Netflix sometimes releases the entire season of a show all at once, allowing people to download the entire season and binge-watch. Hence "binge-y".

IIRC, they first started with "House Of Cards" as an experiment, and found that a lot of people liked the ability to watch it all in a weekend, or 2-3 episodes per night for a week, or whatever.

Having to wait a week to see the next episode allows peoples' interest to wane. Also, for complex plotlines (see: "Lost"), people tend to forget important events that happened weeks prior and have trouble keeping up with the plot. If the event 5 episodes ago was last night (or the night before), people have a better time keeping immersed in the plot.

You stated - quite plainly - that this was "no coaching, no suggestion", obviously some strange legal definition of ""no coaching, no suggestion", of which I am unaware.

And of course, this is only coming from the complaint, which is the FBI's version of events.

If the FBI's version is this sketchy, what do you imagine the real situation was?

Or are you one of those people with "relatives in law enforcement", who have inside information about all officers being honest, forthright persons?

(Except for the ones caught on video, of course!)

Huh. You don't say. And here I was reading some excerpts from the original complaint:

[The FBI supplied, what Booker understood was, the explosives (actually inert material) needed for the bomb, then:]

CHS 1(*) provided Booker with a list of supplies that they needed to purchase in order to build the bomb.

Booker understood that CHS 1 and CHS 2 would build the VBIED

CHS 2 explained the function of the inert VBIED to Booker and demonstrated how to arm the device.

Out of curiosity, does this look like "no coaxing, no suggestion, that's 100% on him" to you?

Because, it doesn't to me...

(*) CHS stands for "Confidential Human Source", and means "FBI undercover agent"

Lest we forget our current state of affairs wrt privacy, note:

If the police can access the data, they can use it to determine lots of things about you. For example, they can probably detect if there's a meth lab upstream from the current location, and use this as a guide for the placement of more sensors. Eventually they'll narrow it down to a single household, and know where the meth lab is.

They could do this with drug use as well. They could find evidence of, say, cocaine use in the stream and use this to place more sensors, then narrow it down to an individual household. Then see if the household member is in a critical job, such as ambulance driver or surgeon.

...or any job, really. They could just alert your employer to the fact that "someone in your household" uses drugs.

They could determine the ethnic profile of individual homes from the food eaten.

They could determine the health of individuals living in individual homes in several ways - detecting diabetes, or obesity, or diet for example. Insurance companies would probably want this information.

And legally, their response would probably be "you have no right to privacy for anything that you flush into the public sewers", or "just as with driving or flying, you can choose not to do it" or some such.

I can see a lot of benefit from doing this (sewer monitoring in India is being used to show that polio has been eradicated), but we really need to get a handle on the privacy implications from the start, before the big abuses begin.

This will be like video cameras: expensive at first, then ubiquitous. Look to see a sensor at the outlet from each home in a couple of decades.

Firstly, not all manhole covers are round. I've seen triangular ones in Nashua and Japan, and there are a lot of rectangular ones in Italy.

Secondly, the reason manhole covers are round generally is that during the industrial age the four major machining operations were casting, cutting, turning, and drilling, and since the covers had to be reasonably accurate while being mass produced they were made by turning (ie - on a lathe).

Thirdly, this is a variation of a "Fermi problem", after Enrico Fermi who famously used it to determine whether an interview candidate could think logically and make back-of-the-envelope questions. However, this question in particular is famous, available to anyone who could look it up on the internet. Along with the answer.

That 'kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Since the question and answer are so readily available, I have to assume that you, the interviewer didn't actually make up your own question. But it looks like *you* happen to enjoy these sorts of questions, and I'm sure that you had to answer your share of these when you interviewed for the company.

That being said, I'm also interviewing your company, to see if I actually want to work here. Since you like questions like this, here's one for you...

(NB: I don't like working for idiots.)

It's much worse than that.

The president, by himself, created and enacted a law which carries a criminal penalty.

