I agree that google needs to maintain its interface simplicity. But I think that something like my scheme should be doable wiithout making the user presentation untidy. Just has after each listing, there is a link to the cached instance (and maybe to a text format), there could be another link for "nominate as having bad
meta tags". The option to search with meta tags enabled
is something you would set once with preferences and rely on cookies to maintain. It would be off by default, so
most users would never see or know about the change.
You've missed the point. I know it ignores meta tags. It ignores them on all pages because some pages abuse them. I am suggesting that google ignore all and only those pages which abuse meta-tags.
I've been kicking around an idea for a scheme to end meta-tag (keyword, description) abuse so that they can actually become useful again. But it would require the cooperation and effort of google (and others) do do this.
The idea is roughly to refuse to index sites which engage in keyword/description abuse.
index keywords and description data
Allow users to search with keywords on or off
If users search with keywords on, provide a mechanism for users to nominate a site as engaging in
keyword abuse.
semi-automatically, and then manusually review nominations.
Refuse to index sites which have engaged in keyword abuse.
This isn't so much a system that meets the specs of the contest. And there is a scaling issue, but it is on my wish-list for google (and others) to do.
I wonder when they will do a piece on spamming.
They have been engaging in opt-out spam of UK Universities. It's even been taken up by JANET CERT.
Here is an excerpt from a posting from a JANET CERT
member
I reported to New Scientist that there had been unfavourable responses to
their bulk mailing activity. They have asked if I can tell them particular
sites where there were many complaints and they will consider dropping
those en masse from their mailing list.
Sorry I can't find any publically accessible archive of the discussion on the UK mail managers' list.
When someone sends me an MS-Word file, I respond with this DVI file, soon to be followed up with
the PDF version. It is a good text (and I don't say that about everything I write), and it has some links to information about the danger of using binary formats.
For various reasons too tedious to explain, I've been watching "launches" of Disney's roller-coaster California Screamin'. I believe that it is propelled by a series of electro-magnets in the track. This sends the roller-coaster cars off at a remarkable acceleration. I have no idea of the efficiency of this, but if it isn't too wasteful than a long ramp up a mountain should get something moving pretty fast. The best part is that the mass of the system doesn't have to be lifted and is entirely reusable.
I'm sure someone who actually knows about this stuff has looked into the possibily of such a launch system. but I'd be interested in any pointers to discussions of such a system.
I've got terribly confused and mixed feelings about what
I want NASA to do. Rationally, I know that unmanned flights are the best use of money for the scientific value. And I do generally believe in economic rationality over sentimentality. But my sentimentality says push for manned space flight.
First, thanks for your outstanding response. But a question remains. You say,
As far as I know, the fist sale doctrine has never been applied to software.
I guess this is the guts of my question. Why does software differ from books, video, etc in the applicability of the doctrine of first sale?
If the doctrine can apply to books, why not software? Or the other way 'round. If the doctrine can be side stepped for software, why can't it be for books and videos?
I doubt that it is merely because no one has challenged the agreements, otherwise that would have been an easier route for the Aussie video renters to go than to get DVDs classified as films instead of software.
Why does the question of whether it is a movie or software matter? More specifically, why can't distributors have a "not for rental" class of VHS tapes either?
I'm not asking this as a rhetorical question. I simply don't understand the guts of the case and am hoping that someone will explain.
Re:If I may brag, I'm 19 and mine is soon to be 3
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 1
That is somethng to brag about. Congratulations.
My 4 is pretty peripheral. Neither it nor the connecting 3s are works in mathematics. Anyway, I just wanted to say a brief congratulations before we get mod-ed down for being off-topic.
I've been reading the book and agree entirely with the review. I have little to say that wouldn't get me moded "redundant", but I'd like to say that anyone interested in that book will probably like
The man who loved only numbers: The story of Paul Erdös.
(and if I may brag a bit, my Erdös number is no greater than 4.)
The article cites cost concerns, but how much does using a linux reduce the price of a $400,000 machine? (Cost of ownership may well go down, but I'm asking about purchase price.)
