You know what I'm talking about. It's that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when the talking heads of the local news call Napster a "website"... We, as Slashdotters, are so proud that it's usually as important to us that people KNOW we went to the moon, as it is that we actually WENT to the moon.
Your Napster and Hackers examples are small-scale misconceptions, which are easily explained to people. And to the extent that they don't care about or 'need' to know about P2P versus servers for now, then I agree one can be obnoxious in constantly correcting non-techie people like that.
But to me the moon thing is very different. It's not just someone misunderstanding the science of how we got to the moon. It's that people are willing (and even excited) to accept a gigantic conspiracy theory. A conspiracy so large that our government (which couldn't even keep simple secrets, like the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate coverup) has kept the lid on it for 32 years, somehow keeping silent the 100,000+ people in the space program, and the Russians, the press, and the rest of the scientific world.
If you let someone believe Apollo was faked, you are letting them believe this is a world where huge, unbelievable conspiracies are plausible. Then they can't deal rationally with the rest of the world, because a) they've already accepted this faulty style of reasoning, and b) they can probably connect everything else (Saddam Hussein, mad cow disease) to the gigantic government conspiracy network. I don't want us to inch closer toward that kind of irrational world.
History shows us that, while it may not happen within a single lifetime, misconceptions like the moon-landing theory simply go away.
I've only got this one lifetime, my kids will only have one lifetime. If the pool of irrational people grows, I may have to pay for it, in the form of different public policy. My kids should not have to sit through school board-mandated "alternative theories" of the moon landings. Just real science in science class, thank you.
And yes, if we were flying people to the moon every week, belief in the conspiracy would drop. But the reality is that, in terms of tech/politics/money/willpower, we're probably 30 years or more from doing that. I don't need 30 years of moon doubters poisoning the mental environment in the meantime.
"I'm slowly learning to just live [with] stuff like this.... [T]he best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them... The ignorance will just go away on its own"
I disagree. The conspiratorial mind can refute any set of facts and explanatory theories, because the conspiratorial mind does not use tools of critical thinking (e.g., Occam's Razor). Rather the reverse; it adds conspiracy on top of conspiracy to patch together a spaghetti-code interpretation of the world.
Conspiracy theorists did this after Greek geometers offered proofs that the world is round. And I expect they did it for years after Columbus' trips, too. There is no natural law guaranteeing people will eventually choose to be rational. The challenge needs to be met head on with every generation, because there are psychological benefits to believing what you already know, or what seems natural (flat earth), or what seems exciting ("Columbus faked his trips!").
You cannot beat conspiracy theorists only by presenting the facts! You need to teach people critical thinking skills, logic, and enough background so that they can spot flaws for themselves.
For example, whenever someone cc's me on an urban legend email, I mail them back (after some research) and try to do a bit of education on why the story is implausible, and point them to a resource like snopes.com. People have told me I've helped them become better at spotting fake stories.
So when you write that "the ignorance will just go away on its own", my thoughts are:
1. You're very optimistic, or else you're content with a much longer time scale than I am.
2. The fact that you've given up means the rest of us have to work harder.
I agree with you it can be frustrating to deal with these situations. But helping people to think more clearly not only gives them freedom from illogic and the agendas of others, but to the extent that it removes bogus memes from dominating the culture, it gives me more freedom, too. I think it's one of the most important jobs we can do as modern people.
Your directory search example didn't work too well for me. And while you *can* search Yahoo's news archive, you'll only be searching sources that have a syndication deal with Yahoo. What news search engines provide is the ability to search most major news sources without any non-news sites, and many people want that.
By the way, the NYTimes story mentions moreover.com, which is a great service. But since their search feature only searches headlines, allow me to mention my own project, NewsBlip.com, which performs full-text searches. Give it a try, thanks!
The article says: Modern mathematical notation is the product of centuries of refinement, and the notational conventions for high-quality typesetting are quite complicated.
That notations are complicated is clear, but it's not clear to me that there have been centuries of refinement. My impression is that it's more like months of refinement spread out across centuries of accepting the status quo.
