I remember on the Microsoft-run zone.com (a game site), the filter is also extremely harsh. They extended it to innocent topics that happen to get used for trolling a lot. (Don't ask how I know...) For example, you can't say "holocaust", apparently because people like to deny it, and you can't say any form of "racist".
How does using this software to provide help to students and faculty constitute donating labor to a private company? The summary says, "IU will draft hundreds of librarians and IT employees to be ChaCha Guides for the university's websites, although a FAQ accompanying IU's press release tells librarians not to expect any checks for their efforts from ChaCha"
Basically, university staff will have to devote time (for which the university pays them) to do things to ChaCha's benefit, and ChaCha will not compensate them. I know, it wasn't immediately obvious from the summary, because whoever wrote it either:
a) is old enough to associate ALL transfers of money with checks, and therefore uses them interchangeably despite the fact that the world has moved on, or
b) is trying to sound folksy by using the metonym "check" to refer to ANY kind of monetary payment.
I hate people who do that, with a passion, whichever set they belong to.
The really surprising thing about your post is it sounds like you think Google is stupid. I doubt you really believe that.
No, I don't, and I don't think my statement implies that. As a matter of fact, I recall this post, where I was highly critical of those who assumed Google used a crude quickfix to solve their Googlebomb problem.
I do, however, think Google's *public statements* *imply* a belief in a higher level of robustness against circumvention than they can provide, even if they are aware of the actual limits to their system.
>They can just trivially re-encode.
No. You're thinking of cryptographic hashes where a one-bit change in the input leads to a totally different signature.
If I were as stupid as you think I think Google is, I would only be thinking of that, yes.
It would most likely be a collection of a lot of hashes for each video, amalgamated into one or more signatures for each video. If I explained the basics of the problem to my eight year old and pointed her in the right direction toward the solution, she would be able to figure it out.
Hey, I'm all for introducing kids to math/science topics earlier than is currently done, and believe they are more capable than generally thought, but that's laughable. I mean, maybe she could come up with one that defeated one kind of re-encoding but not the general case.
There are simple techniques for doing robust signature creation and checking, without solving any hard AI problem.
The reason I call it a hard AI problem is because attackers will exploit every possible change they can make to the video *that a human wouldn't care much about*. The solution thus requires identifying what, to a human, doesn't ruin the video enough.
Heh... the former is a pet peeve of mine: people thinking that their job is more complicated than it really is. It's not limited to software developers.
As for the later...
"okay, okay, you *technically* passed a Turing Test, but only hy having it basically ignore me and ridicule everything I did wrong."
"Sir, you were talking to your wife the whole time."
I'm not the original responder, but I got what you were getting at. And I have to agree. For example, I absolutely think that if Uematsu's work on e.g. Final Fantasy II or III (all US names to keep my sanity) had been presented with actual intstruments and in another medium, it would be identified as "high art". But it's just a video game, so who cares, right? And that frustrates me. (I made a mix CD for my mom one time that had ~10 classical music tracks, and I made one of them a piano arrangement of Rosa's Theme from FFII. I didn't tell her that was it, in advance. She told me it was her second favorite, and then wouldn't believe me when I told her it was written for an SNES game.)
And along smiliar lines, I saw a news magazine show that reported on a famous child artist whose work was regarded as being great *art* because of his age when he made it. But why should that matter? It certainly makes the feat more *impressive*, but it wouldn't, you'd think, make it better *art*.
It's for reasons like these that I've long held the concept of "high art" to be cliquish and unscientific. Now of course "art isn't science". But by that I mean that if subject to appropriate scientific controls, and with groupthink bias removed, no one would agree on what constitutes "high art". I think the recent experiment with Joshua Bell proved this: If his playing was such mind-blowingly great art, wouldn't it be recognizable to someone who hadn't been *told* that in advance, thereby prejudicing his views? It's the Placebo principle: if you have to be told it's good to enjoy it, it's not really good. (He makes most of his money by playing for people who were already told he's good in advance. I found it particularly delicious when he got all sad about how he no longer had that "validation" he gets when he's paid a lot of money to play.)
I do not, however, go so far as to say that e.g. "all art is equal". It's not. There is, however, such a thing as "hype" and "groupthink" and "high art" seems to be particularly infected with it.
