Re:One of the best things Google/GMail could do
on
Gmail Spam Filter Testing
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It may not increase false negatives, but it has decent chances of increasing false positives which is a much greater problem. My best guess is that spammers are hoping that once enough random words are classified as spam words, real emails with those words will start being classified as spam. If they can force enough false positives, people will start turning off bayesian filtering.
What does this package have that makes it any better than dmake(distributed make)? Convincing anyone that uses linux to go with a $750 product over an open source one seems silly, if they were going to do that they wouldn't be using linux in the first place.
Maybe because most open source people (me included) tend not to like flash?????
More importantly, the open source people with the technical skills to write a flash implementation are not interested in it. The Macromedia developers that developed Flash probably don't use it much either, but they were paid to do it. In the open source community people write things that will benefit them, and the people who want a free version of Flash tend to be the kind that are not able to write one, whereas the people who are able to write it are not that interested.
Re:He really isn't a nut
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
However travelling into the past _is_ a big deal
Not really, the book deals with traveling into the past as well. Yes there are many questions that arise from backwards time travel, but they are questions about what will happen, not how to do it. We know the basic methods of how to send somthing back in time, we just can't afford it right now.
He really isn't a nut
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Time travel isn't that big a deal, I mean come on, when you can get a book on How To Build a Time Machine at your local bookstore why are people so amazed at this? The book is real, and it is a serious book (it is not to be confused with the children's book with the same title published previously). The author explains that we know how to travel through time, it is just really expensive at this point. It is a budgetry problem, not a science problem.
Re:He's either a fruit that's a little nutty...
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2, Interesting
C'mon, any 15-year-old who daydreamed in math class knows that we will NEVER be able to send people back in time, for the simple reason that we'd have met them already.
That is not true at all. We haven't met any time travelers because you can not send anything back to before the machine is built. To go back 10 years you need to run a time machine for at least 10 years. All that is happening is that it opens a wormhole to itself, you can not just open one to any time in the past. (This might sound like sci-fi BS, but this comes from actual scientists)
Ha, I wish. I'll admit, Windows XP is a great leap for MS, it's acutally a decent OS, but you go a little far saying that. I recently upgraded my parent's computer from 98SE to XP, and it hung at the step of determining system compatibility for over 6 hours. The machine was only about 3-4 years old, which I think is a reasonable age to expect a current OS on. That same weekend I installed Debian on an 8 year old box with no problems.
People take one look and say screw that, I'm not running that outdated distro.
Who cares? Which should they care more about, making a stable high-quality distribution, or how many people use it? One of the benefits of Debian being non-profit is that they don't have to worry about market share, they can concentrate on improving the system. Debian unstable is far more stable than any "stable" release on RedHat or Madrake that I have used. Does the naming system hurt Debian's public image? Yes. Does it hurt the system? No, and that's what's important.
I actually had trouble with this in Potato over the weekend, and I found something interesting. While all the mirrors (that mirrored source packages as well) had the pine source in there archives, the package listing did not list it. I don't really know why this would happen, but I checked around and found a mirror that had it listed and used that one.
Why would any developer include packages when latest versions can be downloaded from the official web sites?
Why? I have about one thousand packages installed on my computer, it would be impossible to keep track of them all and update each one individually. Instead a simple "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" will do it for me. Yes there are times that I do not have the most current version, but I have the added benefit that the packages are checked for compatibility before they are put in. On my boxes running unstable, I often get programs updated before my friends who run other distros because they haven't even heard that a new version came out. I used to be hesitant to a system like debian's too, but after using it for a week or two I don't ever want to go back.
I have never used a CD from a book either. The number of people who would buy a technical book and not have internet access to download anything that would have been put on the CD is probably small enough not to be worth distributing one. Other than that what would be the benefit of a CD?
not one that you would want...
on
30-pin SIMMs
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· Score: 2
I have a 1MB 30 pin SIMM, but I don't think you would want it. I use it as a keychain:) all the memory chips have fallen off since I bought it though.
It was assumed that this was due to our "excellent" hand-eye co-ordination, but this experiment seems to show that instead we're predicting the motion in a gravity field. It shouldn't have taken 15 days for the astronauts to learn to adjust if they were really following the movement of the ball.
You are jumping to conclusions there. Even if you are right about the ability to catch being inherent rather than learned (I have doubts that it is. Don't believe everything you read.) it would have little bearing on this experiment. To test what you claim is true, you would need to have people who have not been catching under earth's gravity for the past X years try to catch in zero G. It is entirely possible that catching is inherent, yet because these scientists have been exposed to it for so long, they have also learned what to expect, and that may be why it took them longer to re-learn to catch. Someone with no experience catching under gravity may have been able to learn it more quickly.
