This is in response to various replies, not the parent or TFA: This is not "vigilante" activity. A vigilante is someopne who usurps or subverts established social structure, acting as judge, jury and/or executioner.
Before there were laws on the books about spamming, there was no social structure for identifying and acting against spammers. Those who did it then were emergent order enforcement acts. They were volunteers carrying out the desires of many based on the consensus, or at least vocal majority, of the net. There was a socially accepted behavior, people who violated it, and people who took it upon themselves to enforce the socially accepted. All law enforcement has evolved from social systems in precisely this manner.
Now that there are laws, these people seek to identify the perps, and use the established social structure by turning them over to the proper channels and authorities.
Those who provide filtering/blocking services are acting within a social structure suitably designed and executed for property protection. They are offering private protection services and people sign up with them, or not.
Ever since Canter & Seigel people have accused anti-spammers of vigilantism without understanding what it means. Of course this was semi-informed media, hot headed critics, or spammers caught in the act, all of them using the word for hot-button value.
Now, people who cat together their tracking cookies with large garbage files to try to buffer overflow spammers' data collection activities, and people who set up botnets to DDoS spammer botnets, those are vigilantes. There are laws in place. Going around them is what vigilantism is about.
I was there for Canter & Seigel, and many more for several years. Only Alan Boyle, science editor at MSNBC, ever noted that the word "vigilante" was frequently misused in this way by others in the media. The few others anywhere near as correct simply didn't refer to us in that way.
Anything that can be done to take some of the hot air out of blow-hard press releases masquarading as news stories like the physorg.com article linked to, should be. That was some seriously hyperbolic diatribe.
"nations that can sustain commercial satellite launches."
More accurately, "nations that can support the launching of commercial satellites". If a nation's support is required, it's not a commercial launch, it's a government launch. The parent's wording is misleading. That doesn't matter to most people. It does to those interested in commercial space development.
Governments do these things using peoples' money whether or not they want their money used that way. Companies do things with their own money and make more money by selling it to people who want it. There's no competitive market forces acting on a government, and so no expectation of profitability or even reasonable cost, which depends on being affordable to end users.
There's a whole passel of improperly informed people yakking on about consciousness and its relation to reality and other ridiculous notions, specifically because people insist on confusing the necessary MEASUREMENT with the irrelevant OBSERVATION. Collapse of quantum wave functions requries interaction with another non-entangled wave function such as a measuring device. All of the results which support the inequalities tested and referenced here were produced using equipment which measured the phenomena and gave results well before any observation occurred. The parent, and the blurb in Nature both imply the mistaken idea by using terms that refer to a observer. Nature should know better. Everybody else that's really interested in understanding it should learn better. It makes the science much more interesting. But then it weeds out the semi-informed speculativists and the newage (rhymes with sewage) pseudoscientific-spiritual theorists. Being the vast majority, they obviously tend to revolt at the insistence on being correct.
"Makes you wonder what other common household products also test positive; and how many others have been arrested based on faulty test kits who didn't have the resources to defend themselves."
Drug urinanalysis tests are notorious for false positives as well as true positives for common food stuffs which do carry the drug(s), but in minute quantities. I recall an entire class of substance abuse counselors in training being given surprise urinalysis so they'd know how it feels. They all tested positive, in testing and restesting. The culprit was poppy seed muffins supplied by the organization presenting the class. This was figured out by the instructor. Had it not been, or had this been one or more individuals really being tested for whatever reason, the samples would have been retained and passed to a lab for mass spectrometry. This test is many orders of magnitude more accurate. It absolutely identifies molecules present. It does not indicate the source. They'd have been considered positives, which is guilt by fairly irrefutible evidence, but not considered false positives due to circumstantial evidence. How many? I have no idea, in general. I do know that I, and those I worked with in substance abuse treatment, did inquire into possible sources, knowing of the above. All that I supervised admitted using, after giving bad excuses. I knew of the possible other sources -- they didn't. But then I worked for a facility which was owned by a medical corporation. They had potential liability and so expected us to be careful like this. Testing done by law enforcement and similar organizations are not considered as liable, as they themselves cannot be held as accountable. They can and do jail based on initial testing, even probable false positives and obvious ridiculous positives (how was he going to get the supposed intended victim to ingest enough soap?). However, they can be held accountable, especially in the press. Sad as the case is, this is probably the best chance the individual has for getting just due. With popular knowledge and support, any case would go more his way, and law enforement tends to go Tango Uniform when faced with the prospect. He could get damages if he pressed it. I hope his roasts the bastards.
Monospaced, ragged right. That's the formula prescribed by Writer's Digest for the most successful submissions to editors, circa 1980. The easiest read (on the eyes and brain) is the most likely to be read, and so accepted. Having spent almost 5 years as an editor, reading way too much compared to what was good enough to print, I can tell you for a fact it's true. When you have 100 pages to read before bed, and you run across a manuscript that has wordsruntogetherononeline a n d t o o m u c h s p a c e on the next, it slows you down, annoys you, and you trash it. Kerning is just one component, and one of proportional fonts. A such, the point is lost compared to the evidence, except there's precious little consideration given to web page readers, and so proportional fonts rule the bitwaves.
The problem makes more sense, paradoxically, when you consider that we don't read letters at a time, but rather words at a time. If we read letters at a time, the spacing between letters would be a significant factor for understanding a single word at a time. But we read 4 or so words at a time, and the spacing problem accumulates. Losing track of comphrehension because of this problem makes us have to stop and read those words in series (one at a time) instead of parallel (a phrase at a time). The cognitive effort involved bothers us. The brain is lazy and revolts at extra work.
