This happened to me, and I'm posting to shame the company that did it. Fandango.com gave my credit card info to ReservationRewards which has siphoned $50 from me over the last 5 months.
ReservationRewards are theiving scumbags, but some people actually trust a bigger name site like Fandango.
I knew people who played games all the time but never bought anything--not a single title. Same thing with music CD's a few years ago. These folks absolutely would buy _something_ if it were impossible to pirate, because they do buy console games which require much more work.
Yeah, I understand that we are on the inside, and we do black out and lose time. I think that we can't discard our own perception of time moving forward though. The following will sound like gibberish I'm sure:
Suppose that the order of time is undetectable to someone inside--maybe you're part of a computer program. We can run the program in time slices of any order and you won't perceive the difference. So we will run through once and store the state at very fine time intervals. Now we can run it a second time in random order to the same effect for anyone on the 'inside'.
Maybe we make the time slices so small and randomized that we're mainly just reading the previous state as much as doing calculation. We all perceive a window of at least a few milliseconds in time. That perception could not change since it's just a function of the program's execution.
Taken to the extreme, you don't have to do any computations. Just store the state in a book and never open it. That's surely the same as moving to random time slices and doing microseconds of simulation.
So we're all part of a big book, The History of the Universe. It was written based on the first time through. No one is opening it again, but we still experience it just the same.
You think it just contained water? It wasn't on her windowsil either. It was sitting on top of her mailbox by the sidewalk. I know because I saw her put it there.
A laptop that boots in a couple seconds would be very useful. Desktops are often turned on all the time, so a quick boot time doesn't matter--I reboot maybe once a week.
Europeans will have a skewed distribution of African haplotypes, but my understanding is that the population bottlenecks that lead to this also allow for evolution. I don't know if large populations evolve unless it is due to sexual selection.
Don't you think Europeans and Asians are disimilar as well? As a pooled group we are less diverse than the Africans. It's all statistical nonsense; the way genotype data is analyzed is extremely crude. They literally discard data because the models are so piss poor that they actually perform worse when you give them more information!
People keep saying the wii is about fun. What do you think playing games on the xbox is like? Going to the dentist?
You didn't check your haxx0r badge when you turned on your wii; you checked it when you spouted the "fun" line. Go ahead and love your wii, but don't tell the rest of us that we're not having fun just because we don't have to justify paying $250 for a gamecube again and realizing that most of the titles on the rack are embarassing TV license kiddie shit.
I played Mario Kart a lot, but I don't think Gran Turismo is punishment either.
Re:This reminds me of an old game...
on
Iron Sky Trailer
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· Score: 1
Speaking of old space games, someone needs to port lunar rescue from the old black and white mac. That was an excellent game.
Maybe the bot tries once per day but there are many computers on the net. If this is ok then it can try once every three hours. There is a threshold below which you will not get banned and someone with a botnet can probably determine this by trial and error using just a few machines on their network.
I agree with you that we shouldn't eat meat because I think that animals are conscious, and the fear and pain they go through is real. Even worse are the conditions while they are alive. However, we have to remember that most animals don't have compassion for us or for each other.
I saw a famous nature show about the hunting techniques (cruelty) of killer whales and chimpanzees. I realized that these things are as bad as us if not worse! They're as mean as small children (another species whose cruelty we forget after 2nd grade). It's tough to have compassion for a shark when it takes a bite out of a meatless, teenage surfer. These bastards have been terrorizing the sea for millions of years, and some people actually feel sorry for them.
Predators should kill to the point of extinction for the same reason we should be vegetarians. Animals are just too selfish not to overpopulate though...
I should say that the data 23andMe will collect is very valuable. People are talking about them and what they're doing deserves funding. It's just that if you want the most obvious reason why Google would announce investment in a small biotech startup, I think that is it. I don't doubt that it will be an excellent investment, but the obvious has to be pointed out.
I thought this was a mistake in the article but there it is in the abstract (http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/academic/pubs/jansen_user_intent.pdf). Even a naive bayes model on a couple of predictors should have done better. Since the classes are imbalanced 74% could be a decent number if they are skilled at predicting the rare classes.
