Something like lexis/nexis is fine but has anybody put online the microfiche of old newspapers that are usually available free in libraries? It would seem to be eminently useful, perhaps not to a certain number of budgeted scholars but that's what people used. I want Google to make money but I also am severely frustrated when an abstracts database (usually science news, IIRC acm, etc.) wants me to pay money for the article. I propose to google that they make different levels of access at different rates so that you can pay a stellar (maybe not so stellar?) rate for ultimate access, whereas free will still give you access to things that usually are free (I'm thinking of the system in Heinlein's Friday). They should start a reference library, or a service to be used in libraries which the libraries can pay for or individuals/companies can also purchase.
Surfed through the edit wars pages and that was interesting though I didn't find the one on chips. It seems that a wiki is by design vulnerable to 1) edit wars and 2) wasting of critical resources, namely the time of authors and administrators, and the perceived reliability of the wiki, by such wars.
Being a wiki admin I suppose means you are asking for it and shouldn't be surprised at having to arbitrate such battles, but unless the number of admins increases at the same rate as the wiki's articles and readers this is a losing battle. It seems that many of these may be resolved by choosing least common denominator, ignoring the battle and maybe relying on the wiki's search engine a bit more to show related articles.
How about creating a forking wiki? I am not aware such a thing exists yet. Based on the recognition that unlike a static encyclopedia with a static board of editors and publication date, the wikipedia and other wikis are organic entities and involve people with divergent and yet possibly valid opinions. For example see the wars on UK/US terms, historical interpretation (not revisionism), etc. While the U.S. Wikipedia seems quite cool-headed I don't think that is guaranteed for other languages either.
So a forking wikipedia would allow each main article to have links to different versions if there is more than one valid one, basically allowing readers to see both sides of the topic. It would be up to an admin to decide on whether a view is valid enough, since it seems that only a small percentage of pages would have more than one view. You would have to ensure somehow that holders of one view do not edit the other in a prolonged war by locking it.
This sort of functionality might be useful in cases such as description of historical persons and events (e.g. battles), and possibly unpopular but official views held by contemporary governments about history, geography, etc.
Were they fired because their download of a torrent included providing pieces of the torrent to others in the swarm? Aside from that they were not acting maliciously and had a reasonable interest in getting an idea of what they were going to be selling. Or is getting a sneak peak at their own product illegal? I don't get it. Were they supposed to buy it in-house instead? Where is the ethical problem? Except for the mechanics of the download, which suggest they added an infinitesimal amount of bandwidth to an existing swarm, why are they feeling guilty and Apple calling them guilty? Considering iTunes is a major Apple service I would actually like to have sales people be aware of what is on BitTorrent and suggest adding more content to their service. I would pay money for the BBC's Doctor Who if iTunes let me download it quickly through them. Considering I am in the market for a new Mac in the next 2 months I am curious about this and not happy with Apple's treatment of people. I wonder if the people who didn't come forth are glad, or are waiting for the other shoe (lawsuit) to drop.
Interesting, I also do professional translation on the side (Japanese to English) and often clients demand that I "fix" it into broken English. I wonder if their basis for judgement is MS Word and if so how much MS is responsible for this lost time. Do you have a sample sentence?
Skipping for the moment implications of inadequacy on the part of both MS and this scientist, clearly there is a problem when people base their work on expectations of intellectual integrity on the part of corporate IT products like this, especially those not easily accessible by reviewers. There is a Japanese character dictionary built into Windows too but I have no idea how a reviewer could grade it against commonly used print versions.
Besides, geology seems to be one of the most highly leveraged sciences in planetary studies, if you consider most of what the Mars robots were doing was geology. For a planetary scientists to miss this is bizarre.
I was involved in a startup called V-Sync Technologies that made a kiosk to download music over fiber and write it onto a minidisc. The system was called Music POD (Press On Demand) and came long before the iPod (though it would be the perfect way to buy music for the iPod if Apple figured it out). The company is still active as far as I know.
I just realized that typewriters used to have a real physical toggle key that could be depressed for caps lock and then undepressed. Now they are just normal keys. However, note that it is an unimportant key so that if your left hand strays too far left, it will not create extraneous output.
Also I would like to state that I found a good use for the Caps Lock key. I wrote a program called kami-shibai (Japanese for an old fashioned manual slide show) for an artist. One program would check a POP3 mailbox for incoming email, and attached photos would be stored in a folder. Another program would look for new arriving photos and insert them into a running slideshow (windows, perl gui app). I used different programs because I wanted to be able to easily stop and restart the network side so as not to interfere with the artist's own email program when it was being used.
Because there was a slideshow player program running in the foreground, if you told the slideshow player to quit you would quit the slideshow but not the control program, and you would get an ugly error or worse. However, by simply, elegantly, and mysteriously clicking the Caps Lock key, the control program would notice your intent and gracefully close everything down.
