If you look at the example of malaria, sleeping sickness, and yellow fever-- all of which are scourges in Africa-- I think you'll see that 100 years is far too short for humans to evolve a way around AIDS. Anyway, up until scientific medicine came on the scene, cholera, smallpox, and whooping cough routinely decimated Europe. So it's not even clear that people would become immune naturally, even in thousands of years.
> no matter how many times I "kill -9"ed it the process never paid attention > to the command and carried on churning away. I guess that's the process > rather than the OS, but it's still not always "all-powerful root".
That was because the process was in the "D State." This usually means it make a read() or a write() to some device, and the device went out to lunch. But it could be any blocking syscall.
Re:I'm your neighbor, and I drink your milkshake!
on
Verizon, Fiber Or Die?
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· Score: 1
LOL
Re:NOT the same old entrenched politics
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
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It wasn't McCain who backed down. It was Bush. Despite Bush's repeated threat to veto the legislation, McCain succeeded in adding a proviso to a 2005 defense appropriations bill which bans all "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of detainees. This proviso sets the U.S. Army Field Manual as the standard for any interrogation, whether by the military or the CIA. The photo-op where McCain shook hands with Bush was just a PR stunt to show that McCain was still part of the Republican party.
McCain has done a lot of things that have made mainstream Republicans angry. The three big ones are: his liberal stance on immigration, his campaign finance reform (google "McCain-Feingold Act"), and his opposition to torture. He has managed to stay in the party, but only just. Rush Limbaugh hates McCain, predictably.
To claim that McCain has "got no problem" with torture is ridiculous spin. You are completely "swift-boating" the issue to make the facts out to be the opposite of what they are.
The main loophole is the Graham amendment, which McCain had nothing to do with. It basically denies habeas corpus to "unlawful combatants." This makes it hard for detainees to seek legal redress even if they are being tortured. Also, the administration likes to keep pushing the boundaries of what constitutes "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment. In this case, that doesn't mean that the law is wrong, only that the enforcers are flawed.
Come on. You're going to have to do better than that.
I was running Debian on a 300 MHz Pentium II back in 2003, when the rest of the world was using Windows XP. Performance wasn't an issue. Windows XP wouldn't have even installed on that hardware, much less run. (I did have Windows 2000 creaking along for a while, though, to run some Windows-only apps.)
P.S. Dynamic libraries actually reduce memory consumption because multiple apps can share the same memory.
As usual, slashdot posters don't read. The discussion was about finding ADDRESSES using such tools. And hate to break it to you, but neither NavTeq or TeleAtlas are much more accurate than the TIGER/Line data that they are based off of.
NavTeq and TeleAtlas operate in Europe and the far East as well as in the U.S. There is no TIGER data in these areas. Therefore, trivially, NavTeq and TeleAtlas data is not always "based off of TIGER," although that may be true in some cases in the U.S.
...I live in a major county with over 3 million people, in the NYC Metro area)... which is still innaccurate in the same fashion as the TIGER/Line data...
Then submit a map update. Or just be glad that you're still off the radar, for now.
for instance, distance calculations for web back-ends to display a sorted by distance list of a certain set of search results. That's one of just many examples I can post, where it makes sense to use the TIGER/Line data over NavTeq's or TeleAtlas' products.
The reason why I brought up mapping and routing is that, well, those are the things that people like to do with maps. For instance, if your web back-end tells me that the nearest pizza shop is just across the East River (and all I have to do is travel a long way to find a bridge), I'm not going to be very happy. Or if it tells me that all I have to do is cross the busiest highway in town at rush hour.
Add to that the fact that TIGER only works in the U.S., and I'm distinctly not impressed with your solution. But hey, ultimately, the market will decide, not me.
If you think that Tiger data is just as good as what you can get from TeleAtlas and NavTeq-- then you obviously haven't seen these datasets. I have. No commercial GPS unit vendor, or map web service uses Tiger data because it sucks.
Tiger doesn't contain sign data. It doesn't describe one-way roads or turn restrictions. It doesn't include form-of-way information. It doesn't tell you how large roads are. It doesn't offer a fully conneted road network. And on, and on... The address inaccuracy is just icing on the cake. If you think the inaccuracy in Tiger is for national security, I have a bridge to sell you... or is that a tunnel? With Tiger, you'll never know.
The sign data issue alone is a killer because you cannot give good guidance without signs and highway exit numbers. Of course, because of the way Tiger butchers ramps, you can forget about highways anyway.
Map vendor data comes from a lot of different sourcse. Some of it is released into the public domain by local, state, or federal governments. Much of it is from employees hired just to drive around. Some comes from feedback from customers. Some of it comes from satellite or aerial photographs that have been processed with algorithms. And yes, map vendor data has more accurate address information.
NavTeq is being acquired for 8.1 billion dollars. Do you think the Finns would pay that kind of money for crummy US census data? TeleAtlas is also being acquired for megabucks-- in fact, it was the subject of a bidding war between TomTom and Garmin.
If Tiger is adequate to your hobby project, then fine. But don't expect to build the next mapquest or google maps.
Intel, however, is a different story. Until Intel came along, there was a wide variety of processor designs, programming languages, runtimes, and a strong interest in parallel computation. By pushing the x86 architecture, Intel has killed off two decades of work in parallel programming, new programming languages, and many other areas.