If they considered a skill score, I don't know why they quoted the error rate in the abstract. The 80% number was based on automatic classification instead of the labeled data. It makes no sense to quote an estimate based on a shit classifier when you have labeled data. A bad automatic labelling on 100,000 samples is no better than a good labeling on 400.
You cannot seriously sneak Vista Ultimate on there and think your comparison is cool. How much did that add to the price? Tell me how much money I save on the macbook by throwing iLife '08 into the trashcan and then we'll have a good comparison.
After they enter their star rating, you could give the person a list of similarly rated movies (by that person) that are currently inferred to be related, and ask the person "which movies did you love/hate for similar reasons?" If people actually took the question seriously, you would quickly build up a set of very good predictors and even on a person-person basis (look for shared actors/directors/screenwriters amongst their picks).
I don't think Netflix had tried all of the current methods yet. The best algorithms used the SVD (through alternating least squares) and k-nearest-neighbors. Simon Funk made everyone slap their heads when he posted his method, but I don't think this approach to fitting the SVD is new. I admit that no one would have ever used Restricted Boltzmann Machine approach except for Hinton though.
People easily beat Netflix (or did you mean "no one has beat the Netflix challenge yet"?). They just haven't beat the $1,000,000 mark yet.
Does Netflix restrict what you can use in your algorithm now? I haven't checked the rules recently, but I know at first a lot of people were using IMDB and other sites for extra predictors.
I agree. It would be nice to know the details of the algorithm that deciphers the captcha--I don't expect that this is easy to figure out without source code. Maybe they are using something finely tuned by hand, but it would interesting if they applied a general machine learning algorithm successfully to this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
http://consumerist.com/5008441/watch-for-baloney-reservation-rewards-charges-on-your-credit-card
http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/dynamic/ecommerce-investigation-webloyalty.cfm
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/2004/12/24/webloyalty_aka_wli_reservations_is_a_scam
http://ask.metafilter.com/76535/Scammed-by-WLI-Reservation-Rewards
http://www.ripoffreport.com/searchresults.asp?q1=ALL&q4=&q6=&q3=&q2=&q7=&searchtype=0&submit2=Search!&q5=WLI
This happened to me, and I'm posting to shame the company that did it. Fandango.com gave my credit card info to ReservationRewards which has siphoned $50 from me over the last 5 months.
ReservationRewards are theiving scumbags, but some people actually trust a bigger name site like Fandango.
Suppose they really did f*** these guys over. You're asking to cut them some slack?
I knew people who played games all the time but never bought anything--not a single title. Same thing with music CD's a few years ago. These folks absolutely would buy _something_ if it were impossible to pirate, because they do buy console games which require much more work.
This woman is a terrible person. From what I'd seen on slashdot I thought a 'troll' just meant someone who didn't like the Macintosh.
Yeah, I understand that we are on the inside, and we do black out and lose time. I think that we can't discard our own perception of time moving forward though. The following will sound like gibberish I'm sure:
Suppose that the order of time is undetectable to someone inside--maybe you're part of a computer program. We can run the program in time slices of any order and you won't perceive the difference. So we will run through once and store the state at very fine time intervals. Now we can run it a second time in random order to the same effect for anyone on the 'inside'.
Maybe we make the time slices so small and randomized that we're mainly just reading the previous state as much as doing calculation. We all perceive a window of at least a few milliseconds in time. That perception could not change since it's just a function of the program's execution.
Taken to the extreme, you don't have to do any computations. Just store the state in a book and never open it. That's surely the same as moving to random time slices and doing microseconds of simulation.
So we're all part of a big book, The History of the Universe. It was written based on the first time through. No one is opening it again, but we still experience it just the same.
Fortunately that movie was better than the previews would lead you to believe.
That's a question that a robot would ask. The rest of us experience time. Sorry that you don't.
You think it just contained water? It wasn't on her windowsil either. It was sitting on top of her mailbox by the sidewalk. I know because I saw her put it there.
A laptop that boots in a couple seconds would be very useful. Desktops are often turned on all the time, so a quick boot time doesn't matter--I reboot maybe once a week.
Europeans will have a skewed distribution of African haplotypes, but my understanding is that the population bottlenecks that lead to this also allow for evolution. I don't know if large populations evolve unless it is due to sexual selection.
