There are at least two brands sold over the internet only that will let you have a 30 day free trial at home. Axiom and Aperion both make -very- nice speakers. You'd be out the cost of return shipping if you don't like them, which is non-trivial, but they are reasonably safe choices. -Disclosure- I have and love the Axioms, which I bought based on reviews and the guarantee.
That's a good comment. However, a lot of machine learning work looks like predicting the unpredictable to the uninitiate. I have no doubt that the problem is approachable theoretically, or that it wouldn't be useful - if-, and that's a big if in my mind, it is practically achievable.
As you note, the probable output wouldn't be in the form of "this is going to happen", but rather "this outcome is more likely than that outcome", to the degree of some percentage probability. That is certainly a useful form of information even if it isn't absolute. It would be extremely useful in elections, for example.
I don't see the problem as intractable, it's a fairly logical extension of current data mining and predictive modeling techniques that are well described in literature. See http://gnomo.fe.up.pt/~nnig/papers/boo_bag.pdf/ this, for example. The problem is how to define the model training data, and to do so in a way that can be achieved in the context of when you are trying to use the output. It would boil down to trying to find a way to express the problem in a modelable fashion, and summing the outputs into some useful phraseology. It's quite easy to develop models that predict behavior, the question is more along the lines of how to describe and measure the behavior you are trying to model.
And anyone that understands enough of what I just said enough to realize how ignorant I am that would like a good job in Seattle, please contact me. We have work in this space.
My friend, look at what you wrote. You're raving. You probably don't want your kids reading slashdot, because they will encounter opinions counter to yours, many of which are fact based, many of which will cause them to think. In order to counter my statements, you are literally making things up, so that you have points to argue with.
As a matter of fact, I do have a drug problem. I'm a recovering alcoholic and past drug user. I can speak to the relative impacts of the various commodities in question from over 30 years of personal experience as a drug and alcohol user. This includes my both my own experience and that of those I have associated with over the years. You are arguing about what the effects of drugs are with someone who actually knows. You can say whatever you want - I know different. Saying that pot is a hallucinogen is just detached from reality. To paraphase the old political joke, I've done plenty of hallucinogens, and pot is not one of them. It's further ignorant to use the term hallucinogen as a perjorative. Hallucinogens as a recreational drug have many enjoyable and philosophically interesting characteristics. Interestingly, alcoholics sometimes experience hallucinations, so it would be more accurate to describe the wine in your kitchen as a hallucinogen than pot. Having smoked pot for years, drunk alcohol for many more years, and having experimented with most of the things you've ever heard of, I can truthfully and authoritatively say that alcohol is the biggest risk your kids face. This is not simply my own opinion, it is the opinion of many rehab professionals and criminal justice professionals. It is an opinion which is supported by massive amounts of statistics provided by the US government, previously cited for you. If you are truly concerned about your children, you might wish to educate yourself on these matters. Because what happens is, your kids are going to talk to their peers, and their peers are going to tell them that you are full of shit. They will then conclude (correctly) that you have presented them with bogus information, and they will choose to listen to other sources from then on. At that point, as a parent, you are fucked. With you ranting as stridently and as unconstrained by the facts as you are, your kids (if they have any brains) will figure out from their friends and the internet that your opinions are not supportable by the facts, and they may turn down the same path I did. It'll be your fault of that happens.
What happened to me is, everyone kept saying that pot was evil, pot is a hallucinogen, pot will make you want to fuck animals. Then one of my friends turned me on, and I found out that pot was actually pretty mild, fun, and very enjoyable, with negligible negative affects (mostly just societal disapproval). That made me question everything else I had been told, and I began a multiple year journey of exploration. Of course I found that some things were bad, some things were good, and some things were just OK. (on that list, cocaine and meth = bad, LSD, psilocybin = good at the right time, downers = bad, opiates = bad, pot = good). Meanwhile, my parents drank whiskey and wine, while railing about the bad drugs the hippies were doing. So of course, like all the college kids, I drank beer, because it was acceptable and safe, right? After all these years, I could turn my back easily on everything but alcohol. Alcohol is the only one of these drugs I had/have trouble with. My experience is dreadfully common.