When someone creates a new form of mathematics, she usually get to define the notation for it. If she has no ability in design or semiotics, you may end up with something very far from clear and optimal. In creating notation, you want to take the abstract and make it concrete. But many mathematicians thrive in the highly abstract, and find beauty in representing entire constructs with a single letter.
The strong sense of continuity and tradition in mathematics seem to ensure that the notation will likely be frozen in that state. If we were to take all we've learned about psychology, perception, and structured computer programming, we could probably come up with a unified notational system for math that streamlined everything considerably. Just a hypothesis.
In a sense, Google.com offers a "popular control" filter to the Web. Google's often my first stop for a search, and I am implicitly looking to find out what most people out there think are the best matches for my search. (For balance, it's important, though, to have additional search engines working on different search principles, including plain-old full-text indexing, without weighted links.)
I understand that Carr is using the FDA as an analogy, to state his case for regulation of information. But here's why the analogy fails for me: information is not like poison.
1. Poison kills you, irreversibly. Bad information might confuse you, even for years, but with new information you can change your mind.
2. You (generally) cannot detect poison until it's too late. If all poisons smelled bad, we might not need to regulate them as severely. Bad information smells bad. When I get a chain letter, I sense right away whether I'm likely to find it debunked on snopes.com.
Frankly, I wouldn't know how to test my food for poisons. But information is different. Not only do I have well-known sources on the Web that I can use to verify facts, I have the logic of my own mind to analyze arguments.
The solution here is not to throw away free speech, but to EDUCATE people. Educate them about how to find info on the Web, and how to assess its validity. Educate them on corporate media, be it in print, broadcast, or Internet. Educate them on how to have face-to-face discussions with people of differing opinions; how to assess what's valid and what's unsupportable. Educate them with enough commonly-acceptable history and scientific method that they can easily spot the grossest of factual distortions. It's all the same problem that it was 100 years ago, but just on a larger scale now, with different media. The Web remains the greatest opportunity for free expression ever; let's help everyone rise to the opportunity instead of hiding from it.
Bonker writes: Early experiments where researchers shot electrons through tiny holes in a lead sheild and onto film created similiar diffraction patterns, because, since electrons are indeed particles, they are also waves.
Actually, those are the later experiments:-) The early experiments came before film existed, in 1801. Thomas Young, that Georgian-era nerd, did simple experiments with light coming through two slits. Later, watching ducks at the park, he saw the constructive interference of their wakes on the water, and realized that light had a wave nature.
Not impressive enough for you? Well, a decade later Young studied the newly-discovered Rosetta Stone, and through it became the first modern person to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics!
I understand it differently. AFAIK, Landauer showed that enmergy must be spent to erase information, not to clear a bit. You are erasing information if you use a gate with more input wires than it has output wires. For example, a clasical NOT gate has one input, one output, and no info is erased because you can always tell what input caused a given output; it's reversible. But a classical AND gate could cause a 0 output in three possible ways (00, 01, 10), and you can't tell which; it's irreversible, because you've erased information. Read http://www.qubit.org/intros/compSteane/qcintro.htm l for some more info.
Also, someone should note that the energy savings from reversible computation are real but very, very tiny. Chips would have to get 1 million times more efficient than they are now for the energy costs of (current) irreversibility to manifest themselves. And if you expect a quantum computer to operate without tons of expensive, high-powered supporting equipment around it (NMR machines, optical pumps, liquid helium-cooled ion traps), you'd better add a couple more decades onto your time estimate.
By the way, please don't follow that "q-bits" convention in the New Scientist article. All of the people in the field refer to them as "qubits". Try reading http://arxiv.org/archive/quant-ph (AKA www.lanl.gov). There's no sense in needless term duplication. Thanks.
His first claim is that you should not order from a store that uses the http GET method. He doesn't say why, and I cannot think of any reason. If the form is submitted with an SSL-secured action (action="https:...") then both are equally secure.
