if I have to take it on the chin to show AV, that's what I'll do
Versus the slacktivism approach: "I don't like it, so I'll whine about it on Slashdot, but if it's actually going to COST me anything to do anything about it, I won't."
Of course, I'm waiting to see whether the lawsuits materialize, and if they do, whether they're nuisance suits based on absurdly broad patents. It is possible they're patenting a relatively small innovation and people should be paying them a licensing fee, after all.
Is probably 6,112,203 (egad, that's an ugly URL). There are more, according to the article, but this one seems most relevant. Filed in '98.
Method for ranking documents in a hyperlinked environment using connectivity and selective content analysis
Abstract
In a computerized method, a set of documents is ranked according to their content and their connectivity by using topic distillation. The documents include links that connect the documents to each other, either directly, or indirectly. A graph is constructed in a memory of a computer system. In the graph, nodes represent the documents, and directed edges represent the links. Based on the number of links connecting the various nodes, a subset of documents is selected to form a topic. A second subset of the documents is chosen based on the number of directed edges connecting the nodes. Nodes in the second subset are compared with the topic to determine similarity to the topic, and a relevance weight is correspondingly assigned to each node. Nodes in the second subset having a relevance weight less than a predetermined threshold are pruned from the graph. The documents represented by the remaining nodes in the graph are ranked by connectivity based ranking scheme.
But the Standard needs to be expanded, I think, to cover categories of 'bots or categories of files.
For instance, I don't let image-surfing software suck up my bandwidth looking for copyright violations or whatever. The images I have are either original to me, or part of a snapshot archive of newsgroup regulars and events, and there's positively no benefit to me in return for bandwidth hogging.
Now, the bulk of the graphics are in particular directories that are blocked in robots.txt, but you ought also be able to say "no *.jpg" or "no *.cgi" or whatever. Or "no image indexing bots," or whatever.
Bah. I've already had medical care negatively affected by Palm technology.
My husband and I were in the ante-something area at the hospital (the pre-delivery room), and the staff OB had just confirmed that I was really in labor. My husband whips out his Palm to get our OB's home phone number, and the next thing I know, here's the doc pulling his slightly-different-model out and they're doing compare-and-contrast.
Now, while I like techtoys as much as the next geek, at that particular point (contractions every two minutes) I felt it was more important to yell "HEY, CAN I GET SOME DRUGS HERE?"
I'm setting up an office for a nonprofit, and since we've got underpowered donated computers and no budget for this, Linux seems to be the way to go... but we're needing some kind of membership tracking software. We're already running MySQL, and I could write my own, but if there's something already out there that I could install (and possibly just customize), that would be spiffy.
That's normal business practices, some places. I worked for an airline where this happened to a guy while he was out of town. Everybody at home office knew, because they cleaned out his office. Completely. Even his telephone was gone. And chair. Poor guy got back to the office and stood for about twenty minutes staring at the desktop and looking shellshocked. He was upper-level management, too.
And, of course, there's the time I worked for a place for six months *after* getting laid off - when the company moved most of their HQ out of town, it was apparently easier for Payroll to bulk-delete *all* the employees, and only reinstate the few that were staying. I never got reinstated. The Payroll monkeys just pushed the "Override" button every two weeks when the system griped that it was having to send a check to a terminated employee.
but I've never heard of racism being a problem at the biggest software vendor in the world
"Biggest" may be exactly the problem.
You see, there's no obligation to prove that Microsoft has a problem with institutionalized racism. Heck, it can be minority-owned. It doesn't matter.
The company is liable if one manager engages in preferential hiring/promotion. In fact, the company is liable if one employee creates a "hostile work environment." A wronged employee doesn't even have to complain, if a "reasonable person" would consider the behavior hostile... go directly to court, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
All the policies and whatnot do is reduce the amount of punitive damages the jury should award... a company with good policy and managerial training that had one bad apple on the payroll shouldn't be "fined" as much as a company with a poor-or-nonexistent policy, no managerial training, etc. Microsoft being, shall we say, a bit on the large side, has a pretty good chance of having a few bad apples.
