If the researchers can, in fact, target messages that bear signs of being generated from a given template, the spammers will be forced to be looser in generating messages from templates(which increases the risk of garbling beyond comprehension, or being flagged by filters looking for highly non-human output) or step up their game in terms of natural language synthesis.
Much of the spam I've seen already qualifies as garbled beyond comprehension. At best there may be an obfuscated URL that I won't copy/paste to my browser. Spammers have already gone down the road of messages that make no sense whatsoever. I suppose it is because they just need to be able to say they made the run to whoever hired them and perhaps attest that X number weren't rejected out of hand.
It's called "looking for trouble". Actively irritating (and that part can be really obnoxious) a 1.5 ton animal definitely qualifies. If someone who should know better looks for that sort of trouble and finds it then well...call me little but.......
His being a high-profile developer, this part of the rant struck me as absolutely valid despite the making light going on in the rest of the comments:
"So you see this especially in the appliance market where Microsoft will go to a company — off the record as this is never ever done in public — and say 'this product you have there, shame if someone brought a patent suit. So you have two options you can re-architect — here is Windows — or the other thing is why don't you give us a cut on all the free software you are using?'. It is an attempt to create the work that we do, into a Microsoft revenue stream. I don't know about you but that really pisses me off."
The antitrust actions against MS to date have been misplaced IMHO focusing on things like browser bundling. The regulators seem to have no clue about the really evil crap like subverting the ISO and threatening product vendors who use FOSS.
These days many *ARE* getting paid and answer to their bosses for the results of their work. But that is even more reason to have little patience for newbies who don't quite understand what is going on.
The idea is that companies like MS want to engage in patent aggression without it backfiring on them or having to make cross-licensing concessions of their own. So they "invest in" and perhaps "donate" patents to proxies they can sic on inconvenient competitors. I suggest following the money trail of such an equity fund and if it turns out the likes of MS or some other aggressor stands to benefit then file a patent suit against the investor using your patents. When settlement talks start, the nature of the displeasure can be made clear that patent aggression will not be tolerated either directly or indirectly.
This is not a tactic against patent trolls operating on their own. It is against those using trolls as a shield. The "backdoor" the OP mentioned.
Alternatively, the recipient of such an attack can fund and/or patent arm a troll of their own. A few such done tit-for-tat may send the message.
So why not follow the money and retaliate against the investors? An attack is an attack regardless of whether it is done by proxy. That is in line with MAD thinking too where an attack by or on an ally is escalated against the parent aggressor.
That sort of rehashing has been going on since we first started telling stories. The number of premises, themes, and plot lines isn't all that large and would fit in a slim volume. Happily the number of ways those can be combined, sequenced, characterized, and emphasized is pretty much infinite. The OP was complaining of something else. A very limited number of fictional universes and franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars is being rehashed over and over. And when they aren't doing that it is either a "remake" or a "reboot" of something else everyone knows about like SpiderMan. And this happens because the MBAs in charge of the studios want some sort of "guaranteed return".
I don't know if Avatar will turn out to be my cup of tea or not but at least it appears to be an attempt to create a new franchise rather than a respin of an existing one. Though even if I do like it, I'm sure I'll be heartily sick of "Avatar: The New Beginning" 20 years from now.
Casino Royale showed that you could still tell an exciting story with gadgets, without having to resort to invisible cars or surfing down melting icebergs.
I generally agree though I caught that one during the card game and it was still going on 10 or 15 minutes later. How long does that drag on? An hour? I don't mind a little plot and character development but if I wanted to watch that then I would have tuned in to a poker tournament.
And when I commit the crime of the millenium and want to hear news reports about myself I'll be waving my hands frantically around it.....at least until my girlfriend gets sick of it and chucks a pencil through the on/off space.
If the game is online only and 9 of every 10 on the server warezed it then Gas Powered Games is charging for the wrong thing. Sure it is wrong to warez but doesn't mean GPG isn't being extraordinarily stupid. It's kinda like if you mod the X-Box, MS doesn't come and take your X-Box but they ban it from the servers. Even as a hypothetical this really doesn't work.
Adobe were doing well on being the defacto standard, until they found out that their software had to protect against all the inadequacies of the (windows) platform, or be a vector of attack. Go figure; a sort of virus-mine planted by MS. Nice work.
Adobe buys trouble same as any other vendor making focus-group-marketing driven changes to their software. MS didn't make them add Javascript to an electronic paper format.
Most of the characters in the first movies really didn't need much development because they were action hero archetypes: Lovable Rogue, Faithful Sidekick, Plucky Kid, Princess With A Heart Of Gold, and Grizzled Old Zen Monk.......
