If you are uploading geotagged, unblurred pictures to a public site, then you are uploading geotagged, unblurred pictures to a public site. If you don't want people seeing those pictures, don't upload them (or mark them private). It was always possible to look through Flickr pictures, so this doesn't change anything in that regard.
The problem with Google Street View is that they are _taking_ new pictures and making them public.
My general response to those claims is a combination of what you said and the following argument:
Yes, his quote was ambiguous and probably gave a false impression of what he actually did. It was poorly worded and probably misleading. However, he said this in ONE interview and even by looking at the rest of that quote in context, it is clear that he meant something along the lines of "I pushed forward a number of plans and funding proposals which helped to turn the Internet into what it is today." If he repeatedly or directly claimed that he had "invented" or "implemented" the Internet, I would be less sympathetic, but it seems like it was little more than a slightly poorly-worded answer to a single interview question that was blown way out of proportion for purely political reasons.
I happen to believe that it is acceptable for the government to infringe on our freedoms in order to internalize externalities. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
Those who don't are very hardcore libertarians or anarcho-capitalists. It is a legitimate viewpoint to take, just one I happen to disagree with. However, the idea of accepting government infringement on our freedoms is by no means unique to environmental legislation, so an objection on those grounds applies to a publicly-funded police force or fire department as well.
Given how bloated Emacs is, you're more likely to be able to get Firefox for Emacs.
You jest, good sir, but I have been toiling on just such a foul creation. They said I was crazy, but could a crazy person really embed the Uzbl web browser into Emacs? NO! Those cowards were merely afraid of the infinite power I would wield by putting a browser in Emacs. Think, then, of their horror when they learn that someone put an Emacs clone in the browser.
As others have said, the "$15 extra for exchange" is wrong; if you have a "corporate" account, then you have to pay $15 extra for the data plan, but it is the same data plan as the "regular people" plan. You can access Exchange just fine with a regular data plan.
Also, it is possible to use tethering without any permission from Verizon. I just got my Droid and spent some time last night setting up TetherBot. It lets you create a SOCKS 5 proxy over USB, which is good enough for web browsing (and anything that can connect over SOCKS). In my test last night, I got speeds of 1.2Mb/s down and 0.44Mb/s up over Verizon's EVDO.
As far as I know, the 5GB "unlimited" limit still applies, so use that tethering carefully.
You laugh, but I have have started working an Emacs interface for Uzbl called Ezbl (pronounced "ease-able"). It's still in a ridiculously early state, but it's coming along and getting dangerously close to being useful.
SPIM? Ack! I took (and later was a teaching assistant for) a class which used SPIM for teaching MIPS assembly. It is a god-awful program. It is horribly outdated and hasn't been updated in years and has the most confusing UI I've ever seen in any program ever.
Some students wrote a replacement with a reversible debugger (can go forwards and backwards through the code) here:
I second Swing. I've been doing it for 3 years, and it is great way to get exercise, just take a look at this if you don't believe me. Of course, it doesn't start out that fast, very few people, even those who have been doing it for years can't dance that fast for any amount of time.
Plus, it has a very goofy, carefree attitude, which can be easier to approach than the intense, "stare passionately into your partner's eyes" that the Latin family of dances tend to have. Just about any lack of skill can be excused by a big dopey smile.
Lastly, and I have no idea why this is, but swing dancers tend to be techy. At my local scene, almost all (no joke, like 80%) of the guys are either Computer Science or Computer Engineering. The girls are a bit more diverse, but cluster around biomed or applied math/econ.
But the advice of the parent is essential. If you make it clear that you are there to pick up girls, you will quickly become "that creepy guy." On the other hand, I've known fat old guys whom all the college girls are lining up to throw themselves on, so attitude plays a huge part.
An Idea I've been kicking around
on
Censorship By Glut
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Wow, that was an awesome article!
I have been thinking about the same problem for a little while, and have some comments on some of the stuff he proposed.