Yeah, Intel really killed off the programming languages. It's too bad stuff like C++, Scheme, OCaml, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Objective C never got invented. In your world.
And we'll never have parallel processing. Dual core chips will never happen! In your world.
Grove and Gates should be remembered as the Genghis Khans of the 20th century: uncivilized, destructive, opportunistic hordes that became fabulously rich and powerful by plundering other civilization, and creating little of lasting value.
Actually, they're more like the Robo-Hitler Satan of Doom. In your world.
I think it's time that you started rediscovering medical science... by going back on your meds.
>You know what I would do, if I wanted to do something nasty? Suppose for a >moment I was strongly motivated to exploit other people's computers using >open-source software --say I was paid to bring a DDOS attack against some >arbitrary website as part of a protection racket, or something. I'd write an >open-source program; given enough time and motivation, I might even fork off >some useful but immature OSS program. I'd embed some nasty stuff in there, add >features to make lots of people want it. (Example: I take the on-screen clock >in KDE (or GNOME) and make it announce the time out loud --kinda "cool" but >doesn't take that much development effort.) I would upload it to some reputable >site, like SourceForge. I might even fabricate a "development team", complete >with different email addresses for various team members.
Open-source apps on sourceforge don't really get that many users compared to windows shareware like WinAmp or AIM. Linux use is definitely still under 10%. Your KDE clock would be going after %0.01 of 10%-- and it's the bad 10%, the users who actually know how to examine network traffic and source code.
netstat, System Monitor, and nmap are your friends.
I agree with the concept of networks of trust, and code reviews. If you are the NSA, no doubt you need line-by-line review of code. Most people are not the NSA, and are content with firewalls and some common sense.
You can buy all the CFC's you want, conserve til you bleed, eat only grains (because meat is so inefficient) and eventually that will all be pointless unless a lot of humans die fast from something. Too many humans is the fundamental problem-- not global warming, not limited oil, not limited food, not limited water.
Nature is not your friend. It hates you.
Nothing is "fair," in the human sense, in nature. Some species lay their eggs inside other species. Sometimes horrible catastrophes happen that wipe out entire races or phylums. And always, every species tries to get ahead at the expense of everyone else.
Ethics, morality, society... these are human concepts. They do not apply to nature. Your sympathies are misplaced. I agree that the degradation of the environment is a problem that needs to be addressed. But it is a problem because of how it impacts humans, not because of how it impacts nature. Nature is nothing more than a horrible Darwinistic killing field. It might look peaceful, because to us, it moves slowly. But that is still what it is. Don't fool yourself.
I suspect that these things may run in cycles. Of course, that could just be wishful thinking. I'd agree that the general public, except for older people such as myself, don't currently care about privacy the way people, say 20-30 years ago did.
People 20-30 years ago were just as willing to fill out income tax forms with tons of personal information, have their phone numbers and addresses printed in telephone directories, and support governments which conducted extensive surveillance operations. The only thing that's changed is that information technology got better.
Nor do I have any confidence in the results of any effort at teaching even the rudiments of data mining. But I have every confidence in the ability of corporations and governments to eventually go too far, and stir resentment.
A lot of things stir up resentment. The drug war stirs up resentment. Military actions stir up resentment. Whenever a new Wal-Mart moves in, it stirs up resentment. Do you see any of those things ending soon?
Things like receiving a notice from an HMO that your rate has increased due to your being in a higher risk group because data collected via a grocer's affinity card indicates that you eat red meat, etc. That's a stretch, for several reasons--but I'm sure you get the idea.
Why would the HMO bother to tell you the reasons why it decided on a given rate? Car insurance companies don't. Anyway, normal quantities of red meat aren't bad; you have fallen for one of the many nutritional myths that have been in circulation over the last century.
The need is there. I have a *huge* bookmark collection. So large that it's often faster to search rather than drill through the collection--though the bookmarks are still valuable in terms of providing direct links to fundamentals. I do a lot of research, but also some education. So it's worthwhile for me to direct links to fundmental references to, say, the Law of Large Numbers. We're talking non-Wikipedia here, as Wikipedia references can change overnight, due to internal wars. References to fundamental papers better meet my needs.
Buy an el-cheapo 200 GB hard disk
Download the research papers on to it
Buy a search appliance and set it up
Instant searchability
or, if you don't want local copies:
Set up a mysql or postgresql database with fields like author, field, related work, keywords, etc.
Use this database as your bookmarks
If you really care enough, write an HTML frontend, or a mozilla plugin frontend
What might supplant Google is probably going to equally as surprising to most people. Perhaps something from researchers at a university connected to Internet 2, enjoying huge bandwidth. Surely that's something that should make Internet search engine research easier?
What makes search engine research easier is having a huge corpus of data, and gobs and gobs of money. Advantage: Google.
Perhaps the next great search engine advance is a way to weight authoritative references against pop references. Even that would be a stopgap. How do you weight political references? And how do you do something like that while maintaining something like privacy, vice the context of a Google that 'wants to know all about you'? Or is that even possible? Oracle's Ellison has famously declared that there is no privacy, and we should get over it, but as the CEO of the leading DB vendor, he's hardly a disinterested party.
