Bullshit. The Bush administration did everything they could to conflate 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, and they said he had nukes.
If this was about Palestinian terrorists, then how come we haven't actually done anything to improve the situation in Palestine? Oh wait, that's right, we handed over Gaza to Hamas. Well played, sir. We did more to aid Palestinian terrorists than Saddam ever did. They're literally using weapons we paid for against Israel right now.
It wasn't Popular opinion that got him to come to congress, it was the Constitution. If you chose to actually read the Constittion, you'd know that.
You could also try clarifying points before accusing people of missing them.
You could also try not starting a conversation with "that's the stupidest idea I've seen all week." It makes it more enjoyable for both parties.
You may enjoy the challenge of debating or discussing a moving target, I don't.
Well, when I write a full specification for the system, I'll give you a call. Until then, I was posting an idea on a public forum. If you don't enjoy discussing evolving ideas, don't respond when they're posted.
How do people know they're in your whitelist so that they don't waste credits (or waste time generating credits)?
As I've stated, they could always attach credits. And since they're in your whitelist, you could always return them. They don't need to know if they're in your whitelist - they're willing to pay you credits, if you wish. If you're nice, you won't charge them. It could be viewed as a courtesy, though. "Oh, that's nice - he sent me 10 minutes of F@H credit."
How do you stop people from simply spoofing the effort?
The same mechanisms they currently use - assigning work to multiple people and validating the results. Unfortunately, you're correct that they'd probably have to increase their paranoia. Clearly, you'd need to be a "member in good standing" to acquire any credit. Maybe another criteria people would filter on would be "and how long has the sender been in good standing? Four hours? I think I'm going to filter that one out."
Honestly, I'm just thinking this through, which is why you keep seeing me say "maybe." If my idea seems to hold up to all of your criticisms, maybe I'll flesh it out more.
How do you know if the person you're sending an email to is even using your effort based filter?
You don't. That's kind of like asking, "how do you know the receiver will ENJOY the postcard that I'm sending?" It's a nice picture, it makes you feel good to send it. F@H is a nice project, it makes you feel good to support it.
How do you validate that the person sending the email actually put in the effort that they claim?
Like I said, I was originally envisioning that F@H would sign your email, including sender and receiver. Maybe, to keep down their bandwidth, they could just sign the sender, receiver, date-time, and a hash of the contents of the email. It's very much like hashcash on the receiver's end. If the signature doesn't match the contents, you know it's no good.
If you're not using a single centralised source such as F@H, how do you make sure that the sender and the recipient are using the same metric (I'm running Seti for my credit, you're filtering on F@H - what then)?
This is kind of like asking if I use PGP and you use a different encryption standard... The best I can say is that the concept of signing an email is pretty well established - and the only question is the reputation of the agency signing. I respect F@H, and SETI. I'd trust either as a signator of an unsolicited email. And I think it'd be a neat idea if F@H and SETI made people process work units (or fractional parts thereof), before signing.
The way I see it, everybody wins. It's kind of like buying an envelope that has branded on it, "American Cancer Society. All proceeds on the sale of this envelope go to cancer research." In fact, it's almost exactly like that.
Email is inherently unreliable. I'm not proposing a mechanism that everyone would have to use to send email, I'm proposing one way that people could use to increase the liklihood that their unsolicited email would be read by the receiver.
Use your whitelist and your blacklist. For everything in between, it's a hard problem with no clear solutions, so that's why I've got a proposal.
Of course you'd still use your whitelist and blacklist. When did I ever say anything else?
I'm talking about unsolicited emails from addresses and domains you've never heard of before. The email saying, "Hey, I think we were in college together - and I'm going to be in town this weekend - want to get a beer?" This case is exactly where your greylist fails, because there's no way for the sender to raise the liklihood of you reading his email. My proposal would make it possible.
So, allow multiple crediting agencies. The same way I can pick a Star Wars stamp at the Post Office.
If they've got a botnet, and I can force them to use it to help F@H, I see that as a good thing.
And as I said in another post, if someone sends a legitimate email, I think it makes sense that you could return their credit when you say, "Ah yes, this isn't spam."
