2:06 pm:
32°F / 23°F
» 5-Day Forecast
- » ToastedRav.com
- » Deep Fried St. Louis
- » Technology/Gadgets
- » Article
The Newest Videos:
|
|
|
| Public Disservice Announcement: Screw Holiday Shopping, Give Cash! | Emily Riesen - 'My Heart's in St. Louis' | The Toast - 11.28.08 - Tila Tequila Out, Ikki Twins In And An Interview With Vince Vaughn |
Updated 122 Days ago
Get Your Computer (State) Tax Free This Weekend, But Be Careful!
by Mike Flynn in "Technology/Gadgets"
The following is an important money-saving/safety annoucement from your friends at ToastedRav.com regarding Missouri's Tax Holiday August 1st - August 3rd (details here):
- If you are in the market for an decently price-heavy computer, you should go wait in line and buy it this weekend becuase the state sales tax is on our boy Blunt!
- If you just need to go to Best Buy to pick up a 50-pack of DVDs, DON'T DO IT! The DVDs can wait! The place is going to be packed, and while waiting in line just to buy DVDs to make...eh...backup copies of your legally purchased DVDs you are going to end up falling in to madness, and they will find you three weeks later hiding in the fort you made back in car audio wearing a Josh Groban CD for a loincloth and feeding on trainee employees.
Thank you for listening and please head our advice.
About The Author:
Mike is the sole developer and associate editor for ToastedRav.com.He has been a blogger for over 5 years both on personal and professional websites and has a bachelors degree in Computer Science from Truman State University.
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.