Nobody ever said that they were copying the algorithm. The value is in the results. This is basically monte carlo results scraping, with a pleasant bias towards more popular searches (selection bias for bing toolbar users, too).
It's clever, but they are *definitely* copying off of Google's test. The stupid thing about this is that it makes Bing results *more* like Google's, giving me no differentiating reason to use Bing.
Lame, embarassing, fragile, and really poorly responded to. Microsoft fail, 100%.
for the most part Microsoft isn't indexing sites using this method, but augmenting their page ranking algorithm.
Bullshit. They clearly take results for pages that are completely unrelated to their search terms and just spray them up, automatically.
It would be wrong for me to plagiarize a book, but, if I produced a bookmark, that, together with thousands of readers, plagiarized the book one word at a time, then presented that book as my own, would that be okay?
This is basically what Bing is doing.
Really, though, this probably is better for Bing than no mention, and, let's face it. Even with this kind of help, the best Bing will ever be is just behind the curve, a high-order fit of the solution-space of an algorithm that they failed to better.
While clicks are valuable, the point that you appear to be missing is that Microsoft was clearly inspecting the search term involved in the click-through. That's lazy, underhanded, and, clearly, fragile.
Regardless, Google's principle value is built upon the data and media of the internet at large. Are search engines now off limits?
--- Please add this comment to your robots.txt file.
Enjoy explaining how Android outsold the iPhone in the UK, where the iPhone is available on the top five carriers.
Not that a Verizon iPhone won't sell like crazy. There's definitely some pent up demand. Nonetheless, when my mom is talking about how much she likes navigating by voice (and she's not a tech person in the slightest), it's a sign that Apple may have missed an opportunity to really cement their lead in the US. They really hitched their wagon to AT&T for, what, visual voice mail?
With things like Google Voice having already been done in office and land-line based systems, more inventive approaches based on already bone-stock voicemail forwarding (a la Google Voice) could have given Apple the chance to put their platform on the top 4-6 networks in the US with minimal fuss.
Maybe that would have spoiled the simplicity, but a modular radio could have exposed iOS to a *ridiculous* number of users.
Both favorable, I imagine, but profits now don't matter nearly as much as viability in 5-10 years, at least to regular joe schmoe users and application developers.
I'm not saying that Apple isn't dynamic or thoughtful enough to look at opening things up, but it's a risk for them that they may not be willing to take. Perhaps a very profitable 2nd or 3rd place is enough for them.
Similar conditions resulted in winning the battle but losing the war in the old Mac OS vs. Wintel fight. I'd have to imagine that Apple's scars from those days have left them equipped to not make the same mistakes again.
Just a little note, but your gambling winnings are, in fact, taxable. There are special sections of forms and special forms on your taxes for proceeds from gambling.
In this case, he's playing the game as intended, with a setting exposed by the manufacturer (and casino). If he had a hand in placing the vulnerability, sure, he's guilty as sin. If he just noticed and played an exploit through the buttons on the machine, that's hardly fraud.
Counting cards doesn't result in you losing your winnings. If discovered, it likely results in your being barred from that casino (and many others). Still, as long as you're not using an assistive device, counting cards is completely legal.
Sorry, man, but a software "error" is a pretty vague term. The code is written, tested, and audited. It's not rocket surgery here. Once a bet is engaged in, it should sit. You certainly won't see casinos nullifying bets if machines are under-paying gently.
We have gaming commissions to audit code and assure the legality of these systems. Both sides of the gambling puzzle, if honest, would want an empowered and effective auditing process. In reality, the house has tilted both the auditing process and the legal system in their favor.
He used the interface of the machine as intentionally designed, configured willingly by casino staff. No trick coins, no bump keys, no insertion of a backdoor (that's still up in the air) into the code.
These machines are intentionally set up to pay out anywhere from 85-93% of what they take in, just raking in cash by being there. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Sorry, but it's just not the same thing as a locked door. The intent of a locked door is clear, to signal ownership and provide moderate (not really) protection. The intent of a slot machine is also clear, to engage in a pseudo-random game of chance, biased typically toward the owner of the machine. He engaged in that game and won. If you knew that a roulette table hit a particular number commonly enough to make the odds worth it, you'd play that table. It's up to the casinos and manufacturers to make sure that the games that they've rigged in their favor actually remain so.