So, you increase the amount of cross-validation. I kind of fail to see the problem here. At the very least, you're contributing to F@H. That's a good thing.
One idea would be that doing F@H work could earn you credit that you could then apply to any future email you want to send. So, that takes care of your concern about urgency.
All sorts of people filter based on the amount of work that went in to the communication. From least impressive to most impressive - send someone an email, send a fax, place a phone call, put a letter in the mail, show up in person to talk to them, have a friend of theirs say that you'd like to get in touch, put a full page ad in the New York Times. Similarly, if someone spends no credits, some credits, or a lot of credits, you could combine with all of your other filters. If something looks suspiciously like spam, but someone put in hundreds of hours of credit into it, maybe I'll be willing to give it a read.
Maybe I as a reader could return their credit. So, someone can send me an email, and I say, "Oh yeah, that's legit - I don't need to eat up his credit." Therefore, there's less of a discrepancy between the CPU-haves and the CPU-have-nots.
Heck, even if ONLY while I'm typing an email, I'm doing work towards F@H, that takes care of your concern about processing cycles. My computer is spending 99.999% of its time right now doing nothing, as I reply to you.
I'd like you to think of a few more reasons why you think it's stupid, because I *always* appreciate constructive criticism. I think you've strengthened my idea, not weakened it.
So make it fractional, and allow people to build credit. Have F@H give out credits at about the rate of about 60 per hour of work against a Work Unit. The entire concept, duh, is that you trust people you know, and you demand credit from people you don't know. If that doesn't work for at least 50% of your work and 95% of your personal email, then you don't trust many people... So ask for more credits before you'll unfilter spam.
So, here's my thought - before someone sends an email, they contact Folding@Home, identify themselves, say who they want to send an email to, and the contents of the email. F@H gives them a work unit. When they complete it, F@H signs their email. Your email client can filter emails based on how many work units the sender did to send it to you. If someone really wants your attention, they'll process for a day or two. If it's a casual email, one work unit will do. Maybe even a fraction of a work unit.
That way, if you read spam, at least you know that you contributed to F@H. If you want less spam, you turn up your threshold for how many work units the sender has to do.
"Name a single real world problem that doesn't parallelize."
That's like saying "Name a single real world problem that you can't solve on a Turing machine."
Yes, of course, you're right. If you segment and merge your problem space appropriately, minimally you can do speculative computing and bookmarking, etc. to try to prune off branches of your problem space, etc. (Yeah, I know I'm kind of blowing smoke, but you get my point.)
But that doesn't mean that coding in Machine Language is what everyone should do. High-order tools are the only practical way to achieve anything beyong tinker toy problems. And until those tools are commonly available (and bullet-proof) in the programming environment the average developer is ALREADY USING, they're going to see it as a wall not worth climbing.
The software industry is notorious at not even writing *correct* code, and now you want to throw *parallel* in there, too?:)
Download Miro. Can I have my money now?
Any time a group tries to re-invent the wheel, spending a ton of money along the way, offer to solve the problem by re-branding the wheel.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Ever?
Like, people in prison? Convicted felons? Insane people? Severely mentally retarded? People on no-fly lists? Suspected terrorists?
If you're going to stop some of those people, how are you going to regulate to ensure that they don't get arms? Perhaps some kind of national registry? Perhaps some kind of waiting period?
Any kind of arm?
Like, bombs? Nukes? Chemical weapons? Rocket launchers? Grenades?
At any age?
Like, 6?
At any time?
Like, walking in to a Presidential debate?
The moment you agree there should be some restrictions to the right, you have begun engaging in a debate of the extent of those limitations, and how they should be implemented.
I see a lot of people in here asserting that religion is just as valid as science, and I don't disagree. I have no problem with someone blending their religion with reality. The dangerous ones, in my opinion, are the ones who reject reality in favor of religion.
The candidates don't open themselves up to honestly respond to questions from the people.
How else can we challenge them to defend their opinions?
