When Netflix was just a DVD service, keeping up with the star ratings of movies you had watched wasn't hard. You'd log into the web site to manage your queue anyway and clicking on the ratings was simple.

Now so many people watch things via streaming that it's easy to not do it (and so many STBs make it difficult/awkward to rate anyway). Plus I'd bet that much of the streaming viewing is series where rating kind of falls apart because you might watch a single show for a couple of weeks and you lose opportunities to rate many titles since series have a single rating.

It makes me wonder if the suggestion algorithm ever included the critical quality of the movie or if it just included the user ratings. If critical quality was never a factor, skewing the movie base with bad titles makes it seem less effective, especially to a user who may have already taken into account general critical reviews because they see Netflix just pushing bad direct to video titles.

If users are spending more time watching series, not rating due to streaming changing their interactions with the rating system and the recommendation engine not taking into account movie quality it's even easier to see how recommendations become increasingly useless.

I thought they had a big contest where it was a big deal to beat the then-current suggestion engine by 10% because the current engine was supposed to be so good.

IMHO the bigger problem is that streaming has a huge amount of shit associated with it and they will suggest shit movies which makes it appear that the suggestion engine doesn't work.

My guess at this point given all they do to hide/obfuscate how crummy their streaming catalog is they don't really care about the suggestion engine anymore.

I'm curious though how you would leach anything out of a container with a negative pressure. Wouldn't the atmospheric pressure on the container mitigate this somewhat? It results in continuous inward pressure into the container.

The consumer system works great for foods but I've had seals fail before so I don't think I'd personally trust it for criminal activity but the commercial systems seem pretty good, the bags are much thicker and they draw a pretty heavy vacuum.

It's funny what you say about Burger King, but one thing I notice commonly in McDonalds is people hanging out for a long time with their laptops.

A local coffee shop I used to frequent because it had decent wifi, good coffee and a lot of tables with outlets recently eliminated about 2/3s of their tables and replaced them with lounge chairs and couches. And this was long after you had to have the daily password from your receipt to even use the wifi.

I suspect this was done to minimize people using it as something of an office. You can casually use a laptop or a tablet on a couch, but doing anything serious is much harder without a table.

I'd bet fast food places with free wifi are getting some of the cheaper punters who would have normally camped in coffee shops. Most fast food employees around here are immigrants who don't care to enforce any kind of time limit and they won't soon eliminate tables in a restaurant.

I think there's an obvious class conflict when it comes to STEM fields. Wages are high enough that it challenges the corporate class structure that dictates what field should be paid more than other fields.

My wife works in marketing for a company that makes an engineered product and we had a fairly heated discussion about this once. Without thinking about the implications, she actually said that marketing was more important than engineering and marketing should always be paid more. Raising engineering salaries above some ceiling wasn't an option.

Now, my wife isn't a mean spirited snob but I think she genuinely meant this and I think it reflects the class consciousness in corporate thinking.

Strangely I never see this mentioned in articles about H1-Bs and STEM workers. It always seems to devolve into an unresolvable debate involving conflicting macoeconomic labor statistics.

There was a Mythbusters where they tried to fool a drug dog. I only caught the tail end of it (no pun intended) and the only attempt I saw was the target item inside a suitcase with dirty diapers in a room full of suitcases. If I remember the wrap-up scene the dog always found the target.

I'm curious what else they tried to trick the dogs with. The cynic in me believes the cops wouldn't have cooperated if they had actually come up with a technique that worked.

I wonder if vacuum sealing works -- presuming of course you wash the exterior of the vacuum sealed container and possibly double-bagged it. I use a FoodSaver model for food items and since the sealed bag holds a vacuum, presumably there's no way for the odor to migrate out.

Yeah, in Vermont, it took all of about a year.

Vermont's state constitution forbids slavery and was adopted in 1777.

Several other rebel colonies declared themselves free even before independence was formally gained.

During the Revolutionary War, Britain transported slaves of loyalists to other British colonies. (The slaves were not emancipated.)

There was a British court decision in 1763, but it was not binding overall, seems to have been pretty widely ignored by other British courts at the time, and the matter would not be settled in the British Empire for several more decades.

You also managed to get both dates wrong. Nice going.

We don't actually have any sort of twilight this time of year in Stockholm, even though the sun does go down for about 5½ hours. It gets dark only if it happens to be cloudy between 2200 and 0330.

Not quite the midnight sun thing you hear about (that's further north), but it still takes some getting used to.

You really need some better reading material.

And you're THE ONLY ONE who can see this... right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Are you sure you were around 20 years ago? Mainstream/formula music has been around since the dawn of commercial audio recording. Blaming its existence on piracy is silly, and just makes you sound like a **AA shill.

No, they're reporting that it ran in the NYT, which is exactly what they're supposed to be doing.

I believe you intended to say "HTML isn't as popular a beverage".

I hate it when poor delivery spoils what would have been a good punch line.