How about using an external antenna but making it invisible to the naked eye somehow? (e.g. putting it inside a stone-coloured box so that it looks like part of the building, or using an antenna that is very skinny or small)
Actually it'll be very easy to defeat not because of flaws in the system - but because 99.9% of the idiots who use computers will never install spam filtering of this kind.
That doesn't matter to me -- what matters to me is that I won't have to slog through a bucket of spam every morning. And in any case, you're wrong -- when a filter like this comes standard with MicrosoftOutlook or AOL or whatnot, 99.99% of the idiots will eventually have it.
If new diamonds are sold at an artificially inflated price, and are impossible to return, why not buy a used diamond from someone? Then you can take the money you saved and buy your fiance a nice (car/mink coat/honeymoon trip/LinuxPC/whatever) as well.
Or am I being hopelessly naive somehow? (it wouldn't be the first time;^))
Re:It's fair, but uninformative.
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 2
It's true that they waffled there... but if lightning does strike the ribbon, wouldn't the energy just conduct harmlessly into the ground? Seems like it would just be an extra-large lightning rod that way.
The trust people have in their politicians on technical stuff kinda makes you wonder why Gore didn't get away with his "I took the initiative in creating the Internet".
Especially since he was telling the truth. Gore was one of the people who helped create the Internet as we know it today, albeit from the legislative side, rather then the technical side. Here's a quote from Vint Cerf, the person who invented the IP protocol:
Vinton Cerf: Good evening, or whatever time zone you are in, hi!! While we're waiting for questions, I'd like to clear up one little item - about the Vice President... He really does deserve some credit for his early recognition of the importance of the Internet and the technology that makes it work. He was certainly among the first if not the first in Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be and both as Senator and Vice President he has been enormously helpful in supporting legislation and programs to help further develop the Internet - for example the Next Generation Internet program. I get to see a lot of this stuff because I am a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and we regularly review the R&D programs of the US Government and many have relevance to the evolving Internet.
More information can be found here. Just because "Al Gore deluded himself into thinking he invented the Internet" makes for a good one-liner, doesn't mean it's so.
A quick summary of the article: The politicians in Washington don't care what you think, they only care about what their campaign contributors tells them to care about. The sad part is, it's more or less true. Maybe some day the USA will join the free world and become a democracy, one can only hope.
An mp3 of the Adagio in C for Glass Armonica can be found here. It is apparently being played by Klingons...:^)
Re:Let's Get Back Our Access to the Courts
on
Copyright as Cudgel
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· Score: 2
.... but any such bribery would have to be the purebred dishonest criminal variety, not the slippery-slope "campaign contribution wink wink nudge nudge" type that is a fact of political life in other parties today. And, contrary to popular belief, not every politician is dishonest enough to take illegal bribes.
Re:Let's Get Back Our Access to the Courts
on
Copyright as Cudgel
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· Score: 2
Bullshit. Does NOT matter what party you're from, you're susceptible to greed if you're a human being. It's just the invisible hand slipping money under the table. Power is worth money.
Well, of course. But some people are more susceptible than others. And people who are taking the bulk of their money from corporations are the most likely to be influenced by... those corporations. As for reforms to hold politicians accountable, that's all well and good, but the fact is that dishonest people will find a way around them anyway, so a better bet is to vote in honest people... if you can find any;^)
Add a balloon to one of these, and a can of compressed helium to inflate the balloon with, and you can have the best of both worlds. Fly it to your favorite spot, inflate the balloon, hang around for as long as you like, then deflate the balloon and fly home.
Well, conceivably anyway....
Re:Let's Get Back Our Access to the Courts
on
Copyright as Cudgel
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· Score: 2
. Both parties are in this together. Al Gore, Dubya, both Statist Interventionist Global Corporatists to the core.
Agreed. I think our only slim hope for removing corporate influence from politics would be electing politicians that that don't accept corporate contributions (e.g. those from the Green Party). Of course, the current system is designed to make it very difficult for a third party to win, no matter how awful the first two parties are. See my.sig for a partial solution to that problem...
When we examine the record of Christ's words, deeds, and how people and society reacted to him, it looks like the chance of him being a nut can probably be ruled out.
This doesn't follow. There are have been many examples of "complete nuts" who were nonetheless very charismatic and influential. Jim Jones, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Richard Stallman...;^)
I know that gender segregated schools had problems, mainly in the area of the female schools getting less funding, but this is the 21st century, we can legislate equal funding
A great way to achieve a 'flow' state is to play Dance Dance Revolution at the appropriate skill level. Which makes sense, since the game combines some elements of both video games and sport -- you receive the benefits of both mental concentration and exercise.
