I've run my own mailserver for over a decade. It's IP has changed every few years if I switch ISPs, but otherwise it remains stable. I have a static IP on a DSL line and have reverse mappings set up. I have SPF records. I've registered with a whitelist. I've done everything I can. And still nobody who uses hotmail gets email from me. And I have increasing difficulty getting email to anybody else.
And I do not believe a single spam message has ever made it out from my network. I even block outgoing port 25 for the network segment my roommates use (when I have roommates) unless I'm administrating their computers.
This whole trend is really upsetting to me, and totally broken. I never have a problem sending email to someone with a gmail.com address, and they have the best spam filtering of any email provider I've ever used. The shortcut of blocking any DSL IP is clearly unnecessary if Google can do such a good job without it.
I think a better method than a back-of-the envelope calculation like you've made there is to instead look at the amount of space now occupied by a system as powerful as a room-sized setup in 2001. Unfortunately, I don't have any good room-sized setups from 2001 to use as an example.
Secondly, you are ignoring a few factors. One is that cost isn't an issue. Most of the cost of Watson was likely in software. The software has been made now. Another copy costs absolutely nothing to make. Another is that there are other technologies likely to replace lithography that are likely cheaper and can manage a smaller feature size. I don't think Moore's Law has reached the limit we think it will.
And while you don't ignore the software becoming more efficient, I think that the way you calculate other costs magnifies how much more efficient the software has to become. I would imagine a 10 or even 100-fold increase in the efficiency of the software (though this raises the cost), but not 390000.
I like how all of Microsoft's solutions to this Internet-wide problem assume that absolutely everybody is using their software. Honestly, half the problem would go away if everybody stopped using their software.
You would use a completely different set of private keys for identification if need be. And really, since these transactions are basically cash transactions, there's usually very little need to know who anybody is.
There is a way around this. If you had a currency exchange, you could make an agreement with them. "I will send you 100 coins that show an ownership transfer from Alice to you, and in return please send me 99 coins that show an ownership transfer from you to Bob.".
That way, Bob still gets coins in payment, but they don't appear to have come from you. Of course, you have to trust the currency exchange. But when you're sending money to any merchant, you have to trust them.
I read that after I posted. *sheepish grin* That still doesn't really invalidate my point. But the economy will have to get to be about 10 times larger than it currently is for it to start being a problem. Given my conservative estimate about about 20 trillion dollars of capital in the world, there are about about 100 times that many bitcoins. I think people would be willing to tolerate a transaction unit of about 10 cents, so the amount of capital could grow to 200 trillion dollars before that started being an issue.
it has total anonymity. only you, and the person you are sending the money or receiving the money knows about your exchange. noone else.
If that's the case, then the FAQ needs a better explanation of what's going on. From the website:
How does Bitcoin work?
Bitcoin utilizes public/private key digital signatures (ECDSA). A coin has its owner's public key on it. When a coin is transferred from user A to user B, A adds B’s public key to the coin and signs it with his own private key. Now B owns the coin and can transfer it further. To prevent A from transferring the already used coin to another user C, a public list of all the previous transactions is collectively maintained by the network of Bitcoin nodes, and before each transaction the coin’s unusedness will be checked.
It sounds like verifying that you really did get a unique bitcoin that wasn't used to pay for something else requires going through the transaction history of that bitcoin and making sure no other peers have an alternate transaction history. Is this really what's going on? If it is, how can you say that you can use bitcoins and have total anonymity?
First, a fixed number of bitcoins will not actually work. The smallest unit of value people will want to exchange is not one 21 millionth of all the units of value in the world. It will be significantly smaller than that. As the total size of the economy expands, the total value people will want to exchange as a fraction of the size of the economy will become smaller and smaller.
Secondly, the way the system works affords no transaction anonymity. And for a currency to be 'real' this is a big deal.
I have long felt that in order for any currency to work, it must be able to be 'stolen'. In other words, you must be able to use it to engage in transactions that are not legally sanctioned.
Of course, the identity behind any given public key in the bitcoin network is something of a mystery. But it's not that hard to trace, especially since it's possible to compile a complete and unbroken history of all transactions any bitcoin has been involved in.
