Am I right in recalling Microsoft doing that number at some point?
And every single GPL program ever released, as well. GPL section 11:
BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
Yes, I know it's free software and not quite the same, but this is not a valid criticism of Microsoft. The real criticism is that there are people who expect 100% in an environment where that is currently flatly impossible, and while I'll happily argue that Microsoft could do much better, I will not argue that even in theory that their products could be perfect. (Even when we go to great lengths to make perfect software, at staggering costs, it still sometimes fails; there's many good reasons to expect this is fundamental in some ways.)
Unfortunately, there's no good way to partially disclaim quality, so there you have it. You want warenteed software, you're free to pay for it, but it will be orders of magnitude less capable then even Windows 3.1. Good luck affording even a decent text editor built to that standard.
Apollo may have begun as a techno-military tour de force, and sure it was intertwined with nuclear delivery systems, and phalloidal to boot.
When you have a practical design for a non-phallic chemical booster capable of getting into orbit from Earth, let me know.
(Sorry. Been reading too many feminists with no comprehension of physics... to the point they don't even "believe" in physics... who seem to have this stupid idea that the "phallic" nature of rockets are some sort of choice, concious or otherwise, rather then physically-imposed necessity.)
Re:Militarisation of space - one option
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 1
Why not make space, or at least the space around the earth, the same as the air: the space above a particular country belongs to that country...
Because you still have to have a limit on how high that extends or it becomes physically absurd. If you have a limit, it can be "abused", which will encourage people to try to make the limit higher, but you can never make it high enough to prevent "abuse".
Assuming a 24 hour day with an approximation of the speed of light as 186,000 miles per second, at a distance of about 2.5 billion miles, the territories "owned" by the respective countries on the equator are swinging around at the speed of light if I'm getting my math right.
(The circle described at the equator by a point going at the speed of light will have a circumferance of 186,000 * (24*60*60) miles, which after dividing by 2*pi gives you the number of miles that circle will have as a radius. In "bc -l", (24*60*60*186000)/(3.14159*2) gives a result of 2,557,685,758, rounded to the nearest int and with the commas added.)
Granted, that's a lot, but A: the point where it becomes practically impossible to avoid the oncoming "space claim" comes a hell of a lot before that and B: We'd like to think that someday, we'll have people out that far.
So there has to be some limit; you can argue fruitfully over what it should be but you'll be arguing for a difference of degree over what we already have, not kind.
Many times, I have solved The Problem in my sleep. I have also composed some bitching music (music composition being a former hobby of mine).
Of the many times I have solved The Problem, only once was it actually a solution, and even then it was more like a thought that actually put me on the right track when I awoke, more out of coincidence I think then anything else.
Many times I have awoken with the semantic equivalent of "My code will be fixed if I just pick a purple lilac and feed it to my dog.", only much, much wierder in a way that I can not just summon up while awake to provide a good example for. And it all makes such sense at the time.
I'm sure some people really do solve problems in their dreams, and goodness knows a good night's sleep always does help me. But I wonder how many people really solve problems in their dream, and how many people just think they've solved problems. I've managed to drag several ideas from my dreams back into the waking world, including quite a few semi-interesting sci-fi plots, but none of them are worth anything when examined in the light of the sun, except perhaps some entertainment value.
One of the things I remember dragging back was a music melody that was going to make me famous... I don't recall the specifics but I do recall it only involved two notes a whole step apart in some entirely uninspired rhythm; in the waking world it was terminally dull, as you might imagine a two-note melody would be. (I have on the other hand written some music I rather enjoyed based on the wierd feeling I sometimes get after having wierd dreams, but the music did not come to me in my sleep.)
Have you actually any idea what the probabilities are of someone writing the exact same sentence for describing the same thing?
It's a relative thing.
If you're checking for word-for-word plagarism, which a lot of plagarism is and is worth checking, you're right that the odds of a false positive is fairly low as long as you're checking for long enough phrases.
The bad part comes when you say, "Well, the students have figured out how to re-phrase the ideas so the word-for-word checker doesn't work so well. Let's abstract the concepts out and check for those."
Then you start getting into false positive land. The crazier the students get, the looser your concept matches get, the greater the chances of a false positive.
It's a trade-off, and as is often the case, no machine learning technique can really stand up to a determined human attacker's attempt to get an arbitrarily-choosable piece of data misclassified. Eventually the human forces the machine learning algorithm to be so loose it's impossible for the algorithm to really "say" anything about a given input. That's when you get false positives.
It's a tradeoff, and with human attackers, the machines inevitably lose. That's one reason these things are only useful for tools; the professor must not trust these above their own judgement.
Teaching union. Union rhetoric to the contrary, the union does not represent all teachers who are members, just like the AARP doesn't really represent all of its members politically. (I respect my grandparents, who have expressed to me (though not in this precise verbiage of course) that they don't feel they can join the AARP, even though the card does have nice discounts & stuff, because its politics amount to "Screw the young!".)
If the real teachers got together, decided they were fed up with their "leadership", and formed a counter-union, interested in the actual scientific and open-minded study of how to encourage real learning (to the exclusion of "education"), we might get somewhere. If "ifs" got us anywhere, it'd be a chaotic world indeed. While this is not impossible, the social effort needed to accomplish this would be truly significant.
