TFA:

...so it's a little less direct, but no great loss.

I was actually thinking of large platform developers such as Zynga. The fee and labour cost is potentially significantly higher, which makes it only attractive to a smaller number of companies prepared to do the work of scraping information itself, but the opportunity for information transfer still exists, doesn't it?

I believe you when you say the company's trying to improve its image in this regard, but, well, when you have a history of putting things like "Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information" in your privacy policy, that sours users' perception of your brand. It shouldn't really come as a surprise that people assume such things continue.

Did it?

The executive branch has the authority to delay implementation of laws in order to make those laws work better. This has been done THOUSANDS of times in the past, and has been upheld by the courts whenever challenged. It is absolutely a routine part of how the American government works.

Republicans are strategically howling about this, just like they did when he appointed "czars" to manage certain departments (a practice started by Nixon). It's just a tactic. A trick, to make the uneducated masses think Obama is doing something bad. You fell for it, because you're gullible.

How would the opponent overguess you? You can delay your strategy switch for as little or as much time as you like, since their best strategy only breaks even.

If they don't know what you're doing, you could rack up more wins by exploiting flaws in their strategy, and rack up even more wins when they "wise up" and try to counter you. I guess the difference between our answers is that I'm treating this as an actual game against another person, whereas you're looking for more a game theoretical optimum.

Now, if your opponent does have perfect knowledge of your strategy, then randomly alternating between the strategies would be the best approach, which is effectively the same as your 1/3 rock, 2/3 paper idea. By the way, I ran some sims in matlab just now, and I'm getting the optimum to be bang on 1/3-2/3, so the math might not be so interesting after all :-(

There are only two degrees of freedom: the probability that we pick paper (assume we pick rock the rest of the time -- picking scissors should never make sense); and the probability that our opponent picks scissors when they have the choice. I'm assuming that our opponent never intentionally chooses rock. That seems fair since our plan involves throwing paper more often than not.

Making a meshgrid of those two probabilities in 1% increments, running 100k games at each point, and then taking the minimum along the axis of our opponent's choice (i.e. assuming they always pick the best strategy), I find a peak at 68% with us having a 16% advantage, which is about 1-in-6. So it looks like your initial guess in the other post was correct.

I've gotten quite a few random spam messages from Chinese industry, despite being a software engineer at an academic institution with absolutely nothing to do with any product development or manufacturing whatsoever. I've gotten offers for piping, ceramics, and a wide variety of plastics. At this very moment, I am reading a spam message from Kevin, who informs me he represents "one of the best digital images retouching/editing professionals located in China."

They seem like very good deals, and I'm almost saddened that I can't take them up on what appear to be very genuine, heartfelt attempts at mass mailing in an age where most unsolicited e-mail is about "your urgent Cooperation in transferring the sum of $11.3million immediately to your private account" and unauthorized activity notifications from Bl1zzard Entertanmnt on my several hundred Batt1e.net accounts.

If you ever figure out what kind of plastic it was, let me know, and I'll check to see if I got the same e-mail!

Facebook's position on providing large amounts of user data to its business partners has been the subject of scrutiny a few times. It remains unclear exactly how much stuff developers like Zynga have been able to access. There was also a series of events a couple of years ago where privacy controls were updated and set to overly permissive defaults—which is either spectacularly bad management (given how much bad PR it generated each and every time) or a bribed enablement of data-scraping.

As for sending email to a Gmail user, that's what I meant by "passive" use of Google's services, although I should note that if your e-mail never gets read, it cannot make Google money, just like a site with Google ads on it that never gets visited. You're really only an incidental bystander in that situation.

Well, there's at least one sentence that's essentially different: "even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you."

Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers. They exclusively use their own analytics; all an advertiser can do is submit their target demographics and keywords, and let Google do the math. While they're both huge storehouses of personal information, the big G is monolithic and generally non-porous—unless you're a malignant security agency, at least. If you're not using their services (at least passively), you're definitely not making them money.

