Re:The American idea of corporate everything
on
Shutting down Kazaa
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· Score: 1
One other side to the 'record companies are just corporatate parasites on Art' argument is that this placing of a hurdle between musicmakers and the audience does provide a service to the general listening public of separating the true crap out of consideration.
Complain all you want about 'corporate teen bands' (straw man?) but in the end nobody can force people to buy the stuff. It gets bought because it is good. And, perhaps more to your point, you might be afraid of the implicit conclusion in that perspective, that sales actually are a good indication of quality. That quality exists, and that your version of quality only counts for 1/X where X is the population of the listening public.
Few folks ever mention that record company people constantly filter out the noise down to a better signal. The only way they get paid for that service (that saves us large amounts of time and energy) is through various channels of commerce.
I had an Estes clear payloader in about 1986. Being similarly opportunistic, I launched a big (eh, 2 inch) grasshopper up in the thing. Made it all dramatic with lift off countdown, etc.
Picture perfect flight. Way high, you know, up so fast you can barely keep track. Then it floated down on parachute into the middle of a small pond on the community college grounds where we lit the rockets off. Eventually, it drifted to shore. Thank god for that clear-coat!
WEIRD! but there were now TWO big grasshoppers in the payload. Totally alive, dry, and happy to be freed onto the summer grass. I will say this, they were clinging to each other when I released them! I still don't understand what happened. I must have included two originally and not noticed. Or that's how I rationalize it.
I'm not sure the goal is to have the miner spit out names of confirmable terrorists with that kind of accuracy. You're comment is fair if you're looking for that kind of entirely automated solution, but that's not the goal. It doesn't need to be 100% accurate in order to mitigate risk and pay for itself. Neither does the J Crew web site product predictor.
The goal is definitely to help single out people that are worth further investigation. By motivated, thinking, observant humans. That's all.
I also think you might be a little bit reductionist in your estimate of 100 terrorists. It's quite possible that there are many more, though I suppose it doesn't matter because even if you're looking for just one person, it's still worth doing.
Given that you're looking for a reasonably good filter to find qualifiers for a round of investigation, a better metric to use might be the number of people you're willing to investigate as a ratio against those you hope to positively I.D. You might argue that you'd be happy to investigate 5,000 people just to find one 'terrorist'. If so, and you're looking for an estimated 100 terrorists, you can multiply to get the number of 'persons of interest' of 500,000 or.19% of the USA population. This % is much more achievable, and besides, then you use a different algo to ID which of these you should interview first or do MORE research on first.
It seems pretty managable to me. I also think your assessment of the 50% false negative rate is too rosy. It seems to me that the risks would be serious enough of even 1 getting away (as in scanning baggage for instance) that you'd want to cast the widest net possible and then narrow those carefully. False negatives may be more costly than you are suggesting.
Ther term data mining is misleading. Mining is more a matter of sifting through lots of junk to get at the valuable material. That's not exactly what 'data mining' is about.
If you want valuable information and you know what you're looking for, you just query. Find X in pile of data. That's mining. I know it's a semantic comment, but mining's not what we're talking about doing here.
Data mining is more like what geneticists searching for a genetic cause for a cancer are doing. Finding usable correlations and meaningful precursors. We don't call cancer-fighting biologists 'gene miners'. I think the term mining belittles a more complicated activity.
A better term? Data Correlating? Mining also just sounds brutish.
In the last page, this Fayyad of digiMine claims that he doesn't want to work with the govt because the 'Bush administration' hasn't clearly enough articulated its vision of what it wants.
I hope he was misquoted. There may be some legit reasons not to work with the US Govt. on anti-terrorism technology, but Mr. Fayadd is being either overly dismissive or just immune to opportunity by saying what he's quoted as saying. It sure is nice when the client comes to you with a fully articulated vision for the solution he needs, but most just start out with stated or even just perceived needs and leave it to the, ahem, vendors to provide the solution/vision.
On another note, it would be interesting to read an article with some technical detail beyond a generic reference to XML. Maybe someone can post a link.
Without fair enforcement, regulation is reckless. The FTC is up to its necks in tracking down people who are running real scams, perpetrating real theft.
There really is a continuum of legitimacy in email marketing between "real scams" and pure 2x opt-in. The regulations as proposed basically only apply to marketers who are willing to follow them. Such regulations fail even a little logical test because violators will violate anyway.
Regarding enforcement, the regulating of spam sounds similar to regulating guns. When guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns. Spammers are not subject to the same kind of ethical concerns as more legitimate businesses such as those that belong to the DMA. The regulations as proposed only serve to create a safer haven for criminals (and weasels) to operate unmolested.
If this regulation results in real enforcement, then the major project becomes how to fairly enforce. On one side, you have the sort of rogue self-appointed vigilantes like the RBL folks ("my law is now your law") and on another extreme you have what? Federal agencies that are supposed deem legality of messages?
I've yet to hear of any really fair method for enforcement even if standards were agreed upon. DO we really want an environment where every single email sent is subject to the question "Are the content and intent legal?" I agree with other posters who have said it's far better of an idea to spend resources on locking down server and client software to reject more messages per user configuration. Many people here have written and specified user-customizable intelligent learning systems to help reject messages without a lot of human oversight.
