The anonymous poster makes a good counter argument against the idea that the algorithm must be easily defeatible: just because you have an algorithm that detects human behavior does not imply you have an algorithm that emulates the human behavior detected by the original algorithm.
That's vaguely clever, but it doesn't really pass the sniff test. While "one-way" or "trapdoor" functions may or may not exist, they appear to be pretty rare. That's why it's such a big deal when computer scientists identify a new possible trapdoor function. The chances that any randomly-chosen process happens to be trapdoor (for example, verifying human mouse gestures on a webpage) is monumentally unlikely.
Trapdoor functions came to prominence in cryptography in the mid-1970s with the publication of asymmetric (or public key) encryption techniques by Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle. Indeed, Diffie and Hellman first coined the term (Diffie and Hellman, 1976). Several function classes have been proposed, and it soon became obvious that trapdoor functions are harder to find than was initially thought.
I also live in NYC (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn) and I know that I'd certainly rather have stuff shipped to me by USPS than any other option. I don't have any of the problems that you mention. The other carriers are always a much bigger hassle.
Here yesterday I just received a UPS notice on the door; allegedly "Final Attempt" (never received a 1st or 2nd attempt), no info on what the package is, a tracking number which comes up online and by phone as "not in the system, no information", so I don't have any way to find out what I need to do about it now.
The UPS/FedEx stuff is always an eye-rolling hassle when I see one coming. Give me USPS any day over here. I do feel sorry to hear about you local service, that's far beyond anything that I've ever heard of in the several different states that I've lived in.
I'll come out and just call "bullshit" on this entire claim. Textbooks open-source and free, great, I'm all for that. Lecture videos online, that's pretty cool, too (watching one right now on my bus travel to work). Virtual labs, I'm not an applied scientist, but that smells fishy.
Anyway, here's the reason I'm passionate about classroom teaching: The ability for students to ask questions. That's the unalterable advantage that the classroom lecture has. A physical person that you can have an immediate dialogue with, complete with body language, facial expressions, physical manipulation, "here take this chalk and draw me what you're talking about", pointing to specific words, taking a student's book and showing them the reference they can't find, slamming my hand on the board to make a big point, dropping books from the ceiling to check how fast things fall, etc.
Friends and employers keep suggesting that I teach online classes (honestly, the real reason this is attractive to them is that once it's established, they can outsource all the teaching to our friends in India). I wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole. On the day when there's no classroom teaching, then I'll move on to some other job. But I suspect that there will always be a demand for personal, live teachers.
Brick and mortar schools will continue to exist. In fact, they will likely exist just as they do now. Thing is that with secondary enrollment dropping and competition with foreign institutions on the rise...
No, college enrollment is rising. In places it's up 10, 30, even 50% in recent years. And, "Part of the enrollment increase is due to the rising number of foreign students."
IMHO, if turning in a paper that someone else wrote can get me a good grade, that's just a sign that the course wasn't actually teaching anything in the first place, but merely hoping that exposure to the material would magically lead to education of the students.
Good teachers rely on a suite of metrics to gauge student progress and adjust the curriculum to suit. Bad teachers "plagiarize" in the sense that they just deliver the material they were given and grade papers/tests on the basis of their comparison to a hypothetical ideal.
That is some of the purest, most complete bullshit that I've read in a good long time.
I should clarify that most of us aren't happy about it, but a gentleman's agreement is in place that we can either do it voluntarily, or the government can make it a legal requirement and heap more trouble to implement.
That's not a "gentleman's agreement". That's called "being a pussy".
Those of us who run for fun and who are not gifted with perfect alignment may overpronate or supinate our feet when we run. This action is less efficient, so we're less likely to be fast enough to join a college team. A small majority of people overpronate, somewhat less have a good neutral position, and a few people supinate. To look for overpronation, check out your old tennis shoes: if your shoes wear out first near the ball of the foot, chances are you're an overpronator.
Did you notice that the book extract argues that pronation is a good thing, and that preventing pronation with a shoe is precisely what causes more injuries?
For decades, Dr Hartmann has been watching the explosion of ever more structured running shoes with dismay. 'Pronation has become this very bad word, but it's just the natural movement of the foot,' he says. 'The foot is supposed to pronate.'
To see pronation in action, kick off your shoes and run down the driveway. On a hard surface, your feet will automatically shift to selfdefence mode: you'll find yourself landing on the outside edge of your foot, then gently rolling from little toe over to big until your foot is flat. That's pronation - a mild, shockabsorbing twist that allows your arch to compress.
Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all, if by "rational" you mean "economically rational." There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.
