I can't say that I've received more than a handful of non-spam emails from hotmail, msn, etc. over the past 18 months either, but that does not detract from my central
point which is that unsolicited non-spam emails tend to be of high importance to us. They are the proverbial babies that it seems you would be happy to throw out with the
bathwater. Examples: The random email from an old friend you haven't heard from in years, a job lead from an old business contact (maybe using hotmail because it wouldn't
be appropriate to use a business address from work), the email from a friend of a friend of a friend who saw you at the coffee shop and would like to get to know you better.
I'm sure you can come up with examples that might apply to you.
The people sending these emails won't necessarily look down their noses at domain names like msn.com like we do because, frankly, most people don't care. My mom uses msn because it lets her communicate with her family. That's about as far as it goes for her. Because these kind of emails don't happen very often (esp. my last example...Damn!) and because *so much* email is crap that we don't want, I can see how we might be tempted to completely block entire domains, but that's not a solution, it's a capitulation.
Proposals like the Black Penny project are honest attempts to address the problem. I think it is possible that a trade-off point exists that would reduce spam (by making it too costly) while not making it too taxing (literally) on normal email users. It certainly doesn't hurt to speculate.
This wouldn't bother me one bit. I don't have any desire to send messages to anyone with any of those addresses. Nor do I wish to recieve email from anyone with those addresses.
This is just silly. What if you ran a business or were looking for a job? Would you care to forego a relationship with a potiential client or miss a job opportunity simply because it happened come from a hotmail account? Email is email. Don't judge people based on who they choose to deliver their mail.
Another thing it is is a brilliant ploy to get people to download the Opera browser and see for themselves how much better it is than the competition. It would be interesting to see how many more downloads they are getting today.
There's a difference between opening the packaging a piece of software is stored in and breaking the seal on the cd jewel case or sleeve in which the actual code is stored. The former should not invalidate your ability to return said software, the latter should.
It's common practice for a select group of people to go buy the software, take it home, copy it then return it to the store for a refund.
Fine, then don't accept returns if the seal on the software media is opened, but not the software packaging. You have to give people the chance to read the EULA before you forbid them returning it.
What kind of brain dead store policy doesn't allow you to return software? It's not like it gets dirty or something. (though I suppose that may not be true for all work environments.)
There's always the danger of it becoming a frat boys club, but I don't think it is in the interests of the group for that to happen, just like it isn't a good business move for Microsoft to let anybody become an MSCE. Besides, I said that a peer review should be *part* of the certification, not all. I don't think, however that it's right to shut out all subjective criteria since it can be effective at bringing up the level of professionalism for the group. There are a couple of ways that you could mitigate the risk of bias:
Limit who can be a candidate's reviewer (no friends, relatives, business relations, etc.)
Create minimum objective qualifications for being an interviewer. e.g. Minimum years experience, number of publications, endorsements from recognized experts, etc.
Interviewer accountability. Make it so that if a newly certified person does bad, it reflects badly on the interviewer in a meaningful way (suspension, revocation of privileges, expulsion, black marks on your Permanent Record [eek!])
Again, I didn't say it would be easy, but I do think we need to start making ourselves accountable if we want to be taken seriously as a profession.
THAT is what I would like to see a certification treated as...a minimum requirement for evaluation.
I agree that this is all that a certification should be worth as they exist now, but I think that a certification *should* mean more. There are two things that make a certification more valid, in my eyes:
It needs to be administered by a disinterested third party. Otherwise, it's just a means for company x to increase sales by creating its own extended (unpaid) employee base. Most certifications (unfortunately) are disqualified on this count.
It needs to have an element of peer review. I can easily peg a stranger who claims to have a skill that is one of my specialties as a pretender after just 5 minutes of talking with him/her. Think of your certification as a membership card to an exclusive club. In order to get in, in addition to passing some tests or whatever, I should be interviewed and approved by a minimum number of current members. Got to avoid the Old Boys network though, that's hard.
Ahh yes, but in engineering/science there is something called "partial credit" and that introduces gray areas. I may get the formula wrong, but if I apply the wrong formula in a consistent way, I can still receive credit...at least that's how it worked when I was an undergrad.
Just some friendly advice: if you ever find yourself saying it would be easier to rewrite something rather than figure it out, slap yourself. Chances are you are wrong. I certainly was. Creating SuiteRunner was a huge amount of work. Despite my frustrations with JUnit, it would have been orders of magnitude easier to decipher JUnit's source code than to create a brand new testing toolkit.
Then why don't you spend some time integrating your code into the JUnit code base? The Open Source cause (or the XP cause or whatever) is not helped by having two implementations of the same concept. This is a self-serving article reads like a marketing piece designed to show how clever the authors are. I'm not falling for it.
I don't think it would make sense for Apache to bundle a cert *with* the software, but if I needed a cert, I just think that Apache would be a good certifying authority.
When I want to get a certificate for my Web server, or if I'm examining another site's certificate, for that matter, I look for two things. First, Do I know who the CA is? and second, do I trust them? Apache meets both of those criteria for a large number of people. I know them from their various software offerings and I trust them because they make reliable, open source software. This makes them a logical choice as a CA. More logical then Verisign, IMO.