Well, if the store has ads served by a third party, when your browser gets the ad images it will send the third party the refering URL, which is the GET with all your info in it. I don't think this scenario is changed just because the refering page is https. This is a known privacy issue.
The Hawthorne plant was a General Electric plant in Cicero, IL, not England[1]. Also, be sure it's the Hawthorne Effect you suspect, and not the Halo Effect, the Pygmalion Effect, the John Henry Effect, the Placebo Effect, or Post Group Euphoria[2].
That's a great idea. Try to read the "Votescam" site and you'll be disappointed at its tone and the scale of their claims. But hop on over to the well-respected CPSR.org (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility), and you'll find lots of interesting stuff on computerized vote tallying over the last decade, including this tidbit:
"Elections computer programs are not subject to design or source code
inspections by independent auditors outside the vendor, as banking software
is. Some programs still in use consist of unstructured COBOL, patched over
the years. In some cases, special purpose code is written for a specific
election, then discarded. There are no requirements that the programs be
written in a high level language, so assembly language is frequently used.
These features make it difficult to determine if the program is designed
correctly."
* CPSR Newsletter, Fall 1988
I'm sure they have more recent stuff than this newsletter, but I just grabbed something quickly.
(Note that the CPSR reports essentially say the vote tallying needs more openness. They do _not_ say, as votescam does, that there's a giant conspiracy that has been choosing the winners.)
More than one supreme court justice made the choice not to advance the case.
What the other justices decided is irrelevant to whether he should have excused himself. Suppose that instead of a conflict-of-interest question, it was an out-and-out case of bribery; suppose he took a $1 million bribe from Microsoft. If he knew it was going to be an 8-1 decision, would that make it okay for him to throw his vote away for money, since it wouldn't affect the outcome? No, of course not. Because it affects other things, like the public's trust in the judiciary. Likewise, to scale it back down to reality, even if he knew 7 other justices would vote the same way, if it would cause an appearance of a conflict of interest for him to participate, it would be wrong, and he should not do it. BTW, read Justice Rehnquist's rationalization in the longer article; it's quite illogical.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he just port code that was already in the Public Domain?
You're wrong:-) I've never heard anyone seriously challenge the idea that Bill, Paul, and a third guy (whose name escapes me now) wrote the Altair BASIC themselves, in assembly. While at Harvard they used a campus mainframe to simulate the Altair's instruction set, and developed their own BASIC interpreter. So while they didn't copy public domain stuff (AFAIK), they did use university computing resources for a commercial project. If anyone has a copy of Harvard's policy manual for the mid-70s, that would be very interesting. (Endowment = Endowment + $50 billion ?)
First, let me say this stuff is quite different from Cyc. While you can argue about Cyc's level of success, it is entirely the opposite of the MindPixel/OpenMind approach. Cyc is a very highly-structured ontology and set of inferencing systems built and maintained by experts in AI, linguistics, and cognitive science. MindPixel and OpenMind are simply database tables full of English sentences, with flags indicating that the sentences are true or false.
I entirely agree with you that you cannot teach a system just by entering a bunch of text strings, some marked true and some marked false. Neither the MindPixel guy or the OpenMind guy have any definite plans for making use of this free-form text. The Wired author didn't think to ask how a computer which currently doesn't understand natural language could "learn" just by being presented with sentences.
However, MindPixel at least could have one use in the foreseeable future; it can act as a corpus of test questions to use in a restricted Turing test. If you have somehow developed a program you think can pass as human, get a data dump from MindPixel and see how many true/false assessments your program predicts.
Other than that, I don't see a practical purpose in asking people to contribute time to these specific projects. If you want to join a project where a community contributes knowledge in English (rather than, e.g., First Order Modal Logic), there are plenty of places online. Just don't expect a computer to be able understand your sentences, only human readers.
Yes! I started noticing this last week or so. In fact, when I saw this story on/., I had to look into it find out if I was the only one seeing this epinions weirdness. I didn't write down the searches I used, but there was a variety of them that led to epinions' home page, for no discernible reason.
