Oops math mistake on the part where I said 0^1+0^-1 = 0
A better way to show how stupid this is is to observe that
0/0*0=0/0 hence nullity*0=nullity.
But if we keep the normal definition of exponentiation 0^0*0=0^(1+0)=0^1=0 Hence nullity*0=0. Nothing we call a number should give two different values when multiplied by 0.
On the other hand if we get to do manipulations like this then 0^1 = 0^(-2)*0^1 = (1/0)^2 * 0 = 1/0 * 1/0 *0/1 = 0/0 = nullity. So 1= nullity.
I mean just to add some additional points about how stupid this is.
In his 'proof' he goes through the bit where he says 0^0=0^(-1)*0^(1). But 0^1=0^(-1)=0.
It's just all so wrong. This has to be a hoax or I feel really very sorry for those poor children. They are in for a nasty surprise when they start manipulating things like this and keep getting inconsistent answers.
Watch the video this guy starts off defining -inf = -1/0 and +inf = 1/0. Yet basic elementary school math tells us that 0=-0 hence we get that -inf=+inf.
Now if you just want to set -inf and +inf equal to each other you get a reasonable mathematical structure. It isn't quite what we want from the real numbers since it fails to be a field but it's a lot like what you use in projective geometry.
All this aside what this guy says is just really damn stupid. First of all he is no longer working within the axioms of the real numbers so he didn't 'solve' any problem about 0^0. Second of all he seems to lack any understanding of what the content is of asserting what 0^0 would be. It sure as hell isn't just doing some computation. It would have to work consistently with all our other expectations about how exponentials and limits work and you just can't define something that works consistently like this.
I mean jesus christ do people like this not realize that there is an entire profession who does math and has dealt with this sort of thing a LONG time ago.
Actually radio stations get to play the stuff totally for free. In fact I believe this right is guaranteed them directly by law (it helps to have lobbyists) but if not the record companies wouldn't dare tamper with their free advertisements. The problem is the other way with payola. I believe the deal they have is with people who play radio in public areas but I'm not sure.
Uhh they are both moderated the same. Seems like the system is working.
Besides you, just like all the people who whine about their google rank, are missing the point. The moderation system does not exist to give you appropriate credit for your point. It exists to make sure the best points are visible and the shit isn't. It really doesn't matter who said it first and you can hardly argue that this was a deep insight.
The point is that the system generally works in the aggregate not that there is no individual post that gets 'unfairly' modded up or down. Also your example is perfectly consistent with someone trying to be a fair moderator. They notice one before the other because they are browsing the comments in some different fashion.
Actually companies giving charitable donations to the third world for pure profit motive would be one of the best pieces of information I have heard in a long time. The day companies start giving away their products in the third world in anticipation of them becoming a real market is the begining of the end for poverty in those areas.
That having been said I think there is a reasonable justification for the original commenters skepticism. I mean there are charitable donations companies make with buisness motives (good PR) which are all find and nice and then their are loss leaders which aren't always so pleasent. When your cell company gives you a free phone with your contract it's something you should look at with sucpiscion lest the total cost be far more in the long run.
When redhat makes this donation we know it has only the first kind of profit motive as their ability to lock OLPC/users in is considerably limited by the GPL. I very much doubt MS is going to do anything evil to the people getting this laptop but the question is whether they will keep interest in the project or when their charitable motivations wane will OLPC start having to pay for windows. One also has to worry about future fights over enabling certain features and who doesn't qualify for the free OS.
Don't get me wrong if MS decided to donate a whole bunch of MONEY to the project as well as providing a long term contract to provide free versions of windows I think they should take it. But merely donating a version of windows doesn't really count as charity (they get it for free) and has some potential drawbacks despite MS's non-evil intentions.
Actually though I think you are totally wrong about them getting an income from coding. Just as african villages have started selling handcrafts through the internet if they get enough computers/internet don't be surprised to see people in the third world start doing IT related stuff. That's what makes the OLPC project so interesting. Frankly this seems the strongest argument for linux as I doubt visual studio will run on OLPC.
I'm a big fan of FOSS in general but concerns about free code, open standards and the like are first world luxuries that really aren't important compared to getting these people better lives. If I could take a whole african country out of poverty in return for shutting down the copyleft lliscenses all together I would do it despite how much it would suck for me.