Earlier I had joked about Google's claim to be nearing a system that lets them check for copyrighted works. I said that they're basically claiming to have solved a hard AI problem.
Others pointed out that, no, it's not a hard AI problem to just compare some kind of checksum of the video against a set of banned checksums. That's true. But what about once people know they're using this system? They can just trivially re-encode. Perhaps add a scene break here or there, and totally mess up the fingerprint. To prevent that, it seems, you would need to solve a hard-AI problem: that is, be able to determine if an arbitrarily-encoded video appears to a human to match some copyrighted work. It would have to be robust against minor scene shortenings and lengthenings, scene breakups, color gradients laid over the video, etc.
Anyone know how difficult this program is to circumvent? (Just hypothetically -- not advocating criminal activity here.)
Well, if they know that the mice are hearing voices, I'm more interested in the technology they used to access their consciousness and read their qualia, than in mental health treatment...
Cinema was seen as a medium for serious art from its very birth
What are you talking about? It was treated just as video games. From the wiki (and recalling that films first arose in the 1890s):
It wasn't until 1911 that countries other than Australia began to make feature films. By this time 16 full length feature films had been made in Australia.... Leading this trend in America was director D.W. Griffith with his historical epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).... Along with a boom in high-toned literary adaptations, these trends began to make the movies a respectable diversion for the middle class and gain them recognition as a genuine art form with a secure place in the emerging culture of the twentieth century. In France brothers Lafitte in 1907. created so-called Films d'art. They were supposed to draw the higher classes of society into movie theaters. The more educated classes thought that film was just for uneducated people and preferred traditional theater.
Kinda late to jump in, saw today's story linking this...
I couldn't agree with you more. No painting as ever given me the sadness (seeing the cataclysm) or joy (finding out that Locke is still alive), or tormented my sleep (*dreaming* that Locke is still alive), the way FF6 did. And that was constrained by having to run on a 16-bit platform! If that makes me a Philistine, I don't want to have taste.
I agree with you, but it sounds like another instance of "because of the severity of a false positive, it's better to have a lot of false negatives". Somehow it's okay for police to slowly punch in each license plate they have, but not okay to automate it?
Officially, the former; off the record, probably the latter. After all, they don't object to the existence of license plates, do they? Or to marking them as being on stolen cars? Or to police officers doing there due diligence in watching for stolen cars that they pass by in public.
I only saw a few clips from sicko, but one that completely astounded me was where Michael Moore acts all amazed at how the cashier's office in a UK hospital is not for receiving payments, but for compensating people who had to bear certain costs in getting care. (I think it was transportation, or "transport" since it's UK.)
Okay, cool, got it: no additional costs for people when they use a hospital.
But then right afterward, he does this whole sequence where he shows all this cash being handed out, highlighting the idea that HEY!!! FREE MONEY!!! w00t!
It's like he's not just ignorant of how that money comes right out of your hide to pay for the system, but actually revels in that ignorance, and think it's the coolest thing about the UK's health care system. FREE MONEY AT HOSPITALS! Yay!
Who is that supposed to convince? I mean, regardless of what you think needs to be done about health care, why is it so "totally cool" that you can get cash payouts at hospitals from tax money?
Here's the clip, skip to 0:28, although it kind of cuts off the money sequence early.
Hey, I love golf just as much as the next guy (working on getting into a country club).. but IMHO golf will never "make it" as a sport. It's just not entertaining enough to watch. Golf is fun to play, not watch on TV.
In non-troll-speak: Sports are covered so heavily because of inertia. A few people like watching it, enough to justify coverage, and people who don't really care about them watch it because hey, it's on. I don't think gaming will be any different.
Hey, *I* didn't encrypt my data. I just performed a reversible transformation on it. It's not my fault if you're a fuckin' slowpoke at factoring large prime numbers!
Slashdot Mirror
Or even worse: what if all your *electrons* repelled each other?????
I remember on the Microsoft-run zone.com (a game site), the filter is also extremely harsh. They extended it to innocent topics that happen to get used for trolling a lot. (Don't ask how I know...) For example, you can't say "holocaust", apparently because people like to deny it, and you can't say any form of "racist".
It's electronically transfered to my checking account though.
