Seems like more and more companies/industries believe it is the responsibility of the courts to ensure their business models remain effective, and profits guaranteed.
They paid good money to get their self-serving laws (e.g. the DMCA) passed, so of course they expect a return on their investment. This is the sort of thing that should be expected when money becomes more important than votes in politics.
you have to enter the odometer reading on the keypad. If you put another brand of petrol in, then you lose the remainder of your free petrol because they can detect you suddenly got a large increase in kilometrage between fillups.
No problem... if they are relying on you to enter a number into their keypad, just enter the number they expect to see.
What I'd like to see along these lines is a printer that can print out 3 dimensional CPUs or RAM devices. With the third dimension available, the number of transistors and interconnections per unit volume could be much higher than it could ever be in two dimensions. Of course there would be problems with heat dissipation, but I think they might be solvable (use superconducting materials, or leave holes in the cube for cooling fluids to flow through, or etc).
Thank you, Ayn Rand. Now answer me this: If a single company (or organization of cooperating companies) gets powerful enough (one way or another) to squash all competition in its chosen market, how is that market any less "failed" than one where the government forbids all competition? In either case there is no competition, hence no innovation, and usually the customer ends up getting gouged.
The way I have it set up is this: Bayesian spam filter plus a white list. Addresses on the white list get an automatic spam rating of "Genuine", and other addresses get analyzed for content by the Bayesian routine. Email that I train the Bayesian filter on as "genuine" gets its sender address automatically added to the white list. Works pretty well.
Another system which I've read about is this: Anyone on your whitelist gets through the filter immediately; any emails not on your whitelist get an autoreply back to the sender saying "please verify that you are not a spammer". If the sender replies (and there are various techniques to make sure the reply can't be easily done by a robot), the original email is then presented to you (and the sender is auto-added to the white list). That should work 100%.
Disregarding Cope's rule: The idea is that as things evolve, they get bigger. Bigger animals tend to win fights over mates, get more food, have fewer predators. It just makes sense.
Bigger animals are also the first to die out when food gets scarce. If Cope's rule is so valid, why aren't we running away from Brontosauri?
Disregarding Dollo's law: Evolution is a one-way path. Dinosaurs evolve into birds which evolve into dinosaurs
Also untrue. Take dolphins. They were once sea creatures, that evolved into land mammals, and then back into sea creatures. Evolution has no "direction", it just finds whatever solution best fits the situation at hand.
SAVE THE PLANET! Yeah, right, like it's not big enough to look after itself.
But are humans smart enough to look after ourselves? Or are we just going to chew through all the available resources, and then die choking in our own wastes? It's not enough for the planet to survive, we want ourselves to survive also.
[Some Linux vendors are struggling]....and this is somehow a twisted victory for "the cause"
Well, yes. Linux, like all open source software, is a cultural phenomenon, not a corporation, and so its success should be measured by how ubiquitously it is used, not by how much money any particular company is making or losing while trying to sell it.
Your post makes no more sense than trying to judge the success of Microsoft based on how many people are working on the Windows source code.
So it's not what this article is about. Unless you consider user incompetence a security hole. And then, I don't know what you expect MSFT to do about it.
They could start by removing the "feature" that lets users who don't know what they are doing execute VB scripts that were sent to them by strangers by clicking "OK"...
I'm using AGMSBayesianSpam under BeOS to filter out spams from my email and it does a really nice job -- but my poor benighted Windows/Outlook using friends want to use a nice Bayesian Spam filter too, and I don't know what to recommend to them.
Can anyone recommend a Bayesian Spam filter that (a) works with Outlook and Outlook Express, (b) is dead simple to install and use, and (c) works really well? I'd love to be able to point them at a URL.
No, but AFAIK, dealing with the reality of the situation is kinda important. Reality being the key word here, and The Sims being the opposite of reality. Seems like a bit of a problem.
A problem for who? You? Tell you what, you deal with grief the way you want to, and let other people deal with grief the way they want to.
your grandchildren will look back with dismay about the pontificating by a privileged minority who had the arrogance to translate their wish to copy throw-away commercial entertainment into a human rights issue
It's not about the "wish to copy throw-away commercial entertainment". That's already against the law, and will most likely remain so, DMCA or no DMCA. The issue is whether we have the right to control the operation of our own computers, or whether (government/corporations/etc) may force us to install "restraining bolts" that keep our computers from doing things they consider undesirable. To the extent that one's computer acts as an extension of one's mind, and the Internet as an extension of one's voice, such measures are nothing less than an attempt at thought control. So yes, for a society that increasingly relies on computers and the Internet to conduct its public discourse, it is a human rights issue. Silencing someone with government-mandated software is no different in principle from silencing them any other way.
Nanotechnological diseases would behave just like biological ones. They could not discriminate.
Wrong on both counts. Nanotechnological diseases may or may not behave just like biological ones, depending on how they are designed. And in any case, biological diseases are already capable of discrimination. For example, look at malaria, which people from equatorial regions are more resistant to than others.
