Basically, they would do a statistical analysis of the rate of false positives, and let people get away with enough hits to deal with the problem. With a sufficiently reliable system, somebody who cheats once is going to cheat over and over, but somebody who got screwed by a false positive is unlikely to have it happen multiple times in a row. At least, that's what the engineer in me says...
At the college level, the part of me that lives in the real world thinks the policy would be more along the lines of "tough shit, the computer says it was a match, and enrollment at this institution is a privlidge not a right". If the local news covered every story about somebody who was wrongly diciplined at some local college, there wouldn't be anything else on the news. How long do I think it would last? Forever, that's how long. If somebody's daddy was actually rich enough to sue the school, they'd let him buy the kid out of trouble with a donation, and everybody else would get fucked.
In highschool this software is for show only. Highschool is more about conformity and dicipline than knowledge. All you need to pass highschool is a set of busybody parents or the ability to throw a football. The only way to fail out of school at the highschool level or lower is to have parents that couldn't give two shits. Last I checked, cheating on a paper didn't fall into that category.
Right now the weak link is that they are going to get sued out of existance for willful and blatent disregard of copyright law...
Besides, the ability to prove that any given match isn't a flase positive is only a big deal if you don't want to institute draconian and unfair rules on the matter at your institution. Since higher education is full of those kinds of things already, this doen't seem beyond the realm of possibility. Also, if you can quantify the level of accuracy, all you need to do is let the associated number of hits slide for each student given the quantity of papers they are required to produce.
The have no reason to keep the entire document being checked. For performance reasons, they probably aren't checking every document word for word to produce matches. They are probably doing sub-phrase hashing, or using one of the various text classification algorithms. Most of these techniques would produce satisfactory results without needing to store the entire document, or even any of the verbatim text, with the added benefit of actually being able to process a submitted paper in the submitter's lifetime. The one downside would be the inability to prove that a match isn't a false positive... That's something they will either have to suck up and deal with, or they will have to get colleges to require students to license all their work to their service.
Sony is a different beast. Sony intends to make money off of Blueray royalties.
With the PS2, Sony actially made a profit on the hardware for a signifigant portion of the console's lifespan (which isn't over yet). They started making a profit on the hardware well before they said they were going to be able to. Perhaps this is their plan now, as well.
Also, you forgot to include accessory sales in your numbers. PS2 memory cards wre 70-80% profit from the beginning. Controllers, extension cords, S-Video cables... It adds up. This generation you also have the online component which will bring in advertising and 'micro'-payment revenues. Thos things are what will keep me away fron this generation though. (However I see people I know with 360s blowing live points for the tiniest bits of excuses for content, so who knows, it could be a gold mine)
The razors and blades analogy is dumb though, and it's certanly not "tried and true". Most consoles weren't sold at a loss, and of the few that were, most of them were either spectacular failures or would have been if their manufacturer didn't have billions of dollars of cash reserves to blow.
If you fill a rack floor to ceiling with ports, *and* you want to contantly change the configuration, you're just plain screwed.
I used to work on software for multi-node clusters, and we were constantly reconfiguring the networking between a rack of switches, a rack of patch panels, and many, many racks of 1U servers. The key was leaving space between the patch panels and between the switches and using horizontal cable guides to keep the wires neat. Something like these.
For vertical runs I typically used velcro, but if you aren't the type to patiently unstrap, move wires and restrap, one strap at a time, then you should consider getting vertical guides similar to those I linked above.
Yes, this technique cuts the number of ports you can have in your rack in half. If you ask me, it's worth it.
The real question is why does the 360 need to 'upconvert'? PCs have been displaying resolutions that high at those framerates for over a decade. The graphics chip in a 360 is very similar to a PC graphics chip. Why is there a problem?
Of course everything concerning child porn tends to err on the side of vigorous prosecution, but then it's a pretty horrific crime, so that's understandable.
Yup... It's understandable... Right up to the point where you add context.
Which is worse, taking nude photos of a child, or getting a child addicted to illegal drugs for profit? Ok, maybe the porn is worse, but now consider the differences in the sentences. The drug pusher will be out on the streets in under a year. The pornographer, if he or she ever gets out, will be tracked for the rest of their life.
Let's take a more dramatic example: Which is worse, driving drunk and getting the child passenger in your car killed, or taking nude photos of the child? Again, the punishment would indicate that the photos are the worst of the two. If it was me, of the two, personally I'd rather be the kid that was alive...
