I downloaded the game, and it's a clever, clever idea, and I'd enjoy playing it more -- if I could do that with less frustration. I think the author is right that Shuzzle challenges players to think about shapes and thus exercise their brains in a way that most of us who aren't mechanical engineers or graphic don't do often -- but besides being good mental exercise, the game is fun.
But some of the joy us dampened by the controls: while moving the blocks is pretty intuitive, rotating the blocks is difficult. Some rotations are apparently unavailable, because the block is resting on the "ground"; at other times rotation can happen along two degrees of freedom, e.g., pitch and yaw is possible, but not roll, for no apparent reason.
Most frustrating is that there is no indication, either visual or auditory -- a flash, and "stop" hand, or a buzz --, if the particular rotation is not allowed, so the user is left to guess if the rotation simply can't be done, or if he's is "gripping" the block in the wrong place or subsequently moving the mouse in the wrong direction to make the rotation. And moving a block along the "y" axis requires using the "space" bar: in these days of three or more button mice, I'd have assigned this to the third mouse button, or allowed the mouse mode to be changed using an on-screen palette.
(Some of this may be my fault: normally I map the third, wheel button on my mouse to produce a right-click, and the right button to a middle click, in order to use the right button as a "back" command in Firefox and as a "paste" button in any other application. I did switch this back to the default in order to play with the Shuzzle game, but I didn't switch off X-mouse emulation and auto-raising. But even if it is my fault, that would be more obvious if the application included a visual indicator of what mouse mode is currently operational.)
Added to this, the same mouse drags that produce moves or rotations when the mouse is in contact with a block produce panning or rotation of the "camera" view of the blocks. Perhaps this is intentional, in order to make the game harder, but whether intended or not, it's incredibly frustrating to suddenly have the camera move in such a way that the blocks are no longer visible.
But to top it off, when the blocks are invisible and only the shadows are seen -- the whole point of the game --, a big part of the play is guessing, from the shadow, where the block is. Using trial and error to find it, one will inevitably click where a block isn't and swing the camera, or attempt a rotation only to utterly baffled why it doesn't work.
Finally, the game, even if idle, pushes my CPU utilization to 100%, and the game "froze", ignoring any input several times, necessitating closing and re-running the app several times in fifteen minutes.
Again, the game is a clever idea, and I'd love to be able to play it more. I'll hope the developer sees these essentially minor complaints of mine, and addresses them in a future release.
NZX stock exchange has moved their database systems to Oracle running on RedHat Linux,... and [this] is one hell of a boost for the proponents of Linux at the back-end of the financial world.
It's great news that Larry Ellison has Open Sourced Oracle!
And to think people criticize me for getting all my news from Slashdot.
From the linked blog: p.s. The Court also found, in a bizarre twist of logic, that while it is legal to load a program into RAM for repairs, it's illegal to allow it to persist in RAM while you fix it. I don't even know where to begin with that one.
I used to think, when geeks said the courts couldn't effectively decide technology cases, that the geeks were underestimating the courts.
But this, plus the recent ruling that the Wiretap Act does not apply to email because email isn't just transmitted=, it's stored on servers, makes me think that perhaps the courts have finally found an aspect of society to which they just can't seem to effectively apply the law.
Which is worrisome in a number of ways. Perhaps we needs special courts, like the tax courts, for technology issues? Or do we need entire new laws that aren't rooted in traditional property laws?
A year ago I'd have said that traditional property laws could cover technology, but events -- and the courts --seem intent on proving me wrong.
From a reminiscence on the linked site: We were required to lie face down, with an arm over our eyes untill [sic] ten seconds after the blast. I recall being able to see through my arm, like looking at an x-ray!
The guy talks about the amazing fauna he saw while scuba diving between atomic tests, and the requisite topless natives, and concludes that he wouldn't have missed for anything!
I suspect others may not share that opinion, of course, and I doubt I would.
Good find, GoneGaryT, and good work approving it, Michael.
CHeck out my drawings!!1... comments/suggestions are most welcomed
Thank you so much for posting this link to your amateurish drawings of FurryHentai.
After a weekend of consisting of drinking beer, posting on Slashdot, and not going out on any dates, I was naturally questioning whether I was a pathetic loser who had wasted his life on stupidities.
But after seeing your drawings of women with cow and lizard (or something, your cows and your lizards look pretty much the same but for their colors) heads, expression-less faces, impossible ballooning breasts, and crudely drawn swollen genitals stuffed full of gigantic dildos and tentacles, my depression lifted and I felt once again a real satisfaction in my life.
I realized that no matter how much time and potential I've frittered away in my life, no matter what mistakes I've made, nothing I have done is so pointless, lacking in artistic merit, or symptomatic of an inability to relate to women as other than dumb animals with giant boobies and gaping genitals, as the "art" work you are so deluded as to be proud of.
Once again, the internet has served its real purpose: to show, by the great diversity of its most dismal and fetid and stunningly pointless depths, that most of the rest of us are by comparison, balanced, happy, contributing members of society.
Thank you once again for making me -- and I'm sure legions of others -- feel better by displaying just how useless your life is. You are truly a holy martyr to the cause of human joy! Christians claim Christ for our sins, but you have outdone Jesus: you live for your pointless Furry obsession, and in so doing enrich all lives around you merely by comparison!
I salute you sir, for the happiness you bring to the world by allowing the rest of us the relaxing pleasure of some thorough Schadenfreude!
Mod parent up to bring this joy to all who read Slashdot!
