Er, I meant "levers". If only there were some way to see my post before it's submitted...

Either you must be the oldest person alive, or you mean "since I was old enough to notice them". Also, the word is "ads", short for "advertisements".

Related to the Banksy quote, I'd say that ads on the Internet are even easier to control. Just install AdBlock. No, it doesn't get all of them, but it comes close.

It is actually a priority. Google's ad-ranking system takes into account not just the revenue potential from an ad click but also "ad quality", a metric that considers various aspects of the ad, the site to which it links, and more, all related to the user experience. Because Google knows that it's important that when users click on a Google ad they have a good experience. Otherwise, they'll click less. Given that Google only gets paid when they click, that's directly bad for revenue. It likely also reduces the value of the ad to the advertiser, since users who do click may arrive more skeptical of what they'll find, and be less likely to buy. So advertisers will bid less, and that's bad for revenue.

To help the advertisers, Google provides feedback on what they can do to improve their ad quality metric, because it's one of two levels advertisers have to control how often their ad is shown (the other is how much money they bid for each click). Google also provides details statistics to enable advertisers to calculate their ROI from advertising on Google, which will quickly show the damage from any degradation in user trust in Google ads.

I don't know the details of what happened here, and although I could search the bug database to find out, if I knew the details I couldn't post. That said, I strongly suspect that what happened here is that the situation was more complicated than is presented in the article and that there were very good reasons why it took the Google ads team so long to address the issue. Because bad ads are bad for Google.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but don't speak for Google. My description of the ad ranking system is public knowledge and the rest is only my opinions.)

It's actually as safe as it's ever been, safer even than the "Leave It to Beaver" 50s, and the decline in violence and crime is continuing. It's possible that some of the improvement in child safety is due to hypervigilant parents, but I suspect not much. Most of it is just that the nation is more... "civilized" is the best word I can come up with. It's still more dangerous and violent than many other developed nations, but in a better place than it has been, and heading the right direction.

Yup. Our perceptions are badly skewed by media. Our inbuilt mechanism for judging risk is heavily biased towards shocking narratives, and it's also observation-frequency biased. In evolutionary terms, those make sense. Without the range-extending capabilities of technology, our observations were limited to the personal, so observation frequency made sense. For rarer but more severe risks, the information communicated by others also provided a pretty good measure of frequency, since the aggregate perceptive range of our acquaintances and their acquaintances, etc., was pretty small.

That's clearly not the world we live in today.

Of course, we do have excellent tools for judging risk, vastly better than anything our ancestors had. Statistical methods provide a more accurate, more precise and more nuanced view of relative risk than anything our "gut" could ever do. If we use them.

In this case, these children's parents clearly do make use of the statistical tools available to us today, correctly judging the relative risk of their children walking as being lower than driving in an automobile. The CPS agency, not so much.

So what yer sayin' is that y'all got niggers runnin' loose. I kin see why yer afeard a lettin' God-fearin' white children walk theah. Them black bucks is mighty unperdictable.

Wait, this is the 1930s, right?

(Sorry if I misinterpreted your diversity comment, but it wouldn't surprise me if there is an element of racism at work here.)

Why? If he can come back from the dead, certainly traveling to a different continent isn't so difficult.

Given that the civilizations of that period vanished (archaeologically and per the history given in the Book of Mormon), what remnants of that visit would you expect to find?

That's not actually what the Book of Mormon purports to be. It claims to have been written between 600 BC and 200 AD, and translated in the 19th century, to English... in a "scriptural style", mimicking the Bible that Joseph Smith knew. So your complaint is that he chose to use that style, rather than his contemporary language? Okay, but that's a pretty weak criticism.

Is the rest of the list equally weak?

What are you saying is absurd? That there was a prophet? All religions based on Judaism believe in prophets. Or something in particular about Joseph Smith as a prophet?

So where was it, then? Or are you taking the position that it didn't exist but is just allegorical?