He is not paying for internet access, he is paying to go to college. Just because some of that money goes to cover the costs of internet service does not mean that he is entitled to the service from them. He pays the same amount as someone who does not use the school's internet connection.
I expect them to respond in a manner befitting an ISP
They should not have to behave like an ISP, they are not an ISP. As much as he, you, or I do not like it (yes, I don't like it either, but it is the truth) they are an "organization who just happened to bless [him] with a connection." He is paying them for an education, and they happen to give him an internet connection as well, they certainly do not have to.
I know this isn't exactly what you are looking for, but I remember SAT prep books that teach you to read the first line of every paragraph to get a quick summary. Granted it works better for the SATs than it does IRL, but it often works pretty well and it's better than nothing. You could whip up a simple perl script to extract the first line of each paragraph in no time.
Re:Dirty Pool! But also confusing.
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's not a ploy, it's an assurance. Before the FSF is going to commit money and resources to defending a project, they want some proof that the author is truely commited to Free Software. Authors have refused to persue GPL violations in the past, and the FSF doesn't want to let authors pick and choose who can violate the GPL. They also do not want to defend a project that could potentially change it's liscence and become proprietary software sometime in the future. As long as the FSF holds the copyright that can't happen.
So while you are right, they could defend people without assigning copyright to them, they are trying to protect the interests of Free Software, and protect hemselves from being abused.
Where on earth are you pulling this scenario from? Just about every GPL violation I have seen on/. has been resolved in favor of the GPL. Do you remember one that hasn't?
Well, you beat me to it. The DMCS was the fisrt thing I thought of too when I read that. When will lawmakers start to realize how mony things that used to be cinsiddered good for innovation are now illegal. Who needs progress, right?
Yes, that's censorship. Again, an ISP is not a citizen. An ISP's server is not an individual's computer.
When you run Peek-A-Booty, or any proxy, you are acting as an ISP for the people using your proxy to access the internet. Just because you give it away for free does not mean you are not an ISP.
You seem to carry the misconception that my not participating in this program means I am somehow actively blocking them from accessing their destinations. This is completely wrong. I am merely choosing not to allow my personal equipment be used as an avenue for them.
No, I never said that. I am not saying that not running Peek-A-Booty is opressing or censoring anything. I am saying that running Peek-A-Booty and filtering out certain types of material is censorship.
You need to make the distinction between the rights of a person, and that of governments and corporations.
I have said nothing about rights, or even what is right or wrong to to. All I am saying is that it is hypocritical to censor anti-censorship software. You have the right to do it, but it is still hypocritical.
Because, it's my fucking computer. The government has nothing to do with my computer or my decisions not support something. You seem to have people and government confused.
If an ISP decided to block sites they did not like, would that not be censorship? They are not a government, it is their "fucking computer", so by your argument it is not censorship. You seem to have government censorship and censorship in general confused.
Your argument is ridiculous. Would you give a neo-nazi group, or perhaps a coprophiliac web space on your server? Probably not.
I am not giving out web space in the name of free speech or anti-censorship, but if I was, I would most certainly give them the space. You want to give access in the name of anti-censorship, and then you want to censor that access. If that is not hypocritical then I do not know what is. Remember that China views freedom-fighters the way you view nazis.
A person is not a government. A person can exercise their freedom of choice, and their opinions, and my opinion is that I simply do not want to support some causes. I am not oppressing them by not supporting them.
Yes you are oppressing them. Not supporting them, and specificly blocking them are different things, and you want to specificly block them. You have every right to block their traffic through your computer, but do not say you are against censorship if you do that. China does not support people promoting freedom, so they block it, the same way you want to block things you do not promote. It does not matter that they are a government and you are not, it is still oppression. You are abusing your power as someone who can grant access to otherwise blocked material to promote your values to the people that want to use your system, which is exactly what China is doing.
I'd be glad to assist those who are oppressed, but WILL NOT help sexual predators and the like.
Yeah! It horrible that a government should tell people what is right and wrong to look at, but it's fine when I tell them!
Why is it right to censor kiddie porn but not other things? You are not really against censorship if you believe that it is, you just disagree with what should be censored.
Re:New trend in /. posting?
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Just because he doesn't fully explain the workings of a technological idea he has does not mean they are not tech, he is a writer not an engineer. If everything he wrote about was technologicly possible he would not be an author, he would be making billions off his inventions.
His media system is not perfect, but it follows some of the same principles that this new sofware follows. The Diamond Age was published in Feb 1995, if you can even remotely describe a technology that will not be invented for 7 years I will be impressed, even if you don't work out all the bugs right now.
Another Diamond Age prediction true?
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Doen't this system remind anyone of the media network in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age? Information gets passed from one place to another by different people, so that no one can tell where the person on the other end is. Looks like another one of Stephenson's ideas has become a reality.