Sandia's intelligence lab converts business data into 3-D images
I know the taxpayers paid for it, but it always seams like it gets exclusivly [sic] licensed to some company for next to nothing then that company charges the people that paid for it in the first place a lot of money to use it.
When I further learn that "Sandia officials say tech firms or venture capitalists can use the lab on a per-request basis," I begin to understand that Sandia's Corporate Business Development and Partnerships aren't using my tax dollars to protect me, they're providing corporate welfare by dong the Research and Development that business wants but doesn't want to pay for.
Remember, these are the same businesses that vociferously object to government programs that might compete with them, whether that's sponsorship of Open Source Software or rural electric cooperatives or IRS software that might be efficient enough to cost H&R Block. These are the same corporations that got a provision added to the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill to prevent the government from getting discounts by buying those drugs in bulk, but which profit from research funded by the National Institutes of Health.
These are the same corporations that want Ashcroft's Department of Justice to stop worrying so much about fixing the FBI's failures, so it can spend government time -- and your money -- prosecuting civil -- civil, not criminal -- suits against file traders under the PIRATE Act on behalf of those corporations. If you need to sue a corporation, you're on your own; maybe you'll get some coupons out of a class action suit. But if the corporation wants to sue you, they get the assistance of top government lawyers and FBI agents packing guns and warrants.
And this just after the U.S. House passed the biggest corporate tax cuts in twenty years, because existing direct subsidies -- or less politely, corporate welfare -- will no longer be permitted under World Trade Organization rules. Even House Republicans admit this tax cut "is riddled with special-interest provisions that would further complicate the tax code, send jobs overseas and worsen a federal deficit already at record highs."
Does anyone really expect Sandia's going to release the source code to the data mining software to us, the citizens who have to pay for it?
Be proud, Americans, of how fat your labor makes your corporate masters! What a joy it is to serve them! It is your privilege to work long hours and pay high taxes so your masters can buy their yachts -- and buy the laws that enslave you.
America, Of the People, By the People, for the Pe^H^H Corporations
I would have to disagree, however. To the average non-PHD, this dust sounds like nothing more than some static mixed with clinking noises. To me it sounds like SPACE DUST!
Yeah, ok, that explains the static and the clinking noises, but what was that *THUMP*THWACK* sound at the end?
Somebody told me it was Cassini running into a big black monolith full of stars thing.
We already saw a plagiarized articlegreen-lighted, and now this? Cmdr Taco, Slashdot was a brilliant idea of yours, and I love your site -- but that's because I have reasonably high expectations for it.
First, the submitter of this article has he email address jarhead4067@hotmail.com -- and so does the article's author.
Second, what is presented is not a genetic algorithm. The characteristics of the email to be considered to discover if the email is spam are finite and hard-core -- and even the threshold some characteristics must reach to qualify as spam are hard-core:
// This can be adjusted... Calculating the misspelled word ratio and // any Bayesian probability is time consuming
if (stats.SpamProbability <.66)
A genetic algorithm is one in which the goal is hard-core, different means of reaching that goal are generated, and the characteristics of the most successful are used to generate the next "generation"; this is repeated until the goal is reached.
But in this model, each "chromosome" contains statistics about one email. The heart of this model is to train a neural network with known emails ("chromosomes") and then tests unknown emails ("chromosomes") against the network.
Neural networks have a checkered history in Artificial Intelligence research. A (very much simplified) model of biologic neurons, neural networks were for a time seen as a great hope for Artificial Intelligence. A neural network basically starts out with an array of input nodes and an array of output nodes, with each input node connected to each output. Each input corresponds to some characteristic of the items the network is trained with: for classifying animals, the inputs would be characteristic of animals, e.g., "furry", "bipedal", "feathered"; each output a classification, e.g., "mammal", "bird", "human".
To train the network, the input nodes are set to the characteristics of an item, and then the strength of the connection of those inputs to the correct outputs is increased (or that of other connections is decreased -- it's the same thing). With enough training, it's possible to isolate the salient characteristics from the ambiguous one sin a mechanistic way.
This is useful, but it was soon discovered that these simple neural networks, for certain sets of inputs, failed, because of overlapping categories: both birds and humans are bipedal, but only humans are also mammals. In a single layer neural network, the connection strength between input "bipedal" and output "mammal" would fluctuate, unable to describe humans or birds well. These problems can be alleviated by adding additional "hidden" layers of nodes between input and outputs, and by allowing "back-propagation" from output or hidden nodes to layers "previous" to them.
But even with these enhancements, it's been conclusively shown that some problems are intractable for neural networks. In any case, neural networks are no new thing.
Of course I have no idea if classifying spam is intractable or not, but I have to question whether using a neural network reliably can outperform Bayesian (or quasi-Bayesian) filtering. My guess is that since Bayesian filtering can judge email by the occurrence of single tokens ("words"), and not just "chromosome" statistics, and given that this "new" method also uses Bayesian filtering to generate one of those "chromosome" statistics anyway (and for only the most difficult to characterize emails to boot), this method itself probably mostly relies on its Bayesian sub-component.
So I'm a bit at a loss to see why this method is in any way revolutionary or even particularly interesting, or why it was green-lighted for Slashdot. Of course, I only gave the linke
I suppose it could be neat if done correctly but I fear that this could just open Mozilla and others up for some nasty Internet Explorer-esque exploits.
By its very nature it can't be done correctly.
That is to say, of convenience, power, or security, pick any two.