Burn the observatory, so this never happens again!
on
WarTalking Arrest
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· Score: 2
On March 18, Puffer demonstrated to a county official and a Chronicle reporter how easy it was to gain access to the court's system using only a laptop computer and a wireless LAN card.
This is his crime?
I'm glad they've taken prompt measures to make sure nobody else every reports a security hole to them!
Buying up failed software to convert it into OSS or Free Software sets a dangerous precedent! Every little bit player will try to get someone to pay for their failed efforts. You will probably get companies taking the risk of releasing stuff commercially - since they can always make some money even if it fails, just sellout to the Free/OSS community.
And this is a problem why? If this were to happen, then the people who wrote the software would get some money out of it, and the OSS community would get some nice open-source software to play with. Everybody wins. (or, if the OSS community decides it doesn't want to pay for the software, then the software just goes away, pretty much the way it usually happens now)
Perhaps with enough of a fund we might be able to get BeOS source released! Granted, it would likely have to be a much bigger fund than 100,000 euros, but I'd be willing to wager that there are more people interested in BeOS than in Blender, nifty though Blender is
When the BeUnited people asked about this, Palm quoted them a price of two million dollars US. Personally, I think if you want open-source BeOS, you might as well support the OpenBeOS project instead. It is coming along nicely.
Am I missing something? Isn't just TESTING the thing all that's needed? I mean, put in a couple of thousand of votes and check the outcome?
Testing, while helpful, isn't sufficient in itself. It would be trivial to create a system that gave proper results during all the tests, but was nonetheless compromised during the actual election (maybe by a secret backdoor, triggered by the date, or a particular "magic" input sequence, etc). You can't really trust a system unless you have examined it in detail and understand how it works.
No matter how perfect the system one can still CLAIM that it didn't count their vote the way the wanted.
I've always wondered if maybe there is some way of using one-way hashes and the like so that any voter can 'check' his or her vote's contribution to the posted results, to make sure it is what he or she asked for. The hard part of this would be doing it in such a way that the voter's anonymity is protected (i.e. nobody else is able to tell how the voter voted)
So basically you are stating that if you steal the GPL code, and then someone catches you that you must spend time to write the code yourself. Wow. What a huge risk.
Indeed. I wonder what happens if you are caught stealing Microsoft code?;^)
You keep them on that task Ballmer. And let me know when they figure out how to be lower-priced than free. My bet, it'll take them a while.
Actually, they figured it out already. You can force your customer to install your product by bundling it with another product that the customer is already buying. Then your product really is cheaper than free, because there is a non-zero cost (in time and knowledge) involved in getting rid of it.
It definitely would cost more than grid electricity
Certainly at first, but eventually, perhaps not. Keep in mind that two major problems with electricity are that there is no good way to store it, and no perfectly efficient way to transmit it. So if you've got a solar/wind/geothermal/tide generation facility that is harvesting energy from the sun/win/earth/ocean and nobody wants that energy at the moment, you currently have to throw it away. But if you can instead use that unneeded energy to generate stored hydrogen to sell (or convert back to electricity later), then you just cut out a big source of waste, making the system more efficient and the energy cheaper.
I do like the idea of these electric cars, but people are just not gonna hear them coming.
No problem -- just a require an external speaker on the car that makes simulated engine noises. You know someone is going to come out with one anyway.....;^)
Slashdot Mirror
How about using an external antenna but making it invisible to the naked eye somehow? (e.g. putting it inside a stone-coloured box so that it looks like part of the building, or using an antenna that is very skinny or small)
That doesn't matter to me -- what matters to me is that I won't have to slog through a bucket of spam every morning. And in any case, you're wrong -- when a filter like this comes standard with MicrosoftOutlook or AOL or whatnot, 99.99% of the idiots will eventually have it.
Or am I being hopelessly naive somehow? (it wouldn't be the first time
It's true that they waffled there... but if lightning does strike the ribbon, wouldn't the energy just conduct harmlessly into the ground? Seems like it would just be an extra-large lightning rod that way.
