No he failed to comprehend that people have found that particular method of calculating ratio of compression over time is proving to be *useful*.

selecting a sample of users, and conducting tests on them specifically to change their response.

How does changing something about your website to get them to spend more money not qualify as "selecting a sample of users, conduncting tests specifically to change their response"?

So what if the 'sample of users' is everyone, and the A/B test occurs over the same users in two non-overlapping timeframes? If I make the changes to my regionalized .CA website to test the impact on "Canada" before making it to the global site? Does that qualify? Because pretty much all sites do that sort of thing too.

You're definition is so loose it's useless.

That is PRECISELY my point. Getting in a huff about "experimenting on users" is absurd, because the definitions in play ARE uselessly broad. What did OKcupid or facebook do, SPECIFICALLY, that crossed a line that any other website wouldn't do to increase whatever metric they were looking at.

Because, to my view, they haven't done anything different from any other site, at all. So this all really is much ado about nothing.

No. It's what some unethical douche bags do. it has nothing to do with how websites work, asshole.

Anyone who has ever:
a) taken any metrics about there site
a) altered their website in any way
b) measured whether or not it made any difference

Change the font? Rewriting the sales pitch? Moving the photo to the left? Changing the checkout sequence? Showing more or fewer related products? Added bitcoin as a payment option? Offered a discount? Let you checkout without registering? Adjusted your online advertising budget or changed the keywords you were paying for or targeted a new demographic or region...

Do any or all of those one at a time, checking whether sales increased or not... congrats you effectively "experimented" on your users.

Whether or not it is insidious or unethical doesn't depend on "did you or did you not experiment" it depends on what EXACTLY you've been doing.

Me, I've noticed that people tend to click on articles that are finite lists of things. Hypothetically take an article called "Retirement Savings Strategies Everyone should know" gets fewer clicks than "7 retirement savings strategies everyone should know".

The only change is the addition of the number 7.

The internet has gradually been replaced by "X Y's" articles, because it gets more clicks, as this has become increasingly "discovered" by people "experimenting" on users with different headline styles.

The only upside is that I can safely ignore any "news" site with more than 1 article that starts with a count in the title, as containing nothing more than processed brain diarrhea.

Claiming that a score "works" has no meaning,

I could easily devise a cpu scoring methodology that scores CPU based on chip area / cost * clock speed / register width.

Such a score "works" in the sense that the function can be evaluated, but it wouldn't tell you anything about whether to buy an i7 vs a xeon vs a pentium 2.

The suggestion in the article is that the particular scoring methodology that was created for the show is useful for comparing compression algorithms, to the point that it may well be adopted by industry.

Therefore, the only interpretation of the hideously poor writing is that the submitter is claiming the algorithm works.

The writing was perfectly fine, your reading comprehension is what failed here.

I use about 70 to 150 GB per month.

ok... Verizon's taking a real risk with this, Oh, and they'll lose my $700 cash infusion that I supply them approximately yearly, oh, and my $200/month (family-wide) cellular bill... Oh, plus the fact that I've successfully convinced tens of people in the past,

  Hope they can live without that, too.

You bet they can. say 3000/year? For 70-150GB per month? I pay $1500/year at least, and use maybe 15-20GB per YEAR.

So yeah, you make them twice as much $, but use 10x as much bandwidtih. That makes people like ME 5x more profitable than you are.

They'd be happy to lose you, and anyone like you.

If you don't, look to lose about $10,000 per month in revenue by the time I get done canceling my service and talking to my connections about Verizon and they start pulling the plug.

In reality, your connections are mostly in contract, and cant switch anyway. Plus despite your outrage, they are satisfied with their service.

I'm a very convincing and influential person.

And the guy in the mirror agrees with you, so you must be right.

I wonder how many other people like me out there are souring to your business by your anti-consumer practices.

Less than a fraction of a percent of its least profitable paying customers. Your better than people who don't pay their bill, that's about it it.

that the planet's orbit be stable over thousands of years

Very low thousands is plenty if the timing is right. If anything say a few thousand years pre-Copernicus contained astronomical accounts that deviated wildly from what we "know" today, we'd put it in the same category as the artwork and accounts of the flat earth resting on the back of a giant turtle.

If you read this paper, you see they settled on a moon the same mass as Kalgash but with the density of Saturn! How could such a system possibly arise?

Gas Dwarfs?
http://blogs.discovermagazine....

As for the how, with 6 suns dancing around, you've got plenty of candidates to provide the required components, and lots of opportunity for freak events, collisions, etc.

Honestly, I think, after you add in 'freak occurrences' we'll eventually find some pretty spectacularly improbable planets.

No one is paying $200 for a phone they can get for free with a contract

Not true. The 2ndary market for last years premium phones (iphone 4S, galaxy 3, galaxy 4 ...) and they do go for ~$150-250.

There are a few niches where used premium phones really shine:

kids phones -- kids want imessage/sms, games, youtube, and parents don't want to spend $50-80/mo for phone contracts for their kids, so they'll 'get' an older premium phone and stick a pay as you go text messenging plan on it.

This is a popular setup parents go for around here, and its usually put on 'hand-me-down phones' or phones picked up 2nd hand.

