And that's just fundamentally wrong. You can automatically filter out bounce messages and spam. When a message gets through the first level of checking, it can be tied to a customer, so the support person can know all that there is to be known about the customer at the time of reading the email.
If you're sending communication as email, you should expect communication as email back.
IANASE (I Am Not A Superconductor Expert),
but that sounds reasonable. There will not be superconducting wires of this stuff,
at least no wires longer than microscopic scale.
If scientists can figure out how to make transistors from this stuff and use it to link those transistors together inside a chip then we might get CPUs which can massively exceed current clock rates.
The huge disparity between on-chip clocks and bus/memory clocks will increase the pressure on Intel and AMD to push as much circuitry on-chip as possible. The practical limit on that may turn out to be cooling requirements - how much heat is generated and needs to be removed from the chip.
If Google was unavailable for 10 straight hours, that would be really really bad. If google was unavailable for 1 straight hour, that would be really bad.
On the other hand, if google was unavailable for 9.863 seconds per day, every day (which is the equivalent of 1 hour per year), who would care? Just resubmit your query.
What's important about reliability is often not the total downtime but the duration of downtime.
The previous government's Net Filtering software rollout was not a failure. It's simply an indication that most people don't want it. To interpret the small number of installs as a failure and then go about "fixing the problem" by introducing mandatory filtering is monumentally stupid.
If not enough people use public transport, is it correct to ban the private car? Or better to fix the public transport system instead?
It will be interesting to see what kind of checks and balances are built into this proposed law. For example, will it be necessary for a court to find that a user has downloaded something in order for penalties to apply, or will a mere accusation be sufficient?
Who will be checking the bona-fides of the person or organisation making the complaint? Sometimes the complainant doesn't actually have the rights which they say they have.
Can we make a technological defense against this problem, e.g. by comparing Time-to-live (TTL) on the RST packets against TTL on the legitimate packets, and if it is substantially higher on the RST packet then assume interference and drop the RST?
It's like cars on a highway... when the highway is crowded and traffic is slowing down, some cars being driven to a competitor's shop are picked up by a crane and moved back to their starting point, at the onramp to the highway.
I agree; conspiracy and paranoia run through Hubbard and Scientology history.
Hubbard may well have believed in Dianetics (despite obvious evidence to the contrary, such as his first "clear"[*] who could not remember what colour tie Hubbard wore) but I am sure that he started Scientology as a religion for the profit and exemption from income and property taxes.
[*] A "clear" is a Dianetics term for a person who has been rid of mental aberration. Such people, according to Scientology, are supposed to have perfect memory, be able to heal themselves of disease (e.g. Cancer), not catch colds, improve their vision to no longer require eyeglasses, and so on.
Ordinary people would call such a person "deluded" if they believed they had those abilities.
Basically Hubbard just wrote down whatever came into his head, and called it Technology. He had a prolific imagination.
Sorry, but much of Scientology is crap - Hubbard's ramblings dressed up as scientific research.
Scientology claims Hubbard's techniques work all the time but they don't, and are actually quite a good way of siphoning money from the user. Scientology doesn't submit Hubbard's writing for independent analysis because the organisation in fact is deeply anti-scientific. Their claims of a scientific basis for Hubbard's techniques are about as strong as those of the "psychics" who write horoscopes for the newspaper. It impresses people who have heard of Science and think its kinda cool, but who have no idea what actual Science is.
Scientology the organisation is paranoid, litigious, deceitful, cruel -- sharing many of Hubbard's personal characteristics -- and is ultimately a blight upon humanity. This is the aspect which Anonymous is targeting. Scientology kills people, it harasses, it's a bully who will plant fake evidence on you and then call the cops. It drives its members insane - and runs a forced-labour camp called the RPF.
The antagonism to Psychiatry is because it's a competitor to Scientology in the "healing the mind" market, and because Psychiatry, proceeding according to actual scientific principles, is in probably the best position to know what nonsense Scientology is.
Scientology, like many cults, preys on peoples' need to be part of a group. They use standard cult tactics like smothering new members with attention and building up of dependence upon the group. Bait and Switch is used to increase income from services as there is always another course which needs to be done, or some "urgent" problem in the member's psyche which needs to be "handled" (for a price). The auditing process provides the member with the desired "fix" of attention, and the probing personal questions of a
Security Check
provide Scientology with excellent blackmail material.
