X means you are evenly balanced between the two ends. Or in other words, of the ten questions intended to distinguish between Thinking and Feeling, you answered five one way and five the other.
You may find however that if you read the descriptions of the INTP and INFP that you feel one of them definitely represents you better than the other one does.
Submitted by ocipio mailto:ocipio@phobiadotms at 2000-10-03 02:49:12
ocipio writes "The U.S. Government announced that the algorithm, known as Rijndael (pronounced RHINE-dahl), was revealed as the new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), successor to the thirty-year-old Data Encryption Standard (DES). Rijndael was created by two Belgian cryptographers, Vincent Rijman and Joan Daemen. It is open sourced and free to the public. Rijndael is praised for its speed in both hardware and software implementations and its efficency in memory usage. The story can be found on SecurityFocus."
Our AES story is currently 9th on the main page, about halfway down. I don't want to make fun of this particular guy, he saw some news, he submitted it, that's what we want, but... it makes it difficult. --
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
My grammar is pretty good, and my spelling is, well, let's say it's better than CmdrTaco's and leave it at that.:)
Monster.com and hotjobs.com are good; you might also try nynma.org, the New York New Media Association's website, which has many job listings. (However, when I've looked there, a LOT of the listings are from recruiters, and I suspect NYC recruiters are a lot like NYC real estate agents: the best of them are merely sleazy, and the worst are downright criminal.) You can also visit the wwwac.org website and subscribe to the WWWAC list, which has many job listings posted (much higher real company/recruiter ratio).
As to where to live: heh. How much did you want to spend? Living in a "trendy" part of the city can cost more in rent than it would cost to purchase a mansion in other parts of the country. Suggest you pre-check the availability of DSL and/or cable before you think about neighborhoods, since cable only available in a few places and DSL availability is far from universal.
I moved out of Manhattan to Staten Island. For the same rent, I got an apartment five times the size and 20 times nicer. The farther you live from Manhattan, the farther your money goes...
A few reasons. First, no two of the slashdot editors are in the same office (most of the time) - even Hemos has left the Geek Compound. Second, people resubmit the same stories dozens or hundreds of times - the typical scenario is that slashdot is quick on a story, all the other online media reports it the next day, and the newspapers report it the day after that - and we gets waves of submissions for each. For instance, the news about Rijndael being chosen for the AES (we posted it less than an hour after the announcement) will get resubmitted many, many times over the next few days as people discover it in various places and don't see a story on the homepage. Will one of the slashdot editors repost it, not having read the first story? I hope not! But I can't guarantee it.
Your first example is actually a good one. CmdrTaco's story doesn't use the word "Colossus", which I what I searched on before posting the story myself (to look for repeats, because it seemed vaguely familiar), nor is the URL identical (because the site puts tracking information in the URL). So it would be very difficult to discover the repetition through automated means, I needed to have actually *seen* the previous article and remembered it, which I hadn't.
We do usually try to make sure it isn't a duplicate. But no system is perfect. It's really a choice: you could have an editor which diligently checks all stories for duplicates (actually, you'd probably need three people working in shifts), but it would add a great deal of lag time to most stories. I think we'd rather cut things a little closer to the edge and accept the occasional duplicate.
*Shrug*. Other places post lots of duplicate stories, they just change the wording a little bit. Read about 20 stories from one news source regarding, say, Monica's dress, and you'll see how similar they are, how little new content is involved. Here, if we ever link to the same story twice, even years later, we've committed a grievous sin. It's not something we try to do, but I'm not going to get all upset about it either.
That's a heavy job. EPIC publishes a summary of world-wide crypto laws every year - they spend a lot of time and effort on compiling it. And there are a couple of organizations that do thumb-nail analyses of national free speech restrictions - for instance, they rank countries green, yellow or red for good, mediocre or bad. But in-depth analyses would be terribly time-consuming. I'm not ruling it out, you understand, just pointing out the problems.
On the other hand, if you want to submit stories about your national situation, I will try to run them, if only in the YRO section rather than the front page. You can tag stuff as YRO when you submit it...
Hmm, I just read all the comments at 1 or above, and I don't see anyone - none - stating that the system described is the system used on kuro5hin. (Except possibly Sig11, but he's a special case - where are the "lot of other people" who got it "completely wrong"?) They'd have to be pretty dense, since the first few lines of the linked article make it clear who the originator of the system is and where it is used. It is a stated assumption of slashdot that people will read the linked article(s) before replying, which isn't always true of course, but in the event that comment #2 (or whatever) is totally ignorant and off-topic, it doesn't matter at all what the writeup was or what the linked article said, you've simply got a case of stupid-poster-itis, totally uncurable.
