I use script block and flash block. But even when I get a level of mojo in site like DailyKos or Slashdot that enables me to block ads, I don't. If it gives these sites some revenue, it is all ok with me.
What I really want is a way to tell the advertisers my advertisement acceptance policy. I want to be able to say, "no flashing text, no moving images, no sound. No click to dismiss an obnoxious add blocking most of the content". It would be great if I can also specify a few keywords for products and services I am currently planning to buy, or topics of interest too.
As long as the ads are unobtrusive, I would not mind. But the advertises seem to be hell bent on being really really obnoxious and thrust their ads in my face.
BTW on what legal grounds can the attack ad-block? Can they force me watch TV ads instead of going to the bathroom? Or mute the TV when the ads or on? Can they stop me from turning over ad pages of the magazine without looking at them? Can they stop me from throwing away the classified section of the newspaper without looking at it? What if there is a company that will offer me the service of taking my magazine and rip out every ad page in it and then giving me a much slimmed down mag to carry on airplanes?
When all the old Cobol programmers were dead are retired, and the y2k hysteria descended up on us, they found a large and active community of cobol programmers in India. May be the Indian Army is still using the techniques they learnt from the Brits to get secret messages our of Islamabad and Lahore, Pakistan to the Research and Analysis Wing in New Delhi. So check them out. Some Havaldar-Major Harpreet Singh, 109th Signal Company, 7th Punjab Guards might recognize the code.
In Requiring them to provide valet key passwords would inevitably result in more mistakes.
Service providers who don't charge any money, let us leave them off. But I definitely want my bank and brokerage to provide me with read only passwords, so that I can check the balances and transactions from airports and other public places. Or subscribe to account watching services without giving them full access.
Set aside the wisdom or its lack of judges ordering passwords to accounts to be disclosed in discovery. Imagine the havoc a blundering people unfamiliar with the service with a full access password. Imagine cops planting evidence too. It is a nightmare.
As a first step we should demand "read only" access passwords from our service providers. Almost all the accounts, from trivial throwaway email accounts to brokerage/mutual fund accounts holding hundreds of thousands of dollars offer just one level of access. Either you get full access to do anything you damn well please, or nothing. If we have a "valet key" access with limited privileges at least we can be sure these cops or judges won't be able to mess it up.
Other benefits include third party services that can watch for bills being posted, bills being paid on trime, or do investment portfolio analysis etc. E-Trade used to have something similar. They had a regular password and then a second "trading password" to invoke non-const member functions like ordering funds transfer or to buy/sell securities. But, sadly, they took it away.
Some mod thought it is off topic. Getting overwhelming response for an early retirement scheme is nothing unusual. Only in the USA, because of the unnatural linking of healthcare to employment, we see such early retirement options as strange or newsworthy. May be I should have explained it better.
I can understand why the employers are for such a system. I can understand the employers buying a few politicians, and politicians and shills allowing themselves to bought, to make perpetuate the system.
But what galls me is that the employees are the most strident defenders of this system. Oftentimes it is the same employees who shout vociferously about freedom and liberty. They talk till cows come home about how the entrepreneur is the essence of America and how great it would be if everyone and their brother becomes a small business owning entrepreneur. But one of the significant impediment for starting a new business is the lack of healthcare at the initial phases for the entrepreneur and his/her family.
During all these debates and points and counterpoints made during the elections about Obamacare and unemployment rates etc was this nugget:
About 1 million Americans have saved enough for retirement and would retire right away if affordable health insurance was available to individuals. They all hang on till they are 65 (some till their spouses are 65) to qualify for medicare.
In our company one of the very rich founders, a real genuine millionaire, was working as the CFO for the salary of 1 $ a year plus healthcare!
If Americans can buy health insurance at affordable prices, as individuals, not as part of a group, so many would go part time, or move to start ups or start their own companies or even take long breaks. So many Americans who have health insurance through their jobs fight tooth-and-nail any attempt to de-link healthcare from employment. But it is a devil's bargain, as long as this system continues, it is yoking so many people to the jobs they hate.
