You're talking to a forum full of people who don't get that sort of nuance. Witness the outcry over similarly impersonal NSA datamining of international phone calls, and it's sudden rhetorical transformation to "spying". Watch, though.. those same hyperbolic partisan types will jump to defend Google using arguments that would work exactly as well for the NSA.
You said that webmail interfaces will never replace a "good mail client", but, unfortunately, Thunderbird doesn't do the one thing that it could do to serve as a "good mail client" for millions of people out there, and that is to work with MS Exchange. Why they didn't see fit to make that a priority is beyond me... I have tried to use Thunderbird at work, but they gave me no choice but to abandon it 20 minutes later and switch back to Outlook (which I hate).
POP mail is easily handled by Gmail, which attracts a lot of the same market. You mention a lot of what you perceive to be "advantages" of a mail client, but, in reality, most people don't care about those things.
If they hypothetically feed you the words "dark market", they may know with 99.9% confidence that the second word is "market". For the first word, they may know with 99.9% confidence that the word is "?ark"... that first wildcard, though, may be 'd' (85% confidence), 'p' (20%), 'sh' (0.5%), or many number of other things... there is some probability that the wildcard is any given character. If they predict it to be 'd' with 85% confidence (but it is below the threshold), they will take a 'd' or a 'D' as confirmation of that. They aren't going to assume that it is a capital 'D', which might have some negligibly low probability, just because you type a capital 'D'.
Their algorithms are almost certainly smarter than that.
I imagine that it works like any OCR... they have a guess for what it is and a confidence level. If a character falls below some confidence threshold, they will feed it to a reCAPTCHA user. They may know with 99.5% certainty that the word is "?og", but only 85% certainty that the word is "Dog". Whether a user enters 'd' or 'D' is largely irrelevant.
I could see it being a problem with 'Z' and 'z', or something like that. I'm sure they can parse the language, though, and intelligently decide if it is likely to be a situation that calls for a capital letter in those rare situations.
The people who want to choose from a list with "MacOS XVIII", "Plan 10" "FreeBeOS", "ReactOS Hurd", "AmigaOS Phoenix", etc, already know how to get them. They already have choice. You even said yourself that the field allows for the selection of no OS, so what's the problem?
My grandmother, on the other hand, couldn't give a rats ass about having the choice for AmigaOS Phoenix, and, in fact, it will confuse the hell out of people who have no interest or need to learn about all of those things. It's not popular to say on slashdot, or course, but, like it or not, the ubiquity of Windows is the single greatest thing that ever happened in terms of mainstreaming PCs and making them accessible to "normal" people.
This is a lot of special interests bitching and trying to get favors from their regulatory pals. It has absolutely ZERO to do with what's good for the typical customer of a PC vendor.
I saw the Negroponte get all pissy on 60 Minutes because Intel decided to compete with them and build a cheaper machine... this was never about getting a good, affordable product to poor kids for Negroponte, or he would welcome the competition.
They don't even get articles up in a timely manner anymore--I've already seen everything on other sites by the time its on slashdot nowadays. Perhaps everyone is too busy reading DailyKos and Democratic Underground to do their jobs and get content up?
The summary--particular the bit about Bush--is so laughably unprofessional that this can't be considered useful. It is simply a reflection of the childish, uber-simplistic mentality of the "researchers". If the results had come out differently, the more "progressive" participants would be lauded for their reluctance to accept everything at face value and for their tendency to challenge the orthodoxy.
In other words, it's crap, and shame on/. for posting it.
I agree on the shenanigans, but you called BS on the statement that "The PZEV cars don't get better gas milage". PZEVs don't necessarily get better gas milage. Hybrids, like yours, are a subset of PZEVs which DO get better gas milage... but most PZEVs in question are simply going to involve a bolt-on component that removes smog forming emissions, and are still burning gasoline at roughly the same rate and emitting ~20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas.
...used to have timely, cutting-edge news? Now, almost without exception, I have seen the articles on slashdot several days prior at other sites. As more responsive and more numerous tech-centric sites pop up, and as slashdot's political group-think becomes more pervasive and mindless, this site is becoming less relevant as a daily "must read" site.
There isn't even a hint of anything illegal with this. What are you talking about? It actually sounds like a cool and useful program.
And quit calling it "NSA illegal wiretapping" if you want to be taken as anything other than a demagogue. It isn't wiretapping, and the legality is very much up for debate, as it falls in a definite gray area.
