John Hancock was an American Revolutionary, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He signed it as largely and boldly as possible, much larger than any of the other signatures on that document, so that the King of England would have NO trouble identifying him in the face of his (and his compatriots) clear act of treason. His name is now synonymous with autograph or signature, as in, "Can I have your John Hancock here, please?"
If the AT&T technical staff called their data mining "language" Hancock, it may have been a poetic choice: AT&T is signaling their actions, and/or the actions of the government agents, are akin to treasonous. Yes, the charge of 'treason' is nearly moot in modern US law, but the fact remains that any sensible reading of the Constitution would not indicate any authority for what the government is doing with our communications.
The debate's tone would try not to be adversarial, but cordial and educational.
Not sure if this was meant as a joke, but Brownback of Kansas has already dropped out. There goes about half of your fun factor. The rest of the Republicans will hem and haw around the edges of the Creationism issue like a complex number approaching the Mandelbrot set, but Brownback came from the state so bold they redefined pi. The Democrats will try (and fail) to evoke Kennedy's passion for a moon launch while simultaneously explaining how scientifically advanced the latest V-Chip self-censoring technologies are getting.
As I've ranted before, Fitts Law only improves the time it takes you to get to the edge, not the time it takes you to hike or sling back from the edge to where you really want to do something. Sure, skiing down a taller mountain is fun and it's still really easy to find the lodge at the bottom of the hill thanks to gravity, but you're going to have to spend a lot more time on the ski lift before the next run.
Friendcodes are stupid. A solid online experience isn't *that* hard, especially when you have solid examples to reference.
Given that they're making chattable games available to pre-teens, and parents of said pre-teens NEVER look over the shoulder when a kid's playing a "gameboy," I can see why they made the Friend Code system the way they did. You can only play with people you know.
However, the Wii looks like it'll be a bitch. It's not even one Friend Code per Wii or per Mii. It's apparently going to be a Friend Code per player per GAME. This is clearly nonsensical if it's true.
Two suggestions to Nintendo to salvage the situation and foster the use of the Internet for long-distance play with folks you know. (1) Let DS units trade their WiFi Friend Codes via bluetooth. No manual code entry, just let the units sniff at short distance to introduce them for long-distance play in the future. And (2) Let DS units and Wiimotes store and trade Friend Codes by sniffing via bluetooth too. Take your Wiimote to a friend's house, or loan your friend your Wiimote overnight, then when you get it back home you can play remotely with that friend.
I am unaware of any scientist who is celebrating this as a thwart to "those who cling to dogma".
I have known and heard many scientists who were just as dogmatic and venomous against the whole idea of God. I have known and heard many scientists who believe strongly that there is a God and find no problem with the study of the natural world as a study of that God's Creation. I have known and heard many scientists who find the whole debate about the existence of God pointless because it's unsolvable or irrelevant. Newsflash: Science and Spirituality are orthogonal.
A good scientist can be of any of these categories, or more. If they write "cannot imagine it could survive" in a paper, and then want to retract that language or that paper, that's their business. The whole point to science is to learn how it is, and to retract or retire theories which are now untenable.
The problem with most Religions is that they're in the business of being Right by thinking they're right. They rarely consciously rethink a Truth, they teach the same Truth that was taught to them. That's the definition of dogma. Atheism shares this with God-faith religions: they are Right about the Truth and can be quite snippy about those who are not of the same mind. (I'm sure I'll be flamed (again) for calling athiesm a religion.) There are athiest scientists, just as there are buddhist scientists and catholic scientists. Some are dogmatic, and some unfold an ever-growing understanding of reality from their science.
How can this system be used outside of law enforcement?
Sony has already developed a camera with a simpler form of "smile detection." If engaged, the camera will scan the scene for all subjects to smile and then allow the shutter sequence to fire. Seems really gimmicky (useless in practice) to me, but a new tickbox on the carton equates to sales.