The context doesn't make sense in other areas too. The costs of this level of enforcement are enormous and pervasive. Is the crime so common as to justify it? You can only spend so much on the problem before you get diminishing returns. How much is it worth to stop some tiny amount of child pornographers in terms of dollars? It sucks to have to put a value on it, but you have to put a value on it because we are spending real dollars on the problem, and those dollars have to come from somewhere, and they could possibly have gone to something else.
Additionally, people receiving this money for enforcement are under pressure to produce results. What is the level of false prosecution? What would you do if you were looking at legal porn and got nabbed for child porn just to fill the quota? Do you think you would stand a chance defending yourself? There is such a thing as too much enforcement for any crime, no matter how bad the crime is.
I have one last point:
is that demand creates supply, and cutting off the demand for child pornography will lower the incentives to produce it (whether or not money is directly involved)
That logic only works when you are dealing with normal and/or sane people. Child pornographers do not fall into this category. I have never seen evidence that decreasing demand has an indirect effect of reducing supply, and I've never heard any expert make that argument. They usually argue that cracking down on consumption is a way of preventing an escalation of offence in the consumer. If you can produce some evidence that shows a reduction in the number of consumers of child porn reduces the amount produced I will gladly change my mind on this issue, but at the moment I am unconvinced.
It is unlikely that even with the key you could go and open up the machine in an actual polling place.
I don't know what your polling places look like, but around here you check in and then go into a little both and close the curtain. You get plenty of time all by yourself with the voting machine, and nobody can see you.
complicit['e].]
The state of being an accomplice; participation in guilt.
Since whether they are aiding/participating, or just simply working around to the best of their ability is what is in question...
If we can use complicity as the answer to my question, couldn't allowing their site to be blocked from view of the citizens of China through unwillingness to deal also be called complicity?
I think the ability to solve puzzles is tightly correlated with the skill set desired by IT.
I think that given your example, and this statement that you are under some mistaken impression that IT work and software development work are the same thing. The popular usage clearly indicates that IT workers are the people who use the technology developed by the engineers and programmers.
Between the salary differences, the skillset differences, and the vast chasm between the types of tasks done by each group, you do both of those groups a disservice by lumping them together under 'IT'.
Crap. I should have previewed. My text that I stupidly put in angle brackets didn't appear. That post should have said:
I doubt that they will actually do it initially. Obviously, this is up to the individual studios more than it is up to the technology owners. Since their brains are stuck in stupid, I can't imagine that they would be able to understand that making the disc play in both DVD and <insert next gen format here> players for the same price is both a good idea and has negligible cost to them.
I doubt that they will actually do it initially. Obviously, this is up to the individual studios more than it is up to the technology owners. Since their brains are stuck in stupid, I can't imagine that they would be able to understand that making the disc play in both DVD and players for the same price is both a good idea and has negligible cost to them.
Like BPL, just another crack-pipe dream, waiting for WiMax to come along and kick its ass down the street like the punk that it is.
Sounds to me like you're just smoking a different brand of crack. The only way WiMax will ever work well is if providers charge such high rates that hardly anybody uses it. Fortunatly for the providers, that's what they were planning on doing anyway. Are you a CEO or high level sales person for a Fortune 500 company? No? Well then you'll probably never use WiMax. Sorry.
There is already an existing technology to accomplish this with BluRay. In fact, there already existed a similar technology for HD-DVD, and this is just yet another way to do it. Both BluRay and HD-DVD have supported DVD compatable content on the same disc since 2004. (Sorry about the Reg link, but it was the first one I could find on google, and I'm too lazy to dig for a more reputable source. I know they are out there though.)
I'm curious to know how you would explain what makes Google's action in China 'evil'.
Let me rephrase that: Given that these are the only two options, how is providing a censored version of Google to the citizens of China more evil than allowing access to be blocked?
Everything you mention is a way to deal with the problem after the fact, or just a way to discover the problem. None of those things prevent the problem. The best they can do is discourage and detect.
Regardless, why wouldn't you take every precaution available to you, especially if it is an easy precaution to take? And the bigger question, why shouldn't you be expected to demonstrate your qualifications for a position? Why shouldn't an employer be allowed to come up with whatever qualifications they deem fit for selection of employees (again barring the race and sex rules I mentioned earlier, however there are plenty of jobs where specifing even those would be valid criteria)?