The reality is, alcohol is by far the most dangerous drug commonly used in America. This is because it is unique in that it removes inhibitions and impairs ability at the same time, leading it to be a major cause of auto accidents. (Q. What are the last words of a Redneck? A. "Hey, y'all, hold mah beer and watch this..." The biggest risk, by far, to your kid's life is dying in a car driven by a drunk teenager.(National Safety Foundation) You will discount the information because of your irrationality, but i
Quite possibly, but that means I always have someone to talk to. Wikipedia also has nice articles on Ad hominem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem and Red Herring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring arguments. But they were also probably written by some druggie fool. If the druggies are writing them, lord knows they seem to write well and to be able to collect facts and prepare reasoned arguments in spite of their impaired condition. It must be the drugs talking, because it couldn't possibly be that the writers are reasonably intelligent, competent, and functional despite their horribly destructive behavior.:-)
In all seriousness, the data is pretty clear, collected from sources that are primarily funded by the US government, that the vast majority of recreational drugs users lead quite normal, productive lives. A good, primary source is SAMHSAhttp://www.samhsa.gov/index.aspx. The data is equally clear that the drug that ruins more people's lives than any other is alcohol. The usage profiles and physiology associated with pot and LSD, for example, simply don't support the assertions that they should be demonized the way they are. Neither is toxic, for example, while alcohol is. Neither induces aggression and violence (Source: DOJ study, 1994). Alcohol does. Neither leads to physical withdrawal when usage is ceased. Alcohol does. These are not wikipedic suppositions, they are agreed on clinical facts. Ask a cop who he'd rather face, a drunk or a stoner.
Your hostility is kind of interesting. It suggests strongly that you are not confident of your data. It would cost you nothing to browse Cliff Shaffer's libraryhttp://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/index.htm, a truly impressive compendium of material on the subject. The current position of the US costs you about $250/year for every person in your household. We might all save a little money if we rethought it.
The common usage mode for LSD, myself included, is a few times in one's life. The same for ecstacy. I know at least two dozen people who have used LSD. Everyone of them has set it aside years ago. Marijuana is recreationally used by millions of people without apparent negative effect, and people set it aside for work or other reasons with ease. There is a huge body of research that has been done to try to demonstrate dependence issues, with no positive results (from the standpoint of those who would like to demonize pot). For your point to have any merit, you should show that people take these drugs repetitively, in the face of negative consequences.
Caffiene, on the other hand, has been demonstrated in induce tolerance and dependence, and yet we consider it benign. Do you, my friend, drink coffee, tea, Coke? Alcohol is clearly shown to induce dependence and full out addiction. Do you ever have a beer? Was it for recreational purposes? How do you reconcile that consumption with your belief about the other recreational drugs?
Your points sound like another brainwashed citizen, who believes the propaganda from the US government and alcohol and tobacco companies. Try demonstrating a little initiative, and research your opinions, before demonstrating your ignorance to all of slashdot. "pusher's PR lies"? Puh-leeze. Check out your facts, then form your opinions. You can get such information readily from erowid or wikipedia.
You are physiologically dependent on food. Try living without it. Does that mean it's bad, too?
There are plenty of recreational drugs that do not induce physiological dependence, marijuana, ecstacy(MDMA) and LSD for a few examples. Does that mean that they are therefore good? Or is it possibly that the trait of dependency induction is simply a characteristic of these chemicals, neutral of overtones of goodness and badness until we interpret it from within some greater context?
This statement of the parent has to rank up there with one of the most boneheadedly idiotic overgeneralizations I've ever read here.
As for defending religion, it's been used to justify wars, murder, genocide, and raping 14 year olds in Utah. It's hardly the paragon of benefit you are making it out to be, and I would note, is dependency inducing at the cost of significant financial and social harm to many adherents. TFA seems to provide further evidence that god is just a figment of your imagination. Nice to know that it's figments of our imagination causing these pernicious effects - it gives me hope that we someday as a race progress beyond this pitiful state.
Well, what will go into the model will be things like: income, length of employment, other open trade lines(loans/credit cards). If you have several years of employment, decent income with no debt, you won't have any problem. But it wouldn't hurt to have had a credit card that you paid off to zero every month.
