I'd much rather have a President who surrounds himself with well-informed advisors, than a President who weighs his own opinions on specialized topics more heavily than a specialist's opinion. Leadership is delegation. I concur. While it is a priority to us (the technically savvy), we are a minority.
I believe The Simpsons tackled this very subject in They Saved Lisa's Brain--an episode in which Mensa gains control of Springfield. Horrible legislation ensues.
The president should represent the average person of the United States of America. Someone who compiles Linux is not your average person.
We should really pay attention to how they vote, who their delegate these issues to, who they listen to and--most importantly--how willing they are to bow to the companies for an extra buck.
Barack seems to vote to update FISA to support the ACLU's desires to banish Telecom Immunity.
If you want to read it from his site, there's a pdf that explains:
Revise the PATRIOT Act: Barack Obama believes that we must provide law enforcement the tools it needs to investigate, disrupt, and capture terrorists, but he also believes we need real oversight to avoid jeopardizing the rights and ideals of all Americans. There is no reason we cannot fight terrorism while maintaining our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the current administration has abused the powers given to it by the USA PATRIOT Act. A March 2007 Justice Department audit found the FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the PATRIOT Act to secretly obtain personal information about American citizens. As president, Barack Obama would revisit the PATRIOT Act to ensure that there is real and robust oversight of tools like National Security Letters, sneak-and-peek searches, and the use of the material witness provision.
Strengthen Warrantless Wiretap Approval Process: Barack Obama opposed the Bush Administrationâ(TM)s initial policy on warrantless wiretaps because it crossed the line between protecting our national security and eroding the civil liberties of American citizens. As president, Obama would update the Foreign Intelligence
Paid for by Obama for America
Surveillance Act to provide greater oversight and accountability to the congressional Intelligence Committees to prevent future threats to the rule of law. And another that goes on to say:
Eliminate Warrantless Wiretaps. Barack Obama opposed the Bush
Administrationâ(TM)s initial policy on warrantless wiretaps because it crossed the line
between protecting our national security and eroding the civil liberties of American
citizens. As president, Obama would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
to provide greater oversight and accountability to the congressional intelligence
committees to prevent future threats to the rule of law. I'd say (even from a few of his voting records) that he is against it for the most part. Or at the very least, revising it severely.
Doesn't really matter in a two party system though, does it? Take what you can get over the crap I read about in this article from McCain's campaign.
Wikia Search Upgrades Get Closer Closer to?
Wikia Search moves closer to open ideal Oh, an "open ideal?" Is that a problem? I thought that was all Wikia's Search had going for it right now.
Don't get me wrong, that's about all Wikipedia had going for it at one time. That and a meager couple thousand pages.
But I think Wales' search project should aim a little higher at this point in time... the improved tools are great and I don't doubt this is the openest search engine out there... but shouldn't we all be a little more concerned about how well it works?
Also, maybe the reward system should be a little more tangible, like Wikipedia's? I mean, people get a kick out of seeing something they write benefiting everyone in the world. I personally don't get a kick out of knowing that if someone searches for 'Lola by The Kinks' it now comes up with more accurate results. I question the rewards although, to be fair, I also questioned the rewards of Wikipedia.
It shall be interesting to see whether or not this takes off. I encourage Wales to keep trying because even if this doesn't work, it certainly hasn't cost me anything. I wish him and his staff the best of luck!
It's strange, every time a researcher is assigned to go disassemble the prototype, something else comes up right when they come within range of the machine. Yesterday something kept spamming "REDRUM" across the networks broadcast address and causing bandwidth issues. Today several printers in the lab wouldn't stop printing out documents that looked like fake rebates for Newegg...
Next week, watch as people complain about the latest changes... So it'll be like Archie Bunker...
... and kill 10 of the local wildlife for a trader! ... meets Little House on the Prairie?
"A television show that is on once a week isn't enough. The fans today want the experience to go beyond that. For example, we can tell them that there will be an alien invasion at a certain place in the game, at a certain time, and to be there with all their friends and be ready. The outcome depends on them. And then that battle will be part of the universe in the show." Director: Ok, now this is the epic part of the battle where the character you play, PigBenis69, thrusts his cyberknife through the aliens throat so be very very passionate with the dialog. Actor 1: *makes stabbing motions* "Omg j00 g0t wtfpwnedbbq! I am teh quigley dpwn und3r!..." I'm sorry, I'm having a really hard time pronouncing all of these... symbols. Director: No no no, that was brilliant! Now let's get a take of the next line. Actor 2: "What are you talking about, Pig, I totally out DPS'd you. You act all 1337 but your gear is L7." Actor 1: "H4xx. Oh, go cry home to your mother, SirWankenstein, this phat lewt is mine!" Director: Cut, print, that's a wrap! Now everyone prepare for The Barrens chat scene where thousands herald the deeds of PigBenis69. Remember, this scene is crucial as the dialog is a roller coaster ride of intelligence and will earn us our coveted TV-MA rating.
Could be worse I guess, they could have secured Uwe Boll to direct it...
A surprisingly lengthy and revealing blog posting indeed. Quite informative and interesting.
While Google uses ordinary hardware components for its servers... I would like to point out that the networking details were vastly overlooked. Information about the servers is interesting but when you're networking such a vast amount of computers together, I would be more interested in a quick graphic of how the IP addresses are layed out over 'a typical' cluster of 1,800 machines.