For example, I put my daughter on 100$/year unlimited SMS plan, on my old iphone 3GS, and then after she had it a year it gave out, and wasn't worth fixing - so I bought her a used iphone 4S for $180. I think this is a pretty common situation, as everything from small computer shops to ebgames deals in used premium phones and there's always 10+ iphone 4, 4S, samsung SIII and S4 phones in stock at any of these places.

If Verizon was really going to give her a new iPhone for nothing (but a contract extension), she should have still paid Apple the $100 to fix the screen on the old one, and then sold it immediately.

Meh... depends on what phone she had and has now. She probably has a 4S. $100 to repair it and then maybe sell it for $200... $100 net profit whooo... still worth it assuming you value your time less than whatever grief is involved dealing with putzes on craigslist. :)

The guy had already shown his willingness to publicize his dissatisfaction by tweeting about a minor inconvenience,

You know who reads the average persons tweets? Their moms.

https://twitter.com/DuffWatson

300+ tweets, to 400 followers (and I wonder how many of those followers are post-him-being-on-the-news). Seriously this guy is a nobody.

The tweet itself? That was just the catalyst, if the employee hadn't escalated it by pulling him off the plane, nobody would have given two shits about random nobody from minnensota posting his brain diarrhea on twitter where next to nobody cares. He may as well have threatened to tell his sewing circle.

See, the thing is, you're reading that I actually need .docx, which I haven't actually said anywhere

No I caught that, but decided to making the point that docx (actually the harder HR requirement to meet) is still a very low practical barrier.

But mate, cheers for the MS Office sales pitch.

By providing 3 ways to avoid buying it altogether? and one final way that costs less than a premium coffee?? Yeah... Microsoft is paying me well to shill for them, LAMO. :p

and being financially challenged I'm doing the work from LIbre Office.

Ok, so your "financially challenged". I can accept that.

And lets suppose you need your resume in DOCX format as part of the application process. What do you do?

We're trying to do it on the cheap so...

a) Do you really not have a single friend, family member, or neighbor who has office who would be willing to allow you to load your ODF resume, clean it up, and save it as docx? Really? Not a single one?

b) Employment offices - around here there are all manner of taxpayer funded, and volunteer organizations to help people get jobs -- they provide resume assistance, job boards, etc... surely someone there can take your file and help you get a clean DOCX version.

c) Grace period. ok, you have no friends and there are no support mechanisms out there for you to lean on. There are plenty of versions that will run for 30 days grace period before they insist on activating. Several don't even require a key to be input during install. Download a VLA ISO via a torrent site and install it, get your DOCX and remove it. Don't even need cracks.

d) ok, you have no friends, no employment support groups, and you feel even taking advantage of the free grace period is too close to piracy for your strong sense of ethics. $7 bucks a month gets you office 365 personal edition. That's pretty cheap for a legal and DIY option. Skip a meal and haul a bag of aluminum cans to the recycler and you've got MS Office for few weeks, more than enough time to get a resume in order.

Not to be disrespectful to your or your current position, but I'm skeptical you really can't get a reasonable docx version of your resume that easily.

So you don't have $120 to drop on Office Home and Student right now, despite it being an "investment" in getting a job... but really ... you don't know anybody who has a copy who will help you out? Nevermind the other options I listed.

As for PDF... sheesh that's even easier. Assuming your word processor doesn't have the capability built in, or your operating system via the pritner subsystem. (OSX can save to PDF natively, as can Linux if you set it up. And there are several free PDF printer drivers for windows as well.)

But even if all that is too complicated or esoteric there are plenty of online document convertor websites that will take your document and give you a download link to a pdf version. Just google "word to pdf"... even a newbie can manage that or will at the very least know someone who can help them with that.

No. In fact it's absurdly difficult to reliably create reproducible builds.

Yes and no. Yes, absolutely, its absurdly difficult to create identical binaries, for the reasons you mentioned.

But you can pretty reasonably get close enough to make manual inspection of the differences easy enough. And as you said the differences are usually filepaths, hostnames, timestamps etc so one can identify the difference as benign pretty easily.

That's not good enough for general build reproducibility, but for one off code to binary verifications of key pieces its reasonable.

AC isn't about transmission easy, it is all about transformers and mechanical systems.

I guess it would be more correct to say that AC is easier to transmit *because* of the relative simplicity of transformers at the end points.

I know nothing about electricity

So you figured you'd post your suggestion on /. instead of attempting even the most cursory self-directed research. Gotcha. Laziness for the win.

Is it just that we're so used to designing electronics etc. to use AC, or are there other benefits?

Its easier to transmit long distances, at high voltages.
Its trivial to step up and down to different voltage levels via transformers. The equivalent in DC is not simple.

Mechanical AC generators are simpler and cheaper to build and maintain. And nearly all electicity is generated from mechanical sources (turbines).

Hydro and tidal are water driven turbines. Coal, wood, biomass (methane), natural gas, nuclear, even geothermal electricity are all "steam driving turbine" eleciticity generators, wind is an air driven turbine.

That leaves solar, which IS DC. Worldwide, like 0.2% of electricy is from solar.

Batteries too, are DC, but are charged nearly exclusively from AC sources.

then why not put effort into designing AC sources of electricity?

I guess so. I mean, only 99.8% of electricity comes from AC sources. Just imagine what they could do if they put some effort into designing some AC sources, right? :p

Erm...

"Effective 2014-06-18 Freecode is no longer being updated (content may be stale)"

Or were you making a joke that just whooshed by me?