It doesn't surprise me at all that Salganik's experiment showed that popular songs would become more popular, almost regardless of their quality. This seems to be a hard-wired human character trait, to conform to popular opinion, even if contradicts direct observation (see the Asch conformity experiments or the No soap, radio jokes). I think that any "solution" to this problem is likely to be fighting a losing battle against peer pressure, since people will likely try to subvert the "find the merit" process in order to figure out what the group thinks.
On the topic of solving the problem of pre-existing bias, I say, "why bother?" He proposes a number of increasingly complex (though well-thought-out) solutions to the "Pro-Bush, Anti-Bush" article problem, all of which, I think, would be doomed to failure. This seems to be a cat-and-mouse game of "outsmart the rater" which I think the creator of the system would lose. If you try to make a smarter process of preventing people from injecting their bias into an article, they will just figure out a way around it. Rather than trying to outsmart the reader, simply include their bias in the rating of the article.
If you saw an article with a rating that said "95% of Bush supporters liked this article," it would tell you something about it, as would "90% of Kerry supporters also liked this article." You could rely on self-reporting or fancy statistical extraction of preferences to figure out who is a "Bush supporter" and who is a "Kerry supporter." That way, you wouldn't have to trick people into anything.
Additionally, who says something is an important part of what is being said. If you see an article about how 9/11 was a conspiracy by a well-known Truther, that is a very different piece of information than if President Bush says it. Likewise, a heavy metal fanatic liking a heavy metal song sends a different message than someone who thinks Vivaldi is just a young upstart and a passing fad liking the same song.
There could be problems with this (like how to keep the display of who said what short enough to be comprehensible), but it could be a step in the right direction, or at least something interesting to think about.
WTF? A special, magic syntax so you can pass in closures, and you can only pass in *one*?
So sure there are some annoyances in Ruby. There are in any language. But you can most definitely pass more than one closure to a method (since everything is an object, there really aren't "functions" in the purest sense).
Observe:
p1 = lambda { puts "I am p1" } p2 = lambda { puts "I am the other one. p2." }
def the_procs(arg1, arg2)
arg1.call()
arg2.call() end
the_procs(p1, p2)
#=> I am p1 #=> I am the other one. p2.
You could even put the "lambda { blah }" within the function call so you didn't create intermediate variables.
Depending on how much weight you want to lose, something like Ballroom dance can be a great way to get some extra exercise. It's nowhere near as much of a workout as biking, running or lifting, but it is also a lot more interesting, and can be a surprising amount of exercise.
While I wouldn't say that being introverted is necessarily a "problem," if it's something you want to address, being more confident in your physical presence (especially in relation to another person) can make you feel better about being out in front of people.
It's a life-long skill, and I know of at least a few people who have started dancing competitively at around 50 to 60 and done quite well.
It seems that the solution to that would be only to download updates from trusted servers over HTTPS (or some other encrypted connection).
A more interrupting solution would be to shut off any remote-exploitable services between the time the package is requested and when it is installed. This could be included with the (signed) metadata of packages. Something like "OpenSSH needs to be updated, and has a remote-exploitable vulnerability, so shut it down before grabbing the package." This might be acceptable for some workloads.
You could combine the two by allowing the package manager to mark certain mirrors as trustworthy or not and shutting off remote-exploitable services when downloading an update to that package from an untrusted mirror.
Google has a chance to pioneer "effective" advertising, of the type that is extremely context sensual I could be way off on this one, but I think you meant "sensitive," not "sensual."
sensual: sexually exciting or gratifying; "sensual excesses"; "a sultry look"; "a sultry dance"
I think a good partial, short-term solution would be for someone like Google to automatically generate GPG keys with each account and automatically encrypt messages to other Gmail users. Then, at the very least, you would know to count any unencrypted mail from a Gmail account as spam (assuming you also use Gmail). If Microsoft decided to follow suit, you would know that all hotmail mail should be encrypted and signed. It could be done transparent to the user and the webmail site could even hide any trace of gpg encryption except for putting a little padlock in the corner or something.
