As usual, a one-paragraph description of a patent covers exactly the parts that are prior art without actually pointing out the new parts.
The novel bits include: * Being able to advertise things based on the profile of your friends. You may have forgotten to put "skydiving" in your list of interests, but if a dozen of your friends also have "skydiving", you might be in the target market.
* Saving money by advertising only to certain valuable people, not just those with interests but those who know a lot of others with those interests. Why pay for 1,000 ad impressions when 10 would do?
Patents are hard to read, but I recommend skipping the abstract and the claims and going ahead to the description. You'll learn a lot more.
The article is basically attacking a misconception about the Long Tail. It's a misconception that goes all the way back to Chris Anderson's book.
It is possible to get rich from the Long Tail. Amazon does it. ITunes Music Store does it.
What's lacking in the book is pointing out that the *content creators* don't get rich. The Net means you can now eke out a tiny amount of cash by delivering your content to people. And in aggregate, that's a lot of money. But for each individual artist, it's not much.
It doesn't mean the end of blockbusters, because people LIKE blockbusters. It means that you have more alternatives, so you can see something else, but in general, you won't. Most people like what most people like. Duh. The additional cash that goes to the "long tail" artists does make them a bit less profitable, but there's still plenty of profit in them.
So the Long Tail doesn't mean that your rock band is going to be as rich as Van Halen. It means that you can make a few hundred bucks, but it's not going to make you a living, much less a superstar.
Anderson completely missed this fact. He was all rah-rah about what it meant for consumers (who have more options) and big retailers (who make big money on small margins) but paid zero attention to the artists, who get tiny wins but not big wins.
Thanks. I'm out of mod points, but it's very nice to get real knowledge from the source. This is the sort of thing that keeps me coming back to Slashdot. Thanks for sharing it.
The problem, in this case, is the definition of "there".
The administration was trying to play funny games with the semantics. If they were held in the US, they'd certainly be "there". If they were held in Afghanistan, they'd be granted access to the Afghan courts, at least under whatever agreement we had with them. (We're trying to negotiate that same kind of agreement in Iraq right now, and they're balking.)
So... they took them to Guantanamo, where we have a weird perpetual lease where the Cuban law doesn't apply either. The administration thought it found a chunk of the planet where no rules whatsoever applied but was under our control.
The Court here is saying that that's rubbish, and I agree with them.
I wonder if they can move them to a battleship somewhere in international waters, and see if that counts. Probably that's already been settled, or they'd have tried it already.
There are very few good critics, but they do exist.
A good critic is somebody capable of explaining what it is they're seeing, why they liked it and why they didn't. It's much more useful than "I liked it so you will to." Few reviewers even try. Most reviews are:
* 1 paragraph of introduction, usually with a "clever" hook to keep the reader reading * N paragraphs of plot summary * 1 paragraph of review for the actors, writer, and director. * 1 paragraph of review for the tech
The N paragraphs of plot summary have no business in a critique. If there's any value, it's in the last two paragraphs, but few reviewers have the vaguest idea how a movie is made, so they can't tell you what it is they're looking at.
They regularly ding actors for bad dialogue or bad sound, and praise mediocre but flashy performances. They don't know how the music, lighting, editing, etc. interact to make a moment work or fail. They don't know how movies influence each other or the dialogue that creates between directors and intended audiences.
For a critic who can actually do all that, such as the late Pauline Kael, it hardly matters whether they recommend the film or not, and it certainly doesn't matter how many stars they give it. Read the review and you'll know if you're seeing skilled filmmaking, and whether it's likely to appeal to you.
That's largely how RSS is supposed to work, and I'd like to see more mailing-list situations be replaced by RSS feeds.
To use it for personal mail you'd have to be more selective about authentication,since you don't want just anybody to be able to download mail intended for you.
(I'd also like an RSS feeder which incorporates those feeds into my inbox.)
You still have the usual problems of sorting out spam (black/white/graylist/bayesian), but at least the bandwidth problems would be dramatically reduced.
I've been thinking about something like this for a while. I think about it in terms of OpenID, where you get to define the terms of authentication by running your own server.
