Slashdot Mirror


User: Tango42

Tango42's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
688
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 688

  1. Re:Odd ruling on Court: Homeland Security Must Disclose 'Internet Kill Switch' · · Score: 1

    Since the details of the switch haven't been published, I have no view on its merits. It sounds more like a wi-fi jammer than something that will actually kill the internet.

    This court case is not about the merits of the system but about whether the details should be published. The exceptions for things related to security where lives could be at risk by publishing seem to clearly apply.

  2. Odd ruling on Court: Homeland Security Must Disclose 'Internet Kill Switch' · · Score: 1

    Seems like a strange ruling to me. How is something intended to prevent bombs going off not to do with saving lives? I'm all for interpreting things like this narrowly, but the fact that you don't know in advance which lives you are saving doesn't seem like a sensible argument to me...

  3. Re:Why always a back door on Court: Homeland Security Must Disclose 'Internet Kill Switch' · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think prejudice refers to whether or not you can make the claims again. If a claim is dismissed because it is without merit, it will usually be with prejudice, meaning any future claim on that point will be consisted pre-judged and dismissed. If a claim is dismissed due to some procedural issue, it may be without prejudice so you can try again later.

    Whether or not you have leave to appeal is separate.

  4. Private spaceflight is more interesting on Liu Yang Becomes China's First Female Astronaut · · Score: 2

    China is only slightly ahead of private spaceflight, which makes it hard for me to be impressed. Give it 3 or 4 years, and private companies will be able to do more impressive stuff than China. At that point, it will just be a matter of having enough money (it's not much more than that now, really).

    That, and launching women into space isn't actually any more difficult than launching men (you have to design the spacesuits a little differently, but that's trivial). When the first women were launched into space, it was a triumph for equality, but sexism isn't really China's biggest problem (well, not after birth, any way).

  5. Re:Something I've noticed... on Evolution, Big Bang Polls Omitted From NSF Report · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Where is the evidence that that happens more in the US than elsewhere?

  6. What's the margin of error? on IE Not Faring Well In the EU Ballot · · Score: 1

    What is the margin of error on those browser stats? I doubt a 1% drop from one month to the next is statistically significant.

    Even if it is, it was inevitable that there would be a drop. Only IE users get the choice screen and it would be incredible if they all chose IE, so some people are going to switch from IE to something else. A 1% drop sounds extremely small to me, but I'm not sure how far the choice screen has rolled out yet.

  7. Re:Been done? on Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    No, they solve very different problems. Something like Huggle needs to work out if a given edit can be almost guaranteed *not* to be vandalism (usually because the editor is on a whitelist), everything else gets shown to a human. The important thing for something like Huggle is making it easy for humans to review edits, not judging the edits automatically in any way. Something like ClueBot needs to work out if it can almost guarantee that a given edit *is* vandalism. They are very different.

  8. Re:Existing on Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In that paper, you say you think high-recall (ie. low false negatives) should be preferred to high-precision (low false positives) since it reduces the chance of a reader seeing a vandalised version. I disagree. You underestimate the harm caused by losing editors that get annoyed when their legitimate edits are reverted by a bot. The upcoming feature, Flagged Revisions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions ), will provide a much better way of preventing readers from seeing vandalised versions while not costing us useful editors.

  9. Re:Think twice before assisting this harmful proje on Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    If the world doesn't want Wikipedia, they are more than welcome to stop reading it. In truth, however, it seems the world very much wants Wikipedia, since it is the 5th most popular website in the world (by unique visitors per month, if memory serves).

  10. Re:What counts as vandalism on Wikipedia? on Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Officially, vandalism is defined as edits made in bad faith. If you are trying to improve the article but are an idiot (which includes people that don't realise their own bias), that isn't vandalism, it's just idiocy. It is only if you are editing with the intention of making the article worse that you are vandalising.

  11. Re:Been done? on Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    Huggle and Twinkle are tools to help humans deal with vandalism. AntiVandalBot and ClueBot, etc., are bots that deal with (the most obvious) vandalism themselves. They are very different things.

  12. Re:Not so. on Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    What kind of site strips angle brackets from a plain text post?

  13. Re:Not so. on Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    And 662363 799629, so how dare you interrupt?! ;)

  14. Re:And so... ? on Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    The problem isn't a mess of versions (although that doesn't help), it a mess of operating systems. Once you have everything running on one distro you can just go round upgrading everything at one time (well, not exactly one time, since something has to keep running the site). Trying to keep up-to-date with new releases from lots of different distros is far harder.

  15. Re:More surprised at the mess they had before on Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    I know, David, I'm Tango (Thomas Dalton). If you want to play timestamps, my first recorded edit was December 2002 (it was very small back then!) ;).

  16. Re:CentOS is free RHEL on Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    Brion Vibber was the first technical hire (August 2005) and is still the CTO. A few more people have been hired over time, but I don't think anyone has left (not on the technical side, anyway).

  17. Re:More surprised at the mess they had before on Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Your mistake is in thinking it's a large effort - they started with just volunteers and then had only one or two full time staff for a while with the technical stuff still being done by volunteers. The first technical person wasn't hired until August 2005, four and a half years after the launch of Wikipedia (which, by that point, was already a top 50 website according to Alexa), they only have around 5 technical staff now. It's a very small project from that point of view, it's just a hell of a lot of servers!

  18. Re:Holy crap. on Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B · · Score: 1

    Declaring bankruptcy does tend to have a negative effect on ones stock price...

  19. Re:Jumping the gun a bit.... on UK Can Now Hold People Without Charge For 42 Days · · Score: 1

    He was elected to parliament, and then appointed as Chancellor. That's how it such systems work. Gordon Brown wasn't elected PM of the UK, he was elected MP and then appointed PM by the Queen, same as every other PM. Hitler was leader of the party with the most elected seats (well, coalition with the most elected seats, anyway). That's pretty much being elected chancellor.

  20. Re:You may have violated the DMCA by decoding... on UK Can Now Hold People Without Charge For 42 Days · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yet more evidence that farming is a danger to our society and way of life and should be stamped out at all costs.

  21. Re:Okay? on NASA Plans Probe to the Sun · · Score: 1

    There is a big difference between radiation shielding when visiting Mars and radiation shielding when visiting the sun. While the radiation may be the same, there is a hell of a lot more of it, so they will need a different approach to shielding, not just more of the same.

  22. Re:Don't worry NASA is not stupid. on NASA Plans Probe to the Sun · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How have you not heard that joke before?

  23. Re:Easy question on Are Academic Journals Obsolete? · · Score: 1

    It's a lucky academic that gets enough funding to employ someone to type up their papers!

  24. Re:Easy question on Are Academic Journals Obsolete? · · Score: 1

    Indeed, mathematics (my field) is almost universally done in LaTeX from the start. You can't just leave the typesetting to someone else, it would be a nightmare trying to input equations properly into something like Word (I've used MathType for Word once, it works for adding a couple of equations into a primarily prose document, but for anything more than that, you would be pulling your hair out by the end). You could hand write it, but I doubt journals accept hand written papers.

  25. Re:Easy question on Are Academic Journals Obsolete? · · Score: 1

    If the final version is going to be in LaTeX, why wouldn't you just write it in LaTeX to start with? The hard part is learning the language, which you'll have to do anyway. Once you know what you're doing, it's really not difficult to work with.