One of my professors showed everyone Wikipedia for one of our projects. He invited us to use it, particularly if our subject matter was contested or had multiple viewpoints. He showed everyone that the History tab is an invaluable research tool -- paging through all the edits can lend some insight on to various realms of thought regarding a topic and can help shape your research as much or more than just seeing the list of sources on the bottom of an article.
For instance, does your paper need to cite some evidence contrary to your paper, such as opposing viewpoints? Reverted edits or changes that were merged back out can often give you some tips on where to start or what related topics you need to look for.
In this case, all of those fly in the face of what MySpace should have done.
MySpace should have invalidated all the usernames and passwords found in the list and notified those with compromised accounts that they need to change their password and alert them that they were compromised. Or just delete the profiles entirely, as they've probably already been compromised and filled with links to V!@Gr@ websites.
MySpace could even then use the list of passwords to detect hacking attempts and use it to improve their security systems. If someone tried a number of logins from the list, for instance, they are obviously attempting to do something nefarious (or just bored/dumb).
If your root password were on a mailing list, would you stamp your feat and demand everyone delete the e-mail, or would you change your root password?
You'll see a new type of spamming, inviting you to join the mile high club with your new Russian bride using your new 3" longer dick (with your cheap Viagra) and using the money you saved on your mortgage refinancing while you fly to Nigeria to meet with a fallen Prince who wants you to smuggle millions out for him.
Not to mention it is hard to take notes inside a Flash presentation or orientation video.
A small printed manual, however, will let people take notes, draw doodles, and vent their anger toward the damn booklet instead of you.
Note that I said SMALL. People don't want a 300pg binder unless the job actually calls for one!
We do something similar here, although I've turned the book into a small Wiki. While I do have to edit and revise any edits people make (for clarity, spelling, formatting and so forth), they are coming up with things that need documentation that I had no idea people actually (a) cared about and (b) didn't know about.
(Tip for Wiki documentation: set it up to save the search history of your Wiki. You can easily discern what needs to be documented, what needs links (e.g., people here searched for "form archive" because that's what an old tool was called) to proper articles, etc.)
Personally, if I'm advertising weight loss drugs, and my ad shows up on a parked page, I'm not going to value those clicks at all. Now, if someone is coming off of WebMD, I will value those clicks very highly.
Just because someone clicks on your ad doesn't mean they are of any value whatsoever to you.
Granted, the ad on the parked page is probably somewhat contextual, maybe they were trying to get to webmd and typed it wrong. But that doesn't make them very valuable, either, certainly not as valuable as if they actually came from webmd.
Google and the like are only hurting themselves and those that advertise through AdWords by allowing parked domains to serve ads.
If you're paying Google $1500/month in advertising, do you really want your ad to show up on some parked domain that came up because someone can't spell microsoft.com?
I see you've never been in a staff meeting that you need a strategic escape from. Once others catch on to you that you're having your mother call you precisely 30 minutes into every single meeting, you need to find another escape plan. It's easy to hide yogurt; it's not easy to hide Taco Bell, particularly if you work with any stoners.
I see a very large market that Activia can tap into. The trapped business professional!
2 minutes of typing and clicking by a forum monitoring monkey versus pissing off a customer and losing business where your company makes hundreds of dollars per sale and many more hundreds over the lifetime of a product (operating system upgrades, other Apple products).
Your business may live off of text e-mail, and that's fine, most reputable companies also send nice text copies, too. I prefer text e-mail when at all possible.
However, Outlook 2003 used IE for rendering. It ran in a very strict security zone -- no external ANYTHING (except, and only images, and only if you enabled them, with defaults to "off").
If you send RTF e-mail (worse than HTML), it used the Word rendering engine. That's why I don't understand this change at all. If you format a message in Word, doesn't it send it as RTF, and thus render under word on the recipient's computer?
Personally, I fear the Word engine more than IE7, by far! The Word format allows you to embed all sorts of nasties, including macros, 3rd party objects, other documents, etc.
Like it or not, e-mail is used for more than quick notes to each other. It's used for invoices, advertisement (tasteful or not, opt in or not), pictures, etc, things that a secure, well-rounded rendering engine (like IE7 under strict settings in a sandbox) could help with.
Step in the completely wrong direction, again, Microsoft. And to think I was going to sign up for their release party to get a free copy of Office. Hah!
Very late in a reply, but you're right, it doesn't really matter who they were, or what their names were. But it's interesting to read your family history. It's conversation material and things to talk about with your family. It's entertaining.
