I think political speech is important and should not be grouped with spam.
There are 2,578 cities in the US with populations over 10,000. Are you saying you, personally, are willing to receive an email from each of (say) five candidates for mayor, ten candidates for city council and a half dozen judges? That's 54,000 emails if you're slow at math.
7) Because of the definition of the word "theft"
[Insert Webster's dictionary definition]
It's too bad the words like "theft" and "burglary" are legally defined by state governments. For example, in Georgia
Theft by conversion - O.C.G.A. 16-8-4
When an individual has lawfully obtained the property of another for a specified use, and he instead converts the property for own use in violation of the agreement, it is called theft by conversion. For example, if someone obtains a donation from a merchant under the pretense that the goods will be auctioned off for charity, when in reality he intends to sell them for his own profit, he may be convicted of theft by conversion.
So, if you obtain a CD subject to terms where you play the music off the CD and make no more than one archival copy, then rip it to MP3 and share it across the planet, you meet the terms of theft by conversion.
So two counts of copyright infringement > aggravated sexual assault?
Not exactly. Two of the worst possible kind of copyright infringement can get you more jail time than the least serious rape. It's also possible to get zero jail time for multiple counts of copyright infrignement and life for a single count of rape.
Always important to notice modifier words like "maximum" and "minimum".
There are several reasons healthcare is so expensive.
1. Litigation
4. Poor billing
[everything else dropped because they're all consequences of these two]
You forgot the other independent factor: regulation. While you can build an ECG with $10 parts, it'll take a qualified tech a half day to build. Now it costs $410. If you're going to sell it as a diagnostic device in the US,you have to build it in an FDA approved and inspected site. Plan on having someone spend at least a week of prep for each of those visits, and we're up to $2,980, exclusive of the cost of bringing your garage up to FDA spec. Of course, you must first have FDA review of the design, and can count on a minimum of a month to prepare the submission, bringing us to, say, $14,480. (If it's an actual new design, plan on 12-18 months, and plenty of people have already noted that the $10 design would not pass muster) And don't forget, you have to be able to say, exactly, which of your devices used what lot of each component (in case one lot of, say, 10k resistors is eventually found to be bad), so you should plan on another hour or two of record keeping for each device. By the time you tack on a 50% profit margin, your $10 device costs about $29,680.
If someone gets up on stage and plays music from Stockhausen to Madonna, Bach to Kylie, no one asks "is it music"
The analogous question for aural arts is: Is a violin music? HTML (generally) is the instrument with which one creates the visual experience in the same way tha violin is the instrument with which one creates an aural experience.
Of course, a violin can in and of itself be a work of art, and HTML may be as well, but in those cases it's the instrument itself which has aesthetic appeal and not what it generates.
For the sake of using round numbers, let's say it takes someone 5 seconds to identify a message as spam and delete it.[...] this comes out to approximately 3.5 cents per piece of spam received, or $1277/year
This is why it's hard to estimate the cost of such things-5 seconds to identify spam?? I'm not a fast reader, but I can pretty easily identify a spam subject header in under 1 second. If I'm using a decent spam-filter, I can reduce the amount of daily spam I see to 5-10. The first observation drops your estimate to $$250/year; the second to $2.
The place where spam costs real dollars is administration (unless you want to put a dollar figure on your pain-and-suffering). If-like docomo--you have to have infrastructure to support literally 10 times as much e-mail as is even deliverable, then you're talking about real, identifiable money.
it's more like "they're your guests, and you won't let them help you do the dishes because you're afraid they might steal the silverware
You mis-state the situation. To add further enhancement, it's more like "there are strangers asking for access to your home so they can do your dishes. You know absolutely nothing about these people.
The former is closer. In order to be a foreign student [at MIT], you must have at least a student visa, which means at least a rudimentary check. The students have also been accepted to a research university, which implies at least mediocre technical competence and education. Finally-they're not talking about preventing foreign nationals from doing classified/secret research (which is a whole other discussion), they're talking about prohibiting them from doing any research.
At no time does cylinder count enter into this. Two given engines, one a V12 and the other an I4, of the same displacement and turning the same RPM should, all else being equal, produce equal power levels.
All else is not equal, though. The 12 cyl has three times as many pistons, probably 3 times as many valves, which means a lot more mass in the engine needs to be accelerated during the course of each revolution. In theory, there ought to be no difference, but in practice mechanical engines are terribly inefficient, and increasing the number of moving parts increases the inefficiency.
its a private matter.. and i never said I wanted to KILL anyone when I do it.. i just wanna make a permanent imprint on their mind.. and leave them to live out their miserable lives
My guess is that the individuals you imagine have irreparably wronged you are sufficiently absorbed in their own lives that any mechanism of your death will have no lasting effect on them. Probably doesn't matter-you'll never know one way or the other.
