Tell Management that the scripting language is being used only to quickly develop a prototype,
and that then the prototype will be re-implemented
in a "real language" later, with profiling tools
used to determine the priority order of which
modules get re-implemented first.
Once the thing works, if it performs well enough,
the resources to re-implement will dry up.
Once enough of it has been done in a compiled language (that is, about 20%...remember the 80%/20% rule). resources to re-implement the
rest will dry up.
Soon Management will realize this new "Prototyping Paradigm" saves them resources, but gives them
plenty of busy work (re-implementing scripts in compiled code) for when they need to look
busy,
and it will turn out to have been Their Idea All Along.
So are techincal mechanisms feasable (like the following) or is United Nations level international legal enforcement required?
My technical proposal:
people/companies purchase SMTP message-sends the way they purchase cell-phone-minutes:
spammers who use open relays would saturate that relay's quota, and most of the spam thus
relayed would fail to go out, thus the owner of the
relay would have incentive to fix it, so they
can send their own mail.
spammers who send directly from ISP accounts would have to purchase large numbers of them in order to send a given volume of mail.
To enforce such a system, you would need to build
a smart firewall that knew just enough SMTP protocol to read the RCPT To: lines, and count
recipients. When a given sending host exceeds
its counter for the week, poof! the firewall
blocks further SMTP activity (or even all activity) from that host until someone clears it.
Backbones could limit individual ISP's with such
a system, and ISP's could in turn limit individual
customers; indeed they would basically have to,
so that one customer can't ruin their SMTP
quota. If the ISP doesn't enforce such a rule,
their backbone tap enforces it for them.
If such infrastructure became widespread, the only
way a spammer could send large numbers of messages would be to get large numbers of ISP accounts, which would hopefully cost them enough money to make it not worth their while anymore.
The answer should be obvious -- who wrote it?
Apparently J.M. Dillard, Brent Spiner, and John Logan.
Have any of them won, say, a Hugo, or a Nebula?
Next time they need to get, say, Neal Stephenson,
Vernor Vinge, Brian Sterling, or Orson Scott Card.
Or maybe one of the folks who wrote good ones in the past, like Ellison.
So when enough folks get the idea that NASA is
lying to them, they are willing to vote for people
who advocate shutting down NASA.
The frightening part is that it doesn't neccesarily need to be that *many* people who
believe in the issue -- we have an almost exclusively two-party system here, which makes
"swing voters" very powerful -- folks who will
pick one candidate over another based entirely on
one issue -- in other words "fanatics".
So most people could not care less what your position on NASA is as a Congressional candidate.
It doesn't even make the list, next to health care, economic policy, and whether you sleep around (sigh). But if a small group of fanatics will vote based on your position on NASA, and the election is close, voila, you the polititcian now have a position on NASA that helps get you elected...
I suspect in Germany, which has a healthy multi-party system, these swing-voter effects are much weaker. But here in the USA, these relatively small groups who will vote entirely on single issues (abortion policy springs to mind as
a good example...) get the major parties to take
positions on that issue even though the swing-vote group is a single-digit percentage of the populace.
With a short-range gravitational force, decaying exponentially with distance, stable
planetary orbits and galaxies, with their literally astronomical extent, could not exist.
Actually, stable solar systems could work just fine; assuming the constant terms were right. If you
plot x**2 against 2**x, over the [1,4] range, they
don't differ very much at all.
Most people summarize their logs, so the raw logs last just long enough to get converted into fancy reports, and are then tossed.
A summary that says how many hits each directory got, and what the top 10 referring URL's were, etc. is a heck of a lot smaller, and generally more useful, than the full, detailed logs.
Some sites even schlep them over to another machine to do the summaries, so as not to bog down the server doing the work...
Years ago, the good folks at
Nova
back in
season 5
did an episode called "The Case of the Ancient Astronauts", where in they completely and throroughly debunked Von Daniken's
Chariots of the Gods?
Since then, he's written dozens of other books, which he's sold scads of, and plenty of folks still rant and rave about his theories.
So no, debunking these theories with actual facts just doesn't work...
Real micropaments are hard to implement, and most users have already paid for a reasonable amount of email service.
Instead, we need to have people use an authenticating protocol to send mail, and they should get issued a key/certificate/whatever with their e-mail account that lets them send,say, 500 emails a month. That email server is in turn
issuead a certificate with a known signing authority.