I personally think it's totally appropriate to show someone up as a weak-minded fool. Especially since they're running for office, and especially since they're running for that office. And if the candidates are too afraid to "go negative" on each other, and the moderators are too polite to ask tough question and force real answers, and if the media isn't even going to bother to fact-check the answers given, then who's going to do it?
It's totally appropriate to ask questions about the issues that matter to you, in an attempt to sway public opinion. Doing so is the definition of public debate.
Wow. Are you wrong! You're discounting the possibility that people sincerely care about the issue.
No President is an expert in all of the fields related to all of the decisions that they make. Instead, they listen to the experts, and we hope they make wise decisions.
If a nominee has declared that the experts are wrong, and that evolution is not real, then I know they are incapable of making wise decisions in any related area. It also makes me wonder about which other areas they will reject what experts tell them.
Would you like to explain some other, better way that all of us should judge our Presidential nominees?
I'm *always amazed* that right-wing, Christian Republicans aren't trying to ban in-vitro fertilization.
Apparently, the ends (more babies) justify the means (in-virto). But apparently the OTHER ends (destroyed, left-over blastocysts) should never be discussed, they don't exist, I can't hear you, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!
"Why is the government on the *federal* level funding science?"
Because we elected representatives who wrote laws that fund science, those laws were signed by Presidents, and have not been struck down by the courts, or rewritten by later elected representatives. That's how our federal government works.
You kind of answered your own question, honestly. DNA.
"If you are elected President, you will be the head of the Executive Branch. If you do not believe in evolution, please explain why federal prosecutors should continue to submit DNA evidence in federal criminal courts. Either the science behind genetics and evolution are real, or they are not. So, why do you think that DNA should be trusted, but evolution as an explanation for speciation can not?"
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. The Bush administration did everything they could to conflate 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, and they said he had nukes.
If this was about Palestinian terrorists, then how come we haven't actually done anything to improve the situation in Palestine? Oh wait, that's right, we handed over Gaza to Hamas. Well played, sir. We did more to aid Palestinian terrorists than Saddam ever did. They're literally using weapons we paid for against Israel right now.
It wasn't Popular opinion that got him to come to congress, it was the Constitution. If you chose to actually read the Constittion, you'd know that.
You could also try clarifying points before accusing people of missing them.
You could also try not starting a conversation with "that's the stupidest idea I've seen all week." It makes it more enjoyable for both parties.
You may enjoy the challenge of debating or discussing a moving target, I don't.
Well, when I write a full specification for the system, I'll give you a call. Until then, I was posting an idea on a public forum. If you don't enjoy discussing evolving ideas, don't respond when they're posted.
How do people know they're in your whitelist so that they don't waste credits (or waste time generating credits)?
As I've stated, they could always attach credits. And since they're in your whitelist, you could always return them. They don't need to know if they're in your whitelist - they're willing to pay you credits, if you wish. If you're nice, you won't charge them. It could be viewed as a courtesy, though. "Oh, that's nice - he sent me 10 minutes of F@H credit."
How do you stop people from simply spoofing the effort?
The same mechanisms they currently use - assigning work to multiple people and validating the results. Unfortunately, you're correct that they'd probably have to increase their paranoia. Clearly, you'd need to be a "member in good standing" to acquire any credit. Maybe another criteria people would filter on would be "and how long has the sender been in good standing? Four hours? I think I'm going to filter that one out."
Honestly, I'm just thinking this through, which is why you keep seeing me say "maybe." If my idea seems to hold up to all of your criticisms, maybe I'll flesh it out more.
How do you know if the person you're sending an email to is even using your effort based filter?
You don't. That's kind of like asking, "how do you know the receiver will ENJOY the postcard that I'm sending?" It's a nice picture, it makes you feel good to send it. F@H is a nice project, it makes you feel good to support it.
How do you validate that the person sending the email actually put in the effort that they claim?
Like I said, I was originally envisioning that F@H would sign your email, including sender and receiver. Maybe, to keep down their bandwidth, they could just sign the sender, receiver, date-time, and a hash of the contents of the email. It's very much like hashcash on the receiver's end. If the signature doesn't match the contents, you know it's no good.