This is an interesting experiment, but I don't think it's a replacement for currency.
I don't curse at all. So I never curse at my computer. Or, rather, the word I use as a curse is "Bother!". And, strangely enough, I'm not christian, and am largely an atheist.
I also generally don't get frustrated at my computer. Partly that's because it is running Linux, and I understand it well enough that I know that almost anything that goes wrong can be traced down to a root cause. I do find myself sometimes getting frustrated with my Android cell phone because even though it runs Linux, I do not have the same level of understanding of exactly what's going on. But even then, I know that if I just had the knowledge, I could figure it out and fix the problem. My frustration is vented at the people who made it the way it is, not the machine itself.
Not really anymore so than IPv4 was. And in some ways it's better. One article complains about some technical details of IPv6 that were attempts to fix stupidities in IPv4 but ended up being stupid themselves. Another talks about how badly the transition is being handled. But neither really says that IPv6 is inherently any more flawed than IPv4 is.
Yep, it's a mess. But migration is still critical. The fact its a mess just means that it's that much harder to do right. Maybe if people hadn't been putting their fingers in their ears and shouting "NAT NAT NAT!" for the past 5 years, it wouldn't be such a mess now.
I do, in fact, mean negative utility. When something is a trap that forces some part of the ecosystem around it to pay money to a single entity, that has negative value for the entire ecosystem. It makes it more fragile, it reduces variability, and it enriches one member at the expense of all the others. It is bad from the perspective of everybody except for the beneficiary company, and I would argue that its even bad for them, in the long run.
So, if you think that an ecosystem being more adaptable and robust is an important value, then the logical conclusion is that things that reduce these qualities is of negative value. I value these things, and I think most people do. Most just don't think things through from the long term perspective and don't reach the logical conclusion.
If we didn't have a patent system that was of negative utility, then the organization that owns the H.264 patents wouldn't be able to leverage it to themselves create negative utility.
If you desire stagnation and death, and think that attempts to be robust and innovative should be quelled, then I assume that you would reach an opposite conclusion. I suspect you do not desire these things, and so your agenda actually aligns with mine, no matter how much you protest against it. You have deluded yourself.
I consider H.264 support in any browser to be of negative utility. It encourages the prevalence of a heavily patent encumbered format on the Internet, which is bad for everybody, except possibly a few large players like Microsoft (though ultimate I don't think it's in their best long-term interests either).
So, in my opinion, they just added a freedom exploit to a previously useful browser.
I like them just fine. And what Bing is doing isn't the same. They are not improving their own product based on what they can observe about their competitors, they are selling their competitors product with their own label on it.
Well, it's not really publicly available. Bing had to spy on end users to get it.
Secondly, it's not using publicly available information to improve your product. It's using a competitors product in place of your own and slapping your own name on it. That's fine in the world of manufacturing, but it's not fine in the world of information. It's basically finding a sneaky underhanded way around using Google's search API which they require trademark attribution to use.
Like much of what Microsoft does, it's not technically 'wrong', but it certainly is pretty darned sleazy and underhanded.
And like most people who defend Microsoft, you concentrate on what's 'wrong', not whether something is sleazy or underhanded. I don't like companies that do sleazy and underhanded things. If they do it to their competition, they'll do it to me if they think it'll make a buck.
This reveals more about David Oddsson than Wikileaks. I bet Mr. Oddsson has some friends who were very deservedly burned by the Icelandic banking scandal that Wikileaks broke the story on. And, of course, that means Wikileaks must be at fault for anything else wrong involving spying or information leakage. It can't possibly be because Mr. Oddsson's friends are nasty people who deserve long jail sentences, no...
It's like a domestic abuse case where the abused refuses to implicate the abuser in anything the abuser has done and it must all somehow be the fault of the abused person or external entities.
*rolls eyes* Get better friends Mr. Oddsson. Accept that you have terrible taste and learn to overcome your shortcoming.
There are a lot of interesting issues here. First, the developer could've trained themselves in the new technology outside the company. Would the company have believed they had the skill? I know I routinely teach myself new things when they look interesting to me. I also know that it can be hard to get anybody to believe I actually know it.