I understand distributed computing and I understand distributed searching. But the fact of the matter is that at some point at the top of the chain, you're usually transferring very large amounts of data--no matter how tall your 'network pyramid' is. The coding itself is no simple feat but I have heard rumors that Google was building their own 10-Gigabit ethernet switches since they couldn't find any on the market. You'll notice a lot of sites are just speculating but it certainly is a nontrivial problem to network clusters of thousands of computers with more than 200,000 in the whole lot and not require some serious switch/hub/networking hardware to back it.
P.S. When Rich tells the story he always implies that it was because the guys running the turnstile were too busy looking at his girlfriend's boobs to look in her purse. Take that however you want. Her boobs were shaped like knives?
Every time I'm held up by the "No Fly List" because I have an insanely common name, I feel like a victim of security theater. How many would be terrorists have been caught by the no fly list?
In my opinion almost all forms of random searches are security theater.
People putting loaded handguns in their homes in the case of a wood-be assailant or robber breaking in. This is not only security theater, it increases the risk you are putting yourself and your family in. Not to mention that in most instances of murder the victim knew the assailant. You're more likely to die of suicide than a robber killing you.
I don't know if these are examples where the security theater is a cover for another reason--unlikely. But there's clearly examples where it just makes your life worse more often than better.
Here's the abstract:
The present invention provides a web-page (or web-site) search results list which includes images from the actual web-pages or web-sites identified in a user's search, or images associated with the actual organization operating a web-site. This assists a user to locate web-pages of interest or relevance to the user by providing images to assess the relevance of web-pages identified in a search, prior to the user having to hyperlink to the actual web-page itself. The invention also provides a method of assisting a user to be placed in contact with an organization, including the steps of: the user submitting a search request from a terminal, via a computer network, to a database server, the database server containing a database and a server-side application used as database searching software; the database searching software searching the database in accordance with the search request; identified database entries being transmitted to the terminal as a search results list, each entry of the search results list containing contact information for the organization; at least one entry of the search results list additionally containing visual content and/or audio content which relates to the organization. After reading the claims, this patent seems to be more targeting sites that use search engines to return images that relate to a user's query. Although this is a prime example of how the international patent system is broken, it's unlikely they could target "virtually all" web sites with this patent.
"Chuck Fish, an attorney for the McCain campaign and former Time Warner executive"
"Daniel Weitzner, an MIT computer scientist"
Who are you going to place more faith in there? That really depends on what you're trying to get accomplished. The MIT scientist offers up a white paper on how to do it. Unfortunately, I don't need this to be proved or argued for. I want it done. I have no idea what Chuck Fish's interests are but if you want to change the market, it might be best to do it with someone who knows the market--or even has the ability to change it from the inside. I don't think the problem is a theoretical computational barrier, it's a real life political issue that's going to take Machiavellian like maneuvering to produce any real results.
Of course, neither side will offer up anything that's measurable or quantifiable nor will they set any milestones at this point. Which is truly sad.
from the six-v-half-a-dozen dept. Leela: Don't let their identical DNA fool you. While they might sound the same, they differ on some key issues. Jack Johnson: It's time someone had the courage to stand up and say: "I'm against those things that everybody hates". John Jackson: Now I respect my opponent. I think he's a good man but, quite frankly, I agree with everything he just said! Fry: These are the candidates? They sound like clones. [He looks a little harder.] Wait a minute. They are clones! Leela: Don't let their identical DNA fool you. They differ on some key issues. Jack Johnson: I say your three cent titanium tax goes too far. John Jackson: And I say your three cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough! Fry: If I were registered to vote, I'd send these clowns a message by staying home on election day and dressing up like a clown.
Who is Jack Thompson? A man who knows no restraint to further a cause that has religious roots and backings by watchdog groups whose only goals are to overstep their bounds.
A man who stood up on Fox news the day of the Virginia Tech shootings (when the bodies of slain students were still warm) and told the nation that he was certain we would find video games in the shooter's bedroom. He then later turned one of the funerals into a media circus and photo op.
A man who has overstepped laws designed to give Americans freedom and the right to enjoy entertainment in their homes. He has taken the The Bill of Rights into the restroom and wiped his ass with it.
A man who, after overstepping his bounds an pushing extreme values of the political Right, asked for members of the Bush family (which he erroneously thought would be allies) to remove his disbarment from the Florida courts. Name Jeb & George... who ignored the tool that was merely carrying out their core values.
You have a man who has tried to undo the separation of church and state. This same man has been operating in a court of law and using false correlations while pushing his own moral and religious beliefs. He is completely divorced from the sense of Justice and the American People. This same man will soon suffer under The Justice of The United States of America or my faith in it will soon falter...
I can deal with LeBeouf in this Jones movie but I've already heard (and I hate to sound like Entertainment Tonight) that Spielberg has asked LeBeouf to carry on as the main character in a string of potential sequels.
Could this be good? Maybe. But I sure will lament the loss of Ford. In any event I hope to god that LeBeouf's character doesn't assume Indie's role or character or name directly in the coming movies. I haven't seen Crystal Skull yet so I can't say if they're setting us up for that the end (I hope not).
You know, I love the attitude of Indiana Jones and everything about the character but I'm going to get tired of it if you keep rehashing it. You know, it's ok to try out new things and introduce new personalities. In fact, it's almost required for the audience not to lose their interests. Hell, I wouldn't even mind if Lucas kept stealing high level plot lines from Akira Kurosawa films--so long as I don't get the same thing in 6+ movies of a diluted film franchise.
I joked with my roommates that we're not far from Lucas re-releasing a "Special Edition" of The Last Crusade where River Phoenix is superimposed with the image of Shia LeBeouf for continuity (a la Anakin Skywalker's apparition in Return of the Jedi). I know he's not the young version of Indiana Jones but I'm so sick and tired of that kind of stuff. Where's Drew Berrymore so she can step in and convince Lucas we should take this chance to replace all the scary whips in Indiana Jones with licorice sticks.