This would not stop junk mail from spam accounts, but without some other form of major reorganization (or an invite-only service like Gmail) you cannot prevent people from making tons of spam accounts.
Although there is plenty happening around that time, I think it might be interesting, as a departure, to do something in the Old Republic timeline. Over the course of 100 episodes, you could really create a compelling, interesting world. Aside from the little bit mentioned in the movies and EU books, there is a lot left unexplained about the Old Republic, like the Mandalorian wars.
In Knights of the Old Republic, Canderous, a Mandalorian, would tell stories of the wars and nature of the Mandalorians which were fascinating. I think something from that line would really be interesting and there would be less chance of conflict with existing material.
Or you could just take Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy and Spectre of the Past and Vision of the Future and chop them into 100 episodes and be done with it.
I can tell you from personal experience that it is, at the very least, not always inherited. I have been diagnosed multiple times with AD[H]D and believe it (anecdote further down), but my father is the paragon of concentration. He is one of those people who always has the TV or radio on while he is doing his work. He seems able to peripherally concentrate on the other stimulus while focusing most of his attention on his work.
I remember one time in high school when I was hanging out with my girlfriend in the common room of my dorm (it was a boarding school). Now this is Slashdot, so you all will be able to appreciate how rare of an occasion this was. Needless to say, I had an interest in paying attention and holding a conversation with her. We had the TV on and were watching Friends or some such. I remember that, despite my best efforts, I could barely wrench my attention away from the TV, even though I was not particularly interested in what it had to say.
What other people have said about "Attention Inconsistency Disorder" is spot on. I can focus intensley on certain things (like programming or reading sometimes) but it is generally very easy for some little event to steal away my attention.
Actually, depending on the DRM scheme, that may not be true.
My old boarding school had a cache box which sat between the mean old web and your dorm computers. They also throttled all streams down to 40kb/s (arg!). The techy kids among us would use proz (Prozilla) to download multiple streams at once. Anyway, if you downloaded a file from the internet, it would go at 40kb/s, but if it was from the cache, it would go at around 800. Sometimes, when I purchased the iTunes free song of the week, I would get those higher speeds. I wondered about it for a while and then when Pymusique came out, it confirmed my suspicions: Apple sends unDRM'd files to your computer which are then encrypted by iTunes. All Pymusique has to do is simulate the remote calls (which I think are XML-RPC) to the iTMS and then not encrypt the file when it arrives.
Apple might have changed the behavior since then, but it would not surprise me if other music/video services operated in the same way.
I agree. In addition, I have a problem with some of the locale choices made, specifically that anakin lived on Tattooine and the introduction of Naboo. Respecting Tattooine, the sense I got from the trilogy was that the whole point of hiding Luke (and the droids) on Tattooine was that that it was so remote and insignificant that Vader would never find him. Would Leiah really try to hide the droids on Vader's homeworld? It just doesn't make sense. If you want somewhere safe from the prying eyes of the empire, choose a place which they have never heard of, like Niruaun. Naboo (understandably) doesn't appear in the wider universe (at least as far as I know, I've only read novels from after ROTJ), and it seems strange to introduce what seems like a major player which was never mentioned in the trilogy and seldom (if ever) in the novels.
Sorry, but its late and I just got on spring break, so I'm naturally celebrating by playing Rome Total War and reading/. until dawn.
Is it just me, or is the argument of "The ability to download and listen music from any major online retailer" kind of worthless? I mean, how many songs are there that Sony Connect has that iTMS does not? If they have the same catalogue of songs, and assuming the quality is indistinguishable, why bother with another store? As I understand, there is no price difference between any of the stores, so the only logical choice would be to use the store with the best interface and ease of use.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, how does this change the privacy issues ?
If you are uploading geotagged, unblurred pictures to a public site, then you are uploading geotagged, unblurred pictures to a public site. If you don't want people seeing those pictures, don't upload them (or mark them private). It was always possible to look through Flickr pictures, so this doesn't change anything in that regard.
