boredguy8

I disagree that he did a good job answering questions. For instance, I have no idea what it means to "game the system" from his description, nor do I understand the consequences if someone were to game it.

How about instead, "If we told everyone our algorithm, when someone searches for this event, it wouldn't be an issue of whether or not your questions or my answers hold the first position, but whether or not the first 100 results are for Viagra or Cialis."

  There are perpetual requests for changes as new payloads and new demands 
  and modifications are suggested by the users. Changes are expensive because 
  they require extensive testing. The proper way to save money is to curtail 
  the number of requested changes, not the quality of testing for each.

Preach it.

If you have some time, read "Warrantless location Tracking" 83 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 1324 http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv2/groups/public/@nyu_law_websi...

  A common step in police investigations today is to secure a court
  order tracking the movements of a suspect or anyone else whose 
  location the police believe useful. The flip side of this 
  powerful tool, though, is how revealing and intrusive it is. Few 
  people would be comfortable being followed by a police officer 
  all day, even if they did nothing illegal or even interesting. 
  Justice Brandeis once invoked the "right to be let alone,"  and 
  undetectable location tracking pressures the alone part: No one 
  is "let alone" if the police may, without notice or probable 
  cause, find out everywhere they go for a day or a month.

It's a good, if disturbing, read.

Physical objects only ever do exactly what they're 'told' to do, period. Rocks don't have a mind of their own, and physics isn't magic. Yet I don't want to live in a world where we don't spend time twiddling with dials and poking around.

http://www.one-step-forward.net/2008/05/making-moot-point-mo... just FYI. And, btw, it rhymes with "newt" not "cute".

Funny, I was just in a discussion with some folks on this very issue, so enjoy the citation bomb. In short: total compensation isn't outstripping productivity by a substantial degree.

First, start with "The relative stickiness of wages and prices" by David E. Spencer. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5814/is_n1_v36/ai_n2... It provides important background to the discussion of whether wages or prices 'stick' more, and provides an overview of the debate through '98.

Next, we turn to Martin Feldstein's paper, "Did wages reflect growth in productivity", 2008. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953 He highlights two common errors with studies that find wages rose substantially slower than productivity. First, he explains that such studies focus on wages rather than total compensation. Without comparing productivity to total compensation, such studies are dangerously flawed. Second, such studies tend to poorly select the deflator when comparing productivity & compensation. Basically, the price index that's used to determine compensation is different than the price index used to calculate productivity.

For an even more recent discussion of the same problem, but within the context of Russia's economy, read "Productivity and Cost of Labor: How Statistical Illusions Are Born" by R. Kapeliushnikov, May '10 http://mesharpe.metapress.com/index/BW00W218X2143504.pdf. He explains:

  It seems that many of them are unaware of the difference between the 
  producer real wage and the consumer real wage. The former is estimated
  by deflating the nominal wage using the producer price index (PPI) or 
  the GDP deflator; the latter, by deflating the nominal wage using the
  consumer price index (CPI). One reflects the change in the price of 
  labor from the perspective of firms; the other, the change in the pur-
  chasing power of wages from the perspective of employees. Therefore, if 
  we want to answer the question of how expensive or cheap labor is for 
  firms, we should use the producer real wage, not the consumer real wage.

Hopefully this helps in evaluating the claims made by the EPI (the source of the data used by the NYT). I'm not familiar with any direct responses to their latest data, but Feldstein reaches a different conclusion over much of the same time period: While there's some lag in total compensation, it's not dramatically different than the rise in productivity.

Oh please: we don't play along blissfully ignoring that. Arguably the biggest contribution to information theory is Shannon's source coding theorem, and we haven't forgotten it.

For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is much greater than a client computer. RAID is expensive. Backplanes fail. Laptops fall. But now instead of waiting 2-4 hours for a reimage & file transfer, I can take a base image, go to docs.google.com, and be up and running in the time it takes to walk a laptop to my office. Or, if more pressing: in the time it takes to log in at my coworker's machine.

So I'm curious: what's with the pseudo-FUD?

