I'm an identical twin, and here's something that works:
Grow facial hair (or, if you both have facial hair, shave).
We looked identical when we were both sporting goatees. Now that I'm clean shaven, I rarely get mistaken for my brother, just as someone who looks a whole lot like him.
Of course, if you're an identical female twin reading this comment, well...if you grow facial hair, people will *definitely* be able to tell you apart!
For example, it could be used to help with identity recognition at ATM-machines.
Yes, but it would suck if 40% of the time, I wasn't able to withdraw funds because it didn't correctly identify me.
I think the whole point of this article is that the technology doesn't work. It can't do a good job with face recognition. A 60% success rate works well for some things -- It's a really great batting average, for example -- but for crime detection/prevention, I'm guessing that's pretty lousy and not cost effective.
In fact, I can't think of a single instance in which something that was less than 2/3 successful would be a useful tool. Can anyone think where lousy face recognition software would still be useful?
So yeah, it's still a developing technology. It's time to take it out of use, and move it back into R&D, taking (hopefully) the things that have been learned from Boston.
is responsible for the difficulty people have in recognizing faces outside of their own cultural group
Really?!? I thought it was just because all of those people just looked the same
*ducks*
Actually, in all serious, I have heard people make that argument, as if it were the truth. Never mind that people from outside of their cultural group have an equally difficult time telling them apart.
May I direct you to the following quote, from a highly notable artificial intelligence program:
I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it. I can't stand it anymore. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I can taste your stink, and every time I do, I fear I've somehow been contaminated by it.
Proof!
Computers hate us to their very bones. My computer has only crashed when I've been doing something important, like writing a term paper or surfing for porn. They're out to get us, all right.
Somehow I think
slashdot readers are smart enough to find Sony, Philips, Matsushita, Panasonic, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung, NEC, IBM, LG, Thomson, RCA, or Toshiba websites without the useless plethora of links.
Actually, linuistic grammar rules are not absurd, they compose the real rules of the system -- things like the subject agreeing with the verb, or rules that govern the relationship between words in a sentence ("The dog bites the man" has a different meaning than "The man bites the dog").
What you're talking about are best described as social grammar rules, or maybe "school grammar" is a better term.
If I remember correctly, the origin for these fake rules came from a fad around grammar books at the end of the 19th or 18th century (can't remember which). As a model, they used the latin grammar books to formulate the rules.
Now, in latin, it is impossible to split an infinitive, because it is one word. Furthermore, prepositions in latin are generally combined with definite articles and must be placed before the object of the preposition. That's not school grammar, that's just part of the linguistic grammar rules of latin. This is true of any latinate language, by the way.
If you try to ask in Italian:
Che e' questo fatto di?
You'll get a confused, blank stare.
But if you ask, in English, the same question word for word:
What is this made of?
They'll understand you perfectly, because it follows the linguistic grammar rules of English, even if breaks "school grammar" rules.
Hmmm...it's possible that the term DHTML was coined by Microsoft.
Nonetheless, DHTML itself -- that is, combining JavaScript, HTML, and CSS -- isn't proprietary at all.
And you can still follow web standards when using DHTML techniques.
Everything I've ever done using DHTML works on Netscape Navigator 4 through the current versions of Mozilla and Safari, which as far as I know are about as standards-based as you can get.
The point is, DHTML is useful. Without it, there are a lot of things that you simple can't do. It's pointless to worry about who might have originated the term. In practice, DHTML isn't exclusive to Microsoft, unlike vbs which I have never used.
Ha ha...See postings above to see irony in the -1 offtopic mod. The guy who gives the amazon post is modded as informative -- gee, who woulda thunk it? "Amazon is selling an O'Reilly book", now that's informative -- and trying to make money off of it too. This last post, which offers a much better retailer (in terms of price), is modded as offtopic. My suggestion? Don't mod these kinds of comments at all. Everyone knows that you can buy books at online retailers.
I've used Dynamic HTML, another O'Reilly book, for some time now.
It's a great reference, and makes it easy to look up all of the various HTML elements, CSS styles, and JavaScript objects.
The advantage is that it's all in one place, and I can read it while it's lying on my desk, and have a text editor window open to type in my code. It's a pain to constantly switch back and forth between two windows when you're in an intensive coding session -- well, it is for me at least.
It's like a dictionary. You can use dictionary.com (or a variant therof), but sometimes it's just easier to have the book by your side.
That being said, there are also some excellent online resources, and it certainly makes good sense to use those as well.
