I look at it as poor quality of service on Comcast's part. If they can't deliver Vonage packets at a reasonable rate, what evidence do I have that they'd deliver their own? None. They won't get me as a customer for that reason alone.
Let's see you cracking a joke about the robot at the funeral if it was *your* son in the casket.
I did. It was the only way I could react to my father's death. It's who I am. I hurt fiercely, I was crying hard, and when my mom and I stepped into her kitchen I had to say something, so I cracked a quiet joke. It broke the tension, and made us feel just a tiny bit normal.
That's coping, using humor. It happens in real life.
In this forum, however, nine South Africans are truly remote. They're about as far outside my monkey sphere as humans can get. You wanna joke about them? Fine by me. You want to complain about the jokers because you don't think people really deal with tragedy that way? You're quite wrong.
I'm mostly happy with Comcast too. Their HD DVR cable box sucks ass, especially compared to my ReplayTV units, but the HD quality is OK and their internet service is quite fast and I have really good uptime.
But I'd never voluntarily get VoIP through them. It's more expensive than POTS, plus since my wife installed Vonage as a temporary stopgap for her home office, th-e d-am-n sig-na-l s-ou-nd-s li-ke c-rap. If that's how they treat voice traffic, it'd be totally useless.
it's perfectly fine for ExampleBank to impersonate suckers and go feed the phisher's site a million bogus bank account numbers and passwords that drop the phisher into their honeypot server as well as flooding the phisher's supply of account info from real suckers so it's harder to sell.
Is it? Is there any concern for the site hosting the phisher's site? It's usually someone else's mismanaged server that's been owned by some worm or another. Isn't it vigilante justice to flood them with a million page submissions, sticking them with a giant bandwidth tab?
(Just so we're clear, that's purely a "devil's advocate" question. I'm all in favor of poisoning the phisherman's well, regardless of the cost to the poorly maintained machine. I consider it part of the price of negligence.)
It's pretty clear from context that the implication is other applications consider those prefixes as "traditionally safe", and not that Microsoft does.
Umm...no. Your interpretation, while literal, doesn't parse because applications have neither traditions nor opinions on safety, nor do they write themselves. When you expand the original sentence's subject appropriately, it reads like this:
For traditionally "safe" protocols like mailto: or http: [human] application [writer]s often just verify the prefix and then choose to call into the Windows shell32 function ShellExecute() to handle it.
At that point, it reads more like this: "The application developers I know traditionally consider the protocols mailto: and http: to be "safe", and therefore don't need to bother sanitizing the URIs before foisting the heavy lifting off on ShellExecute()." In that context it's clearly the blind presumption of safety on the part of the developers that's the real problem.
Not that it would make me go screaming about mentally deficient Oedipal fornicators...
I, for one, am sick to death of welcoming 50 kilogram robotic overlord after 50 kilogram robotic overlord, only to have them fly off to the moon after a month or so, leaving us high, dry, and overlordless back here on Earth!
"Magical enhancement" is possible of a blurry video image, given sufficient frames.
The trick is to use motion and multiple frames to "discover" edges. Usually the target of enhancement is a human who moves slightly, even when standing still. What the analysis software does is measure the change from each pixel to the next.
Zoom in on the pixels near a "sharply focused" curved edge in a photo of a black circle on a white background (or even a straight line on a diagonal.) You'll see filler pixels near the boundaries that are neither black nor white, but shades of gray where the individual pixel straddles the line on the original. You'll also likely see some colored pixels due to the camera sensor not having all the red, green and blue pixels at the same point. By moving the subject a mere fraction of a pixel and examining another picture, the shades and colors will change accordingly. Interpolating the difference can give you a more precise definition of where the edge really is. The more frames you compare (and with suitable motion) the more likely it is you can determine the edges.
Astronomy software exploits this fairly easily with a technique known as image stacking, as in DeepSkyStacker. However they have it fairly easy as the stars themselves make excellent reference points. It's not as easy with a subject that's not exactly trying to pose for a camera, but it's still possible.
But none of those techniques can do the whole "zoom in on that crowd, zoom in on that guy, zoom in on his name badge, zoom in on the barcode, translate that to text, look him up in the database" that spy shows like to do. There's a difference between magic and miracles.
Huh. So, how would you improve an antivirus product? What do you think is a fair price point?
About $36,000 dollars. That's roughly the cost of a Comp Sci bachelor's degree at a state university.
