Do I want it taken away from us? Heck no. We hold all the power in this area right now. But if we're talking about fair and right, then it really should be handled by the UN rather than any single country.
Well, he's afraid of censorship--at least after reading the first page and scanning the second that's what I gather. Specifically something like a Muslim nation or organization forcing domains with "Mohammad" in them to be automatically rejected or some such nonsense.
That said, he conveniently ignores any attempts for it to happen in the US. And on top of that he doesn't have a real grasp on how actual country by country censorship works today. I mean, it's happening in Thailand occasionally with blocking YouTube on the ISP level or last week with Facebook in Iran. I mean, those things should be done at the ISP level with local law enforcement to stop it.
I say if we hand it over we do so on the condition that certain things stay the way they are. One being that you can't censor a domain but you can allow country by country to force their ISPs to obey whatever stupid law their government enforces. Let their constituents complain.
No one has presented to me a definite argument one way or the other.
Bing! Fries are done! Hmm. Progress, but still no dice...
True, however:
Developer One: "You know that hot girl I met at the bar last night?" Developer Two: "Yeah?" Developer One: "I bing'd her." Developer Two: "No way! What did you find?" Developer One: "Bing says she's categorized as head of a right wing conservative group that attracts females and funnels money into Karl Rove." Developer Two: "Ohhh, dude that sucks, maybe next time?" Developer One: "Yeah... thank god for bing."
Or am I mistaken. I use greasemonkey to already accomplish this.
Yeah, if you read the article, they go on extensively about this:
If you're familiar with the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, you already have a good idea of how Jetpack works. Like Greasemonkey User Scripts, Jetpack-based add-ins are written primarily in JavaScript, and they manipulate browser windows and their contents using familiar AJAX techniques. You install them directly from the Web, and they don't even require a browser restart to take effect. While developing Greasemonkey User Scripts can be somewhat cumbersome, writing add-ins with Jetpack couldn't be simpler.
Jetpack integrates the popular jQuery JavaScript library, the Firebug debugger, and Mozilla's Bespin browser-based code editor to create a complete, interactive development environment. Although it's still in a raw and experimental stage, the combination is both easy to use and incredibly powerful. For example, one of the Jetpack demos is an ad-blocking script that uses a list of regular expressions to selectively filter unwanted graphics, scripts, and iframes from Web pages. The whole script comprises only about 80 lines of code.
It's a little surprising that Mozilla Labs would choose ad blocking as one of its first demos, however, when that's precisely the sort of application that flies directly in the faces of content providers and other Web-based businesses. While the Web is inarguably a mature computing platform, as a platform for business it's still in its infancy. Media companies are struggling to create viable revenue streams, and so far advertising is one of the few that has shown promise. And yet, with just 80 lines of code, Jetpack promises to take it all away.
Of course, ad-blocking plug-ins for browsers have been around a long time, and many users wouldn't fire up a browser without one. But by announcing Jetpack with a demonstration of how easy it is to build an ad-blocking script, Mozilla Labs is in effect saying that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Mashups, filters, formatters, and tools -- when Jetpack is done, anything will be possible, and it will be easy. That's bound to send a chill up any would-be Web mogul's spine.
The big news everyone seems to be missing is that everyone and their mom will be able to block ads with very little knowledge. That's dangerous to content providers and I've highlighted the part in the above text where the author talks about this. Is Mozilla entering a maelstrom that was normally between adblock/noscript and content providers?
CmdrTaco, you posted this dupe to early as the last one was only posted 8 days ago. You are supposed to wait at least a month before duping. Thank you.
Today's article is more centered on the battle that the author believes is about to transpire between content providers and users. If you're having trouble finding these parts:
Content producers, on the other hand, might not be so thrilled.
So far, calls for action such as Lynton's have mostly fallen on deaf ears. But with President Obama due to announce a "cybersecurity czar" this week, there is every indication that the U.S. government is ready to become more directly involved in the workings of the Internet and the Web. According to the White House, the new position will have "broad authority" over the nation's computer networks, both public and private. If that authority includes protecting the economic interests of American Web-based businesses, we could be heading for a helluva scuffle.
I wouldn't call it a dupe as this gives us something new to talk about from a blog.
You can find a complete list of Steve's patents here. For what it's worth, I find Jobs listed on 100 patents or patent applications and Bill Gates listed on two as the inventor.
