This should a huge level of irresponsibility on the part of WikiLeaks for releasing the entire database rather than incriminating files.
This "database" was leaked not by Wikileaks, but, for all we know, by a US government employee. May be Bradley Manning, may be someone else, we don't know for sure. But it was not leaked by Wikileaks, and, chances are, not only to Wikeleaks.
These files were not published just by Wikileaks. In fact, because of the DDOS, they were initially published by papers like NY Times and Guardian. They actually released the info to public first this time. Why are you singling out Wikileaks? And for what? For an activity in which major journalistic outlets share willingly?
Who or what is the antagonist in The Big Lebowski? The dude does not hate anyone, takes life for what it is, goes with the flow. And since he is a likable character and many viewers are able to relate to him (cough, cough), he is definitely a "good guy". So where is the "bad guy"? There are many stories like that, some quite old; many of them are of episodic, comical, or satirical character. Parables (Jewish, Christian, Taoist, Buddhist, you name it) are extremely compelling narratives, but they often choose to mess with your head when describing human actions, the whole point being to teach you good and bad. Or take some of the funniest shit ever written: Gargantua and Pantagruel and The Good Soldier Svejk, or A Confederacy of Dunces if you want something recent and American. In each book, chances are good that you will either love or hate every character, instead of attaching yourself to a single one as you watch him struggle against an antagonist. Instead of Star Wars- or Tolkien-like contrast many stories feature a cast of multifaceted characters and let the reader decide who is good, who is bad, and who they don't care about.
Seriously. I wish I had my cat's job. All it does is walk around the neighborhood all day, then comes home, eats yummy food, gets a massage, and watches the fish tank. And, unlike many human Americans, it enjoys full medical coverage.
I am also skeptical about cats being less social than dogs. Sure, dogs have a pack mentality and often (but not always) hunt together when in the wild, but cats are known to congregate in great numbers, seemingly for no reason other than socializing. And if one watches cats interact outside, where territory matters, one can see that there is A LOT of posturing and highly emotional exchange, and also teaching, learning, and games.
I know nothing about the actual work or purpose of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but I do know the fundamentals. You Yanks have separated your government into 3 major branches with the intention for them to work against each other and check each other's power. It would seem to me entirely reasonable that the Senate Judiciary Committee exists for the sole purpose of subverting the work done by the Supreme Court: these are the people who, akin to John Yoo, work hard to establish just how much trash they can drive through the Constitutional checkpoint. I don't even believe that it is necessarily a bad thing (the law must evolve), I just would not expect them to be the guardians of the Constitution, since it is clearly not their job.
Bikes are great, but they are a niche thing at best. The only factors that always go for bikes are their obscene efficiency and environmental friendliness. But they are nearly useless to disabled, sick, people with a gimped vestibular system, babies. They have to stay home when the weather is bad. They are really bad for transporting luggage. They are very unattractive for any commute that is longer than 20 miles one way, and none but the most extreme bikers will use them to travel more than 50 miles.
IMHO, biking should be encouraged, but it just won't scale to replace the utility given to us by cars. Buses and trains will.
I am not holding my breath for a self-driving car. Robots cannot even vacuum a room with furniture in it, so it may be a while before we have a car that can drive itself safely through a maze of streets and avoid hitting old ladies and bikers. There is this one way to move crowds of people where they want to go that is both cheaper and safer than cars, and it's called public transportation. May be politicians should look into that. Given the current economic slump, government spending on the country's infrastructure would probably pay off handsomely.
I don't feel like arguing with libertarians, but I like seeing you bashing them, so I'll chime in right here.
What the hell is a small government? If I go by the Wiki's definition, it's a government that has no public education, no public healthcare, no NASA, no DARPA, no fundamental research of any kind, no FCC, no FDA, no public highway system, no public rail system, no Internet. This perfect libertarian state sounds worse than Somalia. Next time someone tells me that a small government can govern 300 million people on the same continent without half of them dying from hunger and disease, I am going to bust a nut.
