This headline is misleading. I refuse to RTFA, because I imagine the "10 times as effective" figure comes from the article itself.
Come on, folks. The figures do, in fact, show a 10 times increase in effectiveness between humans and these filters. But what the heck does that mean? I have to question the studies. How did they come up with this 99.84% figure? Does it mean that one person will mis-classify about 16 emails in 10000 (a small number indeed)? Or did one or two outliers taint the data?
The important thing here is that we're comparing three averages. Were the conditions between the trials the same? Were the humans given time limits? Were the accounting methods accurate? Were the spam messages the same?
It's quite possible that these averages were bounded by possible error quantities (they should have been!) and that these were tossed when reporting the numbers to us. This was so that a startling result (10 times as effective as a human) could be shown in a headline. It's all about coming up with a flashy "fact".
It's very easy to make numbers say what you want them to say, so I'd be a little wary of running around to your friends "citing" this 10x improvement figure without doing some deep delving into the processes involved in arriving at the number.
Yeah, I'm dealing with gamma differences in my art, too. Do me a favor and help me study the range of gamma values out there by completing my online gamma test.
make sure your motherboard is not in any contact with the case because of screws
Why? Those metal plates are connected to the ground of the motherboard, which is connected to the ground of the power supply, which (I hope) is connected to the case. No harm done. Probably good for it. I've never had a problem.
Besides, why would motherboard manufacturers specifically make a little metal pad around the screw holes if they didn't expect the screw to be touching it?
A one-time or limited-use PIN is a great idea, but unfortunately, it won't be so simple under the current system...
Unfortunately, the way a PIN is generated is by hashing your bank account number with a special key that only the bank knows. The result is mapped to the digits 0-9 somehow, and that's your PIN.
If a protocol was used in which a hashed or encrypted password was sent to verify credentials, then this is as bad as sending a cleartext password due to replay attacks. Only something like SSH can save you from sniffing.
Hmm... I wonder if your kids read slashdot. Kudos to you for bringing this subject to the site, it's an extremely important thing to talk about.
I'm 21 and only a few years out of the parents' house. I don't plan on having kids, but here go my two cents anyway.
First things first let's look at two possible scenarios:
You don't censor your kids, and they go look at porn.
You censor your kids, and they break your proxy or censorware, or they go to the library, or they go to a friend's house, or they get magazines... and they look at porn.
Like it or not, your kids are going to see it. No question about it. Remember your first nudie mag? Or perhaps it was just a few pictures... Point is, it's perfectly healthy for them to see this stuff. About all you're going to do by making a big deal about it is make them want to see it more. Make a small deal about it so they still get a little excitement, but don't make a huge deal out of it or they're going to end up searching for this stuff out of spite.
Now, (perhaps) more than ever before, it's impossible to completely control what your kids are exposed to. Kids are impressionable, sure, but the way to help shape them right is not to protect them from certain impressions, but rather to add your own where needed. Tell them about porn. Tell them about sex. Please tell them about sex, so they don't end up learning everything they know from the net like I had to.
Don't be shy about telling them all about what they might find on the net. Tell them about pedophiles. Tell them about porn, hell, even show them some if they're still curious. If they see it while you're around, you still have a modicum of control, and you can add your own comments. DON'T demonize it or they'll just want it more.
I suggest as others have that you bring your computers out into the house. I chafed at that as a kid, but without it I probably wouldn't have socialized much with the family. I didn't get a computer with internet in my room until I bought my own and I ran the phone wire and put in a jack myself.
Finally, respect your kids' privacy. There are plenty of things I did, net or otherwise, that the parents Just Didn't Need to Know. Don't watch the screen, they don't want you in on their gossip. Having the computer out in the house will make it so they won't do anything naughty too often; it's limited to when you're not around.
Remember, they will access the darker side of the web, so your job is just to limit it and make it less of a big thing.