The problem with Google Street View is that they are _taking_ new pictures and making them public.
My general response to those claims is a combination of what you said and the following argument:
Yes, his quote was ambiguous and probably gave a false impression of what he actually did. It was poorly worded and probably misleading. However, he said this in ONE interview and even by looking at the rest of that quote in context, it is clear that he meant something along the lines of "I pushed forward a number of plans and funding proposals which helped to turn the Internet into what it is today." If he repeatedly or directly claimed that he had "invented" or "implemented" the Internet, I would be less sympathetic, but it seems like it was little more than a slightly poorly-worded answer to a single interview question that was blown way out of proportion for purely political reasons.
I happen to believe that it is acceptable for the government to infringe on our freedoms in order to internalize externalities. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
Those who don't are very hardcore libertarians or anarcho-capitalists. It is a legitimate viewpoint to take, just one I happen to disagree with. However, the idea of accepting government infringement on our freedoms is by no means unique to environmental legislation, so an objection on those grounds applies to a publicly-funded police force or fire department as well.
Given how bloated Emacs is, you're more likely to be able to get Firefox for Emacs.
You jest, good sir, but I have been toiling on just such a foul creation. They said I was crazy, but could a crazy person really embed the Uzbl web browser into Emacs? NO! Those cowards were merely afraid of the infinite power I would wield by putting a browser in Emacs. Think, then, of their horror when they learn that someone put an Emacs clone in the browser.
Behold, the fruit of my demonic labors: Ymacs in Uzbl in Emacs. IT'S ALIVE!!!
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
As others have said, the "$15 extra for exchange" is wrong; if you have a "corporate" account, then you have to pay $15 extra for the data plan, but it is the same data plan as the "regular people" plan. You can access Exchange just fine with a regular data plan.
Also, it is possible to use tethering without any permission from Verizon. I just got my Droid and spent some time last night setting up TetherBot. It lets you create a SOCKS 5 proxy over USB, which is good enough for web browsing (and anything that can connect over SOCKS). In my test last night, I got speeds of 1.2Mb/s down and 0.44Mb/s up over Verizon's EVDO.
As far as I know, the 5GB "unlimited" limit still applies, so use that tethering carefully.
You laugh, but I have have started working an Emacs interface for Uzbl called Ezbl (pronounced "ease-able"). It's still in a ridiculously early state, but it's coming along and getting dangerously close to being useful.
SPIM? Ack! I took (and later was a teaching assistant for) a class which used SPIM for teaching MIPS assembly. It is a god-awful program. It is horribly outdated and hasn't been updated in years and has the most confusing UI I've ever seen in any program ever.
Some students wrote a replacement with a reversible debugger (can go forwards and backwards through the code) here:
http://mipscope.sourceforge.net/
I second Swing. I've been doing it for 3 years, and it is great way to get exercise, just take a look at this if you don't believe me. Of course, it doesn't start out that fast, very few people, even those who have been doing it for years can't dance that fast for any amount of time.
Plus, it has a very goofy, carefree attitude, which can be easier to approach than the intense, "stare passionately into your partner's eyes" that the Latin family of dances tend to have. Just about any lack of skill can be excused by a big dopey smile.
Lastly, and I have no idea why this is, but swing dancers tend to be techy. At my local scene, almost all (no joke, like 80%) of the guys are either Computer Science or Computer Engineering. The girls are a bit more diverse, but cluster around biomed or applied math/econ.
But the advice of the parent is essential. If you make it clear that you are there to pick up girls, you will quickly become "that creepy guy." On the other hand, I've known fat old guys whom all the college girls are lining up to throw themselves on, so attitude plays a huge part.
Wow, that was an awesome article!
I have been thinking about the same problem for a little while, and have some comments on some of the stuff he proposed.
