Exactly, "Everything about Oblivion (other than the HD graphics)...". Translation for those who haven't seen Oblivion: "Nothing worthwhile about Oblivion would suggest moving it to Revolution." The game is all about gfx. Oh, and herb picking. All the rest sucks.
> And since there's no way to rank the importance of any particular piece of mail, that isn't possible
One unique IP sending one piece of mail to one gmail address with given URL: +0.1 Same IP sending the URL any account above 10th: no bonus Same IP sending more than 10 URLs a day: no bonus Receivers marking as spam: -0.5.
etc, etc.
Sure you can try to game the system, but this isn't quite as easy, especially if the system can easily backfire. Probably that's why they aren't doing it -now- too, working on a spamproof system.
Currently the anti-spam protections of Google are easier to game than PageRank itself - it's easier to get to #1 for given keyword by obliterating competition's pages by engineering proper spam pages pointing to them, resulting in Google's bitchslap sending them to the bottom, than to rise your own page to #1 by increasing only its own pagerank. This is a bigger risk for gmail-based PR (a massive joejob) than account farms for increasing PR.
I don't have links to the articles, saw it pretty long time ago (did some research where's the catch for free uncrippled pop3 when creating my account), but that's the general plan. Last I checked it was just that, a plan, something they intended to start in some nondescript future, but they didn't actually do it, just using adsense with webmail interface and no profitable activity at all with pop3. I don't know how it works now.
Some might argue that Google have a hidden agenda (and no-one has quite worked out what that is yet)
Nope, it's pretty clear they crawl the user mail to affect pagerank. A page that is talked about a lot in the mail is likely to be more important than others, so it goes up for given (Subject:) keywords.
(of course they are also using the data to for building (teaching) a superior AI which is to take over the world on their behalf, but that's just a rumor).
For better remembering effect and to help your imagination at 'inventing' the passphrases have it "written" somewhere around the workplace. Use a sentence from a cover of some user's manual, writing on some poster, "safety regulations notice" or such lying around. Just sit at given computer and look around for some text. If you feel especially rude, swipe the text right from the login screen, like from the standarised footer of the login page with a copyright notice and such:) Especially helpful if you give the password with explanation to the user. "You don't need to write it down, it's written RIGHT HERE already." Steganography rules;)
Google "iraq american war crimes" for the non-official point of view. Complete with photos, movies and gore. Army officials you hear your side from are about as reliable as Iraqui minister of information.
You're talking this out of your ass. "engage point targets" is a neat buzzword that means that if there is a shade of suspicion there may be an enemy in an isolated building, first cover it with fire from half a mile (or call the artillery) away and after unloading half of your ammo supply come closer and use grenades. Then check if there was any enemy soldier in there. If remains of some body are found, it is counted as a soldier.
Oh well, I'm waiting for when the standard PC case will contain a water cooling unit, and the CPU will contain cooling channels for guiding water through it, so you could finally make big 3D chips (not a 1cm square some fraction of milimeter thick, but say a block of 5x5x5cm of silicon logic, with cooling channels through it).
Standarized safe joints, approved standard cooling units, CPUs designed to be watercooled like that etc. And, say, whole side of the PC case for a radiator.
You can get your system underclocked and decrease the speed of a standard "vanilla" fan without thrills. These monsters are meant for overclockers and there's just no sense to review, test, compare etc fans that are -standard-. Nobody cares about sub-$30 computer cases, about brands of standard 300W power supplies, about floppy drives or standard mouses, keyboards etc. They all do their job, no sense to review them, just pick the cheapest one, or the one the shopkeeper has at hand. Only if you do beyond-standard stuff, you need reviews.
That would also greatly increase the number of trolls submitting troll stories. That's what editors want to avoid at all cost. Find a solution to this one first, then likely Taco will think of it:)
1) Check the rear mirror to see if nobody's tailgating you. 2) Wait up the moment they are too distracted to pay attention to you. 3) Push the brakes Really Hard. 4) Say "Shut up".
"Should the size of the sentence really take that 'luck' quantity into account?"
It does. Alcohol has different level of impact on different people. One might steer clear of the pedestrian, the other did not. We'll never know if the first one would, because with that "luck" no pedestrian happened. The other certainly didn't.
One introduced certain, unknown though pretty high level of danger to the roads. He will be punished by suspending his driver and by a high fine. He will try to be more cautious and not drink next time. Due to this luck factor we just don't exactly know -how- dangerous he was. The other leaves no doubt. He was way too drunk to be able to drive safely and the known effect of his actions leaves no doubt as to sentence he deserves.