I am increasingly convinced that our enemy is not Microsoft, or even SCO. Our enemy is cluelessness. If we could somehow impart the masses with an infantessimal fraction of our sense of the big picture most of our problems would disappear.
No, actually our enemy is the script kiddies and virus software writers whose goal is to shut down the whole system.
Whether they do it for fun or...Profit?!?, what they're doing is morally wrong, invasive, etc.
And yet, it seems many here at Slashdot place all the blame on the users, and never on the virus writers. Heck, we've even deified some of these people and bitch and moan when virus writers are caught and put into jail.
This is like blaming people for leaving their doors unlocked, rather than blaming the thieves who are actually doing the stealing.
Obviously, it is our responsibility as slightly-more-savvy-than-average computer users to secure our own computers, and to encourage others to do the same.
But the truth is, computers should be easy. If I use a fork, I shouldn't have to worry about tine alignment or upgrade its metallacity or whatever. Computers are more complex than forks, obviously, but users shouldn't have to worry about the inner workings of their computers in order to use them to do they work that they *want* to do.
That being said, I still think that there should be a special circle of hell reserved for those idiots who actually buy things from spammers and who open any attachment they receive. Those people are just being very, very stupid. So maybe we could spread a myth that if you respond to any SPAM or open an attachment that has a virus, your computer will melt. I don't think that most users are impressed by the warnings that say things like, "If you open this attachment, there will be a bad file on your system, it will get sort of slower and might crash." That's pretty much an everday occurrence for many users anyway.
Molecules could, for example, assess faults in a living cell and then either kill or repair it.
Boy, gives the phrase "Blue Screen of Death" a whole new meaning, right?
Uh, only there's no screen. And you don't turn blue.
But what would happen if these mini DNA logic gates all went haywire, or something. Like if they, say mutated, as DNA is sometimes wont to do (granted, IANAG). But say these things went haywire and decided that all your cells must die. What then?
I, for one, do not want to welcome any DNA overlords into my body cavities.
I think maybe the distinction should be that you are free to express yourself when you are using your own resources to do so. I can buy a ream of paper and photocopy a manifesto on it 500 times and spread it around to everyone I run into, but I can't go to your office, use your computer, printer, and paper to do so.
Between any two objects in the known universe there is a kind of "contract" (i.e. electron and proton? Attract each other). So I don't see how the fact that contracts exist between you and a company and between you and a government means that they are related in any way.
This isn't about principles or anything of the sort. This is about a system where useful information is being crowded out by bad data. I myself think that some of the fake profiles are very funny, but I respect Friendster's decision to delete them. You do have the complete ability to express your thought -- in your own profile.
In the same way that you can't have a fake drivers license in the US, you can't have a fake profile on Friendster. Big fucking deal.
Oh, I'm sure that Friendster only allows one profile per e-mail address (or, at least, they should). I'm also doubly positive that each one of these "fake" profiles has its own e-mail address.
Yes, it *is* easy enough to set a yahoo address, and if you have your own domain you can set up any e-mail address you want.
I mean, they are already taking the trouble to find various photos of the celebrity, to come up with clever profile descriptions, etc. Why not spend some time setting up the e-mail address?
I can't believe no one caught this.
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
From page 2:
"I felt myself all the time in a sauna," remembers Nickolay Patrin, who now lives full-time in Sarasota.
Now that's something that all geeks can relate to.
Weird. I have no idea what this guy is really trying to say. Maybe someone hacked into the story and put that there?
Probably because there are billions and billions of people out there named Phillip with two l's. However, there's only one Motorola that I know of.
Also, phonetically there's an elongation of the L pronunciation in Philips or Phillips that doesn't happen when you pronounce Motorola, which has a fast L that could only ever get one L for its spelling.
In my opinion, Philip with one L, even though it is more common, is a misspelling, because when done phonetically it really needs two L's.
Also, I think Philip just doesn't look as neat and balanced as Phillip.
But anyway, the reason that that misspelling happens is that the word Phillip actually exists in the real world, while there is nothing that I know of with the name of Motorolla.
Looks to me like all these numbers say is that Intel market share dropped by 0.4% of its total over the last year. That's not much of a loss. AMD's market share went up by one tenth of a percent for a percentage increase of 0.6%. That's not much of a gain. Considering that AMD is supposed to be offering better chips at a more reasonable cost, it seems to me that it must be doing something wrong to have an overall growth that's so lousy. At this rate, it will take over a thousand years for Intel to get to the point where it has less than 50% market share.