Probably a fair indication of what kind of leader you have on your hands... definitely marketing/business for Gates.
AFAIK, I'm still banned from the Laughing Dragon in Dallas because when I was 12 years old, I suggested that I liked DBZ better than Akira.
Oh, that's how you remember it, eh? Well I was there when it happened. Some little 12 year old trotting about the room saying "DBZ is better than A-queer-a, DBZ is better..." ad infinitum.
Why do TV shows, such as 30 Rock, The Simpsons, Heroes and Everyone Loves Raymond, persist in so ferevently [sic] stereotyping comic book fans and stores?
Well, the article didn't help me answering that question, it just illustrated the stereotype.
My guess would be (1) because it's funny and (2) even someone like myself who spent tons of time in a comic book store get a kick out of it. A lot of other stereotypes like hair brained teenage cheerleader will catch you a lot of criticism in the media. Those geeks you make fun of in high school? The ones that are hyper obsessive with social disorders that spend more time in their room reading than anywhere else? Those are the people running a lot of stuff today. So I guess it's ok to make fun of them all you want... even when they've become your boss. Other stereotypes hurt: i.e. "Math is hard."
I do wish this article had broken down the social stigma it has associated with it though... although perhaps there's not much to break down.
And so we put it in the same state as Washington. Now, I'm guessing this is a PR company and we have a perfect match of Arbitron Ad agency listing Michael Sharp as Manager, Agency & Advertiser Services for several different regions of the US.
Ok, from there if you google Arbitron Asus and Arbitron Microsoft you come up with two very juicy powerpoints from Microsoft on Arbitron's site.
I just noticed those two powerpoints only come up because they're Microsoft Powerpoints so that's not a very strong link.
But that linking is probably unnecessary considering I just found this bio on Microsoft of a Michael Sharp as Director with the Information Security Team. Yes, it's a pretty common name but I'm pretty sure this ad work reeks of Microsoft and not Asus.
It is difficult to believe that Asus did this out of love for Redmond. I wonder how much MS paid for this special treatment, or did they threaten Asus with higher prices?
I still don't see any conclusive evidence thi was Asus' work. I think your anger should be directed at Microsoft. I can't prove it for sure but the whois of this domain itsbetterwithwindows.com reads:
Registrant: Michael Sharp 12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd. Box 238 Kent, Washington 98030 United States
Domain Name: ITSBETTERWITHWINDOWS.COM Created on: 05-Dec-08 Expires on: 05-Dec-09 Last Updated on: 05-Dec-08
If you use the classic index, click here and select the no smoking column for book reviews. If you use the dynamic index, click here. In this view, find Exclusions under the dynamic index and click it. In the box for other terms, enter "book review" with the quotes and save it the page. Upon a page refresh of your home page, you should notice no more reviews of books.
Well, the article you and I are discussing mentions it several times, including:
In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective-the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid-that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism.
Which seems to more or less directly tie it to the culture (ours) you discuss. I would contend that if your post is not to be taken in the context of concern for economic measures of dot-com transactions then it is off-topic. I also find it amusing that you claim superheros are possessed by the United States and do not enjoy popularity in other countries. A US invention, perhaps, but embraced worldwide.
Of which "Capitalism" as it has been named is merely a side effect of how such a culture operates economically, not a system in of itself.
I do not think I present a false dichotomy when I assume that an argument (and I'm referring to the argument of the article we are discussing) against "dot-Communism" is an argument for "dot-Capitalism" but I am open to your alternative dimensions to this--and yes, I'm talking economics here--aspect of online interaction.
I'm sorry you have wasted your time on such a long and pointless rant.
Our system hasn't completely fallen yet, but I think the communal internet is a great wake up call for the system. It allows individuals to aspire, self-organize, and express their individuality in a helpful way. So in that respect, I agree with the article. I just don't think it's anything new or anything to do with Communism as a system.;-)
Oh, I could play the devil's advocate and think of a stupid roundabout way of showing that Communism is more about empowering the individual to pursue their dreams than worry about possessions. Such flawed and impassioned exercises began to bore me long ago though--so I'll spare you the inanity.
I thought that the majority of Americans have come to terms that absolute Communism and absolute Capitalism are both bad systems?