If TFA says this, tough. I didn't read much of it. I've known this for a quarter century, from practical experience as well as studying language use as a cognitive psychologist.
Let's hear it for this valiant public servant who seeks to save us from the evil, the nasty and the braindeaded and boneheaded out there on the net. Watch how he backpedals when he discovers himself to be among those items to be blocked when people deem e-Zealots to be a danger to their freedom as well as their peace of mind. Faced with the prospect of losing the re-election advantage to be had from being highly visible on the net, he'll cave in like a Chinese coal mine.
"Last I knew, a radio had two nobs." -- George Carlin. Right you are, George, and a browser has a back button.
"You can't own congresscritters -- they have moral standards. You can only rent them. Pray that no one else rents them at a higher rate at the same time."
I stand corrected. Perhaps if I kneel under their desk corrected I could get a few extra points with them. Nah, I'm an adult.
Why is the "smallest" consistently an issue when it comes to electronics and motorized equipment? They're being made smaller all the time. This will continue to be non-news headlines for some time to come.
I'm not impressed at all. They're all using microcontrolers and ROMS and such. A researcher at Los Alamos developed stepper-motor driven insect-like robots using 12, 14, or 20 transistors that'd "learn" to walk, some with different speeds/strides, with no preprogramming and within a few attempts steps. They even developed what amount to social behavior when operated in groups. The more agile ones that could run would run over the smaller, slower ones. In groups, the latter gathered together and backed themselves into a circle, which prevented the larger, faster ones from running over them. The "beheavior" emerged from some very simple conditions, and stretches the definition of "behavior", much like the light-sensing toy cars exhibited in an old SciAm article. In both cases there's no real learning because there's no collecting of information to be used other than immediate feedback through hardwired circuits. But when you saw a table full of these "bugs" circle the wagons to protect themselves against the attacking "lobsters", it was hard to not think of it in those terms.
"You want to see real artifical intelligence? Make it warm and soft and fuzzy and cuddly." -- Karl Pribram, who understood the fault lies with us, Dear Brutish peoploids, not with our toy cars; it's what we "think" they're "doing".
Many companies continue to use airbrushed pictures, so-called subliminal, in their ads despite the fact that the very concept has been debunked. They do it Just In Case it'll work, and they pay big money for it. The only difference is nowdays they deny they do it.
Same with this. It's probabilistic, meaning is does statistics and guesses. It has more holes in it than I'd allow any of my research methods undergrads get away with on homework: besides multiple people using the same browser, how about people who use different browsers? In particular, who use one for some thing, another for other things, etc.?
If there's going to be Yet Another Invasion of Privacy based in cookies, it's time to reconsider testing all those content providers' machines for overflow bugs by merging the cookies they send to DVD.iso files for them to read. Hey, I'm just providing more data for their demographics by showing them what I'm watching. I wonder what's going to happen to the people running these spy machines when I notify the companies that they just downloaded a shitload of pr0n.
And what are they going to do with it? "Targeted" "marketing". Read: try to guess better what spam you'll respond to.
Lest anyone thinks this isn't already done, you haven't been going to unusual web sites and then watching what ads pop up on subesquently viewed sites, and persist on popping up on those subsequent sites weeks or months later.
They're using "probabalistic latent variables" on the "vectors", meaning they look at where you go to from where rather than just where you've been. That means they're going to need to suck down a pile of your cookies. Are they going to pay for the bandwidth? This is upload, which ISPs cap at around 1/4 of download. Gee, thanks for slowing down my work guys, I only transfer gigabytes of data with other researchers. I could use the time off you're giving me by making it take that much longer.
If anyone wants to see one way latent variables are extracted, look into the noise reduction and especially the stereo-from-mixed-mono separation applications of continuous wavelet transform. There's ample freeware and free scripts for commercial software that'll do this analysis. And that's just the more recent way. Bell Labs came up with an analog to this analysis many years ago when they invented "voice prints" based on multiple parallel analyses using the concept that Fourier borrowed from the arabs 200 years ago. I can simulate the same extraction by fooling my software into thinking the data I'm feeding it is an accepted standard for EEG recording. I've done it with heart rate data, sun spot data, climatological data, seismograph readings and so on. I could do it with these "vectors" they're describing, and don't even have to understand very well what those "vectors" are supposed to mean. The latent variables will pop out as abrupt changes in the complexity of the data as the dimensions of the analyses (of the matrices, or similar) increases. I'll see it as blobs of color that weren't there before.
If a bunch of statisticians get ahold of this patent, they can easily describe how the analysis is just another implementation of analyses that have been used for many years and is essentially the same result from a different calculation, leaving the only novel contribution to be to use to which it's put and the specific code written to do it.
When MS stops supporting it, I'll stop getting all these insistent messages to download the latest security fixes which aren't, and can finally have a stable platform I can start to understand. This is a good thing.
XP will not go away. It will continue to exist on the machines of everyone who keeps it and CD ROMS that people don't throw away. Hell, 95 and 98 haven't gone away. I still have them on a couple old machines because some things I use insist on them. By now I can fix anything that might go wrong with them. Same will go for XP.
I could easily say the same thing about the people I encounter in science. In particular, the author of this article. In TFA, he defines his term and then deconstructs his own definition. An imaginary straw man. In his linked article on DRM, he calls it empirical despite the fact it's a survey. He draws conclusions despite his admission that it was not statistically significant. It's easy to pull science out of your ass and call it empirical, and apparently to get attention for it, when you're presenting it to an applied technology field. It's a lot harder to do when you're working in an experimentally oriented field.