Oh, one last thing, don't remove the computers entirely. Giving them internet access gives them a leg up in the world. They'll be tech savvy, probably savvier than you in the future. This is good, this helps them get paid. Learning how to program at age 14 gave me a HUGE advantage at college.
applicants spent at least a hundred hours of their own time
What? I spent, all told, about 3-4 hrs. I got eliminated in the second round, so I did the qualification round (2 problems, 1 hour), the first round (3 problems, 1.5 hrs), and the second round (3 problems, 1.5 hrs). Factor in a little chatting time before and after rounds.
The thing was meant to be a competition, which means you know you're going in with only slight chance of winning anything. I went in for the fun of competing with peers. Note that the problem solutions aren't being harvested and used in Google, the problems aren't like that. It was just a competition.
By the way, it was totally worth it. I won a t-shirt.;)
I may sound conceited or holier-than-thou here, but what if I had to answer no to that question? I imagine if I delved back in my memories for a few hours, I could find something like that situation. But right in the middle of an interview, I really don't think I could come up with something, mostly due to the fact that I have morals.
This question leaves the interviewee in a sticky situation: Come up with an example and you're left trying to defend yourself. Fail to come up with an answer and you look like you're lying. All in all it really isn't too fair of a question.
Now, let me step up and argue the other side of this one for a moment. Sure, gator sucks if it shows up when you don't expect it to, like if some shareware program you download installs it without telling you. However, I recently wanted to encode a DIVX movie. Just one or two, mind you, not a ton of them. So, I went to the DIVX website and downloaded their encoder. They will let you use the decoder for free (or they used to...) but the encoder part costs money. Alternately you can install and use the encoder for free if you agree to let gator on your system.
They're very up front and honest about it: they want money for their software, so either you fork it over or donate your eyeballs. Sounded fair, I didn't intend to have it on there for more than a month or so.
The installer was also very open about the fact that it was installing Gator, and the fact that I'd be seeing ads occasionally. After I installed it, gator came up, and I found a nice little preferences pane. After some digging through "advanced settings" I found out I could make it display ads approximately 1-3 times a week at minimum. I did that, and it never bothered me again. I think I've seen it pop up maybe a few times. I can deinstall it any time.
That won't work so well. They'll still see it spiking occasionally, because the CPU will do things as fast as it can. The point is that they don't NEED it to go as fast as it can, but I'd be willing to bet your little experiment wouldn't quite work.
All it would take would be one little 100% spike and the user would go "See?! I need 3.0ghz!". When possible, rig a demonstration, and when not, at least ensure that chance won't screw you.
Ages ago I saw a bottle of "X-Term Flea and Tick Fogger" in the grocery store. I just had to buy it. I knew xterm had a lot of feature creep... but I had no idea it could get rid of fleas and ticks too!
Sarcasm (as we practice it today) is almost exclusively irony. "Oh, right, that's a GREAT idea." when, in fact, you mean that it's a horrible one, is a good example of one type of irony. You're saying one thing with the intention of conveying the opposite idea. Sarcasm combines irony and insult.
You make some great points, and here's one more to add to the list:
Wireless access kind of needs to be a broadcast medium (how else can it be done?). In, say, an office environment, you set up a network with a switch, so that (ideally) any two communicating parties can get 10mbits/sec. But with a broadcast medium, it's pretty likely that only one person can talk at once. Collisions with the scale of network that eraserewind is talking about would cause a HIDEOUS performance penalty. I suppose that this could be alleviated by using many frequencies dynamically, but I'm still dubious.
Slashdot Mirror
statistics.
This headline is misleading. I refuse to RTFA, because I imagine the "10 times as effective" figure comes from the article itself.
Come on, folks. The figures do, in fact, show a 10 times increase in effectiveness between humans and these filters. But what the heck does that mean? I have to question the studies. How did they come up with this 99.84% figure? Does it mean that one person will mis-classify about 16 emails in 10000 (a small number indeed)? Or did one or two outliers taint the data?
