Trouble is that most joe doe users are not using spam filters. Whilst spam isn't much of a problem to me either (I use cloudmark's spamnet) it continues to exist and grow because the loss rate to spam filters is still pretty low.
What we need is a situation where 90%+ of all users have a spam filter deployed. Indications seem to be that spammers are finding life harder at the moment - if filter users can be moved up to the vast majority then they will likely find it impossible
Which means that what's needed is a good, cheap filtering system that can be deployed by idiots with widespread brand recognition. We've not got one of those yet.
It's a useful fiction. Actually you can think of it in programmer terms quite well. The monarchy and similar institutions are the interfaces while the actual government and other organisations of state are the implementation layers behind it.
This produces stability in that the implementation of government can and has change radically several times over the 350-odd years since 1688 when the spec was drawn up, but the interface layer has stayed broadly the same. This means less disruption all around when radical change is necessary because state organisations and functions that don't need to change during these periods can carry on as before. So for instance as the country democratised in the 19th century the judiciary still continued to act for his/her majesty.
Another nice example of this is the recent devolution of Scotland so it has it's own parliment - which still operates as her majesties government despite the radical constitutional change underneath.
Even those of us, which I count myself among, who think that we should abolish the monarchy have to admit that it has worked and it's going to be difficult to come up with a better solution. We've not has a civil war now, or even the mearest threat of one, for 350 years, which is a pretty good record compared to virtually every other country of similar size I can think of.
Not usually. The Roman army was more like your modern Russian of Chinese army which can be used for engineering projects when necessary. Generally it won it's campaigns then started building for the peace by constructing the infrastructure it needed to occupy and control.
A pattern the modern-day American army would do well to learn from I think.
If you're a business then in Scotland there's grants available of up to UKP1200 for satellite installation. I believe Wales has a similar scheme. No idea about rural England.
In my case I have a satellite connection installed with them help of an earlier version of this grant, which I then network around to neighbours. Latency is not good, but speed is excellent and we've much better bandwidth than in town (ADSL has a 30:1 contention ratio for home users if your lucky - my satellite has the same sized pipe shared between 3 or 4 of us).
I'm living in the middle of the Scottish Highlands and I've got broadband - by satellite. If you do the economics right and you're not too isolated it's as cheap if not cheaper than ADSL in a town - and with more bandwidth.
The solution is to use a satellite provider who doesn't mind you networking and then to share the connection around. Satellite broadband starts at 512Kb uncontended, so compared to town ADSL with a similar pipe but a 30:1 contention ratio for consumer connections you've got oodles of bandwidth spare.
Ideally like me you've got neighbours close enough that you can run cable. Ethernet typically runs out at leat 100 Metres. If you're running farther then either use Ethernet to Fibre (up to 40Km) or a point to point wireless connection (expensive). You might even get by with a wireless lan.
Of course you've got to be something of a geek to set this up and do the administration to keep it going, but my connection, which costs UK Pounds 99 p.m. is shared around between myself and two paying neighbours which brings costs down to comparable to ADSL in towns. We also share it out for free to our elderly neighbours as sort of social responsibility.
Installation costs are higher of course - although if you're a business in the UK there's a good chance of getting a grant to help and you may be able to get neighbours to make a contribution to that too. In my case between all this we got the install costs down from 1800 to about 350 each - not trivial but not impossible either.
OK, from my own personal study - a sample of one* - I can assure you that my own rate of buying CDs has increased by 5 fold since mp3's became available.
Example. I now have all Loreena McKennitt's CDs after finding half a dozen tracks by a random search on Kaazaa.
Example. I have 6 or 7 Dead can Dance CDs after seeing a mention somewhere then downloading a few tracks to sample.
Example. I just purchased a Mariza CD after hearing several tracks from it as mp3. The irony of that one is that the CD has some (easily fixed) copy protection on it!
And that's just from the pile on my desk. What's noticable I suppose is that none of these are exactly mainstream. My guess is that you sample is the 'teeny-boppers' downloading Kylie tracks.
*Aside. I introduced my 13 year old son to Kaazaa a few weeks ago. What's noticable - and without any concious prompting from me - is that he seems to be doing exactly the same thing. For example he was going to get a couple of CDs for christmas but now he's sampled some tracks from other artists he'd heard about he's doubled the number of CDs he's getting at the expense of other items.
Bleurgh. Did you read the post? The point is that it **doesn't** cost anything extra on the defence budget for the RAF to run a search and rescue service.
They'd have to spend the $$ anyway training the pilots to do this work (the purpose of the crews is to be able to mount search and rescue missions in war situations - you know, like ferrying casualties out of the battlefield or downed fighter pilots out of enemy territory) so whether they train on dummy army personal or live lost hikers is immaterial in terms of cost.