Before this Dekatron came back to life, the title of being the oldest working digital computer was held by NS1978. On hearing that it lost that coveted title, it got despondent, got drunk and was seen stumbling through traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, screaming out what time each driver will get home.
They have enough land, and enough oil in tar sands too. Too bad, Canada, we need some breathing space lebensraum , so we are going to have to invade you and take you over. Too bad your experiments with pinko single payer health care and welfare state has to end this way. Learn the fine distinctions between co-pay, co-insurance, deductible and life-time caps.
When you said thought controlled computer I thought you were talking about Nate Silver's brain. But who knows which part thinks and which part is the computer?. Just the cursor. meh!
Nate Silver jokes:
Schrodinger's cat experiment is over. Nate Silver can tell if the cat is alive or dead without taking a look.
When Nate Silver's code throws an exception, he catches it before the debugger does.
Nate Silver's compiler does not show him error messages. It files an RFD to change the C++ standards to comply with his way of writing code.
Update at 4:30PM EST: “Using any Google product to conduct this kind of activity is a violation of our product policies,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
In a related development, Microsoft fixed all its vulnerabilities by issuing a very simple patch. It is basically a statement issued by its spokesperson:"Using the vulnerabilities in Microsoft software is a violation of the our product policies".
Yale lock company and the Chubb safe companies too issued a joint statement saying, "picking our locks is a violation of our product policies".
All these folds and cracks in the brain... Are they different for different people, like fingerprints? Or, do these folds and nooks and crannies largely the same for all human beings with small variations, (like the palm of the hand or something)?
Same thing with molars. I keep reading article about finding a 100000 year old human molar in the rift valley or something. All the complex pattern on the molars... are they the same for all human beings? Or are they as distinct as finger prints?
Oh! yeah! The private sector! The free markets! Let the people decide! Great!
The phone and power companies are private sector. Why the hell aren't they handling the emergencies better? It is completely irrational for private sector to set aside resources to handle emergencies. The free market will not reward them for it. All those resources are opportunity cost, they diminish profits. When an emergency hits, they will feign innocence, "no one could have seen this coming", "it is an act of God", "it is an unforeseen accident" and avoid paying for the damages caused by their total lack of preparedness.
The libertarian solution for problems is as flawed as central planning communistic philosophy. Basically the libertarians would let the free market to take its course, and if people are harmed, they can sue and collect for the damages. The competition will deliver goods and services at the lowest possible cost, and their excesses will be checked because they have to pay for any damage they cause.
This "solution" effectively puts the trial and personal injury lawyers as the only recourse against the excesses of free market. Further it assumes the government that is small enough to be drowned in the bathtub will somehow have the power to enforce the rulings of these judgement.
Of course, I agree there is a free market solution possible for emergencies. In an emergency FEMA will do whatever it takes to alleviate the pain and suffering. And then send the bill to the power and the phone companies that are chartered by their municipalities to have the monopoly. Crack down on them hard couple of times, then they will be prepared for emergencies. Basically they will take insurance against this. And the insurance companies will demand high premia . The utilities will find it cost effective to be better prepared and have agreements to borrow crew and equipment from each other to reduce the insurance costs. This will eventually lead to better handling of emergencies.
But the libertarian crowd is really shills for corporate america. They will take pot shots at people trying to solve problems. But if it ever takes a dime more from the corporations, they will fight that tooth and nail, even if it makes sure the problems go unsolved, and the wounds fester.
The grid goes on the blink for so long in India, almost every (middle and higher class) homes have truck batteries that charge from the grid when the power is on and run fans, lights and TV when it is off. A typical truck battery powers a couple of fluorescent lights, and a couple of ceiling fan for about six hours. But they usually do not run air conditioners or refrigerators on batteries.. yet. Last trip I saw advertisement for "air conditioners specifically designed for inverters". (Inverter converts the DC current from the batteries to AC current for the mains. )
In USA they do not have much use. For emergencies like Sandy, FEMA should simply develop a plan to send the fuel trucks from the army and drive around the affected neighborhoods and dispense fuel for cars in the drive way of homes. The municipalities can collect the cost of the fuel from the homeowners through utility bills later. And the collected money can be considered emergency grants from the federal govt to the municipalities. Once you have an assured supply of fuel in an emergency, we can use the hundreds of thousands of power plants that are already present in these locations.