So I'd have to rate your post as -2, doesn't know what he's talking about. I know it's fashionable to criticize slashdot (always good for an upward moderation), but why not base it on something real, eh?
Why be a dick about it? "It embarasses me"? No, your Mom dressing you like that embarasses you. Duplicate stories on slashdot do not embarass you.
You want better stories? Submit better stories. Probably 3/4 of ALL STORY SUBMISSIONS are duplicates of something we just posted - we post it, some other site posts it, people come back here and resubmit it as news. Boy, everybody and their brother can find old stories - even years ago - if they're posted, but NOBODY checks when they're submitting a story.
The site was just hacked into. What, you think Taco is spending his frigging weekend cruising around town in a Ferrari? No, he's doing an intensive course called "fun with MySQL" and "rebuilding boxen for fun and profit" and "figuring out how to explain to management what happened and why it won't happen again".
Sheesh. What an ingrate. Go crawl back under whatever rock you came from. --
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Cat wasn't going to go back in the bag, worms in the can, horse in the barn, etc. The *really* interesting thing - and no one in the comments seems to have thought of this yet - is how will the rest of the news media handle this tomorrow? Anyone want to wager on the headlines? I'm guessing a simple "Slashdot Hacked", and an article long on pointing and laughing but short on details.
You're correct as far as the "conventional wisdom" goes, of course. Inform privately, blah-blah-blah. But considering that many (perhaps "most") companies who are so informed will prosecute you for hacking into their machines, and you will go to jail for many years, I would suggest that a public announcement is the best way to start. You want to take the public initiative, portray your actions in the best light available, and you want to do it preemptively. If the company is the one firing the initial public salvo, you're going to jail for many years.
What? The above post is written as if the company is your enemy rather than your ally? Yes. Because they are. It's almost certainly much cheaper to tip off the FBI about your evil hacking ways than it would be to fix the security breach. So that's the option they're going to consider first. --
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
You're looking at GIS, aka geographic information systems. The primal source of a lot of GIS data is the U.S. Geological Survey. Start at mapping.usgs.gov. Those maps you see on Yahoo or Mapblast aren't images per se - or at least there isn't any huge database of image files to download. It's a giant vector database of vectors and points, roads and geographic features and bodies of water and points and what-have-you, built into an image on the fly.
GIS is a really neat topic, but not a simple one. You have a significant learning curve ahead of you... AFAIK there isn't a lot of open-source GIS code available. A few national laboratories and other similar places have some code available. But not much. Most of the coding seems to be done by closed-source shops like ESRI.
There's an auto-link function that finds various company names and links them. I think "Wired" is probably the phrase that gets auto-linked most often.
The majority of Government software is written by contractors. (At three to four times the price it would be to hire people directly. This is called "saving money through outsourcing", or "pork", depending on whether or not you are in a position to snag one of these contracts.) Since the contractors do it rather than the government, and since most government contracts are silent on the issue of open source, the contractors own the code, and can therefore hold the government up for ransom on a continuous basis for maintenance fees.
You would be flabbergasted and astonished to discover how many government websites are maintained entirely by outsiders at outrageous fees.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
Yeech! Do you know how many people you're talking about?! You can count slashdot's current staff on one hand.
If people send in the stories, we'll do our best to run them. That's what the YRO section was designed for. But it doesn't seem likely that the posting staff on slashdot will suddenly expand a hundredfold...
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
Actually (to both of you), slashdot has run a bunch of stories about RIP, and a bunch more that mention it in passing. See for example:
The requirement under trade secret law (you're looking for the word "tenet", not "tenant") is that you KEEP IT A SECRET, not that you send out threatening letters or file lawsuits. By definition, nothing that's present in a device you send out to millions of customers is a secret, so there is no claim under trade secret law.
I don't know if it's totally clear but what that PR rep had to say is a complete work of fiction. There's literally no truth in it. Let me count the ways:
-- nothing done with the Cuecat was illegal
-- there's no IP for the Cuecat people to defend - identify it! I dare you! "By posting our IP to the net" my ass!
-- there's no such thing as "Defend it or lose it" under IP law. If 200 people rip off MS Windows and MS prosecutes 2 of them, there's no such defense as "Well, your honor, MS didn't prosecute the other 198 people..." This is a MASSIVE LIE made up by companies who want to shift responsibility. ANYTIME you see a company say "We had to... or lose it" they're lying.