I'd also like to see credit reporting ONLY available to lenders, not to employers or landlords or anyone else not extending credit trying to judge personality or whatever they use it for.
Generally, noone can pull a credit report if you haven't given permission. You also need some reasonable private info (SSN) to get the report. Your employer or landlord cannot get a report on you unless you give them data, and permission. Read the forms that you are signing.
You don't have control over a lot of your credit history because you have elected to do business with other companies using credit. The data is as much theirs as it is yours. You can manage this easily by using cash or a check. Not a debit card.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the credit bureaus are only a problem if you choose to borrow money. It is not required that you borrow money.
I don't think this is accurate. This should increase the value of a credit score for the purchasers of credit scores, which are companies that lend money. This is a clear marker for a fraudulent loan application, which is one of the two precise things that lenders want to discover as they are processing a loan application (the other being a customer who is real, but nonetheless defaults on the loan). Credit Bureaus get money for returning a score for an account, generally about 10 cents a score. It doesn't cost them more, or reduce their demand to have a segment of customers marking their score as a do not lend value. From the credit grantor's standpoint, this is good info, and prevents them from getting scammed. Since the grantor's goal is to not loan money to people who don't intend to pay, they should want this information. The credit bureau still gets paid, and indeed should be able to charge more for a higher quality score. Everyone benefits.
It's quite possible that I'm being naive. But I do work extensively with these scores and their customers in my job, predictive modeling for financial services companies. I'm the dark side. I make these scores. If I could add this feature to a score, I'd get a bonus.
Back in the day, my accounting 410 prof told us that it is a common tactic in troubled financial times to fire your accountants, and then have your lawyer hire them back. That way, management's interactions with them become privileged communication, and not admissible in court. Perhaps the Country Lawyer could weigh in on this.
I think you are confusing accountants with auditors. Internal accounting staff, with the exception of the CFO, don't have liability for the financial statements. Executive management is responsible for the financials and their integrity. The accountants are just paid help. The CFO is a special case, being the executive responsible for the accounting process. Like other executives, he/she is in a more responsible position vis a vis public representations of the company, of which the financial statements are perhaps the most important.
The auditing firm, which is the outside accounting firm hired to attest as to the validity and accuracy of the financial statements, does sign off on the financials, and is liable for misstatements as to their conformance to generally accepted accounting principals, which in lay speak means that they were prepared in conformance with standard accepted practices, and that the data underlying them has been tested (usually via a sampling technique) to check for obvious problems. Even then, auditors/CPAs are NOT tasked with or responsible for finding and uncovering fraud by management, though they do have a responsibility to report fraud that they do uncover - to the management of the company that hired them.
Those are some abnormally stupid accountants. My sympathies. Accounting as a profession is all about matching expense to the period it is incurred, and there are examples of how to correctly treat precisely this problem in every accounting 101 textbook out there. Maintenance contracts are usually there as explicit examples. If you continue to encounter this, suggest that they read the F'ing contract, which is what accountants are supposed to do to understand this.
For the record, I am in fact, or at least once was, an accountant.
My company sells software today that can do pretty good work on predicting whether a given sample of text is written by the same person as another set of samples of text. It needs a fairly large number of samples, say more than 50 of a few hundred words each. It's not a particularly hard problem, as it turns into comparing N-grams of 2 to 5 words. Those turn out to be interesting distinctive. We actually use this in predictive modeling of other variables, but the text's ownership would be a perfectly valid application.
You do still have the problem of tying it to an identity. However, you can solve that by inverting the problem and asking what the likelihood if of the known identity being the same as the writer of the anonymous pieces. You'd likely not get a 95% probability, but a 15 to 25% probability assessment is likely quite doable. That is certainly a threshold that would make sense to follow up on with other investigations.
No, I'm not a statistician or information scientist, but I play one at work.
I'm sorry I struck a nerve. Our company is a fortune 500 firm with 9 figures of net income. Not sales, income. I think our customers are OK. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was responding to the fellow who was looking for advice from other software vendors.