It seems to me that Caps Lock is far more useful than most people think and is definitely an unsung hero! In fact it seems that you could signal a whole host of simultaneous processes at once with a single key that can be toggled into a state that can be interrogated at any time, regardless of input sequences.
You could use the three available toggles to specify up to 8 different states under which a program is to be run, without any overt GUI interaction, which might be useful to evade spyware. One such key might be useful to switch a keyboard map too; I used to use a BlackBox software widget to go between French and English keyboards but now that we are going to web 2.0 we need a cross platform solution.
I definitely think it would be useful to increase the uses of Caps Lock and promote the inclusion of more wild keys. Maybe adding thumbwheels (yeah Sony's Vaio had it too, it was cool) to match Irix's window scaling widgets. Now maybe someone can explain the Pause/Break key to me..
Thanks for your note, and sorry for my belated reply. Yes, you may be right. The artist was using StudioMAX software and was interested in making earthquake-like sounds based on the data but I do not have data to compare; obviously the two parties had differing goals but if the end user is a human the end results might be closer than one would expect. It would be interesting to see though.
Ken Goldberg created an art installation called Memento Mori that translated seismic data received over the net in realtime into deep bass rumblings driving a surround sound system. The big bass woofer was under a floor you could lie on to feel it. He didn't need a 622Mbps connection either..
And incidentally DANTE seems oblivious that the Dante project by NASA was a multilegged robot descending by rope into a volcanic crater.
I don't mean to overshadow their scientific achievements but lack of memory by networked prdroids bugs me.
Yes, I think you are right. It seems to be different from the "uncanny valley", a psychological phenomenon in which robots seem friendly up to the point where they are nearly but not quite human, which is when they seem really creepy. Or maybe we are not at that point yet. For whatever reason, search engines and eliza seem to provide people who need to talk an outlet. But it is dangerous if they think they are talking to a person and nobody in fact listens to their requests for help.
I think search engines should maybe put a note on them saying no human is listening, or just flag certain statistically highly likely phrases for a human to check, just in case it could stop a suicide or murder. Tough call.
I wrote a little perl program to check on whether my family is in the released data.
This is very scary data, though also chock full of interesting info, interesting taken in many different ways. It was easy to find a number of people referencing my small home town of about 20,000 people. I shiver to imagine say a wife using AOL at home and her geek husband searching this stuff at work (not my problem).
Suffice it to say, the data is FULL of personally identifying information. AOL is not telling the truth. Heck, Google even gives you an address if you give it a phone number, people are used to typing people's names into the search box. And if you search for a given ID you can follow their trains of thought over time and it can be shattering; everyone looks for their own family online.. I even found an unknown relative that way once. AOL should hire some clueful people and get them into the loop, but it's too late for some people.
Incidentally, I found one of the most interesting words is "should". That, and "cocktail dresses" but I'm not going to get into that one. You see it turns out that not only do people sometimes unintentionally paste info from mail or webpages into the search field, they also ask questions that normally they might just write on paper and throw in the trash, or give up worrying about. So what AOL has done is closer to taping a confessional, what someone might ask of God or their doctor, or just worry endlessly about, and release it! What infants! It seems to say something about why doctors and priests have a professional code and know how to keep things private. Here are some search phrases, I'm not putting any in that have a person's name but you can probably get the idea from this.
what the fuck should i name my fetus
my nose is bleeding from cocaine what should i do
baby has something stuck in his foot what should i do
my mom is a hooker what should i do
how to tell a wife her husband is having an affair with you
caught my wife cheating
my wife cheated on me with a guy with a huge cock now what
spy on the wife
get revenge from a wife cheater
catch your wife having an affair
my cheating wife
got caught cheating on my wife and now she trying to take my kids away
my wife and kids are living with an ex con
very sexy baby nice pics i wanna c more lol u should take a look at my pic
s tell me what ya think if u wanna chat my yahoo is lets get it mane and my aim is mhsplaya8
should a spouse stay married to a sex addict
should i let my son inlaw fuck me
i should have used a condom
dude read this its reallllly weird body hi. my name is kimi. it's too late now. you shouldn't have opened this bulletin but since you did you will die tonight if you dont keep reading. well i'm 19. i don't have eye lashes and i dont have a nose. pr
what should i do about heart palpitations after smoking crack
should a man go to a strip club the girlfriend is upset
should i see a married man
should i tell the other man's wife
should i confront my wife's adultery partner
mom showed me how to masterbate
why my girlfriend should give me head
should i buy extended warranty on my laptop
an employee jokes all day long what should i do
should parents let their children become stars
l want some pill to dead
l want to kill myself pill sleep
i want to kill myself
should i kill myself
i need someone to help me before i kill myself
help no one loves me i want to kill myself
best way to kill myself
i want to kill myself indiana hotline
god please my heart hurts help
l need to talk with a fbi
should informants be identified
Now maybe people will understand what AOL has done.