(I do not strongly indict teachers for not doing this, though; it's very, very, very risky for the first few teachers doing it and a lot of hard work. But I wish it could happen.)
Counterpoint: If we wipe out the Martian biosphere, so what? Especially if we replace it with a rich, vibrant, diverse biosphere?
It's worth thinking about the answer to those questions very, very carefully. If your answer is, "It's just wrong!", then you understand nothing even about your own opinions, and don't expect the rest of us to give a shit about them.
(I'll also suggest that if your answer is "Because life is precious!", that both "Why?" and "Aren't being a hypocrite then, living with a functional immune system?" are two valuable questions to consider.)
I'm not saying that there's no answer to them. I'm saying that knee-jerk environmentalism only applies to Earth, to the extent that it even makes sense there. Applying it to space is stupid. There is nothing we could do the the Lunar "biosphere" that could possibly make it any worse then it already it. Nothing. All we could possibly do is improve it. Mars may be a slightly more complicated case if bacteria or bacteria-analogues are found, but how much does that really change?
In the end, it boils down to: "Is environmentalism taken to the level you seem to be suggesting a death pact, with the only way to satisfy it being to cower on our planet, huddled in a cave for fear of hurting an animal or plant, sometime, somewhere in the universe, waiting for extinction?" If your answer is "yes", don't expect the rest of us to agree with you.
Admittedly, I'd at least turn the American public school system into something functional before going back to the moon, which we already did 35 freaking years ago.
Turning the American Public School System (and its subsequent export to the rest of the world) into something functional is a bigger problem then going to Mars. It's probably still a bigger problem then getting a self-sustaining colony on Mars, but that's a close thing.
I'm dead serious. The problems with the school system are deep and fundamental, and third-generation entrenched beaureacrats fight any attempt at real change as if their livelihood depended on it. Go figure. Worst of all, they passionately believe they have the One True Way to raise our children, which makes them even more dangerous; they are zealots, with all that word implies.
There are no Martians to actively fight colonization, but there is a huge entrenched teaching union that will fight you tooth and nail for real school reform.
First you have to sweep nearly every Educator out of their position of power, and reform our entire culture to accept that the form of schooling that damn near all of us were raised in is fundamentally sick, something obvious to most educated folk but unfortunately one of the very effects of the decay is making it difficult to see that fact.
What comes next is hardly worth talking about since that's already a multi-decade plan.
Truly, getting the species into space may well be one of the better ways to fix the school system, if the colonies manage to avoid importing our sick system and create a functional one. We could then import a functional school system back from them. Witness how much Europe has imported from the US.
Colonizing Mars or the Moon may very well be one of the most practical ways of fixing the school system over the next 50 years, and again I emphasize, I'm dead serious.
(I'm all for colonization efforts to re-establish the frontier, which is a vibrant and healthy part of civilization that has been lost for so long, we've forgotten how good for us it is. Try pitching that to a skeptic as an intrinsically good enough reason to colonize space. But it's true.)
Yeah, I remembe scrambling on security updates on my box.
But quite a lot of them were "No known exploits", and even more of them were "Exploit created by security researcher who found it, no known exploits in the wild."
Whereas Microsoft seems to get a lot of "You know how the network's been flaky the last couple of days? It's another bug in Microsoft code."
The theoretical severities have been somewhat similar but the practical ones have not. A lot of those Linux bugs are ferreted out in advance of it mattering.
Will that stay permenent? I don't know. But it's a hell of a lot easier to audit Linux software then Microsoft software, so it just may remain the case that the good guys stay reasonably ahead of the bad guys.
I'd say this is the characteristic to watch, that and the development of Real Apps in languages other then C and C++.
(People, Python, seriously. Unless you're doing heavy numerical computations, don't use C, and even then, wrap it. Or use Perl or Ruby a number of other good languages; I recommend Python because I know it best but it's not the only choice. There's a lot of them that are more then ready for real applications; in fact you'll find them much easier to write in these languages. If you're writing new programs in C, you are part of the security problem.)
'When _I_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'
Do not argue with the folks who took "Semantics" and "Linguistics" from abstract, useless philosophy and made a profession of turning it into running code on real machines.