"It's like their renting you the device, not giving it to you - the price of the rental is that you pay them for it's use. "
No, they're giving it away. If they wanted to rent it, then fine let them rent it. The way things stand they are giving it away. It becomes YOUR scanner, if you wanted to, you could drop it off a cliff or run it over with your car, it is YOURS.
If this were a pack of gum, you would be correct. But the scanner came with a license, which restricts your usage and specifically says the scanner is not your property. (You could argue the shrink wrap license is unenforcable in some places, but then that should be your argument. If they required you to sign something at Radio Shack in order to get the scanner, would you then feel free to flout the license?) How is your position any different from a corporation that wants to take the best code from Apache and lock it up in a proprietary product, ignoring the Apache license?
"By posting our IP to the Net the Linux Community has forced us into a position of having to legally defend our technology . Under IP law if we don't PROTECT our IP, we loose any remedies under law to PROTECT our IP."
Trademarks are the only type of IP with this requirement.
Actually, I believe patents, like trademarks, also require you to defend them or lose their protection.
No, not really. The USTPO database holds ideas that have been granted a patent. The anti-patent database would hold:
1) cool ideas that do not have a patent yet (that the inventor wants to give to the world).
2) simple, obvious ideas that do not have a patent yet (that do not deserve patent protection).
In both cases, having those items in the anti-patent database would be helpful, since it preempts others from patenting them. And if it is a large enough datavase, with a strong community evangelizing it, the USTPO will eventually be forced to make checking it a prior art requirement. Heck, they may decide to run with the idea themselves and build their own anti-patent database.
Some have already mentioned some additional fine films of his. Here's a list of the most famous:
Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957).... Colonel Nicholson
Our Man in Havana (1960).... Jim Wormold
Lawrence of Arabia (1962).... Prince Feisal
Fall of the Roman Empire, The (1964).... Marcus Aurelius
Doctor Zhivago (1965).... Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago
Murder by Death (1976).... Jamesir Bensonmum
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1980) (mini) TV Series.... George Smiley
Passage to India, A (1984).... Professor Godbole
(thanks to http://www.imdb.com )
http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/ is a simple page that will return the MD5 hash of a string. It stays on one page, so your plaintext never goes over the wire. Useful if you want to send someone the hash of a password, for example, rather than the password itself, and all you've got handy is a web terminal.
Yeah, but don't places like that usually have fire escape doors, and the folks in the inner sanctum just pop through them when they go on their smoke break?;-)
PostgreSQL certainly has its good points. I would guess one reason they're sticking with MySQL would be speed. MySQL is significantly faster than PostgreSQL, and everything else. Although recently MS SQL Server 7 has caught up in some kinds of operations.
MySQL is extremely fast if you are doing mostly SELECTs (versus a lot of INSERTs and UPDATEs), and that's what Slashdot tends to do. The site spends much more time retrieving messages (and displaying them) than it does storing new messages. Even after the MySQL team spent lots of time tweaking benchmarks to make *PostgreSQL* look better (!), MySQL continues to be much faster, especially in SELECTs.
But as the friendly MySQL team will tell you (on the excellent, excellent mailing list), there are many scenarios where PostgreSQL is the best choice. And hey, there are situations where industrial-size Oracle is the best choice (although it will cost you 5-7 figures).
Re:Bank of America is *FUCKING* DUMB and here's wh
on
Dialectizer Shut Down
·
· Score: 2
You're quite right, Bank of America could have easily solved the "problem" on its own end, without legal threats. That's why I went down to my local BoA branch and spoke with a banker there. They gave me an upper-level customer service officer's number, and I gave him the same message.
Actually, they had received email about this, but hadn't received the Dialectizer's address. I suggested they look at the Slashdot story. (It's tough spelling slashdot.org over the phone; I wanted to spell out all of http://slashdot.org, but didn't think they'd get it.)