I am posting this because:
I want strong pro-privacy legislation re search engines and other online venues
The use of search engines as Voice-of-God or call-for-help is real. Search engines should be mandated to 1) not
This is really chilling. My Mom uses AOL so of course I picked up a copy of the archive. I just searched for a few terms in one of the ten files it contains. grepped the name of my small home town (population 10-20 thousand) which has grown more affluent in recent years. I found two users who did extensive searches, found a number of full names of individuals, hotel names, domain names, personal searches including phrases you might not want your significant other to see, searches including the full name, position and company of an individual, etc. I found the names of nearby schools and my supermarket. Thank God I didn't see my mother's name in it but on the other hand there are 9 files left to go.. and I was going to post some interesting phrases but then I realized that then anybody could see the name of my town. I don't see how you could defend yourself against this kind of thing, someone else's search could end up as an innuendo and picture this scenario: wife uses AOL at home, husband is geek at work with this archive. Maybe the AOL software caches recent queries anyway, I don't know, but who wouldn't worry if they see the names of various men with online searches to purchase party dresses and sexy music? Hoooo boy, they don't even realize the danger in their 0.3% they released. They are going to get sued into oblivion. Now just need some enterprising/. lawyer to start fishing for clients... ouch.
Assuming the quotation is correct, it is just long scale or what I have always thought of as the British counting system (actually it is the French long scale). A thousand million is also a milliard., 10^9 or a billion in the short scale normally used. So the above quotation is just saying the chances you really need to an honest to goodness invisibility device are 1::10^12 (a trillion to one in everyday short notation).
take a look at the cool references below, which mention milliard and billiard (related to pool?). A neat quotation next to the 1926 line in the second ref. Living in Japan it is worse, since the commonly used scale is based on 4 zeroes not 3. (though the exchange rate solves problems at the 12 zeroes mark, so 1 oku yen = approx. 1 million dollars) FYI.
> I am a rising junior in college and decided to > take out loans to cover all my costs so I could > graduate with money in the bank. My tuition bill > is minimal"
Go to a bank and get advice from a pro who can also tell what you need as a college student. If he is honest he will tell you that you took out too many loans, it is neither right nor profitable to bet the stock market against your interest rate, and you should pay back as much of the debt now as you can, leaving a margin of safety.
The point is that you are already investing the money, in yourself. There is no need to swipe that money from yourself and invest it elsewhere again, adding risk to yourself. The investment is what will allow you to spend more time studying and researching good professors than working in a part-time job for student wages, and is also a very good bet that you will make enough money in the first year or two of work after college that you can pay back all your student loans.
Another thing, if you only took loans out to cover living costs since you have a free tuition, then you do not have enough money to make it worth investing. After you subtract the interest you are not going to make more than a few percent on your money. Forget it. Since you don't have any knowledge of finances or anyone to advise you yet, I would recommend that you focus on what your absolutely necessary expenses are and how much you need to live on. Make separate accounts to help you maintain discipline for each semester, and spend your time on studies instead of slashdot. While college appears to be anamorphous free for all, the absolute top performers in each class will in fact get special opportunities, and you need to focus right now on hitting the top of the class and finding your graduation job, maybe even taking time on an internship in the summer. Slashdot is insidious like the stock market and every hour you spend on it is subtracted from your total in Nirvana.
Yes. I asked the openlaszlo project if such a thing could be done in firefox with javascript, just got silence. Flock capabilities in firefox would be good.
Thanks for your comment. Yes, of course. The point being that ordinary users don't know how to make a tar archive (also tar archived filenames can corrupt); a zip is even too hard for most. If the browser could accept a whole folder or selection of files at once and upload them in a batch, preferably resized to something useful, it would be a major change. Not kidding, I failed to explain dragging folders between windows to my sister. Most of the public do not in fact understand the metaphor of the desktop and what you ought to be able to do with it.
Give Firefox and other browsers 1) the ability to drag a number of files/folders onto a spot and facilitate transfer via method specified by the web page: one file at a time, all files in parallel up to X simultaneous uploads, or the whole shebang as a single tar file (filenames in UTF8 or MIME encoded). All those cool photo sites and people still have to upload one photo at a time, that's dumb. 2) Better support for ajax with some useful functions. a high speed xml parser, zip en/decoder, launch and manage multiple javascript threads, provide optionally encrypted local storage, network with other browsing people in realtime if user allows it, etc. Ability to JIT download and store various signed interpreters (python, perl, parrot, random gamer kernel, etc.) would be extremely neat, too. 3) Improved human-computer interaction (HCI) facility. For example there is a DOM selector somewhere in the debug menu or in the scrapbook which is a little useful for programmers, but most mortals (I'm still talking intelligent people, just not programmers) have no way to do simple things like point their finger at something on the screen to tell the computer or website to do something about it. A simple, highly useable way to point at predefined areas on the screen (in a web page and on the desktop), perhaps using a transparent overlay to help out, would be a vast improvement. None of this otaku gesture shit. Something every user can suddenly get a massive improvement out of. 4)While you're at it, support allowing individuals to specify a URI which holds persistent structured info they want to be able to get at. Like favorite links, addresses, whatever. Support a bunch of ways to get at the data including support for high speed encrypted search,retrieval,storage.There's lots of ways that Firefox could support the development of really useful services, just making it possible to do something not necessarily doing it all itself. 5)Allow a miniapp to run in the system tray and respond to events, write in javascript, or whatever. A clue could be taken from the openlaszlo/dojo work.. and note that the Flash security model is too secure while dojo.storage is looking for storage providers and Firefox needs to provide. I'm for making minimal additions that have maximum effect, no more eye candy that never gets used or brings most computers to their knees.
