Nowhere on the Wikipedia page does it say "polio" I just did a search for it. I read most of it and did not see anything that said he was ill.
I apologized for saying these things many posts ago, yet you still, for some reason think it's important to call me a liar and a "sad, sad, excuse for a human being." I did not know he was ill. Only the summary explicitly says that and I will stand by it. Nowhere on the article did the author come out and say he was "ill." I apologized, I was wrong, human beings are wrong.
I'm not on a high horse. I've taken homeless people to restaraunts, I really have. Sure they were McDonalds, but I also hand out water to homeless people if I see them baking in downtown D.C.
It does not shock me that my post is modded as flamebait but the fact that yours isn't stuns me even more.
Did you miss the bit where the article says he's extremely ill?
I don't see that anywhere in the 'article.' Now I see it in the Slashdot summary but the article only says he was in an extremely pitiful flesh suit.
Go ahead and quote the part in the article where it says this. If he is ill, I am extremely sorry for him. I'm sorry for making a suggestion to get a job but, you know, Robert Jordan of Wheel of Time Fame is also extremely ill and I don't see him making the front page of Slashdot asking for rent or medical bill money.
I apologize for sounding coarse but people go through hard times. I sincerely hope that the last months of Robert Anton Wilson's life are enjoyable and that he spends time with his family and friends.
At some point, your choke point is going to be your database but if you make it that far, you've kind of hit a wall, in my opinion, and the only solution for that is to juice up the box (with database sepecific hardware) that's serving your database.
Allow me to correct myself. If you fear this occurring further down the line, you do have another option. Buy multiple database machines and, in your client app, select the connection information for an account based on a lookup table. Then split your database among different machines (I know this is scary because global queries will have to be done across many machines). When the proxy dishes a request to a member of the cluster, they use the lookup table to see where the transactions should be coming from/going to and they will connect to those database machines. This way, you kind of develop your own cluster yourself.
Of course, there are clustered database options (PDF warning) out there if you want to go that route. I might not be understanding the difference between grid and clustered but... I think that multi-machine schemes are much more cost efficient than multi-CPU machines.
...the extremely ill Mr. Wilson can't make his rent. Another testimony to how our society refuses to reward those who enrich it... but not if we can help it!
Well, this post will be modded as flamebait but it can be as much flamebait as the above. First off, I will argue that our society does not, in fact, "refuse to reward those who enrich it." Enrichment turns out to be subjective and relative of how many people you enrich. I think we rewarded The Beatles and Stephen King quite handsomely. It is true, however, that authors produce art that is becoming less and less appreciated by the general populace daily so it does not surprise me that a fringe Sci-Fi author has fallen on hard times.
Second, I don't know what he spent his money on or what he will spend my money on. When I give money to people on the street asking for it, I take them into the nearest restaurant and order them up a meal and leave. That's so I know my money isn't spent on drugs. I'm not saying he's a drug addict, I'm just concerned he might not be able to afford his rent in the first place for a particular reason. I pay my rent just fine, it was harder in college but I've made ends meet, what makes him so special?
Lastly, he's lived in Brooklyn his whole life. Fine. I would like to point out, however, that there are many other spots where rent and living is cheaper. I know quite a few small peaceful towns in Minnesota where rent for an apartment is $200/month everywhere. Get a job as a stocker at WalMart and stop being an anarchist/conspiracy theorist (hey, that's what it says on the linked Wikipedia page) refusing to do actual work for money in our 'system'.
I haven't read any books by him, so maybe I'm really missing out on something. But instead of sending him money, I'd rather send him a letter advising him on how to live a better life throw a steady income job.
Well, I'm not sure about what your particular job is but my current job is developing webservices. There are two servers that I use, a clustered and an unclustered. I deploy the same projects to them--and occasionally find myself rectifying strange resource allocation problems on the clustered server. There's only two machines on that cluster so it's more symbolism right now to the consumer that our software is scalable.
That's right, it seems to me that upper management likes the idea of having a clustered system because if a customer ever asked if our software would work for 1,000 people, my manager would say, "Sure, just buy more machines for the cluster." And everyone likes that idea. The idea that well, the system might not be able to handle everyone right away but wait a year or two and CPU cycles will be so cheap we can just buy 30 low end machines and cluster them to get the job done. Thanks to the common scheme of access that all databases use, this is an actual option.
I offer only the suggestion that maybe your bosses like the idea of just being able to throw more machines at it. Look at it from a financial perspective, if you tailored the code for multi-core CPUs--something I'm not even sure how to do--you would have to rebuild and maybe recode everything for future generations of machines. I can see why grid computing might sound so enticing to your employer. Look at Google's distributed scheme, hundreds of thousands of cheap machines running a stripped down form of Red Hat--I don't know if that's 'grid' computing but I imagine it's along the same lines.
It isn't clear to me whether your bank offers a service for trading or you do them in batches. It seems that the latter is true. Now, you mentioned you work at an investment bank so money probably isn't that big of an issue. Just go to your superior and say, "Look, I need the following." and if he balks at you just ask him how important these 10,000 transactions a day are to him.
So, to me, it would seem more intelligent to use the following idea. Buy new network hardware that handle gigabit ethernet. The cards, the router, whatever you have, just up it so that your internal network can really throw data around. Maybe look at relaying fibre if you don't have it. Then take what money is left over and buy a few more machines. Get a low-end server to act as a proxy that dishes out the requests for a trade to a cluster of machines. Write the software independent of the hardware so that you can always just buy more machines and install your client application on the machines. At some point, your choke point is going to be your database but if you make it that far, you've kind of hit a wall, in my opinion, and the only solution for that is to juice up the box (with database sepecific hardware) that's serving your database.