Slashdot Mirror
It may not increase false negatives, but it has decent chances of increasing false positives which is a much greater problem. My best guess is that spammers are hoping that once enough random words are classified as spam words, real emails with those words will start being classified as spam. If they can force enough false positives, people will start turning off bayesian filtering.
Badgers? We don't need no stinking badgers!
What does this package have that makes it any better than dmake(distributed make)? Convincing anyone that uses linux to go with a $750 product over an open source one seems silly, if they were going to do that they wouldn't be using linux in the first place.
Maybe because most open source people (me included) tend not to like flash?????
More importantly, the open source people with the technical skills to write a flash implementation are not interested in it. The Macromedia developers that developed Flash probably don't use it much either, but they were paid to do it. In the open source community people write things that will benefit them, and the people who want a free version of Flash tend to be the kind that are not able to write one, whereas the people who are able to write it are not that interested.
However travelling into the past _is_ a big deal
Not really, the book deals with traveling into the past as well. Yes there are many questions that arise from backwards time travel, but they are questions about what will happen, not how to do it. We know the basic methods of how to send somthing back in time, we just can't afford it right now.
Time travel isn't that big a deal, I mean come on, when you can get a book on How To Build a Time Machine at your local bookstore why are people so amazed at this? The book is real, and it is a serious book (it is not to be confused with the children's book with the same title published previously). The author explains that we know how to travel through time, it is just really expensive at this point. It is a budgetry problem, not a science problem.
C'mon, any 15-year-old who daydreamed in math class knows that we will NEVER be able to send people back in time, for the simple reason that we'd have met them already.
That is not true at all. We haven't met any time travelers because you can not send anything back to before the machine is built. To go back 10 years you need to run a time machine for at least 10 years. All that is happening is that it opens a wormhole to itself, you can not just open one to any time in the past. (This might sound like sci-fi BS, but this comes from actual scientists)
4. Insert Windows XP CD
5. Install effortlessly
Ha, I wish. I'll admit, Windows XP is a great leap for MS, it's acutally a decent OS, but you go a little far saying that. I recently upgraded my parent's computer from 98SE to XP, and it hung at the step of determining system compatibility for over 6 hours. The machine was only about 3-4 years old, which I think is a reasonable age to expect a current OS on. That same weekend I installed Debian on an 8 year old box with no problems.
People take one look and say screw that, I'm not running that outdated distro.
Who cares? Which should they care more about, making a stable high-quality distribution, or how many people use it? One of the benefits of Debian being non-profit is that they don't have to worry about market share, they can concentrate on improving the system. Debian unstable is far more stable than any "stable" release on RedHat or Madrake that I have used. Does the naming system hurt Debian's public image? Yes. Does it hurt the system? No, and that's what's important.
I actually had trouble with this in Potato over the weekend, and I found something interesting. While all the mirrors (that mirrored source packages as well) had the pine source in there archives, the package listing did not list it. I don't really know why this would happen, but I checked around and found a mirror that had it listed and used that one.
Why would any developer include packages when latest versions can be downloaded from the official web sites?
Why? I have about one thousand packages installed on my computer, it would be impossible to keep track of them all and update each one individually. Instead a simple "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" will do it for me. Yes there are times that I do not have the most current version, but I have the added benefit that the packages are checked for compatibility before they are put in. On my boxes running unstable, I often get programs updated before my friends who run other distros because they haven't even heard that a new version came out. I used to be hesitant to a system like debian's too, but after using it for a week or two I don't ever want to go back.
I have never used a CD from a book either. The number of people who would buy a technical book and not have internet access to download anything that would have been put on the CD is probably small enough not to be worth distributing one. Other than that what would be the benefit of a CD?
I have a 1MB 30 pin SIMM, but I don't think you would want it. I use it as a keychain :) all the memory chips have fallen off since I bought it though.
It was assumed that this was due to our "excellent" hand-eye co-ordination, but this experiment seems to show that instead we're predicting the motion in a gravity field. It shouldn't have taken 15 days for the astronauts to learn to adjust if they were really following the movement of the ball.
You are jumping to conclusions there. Even if you are right about the ability to catch being inherent rather than learned (I have doubts that it is. Don't believe everything you read.) it would have little bearing on this experiment. To test what you claim is true, you would need to have people who have not been catching under earth's gravity for the past X years try to catch in zero G. It is entirely possible that catching is inherent, yet because these scientists have been exposed to it for so long, they have also learned what to expect, and that may be why it took them longer to re-learn to catch. Someone with no experience catching under gravity may have been able to learn it more quickly.
This is just like that episode of the Simpsons where Flanders builds the statue of Maude and there is a gas leak that makes everyone see visions.