I don't think the rent seekers... Ugm, the rights holders got that memo. They seem to be dangerously preoccupied with supply limits of digital media: how there ain't any.
They are. There is a flac discography blob floating around, a remastered 2009 version. The best part, everything you pay for it ($0) goes directly to John Lennon.
And according to TFA, instead of "67 million Verizon customers" TFS should have said "67 million IPs from ranges belonging to Verizon, Comcast, AOL, may be others". Gotta love it when two forums evolve side-by-side.
Oh, OK. so it's right to divert resources from actual airport security and go on a wild goose chase every time when some joker posts something threatening, if only literally so. You don't see a problem with that? This is not protected speech. If it's OK to punish people for being dicks when yell "fire" in a theater, then it should be OK to punish them when they do something comparably stupid in a wide public forum. These jokes , if we are to process them properly, will cost us all money, so let's just NOT say things like that when we know we are read by strangers, and let's punish those who do. Am I really an idiot for thinking that?
Yes, not everyone can figure out when you speak in a sarcastic tone, and sarcasm with no context sometimes misfires, precisely because of its literal sense. Isn't it what I said above?
And no, I just don't see it. There is no smiley, no funny picture, nothing. And I cannot see you winking when you write it, either. If I read it on twitter, written by someone I don't know much about, I'll take it literally. There is absolutely no surprise in that people whose job happens to be airport security sometimes do the same.
You appear to be unhappy with the way the system processes these threats. What are you going to do about it, pass more laws? I have a VERY simple solution: stop posting literal threats on a top 100 website where most of your readers are strangers.
"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"
Any sensible person can see there is no threat there
This is a literal threat. This says, literally, that the speaker will detonate something at an airport, unless his demands are met. The only way to not perceive this as a threat is by reading between the lines and assuming a context that's just not there. When you say this kind of thing at a bar to a friend, where the context is well understood by everyone in the audience (they know you personally!), it is clear that this is merely a hyperbolic expression. When you post this on a widely publicized site like twitter, virtually assuring that most of your readers will not get any context, it's just a bare, literal, unequivocal threat. Would it kill you to add "Just kidding;)" in the end?
May be, may be not. It's just so hard to tell. I am sure that Google can make (is making?) the results worse by moving up the sponsors, but I am guessing that the external manipulation makes them A LOT worse. We may doubt Google's intentions, but not those of the spammers.
I am actually in the same boat as you. I do find Wikipedia far superior to Google at Web search when it comes to science. I am sure that Jimmy, bless his heart, did not plan for that, especially after so many categorical search engines fell into oblivion (remember Yahoo categories? can't blame you if you cannot). We'll just have to wait and see how the search evolves, and may be one day we will have a robust, open, resistant to gaming search index.
You're just realizing that the web is a bunch of crappy cross-linked blogs and syndicated content behind ads/paywalls.
But it's not. Well, may be it is mostly, but I still believe it's plausible to say that useful (whatever that means) content on the Web dwarfs that on just the Wikipedia. What we have here is a spam problem. It's not that Web is nothing but trash. It's not. But Google and others fall short when it comes to filtering out trash. It really is a search problem, not content or availability. And there may be a way out of it.
I am afraid that Google is not interested in suppressing their sponsors' sites, so that's one huge deficiency right there. On top of that, the kind of analysis I described is expensive if it is to be truly personalized, even just for people who log in. Your personal word frequency table will contain hundreds of thousands, if not millions of entries, and that's just for a single user. And if you do it wholesale (a single table for everyone), the conditional probabilities will probably average out. What am I saying. They WILL average out, because it will be just as easy to game. You own local filter, OTOH, is much harder to game, since it's different from everyone else's and you are the only one who can query it.
IMHO, the trash in the Google search is mostly due to spammers: the people who game the page-rank. I agree with eldavojohn: everyone is doing it these days, and the "news" sites are especially notorious. The line is very blurry. I know a dude who works for gather.com, and they are doing it by inserting "keywords" into their news articles. This is not the same as using a botnet to generate traffic, but the goal is the same.