Certainly not a full-on AI problem, just parameterize the flow density and flow rate and define a decent model and cost function, and run it through an NLP solver.
Except that it's really a discrete problem, with a solution that likely has sensitive dependence on initial conditions (i.e., chaotic), and would result in symptoms such as "bus bunching": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching
But, to avoid being modded offtopic, let's ask another question: Why should it be illegal to play pyramid schemes? Just because people are stupid enough to fall for them?
Yes.
I have no sympathy for people who are lured in by promises that are quite bluntly too good to be true, where thinking about it for only a minute would give you enough reasons to stay away from it.
However, WotC cannot stop other companies making D&D-like games, settings, adventures, and products for 3.x rules -- as long as they're not called "D&D". Several companies are still doing that.
I am in the industry and have co-authored several products published under the OGL.
Nontheless, if WOTC decided to file suits against OGL publishers on narrow technical grounds (improper referencing, use of the d20 mark as seen at http://www.d20srd.org/, etc.), the will or ability to defend against such suits would be minimal. Even if they were on the right side of the law.
Fortunately the 3.x rules are open source [opengamingfoundation.org] so D&D can never die, in spite of WotC's seemingly intentional efforts to run their business into the ground.
In theory, yes. However, I fear (and have predicted for some time) that WOTC would begin legal proceedings against sites likes those under technical grounds. The will or ability to defend against any suits would be minimal.
They want the printed copy if there is one available, if the book is good. I've seen books that are readily available in PDF form (from other publishers) go for three and four digit sums on ebay because they can't be bought anymore. I'm in a similar boat, I want my book in my hand (ever tried bringing a laptop to a fantasy RPG session? Talk about mood killer).
Allow me to offer up some counterexamples. I was just at an annual gaming retreat with friends last weekend, where we played classic D&D and other games. (a) I ran an OD&D game, and to my great pleasure, one of the players had bought the OD&D PDFs and printed and bound his own little books from them. (b) I also ran an AD&D game, and instead of hauling the big hardcovers with me, I did indeed have them on a laptop, as I've done before, and it didn't bother anyone (kept below table height on a chair next to me).
Here's the upshot: I was just today going to write my player and recommend he also buy the Supplement I PDF to add to his OD&D books. But now he can't do that. Bizarre.
So in your sick, sorry world, once we are at war we can kill all the civilians we want, and that is a good thing.
Dude, that's what war is. If you don't want war, then don't fight them. Don't sit there and pretend that war is a noble thing like a video game with so many rules.
Dude, that's the definition of crimes against humanity. People have been tried and executed for doing that, such as in the Nuremburg trials. The rules are laid down in internationally-binding documents such as the Hague Conventions, the Geneva Protocol, and the London Charter.
In an observational study, researchers simply observe characteristics and take measurements, as in a sample survey. In a designed experiment, researchers impose treatments and controls and then observe characteristics and take measurements. Observational studies can reveal only association, whereas designed experiments can help establish causation.
In other words the French are rude. When someone from a foreign country walks into an American store, we do our best to help them, like finding a translator. We certainly don't snub them & pretend to not hear them.
Of course, in the situation you describe, you're not dealing with American tourists. If had to do that, I might run and hide myself.
In case you haven't guessed it yet, APRIL FOOLS!!! Seriously, if we get any real news about outages, deaths, or disruptions actually caused by Conficker today, you will read it here first.
(1) Does the article or summary assert causation at any point? No, they don't. Therefore, "correlationisnotcausation" is an entirely irrelevant response here.
(2) Is correlation the strongest possible result from research like this? Yes, it is. To demonstrate causation you'd need a designed experiement, with babies raised for years in a controlled environment with vinyl to see how many became autistic; experiments like that are not possible.
(3) As another poster said, "correlationisnotcausation" has become Slashdot shorthand for "I choose to ignore all of your scientific evidence". Compare to: "Evolution has not been proved, it's only a theory."
Low income. Increases the likelihood of smoking, vinyl flooring, poorly ventilated housing and... oh look, it's right there in the list: "family economic problems".
New tag: "Unsupportedwildspeculationisnotcausation".
Its very unfortunate that everyone in the world doesn't know the difference. It would solve so many problems in the world, if everyone was forced to learn the difference throughout school and in everyday adult life.
It is also unfortunate that everyone in the world can't read. For example, nowhere in the summary or article does anyone assert "causation"; therefore, this objection is entirely irrelevant in here. (As another poster points out, "correlationisnotcausation" has become Slashdot shorthand for "I choose to ignore all of your scientific evidence".)