Annoy us futher and we'll convince you that what you call a "kilobyte" is actually named Terrence the Twenty Third, who is called The Man of 10907481356194159294629842447337828624482641619962 32692431832786189721331849119295216264234525201987 22395729179615702527310987082017718406361097976507 75547990789062988421929895386098252280482051596968 51613591638196771886542609324560121290553901886301 01790025253579991720001007960002653583680090529780 58809523505016301954756539110053123645600148474260 35293551245843928918752768696279344088055617515694 34994540667782514081490061610592025643850457801332 64935658360472424073824428122451315177575191648992 26365743722432277368075027627883045206501792761700 94569916849725787968385173704999690096112051565505 01155612714914925153421057489666295470327863215057 30828430221664970324396138635251626409516168005427 62343599630892169144618118740639531066540488573943 48328774281674074953709935118687563599703901170218 23616749458620969857006263612082706715408157066575 13728102702231092756491027675916052087830463241104 93645687549209673229824591847634273837902724484380 18526977764941072715611580434690827459339991961414 24274141059911742606055648376375631452761136265862 83833686211579936380208785376755453367899156942344 33955666315070087213535470255670312004130725495834 50835743965382893607708097855057891296790735278005 49356215610907958451729541159729274798775277385600 08204118558930004777748727761853813510493840581861 59865221160596030835640594182118971403786872621948 14987276036536162988561748224130334854387853240247 51419417183012281078209729303537372804574372095228 70362277636394529086980625842235514850757103961938 74496298668081887696628157781530793931790931436483 40761738581819563002994422790754955061288818308430 07964869323217915876591803556521615711540299212027 61556078731079374774668415283629877086994501520312 31862594203085693838944657061346236704234026821102 95895495119708707654618662279629453645162075650935 10189060237738215395327762086769785897319663303088 93304665169436185078350641568336944530051437491311 29883436726523859540490427345592872394952522718461 74043678547546104743770197680255766058810380772707 07717942221977090385438585844095492116099852538903 97465570394397308609093059696336076752996493841459 81857059637545614973558278136238332889063090042880 17321424808663962671333528009232758350873059614118 72378142210146019861574738685509689608918918044133 95585248228675411132126387936755676503403629700319 30023397828465318547238244232028015189689660418822 97600081543761065225427016359565087543385114712321 42272666054035817814690908065764689505876619971865 05665475715792896 Distinct States, which means About One Page, but all it is is a slithy jabberwock, and by then you'll be so confused you'd believe anything just to shut us
Don't forget that you can copyright any "holes" you find and subsequently release them into the public domain, assuming there's a limited number of them.
You can not, of course, just do a mass copyright of all possible music, but if there weren't too many of them you could deliberately use them in some music piece of your own (I suggest the title "Unheard Music";-) ) and then you'd have a copyright on that. This won't work if there's too many phrases in there; a judge is not likely to buy a fifteen-year song or something indistinguishable from white noise... even though frankly, if one applies copyright law in the way it has been lately, they should.
I'd have thought the plain English in my article would have shown them the way by now, but I've clearly overestimated their intelligence.
Postscript: Considering the number of non-spammers who continue to misread that piece, completely failing to get past "What do you mean Bayesian filters aren't utterly invincible for all time? You're an idiot!" I got another one of these just today a few hours before this story was posted) and actually read what it says, perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised that the spammers haven't seemed to be able to decode it yet.
Who'da thunk an algorithm could attract fanboys? I mean, I vaguely understand the Star Trek or Star Wars fanboys, but an algorithm?
(I used to blame this on my writing but when you explicitly and repeatedly say things like "Bayesian filters are very, very good", or go into such detail about how they work that you can start talking about how to attack them and provide a working demonstration, and you still get emails accusing you of hating Bayes (??? WTF would I hate an algorithm? Is that like the opposite of being a fanboy of an algorithm?) or not understanding it, then you have to start assuming at some point that the readers sending the emails bears at least some responsibility for the misunderstanding.)
Do you have evidence to back that assertion? In my case (I know it's just me), ham basically means either refering to my open-source projects or written in French (even then spambayes does a good job at rejecting French spam).
Language is often a big indicator; since spam is aimed at a particular langauge group I don't consider it much. The fact my filter marks Japanese or Korean messages as spam is almost irrelevant, in a way, since I can't read it anyhow and it's easily dismissed.
But there's this common misconception that inside the spam filter it just looks for the three or four key words that mark "your" ham to the exclusion of all else. In reality there are big cues that are indepedent of "personalization"; see the Interesting Results section. Would you have guessed that "I'm" is such a non-spam indicator?
There's a strong core of hamminess that will be common to nearly everybody. (Also clarifies your point 1.)
2) Lack of "training data" for them We have lots of data from which we can learn how to avoid spam, but they have very little data which they can use to "train" anti-filter techniques.
Well, I sure didn't have any trouble finding ham for my training! Collecting 20,000 ham messages took me about 15 minutes; it took me longer to process them then find them. If I were a dedicated spammer I could collect a million in a couple of days, depending on how diverse a selection I want to acquire. One "weakness" of my experiment is the limited selection I acquired, but that's easily fixed and I think based on my experience it's already plenty diverse.
3) They have to get the main message through. Eventually, if you can detect all forms (that remains to be seen) of the word "Viagra", they simply can't use that word in their email anymore (assuming I've got no ham containing that word).
Yes and no. I already acknoleged in my post that without "cheating", you can't really get a sex spam through. (Though you'll have a hard time getting a real sex email through, too, if that is a normal email for you.)
But I "played fair"... spammers don't have to. They can craft a highly hammy message and append it to their spam. Even if your filter stop it, it poisons the filter. The filter writers can then take countermeasures against that, but you're back to an arms race and that's not a gain over what we had before the Bayesian filters.
4) Because each spam message is different, they have to find a cost-effective way to make each of them immune to filters. That's not easy either.
Well, creating a highly hammy message and appending any short spam to it they want ought to work. That's not too expensive.
