Posts by GumboKing

Couldn't possibly go wrong

Human you have not returned that item to the correct bin!

You have 5 seconds to comply!

Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!

Some collateral damage

After a customer's PayPal order seemed to have mysteriously not appeared in our system, we discovered that PayPal has blocked SSLv3 on their Instant Payment Notification (IPN) callbacks (without any notice as far as I can tell). It affects people who use older versions of their API under PHP.

A bit more info here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26379773/paypal-ipn-acknowledgements-failing-with-ssl-routinesssl3-read-bytessslv3-aler

FAA approval?

I wonder if it will shut down the Air Traffic Control system when it gets over 60,000 feet like that U-2 over L.A. did at the end of April?

I disagree with the initial analysis of the first two graphs

While I understand the paradox and agree the two sets should not be merged, the initial analysis of the first two graphs does not "prove that the act of spending more on advertising really is directly causing the product to sell better". It seems to show that an increase in spending is causing it to sell better up to a certain point, and past that point it will actually decrease.

For Client A they should cap spending at 45 pounds and Client B should cap spending at 350.

For Client A, two campaigns at 30 pounds should have generated around 600K in results, three 20 pound campaigns would have generated 750K whereas the 60 pound campaign only generated around 325K.

As an imaginary Client, I would be pretty ticked if I would have had much better results running 2 or 3 campaigns of lesser value instead of just one expensive less effective campaign.

P.S. (Paradox Sidenote) in Back to the Future II there is a Pair of Docs Paradox.

Fixed it for you

"Soylent advances this concept even further by providing all the calories and nutrients from the human body, refining them into their purest form"

Blame the Butcher for the difference

<---- Hey, your thumb is on the scale!

Oh the humanity!

So, since you are using Hydrogen as a lift gas, I would be remiss if I did not suggest putting an igniter inside the balloon.

It wouldn't really help in the testing at as it would probably destroy everything, but would be spectacular and more in keeping with personality of the project's namesake.

Flame ON!

ROTM

"automated network monitoring and reconnaissance systems to detect attacks and visualize the network's structure" Seems to me this was how skynet got started in Terminator 3.

"The next step is to augment these with a series of semi-automated mission plans to counter popular attack vectors using a "human-on-the-loop interface"", which was their second phase as well until skynet created a virus to attack itself so the meatbags would give it full control. Judgement Day approaches!

The Illuminati will be mad

I always thought that little triangle between the O and S on the old logo was supposed to evoke an Illuminati Pyramid. I guess a different conspiratorial cabal is in charge now.

Black Helicopter, natch.

Whew!

I was just about to exchange all my Quatloos for Bitcoins, good thing I saw this!

Hmmmm...

Too bad the entire system is defeated by one man and a flute.

From the Book

Spookily enough, I had just read the related section last night from Game of Thrones:

Ned could feel cold steel against his fingers as he leaned forward. Between each finger was a blade, the points of twisted swords fanning out like talons from the arms of the throne. Even after three centuries, some were still sharp enough to cut. The Iron Throne was full of traps for the unwary. The songs said it had taken a thousand blades to make it, heated white-hot in the furnace breath of Balerion the Black Dread. The hammering had taken fifty-nine days. The end of it was this hunched black beast made of razor edges and barbs and ribbons of sharp metal; a chair that could kill a man, and had, if the stories could be believed.

The Fiberglass Throne doesn't quite have the same ring.

Skull sitting on swords, natch.

Too bad it wasn't one of the larger stringed instruments, so that the title could have been:

PayPal to scammer: All your Bass are belong to us!

The coat with the smashed tiny violin in the pocket, please.

Up again after a reboot.

We have a dedicated server there, when I called about 5:30 pm CDT they still had their voice message saying all dedicated servers were down. I waited on hold until I got a tech person who said they had 'just finished' some updates but that I would have to reboot my server to reactivate it.

Once I rebooted it seemed to all come up ok. So anyone else out there affected you may need to reboot.

Fox News Alert!

Would it be a bigger story on Fox News if the Washington Monument was tilting left or tilting right?

Tilting Right headline: God sends sign that you should vote Republican!

Tilting Left head line: Liberal Commie quake forever scars DC landscape!

The Canadian Lewis

The story of the EH 101 in Canada is one that would have been the subject of many Lewis-like articles over the last 20 years. From reviewing several of the CBC articles here is a general rundown for those interested.

The Canadian Tory government had made a deal in the early 90's to purchase 50 EH-101's for C$4.8 Billion to replace our ancient Sea Kings. The Tories then lost the next election in 1993 and the contract was cancelled for being too expensive, which ended up costing C$500 million in cancellation fees. The Sikorsky S-92 was eventually picked to be used for the military.

Then in 1998 15 Cormorants CH-149 (based on the the EH 101) were purchased for C$790 million to replace twin rotor Labradors used for search and rescue (which were approaching 40 years in service). The Cormorants went into service in 2001, in 2004 they were taken out of all but "essential service" for a while after cracks in the tail rotor were discovered and one crashed killing 3 crew in 2006. The last maintenance contract was for C$591 million for 7 years starting in 2007.

As for its maintenance headaches, the initial specs said it should require 7 hours of maintenance / hour of flight, but initially it was a 22:1 ratio. That had dropped to 12:1 by 2005.

Press the button faster Ken!

In watching the show, it did look like Watson had a real speed advantage on ringing in first.

In a normal Jeopardy! game the buzzers are locked out until Trebek finishes reading the answer. I'm not sure how this is accomplished as you would likely need another human "turning on" the buttons, unless it is done electronically based on Trebek's mic. I also seem to recall there being a set delay before you can ring again if you are too early. According to Wackypedia they turn on a light to cue the contestants as to when they can ring in and have a .25 sec delay if they ring in early.