Seriously, knowing what the hell you are doing is far more effective protection than relying on a $50 chunk of software. I've had three "malware" infections so far. One was an advertising distribution peer-to-peer network that was intentionally installed by a commercial CD-ROM as a part of a kid's game (Mattel, back in the 1990s), and the other two were at work. Some idiot brought SQL Slammer in on his laptop, and another commercial product (a battery backup software installation CD-ROM) installed one of those "sleepers". Otherwise firewalls and knowledge have kept my gear safe.
My antivirus has legitimately kicked in only once: a Word virus on a resume. I'll give the AV software credit, even though I have auto-run macros disabled and would not have been infected. The only other times my antivirus software has anything to do is when I do suspicious stuff myself, like create my own root authority certificates. It's nice to see it working when that happens.
Teachers don't seem capable of grasping the concept of bending/breaking rules set by the local superintendent
It's not the concept they don't grasp. It's the zero-tolerance world which the extremists among us have created for ourselves.
If a teacher allows any violations of the rules in his or her class, you can be sure that more than one nutjob parent is going to be filing a complaint with the school board. Doesn't seem to matter if it's a complaint about Junior reading Richard Dawkins or Sally reading the Holy Bible, there's going to be some asshole soccer mom who will threaten to take the issue to court. Right or wrong, firing a teacher is a whole lot cheaper than defending the district in a lawsuit.
And of course a fired teacher is another way of saying "homeless person." No other school board will risk hiring a controversial teacher. Hope that fallback career of "painter's assistant" pans out.
You may wish your teacher showed some balls, but your teacher really just wants to collect a paycheck next month. Standing up for your rights isn't going to help accomplish that goal.
There's the old story about DES, and how the NSA improved the cipher, but refused to say exactly why the new version was better...
Yes, the NSA weakened Lucifer by reducing the key size. No argument there. But they changed two other aspects of the algorithm -- the complete redoing of the values of the S boxes, of course, and they also added the staggering of the permutation step. Both changes were made without public explanation, and were the fuel for the paranoia surrounding DES.
But as you say, that's a pretty old story, and it long ago was given an ending. After the civilian cryptography community discovered two "new" attacks, in 1994 an IBMer by the name of Don Coppersmith revealed the actual reasons for keeping the changes secret.
It wasn't until Biham and Shamir discovered differential cryptanalysis in the late '80s that the value of the S box and permutation schedule became apparent -- the values provided maximum uncertainty increasing the amount of chosen plaintext required to successfully attack a key. Later, Mitsuru Matsui discovered an more powerful variant of differential analysis called linear analysis, but careful selection of the S box values minimized the amount of information revealed by this attack, too.
After the public announcement of the discovery of differential and linear analysis, Coppersmith released a paper detailing the strength of DES against these exact attacks. In it, he says "After discussions with NSA, it was decided that disclosure of the design considerations would reveal the technique of differential cryptanalysis, a powerful technique that could be used against many ciphers. This in turn would weaken the competitive advantage the United States enjoyed over other countries in the field of cryptography." So the secrecy was not that DES was weakened, but to hide the reasons why it was strengthened!
As Schneier once pointed out, the NSA's biggest mistake was allowing DES to be made public. It taught civilians (and therefore potential enemies) a great deal about strong cryptography. Coppersmith's paper confirmed his assumption. Without DES, who knows what cryptography would look like today? We might all still be thinking Enigma machines are secure.
But flexibility itself is an important attribute only for certain speaker installations. Mechanically, a speaker sees much different use than an electric guitar or a studio camera.
Mounted speakers? Flex is an attribute that only needs to be considered during installation. Minimum bending radius is likely to be the limiting factor. Solid conductors should work very well in this installation.
Concert speaker stacks that are set up and taken down at each venue? Flex and durability are of paramount importance, but as with anything mobile there is a maintenance aspect. They will wear and they will break. Regardless of the choice of fine strands or coarse, spare cables will be more important than any individual cable choice.
Free-standing floor speakers? That depends on the room situation. If you're constantly reconfiguring the room to support different listening modes, then flexibility becomes more important, but if you have a fairly static listening area, it's just not critical. Coarse strands would probably suit most installations quite well.
Corrosion, thermal stresses, and vibration at the terminals will likely be the bigger enemies for just about any cable. Maximizing contact area and mechanically reinforcing the connections (strain relief) will help prevent these losses. Corrosion resistant plating on the terminals (i.e. gold plating) will help with longevity of an installation. But unless your speakers are mounted on a moving trolley, superflex is likely a poor choice.
