Actually, the victim fatality rate, the long-term dormancy of the virus, and the apparent good health of HIV carriers makes AIDS, in the absence of careful avoidance practices and an ultimate cure, a nightmare of a people killer.
a faster acting plague would inspire a much more radical reaction in the uninfected portions of humanity to protect themselves, possibly resulting in less damage
I don't think a faster working HIV virus would help you much. Because the old kind would still be around, carried by some of those not infected by the "new" kind.
Don't tell me that you really think that people immigrating to America deliberately wanted to spread epidemics.
They most certainly did. It is well documented that we gave blankets and bedding known to be infected with smallpox to many native tribes with devastating results, in what is the first such biological warfare program of which I'm aware.
Certainly not the first occurence of biological warfare. This is as old as war itself. Some of ours dead from bad diseases? Get them into enemy territory in one way or another. Toss the bodies over their walls with a catapult. Or into the river that flows into their area.
My company has enough trouble trying to have it work with under 50 users.
Exactly. I once worked in a company that used exchange. (And sold lots of microsoft solutions). One day we all got a letter from the mail administrator telling us to change our outlook setup from polling every minute to every 10 minutes instead. Because the mail server machine (with its 500M, several cpu's...) couldn't handle the load generated by every user polling every minute. How any users? 50. The big NT+exchange machine had trouble with one mail poll per second.
I believe it is possible to set up exchange a lot better than that, but apparently not by default.
Consider how a mail server will be used. In the beginning email is new, like the phone once was. Cool, but not something the company depends on. After a while all internal communication goes through email, and a lot of external communication too. Downtime on the phone system is simply not tolerated, the same will become true for your email system after a while. Select something with low regular maintenance overhead. It doesn't matter how hard or easy it is to setup the first time, how many months between hiccups matters a lot with thousands of users.
WRONG. The purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. The only way they can do that is to sell something that people like. A very democratic process. Without government intervention, the free market MUST provide consumers with the best possible products. This gets perverted when government incentives exist (subsidies, special protections). (side note: I believe there is a case for anti-trust law, but otherwise I am against governmental interference in the operation of a market.)
Corporations maximize shareholder value - but not necessarily by providing the best products. They may choose undemocratic ways like bribing politicians to do what they want. Such as undermining the "free market" in subtle ways.
This I've never really understood. Excessive violence is indeed more permissible than any sexual content - and it isn't just an American thing. Maybe not just American, but certainly not universal. Violence i films can easily earn a 18-year old limit. Sex scenes of the normal kind won't do that, they won't even push the film into late night when it eventually is released for TV.
The attitude is thus -
"Let's make sex mysterious and 'adult' - that way, teens won't have sex and get pregnant or get diseases or anything."
Here they tell you about how babies are made in kindergarten. This is repeated now and then during school. (One of the few subjects even a teacher cannot make boring) You are supposed to know before age wakes your instincts.
There's no way you can prevent teens from having sex, but unwanted pregnancy is avoidable when you know.
Cyber Patrol is not necessarily a voluntary product. In some cases there are persons working at companies, where Cyber Patrol has been installed, and the people working there might not even know until they try to access a page that is blocked and it comes up with an error.
If I ever get that kind of problem I'll go to the boss (or more likely the system administrator) and say "I need to access this webpage in order to do my work! I'll be waiting (and collecting my salary for nothing) till it gets fixed."
They will then have to modify the blocking list, or turn the thing off for a while. Sooner or later they'll get tired of it and see the problem with such blocking.
I cannot imagine how blocking can help a company either. The user who can't waste company time on porn may still waste the same time on family-friendly entertainment. Just keep a log, and check it whenever someone doesn't get the usual amount of work done.
what if you harpoon onto the comet, and then retract the harpoon real fast before releasing it, catapulting yourself on from the comet. No resistance and all that up there, wouldn't you then be travelling x times faster than the comet was originally travelling?
First, you'll have real trouble finding harpoons and wire strong enough for what you are suggesting. Do that and you can get some speed the way you suggest though. Not that it is a smart move - that retracting motion you need will need a lot of power, you might as well use that power for jumping off the surface of the moon. The comet won't necessarily make much difference.
A lot of things can change the appearance of your irises, like diabetes, RP, keratitus
No big deal. You'll have to go to the bank and re-scan your eyes - then you can use ATM's again. It is not as if people get such a disease every other week. Many more people loose or accidentally destroy their cards today. Those with no eyes at all can do business the old-fashioned way, by actually talking to the bank clerks. Most of them do that already, the visual interface is no good for them.
