I will bite. Life is defined by your experiences on this planet, and getting involved in triumphs of people whose work you like is part of it. There are many things which are great and are an end in themselves, but tell me, how many such monumental achievements will people remember 100 years from now? Awards like this make sure that future generations will watch them again and again because they were recongnised the academy, If you don't agree with me, then Ask Peter jackson himself is it makes a difference to him or not. Having a holier than thou attitude does not help, but understanding how this world works does.
Peter Jackson got what he deserved. I was literally waiting with bated breath to see him get the best director award. LOTR is not just a movie, it is an epic.
I'm sitting in a downtown San Francisco cafe with a man who won't tell me his name. Instead, he insists that I call him "Roy Batty" -- leader of the Nexus 6 replicants in Blade Runner. He says coyly that he's "in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic" and works as "a writer." Of what, he won't say.
Batty is a gaunt-looking man with serious gray-green eyes. He's probably in his early 30s. He's a coffeehouse philosopher who drops names like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and French avant-thinker Guy Debord the way some guys his age drop the names of indie rock bands. Batty doesn't want to give his real name because he believes that the concept of identity is quite elastic. Throughout history, he notes, human beings have loved to wear masks, adopting personas that were far different than their everyday ones. The malleable nature of selfhood is why he's so intrigued by Blade Runner, which, he says, he's seen more than 100 times. The Batty replicant isn't quite human, but is so close that it causes the viewer to question what it means to be truly human. Similarly, the Batty I'm drinking coffee with struggles with what it means to be "really yourself." Who you are, he says, can change from moment to moment.
"Identity is provisional," Batty insists. "It's fluid."
I met Roy Batty on Friendster.com, the popular matchmaking Web site that's quickly become a social phenomenon among even people who aren't single. Friendster introduces you to the friends of your friends through a big interconnected database. You register for the free site, create a personal profile with pictures and descriptions of yourself, and invite your friends to do the same. Your page is linked to their pages, and their pages are linked to their friends' pages, and so on. When you look at other people's profiles, you can see how you are connected through mutual friends. Suddenly at your fingertips is an ocean of potential friends, lovers, and networking opportunities.
That was the plan, at least.
The site has attracted legions of young creative types: DJs, artists, media people, Burning Man freaks, and other hipsters -- particularly in tech-savvy San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Not surprisingly, many of them went to great lengths to make their profiles unusual, or above-it-all and drenched in irony. Some, like Batty, took it a step further by not being themselves at all.
Batty and numerous other Friendsters routinely violate the site's user agreement by creating fictional characters as profiles instead of, or in addition to, their "real" profiles. These "fakesters" portray themselves as everything from inanimate objects like the World Trade Center to celebrities like Paris Hilton to historical forces like War (which lists its profession as "resolving disputes").
Emboldened by their masks and often preferring the weird over the normal, fakesters are turning Friendster on its ear. They link to other users they've never met in real life, flouting the site's original intent of connecting people through verifiable personal relationships. Many compete to link to as many other users as possible, so that their fictional characters function as social hubs in the Friendster network.
Though they are some of Friendster's most ardent fans -- many spend several hours a day on the site -- fakesters do everything they can to create anarchy in the system. They are not interested in finding friends through prosaic personal ads, but through a big, surreal party where Jesus, Chewbacca, and Nitrous are all on the guest list. To fakesters, phony identities don't destroy the social experience of Friendster; they enrich it.
But fakesters aren't hosting this gig. Jonathan Abrams, the 33-year-old software engineer who founded Friendster to improve his own social life, is -- and he abhors the phony profiles. He believes they diminish his site's worth as a networking tool and claims that fakesters' pictures -- often images ripped off the Web -- violate trademark law. Abrams' 10-person Sunnyvale company has begun rut
INSURANCE cheats will be subject to lie-detector tests in a pilot project being introduced by a Edinburgh bank.
City-based HBoS will launch a three-month scheme starting in September analysing phone calls to its insurance hotlines using the sophisticated technology.
And the insurance industry is sure to be watching with interest as it fights to reclaim the estimated 1 billion which the Association of British Insurers says are made in fraudulent claims each year.
The new HBOS phone system will randomly test a selection of the calls it receives from its 1.5 million policyholders.
Using voice stress analysis techniques to detect changes in speech patterns caused by stress, the machines will be able to make an initial assessment as to whether the caller may be lying.
A special series of questions has also been devised to try and catch out fraudsters.
Mark Hemingway, spokesman for HBOS, said plans to use the voice stress system would begin on a "small-scale" trial basis on calls to its household insurance department.
