This reminds me of the technique mentioned in Stephenson's Diamond Age for detecting 'mite' activity. (Since the nanobots in that novel were omnipresent and communicated via visible light, you could get an idea of how much activity is going on by making a closed-off tube out of your hands and watching for flashes in the space enclosed.)

For $75 shipping--inside the US--I think it's not unreasonable to expect that the packing will be done with a high degree of professionalism. It's not a big or heavy camera, so the cost can't be attributed to either of those factors.

If we take the story at face value, he's not just complaining because the camera box was in poor condition on arrival: he's complaining, on Amazon, in public, because his first attempt to gain satisfaction--on the phone--got him nowhere.

Part of the problem here is that Amazon does not permit you to _edit_ feedback after you've submitted it. You can remove it or leave it: those are the two choices. If editing were possible, then a note from the company saying "here's $75, we'd appreciate it if you'd edit your feedback to reflect the fact that we're trying to make amends", that would seem entirely reasonable.

Since he can't edit...I still feel that they should make the first move and hope that he takes off the feedback voluntarily.

SyntaxError: he wasn't offered a complete shipping refund. He was offered money for taking down a negative review (quid pro quo). Had they said "here's your $75 back" and stuck a note in the envelope with the check saying "by the way if you'd take down that negative review we'd really really appreciate it" that would be a very different story.

IMO--again, assuming that we take this all at face value--the original review should stand, and while it's too bad that Amazon doesn't let people edit (or, better: add comments to) existing reviews, the review's existence (and BoingBoing-generated publicity) should be a powerful motivation to the company to do what's necessary to avoid such problems in the future.

mongeese?

\begin{snooty}[fake]
I believe that the correct pluralization is "polygoose".
\end{snooty}

;)

Maybe I'm missing something...but we're talking about girls who are attending a particular school, right? This implies that the school does not have toilets that the girls can use. (And the quoted article suggests that these toilets are going to specific girls and their families, although maybe that's unintentionally misleading and the toilets really are for the school.)

If so, would it make more sense to build toilets for the school first? (Toilets for individuals are all well and good, but you presumably get more bang for your buck by making them public, if that's feasible. I am largely ignorant of the culture in this region, so I don't know if this would be a non-starter for some reason.)

#7, Antinous: Not bad, but I still think it's Gorilla
gorilla gorilla FTW. :)

As several other posters have pointed out, "trust isn't transitive" sounds snappy but implies that it's related to social networks (if I trust A and A trusts B, should I trust B?). Which is misleading in this context.

(Oh, and by the way, algorithms such as PageRank are based on the notion that trust is at least somewhat transitive in the above sense. Otherwise you'd just count in-links.)

A more appropriate phrase (speaking as someone who's done a bit of research in reputation systems) would be

Trust is domain-specific.

(Which is an oversimplification, because trust in some domains does bleed over into some other domains...but it's a reasonable starting point.)

Niven stated in at least one of his "collected works" books (either _N-Space_ or _Playgrounds of the Mind_) that he wrote "The Jigsaw Man" (and subsequently other books involving the practice of "organlegging") to point out that he felt that there was a real risk that easy organ harvesting would lead to the institution of the death penalty for a wide variety of offenses (including false advertising--seriously).

I don't know what his real views are. But his quote here should be put in the context of the above. In all seriousness, I suspect that he brings up things like this at least in part so that people will recognize that it's a possibility. (Consider that now that he's put it out there, if the government _were_ to try something like this tactic, people would be more likely to spot it and recognize it for what it is.)

@21: _Fallen Angels_ was explicitly written as fan service (or "tribute to SF fandom", if you will). It wasn't intended to be taken very seriously.

(I can attest that David Brin's views were accurately reflected in his quote, though. It's a theme he's repeated many times on his blog...although it's clear that the quote is out of context.)

While all these things may be technically true, all observed GRB's are *extragalactic*. Once per galaxy per 100,000 years are pretty good odds by my book, not to mention the volume of space in our galaxy (150,000 ly across, give or take) suggest it's unlikely that one could pop up next to us.

Ari1413@17:

So, let's do the math.

Assume the following:

(1) All GRBs outside 6K ly are of no interest. (A conservative assumption, but easily fungible.)

(2) The Milky Way is essentially a circle of radius 75K ly.

So _if_ a GRB goes off in the Milky Way, the probability of it being within 6K ly are 6^2/75^2 = .0064, i..e., 0.64%.