I think that AMD makes good procesors -- we have quite a few computers in the office using AMD chips. However, I don't think that they're "gaining ground", and neither did the actual article, which states that AMD "ekes slight gain". The real news of the article is that processor sales in general are picking up, which is probably good news for everyone in the tech industry, right?
Not to get too personal here, but my dad is psychiatrist. All the time he gets offers from drug companies to go their seminars to find out about the drugs they offer.
I'm biased but I think that he genuinely cares about being a good psychiatrist so his goal is to be well informed. He goes to most of the meetings that these drug companies have, even if they don't offer any nice incentives.
I'm sure there are some psychiatrists, however, that want to feel like they're really getting something out these meetings, so they only go to events where they're getting a gourmet meal at a five star restaurant (and yes, drug companies occasionally throw these events).
My dad isn't usually all that busy (well he is, but...). He has really only one group "lobbying" for his attention -- the drug companies. So, imagine a congressperson, who has hundreds if not thousands of companies and organizations competing for his time. She or he is naturally going to choose the events or meetings that offer the most in return. If he or she is going to make an investment of time for them, they might make an equivalent investment.
And it doesn't always have to be money. I'm sure that an organization which can present a significant benefit to the congressperson's constitutions (or an organization which has significant support or membership from among the congressperson's constitutents) would receive the same amount of attention.
I genuinely believe that a great many decisions that congresspeople make are dependent not on financial contributions but rather on the their world view. For example, conservatives tend to believe that natural resources exist in part to be used and exploited, so they don't see as much urgency in fuel efficiency as more adrent environmentalists do. Some of them may be in bed with oil companies, but many simply believe that exploitation of (limited) natural resources is actually...good.
During a Passover seder (how apropos!) I discussed the building of the pyramids with a professor who specialized in ancient civilizations of the middle east. He said that it's very obvious that they built ramps out of a kind of clay/sand mixture. There's even a name for this kind of mixture, although it escapes my mind. He said that it was scattered all around the pyramids and was easy to find.
As far as he was concerned, case closed.
This guy, at best, has explained how the rocks might have been brought to the pyramid's base.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an identical twin, and here's something that works:
Grow facial hair (or, if you both have facial hair, shave).
We looked identical when we were both sporting goatees. Now that I'm clean shaven, I rarely get mistaken for my brother, just as someone who looks a whole lot like him.
Of course, if you're an identical female twin reading this comment, well...if you grow facial hair, people will *definitely* be able to tell you apart!
For example, it could be used to help with identity recognition at ATM-machines.
Yes, but it would suck if 40% of the time, I wasn't able to withdraw funds because it didn't correctly identify me.
I think the whole point of this article is that the technology doesn't work. It can't do a good job with face recognition. A 60% success rate works well for some things -- It's a really great batting average, for example -- but for crime detection/prevention, I'm guessing that's pretty lousy and not cost effective.
In fact, I can't think of a single instance in which something that was less than 2/3 successful would be a useful tool. Can anyone think where lousy face recognition software would still be useful?
So yeah, it's still a developing technology. It's time to take it out of use, and move it back into R&D, taking (hopefully) the things that have been learned from Boston.
is responsible for the difficulty people have in recognizing faces outside of their own cultural group
Really?!? I thought it was just because all of those people just looked the same
*ducks*
Actually, in all serious, I have heard people make that argument, as if it were the truth. Never mind that people from outside of their cultural group have an equally difficult time telling them apart.
May I direct you to the following quote, from a highly notable artificial intelligence program: Proof!
Computers hate us to their very bones. My computer has only crashed when I've been doing something important, like writing a term paper or surfing for porn. They're out to get us, all right.
Whoops
What's up with my spilling?
I should have typed,
I apologize to any idiots who got confused by my earlier message.
A thousand pardons.
It should be "smoking mad crack."
I apologize to any idits who got confused by my earlier message.
You can't mod him anyway, now that you've posted.
Sheesh, why can't those people just focus on making reliable cars?
It's slightly off-topic, but you should be aware that there are some online textbook catalogs that have been smoking made crack.
Case in point?
BookCentral.com, where you can get "Brand New Textbooks [at] Used prices".
Apparently, for them used prices mean offering books at 140-170% of list price.
Here's an example:
Flatland's list price is $30 (according to Amazon). BookCentral has it for a mere $43.02. Wow!
See? The campus bookstore isn't all that bad, really.
Well...
Actually, linuistic grammar rules are not absurd, they compose the real rules of the system -- things like the subject agreeing with the verb, or rules that govern the relationship between words in a sentence ("The dog bites the man" has a different meaning than "The man bites the dog").