Nobody who matters is interested in maintaining privacy, at least in the 20th century sense of the word. Corporations realize the money to be made on profiling customers. Governments want to send spooks after terrorists. The general public doesn't understand or care about the issue because they don't understand data mining. The advocate of 20th-century-style privacy is in the same position as a well-meaning pacifist in the 19th century saying "don't use these new artillery pieces to redraw the political maps, mkay?" Databases of personal information are inevitable; what we should be pushing for is a transparent government that we can monitor in turn.
I suspect that the fortunes will be made by quantitative analysis and AI folk.
Google opened an office in Pittsburgh specifically to do AI research. They are trying to stay on top of this field, too.
Arguably, most of what Google does falls under the category of AI-- their search engine backend is a machine which tries to sift through the detritus of the internet in search of meaningful content, using proprietary heuristics. Their gmail system employs a spam filter which does a similar thing. Their AdSense system takes some text and tries to associate relevant advertisements with it. The holy grail of search is a computer system which cannot be "gamed"-- which assigns the same rank to pages that a moderately intelligent human would. This is basically the turing test restated for 2007, and I'm sure they realize it.
I swear to Aisha it's not that hard to understand that Sony is the legally liable party. Remember the rootkits? Same deal. Contaminated dog food? Not Petsmart's legal problem. Faulty TurboTax software? Not OfficeMax's responsibility. Failure of hydraulic jack to hold the advertised 2000 pounds, breaking your car? You won't win any money in a suit against Autozone, unless it's a store brand jack.
But what if the store knows that the items are defective, but continues to sell them? What if the store keeps selling the poisonous pet food after it has been recalled? Then we are quite right to blame the retailer.
Which is exactly the situation here.
If you bought one of these DVDs unwittingly and it doesn't work, return it. But don't buy all the DVDs you can find, rip them all, and return them all just because you're having a little tantrum. All that does is make money for Sony and leave retailers with a gaping hole in the cash registers. It's the pump and dump scheme (at the top of this thread) that is reprehensible. It's exploitation of customer service and retailers at their expense, and it doesn't do anything to Sony's bottom line except make it bigger.
We've been through this over and over. The point is to convince people selling defective merchandise, not to do that.
Retailers are fully aware of the problems with copy protection. They know that it will increase return costs by some percent. If that percentage is high enough, they will go with another vendor to fill the "entertainment" niche.
Write to Sony, sue Sony, send the disc back to Sony. But advocating *buying* discs in large numbers and then dumping them back on retailers as the OP did only generates more money for Sony, however well-intentioned the idea is.
If Sony won't accept returns from the stores, whom they have a business relationship with, how likely is it that they will accept returns from individual customers? You know damn well that Sony will not accept these returns.
Your "advice" is equivalent to "hope really hard! and write a letter to your local newspaper."
That's the way the digital marketplace was set up (with good reason; retailers and distributors have jack-shit to do with the performance, compatibility, or operation of software and have no capacity to do any sort of testing to defend that guarantee).
I'm sorry, but by opening a retail store, you take on responsibility for the customer's sales experience. That includes helping people with stupid questions and accepting returns for products that didn't work (and even some products that did!) If you don't like it, you can get into some other business.
If you are selling products that are advertised as "compatible with X" and they aren't compatible with X, then I have no sympathy for you. Your high-horse attidue of "it's the customer's problem" comes close to being a blatant troll. Buying and returning these defective discs *will* put the hurt on Sony-- and any retail outlets stupid enough to carry them in the first place.
If it's generated by an algorithm, it can be deconstructed using an algorithm.
False.
There are a lot of algorithms that are one-way in the sense that you can never reconstruct the input from the output. There are even some algorithms where it is possible but computationally infeasible.
For example, it is relatively easy to multiply together large prime numbers. But factoring an extremely large number is very hard. This is the basis of RSA encryption.
And I could easily write a script to deal with that sort of sentence, too..
The point is that it costs you time and effort to do this. Which is all that the admin wanted to do. If you actually spend some face time with your web browser, you can be as stupid as you want on unmoderated forums. (Hey, look at slashdot!)
You seem to have the misconception that there is some sort of "unbreakable captcha" that people should be spending their time on. Care to enlighten us as to what that is? Because I don't believe that such a thing can exist.
Captcha authors** are trying to avoid an arms race. sure, you can upgrade your simple crapcha every 6 months to keep up to date with spammers, or you can put a good one in place once. Much better the latter, methinks. Yes, because we all know how much effort it is to put in a new captcha. You have to update your bulletin board software, and then click a button. (Or edit a text config file.)
It's not about what spammers are doing now, it's about what they could do tomorrow. No, it really is about what spammers are doing now. If you're a web admin, spending time and money on inane hypotheticals is stupid.
Besides, if you believe the strong-AI hypothesis, there is no limit on what "spammers could do tomorrow."
Because Google wants to see all data, analyze that data, and catalog it. That's exactly what would happen if you uploaded your scanned document to Google: Sure they would OCR it and do a good job, but they would also save the OCR'ed copy for later data mining. Google doesn't necessarily want to see ALL data. Nobody wants to see ALL data. People want to see the data that is most useful to them.