What I wonder is whether you believe that this is a political issue or not. Science has been "fighting" with religion for centuries. Do you think that fight is over?
In an age where some stem cell research is banned for religious reasons, managing only to drive the research overseas, is it wise to ignore the battle between science and religion?
.... Is your strategy to oppose such religious extremism, or is your strategy simply to surrender the battle between science and religion?
I suppose that depends on what data is being stored, and why...in the case of Amazon, I personally could care less if someone else could look at which CD's I'm interested in. I think the decision should be left to the end user.
Well, I popped this question because I think the recent news with the governments of multiple countries demanding search results has put a hampering on this data-mining-for-good-reasons initiative that so many companies have started. You didn't cover what would happen if the data used to find which CDs you liked were requisitioned by a government. Wouldn't this concern you regardless of what the information is being used for? Could you ever rely on a government not to store everything--even that which might cause a government to bring a case against you?
If it's the user's choice, that simplifies things but also complicates the end-user experience. In our world of "auto-magical" applications, ease of use is high on the requirements charts. However, this is also the only true solution I can come to. If you had to click a EULA that said, "The government may acquire this stored information for prosecution..." would you click it?
Why is it that the Slashdot editors are just too damn lazy to look up the RSS feed links to these pages?
The problem is not easy. Says one researcher: "You're competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem."
While this may be true, I wouldn't let it deter you. Collaborative filtering is a field that is far from dead. The interesting thing about collaborative filtering is that on the surface, it seems pretty straight forward but once you dig into the mechanics of it, there is actually a lot of playing you can do. Ironically, the way you display the data to the end user is often what determines how well of a job you did.
Allow me to take a naïve approach at this topic and say we generate a movie index of each person. I would have A Clockwork Orange and Koyaanisqatsi at 5 while The Ring 2 would be at the very low end. My friend might have similar movies. If he has A Clockwork Orange up there, you might be able to compute a Euclidean distance between us. However, this approach falls apart because no one has seen Koyaanisqatsi and of the 20 movies I've ranked highly, they are hard to find.
You don't have to stop there, however. You could also database the movies I marked as "uninterested" or the movies that were presented to me but I didn't vote on. Like if I had seen the offer to mark J-Lo's latest flop but didn't, wouldn't that tell you something about me?
So these caveats present themselves all along the way and, at the end computation, you have many different strategies for this data. For example, while you might not be able to link my friend an I through movies, how far apart are we on a nod network? What I mean is, if you plotted every user in their own dimension depending on the movies they ranked and attempted to compute as good a distance as possible between all users, how far would I be away from my friend by hopping on these nodes? There's a lot of information to be gleaned in this sort of friend-of-a-friend collaborative approach.
Now you need to present this information to the user. Do you just up and recommend him a movie? Do you take Amazon's approach and say "Other people did this -- so should you."? Or do you give them some sort of three dimensional flash plotting of you versus the people nearest to you? Do you allow the user to contact those closest to them? Those farthest away?
My point is that while 15 years of research has been done, it doesn't mean there's been 15 years of testing and implementation which, in the end of creating products, is where most of the importance lies.
Or, very similar to the Futurama episode where Fry discovers why men are not to date robots through the cheesy 1950s-ish sex-ed film? (humans will fail to reproduce and die as a species)
The new gambling provision is not expected to affect gambling at tracks or casinos.
That's right, gambling at tracks and casinos will be restricted to our nation's poorest areas, with the exception of Nevada. Indeed, something is rotten in the states of Louisiana, South Dakota, Mississippi, New Jersey... all states with gambling in poor areas. It simply baffles me because if this was a legitimate business, the sensible person would allow it to thrive in a large city or everywhere. So, by these restrictions and odd placements, it's quite obvious that everyone knows gambling is detrimental to the populace and only promotes Pareto Law.
Does anyone else question why gambling can only happen out in the middle of nowhere or in places where the a lot of the populace lives below the poverty line? Is there a correlation between these or is it causation?
I'm from the mid-west and if you drive out to South Dakota, there'll be multi-million dollar casinos out in the middle of nowhere. Why aren't they in DC or New York City? It just doesn't make sense to me.
I just don't understand things like slots where they show you the payouts right in front of you and they're not in your favor. Maybe I'm just more statistical than other people but I've only been gambling once like that. Poker, on the other hand, can be fun and social. It also has a clear cut 0 sum (aside from the rake) outcome for the players -- which is nice.
And I don't want to hear any of this Native American loophole crap because there's an act for that enacted by our Federal Government. They control it in the end -- I don't buy it that it's affirmative action for the Native peoples. None of this "The Indians stole my money BS" because the government controls where it happens and takes their own cut through taxes.
I don't think gambling needs to be abolished because it is, in fact, fun for people. In moderation, it probably makes you feel good -- just like drinking or tobacco. But when you sit down and do the math, people are raking in cash. Why doesn't the government enforce something like a maximum 5% take by the house? What I mean is that I'm sure the house is making on average something like 10-15% so why doesn't the government tax them back to 5% or allow the casino to give back to the local community through donations of this excess or building of community buildings? This isn't going to solve the social problems but I've heard that the tribe running Mystic Lake in Minnesota rakes in millions per member quarterly. I know a lot of them hand it out to members of their tribe but I don't know if that money is spent on things that necessarily benefit the community.
I am truly baffled when it comes to the history of gambling.
Depends, if I'm a manager at McDonald's, you bet your ass I'd hire him. Anti-social nerds make the best french fries.