It seems that these people expect everything to go their way, but if it doesn't, they bitch and whine about it because they think it's caused by the fact that they're a minority. Some people think that they should get special treatment only because they belong to a minority group. Hmm, isn't that just as unfair as getting special treatment only because you belong to a MAJORITY group?
I always thought this way until I got involved in a Title VII situation myself (sexual discrimination/hostile work environment). Prior to that, I'd thought "Nobody could be that stupid." I mean, I'd worked in some classically sexist environments, with girlie calendars and groping salesmen, and I've always figured that a simple "Paws off, creep" was more effective than a lawsuit.
And then I met someone who was that stupid (well, more perverted than stupid), and had a company owner who was desperate enough to be afraid to do anything about it. It was a messy situation.
But here's the ugly part: two people got unjustly fired over the situation. One female, one male. The male ex-employee had no recourse because he wasn't a member of a Protected Class under Title VII, even though the situation itself was a Title VII violation.
So apparently if you're in a (hypothetical) chronically racist company, say as a manager, and you get fired for, say, promoting a minority employee, you're SOL unless you're a minority too. Something wrong with that law.
And oftentimes you specify an absurd punitive figure so you can come back and say "OR the company can institute thus-and-such an education program to teach the managers what they can't do and to teach the employees what their options are if the managers do what they can't do."
But those things happen further in, and get locked up into the nondisclosure bit of the settlement, so only the absurd figure gets to the press.
How many sites actually use the RBL (and kin) for blocking Web sites? Last I checked, tossing it into my sendmail config only affected my ability to receive mail from listed sites - no packet blocking at all. Is anything else a common usage of the RBL?
Neon. I got one of those as a rental car a few years back (not a bad little car, for a little car) and every time I went out to the parking lot I had an overwhelming urge to say "Hi" to the excessively cute little thing. Gah.
Are the old archives back, though?
on
Deja.com Vu!
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· Score: 1
When I checked, they still had a memory lapse in 1999. That's kind of a major deal.
And, of course, Remarq was pieced out before the "core service" (the Usenet archives) was just plain discontinued. I'm not breaking out the champagne yet.
The procedure I talked about hardly describes a 'technological wizard'.
To the average nontechnical user, it is wizardry. High wizardry, completely arcane. We're talking about people who don't like to subscribe to more than one mailing list because the messages get all confused in their Inbox. About people who sign up, and then respond to the first mailing list message with "Who are you, and why are you saying that to me?"
This is, of course, exactly why web forums (you know, like here...) are more popular these days. It's clunky, it's slow, but there are big friendly buttons to click on, and if you don't understand it, you can stop going there and it doesn't keep piling up in your mailbox and scaring you.
Another thought - do you really want people that dumb on your mailing list? I sure wouldn't.
If it was a technical list, I might agree with you. But I'm insufficiently elitist to say that people have to be technological wizards to join mailing lists that have nothing to do with technology.
(I actually used to be that way. The lists used to reject MIME and attachments and HTML-formatted posts and all that sort of thing. Now it silently cleans them up and posts them, since that's easier than trying to get users to correctly configure Outlook or AOL. The only thing I still don't hand out any sympathy for is people who can't unsubscribe. They get set to moderated so other people don't have to listen to "UNSUBSCRIBE ME NOW!!1!!!1!" whines, and if they ask politely, they get pointed to a page that lectures them on all the ways they could have figured out how to unsubscribe (starting with "Why didn't you keep the file that started out with the warning 'SAVE THIS FILE, YOU'LL NEED IT LATER'?") before actually telling them how.)
Re:Christmas isn't about presents
on
Gifts For Geeks
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· Score: 1
Athiest Children Get Presents Day
What about the children who are only athy, or perhaps just a little athier? Don't they get presents, too, or is it some kind of competition?