This is just blurring the "guilty/not guilty" border in case it cannot be decided, with some similarities to alleged attempted murder. Instead of pondering whether he would or wouldn't kill someone and pledge either guilty or not guilty and give full or no punishment, we assume "very likely to kill someone" and give something halfway.
With Google set to display 50 results per page I rarely need to get beyond page 3:)
Actually, no. If until the page 3 you didn't find what you wanted, you likely have an idea what's wrong with your search terms and add some -sex -buy -ass or such to your search terms, culling 95% of spam that appeared in the first 3 pages, and getting THE result within 3 pages away. This means I get the site that was, say, on page 70, but not by skipping 70 pages but by narrowing search terms and pulling it up.
I -did- search 200+ pages sometimes. Like for classical music mp3 - one that IS in public domain, but still getting the actual mp3 is hard, as the search is spammed ears deep with sites that provide you with thousands of free classical mp3 as long as you pay $99/month for access.
Besides, does the results of the research mean things about the users, or maybe just about the quality of search engines improving? If I look for an "undocummented" javascript method reference, I don't care there's 50 sites explaining it, I need one - any of them, and likely will pick the one that is on the first page. The fact that your search resulter 3,000,000 results doesn't mean it was useless, it just means the term is popular - still quite likely the site you want is within first 3 of the 3,000,000.
1) Anthrax scenario won't work. Anthrax requires live humans to spread. Most of bacterias and all of viruses attack directly. They can't multiply outside of human organism. Killing humans is kind of suicide, simply spread rate must surpass mortality rate. Most aggressive viruses are very rare because the victim dies before infecting anyone, preventing the virus from gaining more advantage, spreading. There are few bacteria that "kill accidentially" - live off some non-human nutrient, but still kill humans (say, these responsible for meat rot), but you actually need to eat rotten meat to get poisoned - and their nutrient is rather "niche". The problem with the glue bacteria is that no "biological immunity of organism" would help and lack of access to humans for the bacteria population wouldn't hinder its growth and wouldn't make it any less problematic to humans. 2) "what prevents this series of mutations from happening *right now*?" Nothing. Except of low probability. Laws of big numbers kick in, and if you count probability of all the necessary prerequisites for such a mutation to happen in one bacteria, suddenly the world population of bacterias gets small. Doesn't mean won't happen, just very unlikely to happen. Mutations happen all the time, but even in case of the strongest, epidemic ones, some people are immune and survive. The rest may die out, ending the epidemy.
Some inaugurational parliament gathering, these aren't too secret and most of country officials attend these. And if several smaller bombs go off simultaneously in all access corridors to the gathering hall, simply allowing the gas to seep inside while all the exit routes are cut off (by the gas), all the people inside will get poisoned. That's why I didn't talk about a conventional bomb, as it would require huge amount of explosives. But several smaller containers with mustard gas in the air vents of all the access routes - the gas will eventually fill the whole building, so the fatal range will be just that, and only those near exits will get to escape in time.
What you need besides the gas is the air duct plans, method to override/bypass the security, and that's about it. You plant several bombs activated by radio (even using the local power supply to keep them active) weeks or months ahead, one at a time - small, unsuspecting-looking packages. Then push the button when you see on TV that the house is full.
Well, what will cause more serious drop to the productivity of the government, no afterhours for the ambitious or a gas bomb killing off 98% of the government members when the security information is leaked and the bomb hidden in the parliament building, thanks to some ambitious security officer's laptop stolen?
I bet this all could be avoided by enforcing proper use of strong encryption. Ok, the hardware got stolen but the thief won't break the cipher. No biggie. Otherwise, it could be easily considered treason and collaboration with the enemy. "I lost these documents" or "someone stole them from me" would be the first excuse for someone who sold them.
Bacteria are known to mutate, right? Some mutations spread uncontrollably, known fact. Sugar is one of more common substances in the world.
Imagine the world where stepping on the grass means they have to amputate your legs to free you. And the glue infection spreading, things getting gradually more sticky everywhere. Up to the point when everyone is glued to the ground, and everything that moves, stops. Entropic death, no more movement.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, "Everything about Oblivion (other than the HD graphics)...".
Translation for those who haven't seen Oblivion: "Nothing worthwhile about Oblivion would suggest moving it to Revolution."
The game is all about gfx. Oh, and herb picking. All the rest sucks.
I was absolutely sure they mean it will contain a skype-like application, voice chat, internet telephony.
Nope. Support by phone will be available. MSIE won't support a phone.
> And since there's no way to rank the importance of any particular piece of mail, that isn't possible
One unique IP sending one piece of mail to one gmail address with given URL: +0.1
Same IP sending the URL any account above 10th: no bonus
Same IP sending more than 10 URLs a day: no bonus
Receivers marking as spam: -0.5.
etc, etc.