A marketing attack There may be a way to use M$ tactics against them. Prepare Firefox code so that it can be easily branded and customized. Make a new version for every computer manufacturer and rename versions as Explorer. Every new computer could have a version of Firefox and the manufacturer might give it priority if say it includes a free user feedback ajax app, etc. Embrace and extend? You just want to make sure Microsoft doesn't willfully throw a wrench onto every desktop making it impossible for Firefox to deliver useful improvements to the user experience.
Nobody seems to have picked up on the fact that this means we will may be able to get things like large lightweight, cheap mems arrays of mirrors powered by a watch battery. I'm looking forward to real nice looking ebooks, tiny passive image projectors, and maybe some inexpensive holography. This stuff sounds great! Only problem is now we definitely will have a spypest(TM) problem, though mostly only in dry climates I imagine (rain will absorb all the microwaves I hope).
It seems that while humans are pretty good at smelling things, though maybe not as talented or intereste in smells as say a cat or a dog, we have a limited ability to create smells.
A massively trained organic chemist, food chemist, chef, patissier, etc. can do it in a given limited field, but we have no ability to create output in the smell spectrum that is so amazingly versatile and broadband as our bodies can sense input (including not just the nose but also connected senses of taste, heat, and reactions like eye watering or itching).
If such a thing existed as a piano or a programmatic interface to a smell generator this would let people train their sense of smell to a fine degree, perhaps enough even to sense explosives, or water, or poisonous gases at low concentrations. It could be really important in space habitats, where it is likely that telltale scents might be in the air at low concentrations before full failure of a system, especially a hydroponic or recycling system.
It would also be very useful for training people in diagnosis of disease as smell is apparently a big factor there too. You might find some interesting correlations between how well people score on smell tests and how effective they are in a given field where it is important.
When I saw this headline I was thinking. While it is impossible to get every host clean, it is certainly possible for a quickly reacting organization to do the following:
1.detect malware, viruses, crackers, zombie traffic, etc. 2.define an identifying pattern and critical data segments to be destroyed 3.diffuse this info to major routers and other servers on the net around the world 4.ISPs and smart individuals can also subscribe to the data feed 5.Routers and firewalls use this feed to filter out (or rewrite with random info) dangerous packets, effectively defanging all known dangerous files or communications. 6.A common ontology and method for distributed discovery and reporting is implemented to accelerate the whole thing and federate all the antivirus companies and anti-espionage agencies to try and solve the problem transparently.
This way the infrastructure becomes first line of defense, The ISPs are the second line, Individuals' PCs and maybe firewalls in businesses/schools/dwellings are the third line. Researchers who have a reason to send dangerous things to each other can encrypt them.
I am eagerly looking forward to one of those forms about why this can't be done. It seems like the obvious answer to these totally disorganized, unfederated Internet storm centers and virus advisory sites.
Whatever zombie communication and malware is left on the net will then likely be focused near where it was injected, so if nothing else a filter on outgoing data could possibly even detect the workstation from which it was injected in the first place! (though this is probably a wifi hotspot anyway.)
Maybe the government is doing a little of this already? Too much to hope for, I expect they are more interested in reading people's email and using malware to engineer entry points for themselves, than to actually defang the wild. But it's a thought.
I was reading this and wondering how important MS is to the economy and what if this was a real war like the War on Terrorism, or maybe realer than that one. What if the next commandeered plane or North Korean missile hits Redmond and none of the other expected(?) targets. Is there a backup plan? Will we enter a great depression? Will linux people be blamed? Will it be turned lose and opened up so every one who can help maintain it does? etc. About that map by the way, it stars out cool with the failed FUD/SCO assaults but after a while it kinda sucks. More like there are many planes that are separate battlefields which intersect or coexist for a time. Might be better rendered as a little animated movie?
My normal is your wierd I guess. I live in Japan and have personal experience with the laws I am mentioning, which were only instated this year. I am not aware they were based on British law, though it would be interesting if they are. The basic corporation law also was drastically reformed this year so every company has been scrambling to deal with all these changes. Which has nothing to do with security, NTT (the old phone monopoly) announced today they lost IIRC 81,000 IDs in a cracker attack on their e-money certificates.. they lost US$30K and stand to lose another $400K before all is done.