I mean, even the most wing-nut conservatives believe in some sort of tax or anti-trust laws and even the most bleeding hearted liberals believe that we should be left a sizable share of our income to our own responsibility and desires.
So why do we move back to a stupid argument between the absolutes of Capitalism vs Communism when the correct solution is somewhere to be found in the middle? And different peoples enjoy different solutions. It so turns out that corruptibility of humans by nature dictates we should be closer to capitalism that communism. If the author of this article thinks the internet has far too much communal activity, so be it. But make rational arguments and don't play on the red scare... we're adults now, we're past that.
I tire of the return to young idealist zealotry and yawn at the attempt to evoke fear from me of one side over the other. The absolutes are both dangerous and stupid.
Presumably they will either have to take into account the clues that come from the category itself (as in your example) or rig the system by avoiding "trick" categories. It's not an easy problem and it'll be very interesting to see what IBM come up with.
An example from last night, they had a category "Knockouts" in both the first and second round. In the first round, all the answers were hot women (i.e. knockouts!), in the second round all the answers were about boxing. How will Watson deal with this? I don't know.
Yes, there are categories which require the contestant to have an active imagination and it's these categories I wish the article had addressed instead of a vanilla one. And I believe it's these categories that makes Jeopardy fresh and new after decades.
In retrospect, I should have broke out the conversation into a different post so that this wasn't modded +5 Funny. I'm seriously interested in how IBM plans to address things that require the natural speech recognition of Alex Trebek. Does it take into account other answers in the same category to "catch on" like some contestants obviously do?
Then there's the folks running Jeopardy who could pick some categories that would wreck Watson and give the humans the creative advantage. I hope they exploit this creative ability humans have and write an entire category in... oh, say Pig Latin!
In reality, they stand to have much more to gain if the machine comes close to winning... as they could make this into an annual competition drawing fans and viewers much like the quest to beat the world chess grand masters.
How tastelessly incorrect. Extra-terrestrials don't come back to life. Watson would cross reference The Bible with many recent movies and come up with the correct question we were looking for: "What was a zombie?"
I wonder how they plan to do with categories that have implications for all the answers. I've seen categories where words must be so many letters in length or perhaps start with certain things and Alex will interject while reading the category such as "'Cats'--and that means all the words in this category start with 'Cat'." Now, with that in mind, a clue could come in as "They are the popular makers of earth moving equipment." Might prompt Watson to find the most popular makers of earth moving equipment--Who is John Deere? The category of 'Cats' would do nothing for Watson without the aid of Alex's interjection... thus failing at finding "Who is Caterpillar?" (bonus points if you also thought of "Who is Bobcat?" but that answer doesn't start with Cat).
As a fairly avid though novice crossword puzzler, my mind explodes with questions. Could Watson discern a four letter word for "Pleasant French city" (Nice)? Or what about a four letter word for "Beefy Laker" (Kobe)?
Lastly, will Watson have something inane and boring to talk about during the break?
Alex Trebek: Now, Watson, it says here that you are named after Thomas J. Watson who forbade his employees to drink and even frowned upon it while off the job? Watson: That is correct. It is against IBM regulation 4-245 Section 8 to consume alcohol on the premises of any facility. Alex Trebek: Fascinating, I'm sure you've never broken that strict regulation, ha ha. Watson: Good sir, I am a computer, drinking is not within my capacity. Alex Trebek: Um, right. So could you tell us something interesting about yourself? Watson: *pauses to search records* During the fabrication of my circuitry, several engineers went months without sleep. Leading one to go insane and killed his wife and kid before taking his own life in a double homicide/suicide case. Alex Trebek: How unfortunate. Well, I wish you the best of luck today in Jeopardy. Watson: Thank you, my snide game show master.
Hello. Closed source software. I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not. I doubt even the militarised versions of Windows have *everything* they know about fixed - it's easier to just say "don't do this" or not include a certain tool/utility/feature than it is to fix it and document it.
Why on Earth would you ever find this alarming, or unforgivable? It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code and (hopefully) never see it.
I disagree.
You could (should) offer a closed source product and still be honest about all the bugs that exist in it to your paying customers. Granted, I'm not distributing my web applications on a scale that Vista is being distributed on but you know seeing these 700 fixes listed out does alarm me. I mean, that really serious bug? The one that puts your Windows 2008 server at risk? Could still be at large without you ever knowing about it.
