What is the long tail? The summary, and TFA (I skimmed it so maybe I missed this) seem to indicate that the long tail theory means the more obscure stuff will be more popular. I thought it simply meant that you could make money off the obscure stuff when your distribution costs went to zero (because of the Internet). Am I missing something, or does the article interpret the idea of the long tail incorrectly?
I don't understand how your comments relate to GMail's CAPTCHA being broken. The link to bulk account creator has a screenshot clearly showing that the CAPTCHA still hast to be solved by a real person for each address being created. Looks like it's just a screen scraper, streamlining the account setup process. The second link is a scammer looking for real people to create accounts manually.
Both of these things are problems, but don't have anything to do with breaking a CAPTCHA. Also, is there a good solution to this problem? What can Google do to stop people from manually creating accounts in bulk?
If you liked adcritic, you should check out adhaiku.com. Every year there is a commerical fesitval France, with ~5000 submissions. A friend of mine watches them all, picks the 100 best, and writes a haiku about them. There's some very funny stuff there.
This reminds me of a joke. It's few years old, but still funny and supports your point in a frightening way:
A guy walks into a bar and looks over and sees Bush, Collin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld having some drinks and pouring over some documents. The guys asks the bar tender: "Hey, is that Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld? What are they doing here?" Bartenders says he doesn't know. After a few beers the guy gets up a the courage and walks over and asks them: "Hey fellas. What are you working on there?".
Bush repsonds: "Well, I probably shouldn't tell you this, but we're planning World War III".
"Really?", the guy says. "What's going to happen?"
"Well, we're going to kill 200 million muslims, and a blonde with big tits."
The guy thinks for a second and asks, "Why are you going to kill a blonde with big tits?"
Rumsfeld turns to Bush and smiles, "See, I told you no one would care about the 200 million muslims."
Even if the dots are inserted at the hardware layer, if you have source for the driver couldn't you have it add more dots, in random locations? You wouldn't be able to tell which dots identified the printer and which were part of the random noise.
I read a stat once that said for every 1000 engineers that graduate the GDP increases by some small number (0.001 % or something). For every 1000 lawyers that graduate the GDP decreases some larger amount (-0.05% or something). Not that GDP is the sole measure of 'goodness for society' but I thought it was pretty telling anyway.
I'm not sure your analysis is complete. First of all, where does that number 1 in 45000 come from? Assuming that means that one of these events happens every 45000 years (I don't know if that's what you meant, but let's go with that) then the fact that there are lots of NEOs is already taken into account. As for your claim that if it will cause $2 trillion in damages then spending $50 million/year is warranted, that's true if the $50 million will completely mitigate the $2 trillion in damages should it occur. But the $50 million will only buy us detection. Total prevention of the collision would probably cost more than the $2 trillion, if at all possible. Frankly, I think it would actually cause quite a bit more than $2 trillion if one of these babies hit the earth, but I can't back that up, and I don't think it's possible to do much about it even if we knew about it, so I say just sit back and enjoy the show.
This is bullshit. I have several friends that are climate scientists. They believe that global warming is anthroprogenic, and that it will have serious negative consequences. I can assure you though, they don't go to posh conventions, or get some sort of kick backs by holding these views. Quite the opposite. They are extremely intelligent people who are more interested in finding out about the world than making money. They live on next to nothing. If they wanted to make serious money they could get jobs with oil companies, defense contrators, etc, but they actually care about what they do.
As others have pointed out freedom of speech doesn't extend to libel. Also, as I understand the US constitution (I'm Canadian) it doesn't provide for anonymous speech. So you should be able to say whatever you like on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the net, but the people you write about should have the right to know who you are and to sue you if you say something libelous.
It seems that on Wikipedia you can perform a character assassination with no consequences, but maybe I don't understand Wikipedia well enough.
Since Slashdot seems to now be posting long articles in the summary section I thought I'd help out by summarizing. I fired up MS-Word and used autosummarize to chop this sucker down a bit. Here's the result:
Priorities are power
No, only if we have time. (What if he does convince Sally? The project's engineering work (as described briefly earlier)
Adherence to the project goals? If communication isn't working, switch the mode. Get people alone. Hunt people down. The three most basic ordered lists are: project goals (vision), list of features, and list of work items. If you can't say no, you effectively have no priorities.
There's a good example of this in The Practice of Programming, by Kernighan and Pike, with sample code in C, C++, Java, AWK and Perl for a markov chain text creator. The example is to demonstrate data structures and compare running time of different languages, but the code itself is kind of cool.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the long tail? The summary, and TFA (I skimmed it so maybe I missed this) seem to indicate that the long tail theory means the more obscure stuff will be more popular. I thought it simply meant that you could make money off the obscure stuff when your distribution costs went to zero (because of the Internet). Am I missing something, or does the article interpret the idea of the long tail incorrectly?
