Remember how I said yesterday that Windows Update occasionally forcibly restarted my laptop when I was doing something important and didn’t notice the countdown timer?

A helpful reader named Akar let me know that I can stop this from happening by opening gpedit.msc and going to Local Computer Policy → Computer Configuration → Admininstrative Templates → Windows Components → Windows Update and disabling Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.

The best part? It actually works.

Thanks Akar.

*high-five*

What I’m Reading

After a handful of days being too busy to read, I finally managed to finish Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, the sequel to Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

Like Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics presents some interesting questions that only a truly curious economist would ask, and keeps the underlying theme of how people react to incentives.

My favorite selections from Superfreakonomics included the results of a variation of the economics game where you have $10 and you can elect to give none, some, or all of it to another person; how effective cheap and simple solutions can be compared to expensive solutions, and how a cheap and simple solution could effectively reverse global warming; what effect the choice of a doctor’s tie has on patients’ death rates; and how monkeys, if given the chance, will turn to prostitution to satisfy their desires.

If you read and enjoyed Freakonomics, you should definitely read Superfreakonomics. If you recall from a while back, one of the very few complaints I had about Freakonomics was that it went into a little bit too much detail about some of the topics. Superfreakonomics completely avoids that and has just the right amount of data and elaboration on each of the topics it discusses. It also discusses topics that incite more curiosity and have more relevance to things we might experience today.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #177: What does freedom mean? People talk about freedom all the time, but what does it mean in real life? Is a person who has a job truly free? What about the responsibilities of having a family or a friend? It’s one thing to be free to make a choice, but after a choice is made, are we truly free anymore?

In response to the question “What does freedom mean?”: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define+freedom

I think anyone who is not strictly controlled by another individual is considered free. An easy way to determine if someone is strictly controlled or not is if they have a free choice to do something. Of course, as the prompt mentioned, someone with a job or a family or a friend might be considered controlled by their responsibilities, but they still have the choice to quit the job, divorce and separate from the family, and split away from the friend. Obviously, doing so might not be the best decision one could make, but it can still be done.

Someone without freedom is under such close supervision and ownership of another individual that he or she is unable to choose to do something. The easiest example of someone without freedom is a slave. Their life consists of serving their master. They could choose to run away and end their life as it exists now and start a new one, but escape would be extremely difficult, and if found, they would most likely be recaptured or killed, effectively making their choice useless even if they wanted to choose.