I agree that corporations need to be held accountable for their actions, but imagine what could happen if we do what you suggest.
Let's say it's your bank. Your ATM card, credit card, check book are now all useless. You can't pay your bills. You can't buy groceries.
Or maybe it's your power company. If they're not allowed to produce, your lights go out. All of the food in your refrigerator goes bad. You don't have heating/air conditioning. You may not have hot water to bathe in.
Or what if it was your employer? Some ass hole managers or salespeople that you may not have ever even met bribed someone, which you had nothing to do with. Now you don't get a pay check. Depending on how long it is, you may not have a job any more.
If you shut down a whole corporation, you punish everyone that does business with them (who may not have a real option of doing business with anyone else), and you punish all of their employees (whether they had anything to do with the crime or not).
I think it's better to punish the people who actually committed the crimes. And the people who knew about it but didn't do anything. And the people above them who reasonably should have known but were negligent in trying to stop or detect such things.
Talk to your friends, family, people you've worked with, professors, etc.
I'd say either stick to people that have technical backgrounds or be very specific about what you are looking for. Otherwise, you may get too many useless recommendations.
One problem is that you'll get told about jobs that you are not even close to being qualified for. A lot of people don't understand how broad of a field IT is--they will think of you as a "computer person" and the whole field as "computer jobs". So they'll tell you about network administrator positions when you're looking for a developer position. Or if it is a developer position, it'll be for a language you don't know (or maybe haven't even heard of).
Another problem is that they may not be in a position where their recommendation will do you any good. I'm just speculating here, but I just don't see how a recommendation from someone not in an IT field will do any good (especially at a larger company). For example, someone who works retail at a Target store putting in a recommendation for me for an IT position in the corporate office is probably not going to accomplish anything. Though I guess it probably doesn't hurt for them to try.
So while the parent is correct that personal connections are very important, make sure you are going to the right people and giving them the right information.
You can close that hole, you just didn't follow through far enough.
When you called the bank to confirm the identity, you also ask to be connected to that person. If the person you talk to says they can't do that (like what happened to you), then you just need to ask for the phone number of the original bank employee who called you.
You call that number and see who answers. Compare voices between who answers and the original caller. If they match, then you're safe. If they don't match, it was someone trying to scam you.
That, of course, assumes that when you call the bank, they will tell you the employee's phone number. If they won't just give it to you, you can try reading off the number she gave when she called and asking them to tell you if it matches. If they won't even do that, then they're jerks and idiots and don't deserve your business.
To be honest, it's not very often you hear about someone giving birth to a child without knowing who the mother is.
I had a dream about that once. In typical dream fashion, it made perfect sense to me that I could be the father of the baby and have no idea who the mother was. I just thought "hmm, that's odd...I don't remember having sex with anyone. But that baby sure looks like me, so he's clearly mine."
Needless to say, I was highly amused when I woke up and realized how nonsensical that was.
If I join an engineer's guild, do I get to carry a sword around and wear chain mail armor made of mithril? Sure, if that's what you'd like. But you have to find your own mithril.
Why would anyone want to encourage people who don't want kids to have them? Maybe to validate their own decisions?
I don't know, but (if you do end up having kids), the same people will also buy your kids the most noisy and obnoxious toys that they can find. It almost seems like a "misery loves company" sort of thing—they suffered, and now they want other people to suffer like they did.
You're right, it was a real problem. There were a few glitches, and it could have been much worse.
But a lot of people got way too worked up about it, and that is why it was, at the same time, a joke: "Oh my God, the nuclear weapons are going to launch by themselves and we're going to lose power, so I better by 5 months of canned good, and I better get a gun so I can fight off my lazy neighbors who didn't stock up!"
Well, apparently the mods haven't seen Top Gun. I just wanted to let you know I appreciated the joke (and the GP's joke too...), even though apparently other people didn't...
Yeah, you could use a Huffman code for that. You know, get the statistically most common phrases and assign them values. You'd put the regular allowed character set in there too for that rare specimen of originality, but since it's so rare it'd have a longer representation.