For web applications to be convenient, they have to be easy to install and offer all the power of a desktop application. That includes access to the filesystem, and to the burgeoning number of peripherals: personal LANs, WiFi antennae, microphones and webcams. (Did you know that Flash pages can turn on the web cam on your computer, if you allow it?)
But security requires bright lines of demarcation between your local machine, its peripherals, the LAN it may be on, and servers owned by others. It's on those distant servers that these applications will live, but this paradigm means granting any one of them as much access to the local computer as any locally installed program.
And as others gave mentioned, the reason I like Firefox is that it's only a browser. I don't want or need a browser that tries to be a poor substitute for several other programs, like a cheaply made Swiss Army knife -- I want a browser that is just as good a browser as possible.
I agree with Loopy that prohibiting commercial use is selfish a lot of the time, but I wouldn't say *always*.
I think corporations are selfishly trying to make as much profit as possible for their top management and shareholders.
But ah, maybe I was smoking crack when I was reading,a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith'>Ada m Smith.
My problem with the GPL is that it allows companies to profit off of other people's code without sharing those profits with the creators of that code.
Yes, they have to share their (modified) code, and sometimes that balances things out. On the other hand, sometimes al they add is their company logo, and you often see software "agregators" selling CDs of GPL'd software, without ever clearly explaining this stuff is freely available.
Given that companies also use those profits to buy legislation like the INDUCE Act, writing code as "charity work" for for-profit companies is tantamount to volunteering to forge your own shackles and chains for your enslavers.
To those never entering the shitlist, what made a difference was the constant pounding of head against the beaurocratic [sic] brickwall, the humiliation of "sorry, you're not allowed to enter that flight", "you're not authorized by proper authorities", always have to submit to some greater authority. Always hearing "you have nothing to fear if you have done nothing wrong". To most, that's something they could live with. And what it would take to change it had very little to do with leadership, it had to do with people getting off their asses.
Yours is one of the most informative comments I've read on Slashdot.
To anyone who doubts just how much we've become like the totalitarian societies we once despised, just compare what Dovregubbens Hall (583591) writes to your last visit to an airport or a Federal building.
We've learned to fear the screener for the Transportation Security agency, because if he doesn't like your attitude, he can keep you off your flight -- or from flying ever again. A year ago that screener was a janitor or a Microsoft Certification dropout. Today he can seriously disrupt your life if he wants to -- and for the first time in his life, he know he holds that kind of power.
We've got the government "training" long-haul truck drivers -- guys who routinely drive twelve or eighteen hours straight to meet deadlines --, and bus drivers, and rest stop workers to identify "suspicious" people and report them to a secret toll-free phone number. To think that this volunteer force can't be used to suppress dissent -- "Just keep a count of pro-choice bumper stickers" --is to be willfully blind to a century or more of police misconduct.
Even guys with cameras aren't safe from being scrutinized and added to government databases, because cops today wave the bloody shirt of 9-11 and invoke "patriotism" as a fig-leaf to justify anything they care do to -- reasonable or not, legal or not.
Protesters, exercising their First Amendmentrights, are already being arrested solely because of the content of their speech. Whether they are eventually convicted or just harassed by cops and city inspectors, the message is clear: dissent will cost you at least a day in jail, enough money to hire a lawyer (or rely on a possibly incompetent court-appointed lawyer), and maybe a little roughing up by the cops.
Every war attracts a few war profiteers along with the honest, self-sacrificing patriots. Every increase in police powers gives police new tools to fight crime, but at the same time gives that minority of cops who are bullies, busybodies, and braggarts interested in throwing their weight around more occasion to lord that power over the innocent citizens.
The thing to fear is not another 9-11. It's not even Stalinist knocks on the door at midnight. What we need to fear is more subtle: a steady erosion of American liberties, of what it means to be an American.
I always believed that, as a citizen in a democracy, the police were not to be feared -- and weren't any "better" than me. Now we have the Hiibel decisi
I'm not trying to be an ass, but it seems as though you are suggesting that someone fill you in on all the things you missed out on by not getting a CS degree...It is a bit much to ask someone to cram 4 years of college courses into an online reference.
Of course it is. But I'd like to see, as I've mentioned here before, Slashdot articles that are educational.
I'm not expecting comprehensive works, but just a start, an overview, something that might eventually be contributed to something like Wikibooks.
Honestly, I think that proponents of open source are the ideal people to make learning more open source, less a "mere" four years of college and more of a lifelong avocation. There are a lot of smart people here, and I hope to teach them something of what I know, and learn from them what I don't.
A good Computer Science program will cover everything in GEB with more depth and without all the stupid-writing-tricks and dumbing down that Hofstadter employs.
As someone who greatly enjoyed GEB, and as someone who became a professional programmer without (much) of a standard Computer Science education, let me offer you a challenge: give those of us without the benefit of your education a chapter-by-chapter (or concept-by-concept) breakdown -- or, better since you complain of Hofstadter "dumbing down", a "wising up" -- of GEB as several entries on your Slashdot Journal.
Over the course of a few weeks, explain to us what we missed in GEB, and provide references to where we can fill in these gaps in our knowledge.
If GEB is so simplistic, you'll have little trouble so demonstrating, and your efforts will be of benefit to many Slashdot readers. Rather than just deriding, you'll be able to educate, rather than just tearing down, you'll have the satisfaction of having built up the knowledge of many of us -- and our gratitude.
In reading the preceding suggestions, I see that the "merely" inspirational and entirely clever synthesis Godel, Escher, Bach is derided as too simplistic, and that engaging and revealing look at how engineers work, The soul of the New Machine is dismissed as "too depressing" -- I suppose for managers it is; for those to whom the thrill is in the journey rather than the Wall street Journal it continues to be uplifting.
