Sony is LAME
Apparently, the Go.exe binary that comes with the same discs infected with the Sony rootkit is statically linked to LAME, and thus a GPL violation.
Wow. Sony – You’ve made my day.
Search Strings
So, according to my website stats, these fine search engine strings have been used (among others) in the month of October to find my site:
everything is gay
bastard
academia sucks
Not much terribly interesting for November, except maybe "xray apendicitis" [sic], which is rather odd.
I am amused.
Trojan Using Sony DRM Rootkit Spotted
Most interesting Slashdot response I’ve ever seen
Upcoming Travel
I'm doing a bit more travelling before the year ends.
This Saturday (12 Nov), I'm leaving for Berlin for an Intel thing. I'll be there until the next Saturday morning. I should hopefully have a fair amount of time to do some sightseeing, and I'll be able to see Jens and Moritz while I'm there. Awesome. Malte, from our Munich office should be joining me for a couple days, which will be cool.
In December, I'm going back to the east coast for Christmas and New Year's. Amazingly, I managed to get a free flight with all the miles I've racked up with United this past year. I really thought that entire time period would be blacked out, but I managed to get a flight out on the 24th, and one back on the 4th. Not ideal, but it's free, so I'll take it. I'll probably be up in NYC for a day or two around the 28th or 29th, so if you're in the area, drop me a line. Otherwise I'll be in MD.
Joe Blow can, well, blow me
Well said. This is basically what I want to tell people when they say "Linux needs this", or "OSS needs this", or "your application needs this" if I want more people/average users/my grandmother to be able to use it. The bottom line is: I don't care if these people use Linux. And I certainly don't want them using Linux if getting them to do so means being forced to make stability and security compromises (among other things).
Some Press…
Aww, so we're GNOME's "beloved little brother"? That's so cute.
Sulu
Huh, it seems that George Takei (aka Star Trek's Hikaru Sulu), is gay. Never woulda guessed.
I feel like something of a jackass blogging about this, but hey, why not.
Re: Monty Hall
Erik, I presume what you call the Monty Hall problem is in summary this:
- You’re in a game and you have to choose one of three doors behind which there may be a prize (apparently in this case a donkey, hmm, maybe not a prize then ;-)
- After you have chosen a door, the game show host opens one of the other doors behind which there is no prize.
- You get the chance to change your choice of doors.
The correct answer is that you should switch your choice without thinking, because it doubles your chance to get the prize. Is this the problem we are talking about?
Most people will intuitively feel that there is now a new situation where you have a 50% chance of getting the prize, because there are two doors left and one of them has the prize.
The reason this is not the case is in rule number 2 above. The important part is that the host chooses one of the other doors and never the door you have chosen. Now, this gives you two possibilities:
- You initially chose a door with the prize: (33% chance) -> This is easy for the game show host, he can chose any of the other doors. The other door has 0% chance to contain the prize. Switching will give you the wrong door.
- You initially chose a door with no prize (66% chance) -> The game show host has no choice. He has to choose the remaining empty door. Now this is interesting. The other door has 100% chance of containing the prize. Switching will give you the right door.
See, because the chance to choose a room with no prize initially is twice as high, you have a bigger chance that the game show host is forced to open the other empty room, which gives a bigger chance for the third room to contain the prize.
Does that help? Or were you talking about something else entirely? ;-)
Update:
Maybe this is a better summary:
If you choose right the first time, switching will never give you the prize. If you choose wrong the first time, switching will always give you the prize. There’s a much bigger chance you choose wrong (2 out of 3).