Service providers like GMail can turn that around and say, "OK, but we're only going to accept authentication from certain providers, who have confirmed to us one way or another that they reliably identify you as a human."
OpenID separates authentication from the services, so you don't have a single database to be compromised. The most desirable ones (the ones that many service providers will accept) will still be serious targets, and they'll have to be VERY careful to use crypto to keep things safe, but at least it won't be a single point of failure.
It would be up to the individual identity providers to verify your humanity, from really good CAPTCHAs to showing up in person. The good part, though, is that it lets the service providers like GMail outsource the effort, so they can get back to doing what they're good at.
The Globe and Mail isn't exactly Science. It's not even Scientific American.
The article focus almost exclusively on the reactions of people to the news. It mentions a "symposium" but not the name of it or who was holding it.
Presumably, there will be a journal article out of it, and if that article passes peer review, you'll hear from it again. Meantime, dismiss anything scientific you read in the daily papers. They're just astonishingly bad at reporting science.
A bit of googling on the name of the one scientist mentioned in the article suggests that this is the lecture they're talking about.
Especially since they all add weight, and more weight means more fuel. And more fuel means even more fuel, because some of the fuel goes to lifting the rest of the fuel to the point where it's needed.
I don't really notice it when I'm looking at it straight on, but when I catch it in the peripheral vision, it flashes like crazy.
I use an old CRT as a second monitor, and Windows Updates sometimes cause it to reset to a 60Hz refresh for some inane Redmond reason. When it happens I notice it, but when I stare at it it mostly goes away.
Really, you need to do it the other way around. You tell all your friends that you're john38+yeahreally@gmail.com, and you send anything without the +yeahreally to the bit bucket.
You can even give different people different +extensions, though managing the white list for them gets to be a pain. Especially since your new, improved email addresses will gradually leak into the spam books (everybody's got a friend dumb enough to push the "forward this article to a friend and sign them up for spam for life!") but it gives you some address space to play with even when you don't have direct control over the mail server.
A bomb takes out a post office or a truck. A bomb that takes out a tunnel destroys something harder to fix, more expensive, and with national rather than local effects.
Right, but that assumes that such a list exists. There may not actually be such a list, or it may be that the only people on it are non-citizens without the standing to sue.
There may not actually be anybody with the standing to sue, yet. The Bush administration is essentially telling us that there won't ever actually be one, because they're only wiretapping bad guys. The ACLU wants to know how they can know that's true, and they're especially suspicious because the bar to get a warrant isn't terribly high.
If a law permits abuse, but it isn't actually ever abused, is it still unconstitutional? The Court appears to be saying "no".
The list you're seeking may not exist. The smoking gun would be some liberal or Democratic organization whose phones were tapped for purely political reasons.
It's entirely possible that it has never happened. The decision is disturbing because it _enables_ the abuse of power, without actually indicating that the abuse of power has in fact occurred.
Supporters of the warrantless wiretap are basically trusting that it won't occur, and that all warrantless wiretaps are used against valid terrorist targets. The ACLU's claim is that (a) it's illegal anyway, even if used against actual terrorists, and (b) the checks-and-balances are eliminated, making abuses likely simply because they're possible, even if they haven't happened.
Justice Roberts has said that he'd rather use the Supreme Court to hear actual cases, rather than hypothetical ones. That makes the ACLU livid, since it can easily be too late by the time an actual abuse has occurred. Roberts says his interpretation of the Constitution ties his hands: no harm means no foul.
Which means that we're back to relying on our faith in individual agents of the US government to tell us if an actual abuse occurs, which is what the checks-and-balances (and the FISA court in particular, in this case) were supposed to prevent.
That's right. Democrats have stupid ideas. Republicans have stupid ideas.
So why should they have the lock on everything? Libertarians ALSO have some incredibly stupid ideas, and they should be heard. We might even get a government run by different stupid ideas than we're already running it with.
Trusted providers probably WILL charge for the service. The OpenID scheme considers that a good thing. You get to choose any authenticator you want, and you can decide how hard you want to work on protecting your identity as it relates to any particular web site.