As for the people you're encountering, and the people he's talking about, they're not the same. You won't encounter the people he's describing working for an IT department, supporting users who don't know their ASCII from a hole. If any did happen to be working in your organization, you probably would never hear anything from them because they'd fix their own problems. And if you did hear from them, they'd know not to let on how much they know.
My Dell computer calls home regularly. I didn't ask for this and I don't want it. Until my warranty expired I didn't dare remove it.
I have to keep a copy of IE available because Firefox chokes on the tracking cookies MSNBC shoves at me. And still Zonealarm reports spyware being blocked from time to time.
With this level of white collar participation, business will tell its entertainment branch, government, that this is all perfectly legal. The FTC people are great, and more power to them, but nobody is going to go to jail over it.
On the other hand, I get spyware blocking reports from Zonealarm when I use a couple of well known bittorrent sites. Now THEY should be afraid. They don't own any congresscritters.
So TFA says warmer weather corresponds to increased sunspots, except that it doesn't.
Putting aside the probability that the BBC article focused on the sensational aspects and overemphasized those, it seems they're using the same data to reach different conclusions when the fact is that one part of the data contradicts another. This requires no small amount of rationalization. Or perhaps that's BBC's approach, and the original work is much clearer on these points.
This internal inconsistency should prove invaluable to the/. community, in that it will support at least two sides of the OMG GLOBALWARMINGISKILLINGUSALL OR NOT argument, which we join already in progress. Never have so many known so little and said so much about it in no uncertain terms.
> I guess now they've finally succumbed to grasping at straws that aren't there.
"Finally"? You must be new here. The Society for Confabulation and Obsfucation have been building entire imaginary straw men out of those things, trying to Don Quixote their way through court.
My money still says SCO has been hoping a payoff, buy out or outright take over by IBM or one of the other (previous) defendents before they crash and burn. At this stage about all they're going to get is a helmet so they don't hurt themselves and a seat on the little corporate school bus on its way to Enronville. Hopefully, by the time they implode, the only stockholders will be McBride and his pals, and their attorneys.
How about software available for download? Here's a usenet post from 1994 containing links to available software. This is just the first result I got searching the newsgroups via Google's advanced search function (search terms "phone internet duplex", filtered dates Jan 1 1981 to Dec 31 1994) [usenet post below ===== divider].
Google's patent search for the same terms and dates gave this result:
Abstract An asynchronous, high-speed, fiber optic local area network originally developed for tactical environments with additional benefits for other environments such as spacecraft, and the like. The network supports ordinary data packet traffic simultaneously with synchronous T1 voice traffic over a common token ring channel; however, the techniques and apparatus of this invention can be applied to any deterministic class of packet data networks, including multitier backbones, that must transport stream data (e.g., video, SAR, sensors) as well as data. A voice interface module parses, buffers, and resynchronizes the voice data to the packet network employing elastic buffers on both the sending and receiving ends. Voice call setup and switching functions are performed external to the network with ordinary PABX equipment. Clock information is passed across network boundaries in a token passing ring by preceeding the token with an idle period of non-transmission which allows the token...
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps From: Sven Guckes Date: Sat, 18 Jun 1994 06:37:56 GMT Local: Sat, Jun 18 1994 12:37 am Subject: Re: Voice messages across the internet??? Reply to author | Forward | Print | Individual message | Show original | Report this message | Find messages by this author j...@iastate.edu (Jeff A Jensen) writes:
[Real-time talk over network]
>How come nobody's written a shareware program to let users of way-cooler >macs to do the same thing?:) After all, most recent macs come with >microphones, and they all have sound capabilities. So, where's the >enterprising programmer(s) who will make this possible for thousands of >dedicated mac/internet users?
-- The UMICH Macintosh Archive
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questi...@mac.archive.umich.edu Gopher: gopher.archive.merit.edu "Software Archives" Useful files:/mac/00introduction : File with introductory information to UMICH/mac/misc/documentation : FAQs, pointer files, program descriptions/mac/00help/index.txt : File containing all descriptions of stored files The UMICH upload list:
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Topic: Voice conversation on networks/mac/util/network/2waytalker2.1.sit.hqx/mac/util/network/talk2me1.3.cpt.hqx/mac/util/network/townmeeting2.0.cpt.hqx/mac/util/network/xcuseeme0.60b1.cpt/mac/util/network/zing1.3.cpt.hqx
To be successful, the product has to actually be good enough on its own.
The fight back against big brother lawsuits, be able to prove invalidity, and after the discovery process shows that, file charges of barratry against the lawyers. Lawyers are only confrontational when it comes to clients. When it's their own ass on the line, they scurry like cockroaches when the light is turned on.
> "But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent."
No it isn't. Plagiarism due to failure to adequately research prior work and provide full references to prove the fact is still plagiarism. Presenting someone else's ideas as one's own, no matter what forms the original and the presented work, is plagiarism. Ignorance is no excuse. This is precisely the same mistake people make with regards to prior art research and disclosure in patent applications. Academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct require intent, plagiarism and failure to disclose prior art do not. "Unintentional" plagiarism will get a softer treatment than "intentional", but both still get you busted.
Don't bother to quote the Wiki article on the subject, it's wrong. Having been invited to teach research ethics at the graduate level due to years of studying the subject, someone besides myself considers me an authority.