So I'll offer a suggestion that isn't blue-sky theorizing, but instead a hard-headed look at how to design a large system, with all the compromises and trade-offs that entails, a "purely" technical book that nevertheless (and least in the first half) reads like a thrilling novel, and a book that gives great insight into how a familiar and loved -- or foolishly reviled -- tool came to be: Bjarne Stroustrup's Design and Evolution of C++.
If you've ever wondered why the C++ language works the way it does -- or why some particular "mistake" that's so obvious to you made it past Stroustrup and later the Standard Committee --, or how to create a wholly new language that's backward compatible with a well- and widely-established one, without compromising the efficiencies that made the original so popular, or just how to design a large scale project that must be many things to many "constituents" -- procedural language, object oriented language, reasonably easy to write compilers for, D&E is a must read.
What are your values? Free porn for all kids? There are legitimate reasons to agree as a society that kids viewing porn is not a good thing. The government frequently passes laws restricting behavior of children in the interests of protecting them. (mandatory bike helmets, can't buy beer until you're 21, ban Joe Camel ads, etc.)
Well, perhaps there are legitimate reasons to keep kids from porn.
But there are certainly legitimate reasons to insist that parents are responsible to monitor their children's use of the internet and not expect the nanny-State to do it for them.
There's no mechanism for keeping porn form kids that doesn't involve the government judging content and registering that content or its viewers, or both.
And there is a chilling effect on free speech if one has to get government permission before distributing content or fear government prosecution afterwards. The cure is worse than the disease.
Let's recall the various works banned by the U.S. Government for "obscenity"; DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, James Joyce's Ulysses -- and even Voltaire's political/religious satire Candide -- all were banned from the United States by U.S. customs inspectors. And all, of course, are now considered classic works of literary art.
Sorry -- there are many good things in this world that it's not at all good to expect the government to provide.
Health care is a good, and I suspect that many parents would desire free health care for their kids even more than government suppression of porn. Little Johnny will recover from seeing a "beaver shot" a lot more easily than he'll recover from leukemia.
But the same fundamentalist conservatives who swear up and down that it will be positively disastrous for government to get in the universal health care business -- even just for kids --, advocate government telling us what we can and cannot view -- for the benefit of "the children".
The same conservatives who explain that government regulation of business stifles innovation and creates a drag on the economy, want to regulate the 50 billion dollar porn industry out of business -- even though by far the vast majority of porn customers are adults.
The same conservatives who rail against "Big Government" apparently don't think it's too much for government to vet every one of million of web pages?
Please: the same fundamentalists who preach about "personal responsibility" every time they want to cut a welfare program or unemployment benefits, can't ask a middle-class parent able to afford a computer and an internet connection to watch what sites his kids visit?
...I'm sure some people here won't be surprised, and will in fact welcome such intrusion into their email, as evidenced by the enthusiasm here and elsewhere in geek circles for Google's Gmail service, which at least as intrusive and does the exact same thing with a user's emails.... I'm still not sure what causes this cognitive disconnect in the technical community, but it is both puzzling and worrisome.
I heard there's a pig named Napoleon going around, teaching the whole flock of sheep to chant:
The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (covering Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island) has ruled that e-mail providers are not violating the law by reading users' e-mail without the user's consent.
In a way, I suppose, this ruling is a good thing, because it underscores the need for a comprehensive privacy and data retention law.
What's needed is something along the lines of The European Union's privacy law: that is, something that is explicitly mandated, rather then the "penumbras" of privacy that some judges can, and some judges won't, see lurking between the lines of the Ninth Amendment.
We can hope that this defeat in the courts can be -- with our hard work -- turned into a victory in the U.S. Congress.
In a 9-0 decision, Canada's highest court ruled, despite the fact that ISPs provide the means for piracy, they are not liable for what people download....this is a very good thing."
Good? This is horrible!
How am I to continue my suit against paper-makers and ink producers on behalf of book publishers?
Oh, wait, I can still do that in the "Land of the Free", the United States.
(It's the land of the free for corporations -- they can get away with anything. It's the land of the fee for taxpayers.)
Bonch, aka Overly Critical Guy, who keeps proclaiming he hates the bias of Slashdot and all the people the comment here, has submitted a review here. Talk about interesting personality conflict.
I didn't know trolls submitted articles these days.
Slashdot Mirror
I downloaded the game, and it's a clever, clever idea, and I'd enjoy playing it more -- if I could do that with less frustration. I think the author is right that Shuzzle challenges players to think about shapes and thus exercise their brains in a way that most of us who aren't mechanical engineers or graphic don't do often -- but besides being good mental exercise, the game is fun.
But some of the joy us dampened by the controls: while moving the blocks is pretty intuitive, rotating the blocks is difficult. Some rotations are apparently unavailable, because the block is resting on the "ground"; at other times rotation can happen along two degrees of freedom, e.g., pitch and yaw is possible, but not roll, for no apparent reason.
Most frustrating is that there is no indication, either visual or auditory -- a flash, and "stop" hand, or a buzz --, if the particular rotation is not allowed, so the user is left to guess if the rotation simply can't be done, or if he's is "gripping" the block in the wrong place or subsequently moving the mouse in the wrong direction to make the rotation. And moving a block along the "y" axis requires using the "space" bar: in these days of three or more button mice, I'd have assigned this to the third mouse button, or allowed the mouse mode to be changed using an on-screen palette.