In 1987 I was involved in the production of
a
bibliography of computational linguistics produced by CSLI and distrubted by Chicago University Press. The compilers of the bibliograhpy wanted to make the biliography (in refer format ) publically available. Chicago wasn't happy about that and the compromise was to allow the bibliography to be publically searchable, but with restrictions to prevent grabbing the whole thing.
So in addition to doing a lot of TeX and Tib work to
get the bibliography part printed usably, I wrote what you will find at the other end of clbib@csli.stanford.edu with the subject "help". (I expect that it has been completely rewritten now. I certainly hope it has.) I've just tested it and it appears that it is either down, removed entirely, or no longer responds immediately..
Anyway, I never dealt with Chicago University Press directly, but I was told that they were convinced in the end that making the information available that way helped sales of the printed book.
At the risk of getting moded down for "redundent", I'm going to add my voice to the suggesting to look at the
open content license, but also at a varient of it, the Open Publication License which allows you to restrict publication of printed copies in various ways.
Much of the Open Content license appears to be geared toward software documentation, while the open publication license is more flexible. But I do have a question (I probably should have started a new thread). Does anyone know of a use of the Open Publication license outside of Geekhood? I am working on a book proposal for a non-geek book, and am wondering if I can point potential publishers to precedents for use of things like the open publication license.
What nobody has mentioned here is that in the long run the widespread worldwide use of strong crypto is in the interest of US foreign policy. While it means that bad guys will be able to keep secrets from the US, it also means that good guys will be able to keep secrets from their own bad governments. On the whole it is bad governments which want to snoop on their citizens communications, so on balence widespread use of strong crypto is a good thing.
This is great news, but I we need to make sure that it actually succeeds. I don't know how the typical/.-er can
do that, but let's keep our eyes open for opportunities has they arise. (answers to questions on newsgroups, providing decent internalization in our projects, etc).
This is an arrogant shameless plug, but I've got a document on this
issue which also addresses the "de facto" standard question. It is available in a number of formats
Not only is this obvious, there are analytical models that have shown exactly under what conditions punishment
works (also taking into account punishment of those who
don't punish freeloading, and punishment of those who don't punish those who don't punish the freeloaders, etc)
This is the kind of stuff that game theory is made of. But for some strange reason, nobody cares about the proofs that have been around for ages, but only seem to pay attention to the far less informative simulations.
Forgive me for plugging
my own paper on the question of this kind of hype
To quote a founder of evolutionary game theory, John Maynard Smith, the idea that there is a bold new science of emergence and complexity is "absolute f*ing crap, but crap with good PR."
(Reference in the paper linked to in previous paragraph.)
This does look like part of a common pattern. As I read the press release, I was trying to figure out if it was a scam or a joke. Or some genuine crackpot.
Anyway, I've got to get back to working on my patent application for my algorithm which analyses programs and data to see if they'll halt. I won't reveal more until the patent is awarded, but I can leak the infomation that it uses Fractal LR BackTracking to identify ChomskySingularities in the Generalized MetaStack.
Potential investors should note that the road to fully commercializing this may be a long one (but it does halt).
Slashdot Mirror
A geek who would post his proposal this way is a very good catch.
The timeline starts only at 1945. That misses things like Colossus which is a decent candidate for first electronic programmable (UTM) computer.
I agree that google needs to maintain its interface simplicity. But I think that something like my scheme should be doable wiithout making the user presentation untidy. Just has after each listing, there is a link to the cached instance (and maybe to a text format), there could be another link for "nominate as having bad
meta tags". The option to search with meta tags enabled
is something you would set once with preferences and rely on cookies to maintain. It would be off by default, so
most users would never see or know about the change.
You've missed the point. I know it ignores meta tags. It ignores them on all pages because some pages abuse them. I am suggesting that google ignore all and only those pages which abuse meta-tags.
The idea is roughly to refuse to index sites which engage in keyword/description abuse.
- index keywords and description data
- Allow users to search with keywords on or off
- If users search with keywords on, provide a mechanism for users to nominate a site as engaging in
keyword abuse.
- semi-automatically, and then manusually review nominations.
- Refuse to index sites which have engaged in keyword abuse.