If all you had to do was install a fresh copy of XP on the machines then MS wouldn't need to do any work in porting the system to OLPC. Almost certainly by cutting out inessential features MS could reduce the memory demands for XP significantly, though given Mc's notorious interdependence problems perhaps not enough. But this is why MS has a specialized mobile OS just for this sort of problem.
Sure OLPC is inclined to go with a FOSS solution and has some good justifications for doing so but I don't see how they in good conscience could refuse an offer from MS to pay for some *huge* number of the laptops complete with a guarantee of a free version of windows for all the OLPC machines.
Whatever I might think of the technical and design features of MS software it does get the job done not to mention it's extreme ubiquity means that knowing how to use windows is a more useful skill than knowing how to use some random other interface. The worries about MS controlling the project could easily be dealt with via the right sort of contract, and unlike other corporate agreements signing a contract in bad faith or weaseling out of it in this situation would just be too horrible from a PR standpoint for MS to ever consider. So as much as I might wish all these kids were brought up using Linux if MS is going to give away millions of these devices just for running windows the offer should be taken.
Hopefully more companies start taking a long term view of things and donating their products to the third world to prepare for when they become consumers.
I've posted a lot more that 23 times and I agree with his point.
MOST moderation is good. Most moderation seems to be well intentioned and usually ends up being pretty good. Sure it isn't perfect, and there is going to be lots of disagreement on funny but it isn't some horrible problem.
That being said it is also far from perfect. Posts in particularly controversial conversations or expressing unpopular ideas are far too likely to get buried even if they are good. Not because of any deep evil among moderators but because of the system.
That said I disagree with nearly all your suggestions except the bit about meta-moderators reading comments (it should at least be easy for them). The mod tags are pretty self explanatory and their only goal is to communicate something to the reader who is going to have the same idea of their meaning as the moderator did. Requiring a comment to be included would drasticly reduce the amount of moderating that would get done. This would be problematic as it would effectively give each individual moderation far more weight making things even more random. Besides what good with this justification be? The meta-moderator should approach the moderation with fresh eyes anyway. Finally I don't even understand the last point. Do you want every reader to get to do this? This would just encourage people to take away up mods from posts they disagree with if they didn't lose any mod points for doing so just like on dig. Besides most people don't see posts that are unfairly downloaded so how could they fix it?
In my opinion the problems with the mod system stem from the biases toward hiding posts making 'censorship' too easy. It takes a smaller percent of the readership to hide a comment than to keep it visible This is because all you need to do to keep a comment off the page is to drop it below 0 (or sometimes 1) and then most moderators who might like it won't see it (some will but not all). So it takes a pretty small percent of moderators to get a view 'censored' than it does to keep it visible since the former group only needs to get it below 0 and it is unlikely to return. This is a bit of a problem but could be solved easily by requiring moderators to browse with everything visible.
A more troubling problem is the fact that you get to choose where to assign your mod points. An unpopular opinion that is well argued will end up hidden even if most people respect the argument. Since people choose where they moderate they want to distribute their points in an economical manner. People are simply less likely to spend their points modding up a position they really dislike even if it is unfairly modded when they can spend them on other comments.
My solution would be to do the following:
* Require a certain amount of moderation to get the karma bonus * Do comment moderation randomly the way we do meta-moderation. * If it doesn't already happen moderators who are meta-modded as bad too much should lose mod priv * Allow 'appeals' of bad moderation. An appeal would just promote the comment to the head of the meta-moderation queue but abuse of appeals would result in loss of privilege and loss of moderation privilege.
Ajax really did make the web way more useful and just because some idiots use it poorly doesn't mean it doesn't.
Like all earlier great new things on the web once people recognize something as the next big new thing they all want a piece of the action and slap it on their site whether it is useful or not. As always they overdo it but this doesn't mean the original idea wasn't important.
Simple ajax things are hugely useful. The modal dialog boxes and displays are very useful (except when they are ads).
The majority is pretty damn good in deciding what something is ABOUT. People may be dumb enough to think that intelligent design is a good theory of speciation and natural history but even the most hardcore ID proponent agrees that 'the origin of the species' is a book about speciation and natural history.
metadata is suppose to tell us what the data is about not whether it is true or false.
