we'll see how it fares on the *major* protected media content: live TV. After all, wouldn't want a hack to block advertisements on TV like we do in Firefox.
I have a feeling the tests we've seen so far will seem quaint in retrospect.
"Remember back in the day when you could chip a game console and only get a threatening letter?" said one inmate to the other.
It's interesting the comment in the Discovery article:
"Unlike gorillas, which invariably charge when they see a threat, these apes turn around and silently slip away into the forest when encountered, Ammann said."
This behavior alone could account for them remaining relatively unnoticed for so long.
Again on the Pygmies, Turnbull's book "The Forest People" is a first-hand account of Turnbull's experiences with the Pygmies of the Congo. In it, he describes how vast and uncharted the Congo forests still are, saying there are areas many hundreds of miles wide where only the Pygmies know well. And of course, the Pygmies don't have much to do with people from outside the forest.
It's nice to think of expansive lands right here on Earth that are still not within the long view of Us.
Let's take a bunch of senior congressmen (the kind who get the juicy oversight committee jobs) who have long histories of spending 1/4th of our tax dollars on the largest military in history and give them the job of oversight for whizzy tech projects out of the Defense Department. Sounds like a recipe for success to me!
Oversight is useless unless its done by and for public interest. Fat cats who regularly porkbarrel for the defense industry are not for the public interest.
And, I probably had the closest estimate! The tree we were looking at was nowhere near as big as an Oak.. so maybe it was half to a tenth as many leaves. Who knows, who cares? I see thousands in that paper. w00t.
No I don't. I can't find anything on google either. There are many people who say it's a good exercise in estimation, but I can't find anyone who has actually validated their estimates.
The situation was the same that day. We couldn't resolve it. Everyone agreed the CTO was way off, but we argued about whether 5k, 10k or 50k was more likely correct (in datamining, "likely correct" is all you talk about).
We thought about doing some image processing. You could take a picture and do some counting using a program. Or you could take a picture and then compare it to a 3D model of a tree with the same branching characteristics, and just parameterize the 3D model until you get a close fit.
But surely somebody has at some point counted the # of leaves on a tree?!
I used to work at a small datamining shop. The people there were very bright, some of them quite famous in the fields of statistics, number theory, etc.. One day, we were sitting in the front room of our offices having lunch, chewing the fat, as it were.
At lunches, we would sometimes try to stump our CTO a grey beard who is famous for work in information theory and general genius. We had never succeeded, even with obscure questions in biology "How do Prions work?", physics "What order are the colors of the rainbow, and why?", "How does the Corriolus effect work?", etc. that none of us had any particular knowledge of, and always had to research afterwards to determine the correctness of his answers.
So, I posed the question to the group "How many leaves are on that tree outside the window?" It was a ~30 foot tall, bushy tree in the height of summer. I hoped he'd take the bait.. I thought this was going to be very hard to "get right", and it would even be difficult come up with a plausible answer.
After a few moments, I set off the responses by saying that I thought it easily had 10k leaves, possibly 20k or more.
Everyone gasped. "Oh no! No way..." and then proceeded to offer lower and lower estimates.
The responses started with me and made their way up in the seniority ranks (I was the most junior) all the way up to the CTO. He said "Oh! those kinds of things are notoriously hard to estimate. We typically overestimate grossly in counting things of plentitude. Oh, I don't know. 200?".
Finally we had him. There was no way there were 200 leaves on that tree.
Later, in discussion, a trend became clear. The more senior the person, the more conservative was their response, even to the ridiculous level of our CTO saying a tree in full flush, that he could see right outside of the window, had 200 leaves, when it most plainly had many, many more.
Anyone want to hazard a guess? How many leaves on say, an adult Sycamore (or Maple, Oak, etc.)?
I filed a case with the FTC's fraud clearinghouse, filed a complaint with the FBI's fraud group, and called the guy who hosts it. At first he was like "yeah yeah.. send a msg to...", then I told him there was a case filed with the FBI's consumer fraud group. The page was gone in seconds and is now 404. The page is still in google's cache, and i've put that search query in my fbi submission. LOL! Interesting morning.
I just called all the people on the list linked here and either left a msg or explained the situation. Took about 30 minutes. The clearest way I found of convincing them was to tell them how to do the Google search themselves. For most of them, their name in quotes and the word "MasterCard" or whatever brought up 1 page, the page with their info on it. I got many answering machines and disconnected numbers, but a few thanks as well.