I bet you never collected one cent either, because your computer is not a fax machine.
His computer may very well be a fax machine, equipped with a faxmodem, scanner & printer. It may then do everything a fax machine does. I.e. it is a fax machine with a computer attached for additional services. Do the law in question require that the spam arrived through the phone line? Or is reaching the fax machine in some way enough?
Re:Broadband will make Spam a Huge Burden
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Austria Bans Spam
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· Score: 1
I like the analogy that spam is like direct marketing through collect phone calls - the recipient always pays. It's a succinct and easily understandable statement that leads easily and directly to illegalization.
Spamming is more like sending junk mail without paying, so the recipient has to pay. Oh, your post office doesn't allow that? Doesn't matter, because the spammer actually break into the post office in order to place his sacks of junk mail. And he uses a fake identity too so he won't get caught.
Sounds like a double crime to me. No radical new laws needed, just apply existing mail laws to email.
If you are the admin of a corporate PC running NT, you tell the user, if you touch this program intentionally your boss will hear about it, and they leave it alone.
And when my boss asks "why did you kill that program?" I just tell them I didn't - it probably crashed by itself or because of some os glitch.
Linux wont compete as well in China since once of it's key features is being free. In China so is Windows 95/98/2000. (practically)
Don't forget the other key feature: Linux runs, and runs well on old hardware. A pentium 66 with 16M runs X in a useable way. Even a 386 is useful, although you may not want to run X on it. Developing countries have few new machines.
You can do that, and make your customers happy - but then why would any of them buy the 1M connection? Word will get around and suddenly you'll have everyone on 128K connections, using 1M.
Easy. Those who pay for 1M will always get 1M (the money pays for necessary equipment) If "word gets around" then the service becomes so popular that it gets overloaded, and those who didn't pay for 1M suddenly fall down to the 128k they paid for. Those who paid for 1M still have 1M of course. Those who paid for cheap 128k and got addicted to 1M now seriously think of upgrading their service to 1M...
Also, allowing people to use spare capacity will spread the load more, utilizing the equipment better. Geeks will use the service at odd hours in order to get better bandwith cheaply. If they have to pay to get more even in low-load situations then they may do so - and only use the service at more convenient times. This won't necessary make more money as everybody wanting 1M at the most loaded time of day will force the vendor to install a lot more equipment which will be idle half of the time.
After all, when you buy a copy of Windows, you don't sign any contract saying you won't make copies for all your friends, but your first use of the product counts as your agreement to abide by the licensing terms.
Using the product don't count as an agreement. I can't buy a copy of windows and legally make copies for my friends as long as I don't use it. You can't copy it no matter what you do or don't do to the box.
Opening the box/using the sw merely gives the vendor the option of not taking it back if I try to return it.
I'm not sure how workable this is in practice. Hashes work great on digital data that is the same every time. But TV, even digitised, has been through an analogue stage, that means it is different every time. I'm not sure how technically possible it is to remove the "noise" in such a way you get repeatable data that can be hashed.
You can get get rid of the noise with lossy compression. Use averaging and rounding, transform the picture to 50x50 16 color before hashing it.
I wouldn't worry too much about them putting in animations at the bottom, you can then hash only the middle. Similiar filtering will remove many other possibilities for them as well. They can make entirely different commercials every time, but that is expensive. And it won't work too well either, commercials depends on recognition. They work best when people see them over and over.
There's something wrong with NT if you need a "good NT persion" just to keep it from crashing! Linux doesn't need that. A "good os person" is necessary to get the best possible from any os of course. But stability shouldn't need tweaking.
Anybody with 4 network cards of this sort in a system would need 2.5 OC-3 lines to connect too, and they would probably be running a load-balancing switch.
We are no longer talking webserver only. A machine with 4 (or more) cards might be an intranet router/switch as well as server. With the cards connecting different subnets you might get all sorts of unbalanced network traffic.
Hopefully Linux 2.4 with the new scheduler, a lot of patches, a threaded IP stack (this seemed to be one of the things that slowed Linux) and a way tobind a card to a CPU and Linux can severely improve it's performance.
Yes, a smp-friendly IP stack would be nice. I am not sure binding a card to a cpu is such a good idea though, imagine a scenario where 90% of the traffic is on one of the 4 or so adapters. Realistic I think - network traffic may occur in bursts, sometimes here, sometimes there. Having all cpu's working on serving the busy card is then a good idea.