Sure, "mass extinction" isn't as bad as "incineration of the planet", but, you know, it's bad enough. :)

That is to say: there's a decent chance that we'll only ever see one GRB in the Milky Way...not because they're uncommon (although they appear to be), but because one might be enough to ensure that we (as a species) wouldn't be around to see another.

TJarrett@2: You beat me to it, dang you. :)

JuniorMadScientist@4: What's your point? The sketch itself came out a number of years before anyone blogged it, I'm sure. Cory posted it today in particular for reasons that are left as an exercise for the reader. Were you just looking for an excuse to post a link to that blog?

(I've sung and played this in at least a couple of different ensembles; it's a beautiful piece and done right it can bring tears to the eyes...but done the way the Muppets do it can bring tears of a rather different kind. Bravo, Mr. Henson.)

Teresa@10:

It's probably just as well that I didn't know about this when any of my kids were born. (What would I have done with 40+ of these posters?)

I agree that all babies look like Winston Churchill, at least briefly.

The quotes around Zuzu@8 led me to suspect that Zuzu was quoting. Sure enough, a brief $SEARCH_ENGINE search suggests that it's from a movie called Code 46. Maybe your comment was meant for Bek@7?

#47: Clearly, as both Mark and Cory (at least) have demonstrated, if those are supposed to be 'birth control glasses', they don't work. ;)

Nice picture, folks. I join the chorus of folks who believe that Xeni should borrow some glasses for the next such picture just for giggles, but I admit that it would have compromised the Puckish look that she's got going here.

RRSafety:

Keep these prisoners of war locked up. Once hostilities cease, repatriate them.

What war? Was there a war declared at some point?

The whole point of this facility is that these are not "prisoners of war". If they were, they would be entitled to certain protections under the Geneva Conventions. Which the Bush administration has been claiming that they are not, specifically because they are "(unlawful) enemy combatants". Not "prisoners of war".

Anyway, in this case there has been no formal declaration of hostilities, and there is unlikely to ever be any formal cessation of them, either. So when do we send them home? What specific criteria do you believe are, or should be, relevant here?

Certainly we need a place to put prisoners of war, if we're going to fight wars. But we don't need Guantanamo for that. The only reason why the Bush administration feels that it needs Guantanamo is so that it can have a place that it controls utterly that is nevertheless not US soil.

A most heartfelt congratulations, sir. Speaking as the father of a 3-year-old and two 7-month-olds, you've just stepped onto one king hell of a roller coaster ride--hang on. :)

#1: Do you have any kids? (My three-year-old has already learned to lie. Yes, fine, insert cheap shot here. :P :) )

All: please note that the summary states that (some of) the children are "displaying flattery", which I interpret as "saying things which can be interpreted as flattery". There is no suggestion (well, maybe there is in the article; I've only read the excerpt above) that they have established _why_ the kids are doing this. Several of these explanations could be apropos; not sure why everyone thinks that their pet theory is denied by the article.

quoting Teresa:

Killfiling was a necessary technology back on the internet, when there was no other way to deal with loud, persistent, or malign crazies. We're not on the internet. If there's someone who's so troublesome and disruptive that they drown out the conversation, it's my job to deal with them.

The only point of Crash's killfile script is to block out people whose opinions he finds uncongenial, in what is supposed to be a general conversation. If he's blocked one or more of the people who are part of a substantive discussion, he can't follow it or participate in it. What he can do is disrupt it. The same goes for anyone else using his script.

Teresa, I am grateful for your services, if for no other reason than that your presence and activities make the Boing Boing contributors willing to enable comments, which I consider a good thing overall.

That said, there's a technical distinction in spam filtering that may be of terminological use here: "spam" is mail that essentially no one wants, and "graymail" is mail (sent to many recipients) for which there is no strong consensus among recipients: some want it, some don't.

These two problems require different solutions. A very crude analogy would suggest that you're the "spam" filter, and Crash's script empowers individuals to filter out "graymail".

There are often multiple threads of discussion in response to any given post. In such cases I could often nuke an entire (tangential) thread and not miss anything of interest to me. (It would be nice if the discussions actually _were_ threaded...but that's another topic.)

Even when there's only a single thread, however, I can think of individuals whose posts don't add anything to the discussion, in my opinion. Yes, there are cases in which removing posts makes it hard to comment coherently in response...but, with all due respect, the worst cases of this are ones in which you deleted the post in question. (Granted, Crash's script wasn't available back then, so you were the only one that could make a post disappear. Nevertheless.)

You seem to suggest (in the same post which I quoted above) that there's something fundamentally wrong with filtering the information to which we expose ourselves. To me it seems clear that we _must_ filter all the time, because we can't possibly read everything everywhere...so the only real question is how we decide what we want to see.

