I wonder if the spammers were taken out on a main street and shot, would that discourage spammers?
A similar experiment was recently performed in an attempt to address piracy, but instead of a main street, it was a small lifeboat. Surviving peers of the dead teenaged pirates are claiming steadfast resolve to continue their pirate behavior.
The problem is that a lot (most?) research is done for its own sake, to discover new things, rather than having any particular application in mind.
I know I'm stating the obvious here because you sound well-versed in the research field. While scientists are typically motivated to perform research to satisfy curiosity, etc. funding sources have very distinct agendas. Prior to 2000, it seemed like the best way to get your research funded was if the science had a military application. Hence, this charged particle plasma conduit was touted to be a laser-taser a few years back. Nowadays, it's all about renewable energy if you want to get funding to conduct basic science research.
Come to think of it, I just bought a 1T Hitatchi hard drive for $89. That's $0.09 per gig with retailer and manufacturer's profits both built in. Google undoubtedly buys directly from manufacturers.
Here's a simple solution I haven't heard anyone propose. Extensive renewable thinning of the forests.
Actually, this is a frequent recommendation by the lumber lobby. They blame large forest fires on federal regulations that prevent the lumber industry from 'maintaining' national forests. Their proposed maintenance is largely what you're recommending.
I understand what you're suggesting in terms of the harvested wood being used in construction that will 'sink' their carbon longer than allowing dead trees to rot on the forest floor. I suppose the only challenge might be in harvesting and processing the trees with less of a carbon footprint than the carbon they contain.
I'm not highly sensitive to the breaking of auto-fill mechanisms for the sake of increased security.
Additionally, improved obfuscation would change the field names frequently so as to complicate bot scripting. I'd recommend the field names generate dynamically based off a hash of the day of the week and the month.
Another good obfuscation method is for the signup form handler path to change on a per-visitor basis with a similar dynamic hash. Essentially, every three or four sign-ups can trigger the enclosing directory of the form handler to be re-created with a dynamic name and the form code update to reflect the new path of the target.
Finally, I'm a big fan of.htaccess security. You can add.htaccess directives that prevent access to the form handler based on referral as well as IP ranges. Unless your site is intended for a world-wide audience, no need to allow foreign IP's access to the registration pages. That alone will sweep the legs out of most spam bots.
An app store is an excellent incentive for developers to invest the time to create Boxee plugins. That's something missing from MythTV. For instance, I'd like to see a MAME plugin for Boxee. Who's going to integrate it? With an app store, there's the possibility people will pay a buck or two for each installation.
Also, the barrier to entry for Boxee is much less than other set-top platforms. It runs as a standalone application on Mac OS X (intel), Ubuntu, and WinXP. You can install the application, start it, connect video out to your TV set, and install a remote control app on your iPhone and the whole deal probably takes less than an hour.
Most stuff like this gets previewed in Austin in order to buy Harry Knowles' endorsement. It's not a high barrier to entry. Studios usually just massage his ego with a visit to their set, an advance screening on his birthday, or bring him up on stage to introduce a screening. As if he knows two shits about anything (that youtube link is to a video of him introducing the Star Trek premiere mentioned in TFA).
If you actually go looking for some song from some obscure 60s band, odds are you really want that song from that band, and are probably less price sensitive as a result.
That is true. It's also a missed opportunity for a LOT of content publishers & creators.
Savvy marketers know that for every serious purchaser of a piece of content, there may be dozens that have a moderate interest in that content. You can charge a high price ($10) and gouge one buyer, or charge a moderate price ($2) and collect a lot more money total.
Digital distribution of music, movies, and books presents an opportunity for copyright holders to collect 'free money' from out-of-print works. There are huge storehouses of content that isn't currently generating any revenue for publishers because it has been end-of-lifed. The promotion is over, the shelf space in stores has been shifted to current products, and basically, these titles are found only in public libraries, thrift stores, or garage sales- places that don't pay publishers a royalty for every transaction.
Consider an album by Ronnie Milsap and the Foundation series of books by Isaac Asimov. The publishers of those works have already covered their recording, pressing, printing, and promotional expenses for these titles. Today they're exchanged at flea markets for a couple of quarters, tops. There are a few die-hard fans, but most people will avoid the $9.99 charge at iTunes for the Milsap albums or the $7.00 charge for each of Asimov's Foundation books on their Kindle. Imagine, to get the entire Foundation series on Kindle, you'll have to lay out more than $50. How many times is Amazon clocking in those sales on the Foundation series? Maybe one or two, I'd wager. If they could drop the price to $2.00 per book, Amazon would see a lot more people buying the entire series and making many, many times over what they're making off it @ $50. Same with those Ronnie Milsap records.
