Slashdot Mirror

2muchcoffeeman writes "Adobe announced Monday that it is joining the Linux Foundation and alpha-released a Linux version of its new Adobe Internet Runtime environment, which allows Internet-enabled applications to run on Windows and Mac OS desktops, for Linux. According to Adobe, the alpha version lacks some key features that will be available in the final product and only runs with Sun Java, not GNU Java. Adobe also released an alpha of Flex Builder for Linux Monday."

tonyreadsnews writes "Usually, 'thinking of the children' is a starting point to impose limitations on video games and internet in general. For once, a study requested by UK's Prime Minister seems to be a bit more objective than most. In the Executive Summary (PDF) 'Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe — this isn't just about a top-down approach. Children will be children — pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.' I think that is an important point that most studies miss, that just 'thinking of the children' and locking the bad stuff away is actually setting them up for failure later in life. A direct link to the full PDF is also available."

Celestis Inc., has pioneered the sending of cremated remains into suborbital space on rockets and now it wants to start a service that would send your ashes to the surface of the moon. The new service starts at $10,000 for a small amount of ashes from one person and could begin as early as next year. The Company currently offers a service that will spread your ashes on the sound stage where the original moon landing was shot for $100.

Amit Agarwal writes "Adobe today launched a basic version of Adobe Photoshop available for free online. Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. According to Yahoo! News, Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that's in the works."

Reservoir Hill writes "The Pentagon announced that the United States had mistakenly shipped to Taiwan four electrical fuses designed for use on intercontinental ballistic missiles, but has since recovered them. The mistaken shipment to Taiwan did not include nuclear materials, although the fuses are linked to the triggering mechanism in the nose cone of a Minuteman nuclear missile. Taiwanese authorities notified U.S. officials of the mistake, but it was not clear when the notification was made. An examination of the site in Taiwan where the components had been stored after delivery indicated that they had not been tampered with. The fuses had been in four shipping containers sent in March 2005 from F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo., to a Defense Logisitics Agency warehouse at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. It was then in the logistics agency's control and was shipped to Taiwan "on or around" August 2006, according to a memo from Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordering Navy Adm. Kirkland H. Donald to investigate the incident."

Japan has created a new government position to promote animation and appointed a popular cartoon robot cat named Doraemon, their new "anime ambassador". The time traveling robot cat ambassador who loves to help his friends is a stark contrast to the more irritable and incomprehensible U.S. cartoon ambassador, Ookla the Mok.

walterbyrd writes "Bender's Big Score is just getting set to air on Comedy Central, but already Fox has announced that the next straight-to-DVD Futurama film/series is coming in June. The title? 'The Beast with a Billion Backs.' 'In what Fox is calling the most tentacle-packed Futurama epic, space itself rips open, revealing a gateway to another universe. What lies beyond is a mix of horror and love as the Planet Express crew encounters a repulsive, planet-sized monster with romantic intentions. The second feature-length Futurama film will be followed by at least two more movies from series creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen. The show's entire voice cast and most of its main writers have returned to help revive the series, which FOX cancelled in 2003.'"

MachineShedFred writes "The Supreme Court of the United States has announced that it will be hearing the FCC's appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision that the FCC has changed its policy on fleeting expletives without adequate explanation. It's now on the FCC to explain to the Supreme Court why its policy has changed. This is also the first time the Supreme Court has heard a major 'broadcast indecency' case in 30 years."

psychosmyth writes "Microsoft's deal to Yahoo! is apparently back on the table. Yahoo execs met again with Microsoft early this past week to re-discuss the deal that fell through earlier. 'The gathering, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, gave Microsoft its first chance to sell Yahoo on the rationale for the proposed marriage since the software maker unveiled its plans six weeks ago. Since then, Yang has been exploring different ways to ward off Microsoft. The alternatives have included possible alliances with Internet search and advertising leader Google Inc., News Corp.'s MySpace.com and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.' Microsoft is apparently still keeping all of its options open; a hostile take-over is not out of the question."

psychosmyth writes "Microsoft's deal to Yahoo! is apparently back on the table. Yahoo execs met again with Microsoft early this past week to re-discuss the deal that fell through earlier. 'The gathering, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, gave Microsoft its first chance to sell Yahoo on the rationale for the proposed marriage since the software maker unveiled its plans six weeks ago. Since then, Yang has been exploring different ways to ward off Microsoft. The alternatives have included possible alliances with Internet search and advertising leader Google Inc., News Corp.'s MySpace.com and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.' Microsoft is apparently still keeping all of its options open; a hostile take-over is not out of the question."

The city of Northhampton, Mass. has hired specially trained stink-sniffers to help determine whether the dump is too stinky for homeowners to stand. The super sniffers work for an Agawam environmental company and rate the stink on a scale of 1 to 8. They also carry a kit of ready-to-sniff odors of various intensities to match their findings against. I can't believe my high school guidance counselor never told me this was a viable career option.

Nimey brings word that for the first time in 25 years, the US House of Representatives will use a closed-door session to discuss proposed wiretapping legislation. The old legislation expired last month when government officials could not agree on retroactive immunity for the telecommunications providers who assisted with the wiretaps. The most recent version of the bill, proposed by House democrats, does not include telecom immunity. Because of that, President Bush has stated his willingness to veto the bill. The Yahoo article notes, "The closed-door debate was scheduled for late Thursday night, after the House chamber could be cleared and swept by security personnel to make sure there are no listening devices."

As proof that things are only getting worse the list of deadly sins, written in the 6th century, has just had an update. The Vatican has added pollution, mind-damaging drugs, genetic experiments, and monetary social injustice. New Line Cinema has already retained Morgan Freeman and is working on a script for 'Ten'.

tuxgeek writes "A suit was filed Wednesday against Apple over the possibility that the iTunes music store and iPod are 'illegally using a patented method for distributing digital media over the Internet.' ZapMedia Services filed the suit, accusing the well-known OS and computer manufacturer of violating patents obtained just recently. 'The patents in question cover a way of sending music and other digital content from servers to multiple media players, a broad description that could also apply to a wide swath of other companies selling digital media and the devices to play it. ZapMedia said it met with Apple to discuss licensing, but Apple rebuffed the offer.'"

tuxgeek writes "A suit was filed Wednesday against Apple over the possibility that the iTunes music store and iPod are 'illegally using a patented method for distributing digital media over the Internet.' ZapMedia Services filed the suit, accusing the well-known OS and computer manufacturer of violating patents obtained just recently. 'The patents in question cover a way of sending music and other digital content from servers to multiple media players, a broad description that could also apply to a wide swath of other companies selling digital media and the devices to play it. ZapMedia said it met with Apple to discuss licensing, but Apple rebuffed the offer.'"

Voters in eastern Sri Lanka were blocked from polling booths Monday by elephants. Local officials sent a team of commandos in armored personnel carriers and sirens to drive them away and clear the streets. This marks the first time the Republican party has unleashed it's army of vote busting elephants on an Island nation.

