It costs $660 million dollars now, but it cuts the Vatican's power bill to zero, and the spare power can be sold to Italy at the market rate, resulting in a significant financial win for the Vatican. The money saved is money that can then be spent on humanitarian projects around the world.
By that argument, the Vatican should operate a casino, sell storage silos for nuclear waste in the catacombs beneath Vatican City, open a brothel, and spend the profits on humanitarian projects around the world.
a free and equal Internet for all. The Internet is a freely available source of information, not a money making machine.
Absolutely. YOUR site can be as free as you want it to be. YOU can provide all the useful content you want to for free. Go ahead, host it, pay the bandwidth bills, I'll wait right here.
...
Are you broke yet?
If you're not broke, it's because you're posting stuff the rest of the world finds relatively useless. Thanks, but we've just empirically proven we can survive as a species without your input. And if you are broke, congratulations, not only are you posting phenomenally good information, but you can no longer continue to host such good stuff without additional expense. So now either it gets taken off line because you can't pay your bandwidth bill, or you fund it.
So where do you get the money? You could post advertisements, but they may not match your social mores (ads for "Tasty Pork Sausages" wouldn't do well on the PeTA site, and in your case ads for "eTrade" probably wouldn't play well amongst your communist readership.) Or you could ask your readers for money, possibly via donations, or you could sell subscriptions, or have them pay you on a usage/per-click basis.
Get it yet? The internet is not free. It's not free to consume because you still have to pay your ISP for your connection and bandwidth, and you still view ads on sites. And it's not free to provide, because you have to pay for hardware and building space and administration and security and electricity and heating and cooling and water and repairs and you still have to pay your bandwidth and connection charges.
And just in case you were still misunderstanding, "net neutrality" specifically means "no throttling packets based on their content", which is almost nonsensical on its face. Routers have employed Quality of Service throttling for many years, and virtually every business running VoIP uses them to ensure adequate voice quality. The reason it's an issue is that QoS was being used as a weapon by internet providers that also provided VoIP service: they would escalate priority on their own VoIP packets, but drop priority on the competition such as Vonage or Skype. (Turns out they don't have to drop priority anyway, Vonage sounds like crap even without artificial throttling.) Net neutrality has nothing to do with "freedom" or "equality". It's also only about the money.
Moni Naor. Verification of a human in the loop or Identification via the Turing Test. Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Weizmann Institute. [Online] 13 September 1996. [Cited: April 19, 2009.] http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/human.ps
This is the seminal paper that introduced the concept of CAPTCHAs. On page 3 in section two he suggested several potential sources of problems, including, "Handwriting understanding - given a handwritten word the user should type it. Again, it makes sense to add the kind of noise that people do not have a problem to ignore." And page 4 has this paragraph, "Another possible advantage of the scheme proposed is encouraging research in those areas that are chosen as challenges. One has to look at the problem of factoring numbers and see the tremendous algorithmic progress made there since it was suggested as a basis for cryptographic protocols to realize the potential."
While I'll grant you that the paper doesn't explicitly call out "OCR" as the problem to be solved, he does predict more research into whatever challenges are used, and he presents character recognition as one of the potential challenges.
That's why we need a good micropayment consolidation service. It wouldn't be effective for a site owner to send out bills for $0.005, nor would it be a joy for me to authenticate a hundred different websites to decide whether or not to pay them. But as a consumer I'd be willing to let someone like Google Micropayments (Beta) run the whole show. They'd get different sites to sign up to get $0.005 per eyeball. I'd give them $50.00, and start surfing. As long as it's no harder than my checking the "Allow ( )1 / (o)10 / ( )100 micropayments to slashdot.org" button, I'd be willing to use it.
Advancing the state of the art in Optical Character Recognition was always intended to be a side-benefit of CAPTCHAs. It looks like that plan came through nicely.
I have always figured CAPTCHAs would be a stopgap until other methods of authentication could easily be used, such as micro-payments or single signon solutions like OpenID. Unfortunately, those other methods haven't been adopted nearly as fast as the need. Perhaps if CAPTCHAs are declared "dead", site operators will feel more urgency to adopt these solutions.
