Internet Explorer Users Have Low Risk Intelligence 264
First time accepted submitter benne2011 writes "A hoax report earlier this year claimed that people who used Internet Explorer had a lower IQ than those using other browsers. Inspired by this bit of fun, Projection Point decided to carry out a real study comparing the risk intelligence (RQ) of people using different browsers. We found that Internet Explorer users performed worse than everyone else; they had lower RQ scores and were grossly overconfident."
Salt in the wound? (Score:5, Funny)
So first we called them stupid, and now they are grossly overconfident according to another study.
I predict the next study will show that their mothers are fatter than average, and ugly.
Re:Salt in the wound? (Score:5, Insightful)
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At a previous employer, which used SAP, it not only required you to run IE and only IE. It not only required you to allow Active-X. It required you to configure IE to maximum promiscuity run *ALL* Active-X without prompting. The SAP web page checked, and if you had "At least ask for permission before reaming me with Active-X" set, it wouldn't run.
It's been a few years; maybe SAP is better now. And maybe that reckless insanity was entirely the fault of whoever installed it there, not SAP's fault. It s
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Droid users... Apple users......If you're going to throw gasoline onto the fire, at least learn to do it right.
And they both suck!
Re:Salt in the wound? (Score:4, Informative)
You're doing it wrong. If you mock people based on their consumption choices, you have to state your own choice so we can mock you in return.
Watch and learn:IE socks! Telnet+Lynx FTW!
Re:Salt in the wound? (Score:5, Funny)
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Multicasting via smoke signals, FTW! Take that, ICQ chat!
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Is it wrong that I actually enjoy browsing with Lynx? It's like the internet equivalent of listening to a crystal radio.
"Droid"? (Score:2)
Just saying "Droid" (vs. "Android") is enough to start a flamewar in this unstable day and age. A "Slashdot Spring" if you will.
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Failed presidential candidates.
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Re:Salt in the wound? (Score:5, Funny)
So first we called them stupid, and now they are grossly overconfident according to another study.
Don't worry. Most will have to ask someone what "grossly overconfident" means so few will feel the sting.
Re:Salt in the wound? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry. Most will have to ask someone what "grossly overconfident" means so few will feel the sting.
You sound pretty sure about that...
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Once again, Slashdot continues the tradition of unnecessarily complex story titles. The word "Risk" is unnecessary.
Re:Salt in the wound? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, Microsoft said they had "no obligation to return data" [in-other-news.com] to their customers.
You have to be both grossly overconfident and very naive to do business with that company.
And to all MS-apologists: No, it is not the case that "everybody does this". Most companies do provide guarantees to their customers, especially when it comes about handling data. What is the point of storing something in "the cloud" when the company boldly tells you that they have "no obligation" to even give you the data back? Of course there are some things where MS cannot be avoided, but it is your choice to minimize or maximize your exposure.
So when MS screws you over [xda-developers.com], don't complain. Also I just don't get the philosophy to shut down all servers when some deadline runs out - it would cost MS practically zero to just keep the servers running - but no, they must turn everything off to inflict maximum pain for their (hopefully ex-) customers.
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I predict the next study will show that their mothers are fatter than average, and ugly
Well, stupid kids are likely to have come from stupid parents, and stupid people are too stupid to stop eating so much when they get fat. And getting fatter almost always makes you uglier. So I wouldn't be surprised by that outcome.
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now they are grossly overconfident
Hold my beer and watch this.... (mouseclick)
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Oh dear. Are you lost, little one? How did you get in here?
This is serious Confirmation (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hey, folks! This one here uses Internet Explorer!
Re:This is serious Confirmation (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I've seen worse. It does contain some questionable questions ("There are 7 notes in an octave" is supposedly false, "Norway is the land of the midnight sun" is supposedly true even though the explanation then says that Norway is just one of several countries that bear the title, "Gout is known as the Royal Disease" is supposedly false, note the inconsistency between the Norway and Gout questions) but I e-mailed them and they immediately changed at least one of the questions. Very friendly people, and they confirm the test is still being worked on. They even thanked me for my input with a voucher for the expert test.
As long as they only include uncontestable questions, I think this idea is actually pretty good and I would expect the results to be a lot more accurate than most other personality tests (which are usually complete rubbish).
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Where's the test? (Score:5, Insightful)
This study would be a lot more believable if they didn't use phrases like " users of monopoly software" and actually linked to the test they gave.
(For the record, I'm not an IE user either. But the article isn't too far from spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign)
Re:Where's the test? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Where's the test? (Score:4, Insightful)
This study would be a lot more believable if they didn't use phrases like " users of monopoly software" and actually linked to the test they gave.