Just keep chuggin along, eventually you'll get noticed and promoted. You shouldn't do the work for the credit, you should do it for the sake of the company and the greater good. That's when you really get noticed. I disagree, there's still a possibility that he's still overlooked. This is corporate America, after all.
You're in a position where your boss depends on you. And he's promoting it. Who cares what management thinks. Is your paycheck sufficient? If not, just wait until a few weeks before the next big delivery and tell your boss you've found another job offering you what you think you should get paid. Since he's on the hook, he'll probably try to keep you happy.
You could ask him to mention your name to the big wigs but what would that get you, really? Are you under some impression that your ability in software development will move you up the chain? Because I've noticed that's not really what does it at most companies.
No, my suggestion to you would be to keep chugging along and if nothing else, put it on your resume confident you can back what you put on there. Then expand your horizons and call in sick a few days for the sake of a few interviews. If you have no other options, you are probably forced to play this symbiosis of your manager needing you and you needing him despite your perception he adds nothing.
Whatever turns out, it sure is great experience. If you are certain you can do the hardcore development and provide the functionality your middle management provides, have you thought about starting your own company? That's an option I think more and more about everyday...
The developers strongly discourage any serious use though as it's still highly experimental. It's so dangerous that a single developer can only work on a few lines of code at one time. I heard that one developer accidentally saw a whole module at once... he's in the hospital now and his condition is stable, I think he's going to be ok.
Seriously, they treat this thing like they're trying to hype it. "It's not ready for users, not even developers!" The only thing it's ready for is Guatemalan Insane Asylum Inmates! Avert your eyes!
It is funny that they claim more progress working on this for six months than working on Gentoo for four years. Because of bickering and criticism. I can totally believe that. I wish them tons of success!
To be fair, there are a few other differences between the two forums, but the point may still be valid.
I'll say.
My first suspicion was that one just reeked of horrid angry fruit salad 1999 intarwebs design (dancing Jesu & flying toasters with a midi track in octaves meant for torture timed with a blinking marquee tag). Honestly, they look about on par although I prefer the simplicity of YaBB though in my opinion it doesn't seem to be an issue here. Normally this is the biggest discriminator for a website's success, not the content.
I did find it interesting to note the slant to these message boards though. The 'uncensored' website has this text as it's homepage:
Did you know:
The consensus view among scientists is that polygraph testing has no scientific basis?
The longest polygraph school produces newly minted polygraphers in just 14 weeks -- less than half the time it takes to graduate from a typical barber college?
The researcher who developed the U.S. Government's polygraph Test for Espionage and Sabotage "thought the whole security screening program should be shut down?"
The National Academy of Sciences concluded that "[polygraph testing's] accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies?"
Ok, so I like these new search engine ideas but I am grossly underwhelmed here. I tried the input:
Who is David Bowie? Which it handled quite nicely. Biography, additional links and all that Wikipedia jazz.
But come on, that's a simple question. Let's talk stuff I get into arguments over with my coworkers:
Who played the villain in the first Die Hard? Which at least put Alan Rickman at #8. But let's try mutating that to make it harder but still understood by you and I:
Who played the bad guy in the first Die Hard? Which resulted in very little but drivel with no mention of the great Alan Rickman whatsoever... although it did put Billie Jean King and Madonna in there for some hilarious reason.
So maybe it can't understand 'bad guy.' Well onto another question:
Who was the organist for The Beatles on Abbey Road? Which resulted in at least the first 20 having no mention of the great & oft forgotten Billy Preston.
So you want to know what the kicker is? I put those same inputs into Google and found the name in the first or second result. Granted PowerSet doesn't do the whole web, I'm pretty sure that if it did, it wouldn't have the pretty results that it gave when I did what one of the articles told me to--ask it when earthquakes hit Tokyo. Just imagine the dates it would come up with if it hit a site with an html table of any seismic activity whatsoever in Tokyo!
I think it's a novel idea to mine Wikipedia for a search engine so long as it isn't just plain old token matching like PowerSet seems to be up to. Be inventive, try a natural language parser written in Prolog that digests all of Wikipedia into a huge network/ontology of concepts... no matter how flawed it might be.
I find them talking about this in the articles:
Powerset is different. It says that its technology reads and comprehends each word on a page. It looks at each sentence. It understand the words in each sentence and how they related to each other. It works out what that sentence really means, all the facts that are being presented. This means it knows what any page is really about. Yet, I'm not impressed. You can try to personify your software and convince me that Baby Alive really defecates like a human being all over so it feels like I have a real baby. But I know it's just software. You don't have to dumb it down if you're going to blog about it. What is this? A pattern matching implementation? A depth first search tree parsing implementation? An ontology builder? Could you at least drop one of the buzzwords of the natural language parsing field for me here?
So does this story actually have more than a startup looking for a sugar daddy to buy it out?
As we enter a new "Space Nexus" like we did after Apollo, now is a critical time to let your representatives know how you feel about space exploration, and yet no-one has anything to say. I can't listen to the podcast as I'm at work but I think the key difference now is that people are, on average, more informed about how difficult the logistics are of space travel... and also about the risks that come with that. On top of that most of us have witnessed the Challenger and Colombia incidents.
That's not to say that early flight didn't have its fair share of mishaps and deaths but I think it's getting to the point where the only advocates I see for space are those who want it turned over to the private sector. The private sector is a good answer when it's too complicated/expensive/morally questionable for a government.
