The way it's currently implemented, the spam mail isn't deleted -- it simply drops into a "Spam" folder which can be perused as your leisure.
After doing the math, I've come to absolutely trust the filter, even though it occassionally misses a legitimate mail. That's because my rate of classification error is actually higher than the filter's rate of error. The filter is actually better than me at doing it. The fact that it occassionally is wrong is irrelevant.
No, you "get me" correctly. I've been consistently amazed at the reactionary attitudes people seem to display towards spam. Ranging from "false positives are unacceptable," to "open relays are evil," to "we need tough new laws to stop this," I think these people haven't thought through the issue as fully as they could. If you can mute the spammers in any way possible, consistently, then they will eventually wither away -- and there's no need for us to give up what I view as priveledges: the ability to transmit data freely, and if we desire, anonymously.
There are some more fundamental issues here that will need to be addressed. One of the more important, IMHO, is the possibility for fully automated censorship. The computer determines that your sentiments are anti-American? You're censored.
That's one of the more disturbing scenarios I've had to contend with while taking part in this research. If we can reach a point where a filter can reliably determine if something is an advertisement, then maybe we can reliably determine if someone is expressing a particular opinion. Scary stuff.
Wrong. 1 false positive can be acceptable, and in fact is probably better than how things are now.
At USENIX '03 there was a paper presented on artificial intelligence techniques for spam detection. I can't provide a link since only USENIX members can download the paper (at this point, at least). I was a coauthor of that paper.
One of the things we've discovered in our research is that some classes of filters (most notably, the one I have been developing along with a few other individuals) are actually more effective at correctly classifying email than humans are. That is to say, you can train the learning algorithm on mostly-correctly-classified data, then re-run it over the training data, and almost miraculously, it discovers all kinds of email in the training set that was incorrectly classified.
I.e., this filter has discovered mail that I myself incorrectly thought was spam. It's scary, because there's a lot of it.
To assume that a human will always be 100% accurate at classifying their own email isn't just arrogant, it's plain wrong. Newer filters that will be introduced in the near future might possibly be more accurate than you, a frail human, could ever be.
Yeah, it's a bitch when a company can't slap a widget onto government funded software and then sell it back.
They're already way ahead of you. Check out this passage from the license agreement for the open source computational fluid dynamics software called "ISAAC" (can be found here):
NO SALE TO U.S. GOVERNMENT
11. The PROGRAM, and/or any modified version thereof, shall not, in any manner, be offered for sale to the U.S. Government, without the written consent of the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government shall not pay a second time for the PROGRAM or any enhanced/modified version therof. The PROGRAM may be used in contract with the U.S. Government, but no charge may be made for its use. If the PROGRAM is modified using or enhanced using U.S. Government funds, the Government will be provided the complete source code of that modified/enhanced version and the intellectual property rights of the resulting modification/enhancement shall be controlled by such funding agreement.
In other words, the government already paid for it once, and they'll be damned if they're gonna pay for it again. I'm quite sure that this passage was a requirement of their federal research grant.
Therefore, if left to compete in the open environment (maybe some seeds spread to a different field, or some kid turns their fish loose in the sea) they could replace the natural species.
Cool, huh? Evolution has come up with an incredible trick to accelerate itself -- evolve a supersmart organism and apply its intelligence to the genetic engineering problem.
Who the hell are we to stand in the way of evolution?
My point wasn't the fact that the doc was 500k, I just said that to give a specific example.
In a way it makes sense to hold media organizations to a right-of-reply standard since they generally have control over the media distribution channels (the capacity to print newspapers, ownership of the broadcasting stations, etc.) and therefore could easily stifle contrary opinions.
There is no such potential monopoly of information on the web. Anyone and everyone can put up a web site (by hosting it themselves, or through someone else, or just posting comments on any of the billion bulletin boards out there). It isn't possible for people to censor each other on the web, since nothing is stopping you from putting up your own site. The situation is quite different when you need a half million in startup capital just to start printing your own newsletter.
I'd say the internet is making traditional media organizations less and less relevant. This sort of law is just total stupidity.
It just ensures the powerfull and rich people can't bash and blaim poor people
No, it means that when you post anti-Microsoft tirades on your little blog site, MS has the right to come in and force you to put up a 500k.doc file telling everyone why you are full of shit.
I figured it would get modded that way before I even started writing it. Ironically I also used to take a cocktail of various things, this is why I felt I had some experience to comment on it.