The hundreds of thousands of powerplants are typically four cylinder gasoline engines, and a good portion of them are six and eight cylinders, the automobile engines. Presently the alternator is sized to provide just enough electric power for the car. If we design a generator that runs at the right RPM, and connection kits that will allow it to be coupled to an car engine it would be very helpful. I am thinking of some kind of frame, a new serpentine belt, or some way to work off the belt driving the alternator. If FEMA funds the R&D to create these kits, builds them and stocks them, they can be deployed in an emergency.
In an emergency so many people would happily stay at home and avoid driving around, if they can. But they are all forced to run around looking for food, gas and water. Municipalities should develop emergency plans where their residents simply text to some known number information like, "running short of water/food/gas", "Medical attention needed", "Number of young children = XX". They should consolidate and send around FEMA trucks to bring food/water/gas to them. If people have the peace of mind, they will stay home and let the roads free for people with real emergencies.
Oh! Yet another posting from the handle Anonymous Coward. I have seen many racist comments by that user id. If only the real name behind Anonymous Coward is found, he/she is going to face music. But from what I have read from this user id, the person behind it seems to be suffering from multiple personality disorder. Sometimes ultra liberal, sometimes ultra conservative, more often trolling both sides of the issue...
May be this is how we beat the insane software patents. Declare them as speech. Give the programmers first amendment protections. Then at best software can be copyrighted. So all software patents would become invalid! hooray!
When IE had above 90% market share in the browsers, it was very very insecure. And most apologists for IE kept repeating the mantra, "IE provides the biggest target. Once the other browsers gain marketshare, they will be as insecure as IE". Other browsers did gain marketshare, first FireFox and then Chrome overtook it. Of couse, they too have some malware, but nothing compared what Flash and PDF readers have. Even when IE had that kind of marketshare, among the web servers Apache had 70% market share. And it provided more juicy target because so many banks and trading houses used Apache server that must have its ports exposed to incoming connections from the net, unlike these browsers. So much for the IE apologista.
Now that Android is having this kind of marketshare, especially in the East, where they are laisse-faire about installing software of suspect provenance. Now what is the malware scenario in smart phones? Android much worse than its competitors on the security front?
The moment you start talking about correlations and probability distributions, it goes without saying that you never get probability = 0 or 1.0 exact. It is always an epsilon one way or (1.0 - epsilon) on the other end. Son of poor Scottish immigrants could rise to own 2% of the GDP of the country like Andrew Carnegie, and the son of a neuro surgeon and his pediatric cardiologist wife end up stocking shelves in the local grocery store. (true story, that kid is making less in pay than what his parents paid in tuition to the private school)
The word intelligence means different things to different people. It is like a stretchable sock. You can stretch it to prove anything you want.
If you define intelligence as the ability to survive off the land, then these soldiers trained to eat ants and bees to elude capture would be the most intelligent of all. They are the ones that have used all the inventions like writing, formal schooling, training from professionals to the task of surviving in the wild. If you define it as the ability solve abstract problems or as the ability to conjure up mechanical contraptions, or as the ability communicate your thoughts well, or as the ability to empathize etc etc you will get different sets of people as the most intelligent.
Albert Einstein might not have lasted three days in a the jungles of New Guinea. But New Guinean people engaged in constant chronic warfare. Incessant warfare that killed some 2% of the population every year. Now who is more intelligent?
Culture, wealth and income are also correlated with parent's education level. But culture is subjective and has no reliable yard stick or units of measurement. Total number of years of formal schooling of parents is a countable number.
Not only these are correlated there are active feedback loops. Higher education -> more income -> higher education for children -> more income -> social circle changes from blue collar to pink collar to white collar to dark suit -> "culture" changes -> more income -> leechers join in -> diseases of the wealthy alcoholism hedonism -> neglected children ->...
It is not linear, the whole chain of causation and the feedback loops and the amplification factors are all jumbled up. Very difficult to discern the core chain of causation.