Put it another way. If you have hardware like planes and helicopters for use in war then you have to let the pilots fly them on a regular basis. At least search and rescue is doing something useful with the necessary training - the pair of jet fighters that fly over my house on most fine days are making no immediate useful contribution.
It's not quite so simple as that. Here in the UK the RAF (Air Force) run the search and rescue services and regularly pull mountaineers out of accident situations they've gotten themselves into.
From time to time someone in the press brings up your argument about the cost and risk to the RAF. And every time the argument is dismissed by the RAF themselves because they actually want to run the service.
The RAF say that the search and rescue service is ideal training for them. If they didn't run the service they'd have to have a similar number of crews running similar make-believe 'practice' missions - so the net cost of running search and rescue is practically zero and the real thing is better for skills than any make-believe exercise. And of course the PR benefit is immense.
I must pitch in a plug for these guys again. I've been running their Outlook plugin since it was in beta (maybe a year or more ago now) and Spam simply isn't a problem anymore. I see maybe 3 or 4 spams a week on an email account that's 6 years old and has been used in many hundreds of places for registration over that time. It catches 99%+ of all spams with false positives extremely rare.
Trinity, yeah I was really dissapointed at in the end it seems Trinity's handle is emphasised as a religious connection.
From the first film I'd always assumed that Trinity took her handle from the codename of the first atomic bomb test. Seems a much more hacker'ish connection than a religious icon.
Re:The typical progression
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 1
Mod the parent up. It's exactly correct - when Kylix 1.0 first came out Slashdot generally agreed it was the killer app and generally the saviour of all humankind.
But why do you need then quickly? Your mayor certainly and I guess district attorney and sherriff need to be know fairly quickly too, but does it really matter if the results of your 13 referendums don't come in for a week or even two?
Indeed, but there's always recounts and the margin of error is rarely enough to be critical. Again here in the UK constituancies are around 50,000 people and in a general election of 600 odd seats there's usually only a couple of dozen recounts and generally only two or three seats where the margin is small enough for there to be any real concern over error.
Not being contrary here - I'm just trying to find a good, practical reason why you need e-voting and all the potential pitfalls it delivers compared to a reliable low-tech proven solution.
Isn't voting by proxy easier in those cases? Or postal ballot with a trusted family member, friend or neighbour to help? Don't see you need the technological fix for this case either.
Could someone explain to me why you can't just write an X on a bit of paper with a pencil, put it in a sealed box, and count up the totals at the end like we do here in the UK?
I just don't see why you need to use any more technology. What is the point?
That is of course true, however the difference with the earth-moon system is that you can observe the eclipse from the surface of (to quote trek) a class M planet supporting an advanced multicellular fauna. Plus there's always the strange behaviour of the dominant intelligent lifeform to observe. Think total eclipse experience here;-)
For fun putting aside the 'do they exist?' and 'can they get here easily?' questions I've often thought that if you really want to find visiting Aliens and the like then you have to find something on earth that would be worthwhile coming to see - an alien tourist honeypot if you will.
The only thing that I can think of that potentially fits this bill is a total solar eclipse. Although there's some compelling evidence that life like ours can only evolve in a similar 'double planet' system like the earth-moon, there's really no reason to expect intelligent life to be around at exactly the same time as the apparent moon and sun size matches sufficiently closely to see a total eclipse. Indeed total solar eclipses have only been visible on earth for a hundred million years or so and will continue only for a few hundred million more - quite a small window in the history of our planet and something sufficiently rare that it may be worthwhile diverting a few light years to see.
So if I did want to find an alien or the like I'd look in the middle of a path of totality
"Truly understand the creationist position"? What is there to "truly understand"? Take any point at random and it's complete and utter nonsense - for example creationism only allows evolution 'within kinds' (whatever a 'kind' may be - there's no rigerous definition ever given) and certainly not the derivation of new species.
Hmmm. This *is* German science we're talking about here with something of an emphasis of team playing;-). My understanding of the situation was that Michel did most of the work (and had the insight about using a long chain alcohol molecule to enable crystal growth), Huber provided the X-ray machine and computational facilties (important, but nothing that couldn't be substituted by any one of dozens of other PX labs - he was just in the same building at the time) and Deisenhofer was in simply charge of the group that Huber was in - hence all three names went on the paper.
I over-simplify of course, but I think Michel certainly deserves the prime credit.
Slashdot Mirror
Trouble is that most joe doe users are not using spam filters. Whilst spam isn't much of a problem to me either (I use cloudmark's spamnet) it continues to exist and grow because the loss rate to spam filters is still pretty low.