If their legal antics bother you, please contact Bank of America and explain, politely, why you're bothered. This is particularly effective if you have an account at BoA.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what I'm talking about. It's that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when the talking heads of the local news call Napster a "website"... We, as Slashdotters, are so proud that it's usually as important to us that people KNOW we went to the moon, as it is that we actually WENT to the moon.
Your Napster and Hackers examples are small-scale misconceptions, which are easily explained to people. And to the extent that they don't care about or 'need' to know about P2P versus servers for now, then I agree one can be obnoxious in constantly correcting non-techie people like that.
But to me the moon thing is very different. It's not just someone misunderstanding the science of how we got to the moon. It's that people are willing (and even excited) to accept a gigantic conspiracy theory. A conspiracy so large that our government (which couldn't even keep simple secrets, like the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate coverup) has kept the lid on it for 32 years, somehow keeping silent the 100,000+ people in the space program, and the Russians, the press, and the rest of the scientific world.
If you let someone believe Apollo was faked, you are letting them believe this is a world where huge, unbelievable conspiracies are plausible. Then they can't deal rationally with the rest of the world, because a) they've already accepted this faulty style of reasoning, and b) they can probably connect everything else (Saddam Hussein, mad cow disease) to the gigantic government conspiracy network. I don't want us to inch closer toward that kind of irrational world.
History shows us that, while it may not happen within a single lifetime, misconceptions like the moon-landing theory simply go away.
I've only got this one lifetime, my kids will only have one lifetime. If the pool of irrational people grows, I may have to pay for it, in the form of different public policy. My kids should not have to sit through school board-mandated "alternative theories" of the moon landings. Just real science in science class, thank you.
And yes, if we were flying people to the moon every week, belief in the conspiracy would drop. But the reality is that, in terms of tech/politics/money/willpower, we're probably 30 years or more from doing that. I don't need 30 years of moon doubters poisoning the mental environment in the meantime.
"I'm slowly learning to just live [with] stuff like this. ... [T]he best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them... The ignorance will just go away on its own"
I disagree. The conspiratorial mind can refute any set of facts and explanatory theories, because the conspiratorial mind does not use tools of critical thinking (e.g., Occam's Razor). Rather the reverse; it adds conspiracy on top of conspiracy to patch together a spaghetti-code interpretation of the world.
Conspiracy theorists did this after Greek geometers offered proofs that the world is round. And I expect they did it for years after Columbus' trips, too. There is no natural law guaranteeing people will eventually choose to be rational. The challenge needs to be met head on with every generation, because there are psychological benefits to believing what you already know, or what seems natural (flat earth), or what seems exciting ("Columbus faked his trips!").
You cannot beat conspiracy theorists only by presenting the facts! You need to teach people critical thinking skills, logic, and enough background so that they can spot flaws for themselves.
For example, whenever someone cc's me on an urban legend email, I mail them back (after some research) and try to do a bit of education on why the story is implausible, and point them to a resource like snopes.com. People have told me I've helped them become better at spotting fake stories.
So when you write that "the ignorance will just go away on its own", my thoughts are:
1. You're very optimistic, or else you're content with a much longer time scale than I am.
2. The fact that you've given up means the rest of us have to work harder.
I agree with you it can be frustrating to deal with these situations. But helping people to think more clearly not only gives them freedom from illogic and the agendas of others, but to the extent that it removes bogus memes from dominating the culture, it gives me more freedom, too. I think it's one of the most important jobs we can do as modern people.
Your directory search example didn't work too well for me. And while you *can* search Yahoo's news archive, you'll only be searching sources that have a syndication deal with Yahoo. What news search engines provide is the ability to search most major news sources without any non-news sites, and many people want that.
By the way, the NYTimes story mentions moreover.com, which is a great service. But since their search feature only searches headlines, allow me to mention my own project, NewsBlip.com, which performs full-text searches. Give it a try, thanks!
The article says: Modern mathematical notation is the product of centuries of refinement, and the notational conventions for high-quality typesetting are quite complicated.
That notations are complicated is clear, but it's not clear to me that there have been centuries of refinement. My impression is that it's more like months of refinement spread out across centuries of accepting the status quo.