But on a more serious note, I would hire anybody as long as they have the right personality. That's right, I've seen it happen too. People who don't know anything about computers are working in corporate America as programmers. They are one trick ponies and it would take me a few minutes to show others how to do that one trick. The questions I need answered are:
Can they work with people?
Can they dress well?
Do they shower?
Are they capable of staying after normal work hours every now and then to see to something getting finished?
Are they sensitive to other people and their surroundings?
If you answered "yes" to all these questions, you too are a potential "team member." In any business. Degrees help but are not required.
Judging by the stereotypical picture of a black hat that the media has given the public, I would guess they wouldn't pass the first bullet above. Judging by the few that I know, they are risks but at some point straightened up and are valuable employees to their companies. You just need to assess whether or not they've figured out that a steady source of income is way more rewarding than having "VIODENTIA RULEZ #1" spray painted on the RIAA's website once a year. And that "selling out" isn't really "selling out" but devoting some of your time to a large project in order to better your circumstances the rest of the time. If they're past that point, then you've got a potential for a great employee.
What's unfortunate for black hats is that there is a wealth of solid programmers from America, India and Russia (if they can make it here) who are more than willing to do anything. On top of that, they have no criminal background. So even if a Blackhat is more qualified, they're probably just dismissed since a thousand other people are eager for the work and meet the basic qualifications. Unfortunate, but something to think about if you want to delve into the dark side of computers and networks.
The study, which they're presenting to lawmakers today, claims that piracy has a ripple effect on the economy.
The study also claims that piracy is on the rise to become America's number one killer by the end of the year. It claims that piracy is capable of running rampant down the street and reeking havoc everywhere.
They interviewed a crew hand from Waterworld and, aside from forcing him out of a job, the unnamed victim reported that piracy forcefully entered his home and raped him in front of his youngest son. Piracy has taken not only his source of income but also the joy that he and his son once shared.
The report concludes with piracy being at large and dangerous. Piracy is capable of flipping bits in a pattern that resembles music and is also known to cause cancer.
The study, which they're presenting to lawmakers today...
So when are lawmakers presented with the Piracy Is Actually Pretty Bitching for Consumers report? What about the Economics Research is Bullshit & Baseless report? Oh, that's right, the other side of the issue never gets to hear it's voice heard and no alternatives will ever be explored. Silly me.
Does anybody find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as I do...?
What's so hilarious about it? It plainly states that the patents have expired and that they have more patents based on the technology. I find it sad that their legal department found that necessary.
What I find genuinely hilarious, however, is the United State of America's Patent System.
String theory is a scientific theory that has neither been proved nor disproved to my knowledge.
I could speculate all day on whether or not it is fact but from what I've read, I will make a few statements. It seems that string theory was invented to satisfy some things we could not explain. This doesn't mean it's wrong or right although some people will contend that it is most probably wrong.
As the summary points out, few (if any) of String Theory's propositions can be tested or even observed. So it is simply an unknown right now. We cannot measure the proposed strings so how can we prove if they exist or they don't? We simply can't yet.
A good analogy would be Bohr's early assumptions about the atom. They were wrong but they were a step in the right direction. In hindsight, we see this now but we don't know what the future holds for String Theory. I'm just glad there are people out there thinking outside the box.
Do not fret, however, as scientists have been very resourceful at proving/disproving theories. I submit, for example, the exercise of determining the diameter of the building blocks of matter. Scientists had the idea to fill up one cubic milliletre of oil and dump it on top of a trough of water with a roller across the top. As the oil spread out, they moved the roller further down the trough. Once they started to see non-reflective parts of the water, they moved it back until they agreed the oil was completely spread out to the best of their abilities. Using this area, they determined how thick a molecule of oil could be without precision tools!
Similar ingenious tests have been devised to easily find the diameter of the earth at sunset on a beach with a yard stick or ruler.
So even though we may never be able to measure these strings, there are still some options left to explore to record properties that may prove/disprove their existence. We're merely in the very early stages of the scientific process.
Let us be excited about String Theory, even if it is wrong it sure is interesting. Nothing's wrong with a scientist who dreams, is there?
If they're talking about using this for identifying fraudulent users...how much would changing news/services on the internet affect that? I can think of several news items and new services that instantaneously and permanently caused me to alter my browsing and internet using habits. Wouldn't those sorts of behavior altering agents increase false positives?
To the best of my knowledge, the idea is that you wouldn't change drastically. And if you did, it might falsely accuse you of being a fraudulent user and then you mearly need to straighten things out.
The odds are low and this is a variable to be tweaked. But the assumption is that you will still visit your old sites and exhibit your behaviors on them. If you found say one new site a week, it would actually slowly be incorporated into your routine (if they used regression properly and allowed the model to train on your data -- old and new). But if you suddenly stopped going to your old sites and started visiting new ones, you would probably be flagged. And that's the trade off of trying to repress fraud.
I should point out that there's a lot of play with the variables here and that actual implementation of this theoretical paper could be either well done or badly done.
Excellent point, though. Sometimes these new technologies turn out to be more cumbersome than helpful and we need to watch out for that!
So I can already anticipate people being concerned about their identities being tracked through clicks online.
You don't have to worry about this, however, as it is easy to distinguish two different users but probably difficult to pick you out of a crowd. Furthermore, if they're tracking your clicks, they probably already know your IP address. The number of sessions probably raises to a problematic number if you are trying to identify one user out of one thousand. Therefore, this will only be useful in identifying different behavior between two users -- or specifically identifying when it is highly likely that someone who is logged in is significantly different from the click profile associated with that account (as the article states).
