That's not about e-textbooks, though, that's a completely new teaching paradigm. Several people are doing good things with it, but most people are making a hash of it and simply adding "interactive" exercises to a straight scan of the book, and some of the exercises don't even mark themselves. There is some truly woeful e-learning out there....
All the cheaper competitors have a security flaw that allows unsecure files. It's called "PNG support", and you get porn in.PNG format -- won't somebody think of the children!!
Email tends to resolve addresses only at sending time, and in a forum system, that's several subsystems away. In fact, in a full-service hosted environment, that's probably way off in your ISP's systems.
He predicted that some of his real users will notice the error when viewing the home page:
Your alternate domain list displayed 'gmail.com'!
Hi Fred, no it doesn't. Just reloaded the homepage 10 times, nothing like that. all the best.
No, you misunderstand. His point is that "Fred" would say this "Your alternate domain list displayed 'gmail.com'!" based on the fact it came up in the scraper's results. He then directs "Fred" to look at the homepage and verify for himself that it actually never comes up. You see?
Reason 2 is that scraper writers aren't stupid. They won't just load the second page knowing it's an obvious trap. They will load the main page like a regular user, and then parse the small iframe.
Ah, and here I thought the owner of the mailinator.com domain had access to the server statistics that would tell him how people accessed his site. But obviously you're the person with that access, right?
The "loudness war" has been raging for a very long time, much longer than people have been listening to iPods on buses.
TV adverts/commercials use the same trick -- the audio in an advert is given heavy dynamic compression so as to be louder than the program you were watching, and hopefully the other adverts too. And you don't watch TV commercias on an iPod on the bus, do you...?
Wait... the standard isn't dead because you still use it? I think I'll pull out my C64 and prove that audio tapes isn't dead as a medium for computer programs....
Probably because most PC gamers buy only on-line. Console gamers often buy on the high street, where shelf space means shovelware physically squeezes out the good stuff. And buying on-line kills the impulse buy, replacing it with lots of review reading, so shovelware is less likely to sell well on the PC.
You mean you buy a new phone and it assumes that you want GMail until you tell it you don't? That's a little bit rude. If I want GMail, I'll ask for it!
Ah yes, the "dogs are different, so it's not racist to say that humans are different too".
Except that we have specifically selectively bred dogs for attributes that we as a culture valued. We bred them to specialise them to different tasks. Corgis are small, fast, with sharp teeth and a tendency to bite and not let go because we specifically bred that into them so they would catch rats. Labradors can carry unbroken eggs in their mouths because we bred them as hunting dogs. Intensively. And in particular in recent centuries.
Human evolution has been far less driven. Nazi eugenics only generated one generation of tall blondes, and they're still a drop in the ocean within the wider human race... and they are not keeping within a closed population (there's even a stigma attached to being one of the übermenschen kids), so they are never going to constitute a new "breed" of human. And no-one has attempted to breed dwarf kids for their cutesiness (comparable to chihuahuas and other handbag-dogs or lapdogs).
(Also, dogs have much shorter lives than humans, so measured in generations rather than years, they've had a lot more time to change.)
Nonono... Us whities are far more intelligent. After all, was in not us who invented modern banking, which only goes from strength to... oh... can anyone loan me a few coins? Just until I find a job....
Well it's all good talking about volunteers and arbitrary code, but people don't just put coins in a plain white tin market "charity" -- we like to chose who the beneficiaries of our goodwill are. Our donations make us feel involved, and therefore good about ourselves.
And on the flipside, there are things some people won't donate to. There are many people who wouldn't be happy having their CPU used for foetal stem cell research, for example. And some who would object to anything involving animal research. The anti-nuclear lobby would be against simulating new power station prototypes. And half the world would object to having weapons research (nuclear, biological, chemical or conventional) carried out on their PCs.
"Something for everyone" often goes hand in hand with "something against everyone", and rather than having an additive effect on the pool of volunteers, it has a subtractive effect.
The article concludes it's not profitable enough compared to other botnet activities to be worth doing. Hmmm... I think he's missed a certain point: botnets, like hire cars, aren't on hire to clients 24x365, so I imagine it'll be picked up as a method of profiting during any downturns in the DDoS market....
I think you miss my point. The article talks about reason as a mechanism for convincing people you're right, using a mixture of false premises, flawed logic and false premises. If you can convince people that "big pharma is biased against splogweed" is a premise (and not a supposition), then they will reason from there. Can you say that you have personally incontrovertibly tested all things you take as given when reasoning? I have not proven that my the sodium in salt is required for the correct transmission of neural activations between synapses -- I merely believe people who told me so. I have not proven that the C command fprintf() does nothing more than write a string of 8-bit integers to a file -- I merely believe people who told me so.