It's become pretty clear that travel or tourism has been given to the private sector (as I believe the Russians have given that up) while 'exploration' and 'colonization' are probably still the government's responsibility.
I'm all for exploration and research-y type things in space but I'm not so sure about colonization or travel yet. I used to be very pro-colonizing other planets after reading a lot of Carl Sagan but now if I were to write my representatives it would be asking them to save Earth first then think about colonization and travel.
You may not realize that only a 80 years ago, the population of the Earth was only around 2 billion. I think it was in Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan that I was first exposed to this idea that poverty and illiteracy could be linked to high birth rates. Since then I have read articles by Paul and Anne Ehrlich as well as Collapse by Jared Diamond. I had been exposed to the Chinese way of economically pressuring citizens to have only one child. I ignorantly thought this was a form of extreme fascism.
But a key difference at that time was I was still Catholic.
One of many reasons for divorcing myself from Catholicism was its stance towards birth control. Iâ(TM)m not talking abortion (or âoebaby killingâ as some of them like to refer to it)â"Iâ(TM)m talking about preventative measures like condoms and Plan B. For some reason, the Vaticanâ"the organization that is the Catholic Churchâ"took it upon itself to stop the use of preventative measures. In pre-industrial times, this may have been advantageous to a religion and even a people. However, as it stands now this attitude results in a powder keg leaving the populace open to drought, famine, disease and brutal warfare (probably as a result of the famine) to keep the human population in check. Just look at the enterovirus (EV71) in China.
I think a lot of the responses are going to be along the lines of what Iâ(TM)ve said so far; that if we donâ(TM)t start to pay attention to population and think of non-intrusive non-immoral ways to keep it in check then weâ(TM)re in some serious trouble. Instead, Iâ(TM)d like to relay some views Iâ(TM)ve heard from people quite close to me on this issue. Iâ(TM)m not sure if this will become a political issue in the near term but I know that, at least in the United States, there are people with conflicting views.
A close friend of mine who is a Christian and a bit conservative voiced concern that the United Statesâ(TM) population growth is lagging behind many other countries. Many of the Western countriesâ"such as those in Europeâ"are also lagging behind those of Muslim nations like Turkey and several others in the Middle East & Africa. He claimed (or âoefear mongeredâ if you will) that if the current trend continued the end state of the world would most certainly be Muslim Dictatorships everywhere. I would like to quickly point out that I do not share his ideas in this Christian Vs Muslim war he believes has been going on since the crusades. I am merely relaying what many conservative Christians in the world are probably subconsciously thinking.
Now just last week my uncle sent me an e-mail that was along his thinking of people should have to have a license to have children. They should have to pass tests demonstrating they can provide food shelter clothing water all the basic life necessities before they can start to procreate. This would require a source of income to sustain a child ⦠he also has said that criminal record and health history should be taken into consideration. He linked an unfortunate story and was perhaps half joking.
Are either of these ideas the future? Is the idea of a procreation license issued by the state an unfortunate reality? Is it my friend wrong to push to close the âbirth rate gapâ(TM) between West and East?
Personally, all I can do is rail for education worldwide for all and, with that, the power to do what is right for us and the future of our children.
Reader Acererak points that it would take some pretty heavy usage (by current standards) to hit the cap described. It's easy to say that if you're not one of the outliers. It's within Comcast's right to introduce this cap. And I'm sure they'll let it sit there as Netflix streams and iPod video become more and more popular. Or they'll even lower it by pure logic of it being only a need of 3% of the populace so who cares if we piss them off? If it helps the other 97% maybe it isn't such a bad idea.
It kind of confuses me though. We're already capped on our upload/download rates and since we pay them like a service we should pay them based on the rate of that service. Garbage, Cable TV and Water are rates I pay monthly that never change. Power is different but Cable TV is pretty much equivalent to cable internet... are they going to limit the total amount of TV I can air in my home?
Comcast lies anyway. I don't trust them any further than I can throw their entire infrastructure. We paid a premium on bandwidth for 3 months and were supposed to be getting 15 Mbps download speed (as opposed to the standard which is 5 Mbps). After several problems with lag between me and my three other roommates, we started doing periodic tests. Averaged around 1.2 Mbps download daily. So we called them and they told us our signal strength sucked. So fix it. Oh, they couldn't. Not only could they not fix it, they couldn't refund us the premium we paid. But they could offer us the 5 Mbps download rate.... after which we change to that it remained at 1.2 Mbps download. What else could we do? There's no competition in cable internet.
Liars that don't give a damn about the end consumer. You'll be lucky if the 250 GB doesn't include your digital TV as download or even if they agree to their contractual terms.
They make sure you pay too much no matter what you buy. XP is worth less than Xandros but we all know that Xandros costs less. Perhaps this is part of the M$ "patent deal" with Xandros but the details don't matter. All of Oz is being screwed by a predatory US company. As a US Citizen, I appologize for the failure of our laws.
On behalf of Slashdot, get the hell out of our community you threadjacking schizophrenic crackberry addicted redundant waste of time.
You are not adding anything to the conversations here!
Seriously if I wanted people twittering their lives to me one hundred and forty bytes at a time, I would go to twitter. Do you think anyone would appreciate it if I went to twitter and tried to post long cohesive thoughts and somehow attach them to the most popular posts? I don't think so.
Please for the sake of my sanity, leave Slashdot as Slashdot and Twitter as Twitter. Otherwise I propose CmdrTaco answers in kind and rigs up a way for every single new post on Slashdot to be parsed into 140 bytes and delivered to Twitter as user Slashdot.
