Negative. The reviewer is actually the master of Social Engineering, and has intentionally aroused the suspicions of/.'rs to prevent anyone from reading the contents therein.
History tells us that most people don't care, and happily forgo that in favor of simplicity, equal rigs and a lower cost. The advantage of superior controls on a PC is irrelevant to them.
I'd guess any repetitive technique like this with more than one obfuscation would make it increasingly unique and identifiable, no? If we're looking to lower the confidence of matching, maybe aim for the common denominator.
Perhaps it's better to write to a fourth grade level and just run everything against a common spell check engine, like the one in Outlook?
Jeopardy is a television quiz show you've recently seen countless articles about on slashdot, due to IBM having fielded a computer to play as a contestant for a time.
The Super Bowl is America's biggest annual sporting event. The game is American football.
"Forth Down" is part of the vocabulary of that game.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you've left out a seemingly important qualifier from the same paragraph:
"We may permit our vendors to access your Personal Information, but only in connection with services that they perform for us and not to use for their own purposes."
It's cowardly, maybe, but I'm not going to intentionally view anything on the internet being even remotely related to child pornography... fairly or unfairly. Maybe my paranoia is unfounded, but I'm not testing the waters on this one.
It seems like the doable solution is actually for the state to collect sales tax from the business on all sales, regardless of purchasers place of residence. I suppose the problems there are that you'd have to make this mandatory at the federal level (which could be overstepping it's authority on the issue), figure out how to handle businesses that call one state home but do fullfillment out of another state (Amazon, et al), and then all states would have to compete on "business friendliness" to be able to collect sales tax. Now you have to figure out how to handle localized tax code, etc. Yikes.
I'd guess that no matter how you handle that, places like Chicago would be looking at a mass exodus at about 11% sales tax.
Your personal information is not the same as a business working with investment vehicles using other peoples money. There's little "right to privacy" here.
These people weren't worried about being waterboarded by a nefarious shadow government for making a $5 wikileaks contribution.
When they start destroying all records of communication surrounding what they did, it was criminal destruction of evidence.
I'd guess it's more an effect of us all screaming that it takes them way too long to release fixes as it is. Introducing more lag time for marginal benefit to most of us is a no-win, I'd guess.
Can't happen. Google can't delist swaths of multi-billion dollar entertainment companies responsible for generating the bulk of popular culture. They'd sink their own battleship.
Google is strong because their search engine is strong. Take that away and they're not the Google we know today.
That's not to say it wouldn't be awesome to see, though.:)
I get the feeling that they have brilliant people making these kinds of things, and the mini-ballmers are quashing everything.
Think about surface... MS was pushing into cool multi-touch interfaces before anyone had even heard of Apple multitouch. Never became anything "for the rest of us".
Or the Courier. A genuinely cool idea that lots of people thought would be a real, serious, tablet-esque device that appealed to creatives and business people alike. They'd have sold a gajillion of those things. Shelved.
There's a long list of really neat things that microsoft has done, not just in hardware, that ended up being neglected and eventually canned. I don't know who makes the decisions around there, but I think they could really help themselves by getting more intelligent people up top in the decision-making process so they can actually capitalize on the great things they already generate in the background.
Year of the linux desktop indeed!
Already fixed.
Noobs. FreeBSD ftw !%!
Ubuntu sux it's too easy.
Ahem, my Mac does not do this.
Feature parity w/ windoze!
Slashdot stays in my feed for a couple of reasons. I don't manage to catch all the good tech listings at the source. Also, while there's plenty to bitch about, the comments are usually miles above the quality of comments elsewhere. Perhaps it's a combination of sheer volume and a moderation system that (for all its flaws) seems to work better than unlimited thumbs-up/thumbs-down across all users. Digg style moderating sucks, to be honest, and I'm glad/. hasn't gone that route like everywhere else.
I have to agree. The information collected is effectively harvesting the intelligence of the USER, not Google's pagerank. If a user thinks a page is relevant to given criteria, that's useful information. If you want to update your search results based on the decisions your users make, that seems completely up-and-up to me when your users have ok'd it.
If Microsoft wanted to rip off Google, they'd come up with a clever way that doesn't involve a swarm of dummies in the process to muddy the results. But as I said, this is collecting what people think is relevant. Not Google.
I'm pretty sure they're not just screen-scraping results from google and redisplaying them at Bing.
They're collecting information that helps them black-box how Google's search works. In short, they're learning by investigation, not just copying. There's nothing wrong with this.
It's not that I doubt that possibility, but the passage you linked to starts with, "Studies have shown conflicting results."
Followed by seemingly relevant bits about many bombers being physically disabled, missing limbs and such. In addition, it also seems that results vary depending on location. At one point, it does say, "Some suicide bombers are educated, with college or university experience, and come from middle class homes." [emphasis mine]
Perhaps the more appropriate response would have been, "It's difficult to profile suicide bombers".
Slashdot Mirror
Negative. The reviewer is actually the master of Social Engineering, and has intentionally aroused the suspicions of /.'rs to prevent anyone from reading the contents therein.
History tells us that most people don't care, and happily forgo that in favor of simplicity, equal rigs and a lower cost. The advantage of superior controls on a PC is irrelevant to them.
But I thought all government workers were spoiled, lazy, and overpaid?
You make a good point... clearly there's an exception to every rule!
I kid, I kid. Please don't audit me.
I'd guess any repetitive technique like this with more than one obfuscation would make it increasingly unique and identifiable, no? If we're looking to lower the confidence of matching, maybe aim for the common denominator.