See, the secret illegal wiretaps don't even have to incur that FISA-approved tap charge. They just say "do it, or else" to the telco, and I bet the telco doesn't get to add a line item on the accounting ledger.
After all, people SHOULDN'T be providing copyrighted content except under fair use laws.
This view is all well and good, but (1) fair use is not a right backed by a law, it's a doctrine (it's essentially a recognized loophole or accepted defense), and (2) the four factors governing what is fair use and what is not fair use are purposely vague, so as to require a reasonable legal debate (read: lawsuit) of each and every instance of purported fair/unfair usage of copyrighted content. Fair Use cannot be encoded into a machine.
I think that every Republican who worked toward this should be tarred and feathered in their districts. Especially after they whine and bitch and holler about how bad it would be giving "amnesty" to all those illegal immigrants who have been actively supporting their agricultural state economies for years. This wiretap immunity is corporate amnesty.
I totally don't condone the "prankster" jerk's behavior in this incident, or anything similar.
However, I have to say that a silver lining in this sort of incident is that it might help the more zealous members of law enforcement (ever more beefy, ever more armored, ever more anonymous, ever more hair-triggered) remember that there are innocent people out there who don't deserve a knee in the back, a taser in the ass, or a broken door. A citizen who is drunk at a restaurant, or who is loud at a rally does not equate to being dangerous or resisting.
When you assume, it makes an ass of you and me. When a cop assumes, all too often he reaches for his sidearm.
I use VirtueDesktops, but won't need it once Leopard offers me spaces. The author agrees-- last I read, he was not going to continue development down a dead end.
I'm looking forward to the release, but I don't think I'll buy it until the first patches come out. A lot of press said Panther and Tiger were pretty solid, but I found a lot of little "quirks" and bugs that needed squishing after the public release. It's also inevitable that I'll have to work around some new "feature" in some of my photography scripts because something tiny changed. And then there's the impact to various macports which I'll have to wait for patches (or learn enough of the codebase to hack a fix).
I wonder if it prints yellow dots to encode the redacted text for forensic analysis.
You know, it used to be that a "national security" threat was something that could kill millions, or wipe out the White House. Now a kid with some lighter fluid can be arrested for terroristic threats, and it's the White House that authorizes the killing. Can nobody read the Constitution?
It's not just monopolies. I have stated before that democracy and capitalism (voting with the pen and with the wallet) seems to break down at 1e7~1e8 customers or voters. Once there are that many, the company or political party knows they have nothing to lose... any negativism is drowned by apathy.
I am finding more and more examples of numerical illiteracy in corporate communications.
One type is an "honest mistake" (in quotes), such as corporate earnings reports that need to be restated on a regular basis. Another type is when corporate messages take advantage of the poor numeracy of their reader.
On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows.
If you have 10 sales/month, and it increases +5, that's an increase of 50%. If you have 1000 sales/month, and it increases +50, that's "only" an increase of 5%. You can "truthfully" state that 50% growth is faster than 5% growth, but that +5/month increase is not going to make Microsoft worry quite yet.
This is why I find it important to distinguish from consumer and customer. The customer is always right. The consumer is just a resource. Problem is, we are the consumer. The corporation on the other end of the data-mining business is the customer.
This is akin to the 72-year-old pensioner who was asked for proof of age when buying a bottle of wine. He refused on the grounds that it is flat out ridiculous to have to show documentation when nobody in their right mind would think he might not have reached 21 years of age.
Paperwork is not supposed to be a replacement for having staff who are sane and lucid. It is just ridiculous that many managers (and bonehead front-line workers) would disagree. Darwin has failed for humanity.
I really just don't get this attitude about free email services. It's ad-supported. You can delete stuff if their already generous-for-free service is getting full. They likely have gotten all the value out of reading your older emails anyway, so it's not in their best interest to offer you endlessly increasing storage. Stop being a mooch and a whiner.
