The basic gist is that google flags pages as more important (or higher relevance) if they have more links pointing to them...so the CoS makes thousands of spam pages that points at its main pages. Google sees the thousands of links, assigns the main CoS pages a high relevance, and thus they're the first to come up in any scientology-related search.
The moral being, for any new cool search technique devised to help fetch more relevant content, there'll be someone out there looking for a way to defeat it.
Re:complexity of supercomputers approaching brain
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
Things like ESP, precognition, and yes, even magick we don't have the foggiest clue how that stuff works, even though there is documented evidence that it *does* work.
Hey, if you have this documented evidence, why not make yourself rich and take the Amazing Randi's Million Dollar Challenge?
http://www.randi.org/research/index.html
How many psychics with precognition predicted September 11th, arguably the defining moment of 2001 (at least for Americans)?
Cruel.com said it best: "All Your Domain Are Belong To Us"
In 1990, Chip Rosenthal registered unicom.com for Unicom Systems Development. Eleven years later, Unicom Systems sued him for infringing a trademark it registered in 1997, relying on a unique legal theory involving a breach of the space-time continuum. (12-31)
Ironically, I believe that the libertarian view is that private lawsuits[...]
Wouldn't "private lawsuits" require the government meddling in the affairs of business? Wasn't this whole shebang started because of lawsuits lodged by various parties against Microsoft?
(I'm not trying to argue, here, just to understand. I was under the impression that the Libertarian platform was no government except for a military for national defense, a police force/courts for personal (ie, non-corporate) crimes, and the minimum personnel required to collect taxes to pay for the above.)
allow licenses and agreements that allow public disclosure (the software licensing that prevents printing of statistics, for example)
I don't get this part; did you mean disallow public disclosure?
The fact is that in a free market such labels would already exist, because consumers would demand them!
Oh, they would?
Let's suppose that you're right, and the consumers do demand nutritional labels. Without government intervention, what keeps the business from simply lying ("Hey, look! This Cinna-sugar-pecan-fudge-bun has zero fat and only ten calories!")? Sure, someone might decide something was suspicious and do their own tests...but probably not. Who's going to pay for these tests? Consumers? Nah. Reporters? Perhaps, but the company in question could just pay the reporter's company more to keep them quiet. And finally, even if it somehow comes to light, and consumers lose confidence in that company, it can simply reinvent itself under another brand.
And I noticed you bypassed the other items. Let us look to history. Did seatbelts come about because consumers demanded them? No. Well, surely consumer demand must have put a stop to waste dumping. Oh, no, it hasn't done that either...
Now, I'll admit: in the macroscopic, long term view (and by this I mean "in the 100+ year timeline"), consumer demand may or may not have the desired effect on the marketplace, in its inefficient fashion, because consumer demand is as inefficient as evolution: if you give it long enough, it'll get the job done, but there will be plenty of mistakes along the way, and you'll be dead by the time the desired result comes to pass.
Government has no business interfering with the market!
Yep. I dream of the day when food products no longer need to have those annoyingly informative nutritional labels upon them. I yearn for when we can break free of the schackles imposed upon us by "truth in advertising". I'll lead the parade when we get rid of "safety standards". I'll...
I mean, really. This isn't flamebait. I read the article, and the only thing about Java (or, more precisely, Java coders) that I found in it was that, man, Java coders are religious about their language (which could be said about any language), and Java runs slowly (which is true, but not a new observation).
The rest was all quite rambling about different OSes for no particular reason that I could discern.
Why should I spend money to get music as files that won't play on my Nomad or Archos Jukebox?
I'm all for giving the artists a cut of the subscription, or on a per-download basis, or what have you, but if it's in this "secure" format then it becomes worthless to me.
The article says, in summary, "Ion Storm was a great place to work, and everything was good, until people started attacking them, and then it all went to crap."
Which is, well, debatable. I mean, Daikatana didn't get bad reviews because people wanted to slam Ion Storm; it got bad reviews because it bit. If it had been good, it would've gotten good reviews, regardless of people's like or dislike of Ion Storm. They overreached and failed, end of story.