Exactly. And as I said in the prior posts, if the Gates foundation isn't making money off of the evil corporations, someone will. At least with the Gates foundation, the money is going to treat disease, bring clean and renewable drinking sources, textbooks, etc, whereas if someone else, say, Mr. Trump were to invest, the money would go toward a useless condo tower or crappy TV show.
It would be a different story if the foundation was using their money as investment capital to evil startup companies or backing radical governments. But they aren't.
Agreed. There is a much better dead man's switch available, and it's called a living will and a lawyer who has the legal authority to open your safe deposit box in the bank once you pass on. It even has generations of legal precedent to help defend against greedy family members.
You can even set it up with your lawyer to have him mail things out once you're dead -- including your encryption keys, letters to family, etc.
And yes, I have been the recipient of such a letter. Many such letters, in fact. My great grandparents both wrote letters to the family describing our family history going back to roughly 1550-1600. Instead of sending them to us and us inevitably losing them, they wrote them to their estate lawyer, who held them until they both passed on. They are great reading and have been far more valuable tracing family history than the Internet or any books or libraries have gotten us.
The problem is that many people see the airline bailouts by the government as acknowledgment that the airlines are public transportation, instead of widely used private transportation.
But that simply isn't true.
People need to look at the multi-billion dollar bailouts as a financial move only. Airlines are far more beneficial if there are a lot of them and there is competition. Airlines fuel thousands of other businesses. Take a state like Florida. Without relatively inexpensive air fare, Florida's entire tax system gets thrown out the window. Thousands of businesses will go under, greatly reducing the overall tax income. This applies to almost any city -- businesses rely on planes, too, not just for tourism.
So when someone tells you that you personally paid $8 of your tax money to bail out American Airlines, smile, don't frown. Your $8 is helping keep hundreds of thousands of people employed. Sometimes you need to violate your principals for the greater good, even if it is supporting a failing industry.
Why would any profitable porn website voluntarily move to a new domain? If you were, say, cnn.com, and a new.news TLD opened up, would you move to cnn.news? Hell no. Even if cnn.com simply redirected to cnn.news, you're losing years and millions of dollars worth of branding and recognition. How often do you go back to Google when looking for porn? I doubt very often, you probably go to some indexing website catered to adult websites instead -- that's big-time branding and worth big-time cash.
Also, dividing what some in society see a deviance is just asking for problems down the road related to censorship and restricted access. "Oh, you wanted.xxx access with your cable modem? That's another $15/month."
As a non-investor, it's very hard to change the practices of outside companies. Try it: go up to your local gas station and start yelling at them that the oil and gasoline runoff from their parking lot is killing local wildlife. You won't get far.
Now try again, but first buy a few hundred thousand shares of the company, and instead of complaining to the local gas station, complain to the company and use your shares to help influence the behavior and movement of the company. It won't be a quick change, but some change is better than no change.
Someone is going to profit off of investing in that power plant. Would you rather it be a non-profit who is helping people, or a filthy rich investment banker? Do you think that investment banker would try to alter the company or raise issues with a polluting plant? Aside from a few philanthropist investors, most are blood-sucking fiends (and even active philanthropists are fiends).
Re-keying profile data is nothing -- how often do you change your birthplace or last name?
The guts of every social networking website is the friends systems, messaging/IM, photos, blogging (of one form or another), commenting, etc. Why would SocialNetworkA want to share that with SocialNetworkB? That assumes they are alike, and for social networking websites to all survive, they will need to differentiate and stay that way. In face, they already have -- Facebook, for instance, is geared more toward the college student/post-college professional. MySpace was started for bands/music. Etc.
When you're posting about your class schedule, do you really care if your friends back home on MySpace see it? Doubtful.
Besides, if all the social networking websites were the same, how could teens carry on their multiple mood swings throughout a day?
While this isn't major news, I'd suspect any maintenance news for any major system would be newsworth on Slashdot. Like WoW or not, they do run one of the largest game network in the world. The reason you see more WoW news than, say, news about the Windows Update servers, is because WoW is more open about their network and generally how stuff works.
It still does, though. It's not like Google is being accused of altering the search results -- the results are the same. Nothing at all is preventing someone coming up with a superior product and getting a high page rank to get the #1 slot, is there?
Do you also cry foul when a newspaper puts their name on top of the classifieds section?
Do you cry foul when a yellow pages book from your phone company advertises the phone company?
Do you cry foul when an advertising campaign also advertises the advertising studio that put the campaign together?
