About 25 years ago I was chatting to a young programmer, I think about Prolog, which was very hot at the time. He said he was working on a medical diagnosis system, and he was upset because the error rate was quite high, perhaps 25%.
I pointed out to him that doctors have an error rate too, and he should be comparing his system's error rate to theirs. He seemed unconsoled; thinking about it now, I can see that he would have had to pitch that concept to a bunch of *doctors*.
Another point that I might have made was that his system's error rate was being calculated on the assumption that the comparison diagnosis made by a doctor was actually correct itself.
Yet another point is that a doctor's success/error rate may be skewed by the fact that some diseases are much more common than others. For instance, if 80% of his patients have disease A, he can just guess that they *all* have A, and achieve an 80% success rate. In other words, if they are required to diagnose 1000 separate diseases, rather than a representative mix of 1000 patients, their true success rate may be absolutely appalling.
Or to look at it the other way, what would you do if you and your buddies were prison guards who had been sexually torturing hundreds of men with impunity for years, and then you heard that a bunch of the prisoners who could testify against you were about to be released.
I certainly can't defend the United States against a terrorist attack or attack by missiles from North Korea by myself.
If it wasn't for the policies of the US Federal Government you probably wouldn't need to. People who think like you make endless wars the smart choice for the Feds.
Your basic point about Motorola phones is true, but...
I bought a Motorola phone a few weeks ago, and subsequently found out about all the hacking stuff available. (I'd really like to increase the volume and enable the sound recorder.) Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work. Some references said it might be necessary to install PSTools to get the drivers. But the PSTools software you refer to as "all over the web" I could only find at a.ru site.
I downloaded it and thought about it. Then I thought about it some more....I still haven't installed it.
How is a girl who asks for money becuase she wants money a "scam"?
As you present it, it's not a scam.
But usually it's more like this:
"Mom me buffalo die no money fix. Mom say sister me she go work bar now. Sister me she 14 only. She scare! I want give 100 dollar give new buffalo but cannot. I know you good heart."
They use your generosity, and feelings of embarrassment about the inequality between your financial positions, to exploit you and twenty other marks simultaneously. They have contempt for you.
This is like pollution-cleanup and disposal companies. When I read about them I thought "How the hell are they ever going to make any money with all the regulations and stuff?"
Naively, I assumed they were going to *follow* all the regulations and stuff.
On the other hand, a lot of such files are very obviously too large for their resolution.
Did it really belong to the seller?
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 1
I only checked the first page of this story, but I didn't see anybody mention the obvious possibility that the seller was not the *owner* of the laptop, ie he had stolen it.
Thus the person whose private life was exposed could have been doubly victimized.
Those little touches are incredibly easy to do, but no one ever adds them. I'd much rather be able to swing out my power supply so I don't have to disassemble my computer to add RAM or whatnot, rather than have my case look like it's got eyes on.
I agree. A couple more things that should add about 0.25 USD to the cost of a case:
1. Easily accessible and replaceable fan filters
2. Some sort of provision for a cable tray at the rear so connectors don't get dinged etc
3. Large power and reset buttons, but recessed so you don't press them accidentally
4. A hole for a serial-ATA connector
5. HD activity light that is visible over a wide radius, but has a cover in case you don't want to be distracted
If you had like an extra ten USD to play with, there's a bunch more things that would be good, like providing threaded holes to allow the unit to be easily mounted to a panel, underneath a desk etc, or a network activity light, or a filter-clogged warning dial (like I had on rackmount equipment in the seventies), or a power-supply monitor socket. But what we can actually *get* for ten USD is fluorescent-lit plastic goldfish. Sheesh.
I wish games were more modular. Right now several major games allow modding, but it's too hard to use. It's like buying a program for your CP/M machine and discovering you have to relink it to make it run on your box. Worse, the mods don't really change the gameplay.
For instance, I think the graphics in the original Quake were just fine, but the AI was the same old. It would be great to buy an add-on AI module which would allow the monsters to flank you, or run away when your sniping position is too good, etc.
Or maybe you could plug a Rainbow-6 style mission planner into it. What a product! Minimal graphics, tons of gameplay, and your customers are pre-sold.
You make a good point, but many other scenarios are possible. For instance, the OP may suspect his wife of having an affair, but she is executing the "as a good wife I will bear the agony of separation without flinching for the sake of the increased family alimony^w income" tactic. The OP may just need a lot of arguments he can use to turn down the job without making her suspicious.