Turns out after resistors, capacitors,inductors and memristors the 5th fundamental element is... love?
http://www.glassdoor.com/ I don't know about internships.
They had the correct links but before submitting it he clicked his mouse which interfered with his computer.
Both of these things are problems, but don't have anything to do with breaking a CAPTCHA. Also, is there a good solution to this problem? What can Google do to stop people from manually creating accounts in bulk?
Do I detect the start of a new /. meme?
If you liked adcritic, you should check out adhaiku.com. Every year there is a commerical fesitval France, with ~5000 submissions. A friend of mine watches them all, picks the 100 best, and writes a haiku about them. There's some very funny stuff there.
This reminds me of a joke. It's few years old, but still funny and supports your point in a frightening way:
A guy walks into a bar and looks over and sees Bush, Collin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld having some drinks and pouring over some documents. The guys asks the bar tender: "Hey, is that Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld? What are they doing here?" Bartenders says he doesn't know. After a few beers the guy gets up a the courage and walks over and asks them: "Hey fellas. What are you working on there?".
Bush repsonds: "Well, I probably shouldn't tell you this, but we're planning World War III".
"Really?", the guy says. "What's going to happen?"
"Well, we're going to kill 200 million muslims, and a blonde with big tits."
The guy thinks for a second and asks, "Why are you going to kill a blonde with big tits?"
Rumsfeld turns to Bush and smiles, "See, I told you no one would care about the 200 million muslims."
Even if the dots are inserted at the hardware layer, if you have source for the driver couldn't you have it add more dots, in random locations? You wouldn't be able to tell which dots identified the printer and which were part of the random noise.
Since none of the links in the story explain what the win32-loader is, can anyone explain what it does?
I read a stat once that said for every 1000 engineers that graduate the GDP increases by some small number (0.001 % or something). For every 1000 lawyers that graduate the GDP decreases some larger amount (-0.05% or something). Not that GDP is the sole measure of 'goodness for society' but I thought it was pretty telling anyway.
I'm not sure your analysis is complete. First of all, where does that number 1 in 45000 come from? Assuming that means that one of these events happens every 45000 years (I don't know if that's what you meant, but let's go with that) then the fact that there are lots of NEOs is already taken into account. As for your claim that if it will cause $2 trillion in damages then spending $50 million/year is warranted, that's true if the $50 million will completely mitigate the $2 trillion in damages should it occur. But the $50 million will only buy us detection. Total prevention of the collision would probably cost more than the $2 trillion, if at all possible. Frankly, I think it would actually cause quite a bit more than $2 trillion if one of these babies hit the earth, but I can't back that up, and I don't think it's possible to do much about it even if we knew about it, so I say just sit back and enjoy the show.
This is bullshit. I have several friends that are climate scientists. They believe that global warming is anthroprogenic, and that it will have serious negative consequences. I can assure you though, they don't go to posh conventions, or get some sort of kick backs by holding these views. Quite the opposite. They are extremely intelligent people who are more interested in finding out about the world than making money. They live on next to nothing. If they wanted to make serious money they could get jobs with oil companies, defense contrators, etc, but they actually care about what they do.
Need to re-read my post before posting. It was AT&T, not IBM. Anyway, turns out it wasn't such a great idea after all.
IBM already tried that and it worked great for them!
The parent's comment was just ripped off verbatim from another thread about click fraud. Here's the original.
Lisa: Yes, but who will police the police?
Homer: I dunno. The coast guard?
Arguing online is like competing in the special olympics. Even in you win you're still retarded.
As others have pointed out freedom of speech doesn't extend to libel. Also, as I understand the US constitution (I'm Canadian) it doesn't provide for anonymous speech. So you should be able to say whatever you like on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the net, but the people you write about should have the right to know who you are and to sue you if you say something libelous.
It seems that on Wikipedia you can perform a character assassination with no consequences, but maybe I don't understand Wikipedia well enough.
I don't think that's too likely, if this is any indication of type of business people they have working for them.
I think most distrubingly:
Results 1 - 10 of about 7,300,000 for who's the boss
There's a good example of this in The Practice of Programming, by Kernighan and Pike, with sample code in C, C++, Java, AWK and Perl for a markov chain text creator. The example is to demonstrate data structures and compare running time of different languages, but the code itself is kind of cool.
Lisa: Yes, but who will police the police? Homer: I dunno. Coast guard?