard of people selling their iPods with the music on them).
Judging from what I saw on the news the other day, it seems that making new games for the PS3 will be very difficult if the designers intend to make use of all that the console can do anyway. (what I heard on the news was that on the PS3's new basketball game the designers spent a lot of time getting the players' sweat just right, using a combination of algorithms that take into account the amount of work a player is doing as well as the shape and contours of the player's face)
If detail like that is going into every bit of the game, then, as a developer, I think I'd much prefer to be on the Nintendo Wii team, rather than the PS3 team, if I ever want to see my game make it to market (I'm not a developer, but I mean, if I were...).
Slashdot Mirror
I have to admit--I really just said the "brilliant lawyer" bit to calm the Hillary fans. Really I have nothing good to say about her.
My problem with this is the use of the phrase "right to privacy." Clinton is a brilliant lawyer, and I know that she understands what "right to privacy" means in the legal sense. The "right to privacy" is the (supposedly) constitutionally protected right for a person to make decisions intimately affecting their own lives. This "right to privacy" allows a person to raise and educate their children as they see fit (allowing Amish people to educate their kids at home despite laws mandating public education for all), have an abortion prior to the time the fetus is viable, marry across racial lines, use birth control, cohabitate, and a few other like things.
This "right to privacy" does not apply to personal information out there on the internet. There might be laws protecting some aspects of this information, but it isn't a constitutional thing.
Clinton knows this. Non-lawyer tech geeks don't know this. She's using this lack of knowledge about what the legal term "right to privacy" means, intentionally allowing techies to confuse it with their concept of right to privacy, trying to attract votes.
Don't be fooled. The right to have information about yourself be private is purely statutory (without such a statute, there is no such right). This is not a constitutional right. It is fleeting. Don't let Clinton convince you that judges would extend this "right to privacy" to personal information (the judges know better, just like Clinton does).
I was thinking when I saw the pictures--it's all single seats, no couches. That's only useful if you're planning to not invite any girls over for the movie! ...Then I realized--girls? This guy just transformed his home theater to some Star Trek thing; there aren't likely to ever be girls in that room for which a couch would be needed.
Well, if it's bothering you to such a high degree, I should tell you--you don't have to browse Slashdot everyday. You could go to a similar site with stricter content requirements. Or, you could supply Slashdot with higher quality content yourself. Or, make a couple bucks starting your own Slashdot competitor, but advertise it as being "Better than Slashdot, because we have English majors on staff who throw out badly written posts." I'm afraid, though, with so many computer-oriented people interested the the Slashdot material, you aren't likely to find many who actually care about badly written content. Just a lot of people complaining as if they really care...but still checking the site out on a daily basis....
I bet get all my important internets sent out quick before they have to wait in line behind movies. The internet isn't like a truck, you know...
Here is why he gets mocked:
...
"There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
"But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
"Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
"Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
" It's a series of tubes.
"And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
"Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?
"Do you know why?
"Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people."
This quote (more fully found here; there is also a link to the audio recording on that page) doesn't actually get at what the Senator was talking about--how corporations clog the "tubes," causing them to be unavailable to the average consumer for sending "internets," and therefore telephone companies should be allowed to charge fees to content providers to discourage clogging the "tubes."
Here is a tracking of the Senator's delayed "internet."
Also see, of course, the relevant Wikipedia entry.
[and this is why we should probably hand decisionmaking authority with regard to this type of regulation to an expert body, rather than leaving it to congresspeople who don't even know the proper use of the word "email."]
I use Office 2007, and actually, I think it is better than Office 2003. It isn't harder to understand than 2003. The "ribbon" isn't some difficult concept, it's just a menu turned sideways that always open (unless you turn it off). The menue-like buttons allow you to easily switch to different ribbons depending on what you're doing. Basically, the ribbon just has all of the most commonly used buttons for a given task right up front. And they're done in a way that makes more sense than the mini-ribbon in Office 2003 (they're arranged according to purpose, so there isn't just a nonsensical mass of buttons), plus the full preferences are available with a single click without going into a menu.
As for the transparent box that comes up when you highlight text--what is your intention when highlighting text? Generally when you highlight text it is because you're about to change the font, color, style, size, color, or something along those lines. In Office 2007, when you highlight text, if you move your mouse up, a box appears with right next to the highlighted text with several oft-used formatting choices, far reducing the amount of mouse travel needed to make minor alterations. I found this extremely valuable when making many small changes in a document. You can turn it off if you don't like it.
So personally, I like Office 2007--it is definitely an upgrade over 2003. I don't think it's enough of an upgrade to be worth the money, and I don't think people should put out money for it when there is something like OOo available, but still, it's pretty good.
Hey--allow us to be skeptical. A formula determining procrastination? Seriously.... (keep in mind that I'm not willing to pay the money to read the full article, and that the "formula" sounds awfully similar to this)
However, one commenter above actually said something useful in response to my skepticism (as opposed to your useless rant). He noted that the equation isn't meant to be an input of precise measurements with an output of a meaningful numerical value, but rather a mere visual method of depicting the relationship of the variables involved. That, I believe is how Slashdot works--I expressed skepticism, and explained why; the responder answered my skepticism with a reasonable explanation. What a good way to run a discussion board! Try not to clog it with your rants.
The author apparently didn't run that comment by any of his "rude mathematicians".