Good question. And doesn't the FAA, for example, have flight limits like a pilot may not fly more than x hours at a time, and not more than y hours in z days? I'm too lazy to look up the numbers, but I am pretty sure there are limits. And I imagine that other countries have similar rules. Does anybody know how this guy is getting around those rules? Is he somehow avoiding flying over countries with those rules? Did he somehow get an exemption or something?
Your misuse of apostrophes is making my eyes bleed... Not one of them was needed:-)
You might want to get that bleeding eye thing checked out...I'm pretty sure they're not really supposed to do that, but I'm not a doctor or anything. I hope it's nothing serious.
I agree that the things you have listed are problems, and that they'd sure be nice to solve. I just wanted to address one of them for now, as I have been trying to deal with it myself.
The hidden text problem that you mention is a surprisingly hard problem to deal with, as there are so many ways to do it.
You have:
The <font> tag
CSS (several ways, such as the:hidden property, changing the colors, using the z order, etc.), both internal and externally linked (for which the search engine must download that file while spidering)
DHTML positioning over other elements
A background image the same color as the text
Javascript to generate any of the above
Use of nearly identical colors for all of the above (such as #FFFFFF for the background and #FFFFFE for the foreground). In fact, there could be dozens of colors that are all slightly different enough that a human wouldn't be able to detect it without looking very closely, or at all.
I'm sure there are more that I'm missing, but I think you (meaning everyone...I'm not just picking on the parent here...) get the idea. You pretty much have to render the page like a browser to take care of all of those, which really sucks for us search engine developers trying to fight it, and us users that have to deal with that crap.
Something that I've observed for myself is that there are two types of remembering, sort of. One is being able to recall something ("Valentine's day is February 14th"). The other is being able to recall something at certain times ("I better get some flowers because Valentine's day is coming up").
I say this because I have a really easy time learning new things and remembering fun facts and such. I'm one of those people you hated at school because I would get the top score on the tests without studying (OK, I did really suck at Diff. Eq.). I could just remember the stuff that the professor talked about. But I have a much harder time remembering stuff at predefined times. You know, stuff like "I have to get a birthday card by Sept. 21st" or "I have to take out the garbage tonight."
To me, the main difference seems to be that one of them is like a search of my brain for the necessary information, and the other is like an alarm that should remind me to do something when certain conditions are met.
OK, enough rambling. The point is, I think there's two kinds of remembering. That doesn't make it true. It's just what I've come up with from examining my own situation.
Yes, you do find fewer documents, but you have many more potential documents. That is, when a search is run, you must find the documents that contain all of the keywords (in most search engines, anyway).
So say you have search terms a, b, and c. The documents that contain these are found using the index that they construct, and the documents that contain a are set A, the documents that contain b are set B, and the documents that contain c are set C. You must then find the intersection of A, B, and C. Although this is an easy concept, it is not as easy to do quickly, as it requires that you iterate through each set to find the documents that have all of the terms in common.
So if a is contained in 500,000 documents, b is contained in 100,000 documents, and c is in 50,000 documents, you have to iterate through 650,000 items to find the intersection, even though that may only be 100 documents.
And no, it's not feasible to have the index take word pairs or triplets (or more), either, due to space limitations. That would potentially square or cube (or more...it depends on what n is...) the amount of space needed to store the index.
I hope I am explaining this well. If not, then just try to think about how you would find the intersection of n lists on paper or programmatically, and you will realize how slow that is. I'm guessing that Google can do this because they have the money to through more computing power at it.
And yes, I am a search engine developer (though not for Google...)
Maybe it's just me, but it really seems that most people don't give a damn, no matter how much they're paid or where they work. They'd rather be doing anything other than work.