May be the future of search is Bayesian filtering? It is doable even right now: have a local program load 1000 or so Google hits and unleash on them your own personal filter. Everyone heard about spam/ham filtering, but the math and the algorithm extend naturally to any finite number of categories, so a user can create categories such as "spam", "science", "shopping", "blog", "porn", train the filter, and enjoy truly personalized search results. Google is obviously loosing to rank gamers, they are way too smart and too quick to adapt. But a personal Bayesian filter could take the raw index with 90% spam and select results relevant to YOU, while slashing the amount of spam by a couple of orders of magnitude.
My Thunderbird filter works like a charm: in the last year I've had 1 (one) false positive and what feels like less than 5% of false negatives. I think it will work just great on Web pages.
Um, I am resubmitting this, since it's not appearing. Sorry if it's a dupe.
IMHO, the trash in the Google search is mostly due to spammers: the people who game the page-rank. I agree with eldavojohn: everyone is doing it these days, and the "news" sites are especially notorious. The line is very blurry. I know a dude who works for gather.com, and they are doing it by inserting "keywords" into their news articles. This is not the same as using a botnet to generate traffic, but the goal is the same.
May be the future of search is Bayesian filtering? It is doable even right now: have a local program load 1000 or so Google hits and unleash on them your own personal filter. Everyone heard about spam/ham filtering, but the math and the algorithm extend naturally to any finite number of categories, so a user can create categories such as "spam", "science", "shopping", "blog", "porn", train the filter, and enjoy truly personalized search results. Google is obviously loosing to rank gamers, they are way too smart and too quick to adapt. But a personal Bayesian filter could take the raw index with 90% spam and select results relevant to YOU, while slashing the amount of spam by a couple of orders of magnitude.
My Thunderbird filter works like a charm: in the last year I've had 1 (one) false positive and what feels like less than 5% of false negatives. I think it will work just great on Web pages.
Slashdot Mirror
This should a huge level of irresponsibility on the part of WikiLeaks for releasing the entire database rather than incriminating files.
This "database" was leaked not by Wikileaks, but, for all we know, by a US government employee. May be Bradley Manning, may be someone else, we don't know for sure. But it was not leaked by Wikileaks, and, chances are, not only to Wikeleaks.
These files were not published just by Wikileaks. In fact, because of the DDOS, they were initially published by papers like NY Times and Guardian. They actually released the info to public first this time. Why are you singling out Wikileaks? And for what? For an activity in which major journalistic outlets share willingly?
Take your head out of your anus.
Who or what is the antagonist in The Big Lebowski? The dude does not hate anyone, takes life for what it is, goes with the flow. And since he is a likable character and many viewers are able to relate to him (cough, cough), he is definitely a "good guy". So where is the "bad guy"? There are many stories like that, some quite old; many of them are of episodic, comical, or satirical character. Parables (Jewish, Christian, Taoist, Buddhist, you name it) are extremely compelling narratives, but they often choose to mess with your head when describing human actions, the whole point being to teach you good and bad. Or take some of the funniest shit ever written: Gargantua and Pantagruel and The Good Soldier Svejk, or A Confederacy of Dunces if you want something recent and American. In each book, chances are good that you will either love or hate every character, instead of attaching yourself to a single one as you watch him struggle against an antagonist. Instead of Star Wars- or Tolkien-like contrast many stories feature a cast of multifaceted characters and let the reader decide who is good, who is bad, and who they don't care about.
Seriously. I wish I had my cat's job. All it does is walk around the neighborhood all day, then comes home, eats yummy food, gets a massage, and watches the fish tank. And, unlike many human Americans, it enjoys full medical coverage.
I am also skeptical about cats being less social than dogs. Sure, dogs have a pack mentality and often (but not always) hunt together when in the wild, but cats are known to congregate in great numbers, seemingly for no reason other than socializing. And if one watches cats interact outside, where territory matters, one can see that there is A LOT of posturing and highly emotional exchange, and also teaching, learning, and games.