There's a lot of discussion about this in the paper. Mentioning that the priors are set at 50% for 2 users but at 1% for 100 users (obviously). And also that:
In an experiment involving 42 user profiles, Monrose and Rubin (1997) shows that depending on the classifier used, between 80 to 90 percent of users can be automatically recognized using features such as the latency between keystrokes and the length of time different keys are pressed.
They go on to say that the method they suggest for detecting a fradulent user "do not require that users have truly unique profiles."
I read a bit of the paper and I identified Weka's decision tree method being used to classify the users (if you've ever used the ID3 algorithm or its brethren C4.5 in classification, imagine exploring methods of developing different decision trees).
Indeed the paper states:
We chose weka's J4.8 as the classifier since classification trees
in general have been shown to be highly accurate classifiers.
I'll take this opportunity to recommend two open source projects. Torpark for those of you concerned about your identity and also Weka -- the easy to use collection of data mining software in Java! Also something to note is that Weka has recently become part of Pentaho, a project of open source business intelligence products. Explore the valuable tools that are out there and enjoy!
What I've already done is sent a hand written and signed letter addressed to my representatives in congress, my representative in the house, my president and my local paper (addressed to my fellow citizens).
I did that because it's what I'm supposed to do. This is how it's supposed to work. I feel a bit more satisfied but I still fear for my country. I urge each and everyone of you who are American citizens to do the same, whether you're for or against this bill.
Which one do I have the most faith in? My fellow citizens.
The rest could be hit by a bus and I wouldn't really care.
Both parties are full of shit. Although it appears that Republicans are simply more full of shit than Democrats at the moment. Don't confuse me with a Democrat, it's just much easier to criticize a party when it owns all three branches of the government.
Republicans called it a test before the election of whether Democrats want to fight or coddle terrorists.
Bullshit. This isn't about terrorists, it's about my privacy and my rights as an American. The true test is whether or not our leaders are competent enough to defeat terrorism without destroying the laws and rights that made this country great.
Offering other means to fight terrorists is not 'coddling' them.
"To always have reasons why you just can't vote 'yes,' I think speaks volumes when it comes to which party is better able and more willing to take on the terrorists and defeat them," Boehner said.
And voting 'yes' just for the sake of being able to vote 'yes' would be an even larger problem. My message to congress: engage brain before voting. I would rather have everything scrutinized than making progress for the sake of making progress. When you gather 100 people from different parts of the country together, there's bound to be more than a few that have reasons not to vote 'yes' or 'no.' That's called Democracy and that's how it's supposed to work.
What is it with Republicans and their extreme views? The world isn't black and white. You can't tell me that by fearing for my civil rights I'm less able to combat terrorism. And what the hell is up with this tunnel vision of one and only one option on nearly every issue? Stop being selective about revealing consequences! This might help you fight terrorism but it's also going to give you powers that the wrong government officials could abuse! You cannot deny this so stop sidestepping it.
It said the government should not support science education programs that 'include concepts that are derived from ideology,' an apparent reference to creationism and its ideological cousin, intelligent design.
The sad fact of the current political state of the United States is simply that politicians are relying on voters to vote based on emotion, not logic.
This group is asking politicians to make decisions based on logic and scientific evidence when the voters aren't even using these processes. I remember the 2004 election and I remember plotzing when I heard someone was voting for Bush. Often times, I got a canned response of something crazy like, "John Kerry is for abortion. Bush is against it. If my mother had had me aborted, I wouldn't be here and that's why I'm voting for Bush." Now, whether any of that is true or not can be debated forever, that's not the point of this post. The point is that someone or something had gotten to them the message that if Kerry was president, all fetuses would be aborted. They didn't pay attention to any other issues except that one and they made a very emotional decision based on it.
What's even more exasperating about this situation is that Kerry wouldn't have had the power to change the abortion laws and Bush hasn't done a damn thing about them either. This makes the "my body my right" crowd just as idiotic. Abortion is always a steaming political debate right around an election and then subsides to nothing during the term because the trimester laws aren't budging.
The logical step is to not even base your vote on the abortion stance. Of course, none of the voters are logical.
What's the first aim of SEFORA? To push one candidate based on a single issue -- stem cells.
The group's organizers include John H. Gibbons and Neal Lane, who were science advisers in the Clinton administration, the Nobel laureates Peter Agre and Alfred Gilman, and Susan F. Wood, who resigned from the Food and Drug Administration last year to protest the agency's delay in approving over-the-counter sales of the so-called Plan B emergency contraception.
Just admit it, Democrats are less founded in conservative Christian belief and therefore are more prone to rely on science for decisions/explanations. This 527 will most likely end up supporting the Democratic candidate 9 times out of 10 simply because of the "party stances" the Republican will most certainly take. The million dollar question is, "Would they support a third party candidate running on the Science platform before the bi-partisan idiots?" And the answer is 'probably not.' Which is really too bad because sometimes the third party candidate has good ideas and stances -- just lacks major funds to get the word out.
I see this group as doing an overall good thing but I'm not a big fan of their methods. What ever happened to just trying to educate the voters? At the end of the day, the people voting are not scientifically founded. If they were, I wouldn't have to put up with commercials for The War at Home on TV. The politicians are supposed to represent the people and, since most people aren't experts using science and engineering, they shouldn't make decisions based on this.
I'll just out and say it -- Ken Mingis is just looking for bells & whistles. He's not in search of the 'best' operating system, just looking for the one that can waste CPU cycles while making the user ooh and ahh.
Here's something you could have figured out for me: how efficient are these effects? What's the net cost of having Aqua or Aero? Do these graphical interfaces leave sasquatch sized memory footprints? Are Gadgets & Widgets memory efficient? Does all this extra shit cause any more bugs than a regular operating system without them?