Self-signed certificates are ludicrous - it takes only a few moments longer to create your own CA (certificate authority, what Verisign is) and issue yourself a certificate. Then just link incoming clients to the CA certificate, which will be added to their CA list if they accept it, and after that your site will be free of certificate warnings.
Cool! Could you maybe point us to (or write) a HOWTO for this? I'd really like to do this, but I've never been able to find instructions.
I've always thought some entity like the Apache foundation should get in the certificate business. They are already issuing the most Web server software, why not web site certificates as well.
I've also seen a great preponderance of text only messages encoded in base64. I assume this is also an attempt to evade filters.
I have also seen this a lot lately. Are there any legitimate reasons to base64 encode your entire email message or are there any standard mailers that base64 encode mail? If no and no, then you should be able to tag any base64 encoded mail as spam, no?
Not at all. In fact, I think your joke reinforces my point. That being, it's easy to have fun with this concept, which would only encourage people to use it. Perhaps you might employ analogues to magic items and saving throws if they made sense for the type of certification.
I'd like to see some sort of multi-tiered credential on a per-technology basis. Sort of like D&D and other role playing games.
So I might be certified as a 3rd level Apache admin, for instance. Your level would be tied to some sort of points system. Some certifying authority (not necessarily the government) or authorities would be in charge of determining the criteria for assigning points as well as the actual awarding of points.
Think about it, most tech types are already familiar with this type of system from their game playing days so it
would be an easy transition. It would also tie my qualifications to a number that job recruiters and hiring managers
would have an easy time dealing with.
What I don't understand about Lessig's proposal is how would he enforce the bounty part of the law against off-shore spammers. Suppose I get an unlabelled spam from someone and I manage to track down the spammer as originating in Mauritania. How do I get my $10,000 from this guy. Is the US going to invade Mauritania to get it?
Re:Science is open to everyone
on
Who Owns Science?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'd rather have Newton, Einstein and Feynman on my science bowl team than Venter, Wolfram and Ramanujan any day.;-)
it is important that they receive some sort of carrot to keep them motivated.
Oh come now...People who do science rarely do it for the money, now or throughout history. I don't think it an over-generalization to say that most scientists are motivated by, above all, personal curiosity, and perhaps a desire for peer recognition, very little else. There have always been better ways for intelligent people to earn big bucks.
Information tolls are a serious barrier to the advancement of science, especially for Third-World scientists. They serve mainly to enrich the publishers, not the researchers. The only really important thing they provide is the peer review process and that could conceviably be done by a body like PLoS.
I do remember '86. The Challenger was sent up because of political pressure from the White House to launch, among other things.
As I recall, it was because the bureaucracy was set up so that engineers were unable to stop things when they had legitimate concerns. We paid for our willingness to unecessarily risk lives with years of setback.
All I'm saying is that there would be consequences to allowing more risk. One of those consequences could be that our leaders would decide it's not worth having a space program at all. This would be bad.
Personally, I'm proud that NASA holds itself to such high standards of safety. Is it overly bureaucratic? Sure, but such is life. Exploring space is not something that we can do in Internet Time. Let's take the time to do it right.
Slashdot Mirror
I just look for a decent cut of meat and really good mustard.
Sorry. I couldn't help myself.
I can't say that I've received more than a handful of non-spam emails from hotmail, msn, etc. over the past 18 months either, but that does not detract from my central point which is that unsolicited non-spam emails tend to be of high importance to us. They are the proverbial babies that it seems you would be happy to throw out with the bathwater. Examples: The random email from an old friend you haven't heard from in years, a job lead from an old business contact (maybe using hotmail because it wouldn't be appropriate to use a business address from work), the email from a friend of a friend of a friend who saw you at the coffee shop and would like to get to know you better. I'm sure you can come up with examples that might apply to you.
The people sending these emails won't necessarily look down their noses at domain names like msn.com like we do because, frankly, most people don't care. My mom uses msn because it lets her communicate with her family. That's about as far as it goes for her. Because these kind of emails don't happen very often (esp. my last example...Damn!) and because *so much* email is crap that we don't want, I can see how we might be tempted to completely block entire domains, but that's not a solution, it's a capitulation.
Proposals like the Black Penny project are honest attempts to address the problem. I think it is possible that a trade-off point exists that would reduce spam (by making it too costly) while not making it too taxing (literally) on normal email users. It certainly doesn't hurt to speculate.
This is just silly. What if you ran a business or were looking for a job? Would you care to forego a relationship with a potiential client or miss a job opportunity simply because it happened come from a hotmail account? Email is email. Don't judge people based on who they choose to deliver their mail.
Another thing it is is a brilliant ploy to get people to download the Opera browser and see for themselves how much better it is than the competition. It would be interesting to see how many more downloads they are getting today.
The best thing about XP is that it has gotten a heck of a lot of people to think about and even get excited about software development processes.
That is no small accomplishment.
There's a difference between opening the packaging a piece of software is stored in and breaking the seal on the cd jewel case or sleeve in which the actual code is stored. The former should not invalidate your ability to return said software, the latter should.