Slashdot Mirror
Something like lexis/nexis is fine but has anybody put online the microfiche of old newspapers that are usually available free in libraries? It would seem to be eminently useful, perhaps not to a certain number of budgeted scholars but that's what people used. I want Google to make money but I also am severely frustrated when an abstracts database (usually science news, IIRC acm, etc.) wants me to pay money for the article. I propose to google that they make different levels of access at different rates so that you can pay a stellar (maybe not so stellar?) rate for ultimate access, whereas free will still give you access to things that usually are free (I'm thinking of the system in Heinlein's Friday). They should start a reference library, or a service to be used in libraries which the libraries can pay for or individuals/companies can also purchase.
Surfed through the edit wars pages and that was interesting though I didn't find the one on chips. It seems that a wiki is by design vulnerable to 1) edit wars and 2) wasting of critical resources, namely the time of authors and administrators, and the perceived reliability of the wiki, by such wars.
Being a wiki admin I suppose means you are asking for it and shouldn't be surprised at having to arbitrate such battles, but unless the number of admins increases at the same rate as the wiki's articles and readers this is a losing battle. It seems that many of these may be resolved by choosing least common denominator, ignoring the battle and maybe relying on the wiki's search engine a bit more to show related articles.
How about creating a forking wiki? I am not aware such a thing exists yet. Based on the recognition that unlike a static encyclopedia with a static board of editors and publication date, the wikipedia and other wikis are organic entities and involve people with divergent and yet possibly valid opinions. For example see the wars on UK/US terms, historical interpretation (not revisionism), etc. While the U.S. Wikipedia seems quite cool-headed I don't think that is guaranteed for other languages either.
So a forking wikipedia would allow each main article to have links to different versions if there is more than one valid one, basically allowing readers to see both sides of the topic. It would be up to an admin to decide on whether a view is valid enough, since it seems that only a small percentage of pages would have more than one view. You would have to ensure somehow that holders of one view do not edit the other in a prolonged war by locking it.
This sort of functionality might be useful in cases such as description of historical persons and events (e.g. battles), and possibly unpopular but official views held by contemporary governments about history, geography, etc.
Were they fired because their download of a torrent included providing pieces of the torrent to others in the swarm? Aside from that they were not acting maliciously and had a reasonable interest in getting an idea of what they were going to be selling. Or is getting a sneak peak at their own product illegal? I don't get it. Were they supposed to buy it in-house instead? Where is the ethical problem? Except for the mechanics of the download, which suggest they added an infinitesimal amount of bandwidth to an existing swarm, why are they feeling guilty and Apple calling them guilty? Considering iTunes is a major Apple service I would actually like to have sales people be aware of what is on BitTorrent and suggest adding more content to their service. I would pay money for the BBC's Doctor Who if iTunes let me download it quickly through them. Considering I am in the market for a new Mac in the next 2 months I am curious about this and not happy with Apple's treatment of people. I wonder if the people who didn't come forth are glad, or are waiting for the other shoe (lawsuit) to drop.
Interesting, I also do professional translation on the side (Japanese to English) and often clients demand that I "fix" it into broken English. I wonder if their basis for judgement is MS Word and if so how much MS is responsible for this lost time. Do you have a sample sentence?
Joke, sorry I meant dark matter is supposedly surrounding us here too.. could be wrong.
It *is* in the lab!
Skipping for the moment implications of inadequacy on the part of both MS and this scientist, clearly there is a problem when people base their work on expectations of intellectual integrity on the part of corporate IT products like this, especially those not easily accessible by reviewers. There is a Japanese character dictionary built into Windows too but I have no idea how a reviewer could grade it against commonly used print versions.
Besides, geology seems to be one of the most highly leveraged sciences in planetary studies, if you consider most of what the Mars robots were doing was geology. For a planetary scientists to miss this is bizarre.
I was involved in a startup called V-Sync Technologies that made a kiosk to download music over fiber and write it onto a minidisc. The system was called Music POD (Press On Demand) and came long before the iPod (though it would be the perfect way to buy music for the iPod if Apple figured it out). The company is still active as far as I know.
I just realized that typewriters used to have a real physical toggle key that could be depressed for caps lock and then undepressed. Now they are just normal keys. However, note that it is an unimportant key so that if your left hand strays too far left, it will not create extraneous output.
Also I would like to state that I found a good use for the Caps Lock key. I wrote a program called kami-shibai (Japanese for an old fashioned manual slide show) for an artist. One program would check a POP3 mailbox for incoming email, and attached photos would be stored in a folder. Another program would look for new arriving photos and insert them into a running slideshow (windows, perl gui app). I used different programs because I wanted to be able to easily stop and restart the network side so as not to interfere with the artist's own email program when it was being used.
