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User: TsuruchiBrian

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  1. The answer: essay grader graders on Grading Software Fooled By Nonsense Essay Generator · · Score: 2

    I don't see a problem with automated essay graders in principle. It's just that the current essay graders are no good. Once we are able to make computer software that can actually understand essays as well as a human it will be should be perfectly competent to grade an essay.

    I certainly see the motivation to have a computer grade essays. Who wants to read multitudes of mediocre essays. I might rather be put in solitary confinement. I am all for the automated essay graders, but only after they can be proven to be as competent as a human.

    I have no idea how to make a such a competent essay grader, but I do know how to grade an essay grader. You have a bunch of computer graders and human graders grading the same essays. If the computer graders show a more consistent performance than the humans (i.e. are the outlier less frequently), then the computer grader is better.

    If a paper is scored by 4 human judges and a computer, and the humans score the paper 1, 2, 3, 4, and the computer scores the paper as a 9, then it means that according to most of the human graders, the computer was way off. Essays are inherently subjective. Are the humans right or is the computer right? Who cares it doesn't matter.

    If a paper is scored by 4 human judges and a computer, and the humans score the paper 4, 5, 7, 9, and the computer scores the paper as a 6, then it means that according to every human grader, the computer did better than half the humans.

    If a computer can do better than the humans even by human standards, then I think it's fair to say that a computer is good enough.

  2. Maybe they should just... on DreamWorks Animation CEO: Movie Downloads Will Move To Pay-By-Screen-Size · · Score: 1

    Maybe they should just charge based on how much we enjoy the movie. They could install brain sensors in all the audience members, and if it's a really good movie like Spider Man 2 or The Revenge of the Sith we can pay top dollar, and if it's a really terrible movie like Spider Man 3 or The Phantom Menace we can get a discount.

  3. Re:Does it make me a bad person... on Australian Exploration Company Believes It May Have Found MH370 Wreckage · · Score: 1

    And we still have no real time data on the planes in the sky

    We do, we just don't have a sensor that can tell if the human at the controls is a Muslim extremist intending to get his 72 virgins.

    The other problem is that even if we did have such a sensor, we would not know for sure if it was working properly. We can have the ATC ask the pilot if he is a Muslim extremist who intends to crash the plane into a building, but he could just lie and say no. We still have to decide if it is the right decision to blow up an airplane full of passengers using partial information, regardless.

    Given that there are about 87,000 flights in the US per day, how many terrorist hijackings/crashes are you willing to tolerate where we don't necessarily need to react by installing a bunch of new equipment? You said you don't expect 100% safety, so your answer can't be 0.

  4. This is like... on AOL Finally Admits They Were Hacked · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is like finding out that Dutch East India Company servers were hacked.

  5. Re:Does it make me a bad person... on Australian Exploration Company Believes It May Have Found MH370 Wreckage · · Score: 1

    I think the idea that some cheap device installed on a plane is going to completely mitigate the possibility of terrorism is naive.

    Our proclivity for starting wars when we are attacked can be mitigated by either stopping 100% of terrorist attacks or changing our attitude about when it is appropriate to start wars. One of these is hard and the other is impossible.

    Terrorism and crashes in aircraft is already exceedingly rare. Just how well are you expecting this device to work (i.e. how much of an improvement will it be over what we already have)?

  6. Re:Does it make me a bad person... on Australian Exploration Company Believes It May Have Found MH370 Wreckage · · Score: 1

    I really don't see what this has to do with 9/11. Had the hijackers blown up a bunch of buses instead of crashing airplanes, would we be talking about installing bomb detectors in every bus?

    This is a numbers game. The question that needs to be asked is whether the expenditure of money worth the benefit that is gained. "Tell that to the families!" you may cry. If we had unlimited money then sure let's buy everything. The fact is that money represents limited resources in raw materials and human time and effort. It is better if we spend that money in the way that creates the greatest benefit.

    Emotionally over-reacting to every tragedy is not the best way forward.

  7. Re:Does it make me a bad person... on Australian Exploration Company Believes It May Have Found MH370 Wreckage · · Score: 1

    This is an extremely rare case. Usually there is no problem finding the planes. If onstar system lost 1 car out of millions, we wouldn't necessarily need to rethink the whole system, especially when knowing where the plane/car is doesn't necessarily mean you get to save anybody.

