Sir Terry Pratchett was the greatest humanist I knew in my life.
He managed to touch the souls of great number of people through his uniquely clear worldview and managed to infuse great human values in the best possible way.
Needless to say, reading and living with his books was one of the most enlightening experiences I have ever had with the written letters.
His wisdom and approach to life will be dearly missed. Him being of the most famoust atheists, I can only say he left this earth forever, to finally settle in our hearts and the souls of those to come after us, growing up to be better human beings, through his books and ideas.
Because ideas never die...
RIP Sir Terry Pratchett
Long Live Sir Terry Pratchett
I first hand experience from the country mentioned, Bulgaria.
The NYT got it pretty wrong...
I have never experienced such a large grassroots uprising of people in my own country as againts the fracking of oil and gas. Period.
When there was a word that somebody up there is doing something about fracking in the land where all the corn and wheat is produced in Bulgaria - pretty much everybody I knew came out on the streets.
Let me tell you a couple of things about my country.
People are poor, do not know a lot about politics, the scene is ripe with populist and desinformation. In a word, we don't give a thing about the stupidity of our leaders or politicians. And there is A LOT of it present. It takes quite a grab to unnerve a sleeping monster like that.
And when the plans to spoil our main source of bread and water started to loom, the reaction was lightning fast.
For one thing, we have the internet. So we knew about the consequences from fracking in America. And there was the film "Gasland".
I give it one thing: you cannot easily go back to sleep after you've seen one's tap water on fire...
A lot of naysayers might try to say something about the russians, but the dreaded truth is this was the jolt of electricity that gave a rise to the new generation of conscious people on our streets that start to push back on all the stupid advances and encroaches on our land.
And then, there was ACTA...
There is a genius Go programmer (as in Weiqi, Baduk, GO game) that IIRC has come out as schizophrenic some years ago.
His name is Frank A. de Groot, author of MoyoGo Studio - a controversial but good go-studying platform.
Some time ago, he used to offer his program for a fee, got into trouble with major Go schools in Korea I think (they claimed he used their pro game logs data without authorization). The guy always has an axe to grind with somebody, whether on good ole groups, irc, email or forums. After some time, he started offering MoyoGoStudio for free...
And then, he deleted it. Forever.
Just like that, with all backup copies of it.
Or at least that`s what he claimed to have done, in a bad episode. Next thing i hear, when in a lighter mood, he dug up some god-forsaken source copy and apologized for not taking his pills.
I think the guy IS a genius programmer, but completely fills in the proverb about not every gift being a blessing...
Maybe he can offer some personal, non-anonymous advice on the subject?
This is not a surprise to anybody, that has already watched the movie analysis by Rob Ager: http://www.collativelearning.com/Starship%20troopers%20analysis.html
The guy nailed it back there, pretty obvious, but let's just say the world was in denial.... and in shock and awe from the bugs:)))
Hi, Dr Ramsey! What is your best estimate as to what is the US DOD's current GPS backup system?
IIRC Obama cut the budget for LORAN around 2010 and till then the system was financed with the explicit explanation and purpose - GPS backup. But no more...
I am currently teaching ECDIS systems to mariners and I always emphasize the weaknesses of GPS under jamming.
Ever since Selective Availability has been switched off, the jamming topic pops up more and more as a soft spot of the whole process, so I think we are not fooling ourselves that the US would let down such a gaping hole in its systems uncovered...
This mechanism was very well documented in a businessweek article: Pssst.... Wanna buy a Law?
In a nutshell, the companies lobby and pre-fabricate heavily customized (for their own needs) bills for local governments` use, keep them in the drawer and present them whenever opportunity rears its ugly head. The article describes exactly this bill in action in Lafayette and the havoc it wreaks on the municipality's idea to build its own infrastructure. Very grimmm...
DOES
NOT
HAPPEN ...
Anyone who'd read "Nation" knows the aforementioned lines actually mean the opposite to the common wisdom and are thus very supportive to Terry's choice, even though they actually convey the continuation of life on terms of one's will, not some deity's one.
Quite a book that was, typical Pratchett, but without the Discworld guise, pity it is not as famous as the rest of the bunch, read almost all of them.
Kudos for Terry, btw, in any way possible.
I second that, too.