(For the record, I'm not an IE user either. But the article isn't too far from spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign)
And perhaps they could give the error margins for their results. I'd put money on the error margin being a lot bigger than differences in the user group results.
Re:Where's the test? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a study. It's an online poll. The participants self-selected
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I dunno where the poll was (TFA just mentions "a website"), I was just creating a distinction between a scientific study, and what these guys did.
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Why I use IE7 instead of Firefox and Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, it's not strictly instead of Firefox and Chrome, but it's my default browser on my primary work machine. I'm currently running VMware Player, with a Linux machine on it, and that runs Firefox, which crashes Way Way Too Often, usually because of Flash. I do most of my web browsing there, and have NoScript, Ghostery, and AdBlock Plus, and usually a couple of other safety tools. And I keep another Virtual Machine around, with a stripped-down Linux distro with Firefox in Private Browsing Mode, which I use to read Facebook, because I don't want Facebook contaminating anything else, stealing cookies and history files, or whatever. (If there's a way to keep VMware Player paged in, using the whole 1GB I have allocated for it, instead of swapping itself out when it's not busy even though there's spare hardware RAM left, I'd appreciate pointers; I haven't found them.)
I'm also running Chrome natively, mostly for a bunch of electronics blogs like Hackaday, and occasionally for Gmail, and it's really bloated - burns almost 2GB if I have it turned on with my usual set of tabs. I'm not sure I entirely trust Google to behave themselves with Chrome, but they already know everything about my Gmail account (which I don't use for anything sensitive), and the electronics stuff doesn't get much personal information except when I'm buying equipment.
I used to run Firefox natively as my default browser, but there are a couple of problems with it - it Crashes Way Too Often, and it's also a memory hog (though better than it used to be, and not as bad as Google), and there are a couple of work applications that don't run cleanly except on IE. Until recently, it was my default browser, so if I clicked on a link in an email message, FF would either start from scratch or open another tab, spin the disk for a while while it sucked down memory, and then run, hopefully without crashing itself or crashing something else by hogging memory, and then be its usual friendly self. But I found that usually when I'm clicking on links from my work email, they're either sites I trust, or else they're work related sites like the HR website or web conference bridge that are happier running in IE, and I got tired of that.
That takes us to IE. It's IE7 because the Desktop Support department at work finally let us use IE7 instead of IE6, but is too scared to go to IE8, at least on Windows XP, and they made their saving throw against Windows Vista a couple of years ago - my next set of hardware will run Win7. And it has tabs, so it's not totally obnoxious to use, and it really doesn't crash much, so it's less obnoxious than Firefox, and it usually doesn't use a lot of memory, because I don't usually let it keep more than a couple of tabs open at a time, though it would happily be a memory pig if I let it.
(And then there's Safari and Opera, which I used to have installed - the IT department run little scanning robots that rat you out within a day if you install them, for reasons that sound more like the Software License Police rather than the IT department's normal reticence to have useful software running on our machines, and you get a call from some guy in India who's going to walk you through uninstalling them whether you like it or not. So I no longer run them.)
I suppose there's also Konqueror or other Linux-oriented browsers that I could be running in the Linux VM - are there times it's worth using them instead of Firefox?
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Actually, Mac OS X does. Check out NSCache and NSPurgeableMemory [apple.com]. I'm not sure if Firefox uses it, mind you.
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I'm currently running VMware Player, with a Linux machine on it, and that runs Firefox, which crashes Way Way Too Often, usually because of Flash. I do most of my web browsing there
...followed by...
I'm also running Chrome natively, mostly for a bunch of electronics blogs like Hackaday, and occasionally for Gmail, and it's really bloated
...damn near made my head explode. Chrome is a greater memory hog than running Firefox inside a VM? There's no way you can make me believe that. Unless you're surfing child porn, your browsing setup is way over-paranoid for your stated goals. And if you are chasing unsavory content, then you've built a nice "LOOK AT ME I'M OVER HERE!" system for the authorities to dig through.
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Um, your experience doesn't mirror mine at all. FF crashes on both Linux and Win 7, but only when Flash is running. Open your task list in XP, open TWO (you don't need any more) tabs with Yahoo News and your memory useage is pegged at WAY over a GB; we have IE7 on XP at work and three open yahoo news tabs locks the computer up.
And you know what? I don't believe you're running IE7 because slashdot is almost completely hosed in IE7. Go to slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=list&uid=[your user ID] ande play "catch
You must be an IE user (Score:2)
The link to the test is at the bottom of the article.