Even so, you're sending a lot of people the same message for so little money it boggles the mind. Raising the bar for writing a message a little won't stop the flow, because it amortizes across all copies of the message sent too well. You need to raise cost per message or a number of other approaches.
I don't think spammers are that dumb either.
I used to not think so, and I had bet that Bayesian would already be useless by now. But I now realize that I have overestimated them by a significant margin. Like I said, I know some of them have read that piece. I get hits for "bypassing Bayesian filters" nearly every week from Google. I've gotten several requests for source code to my program, and I wager not all of them were legitimately academic. (Fortunately, I've lost it through a hard drive crash, but I consider my results still scientifically valid as at least in my opinion, I've given enough information to replicate my results.)
But they still haven't progressed past stupid o.b.f.u.s.c.a.t.i.o.n techniques (no, that won't get past Bayesian) and purely random words (neither will that) very far. (Remember, which a lot of people seem to miss when they read my piece, I respect Bayesian
The real problem will be when the spammers finally figure out how to deliberately poison the Bayesian filters. So far they're using more-or-less random words, but that won't really work against Bayesian; it can tolerate that.
However, what constitutes "non-spam" is not as unique as most people think, as I've examined here. If they figure out how to deliberately put in hammy words, Bayesian will fall.
I feel OK posting this because I freely admit to this point I've overestimated them; I'm sure spammers have read that piece, and to date they have been too stupid to figure out what I said in plain English. But sooner or later one of them is going to figure out.
There's a strong core of "ham" that is "ham" for everybody, and sooner or later they're going to start abusing that.
And if I may forstall one objection... "But you don't understand Bayesian, it's [awesome for some reason and can't be beat ever, by anybody]" - I'll listen when you've actually written a program to examine filters yourself, OK? I understand it pretty damn well. It'll take more then bald assertions to convince me I'm wrong, I've done actual research, in the original sense of the word.
First, why not open up one of your CD-ROM, DVD, Gamecube, other optical drive and see what's in there? Or look at the many laser pointers and derivative products on the market? Way too late for "first consumer laser".
Second, who said this is consumer? Only the Slashdot summary, as far as I can tell. It sounded to me like pure industry use only, because it's slow, so slow it's not even useful to the industry in the present form. So it's not even a "consumer laser".
Errr, it's enough to display about.000004% of a Library of Congress?
(Based on a LOC of 105,000,000 MiB (number pulled from here, MiB for my convenience), and a resolution of 1365x768 at 32 bits. Of course, any 1365x768 display is enough to display.000004% of an LOC.)
the problem with your argument is that no one appears to really believe in the economic benefits of space
And that is a counterargument against "if we could tap [the resources of space] such that space exploration could become self-sustaining, there's no practical upper limit to the wealth this could generate" how, exactly?
You're arguing against "we're going to tap the resources of space etc.", which is not what I said.
God, I hate it when people can't even read what you said without assuming it must say something else. "If", it's a two-letter word, why not learn about it?
Everybody who wants to make claims that are suspiciously supportive of your cause while also implying some people are stupid (for instance, spending millions when $1 would do fine) should have Snopes committed to memory in an indexed form.
Because there are those of us who do. And there are few things that do as much damage to your claims as seeing it on Snopes, in the "False" pile.
There are quite a few other categories of claims that should be checked too.
You clearly missed "Yes, some other country could take over but the US could take over more quickly; for a real-life tech example of this, note how quickly IBM because the largest Linux company." As the wealthiest nation on the world... unless you care to dispute that point?... this is more-or-less objectively true and not open to political opinions (unless you are so blinded by politics you've become incapable of seeing objective facts).
Speed is time is money is life; the faster we get into space the better for everyone.
Perhaps you should work harder on "reading what is actually there" and not "reading what you expect to be there".
This could be a gigantic boon for the economy, in theory. Anybody who's interested in space has read about the resources and the possibilities in space, and if we could tap that such that space exploration could become self-sustaining, there's no practical upper limit to the wealth this could generate.
If the US intends to maintain its lead, rather then "sink" into a parity position with many countries (by staying relatively stagnant while other countries catch up), this is probably the biggest win that is feasible. (Note that everybody really ought to be rooting for this, even non-Americans, because if the US is rising, so is everybody else in absolute terms; without somebody leading the way I'm fearful we could all end up stagnating together. Yes, some other country could take over but the US could take over more quickly; for a real-life tech example of this, note how quickly IBM because the largest Linux company.) It's worth a try.
In this sense, its utility as an economy saver will be directly related to how deliberately it is run with this idea in mind, to be bold, to deliberately ask private companies to produce technologies and benefit from them, etc.
To the extent that this is run like NASA, it may not be a waste but it will not be an "economy saving" gain.
So, it depends on how its run. As is too often the case, if it is run too "selfishly" (too much focus on the short-term gain), it will be useless. But if it is run well, it could be an amazing boon for the entire human race.
I know which one I'd bet on if I had too... but I can still hope...
Slashdot Mirror
And every single GPL program ever released, as well. GPL section 11:Yes, I know it's free software and not quite the same, but this is not a valid criticism of Microsoft. The real criticism is that there are people who expect 100% in an environment where that is currently flatly impossible, and while I'll happily argue that Microsoft could do much better, I will not argue that even in theory that their products could be perfect. (Even when we go to great lengths to make perfect software, at staggering costs, it still sometimes fails; there's many good reasons to expect this is fundamental in some ways.)
