coshx - Slashdot User

Censorship By Glut 391

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 01, 2008 @02:12PM from the all-my-ideas-are-brilliant dept.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A 2006 paper by Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts, about the patterns that users follow in choosing and recommending songs to each other on a music download site, may be the key to understanding the most effective form of "censorship" that still exists in mostly-free countries like the US It also explains why your great ideas haven't made you famous, while lower-wattage bulbs always seem to find a platform to spout off their ideas (and you can keep your smart remarks to yourself)." Read on for the rest of Bennett's take on why the effects of peer ratings on a music download site go a long way towards explaining how good ideas can effectively be "censored" even in a country with no formal political censorship.

Comment Re:Can we enter a bot? (Score 1) 129

by coshx on Monday August 14, 2006 @07:15PM (#15906939) Attached to: Google Code Jam Registration Opens Today

While it's true that certain types of questions get repeated in different forms (e.g. the language of the problem might clue you in to it having a dynamic programming solution) I highly doubt that in the next few years (or the next 5-20 years for that matter) a bot will be able to do any more than identify the reuse of a previous question with different wording and solve this.

This is easy to circumvent, however, as more complicated/obscure natural language constructs can be used to confuse the bot (botfuscation). What you're suggesting is that in a few years we'll have bots that are perfectly capable of parsing natural language, understanding the problem asked, and solving it. This means they'll have to perform image recognition as well for the problems that have pictures. I believe this technology is still in its infancy and is nowhere near 100% accurate. But maybe you're more up on the research than I am?

Music Downloads = Expensive Concerts? 698

Posted by Zonk on Friday April 21, 2006 @09:57AM from the shaft-the-listener dept.

melonman writes "According to an article at BBC News, $250 tickets for the latest Madonna tour are the fault of P2P file sharing. 'Before the advent of illegal downloads, artists had an incentive to underprice their concerts, because bigger audiences translated into higher record sales, Professor Krueger argues. But now, he says, the link between the two products has been severed, meaning that artists and their managers need to make more money from concerts and feel less constrained in setting ticket prices.' And it seems David Bowie agrees. Is 'the fans always get fleeced' the rock industry's equivalent to Moore's Law?"

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