TaeKwonDood writes "Biology post-doc Dr. Michael White takes a look at the '2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing' and doesn't like what he finds in an article called Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog. Turns out it's not just political writers who pick a position they want to advocate and then write stories to confirm it. Science journalism gets a scolding and it's been a long time coming."

MikeURL alerts to a AP story just published after a months-long investigation on the vast array of pharmaceuticals present in US drinking water. These include antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers, and sex hormones, as well as over-the-counter drugs. Quoting: "To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe. But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health."

The mayor of Sarpourenx, a small village in the southwest of France has forbidden locals from dying there. The ordinance is designed to help fight the overcrowding problem in the local cemetery. Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village that, "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish." He added, "Offenders will be severely punished." I'm pretty sure this is how a couple Twilight Zones and a Lovecraft story start.

TaeKwonDood notes that ScientificBlogging.com has just written about a development in applied math that was published last year. "The Schwarz-Christoffel transformation is an elegant application of conformal mapping to make complex problems faster to solve. But it didn't do well with irregular geometries or holes, so it simplified too much for a lot of modern-day mechanical engineering applications. 140 years after Schwarz and Christoffel's work, a professor at Imperial College London has generalized the equation. MatLab users rejoice!"

Multiple readers have written to tell us of news that Pakistan has ordered its ISPs to block access to YouTube "for containing blasphemous web content/movies." This follows increasing unrest in Pakistan over a Danish newspaper's reprinting of cartoons which depict Islam in a less-than-favorable light. The cartoons also sparked controversy when they were first published a few years ago.

tuxgeek writes "In the continuing saga of Yahoo resisting a Microsoft buy out, Yahoo is now being sued by its shareholders. 'Two Detroit pension funds have sued Yahoo Inc. and its board of directors, saying they breached their duties to shareholders in trying to thwart a takeover by Microsoft Corp. The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Chancery Court on Thursday by lawyers representing Detroit's police and fire retirement system and general retirement system, as well as 'all other similarly situated public shareholders.'"

tuxgeek writes "In the continuing saga of Yahoo resisting a Microsoft buy out, Yahoo is now being sued by its shareholders. 'Two Detroit pension funds have sued Yahoo Inc. and its board of directors, saying they breached their duties to shareholders in trying to thwart a takeover by Microsoft Corp. The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Chancery Court on Thursday by lawyers representing Detroit's police and fire retirement system and general retirement system, as well as 'all other similarly situated public shareholders.'"

Ever wonder what happens to all the 'winner' memorabilia that gets printed for losing teams? It turns out a lot of it is donated to help out poor children in Latin America and Africa. This year hundreds of children in the southern city of Diriamba, Nicaragua will be sporting Patriots perfect season jerseys and caps. Maurice Castillo, coach of the Diriamba city youth football league said, "This is a big deal to these kids. These jerseys mean more to them than you can imagine." Unfortunately this gratitude didn't extend to the scrimmage between the junior league team and the once powerful Pats, where the kids upset the Patriots 21-10.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wants to make online dating better. Here's how he wants to do it. "Suppose you're an entrepreneur who wants to break into the online personals business, but you face impossible odds because everybody wants to go where everybody else already is (basically, either Match.com or Yahoo Personals). Here is a suggestion that would give you an edge. In a nutshell: Each member lists the criteria for people that they are looking for. Then when people contact them, they choose whether or not to respond. After the system has been keeping track of who contacts you and who you respond to, the site lists your profile in other people's search results along with your criteria-specific response rate: "Lisa has responded to 56% of people who contacted her who meet her criteria." Read on for the rest of his thoughts. I realize that every time I write something along the lines of "They should do it this way instead of the way they do it now", whether for search engines, spam filters, content rating systems or whatever, I leave some people shrugging and wondering why anyone should switch to my idea. So let me try something new: I want to prove mathematically that this change would result in some (in fact, most) of the participants being better off, while nobody would be worse off (what economists call a Pareto improvement). I am not necessarily saying that it would lead to a good outcome for everybody; basically, it will lead to better outcomes for most users (although some of those will still be bad outcomes), and will do so in a lot less time.

If as soon as you read the phrase "I can prove mathematically" you thought, "Oh well no wonder he gets such a low response rate if he talks like that all the time", then I humbly submit that (1) while I like my Slashdot persona of a pedant banging people over the head with what I think is a brilliant idea, I do have other programmable settings, like conversation about movies, and (2) for once, it's not just me. Sites like eDateReview.com list hundreds of reviews for the most popular sites like Yahoo, Match.com and eHarmony, all of which got an average rating of about 2 out of 5. Another site hosting reviews of online personals services, DatingSitesReviews.com, posted a message urging people to take the predominantly negative reviews with a grain of salt, since users with a bad experience are much more likely to post a review than users with a positive one, but that only generated comments from the site's users reiterating, "No, they really do suck." Most of the complaints from men are not just about the number of obviously fake profiles (which led to lawsuits against Yahoo and Match.com), but about the low response rate even from women who are ostensibly real.

Not that I blame the women. Having watched over the shoulder of some female friends scrolling through their Yahoo Personals inboxes, some of them get far too many messages to reply to (and even if they had time to reply, they'd only be leading on most of the correspondents, since there would never be enough time to actually meet all of them). Yahoo Personals formats your inbox so that you see each person's picture along with the first few words of what they wrote, so if you have too many messages, all you can really do is scroll through the pictures (yes, women do care about that). In fact, Yahoo has a feature that lets you see the users who have viewed your profile -- which may have revealed more than Yahoo intended, since sometimes after writing to 20 or 30 people, I find out that none of them even clicked through to my profile anyway -- so if you're a guy, take Yahoo's advice about "polishing your profile" with a grain of salt. (In fact, many users with Yahoo Personals profiles are not paid members, which means they cannot reply to the messages you send them except with boilerplate like "I liked your message", and Yahoo blocks you from sending them your e-mail address. So Yahoo is listing them as people that you can contact through their service, even though Yahoo knows those people won't be able to write you back. If this strikes you as something between bad site design and actionable fraud, then you are not a Yahoo employee.)

So, yes, there is a problem worth solving. For the purpose of describing the response-rate system, I'm going to dispense with political correctness and refer to the people sending the messages as the "men" and to the people receiving messages as the "women". I hear from the pilot episode of Sex and the City that after the "mid-thirties power flip", the odds shift the other way (due to women getting older and the men accumulating more money, although the show doesn't put it quite so bluntly), so if you're in that age bracket, substitute the appropriate genders in the discussion below.

Note that I when I talk about listing women's response rates, I am talking about their response rates to men who meet their criteria. If you only want to meet men aged 28 to 29 who are interested in paddleboating, then your displayed response rate is only affected by the percentage of messages that you respond to from men in that group.