(My outrage meter is pretty much pegged, and I had a polemic about secret laws, secret courts, ordering US citizens killed, and such... but I think that one statement above stands by itself. The US is well and truly fucked.)

Check out the actual bump.

Anecdotal of course, but it sure seems like the announcement caused a massive spike in trading.

Also note that TSLA is up $4 over yesterday's close, so that's a total of 3%.

This is not nothing, given the scope of effort they made (a simple blog post and twitter announcement).

The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.

This is what's known as a "rationalization". Pick the one explanation you like, and then find some evidence to support it.

To really choose the best answer without experimentation, you write down *all* the possible explanations, and then pick the one that seems most likely.

(If you can do experiments you can eliminate explanations directly - but when you can't do this, the best course is to list all explanations and pick the simplest one.)

A simpler explanation of the low pass rate is that the online courses are of poor quality.

And indeed, many of the online courses are very low quality - especially the ones from high-end players.

The "Probabalistic Graphical Models" course by Stanford is known as a weeder (students get caught off guard with the difficulty), and the online version demonstrates this: the video shows Daphne Koller standing at a lectern droning on and on(*) with no vocal variety, reading the text of the online slides to the viewer... completely uninteresting and making a simple course boring as hell. (sample video.)

I thumbed through the edX course listing and hit on a course I liked - and the introductory video contained absolutely *no* information about the course! The full text of the course description read something like: "Join me as we explore the boundaries of $subject". (Is it a difficult course? Is it introductory or advanced? What level of math is required? What's the syllabus?)

I mentioned it to the head of edX in a private E-mail, and he responded by saying "that's an affiliate course [ie - from an affiliate institution] and we don't have control of the quality or content".

(WTF? You're running a startup and you don't have control over the quality? And he seemed to intimate that he was more interested in building the scope of their selection than the quality.)

Kahn academy is trying to get feedback from students to improve their presentation and make their lectures more effective, but I don't see any other players doing this.

Everyone's just taping their lectures and putting them online(**). The situation won't change until everyone burns through all the seed money and has to start making a profit based on results. For example, edX got $60 million in seed money, and they're burning through it with no viable business plan.

(*) Keep in mind that I'm critiquing the course, and not Professor Koller.

(**) For a counterpoint example, consider Donald Sadoway's Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, which is *not* a MOOC lecture series but is free for online viewing. Light years ahead of any MOOC course and well worth viewing.

Firstly, it's a glorified eye-dropper not a syringe.

Secondly, it's an important biomedical advancement made by citizen scientists. (The important part of that sentence is "by citizen scientists".)

Thirdly, there's an organization which is a nexus for citizen science.

The important bit of this announcement, and the one that makes it interesting to me, is that people are making biomedical experiments on their own, bypassing regulatory agencies and big industry alike.

This is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a stagnant market dominated by large monolithic entities. It's usually a small upstart company that's more agile than the big conglomerate, but it works the same in research as it does everywhere else.

For a games-theory argument, consider that the regulatory agencies are free to require any safety requirements at no cost to themselves, but if something goes wrong they are held responsible. As a result we have a system where it costs 2.5 billion dollars to bring a drug to market, so that it's economically infeasable to implement existing cures for rare diseases. It's also impossible for individuals to manage their own risk with informed consent.

For a games-theory argument, consider that health insurance companies see care and maintenance as a cost to be minimized and rates as profit to be maximized. As a result, insurance companies are unwilling to pay for newly minted procedures and therapies because "it's experimental".

(As a concrete example, it tool a loooong time for the insurance companies to consider MRI scans non-experimental.)

So it's not really *surprising* that people are taking things into their own hands and doing their own research, but it's an important development.

Oh, and cue up the kneejerk response from established players about risk, gold-standard regulatory bureaucratic fandom, and how no one without a PhD can possibly do real research.

The elephant in the room, of course, is security.

With NSA "upgrade factories" - where spyware is installed by the NSA before delivery - China and everyone else is looking for alternatives to American products.