From Microsoft's end, how do they handle multiple bug reports when users don't have access to a complete list of known bugs so they know to report it?
And maybe it's obvious why they keep them from you--you'd probably flip to a serving solution without that bug. But, as an advocate for transparency, I would expect Microsoft to at least publicize its bugs--especially if they've been fixed in an update. I'm kind of lead to believe that these 700 (on the dot!) bug fixes are only a subset.
The Fc.exe command does not work correctly in Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2008 when the command compares files that differ at every 128th byte of a character string
The Fc.exe command does not work correctly in Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2008 when the two files that you are comparing have the TAB or SPACE character around the 128th byte in a character string
I can almost imagine the developer sitting at his desk getting an e-mail from their issue management system that there's a problem with Fc.exe (file compare)... only to have him realize that his for loop that iterates over the buffer that reads the files should have the while conditions of <= 128 and not simply < 128!
This is forgivable, I code some pretty stupid errors sometimes.
What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming!
Program Manager: What the hell is happening?! Why is the website down?! Web Programmer: It's the users, sir, one of them put dashes in their SSN on the form! Program Manager: I don't have time for this mumbo jumbo geek jargon... what are you trying to tell me? This is an emergency, accounting said our money is leaving! Web Programmer: Well, you see the dashes are inside the string. Program Manager: Inside? How is this possible? Web Programmer: Well, the user must have paused to push the dash key, sir. Program Manager: So if the dashes are inside the string, we have to get them out. Is there someone we can pay for this service? Web Programmer: I'm afraid it's too complicated for that. But maybe if we had it write to a file and one of us kept refreshing a text editor on that file... we could remove it and then it could read back the file after waiting for a few seconds. We would have to hope that more users don't come while we are performing emergency dash extraction. Program Manager: Goddamnit! Why didn't testing find this?! Web Programmer: Well, they did but to fix this bug we just removed the dash keys on their keyboards. Program Manager: Can we do that to each of the users? *IBM employee enters with massive box labeled "Enterprise SSN Dash Extractor"* IBM Sales Rep: Gentlemen, let IBM solve all your SSN problems for a mere $2,000 per site license!
Put that into your favorite Javascript regular expression object and write a stupid onChange reference to it in your HTML and... tada! Too complicated? Here's some more prior art. Or here. A little bit of Googling must be too much for the USPTO.
Are we suddenly shocked to discover one line of code can be patented when a whole mess of code can be patented?
Because any developer worth their weight in salt will tell you that RNGs are not truly random.
No, they are not truly random. Nor is his dice machine, as the dice are possibly imperfect and subject to gravity or the way it reloads them into the hopper. Influences could be anywhere.
I would be interested in seeing him run this machine for 30 days and then compute the Shannon entropy on the results and then compare this to popular RNGs out there.
Although I would expect the RNGs (however flawed) to perform better, it would be interesting nonetheless.
While not called out in the article, the pictures clearly show a Dell Mini 9 running the show (and performing the optical recognition of the dice values.)
Yes but there's not a lot of "optical recognition" going on. From the article:
The dice are "Michigan Red Eyes", which have different colored pips for each value. The different colors make it pretty easy to count rolls. For example, if 6 yellow dots are found in the image, there were three 2s rolled, no need to worry about determining the proper grouping or orientation of pips.
If you control the background as being black or shades of grey (which is what it appears on that dirty dirty Windows XP screen) then your task is a lot easier and less error prone. Well done on the designer's part but surely reduces the computational work load.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I want it taken away from us? Heck no. We hold all the power in this area right now. But if we're talking about fair and right, then it really should be handled by the UN rather than any single country.
Well, he's afraid of censorship--at least after reading the first page and scanning the second that's what I gather. Specifically something like a Muslim nation or organization forcing domains with "Mohammad" in them to be automatically rejected or some such nonsense.
That said, he conveniently ignores any attempts for it to happen in the US. And on top of that he doesn't have a real grasp on how actual country by country censorship works today. I mean, it's happening in Thailand occasionally with blocking YouTube on the ISP level or last week with Facebook in Iran. I mean, those things should be done at the ISP level with local law enforcement to stop it.