Unfortunately, there's no good way to partially disclaim quality, so there you have it. You want warenteed software, you're free to pay for it, but it will be orders of magnitude less capable then even Windows 3.1. Good luck affording even a decent text editor built to that standard.
Hey, these so-called "Press Release Lie Detector Glasses" are just solid pieces of black plastic!
The power supply will be a big source of heat. Moving it out means keeping the heat out, means no need to run the fan to disippate it.
Don't expect small, quiet computers with integrated power supplies anytime soon, unless it can run on much less power then it does now.
Apollo may have begun as a techno-military tour de force, and sure it was intertwined with nuclear delivery systems, and phalloidal to boot.
When you have a practical design for a non-phallic chemical booster capable of getting into orbit from Earth, let me know.
(Sorry. Been reading too many feminists with no comprehension of physics... to the point they don't even "believe" in physics... who seem to have this stupid idea that the "phallic" nature of rockets are some sort of choice, concious or otherwise, rather then physically-imposed necessity.)
Why not make space, or at least the space around the earth, the same as the air: the space above a particular country belongs to that country...
Because you still have to have a limit on how high that extends or it becomes physically absurd. If you have a limit, it can be "abused", which will encourage people to try to make the limit higher, but you can never make it high enough to prevent "abuse".
Assuming a 24 hour day with an approximation of the speed of light as 186,000 miles per second, at a distance of about 2.5 billion miles, the territories "owned" by the respective countries on the equator are swinging around at the speed of light if I'm getting my math right.
(The circle described at the equator by a point going at the speed of light will have a circumferance of 186,000 * (24*60*60) miles, which after dividing by 2*pi gives you the number of miles that circle will have as a radius. In "bc -l", (24*60*60*186000)/(3.14159*2) gives a result of 2,557,685,758, rounded to the nearest int and with the commas added.)
Granted, that's a lot, but A: the point where it becomes practically impossible to avoid the oncoming "space claim" comes a hell of a lot before that and B: We'd like to think that someday, we'll have people out that far.
So there has to be some limit; you can argue fruitfully over what it should be but you'll be arguing for a difference of degree over what we already have, not kind.
Many times, I have solved The Problem in my sleep. I have also composed some bitching music (music composition being a former hobby of mine).
Of the many times I have solved The Problem, only once was it actually a solution, and even then it was more like a thought that actually put me on the right track when I awoke, more out of coincidence I think then anything else.
Many times I have awoken with the semantic equivalent of "My code will be fixed if I just pick a purple lilac and feed it to my dog.", only much, much wierder in a way that I can not just summon up while awake to provide a good example for. And it all makes such sense at the time.
I'm sure some people really do solve problems in their dreams, and goodness knows a good night's sleep always does help me. But I wonder how many people really solve problems in their dream, and how many people just think they've solved problems. I've managed to drag several ideas from my dreams back into the waking world, including quite a few semi-interesting sci-fi plots, but none of them are worth anything when examined in the light of the sun, except perhaps some entertainment value.
One of the things I remember dragging back was a music melody that was going to make me famous... I don't recall the specifics but I do recall it only involved two notes a whole step apart in some entirely uninspired rhythm; in the waking world it was terminally dull, as you might imagine a two-note melody would be. (I have on the other hand written some music I rather enjoyed based on the wierd feeling I sometimes get after having wierd dreams, but the music did not come to me in my sleep.)
Have you actually any idea what the probabilities are of someone writing the exact same sentence for describing the same thing?
It's a relative thing.
If you're checking for word-for-word plagarism, which a lot of plagarism is and is worth checking, you're right that the odds of a false positive is fairly low as long as you're checking for long enough phrases.
The bad part comes when you say, "Well, the students have figured out how to re-phrase the ideas so the word-for-word checker doesn't work so well. Let's abstract the concepts out and check for those."
Then you start getting into false positive land. The crazier the students get, the looser your concept matches get, the greater the chances of a false positive.
It's a trade-off, and as is often the case, no machine learning technique can really stand up to a determined human attacker's attempt to get an arbitrarily-choosable piece of data misclassified. Eventually the human forces the machine learning algorithm to be so loose it's impossible for the algorithm to really "say" anything about a given input. That's when you get false positives.
It's a tradeoff, and with human attackers, the machines inevitably lose. That's one reason these things are only useful for tools; the professor must not trust these above their own judgement.
Teaching union. Union rhetoric to the contrary, the union does not represent all teachers who are members, just like the AARP doesn't really represent all of its members politically. (I respect my grandparents, who have expressed to me (though not in this precise verbiage of course) that they don't feel they can join the AARP, even though the card does have nice discounts & stuff, because its politics amount to "Screw the young!".)
If the real teachers got together, decided they were fed up with their "leadership", and formed a counter-union, interested in the actual scientific and open-minded study of how to encourage real learning (to the exclusion of "education"), we might get somewhere. If "ifs" got us anywhere, it'd be a chaotic world indeed. While this is not impossible, the social effort needed to accomplish this would be truly significant.