You're talking about decimal time as proposed by Poincaire. Although the entire system was not adopted, we do use decimal days See the Near Earth Object Impact Hazards Table for instance: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ Look at any of the objects' data and observe the date/time stamp used. Time as date point xx more compact than date/hour/minute/second
The "metric angle stuff", most commonly known as gradians (400 per circle, 100 per right angle) is commonly used in surveying. Theodolites have 100 divisions per right angle. They call them "gons". They are the primary reason that trig capable calculators still have DRG (degree/radian/grad) conversion buttons.
I was being humorous. You were being pedantic and wrong, no matter what day it was.
They're testing US made CPUs in the EU. They're measuring in metric seconds, while the CPUs were designed to run on English seconds. The difference is very slight, but it accumulates. This is why we have to adjust for it periodically, by having a leap second. You'll notice these leap seconds are announced in the US by the Naval Observatory, and not at Europe's equivalent, the Greenwich observatory, which runs on the more constant metric time and serves as the background against which we measure the drift*. Hence the GMT in time stamp: Greenwich Metric Time. Since it stays constant, whereas the English time drifts, it is also sometimes considered to be an average of time, so is also called Greenwich Mean Time.
* Just a technical term. The time doesn't actually speed up and slow down. It just has different numbers of microseconds in a second, and that number varies, just like the number of days in a month.
Of course they did. Ever since they got caught hacking Falun Gong web sites from machines at the Ministry of Defense (among many other activities) they've been spoofing their IPs.
The Apple ][ software maker Beagle Brothers was well known for finding features that were either bug results, easter eggs, or just plain strange behavior. My favorite was their discovery of the ROM routine addressing command "call 985". When invoked from Applesoft* BASIC, a distinct "MOOOO" would come from the internal speaker. This was almost certainly a bug, as its behavior depended on other, uninvestigated and unknown events in the machine's memory. Sometimes it would do it only once, sometimes it could be invoked in a row, and sometimes it would not work at all. If it worked and then quit, it would not do it again unless the machine was rebooted.
Beagle Bros. cranked out such a volume of utilities/goofy-stuff software for the Apple ][ that something very much like the following appeared in the letters to the editor in one edition of the Apple users' magazine Softalk:
"I think the monthly 'Top 10 Utilities' list should be renamed 'The Top 10 Beagle Bros.' list." Mark Pelczarski Penguin Software
"I agree." Bert Kersey Beagle Bros. Software
It remains a mystery as to whether these letters were done by pre-arrangement between Pelczarski and Kersey (a distinct possibility, considering the closeness of the Apple community at the time) or a prank printing by the editors of Softalk (also a distinct possibility, considering the irreverent nature of the Apple community).
* The argument as to whether it was a bug-as-feature or an easter egg is exacerbated by the fact that the Applesoft ROMs were not written by Wozniak: they are stamped "Copyright 1981, Microsoft". The "routine" at address 985 (almost certainly a point internal to some other routine that started earlier) was not within the Applesoft ROMs, but it only worked when invoked through Applesoft.
The lack of "media richness" in email makes its intent easier to mistake. Males tend to jump to conclusions because the tend to try to problem-solve everything (especially when the problem is figuring out if they've been attacked), while females tend to either give it the benefit of the doubt or ignore it.
In TFA, the authors start from a hypothesis which includes an operational definition nobody else uses, and they go on to support what amounts to a supposition. A great deal of communications studies in both gender communication and computer mediated communication is entirely ignored. I've studied both, taught both, and published in the latter. It's a gender stereotype when you draw the conclusion, right or wrong, without considering objective data. TFA ignores masses of objective data. Therefore I submit that their conclusion is precisely the thing they claim to be trying to study.
> A better description would have been the "mythical '640k' remark", > because he never said it.
Quite so. The actual remark was made by Steve Jobs to Steve Wozniak regarding building a card to expand the Apple II's memory from the max possible on the motherboard of 48K to a full 64K (the "language card"). Jobs' statement "Who would ever want more than 48K?" has been misattributed and misquoted for years, as have many statements made by some that sound so much better coming from someone else. The answer was, almost everybody. When the IIe came out it had 64K on the board and could accept a second 64K card. The IIc came with two full 64K banks installed.
Jobs was frequently at odds with Wozniak over technical issues. Jobs wanted no more than 2 slots in the Apple II. Woz wanted 8 and put them in. Jobs argued against color. Woz put it in, first in blocky lo-res, then in an awesome hack that resulted in 16 color (including two blacks and two whites) hi-res. Other examples exist, but these two illustrate Jobs' penchant for one-upsmanship: When he built the first Mac, it had no color and no slots.
Jobs' quote was in many MOTD files during the late 70's and early 80's, until the misattributed Gates quote started replacing it.
One point Jobs didn't argue against was the inclusion of a programming language in ROM. He contracted out the creation of Applesoft in ROM. The result can be seen on the Apple II ROMs that say "Copyright 1981, Microsoft".
IIRC, the original quote was the subject of a trivia contest question in Softalk magazine.
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This is in response to various replies, not the parent or TFA: This is not "vigilante" activity. A vigilante is someopne who usurps or subverts established social structure, acting as judge, jury and/or executioner.
Before there were laws on the books about spamming, there was no social structure for identifying and acting against spammers. Those who did it then were emergent order enforcement acts. They were volunteers carrying out the desires of many based on the consensus, or at least vocal majority, of the net. There was a socially accepted behavior, people who violated it, and people who took it upon themselves to enforce the socially accepted. All law enforcement has evolved from social systems in precisely this manner.