(Some of this may be my fault: normally I map the third, wheel button on my mouse to produce a right-click, and the right button to a middle click, in order to use the right button as a "back" command in Firefox and as a "paste" button in any other application. I did switch this back to the default in order to play with the Shuzzle game, but I didn't switch off X-mouse emulation and auto-raising. But even if it is my fault, that would be more obvious if the application included a visual indicator of what mouse mode is currently operational.)
Added to this, the same mouse drags that produce moves or rotations when the mouse is in contact with a block produce panning or rotation of the "camera" view of the blocks. Perhaps this is intentional, in order to make the game harder, but whether intended or not, it's incredibly frustrating to suddenly have the camera move in such a way that the blocks are no longer visible.
But to top it off, when the blocks are invisible and only the shadows are seen -- the whole point of the game --, a big part of the play is guessing, from the shadow, where the block is. Using trial and error to find it, one will inevitably click where a block isn't and swing the camera, or attempt a rotation only to utterly baffled why it doesn't work.
Finally, the game, even if idle, pushes my CPU utilization to 100%, and the game "froze", ignoring any input several times, necessitating closing and re-running the app several times in fifteen minutes.
Again, the game is a clever idea, and I'd love to be able to play it more. I'll hope the developer sees these essentially minor complaints of mine, and addresses them in a future release.
NZX stock exchange has moved their database systems to Oracle running on RedHat Linux,... and [this] is one hell of a boost for the proponents of Linux at the back-end of the financial world.
It's great news that Larry Ellison has Open Sourced Oracle!
And to think people criticize me for getting all my news from Slashdot.
No word on candidates yet.
Here are your candidates for Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's next visit with the Star War nerds; I found then by clicking on the fame link in the article.
Please note -- the goggles will not work if you view Gimli's love child with Arwen or The Nerd Kids On The Block-Street Boys (by sure to scroll down for the full horror on this one).
To those of you on Slashdot who know what I'm talking about: are your circuits truly redundant? What have your experiences in network redundancy been?
I have two homing pigeons.
If Cupid smiles on them, soon I'll have even more redundancy.
From the linked blog: p.s. The Court also found, in a bizarre twist of logic, that while it is legal to load a program into RAM for repairs, it's illegal to allow it to persist in RAM while you fix it. I don't even know where to begin with that one.
I used to think, when geeks said the courts couldn't effectively decide technology cases, that the geeks were underestimating the courts.
But this, plus the recent ruling that the Wiretap Act does not apply to email because email isn't just transmitted=, it's stored on servers, makes me think that perhaps the courts have finally found an aspect of society to which they just can't seem to effectively apply the law.
Which is worrisome in a number of ways. Perhaps we needs special courts, like the tax courts, for technology issues? Or do we need entire new laws that aren't rooted in traditional property laws?
A year ago I'd have said that traditional property laws could cover technology, but events -- and the courts --seem intent on proving me wrong.
From a reminiscence on the linked site: We were required to lie face down, with an arm over our eyes untill [sic] ten seconds after the blast. I recall being able to see through my arm, like looking at an x-ray!
The guy talks about the amazing fauna he saw while scuba diving between atomic tests, and the requisite topless natives, and concludes that he wouldn't have missed for anything!
I suspect others may not share that opinion, of course, and I doubt I would.
Good find, GoneGaryT, and good work approving it, Michael.
Slashdot is improved by articles like this.
CHeck out my drawings!!1... comments/suggestions are most welcomed
Thank you so much for posting this link to your amateurish drawings of Furry Hentai.
After a weekend of consisting of drinking beer, posting on Slashdot, and not going out on any dates, I was naturally questioning whether I was a pathetic loser who had wasted his life on stupidities.
But after seeing your drawings of women with cow and lizard (or something, your cows and your lizards look pretty much the same but for their colors) heads, expression-less faces, impossible ballooning breasts, and crudely drawn swollen genitals stuffed full of gigantic dildos and tentacles, my depression lifted and I felt once again a real satisfaction in my life.
I realized that no matter how much time and potential I've frittered away in my life, no matter what mistakes I've made, nothing I have done is so pointless, lacking in artistic merit, or symptomatic of an inability to relate to women as other than dumb animals with giant boobies and gaping genitals, as the "art" work you are so deluded as to be proud of.
Once again, the internet has served its real purpose: to show, by the great diversity of its most dismal and fetid and stunningly pointless depths, that most of the rest of us are by comparison, balanced, happy, contributing members of society.
Thank you once again for making me -- and I'm sure legions of others -- feel better by displaying just how useless your life is. You are truly a holy martyr to the cause of human joy! Christians claim Christ for our sins, but you have outdone Jesus: you live for your pointless Furry obsession, and in so doing enrich all lives around you merely by comparison!
I salute you sir, for the happiness you bring to the world by allowing the rest of us the relaxing pleasure of some thorough Schadenfreude!
Mod parent up to bring this joy to all who read Slashdot!
Sandia's intelligence lab converts business data into 3-D images
I know the taxpayers paid for it, but it always seams like it gets exclusivly [sic] licensed to some company for next to nothing then that company charges the people that paid for it in the first place a lot of money to use it.
You're a wisely cynical man.
In the light of the 9/11 Commission's report of the multiple failures of the CIA and FBI that allowed the terrorists to attack us in 2001, in the light of Sibel Edmonds's allegations that the FBI intentionally destroyed translations of intercepted terrorist conversations, in light of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report about systemic CIA failures to provide accurate intelligence about WMDs in Iraq, why am I less than thrilled to discover that Sandia National Laboratories' businesses?
