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  1. Re:How to avoid electing chickenhawks: on Election Day Discussion · · Score: 1

    Did you vote for Dole over Clinton? Please reply.

  2. Re:I wasn't that impressed with jon stewart on Jon Stewart on CNN's Crossfire · · Score: 1

    He did do a good job considering the situation. But that just isn't that impressive. Or at least not as impressive as a lot of comments in this thread are suggesting the performance was. This performance does not show a mind at work. This performance didn't even stick it to crossfire really. Please listen to this link. It is jon stewart being very impressive forming interesting ideas and siting examples to back up the ideas. Much more impressive than his book. I am impressed by jon stewart. I am not all that impressed by jon stewart in this video.

  3. I wasn't that impressed with jon stewart on Jon Stewart on CNN's Crossfire · · Score: 2, Interesting

    First off I'm a big Jon Stewart fan. I've read his most recent book and used to listen to his stand up a lot. Did jon stewart catch Begowa and Carlson off guard. Absolutely. Of course the format of their show is that they attack and they ask the questions so of course they are off guard when their show and themselves became the topic of attack. Although Jon Stewart defended himself well against attacks from Carlson, Stewart did not form strong arguments himself against cross fire: at least not in this interview. Yes he called the show theatre over and over again but what did this mean? He started to have an interesting point about politicos using disingenuous arguments because the ends justified the means but he didn't develop this point and certainly didn't even hint why this was cross fires fault. In the end when he was asked if cross fire was "too easy" on its guests he said no that's not it and then sort of stared off and mumbled a bit. To be fair he wasn't given much opportunity to develop his points. A good interview where he does develop his points is here at freshair.

    Really my big problem with the crossfire interview is that when you go on the show as a guest you are agreeing to be the topic of debate. If you want to attack the crossfire guys the venue to do that is to have the hosts interviewed on a different show. How much of a point are you making when you catch people off guard who aren't intending to be asked questions. Let them prepare to defend them selves and have them interviewed to see if crossfire can be defended.

  4. Re:Does this defeat the purpose? on 'Tit for Tat' Defeated In Prisoner's Dilemma Challenge · · Score: 1

    The point of the PD simulation is to talk about whether, in the absence of any social consequences, it is better to screw someone over for money or to work cooperatively with them.

    How do you figure that? If that were true then why are the players aloud to keep track of their opponents previous moves? If there are no consequences, no memory of your prior moves, then the answer is it better to screw someone over. The fun and interest of this sort of play is the social consequences.

  5. Re:Unfair test on Phish Scams Fooling 28% of Users · · Score: 1

    None of the links will actually take you anywhere out of safety. The guys putting on the test would feel extremely guilty if someone followed a link and provided information to some scammer. So what they do instead is use a bunch of java script: including using java script to alter the status bar at the bottom when you use cursor over. But because scammers alter the status bar a lot and there isn't a lot of legitimate reason to do this, firefox has this turned off. As a general rule you shouldn't trust the status bar in IE to filter out scammers.

  6. What this is not (or what it may not be) on Detecting Faked Photographs Gets Easier · · Score: 1

    There have been a lot of comments so far saying that this algorhythm would be a great help in creating doctored photos. Someone even said that if it passes the algorhythm surly it will pass the human eye.

    This may not be the case. There are certainly some features that we are very good at recognizing when there is something wrong: like proportions and white balance changes. I mean we are very good at this so creating an algorhythm to do better than us would be very hard. However there are some features we don't even consider: like in a certain are is every other pixel the perfect average of its surroundings. The NYT article shows an example of the alorhythm using the latter.

    I recognize that there are very smart people out there capable of creating very good algorhythms that may work in the first way. But why bother? Someone doctoring an image - up to this point - has only considered perfecting the variants that human eye can catch. I'm not saying what these guys have done is easy or obvious. Quite the opposite. Finding variants that we don't usually requires a huge amount of ingenuity. But correcting these variants won't help fool a person any better.