Don't you think Europeans and Asians are disimilar as well? As a pooled group we are less diverse than the Africans. It's all statistical nonsense; the way genotype data is analyzed is extremely crude. They literally discard data because the models are so piss poor that they actually perform worse when you give them more information!
I thought you were going to tear me a new one for that, but I appreciate the thoughtfulness in your response.
People keep saying the wii is about fun. What do you think playing games on the xbox is like? Going to the dentist?
You didn't check your haxx0r badge when you turned on your wii; you checked it when you spouted the "fun" line. Go ahead and love your wii, but don't tell the rest of us that we're not having fun just because we don't have to justify paying $250 for a gamecube again and realizing that most of the titles on the rack are embarassing TV license kiddie shit.
I played Mario Kart a lot, but I don't think Gran Turismo is punishment either.
Speaking of old space games, someone needs to port lunar rescue from the old black and white mac. That was an excellent game.
Maybe the bot tries once per day but there are many computers on the net. If this is ok then it can try once every three hours. There is a threshold below which you will not get banned and someone with a botnet can probably determine this by trial and error using just a few machines on their network.
I agree with you that we shouldn't eat meat because I think that animals are conscious, and the fear and pain they go through is real. Even worse are the conditions while they are alive. However, we have to remember that most animals don't have compassion for us or for each other.
I saw a famous nature show about the hunting techniques (cruelty) of killer whales and chimpanzees. I realized that these things are as bad as us if not worse! They're as mean as small children (another species whose cruelty we forget after 2nd grade). It's tough to have compassion for a shark when it takes a bite out of a meatless, teenage surfer. These bastards have been terrorizing the sea for millions of years, and some people actually feel sorry for them.
Predators should kill to the point of extinction for the same reason we should be vegetarians. Animals are just too selfish not to overpopulate though...
I should say that the data 23andMe will collect is very valuable. People are talking about them and what they're doing deserves funding. It's just that if you want the most obvious reason why Google would announce investment in a small biotech startup, I think that is it. I don't doubt that it will be an excellent investment, but the obvious has to be pointed out.
These are nice theories but I have a simpler one. The founder of 23andMe is wife of one of the google founders (so I heard).
I thought this was a mistake in the article but there it is in the abstract (http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/academic/pubs/jansen_user_intent.pdf). Even a naive bayes model on a couple of predictors should have done better. Since the classes are imbalanced 74% could be a decent number if they are skilled at predicting the rare classes.
If they considered a skill score, I don't know why they quoted the error rate in the abstract. The 80% number was based on automatic classification instead of the labeled data. It makes no sense to quote an estimate based on a shit classifier when you have labeled data. A bad automatic labelling on 100,000 samples is no better than a good labeling on 400.
Is four hours supposed to be good? I thought the old Centrino's were doing that well.
You cannot seriously sneak Vista Ultimate on there and think your comparison is cool. How much did that add to the price? Tell me how much money I save on the macbook by throwing iLife '08 into the trashcan and then we'll have a good comparison.
After they enter their star rating, you could give the person a list of similarly rated movies (by that person) that are currently inferred to be related, and ask the person "which movies did you love/hate for similar reasons?" If people actually took the question seriously, you would quickly build up a set of very good predictors and even on a person-person basis (look for shared actors/directors/screenwriters amongst their picks).
I don't think Netflix had tried all of the current methods yet. The best algorithms used the SVD (through alternating least squares) and k-nearest-neighbors. Simon Funk made everyone slap their heads when he posted his method, but I don't think this approach to fitting the SVD is new. I admit that no one would have ever used Restricted Boltzmann Machine approach except for Hinton though.
People easily beat Netflix (or did you mean "no one has beat the Netflix challenge yet"?). They just haven't beat the $1,000,000 mark yet.
Does Netflix restrict what you can use in your algorithm now? I haven't checked the rules recently, but I know at first a lot of people were using IMDB and other sites for extra predictors.
I agree. It would be nice to know the details of the algorithm that deciphers the captcha--I don't expect that this is easy to figure out without source code. Maybe they are using something finely tuned by hand, but it would interesting if they applied a general machine learning algorithm successfully to this problem.