Okay, just stating the wattage is like stating MPG for a car or the energy usage for a fridge. But every year, car performance stays about the same or gets worse, and the fridge ain't getting more full. There doesn't seem to be a single useful energy metric that can drive informed purchasing decisions.
So how do you deal with CPUs that are twice as powerful in the next product cycle? The wattage will be about the same, but the amount you can get done with that chip will be much higher. It's like next year's car suddenly weighs twice as much, or goes twice as fast, or seats two whole families, while getting the same mileage. You can't even consider it in two tiers like "passenger cars vs truck frames" because you have to deal with 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 performance tiers... they change all the time. How can someone make an informed decision from this?
I'm not an Apple fanboi, but you can hold the T key down when booting ANY Mac and it boots into a "firewire drive" mode instead of a full kernel and gui. This has been true for years.
And this is promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts, how, again?
Make the "Groundhog Day Effect" Illegal
on
Gaming Usability 101
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I call this one the "Groundhog Day Effect."
I hate it when a game is clearly designed in such a way that the ONLY way you can learn how to solve a puzzle or beat a boss is to be killed (GAME OVER) and try again from the last save. I don't mind dying from my own stupidity, but the game should be solvable in theory without ever having to back up to the previous save point. There are quite a few games where there was no information available about the solution until after you'd committed the fatal mistake and hit a point of no-return-except-RESET.
I know it's an oft-repeated argument, about whether or not to put the GNU/ on that product or platform. But extending the usual meme slightly may shed some new light on that debate. I'm just hoping it won't produce flame instead.
Linspire isn't just Linux. It's not even just GNU/Linux. Some might call it GNU/Apache/Qt/Linux/etc. Now it's GNU/Apache/Qt/Microsoft/Adobe/Real/Linux/etc. Pretty soon, your "free software" is going to have more corporate badges than a brand new laptop.
The flaw, publicly disclosed more than three weeks ago, could allow hackers to use rigged PDF files to take control of Window XP computers with Internet Explorer 7 installed.
Did Adobe ask the feds to lock up the person who publicly disclose this flaw? Or do they just save that treatment for the publication of flaws in eBook products that blind people can't use in Russia?
Slashdot Mirror
Jokes aside, is this related to John Hancock?
John Hancock was an American Revolutionary, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He signed it as largely and boldly as possible, much larger than any of the other signatures on that document, so that the King of England would have NO trouble identifying him in the face of his (and his compatriots) clear act of treason. His name is now synonymous with autograph or signature, as in, "Can I have your John Hancock here, please?"
If the AT&T technical staff called their data mining "language" Hancock, it may have been a poetic choice: AT&T is signaling their actions, and/or the actions of the government agents, are akin to treasonous. Yes, the charge of 'treason' is nearly moot in modern US law, but the fact remains that any sensible reading of the Constitution would not indicate any authority for what the government is doing with our communications.
Not sure if this was meant as a joke, but Brownback of Kansas has already dropped out. There goes about half of your fun factor. The rest of the Republicans will hem and haw around the edges of the Creationism issue like a complex number approaching the Mandelbrot set, but Brownback came from the state so bold they redefined pi. The Democrats will try (and fail) to evoke Kennedy's passion for a moon launch while simultaneously explaining how scientifically advanced the latest V-Chip self-censoring technologies are getting.
As I've ranted before, Fitts Law only improves the time it takes you to get to the edge, not the time it takes you to hike or sling back from the edge to where you really want to do something. Sure, skiing down a taller mountain is fun and it's still really easy to find the lodge at the bottom of the hill thanks to gravity, but you're going to have to spend a lot more time on the ski lift before the next run.
Given that they're making chattable games available to pre-teens, and parents of said pre-teens NEVER look over the shoulder when a kid's playing a "gameboy," I can see why they made the Friend Code system the way they did. You can only play with people you know.
However, the Wii looks like it'll be a bitch. It's not even one Friend Code per Wii or per Mii. It's apparently going to be a Friend Code per player per GAME. This is clearly nonsensical if it's true.