There aren't any other vendors who provide what we do. If there were, we wouldn't be able to charge what we do. Since the software provides extremely high value, the last thing on the list of procurement criteria is an assessment of whether the GPL weenies in the basement approve of our licensing scheme. The folks who cut the check don't care. The folks who use our software don't care. And if they write the license code down and save it, they can always reinstall from the media, even if we disappear from the face of the earth.
I work for a company that sells -very- expensive software. As in 6 figures/year in licensing fees for a single installation. We use a license key that is generated as part of the build process. When customers install, they are required to contact us for a valid license key, which is then hidden in the libraries. This works well, and is reasonably non-intrusive. It does not prevent the customer from making copies, though I have an enhancement request it to hash the key with a CPU ID to require use of the install disk and re-request of a license key on an install. I asked for this, because I caught a customer installing the software on multiple machines in violation of the license.
In three years, I have NEVER had a customer even squeak about this process. However, we provide very high touch support, in sharp contrast to many companies out there.
Because you have to know how to get the bots to acknowledge your command. This requires that you know enough about the bots to set up the connection, and I suspect that there is authentication code within the bot to prevent them from being pirated by other bot-herders. It's a competitive business after all.
I don't know the details, but from what I have read, the guys who wrote this are a little more skilled than your average script kiddie. The bots are able to detect if they are being watched in a virtual machine environment, which reduces the effectiveness of the primary tool for fighting them, as the past approach has been to set up a honeypot machine, allow it to be infected, and then monitor what it does. There is a lot of engineering that has gone into this puppy.
The lesson we should take from that time is how General MacArthur turned Japan into a thriving democracy within five years. If the Bush administration had been less concerned about how to maximize profit for civilian contractors and more interested in studying what MacArthur did for Japan and what the Marshall Plan did for Europe we wouldn't have such a mess in Iraq right now.
I'm not confident that George Bush could tell you who MacArthur was, or that he could find Japan on a map. And he'd certainly have problems with describing a democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
There are at least two brands sold over the internet only that will let you have a 30 day free trial at home. Axiom and Aperion both make -very- nice speakers. You'd be out the cost of return shipping if you don't like them, which is non-trivial, but they are reasonably safe choices. -Disclosure- I have and love the Axioms, which I bought based on reviews and the guarantee.
If you want unrestricted service, why not just pay for it?
With Comcast, we do. That's the problem.
You either trust your government or you dont. If you dont trust the current admin, elect a new one.
We didn't elect this one. Their minions in Florida stole it.
Could it be that the surveillance has uncovered enough dirt, on enough members of Congress, that a little blackmail can be applied?
That's a good comment. However, a lot of machine learning work looks like predicting the unpredictable to the uninitiate. I have no doubt that the problem is approachable theoretically, or that it wouldn't be useful - if-, and that's a big if in my mind, it is practically achievable.
As you note, the probable output wouldn't be in the form of "this is going to happen", but rather "this outcome is more likely than that outcome", to the degree of some percentage probability. That is certainly a useful form of information even if it isn't absolute. It would be extremely useful in elections, for example.
I don't see the problem as intractable, it's a fairly logical extension of current data mining and predictive modeling techniques that are well described in literature. See http://gnomo.fe.up.pt/~nnig/papers/boo_bag.pdf/ this, for example. The problem is how to define the model training data, and to do so in a way that can be achieved in the context of when you are trying to use the output. It would boil down to trying to find a way to express the problem in a modelable fashion, and summing the outputs into some useful phraseology. It's quite easy to develop models that predict behavior, the question is more along the lines of how to describe and measure the behavior you are trying to model.
And anyone that understands enough of what I just said enough to realize how ignorant I am that would like a good job in Seattle, please contact me. We have work in this space.
My friend, look at what you wrote. You're raving. You probably don't want your kids reading slashdot, because they will encounter opinions counter to yours, many of which are fact based, many of which will cause them to think. In order to counter my statements, you are literally making things up, so that you have points to argue with.