(I do not strongly indict teachers for not doing this, though; it's very, very, very risky for the first few teachers doing it and a lot of hard work. But I wish it could happen.)
Counterpoint: If we wipe out the Martian biosphere, so what? Especially if we replace it with a rich, vibrant, diverse biosphere?
It's worth thinking about the answer to those questions very, very carefully. If your answer is, "It's just wrong!", then you understand nothing even about your own opinions, and don't expect the rest of us to give a shit about them.
(I'll also suggest that if your answer is "Because life is precious!", that both "Why?" and "Aren't being a hypocrite then, living with a functional immune system?" are two valuable questions to consider.)
I'm not saying that there's no answer to them. I'm saying that knee-jerk environmentalism only applies to Earth, to the extent that it even makes sense there. Applying it to space is stupid. There is nothing we could do the the Lunar "biosphere" that could possibly make it any worse then it already it. Nothing. All we could possibly do is improve it. Mars may be a slightly more complicated case if bacteria or bacteria-analogues are found, but how much does that really change?
In the end, it boils down to: "Is environmentalism taken to the level you seem to be suggesting a death pact, with the only way to satisfy it being to cower on our planet, huddled in a cave for fear of hurting an animal or plant, sometime, somewhere in the universe, waiting for extinction?" If your answer is "yes", don't expect the rest of us to agree with you.
Admittedly, I'd at least turn the American public school system into something functional before going back to the moon, which we already did 35 freaking years ago.
Turning the American Public School System (and its subsequent export to the rest of the world) into something functional is a bigger problem then going to Mars. It's probably still a bigger problem then getting a self-sustaining colony on Mars, but that's a close thing.
I'm dead serious. The problems with the school system are deep and fundamental, and third-generation entrenched beaureacrats fight any attempt at real change as if their livelihood depended on it. Go figure. Worst of all, they passionately believe they have the One True Way to raise our children, which makes them even more dangerous; they are zealots, with all that word implies.
There are no Martians to actively fight colonization, but there is a huge entrenched teaching union that will fight you tooth and nail for real school reform.
First you have to sweep nearly every Educator out of their position of power, and reform our entire culture to accept that the form of schooling that damn near all of us were raised in is fundamentally sick, something obvious to most educated folk but unfortunately one of the very effects of the decay is making it difficult to see that fact.
What comes next is hardly worth talking about since that's already a multi-decade plan.
Truly, getting the species into space may well be one of the better ways to fix the school system, if the colonies manage to avoid importing our sick system and create a functional one. We could then import a functional school system back from them. Witness how much Europe has imported from the US.
Colonizing Mars or the Moon may very well be one of the most practical ways of fixing the school system over the next 50 years, and again I emphasize, I'm dead serious.
(I'm all for colonization efforts to re-establish the frontier, which is a vibrant and healthy part of civilization that has been lost for so long, we've forgotten how good for us it is. Try pitching that to a skeptic as an intrinsically good enough reason to colonize space. But it's true.)
Yeah, I remembe scrambling on security updates on my box.
.)
But quite a lot of them were "No known exploits", and even more of them were "Exploit created by security researcher who found it, no known exploits in the wild."
Whereas Microsoft seems to get a lot of "You know how the network's been flaky the last couple of days? It's another bug in Microsoft code."
The theoretical severities have been somewhat similar but the practical ones have not. A lot of those Linux bugs are ferreted out in advance of it mattering.
Will that stay permenent? I don't know. But it's a hell of a lot easier to audit Linux software then Microsoft software, so it just may remain the case that the good guys stay reasonably ahead of the bad guys.
I'd say this is the characteristic to watch, that and the development of Real Apps in languages other then C and C++.
(People, Python, seriously. Unless you're doing heavy numerical computations, don't use C, and even then, wrap it. Or use Perl or Ruby a number of other good languages; I recommend Python because I know it best but it's not the only choice. There's a lot of them that are more then ready for real applications; in fact you'll find them much easier to write in these languages. If you're writing new programs in C, you are part of the security problem
'When _I_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'
Do not argue with the folks who took "Semantics" and "Linguistics" from abstract, useless philosophy and made a profession of turning it into running code on real machines.