If CAPTCHAs do continue, I'd like the next problem to be facial recognition software. I'd love a package that could look at a picture and tag it "Nicholas and Andrea" or "Glen and Helene". Digital camera software everywhere could benefit from this technology. Not sure how you'd bake that into a CAPTCHA, but it's a good problem to solve.
I love it when those "Send All/Remove Me/Me too!" storms flood the Exchange servers at work. It's like a paid 3-hour break, and as a bonus I get a list of all the stupidest people.
TV was next. The picture boxes that ruined our eyes (ok, those old ones maybe did), that showed us braindead stories and turned us all into zombies. The TV generation grew up...
...and now the planet is overrun with complete idiots. I think you just broke your own argument.
Given that Jack Thompson himself is evidently suffering from several mental disorders, and at least one of those precludes his forming a coherent, logical argument, I would no longer refer to his position in an argument except as the subject.
Besides, with him likely getting kicked out of Utah any day now, and nobody else willing to tolerate him, we'll soon need a new representative of the face of anti-gaming. Any slashdotters know of the next rising star in the "Focus on Fucking Up Other People's Lives" crowd?
Not all programs one might want to run from their server can be installed from the command line. This is indeed the fault of the program writers, but nevertheless I have encountered a few cases where for some dumb reason the prog writers thought it would be a good idea to make a critical part of the install process require a GUI.
I haven't found any of those cases where the software in question was important enough to install (at least not since the early days of Windows.) A crappy installer pretty much prevents me from giving a product a positive evaluation.
I suppose even if we did buy it, we'd be rewrapping the software in a customized install package anyway before we deployed it.
It's not just "yet another mapping service." He's saying that the service will provide spatially relevant information, that the API will add value to the information (from both Yahoo and user-contributed sources), and how overcoming the difficulties isn't as simple as scratching out a few requirements.
One example might be if I searched for "ATM" and I was on the freeway when I made the request, it would search for ATMs around the nearest exit ramp instead of the nearby store on the other side of the fence. Or maybe it would incorporate police reports about snatch and grabs in the area, so I'd choose a different ATM.
Or perhaps if I'm in Minneapolis and I search for Miami hotels, it'll look in south Florida, but if I'm in Oxford, Ohio, it might find one near the university.
As for their added value, perhaps they'd put ads for restaurants near the ATM.
TFA is talking about "grey water", not "black water". Grey water is water that has been used for cleaning (showers, laundry, bathing, etc.), but contains limited biological waste. Black water is the water that has the real sewage in it. Grey water typically requires less treatment than black water.
In most cities and homes the two are always routed out a common sewer pipe, which has to be treated as if it were 100% black water. But in homes with limited septic systems, grey water is sometimes routed straight to the drain field whereas black water first passes through a septic tank. Moving to greener solutions, there are also people that are reclaiming grey water for use in toilet tanks, where there isn't a functional need for fresh water.
<Sarcasm> Yeah because there is a huge IT workforce in the Arctic and lots of others who want to move there from someplace like California. </Sarcasm>
So what? You get a couple of Inuit electricians to run cables for you and drive the forklifts. The rest of the work is done over the tubes. At that point, it's JBOC -- Just a Building full Of Computers.
The best bet is to put it as close to its energy sources as possible, in the least humanly desirable geographic location -- siting it on a reclaimed Superfund dump in the middle of the Arctic next to an oil well and refinery sounds pretty effective to me.
The sad part is: there are some fibers that DO have copper. Some of the gullible audiophiles out there actually purchase "shielded optical fiber", as if EM interference was somehow going to violate the laws of physics and change the shape of their photons enough to "color" their sound.
Fortunately, buried cable owners aren't nearly that stupid, and their fibers are protected with ordinary non-metallic sheathing. Any wrappers or sheathing around them are put there for the physical protection of the fibers, not for "interference".