Human pharmacists have always served as information resources for their customers, and even as a check on poorly-chosen prescriptions from doctors.
They'll still serve that function. The part that is automated is the pill-picking. Human pharmacists are, well, human, and make occasional mistakes: wrong number of pills, wrong size, even wrong pill. The point of automating that is to reduce the error rate from (say) 0.01% to 0.0001%
but since they are hits that are basically forced, or unaware hits, how will this increase sales for the product being advertised?
It's the same theory as the cologne commandos in department stores. They know the only reason you haven't bought their product is because you haven't been exposed to it. Any exposure, even that which you would initially consider unwanted or criminal, that exposes you to their product has infinitely greater chance of making you want their product than does no exposure. It's the marketing interpretation of dividing by zero.
Does anyone else out there have the same feeling I do, that the Tablet PC is over hyped? The only tangible benefit I can really see is totally comfort motivated.
I can imagine using a tablet PC just like a lab notebook. With wireless networking and lab procedures online, you could carry a tablet around the lab, keep procedures in front of you and even update a central database of notes. Add a barcode scanner and you facilitate keeping track of samples. Tablet PCs definitely have a lot of promise in that setting, though they're probably of more limited value to people who don't move around every 5 minutes.
I really have my doubts about wether Microsoft will allow "any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence" to muck around with Office documents.
God I hope they don't. The last thing I want to have happen is for some perl/vbs/whatever worm to run amok on the departmental server changing all the "Dear Mr." into "Hey f_;kwad," or random "do"s into "do not."
Nah, I just know there's no such thing as "gene therapy" in any practical sense. The deaths at Penn were unexcusable-a failure to adequately verify the purity of the experimental substance in a project already regulated by the FDA. It's as bad as injecting insulin without being sure there's no cyanide in it. The few people who have been involved in human gene therapy trials are all experimental subjects, no drug company has any gene therapy product, and the whole topic is likely to be moot for a couple more decades. Any bozo can put together a couple PCR primers, call it a test-for-cancer, and sell it to half-informed physicians for 1000x what it costs. That is where the genetic medicine money is right now, and that is the area the panel in question planned to suggest the FDA monitor more closely.
"It's very frustrating," said Paul Gelsinger, who became a member of the committee after his son, Jesse, died in a Pennsylvania gene therapy experiment that was later found to have broken basic safety rules.
When your eyes move across the page, it doesn't qualify as reading unless comprehension ensues
One had recommended that the Food and Drug Administration expand its regulation of the increasingly lucrative genetic testing industry
Comprehension also requires the recognition of context.
I don't quite understand why a big lookup table is an important step for AI. Humans don't play games by checking every possible move and picking the best one and never will.
Perhaps not consciously, but your memory of prior games, moves, and strategies that worked in the past certainly influences your choice of current move. Memory is not to be underestimated. eg: if you want to pick up a beer, there are two ways to approach the problem. You can solve the inverse dynamics and calculate in real time the exact muscle forces you need to exert to put your hand exactly on the bottle and carry it directly to your mouth, or you can remember how you did it last time.
Why is a cell phone more distracting than a passenger?
Because a passenger is almost as aware of road and traffic conditions as the driver and will stop talking if conditions call for it. Even better, a passenger will sometimes scream if you're about to drive into a tree. By contrast, the person on the other end of the cell phone has no idea whether you're diving at Indy or sitting on the toilet.
nice troll..
No troll, Mr Ignorant. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is a book by Tom Wolfe based on the 60's LSD counter-culture. Drinking the Kool Aid refers specifically to the Jonestown cult suicides in 1978. Dropping acid may make you feel like part of a group, but not everyone who does so is a fanatic about it. Everyone who drank the kool aid and Jonestown was a zealot.
Let the voter who wishes to be informed to READ about the candidates and issues rather than having (dis)information spoon-fed to them through the boob tube.
You want to impose yet another constraint on voters? In the US, people are already bad enough at registering to vote that many states have resorted to automatically registering you when you get a drivers license. Voter turnouts as high as 35% are hailed as exceptional. And you want them to go out of their way, track down written information (from a web site? newspaper on a particular day? perhaps on file at city hall?) and spend hours reading about the candidates and issues? The major effects of that policy would be to increase dramatically the number of random votes cast and to disenfrancise a large segment of the population.
Nothing guarantees my right to go on TV and spout off about my piss-me-off-du-jour complaints
Actually, you do have that right...you just have to pay for the spot the same as every other schmuck in the country. Most of us don't care enough about out complaint-du-jour to spend $10k on a TV spot, and I expect you don't either.