So you're leaving Walmart, you already paid. Then an alarm goes off as you pass the double secret sensor. You're surrounded by armed guards, who whisk you off to a Homeland Security interrogation center in Pakistan to find out how you managed to disable the RFID on one of the items at the first sensor.
A couple of years later, as you sit drinking Victory gin...
It's better to light a candle than to sit and curse the darkness.
Yeah, like the Tom and Jerry cartoon where Tom is in the dark and tries to light a candle, only to discover Jerry has stealthily substituted a firecracker...
You're right that people should be aware that it is technologically possible for all their unencrypted internet traffic to be monitored by various people.
Analogy time: Everybody knows that curtains and drapes don't really make it impossible to peek in their house. If someone sneaks up outside, they can see you in your underwear, drinking domestic red wine, picking your nose and watching "Buffy".
Do you want the government to spend your tax dollars to install FBI agents at every window with notebooks because of the risk you may start manufacturing explosives with commonly-available household items?
The idea you describe is not new. However, when I read your post it made me realize that the Tivo has all the functions needed to handle the necessary billing.
1. The Tivo logs all the shows you watch.
2. It sends the data back to Tivo hq -- hopefully suitably massaged for privacy, ie "Discovery Channel: 1.8 hrs" not "Discovery Channel Special on Improvised Munitions".
3. They generate a bill to you and a credit to each station.
Ideally, it would create a new class of TV programming, designed to appeal to the consumer rather than the advertiser.
and let me tell you, we got calls where someone would say "your guys installed a light and now my toilet won't flush" and they were serious
I bought a CD player at Best Buy and told them to fit it. Went to pick up the car and it wouldn't start: absolutely dead. (The car was 3 years old and had never had a failure to start.) I assume they had zapped or just reset the ignition electronics. They refused any responsibility and said I had to communicate by mail with some outfit in another state. Tow, repair. Bux.
I was in a computer store today in Phnom Penh Cambodia, lined with second-hand PCs. Many seemed to be from Japan -- the laptops almost all had Japanese keyboards -- but I noticed one Dell which still had a property sticker from a clinic in California.
It was on sale for about 100 USD. These old boxes -- usually something like a PIII/433/128/10G -- still have a market here.
What's going to happen to the piles of old inkjet printers that the store also had for sale is another question.
I disagree. There are *many* ways to make a bad movie. Or a good one.
Personally I would like to see game movies which weren't much like the game experience at all. I just recently reinstalled Halflife, and sat through the intro sequence again a few times. There's a lot of background there about daily life at the Black Mesa Research Lab, and it's funny, coherent and insightful. For instance, the PA cajoles you to approach your supervisor if you are concerned about any safety hazard, and right at that moment the train passes a vat of radioactive waste with a tear in the side and glowing gloop pouring out. Everybody taking the train that day must have seen it, but did one single one of them tell their supervisor? What happens when you bring a problem to your supervisor?
I'd love to see a Halflife prequel. So long as we don't see Gordon Freeman as a kid killing hundreds of Iraqis singlehanded.
The stats you quote may be true, but they do not reflect an important parameter: whether the people involved really have the *option* of anything but monogamy.
For instance, when soldiers are stationed in some Asian hotspot full of sloe-eyed beauties, do they carefully consider which girl would be the ideal marriage partner? No, every week they blow their pay on bonking four new ones.
The judge in the case said that this incident was part of the worst prosecution he'd ever heard of.
My guess is that the prosecution strategy has been to force the court into a summary judgement of innocence as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. Why would they do so? Because the evidence introduced during the trial has been consistently embarrassing and has weakened the government's entire 9/11 theory. If the court releases the only defendant in 9/11, the feds can claim they need more money, more laws, and more compliant courts. Like they're already claiming.
There's a story about Asimov when he was invited to the preview screening of "2001". At the time Asimov was used to every sf writer following his Three Laws, so he was astonished when he realized Hal was killing the astronauts. He started to get up, and blurted out "They can't do that! They're breaking the 1st law!".
A voice in the darkness said "So strike 'em dead wit' lightning, Isaac!"
I live in Cambodia. I have been to several movie theaters in Phnom Penh (the capital); I don't know details of their technology but it is clearly digital. At least to me, resolution and gamut are quite acceptable, in line with a multiplex like Showcase or Loew's.
It seems to be a widescreen format with better-than-DVD resolution. My guess is that it's basically MP2 on a hard disk, shot on a HD camcorder.
A new movie here typically plays at one cinema for several weeks; a popular movie may get a sexcond run after an interval.