He said honest policyholders had nothing to fear from the new system as it will not be used in "isolation", but only as a starting point for further investigations.
He added that it could also lead to lower premiums.
Mr Hemingway said: "The techniques of voice stress analysis have been used in the insurance trade for the last 18 months or so to combat fraud and have been shown to be successful.
"This will just be one of systems we use to help cut down on fraudulent insurance claims and it won't be used in isolation and won't include everyone.
"After the initial three-month trial period we'll be able to judge whether it's been a success or not."
Callers selected to be part of the trial will be read a short script outlining responsibilities under the Data Protection Act before they give details of their claim. And Mr Hemingway said there will be measures in place to make sure only fraudsters are trapped, rather than those who naturally find making such phone calls difficult.
He said: "The system will be used with a whole host of other ways such as the sharing of information which the insurance industry does as routine.
"Honest policyholders will have nothing to fear and combating fraud will make things better for them anyway by helping to keep premium costs down."
And, according to research carried out by Insurance Times magazine, the system, which takes about 15 minutes per claim, could be used to cut down dramatically the need for lengthy investigations into claims by insurance loss adjusters.
But rival insurers, who will be sure to watch whether the system is a success, have already cast doubts on whether the lie-detectors are reliable.
A spokeswoman for Britain's biggest insurer, Norwich Union, said: "We have looked at voice stress systems and we don't believe they are tested, or are effective enough."
And civil liberties groups have also expressed strong reservations about the use of the technology and are seeking assurances about how the data will be used.
Mark Littlewood, campaigns director for Liberty, said: "The first critical thing is that customers are made aware they are under this sort of surveillance. Covert surveillance is very worrying.
"I'm also not persuaded this works, and that it doesn't discriminate against those who are just very distressed."
The new technology is just one of a series of developments which insurance companies have been looking at to try to cut down on the cost of fraud.
Last year, a computer software company announced it had developed an online lie-detector test which sifted through email and other text, looking at factors such as the tone of the messages, to try and find indications of senders telling lies.
One evening late in 2001, Julian Green's 7-year-old daughter came upstairs from the computer room of their house in the resort town of Torquay, in western England, and said, "The home page has changed, and it's something not very nice."
When Green checked the family PC, he found that it seemed almost possessed. The Internet home page had been switched so that the computer displayed a child pornography site when the browser software started up. Even if he turned the computer off, it would turn itself back on and dial the Internet on its own.
Green called the manufacturer and followed instructions to return his PC to a G-rated condition. The porn went away, but the computer still often crashed and kept connecting to the Internet even when "there was no one in the blinking house," he said.
But Green's problems were only beginning. Last October, police knocked on his door, searched his house and seized his computer. They found no sign of pornography in his house but discovered 172 images of child porn on the computer's hard drive. They arrested Green.
This month, Green was acquitted in Exeter Crown Court after arguing that the material had been gathered without his knowledge by a rogue program created by hackers -- a so-called Trojan horse -- that had infected his PC, probably during innocent Internet surfing. Green, 45, is one of the first people to use this defense successfully.
While a case that played out in the British legal system sets no precedent in the United States, legal experts say the technical issues raise two troubling possibilities. For one, actual child pornographers could arm themselves with a new alibi that would be difficult to disprove. Or, unknowing Web surfers could find themselves charged with possessing illegal material that a lurking software program has acquired.
"The scary thing is not that the defense might work," said Mark Rasch, a former federal computer crime prosecutor. "The scary thing is that the defense might be right," and that hijacked computers could be turned to an illegal purpose without the owner's knowledge or consent.
"The nightmare scenario," Rasch said, "is somebody might go to jail for something he didn't do because he was set up."
Green was eventually exonerated, and he said he had no clue how the rogue software showed up on his computer. "I never download anything, and as far as I knew, no others had," he said.
When his solicitor, Chris Bittlestone, hired a computer security consultant to examine the PC, nearly a dozen Trojan horse programs showed up on the hard drive.
"When the report came in, it was very much what you would call a eureka moment," Bittlestone said. But Green took the news differently.
"He was very quiet and said, 'See? I told you,' " Bittlestone recalled.
"There's some little sicko out there who's doing this," Green said, "and he's ruined my life. I've got to fight to get everything back."
Green's case could point the way to a new defense in U.S. courts , said Andrew Grosso, a lawyer and former federal prosecutor. The presence of a Trojan could mean that the computer is "not entirely under your control," he said, and a defendant could "legitimately point a finger elsewhere."
Slashdot Mirror
This will not work, the Junk placement guys a la Searchking will just hike their fees....