The mathematical argument commences: If you're a man writing to women on a site, for every women there are two essential variables: the probability P that she will reply to you, and how much value V you would place on getting a reply from her (say, on a scale of 1 to 10). For any woman that you write to, if P = (probability of getting a reply) and V = (value of getting a reply), then then probabilistic benefit of writing to her is P x V. (And I swear I didn't notice this until after I'd written the article, but I do not want to hear anything juvenile about framing a discussion of men meeting women in terms of the "P" and the "V".) If you have non-standard tastes, such as a preference for "Big Beautiful Women", that's great, since the women that you consider to be 9s and 10s may also be the ones that you have the highest chance of getting a reply from, since fewer other men are writing to them, and P x V for those women will be -- in a manner of speaking -- huge. Unfortunately, if your tastes are fairly typical, then the women you consider to be 9s and 10s are also getting lots of messages from other men, and have the lowest probability of replying to you. So as V = (value of getting a reply) goes up, P = (probability of getting a reply) goes down, and the product doesn't vary as much as you would like. There's nothing that the response-rate system can do about that.

In any case, if you're allocating your time rationally, you would first write to the members where you estimate P x V to be the highest, and then write to the members where P x V was the next highest, and then based on the cost-benefit principle, you'd continue writing until P x V of writing to the next person is exceeded by the value of the time it would take you to do it. (The incremental value of each additional minute of your time is not constant -- after a long time spent sending messages, you might get bored, and would require a larger incentive to spend an additional minute of your time doing it.) All of this is basically intuition and common sense, even if people don't think of it in terms of these equations (except me!).

But here's the advantage of the response-rating system: With a conventional personals site, you're only guessing the value of P x V -- to be precise, you know the value of V (at least as well as anyone can possibly know it from reading someone's profile), but you're only estimating P, based on how many messages you think she's probably getting from other people. Because of that randomness, that means some of the time you are sending messages without the best possible P x V value, and probably some of the time you are even sending messages where P x V would not even be worth the effort of sending the message, if you knew how low P was. Whereas with a system that shows a woman's response rate to people who meet her criteria, if you're someone who meets her criteria, you know roughly the probability P of getting a reply. (Actually, the probability P for you of getting a response, might not be the percentage-response-rate displayed by the site -- if you have an especially attractive or unattractive face, but there's no way for the woman to specify that in her criteria, then your chance of getting a reply might be higher or lower than the displayed percentage-response-rate. But, then you could just scale all of the displayed response rates upwards or downwards to gauge your probability P of getting a reply. It would still be better than making a total guess on a conventional personals site that didn't display percentage response rates at all.) So this is an unambiguous improvement from the point of view of the men. Another reason why men would be much better off is a specific case of this: they would avoid the time sink of writing to women who do not or cannot respond to most of the messages they're getting. With a response-rate system, those women's profiles would gradually display lower and lower response rates until the percentage was low enough to dissuade all but the most optimistic (or handsome) suitors. Without a display of the response rate, those users continue getting ridiculously large numbers of messages for as long as their profiles are active (as some of my female friends with profiles could attest).

Then consider from the women's point of view. Suppose you're a woman interested in meeting people who meet certain criteria, and you're sincerely interested in replying to at least a significant portion of people who fit those criteria. The problem is that of the men who meet those requirements, some of their attention is still going to be siphoned off by them writing to other women who only have a low chance of responding. Even if you have very specific criteria, so the men who meet your criteria have a great chance of getting a reply from you, on a conventional personals site they might not realize that. But if your response rate were displayed by your profile, then when men searched for women whose criteria they met (and who met their own criteria as well), you would be listed as one of the people with the highest chance of replying, and you'd have a greater chance of hearing from men who met your requirements. (This is not a huge benefit for women, because most women get enough messages that there will usually be some who meet their criteria anyway. The response-rate system would mainly be beneficial to men; I'm just saying it would not be worse for women and would in fact be a little better for some of them.)

Now there's one group of people who would not be better off: Women who create accounts mainly for the ego boost of getting huge numbers of messages and not replying to them. I talked with a few women who used the personals sites for this purpose; some I knew in person, some of them I talked to back when Yahoo Personals would display a woman's Yahoo Messenger screen name, and if you sent them an instant message they would sometimes reply out of sheer boredom and admit that that was what they were doing. These people would not be better off in a system that displayed response rates, since after their response rates dwindled low enough, so would the number of messages. So this would not be a true Pareto improvement, since the definition of a Pareto improvements insists on nobody being worse off, and doesn't make judgments as to people's reasons. Fine, but I submit that people who use the personals sites for the ego boost of ignoring messages are going against the site's purpose, and any improvement that pisses them off but improves things for everybody else, is still a good thing.

You might worry that the ego-trippers would continue to game the system by writing trivially short replies to all the messages they got, in order to keep their "response rate" high and keep the messages coming. I'm not sure, but I don't think that would be very common, because my impression from talking to the girls who do this is that the whole point of the ego boost is that the messages keep coming in without them having to do anything. If they had to exert themselves at all -- even long enough to reply to each message and say "yeah" -- then it wouldn't feel as much fun. Probably some would do this anyway. But of the men who kept getting responses like "yeah" and "I dunno", hopefully they would get the message quickly and stop wasting time. I could be wrong about some of these things, but my point is that it would not be any worse than the old system, where so many users already waste time writing to people who don't write back, and the new system would probably be better since it would eliminate some of the time-wasters.

There are some design decisions that I didn't specify here -- for example, do you display each user's response rate over their entire history on the site, or just over the last 24-72 hours, or both? A trickier question: Do you display the user's criteria that they have entered to specify what they're looking for, and which are used when the site calculates their response rate to all users who "meet their criteria"? Most sites do of course let users list what they are looking for. But suppose a woman is only interested in meeting men who make more than $75,000 per year, but she thinks it would be crass to list that on her profile. On the other hand, if she doesn't list it as a requirement, then her percentage response rate will be dragged down by all the men writing to her who make less than $75,000 but who she's not interested in replying to. One alternative would be that she could still have one set of public criteria displayed on her profile, and one set of "secret" criteria that included the $75,000 cutoff. Then men who made $75,000 or more would be steered toward her profile with the message, "You meet her criteria, and she responds to 50% of men who meet her requirements!" But you'd have the ticklish business of men who somehow find her profile, and meet all of her public criteria, but can't figure out why the system is telling them that they weren't a match for her -- and they contact the service to ask why, and tech support has to tactfully explain that sometimes you don't meet all of someone's secret requirements. In any case, a man would be able to reverse-engineer a woman's "secret" requirements by varying his own characteristics on his profile until the system said, "Ding! You're a match for her!" (But then what are you going to do, send her a message calling her a gold digger? Go ahead, it doesn't affect her percentage response rate anyway.)