It isn't the judge's job to prepare someone's case for them. There are two sides, two scholarly legal arguments which take conflicting views of the law. The judge determines which more accurately interprets the law with respect to the actual written law and legal precedent.
It's possible that they DID have permission to use those images, and that they simply displayed the watermarked ones by mistake. That's an awfully serious charge you guys are throwing around without evidence.
I've been saying that for a while... slashdot is dominated by a clique-ish groupthink that is absolutely unhealthy, and makes it hard to take much of the opinion here seriously. Too many people spend too much time saying things that they will make them look "cool" to other similarly insecure slashdotter, and not enough time actually critically reading the articles.
According to the article, there are warrants for the 100 people who are under surveillance in America. This is completely inline with what the Bush administration has said from day one.
Am I engaging in "censorship", then, since I have chosen not to operate a retail store that sells unmodified albums? It isn't censorship to choose not to sell something. That's basically what you're bitching about, and you'll have to get over it.
I can go to the store and buy a beer on Sunday today. You may have been conditioned by others to THINK that we have fewer rights today than at any time in the last 50 years, but it just doesn't hold water... it's more of a demagogic point than a factual one.
The Patriot Act is one of those things that a lot of people (like you, apparently) don't understand. Nobody is put on the no-fly list "for just criticizing the Bush administration", and that has little directly to do with the Patriot Act.
Actually, your post is so uninformed and cartoonishly riddled with blind, knee-jerk partisanship--with more than a hint of juvenile talking-point-parroting--that I'm not going to further respond other than to say that there is nothing rational about a single one of your "points". If you want to dialog with me try to sound thoughtful and informed... simply quoting Keith Olbermann at me doesn't impress.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking to a forum full of people who don't get that sort of nuance. Witness the outcry over similarly impersonal NSA datamining of international phone calls, and it's sudden rhetorical transformation to "spying". Watch, though.. those same hyperbolic partisan types will jump to defend Google using arguments that would work exactly as well for the NSA.
Every four or eight years in the US, the leader of the executive branch leaves and is replaced by someone else. I would hardly call that a crisis.
There is nothing in the article to hint that Thunderbird's continued existence is threatened in the least.
You said that webmail interfaces will never replace a "good mail client", but, unfortunately, Thunderbird doesn't do the one thing that it could do to serve as a "good mail client" for millions of people out there, and that is to work with MS Exchange. Why they didn't see fit to make that a priority is beyond me... I have tried to use Thunderbird at work, but they gave me no choice but to abandon it 20 minutes later and switch back to Outlook (which I hate).
POP mail is easily handled by Gmail, which attracts a lot of the same market. You mention a lot of what you perceive to be "advantages" of a mail client, but, in reality, most people don't care about those things.
If they hypothetically feed you the words "dark market", they may know with 99.9% confidence that the second word is "market". For the first word, they may know with 99.9% confidence that the word is "?ark"... that first wildcard, though, may be 'd' (85% confidence), 'p' (20%), 'sh' (0.5%), or many number of other things... there is some probability that the wildcard is any given character. If they predict it to be 'd' with 85% confidence (but it is below the threshold), they will take a 'd' or a 'D' as confirmation of that. They aren't going to assume that it is a capital 'D', which might have some negligibly low probability, just because you type a capital 'D'.
Their algorithms are almost certainly smarter than that.
I imagine that it works like any OCR... they have a guess for what it is and a confidence level. If a character falls below some confidence threshold, they will feed it to a reCAPTCHA user. They may know with 99.5% certainty that the word is "?og", but only 85% certainty that the word is "Dog". Whether a user enters 'd' or 'D' is largely irrelevant.
I could see it being a problem with 'Z' and 'z', or something like that. I'm sure they can parse the language, though, and intelligently decide if it is likely to be a situation that calls for a capital letter in those rare situations.
The people who want to choose from a list with "MacOS XVIII", "Plan 10" "FreeBeOS", "ReactOS Hurd", "AmigaOS Phoenix", etc, already know how to get them. They already have choice. You even said yourself that the field allows for the selection of no OS, so what's the problem?
My grandmother, on the other hand, couldn't give a rats ass about having the choice for AmigaOS Phoenix, and, in fact, it will confuse the hell out of people who have no interest or need to learn about all of those things. It's not popular to say on slashdot, or course, but, like it or not, the ubiquity of Windows is the single greatest thing that ever happened in terms of mainstreaming PCs and making them accessible to "normal" people.