In Google's case, they want to learn as much as possible about users, so that they can turn around and sell that information to advertisers. They also want to sell ad space on their page directly. Remember their primary revenue model-- selling eyeballs to advertisers.
To accomplish these goals, they offer information that people might be interested in, like search results, Google maps, and Google image search.
BTW, I am aware of plagiarism.org and their plagiarism-detection service which works like the thing that I want Google to do. Of course, if Google enters this market, they will crush all competition immediately, and plausibly, they'll do a better job because their database is just bigger. Well, I know that google already has their Google Scholar service that provides access to university-level research papers that are in the public domain. I'm sure that it brings a lot of traffic to their page, in addition to being a nifty public resource.
Term papers that bachelor's students and high schoolers write are a little bit different. It's not likely that anyone else will care about your high school paper about Moby Dick. I doubt that professors are eager to cite "Joe Random high schooler" or "Bob Random undergrad" in their papers. If they want to learn general background, they'll visit wikipedia or another such webpage. If they want to read cutting-edge research, they'll trawl through arXiv.org or Google Scholar. (Or even, gasp, read a peer-reviewed journal that their university pays for a subscription to.) What niche does that leave for term papers?
Then, they could keep the data from the term papers for the future, to make sure that nobody turns in that same paper in a later semester. Google not only gets money for this, but a whole lot of data to crawl through. Who knows what they would learn if a curious goog starts cleverly mining that data? It's not obvious to me that term papers contain any really useful information "for the future." Maybe if you indexed them by author name in a really creepy, big-brotherish way, you could get information about the students.
If they do this, I would really love to work for them and use my 20% "downtime" to code a sentence structure analyzer that could predict a grade based just on syntactic features of the writing. Well, you don't have to work for Google to get involved with Natural Language processing.:)
Most universities have faculty who are working on this topic. I once passed up a staff job working for such a professor (greener pastures and all that.)
And here begin the political flamewars. A person in a coma could come back to life at any time, really -- how do we differentiate between that and a person who's simply passed out? Is it legal to kill someone if I get them fall-down drunk first? Clearly, you have to look at behavior over a reasonably long period of time, to get any kind of yes/no answer. A department store mannequin might look a lot like a sleeping human, but eventually you realize that it is not. Likewise, sleeping people or people in a coma could eventually wake up.
I actually didn't want to raise the coma issue, but now that it's out there... I favor continuing treatment up to the point where the prospects of the subject waking up are just hopeless. It may be hard to quantify that point, but that is my principle. I also don't think that people should be kept alive in a vegetable-like state indefinitely.
Yet they are still a different species. There's actually a simple definition there -- you cannot reproduce with a chimp. I imagine you could also figure this out by looking at DNA. I very much doubt we are at the stage where we could figure out anything just by looking at the DNA. Biology is still very much at the "look, we threw a monkey wrench in the gears, and stuff happened!" stage. Even if we understood exactly how DNA's control machinery worked, chemistry is still an experimental science where the standard answer to any specific question is "try it and see." So even if you knew that it was making enzymes A, B, and C, you still have little idea how those chemicals behave.
Anyway, some people are infertile. Also, the question of what you can breed with what is a lot more complicated than a simple yes/no. Sometimes you can breed two things together, but the offspring are sterile (like mules). Sometimes you can breed A to B, and B to C, but not C to A. It's best to leave biology to the biologists, and concentrate on a definition that's not encrusted with organic muck.
You can probably fit every piece of music you've ever recorded on to a single 100 GB drive. So do that, and then keep copies of that drive. Hard drives fail eventually, but if you have two brains cells that still light up, you're using RAID, so it doesn't matter.
DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs are flakey and tend to fail catastrophically as a result of a single scratch. CD-Rs are a little bit better, but they don't store much data.
I don't know anything about this crazy analog gear you are all talking about, but it sounds like a pain in the ass, what with the recording machines that eat tapes, the slow access, and the huge expense of it all.
I'm sure there are many people that would love to research the topic in such depth but don't have the time--but do have the money to get advice from someone knowledgeable. Anyone giving you advice about which products to buy in exchange for money is a salesman. The only difference is "what's in it for them." Some salesmen get commission, and want you to buy more expensive items. Some are paid by the hour, and just want you to stop interrupting their afternoon nap. Some, like the Consumer Reports / Trade magazine people, are selling information. It's in their interest to at least appear to (and hopefully actually do) research about the products before giving a suggestion.
People pay retail prices because they don't know any better, or because they are rich enough not to care about getting the optimal deal. Don't forget, for many rich people, expensive things are a status symbol, no matter how good or bad they are at their nominal function.
Bottom line-- if you can't filter out the bullshit from what's real, you are going to get screwed. There are no "neutral third parties" in business-- except for those who really don't care about you and your situation, and those usually aren't of much use. Businesses exist to make money.
The idea is that you are paying directly for the assistance in finding what you want, not the good you finally decide on, thus removing the conflicts of interest and getting the "best of both worlds". This is the business model of Consumer Reports. They research products and then write about them. Usually they give them a rating. I have a subscription.