It doesn't surprise me at all that Salganik's experiment showed that popular songs would become more popular, almost regardless of their quality. This seems to be a hard-wired human character trait, to conform to popular opinion, even if contradicts direct observation (see the Asch conformity experiments or the No soap, radio jokes). I think that any "solution" to this problem is likely to be fighting a losing battle against peer pressure, since people will likely try to subvert the "find the merit" process in order to figure out what the group thinks.
On the topic of solving the problem of pre-existing bias, I say, "why bother?" He proposes a number of increasingly complex (though well-thought-out) solutions to the "Pro-Bush, Anti-Bush" article problem, all of which, I think, would be doomed to failure. This seems to be a cat-and-mouse game of "outsmart the rater" which I think the creator of the system would lose. If you try to make a smarter process of preventing people from injecting their bias into an article, they will just figure out a way around it. Rather than trying to outsmart the reader, simply include their bias in the rating of the article.
If you saw an article with a rating that said "95% of Bush supporters liked this article," it would tell you something about it, as would "90% of Kerry supporters also liked this article." You could rely on self-reporting or fancy statistical extraction of preferences to figure out who is a "Bush supporter" and who is a "Kerry supporter." That way, you wouldn't have to trick people into anything.
Additionally, who says something is an important part of what is being said. If you see an article about how 9/11 was a conspiracy by a well-known Truther, that is a very different piece of information than if President Bush says it. Likewise, a heavy metal fanatic liking a heavy metal song sends a different message than someone who thinks Vivaldi is just a young upstart and a passing fad liking the same song.
There could be problems with this (like how to keep the display of who said what short enough to be comprehensible), but it could be a step in the right direction, or at least something interesting to think about.
WTF? A special, magic syntax so you can pass in closures, and you can only pass in *one*?
So sure there are some annoyances in Ruby. There are in any language. But you can most definitely pass more than one closure to a method (since everything is an object, there really aren't "functions" in the purest sense).
Observe:
p1 = lambda { puts "I am p1" }
p2 = lambda { puts "I am the other one. p2." }
def the_procs(arg1, arg2)
arg1.call()
arg2.call()
end
the_procs(p1, p2)
#=> I am p1
#=> I am the other one. p2.
You could even put the "lambda { blah }" within the function call so you didn't create intermediate variables.
Depending on how much weight you want to lose, something like Ballroom dance can be a great way to get some extra exercise. It's nowhere near as much of a workout as biking, running or lifting, but it is also a lot more interesting, and can be a surprising amount of exercise.
While I wouldn't say that being introverted is necessarily a "problem," if it's something you want to address, being more confident in your physical presence (especially in relation to another person) can make you feel better about being out in front of people.
It's a life-long skill, and I know of at least a few people who have started dancing competitively at around 50 to 60 and done quite well.
Clever and nefarious. Nice.
It seems that the solution to that would be only to download updates from
trusted servers over HTTPS (or some other encrypted connection).
A more interrupting solution would be to shut off any remote-exploitable
services between the time the package is requested and when it is
installed. This could be included with the (signed) metadata of
packages. Something like "OpenSSH needs to be updated, and has a
remote-exploitable vulnerability, so shut it down before grabbing the package."
This might be acceptable for some workloads.
You could combine the two by allowing the package manager to mark certain
mirrors as trustworthy or not and shutting off remote-exploitable services when
downloading an update to that package from an untrusted mirror.
This might be going overboard, though.
sensual: sexually exciting or gratifying; "sensual excesses"; "a sultry look"; "a sultry dance"
I think a good partial, short-term solution would be for someone like Google to automatically generate GPG keys with each account and automatically encrypt messages to other Gmail users. Then, at the very least, you would know to count any unencrypted mail from a Gmail account as spam (assuming you also use Gmail). If Microsoft decided to follow suit, you would know that all hotmail mail should be encrypted and signed. It could be done transparent to the user and the webmail site could even hide any trace of gpg encryption except for putting a little padlock in the corner or something. This would not stop junk mail from spam accounts, but without some other form of major reorganization (or an invite-only service like Gmail) you cannot prevent people from making tons of spam accounts.