You would, of course, have to take a little more time in setting up your mail account on such an XNS-enabled mail server - set up the email address of those people and mailing lists you're on, so they don't get trashed, or bounce messages back into lists, etc. Small price to pay to actually destroy the entire spam industry, though, I'd think
Speaking as a mailing list provider, I can pretty much tell you that that "small price" would kill mailing lists, too. People aren't smart enough to figure out how to unsubscribe (when all you do is send an email to listname-off@domain, and it's IN THE STUPID SIG OF EVERY STUPID LIST MESSAGE), do you think they'll remember to put the mailing address in their filter exceptions?
Heck no. They'll subscribe, bounce crap to the list or listowner (who has to try to figure out where the crap is coming from since half the time it's forwarded from a hotmail address that's subscribed), and then say "This mailing list sucks. I never get any mail from it.
other than why an airline pilot would be in grad school for sociology
A lot of pilots (especially ones who came out of the armed forces) don't plan to do it for life. For one thing, FAA regs require you to stop flying at 60. Period. Doesn't matter what your physical says. When your only promotion path is to go from "fly plane" to "fly desk, managing people who fly planes," sometimes you want to have another option, even before 60.
was probably BS
Of course, some of the biggest BS'ers I've known have been (real) pilots, so...
It's been a while since I've read the book, but I think there was a period of time where he was flying, if only sitting in the seat while the auto-pilot did the flying, so that the real pilot could piss, or sleep, or something.
Well, by that standard I've flown a 727, then, by virtue of being the only one awake in the cockpit. (For awhile, anyway. After I thought about it, I realized the only way I'd know anything was wrong was if it beeped or buzzed or whatever, and that would wake up the PIC just as well as I could, so there wasn't any real reason for me to stay awake, either. So I didn't. Hey, if we're going to engage in Uncontrolled Flight Into Terrain, I'd just as soon sleep through it.)
Re:Anecdotes missing from previous releases?
on
Catch Me If You Can
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· Score: 1
the ATM was messed up but he could take their deposits
People are astonishingly trusting. One morning when I was going to work (at a bank headquarters which included a consumer branch on the first floor), someone was having trouble with the drive-up ATM outside the main doors. Couple of employees stopped to help on their way in, confirmed that the beastie was misbehaving (again; our vendor told us they could do a TCP/IP network, but didn't tell us they'd never done one before), and told the customer the branch opened at 9. Said customer then handed the deposit envelope to the employee, said "Would you turn this in for me when it opens, then?" and drove away. Not being a teller (excuse me: "Customer Service Representative), the employee had no nametag, no visible ID of any kind. Go figure.
He'd said that flights of over eight hours require three pilots, while shorter ones are allowed only two, but several minutes later, he said something about being one of two pilots on a ten-hour flight.
It can happen, but it's pretty unlikely. If you get diverted/delayed, you can end up going over your limits. Usually not by two hours, though. But sometimes (like a charter service that's only got the one crew on, say, Aruba) the airline will "accidentally" schedule a crew over its limit because otherwise they wouldn't be able to get their plane back that day, and they'd rather self-report, pay the fine, and move on than have to worry about scheduling a different plane/crew and/or a buttload of irate vacationers (who are vastly more hostile than regular business travelers, who are used to delays and whatnot and are usually not quite as drunk).
Majors don't have to worry about this very often, because they've got enough flights, planes, and crews going through any one spot that they can just bump people to a later flight, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Versus the slacktivism approach: "I don't like it, so I'll whine about it on Slashdot, but if it's actually going to COST me anything to do anything about it, I won't."
Of course, I'm waiting to see whether the lawsuits materialize, and if they do, whether they're nuisance suits based on absurdly broad patents. It is possible they're patenting a relatively small innovation and people should be paying them a licensing fee, after all.