Now that there are laws, these people seek to identify the perps, and use the established social structure by turning them over to the proper channels and authorities.
Those who provide filtering/blocking services are acting within a social structure suitably designed and executed for property protection. They are offering private protection services and people sign up with them, or not.
Ever since Canter & Seigel people have accused anti-spammers of vigilantism without understanding what it means. Of course this was semi-informed media, hot headed critics, or spammers caught in the act, all of them using the word for hot-button value.
Now, people who cat together their tracking cookies with large garbage files to try to buffer overflow spammers' data collection activities, and people who set up botnets to DDoS spammer botnets, those are vigilantes. There are laws in place. Going around them is what vigilantism is about.
I was there for Canter & Seigel, and many more for several years. Only Alan Boyle, science editor at MSNBC, ever noted that the word "vigilante" was frequently misused in this way by others in the media. The few others anywhere near as correct simply didn't refer to us in that way.
Anything that can be done to take some of the hot air out of blow-hard press releases masquarading as news stories like the physorg.com article linked to, should be. That was some seriously hyperbolic diatribe.
"nations that can sustain commercial satellite launches."
More accurately, "nations that can support the launching of commercial satellites". If a nation's support is required, it's not a commercial launch, it's a government launch. The parent's wording is misleading. That doesn't matter to most people. It does to those interested in commercial space development.
Governments do these things using peoples' money whether or not they want their money used that way. Companies do things with their own money and make more money by selling it to people who want it. There's no competitive market forces acting on a government, and so no expectation of profitability or even reasonable cost, which depends on being affordable to end users.
There's a whole passel of improperly informed people yakking on about consciousness and its relation to reality and other ridiculous notions, specifically because people insist on confusing the necessary MEASUREMENT with the irrelevant OBSERVATION. Collapse of quantum wave functions requries interaction with another non-entangled wave function such as a measuring device. All of the results which support the inequalities tested and referenced here were produced using equipment which measured the phenomena and gave results well before any observation occurred. The parent, and the blurb in Nature both imply the mistaken idea by using terms that refer to a observer. Nature should know better. Everybody else that's really interested in understanding it should learn better. It makes the science much more interesting. But then it weeds out the semi-informed speculativists and the newage (rhymes with sewage) pseudoscientific-spiritual theorists. Being the vast majority, they obviously tend to revolt at the insistence on being correct.
"Makes you wonder what other common household products also test positive; and how many others have been arrested based on faulty test kits who didn't have the resources to defend themselves."
Drug urinanalysis tests are notorious for false positives as well as true positives for common food stuffs which do carry the drug(s), but in minute quantities. I recall an entire class of substance abuse counselors in training being given surprise urinalysis so they'd know how it feels. They all tested positive, in testing and restesting. The culprit was poppy seed muffins supplied by the organization presenting the class. This was figured out by the instructor. Had it not been, or had this been one or more individuals really being tested for whatever reason, the samples would have been retained and passed to a lab for mass spectrometry. This test is many orders of magnitude more accurate. It absolutely identifies molecules present. It does not indicate the source. They'd have been considered positives, which is guilt by fairly irrefutible evidence, but not considered false positives due to circumstantial evidence. How many? I have no idea, in general. I do know that I, and those I worked with in substance abuse treatment, did inquire into possible sources, knowing of the above. All that I supervised admitted using, after giving bad excuses. I knew of the possible other sources -- they didn't. But then I worked for a facility which was owned by a medical corporation. They had potential liability and so expected us to be careful like this. Testing done by law enforcement and similar organizations are not considered as liable, as they themselves cannot be held as accountable. They can and do jail based on initial testing, even probable false positives and obvious ridiculous positives (how was he going to get the supposed intended victim to ingest enough soap?). However, they can be held accountable, especially in the press. Sad as the case is, this is probably the best chance the individual has for getting just due. With popular knowledge and support, any case would go more his way, and law enforement tends to go Tango Uniform when faced with the prospect. He could get damages if he pressed it. I hope his roasts the bastards.
Monospaced, ragged right. That's the formula prescribed by Writer's Digest for the most successful submissions to editors, circa 1980. The easiest read (on the eyes and brain) is the most likely to be read, and so accepted. Having spent almost 5 years as an editor, reading way too much compared to what was good enough to print, I can tell you for a fact it's true. When you have 100 pages to read before bed, and you run across a manuscript that has
wordsruntogetherononeline
a n d t o o m u c h s p a c e
on the next, it slows you down, annoys you, and you trash it. Kerning is just one component, and one of proportional fonts. A such, the point is lost compared to the evidence, except there's precious little consideration given to web page readers, and so proportional fonts rule the bitwaves.
The problem makes more sense, paradoxically, when you consider that we don't read letters at a time, but rather words at a time. If we read letters at a time, the spacing between letters would be a significant factor for understanding a single word at a time. But we read 4 or so words at a time, and the spacing problem accumulates. Losing track of comphrehension because of this problem makes us have to stop and read those words in series (one at a time) instead of parallel (a phrase at a time). The cognitive effort involved bothers us. The brain is lazy and revolts at extra work.
If TFA says this, tough. I didn't read much of it. I've known this for a quarter century, from practical experience as well as studying language use as a cognitive psychologist.
Let's hear it for this valiant public servant who seeks to save us from the evil, the nasty and the braindeaded and boneheaded out there on the net. Watch how he backpedals when he discovers himself to be among those items to be blocked when people deem e-Zealots to be a danger to their freedom as well as their peace of mind. Faced with the prospect of losing the re-election advantage to be had from being highly visible on the net, he'll cave in like a Chinese coal mine.
