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 Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Best Joe Millionaire Article Yet. Best Joe Millionaire Article Yet
John Dvorak of all people is the author too. Go figure. He raises some very valid points:
Has the Internet become the only way we can get a glimpse at facts? I think so more and more, despite all the hoaxes and fakery there. On the Net, at least you have a shot at finding out the truth.
My journey into the vagaries of truth begins with the Fox reality TV show, "Joe Millionaire." [_Go_] [The FuzzyBlog!]
The transparency of the Internet makes it much harder to commit fraud. What is amazing is that none of the mainstream media are picking up on this at all. 11:42:26 AM 
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Publishers Make Lots on Public Domain Works. Waddya know. And it's big media companies too: B&N, Penguin, Bantam Dell Publishing Group and The Modern Library (of Bertelsmann). And thanks to Sonny Bono, publishers of public domain books no longer keep track of works going into the public domain, because well, they aren't getting new titles that fall out of copyright. "The first thing you'd do in classics publishing was keep a list [~] a rolling schedule of what was going into the... [bIPlog]
Read the Times article. This is going to be a real problem. A huge area of the publishers libraries will not exist. Basic income will disappear. But at least Disney will still hold all the rights to any mouse-like creature that wears gloves, right? Should a book that was written over 75 years ago still have an exclusive publisher? 11:23:08 AM
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The Patent office is getting to be such a joke, because the government has been choking it off for the last 10 years. There has been a huge increase in computer and biotech patents but not a related increase in examiners. Since they are rewarded by how many patents they issue a year, is it any wonder that many of them just throw up their hands and say let the courts handle it. But the courts have made it worse, allowing patents for ideas, not things, to be awarded. Business plans get patents. Patenting navigation bars are allowed. There are companies whose only point of existence is to buy up IP and make money by licensing. They do not really want things to go to court, so they buffer their extortion. If they can find 100 companies to pay a yearly license of $10000 for one patent, they will do it, even if it is a faulty patent. A thousand companies would be better. Because none of the companies wants to spend a whole lot more money that $10000 to fight the patent (Estimates are that a patent fight is a minimum of $1 million). So we get stiffling of innovation. This will all come tumbling down because, eventually, one of the guys will go too far. Greed, combined with over-reaching, is self-limiting. But it could take a while and cause a lot of grief. 11:03:49 AM
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NetNewsWire 1.0 ships. After months of beta testing and coding, Brent Simmons' excellent RSS newsreader NetNewsWire is shipping! [Mac Net Journal]
I am upgrading the memories, drives, etc. of my computers so I can get everything on OS X. This is something I will definitely try. 10:51:49 AM
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Aarrgh!! I'm going to be trying this to figure out this puzzle all day. I'm toying with the fact that the 2 switches are given names, A and B, signifying that you want to keep their positions separate. This implies something almost binary: both off; A on, B off; A off, B on; both on. Giving the numbers 1-4. Flipping a switch would do binary addition or subtraction. Humm. Maybe even and odd numbers.I'll fiddle around with 3 prisoners. 10:42:07 AM
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Dreaming Wrong Answers. The weekly Puzzler from Click and Clack, the Car Talk guys, was so hard that they extended it a week and gave some hints. I woke up this morning at 5:30 and knew the answer without having thought about it consciously. Next on my dream agenda: Re-discover benzine's structure! Unfortunately, when I re-checked the puzzle this morning, I found I'd significantly altered its terms, a case of having the right answer to the wrong question. Anyway, here's the puzzle: The warden meets with 23 new prisoners when they arrive. He tells them, "You may meet today and plan a strategy.... [Joho the Blog]
A great puzzle. I'll have to think about this one a bit. 10:24:44 AM
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Bayes vs. Latent Semantics. Just to prove my point about my dysfactia, I recently said that Mac OS X uses bayesian probability to filter spam. I said that because I read it somewhere on the Internet. (Damn Intermenet!) Kevin Marks not only wrote to correct me — the Mac uses Latent Semantics — but also cc'ed Tim Oren who then blogged a brilliant explanation and analysis of the two techniques. Thus has my stupidity made us all a little smarter. Don't thank me. It's what I do.... [Joho the Blog]
Here is a direct link to the article. Very nIce explanation but requires some understanding of what is really going on. 10:14:48 AM
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