Two suggestions to Nintendo to salvage the situation and foster the use of the Internet for long-distance play with folks you know. (1) Let DS units trade their WiFi Friend Codes via bluetooth. No manual code entry, just let the units sniff at short distance to introduce them for long-distance play in the future. And (2) Let DS units and Wiimotes store and trade Friend Codes by sniffing via bluetooth too. Take your Wiimote to a friend's house, or loan your friend your Wiimote overnight, then when you get it back home you can play remotely with that friend.
I have known and heard many scientists who were just as dogmatic and venomous against the whole idea of God. I have known and heard many scientists who believe strongly that there is a God and find no problem with the study of the natural world as a study of that God's Creation. I have known and heard many scientists who find the whole debate about the existence of God pointless because it's unsolvable or irrelevant. Newsflash: Science and Spirituality are orthogonal.
A good scientist can be of any of these categories, or more. If they write "cannot imagine it could survive" in a paper, and then want to retract that language or that paper, that's their business. The whole point to science is to learn how it is, and to retract or retire theories which are now untenable.
The problem with most Religions is that they're in the business of being Right by thinking they're right. They rarely consciously rethink a Truth, they teach the same Truth that was taught to them. That's the definition of dogma. Atheism shares this with God-faith religions: they are Right about the Truth and can be quite snippy about those who are not of the same mind. (I'm sure I'll be flamed (again) for calling athiesm a religion.) There are athiest scientists, just as there are buddhist scientists and catholic scientists. Some are dogmatic, and some unfold an ever-growing understanding of reality from their science.
Sony has already developed a camera with a simpler form of "smile detection." If engaged, the camera will scan the scene for all subjects to smile and then allow the shutter sequence to fire. Seems really gimmicky (useless in practice) to me, but a new tickbox on the carton equates to sales.
Sony Smile-Detecting Camera
See, the secret illegal wiretaps don't even have to incur that FISA-approved tap charge. They just say "do it, or else" to the telco, and I bet the telco doesn't get to add a line item on the accounting ledger.
This view is all well and good, but (1) fair use is not a right backed by a law, it's a doctrine (it's essentially a recognized loophole or accepted defense), and (2) the four factors governing what is fair use and what is not fair use are purposely vague, so as to require a reasonable legal debate (read: lawsuit) of each and every instance of purported fair/unfair usage of copyrighted content. Fair Use cannot be encoded into a machine.
I think that every Republican who worked toward this should be tarred and feathered in their districts. Especially after they whine and bitch and holler about how bad it would be giving "amnesty" to all those illegal immigrants who have been actively supporting their agricultural state economies for years. This wiretap immunity is corporate amnesty.
Sturgeon's Law (paraphrased): 90% of everything sucks.
Just goes to show, that when you think it can't suck any worse, you find it can suck a LOT worse.
I totally don't condone the "prankster" jerk's behavior in this incident, or anything similar.
However, I have to say that a silver lining in this sort of incident is that it might help the more zealous members of law enforcement (ever more beefy, ever more armored, ever more anonymous, ever more hair-triggered) remember that there are innocent people out there who don't deserve a knee in the back, a taser in the ass, or a broken door. A citizen who is drunk at a restaurant, or who is loud at a rally does not equate to being dangerous or resisting.
When you assume, it makes an ass of you and me. When a cop assumes, all too often he reaches for his sidearm.
I use VirtueDesktops, but won't need it once Leopard offers me spaces. The author agrees-- last I read, he was not going to continue development down a dead end.
I'm looking forward to the release, but I don't think I'll buy it until the first patches come out. A lot of press said Panther and Tiger were pretty solid, but I found a lot of little "quirks" and bugs that needed squishing after the public release. It's also inevitable that I'll have to work around some new "feature" in some of my photography scripts because something tiny changed. And then there's the impact to various macports which I'll have to wait for patches (or learn enough of the codebase to hack a fix).