The problem is, how do you prevent a spammer from obtaining an arbitrary number of email server certificates? Commercial "authorities" like Thawte, etc. are not an answer; as many credit card numbers as you can get is as many certificates you can get. As long as you can send a few million emails before your certificate gets blacklisted, the cost per email for the ceritificate is trivial.
The only answer I see is to hold all email for a day before delivery, and to have a distributed mechansim for counting email sent by each server. If a given server is sending spam-house rates of email, it gets (automatically) blacklisted, and all the email being held from that server gets deleted before its ever delivered.
ALL largish companies do this (or something similar), not just MS and Intel. Insurance companies gobble up little comptetitors, fast food chains set up shop next to similar local business, Starbucks does the same.
But in the case of monopolies like Microsoft, much of that becomes illegal. Even buying up direct suppliers of your competitors to shut off their
supplies might be illegal.
But the Microsoft/Intel trick is to buy up companies that make things that customers of your competitors buy to use with your product.
This would be like Starbucks buying up Sweet-n-Low and reformulating the sweetner it so it makes any coffee but theirs taste horrible, then doing the same to Nutrisweet, then to sugar and dairy companies...
Pretty soon only people who like their coffee black will buy it from anyone else.
Seems to me the most practical tracking method would be embedding images in HTML email with encoded URLs.
Actually, the ones I've seen lately put a CSS style sheet link into a multipart/mime with an HTML section. The URL for the stylesheet was of the form:
http://mail.ecplaza.net/am_bin/auth_main.cgi/vouch er?
uid=...&
voucher_path=big long hash&
sender_name=...
So yes they're doing stuff like that, but it isn't neccesarily with images.
Note to Mozilla developers -- we may need a flag to turn off not just images in email, but also style sheets, or any other URL reference from email messages.
Okay, so we know where it came in, and where it went out, and fairly precisely what time it was...
So then you are in a pretty good position to extrapolate the path of the object backwards,
and figure out where it came from, right?
If it was moving at 400km/h, its patj would have been
warped somewhat by the sun's gravitation,
but that should be able to be figured in.
Then you should point all your best telescopes off in the direction that it must have come from, and see what's there.
Any good amateur rocket/astronomy folks out there?
If you shot something from Antartica opposite the direction of the tip of India at 450km/sec, on October 22, 1993, 09:55:57 GMT, where would it go?
White lists don't work because the spammers are already faking From: addresses, Received: headers, etc. so that the email looks like it comes from
someone you know, just like Klez viruses do.
Granted, few of them are doing it now, but as whitelists become prevalent, the spammers will
simply maintain lists of email tuples, each
tuple will have you, your mom, your uncle, and
your best friend; all folks in your whitelist.
Send to each address in the tuple with a From: address from the tuple, and voila, your whitelist does nothing.
At Purdue this was always "the double-E joke",
and the two participants were majoring in
Electrial Engineering and Elementary Education,
respectively...
No one is saying it is okay to pirate movies; at least I haven't heard anyone say anything like that here.
What people are pointing out is that, even in the face of the usual amount of limited piracy, the studio is making a fortune on the movie. Hence their claims that they need the DMCA in order to preserve their livelyhood are patently false.
Similarly, their claim that every network download is a lost sale is false, as evidenced by people who have looked at the online pirated copy and are still going to see the movie at the theater.
What you're missing is that in this forum, the context of all such discussions is that
the reasoning behind the DMCA, and proposed Digital Rights Management requirements on technology are flawed, and that
the attempts to impose and enforce those restrictions are doomed, and
it is actually kind of humorous when the hugely expensive attempts at such restrictions are thwarted by guys sneaking video cameras into theaters or folks using magic markers on their CD's.
It's not that we think folks should do it, or that it's okay, but sort of like Smokey and the Bandit, it's kind of fun to watch it happen.
You guys should really look at the old Purdue file entombing code, which these days lives
here.
It is a really efficient way to do this.
It was initially done, I think, in 1984 or 1985...
I think the code that's there is for BSD 4.3, but
if you've already done the library work...
The overview reads:
This is the Purdue/ksb entombing system. Files removed by programs
linked with "libtomb" are cached for a while (long enough to get on a
backup tape would be best case) in case their untimely loss is noticed.
The 3 programs are "unrm" (the user agent to get files back), "entomb"
the system agent to cache a file, and "preend" (the system agent to
clean the older files from the tombs.