I say if we hand it over we do so on the condition that certain things stay the way they are. One being that you can't censor a domain but you can allow country by country to force their ISPs to obey whatever stupid law their government enforces. Let their constituents complain.
No one has presented to me a definite argument one way or the other.
So what's the new branding going to be after this one fails? Bong?
Nah, I think it's going to be "Bang" so that sentences like this happen:
"I couldn't find the answer in my textbook so I Banged it."
Bing! Fries are done! Hmm. Progress, but still no dice...
True, however:
... thank god for bing."
Developer One: "You know that hot girl I met at the bar last night?"
Developer Two: "Yeah?"
Developer One: "I bing'd her."
Developer Two: "No way! What did you find?"
Developer One: "Bing says she's categorized as head of a right wing conservative group that attracts females and funnels money into Karl Rove."
Developer Two: "Ohhh, dude that sucks, maybe next time?"
Developer One: "Yeah
Or am I mistaken. I use greasemonkey to already accomplish this.
Yeah, if you read the article, they go on extensively about this:
If you're familiar with the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, you already have a good idea of how Jetpack works. Like Greasemonkey User Scripts, Jetpack-based add-ins are written primarily in JavaScript, and they manipulate browser windows and their contents using familiar AJAX techniques. You install them directly from the Web, and they don't even require a browser restart to take effect. While developing Greasemonkey User Scripts can be somewhat cumbersome, writing add-ins with Jetpack couldn't be simpler.
Jetpack integrates the popular jQuery JavaScript library, the Firebug debugger, and Mozilla's Bespin browser-based code editor to create a complete, interactive development environment. Although it's still in a raw and experimental stage, the combination is both easy to use and incredibly powerful. For example, one of the Jetpack demos is an ad-blocking script that uses a list of regular expressions to selectively filter unwanted graphics, scripts, and iframes from Web pages. The whole script comprises only about 80 lines of code.
It's a little surprising that Mozilla Labs would choose ad blocking as one of its first demos, however, when that's precisely the sort of application that flies directly in the faces of content providers and other Web-based businesses. While the Web is inarguably a mature computing platform, as a platform for business it's still in its infancy. Media companies are struggling to create viable revenue streams, and so far advertising is one of the few that has shown promise. And yet, with just 80 lines of code, Jetpack promises to take it all away.
Of course, ad-blocking plug-ins for browsers have been around a long time, and many users wouldn't fire up a browser without one. But by announcing Jetpack with a demonstration of how easy it is to build an ad-blocking script, Mozilla Labs is in effect saying that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Mashups, filters, formatters, and tools -- when Jetpack is done, anything will be possible, and it will be easy. That's bound to send a chill up any would-be Web mogul's spine.
The big news everyone seems to be missing is that everyone and their mom will be able to block ads with very little knowledge. That's dangerous to content providers and I've highlighted the part in the above text where the author talks about this. Is Mozilla entering a maelstrom that was normally between adblock/noscript and content providers?
CmdrTaco, you posted this dupe to early as the last one was only posted 8 days ago. You are supposed to wait at least a month before duping. Thank you.
Today's article is more centered on the battle that the author believes is about to transpire between content providers and users. If you're having trouble finding these parts:
Content producers, on the other hand, might not be so thrilled.
He goes on to cite the New York Times effort to provide an open API to their stories as well as Michael Lynton, Sony CEO Troll and wraps up with Obama's often referenced cybersecurity czar (god, I hate typing that):
So far, calls for action such as Lynton's have mostly fallen on deaf ears. But with President Obama due to announce a "cybersecurity czar" this week, there is every indication that the U.S. government is ready to become more directly involved in the workings of the Internet and the Web. According to the White House, the new position will have "broad authority" over the nation's computer networks, both public and private. If that authority includes protecting the economic interests of American Web-based businesses, we could be heading for a helluva scuffle.
I wouldn't call it a dupe as this gives us something new to talk about from a blog.
His name is also on a patent for the earphones/iPod lanyard and that patent references 47 other patents.
... definitely marketing/business for Gates.
You can find a complete list of Steve's patents here. For what it's worth, I find Jobs listed on 100 patents or patent applications and Bill Gates listed on two as the inventor.
Probably a fair indication of what kind of leader you have on your hands
AFAIK, I'm still banned from the Laughing Dragon in Dallas because when I was 12 years old, I suggested that I liked DBZ better than Akira.
