Oddly, I couldn't get past about book 6 of "A Series of Unfortunate Events," despite the fact that the books are considerably shorter than even the early Harry Potter books. (Though the briefness of each story makes the formula even more noticeable.) One of the major differences in the way adults are portrayed is that in HP, adults can be good, evil, competent, incompetent, or some mixture thereof. In ASOUE, at least the first half, they're either evil or incompetent (or both). It just got tiresome -- like reading an entire book of life with the Dursleys.
The Internet is also everywhere, and contains the sum total of all useful knowledge...
Hey, that's what Wikipedia claims to be!
And there you have it: proof that Wikipedia is the Internet!
(On a more serious note, I've found that I tend to surf Wikipedia today in much the same way as I surfed the fledgling web back in 1994-1995: Read a page, keep following links as they look interesting, spend hours just going from one topic to another. Today's web feels more like a star topology than an actual web: start at a search engine or bookmarks, move to a site, do stuff there, go back to the search engine, look for something else. Hypertext has given way to navigation links. Wikipedia actually makes use of hypertext, so I find myself jumping to interesting related topics instead of going back to the hub.)
There will need to be a 'wii keyboard' or remote attachment. One that can fold up, like I've seen on some PDA's would be cool. But also allowing any USB keyboard to plug and play from the console would be nice as well.
Related to this, how's regular navigation? One thing I've noticed whenever I put a DVD in my computer is that it's easier to navigate the menus with a mouse than with the arrows on my remote. And those are usually designed with arrow-navigation in mind.
The web is mostly designed by people who expect a free-form pointer-type device. Does the Opera browser make use of the Wiimote as a pointer, or does it rely on the arrows?
Funny you should mention CSI. "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" was the basis for a TV series that ran from 1993-1999. I had a girlfriend in college who was a big fan of the show, and freaked one of my friends out once by blurting out, "Homicide rules!" in conversation. Interestingly enough, she was a criminology major...
The difference, of course, is in how these Hallows relate to death.
The Ori will bore you to death. The Harry Potter books, however, will kill you if dropped on your head. Seriously, the last three books have been moving into Wheel of Time territory.
Interesting question: If she keeps writing, but writes other stuff (ie. not Harry Potter books 8-infinity), would people still consider her money-grubbing?
"Harry," said Dumbledore, "we frown upon sex with younger students, especially freshmen boys. You see, this is why we have female goblins and elves around here."
The sad thing is, you can probably find this story on a Harry Potter fanfic site.
Oh, the spam folder! *Whew!* Since we're talking about spam, when I saw the phrase "See it grow," I was afraid for a second that it meant something else entirely!
1. It's harder to extract useful data from an image than from text or a markup language like HTML. OCR is possible, but wasn't worth the effort until the volume jumped up recently. 2. Without that meaningful data, it looks a lot like messages that people forward each other. A picture sent from a cell phone, for instance, or the latest funny animation, or pictures from last week's party, or whatever. The filter is left with header info and not much else.
Filters aren't just acting on spam vs. business mail -- they're also acting on spam vs. personal mail.
Is there anyone out there who seriously READs this garbage and actually considers sending money to these people?
The great irony of the spam arms race is that the better we get at filtering the spam, the more garbage the spammers send out just to get the same return. You can't stop filtering it, because the mail you want would be buried in a torrent of spam. But filtering more just raises the bar for the next round of spam.
Eventually it may get to the point where (a) email is unusable or (b) spammers have to send such a massive volume of cr@p that it no longer becomes a cheap business, and it ceases to be worth spamming. Until then, things will keep escalating.
It takes time for people -- and companies -- to adjust. I used the term paradigm deliberately. Even though Microsoft should have considered security more carefully when writing a network client, they were still operating under the paradigm established under the older, less-connected reality.
IE has been around for a decade. It took until people started massively taking advantage of the security flaws in Windows, IE, Outlook (Express) -- the outbreak of worms and viruses a few years ago -- for Microsoft to adjust to the fact that security was not just something to consider, but might possibly trump the old priorities.
Microsoft designed IE with features, not features specifically for secure browsing
Microsoft (and other software companies, but MS gets the most attention for it) spent years working under the paradigm where making things more convenient and/or more powerful for the user was the most important thing you could do to get people to use and buy your product. (Not saying they succeeded at making things convenient, just that it was the goal.) Security was only rarely a concern, because for the most part an attacker (barring the occasional virus-infected floppy) needed physical access to a personal computer to mess with it.
