The limit was bumped up a couple months ago, I don't remember exactly when. (And if abuse gets worse, of course, we'll take it back down... but hopefully in 2004 we're no longer on the bleeding edge and client application authors will get more friendly...)
If you'd like me to check it out, I will. I've set up a Firefox live bookmark for myself and I'll check the logs for my own accesses and see what happens. If you do the same and get banned, go ahead and email me directly -- as soon as possible so our logs don't roll over -- and I'll take a look.
Is there a reason Slashdot doesn't cache better? I'd think that'd save a lot of bandwidth.
Not really. Our cache hit rate would be about zero. We update the homepage about once a minute, and the same goes for any page that any reader would be likely to reload within a reasonable time.
Slashdot blocks your IP from accessing RSS if you access our site more than fifty times in one hour. I think that's reasonable, don't you? Especially since our FAQ tells you to request a feed only twice an hour.
Every complaint about this that I've investigated has turned out to be either a broken RSS reader or an IP that's proxying a ton of traffic (which we usually do make an exception for).
Oh, and if you want to read sectional stories in RSS, then:
edit your homepage to include sectional stories you like (and exclude those you don't),
then reload the homepage and copy that "rss" link at the very bottom of the page. It will be customized to your exact specs!
Slashdot's RSS traffic, like Boing Boing's, is huge, and blocking broken readers has saved us a ton of bandwidth, which of course means money. We were one of the first sites to do this but (as this story suggests) you'll see a lot more sites doing it in the future. I think our policy is fair.
I just played "Attack!" the other day for the first time, with a friend who -- like me -- finds Risk too easy and Axis and Allies too tedious. I like the game and think we'll enjoy playing it more. The combat rules are a bit like Axis and Allies, but the rules for conducting turns are more open and flexible, placing and moving units requires less planning ahead, and naval control is much simplified. So the game goes a lot faster. The object is global conquest, and it's more pure-strategy like Risk in that you can pick your starting locations. I have the feeling it'd be best with 3-4 players.
The one odd thing is that the basic game of "Attack!", at $30 retail, only has the Western hemisphere and Europe and Africa; if you want to carry your world war over into Asia (and make the game fun for more players, I assume) you need the expansion which is another $30 retail.
Pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the "high" from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erototoxins -- mind-altering drugs produced by the viewer's own brain.
How does this 'brain sabotage' occur? Brain scientists tell us that "in 3/10 of a second a visual image passes from the eye through the brain, and whether or not one wants to, the brain is structurally changed and memories are created - we literally 'grow new brain' with each visual experience."
[...] Any highly excitatory stimuli (whether sexually explicit sex education or X-Rated films) say neurologists, "which lasts half a second within five to ten minutes has produced a structural change that is in some ways as profound as the structural changes one sees in [brain] damage...[and] can...leave a trace that will last for years."
Pornography psychopharmacologically imprints young brains - thereby invalidating notions of informed consent. [...]
A basic science research team employing a cautiously protective methodology should study erototoxins and the brain/body.
This is mumbo-jumbo as far as I can tell. Note how quickly Dr. Reisman -- her Ph.D. is in Communications, and she has no education in medicine -- goes from coining a brand new word to describe something she cannot prove exists ("what I dub erototoxins") to using that word as if the substance is real ("study erototoxins"). Along the way she uses partial quotes out of context, and prepends her views on pornography to a quote that matter-of-factly describes an obvious fact about the brain.
And if you missed it -- yes -- she is railing against "sexually explicit sex education." She is saying that sex ed causes brain damage.
That last link, http://poynterextra.org/epic/, is really interesting. But the key technological turning point, where Google comes up with a magic algorithm to combine and rewrite multiple news stories to generate a customized, nuanced, original news story for each reader, is not grounded in reality.
Rewriting English is similar to summarizing it. Using clever tricks, computers are about as good at writing a précis of a block of text as a dull 3rd grader -- every such summary lacks nuance, because the computer that generated it lacks understanding. All there is, is tricks. So the idea that an algorithm can be taught not only to understand the meaning of news stories that were written by humans, but then to rewrite them adaptively, is pure science fiction.
