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User: siskbc

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  1. injunction on SCO Announces Final Termination of IBM's Licence · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It's interesting that SCO is taking such drastic measures such as the license termination and licensing linux to end users before they even go to trial. The logical conclusion one draws from such measures is that they do not have a case, and do not think they can win. I can't believe that the court system is allowing this to occur,

    Good point. I don't know why IBM hasn't filed for a temporary injunction against the license termination. It would accomplish two things. 1) it would put AIX users a bit at ease (even if IBM has indemnified them), and 2) would get this thing in a courtroom quicker which is *obviously* the last thing SCO wants. I believe when they start getting legal defeats the stock will tank.

  2. THIS system is bogus on Insurance Claims to be Tested by Lie Detector · · Score: 1
    Remember, police don't generally use the polygraph to make a direct case against someone. They use it in conjunction with hard evidence and a narrowed list of suspects for a particular, established crime.

    They would if they could - polygraphs aren't admissible in many states here in the US. And there's a reason - it's not all that accurate, and that's when used by someone trained. Also, this system isn't even being administered by any trained person, as it isn't even being administered by an actual person. Combine that with the mitigating factors (like how pundits have mentioned that people typically ARE stressed when reporting a claim), and this system doesn't sound so good.

  3. Re:When? Now. on Identity Theft Countermeasures? · · Score: 1
    How do you know he wasn't telling the truth ?

    I figured I'd get that one after I posted. He wasn't a new customer - he placed the order by email, and she recognized his emails (I guess his sig or something). So sounds pretty suspicious.

  4. Re:Cher - The 14th farwell tour 2034 on OpEd Piece on Extended Life Expectancy · · Score: 1

    As if that nasty ass isn't sagging through her fishnets already. It's going to be hitting the ground in a few years.

  5. When? Now. on Identity Theft Countermeasures? · · Score: 2, Interesting
    From Article: "and I'm wondering when credit-abusers will start crying 'fraud' just to get out of debt... making things even harder for the true victims."

    Already. My wife sells telecom equipment for a major vendor, and they've had one guy try it. He bought something, and wanted to return it, but knew their policy wouldn't allow it. Instead, he claimed he never placed the order, that it was someone else stealing his card. Nice, huh?

  6. Well, um... on SCO Execs Dumping Stock · · Score: 1

    ...no. But there should be.

  7. Vic 20? on Local Area Security Linux 0.4a · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    Anyone have linux formatted for my vic20.. I like the computer and i use it every day.. I want to get a distrabution that will fit on the vic 20 tape.. I feel my vic20 computer is the most safe of the market for hackers and such.. I am running windows xp on it at the moment.. Anyone help me?

    I thought I was the only one who still had one of those laying around. ;) Nice computer...when I was 8.

  8. Re:population on OpEd Piece on Extended Life Expectancy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Uh, yeah they are. Check out Liberia, Ethiopea, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Afghanistan, ...

    You'd think g'parent would have actually seen that line coming. Of course you live riskier (say, war) when you figure dysentery is going to get you any day anyway.

  9. how's that different? on Microsoft Nailed by Software Patent · · Score: 1
    IT DOESN'T MATTER what their "intentions" are.. This case clearly shows how silly software patent-laws are. With guns and sanctions they dictate who can use what technology, because someone were "first". Come on! Most of us stopped such silliness in the kindergarden.

    Um, that's also how regular patents work. Whoever is "first" gets to decide who uses the technology. Here, it happens to be software. Why is software different than anything else?

  10. We have a mystic in the house! on Gentoo Package Accused of Violating DMCA · · Score: 1
    What are the factors that decide if a file is really in violation of the DMCA? I can see lots of lameness coming from this type of system.

    Need a crystal ball for that insight, did we?

  11. taxonomy on Search Engine Learns From User Feedback · · Score: 1
    The reason why Google doesn't offer anything similar might be because Northern Light has patented their subject classification and taxonomy.

