I tested a tablet a couple of years ago that had MS handwriting and voice recognition built in. You have to "train" the voice recognition by reading pre-made texts out loud (strangely, they were mostly about how great Microsoft is). Even after the training, the results were like the computer was channeling James Joyce. It especially had trouble with short words like "our." If the presenter had said, "Dear Mother, please rendezvous with me in Luxembourg" it would have been just fine.
"Frankly, I imagine that Wikipedia would be best served by pre-comment acception editors or moderators of some sort during major current event times. Of course it would be difficult (especially given the fact that Wikipedia users aren't tied to some predetermined schedule), but slowing down the flow of information -- even at the expense of correct but uncorroborated fact addition -- would surely be worthwhile during the early hours/days of a current event. "
What about some way of voting on chunks of content? "This content is good/bad/unverifiable/someone's opinion," etc. Voting restricted by IP address &/or email address? Maybe there could be text color cues to give hints as to how some information is viewed - i.e., red text means > 75% of votes say it's bad information.
You could also send the info to the site below. I've been sending them a lot of my email phish and it they seem to be pretty active in getting sites taken down. Thank goodness! My Dad had a PayPal phish the other day that said something like "confirm you submitted this payment blahblah" for some item he hadn't actually bought. The scary thing was, the phish email actually had his real name in it. Luckily, the phish site had already been taken down when he tried to go to it to give them his PayPal info...
A global phishing termination operation launched by CastleCops and Sunbelt Software, the volunteer PIRT Squad is comprised of folks who report phish, investigate phish, and actively work on phish takedown and termination (original concept by Robin Laudanski). PIRT is funded by CastleCops. Become a PIRT Squad terminator by reporting phish today!"
I was working for a large university, running the off-campus modem pool (mostly maintaining Cisco 5200's). One of the top admins of the network services dept. comes to my desk one morning. "I can't get my email!" She was pretty mad so I didn't try to explain that off-campus modem pool != on-campus ethernet (nor email, for that matter), I just trailed after her to her office. She sits down at her desk and I immediately notice the little green light on her keyboard indicating CAPSLOCK IS ON. Some quick thinking - "How am I going to NOT make her feel like an idiot?" I said "Oh, I do this all the time." and hit the capslock button and quickly head back to my desk.
Even if the laptop server stays up, isn't whatever network it's connected to going to go down if the power goes out? Routers, hubs, terminal servers, whatever, they all tend to like electricity, too.
I tried to set up a user's home machine with limited rights instead of admin. Gave up when I found that the Windows Automated Updates would not install under the non-admin account. (This can be worked around if you are on a domain but not for a user at home with dialup).
I used to get mod points pretty often. Eventually, I got several negative meta-mods, usually because I had modded down some comment that was particularly sexist. That seems to offend some meta-moderators. Basically, if I only mod things up and not down, I don't get negative meta-mods. I still get points every now and then but not nearly as often as I once did.
Re:Having just been to a class...
on
Hacker Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
I got to go to Ed's workshop recently, too. It was very interesting stuff, lots of good advice, and a lot cheaper than $4300!
"Have a permanent, voter verifiable, auditable, and recountable paper trail (a feature Diebold and ES&S both offer)"
A good idea, but apparently the paper trail doesn't always work, as they found out in Tarrant County, TX earlier this month:
A recount of ballots cast during the March 7 primary election ground to a halt Tuesday -- midway through its second day -- after workers could not resolve discrepancies that affected more than 1,400 ballots.
The problem in the recount appears to be with new, federally mandated electronic voting machines, provided by vendor Hart InterCivic. During a hand recount, the machines are designed to print out paper ballots for each voter's choices, but McKerley said the machines that were used to register early votes printed out only 75 percent to 80 percent of the votes believed to have been cast.
"Who wears a Tshirt to an event like a State of the Union address anyway? "
Beverly Young, wife of Representative C. W. Bill Young, Republican of Florida, for one.