Pandora's recommendations suck. I was all excited and kept trying it for awhile but the recommendations all stunk. It was actually worse than just listening to the radio.
Pandora seemed totally unaware of the qualities that make a great song different from a horrible song in the same broad area. I don't want songs that have similar guitar patterns or some other weird category I want other songs that sound *good* like the ones I like.
Thanks for the last.fm mention I should try that as it sounds like I would prefer it. I'm guessing that I have more mainstream taste than you and would prefer the hitness that last.fm can predict.
Interesting then that wikipedia has far better coverage of my subject (recursion theory branch of mathematics) than any other encyclopedia I've ever seen and very few errors. Clearly it works sometimes!
What you miss is that even if people are morons they are reasonably good at recognizing who is less of a moron than they are, at least for most subjects. Religion (and politics) are good examples of where things break down. Since religion redefines who counts as an expert (only our priests have the line to god) and establishes it's own expert terminology people don't realize that it's all BS.
The very existance of universities, scientists and other specialists is testament to the ability of people to identify expertise and respect it. Except for a few areas where competing standards of authority are set up it works pretty well.
No google exists because there is a need for a central index of the information on the web.
I don't care if it's semantic non-semantic or whatever you need someplace you can go to find out where to start.
Maybe a real semantic web would make things easier for google but that just means we would expect more of it. There will always be some best information search tool and people will use that. The more semantic data we get the better the results we will expect, nothing more.
Wow, that's an incredible example. I've been arguing for a long time for a more punative meta-moderation system. That is a system that yanks moderation rights for anyone who gets enough bad meta-moderation from enough different sources (since you can't select what you meta-mod this avoids the stalker problem).
Additionally to reply to your parent the moderation issue is still a problem even without evil abuses like this. Back when I used to post more frequently I noticed that my comments that were equally if not better reasoned but supported views some people wanted to dismiss as obviously false would disappear below threshold sometimes (not always but it never happened with comments with more slashdot mainstream type conclusions). For instance comments expressing non-standard moral conclusions, e.g., killing people isn't itself a harm only the suffering it causes to the living matters.
The system is reasonably good for fairly simple points and I think most people try to moderate fairly. It doesn't scale well to more complex issues or any situation where people think some things are just stupid even though they aren't, e.g., divisive issues like abortion.
There certainly is an element of this. I've often complained that the meta-mod system needs a more complex system to punish people who downgrade comments they just disagree with.
However, I've also seen well reasoned comments challenging the prevailing views get modded up to 5. Half the reason you appear to see this effect is probably the fact that slashdot attracts people who think this way so the people who think MS is great and have reasons aren't here leaving only trolls to post about it.
First of all it just isn't true that slashdot moderation is an example of useful metadata from an untrusted source. The *presenter* of the metadata, i.e., slashdot, is a trusted source. When we see a comment with moderation 5 we know the slashdot system has moderated it 5 and that some random spammer didn't just lie and give it moderation 5. Sure this metadata is created based on 'untrusted' input but that is a different matter entirely and in reality the sources are sorta trusted because only accounts who contribute sufficiently get to moderate. The tagging thing might be an example of a useful app where the metadata is formed from untrusted input but either way the example isn't quite on target.
As for the issue of metadata on the web it is a serious concern and search engines can't continue to just ignore it. As ajax and other dynamic presentation technologies become more and more common less and less of the content on the web will be encoded in simple HTML. Sure everyone who writes up some fancy ajax site and isn't an idiot will leave some html files around for google to index but this doesn't solve the problem. If everyone who visits the site sees something other than the info in the HTML then the HTML itself has become the metadata.
This problem is solvable since, as the success of google itself indicates, if the data is being used by the end user for some significant purpose the authors stay honest. The reason websites sometimes give bogus meta tags is because it doesn't affect the user's experience in the least. If we get something like the semantic web where the users are actually making use of the metadata then things are no different than they are now.
I hope this is what happens as the other option where google starts learning to crawl through ajax calls is much less pleasant. It was bad enough when all ruby actions were gets and google would trigger all sorts of things to happen in your app. It will be far worse if they are deliberately trigger all the JS scripts on your page in order to search effectively. And they *need* to be able to search effectively as that is the heart of why the web works.