  7. Re:What kind of digitized photos does this work on on Detecting Faked Photographs Gets Easier · · Score: 4, Informative
    The NY Times article deals with this directly.

    But Professor Farid said that for now the technique does not work as well with files created in JPEG, the compressed picture format most commonly used online. As the size of a JPEG file shrinks, the correlations between pixels become much less obvious. "At 90 percent quality, it falls apart very quickly," Professor Farid noted.

    So good point. That does seem to be a problem. The NY Times article has more details than the other; it is worth reading.
  8. Re:This is over the line on Is Sveasoft Violating the GPL? · · Score: 1

    I don't know if it's clear at all what is being sold, but it seems to be an important question, if not a little lost in semantics. If he is selling the software then he is fine; if he is selling subscriptions he is infringing the GPL. Since the difference in the two behaviours is mostly semantic - lacking any additional evidence it seems reasonable to assume that he is behaving in a legal way as opposed to an infinging way. I say the difference is semantic since both of us recognize the same basic actions we just give them different names.

  9. Re:This is over the line on Is Sveasoft Violating the GPL? · · Score: 1

    If you were paying for support sure this would be "refusal of service" (ooh... another expression full of conotations and gut feelings). But you are not buying support. You are buying the binary and the source. The support is a bribe on the providers part asking that you don't redistribute.

    A programmer is not required to support a GPL'd program for any period of time after releasing it UNLESS he said he would (say as part of the sale). The sale doesn't imply support. But the sale does demand that the buyer receives the product she has been promised. So if the product is said to be super stable and there are tons of bugs in it then some support or updates should be expected and not having them would be a refusal of service. At least that's how my gut feels it. He could be wrong.

  10. Re:Actually on Is Sveasoft Violating the GPL? · · Score: 1

    That's why I like this summary. He points out that both licenses are in fact GPL just that one offers more benefits (the subscription). The software is never not under the GPL. You are aloud to offer more benefits just not more restrictions. This is at least how the FSF seems to see it. Perhaps, unlike you, they also find this "hard to understand."

  11. Re:This is over the line on Is Sveasoft Violating the GPL? · · Score: 1

    Your argument seems to hinge upon "This is just wrong." Did your gut tell you this? Or perhaps a little birdie? Yes if having a subscription cancelled is a penalty then this is in fact a violation. If however having your subscription cancelled is not a penatly then it is not a violation. We all know the "you may not impose any further restrictions..." but that is not what this argument hinges upon.

    Yes the word cancelled has certain conotations that imply penalty which does give the gut feeling that this is an infringment. But can you offer more than a gut feeling. There a several well written comments that argue exactly the opposite of what you take for granted but you don't seem to rebut their points. I see your analogy to the different fees as being new. But isn't this different. The receiver isn't asked to actively give anything or even return anything; the days of subscription up to the point of cancellation are still hers.

    I'm not saying that this point of whether it is a restriction is clear to me either. I am saying that if you believe it is a penalty then this charge has to be backed up. Especially if you have the FSF disagreeing with you.

  12. Re:Actually on Is Sveasoft Violating the GPL? · · Score: 1

    This is one of the best summaries so far. Too bad it is buried so deep.

  13. Re:Actually on Is Sveasoft Violating the GPL? · · Score: 1

    Can you point me somewhere that says that? I mean if there is a site out there that is serving the source for free it is certainly sufficient for me to say "the source is available here." However if I give a modified gpl'd program to you on a disk and there is source on that disk it does not make sense that you should be able to hand out the binary on that disk and tell people they have to call me for the source. So did you just ummm make something up?