What are these researchers supposed to do, not publish their findings because they establish correlation? In research like this, it is the very strongest possible finding that could be had (until we start doing double-blind experiments on children raised in enclosed environments).
No, we don't know how he discovered her identity one way or the other. That's the glaring omission in this story, apparently no one's so much as thought to ask the congressman, and all of this hand-wringing is really beside the point until we find out.
When and if the exact mechanism is revealed, I'm calling it an easy bet that it will turn out to be an abuse of government power (judging from some small personal experience).
That's nice, but I don't remember anything I did in college courses- and when your business is mostly CRUD apps little things like that matter even less. I write things so that they could conceivably be maintained by even our most junior coder. The functionality of software is important but it is also a form of communication, much like mathematics.
I must admit that seems mind-bogglingly stupid. (1) Computer science is about algorithms. (2) Complexity should be abstracted. (3) College is for education.
You're actually taking pride in saying that you prohibit all of those things in your workplace. It seriously sounds like you're not really writing software at all.
According to the indictment, these alleged criminal actions affected the outcome of federal, local, and state primary and general elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006. The indictment accused the defendants of the following criminal actions:
2. On or about May 16,2006, and on or about November 7,2006, pursuant to the laws of the United States and the Commonwealth of Kentucky, primary and general elections were held in Manchester, Clay County, in the Eastern District of Kentucky, for the purpose of selecting candidates for state, local and federal offices.
That's followed by the precise manner in which the conspirators tampered with those elections.
Meta-moderators feel free to down-moderate people who thought parent was insightful. It's very much not so.
Slashdot Mirror
The anonymous poster makes a good counter argument against the idea that the algorithm must be easily defeatible: just because you have an algorithm that detects human behavior does not imply you have an algorithm that emulates the human behavior detected by the original algorithm.
That's vaguely clever, but it doesn't really pass the sniff test. While "one-way" or "trapdoor" functions may or may not exist, they appear to be pretty rare. That's why it's such a big deal when computer scientists identify a new possible trapdoor function. The chances that any randomly-chosen process happens to be trapdoor (for example, verifying human mouse gestures on a webpage) is monumentally unlikely.
Trapdoor functions came to prominence in cryptography in the mid-1970s with the publication of asymmetric (or public key) encryption techniques by Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle. Indeed, Diffie and Hellman first coined the term (Diffie and Hellman, 1976). Several function classes have been proposed, and it soon became obvious that trapdoor functions are harder to find than was initially thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_door_function
I also live in NYC (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn) and I know that I'd certainly rather have stuff shipped to me by USPS than any other option. I don't have any of the problems that you mention. The other carriers are always a much bigger hassle.
Here yesterday I just received a UPS notice on the door; allegedly "Final Attempt" (never received a 1st or 2nd attempt), no info on what the package is, a tracking number which comes up online and by phone as "not in the system, no information", so I don't have any way to find out what I need to do about it now.
The UPS/FedEx stuff is always an eye-rolling hassle when I see one coming. Give me USPS any day over here. I do feel sorry to hear about you local service, that's far beyond anything that I've ever heard of in the several different states that I've lived in.
I'll come out and just call "bullshit" on this entire claim. Textbooks open-source and free, great, I'm all for that. Lecture videos online, that's pretty cool, too (watching one right now on my bus travel to work). Virtual labs, I'm not an applied scientist, but that smells fishy.
Anyway, here's the reason I'm passionate about classroom teaching: The ability for students to ask questions. That's the unalterable advantage that the classroom lecture has. A physical person that you can have an immediate dialogue with, complete with body language, facial expressions, physical manipulation, "here take this chalk and draw me what you're talking about", pointing to specific words, taking a student's book and showing them the reference they can't find, slamming my hand on the board to make a big point, dropping books from the ceiling to check how fast things fall, etc.
Friends and employers keep suggesting that I teach online classes (honestly, the real reason this is attractive to them is that once it's established, they can outsource all the teaching to our friends in India). I wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole. On the day when there's no classroom teaching, then I'll move on to some other job. But I suspect that there will always be a demand for personal, live teachers.
Brick and mortar schools will continue to exist. In fact, they will likely exist just as they do now. Thing is that with secondary enrollment dropping and competition with foreign institutions on the rise...
No, college enrollment is rising. In places it's up 10, 30, even 50% in recent years. And, "Part of the enrollment increase is due to the rising number of foreign students."
http://www.examiner.com/x-1393-Education-Improvement-Examiner~y2009m2d18-Student-enrollment-rising-at-many-colleges
IMHO, if turning in a paper that someone else wrote can get me a good grade, that's just a sign that the course wasn't actually teaching anything in the first place, but merely hoping that exposure to the material would magically lead to education of the students.