The foundations of human reason are thus, and thus corruptible. Which is the point the researchers are trying to make.
Researchers are blinded by their above average intelligence into thinking that other people respond to "reason".
Methinks thou hast missed the point.
The article is going against the idea that "human reason" is an imperfect realisation of pure logic, but that human reason is flawed by nature. When people are conned into buying things they don't need, it's not lack of reason, it's use of reason.
I once heard Richard Dawkins decrying alternative medicine. Most alternative medicine is out-and-out quackery, and I would be happy to see an end to it. But Dawkins claimed that people were turning to it do to a lack of critical reasoning (and he incidentally blamed this on organised religion). However, most supporters of alternative therapies do indeed follow a path of reasoning. This path of reasoning includes some valid data (including failure rates of surgical and pharmacological medicine), some invalid data (unreviewed, unproven figures for the success rates of alternative therapies) and a big dose of conspiracy theory ("big pharma is trying to ban the use of splogweed in the treatment of ungweldbiterbal cancer because they can't profit from it" etc), and they reach a conclusion that follows from the premises.
People do respond to reason, but as the article points out, not in an entirely expected way....
"Such is the weakness of our reason; most often it serves only to justify our own beliefs." [from La Gloire de mon Père, my translation]
Having read that from Pagnol (and it's now my favourite quote), I'm not surprised that it was a French team who came up with this theory -- Pagnol was one of the most important figures in French literature of his era.
Pagnol's original context is no less relevant today than it was at the time: he was referring to how the local teacher and the local priest where he grew up were both very well educated, very intelligent people, yet their conclusions were almost diametrically opposed. I think the parallel to modern life is clear....
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you can, but that would fundamentally alter the architecture of the forum software.
These were hypothetical conversations, so it doesn't matter whether the scraper writers communicate with him directly or not.
That's not about e-textbooks, though, that's a completely new teaching paradigm. Several people are doing good things with it, but most people are making a hash of it and simply adding "interactive" exercises to a straight scan of the book, and some of the exercises don't even mark themselves. There is some truly woeful e-learning out there....
All the cheaper competitors have a security flaw that allows unsecure files. It's called "PNG support", and you get porn in .PNG format -- won't somebody think of the children!!
It would be possible, would it not, for spammers to use it to sign up to bulleting boards...?
Email tends to resolve addresses only at sending time, and in a forum system, that's several subsystems away. In fact, in a full-service hosted environment, that's probably way off in your ISP's systems.
Your claim 3 is wrong because of 2 reasons:
He predicted that some of his real users will notice the error when viewing the home page:
Your alternate domain list displayed 'gmail.com'! Hi Fred, no it doesn't. Just reloaded the homepage 10 times, nothing like that. all the best.
No, you misunderstand. His point is that "Fred" would say this "Your alternate domain list displayed 'gmail.com'!" based on the fact it came up in the scraper's results. He then directs "Fred" to look at the homepage and verify for himself that it actually never comes up. You see?
Reason 2 is that scraper writers aren't stupid. They won't just load the second page knowing it's an obvious trap. They will load the main page like a regular user, and then parse the small iframe.
Ah, and here I thought the owner of the mailinator.com domain had access to the server statistics that would tell him how people accessed his site. But obviously you're the person with that access, right?
The "loudness war" has been raging for a very long time, much longer than people have been listening to iPods on buses.
TV adverts/commercials use the same trick -- the audio in an advert is given heavy dynamic compression so as to be louder than the program you were watching, and hopefully the other adverts too. And you don't watch TV commercias on an iPod on the bus, do you...?
HAL.
Would it be racist if Destiny's Child was a white group? So in a sense, isn't crying "racism" here racist in and of itself...?
Wait... the standard isn't dead because you still use it? I think I'll pull out my C64 and prove that audio tapes isn't dead as a medium for computer programs....
Probably because most PC gamers buy only on-line. Console gamers often buy on the high street, where shelf space means shovelware physically squeezes out the good stuff. And buying on-line kills the impulse buy, replacing it with lots of review reading, so shovelware is less likely to sell well on the PC.
High cost over low performance = low ratio.
I think that quote was supposed to be a line about how other people sell you stuff for more than their true value. But it was a clumsy line anyway....
You mean you buy a new phone and it assumes that you want GMail until you tell it you don't? That's a little bit rude. If I want GMail, I'll ask for it!