I wonder if it prints yellow dots to encode the redacted text for forensic analysis.
You know, it used to be that a "national security" threat was something that could kill millions, or wipe out the White House. Now a kid with some lighter fluid can be arrested for terroristic threats, and it's the White House that authorizes the killing. Can nobody read the Constitution?
We the [REDACTED]It's not just monopolies. I have stated before that democracy and capitalism (voting with the pen and with the wallet) seems to break down at 1e7~1e8 customers or voters. Once there are that many, the company or political party knows they have nothing to lose... any negativism is drowned by apathy.
I am finding more and more examples of numerical illiteracy in corporate communications.
One type is an "honest mistake" (in quotes), such as corporate earnings reports that need to be restated on a regular basis. Another type is when corporate messages take advantage of the poor numeracy of their reader.
On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows.If you have 10 sales/month, and it increases +5, that's an increase of 50%. If you have 1000 sales/month, and it increases +50, that's "only" an increase of 5%. You can "truthfully" state that 50% growth is faster than 5% growth, but that +5/month increase is not going to make Microsoft worry quite yet.
This is why I find it important to distinguish from consumer and customer. The customer is always right. The consumer is just a resource. Problem is, we are the consumer. The corporation on the other end of the data-mining business is the customer.
This is akin to the 72-year-old pensioner who was asked for proof of age when buying a bottle of wine. He refused on the grounds that it is flat out ridiculous to have to show documentation when nobody in their right mind would think he might not have reached 21 years of age.
Paperwork is not supposed to be a replacement for having staff who are sane and lucid. It is just ridiculous that many managers (and bonehead front-line workers) would disagree. Darwin has failed for humanity.
I really just don't get this attitude about free email services. It's ad-supported. You can delete stuff if their already generous-for-free service is getting full. They likely have gotten all the value out of reading your older emails anyway, so it's not in their best interest to offer you endlessly increasing storage. Stop being a mooch and a whiner.
Okay, just stating the wattage is like stating MPG for a car or the energy usage for a fridge. But every year, car performance stays about the same or gets worse, and the fridge ain't getting more full. There doesn't seem to be a single useful energy metric that can drive informed purchasing decisions.
So how do you deal with CPUs that are twice as powerful in the next product cycle? The wattage will be about the same, but the amount you can get done with that chip will be much higher. It's like next year's car suddenly weighs twice as much, or goes twice as fast, or seats two whole families, while getting the same mileage. You can't even consider it in two tiers like "passenger cars vs truck frames" because you have to deal with 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 performance tiers... they change all the time. How can someone make an informed decision from this?
I'm not an Apple fanboi, but you can hold the T key down when booting ANY Mac and it boots into a "firewire drive" mode instead of a full kernel and gui. This has been true for years.
And this is promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts, how, again?
I call this one the "Groundhog Day Effect."
I hate it when a game is clearly designed in such a way that the ONLY way you can learn how to solve a puzzle or beat a boss is to be killed (GAME OVER) and try again from the last save. I don't mind dying from my own stupidity, but the game should be solvable in theory without ever having to back up to the previous save point. There are quite a few games where there was no information available about the solution until after you'd committed the fatal mistake and hit a point of no-return-except-RESET.
I know it's an oft-repeated argument, about whether or not to put the GNU/ on that product or platform. But extending the usual meme slightly may shed some new light on that debate. I'm just hoping it won't produce flame instead.
Linspire isn't just Linux. It's not even just GNU/Linux. Some might call it GNU/Apache/Qt/Linux/etc. Now it's GNU/Apache/Qt/Microsoft/Adobe/Real/Linux/etc. Pretty soon, your "free software" is going to have more corporate badges than a brand new laptop.
Did Adobe ask the feds to lock up the person who publicly disclose this flaw? Or do they just save that treatment for the publication of flaws in eBook products that blind people can't use in Russia?