My history on other forums has nothing to do with the idea. Basically what you are proposing is a support forum where people interested in a particular electronic appliance get together and help each other, to their mutual benefit. They have these all over the web. You can visit them without even getting in your automobile! And if you only knew enough to be a web admin, you could even host one for a very minimal cost, without having to rent floor space, hire security guards, or form a corporation.
Basically, you acted like a jackass on a support forum. Now you are proposing a "great new idea"-- support forums. Ever hear about irony?
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the example of malaria, sleeping sickness, and yellow fever-- all of which are scourges in Africa-- I think you'll see that 100 years is far too short for humans to evolve a way around AIDS. Anyway, up until scientific medicine came on the scene, cholera, smallpox, and whooping cough routinely decimated Europe. So it's not even clear that people would become immune naturally, even in thousands of years.
> no matter how many times I "kill -9"ed it the process never paid attention
> to the command and carried on churning away. I guess that's the process
> rather than the OS, but it's still not always "all-powerful root".
That was because the process was in the "D State." This usually means it make a read() or a write() to some device, and the device went out to lunch. But it could be any blocking syscall.
LOL
It wasn't McCain who backed down. It was Bush. Despite Bush's repeated threat to veto the legislation, McCain succeeded in adding a proviso to a 2005 defense appropriations bill which bans all "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of detainees. This proviso sets the U.S. Army Field Manual as the standard for any interrogation, whether by the military or the CIA. The photo-op where McCain shook hands with Bush was just a PR stunt to show that McCain was still part of the Republican party.
McCain has done a lot of things that have made mainstream Republicans angry. The three big ones are: his liberal stance on immigration, his campaign finance reform (google "McCain-Feingold Act"), and his opposition to torture. He has managed to stay in the party, but only just. Rush Limbaugh hates McCain, predictably.
To claim that McCain has "got no problem" with torture is ridiculous spin. You are completely "swift-boating" the issue to make the facts out to be the opposite of what they are.
The main loophole is the Graham amendment, which McCain had nothing to do with. It basically denies habeas corpus to "unlawful combatants." This makes it hard for detainees to seek legal redress even if they are being tortured. Also, the administration likes to keep pushing the boundaries of what constitutes "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment. In this case, that doesn't mean that the law is wrong, only that the enforcers are flawed.
Mod parent up.
I think this post says it all.
I was running Debian on a 300 MHz Pentium II back in 2003, when the rest of the world was using Windows XP. Performance wasn't an issue. Windows XP wouldn't have even installed on that hardware, much less run. (I did have Windows 2000 creaking along for a while, though, to run some Windows-only apps.)
P.S. Dynamic libraries actually reduce memory consumption because multiple apps can share the same memory.
NavTeq and TeleAtlas operate in Europe and the far East as well as in the U.S. There is no TIGER data in these areas. Therefore, trivially, NavTeq and TeleAtlas data is not always "based off of TIGER," although that may be true in some cases in the U.S.
Then submit a map update. Or just be glad that you're still off the radar, for now.
for instance, distance calculations for web back-ends to display a sorted by distance list of a certain set of search results. That's one of just many examples I can post, where it makes sense to use the TIGER/Line data over NavTeq's or TeleAtlas' products.
The reason why I brought up mapping and routing is that, well, those are the things that people like to do with maps. For instance, if your web back-end tells me that the nearest pizza shop is just across the East River (and all I have to do is travel a long way to find a bridge), I'm not going to be very happy. Or if it tells me that all I have to do is cross the busiest highway in town at rush hour.
Add to that the fact that TIGER only works in the U.S., and I'm distinctly not impressed with your solution. But hey, ultimately, the market will decide, not me.
As usual, slashdot posters get it wrong.
If you think that Tiger data is just as good as what you can get from TeleAtlas and NavTeq-- then you obviously haven't seen these datasets. I have. No commercial GPS unit vendor, or map web service uses Tiger data because it sucks.
Tiger doesn't contain sign data. It doesn't describe one-way roads or turn restrictions. It doesn't include form-of-way information. It doesn't tell you how large roads are. It doesn't offer a fully conneted road network. And on, and on... The address inaccuracy is just icing on the cake. If you think the inaccuracy in Tiger is for national security, I have a bridge to sell you... or is that a tunnel? With Tiger, you'll never know.
The sign data issue alone is a killer because you cannot give good guidance without signs and highway exit numbers. Of course, because of the way Tiger butchers ramps, you can forget about highways anyway.
Map vendor data comes from a lot of different sourcse. Some of it is released into the public domain by local, state, or federal governments. Much of it is from employees hired just to drive around. Some comes from feedback from customers. Some of it comes from satellite or aerial photographs that have been processed with algorithms. And yes, map vendor data has more accurate address information.
NavTeq is being acquired for 8.1 billion dollars. Do you think the Finns would pay that kind of money for crummy US census data? TeleAtlas is also being acquired for megabucks-- in fact, it was the subject of a bidding war between TomTom and Garmin.
If Tiger is adequate to your hobby project, then fine. But don't expect to build the next mapquest or google maps.
Intel, however, is a different story. Until Intel came along, there was a wide variety of processor designs, programming languages, runtimes, and a strong interest in parallel computation. By pushing the x86 architecture, Intel has killed off two decades of work in parallel programming, new programming languages, and many other areas.
