801 karma · joined January 10, 2011
Real human social activity is a lot more random than real informational content in blogs - so fb's problem seems harder.
Also, facebook banning accounts is a much stronger action than google just lowering the pagerank of suspected splogs.
So overall I think fb's problem is harder than a currently google-unsolved problem.
Getting these people to use github would be awesome!
Would love to see two citations for this! (post 1940s!)
Last thing I saw on it was a blogging heads video [0], which convinced me it's not as dead as I thought it was.
We don't worry about reducing work to a living wage in any other field - we allow free entry into carpentry, construction, business & don't require them to buy medallions before starting to work.
It's a general problem of resource allocation - just like cancer. Some group or cell identifies a resource and starts diverting or blocking it for their own benefit, and this increased power/energy is enough to protect the problem from unmotivated defenders.
But does that change your life at all? No, your life is exactly the same as before.
Same with these stats. Just because people who have lower life expectancies move or happen to live near you, it doesn't change anything about your life.
If canada and the US merged, the average life expectancy of the new country would go up, but that number itself wouldn't change anyone's life.
It's the same with arbitrary county groupings. If you live in a county with lots of poor people, they will have a lower life expectancy. That doesn't mean anything about you, though. If the border was different, you might live in a county with lots of rich people.
So fruit really isn't 'natural', and it being natural wouldn't mean it was good for you, anyway - fruit evolved as a tempation to animals to get them to help plants distribute seeds - that's it. Plants were selected based on how well their seeds were spread, so they came up with fruits which attracted animals. If they could have come up with versions which hurt the animals a bit, they wouldn't have even known or cared.
How about:
P(disease|calories) = P(disease|calories from sugar) + P(disease|calories not from sugar)
So it might mean:
P(disease|calories from sugar) =0.05 P(disease|calories not from sugar)=0.01
Or you can write a greasemonkey script that fixes it automatically.
I am waiting for a site that puts clauses like "10% of your income belongs to us" in their clickthrough one day.
They're warm enough, in one of the coldest places in the world.
They should implement autopager in js and leave it on by default for the entire site - I bet total photo views would go up 50% permanently. From places where flickr is slow, this makes the site way, way more usable.
The community is incredible, and they have huge followings all over the world - you can easily stumble into really active nonenglish groups. I wonder if they ever realize how many people use the service.
Regarding keys, I once wrote a client which downloaded about 60m full size images over about 2 years for a job. All on a non-commercial key. We kept roughly within the usage limits, and they never seemed to notice.
The change I remember from the past few years was that they changed the photostream navigation tool on the right side of a photo - now, it remembers where you came from, and that controls which one is open by default. So if you were browsing someone's favorites, the navigator for the favorites will be open (even though you already saw that thumbnail on the previous page). In the past version, the photostream of the person's page you were on was always open no matter where you came from. Now, you are always a click away from seeing even the next photo's thumbnail. This is a bad change for me, cause I always use tabs to browse flickr anyway, and so I just came from a screen containing all the favorite thumbnails. Now, you often end up on someone's photostream, with no other of their thumbnails displayed.
are there local announcers over a game-sound-only feed?
I have always thought having free announcers who could say whatever they want would be way better than ones who are restrained by having to keep relationships with the players coaches, and networks who pay their salaries.
By your reasoning, it would be wrong to complain about cars which have a speed limit of 40 miles an hour, since "the nearest competitor" (bikes, horses?) would still be still worse.
It took a long time before I was convinced to try it - but it's sweet.
vpns have been horribly bad the last few weeks
tunneling through ssh has also stopped working consistently.
I don't know anybody over here who has a good vpn anymore. It's got to be hurting business that collaborate internationally - the net goes down for a few minutes at a time, throughout the day.
If they represent only a few percent of his annual plastic-in-ocean contribution, it would be silly to worry about them while ignoring all that other stuff.
first, there's no dividing line between us and our human-like ancestors.
second, this depends on the precise moment life begins. Quite a few people claim to believe that human life begins at conception - if that's the case, in order to be consistent, they should count life starting from conception, which would at least double the total historical human population (due to natural miscarriages, not just abortions).
As an analogy think about how we feel about people 2000 years ago - if we could have just a few comprehensive samples of something in their world, we would really like it. Even things like exhaustive lists of every word they said for a week would be incredibly useful for linguists, lists of everything they ate would be useful, etc.
We shouldn't rely on their choices of what is worth preserving - we should adopt a broad based approach and try to preserve the maximum amount of things, and hope it will be useful later on.
I think today we have even used graffiti preserved on the walls of Pompei to get an idea of what the ancient world was like - surely there would be valuable information stored in even an imperfectly-frozen brain?
Who knows what kind of crazy theories they may have in the future, that they just would need to have a few brains to test out with?
I think it would improve our capacity. Look at how much investment is put into someone before they can productively give back to the economy - kids take years of being raised, teacher's time, plus years of experience before they start paying their own way.
I think life extension would spread that capital cost out over a much longer productive life - right now say years 1-20 you are a resource drain, and the same for years 65-90. So you are producing stuff for society just half of your life (yet, this is enough for a surplus - the quality of goods output today in the world is continuously increasing) If we double lifespan it would double the productive years, so each life would be MUCH more productive.
That's not even including the fact that the second (doubled) productive section could take advantage of the first section's experience. So if we doubled each individual's productive lifetime, (by increasing total lifespan by just 50%) it would most likely more than double their total output.
Imagine how valuable someone who had 40 years of experience, plus a 20 year old's fast mind would be?
[note that by productivity I mean the amount of human / natural resources a person takes up; kids take up parents & teacher's time, older people take up highly trained doctor's time. People who are "productive" are generating more valuable services than they're taking up. So, people spending longer within that middle section would make them even more of a gain for the world]
The following quotes are from an investigation of what type of advice real homeopaths give when asked to recommend treatment for someone planning to visit areas exposed to malaria.
"... I tried to find out what homeopaths would offer to a young traveller seeking protection against malaria. Working with Alice Tuff and the charity Sense About Science, we developed a storyline in which Tuff would be making a ten week overland trip through West Africa, where there is a high prevalence of the most dangerous strain of malaria, which can result in death within three days. Tuff, a young graduate, would explain to homeopaths that she had previously suffered side-effects from conventional malaria tablets and wondered if there was a homeopathic alternative."
...
"Next Tuff found a variety of homeopaths by searching on the internet, just as any young student might do. She then visited or phoned ten of them, mainly based in and around London. In each case, Tuff secretly recorded the conversations in order to document the consultation. The results were shocking. Seven out of the ten homeopaths failed to ask about the patient's medical background and also failed to offer any general advice about bite prevention. Worse still, ten out of ten homeopaths were willing to advise homeopathic protection against malaria instead of conventional treatment, which would have put our pretend traveller's life at risk."