I know nothing about the actual work or purpose of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but I do know the fundamentals. You Yanks have separated your government into 3 major branches with the intention for them to work against each other and check each other's power. It would seem to me entirely reasonable that the Senate Judiciary Committee exists for the sole purpose of subverting the work done by the Supreme Court: these are the people who, akin to John Yoo, work hard to establish just how much trash they can drive through the Constitutional checkpoint. I don't even believe that it is necessarily a bad thing (the law must evolve), I just would not expect them to be the guardians of the Constitution, since it is clearly not their job.
Bikes are great, but they are a niche thing at best. The only factors that always go for bikes are their obscene efficiency and environmental friendliness. But they are nearly useless to disabled, sick, people with a gimped vestibular system, babies. They have to stay home when the weather is bad. They are really bad for transporting luggage. They are very unattractive for any commute that is longer than 20 miles one way, and none but the most extreme bikers will use them to travel more than 50 miles.
IMHO, biking should be encouraged, but it just won't scale to replace the utility given to us by cars. Buses and trains will.
I am not holding my breath for a self-driving car. Robots cannot even vacuum a room with furniture in it, so it may be a while before we have a car that can drive itself safely through a maze of streets and avoid hitting old ladies and bikers. There is this one way to move crowds of people where they want to go that is both cheaper and safer than cars, and it's called public transportation. May be politicians should look into that. Given the current economic slump, government spending on the country's infrastructure would probably pay off handsomely.
I don't feel like arguing with libertarians, but I like seeing you bashing them, so I'll chime in right here.
What the hell is a small government? If I go by the Wiki's definition, it's a government that has no public education, no public healthcare, no NASA, no DARPA, no fundamental research of any kind, no FCC, no FDA, no public highway system, no public rail system, no Internet. This perfect libertarian state sounds worse than Somalia. Next time someone tells me that a small government can govern 300 million people on the same continent without half of them dying from hunger and disease, I am going to bust a nut.
May be I am misunderstanding, but isn't (A && ~A) tautologically false?
There is no worry about supply limits.
I don't think the rent seekers... Ugm, the rights holders got that memo. They seem to be dangerously preoccupied with supply limits of digital media: how there ain't any.
They are. There is a flac discography blob floating around, a remastered 2009 version. The best part, everything you pay for it ($0) goes directly to John Lennon.
Yeah, they just have to deal with scientists turning into zombies and the forces of hell pouring through a hole in spacetime. Other than that, it's clear sailing on Mars.
And according to TFA, instead of "67 million Verizon customers" TFS should have said "67 million IPs from ranges belonging to Verizon, Comcast, AOL, may be others". Gotta love it when two forums evolve side-by-side.
Oh, OK. so it's right to divert resources from actual airport security and go on a wild goose chase every time when some joker posts something threatening, if only literally so. You don't see a problem with that? This is not protected speech. If it's OK to punish people for being dicks when yell "fire" in a theater, then it should be OK to punish them when they do something comparably stupid in a wide public forum. These jokes , if we are to process them properly, will cost us all money, so let's just NOT say things like that when we know we are read by strangers, and let's punish those who do. Am I really an idiot for thinking that?
It's nice. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
I apathetically accept :|
Yes, not everyone can figure out when you speak in a sarcastic tone, and sarcasm with no context sometimes misfires, precisely because of its literal sense. Isn't it what I said above?
And no, I just don't see it. There is no smiley, no funny picture, nothing. And I cannot see you winking when you write it, either. If I read it on twitter, written by someone I don't know much about, I'll take it literally. There is absolutely no surprise in that people whose job happens to be airport security sometimes do the same.
You appear to be unhappy with the way the system processes these threats. What are you going to do about it, pass more laws? I have a VERY simple solution: stop posting literal threats on a top 100 website where most of your readers are strangers.
"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"
Any sensible person can see there is no threat there
This is a literal threat. This says, literally, that the speaker will detonate something at an airport, unless his demands are met. The only way to not perceive this as a threat is by reading between the lines and assuming a context that's just not there. When you say this kind of thing at a bar to a friend, where the context is well understood by everyone in the audience (they know you personally!), it is clear that this is merely a hyperbolic expression. When you post this on a widely publicized site like twitter, virtually assuring that most of your readers will not get any context, it's just a bare, literal, unequivocal threat. Would it kill you to add "Just kidding ;)" in the end?