When someone creates a new form of mathematics, she usually get to define the notation for it. If she has no ability in design or semiotics, you may end up with something very far from clear and optimal. In creating notation, you want to take the abstract and make it concrete. But many mathematicians thrive in the highly abstract, and find beauty in representing entire constructs with a single letter.
The strong sense of continuity and tradition in mathematics seem to ensure that the notation will likely be frozen in that state. If we were to take all we've learned about psychology, perception, and structured computer programming, we could probably come up with a unified notational system for math that streamlined everything considerably. Just a hypothesis.
In a sense, Google.com offers a "popular control" filter to the Web. Google's often my first stop for a search, and I am implicitly looking to find out what most people out there think are the best matches for my search. (For balance, it's important, though, to have additional search engines working on different search principles, including plain-old full-text indexing, without weighted links.)
I understand that Carr is using the FDA as an analogy, to state his case for regulation of information. But here's why the analogy fails for me: information is not like poison.
1. Poison kills you, irreversibly. Bad information might confuse you, even for years, but with new information you can change your mind.
2. You (generally) cannot detect poison until it's too late. If all poisons smelled bad, we might not need to regulate them as severely. Bad information smells bad. When I get a chain letter, I sense right away whether I'm likely to find it debunked on snopes.com.
Frankly, I wouldn't know how to test my food for poisons. But information is different. Not only do I have well-known sources on the Web that I can use to verify facts, I have the logic of my own mind to analyze arguments.
The solution here is not to throw away free speech, but to EDUCATE people. Educate them about how to find info on the Web, and how to assess its validity. Educate them on corporate media, be it in print, broadcast, or Internet. Educate them on how to have face-to-face discussions with people of differing opinions; how to assess what's valid and what's unsupportable. Educate them with enough commonly-acceptable history and scientific method that they can easily spot the grossest of factual distortions. It's all the same problem that it was 100 years ago, but just on a larger scale now, with different media. The Web remains the greatest opportunity for free expression ever; let's help everyone rise to the opportunity instead of hiding from it.
Bonker writes: Early experiments where researchers shot electrons through tiny holes in a lead sheild and onto film created similiar diffraction patterns, because, since electrons are indeed particles, they are also waves.
:-) The early experiments came before film existed, in 1801. Thomas Young, that Georgian-era nerd, did simple experiments with light coming through two slits. Later, watching ducks at the park, he saw the constructive interference of their wakes on the water, and realized that light had a wave nature.
Actually, those are the later experiments
Not impressive enough for you? Well, a decade later Young studied the newly-discovered Rosetta Stone, and through it became the first modern person to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics!
I understand it differently. AFAIK, Landauer showed that enmergy must be spent to erase information, not to clear a bit. You are erasing information if you use a gate with more input wires than it has output wires. For example, a clasical NOT gate has one input, one output, and no info is erased because you can always tell what input caused a given output; it's reversible. But a classical AND gate could cause a 0 output in three possible ways (00, 01, 10), and you can't tell which; it's irreversible, because you've erased information. Read http://www.qubit.org/intros/compSteane/qcintro.htm l for some more info.
Also, someone should note that the energy savings from reversible computation are real but very, very tiny. Chips would have to get 1 million times more efficient than they are now for the energy costs of (current) irreversibility to manifest themselves. And if you expect a quantum computer to operate without tons of expensive, high-powered supporting equipment around it (NMR machines, optical pumps, liquid helium-cooled ion traps), you'd better add a couple more decades onto your time estimate.
By the way, please don't follow that "q-bits" convention in the New Scientist article. All of the people in the field refer to them as "qubits". Try reading http://arxiv.org/archive/quant-ph (AKA www.lanl.gov). There's no sense in needless term duplication. Thanks.
His first claim is that you should not order from a store that uses the http GET method. He doesn't say why, and I cannot think of any reason. If the form is submitted with an SSL-secured action (action="https:...") then both are equally secure.