That's all I'm saying.
Fine, then don't accept returns if the seal on the software media is opened, but not the software packaging. You have to give people the chance to read the EULA before you forbid them returning it.
What kind of brain dead store policy doesn't allow you to return software? It's not like it gets dirty or something. (though I suppose that may not be true for all work environments.)
There's always the danger of it becoming a frat boys club, but I don't think it is in the interests of the group for that to happen, just like it isn't a good business move for Microsoft to let anybody become an MSCE. Besides, I said that a peer review should be *part* of the certification, not all. I don't think, however that it's right to shut out all subjective criteria since it can be effective at bringing up the level of professionalism for the group. There are a couple of ways that you could mitigate the risk of bias:
- Limit who can be a candidate's reviewer (no friends, relatives, business relations, etc.)
- Create minimum objective qualifications for being an interviewer. e.g. Minimum years experience, number of publications, endorsements from recognized experts, etc.
- Interviewer accountability. Make it so that if a newly certified person does bad, it reflects badly on the interviewer in a meaningful way (suspension, revocation of privileges, expulsion, black marks on your Permanent Record [eek!])
Again, I didn't say it would be easy, but I do think we need to start making ourselves accountable if we want to be taken seriously as a profession.I agree that this is all that a certification should be worth as they exist now, but I think that a certification *should* mean more. There are two things that make a certification more valid, in my eyes:
Umm...I think he has a life. A quite distinguished one at that.
Ahh yes, but in engineering/science there is something called "partial credit" and that introduces gray areas. I may get the formula wrong, but if I apply the wrong formula in a consistent way, I can still receive credit...at least that's how it worked when I was an undergrad.
From the article...
Then why don't you spend some time integrating your code into the JUnit code base? The Open Source cause (or the XP cause or whatever) is not helped by having two implementations of the same concept. This is a self-serving article reads like a marketing piece designed to show how clever the authors are. I'm not falling for it.
I don't think it would make sense for Apache to bundle a cert *with* the software, but if I needed a cert, I just think that Apache would be a good certifying authority.
When I want to get a certificate for my Web server, or if I'm examining another site's certificate, for that matter, I look for two things. First, Do I know who the CA is? and second, do I trust them? Apache meets both of those criteria for a large number of people. I know them from their various software offerings and I trust them because they make reliable, open source software. This makes them a logical choice as a CA. More logical then Verisign, IMO.
Cool! Could you maybe point us to (or write) a HOWTO for this? I'd really like to do this, but I've never been able to find instructions.
I've always thought some entity like the Apache foundation should get in the certificate business. They are already issuing the most Web server software, why not web site certificates as well.
I have also seen this a lot lately. Are there any legitimate reasons to base64 encode your entire email message or are there any standard mailers that base64 encode mail? If no and no, then you should be able to tag any base64 encoded mail as spam, no?
...Internet taxes == tax on the horny.
Not at all. In fact, I think your joke reinforces my point. That being, it's easy to have fun with this concept, which would only encourage people to use it. Perhaps you might employ analogues to magic items and saving throws if they made sense for the type of certification.
I'd like to see some sort of multi-tiered credential on a per-technology basis. Sort of like D&D and other role playing games.
So I might be certified as a 3rd level Apache admin, for instance. Your level would be tied to some sort of points system. Some certifying authority (not necessarily the government) or authorities would be in charge of determining the criteria for assigning points as well as the actual awarding of points.
Think about it, most tech types are already familiar with this type of system from their game playing days so it would be an easy transition. It would also tie my qualifications to a number that job recruiters and hiring managers would have an easy time dealing with.
What I don't understand about Lessig's proposal is how would he enforce the bounty part of the law against off-shore spammers. Suppose I get an unlabelled spam from someone and I manage to track down the spammer as originating in Mauritania. How do I get my $10,000 from this guy. Is the US going to invade Mauritania to get it?
I'd rather have Newton, Einstein and Feynman on my science bowl team than Venter, Wolfram and Ramanujan any day. ;-)
Oh come now...People who do science rarely do it for the money, now or throughout history. I don't think it an over-generalization to say that most scientists are motivated by, above all, personal curiosity, and perhaps a desire for peer recognition, very little else. There have always been better ways for intelligent people to earn big bucks.
Information tolls are a serious barrier to the advancement of science, especially for Third-World scientists. They serve mainly to enrich the publishers, not the researchers. The only really important thing they provide is the peer review process and that could conceviably be done by a body like PLoS.
I think a late night infomercial with that Ronco guy would be extremely effective [It slices, it dices, and makes juliened fries].
As I recall, it was because the bureaucracy was set up so that engineers were unable to stop things when they had legitimate concerns. We paid for our willingness to unecessarily risk lives with years of setback.
All I'm saying is that there would be consequences to allowing more risk. One of those consequences could be that our leaders would decide it's not worth having a space program at all. This would be bad.
Personally, I'm proud that NASA holds itself to such high standards of safety. Is it overly bureaucratic? Sure, but such is life. Exploring space is not something that we can do in Internet Time. Let's take the time to do it right.