The guy's response to my comment was also quite civilized, I think it's pretty apparent that this isn't a flamewar here...
Let me get this straight. You don't feel good about who you are, so you've decided to bombard yourself with a mix of psychoactive drugs until you do feel good?
How can you even objectively determine what "feeling good" means, if your mental state is so heavily modified? It's a paradox. For all you know, your sober self might hate your current state, and the only reason you seem to be comfortable with it is precisely because you're all fucked up. Ever consider that?
I think the only real problem you have is obsession and compulsion. More specifically, you seem like a hypochondriac (I have direct family experience of both disorders). You don't have a billion different problems requiring a billion drugs, you have one problem that requires counseling...
BTW, the fact that these are all "natural" substances means precisely dick.
N2O (nitrous oxide) is used to make instant whipped cream - in a pressurised state it dissolves in fat
This, by the way, is why it gets you "high" when you breathe it. The N2O dissolves into the fatty cell membrane of neurons, causing them to expand a fraction of a percent. The swollen nerve cells are the cause of the anaesthetic effect. The N2O isn't changed by this process, you eventually just breathe it all back out again. Although it can also diffuse out through your ear drums and cause some discomfort in the ear. In fact it's a generally stupid thing to do.
Has anyone else thought that maybe, instead of completely insane behavior on SCO's part, this is actually a very clever method of advancing Linux? Maybe SCO sees the end of days coming and decided to "heroically" go down in a ridiculous court battle that gets tons of free publicity for Linux and ultimately makes Linux look like a champion in the end?
I know that seems a little off the deep end, but I've spoken to more than one person who believes this might be the case...
Now, I agree with you that posting a pirate wankfest to the front page of Slashdot is just plain idiotic. I'm sick of seeing articles brazenly encouraging illegal behavior (regardless of what we might think of those laws).
But what the hell are you talking about Open Source for? I didn't see Open Source mentioned anywhere, and given that the majority of Slashdot readers use Windows as indicated in a recent poll I think it's kind of funny to refer to the whole of Slashdot as "Open Source culture."
OK - so Red Hat can come in and check I'm not claiming their services for more installations than they authorised their services for. Entirely reasonable.
How the fuck is that "entirely reasonable?" How would you like it if you had a contract with Ford which said, "We grant Ford the right to audit Purchaser's home and vehicle from time to time in order to verify compliance with the Warranty conditions."
You paid for it, and unless Red Hat believes you to be dishonest in some way they have no business invading your workplace. And just because it's written in a license agreement doesn't mean it's not completely bullshit.
Wrong. On some platforms a code pointer can be a different size than a data pointer. On 16-bit MS-DOS for example it would be common to make API calls using far pointers (two 16-bit components) yet reference application variables using near pointers (single 16-bit component). In such a memory model it would be impossible to store a 32-bit code address into a 16-bit data pointer. Which is exactly why the C language makes no guarantees about the compatibility between different pointer types.
If you're bothering to use C, you should do it right. If a pointer is pointing to a function, then it should be declared as a pointer to a function. You could also, in principle, just use ints as pointers and "cast that to whatever you need," but that would be stupid, wouldn't it?
I dunno about USB bongs, but there are USB vaporizers that can be programmed to fairly complicated heating/cooling schedules. I saw one of these last weekend, couldn't believe my eyes...
First, they didn't define "near vacuum." They could have meant 15% of sea level pressure, or 5%, or 35%. Who knows. I don't know how high the thing was when it happened, but if I did, it would be easy to compute.
The fact is, even if the shuttle were accelerating upward at 4 G's (a sustained acceleration of 4G is huge), and the foam accelerating downward at 1 G, for a total acceleration of the foam relative to the shuttle of 5 G's, then in falling a distance of, say, 200 feet along the shuttle the thing would only be moving at sqrt(2*5*32*200) = 253 ft/s = 172 MPH. And 200 feet is an overestimate. From looking at the video, it's easily shown that the thing was really moving closer to 500 MPH. The difference of 328 MPH must have been caused by some other force, and the only other possible force is wind resistance.
Well, guessing conservatively that the shuttle is accelerating upward at 1 G (the numbers are even more convincing if it accelerates faster than that): 1000 MPH = 1466 ft/s. Divide by 32 ft/s^2 acceleration (1 G) gives 45 seconds to reach 1466 ft/s. Distance traveled in that time is 1/2*32*45*45 = 32400 ft. About the same height as a commercial airliner. A little higher than Mt. Everest.