Which makes sense given the Samurai movie bones under the space opera flesh. All you really needed was a Villain Wearing Black.....and boy howdy did they deliver on that. Where Lucas fucked up severely was fooling himself he was making a Great Epic when all that was really going on is a Few Good Guys with Excellent Aim taking out hordes of Evil Inept Guards and they did it with the best and loudest special effects going. So of course in addition to bolting on Creative Workshop Grand Themes he hosed up the effects too.
The argument is made that way because of the damage that will be done if most innocent people see themselves as potential victims. When the innocent are punished they'll fear justice rather than the criminals. That and the ones that do get wronged in this way will have extremely massive chips on their shoulders. Enough of this makes criminals OF the innocent and dangerous ones at that.
The first three at least work as summer action/adventure movies. Sure the Ewoks were a bit hard to take in the third but these movies weren't any worse than say RoboCop or Terminator. And I'm speaking of the original un-"enhanced" versions. The "enhancements" to the first three manage to shovel in a good bit of the suckness the prequels had. And I was there in the seventies and more than kids liked them. I knew many adults who watched them in the theatre multiple times. But take the fast moving lightly explained at most premises of the first movie and add:
Annoying little kid characters. Annoying mockery of Jamaicans character. Nasty explicatory things like "midichlorians" and trade disputes cgi that doesn't exceed the original effects in many respects (hint here: if I get the feeling I'm watching someone play Wing Commander IV...) excruciatingly bad dialog (or at least WAY MORE of it) A drawn out love story thin political debate
and take away:
Anything remotely resembling a character you want to care about.
Ah hell, I could go on for a long time. Trash up the summer movie aspect with buckets of that sort of vomit and all you have left is something that is for VERY easily pleased little kids.
The nice thing about his fantasy weapons is that even those had definite capabilities, limitations, and liabilities. And he stuck to them consistently. Another thing I thought he handled well aside from the distances and speed involved in space combat was seeing in space. The job of Scan was nontrivial and one of the liabilities of his fantasy energy weapons was blinding yourself or being blinded. And I liked that simply finding your opponent in the first place wasn't super easy.
The Wikipedia article doesn't contain the advice he's referring to. Peter advises using Creative Incompetence if one wants to avoid an unwanted promotion and stay in a niche. Creative Incompetence is an act that disqualifies you from the promotion but doesn't disqualify your current position. For instance, Dr. Peter once found himself in a meeting where they sprang a promotion to Department Head on him. While appearing to consider it, he walked to window and used a magnifying glass to light his cigar then sat back down. Peter called coming up with a suitable act of Creative Incompetence Peter's Bridge. An excessive display gets you fired and an insufficient act gets you promoted anyway. The cigar lighting worked because a bit of mild weirdness was tolerable in a faculty member but not in an Administrator.
It probably is but some worry that the electron microscope big guns are going to be dragged out for their typical case common criminal asses. So the zero pass confuses the issue and further disconnects any random strings of data that could be hypothetically extracted. If we're talking flash media, the zeros are as good as it gets. Only a hammer followed by fire suffices for remapped bad blocks with either. But those too are costly to recover if busting some run of the mill crook.
Except for this argument: Anarchy naturally devolves to government. Go to one a meeting where anarchist wannabees hang out. Sure enough there will be someone there who is taken the most seriously and is looked to for leadership. There are other problems. In a true anarchy, some people are going to be naturally good either gaining followers due to personal charisma or good at getting money* or both. Money becomes power and blammo you've got a defacto government on your hands. Something like that happens or gangs and warlords just terrorize everybody.
Incidentally, places like Somalia pretty much are anarchies. Garden spots they are not. Of course it will be argued that isn't "true anarchy" but "true anarchy" has a little something in common with "true communism": what happens in real application WON'T be a utopia.
This all happens because most humans one way or another will live in hierarchies and pecking orders of some sort. It is an innate part of our psychology so anarchy is hopelessly naive on the face of it. This cannot be gotten rid of any more than say greed. So the question is how best to manage these aspects of ourselves. Since we ARE going to be stuck with government of some kind the question is how best can we keep it from turning into a monster?
Slashdot Mirror
If the researchers can, in fact, target messages that bear signs of being generated from a given template, the spammers will be forced to be looser in generating messages from templates(which increases the risk of garbling beyond comprehension, or being flagged by filters looking for highly non-human output) or step up their game in terms of natural language synthesis.