"Last I knew, a radio had two nobs." -- George Carlin.
Right you are, George, and a browser has a back button.
A.C. sez:
"You can't own congresscritters -- they have moral standards. You can only rent them. Pray that no one else rents them at a higher rate at the same time."
I stand corrected. Perhaps if I kneel under their desk corrected I could get a few extra points with them. Nah, I'm an adult.
Moral standards? "WAAAAAAAAH?!" -- Jon Stewart
Why is the "smallest" consistently an issue when it comes to electronics and motorized equipment? They're being made smaller all the time. This will continue to be non-news headlines for some time to come.
I'm not impressed at all. They're all using microcontrolers and ROMS and such. A researcher at Los Alamos developed stepper-motor driven insect-like robots using 12, 14, or 20 transistors that'd "learn" to walk, some with different speeds/strides, with no preprogramming and within a few attempts steps. They even developed what amount to social behavior when operated in groups. The more agile ones that could run would run over the smaller, slower ones. In groups, the latter gathered together and backed themselves into a circle, which prevented the larger, faster ones from running over them. The "beheavior" emerged from some very simple conditions, and stretches the definition of "behavior", much like the light-sensing toy cars exhibited in an old SciAm article. In both cases there's no real learning because there's no collecting of information to be used other than immediate feedback through hardwired circuits. But when you saw a table full of these "bugs" circle the wagons to protect themselves against the attacking "lobsters", it was hard to not think of it in those terms.
"You want to see real artifical intelligence? Make it warm and soft and fuzzy and cuddly." -- Karl Pribram, who understood the fault lies with us, Dear Brutish peoploids, not with our toy cars; it's what we "think" they're "doing".
Many companies continue to use airbrushed pictures, so-called subliminal, in their ads despite the fact that the very concept has been debunked. They do it Just In Case it'll work, and they pay big money for it. The only difference is nowdays they deny they do it.
.iso files for them to read. Hey, I'm just providing more data for their demographics by showing them what I'm watching. I wonder what's going to happen to the people running these spy machines when I notify the companies that they just downloaded a shitload of pr0n.
Same with this. It's probabilistic, meaning is does statistics and guesses. It has more holes in it than I'd allow any of my research methods undergrads get away with on homework: besides multiple people using the same browser, how about people who use different browsers? In particular, who use one for some thing, another for other things, etc.?
If there's going to be Yet Another Invasion of Privacy based in cookies, it's time to reconsider testing all those content providers' machines for overflow bugs by merging the cookies they send to DVD
And what are they going to do with it? "Targeted" "marketing". Read: try to guess better what spam you'll respond to.
Lest anyone thinks this isn't already done, you haven't been going to unusual web sites and then watching what ads pop up on subesquently viewed sites, and persist on popping up on those subsequent sites weeks or months later.
They're using "probabalistic latent variables" on the "vectors", meaning they look at where you go to from where rather than just where you've been. That means they're going to need to suck down a pile of your cookies. Are they going to pay for the bandwidth? This is upload, which ISPs cap at around 1/4 of download. Gee, thanks for slowing down my work guys, I only transfer gigabytes of data with other researchers. I could use the time off you're giving me by making it take that much longer.
If anyone wants to see one way latent variables are extracted, look into the noise reduction and especially the stereo-from-mixed-mono separation applications of continuous wavelet transform. There's ample freeware and free scripts for commercial software that'll do this analysis. And that's just the more recent way. Bell Labs came up with an analog to this analysis many years ago when they invented "voice prints" based on multiple parallel analyses using the concept that Fourier borrowed from the arabs 200 years ago. I can simulate the same extraction by fooling my software into thinking the data I'm feeding it is an accepted standard for EEG recording. I've done it with heart rate data, sun spot data, climatological data, seismograph readings and so on. I could do it with these "vectors" they're describing, and don't even have to understand very well what those "vectors" are supposed to mean. The latent variables will pop out as abrupt changes in the complexity of the data as the dimensions of the analyses (of the matrices, or similar) increases. I'll see it as blobs of color that weren't there before.
If a bunch of statisticians get ahold of this patent, they can easily describe how the analysis is just another implementation of analyses that have been used for many years and is essentially the same result from a different calculation, leaving the only novel contribution to be to use to which it's put and the specific code written to do it.
When MS stops supporting it, I'll stop getting all these insistent messages to download the latest security fixes which aren't, and can finally have a stable platform I can start to understand. This is a good thing.
XP will not go away. It will continue to exist on the machines of everyone who keeps it and CD ROMS that people don't throw away. Hell, 95 and 98 haven't gone away. I still have them on a couple old machines because some things I use insist on them. By now I can fix anything that might go wrong with them. Same will go for XP.
I could easily say the same thing about the people I encounter in science. In particular, the author of this article. In TFA, he defines his term and then deconstructs his own definition. An imaginary straw man. In his linked article on DRM, he calls it empirical despite the fact it's a survey. He draws conclusions despite his admission that it was not statistically significant. It's easy to pull science out of your ass and call it empirical, and apparently to get attention for it, when you're presenting it to an applied technology field. It's a lot harder to do when you're working in an experimentally oriented field.
As for the people you're encountering, and the people he's talking about, they're not the same. You won't encounter the people he's describing working for an IT department, supporting users who don't know their ASCII from a hole. If any did happen to be working in your organization, you probably would never hear anything from them because they'd fix their own problems. And if you did hear from them, they'd know not to let on how much they know.