So all electronic transfers to your checking account are "checks"? A transfer from savings to checking is a "check"?
I'm confused why there's such anger over using the word "check" in this way
There isn't, it's just me. Although one does sound quaint when one uses the term "check" this way. That is all.
I don't get a paycheck. I just get a salary. The money is electronically transferred. No check is involved.
Basically, university staff will have to devote time (for which the university pays them) to do things to ChaCha's benefit, and ChaCha will not compensate them. I know, it wasn't immediately obvious from the summary, because whoever wrote it either:
a) is old enough to associate ALL transfers of money with checks, and therefore uses them interchangeably despite the fact that the world has moved on, or
b) is trying to sound folksy by using the metonym "check" to refer to ANY kind of monetary payment.
I hate people who do that, with a passion, whichever set they belong to.
Yeah, even making *one* difference engine is hard. I heard one guy tried to make one for fifty years ... and failed!
I'd love to hear their explanation of how Zelda, Mario, and Samus (for starters) ended up in the same time and place ...
There is no oxygen. If you can breathe right now, it's because you never wronged Chuck Norris.
You gotta love how far-removed this quotation gets:
Cmdr Taco posts that:
Tech_Luver writes that:
Gene Expression reports that:
Tyler Cowen quotes from a:
Razib paper showing that:
A survey found that:
***
I'm worried that if I tell someone that I read about this on slashdot, the universe might implode.
The really surprising thing about your post is it sounds like you think Google is stupid. I doubt you really believe that.
No, I don't, and I don't think my statement implies that. As a matter of fact, I recall this post, where I was highly critical of those who assumed Google used a crude quickfix to solve their Googlebomb problem.
I do, however, think Google's *public statements* *imply* a belief in a higher level of robustness against circumvention than they can provide, even if they are aware of the actual limits to their system.
>They can just trivially re-encode.
No. You're thinking of cryptographic hashes where a one-bit change in the input leads to a totally different signature.
If I were as stupid as you think I think Google is, I would only be thinking of that, yes.
It would most likely be a collection of a lot of hashes for each video, amalgamated into one or more signatures for each video. If I explained the basics of the problem to my eight year old and pointed her in the right direction toward the solution, she would be able to figure it out.
Hey, I'm all for introducing kids to math/science topics earlier than is currently done, and believe they are more capable than generally thought, but that's laughable. I mean, maybe she could come up with one that defeated one kind of re-encoding but not the general case.
There are simple techniques for doing robust signature creation and checking, without solving any hard AI problem.
The reason I call it a hard AI problem is because attackers will exploit every possible change they can make to the video *that a human wouldn't care much about*. The solution thus requires identifying what, to a human, doesn't ruin the video enough.
Heh ... the former is a pet peeve of mine: people thinking that their job is more complicated than it really is. It's not limited to software developers.
As for the later...
"okay, okay, you *technically* passed a Turing Test, but only hy having it basically ignore me and ridicule everything I did wrong."
"Sir, you were talking to your wife the whole time."
I'm not the original responder, but I got what you were getting at. And I have to agree. For example, I absolutely think that if Uematsu's work on e.g. Final Fantasy II or III (all US names to keep my sanity) had been presented with actual intstruments and in another medium, it would be identified as "high art". But it's just a video game, so who cares, right? And that frustrates me. (I made a mix CD for my mom one time that had ~10 classical music tracks, and I made one of them a piano arrangement of Rosa's Theme from FFII. I didn't tell her that was it, in advance. She told me it was her second favorite, and then wouldn't believe me when I told her it was written for an SNES game.)
And along smiliar lines, I saw a news magazine show that reported on a famous child artist whose work was regarded as being great *art* because of his age when he made it. But why should that matter? It certainly makes the feat more *impressive*, but it wouldn't, you'd think, make it better *art*.
It's for reasons like these that I've long held the concept of "high art" to be cliquish and unscientific. Now of course "art isn't science". But by that I mean that if subject to appropriate scientific controls, and with groupthink bias removed, no one would agree on what constitutes "high art". I think the recent experiment with Joshua Bell proved this: If his playing was such mind-blowingly great art, wouldn't it be recognizable to someone who hadn't been *told* that in advance, thereby prejudicing his views? It's the Placebo principle: if you have to be told it's good to enjoy it, it's not really good. (He makes most of his money by playing for people who were already told he's good in advance. I found it particularly delicious when he got all sad about how he no longer had that "validation" he gets when he's paid a lot of money to play.)