At the official launch today, the company told journalists that 'Microsoft has been a longstanding supporter of Asus' to explain the price discrepancy. It might also be nice to quote the prices ($600 Vs $650) and the physical discriminator which is (and this is from TFA): "the XP model has just 12GB of storage, while the Linux version has 20GB."
I'm pretty sure the only reason the pricing is different is due to the storage factor. I've suspected for quite sometime that Microsoft basically gives away XP & MS Works with Dell computers and now that the price of hardware is dropping, they're going to have to. Works is a real piece of work, FYI... my signature heavily applies to that software in this case.
Is it ok to chastise Asus for denying customers the choice of OS independent of HDD size? Yes.
Is it ok to go on a rant about Microsoft's hidden costs? Definitely, in fact I'm sure there's going to be a few +5 insightfuls with that theme.
Is it ok to wig out and claim that Microsoft is cutting deals with Asus to insure the downfall of Linux? No. You're wasting your time--spend it more constructively coding open source or lobbying for your company to use open source.
Asus is free to do as they please and if Microsoft thinks it's a good business move, let them. The funny thing about open source is that you don't have to promote it to end users. It's slowly and steadily being adopted. The end state is open source for everyone everywhere; it's unavoidable; it's just a question of when it happens (and no, I'm not going to personify software or data as 'wanting' to be free because it's about what improves the community not what software 'wants'). As long as Microsoft isn't doing something shady to keep Linux out of the Enterprise, they can do whatever they want. I don't even know how they could do that. If you look at the trends, whatever is adopted by the Enterprise is usually adopted by the single consumer in due time. DoD is starting to mandate open source also.
Ubuntu 8.04 was a marked improvement over 7.10. Aero was on par with XP. Microsoft has parked themselves at the head of the pack and are now relying on Business and Marketing to promote a Technology. It's a good sign of bad times for Microsoft.
So why is everyone fretting? Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Please, don't be one of those guys who preach about open source in a RMS religious zealot style to end users who just want their goddamn iPod to work on their home machine (Oh, by the way, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my shuffle Just Worked when I attached it to Ubuntu 8.04). You're doing more harm than good.
The US is very badly lagging in the international bed rest race! I thought I read somewhere about the ESA doing this two years ago for female astronauts at least. There's some interesting comments on their WISE page such as:
All volunteers were surprised how fast the time passed by. I'll bet that month you spend in bed is completely lost with little or no memories for it.
And if you really want to know more, they published all their findings for all their experiments in five hefty PDFs.
This appears to be a rather intelligent look at the issue, but the sad part is I have to wonder how many TSA employees are actually going to read it, especially at airports. Second guessing the United States Government?! I see you are a perfect match of the subject of Chapter 25: The Elusive Tinfoil Hat Thought Crime Terrorist of Mother's Basement.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe The Simpsons tackled this very subject in They Saved Lisa's Brain--an episode in which Mensa gains control of Springfield. Horrible legislation ensues.
The president should represent the average person of the United States of America. Someone who compiles Linux is not your average person.
We should really pay attention to how they vote, who their delegate these issues to, who they listen to and--most importantly--how willing they are to bow to the companies for an extra buck.
If you want to read it from his site, there's a pdf that explains: Revise the PATRIOT Act: Barack Obama believes that we must provide law enforcement the tools it needs to investigate, disrupt, and capture terrorists, but he also believes we need real oversight to avoid jeopardizing the rights and ideals of all Americans. There is no reason we cannot fight terrorism while maintaining our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the current administration has abused the powers given to it by the USA PATRIOT Act. A March 2007 Justice Department audit found the FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the PATRIOT Act to secretly obtain personal information about American citizens. As president, Barack Obama would revisit the PATRIOT Act to ensure that there is real and robust oversight of tools like National Security Letters, sneak-and-peek searches, and the use of the material witness provision.
Strengthen Warrantless Wiretap Approval Process: Barack Obama opposed the Bush Administrationâ(TM)s initial policy on warrantless wiretaps because it crossed the line between protecting our national security and eroding the civil liberties of American citizens. As president, Obama would update the Foreign Intelligence Paid for by Obama for America Surveillance Act to provide greater oversight and accountability to the congressional Intelligence Committees to prevent future threats to the rule of law. And another that goes on to say: Eliminate Warrantless Wiretaps. Barack Obama opposed the Bush Administrationâ(TM)s initial policy on warrantless wiretaps because it crossed the line between protecting our national security and eroding the civil liberties of American citizens. As president, Obama would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide greater oversight and accountability to the congressional intelligence committees to prevent future threats to the rule of law. I'd say (even from a few of his voting records) that he is against it for the most part. Or at the very least, revising it severely.
Doesn't really matter in a two party system though, does it? Take what you can get over the crap I read about in this article from McCain's campaign.
Don't get me wrong, that's about all Wikipedia had going for it at one time. That and a meager couple thousand pages.
But I think Wales' search project should aim a little higher at this point in time
Also, maybe the reward system should be a little more tangible, like Wikipedia's? I mean, people get a kick out of seeing something they write benefiting everyone in the world. I personally don't get a kick out of knowing that if someone searches for 'Lola by The Kinks' it now comes up with more accurate results. I question the rewards although, to be fair, I also questioned the rewards of Wikipedia.
It shall be interesting to see whether or not this takes off. I encourage Wales to keep trying because even if this doesn't work, it certainly hasn't cost me anything. I wish him and his staff the best of luck!