As a matter of fact, I do have a drug problem. I'm a recovering alcoholic and past drug user. I can speak to the relative impacts of the various commodities in question from over 30 years of personal experience as a drug and alcohol user. This includes my both my own experience and that of those I have associated with over the years. You are arguing about what the effects of drugs are with someone who actually knows. You can say whatever you want - I know different. Saying that pot is a hallucinogen is just detached from reality. To paraphase the old political joke, I've done plenty of hallucinogens, and pot is not one of them. It's further ignorant to use the term hallucinogen as a perjorative. Hallucinogens as a recreational drug have many enjoyable and philosophically interesting characteristics. Interestingly, alcoholics sometimes experience hallucinations, so it would be more accurate to describe the wine in your kitchen as a hallucinogen than pot. Having smoked pot for years, drunk alcohol for many more years, and having experimented with most of the things you've ever heard of, I can truthfully and authoritatively say that alcohol is the biggest risk your kids face. This is not simply my own opinion, it is the opinion of many rehab professionals and criminal justice professionals. It is an opinion which is supported by massive amounts of statistics provided by the US government, previously cited for you. If you are truly concerned about your children, you might wish to educate yourself on these matters. Because what happens is, your kids are going to talk to their peers, and their peers are going to tell them that you are full of shit. They will then conclude (correctly) that you have presented them with bogus information, and they will choose to listen to other sources from then on. At that point, as a parent, you are fucked. With you ranting as stridently and as unconstrained by the facts as you are, your kids (if they have any brains) will figure out from their friends and the internet that your opinions are not supportable by the facts, and they may turn down the same path I did. It'll be your fault of that happens.
What happened to me is, everyone kept saying that pot was evil, pot is a hallucinogen, pot will make you want to fuck animals. Then one of my friends turned me on, and I found out that pot was actually pretty mild, fun, and very enjoyable, with negligible negative affects (mostly just societal disapproval). That made me question everything else I had been told, and I began a multiple year journey of exploration. Of course I found that some things were bad, some things were good, and some things were just OK. (on that list, cocaine and meth = bad, LSD, psilocybin = good at the right time, downers = bad, opiates = bad, pot = good). Meanwhile, my parents drank whiskey and wine, while railing about the bad drugs the hippies were doing. So of course, like all the college kids, I drank beer, because it was acceptable and safe, right? After all these years, I could turn my back easily on everything but alcohol. Alcohol is the only one of these drugs I had/have trouble with. My experience is dreadfully common.
The reality is, alcohol is by far the most dangerous drug commonly used in America. This is because it is unique in that it removes inhibitions and impairs ability at the same time, leading it to be a major cause of auto accidents. (Q. What are the last words of a Redneck? A. "Hey, y'all, hold mah beer and watch this..." The biggest risk, by far, to your kid's life is dying in a car driven by a drunk teenager.(National Safety Foundation) You will discount the information because of your irrationality, but i
You're either dreadfully misinformed or a troll. Bye
Quite possibly, but that means I always have someone to talk to. Wikipedia also has nice articles on Ad hominem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem and Red Herring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring arguments. But they were also probably written by some druggie fool. If the druggies are writing them, lord knows they seem to write well and to be able to collect facts and prepare reasoned arguments in spite of their impaired condition. It must be the drugs talking, because it couldn't possibly be that the writers are reasonably intelligent, competent, and functional despite their horribly destructive behavior. :-)
In all seriousness, the data is pretty clear, collected from sources that are primarily funded by the US government, that the vast majority of recreational drugs users lead quite normal, productive lives. A good, primary source is SAMHSAhttp://www.samhsa.gov/index.aspx. The data is equally clear that the drug that ruins more people's lives than any other is alcohol. The usage profiles and physiology associated with pot and LSD, for example, simply don't support the assertions that they should be demonized the way they are. Neither is toxic, for example, while alcohol is. Neither induces aggression and violence (Source: DOJ study, 1994). Alcohol does. Neither leads to physical withdrawal when usage is ceased. Alcohol does. These are not wikipedic suppositions, they are agreed on clinical facts. Ask a cop who he'd rather face, a drunk or a stoner.
Your hostility is kind of interesting. It suggests strongly that you are not confident of your data. It would cost you nothing to browse Cliff Shaffer's libraryhttp://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/index.htm, a truly impressive compendium of material on the subject. The current position of the US costs you about $250/year for every person in your household. We might all save a little money if we rethought it.