Big deal. Call me when you write an object review. I want to know which of these operating systems will run on my old ass laptop with a low end P4 in it. Not all of us have the new intel core 2 duos.
Congratulations, four pages of inundating me with ads, bitching about UAC & falling head over heels for Aero. Sounds like every other Vista review I've read.
Pentagon officials, however, have kept quiet regarding China's efforts as part of a Bush administration policy to keep from angering Beijing, which is a leading U.S. trading partner and seen as key to dealing with onerous states like North Korea and Iran.
That's why.
Read the rest of it. It's an interesting article, but some of these statements come off as revenue generating news (and considering this is Defense News, it's no surprise).
China has fired high-power lasers at U.S. spy satellites flying over its territory in what experts see as a test of Chinese ability to blind the spacecraft, according to sources.
They forget to mention that we would probably do the same (if not worse) to deter spy satellites over our own country. They also don't address the concept of whether or not a country has a righ to its own privacy here. I think we would want privacy for our country and should not be surprised or angered to find our attempts thwarted when spying on other countries.
Russian jamming systems are publicly known -- the Air Force destroyed such a system deployed to Iraq to keep American GPS guided bombs from finding their targets during the 2003. The site was destroyed by GPS guided bombs.
Well, that jamming station must not have worked well and I highly doubt it was put there by the Russians. I cannot think of a clear motive for it. Probably sold as surplus or exchanged for payment by a disgruntled soldier and found its way to Iraq.
So we'll either change our standards or give the military a special encrypted standard. The cat and mouse game will begin between the US wanting to see what China's doing and China not wanting the US to see what they're doing. Frankly, I don't really give a damn. China has some bad leaders and some severe problems but they're more internal than anything.
You'll find at the bottom of the article:
As for China specifically, Thompson said the country has a right to defend itself.
That's right, they do. So this isn't really news so much as "Country X Defends Itself Against Country Y" except that Country Y is the only country that thinks it's hot shit and that the world must reveal all and revolve around Country Y. Also, our leader has stated that non-compliance means you are with the terrorists and you're against us.
I'm glad Ed Bott was able to discern which people were using genuine software and which had copies. People can get copies from machine vendors without knowing it, you know. Did he have access to Microsoft's database?
It's more than likely that one of the very few problems you could experience with this software is that it gives you a false positive--therefore a high percentage of forum posts are based on this problem.
Honestly, do you think that every person who used this with success went straight to the forum boards and posted "Success! Thanks Microsoft!"?
In a related story, the first WGA errors from Windows Vista and Office 2007 have appeared in the wild.
Wait, you're trying to tell me that a software program run on thousands of machines has failed in some cases!? No fscking way. That never happens--WGA should be error free--this is unacceptable.
In the software world, 137 problems on say 5,000 cases of average people using your brand new product is "nearly flawless." I would guess 50% are user error, 42% false positives and 8% other.
How is this news? Come on guys, I hate Microsoft as much as the next Linux user but I'm not blindly stupid about it... leave bending percentages and pointing out unavoidable errors to the politicians & corporate America, please! WGA sucks. But let's tear down its principle and theory--not the implementation.
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No, sir, you are the one who is the liar.
Nowhere on the Wikipedia page does it say "polio" I just did a search for it. I read most of it and did not see anything that said he was ill.
I apologized for saying these things many posts ago, yet you still, for some reason think it's important to call me a liar and a "sad, sad, excuse for a human being." I did not know he was ill. Only the summary explicitly says that and I will stand by it. Nowhere on the article did the author come out and say he was "ill." I apologized, I was wrong, human beings are wrong.
I'm not on a high horse. I've taken homeless people to restaraunts, I really have. Sure they were McDonalds, but I also hand out water to homeless people if I see them baking in downtown D.C.
It does not shock me that my post is modded as flamebait but the fact that yours isn't stuns me even more.
Go ahead and quote the part in the article where it says this. If he is ill, I am extremely sorry for him. I'm sorry for making a suggestion to get a job but, you know, Robert Jordan of Wheel of Time Fame is also extremely ill and I don't see him making the front page of Slashdot asking for rent or medical bill money.
I apologize for sounding coarse but people go through hard times. I sincerely hope that the last months of Robert Anton Wilson's life are enjoyable and that he spends time with his family and friends.
Of course, there are clustered database options (PDF warning) out there if you want to go that route. I might not be understanding the difference between grid and clustered but
Second, I don't know what he spent his money on or what he will spend my money on. When I give money to people on the street asking for it, I take them into the nearest restaurant and order them up a meal and leave. That's so I know my money isn't spent on drugs. I'm not saying he's a drug addict, I'm just concerned he might not be able to afford his rent in the first place for a particular reason. I pay my rent just fine, it was harder in college but I've made ends meet, what makes him so special?
Lastly, he's lived in Brooklyn his whole life. Fine. I would like to point out, however, that there are many other spots where rent and living is cheaper. I know quite a few small peaceful towns in Minnesota where rent for an apartment is $200/month everywhere. Get a job as a stocker at WalMart and stop being an anarchist/conspiracy theorist (hey, that's what it says on the linked Wikipedia page) refusing to do actual work for money in our 'system'.
I haven't read any books by him, so maybe I'm really missing out on something. But instead of sending him money, I'd rather send him a letter advising him on how to live a better life throw a steady income job.
Well, I'm not sure about what your particular job is but my current job is developing webservices. There are two servers that I use, a clustered and an unclustered. I deploy the same projects to them--and occasionally find myself rectifying strange resource allocation problems on the clustered server. There's only two machines on that cluster so it's more symbolism right now to the consumer that our software is scalable.