This is why these taxes were ridiculous in the first place. Take money from one industry or product to give to another for the crimes that might leverage the first's? This should immediately freak any sane uninterested party right the hell out.
It is really not the place of good government to make "crimes" (unproven) right by stealing from one industry to placate another. If your government does this (and yours probably does), your government is corrupt.
Which is exactly why the mere possession of any information should not be a crime.
It's far too easy in the digital era to "possess" information that could land you in the hot seat. You want to shut down child pornography? Cut down the producers of it. Not in your country? Get international laws. Can't get the U.N. to have some teeth? Time for a new U.N.
It's plainly ridiculous to continue to criminalize the possession of information. The bits aren't hurting anyone.
Protection from business abuse does not equal governmental abuse.
This is the standard free-enterprise fear-mongering tripe, and it has *no* place on slashdot. Protecting the consumer from abuse by artificial monopolies (or oligopolies) is just as important as protecting the citizen from abuse by the government. It is the function of a responsible government to do both.
Why worry about a slippery slope when you're already aiming for the bottom?
Your public service commission exists because phone and cable companies are granted local exclusive grants on line easements. Virtually every utility you use, including wireless, is granted certain exclusive rights that effectively render them artificial monopolies (or oligopoly, which is effectively the same thing).
You have to work very hard to find a utility that is subject to open and fair competition.
I think Washington is full of empty promises, stuffed suits, and veiled villains, but I don't think it makes sense to react negatively to everything from them.
We need protection from monopolistic abuses, plain and simple. We also need protection from our government (clearly). Two lessons need to be learned in Washington:
1. The internet does not belong to big business. 2. The internet does not belong to the United States Government.
What the FCC are doing and what Franken is talking about are in opposition. Franken wants the internet to remain open, and you're just not going to get that with corporate control of (or pricing of) available services.
Every single government-granted monopoly (or oligopoly) should be subject to regulation protecting against abuses of that artificial market control. These companies *can't* go out of business if they all fix prices and limit availability. Unfortunately, frequency allocation practices present a barrier to entry that renders competition infeasible. This is why we have public service commissions and other bodies regulating artificial monopolies. Market pressures don't stand a chance against legal grants barring others from participating.
Again, this is not about the government going all crazy and stepping in to regulate something that they don't already regulate. This is about the government preventing a narrowing of available content. I know it's hard to fathom, but Franken is talking about reducing censorship and restriction, not increasing it. On rare occasion when someone in government is trying to protect our rights, be it from government or commercial interest, we should remember that the real impetus behind the small-government argument is the protection of our rights and freedoms. This deserves our applause, rather than knee-jerk pigeon-holing.
This is the usual false dichotomy presented by wannabe free-market folk who don't understand that they're playing into private hands. It's not corporate control or government control. It's corporate control or freedom.
Data is data is data on this network, and networks can be *completely* managed from a fairness and reliability perspective by treating data agnostically, throttling momentary or persistent usage to manage access for others.
Specifically charging for particular routes or traffic types fractures a network that the public created and all but guarantees grossly anti-competitive behavior. It allows supposed "free-market" monopolies and oligopolies to run rampant in using one business sector to artificially strengthen another.
We're not talking about content control, Fairness Doctrine, or anything like that. We're talking about prima facie anti-competitive practices for which the market has no natural remedy. You want to string wires on our land, use our airwaves, and benefit from a network backbone invented and implemented on the back of the public? Fine. You have to at least not suck the blood out of an economy that has made you money hand over fist because you're a leave-no-action-uncapitalized vampire.
There are many equilibria of corporate pricing and competition, but one that has proven time and again to be favored by big businesses in full control of limited resources (frequency ranges are a limited resource) is the one that completely screws the public at large. Handing carte blanche to these guys is like a public goatse session.