This isn't so much a system that meets the specs of the contest. And there is a scaling issue, but it is on my wish-list for google (and others) to do.Look at the Open Content License and the Open Publication License.
When someone sends me an MS-Word file, I respond with this DVI file, soon to be followed up with
the PDF version. It is a good text (and I don't say that about everything I write), and it has some links to information about the danger of using binary formats.
I'm sure someone who actually knows about this stuff has looked into the possibily of such a launch system. but I'd be interested in any pointers to discussions of such a system.
If the doctrine can apply to books, why not software? Or the other way 'round. If the doctrine can be side stepped for software, why can't it be for books and videos?
I doubt that it is merely because no one has challenged the agreements, otherwise that would have been an easier route for the Aussie video renters to go than to get DVDs classified as films instead of software.
I'm not asking this as a rhetorical question. I simply don't understand the guts of the case and am hoping that someone will explain.
That is somethng to brag about. Congratulations.
My 4 is pretty peripheral. Neither it nor the connecting 3s are works in mathematics. Anyway, I just wanted to say a brief congratulations before we get mod-ed down for being off-topic.
(and if I may brag a bit, my Erdös number is no greater than 4.)
The article cites cost concerns, but how much does using a linux reduce the price of a $400,000 machine? (Cost of ownership may well go down, but I'm asking about purchase price.)
So in addition to doing a lot of TeX and Tib work to get the bibliography part printed usably, I wrote what you will find at the other end of clbib@csli.stanford.edu with the subject "help". (I expect that it has been completely rewritten now. I certainly hope it has.) I've just tested it and it appears that it is either down, removed entirely, or no longer responds immediately..
Anyway, I never dealt with Chicago University Press directly, but I was told that they were convinced in the end that making the information available that way helped sales of the printed book.
As pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, the Open Publication License covers the problems mentioned.
Much of the Open Content license appears to be geared toward software documentation, while the open publication license is more flexible. But I do have a question (I probably should have started a new thread). Does anyone know of a use of the Open Publication license outside of Geekhood? I am working on a book proposal for a non-geek book, and am wondering if I can point potential publishers to precedents for use of things like the open publication license.
Let's just hope it is not Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Even Numbered Sequel.
What nobody has mentioned here is that in the long run the widespread worldwide use of strong crypto is in the interest of US foreign policy. While it means that bad guys will be able to keep secrets from the US, it also means that good guys will be able to keep secrets from their own bad governments. On the whole it is bad governments which want to snoop on their citizens communications, so on balence widespread use of strong crypto is a good thing.
This is great news, but I we need to make sure that it actually succeeds. I don't know how the typical /.-er can
do that, but let's keep our eyes open for opportunities has they arise. (answers to questions on newsgroups, providing decent internalization in our projects, etc).
I have a canned response in as DVI which I regularly send. I follow it up with a PDF version about 20 minutes later.
If I may be so conceited, it is good rant worth reading. you can get it in many formats starting here.
This is an arrogant shameless plug, but I've got a document on this issue which also addresses the "de facto" standard question. It is available in a number of formats
Not only is this obvious, there are analytical models that have shown exactly under what conditions punishment works (also taking into account punishment of those who don't punish freeloading, and punishment of those who don't punish those who don't punish the freeloaders, etc)
This is the kind of stuff that game theory is made of. But for some strange reason, nobody cares about the proofs that have been around for ages, but only seem to pay attention to the far less informative simulations. Forgive me for plugging my own paper on the question of this kind of hype
To quote a founder of evolutionary game theory, John Maynard Smith, the idea that there is a bold new science of emergence and complexity is "absolute f*ing crap, but crap with good PR." (Reference in the paper linked to in previous paragraph.)
This does look like part of a common pattern. As I read the press release, I was trying to figure out if it was a scam or a joke. Or some genuine crackpot.
Anyway, I've got to get back to working on my patent application for my algorithm which analyses programs and data to see if they'll halt. I won't reveal more until the patent is awarded, but I can leak the infomation that it uses Fractal LR BackTracking to identify ChomskySingularities in the Generalized MetaStack.
Potential investors should note that the road to fully commercializing this may be a long one (but it does halt).