Alternatively maybe google could start incentivizing accurate metadata descriptions of *other* pages (via outgoing links) by giving your web page a boost in the rankings. Thus, like wikipedia, perhaps enough good contributions would outweigh the bad ones.
Just take a few (more than 2) images of the same location and eliminate anything that isn't in all of them.
Of course this isn't so simple in implementation. You have to figure out when you are viewing the same thing from a different angle and so forth but it certainly is possible.
This demand has legal trouble stamped all over it.
For starters this seems like a violation of the anti-trust statutes. Universal knows they have no legal means to compel apple to pay them money for every iPod sold so instead they are trying to blackmail them into doing so by threatening to stop selling apple their songs. Whether or not the iPod is used to play/possess illegal songs is totally irrelevant. Refusing to let apple sell their songs on iTunes won't stop ipods from being used for illegal music, in fact it would likely increase it. This is nothing but a clear cut case of a company using it's monopolistic practices to extort money, exactly the sort of thing the anti-trust laws were designed to prevent. At least MS could come up with a non-laughable (just a bit of a snicker) claim that their bundling practices were for the consumer's benefit, Universal has no such case.
More interestingly what happens when the RIAA sues someone who had illegal music on their ipod and they argue in court that the ipod surcharge gives them the right to do so? While I'm skeptical that such a claim could succeed one never knows. Also, even if the poor victim of the lawsuit loses this point it puts Universal in an interesting position. In order to successfully sue people using their ipods to play illegal music they must admit apple wasn't purchasing *anything* with the surcharge. That makes it even harder to claim that the surcharge was part of a valid business deal rather than something they coerced using monopolistic power.
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I know one thing for sure though. The second I find myself paying a surcharge on a device I purchase to the RIAA I will make a point of not purchasing music for that device. At the moment I buy songs from itunes not too infrequently but if I've already paid $5 to the RIAA I will always search for an illegal copy first. Maybe in the long run they will realize people have an innate sense of fair play. If you don't insist on DRM and sell songs for a reasonable price people will choose to pay money so the artists are compensated but the second you pick someone's pocket claiming you need to be paid for what you were going to steal people will stop feeling bad about stealing from you.
This raises some interesting questions. In particular a website is mostly, perhaps exclusively, expressive content. I think there is a plausible argument that the ADA act amounts to compelled speech in this case and thus is unenforceable when applied to web sites.
Also remember that the ADA only requires that someone make reasonable accommodations. If building a disabled accessible website is impossible or nearly so with the technology the company choose to use it likely won't have to be compliant. But since you could always add an additional text only website this is a problem.
I'm very conflicted over the ADA act. On the one hand disabled people clearly shouldn't be screwed over and ADA protections have heavily helped them. On the other hand it seems not only disturbing that the ADA is so intrusive but downright backwards that the ADA penalizes companies for offering more service. A law that says you must offer everyone the same level of service encourages people to make that level universally low. It means that if I'm a company thinking of going online I either have to do it all at once or not go online at all. I don't really know if this applies to sufficiently small companies however.
I think I would favor a replacement for the ADA that instead of requiring compliance pays (or gives serious tax breaks) companies to be compliant. Yes this would be expensive but we are paying the same price through increased good cost anyway. Perhaps we should just pay the disabled people directly and let them decide if they want to give the money to corporations to become compliant or keep it and use it themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
No I used the same step he did
0^(-1)=1/0
and then
0*0 = 0 =0/1
Hence 0^(-1)*0*0 = 1/0*0/1
Now just as he did in the video I combined
1/0*0/1=0/0=nullity
So if his reasoning works why doesn't this?
This has to be a hoax of some kind. I can't believe they let people this dumb teach math.
The same sort of manipulation this guy does can easily be applied to show that 0 = nullity.
0=0^1=0^-1 * 0^2 = 1/0 * 0*0 = 1/0 * 0 = 1/0 * 0/1 = 0/0 = nullity.
How can someone who is supposedly trained and licensed do this to kids.
Gahh I'm tired. In the above post I skipped the step where 0^1 = 0^(-2)*0^(3) = 0^-2 * 0^1
Here is a really good example of how stupid this shit is:
0^1 = 0 but if we do what he does then
0^1 = 0^(-2)* 0^(3) = (1/0)^2 * 0^3=1/0 * 1/0 *0 = 1/0 *0/1 = 0/0 = nullity.