Go has a pretty lower entry barrier for learning than chess. That's why it is used much more profoundly in Asia for educating children from a very early age.
It is scientifically proven to stimulate more concisely both hemispheres of the brain as compared to chess, too.
View it as a hollistic approach, instead of a one-sided.
Do you really expect WSJ to post *anything* else as their opinion?
After all, they represent big capital in a very, VERY conservative way, not to mention that Keith Rupert Murdoch is breathing down their necks.
Just an example of why I can relate, so to speak, to Paul Allen:
When BillG announced his intention to "give away" or pledge half of his fortunes to the foundation of his and his wife's name, I thought: how convenient, this is what some ultra rich people are doing to actually protect their fortunes from IRS. Certainly Soros did it. But is BillG REALLY that philantropic? A couple of years later, the answer came from Bill's father himself, Bill Jr (Gates is 3rd). His father said in an interview that he has been pesking his son about starting a foundation -- NOT ONLY BECAUSE OF TAX PURPOSES -- but for some new challenges...
A sigh... Can't get any much closer than that to the source. BillG I think had some sort of Aspergers that made him what he is - a ruthless and brilliant programmer and a cutthroat businessman. But it didn't made him human.
Not at all.
This was the PR department's job in Microsoft. And it's a good thing that Allen brings some perspective, even after some years, -- AND for profit -- i.e. his auto-bio book sales. It is a good grain of truth in there, somewhere, one that neither the PR people, nor BillG himself would really like to shine out in public. But hell, either of these men is rich beyond caring, so who gives?:)
Nothing particularly new under the sun, and then it's just the MS way...
They've been incorporating this kind of things for quite a while now.
About a year ago, I attended the offical MS cryptography class 2821A, aka PKI environment managing and setup.
The tutor was a very bright guy, great instructor AND seller of MS-related stuff.
He was also kind enough to share that some of the bleeding edge stuff they were currently doing was just like what the article announces.
The weird part? It was done in Kosovo of all places on the face of Earth...
It begs to differ but this reminds me of the opportunities that disaster capitalism offers to, hm, MS innovators.
Being able to implement a Layer 1 or Layer 2 discriminatory network that doesn't let a single PC plugin to a simple router and get on the network without all the patches to the OS and the Antivirus soft already present - whoa, that is a whole new level of paranoia.
But yet again, it was work done for their banking and financial systems - literrary being recreated from scratch, that recently had to bleed some upper management staff, due to misappropriations and money laundering. Given the ripe atmosphere of rogue law-less-ness, no wonder those boys didn't want to share the pie with some - with any - script kiddies.;)
It is a *translucent* layer of material. That is why it could not be picked up by the satellite imagery, besides being of microscopic proportions individually.
This is one of the very few places of distant observations where our advances in technology cannot make up for the loss of *in situ* research, a bit like the HUMINT gaffe and shortage of CIA in the middle east.
Also - a typical example of the proverb about the fallen tree, not reported by the media. When it gets to the point to be reportable and visible from space - it would have been already way too late...
It was accidentally stumbled upon by a strained sailboat, thus the skipper was close enough and slow in the water to take notice and that's how it all started.
There are a couple of movies on the subject, shot on location and the result and the impact from them make all the difference.
I have been in the program from almost the very beginning and I am glad they are coming finally frank and open about it.
some more comments and caveats first:
-as anything modern in IT, people sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) so not a lot can be said from within the circle without breaking its terms.
Having read the interview, I see the chief has also pretty much kept it this way, let alone only for the terms that are already publicly disclosed
-google operates through 3rd party outsourcers and pretty much all non-essential communication is through them and not google directly, that's why the guy can't tell ya exact number about his posse. the big numbers are probably very correct, but I'm not sure about now.
there seemed to be a very big wave of cut-offs and discontinued access for raters about a year ago, a lot of people got the boot and I'm not sure why - my bet is just a sweep of the axe. some were gone for a good reason, others very randomly.
-the raters have a few spaces and forums to discuss their work, open to public and with minimal chance for an NDA break.
-the raters have mods, too, but I haven't seen activity on that from for a while.