It's strange, every time a researcher is assigned to go disassemble the prototype, something else comes up right when they come within range of the machine. Yesterday something kept spamming "REDRUM" across the networks broadcast address and causing bandwidth issues. Today several printers in the lab wouldn't stop printing out documents that looked like fake rebates for Newegg ...
Actor 1: *makes stabbing motions* "Omg j00 g0t wtfpwnedbbq! I am teh quigley dpwn und3r!
Director: No no no, that was brilliant! Now let's get a take of the next line.
Actor 2: "What are you talking about, Pig, I totally out DPS'd you. You act all 1337 but your gear is L7."
Actor 1: "H4xx. Oh, go cry home to your mother, SirWankenstein, this phat lewt is mine!"
Director: Cut, print, that's a wrap! Now everyone prepare for The Barrens chat scene where thousands herald the deeds of PigBenis69. Remember, this scene is crucial as the dialog is a roller coaster ride of intelligence and will earn us our coveted TV-MA rating.
Could be worse I guess, they could have secured Uwe Boll to direct it
I understand distributed computing and I understand distributed searching. But the fact of the matter is that at some point at the top of the chain, you're usually transferring very large amounts of data--no matter how tall your 'network pyramid' is. The coding itself is no simple feat but I have heard rumors that Google was building their own 10-Gigabit ethernet switches since they couldn't find any on the market. You'll notice a lot of sites are just speculating but it certainly is a nontrivial problem to network clusters of thousands of computers with more than 200,000 in the whole lot and not require some serious switch/hub/networking hardware to back it.
Every time I'm held up by the "No Fly List" because I have an insanely common name, I feel like a victim of security theater. How many would be terrorists have been caught by the no fly list?
In my opinion almost all forms of random searches are security theater.
People putting loaded handguns in their homes in the case of a wood-be assailant or robber breaking in. This is not only security theater, it increases the risk you are putting yourself and your family in. Not to mention that in most instances of murder the victim knew the assailant. You're more likely to die of suicide than a robber killing you.
I don't know if these are examples where the security theater is a cover for another reason--unlikely. But there's clearly examples where it just makes your life worse more often than better.
Here's the abstract: The present invention provides a web-page (or web-site) search results list which includes images from the actual web-pages or web-sites identified in a user's search, or images associated with the actual organization operating a web-site. This assists a user to locate web-pages of interest or relevance to the user by providing images to assess the relevance of web-pages identified in a search, prior to the user having to hyperlink to the actual web-page itself. The invention also provides a method of assisting a user to be placed in contact with an organization, including the steps of: the user submitting a search request from a terminal, via a computer network, to a database server, the database server containing a database and a server-side application used as database searching software; the database searching software searching the database in accordance with the search request; identified database entries being transmitted to the terminal as a search results list, each entry of the search results list containing contact information for the organization; at least one entry of the search results list additionally containing visual content and/or audio content which relates to the organization. After reading the claims, this patent seems to be more targeting sites that use search engines to return images that relate to a user's query. Although this is a prime example of how the international patent system is broken, it's unlikely they could target "virtually all" web sites with this patent.
"Daniel Weitzner, an MIT computer scientist"
Who are you going to place more faith in there? That really depends on what you're trying to get accomplished. The MIT scientist offers up a white paper on how to do it. Unfortunately, I don't need this to be proved or argued for. I want it done. I have no idea what Chuck Fish's interests are but if you want to change the market, it might be best to do it with someone who knows the market--or even has the ability to change it from the inside. I don't think the problem is a theoretical computational barrier, it's a real life political issue that's going to take Machiavellian like maneuvering to produce any real results.
Of course, neither side will offer up anything that's measurable or quantifiable nor will they set any milestones at this point. Which is truly sad.
Jack Johnson: It's time someone had the courage to stand up and say: "I'm against those things that everybody hates".
John Jackson: Now I respect my opponent. I think he's a good man but, quite frankly, I agree with everything he just said!
Fry: These are the candidates? They sound like clones. [He looks a little harder.] Wait a minute. They are clones!
Leela: Don't let their identical DNA fool you. They differ on some key issues.
Jack Johnson: I say your three cent titanium tax goes too far.
John Jackson: And I say your three cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough!
Fry: If I were registered to vote, I'd send these clowns a message by staying home on election day and dressing up like a clown.
A man who stood up on Fox news the day of the Virginia Tech shootings (when the bodies of slain students were still warm) and told the nation that he was certain we would find video games in the shooter's bedroom. He then later turned one of the funerals into a media circus and photo op.
A man who has overstepped laws designed to give Americans freedom and the right to enjoy entertainment in their homes. He has taken the The Bill of Rights into the restroom and wiped his ass with it.
A man who, after overstepping his bounds an pushing extreme values of the political Right, asked for members of the Bush family (which he erroneously thought would be allies) to remove his disbarment from the Florida courts. Name Jeb & George
You have a man who has tried to undo the separation of church and state. This same man has been operating in a court of law and using false correlations while pushing his own moral and religious beliefs. He is completely divorced from the sense of Justice and the American People. This same man will soon suffer under The Justice of The United States of America or my faith in it will soon falter
I can deal with LeBeouf in this Jones movie but I've already heard (and I hate to sound like Entertainment Tonight) that Spielberg has asked LeBeouf to carry on as the main character in a string of potential sequels.
Could this be good? Maybe. But I sure will lament the loss of Ford. In any event I hope to god that LeBeouf's character doesn't assume Indie's role or character or name directly in the coming movies. I haven't seen Crystal Skull yet so I can't say if they're setting us up for that the end (I hope not).
