WTF is Lua and why didn't anyone have the foresight to make this into a simpler to use module?
I daresay that Fidelis Assis -- the author -- wanted to spend his time as effectively as he could building the best spam filter he was able. I can't say that he made the wrong choice as his filter is outstanding. He did take the trouble to make it an available open-source project, which allows anybody to repackage it as they see fit.
Apparently, image spam beats a number of spam filters. But not all. Try another filter. I haven't done an extensive test in the post-image-spam era but OSBF-Lua is the best available filter I know of, and I haven't noticed that it is compromised by image spam. It is free.
It appears to me that the increase is almost all due to a small number of messages swamping us. One advertises the stock symbol PHYA and has no link. The scam is that if you Google for that symbol, there will be a full-width paid ad for a fake broker/analyst site. About 10% of my email for the last couple of weeks (i.e. over 100 of 1000 spams/day) advertises this stock symbol.
The research I did indicates that legal interpretations of vacancy exclusions on insurance policies can vary a lot (a pile of dirty clothes on the floor might mean the house isn't vacant). But if you tell your insurance agent you want to insure a vacant house, you will get dropped like a hot potato.
You don't want to explore the legal interpretations in court when you try to make a claim, and for this reason you don't want to push the limit of what's sensible, or do anything that could be construed as material misrepresentation to acquire/maintain a policy.
Many insurance policies won't cover unoccupied houses. Check with your agent and secure additional coverage if necessary. And hire somebody to look after your house. For money. With well defined responsibilities, like checking the house every k days and keeping a record.
They need to stop all this security nonsense and just let people be. It would probably only cost us 1 or 2 hijackings and maybe a couple planes into a couple buildings every 6 months or a year or so. We can live with that, eh?
Dripping sarcasm notwithstanding, there's a fundamental point here. Can the intrusions in liberty be justified by reduced risk of hijackings or whatever? Or, perhaps, do they increase the risk? Some evidence would be apropos.
Suppose that the numbers above were true. The toll in deaths and ruined lives would still be lower than, say, the carnage on the highways. An orthogonal issue? I don't think so. Just think of what you could do with the billions of dollars wasted on building the police state. Highway safety is not even the most effective use to which these dollars could be put, but its orders of magnitude better than whatever DHS does with it.
But don't let my digression distract you from the fundamental point: there is not one iota of evidence that wiretaps, no-fly lists, torture, profiling, etc. make us safer. There is plenty of evidence that they directly diminish our quality of life, and indirectly divert our resources from more worthy pursuits.
I hope that the new Congress will put its foot down on yet another intrusion into American personal liberty. The old one -- even the Democratic members -- did not.
MSR is not a product development group. It is a research organization within Microsoft. MSR researchers pursue curiosity-driven research and publish in the normal academic channels.
If you have the misfortune to be labeled by this method as a potential offender, there's a 10% chance that you are. That's a 90% chance that you aren't.
On the other hand, if you're an offender, there's a 50% chance you'll be labeled. Thats a 50% chance you won't.
Better than chance, I suppose, but a useful predictive tool it is not.
Output as measured by GDP. Sounds like money to me.
This is all an aside from my original contrarian statement questioning the value of this particular economic theory.
It may be that rather than hitting the bounds of human intelligence, as the article said, we are likely to hit the bounds of the mantra that we require constant "growth" just to stay in the same place.
Actually, that's giving the article too much credit. It says nothing at all.
Productivity measures money. A Manhattan lawyer is more productive than one in Grand Forks because he or she bills more per hour. The argument that the Manhattan lawyer makes more "stuff" other than money is tenuous at best.
At the end of the 19th century it was commonly thought that pretty well everything that needed to be known about science and technology was known; that only incremental development would occur from then on.
Similar lack of imagination has been expressed in many contexts over the years.
And, by the way, who says that 'productivity' is a useful measure of anything?
Coin flipping is not 50% 'reliable' whatever that means. Suppose that 1 in 1000 people is a terr-ist. You haul in a bunch of people at random and subject them all to the coin-flip test. About 50% of them come up positive and about 50% negative. So you label the 50% (including 50% of all terr-ists) innocent, and you label 50% terr-ists. Of the ones you labeled terr-ists, only 1/1000 really are. That's 99.9% false positives. Hardly "50% reliable".
If you would like to investigate the proper standards for evaluating diagnostic tests, Google for "positive predictive value" and "negative predictive value"
Yes, and if a lie detector were even slightly better than flipping a coin, it would be a valid test, and there would be scientific experiments to validate it. So far nobody -- any many have tried -- have shown it better (even by a little bit) than flipping a coin, reading tea leaves, reading palms, Tarot cards, etc.
Yes, there is a bidding war for employers to hire top computer scientists. Colleges and potential students haven't noticed yet, that that's par for the course. Applications and admissions will triple about when the market dries up again.
The reason your machine has 32-bit XP is because Microsoft made the (misguided, in my opinion) to make XP-64 require 64 bit drivers, and your favorite dollar-store device doesn't come with one. Had they implemented some facility for for XP64 to use 32-bit drivers, we'd all be using it by now.
Slashdot Mirror
I daresay that Fidelis Assis -- the author -- wanted to spend his time as effectively as he could building the best spam filter he was able. I can't say that he made the wrong choice as his filter is outstanding. He did take the trouble to make it an available open-source project, which allows anybody to repackage it as they see fit.