Use hi-res porn images as the CAPTCHA images, and use hard-to-automate anatomical questions like "are the blonde's boobs bigger than the brunette's?" or "Are these two lesbians?" Any wrong answer brings up another PORNTCHA challenge. Any correct answer ends the porn session and proceeds to the signup. The porn users probably won't "feel the need" to answer a lot of questions correctly, and the service users have a way to get past.
It's kinda like a honey pot, only with tasty, tasty honeys.
The plaintiffs in cases like these usually involves throwing as many claims as possible into the fan, hoping that at least a few stick to the defendant.
This is also a favorite tactic of prosecutors in criminal cases these days: pull someone over for speeding, and charge them with possession, molesting a teenager, carrying a concealed weapon, and reckless driving. Shock the defendant into pleading guilty to the reckless driving charge in exchange for dropping the rest, when in reality he deserved no more than a $200 ticket for speeding.
So in this case, why not claim "fair use"? Why stop at just one claim? Why not raise a thousand doubts about the legitimacy of the claims? It's certainly no worse (nor less truthful) than the RIAA claiming a million dollars in damages for putting 10 files up on an FTP site.
Actually, this article is just a part of the conspiracy. Conficker was designed to pull the trigger on April 1st just so the techie Slashdot readership would be lulled into reading a bunch of crap stories and ignore the real effects of conficker.
I think the authors of the worm hope the world is so busy chasing down April Fool's stupidity (like the mythical affected ATMs) that they won't have time to notice or stop the worm's real destructive effects.
There are many more factors than those you mention, the most important (IMHO) being "number of things to be clicked upon", but in general the approach I like to take is that it costs almost nothing additional to support a command line, whereas it costs a fortune to "script" a GUI.
Trying to get someone to write a Powershell script for Windows almost means hiring a Powershell expert. (Those developers who can easily pick up things like Powershell scorn the very idea of Powershell, and those who can barely muster the neural impulses to click on the "pretty yellow box" aren't going to produce anything useful anyway.) But just about any developer can write a script or launch an executable.
"GUI scripts" are also incredibly fragile. If someone rearranges the order of buttons, you get fail. If someone pops up an unexpected dialog box, you get fail. If the operator moves the mouse during the script operation and shifts focus, you get fail. If the vendor releases 2.1 and it has an extra "next" screen in front of the "finish" button, you get fail. (Yes, I know there are ways to overcome many of these issues, but the point remains that GUI scripts utterly suck to maintain.)
Command line interfaces, on the other hand, are usually self-documenting and screamingly fast to write and maintain.
I wonder what one could do with a phantom penis. Any volunteers?
Let me know the results. I can supply a phantom girlfriend for the
experiment, if necessary.
I think he was referring to the Quantum Limb effect, which is a term I just made up to describe it, and won't exist on Google until it indexes this discussion.
The sad truth of it is many of the grads for the last 15 years are junk. Not as people - fortunately, the career still attracts a great crowd - but the curriculums now create people who think that the compiler, the runtime, and the OS are a black box. They rather literally think in terms of South Park's gnomes.. Step 1) write code, Step 3) Profit! And that mindless dependence creates people who have no idea how or why their code works or more often doesn't.
That depends entirely on the school and curriculum. My son is graduating this semester with a CSci degree, and I envy him the program he's completing. They've been doing some really cool stuff, including C coding with a healthy dose of reverse engineering: use gdb to debug an executable, and figure out what inputs the program was expecting in order to make it run successfully.
There was a period of time in the late 90s and early 00s when the schools were teaching nothing but Java, and cranking out nothing but kids who needed that hold-my-hand environment. I have to work with some of those people, and it's disturbing to have to explain hex notation to someone with a CSci "degree". But not all schools are turning out "junk".
Slashdot Mirror
It costs $660 million dollars now, but it cuts the Vatican's power bill to zero, and the spare power can be sold to Italy at the market rate, resulting in a significant financial win for the Vatican. The money saved is money that can then be spent on humanitarian projects around the world.