You know, I love the attitude of Indiana Jones and everything about the character but I'm going to get tired of it if you keep rehashing it. You know, it's ok to try out new things and introduce new personalities. In fact, it's almost required for the audience not to lose their interests. Hell, I wouldn't even mind if Lucas kept stealing high level plot lines from Akira Kurosawa films--so long as I don't get the same thing in 6+ movies of a diluted film franchise.
I joked with my roommates that we're not far from Lucas re-releasing a "Special Edition" of The Last Crusade where River Phoenix is superimposed with the image of Shia LeBeouf for continuity (a la Anakin Skywalker's apparition in Return of the Jedi). I know he's not the young version of Indiana Jones but I'm so sick and tired of that kind of stuff. Where's Drew Berrymore so she can step in and convince Lucas we should take this chance to replace all the scary whips in Indiana Jones with licorice sticks.
You're in a position where your boss depends on you. And he's promoting it. Who cares what management thinks. Is your paycheck sufficient? If not, just wait until a few weeks before the next big delivery and tell your boss you've found another job offering you what you think you should get paid. Since he's on the hook, he'll probably try to keep you happy.
You could ask him to mention your name to the big wigs but what would that get you, really? Are you under some impression that your ability in software development will move you up the chain? Because I've noticed that's not really what does it at most companies.
No, my suggestion to you would be to keep chugging along and if nothing else, put it on your resume confident you can back what you put on there. Then expand your horizons and call in sick a few days for the sake of a few interviews. If you have no other options, you are probably forced to play this symbiosis of your manager needing you and you needing him despite your perception he adds nothing.
Whatever turns out, it sure is great experience. If you are certain you can do the hardcore development and provide the functionality your middle management provides, have you thought about starting your own company? That's an option I think more and more about everyday
Seriously, they treat this thing like they're trying to hype it. "It's not ready for users, not even developers!" The only thing it's ready for is Guatemalan Insane Asylum Inmates! Avert your eyes!
It is funny that they claim more progress working on this for six months than working on Gentoo for four years. Because of bickering and criticism. I can totally believe that. I wish them tons of success!
To be fair, there are a few other differences between the two forums, but the point may still be valid.
I'll say.
My first suspicion was that one just reeked of horrid angry fruit salad 1999 intarwebs design (dancing Jesu & flying toasters with a midi track in octaves meant for torture timed with a blinking marquee tag). Honestly, they look about on par although I prefer the simplicity of YaBB though in my opinion it doesn't seem to be an issue here. Normally this is the biggest discriminator for a website's success, not the content.
I did find it interesting to note the slant to these message boards though. The 'uncensored' website has this text as it's homepage:
Did you know:
While the 'censored' board has this as its opening text:
The Polygraph Place
But come on, that's a simple question. Let's talk stuff I get into arguments over with my coworkers: Who played the villain in the first Die Hard? Which at least put Alan Rickman at #8. But let's try mutating that to make it harder but still understood by you and I: Who played the bad guy in the first Die Hard? Which resulted in very little but drivel with no mention of the great Alan Rickman whatsoever
So maybe it can't understand 'bad guy.' Well onto another question: Who was the organist for The Beatles on Abbey Road? Which resulted in at least the first 20 having no mention of the great & oft forgotten Billy Preston.
So you want to know what the kicker is? I put those same inputs into Google and found the name in the first or second result. Granted PowerSet doesn't do the whole web, I'm pretty sure that if it did, it wouldn't have the pretty results that it gave when I did what one of the articles told me to--ask it when earthquakes hit Tokyo. Just imagine the dates it would come up with if it hit a site with an html table of any seismic activity whatsoever in Tokyo!
I think it's a novel idea to mine Wikipedia for a search engine so long as it isn't just plain old token matching like PowerSet seems to be up to. Be inventive, try a natural language parser written in Prolog that digests all of Wikipedia into a huge network/ontology of concepts
I find them talking about this in the articles: Powerset is different. It says that its technology reads and comprehends each word on a page. It looks at each sentence. It understand the words in each sentence and how they related to each other. It works out what that sentence really means, all the facts that are being presented. This means it knows what any page is really about. Yet, I'm not impressed. You can try to personify your software and convince me that Baby Alive really defecates like a human being all over so it feels like I have a real baby. But I know it's just software. You don't have to dumb it down if you're going to blog about it. What is this? A pattern matching implementation? A depth first search tree parsing implementation? An ontology builder? Could you at least drop one of the buzzwords of the natural language parsing field for me here?
So does this story actually have more than a startup looking for a sugar daddy to buy it out?
That's not to say that early flight didn't have its fair share of mishaps and deaths but I think it's getting to the point where the only advocates I see for space are those who want it turned over to the private sector. The private sector is a good answer when it's too complicated/expensive/morally questionable for a government.
It's become pretty clear that travel or tourism has been given to the private sector (as I believe the Russians have given that up) while 'exploration' and 'colonization' are probably still the government's responsibility.
I'm all for exploration and research-y type things in space but I'm not so sure about colonization or travel yet. I used to be very pro-colonizing other planets after reading a lot of Carl Sagan but now if I were to write my representatives it would be asking them to save Earth first then think about colonization and travel.
But a key difference at that time was I was still Catholic.
One of many reasons for divorcing myself from Catholicism was its stance towards birth control. Iâ(TM)m not talking abortion (or âoebaby killingâ as some of them like to refer to it)â"Iâ(TM)m talking about preventative measures like condoms and Plan B. For some reason, the Vaticanâ"the organization that is the Catholic Churchâ"took it upon itself to stop the use of preventative measures. In pre-industrial times, this may have been advantageous to a religion and even a people. However, as it stands now this attitude results in a powder keg leaving the populace open to drought, famine, disease and brutal warfare (probably as a result of the famine) to keep the human population in check. Just look at the enterovirus (EV71) in China.