Remember, Google is, in a sense, one huge advertising system. However, the entry is free for enterprising individuals with the content and product to back their site up to searchers.
Expanding on what you said, do the experiment with eight groups.
The first and second groups act as they did in this study.
The second and third groups act as the first and second, but with a man.
The fourth and fifth groups act as the first and second, but with a man, but of a different race (black subjects get a white victim, etc).
The sixth and seventh groups act as the first and second, but with a man they are told is an enemy combatant.
There are a lot of variations of this, and I doubt any of them are very ethical. But being unethical doesn't make the results uninteresting or invalid, but without a sufficiently large group, any results would be generally untrusted (but still interesting!).
As much as I hope the cameras do come down, do you really want to risk that even if it does teach a generation a lesson about respecting others? I have a feeling talking cameras will just make things worse. Having cameras won't deter crime, it will push it underground and make it harder yet to catch criminals that are actually worth catching. Personally, I'd rather my government cut down on gangs and violent crime than, say, littering or jaywalking.
Once a government has been given a power, what motivation do they have to remove that power? Very little, I'd suspect.
Monitoring is a very slippery slope. Want to defeat a rival politician who is pro-privacy? Just sling things like "You want to get rid of the cameras? What about all the children they protect? Are you saying you are for pedophiles being able to kidnap children from our sidewalks?" Of course, most intelligent people realize what a fallacy that is, but remember, for every 1 person with above average intelligence, there is 1 below average.
There is a major difference, though. Displaying something in a window has no inherent costs -- once it's there, it's free to hang there. Bandwidth, on the other hand, is not free.
I am wary to applaud this ruling, but at least it will give some recourse to those that have been targeted by bandwidth thefts. Instead of just being able to fuck with thieves (by replacing my_super_highres_image.jpg with, say, some kind some kind of bathtub graphic), companies now have a legal ruling to back them.
Would you rather have them see that a $300 million bridge is really going nowhere or blindly accept that it's going to a large island of stranded Alaskans? A few tens of thousands of fees in travel is nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my professors showed everyone Wikipedia for one of our projects. He invited us to use it, particularly if our subject matter was contested or had multiple viewpoints. He showed everyone that the History tab is an invaluable research tool -- paging through all the edits can lend some insight on to various realms of thought regarding a topic and can help shape your research as much or more than just seeing the list of sources on the bottom of an article.
For instance, does your paper need to cite some evidence contrary to your paper, such as opposing viewpoints? Reverted edits or changes that were merged back out can often give you some tips on where to start or what related topics you need to look for.
In this case, all of those fly in the face of what MySpace should have done.
MySpace should have invalidated all the usernames and passwords found in the list and notified those with compromised accounts that they need to change their password and alert them that they were compromised. Or just delete the profiles entirely, as they've probably already been compromised and filled with links to V!@Gr@ websites.
MySpace could even then use the list of passwords to detect hacking attempts and use it to improve their security systems. If someone tried a number of logins from the list, for instance, they are obviously attempting to do something nefarious (or just bored/dumb).
If your root password were on a mailing list, would you stamp your feat and demand everyone delete the e-mail, or would you change your root password?
You'll see a new type of spamming, inviting you to join the mile high club with your new Russian bride using your new 3" longer dick (with your cheap Viagra) and using the money you saved on your mortgage refinancing while you fly to Nigeria to meet with a fallen Prince who wants you to smuggle millions out for him.
No, Hollywood, that wouldn't make a good movie.
Not to mention it is hard to take notes inside a Flash presentation or orientation video.
A small printed manual, however, will let people take notes, draw doodles, and vent their anger toward the damn booklet instead of you.
Note that I said SMALL. People don't want a 300pg binder unless the job actually calls for one!
We do something similar here, although I've turned the book into a small Wiki. While I do have to edit and revise any edits people make (for clarity, spelling, formatting and so forth), they are coming up with things that need documentation that I had no idea people actually (a) cared about and (b) didn't know about.
(Tip for Wiki documentation: set it up to save the search history of your Wiki. You can easily discern what needs to be documented, what needs links (e.g., people here searched for "form archive" because that's what an old tool was called) to proper articles, etc.)
Personally, if I'm advertising weight loss drugs, and my ad shows up on a parked page, I'm not going to value those clicks at all. Now, if someone is coming off of WebMD, I will value those clicks very highly.
Just because someone clicks on your ad doesn't mean they are of any value whatsoever to you.