Let me be even more of a devil's advocate here. As a business owner, your customer's credit cards and identity information are going to be passing through the hands of your employees. Shouldn't business owners take every available step to protect their customer's credit? Would you be so willing to let a cashier imprint your credit card if you knew that cashier had 25x their annual salary in overdue debt and had to make that next payment before the repo-man came for his stuff?
Some genres just don't end up on consoles.. or don't anymore because they don't show off the uber-1337 graphics technology, or generate recurring revenue streams or whatever rot that the console makers want to cram down your throat on the box that they control yet have tricked you to part with your money for...
PCs are open platforms. Games don't need to be sanctioned by the system manufacturer in order to run on them. Game, set, and match.
Ok, let's say you're right... Who wins when both sides pull the same control antics? Are you too anti-Sony to see that HD-DVD has all the same DRM baggage?
I just tell my employer, all my consulting gigs, friends, relatives, and people browsing in the shop that I won't buy anything Sony. I seem to recall an old sales maxim... one bad response to a company costs ten sales
That adage only holds true when the bad comments come from sombody that people consider knowledgeable. I'm sure that to most people you say that to you really just sound like a crackpot.
When I first bought my iPod 2 years ago, none of these were feasible alternatives. Competitors had crappy flimsy products that were too big for my pocket, and cell phones that "tried to do it all" just sucked. Not anymore...
It's not the competition, or any other device that is going to be an 'iPod killer' though. It's the iPod itself... Read your own post. You aren't not buying an iPod because some other player is better/cheaper/cooler. You're not buying an iPod because you already own one. The percentage of the population that has an interest in portable digital music players but doesn't already own one is tiny.
Dispite all the analyst trash talk about who was going to take over Apple's mp3 player market share, the answer turned out to be 'nobody'.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no more science in a large rocket than a small one. The majority of rocket science isn't science at all.
I know several materials scientists who would disagree with you there.
Basically, they would do a statistical analysis of the rate of false positives, and let people get away with enough hits to deal with the problem. With a sufficiently reliable system, somebody who cheats once is going to cheat over and over, but somebody who got screwed by a false positive is unlikely to have it happen multiple times in a row. At least, that's what the engineer in me says...
At the college level, the part of me that lives in the real world thinks the policy would be more along the lines of "tough shit, the computer says it was a match, and enrollment at this institution is a privlidge not a right". If the local news covered every story about somebody who was wrongly diciplined at some local college, there wouldn't be anything else on the news. How long do I think it would last? Forever, that's how long. If somebody's daddy was actually rich enough to sue the school, they'd let him buy the kid out of trouble with a donation, and everybody else would get fucked.
In highschool this software is for show only. Highschool is more about conformity and dicipline than knowledge. All you need to pass highschool is a set of busybody parents or the ability to throw a football. The only way to fail out of school at the highschool level or lower is to have parents that couldn't give two shits. Last I checked, cheating on a paper didn't fall into that category.
Either you're a troll, or you have zero sense of satire.
So you have to pick the lesser of two evils...
Right now the weak link is that they are going to get sued out of existance for willful and blatent disregard of copyright law...
Besides, the ability to prove that any given match isn't a flase positive is only a big deal if you don't want to institute draconian and unfair rules on the matter at your institution. Since higher education is full of those kinds of things already, this doen't seem beyond the realm of possibility. Also, if you can quantify the level of accuracy, all you need to do is let the associated number of hits slide for each student given the quantity of papers they are required to produce.
The have no reason to keep the entire document being checked. For performance reasons, they probably aren't checking every document word for word to produce matches. They are probably doing sub-phrase hashing, or using one of the various text classification algorithms. Most of these techniques would produce satisfactory results without needing to store the entire document, or even any of the verbatim text, with the added benefit of actually being able to process a submitted paper in the submitter's lifetime. The one downside would be the inability to prove that a match isn't a false positive... That's something they will either have to suck up and deal with, or they will have to get colleges to require students to license all their work to their service.
Sony is a different beast. Sony intends to make money off of Blueray royalties.
With the PS2, Sony actially made a profit on the hardware for a signifigant portion of the console's lifespan (which isn't over yet). They started making a profit on the hardware well before they said they were going to be able to. Perhaps this is their plan now, as well.
