Even if they sound reliable - if you have a scanner that's 99.9% accurate, that means that one person in 1000 has a close enough fingerprint to pretend to be you. Or to put it another way, 10000 Belgians share your fingerprint.
Or to put it a third way, if you have 1000 people authorised to be on site, the odds are that any random who walks up and puts his finger on the scanner will be let right in...
- had an extra track with non-DRM MP3s, OGG, and WMA files?
If they're non-DRM, just let people rip their own. It's unnecessary to waste the space. Anyway, whenever I open up a music CD in Konqueror, I already see a directory full of MP3s, a directory full of OGGs, and a directory full of FLACs, which I can copy stuff out of just fine...
Interest in any given subject guarantees neither intelligence nor expertise in it or any other.
No, but interest in the particular subjects covered on/. probably does correlate with high intelligence. Geekdom is a subculture that disproportionately attracts intelligent people.
Unfortunately, returning to the original point, this does not necessarily mean that geeks' political opinions are worth anything. Another common characteristic of the geek is that we tend to make completely invalid assumptions about human nature, always overestimating the importance of rationality, and so our estimates of what's best for the normal population are probably horribly wrong, however intelligent we ourselves may be...
Neither. This calls for a slightly geeky, Gordon Freeman type of hero. It's a radio telescope, after all. Someone who's capable of rewiring stuff to emit a blast of anti-zombie RF energy, but isn't afraid of getting stuck in with a blunt instrument when necessary.
Play-Doh is a clay-like compound used by children to form various things.
'When I was a little man
Playdoh came in a little can
I was Star Wars' biggest fan
Now I'm stuck without a plan
G. I. Joe was an action man
Shaggy drove the mystery van
Devo was my favourite band
Take me back to my happy land!'
-- The Aquabats, Playdoh. A wonderful song of geek nostalgia...
Slashdot has at least as many 12 year olds, but it has a much better method of dealing with them so that actual adults aren't afraid to comment. I'll often see something on digg and look forward to seeing if it makes Slashdot simply because I know the comments will be worth reading.
'Tis true. We gripe and moan about Mods On Crack, about the occasional abuse of the Bitchslap, about the ACs and the trolls, and I fondly remember the 50+1-1=49 thing, but then you look elsewhere. Read the +4 and +5 posts here and though you'll see a lot of/. groupthink you'll also get a much higher concentration of decent analysis and opinion. The moderation system here is actually a rather good Sturgeon filter, bringing the ratio of crap down from 95% to... oh, maybe 70 or 80?
Don't take this as a defense of American corporate ethos, or a criticism of Japanese ones, though. The two countries simply have different Zeitgeists.
I think Weltanschauung is nearer to what you mean here.
Zeitgeist is 'spirit of the time': the Zeitgeist governs which fashions or fads catch on, which technologies are adopted and which abandoned, which political philosophies are prevalent, and so forth. It's related to a period, rather than to a locale.
Weltanschauung is 'worldview': the Weltanschauung of a person or culture governs its interpretation of events and its behaviour in response to them. One might speak of a fundamentalist Islamic Weltanschauung in which the USA is the Great Satan, controlled by the Jews and in which all events are part of some Zionist conspiracy, or of a Marxist Weltanschauung in which all human history is the record of class struggles inevitably leading through capitalism to socialism to Communism and the dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Thus the response a person makes when responsible for an error of this magnitude will be governed largely by his cultural Weltanschauung.
And I am quite delighted that we're mixing cultural concepts from Japan, the USA and Germany here. How wonderfully diverse.
Problem is, that our (GPS) satelites will probably be out of commission too, as they are no longer protected by the earths magnatic field against solar winds.
The GPS satellites are in a very high orbit, far above the region where comsats and space stations live; I doubt the Earth's magnetic field gives them any significant protection at that altitude.
It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?
Quite possibly. Remember how 'Hoover' became a generic term for a vacuum cleaner? How 'walkman' became a generic term for a portable personal cassette player?
I would not be surprised to see 'iPod' becoming a generic term for digital audio players - or, if Apple defends its trademark as well as it probably will, the obvious corruption to just plain 'pod'. The increasingly widespread currency of the word 'podcast' might well cause this to happen more quickly. If you can listen to podcasts on it, it's a pod, right? Not an iPod, because that's only the Apple ones, but a pod nonetheless...
I can't believe podcasting got into the dictionary before rootkit did!
The reason for this was that I pwnz3d their systems with a trojaned podcast and installed a rootkit, then began spearphishing the researchers to obtain the necessary details to forge submissions. The result of this lifehack was that I was able to unfairly influence the dictionary - not only could they not detect the rootkit, they couldn't even list the word in their lexicon;-)
Just how is such a thing selected for? Seems too amazing to be a coincidence.
