That said, Tesla is a US company, and Top Gear Is produced by BBC in the UK. So I'm not sure there is much hope for this lawsuit to accomplish anything anyways.

I'm guessing you haven't heard much about British libel laws.

Why are they coming up with their own operating system and app ecosystem, is this really the core competency of a car company? Why aren't they using Android, which already has text to voice, voice to text, GPS navigation, and almost everything else you might need in a car?

Slashdot no-longer looks like a car crash by reverting to essentially the level of site complexity they had in 2006 (or, at least, disguising the "improvements" more effectively). Will be interesting to see if this stems or reverses the exodus of readers /. has experienced over the past half-decade.

The ad model is working extremely well for Google, Facebook, and others.

Rather it is an auto-immune disorder, gluten causes the sufferer's own immune system to attack their small intestine. Aside from the immediate pain (a stomach ache for a day or two after eating even a tiny amount of gluten), it can result in deficiencies in various necessary substances, and can lead to an increased danger of cancer. My wife had stomach aches most of her life, she had grown accustomed to them, thinking they were normal. A few years back (she was 28), on someone's suggestion she got tested for Celiac (first a blood test, then a biopsy of her small intestine). She was positive. She has been avoiding gluten ever since, she can't even have a single crumb of bread without getting sick now. Most people that have Celiac are never diagnosed, and suffer a life of pain and misery as a result, in addition to a shortened lifespan. If you get a lot of stomach aches for reasons you can't determine, you owe it to yourself to get a blood test for Celiac.

It's about forcing you to do these things at gunpoint (and yes, a gunpoint is somewhere in your future if you stop paying your taxes) by raising taxes (by 3.8%) and by forcing you to buy health insurance when you don't want to do so.

And yet I'd bet you'd be the first to expect to get treated in an emergency room if you didn't have health insurance and something bad happened. The reality is that nobody wants to live in a country where people are allowed to die on the streets because they are poor. If you accept that as a premise, then at some point it is necessary for us all to accept some kind of mandate to participate in the health care system. The alternative is the current situation, the worst of all worlds, where emergency rooms end up being the safety net for those without insurance, and we all pay through the nose for it.

One reason this kind of problem occurs is that many collaborative filtering algorithms are measured based on "root mean squared error", basically the square root of the mean of the differences between what was predicted and what the user actually did.

The problem with this metric? It doesn't account for a variety of important things, one of which is that most users value diversity. Another is that in most recommendation systems, what is important is the relative relevance of recommendations to each-other, whereas RMSE is an absolute measure of effectiveness. And a really tricky one is that the recommendation algorithm itself can impact user behavior. For example, the user may raise their standards if the algorithm does a better job.

The unfortunate answer is that the only rock-solid way to measure the effectiveness of recommendation algorithms is to test them with real users, perhaps splitting the user population between different algoritms, and seeing which does best.

I'm pretty familiar with this issue as my day job is building a behavioral ad targeting engine. We learned a long time ago that while RMSE has its uses, there is often limited correlation between an algorithm's ability to predict user behavior retrospectively (which ads they will click on and what products they will buy), and how much additional revenue the algorithm will generate in practice.

Our solution is to use RMSE as a first-blush indication of how good an algorithm is. Secondly, we take the top, say, 10% of ads with the best predictions, and see what the actual click or conversion rate is within this 10%. This requires a higher volume of data, but yields results that are closer to what we find in reality. Lastly, the algorithm then has to prove itself in the wild on a small subset of traffic. Only then can we really know if any algorithm is an improvement on any other.

It seems that Wikileaks should operate over Freenet. Leaks could be submitted anonymously that way, and also distributed anonymously. The advantage would be that it would be entirely decentralized, so there would be no organization vulnerable to legal action.

Freenet has been slow and hard to use in the past, but its improved quite a bit. It is the obvious platform for something like Wikileaks. Of course, there is nothing to prevent people from mirroring content on the web (since installing Freenet, like any piece of software, is a hassle). But at least there will be an unimpeachable backup of all data on Freenet.

You are an idiot. If anyone is worse than Microsoft it is these patent trolls.