That's right, it seems to me that upper management likes the idea of having a clustered system because if a customer ever asked if our software would work for 1,000 people, my manager would say, "Sure, just buy more machines for the cluster." And everyone likes that idea. The idea that well, the system might not be able to handle everyone right away but wait a year or two and CPU cycles will be so cheap we can just buy 30 low end machines and cluster them to get the job done. Thanks to the common scheme of access that all databases use, this is an actual option.
I offer only the suggestion that maybe your bosses like the idea of just being able to throw more machines at it. Look at it from a financial perspective, if you tailored the code for multi-core CPUs--something I'm not even sure how to do--you would have to rebuild and maybe recode everything for future generations of machines. I can see why grid computing might sound so enticing to your employer. Look at Google's distributed scheme, hundreds of thousands of cheap machines running a stripped down form of Red Hat--I don't know if that's 'grid' computing but I imagine it's along the same lines.
It isn't clear to me whether your bank offers a service for trading or you do them in batches. It seems that the latter is true. Now, you mentioned you work at an investment bank so money probably isn't that big of an issue. Just go to your superior and say, "Look, I need the following." and if he balks at you just ask him how important these 10,000 transactions a day are to him.
So, to me, it would seem more intelligent to use the following idea. Buy new network hardware that handle gigabit ethernet. The cards, the router, whatever you have, just up it so that your internal network can really throw data around. Maybe look at relaying fibre if you don't have it. Then take what money is left over and buy a few more machines. Get a low-end server to act as a proxy that dishes out the requests for a trade to a cluster of machines. Write the software independent of the hardware so that you can always just buy more machines and install your client application on the machines. At some point, your choke point is going to be your database but if you make it that far, you've kind of hit a wall, in my opinion, and the only solution for that is to juice up the box (with database sepecific hardware) that's serving your database.
If it's the user's choice, that simplifies things but also complicates the end-user experience. In our world of "auto-magical" applications, ease of use is high on the requirements charts. However, this is also the only true solution I can come to. If you had to click a EULA that said, "The government may acquire this stored information for prosecution
Why is it that the Slashdot editors are just too damn lazy to look up the RSS feed links to these pages?
While this may be true, I wouldn't let it deter you. Collaborative filtering is a field that is far from dead. The interesting thing about collaborative filtering is that on the surface, it seems pretty straight forward but once you dig into the mechanics of it, there is actually a lot of playing you can do. Ironically, the way you display the data to the end user is often what determines how well of a job you did.
Allow me to take a naïve approach at this topic and say we generate a movie index of each person. I would have A Clockwork Orange and Koyaanisqatsi at 5 while The Ring 2 would be at the very low end. My friend might have similar movies. If he has A Clockwork Orange up there, you might be able to compute a Euclidean distance between us. However, this approach falls apart because no one has seen Koyaanisqatsi and of the 20 movies I've ranked highly, they are hard to find.
You don't have to stop there, however. You could also database the movies I marked as "uninterested" or the movies that were presented to me but I didn't vote on. Like if I had seen the offer to mark J-Lo's latest flop but didn't, wouldn't that tell you something about me?
So these caveats present themselves all along the way and, at the end computation, you have many different strategies for this data. For example, while you might not be able to link my friend an I through movies, how far apart are we on a nod network? What I mean is, if you plotted every user in their own dimension depending on the movies they ranked and attempted to compute as good a distance as possible between all users, how far would I be away from my friend by hopping on these nodes? There's a lot of information to be gleaned in this sort of friend-of-a-friend collaborative approach.
Now you need to present this information to the user. Do you just up and recommend him a movie? Do you take Amazon's approach and say "Other people did this -- so should you."? Or do you give them some sort of three dimensional flash plotting of you versus the people nearest to you? Do you allow the user to contact those closest to them? Those farthest away?
My point is that while 15 years of research has been done, it doesn't mean there's been 15 years of testing and implementation which, in the end of creating products, is where most of the importance lies.
Maybe it'll be along the same lines as this ad for Warcraft?
...
Or, very similar to the Futurama episode where Fry discovers why men are not to date robots through the cheesy 1950s-ish sex-ed film? (humans will fail to reproduce and die as a species)
That's the most I can gather from the title
Does anyone else question why gambling can only happen out in the middle of nowhere or in places where the a lot of the populace lives below the poverty line? Is there a correlation between these or is it causation?
I'm from the mid-west and if you drive out to South Dakota, there'll be multi-million dollar casinos out in the middle of nowhere. Why aren't they in DC or New York City? It just doesn't make sense to me.
I just don't understand things like slots where they show you the payouts right in front of you and they're not in your favor. Maybe I'm just more statistical than other people but I've only been gambling once like that. Poker, on the other hand, can be fun and social. It also has a clear cut 0 sum (aside from the rake) outcome for the players -- which is nice.
And I don't want to hear any of this Native American loophole crap because there's an act for that enacted by our Federal Government. They control it in the end -- I don't buy it that it's affirmative action for the Native peoples. None of this "The Indians stole my money BS" because the government controls where it happens and takes their own cut through taxes.
I don't think gambling needs to be abolished because it is, in fact, fun for people. In moderation, it probably makes you feel good -- just like drinking or tobacco. But when you sit down and do the math, people are raking in cash. Why doesn't the government enforce something like a maximum 5% take by the house? What I mean is that I'm sure the house is making on average something like 10-15% so why doesn't the government tax them back to 5% or allow the casino to give back to the local community through donations of this excess or building of community buildings? This isn't going to solve the social problems but I've heard that the tribe running Mystic Lake in Minnesota rakes in millions per member quarterly. I know a lot of them hand it out to members of their tribe but I don't know if that money is spent on things that necessarily benefit the community.