"Further, if your going to link to a news story try to make it an unbiased one. The article you linked to was on a site that's about as biased as you can get."
It was an article that had Sheehan's description of what happened, not "assumptions" about what she did (some mainstream media reacted similarly to the way you did and exaggerated or made up statements about what happened.)
The NYT pointed out that "An officer who insisted on anonymity because the officers are not authorized to speak publicly about their work said the guards at the speech had been instructed to watch Ms. Sheehan closely in case she sought to interrupt the event to gain attention for her cause."
You might have also noticed that later the charges were dropped, an apology issued, and the statement "We were wrong and shouldn't have arrested her" was given.
"Sure, I'm outspoken and don't normally shy away from protesting. But that wasn't my plan. Just hours before the speech, I had been given a ticket by Rep. Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma, who has worked to press Congress to bring the troops home.
At first I didn't really want to go, and I gave the ticket away to someone who gave it back. I would not have been disruptive out of respect for Lynn and the many other members of Congress I deeply admire.
I intended to make a statement, not a scene. Had I wanted to create a disruption, I would have waited until the president arrived to reveal my shirt.
My ticket was in the fifth gallery, front row. An officer -- who a few minutes later would arrest me -- helped me to my seat. I had just sat down and was warm from climbing three flights of stairs, so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out when the officer saw my shirt and yelled "protester!" He then hauled me out of my seat and shoved me up the stairs."
I've been working on a web project about vegetable seed identification and did some searching for a very similar thing (a dictionary I could import into MS Word that had the Latin names of plants). I didn't find anything appropriate - it's particularly sticky because some folks use different names to mean the same plant, and some use the same name to refer to different plants! As in many scientific fields, there are efforts to standardize the nomenclature so everyone is talking about the same thing using the same terms.
Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) is a medical group struggling with the same issues. They don't seem to provide any kind of dictionaries, either. http://www.snomed.org/about/index.html
[it's full of thugs, imbeciles, etc...] "All this is true mostly of the Alt newsgroups, which were designed to have few inhibitions. Other groups, such as Comp, Sci, Soc and Humanities, fare much better, largely because they can be moderated. They contain lots of valuable stuff.
But the rise in the signal-to-noise ratio among the Alt groups has made combing through the chatter a tedious process. So useless has Usenet's reputation become..." [blah, blah, blah]
Is he talking about alt. groups or not? Why make a distinction and then act like usenet is nothing but alt.* ? Does he think it's like an ocean and you have to wade through all the alt groups to get to the moderated ones?
I read usenet groups pretty much every day. I've never gotten a virus from usenet but then I don't download binaries, either.
For instance: I like reading alt.horror for the goofy posts and pointers to movies I've never heard of. There are hundreds of posts there every day. Now I am a fan of Takashi Miike and Dario Argento, two great directors I'd never have heard of otherwise.
When I'm stumped on a technical problem, whether computer or automobile related, and web searching doesn't help, often I can find the problem already solved on usenet. Or I can find a group to post to and get help.
I want a job as a Spam Bounty Hunter...go to exotic places like Nigeria or Korea and hunt down spammers with bolt-cutters and sledgehammers...mmmmm. Wonder what the going rate for spammer pelts is?
I searched around deja for more of those ad-link inserts. I thought I had found a clever way of searching using "arrow_link.gif" since I came up with this one:
which does contain a (mostly relevant) ad-link. but it turns out the post's footer has "begin 666 arrow_link.gif" in it.
The most absolutely ridiculous one I found (totally by accident) is at: http://x75.deja.com/threadmsg_ct.xp?thitnum=16&mhi tnum=2&CONTEXT=964038837.1165557925
See the ad-linked "51" in the header? At least it should be fairly obvious to even the most clueless reader the orginal poster didn't put an ad-link in the time-stamp header of his post.