Two things changed: personal computers are now vastly interconnected. Lots more people have them. Result? Bad guys can attack random machines on the other side of the planet using automated tools. Security is now a major priority.
Bolting security onto insecure-by-design products has had spotty success. In the last couple of years Microsoft has also tried to make more security-conscious designs...and they've paid for it in complaints when customers lose the convenience of, for example, always running with admin rights.
Or if you prefer, read Darwin's "On the Origin of Species"
Remember, though, that survival of the fittest doesn't mean survival of the best overall. It means survival of the best fit for a particular set of circumstances.
We're pretty good at remaking our surroundings to make ourselves the "fittest" species around, in that sense of the word. But drop the average city-dweller in a small canyon with a hungry lion, and natural selection favors the lion.
Radiation is bad but we irradiate people to cure cancer, well we irradiate the cancer cells anyway Its called Chemotherapy.
No, it's called radiation therapy. Chemotherapy uses chemicals -- essentially you give the person enough poison to make them horribly sick, but not enough to actually kill them, and hope it's enough to kill off the cancer cells before it's too late to recover from the chemo.
Is that four drinks every day? Or is that up to four drinks in a given 24-hour period, from time to time? - i.e. four drinks on Saturday night, then several more scattered throughout the week
Because I don't hink I'd consider four drinks every day to be "moderate" drinking.
Buy a phone, it comes with a charger, you charge it. Who cares if your neighbor has a different charger??
When my wife and I travel, we have to carry the following chargers:
1 for my phone 1 for her phone 1 for the laptop 1 for the PDA 1 for the camera
Sure, it means we can recharge everything at once if we have to. But it also means we have to carry 5 items that do the same thing. That's wasted clutter.
Now, if each device used the same connectors and voltage, we could cut that down to one charger. That would be very convenient.
I'm not saying government mandate is the way to go. I'm just pointing out that there's a valid reason people might want those common chargers.
On another note, I think you're getting North Korea and South Korea mixed up.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly, I couldn't get past about book 6 of "A Series of Unfortunate Events," despite the fact that the books are considerably shorter than even the early Harry Potter books. (Though the briefness of each story makes the formula even more noticeable.) One of the major differences in the way adults are portrayed is that in HP, adults can be good, evil, competent, incompetent, or some mixture thereof. In ASOUE, at least the first half, they're either evil or incompetent (or both). It just got tiresome -- like reading an entire book of life with the Dursleys.
And there you have it: proof that Wikipedia is the Internet!
(On a more serious note, I've found that I tend to surf Wikipedia today in much the same way as I surfed the fledgling web back in 1994-1995: Read a page, keep following links as they look interesting, spend hours just going from one topic to another. Today's web feels more like a star topology than an actual web: start at a search engine or bookmarks, move to a site, do stuff there, go back to the search engine, look for something else. Hypertext has given way to navigation links. Wikipedia actually makes use of hypertext, so I find myself jumping to interesting related topics instead of going back to the hub.)
Related to this, how's regular navigation? One thing I've noticed whenever I put a DVD in my computer is that it's easier to navigate the menus with a mouse than with the arrows on my remote. And those are usually designed with arrow-navigation in mind.
The web is mostly designed by people who expect a free-form pointer-type device. Does the Opera browser make use of the Wiimote as a pointer, or does it rely on the arrows?
Pretty much, yes. Judging by Adobe's website, it looks like Studio is the only product that still has the Macromedia name on it.
Funny you should mention CSI. "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" was the basis for a TV series that ran from 1993-1999. I had a girlfriend in college who was a big fan of the show, and freaked one of my friends out once by blurting out, "Homicide rules!" in conversation. Interestingly enough, she was a criminology major...
Oh, that Bash quote. I thought for certain you were going to post "I put on my robe and wizard hat."
The difference, of course, is in how these Hallows relate to death.
The Ori will bore you to death.
The Harry Potter books, however, will kill you if dropped on your head. Seriously, the last three books have been moving into Wheel of Time territory.
Interesting question: If she keeps writing, but writes other stuff (ie. not Harry Potter books 8-infinity), would people still consider her money-grubbing?
The sad thing is, you can probably find this story on a Harry Potter fanfic site.
I was speaking of filtering in the general sense, not just content filtering. That includes RBLs, greylisting, etc.
To take RBLs as an example, the more IPs you block, the more spam they have to send out to get the same amount of stuff past the blocks.