And I don't really feel the developer has complete responsibility for doing this either. A good company will encourage its employees to learn new things and provide training. If they don't, they are basically calling their people disposable. They would rather hire new young college grads, even at a premium salary, than train their existing employees, even if it cost less in the long run.
Lastly, I really think this betrays a bias for youth over everything. And, to some extent, it's a bias I can understand. When I was younger, I wrote more code and faster than I do now. It wasn't as good, and I'm a much better programmer than I was. But companies frequently prefer code that's 'finished' to code that works well. I think it stinks, and I think companies are selling themselves short and limiting their own lifetimes by doing things that way.
It is what is commonly referred to as a relevant statistic. This is similiar to how it is relevant to look at how many licensed vehicles are on the road when looking at how many traffic accidents occur in an area.
It's more like going to someplace in India and referring to the number of people in an area talking about the number of traffic accidents involving cars. It's basically a nearly completely irrelevant statistic that has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the article.
1% * 17 (number of years someone is a child) = 17%. This means more than 1 in 6 children. If it were reporting on kidnapped, that would be a ridiculous statistic. It's a scare number statistic designed to make someone who isn't attentive and critical think the number who are kidnapped is much, much, much worse than it really is.
My point wasn't that the number was bogus. The fact that it is is completely obvious. My point is, why are they reporting a bogus number at all? That number has nothing to do with amber alerts. Nothing whatsoever. Why even bother stating it?
Yes, this is true, but how is that number in any way at all related to the Amber Alerts? My argument isn't that the number is wrong (which it may very well be), but that it's obviously irrelevant to what the press release is talking about.
If we were to take that number seriously, it would mean that at least 1 in 7 people experience a kidnapping during their childhood. When you're coming up with statistics to support a position, please make at least a vague attempt to use a relevant statistic instead of some random trumped up value that sounds good?
I would like to know the actual number of children kidnapped per year in the US. It would be an interesting statistic and highly relevant to the announcement they made.
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I've run my own mailserver for over a decade. It's IP has changed every few years if I switch ISPs, but otherwise it remains stable. I have a static IP on a DSL line and have reverse mappings set up. I have SPF records. I've registered with a whitelist. I've done everything I can. And still nobody who uses hotmail gets email from me. And I have increasing difficulty getting email to anybody else.
And I do not believe a single spam message has ever made it out from my network. I even block outgoing port 25 for the network segment my roommates use (when I have roommates) unless I'm administrating their computers.
This whole trend is really upsetting to me, and totally broken. I never have a problem sending email to someone with a gmail.com address, and they have the best spam filtering of any email provider I've ever used. The shortcut of blocking any DSL IP is clearly unnecessary if Google can do such a good job without it.
Mod parent up.
I think a better method than a back-of-the envelope calculation like you've made there is to instead look at the amount of space now occupied by a system as powerful as a room-sized setup in 2001. Unfortunately, I don't have any good room-sized setups from 2001 to use as an example.
Secondly, you are ignoring a few factors. One is that cost isn't an issue. Most of the cost of Watson was likely in software. The software has been made now. Another copy costs absolutely nothing to make. Another is that there are other technologies likely to replace lithography that are likely cheaper and can manage a smaller feature size. I don't think Moore's Law has reached the limit we think it will.
And while you don't ignore the software becoming more efficient, I think that the way you calculate other costs magnifies how much more efficient the software has to become. I would imagine a 10 or even 100-fold increase in the efficiency of the software (though this raises the cost), but not 390000.
It's not going to take 30 years for that system to fit in your pocket and cost $20. It's going to take 5 or 10.
I like how all of Microsoft's solutions to this Internet-wide problem assume that absolutely everybody is using their software. Honestly, half the problem would go away if everybody stopped using their software.
You would use a completely different set of private keys for identification if need be. And really, since these transactions are basically cash transactions, there's usually very little need to know who anybody is.
There is a way around this. If you had a currency exchange, you could make an agreement with them. "I will send you 100 coins that show an ownership transfer from Alice to you, and in return please send me 99 coins that show an ownership transfer from you to Bob.".
That way, Bob still gets coins in payment, but they don't appear to have come from you. Of course, you have to trust the currency exchange. But when you're sending money to any merchant, you have to trust them.
