Ok, cut down the odds by a factor of 2 or 4 to disallow the dart landing in, or soon after, an ice age. Heck, let's be vain and block out 50% of the time between the last ice age and now, because it'd be impossible for any civilization to develop that much faster than we did. Happy now?
So now it's only a 100-year coincidence in a span of what... 10,000 years? I'm still skeptical.
No, you are. Judging by the timings of previous warming events, we can really only say something about as specific as "we're due for another one sometime in the next 10 or 20 thousand years." I don't think that's what you meant by "near future."
The notion that such an event would line up this closely with such a radical one-time shift in human behaviour (not to mention a 3 or 4 fold increase in the human population over one century, following millennia of far slower growth) entirely by chance, is a big stretch.
Ice age durations and the breaks between them have varied by as much as 50% over the Pleistocene period. This kind of periodicity is not even close to periodic enough to make predictions with accuracy on the order of a decade or a century.
Not by that much. Go ahead and double or triple your guesstimate if it'll make you feel better, but global warming deniers are still asking us to believe in a several-hundred-to-one coincidence by positing that the Earth would pick this particular century to warm up, almost immediately(in geoclimatic scales) after we began an unprecedented worldwide project of mass fossil energy extraction.
Imagine you're standing in front of a big paper graph, depicting temperature variations over a timeline. The timeline is about 400 thousand years in length, and there is a dramatic spike in the graph every 100 thousand years or so.
Now, you're holding a dart, and that dart is labeled "industrial revolution." You close your eyes, your friends spin you around a couple times, and you throw the dart at the graph.
Now, what are the odds that your dart lands less than 200 years away from one of the aforementioned graph spikes? Go on, make a guesstimate.
(this is all from merely RTFS, though. I'm not really interested enough to look at their data, but which stat they chose to put in the summary speaks volumes.)
That's 65% with just one tweet, though; presumably quality is better given more tweets as sample data.
I wouldn't be so sure. I think the uncertainty might have less to do with a given user's linguistic variation from one tweet to the next, and more to do with the fact that gender isn't actually the sole determinant of how people talk. If 30% of women consistently produce "male-sounding" language and 30% of men produce "female-sounding" language, according to whatever metric these researchers have come up with, that's quite different from if all women produce "male-sounding" language 30% of the time and vice versa. I find the first scenario far more likely than the second, and if this were true, it would imply that gathering more tweets from the same user is unlikely to make their guess much better.
Reading between the lines, I suspect that if reading subsequent tweets *did* refine their estimates significantly, they would have opted to use a more impressive stat such as "80% certainty after reading ten tweets".
Positive connotations also "taint" the surrounding community, and the successes of one open source project lend credibility to the others around it. That is what's meant when people talk about things like "ecosystem", it's an effect that the open source world counts on, and we can't go around blithely imagining that this works for good publicity but not for bad.
I don't understand why, in discussions like this, the discussion seems to immediately fall back to questions of free speech. It's like there's no such thing as being an asshole; as long as you're not actually breaking a law, no one has the right to question anything you do. Free speech is not the issue here - no one is suggesting that this project name was illegal, they're suggesting that it was a dick move. Why is that so difficult?
I didn't know companies had a right to be mentioned on wikipedia.
Never said they had a right to be on Wikipedia. On the other hand, Wikipedia is not for company shills to be using for the advancement of their company above others.
You're absolutely right, and that's why I think it was the Wikimedia foundation who has a claim to have been wronged, and not the plaintiff of this lawsuit.
can you load modern software? Can you meet todays needs? If the answer to any of this is 'no', I'll give even odds that a resource-sucking OS such as Windows is at least partly to blame. Not exactly a problem for Google.
If you think human history was going to continue under the effects of Darwinian genetic selection, you really need to spend a while thinking about different timescales.
Or people can be free to generate their own key, by whatever method they like. Any number of freeware, commercial, or opensource methods could make this a simple and autonomous process, so that people could do as much or as little as they liked to ensure that their own key was securely generated. The free market's built-in 'reputability' mechanisms would go a long way toward ensuring security in these, and people would mostly end up converging around a few very popularly "trustworthy" solutions. For the people who REALLY NEED TO BE CERTAIN, the government could provide a boot-disk image with source which was guaranteed by the White House to be malware-free, a fact which could be guaranteed independently by private actors, and the President could go on TV and recite a checksum/hash of that CD image to vouch for its integrity.