Well, if the store has ads served by a third party, when your browser gets the ad images it will send the third party the refering URL, which is the GET with all your info in it. I don't think this scenario is changed just because the refering page is https. This is a known privacy issue.
The Hawthorne plant was a General Electric plant in Cicero, IL, not England[1]. Also, be sure it's the Hawthorne Effect you suspect, and not the Halo Effect, the Pygmalion Effect, the John Henry Effect, the Placebo Effect, or Post Group Euphoria[2].
m
0 1.html
[1] http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/417/417lect05.ht
[2] http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/outres/1998-02/00
That's a great idea. Try to read the "Votescam" site and you'll be disappointed at its tone and the scale of their claims. But hop on over to the well-respected CPSR.org (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility), and you'll find lots of interesting stuff on computerized vote tallying over the last decade, including this tidbit:
"Elections computer programs are not subject to design or source code
inspections by independent auditors outside the vendor, as banking software
is. Some programs still in use consist of unstructured COBOL, patched over
the years. In some cases, special purpose code is written for a specific
election, then discarded. There are no requirements that the programs be
written in a high level language, so assembly language is frequently used.
These features make it difficult to determine if the program is designed
correctly."
* CPSR Newsletter, Fall 1988
I'm sure they have more recent stuff than this newsletter, but I just grabbed something quickly.
(Note that the CPSR reports essentially say the vote tallying needs more openness. They do _not_ say, as votescam does, that there's a giant conspiracy that has been choosing the winners.)
More than one supreme court justice made the choice not to advance the case.
What the other justices decided is irrelevant to whether he should have excused himself. Suppose that instead of a conflict-of-interest question, it was an out-and-out case of bribery; suppose he took a $1 million bribe from Microsoft. If he knew it was going to be an 8-1 decision, would that make it okay for him to throw his vote away for money, since it wouldn't affect the outcome? No, of course not. Because it affects other things, like the public's trust in the judiciary. Likewise, to scale it back down to reality, even if he knew 7 other justices would vote the same way, if it would cause an appearance of a conflict of interest for him to participate, it would be wrong, and he should not do it. BTW, read Justice Rehnquist's rationalization in the longer article; it's quite illogical.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he just port code that was already in the Public Domain?
:-) I've never heard anyone seriously challenge the idea that Bill, Paul, and a third guy (whose name escapes me now) wrote the Altair BASIC themselves, in assembly. While at Harvard they used a campus mainframe to simulate the Altair's instruction set, and developed their own BASIC interpreter. So while they didn't copy public domain stuff (AFAIK), they did use university computing resources for a commercial project. If anyone has a copy of Harvard's policy manual for the mid-70s, that would be very interesting. (Endowment = Endowment + $50 billion ?)
You're wrong
First, let me say this stuff is quite different from Cyc. While you can argue about Cyc's level of success, it is entirely the opposite of the MindPixel/OpenMind approach. Cyc is a very highly-structured ontology and set of inferencing systems built and maintained by experts in AI, linguistics, and cognitive science. MindPixel and OpenMind are simply database tables full of English sentences, with flags indicating that the sentences are true or false.
I entirely agree with you that you cannot teach a system just by entering a bunch of text strings, some marked true and some marked false. Neither the MindPixel guy or the OpenMind guy have any definite plans for making use of this free-form text. The Wired author didn't think to ask how a computer which currently doesn't understand natural language could "learn" just by being presented with sentences.
However, MindPixel at least could have one use in the foreseeable future; it can act as a corpus of test questions to use in a restricted Turing test. If you have somehow developed a program you think can pass as human, get a data dump from MindPixel and see how many true/false assessments your program predicts.
Other than that, I don't see a practical purpose in asking people to contribute time to these specific projects. If you want to join a project where a community contributes knowledge in English (rather than, e.g., First Order Modal Logic), there are plenty of places online. Just don't expect a computer to be able understand your sentences, only human readers.
Yes! I started noticing this last week or so. In fact, when I saw this story on /., I had to look into it find out if I was the only one seeing this epinions weirdness. I didn't write down the searches I used, but there was a variety of them that led to epinions' home page, for no discernible reason.
