Lizards could have picked up the ability after birds and mammals split off from reptiles. IANA paleontologist, of course, so I have no idea when lizards picked up the ability.
Alternatively, it could simply not have been useful enough for the early mammals and birds. Selection pressure only applies to things that increase your ability to reproduce. (Survive to reproductive age, find a mate, and produce viable offspring.) And if, say, flight or fur proved to be more advantageous than regenerating a tail, flight and fur would win out.
Remember, evolution isn't a ladder, it's a tree. Or maybe a branching vine would be more appropriate an analogy. There's no absolute "better" or "worse" -- just better or worse for a particular ecological niche.
I hit submit too early. What I'm getting at is that the decryption and the redistribution of copyrighted material look like two different issues.
Imagine this scenario:
Company purchases a DVD.
Company copies the DVD without decrypting it.
Company sells the copy and original to the same person.
Or this one:
Company purchases a DVD.
Company pulls the data off the DVD and puts it on a hypothetical device that can play encrypted DVD data.
Company sells the device with the original DVD.
If the copy and the original were ever separated, then yes, that would be a clear copyright violation. But as far as copyright itself is concerned, all of these scenarios are on the level of copying music to your iPod, then selling the iPod along with your CD collection.
Argh... hit submit by mistake. What I'm trying to get at is, the MPAA is trying to slap them for two things: circumventing DRM *and* violating copyright. It seems to me that those are two different issues, as the "copyright infringement" involved is the equivalent of asking someone to transfer songs from your CDs to your iPod. Unless the other person keeps a copy of the music, it takes pretty insane troll logic to decide that it's copyright infringement.
Not that the MPAA isn't known for using insane troll logic, but still...
The MP3.com case (remember that one) seemed to hinge on the fact that even though the service was trying to verify that consumers already owned the CDs, they were doing the actual ripping from a copy that the service had purchased.
Now we've heard that space-shifting falls under fair use, as long as you don't distribute the copy. This is the principle under which it's legal to rip tracks from your own CDs and load them on your iPod.
Now, we've got someone who is oofering (1) a legit copy of the music and (2) a service that will take your DVD and transfer it to your iPod. All copies made under fair use are transferred at the same time.
Now it may be that circumventing copy protection is illegal under DMCA... but does that make it an infringement of copyright?
What makes this bizarre is the apparent belief that the "blogosphere" is somehow cohesive and all contributors follow some sort of code of conduct. Sure, there are people who are all about leading an information revolution, the "never change a word of what you've written" school of thought, etc. But come on... people don't even blog in the same *ways*. You've got people who post little more than links and "Hey this is cool." You've got people who post original writing on various subjects. You've got people who post analysis of other people's writings on various subjects. You've got people from all over the political and philosophical map.
Why expect all bloggers to follow the same playbook?
This post only makes sense if the particular bloggers cited had expressed a desire to play the transparency-in-everything card.
Yeah, that's for sure. I still don't know who my new US Congressperson is going to be, and it's all the fault of the county south of me thinking that touch screen voting machines were a good way to go.
A lot of it has to do with the specific type of voting machine used. I've heard stories of some really bad designs from people who voted in different areas last week, but it can be done...not necessarily right, but at least better.
The machines that my district has used for the last ~2 years are pain to use (basically a click wheel, and the display is slow enough you can watch it drawing rectangles), but at least have some measures against fraud. For instance, activating the machine requires a single-use passcode that's generated by the control unit and handed to you by the official running that station, so you can't sneak into an unused booth when you're done and vote again. (Not that this would have been possible where I was. They were watching the booths like hawks waiting for one to free up so they could get people through the line as fast as possible. It was the most crowded midterm election I've seen since I started voting in 1994, unless you count the 2003 California governor recall.)
Most importantly, each voting machine has a roll of paper inside like the store copy in a cash register. When you finish your ballot, it first gives you a chance to review your choices on-screen, then it prints them out on the paper roll, which is visible through a plastic window. You have one more chance to confirm that the paper copy matches what you actually chose, then it accepts your vote and rolls the paper out of view.
With that type of machine, even if the memory gets wiped by a power outage, there's still a paper record that can be examined.