I am truly baffled when it comes to the history of gambling.
But on a more serious note, I would hire anybody as long as they have the right personality. That's right, I've seen it happen too. People who don't know anything about computers are working in corporate America as programmers. They are one trick ponies and it would take me a few minutes to show others how to do that one trick. The questions I need answered are:
- Can they work with people?
- Can they dress well?
- Do they shower?
- Are they capable of staying after normal work hours every now and then to see to something getting finished?
- Are they sensitive to other people and their surroundings?
If you answered "yes" to all these questions, you too are a potential "team member." In any business. Degrees help but are not required.Judging by the stereotypical picture of a black hat that the media has given the public, I would guess they wouldn't pass the first bullet above. Judging by the few that I know, they are risks but at some point straightened up and are valuable employees to their companies. You just need to assess whether or not they've figured out that a steady source of income is way more rewarding than having "VIODENTIA RULEZ #1" spray painted on the RIAA's website once a year. And that "selling out" isn't really "selling out" but devoting some of your time to a large project in order to better your circumstances the rest of the time. If they're past that point, then you've got a potential for a great employee.
What's unfortunate for black hats is that there is a wealth of solid programmers from America, India and Russia (if they can make it here) who are more than willing to do anything. On top of that, they have no criminal background. So even if a Blackhat is more qualified, they're probably just dismissed since a thousand other people are eager for the work and meet the basic qualifications. Unfortunate, but something to think about if you want to delve into the dark side of computers and networks.
They interviewed a crew hand from Waterworld and, aside from forcing him out of a job, the unnamed victim reported that piracy forcefully entered his home and raped him in front of his youngest son. Piracy has taken not only his source of income but also the joy that he and his son once shared.
The report concludes with piracy being at large and dangerous. Piracy is capable of flipping bits in a pattern that resembles music and is also known to cause cancer.
So when are lawmakers presented with the Piracy Is Actually Pretty Bitching for Consumers report? What about the Economics Research is Bullshit & Baseless report? Oh, that's right, the other side of the issue never gets to hear it's voice heard and no alternatives will ever be explored. Silly me.
What I find genuinely hilarious, however, is the United State of America's Patent System.
String theory is a scientific theory that has neither been proved nor disproved to my knowledge.
I could speculate all day on whether or not it is fact but from what I've read, I will make a few statements. It seems that string theory was invented to satisfy some things we could not explain. This doesn't mean it's wrong or right although some people will contend that it is most probably wrong.
As the summary points out, few (if any) of String Theory's propositions can be tested or even observed. So it is simply an unknown right now. We cannot measure the proposed strings so how can we prove if they exist or they don't? We simply can't yet.
A good analogy would be Bohr's early assumptions about the atom. They were wrong but they were a step in the right direction. In hindsight, we see this now but we don't know what the future holds for String Theory. I'm just glad there are people out there thinking outside the box.
Do not fret, however, as scientists have been very resourceful at proving/disproving theories. I submit, for example, the exercise of determining the diameter of the building blocks of matter. Scientists had the idea to fill up one cubic milliletre of oil and dump it on top of a trough of water with a roller across the top. As the oil spread out, they moved the roller further down the trough. Once they started to see non-reflective parts of the water, they moved it back until they agreed the oil was completely spread out to the best of their abilities. Using this area, they determined how thick a molecule of oil could be without precision tools!
Similar ingenious tests have been devised to easily find the diameter of the earth at sunset on a beach with a yard stick or ruler.
So even though we may never be able to measure these strings, there are still some options left to explore to record properties that may prove/disprove their existence. We're merely in the very early stages of the scientific process.
Let us be excited about String Theory, even if it is wrong it sure is interesting. Nothing's wrong with a scientist who dreams, is there?
The odds are low and this is a variable to be tweaked. But the assumption is that you will still visit your old sites and exhibit your behaviors on them. If you found say one new site a week, it would actually slowly be incorporated into your routine (if they used regression properly and allowed the model to train on your data -- old and new). But if you suddenly stopped going to your old sites and started visiting new ones, you would probably be flagged. And that's the trade off of trying to repress fraud.
I should point out that there's a lot of play with the variables here and that actual implementation of this theoretical paper could be either well done or badly done.
Excellent point, though. Sometimes these new technologies turn out to be more cumbersome than helpful and we need to watch out for that!
You don't have to worry about this, however, as it is easy to distinguish two different users but probably difficult to pick you out of a crowd. Furthermore, if they're tracking your clicks, they probably already know your IP address. The number of sessions probably raises to a problematic number if you are trying to identify one user out of one thousand. Therefore, this will only be useful in identifying different behavior between two users -- or specifically identifying when it is highly likely that someone who is logged in is significantly different from the click profile associated with that account (as the article states).
There's a lot of discussion about this in the paper. Mentioning that the priors are set at 50% for 2 users but at 1% for 100 users (obviously). And also that: They go on to say that the method they suggest for detecting a fradulent user "do not require that users have truly unique profiles."
I read a bit of the paper and I identified Weka's decision tree method being used to classify the users (if you've ever used the ID3 algorithm or its brethren C4.5 in classification, imagine exploring methods of developing different decision trees).
Indeed the paper states: I'll take this opportunity to recommend two open source projects. Torpark for those of you concerned about your identity and also Weka -- the easy to use collection of data mining software in Java! Also something to note is that Weka has recently become part of Pentaho, a project of open source business intelligence products. Explore the valuable tools that are out there and enjoy!