Of course, my personal dislike of Ion Storm comes from the (admittedly irrational) belief that the money Eidos gave for Daikatana would've been much better spent on Looking Glass Studios.
RichFX, based in New York City, is developing the "virtual gift exchange". The service allows someone to send a virtual greeting card with details of the gift. If it is not up to scratch, the recipient can exchange it for another one at the same store, before it ever gets shipped.
In other news, it was determined that if you told someone what you were going to get them for Christmas before actually buying it, or, better yet, brought them along when you bought their gift, returns and exchanges could be reduced to almost nil.
The OP probably started at 2 (possible to do once your karma reaches a certain score), so the mods that you saw (starts at 2, +1, +1, +6, -5) equaled 5 (not +5, just 5)
Your last point (new computer users want just one way to do it) is the heart of what I'm getting at - is "internal consistency" (using middle-mouse only or CTRL-C, CTRL-V only for cut-n-paste) something that users of an open-source OS really want?
Well, personally, I want everything done my way. =P I, for instance, don't like to use the mouse, and if CTRL-C copies highlighted text in all the applications I use and CTRL-V pastes it, I'm a happy person. I'm not tied to CTRL-C and CTRL-V (that's just what Windows uses, so everyone else does too), but I would like it to be consistent. IMO, the best way to handle this would be to allow the universal keystrokes to be definable so that I could make, say, CTRL-P be the "paste" shortcut in all of my applications. The OS (or it's GUI shell) would catch the preferred keystroke and pass on system-defined messages, which the applications would look for, instead of keystrokes. Not going to happen anytime soon, but still nice to think about.
As to making Linux internally consistent: I'd like it to be so, yes. I prefer that all of my computer knowledge become obsolete only with major upgrades, as opposed to each time I install a new application.
Maybe "internal consistency" is something that a mass-marketed OS might want, but for the legions of DIY'ers out there, is this something to be worried about in an open-source OS?
Internal consistency isn't about making your desktop look like the next guy's -- it's about making the way the user interface works consistent. Experts tend to overlook this, but it's important when introducing someone new to computers.
You may or may not have used DOS systems, but every application in DOS that had a GUI looked (and worked) differently. Some had mouse support, some didn't. Some had menubars, some didn't. Some would use accelerator keys (Alt+whatever), some wouldn't. Some would have right-click context menus, some wouldn't. One of the ideas behind a good OS is that all of that would be consistent: all windows should resize the same way, so that once you learn how to resize one window, you know how to resize them all. That sort of thing. The point of the quote was that, since Linux apps are written by lots of people with little in the way of an overseeing body, it won't have the consistency that a "monolithic" OS might.
Ok. There's ~20 some posts here, and already the site is Slashdotted. Which is too bad, because I was interested in reading the article. So instead of commenting on it, I guess I'll have to settle for commenting on Slashdot's lack of caching.
In the FAQ, Taco says that he doesn't want to cache because the website might update it's data, and then Slashdot's cache would be out of date. Well, sure, valid: I would rather have up-to-date data than out-of-date data. But I would also have out-of-date data compared to no data. If you offer the original link and a cache link, at least I get a choice. As it is now, no choice.
Of course, what happens now is that someone will find a mirror or a Google cache and post it (eventually). So the end result is that the Slashdot community still gets out-of-date information, but they get it later than they would normally.
Well, if you assume that the company in question is actually selling something, and to actually sell something has some method in which they can be contacted or traced, then the collection problem becomes easier.
Records are kept of who pays for that 1-800 number, or who signed up for that AOL account, after all. Sure, you might not get 100% collection if these are fly-by-night operations, but you should get enough that others start thinking twice.
Sure. If every single person you know is as clueful as you, that'll work fine.
Heavens forbid, though, that you have some relative who is not as good with computers, or (more likely) a coworker. If the worm spreads like most other recent ones (via the Address Book), you'll get the message from someone you know.
You could just delete all suspicious messages without reading them, of course. It would certainly save time, but I somehow doubt it'd be a good thing to do.