If you want to jump ahead in the article, here are your options:
Gee, that helps!
The only association I've seen so far between Vista and spam is an insane number of messages offering "discount" copies of the OS.
Well, it doesn't cost them more in terms of bandwidth, but I understand there's a thriving black-market business in selling access to the botnets.
Yes, obfuscation, at least, seems to be one tactic they've embraced that ought to be self-defeating.
Oh, the spam folder! *Whew!* Since we're talking about spam, when I saw the phrase "See it grow," I was afraid for a second that it meant something else entirely!
It gets through for two reasons:
1. It's harder to extract useful data from an image than from text or a markup language like HTML. OCR is possible, but wasn't worth the effort until the volume jumped up recently.
2. Without that meaningful data, it looks a lot like messages that people forward each other. A picture sent from a cell phone, for instance, or the latest funny animation, or pictures from last week's party, or whatever. The filter is left with header info and not much else.
Filters aren't just acting on spam vs. business mail -- they're also acting on spam vs. personal mail.
The great irony of the spam arms race is that the better we get at filtering the spam, the more garbage the spammers send out just to get the same return. You can't stop filtering it, because the mail you want would be buried in a torrent of spam. But filtering more just raises the bar for the next round of spam.
Eventually it may get to the point where (a) email is unusable or (b) spammers have to send such a massive volume of cr@p that it no longer becomes a cheap business, and it ceases to be worth spamming. Until then, things will keep escalating.
It takes time for people -- and companies -- to adjust. I used the term paradigm deliberately. Even though Microsoft should have considered security more carefully when writing a network client, they were still operating under the paradigm established under the older, less-connected reality.
IE has been around for a decade. It took until people started massively taking advantage of the security flaws in Windows, IE, Outlook (Express) -- the outbreak of worms and viruses a few years ago -- for Microsoft to adjust to the fact that security was not just something to consider, but might possibly trump the old priorities.
Have you looked at it since Opera 9 was released? It's supposed to fix a lot of AJAX-related problems and shortcomings.
Microsoft (and other software companies, but MS gets the most attention for it) spent years working under the paradigm where making things more convenient and/or more powerful for the user was the most important thing you could do to get people to use and buy your product. (Not saying they succeeded at making things convenient, just that it was the goal.) Security was only rarely a concern, because for the most part an attacker (barring the occasional virus-infected floppy) needed physical access to a personal computer to mess with it.
Two things changed: personal computers are now vastly interconnected. Lots more people have them. Result? Bad guys can attack random machines on the other side of the planet using automated tools. Security is now a major priority.
Bolting security onto insecure-by-design products has had spotty success. In the last couple of years Microsoft has also tried to make more security-conscious designs...and they've paid for it in complaints when customers lose the convenience of, for example, always running with admin rights.
Remember, though, that survival of the fittest doesn't mean survival of the best overall. It means survival of the best fit for a particular set of circumstances.
We're pretty good at remaking our surroundings to make ourselves the "fittest" species around, in that sense of the word. But drop the average city-dweller in a small canyon with a hungry lion, and natural selection favors the lion.
1. The US Government is fighting a War on Drugs(tm).
2. Patents prevent drugs.
Therefore:
3. Patents are a powerful weapon in the War on Drugs.
4. The government wants to preserve the patent system.
Not sure if it's quite what you want, but Gmail does offer POP access and SMTP. They have directions for setting up Thunderbird to use it.
No, it's called radiation therapy. Chemotherapy uses chemicals -- essentially you give the person enough poison to make them horribly sick, but not enough to actually kill them, and hope it's enough to kill off the cancer cells before it's too late to recover from the chemo.
Is that four drinks every day? Or is that up to four drinks in a given 24-hour period, from time to time? - i.e. four drinks on Saturday night, then several more scattered throughout the week
Because I don't hink I'd consider four drinks every day to be "moderate" drinking.
Buy a phone, it comes with a charger, you charge it. Who cares if your neighbor has a different charger??
When my wife and I travel, we have to carry the following chargers:
1 for my phone
1 for her phone
1 for the laptop
1 for the PDA
1 for the camera
Sure, it means we can recharge everything at once if we have to. But it also means we have to carry 5 items that do the same thing. That's wasted clutter.
Now, if each device used the same connectors and voltage, we could cut that down to one charger. That would be very convenient.
I'm not saying government mandate is the way to go. I'm just pointing out that there's a valid reason people might want those common chargers.
On another note, I think you're getting North Korea and South Korea mixed up.