Oh, that's how you remember it, eh? Well I was there when it happened. Some little 12 year old trotting about the room saying "DBZ is better than A-queer-a, DBZ is better ..." ad infinitum.
*squints eyes*
That ban saved your life.
Why do TV shows, such as 30 Rock, The Simpsons, Heroes and Everyone Loves Raymond, persist in so ferevently [sic] stereotyping comic book fans and stores?
Well, the article didn't help me answering that question, it just illustrated the stereotype.
... even when they've become your boss. Other stereotypes hurt: i.e. "Math is hard."
... although perhaps there's not much to break down.
My guess would be (1) because it's funny and (2) even someone like myself who spent tons of time in a comic book store get a kick out of it. A lot of other stereotypes like hair brained teenage cheerleader will catch you a lot of criticism in the media. Those geeks you make fun of in high school? The ones that are hyper obsessive with social disorders that spend more time in their room reading than anywhere else? Those are the people running a lot of stuff today. So I guess it's ok to make fun of them all you want
I do wish this article had broken down the social stigma it has associated with it though
And so we put it in the same state as Washington. Now, I'm guessing this is a PR company and we have a perfect match of Arbitron Ad agency listing Michael Sharp as Manager, Agency & Advertiser Services for several different regions of the US. Ok, from there if you google Arbitron Asus and Arbitron Microsoft you come up with two very juicy powerpoints from Microsoft on Arbitron's site.
I just noticed those two powerpoints only come up because they're Microsoft Powerpoints so that's not a very strong link.
But that linking is probably unnecessary considering I just found this bio on Microsoft of a Michael Sharp as Director with the Information Security Team. Yes, it's a pretty common name but I'm pretty sure this ad work reeks of Microsoft and not Asus.
It is difficult to believe that Asus did this out of love for Redmond. I wonder how much MS paid for this special treatment, or did they threaten Asus with higher prices?
I still don't see any conclusive evidence thi was Asus' work. I think your anger should be directed at Microsoft. I can't prove it for sure but the whois of this domain itsbetterwithwindows.com reads:
And so we put it in the same state as Washington. Now, I'm guessing this is a PR company and we have a perfect match of Arbirtron Ad agency listing Michael Sharp as Manager, Agency & Advertiser Services for several different regions of the US.
Ok, from there if you google Arbitron Asus and Arbitron Microsoft you come up with two very juicy powerpoints from Microsoft on Arbitron's site.
I would put my guess at 95% that this is a Microsoft run and funded site with little to do with Asus other than get their permission.
And project an image of my ass onto a car window as I pass someone?
...
Because you're sitting on a goldmine if it can.
What? It can't? *sigh* Oh well. A man can dream, can't he? A man can dream
are book reviews news?
If you use the classic index, click here and select the no smoking column for book reviews. If you use the dynamic index, click here. In this view, find Exclusions under the dynamic index and click it. In the box for other terms, enter "book review" with the quotes and save it the page. Upon a page refresh of your home page, you should notice no more reviews of books.
Who said anything about Capitalism?
Well, the article you and I are discussing mentions it several times, including:
In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective-the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid-that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism.
Which seems to more or less directly tie it to the culture (ours) you discuss. I would contend that if your post is not to be taken in the context of concern for economic measures of dot-com transactions then it is off-topic. I also find it amusing that you claim superheros are possessed by the United States and do not enjoy popularity in other countries. A US invention, perhaps, but embraced worldwide.
Of which "Capitalism" as it has been named is merely a side effect of how such a culture operates economically, not a system in of itself.
I do not think I present a false dichotomy when I assume that an argument (and I'm referring to the argument of the article we are discussing) against "dot-Communism" is an argument for "dot-Capitalism" but I am open to your alternative dimensions to this--and yes, I'm talking economics here--aspect of online interaction.
I'm sorry you have wasted your time on such a long and pointless rant.
The pleasure is all mine, apparently.
Our system hasn't completely fallen yet, but I think the communal internet is a great wake up call for the system. It allows individuals to aspire, self-organize, and express their individuality in a helpful way. So in that respect, I agree with the article. I just don't think it's anything new or anything to do with Communism as a system. ;-)
Oh, I could play the devil's advocate and think of a stupid roundabout way of showing that Communism is more about empowering the individual to pursue their dreams than worry about possessions. Such flawed and impassioned exercises began to bore me long ago though--so I'll spare you the inanity.