Certainly not something that 99.999% of people would be able to pick up by ear.
99.999% of the current U.S. population (about 300,000,000) leaves 3,000 people. If you can get all three thousand of them to believe you so they spend $7,000 each on speaker cables, you'll make $21 million dollars (minus the actual cost of the wire, so about $20,997,000 dollars.)
Think about this: a human operator can generally tell spam from non-spam with 100% accuracy and zero false positives.
-1, wrong.
If humans could tell spam from ham, spam wouldn't be a problem because it wouldn't exist. Spam advertising wouldn't result in a single sale. No stock prices would change as a result of spam-based pump and dump schemes. Nobody would fall for phishing attacks. But because spam does sell products, and stock prices do change as a result of spam, and people constantly enter their PINs into 0wned servers because a phish speared them, we know that great numbers of human operators cannot successfully identify spam.
What is and isn't spam is not a machine based problem, it's a human categorization problem. And machines are still bad at it.
Cognitive pattern recognition is still definitely not a solved problem, despite many advances in the field. Look at the Department of Homeland Security facial recognition scanners they've been testing in airports: 30% accuracy in tests, no actual terrorists caught, high false positive rates, and fooled with little effort. Look at CAPTCHAs, which are quite effective at protecting low-value targets from automated attacks. Or look at Phishtank which has acknowledged that machine recognition doesn't work and is using volunteer humans to solve the problem.
Remember that spam is a numbers game: if 99% of people can identify spam, then it makes sense that filters that are as good as humans might be able to decrease 99% of the spam. But all a spammer has to do is identify the characteristics that allowed the 1% of spam to get through, and evolve the rest of their spam to use whatever worked at bypassing the filters. Any automated large-scale "solution" to spam is going to fail because of this evolution. At some point spam filters become too sensitive, incorrectly blocking valid email messages and causing user complaints. And we've already reached this point.
As I said in another post, personal spam filters can be quite effective, as long as they're not distributed widely. A spammer won't bother trying to get past your personal filter -- 99% of the people don't have spam filters, so his spam will reach his target audience. But if your filter is sold to ISPs, the "evolutionary pressure" of dodging the commercial filters will result in the spam dodging your own personal filters, making your filters less and less effective as time progresses.
The only 100% answer to spam is new email protocols with perfectly secured end-user machines that prevent zombies from sending spam. When both of those things are rolled out to every machine on the internet, spam will be a "solved" problem. Until then, everything that is proposed to "solve" the problem is at best a temporary stopgap that will not long endure.
What his joke is offering is the insight that every easy route (and most moderately complex routes) to blocking spam has already been tried and failed. Every "new" whiz-bang spam filtering idea these days is merely a rehash or mashup of previous filtering ideas that still retain the problems that plagued the original ideas. The method described in this paper is not novel -- it's a complex mashup of whitelists, CAPTCHAs, Bayesian filters, and new mail client software, each of which has been tried and has their own set of well-understood problems.
The spam problem is not that any new anti-spam idea is "unproven" or "untested" or "novel." The true underlying problem is that the mail protocols in place are not securable, never having been designed to be secured. Any true anti-spam change will require a protocol change and the total securing of every box on the net, and like the form letter also points out, that's not going to happen.
Spam filters are the modern equivalent of patent applications for perpetual motion. Eventually, the patent office realized that it had to reject them out of hand, because they were claiming to solve an unsolvable problem. Spam filters fall in that same category, and this form letter is a nerdy way of rejecting them out of hand. "We gotta try new things" is a fine attitude that solves a lot of problems that do have solutions. But it can't solve a problem whose only solution can not exist -- a new protocol relying on perfectly secured endpoint computers.
There is one place where spam filtering does work, and it's part of why I dislike these ideas: private filters can be very effective. That means if you invent a novel spam filter and want to enjoy its benefits for as long as possible, the best way to do it is to keep it quiet. My old simple perl scripts full of regexps worked great up until someone decided to mass-market spam blockers and apply the same principles at the ISP level. At that point my scripts were useless. Spammers really don't care if a handful of nerds block their stuff, but they are out of business if the blocking process can be automated and applied at the ISP or corporate levels. At that point they invent a workaround, rendering the previously working ideas useless.