Slashdot Mirror
About 25 years ago I was chatting to a young programmer, I think about Prolog, which was very hot at the time. He said he was working on a medical diagnosis system, and he was upset because the error rate was quite high, perhaps 25%.
I pointed out to him that doctors have an error rate too, and he should be comparing his system's error rate to theirs. He seemed unconsoled; thinking about it now, I can see that he would have had to pitch that concept to a bunch of *doctors*.
Another point that I might have made was that his system's error rate was being calculated on the assumption that the comparison diagnosis made by a doctor was actually correct itself.
Yet another point is that a doctor's success/error rate may be skewed by the fact that some diseases are much more common than others. For instance, if 80% of his patients have disease A, he can just guess that they *all* have A, and achieve an 80% success rate. In other words, if they are required to diagnose 1000 separate diseases, rather than a representative mix of 1000 patients, their true success rate may be absolutely appalling.
Hint: if hackers don't spend all their time reading Slashdot, they have time for sex. ...No, no, with her mother... 12 years ago.
Or to look at it the other way, what would you do if you and your buddies were prison guards who had been sexually torturing hundreds of men with impunity for years, and then you heard that a bunch of the prisoners who could testify against you were about to be released.
If it wasn't for the policies of the US Federal Government you probably wouldn't need to. People who think like you make endless wars the smart choice for the Feds.
Your basic point about Motorola phones is true, but...
.ru site.
...I still haven't installed it.
I bought a Motorola phone a few weeks ago, and subsequently found out about all the hacking stuff available. (I'd really like to increase the volume and enable the sound recorder.) Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work. Some references said it might be necessary to install PSTools to get the drivers. But the PSTools software you refer to as "all over the web" I could only find at a
I downloaded it and thought about it. Then I thought about it some more.
In other words, it isn't that easy.
As you present it, it's not a scam.
But usually it's more like this:
"Mom me buffalo die no money fix. Mom say sister me she go work bar now. Sister me she 14 only. She scare! I want give 100 dollar give new buffalo but cannot. I know you good heart."
They use your generosity, and feelings of embarrassment about the inequality between your financial positions, to exploit you and twenty other marks simultaneously. They have contempt for you.
It's a scam.
This is like pollution-cleanup and disposal companies. When I read about them I thought "How the hell are they ever going to make any money with all the regulations and stuff?"
Naively, I assumed they were going to *follow* all the regulations and stuff.
None of them do.
On the other hand, a lot of such files are very obviously too large for their resolution.
I only checked the first page of this story, but I didn't see anybody mention the obvious possibility that the seller was not the *owner* of the laptop, ie he had stolen it.
Thus the person whose private life was exposed could have been doubly victimized.
It seems like a *lot* of the people identified as suicide bombers have no known links to organizations advocating violence.
That could mean that they are ultra-clever and have found a way to evade the clumsy security forces.
Or it may mean that they were *not* in fact suicide bombers.
I agree. A couple more things that should add about 0.25 USD to the cost of a case:
1. Easily accessible and replaceable fan filters
2. Some sort of provision for a cable tray at the rear so connectors don't get dinged etc
3. Large power and reset buttons, but recessed so you don't press them accidentally
4. A hole for a serial-ATA connector
5. HD activity light that is visible over a wide radius, but has a cover in case you don't want to be distracted
If you had like an extra ten USD to play with, there's a bunch more things that would be good, like providing threaded holes to allow the unit to be easily mounted to a panel, underneath a desk etc, or a network activity light, or a filter-clogged warning dial (like I had on rackmount equipment in the seventies), or a power-supply monitor socket. But what we can actually *get* for ten USD is fluorescent-lit plastic goldfish. Sheesh.
I wish games were more modular. Right now several major games allow modding, but it's too hard to use. It's like buying a program for your CP/M machine and discovering you have to relink it to make it run on your box. Worse, the mods don't really change the gameplay.
For instance, I think the graphics in the original Quake were just fine, but the AI was the same old. It would be great to buy an add-on AI module which would allow the monsters to flank you, or run away when your sniping position is too good, etc.
Or maybe you could plug a Rainbow-6 style mission planner into it. What a product! Minimal graphics, tons of gameplay, and your customers are pre-sold.
You make a good point, but many other scenarios are possible. For instance, the OP may suspect his wife of having an affair, but she is executing the "as a good wife I will bear the agony of separation without flinching for the sake of the increased family alimony^w income" tactic. The OP may just need a lot of arguments he can use to turn down the job without making her suspicious.