Hence the reason we treat them as undefined and not a real number.
Oops math mistake on the part where I said 0^1+0^-1 = 0
A better way to show how stupid this is is to observe that
0/0*0=0/0 hence nullity*0=nullity.
But if we keep the normal definition of exponentiation 0^0*0=0^(1+0)=0^1=0 Hence nullity*0=0. Nothing we call a number should give two different values when multiplied by 0.
On the other hand if we get to do manipulations like this then 0^1 = 0^(-2)*0^1 = (1/0)^2 * 0 = 1/0 * 1/0 *0/1 = 0/0 = nullity. So 1= nullity.
The projective line is neat and all but what he is doing is just stupid and fucking up his kids.
He reasons thusly 1/0=+inf -1/0=-inf (already see the problem that +inf=-inf) and 0/0=nullity (hence nullity = +inf)
He then reasons that 0^0=0^(-1)*0^(1)=1/0*0 = 0/0 = nullity.
Now let's try that another way.
nullity*0=0/0*0=0/0=nullity.
But also if 0^0 is a number then 0^0*0^1 = 0^1 = 0 Thus nullity*0=0 hence nullity*0=nullity=0. This is a pretty clear contradiction.
In other words it's just dumb. Mathematicians are not idiots. We haven't missed something like this for thousands of years.
I mean just to add some additional points about how stupid this is.
In his 'proof' he goes through the bit where he says 0^0=0^(-1)*0^(1). But 0^1=0^(-1)=0.
It's just all so wrong. This has to be a hoax or I feel really very sorry for those poor children. They are in for a nasty surprise when they start manipulating things like this and keep getting inconsistent answers.
Watch the video this guy starts off defining -inf = -1/0 and +inf = 1/0. Yet basic elementary school math tells us that 0=-0 hence we get that -inf=+inf.
Now if you just want to set -inf and +inf equal to each other you get a reasonable mathematical structure. It isn't quite what we want from the real numbers since it fails to be a field but it's a lot like what you use in projective geometry.
All this aside what this guy says is just really damn stupid. First of all he is no longer working within the axioms of the real numbers so he didn't 'solve' any problem about 0^0. Second of all he seems to lack any understanding of what the content is of asserting what 0^0 would be. It sure as hell isn't just doing some computation. It would have to work consistently with all our other expectations about how exponentials and limits work and you just can't define something that works consistently like this.
I mean jesus christ do people like this not realize that there is an entire profession who does math and has dealt with this sort of thing a LONG time ago.
Actually radio stations get to play the stuff totally for free. In fact I believe this right is guaranteed them directly by law (it helps to have lobbyists) but if not the record companies wouldn't dare tamper with their free advertisements. The problem is the other way with payola. I believe the deal they have is with people who play radio in public areas but I'm not sure.
Uhh they are both moderated the same. Seems like the system is working.
Besides you, just like all the people who whine about their google rank, are missing the point. The moderation system does not exist to give you appropriate credit for your point. It exists to make sure the best points are visible and the shit isn't. It really doesn't matter who said it first and you can hardly argue that this was a deep insight.
The point is that the system generally works in the aggregate not that there is no individual post that gets 'unfairly' modded up or down. Also your example is perfectly consistent with someone trying to be a fair moderator. They notice one before the other because they are browsing the comments in some different fashion.
Actually companies giving charitable donations to the third world for pure profit motive would be one of the best pieces of information I have heard in a long time. The day companies start giving away their products in the third world in anticipation of them becoming a real market is the begining of the end for poverty in those areas.
That having been said I think there is a reasonable justification for the original commenters skepticism. I mean there are charitable donations companies make with buisness motives (good PR) which are all find and nice and then their are loss leaders which aren't always so pleasent. When your cell company gives you a free phone with your contract it's something you should look at with sucpiscion lest the total cost be far more in the long run.
When redhat makes this donation we know it has only the first kind of profit motive as their ability to lock OLPC/users in is considerably limited by the GPL. I very much doubt MS is going to do anything evil to the people getting this laptop but the question is whether they will keep interest in the project or when their charitable motivations wane will OLPC start having to pay for windows. One also has to worry about future fights over enabling certain features and who doesn't qualify for the free OS.