My favorite example of this is Cyc, a project to feed into a database all the propositions which some believe constitute "common sense." For example, Cyc knows that dogs and cats are mammals, and that they are common pets, so one could tell it "I have a mammal as a pet," and it could deduce that I have a dog or a cat or maybe something else. In the early 1990s, when the project was getting started, its researchers believed that in about five years, it would be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it well enough to assimilate into its database. At that point, of course, it would start absorbing all the knowledge in the world until it became the smartest encyclopedia there was.
And then in the last 1990s, its researchers were again interviewed, and again they said that it would soon be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it. When? In about five years. For any time T, strong AI is always about five years away.
So I'm amused that the strong AI postulated in that excellent Flash animation, the key which allows "big media" to die off because computers will do custom rewrites of amateur news dispatches and form newsfeeds of their own, comes to pass in... about five years. I don't think the New York Times has much to worry about.
Total disk space in use among all the computers in the house is about 350 GB. I want centralized backup without having to worry about whether I have enough space. Granted, about 100 GB of that is existing backups, 50 GB is music that needs to be backed-up rarely, and another 100 GB is stuff I don't care whether it survives a disk crash or not, but that's still 100 GB I want periodic backups of.
And being able to rip our DVD collection, to pick a movie without having to get off the couch and manipulate plastic objects, is strangely compelling.
Later, I bought a second series 1 as a gift for a friend.
Then, I upgraded the series 1 to a series 2 in 2003. The upgrade means I basically bought a new series 2 at a slight discount, and then transferred the lifetime subscription from the first box. The original series 1 is on a shelf in the basement now.
The hard drive on the series 2 is going bad and I don't feel like going through the hassle of replacing it. My plan is to put a terabyte file server in the basement sometime next year, for backup and general house data storage. By then a front-end MythTV box with a pair of good video import cards should be at a nice price point -- or at least, nice enough that I can justify spending more than I would on a comparable black-box, welded-shut, everything-encrypted, ripping-verboten, no-edit-points, hands-off TiVo.
The remote will be the thing I miss the most... TiVo's remote is awesome.
Huh, for some reason I always thought logical positivism arose in the late 1800s. My mistake.
Logical positivism seems to me not useful for any practical purpose. I can't think of any observational statement that is truly a priori, excluding contrived philosophical examples. Ever since Gödel, I think the world has moved away from philosophies that think they can start with cogito ergo sum and derive every crumb of human knowledge using pure logic. Well, except for Ayn Rand, who didn't get the memo.
Oh, and specifically regarding CNN, a quick Google search turns up nine transcripts where exactly the phrase you claim CNN will "never use" is used specifically to describe Moveon.org. The phrase "liberal group" is used all the time on CNN.
Liberals are used to CNN and the mainstream media where journalists label others as "conservative" but never use the word "liberal." I've never heard them say "liberal group MoveOn.org" but I've heard them say "conservative right-wing group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth."
AP wire, Nov. 2, 2004: "Minnesota Republicans failed Tuesday in a bid to push the liberal group MoveOn.org away from polling places..."
ABC News, Oct. 18, 2004: "Hlinko is also one of the people behind the liberal group MoveOn.org..."
San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 2004: "The liberal group MoveOn.org is airing an ad..."
New York Times, August 18, 2004: "Senator John Kerry denounced an advertisement by the liberal group MoveOn.org..."
Washington Post, August 18, 2004: "...the spot being aired by the liberal group MoveOn.org."
New York Daily News, August 17, 2004: "The liberal group MoveOn.org, meanwhile, airs a new ad today..."
USA Today, August 4, 2004: "Members of the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accuse Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry of lying about his Vietnam War record. The ad, called 'any questions' is the toughest political ad since an anti-Bush spot called 'Fire Rumsfeld' (showing a hooded Statue of Liberty to remind voters of how U.S. soldiers had abused prisoners in Iraq) was aired by the liberal group MoveOn.org in late May."
"The scientist's job is to discover *FACTS* about the natural world, not truth. There's a difference. Interpreting those facts may give you some insight into an underlying truth, but that requires a human insight, something beyond the application of the scientific method to an investigation."