By that argument, the Vatican should operate a casino, sell storage silos for nuclear waste in the catacombs beneath Vatican City, open a brothel, and spend the profits on humanitarian projects around the world.
a free and equal Internet for all. The Internet is a freely available source of information, not a money making machine.
Absolutely. YOUR site can be as free as you want it to be. YOU can provide all the useful content you want to for free. Go ahead, host it, pay the bandwidth bills, I'll wait right here.
Are you broke yet?
If you're not broke, it's because you're posting stuff the rest of the world finds relatively useless. Thanks, but we've just empirically proven we can survive as a species without your input. And if you are broke, congratulations, not only are you posting phenomenally good information, but you can no longer continue to host such good stuff without additional expense. So now either it gets taken off line because you can't pay your bandwidth bill, or you fund it.
So where do you get the money? You could post advertisements, but they may not match your social mores (ads for "Tasty Pork Sausages" wouldn't do well on the PeTA site, and in your case ads for "eTrade" probably wouldn't play well amongst your communist readership.) Or you could ask your readers for money, possibly via donations, or you could sell subscriptions, or have them pay you on a usage/per-click basis.
Get it yet? The internet is not free. It's not free to consume because you still have to pay your ISP for your connection and bandwidth, and you still view ads on sites. And it's not free to provide, because you have to pay for hardware and building space and administration and security and electricity and heating and cooling and water and repairs and you still have to pay your bandwidth and connection charges.
And just in case you were still misunderstanding, "net neutrality" specifically means "no throttling packets based on their content", which is almost nonsensical on its face. Routers have employed Quality of Service throttling for many years, and virtually every business running VoIP uses them to ensure adequate voice quality. The reason it's an issue is that QoS was being used as a weapon by internet providers that also provided VoIP service: they would escalate priority on their own VoIP packets, but drop priority on the competition such as Vonage or Skype. (Turns out they don't have to drop priority anyway, Vonage sounds like crap even without artificial throttling.) Net neutrality has nothing to do with "freedom" or "equality". It's also only about the money.
[Citation needed]
Moni Naor. Verification of a human in the loop or Identification via the Turing Test. Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Weizmann Institute. [Online] 13 September 1996. [Cited: April 19, 2009.] http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/human.ps
This is the seminal paper that introduced the concept of CAPTCHAs. On page 3 in section two he suggested several potential sources of problems, including, "Handwriting understanding - given a handwritten word the user should type it. Again, it makes sense to add the kind of noise that people do not have a problem to ignore." And page 4 has this paragraph, "Another possible advantage of the scheme proposed is encouraging research in those areas that are chosen as challenges. One has to look at the problem of factoring numbers and see the tremendous algorithmic progress made there since it was suggested as a basis for cryptographic protocols to realize the potential."
While I'll grant you that the paper doesn't explicitly call out "OCR" as the problem to be solved, he does predict more research into whatever challenges are used, and he presents character recognition as one of the potential challenges.
That's why we need a good micropayment consolidation service. It wouldn't be effective for a site owner to send out bills for $0.005, nor would it be a joy for me to authenticate a hundred different websites to decide whether or not to pay them. But as a consumer I'd be willing to let someone like Google Micropayments (Beta) run the whole show. They'd get different sites to sign up to get $0.005 per eyeball. I'd give them $50.00, and start surfing. As long as it's no harder than my checking the "Allow ( )1 / (o)10 / ( )100 micropayments to slashdot.org" button, I'd be willing to use it.
Advancing the state of the art in Optical Character Recognition was always intended to be a side-benefit of CAPTCHAs. It looks like that plan came through nicely.
I have always figured CAPTCHAs would be a stopgap until other methods of authentication could easily be used, such as micro-payments or single signon solutions like OpenID. Unfortunately, those other methods haven't been adopted nearly as fast as the need. Perhaps if CAPTCHAs are declared "dead", site operators will feel more urgency to adopt these solutions.