There are over five hundred thousand Slashdotters.
Of these, probably four hundred thousand paid more taxes than Microsoft did in 1999.
MS paid $1.6 million taxes in 1999. I guess there really are a lot of dot-com millionares reading slashdot.
Re:Spread of US "culture"
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 1
[the lack of local soft-drinks] was something that got in the way of emersing yourself in a completely different culture
This is the bit that confuses me. On the one hand, folk seem to be very excited about growing ease of international communication eg internet, cell phones, &c. A necessary corrolary to this is a loss, or at least reduction in, "local culture," most of which depends on relative isolation. Sometimes, this means American icons will intrude into undeveloped nations, but it also means that elements of those undeveloped nations get incorporated into America. It's harder to recognize, because you're part of it, but have you, for example, noticed how much easier it is to get good Thai food now than 10, 15 years ago?
On one matter, however, spammers and their nemeses agree: the United States needs a federal spam law
The article claims this... and yet we see big spam houses fighting anti-spam laws left and right everytime they're proposed in the legislature for a state
Yeah, I think it's a fundamental miscommunication: we want anti-spamming laws to prevent people from sending spam, they want spamming laws to prevent people from filtering spam.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 2,578 cities in the US with populations over 10,000. Are you saying you, personally, are willing to receive an email from each of (say) five candidates for mayor, ten candidates for city council and a half dozen judges? That's 54,000 emails if you're slow at math.
[Insert Webster's dictionary definition]
It's too bad the words like "theft" and "burglary" are legally defined by state governments. For example, in Georgia
So, if you obtain a CD subject to terms where you play the music off the CD and make no more than one archival copy, then rip it to MP3 and share it across the planet, you meet the terms of theft by conversion.Not exactly. Two of the worst possible kind of copyright infringement can get you more jail time than the least serious rape. It's also possible to get zero jail time for multiple counts of copyright infrignement and life for a single count of rape.
Always important to notice modifier words like "maximum" and "minimum".
1. Litigation
4. Poor billing
[everything else dropped because they're all consequences of these two]
You forgot the other independent factor: regulation. While you can build an ECG with $10 parts, it'll take a qualified tech a half day to build. Now it costs $410. If you're going to sell it as a diagnostic device in the US,you have to build it in an FDA approved and inspected site. Plan on having someone spend at least a week of prep for each of those visits, and we're up to $2,980, exclusive of the cost of bringing your garage up to FDA spec. Of course, you must first have FDA review of the design, and can count on a minimum of a month to prepare the submission, bringing us to, say, $14,480. (If it's an actual new design, plan on 12-18 months, and plenty of people have already noted that the $10 design would not pass muster) And don't forget, you have to be able to say, exactly, which of your devices used what lot of each component (in case one lot of, say, 10k resistors is eventually found to be bad), so you should plan on another hour or two of record keeping for each device. By the time you tack on a 50% profit margin, your $10 device costs about $29,680.
The analogous question for aural arts is: Is a violin music? HTML (generally) is the instrument with which one creates the visual experience in the same way tha violin is the instrument with which one creates an aural experience.
Of course, a violin can in and of itself be a work of art, and HTML may be as well, but in those cases it's the instrument itself which has aesthetic appeal and not what it generates.
This is why it's hard to estimate the cost of such things-5 seconds to identify spam?? I'm not a fast reader, but I can pretty easily identify a spam subject header in under 1 second. If I'm using a decent spam-filter, I can reduce the amount of daily spam I see to 5-10. The first observation drops your estimate to $$250/year; the second to $2.
The place where spam costs real dollars is administration (unless you want to put a dollar figure on your pain-and-suffering). If-like docomo--you have to have infrastructure to support literally 10 times as much e-mail as is even deliverable, then you're talking about real, identifiable money.
You mis-state the situation. To add further enhancement, it's more like "there are strangers asking for access to your home so they can do your dishes. You know absolutely nothing about these people.
The former is closer. In order to be a foreign student [at MIT], you must have at least a student visa, which means at least a rudimentary check. The students have also been accepted to a research university, which implies at least mediocre technical competence and education. Finally-they're not talking about preventing foreign nationals from doing classified/secret research (which is a whole other discussion), they're talking about prohibiting them from doing any research.
All else is not equal, though. The 12 cyl has three times as many pistons, probably 3 times as many valves, which means a lot more mass in the engine needs to be accelerated during the course of each revolution. In theory, there ought to be no difference, but in practice mechanical engines are terribly inefficient, and increasing the number of moving parts increases the inefficiency.
My guess is that the individuals you imagine have irreparably wronged you are sufficiently absorbed in their own lives that any mechanism of your death will have no lasting effect on them. Probably doesn't matter-you'll never know one way or the other.
