Just taking this quick opportunity to post a link to my favorite journal, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis: http://www.jasnh.com/ .
JASNH is one of the few places where you can submit a paper that says "we tested for X effect on Y and found no evidence that X affects Y". Generally this research is unpublishable and people will tweak parameters to get something career-advancing out of their research; I like JASNH because of the reminder that "falsifiability" can really happen.
Picking 90% of the winners from the first two days of applicants is not great, yes.
Give them credit for owning up to their mistakes, at least. It could be worse -- it's widely believed that the 1969 draft lottery was so un-random that people born in later months were dramatically more likely to be picked for an early draft!
On Command was doing literally this exact thing, but 20 years ago and (1) with VCRs instead of DVD players; (2) with the VCRs at the hotel front desk and you in your hotel room, instead of with the DVD players in California and you anywhere on the Internet.
OK, I did some digging in PACER, where it looks like the documents have probably been filed but are probably still sealed.
The relevant case is in the Southern District of New York (https://ecf.nysd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/ShowIndex.pl - anyone can sign up for a PACER account, they're free but you pay 8 cents per page, and if you charge less than $10 in a quarter it's free).
They're using an existing case, 1:10-cr-00336-LAK, which is all about the arrest and indictment of a gambling payment processor dude a year ago in April 2010.
So the timeline is: 1) Gambling dude is arrested in 2010 and charged with some gambling-related crimes. See his indictment at http://tech.mit.edu/~mherdeg/10-cr-00336-lak-1.pdf 2) Some time recently, he is (according to an Australian newspaper) secretly released from prison and prosecutors have not said whether he's still being charged 3) These 11 people are all being charged with 9 new crimes (documents not yet available, but apparently they'll be stored in this place / as part of this case number)
There have been a bunch of sealed documents added to the case recently; maybe they include the complaint and indictment that the press release talks about. You can see the history I got from PACER at http://tech.mit.edu/~mherdeg/10-cr-00336-entries.txt.
The Slashdot article links to a press release about the indictment (http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/April11/scheinbergetalindictmentpr.pdf), not the indictment itself.
In understanding legal issues, I am all about "reading the source code". Has anyone found a copy of the actual indictment itself that lists all the details about what these folks are being charged with?
Even better would be a link to the criminal complaint which I assume preceded the indictment. Those things are usually dozens of pages long, full of fascinating, juicy facts, and end up being filtered by the news media into reports that sometimes skip some of the cool details you can see yourself if you "read the source code" of the complaint. I'd be eager to see this, but so far none of the news sources reporting on the issue have disclosed it.
I'm not going to make any kind of normative statement about whether people should say Yes to Cal's offer, here, but just wanted to point out that weird-ass instrusions into student privacy are nothing new.
The contest is to figure out a way to make more bits available.
It is not obvious that Twitter messages are always guaranteed to carry 4339 bits of information (which is why the original post announcing the contest offers only 4200 bits).
Any attempt to use "compression" as we usually understand it would be pointless because you can't always fit x bits of arbitrary data in an x-1 bit channel.
If it makes you feel any better, a lot of commenters didn't get it, either.
Type up your passwords and encryption keys and put the device in a safe somewhere.
It seems like a 1 kilobyte file is more likely to last on a hard drive if you store 50 million copies of it. (And if you store 500,000 copies of the file on a CD, you're less likely to be screwed by a scratch.) Is there an easy way to automate this duplication? Some weird "very small, very-high-repetition on same volume" file system, or just a perl script?
Not sure what you mean by keeping their cool, but you can't be referring to heat since they both run cooler than any PC.
We use six previous-generation Mac Minis in our office (1.83GHz Core 2 Duo).
We tried stacking four of them on top of each other, but saw frequent system instability related to overheating issues. No surprise there, really.
One of the other two occasionally fails -- the system freezes completely with no response to keyboard or mouse input. This pretty much only happens when we run it out in the sun during the day, though; so we just close the blinds and hard-reboot the machine.