What we need is a situation where 90%+ of all users have a spam filter deployed. Indications seem to be that spammers are finding life harder at the moment - if filter users can be moved up to the vast majority then they will likely find it impossible
Which means that what's needed is a good, cheap filtering system that can be deployed by idiots with widespread brand recognition. We've not got one of those yet.
It's a useful fiction. Actually you can think of it in programmer terms quite well. The monarchy and similar institutions are the interfaces while the actual government and other organisations of state are the implementation layers behind it.
This produces stability in that the implementation of government can and has change radically several times over the 350-odd years since 1688 when the spec was drawn up, but the interface layer has stayed broadly the same. This means less disruption all around when radical change is necessary because state organisations and functions that don't need to change during these periods can carry on as before. So for instance as the country democratised in the 19th century the judiciary still continued to act for his/her majesty.
Another nice example of this is the recent devolution of Scotland so it has it's own parliment - which still operates as her majesties government despite the radical constitutional change underneath.
Even those of us, which I count myself among, who think that we should abolish the monarchy have to admit that it has worked and it's going to be difficult to come up with a better solution. We've not has a civil war now, or even the mearest threat of one, for 350 years, which is a pretty good record compared to virtually every other country of similar size I can think of.
Not usually. The Roman army was more like your modern Russian of Chinese army which can be used for engineering projects when necessary. Generally it won it's campaigns then started building for the peace by constructing the infrastructure it needed to occupy and control.
A pattern the modern-day American army would do well to learn from I think.
Aye, you'll be able to spot it by the blue star on the packaging.
If you're a business then in Scotland there's grants available of up to UKP1200 for satellite installation. I believe Wales has a similar scheme. No idea about rural England.
In my case I have a satellite connection installed with them help of an earlier version of this grant, which I then network around to neighbours. Latency is not good, but speed is excellent and we've much better bandwidth than in town (ADSL has a 30:1 contention ratio for home users if your lucky - my satellite has the same sized pipe shared between 3 or 4 of us).
I'm living in the middle of the Scottish Highlands and I've got broadband - by satellite. If you do the economics right and you're not too isolated it's as cheap if not cheaper than ADSL in a town - and with more bandwidth.
The solution is to use a satellite provider who doesn't mind you networking and then to share the connection around. Satellite broadband starts at 512Kb uncontended, so compared to town ADSL with a similar pipe but a 30:1 contention ratio for consumer connections you've got oodles of bandwidth spare.
Ideally like me you've got neighbours close enough that you can run cable. Ethernet typically runs out at leat 100 Metres. If you're running farther then either use Ethernet to Fibre (up to 40Km) or a point to point wireless connection (expensive). You might even get by with a wireless lan.
Of course you've got to be something of a geek to set this up and do the administration to keep it going, but my connection, which costs UK Pounds 99 p.m. is shared around between myself and two paying neighbours which brings costs down to comparable to ADSL in towns. We also share it out for free to our elderly neighbours as sort of social responsibility.
Installation costs are higher of course - although if you're a business in the UK there's a good chance of getting a grant to help and you may be able to get neighbours to make a contribution to that too. In my case between all this we got the install costs down from 1800 to about 350 each - not trivial but not impossible either.
OK, from my own personal study - a sample of one* - I can assure you that my own rate of buying CDs has increased by 5 fold since mp3's became available.
Example. I now have all Loreena McKennitt's CDs after finding half a dozen tracks by a random search on Kaazaa.
Example. I have 6 or 7 Dead can Dance CDs after seeing a mention somewhere then downloading a few tracks to sample.
Example. I just purchased a Mariza CD after hearing several tracks from it as mp3. The irony of that one is that the CD has some (easily fixed) copy protection on it!
And that's just from the pile on my desk. What's noticable I suppose is that none of these are exactly mainstream. My guess is that you sample is the 'teeny-boppers' downloading Kylie tracks.
*Aside. I introduced my 13 year old son to Kaazaa a few weeks ago. What's noticable - and without any concious prompting from me - is that he seems to be doing exactly the same thing. For example he was going to get a couple of CDs for christmas but now he's sampled some tracks from other artists he'd heard about he's doubled the number of CDs he's getting at the expense of other items.
Bleurgh. Did you read the post? The point is that it **doesn't** cost anything extra on the defence budget for the RAF to run a search and rescue service.
They'd have to spend the $$ anyway training the pilots to do this work (the purpose of the crews is to be able to mount search and rescue missions in war situations - you know, like ferrying casualties out of the battlefield or downed fighter pilots out of enemy territory) so whether they train on dummy army personal or live lost hikers is immaterial in terms of cost.