Bug. Actually, I guess technically, it was down for maintenance. The 2^24th comment triggered a bug in threading, which was easy to fix (change the data type on the "parent comment" field), but took hours to run. So they disabled threading entirely while they ran the database update.
But if you train these messages as spam, and they send similar messages with links, those messages will actually be more likely to be recognized as spam.
What they're more likely to succeed at is not detraining the filters but overtraining them. By sending innocuous text and getting it trained as spam, your filter is more likely to mark normal mail as spam, thus increasing the level of false positives and resulting in a filter which marks spam, but isn't terribly useful.
At least, that's the theory, and the more likely goal. I use SpamAssassin, and I generally train on these anyway. I don't see many false positives, and of those I do see, very few (if any at all in the past year or so) have been attributable to the Bayesian portion of the analysis.
Just last month we learned that Spirit was bored out of its mind with Mars. Obviously the rover has been passing time by trying out its throwing arm on some of those rock specimens it's been collecting.
Either that or it and Opportunity have started one-on-one baseball. You think your neighbors get mad when you hit the ball into their window -- that's nothing compared to what'll happen when NASA finds out Spirit took out MGS with a homer.
Spammers have adapted and many have valid SPF records.
And this is a problem because... you can validate it, know that the spam really came from the spammer's own domain, and blacklist them. No, wait, that isn't a problem.
SPF was never about stopping spam, or about bypassing filters. It was about identifying forged senders at the domain level. It happens that there's a high correlation these days between the two, and in the long run knowing whether the sender is valid will be a useful piece of input in spam filters. And of course spam is what gets the headlines.
If you have some way of validating that the sender is who they say they are, you can do a number of things:
Whitelist/blacklist based on domain name. (SpamAssassin provides hooks for this, and SARE provides some rulesets that make use of them)
Don't send C-R challenges to a sender that you know is forged.
Only send C-R challenges to a sender that you know is valid.
Don't send bounce notices to forged senders.
Block messages with forged senders, or treat them with suspicion.
The main problem is that neither SPF nor DomainKeys has reached critical mass. Not enough places have implemented them, and implemented them strictly, for it to be worth checking. Not enough places are checking for it to be worth implementing.
Part of it is inertia. And there are still two main problems: forwarding services and road warriors. Both have solutions. You can have an SPF-aware forwarder, or one which implements DomainKeys. You can set up SMTP-AUTH on the submission port and remote users should theoretically be able to send using the home server (unless the network is brain-dead and blocks port 587 in addition to 25. And I have no doubt that they exist).
Whether SPF will prove useful in the long run is, I think, still up in the air. But saying that it's useless because spammers have "adapted" to it is missing the point.
But one thing they cannot change is their IP addresses.
Sure they can. They've got access to botnets of random compromised PCs sitting in homes and offices around the world. If they find one being blocked too much, all they have to do is send the commands to another one. It's legit mailers, who have anywhere from one to a few dozen outgoing servers (depending on the size of the organization) who can't change their IPs.
I wrote a script to parse my mail and save the IP addresses (or more precisely, their first two numbers - e.g., 213.186) that appear in spam messages, but not in normal ones.
The list you're putting together is probably mostly a mix of spam-friendly ISPs and residential/small business DSL/cable IP blocks. The reason you're not seeing many false positives is that most legit home users send through their ISP's mail server rather than directly to you, so you don't see that their IP is on your list.
I often get email that contains no advertising, contains no links, has no attachments, but is definitely not written by a human and does not convey any useful information. Often this is in the form of a short story.
In addition to the bayes poisoning explanation goofy183 posted, I suspect that some of them started out as the distraction portion of an image-based spam, but the attached images were either stripped out by a relay or left off in the first place by broken spam software (like the stuff you used to see from time to time from %RNDUSER advertising %RNDADJECTIVE %RNDNOUN).
You don't have the Mac developers to fix-up Firefox? Do you guys even talk to the Camino team? Even if you just borrowed Keychain support from them, Firefox would be a huge improvement on the Mac.
Josh Aas is a Camino developer who has crossed over to working on Mac integration for Firefox, as well as the shared codebase used by both browsers. Not surprisingly, a lot of the interesting stuff missed Firefox 2 and is going into Firefox 3.