I know you're skeptical that the kinds of movies we like reflect the kind of culture we live in year-to-year, but consider John Carpenter's masterpiece They Live. Of course it was about politics in the Ronald Reagan era!
Some people on/b/ spent an hour early Friday morning discussing how they could make up a rumor that people were likely to believe, just for the lulz. Eventually, and basically by accident, someone decided that a Steve Jobs rumor would work just fine. He posted a fake but almost plausible story on iReport and digg ("I just saw paramedics take Steve Jobs away, he had a heart attack!") and got hundreds or thousands of/b/ users to Digg it.
I saw this conversation happening live. It's pretty cool that tens of thousands of random anonymous people can change world markets, huh?
The story was obviously fake, and any careful reader of Digg would've immediately noticed the 4chan references in the comments. Naturally there were no careful readers; blogs which have never been very good about checking their sources reported the joke as a real rumor, and small parts of the "real media" started to pick up the story.
The beleaguered stock hit its 52-week low on Friday, although it regained some value after Apple issued an official denial. The SEC has demanded (and received) docs from CNN on the/b/tard who submitted the iReport story.
There's nothing new here, guys. Real media have always known that you need to trust your sources, and if the free market and the "new media" blogs can't figure that out, they're dumber than we give them credit for.
Item TS1448 in the Apple support knowledge base addresses this issue and is dated June 6, 2008. The issue was reported by users as early as October.
Users noticed in October that Apple's built-in file system permissions verifier really wanted to delete the ARDAgent program (along with several others) because it was user-executable and setuid root. None of the users seemed to understand exactly what this meant...
Apple's reported fix, and I am not making this up:
The resolution: You can safely ignore these messages. They are accurate but not a cause for concern.
The entire text below, in case Apple deletes it:
Mac OS X 10.5: Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions reports issues with SUID files
* Last Modified: June 06, 2008
* Article: TS1448
* Old Article: 306925
Symptoms
The following messages may appear in the Disk Utility log window when repairing disk permissions.
Warning: SUID file "usr/libexec/load_hdi" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskManagement.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DiskManagementTool" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DesktopServicesPriv.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Locum" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Install.framework/Versions/A/Resources/runner" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Admin.framework/Versions/A/Resources/readconfig" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Admin.framework/Versions/A/Resources/writeconfig" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "usr/libexec/authopen" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/OwnerGroupTool" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent" has been modified and will not be repaired.
"Any message that starts with: 'ACL found but not expected on...'." Products Affected
Mac OS X 10.5 Resolution
You can safely ignore these messages. They are accurate but not a cause for concern.
Now that I have your attention: even strict editor-based filtering doesn't often work very well. Too often it reflects the knowledge gaps or biases of the editors. This is not to say that people are dumb. Rather, we tend to trust others and think less critically about topics with which we're only casually acquainted, compared with topics where we're experts.
To see a prime example, take a look at Saturday's Slashdot post Wikimedia Censors Wikinews. The latter half of the article text, written by an anonymous author, was just wrong, a fact that one commenter noticed after discussion was well underway.
The text, in case you're curious:
The US Communications Deceny Act section 230 grants providers of internet services (such as the Wikipedia and Wikinews) immunity from legal action related to their user-generated content provided they do not exercise pre-publication control. In deleting articles critical of the WMF prior to publication, Wikileaks says the Wikimedia Foundation may have set a dangerous precedent that could remove all of its CDA section 230 immunity (at least for Wikinews, where the control was exercised)."
(Actually, section 230 exempts you whether or not you exercise editorial control. In fact, that law was passed in large part to clarify unclear prior laws and to make it clear that even if you exercised editorial control, you were still protected. See Stratton Oakmont Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., 1995 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 229 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1995).)
No, you're wrong. Saying that any version of Windows runs on a system means that it doesn't matter which version, or bunch of versions, you choose, it/they will still run on the system in question. The key in the definition you linked to is the word "indiscriminately".