Put it another way. If you have hardware like planes and helicopters for use in war then you have to let the pilots fly them on a regular basis. At least search and rescue is doing something useful with the necessary training - the pair of jet fighters that fly over my house on most fine days are making no immediate useful contribution.
It's not quite so simple as that. Here in the UK the RAF (Air Force) run the search and rescue services and regularly pull mountaineers out of accident situations they've gotten themselves into.
From time to time someone in the press brings up your argument about the cost and risk to the RAF. And every time the argument is dismissed by the RAF themselves because they actually want to run the service.
The RAF say that the search and rescue service is ideal training for them. If they didn't run the service they'd have to have a similar number of crews running similar make-believe 'practice' missions - so the net cost of running search and rescue is practically zero and the real thing is better for skills than any make-believe exercise. And of course the PR benefit is immense.
My favourite Rutherford Quote
"We havn't the money, so we'll have to think"
I must pitch in a plug for these guys again. I've been running their Outlook plugin since it was in beta (maybe a year or more ago now) and Spam simply isn't a problem anymore. I see maybe 3 or 4 spams a week on an email account that's 6 years old and has been used in many hundreds of places for registration over that time. It catches 99%+ of all spams with false positives extremely rare.
Trinity, yeah I was really dissapointed at in the end it seems Trinity's handle is emphasised as a religious connection.
From the first film I'd always assumed that Trinity took her handle from the codename of the first atomic bomb test. Seems a much more hacker'ish connection than a religious icon.
Mod the parent up. It's exactly correct - when Kylix 1.0 first came out Slashdot generally agreed it was the killer app and generally the saviour of all humankind.
But why do you need then quickly? Your mayor certainly and I guess district attorney and sherriff need to be know fairly quickly too, but does it really matter if the results of your 13 referendums don't come in for a week or even two?
Indeed, but there's always recounts and the margin of error is rarely enough to be critical. Again here in the UK constituancies are around 50,000 people and in a general election of 600 odd seats there's usually only a couple of dozen recounts and generally only two or three seats where the margin is small enough for there to be any real concern over error.
Not being contrary here - I'm just trying to find a good, practical reason why you need e-voting and all the potential pitfalls it delivers compared to a reliable low-tech proven solution.
Isn't voting by proxy easier in those cases? Or postal ballot with a trusted family member, friend or neighbour to help? Don't see you need the technological fix for this case either.
Could someone explain to me why you can't just write an X on a bit of paper with a pencil, put it in a sealed box, and count up the totals at the end like we do here in the UK?
I just don't see why you need to use any more technology. What is the point?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/nature.shtml
Is a good place to start - listen to the Accidental Moon program from 27/Oct/03
That is of course true, however the difference with the earth-moon system is that you can observe the eclipse from the surface of (to quote trek) a class M planet supporting an advanced multicellular fauna. Plus there's always the strange behaviour of the dominant intelligent lifeform to observe. Think total eclipse experience here ;-)
For fun putting aside the 'do they exist?' and 'can they get here easily?' questions I've often thought that if you really want to find visiting Aliens and the like then you have to find something on earth that would be worthwhile coming to see - an alien tourist honeypot if you will.
The only thing that I can think of that potentially fits this bill is a total solar eclipse. Although there's some compelling evidence that life like ours can only evolve in a similar 'double planet' system like the earth-moon, there's really no reason to expect intelligent life to be around at exactly the same time as the apparent moon and sun size matches sufficiently closely to see a total eclipse. Indeed total solar eclipses have only been visible on earth for a hundred million years or so and will continue only for a few hundred million more - quite a small window in the history of our planet and something sufficiently rare that it may be worthwhile diverting a few light years to see.
So if I did want to find an alien or the like I'd look in the middle of a path of totality
...and your $10 or $20 dissapears in the cost of the first support call.
The National Gallery in London has a exhibition on Plasma Screen art on at the moment.l _viola/default.htm
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/bil
You need moving artwork. Like this - http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/bill _viola/default.htm
"Truly understand the creationist position"? What is there to "truly understand"? Take any point at random and it's complete and utter nonsense - for example creationism only allows evolution 'within kinds' (whatever a 'kind' may be - there's no rigerous definition ever given) and certainly not the derivation of new species.
What more can one possibly say?
Hmmm. This *is* German science we're talking about here with something of an emphasis of team playing ;-). My understanding of the situation was that Michel did most of the work (and had the insight about using a long chain alcohol molecule to enable crystal growth), Huber provided the X-ray machine and computational facilties (important, but nothing that couldn't be substituted by any one of dozens of other PX labs - he was just in the same building at the time) and Deisenhofer was in simply charge of the group that Huber was in - hence all three names went on the paper.
I over-simplify of course, but I think Michel certainly deserves the prime credit.
Ahh, the joys of academic politics!