jfager

22 ms·

181.
by jfager 16y ago
Everything they can to prevent raw data being available, up to and including posting it freely on their own websites: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
182.
by jfager 16y ago
Why are we singling out climate scientists here? The only article of the three that were linked that was solely about climate scientists was the one from RealClimate; the other two make it more than clear that these issues span the full sc
183.
by jfager 16y ago
Where's the "meets Groupon" part? Look exactly like just Foursquare to me...
184.
by jfager 16y ago
Having people disenfranchise themselves based on whether or not they feel they have an adequate grasp on the real issues would not end as you'd hope. Are you familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect? If people took your advice to heart, th
185.
by jfager 16y ago
You didn't say what your father actually researches, but there are tons of cushy research jobs in industry, if you're smart enough. Many big tech companies (MS, Google, IBM) will hire people to work on whatever they want, simply to prevent
186.
by jfager 16y ago
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. The fact that they are well-credentialed does not excuse the fact that the study in question just flat-out isn't science. It's not reproducible without getting the same group back in a room togeth
187.
by jfager 16y ago
I completely acknowledge the importance of policy, hence the mention of the Netherlands progressiveness in the area. Explain how you measure the social impact of a drug without also measuring the social impact of the policy around the drug
188.
by jfager 16y ago
There is no chance that this chart is accurate for the US. Crack and heroin are together directly responsible for a ridiculously high percentage of gang violence and other inner-city problems, and crystal meth has destroyed many small rura
189.
by jfager 16y ago
What stupid linkbait. Cracking LM-hashed passwords is about as interesting as .1 + .2 != .3 in ieee754. Can we at least change the headline to something like "Newsflash: SSDs faster than spinning platters"?
190.
by jfager 16y ago
The point is, where do you draw the line? If you're comfortable with government spending money on private goods that are intermediate goods for military protection, then why not with government spending money on social programs that can be
191.
by jfager 16y ago
Tollbooths? And what about the military? Military protection is commonly cited as a public good, but sustaining the military requires massive government expenditures on private goods. How does that square with the idea that the government
192.
by jfager 16y ago
For a public wifi user, how do those 150k downloads actually affect the probability that someone else on the network is using a session-hijacking tool? Given that it was already high enough that people should have already been taking preve
193.
by jfager 16y ago
The intersection of 'evil enough to do something truly malicious', 'read a tech blog in the right 24-hour period', 'didn't already know the problem existed', and 'in enough cafes to pair with enough potential victims' is too low to cause "m
194.
by jfager 16y ago
As long as only the minimally motivated can exploit it, it's not really a problem, gotcha. How about instead of shooting the messenger, you take some of that righteous anger and point it at the companies with millions/billions to spend who
195.
by jfager 16y ago
Anyone who wanted to hijack http sessions was five minutes of Googling and installing away from being able to do so before "Eric Butler's little gift" anyways. Are you claiming that the marginal impact of packaging it up into a firefox ext
196.
by jfager 16y ago
Butler has not raised the threat level on anything. This has been a widely known issue since forever . A friend of mine wrote a sniffer that could do this back in college, and he was one of the last to the party. Want something else to
197.
by jfager 16y ago
Aussie rules football is a completely different game. American football builds in a guaranteed 6+ head contacts per play, from linemen colliding with each other when the ball gets snapped each down. In Aussie rules, players distribute acro
198.
by jfager 16y ago
Now you know the reason ;)
199.
by jfager 16y ago
Plot every person in the world on a two dimension grid. Dimension x is awesomeness, dimension y is crappiness of crappiest job. Vast majority of people will be clustered around top left of graph (unawesome people with crappy jobs). But i
200.
by jfager 16y ago
It's completely dickish of you to assume you know the answer, but you ask a good question. I don't know. That is the hardest part of all this, isn't it? Figuring out what you're going to do to make an actual positive difference in the wo
201.
by jfager 16y ago
Nobody anywhere speaks about MPR, though, and if people did, we'd be used to the typical MPR ranges that a reasonable loan actually falls into. A 462% APR isn't staggering because it's "462" in isolation, it's because it's 462 compared wit
202.
by jfager 16y ago
No, it doesn't. Correlation is not causation. If awesome people have worked crappy jobs more often than not, there can still be a positive correlation between the two variables even if there are dramatically fewer awesome people than peop
203.
by jfager 16y ago
Correlation is not causation. You could just as easily interpret his statement as P(CJ|A) > P(CJ|~A): the conditional probability that someone had a crappy job at some point in their life given that they're awesome is higher than the
204.
by jfager 16y ago
As mattmcknight points out elsewhere, I did miss a sentence that indicates they will accept early repayment. The 30% origination fee on every loan is still significantly higher than most payday loan places, though (it's usually something m
205.
by jfager 16y ago
Thanks, I missed the sentence about early payments when going through the site before. In a typical payday loan scenario, you'd be paying the origination fees every two weeks Saying that ZestCash is significantly better in this regard ass
206.
by jfager 16y ago
So you'd prefer that economically viable rates are only offered by people who are irresponsible and/or uncaring. No. I'm saying that only irresponsible and/or uncaring people offer those rates, that the act of charging those rates demons
207.
by jfager 16y ago
Many already exist. I guess I don't understand your point?
208.
by jfager 16y ago
Payday loan companies do track who pays and who doesn't. If you sufficiently establish that you don't pay, you will get cut off (and head to the competitor down the road). If you establish that you do pay, by your reasoning, you would e
209.
by jfager 16y ago
Because there's no way to tell who's responsible and who isn't at that level with a sufficiently small expenditure on getting that information to make it profitable. Then maybe the loan shouldn't be getting made. If an industry can't eth
210.
by jfager 16y ago
The first thing he said is that payday loan shops don't charge a huge APR, they charge a flat fee for getting a payday loan, often $20 or $40 on a $500 loan. That's 5% to 10% of the loan amount, however, if you average that to APR you get

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