Because there was a slideshow player program running in the foreground, if you told the slideshow player to quit you would quit the slideshow but not the control program, and you would get an ugly error or worse. However, by simply, elegantly, and mysteriously clicking the Caps Lock key, the control program would notice your intent and gracefully close everything down.
It seems to me that Caps Lock is far more useful than most people think and is definitely an unsung hero! In fact it seems that you could signal a whole host of simultaneous processes at once with a single key that can be toggled into a state that can be interrogated at any time, regardless of input sequences.
You could use the three available toggles to specify up to 8 different states under which a program is to be run, without any overt GUI interaction, which might be useful to evade spyware. One such key might be useful to switch a keyboard map too; I used to use a BlackBox software widget to go between French and English keyboards but now that we are going to web 2.0 we need a cross platform solution.
I definitely think it would be useful to increase the uses of Caps Lock and promote the inclusion of more wild keys. Maybe adding thumbwheels (yeah Sony's Vaio had it too, it was cool) to match Irix's window scaling widgets. Now maybe someone can explain the Pause/Break key to me..
Thanks for your note, and sorry for my belated reply.
Yes, you may be right. The artist was using StudioMAX software and was interested in making earthquake-like sounds based on the data but I do not have data to compare; obviously the two parties had differing goals but if the end user is a human the end results might be closer than one would expect. It would be interesting to see though.
And incidentally DANTE seems oblivious that the Dante project by NASA was a multilegged robot descending by rope into a volcanic crater.
I don't mean to overshadow their scientific achievements but lack of memory by networked prdroids bugs me.
> Are search engines now the new form of "Eliza"?
Yes, I think you are right. It seems to be different from the "uncanny valley", a psychological phenomenon in which robots seem friendly up to the point where they are nearly but not quite human, which is when they seem really creepy. Or maybe we are not at that point yet. For whatever reason, search engines and eliza seem to provide people who need to talk an outlet. But it is dangerous if they think they are talking to a person and nobody in fact listens to their requests for help.
I think search engines should maybe put a note on them saying no human is listening, or just flag certain statistically highly likely phrases for a human to check, just in case it could stop a suicide or murder. Tough call.
This is very scary data, though also chock full of interesting info, interesting taken in many different ways. It was easy to find a number of people referencing my small home town of about 20,000 people. I shiver to imagine say a wife using AOL at home and her geek husband searching this stuff at work (not my problem).
Suffice it to say, the data is FULL of personally identifying information. AOL is not telling the truth. Heck, Google even gives you an address if you give it a phone number, people are used to typing people's names into the search box. And if you search for a given ID you can follow their trains of thought over time and it can be shattering; everyone looks for their own family online.. I even found an unknown relative that way once. AOL should hire some clueful people and get them into the loop, but it's too late for some people.
Incidentally, I found one of the most interesting words is "should". That, and "cocktail dresses" but I'm not going to get into that one. You see it turns out that not only do people sometimes unintentionally paste info from mail or webpages into the search field, they also ask questions that normally they might just write on paper and throw in the trash, or give up worrying about. So what AOL has done is closer to taping a confessional, what someone might ask of God or their doctor, or just worry endlessly about, and release it! What infants! It seems to say something about why doctors and priests have a professional code and know how to keep things private. Here are some search phrases, I'm not putting any in that have a person's name but you can probably get the idea from this.
what the fuck should i name my fetus
my nose is bleeding from cocaine what should i do
baby has something stuck in his foot what should i do
my mom is a hooker what should i do
how to tell a wife her husband is having an affair with you
caught my wife cheating
my wife cheated on me with a guy with a huge cock now what
spy on the wife
get revenge from a wife cheater
catch your wife having an affair
my cheating wife
got caught cheating on my wife and now she trying to take my kids away
my wife and kids are living with an ex con
very sexy baby nice pics i wanna c more lol u should take a look at my pic s tell me what ya think if u wanna chat my yahoo is lets get it mane and my aim is mhsplaya8
should a spouse stay married to a sex addict
should i let my son inlaw fuck me
i should have used a condom
dude read this its reallllly weird body hi. my name is kimi. it's too late now. you shouldn't have opened this bulletin but since you did you will die tonight if you dont keep reading. well i'm 19. i don't have eye lashes and i dont have a nose. pr
what should i do about heart palpitations after smoking crack
should a man go to a strip club the girlfriend is upset
should i see a married man
should i tell the other man's wife
should i confront my wife's adultery partner
mom showed me how to masterbate
why my girlfriend should give me head
should i buy extended warranty on my laptop
an employee jokes all day long what should i do
should parents let their children become stars
l want some pill to dead
l want to kill myself pill sleep
i want to kill myself
should i kill myself
i need someone to help me before i kill myself
help no one loves me i want to kill myself
best way to kill myself
i want to kill myself indiana hotline
god please my heart hurts help
l need to talk with a fbi
should informants be identified
Now maybe people will understand what AOL has done.