SET KANSAS_MODE = TRUE
Obviously this mechanism for spreading cancer throughout the body is too wonderful to have evolved. It's clear evidence of intelligent design... By a complete bastard.
Now there's going to be all sorts of virus / worm stuff related to important dates, like July 4 or the founding of the USSR, or whatever. I thought the whole date-triggered thing went out of fashion with the Michelangelo virus.
Your post rang bells in a dark recess of my mind labelled 'Elder Virus Lore', and I had to check with Google.
No one spends time spell checking aim messages and common mistakes constantly occur. If the conversation was perfect, flags would start to raised. That is why AI needs to have programmed imperfections to pass as a human.
OK... have the AI produce its response, and then have it pipe through a filter. This filter will take each character in the message in turn, and for each one it will (on the roll of a 1) replace the letter with an adjacent letter from the standard QWERTY layout, and (on the roll of a 20) prepend an adjacent letter from the QWERTY layout to the original letter.
Plausible typos that might be made by an intelligent user attempting to write good English but doing so rather too quickly to be entirely accurate.
I've seen more than one person suggest a filter which would junk messages which contain more than X% (say 2-5%) misspellings... Of course, spammers will compensate by padding emails with 98% Shakespeare, so that advantage won't last long.
Shakespeare couldn't even spell his own name consistently. If you were to implement a filter that junked emails if they contained too many misspelled words, the Bard wouldn't have a prayer of getting through. Remember, he lived before the publication of the first dictionary; spellings were more or less optional in Elizabethan England.
Because time is money even in the IM world. With probably hundreds of people on that person's buddy list, chances are they're talking to multiple people at once. Why use proper grammar to talk to one person when you can ignore netiquette and talk to five people in the same time?
What rot. If you're using IM for business purposes, you'd better be spending more time thinking about what to say than you spend saying it. Legally, you're putting this stuff in writing. They could log what you say over IM and use it against you later.
Assuming you are spending more time thinking about what to say than actually doing the mechanical work of typing it, then the benefit in terms of time between 'u' and 'you' becomes trivial, while the benefit in terms of your professional image between 'you' and 'u' is just as significant.
Let me know when it will have hot N3TS3X with you, and I'm in!
The frightening thing is, that would probably be pretty easy to code. The net is full of freely-available pornographic stories; extract a whole bunch of phrases from those, use an Eliza-like system to select the right one for the circumstances and incorporate elements of what the user just said into your response...
You could write up a pretty effective cybersex bot, and you could program it to offer to send across 'cam pix' once in a while. Which would, of course, be virus-ridden.
Better yet, once you've written it you could have it communicate with sad lusers via SMS at, oh, 20p per message. And make a killing. Excuse me, I have an Eliza-bot to hack up with some pornography. bbl, d00dz.
Slashdot Mirror
Or to put it a third way, if you have 1000 people authorised to be on site, the odds are that any random who walks up and puts his finger on the scanner will be let right in...
If they're non-DRM, just let people rip their own. It's unnecessary to waste the space. Anyway, whenever I open up a music CD in Konqueror, I already see a directory full of MP3s, a directory full of OGGs, and a directory full of FLACs, which I can copy stuff out of just fine...
No, but interest in the particular subjects covered on /. probably does correlate with high intelligence. Geekdom is a subculture that disproportionately attracts intelligent people.
Unfortunately, returning to the original point, this does not necessarily mean that geeks' political opinions are worth anything. Another common characteristic of the geek is that we tend to make completely invalid assumptions about human nature, always overestimating the importance of rationality, and so our estimates of what's best for the normal population are probably horribly wrong, however intelligent we ourselves may be...
Neither. This calls for a slightly geeky, Gordon Freeman type of hero. It's a radio telescope, after all. Someone who's capable of rewiring stuff to emit a blast of anti-zombie RF energy, but isn't afraid of getting stuck in with a blunt instrument when necessary.
I vote Nicholas Cage.
'When I was a little man
Playdoh came in a little can
I was Star Wars' biggest fan
Now I'm stuck without a plan
G. I. Joe was an action man
Shaggy drove the mystery van
Devo was my favourite band
Take me back to my happy land!'
-- The Aquabats, Playdoh. A wonderful song of geek nostalgia...
'Tis true. We gripe and moan about Mods On Crack, about the occasional abuse of the Bitchslap, about the ACs and the trolls, and I fondly remember the 50+1-1=49 thing, but then you look elsewhere. Read the +4 and +5 posts here and though you'll see a lot of /. groupthink you'll also get a much higher concentration of decent analysis and opinion. The moderation system here is actually a rather good Sturgeon filter, bringing the ratio of crap down from 95% to... oh, maybe 70 or 80?