In concluding that "everyone" would be better off under this system, I did make the type of assumptions that are common in mathematical/economic models, such as assuming that all participants are cold rationalists maximizing benefit to themselves. Such assumptions often do model human behavior pretty well, even in romantic pairings -- it explains why 10's usually end up with 10's, 9's usually end up with 9's, and so on. But these axioms may not take seemingly "irrational" preferences into account. For example, I've assumed that if it would be a waste of time for a user to write to 10 women who are not going to write back, then the new system is an improvement if it dissuades him from ever writing to those 10 women in the first place, because the end result is the same (nothing) and you've saved them the effort. But on a conventional personals site, after someone has written to 10 people and before they realize they're not getting any responses, they still have the hope that they might get answers, and that can be a good feeling. They'll be disappointed later on once they realize they're not getting any responses, but if they have a personality that is especially receptive to hope and especially resistant to disappointment, then it could average out to a better overall experience under the old system. Well, the old-style Match.com and Yahoo Personals would still be around for people who prefer to dream. I'm just saying the new-style system would better suit people looking for results.

The real problem with starting a competing personals site around this system (apart from pulling in enough users to reach "critical mass", but assume you had an ad campaign to do that), is that even if your system produced better matches for everybody in the long run, Yahoo Personals and Match.com would still be better at luring people in with the hope of getting a fabulous match-up. Even if Yahoo Personals got rid of all the fake profiles, and even if they gave anyone listed as a "member" a way to reply to people who send them messages (which among other things would bring them in line with laws against false advertising), their gallery would still be glittering with all the profiles of people who are getting too much mail to possibly reply to it all -- but as a new user, you wouldn't know that. On the other hand, with a personals site that listed criteria-specific response rates next to each profile, if you didn't have a good chance of getting a response from the most popular users, you'd know that from the beginning. You could then come back down to Earth and focus on the users whose criteria you met and who responded to most of their mail. But the site wouldn't be able to use its superstars to lure people in and string them along like Yahoo and Match.com can do.

So, to the business that launches a personals site around this system, this is what I'd propose to do: Since your system really does work better, contact a bunch of single reporters (I mean, higher up than me) and tell them to sign up for an account with Yahoo Personals, an account with Match.com, and an account with your new response-rating site, and spend twenty minutes on each site writing to users that they're interested in meeting. Or sponsor a controlled study where dozens of users try the same thing. Your site will be the only one where the participants can find and write to the members with the highest response rate for people meeting their criteria, and if the system really does result in more efficient matches, then the reporters and the study organizers ought to be able to verify that. Then you have your new ad campaign!

It's easy to list all the problems that would occur in this system: People could lie on their profiles, you can't always judge someone from a profile even if they're honest, people could waste your time starting a conversation and then bailing on you, just because people meet through the site doesn't mean they'll be a good match in person, etc. But these are problems with any personals site. This system only addresses the specific problem of efficiency; I haven't come up with an algorithmic solution to all of the problems of dating and love. It's only Tuesday.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wants to make online dating better. Here's how he wants to do it. "Suppose you're an entrepreneur who wants to break into the online personals business, but you face impossible odds because everybody wants to go where everybody else already is (basically, either Match.com or Yahoo Personals). Here is a suggestion that would give you an edge. In a nutshell: Each member lists the criteria for people that they are looking for. Then when people contact them, they choose whether or not to respond. After the system has been keeping track of who contacts you and who you respond to, the site lists your profile in other people's search results along with your criteria-specific response rate: "Lisa has responded to 56% of people who contacted her who meet her criteria." Read on for the rest of his thoughts. I realize that every time I write something along the lines of "They should do it this way instead of the way they do it now", whether for search engines, spam filters, content rating systems or whatever, I leave some people shrugging and wondering why anyone should switch to my idea. So let me try something new: I want to prove mathematically that this change would result in some (in fact, most) of the participants being better off, while nobody would be worse off (what economists call a Pareto improvement). I am not necessarily saying that it would lead to a good outcome for everybody; basically, it will lead to better outcomes for most users (although some of those will still be bad outcomes), and will do so in a lot less time.

If as soon as you read the phrase "I can prove mathematically" you thought, "Oh well no wonder he gets such a low response rate if he talks like that all the time", then I humbly submit that (1) while I like my Slashdot persona of a pedant banging people over the head with what I think is a brilliant idea, I do have other programmable settings, like conversation about movies, and (2) for once, it's not just me. Sites like eDateReview.com list hundreds of reviews for the most popular sites like Yahoo, Match.com and eHarmony, all of which got an average rating of about 2 out of 5. Another site hosting reviews of online personals services, DatingSitesReviews.com, posted a message urging people to take the predominantly negative reviews with a grain of salt, since users with a bad experience are much more likely to post a review than users with a positive one, but that only generated comments from the site's users reiterating, "No, they really do suck." Most of the complaints from men are not just about the number of obviously fake profiles (which led to lawsuits against Yahoo and Match.com), but about the low response rate even from women who are ostensibly real.

Not that I blame the women. Having watched over the shoulder of some female friends scrolling through their Yahoo Personals inboxes, some of them get far too many messages to reply to (and even if they had time to reply, they'd only be leading on most of the correspondents, since there would never be enough time to actually meet all of them). Yahoo Personals formats your inbox so that you see each person's picture along with the first few words of what they wrote, so if you have too many messages, all you can really do is scroll through the pictures (yes, women do care about that). In fact, Yahoo has a feature that lets you see the users who have viewed your profile -- which may have revealed more than Yahoo intended, since sometimes after writing to 20 or 30 people, I find out that none of them even clicked through to my profile anyway -- so if you're a guy, take Yahoo's advice about "polishing your profile" with a grain of salt. (In fact, many users with Yahoo Personals profiles are not paid members, which means they cannot reply to the messages you send them except with boilerplate like "I liked your message", and Yahoo blocks you from sending them your e-mail address. So Yahoo is listing them as people that you can contact through their service, even though Yahoo knows those people won't be able to write you back. If this strikes you as something between bad site design and actionable fraud, then you are not a Yahoo employee.)

So, yes, there is a problem worth solving. For the purpose of describing the response-rate system, I'm going to dispense with political correctness and refer to the people sending the messages as the "men" and to the people receiving messages as the "women". I hear from the pilot episode of Sex and the City that after the "mid-thirties power flip", the odds shift the other way (due to women getting older and the men accumulating more money, although the show doesn't put it quite so bluntly), so if you're in that age bracket, substitute the appropriate genders in the discussion below.

Note that I when I talk about listing women's response rates, I am talking about their response rates to men who meet their criteria. If you only want to meet men aged 28 to 29 who are interested in paddleboating, then your displayed response rate is only affected by the percentage of messages that you respond to from men in that group.