This is a lot of special interests bitching and trying to get favors from their regulatory pals. It has absolutely ZERO to do with what's good for the typical customer of a PC vendor.
What is even more shocking is that dumb-ass anarchists on slashdot don't understand why security reacted.
That's not shocking at all. There some really fucking stupid people on slashdot. A lot of them.
How did they manage police work before they had tasers?
How did morons like this idiot practice their ass-hattery before they had police with tasers to provoke and YouTube to distribute the planned video?
I saw the Negroponte get all pissy on 60 Minutes because Intel decided to compete with them and build a cheaper machine... this was never about getting a good, affordable product to poor kids for Negroponte, or he would welcome the competition.
They don't even get articles up in a timely manner anymore--I've already seen everything on other sites by the time its on slashdot nowadays. Perhaps everyone is too busy reading DailyKos and Democratic Underground to do their jobs and get content up?
The summary--particular the bit about Bush--is so laughably unprofessional that this can't be considered useful. It is simply a reflection of the childish, uber-simplistic mentality of the "researchers". If the results had come out differently, the more "progressive" participants would be lauded for their reluctance to accept everything at face value and for their tendency to challenge the orthodoxy.
/. for posting it.
In other words, it's crap, and shame on
I agree on the shenanigans, but you called BS on the statement that "The PZEV cars don't get better gas milage". PZEVs don't necessarily get better gas milage. Hybrids, like yours, are a subset of PZEVs which DO get better gas milage... but most PZEVs in question are simply going to involve a bolt-on component that removes smog forming emissions, and are still burning gasoline at roughly the same rate and emitting ~20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas.
...used to have timely, cutting-edge news? Now, almost without exception, I have seen the articles on slashdot several days prior at other sites. As more responsive and more numerous tech-centric sites pop up, and as slashdot's political group-think becomes more pervasive and mindless, this site is becoming less relevant as a daily "must read" site.
Something to consider.
There isn't even a hint of anything illegal with this. What are you talking about? It actually sounds like a cool and useful program. And quit calling it "NSA illegal wiretapping" if you want to be taken as anything other than a demagogue. It isn't wiretapping, and the legality is very much up for debate, as it falls in a definite gray area.
How many libraries do you know of that make digital copies of music readily available to anyone with an internet connection?
It isn't the judge's job to prepare someone's case for them. There are two sides, two scholarly legal arguments which take conflicting views of the law. The judge determines which more accurately interprets the law with respect to the actual written law and legal precedent.
And Walmart isn't distributing Oreos by putting them on the shelf. Get a better argument, and shame on slashdot for endorsing such a ridiculous view.
So how did they suddenly become a posterchild for copyright laws on slashdot? A bit desperate for news, are we?
It's possible that they DID have permission to use those images, and that they simply displayed the watermarked ones by mistake. That's an awfully serious charge you guys are throwing around without evidence.
I've been saying that for a while... slashdot is dominated by a clique-ish groupthink that is absolutely unhealthy, and makes it hard to take much of the opinion here seriously. Too many people spend too much time saying things that they will make them look "cool" to other similarly insecure slashdotter, and not enough time actually critically reading the articles.
According to the article, there are warrants for the 100 people who are under surveillance in America. This is completely inline with what the Bush administration has said from day one.
Am I engaging in "censorship", then, since I have chosen not to operate a retail store that sells unmodified albums? It isn't censorship to choose not to sell something. That's basically what you're bitching about, and you'll have to get over it.
I can go to the store and buy a beer on Sunday today. You may have been conditioned by others to THINK that we have fewer rights today than at any time in the last 50 years, but it just doesn't hold water... it's more of a demagogic point than a factual one.
The Patriot Act is one of those things that a lot of people (like you, apparently) don't understand. Nobody is put on the no-fly list "for just criticizing the Bush administration", and that has little directly to do with the Patriot Act. Actually, your post is so uninformed and cartoonishly riddled with blind, knee-jerk partisanship--with more than a hint of juvenile talking-point-parroting--that I'm not going to further respond other than to say that there is nothing rational about a single one of your "points". If you want to dialog with me try to sound thoughtful and informed... simply quoting Keith Olbermann at me doesn't impress.