With a BS in Comp Science, you would know that anecdotal evidence amounts to nothing. You can pitch a thousand anecdotes for something and the opposition will pitch a thousand anecdotes against the same thing. The sample set is in millions, and there is no end in sight.
So ask yourself this question: Among all the playmates in you had in childhood, with similar level of parental education, how many of them ended up with BS in engg or PhD? Go back to you BS in comp sci class and can you guess how many of them came from very poor families with very little parental education? Now you have expanded your sample size from 2 (you and your sister) to may be 50. See the difference? See the trend? Now expand it to your entire elementary school and the entire univeristy. Now you have three sample sets. Plot the percentage of people making college on y axis (100% for sample size = 2), and the sample size in x axis, use Richardson's extrapolation formula to extend it to an infinite sample size.
The best predictor for educational/academic success is not race. It is the level of education of the parents. Usually parents' educational achievement is correlated with income and wealth too. (correlated, that is all. No inference on the direction of causation). Level of education of parents is also correlated with race. With so many cross correlation it takes some serious study to understand the causation, and the feedback loop.
I think the students would be better served if a relative ranking within their own "class" is tabulated. A student can belong to more than one class. One by race, another by level of income, and another by level of parents' education etc. Again instead of messing around with pass/fail for the students, this correlation should be used to judge teachers. All teachers do not get uniform quality input. Then it is wrong to judge them by the raw educational achievements of their students. These correlations can be used to identify the good teachers and the bad teachers.
Slashdot Mirror
What I really want is a way to tell the advertisers my advertisement acceptance policy. I want to be able to say, "no flashing text, no moving images, no sound. No click to dismiss an obnoxious add blocking most of the content". It would be great if I can also specify a few keywords for products and services I am currently planning to buy, or topics of interest too.
As long as the ads are unobtrusive, I would not mind. But the advertises seem to be hell bent on being really really obnoxious and thrust their ads in my face.
BTW on what legal grounds can the attack ad-block? Can they force me watch TV ads instead of going to the bathroom? Or mute the TV when the ads or on? Can they stop me from turning over ad pages of the magazine without looking at them? Can they stop me from throwing away the classified section of the newspaper without looking at it? What if there is a company that will offer me the service of taking my magazine and rip out every ad page in it and then giving me a much slimmed down mag to carry on airplanes?
When all the old Cobol programmers were dead are retired, and the y2k hysteria descended up on us, they found a large and active community of cobol programmers in India. May be the Indian Army is still using the techniques they learnt from the Brits to get secret messages our of Islamabad and Lahore, Pakistan to the Research and Analysis Wing in New Delhi. So check them out. Some Havaldar-Major Harpreet Singh, 109th Signal Company, 7th Punjab Guards might recognize the code.
In Requiring them to provide valet key passwords would inevitably result in more mistakes.
Service providers who don't charge any money, let us leave them off. But I definitely want my bank and brokerage to provide me with read only passwords, so that I can check the balances and transactions from airports and other public places. Or subscribe to account watching services without giving them full access.
As a first step we should demand "read only" access passwords from our service providers. Almost all the accounts, from trivial throwaway email accounts to brokerage/mutual fund accounts holding hundreds of thousands of dollars offer just one level of access. Either you get full access to do anything you damn well please, or nothing. If we have a "valet key" access with limited privileges at least we can be sure these cops or judges won't be able to mess it up.
Other benefits include third party services that can watch for bills being posted, bills being paid on trime, or do investment portfolio analysis etc. E-Trade used to have something similar. They had a regular password and then a second "trading password" to invoke non-const member functions like ordering funds transfer or to buy/sell securities. But, sadly, they took it away.
Some mod thought it is off topic. Getting overwhelming response for an early retirement scheme is nothing unusual. Only in the USA, because of the unnatural linking of healthcare to employment, we see such early retirement options as strange or newsworthy. May be I should have explained it better.
I know, I know. I was just pointing to the ridiculousness of the situation where a millionaire is occupying a position just to get healthcare.
But what galls me is that the employees are the most strident defenders of this system. Oftentimes it is the same employees who shout vociferously about freedom and liberty. They talk till cows come home about how the entrepreneur is the essence of America and how great it would be if everyone and their brother becomes a small business owning entrepreneur. But one of the significant impediment for starting a new business is the lack of healthcare at the initial phases for the entrepreneur and his/her family.
