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Comment Carrier comparison (Score 2) 208

Many who comment here will have a reason that they chose one carrier over one other carrier. They may have switched carriers. I always found that the latest carrier plan was better than the competition, and that it would go back and forth or be too confusing to come up with one clear answer. I actually have iPhones and aPhones on 5 carriers. I also travel the world quite a bit. Domestically, all the carriers are good for most unless you live in an area not covered by some. I remember times when Verizon was faster but now it seems that AT&T is faster for me, most of the time. I remember when you could buy international data from Verizon that covered 200 countries, while the AT&T list was only about 50 countries. That affected me in places like Russia and South Africa, back then. T-Mobile has incredible data plans for here and away but they don't seem as fast as claimed unless I'm in the store. Sprint has gone far out of their way to help me with issues, including a stolen phone number. Right now I believe that the best carrier I have, for my own needs, is Google Project Fi because the plan works in over 100 countries. You can even order a free data-only SIM for free, without even a shipping charge, to use it on iPads and the like. I would never say that anyone's choice of plan is bad in any way though.

Comment Re:No. (Score 5, Informative) 198

A whole interview rarely carries over. I was asked if I thought Apple would be around in 100 years. My reply even referred to IBM, along the lines of what you can do and how many restarts you can get when you are that big. I facetiously jabbed at the idea of Trump seeking advice from today's huge internet companies by telling the reporter that they would all ask for lower taxes and become larger yet.

Comment Re:I remember 1979 well. (Score 1) 62

Exactly. I got my first computer as a kid in 1981 (a Casio PB100). The manual was excellent, and I learned BASIC as well as some numerical analysis with it : Monte-Carlo method, systems of equations, etc. My parents were short of money at the time, had a large house, and took guests who needed a place to stay for a few months. I remember long discussions with a couple of computer specialists (as we said at the time) working for major banks. They only seemed to know VM and COBOL on big iron computers, punched cards, line editors on ttys, and files on tapes, so, "serious" computers which have practically disappeared except in legacy applications. They made fun of me with my small device and my dreams of having an Apple ][ or an IBM PC, which was worth the price of a hot hatch at the time, and that my parents could not afford, saying that a real computer was worth minimum $1M, or how I was using a TI 994/A at school to play some music. I realized they had almost no concept of a backdoor, and were hardly gasping the concept of a superuser, which I knew only from books, but had understood. Now, I am using the most powerful computers of the planet in atomic energy centers, and still think of them making fun of me trying to program 2-degree equations or 3-unknown linear equations on my 512 byte computer in BASIC. They did not seem to see the point, since they only thought about (non-relational) databases and accounting.

Comment p-value research is misleading almost always (Score 5, Interesting) 208

I studied and tutored experimental design and this use of inferential statistics. I even came up with a formula for 1/5 the calculator keystrokes when learning to calculate the p-value manually. Take the standard deviation and mean for each group, then calculate the standard deviation of these means (how different the groups are) divided by the mean of these standard deviations (how wide the groups of data are) and multiply by the square root of n (sample size for each group). But that's off the point. We had 5 papers in our class for psychology majors (I almost graduated in that instead of engineering) that discussed why controlled experiments (using the p-value) should not be published. In each case my knee-jerk reaction was that they didn't like math or didn't understand math and just wanted to 'suppose' answers. But each article attacked the math abuse, by proficient academics at universities who did this sort of research. I came around too. The math is established for random environments but the scientists control every bit of the environment, not to get better results but to detect thing so tiny that they really don't matter. The math lets them misuse the word 'significant' as though there is a strong connection between cause and effect. Yet every environmental restriction (same living arrangements, same diets, same genetic strain of rats, etc) invalidates the result. It's called intrinsic validity (finding it in the experiment) vs. extrinsic validity (applying in real life). You can also find things that are weaker (by the square root of n) by using larger groups. A study can be set up in a way so as to likely find 'something' tiny and get the research prestige, but another study can be set up with different controls that turn out an opposite result. And none apply to real life like reading the results of an entire population living normal lives. You have to study and think quite a while, as I did (even walking the streets around Berkeley to find books on the subject up to 40 years prior) to see that the words "99 percentage significance level" means not a strong effect but more likely one that is so tiny, maybe a part in a million, that you'd never see it in real life.

Comment Re:Math author dies rich... (Score 1) 170

Yes, I bought some of the Landau and Lifchitz books at the time for $3, they are now worth $150 at Springer...Younger self should have believed in himself more. Funny to see that now we can download 5000 C64 games for free, not to mention MAME roms, a good PC is $500, (at the time, $30 per game, a decent PC was $3000 of the time) but those books are 50 times more expensive...and the content still worth it.

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