Also, you forgot to include accessory sales in your numbers. PS2 memory cards wre 70-80% profit from the beginning. Controllers, extension cords, S-Video cables... It adds up. This generation you also have the online component which will bring in advertising and 'micro'-payment revenues. Thos things are what will keep me away fron this generation though. (However I see people I know with 360s blowing live points for the tiniest bits of excuses for content, so who knows, it could be a gold mine)
The razors and blades analogy is dumb though, and it's certanly not "tried and true". Most consoles weren't sold at a loss, and of the few that were, most of them were either spectacular failures or would have been if their manufacturer didn't have billions of dollars of cash reserves to blow.
If you fill a rack floor to ceiling with ports, *and* you want to contantly change the configuration, you're just plain screwed.
I used to work on software for multi-node clusters, and we were constantly reconfiguring the networking between a rack of switches, a rack of patch panels, and many, many racks of 1U servers. The key was leaving space between the patch panels and between the switches and using horizontal cable guides to keep the wires neat. Something like these.
For vertical runs I typically used velcro, but if you aren't the type to patiently unstrap, move wires and restrap, one strap at a time, then you should consider getting vertical guides similar to those I linked above.
Yes, this technique cuts the number of ports you can have in your rack in half. If you ask me, it's worth it.
The real question is why does the 360 need to 'upconvert'? PCs have been displaying resolutions that high at those framerates for over a decade. The graphics chip in a 360 is very similar to a PC graphics chip. Why is there a problem?
Of course everything concerning child porn tends to err on the side of vigorous prosecution, but then it's a pretty horrific crime, so that's understandable.
Yup... It's understandable... Right up to the point where you add context.
Which is worse, taking nude photos of a child, or getting a child addicted to illegal drugs for profit? Ok, maybe the porn is worse, but now consider the differences in the sentences. The drug pusher will be out on the streets in under a year. The pornographer, if he or she ever gets out, will be tracked for the rest of their life.
Let's take a more dramatic example: Which is worse, driving drunk and getting the child passenger in your car killed, or taking nude photos of the child? Again, the punishment would indicate that the photos are the worst of the two. If it was me, of the two, personally I'd rather be the kid that was alive...
The context doesn't make sense in other areas too. The costs of this level of enforcement are enormous and pervasive. Is the crime so common as to justify it? You can only spend so much on the problem before you get diminishing returns. How much is it worth to stop some tiny amount of child pornographers in terms of dollars? It sucks to have to put a value on it, but you have to put a value on it because we are spending real dollars on the problem, and those dollars have to come from somewhere, and they could possibly have gone to something else.
Additionally, people receiving this money for enforcement are under pressure to produce results. What is the level of false prosecution? What would you do if you were looking at legal porn and got nabbed for child porn just to fill the quota? Do you think you would stand a chance defending yourself? There is such a thing as too much enforcement for any crime, no matter how bad the crime is.
I have one last point:
is that demand creates supply, and cutting off the demand for child pornography will lower the incentives to produce it (whether or not money is directly involved)
That logic only works when you are dealing with normal and/or sane people. Child pornographers do not fall into this category. I have never seen evidence that decreasing demand has an indirect effect of reducing supply, and I've never heard any expert make that argument. They usually argue that cracking down on consumption is a way of preventing an escalation of offence in the consumer. If you can produce some evidence that shows a reduction in the number of consumers of child porn reduces the amount produced I will gladly change my mind on this issue, but at the moment I am unconvinced.
It is unlikely that even with the key you could go and open up the machine in an actual polling place.
I don't know what your polling places look like, but around here you check in and then go into a little both and close the curtain. You get plenty of time all by yourself with the voting machine, and nobody can see you.
and it rots rubber and a number of other things
It oxidizes copper. I wouldn't want it anywhere near my motherboard.
Since whether they are aiding/participating, or just simply working around to the best of their ability is what is in question...
If we can use complicity as the answer to my question, couldn't allowing their site to be blocked from view of the citizens of China through unwillingness to deal also be called complicity?
I think the ability to solve puzzles is tightly correlated with the skill set desired by IT.
I think that given your example, and this statement that you are under some mistaken impression that IT work and software development work are the same thing. The popular usage clearly indicates that IT workers are the people who use the technology developed by the engineers and programmers.
Between the salary differences, the skillset differences, and the vast chasm between the types of tasks done by each group, you do both of those groups a disservice by lumping them together under 'IT'.