(And note that the spyware can be implanted in the BIOS, and even the hard drive firmware, and will persist even if the system is wiped, or the BIOS is replaced.)

The scope of economic damage this has done is astonishing. I've never believed in trickle-down economics, but once China starts making servers my guess is our IT industry will tank from the top down.

Expect an economic crisis in, oh... about 5 years.

(The solution would appear to be a complete open-source ecosystem including BIOS and hard drive firmware. Just as I can verify my linux installation, there should be verifiable BIOS and hard drive firmware, so that any country can purchase any computer, and be confident of its security.)

That is an informed position, I have no problem with it.

You said that you're arguing with my approach, but I was only pointing out how their approach used psychological trickery to circumvent rational analysis. I realize that there are tradeoffs, and I come to this site specifically to see the tradeoffs and all sides of the story.

It isn't about the tradeoffs, it's about the trickery.

(And for the record, paying an access fee to store energy on the grid seems logical and reasonable. I 'kinda agree with it. Keep an eye out for trickery, though.)

(2) that anyone disseminating untrue information is an agent of the enemy

"What Muggles have learned is that there is a power in the truth, in all the pieces of the truth which interact with each other, which you can only find by discovering as many truths as possible. To do that you can't defend false beliefs in any way, not even by saying the false belief is useful." (source)

(3) there is no obligation to treat enemy or enemy agents ethically which puts you in the company of a lot of less-than-august characters.

You're extending my position from fairness to ethics and then applying it to people, implying that since I said it was OK to be unfair to a corporation, it's also OK to be unethical to people. And then an ad-hominem attack by putting me in the company of unsavory people.

One definition of ethics is to take actions which minimize the suffering of others. Rooftop solar would likely reduce total suffering much more than bolstering the profits of the energy conglomerate, so I don't see a problem with the ethics.

And why is the argument suddenly about me? Doesn't that deflect discussion away from the original point?

(1) there can be no true information against your base premise

You certainly haven't presented any true information. In fact, you haven't presented any information at all.

Really. Speak to the specific issue (rooftop solar), or the outer issue of (astroturfing) and let's have a discussion.

I've often wondered how much astroturfing goes on at Slashdot.

Certain news stories come up, and people make the most twisted arguments imaginable to deflect, downplay, or show shades of grey. Sometimes it's from long-term users with varied post histories - are these well-crafted astroturfers, carefully building up a false history to deflect suspicion?

My last remembered example was the one about home solar installations: The panels give unused power to the grid during the day, and the users take power from the grid at night.

The home-solar owner is using the grid as offline storage and not paying for it... and that's not fair.

This is straight from Robert Cialdini's book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion(*). "I'd like to get solar panels for my house, but oh! if I'm being unfair, then the answer's obvious! I can't be unfair now... can I?"

It's a well-crafted argument that halts rational thought by activating an automatic response on the part of the reader... by presenting a point of view that's not particularly obvious, and not something that is actually important to the issue.

(Consider: Do you really care about being unfair to the huge corporate energy conglomerate? And do you think that they would be fair to you in return? And looking forward 50 years, is the world populated by distributed home solar installations *better* than the world relying on monolithic energy production? And if so, won't "being unfair" now help to bring that about?)

This is only one example, I've noticed many sketchy arguments presented here - the Uber controversy seems to be particularly inflated.

We know that big corporate interests will astroturf politicians and regulators by faking letters of support &c (viz: the outpouring of support of the Comcast/TimeWarner merger).

We're a nexus (probably the biggest one) of smart people on the internet. Are there teams of astroturfers trying to shape public opinion?

Has anyone else noticed any particularly suspicious arguments?

(*) Chapter 3, "Commitment and Consistency"

"Without working computers, teachers cannot take attendance, access phone numbers or records, and students cannot purchase food in cafeterias.

One can only wonder how difficult it was to teach highschool before computers.

How did our ancestors manage?