If CAPTCHAs do continue, I'd like the next problem to be facial recognition software. I'd love a package that could look at a picture and tag it "Nicholas and Andrea" or "Glen and Helene". Digital camera software everywhere could benefit from this technology. Not sure how you'd bake that into a CAPTCHA, but it's a good problem to solve.
With Microsoft cooperating to improve the language, now we can move on beyond the fifth edition, toward ECMAScript harmony.
Microsoft? Cooperating? Whatever happened to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish? How can we keep hating on Microsoft if they're going to cooperate?
I love it when those "Send All/Remove Me/Me too!" storms flood the Exchange servers at work. It's like a paid 3-hour break, and as a bonus I get a list of all the stupidest people.
..."bad books"...
...radio...
TV was next. The picture boxes that ruined our eyes (ok, those old ones maybe did), that showed us braindead stories and turned us all into zombies. The TV generation grew up...
Given that Jack Thompson himself is evidently suffering from several mental disorders, and at least one of those precludes his forming a coherent, logical argument, I would no longer refer to his position in an argument except as the subject.
Besides, with him likely getting kicked out of Utah any day now, and nobody else willing to tolerate him, we'll soon need a new representative of the face of anti-gaming. Any slashdotters know of the next rising star in the "Focus on Fucking Up Other People's Lives" crowd?
Not all programs one might want to run from their server can be installed from the command line. This is indeed the fault of the program writers, but nevertheless I have encountered a few cases where for some dumb reason the prog writers thought it would be a good idea to make a critical part of the install process require a GUI.
I haven't found any of those cases where the software in question was important enough to install (at least not since the early days of Windows.) A crappy installer pretty much prevents me from giving a product a positive evaluation.
I suppose even if we did buy it, we'd be rewrapping the software in a customized install package anyway before we deployed it.
It's not just "yet another mapping service." He's saying that the service will provide spatially relevant information, that the API will add value to the information (from both Yahoo and user-contributed sources), and how overcoming the difficulties isn't as simple as scratching out a few requirements.
One example might be if I searched for "ATM" and I was on the freeway when I made the request, it would search for ATMs around the nearest exit ramp instead of the nearby store on the other side of the fence. Or maybe it would incorporate police reports about snatch and grabs in the area, so I'd choose a different ATM.
Or perhaps if I'm in Minneapolis and I search for Miami hotels, it'll look in south Florida, but if I'm in Oxford, Ohio, it might find one near the university.
As for their added value, perhaps they'd put ads for restaurants near the ATM.
Even old New York
Was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it, I can't say
People just liked it better that way!
Many metropolitan cities have energy companies that use evaporative cooling towers to provide chilled water to office towers for air conditioning.
TFA is talking about "grey water", not "black water". Grey water is water that has been used for cleaning (showers, laundry, bathing, etc.), but contains limited biological waste. Black water is the water that has the real sewage in it. Grey water typically requires less treatment than black water.
In most cities and homes the two are always routed out a common sewer pipe, which has to be treated as if it were 100% black water. But in homes with limited septic systems, grey water is sometimes routed straight to the drain field whereas black water first passes through a septic tank. Moving to greener solutions, there are also people that are reclaiming grey water for use in toilet tanks, where there isn't a functional need for fresh water.
<Sarcasm> Yeah because there is a huge IT workforce in the Arctic and lots of others who want to move there from someplace like California. </Sarcasm>
So what? You get a couple of Inuit electricians to run cables for you and drive the forklifts. The rest of the work is done over the tubes. At that point, it's JBOC -- Just a Building full Of Computers.
The best bet is to put it as close to its energy sources as possible, in the least humanly desirable geographic location -- siting it on a reclaimed Superfund dump in the middle of the Arctic next to an oil well and refinery sounds pretty effective to me.
The sad part is: there are some fibers that DO have copper. Some of the gullible audiophiles out there actually purchase "shielded optical fiber", as if EM interference was somehow going to violate the laws of physics and change the shape of their photons enough to "color" their sound.
Fortunately, buried cable owners aren't nearly that stupid, and their fibers are protected with ordinary non-metallic sheathing. Any wrappers or sheathing around them are put there for the physical protection of the fibers, not for "interference".