Ummm, I did RTFA, and I just read it again to see what you were talking about. There's no mention in there of standardized tests for any of the factors. Additionally, if the formula was intended to be precise, it would have to take into account the degree that one factor matters in comparison to another. I didn't however read the actual paper; perhaps there is more in the paper.
Steel has also come up with the E=mc2 of procrastination, a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (G) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D).
It looks like this and uses the Greek letter G (capital gamma [except I changed the gamma to a G since slashdot wouldn't take the gamma]): Utility = E x V / GD
Here's my problem with psychology types coming up with formulae--the results of the calculation depend heavily on the scale used for measurement of the variables. I don't know of any standard scale for "expectancy of succeeding with a given task" or any of the other variables. Further, it seems that these variables would depend on self-evaluation, which we all know is not particularly useful--particularly in this area.
In other words--why did this guy claim to make a formula? Formulae are for people looking for a result that is reasonably precise; but in this case the extremely imprecise input will result in useless output.
I should preface this post with the fact that I'm in the US. When I took physics and chemistry in college we barely discussed English units. There was one class period that we talked a little about conversion from English to metric units (I don't believe we even did the opposite), and that was about it. It was just assumed that we knew metric very well already. If I graduated and went to work for NASA and had to use English measures, I think I would have to almost relearn some of the physics--it would be awkward for me to work with the non-SI units, and even more awkward to have to learn new constants (I learned the constants in metric units). So I assumed that NASA had moved away from English units long ago since it hasn't been taught in so long.
Still, though... fitting timing...
IS slashdot trying to redeam itself after being conned into an instance of viral marketing?!
See particularly this portion of the comments/story...
On his latest page regarding this topic, Dean listed four sites that he says he happend upon that wrote blogs about his experience. I looked at all four of those sites, and they truly were all blogging about his "experience." However, if you go to the main page of each linked site, they are ALL internet marketing sites. My suspicion is that he is either affiliated with those sites (something he does himself, in fact) or they are his clients that paid him to increase their web traffic.
I suppose it's too bad that we can fall for things like this so easily. But you've gotta admit--that's pretty darn tricky; tough to avoid...
I think that you don't get much control over the format of the page, judging from the tour. Why wouldn't googlepages or blogspot work for your purposes? They're both free and appear to give a little more leeway in the format. In fact, I think this is a little different from what you want, because it looks like it isn't only the "owner" of a site that gets to write articles on his site (I'm not sure of this though; the tour wasn't totally clear) and I'm not sure if pictures get to be posted.
How is this different than, like, Blogspot or googlepages? And how does the 100% ad revenue thing work if you use Adsense?
Option 1: Set up a web cam pointed in your living room, and put a thermometer in view. Then you'll see if there's a broken pipe, and you can read the thermometer.
Option 2: get to know your neighbor.
Well then, I'm glad I live next to VMI, which happens to be more than just a school--it's also a "well regulated militia."
But how do you make the "mu" character show up on Slashdot? I tried, but it didn't work. Taking the "mu" out of the name removes the meaning from the name of the client (I think the idea is to play off "mu" being used as a prefix meaning "micro-" in SI; uTorrent being much lighter than Azureus).
It isn't like people just get DVRs just to skip ads. And people don't download the Google toolbar just because it blocks popups (actually, I bet more do this than buy DVRs to skip ads--before switching to Opera, I used to use the Google toolbar to block popups, but I would not actually show the toolbar, so I was actually only using it for its popup blocking ability, not for its search features. But I bet the majority of users download it for the search function).
The article could more correctly say that "people are fed up with ads" if it were showing that people are going out of their way to block them. Instead they're showing that a lot of people downloaded the Google toolbar and discovered that it also blocks ads, and a lot of people bought DVRs so they could watch shows whenever they want, and discovered they can also fast forward through commercials.
A better measure of people's "fed-upness" with ads would be keeping track of the increase in use of products like ad-block in Firefox, or see if there's a major increase in the use of products that block ads that cost money (far fewer people would use such a product, but a dramatic increase in usership could likely be extrapolated to the general attitude of a population).
I just realized, ummm--and yes, depending where I put it in my wallet, you can see the outline of the devise on the outside of my wallet.
Some people have round outlines on their wallets . . . geeks have USB stick outlines on theirs. . . .
I have an Intelligent Stick--mine's served me quite well and fits inside my wallet (I don't like things on my keychain).
In case you look at it and think it isn't a USB drive--it is. You can get an adapter to make it look more like a normal USB drive, but then it doesn't fit in your wallet!
I heard someplace that the Zune comes preloaded with music, so wouldn't that justify the royalties being paid. I suppose it would only justify if Universal owns the copyrights the the preloaded music. I don't know what labels Universal owns. Maybe someone could check that out--does universal own any of these songs?
The iPod doesn't come preloaded with music (as far as I know; I don't have one. Though I've heard of people selling their iPods with the music on them).
Judging from what I saw on the news the other day, it seems that making new games for the PS3 will be very difficult if the designers intend to make use of all that the console can do anyway. (what I heard on the news was that on the PS3's new basketball game the designers spent a lot of time getting the players' sweat just right, using a combination of algorithms that take into account the amount of work a player is doing as well as the shape and contours of the player's face)
If detail like that is going into every bit of the game, then, as a developer, I think I'd much prefer to be on the Nintendo Wii team, rather than the PS3 team, if I ever want to see my game make it to market (I'm not a developer, but I mean, if I were...).