... we're adults now, we're past that.
I thought that the majority of Americans have come to terms that absolute Communism and absolute Capitalism are both bad systems?
I mean, even the most wing-nut conservatives believe in some sort of tax or anti-trust laws and even the most bleeding hearted liberals believe that we should be left a sizable share of our income to our own responsibility and desires.
So why do we move back to a stupid argument between the absolutes of Capitalism vs Communism when the correct solution is somewhere to be found in the middle? And different peoples enjoy different solutions. It so turns out that corruptibility of humans by nature dictates we should be closer to capitalism that communism. If the author of this article thinks the internet has far too much communal activity, so be it. But make rational arguments and don't play on the red scare
I tire of the return to young idealist zealotry and yawn at the attempt to evoke fear from me of one side over the other. The absolutes are both dangerous and stupid.
It's possible that the questions for that particular show will be specifically chosen to be more explicit and less ambiguous ...
Yes, clues like "It's the cube root of 474552" would level the playing field.
Isn't the purpose of this to let Jeopardy be Jeopardy? And see if a computer can compete at what the show is?
Presumably they will either have to take into account the clues that come from the category itself (as in your example) or rig the system by avoiding "trick" categories. It's not an easy problem and it'll be very interesting to see what IBM come up with.
An example from last night, they had a category "Knockouts" in both the first and second round. In the first round, all the answers were hot women (i.e. knockouts!), in the second round all the answers were about boxing. How will Watson deal with this? I don't know.
Yes, there are categories which require the contestant to have an active imagination and it's these categories I wish the article had addressed instead of a vanilla one. And I believe it's these categories that makes Jeopardy fresh and new after decades.
... oh, say Pig Latin!
... as they could make this into an annual competition drawing fans and viewers much like the quest to beat the world chess grand masters.
In retrospect, I should have broke out the conversation into a different post so that this wasn't modded +5 Funny. I'm seriously interested in how IBM plans to address things that require the natural speech recognition of Alex Trebek. Does it take into account other answers in the same category to "catch on" like some contestants obviously do?
Then there's the folks running Jeopardy who could pick some categories that would wreck Watson and give the humans the creative advantage. I hope they exploit this creative ability humans have and write an entire category in
In reality, they stand to have much more to gain if the machine comes close to winning
What was an extra-terrestrial?
How tastelessly incorrect. Extra-terrestrials don't come back to life. Watson would cross reference The Bible with many recent movies and come up with the correct question we were looking for: "What was a zombie?"
I wonder how they plan to do with categories that have implications for all the answers. I've seen categories where words must be so many letters in length or perhaps start with certain things and Alex will interject while reading the category such as "'Cats'--and that means all the words in this category start with 'Cat'." Now, with that in mind, a clue could come in as "They are the popular makers of earth moving equipment." Might prompt Watson to find the most popular makers of earth moving equipment--Who is John Deere? The category of 'Cats' would do nothing for Watson without the aid of Alex's interjection ... thus failing at finding "Who is Caterpillar?" (bonus points if you also thought of "Who is Bobcat?" but that answer doesn't start with Cat).
As a fairly avid though novice crossword puzzler, my mind explodes with questions. Could Watson discern a four letter word for "Pleasant French city" (Nice)? Or what about a four letter word for "Beefy Laker" (Kobe)?
Lastly, will Watson have something inane and boring to talk about during the break?
Alex Trebek: Now, Watson, it says here that you are named after Thomas J. Watson who forbade his employees to drink and even frowned upon it while off the job?
Watson: That is correct. It is against IBM regulation 4-245 Section 8 to consume alcohol on the premises of any facility.
Alex Trebek: Fascinating, I'm sure you've never broken that strict regulation, ha ha.
Watson: Good sir, I am a computer, drinking is not within my capacity.
Alex Trebek: Um, right. So could you tell us something interesting about yourself?
Watson: *pauses to search records* During the fabrication of my circuitry, several engineers went months without sleep. Leading one to go insane and killed his wife and kid before taking his own life in a double homicide/suicide case.
Alex Trebek: How unfortunate. Well, I wish you the best of luck today in Jeopardy.