I think Weltanschauung is nearer to what you mean here.
Zeitgeist is 'spirit of the time': the Zeitgeist governs which fashions or fads catch on, which technologies are adopted and which abandoned, which political philosophies are prevalent, and so forth. It's related to a period, rather than to a locale.
Weltanschauung is 'worldview': the Weltanschauung of a person or culture governs its interpretation of events and its behaviour in response to them. One might speak of a fundamentalist Islamic Weltanschauung in which the USA is the Great Satan, controlled by the Jews and in which all events are part of some Zionist conspiracy, or of a Marxist Weltanschauung in which all human history is the record of class struggles inevitably leading through capitalism to socialism to Communism and the dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Thus the response a person makes when responsible for an error of this magnitude will be governed largely by his cultural Weltanschauung.
And I am quite delighted that we're mixing cultural concepts from Japan, the USA and Germany here. How wonderfully diverse.
If I was a heroic space adventurer - yes, absolutely!
* strikes heroic pose for the camera *
Smoke me a kipper! I'll be back for breakfast.
Please don't use the word 'leverage' again unless you can estimate a value in newton metres. It makes you sound like a PHB.
Rephrasing into sensible English,
sites are able to use Web 2.0 technologies
I knew that. I knew that.
* bangs head on desk in orbital-mechanics embarrassment *
That'll teach me to post on /. after having been to the pub at lunch...
The GPS satellites are in a very high orbit, far above the region where comsats and space stations live; I doubt the Earth's magnetic field gives them any significant protection at that altitude.
I fully agree. We look forward to having you all back.
I vote for AVG.
Quite possibly. Remember how 'Hoover' became a generic term for a vacuum cleaner? How 'walkman' became a generic term for a portable personal cassette player?
I would not be surprised to see 'iPod' becoming a generic term for digital audio players - or, if Apple defends its trademark as well as it probably will, the obvious corruption to just plain 'pod'. The increasingly widespread currency of the word 'podcast' might well cause this to happen more quickly. If you can listen to podcasts on it, it's a pod, right? Not an iPod, because that's only the Apple ones, but a pod nonetheless...
The reason for this was that I pwnz3d their systems with a trojaned podcast and installed a rootkit, then began spearphishing the researchers to obtain the necessary details to forge submissions. The result of this lifehack was that I was able to unfairly influence the dictionary - not only could they not detect the rootkit, they couldn't even list the word in their lexicon ;-)
A wise man once say: the Americans think a hundred years is a long time, but the English think a hundred miles is a long drive.
SET KANSAS_MODE = TRUE
Obviously this mechanism for spreading cancer throughout the body is too wonderful to have evolved. It's clear evidence of intelligent design... By a complete bastard.
In the circumstances, wouldn't a robe and wizard hat be more appropriate?
Your post rang bells in a dark recess of my mind labelled 'Elder Virus Lore', and I had to check with Google.
January 5th is Joshi's birthday.
Never mind the Nazi stuff, I think the Sober guys are just paying tribute to a viral classic :)
OK... have the AI produce its response, and then have it pipe through a filter. This filter will take each character in the message in turn, and for each one it will (on the roll of a 1) replace the letter with an adjacent letter from the standard QWERTY layout, and (on the roll of a 20) prepend an adjacent letter from the QWERTY layout to the original letter.
Plausible typos that might be made by an intelligent user attempting to write good English but doing so rather too quickly to be entirely accurate.
Your terminal appends OK messages to incoming IMs?
Shakespeare couldn't even spell his own name consistently. If you were to implement a filter that junked emails if they contained too many misspelled words, the Bard wouldn't have a prayer of getting through. Remember, he lived before the publication of the first dictionary; spellings were more or less optional in Elizabethan England.
It ended on September 4165, 1993. Wake up...
What rot. If you're using IM for business purposes, you'd better be spending more time thinking about what to say than you spend saying it. Legally, you're putting this stuff in writing. They could log what you say over IM and use it against you later.
Assuming you are spending more time thinking about what to say than actually doing the mechanical work of typing it, then the benefit in terms of time between 'u' and 'you' becomes trivial, while the benefit in terms of your professional image between 'you' and 'u' is just as significant.
The frightening thing is, that would probably be pretty easy to code. The net is full of freely-available pornographic stories; extract a whole bunch of phrases from those, use an Eliza-like system to select the right one for the circumstances and incorporate elements of what the user just said into your response...
You could write up a pretty effective cybersex bot, and you could program it to offer to send across 'cam pix' once in a while. Which would, of course, be virus-ridden.
Better yet, once you've written it you could have it communicate with sad lusers via SMS at, oh, 20p per message. And make a killing. Excuse me, I have an Eliza-bot to hack up with some pornography. bbl, d00dz.