So you're leaving Walmart, you already paid. Then an alarm goes off as you pass the double secret sensor. You're surrounded by armed guards, who whisk you off to a Homeland Security interrogation center in Pakistan to find out how you managed to disable the RFID on one of the items at the first sensor.
A couple of years later, as you sit drinking Victory gin...
Yeah, like the Tom and Jerry cartoon where Tom is in the dark and tries to light a candle, only to discover Jerry has stealthily substituted a firecracker...
You're right that people should be aware that it is technologically possible for all their unencrypted internet traffic to be monitored by various people.
Analogy time: Everybody knows that curtains and drapes don't really make it impossible to peek in their house. If someone sneaks up outside, they can see you in your underwear, drinking domestic red wine, picking your nose and watching "Buffy".
Do you want the government to spend your tax dollars to install FBI agents at every window with notebooks because of the risk you may start manufacturing explosives with commonly-available household items?
The idea you describe is not new. However, when I read your post it made me realize that the Tivo has all the functions needed to handle the necessary billing.
1. The Tivo logs all the shows you watch.
2. It sends the data back to Tivo hq -- hopefully suitably massaged for privacy, ie "Discovery Channel: 1.8 hrs" not "Discovery Channel Special on Improvised Munitions".
3. They generate a bill to you and a credit to each station.
Ideally, it would create a new class of TV programming, designed to appeal to the consumer rather than the advertiser.
I bought a CD player at Best Buy and told them to fit it. Went to pick up the car and it wouldn't start: absolutely dead. (The car was 3 years old and had never had a failure to start.) I assume they had zapped or just reset the ignition electronics. They refused any responsibility and said I had to communicate by mail with some outfit in another state. Tow, repair. Bux.
I was in a computer store today in Phnom Penh Cambodia, lined with second-hand PCs. Many seemed to be from Japan -- the laptops almost all had Japanese keyboards -- but I noticed one Dell which still had a property sticker from a clinic in California.
It was on sale for about 100 USD. These old boxes -- usually something like a PIII/433/128/10G -- still have a market here.
What's going to happen to the piles of old inkjet printers that the store also had for sale is another question.
I disagree. There are *many* ways to make a bad movie. Or a good one.
Personally I would like to see game movies which weren't much like the game experience at all. I just recently reinstalled Halflife, and sat through the intro sequence again a few times. There's a lot of background there about daily life at the Black Mesa Research Lab, and it's funny, coherent and insightful. For instance, the PA cajoles you to approach your supervisor if you are concerned about any safety hazard, and right at that moment the train passes a vat of radioactive waste with a tear in the side and glowing gloop pouring out. Everybody taking the train that day must have seen it, but did one single one of them tell their supervisor? What happens when you bring a problem to your supervisor?
I'd love to see a Halflife prequel. So long as we don't see Gordon Freeman as a kid killing hundreds of Iraqis singlehanded.
The stats you quote may be true, but they do not reflect an important parameter: whether the people involved really have the *option* of anything but monogamy.
For instance, when soldiers are stationed in some Asian hotspot full of sloe-eyed beauties, do they carefully consider which girl would be the ideal marriage partner? No, every week they blow their pay on bonking four new ones.
The judge in the case said that this incident was part of the worst prosecution he'd ever heard of.
My guess is that the prosecution strategy has been to force the court into a summary judgement of innocence as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. Why would they do so? Because the evidence introduced during the trial has been consistently embarrassing and has weakened the government's entire 9/11 theory. If the court releases the only defendant in 9/11, the feds can claim they need more money, more laws, and more compliant courts. Like they're already claiming.
There's a story about Asimov when he was invited to the preview screening of "2001". At the time Asimov was used to every sf writer following his Three Laws, so he was astonished when he realized Hal was killing the astronauts. He started to get up, and blurted out "They can't do that! They're breaking the 1st law!".
A voice in the darkness said "So strike 'em dead wit' lightning, Isaac!"
I live in Cambodia. I have been to several movie theaters in Phnom Penh (the capital); I don't know details of their technology but it is clearly digital. At least to me, resolution and gamut are quite acceptable, in line with a multiplex like Showcase or Loew's.
It seems to be a widescreen format with better-than-DVD resolution. My guess is that it's basically MP2 on a hard disk, shot on a HD camcorder.
A new movie here typically plays at one cinema for several weeks; a popular movie may get a sexcond run after an interval.
In my experience, girls don't say that. They usually say:
"Are you in yet?"