Crap. I should have previewed. My text that I stupidly put in angle brackets didn't appear. That post should have said:
I doubt that they will actually do it initially. Obviously, this is up to the individual studios more than it is up to the technology owners. Since their brains are stuck in stupid, I can't imagine that they would be able to understand that making the disc play in both DVD and <insert next gen format here> players for the same price is both a good idea and has negligible cost to them.
I doubt that they will actually do it initially. Obviously, this is up to the individual studios more than it is up to the technology owners. Since their brains are stuck in stupid, I can't imagine that they would be able to understand that making the disc play in both DVD and players for the same price is both a good idea and has negligible cost to them.
Isn't that a circular answer?
Oh goodie. I get to have all the complexity and bloat of Java in my FUCKING VIDEO PLAYER.
Right, because the JavaScript engine for HD-DVD is going to be smaller? I bet it will work about as well as Javascript works for the web too. Joy.
Like BPL, just another crack-pipe dream, waiting for WiMax to come along and kick its ass down the street like the punk that it is.
Sounds to me like you're just smoking a different brand of crack. The only way WiMax will ever work well is if providers charge such high rates that hardly anybody uses it. Fortunatly for the providers, that's what they were planning on doing anyway. Are you a CEO or high level sales person for a Fortune 500 company? No? Well then you'll probably never use WiMax. Sorry.
There is already an existing technology to accomplish this with BluRay. In fact, there already existed a similar technology for HD-DVD, and this is just yet another way to do it. Both BluRay and HD-DVD have supported DVD compatable content on the same disc since 2004. (Sorry about the Reg link, but it was the first one I could find on google, and I'm too lazy to dig for a more reputable source. I know they are out there though.)
I'm curious to know how you would explain what makes Google's action in China 'evil'.
Let me rephrase that: Given that these are the only two options, how is providing a censored version of Google to the citizens of China more evil than allowing access to be blocked?
Everything you mention is a way to deal with the problem after the fact, or just a way to discover the problem. None of those things prevent the problem. The best they can do is discourage and detect.
Regardless, why wouldn't you take every precaution available to you, especially if it is an easy precaution to take? And the bigger question, why shouldn't you be expected to demonstrate your qualifications for a position? Why shouldn't an employer be allowed to come up with whatever qualifications they deem fit for selection of employees (again barring the race and sex rules I mentioned earlier, however there are plenty of jobs where specifing even those would be valid criteria)?
Let me be even more of a devil's advocate here. As a business owner, your customer's credit cards and identity information are going to be passing through the hands of your employees. Shouldn't business owners take every available step to protect their customer's credit? Would you be so willing to let a cashier imprint your credit card if you knew that cashier had 25x their annual salary in overdue debt and had to make that next payment before the repo-man came for his stuff?
but there will be a time when we wish that we had not burnt our landfills. It is a waste of valuable resources.
I hear you. I wish I hadn't eaten my sandwich at lunch, because then I would still have a sandwich to eat.
Some genres just don't end up on consoles.. or don't anymore because they don't show off the uber-1337 graphics technology, or generate recurring revenue streams or whatever rot that the console makers want to cram down your throat on the box that they control yet have tricked you to part with your money for...
PCs are open platforms. Games don't need to be sanctioned by the system manufacturer in order to run on them. Game, set, and match.
Ok, let's say you're right... Who wins when both sides pull the same control antics? Are you too anti-Sony to see that HD-DVD has all the same DRM baggage?
I just tell my employer, all my consulting gigs, friends, relatives, and people browsing in the shop that I won't buy anything Sony. I seem to recall an old sales maxim... one bad response to a company costs ten sales
That adage only holds true when the bad comments come from sombody that people consider knowledgeable. I'm sure that to most people you say that to you really just sound like a crackpot.
When I first bought my iPod 2 years ago, none of these were feasible alternatives. Competitors had crappy flimsy products that were too big for my pocket, and cell phones that "tried to do it all" just sucked. Not anymore...
It's not the competition, or any other device that is going to be an 'iPod killer' though. It's the iPod itself... Read your own post. You aren't not buying an iPod because some other player is better/cheaper/cooler. You're not buying an iPod because you already own one. The percentage of the population that has an interest in portable digital music players but doesn't already own one is tiny.
Dispite all the analyst trash talk about who was going to take over Apple's mp3 player market share, the answer turned out to be 'nobody'.