Especially since he was telling the truth. Gore was one of the people who helped create the Internet as we know it today, albeit from the legislative side, rather then the technical side. Here's a quote from Vint Cerf, the person who invented the IP protocol:
Vinton Cerf: Good evening, or whatever time zone you are in, hi!! While we're waiting for questions, I'd like to clear up one little item - about the Vice President
Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be and both as Senator and Vice President he has been enormously helpful in supporting legislation and programs to help further develop the Internet - for example the Next Generation Internet program. I get to see a lot of this stuff because I am a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and we regularly review the R&D programs of the US Government and many have relevance to the evolving Internet.
More information can be found here. Just because "Al Gore deluded himself into thinking he invented the Internet" makes for a good one-liner, doesn't mean it's so.
A quick summary of the article: The politicians in Washington don't care what you think, they only care about what their campaign contributors tells them to care about. The sad part is, it's more or less true. Maybe some day the USA will join the free world and become a democracy, one can only hope.
An mp3 of the Adagio in C for Glass Armonica can be found here. It is apparently being played by Klingons... :^)
.... but any such bribery would have to be the purebred dishonest criminal variety, not the slippery-slope "campaign contribution wink wink nudge nudge" type that is a fact of political life in other parties today. And, contrary to popular belief, not every politician is dishonest enough to take illegal bribes.
Well, of course. But some people are more susceptible than others. And people who are taking the bulk of their money from corporations are the most likely to be influenced by... those corporations. As for reforms to hold politicians accountable, that's all well and good, but the fact is that dishonest people will find a way around them anyway, so a better bet is to vote in honest people... if you can find any ;^)
Well, conceivably anyway....
Agreed. I think our only slim hope for removing corporate influence from politics would be electing politicians that that don't accept corporate contributions (e.g. those from the Green Party). Of course, the current system is designed to make it very difficult for a third party to win, no matter how awful the first two parties are. See my .sig for a partial solution to that problem...
Perhaps Nicole Kidman? She's good at being beautiful and evil.....
reacted to him, it looks like the chance of him being a nut can probably be ruled out.
This doesn't follow. There are have been many examples of "complete nuts" who were nonetheless very charismatic and influential. Jim Jones, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Richard Stallman... ;^)
Didn't you hear? Separate-but-equal was ruled unacceptable.
do not learn how to 'socialize' (read: screw) properly when attending them.
You seem to have a very distorted view of what goes on in schools.
A great way to achieve a 'flow' state is to play Dance Dance Revolution at the appropriate skill level. Which makes sense, since the game combines some elements of both video games and sport -- you receive the benefits of both mental concentration and exercise.
This is his crime?
I'm glad they've taken prompt measures to make sure nobody else every reports a security hole to them!
Yeah, but in real life, he'd be less likely, because he's learned his lesson and knows to keep his distance from the speeding llamas...
And this is a problem why? If this were to happen, then the people who wrote the software would get some money out of it, and the OSS community would get some nice open-source software to play with. Everybody wins. (or, if the OSS community decides it doesn't want to pay for the software, then the software just goes away, pretty much the way it usually happens now)
When the BeUnited people asked about this, Palm quoted them a price of two million dollars US. Personally, I think if you want open-source BeOS, you might as well support the OpenBeOS project instead. It is coming along nicely.
Testing, while helpful, isn't sufficient in itself. It would be trivial to create a system that gave proper results during all the tests, but was nonetheless compromised during the actual election (maybe by a secret backdoor, triggered by the date, or a particular "magic" input sequence, etc). You can't really trust a system unless you have examined it in detail and understand how it works.
I've always wondered if maybe there is some way of using one-way hashes and the like so that any voter can 'check' his or her vote's contribution to the posted results, to make sure it is what he or she asked for. The hard part of this would be doing it in such a way that the voter's anonymity is protected (i.e. nobody else is able to tell how the voter voted)
Indeed. I wonder what happens if you are caught stealing Microsoft code? ;^)
Actually, they figured it out already. You can force your customer to install your product by bundling it with another product that the customer is already buying. Then your product really is cheaper than free, because there is a non-zero cost (in time and knowledge) involved in getting rid of it.
Certainly at first, but eventually, perhaps not. Keep in mind that two major problems with electricity are that there is no good way to store it, and no perfectly efficient way to transmit it. So if you've got a solar/wind/geothermal/tide generation facility that is harvesting energy from the sun/win/earth/ocean and nobody wants that energy at the moment, you currently have to throw it away. But if you can instead use that unneeded energy to generate stored hydrogen to sell (or convert back to electricity later), then you just cut out a big source of waste, making the system more efficient and the energy cheaper.
No problem -- just a require an external speaker on the car that makes simulated engine noises. You know someone is going to come out with one anyway..... ;^)