About 1 million Americans have saved enough for retirement and would retire right away if affordable health insurance was available to individuals. They all hang on till they are 65 (some till their spouses are 65) to qualify for medicare.
In our company one of the very rich founders, a real genuine millionaire, was working as the CFO for the salary of 1 $ a year plus healthcare!
If Americans can buy health insurance at affordable prices, as individuals, not as part of a group, so many would go part time, or move to start ups or start their own companies or even take long breaks. So many Americans who have health insurance through their jobs fight tooth-and-nail any attempt to de-link healthcare from employment. But it is a devil's bargain, as long as this system continues, it is yoking so many people to the jobs they hate.
Before this Dekatron came back to life, the title of being the oldest working digital computer was held by NS1978. On hearing that it lost that coveted title, it got despondent, got drunk and was seen stumbling through traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, screaming out what time each driver will get home.
They have enough land, and enough oil in tar sands too. Too bad, Canada, we need some breathing space lebensraum , so we are going to have to invade you and take you over. Too bad your experiments with pinko single payer health care and welfare state has to end this way. Learn the fine distinctions between co-pay, co-insurance, deductible and life-time caps.
The famous Einstein quote, "God does not play dice" is incompletely reported. The full quote is: "God does not play dice with Nate Silver".
Nate Silver jokes:
Schrodinger's cat experiment is over. Nate Silver can tell if the cat is alive or dead without taking a look.
When Nate Silver's code throws an exception, he catches it before the debugger does.
Nate Silver's compiler does not show him error messages. It files an RFD to change the C++ standards to comply with his way of writing code.
Update at 4:30PM EST: “Using any Google product to conduct this kind of activity is a violation of our product policies,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
In a related development, Microsoft fixed all its vulnerabilities by issuing a very simple patch. It is basically a statement issued by its spokesperson:"Using the vulnerabilities in Microsoft software is a violation of the our product policies".
Yale lock company and the Chubb safe companies too issued a joint statement saying, "picking our locks is a violation of our product policies".
Einstein specifically requested his brain not be analyzed or end up as a grotesque and bizarre display stoking morbid curiosity.
Same thing with molars. I keep reading article about finding a 100000 year old human molar in the rift valley or something. All the complex pattern on the molars... are they the same for all human beings? Or are they as distinct as finger prints?
The phone and power companies are private sector. Why the hell aren't they handling the emergencies better? It is completely irrational for private sector to set aside resources to handle emergencies. The free market will not reward them for it. All those resources are opportunity cost, they diminish profits. When an emergency hits, they will feign innocence, "no one could have seen this coming", "it is an act of God", "it is an unforeseen accident" and avoid paying for the damages caused by their total lack of preparedness.
The libertarian solution for problems is as flawed as central planning communistic philosophy. Basically the libertarians would let the free market to take its course, and if people are harmed, they can sue and collect for the damages. The competition will deliver goods and services at the lowest possible cost, and their excesses will be checked because they have to pay for any damage they cause.
This "solution" effectively puts the trial and personal injury lawyers as the only recourse against the excesses of free market. Further it assumes the government that is small enough to be drowned in the bathtub will somehow have the power to enforce the rulings of these judgement.
Of course, I agree there is a free market solution possible for emergencies. In an emergency FEMA will do whatever it takes to alleviate the pain and suffering. And then send the bill to the power and the phone companies that are chartered by their municipalities to have the monopoly. Crack down on them hard couple of times, then they will be prepared for emergencies. Basically they will take insurance against this. And the insurance companies will demand high premia . The utilities will find it cost effective to be better prepared and have agreements to borrow crew and equipment from each other to reduce the insurance costs. This will eventually lead to better handling of emergencies.
But the libertarian crowd is really shills for corporate america. They will take pot shots at people trying to solve problems. But if it ever takes a dime more from the corporations, they will fight that tooth and nail, even if it makes sure the problems go unsolved, and the wounds fester.