Annoy us futher and we'll convince you that what you call a "kilobyte" is actually named Terrence the Twenty Third, who is called The Man of 10907481356194159294629842447337828624482641619962 32692431832786189721331849119295216264234525201987 22395729179615702527310987082017718406361097976507 75547990789062988421929895386098252280482051596968 51613591638196771886542609324560121290553901886301 01790025253579991720001007960002653583680090529780 58809523505016301954756539110053123645600148474260 35293551245843928918752768696279344088055617515694 34994540667782514081490061610592025643850457801332 64935658360472424073824428122451315177575191648992 26365743722432277368075027627883045206501792761700 94569916849725787968385173704999690096112051565505 01155612714914925153421057489666295470327863215057 30828430221664970324396138635251626409516168005427 62343599630892169144618118740639531066540488573943 48328774281674074953709935118687563599703901170218 23616749458620969857006263612082706715408157066575 13728102702231092756491027675916052087830463241104 93645687549209673229824591847634273837902724484380 18526977764941072715611580434690827459339991961414 24274141059911742606055648376375631452761136265862 83833686211579936380208785376755453367899156942344 33955666315070087213535470255670312004130725495834 50835743965382893607708097855057891296790735278005 49356215610907958451729541159729274798775277385600 08204118558930004777748727761853813510493840581861 59865221160596030835640594182118971403786872621948 14987276036536162988561748224130334854387853240247 51419417183012281078209729303537372804574372095228 70362277636394529086980625842235514850757103961938 74496298668081887696628157781530793931790931436483 40761738581819563002994422790754955061288818308430 07964869323217915876591803556521615711540299212027 61556078731079374774668415283629877086994501520312 31862594203085693838944657061346236704234026821102 95895495119708707654618662279629453645162075650935 10189060237738215395327762086769785897319663303088 93304665169436185078350641568336944530051437491311 29883436726523859540490427345592872394952522718461 74043678547546104743770197680255766058810380772707 07717942221977090385438585844095492116099852538903 97465570394397308609093059696336076752996493841459 81857059637545614973558278136238332889063090042880 17321424808663962671333528009232758350873059614118 72378142210146019861574738685509689608918918044133 95585248228675411132126387936755676503403629700319 30023397828465318547238244232028015189689660418822 97600081543761065225427016359565087543385114712321 42272666054035817814690908065764689505876619971865 05665475715792896 Distinct States, which means About One Page, but all it is is a slithy jabberwock, and by then you'll be so confused you'd believe anything just to shut us
Nah, that's too cultural.
It's when they flip you the seventh finger you need to worry.
Don't forget that you can copyright any "holes" you find and subsequently release them into the public domain, assuming there's a limited number of them.
;-) ) and then you'd have a copyright on that. This won't work if there's too many phrases in there; a judge is not likely to buy a fifteen-year song or something indistinguishable from white noise... even though frankly, if one applies copyright law in the way it has been lately, they should.
You can not, of course, just do a mass copyright of all possible music, but if there weren't too many of them you could deliberately use them in some music piece of your own (I suggest the title "Unheard Music"
I'd have thought the plain English in my article would have shown them the way by now, but I've clearly overestimated their intelligence.
Postscript: Considering the number of non-spammers who continue to misread that piece, completely failing to get past "What do you mean Bayesian filters aren't utterly invincible for all time? You're an idiot!" I got another one of these just today a few hours before this story was posted) and actually read what it says, perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised that the spammers haven't seemed to be able to decode it yet.
Who'da thunk an algorithm could attract fanboys? I mean, I vaguely understand the Star Trek or Star Wars fanboys, but an algorithm?
(I used to blame this on my writing but when you explicitly and repeatedly say things like "Bayesian filters are very, very good", or go into such detail about how they work that you can start talking about how to attack them and provide a working demonstration, and you still get emails accusing you of hating Bayes (??? WTF would I hate an algorithm? Is that like the opposite of being a fanboy of an algorithm?) or not understanding it, then you have to start assuming at some point that the readers sending the emails bears at least some responsibility for the misunderstanding.)
Do you have evidence to back that assertion? In my case (I know it's just me), ham basically means either refering to my open-source projects or written in French (even then spambayes does a good job at rejecting French spam).
Language is often a big indicator; since spam is aimed at a particular langauge group I don't consider it much. The fact my filter marks Japanese or Korean messages as spam is almost irrelevant, in a way, since I can't read it anyhow and it's easily dismissed.
But there's this common misconception that inside the spam filter it just looks for the three or four key words that mark "your" ham to the exclusion of all else. In reality there are big cues that are indepedent of "personalization"; see the Interesting Results section. Would you have guessed that "I'm" is such a non-spam indicator?
There's a strong core of hamminess that will be common to nearly everybody. (Also clarifies your point 1.)
2) Lack of "training data" for them We have lots of data from which we can learn how to avoid spam, but they have very little data which they can use to "train" anti-filter techniques.
Well, I sure didn't have any trouble finding ham for my training! Collecting 20,000 ham messages took me about 15 minutes; it took me longer to process them then find them. If I were a dedicated spammer I could collect a million in a couple of days, depending on how diverse a selection I want to acquire. One "weakness" of my experiment is the limited selection I acquired, but that's easily fixed and I think based on my experience it's already plenty diverse.
3) They have to get the main message through. Eventually, if you can detect all forms (that remains to be seen) of the word "Viagra", they simply can't use that word in their email anymore (assuming I've got no ham containing that word).
Yes and no. I already acknoleged in my post that without "cheating", you can't really get a sex spam through. (Though you'll have a hard time getting a real sex email through, too, if that is a normal email for you.)
But I "played fair"... spammers don't have to. They can craft a highly hammy message and append it to their spam. Even if your filter stop it, it poisons the filter. The filter writers can then take countermeasures against that, but you're back to an arms race and that's not a gain over what we had before the Bayesian filters.
4) Because each spam message is different, they have to find a cost-effective way to make each of them immune to filters. That's not easy either.
Well, creating a highly hammy message and appending any short spam to it they want ought to work. That's not too expensive.
Even so, you're sending a lot of people the same message for so little money it boggles the mind. Raising the bar for writing a message a little won't stop the flow, because it amortizes across all copies of the message sent too well. You need to raise cost per message or a number of other approaches.