The common usage mode for LSD, myself included, is a few times in one's life. The same for ecstacy. I know at least two dozen people who have used LSD. Everyone of them has set it aside years ago. Marijuana is recreationally used by millions of people without apparent negative effect, and people set it aside for work or other reasons with ease. There is a huge body of research that has been done to try to demonstrate dependence issues, with no positive results (from the standpoint of those who would like to demonize pot). For your point to have any merit, you should show that people take these drugs repetitively, in the face of negative consequences.
Caffiene, on the other hand, has been demonstrated in induce tolerance and dependence, and yet we consider it benign. Do you, my friend, drink coffee, tea, Coke? Alcohol is clearly shown to induce dependence and full out addiction. Do you ever have a beer? Was it for recreational purposes? How do you reconcile that consumption with your belief about the other recreational drugs?
Your points sound like another brainwashed citizen, who believes the propaganda from the US government and alcohol and tobacco companies. Try demonstrating a little initiative, and research your opinions, before demonstrating your ignorance to all of slashdot. "pusher's PR lies"? Puh-leeze. Check out your facts, then form your opinions. You can get such information readily from erowid or wikipedia.
You are physiologically dependent on food. Try living without it. Does that mean it's bad, too?
There are plenty of recreational drugs that do not induce physiological dependence, marijuana, ecstacy(MDMA) and LSD for a few examples. Does that mean that they are therefore good? Or is it possibly that the trait of dependency induction is simply a characteristic of these chemicals, neutral of overtones of goodness and badness until we interpret it from within some greater context?
This statement of the parent has to rank up there with one of the most boneheadedly idiotic overgeneralizations I've ever read here.
As for defending religion, it's been used to justify wars, murder, genocide, and raping 14 year olds in Utah. It's hardly the paragon of benefit you are making it out to be, and I would note, is dependency inducing at the cost of significant financial and social harm to many adherents. TFA seems to provide further evidence that god is just a figment of your imagination. Nice to know that it's figments of our imagination causing these pernicious effects - it gives me hope that we someday as a race progress beyond this pitiful state.
Well, what will go into the model will be things like: income, length of employment, other open trade lines(loans/credit cards). If you have several years of employment, decent income with no debt, you won't have any problem. But it wouldn't hurt to have had a credit card that you paid off to zero every month.
I'd also like to see credit reporting ONLY available to lenders, not to employers or landlords or anyone else not extending credit trying to judge personality or whatever they use it for. Generally, noone can pull a credit report if you haven't given permission. You also need some reasonable private info (SSN) to get the report. Your employer or landlord cannot get a report on you unless you give them data, and permission. Read the forms that you are signing.
You don't have control over a lot of your credit history because you have elected to do business with other companies using credit. The data is as much theirs as it is yours. You can manage this easily by using cash or a check. Not a debit card.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the credit bureaus are only a problem if you choose to borrow money. It is not required that you borrow money.
I don't think this is accurate. This should increase the value of a credit score for the purchasers of credit scores, which are companies that lend money. This is a clear marker for a fraudulent loan application, which is one of the two precise things that lenders want to discover as they are processing a loan application (the other being a customer who is real, but nonetheless defaults on the loan). Credit Bureaus get money for returning a score for an account, generally about 10 cents a score. It doesn't cost them more, or reduce their demand to have a segment of customers marking their score as a do not lend value. From the credit grantor's standpoint, this is good info, and prevents them from getting scammed. Since the grantor's goal is to not loan money to people who don't intend to pay, they should want this information. The credit bureau still gets paid, and indeed should be able to charge more for a higher quality score. Everyone benefits.
It's quite possible that I'm being naive. But I do work extensively with these scores and their customers in my job, predictive modeling for financial services companies. I'm the dark side. I make these scores. If I could add this feature to a score, I'd get a bonus.
Back in the day, my accounting 410 prof told us that it is a common tactic in troubled financial times to fire your accountants, and then have your lawyer hire them back. That way, management's interactions with them become privileged communication, and not admissible in court. Perhaps the Country Lawyer could weigh in on this.
I think you are confusing accountants with auditors. Internal accounting staff, with the exception of the CFO, don't have liability for the financial statements. Executive management is responsible for the financials and their integrity. The accountants are just paid help. The CFO is a special case, being the executive responsible for the accounting process. Like other executives, he/she is in a more responsible position vis a vis public representations of the company, of which the financial statements are perhaps the most important.