The important thing here is that we're comparing three averages. Were the conditions between the trials the same? Were the humans given time limits? Were the accounting methods accurate? Were the spam messages the same?
It's quite possible that these averages were bounded by possible error quantities (they should have been!) and that these were tossed when reporting the numbers to us. This was so that a startling result (10 times as effective as a human) could be shown in a headline. It's all about coming up with a flashy "fact".
It's very easy to make numbers say what you want them to say, so I'd be a little wary of running around to your friends "citing" this 10x improvement figure without doing some deep delving into the processes involved in arriving at the number.
Everyone seems to be able to say something Informative or Insightful on this topic. Come on. It's just too easy, folks.
Yeah, I'm dealing with gamma differences in my art, too. Do me a favor and help me study the range of gamma values out there by completing my online gamma test.
Why? Those metal plates are connected to the ground of the motherboard, which is connected to the ground of the power supply, which (I hope) is connected to the case. No harm done. Probably good for it. I've never had a problem.
Besides, why would motherboard manufacturers specifically make a little metal pad around the screw holes if they didn't expect the screw to be touching it?
Uhh, in a circle? Right, some nice 3d rotating views of a camera or two exploding.
Great, now you've gone and sent all of SF's slashdotters to this network, it's gonna keel over any second...
You just made a great case for Kermit, but I feel it needs a bit of a summary:
in space, reliability is key
Often triply redundant systems are deployed, and their life expectancy is STILL 5-10 years at best.
A one-time or limited-use PIN is a great idea, but unfortunately, it won't be so simple under the current system...
Unfortunately, the way a PIN is generated is by hashing your bank account number with a special key that only the bank knows. The result is mapped to the digits 0-9 somehow, and that's your PIN.
It ain't going to do you any good, if you can't even spell it.
And what did you say your IP was again...? ;)
If a protocol was used in which a hashed or encrypted password was sent to verify credentials, then this is as bad as sending a cleartext password due to replay attacks. Only something like SSH can save you from sniffing.
This gives a whole new meaning to the spelling error "algorhythm".
I'm 21 and only a few years out of the parents' house. I don't plan on having kids, but here go my two cents anyway.
First things first let's look at two possible scenarios:
- You don't censor your kids, and they go look at porn.
- You censor your kids, and they break your proxy or censorware, or they go to the library, or they go to a friend's house, or they get magazines... and they look at porn.
Like it or not, your kids are going to see it. No question about it. Remember your first nudie mag? Or perhaps it was just a few pictures... Point is, it's perfectly healthy for them to see this stuff. About all you're going to do by making a big deal about it is make them want to see it more. Make a small deal about it so they still get a little excitement, but don't make a huge deal out of it or they're going to end up searching for this stuff out of spite.Now, (perhaps) more than ever before, it's impossible to completely control what your kids are exposed to. Kids are impressionable, sure, but the way to help shape them right is not to protect them from certain impressions, but rather to add your own where needed. Tell them about porn. Tell them about sex. Please tell them about sex, so they don't end up learning everything they know from the net like I had to.
Don't be shy about telling them all about what they might find on the net. Tell them about pedophiles. Tell them about porn, hell, even show them some if they're still curious. If they see it while you're around, you still have a modicum of control, and you can add your own comments. DON'T demonize it or they'll just want it more.
I suggest as others have that you bring your computers out into the house. I chafed at that as a kid, but without it I probably wouldn't have socialized much with the family. I didn't get a computer with internet in my room until I bought my own and I ran the phone wire and put in a jack myself.
Finally, respect your kids' privacy. There are plenty of things I did, net or otherwise, that the parents Just Didn't Need to Know. Don't watch the screen, they don't want you in on their gossip. Having the computer out in the house will make it so they won't do anything naughty too often; it's limited to when you're not around.
Remember, they will access the darker side of the web, so your job is just to limit it and make it less of a big thing.