I just called all the people on one of the lists linked here and either left a msg or explained the situation. Took about 30 minutes. The clearest way I found of convincing them was to tell them how to do the Google search themselves. For most of them, their name in quotes and the word "MasterCard" or whatever brought up 1 page, the page with their info on it. I got many answering machines and disconnected numbers, but a few thanks as well.
My friend forwarded me your article last week, and though i thought some of the rest of it was typically interesting, that comment about the lack of Java programmers... well, I'm less likely to click on the next link to an article of yours. Your mindshare, you do what you want with it;)
btw, in java i've programmed a desktop env., statistical natural language processors, neural nets and bayesian learners, a 3D solar system simulator, a Wolfram Automaton renderer, PIC controllers for robotics, a predicate logic system and a whole lot of middleware/JSPs.. off the top of my head. Now that's not a bad language. The only other languages I know that I have personally seen used for such various applications are C/++ and Lisp.
Actually, programs are abstractions of electrical systems that, though I have programmed a simple CPU in an FPGA and wired up breadboards, etc. etc., I still don't understand. And Physicists don't even understand Physics! And thanks to Gödel, it's clear we don't understand Math! Argh. Who can save us?!
It's an indictment of Aristotle, Kant, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Method that all of our attempts at formalizing the universe blow up in our faces.
Until we approach every program as the algebraic systematic proof of a string-theoretic electrical circuit model, we will be burdened by the inexorable piles of poo that is the vast majority of the software written today.
See how easy it is to assert that something isn't cool?
When I read Graham's article, I was disappointed. It had that air of someone being passed by, by a lot of fun. Saying Java isn't cool is like saying Scheme or ML isn't cool. It's just a personal preference, and when you express it, you run the risk of sounding anal and/or ignorant. His older articles were better considered.
Here's my utterly ignorant statement of the day: No matter how many ultra-cool hackers I know tell me that Lisp and Scheme and ML are cool, I never have fun using them. They force my brain into such an unpleasant state of nerdliness that the only thing I can program in them is a mathematical proof or some sort of logical system.. in short, I'm forced to become a boring CS professor using them.
Don't bother debunking reasons why Java isn't cool. The only path to cool is the acceptance of luserdom. Only when you have nothing to lose will you dare to do something audacious.
Look at punks. The only time they're cool is when most of society considers them fringe lunatics with no social graces. And then the rock happens again. It's when they're "cool" that the music invevitably begins to suck.
Being called uncool is a blessing in disguise. Thanks Paul.
I was really just whining about/., which is useless, I know. So sad to see so many geeks with so little political backbone. Smart? Definitely. Relevant? We choose not to be, thanks; back to the pr0n.
On a related note, I saw a do-gooder on my way home from work today (on public transportation; yes, gas is scarce). He was holding a "Beat Bush" sign and sign-up, with a Kerry 2004 sticker on it. I asked him as I passed by "Did Kerry vote for the War?", to which he dutifully responded "Yes." And apparently that was all he could muster.
It must have been painfully obvious, even to him, the guy who was "burning shoe leather", as you put it, that at least for that issue, Kerry was no more beating Bush than Bush was.
And really, war is the main issue. We ought not elect a leader who will screw us in matters of war.
So, while you're burning that shoe leather for no good reason, I'll be sitting on my butt, still frustrated by the lack of popular political spectrum, and the obvious fact that Americans enjoy unfreedom.
Though, maybe I'll make a little sign-up called, "Beat RDNC". You've inspired me! The impossible is possible! How lazy of me!
Again, to paraphrase, where did we cross the line where we now think that information is action? Great, people know who the WTO and IMF are. And?
Not to shoot you down.. I think those are steps in the right direction. But knowledge of your adversary is not equivalent to actions against your adversary.
If the WTO keeps making trade policies that screw the little man, and we all watch and say "The WTO sucks! Ha!", it's almost worst.. at least we had some dignity before in naivety.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be a good example of who patches faster.. OSS or CSS. And they're off!
we'll see how it fares on the *major* protected media content: live TV. After all, wouldn't want a hack to block advertisements on TV like we do in Firefox.
I have a feeling the tests we've seen so far will seem quaint in retrospect.
"Remember back in the day when you could chip a game console and only get a threatening letter?" said one inmate to the other.
Just when i start reading /. for a few days again, i'm reminded why it's so easy to drift........ away......
Sorry.. couldn't resist.
It's interesting the comment in the Discovery article:
"Unlike gorillas, which invariably charge when they see a threat, these apes turn around and silently slip away into the forest when encountered, Ammann said."