Yeah, but they'll also charge pi times as much, and 37 times as much, and 3i-4 times as much. In fact, all complex numbers, all at the same time! And it doesn't even matter how many cores you have. I don't know about you, but I'm worried;-)
Not to mention that even knowing that a message is there may not help. Consider if different people used different bit pattern for different instructions: if I use the 0 for ADD and 1 for SUB, and Bob uses 1 for SUB and 0 for ADD, then a message embedded by me will look much different than a message embedded by Bob. Now considering the number of permutations that there are for each set of redundant instructions, there can be many more possible encodings for a given message. It only matters that the person who embedded the data and the intended recipient agree on which bit patterns to use for each instruction. Not that this can't be brute forced, but it makes it much more complicated to try to find and decrypt the message.
I wouldn't trust their data. I am just finishing up a project for a Pocket PC, which happens to run Windows CE. I use Microsoft Embedded Visual C++ as the compiler for the project, and at one point I was looking into using C++ style exceptions to make my code a bit cleaner. In the help file included with Embedded Visual C++, Microsoft claims that C++ syle exceptions are supported, and they give examples of how to do it. These claims are also available online here , and where they explain how to use C++ or structured style exception handling, they recommend using C++ style exceptions for portability. However, when I tried to compile my application, I first got the warning that I needed to compile with a flag to enable the stack unwinding semantics. So I did that, and tried to recompile, but this time it failed in the linking stage with an error like "error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "const type_info::`vftable'" (??_7type_info@@6B@)". After hours and hours of trying to figure out if I had missed a command line option for the linker or forgot to #include something, I stumbled across an online discussion where someone else was having the same problems. Someone else responded with an answer, pointing to a Knowledge Base article, which said that C++ style exceptions are NOT supported in Embedded Visual C++, and that the functionality "is by design."
As you may guess, this is very frustrating, to be told in all documentation that something is supported, and to have the compiler act like it's supported, but for it to not be supported. It also goes to show that you cannot trust those bastards over at Microsoft when they say that something is supported. Oh, yeah, and you may notice that the invalid documentation has been up since 2000, and the KB article was put up in 2003. This means that the invalid documentation has been up for 4 years now, and only a year ago do they admit that it's not supported (even though it's STILL in the documentation for the product that it IS supported).
They could mean ad hoc wireless networking. If they are looking for something that could help them communicate in the field, ad hoc wireless networking has great applications for them--basically, an ad hoc network does not have predefined hosts, access points, or what have you. Every node in the network communicates with the nodes around it (they could be a mixture of some wireless nodes and some wired nodes). There is no predefined leader, but the nodes themselves pick which nodes will act as temporary leaders to keep routing information, among other things. There are many different algorithms for determining these leaders, and the leaders can be changed if necessary due to nodes moving, entering an area, or leaving an area.
More information can be found here (Google's html version here.)
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I agree that corporations need to be held accountable for their actions, but imagine what could happen if we do what you suggest.
Let's say it's your bank. Your ATM card, credit card, check book are now all useless. You can't pay your bills. You can't buy groceries.
Or maybe it's your power company. If they're not allowed to produce, your lights go out. All of the food in your refrigerator goes bad. You don't have heating/air conditioning. You may not have hot water to bathe in.
Or what if it was your employer? Some ass hole managers or salespeople that you may not have ever even met bribed someone, which you had nothing to do with. Now you don't get a pay check. Depending on how long it is, you may not have a job any more.
If you shut down a whole corporation, you punish everyone that does business with them (who may not have a real option of doing business with anyone else), and you punish all of their employees (whether they had anything to do with the crime or not).
I think it's better to punish the people who actually committed the crimes. And the people who knew about it but didn't do anything. And the people above them who reasonably should have known but were negligent in trying to stop or detect such things.
Talk to your friends, family, people you've worked with, professors, etc.
I'd say either stick to people that have technical backgrounds or be very specific about what you are looking for. Otherwise, you may get too many useless recommendations.
One problem is that you'll get told about jobs that you are not even close to being qualified for. A lot of people don't understand how broad of a field IT is--they will think of you as a "computer person" and the whole field as "computer jobs". So they'll tell you about network administrator positions when you're looking for a developer position. Or if it is a developer position, it'll be for a language you don't know (or maybe haven't even heard of).