The air is definitely thinner up there, but it's not exactly "vacuum." Heavy, 180+ pound people can't climb Everest in 150 MPH winds, let alone 1000 MPH winds. Compare that to the effect on a 1.5 pound piece of foam with a large cross section. I can quite easily believe the foam accelerated to 500 MPH relative to the wing.
What I meant (and what I assume NASA meant) was that the foam was traveling 500 MPH relative to the shuttle. After all, the speed relative to anything else is pretty irrelevant, since the only things involved in the collision were the shuttle and the foam.
It was the shuttle's 1000 MPH speed relative to the ground that caused a 1000 MPH apparent wind relative to the shuttle, which blew the foam so that it was traveling 500 MPH relative to the shuttle. OK, clear?
Think of it this way. The shuttle was moving upward at about 1000 MPH. The air is "standing still," so it's just as if the shuttle were standing still, and a 1000 MPH hour wind were blowing past it. Now, imagine a piece of foam breaks off and separates from the shuttle. It hits this 1000 MPH wind, and is accelerated backward extremely quickly so that by the time it has reached the shuttle wing, it's going 500 MPH.
It's the 1000 MPH relative wind that produced the huge change in speed between the wing and the foam. The shuttle was accelerating upward somewhere around 3-4 G, and there's the 1 G due to gravity, but those are small accelerations compared to the wind resistance.
Slashdot Mirror
After doing the math, I've come to absolutely trust the filter, even though it occassionally misses a legitimate mail. That's because my rate of classification error is actually higher than the filter's rate of error. The filter is actually better than me at doing it. The fact that it occassionally is wrong is irrelevant.
There are some more fundamental issues here that will need to be addressed. One of the more important, IMHO, is the possibility for fully automated censorship. The computer determines that your sentiments are anti-American? You're censored.
That's one of the more disturbing scenarios I've had to contend with while taking part in this research. If we can reach a point where a filter can reliably determine if something is an advertisement, then maybe we can reliably determine if someone is expressing a particular opinion. Scary stuff.
Finally we'll be able to have anonymous remailers again, without spammers abusing them.
At USENIX '03 there was a paper presented on artificial intelligence techniques for spam detection. I can't provide a link since only USENIX members can download the paper (at this point, at least). I was a coauthor of that paper.
One of the things we've discovered in our research is that some classes of filters (most notably, the one I have been developing along with a few other individuals) are actually more effective at correctly classifying email than humans are. That is to say, you can train the learning algorithm on mostly-correctly-classified data, then re-run it over the training data, and almost miraculously, it discovers all kinds of email in the training set that was incorrectly classified.
I.e., this filter has discovered mail that I myself incorrectly thought was spam. It's scary, because there's a lot of it.
To assume that a human will always be 100% accurate at classifying their own email isn't just arrogant, it's plain wrong. Newer filters that will be introduced in the near future might possibly be more accurate than you, a frail human, could ever be.
I'm confused -- doesn't McDonald's food come in a brown bag?
Competition between MS and Google might occur. Google might improve. How terrible!
They're already way ahead of you. Check out this passage from the license agreement for the open source computational fluid dynamics software called "ISAAC" (can be found here):
NO SALE TO U.S. GOVERNMENT
11. The PROGRAM, and/or any modified version thereof, shall not, in any manner, be offered for sale to the U.S. Government, without the written consent of the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government shall not pay a second time for the PROGRAM or any enhanced/modified version therof. The PROGRAM may be used in contract with the U.S. Government, but no charge may be made for its use. If the PROGRAM is modified using or enhanced using U.S. Government funds, the Government will be provided the complete source code of that modified/enhanced version and the intellectual property rights of the resulting modification/enhancement shall be controlled by such funding agreement.
In other words, the government already paid for it once, and they'll be damned if they're gonna pay for it again. I'm quite sure that this passage was a requirement of their federal research grant.
Cool, huh? Evolution has come up with an incredible trick to accelerate itself -- evolve a supersmart organism and apply its intelligence to the genetic engineering problem.
Who the hell are we to stand in the way of evolution?
In a way it makes sense to hold media organizations to a right-of-reply standard since they generally have control over the media distribution channels (the capacity to print newspapers, ownership of the broadcasting stations, etc.) and therefore could easily stifle contrary opinions.
There is no such potential monopoly of information on the web. Anyone and everyone can put up a web site (by hosting it themselves, or through someone else, or just posting comments on any of the billion bulletin boards out there). It isn't possible for people to censor each other on the web, since nothing is stopping you from putting up your own site. The situation is quite different when you need a half million in startup capital just to start printing your own newsletter.