The mathematical argument commences: If you're a man writing to women on a site, for every women there are two essential variables: the probability P that she will reply to you, and how much value V you would place on getting a reply from her (say, on a scale of 1 to 10). For any woman that you write to, if P = (probability of getting a reply) and V = (value of getting a reply), then then probabilistic benefit of writing to her is P x V. (And I swear I didn't notice this until after I'd written the article, but I do not want to hear anything juvenile about framing a discussion of men meeting women in terms of the "P" and the "V".) If you have non-standard tastes, such as a preference for "Big Beautiful Women", that's great, since the women that you consider to be 9s and 10s may also be the ones that you have the highest chance of getting a reply from, since fewer other men are writing to them, and P x V for those women will be -- in a manner of speaking -- huge. Unfortunately, if your tastes are fairly typical, then the women you consider to be 9s and 10s are also getting lots of messages from other men, and have the lowest probability of replying to you. So as V = (value of getting a reply) goes up, P = (probability of getting a reply) goes down, and the product doesn't vary as much as you would like. There's nothing that the response-rate system can do about that.

In any case, if you're allocating your time rationally, you would first write to the members where you estimate P x V to be the highest, and then write to the members where P x V was the next highest, and then based on the cost-benefit principle, you'd continue writing until P x V of writing to the next person is exceeded by the value of the time it would take you to do it. (The incremental value of each additional minute of your time is not constant -- after a long time spent sending messages, you might get bored, and would require a larger incentive to spend an additional minute of your time doing it.) All of this is basically intuition and common sense, even if people don't think of it in terms of these equations (except me!).

But here's the advantage of the response-rating system: With a conventional personals site, you're only guessing the value of P x V -- to be precise, you know the value of V (at least as well as anyone can possibly know it from reading someone's profile), but you're only estimating P, based on how many messages you think she's probably getting from other people. Because of that randomness, that means some of the time you are sending messages without the best possible P x V value, and probably some of the time you are even sending messages where P x V would not even be worth the effort of sending the message, if you knew how low P was. Whereas with a system that shows a woman's response rate to people who meet her criteria, if you're someone who meets her criteria, you know roughly the probability P of getting a reply. (Actually, the probability P for you of getting a response, might not be the percentage-response-rate displayed by the site -- if you have an especially attractive or unattractive face, but there's no way for the woman to specify that in her criteria, then your chance of getting a reply might be higher or lower than the displayed percentage-response-rate. But, then you could just scale all of the displayed response rates upwards or downwards to gauge your probability P of getting a reply. It would still be better than making a total guess on a conventional personals site that didn't display percentage response rates at all.) So this is an unambiguous improvement from the point of view of the men. Another reason why men would be much better off is a specific case of this: they would avoid the time sink of writing to women who do not or cannot respond to most of the messages they're getting. With a response-rate system, those women's profiles would gradually display lower and lower response rates until the percentage was low enough to dissuade all but the most optimistic (or handsome) suitors. Without a display of the response rate, those users continue getting ridiculously large numbers of messages for as long as their profiles are active (as some of my female friends with profiles could attest).

Then consider from the women's point of view. Suppose you're a woman interested in meeting people who meet certain criteria, and you're sincerely interested in replying to at least a significant portion of people who fit those criteria. The problem is that of the men who meet those requirements, some of their attention is still going to be siphoned off by them writing to other women who only have a low chance of responding. Even if you have very specific criteria, so the men who meet your criteria have a great chance of getting a reply from you, on a conventional personals site they might not realize that. But if your response rate were displayed by your profile, then when men searched for women whose criteria they met (and who met their own criteria as well), you would be listed as one of the people with the highest chance of replying, and you'd have a greater chance of hearing from men who met your requirements. (This is not a huge benefit for women, because most women get enough messages that there will usually be some who meet their criteria anyway. The response-rate system would mainly be beneficial to men; I'm just saying it would not be worse for women and would in fact be a little better for some of them.)

Now there's one group of people who would not be better off: Women who create accounts mainly for the ego boost of getting huge numbers of messages and not replying to them. I talked with a few women who used the personals sites for this purpose; some I knew in person, some of them I talked to back when Yahoo Personals would display a woman's Yahoo Messenger screen name, and if you sent them an instant message they would sometimes reply out of sheer boredom and admit that that was what they were doing. These people would not be better off in a system that displayed response rates, since after their response rates dwindled low enough, so would the number of messages. So this would not be a true Pareto improvement, since the definition of a Pareto improvements insists on nobody being worse off, and doesn't make judgments as to people's reasons. Fine, but I submit that people who use the personals sites for the ego boost of ignoring messages are going against the site's purpose, and any improvement that pisses them off but improves things for everybody else, is still a good thing.

You might worry that the ego-trippers would continue to game the system by writing trivially short replies to all the messages they got, in order to keep their "response rate" high and keep the messages coming. I'm not sure, but I don't think that would be very common, because my impression from talking to the girls who do this is that the whole point of the ego boost is that the messages keep coming in without them having to do anything. If they had to exert themselves at all -- even long enough to reply to each message and say "yeah" -- then it wouldn't feel as much fun. Probably some would do this anyway. But of the men who kept getting responses like "yeah" and "I dunno", hopefully they would get the message quickly and stop wasting time. I could be wrong about some of these things, but my point is that it would not be any worse than the old system, where so many users already waste time writing to people who don't write back, and the new system would probably be better since it would eliminate some of the time-wasters.

There are some design decisions that I didn't specify here -- for example, do you display each user's response rate over their entire history on the site, or just over the last 24-72 hours, or both? A trickier question: Do you display the user's criteria that they have entered to specify what they're looking for, and which are used when the site calculates their response rate to all users who "meet their criteria"? Most sites do of course let users list what they are looking for. But suppose a woman is only interested in meeting men who make more than $75,000 per year, but she thinks it would be crass to list that on her profile. On the other hand, if she doesn't list it as a requirement, then her percentage response rate will be dragged down by all the men writing to her who make less than $75,000 but who she's not interested in replying to. One alternative would be that she could still have one set of public criteria displayed on her profile, and one set of "secret" criteria that included the $75,000 cutoff. Then men who made $75,000 or more would be steered toward her profile with the message, "You meet her criteria, and she responds to 50% of men who meet her requirements!" But you'd have the ticklish business of men who somehow find her profile, and meet all of her public criteria, but can't figure out why the system is telling them that they weren't a match for her -- and they contact the service to ask why, and tech support has to tactfully explain that sometimes you don't meet all of someone's secret requirements. In any case, a man would be able to reverse-engineer a woman's "secret" requirements by varying his own characteristics on his profile until the system said, "Ding! You're a match for her!" (But then what are you going to do, send her a message calling her a gold digger? Go ahead, it doesn't affect her percentage response rate anyway.)

In concluding that "everyone" would be better off under this system, I did make the type of assumptions that are common in mathematical/economic models, such as assuming that all participants are cold rationalists maximizing benefit to themselves. Such assumptions often do model human behavior pretty well, even in romantic pairings -- it explains why 10's usually end up with 10's, 9's usually end up with 9's, and so on. But these axioms may not take seemingly "irrational" preferences into account. For example, I've assumed that if it would be a waste of time for a user to write to 10 women who are not going to write back, then the new system is an improvement if it dissuades him from ever writing to those 10 women in the first place, because the end result is the same (nothing) and you've saved them the effort. But on a conventional personals site, after someone has written to 10 people and before they realize they're not getting any responses, they still have the hope that they might get answers, and that can be a good feeling. They'll be disappointed later on once they realize they're not getting any responses, but if they have a personality that is especially receptive to hope and especially resistant to disappointment, then it could average out to a better overall experience under the old system. Well, the old-style Match.com and Yahoo Personals would still be around for people who prefer to dream. I'm just saying the new-style system would better suit people looking for results.