Problem with the test however is that it is American centric, lots of stuff a non-American is less likely to know like the starting line of the decleration of independence. I guessed that the given sentence is not it because that is what everyone thinks and in these kinds of things, what everyone thinks is always wrong but it was a guess, not something I actually once learned in school or read because it was relevant to me... oh wait, that is just like an
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The link to the test is at the bottom of the article.
They must have put it up after the article posted on Slashdot -- I do not believe it was there before. Or perhaps it's hidden from my version of Chrome! :)
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Knowing the answers to the questions doesn't affect the outcome of the test.
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{Shudder} (Score:4, Funny)
What if some of them also watch FOX News?
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Watching is OK ... its believing that can get you in trouble.
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I think it'd be more of an issue for the masses that watch MSNBC, or listen to NPR.
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This just in... (Score:2)
Of the people that bought cars this last year, the ones that bought electric cars are more educated on environment issues than those that bought sports cars.
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So how do Tesla Roadster buyers fit into that?
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Educated and caring are two different things.
In my case, I simply don't give a rat's ass, and will have the car that's actually fun to drive -- and also still happens to manage 30+ mpg combined highway & city.
Then again, if by "sports cars" you mean the return of ill-handling V8 powered land yachts, you may very well be right.
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depending on the sulphur content of your fuel, the polluting balance will tip the other way over the life of the vehicle.
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Informative)
All first world countries have required ultra low sulfur gasoline about as long as they've required emissions controls, because sulfur will poison a catalytic converter. The trucking industry fought it for several decades, but as of 2010 even diesel fuel is required to be ultra low sulfur in the US.
I suppose you could be talking about some kind of African country where high sulfur fuel is still allowed.
Offtopic but I think it's interesting (Score:2)
New research shows that..... (Score:3, Funny)
firefox users think they are smart,
chrome users are the douchebags of the internet,
opera users are superficial,
safari users are fashion hippies with deep pockets or high credit bills
and ofcourse....
netscape users are still on dial-up and
bbs users have something naughty to hide
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And lynx users are bad at imagination, but good at texting.
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Not fair. (Score:5, Insightful)
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To use a sort of car analogy how many people look under the hood of their car?
Wait, what? I thought this is a rite of passage for anyone buying his first car and showing it off to his buddies - pop the hood and everyone stands around looking at the engine. Beer in hand.
Not that half the people looking know what they're looking at, but that's besides the point.
Now I bet the guys that heavily modify their cars have higher intelligence than the average stiff.
It's got nothing to do with intelligence, and ever
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I thought this is a rite of passage for anyone buying his first car and showing it off to his buddies - pop the hood and everyone stands around looking at the engine.
That's kind of pointless these days. If you open the hood on a modern car, usually all you get to see is a big piece of black plastic covering up anything of interest. I'm not sure why.
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So instead of standing there with a timing light and tweaking the carb, you buy (or program your own) performance eeprom and drop it in. The hotrod rags are full of ads for these things.
Same ideas. Different methods. Just machines.
Indeed, the new way means it's easier to pass emissions. Plug in factory chip, get emissions tested, get the sticker, put in performance eeprom, drive serenely away.
Again, just machines.
--
BMO
Re:Not fair. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but ... I'd have expected the opposite result myself - technologically illiterate people who are risk adverse would be more likely to not try installing third party software on their PCs. Overconfident types would install every browser from everywhere without consideration for where it came from and what trojans it might harbour.
Of course, it could be that this study is just as much of a hoax as the original.
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Hey, I resemble that remark. :)
As a matter of fact, I ordered parts to upgrade one of my cars, which hopefully will be here by the weekend. And ya, I tune my PCs and their OSs to work better than average. And if I ever found a button that said "Do not touch", I'd probably just ask why, and/or investigate the reason for it. No button would ever be installed to never use. Obviously that switch has a purpose, and an intended time to be used. :)
Average Joe wou
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To use a sort of car analogy how many people look under the hood of their car?
So you can open the cover of your car? Doesn't that void the warranty?
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Better to wait until Apple produces a car where you can't even open the hood.
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Volvo is way ahead of you with the YCC [bbc.co.uk]:
The whole front of the car is moulded in one piece which can be removed only by a Volvo mechanic.
In fact, a Spanish software magazine had an editorial article where they used it for a car analogy with MS ;)
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Nothing new, move along - (Score:5, Informative)
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From Wikipedia:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.
