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User: languagehacker

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  1. DARPA challenge on James Bond Gadgets · · Score: 1

    Anything harder-core than driving on the highway is a non-trivial problem for current neural network models used to automatically drive a car. That being said, the phone interface would be easy to implement once a car can navigate the side streets of Budapest by itself.

  2. The animal cell is also built wrong on The Internet Is 'Built Wrong' · · Score: 1

    By holding on to seemingly useless strands of proteins and harboring an entirely different life form it's been supporting for millions of years, the animal cell requires far more energy than it would if it had been developed in a leaner, meaner, more content-centric way. Oh, wait, both of these things are an example of natural composition and a tendency towards messy, gradient, whatever-works-at-the-moment steps in complexity.

  3. MD5 Collisions... on US District Court Says Calculating a Hash Value = Search · · Score: 1

    ...are like a mistaken identity sitcom waiting to happen--especially when that mistaken identity is a pedophile. I mean, they've covered that in probably like four Seinfelds, three Curb Your Enthusiasms, and a couple of Arrested Developments, right?

  4. Spam's getting smarter on Spammers Choose GMail · · Score: 1

    Spamming vs. catching spam, in many ways, has a lot of parallels with the long history of cryptography. A spam filter is a lot like a cryptanalyst, while a spammer is a lot like someone writing an encrypted message. Just like a cryptanalyst looks for recurring clusters of words to pick out "the", "a", and "of" in an encrypted text and work from there, spam filters try to learn what makes an email spammy. There's a number of ways to catch spam with machine learning, but of course, two of the best ways are looking for specific words or variations on them and testing for syntactic coherence. The incorporation of better language models with the use of synonyms makes it harder to catch spam based on its text alone. It's even looking a lot more coherent lately. What's more, we've got bots doing much better at breaking CAPTCHAs these days. But they're not so good at discourse coherence yet, so this might be the next step in catching spam (until they get good at that, too).

  5. We have unequivocal proof... on McCain Campaign Uses Spider/Diff Against Obama · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...that someone spending almost all their time going across the country talking to people about different issues actually changed his mind about where he stands on certain topics. As Republicans, this is foreign to us, and upsetting to think about.

  6. Re:No on PC Repair In Texas Now Requires a PI License · · Score: 1

    I think I didn't get the whole link chain right here. The PC Magazine article linked to a CW affiliate (ha) in Dallas that linked to the Daily Texan. And even better, the CW affiliate posting was done by an intern--icing on the cake, and bad supervision by her superiors. Shame on them for fomenting such needless alarmism on the interblogs.

  7. Re:No on PC Repair In Texas Now Requires a PI License · · Score: 5, Informative

    This news story essentially came out like the telephone game. The linked story came from a Daily Texan article (the UT student newspaper) which came from an anecdote by a PC repairman. There were too many intermediaries. The Daily Texan article is available here: http://media.www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2008/06/27/TopStories/Computer.Repair.Technicians.May.Be.Acting.Illegally-3386027.shtml And essentially, what it's suggesting here is that you only need a PI license if you're snooping through a user's data for whom you're not repairing the computer. There will be plenty of repair shops taking care of single-owner Dells and Gateways who won't even need to remember the word "forensics" even exists until CSI comes on.