The real problem with starting a competing personals site around this system (apart from pulling in enough users to reach "critical mass", but assume you had an ad campaign to do that), is that even if your system produced better matches for everybody in the long run, Yahoo Personals and Match.com would still be better at luring people in with the hope of getting a fabulous match-up. Even if Yahoo Personals got rid of all the fake profiles, and even if they gave anyone listed as a "member" a way to reply to people who send them messages (which among other things would bring them in line with laws against false advertising), their gallery would still be glittering with all the profiles of people who are getting too much mail to possibly reply to it all -- but as a new user, you wouldn't know that. On the other hand, with a personals site that listed criteria-specific response rates next to each profile, if you didn't have a good chance of getting a response from the most popular users, you'd know that from the beginning. You could then come back down to Earth and focus on the users whose criteria you met and who responded to most of their mail. But the site wouldn't be able to use its superstars to lure people in and string them along like Yahoo and Match.com can do.

So, to the business that launches a personals site around this system, this is what I'd propose to do: Since your system really does work better, contact a bunch of single reporters (I mean, higher up than me) and tell them to sign up for an account with Yahoo Personals, an account with Match.com, and an account with your new response-rating site, and spend twenty minutes on each site writing to users that they're interested in meeting. Or sponsor a controlled study where dozens of users try the same thing. Your site will be the only one where the participants can find and write to the members with the highest response rate for people meeting their criteria, and if the system really does result in more efficient matches, then the reporters and the study organizers ought to be able to verify that. Then you have your new ad campaign!

It's easy to list all the problems that would occur in this system: People could lie on their profiles, you can't always judge someone from a profile even if they're honest, people could waste your time starting a conversation and then bailing on you, just because people meet through the site doesn't mean they'll be a good match in person, etc. But these are problems with any personals site. This system only addresses the specific problem of efficiency; I haven't come up with an algorithmic solution to all of the problems of dating and love. It's only Tuesday.

Socguy brings us a story from CBC News about a recently developed crystal that can soak up carbon dioxide gas "like a sponge." Chemists from UCLA believe that the crystals will become a cheap, stable method to absorb emissions at power plants. We discussed a prototype for another CO2 extraction device last year. Quoting: "'The technical challenge of selectively removing carbon dioxide has been overcome,' said UCLA chemistry professor Omar Yaghi in a statement. The porous structures can be heated to high temperatures without decomposing and can be boiled in water or solvents for a week and remain stable, making them suitable for use in hot, energy-producing environments like power plants. The highly porous crystals also had what the researchers called 'extraordinary capacity for storing CO2': one litre of the crystals could store about 83 litres of CO2."

Saudi Arabia's religious police are seeing red over red roses. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has ordered the removal from stores any items colored scarlet, which is widely seen as symbolizing love. It is not unusual for the Saudi vice squad to become stricter before Valentine's Day, which it sees as encouraging relations between men and women outside of wedlock. Saudi officials said they are studying the effects of other things that fuel lust, like being awake, the vibrations of a heavy truck driving close by and the cute cashier at the gas station.

jerrymander writes "We're moving into "Generation Virtual", says Gartner analyst Adam Sarner in a Baseline article. With an emphasis on the opportunities that virtual personas represent now and in the future, Sarner details the traits of being a part of Generation V. Sarner outlines in his assessment that: 'Traditional ways of selling to customers using demographic information will become irrelevant in the online world, which has its own merit-based system using personas that conduct transactions and spread influence anonymously.' And, by extension, Sarner says that 'business intelligence (BI) and analytic tools will shift toward consumer applications, eventually arming companies with automated, artificial intelligence, self-learning 'persona bots' to seek customers' needs and desires.'"

An anonymous reader writes about a new robot submersible that uses temperature differences in the sea to power operation for more than twice as long as previous, battery-dependent vehicles. "The torpedo-shaped glider moves through the ocean by changing its buoyancy to dive and surface, unlike motorized, propeller-driven undersea vehicles. To power its propulsion, the submersible gathers thermal energy from the ocean. When it moves from cooler water to warmer areas, internal tubes of wax are heated up and expand, pushing out the gas in surrounding tanks and increasing its pressure. The compressed gas stores potential energy, like a squeezed spring, that can be used to power the vehicle. To rise, oil is pushed from inside the vehicle to external bladders, thus increasing the glider's volume without changing its mass, making it less dense. The oil can be shifted inside to increase the density and sink the vehicle."

Angus McKraken brings us a Washington Post story about how travelers are seeking more well-defined policies and rules about the search and seizure of electronic devices by U.S. Customs officials. The EFF has already taken legal action over similar concerns. We recently discussed the related issue of requiring people to disclose their passwords in order to search their private data. From the Post: "Maria Udy, a marketing executive with a global travel management firm in Bethesda, said her company laptop was seized by a federal agent as she was flying from Dulles International Airport to London in December 2006. Udy, a British citizen, said the agent told her he had 'a security concern' with her. 'I was basically given the option of handing over my laptop or not getting on that flight,' she said. 'I was assured that my laptop would be given back to me in 10 or 15 days,' said Udy, who continues to fly into and out of the United States. She said the federal agent copied her log-on and password, and asked her to show him a recent document and how she gains access to Microsoft Word. She was asked to pull up her e-mail but could not because of lack of Internet access. With ACTE's help, she pressed for relief. More than a year later, Udy has received neither her laptop nor an explanation."

thinkzinc notes a story indicating that, according to a new study, men have a harder time putting down a controller than women do. Researchers at Stanford did brain imaging work on a group of young test subjects while they played a simple PC game. Besides the 'obvious' conclusion that men were more 'aggressive at gaining territory on the screen', the tests also indicated that male brains showed more activity in the reward and addiction components of the brain. "The lead author, Dr. Allan Reiss, noted that most of the video games that are popular with men are territory and aggression-type games. 'These gender differences in the brain may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become hooked on video games than females,' he said. Other recent surveys indicate that about 40 percent of Americans regularly play games on a computer or console, but young males are two or three times more likely than females to feel addicted to video games, Reiss said. "

If your spouse bothers you don't expect time to make it better. In fact, if the findings of Kira Birditt, a research fellow at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research are correct, it's only going to get worse. The study did not show the same trend in annoying friends or ill mannered children. So the next time you roll over, look at your spouse sleeping and think, "I hate you a little more everyday!" rest assured that it's normal and they think the same about you.