My Dell computer calls home regularly. I didn't ask for this and I don't want it. Until my warranty expired I didn't dare remove it.
I have to keep a copy of IE available because Firefox chokes on the tracking cookies MSNBC shoves at me. And still Zonealarm reports spyware being blocked from time to time.
With this level of white collar participation, business will tell its entertainment branch, government, that this is all perfectly legal. The FTC people are great, and more power to them, but nobody is going to go to jail over it.
On the other hand, I get spyware blocking reports from Zonealarm when I use a couple of well known bittorrent sites. Now THEY should be afraid. They don't own any congresscritters.
So TFA says warmer weather corresponds to increased sunspots, except that it doesn't.
/. community, in that it will support at least two sides of the OMG GLOBALWARMINGISKILLINGUSALL OR NOT argument, which we join already in progress. Never have so many known so little and said so much about it in no uncertain terms.
Putting aside the probability that the BBC article focused on the sensational aspects and overemphasized those, it seems they're using the same data to reach different conclusions when the fact is that one part of the data contradicts another. This requires no small amount of rationalization. Or perhaps that's BBC's approach, and the original work is much clearer on these points.
This internal inconsistency should prove invaluable to the
> I guess now they've finally succumbed to grasping at straws that aren't there.
"Finally"? You must be new here. The Society for Confabulation and Obsfucation have been building entire imaginary straw men out of those things, trying to Don Quixote their way through court.
My money still says SCO has been hoping a payoff, buy out or outright take over by IBM or one of the other (previous) defendents before they crash and burn. At this stage about all they're going to get is a helmet so they don't hurt themselves and a seat on the little corporate school bus on its way to Enronville. Hopefully, by the time they implode, the only stockholders will be McBride and his pals, and their attorneys.
> we need 'prior art'
:) After all, most recent macs come with
:= mac.archive.umich.edu
/mac/00introduction : File with introductory information to UMICH /mac/misc/documentation : FAQs, pointer files, program descriptions /mac/00help/index.txt : File containing all descriptions of stored files
/mac/util/network/2waytalker2.1.sit.hqx /mac/util/network/talk2me1.3.cpt.hqx /mac/util/network/townmeeting2.0.cpt.hqx /mac/util/network/xcuseeme0.60b1.cpt /mac/util/network/zing1.3.cpt.hqx
/mac/util/network/2waytalker2.1.sit.hqx
How about software available for download? Here's a usenet post from 1994 containing links to available software. This is just the first result I got searching the newsgroups via Google's advanced search function (search terms "phone internet duplex", filtered dates Jan 1 1981 to Dec 31 1994) [usenet post below ===== divider].
Google's patent search for the same terms and dates gave this result:
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT4866704
Abstract
An asynchronous, high-speed, fiber optic local area network originally developed for tactical environments with additional benefits for other environments such as spacecraft, and the like. The network supports ordinary data packet traffic simultaneously with synchronous T1 voice traffic over a common token ring channel; however, the techniques and apparatus of this invention can be applied to any deterministic class of packet data networks, including multitier backbones, that must transport stream data (e.g., video, SAR, sensors) as well as data. A voice interface module parses, buffers, and resynchronizes the voice data to the packet network employing elastic buffers on both the sending and receiving ends. Voice call setup and switching functions are performed external to the network with ordinary PABX equipment. Clock information is passed across network boundaries in a token passing ring by preceeding the token with an idle period of non-transmission which allows the token...
Patent number: 4866704
Filing date: Mar 16, 1988
Issue date: Sep 12, 1989
=====
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
From: Sven Guckes
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 1994 06:37:56 GMT
Local: Sat, Jun 18 1994 12:37 am
Subject: Re: Voice messages across the internet???
Reply to author | Forward | Print | Individual message | Show original | Report this message | Find messages by this author
j...@iastate.edu (Jeff A Jensen) writes:
[Real-time talk over network]
>How come nobody's written a shareware program to let users of way-cooler
>macs to do the same thing?
>microphones, and they all have sound capabilities. So, where's the
>enterprising programmer(s) who will make this possible for thousands of
>dedicated mac/internet users?
2WayTalker 2.1
Talk2Me 1.3
TownMeeting 2.0
XCUSeeMe 0.60b1
Zing 1.3
See pointers below.
Sven
-- The UMICH Macintosh Archive
UMICH
Email: comme...@mac.archive.umich.edu
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Useful files:
The UMICH upload list:
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to interested people. If you want a copy of this then all you need to do
is ask by email at "mac-recent-requ...@mac.archive.umich.edu"!
Topic: Voice conversation on networks
Descriptions:
92 3/6/94 BinHex4.0,StuffIt3.07
To be successful, the product has to actually be good enough on its own.
The fight back against big brother lawsuits, be able to prove invalidity, and after the discovery process shows that, file charges of barratry against the lawyers. Lawyers are only confrontational when it comes to clients. When it's their own ass on the line, they scurry like cockroaches when the light is turned on.
> "But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent."
No it isn't. Plagiarism due to failure to adequately research prior work and provide full references to prove the fact is still plagiarism. Presenting someone else's ideas as one's own, no matter what forms the original and the presented work, is plagiarism. Ignorance is no excuse. This is precisely the same mistake people make with regards to prior art research and disclosure in patent applications. Academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct require intent, plagiarism and failure to disclose prior art do not. "Unintentional" plagiarism will get a softer treatment than "intentional", but both still get you busted.