Finally, if you were wondering about my handle... no, I've never been a Scientologist. But they threatened to sue me, and so I investigated them, and was disgusted by what I found. This is an evil organisation if ever there was one. Calling myself 'elronxenu' is just a small thing; they're very sensitive to the name Xenu and often self-censor it, so they'd probably refer to me in their dossier as 'elron****'. Yes, they do keep dossiers on people who criticise them. Mine is probably pretty thin, as they'd probably consider me only a minor nuisance, unlike a full-blown enemy such as
David Gerard.
One of my first acts at Semco was to throw out the rules. All companies have procedural bibles. Some look like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Who needs all those rules? They discourage flexibility and comfort the complacent. At Semco, we stay away from formulas and try to keep our minds open. I knew our rule book was useless when, as a test, I once distributed some additional pages for it. I asked some managers to read the new sections and give me their reaction. Almost everyone said they were just fine. Trouble was, I had stapled the pages together so they couldn't be read without first prying them apart. Funny how no one mentioned that. All that new employees at Semco get today is a 20-page booklet we call The Survival Manual. As you will see in Appendix D, it has lots of cartoons but few words. The basic message: Use your common sense.
What I mean is that typically, profits belong to those who invest the capital. It's not sufficient that a person be an inventor or innovator, in order to obtain full benefit from their invention. They must also take on risk, such as investing their own money and building a corporation around the invention.
If they aren't willing to risk anything, then society provides a kind of low-risk, low-reward option - a job. The employer takes on the risk of an inventor who doesn't invent anything (or invents only things of low value) and perhaps hedges that risk by making the R&D part of a larger business with more stable cashflow. Or the employer can use any one of a number of other business models.
As a society, there needs to be a way to reward the "small" inventor/innovators for their ingenuity, without preventing the exploitation of those ideas by the rest of the society.
We have such a thing already, it's known as a "job".
You tell someone on the phone your password. That person now knows your password. You forget to change it afterward, and that person now gets _different_ credit in your name.
I think any system in which you, the user, have to hand over your secrets to some third party to authenticate yourself, is just going to suffer from the same kind of problems.
This is just like payment by credit card. You hand over the secret number to restaurants and shops whenever you use the card.
You really need to be able to authenticate yourself without handing over any secrets, i.e. by using some kind of protocol where you prove that you _have_ a secret (such as a CC# or SSN) without any requirement to reveal what it is.
... and to enable peak physical monitoring, the employees will lie down in a tube filled with fluid. Monitoring connections will be attached at the back of the head. Regular nutrition will be available. *Note special conditions.
* Special conditions: the employee agrees that any excess electricity generated by the employee in the patented chamber will be available for use by the Company, at no charge.
For a tool user such as myself, Windows is almost useless because it provides basically none of the tools which I use every day in order to work effectively. And the Windows analogues of unix tools, such as 'putty' for ssh sessions, simply don't work as well as the native ssh run under an X terminal (I use konsole because it allows me to have many
shell sessions within the one window; 'screen' under putty is not a replacement for that).
User Interface design also matters a lot. Focus-follows-mouse, X input conventions, key bindings, multiple desktops and the like are very convenient to me, whereas the Windows user interface is not.
For me, lack of applications (specifically, lack of Windows applications under linux) is only a problem where there is no equivalent package for linux, or where I'm expected to be able to use some proprietary file format. I always recommend use of open formats and open protocols, but the advice often falls on deaf ears.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're sending communication as email, you should expect communication as email back.
IANASE (I Am Not A Superconductor Expert), but that sounds reasonable. There will not be superconducting wires of this stuff, at least no wires longer than microscopic scale.
If scientists can figure out how to make transistors from this stuff and use it to link those transistors together inside a chip then we might get CPUs which can massively exceed current clock rates.
The huge disparity between on-chip clocks and bus/memory clocks will increase the pressure on Intel and AMD to push as much circuitry on-chip as possible. The practical limit on that may turn out to be cooling requirements - how much heat is generated and needs to be removed from the chip.
On the other hand, if google was unavailable for 9.863 seconds per day, every day (which is the equivalent of 1 hour per year), who would care? Just resubmit your query.
What's important about reliability is often not the total downtime but the duration of downtime.
Almost nobody wanted the downloadable filter which the Howard government spent so much to make available for free.
If you don't want to run a free filter program on your computer, what makes the Government think you want the ISP to filter for you?
If not enough people use public transport, is it correct to ban the private car? Or better to fix the public transport system instead?
More, if they don't all enforce at the same time.
It will be interesting to see what kind of checks and balances are built into this proposed law. For example, will it be necessary for a court to find that a user has downloaded something in order for penalties to apply, or will a mere accusation be sufficient?
Who will be checking the bona-fides of the person or organisation making the complaint? Sometimes the complainant doesn't actually have the rights which they say they have.
