Yes, I will definitely use the paid version of Facebook and Twitter next time! Unfortunately consumers don't have a choice here. Go to a paid social network that no one uses, or put up with getting spammed by pushy marketers? Somehow everyone decided that because their business model is based on advertising they should forget about good customer experience.
It's certainly not OK. Why not just have pop-ups all over your page, like the more old-school "advertising-based" websites did?
> Somehow everyone decided that because their business model is based on advertising they should forget about good customer experience
Somehow everyone decided that even though companies were being annoying they would put up with it to get the service, and here we are.
My point is that complaining publicly while not changing your behavior is pointless. If enough people actually DID choose a social network that wasn't as aggressive in it's emails, not only would there then be more people on those networks, but the others would change as well.
> It's certainly not OK. Why not just have pop-ups all over your page, like the more old-school "advertising-based" websites did?
And what happened with that? People took action, and either avoided those sites or used blockers so they were ineffective. If it still worked we would see more of it.
Did you ever try the google vs bing comparison site? (http://www.bingiton.com/). I tried it and google won 5-0, it wasn't even close!
But I agree that google is not what it used to be. They have a weird hunger for our data. But it's not just them, all web companies have become very aggressive in getting our data, it feels like we're being watched the whole time. It's exactly the opposite of what the internet was early on, it's almost like a change in the philosophy of the web. And not for the better.
It seems like issues that famous people have, that they lose privacy at the price of fame, that whatever they do is public, forever. We all lost privacy and we didn't even get fame!
Wow, thanks for pointing that site out. I was actually hoping to see an improvement in Bing, but I picked Google 4 out of 5 times (doing more than just programming related searches, too)
I like to imagine someday Microsoft is going to come out and say the results which they said Google won Bing won and vice versa. This is the only thing that makes sense given Microsoft's marketing speak on that site (suggesting Bing wins in the majority of cases) as I've never known someone to actually have Bing come out on top.
When I came up with my own search terms, Google won, 4 to 1. When I selected from the set they gave me (the list below the box to type in a manual query), Bing honestly won every single round. That's actually how they ran the experiment: they gave each person a set of search terms chosen from the Google Zeitgeist to select from. If you are curious to learn more about the experiment, Microsoft has a not-terribly-in-depth article covering the setup (there may be something more in-depth somewhere, but this is what Bing forwarded me to and it at least seems to directly answer your question).
Frankly, though, the reason that I believe Bing kept winning for me is that for these really popular core queries, the results were very similar: Bing simply selected more useful text snippets from news articles (letting me avoid clicking results) and weirdly even had better page titles, so it made what was overall the same results more pleasant to use. When I selected my own queries, though, the fact that Google continues to (and will forever) have a larger selection of the Internet available to its search engine became the deciding factor, as it would surface a few interesting things that Bing wouldn't catch.
What I thereby obtain from Bing it On! is not that I want to switch from Google, but that Google has too much power at this point: they are probably forever going to get my search queries simply because they figured out how to index the web extensively and efficiently before "how to build scalable systems" became more general knowledge (although some of that is actually due to Google, so there's this part of me that is saying "shut up and be grateful"), but now that they have this lead there's no real way to kick them down, even if someone else has managed to use the data they have more effectively.
What is the probability of dying and a super-natural being transferring you to heaven? It's non-zero. I've heard the same exact argument from ultra religious people.
I am all for keeping a bit of hope alive, but a non-zero chance argument on its own is not enough. What is the probability exactly, can it be proven.
The "non-zero" argument can be fixed simply by comparing relative likelihoods, or noting that while one can't ever rationally believe with 0% probability, you can use epsilon as a substitute for "it's more than 0 but I can't measure how much because it's so small". Personally I think there's enough evidence to put religious ideas of afterlife far below the probability of a single sha256 hash resulting in a new block in the bitcoin blockchain: http://blockexplorer.com/q/probability
Hanson's estimate is no better than the Drake equation. Everyone assigns different numbers to the various probabilities, multiplies them together, and gets a different result.
Sure, though the more important part of the exercise is the analysis. Same thing with the Drake Equation. And in both cases the terms aren't immune to new information, nor can you expect to honestly get away with assigning anything you want. You might have a different list of criteria or different probabilities, but the point is to lay them down and give a reason why you think it's unlikely enough not to pay the small sum of money. It also lets others argue with you over your estimates, because they might have information you don't, now or in future years. Several of Hanson's criteria can have their probabilities increase towards 1 or decrease towards 0 depending on what humanity does in the coming years.
> And in both cases the terms aren't immune to new information, nor can you expect to honestly get away with assigning anything you want.
Actually, you can get away with assigning anything you want. That's hidden in the assumption that the criteria he lists are more-or-less independent.
> You might have a different list of criteria or different probabilities, but the point is to lay them down and give a reason why you think it's unlikely enough not to pay the small sum of money.
You've got the burden of proof backward. The cryonics advocates are the ones trying to argue that cryonics will work with sufficiently high probability to make investing in it worthwhile. The grandparent cited 5% as if that figure had even one significant digit -- which it doesn't, by Hanson's own calculation.
> It also lets others argue with you over your estimates, because they might have information you don't, now or in future years.
It also lets others argue even if they don't have new information, which just wastes everyone's time. The same phenomena also occurs with the Drake equation.
And you really have to wonder, because the last time I had to implement a CAPTCHA (around 5 years ago), it was about 5 minutes of work. Google query, found a library, downloaded the library, copied the example into a form, and I was done.
I can't imagine coming up with your own clever hacked-together bogus CAPTCHA would be simpler than that. So they actually did it the hard way?
It's certainly not OK. Why not just have pop-ups all over your page, like the more old-school "advertising-based" websites did?