If you're not using a single centralised source such as F@H, how do you make sure that the sender and the recipient are using the same metric (I'm running Seti for my credit, you're filtering on F@H - what then)?
This is kind of like asking if I use PGP and you use a different encryption standard... The best I can say is that the concept of signing an email is pretty well established - and the only question is the reputation of the agency signing. I respect F@H, and SETI. I'd trust either as a signator of an unsolicited email. And I think it'd be a neat idea if F@H and SETI made people process work units (or fractional parts thereof), before signing.
The way I see it, everybody wins. It's kind of like buying an envelope that has branded on it, "American Cancer Society. All proceeds on the sale of this envelope go to cancer research." In fact, it's almost exactly like that.
Yup, and Google and Hotmail and Yahoo and...
Email is inherently unreliable. I'm not proposing a mechanism that everyone would have to use to send email, I'm proposing one way that people could use to increase the liklihood that their unsolicited email would be read by the receiver.
Use your whitelist and your blacklist. For everything in between, it's a hard problem with no clear solutions, so that's why I've got a proposal.
Way to miss the point.
Of course you'd still use your whitelist and blacklist. When did I ever say anything else?
I'm talking about unsolicited emails from addresses and domains you've never heard of before. The email saying, "Hey, I think we were in college together - and I'm going to be in town this weekend - want to get a beer?" This case is exactly where your greylist fails, because there's no way for the sender to raise the liklihood of you reading his email. My proposal would make it possible.
So, allow multiple crediting agencies. The same way I can pick a Star Wars stamp at the Post Office.
If they've got a botnet, and I can force them to use it to help F@H, I see that as a good thing.
And as I said in another post, if someone sends a legitimate email, I think it makes sense that you could return their credit when you say, "Ah yes, this isn't spam."
So, you increase the amount of cross-validation. I kind of fail to see the problem here. At the very least, you're contributing to F@H. That's a good thing.
One idea would be that doing F@H work could earn you credit that you could then apply to any future email you want to send. So, that takes care of your concern about urgency.
All sorts of people filter based on the amount of work that went in to the communication. From least impressive to most impressive - send someone an email, send a fax, place a phone call, put a letter in the mail, show up in person to talk to them, have a friend of theirs say that you'd like to get in touch, put a full page ad in the New York Times. Similarly, if someone spends no credits, some credits, or a lot of credits, you could combine with all of your other filters. If something looks suspiciously like spam, but someone put in hundreds of hours of credit into it, maybe I'll be willing to give it a read.
Maybe I as a reader could return their credit. So, someone can send me an email, and I say, "Oh yeah, that's legit - I don't need to eat up his credit." Therefore, there's less of a discrepancy between the CPU-haves and the CPU-have-nots.
Heck, even if ONLY while I'm typing an email, I'm doing work towards F@H, that takes care of your concern about processing cycles. My computer is spending 99.999% of its time right now doing nothing, as I reply to you.
I'd like you to think of a few more reasons why you think it's stupid, because I *always* appreciate constructive criticism. I think you've strengthened my idea, not weakened it.
So make it fractional, and allow people to build credit. Have F@H give out credits at about the rate of about 60 per hour of work against a Work Unit. The entire concept, duh, is that you trust people you know, and you demand credit from people you don't know. If that doesn't work for at least 50% of your work and 95% of your personal email, then you don't trust many people... So ask for more credits before you'll unfilter spam.
The stupid part about hashcash is that no useful work is done. I'm proposing an idea that would at the very least get something useful accomplished.
There are all sorts of third parties involved in sending email. I'm not proposing a solution for everyone - I'm suggesting one possibility.
So, here's my thought - before someone sends an email, they contact Folding@Home, identify themselves, say who they want to send an email to, and the contents of the email. F@H gives them a work unit. When they complete it, F@H signs their email. Your email client can filter emails based on how many work units the sender did to send it to you. If someone really wants your attention, they'll process for a day or two. If it's a casual email, one work unit will do. Maybe even a fraction of a work unit.
That way, if you read spam, at least you know that you contributed to F@H. If you want less spam, you turn up your threshold for how many work units the sender has to do.
"Name a single real world problem that doesn't parallelize."