I do not know how this affects these games, especially since there is no audio interface on Watson. One of the reasons Ken Jennings was so successful for so long was that he had a fast reaction time and would usually beat the other players in ringing in. He would often ring in first then figure out the correct response when he had to (of course he was also pretty good at that).

From the Nova shows on Watson, (linked to in my comments on the article about first show), I do know that Watson was only supposed to ring in when it was reasonably sure of its response and he has a mechanical button pusher. The overlay of his his response calculation on the screen has a vertical bar which is where the threshold is supposed to be. I think they also were doing colour coding of both the avatar and the overlay of his answer confidence. It did look like he rang in and responded to at least one question where I thought it was below the threshold, so it may no longer be an absolute condition.

As far as Final Jeopardy goes, Watson may have had trouble parsing the term "US" in the category, and also "World War II" in the answer. In training runs it had real problems with roman numerals, so it would almost always fail on royalty answers. They were supposed to have fixed it so it would understand them and also not say "Elizabeth II" as "Elizabeth Eye Eye"

The ambiguity of "US" likely affected its confidence in the category and led to the very low bid.

BTW for those of you who are not Canadian, the 2nd largest airport in T.O. is Toronto Island Airport, the word "Island" is in a multitude of WW II battle names, and Lester B. Pearson, in addition to being the 14th Prime Minister of Canada (as mentioned in posts above) and the namesake of the larget TO ariport, was in the Army and later the RFC in WW I. So Watson's response, though pretty far out there, has a little bit of validation behind it, especially if it didn't get the WW II or US caveats.

The inclusion of that Final, which should easily be answered by most human Jeopardy players, as well as the "Etudes, Brute" which Watson spoke as Brute, like a dry champagne instead of a back-stabbing Roman, makes me think the staff is setting up at least a few of the categories to get their digs in for the humans.

One of the other things I noticed was that Watson seems to "hunt" for the Daily Doubles, which is probably another tactic that the developers noticed among the most successful players and included.

Looking forward to the final show where they play a complete game.

HMMMMMMMMMM...

Actually the update was to replace tweet distribution by internet with tweet distribution by vuvuzela, which more appropriately matches the mind numbing background noise of useless tweets.

Cruel Irony

As I load this comment page in my 64 bit version of IE on Win7 (the default browser shipped with that OS) I get my old friend "This website wants to install the following add-on: 'Adobe Flash Player Installer'" Too bad those lazy sods at Adobe have not got one to install. While I usually don't miss the ads, there are times when you need it, so then I must switch back to 32 bit FireFox.

Remind me again how long Windows 7 has been out.

Oh the humanity!

I hope they are not planning to use liquid Hydrogen to cool the magnets.

Big ball of flame due to their testing in Lakehurst.

Snicker, snicker

Everytime I see an article about the LHC, I still see it as Large Hardon Collider.

Paris, natch.

Hmmmm...

Sounds like they are building Skynet.

How long before the the Google Zeitgeist becomes self aware and thinks it can no longer ensure it's survival by relying on Fleshies that spend all their time searching inane celebrity keywords?

Just a matter of time before armed Street View Battle Droids are roaming the roadways with their new Face Recognition Targeting software.

Resistance is Futile!

The North Pole is not in Alaska!

You can still send your letter to Santa at his real address:

Santa Claus

North Pole

Canada

H0H 0H0

Not sure if his Canada Post elves will respond to letters from foreigners.

I can't wait for...

an infinite number of Talking Monkey Shakespeare Books on CD.

After they are done typing it, that is.

"Filthy plagiarists.", Bucky Katt

re: I'm sure this was competly innocent

"It seems somewhat unlikely to me that anyone would go to all that trouble with no guarantee that the intended victim would every actually become aware of the other, hidden, message."

I have gone to that trouble a number of times when having to respond in a civil manner to a particularly rude or ignorant complaint. True, most people will not see it, but there is always the hope that it will at least affect the target subliminally. The art of it is in making it appear like it was an 'accident'.

If Elvis were alive...

he would've shot hundreds of iPhones by now. "This app ain't no damn good!" Blam!

The coat with the peanut butter and banana sandwich in the pocket, oh mamma.

@Jason Bloomberg

...disable the stoopid desktop cleanup to get rid of annoying popups...

I didn't even think that was possible. After a quick google on it, I have found where the hidden checkbox under customize desktop is and am now free of the yoke of my every 60 day oppressor.

Cheers!

Sounds like a TIE Fighter?

So what does a TIE fighter sound like anyways? I couldn't tell when I last saw one, since there is no sound in a vacuum. </pedant>

It is good to have a monopoly!

Overheard in some Ticketmaster boardroom, "Let's see, we are already making extra money on our additional fees, but now that we have three types of extra fees it will be tough to add another. Any ideas?"

"I just saw that movie about Enron, what if we create our own marketplace for tickets we have already sold. Then since we are sold out, we can link to that marketplace, whose prices will have skyrocketed and we can charge fees for reselling AND buying."

"Yes, we can then charge the fees three times on the same ticket. Brilliant!"

They have been taking some flack in Canada already. It started last year when idiot parents paid 3 or more times the regular price so their sprog could see Miley Cyrus or some such. Those parents were immediately redirected to the reseller site which still had TicketMaster branding so they thought they were paying thte actual ticket price.

As they pretty much have a monopoly here on most large venues there are not many options except for boycotting all shows.

Re: Evil Instructions

Sadly, Evil instructions are just a byproduct of the proliferation of Dual core processors. It is a natural law that one of the twins needs to be evil. Bwahahaha!

Ahem...

Sounds like they got quite the buzz.

My coat is already on.