-the specifics of the most cases have drawn me to a conclusion that for each surveyed example, there are at least 6 or 7 people working and giving opinions about, before a final decision is drawn, so there is your internal balance and weeding out bad judgement. lemme say it again you cannot single-handedly change Google's opinion about a particular site and particular search term.
-about natural language processing - this is the scary part. you cannot imagine how good are these guys, especially their algorithms. from time to time they let us sneak peek at it and let me say we had a look at some betas (or alfa-s) of correct grammar processing and translation MONTHS ahead of their official announcement to the world. you could tell it was machine-made translation, but it was good, scary good. And I'm NOT talking English only, no,no.
-the pay -it gets delayed about 6 weeks after month's end but is regular and usually not enough for a living, mainly due to the lack of work. first year it was good, very good, but in 2008 it started getting less and less, which is a shame, since it is a nice way to browse the net and get really paid to do it !;-)
in those initial months, we were mainly dealing with spam, but recently even that is not so much present.
-the reason they do not pinpoint sites has to do with the entire structure of the reviewing process - we look at a certain page from the perspective of a concrete search term and it's relevance to it, which is a good compromise. also you can get good content AND spam at the same time.
Altogether for nearly two years in it, the terms we are monitoring haven't changed drastically an it can be boring from time to time, but otherwise, you get to see some really weird things people type into the search field.
-altogether, recently I was both happy and pissed off at what their focus of work changed -dumbing down. more simpler and simpler explanations and help for the raters, so no surprise.
-oh, yeah, one more thing. The leaked Guidelines - way beyond old so of not much use for reverse-engineering and helping the SEO guys. good luck with that:)
Somehow this kind of teamwork reminds me of the Amazing Maurice RatKing that Pratchett described. Both in weirdness, evil-ness and team-ness. Talk about the new perestroika...
I've had my share of sailing, thanks god I wasn`t that deep in the net then;-)
First - the cruise: this is a one in a lifetime experience and get the most out of it. in the case of internet communication, that means get to know the bridge guys, the navigating officers. They have the communications at their disposal, wherever and whatever the pay plan. if you want free time, look to befriend them in the "dead man's watch" - after 01AM local time in the darkness till ~05 in the morning. believe me, they would be happy to have some company and would gladly treat in some time in favor.
next: free WiFi in the ports - most definitely get a good Pringles-like pointed antenna. you might consider limiting yourself to a phone and sms messages, now that cruise ships usually have a roaming cell for GSM networks (even pricey, yet) - it is good for emergency calls and such, but not for blogging.
bring a lot of offline stuff to read and beat the boredom in the long passages and I mean a lot!
for the true junkie- get the BGAN or as the experienced fellas say - OFFLINE POP3 mail client.(thunderbird portable?)
when you are put in a non-real-time environment, you are forced to think and distill your answers and writings, thus making them better and also helps time pass faster (believe me, you'll have PLENTY).
Enjoy the different experience. Plan what to see in the ports you call.
If you are persistent and disciplined, keep a diary on daily basis, helps keep the head clear.
meet and interact with as many people as possible. after the 3rd month you'll be pissed off each other pretty much, but if you're aware of that symptom, you'll get over it quickly and it'll be a good lesson in HR.
explore yourself and the wonderful places you get to visit!
This is a true eyes-opener, don't spoil it just to keep being hooked to the net, beach-rats' way;-)
I'd really like to see these guy's algorithms in the game of Go (wei-qi). Or imagine one day being able to get some machine learning from Guo Juan http://www.guojuangoschool.com/ - she's pretty nice and (still) understandable high-dan player. Recently some Chinese professor that participated in the Deep Blue's victory over Gary said with the help of M$ research money he's inking closer on the brute-force approach in Go next http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5552 . But it is still a steep curve. The chinese chess projections point to a breakthrough in the next 2-3 years and it is still a couple of exponents simpler than Go. So, way to go, Ms.Pac-Man:-)
recently, the so-called "list 301" of countries, labeled as very bad copyright infringers got its 2007 edition. due to that, in the country of Bulgaria the two most famous torrent trackers - arenabg.com and zamunda.net, were forcefully brought down BY THE POLICE and also the largest telecom in the country blocked the access to one of them, despite announcing its address in the BGP sessions. the few other smaller tracker sites simply shut down ops, while the arena-s, being of a somewhat mirky origin and obviously possesing some resource - relocated their hostings in Frisco, TX;-) a lot of hassle was stirred up, the owner was brought to court - and promptly relieved, because he was not properly charged, nor could he have been. mostly advantageously random fact - in the very days when the raids happened, some frickin` unbeknownst to noone firm started spreading the good news that it is a distributor of the hollywood films under DRM shackles. it just became crystal clear to everyone, that this was all a stage-up, meant to make a poor little country benign and (ob)serving in the eyes of the western big brothers. but the amateurish guerrila and partisan methods by the state apparatus - the so called State Division for fighting Organized Crime (GDBOP), made this all such a bad mess, that even the scene started laughing at them - a group posted a greeting, saying "FBI pwns GDBOP, because the bureau at least knows what a scene is and so on."