-- That whole third paragraph about the linux community helping Microsoft is hogwash.
-- there aren't any illegal posting efforts
-- if it took them five years to develop a BARCODE SCANNER which MUNGES the normal output in a trivial manner before outputting it, I am a Great Horned Antelope. I'm not? Well then I guess they're lying again. I talked to a friend of mine at Symbol, and Digital Convergance approached them to make this device earlier this year. (Symbol didn't end up making it.) Their company has been in existence less than one year. Symbol could make a run of these for you in a few months.
And what I really hate is that the lies are so pervasive that they end up shaping the whole debate. People can only see past a certain limited number of lies at a time. So they'll catch a few, but then they'll accept the bigger lies like "We had to... or lose it".
Random thought to any company executives who happen to be reading this: you know, if you truly wanted [your company] to be a radical, different company, try this on for size. Fire any and all PR people. Just fire them. Don't hire any more. Ever. If there's a story where you have to talk to the press, let one of the principals do it - the guy who programmed that feature, or whatever. No matter how big the company gets, DON'T EMPLOY TRAINED LIARS TO DEFEND IT. Because that's what a PR person is - someone trained in the art of creating believable lies day in and day out. People catch on to this, believe it or not, even though it's a very slippery thing to catch on to, and they end up with (at a minimum) a vague distrust of that company, because they know they're being lied to but can't quite figure out exactly where. It's the reason Microsoft has such a bad reputation. If VA or Red Hat or anyone else truly wanted to break the mold, they would abandon the institutionalized lying. This would prevent that distrust from building, as well as keeping the company on the straight and narrow - without a wall of lying to protect them, the company execs get good feedback whenever they're doing something wrong.
I think the first company to do this has the potential of being a very different, much more
people-friendly company than we've seen in the past.
Case 2: I'm a cop without a suspect. I take a DNA sample from the crime sceane and do a database search based on the sample. It is now about a million time more likely that I get a false positive. If I do this for 1000 case per year it is now 1 billion times more likely that I get a false positive sometime during the year. Ultimatly, I end up convicting a lot of innocent people based on bullshit.
This is actually a +5 Insightful comment. Cryptography has the concept of "collisions", that is, the odds when generating a hash of some sort that your random hash will be the same as the hash of something else. They call it the birthday problem: what are the odds someone else in the room has the same birthday as you? Relatively low. What are the odds any two people in the room have the same birthday? Much higher - so much higher that it's worth betting on in any large group (where "large" is "23 people or more").
Essentially, if your database of DNA values is large enough (like, the whole population) it's extremely likely that you'll find a match with a random sample. Now, prove you didn't commit that murder - after all, "your" DNA is at the scene...
I cannot stress this enough, people. Read the articles referenced by slashdot before you post obvious questions.
No kidding. I'm astonished by the number of questions posted in the comments that are answered two lines into the referenced URL. Look folks, the people who work behind the scenes at slashdot aren't trying to summarize the whole frigging article in a little blurb. We're trying to give you enough information to know whether you want to read it or not, or maybe a little info that isn't in the article. It is my unstated assumption that everyone who wants to post intelligent comments about a story will read it... but there are so many cases when this isn't true. Some of them are the slashdot trolls. But many aren't.
Here's an open question: what can we (we meaning the slashdot crew) do to get people to read the stories before posting?
I've never seen a condition like that on books in the U.S. The closest we come is a note on the title page that if the book is sold without a cover, then it may be illegitimate. (The reason is that bookstores strip off the covers of books they don't sell and return only the covers to publishers for refunds [to save postage], and the coverless books are sometimes retrieved from the garbage and sold.)
As for licensing on books in general, you may wish to see my Copyrant.
"As a consequence, a computer is a basic tool of dental school and in the 2001-2002
academic year (Class of 2005), a computer and the VitalBook will be required as part of
coming to dental school."
I suppose you could buy the Vitalbook AND paper copies.
Slashdot Mirror
X means you are evenly balanced between the two ends. Or in other words, of the ten questions intended to distinguish between Thinking and Feeling, you answered five one way and five the other.