Just so you don't think Americans are the only people who have no clue when it comes to their history, a recent survey found a fair number of British people believe that Churchill, Charles Dickens, and Mahatma Gandhi were fictional characters. Who made the "real people" list? Over half the people asked thought Sherlock Holmes was real. Many people were surprised to find out that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was not a documentary.

dacarr writes "SCO has filed their 10K with the SEC — and according to this, their own assessment of the company's outlook is pretty grim. As usual, PJ of Groklaw has a good synopsis of the filing highlights. In short, it boils down to one thing: unless there's a miracle, even SCO doesn't think they're going to come out of this. 'As a result of the Chapter 11 filings, realization of assets and liquidation of liabilities are subject to uncertainty. While operating as debtors-in-possession under the protection of Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code, the Debtors may sell or otherwise dispose of assets and liquidate or settle liabilities for amounts other than those reflected in the consolidated financial statements, in the ordinary course of business, or, if outside the ordinary course of business, subject to Bankruptcy Court approval. In addition, under the priority scheme established by the Bankruptcy Code, unless creditors agree otherwise, post-petition liabilities and prepetition liabilities must be satisfied in full before stockholders are entitled to receive any distribution or retain any property under a plan of reorganization.'"

JusticeLink, a multi-jurisdictional court computer system, will be rolled out in New South Wales over the next 12 months. Attorneys will log in to a bulletin board and type their arguments, which would then be sent to a judge by email. Justice should be swift, so judges make rulings in real time. I'm interested to see what sort of jail time swapping scams the Nigerian spammers come up with.

jangel writes to give us a look at the prototype UIs for Mobile Firefox, which is currently under development. Mozilla project lead Doug Turner has asked for opinions on the design. Quoting: "Comments on the Wiki provide an idea of the choices the developers still have to make. For example, should the chevron at the right of the toolbar open a history page listing the most recently viewed pages, or -- as on desktop Firefox -- merely a list of most frequently typed URLs? And should "full screen" mode hide everything except the page being browsed, or retain the lowermost toolbar? Turner writes that while the user interfaces shown are merely starting points, 'going from the pretty pictures that Photoshop can produce to something that is functional is easy with the Mozilla platform. Building functional prototypes ... using only Javascript, XML, CSS, and images is really awesome.'"

A UK farmer built an entire mock castle and kept it hidden behind bales of hay for 4 years to avoid building regulations. The builder wants to take advantage of a provision of planning law that allows buildings without planning permission to be declared legal if no objections have been made after four years. The county council is not happy and is moving their mock seige weaponry towards the farm.

sleeplesseye writes "In a speech at the Midem music industry convention in Cannes, Paul McGuinness, longtime manager of the band U2, has called on Internet service providers to immediately introduce mandatory French-style service disconnections to end music downloading, and has urged governments to force ISPs to adopt such policies. McGuinness criticized Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' pay-what-you-want business model, saying that 'the majority of downloads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire'. He also accused ISPs, telcos, device makers, and numerous specifically named companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Oracle, and Facebook of building 'multi billion dollar industries on the back of our content without paying for it', and of being 'makers of burglary kits' who have made 'a thieves' charter' to steal money from the music industry. The full text of his speech has been posted on U2's website."

r3lody writes "There are many households that have high-speed Internet connections, yet most people are simply not doing enough to protect themselves from the many exploits that exist. The Symantec Guide to Home Internet Security by Andrew Conry-Murray and Vincent Weafer was written to speak to those people. Symantec Press is the publisher, yet it remains reasonably vendor-neutral. This book is for non-technical people. Its ten chapters cover a relatively slim 240 pages, so it should not intimidate someone who is not a computer professional. Also, you do not really have to read the book front-to-back, but you can focus in on the chapter or chapters that interest you and have fairly complete information." Read on for the rest of Ray's review. The Symantec Guide to Home Internet Security author Andrew Conry-Murray and Vincent Weafer pages 240 publisher Symantec Press rating 8/10 reviewer Ray Lodato ISBN 0321356411 summary A slim volume packed with valuable information for non-technical Internet users. The first chapter gives the reader a basic overview of the risks of using the Internet without some steps to protect yourself. Fraudsters, those who ply you with get-rich-quick schemes and other spam-delivered scams, are distinguished from hijackers who compromise your machine for local data or to make it part of a “bot farm”. The remaining chapters discuss various aspects of security exposures, how to protect yourself from them, and conclude with a checklist of high points and “Helpful Resources” that contain web sites, phone numbers, and occasional additional side-bars with more in-depth examples.

The next chapter is a very informative chapter on preventing identity theft. This part of the book is worthwhile, even if you don’t use the Internet for financial transactions. The authors mention how your personal data can be stolen from company databases, despite precautions you yourself have taken. There are discussions on social engineering and dumpster-diving, as well as phishing scams and keyloggers. The best part of the chapter is the “Recovering from Identify Theft” section. Hopefully you will never need the information there, but it’s very helpful to see it collected in a simple bulleted list. The second side-bar at the end discusses a personal account of a brush with identity theft.

Chapter 3 covers firewalls, which most people think is the only protection they need. It discusses the basics of Internet Protocol (IP), and what firewalls can and can’t do. Lists of both free and commercial firewall products are provided. It wraps up with a few sites that can test your firewall settings to see if you are really protected or not. There were a couple of minor errors (for example, 192.101.432.156 is offered as an IP address, but the third number can’t be more than 255), but most non-technical people need the product lists provided.

The following two chapters cover the various forms of “malware” (viruses, worms, adware, spyware, and Trojans). Conry-Murray and Weafer provide several preventative actions you can take to avoid infection — the most important involves using your common sense (e.g. “Use a firewall” and “Don’t Open Strange E-Mail”) They wrap up by describing how to remove malware via the available anti-spyware programs.

The final category of unwanted Internet debris is spam. The authors state that for most people “spam is an annoyance rather than a plague.” However, they go on to disclose figures that estimate anywhere from 50 to 90% of the 30 billion e-mails sent each day are spam. To explain why spam works, a side-bar talks about Jeremy Jaynes, who was convicted in November 2004 for spamming. He generated about 10,000 credit card sales per month. Two-thirds of those were returned, yet he still netted more that $100,000 a month.

Chapter 7 covers securing Windows XP. At the time of publishing, Microsoft had come out with XP Service Pack 2, with the Windows Security Center. A large section deals with installing SP2 and configuring the Security Center. It’s kept at a level that most users can comprehend and follow, making it another very worthwhile chapter. The following section describes securing Internet Explorer 6 in great detail. The authors do suggest, however, that you might want to use a different browser, such as Firefox or Opera. The thinking is that Firefox and Opera will be more secure because fewer exploits are targeted towards them.

Locking down Windows and IE is not enough to keep your family safe. That’s why they devote the next chapter to “Keeping Your Family Safe Online.” Pitched mostly to parents of younger kids, chapter 8 starts by talking about blocking objectionable content using IE’s Content Adviser. Sexual predators is the next topic, and the authors give the reader good information on how to monitor your children’s online activities, as well as how to report solicitations to the authorities. The final topic revolves around file-sharing software. While they mention the prospect of downloading viruses, the legal ramification of potentially housing illegal downloads is the most important lesson to take away from this section.