needless to say, right after bulgaria was delisted from 301, few days later most of the trackers resumed ops like nothing has happened....
"Vot Eto Da!" It is indeed rare to see some of the brothers from the Former Soyuz here discussing in great details those dark minutes... As for the protocol, in the military academy we were told under the counter that the military were involved in the running of the test, and that itself is a clear flag for the lack of real plant operators present and the pushing of the safety boundaries.
The fliud dynamics is an area, which is purported to be on the current edge of supercomputer capabilities, along with nuclear weapons simulation, weather forecasting and GO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_board_game/ . Chess, on the other hand, is no longer part of this exclusive club, as the comparison says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_board_game#Numeric al_estimates. I suspect, some fancy hardware and breakthrough programming was needed to assist the geniuses, that managed to pull this one out. That is a good sign of the advances in this outer-limits areas.
i have personally noticed that precisely after sept. 11 last year, yahoo msgs on my cellular and odigo messages to it got repeatedly sent over and over again, sometimes 3,4 or 5 times. i literally had to quit this kind of service. and i'm paranoid enough to think tha some kind of active filtering has taken place after that date. i wish reality will prove my concerns groundless, but alas.. we'll just never know for sure, wherever the truth may be out there.
format it in arial or the other tricky font used in corp sites like , urgh, MS's - sorry.
no better example.
in the cheaper life-stages in the east (the Balkans, anyone?) we devote quite more resource of our lives in reading it this way. it IS a kinda committment- i don't have a good monitor, nor will i ever do, but i will read THAT BIG PILE of quiality SF, rus and english, both. it IS worth the effort, for humans we are, too..
if you can imagine it, this masterpiece was SO human and "dangerous" that some idiots in the censorship department in bulgaria deided to cut off som of the last pages of the work- too much intrusive for the stupid bulgarians.
and only recently was this "feature" discovered.
human, only all too human...
first one has to overcome the inner cultural barier in order truly to start understanding another form of civilization and especially language.
the language is the first "interface" to the folks, it is not onlymultinational, like english, it is unique full of clues bunch, baring the scars and marks of nature.
getting into other languages is quite enriching and the average americans (as usually) are far behind the rest of the wordl due to this.
simply the level of cultural identity , characteristic for the eastern countries and the slavonic ones in particular more than makes up for their size on the map;)
perhaps this is also true for quite a small minority of intelligentsia in the US, and only they can assert this truth.
linua franca is not a way of dominance for the English now - just a sign of what is coming.
a voluntary knighting - that's metaphorically what it is to learn a new language- it comes prebundled with its culture, so keep that in mind and venture into it, if you dare!
i am a bulgarian- for those from US it's a country on the balkans and to me, both russian and english were not mother-tongues.
i am exploring the English lit, and SF especially, for the latter half of my life so i have collected at least some experience.
and even as a slavonic person (cyrillc, anyone?) the russian lit is quite a challenge. english is more on the tech ingenuity, russian's on the spiritual inside, serious one, too. that's why asimov, clarke and bradbury are more akin to them. Heinlein isn't, at least not recently.
language learning IS much more than words- it's a gate to a whole new culture. it IS enriching, not only in terms of reading solaris or roadside picnick natively;-)
for those who can aford to do it - expand your horizons. Eco rules, too!
does this arrogant mindless imaginative half-a page constitute relations with anything of an open source nature?
naah, hardly, except the woe of churning out virus-like freemindedness;)
Slashdot Mirror
Sir Terry Pratchett was the greatest humanist I knew in my life. ...