Nothing on a biological level separates the White Hats from the Black Hats, so it is simply not possible to engineer a disease-- biological or otherwise-- that gets them but not us.
That depends. If your goal is genocide, there may be plenty of differences. Different races will have different markers in their DNA (those differing phenotypes have to come from somewhere, don't they?), they may have different diets.
The only hope for such a battle plan is geographic isolation, which, like counting on the direction of the wind in the trenches of the Great War, is no plan at all
Not at all. With a properly nasty nanotech "disease", you would spread it far and wide, infecting both your people and theirs. The agents would be program to remain inert and unnoticed until they received a certain trigger message (transmitted by radio or other means), at which point they would activate, killing or disabling their host. The trick would be that only you know the trigger message. You can then go around at will, killing whole populations using nothing more than a directional radio antenna.
Thanks for the link. I'm happy to admit that IRV has its problems, but as the article mentions, it's been proven that no voting system is completely free from counterintuitive outcomes. The examples given to demonstrate IRV's potential problems look pretty contrived to me -- if a real election were to have such closely balanced results, the results would be a toss-up under just about any election system, and there would always be someone who perceived the results as unfair.
That said, I think we can agree that any of the alternatives suggested would be an order of magnitude better than the current plurality system, and that therefore the most productive use of one's energy is to get one of these systems adopted, rather than to bicker about which is the theoretical best one.
To that end, IRV has several advantages: First, it's easy for anyone to understand how it works, which is extremely important -- people won't trust a system they can't understand, and they won't adopt a system they don't trust. Second, it has a decent amount of political momentum behind it already, with IRV already having been adopted in San Francisco, and being seriously considered in Vermont and elsewhere. Other methods would have to start from scratch, which would mean more elections held using the current, inadequate plurality system.
If it weren't for the political realities mentioned above, I'd probably advocate Borda count or Condorcet voting instead -- but since I want to see reforms actually happen and not just get discussed, IRV is good enough for me.
The question isn't how much they are paid to make the arguments, it's whether the arguments they make have any merit. A good argument doesn't become bad simply because money changed hands (or vice versa).
Your idea is, in a word, dumb. It is simply not possible to design a nanotechnological weapon that will kill only whom you want it to kill. Can't be done.
Save that quote, it will be good fodder for a future list of short-sighted predictions about the future. And while you're at it, check out page 11 of the article, which reads:
"Nanotechnology is likely to permit... artificial "disease" agents that could hide undetected in the bodies of enemy populations or leaders until triggered by external stimuli"
Sounds plausible to me (or at least as plausible as nanotechnology in general).
The idea of self-replicating nanotechnological assemblers is a dumb one, and Drexler deserves a special form of ridicule for ever seriously proposing it
If you're going to get a (3, Insightful) for this post, then you really ought to back up the above with a good solid argument.
What if the VM has a security flaw, isn't this just like running a secure program on top of windows. Just keeping a developer from using pointers is no way to insure a projects security
True, there might be a security flaw in the VM. But the chances of there being a bug in the VM is much much smaller than the chances of there being a bug in the application code, so it's still a big improvement over writing everything in C directly.
A good VM is much more likely to be bug free for several reasons: (a) its task is much more clearly defined than that of the typical application, (b) it is much smaller than the typical application, (c) it was generally written by people who are very good at what they do, and (d) it has been used and tested by a large number of people and organizations over a long period of time.
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business models remain effective, and profits guaranteed.
They paid good money to get their self-serving laws (e.g. the DMCA) passed, so of course they expect a return on their investment. This is the sort of thing that should be expected when money becomes more important than votes in politics.
No problem... if they are relying on you to enter a number into their keypad, just enter the number they expect to see.
What I'd like to see along these lines is a printer that can print out 3 dimensional CPUs or RAM devices. With the third dimension available, the number of transistors and interconnections per unit volume could be much higher than it could ever be in two dimensions. Of course there would be problems with heat dissipation, but I think they might be solvable (use superconducting materials, or leave holes in the cube for cooling fluids to flow through, or etc).
And the second thing you'll want to print is a few extra ink cartridges, so that you'll never run out of ink...
Thank you, Ayn Rand. Now answer me this: If a single company (or organization of cooperating companies) gets powerful enough (one way or another) to squash all competition in its chosen market, how is that market any less "failed" than one where the government forbids all competition? In either case there is no competition, hence no innovation, and usually the customer ends up getting gouged.
Another system which I've read about is this: Anyone on your whitelist gets through the filter immediately; any emails not on your whitelist get an autoreply back to the sender saying "please verify that you are not a spammer". If the sender replies (and there are various techniques to make sure the reply can't be easily done by a robot), the original email is then presented to you (and the sender is auto-added to the white list). That should work 100%.
Bigger animals are also the first to die out when food gets scarce. If Cope's rule is so valid, why aren't we running away from Brontosauri?
Disregarding Dollo's law: Evolution is a one-way path. Dinosaurs evolve into birds which evolve into dinosaurs
Also untrue. Take dolphins. They were once sea creatures, that evolved into land mammals, and then back into sea creatures. Evolution has no "direction", it just finds whatever solution best fits the situation at hand.
