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Trump's Doing Ed McMahon a Solid....
from celebitchy:
I really, really dislike Donald Trump, mostly because of his dreadful show, but this story has softened my attitude. Not so much that I’ll watch his show, but I won’t scream at the television about the state of entertainment when I see it advertised, as if Donald Trump is somehow responsible for the reality television phenomenon. Trump is buying Ed McMahon’s house, which was slated for foreclosure, and lis etting him stay in it:
Mega-developer and TV personality Donald Trump has agreed to buy Ed McMahon’s Beverly Hills house for an undisclosed amount and allow McMahon to continue living in it. Details of the deal are still being ironed out.
“I don’t know the man, but I grew up watching him on TV,” Trump said in an exclusive interview with The Times.
McMahon, 85, was facing foreclosure within two weeks on his Beverly Hills home of 18 years. The aging television icon, who was Johnny Carson’s sidekick for three decades, defaulted on $4.8 million in mortgage loans with Countrywide Financial Corp. He said in interviews that he was unable to work because of a neck injury that occurred about 18 months ago.
Trump said he stepped in because helping McMahon “would be an honor.” His plan is to buy the home from the lender and lease it back to McMahon.
“When I was at the Wharton School of Business,” Trump said, “I’d watch him every night. How could this happen?”
The Don is no fool. While the house was initially listed at $7million, but dropped to $4.6million, no matter what The Don pays he’ll get more than that value out of the good publicity given him. Donald previously offered to help Ed and his shopaholic wife Pamela out, but reports suggested the offer was for publicity and not genuine. While Donald is probably only doing it for publicity, help is help no matter the motive.
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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.