Sure you can try to game the system, but this isn't quite as easy, especially if the system can easily backfire. Probably that's why they aren't doing it -now- too, working on a spamproof system.
Currently the anti-spam protections of Google are easier to game than PageRank itself - it's easier to get to #1 for given keyword by obliterating competition's pages by engineering proper spam pages pointing to them, resulting in Google's bitchslap sending them to the bottom, than to rise your own page to #1 by increasing only its own pagerank. This is a bigger risk for gmail-based PR (a massive joejob) than account farms for increasing PR.
I don't have links to the articles, saw it pretty long time ago (did some research where's the catch for free uncrippled pop3 when creating my account), but that's the general plan. Last I checked it was just that, a plan, something they intended to start in some nondescript future, but they didn't actually do it, just using adsense with webmail interface and no profitable activity at all with pop3. I don't know how it works now.
Some might argue that Google have a hidden agenda (and no-one has quite worked out what that is yet)
Nope, it's pretty clear they crawl the user mail to affect pagerank. A page that is talked about a lot in the mail is likely to be more important than others, so it goes up for given (Subject:) keywords.
(of course they are also using the data to for building (teaching) a superior AI which is to take over the world on their behalf, but that's just a rumor).
A real error message from a real e-store registration, denying access for a customer who entered his actual, legit personal data:
"Your surname name is too short. Surname must be at least 4 characters long."
For better remembering effect and to help your imagination at 'inventing' the passphrases have it "written" somewhere around the workplace. Use a sentence from a cover of some user's manual, writing on some poster, "safety regulations notice" or such lying around. Just sit at given computer and look around for some text. If you feel especially rude, swipe the text right from the login screen, like from the standarised footer of the login page with a copyright notice and such :) Especially helpful if you give the password with explanation to the user. "You don't need to write it down, it's written RIGHT HERE already." Steganography rules ;)
One thing more.
= 5116596&action=article
http://www.iii.co.uk/news/?type=afxnews&articleid
Google "iraq american war crimes" for the non-official point of view. Complete with photos, movies and gore. Army officials you hear your side from are about as reliable as Iraqui minister of information.
> Calling down arty on a house in Iraq would kill dozens of civilians.
Yes, it does.
> That doesn't look so hot on CNN and FOX.
Journalists not allowed into the area.
These who sneak in there get shot.
Some who survive get silenced "by the powers that be".
Login: bugmenot
Password: Bugm3n.+
Reminder: http://www.bugmenot.com/
> Doesn't anyone remember the 'pass phrase' thing from awhile back?
> "The quick fox jumps over the lazy brown dog"
Way too long to type.
> D'tart'pp;tfawb?
> Tqfjotlbd
Passphrase-based passwords (take each first leter, caps and semigraphics retained) are a good option.
You're talking this out of your ass. "engage point targets" is a neat buzzword that means that if there is a shade of suspicion there may be an enemy in an isolated building, first cover it with fire from half a mile (or call the artillery) away and after unloading half of your ammo supply come closer and use grenades. Then check if there was any enemy soldier in there.
If remains of some body are found, it is counted as a soldier.
Oh well, I'm waiting for when the standard PC case will contain a water cooling unit, and the CPU will contain cooling channels for guiding water through it, so you could finally make big 3D chips (not a 1cm square some fraction of milimeter thick, but say a block of 5x5x5cm of silicon logic, with cooling channels through it).
Standarized safe joints, approved standard cooling units, CPUs designed to be watercooled like that etc. And, say, whole side of the PC case for a radiator.
You can get your system underclocked and decrease the speed of a standard "vanilla" fan without thrills. These monsters are meant for overclockers and there's just no sense to review, test, compare etc fans that are -standard-. Nobody cares about sub-$30 computer cases, about brands of standard 300W power supplies, about floppy drives or standard mouses, keyboards etc. They all do their job, no sense to review them, just pick the cheapest one, or the one the shopkeeper has at hand. Only if you do beyond-standard stuff, you need reviews.
That would also greatly increase the number of trolls submitting troll stories. That's what editors want to avoid at all cost. Find a solution to this one first, then likely Taco will think of it :)
1) Check the rear mirror to see if nobody's tailgating you.
2) Wait up the moment they are too distracted to pay attention to you.
3) Push the brakes Really Hard.
4) Say "Shut up".
Somebody was singing a lullaby on the phone and this catalysed the effect of the drugs and made him fall asleep! If not the phone, he wouldn't crash!
"Should the size of the sentence really take that 'luck' quantity into account?"
It does. Alcohol has different level of impact on different people. One might steer clear of the pedestrian, the other did not. We'll never know if the first one would, because with that "luck" no pedestrian happened. The other certainly didn't.