Sadly, these bigtime publishers think they're sitting on a gold mine of content when they're really sitting on a big warehouse of Salvation Army stock.
I'm just a popcorn eater. I went to see the X-Men 3 movie a couple summers ago at the drive-in in Tulsa, Ok. Your idiot comic book characters spent the first 15 minutes of the movie planning a wedding or some such shit.
You have nothing to worry about here. I won't download this leaked copy and I won't purchase a ticket to any future installments.
As expected, I didn't read the article. Just skimmed the images and text. They're reviewing a game that is prioritized for console sales, not PC. ID has sold out for quantity over quality. They're aiming for the people who used to play PC games, but have switched to consoles and remember playing ID releases like Wolfenstein 3D in the olden days. And they'll scoop up some curious new customers as well. Goodbye ID.
I was there with you in the late nineties. I had a client perpetually complaining because our web publishing product would insert an extra carriage return into every HTML page whenever an SSI was performed. Annoying.
much of the game industry and web company startups seem to be not only young, but male
Game companies take advantage of the 'glamour' and offer small compensation because there are so many people begging to work on games. The 'young male' correlation you've made is due to the gaming demograph skewing young-male. People who don't play games and are experienced won't settle for the peanuts gaming companies pay.
Gaming companies are highly unstable and are not a long-term investment.
The 'server' you are referring to is a computer that is also compromised by the worm. It would be owned by an innocent 3rd party who is unaware of the infection. Every day, each computer in the botnet runs an algorithm to identify 50,000 hostnames. It then performs a DNS lookup on each of those 50,000 hostnames. When it finds something that resolves to an IP address, it contacts that computer for instructions, downloading a binary executable, etc. The worm owners only have to register one of the 50,000 unique hostnames a couple days in advance using a stolen credit card. Then they upload instructions, payload, etc. to the computer with the IP address they want to use to instruct the other bots. The only traceable point would be the domain registration, but as mentioned, a stolen credit card will remove any trace of fingerprints on that.
As the GP mentioned, it's impossible to pre-register all the possible domains, but the damage could be mitigated by watching for any of the 50,000 daily unique hostnames to be registered, then altering DNS to invalidate the IP for that hostname.
I often need to reach them and they don't answer their phone. Sometimes they're out of range, sometimes they just don't want to answer.
If your child isn't answering the phone when you call, you need to return the phone to the store you bought it from. Tell your child the device isn't succeeding at fulfilling the purpose for which you purchased it. If your teenager has a job and bought the phone himself / herself, then it is the child's choice of when to answer the phone.
Not sure that Cisco is such a lone cash giant as suggested. Apple has $28 billion in reserves as of Jan 22, 2009. With the recent economic fiasco, both Cisco and Apple might be in different positions.
It has more than $30 billion in cash, more than any other tech company.
If the blimp is going to provide any kind of valuable surveillance, it's likely to be photographic. So, the blimp works best when it can see unconcentrated sunlight reflecting from the ground. Lasers are focused light beams, which are even more effective at penetrating 65k ft. of atmosphere. Just working through the logic of your criticism of anti-blimp lasers....
We've assumed technical / military superiority over these middle-eastern foes. You're right, that the Taliban's technical resources are severely limited. The likelihood is that their buddies in Iran will use a bit of their oil money to buy powerful laser toys just to maintain destabilization in the region.
I'm not sure what type of anti-ship missile you're referring to, but aircraft carriers have computer-controlled mini-guns mounted to defend against air-to-surface missiles. I would assume the same could work for these battleships.
Child prostitution... according to American law that would include 20 y/o with 11 months and three weeks on the clock right?
No. Not right. Wrong. 21 is the cutoff for alcohol consumption. 18 is the age one becomes an 'adult' in America and can work in 'adult entertainment' such as topless dancing, pornography, and prostitution (in the limited areas where that business is legal). It's sad to see such clueless moderation.
Have you ever even SEEN pictures of marine sportfish from 50 years ago?