When I further learn that "Sandia officials say tech firms or venture capitalists can use the lab on a per-request basis," I begin to understand that Sandia's Corporate Business Development and Partnerships aren't using my tax dollars to protect me, they're providing corporate welfare by dong the Research and Development that business wants but doesn't want to pay for.
Remember, these are the same businesses that vociferously object to government programs that might compete with them, whether that's sponsorship of Open Source Software or rural electric cooperatives or IRS software that might be efficient enough to cost H&R Block. These are the same corporations that got a provision added to the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill to prevent the government from getting discounts by buying those drugs in bulk, but which profit from research funded by the National Institutes of Health.
These are the same corporations that want Ashcroft's Department of Justice to stop worrying so much about fixing the FBI's failures, so it can spend government time -- and your money -- prosecuting civil -- civil, not criminal -- suits against file traders under the PIRATE Act on behalf of those corporations. If you need to sue a corporation, you're on your own; maybe you'll get some coupons out of a class action suit. But if the corporation wants to sue you, they get the assistance of top government lawyers and FBI agents packing guns and warrants.
And this just after the U.S. House passed the biggest corporate tax cuts in twenty years, because existing direct subsidies -- or less politely, corporate welfare -- will no longer be permitted under World Trade Organization rules. Even House Republicans admit this tax cut "is riddled with special-interest provisions that would further complicate the tax code, send jobs overseas and worsen a federal deficit already at record highs."
Does anyone really expect Sandia's going to release the source code to the data mining software to us, the citizens who have to pay for it?
Be proud, Americans, of how fat your labor makes your corporate masters! What a joy it is to serve them! It is your privilege to work long hours and pay high taxes so your masters can buy their yachts -- and buy the laws that enslave you.
America, Of the People, By the People, for the Pe^H^H Corporations
I would have to disagree, however. To the average non-PHD, this dust sounds like nothing more than some static mixed with clinking noises. To me it sounds like SPACE DUST!
Yeah, ok, that explains the static and the clinking noises, but what was that *THUMP*THWACK* sound at the end?
Somebody told me it was Cassini running into a big black monolith full of stars thing.
What's that all about?
We already saw a plagiarized article green-lighted, and now this? Cmdr Taco, Slashdot was a brilliant idea of yours, and I love your site -- but that's because I have reasonably high expectations for it.
First, the submitter of this article has he email address jarhead4067@hotmail.com -- and so does the article's author.
Second, what is presented is not a genetic algorithm. The characteristics of the email to be considered to discover if the email is spam are finite and hard-core -- and even the threshold some characteristics must reach to qualify as spam are hard-core:
A genetic algorithm is one in which the goal is hard-core, different means of reaching that goal are generated, and the characteristics of the most successful are used to generate the next "generation"; this is repeated until the goal is reached.
But in this model, each "chromosome" contains statistics about one email. The heart of this model is to train a neural network with known emails ("chromosomes") and then tests unknown emails ("chromosomes") against the network.
Neural networks have a checkered history in Artificial Intelligence research. A (very much simplified) model of biologic neurons, neural networks were for a time seen as a great hope for Artificial Intelligence. A neural network basically starts out with an array of input nodes and an array of output nodes, with each input node connected to each output. Each input corresponds to some characteristic of the items the network is trained with: for classifying animals, the inputs would be characteristic of animals, e.g., "furry", "bipedal", "feathered"; each output a classification, e.g., "mammal", "bird", "human".
To train the network, the input nodes are set to the characteristics of an item, and then the strength of the connection of those inputs to the correct outputs is increased (or that of other connections is decreased -- it's the same thing). With enough training, it's possible to isolate the salient characteristics from the ambiguous one sin a mechanistic way.
This is useful, but it was soon discovered that these simple neural networks, for certain sets of inputs, failed, because of overlapping categories: both birds and humans are bipedal, but only humans are also mammals. In a single layer neural network, the connection strength between input "bipedal" and output "mammal" would fluctuate, unable to describe humans or birds well. These problems can be alleviated by adding additional "hidden" layers of nodes between input and outputs, and by allowing "back-propagation" from output or hidden nodes to layers "previous" to them.
But even with these enhancements, it's been conclusively shown that some problems are intractable for neural networks. In any case, neural networks are no new thing.
Of course I have no idea if classifying spam is intractable or not, but I have to question whether using a neural network reliably can outperform Bayesian (or quasi-Bayesian) filtering. My guess is that since Bayesian filtering can judge email by the occurrence of single tokens ("words"), and not just "chromosome" statistics, and given that this "new" method also uses Bayesian filtering to generate one of those "chromosome" statistics anyway (and for only the most difficult to characterize emails to boot), this method itself probably mostly relies on its Bayesian sub-component.
So I'm a bit at a loss to see why this method is in any way revolutionary or even particularly interesting, or why it was green-lighted for Slashdot. Of course, I only gave the linke
I suppose it could be neat if done correctly but I fear that this could just open Mozilla and others up for some nasty Internet Explorer-esque exploits.
By its very nature it can't be done correctly.
That is to say, of convenience, power, or security, pick any two.
For web applications to be convenient, they have to be easy to install and offer all the power of a desktop application. That includes access to the filesystem, and to the burgeoning number of peripherals: personal LANs, WiFi antennae, microphones and webcams. (Did you know that Flash pages can turn on the web cam on your computer, if you allow it?)