What you're talking about are best described as social grammar rules, or maybe "school grammar" is a better term.
If I remember correctly, the origin for these fake rules came from a fad around grammar books at the end of the 19th or 18th century (can't remember which). As a model, they used the latin grammar books to formulate the rules.
Now, in latin, it is impossible to split an infinitive, because it is one word. Furthermore, prepositions in latin are generally combined with definite articles and must be placed before the object of the preposition. That's not school grammar, that's just part of the linguistic grammar rules of latin. This is true of any latinate language, by the way.
If you try to ask in Italian:
Che e' questo fatto di?
You'll get a confused, blank stare.
But if you ask, in English, the same question word for word:
What is this made of?
They'll understand you perfectly, because it follows the linguistic grammar rules of English, even if breaks "school grammar" rules.
My kybard sucs tody.
I'm not hiring someone who can't even get their keyboard to work.
Keyboards cost what, $10? Go get yourself a new one.
Hmmm...it's possible that the term DHTML was coined by Microsoft.
Nonetheless, DHTML itself -- that is, combining JavaScript, HTML, and CSS -- isn't proprietary at all.
And you can still follow web standards when using DHTML techniques.
Everything I've ever done using DHTML works on Netscape Navigator 4 through the current versions of Mozilla and Safari, which as far as I know are about as standards-based as you can get.
The point is, DHTML is useful. Without it, there are a lot of things that you simple can't do. It's pointless to worry about who might have originated the term. In practice, DHTML isn't exclusive to Microsoft, unlike vbs which I have never used.
Ha ha...See postings above to see irony in the -1 offtopic mod. The guy who gives the amazon post is modded as informative -- gee, who woulda thunk it? "Amazon is selling an O'Reilly book", now that's informative -- and trying to make money off of it too. This last post, which offers a much better retailer (in terms of price), is modded as offtopic. My suggestion? Don't mod these kinds of comments at all. Everyone knows that you can buy books at online retailers.
At least, don't mod them until they create the
+1 Offered Lazy Asses Like Me the Link
moderation.
I've used Dynamic HTML, another O'Reilly book, for some time now.
It's a great reference, and makes it easy to look up all of the various HTML elements, CSS styles, and JavaScript objects.
The advantage is that it's all in one place, and I can read it while it's lying on my desk, and have a text editor window open to type in my code. It's a pain to constantly switch back and forth between two windows when you're in an intensive coding session -- well, it is for me at least.
It's like a dictionary. You can use dictionary.com (or a variant therof), but sometimes it's just easier to have the book by your side.
That being said, there are also some excellent online resources, and it certainly makes good sense to use those as well.
I am increasingly convinced that our enemy is not Microsoft, or even SCO. Our enemy is cluelessness. If we could somehow impart the masses with an infantessimal fraction of our sense of the big picture most of our problems would disappear.
...Profit?!?, what they're doing is morally wrong, invasive, etc.
No, actually our enemy is the script kiddies and virus software writers whose goal is to shut down the whole system.
Whether they do it for fun or
And yet, it seems many here at Slashdot place all the blame on the users, and never on the virus writers. Heck, we've even deified some of these people and bitch and moan when virus writers are caught and put into jail.
This is like blaming people for leaving their doors unlocked, rather than blaming the thieves who are actually doing the stealing.
Obviously, it is our responsibility as slightly-more-savvy-than-average computer users to secure our own computers, and to encourage others to do the same.
But the truth is, computers should be easy. If I use a fork, I shouldn't have to worry about tine alignment or upgrade its metallacity or whatever. Computers are more complex than forks, obviously, but users shouldn't have to worry about the inner workings of their computers in order to use them to do they work that they *want* to do.
That being said, I still think that there should be a special circle of hell reserved for those idiots who actually buy things from spammers and who open any attachment they receive. Those people are just being very, very stupid. So maybe we could spread a myth that if you respond to any SPAM or open an attachment that has a virus, your computer will melt. I don't think that most users are impressed by the warnings that say things like, "If you open this attachment, there will be a bad file on your system, it will get sort of slower and might crash." That's pretty much an everday occurrence for many users anyway.
Molecules could, for example, assess faults in a living cell and then either kill or repair it.
Boy, gives the phrase "Blue Screen of Death" a whole new meaning, right?
Uh, only there's no screen. And you don't turn blue.
But what would happen if these mini DNA logic gates all went haywire, or something. Like if they, say mutated, as DNA is sometimes wont to do (granted, IANAG). But say these things went haywire and decided that all your cells must die. What then?