He managed to touch the souls of great number of people through his uniquely clear worldview and managed to infuse great human values in the best possible way.
Needless to say, reading and living with his books was one of the most enlightening experiences I have ever had with the written letters.
His wisdom and approach to life will be dearly missed. Him being of the most famoust atheists, I can only say he left this earth forever, to finally settle in our hearts and the souls of those to come after us, growing up to be better human beings, through his books and ideas.
Because ideas never die
RIP Sir Terry Pratchett
Long Live Sir Terry Pratchett
I first hand experience from the country mentioned, Bulgaria. ...
The NYT got it pretty wrong...
I have never experienced such a large grassroots uprising of people in my own country as againts the fracking of oil and gas. Period.
When there was a word that somebody up there is doing something about fracking in the land where all the corn and wheat is produced in Bulgaria - pretty much everybody I knew came out on the streets.
Let me tell you a couple of things about my country.
People are poor, do not know a lot about politics, the scene is ripe with populist and desinformation. In a word, we don't give a thing about the stupidity of our leaders or politicians. And there is A LOT of it present. It takes quite a grab to unnerve a sleeping monster like that. And when the plans to spoil our main source of bread and water started to loom, the reaction was lightning fast.
For one thing, we have the internet. So we knew about the consequences from fracking in America. And there was the film "Gasland".
I give it one thing: you cannot easily go back to sleep after you've seen one's tap water on fire...
A lot of naysayers might try to say something about the russians, but the dreaded truth is this was the jolt of electricity that gave a rise to the new generation of conscious people on our streets that start to push back on all the stupid advances and encroaches on our land.
And then, there was ACTA
There is a genius Go programmer (as in Weiqi, Baduk, GO game) that IIRC has come out as schizophrenic some years ago.
His name is Frank A. de Groot, author of MoyoGo Studio - a controversial but good go-studying platform. Some time ago, he used to offer his program for a fee, got into trouble with major Go schools in Korea I think (they claimed he used their pro game logs data without authorization). The guy always has an axe to grind with somebody, whether on good ole groups, irc, email or forums. After some time, he started offering MoyoGoStudio for free...
And then, he deleted it. Forever.
Just like that, with all backup copies of it.
Or at least that`s what he claimed to have done, in a bad episode. Next thing i hear, when in a lighter mood, he dug up some god-forsaken source copy and apologized for not taking his pills.
I think the guy IS a genius programmer, but completely fills in the proverb about not every gift being a blessing...
Maybe he can offer some personal, non-anonymous advice on the subject?
This is not a surprise to anybody, that has already watched the movie analysis by Rob Ager: http://www.collativelearning.com/Starship%20troopers%20analysis.html .... and in shock and awe from the bugs :)))
The guy nailed it back there, pretty obvious, but let's just say the world was in denial
Hi, Dr Ramsey!
What is your best estimate as to what is the US DOD's current GPS backup system?
IIRC Obama cut the budget for LORAN around 2010 and till then the system was financed with the explicit explanation and purpose - GPS backup. But no more...
I am currently teaching ECDIS systems to mariners and I always emphasize the weaknesses of GPS under jamming. Ever since Selective Availability has been switched off, the jamming topic pops up more and more as a soft spot of the whole process, so I think we are not fooling ourselves that the US would let down such a gaping hole in its systems uncovered...
This mechanism was very well documented in a businessweek article: Pssst .... Wanna buy a Law?
In a nutshell, the companies lobby and pre-fabricate heavily customized (for their own needs) bills for local governments` use, keep them in the drawer and present them whenever opportunity rears its ugly head. The article describes exactly this bill in action in Lafayette and the havoc it wreaks on the municipality's idea to build its own infrastructure. Very grimmm...
DOES
...
NOT
HAPPEN
Anyone who'd read "Nation" knows the aforementioned lines actually mean the opposite to the common wisdom and are thus very supportive to Terry's choice, even though they actually convey the continuation of life on terms of one's will, not some deity's one.
Quite a book that was, typical Pratchett, but without the Discworld guise, pity it is not as famous as the rest of the bunch, read almost all of them.
Kudos for Terry, btw, in any way possible.
I second that, too.