    For what it's worth, the way I'd do it would *not* require a subject/keyword taxonomy. To me, that's one of Google's strengths - they don't attempt to evaluate content ahead of time. I wouldn't either - in fact, I think you *have* to develop the substructure/classification relationships based on the results of the search. Otherwise, all you have is a fancy card-catalog system.

    I read their patent (5,924,090), and it was fairly badly written (even compared to other patents!). I'm not sureif my method would be covered, as I wouldn't even attempt to use a taxonomy, as I think it would fail based on its very nature. It does seem as if they're trying to "0wnz0r" the entire idea of classifying results, which seems damned broad, and I think people were doing this far before July 2001 when they filed.

    The whole taxonomy patent thing is weird, though. As I said, I've seen *numerous* websites offer up pre-designated categories based on search results (Yahoo, etc). Do all these companies license Northern Lights' technology, I wonder? If not, then the patent must be more specific than it initially seems.

    As for ease of use, you're right - this wouldn't necessarily be the way you want the search engine to always work. To me, it would be like another version of "advanced search." You don't always want to use it, but you definitely want it there.

  12. Re:America's lovely legal system on Webcams Watching The Classrooms? · · Score: 1
    While you certainly make a valid point, classrooms aren't delivery rooms (thank you, captain obvious).

    Obviously (as you state), but the concept is the same. When the school is responsible for the teachers' actions, it doesn't make sense to document them.

    I'm sure there are things that go on in operating rooms of all sorts that most ignorant people would think was wrong due to lack of education on the topic and experience

    The fear is not of the perception of random onlookers (who still are permitted to bring their eyes, btw), but of the perception of lawyers who can use the footage in court. Same problem with schools.

    we've all been to a classroom and we all know how they should function. It's not life or death.

    No, it's life or sue, which is worse from a culpability standpoint (death benefits are low compared to "menal suffering" payouts.

    That bit of philosophy and idealism, of course, won't change the outcome, and that's that cameras would make firing teachers a lot more necessary, and schools would hate that.

    Right, the only beneficial aspect of cameras for the school is that they can use teachers as scapegoats. There's very real little upside.

  13. America's lovely legal system on Webcams Watching The Classrooms? · · Score: 1
    The camera would certainly make the facts of the case clear, though, wouldn't it? After all, if little Susie claims that Mr. Teacher molested her after class, the camera would have something to say about that (either for or against), wouldn't it?

    If I believed in our legal system, I would fully agree. However, I have more faith in a system that simply practiced random executions of defendants (ie, Texas - sorry, couldn't resist). Alternatively, no camera turns into a "he said, she said" trial - ie, no evidence. Net benefit for school, and probably the teacher.

    As such, I think the lawsuit would be too much harm in itself, and the possibility of a retarded guilty verdict ruining a teacher's life is too much risk.

    Ultimately, I'll tell you this - schools won't use cameras for the same reason that hospitals have banned video cameras from delivery rooms. Too much liability.

  14. Obviously what they need most is... on GnuCash - A Call For Help · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...a decent web server.

  15. if it weren't for parents... on Webcams Watching The Classrooms? · · Score: 2, Interesting
    How many people have been in class and had a teacher watched by an administration member only to watch a COMPLETELY different teacher come through? Exactly.

    Sometimes that's OK, but usually that teacher is worse. Bland, unengaging, etc in fear that they might do something controversial. I think best-case is they just get used to it, a la "The Real World."

    I've seen the other side though, and with the damned lawsuit-happy parents, the school would find itself perpetually in court.

  16. oversight on press release on SCO: Fortune 500 Company Buys License, IBM Retort · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...an undisclosed Fortune 500 company...

    We're sorry. We meant to say a Fortune *500,000,000* company. It was actually a lemonade stand, and they were using old RedHat disks as coasters. We traded them a license for 2 cups of lemonade.

    --Darl

  17. That's about it on Search Engine Learns From User Feedback · · Score: 1

    I checked it out, and gave it the "apple" test. Didn't do bad, but I think it could be done better. I might talk to the guys, thanks for the link.