Hmmm... after some searching, I haven't found any backing for my previous statement, so I retract it.
"It's like their renting you the device, not giving it to you - the price of the rental is that you pay them for it's use. "
No, they're giving it away. If they wanted to rent it, then fine let them rent it. The way things stand they are giving it away. It becomes YOUR scanner, if you wanted to, you could drop it off a cliff or run it over with your car, it is YOURS.
If this were a pack of gum, you would be correct. But the scanner came with a license, which restricts your usage and specifically says the scanner is not your property. (You could argue the shrink wrap license is unenforcable in some places, but then that should be your argument. If they required you to sign something at Radio Shack in order to get the scanner, would you then feel free to flout the license?) How is your position any different from a corporation that wants to take the best code from Apache and lock it up in a proprietary product, ignoring the Apache license?
Perhaps they have trademark issues? They assert:
"By posting our IP to the Net the Linux Community has forced us into a position of having to legally defend our technology . Under IP law if we don't PROTECT our IP, we loose any remedies under law to PROTECT our IP."
Trademarks are the only type of IP with this requirement.
Actually, I believe patents, like trademarks, also require you to defend them or lose their protection.
No, not really. The USTPO database holds ideas that have been granted a patent. The anti-patent database would hold:
1) cool ideas that do not have a patent yet (that the inventor wants to give to the world).
2) simple, obvious ideas that do not have a patent yet (that do not deserve patent protection).
In both cases, having those items in the anti-patent database would be helpful, since it preempts others from patenting them. And if it is a large enough datavase, with a strong community evangelizing it, the USTPO will eventually be forced to make checking it a prior art requirement. Heck, they may decide to run with the idea themselves and build their own anti-patent database.
Some have already mentioned some additional fine films of his. Here's a list of the most famous:
.... Colonel Nicholson
.... Jim Wormold
.... Prince Feisal
.... Marcus Aurelius
.... Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago
.... Jamesir Bensonmum
.... George Smiley
.... Professor Godbole
Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957)
Our Man in Havana (1960)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Fall of the Roman Empire, The (1964)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Murder by Death (1976)
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1980) (mini) TV Series
Passage to India, A (1984)
(thanks to http://www.imdb.com )
http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/ is a simple page that will return the MD5 hash of a string. It stays on one page, so your plaintext never goes over the wire. Useful if you want to send someone the hash of a password, for example, rather than the password itself, and all you've got handy is a web terminal.
Yeah, but don't places like that usually have fire escape doors, and the folks in the inner sanctum just pop through them when they go on their smoke break? ;-)
PostgreSQL certainly has its good points. I would guess one reason they're sticking with MySQL would be speed. MySQL is significantly faster than PostgreSQL, and everything else. Although recently MS SQL Server 7 has caught up in some kinds of operations.
MySQL is extremely fast if you are doing mostly SELECTs (versus a lot of INSERTs and UPDATEs), and that's what Slashdot tends to do. The site spends much more time retrieving messages (and displaying them) than it does storing new messages. Even after the MySQL team spent lots of time tweaking benchmarks to make *PostgreSQL* look better (!), MySQL continues to be much faster, especially in SELECTs.
But as the friendly MySQL team will tell you (on the excellent, excellent mailing list), there are many scenarios where PostgreSQL is the best choice. And hey, there are situations where industrial-size Oracle is the best choice (although it will cost you 5-7 figures).
You're quite right, Bank of America could have easily solved the "problem" on its own end, without legal threats. That's why I went down to my local BoA branch and spoke with a banker there. They gave me an upper-level customer service officer's number, and I gave him the same message.
Actually, they had received email about this, but hadn't received the Dialectizer's address. I suggested they look at the Slashdot story. (It's tough spelling slashdot.org over the phone; I wanted to spell out all of http://slashdot.org, but didn't think they'd get it.)
If their legal antics bother you, please contact Bank of America and explain, politely, why you're bothered. This is particularly effective if you have an account at BoA.