Another problem is that they may not be in a position where their recommendation will do you any good. I'm just speculating here, but I just don't see how a recommendation from someone not in an IT field will do any good (especially at a larger company). For example, someone who works retail at a Target store putting in a recommendation for me for an IT position in the corporate office is probably not going to accomplish anything. Though I guess it probably doesn't hurt for them to try.
So while the parent is correct that personal connections are very important, make sure you are going to the right people and giving them the right information.
You can close that hole, you just didn't follow through far enough.
When you called the bank to confirm the identity, you also ask to be connected to that person. If the person you talk to says they can't do that (like what happened to you), then you just need to ask for the phone number of the original bank employee who called you.
You call that number and see who answers. Compare voices between who answers and the original caller. If they match, then you're safe. If they don't match, it was someone trying to scam you.
That, of course, assumes that when you call the bank, they will tell you the employee's phone number. If they won't just give it to you, you can try reading off the number she gave when she called and asking them to tell you if it matches. If they won't even do that, then they're jerks and idiots and don't deserve your business.
Dude, go easy on him. We can still have alarmist discussion. I mean, look at what he said
...but after their doctors talked them into removing the tumors and doing radiation/chemo treatment, they were dead within a year.See? The doctors are in on it! Doctors give you cancer!
It's not uncharted, you lost the chart.
I had a dream about that once. In typical dream fashion, it made perfect sense to me that I could be the father of the baby and have no idea who the mother was. I just thought "hmm, that's odd...I don't remember having sex with anyone. But that baby sure looks like me, so he's clearly mine."
Needless to say, I was highly amused when I woke up and realized how nonsensical that was.
No man. Twice.
I should have listened to that saying...Fool me once....
Damn shoes.
You're right, it was a real problem. There were a few glitches, and it could have been much worse. But a lot of people got way too worked up about it, and that is why it was, at the same time, a joke: "Oh my God, the nuclear weapons are going to launch by themselves and we're going to lose power, so I better by 5 months of canned good, and I better get a gun so I can fight off my lazy neighbors who didn't stock up!"
Honest question: what do you mean when you refer to God as being "cash-mishandling?" This is just out of curiosity.
Well, apparently the mods haven't seen Top Gun. I just wanted to let you know I appreciated the joke (and the GP's joke too...), even though apparently other people didn't...
P.S. I'm only semi-joking.
Good question. And doesn't the FAA, for example, have flight limits like a pilot may not fly more than x hours at a time, and not more than y hours in z days? I'm too lazy to look up the numbers, but I am pretty sure there are limits. And I imagine that other countries have similar rules. Does anybody know how this guy is getting around those rules? Is he somehow avoiding flying over countries with those rules? Did he somehow get an exemption or something?
The hidden text problem that you mention is a surprisingly hard problem to deal with, as there are so many ways to do it.
You have:
- The <font> tag
- CSS (several ways, such as the
:hidden property, changing the colors, using the z order, etc.), both internal and externally linked (for which the search engine must download that file while spidering)
- DHTML positioning over other elements
- A background image the same color as the text
- Javascript to generate any of the above
- Use of nearly identical colors for all of the above (such as #FFFFFF for the background and #FFFFFE for the foreground). In fact, there could be dozens of colors that are all slightly different enough that a human wouldn't be able to detect it without looking very closely, or at all.
I'm sure there are more that I'm missing, but I think you (meaning everyone...I'm not just picking on the parent here...) get the idea. You pretty much have to render the page like a browser to take care of all of those, which really sucks for us search engine developers trying to fight it, and us users that have to deal with that crap.I say this because I have a really easy time learning new things and remembering fun facts and such. I'm one of those people you hated at school because I would get the top score on the tests without studying (OK, I did really suck at Diff. Eq.). I could just remember the stuff that the professor talked about. But I have a much harder time remembering stuff at predefined times. You know, stuff like "I have to get a birthday card by Sept. 21st" or "I have to take out the garbage tonight."
To me, the main difference seems to be that one of them is like a search of my brain for the necessary information, and the other is like an alarm that should remind me to do something when certain conditions are met.