  18. frikkin' tarrifs on EU IP Enforcement Directive Criticized · · Score: 1
    Still the USA would never try protectionist tariffs to favour local companies would it? :-)

    Nah. 'Course not. Well, only industries that are prominent in election swing-states. Like, say, steel.

    You can thank the electoral college system for that steel tarrif, btw.

  19. Doesn't have to be useful for everything on Search Engine Learns From User Feedback · · Score: 1
    So, if Google's tool could also be used to identify the different meanings that each word has, then maybe they could give you a few links for each meaning.

    That's very much the idea.

    Of course, many search items might not be this easy to categorize.

    That's true, but at point the most successful solution would be what google does now. In other words, if there isn't any clear substructure to the organization of results, just return the most relevant.

    We haven't yet proven that your algorithm is easy

    Obviously, since I don't have access to google's database of webcrawls to test it. However, I will say that the problem reduces to pattern classification tasks that are reasonably well characterized. I have a pretty good background in that, and am familiar with techniques that work very well with problems similar to this one. I'm actually fairly confident this would work.

    and we also haven't proven that it would be useful for many types of searches.

    As I said, it doesn't have to be useful for all searches. It simply has to be useful for the categories of searches at which google now fails. The "apple" search is one of the prime examples of google's failure, as it's pretty damned good at everything else.

  20. Re:ABOLISH MONEY!!! on Top 10 Inventions in Money Technology During the 1900's · · Score: 1
    communism isn't about bartering. It's about having a gift economy, where people of the world don't need to put their faith in bits of paper with numbers printed on them, or bits on a disk/card, they put their faith in other humans.

    For your sake I hope you're trolling.

    Impossible? No.

    Perhaps you're unfamiliar with human nature. "Pay it forward" doesn't work outside the movie. People are greedy. People are motivated by the possibility of enhancing their own enjoyment in life. In general, people aren't motivated by kindness. Anything else is a pipe dream. And I mean that in the "whatcha smokin'" sense.

  21. So why *isn't* this being done? on Search Engine Learns From User Feedback · · Score: 2, Interesting
    No offense but:

    In general, statements like that are used by people who haven't actually thought through the algorithm in detail, or who don't have good knowledge of algorithmic theory.

    None taken. Put it this way - I could write it in matlab, and I could write it pretty bad in C++. However, I'm not familiar with google's code, and wouldn't be able to integrate it into that. But I could write a version of it, just not as it would need to be, final form. In other words, I'm very familiar with the algorithms involved, that's definitely not the problem. I do work on problems similar to this in grad school - the source of the data is completely different, but the same tools can be applied.

    In specific, your suggestion sounds excellent. Sufficiently excellent that I would be very surprised if Google, with their famously large R&D division, didn't have some very smart people thinking about it or something similar.

    Thanks, and I agree - if they're not doing this, they should be/have been. What I outlined would be reasonably accomplished through new applications of existing decision theory algorithms.

    Thinking about it briefly the first couple aproaches I come up with wind up being factorial time. Plus there is a lot of fuziness as far as how to promote Fiona Apple links but not just lousy Apple Computer ones, not to mention search terms where the "families" of hits are less distinct than for Apple.

    it's not as fuzzy as you'd think, and I think this could be done with less computational overhead than you'd initially believe. Basically, what we have is a classic supervised pattern classification algorithm, where the two classes are "useful" and "not useful." At the point where you tell it the groupings, then it's just a matter of determining what characteristics are common among the groups. You'd have to reduce the results to more ordinal characteristics, but this would be a solution similar to how mozilla translates emails into vectors of charactersitics for their Bayesian mail filters.

    Most of this could be done starting with, say, a few hundred results or so per search. Arranging into categories from here would be fairly trivial, at which point those categories would be presented to the user. The user could then update the relationships as they are determined by the computer, and resubmit.

    Of course, the more samples you use, the more overhead. Also, the more descriptors/features/parameters, the mroe overhead. Using one way of doing it, the problem would be linear with samples, and O(N^3) with features (due to a matrix inversion). Not all that bad, particularly when the number of features can be capped, and does not grow (necessarily) with samples.