I am posting this because:
This is really chilling. My Mom uses AOL so of course I picked up a copy of the archive. I just searched for a few terms in one of the ten files it contains. grepped the name of my small home town (population 10-20 thousand) which has grown more affluent in recent years. I found two users who did extensive searches, found a number of full names of individuals, hotel names, domain names, personal searches including phrases you might not want your significant other to see, searches including the full name, position and company of an individual, etc. I found the names of nearby schools and my supermarket. Thank God I didn't see my mother's name in it but on the other hand there are 9 files left to go.. and I was going to post some interesting phrases but then I realized that then anybody could see the name of my town. I don't see how you could defend yourself against this kind of thing, someone else's search could end up as an innuendo and picture this scenario: wife uses AOL at home, husband is geek at work with this archive. Maybe the AOL software caches recent queries anyway, I don't know, but who wouldn't worry if they see the names of various men with online searches to purchase party dresses and sexy music? Hoooo boy, they don't even realize the danger in their 0.3% they released. They are going to get sued into oblivion. Now just need some enterprising /. lawyer to start fishing for clients... ouch.
take a look at the cool references below, which mention milliard and billiard (related to pool?). A neat quotation next to the 1926 line in the second ref. Living in Japan it is worse, since the commonly used scale is based on 4 zeroes not 3. (though the exchange rate solves problems at the 12 zeroes mark, so 1 oku yen = approx. 1 million dollars) FYI.
Wikipedia refs: Milliard, Long and short scales
> I am a rising junior in college and decided to
> take out loans to cover all my costs so I could
> graduate with money in the bank. My tuition bill
> is minimal"
Go to a bank and get advice from a pro who can also tell what you need as a college student. If he is honest he will tell you that you took out too many loans, it is neither right nor profitable to bet the stock market against your interest rate, and you should pay back as much of the debt now as you can, leaving a margin of safety.
The point is that you are already investing the money, in yourself. There is no need to swipe that money from yourself and invest it elsewhere again, adding risk to yourself. The investment is what will allow you to spend more time studying and researching good professors than working in a part-time job for student wages, and is also a very good bet that you will make enough money in the first year or two of work after college that you can pay back all your student loans.
Another thing, if you only took loans out to cover living costs since you have a free tuition, then you do not have enough money to make it worth investing. After you subtract the interest you are not going to make more than a few percent on your money. Forget it. Since you don't have any knowledge of finances or anyone to advise you yet, I would recommend that you focus on what your absolutely necessary expenses are and how much you need to live on. Make separate accounts to help you maintain discipline for each semester, and spend your time on studies instead of slashdot. While college appears to be anamorphous free for all, the absolute top performers in each class will in fact get special opportunities, and you need to focus right now on hitting the top of the class and finding your graduation job, maybe even taking time on an internship in the summer. Slashdot is insidious like the stock market and every hour you spend on it is subtracted from your total in Nirvana.
Yes. I asked the openlaszlo project if such a thing could be done in firefox with javascript, just got silence. Flock capabilities in firefox would be good.
Thanks for your comment. Yes, of course. The point being that ordinary users don't know how to make a tar archive (also tar archived filenames can corrupt); a zip is even too hard for most. If the browser could accept a whole folder or selection of files at once and upload them in a batch, preferably resized to something useful, it would be a major change. Not kidding, I failed to explain dragging folders between windows to my sister. Most of the public do not in fact understand the metaphor of the desktop and what you ought to be able to do with it.
New functionality
Give Firefox and other browsers
1) the ability to drag a number of files/folders onto a spot and facilitate transfer via method specified by the web page: one file at a time, all files in parallel up to X simultaneous uploads, or the whole shebang as a single tar file (filenames in UTF8 or MIME encoded). All those cool photo sites and people still have to upload one photo at a time, that's dumb.
2) Better support for ajax with some useful functions. a high speed xml parser, zip en/decoder, launch and manage multiple javascript threads, provide optionally encrypted local storage, network with other browsing people in realtime if user allows it, etc. Ability to JIT download and store various signed interpreters (python, perl, parrot, random gamer kernel, etc.) would be extremely neat, too.
3) Improved human-computer interaction (HCI) facility. For example there is a DOM selector somewhere in the debug menu or in the scrapbook which is a little useful for programmers, but most mortals (I'm still talking intelligent people, just not programmers) have no way to do simple things like point their finger at something on the screen to tell the computer or website to do something about it. A simple, highly useable way to point at predefined areas on the screen (in a web page and on the desktop), perhaps using a transparent overlay to help out, would be a vast improvement. None of this otaku gesture shit. Something every user can suddenly get a massive improvement out of.