I think Lua's pretty easy to download & install, but if you want a good filter written in C, try Bogofilter.
On what exchange? I'm not saying they are a front, but I wasn't able to find any real information about this company.
Apparently, image spam beats a number of spam filters. But not all. Try another filter. I haven't done an extensive test in the post-image-spam era but OSBF-Lua is the best available filter I know of, and I haven't noticed that it is compromised by image spam. It is free.
P.S. Feel free to Google PHYA and click the ad. It costs them money.
It appears to me that the increase is almost all due to a small number of messages swamping us. One advertises the stock symbol PHYA and has no link. The scam is that if you Google for that symbol, there will be a full-width paid ad for a fake broker/analyst site. About 10% of my email for the last couple of weeks (i.e. over 100 of 1000 spams/day) advertises this stock symbol.
You don't want to explore the legal interpretations in court when you try to make a claim, and for this reason you don't want to push the limit of what's sensible, or do anything that could be construed as material misrepresentation to acquire/maintain a policy.
Many insurance policies won't cover unoccupied houses. Check with your agent and secure additional coverage if necessary. And hire somebody to look after your house. For money. With well defined responsibilities, like checking the house every k days and keeping a record.
Google for "false dichotomy."
Dripping sarcasm notwithstanding, there's a fundamental point here. Can the intrusions in liberty be justified by reduced risk of hijackings or whatever? Or, perhaps, do they increase the risk? Some evidence would be apropos.
Suppose that the numbers above were true. The toll in deaths and ruined lives would still be lower than, say, the carnage on the highways. An orthogonal issue? I don't think so. Just think of what you could do with the billions of dollars wasted on building the police state. Highway safety is not even the most effective use to which these dollars could be put, but its orders of magnitude better than whatever DHS does with it.
But don't let my digression distract you from the fundamental point: there is not one iota of evidence that wiretaps, no-fly lists, torture, profiling, etc. make us safer. There is plenty of evidence that they directly diminish our quality of life, and indirectly divert our resources from more worthy pursuits.
I hope that the new Congress will put its foot down on yet another intrusion into American personal liberty. The old one -- even the Democratic members -- did not.
MSR is not a product development group. It is a research organization within Microsoft. MSR researchers pursue curiosity-driven research and publish in the normal academic channels.
On the other hand, if you're an offender, there's a 50% chance you'll be labeled. Thats a 50% chance you won't.
Better than chance, I suppose, but a useful predictive tool it is not.
Output as measured by GDP. Sounds like money to me.
This is all an aside from my original contrarian statement questioning the value of this particular economic theory.
It may be that rather than hitting the bounds of human intelligence, as the article said, we are likely to hit the bounds of the mantra that we require constant "growth" just to stay in the same place.
Actually, that's giving the article too much credit. It says nothing at all.
Productivity measures money. A Manhattan lawyer is more productive than one in Grand Forks because he or she bills more per hour. The argument that the Manhattan lawyer makes more "stuff" other than money is tenuous at best.
At the end of the 19th century it was commonly thought that pretty well everything that needed to be known about science and technology was known; that only incremental development would occur from then on.
Similar lack of imagination has been expressed in many contexts over the years.
And, by the way, who says that 'productivity' is a useful measure of anything?
Here's my spam filter setup. Some assembly required.
m l
http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/spamassassin.ht
Coin flipping is not 50% 'reliable' whatever that means. Suppose that 1 in 1000 people is a terr-ist. You haul in a bunch of people at random and subject them all to the coin-flip test. About 50% of them come up positive and about 50% negative. So you label the 50% (including 50% of all terr-ists) innocent, and you label 50% terr-ists. Of the ones you labeled terr-ists, only 1/1000 really are. That's 99.9% false positives. Hardly "50% reliable".
If you would like to investigate the proper standards for evaluating diagnostic tests, Google for "positive predictive value" and "negative predictive value"
Yes, and if a lie detector were even slightly better than flipping a coin, it would be a valid test, and there would be scientific experiments to validate it. So far nobody -- any many have tried -- have shown it better (even by a little bit) than flipping a coin, reading tea leaves, reading palms, Tarot cards, etc.
gvcormac@uwaterloo.ca -- Bring it on!
Seriously, if we cower in fear, the spammers win. Obfuscating, Turing tests, whatever show fear.
The polygraph doesn't pass any scientific validity tests. It is an interrogation device, that's all. See The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.
Yes, there is a bidding war for employers to hire top computer scientists. Colleges and potential students haven't noticed yet, that that's par for the course. Applications and admissions will triple about when the market dries up again.
The reason your machine has 32-bit XP is because Microsoft made the (misguided, in my opinion) to make XP-64 require 64 bit drivers, and your favorite dollar-store device doesn't come with one. Had they implemented some facility for for XP64 to use 32-bit drivers, we'd all be using it by now.
How does Vista change this?
In California, sports and TV stars can murder their wives with impunity. Can OSS gurus? Perhaps this is the bellweather case.
You have to pronounce Nazi as not-see to get the pun.
I pronounce Nazi as gnat-see so it doesn't work for me,
unless I translate to Ahmerikhan.