    How much money would you be willing to spend per plane

    to upgrade tracking systems to increase the chances of finding some potential lost plane in the future knowing how rare it is to actually lose a plane right now.

    Given that air travel is already one of the safest modes of transportation, I would probably spend that money on something more worthwhile. I would rather save a $1 on the price of my ticket than fly on a plane that allows them to find my dead body more quickly in the extremely unlikely event of a crash.

    There's a reason I don't spend money on tornado insurance on my house. As terrible as a tornado destroying my house would be, the chances are so unlikely that it is not even worth spending the modest amount that it would cost.

  8. Re:Does it make me a bad person... on Australian Exploration Company Believes It May Have Found MH370 Wreckage · · Score: 1

    I don't think onstar can find your car if the battery is dead or it is on the bottom of an ocean.

  9. Re:"spin" implies falsehood, or at least bias on Australian Exploration Company Believes It May Have Found MH370 Wreckage · · Score: 0

    Like how Fox News reported nothing but Benghazi stuff for a while? The right really seemed to care about all the ways Benghazi was bad for democrats?

    I would think that reporting on the same tired shit like exactly what day the president referred the Benghazi attack as a terrorist attack) for political reasons, while not necessarily false information, it is misleading people as far as what news actually matters, especially given the amount of actually important news that they never cover.

    I don't think it's possible to report unbiased news especially when you are catering to one side, and especially when you are actually engaged in deciding what is of interest to people.

  10. Oh the irony on F.C.C., In Net Neutrality Turnaround, Plans To Allow Fast Lane · · Score: 2

    The big internet companies managed to turn net neutrality from something they didn't want into something they do. All they had to do was use all their lobbyists to lobby congress to change laws in their favor.

    SHOCKING!!!

    Now we are going to have the worst of both worlds. We have exactly the internet we didn't want and some more laws for our economy to waste GDP on lawyers and litigation.

    If we really want internet freedom, we should be lobbying for actual competition in the ISP game. It may not be possible to have 10 ISPs all competing at the same time, with their own fiber cables, but we could have a system where the lines are owned by the public (rather than the telecoms), and the telecoms just compete for contracts to administer the network. If we didn't like how a company was doing business, it would be much easier to ditch them for a new company if we owned the pipes.

    Unfortunately politicians are generally shitty and it takes a lot of public engagement to get them to actually do something correctly rather than way that benefits them the most when no one is paying attention (i.e. cheaply in the short term).

  11. Re:P2P on How Much Data Plan Bandwidth Is Wasted By DRM? · · Score: 1

    I think the convenience of it also depends on how many minutes/hours of content you are actually able to cache on a phone with limited memory. You can cache a lot of music on a phone. You can't cache very much high def video.

    If we assumed that you *had* to watch 5 minutes of 4k resolution video on your phone on an airplane, then being able to cache it would probably be very convenient.

    I would much rather have 500 minutes of cached music over 5 minutes of cached 4k video on an airplane.

    Maybe "convenient" is not the right word. Maybe utility is the right word. There is currently not as much utility in being able to cache high bitrate files on phones with limited memory, but it is certainly convenient to be able to cache large amounts of data if you absolutely need them offline.

  12. Re:P2P on How Much Data Plan Bandwidth Is Wasted By DRM? · · Score: 1

    I think maybe it makes sense for google play because they also do music. Music files are smaller, and so I can see this feature being more useful. Once they have the software infrastructure for caching written, to enable it for video as well was probably trivial.

  13. Re:P2P on How Much Data Plan Bandwidth Is Wasted By DRM? · · Score: 1

    I am sure a lot of people think caching files is a security risk. But I don't think this is the reason that some content services don't support caching. I'm assuming a company like Netflix probably has encryption/DRM experts working for them. These people surely know that caching encrypted files pose no additional security risk. I think they just haven't implemented it because they don't think it would be a useful feature.

    The memory on my phone is pretty limited. I think I have 16GB of memory and most of that is taken up by apps. One of the reasons I like streaming is because I don't have to consume the flash memory on my phone.