Dunning-Kruger Effect [wikipedia.org]
Study was done in 99, so they are only 12 years late on this one.
So that explains why 85% of drivers consider their driving skills to be above average.
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Actually, it's 93% [wikimedia.org] of Americans.
Quite possibly, the most useful study EVER (Score:4, Interesting)
The Dunning-Kruger effect is perhaps the most useful effect to use when trying to make sense of modern politics. Listen to any die-hard politico, and the more sure they are of their response, the more certain you can be of how inexperienced they are.
In today's politics, a sure, unwavering certainty is almost a sure sign of success: a "flip flopper" will get nowhere, (Mitt Romney, John Kerry take note) while idiots who never change their opinions (EG: George Bush Jr) get lots of press for "holding true" despite all the evidence to the contrary.
So, the loudest political advocates are either the idiots, or somewhat less loudly, those who actually have some idea what's going on. For those who just want to "do the right thing", without a lot of effort, it's damnably difficult to tell the difference.
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"The Dunning-Kruger effect is perhaps the most useful effect to use when trying to make sense of modern politics."
That's one part of the equation, here is the other - human reasoning doesn't work like the enlightenment thought it did:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc [bit.ly]
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Opera (Score:2)
Is this a case of hoax 2.0 (a hoax of a hoax)? (Score:5, Insightful)
From their website: "We define Risk Intelligence as the ability to estimate probabilities accurately."
Are they not aware of the pioneering and Nobel prize awarded studies of Tversky and Kahnemann in the 70's which demonstrated beyond any doubt that humans are terrible at estimating any kind of probability (especially risk-related ones)?
What about the 10-step percentage scale they used? Seriously, is any person able to differentiate between being "70% sure" and "80% sure" regarding any statement?
What about latent variables like the OS used? How can one possibly compare any feature of a Windows user with features of Mac or Linux user?
I can't locate any samples of the questionnaire used and I don't need to see any, because I'm 89.345943% sure they don't know what they're talking about.
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What about the 10-step percentage scale they used? Seriously, is any person able to differentiate between being "70% sure" and "80% sure" regarding any statement?
I play a lot of DnD, and it's amazing how useful knowing that sort of shit is for your saving throws.
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I can't locate any samples of the questionnaire used and I don't need to see any, because I'm 89.345943% sure they don't know what they're talking about.
Not only that, but I didn't see anything about how the study subjects were selected or how balanced the numbers of subjects in each category were. And there appeared to be no real statistical analysis of the results at all. Without a lot more information, I don't see how this qualified as front page material on Slashdot.
Late adopters (Score:2)
People that need to read textbooks... (Score:5, Informative)
The study size was 350 participants.
If you break down the percentages, they are variations of two or three people in each sample.
This is so far from statistically significant, it's laughable.
microsoft trained brain syndrome. (Score:2)
I do not believe that his anything to do with users' IQ.
I believe it has everything to do with this [linuxinsider.com].
Re:Of course, but meaningless ..... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know, last time I loaded up IE, I got the irresistible urge to watch Fox News.
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IE Users who also watch Fox News are more likely than most to be in a coma and on life support, but on their own dime... cause even in a coma, they didn't need no damn government assistance!
That was me.. failing to login before posting.
So you've been a Fox News watching IE user? :-)
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Re:Please no... (Score:4, Funny)
It's psychological research... ofcourse it's not a real study.
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Ooh, ooh! Next, let's rank people from best to worst!
/ oblig xkcd
Re:Please no... (Score:4, Funny)
I think you're looking for this one: http://xkcd.com/451/ [xkcd.com]
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Should I get her on to Chromium instead?
It is enough to get her stop using yahoo.
Re:Please no... (Score:5, Insightful)
If she is using NoScript in a "medium" security manner -- meaning temporarily trust the parent domain of the site, but only whitelist external scripts (which means a fair amount of clicking "Temp allow akami / googleapis / disqus / some-image-service / etc") then that is MUCH better than Chome. Even NoScript in a "low" security method that temp-allows all scripts on a page but still blocks XSS, ClearClick, and anything else you choose like Java applets and iframes is still better than allowing all javascript and all plugins.
On the privacy front, try BetterPrivacy (never touch it after first time config) to flush all local Flash storage on browser start+stop. (You can of course whitelist LSOs from your bank or whatever.) Additionally, try CookieMonster in whitelist-only mode. It's just like NoScript, but for cookies so you can permanently allow all the sites she logs into, and temp allow any random page with a form.
Even just trying some extra plugins or stronger security settings will help everyone think more about security as they're learning more about security.