That is 100% wrong. The scientist's job is to learn facts, propose hypotheses, test the hypotheses against the facts, then return to step 1 and repeat. The theories that fall out of the tested hypotheses, and thus the advancement of human knowledge, are the product of the scientific method. That's what doing science is all about.
Human insight is an absolute requirement for the scientific method; how else could our sphere of knowledge be expanded? It is obviously necessary for the proposing of hypotheses, but it also happens to be a key element both in discovering facts in the first place, and in testing hypotheses. There's a reason science isn't done by robots.
I used the term "truth" loosely in my writeup for this story. If you want to quibble and say science is limited to proposing and testing theories or models, or come up with some other strict definition of science, that's fine. But to say science begins and ends with discovering facts, and requires no human insight, is simply wrong.
You may want to read the now-discredited logical positivists of the 19th century, and then the much more enjoyable Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Fun stuff.
I have a preference for Slash, but then I'm kinda biased, I help write it.
Slash's main advantage is its security. There may be security bugs in Slash, but the last one we found in a major release was over two years ago. Of course the last major release we had was three years ago, so maybe that's not saying much. Seriously, we're good about security: we know where the pitfalls are and we write code with a careful eye for them.
Slash's second advantage is speed (we cache aggressively, write.shtml files, and are integrated with MySQL replication and memcached). It's optimized for heavy discussion if you're expecting that, including lots of tools to fend off hostile users, but it works OK for just posting periodic stories. Slash's major disadvantage is that you (effectively) need root to install it, and it's a real pain to customize its look and feel (mostly because it's so powerfully configurable; we hope to make customization easier in the months to come).
(Interestingly, Slash fell prey to a similar attack almost a year ago; our code, however, was not trojaned.)
If you're just looking for software to post entries to a blog or something, though, you should probably look elsewhere:)
Considering NewsForge and Slashdot run on Slash, an open-source alternative to the open-source product which was trojaned, shouldn't your conspiracy theory be working the other way?
Right, good analysis. What does it mean to say the human "won" when, on balance, his submitted strategies did worse than the median? If there were an entry fee and the pot split proportional to final score, he'd be out of a lot of money. So another way of looking at this is that the human took advantage of an artificially-constructed winning condition.
In the particular case I ran, it didn't make any difference. Now, though, I've added errors to what each agent tries to play. Tit-For-Tat responds to those errors and, playing against another Tit-For-Tat, quickly plunks down to (say) 90% cooperation plus or minus error, and random-walks around from there. "Always cooperate," though, sticks at 100% plus or minus error, so it does a little better.
If you'd like to try your hand at it, please feel free to email me the code any program you'd like to try. (Or just describe to me the strategy you want to take and I can probably write code for it.)
I've written perl scripts to run Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments on my website (the perl source code for all the species in the last run is on that page) and new submissions for the next tournament are welcome. Since my tournament does Darwinian selection on every agent that plays in it -- agents which don't earn points eventually die off, those which earn a lot of points reproduce -- self-sacrificing pairs of strategies won't do very well.
I haven't yet written code which can trickle in new members over time, but that really wouldn't be very hard to add (I could probably set it up in an hour if you are really interested:)
It's pretty trivial that if two or more Dilemma agents are able to recognize each other, they have an advantage over those which cannot. I've got a
Prisoner's Dilemma simulation
running on my website -- I wrote some code for it over the summer and have been playing around with it on and off.
Once I experimented with letting the agents recognize which "species" they were in and which "species" their opponent was. The runaway winner, of course, was the one which always cooperated with itself, and was less nice to every other species. (In my version, "less nice" meant playing Tit-For-Tat, but the idea's the same.)
Being able to do this is like having the teacher's edition. If recognizing which species other agents belong to is allowed, that's a pretty trivial strategy. It's not called cooperation. It's called xenophobia, or to put it into the most familiar anthropomorphization, racism.
(The life lesson, if I may go out on a limb, is that in an environment where some recognize a quality called "race" and discriminate based on it, being unable to see that quality is a liability. Being truly color-blind means you are unable to recognize not only race but racism, which means you will be taken advantage of.)