Docs has been down twice in the last two weeks during business hours. 9/7 it was down for about an hour, and 8/26 the Docs listing was down for about two hours (the listed time on the 26th is about an hour after we submitted the issue).

Is this a new realization? Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory explains that 'hygiene' factors keep a person from being unhappy, but aren't themselves motivators. So having a good salary keeps someone from becoming unhappy, but isn't itself a motivator (except possibly a very short time).

And as Gladwell writes in Outliers: "Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying."

"Easier said than done, I know, but the thing I find helps most people is to understand that you can't refrain from doing something you like. You can, however, change the person you are into the kind of person who doesn't even like that stuff. Sugar Smacks still taste the same as they did under Carter, but I don't know anybody who still eats them. Do the same for soda."

"Free Text Messaging" is an interesting 4 year period, though it looks like it's dead as a search term now. Is this because of Google Voice? Or did people give up on the idea?

http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:g2VSqRc0n...

Why not? I barely receive spam at this point, and it's pretty easy to block people that abuse the address.

On the other hand, I'd love it if the places to which I've never returned asked me why, and then changed as a result and invited me to try again.

Burger, you're saying something different than the OP (and hence, different than what tghw was criticizing). In "all probability" the location won't be China or India, as those two countries alone don't represent a substantial majority of births.

So your point that those two have the highest birth rate isn't responsive to tghw's point that those two alone don't represent the majority of new births. So if we had to bet on "one country", a person would pick one of those two. But when we're betting "India/China or somewhere else?" the smart money is on "somewhere else".

This passage seems relevant as it points at the contours of what I take to be the underlying 'problem' that the OP hints at with the litany of questions. It's also an interesting background from which to approach the writings of people like Kurzweil. There is, it seems, a deep desire to escape our bodies. The drive is present in many religions and it is present in futurism of diverse sorts. Lastly, the final sentence seems especially relevant at a time when it seems that most 'misfortunes' get transformed into 'moral failings'.

From the essay "Really Bad Infinities", in the journal parallax, written 1999:

In ‘Body Fluids’, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of what we have come to know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic:

  What will we say to those who ignore advice and continue to make contacts
  known to be at risk? Will we treat them as irresponsible, to be lectured to,
  put under observation, and converted? In that case, our future scenario is
  assured: that of the child in the glass bubble, for whom the outside envi-
  ronment means death; that of the obsessional struggle against all unmonitored
  contact as potentially the source of death.‘

Much has happened in the fourteen years since Stengers’s and Gille’s essay first appeared. We have learned, for example, that the pandemic is interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS (with the full force of the partitive: we belong to AIDS as its ownmost), and that we can therefore no longer think of the future as the restoration of a putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer sex is not a state of being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality; we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our bodies are our unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our utter nontranscendence, our finitude. And we have had to live the future scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we have seen technical advice pertinent to our pleasures pressed into the service of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid, moralism. Indeed, safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range of material and institutional practices, has become an essential part of an entire scientific medical technology of social control such that all illness, disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather than misfortunes.

...what?

The 'cost', to Apple, of going to Enterprise is pretty large. Enterprises need things like stable patch schedules, forward-looking roadmaps, and integrated control structure. The toughest, culturally, on that list, is the forward-looking roadmaps. As one of many examples: Apple's switch from PPC chips to Intel chips was done with no warning & negatively impacted order fulfillment. (I was working at a university at the time, and lab computers ordered well in advance of the change were delayed 2 weeks -- other schools who ordered later were waiting months.)

Compare & contrast Microsoft's "patch Tuesday" with Apples "patch whenever". There's a cost to 'going enterprise' that goes far beyond "we don't want you to use this at work".

And that's not even touching the issue other's have pointed out regarding 'image' and 'branding' and emotional associations with the system you're using at the job you hate.

I like the friend's response. Almost always, the only wrong response to a "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" situation is to stall.

That's why I love the Zappos story at http://consumerist.com/2007/10/zappos-sends-you-flowers.html - customer service for a "normal" like me, not the person that runs HARO & has a huge following.