I posted it before, and I'll post it again: PORNTCHA!
Use hi-res porn images as the CAPTCHA images, and use hard-to-automate anatomical questions like "are the blonde's boobs bigger than the brunette's?" or "Are these two lesbians?" Any wrong answer brings up another PORNTCHA challenge. Any correct answer ends the porn session and proceeds to the signup. The porn users probably won't "feel the need" to answer a lot of questions correctly, and the service users have a way to get past.
It's kinda like a honey pot, only with tasty, tasty honeys.
Of course they have.
The plaintiffs in cases like these usually involves throwing as many claims as possible into the fan, hoping that at least a few stick to the defendant.
This is also a favorite tactic of prosecutors in criminal cases these days: pull someone over for speeding, and charge them with possession, molesting a teenager, carrying a concealed weapon, and reckless driving. Shock the defendant into pleading guilty to the reckless driving charge in exchange for dropping the rest, when in reality he deserved no more than a $200 ticket for speeding.
So in this case, why not claim "fair use"? Why stop at just one claim? Why not raise a thousand doubts about the legitimacy of the claims? It's certainly no worse (nor less truthful) than the RIAA claiming a million dollars in damages for putting 10 files up on an FTP site.
Actually, this article is just a part of the conspiracy. Conficker was designed to pull the trigger on April 1st just so the techie Slashdot readership would be lulled into reading a bunch of crap stories and ignore the real effects of conficker.
I think the authors of the worm hope the world is so busy chasing down April Fool's stupidity (like the mythical affected ATMs) that they won't have time to notice or stop the worm's real destructive effects.
There are many more factors than those you mention, the most important (IMHO) being "number of things to be clicked upon", but in general the approach I like to take is that it costs almost nothing additional to support a command line, whereas it costs a fortune to "script" a GUI.
Trying to get someone to write a Powershell script for Windows almost means hiring a Powershell expert. (Those developers who can easily pick up things like Powershell scorn the very idea of Powershell, and those who can barely muster the neural impulses to click on the "pretty yellow box" aren't going to produce anything useful anyway.) But just about any developer can write a script or launch an executable.
"GUI scripts" are also incredibly fragile. If someone rearranges the order of buttons, you get fail. If someone pops up an unexpected dialog box, you get fail. If the operator moves the mouse during the script operation and shifts focus, you get fail. If the vendor releases 2.1 and it has an extra "next" screen in front of the "finish" button, you get fail. (Yes, I know there are ways to overcome many of these issues, but the point remains that GUI scripts utterly suck to maintain.)
Command line interfaces, on the other hand, are usually self-documenting and screamingly fast to write and maintain.
I wonder what one could do with a phantom penis. Any volunteers? Let me know the results. I can supply a phantom girlfriend for the experiment, if necessary.
That's a pretty transparent ploy.
Is it ... "Anals of Neurology"...?
For a brain surgeon, you sure are an asshole.
I think he was referring to the Quantum Limb effect, which is a term I just made up to describe it, and won't exist on Google until it indexes this discussion.
The sad truth of it is many of the grads for the last 15 years are junk. Not as people - fortunately, the career still attracts a great crowd - but the curriculums now create people who think that the compiler, the runtime, and the OS are a black box. They rather literally think in terms of South Park's gnomes .. Step 1) write code, Step 3) Profit! And that mindless dependence creates people who have no idea how or why their code works or more often doesn't.
That depends entirely on the school and curriculum. My son is graduating this semester with a CSci degree, and I envy him the program he's completing. They've been doing some really cool stuff, including C coding with a healthy dose of reverse engineering: use gdb to debug an executable, and figure out what inputs the program was expecting in order to make it run successfully.
There was a period of time in the late 90s and early 00s when the schools were teaching nothing but Java, and cranking out nothing but kids who needed that hold-my-hand environment. I have to work with some of those people, and it's disturbing to have to explain hex notation to someone with a CSci "degree". But not all schools are turning out "junk".