Meh. I took two years of chemistry in high school (second was AP). It was okay, and I suppose it's been marginally useful. I'm not sure everyone needs more chemistry than is taught in seventh and eighth grade science class, though... atoms and molecules, a bit about chemical reactions, an overview of the periodic table, including a basic notion of what the columns mean, a brief discussion of the ideal gas law, etc. I think that's sufficient for most. Stoichiometry, understanding valence shells, etc... not so much. The general structure is crucial. The details, including the construction of chemical names, really isn't.

What's more important, and not taught very well at all, is the theory and operation of the scientific method as a whole. I discovered a while ago that my wife -- who has a BS in biology and taught junior and high school science -- didn't really understand the scientific method. Specifically, she didn't understand the distinction between hypothesis and prediction, or why it matters, and didn't fully understand the critical nature of falsifiability and its implication that science is and always will be a series of successive approximations to the truth, never achieving perfect truth, yet being by far the most effective tool we have for getting ever closer to it.

The AC addressed this point quite well, so I'll let his comment stand.

Your reading comprehension needs work, then. But I'll summarize: I was agreeing with you.

I don't think it's that bad. I think this is "Dihydrogen Monoxide" trickery, only a slightly subtler form.

The dihydrogen monoxide trickery is using an unfamiliar name for a familiar substance. Unless you've taken some chemisty and know how to parse "dihydrogen monoxide" as "a molecule consisting of two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms", you don't realize it's water and the selective quotes, presented in a context that implies that the speaker/writer is a reasonably-intelligent person who genuinely believes there is a risk, obviously causes listeners to assume that it's dangerous.

A really essential part of the joke/scam is the fact that the speaker/writer appears to be intelligent and sincere. It's a social engineering scam, relying on the fact that most people are intelligent and sincere (the slashdot elitist tendency to assume general stupidity notwithstanding) and that therefore absent some sort of contraindications people tend to believe other people, because that's what makes society work.

In this case, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of the 80% who were confused actually know perfectly well what DNA is, and fully understand that most of our food contains it because most of our food is made from living organisms. And they understand that children get their DNA from their parents, including their mother.

But the way this is presented strongly implies that the topic of discussion is some other DNA, which is not supposed to be in the food and can have some sort of deleterious effect, and that warning labels might be useful. Further, the similarity of the ratio with those who support labeling of GMO foods indicates that the presentation may have caused the respondents to conflate the question with one about GMO. Some of them might even have assumed that the survey was in error and intended to ask about GMO foods and answered in the affirmative while shaking their heads about the cluelessness of the survey author. The apparent intelligence and sincerity of the speaker motivates people to believe there's a real issue, rather than this being a joke or a trick.

So I suspect that the 80/20 split here is less an artifact of education levels than it is an artifact of the distribution of different personality types. To what degree are you skeptical of scientific-sounding claims that are presented to you as factual? And how willing are you to lend your support to crusades pushed by apparently well-intentioned people, particularly when they appear to have little, if any, downside? The suggestion that the action to be taken is just labeling makes this a relatively low-impact campaign, even if successful, so the cost to society is low, and the cost to the survey respondent is nearly zero. In that sort of situation, many people will agree merely to be agreeable, regardless of their opinion on the issue.

I'm feeling pedantic this morning: The correct English plural of virus is viruses. In Latin the word is a mass noun, which means that the notion of a plural form didn't make any sense. In modern times we've applied a new definition which does allow for sensible pluralization, but historical Latin writings give us no clue about how to pluralize it. The most probable forms, though would be "vira" and "viri", not "virii". In English, though, the word is viruses.

It's ridiculous to assume that the mechanisms of selective breeding, where the changes originate in random mutations -- often accelerated by the use of mutagens -- plus random viral- and bacterial-vectored transgenic splicing, is somehow safer than deliberately-engineered splicing. It's like expecting that a bridge created by a fallen tree is more trustworthy than a manmade construct.

Of course not. The main cost of living difference is housing. By way of example, consider me (I live in the Mountain West; Utah) and one of my colleagues (in Sunnyvale, CA). He bought a house last year for $1.2M. If I bought a comparable house in my area, it would be maybe $150K, probably less. My $400K house would cost at least $7-8M in the bay area. His house cost so much that he can't make the mortgage payments on his (fairly nice, by most standards) Google salary, so he actually rents out his master bedroom to make ends meet. He rents that one bedroom and attached bathroom out for not much less than it would cost to rent my whole 4000 square foot house.

