Slashdot Mirror

Newsvine always seems to have a pretty high signal to noise ratio. I'm not at all familiar with how Yahoo's message groups used to work. I can tell you that Newsvine has a very interesting formula going for a user driven interactive news site.

It should be no surprise that countries with little or no protection of free speech are arresting people for their comments online. Many bloggers use their real names (or make it easy for police to trace them. The people who would be arrested for public dissent should not be surprised if they are arrested for dissent online ... I would hope that many of these people relish the thought of being arrested for blogging, as it sometimes creates worldwide recognition to their cause or their plight.

It certainly seems that blogger arrests are on the rise, such as the recent Greek blogger arrested for content he didn't write, and the constant string of arrested bloggers and other internet users in China (such as documentary filmmaker Hao Wu). This is probably an indication that Governments are just now learning about the influence commanded by a popular blogger rather than a change in policies around the globe ... it's not like governments are quick to catch up with technical trends.

This person begs to differ!

I think you'd agree the art in the Zune installer is pretty edgy!

Other networks are in the same fight. I wrote about this two months ago when Variety hit on it and again just now on Newsvine. NBC, ABC, and CBS are all in it with the Guild right now and it's going to come to a head when the contract is up next year.

Until recently there was no rigorous metric for the power of a natural language understanding system but that has changed with The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. Since the introduction of the Hutter Prize here at Slashdot there has already been as much progress as ordinarily occurs in a year (actually a bit more since an average year progresses 3% in compression of natural language and the current contestants may have already achieved 4% improvement since the /. announcement).

The theory is simple enough and the mathematical proof has been done: If you can sufficiently compress a large, general knowledge natural langage corpus like Wikipedia, you can competently articulate and understand natural language.

It's a hard problem but with the metric and the prize competition driving progress there's a good chance human-level understanding of natural language will start to emerge within the next few years.

BTW: This revolutionizes software development in more ways than one. Think about it like this: When Alan Kay first dreamt of Smalltalk, he was dreaming of a system anyone could program. Well, if you can just say what you want and the system is good enough at comprehending you, program specification just became very natural -- natural enough that you child could perform feats of programming not practical with corporate teams of software developers before.

Perhaps if people got a share of the ad revenue from the stories they posted, it'd work better.

That's exactly the model that Newsvine uses. It's a good combination of the AP wire feed with user-submitted content from elsewhere on the web.

Apple should have agreed to license Fairplay to Creative so that their devices could play music from the iTMS. In fact, they should offer to do so for every company that is not currently making a device that rhymes with "boon". I've posted an open letter to Apple which discusses the need to cut Microsoft off from their ability to buy their way into the digital music market. You can read it here.

The tragedy is that there has been nearly a half century of computer science -- much of it involving relational systems such as RDBMS -- and only one real attempt to go back and revive relation arithmetic as a formal basis for computer systems. Imagine the mathematical rigor, simplicity and elegance of arithmetic applied to such complicated systems as RDBMSs and you get an idea of where something fundamental like this could go -- not in the far future but quite soon.

I wrote about this months ago - http://celerityfm.newsvine.com/_news/2006/01/14/59 193-intel-based-macs-herald-the-end-of-the-microso ft-windows-era.

I'm hoping this happens. If Intel based Macs happened then anythings possible.

Indeed, I see plenty of copyright but no privacy policy on Yahoo! China. Yahoo! will leave that to Alibaba.

Wrong website. You should look in the Yahoo! HK site instead. Specifically, Yahoo! HK's Privacy Policy.

Furthermore, as a company registered in Hong Kong, Yahoo! HK falls under Hong Kong jurisdiction, where there are laws regarding privacy such as the Personal (Data) Privacy Ordinance. Some info here. In fact Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner Office is currently investigating Yahoo! HK on whether it has breached any HK laws.

I disagree. I actually "wish" the networks would learn that 2-4 seasons of a show is a good goal and would start writing tighter story lines based on not extending a show past it's viable prime. (Simpsons... I'm looking at you!) I actually wrote a post on newsvine.com that looks into the possibilities of this model concerning network TV. You can read it here.

It's impossible to say newspapers are going to drop off the face of the planet. There are a couple of main reasons why the consideration to necessarily adapt to these new technologies is ridiculous.

(1) People should not be listening to tycoons who don't give a damn about the industry. Murdoch is telling people to blow money into new tech, when newspapers just need to stick to their guns. Good newspapers really need to do one thing: produce good content. Instead of trying to figure out podcasting and instant feedback and 10,000 ways to produce for the mobile Web, these organizations should stick to journalism. Break the story, update it, and follow through. If the story can be told several ways, tell them through these venues when appropriate. There's no reason to go crazy with figuring out all of these new things to do at the same time.

(2) Most importantly, local coverage has been completely ignored, and it's probably the most significant weapon a local newspaper has in its arsenal. With the slight caveat of http://newsvine.com/, newspapers have inherent control of their local area. Nobody can tell a story better than they can in their town. A good city paper will beat out the NYT bureau in that city almost every day. When a smart newspaper understands this, it can find revenue from these streams. Obviously no newspaper Web site is going to try to charge for national and international stories, but the local coverage is worth something that you can't buy from many other places.

Really, newspapers will need to strike a balance of what the community needs. Large news organizations can fill the niche of on-demand content. Newspapers need to reach deep and understand their core.

Granted, it's not strictly a tech site, but Newsvine seems to be doing a great job of combining various elements of Digg, /., and some other news sites. And the devs constantly read the posted articles and comments and are more than happy to take constructive criticism. As I said, it's a general news site, but there are 'technology' and 'science' categories over there, so let's get the ball rolling and turn it into a slashdot-killer. : p

I think Newsvine is meant to do this kind of thing or at least I hope it is. They've just started giving out invites but I haven't got mine yet so I can't comment further.

For a review of Peter Turney's group's accomplishment see "AI Breakthrough or the Mismeasure of Machine?"