Method for ranking documents in a hyperlinked environment using connectivity and selective content analysis
Abstract
In a computerized method, a set of documents is ranked according to their content and their connectivity by using topic distillation. The documents include links that connect the documents to each other, either directly, or indirectly. A graph is constructed in a memory of a computer system. In the graph, nodes represent the documents, and directed edges represent the links. Based on the number of links connecting the various nodes, a subset of documents is selected to form a topic. A second subset of the documents is chosen based on the number of directed edges connecting the nodes. Nodes in the second subset are compared with the topic to determine similarity to the topic, and a relevance weight is correspondingly assigned to each node. Nodes in the second subset having a relevance weight less than a predetermined threshold are pruned from the graph. The documents represented by the remaining nodes in the graph are ranked by connectivity based ranking scheme.
Disallow: *
All the patented indexes in the world don't do doodly if there's nothing in your index...
They're also useful for tourist attractions. Looks like something you'd want to have next to Big Brutus. ("11,000,000 pounds of fun!")
(I drive by it every time I visit my mother out of state. I've never stopped. Someday I'll have to, just because.)
For instance, I don't let image-surfing software suck up my bandwidth looking for copyright violations or whatever. The images I have are either original to me, or part of a snapshot archive of newsgroup regulars and events, and there's positively no benefit to me in return for bandwidth hogging.
Now, the bulk of the graphics are in particular directories that are blocked in robots.txt, but you ought also be able to say "no *.jpg" or "no *.cgi" or whatever. Or "no image indexing bots," or whatever.
My husband and I were in the ante-something area at the hospital (the pre-delivery room), and the staff OB had just confirmed that I was really in labor. My husband whips out his Palm to get our OB's home phone number, and the next thing I know, here's the doc pulling his slightly-different-model out and they're doing compare-and-contrast.
Now, while I like techtoys as much as the next geek, at that particular point (contractions every two minutes) I felt it was more important to yell "HEY, CAN I GET SOME DRUGS HERE?"
And, of course, there's the time I worked for a place for six months *after* getting laid off - when the company moved most of their HQ out of town, it was apparently easier for Payroll to bulk-delete *all* the employees, and only reinstate the few that were staying. I never got reinstated. The Payroll monkeys just pushed the "Override" button every two weeks when the system griped that it was having to send a check to a terminated employee.
"Biggest" may be exactly the problem.
You see, there's no obligation to prove that Microsoft has a problem with institutionalized racism. Heck, it can be minority-owned. It doesn't matter.
The company is liable if one manager engages in preferential hiring/promotion. In fact, the company is liable if one employee creates a "hostile work environment." A wronged employee doesn't even have to complain, if a "reasonable person" would consider the behavior hostile... go directly to court, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
All the policies and whatnot do is reduce the amount of punitive damages the jury should award... a company with good policy and managerial training that had one bad apple on the payroll shouldn't be "fined" as much as a company with a poor-or-nonexistent policy, no managerial training, etc. Microsoft being, shall we say, a bit on the large side, has a pretty good chance of having a few bad apples.
I always thought this way until I got involved in a Title VII situation myself (sexual discrimination/hostile work environment). Prior to that, I'd thought "Nobody could be that stupid." I mean, I'd worked in some classically sexist environments, with girlie calendars and groping salesmen, and I've always figured that a simple "Paws off, creep" was more effective than a lawsuit.
And then I met someone who was that stupid (well, more perverted than stupid), and had a company owner who was desperate enough to be afraid to do anything about it. It was a messy situation.
But here's the ugly part: two people got unjustly fired over the situation. One female, one male. The male ex-employee had no recourse because he wasn't a member of a Protected Class under Title VII, even though the situation itself was a Title VII violation.
So apparently if you're in a (hypothetical) chronically racist company, say as a manager, and you get fired for, say, promoting a minority employee, you're SOL unless you're a minority too. Something wrong with that law.
But those things happen further in, and get locked up into the nondisclosure bit of the settlement, so only the absurd figure gets to the press.
Whoa. It's illegal to move? Dang. And I had my eye on a nice three-bedroom Victorian.
Is my scorecard behind? I thought UUnet == MCI.
And, of course, Remarq was pieced out before the "core service" (the Usenet archives) was just plain discontinued. I'm not breaking out the champagne yet.