I may not bother to use Crash's script (partially because I usually read BB on Safari) but honestly I don't see that your work makes it unnecessary. In fact, it seems clear that your work gives Crash's a reason for being--in a good way.

To supplement my comments (@2) above a bit...

First, I think that an open-source search service is a nice idea. (Lucene, as an open-source search _engine_, has been around for some time.)

Second, I like the notion of using user feedback on relevance and ranking results as an additional data source to improve the algorithms. This is actually a completely separate notion from the idea of making the algorithms themselves open to review, and should be judged separately.

It could be that the characterization of what Wikia's going to do as providing a more "transparent" search service is misleading. But if we assume that they are actually going to make the algorithms themselves available (that is, world-readable if not world-writeable), I offer here an excerpt from some comments that I made on this proposal elsewhere:

Making the algorithms open doesn't mean that any flaws will be fixed quickly; it just means that they'll be _found_ (more) quickly. Part of the problem here is that it's a lot harder to make a good fix to an algorithm [especially in this space!] than it is to correct an historical article. For one thing, as I mentioned on BB, random Wikia users won't have access to the data that informs the algorithm design; all they'll be able to see is the algorithm and the resultant rankings. Nor, I suspect, will Wikia be letting just anyone _edit_ their algorithms, unless they're complete idiots.

So, yeah. I guess I'll reserve judgement until I see what they're actually proposing. Wikia will have one advantage: at least initially, they might not have to worry about third parties gaming their system because it's not worth the effort (at least in terms of monetary gain) to corrupt a system that no one's using yet.

@7: The linked article states that it's opening 7 January, I believe.

But "security through obscurity" is widely discredited in information security circles. Obscurity stops dumb attackers from getting through, but it lets the smart attackers clobber you because the smart defenders can't see how your system works and point out its flaws.

Sure. But it's not obvious that this is relevant here.

Cryptography algorithms are designed to turn meaningful data into something that's indistinguishable from noise unless you have the necessary data (e.g., a private key) to interpret it.

Search engines are designed to take a set of meaningful criteria (including the text of your query) and return a set of results; most of them also associate an ordering with this set. This set, and its ordering, should be ones that the vast majority of the users will find relevant and reasonable. (Personalized search is another can of worms that I won't open here.)

That is, the output of a search engine is designed to be as _transparently obvious_ as possible.

To the extent that the criteria on which a page's relevance and ranking depend on properties that are easily manipulable by third parties, you're kind of screwed.

Now, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and the rest are almost certainly doing their best to arrange matters so that the inputs to their algorithms are not something that can be manipulated (in a bad way) easily if at all, or at least in such a way that manipulation is obvious and possible to circumvent. (I am familiar with some of the research in this area.) But the means that criminals have to screw with these algorithms are the same ones that genuine users and contributors of data (i.e., creators of links) have to improve things in the first place, so you have to be very careful about locking things down.

To put it another way: if your system has inherent flaws that are a function of the problem you're trying to solve, then sometimes security through obscurity may be the best you can do.

As a practical matter, I'd guess that in practice the relevance and ranking methods are undergoing constant and rapid metamorphosis to both promote good results and combat (perceived) manipulation...so I could easily imagine that keeping up with the changes (to examine them for problems) would be tricky at best.

Now, it's possible that search engines could publish some parts of their algorithms for external review. But...

...getting back to that can of worms that we mentioned earlier: the "correctness" of relevance and ranking algorithms is subjective by definition. You need a broad spectrum of users (and usage data) in order to be able to measure how well the algorithms are doing. It's not clear that third-party basement hackers would be able to help much...but third-party criminals might be given a major bonanza.

Finally, the relevance/ranking algorithms are a large part of the IP upon which companies like Google and Yahoo (and to a lesser extent MS) are based. Granted, knowing Google's algorithms wouldn't give you access to their server farms (or their collected data)...but releasing them would basically hand Google's competitors a gun with which to shoot them.

Robert Anton Wilson's _Schroedinger's Cat_ had a truly wonderful list of band names near the end. My personal favorite was "The Weird Made Flesh", although "The Aluminum Bavariati" isn't bad either.

#6: There were rumors of such a contest (the version that I saw was offering a prize of N divided by the number of sides), but I was never able to confirm them.

Looks like someone's been reading Greg Egan's Quarantine again...

I agree that it's funny in concept...but I hope that you're kidding (and, perhaps more to the point, that Randall is). The world does not need more completely exposed computers to be incorporated into botnets.

(If you could completely disable _outgoing_ network connections--maybe.)