I think a lot of the responses are going to be along the lines of what Iâ(TM)ve said so far; that if we donâ(TM)t start to pay attention to population and think of non-intrusive non-immoral ways to keep it in check then weâ(TM)re in some serious trouble. Instead, Iâ(TM)d like to relay some views Iâ(TM)ve heard from people quite close to me on this issue. Iâ(TM)m not sure if this will become a political issue in the near term but I know that, at least in the United States, there are people with conflicting views.
A close friend of mine who is a Christian and a bit conservative voiced concern that the United Statesâ(TM) population growth is lagging behind many other countries. Many of the Western countriesâ"such as those in Europeâ"are also lagging behind those of Muslim nations like Turkey and several others in the Middle East & Africa. He claimed (or âoefear mongeredâ if you will) that if the current trend continued the end state of the world would most certainly be Muslim Dictatorships everywhere. I would like to quickly point out that I do not share his ideas in this Christian Vs Muslim war he believes has been going on since the crusades. I am merely relaying what many conservative Christians in the world are probably subconsciously thinking.
Now just last week my uncle sent me an e-mail that was along his thinking of people should have to have a license to have children. They should have to pass tests demonstrating they can provide food shelter clothing water all the basic life necessities before they can start to procreate. This would require a source of income to sustain a child ⦠he also has said that criminal record and health history should be taken into consideration. He linked an unfortunate story and was perhaps half joking.
Are either of these ideas the future? Is the idea of a procreation license issued by the state an unfortunate reality? Is it my friend wrong to push to close the âbirth rate gapâ(TM) between West and East?
Personally, all I can do is rail for education worldwide for all and, with that, the power to do what is right for us and the future of our children.
It kind of confuses me though. We're already capped on our upload/download rates and since we pay them like a service we should pay them based on the rate of that service. Garbage, Cable TV and Water are rates I pay monthly that never change. Power is different but Cable TV is pretty much equivalent to cable internet
Comcast lies anyway. I don't trust them any further than I can throw their entire infrastructure. We paid a premium on bandwidth for 3 months and were supposed to be getting 15 Mbps download speed (as opposed to the standard which is 5 Mbps). After several problems with lag between me and my three other roommates, we started doing periodic tests. Averaged around 1.2 Mbps download daily. So we called them and they told us our signal strength sucked. So fix it. Oh, they couldn't. Not only could they not fix it, they couldn't refund us the premium we paid. But they could offer us the 5 Mbps download rate
Liars that don't give a damn about the end consumer. You'll be lucky if the 250 GB doesn't include your digital TV as download or even if they agree to their contractual terms.
They make sure you pay too much no matter what you buy. XP is worth less than Xandros but we all know that Xandros costs less. Perhaps this is part of the M$ "patent deal" with Xandros but the details don't matter. All of Oz is being screwed by a predatory US company. As a US Citizen, I appologize for the failure of our laws.
On behalf of Slashdot, get the hell out of our community you threadjacking schizophrenic crackberry addicted redundant waste of time.You are not adding anything to the conversations here!
Seriously if I wanted people twittering their lives to me one hundred and forty bytes at a time, I would go to twitter. Do you think anyone would appreciate it if I went to twitter and tried to post long cohesive thoughts and somehow attach them to the most popular posts? I don't think so.
Please for the sake of my sanity, leave Slashdot as Slashdot and Twitter as Twitter. Otherwise I propose CmdrTaco answers in kind and rigs up a way for every single new post on Slashdot to be parsed into 140 bytes and delivered to Twitter as user Slashdot.
I'm pretty sure the only reason the pricing is different is due to the storage factor. I've suspected for quite sometime that Microsoft basically gives away XP & MS Works with Dell computers and now that the price of hardware is dropping, they're going to have to. Works is a real piece of work, FYI
Is it ok to chastise Asus for denying customers the choice of OS independent of HDD size? Yes.
Is it ok to go on a rant about Microsoft's hidden costs? Definitely, in fact I'm sure there's going to be a few +5 insightfuls with that theme.
Is it ok to wig out and claim that Microsoft is cutting deals with Asus to insure the downfall of Linux? No. You're wasting your time--spend it more constructively coding open source or lobbying for your company to use open source.
Asus is free to do as they please and if Microsoft thinks it's a good business move, let them. The funny thing about open source is that you don't have to promote it to end users. It's slowly and steadily being adopted. The end state is open source for everyone everywhere; it's unavoidable; it's just a question of when it happens (and no, I'm not going to personify software or data as 'wanting' to be free because it's about what improves the community not what software 'wants'). As long as Microsoft isn't doing something shady to keep Linux out of the Enterprise, they can do whatever they want. I don't even know how they could do that. If you look at the trends, whatever is adopted by the Enterprise is usually adopted by the single consumer in due time. DoD is starting to mandate open source also.
Ubuntu 8.04 was a marked improvement over 7.10. Aero was on par with XP. Microsoft has parked themselves at the head of the pack and are now relying on Business and Marketing to promote a Technology. It's a good sign of bad times for Microsoft.
So why is everyone fretting? Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Please, don't be one of those guys who preach about open source in a RMS religious zealot style to end users who just want their goddamn iPod to work on their home machine (Oh, by the way, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my shuffle Just Worked when I attached it to Ubuntu 8.04). You're doing more harm than good.
And if you really want to know more, they published all their findings for all their experiments in five hefty PDFs.