Well i think the main Problem is, that the only SPAM i get is this stupid "Make money fast" etc crap. Now if i were to get some sensible stuff, Like ads that Interest me, it still would not be good, but a little better.
If you want "ads that interest you" then use a search engine like altavista and find 1000 interesting ads. It is that simple. No email needed for that!
Microsoft would never have pushed for these tests if they weren't 100% sure they would win.
They are possibly doing their own tests with linux in order to find scenarios where they can win. Then they announce a test, possibly inviting linux people to tweak the linux machine in order to gain credibility. Then they can say "They worked hard at it - but we still won!"
This isn't all bad, as we get hints on what we should improve. But we should set up tests ourself too, balancing the opinion by showing off some real-life scenarios where linux wins already.
How about a stability test with a machine that runs many different services (file/print + database + dynamic web +...) for months? Or performance tests in an area where linux wins today?
People who want a purely static webserver now knows to use solaris or NT. Some other benchmarks might let them know when to use linux too. Red hat & other linux vendors could surely fund some tests themselves.
Given that you can produce nanomachines, how the hell do you tell them what to do?
They won't need a big computer of course. Remember early 4-bit processors with perhaps a few hundred transistors? Imagine building one of those with today's.18 tecnology or something even smaller. A nanomachine don't need to be super-intelligent and it don't need to be fast at all. You make up for that by having large numbers of them. And the first nanomachine won't need code sets for all future machines - a "nano-factory" building simpler nanomachines can be made programmable. Perhaps electronic programmable, perhaps programmable by feeding it "blueprints" in the form of DNA or other useful signal molecules.
i am not disagreeing that Linux contributed to the CS field, i am just wondering if he is in the same category as Turing, Einstein and Newton.
You don't have to "beat Einstein" to get a degree. Being "good enough" is enough. I think Linus is good enough. Some says he just used what he learned, such as an engineer building a bridge. Well, if the bridge is sufficiently unusual or spectacular... To take the analogy further: Linus' "bridge" is unusually big, it won't fall down in an earthquake, and anybody may cross it for free. Lots of people have come to depend on it.
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Bringing back old diseases would be bad, but it wouldn't be the end of the world either. There are always survivors, even ebola didn't kill all.
Actually, the victim fatality rate, the long-term dormancy of the virus, and the apparent good health of HIV carriers makes AIDS, in the absence of careful avoidance practices and an ultimate cure, a nightmare of a people killer.
a faster acting plague would inspire a much more radical reaction in the uninfected portions of humanity to protect themselves, possibly resulting in less damage
I don't think a faster working HIV virus would help you much. Because the old kind would still be around, carried by some of those not infected by the "new" kind.
Outcome 4:
Someone breaks in. He removes all evidence of this, so it isn't noticed. Then he writes a new version of backorifice or a win2000-virus...
Don't tell me that you really think that people immigrating to America deliberately wanted to spread epidemics.
They most certainly did. It is well documented that we gave blankets and bedding known to be infected with smallpox to many native tribes with devastating results, in what is the first such biological warfare program of which I'm aware.
Certainly not the first occurence of biological warfare. This is as old as war itself. Some of ours dead from bad diseases? Get them into enemy territory in one way or another. Toss the bodies over their walls with a catapult. Or into the river that flows into their area.
This is older than Columbus.
My company has enough trouble trying to have it work with under 50 users.
Exactly. I once worked in a company that used exchange. (And sold lots of microsoft solutions). One day we all got a letter from the mail administrator telling us to change our outlook setup from polling every minute to every 10 minutes instead. Because the mail server machine (with its 500M, several cpu's...) couldn't handle the load generated by every user polling every minute. How any users? 50. The big NT+exchange machine had trouble with one mail poll per second.
I believe it is possible to set up exchange a lot better than that, but apparently not by default.
Consider how a mail server will be used. In the beginning email is new, like the phone once was. Cool, but not something the company depends on. After a while all internal communication goes through email, and a lot of external communication too. Downtime on the phone system is simply not tolerated, the same will become true for your email system after a while. Select something with low regular maintenance overhead. It doesn't matter how hard or easy it is to setup the first time, how many months between hiccups matters a lot with thousands of users.
WRONG. The purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. The only way they can do that is to sell something that people like. A very democratic process. Without government intervention, the free market MUST provide consumers with the best possible products. This gets perverted when government incentives exist (subsidies, special protections). (side note: I believe there is a case for anti-trust law, but otherwise I am against governmental interference in the operation of a market.)
Corporations maximize shareholder value - but not necessarily by providing the best products. They may choose undemocratic ways like bribing politicians to do what they want. Such as undermining the "free market" in subtle ways.