Yeah, I'm familiar with the sportfish decline. I used to fish in the Gulf of Mexico and saw the drastic reduction in large fish when the Asian longline fishing boats showed up. And like you said, it's not that they were just taking the big fish. They took all game fish and large non-gamefish they caught were usually dead and their carcasses were thrown in the ocean. So the effect has been that only younger, smaller fish of those species are in the majority. Very sad. And with fewer large predator fish (sharks, King Mackerel, etc.), the less desireable trash fish populations are growing and consuming more of the food in the ocean.
If you spend four hours casting lures in front of a group of > 2' striped bass that you can clearly see in the water and the only fish that bite are smaller, younger, fish, then you'd be familiar with this phenomena known as 'smarter fish.' You could also call them 'wary' fish.
Really, though, I was criticizing the methodology of the study that removes behavior from the selection process. The study assumes fish cannot control their own removal from the gene pool. The researchers simply pulled out fish based on their size. It's a one-dimensional selection process. In the wild, there are many factors weighing on the gene pool and while humans are one of those, wild populations are far more complex than this model. For instance, this experiment doesn't consider that larger fish are more resistant to predator fishes and birds, which strengthens the larger fishes' presence in the gene pool. It also doesn't account for large fish being more competitive while preying on other fish for food. Both of these factors would likely counter much of the impact that size-selective fishing by humans has on their populations.
This experiment would be more accurate when applied to crustaceans because they have fewer natural predators and size doesn't much affect their ability to harvest their own food. Additionally, human fishing of crustaceans is size-selective, so their model more accurately mimics how fishing would affect those populations.
TFA describes a closed study of a population of fish. It's not an examination of wild populations of fish or an analysis of trends in wild populations. Extrapolating their observations from the closed population and applying them to the wild populations isn't accurate.
Commercial fishing is performed with nets (or longlines) and does not discriminate based on size. Everything in the net goes into the hold. Any non-target fish are discarded after they are dead. Sport fishing does discriminate based on size, but doesn't have a significant impact on saltwater fish. Also, larger fish are usually the smarter fish that have avoided anglers' lures, etc. which is a phenomena that isn't accounted for in this study.
There's currently another post on the front of Slashdot today describing an 'Ark' where biologists are collecting amphibians in the rainforest to preserve them until a cure can be found for the fungus that is decimating their populations and threatening thousands of species with extinction.
Slashdot Mirror
A similar experiment was recently performed in an attempt to address piracy, but instead of a main street, it was a small lifeboat. Surviving peers of the dead teenaged pirates are claiming steadfast resolve to continue their pirate behavior.
Seth
I know I'm stating the obvious here because you sound well-versed in the research field. While scientists are typically motivated to perform research to satisfy curiosity, etc. funding sources have very distinct agendas. Prior to 2000, it seemed like the best way to get your research funded was if the science had a military application. Hence, this charged particle plasma conduit was touted to be a laser-taser a few years back. Nowadays, it's all about renewable energy if you want to get funding to conduct basic science research.
Seth
Come to think of it, I just bought a 1T Hitatchi hard drive for $89. That's $0.09 per gig with retailer and manufacturer's profits both built in. Google undoubtedly buys directly from manufacturers.
Seth
What value are these new URLs if they aren't cute?!?
Seth
Actually, this is a frequent recommendation by the lumber lobby. They blame large forest fires on federal regulations that prevent the lumber industry from 'maintaining' national forests. Their proposed maintenance is largely what you're recommending.
I understand what you're suggesting in terms of the harvested wood being used in construction that will 'sink' their carbon longer than allowing dead trees to rot on the forest floor. I suppose the only challenge might be in harvesting and processing the trees with less of a carbon footprint than the carbon they contain.
Seth
I'm not highly sensitive to the breaking of auto-fill mechanisms for the sake of increased security.
.htaccess security. You can add .htaccess directives that prevent access to the form handler based on referral as well as IP ranges. Unless your site is intended for a world-wide audience, no need to allow foreign IP's access to the registration pages. That alone will sweep the legs out of most spam bots.
Additionally, improved obfuscation would change the field names frequently so as to complicate bot scripting. I'd recommend the field names generate dynamically based off a hash of the day of the week and the month.
Another good obfuscation method is for the signup form handler path to change on a per-visitor basis with a similar dynamic hash. Essentially, every three or four sign-ups can trigger the enclosing directory of the form handler to be re-created with a dynamic name and the form code update to reflect the new path of the target.