Many homes are now using wireless access points. Unfortunately, poor configurations open them up for eavesdroppers and bandwidth hijackers. The simple precautions of changing and hiding the network name (SSID) and changing the password will do a lot, but encryption using WEP, WPA, or WPA2 will help a lot more. They also go into the security issues of public hotspots, including the prospect of “Evil Twins” (user computers that offer a look-alike access point just to steal your personal information).

The book wraps up with a chapter on “Privacy and the Internet.” Anyone who conducts any transactions over the Internet has their personal data stored on a computer that might be accessed online. The key precaution is to not divulge any information you don’t absolutely have to. Data Brokers collect amazing amounts of information on each of us. Three major companies, Acxiom, ChoicePoint and LexisNexis are individually described, with information on how to get reports on what information they’ve recorded, and possibly how to opt-out of having it stored.

Andrew Conry-Murray and Vincent Weafer conclude the book by giving the reader five basic steps to protect themselves online. However, I prefer their final, single simple rule: Use Your Common Sense.

The Symantec Guide to Home Internet Security, though a slim book, is packed with a lot of valuable information pitched to the non-technical user. I believe that anyone with a computer connected to the Internet would benefit from reading this book.

You can purchase The Symantec Guide to Home Internet Security from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

dnormant writes in with a note about QTrax, a 5-year-old startup that just announced deals with all the major labels to provide free, ad-supported music downloads. The new wrinkle is that, though the free tracks come encumbered with Windows Media DRM, QTrax claims that they will be playable soon on iPods. Wired's assumption is that the company is on the verge of a deal with Apple to allow use of its FairPlay DRM in place of Microsoft's. (Apple hasn't licensed FairPlay to anyone so far.) The AP coverage of the story assumes that QTrax has found a way around FairPlay on the iPod, and if so, that its solution will break the next time Apple updates iTunes.

dnormant, among other readers, sent us word that a US spy satellite has lost power and propulsion and could hit the Earth in late February or March. Government officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified as secret. None of the coverage speculates on how big the satellite is, but Wikipedia claims that US spy satellites in the KH-11 class, launched up to the mid-90s, are about the size of the Hubble — which is 13 meters long and weighs over 11,000 kg. "The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down... A senior government official said that lawmakers and other nations are being kept apprised of the situation."

Like2Byte writes "CNN is reporting that a US Marine who lost both his legs in Iraq is now able to walk again by using bluetooth technology to coordinate his leg movement. The two legs communicate to keep the man in motion. ' [...] Computer chips in each leg send signals to motors in the artificial joints so the knees and ankles move in a coordinated fashion. Bleill's set of prosthetics [legs] have Bluetooth receivers strapped to the ankle area. The Bluetooth device on each leg tells the other leg what it's doing, how it's moving, whether walking, standing or climbing steps, for example.'"

E5Rebel writes "Microsoft will spend $235m in schools worldwide over the next five years, part of a plan to triple the number of students and teachers trained in its software programs to up to 270 million by 2013. 'Microsoft's investment shows how important it views developing markets to its future business. Last year, Microsoft introduced the Student Innovation Suite, which includes the XP Starter Edition plus educational applications, for $3 for qualifying countries. Microsoft faces heated competition from companies supporting the open-source OS Linux and associated software in developing countries. "I think as a company we welcome choice," [Orlando Ayala] said. "Frankly, we welcome the competition." The company's educational funding comes with a hitch: "Of course, that includes the fact they [the schools] use Windows," Ayala said.' If you don't use Windows you don't get the cash." Microsoft has long been interested in the education of children.

Brad Eleven writes "The AP reports that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has invoked executive privilege to justify withholding information in its response to a lawsuit. The state of California is challenging the agency's decision to block their attempt to curb the emissions from new cars and trucks. In response, the EPA has delivered documents requested by the Freedom of Information Act for the discovery phase of the lawsuit — but the documents are heavily redacted. That is, the agency has revealed that it did spend many hours meeting to discuss the issue, but refuses to divulge the details or the outcomes of the meetings. Among the examples cited, 16 pages of a 43-page Powerpoint presentation are completely blank except for the page titles. An EPA spokesperson used language similar to other recent claims of executive privilege, citing 'the chilling effect that would occur if agency employees believed their frank and honest opinions and analysis expressed as part of assessing California's waiver request were to be disclosed in a broad setting.'"

caffiend666 writes "According to an AP news article, NASA engineers are concerned about the design for the new rocket meant to replace the shuttle. Work on the project has revealed that the first few minutes of flight could see 'violent shaking', a serious flaw that might destroy the craft soon after launch. 'NASA officials hope to have a plan for fixing the design as early as March, and they do not expect it to delay the goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. The shaking problem, which is common to solid rocket boosters, involves pulses of added acceleration caused by gas vortices in the rocket similar to the wake that develops behind a fast-moving boat.'

meanonymous writes "HPCWire reports that a unique marketing model for 'manycore' processors is being proposed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers. The current economic model has customers purchasing systems containing processors that meet the average or worst-case computation needs of their applications. The researchers contend that the increasing number of cores complicates the matching of performance needs and applications and makes the cost of buying idle computing power increasingly prohibitive. They speculate that the customer will typically require fewer cores than are physically on the chip, but may want to use more of them in certain instances. They suggest that chips be developed in a manner that allows users to pay only for the computing power they need rather than the peak computing power that is physically present. By incorporating small pieces of logic into the processor, the vendor can enable and disable individual cores, and they offer five models that allow dynamic adjustment of the chip's available processing power."

An anonymous reader writes "According to James Bullen of NXT, 'The UK ministry of defense was experimenting with a way to dampen the sound in helicopters and developed a honeycombed material that did the opposite — conducted sound.' Cambridge-based NXT christened it "SurfaceSound" and arranged for it to be crafted into Toyota cars, Gateway computers, Hallmark greeting cards and more. NXT is working on ways to put the technology to use in touch screens that promise to be part of a new rage in 'natural interfaces' for computers, mobile telephones, televisions and other electronic devices. Toyota has SurfaceSound in the head liners of four of its car models. NXT recently made a deal with greeting card giant Hallmark to use the technology in 'big cards with big sound' when opened, Bullen said."

If you've just had a baby but your relatives live too far away to show off the bundle of joy, a rice shop in Fukuoka Japan has a solution for you. A baby made of rice. Each rice bag is shaped like a bundled baby, printed with the baby's face and name, and weighs as much as the new-born. Best of all it's not illegal to leave it in the pantry for days at a time and is delicious with a splash of soy.

Maria Energia writes "Scientific American Magazine proposes a huge, far-reaching plan to get solar energy powering 69% of America's electricity needs by 2050. The costs and technology are ready, they say, but huge changes to our transmission system will be needed."