Although there is plenty happening around that time, I think it might be interesting, as a departure, to do something in the Old Republic timeline. Over the course of 100 episodes, you could really create a compelling, interesting world. Aside from the little bit mentioned in the movies and EU books, there is a lot left unexplained about the Old Republic, like the Mandalorian wars. In Knights of the Old Republic, Canderous, a Mandalorian, would tell stories of the wars and nature of the Mandalorians which were fascinating. I think something from that line would really be interesting and there would be less chance of conflict with existing material. Or you could just take Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy and Spectre of the Past and Vision of the Future and chop them into 100 episodes and be done with it.
I can tell you from personal experience that it is, at the very least, not always inherited. I have been diagnosed multiple times with AD[H]D and believe it (anecdote further down), but my father is the paragon of concentration. He is one of those people who always has the TV or radio on while he is doing his work. He seems able to peripherally concentrate on the other stimulus while focusing most of his attention on his work. I remember one time in high school when I was hanging out with my girlfriend in the common room of my dorm (it was a boarding school). Now this is Slashdot, so you all will be able to appreciate how rare of an occasion this was. Needless to say, I had an interest in paying attention and holding a conversation with her. We had the TV on and were watching Friends or some such. I remember that, despite my best efforts, I could barely wrench my attention away from the TV, even though I was not particularly interested in what it had to say. What other people have said about "Attention Inconsistency Disorder" is spot on. I can focus intensley on certain things (like programming or reading sometimes) but it is generally very easy for some little event to steal away my attention.
Actually, depending on the DRM scheme, that may not be true. My old boarding school had a cache box which sat between the mean old web and your dorm computers. They also throttled all streams down to 40kb/s (arg!). The techy kids among us would use proz (Prozilla) to download multiple streams at once. Anyway, if you downloaded a file from the internet, it would go at 40kb/s, but if it was from the cache, it would go at around 800. Sometimes, when I purchased the iTunes free song of the week, I would get those higher speeds. I wondered about it for a while and then when Pymusique came out, it confirmed my suspicions: Apple sends unDRM'd files to your computer which are then encrypted by iTunes. All Pymusique has to do is simulate the remote calls (which I think are XML-RPC) to the iTMS and then not encrypt the file when it arrives. Apple might have changed the behavior since then, but it would not surprise me if other music/video services operated in the same way.
I'm sure that new wiggly...thing that the guy was showing on her last week will snag a few more converts.
I must be doing something wrong, I've tried that and all it's snagged me is restriction orders.
I agree. In addition, I have a problem with some of the locale choices made, specifically that anakin lived on Tattooine and the introduction of Naboo.
/. until dawn.
Respecting Tattooine, the sense I got from the trilogy was that the whole point of hiding Luke (and the droids) on Tattooine was that that it was so remote and insignificant that Vader would never find him. Would Leiah really try to hide the droids on Vader's homeworld? It just doesn't make sense. If you want somewhere safe from the prying eyes of the empire, choose a place which they have never heard of, like Niruaun.
Naboo (understandably) doesn't appear in the wider universe (at least as far as I know, I've only read novels from after ROTJ), and it seems strange to introduce what seems like a major player which was never mentioned in the trilogy and seldom (if ever) in the novels.
Sorry, but its late and I just got on spring break, so I'm naturally celebrating by playing Rome Total War and reading
OMG theres a Ti-83 at the end of my arm!?!
In Korea, only old people buy dancing robots.
Could this be it? gatese.cx anyone?
Is it just me, or is the argument of "The ability to download and listen music from any major online retailer" kind of worthless? I mean, how many songs are there that Sony Connect has that iTMS does not? If they have the same catalogue of songs, and assuming the quality is indistinguishable, why bother with another store? As I understand, there is no price difference between any of the stores, so the only logical choice would be to use the store with the best interface and ease of use.
Damn! You are lucky, mine doesnt ship till the 3th!
I immediately checked sonicare.com and saw this picture.
I will never look at electric toothbrushes the same way again.