Finally, I'm a big fan of
Seth
An app store is an excellent incentive for developers to invest the time to create Boxee plugins. That's something missing from MythTV. For instance, I'd like to see a MAME plugin for Boxee. Who's going to integrate it? With an app store, there's the possibility people will pay a buck or two for each installation.
Also, the barrier to entry for Boxee is much less than other set-top platforms. It runs as a standalone application on Mac OS X (intel), Ubuntu, and WinXP. You can install the application, start it, connect video out to your TV set, and install a remote control app on your iPhone and the whole deal probably takes less than an hour.
Seth
Most stuff like this gets previewed in Austin in order to buy Harry Knowles' endorsement. It's not a high barrier to entry. Studios usually just massage his ego with a visit to their set, an advance screening on his birthday, or bring him up on stage to introduce a screening. As if he knows two shits about anything (that youtube link is to a video of him introducing the Star Trek premiere mentioned in TFA).
Seth
That is true. It's also a missed opportunity for a LOT of content publishers & creators.
Savvy marketers know that for every serious purchaser of a piece of content, there may be dozens that have a moderate interest in that content. You can charge a high price ($10) and gouge one buyer, or charge a moderate price ($2) and collect a lot more money total.
Digital distribution of music, movies, and books presents an opportunity for copyright holders to collect 'free money' from out-of-print works. There are huge storehouses of content that isn't currently generating any revenue for publishers because it has been end-of-lifed. The promotion is over, the shelf space in stores has been shifted to current products, and basically, these titles are found only in public libraries, thrift stores, or garage sales- places that don't pay publishers a royalty for every transaction.
Consider an album by Ronnie Milsap and the Foundation series of books by Isaac Asimov. The publishers of those works have already covered their recording, pressing, printing, and promotional expenses for these titles. Today they're exchanged at flea markets for a couple of quarters, tops. There are a few die-hard fans, but most people will avoid the $9.99 charge at iTunes for the Milsap albums or the $7.00 charge for each of Asimov's Foundation books on their Kindle. Imagine, to get the entire Foundation series on Kindle, you'll have to lay out more than $50. How many times is Amazon clocking in those sales on the Foundation series? Maybe one or two, I'd wager. If they could drop the price to $2.00 per book, Amazon would see a lot more people buying the entire series and making many, many times over what they're making off it @ $50. Same with those Ronnie Milsap records.
Sadly, these bigtime publishers think they're sitting on a gold mine of content when they're really sitting on a big warehouse of Salvation Army stock.
Seth
I'm just a popcorn eater. I went to see the X-Men 3 movie a couple summers ago at the drive-in in Tulsa, Ok. Your idiot comic book characters spent the first 15 minutes of the movie planning a wedding or some such shit.
You have nothing to worry about here. I won't download this leaked copy and I won't purchase a ticket to any future installments.
Seth
As expected, I didn't read the article. Just skimmed the images and text. They're reviewing a game that is prioritized for console sales, not PC. ID has sold out for quantity over quality. They're aiming for the people who used to play PC games, but have switched to consoles and remember playing ID releases like Wolfenstein 3D in the olden days. And they'll scoop up some curious new customers as well. Goodbye ID.
Seth
I was there with you in the late nineties. I had a client perpetually complaining because our web publishing product would insert an extra carriage return into every HTML page whenever an SSI was performed. Annoying.
Seth
Game companies take advantage of the 'glamour' and offer small compensation because there are so many people begging to work on games. The 'young male' correlation you've made is due to the gaming demograph skewing young-male. People who don't play games and are experienced won't settle for the peanuts gaming companies pay.
Gaming companies are highly unstable and are not a long-term investment.
Seth
The 'server' you are referring to is a computer that is also compromised by the worm. It would be owned by an innocent 3rd party who is unaware of the infection. Every day, each computer in the botnet runs an algorithm to identify 50,000 hostnames. It then performs a DNS lookup on each of those 50,000 hostnames. When it finds something that resolves to an IP address, it contacts that computer for instructions, downloading a binary executable, etc. The worm owners only have to register one of the 50,000 unique hostnames a couple days in advance using a stolen credit card. Then they upload instructions, payload, etc. to the computer with the IP address they want to use to instruct the other bots. The only traceable point would be the domain registration, but as mentioned, a stolen credit card will remove any trace of fingerprints on that.
As the GP mentioned, it's impossible to pre-register all the possible domains, but the damage could be mitigated by watching for any of the 50,000 daily unique hostnames to be registered, then altering DNS to invalidate the IP for that hostname.