It is if you pay for it.
He is not paying for internet access, he is paying to go to college. Just because some of that money goes to cover the costs of internet service does not mean that he is entitled to the service from them. He pays the same amount as someone who does not use the school's internet connection.
I expect them to respond in a manner befitting an ISP
They should not have to behave like an ISP, they are not an ISP. As much as he, you, or I do not like it (yes, I don't like it either, but it is the truth) they are an "organization who just happened to bless [him] with a connection." He is paying them for an education, and they happen to give him an internet connection as well, they certainly do not have to.
I know this isn't exactly what you are looking for, but I remember SAT prep books that teach you to read the first line of every paragraph to get a quick summary. Granted it works better for the SATs than it does IRL, but it often works pretty well and it's better than nothing. You could whip up a simple perl script to extract the first line of each paragraph in no time.
It's not a ploy, it's an assurance. Before the FSF is going to commit money and resources to defending a project, they want some proof that the author is truely commited to Free Software. Authors have refused to persue GPL violations in the past, and the FSF doesn't want to let authors pick and choose who can violate the GPL. They also do not want to defend a project that could potentially change it's liscence and become proprietary software sometime in the future. As long as the FSF holds the copyright that can't happen.
So while you are right, they could defend people without assigning copyright to them, they are trying to protect the interests of Free Software, and protect hemselves from being abused.
Where on earth are you pulling this scenario from? Just about every GPL violation I have seen on /. has been resolved in favor of the GPL. Do you remember one that hasn't?
Well, you beat me to it. The DMCS was the fisrt thing I thought of too when I read that. When will lawmakers start to realize how mony things that used to be cinsiddered good for innovation are now illegal. Who needs progress, right?
Yes, that's censorship. Again, an ISP is not a citizen. An ISP's server is not an individual's computer.
When you run Peek-A-Booty, or any proxy, you are acting as an ISP for the people using your proxy to access the internet. Just because you give it away for free does not mean you are not an ISP.
You seem to carry the misconception that my not participating in this program means I am somehow actively blocking them from accessing their destinations. This is completely wrong. I am merely choosing not to allow my personal equipment be used as an avenue for them.
No, I never said that. I am not saying that not running Peek-A-Booty is opressing or censoring anything. I am saying that running Peek-A-Booty and filtering out certain types of material is censorship.
You need to make the distinction between the rights of a person, and that of governments and corporations.
I have said nothing about rights, or even what is right or wrong to to. All I am saying is that it is hypocritical to censor anti-censorship software. You have the right to do it, but it is still hypocritical.
Because, it's my fucking computer. The government has nothing to do with my computer or my decisions not support something. You seem to have people and government confused.
If an ISP decided to block sites they did not like, would that not be censorship? They are not a government, it is their "fucking computer", so by your argument it is not censorship. You seem to have government censorship and censorship in general confused.
Your argument is ridiculous. Would you give a neo-nazi group, or perhaps a coprophiliac web space on your server? Probably not.
I am not giving out web space in the name of free speech or anti-censorship, but if I was, I would most certainly give them the space. You want to give access in the name of anti-censorship, and then you want to censor that access. If that is not hypocritical then I do not know what is. Remember that China views freedom-fighters the way you view nazis.
A person is not a government. A person can exercise their freedom of choice, and their opinions, and my opinion is that I simply do not want to support some causes. I am not oppressing them by not supporting them.
Yes you are oppressing them. Not supporting them, and specificly blocking them are different things, and you want to specificly block them. You have every right to block their traffic through your computer, but do not say you are against censorship if you do that. China does not support people promoting freedom, so they block it, the same way you want to block things you do not promote. It does not matter that they are a government and you are not, it is still oppression. You are abusing your power as someone who can grant access to otherwise blocked material to promote your values to the people that want to use your system, which is exactly what China is doing.
I'd be glad to assist those who are oppressed, but WILL NOT help sexual predators and the like.
Yeah! It horrible that a government should tell people what is right and wrong to look at, but it's fine when I tell them!
Why is it right to censor kiddie porn but not other things? You are not really against censorship if you believe that it is, you just disagree with what should be censored.
Just because he doesn't fully explain the workings of a technological idea he has does not mean they are not tech, he is a writer not an engineer. If everything he wrote about was technologicly possible he would not be an author, he would be making billions off his inventions.
His media system is not perfect, but it follows some of the same principles that this new sofware follows. The Diamond Age was published in Feb 1995, if you can even remotely describe a technology that will not be invented for 7 years I will be impressed, even if you don't work out all the bugs right now.
Doen't this system remind anyone of the media network in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age? Information gets passed from one place to another by different people, so that no one can tell where the person on the other end is. Looks like another one of Stephenson's ideas has become a reality.