The auditing firm, which is the outside accounting firm hired to attest as to the validity and accuracy of the financial statements, does sign off on the financials, and is liable for misstatements as to their conformance to generally accepted accounting principals, which in lay speak means that they were prepared in conformance with standard accepted practices, and that the data underlying them has been tested (usually via a sampling technique) to check for obvious problems. Even then, auditors/CPAs are NOT tasked with or responsible for finding and uncovering fraud by management, though they do have a responsibility to report fraud that they do uncover - to the management of the company that hired them.
Those are some abnormally stupid accountants. My sympathies. Accounting as a profession is all about matching expense to the period it is incurred, and there are examples of how to correctly treat precisely this problem in every accounting 101 textbook out there. Maintenance contracts are usually there as explicit examples. If you continue to encounter this, suggest that they read the F'ing contract, which is what accountants are supposed to do to understand this.
For the record, I am in fact, or at least once was, an accountant.
My company sells software today that can do pretty good work on predicting whether a given sample of text is written by the same person as another set of samples of text. It needs a fairly large number of samples, say more than 50 of a few hundred words each. It's not a particularly hard problem, as it turns into comparing N-grams of 2 to 5 words. Those turn out to be interesting distinctive. We actually use this in predictive modeling of other variables, but the text's ownership would be a perfectly valid application.
You do still have the problem of tying it to an identity. However, you can solve that by inverting the problem and asking what the likelihood if of the known identity being the same as the writer of the anonymous pieces. You'd likely not get a 95% probability, but a 15 to 25% probability assessment is likely quite doable. That is certainly a threshold that would make sense to follow up on with other investigations.
No, I'm not a statistician or information scientist, but I play one at work.
I'm sorry I struck a nerve. Our company is a fortune 500 firm with 9 figures of net income. Not sales, income. I think our customers are OK. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was responding to the fellow who was looking for advice from other software vendors.
There aren't any other vendors who provide what we do. If there were, we wouldn't be able to charge what we do. Since the software provides extremely high value, the last thing on the list of procurement criteria is an assessment of whether the GPL weenies in the basement approve of our licensing scheme. The folks who cut the check don't care. The folks who use our software don't care. And if they write the license code down and save it, they can always reinstall from the media, even if we disappear from the face of the earth.
I work for a company that sells -very- expensive software. As in 6 figures/year in licensing fees for a single installation. We use a license key that is generated as part of the build process. When customers install, they are required to contact us for a valid license key, which is then hidden in the libraries. This works well, and is reasonably non-intrusive. It does not prevent the customer from making copies, though I have an enhancement request it to hash the key with a CPU ID to require use of the install disk and re-request of a license key on an install. I asked for this, because I caught a customer installing the software on multiple machines in violation of the license.
In three years, I have NEVER had a customer even squeak about this process. However, we provide very high touch support, in sharp contrast to many companies out there.
I put it on every machine I work on.
Because you have to know how to get the bots to acknowledge your command. This requires that you know enough about the bots to set up the connection, and I suspect that there is authentication code within the bot to prevent them from being pirated by other bot-herders. It's a competitive business after all.
I don't know the details, but from what I have read, the guys who wrote this are a little more skilled than your average script kiddie. The bots are able to detect if they are being watched in a virtual machine environment, which reduces the effectiveness of the primary tool for fighting them, as the past approach has been to set up a honeypot machine, allow it to be infected, and then monitor what it does. There is a lot of engineering that has gone into this puppy.
I know that Comcast can check their network for infected hosts and shut them off. They need to do a much better job of it.
They are too busy chasing down bittorrent users and degrading their service.
I thought that was slashdot.
The lesson we should take from that time is how General MacArthur turned Japan into a thriving democracy within five years. If the Bush administration had been less concerned about how to maximize profit for civilian contractors and more interested in studying what MacArthur did for Japan and what the Marshall Plan did for Europe we wouldn't have such a mess in Iraq right now.
I'm not confident that George Bush could tell you who MacArthur was, or that he could find Japan on a map. And he'd certainly have problems with describing a democracy.
I've got one: Enron.