When you download something from a webpage (anything: HTML file, WAV file, TXT file, etc), you get a bunch of headers before the download. The browsers hide this from you, though most have options to see this information (exception, I believe, IE). It's pretty standard stuff (server type, info about caching, etc), but one of the header bits is 'content-type'
So, anyways, if you can change the content-type for a file type (trivial to do in Apache in the conf/mime.types file), you can get IE to download the file without regarding it as what it really is. Eg, even if the file is called 'goner.exe', if your web server swears the content-type is 'text/html', then IE won't pop up the application download box (the one that asks if you want to save or run), even though (and this is the important bit) the file is called 'goner.exe'
Now, this would be fine if it was consistent. However, we all know that explorer (not IE) runs off of file extensions, and the problem comes into focus.
And time exactly how long it takes for someone to make a virus out of this li'l puppy.
The best(?) part being that, after years of telling users that to get a virus via Outlook they had to click the attachment, it seems to be possible to write an executable-disguised-as-HTML message that will automatically execute, since there's no option to turn off HTML viewing in Outlook.
Watch out for the lighting. I have worked in places where the lighting was both overly bright and too dim -- both of those states are hard to notice to begin with, but after a few weeks your eyes will really start to ache halfway through the day. If the lighting is too dim, like your question indicates, bringing in some indirect lighting (one of those floor lamps that opens towards the ceiling) might do the trick.
As simple as it may sound, make sure you've got a good eighteen to twenty-four inches between you and the monitor for most of the day.
If the walls are too dark and providing too much contrast, use posters as another comment suggested, or, alternatively, whiteboards (management loves to see those things around).
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting article here at http://www.operatingthetan.com/google/ about how the Church of Scientology exploits google's ranking system.
The basic gist is that google flags pages as more important (or higher relevance) if they have more links pointing to them...so the CoS makes thousands of spam pages that points at its main pages. Google sees the thousands of links, assigns the main CoS pages a high relevance, and thus they're the first to come up in any scientology-related search.
The moral being, for any new cool search technique devised to help fetch more relevant content, there'll be someone out there looking for a way to defeat it.
Things like ESP, precognition, and yes, even magick we don't have the foggiest clue how that stuff works, even though there is documented evidence that it *does* work.
Hey, if you have this documented evidence, why not make yourself rich and take the Amazing Randi's Million Dollar Challenge?
http://www.randi.org/research/index.html
How many psychics with precognition predicted September 11th, arguably the defining moment of 2001 (at least for Americans)?
Cruel.com said it best: "All Your Domain Are Belong To Us"
In 1990, Chip Rosenthal registered unicom.com for Unicom Systems Development. Eleven years later, Unicom Systems sued him for infringing a trademark it registered in 1997, relying on a unique legal theory involving a breach of the space-time continuum. (12-31)
It's a dolphin. It's associated with SQL.
So you call it 'squealie'. Squealie the Dolphin. See? Rolls off the tongue.
Well, ok, maybe not. How about Sam?
Ironically, I believe that the libertarian view is that private lawsuits[...]
Wouldn't "private lawsuits" require the government meddling in the affairs of business? Wasn't this whole shebang started because of lawsuits lodged by various parties against Microsoft?
(I'm not trying to argue, here, just to understand. I was under the impression that the Libertarian platform was no government except for a military for national defense, a police force/courts for personal (ie, non-corporate) crimes, and the minimum personnel required to collect taxes to pay for the above.)
allow licenses and agreements that allow public disclosure (the software licensing that prevents printing of statistics, for example)
I don't get this part; did you mean disallow public disclosure?
The fact is that in a free market such labels would already exist, because consumers would demand them!
Oh, they would?
Let's suppose that you're right, and the consumers do demand nutritional labels. Without government intervention, what keeps the business from simply lying ("Hey, look! This Cinna-sugar-pecan-fudge-bun has zero fat and only ten calories!")? Sure, someone might decide something was suspicious and do their own tests...but probably not. Who's going to pay for these tests? Consumers? Nah. Reporters? Perhaps, but the company in question could just pay the reporter's company more to keep them quiet. And finally, even if it somehow comes to light, and consumers lose confidence in that company, it can simply reinvent itself under another brand.