Typical slashdot response.
Ah yes, the "dogs are different, so it's not racist to say that humans are different too".
Except that we have specifically selectively bred dogs for attributes that we as a culture valued. We bred them to specialise them to different tasks. Corgis are small, fast, with sharp teeth and a tendency to bite and not let go because we specifically bred that into them so they would catch rats. Labradors can carry unbroken eggs in their mouths because we bred them as hunting dogs. Intensively. And in particular in recent centuries.
Human evolution has been far less driven. Nazi eugenics only generated one generation of tall blondes, and they're still a drop in the ocean within the wider human race... and they are not keeping within a closed population (there's even a stigma attached to being one of the übermenschen kids), so they are never going to constitute a new "breed" of human. And no-one has attempted to breed dwarf kids for their cutesiness (comparable to chihuahuas and other handbag-dogs or lapdogs).
(Also, dogs have much shorter lives than humans, so measured in generations rather than years, they've had a lot more time to change.)
Nonono... Us whities are far more intelligent. After all, was in not us who invented modern banking, which only goes from strength to ... oh... can anyone loan me a few coins? Just until I find a job....
Well it's all good talking about volunteers and arbitrary code, but people don't just put coins in a plain white tin market "charity" -- we like to chose who the beneficiaries of our goodwill are. Our donations make us feel involved, and therefore good about ourselves.
And on the flipside, there are things some people won't donate to. There are many people who wouldn't be happy having their CPU used for foetal stem cell research, for example. And some who would object to anything involving animal research. The anti-nuclear lobby would be against simulating new power station prototypes. And half the world would object to having weapons research (nuclear, biological, chemical or conventional) carried out on their PCs.
"Something for everyone" often goes hand in hand with "something against everyone", and rather than having an additive effect on the pool of volunteers, it has a subtractive effect.
HAL.
The article concludes it's not profitable enough compared to other botnet activities to be worth doing. Hmmm... I think he's missed a certain point: botnets, like hire cars, aren't on hire to clients 24x365, so I imagine it'll be picked up as a method of profiting during any downturns in the DDoS market....
Note the word "cold" in your URL. It's cold fusion we can't do -- hot fusion's perfectly normal stuff.
Reason is application of a process of logic.
If reason is logic, then human reason is an oxymoron.
I think you miss my point. The article talks about reason as a mechanism for convincing people you're right, using a mixture of false premises, flawed logic and false premises. If you can convince people that "big pharma is biased against splogweed" is a premise (and not a supposition), then they will reason from there. Can you say that you have personally incontrovertibly tested all things you take as given when reasoning? I have not proven that my the sodium in salt is required for the correct transmission of neural activations between synapses -- I merely believe people who told me so. I have not proven that the C command fprintf() does nothing more than write a string of 8-bit integers to a file -- I merely believe people who told me so.
The foundations of human reason are thus, and thus corruptible. Which is the point the researchers are trying to make.
Researchers are blinded by their above average intelligence into thinking that other people respond to "reason".
Methinks thou hast missed the point.
The article is going against the idea that "human reason" is an imperfect realisation of pure logic, but that human reason is flawed by nature. When people are conned into buying things they don't need, it's not lack of reason, it's use of reason.
I once heard Richard Dawkins decrying alternative medicine. Most alternative medicine is out-and-out quackery, and I would be happy to see an end to it. But Dawkins claimed that people were turning to it do to a lack of critical reasoning (and he incidentally blamed this on organised religion). However, most supporters of alternative therapies do indeed follow a path of reasoning. This path of reasoning includes some valid data (including failure rates of surgical and pharmacological medicine), some invalid data (unreviewed, unproven figures for the success rates of alternative therapies) and a big dose of conspiracy theory ("big pharma is trying to ban the use of splogweed in the treatment of ungweldbiterbal cancer because they can't profit from it" etc), and they reach a conclusion that follows from the premises.
People do respond to reason, but as the article points out, not in an entirely expected way....
"Such is the weakness of our reason; most often it serves only to justify our own beliefs." [from La Gloire de mon Père, my translation]
Having read that from Pagnol (and it's now my favourite quote), I'm not surprised that it was a French team who came up with this theory -- Pagnol was one of the most important figures in French literature of his era.
Pagnol's original context is no less relevant today than it was at the time: he was referring to how the local teacher and the local priest where he grew up were both very well educated, very intelligent people, yet their conclusions were almost diametrically opposed. I think the parallel to modern life is clear....
HAL.
Shhhh!!! Don't give the wireless lobby ideas!!!