You may find however that if you read the descriptions of the INTP and INFP that you feel one of them definitely represents you better than the other one does.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
The Meyer-Briggs scale could actually be described as four analog scales:
E --- I
N --- S
T --- F
J --- P
The letters only suggest which end of the scale you favor.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
This submission just came in:
Submitted by ocipio mailto:ocipio@phobiadotms at 2000-10-03 02:49:12
ocipio writes "The U.S. Government announced that the algorithm, known as Rijndael (pronounced RHINE-dahl), was revealed as the new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), successor to the thirty-year-old Data Encryption Standard (DES). Rijndael was created by two Belgian cryptographers, Vincent Rijman and Joan Daemen. It is open sourced and free to the public. Rijndael is praised for its speed in both hardware and software implementations and its efficency in memory usage. The story can be found on SecurityFocus."
Our AES story is currently 9th on the main page, about halfway down. I don't want to make fun of this particular guy, he saw some news, he submitted it, that's what we want, but... it makes it difficult.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
My grammar is pretty good, and my spelling is, well, let's say it's better than CmdrTaco's and leave it at that. :)
Monster.com and hotjobs.com are good; you might also try nynma.org, the New York New Media Association's website, which has many job listings. (However, when I've looked there, a LOT of the listings are from recruiters, and I suspect NYC recruiters are a lot like NYC real estate agents: the best of them are merely sleazy, and the worst are downright criminal.) You can also visit the wwwac.org website and subscribe to the WWWAC list, which has many job listings posted (much higher real company/recruiter ratio).
As to where to live: heh. How much did you want to spend? Living in a "trendy" part of the city can cost more in rent than it would cost to purchase a mansion in other parts of the country. Suggest you pre-check the availability of DSL and/or cable before you think about neighborhoods, since cable only available in a few places and DSL availability is far from universal.
I moved out of Manhattan to Staten Island. For the same rent, I got an apartment five times the size and 20 times nicer. The farther you live from Manhattan, the farther your money goes...
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
A few reasons. First, no two of the slashdot editors are in the same office (most of the time) - even Hemos has left the Geek Compound. Second, people resubmit the same stories dozens or hundreds of times - the typical scenario is that slashdot is quick on a story, all the other online media reports it the next day, and the newspapers report it the day after that - and we gets waves of submissions for each. For instance, the news about Rijndael being chosen for the AES (we posted it less than an hour after the announcement) will get resubmitted many, many times over the next few days as people discover it in various places and don't see a story on the homepage. Will one of the slashdot editors repost it, not having read the first story? I hope not! But I can't guarantee it.
Your first example is actually a good one. CmdrTaco's story doesn't use the word "Colossus", which I what I searched on before posting the story myself (to look for repeats, because it seemed vaguely familiar), nor is the URL identical (because the site puts tracking information in the URL). So it would be very difficult to discover the repetition through automated means, I needed to have actually *seen* the previous article and remembered it, which I hadn't.
We do usually try to make sure it isn't a duplicate. But no system is perfect. It's really a choice: you could have an editor which diligently checks all stories for duplicates (actually, you'd probably need three people working in shifts), but it would add a great deal of lag time to most stories. I think we'd rather cut things a little closer to the edge and accept the occasional duplicate.
*Shrug*. Other places post lots of duplicate stories, they just change the wording a little bit. Read about 20 stories from one news source regarding, say, Monica's dress, and you'll see how similar they are, how little new content is involved. Here, if we ever link to the same story twice, even years later, we've committed a grievous sin. It's not something we try to do, but I'm not going to get all upset about it either.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
That's a heavy job. EPIC publishes a summary of world-wide crypto laws every year - they spend a lot of time and effort on compiling it. And there are a couple of organizations that do thumb-nail analyses of national free speech restrictions - for instance, they rank countries green, yellow or red for good, mediocre or bad. But in-depth analyses would be terribly time-consuming. I'm not ruling it out, you understand, just pointing out the problems.
On the other hand, if you want to submit stories about your national situation, I will try to run them, if only in the YRO section rather than the front page. You can tag stuff as YRO when you submit it...
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Hmm, I just read all the comments at 1 or above, and I don't see anyone - none - stating that the system described is the system used on kuro5hin. (Except possibly Sig11, but he's a special case - where are the "lot of other people" who got it "completely wrong"?) They'd have to be pretty dense, since the first few lines of the linked article make it clear who the originator of the system is and where it is used. It is a stated assumption of slashdot that people will read the linked article(s) before replying, which isn't always true of course, but in the event that comment #2 (or whatever) is totally ignorant and off-topic, it doesn't matter at all what the writeup was or what the linked article said, you've simply got a case of stupid-poster-itis, totally uncurable.