This behavior alone could account for them remaining relatively unnoticed for so long.
Again on the Pygmies, Turnbull's book "The Forest People" is a first-hand account of Turnbull's experiences with the Pygmies of the Congo. In it, he describes how vast and uncharted the Congo forests still are, saying there are areas many hundreds of miles wide where only the Pygmies know well. And of course, the Pygmies don't have much to do with people from outside the forest.
It's nice to think of expansive lands right here on Earth that are still not within the long view of Us.
Let's take a bunch of senior congressmen (the kind who get the juicy oversight committee jobs) who have long histories of spending 1/4th of our tax dollars on the largest military in history and give them the job of oversight for whizzy tech projects out of the Defense Department. Sounds like a recipe for success to me!
Oversight is useless unless its done by and for public interest. Fat cats who regularly porkbarrel for the defense industry are not for the public interest.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble..."
Because it used to, and people couldn't gather and protest the abuse of power. Don't believe the hype.
High school math teachers everywhere quake in yer boots!
Finally a resolution to the great lunch question!
And, I probably had the closest estimate! The tree we were looking at was nowhere near as big as an Oak.. so maybe it was half to a tenth as many leaves. Who knows, who cares? I see thousands in that paper. w00t.
No I don't. I can't find anything on google either. There are many people who say it's a good exercise in estimation, but I can't find anyone who has actually validated their estimates.
The situation was the same that day. We couldn't resolve it. Everyone agreed the CTO was way off, but we argued about whether 5k, 10k or 50k was more likely correct (in datamining, "likely correct" is all you talk about).
We thought about doing some image processing. You could take a picture and do some counting using a program. Or you could take a picture and then compare it to a 3D model of a tree with the same branching characteristics, and just parameterize the 3D model until you get a close fit.
But surely somebody has at some point counted the # of leaves on a tree?!
I used to work at a small datamining shop. The people there were very bright, some of them quite famous in the fields of statistics, number theory, etc.. One day, we were sitting in the front room of our offices having lunch, chewing the fat, as it were.
At lunches, we would sometimes try to stump our CTO a grey beard who is famous for work in information theory and general genius. We had never succeeded, even with obscure questions in biology "How do Prions work?", physics "What order are the colors of the rainbow, and why?", "How does the Corriolus effect work?", etc. that none of us had any particular knowledge of, and always had to research afterwards to determine the correctness of his answers.
So, I posed the question to the group "How many leaves are on that tree outside the window?" It was a ~30 foot tall, bushy tree in the height of summer. I hoped he'd take the bait.. I thought this was going to be very hard to "get right", and it would even be difficult come up with a plausible answer.
After a few moments, I set off the responses by saying that I thought it easily had 10k leaves, possibly 20k or more.
Everyone gasped. "Oh no! No way..." and then proceeded to offer lower and lower estimates.
The responses started with me and made their way up in the seniority ranks (I was the most junior) all the way up to the CTO. He said "Oh! those kinds of things are notoriously hard to estimate. We typically overestimate grossly in counting things of plentitude. Oh, I don't know. 200?".
Finally we had him. There was no way there were 200 leaves on that tree.
Later, in discussion, a trend became clear. The more senior the person, the more conservative was their response, even to the ridiculous level of our CTO saying a tree in full flush, that he could see right outside of the window, had 200 leaves, when it most plainly had many, many more.
Anyone want to hazard a guess? How many leaves on say, an adult Sycamore (or Maple, Oak, etc.)?
http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
Many people know the problems of our industrial society. Some even want to fix them.
I'm not sure every corner of the net heard that.
I filed a case with the FTC's fraud clearinghouse, filed a complaint with the FBI's fraud group, and called the guy who hosts it. At first he was like "yeah yeah.. send a msg to ...", then I told him there was a case filed with the FBI's consumer fraud group. The page was gone in seconds and is now 404. The page is still in google's cache, and i've put that search query in my fbi submission. LOL! Interesting morning.
I just called all the people on the list linked here and either left a msg or explained the situation. Took about 30 minutes. The clearest way I found of convincing them was to tell them how to do the Google search themselves. For most of them, their name in quotes and the word "MasterCard" or whatever brought up 1 page, the page with their info on it. I got many answering machines and disconnected numbers, but a few thanks as well.
I just called all the people on one of the lists linked here and either left a msg or explained the situation. Took about 30 minutes. The clearest way I found of convincing them was to tell them how to do the Google search themselves. For most of them, their name in quotes and the word "MasterCard" or whatever brought up 1 page, the page with their info on it. I got many answering machines and disconnected numbers, but a few thanks as well.