One introduced certain, unknown though pretty high level of danger to the roads. He will be punished by suspending his driver and by a high fine. He will try to be more cautious and not drink next time. Due to this luck factor we just don't exactly know -how- dangerous he was. The other leaves no doubt. He was way too drunk to be able to drive safely and the known effect of his actions leaves no doubt as to sentence he deserves.
This is just blurring the "guilty/not guilty" border in case it cannot be decided, with some similarities to alleged attempted murder. Instead of pondering whether he would or wouldn't kill someone and pledge either guilty or not guilty and give full or no punishment, we assume "very likely to kill someone" and give something halfway.
And now if you drive while holding the cup of coffee in one hand and the cell phone in the other, now THAT is distracting!
With Google set to display 50 results per page I rarely need to get beyond page 3 :)
Actually, no. If until the page 3 you didn't find what you wanted, you likely have an idea what's wrong with your search terms and add some -sex -buy -ass or such to your search terms, culling 95% of spam that appeared in the first 3 pages, and getting THE result within 3 pages away. This means I get the site that was, say, on page 70, but not by skipping 70 pages but by narrowing search terms and pulling it up.
I -did- search 200+ pages sometimes. Like for classical music mp3 - one that IS in public domain, but still getting the actual mp3 is hard, as the search is spammed ears deep with sites that provide you with thousands of free classical mp3 as long as you pay $99/month for access.
Besides, does the results of the research mean things about the users, or maybe just about the quality of search engines improving? If I look for an "undocummented" javascript method reference, I don't care there's 50 sites explaining it, I need one - any of them, and likely will pick the one that is on the first page. The fact that your search resulter 3,000,000 results doesn't mean it was useless, it just means the term is popular - still quite likely the site you want is within first 3 of the 3,000,000.
nope. just got imagination. And pissed off about the current govt. Any idea where to buy mustard gas?
1) Anthrax scenario won't work. Anthrax requires live humans to spread. Most of bacterias and all of viruses attack directly. They can't multiply outside of human organism. Killing humans is kind of suicide, simply spread rate must surpass mortality rate. Most aggressive viruses are very rare because the victim dies before infecting anyone, preventing the virus from gaining more advantage, spreading. There are few bacteria that "kill accidentially" - live off some non-human nutrient, but still kill humans (say, these responsible for meat rot), but you actually need to eat rotten meat to get poisoned - and their nutrient is rather "niche". The problem with the glue bacteria is that no "biological immunity of organism" would help and lack of access to humans for the bacteria population wouldn't hinder its growth and wouldn't make it any less problematic to humans.
2) "what prevents this series of mutations from happening *right now*?" Nothing. Except of low probability. Laws of big numbers kick in, and if you count probability of all the necessary prerequisites for such a mutation to happen in one bacteria, suddenly the world population of bacterias gets small. Doesn't mean won't happen, just very unlikely to happen. Mutations happen all the time, but even in case of the strongest, epidemic ones, some people are immune and survive. The rest may die out, ending the epidemy.
Some inaugurational parliament gathering, these aren't too secret and most of country officials attend these. And if several smaller bombs go off simultaneously in all access corridors to the gathering hall, simply allowing the gas to seep inside while all the exit routes are cut off (by the gas), all the people inside will get poisoned.
That's why I didn't talk about a conventional bomb, as it would require huge amount of explosives. But several smaller containers with mustard gas in the air vents of all the access routes - the gas will eventually fill the whole building, so the fatal range will be just that, and only those near exits will get to escape in time.
What you need besides the gas is the air duct plans, method to override/bypass the security, and that's about it. You plant several bombs activated by radio (even using the local power supply to keep them active) weeks or months ahead, one at a time - small, unsuspecting-looking packages. Then push the button when you see on TV that the house is full.
Well, what will cause more serious drop to the productivity of the government, no afterhours for the ambitious or a gas bomb killing off 98% of the government members when the security information is leaked and the bomb hidden in the parliament building, thanks to some ambitious security officer's laptop stolen?
I bet this all could be avoided by enforcing proper use of strong encryption. Ok, the hardware got stolen but the thief won't break the cipher. No biggie. Otherwise, it could be easily considered treason and collaboration with the enemy. "I lost these documents" or "someone stole them from me" would be the first excuse for someone who sold them.
Bacteria are known to mutate, right?
Some mutations spread uncontrollably, known fact.
Sugar is one of more common substances in the world.
Imagine the world where stepping on the grass means they have to amputate your legs to free you. And the glue infection spreading, things getting gradually more sticky everywhere. Up to the point when everyone is glued to the ground, and everything that moves, stops. Entropic death, no more movement.
I for one welcome our sticky bacterial overlords.