Oh, one last thing, don't remove the computers entirely. Giving them internet access gives them a leg up in the world. They'll be tech savvy, probably savvier than you in the future. This is good, this helps them get paid. Learning how to program at age 14 gave me a HUGE advantage at college.
applicants spent at least a hundred hours of their own time
;)
What? I spent, all told, about 3-4 hrs. I got eliminated in the second round, so I did the qualification round (2 problems, 1 hour), the first round (3 problems, 1.5 hrs), and the second round (3 problems, 1.5 hrs). Factor in a little chatting time before and after rounds.
The thing was meant to be a competition, which means you know you're going in with only slight chance of winning anything. I went in for the fun of competing with peers. Note that the problem solutions aren't being harvested and used in Google, the problems aren't like that. It was just a competition.
By the way, it was totally worth it. I won a t-shirt.
I may sound conceited or holier-than-thou here, but what if I had to answer no to that question? I imagine if I delved back in my memories for a few hours, I could find something like that situation. But right in the middle of an interview, I really don't think I could come up with something, mostly due to the fact that I have morals.
This question leaves the interviewee in a sticky situation: Come up with an example and you're left trying to defend yourself. Fail to come up with an answer and you look like you're lying. All in all it really isn't too fair of a question.
Now, let me step up and argue the other side of this one for a moment. Sure, gator sucks if it shows up when you don't expect it to, like if some shareware program you download installs it without telling you. However, I recently wanted to encode a DIVX movie. Just one or two, mind you, not a ton of them. So, I went to the DIVX website and downloaded their encoder. They will let you use the decoder for free (or they used to...) but the encoder part costs money. Alternately you can install and use the encoder for free if you agree to let gator on your system.
They're very up front and honest about it: they want money for their software, so either you fork it over or donate your eyeballs. Sounded fair, I didn't intend to have it on there for more than a month or so.
The installer was also very open about the fact that it was installing Gator, and the fact that I'd be seeing ads occasionally. After I installed it, gator came up, and I found a nice little preferences pane. After some digging through "advanced settings" I found out I could make it display ads approximately 1-3 times a week at minimum. I did that, and it never bothered me again. I think I've seen it pop up maybe a few times. I can deinstall it any time.
So what's the big deal?
That won't work so well. They'll still see it spiking occasionally, because the CPU will do things as fast as it can. The point is that they don't NEED it to go as fast as it can, but I'd be willing to bet your little experiment wouldn't quite work.
All it would take would be one little 100% spike and the user would go "See?! I need 3.0ghz!". When possible, rig a demonstration, and when not, at least ensure that chance won't screw you.
Ages ago I saw a bottle of "X-Term Flea and Tick Fogger" in the grocery store. I just had to buy it. I knew xterm had a lot of feature creep... but I had no idea it could get rid of fleas and ticks too!
Frankly, I thought it was rather childish and accomplished nothing.
In the article, which I read to clear up the confusion previously stated.
You insensitive Slashdot-centric clod.
This one had me boggling for a second. 500 million computers sold in the US? Maybe it means in the world...
Or CERT to boost web server security?
Sarcasm (as we practice it today) is almost exclusively irony. "Oh, right, that's a GREAT idea." when, in fact, you mean that it's a horrible one, is a good example of one type of irony. You're saying one thing with the intention of conveying the opposite idea. Sarcasm combines irony and insult.
Isn't that hypocritical? It'd be irony if we were actually purposefully inserting grammar errors to make a point or something stupid like that.
You make some great points, and here's one more to add to the list:
Wireless access kind of needs to be a broadcast medium (how else can it be done?). In, say, an office environment, you set up a network with a switch, so that (ideally) any two communicating parties can get 10mbits/sec. But with a broadcast medium, it's pretty likely that only one person can talk at once. Collisions with the scale of network that eraserewind is talking about would cause a HIDEOUS performance penalty. I suppose that this could be alleviated by using many frequencies dynamically, but I'm still dubious.