You've misinterpreted the definitions.
Look, I first sourced you a U.S. Navy writing guide which said that the word "any" is ambiguous because
Writers may intend it to denote "plurality" and readers may interpret it to denote "oneness." Also, when "any" is used to describe the selection of items from a set, it's the reader who selects, not the writer. Which, and how many items the readers select depends upon their point of view.
You refused to accept that as an example of modern English usage, so I supplied you with a dictionary definition in which "any" means either one or indiscriminately many of "a or some without reference to quality or extent." The "or indiscriminately" is not exclusive.
From the Oxford English Dictionary, a similar definition:
3. With a specially qualitative force: Of any kind or sort whatever; = earlier ANYKINS. Often depreciatory: Any, however imperfect. Cf. ANYBODY 2b, ANYTHING 2, ANYWAY 2. 1866 RUSKIN Cr. Wild Olive 98 This place..this moorland torrent-bitten, snow-blighted; this any place where God lets down the ladder. 1868 M. PATTISON Academ. Organ. 2 The danger is..that any reform should be adopted because some reform is required.
Speakers of the English language have, since at least 1866, sometimes used "any" to mean "there exists" rather than "for all".
1: one or some indiscriminately of whatever kind: a: one or another taken at random b: every --used to indicate one selected without restriction 2: one, some, or all indiscriminately of whatever quantity: a: one or more --used to indicate an undetermined number or amount b: all --used to indicate a maximum or whole c: a or some without reference to quantity or extent
Consequently, "any version of Windows runs on this system" could reasonably be spoken to mean "one or more one of the possible versions of Windows runs on this system" or "all of the possible versions of Windows run on this system."
Per a quick Google search: "Any voids greater than 1 mm across shall be filled." This requirement says that some voids greater than 1 mm, but not necessarily all of them, must be found and filled.
"There shall be less than 10 mV of error measurable between any two of the three test points." Here the specification says that if the tester finds one of the measurements yielding less than 10 mV, the equipment passes the test.
If only there were some computer programming language that had built-in support for some kind of a Comprehensive Archive Network, that would be the best.
Maybe the C++ language could do it. Then you could just... hmm... "import" the things you need from the Comprehensive C++ Archive Network!
Hmm, CC++AN sounds pretty dumb. It'd never catch on. Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
Just taking this quick opportunity to post a link to my favorite journal, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis: http://www.jasnh.com/ .
JASNH is one of the few places where you can submit a paper that says "we tested for X effect on Y and found no evidence that X affects Y". Generally this research is unpublishable and people will tweak parameters to get something career-advancing out of their research; I like JASNH because of the reminder that "falsifiability" can really happen.
I guess the Da Vinci virus wasn't playing around. Bummer.
I thought this was interesting when I read it in a news.ycombinator.com post from 2010.
Picking 90% of the winners from the first two days of applicants is not great, yes.
Give them credit for owning up to their mistakes, at least. It could be worse -- it's widely believed that the 1969 draft lottery was so un-random that people born in later months were dramatically more likely to be picked for an early draft!
Hey, guys, for a good time, have a look at On Command Video Corp. v. Columbia Pictures Industries, 777 F. Supp. 787 (N.D. Cal. 1991).
On Command was doing literally this exact thing, but 20 years ago and (1) with VCRs instead of DVD players; (2) with the VCRs at the hotel front desk and you in your hotel room, instead of with the DVD players in California and you anywhere on the Internet.
Things did not work out well for On Command. However, the legal landscape has changed somewhat in more recent years -- a more relevant ruling might be the 2008 Cablevision DVR case (see discussion e.g. at http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2008/08/cablevision-wins-on-appeal-remote-dvr-lawful-after-all.ars.
OK, I did some digging in PACER, where it looks like the documents have probably been filed but are probably still sealed.
The relevant case is in the Southern District of New York (https://ecf.nysd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/ShowIndex.pl - anyone can sign up for a PACER account, they're free but you pay 8 cents per page, and if you charge less than $10 in a quarter it's free).