I will bite. Life is defined by your experiences on this planet, and getting involved in triumphs of people whose work you like is part of it. There are many things which are great and are an end in themselves, but tell me, how many such monumental achievements will people remember 100 years from now? Awards like this make sure that future generations will watch them again and again because they were recongnised the academy, If you don't agree with me, then Ask Peter jackson himself is it makes a difference to him or not. Having a holier than thou attitude does not help, but understanding how this world works does.
Peter Jackson got what he deserved. I was literally waiting with bated breath to see him get the best director award. LOTR is not just a movie, it is an epic.
Google better patent the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button real quick....
I'm sitting in a downtown San Francisco cafe with a man who won't tell me his name. Instead, he insists that I call him "Roy Batty" -- leader of the Nexus 6 replicants in Blade Runner. He says coyly that he's "in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic" and works as "a writer." Of what, he won't say.
Batty is a gaunt-looking man with serious gray-green eyes. He's probably in his early 30s. He's a coffeehouse philosopher who drops names like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and French avant-thinker Guy Debord the way some guys his age drop the names of indie rock bands. Batty doesn't want to give his real name because he believes that the concept of identity is quite elastic. Throughout history, he notes, human beings have loved to wear masks, adopting personas that were far different than their everyday ones. The malleable nature of selfhood is why he's so intrigued by Blade Runner, which, he says, he's seen more than 100 times. The Batty replicant isn't quite human, but is so close that it causes the viewer to question what it means to be truly human. Similarly, the Batty I'm drinking coffee with struggles with what it means to be "really yourself." Who you are, he says, can change from moment to moment.
"Identity is provisional," Batty insists. "It's fluid."
I met Roy Batty on Friendster.com, the popular matchmaking Web site that's quickly become a social phenomenon among even people who aren't single. Friendster introduces you to the friends of your friends through a big interconnected database. You register for the free site, create a personal profile with pictures and descriptions of yourself, and invite your friends to do the same. Your page is linked to their pages, and their pages are linked to their friends' pages, and so on. When you look at other people's profiles, you can see how you are connected through mutual friends. Suddenly at your fingertips is an ocean of potential friends, lovers, and networking opportunities.
That was the plan, at least.
The site has attracted legions of young creative types: DJs, artists, media people, Burning Man freaks, and other hipsters -- particularly in tech-savvy San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Not surprisingly, many of them went to great lengths to make their profiles unusual, or above-it-all and drenched in irony. Some, like Batty, took it a step further by not being themselves at all.
Batty and numerous other Friendsters routinely violate the site's user agreement by creating fictional characters as profiles instead of, or in addition to, their "real" profiles. These "fakesters" portray themselves as everything from inanimate objects like the World Trade Center to celebrities like Paris Hilton to historical forces like War (which lists its profession as "resolving disputes").
Emboldened by their masks and often preferring the weird over the normal, fakesters are turning Friendster on its ear. They link to other users they've never met in real life, flouting the site's original intent of connecting people through verifiable personal relationships. Many compete to link to as many other users as possible, so that their fictional characters function as social hubs in the Friendster network.
Though they are some of Friendster's most ardent fans -- many spend several hours a day on the site -- fakesters do everything they can to create anarchy in the system. They are not interested in finding friends through prosaic personal ads, but through a big, surreal party where Jesus, Chewbacca, and Nitrous are all on the guest list. To fakesters, phony identities don't destroy the social experience of Friendster; they enrich it.
But fakesters aren't hosting this gig. Jonathan Abrams, the 33-year-old software engineer who founded Friendster to improve his own social life, is -- and he abhors the phony profiles. He believes they diminish his site's worth as a networking tool and claims that fakesters' pictures -- often images ripped off the Web -- violate trademark law. Abrams' 10-person Sunnyvale company has begun rut
INSURANCE cheats will be subject to lie-detector tests in a pilot project being introduced by a Edinburgh bank.
City-based HBoS will launch a three-month scheme starting in September analysing phone calls to its insurance hotlines using the sophisticated technology.
And the insurance industry is sure to be watching with interest as it fights to reclaim the estimated 1 billion which the Association of British Insurers says are made in fraudulent claims each year.
The new HBOS phone system will randomly test a selection of the calls it receives from its 1.5 million policyholders.
Using voice stress analysis techniques to detect changes in speech patterns caused by stress, the machines will be able to make an initial assessment as to whether the caller may be lying.
A special series of questions has also been devised to try and catch out fraudsters.
Mark Hemingway, spokesman for HBOS, said plans to use the voice stress system would begin on a "small-scale" trial basis on calls to its household insurance department.