    If netflix enabled caching on their mobile app, I suspect they would spend millions of dollars and in the end not many people would use it, and of the people who did, they would get complaints that they could only cache 4 files before they ran out of space.

    I think once memory in smartphones increases to the point where this caching feature becomes much more useful to more people, it wil be worth it for Netflix to implement.

  14. Re:Real problem was law letting the networks charg on Aereo To SCOTUS: Shut Us Down and You Shut Down Cloud Storage · · Score: 1

    I watch over the air HD. I have a mythtv box and a HDHomerun that I use as an OTA DVR. Anything that's not coming over air or available on netflix or HBO Go, I just get from bittorrent. Cable providers can go to hell.

  15. Re:P2P on How Much Data Plan Bandwidth Is Wasted By DRM? · · Score: 1

    You can cache songs on google music.

    I agree with Dynedain that the problem isn't that DRM wastes bandwidth, it's that *some* companies have DRM schemes which do not allow caching.

    It's not like encrypted data coming over a network is more secure than encrypted data in a file on a hard drive. I have wireshark. I can store the incoming network packets to a file.

  16. And most importantly on Skilled Manual Labor Critical To US STEM Dominance · · Score: 1

    We need more of these people *so* the salaries for these professions drop. If there were more qualified electricians, then there would be less demand for them and it wouldn't cost so much to have electrical work done, and I would actually hire one rather than trying to figure out how to do my own electrical work on youtube.

  17. Re:perception on GoPro Project Claims Technology Is Making People Lose Empathy For Homeless · · Score: 1

    Some people are not capable of being self sufficient and some people are. Obviously the people who are not capable of being self sufficient are going to stay in a position of need by definition. In the other camp, I have seen numerous examples of the government helping people in times of need and empowering them to become self sufficient.

    I've had many friends that have lost their jobs during the financial crisis. The unemployment benefits they collected helped them survive through that time.

    I know lots of people that are helped by medical and medicare. My wife works in a hospital and sees this everyday.

    I have a cousin who works for the state department in a program to build schools in Afghanistan.

    Also, I've never really seen anyone's government aid being contingent on worshiping anybody. I can not say the same about religious charities I've seen.

  18. Re:perception on GoPro Project Claims Technology Is Making People Lose Empathy For Homeless · · Score: 1

    Ok, I'm convinced. We should go back to anarchy.

  19. Re:we don't know what happened AT ALL on How Does Heartbleed Alter the 'Open Source Is Safer' Discussion? · · Score: 1

    It's not just a bug, it's this bug. Clearly a bug this severe is a much more shocking revelation than say an issue with toolbar location persistence in libre office.

    There are bits of software where bugs tend to be more likely to have security implications. Things like the kernel, encryption libraries, etc. It is still not shocking that these bits of software contain bugs.

    And it has dubious value given that this bug was committed, reviewed and accepted then extremely widely circulated despite many eyes being on it

    Having the software be widely circulated is *how* there are many eyes on it. If hardly anyone used this software then far fewer people would be looking at it, and this bug would likely never have been caught.

    It's not about having heaps of people look at it, it's about having a few people with the right knowledge and understanding of the system looking at it.

    That's like how winning the lottery is not about buying lots of tickets, it's about picking the right numbers on a single ticket.

    So what's the argument? That you have many eyes on it so this is less likely to happen than...what? Closed source software? Lower profile Open Source software?

    My argument is that the more eyes you have on the software, the more bugs you find and at a fester rate. One way to increase the eyes is to have software be open source, another is to have it be higher profile, another is to pay thousands of programmers to look at at. My point is that open source can only help the situation and often does. It makes your software more accessible to more eyes, and typically increases it's profile, and none of this precludes other people from being paid to hunt down bugs.

    This is why it has dubious value, yes you might happen to fluke it but you're just as likely to have many eyes that completely miss it.

    Even if you are just as likely to miss the bug as find it, you've increased your odds of finding a bug due to the source code's openness from 0% to 50%.

    Touting it as an advantage (even if it is in some circumstances) does it a disservice because you end up with people trusting that "it's open source so many other people are looking at it"

    Whats the alternative? Not using software? Using it while being very nervous? You should already be assuming that bugs pose a constant risk to computer security.

