What makes you think it's honest, or that it's mourning for Kim Jong-Il?
In the absurdist documentary The Red Chapel, the director speculates that when their North Korean guide starts crying at the monument to Kim Il-Sung, she is actually crying for her relatives who died under his policies.
Looks like you stumbled across a textbook example of Simpson's Paradox. Like with the Monty Hall Problem, gaining a thorough understanding of it will dramatically improve your intuitive understanding of probability and statistics. (At least it did for me!)
CarrierIQ bandwidth is not counted against your cap. At least it's not supposed to be, although we know how good the telcos are at billing you properly.
Hollywood makes plenty of great movies. The problem is they aren't marketed as much, because of the Big Mac effect you mentioned. However, just becuse there are lots of McDonald's doesn't mean there aren't awesome restaurants around too. You just need to search them out yourself instead of relying on advertising (or complaining about it
You don't even need to go outside the U.S., although it does help if you're feeling tired of the "same old formula," since other countries' fimmakers are going to follow different storytelling norms. Anyway, here's the IMDb list of top movies from 2000-2009 to get you started: http://www.imdb.com/chart/2000s. I've seen most of them, and they definitely deserve to be on that list... just look for one that suits your taste in genre and enjoy.
Another way to find good movies is to follow directors who don't compromise creative integrity. I recommend Christopher Nolan (Memento), Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream), and David Fincher (Se7en). Those movies are all masterpieces in one way or another, and all came out of Hollywood within the last 20 years. Find one you like and start watching other movies by the same director.
Each device I worked on, each firmware release, each line of code, does something useful for many, many people. Some of those people don't even know that audio equipment, leave alone software, is involved with what they are hearing.
Awfully arrogant of you to claim that some people benefit from your work without realizing it, without acknowledging that the same could be true of his. If he adds liquidity to the market, then you save money every time you buy or sell stock (or your 401k/mutual funds do). It's not necessarily true that he does, but you certainly aren't in a position to know. You could read more here, but I suppose that would just get in the way of your populist rage so maybe you'd rather not.
Oh, and you follow it up with another stunning display when you criticize him for not using his real name and then you wish him death in the very next sentence. Wow.
Do you ever buy or sell stock? Perhaps indirectly, through a mutual fund or 401k type plan? If so, then you benefit from high liquidity in the market. HFT and other Wall Street shenanigans do skim from the top, but they also provide liquidity. It's almost certain that the liquidity benefits small market players more than the skimming hurts them. In other words, the money they're skimming comes from the banks and brokers rather than you and me.
For example, take the stock of Red Hat (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=RHT). Yahoo Finance right now shows that, as of the last time the market was open, I could buy 100 shares for $42.56 (that's the "ask" or best current asking price), or I could sell 300 shares for $42.09 (the best available "bid"). That's a bid-ask spread of about 50 cents. That spread is a hidden cost to either buying or selling stock: If you buy and then sell RHT, you will have paid about 50 cents per share just for the privilege, even if nothing in particular happens to the company. Let's split that 50-50 and say that every stock transaction in RHT (buy or sell) costs you 25 cents per share in implied fees.
Those bids and asks are set by individuals and companies who are competing. They want to get a good deal for either buying or selling the stock, but they also know that if they set asking price too high or their bid too low, they'll never make any trades. The more competition there is, the tighter the bid-ask spread will be. HFT and other algorithmic approaches allow firms to set prices on tons of stocks without requiring human attention for each one, which dramatically increases the competition and thus tightens the bid-ask spread.
In this example, if you outlaw HFT and similar trading strategies, maybe RHT will have a spread of $1 intead of 50 cents. Maybe you'll be happy that HFTers aren't making ther 5 cent skim off the top anymore, but it'll be cold comfort when you're paying 25 cents more on each transaction and it's just going to a different Wall Street firm.
If you think I'm exaggerating the effect of computerized trading of the spread, have a look at slide 8 (page 4) of this study: http://fisher.osu.edu/~diether_1/b822/trading_costs_2up.pdf. Starting in 1960, the average bid-ask spread has ben dropping steadily every decade to a small fraction of what it used to be.
Background: I am an actuary trained in quantitative finance. I've never worked in Wall Street or done any HFT or other algo trading.
You're really reaching here, like someone who claims the warm hum and crackle of LPs makes them better. You can certainly claim that the objectively-worse aspects of books make them subjectively better for you, but you shouldn't expect anyone else to be convinced!