Granted, the ad on the parked page is probably somewhat contextual, maybe they were trying to get to webmd and typed it wrong. But that doesn't make them very valuable, either, certainly not as valuable as if they actually came from webmd.
Google and the like are only hurting themselves and those that advertise through AdWords by allowing parked domains to serve ads.
If you're paying Google $1500/month in advertising, do you really want your ad to show up on some parked domain that came up because someone can't spell microsoft.com?
I see you've never been in a staff meeting that you need a strategic escape from. Once others catch on to you that you're having your mother call you precisely 30 minutes into every single meeting, you need to find another escape plan. It's easy to hide yogurt; it's not easy to hide Taco Bell, particularly if you work with any stoners.
I see a very large market that Activia can tap into. The trapped business professional!
I'm should have a kid just so I can get rich off of my own bad parenting skills.
2 minutes of typing and clicking by a forum monitoring monkey versus pissing off a customer and losing business where your company makes hundreds of dollars per sale and many more hundreds over the lifetime of a product (operating system upgrades, other Apple products).
Hmm. I wonder which costs Apple more money?
Your business may live off of text e-mail, and that's fine, most reputable companies also send nice text copies, too. I prefer text e-mail when at all possible.
However, Outlook 2003 used IE for rendering. It ran in a very strict security zone -- no external ANYTHING (except, and only images, and only if you enabled them, with defaults to "off").
If you send RTF e-mail (worse than HTML), it used the Word rendering engine. That's why I don't understand this change at all. If you format a message in Word, doesn't it send it as RTF, and thus render under word on the recipient's computer?
Personally, I fear the Word engine more than IE7, by far! The Word format allows you to embed all sorts of nasties, including macros, 3rd party objects, other documents, etc.
Like it or not, e-mail is used for more than quick notes to each other. It's used for invoices, advertisement (tasteful or not, opt in or not), pictures, etc, things that a secure, well-rounded rendering engine (like IE7 under strict settings in a sandbox) could help with.
Step in the completely wrong direction, again, Microsoft. And to think I was going to sign up for their release party to get a free copy of Office. Hah!
Very late in a reply, but you're right, it doesn't really matter who they were, or what their names were. But it's interesting to read your family history. It's conversation material and things to talk about with your family. It's entertaining.
Exactly. And as I said in the prior posts, if the Gates foundation isn't making money off of the evil corporations, someone will. At least with the Gates foundation, the money is going to treat disease, bring clean and renewable drinking sources, textbooks, etc, whereas if someone else, say, Mr. Trump were to invest, the money would go toward a useless condo tower or crappy TV show.
It would be a different story if the foundation was using their money as investment capital to evil startup companies or backing radical governments. But they aren't.
Agreed. There is a much better dead man's switch available, and it's called a living will and a lawyer who has the legal authority to open your safe deposit box in the bank once you pass on. It even has generations of legal precedent to help defend against greedy family members.
You can even set it up with your lawyer to have him mail things out once you're dead -- including your encryption keys, letters to family, etc.
And yes, I have been the recipient of such a letter. Many such letters, in fact. My great grandparents both wrote letters to the family describing our family history going back to roughly 1550-1600. Instead of sending them to us and us inevitably losing them, they wrote them to their estate lawyer, who held them until they both passed on. They are great reading and have been far more valuable tracing family history than the Internet or any books or libraries have gotten us.
The problem is that many people see the airline bailouts by the government as acknowledgment that the airlines are public transportation, instead of widely used private transportation.
But that simply isn't true.
People need to look at the multi-billion dollar bailouts as a financial move only. Airlines are far more beneficial if there are a lot of them and there is competition. Airlines fuel thousands of other businesses. Take a state like Florida. Without relatively inexpensive air fare, Florida's entire tax system gets thrown out the window. Thousands of businesses will go under, greatly reducing the overall tax income. This applies to almost any city -- businesses rely on planes, too, not just for tourism.
So when someone tells you that you personally paid $8 of your tax money to bail out American Airlines, smile, don't frown. Your $8 is helping keep hundreds of thousands of people employed. Sometimes you need to violate your principals for the greater good, even if it is supporting a failing industry.
Lace your ammonia with rat poison and you won't have a problem.
What? It works for garbage cans to get rid of raccoons!
Why would any profitable porn website voluntarily move to a new domain? If you were, say, cnn.com, and a new .news TLD opened up, would you move to cnn.news? Hell no. Even if cnn.com simply redirected to cnn.news, you're losing years and millions of dollars worth of branding and recognition. How often do you go back to Google when looking for porn? I doubt very often, you probably go to some indexing website catered to adult websites instead -- that's big-time branding and worth big-time cash.