I read that after I posted. *sheepish grin* That still doesn't really invalidate my point. But the economy will have to get to be about 10 times larger than it currently is for it to start being a problem. Given my conservative estimate about about 20 trillion dollars of capital in the world, there are about about 100 times that many bitcoins. I think people would be willing to tolerate a transaction unit of about 10 cents, so the amount of capital could grow to 200 trillion dollars before that started being an issue.
it has total anonymity. only you, and the person you are sending the money or receiving the money knows about your exchange. noone else.
If that's the case, then the FAQ needs a better explanation of what's going on. From the website:
How does Bitcoin work?
Bitcoin utilizes public/private key digital signatures (ECDSA). A coin has its owner's public key on it. When a coin is transferred from user A to user B, A adds B’s public key to the coin and signs it with his own private key. Now B owns the coin and can transfer it further. To prevent A from transferring the already used coin to another user C, a public list of all the previous transactions is collectively maintained by the network of Bitcoin nodes, and before each transaction the coin’s unusedness will be checked.
It sounds like verifying that you really did get a unique bitcoin that wasn't used to pay for something else requires going through the transaction history of that bitcoin and making sure no other peers have an alternate transaction history. Is this really what's going on? If it is, how can you say that you can use bitcoins and have total anonymity?
First, a fixed number of bitcoins will not actually work. The smallest unit of value people will want to exchange is not one 21 millionth of all the units of value in the world. It will be significantly smaller than that. As the total size of the economy expands, the total value people will want to exchange as a fraction of the size of the economy will become smaller and smaller.
Secondly, the way the system works affords no transaction anonymity. And for a currency to be 'real' this is a big deal.
I have long felt that in order for any currency to work, it must be able to be 'stolen'. In other words, you must be able to use it to engage in transactions that are not legally sanctioned.
Of course, the identity behind any given public key in the bitcoin network is something of a mystery. But it's not that hard to trace, especially since it's possible to compile a complete and unbroken history of all transactions any bitcoin has been involved in.
This is an interesting experiment, but I don't think it's a replacement for currency.
I don't curse at all. So I never curse at my computer. Or, rather, the word I use as a curse is "Bother!". And, strangely enough, I'm not christian, and am largely an atheist.
I also generally don't get frustrated at my computer. Partly that's because it is running Linux, and I understand it well enough that I know that almost anything that goes wrong can be traced down to a root cause. I do find myself sometimes getting frustrated with my Android cell phone because even though it runs Linux, I do not have the same level of understanding of exactly what's going on. But even then, I know that if I just had the knowledge, I could figure it out and fix the problem. My frustration is vented at the people who made it the way it is, not the machine itself.
Not really anymore so than IPv4 was. And in some ways it's better. One article complains about some technical details of IPv6 that were attempts to fix stupidities in IPv4 but ended up being stupid themselves. Another talks about how badly the transition is being handled. But neither really says that IPv6 is inherently any more flawed than IPv4 is.
Yep, it's a mess. But migration is still critical. The fact its a mess just means that it's that much harder to do right. Maybe if people hadn't been putting their fingers in their ears and shouting "NAT NAT NAT!" for the past 5 years, it wouldn't be such a mess now.
I do, in fact, mean negative utility. When something is a trap that forces some part of the ecosystem around it to pay money to a single entity, that has negative value for the entire ecosystem. It makes it more fragile, it reduces variability, and it enriches one member at the expense of all the others. It is bad from the perspective of everybody except for the beneficiary company, and I would argue that its even bad for them, in the long run.
So, if you think that an ecosystem being more adaptable and robust is an important value, then the logical conclusion is that things that reduce these qualities is of negative value. I value these things, and I think most people do. Most just don't think things through from the long term perspective and don't reach the logical conclusion.
If we didn't have a patent system that was of negative utility, then the organization that owns the H.264 patents wouldn't be able to leverage it to themselves create negative utility.
If you desire stagnation and death, and think that attempts to be robust and innovative should be quelled, then I assume that you would reach an opposite conclusion. I suspect you do not desire these things, and so your agenda actually aligns with mine, no matter how much you protest against it. You have deluded yourself.