I agree; conspiracy and paranoia run through Hubbard and Scientology history.
Hubbard may well have believed in Dianetics (despite obvious evidence to the contrary, such as his first "clear"[*] who could not remember what colour tie Hubbard wore) but I am sure that he started Scientology as a religion for the profit and exemption from income and property taxes.
[*] A "clear" is a Dianetics term for a person who has been rid of mental aberration. Such people, according to Scientology, are supposed to have perfect memory, be able to heal themselves of disease (e.g. Cancer), not catch colds, improve their vision to no longer require eyeglasses, and so on.
Ordinary people would call such a person "deluded" if they believed they had those abilities.
Basically Hubbard just wrote down whatever came into his head, and called it Technology. He had a prolific imagination.
Sorry, but much of Scientology is crap - Hubbard's ramblings dressed up as scientific research.
Scientology claims Hubbard's techniques work all the time but they don't, and are actually quite a good way of siphoning money from the user. Scientology doesn't submit Hubbard's writing for independent analysis because the organisation in fact is deeply anti-scientific. Their claims of a scientific basis for Hubbard's techniques are about as strong as those of the "psychics" who write horoscopes for the newspaper. It impresses people who have heard of Science and think its kinda cool, but who have no idea what actual Science is.
Scientology the organisation is paranoid, litigious, deceitful, cruel -- sharing many of Hubbard's personal characteristics -- and is ultimately a blight upon humanity. This is the aspect which Anonymous is targeting. Scientology kills people, it harasses, it's a bully who will plant fake evidence on you and then call the cops. It drives its members insane - and runs a forced-labour camp called the RPF.
The antagonism to Psychiatry is because it's a competitor to Scientology in the "healing the mind" market, and because Psychiatry, proceeding according to actual scientific principles, is in probably the best position to know what nonsense Scientology is.
Scientology, like many cults, preys on peoples' need to be part of a group. They use standard cult tactics like smothering new members with attention and building up of dependence upon the group. Bait and Switch is used to increase income from services as there is always another course which needs to be done, or some "urgent" problem in the member's psyche which needs to be "handled" (for a price). The auditing process provides the member with the desired "fix" of attention, and the probing personal questions of a Security Check provide Scientology with excellent blackmail material.
Finally, if you were wondering about my handle ... no, I've never been a Scientologist. But they threatened to sue me, and so I investigated them, and was disgusted by what I found. This is an evil organisation if ever there was one. Calling myself 'elronxenu' is just a small thing; they're very sensitive to the name Xenu and often self-censor it, so they'd probably refer to me in their dossier as 'elron****'. Yes, they do keep dossiers on people who criticise them. Mine is probably pretty thin, as they'd probably consider me only a minor nuisance, unlike a full-blown enemy such as
David Gerard.
Gamma-ray
Observatory
Astronomical
Telescope
Special
Edition
From "Maverick! The success story behind the world's most unusual workplace" by Ricardo Semler ...
If they aren't willing to risk anything, then society provides a kind of low-risk, low-reward option - a job. The employer takes on the risk of an inventor who doesn't invent anything (or invents only things of low value) and perhaps hedges that risk by making the R&D part of a larger business with more stable cashflow. Or the employer can use any one of a number of other business models.
We have such a thing already, it's known as a "job".
Wubi, which "is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click."
I think any system in which you, the user, have to hand over your secrets to some third party to authenticate yourself, is just going to suffer from the same kind of problems. This is just like payment by credit card. You hand over the secret number to restaurants and shops whenever you use the card.
You really need to be able to authenticate yourself without handing over any secrets, i.e. by using some kind of protocol where you prove that you _have_ a secret (such as a CC# or SSN) without any requirement to reveal what it is.
* Special conditions: the employee agrees that any excess electricity generated by the employee in the patented chamber will be available for use by the Company, at no charge.
For a tool user such as myself, Windows is almost useless because it provides basically none of the tools which I use every day in order to work effectively. And the Windows analogues of unix tools, such as 'putty' for ssh sessions, simply don't work as well as the native ssh run under an X terminal (I use konsole because it allows me to have many shell sessions within the one window; 'screen' under putty is not a replacement for that).
User Interface design also matters a lot. Focus-follows-mouse, X input conventions, key bindings, multiple desktops and the like are very convenient to me, whereas the Windows user interface is not.
For me, lack of applications (specifically, lack of Windows applications under linux) is only a problem where there is no equivalent package for linux, or where I'm expected to be able to use some proprietary file format. I always recommend use of open formats and open protocols, but the advice often falls on deaf ears.
I'm thinking that Terrorists could use this system as a way to clandestinely send information to their "cells".