Search for "C:\Documents and Settings" on Google's Uncle Sam sub-search, here.
My friend forwarded me your article last week, and though i thought some of the rest of it was typically interesting, that comment about the lack of Java programmers... well, I'm less likely to click on the next link to an article of yours. Your mindshare, you do what you want with it ;)
btw, in java i've programmed a desktop env., statistical natural language processors, neural nets and bayesian learners, a 3D solar system simulator, a Wolfram Automaton renderer, PIC controllers for robotics, a predicate logic system and a whole lot of middleware/JSPs.. off the top of my head. Now that's not a bad language. The only other languages I know that I have personally seen used for such various applications are C/++ and Lisp.
Was at the smtp level too.
Eval of the classification system is here:
http://reeltwo.com/products.html
I wrote a desktop (email, browser, chat, etc.) in about 1500 LOC in Swing. I think Swing is cool.
g e= jos.desktop
http://freality.org/~pablo/code/index.jsp?packa
OBVIOUS NOTE: It's not Windows XP. Hackers only.
Actually, programs are abstractions of electrical systems that, though I have programmed a simple CPU in an FPGA and wired up breadboards, etc. etc., I still don't understand. And Physicists don't even understand Physics! And thanks to Gödel, it's clear we don't understand Math! Argh. Who can save us?!
It's an indictment of Aristotle, Kant, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Method that all of our attempts at formalizing the universe blow up in our faces.
Until we approach every program as the algebraic systematic proof of a string-theoretic electrical circuit model, we will be burdened by the inexorable piles of poo that is the vast majority of the software written today.
Agreed.
Johnny come lately to the open-source party that IBM's using to eat your lunch with. Mmm, sweet irony.
Be warned geeks. There's a heartless money grubbing corporation behind this innocent-sounding appeal. They lie.
If they're serious about open-source, they know where to go:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
This smells more like "Is there anything we can do to get buy-in from the Slashdot crowd?"
See how easy it is to assert that something isn't cool?
When I read Graham's article, I was disappointed. It had that air of someone being passed by, by a lot of fun. Saying Java isn't cool is like saying Scheme or ML isn't cool. It's just a personal preference, and when you express it, you run the risk of sounding anal and/or ignorant. His older articles were better considered.
Here's my utterly ignorant statement of the day: No matter how many ultra-cool hackers I know tell me that Lisp and Scheme and ML are cool, I never have fun using them. They force my brain into such an unpleasant state of nerdliness that the only thing I can program in them is a mathematical proof or some sort of logical system.. in short, I'm forced to become a boring CS professor using them.
Don't bother debunking reasons why Java isn't cool. The only path to cool is the acceptance of luserdom. Only when you have nothing to lose will you dare to do something audacious.
Look at punks. The only time they're cool is when most of society considers them fringe lunatics with no social graces. And then the rock happens again. It's when they're "cool" that the music invevitably begins to suck.
Being called uncool is a blessing in disguise. Thanks Paul.
Agreed, protests as positive forces.
/., which is useless, I know. So sad to see so many geeks with so little political backbone. Smart? Definitely. Relevant? We choose not to be, thanks; back to the pr0n.
I was really just whining about
You missed the RDNC quip. I forgive you.
On a related note, I saw a do-gooder on my way home from work today (on public transportation; yes, gas is scarce). He was holding a "Beat Bush" sign and sign-up, with a Kerry 2004 sticker on it. I asked him as I passed by "Did Kerry vote for the War?", to which he dutifully responded "Yes." And apparently that was all he could muster.
It must have been painfully obvious, even to him, the guy who was "burning shoe leather", as you put it, that at least for that issue, Kerry was no more beating Bush than Bush was.
And really, war is the main issue. We ought not elect a leader who will screw us in matters of war.
So, while you're burning that shoe leather for no good reason, I'll be sitting on my butt, still frustrated by the lack of popular political spectrum, and the obvious fact that Americans enjoy unfreedom.
Though, maybe I'll make a little sign-up called, "Beat RDNC". You've inspired me! The impossible is possible! How lazy of me!
Again, to paraphrase, where did we cross the line where we now think that information is action? Great, people know who the WTO and IMF are. And?
Not to shoot you down.. I think those are steps in the right direction. But knowledge of your adversary is not equivalent to actions against your adversary.
If the WTO keeps making trade policies that screw the little man, and we all watch and say "The WTO sucks! Ha!", it's almost worst.. at least we had some dignity before in naivety.