I consider H.264 support in any browser to be of negative utility. It encourages the prevalence of a heavily patent encumbered format on the Internet, which is bad for everybody, except possibly a few large players like Microsoft (though ultimate I don't think it's in their best long-term interests either).
So, in my opinion, they just added a freedom exploit to a previously useful browser.
I like them just fine. And what Bing is doing isn't the same. They are not improving their own product based on what they can observe about their competitors, they are selling their competitors product with their own label on it.
Well, it's not really publicly available. Bing had to spy on end users to get it.
Secondly, it's not using publicly available information to improve your product. It's using a competitors product in place of your own and slapping your own name on it. That's fine in the world of manufacturing, but it's not fine in the world of information. It's basically finding a sneaky underhanded way around using Google's search API which they require trademark attribution to use.
Like much of what Microsoft does, it's not technically 'wrong', but it certainly is pretty darned sleazy and underhanded.
And like most people who defend Microsoft, you concentrate on what's 'wrong', not whether something is sleazy or underhanded. I don't like companies that do sleazy and underhanded things. If they do it to their competition, they'll do it to me if they think it'll make a buck.
This reveals more about David Oddsson than Wikileaks. I bet Mr. Oddsson has some friends who were very deservedly burned by the Icelandic banking scandal that Wikileaks broke the story on. And, of course, that means Wikileaks must be at fault for anything else wrong involving spying or information leakage. It can't possibly be because Mr. Oddsson's friends are nasty people who deserve long jail sentences, no...
It's like a domestic abuse case where the abused refuses to implicate the abuser in anything the abuser has done and it must all somehow be the fault of the abused person or external entities.
*rolls eyes* Get better friends Mr. Oddsson. Accept that you have terrible taste and learn to overcome your shortcoming.
There are a lot of interesting issues here. First, the developer could've trained themselves in the new technology outside the company. Would the company have believed they had the skill? I know I routinely teach myself new things when they look interesting to me. I also know that it can be hard to get anybody to believe I actually know it.
And I don't really feel the developer has complete responsibility for doing this either. A good company will encourage its employees to learn new things and provide training. If they don't, they are basically calling their people disposable. They would rather hire new young college grads, even at a premium salary, than train their existing employees, even if it cost less in the long run.
Lastly, I really think this betrays a bias for youth over everything. And, to some extent, it's a bias I can understand. When I was younger, I wrote more code and faster than I do now. It wasn't as good, and I'm a much better programmer than I was. But companies frequently prefer code that's 'finished' to code that works well. I think it stinks, and I think companies are selling themselves short and limiting their own lifetimes by doing things that way.
It is what is commonly referred to as a relevant statistic. This is similiar to how it is relevant to look at how many licensed vehicles are on the road when looking at how many traffic accidents occur in an area.
It's more like going to someplace in India and referring to the number of people in an area talking about the number of traffic accidents involving cars. It's basically a nearly completely irrelevant statistic that has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the article.
1% * 17 (number of years someone is a child) = 17%. This means more than 1 in 6 children. If it were reporting on kidnapped, that would be a ridiculous statistic. It's a scare number statistic designed to make someone who isn't attentive and critical think the number who are kidnapped is much, much, much worse than it really is.
My point wasn't that the number was bogus. The fact that it is is completely obvious. My point is, why are they reporting a bogus number at all? That number has nothing to do with amber alerts. Nothing whatsoever. Why even bother stating it?
Your theory assumes polygynous without polyandry. The truth is that polygamy is the default state.
Well, I believe that polygamy is the 'default' state. But I think our culture has skewed it towards being more polygynous than polyandrous.
Yes, this is true, but how is that number in any way at all related to the Amber Alerts? My argument isn't that the number is wrong (which it may very well be), but that it's obviously irrelevant to what the press release is talking about.
If we were to take that number seriously, it would mean that at least 1 in 7 people experience a kidnapping during their childhood. When you're coming up with statistics to support a position, please make at least a vague attempt to use a relevant statistic instead of some random trumped up value that sounds good?
I would like to know the actual number of children kidnapped per year in the US. It would be an interesting statistic and highly relevant to the announcement they made.