Perhaps it's better to write to a fourth grade level and just run everything against a common spell check engine, like the one in Outlook?
I believe it says they're using a sparkfun control pad. It seems there are a bunch on their site.
I bet you never thought you'd get to reference that movie and have it come up "insightful". Amirite?
Jeopardy is a television quiz show you've recently seen countless articles about on slashdot, due to IBM having fielded a computer to play as a contestant for a time.
The Super Bowl is America's biggest annual sporting event. The game is American football.
"Forth Down" is part of the vocabulary of that game.
For more information, see the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Football
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(artificial_intelligence_software)
Hope it helps.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you've left out a seemingly important qualifier from the same paragraph:
"We may permit our vendors to access your Personal Information, but only in connection with services that they perform for us and not to use for their own purposes."
It's cowardly, maybe, but I'm not going to intentionally view anything on the internet being even remotely related to child pornography... fairly or unfairly. Maybe my paranoia is unfounded, but I'm not testing the waters on this one.
It seems like the doable solution is actually for the state to collect sales tax from the business on all sales, regardless of purchasers place of residence. I suppose the problems there are that you'd have to make this mandatory at the federal level (which could be overstepping it's authority on the issue), figure out how to handle businesses that call one state home but do fullfillment out of another state (Amazon, et al), and then all states would have to compete on "business friendliness" to be able to collect sales tax. Now you have to figure out how to handle localized tax code, etc. Yikes.
I'd guess that no matter how you handle that, places like Chicago would be looking at a mass exodus at about 11% sales tax.
Your personal information is not the same as a business working with investment vehicles using other peoples money. There's little "right to privacy" here.
These people weren't worried about being waterboarded by a nefarious shadow government for making a $5 wikileaks contribution.
When they start destroying all records of communication surrounding what they did, it was criminal destruction of evidence.
I'd guess it's more an effect of us all screaming that it takes them way too long to release fixes as it is. Introducing more lag time for marginal benefit to most of us is a no-win, I'd guess.
I've found that at any place that asks, a simple, "I don't give that information out." will suffice. Stores want my money first and foremost.
Odd that more people don't try the same.
Can't happen. Google can't delist swaths of multi-billion dollar entertainment companies responsible for generating the bulk of popular culture. They'd sink their own battleship.
Google is strong because their search engine is strong. Take that away and they're not the Google we know today.
That's not to say it wouldn't be awesome to see, though. :)
I get the feeling that they have brilliant people making these kinds of things, and the mini-ballmers are quashing everything.
Think about surface... MS was pushing into cool multi-touch interfaces before anyone had even heard of Apple multitouch. Never became anything "for the rest of us".
Or the Courier. A genuinely cool idea that lots of people thought would be a real, serious, tablet-esque device that appealed to creatives and business people alike. They'd have sold a gajillion of those things. Shelved.
There's a long list of really neat things that microsoft has done, not just in hardware, that ended up being neglected and eventually canned. I don't know who makes the decisions around there, but I think they could really help themselves by getting more intelligent people up top in the decision-making process so they can actually capitalize on the great things they already generate in the background.
Year of the linux desktop indeed!
Already fixed.
Noobs. FreeBSD ftw !%!
Ubuntu sux it's too easy.
Ahem, my Mac does not do this.
Feature parity w/ windoze!
Slashdot stays in my feed for a couple of reasons. I don't manage to catch all the good tech listings at the source. Also, while there's plenty to bitch about, the comments are usually miles above the quality of comments elsewhere. Perhaps it's a combination of sheer volume and a moderation system that (for all its flaws) seems to work better than unlimited thumbs-up/thumbs-down across all users. Digg style moderating sucks, to be honest, and I'm glad /. hasn't gone that route like everywhere else.
Well, and nostalgia, to a lesser extent. :)
Yeah seriously, is it Friday already? People seem to just keep reinventing the invisibility cloak, and then losing their prototype.
By now you'd think we'd be tripping on stacks of the damn things.
I have to agree. The information collected is effectively harvesting the intelligence of the USER, not Google's pagerank. If a user thinks a page is relevant to given criteria, that's useful information. If you want to update your search results based on the decisions your users make, that seems completely up-and-up to me when your users have ok'd it.
If Microsoft wanted to rip off Google, they'd come up with a clever way that doesn't involve a swarm of dummies in the process to muddy the results. But as I said, this is collecting what people think is relevant. Not Google.
I'm pretty sure they're not just screen-scraping results from google and redisplaying them at Bing.
They're collecting information that helps them black-box how Google's search works. In short, they're learning by investigation, not just copying. There's nothing wrong with this.
Well sure, this is clever and all... but I still prefer the shock-and-awe approach to mosquito control:
http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria.html
You can just f-fwd to the 12m mark for the craziness.
I agree on all counts.
It's not that I doubt that possibility, but the passage you linked to starts with, "Studies have shown conflicting results."
Followed by seemingly relevant bits about many bombers being physically disabled, missing limbs and such. In addition, it also seems that results vary depending on location. At one point, it does say, "Some suicide bombers are educated, with college or university experience, and come from middle class homes." [emphasis mine]
Perhaps the more appropriate response would have been, "It's difficult to profile suicide bombers".
Holy crap, Cap'n Crunch posts on slashdot?
That commercial was hysterical, and I saw it as a shot across the bow of HP, who's been pushing this silliness non-stop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awIRXQth1r4
I guess putting celebs up front in the tech world sells widgets, just like everywhere else. :(