  14. Re:Payoff matrices and game theory on Matrix Decision Making · · Score: 1

    Do you honestly believe that the problems of rational decision axioms have been solved? It does not matter what form of utility you use (note that von Nuemann-Morgenstern utility is a single model in a branch of economics that has many competing models) it must form a vector space over the rationals with addition being defined in the obvious way - cojoining independant decisions. As such the problem of linear distributivity arises which was displayed in the mentioned problem. For a slashdot based discussion it seemed that using a value that behaves like the integers was appropriate as it was easy to understand for the audience. Perhaps you have not heard of axioms of rational choice... they aren't mentioned in high school economics classes in the same way utilities are.

    I know I shouldn't have been drawn into responding to flamebait with flamebait but now I've done it.

  15. Re:Payoff matrices and game theory on Matrix Decision Making · · Score: 2, Interesting

    People love to throw around the statement that the problem with game theory is that people aren't rational but usually the problem isn't as simple as that. Often when a player doesn't act rationally it is due to the fact that the term rational is ill defined or more specifically the axioms of rational choice are mischosen. What do I mean by this? Take an example. There is an axiom that if you take a rational choice from a payoff matrix and multiply all that values by some positive number then the choice is still rational. This seems like a good choice and is often used in arguements ("... what if instead of $10 we were talking about $1,000. It's the same thing right?") But in practice this appears to be a bad axiom. Take a lottery where the tickets are $1 and you have a 1 in 3 chance in winning $10. This is a good game and we can probably agree it is rational to play this game. Now take the same lottery and multiply by 100,000. I can't imagine anyone except the extremely rich who would buy a $100,000 lottery ticket for a 1 in 3 chance of winning a million dollars.

    My point? Numbers oriented people love to talk about acting rational as measurable characteristic. However at the moment rational behavior is similar to moral behavior. We may have all sorts of arguments of why we think a behavior is rational but when it comes down to it rationallity is still something that we know it when we see it. So it is still too early to judge whether most players act rationally or not; whether you read about chaos or not.

  16. Re:There is an issue here on Online Plagiarist Sues University · · Score: 1

    Self- : [...] 2 a : to, with, for, or toward oneself or itself [...]

    This is from http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=self-plag iarism

    Then they go on to list self-plagiarism as a word where you can draw the meaning yourself.

    Now this univerisity defines self-plagiarism differently. In this case they refer to using material for which you have already received credit. So in this case lifting a paragraph from you're own website should be fine. My point is however that self-plagiarism is an idea that clearly does exist in English.

  17. Re:No good deed goes unpunished... on Compensation for Bandwidth Costs is Extortion? · · Score: 1

    Exactly... and I'd go even further. Assume it is his website (which by most measures it is). Then does it matter even if he's really rude and demands back pay or he's taking down his own site. I'm sure the guy was a jerk about and didn't just suggest that he needs money. He probably got all frazzled and said something like "You better pay me or I'm taking down your website." (He's a gun fanatic remember... guys like that tend to constantly want to show how important they are and how much power they wield.) But even if he said that... even if he called the website theirs... if it is still his then how was his threat or eventual actions extortion.

  18. HardOCP's responce seems a little shaky... on Infinium Labs Threatens HardOCP Again · · Score: 1

    I don't have the time or the inclination to go through both the complaint letter and the original article with a fine tooth come and determine which complaints are valid and which are not. Saying that I did spend a few minutes looking over both and HardOCP's responce does seems to smear the truth a bit.

    In at least several of the cases where "Kyle Bennett" claims innuendo the reasonable reader probably does assume the "innuendo." For example when the article said that "Timothy Roberts, has helmed several businesses that have failed or have gone bankrupt in the last six years." It seems reasonable to me that he was at the helm when they bankrupted - even though this isn't true. It isn't completely obsurd to say that this is HardOCP's suggestion. At the same time is it really HardOCP's responsibility to clarify this? Doesn't seem like it to me.