    The advantage is the ability to find and fix issues yourself, not that many other people may or may not be doing it for you.

    So if I find and fix the issue myself, you have just had the issue fixed for you. If you find and fix an issue yourself, then I have had the issue fixed for me. We all benefit from bugs found and fixed by other people.

    Do you ever notice how software versions keep incrementing? That's because people are adding new features and fixing bugs. The fact that you aren't helping doesn't mean other people aren't.

  20. Re:I will be a millionaire. on Survey: 56 Percent of US Developers Expect To Become Millionaires · · Score: 1

    If you had read what I said, you would have noticed that I did not mention anything about interest rates staying low. The only economic factor I actually cited was inflation.

    I never said my house was going to appreciate in value. I said it would be worth at least $1 million US dollars in 27 years.

    Furthermore, I wasn't saying that my house is *the reason* I will be a millionaire. This was just a reference point. I would be a millionaire just from putting my paychecks into a bank account with no interest. Buying the house has helped a bit because I bought near the recent bottom (a year early actually) and have a pretty low interest rate locked in, but that's just a bonus.

    A lot of my colleagues got raped when the housing bubble burst. They will also still probably become millionaires, it will just take them a little longer due to bad luck.

    The only thing that could prevent me from being a millionaire is a catastrophic event (e.g. death, illness) or if somehow the dollar is prevented from depreciating in value.

  21. Re:perception on GoPro Project Claims Technology Is Making People Lose Empathy For Homeless · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I think the government is certainly in the best position to help the poor.

  22. Re:Why is Raymond's claim theoretically sound? on How Does Heartbleed Alter the 'Open Source Is Safer' Discussion? · · Score: 1

    The problem isn't even with C. Sometimes it's nice to be able to shoot between your toes. We use C++ at my company but we only use frameworks and data structures that do proper bounds checking (e.g. Qt). We don't really ever do raw memcpy. We use QByteArray methods. This doesn't mean memcpy is bad. QbyteArray is surely using memcpy or something exactly like it under the hood.

    I personally like the versatility of C++. You can do memcpy if you really need the speed for some reason, or you can build something safer on top of memcpy and use that.

  23. Re:we don't know what happened AT ALL on How Does Heartbleed Alter the 'Open Source Is Safer' Discussion? · · Score: 1

    I didn't say anyone did, in fact such a thing is demonstrably false so I'm not quite sure what you say that.

    I don't understand how else it could be shocking to find a bug in a piece of software unless it didn't contain any bugs.

    No but when a bug this severe is discovered in something so widely deployed it certainly does damage the "many eyes" claim, it has about as many eyes on it as any open source program is likely to get so clearly that isn't the answer.

    It's not as if "severe" bugs are easier to find. Why does it damage the many eyes claim? It had many eyes on it, and it eventually got found by a few of those many eyes. Nothing is *the* answer. Open source is one of many ways to *improve* the quality of code.

    Having "many eyes" doesn't necessarily diminish the quality, but obviously it doesn't necessarily improve it either so saying it's better because it has "many eyes" looking over it is disingenuous at best.

    I think it quite clearly does improve the quality. Even if 1 bug was found by someone looking through open source code this is an improvement over not finding this bug. The question is how much is the code improved by it being open source.

    Better doesn't mean good. Better means better.

    Spell checking your English paper makes it better if you find even one spelling mistake, it doesn't make it good.

  24. Re:we don't know what happened AT ALL on How Does Heartbleed Alter the 'Open Source Is Safer' Discussion? · · Score: 1

    The whole point of wanting to have many eyes on open source code is *because* there are bugs in it, and every software.

    I am not aware of any claims made by anyone remotely reputable that open source software doesn't contain bugs.

    Even if the claim is that open source software contains fewer bugs, finding one bug does not disprove that sort of claim.

  25. Re:Definition of Millionaire doesn't include your on Survey: 56 Percent of US Developers Expect To Become Millionaires · · Score: 1

    I really don't even hear people use the term millionaire anymore. Plus I could just sell my home and I would have $1 million not including my home. Do I really need a million dollar home AND a $1 million in a bank account for this weird new age definition? Why not just require $2 million net worth? Or better yet how about a relative term like "the 1%". I assume that the richest 1% of people will always be considered rich.