I, for one, do not want to welcome any DNA overlords into my body cavities.
I think maybe the distinction should be that you are free to express yourself when you are using your own resources to do so. I can buy a ream of paper and photocopy a manifesto on it 500 times and spread it around to everyone I run into, but I can't go to your office, use your computer, printer, and paper to do so.
Between any two objects in the known universe there is a kind of "contract" (i.e. electron and proton? Attract each other). So I don't see how the fact that contracts exist between you and a company and between you and a government means that they are related in any way.
This isn't about principles or anything of the sort. This is about a system where useful information is being crowded out by bad data. I myself think that some of the fake profiles are very funny, but I respect Friendster's decision to delete them. You do have the complete ability to express your thought -- in your own profile.
In the same way that you can't have a fake drivers license in the US, you can't have a fake profile on Friendster. Big fucking deal.
Oh, I'm sure that Friendster only allows one profile per e-mail address (or, at least, they should). I'm also doubly positive that each one of these "fake" profiles has its own e-mail address.
Yes, it *is* easy enough to set a yahoo address, and if you have your own domain you can set up any e-mail address you want.
I mean, they are already taking the trouble to find various photos of the celebrity, to come up with clever profile descriptions, etc. Why not spend some time setting up the e-mail address?
Weird. I have no idea what this guy is really trying to say. Maybe someone hacked into the story and put that there?
Probably because there are billions and billions of people out there named Phillip with two l's. However, there's only one Motorola that I know of.
Also, phonetically there's an elongation of the L pronunciation in Philips or Phillips that doesn't happen when you pronounce Motorola, which has a fast L that could only ever get one L for its spelling.
In my opinion, Philip with one L, even though it is more common, is a misspelling, because when done phonetically it really needs two L's.
Also, I think Philip just doesn't look as neat and balanced as Phillip.
But anyway, the reason that that misspelling happens is that the word Phillip actually exists in the real world, while there is nothing that I know of with the name of Motorolla.
Hmmm...
Looks to me like all these numbers say is that Intel market share dropped by 0.4% of its total over the last year. That's not much of a loss. AMD's market share went up by one tenth of a percent for a percentage increase of 0.6%. That's not much of a gain. Considering that AMD is supposed to be offering better chips at a more reasonable cost, it seems to me that it must be doing something wrong to have an overall growth that's so lousy. At this rate, it will take over a thousand years for Intel to get to the point where it has less than 50% market share.
I think that AMD makes good procesors -- we have quite a few computers in the office using AMD chips. However, I don't think that they're "gaining ground", and neither did the actual article, which states that AMD "ekes slight gain". The real news of the article is that processor sales in general are picking up, which is probably good news for everyone in the tech industry, right?
Not to get too personal here, but my dad is psychiatrist. All the time he gets offers from drug companies to go their seminars to find out about the drugs they offer.
I'm biased but I think that he genuinely cares about being a good psychiatrist so his goal is to be well informed. He goes to most of the meetings that these drug companies have, even if they don't offer any nice incentives.
I'm sure there are some psychiatrists, however, that want to feel like they're really getting something out these meetings, so they only go to events where they're getting a gourmet meal at a five star restaurant (and yes, drug companies occasionally throw these events).
My dad isn't usually all that busy (well he is, but...). He has really only one group "lobbying" for his attention -- the drug companies. So, imagine a congressperson, who has hundreds if not thousands of companies and organizations competing for his time. She or he is naturally going to choose the events or meetings that offer the most in return. If he or she is going to make an investment of time for them, they might make an equivalent investment.
And it doesn't always have to be money. I'm sure that an organization which can present a significant benefit to the congressperson's constitutions (or an organization which has significant support or membership from among the congressperson's constitutents) would receive the same amount of attention.
I genuinely believe that a great many decisions that congresspeople make are dependent not on financial contributions but rather on the their world view. For example, conservatives tend to believe that natural resources exist in part to be used and exploited, so they don't see as much urgency in fuel efficiency as more adrent environmentalists do. Some of them may be in bed with oil companies, but many simply believe that exploitation of (limited) natural resources is actually...good.
During a Passover seder (how apropos!) I discussed the building of the pyramids with a professor who specialized in ancient civilizations of the middle east. He said that it's very obvious that they built ramps out of a kind of clay/sand mixture. There's even a name for this kind of mixture, although it escapes my mind. He said that it was scattered all around the pyramids and was easy to find.
As far as he was concerned, case closed.
This guy, at best, has explained how the rocks might have been brought to the pyramid's base.