Much of the spam I've seen already qualifies as garbled beyond comprehension. At best there may be an obfuscated URL that I won't copy/paste to my browser. Spammers have already gone down the road of messages that make no sense whatsoever. I suppose it is because they just need to be able to say they made the run to whoever hired them and perhaps attest that X number weren't rejected out of hand.
It's called "looking for trouble". Actively irritating (and that part can be really obnoxious) a 1.5 ton animal definitely qualifies. If someone who should know better looks for that sort of trouble and finds it then well...call me little but.......
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-15BuffaloPR.mspx
http://www.pcworld.com/article/132893/microsoft_linspire_sign_linux_patent_deal.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3373
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202400435
His being a high-profile developer, this part of the rant struck me as absolutely valid despite the making light going on in the rest of the comments:
"So you see this especially in the appliance market where Microsoft will go to a company — off the record as this is never ever done in public — and say 'this product you have there, shame if someone brought a patent suit. So you have two options you can re-architect — here is Windows — or the other thing is why don't you give us a cut on all the free software you are using?'. It is an attempt to create the work that we do, into a Microsoft revenue stream. I don't know about you but that really pisses me off."
The antitrust actions against MS to date have been misplaced IMHO focusing on things like browser bundling. The regulators seem to have no clue about the really evil crap like subverting the ISO and threatening product vendors who use FOSS.
Except of course when they are allowing their children to die. Then they're generally seen as negligent.
Exactly my idea! I'm always picking sides for the bull, hoping those bloodthirsty toreadors get to run for their life
I also enjoy seeing bull riders get a good trampling, pen smashing, or wall bashing.
These days many *ARE* getting paid and answer to their bosses for the results of their work. But that is even more reason to have little patience for newbies who don't quite understand what is going on.
The idea is that companies like MS want to engage in patent aggression without it backfiring on them or having to make cross-licensing concessions of their own. So they "invest in" and perhaps "donate" patents to proxies they can sic on inconvenient competitors. I suggest following the money trail of such an equity fund and if it turns out the likes of MS or some other aggressor stands to benefit then file a patent suit against the investor using your patents. When settlement talks start, the nature of the displeasure can be made clear that patent aggression will not be tolerated either directly or indirectly.
This is not a tactic against patent trolls operating on their own. It is against those using trolls as a shield. The "backdoor" the OP mentioned.
Alternatively, the recipient of such an attack can fund and/or patent arm a troll of their own. A few such done tit-for-tat may send the message.
So why not follow the money and retaliate against the investors? An attack is an attack regardless of whether it is done by proxy. That is in line with MAD thinking too where an attack by or on an ally is escalated against the parent aggressor.
That sort of rehashing has been going on since we first started telling stories. The number of premises, themes, and plot lines isn't all that large and would fit in a slim volume. Happily the number of ways those can be combined, sequenced, characterized, and emphasized is pretty much infinite. The OP was complaining of something else. A very limited number of fictional universes and franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars is being rehashed over and over. And when they aren't doing that it is either a "remake" or a "reboot" of something else everyone knows about like SpiderMan. And this happens because the MBAs in charge of the studios want some sort of "guaranteed return".
I don't know if Avatar will turn out to be my cup of tea or not but at least it appears to be an attempt to create a new franchise rather than a respin of an existing one. Though even if I do like it, I'm sure I'll be heartily sick of "Avatar: The New Beginning" 20 years from now.
That was spoken like a true meatbag.
Casino Royale showed that you could still tell an exciting story with gadgets, without having to resort to invisible cars or surfing down melting icebergs.
I generally agree though I caught that one during the card game and it was still going on 10 or 15 minutes later. How long does that drag on? An hour? I don't mind a little plot and character development but if I wanted to watch that then I would have tuned in to a poker tournament.
And when I commit the crime of the millenium and want to hear news reports about myself I'll be waving my hands frantically around it.....at least until my girlfriend gets sick of it and chucks a pencil through the on/off space.
If the game is online only and 9 of every 10 on the server warezed it then Gas Powered Games is charging for the wrong thing. Sure it is wrong to warez but doesn't mean GPG isn't being extraordinarily stupid. It's kinda like if you mod the X-Box, MS doesn't come and take your X-Box but they ban it from the servers. Even as a hypothetical this really doesn't work.
Adobe were doing well on being the defacto standard, until they found out that their software had to protect against all the inadequacies of the (windows) platform, or be a vector of attack. Go figure; a sort of virus-mine planted by MS. Nice work.
Adobe buys trouble same as any other vendor making focus-group-marketing driven changes to their software. MS didn't make them add Javascript to an electronic paper format.