This doesn't make them Totally Cool Groovy Guys You Should Trust With Anything, but it does make them naive ideologues surfing along the edge of a slippery slope rather than the outright thuggery of Facebook and other traditional advertisers—FB is more like a spam subscription; once you get signed up, you can be certain that your private information will propagate across the cosmos for eternity.

I think you have an error in there. His best strategy in your example would be to always use paper, in which case he's doing the exact same thing as you are, and so the odds are even.

I think your best strategy would have to involve reacting to his. Start with 100% paper until you see what he's throwing when he's not throwing rock. This gives you at least even odds regardless of what he does.

He'll probably start throwing scissors, at which point you switch to you switch to 50% rock 50% paper. This will have you win 2/4, lose 1/4, draw 1/4.

He should respond by starting to throw paper. so you just go back to 100% paper and win half the time. If he switches back to scissors, you start throwing rock again.

The goal is to use long stretches of paper to for him into 50R:50S (which only breaks even at best), and then switch to 50R:50P to pick up some wins until he switches back 50R:50P (again, he'll only be able to break even). So when he's properly countering you, he can only break even, and every time you switch strategies you should pick up some extra wins. If he tries to go for a midpoint (50:25:25) he'll lose to either of your two strategies.

You're so close to the truth, you even tripped over it and didn't notice.

Where are they getting that money? It ain't coming from the church collection dish.

This isn't about religion. This is about the robber barons trying to squeeze the last few drops of life blood out of this country before they retire to their private paradise. The country, even when it was at its most religious, was not anti-science in the past. People loved science in the 50s. They only became anti-science when certain very rich individuals realized they could become richer by spreading anti-intellectual propaganda.

No, see, that's the problem. You're aiming at the wrong group. These congressmen aren't ignorant because they're religious. They're ignorant because certain entrenched interests pay them ENORMOUS SUMS OF MONEY to remain ignorant. You can never, ever compete with that. No education, no promotion of science, will ever make a dent.

If you want it to get better, you need to get serious campaign finance reform. And that can't happen until you get rid of the current SCOTUS. Which means that our one and only chance to fix this is in the next presidential election, since the winner might, maybe get to replace a conservative justice. If we get a Republican president, Scalia and Kennedy will retire, and we will be damned to another 20 years of oligarchy.

If we manage to get a Democratic president, Scalia and Kennedy will try to hold on as long as they can.

Absolute best case scenario (barring a miracle heart attack), we might be able to start fixing this around 2025.

It will probably be too late by then.

My hands are busy when I'm driving, as are my feet. So how am I going to move these cameras, and how is it going to be easier than slightly tilting my head? 'Cause tilting my head is really, really easy. I mastered that shit when I was like, six months old.

Which exactly matches with what I said, that "the engineers will need to find a way to cover all of the necessary angles without taking up too much space on the dashboard". (Seriously, did you read past the first sentence of my post? It wasn't that long!) A 180 degree view could work, but they need to find a way to make it fit into the dashboard without taking up too much space, and without making the display too small, and without making it ruin people's night vision. As I said, it's a solvable problem. But it's not a trivial one.

If I think there might be something just out of my field of view in a mirror, I can lean slightly to change the angle. That doesn't work with cameras. Not necessarily a problem, but the engineers will need to find a way to cover all of the necessary angles without taking up too much space on the dashboard. I absolutely do not want to hit any buttons to pan the camera while driving.

I was just explaining this to someone the other day that thought AWS was going to save them money. It's not cheaper than running your own shop. The only advantage I see is that you don't have to house/cool/maintain hardware. You can just move your application to higher capacity, faster servers. You get additional power and network reliability.

If your dev/test platform is already off-site and working, then what is the compelling reason to interrupt everything and do the move? Where I am working today, the tried to move from AWS to Google's cloud and had tons of issues of reliability. We're back on AWS. Our usage model though, lends itself to AWS. We sell "application instances" which are deployed for customers to AWS for its up-time reliability. All our development happens in-house though.

It's not a magic bullet. If you're looking to save money and your place already has a cooled closet and redundant network and power, then it offers no incentive for you to move.

Good to know. Now I just need to find a way because my state makes it illegal for labs to sell directly to consumers.