Included as nifty side products are "rmfile" which helps novice users
delete files with funny names (like "-") and "untmp" which should be
used to clean/tmp from a ".logout" type file from casual users.
Currently Andrew J. Korty is working on a
project to port the code to current FreeBSD.
Patents were not designed to protect inventors, they were designed to encourage invention, by handing out temporary monopolies to folks who came up with something interesting.
It also (perhaps more importantly) requires people to publish how their inventions work in order to get the patent.
That said, issuing patents for simple obvious things is pretty ridiculous. I propose that folks in the patent office use my new "purple paper" test. Take any pattent application, and substitute "purple paper" for "computer" throughout. If the patent application still reads basically the same as before,
don't issue it...
Yes, but my suspicion is that fewer wiretaps were actually performed, even though more were approved. That is to say, when someone makes sure you actually get approval for wiretaps before doing them, the approvals go up, and the actual wiretapping goes down.
After all, the number of wiretaps performed with a warrant approved by a judge doesn't bother me. It's the number of wiretaps performed without a warrant that bothers me.
Slashdot Mirror
Once the thing works, if it performs well enough, the resources to re-implement will dry up.
Once enough of it has been done in a compiled language (that is, about 20%...remember the 80%/20% rule). resources to re-implement the rest will dry up.
Soon Management will realize this new "Prototyping Paradigm" saves them resources, but gives them plenty of busy work (re-implementing scripts in compiled code) for when they need to look busy, and it will turn out to have been Their Idea All Along.
My technical proposal: people/companies purchase SMTP message-sends the way they purchase cell-phone-minutes:
- spammers who use open relays would saturate that relay's quota, and most of the spam thus
relayed would fail to go out, thus the owner of the
relay would have incentive to fix it, so they
can send their own mail.
- spammers who send directly from ISP accounts would have to purchase large numbers of them in order to send a given volume of mail.
To enforce such a system, you would need to build a smart firewall that knew just enough SMTP protocol to read the RCPT To: lines, and count recipients. When a given sending host exceeds its counter for the week, poof! the firewall blocks further SMTP activity (or even all activity) from that host until someone clears it.Backbones could limit individual ISP's with such a system, and ISP's could in turn limit individual customers; indeed they would basically have to, so that one customer can't ruin their SMTP quota. If the ISP doesn't enforce such a rule, their backbone tap enforces it for them.
If such infrastructure became widespread, the only way a spammer could send large numbers of messages would be to get large numbers of ISP accounts, which would hopefully cost them enough money to make it not worth their while anymore.
Have any of them won, say, a Hugo, or a Nebula?
Next time they need to get, say, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Brian Sterling, or Orson Scott Card. Or maybe one of the folks who wrote good ones in the past, like Ellison.
Then they might get some interesting story lines.
- NASA is funded by the US Congress
- Congress is voted for by "The People"
- "The People" get silly ideas
So when enough folks get the idea that NASA is lying to them, they are willing to vote for people who advocate shutting down NASA.The frightening part is that it doesn't neccesarily need to be that *many* people who believe in the issue -- we have an almost exclusively two-party system here, which makes "swing voters" very powerful -- folks who will pick one candidate over another based entirely on one issue -- in other words "fanatics".
So most people could not care less what your position on NASA is as a Congressional candidate. It doesn't even make the list, next to health care, economic policy, and whether you sleep around (sigh). But if a small group of fanatics will vote based on your position on NASA, and the election is close, voila, you the polititcian now have a position on NASA that helps get you elected...
I suspect in Germany, which has a healthy multi-party system, these swing-voter effects are much weaker. But here in the USA, these relatively small groups who will vote entirely on single issues (abortion policy springs to mind as a good example...) get the major parties to take positions on that issue even though the swing-vote group is a single-digit percentage of the populace.
Now galaxies, that would probably break down.
A summary that says how many hits each directory got, and what the top 10 referring URL's were, etc. is a heck of a lot smaller, and generally more useful, than the full, detailed logs.
Some sites even schlep them over to another machine to do the summaries, so as not to bog down the server doing the work...
<Emily_Latella_Mode>
Nevermind.
</Emily_Latella_Mode>
Look for the gear they left on the moon.
'nuff said.
Since then, he's written dozens of other books, which he's sold scads of, and plenty of folks still rant and rave about his theories.