    More disturbing however is that HardOCP says in its defence that "After hours of consideration, out of the 18 items noted we have found 5 that were in need of addressing as outlined below... As for the rest of Infinium Labs' demands, they seem to us to simply not be based in reality." But then he doesn't comment that they did correct the factual mistake pointed out in complaint 7: "You allege that Mr. Roberts' brother stepped down as CEO of Wanforce. You need to correct your statement to state that Mr. Roberts' brother is still the CEO of Wanforce - he never stepped down as CEO." They did in fact say this in the original article and they did correct this. So saying that he didn't address any other complaints is just not true.

    HardOCP says in its defence that "The odd thing to me about the above letter is that it continually refers to statements we never made and innuendos that are nonexistent in our article." If so why not quote a few places in the letter where this happens. That certainly would be entertaining to a fan of HardOCP. From what I read the complaints made by Infinium Labs don't seem to raise to the level of anything close to damning. But again at the same time saying that the complaints aren't based in reality... well that doesn't appear to be true either.

  19. Between the lines on WB Cancels Angel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There is one line in the announcement that makes suspicious something else is going on. "David Boreanaz continues to be one of the finest, classiest and friendliest actors we have had the pleasure to work with and we hope that the relationship furthers from here." I wonder if someone that the WB has a "close" relationship with, like say Kevin Williamson, has expressed interest in having Boreanaz in one of his series and the WB decided to "free" him from his contract. So now we're going to get some kind of Dawson's Creek crap with Boreanaz casted as the teacher. All part of the WB vision.

  20. Re:Three CCDs on Reviews for Digital Camcorders? · · Score: 1

    Three CCDs will almost alway give you a better image but in general they are much worse in low light (dark) situations. The way a single CCD camera works is different pixels are filtered, so there is a red pixel, a blue pixel. Then a chip comes up with a best estimate for colour for each pixel. Remember a CCD can only tell you light intensity... not colour. On a three CCD the image is actually put through a prism so each CCD only receives a 3rd the brightness. Some say the colour resolution makes a big difference. Most psych tests I've seen suggest that as long as the intensity resolution is fairly high most people don't notice a low colour resolution. There are tests out there so you can see what affects you.

  21. medical informatics on Switching from Another Industry to Engineering/CS? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    First off I should mention that this is nothing more than a plug. Dalhousie university (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) has just started a graduate program in Medical informatics. Medical informatics is basically the science of using mathematics and computers to data mine medical information for useful results. This is particularly relevant to this situation since the ideal candidates for this program are people with a medical background. People who can look at the data and form some sort of understanding of what it means in the real world. I know at the moment Dalhousie is the only Canadian school to offer such a program though I do believe there are a few American schools offering similar programs. Beyond that I don't know who else offers such a program.

    It is also worth noting that Dalhousie Comp sci has just aquired Jon Borwein who is one of the worlds formost experts in experimental mathematics and just happens to have a history with several of the developers of the Medical informatics progam. It is unclear if he will be involved with the program but he will certainly be teaching courses at Dal. Probably worth looking into.

  22. Re:Okay so is it over now? on SCO Fails to Produce Evidence · · Score: 1

    All they did was buy the rights to the code. Doesn't necessarily mean they have the code and certainly doesn't mean the code is in any of their products.

  23. Re:Now running! on Kernel 2.6.1 Released · · Score: 1

    as far as I'm aware you'll have to wait for a new version of cdrdao first... which sucks... but until then make mine ide-scsi

  24. Re:Things like... on What You Can't Say · · Score: 1

    German's didn't vote for Hitler. He gained power politically and legally but the German system was such that he could be appointed to maintain stability without being elected.

  25. squash is a game of skill on Hackers On Atkins · · Score: 1

    I find that the best squash players I know (guys who are usually at the top of ladders) don't use a lot of energy when playing. One of them I would even call over weight. The reason is that squash gives a major advantage to the player with strong aim and strategy and no amount of speed or running will overcome that. I love squash as a game but a work out it often isn't. If you want a game that is all about stamina and speed check out raquetball. Strong squash players don't use fast reflexes that often either. They know where the ball is going long before it gets there and have thought out their swing when it does.

    Just a gratuitous squash rant