In USA they do not have much use. For emergencies like Sandy, FEMA should simply develop a plan to send the fuel trucks from the army and drive around the affected neighborhoods and dispense fuel for cars in the drive way of homes. The municipalities can collect the cost of the fuel from the homeowners through utility bills later. And the collected money can be considered emergency grants from the federal govt to the municipalities. Once you have an assured supply of fuel in an emergency, we can use the hundreds of thousands of power plants that are already present in these locations.
The hundreds of thousands of powerplants are typically four cylinder gasoline engines, and a good portion of them are six and eight cylinders, the automobile engines. Presently the alternator is sized to provide just enough electric power for the car. If we design a generator that runs at the right RPM, and connection kits that will allow it to be coupled to an car engine it would be very helpful. I am thinking of some kind of frame, a new serpentine belt, or some way to work off the belt driving the alternator. If FEMA funds the R&D to create these kits, builds them and stocks them, they can be deployed in an emergency.
In an emergency so many people would happily stay at home and avoid driving around, if they can. But they are all forced to run around looking for food, gas and water. Municipalities should develop emergency plans where their residents simply text to some known number information like, "running short of water/food/gas", "Medical attention needed", "Number of young children = XX". They should consolidate and send around FEMA trucks to bring food/water/gas to them. If people have the peace of mind, they will stay home and let the roads free for people with real emergencies.
Be warned AC. You will be outed soon.
May be this is how we beat the insane software patents. Declare them as speech. Give the programmers first amendment protections. Then at best software can be copyrighted. So all software patents would become invalid! hooray!
Now that Android is having this kind of marketshare, especially in the East, where they are laisse-faire about installing software of suspect provenance. Now what is the malware scenario in smart phones? Android much worse than its competitors on the security front?
Is correlated, but not set in stone.
The moment you start talking about correlations and probability distributions, it goes without saying that you never get probability = 0 or 1.0 exact. It is always an epsilon one way or (1.0 - epsilon) on the other end. Son of poor Scottish immigrants could rise to own 2% of the GDP of the country like Andrew Carnegie, and the son of a neuro surgeon and his pediatric cardiologist wife end up stocking shelves in the local grocery store. (true story, that kid is making less in pay than what his parents paid in tuition to the private school)
If you define intelligence as the ability to survive off the land, then these soldiers trained to eat ants and bees to elude capture would be the most intelligent of all. They are the ones that have used all the inventions like writing, formal schooling, training from professionals to the task of surviving in the wild. If you define it as the ability solve abstract problems or as the ability to conjure up mechanical contraptions, or as the ability communicate your thoughts well, or as the ability to empathize etc etc you will get different sets of people as the most intelligent.
Albert Einstein might not have lasted three days in a the jungles of New Guinea. But New Guinean people engaged in constant chronic warfare. Incessant warfare that killed some 2% of the population every year. Now who is more intelligent?
Not only these are correlated there are active feedback loops. Higher education -> more income -> higher education for children -> more income -> social circle changes from blue collar to pink collar to white collar to dark suit -> "culture" changes -> more income -> leechers join in -> diseases of the wealthy alcoholism hedonism -> neglected children -> ...
It is not linear, the whole chain of causation and the feedback loops and the amplification factors are all jumbled up. Very difficult to discern the core chain of causation.
So ask yourself this question: Among all the playmates in you had in childhood, with similar level of parental education, how many of them ended up with BS in engg or PhD? Go back to you BS in comp sci class and can you guess how many of them came from very poor families with very little parental education? Now you have expanded your sample size from 2 (you and your sister) to may be 50. See the difference? See the trend? Now expand it to your entire elementary school and the entire univeristy. Now you have three sample sets. Plot the percentage of people making college on y axis (100% for sample size = 2), and the sample size in x axis, use Richardson's extrapolation formula to extend it to an infinite sample size.
I think the students would be better served if a relative ranking within their own "class" is tabulated. A student can belong to more than one class. One by race, another by level of income, and another by level of parents' education etc. Again instead of messing around with pass/fail for the students, this correlation should be used to judge teachers. All teachers do not get uniform quality input. Then it is wrong to judge them by the raw educational achievements of their students. These correlations can be used to identify the good teachers and the bad teachers.