Slashdot Mirror

New submitter Intrepid imaginaut sends word of a study (PDF) into how e-commerce sites show online shoppers different prices depending on how they found an item and what the sites know about the customer. "For instance, the study found, users logged in to Cheaptickets and Orbitz saw lower hotel prices than shoppers who were not registered with the sites. Home Depot shoppers on mobile devices saw higher prices than users browsing on desktops. Some searchers on Expedia and Hotels.com consistently received higher-priced options, a result of randomized testing by the websites. Shoppers at Sears, Walmart, Priceline, and others received results in a different order than control groups, a tactic known as “steering.” To get a better price, the article advises deleting cookies before shopping, using your browser's private mode, putting the items in your shopping cart without buying them right away, and using tools like Camelcamelcamel to keep an eye out for price drops.

KentuckyFC writes writes to share a new online test that is being touted as the "financial Turing test." The web-based exercise asks users to distinguish between real and randomly generated financial data. "Various economists argue that the efficiency of a market ought to be clearly evident in the returns it produces. They say that the more efficient it is, the more random its returns will be and a perfect market should be completely random. That would appear to give the lie to the widespread belief that humans are unable to tell the difference between financial market returns and, say, a sequence of coin tosses. However, there is good evidence that financial markets are not random (although they do not appear to be predictable either). Now a group of scientists have developed a financial Turing test to find out whether humans can distinguish real financial data from the same data randomly rearranged. Anybody can take the test and the results indicate that humans are actually rather good at this kind of pattern recognition."

mr. squishie writes "Someone important must have gotten an Aibo...According to Wired news, the Army's Tank-automotive and Armaments Command has just awarded a $2.5 million contract to build a prototype of a large robot dog that would follow soldiers into battle and carry food, ammunition, and medical supplies. This is apparently part of a larger movement by various branches of the military investigating the uses of robots based on various types of wildlife, ranging from engine-repairing robot elephant trunks and mine-destroying robot lobsters to the cliched robot-fly-spy-on-the-wall trick. I wonder if they're looking into giant robot anteaters as an alternative to costly bunker-buster bombs?"

Rednerd asks: "I've been looking into Smart Cards as a good alternative to password authentication but other than the ISO 7816 standard there doesn't seem to be a lot of standards that govern the use of these devices. It seems pretty clear that if I was working in an all Sun, or Microsoft environment implementing a network wide Smart Card solution would be simple, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of heterogeneous Smart Card support out there. I was wondering what kind of experience slashdot readers have had with Smart Cards in mixed environments? What cards and card readers seem to work the best? How have remote users dealt with the use of Smart Cards?"

Rednerd asks: "I just moved into a new apartment and I'm almost done painting and running the cat 5. I have been looking at office furniture for a new desk to become the new home for all of my misc. computer gadgetry, but I haven't been able to find anything that really fits. (No one seems to sell a desk with room for two 19" monitors, seven computers, a beer fridge, coffee maker, and a small compartment to serve as a shrine for my little plush penguin - Potelé) I'm leaning toward building a custom desk for my computers. With all the talk on Slashdot about creating an ultra-efficient cubicle, I was wondering what other slashdotters have created in the way of DIY home offices?"

GlitchZ28 asks: "It seems to me that the problem with Internet filters is their blanket approach searching for words in pages, URLs and of course the ole blacklist. It's the same as WWII blanket bombing. Drop 500 bombs at one target and chances are you'll get it (along with a lot of things that weren't targets). Has anyone considered starting a little project to create a simple, very easily modified open source Internet filtering program? Allowing library officals to decide what tactics would fit their needs such as a blacklist of the the obvious porno sites. I really wouldn't mind a filtering system IN public libraries if it could be scrutinized BY the public and then changed."

If we must censor content on the Internet, I would feel better about it (but not much) knowing that the censorship was done by the people rather than some bureaucrat in Congress.

Comment by michael : Many anti-censorship folks have been pushing this line for a long time; that the blacklists used in public institutions should, at the minimum, be open for public inspection. This would, no doubt help cure some of the more egregious errors. But the above poster is making an error in his reasoning. Computers do the searching because there is no other way to do it - you simply cannot categorize hundreds of millions of pages by hand, period, end of sentence. And an algorithmic approach can never fully characterize the range of human expression present on the Web - even assuming, for the moment, that you could get people to agree on what should or should not be censored, there's no way to make rules which will pick out those pages with 100% accuracy, or even anything close to that. Doing so would require the development of true artificial intelligence, which isn't even on the horizon. Calling something "open source" or not doesn't make it magically able to achieve a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. When you add in the fact that with three people in a room you have four different opinions on what should and should not be censored, it should become clear that throwing an open source label at something is not going to result in an easy solution.

RomulusNR writes "The 'state' of Massachusetts is firing back at years of Siliconia by nicknaming itself the ".commonwealth". (Ya see, MA isn't really a state, it's a Commonwealth, as are KY, VA, and PA, allowing them to come up with this somewhat tacky nickname.) Boston Globe has a story on this, and there's also the official .COMmonwealth site. Oh, and another groaner: MA is also now "the state of things to come". " Yes, it is official: Virgina - the .com state and MA are now in competition.

joshwa writes "The Boston Globe today reported a study by Nature saying that search engines barely index one-sixth of the pages on the net. To a certain extent it's a plug for the Northern Light search engine, which claims to be the most comprehensive (at a staggering 16 percent of the web), but it's an interesting read nonetheless. "

Brian Gregor wrote in with a suggestion for a forum. He says "I am recently been suffering from pain and stiffness in my wrists and forearms after using standard computer keyboards and mice, including my Logitech Mouseman. Aside from a trip to a doctor, I am looking into ergonomic keyboards and mice. Some feedback and suggestions from the slashdot community would be great, especially since I imagine that this is not a rare problem. " I'm very interested in this. My wrists often are quite sore at the end of a long day. Brian sent a few relevant links also: Kinesis makes ergo keyboards, the Anir mouse, The Twiddler which has linux drivers.

Noah Meyerhans sent us this USA Today Article on Cryptology. It's a very mainstream piece, and explains simply and clearly one the major reasons that back doors for Uncle Same should not be required. It's cool because my mom would understand why this is a bad thing after reading this article. There are many more reasons why govt restrictions on encryption are bad, but this is a nice start at explaining them.

Kirk Mitchener writes "HP's E-Business magazine posted an article on current quantum computing technologies and future possibilities. Very interesting article. "