And I noticed you bypassed the other items. Let us look to history. Did seatbelts come about because consumers demanded them? No. Well, surely consumer demand must have put a stop to waste dumping. Oh, no, it hasn't done that either...
Now, I'll admit: in the macroscopic, long term view (and by this I mean "in the 100+ year timeline"), consumer demand may or may not have the desired effect on the marketplace, in its inefficient fashion, because consumer demand is as inefficient as evolution: if you give it long enough, it'll get the job done, but there will be plenty of mistakes along the way, and you'll be dead by the time the desired result comes to pass.
Government has no business interfering with the market!
Yep. I dream of the day when food products no longer need to have those annoyingly informative nutritional labels upon them. I yearn for when we can break free of the schackles imposed upon us by "truth in advertising". I'll lead the parade when we get rid of "safety standards". I'll...
Oh, wait. You're a troll. Nevermind.
I mean, really. This isn't flamebait. I read the article, and the only thing about Java (or, more precisely, Java coders) that I found in it was that, man, Java coders are religious about their language (which could be said about any language), and Java runs slowly (which is true, but not a new observation).
The rest was all quite rambling about different OSes for no particular reason that I could discern.
Two words: .NAP files.
Why should I spend money to get music as files that won't play on my Nomad or Archos Jukebox?
I'm all for giving the artists a cut of the subscription, or on a per-download basis, or what have you, but if it's in this "secure" format then it becomes worthless to me.
The article says, in summary, "Ion Storm was a great place to work, and everything was good, until people started attacking them, and then it all went to crap."
Which is, well, debatable. I mean, Daikatana didn't get bad reviews because people wanted to slam Ion Storm; it got bad reviews because it bit. If it had been good, it would've gotten good reviews, regardless of people's like or dislike of Ion Storm. They overreached and failed, end of story.
Of course, my personal dislike of Ion Storm comes from the (admittedly irrational) belief that the money Eidos gave for Daikatana would've been much better spent on Looking Glass Studios.
RichFX, based in New York City, is developing the "virtual gift exchange". The service allows someone to send a virtual greeting card with details of the gift. If it is not up to scratch, the recipient can exchange it for another one at the same store, before it ever gets shipped.
In other news, it was determined that if you told someone what you were going to get them for Christmas before actually buying it, or, better yet, brought them along when you bought their gift, returns and exchanges could be reduced to almost nil.
The OP probably started at 2 (possible to do once your karma reaches a certain score), so the mods that you saw (starts at 2, +1, +1, +6, -5) equaled 5 (not +5, just 5)
Your last point (new computer users want just one way to do it) is the heart of what I'm getting at - is "internal consistency" (using middle-mouse only or CTRL-C, CTRL-V only for cut-n-paste) something that users of an open-source OS really want?
Well, personally, I want everything done my way. =P I, for instance, don't like to use the mouse, and if CTRL-C copies highlighted text in all the applications I use and CTRL-V pastes it, I'm a happy person. I'm not tied to CTRL-C and CTRL-V (that's just what Windows uses, so everyone else does too), but I would like it to be consistent. IMO, the best way to handle this would be to allow the universal keystrokes to be definable so that I could make, say, CTRL-P be the "paste" shortcut in all of my applications. The OS (or it's GUI shell) would catch the preferred keystroke and pass on system-defined messages, which the applications would look for, instead of keystrokes. Not going to happen anytime soon, but still nice to think about.
As to making Linux internally consistent: I'd like it to be so, yes. I prefer that all of my computer knowledge become obsolete only with major upgrades, as opposed to each time I install a new application.
Maybe "internal consistency" is something that a mass-marketed OS might want, but for the legions of DIY'ers out there, is this something to be worried about in an open-source OS?
Internal consistency isn't about making your desktop look like the next guy's -- it's about making the way the user interface works consistent. Experts tend to overlook this, but it's important when introducing someone new to computers.