A quick look at older articles shows that they're still threaded. Will this story be threaded again once threading is enabled or is it doomed to be flat forever?
If I understand the situation correctly, each comment has a field that identifies the parent comment. That field is the one that broke and is being fixed today. What Slashdot is doing during the update is just disabling the ability to post replies to comments.
All the older comments have threading information on them, so they can be displayed properly threaded. But if you look at an article from yesterday, you'll see the "Reply to this comment" links are missing. Everything being posted today, however, is being posted as if it were the start of a new thread.
When Slashdot turns threading back on, new comments to this article will probably be threaded... but the first few hundred posts will stay flat unless someone with access feels like manually tracking down parent comments and updating the DB themselves.
Someone above asked about RPMs for Fedora Core. It turns out that Fedora is skipping Firefox 2. They'll stick with the 1.5 updates for now, and upgrade to Firefox 3 when it's released.
This may prove to be a bit of a problem, though, since Firefox 1.5 is only being supported through April 2007, and Firefox 3 isn't scheduled to be released until May. Fedora Core 7 doesn't have a release schedule yet, but based on past trends it'll probably be next summer, giving them plenty of time to pull in Firefox 3.
This leaves them with a choice between jumping from Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 3 in the middle of the release, or backporting security fixes from April on to Fedora 6's EOL.
Anyone wanting to run Firefox 2 on Fedora Core will probably want to just grab the installer from Mozilla and install into/usr/local or someplace. Though if you go back to that first link, they're apparently trying to settle on a general recommendation, either by providing a separate Firefox 2 RPM or getting Firefox 2 into Fedora Extras. Either way, this will probably only help with Fedora Core 5 and 6.
I take it you missed the opening paragraphs of the article, including this choice bit:
That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.
Anyone who has been following spam efforts will have encountered the phrase "Joe Job." It refers to a spam campaign engineered to look like someone else is sending it, for the express purpose of damaging the victim's reputation.
As an example, someone might send out a spam campaign claiming to be Slashdot and encouraging pirates, hackers (banking on the public perception of "hacker"), and pornographers to drop by. Result: People see the spam, think that Slashdot is a haven for pirates, hackers and pornographers, *and* they think Slashdot is spamming.
Since telemarketing and spamming are more or less the same job, it makes sense that dirty tricks from one field would cross over into the other.
I think I'd give this article a bit more credibility if the author wasn't so dead set on demonstrating global warming was evidence of a UN conspiracy to take over the world.
Even if global warming does turn out to be wrong, there are *plenty* of ways for scientists to reach an incorrect consensus without resorting to black helicopters and secret cabals.
It's really annoying that politics has become so wrapped up in both sides of what should be a purely scientific issue.
I'll leave reviews of the science in the article to those more knowledgeable in the area than I am.
When they finally delivered a Windows version it was crap. I crashed it in the first 15 mins of use.
I remember spending ~90 minutes on the phone with WordPerfect tech support trying to solve the problem where WP would crash whenever I tried to run a spell check. It wasn't resolved until the next version of the software.
WordPerfect 5 was a fantastic DOS app. But they bungled the transition to Windows terribly. By the time they had a decent release, 2 or 3 versions had gone by, the software had changed hands at least once (Novell, interestingly) if not twice (Corel), Microsoft Word was firmly entrenched, and everyone was expecting full-up office suites, not stand-alone word processors.
They could buy the Mozilla Corporation or the Mozilla Foundation.
They could hire the developers.
But they can't buy the product. The entire codebase is out there, and already licensed such that even if Microsoft bought all the rights to the code, other projects like Flock, Iceweasel, K-Meleon, and such could go right on using it.
Nope. The official recommendation from Microsoft is -- and I'm not kidding -- to run older versions of Internet Explorer in a virtual machine. Seriously. This, of course, means that if you're using a Windows XP image in your VM, you need to either not run any updates on it or install the IE7 blocker on it.
On the plus side, Virtual PC is now free, though it claims that it won't run on Windows XP Home (I haven't tried yet). But it's still massive overkill just to run the occasional website on another web rendering engine.
