> You are overreating.

That explains his weight gain. But what about this privacy issue?

hi all, arash (from dropbox) here. as mentioned elsewhere in the discussion, the terms are referring to contact information, not data.

While I'm all for improving the state of broadband and internet access in general, I think 15th out of 190-odd countries is decent. It's certainly in the top 10%. In fact, according to international studies, it's better than we do in education.

I think the internet is wonderful, but the US will lag in broadband over densely populated, urban nations. The US has a huge rural population and I really do hope that wireless broadband improves our ability to serve them, but sometimes there are limitations.

Plus, I don't actually think the statistics show the US as having a bad adoption rate. (http://www.internetworldstats.com/dsl.htm) That's what I found quickly searching. The US comes out on top of Germany and Japan (both countries that are very urban and densely populated). I think one of the keys is also that we are decently close to the leadership. It's not like the leaders (1-12) have 70% adoption and then there's a steep drop off to us at 20% adoption.

I'd bet that this is more of a state by state issue. Densely populated states like NJ, RI, and MA probably have broadband adoption rates that would be much better than the country as a whole - and seeing as though many of the countries doing better than the US are the geographic size of (or have a populated center the geographic size of) one of our smaller states, that might make for a better comparison. Out of the 18 countries beating the US, only Canada, the UK and France are of any size. Comparing the US to a country like Denmark isn't really fair. We're talking about comparing 31 people per km^2 to 127 people per km^2. And the countries that have lower population densities often have the majority of their population in a few urban centers.

Lastly, there's a methodology problem. We're comparing broadband connections to the number of people. That doesn't tell us what percentage of people have broadband. I live with several other people and we have one broadband connection for the house. We all have access, but it will look like we have a 25% adoption rate. As European families usually have fewer children, that might create a bias in tabulating. With a US family averaging over 25% more children than a Swedish family, there might be an uncorrected bias that skews results against the US. Of course, if the US has more split families, that could skew in the US' favor.

I just think this is one of those cases where a politician is grandstanding without facts being behind them. OMG IT'S UNACCEPTABLE!!! No, it's pretty acceptable. Yeah, we should improve, but you can't expect the US as a whole to be able to match a country with a much denser population and a much smaller geographic area to cover. We're doing really well that we're so close.

Stop making everything unacceptable! It just means that people don't listen to you because you've shown an ineptitude at interpreting data.

I have no idea what that guy is talking about with double moving averages and what not, but I'd bet that a few simple IF/THEN statements could have produced similar results over the same period of time. Say it hand done well, would you go an invest a few thousand dollars using the IF/THEN algorithm?

On a similar note, say this guy did lose his $3500. Do you think you'd be reading this post on how to automate day trading? Randomness and the survivorship bias play a huge, huge role here.

As far as the website ideas go, I'm pretty sure that some very smart people have demonstrated that using past performance to estimate future performance simply does not work; no amount of tweaking buy/sell algorithms will help you predict where the market is going tomorrow.

I live only 100 miles north of Boston, in a fairly "wealthy" state (New Hampshire) and my only option is satellite. That's just a sad state of the infrastructure.

Furthermore, broadband speeds vary from country to country:

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/bro...

It's not just penetration that we lag behind. It's speed too.

As for density, Canada's a fairly big place, and they have a bigger, faster broadband (see my link and yours) even as their GDP is 10% of ours: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

If Microsoft had anything worth pirating, I'd pirate it, just to get even close to paying myself a reasonable hourly rate for the time I've had to spend debugging css for IE6.

If you're doing test charges for SAAS, you're doing it wrong.

The subscription is worthless without you flipping a little bit in your database somewhere, right? You could flip that little bit at any time if you suspected the account was fraudulent, right? Great news. Assume everybody is telling the truth that they're authorized, even if they fail AVS. If the charge is later disputed, rescind it and (optionally) lock the account. If it is not later disputed, hey, it must have been authorized.

This is time tracking not file hosting -- scamming 25 days out of the provider doesn't provide you any benefit. You should expect fraud rates to be negligible.

Why is locking the account optional? Well, really, clanging the doors shut on a legitimate paying customer is a lot worse for you than letting 10 illegitimate people take up another record in your database.

(Oh noes, how will I scale with invalid records in my database?! Oh wait, I charge people money which means I scale practically by definition.)

So sure, give people a few extra days to get their details re-entered before you shut down their access. The time is free to you.

In my business (selling downloadable software), after I have handed over the Registration Key the horse is out of the barn... and I could care less. They're free to me. You can try paying me with an e-check, which is basically a promise that 5 days from now you'll have money in a checking account ready for me, and e-checks come with NO verification for those 5 days. I'll still give you the key as soon as you hit the submit button. If you were dishonest or fumble-fingered your account number... oh well? Paypal will send you an email to retype it, if you do that is great, if not then I'm not out any money am I.

"This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash. The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and inital positions of the four circles, and length, spring constant and damping of the eight springs. The graph shows the "mean" and "best" fitness. I should really make a new version with better explanations of what's going on."

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7i22c/genetic_p...