OK, enough rambling. The point is, I think there's two kinds of remembering. That doesn't make it true. It's just what I've come up with from examining my own situation.
So say you have search terms a, b, and c. The documents that contain these are found using the index that they construct, and the documents that contain a are set A, the documents that contain b are set B, and the documents that contain c are set C. You must then find the intersection of A, B, and C. Although this is an easy concept, it is not as easy to do quickly, as it requires that you iterate through each set to find the documents that have all of the terms in common.
So if a is contained in 500,000 documents, b is contained in 100,000 documents, and c is in 50,000 documents, you have to iterate through 650,000 items to find the intersection, even though that may only be 100 documents.
And no, it's not feasible to have the index take word pairs or triplets (or more), either, due to space limitations. That would potentially square or cube (or more...it depends on what n is...) the amount of space needed to store the index.
I hope I am explaining this well. If not, then just try to think about how you would find the intersection of n lists on paper or programmatically, and you will realize how slow that is. I'm guessing that Google can do this because they have the money to through more computing power at it.
And yes, I am a search engine developer (though not for Google...)
Maybe it's just me, but it really seems that most people don't give a damn, no matter how much they're paid or where they work. They'd rather be doing anything other than work.
Yeah, but they'll also charge pi times as much, and 37 times as much, and 3i-4 times as much. In fact, all complex numbers, all at the same time! And it doesn't even matter how many cores you have. I don't know about you, but I'm worried ;-)
Not to mention that even knowing that a message is there may not help. Consider if different people used different bit pattern for different instructions: if I use the 0 for ADD and 1 for SUB, and Bob uses 1 for SUB and 0 for ADD, then a message embedded by me will look much different than a message embedded by Bob. Now considering the number of permutations that there are for each set of redundant instructions, there can be many more possible encodings for a given message. It only matters that the person who embedded the data and the intended recipient agree on which bit patterns to use for each instruction. Not that this can't be brute forced, but it makes it much more complicated to try to find and decrypt the message.
I wouldn't trust their data. I am just finishing up a project for a Pocket PC, which happens to run Windows CE. I use Microsoft Embedded Visual C++ as the compiler for the project, and at one point I was looking into using C++ style exceptions to make my code a bit cleaner. In the help file included with Embedded Visual C++, Microsoft claims that C++ syle exceptions are supported, and they give examples of how to do it. These claims are also available online here , and where they explain how to use C++ or structured style exception handling, they recommend using C++ style exceptions for portability. However, when I tried to compile my application, I first got the warning that I needed to compile with a flag to enable the stack unwinding semantics. So I did that, and tried to recompile, but this time it failed in the linking stage with an error like "error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "const type_info::`vftable'" (??_7type_info@@6B@)". After hours and hours of trying to figure out if I had missed a command line option for the linker or forgot to #include something, I stumbled across an online discussion where someone else was having the same problems. Someone else responded with an answer, pointing to a Knowledge Base article, which said that C++ style exceptions are NOT supported in Embedded Visual C++, and that the functionality "is by design."
As you may guess, this is very frustrating, to be told in all documentation that something is supported, and to have the compiler act like it's supported, but for it to not be supported. It also goes to show that you cannot trust those bastards over at Microsoft when they say that something is supported. Oh, yeah, and you may notice that the invalid documentation has been up since 2000, and the KB article was put up in 2003. This means that the invalid documentation has been up for 4 years now, and only a year ago do they admit that it's not supported (even though it's STILL in the documentation for the product that it IS supported).
They could mean ad hoc wireless networking. If they are looking for something that could help them communicate in the field, ad hoc wireless networking has great applications for them--basically, an ad hoc network does not have predefined hosts, access points, or what have you. Every node in the network communicates with the nodes around it (they could be a mixture of some wireless nodes and some wired nodes). There is no predefined leader, but the nodes themselves pick which nodes will act as temporary leaders to keep routing information, among other things. There are many different algorithms for determining these leaders, and the leaders can be changed if necessary due to nodes moving, entering an area, or leaving an area.
More information can be found here (Google's html version here.)