Go has a pretty lower entry barrier for learning than chess. That's why it is used much more profoundly in Asia for educating children from a very early age. It is scientifically proven to stimulate more concisely both hemispheres of the brain as compared to chess, too.
View it as a hollistic approach, instead of a one-sided.
Do you really expect WSJ to post *anything* else as their opinion? :)
After all, they represent big capital in a very, VERY conservative way, not to mention that Keith Rupert Murdoch is breathing down their necks.
Just an example of why I can relate, so to speak, to Paul Allen:
When BillG announced his intention to "give away" or pledge half of his fortunes to the foundation of his and his wife's name, I thought: how convenient, this is what some ultra rich people are doing to actually protect their fortunes from IRS. Certainly Soros did it. But is BillG REALLY that philantropic? A couple of years later, the answer came from Bill's father himself, Bill Jr (Gates is 3rd). His father said in an interview that he has been pesking his son about starting a foundation -- NOT ONLY BECAUSE OF TAX PURPOSES -- but for some new challenges...
A sigh... Can't get any much closer than that to the source. BillG I think had some sort of Aspergers that made him what he is - a ruthless and brilliant programmer and a cutthroat businessman. But it didn't made him human.
Not at all.
This was the PR department's job in Microsoft. And it's a good thing that Allen brings some perspective, even after some years, -- AND for profit -- i.e. his auto-bio book sales. It is a good grain of truth in there, somewhere, one that neither the PR people, nor BillG himself would really like to shine out in public. But hell, either of these men is rich beyond caring, so who gives?
Nothing particularly new under the sun, and then it's just the MS way... They've been incorporating this kind of things for quite a while now. About a year ago, I attended the offical MS cryptography class 2821A, aka PKI environment managing and setup. The tutor was a very bright guy, great instructor AND seller of MS-related stuff. He was also kind enough to share that some of the bleeding edge stuff they were currently doing was just like what the article announces. The weird part? It was done in Kosovo of all places on the face of Earth... It begs to differ but this reminds me of the opportunities that disaster capitalism offers to, hm, MS innovators. Being able to implement a Layer 1 or Layer 2 discriminatory network that doesn't let a single PC plugin to a simple router and get on the network without all the patches to the OS and the Antivirus soft already present - whoa, that is a whole new level of paranoia. But yet again, it was work done for their banking and financial systems - literrary being recreated from scratch, that recently had to bleed some upper management staff, due to misappropriations and money laundering. Given the ripe atmosphere of rogue law-less-ness, no wonder those boys didn't want to share the pie with some - with any - script kiddies. ;)
It is a *translucent* layer of material. That is why it could not be picked up by the satellite imagery, besides being of microscopic proportions individually.
This is one of the very few places of distant observations where our advances in technology cannot make up for the loss of *in situ* research, a bit like the HUMINT gaffe and shortage of CIA in the middle east.
Also - a typical example of the proverb about the fallen tree, not reported by the media. When it gets to the point to be reportable and visible from space - it would have been already way too late...
It was accidentally stumbled upon by a strained sailboat, thus the skipper was close enough and slow in the water to take notice and that's how it all started.
There are a couple of movies on the subject, shot on location and the result and the impact from them make all the difference.
an obligatory statement about the murky distinction between the "bing" for your "bang" coming in 3, 2, 1 ....
I have been in the program from almost the very beginning and I am glad they are coming finally frank and open about it. some more comments and caveats first: ;-)
in those initial months, we were mainly dealing with spam, but recently even that is not so much present.
-the reason they do not pinpoint sites has to do with the entire structure of the reviewing process - we look at a certain page from the perspective of a concrete search term and it's relevance to it, which is a good compromise. also you can get good content AND spam at the same time.
Altogether for nearly two years in it, the terms we are monitoring haven't changed drastically an it can be boring from time to time, but otherwise, you get to see some really weird things people type into the search field.
-altogether, recently I was both happy and pissed off at what their focus of work changed -dumbing down. more simpler and simpler explanations and help for the raters, so no surprise.