As long as you're mentioning "guilt-free electronics", the author might want to be concerned about other social issues around his laptop:
Ensure that any tantalum used in the capacitors was mined from a source other than the Congo -- the money is funding a horrifying civil war with unbelievable atrocities being committed on both sides, and the coltan miners themselves are killing the eastern lowland gorillas for food.
Check for RoHS compliance -- help keep the future electronics waste stream lead-free.
Recycle the old laptop -- since it still works, donate it to charity or mod it and use it as a picture frame. If it no longer works, bring it to a household hazardous waste collection site. Our local site charges $0.15 per pound.
A couple of points about that. Those 14,030 weapons are among those intentionally delivered to the Iraqi police by the U.S; they do not represent the number of U.S. Army weapons that have gone "missing" or that we would "leave behind" after fighting the war (apart from arming the locals.) 14,030 may sound like a lot of weapons to people like us, (and would be enough to make Nicholas Cage rich), it's probably less than one percent of the weapons the U.S. brought into Iraq for themselves. And while that's enough to arm a fraction of a national police force or a small insurgency, it's not nearly enough to equip a standing army or fight an ongoing large-scale war.
For contrast, compare that number to how many Reagan was selling to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Just a single figure from page 50 of the "Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair" by Lee H. Hamilton and Daniel K. Inouye (the count is from Oliver North's personal notebook) shows that on May 8, 1985, North confirmed delivery of 40,000 working M-79 grenade launchers. (Many other weapons were delivered on many other days including notes about 10,000 AK-47 rifles, plus other unspecified quantities of RPG-7 rocket launchers, light machine guns, and SA-7 surface to air missiles; I wasn't able to identify exact numbers directly from that report without the references.)
I'll say it again: delivering weapons to other countries may be a good short-to-medium term tactic, but in the last 50 years it has proven time and again to be counterproductive to our strategic interests. If we want U.S. weapons delivered and used anywhere else, it should be American soldiers wielding them, keeping them out of the hands of the locals. That way when we want to pick up our ball and go home, all that's left is for the locals to throw rocks and insults at each other. I can live with that.
I say put a rifle in the hands of every able-bodied man and woman in Myanmar and see how things change.
That's the approach we successfully employed in Afghanistan. We taught the mujaheddin how to resist the Soviet invaders and taught them the principles of insurgency, which they haven't seem to have forgotten yet. And in Iraq, we sold peace-lovin' Saddam Hussein the weapons to defend himself against Persian aggression, which he peacefully used to help the Kurds avoid an uprising, and peacefully used to liberate Kuwait... and now we're rearming the Iraqi police to defend against those same weapons.
So if at any point you continue to think it is a good idea for us to keep providing arms to other people, just start flipping through your history books or your newspaper. Seriously, I think a U.S. invasion would be better than a weapons deal, simply because we wouldn't leave the weapons behind after the fighting is done.
My understanding of UK libel laws (which came from a London friend, not from any actual education or experience) is that it's still OK to "ask" the question, as I did above. I did not say they are swindling vulnerable adults. I asked if what they were doing was the same as swindling vulnerable adults. And as far as I can tell, questions on whether or not someone is breaking a law is pretty much the reason the legal system exists.
Of course, what I did do was unfavorably compare their customers to vulnerable adults. If their customers feel like suing me they might have a case, except for the part where I didn't personally identify any of them. It's really no different than claiming people who voted for Candidate X are stupid: not likely to win me friends or influence people, but hardly illegal.
If there are suckers who don't bother to read the print and take the steps necessary to opt out, and they go around telling people that the company is engaged in fraud when they aren't, those people should be sued. It's libel to make false statements like that, and there really isn't anything else that can be done to put a stop to it.
Don't you think the circumstances are somehow different when it's an education company aimed at selling their product to complete and total idiots? I mean in order to buy one of those discs, you've pretty much ducked under the sign that reads "YOU MUST BE --THIS STUPID-- TO ORDER". So given that his clientèle has already demonstrated an inability to read the large print, there's virtually no chance they'll be able to read the fine print. Isn't this akin to swindling vulnerable adults?
Frankly if you can't look at a problem and then pull out five or six languages from your tool belt and evaluate which will be the best for this job, then you are a bad programmer.
While I agree with this sentiment on principle, in practice this has proven to yield unworkable solutions. Different people bring different skillsets to the table. You may have a dozen developers who all have C++ in common, but to varying degrees. One may be more skilled in Perl, another in smalltalk, another in Python, and three more in Java. Divvy up the specs and tell each one to "Write your code using the best tool for the job." Then spend another year trying to integrate the pieces, and when they quit try to hire someone who can maintain the hydra.