I use Livejournal for my openID, which is fine, but I don't necessarily trust them. They're not professional security providers, and they have a lot of other things to do. So I wouldn't use my LJ authentication when there was money on the line, but it would be fine to use it for my Slashdot login.
You get to put all your eggs in one basket, and then make sure it's a really good basket. But you and I aren't required to put out eggs in the same basket, so if I use ReallySecureID.com and it gets hacked, your login at NoSeriouslyTotallySecureID.com will still be safe.
And more importantly, we'd no longer be trusting each and every web site we dealt with to be safe with our passwords.
We're against all possibility of errors. Defensive programming, dontcha know.
So like good programmers, we're going to leave the current version in place (no matter how buggy it is) rather than upgrade to something else with different bugs until we've got every last possible bug worked out.
There are even more talented artists out there than American Idol suggests. American Idol has a very strict age cutoff, precisely because they're trying to produce stars rather than musicians, and stars start young. Experienced, talented musicians over 30 need not apply.
I've never been 100% clear on this. Is the weak force really infinite but just drops off to effectively-zero faster than electricity and gravity to?
At least, that was the way I thought of it. You're saying (if I get it) that because the mediating particles are massful rather than massless, they're limited to sublight speeds. That is intriguing, but I don't quite follow the implications.
I've never seen an equation for weak or strong interactions corresponding to the Maxwell or Newton/Einstein equations for electricity and gravity. Is that because we just don't model weak force as a field because the particles don't move fast enough?
Slashdot Mirror
As usual, a one-paragraph description of a patent covers exactly the parts that are prior art without actually pointing out the new parts.
The novel bits include:
* Being able to advertise things based on the profile of your friends. You may have forgotten to put "skydiving" in your list of interests, but if a dozen of your friends also have "skydiving", you might be in the target market.
* Saving money by advertising only to certain valuable people, not just those with interests but those who know a lot of others with those interests. Why pay for 1,000 ad impressions when 10 would do?
Patents are hard to read, but I recommend skipping the abstract and the claims and going ahead to the description. You'll learn a lot more.
The article is basically attacking a misconception about the Long Tail. It's a misconception that goes all the way back to Chris Anderson's book.
It is possible to get rich from the Long Tail. Amazon does it. ITunes Music Store does it.
What's lacking in the book is pointing out that the *content creators* don't get rich. The Net means you can now eke out a tiny amount of cash by delivering your content to people. And in aggregate, that's a lot of money. But for each individual artist, it's not much.
It doesn't mean the end of blockbusters, because people LIKE blockbusters. It means that you have more alternatives, so you can see something else, but in general, you won't. Most people like what most people like. Duh. The additional cash that goes to the "long tail" artists does make them a bit less profitable, but there's still plenty of profit in them.
So the Long Tail doesn't mean that your rock band is going to be as rich as Van Halen. It means that you can make a few hundred bucks, but it's not going to make you a living, much less a superstar.
Anderson completely missed this fact. He was all rah-rah about what it meant for consumers (who have more options) and big retailers (who make big money on small margins) but paid zero attention to the artists, who get tiny wins but not big wins.
It's the ultimate evil font only because they retired Zapf Chancery's jersey number. That was one evil, evil overused font.
Thanks. I'm out of mod points, but it's very nice to get real knowledge from the source. This is the sort of thing that keeps me coming back to Slashdot. Thanks for sharing it.
The problem, in this case, is the definition of "there".
The administration was trying to play funny games with the semantics. If they were held in the US, they'd certainly be "there". If they were held in Afghanistan, they'd be granted access to the Afghan courts, at least under whatever agreement we had with them. (We're trying to negotiate that same kind of agreement in Iraq right now, and they're balking.)
So... they took them to Guantanamo, where we have a weird perpetual lease where the Cuban law doesn't apply either. The administration thought it found a chunk of the planet where no rules whatsoever applied but was under our control.
The Court here is saying that that's rubbish, and I agree with them.
I wonder if they can move them to a battleship somewhere in international waters, and see if that counts. Probably that's already been settled, or they'd have tried it already.