.xxx access with your cable modem? That's another $15/month."
Also, dividing what some in society see a deviance is just asking for problems down the road related to censorship and restricted access. "Oh, you wanted
As a non-investor, it's very hard to change the practices of outside companies. Try it: go up to your local gas station and start yelling at them that the oil and gasoline runoff from their parking lot is killing local wildlife. You won't get far.
Now try again, but first buy a few hundred thousand shares of the company, and instead of complaining to the local gas station, complain to the company and use your shares to help influence the behavior and movement of the company. It won't be a quick change, but some change is better than no change.
Someone is going to profit off of investing in that power plant. Would you rather it be a non-profit who is helping people, or a filthy rich investment banker? Do you think that investment banker would try to alter the company or raise issues with a polluting plant? Aside from a few philanthropist investors, most are blood-sucking fiends (and even active philanthropists are fiends).
Re-keying profile data is nothing -- how often do you change your birthplace or last name?
:-) :-o
The guts of every social networking website is the friends systems, messaging/IM, photos, blogging (of one form or another), commenting, etc. Why would SocialNetworkA want to share that with SocialNetworkB? That assumes they are alike, and for social networking websites to all survive, they will need to differentiate and stay that way. In face, they already have -- Facebook, for instance, is geared more toward the college student/post-college professional. MySpace was started for bands/music. Etc.
When you're posting about your class schedule, do you really care if your friends back home on MySpace see it? Doubtful.
Besides, if all the social networking websites were the same, how could teens carry on their multiple mood swings throughout a day?
Mood: happy
Mood: angry >:\
Mood: horny
Mood: suicidal X-|
While this isn't major news, I'd suspect any maintenance news for any major system would be newsworth on Slashdot. Like WoW or not, they do run one of the largest game network in the world. The reason you see more WoW news than, say, news about the Windows Update servers, is because WoW is more open about their network and generally how stuff works.
It still does, though. It's not like Google is being accused of altering the search results -- the results are the same. Nothing at all is preventing someone coming up with a superior product and getting a high page rank to get the #1 slot, is there?
Do you also cry foul when a newspaper puts their name on top of the classifieds section?
Do you cry foul when a yellow pages book from your phone company advertises the phone company?
Do you cry foul when an advertising campaign also advertises the advertising studio that put the campaign together?
Remember, Google is, in a sense, one huge advertising system. However, the entry is free for enterprising individuals with the content and product to back their site up to searchers.
Obviously I shouldn't be allowed to lead the study, on account that I cannot count. :P
Expanding on what you said, do the experiment with eight groups.
The first and second groups act as they did in this study.
The second and third groups act as the first and second, but with a man.
The fourth and fifth groups act as the first and second, but with a man, but of a different race (black subjects get a white victim, etc).
The sixth and seventh groups act as the first and second, but with a man they are told is an enemy combatant.
There are a lot of variations of this, and I doubt any of them are very ethical. But being unethical doesn't make the results uninteresting or invalid, but without a sufficiently large group, any results would be generally untrusted (but still interesting!).
As much as I hope the cameras do come down, do you really want to risk that even if it does teach a generation a lesson about respecting others? I have a feeling talking cameras will just make things worse. Having cameras won't deter crime, it will push it underground and make it harder yet to catch criminals that are actually worth catching. Personally, I'd rather my government cut down on gangs and violent crime than, say, littering or jaywalking.
Once a government has been given a power, what motivation do they have to remove that power? Very little, I'd suspect.
Monitoring is a very slippery slope. Want to defeat a rival politician who is pro-privacy? Just sling things like "You want to get rid of the cameras? What about all the children they protect? Are you saying you are for pedophiles being able to kidnap children from our sidewalks?" Of course, most intelligent people realize what a fallacy that is, but remember, for every 1 person with above average intelligence, there is 1 below average.
There is a major difference, though. Displaying something in a window has no inherent costs -- once it's there, it's free to hang there. Bandwidth, on the other hand, is not free.
I am wary to applaud this ruling, but at least it will give some recourse to those that have been targeted by bandwidth thefts. Instead of just being able to fuck with thieves (by replacing my_super_highres_image.jpg with, say, some kind some kind of bathtub graphic), companies now have a legal ruling to back them.
Would you rather have them see that a $300 million bridge is really going nowhere or blindly accept that it's going to a large island of stranded Alaskans? A few tens of thousands of fees in travel is nothing.