But security requires bright lines of demarcation between your local machine, its peripherals, the LAN it may be on, and servers owned by others. It's on those distant servers that these applications will live, but this paradigm means granting any one of them as much access to the local computer as any locally installed program.
And as others gave mentioned, the reason I like Firefox is that it's only a browser. I don't want or need a browser that tries to be a poor substitute for several other programs, like a cheaply made Swiss Army knife -- I want a browser that is just as good a browser as possible.
I agree with Loopy that prohibiting commercial use is selfish a lot of the time, but I wouldn't say *always*.
,a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith'>Ada m Smith.
I think corporations are selfishly trying to make as much profit as possible for their top management and shareholders.
But ah, maybe I was smoking crack when I was reading
My problem with the GPL is that it allows companies to profit off of other people's code without sharing those profits with the creators of that code.
Yes, they have to share their (modified) code, and sometimes that balances things out. On the other hand, sometimes al they add is their company logo, and you often see software "agregators" selling CDs of GPL'd software, without ever clearly explaining this stuff is freely available.
Given that companies also use those profits to buy legislation like the INDUCE Act, writing code as "charity work" for for-profit companies is tantamount to volunteering to forge your own shackles and chains for your enslavers.
To those never entering the shitlist, what made a difference was the constant pounding of head against the beaurocratic [sic] brickwall, the humiliation of "sorry, you're not allowed to enter that flight", "you're not authorized by proper authorities", always have to submit to some greater authority. Always hearing "you have nothing to fear if you have done nothing wrong". To most, that's something they could live with. And what it would take to change it had very little to do with leadership, it had to do with people getting off their asses.
Yours is one of the most informative comments I've read on Slashdot.
To anyone who doubts just how much we've become like the totalitarian societies we once despised, just compare what Dovregubbens Hall (583591) writes to your last visit to an airport or a Federal building.
We've learned to fear the screener for the Transportation Security agency, because if he doesn't like your attitude, he can keep you off your flight -- or from flying ever again. A year ago that screener was a janitor or a Microsoft Certification dropout. Today he can seriously disrupt your life if he wants to -- and for the first time in his life, he know he holds that kind of power.
We've got the government "training" long-haul truck drivers -- guys who routinely drive twelve or eighteen hours straight to meet deadlines --, and bus drivers, and rest stop workers to identify "suspicious" people and report them to a secret toll-free phone number. To think that this volunteer force can't be used to suppress dissent -- "Just keep a count of pro-choice bumper stickers" --is to be willfully blind to a century or more of police misconduct.
Even guys with cameras aren't safe from being scrutinized and added to government databases, because cops today wave the bloody shirt of 9-11 and invoke "patriotism" as a fig-leaf to justify anything they care do to -- reasonable or not, legal or not.
Protesters, exercising their First Amendment rights, are already being arrested solely because of the content of their speech. Whether they are eventually convicted or just harassed by cops and city inspectors, the message is clear: dissent will cost you at least a day in jail, enough money to hire a lawyer (or rely on a possibly incompetent court-appointed lawyer), and maybe a little roughing up by the cops.
Every war attracts a few war profiteers along with the honest, self-sacrificing patriots. Every increase in police powers gives police new tools to fight crime, but at the same time gives that minority of cops who are bullies, busybodies, and braggarts interested in throwing their weight around more occasion to lord that power over the innocent citizens.
The thing to fear is not another 9-11. It's not even Stalinist knocks on the door at midnight. What we need to fear is more subtle: a steady erosion of American liberties, of what it means to be an American.
I always believed that, as an American, I had a right to protest my government. It said so right in the Constitution. But now I'm reluctant not only to protest, but to even view protests, giving that several nurses at a conference in Washington D.C. were arrested along with protesters, just for being nearby.
I always believed that, as a citizen in a democracy, the police were not to be feared -- and weren't any "better" than me. Now we have the Hiibel decisi
Stress-test my homepage: Wifi, Photography & Fortune [blogdns.org]
I too you up on your offer and got an excellent "wallpaper" out of it.
Although this galactic center look great, I went with the bars of sunlight on the magpies to replace my old wallpaper, a satellite photo of Venice.
Thanks.
(for the astronomers in the crowd) ...would the solar storms "rip" all the water from the planet, and then where would it all go?
"Solar storms". That's what they want you to believe.
But the Fremen know it was the giant Sandworms.
I'm not trying to be an ass, but it seems as though you are suggesting that someone fill you in on all the things you missed out on by not getting a CS degree...It is a bit much to ask someone to cram 4 years of college courses into an online reference.
Of course it is. But I'd like to see, as I've mentioned here before, Slashdot articles that are educational.
I'm not expecting comprehensive works, but just a start, an overview, something that might eventually be contributed to something like Wikibooks.
Honestly, I think that proponents of open source are the ideal people to make learning more open source, less a "mere" four years of college and more of a lifelong avocation. There are a lot of smart people here, and I hope to teach them something of what I know, and learn from them what I don't.
A good Computer Science program will cover everything in GEB with more depth and without all the stupid-writing-tricks and dumbing down that Hofstadter employs.
As someone who greatly enjoyed GEB, and as someone who became a professional programmer without (much) of a standard Computer Science education, let me offer you a challenge: give those of us without the benefit of your education a chapter-by-chapter (or concept-by-concept) breakdown -- or, better since you complain of Hofstadter "dumbing down", a "wising up" -- of GEB as several entries on your Slashdot Journal.
Over the course of a few weeks, explain to us what we missed in GEB, and provide references to where we can fill in these gaps in our knowledge.
