Microsoft has made an unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. The bid, which would consist of cash and Microsoft stock, values Yahoo shares at $31 a share, a 62% premium on Thursdays closing price.
Microsoft + Yahoo = a stronger competitor to the Google borg.
It seems that a group of artists have celebrated 1-31-07 in their own way and have created a series of political themed LED art sculptures and (you guessed it) placed them all over Boston. Pictured here, Bush & Bin Laden...
I have a friend that goes the Berklee School of Music in Boston. He gave me a first hand account of the bullshit the scared sheep caused there 1 year ago. I thank the artists for the mockery.
Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, "Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that."? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?
Well, here's one idea.
1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college. 2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college. 3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!
Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores
4. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average. 5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.
The best parts of conversations with Virgil is that occasionally you pick up on subtle jokes. Other times they completely fly by you and Virgil has to come out and tell you what your missing:
Legions of Literature majors harangued about Lolita's categorization as "Erotica" instead of "Classics". Fine. I've already updated the entry and rankings. Tomorrow I'll make a new version of the images with Lolita in "Classics". You all lack any sense of humor.
NIST has opened a public competition to develop a new cryptographic hash algorithm, which converts a variable length message into a short “message digest” that can be used for digital signatures, message authentication and other applications. The competition is NIST’s response to recent advances in the cryptanalysis of hash functions. The new hash algorithm will be called “SHA-3” and will augment the hash algorithms currently specified in FIPS 180-2, Secure Hash Standard. Entries for the competition must be received by October 31, 2008.
Spectator: Detection and Containment of JavaScript Worms
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:08 pm EDT, Oct 29, 2007
Recent popularity of interactive AJAX-based Web 2.0 applications has given rise to a new breed of security threats: JavaScript worms. We propose Spectator, the first automatic detection and containment solution for JavaScript worms. Spectator is a proxy that performs distributed data tainting by observing and tagging the traffic between the browser and the Web application. When a piece of data propagates "too far", a potential worm is reported. To prevent worm propagation, subsequent upload attempts performed by the same worm are blocked. Spectator is able to detect fast and slow moving, monomorphic and polymorphic worms with a low rate of false positives. In addition to our detection and containment solution, we propose a range of deployment models for Spectator, ranging from simple intranet-wide deployments to a scalable load-balancing scheme appropriate for large Web sites.
Ben Livshits, a researcher at MSFT is up to some pretty cool code analysis work.
Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.
It's time to fight back.
The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.
Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a Wordpress plugin.
Snow White: Chlamydia is a lot like swallowing a poisoned apple transformed through magic by a witch. Except, instead of a poisoned apple, it’s more like bacteria living on dirty dwarf cock.
Cinderella: The Chlamydia bacteria can grow in the throat, vagina, penis, or absolutely anywhere on that whore “Sleeps-Around Beauty.” Oh, I’m sorry. I mean, Aurora.
Pocahontas: Chlamydia is the only thing I still have from John Smith.
How Do You Get It?
Snow White: I’m not a scientist so I can only guess, but I think the smart money is on doing the rusty trombone with Happy.
Jasmine: Chlamydia was invented by Jews.
Ariel: I got it playing a game I like to call “Finding Nemo.”