Of course, this makes the question of desktop machines running botnets a much bigger deal. But that's kind of a problem we need to deal with anyway; people already bank online.
Because there's no way you could modify the checksums... Sure, if they're stored along with the data that they're checksumming.
Seriously. Look up some crypto voting proposals. Pick one at random and research it for 2 minutes. They all account for this. The point is to put the checksums out of "tampering" reach when they're generated. Sometimes this means putting them into a database which is readable by the whole world. Sometimes this means printing it on a receipt for the voter. The people coming up with these proposals do have a clue about how crypto works, you know.
Checksums are just as easy to change as the original vote bits Sure, if they're stored along with the data that they're checksumming.
Seriously. Look up some crypto voting proposals. Pick one at random and research it for 2 minutes. They all account for this. The point is to put the checksums out of "tampering" reach when they're generated. Sometimes this means putting them into a database which is readable by the whole world. Sometimes this means printing it on a receipt for the voter. The people coming up with these proposals do have a clue about how crypto works, you know.
No, none of them have to understand the cryptography themselves. All they have to do is take the leap of faith that mathematicians know what they're talking about. I don't have to read the entire Linux kernel source to trust that it doesn't contain a backdoor. All I have to know is that sufficiently many people who are qualified to spot one, and who wouldn't profit from concealing one, are looking. Even among the coders, I suspect that most Slashdotters are like me in this respect.
Though I suppose in the nation which could manufacture a scientific "controversy" about the risks of smoking or pollution, even symbolic mathematical proofs would be met with armchair-expert skepticism. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, cut down the odds by a factor of 2 or 4 to disallow the dart landing in, or soon after, an ice age. Heck, let's be vain and block out 50% of the time between the last ice age and now, because it'd be impossible for any civilization to develop that much faster than we did. Happy now?
So now it's only a 100-year coincidence in a span of what... 10,000 years? I'm still skeptical.
Then you get 3 extra lives and infinite ammo.
No, you are. Judging by the timings of previous warming events, we can really only say something about as specific as "we're due for another one sometime in the next 10 or 20 thousand years." I don't think that's what you meant by "near future."
The notion that such an event would line up this closely with such a radical one-time shift in human behaviour (not to mention a 3 or 4 fold increase in the human population over one century, following millennia of far slower growth) entirely by chance, is a big stretch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_CO2_with_glaciers_cycles.gif
Ice age durations and the breaks between them have varied by as much as 50% over the Pleistocene period. This kind of periodicity is not even close to periodic enough to make predictions with accuracy on the order of a decade or a century.
Not by that much. Go ahead and double or triple your guesstimate if it'll make you feel better, but global warming deniers are still asking us to believe in a several-hundred-to-one coincidence by positing that the Earth would pick this particular century to warm up, almost immediately(in geoclimatic scales) after we began an unprecedented worldwide project of mass fossil energy extraction.
Imagine you're standing in front of a big paper graph, depicting temperature variations over a timeline. The timeline is about 400 thousand years in length, and there is a dramatic spike in the graph every 100 thousand years or so.
Now, you're holding a dart, and that dart is labeled "industrial revolution." You close your eyes, your friends spin you around a couple times, and you throw the dart at the graph.
Now, what are the odds that your dart lands less than 200 years away from one of the aforementioned graph spikes? Go on, make a guesstimate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outing
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/outing
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outing
Linguists know that their job is to document usage, not prescribe it.
(this is all from merely RTFS, though. I'm not really interested enough to look at their data, but which stat they chose to put in the summary speaks volumes.)
That's 65% with just one tweet, though; presumably quality is better given more tweets as sample data.
I wouldn't be so sure. I think the uncertainty might have less to do with a given user's linguistic variation from one tweet to the next, and more to do with the fact that gender isn't actually the sole determinant of how people talk. If 30% of women consistently produce "male-sounding" language and 30% of men produce "female-sounding" language, according to whatever metric these researchers have come up with, that's quite different from if all women produce "male-sounding" language 30% of the time and vice versa. I find the first scenario far more likely than the second, and if this were true, it would imply that gathering more tweets from the same user is unlikely to make their guess much better.