If GEB is so simplistic, you'll have little trouble so demonstrating, and your efforts will be of benefit to many Slashdot readers. Rather than just deriding, you'll be able to educate, rather than just tearing down, you'll have the satisfaction of having built up the knowledge of many of us -- and our gratitude.
In reading the preceding suggestions, I see that the "merely" inspirational and entirely clever synthesis Godel, Escher, Bach is derided as too simplistic, and that engaging and revealing look at how engineers work, The soul of the New Machine is dismissed as "too depressing" -- I suppose for managers it is; for those to whom the thrill is in the journey rather than the Wall street Journal it continues to be uplifting.
So I'll offer a suggestion that isn't blue-sky theorizing, but instead a hard-headed look at how to design a large system, with all the compromises and trade-offs that entails, a "purely" technical book that nevertheless (and least in the first half) reads like a thrilling novel, and a book that gives great insight into how a familiar and loved -- or foolishly reviled -- tool came to be: Bjarne Stroustrup's Design and Evolution of C++.
If you've ever wondered why the C++ language works the way it does -- or why some particular "mistake" that's so obvious to you made it past Stroustrup and later the Standard Committee --, or how to create a wholly new language that's backward compatible with a well- and widely-established one, without compromising the efficiencies that made the original so popular, or just how to design a large scale project that must be many things to many "constituents" -- procedural language, object oriented language, reasonably easy to write compilers for, D&E is a must read.
Will they be available to customers in Istanbul (not Constantanople [sic])?
I loved their video with the dwarfs dancing around a miniature Stonehenge!
Er, or was that another band?
What are your values? Free porn for all kids? There are legitimate reasons to agree as a society that kids viewing porn is not a good thing. The government frequently passes laws restricting behavior of children in the interests of protecting them. (mandatory bike helmets, can't buy beer until you're 21, ban Joe Camel ads, etc.)
Well, perhaps there are legitimate reasons to keep kids from porn.
But there are certainly legitimate reasons to insist that parents are responsible to monitor their children's use of the internet and not expect the nanny-State to do it for them.
There's no mechanism for keeping porn form kids that doesn't involve the government judging content and registering that content or its viewers, or both.
And there is a chilling effect on free speech if one has to get government permission before distributing content or fear government prosecution afterwards. The cure is worse than the disease.
Let's recall the various works banned by the U.S. Government for "obscenity"; DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, James Joyce's Ulysses -- and even Voltaire's political/religious satire Candide -- all were banned from the United States by U.S. customs inspectors. And all, of course, are now considered classic works of literary art.
And as I noted previously, there is plenty of stuff on the internet that, while not obscene, probably shouldn't be viewed by children. Will you ban pictures of the Nazi Holocaust in your attempt to make the internet safe for children?
And the whole "for the children" argument is a straw-man, set up by fundamentalists who are using "the children" as an excuse to keep porn from adults by banning porn altogether.
Sorry -- there are many good things in this world that it's not at all good to expect the government to provide.
Health care is a good, and I suspect that many parents would desire free health care for their kids even more than government suppression of porn. Little Johnny will recover from seeing a "beaver shot" a lot more easily than he'll recover from leukemia.
But the same fundamentalist conservatives who swear up and down that it will be positively disastrous for government to get in the universal health care business -- even just for kids --, advocate government telling us what we can and cannot view -- for the benefit of "the children".
The same conservatives who explain that government regulation of business stifles innovation and creates a drag on the economy, want to regulate the 50 billion dollar porn industry out of business -- even though by far the vast majority of porn customers are adults.
The same conservatives who rail against "Big Government" apparently don't think it's too much for government to vet every one of million of web pages?
Please: the same fundamentalists who preach about "personal responsibility" every time they want to cut a welfare program or unemployment benefits, can't ask a middle-class parent able to afford a computer and an internet connection to watch what sites his kids visit?
I heard there's a pig named Napoleon going around, teaching the whole flock of sheep to chant:
The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (covering Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island) has ruled that e-mail providers are not violating the law by reading users' e-mail without the user's consent.
In a way, I suppose, this ruling is a good thing, because it underscores the need for a comprehensive privacy and data retention law.
What's needed is something along the lines of The European Union's privacy law: that is, something that is explicitly mandated, rather then the "penumbras" of privacy that some judges can, and some judges won't, see lurking between the lines of the Ninth Amendment.
We can hope that this defeat in the courts can be -- with our hard work -- turned into a victory in the U.S. Congress.
I hear the Canada is harboring terrorists. Quick to the F14...mobile
Bur when Bush/Cheney invade Canada, where will the draft dodgers run to?
Eh, anyway, so much for the longest undefended border in the world.
In a 9-0 decision, Canada's highest court ruled, despite the fact that ISPs provide the means for piracy, they are not liable for what people download. ...this is a very good thing."
Good? This is horrible!
How am I to continue my suit against paper-makers and ink producers on behalf of book publishers?
Oh, wait, I can still do that in the "Land of the Free", the United States.
(It's the land of the free for corporations -- they can get away with anything. It's the land of the fee for taxpayers.)
Bonch, aka Overly Critical Guy, who keeps proclaiming he hates the bias of Slashdot and all the people the comment here, has submitted a review here. Talk about interesting personality conflict.
I didn't know trolls submitted articles these days.
Trolls submit articles.
But trolls don't write articles.
THIS REVIEW IS PLAIGARISM, PURE AND SIMPLE
bonch (38532) did write this review.
Unless bonch's name is really Devin Faraci, "bonch's" review is cut-and-pasted from chud.com.