I did that because it's what I'm supposed to do. This is how it's supposed to work. I feel a bit more satisfied but I still fear for my country. I urge each and everyone of you who are American citizens to do the same, whether you're for or against this bill.
Which one do I have the most faith in? My fellow citizens.
The rest could be hit by a bus and I wouldn't really care.
Bullshit. This isn't about terrorists, it's about my privacy and my rights as an American. The true test is whether or not our leaders are competent enough to defeat terrorism without destroying the laws and rights that made this country great.
Offering other means to fight terrorists is not 'coddling' them. And voting 'yes' just for the sake of being able to vote 'yes' would be an even larger problem. My message to congress: engage brain before voting. I would rather have everything scrutinized than making progress for the sake of making progress. When you gather 100 people from different parts of the country together, there's bound to be more than a few that have reasons not to vote 'yes' or 'no.' That's called Democracy and that's how it's supposed to work.
What is it with Republicans and their extreme views? The world isn't black and white. You can't tell me that by fearing for my civil rights I'm less able to combat terrorism. And what the hell is up with this tunnel vision of one and only one option on nearly every issue? Stop being selective about revealing consequences! This might help you fight terrorism but it's also going to give you powers that the wrong government officials could abuse! You cannot deny this so stop sidestepping it.
This group is asking politicians to make decisions based on logic and scientific evidence when the voters aren't even using these processes. I remember the 2004 election and I remember plotzing when I heard someone was voting for Bush. Often times, I got a canned response of something crazy like, "John Kerry is for abortion. Bush is against it. If my mother had had me aborted, I wouldn't be here and that's why I'm voting for Bush." Now, whether any of that is true or not can be debated forever, that's not the point of this post. The point is that someone or something had gotten to them the message that if Kerry was president, all fetuses would be aborted. They didn't pay attention to any other issues except that one and they made a very emotional decision based on it.
What's even more exasperating about this situation is that Kerry wouldn't have had the power to change the abortion laws and Bush hasn't done a damn thing about them either. This makes the "my body my right" crowd just as idiotic. Abortion is always a steaming political debate right around an election and then subsides to nothing during the term because the trimester laws aren't budging.
The logical step is to not even base your vote on the abortion stance. Of course, none of the voters are logical.
What's the first aim of SEFORA? To push one candidate based on a single issue -- stem cells.
Just admit it, Democrats are less founded in conservative Christian belief and therefore are more prone to rely on science for decisions/explanations. This 527 will most likely end up supporting the Democratic candidate 9 times out of 10 simply because of the "party stances" the Republican will most certainly take. The million dollar question is, "Would they support a third party candidate running on the Science platform before the bi-partisan idiots?" And the answer is 'probably not.' Which is really too bad because sometimes the third party candidate has good ideas and stances -- just lacks major funds to get the word out.
I see this group as doing an overall good thing but I'm not a big fan of their methods. What ever happened to just trying to educate the voters? At the end of the day, the people voting are not scientifically founded. If they were, I wouldn't have to put up with commercials for The War at Home on TV. The politicians are supposed to represent the people and, since most people aren't experts using science and engineering, they shouldn't make decisions based on this.
I'll just out and say it -- Ken Mingis is just looking for bells & whistles. He's not in search of the 'best' operating system, just looking for the one that can waste CPU cycles while making the user ooh and ahh.
Here's something you could have figured out for me: how efficient are these effects? What's the net cost of having Aqua or Aero? Do these graphical interfaces leave sasquatch sized memory footprints? Are Gadgets & Widgets memory efficient? Does all this extra shit cause any more bugs than a regular operating system without them?
Big deal. Call me when you write an object review. I want to know which of these operating systems will run on my old ass laptop with a low end P4 in it. Not all of us have the new intel core 2 duos.
Congratulations, four pages of inundating me with ads, bitching about UAC & falling head over heels for Aero. Sounds like every other Vista review I've read.
Read the rest of it. It's an interesting article, but some of these statements come off as revenue generating news (and considering this is Defense News, it's no surprise).
They forget to mention that we would probably do the same (if not worse) to deter spy satellites over our own country. They also don't address the concept of whether or not a country has a righ to its own privacy here. I think we would want privacy for our country and should not be surprised or angered to find our attempts thwarted when spying on other countries. Well, that jamming station must not have worked well and I highly doubt it was put there by the Russians. I cannot think of a clear motive for it. Probably sold as surplus or exchanged for payment by a disgruntled soldier and found its way to Iraq.
So we'll either change our standards or give the military a special encrypted standard. The cat and mouse game will begin between the US wanting to see what China's doing and China not wanting the US to see what they're doing. Frankly, I don't really give a damn. China has some bad leaders and some severe problems but they're more internal than anything.
You'll find at the bottom of the article: That's right, they do. So this isn't really news so much as "Country X Defends Itself Against Country Y" except that Country Y is the only country that thinks it's hot shit and that the world must reveal all and revolve around Country Y. Also, our leader has stated that non-compliance means you are with the terrorists and you're against us.
It's more than likely that one of the very few problems you could experience with this software is that it gives you a false positive--therefore a high percentage of forum posts are based on this problem.
Honestly, do you think that every person who used this with success went straight to the forum boards and posted "Success! Thanks Microsoft!"?
Wait, you're trying to tell me that a software program run on thousands of machines has failed in some cases!? No fscking way. That never happens--WGA should be error free--this is unacceptable.
In the software world, 137 problems on say 5,000 cases of average people using your brand new product is "nearly flawless." I would guess 50% are user error, 42% false positives and 8% other.
How is this news? Come on guys, I hate Microsoft as much as the next Linux user but I'm not blindly stupid about it