That sentence is chock full of misinformation. Joseph Smith was never convicted of fraud (he was charged with banking fraud, but that was later -- all of his various charges came after he had published the Book of Mormon, and most were vague, like "disorderly person", because the people didn't like what he was saying -- and was a charge trumped up because they didn't like how the church members were organized), the Book of Mormon wasn't written by God himself but by a series of prophets, the same as the Bible, and it wasn't found in a cave.

Not much of a Catholic if you don't believe in the Apostolic succession :-)

Why? You can only stare at the cheap hotel room art for so long. TV sucks. Books are good, but the net has a lot more. In some locales it's worthwhile to leave the hotel and find other stuff to do, but in a lot of places I travel for business, there really isn't much point in that.

When evaluating a hotel room, I rate the importance of Internet service just below the importance of having a bed. If your Internet service doesn't work, I'm leaving.

It varies widely across the levels of hotels, but there are some patterns:

The really sleazy motels generally charge for Internet (some don't even have it).

Stepping up to stuff like Comfort Inn, Econolodge, etc., wifi is generally free. Their customers are price-sensitive and are likely to be annoyed at being asked to pay extra for much of anything.

The next step up is the lower tier of business travel hotels, like Hampton Inn and such. They generally have free wifi, same rationale as the previous. However, many of them offer a premium service with higher bandwidth, perhaps a external IP, because some business travelers need it and will often pay.

The next step up is the higher tier of business travel hotels, like Marriott Residence Inn, Embassy Suites, etc., vary. Pretty much the same situation as the lower tier, but a higher percentage of them charge even for "basic" service. They nearly always have free Internet in their business center.

Luxury hotels mostly charge for Internet. Luxury hotels nickel and dime you for every damned thing they can think of, I suppose on the theory that if you're willing to pay $350+ per night for a room, you won't bother to look at the bill and notice an extra $50 per day in extra charges.

I don't often stay at "destination" hotels ($700 per night and up, usually), in fact my sample size is two stays at the same Ritz Carlton (the one in Half Moon Bay), but what I saw there was that Wifi was free again. Not, I'm sure, because they think the patrons are sensitive to the price, but because making them go through some hassle to get onto the net is unacceptable customer service and clashes with the bowing and scraping that is de rigeur in every other part of the experience.

All of this is in relation to hotels in the US. International travelers can expect it to be all over the place. I stayed at a fairly nice place in Zurich that didn't offer Internet at all, and a fleabag in Santiago that had outstanding Internet. That's not saying anything about Zurich or Santiago, either; different hotels in the same area were different.

Out of curiosity, which Mormon beliefs do you find absurd? I'm mostly interested to see whether they're actual Mormon beliefs, or urban legends.

Either that or notice it while perusing the other devices Google has for sale.

Either that or read the description on the Play site.

Granted on the fortune. $1500 is expensive.

Then you explain the context, and have the relevant people testify about their recollection of it. With no documentation to trip them up, and with the benefit of hindsight. This actually happens a lot, when some of the documentation still exists while other documentation has already been deleted.

That assumes you recognize it before it becomes a problem. Which, besides being difficult on its own, raises the question of who the "you" is. An e-mail communication between two employees, neither of whom sees a problem, won't ever come to the attention of management, much less the legal staff. Not until a discovery search, at which point it's far too late. Acting at that point could actually make things worse.

Perhaps you want management and legal to be responsible for reading every e-mail, chat and document sent or received by any employee? That would be even more insanely expensive than trawling through terabytes of old data because in the discovery case the searchers at least have some notion of what they're looking for and can ignore much irrelevant documentation. Not to mention the chilling effect on employee productivity and/or morale.

Agreed. But having a reasonable retention policy is not going to "great length".

Without evidence, suits get dismissed and media gets bored and moves on.

Yes, that's exactly the point of a retention policy, to eliminate litigious lawyer-feed.

Interesting. Can you elaborate on how they simplify the design? I'm not sure it's a meaningful data point anyway, because since we don't understand general intelligence we can't know what a successful design will look like or require. But I'm interested to hear your reasoning.

It's not necessary to have some characteristic in order to understand it and work with it.