He said honest policyholders had nothing to fear from the new system as it will not be used in "isolation", but only as a starting point for further investigations.
He added that it could also lead to lower premiums.
Mr Hemingway said: "The techniques of voice stress analysis have been used in the insurance trade for the last 18 months or so to combat fraud and have been shown to be successful.
"This will just be one of systems we use to help cut down on fraudulent insurance claims and it won't be used in isolation and won't include everyone.
"After the initial three-month trial period we'll be able to judge whether it's been a success or not."
Callers selected to be part of the trial will be read a short script outlining responsibilities under the Data Protection Act before they give details of their claim. And Mr Hemingway said there will be measures in place to make sure only fraudsters are trapped, rather than those who naturally find making such phone calls difficult.
He said: "The system will be used with a whole host of other ways such as the sharing of information which the insurance industry does as routine.
"Honest policyholders will have nothing to fear and combating fraud will make things better for them anyway by helping to keep premium costs down."
And, according to research carried out by Insurance Times magazine, the system, which takes about 15 minutes per claim, could be used to cut down dramatically the need for lengthy investigations into claims by insurance loss adjusters.
But rival insurers, who will be sure to watch whether the system is a success, have already cast doubts on whether the lie-detectors are reliable.
A spokeswoman for Britain's biggest insurer, Norwich Union, said: "We have looked at voice stress systems and we don't believe they are tested, or are effective enough."
And civil liberties groups have also expressed strong reservations about the use of the technology and are seeking assurances about how the data will be used.
Mark Littlewood, campaigns director for Liberty, said: "The first critical thing is that customers are made aware they are under this sort of surveillance. Covert surveillance is very worrying.
"I'm also not persuaded this works, and that it doesn't discriminate against those who are just very distressed."
The new technology is just one of a series of developments which insurance companies have been looking at to try to cut down on the cost of fraud.
Last year, a computer software company announced it had developed an online lie-detector test which sifted through email and other text, looking at factors such as the tone of the messages, to try and find indications of senders telling lies.
Ever heard of Wake on LAN? This has been available for YEARS Dude.
One evening late in 2001, Julian Green's 7-year-old daughter came upstairs from the computer room of their house in the resort town of Torquay, in western England, and said, "The home page has changed, and it's something not very nice."
When Green checked the family PC, he found that it seemed almost possessed. The Internet home page had been switched so that the computer displayed a child pornography site when the browser software started up. Even if he turned the computer off, it would turn itself back on and dial the Internet on its own.
Green called the manufacturer and followed instructions to return his PC to a G-rated condition. The porn went away, but the computer still often crashed and kept connecting to the Internet even when "there was no one in the blinking house," he said.
But Green's problems were only beginning. Last October, police knocked on his door, searched his house and seized his computer. They found no sign of pornography in his house but discovered 172 images of child porn on the computer's hard drive. They arrested Green.
This month, Green was acquitted in Exeter Crown Court after arguing that the material had been gathered without his knowledge by a rogue program created by hackers -- a so-called Trojan horse -- that had infected his PC, probably during innocent Internet surfing. Green, 45, is one of the first people to use this defense successfully.
While a case that played out in the British legal system sets no precedent in the United States, legal experts say the technical issues raise two troubling possibilities. For one, actual child pornographers could arm themselves with a new alibi that would be difficult to disprove. Or, unknowing Web surfers could find themselves charged with possessing illegal material that a lurking software program has acquired.
"The scary thing is not that the defense might work," said Mark Rasch, a former federal computer crime prosecutor. "The scary thing is that the defense might be right," and that hijacked computers could be turned to an illegal purpose without the owner's knowledge or consent.
"The nightmare scenario," Rasch said, "is somebody might go to jail for something he didn't do because he was set up."
Green was eventually exonerated, and he said he had no clue how the rogue software showed up on his computer. "I never download anything, and as far as I knew, no others had," he said.
When his solicitor, Chris Bittlestone, hired a computer security consultant to examine the PC, nearly a dozen Trojan horse programs showed up on the hard drive.
"When the report came in, it was very much what you would call a eureka moment," Bittlestone said. But Green took the news differently.
"He was very quiet and said, 'See? I told you,' " Bittlestone recalled.
"There's some little sicko out there who's doing this," Green said, "and he's ruined my life. I've got to fight to get everything back."
Green's case could point the way to a new defense in U.S. courts , said Andrew Grosso, a lawyer and former federal prosecutor. The presence of a Trojan could mean that the computer is "not entirely under your control," he said, and a defendant could "legitimately point a finger elsewhere."