And 1.01 seconds is a VERY long time in the 400 meters. In a race at this level, it's the difference between first and last place.
There are very few good critics, but they do exist.
A good critic is somebody capable of explaining what it is they're seeing, why they liked it and why they didn't. It's much more useful than "I liked it so you will to." Few reviewers even try. Most reviews are:
* 1 paragraph of introduction, usually with a "clever" hook to keep the reader reading
* N paragraphs of plot summary
* 1 paragraph of review for the actors, writer, and director.
* 1 paragraph of review for the tech
The N paragraphs of plot summary have no business in a critique. If there's any value, it's in the last two paragraphs, but few reviewers have the vaguest idea how a movie is made, so they can't tell you what it is they're looking at.
They regularly ding actors for bad dialogue or bad sound, and praise mediocre but flashy performances. They don't know how the music, lighting, editing, etc. interact to make a moment work or fail. They don't know how movies influence each other or the dialogue that creates between directors and intended audiences.
For a critic who can actually do all that, such as the late Pauline Kael, it hardly matters whether they recommend the film or not, and it certainly doesn't matter how many stars they give it. Read the review and you'll know if you're seeing skilled filmmaking, and whether it's likely to appeal to you.
And that's NEVER the guy in your local paper.
That's largely how RSS is supposed to work, and I'd like to see more mailing-list situations be replaced by RSS feeds.
To use it for personal mail you'd have to be more selective about authentication,since you don't want just anybody to be able to download mail intended for you.
(I'd also like an RSS feeder which incorporates those feeds into my inbox.)
You still have the usual problems of sorting out spam (black/white/graylist/bayesian), but at least the bandwidth problems would be dramatically reduced.
I've been thinking about something like this for a while. I think about it in terms of OpenID, where you get to define the terms of authentication by running your own server.
Service providers like GMail can turn that around and say, "OK, but we're only going to accept authentication from certain providers, who have confirmed to us one way or another that they reliably identify you as a human."
OpenID separates authentication from the services, so you don't have a single database to be compromised. The most desirable ones (the ones that many service providers will accept) will still be serious targets, and they'll have to be VERY careful to use crypto to keep things safe, but at least it won't be a single point of failure.
It would be up to the individual identity providers to verify your humanity, from really good CAPTCHAs to showing up in person. The good part, though, is that it lets the service providers like GMail outsource the effort, so they can get back to doing what they're good at.
The Globe and Mail isn't exactly Science. It's not even Scientific American.
The article focus almost exclusively on the reactions of people to the news. It mentions a "symposium" but not the name of it or who was holding it.
Presumably, there will be a journal article out of it, and if that article passes peer review, you'll hear from it again. Meantime, dismiss anything scientific you read in the daily papers. They're just astonishingly bad at reporting science.
A bit of googling on the name of the one scientist mentioned in the article suggests that this is the lecture they're talking about.
Especially since they all add weight, and more weight means more fuel. And more fuel means even more fuel, because some of the fuel goes to lifting the rest of the fuel to the point where it's needed.
I don't really notice it when I'm looking at it straight on, but when I catch it in the peripheral vision, it flashes like crazy.
I use an old CRT as a second monitor, and Windows Updates sometimes cause it to reset to a 60Hz refresh for some inane Redmond reason. When it happens I notice it, but when I stare at it it mostly goes away.
Lemme guess... white, middle-class male?
It's so much easier to tell other people that discrimination isn't a problem when it doesn't affect you.
Really, you need to do it the other way around. You tell all your friends that you're john38+yeahreally@gmail.com, and you send anything without the +yeahreally to the bit bucket.
You can even give different people different +extensions, though managing the white list for them gets to be a pain. Especially since your new, improved email addresses will gradually leak into the spam books (everybody's got a friend dumb enough to push the "forward this article to a friend and sign them up for spam for life!") but it gives you some address space to play with even when you don't have direct control over the mail server.
The summary misses the vastly more reasonable figure of 20 euros per month, already available and expected to come down.
The ten euros a day figure is for international roaming, the most expensive kind of access.