I don't think spammers are that dumb either.
I used to not think so, and I had bet that Bayesian would already be useless by now. But I now realize that I have overestimated them by a significant margin. Like I said, I know some of them have read that piece. I get hits for "bypassing Bayesian filters" nearly every week from Google. I've gotten several requests for source code to my program, and I wager not all of them were legitimately academic. (Fortunately, I've lost it through a hard drive crash, but I consider my results still scientifically valid as at least in my opinion, I've given enough information to replicate my results.)
But they still haven't progressed past stupid o.b.f.u.s.c.a.t.i.o.n techniques (no, that won't get past Bayesian) and purely random words (neither will that) very far. (Remember, which a lot of people seem to miss when they read my piece, I respect Bayesian
The real problem will be when the spammers finally figure out how to deliberately poison the Bayesian filters. So far they're using more-or-less random words, but that won't really work against Bayesian; it can tolerate that.
However, what constitutes "non-spam" is not as unique as most people think, as I've examined here. If they figure out how to deliberately put in hammy words, Bayesian will fall.
I feel OK posting this because I freely admit to this point I've overestimated them; I'm sure spammers have read that piece, and to date they have been too stupid to figure out what I said in plain English. But sooner or later one of them is going to figure out.
There's a strong core of "ham" that is "ham" for everybody, and sooner or later they're going to start abusing that.
And if I may forstall one objection... "But you don't understand Bayesian, it's [awesome for some reason and can't be beat ever, by anybody]" - I'll listen when you've actually written a program to examine filters yourself, OK? I understand it pretty damn well. It'll take more then bald assertions to convince me I'm wrong, I've done actual research, in the original sense of the word.
Keep trying.
I opend my CD-rom and I can see the laser. Now where do I attach the sharks head?
Sorry, CD-ROM drives use standard lasers; sharks are only rated for friggen' laser beams, which are only available to evil geniuses and their progeny.
The first consumer laser..
;-)
Two things:
First, why not open up one of your CD-ROM, DVD, Gamecube, other optical drive and see what's in there? Or look at the many laser pointers and derivative products on the market? Way too late for "first consumer laser".
Second, who said this is consumer? Only the Slashdot summary, as far as I can tell. It sounded to me like pure industry use only, because it's slow, so slow it's not even useful to the industry in the present form. So it's not even a "consumer laser".
Well, at least you got "laser" right...
Errr, it's enough to display about .000004% of a Library of Congress?
.000004% of an LOC.)
(Based on a LOC of 105,000,000 MiB (number pulled from here, MiB for my convenience), and a resolution of 1365x768 at 32 bits. Of course, any 1365x768 display is enough to display
the problem with your argument is that no one appears to really believe in the economic benefits of space
And that is a counterargument against " if we could tap [the resources of space] such that space exploration could become self-sustaining, there's no practical upper limit to the wealth this could generate" how, exactly?
You're arguing against " we're going to tap the resources of space etc.", which is not what I said.
God, I hate it when people can't even read what you said without assuming it must say something else. "If", it's a two-letter word, why not learn about it?
Everybody who wants to make claims that are suspiciously supportive of your cause while also implying some people are stupid (for instance, spending millions when $1 would do fine) should have Snopes committed to memory in an indexed form.
;-)
Because there are those of us who do. And there are few things that do as much damage to your claims as seeing it on Snopes, in the "False" pile.
There are quite a few other categories of claims that should be checked too.
Let that be a warning
You clearly missed "Yes, some other country could take over but the US could take over more quickly; for a real-life tech example of this, note how quickly IBM because the largest Linux company." As the wealthiest nation on the world... unless you care to dispute that point?... this is more-or-less objectively true and not open to political opinions (unless you are so blinded by politics you've become incapable of seeing objective facts).
Speed is time is money is life; the faster we get into space the better for everyone.
Perhaps you should work harder on "reading what is actually there" and not "reading what you expect to be there".
This could be a gigantic boon for the economy, in theory. Anybody who's interested in space has read about the resources and the possibilities in space, and if we could tap that such that space exploration could become self-sustaining, there's no practical upper limit to the wealth this could generate.
If the US intends to maintain its lead, rather then "sink" into a parity position with many countries (by staying relatively stagnant while other countries catch up), this is probably the biggest win that is feasible. (Note that everybody really ought to be rooting for this, even non-Americans, because if the US is rising, so is everybody else in absolute terms; without somebody leading the way I'm fearful we could all end up stagnating together. Yes, some other country could take over but the US could take over more quickly; for a real-life tech example of this, note how quickly IBM because the largest Linux company.) It's worth a try.
In this sense, its utility as an economy saver will be directly related to how deliberately it is run with this idea in mind, to be bold, to deliberately ask private companies to produce technologies and benefit from them, etc.
To the extent that this is run like NASA, it may not be a waste but it will not be an "economy saving" gain.
So, it depends on how its run. As is too often the case, if it is run too "selfishly" (too much focus on the short-term gain), it will be useless. But if it is run well, it could be an amazing boon for the entire human race.
I know which one I'd bet on if I had too... but I can still hope...