Don't get me wrong if MS decided to donate a whole bunch of MONEY to the project as well as providing a long term contract to provide free versions of windows I think they should take it. But merely donating a version of windows doesn't really count as charity (they get it for free) and has some potential drawbacks despite MS's non-evil intentions.
Actually though I think you are totally wrong about them getting an income from coding. Just as african villages have started selling handcrafts through the internet if they get enough computers/internet don't be surprised to see people in the third world start doing IT related stuff. That's what makes the OLPC project so interesting. Frankly this seems the strongest argument for linux as I doubt visual studio will run on OLPC.
Nor should he be.
I'm a big fan of FOSS in general but concerns about free code, open standards and the like are first world luxuries that really aren't important compared to getting these people better lives. If I could take a whole african country out of poverty in return for shutting down the copyleft lliscenses all together I would do it despite how much it would suck for me.
If all you had to do was install a fresh copy of XP on the machines then MS wouldn't need to do any work in porting the system to OLPC. Almost certainly by cutting out inessential features MS could reduce the memory demands for XP significantly, though given Mc's notorious interdependence problems perhaps not enough. But this is why MS has a specialized mobile OS just for this sort of problem.
Sure OLPC is inclined to go with a FOSS solution and has some good justifications for doing so but I don't see how they in good conscience could refuse an offer from MS to pay for some *huge* number of the laptops complete with a guarantee of a free version of windows for all the OLPC machines.
Whatever I might think of the technical and design features of MS software it does get the job done not to mention it's extreme ubiquity means that knowing how to use windows is a more useful skill than knowing how to use some random other interface. The worries about MS controlling the project could easily be dealt with via the right sort of contract, and unlike other corporate agreements signing a contract in bad faith or weaseling out of it in this situation would just be too horrible from a PR standpoint for MS to ever consider. So as much as I might wish all these kids were brought up using Linux if MS is going to give away millions of these devices just for running windows the offer should be taken.
Hopefully more companies start taking a long term view of things and donating their products to the third world to prepare for when they become consumers.
I've posted a lot more that 23 times and I agree with his point.
MOST moderation is good. Most moderation seems to be well intentioned and usually ends up being pretty good. Sure it isn't perfect, and there is going to be lots of disagreement on funny but it isn't some horrible problem.
That being said it is also far from perfect. Posts in particularly controversial conversations or expressing unpopular ideas are far too likely to get buried even if they are good. Not because of any deep evil among moderators but because of the system.
That said I disagree with nearly all your suggestions except the bit about meta-moderators reading comments (it should at least be easy for them). The mod tags are pretty self explanatory and their only goal is to communicate something to the reader who is going to have the same idea of their meaning as the moderator did. Requiring a comment to be included would drasticly reduce the amount of moderating that would get done. This would be problematic as it would effectively give each individual moderation far more weight making things even more random. Besides what good with this justification be? The meta-moderator should approach the moderation with fresh eyes anyway. Finally I don't even understand the last point. Do you want every reader to get to do this? This would just encourage people to take away up mods from posts they disagree with if they didn't lose any mod points for doing so just like on dig. Besides most people don't see posts that are unfairly downloaded so how could they fix it?
In my opinion the problems with the mod system stem from the biases toward hiding posts making 'censorship' too easy. It takes a smaller percent of the readership to hide a comment than to keep it visible This is because all you need to do to keep a comment off the page is to drop it below 0 (or sometimes 1) and then most moderators who might like it won't see it (some will but not all). So it takes a pretty small percent of moderators to get a view 'censored' than it does to keep it visible since the former group only needs to get it below 0 and it is unlikely to return. This is a bit of a problem but could be solved easily by requiring moderators to browse with everything visible.
A more troubling problem is the fact that you get to choose where to assign your mod points. An unpopular opinion that is well argued will end up hidden even if most people respect the argument. Since people choose where they moderate they want to distribute their points in an economical manner. People are simply less likely to spend their points modding up a position they really dislike even if it is unfairly modded when they can spend them on other comments.
My solution would be to do the following:
* Require a certain amount of moderation to get the karma bonus
* Do comment moderation randomly the way we do meta-moderation.