Good teachers rely on a suite of metrics to gauge student progress and adjust the curriculum to suit. Bad teachers "plagiarize" in the sense that they just deliver the material they were given and grade papers/tests on the basis of their comparison to a hypothetical ideal.
That is some of the purest, most complete bullshit that I've read in a good long time.
I should clarify that most of us aren't happy about it, but a gentleman's agreement is in place that we can either do it voluntarily, or the government can make it a legal requirement and heap more trouble to implement.
That's not a "gentleman's agreement". That's called "being a pussy".
Those of us who run for fun and who are not gifted with perfect alignment may overpronate or supinate our feet when we run. This action is less efficient, so we're less likely to be fast enough to join a college team. A small majority of people overpronate, somewhat less have a good neutral position, and a few people supinate. To look for overpronation, check out your old tennis shoes: if your shoes wear out first near the ball of the foot, chances are you're an overpronator.
Did you notice that the book extract argues that pronation is a good thing, and that preventing pronation with a shoe is precisely what causes more injuries?
For decades, Dr Hartmann has been watching the explosion of ever more structured running shoes with dismay. 'Pronation has become this very bad word, but it's just the natural movement of the foot,' he says. 'The foot is supposed to pronate.'
To see pronation in action, kick off your shoes and run down the driveway. On a hard surface, your feet will automatically shift to selfdefence mode: you'll find yourself landing on the outside edge of your foot, then gently rolling from little toe over to big until your foot is flat. That's pronation - a mild, shockabsorbing twist that allows your arch to compress.
Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all, if by "rational" you mean "economically rational." There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.
Is this not a case of a game with more than one Nash equilibrium, like a bank run? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
If not that, then the even simpler explanation is that "contrary to traditional economic assumptions, people are not rational".
Hmmm, if you smoothed out the data so that it was say, averaged over an hour, and force it to be continuous, could you get something going then.
My point is that's about the worst assumption you can make.
Certainly not a full-on AI problem, just parameterize the flow density and flow rate and define a decent model and cost function, and run it through an NLP solver.
Except that it's really a discrete problem, with a solution that likely has sensitive dependence on initial conditions (i.e., chaotic), and would result in symptoms such as "bus bunching": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching
But, to avoid being modded offtopic, let's ask another question: Why should it be illegal to play pyramid schemes? Just because people are stupid enough to fall for them?
Yes.
I have no sympathy for people who are lured in by promises that are quite bluntly too good to be true, where thinking about it for only a minute would give you enough reasons to stay away from it.
Too fucking bad.
However, WotC cannot stop other companies making D&D-like games, settings, adventures, and products for 3.x rules -- as long as they're not called "D&D". Several companies are still doing that.
I am in the industry and have co-authored several products published under the OGL.
Nontheless, if WOTC decided to file suits against OGL publishers on narrow technical grounds (improper referencing, use of the d20 mark as seen at http://www.d20srd.org/, etc.), the will or ability to defend against such suits would be minimal. Even if they were on the right side of the law.
Fortunately the 3.x rules are open source [opengamingfoundation.org] so D&D can never die, in spite of WotC's seemingly intentional efforts to run their business into the ground.
In theory, yes. However, I fear (and have predicted for some time) that WOTC would begin legal proceedings against sites likes those under technical grounds. The will or ability to defend against any suits would be minimal.
They want the printed copy if there is one available, if the book is good. I've seen books that are readily available in PDF form (from other publishers) go for three and four digit sums on ebay because they can't be bought anymore. I'm in a similar boat, I want my book in my hand (ever tried bringing a laptop to a fantasy RPG session? Talk about mood killer).
Allow me to offer up some counterexamples. I was just at an annual gaming retreat with friends last weekend, where we played classic D&D and other games. (a) I ran an OD&D game, and to my great pleasure, one of the players had bought the OD&D PDFs and printed and bound his own little books from them. (b) I also ran an AD&D game, and instead of hauling the big hardcovers with me, I did indeed have them on a laptop, as I've done before, and it didn't bother anyone (kept below table height on a chair next to me).
Here's the upshot: I was just today going to write my player and recommend he also buy the Supplement I PDF to add to his OD&D books. But now he can't do that. Bizarre.
So in your sick, sorry world, once we are at war we can kill all the civilians we want, and that is a good thing.
Dude, that's what war is. If you don't want war, then don't fight them. Don't sit there and pretend that war is a noble thing like a video game with so many rules.