Go to the Control Panel, then open Add or Remove Programs. Look for "Windows Internet Explorer 7" and uninstall it. (In the unlikely even that you can't see it, you might have to check the "Show updates" box.) Uninstalling will leave the system with IE6.
Sorry, were you expecting something more complicated?
Procedure for stable Firefox 2: Export bookmarks as a file, Uninstall, Delete profile, cache and installation directories/files. Install, import bookmarks from file but import no other settings, make settings (none undocumented), do not install themes, use only current extensions and a minimum of them. Works perfectly.
Slashdot Mirror
Lizards could have picked up the ability after birds and mammals split off from reptiles. IANA paleontologist, of course, so I have no idea when lizards picked up the ability.
Alternatively, it could simply not have been useful enough for the early mammals and birds. Selection pressure only applies to things that increase your ability to reproduce. (Survive to reproductive age, find a mate, and produce viable offspring.) And if, say, flight or fur proved to be more advantageous than regenerating a tail, flight and fur would win out.
Remember, evolution isn't a ladder, it's a tree. Or maybe a branching vine would be more appropriate an analogy. There's no absolute "better" or "worse" -- just better or worse for a particular ecological niche.
Interesting. It hadn't occurred to me (though I suppose it should have) that audio and video works would be subject to different legal conditions.
I hit submit too early. What I'm getting at is that the decryption and the redistribution of copyrighted material look like two different issues.
Imagine this scenario:
Company purchases a DVD.
Company copies the DVD without decrypting it.
Company sells the copy and original to the same person.
Or this one:
Company purchases a DVD.
Company pulls the data off the DVD and puts it on a hypothetical device that can play encrypted DVD data.
Company sells the device with the original DVD.
If the copy and the original were ever separated, then yes, that would be a clear copyright violation. But as far as copyright itself is concerned, all of these scenarios are on the level of copying music to your iPod, then selling the iPod along with your CD collection.
The only difference is the decryption.
Argh... hit submit by mistake. What I'm trying to get at is, the MPAA is trying to slap them for two things: circumventing DRM *and* violating copyright. It seems to me that those are two different issues, as the "copyright infringement" involved is the equivalent of asking someone to transfer songs from your CDs to your iPod. Unless the other person keeps a copy of the music, it takes pretty insane troll logic to decide that it's copyright infringement.
Not that the MPAA isn't known for using insane troll logic, but still...
The MP3.com case (remember that one) seemed to hinge on the fact that even though the service was trying to verify that consumers already owned the CDs, they were doing the actual ripping from a copy that the service had purchased.
Now we've heard that space-shifting falls under fair use, as long as you don't distribute the copy. This is the principle under which it's legal to rip tracks from your own CDs and load them on your iPod.
Now, we've got someone who is oofering (1) a legit copy of the music and (2) a service that will take your DVD and transfer it to your iPod. All copies made under fair use are transferred at the same time.
Now it may be that circumventing copy protection is illegal under DMCA... but does that make it an infringement of copyright?
What makes this bizarre is the apparent belief that the "blogosphere" is somehow cohesive and all contributors follow some sort of code of conduct. Sure, there are people who are all about leading an information revolution, the "never change a word of what you've written" school of thought, etc. But come on... people don't even blog in the same *ways*. You've got people who post little more than links and "Hey this is cool." You've got people who post original writing on various subjects. You've got people who post analysis of other people's writings on various subjects. You've got people from all over the political and philosophical map.
Why expect all bloggers to follow the same playbook?
This post only makes sense if the particular bloggers cited had expressed a desire to play the transparency-in-everything card.
A lot of it has to do with the specific type of voting machine used. I've heard stories of some really bad designs from people who voted in different areas last week, but it can be done...not necessarily right, but at least better.
The machines that my district has used for the last ~2 years are pain to use (basically a click wheel, and the display is slow enough you can watch it drawing rectangles), but at least have some measures against fraud. For instance, activating the machine requires a single-use passcode that's generated by the control unit and handed to you by the official running that station, so you can't sneak into an unused booth when you're done and vote again. (Not that this would have been possible where I was. They were watching the booths like hawks waiting for one to free up so they could get people through the line as fast as possible. It was the most crowded midterm election I've seen since I started voting in 1994, unless you count the 2003 California governor recall.)