4)While you're at it, support allowing individuals to specify a URI which holds persistent structured info they want to be able to get at. Like favorite links, addresses, whatever. Support a bunch of ways to get at the data including support for high speed encrypted search,retrieval,storage.There's lots of ways that Firefox could support the development of really useful services, just making it possible to do something not necessarily doing it all itself.
5)Allow a miniapp to run in the system tray and respond to events, write in javascript, or whatever. A clue could be taken from the openlaszlo/dojo work.. and note that the Flash security model is too secure while dojo.storage is looking for storage providers and Firefox needs to provide. I'm for making minimal additions that have maximum effect, no more eye candy that never gets used or brings most computers to their knees.
A marketing attack
There may be a way to use M$ tactics against them. Prepare Firefox code so that it can be easily branded and customized. Make a new version for every computer manufacturer and rename versions as Explorer. Every new computer could have a version of Firefox and the manufacturer might give it priority if say it includes a free user feedback ajax app, etc. Embrace and extend? You just want to make sure Microsoft doesn't willfully throw a wrench onto every desktop making it impossible for Firefox to deliver useful improvements to the user experience.
microsoft automotive. It's not going to be running win xp.
Nobody seems to have picked up on the fact that this means we will may be able to get things like large lightweight, cheap mems arrays of mirrors powered by a watch battery. I'm looking forward to real nice looking ebooks, tiny passive image projectors, and maybe some inexpensive holography. This stuff sounds great! Only problem is now we definitely will have a spypest(TM) problem, though mostly only in dry climates I imagine (rain will absorb all the microwaves I hope).
It seems that while humans are pretty good at smelling things, though maybe not as talented or intereste in smells as say a cat or a dog, we have a limited ability to create smells.
A massively trained organic chemist, food chemist, chef, patissier, etc. can do it in a given limited field, but we have no ability to create output in the smell spectrum that is so amazingly versatile and broadband as our bodies can sense input (including not just the nose but also connected senses of taste, heat, and reactions like eye watering or itching).
If such a thing existed as a piano or a programmatic interface to a smell generator this would let people train their sense of smell to a fine degree, perhaps enough even to sense explosives, or water, or poisonous gases at low concentrations. It could be really important in space habitats, where it is likely that telltale scents might be in the air at low concentrations before full failure of a system, especially a hydroponic or recycling system.
It would also be very useful for training people in diagnosis of disease as smell is apparently a big factor there too. You might find some interesting correlations between how well people score on smell tests and how effective they are in a given field where it is important.
When I saw this headline I was thinking. While it is impossible to get every host clean, it is certainly possible for a quickly reacting organization to do the following:
1.detect malware, viruses, crackers, zombie traffic, etc.
2.define an identifying pattern and critical data segments to be destroyed
3.diffuse this info to major routers and other servers on the net around the world
4.ISPs and smart individuals can also subscribe to the data feed
5.Routers and firewalls use this feed to filter out (or rewrite with random info) dangerous packets, effectively defanging all known dangerous files or communications.
6.A common ontology and method for distributed discovery and reporting is implemented to accelerate the whole thing and federate all the antivirus companies and anti-espionage agencies to try and solve the problem transparently.
This way the infrastructure becomes first line of defense,
The ISPs are the second line,
Individuals' PCs and maybe firewalls in businesses/schools/dwellings are the third line.
Researchers who have a reason to send dangerous things to each other can encrypt them.
I am eagerly looking forward to one of those forms about why this can't be done. It seems like the obvious answer to these totally disorganized, unfederated Internet storm centers and virus advisory sites.
Whatever zombie communication and malware is left on the net will then likely be focused near where it was injected, so if nothing else a filter on outgoing data could possibly even detect the workstation from which it was injected in the first place! (though this is probably a wifi hotspot anyway.)
Maybe the government is doing a little of this already? Too much to hope for, I expect they are more interested in reading people's email and using malware to engineer entry points for themselves, than to actually defang the wild. But it's a thought.
I was reading this and wondering how important MS is to the economy and what if this was a real war like the War on Terrorism, or maybe realer than that one. What if the next commandeered plane or North Korean missile hits Redmond and none of the other expected(?) targets. Is there a backup plan? Will we enter a great depression? Will linux people be blamed? Will it be turned lose and opened up so every one who can help maintain it does? etc. About that map by the way, it stars out cool with the failed FUD/SCO assaults but after a while it kinda sucks. More like there are many planes that are separate battlefields which intersect or coexist for a time. Might be better rendered as a little animated movie?
My normal is your wierd I guess. I live in Japan and have personal experience with the laws I am mentioning, which were only instated this year. I am not aware they were based on British law, though it would be interesting if they are. The basic corporation law also was drastically reformed this year so every company has been scrambling to deal with all these changes. Which has nothing to do with security, NTT (the old phone monopoly) announced today they lost IIRC 81,000 IDs in a cracker attack on their e-money certificates.. they lost US$30K and stand to lose another $400K before all is done.