-oh, yeah, one more thing. The leaked Guidelines - way beyond old so of not much use for reverse-engineering and helping the SEO guys. good luck with that :)
-as anything modern in IT, people sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) so not a lot can be said from within the circle without breaking its terms. Having read the interview, I see the chief has also pretty much kept it this way, let alone only for the terms that are already publicly disclosed -google operates through 3rd party outsourcers and pretty much all non-essential communication is through them and not google directly, that's why the guy can't tell ya exact number about his posse. the big numbers are probably very correct, but I'm not sure about now. there seemed to be a very big wave of cut-offs and discontinued access for raters about a year ago, a lot of people got the boot and I'm not sure why - my bet is just a sweep of the axe. some were gone for a good reason, others very randomly. -the raters have a few spaces and forums to discuss their work, open to public and with minimal chance for an NDA break. -the raters have mods, too, but I haven't seen activity on that from for a while. -the specifics of the most cases have drawn me to a conclusion that for each surveyed example, there are at least 6 or 7 people working and giving opinions about, before a final decision is drawn, so there is your internal balance and weeding out bad judgement. lemme say it again you cannot single-handedly change Google's opinion about a particular site and particular search term. -about natural language processing - this is the scary part. you cannot imagine how good are these guys, especially their algorithms. from time to time they let us sneak peek at it and let me say we had a look at some betas (or alfa-s) of correct grammar processing and translation MONTHS ahead of their official announcement to the world. you could tell it was machine-made translation, but it was good, scary good. And I'm NOT talking English only, no,no. -the pay -it gets delayed about 6 weeks after month's end but is regular and usually not enough for a living, mainly due to the lack of work. first year it was good, very good, but in 2008 it started getting less and less, which is a shame, since it is a nice way to browse the net and get really paid to do it !
Somehow this kind of teamwork reminds me of the Amazing Maurice RatKing that Pratchett described. Both in weirdness, evil-ness and team-ness. Talk about the new perestroika ...
I've had my share of sailing, thanks god I wasn`t that deep in the net then ;-)
First - the cruise: this is a one in a lifetime experience and get the most out of it. in the case of internet communication, that means get to know the bridge guys, the navigating officers. They have the communications at their disposal, wherever and whatever the pay plan. if you want free time, look to befriend them in the "dead man's watch" - after 01AM local time in the darkness till ~05 in the morning. believe me, they would be happy to have some company and would gladly treat in some time in favor.
next: free WiFi in the ports - most definitely get a good Pringles-like pointed antenna. you might consider limiting yourself to a phone and sms messages, now that cruise ships usually have a roaming cell for GSM networks (even pricey, yet) - it is good for emergency calls and such, but not for blogging.
bring a lot of offline stuff to read and beat the boredom in the long passages and I mean a lot!
for the true junkie- get the BGAN or as the experienced fellas say - OFFLINE POP3 mail client.(thunderbird portable?)
when you are put in a non-real-time environment, you are forced to think and distill your answers and writings, thus making them better and also helps time pass faster (believe me, you'll have PLENTY).
Enjoy the different experience. Plan what to see in the ports you call.
If you are persistent and disciplined, keep a diary on daily basis, helps keep the head clear.
meet and interact with as many people as possible. after the 3rd month you'll be pissed off each other pretty much, but if you're aware of that symptom, you'll get over it quickly and it'll be a good lesson in HR.
explore yourself and the wonderful places you get to visit!
This is a true eyes-opener, don't spoil it just to keep being hooked to the net, beach-rats' way ;-)
I'd really like to see these guy's algorithms in the game of Go (wei-qi). :-)
Or imagine one day being able to get some machine learning from Guo Juan http://www.guojuangoschool.com/ - she's pretty nice and (still) understandable high-dan player.
Recently some Chinese professor that participated in the Deep Blue's victory over Gary said with the help of M$ research money he's inking closer on the brute-force approach in Go next http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5552 . But it is still a steep curve. The chinese chess projections point to a breakthrough in the next 2-3 years and it is still a couple of exponents simpler than Go.