A physical book is what reminds us that not everything has to be available at an instant, that we can take our time to sit down and enjoy ourselves without the worry of glare off a screen, our batteries running out or spilling our Dew on the device and shorting it.
While books may be perishable, they are far more durable than any electronic device.
Whether a book is electronic has nothing to do with taking our time to enjoy it. You can sit down, take your time and read all the classic works of literature you want, at whatever pace you want, on an eReader. Modern eReaders do not have screen glare and have batteries that last for months. If you spill your Dew on a physical book you might have to throw away the actual book, whereas if you spill your dew on an eReader, the book itself is in perfect condition and always will be, safe on your hard drive and Amazon's backup servers. Just replace the device (not so expensive nowadays) and your entire library is restored for free.
Congratulations again. You've just excluded at least one third of the world's population, most likely closer to half, who don't have a net connection and will probably not have one in the foreseeable future for various reasons. Cost and infrastructure being the two biggest culprits.
If their conditions are that bad, do you think they're spending their money on libraries and textbooks? They're not going to have access to many books, electronic or not.
Most countries at least have cellular phone networks even if their other infrastructure is lacking, or they have one satellite internet access point. A few eReaders with cellular internet (or occasional access to satellite net) and months-long battery lives could be more valuable than an entire library, and wouldn't cost nearly as much to transport.
I'm not sure she wants a real man. Can you say "marriage of convenience?"
If only there were some easy way to find out whether Google will be doing that. But I guess you can't be expected to read the summary nowadays.
Bill Coughran, Google senior vice president said in his blog that from now on, Google will redirect users that visit google.kz to google.com in Kazakh
Most Americans are OK with spying on people in direct contact with terrorist organizations, or who are plotting an attack.
What about spying on anyone they want? I didn't even have to read TFA to find this gem:
the Patriot Act powers this approval includes would extend "to so-called 'lone wolf' suspects who aren't affiliated with any terrorist group."
If you take away the double speak, 'lone wolf suspect' just means 'anyone we want.' Anyone they want to spy on is automatically a 'suspect' by definition, and if they don't have any connections to terrorism, then I guess they are a 'lone wolf.'
If two people making the same query get different results, they are failing badly!
Bullshit. If I google "wine" I'm interested in the software project, and if my mother does she wants the drink. A search engine that knows that is better than one that doesn't (for the vast majority of users).
Messages using a non-trivial, it is running motion not seen the original, they will give interesting results if someone can figure it out yet.
That it was a message using the results of the first when I need to understand the use of the interesting examples can feel the pit, you do this your need to get you in the clear yet.
The iPhone and iPod touch weren't even introduced 4 years ago.
Actually, "the first iPhone was introduced on January 9, 2007." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/iPhone)
This has been your regularly scheduled Slashdot pedantry. You may now return to your discussion.
Do you have a smart phone? You'd love Swype. It's basically what you describe but for the soft-keyboard on a touchscreen. You put your finger down somewhere near the letter your word starts with, drag it around in the general direction and neighborhood of the rest of the letters in the word, and then lift it up. Swype calculates a probability of what word you were trying to type based on the shape, even if you didn't quite touch all the letters in the word. If it's confident enough, it inserts the word into the text field... otherwise it displays a list of words in order of confidence for you to pick from. (If you wanted the top word in the list you can just start typing your next word and it will insert it.) And of course it automatically learns any new words you type.
At first I thought it was just a gimmick but I've been VERY impressed by it on my Galaxy S phone... I specifically got a phone with a slide-out keyboard because I didn't like the idea of a soft-keyboard, but now I use both in different situations. The hardware keyboard is still nicer for entering symbols and other non-words conveniently (e.g. an SSH session or a web password), but for regular writing Swype is actually faster!
I also live in Minnesota and drive a Prius, and I haven't had any problems. My batteries have been working fine for 4.5 years, and the computer's always been able to start up the engine even at -15 degrees F last week.
I've been tracking my gas mileage since I bought the car (using actual gas receipts and odometer rather than the car's reported MPG), and I find that it drops from 45-50MPG in mid-summer to 35-40MPG in the coldest parts of winter. While that's definitely a decline, it's closer to 75% of the range than half and I doubt it's because of the battery. Everyone's MPG goes down somewhat in the winter, and the Prius moreso because it can't shut off its engine and go into electric mode as often.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