SPAM (like all scams) really does hurt legitimate business--think of the sender, not the message. It's very hard to argue credibly otherwise. Given that reality, we should all want to stop "it." Doing so will help the economy, which helps everyone's standard of living. But spam regulation has about as little help to offer as gun regulation offers to prevent violent crime.
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Complain all you want about 'corporate teen bands' (straw man?) but in the end nobody can force people to buy the stuff. It gets bought because it is good. And, perhaps more to your point, you might be afraid of the implicit conclusion in that perspective, that sales actually are a good indication of quality. That quality exists, and that your version of quality only counts for 1/X where X is the population of the listening public.
Few folks ever mention that record company people constantly filter out the noise down to a better signal. The only way they get paid for that service (that saves us large amounts of time and energy) is through various channels of commerce.
Picture perfect flight. Way high, you know, up so fast you can barely keep track. Then it floated down on parachute into the middle of a small pond on the community college grounds where we lit the rockets off. Eventually, it drifted to shore. Thank god for that clear-coat!
WEIRD! but there were now TWO big grasshoppers in the payload. Totally alive, dry, and happy to be freed onto the summer grass. I will say this, they were clinging to each other when I released them! I still don't understand what happened. I must have included two originally and not noticed. Or that's how I rationalize it.
I'm not sure the goal is to have the miner spit out names of confirmable terrorists with that kind of accuracy. You're comment is fair if you're looking for that kind of entirely automated solution, but that's not the goal. It doesn't need to be 100% accurate in order to mitigate risk and pay for itself. Neither does the J Crew web site product predictor.
The goal is definitely to help single out people that are worth further investigation. By motivated, thinking, observant humans. That's all.
I also think you might be a little bit reductionist in your estimate of 100 terrorists. It's quite possible that there are many more, though I suppose it doesn't matter because even if you're looking for just one person, it's still worth doing.
Given that you're looking for a reasonably good filter to find qualifiers for a round of investigation, a better metric to use might be the number of people you're willing to investigate as a ratio against those you hope to positively I.D. You might argue that you'd be happy to investigate 5,000 people just to find one 'terrorist'. If so, and you're looking for an estimated 100 terrorists, you can multiply to get the number of 'persons of interest' of 500,000 or .19% of the USA population. This % is much more achievable, and besides, then you use a different algo to ID which of these you should interview first or do MORE research on first.
It seems pretty managable to me. I also think your assessment of the 50% false negative rate is too rosy. It seems to me that the risks would be serious enough of even 1 getting away (as in scanning baggage for instance) that you'd want to cast the widest net possible and then narrow those carefully. False negatives may be more costly than you are suggesting.
If you want valuable information and you know what you're looking for, you just query. Find X in pile of data. That's mining. I know it's a semantic comment, but mining's not what we're talking about doing here.
Data mining is more like what geneticists searching for a genetic cause for a cancer are doing. Finding usable correlations and meaningful precursors. We don't call cancer-fighting biologists 'gene miners'. I think the term mining belittles a more complicated activity.
A better term? Data Correlating? Mining also just sounds brutish.
I missed the episode with T in the server room.
In the last page, this Fayyad of digiMine claims that he doesn't want to work with the govt because the 'Bush administration' hasn't clearly enough articulated its vision of what it wants.
I hope he was misquoted. There may be some legit reasons not to work with the US Govt. on anti-terrorism technology, but Mr. Fayadd is being either overly dismissive or just immune to opportunity by saying what he's quoted as saying. It sure is nice when the client comes to you with a fully articulated vision for the solution he needs, but most just start out with stated or even just perceived needs and leave it to the, ahem, vendors to provide the solution/vision.
On another note, it would be interesting to read an article with some technical detail beyond a generic reference to XML. Maybe someone can post a link.
Without fair enforcement, regulation is reckless. The FTC is up to its necks in tracking down people who are running real scams, perpetrating real theft.
There really is a continuum of legitimacy in email marketing between "real scams" and pure 2x opt-in. The regulations as proposed basically only apply to marketers who are willing to follow them. Such regulations fail even a little logical test because violators will violate anyway.
Regarding enforcement, the regulating of spam sounds similar to regulating guns. When guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns. Spammers are not subject to the same kind of ethical concerns as more legitimate businesses such as those that belong to the DMA. The regulations as proposed only serve to create a safer haven for criminals (and weasels) to operate unmolested.
If this regulation results in real enforcement, then the major project becomes how to fairly enforce. On one side, you have the sort of rogue self-appointed vigilantes like the RBL folks ("my law is now your law") and on another extreme you have what? Federal agencies that are supposed deem legality of messages?
I've yet to hear of any really fair method for enforcement even if standards were agreed upon. DO we really want an environment where every single email sent is subject to the question "Are the content and intent legal?" I agree with other posters who have said it's far better of an idea to spend resources on locking down server and client software to reject more messages per user configuration. Many people here have written and specified user-customizable intelligent learning systems to help reject messages without a lot of human oversight.
SPAM (like all scams) really does hurt legitimate business--think of the sender, not the message. It's very hard to argue credibly otherwise. Given that reality, we should all want to stop "it." Doing so will help the economy, which helps everyone's standard of living. But spam regulation has about as little help to offer as gun regulation offers to prevent violent crime.