Most of the characters in the first movies really didn't need much development because they were action hero archetypes: Lovable Rogue, Faithful Sidekick, Plucky Kid, Princess With A Heart Of Gold, and Grizzled Old Zen Monk.......
Which makes sense given the Samurai movie bones under the space opera flesh. All you really needed was a Villain Wearing Black.....and boy howdy did they deliver on that. Where Lucas fucked up severely was fooling himself he was making a Great Epic when all that was really going on is a Few Good Guys with Excellent Aim taking out hordes of Evil Inept Guards and they did it with the best and loudest special effects going. So of course in addition to bolting on Creative Workshop Grand Themes he hosed up the effects too.
The argument is made that way because of the damage that will be done if most innocent people see themselves as potential victims. When the innocent are punished they'll fear justice rather than the criminals. That and the ones that do get wronged in this way will have extremely massive chips on their shoulders. Enough of this makes criminals OF the innocent and dangerous ones at that.
The first three at least work as summer action/adventure movies. Sure the Ewoks were a bit hard to take in the third but these movies weren't any worse than say RoboCop or Terminator. And I'm speaking of the original un-"enhanced" versions. The "enhancements" to the first three manage to shovel in a good bit of the suckness the prequels had. And I was there in the seventies and more than kids liked them. I knew many adults who watched them in the theatre multiple times. But take the fast moving lightly explained at most premises of the first movie and add:
Annoying little kid characters.
Annoying mockery of Jamaicans character.
Nasty explicatory things like "midichlorians" and trade disputes
cgi that doesn't exceed the original effects in many respects (hint here: if I get the feeling I'm watching someone play Wing Commander IV...)
excruciatingly bad dialog (or at least WAY MORE of it)
A drawn out love story
thin political debate
and take away:
Anything remotely resembling a character you want to care about.
Ah hell, I could go on for a long time. Trash up the summer movie aspect with buckets of that sort of vomit and all you have left is something that is for VERY easily pleased little kids.
The nice thing about his fantasy weapons is that even those had definite capabilities, limitations, and liabilities. And he stuck to them consistently. Another thing I thought he handled well aside from the distances and speed involved in space combat was seeing in space. The job of Scan was nontrivial and one of the liabilities of his fantasy energy weapons was blinding yourself or being blinded. And I liked that simply finding your opponent in the first place wasn't super easy.
I suspect MS will just pay Netflix the difference. They'll do it under the table if need be.
The Wikipedia article doesn't contain the advice he's referring to. Peter advises using Creative Incompetence if one wants to avoid an unwanted promotion and stay in a niche. Creative Incompetence is an act that disqualifies you from the promotion but doesn't disqualify your current position. For instance, Dr. Peter once found himself in a meeting where they sprang a promotion to Department Head on him. While appearing to consider it, he walked to window and used a magnifying glass to light his cigar then sat back down. Peter called coming up with a suitable act of Creative Incompetence Peter's Bridge. An excessive display gets you fired and an insufficient act gets you promoted anyway. The cigar lighting worked because a bit of mild weirdness was tolerable in a faculty member but not in an Administrator.
It only worked on VCRs with inferior AGC circuits. Of course they just had Congress mandate that inferior circuitry.
It probably is but some worry that the electron microscope big guns are going to be dragged out for their typical case common criminal asses. So the zero pass confuses the issue and further disconnects any random strings of data that could be hypothetically extracted. If we're talking flash media, the zeros are as good as it gets. Only a hammer followed by fire suffices for remapped bad blocks with either. But those too are costly to recover if busting some run of the mill crook.
Except for this argument: Anarchy naturally devolves to government. Go to one a meeting where anarchist wannabees hang out. Sure enough there will be someone there who is taken the most seriously and is looked to for leadership. There are other problems. In a true anarchy, some people are going to be naturally good either gaining followers due to personal charisma or good at getting money* or both. Money becomes power and blammo you've got a defacto government on your hands. Something like that happens or gangs and warlords just terrorize everybody.
Incidentally, places like Somalia pretty much are anarchies. Garden spots they are not. Of course it will be argued that isn't "true anarchy" but "true anarchy" has a little something in common with "true communism": what happens in real application WON'T be a utopia.
This all happens because most humans one way or another will live in hierarchies and pecking orders of some sort. It is an innate part of our psychology so anarchy is hopelessly naive on the face of it. This cannot be gotten rid of any more than say greed. So the question is how best to manage these aspects of ourselves. Since we ARE going to be stuck with government of some kind the question is how best can we keep it from turning into a monster?
Hmm. So lets refine the process a little:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/home/username/boringutility.bin /home/username/boringutility.bin
dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/username/boringutility.bin
rm