* If it doesn't already happen moderators who are meta-modded as bad too much should lose mod priv
* Allow 'appeals' of bad moderation. An appeal would just promote the comment to the head of the meta-moderation queue but abuse of appeals would result in loss of privilege and loss of moderation privilege.
gmail? google spreadsheet?
Ajax really did make the web way more useful and just because some idiots use it poorly doesn't mean it doesn't.
Like all earlier great new things on the web once people recognize something as the next big new thing they all want a piece of the action and slap it on their site whether it is useful or not. As always they overdo it but this doesn't mean the original idea wasn't important.
Simple ajax things are hugely useful. The modal dialog boxes and displays are very useful (except when they are ads).
The majority is pretty damn good in deciding what something is ABOUT. People may be dumb enough to think that intelligent design is a good theory of speciation and natural history but even the most hardcore ID proponent agrees that 'the origin of the species' is a book about speciation and natural history.
metadata is suppose to tell us what the data is about not whether it is true or false.
I disagree totally.
Pandora's recommendations suck. I was all excited and kept trying it for awhile but the recommendations all stunk. It was actually worse than just listening to the radio.
Pandora seemed totally unaware of the qualities that make a great song different from a horrible song in the same broad area. I don't want songs that have similar guitar patterns or some other weird category I want other songs that sound *good* like the ones I like.
Thanks for the last.fm mention I should try that as it sounds like I would prefer it. I'm guessing that I have more mainstream taste than you and would prefer the hitness that last.fm can predict.
Interesting then that wikipedia has far better coverage of my subject (recursion theory branch of mathematics) than any other encyclopedia I've ever seen and very few errors. Clearly it works sometimes!
What you miss is that even if people are morons they are reasonably good at recognizing who is less of a moron than they are, at least for most subjects. Religion (and politics) are good examples of where things break down. Since religion redefines who counts as an expert (only our priests have the line to god) and establishes it's own expert terminology people don't realize that it's all BS.
The very existance of universities, scientists and other specialists is testament to the ability of people to identify expertise and respect it. Except for a few areas where competing standards of authority are set up it works pretty well.
No google exists because there is a need for a central index of the information on the web.
I don't care if it's semantic non-semantic or whatever you need someplace you can go to find out where to start.
Maybe a real semantic web would make things easier for google but that just means we would expect more of it. There will always be some best information search tool and people will use that. The more semantic data we get the better the results we will expect, nothing more.
Wow, that's an incredible example. I've been arguing for a long time for a more punative meta-moderation system. That is a system that yanks moderation rights for anyone who gets enough bad meta-moderation from enough different sources (since you can't select what you meta-mod this avoids the stalker problem).
Additionally to reply to your parent the moderation issue is still a problem even without evil abuses like this. Back when I used to post more frequently I noticed that my comments that were equally if not better reasoned but supported views some people wanted to dismiss as obviously false would disappear below threshold sometimes (not always but it never happened with comments with more slashdot mainstream type conclusions). For instance comments expressing non-standard moral conclusions, e.g., killing people isn't itself a harm only the suffering it causes to the living matters.
The system is reasonably good for fairly simple points and I think most people try to moderate fairly. It doesn't scale well to more complex issues or any situation where people think some things are just stupid even though they aren't, e.g., divisive issues like abortion.
There certainly is an element of this. I've often complained that the meta-mod system needs a more complex system to punish people who downgrade comments they just disagree with.
However, I've also seen well reasoned comments challenging the prevailing views get modded up to 5. Half the reason you appear to see this effect is probably the fact that slashdot attracts people who think this way so the people who think MS is great and have reasons aren't here leaving only trolls to post about it.
First of all it just isn't true that slashdot moderation is an example of useful metadata from an untrusted source. The *presenter* of the metadata, i.e., slashdot, is a trusted source. When we see a comment with moderation 5 we know the slashdot system has moderated it 5 and that some random spammer didn't just lie and give it moderation 5. Sure this metadata is created based on 'untrusted' input but that is a different matter entirely and in reality the sources are sorta trusted because only accounts who contribute sufficiently get to moderate. The tagging thing might be an example of a useful app where the metadata is formed from untrusted input but either way the example isn't quite on target.