Don't bother to quote the Wiki article on the subject, it's wrong. Having been invited to teach research ethics at the graduate level due to years of studying the subject, someone besides myself considers me an authority.
You're talking about decimal time as proposed by Poincaire. Although the entire system was not adopted, we do use decimal days See the Near Earth Object Impact Hazards Table for instance: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ Look at any of the objects' data and observe the date/time stamp used. Time as date point xx more compact than date/hour/minute/second
The "metric angle stuff", most commonly known as gradians (400 per circle, 100 per right angle) is commonly used in surveying. Theodolites have 100 divisions per right angle. They call them "gons". They are the primary reason that trig capable calculators still have DRG (degree/radian/grad) conversion buttons.
I was being humorous. You were being pedantic and wrong, no matter what day it was.
They're testing US made CPUs in the EU. They're measuring in metric seconds, while the CPUs were designed to run on English seconds. The difference is very slight, but it accumulates. This is why we have to adjust for it periodically, by having a leap second. You'll notice these leap seconds are announced in the US by the Naval Observatory, and not at Europe's equivalent, the Greenwich observatory, which runs on the more constant metric time and serves as the background against which we measure the drift*. Hence the GMT in time stamp: Greenwich Metric Time. Since it stays constant, whereas the English time drifts, it is also sometimes considered to be an average of time, so is also called Greenwich Mean Time.
* Just a technical term. The time doesn't actually speed up and slow down. It just has different numbers of microseconds in a second, and that number varies, just like the number of days in a month.
Your free clue is on page 2. The company "Ripal Uno".
> I guess China had already seen this coming!
Of course they did. Ever since they got caught hacking Falun Gong web sites from machines at the Ministry of Defense (among many other activities) they've been spoofing their IPs.
The Apple ][ software maker Beagle Brothers was well known for finding features that were either bug results, easter eggs, or just plain strange behavior. My favorite was their discovery of the ROM routine addressing command "call 985". When invoked from Applesoft* BASIC, a distinct "MOOOO" would come from the internal speaker. This was almost certainly a bug, as its behavior depended on other, uninvestigated and unknown events in the machine's memory. Sometimes it would do it only once, sometimes it could be invoked in a row, and sometimes it would not work at all. If it worked and then quit, it would not do it again unless the machine was rebooted.
Beagle Bros. cranked out such a volume of utilities/goofy-stuff software for the Apple ][ that something very much like the following appeared in the letters to the editor in one edition of the Apple users' magazine Softalk:
"I think the monthly 'Top 10 Utilities' list should be renamed 'The Top 10 Beagle Bros.' list."
Mark Pelczarski
Penguin Software
"I agree."
Bert Kersey
Beagle Bros. Software
It remains a mystery as to whether these letters were done by pre-arrangement between Pelczarski and Kersey (a distinct possibility, considering the closeness of the Apple community at the time) or a prank printing by the editors of Softalk (also a distinct possibility, considering the irreverent nature of the Apple community).
* The argument as to whether it was a bug-as-feature or an easter egg is exacerbated by the fact that the Applesoft ROMs were not written by Wozniak: they are stamped "Copyright 1981, Microsoft". The "routine" at address 985 (almost certainly a point internal to some other routine that started earlier) was not within the Applesoft ROMs, but it only worked when invoked through Applesoft.
> men seem more responsive to email because it bypasses their competitive tendencies
C M&coll=&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618
- 3%20guest.html
Which is profoundly contradicted by research on flaming:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=967562&dl=A
http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/readers/full-text/15
The lack of "media richness" in email makes its intent easier to mistake. Males tend to jump to conclusions because the tend to try to problem-solve everything (especially when the problem is figuring out if they've been attacked), while females tend to either give it the benefit of the doubt or ignore it.
In TFA, the authors start from a hypothesis which includes an operational definition nobody else uses, and they go on to support what amounts to a supposition. A great deal of communications studies in both gender communication and computer mediated communication is entirely ignored. I've studied both, taught both, and published in the latter. It's a gender stereotype when you draw the conclusion, right or wrong, without considering objective data. TFA ignores masses of objective data. Therefore I submit that their conclusion is precisely the thing they claim to be trying to study.
> A better description would have been the "mythical '640k' remark",
> because he never said it.
Quite so. The actual remark was made by Steve Jobs to Steve Wozniak regarding building a card to expand the Apple II's memory from the max possible on the motherboard of 48K to a full 64K (the "language card"). Jobs' statement "Who would ever want more than 48K?" has been misattributed and misquoted for years, as have many statements made by some that sound so much better coming from someone else. The answer was, almost everybody. When the IIe came out it had 64K on the board and could accept a second 64K card. The IIc came with two full 64K banks installed.
Jobs was frequently at odds with Wozniak over technical issues. Jobs wanted no more than 2 slots in the Apple II. Woz wanted 8 and put them in. Jobs argued against color. Woz put it in, first in blocky lo-res, then in an awesome hack that resulted in 16 color (including two blacks and two whites) hi-res. Other examples exist, but these two illustrate Jobs' penchant for one-upsmanship: When he built the first Mac, it had no color and no slots.
Jobs' quote was in many MOTD files during the late 70's and early 80's, until the misattributed Gates quote started replacing it.
One point Jobs didn't argue against was the inclusion of a programming language in ROM. He contracted out the creation of Applesoft in ROM. The result can be seen on the Apple II ROMs that say "Copyright 1981, Microsoft".
IIRC, the original quote was the subject of a trivia contest question in Softalk magazine.