swsnyder - Slashdot User

Banks Find Way To Sell Consumers' Shopping Data 195

Posted by timothy on Monday July 11, 2011 @07:46PM from the milo-minderbinder-comes-to-mind dept.

nonprofiteer writes "Banks plan to compete with Groupon and LivingSocial by targeting coupons and deals at credit card holders based on their shopping habits. They found a way to do it without violating financial privacy laws: 'They're "selling" shopping habits the same way Facebook "sells" personal data about its users: in-network. It's a clever privacy work-around. Just as Facebook allows advertisers to specifically target certain kinds of users based on their profile information (without actually providing that profile information to the advertisers), banks plan to allow advertisers to send deals and coupons to their customers based on what they've bought before. That way, no user data actually leaves the network — instead, deals just enter the network. Each time a customer cashes in on one of those deals, the bank gets a commission.'"

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 13, 2010 @07:57PM from the less-math-more-social-science dept.

artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"

How Does a 9/80 Work Schedule Work Out? 1055

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @08:52PM from the on-the-ground dept.

cellocgw writes "My company is in the process of implementing a version of '9/80,' a work schedule that squeezes 80 hours' labor time into 9 business days and provides every other Friday off. I was wondering how this has been implemented in other companies, and how it's worked out for other Slashdot readers. Is your system flexible? Do you find time to get personal stuff done during the week? Is Friday good for anything other than catching up on lost sleep? And perhaps most important, do your managers respect the off-Fridays, or do they pull people in on a regular basis to handle 'crises?'"

American Nerd 240

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @11:23AM from the read-all-about-it dept.

Adam Jenkins writes "This book seemed to have potential, particularly since the image of nerds has changed in recent times. Once objects of derision and schoolyard bullying, nerds are now acknowledged as having a place in society. The Lord of the Rings became a multi-million dollar movie trilogy, the internet is now used by an incredible number of people, and computer games are no longer seen as being 'just for kids.' Around the years of the dot-com boom, successful nerds were driving Ferraris and going to cool parties. So it's not so surprising that the definition of a nerd has changed over time, nor that a society which has generally become better at accepting people who are different, has accepted nerds." Read below for the rest of Adam's review.

Comment Re:Which compiler was used? (Score 1) 295

by swsnyder on Saturday October 28, 2006 @04:46PM (#16624762) Attached to: Firefox 2 Downloads Top 2 million in 24 Hours

I used to build the Mozilla Suite (Gecko v1.7.x) with ICC/Linux, so it's likely that Firefox is also possible. It doesn't work out-of-the-box, though, because the Mozilla config programs only recognizes a few specific compilers.

The default floating-point optimization breaks the code in prstoa.c and jsdtoa.c, but that's fixable with a compiler switch. Beyond that it's a no-brainer to patch the config files to use call ICC instead of GCC.

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