To the average nontechnical user, it is wizardry. High wizardry, completely arcane. We're talking about people who don't like to subscribe to more than one mailing list because the messages get all confused in their Inbox. About people who sign up, and then respond to the first mailing list message with "Who are you, and why are you saying that to me?"
This is, of course, exactly why web forums (you know, like here...) are more popular these days. It's clunky, it's slow, but there are big friendly buttons to click on, and if you don't understand it, you can stop going there and it doesn't keep piling up in your mailbox and scaring you.
If it was a technical list, I might agree with you. But I'm insufficiently elitist to say that people have to be technological wizards to join mailing lists that have nothing to do with technology.
(I actually used to be that way. The lists used to reject MIME and attachments and HTML-formatted posts and all that sort of thing. Now it silently cleans them up and posts them, since that's easier than trying to get users to correctly configure Outlook or AOL. The only thing I still don't hand out any sympathy for is people who can't unsubscribe. They get set to moderated so other people don't have to listen to "UNSUBSCRIBE ME NOW!!1!!!1!" whines, and if they ask politely, they get pointed to a page that lectures them on all the ways they could have figured out how to unsubscribe (starting with "Why didn't you keep the file that started out with the warning 'SAVE THIS FILE, YOU'LL NEED IT LATER'?") before actually telling them how.)
What about the children who are only athy, or perhaps just a little athier? Don't they get presents, too, or is it some kind of competition?
Speaking as a mailing list provider, I can pretty much tell you that that "small price" would kill mailing lists, too. People aren't smart enough to figure out how to unsubscribe (when all you do is send an email to listname-off@domain, and it's IN THE STUPID SIG OF EVERY STUPID LIST MESSAGE), do you think they'll remember to put the mailing address in their filter exceptions?
Heck no. They'll subscribe, bounce crap to the list or listowner (who has to try to figure out where the crap is coming from since half the time it's forwarded from a hotmail address that's subscribed), and then say "This mailing list sucks. I never get any mail from it.
A lot of pilots (especially ones who came out of the armed forces) don't plan to do it for life. For one thing, FAA regs require you to stop flying at 60. Period. Doesn't matter what your physical says. When your only promotion path is to go from "fly plane" to "fly desk, managing people who fly planes," sometimes you want to have another option, even before 60.
was probably BS
Of course, some of the biggest BS'ers I've known have been (real) pilots, so...
Well, by that standard I've flown a 727, then, by virtue of being the only one awake in the cockpit. (For awhile, anyway. After I thought about it, I realized the only way I'd know anything was wrong was if it beeped or buzzed or whatever, and that would wake up the PIC just as well as I could, so there wasn't any real reason for me to stay awake, either. So I didn't. Hey, if we're going to engage in Uncontrolled Flight Into Terrain, I'd just as soon sleep through it.)
People are astonishingly trusting. One morning when I was going to work (at a bank headquarters which included a consumer branch on the first floor), someone was having trouble with the drive-up ATM outside the main doors. Couple of employees stopped to help on their way in, confirmed that the beastie was misbehaving (again; our vendor told us they could do a TCP/IP network, but didn't tell us they'd never done one before), and told the customer the branch opened at 9. Said customer then handed the deposit envelope to the employee, said "Would you turn this in for me when it opens, then?" and drove away. Not being a teller (excuse me: "Customer Service Representative), the employee had no nametag, no visible ID of any kind. Go figure.
It can happen, but it's pretty unlikely. If you get diverted/delayed, you can end up going over your limits. Usually not by two hours, though. But sometimes (like a charter service that's only got the one crew on, say, Aruba) the airline will "accidentally" schedule a crew over its limit because otherwise they wouldn't be able to get their plane back that day, and they'd rather self-report, pay the fine, and move on than have to worry about scheduling a different plane/crew and/or a buttload of irate vacationers (who are vastly more hostile than regular business travelers, who are used to delays and whatnot and are usually not quite as drunk).
Majors don't have to worry about this very often, because they've got enough flights, planes, and crews going through any one spot that they can just bump people to a later flight, etc.