Dude, that's the definition of crimes against humanity. People have been tried and executed for doing that, such as in the Nuremburg trials. The rules are laid down in internationally-binding documents such as the Hague Conventions, the Geneva Protocol, and the London Charter.
You are incorrect.
In an observational study, researchers simply observe characteristics and take measurements, as in a sample survey. In a designed experiment, researchers impose treatments and controls and then observe characteristics and take measurements. Observational studies can reveal only association, whereas designed experiments can help establish causation.
Neil A. Weiss, Introductory Statistics 7E, p. 22.
In other words the French are rude. When someone from a foreign country walks into an American store, we do our best to help them, like finding a translator. We certainly don't snub them & pretend to not hear them.
Of course, in the situation you describe, you're not dealing with American tourists. If had to do that, I might run and hide myself.
From the original article:
In case you haven't guessed it yet, APRIL FOOLS!!! Seriously, if we get any real news about outages, deaths, or disruptions actually caused by Conficker today, you will read it here first.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/04/conficker_worm_strikes_militar.html?wprss=securityfix
(1) Does the article or summary assert causation at any point? No, they don't. Therefore, "correlationisnotcausation" is an entirely irrelevant response here.
(2) Is correlation the strongest possible result from research like this? Yes, it is. To demonstrate causation you'd need a designed experiement, with babies raised for years in a controlled environment with vinyl to see how many became autistic; experiments like that are not possible.
(3) As another poster said, "correlationisnotcausation" has become Slashdot shorthand for "I choose to ignore all of your scientific evidence". Compare to: "Evolution has not been proved, it's only a theory."
Low income. Increases the likelihood of smoking, vinyl flooring, poorly ventilated housing and... oh look, it's right there in the list: "family economic problems".
New tag: "Unsupportedwildspeculationisnotcausation".
Its very unfortunate that everyone in the world doesn't know the difference. It would solve so many problems in the world, if everyone was forced to learn the difference throughout school and in everyday adult life.
It is also unfortunate that everyone in the world can't read. For example, nowhere in the summary or article does anyone assert "causation"; therefore, this objection is entirely irrelevant in here. (As another poster points out, "correlationisnotcausation" has become Slashdot shorthand for "I choose to ignore all of your scientific evidence".)
What are these researchers supposed to do, not publish their findings because they establish correlation? In research like this, it is the very strongest possible finding that could be had (until we start doing double-blind experiments on children raised in enclosed environments).
He discovered her identity fair and square.
No, we don't know how he discovered her identity one way or the other. That's the glaring omission in this story, apparently no one's so much as thought to ask the congressman, and all of this hand-wringing is really beside the point until we find out.
When and if the exact mechanism is revealed, I'm calling it an easy bet that it will turn out to be an abuse of government power (judging from some small personal experience).
If this passes, I'm going to open up an Institute of Paranormal Studies in Texas, and hire every two bit crackpot psychic to be professors!
Dude, you're thinking too small. I want my M.S. in Flying Spaghetti Monster Studies (MSFSMS), and I want it now.
That's nice, but I don't remember anything I did in college courses- and when your business is mostly CRUD apps little things like that matter even less. I write things so that they could conceivably be maintained by even our most junior coder. The functionality of software is important but it is also a form of communication, much like mathematics.
I must admit that seems mind-bogglingly stupid. (1) Computer science is about algorithms. (2) Complexity should be abstracted. (3) College is for education.
You're actually taking pride in saying that you prohibit all of those things in your workplace. It seriously sounds like you're not really writing software at all.
Source please? Not saying your wrong, I just missed that detail when I RTFA.
From the website of WLEX-TV in Lexington KY ( http://www.lex18.com/Global/story.asp?S=10037216&nav=menu203_2 , 3rd paragraph):
According to the indictment, these alleged criminal actions affected the outcome of federal, local, and state primary and general elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006. The indictment accused the defendants of the following criminal actions:
From the official indictment papers ( http://media.kentucky.com/smedia/2009/03/19/17/clayindict.source.prod_affiliate.79.pdf ; page 14, paragraph 2):
2. On or about May 16,2006, and on or about November 7,2006, pursuant to the
laws of the United States and the Commonwealth of Kentucky, primary and general
elections were held in Manchester, Clay County, in the Eastern District of Kentucky, for
the purpose of selecting candidates for state, local and federal offices.
That's followed by the precise manner in which the conspirators tampered with those elections.
Meta-moderators feel free to down-moderate people who thought parent was insightful. It's very much not so.