You don't want government reaching in and telling you what you can and can't push over that internet connection, but you don't want corporations doing it, either. Trust me.
When I was in High School, back in the '90s, we went through a couple of "Computer Science" teachers. The first was a washed-up math teacher looking to have us write in BASIC, though most of us used pascal or C++ (I bought Turbo C++) for our projects.
She had a real problem with students knowing more than her, and it showed. She modified the grading system mid-year to include 30% for "class participation" and handed out almost an entire classroom full of C's for the semester. One kid in our class was eventually suspended for jumping up on a table and kicking her in the face.
After her being asked to retire early, several of us went back for the replacement with an AP programming class that was mostly free form (run by the sysadmin who didn't know any languages). It seemed to track alright, but that usual high-schooler disrespect for the unqualified came up in our class again.
Year end projects came up. I wrote a texture-mapped bucket-sort protected-mode-DOS 3D engine from scratch for a chess game, wrote the move and input systems, did all the art, and wrote up basic MIDI playback.
My partner played the MIDI song that I tracked.
He got an A, I got a C. The reason? Not enough comments...
For me, that resonates as a few life lessons: 1. If a counter-party has all the power, kiss ass. 2. Even if you're going to get a C, don't over-comment your code. It's just annoying to see comments that describe what the code describes. Besides, see rule 3. 3. Politics bests quality nine times out of ten.
Learning those few lessons prepared me for career as a computer programmer, so I'd say that my CS classes were pretty spot on.
Slashdot Mirror
Muphry's law will likely strike me down here, but you probably should have used a colon in there.
Here are a couple of suggested corrections:
I only bring it up because you're pedantically missing the point of an intentional abuse of grammatical conventions.
e.g. Your post IS fail.
Nobody ever said that they were copying the algorithm. The value is in the results. This is basically monte carlo results scraping, with a pleasant bias towards more popular searches (selection bias for bing toolbar users, too).
It's clever, but they are *definitely* copying off of Google's test. The stupid thing about this is that it makes Bing results *more* like Google's, giving me no differentiating reason to use Bing.
Lame, embarassing, fragile, and really poorly responded to. Microsoft fail, 100%.
for the most part Microsoft isn't indexing sites using this method, but augmenting their page ranking algorithm.
Bullshit. They clearly take results for pages that are completely unrelated to their search terms and just spray them up, automatically.
It would be wrong for me to plagiarize a book, but, if I produced a bookmark, that, together with thousands of readers, plagiarized the book one word at a time, then presented that book as my own, would that be okay?
This is basically what Bing is doing.
Really, though, this probably is better for Bing than no mention, and, let's face it. Even with this kind of help, the best Bing will ever be is just behind the curve, a high-order fit of the solution-space of an algorithm that they failed to better.
With a pretty background.
While clicks are valuable, the point that you appear to be missing is that Microsoft was clearly inspecting the search term involved in the click-through. That's lazy, underhanded, and, clearly, fragile.
Regardless, Google's principle value is built upon the data and media of the internet at large. Are search engines now off limits?
---
Please add this comment to your robots.txt file.
Bingo!
This is absolutely the most right-headed (and concise) statement of this problem that I've seen.
All of these guys (congress and parliament included) should be in jail.
You may have missed Nokia and Sony selling unlocked GSM phones.
That's okay, so did most of the market.
Enjoy explaining how Android outsold the iPhone in the UK, where the iPhone is available on the top five carriers.
Not that a Verizon iPhone won't sell like crazy. There's definitely some pent up demand. Nonetheless, when my mom is talking about how much she likes navigating by voice (and she's not a tech person in the slightest), it's a sign that Apple may have missed an opportunity to really cement their lead in the US. They really hitched their wagon to AT&T for, what, visual voice mail?
With things like Google Voice having already been done in office and land-line based systems, more inventive approaches based on already bone-stock voicemail forwarding (a la Google Voice) could have given Apple the chance to put their platform on the top 4-6 networks in the US with minimal fuss.
Maybe that would have spoiled the simplicity, but a modular radio could have exposed iOS to a *ridiculous* number of users.