Yeah, Intel really killed off the programming languages. It's too bad stuff like C++, Scheme, OCaml, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Objective C never got invented. In your world.
And we'll never have parallel processing. Dual core chips will never happen! In your world.
Grove and Gates should be remembered as the Genghis Khans of the 20th century: uncivilized, destructive, opportunistic hordes that became fabulously rich and powerful by plundering other civilization, and creating little of lasting value.
Actually, they're more like the Robo-Hitler Satan of Doom. In your world.
I think it's time that you started rediscovering medical science... by going back on your meds.
>You know what I would do, if I wanted to do something nasty? Suppose for a
>moment I was strongly motivated to exploit other people's computers using
>open-source software --say I was paid to bring a DDOS attack against some
>arbitrary website as part of a protection racket, or something. I'd write an
>open-source program; given enough time and motivation, I might even fork off
>some useful but immature OSS program. I'd embed some nasty stuff in there, add
>features to make lots of people want it. (Example: I take the on-screen clock
>in KDE (or GNOME) and make it announce the time out loud --kinda "cool" but
>doesn't take that much development effort.) I would upload it to some reputable
>site, like SourceForge. I might even fabricate a "development team", complete
>with different email addresses for various team members.
Open-source apps on sourceforge don't really get that many users
compared to windows shareware like WinAmp or AIM. Linux use is definitely still
under 10%. Your KDE clock would be going after %0.01 of 10%-- and it's the bad 10%,
the users who actually know how to examine network traffic and source code.
netstat, System Monitor, and nmap are your friends.
I agree with the concept of networks of trust, and code reviews. If you are the NSA,
no doubt you need line-by-line review of code. Most people are not the NSA, and
are content with firewalls and some common sense.
You can buy all the CFC's you want, conserve til you bleed, eat only grains (because meat is so inefficient) and eventually that will all be pointless unless a lot of humans die fast from something. Too many humans is the fundamental problem-- not global warming, not limited oil, not limited food, not limited water.
Nature is not your friend. It hates you.
Nothing is "fair," in the human sense, in nature. Some species lay their eggs inside other species. Sometimes horrible catastrophes happen that wipe out entire races or phylums. And always, every species tries to get ahead at the expense of everyone else.
Ethics, morality, society... these are human concepts. They do not apply to nature. Your sympathies are misplaced. I agree that the degradation of the environment is a problem that needs to be addressed. But it is a problem because of how it impacts humans, not because of how it impacts nature. Nature is nothing more than a horrible Darwinistic killing field. It might look peaceful, because to us, it moves slowly. But that is still what it is. Don't fool yourself.
Ultimately, digital audio is just a series of tubes.
It's not a truck, like good old analog audio.
Instead of reading Chomsky, how about reading Karl Marx's "Das Kapital," and then drinking two bottles of cough syrup.
That will get you the same amount of "enlightenment."
I suspect that these things may run in cycles. Of course, that could just be wishful thinking. I'd agree that the general public, except for older people such as myself, don't currently care about privacy the way people, say 20-30 years ago did.
People 20-30 years ago were just as willing to fill out income tax forms with tons of personal information, have their phone numbers and addresses printed in telephone directories, and support governments which conducted extensive surveillance operations. The only thing that's changed is that information technology got better.
Nor do I have any confidence in the results of any effort at teaching even the rudiments of data mining. But I have every confidence in the ability of corporations and governments to eventually go too far, and stir resentment.
A lot of things stir up resentment. The drug war stirs up resentment. Military actions stir up resentment. Whenever a new Wal-Mart moves in, it stirs up resentment. Do you see any of those things ending soon?
Things like receiving a notice from an HMO that your rate has increased due to your being in a higher risk group because data collected via a grocer's affinity card indicates that you eat red meat, etc. That's a stretch, for several reasons--but I'm sure you get the idea.
Why would the HMO bother to tell you the reasons why it decided on a given rate? Car insurance companies don't.
Anyway, normal quantities of red meat aren't bad; you have fallen for one of the many nutritional myths that have been in circulation over the last century.
or, if you don't want local copies:
What might supplant Google is probably going to equally as surprising to most people. Perhaps something from researchers at a university connected to Internet 2, enjoying huge bandwidth. Surely that's something that should make Internet search engine research easier?
What makes search engine research easier is having a huge corpus of data, and gobs and gobs of money. Advantage: Google.
Perhaps the next great search engine advance is a way to weight authoritative references against pop references. Even that would be a stopgap. How do you weight political references? And how do you do something like that while maintaining something like privacy, vice the context of a Google that 'wants to know all about you'? Or is that even possible? Oracle's Ellison has famously declared that there is no privacy, and we should get over it, but as the CEO of the leading DB vendor, he's hardly a disinterested party.
Nobody who matters is interested in maintaining privacy, at least in the 20th century sense of the word. Corporations realize the money to be made on profiling customers. Governments want to send spooks after terrorists. The general public doesn't understand or care about the issue because they don't understand data mining. The advocate of 20th-century-style privacy is in the same position as a well-meaning pacifist in the 19th century saying "don't use these new artillery pieces to redraw the political maps, mkay?" Databases of personal information are inevitable; what we should be pushing for is a transparent government that we can monitor in turn.