They'll still serve that function. The part that is automated is the pill-picking. Human pharmacists are, well, human, and make occasional mistakes: wrong number of pills, wrong size, even wrong pill. The point of automating that is to reduce the error rate from (say) 0.01% to 0.0001%
It's the same theory as the cologne commandos in department stores. They know the only reason you haven't bought their product is because you haven't been exposed to it. Any exposure, even that which you would initially consider unwanted or criminal, that exposes you to their product has infinitely greater chance of making you want their product than does no exposure. It's the marketing interpretation of dividing by zero.
I can imagine using a tablet PC just like a lab notebook. With wireless networking and lab procedures online, you could carry a tablet around the lab, keep procedures in front of you and even update a central database of notes. Add a barcode scanner and you facilitate keeping track of samples. Tablet PCs definitely have a lot of promise in that setting, though they're probably of more limited value to people who don't move around every 5 minutes.
God I hope they don't. The last thing I want to have happen is for some perl/vbs/whatever worm to run amok on the departmental server changing all the "Dear Mr." into "Hey f_;kwad," or random "do"s into "do not."
You may want to have a look at the 'caseless' computer. Dunno how cool it runs, but it appears to run.
I'm not looking forward to staring at Bill Gates' face carved into Mt Ranier.
Nah, I just know there's no such thing as "gene therapy" in any practical sense. The deaths at Penn were unexcusable-a failure to adequately verify the purity of the experimental substance in a project already regulated by the FDA. It's as bad as injecting insulin without being sure there's no cyanide in it. The few people who have been involved in human gene therapy trials are all experimental subjects, no drug company has any gene therapy product, and the whole topic is likely to be moot for a couple more decades. Any bozo can put together a couple PCR primers, call it a test-for-cancer, and sell it to half-informed physicians for 1000x what it costs. That is where the genetic medicine money is right now, and that is the area the panel in question planned to suggest the FDA monitor more closely.
One had recommended that the Food and Drug Administration expand its regulation of the increasingly lucrative genetic testing industry
Comprehension also requires the recognition of context.
Look for /tmp/.bugtraq
Perhaps not consciously, but your memory of prior games, moves, and strategies that worked in the past certainly influences your choice of current move. Memory is not to be underestimated. eg: if you want to pick up a beer, there are two ways to approach the problem. You can solve the inverse dynamics and calculate in real time the exact muscle forces you need to exert to put your hand exactly on the bottle and carry it directly to your mouth, or you can remember how you did it last time.
Because a passenger is almost as aware of road and traffic conditions as the driver and will stop talking if conditions call for it. Even better, a passenger will sometimes scream if you're about to drive into a tree. By contrast, the person on the other end of the cell phone has no idea whether you're diving at Indy or sitting on the toilet.
nice troll.. No troll, Mr Ignorant. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is a book by Tom Wolfe based on the 60's LSD counter-culture. Drinking the Kool Aid refers specifically to the Jonestown cult suicides in 1978. Dropping acid may make you feel like part of a group, but not everyone who does so is a fanatic about it. Everyone who drank the kool aid and Jonestown was a zealot.
You want to impose yet another constraint on voters? In the US, people are already bad enough at registering to vote that many states have resorted to automatically registering you when you get a drivers license. Voter turnouts as high as 35% are hailed as exceptional. And you want them to go out of their way, track down written information (from a web site? newspaper on a particular day? perhaps on file at city hall?) and spend hours reading about the candidates and issues? The major effects of that policy would be to increase dramatically the number of random votes cast and to disenfrancise a large segment of the population.
Nothing guarantees my right to go on TV and spout off about my piss-me-off-du-jour complaints
Actually, you do have that right...you just have to pay for the spot the same as every other schmuck in the country. Most of us don't care enough about out complaint-du-jour to spend $10k on a TV spot, and I expect you don't either.
MS paid $1.6 million taxes in 1999. I guess there really are a lot of dot-com millionares reading slashdot.
This is the bit that confuses me. On the one hand, folk seem to be very excited about growing ease of international communication eg internet, cell phones, &c. A necessary corrolary to this is a loss, or at least reduction in, "local culture," most of which depends on relative isolation. Sometimes, this means American icons will intrude into undeveloped nations, but it also means that elements of those undeveloped nations get incorporated into America. It's harder to recognize, because you're part of it, but have you, for example, noticed how much easier it is to get good Thai food now than 10, 15 years ago?
The article claims this... and yet we see big spam houses fighting anti-spam laws left and right everytime they're proposed in the legislature for a state
Yeah, I think it's a fundamental miscommunication: we want anti-spamming laws to prevent people from sending spam, they want spamming laws to prevent people from filtering spam.