Both favorable, I imagine, but profits now don't matter nearly as much as viability in 5-10 years, at least to regular joe schmoe users and application developers.
I'm not saying that Apple isn't dynamic or thoughtful enough to look at opening things up, but it's a risk for them that they may not be willing to take. Perhaps a very profitable 2nd or 3rd place is enough for them.
Similar conditions resulted in winning the battle but losing the war in the old Mac OS vs. Wintel fight. I'd have to imagine that Apple's scars from those days have left them equipped to not make the same mistakes again.
Just a little note, but your gambling winnings are, in fact, taxable. There are special sections of forms and special forms on your taxes for proceeds from gambling.
I don't think so, man. What happens in Vegas... shows up roughly nine months later.
The stupid and addicted are way ahead of us...
This is just wrong. You don't lose your winnings for counting cards. You get bounced, keep your winnings, and that's it.
In this case, he's playing the game as intended, with a setting exposed by the manufacturer (and casino). If he had a hand in placing the vulnerability, sure, he's guilty as sin. If he just noticed and played an exploit through the buttons on the machine, that's hardly fraud.
There's no misrepresentation in winning.
Counting cards doesn't result in you losing your winnings. If discovered, it likely results in your being barred from that casino (and many others). Still, as long as you're not using an assistive device, counting cards is completely legal.
Sorry, man, but a software "error" is a pretty vague term. The code is written, tested, and audited. It's not rocket surgery here. Once a bet is engaged in, it should sit. You certainly won't see casinos nullifying bets if machines are under-paying gently.
We have gaming commissions to audit code and assure the legality of these systems. Both sides of the gambling puzzle, if honest, would want an empowered and effective auditing process. In reality, the house has tilted both the auditing process and the legal system in their favor.
He used the interface of the machine as intentionally designed, configured willingly by casino staff. No trick coins, no bump keys, no insertion of a backdoor (that's still up in the air) into the code.
These machines are intentionally set up to pay out anywhere from 85-93% of what they take in, just raking in cash by being there. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Sorry, but it's just not the same thing as a locked door. The intent of a locked door is clear, to signal ownership and provide moderate (not really) protection. The intent of a slot machine is also clear, to engage in a pseudo-random game of chance, biased typically toward the owner of the machine. He engaged in that game and won. If you knew that a roulette table hit a particular number commonly enough to make the odds worth it, you'd play that table. It's up to the casinos and manufacturers to make sure that the games that they've rigged in their favor actually remain so.
This is why these taxes were ridiculous in the first place. Take money from one industry or product to give to another for the crimes that might leverage the first's? This should immediately freak any sane uninterested party right the hell out.
It is really not the place of good government to make "crimes" (unproven) right by stealing from one industry to placate another. If your government does this (and yours probably does), your government is corrupt.
Which is exactly why the mere possession of any information should not be a crime.
It's far too easy in the digital era to "possess" information that could land you in the hot seat. You want to shut down child pornography? Cut down the producers of it. Not in your country? Get international laws. Can't get the U.N. to have some teeth? Time for a new U.N.
It's plainly ridiculous to continue to criminalize the possession of information. The bits aren't hurting anyone.
Protection from business abuse does not equal governmental abuse.
This is the standard free-enterprise fear-mongering tripe, and it has *no* place on slashdot. Protecting the consumer from abuse by artificial monopolies (or oligopolies) is just as important as protecting the citizen from abuse by the government. It is the function of a responsible government to do both.
Why worry about a slippery slope when you're already aiming for the bottom?
Your public service commission exists because phone and cable companies are granted local exclusive grants on line easements. Virtually every utility you use, including wireless, is granted certain exclusive rights that effectively render them artificial monopolies (or oligopoly, which is effectively the same thing).
You have to work very hard to find a utility that is subject to open and fair competition.
I think Washington is full of empty promises, stuffed suits, and veiled villains, but I don't think it makes sense to react negatively to everything from them.