Reading between the lines, I suspect that if reading subsequent tweets *did* refine their estimates significantly, they would have opted to use a more impressive stat such as "80% certainty after reading ten tweets".
So remind me, how's dev activity going on ReiserFS these days?
That's bigotry, that's guilt by association.
That's life.
Positive connotations also "taint" the surrounding community, and the successes of one open source project lend credibility to the others around it. That is what's meant when people talk about things like "ecosystem", it's an effect that the open source world counts on, and we can't go around blithely imagining that this works for good publicity but not for bad.
I don't understand why, in discussions like this, the discussion seems to immediately fall back to questions of free speech. It's like there's no such thing as being an asshole; as long as you're not actually breaking a law, no one has the right to question anything you do. Free speech is not the issue here - no one is suggesting that this project name was illegal, they're suggesting that it was a dick move. Why is that so difficult?
I didn't know companies had a right to be mentioned on wikipedia.
Never said they had a right to be on Wikipedia. On the other hand, Wikipedia is not for company shills to be using for the advancement of their company above others.
You're absolutely right, and that's why I think it was the Wikimedia foundation who has a claim to have been wronged, and not the plaintiff of this lawsuit.
If this sort of lawsuit becomes the norm, we can *definitely* expect a chilling effect.
can you load modern software? Can you meet todays needs?
If the answer to any of this is 'no', I'll give even odds that a resource-sucking OS such as Windows is at least partly to blame. Not exactly a problem for Google.
and what is the benefit again?
Living in the kind of world where other people might do the same for you.
You're reading awfully charitably into "commit crimes", in my humble opinion.
Did the AC reply above me break any laws in your jurisdiction?
If you think human history was going to continue under the effects of Darwinian genetic selection, you really need to spend a while thinking about different timescales.
Or people can be free to generate their own key, by whatever method they like. Any number of freeware, commercial, or opensource methods could make this a simple and autonomous process, so that people could do as much or as little as they liked to ensure that their own key was securely generated. The free market's built-in 'reputability' mechanisms would go a long way toward ensuring security in these, and people would mostly end up converging around a few very popularly "trustworthy" solutions. For the people who REALLY NEED TO BE CERTAIN, the government could provide a boot-disk image with source which was guaranteed by the White House to be malware-free, a fact which could be guaranteed independently by private actors, and the President could go on TV and recite a checksum/hash of that CD image to vouch for its integrity.
Of course, this makes the question of desktop machines running botnets a much bigger deal. But that's kind of a problem we need to deal with anyway; people already bank online.
pardon the double reply, readers. I seem to have web browser schizophrenia.
Because there's no way you could modify the checksums ...
Sure, if they're stored along with the data that they're checksumming.
Seriously. Look up some crypto voting proposals. Pick one at random and research it for 2 minutes. They all account for this. The point is to put the checksums out of "tampering" reach when they're generated. Sometimes this means putting them into a database which is readable by the whole world. Sometimes this means printing it on a receipt for the voter. The people coming up with these proposals do have a clue about how crypto works, you know.
Checksums are just as easy to change as the original vote bits
Sure, if they're stored along with the data that they're checksumming.
Seriously. Look up some crypto voting proposals. Pick one at random and research it for 2 minutes. They all account for this. The point is to put the checksums out of "tampering" reach when they're generated. Sometimes this means putting them into a database which is readable by the whole world. Sometimes this means printing it on a receipt for the voter. The people coming up with these proposals do have a clue about how crypto works, you know.
No, none of them have to understand the cryptography themselves. All they have to do is take the leap of faith that mathematicians know what they're talking about. I don't have to read the entire Linux kernel source to trust that it doesn't contain a backdoor. All I have to know is that sufficiently many people who are qualified to spot one, and who wouldn't profit from concealing one, are looking. Even among the coders, I suspect that most Slashdotters are like me in this respect.
Though I suppose in the nation which could manufacture a scientific "controversy" about the risks of smoking or pollution, even symbolic mathematical proofs would be met with armchair-expert skepticism. Sigh.
"The bits flipped but we don't know because there's no trace of tampering."
Spoken like someone who has never heard of checksums.