  22. Re:Yeah it's fair, and Davis will go! on Ask the 'Geek Candidate' for California Governor · · Score: 1
    No Democrat-registered voters voted for Simon in the Republican primary, because California does not allow that. You may vote only for your own party nomination, not for any other, with the exception of people who chose "Decline to State", who may choose from any of the party ballots for those parties which accept voters registered as such.

    I suspect quite a few people from both parties refrained from registering so as to get around that loophole. Why wouldn't you, as an interested voter, want to have as much political participation as possible? Lots of Dems voted in the Republican primary, believe it. And that had a big role in Riordan losing. Everyone knew he was the stronger candidate, except the *truly* stupid.

    However, Davis DID run a campaign targeting Riordan, nominally telling the public that he was prone to flipping back and forth on issues, but concentrating on his pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-environment stances in an effort to get the most conservative Republicans to vote for Simon (a true nitwit) instead.

    Exactly - and I see that as a subversion of the normal political processs. Davis flat-out bought that election.

    Davis's budgets were submitted on time, but left alone things like the state prison guard union. BTW, he received $119,500 from Enron and its employees from 1996 to early 2002. Can't find immediate numbers on Cisco, but I know that one of its upper-level people donated $25K to his campaign last year.

    They were submitted on time, but not approved, as I recall - I see that as part of a governor's job, getting that sort of thing through the assembly. Good numbers on Enron - I can't decide if he's dirty there, or just the dumbest person alive. Either way, shouldn't be governor. As for Cisco, that was flat-out graft.

    So ultimately, I find it a bit disingenious of Davis to claim that the process has been circumvented (despite the fact that recall of a governor is quite clearly outlined), when he bought the election in the first place.

  23. Something like that on Search Engine Learns From User Feedback · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The biggest flaw I can see with this system is that if I'm looking for something rare and specific, once I find it, I won't thumbs-up it, I'll just click on the link...It might be useful to have a "thumbs-down all on page checkbox" which might narrow the search intelligently.

    That would help, but it would have to know why they're bad to know how it would differ from other results that might be more acceptable.

    Here's what I would do. First, instead of google returning the most relevant choices, it needs to be a factor of relevance and diversity. So, with the typical "apple" search, it would return some apple computer results, some fiona apple results, and some results about the fruit. All of those would be highly relevant, but it would only give, say, a few of each. You could then click on the more relevant results (if you wanted apple the fruit, you'd click on the three fruit links), at which point it would reject the others and give you more of what you want.

    The key here is that it would have to give diversity in the beginning for you to be *able* to differentiate things like what you want from things you don't. This is not how google works now, I don't believe.

    For what it's worth, this algorithm wouldn't be too complicated to do. I lack the programming ability, but I could do the algorithm in pseudocode (at point most decent programmers could reduce it to C++). It should be quite possible.

  24. britspeak on EU IP Enforcement Directive Criticized · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    Pfft bloody American arsewipes polluting OUR language. ;)

    It's called phon-ics, you snaggle-toothed uglies. ;)

    And if you jackarses (see! I can speak Brit!) would have decided to spell things in the 1600's, before we told you where to stick your tea tax, none of use would have this problem.

    As it is, you have some arsehole trying to throw you in gaol just because, when attempting a tricky manouevre in your car, your arse-coloured tires are a bit off-centre and run up on the kerb, hitting the lorrie in front of you, and mucking your bonnet.

    And don't even ask me about the time I requested a napkin at a restaurant. ;)

  25. Answer to your question on EU IP Enforcement Directive Criticized · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I know the gun thing is probably overused, but let's say I want a high pressure water gun so I can soak my buddy with water. This is like outlawing this water pistol because someone else put bleach in theirs and sprayed it in the eyes of a law enforcement officer. Blinding a cop is illegal, and for good reason. Why make owning a water pistol illegal?

    If cops had no fundamental understanding of the functioning of a water pistol, then they probably would. That's why we're having the current problem - lawmakers have absolutely no idea how these systems work, so all they have to go on is the info from industry shills.