Most importantly, each voting machine has a roll of paper inside like the store copy in a cash register. When you finish your ballot, it first gives you a chance to review your choices on-screen, then it prints them out on the paper roll, which is visible through a plastic window. You have one more chance to confirm that the paper copy matches what you actually chose, then it accepts your vote and rolls the paper out of view.
With that type of machine, even if the memory gets wiped by a power outage, there's still a paper record that can be examined.
Bug. Actually, I guess technically, it was down for maintenance. The 2^24th comment triggered a bug in threading, which was easy to fix (change the data type on the "parent comment" field), but took hours to run. So they disabled threading entirely while they ran the database update.
But if you train these messages as spam, and they send similar messages with links, those messages will actually be more likely to be recognized as spam.
What they're more likely to succeed at is not detraining the filters but overtraining them. By sending innocuous text and getting it trained as spam, your filter is more likely to mark normal mail as spam, thus increasing the level of false positives and resulting in a filter which marks spam, but isn't terribly useful.
At least, that's the theory, and the more likely goal. I use SpamAssassin, and I generally train on these anyway. I don't see many false positives, and of those I do see, very few (if any at all in the past year or so) have been attributable to the Bayesian portion of the analysis.
YMMV.
Just last month we learned that Spirit was bored out of its mind with Mars. Obviously the rover has been passing time by trying out its throwing arm on some of those rock specimens it's been collecting.
Either that or it and Opportunity have started one-on-one baseball. You think your neighbors get mad when you hit the ball into their window -- that's nothing compared to what'll happen when NASA finds out Spirit took out MGS with a homer.
And this is a problem because... you can validate it, know that the spam really came from the spammer's own domain, and blacklist them. No, wait, that isn't a problem.
SPF was never about stopping spam, or about bypassing filters. It was about identifying forged senders at the domain level. It happens that there's a high correlation these days between the two, and in the long run knowing whether the sender is valid will be a useful piece of input in spam filters. And of course spam is what gets the headlines.
If you have some way of validating that the sender is who they say they are, you can do a number of things:
The main problem is that neither SPF nor DomainKeys has reached critical mass. Not enough places have implemented them, and implemented them strictly, for it to be worth checking. Not enough places are checking for it to be worth implementing.
Part of it is inertia. And there are still two main problems: forwarding services and road warriors. Both have solutions. You can have an SPF-aware forwarder, or one which implements DomainKeys. You can set up SMTP-AUTH on the submission port and remote users should theoretically be able to send using the home server (unless the network is brain-dead and blocks port 587 in addition to 25. And I have no doubt that they exist).
Whether SPF will prove useful in the long run is, I think, still up in the air. But saying that it's useless because spammers have "adapted" to it is missing the point.
Sure they can. They've got access to botnets of random compromised PCs sitting in homes and offices around the world. If they find one being blocked too much, all they have to do is send the commands to another one. It's legit mailers, who have anywhere from one to a few dozen outgoing servers (depending on the size of the organization) who can't change their IPs.
The list you're putting together is probably mostly a mix of spam-friendly ISPs and residential/small business DSL/cable IP blocks. The reason you're not seeing many false positives is that most legit home users send through their ISP's mail server rather than directly to you, so you don't see that their IP is on your list.
Parent
In addition to the bayes poisoning explanation goofy183 posted, I suspect that some of them started out as the distraction portion of an image-based spam, but the attached images were either stripped out by a relay or left off in the first place by broken spam software (like the stuff you used to see from time to time from %RNDUSER advertising %RNDADJECTIVE %RNDNOUN).
Parent
Josh Aas is a Camino developer who has crossed over to working on Mac integration for Firefox, as well as the shared codebase used by both browsers. Not surprisingly, a lot of the interesting stuff missed Firefox 2 and is going into Firefox 3.
Parent
Replying to comment #16787077 by Equis:
If I understand the situation correctly, each comment has a field that identifies the parent comment. That field is the one that broke and is being fixed today. What Slashdot is doing during the update is just disabling the ability to post replies to comments.