When I ran my first tournament and got some interesting results based on this, I realized that knowledge of what "species" an agent belongs to is too powerful, it throws a monkey wrench into the works. So I scrapped it and moved on to stuff I found more interesting.
But the winner of this PD tournament was even craftier; he submitted a ton of entries, all of which were xenophobic in this way, except that they all recognized one "species" as the top dog. The other "species" essentially committed suicide to give the highest score to the top dog. That wouldn't have worked in my tournament, since they literally would have committed suicide (my agents starve to death if they don't score high enough) and that would have shaped the resulting environment. Every tournament is artificial in some way, and the human submitting entries to this one was clever enough to take advantage of these particular artificialities.
Since it's now been shown that inter-agent communication is possible, that's going to be fair game for every tournament from now on. The next step is going to be designing tournaments to work with this trick, not against it. As I wrote to this tournament's organizers:
Since that's such a powerful strategy, I think the next step in PD
tournaments is not to try to overcome it, but to embrace it: allow
agents to communicate, not just with their own species, but with
whoever they're playing against. My guess is that mere xenophobia
would be eclipsed by the much more powerful strategy of joining the
ongoing discussion about which agents can and can't be trusted.
That's the next big feature I want to try.
Re:List of this groups backers. MAJOR GOP SUPPORTE
on
Disenfranchised In Nevada
·
· Score: 4, Informative
No, that's "America Votes." The Republican-headed effort to register Republicans and disenfranchise Democrats is called Project America Votes. The linked news story was confused, and you are confused, because the GOP-headed organization was misrepresenting itself as a nationally-known, reputable voter registration organization. Needless to say, the organization in question is not too happy about it, and is "in the process of pursuing all of [its] legal options."
Just when you thought the story couldn't get any scummier...
Slashdot Mirror
Argh! Sorry, I just described a subscriber-only feature. My bad. Never mind.
If you'd like me to check it out, I will. I've set up a Firefox live bookmark for myself and I'll check the logs for my own accesses and see what happens. If you do the same and get banned, go ahead and email me directly -- as soon as possible so our logs don't roll over -- and I'll take a look.
Not really. Our cache hit rate would be about zero. We update the homepage about once a minute, and the same goes for any page that any reader would be likely to reload within a reasonable time.
Your number is a bit off... facts here...
Of course we blocked your IP when you hammered our server. And we'll do it again. Duh. We monitor abuse on the whole site, not just RSS.
Every complaint about this that I've investigated has turned out to be either a broken RSS reader or an IP that's proxying a ton of traffic (which we usually do make an exception for).
Oh, and if you want to read sectional stories in RSS, then:
Slashdot's RSS traffic, like Boing Boing's, is huge, and blocking broken readers has saved us a ton of bandwidth, which of course means money. We were one of the first sites to do this but (as this story suggests) you'll see a lot more sites doing it in the future. I think our policy is fair.
I'm gonna guess the truck burned 30 g of fuel driving those 2 km. What do I win? :)
The one odd thing is that the basic game of "Attack!", at $30 retail, only has the Western hemisphere and Europe and Africa; if you want to carry your world war over into Asia (and make the game fun for more players, I assume) you need the expansion which is another $30 retail.
This is mumbo-jumbo as far as I can tell. Note how quickly Dr. Reisman -- her Ph.D. is in Communications, and she has no education in medicine -- goes from coining a brand new word to describe something she cannot prove exists ("what I dub erototoxins") to using that word as if the substance is real ("study erototoxins"). Along the way she uses partial quotes out of context, and prepends her views on pornography to a quote that matter-of-factly describes an obvious fact about the brain.
And if you missed it -- yes -- she is railing against "sexually explicit sex education." She is saying that sex ed causes brain damage.
This is the same woman who thinks the Catholic Church should sue because priests molested children.
Rewriting English is similar to summarizing it. Using clever tricks, computers are about as good at writing a précis of a block of text as a dull 3rd grader -- every such summary lacks nuance, because the computer that generated it lacks understanding. All there is, is tricks. So the idea that an algorithm can be taught not only to understand the meaning of news stories that were written by humans, but then to rewrite them adaptively, is pure science fiction.