Watson: Thank you, my snide game show master.
Hello. Closed source software. I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not. I doubt even the militarised versions of Windows have *everything* they know about fixed - it's easier to just say "don't do this" or not include a certain tool/utility/feature than it is to fix it and document it.
Why on Earth would you ever find this alarming, or unforgivable? It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code and (hopefully) never see it.
I disagree.
You could (should) offer a closed source product and still be honest about all the bugs that exist in it to your paying customers. Granted, I'm not distributing my web applications on a scale that Vista is being distributed on but you know seeing these 700 fixes listed out does alarm me. I mean, that really serious bug? The one that puts your Windows 2008 server at risk? Could still be at large without you ever knowing about it.
From Microsoft's end, how do they handle multiple bug reports when users don't have access to a complete list of known bugs so they know to report it?
And maybe it's obvious why they keep them from you--you'd probably flip to a serving solution without that bug. But, as an advocate for transparency, I would expect Microsoft to at least publicize its bugs--especially if they've been fixed in an update. I'm kind of lead to believe that these 700 (on the dot!) bug fixes are only a subset.
I can almost imagine the developer sitting at his desk getting an e-mail from their issue management system that there's a problem with Fc.exe (file compare) ... only to have him realize that his for loop that iterates over the buffer that reads the files should have the while conditions of <= 128 and not simply < 128!
This is forgivable, I code some pretty stupid errors sometimes.
What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming!
What I don't understand is that PRS asks for 3-5% of your Net Broadcasting Revenue yet if you're an online radio they ask for 6-8% of your total revenue. Why aren't these figures closer?
Also confusing to me is that I thought YouTube reached a deal with these guys back in 2007? Did that just fall apart?
Program Manager: What the hell is happening?! Why is the website down?! ... what are you trying to tell me? This is an emergency, accounting said our money is leaving! ... we could remove it and then it could read back the file after waiting for a few seconds. We would have to hope that more users don't come while we are performing emergency dash extraction.
Web Programmer: It's the users, sir, one of them put dashes in their SSN on the form!
Program Manager: I don't have time for this mumbo jumbo geek jargon
Web Programmer: Well, you see the dashes are inside the string.
Program Manager: Inside? How is this possible?
Web Programmer: Well, the user must have paused to push the dash key, sir.
Program Manager: So if the dashes are inside the string, we have to get them out. Is there someone we can pay for this service?
Web Programmer: I'm afraid it's too complicated for that. But maybe if we had it write to a file and one of us kept refreshing a text editor on that file
Program Manager: Goddamnit! Why didn't testing find this?!
Web Programmer: Well, they did but to fix this bug we just removed the dash keys on their keyboards.
Program Manager: Can we do that to each of the users?
*IBM employee enters with massive box labeled "Enterprise SSN Dash Extractor"*
IBM Sales Rep: Gentlemen, let IBM solve all your SSN problems for a mere $2,000 per site license!
Online Prior Art at the Regex Library from 2004:
Put that into your favorite Javascript regular expression object and write a stupid onChange reference to it in your HTML and ... tada! Too complicated? Here's some more prior art. Or here. A little bit of Googling must be too much for the USPTO.
Are we suddenly shocked to discover one line of code can be patented when a whole mess of code can be patented?
Because any developer worth their weight in salt will tell you that RNGs are not truly random.
No, they are not truly random. Nor is his dice machine, as the dice are possibly imperfect and subject to gravity or the way it reloads them into the hopper. Influences could be anywhere.
I would be interested in seeing him run this machine for 30 days and then compute the Shannon entropy on the results and then compare this to popular RNGs out there.
Although I would expect the RNGs (however flawed) to perform better, it would be interesting nonetheless.
While not called out in the article, the pictures clearly show a Dell Mini 9 running the show (and performing the optical recognition of the dice values.)
Yes but there's not a lot of "optical recognition" going on. From the article:
The dice are "Michigan Red Eyes", which have different colored pips for each value. The different colors make it pretty easy to count rolls. For example, if 6 yellow dots are found in the image, there were three 2s rolled, no need to worry about determining the proper grouping or orientation of pips.
If you control the background as being black or shades of grey (which is what it appears on that dirty dirty Windows XP screen) then your task is a lot easier and less error prone. Well done on the designer's part but surely reduces the computational work load.