May be, may be not. It's just so hard to tell. I am sure that Google can make (is making?) the results worse by moving up the sponsors, but I am guessing that the external manipulation makes them A LOT worse. We may doubt Google's intentions, but not those of the spammers.
I am actually in the same boat as you. I do find Wikipedia far superior to Google at Web search when it comes to science. I am sure that Jimmy, bless his heart, did not plan for that, especially after so many categorical search engines fell into oblivion (remember Yahoo categories? can't blame you if you cannot). We'll just have to wait and see how the search evolves, and may be one day we will have a robust, open, resistant to gaming search index.
You're just realizing that the web is a bunch of crappy cross-linked blogs and syndicated content behind ads/paywalls.
But it's not. Well, may be it is mostly, but I still believe it's plausible to say that useful (whatever that means) content on the Web dwarfs that on just the Wikipedia. What we have here is a spam problem. It's not that Web is nothing but trash. It's not. But Google and others fall short when it comes to filtering out trash. It really is a search problem, not content or availability. And there may be a way out of it.
I am afraid that Google is not interested in suppressing their sponsors' sites, so that's one huge deficiency right there. On top of that, the kind of analysis I described is expensive if it is to be truly personalized, even just for people who log in. Your personal word frequency table will contain hundreds of thousands, if not millions of entries, and that's just for a single user. And if you do it wholesale (a single table for everyone), the conditional probabilities will probably average out. What am I saying. They WILL average out, because it will be just as easy to game. You own local filter, OTOH, is much harder to game, since it's different from everyone else's and you are the only one who can query it.
Another test. Just ignore me!
Test post. Is /. broken? Looks that way.
IMHO, the trash in the Google search is mostly due to spammers: the people who game the page-rank. I agree with eldavojohn: everyone is doing it these days, and the "news" sites are especially notorious. The line is very blurry. I know a dude who works for gather.com, and they are doing it by inserting "keywords" into their news articles. This is not the same as using a botnet to generate traffic, but the goal is the same.
May be the future of search is Bayesian filtering? It is doable even right now: have a local program load 1000 or so Google hits and unleash on them your own personal filter. Everyone heard about spam/ham filtering, but the math and the algorithm extend naturally to any finite number of categories, so a user can create categories such as "spam", "science", "shopping", "blog", "porn", train the filter, and enjoy truly personalized search results. Google is obviously loosing to rank gamers, they are way too smart and too quick to adapt. But a personal Bayesian filter could take the raw index with 90% spam and select results relevant to YOU, while slashing the amount of spam by a couple of orders of magnitude.
My Thunderbird filter works like a charm: in the last year I've had 1 (one) false positive and what feels like less than 5% of false negatives. I think it will work just great on Web pages.
Um, I am resubmitting this, since it's not appearing. Sorry if it's a dupe.
IMHO, the trash in the Google search is mostly due to spammers: the people who game the page-rank. I agree with eldavojohn: everyone is doing it these days, and the "news" sites are especially notorious. The line is very blurry. I know a dude who works for gather.com, and they are doing it by inserting "keywords" into their news articles. This is not the same as using a botnet to generate traffic, but the goal is the same.
May be the future of search is Bayesian filtering? It is doable even right now: have a local program load 1000 or so Google hits and unleash on them your own personal filter. Everyone heard about spam/ham filtering, but the math and the algorithm extend naturally to any finite number of categories, so a user can create categories such as "spam", "science", "shopping", "blog", "porn", train the filter, and enjoy truly personalized search results. Google is obviously loosing to rank gamers, they are way too smart and too quick to adapt. But a personal Bayesian filter could take the raw index with 90% spam and select results relevant to YOU, while slashing the amount of spam by a couple of orders of magnitude.
My Thunderbird filter works like a charm: in the last year I've had 1 (one) false positive and what feels like less than 5% of false negatives. I think it will work just great on Web pages.