The article IS dumb, but it's not as dumb as the summary makes it sound.
A bomb takes out a post office or a truck. A bomb that takes out a tunnel destroys something harder to fix, more expensive, and with national rather than local effects.
Right, but that assumes that such a list exists. There may not actually be such a list, or it may be that the only people on it are non-citizens without the standing to sue.
There may not actually be anybody with the standing to sue, yet. The Bush administration is essentially telling us that there won't ever actually be one, because they're only wiretapping bad guys. The ACLU wants to know how they can know that's true, and they're especially suspicious because the bar to get a warrant isn't terribly high.
If a law permits abuse, but it isn't actually ever abused, is it still unconstitutional? The Court appears to be saying "no".
The list you're seeking may not exist. The smoking gun would be some liberal or Democratic organization whose phones were tapped for purely political reasons.
It's entirely possible that it has never happened. The decision is disturbing because it _enables_ the abuse of power, without actually indicating that the abuse of power has in fact occurred.
Supporters of the warrantless wiretap are basically trusting that it won't occur, and that all warrantless wiretaps are used against valid terrorist targets. The ACLU's claim is that (a) it's illegal anyway, even if used against actual terrorists, and (b) the checks-and-balances are eliminated, making abuses likely simply because they're possible, even if they haven't happened.
Justice Roberts has said that he'd rather use the Supreme Court to hear actual cases, rather than hypothetical ones. That makes the ACLU livid, since it can easily be too late by the time an actual abuse has occurred. Roberts says his interpretation of the Constitution ties his hands: no harm means no foul.
Which means that we're back to relying on our faith in individual agents of the US government to tell us if an actual abuse occurs, which is what the checks-and-balances (and the FISA court in particular, in this case) were supposed to prevent.
The best indicator of vaporware seems to be continual postings on Slashdot that something is real.
Given that the Semantic Web is neither Semantic nor Web, I think we've got another data point for that theory.
Very few Libertarians are really libertarians. I'd vote for a libertarian, but I'm very unlikely to vote for a Libertarian.
I'm disappointed in the Slashdot crowd for not recognizing the difference. Of all people, Slashdotters should know what it means to be case-sensitive.
That's right. Democrats have stupid ideas. Republicans have stupid ideas.
So why should they have the lock on everything? Libertarians ALSO have some incredibly stupid ideas, and they should be heard. We might even get a government run by different stupid ideas than we're already running it with.
Trusted providers probably WILL charge for the service. The OpenID scheme considers that a good thing. You get to choose any authenticator you want, and you can decide how hard you want to work on protecting your identity as it relates to any particular web site.
I use Livejournal for my openID, which is fine, but I don't necessarily trust them. They're not professional security providers, and they have a lot of other things to do. So I wouldn't use my LJ authentication when there was money on the line, but it would be fine to use it for my Slashdot login.
You get to put all your eggs in one basket, and then make sure it's a really good basket. But you and I aren't required to put out eggs in the same basket, so if I use ReallySecureID.com and it gets hacked, your login at NoSeriouslyTotallySecureID.com will still be safe.
And more importantly, we'd no longer be trusting each and every web site we dealt with to be safe with our passwords.
We're against all possibility of errors. Defensive programming, dontcha know.
So like good programmers, we're going to leave the current version in place (no matter how buggy it is) rather than upgrade to something else with different bugs until we've got every last possible bug worked out.
There are even more talented artists out there than American Idol suggests. American Idol has a very strict age cutoff, precisely because they're trying to produce stars rather than musicians, and stars start young. Experienced, talented musicians over 30 need not apply.
I've never been 100% clear on this. Is the weak force really infinite but just drops off to effectively-zero faster than electricity and gravity to?
At least, that was the way I thought of it. You're saying (if I get it) that because the mediating particles are massful rather than massless, they're limited to sublight speeds. That is intriguing, but I don't quite follow the implications.
I've never seen an equation for weak or strong interactions corresponding to the Maxwell or Newton/Einstein equations for electricity and gravity. Is that because we just don't model weak force as a field because the particles don't move fast enough?