As for the issue of metadata on the web it is a serious concern and search engines can't continue to just ignore it. As ajax and other dynamic presentation technologies become more and more common less and less of the content on the web will be encoded in simple HTML. Sure everyone who writes up some fancy ajax site and isn't an idiot will leave some html files around for google to index but this doesn't solve the problem. If everyone who visits the site sees something other than the info in the HTML then the HTML itself has become the metadata.
This problem is solvable since, as the success of google itself indicates, if the data is being used by the end user for some significant purpose the authors stay honest. The reason websites sometimes give bogus meta tags is because it doesn't affect the user's experience in the least. If we get something like the semantic web where the users are actually making use of the metadata then things are no different than they are now.
I hope this is what happens as the other option where google starts learning to crawl through ajax calls is much less pleasant. It was bad enough when all ruby actions were gets and google would trigger all sorts of things to happen in your app. It will be far worse if they are deliberately trigger all the JS scripts on your page in order to search effectively. And they *need* to be able to search effectively as that is the heart of why the web works.
Alternatively maybe google could start incentivizing accurate metadata descriptions of *other* pages (via outgoing links) by giving your web page a boost in the rankings. Thus, like wikipedia, perhaps enough good contributions would outweigh the bad ones.
Just take a few (more than 2) images of the same location and eliminate anything that isn't in all of them.
Of course this isn't so simple in implementation. You have to figure out when you are viewing the same thing from a different angle and so forth but it certainly is possible.
This demand has legal trouble stamped all over it.
For starters this seems like a violation of the anti-trust statutes. Universal knows they have no legal means to compel apple to pay them money for every iPod sold so instead they are trying to blackmail them into doing so by threatening to stop selling apple their songs. Whether or not the iPod is used to play/possess illegal songs is totally irrelevant. Refusing to let apple sell their songs on iTunes won't stop ipods from being used for illegal music, in fact it would likely increase it. This is nothing but a clear cut case of a company using it's monopolistic practices to extort money, exactly the sort of thing the anti-trust laws were designed to prevent. At least MS could come up with a non-laughable (just a bit of a snicker) claim that their bundling practices were for the consumer's benefit, Universal has no such case.
More interestingly what happens when the RIAA sues someone who had illegal music on their ipod and they argue in court that the ipod surcharge gives them the right to do so? While I'm skeptical that such a claim could succeed one never knows. Also, even if the poor victim of the lawsuit loses this point it puts Universal in an interesting position. In order to successfully sue people using their ipods to play illegal music they must admit apple wasn't purchasing *anything* with the surcharge. That makes it even harder to claim that the surcharge was part of a valid business deal rather than something they coerced using monopolistic power.
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I know one thing for sure though. The second I find myself paying a surcharge on a device I purchase to the RIAA I will make a point of not purchasing music for that device. At the moment I buy songs from itunes not too infrequently but if I've already paid $5 to the RIAA I will always search for an illegal copy first. Maybe in the long run they will realize people have an innate sense of fair play. If you don't insist on DRM and sell songs for a reasonable price people will choose to pay money so the artists are compensated but the second you pick someone's pocket claiming you need to be paid for what you were going to steal people will stop feeling bad about stealing from you.
This raises some interesting questions. In particular a website is mostly, perhaps exclusively, expressive content. I think there is a plausible argument that the ADA act amounts to compelled speech in this case and thus is unenforceable when applied to web sites.
Also remember that the ADA only requires that someone make reasonable accommodations. If building a disabled accessible website is impossible or nearly so with the technology the company choose to use it likely won't have to be compliant. But since you could always add an additional text only website this is a problem.
I'm very conflicted over the ADA act. On the one hand disabled people clearly shouldn't be screwed over and ADA protections have heavily helped them. On the other hand it seems not only disturbing that the ADA is so intrusive but downright backwards that the ADA penalizes companies for offering more service. A law that says you must offer everyone the same level of service encourages people to make that level universally low. It means that if I'm a company thinking of going online I either have to do it all at once or not go online at all. I don't really know if this applies to sufficiently small companies however.
I think I would favor a replacement for the ADA that instead of requiring compliance pays (or gives serious tax breaks) companies to be compliant. Yes this would be expensive but we are paying the same price through increased good cost anyway. Perhaps we should just pay the disabled people directly and let them decide if they want to give the money to corporations to become compliant or keep it and use it themselves.