Famously (well, famous if you were into MMOs & high-end raiding 10 years ago), EQ did something similar to what you describe. An end-zone boss wasn't supposed to be reachable before obtaining certain keys that weren't even in the game yet. Folks that had used in-game mechanics to bypass the doors one day logged on to find items like http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=17057 replacing their original loot.

I echo the congrats. However, the 'wave of food' was gluttonous and off-putting to me personally. It also features fried food and carbs, which seems to run counter to the healthier trends I've seen. But I'm way on the outside, so maybe i'm missing something.

I like the ESL comment: that's cute. But to your broader point I ask, "Why?" If I can comment in an online discussion group or I can post on an online discussion group, why is the relation of my temper any different than the relation of my post?

The OED is useful here: it literally defines in as equal to on in the second definition of the prepositional form of 'in'. There's an extended history of the relation between 'in' and 'on', which includes the Latinate source of the Saxon term, its evolution in Old and Middle English, and its use today. Suffice it to say, the distinction is not a trivial one, and 'in' and 'on' are often interchangeable.

As is often the case with these "I'm so smart and other people aren't" posts, the author makes what I bet is an unintended mistake. I assume they want each option to have only one solution. The last example ("It is poor form to ____ you temper in a discussion group"), either option (lose or loose) works. The verb form of 'loose' means 'to set free', and temper has come to mean an agitated state of mind. So you can say, "It is poor form to lose (be deprived of) your temper (calm state of mind) in a discussion group."

But you can also say, "It is poor form to loose (let free from restraint) your temper (agitated state of mind) in a discussion group."

It absolutely can be. The XM-7 Spider is basically the same thing, except over secured remote control, and it holds munitions instead of video cameras. It's pretty difficult to build technology that only saves lives.

At least in CA, trucks can drive in either of the right two lanes in a road with 4 or more lanes in the same direction, and can always pass on the left regardless of the number of lanes.

And just as an FYI: doing nothing is the least you can do. Flipping someone off is nearly the most you can do if you stay in your car & don't endanger the lives of those involved.

I don't think the author is "keeping track" of anything. If I say, "Hey, will you review my YC application?" and you say, "Sure, but get it to me before Wednesday or I won't have time." and I say, "Will do!" and then you never hear from me again, you won't be recommending me for anything. And likely, you won't take the time to help me if I try to reconnect, unless I have a pretty good reason I flaked.

It's not a list, it's human nature. You invest in things that show promise, and the behavior outlined above doesn't show promise.

No it's not. In the first line, it's in [0], in the second line, it's in [1], in the third line, it's in [2]. You have to scan through to find where the '0' appears

And re-introduces the 'magic character' you're trying to eliminate.

Classiest reply in this whole discussion.

For what it's worth, the plaintiffs claimed to have received a tip that Mike Connell was being threatened for providing testimony against Karl Rove. That testimony was provided in a sworn affidavit. So one can speculate as to whether or not the anonymous tip was a legitimate threat, but the concept you criticize has a basis in the events surrounding this case.

Not sure which text size you're using when you take your screenshot, but it works 100% for me using Jane Austin's Pride & Prejudice. The only errors are where I clip the descenders and is much faster than typing:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10RqUDWTGgpZQueJW19QhLxL4...

"Detailed. But wrong...The government cannot prove that the laptop is hers."

I wrote, "the fact that a password works on a particular machine may be incriminating. This is the only line of argument that could work...it could...prove that they did have possession or knowledge of the drive." Seems like we're saying the same thing.

At issue here is likely the status of what constitutes a "Foregone Conclusion". In Fisher, the courts established that, "The existence and location of the papers are a foregone conclusion and the taxpayer adds little or nothing to the sum total of the Government's information by conceding that he in fact has the papers. Under these circumstances by enforcement of the summons 'no constitutional rights are touched. The question is not of testimony but of surrender.'"

In Boucher there's clearly not a foregone conclusion, and the motion to quash the grand jury subpoena was upheld because the password's production was "purely testimonial." Here, it might not be "purely testimonial."

Also, for what it's worth: having a password is certainly better than locking a system via biometrics. At least with a password, the law is (currently) indeterminate. Biometric locks: you're screwed.