This I've never really understood. Excessive violence is indeed more permissible than any sexual content - and it isn't just an American thing.
Maybe not just American, but certainly not universal. Violence i films can easily earn a 18-year old limit. Sex scenes of the normal kind won't do that, they won't even push the film into late night when it eventually is released for TV.
The attitude is thus -
"Let's make sex mysterious and 'adult' - that way, teens won't have sex and get pregnant or get diseases or anything."
Here they tell you about how babies are made in kindergarten. This is repeated now and then during school. (One of the few subjects even a teacher cannot make boring) You are supposed to know before age wakes your instincts.
There's no way you can prevent teens from having sex, but unwanted pregnancy is avoidable when you know.
Cyber Patrol is not necessarily a voluntary product. In some cases there are persons working at companies, where Cyber Patrol has been installed, and the people working there might not even know until they try to access a page that is blocked and it comes up with an error.
If I ever get that kind of problem I'll go to the boss (or more likely the system administrator) and say "I need to access this webpage in order to do my work! I'll be waiting (and collecting my salary for nothing) till it gets fixed."
They will then have to modify the blocking list, or turn the thing off for a while. Sooner or later they'll get tired of it and see the problem with such blocking.
I cannot imagine how blocking can help a company either. The user who can't waste company time on porn may still waste the same time on family-friendly entertainment. Just keep a log, and check it whenever someone doesn't get the usual amount of work done.
Ok, could someone explain to me why it is "cool" when Transmeta gets a patent, but "uncool" when anyone else does?
Software patents are generally uncool. This looks like a hardware patent though, that's different.
Do we even know where Halley's goes off to?
Of course. It is a well-known elliptical orbit.
what if you harpoon onto the comet, and then retract the harpoon real fast before releasing it, catapulting yourself on from the comet. No resistance and all that up there, wouldn't you then be travelling x times faster than the comet was originally travelling?
First, you'll have real trouble finding harpoons and wire strong enough for what you are suggesting. Do that and you can get some speed the way you suggest though. Not that it is a smart move - that retracting motion you need will need a lot of power, you might as well use that power for jumping off the surface of the moon. The comet won't necessarily make much difference.
A lot of things can change the appearance of your irises, like diabetes, RP, keratitus
No big deal. You'll have to go to the bank and re-scan your eyes - then you can use ATM's again. It is not as if people get such a disease every other week. Many more people loose or accidentally destroy their cards today. Those with no eyes at all can do business the old-fashioned way, by actually talking to the bank clerks. Most of them do that already, the visual interface is no good for them.
I bet you never collected one cent either, because your computer is not a fax machine.
His computer may very well be a fax machine, equipped with a faxmodem, scanner & printer. It may then do everything a fax machine does. I.e. it is a fax machine with a computer attached for additional services. Do the law in question require that the spam arrived through the phone line? Or is reaching the fax machine in some way enough?
I like the analogy that spam is like direct marketing through collect phone calls - the recipient always pays. It's a succinct and easily understandable statement that leads easily and directly to illegalization.
Spamming is more like sending junk mail without paying, so the recipient has to pay. Oh, your post office doesn't allow that? Doesn't matter, because the spammer actually break into the post office in order to place his sacks of junk mail. And he uses a fake identity too so he won't get caught.
Sounds like a double crime to me. No radical new laws needed, just apply existing mail laws to email.
If you are the admin of a corporate PC running NT, you tell the user, if you touch this program intentionally your boss will hear about it, and they leave it alone.
And when my boss asks "why did you kill that program?" I just tell them I didn't - it probably crashed by itself or because of some os glitch.
Linux wont compete as well in China since once of it's key features is being free. In China so is Windows 95/98/2000. (practically)
Don't forget the other key feature: Linux runs, and runs well on old hardware. A pentium 66 with 16M runs X in a useable way. Even a 386 is useful, although you may not want to run X on it. Developing countries have few new machines.
You can do that, and make your customers happy - but then why would any of them buy the 1M connection? Word will get around and suddenly you'll have everyone on 128K connections, using 1M.
Easy. Those who pay for 1M will always get 1M (the money pays for necessary equipment) If "word gets around" then the service becomes so popular that it gets overloaded, and those who didn't pay for 1M suddenly fall down to the 128k they paid for. Those who paid for 1M still have 1M of course. Those who paid for cheap 128k and got addicted to 1M now seriously think of upgrading their service to 1M...