The two of us make similar incomes. This means that while Amazon charges us the same, I have substantially more disposable income to spend (or would, if it weren't for my kids).

Google doesn't do that. Rent, sell, donate, whatever. If you have some evidence to the contrary (e.g. public financial filings?), I'd be interested in seeing it. So would the FTC, actually, since AFAICT it would be a violation of Google's consent decree.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here, unless perhaps you're talking about losing your opt-out cookie? If that's what you mean, Google provides browser extensions that ensure that never happens.

Yep, pretty much, that's it. Unless you're paying for Google services or buying Google hardware, online advertising is Google's revenue model. If you have some evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Again, I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that if you stop opting out from targeted ads you start seeing targeted ads? That seems pretty obvious to me.

None of what are for my benefit? The ads? If that's what you mean, I beg to differ. Most ads are useless to me, I agree, but it does happen from time to time that I see one that's useful. Even more importantly, those ads are how the sites that I like get funded, so they benefit me very directly.

(In my particular case, Google ads also pay most of my salary. But I felt the same about all of this before I joined Google so I honestly don't think that affects my opinions much.)

First, I never asserted that Google doesn't know about the data that it collects. That would be to deny a tautology. Second, you seem to be asserting that Google sells the data, which isn't true, as I explained in more detail in my first post in this thread. Third, the advertiser may well know you by name, etc., but not because Google told them anything about you. The fact that your IP may be linked to your identity in various ways is true, but not Google's fault, and Google doesn't participate in spreading information about you.

If you don't want an advertiser to get your IP, I suppose you should avoid clicking on ads.

To the degree that it is cross-referenced, yes. And Google Analytics gives Google perhaps more of this sort of information than any other entity -- unless, of course, you opt out of analytics tracking, in which case Google doesn't track you.

Well, then, don't give your permission. I think that's the key; opt out of the services you find too intrusive. That doesn't completely solve the problem, because of the cross-referencing issue. I think we'll need to deal with that legislatively, to bar companies from cross-referencing the data they have about individuals, and to give individuals access to the information held about them, and the opportunity to request that it be deleted... with, of course, serious consequences for failing to comply with such requests.

I'm really not sure what you're on about.

Yes, Google knows you clicked, because they use that to track advertising effectiveness statistics, and, I assume, as a signal that the ad is for something you're interested in. Normally, of course, a web site doesn't know about clicks on links to other sites. When you click a search result or an ad, you're actually hitting a link to Google, which then redirects you to the destination. This is done so that Google knows you clicked. For both search results and ads, that's an important signal to Google that lets them know they ranked results/ads well and showed you what you were looking for.

Yes, the advertiser's web site knows you clicked, just like any web site you visit. Slashdot knows you viewed this article, and posted, and what you posted, etc. If you use a site, the system and therefore its operators know you did.

I don't see what about all of this upsets you, or what you think someone is trying to hide from you.

But do you want a computer where someone else can replace your OS with three minutes and a screwdriver without you being able to tell that they did so?

Yes, if you click a link that takes you to the advertiser's site, they know you did so. It's no different than if you typed in their URL, except that they see a referer header from Google, and find out what search terms you used to find them. Google didn't give them any of that information, though, YOU did.

If you opt out of personalized ads, there's no value to Google in tracking you.

The news at 11, of course, is that said serial port access is provided via TCP on a public IP, on a known port, with no password.

Yes, you can, at least with Google. Google provides opt-out tools, and they work. I know some of the engineers who work on opt-out and they're quite serious about ensuring that nothing identifiable gets stored about users who present an opt-out cookie. Any team that tried to work around opt out would be in trouble... and would get Google in trouble during its regular FTC privacy audits, pursuant to the consent decree Google signed.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. The above represents only my personal opinions.)

This is a common misunderstanding of Google's business model. Google doesn't sell information. At least, not very much. I think there are a few minor products that involve selling aggregated, statistical information, but they're an insignificant part of Google's revenue stream. Where Google makes money isn't by selling information about users, it's by using information about users. Google doesn't deliver information to advertisers for them to decide who to advertise to, Google accepts ads from the advertisers and uses the information it has to decide which ones to show to which users. Advertisers don't see the user data and have very little control over the targeting of their ads, which is fine with them because Google is better at the targeting than they are anyway.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. The above is all public information.)

To be honest he said 15 years of his life which means he may have start before Dish became spammers (not sure how long their scummier business practices have been around since I have a mental filter on snail mail spam that gets immediately recycled and my home phone is given out to noone who doesn't absolutely need it like our local schools or our doctors office).