:)
That's like saying "Name a single real world problem that you can't solve on a Turing machine."
Yes, of course, you're right. If you segment and merge your problem space appropriately, minimally you can do speculative computing and bookmarking, etc. to try to prune off branches of your problem space, etc. (Yeah, I know I'm kind of blowing smoke, but you get my point.)
But that doesn't mean that coding in Machine Language is what everyone should do. High-order tools are the only practical way to achieve anything beyong tinker toy problems. And until those tools are commonly available (and bullet-proof) in the programming environment the average developer is ALREADY USING, they're going to see it as a wall not worth climbing.
The software industry is notorious at not even writing *correct* code, and now you want to throw *parallel* in there, too?
If only we could create a second, more secure Nigeria.
Download Miro. Can I have my money now? Any time a group tries to re-invent the wheel, spending a ton of money along the way, offer to solve the problem by re-branding the wheel.
Am I the only one who has a giant gray bar blocking almost the entire text of this article from view?
Boy, I could really go for a Beowulf Cluster of those...
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Ever?
Like, people in prison? Convicted felons? Insane people? Severely mentally retarded? People on no-fly lists? Suspected terrorists?
If you're going to stop some of those people, how are you going to regulate to ensure that they don't get arms? Perhaps some kind of national registry? Perhaps some kind of waiting period?
Any kind of arm?
Like, bombs? Nukes? Chemical weapons? Rocket launchers? Grenades?
At any age?
Like, 6?
At any time?
Like, walking in to a Presidential debate?
The moment you agree there should be some restrictions to the right, you have begun engaging in a debate of the extent of those limitations, and how they should be implemented.
I see a lot of people in here asserting that religion is just as valid as science, and I don't disagree. I have no problem with someone blending their religion with reality. The dangerous ones, in my opinion, are the ones who reject reality in favor of religion.
The candidates don't open themselves up to honestly respond to questions from the people.
How else can we challenge them to defend their opinions?
I personally think it's totally appropriate to show someone up as a weak-minded fool. Especially since they're running for office, and especially since they're running for that office. And if the candidates are too afraid to "go negative" on each other, and the moderators are too polite to ask tough question and force real answers, and if the media isn't even going to bother to fact-check the answers given, then who's going to do it?
It's totally appropriate to ask questions about the issues that matter to you, in an attempt to sway public opinion. Doing so is the definition of public debate.
Wow. Are you wrong! You're discounting the possibility that people sincerely care about the issue.
No President is an expert in all of the fields related to all of the decisions that they make. Instead, they listen to the experts, and we hope they make wise decisions.
If a nominee has declared that the experts are wrong, and that evolution is not real, then I know they are incapable of making wise decisions in any related area. It also makes me wonder about which other areas they will reject what experts tell them.
Would you like to explain some other, better way that all of us should judge our Presidential nominees?
I'm *always amazed* that right-wing, Christian Republicans aren't trying to ban in-vitro fertilization.
Apparently, the ends (more babies) justify the means (in-virto). But apparently the OTHER ends (destroyed, left-over blastocysts) should never be discussed, they don't exist, I can't hear you, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!
"Why is the government on the *federal* level funding science?"
Because we elected representatives who wrote laws that fund science, those laws were signed by Presidents, and have not been struck down by the courts, or rewritten by later elected representatives. That's how our federal government works.
Or would you like me to draw you a diagram?
You kind of answered your own question, honestly. DNA.
"If you are elected President, you will be the head of the Executive Branch. If you do not believe in evolution, please explain why federal prosecutors should continue to submit DNA evidence in federal criminal courts. Either the science behind genetics and evolution are real, or they are not. So, why do you think that DNA should be trusted, but evolution as an explanation for speciation can not?"
Feeding them?
The article was talking about people with IQ's around 55, not vegetables.
High intelligence can be just as debilitating as low intelligence. Watch the movies "Little Man Tate," and "Searching For Bobby Fischer."
As Bela Lugosi said in Ed Wood:
I'm not going near that goddamn thing!
Did anyone else notice that there's literally no attempt to explain what the ACLU's rationale was in TFA?