You may or may not have used DOS systems, but every application in DOS that had a GUI looked (and worked) differently. Some had mouse support, some didn't. Some had menubars, some didn't. Some would use accelerator keys (Alt+whatever), some wouldn't. Some would have right-click context menus, some wouldn't. One of the ideas behind a good OS is that all of that would be consistent: all windows should resize the same way, so that once you learn how to resize one window, you know how to resize them all. That sort of thing. The point of the quote was that, since Linux apps are written by lots of people with little in the way of an overseeing body, it won't have the consistency that a "monolithic" OS might.
Ok. There's ~20 some posts here, and already the site is Slashdotted. Which is too bad, because I was interested in reading the article. So instead of commenting on it, I guess I'll have to settle for commenting on Slashdot's lack of caching.
In the FAQ, Taco says that he doesn't want to cache because the website might update it's data, and then Slashdot's cache would be out of date. Well, sure, valid: I would rather have up-to-date data than out-of-date data. But I would also have out-of-date data compared to no data. If you offer the original link and a cache link, at least I get a choice. As it is now, no choice.
Of course, what happens now is that someone will find a mirror or a Google cache and post it (eventually). So the end result is that the Slashdot community still gets out-of-date information, but they get it later than they would normally.
There. Had my say.
Why don't they simply press up-down-up-down-left-right-A-B and get themselves infinite cash?
Do they cook? Clean?
How much will feeding them / boarding them cost?
Well, if you assume that the company in question is actually selling something, and to actually sell something has some method in which they can be contacted or traced, then the collection problem becomes easier.
Records are kept of who pays for that 1-800 number, or who signed up for that AOL account, after all. Sure, you might not get 100% collection if these are fly-by-night operations, but you should get enough that others start thinking twice.
Didn't know about that. Interesting. Thanks.
Sure. If every single person you know is as clueful as you, that'll work fine.
Heavens forbid, though, that you have some relative who is not as good with computers, or (more likely) a coworker. If the worm spreads like most other recent ones (via the Address Book), you'll get the message from someone you know.
You could just delete all suspicious messages without reading them, of course. It would certainly save time, but I somehow doubt it'd be a good thing to do.
The bug works something like this.
When you download something from a webpage (anything: HTML file, WAV file, TXT file, etc), you get a bunch of headers before the download. The browsers hide this from you, though most have options to see this information (exception, I believe, IE). It's pretty standard stuff (server type, info about caching, etc), but one of the header bits is 'content-type'
So, anyways, if you can change the content-type for a file type (trivial to do in Apache in the conf/mime.types file), you can get IE to download the file without regarding it as what it really is. Eg, even if the file is called 'goner.exe', if your web server swears the content-type is 'text/html', then IE won't pop up the application download box (the one that asks if you want to save or run), even though (and this is the important bit) the file is called 'goner.exe'
Now, this would be fine if it was consistent. However, we all know that explorer (not IE) runs off of file extensions, and the problem comes into focus.
And time exactly how long it takes for someone to make a virus out of this li'l puppy.
The best(?) part being that, after years of telling users that to get a virus via Outlook they had to click the attachment, it seems to be possible to write an executable-disguised-as-HTML message that will automatically execute, since there's no option to turn off HTML viewing in Outlook.
But its primary impact has been practical, not ideological.
Captain Obvious strikes again!
Science is wrong ... therefore the bible must be correct.
You are a troll...therefore, someone will take you seriously.
Watch out for the lighting. I have worked in places where the lighting was both overly bright and too dim -- both of those states are hard to notice to begin with, but after a few weeks your eyes will really start to ache halfway through the day. If the lighting is too dim, like your question indicates, bringing in some indirect lighting (one of those floor lamps that opens towards the ceiling) might do the trick.
As simple as it may sound, make sure you've got a good eighteen to twenty-four inches between you and the monitor for most of the day.
If the walls are too dark and providing too much contrast, use posters as another comment suggested, or, alternatively, whiteboards (management loves to see those things around).