I suspect that the fortunes will be made by quantitative analysis and AI folk.
Google opened an office in Pittsburgh specifically to do AI research. They are trying to stay on top of this field, too.
Arguably, most of what Google does falls under the category of AI-- their search engine backend is a machine which tries to sift through the detritus of the internet in search of meaningful content, using proprietary heuristics. Their gmail system employs a spam filter which does a similar thing. Their AdSense system takes some text and tries to associate relevant advertisements with it. The holy grail of search is a computer system which cannot be "gamed"-- which assigns the same rank to pages that a moderately intelligent human would. This is basically the turing test restated for 2007, and I'm sure they realize it.
I swear to Aisha it's not that hard to understand that Sony is the legally liable party. Remember the rootkits? Same deal. Contaminated dog food? Not Petsmart's legal problem. Faulty TurboTax software? Not OfficeMax's responsibility. Failure of hydraulic jack to hold the advertised 2000 pounds, breaking your car? You won't win any money in a suit against Autozone, unless it's a store brand jack.
But what if the store knows that the items are defective, but continues to sell them? What if the store keeps selling the poisonous pet food after it has been recalled? Then we are quite right to blame the retailer.
Which is exactly the situation here.
If you bought one of these DVDs unwittingly and it doesn't work, return it. But don't buy all the DVDs you can find, rip them all, and return them all just because you're having a little tantrum. All that does is make money for Sony and leave retailers with a gaping hole in the cash registers. It's the pump and dump scheme (at the top of this thread) that is reprehensible. It's exploitation of customer service and retailers at their expense, and it doesn't do anything to Sony's bottom line except make it bigger.
We've been through this over and over. The point is to convince people selling defective merchandise, not to do that.
Retailers are fully aware of the problems with copy protection. They know that it will increase return costs by some percent. If that percentage is high enough, they will go with another vendor to fill the "entertainment" niche.
Write to Sony, sue Sony, send the disc back to Sony. But advocating *buying* discs in large numbers and then dumping them back on retailers as the OP did only generates more money for Sony, however well-intentioned the idea is.
If Sony won't accept returns from the stores, whom they have a business relationship with, how likely is it that they will accept returns from individual customers? You know damn well that Sony will not accept these returns.
Your "advice" is equivalent to "hope really hard! and write a letter to your local newspaper."
That's the way the digital marketplace was set up (with good reason; retailers and distributors have jack-shit to do with the performance, compatibility, or operation of software and have no capacity to do any sort of testing to defend that guarantee).
I'm sorry, but by opening a retail store, you take on responsibility for the customer's sales experience. That includes helping people with stupid questions and accepting returns for products that didn't work (and even some products that did!) If you don't like it, you can get into some other business.
If you are selling products that are advertised as "compatible with X" and they aren't compatible with X, then I have no sympathy for you. Your high-horse attidue of "it's the customer's problem" comes close to being a blatant troll. Buying and returning these defective discs *will* put the hurt on Sony-- and any retail outlets stupid enough to carry them in the first place.
Having "In God we trust" on currency excludes polytheists.
Don't forget that humanity has been around for about 100,000 years, and for most of that time, "religion" meant some variant of polytheism.
If it's generated by an algorithm, it can be deconstructed using an algorithm.
False.
There are a lot of algorithms that are one-way in the sense that you can never reconstruct the input from the output.
There are even some algorithms where it is possible but computationally infeasible.
For example, it is relatively easy to multiply together large prime numbers. But factoring an extremely large number is very hard. This is the basis of RSA encryption.
And I could easily write a script to deal with that sort of sentence, too..
The point is that it costs you time and effort to do this. Which is all that the admin wanted to do.
If you actually spend some face time with your web browser, you can be as stupid as you want on unmoderated forums. (Hey, look at slashdot!)
You seem to have the misconception that there is some sort of "unbreakable captcha" that people should be spending their time on. Care to enlighten us as to what that is? Because I don't believe that such a thing can exist.
Captcha authors** are trying to avoid an arms race. sure, you can upgrade your simple crapcha every 6 months to keep up to date with spammers, or you can put a good one in place once. Much better the latter, methinks.
Yes, because we all know how much effort it is to put in a new captcha.
You have to update your bulletin board software, and then click a button. (Or edit a text config file.)
It's not about what spammers are doing now, it's about what they could do tomorrow.
No, it really is about what spammers are doing now.
If you're a web admin, spending time and money on inane hypotheticals is stupid.
Besides, if you believe the strong-AI hypothesis, there is no limit on what "spammers could do tomorrow."
Because Google wants to see all data, analyze that data, and catalog it. That's exactly what would happen if you uploaded your scanned document to Google: Sure they would OCR it and do a good job, but they would also save the OCR'ed copy for later data mining.
:)
Google doesn't necessarily want to see ALL data. Nobody wants to see ALL data. People want to see the data that is most useful to them.
In Google's case, they want to learn as much as possible about users, so that they can turn around and sell that information to advertisers. They also want to sell ad space on their page directly. Remember their primary revenue model-- selling eyeballs to advertisers.
To accomplish these goals, they offer information that people might be interested in, like search results, Google maps, and Google image search.