We need protection from monopolistic abuses, plain and simple. We also need protection from our government (clearly). Two lessons need to be learned in Washington:
1. The internet does not belong to big business.
2. The internet does not belong to the United States Government.
What the FCC are doing and what Franken is talking about are in opposition. Franken wants the internet to remain open, and you're just not going to get that with corporate control of (or pricing of) available services.
Every single government-granted monopoly (or oligopoly) should be subject to regulation protecting against abuses of that artificial market control. These companies *can't* go out of business if they all fix prices and limit availability. Unfortunately, frequency allocation practices present a barrier to entry that renders competition infeasible. This is why we have public service commissions and other bodies regulating artificial monopolies. Market pressures don't stand a chance against legal grants barring others from participating.
Again, this is not about the government going all crazy and stepping in to regulate something that they don't already regulate. This is about the government preventing a narrowing of available content. I know it's hard to fathom, but Franken is talking about reducing censorship and restriction, not increasing it. On rare occasion when someone in government is trying to protect our rights, be it from government or commercial interest, we should remember that the real impetus behind the small-government argument is the protection of our rights and freedoms. This deserves our applause, rather than knee-jerk pigeon-holing.
This is the usual false dichotomy presented by wannabe free-market folk who don't understand that they're playing into private hands. It's not corporate control or government control. It's corporate control or freedom.
Data is data is data on this network, and networks can be *completely* managed from a fairness and reliability perspective by treating data agnostically, throttling momentary or persistent usage to manage access for others.
Specifically charging for particular routes or traffic types fractures a network that the public created and all but guarantees grossly anti-competitive behavior. It allows supposed "free-market" monopolies and oligopolies to run rampant in using one business sector to artificially strengthen another.
We're not talking about content control, Fairness Doctrine, or anything like that. We're talking about prima facie anti-competitive practices for which the market has no natural remedy. You want to string wires on our land, use our airwaves, and benefit from a network backbone invented and implemented on the back of the public? Fine. You have to at least not suck the blood out of an economy that has made you money hand over fist because you're a leave-no-action-uncapitalized vampire.
There are many equilibria of corporate pricing and competition, but one that has proven time and again to be favored by big businesses in full control of limited resources (frequency ranges are a limited resource) is the one that completely screws the public at large. Handing carte blanche to these guys is like a public goatse session.
You don't want government reaching in and telling you what you can and can't push over that internet connection, but you don't want corporations doing it, either. Trust me.
When I was in High School, back in the '90s, we went through a couple of "Computer Science" teachers. The first was a washed-up math teacher looking to have us write in BASIC, though most of us used pascal or C++ (I bought Turbo C++) for our projects.
She had a real problem with students knowing more than her, and it showed. She modified the grading system mid-year to include 30% for "class participation" and handed out almost an entire classroom full of C's for the semester. One kid in our class was eventually suspended for jumping up on a table and kicking her in the face.
After her being asked to retire early, several of us went back for the replacement with an AP programming class that was mostly free form (run by the sysadmin who didn't know any languages). It seemed to track alright, but that usual high-schooler disrespect for the unqualified came up in our class again.
Year end projects came up. I wrote a texture-mapped bucket-sort protected-mode-DOS 3D engine from scratch for a chess game, wrote the move and input systems, did all the art, and wrote up basic MIDI playback.
My partner played the MIDI song that I tracked.
He got an A, I got a C. The reason? Not enough comments...
For me, that resonates as a few life lessons:
1. If a counter-party has all the power, kiss ass.
2. Even if you're going to get a C, don't over-comment your code. It's just annoying to see comments that describe what the code describes. Besides, see rule 3.
3. Politics bests quality nine times out of ten.
Learning those few lessons prepared me for career as a computer programmer, so I'd say that my CS classes were pretty spot on.
You are correct. Wireless is oligopalistic.
See: SMS and data plan rate increases over the last ten years.
Oh, and a side note to your side note. Don't, for one stinking second, conflate data rate caps with service-based packet tolling.
One is content agnostic (read: fair, even if unfairly priced) and the other is essentially abusive from the outset.
Unless you're trolling from an AT&T desk, I think you're missing the point.