They're using an existing case, 1:10-cr-00336-LAK, which is all about the arrest and indictment of a gambling payment processor dude a year ago in April 2010.
See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/arrests-follow-internet-high-flyers-release/story-e6frg6nf-1226039942478 for more on the dude.
So the timeline is:
1) Gambling dude is arrested in 2010 and charged with some gambling-related crimes. See his indictment at http://tech.mit.edu/~mherdeg/10-cr-00336-lak-1.pdf
2) Some time recently, he is (according to an Australian newspaper) secretly released from prison and prosecutors have not said whether he's still being charged
3) These 11 people are all being charged with 9 new crimes (documents not yet available, but apparently they'll be stored in this place / as part of this case number)
There have been a bunch of sealed documents added to the case recently; maybe they include the complaint and indictment that the press release talks about. You can see the history I got from PACER at http://tech.mit.edu/~mherdeg/10-cr-00336-entries.txt.
The Slashdot article links to a press release about the indictment (http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/April11/scheinbergetalindictmentpr.pdf), not the indictment itself.
In understanding legal issues, I am all about "reading the source code". Has anyone found a copy of the actual indictment itself that lists all the details about what these folks are being charged with?
Even better would be a link to the criminal complaint which I assume preceded the indictment. Those things are usually dozens of pages long, full of fascinating, juicy facts, and end up being filtered by the news media into reports that sometimes skip some of the cool details you can see yourself if you "read the source code" of the complaint. I'd be eager to see this, but so far none of the news sources reporting on the issue have disclosed it.
Why Marcus and not Ivanova? "Oops."
Why Aaron Eckhart and not Heath Ledger? "Oooops."
And if the contract is in Dutch but you're not in Flanders, it's null and void, right? :)
From the 1940s to the 1970s, Ivy League colleges took naked pictures of every incoming freshman, supposedly for use in scientific studies of the students' posture.
I am not making this up. See, e.g., this Times coverage from 1995.
I'm not going to make any kind of normative statement about whether people should say Yes to Cal's offer, here, but just wanted to point out that weird-ass instrusions into student privacy are nothing new.
The contest is to figure out a way to make more bits available.
It is not obvious that Twitter messages are always guaranteed to carry 4339 bits of information (which is why the original post announcing the contest offers only 4200 bits).
Any attempt to use "compression" as we usually understand it would be pointless because you can't always fit x bits of arbitrary data in an x-1 bit channel.
If it makes you feel any better, a lot of commenters didn't get it, either.
Type up your passwords and encryption keys and put the device in a safe somewhere.
It seems like a 1 kilobyte file is more likely to last on a hard drive if you store 50 million copies of it. (And if you store 500,000 copies of the file on a CD, you're less likely to be screwed by a scratch.) Is there an easy way to automate this duplication? Some weird "very small, very-high-repetition on same volume" file system, or just a perl script?
We use six previous-generation Mac Minis in our office (1.83GHz Core 2 Duo).
We tried stacking four of them on top of each other, but saw frequent system instability related to overheating issues. No surprise there, really.
One of the other two occasionally fails -- the system freezes completely with no response to keyboard or mouse input. This pretty much only happens when we run it out in the sun during the day, though; so we just close the blinds and hard-reboot the machine.
I know you're skeptical that the kinds of movies we like reflect the kind of culture we live in year-to-year, but consider John Carpenter's masterpiece They Live. Of course it was about politics in the Ronald Reagan era!
Guys, this is not new.
Some people on /b/ spent an hour early Friday morning discussing how they could make up a rumor that people were likely to believe, just for the lulz. Eventually, and basically by accident, someone decided that a Steve Jobs rumor would work just fine. He posted a fake but almost plausible story on iReport and digg ("I just saw paramedics take Steve Jobs away, he had a heart attack!") and got hundreds or thousands of /b/ users to Digg it.
I saw this conversation happening live. It's pretty cool that tens of thousands of random anonymous people can change world markets, huh?