So, way to go, Ms.Pac-Man
recently, the so-called "list 301" of countries, labeled as very bad copyright infringers got its 2007 edition. ;-) a lot of hassle was stirred up, the owner was brought to court - and promptly relieved, because he was not properly charged, nor could he have been.
due to that, in the country of Bulgaria the two most famous torrent trackers - arenabg.com and zamunda.net, were forcefully brought down BY THE POLICE and also the largest telecom in the country blocked the access to one of them, despite announcing its address in the BGP sessions. the few other smaller tracker sites simply shut down ops, while the arena-s, being of a somewhat mirky origin and obviously possesing some resource - relocated their hostings in Frisco, TX
mostly advantageously random fact - in the very days when the raids happened, some frickin` unbeknownst to noone firm started spreading the good news that it is a distributor of the hollywood films under DRM shackles. it just became crystal clear to everyone, that this was all a stage-up, meant to make a poor little country benign and (ob)serving in the eyes of the western big brothers. but the amateurish guerrila and partisan methods by the state apparatus - the so called State Division for fighting Organized Crime (GDBOP), made this all such a bad mess, that even the scene started laughing at them - a group posted a greeting, saying "FBI pwns GDBOP, because the bureau at least knows what a scene is and so on."
needless to say, right after bulgaria was delisted from 301, few days later most of the trackers resumed ops like nothing has happened....
"Vot Eto Da!"
It is indeed rare to see some of the brothers from the Former Soyuz here discussing in great details those dark minutes...
As for the protocol, in the military academy we were told under the counter that the military were involved in the running of the test, and that itself is a clear flag for the lack of real plant operators present and the pushing of the safety boundaries.
The fliud dynamics is an area, which is purported to be on the current edge of supercomputer capabilities, along with nuclear weapons simulation, weather forecasting and GO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_board_game/ . Chess, on the other hand, is no longer part of this exclusive club, as the comparison says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_board_game#Numeric al_estimates.
I suspect, some fancy hardware and breakthrough programming was needed to assist the geniuses, that managed to pull this one out.
That is a good sign of the advances in this outer-limits areas.
i have personally noticed that precisely after sept. 11 last year, yahoo msgs on my cellular and odigo messages to it got repeatedly sent over and over again, sometimes 3,4 or 5 times. i literally had to quit this kind of service. and i'm paranoid enough to think tha some kind of active filtering has taken place after that date.
i wish reality will prove my concerns groundless, but alas..
we'll just never know for sure, wherever the truth may be out there.
format it in arial or the other tricky font used in corp sites like , urgh, MS's - sorry.
no better example.
in the cheaper life-stages in the east (the Balkans, anyone?) we devote quite more resource of our lives in reading it this way. it IS a kinda committment- i don't have a good monitor, nor will i ever do, but i will read THAT BIG PILE of quiality SF, rus and english, both. it IS worth the effort, for humans we are, too..
if you can imagine it, this masterpiece was SO human and "dangerous" that some idiots in the censorship department in bulgaria deided to cut off som of the last pages of the work- too much intrusive for the stupid bulgarians.
and only recently was this "feature" discovered.
human, only all too human...
first one has to overcome the inner cultural barier in order truly to start understanding another form of civilization and especially language. ;)
the language is the first "interface" to the folks, it is not onlymultinational, like english, it is unique full of clues bunch, baring the scars and marks of nature.
getting into other languages is quite enriching and the average americans (as usually) are far behind the rest of the wordl due to this.
simply the level of cultural identity , characteristic for the eastern countries and the slavonic ones in particular more than makes up for their size on the map
perhaps this is also true for quite a small minority of intelligentsia in the US, and only they can assert this truth.
linua franca is not a way of dominance for the English now - just a sign of what is coming.
a voluntary knighting - that's metaphorically what it is to learn a new language- it comes prebundled with its culture, so keep that in mind and venture into it, if you dare!
i am a bulgarian- for those from US it's a country on the balkans and to me, both russian and english were not mother-tongues. ;-)
i am exploring the English lit, and SF especially, for the latter half of my life so i have collected at least some experience.
and even as a slavonic person (cyrillc, anyone?) the russian lit is quite a challenge. english is more on the tech ingenuity, russian's on the spiritual inside, serious one, too. that's why asimov, clarke and bradbury are more akin to them. Heinlein isn't, at least not recently.
language learning IS much more than words- it's a gate to a whole new culture. it IS enriching, not only in terms of reading solaris or roadside picnick natively
for those who can aford to do it - expand your horizons. Eco rules, too!
does this arrogant mindless imaginative half-a page constitute relations with anything of an open source nature? naah, hardly, except the woe of churning out virus-like freemindedness ;)