I'd say the internet is making traditional media organizations less and less relevant. This sort of law is just total stupidity.
No, it means that when you post anti-Microsoft tirades on your little blog site, MS has the right to come in and force you to put up a 500k .doc file telling everyone why you are full of shit.
The guy's response to my comment was also quite civilized, I think it's pretty apparent that this isn't a flamewar here...
How can you even objectively determine what "feeling good" means, if your mental state is so heavily modified? It's a paradox. For all you know, your sober self might hate your current state, and the only reason you seem to be comfortable with it is precisely because you're all fucked up. Ever consider that?
I think the only real problem you have is obsession and compulsion. More specifically, you seem like a hypochondriac (I have direct family experience of both disorders). You don't have a billion different problems requiring a billion drugs, you have one problem that requires counseling...
BTW, the fact that these are all "natural" substances means precisely dick.
I think by "copy" he meant "duplicate the functionality and semantics." Chill, dude, that was harsh.
This, by the way, is why it gets you "high" when you breathe it. The N2O dissolves into the fatty cell membrane of neurons, causing them to expand a fraction of a percent. The swollen nerve cells are the cause of the anaesthetic effect. The N2O isn't changed by this process, you eventually just breathe it all back out again. Although it can also diffuse out through your ear drums and cause some discomfort in the ear. In fact it's a generally stupid thing to do.
I know that seems a little off the deep end, but I've spoken to more than one person who believes this might be the case...
But what the hell are you talking about Open Source for? I didn't see Open Source mentioned anywhere, and given that the majority of Slashdot readers use Windows as indicated in a recent poll I think it's kind of funny to refer to the whole of Slashdot as "Open Source culture."
How the fuck is that "entirely reasonable?" How would you like it if you had a contract with Ford which said, "We grant Ford the right to audit Purchaser's home and vehicle from time to time in order to verify compliance with the Warranty conditions."
You paid for it, and unless Red Hat believes you to be dishonest in some way they have no business invading your workplace. And just because it's written in a license agreement doesn't mean it's not completely bullshit.
Wrong. On some platforms a code pointer can be a different size than a data pointer. On 16-bit MS-DOS for example it would be common to make API calls using far pointers (two 16-bit components) yet reference application variables using near pointers (single 16-bit component). In such a memory model it would be impossible to store a 32-bit code address into a 16-bit data pointer. Which is exactly why the C language makes no guarantees about the compatibility between different pointer types.
If you're bothering to use C, you should do it right. If a pointer is pointing to a function, then it should be declared as a pointer to a function. You could also, in principle, just use ints as pointers and "cast that to whatever you need," but that would be stupid, wouldn't it?
That should be:
void (*funcs[])() = { sys_socket, sys_connect, ... };
I dunno about USB bongs, but there are USB vaporizers that can be programmed to fairly complicated heating/cooling schedules. I saw one of these last weekend, couldn't believe my eyes...
The fact is, even if the shuttle were accelerating upward at 4 G's (a sustained acceleration of 4G is huge), and the foam accelerating downward at 1 G, for a total acceleration of the foam relative to the shuttle of 5 G's, then in falling a distance of, say, 200 feet along the shuttle the thing would only be moving at sqrt(2*5*32*200) = 253 ft/s = 172 MPH. And 200 feet is an overestimate. From looking at the video, it's easily shown that the thing was really moving closer to 500 MPH. The difference of 328 MPH must have been caused by some other force, and the only other possible force is wind resistance.
You can't argue with fact.
The air is definitely thinner up there, but it's not exactly "vacuum." Heavy, 180+ pound people can't climb Everest in 150 MPH winds, let alone 1000 MPH winds. Compare that to the effect on a 1.5 pound piece of foam with a large cross section. I can quite easily believe the foam accelerated to 500 MPH relative to the wing.
It was the shuttle's 1000 MPH speed relative to the ground that caused a 1000 MPH apparent wind relative to the shuttle, which blew the foam so that it was traveling 500 MPH relative to the shuttle. OK, clear?
I'm glad we're all getting moderated to -1 for asking perfectly legitimate questions.
It's the 1000 MPH relative wind that produced the huge change in speed between the wing and the foam. The shuttle was accelerating upward somewhere around 3-4 G, and there's the 1 G due to gravity, but those are small accelerations compared to the wind resistance.