I searched Deja and found not a single mention that there are ad-links being inserted. And I have not found anything to explain that the little orange arrows mean something special. If they put the links off in a side-panel as some have suggested, I wouldn't care at all. I already am used to all the flashing and spinning crapola. But I'm pretty annoyed that they're doing it and not giving any notice. And nuking old posts isn't an option for me, I had several posting accounts that are dead now and I'll never be able to nuke their posts. Same goes for those who munge to avoid spam.
Slashdot Mirror
"Cthulhu 2008...No More Years!"
I tested a tablet a couple of years ago that had MS handwriting and voice recognition built in. You have to "train" the voice recognition by reading pre-made texts out loud (strangely, they were mostly about how great Microsoft is). Even after the training, the results were like the computer was channeling James Joyce. It especially had trouble with short words like "our." If the presenter had said, "Dear Mother, please rendezvous with me in Luxembourg" it would have been just fine.
That's lovely. How old's your boy?
What about some way of voting on chunks of content? "This content is good/bad/unverifiable/someone's opinion," etc. Voting restricted by IP address &/or email address? Maybe there could be text color cues to give hints as to how some information is viewed - i.e., red text means > 75% of votes say it's bad information.
http://www.castlecops.com/pirt
"PIRT Squad Fried Phish(TM) Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination (PIRT) Squad
A global phishing termination operation launched by CastleCops and Sunbelt Software, the volunteer PIRT Squad is comprised of folks who report phish, investigate phish, and actively work on phish takedown and termination (original concept by Robin Laudanski). PIRT is funded by CastleCops. Become a PIRT Squad terminator by reporting phish today!"
I was working for a large university, running the off-campus modem pool (mostly maintaining Cisco 5200's). One of the top admins of the network services dept. comes to my desk one morning. "I can't get my email!" She was pretty mad so I didn't try to explain that off-campus modem pool != on-campus ethernet (nor email, for that matter), I just trailed after her to her office. She sits down at her desk and I immediately notice the little green light on her keyboard indicating CAPSLOCK IS ON. Some quick thinking - "How am I going to NOT make her feel like an idiot?" I said "Oh, I do this all the time." and hit the capslock button and quickly head back to my desk.
Even if the laptop server stays up, isn't whatever network it's connected to going to go down if the power goes out? Routers, hubs, terminal servers, whatever, they all tend to like electricity, too.
I tried to set up a user's home machine with limited rights instead of admin. Gave up when I found that the Windows Automated Updates would not install under the non-admin account. (This can be worked around if you are on a domain but not for a user at home with dialup).
Thanks for the info - do you think that will include a key for new players or will they have to buy the basic set, too?
Is this a 'free' upgrade or are you going to have to buy an install disk?
I used to get mod points pretty often. Eventually, I got several negative meta-mods, usually because I had modded down some comment that was particularly sexist. That seems to offend some meta-moderators. Basically, if I only mod things up and not down, I don't get negative meta-mods. I still get points every now and then but not nearly as often as I once did.
I got to go to Ed's workshop recently, too. It was very interesting stuff, lots of good advice, and a lot cheaper than $4300!
A good idea, but apparently the paper trail doesn't always work, as they found out in Tarrant County, TX earlier this month:
(http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/14158481.h
Beverly Young, wife of Representative C. W. Bill Young, Republican of Florida, for one.
"Further, if your going to link to a news story try to make it an unbiased one. The article you linked to was on a site that's about as biased as you can get."
It was an article that had Sheehan's description of what happened, not "assumptions" about what she did (some mainstream media reacted similarly to the way you did and exaggerated or made up statements about what happened.)
The NYT pointed out that "An officer who insisted on anonymity because the officers are not authorized to speak publicly about their work said the guards at the speech had been instructed to watch Ms. Sheehan closely in case she sought to interrupt the event to gain attention for her cause."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/politics/02sheeh an.html
You might have also noticed that later the charges were dropped, an apology issued, and the statement "We were wrong and shouldn't have arrested her" was given.