All the older comments have threading information on them, so they can be displayed properly threaded. But if you look at an article from yesterday, you'll see the "Reply to this comment" links are missing. Everything being posted today, however, is being posted as if it were the start of a new thread.
When Slashdot turns threading back on, new comments to this article will probably be threaded... but the first few hundred posts will stay flat unless someone with access feels like manually tracking down parent comments and updating the DB themselves.
Someone above asked about RPMs for Fedora Core. It turns out that Fedora is skipping Firefox 2. They'll stick with the 1.5 updates for now, and upgrade to Firefox 3 when it's released.
/usr/local or someplace. Though if you go back to that first link, they're apparently trying to settle on a general recommendation, either by providing a separate Firefox 2 RPM or getting Firefox 2 into Fedora Extras. Either way, this will probably only help with Fedora Core 5 and 6.
This may prove to be a bit of a problem, though, since Firefox 1.5 is only being supported through April 2007, and Firefox 3 isn't scheduled to be released until May. Fedora Core 7 doesn't have a release schedule yet, but based on past trends it'll probably be next summer, giving them plenty of time to pull in Firefox 3.
This leaves them with a choice between jumping from Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 3 in the middle of the release, or backporting security fixes from April on to Fedora 6's EOL.
Anyone wanting to run Firefox 2 on Fedora Core will probably want to just grab the installer from Mozilla and install into
I take it you missed the opening paragraphs of the article, including this choice bit:
Anyone who has been following spam efforts will have encountered the phrase "Joe Job." It refers to a spam campaign engineered to look like someone else is sending it, for the express purpose of damaging the victim's reputation.
As an example, someone might send out a spam campaign claiming to be Slashdot and encouraging pirates, hackers (banking on the public perception of "hacker"), and pornographers to drop by. Result: People see the spam, think that Slashdot is a haven for pirates, hackers and pornographers, *and* they think Slashdot is spamming.
Since telemarketing and spamming are more or less the same job, it makes sense that dirty tricks from one field would cross over into the other.
I think I'd give this article a bit more credibility if the author wasn't so dead set on demonstrating global warming was evidence of a UN conspiracy to take over the world.
Even if global warming does turn out to be wrong, there are *plenty* of ways for scientists to reach an incorrect consensus without resorting to black helicopters and secret cabals.
It's really annoying that politics has become so wrapped up in both sides of what should be a purely scientific issue.
I'll leave reviews of the science in the article to those more knowledgeable in the area than I am.
It was only recently confirmed that Warren Ellis is writing a Castlevania animated film.
Did the owners sell the live-action and animated movie rights to different people at the same time?
I remember spending ~90 minutes on the phone with WordPerfect tech support trying to solve the problem where WP would crash whenever I tried to run a spell check. It wasn't resolved until the next version of the software.
WordPerfect 5 was a fantastic DOS app. But they bungled the transition to Windows terribly. By the time they had a decent release, 2 or 3 versions had gone by, the software had changed hands at least once (Novell, interestingly) if not twice (Corel), Microsoft Word was firmly entrenched, and everyone was expecting full-up office suites, not stand-alone word processors.
What would they buy?
They could buy the trademarks.
They could buy the offices.
They could buy the Mozilla Corporation or the Mozilla Foundation.
They could hire the developers.
But they can't buy the product. The entire codebase is out there, and already licensed such that even if Microsoft bought all the rights to the code, other projects like Flock, Iceweasel, K-Meleon, and such could go right on using it.
Nope. The official recommendation from Microsoft is -- and I'm not kidding -- to run older versions of Internet Explorer in a virtual machine. Seriously. This, of course, means that if you're using a Windows XP image in your VM, you need to either not run any updates on it or install the IE7 blocker on it.
On the plus side, Virtual PC is now free, though it claims that it won't run on Windows XP Home (I haven't tried yet). But it's still massive overkill just to run the occasional website on another web rendering engine.
Go to the Control Panel, then open Add or Remove Programs. Look for "Windows Internet Explorer 7" and uninstall it. (In the unlikely even that you can't see it, you might have to check the "Show updates" box.) Uninstalling will leave the system with IE6.
Sorry, were you expecting something more complicated?
Oh, is that all?