But are humans smart enough to look after ourselves? Or are we just going to chew through all the available resources, and then die choking in our own wastes? It's not enough for the planet to survive, we want ourselves to survive also.
Why stop now?
Who cares? People wouldn't award karma if the posts weren't useful or interesting, no? So who is being hurt here?
OTOH, posts complaining about karma whores (and replies to them) are arguably not worth people's time to read.
Well, yes. Linux, like all open source software, is a cultural phenomenon, not a corporation, and so its success should be measured by how ubiquitously it is used, not by how much money any particular company is making or losing while trying to sell it.
Your post makes no more sense than trying to judge the success of Microsoft based on how many people are working on the Windows source code.
They could start by removing the "feature" that lets users who don't know what they are doing execute VB scripts that were sent to them by strangers by clicking "OK"...
Can anyone recommend a Bayesian Spam filter that (a) works with Outlook and Outlook Express, (b) is dead simple to install and use, and (c) works really well? I'd love to be able to point them at a URL.
key word here, and The Sims being the opposite of reality. Seems like a bit of a problem.
A problem for who? You? Tell you what, you deal with grief the way you want to, and let other people deal with grief the way they want to.
It's not about the "wish to copy throw-away commercial entertainment". That's already against the law, and will most likely remain so, DMCA or no DMCA. The issue is whether we have the right to control the operation of our own computers, or whether (government/corporations/etc) may force us to install "restraining bolts" that keep our computers from doing things they consider undesirable. To the extent that one's computer acts as an extension of one's mind, and the Internet as an extension of one's voice, such measures are nothing less than an attempt at thought control. So yes, for a society that increasingly relies on computers and the Internet to conduct its public discourse, it is a human rights issue. Silencing someone with government-mandated software is no different in principle from silencing them any other way.
Wrong on both counts. Nanotechnological diseases may or may not behave just like biological ones, depending on how they are designed. And in any case, biological diseases are already capable of discrimination. For example, look at malaria, which people from equatorial regions are more resistant to than others.
Nothing on a biological level separates the White Hats from the Black Hats, so it is simply not
possible to engineer a disease-- biological or otherwise-- that gets them but not us.
That depends. If your goal is genocide, there may be plenty of differences. Different races will have different markers in their DNA (those differing phenotypes have to come from somewhere, don't they?), they may have different diets.
The only hope for such a battle plan is geographic isolation, which, like counting on the direction of the wind in the trenches of the Great War, is no plan at all
Not at all. With a properly nasty nanotech "disease", you would spread it far and wide, infecting both your people and theirs. The agents would be program to remain inert and unnoticed until they received a certain trigger message (transmitted by radio or other means), at which point they would activate, killing or disabling their host. The trick would be that only you know the trigger message. You can then go around at will, killing whole populations using nothing more than a directional radio antenna.
That said, I think we can agree that any of the alternatives suggested would be an order of magnitude better than the current plurality system, and that therefore the most productive use of one's energy is to get one of these systems adopted, rather than to bicker about which is the theoretical best one.
To that end, IRV has several advantages: First, it's easy for anyone to understand how it works, which is extremely important -- people won't trust a system they can't understand, and they won't adopt a system they don't trust. Second, it has a decent amount of political momentum behind it already, with IRV already having been adopted in San Francisco, and being seriously considered in Vermont and elsewhere. Other methods would have to start from scratch, which would mean more elections held using the current, inadequate plurality system.
If it weren't for the political realities mentioned above, I'd probably advocate Borda count or Condorcet voting instead -- but since I want to see reforms actually happen and not just get discussed, IRV is good enough for me.
The question isn't how much they are paid to make the arguments, it's whether the arguments they make have any merit. A good argument doesn't become bad simply because money changed hands (or vice versa).
Save that quote, it will be good fodder for a future list of short-sighted predictions about the future. And while you're at it, check out page 11 of the article, which reads:
"Nanotechnology is likely to permit... artificial "disease" agents that could hide undetected in the bodies of enemy populations or leaders until triggered by external stimuli"
Sounds plausible to me (or at least as plausible as nanotechnology in general).
If you're going to get a (3, Insightful) for this post, then you really ought to back up the above with a good solid argument.
Oh? Why not?
Well, to be accurate, free useless segway, since they won't have the electronic key necessary to start the thing up.
I wonder how hard it is to hot-wire a Segway?
But what do they about someone who acts as his own prosecuting attorney?
Any real computer geek would have put them to work.
True, there might be a security flaw in the VM. But the chances of there being a bug in the VM is much much smaller than the chances of there being a bug in the application code, so it's still a big improvement over writing everything in C directly.
A good VM is much more likely to be bug free for several reasons: (a) its task is much more clearly defined than that of the typical application, (b) it is much smaller than the typical application, (c) it was generally written by people who are very good at what they do, and (d) it has been used and tested by a large number of people and organizations over a long period of time.