So no, debunking these theories with actual facts just doesn't work...
Instead, we need to have people use an authenticating protocol to send mail, and they should get issued a key/certificate/whatever with their e-mail account that lets them send,say, 500 emails a month. That email server is in turn issuead a certificate with a known signing authority.
The problem is, how do you prevent a spammer from obtaining an arbitrary number of email server certificates? Commercial "authorities" like Thawte, etc. are not an answer; as many credit card numbers as you can get is as many certificates you can get. As long as you can send a few million emails before your certificate gets blacklisted, the cost per email for the ceritificate is trivial.
The only answer I see is to hold all email for a day before delivery, and to have a distributed mechansim for counting email sent by each server. If a given server is sending spam-house rates of email, it gets (automatically) blacklisted, and all the email being held from that server gets deleted before its ever delivered.
That's my Idea. What's yours?
This would be like Starbucks buying up Sweet-n-Low and reformulating the sweetner it so it makes any coffee but theirs taste horrible, then doing the same to Nutrisweet, then to sugar and dairy companies...
Pretty soon only people who like their coffee black will buy it from anyone else.
This is the pattern that Microsoft and Intel both have repeatedly run through:
- find a company
whose software helps you develop software, or web pages, or what have you
- buy that company
- make future relaeases that only work on
Windows
as the software rot makes the old versions fail, users of that software are herded towards Windows.- always keep at least 2 copies of any data
- copy the data every six months to a year
Just build it into the plan.Its the only way you really know you can read it. Then when you need to shift the data to newer media, its just part of the routine.
Plan to keep the bits forever, and rewrite and/or replace the media regularly.
That said, actual shelf-life of disk drives would be an important cost planning number. I've never seen such a number published.
So yes they're doing stuff like that, but it isn't neccesarily with images.
Note to Mozilla developers -- we may need a flag to turn off not just images in email, but also style sheets, or any other URL reference from email messages.
Any good amateur rocket/astronomy folks out there? If you shot something from Antartica opposite the direction of the tip of India at 450km/sec, on October 22, 1993, 09:55:57 GMT, where would it go?
Granted, few of them are doing it now, but as whitelists become prevalent, the spammers will simply maintain lists of email tuples, each tuple will have you, your mom, your uncle, and your best friend; all folks in your whitelist. Send to each address in the tuple with a From: address from the tuple, and voila, your whitelist does nothing.
At Purdue this was always "the double-E joke", and the two participants were majoring in Electrial Engineering and Elementary Education, respectively...
Pick up a can of spray shellac...
No one is saying it is okay to pirate movies; at least I haven't heard anyone say anything like that here.
What people are pointing out is that, even in the face of the usual amount of limited piracy, the studio is making a fortune on the movie. Hence their claims that they need the DMCA in order to preserve their livelyhood are patently false.
Similarly, their claim that every network download is a lost sale is false, as evidenced by people who have looked at the online pirated copy and are still going to see the movie at the theater.
What you're missing is that in this forum, the context of all such discussions is that
- the reasoning behind the DMCA, and proposed Digital Rights Management requirements on technology are flawed, and that
- the attempts to impose and enforce those restrictions are doomed, and
- it is actually kind of humorous when the hugely expensive attempts at such restrictions are thwarted by guys sneaking video cameras into theaters or folks using magic markers on their CD's.
It's not that we think folks should do it, or that it's okay, but sort of like Smokey and the Bandit, it's kind of fun to watch it happen.For those who missed it the first time, take a look at: this or this thread -- the oldest one I could find on Google...
I see; they've been planning for this all along.
It is a really efficient way to do this. It was initially done, I think, in 1984 or 1985...
I think the code that's there is for BSD 4.3, but if you've already done the library work...
The overview reads:
Currently Andrew J. Korty is working on a project to port the code to current FreeBSD.Patents were not designed to protect inventors, they were designed to encourage invention, by handing out temporary monopolies to folks who came up with something interesting. It also (perhaps more importantly) requires people to publish how their inventions work in order to get the patent.
That said, issuing patents for simple obvious things is pretty ridiculous. I propose that folks in the patent office use my new "purple paper" test. Take any pattent application, and substitute "purple paper" for "computer" throughout. If the patent application still reads basically the same as before, don't issue it...
After all, the number of wiretaps performed with a warrant approved by a judge doesn't bother me. It's the number of wiretaps performed without a warrant that bothers me.