Find a source that suits you here: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Capitol +Police+Chief+Terrance+Gainer+apology&btnG=Search+ News
From http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/7438
"Sure, I'm outspoken and don't normally shy away from protesting. But that wasn't my plan. Just hours before the speech, I had been given a ticket by Rep. Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma, who has worked to press Congress to bring the troops home.
At first I didn't really want to go, and I gave the ticket away to someone who gave it back. I would not have been disruptive out of respect for Lynn and the many other members of Congress I deeply admire.
I intended to make a statement, not a scene. Had I wanted to create a disruption, I would have waited until the president arrived to reveal my shirt.
My ticket was in the fifth gallery, front row. An officer -- who a few minutes later would arrest me -- helped me to my seat. I had just sat down and was warm from climbing three flights of stairs, so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out when the officer saw my shirt and yelled "protester!" He then hauled me out of my seat and shoved me up the stairs."
Try http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/7579 for a series of other incidents involving people being harrassed and arrested for wearing T-shirts.
This page has an interesting list (of plant names) http://www.bgbm.org/IAPT/Nomenclature/Code/SaintLo uis/0118IndexScfNames.htm
but isn't great for building a dictionary because it includes way -not- to spell words!
Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) is a medical group struggling with the same issues. They don't seem to provide any kind of dictionaries, either. http://www.snomed.org/about/index.html
[it's full of thugs, imbeciles, etc...] "All this is true mostly of the Alt newsgroups, which were designed to have few inhibitions. Other groups, such as Comp, Sci, Soc and Humanities, fare much better, largely because they can be moderated. They contain lots of valuable stuff.
But the rise in the signal-to-noise ratio among the Alt groups has made combing through the chatter a tedious process. So useless has Usenet's reputation become..." [blah, blah, blah]
Is he talking about alt. groups or not? Why make a distinction and then act like usenet is nothing but alt.* ? Does he think it's like an ocean and you have to wade through all the alt groups to get to the moderated ones?
I read usenet groups pretty much every day. I've never gotten a virus from usenet but then I don't download binaries, either.
For instance: I like reading alt.horror for the goofy posts and pointers to movies I've never heard of. There are hundreds of posts there every day. Now I am a fan of Takashi Miike and Dario Argento, two great directors I'd never have heard of otherwise.
When I'm stumped on a technical problem, whether computer or automobile related, and web searching doesn't help, often I can find the problem already solved on usenet. Or I can find a group to post to and get help.
I want a job as a Spam Bounty Hunter...go to exotic places like Nigeria or Korea and hunt down spammers with bolt-cutters and sledgehammers...mmmmm. Wonder what the going rate for spammer pelts is?
See this usenet conversation for some interesting info about the recently-spamvertised anti-paypal site:
f rame=right&th=553b4b974475ac63&seekm=hii01uo9o1hlo dbhtro1ufeqhrlg1jddr4%404ax.com#link1
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&
http://x70.deja.com/[ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=645976 861&CONTEXT=964036700.413794493&hitnum=0
which does contain a (mostly relevant) ad-link. but it turns out the post's footer has "begin 666 arrow_link.gif" in it.
The most absolutely ridiculous one I found (totally by accident) is at: http://x75.deja.com/threadmsg_ct.xp?thitnum=16&mhi tnum=2&CONTEXT=964038837.1165557925
See the ad-linked "51" in the header? At least it should be fairly obvious to even the most clueless reader the orginal poster didn't put an ad-link in the time-stamp header of his post.
I searched Deja and found not a single mention that there are ad-links being inserted. And I have not found anything to explain that the little orange arrows mean something special. If they put the links off in a side-panel as some have suggested, I wouldn't care at all. I already am used to all the flashing and spinning crapola. But I'm pretty annoyed that they're doing it and not giving any notice. And nuking old posts isn't an option for me, I had several posting accounts that are dead now and I'll never be able to nuke their posts. Same goes for those who munge to avoid spam.