The story was obviously fake, and any careful reader of Digg would've immediately noticed the 4chan references in the comments. Naturally there were no careful readers; blogs which have never been very good about checking their sources reported the joke as a real rumor, and small parts of the "real media" started to pick up the story.
The beleaguered stock hit its 52-week low on Friday, although it regained some value after Apple issued an official denial. The SEC has demanded (and received) docs from CNN on the /b/tard who submitted the iReport story.
There's nothing new here, guys. Real media have always known that you need to trust your sources, and if the free market and the "new media" blogs can't figure that out, they're dumber than we give them credit for.
Users noticed in October that Apple's built-in file system permissions verifier really wanted to delete the ARDAgent program (along with several others) because it was user-executable and setuid root. None of the users seemed to understand exactly what this meant...
Apple's reported fix, and I am not making this up:
The entire text below, in case Apple deletes it:
Mac OS X 10.5: Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions reports issues with SUID files
* Last Modified: June 06, 2008
* Article: TS1448
* Old Article: 306925
Symptoms
The following messages may appear in the Disk Utility log window when repairing disk permissions.
Warning: SUID file "usr/libexec/load_hdi" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskManagement.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DiskManagementTool" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DesktopServicesPriv.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Locum" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Install.framework/Versions/A/Resources/runner" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Admin.framework/Versions/A/Resources/readconfig" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Admin.framework/Versions/A/Resources/writeconfig" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "usr/libexec/authopen" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/OwnerGroupTool" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent" has been modified and will not be repaired.
"Any message that starts with: 'ACL found but not expected on...'."
Products Affected
Mac OS X 10.5
Resolution
You can safely ignore these messages. They are accurate but not a cause for concern.
To see a prime example, take a look at Saturday's Slashdot post Wikimedia Censors Wikinews. The latter half of the article text, written by an anonymous author, was just wrong, a fact that one commenter noticed after discussion was well underway.
The text, in case you're curious:
(Actually, section 230 exempts you whether or not you exercise editorial control. In fact, that law was passed in large part to clarify unclear prior laws and to make it clear that even if you exercised editorial control, you were still protected. See Stratton Oakmont Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., 1995 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 229 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1995).)
Sure, the "article" may be a crappy posting by some guy in antipolygraph.org, but he's right. Moderators don't filter very well.
To see a good example, moderate me +1 Insightful.
About ten years ago, it became impossible for me to send e-mails to my girlfriend with the subject line "ILOVEYOU."
The error message from Comcast -- something about rejection -- was pretty classic.
You can do a little bit better with a D3.
Look, I first sourced you a U.S. Navy writing guide which said that the word "any" is ambiguous because
You refused to accept that as an example of modern English usage, so I supplied you with a dictionary definition in which "any" means either one or indiscriminately many of "a or some without reference to quality or extent." The "or indiscriminately" is not exclusive.
From the Oxford English Dictionary, a similar definition:
Speakers of the English language have, since at least 1866, sometimes used "any" to mean "there exists" rather than "for all".
Consequently, "any version of Windows runs on this system" could reasonably be spoken to mean "one or more one of the possible versions of Windows runs on this system" or "all of the possible versions of Windows run on this system."
Per a quick Google search:
"Any voids greater than 1 mm across shall be filled." This requirement says that some voids greater than 1 mm, but not necessarily all of them, must be found and filled.
"There shall be less than 10 mV of error measurable between any two of the three test points." Here the specification says that if the tester finds one of the measurements yielding less than 10 mV, the equipment passes the test.
If only there were some computer programming language that had built-in support for some kind of a Comprehensive Archive Network, that would be the best.
... hmm ... "import" the things you need from the Comprehensive C++ Archive Network!
Maybe the C++ language could do it. Then you could just
Hmm, CC++AN sounds pretty dumb. It'd never catch on. Oh well.
Uh, without RTA, it sounds like there was just some linguistic ambiguity. The word "any" is special that way.