BTW, I am aware of plagiarism.org and their plagiarism-detection service which works like the thing that I want Google to do. Of course, if Google enters this market, they will crush all competition immediately, and plausibly, they'll do a better job because their database is just bigger.
Well, I know that google already has their Google Scholar service that provides access to university-level research papers that are in the public domain. I'm sure that it brings a lot of traffic to their page, in addition to being a nifty public resource.
Term papers that bachelor's students and high schoolers write are a little bit different. It's not likely that anyone else will care about your high school paper about Moby Dick. I doubt that professors are eager to cite "Joe Random high schooler" or "Bob Random undergrad" in their papers. If they want to learn general background, they'll visit wikipedia or another such webpage. If they want to read cutting-edge research, they'll trawl through arXiv.org or Google Scholar. (Or even, gasp, read a peer-reviewed journal that their university pays for a subscription to.) What niche does that leave for term papers?
Then, they could keep the data from the term papers for the future, to make sure that nobody turns in that same paper in a later semester. Google not only gets money for this, but a whole lot of data to crawl through. Who knows what they would learn if a curious goog starts cleverly mining that data?
It's not obvious to me that term papers contain any really useful information "for the future." Maybe if you indexed them by author name in a really creepy, big-brotherish way, you could get information about the students.
If they do this, I would really love to work for them and use my 20% "downtime" to code a sentence structure analyzer that could predict a grade based just on syntactic features of the writing.
Well, you don't have to work for Google to get involved with Natural Language processing.
Most universities have faculty who are working on this topic. I once passed up a staff job working for such a professor (greener pastures and all that.)
And here begin the political flamewars. A person in a coma could come back to life at any time, really -- how do we differentiate between that and a person who's simply passed out? Is it legal to kill someone if I get them fall-down drunk first?
Clearly, you have to look at behavior over a reasonably long period of time, to get any kind of yes/no answer. A department store mannequin might look a lot like a sleeping human, but eventually you realize that it is not. Likewise, sleeping people or people in a coma could eventually wake up.
I actually didn't want to raise the coma issue, but now that it's out there... I favor continuing treatment up to the point where the prospects of the subject waking up are just hopeless. It may be hard to quantify that point, but that is my principle. I also don't think that people should be kept alive in a vegetable-like state indefinitely.
Yet they are still a different species. There's actually a simple definition there -- you cannot reproduce with a chimp. I imagine you could also figure this out by looking at DNA.
I very much doubt we are at the stage where we could figure out anything just by looking at the DNA. Biology is still very much at the "look, we threw a monkey wrench in the gears, and stuff happened!" stage. Even if we understood exactly how DNA's control machinery worked, chemistry is still an experimental science where the standard answer to any specific question is "try it and see." So even if you knew that it was making enzymes A, B, and C, you still have little idea how those chemicals behave.
Anyway, some people are infertile. Also, the question of what you can breed with what is a lot more complicated than a simple yes/no. Sometimes you can breed two things together, but the offspring are sterile (like mules). Sometimes you can breed A to B, and B to C, but not C to A. It's best to leave biology to the biologists, and concentrate on a definition that's not encrusted with organic muck.
You can probably fit every piece of music you've ever recorded on to a single 100 GB drive. So do that, and then keep copies of that drive.
Hard drives fail eventually, but if you have two brains cells that still light up, you're using RAID, so it doesn't matter.
DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs are flakey and tend to fail catastrophically as a result of a single scratch. CD-Rs are a little bit better, but they don't store much data.
I don't know anything about this crazy analog gear you are all talking about, but it sounds like a pain in the ass, what with the recording machines that eat tapes, the slow access, and the huge expense of it all.
I'm sure there are many people that would love to research the topic in such depth but don't have the time--but do have the money to get advice from someone knowledgeable.
Anyone giving you advice about which products to buy in exchange for money is a salesman. The only difference is "what's in it for them." Some salesmen get commission, and want you to buy more expensive items. Some are paid by the hour, and just want you to stop interrupting their afternoon nap. Some, like the Consumer Reports / Trade magazine people, are selling information. It's in their interest to at least appear to (and hopefully actually do) research about the products before giving a suggestion.
People pay retail prices because they don't know any better, or because they are rich enough not to care about getting the optimal deal. Don't forget, for many rich people, expensive things are a status symbol, no matter how good or bad they are at their nominal function.
Bottom line-- if you can't filter out the bullshit from what's real, you are going to get screwed. There are no "neutral third parties" in business-- except for those who really don't care about you and your situation, and those usually aren't of much use. Businesses exist to make money.
The idea is that you are paying directly for the assistance in finding what you want, not the good you finally decide on, thus removing the conflicts of interest and getting the "best of both worlds".
This is the business model of Consumer Reports. They research products and then write about them. Usually they give them a rating. I have a subscription.
My history on other forums has nothing to do with the idea.
Basically what you are proposing is a support forum where people interested in a particular electronic appliance get together and help each other, to their mutual benefit. They have these all over the web. You can visit them without even getting in your automobile! And if you only knew enough to be a web admin, you could even host one for a very minimal cost, without having to rent floor space, hire security guards, or form a corporation.
Basically, you acted like a jackass on a support forum. Now you are proposing a "great new idea"-- support forums.
Ever hear about irony?