Also, allowing people to use spare capacity will spread the load more, utilizing the equipment better. Geeks will use the service at odd hours in order to get better bandwith cheaply. If they have to pay to get more even in low-load situations then they may do so - and only use the service at more convenient times. This won't necessary make more money as everybody wanting 1M at the most loaded time of day will force the vendor to install a lot more equipment which will be idle half of the time.
After all, when you buy a copy of Windows, you don't sign any contract saying you won't make copies for all your friends, but your first use of the product counts as your agreement to abide by the licensing terms.
Using the product don't count as an agreement. I can't buy a copy of windows and legally make copies for my friends as long as I don't use it. You can't copy it no matter what you do or don't do to the box.
Opening the box/using the sw merely gives the vendor the option of not taking it back if I try to return it.
I'm not sure how workable this is in practice. Hashes work great on digital data that is the same every time. But TV, even digitised, has been through an analogue stage, that means it is different every time. I'm not sure how technically possible it is to remove the "noise" in such a way you get repeatable data that can be hashed.
You can get get rid of the noise with lossy compression. Use averaging and rounding, transform the picture to 50x50 16 color before hashing it.
I wouldn't worry too much about them putting in animations at the bottom, you can then hash only the middle. Similiar filtering will remove many other possibilities for them as well. They can make entirely different commercials every time, but that is expensive. And it won't work too well either, commercials depends on recognition. They work best when people see them over and over.
It sounds like they need a good NT person?
There's something wrong with NT if you need a "good NT persion" just to keep it from crashing! Linux doesn't need that. A "good os person" is necessary to get the best possible from any os of course. But stability shouldn't need tweaking.
Anybody with 4 network cards of this sort in a system would need 2.5 OC-3 lines to connect too, and they would probably be running a load-balancing switch.
We are no longer talking webserver only. A machine with 4 (or more) cards might be an intranet router/switch as well as server. With the cards connecting different subnets you might get all sorts of unbalanced network traffic.
Hopefully Linux 2.4 with the new scheduler, a lot of patches, a threaded IP stack (this seemed to be one of the things that slowed Linux) and a way tobind a card to a CPU and Linux can severely improve it's performance.
Yes, a smp-friendly IP stack would be nice. I am not sure binding a card to a cpu is such a good idea though, imagine a scenario where 90% of the traffic is on one of the 4 or so adapters. Realistic I think - network traffic may occur in bursts, sometimes here, sometimes there. Having all cpu's working on serving the busy card is then a good idea.
Well i think the main Problem is, that the only SPAM i get is this stupid "Make money fast" etc crap. Now if i were to get some sensible stuff, Like ads that Interest me, it still would not be good, but a little better.
If you want "ads that interest you" then use a search engine like altavista and find 1000 interesting ads. It is that simple. No email needed for that!
Microsoft would never have pushed for these tests if they weren't 100% sure they would win.
...) for months? Or performance tests in an area where linux wins today?
They are possibly doing their own tests with linux in order to find scenarios where they can win. Then they announce a test, possibly inviting linux people to tweak the linux machine in order to gain credibility. Then they can say "They worked hard at it - but we still won!"
This isn't all bad, as we get hints on what we should improve. But we should set up tests ourself too, balancing the opinion by showing off some real-life scenarios where linux wins already.
How about a stability test with a machine that runs many different services (file/print + database + dynamic web +
People who want a purely static webserver now knows to use solaris or NT. Some other benchmarks might let them know when to use linux too. Red hat & other linux vendors could surely fund some tests themselves.
Given that you can produce nanomachines, how the hell do you tell them what to do?
.18 tecnology or something even smaller. A nanomachine don't need to be super-intelligent and it don't need to be fast at all. You make up for that by having large numbers of them. And the first nanomachine won't need code sets for all future machines - a "nano-factory" building simpler nanomachines can be made programmable. Perhaps electronic programmable, perhaps programmable by feeding it "blueprints" in the form of DNA or other useful signal molecules.
They won't need a big computer of course. Remember early 4-bit processors with perhaps a few hundred transistors? Imagine building one of those with today's
i am not disagreeing that Linux contributed to the CS field, i am just wondering if he is in the same category as Turing, Einstein and Newton.
You don't have to "beat Einstein" to get a degree. Being "good enough" is enough. I think Linus is good enough. Some says he just used what he learned, such as an engineer building a bridge. Well, if the bridge is sufficiently unusual or spectacular...
To take the analogy further: Linus' "bridge" is unusually big, it won't fall down in an earthquake, and anybody may cross it for free. Lots of people have come to depend on it.