So I'd have to rate your post as -2, doesn't know what he's talking about. I know it's fashionable to criticize slashdot (always good for an upward moderation), but why not base it on something real, eh?
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Why be a dick about it? "It embarasses me"? No, your Mom dressing you like that embarasses you. Duplicate stories on slashdot do not embarass you.
You want better stories? Submit better stories. Probably 3/4 of ALL STORY SUBMISSIONS are duplicates of something we just posted - we post it, some other site posts it, people come back here and resubmit it as news. Boy, everybody and their brother can find old stories - even years ago - if they're posted, but NOBODY checks when they're submitting a story.
The site was just hacked into. What, you think Taco is spending his frigging weekend cruising around town in a Ferrari? No, he's doing an intensive course called "fun with MySQL" and "rebuilding boxen for fun and profit" and "figuring out how to explain to management what happened and why it won't happen again".
Sheesh. What an ingrate. Go crawl back under whatever rock you came from.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Actually my watch had already rolled over to the 29th. :)
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Cat wasn't going to go back in the bag, worms in the can, horse in the barn, etc. The *really* interesting thing - and no one in the comments seems to have thought of this yet - is how will the rest of the news media handle this tomorrow? Anyone want to wager on the headlines? I'm guessing a simple "Slashdot Hacked", and an article long on pointing and laughing but short on details.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
With all due respect, I disagree.
You're correct as far as the "conventional wisdom" goes, of course. Inform privately, blah-blah-blah. But considering that many (perhaps "most") companies who are so informed will prosecute you for hacking into their machines, and you will go to jail for many years, I would suggest that a public announcement is the best way to start. You want to take the public initiative, portray your actions in the best light available, and you want to do it preemptively. If the company is the one firing the initial public salvo, you're going to jail for many years.
What? The above post is written as if the company is your enemy rather than your ally? Yes. Because they are. It's almost certainly much cheaper to tip off the FBI about your evil hacking ways than it would be to fix the security breach. So that's the option they're going to consider first.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
You're looking at GIS, aka geographic information systems. The primal source of a lot of GIS data is the U.S. Geological Survey. Start at mapping.usgs.gov. Those maps you see on Yahoo or Mapblast aren't images per se - or at least there isn't any huge database of image files to download. It's a giant vector database of vectors and points, roads and geographic features and bodies of water and points and what-have-you, built into an image on the fly.
GIS is a really neat topic, but not a simple one. You have a significant learning curve ahead of you... AFAIK there isn't a lot of open-source GIS code available. A few national laboratories and other similar places have some code available. But not much. Most of the coding seems to be done by closed-source shops like ESRI.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
There's an auto-link function that finds various company names and links them. I think "Wired" is probably the phrase that gets auto-linked most often.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
The majority of Government software is written by contractors. (At three to four times the price it would be to hire people directly. This is called "saving money through outsourcing", or "pork", depending on whether or not you are in a position to snag one of these contracts.) Since the contractors do it rather than the government, and since most government contracts are silent on the issue of open source, the contractors own the code, and can therefore hold the government up for ransom on a continuous basis for maintenance fees.
You would be flabbergasted and astonished to discover how many government websites are maintained entirely by outsiders at outrageous fees.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Yeech! Do you know how many people you're talking about?! You can count slashdot's current staff on one hand.
If people send in the stories, we'll do our best to run them. That's what the YRO section was designed for. But it doesn't seem likely that the posting staff on slashdot will suddenly expand a hundredfold...
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Actually (to both of you), slashdot has run a bunch of stories about RIP, and a bunch more that mention it in passing. See for example:
6 234
5 242
http://slashdot.org/yro/00/03/03/1837216.shtml
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/19/141
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/09/144
But hey, don't let the facts stand in your way...
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
And hiding behind Anonymous Coward status is what?
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
The requirement under trade secret law (you're looking for the word "tenet", not "tenant") is that you KEEP IT A SECRET, not that you send out threatening letters or file lawsuits. By definition, nothing that's present in a device you send out to millions of customers is a secret, so there is no claim under trade secret law.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I don't know if it's totally clear but what that PR rep had to say is a complete work of fiction. There's literally no truth in it. Let me count the ways:
... or lose it" they're lying.
... or lose it".
-- nothing done with the Cuecat was illegal
-- there's no IP for the Cuecat people to defend - identify it! I dare you! "By posting our IP to the net" my ass!