Seth
If your child isn't answering the phone when you call, you need to return the phone to the store you bought it from. Tell your child the device isn't succeeding at fulfilling the purpose for which you purchased it. If your teenager has a job and bought the phone himself / herself, then it is the child's choice of when to answer the phone.
Seth
Not sure that Cisco is such a lone cash giant as suggested. Apple has $28 billion in reserves as of Jan 22, 2009. With the recent economic fiasco, both Cisco and Apple might be in different positions.
It has more than $30 billion in cash, more than any other tech company.
Seth
If the blimp is going to provide any kind of valuable surveillance, it's likely to be photographic. So, the blimp works best when it can see unconcentrated sunlight reflecting from the ground. Lasers are focused light beams, which are even more effective at penetrating 65k ft. of atmosphere. Just working through the logic of your criticism of anti-blimp lasers....
Seth
We've assumed technical / military superiority over these middle-eastern foes. You're right, that the Taliban's technical resources are severely limited. The likelihood is that their buddies in Iran will use a bit of their oil money to buy powerful laser toys just to maintain destabilization in the region.
Seth
Here's a hint:
An off-the-cuff question like this is not 'Insightful'.
Moderator Support
I'm not sure what type of anti-ship missile you're referring to, but aircraft carriers have computer-controlled mini-guns mounted to defend against air-to-surface missiles. I would assume the same could work for these battleships.
Seth
No. Not right. Wrong. 21 is the cutoff for alcohol consumption. 18 is the age one becomes an 'adult' in America and can work in 'adult entertainment' such as topless dancing, pornography, and prostitution (in the limited areas where that business is legal). It's sad to see such clueless moderation.
Seth
Have you ever even SEEN pictures of marine sportfish from 50 years ago?
Yeah, I'm familiar with the sportfish decline. I used to fish in the Gulf of Mexico and saw the drastic reduction in large fish when the Asian longline fishing boats showed up. And like you said, it's not that they were just taking the big fish. They took all game fish and large non-gamefish they caught were usually dead and their carcasses were thrown in the ocean. So the effect has been that only younger, smaller fish of those species are in the majority. Very sad. And with fewer large predator fish (sharks, King Mackerel, etc.), the less desireable trash fish populations are growing and consuming more of the food in the ocean.
Seth
If you spend four hours casting lures in front of a group of > 2' striped bass that you can clearly see in the water and the only fish that bite are smaller, younger, fish, then you'd be familiar with this phenomena known as 'smarter fish.' You could also call them 'wary' fish.
Really, though, I was criticizing the methodology of the study that removes behavior from the selection process. The study assumes fish cannot control their own removal from the gene pool. The researchers simply pulled out fish based on their size. It's a one-dimensional selection process. In the wild, there are many factors weighing on the gene pool and while humans are one of those, wild populations are far more complex than this model. For instance, this experiment doesn't consider that larger fish are more resistant to predator fishes and birds, which strengthens the larger fishes' presence in the gene pool. It also doesn't account for large fish being more competitive while preying on other fish for food. Both of these factors would likely counter much of the impact that size-selective fishing by humans has on their populations.
This experiment would be more accurate when applied to crustaceans because they have fewer natural predators and size doesn't much affect their ability to harvest their own food. Additionally, human fishing of crustaceans is size-selective, so their model more accurately mimics how fishing would affect those populations.
Seth Johnson
TFA describes a closed study of a population of fish. It's not an examination of wild populations of fish or an analysis of trends in wild populations. Extrapolating their observations from the closed population and applying them to the wild populations isn't accurate.
Commercial fishing is performed with nets (or longlines) and does not discriminate based on size. Everything in the net goes into the hold. Any non-target fish are discarded after they are dead. Sport fishing does discriminate based on size, but doesn't have a significant impact on saltwater fish. Also, larger fish are usually the smarter fish that have avoided anglers' lures, etc. which is a phenomena that isn't accounted for in this study.
Seth
There's currently another post on the front of Slashdot today describing an 'Ark' where biologists are collecting amphibians in the rainforest to preserve them until a cure can be found for the fungus that is decimating their populations and threatening thousands of species with extinction.
In this scenario, Craigslist is the fungus, the newspapers are the amphibians, and this eBook reader is the 'ark'.
The death of the American newspaper is one of the unintended consequences of a benign technological development: free classified ads.
Seth