My favorite example of this is Cyc, a project to feed into a database all the propositions which some believe constitute "common sense." For example, Cyc knows that dogs and cats are mammals, and that they are common pets, so one could tell it "I have a mammal as a pet," and it could deduce that I have a dog or a cat or maybe something else. In the early 1990s, when the project was getting started, its researchers believed that in about five years, it would be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it well enough to assimilate into its database. At that point, of course, it would start absorbing all the knowledge in the world until it became the smartest encyclopedia there was.
And then in the last 1990s, its researchers were again interviewed, and again they said that it would soon be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it. When? In about five years. For any time T, strong AI is always about five years away.
So I'm amused that the strong AI postulated in that excellent Flash animation, the key which allows "big media" to die off because computers will do custom rewrites of amateur news dispatches and form newsfeeds of their own, comes to pass in... about five years. I don't think the New York Times has much to worry about.
And being able to rip our DVD collection, to pick a movie without having to get off the couch and manipulate plastic objects, is strangely compelling.
If you point out a factual error, I will be happy to correct it.
Later, I bought a second series 1 as a gift for a friend.
Then, I upgraded the series 1 to a series 2 in 2003. The upgrade means I basically bought a new series 2 at a slight discount, and then transferred the lifetime subscription from the first box. The original series 1 is on a shelf in the basement now.
The hard drive on the series 2 is going bad and I don't feel like going through the hassle of replacing it. My plan is to put a terabyte file server in the basement sometime next year, for backup and general house data storage. By then a front-end MythTV box with a pair of good video import cards should be at a nice price point -- or at least, nice enough that I can justify spending more than I would on a comparable black-box, welded-shut, everything-encrypted, ripping-verboten, no-edit-points, hands-off TiVo.
The remote will be the thing I miss the most... TiVo's remote is awesome.
Logical positivism seems to me not useful for any practical purpose. I can't think of any observational statement that is truly a priori, excluding contrived philosophical examples. Ever since Gödel, I think the world has moved away from philosophies that think they can start with cogito ergo sum and derive every crumb of human knowledge using pure logic. Well, except for Ayn Rand, who didn't get the memo.
Oh, and specifically regarding CNN, a quick Google search turns up nine transcripts where exactly the phrase you claim CNN will "never use" is used specifically to describe Moveon.org. The phrase "liberal group" is used all the time on CNN.
AP wire, Nov. 2, 2004: "Minnesota Republicans failed Tuesday in a bid to push the liberal group MoveOn.org away from polling places..."
ABC News, Oct. 18, 2004: "Hlinko is also one of the people behind the liberal group MoveOn.org..."
San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 2004: "The liberal group MoveOn.org is airing an ad..."
New York Times, August 18, 2004: "Senator John Kerry denounced an advertisement by the liberal group MoveOn.org..."
Washington Post, August 18, 2004: "...the spot being aired by the liberal group MoveOn.org."
New York Daily News, August 17, 2004: "The liberal group MoveOn.org, meanwhile, airs a new ad today..."
USA Today, August 4, 2004: "Members of the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accuse Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry of lying about his Vietnam War record. The ad, called 'any questions' is the toughest political ad since an anti-Bush spot called 'Fire Rumsfeld' (showing a hooded Statue of Liberty to remind voters of how U.S. soldiers had abused prisoners in Iraq) was aired by the liberal group MoveOn.org in late May."
That is 100% wrong. The scientist's job is to learn facts, propose hypotheses, test the hypotheses against the facts, then return to step 1 and repeat. The theories that fall out of the tested hypotheses, and thus the advancement of human knowledge, are the product of the scientific method. That's what doing science is all about.
Human insight is an absolute requirement for the scientific method; how else could our sphere of knowledge be expanded? It is obviously necessary for the proposing of hypotheses, but it also happens to be a key element both in discovering facts in the first place, and in testing hypotheses. There's a reason science isn't done by robots.
I used the term "truth" loosely in my writeup for this story. If you want to quibble and say science is limited to proposing and testing theories or models, or come up with some other strict definition of science, that's fine. But to say science begins and ends with discovering facts, and requires no human insight, is simply wrong.