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Re:Please no... (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting, even though I will lose my mod priv. for this page (and i'd voted up a couple of good 'uns too!);
I have to say that is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent as well as funny posts I've seen on /. in a good while! I love the "U want teh lezboz? We GOT teh lezboz" line. I may be stealing that.
What I actually wanted to post though was that I don't think you can blame IE for this; it is merely a victim of MS's installed-first philosophy. In short, only the stupid users use IE, because it's already there for them. If they were more savvy, they'd already have installed FF/Safari/Chrome etc., so really when you see someone that only has IE, you're seeing someone that is incredibly unlikely to be computer-literate.
And that means they'll be paranoid about not breaking it, and so will easily all for all the scams. In addition, if they're guys, they'll probably fall for "teh lezboz" scams, since they'll probably not know about real porn, and where to find it, for free!
/ As an aside, we have moron's over here in the Mac world, but the mac just does a better job of protecting them, and the lower market-share means most malware is aimed at windows. I wonder how many mac-users that arechallengedhave "setup.exe" files in their ~/Downloads directory. Or for that matter, a whole shit ton of "OMG_teh_best_lezboz_EVA.exe" in there as well // Second fark-style slashy; it took me about 5 minutes of carefully 1-cursor-point-at-a-time editing of this post to get all those "teh" to actually stay that way, since OS X knows best, and corrects it EVERY FUCKING TIME!!!
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Or what's an "Operating System"... do I need one? Is Internet Explorer our ISP? I can't make documents because I don't have MS Word...
It NEVER gets better. You get the odd person who while not a techie takes your advice and follows all of your suggestions - but they are just decoys to bash your hopes of an intelligent user base in the head until a green stuff that looks like guacamole comes out...
I don't want much, just LEARN to use the tool you have spent hundreds, if not thousands in some cases, to purcha
Re:Please no... (Score:4)
Yeah, I hear that.
One of my fiancé's (she went back to college to retrain as a graphics artist) classmates is a lovely woman, same age range as my other half, mid thirties. Not stupid by any means, intelligent enough, really amazing painter. Doesn't know what a web-browser is. Or why IE is a bad one. Or that there are other ones out there.
Once you tell her it a couple of times, and explain it in a way she can understand, she's fine, but no-one has done that for a lot of things we take for granted as "basic", so when we move on to more advanced topics, she has no frame of reference to base it on, and cannot understand.
The key in these situations is to determine if the person is either stupid, or uneducated. If they are merely uneducated, they can be taught, as long as you do so in a manner they can relate to.
If they're stupid, give up, life's too short.
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Funny part, second biggest cause of spam? firefox users that have yahoo accounts. The malware guys have figured out how to get Firefox to load an invisible iFrame that lets them load the Yahoo account and silently spam their address book while they look at "free porn" sites thanks to infected ads. This trick doesn't seem to work on the other browsers, not even IE, and it don't seem to work with hotmail nor Gmail, just Yahoo and FF.
What do you bet that all it takes is a POST to the correct URL and if they're logged in an e-mail is sent from their account...
Okay, still missing some way of getting the address book contacts. I'd have thought that cross-site scripting restrictions would prevent them doing that.
And hang it all, they should be using private browsing sessions to watch porn anyway.
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Re:Please no... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dewey Defeated Truman when the pollsters only pulled people in country clubs. The math was correct... The sample size was good, the problem was the sample wasn't random enough.
Or pull questions that can be used to direct people into answering the questions in a particular way."Do you believe that a mother has the right to kill her own baby?" or "Do you think the woman has the right to choose how to live their life?"
Am I the only one who is quite frustrated by the abuse of Math in modern society, where numbers and percentages are spat out without giving us the data to make recheck the decision ourselves and evaluate the data. I mean we have protests and people getting arrested and some hurt and killed over their particular summarized summary of the data. Those 99%ers vs the 53%ers. Where everyone thinks they are the majority because the numbers that have been manipulated shows them to be right.
Give us the raw data. Let us see and and peer check it ourselves see if we come with the same conclusion. I much rather be wrong and know the truth then think I am right and live a lie... But I may be the minority on that, I didn't collect any data on that.
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Wheeeee! (Score:3)
Has nobody posted this [youtube.com] yet?
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A sample size of 351 and the scores are 57.5, 59.8, 60.2, and 61.8. That proves what exactly?
The margin of error is +/- 5%
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How your drivel got modded insightful I'll never know. Google "Risk Intelligence" brings up 184000 hits. The second result is this one [wikipedia.org] which references its use and definition.