-- there's no such thing as "Defend it or lose it" under IP law. If 200 people rip off MS Windows and MS prosecutes 2 of them, there's no such defense as "Well, your honor, MS didn't prosecute the other 198 people..." This is a MASSIVE LIE made up by companies who want to shift responsibility. ANYTIME you see a company say "We had to
-- That whole third paragraph about the linux community helping Microsoft is hogwash.
-- there aren't any illegal posting efforts
-- if it took them five years to develop a BARCODE SCANNER which MUNGES the normal output in a trivial manner before outputting it, I am a Great Horned Antelope. I'm not? Well then I guess they're lying again. I talked to a friend of mine at Symbol, and Digital Convergance approached them to make this device earlier this year. (Symbol didn't end up making it.) Their company has been in existence less than one year. Symbol could make a run of these for you in a few months.
And what I really hate is that the lies are so pervasive that they end up shaping the whole debate. People can only see past a certain limited number of lies at a time. So they'll catch a few, but then they'll accept the bigger lies like "We had to
Random thought to any company executives who happen to be reading this: you know, if you truly wanted [your company] to be a radical, different company, try this on for size. Fire any and all PR people. Just fire them. Don't hire any more. Ever. If there's a story where you have to talk to the press, let one of the principals do it - the guy who programmed that feature, or whatever. No matter how big the company gets, DON'T EMPLOY TRAINED LIARS TO DEFEND IT. Because that's what a PR person is - someone trained in the art of creating believable lies day in and day out. People catch on to this, believe it or not, even though it's a very slippery thing to catch on to, and they end up with (at a minimum) a vague distrust of that company, because they know they're being lied to but can't quite figure out exactly where. It's the reason Microsoft has such a bad reputation. If VA or Red Hat or anyone else truly wanted to break the mold, they would abandon the institutionalized lying. This would prevent that distrust from building, as well as keeping the company on the straight and narrow - without a wall of lying to protect them, the company execs get good feedback whenever they're doing something wrong.
I think the first company to do this has the potential of being a very different, much more
people-friendly company than we've seen in the past.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I would have marked this Insightful instead of Funny. I think it's only a matter of time.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Case 2: I'm a cop without a suspect. I take a DNA sample from the crime sceane and do a database search based on the sample. It is now about a million time more likely that I get a false positive. If I do this for 1000 case per year it is now 1 billion times more likely that I get a false positive sometime during the year. Ultimatly, I end up convicting a lot of innocent people based on bullshit.
This is actually a +5 Insightful comment. Cryptography has the concept of "collisions", that is, the odds when generating a hash of some sort that your random hash will be the same as the hash of something else. They call it the birthday problem: what are the odds someone else in the room has the same birthday as you? Relatively low. What are the odds any two people in the room have the same birthday? Much higher - so much higher that it's worth betting on in any large group (where "large" is "23 people or more").
Essentially, if your database of DNA values is large enough (like, the whole population) it's extremely likely that you'll find a match with a random sample. Now, prove you didn't commit that murder - after all, "your" DNA is at the scene...
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I cannot stress this enough, people. Read the articles referenced by slashdot before you post obvious questions.
No kidding. I'm astonished by the number of questions posted in the comments that are answered two lines into the referenced URL. Look folks, the people who work behind the scenes at slashdot aren't trying to summarize the whole frigging article in a little blurb. We're trying to give you enough information to know whether you want to read it or not, or maybe a little info that isn't in the article. It is my unstated assumption that everyone who wants to post intelligent comments about a story will read it... but there are so many cases when this isn't true. Some of them are the slashdot trolls. But many aren't.
Here's an open question: what can we (we meaning the slashdot crew) do to get people to read the stories before posting?
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
The guy who wrote the song said his webserver was a 386. Looks like he redirected to a free web page host, and *they* took down the account.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I've never seen a condition like that on books in the U.S. The closest we come is a note on the title page that if the book is sold without a cover, then it may be illegitimate. (The reason is that bookstores strip off the covers of books they don't sell and return only the covers to publishers for refunds [to save postage], and the coverless books are sometimes retrieved from the garbage and sold.)
As for licensing on books in general, you may wish to see my Copyrant.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Score -1, didn't read links before replying.
"As a consequence, a computer is a basic tool of dental school and in the 2001-2002
academic year (Class of 2005), a computer and the VitalBook will be required as part of
coming to dental school."
I suppose you could buy the Vitalbook AND paper copies.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org