I do not, however, go so far as to say that e.g. "all art is equal". It's not. There is, however, such a thing as "hype" and "groupthink" and "high art" seems to be particularly infected with it.
Earlier I had joked about Google's claim to be nearing a system that lets them check for copyrighted works. I said that they're basically claiming to have solved a hard AI problem.
Others pointed out that, no, it's not a hard AI problem to just compare some kind of checksum of the video against a set of banned checksums. That's true. But what about once people know they're using this system? They can just trivially re-encode. Perhaps add a scene break here or there, and totally mess up the fingerprint. To prevent that, it seems, you would need to solve a hard-AI problem: that is, be able to determine if an arbitrarily-encoded video appears to a human to match some copyrighted work. It would have to be robust against minor scene shortenings and lengthenings, scene breakups, color gradients laid over the video, etc.
Anyone know how difficult this program is to circumvent? (Just hypothetically -- not advocating criminal activity here.)
Well, if they know that the mice are hearing voices, I'm more interested in the technology they used to access their consciousness and read their qualia, than in mental health treatment...
So, I'm curious, what's the difference between being schizophrenic (or otherwise having some recongized mental illness), and just "being a dick"?
/. with the name "UbuntuDupe".)
(I mean, *other* than that the latter posts on
What are you talking about? It was treated just as video games. From the wiki (and recalling that films first arose in the 1890s): It wasn't until 1911 that countries other than Australia began to make feature films. By this time 16 full length feature films had been made in Australia.
And, more importantly, because, as Confucius say:
Man who go through turnstile sideways, is going to Bangkok.
Kinda late to jump in, saw today's story linking this...
I couldn't agree with you more. No painting as ever given me the sadness (seeing the cataclysm) or joy (finding out that Locke is still alive), or tormented my sleep (*dreaming* that Locke is still alive), the way FF6 did. And that was constrained by having to run on a 16-bit platform! If that makes me a Philistine, I don't want to have taste.
But then, the earth wouldn't be a spaceship, it would be series of tubes!
I agree with you, but it sounds like another instance of "because of the severity of a false positive, it's better to have a lot of false negatives". Somehow it's okay for police to slowly punch in each license plate they have, but not okay to automate it?
Officially, the former; off the record, probably the latter. After all, they don't object to the existence of license plates, do they? Or to marking them as being on stolen cars? Or to police officers doing there due diligence in watching for stolen cars that they pass by in public.
I only saw a few clips from sicko, but one that completely astounded me was where Michael Moore acts all amazed at how the cashier's office in a UK hospital is not for receiving payments, but for compensating people who had to bear certain costs in getting care. (I think it was transportation, or "transport" since it's UK.)
Okay, cool, got it: no additional costs for people when they use a hospital.
But then right afterward, he does this whole sequence where he shows all this cash being handed out, highlighting the idea that HEY!!! FREE MONEY!!! w00t!
It's like he's not just ignorant of how that money comes right out of your hide to pay for the system, but actually revels in that ignorance, and think it's the coolest thing about the UK's health care system. FREE MONEY AT HOSPITALS! Yay!
Who is that supposed to convince? I mean, regardless of what you think needs to be done about health care, why is it so "totally cool" that you can get cash payouts at hospitals from tax money?
Here's the clip, skip to 0:28, although it kind of cuts off the money sequence early.
Hey, I love golf just as much as the next guy (working on getting into a country club).. but IMHO golf will never "make it" as a sport. It's just not entertaining enough to watch. Golf is fun to play, not watch on TV.
In non-troll-speak: Sports are covered so heavily because of inertia. A few people like watching it, enough to justify coverage, and people who don't really care about them watch it because hey, it's on. I don't think gaming will be any different.
*sorry*, that should be "factoring products of large prime numbers". I'm sure all of you know the factors of every prime number...
Hey, *I* didn't encrypt my data. I just performed a reversible transformation on it. It's not my fault if you're a fuckin' slowpoke at factoring large prime numbers!