You may want to read the now-discredited logical positivists of the 19th century, and then the much more enjoyable Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Fun stuff.
Slash's main advantage is its security. There may be security bugs in Slash, but the last one we found in a major release was over two years ago. Of course the last major release we had was three years ago, so maybe that's not saying much. Seriously, we're good about security: we know where the pitfalls are and we write code with a careful eye for them.
Slash's second advantage is speed (we cache aggressively, write .shtml files, and are integrated with MySQL replication and memcached). It's optimized for heavy discussion if you're expecting that, including lots of tools to fend off hostile users, but it works OK for just posting periodic stories. Slash's major disadvantage is that you (effectively) need root to install it, and it's a real pain to customize its look and feel (mostly because it's so powerfully configurable; we hope to make customization easier in the months to come).
(Interestingly, Slash fell prey to a similar attack almost a year ago; our code, however, was not trojaned.)
If you're just looking for software to post entries to a blog or something, though, you should probably look elsewhere :)
Considering NewsForge and Slashdot run on Slash, an open-source alternative to the open-source product which was trojaned, shouldn't your conspiracy theory be working the other way?
Right, good analysis. What does it mean to say the human "won" when, on balance, his submitted strategies did worse than the median? If there were an entry fee and the pot split proportional to final score, he'd be out of a lot of money. So another way of looking at this is that the human took advantage of an artificially-constructed winning condition.
In the particular case I ran, it didn't make any difference. Now, though, I've added errors to what each agent tries to play. Tit-For-Tat responds to those errors and, playing against another Tit-For-Tat, quickly plunks down to (say) 90% cooperation plus or minus error, and random-walks around from there. "Always cooperate," though, sticks at 100% plus or minus error, so it does a little better.
I've written perl scripts to run Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments on my website (the perl source code for all the species in the last run is on that page) and new submissions for the next tournament are welcome. Since my tournament does Darwinian selection on every agent that plays in it -- agents which don't earn points eventually die off, those which earn a lot of points reproduce -- self-sacrificing pairs of strategies won't do very well.
I haven't yet written code which can trickle in new members over time, but that really wouldn't be very hard to add (I could probably set it up in an hour if you are really interested :)
Once I experimented with letting the agents recognize which "species" they were in and which "species" their opponent was. The runaway winner, of course, was the one which always cooperated with itself, and was less nice to every other species. (In my version, "less nice" meant playing Tit-For-Tat, but the idea's the same.)
Being able to do this is like having the teacher's edition. If recognizing which species other agents belong to is allowed, that's a pretty trivial strategy. It's not called cooperation. It's called xenophobia, or to put it into the most familiar anthropomorphization, racism.
(The life lesson, if I may go out on a limb, is that in an environment where some recognize a quality called "race" and discriminate based on it, being unable to see that quality is a liability. Being truly color-blind means you are unable to recognize not only race but racism, which means you will be taken advantage of.)
When I ran my first tournament and got some interesting results based on this, I realized that knowledge of what "species" an agent belongs to is too powerful, it throws a monkey wrench into the works. So I scrapped it and moved on to stuff I found more interesting.
But the winner of this PD tournament was even craftier; he submitted a ton of entries, all of which were xenophobic in this way, except that they all recognized one "species" as the top dog. The other "species" essentially committed suicide to give the highest score to the top dog. That wouldn't have worked in my tournament, since they literally would have committed suicide (my agents starve to death if they don't score high enough) and that would have shaped the resulting environment. Every tournament is artificial in some way, and the human submitting entries to this one was clever enough to take advantage of these particular artificialities.
Since it's now been shown that inter-agent communication is possible, that's going to be fair game for every tournament from now on. The next step is going to be designing tournaments to work with this trick, not against it. As I wrote to this tournament's organizers:
Just when you thought the story couldn't get any scummier...
That is incorrect. As the article makes clear, the physical evidence that the "two guys" provided backs up their story.
You may not be convinced, but don't overstate your case. The article may not be proven yet, but it is clearly substantiated.