Picking a single language for a project (at least at the component level) is pretty much a requirement.
Even though they try to hand-wave it away, this has been a big problem in the Microsoft.NET world. When it was introduced, Microsoft promised that all.NET languages were equal, first-class languages (my interpretation at the time was that C# programmers were instantly demoted to VB programmers:-( ) and that a developer could write in whichever.NET language they were most comfortable. But there are C# programmers and VB.NET programmers who don't really speak each other's language, even though they all compile down to the same MSIL. Trying to get them to maintain each others code leads to a lot of squabbling.
It's easy to say "A good programmer can write in any of these languages" but in reality it's much harder to find a lot of good programmers that are both willing and able to competently do maintenance in all of the languages you might end up with.
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I look at it as poor quality of service on Comcast's part. If they can't deliver Vonage packets at a reasonable rate, what evidence do I have that they'd deliver their own? None. They won't get me as a customer for that reason alone.
That's coping, using humor. It happens in real life.
In this forum, however, nine South Africans are truly remote. They're about as far outside my monkey sphere as humans can get. You wanna joke about them? Fine by me. You want to complain about the jokers because you don't think people really deal with tragedy that way? You're quite wrong.
But I'd never voluntarily get VoIP through them. It's more expensive than POTS, plus since my wife installed Vonage as a temporary stopgap for her home office, th-e d-am-n sig-na-l s-ou-nd-s li-ke c-rap. If that's how they treat voice traffic, it'd be totally useless.
Is it? Is there any concern for the site hosting the phisher's site? It's usually someone else's mismanaged server that's been owned by some worm or another. Isn't it vigilante justice to flood them with a million page submissions, sticking them with a giant bandwidth tab?
(Just so we're clear, that's purely a "devil's advocate" question. I'm all in favor of poisoning the phisherman's well, regardless of the cost to the poorly maintained machine. I consider it part of the price of negligence.)
Umm...no. Your interpretation, while literal, doesn't parse because applications have neither traditions nor opinions on safety, nor do they write themselves. When you expand the original sentence's subject appropriately, it reads like this:
At that point, it reads more like this: "The application developers I know traditionally consider the protocols mailto: and http: to be "safe", and therefore don't need to bother sanitizing the URIs before foisting the heavy lifting off on ShellExecute()." In that context it's clearly the blind presumption of safety on the part of the developers that's the real problem.
Not that it would make me go screaming about mentally deficient Oedipal fornicators ...
I, for one, am sick to death of welcoming 50 kilogram robotic overlord after 50 kilogram robotic overlord, only to have them fly off to the moon after a month or so, leaving us high, dry, and overlordless back here on Earth!
The trick is to use motion and multiple frames to "discover" edges. Usually the target of enhancement is a human who moves slightly, even when standing still. What the analysis software does is measure the change from each pixel to the next.
Zoom in on the pixels near a "sharply focused" curved edge in a photo of a black circle on a white background (or even a straight line on a diagonal.) You'll see filler pixels near the boundaries that are neither black nor white, but shades of gray where the individual pixel straddles the line on the original. You'll also likely see some colored pixels due to the camera sensor not having all the red, green and blue pixels at the same point. By moving the subject a mere fraction of a pixel and examining another picture, the shades and colors will change accordingly. Interpolating the difference can give you a more precise definition of where the edge really is. The more frames you compare (and with suitable motion) the more likely it is you can determine the edges.
Astronomy software exploits this fairly easily with a technique known as image stacking, as in DeepSkyStacker. However they have it fairly easy as the stars themselves make excellent reference points. It's not as easy with a subject that's not exactly trying to pose for a camera, but it's still possible.
But none of those techniques can do the whole "zoom in on that crowd, zoom in on that guy, zoom in on his name badge, zoom in on the barcode, translate that to text, look him up in the database" that spy shows like to do. There's a difference between magic and miracles.
About $36,000 dollars. That's roughly the cost of a Comp Sci bachelor's degree at a state university.
Seriously, knowing what the hell you are doing is far more effective protection than relying on a $50 chunk of software. I've had three "malware" infections so far. One was an advertising distribution peer-to-peer network that was intentionally installed by a commercial CD-ROM as a part of a kid's game (Mattel, back in the 1990s), and the other two were at work. Some idiot brought SQL Slammer in on his laptop, and another commercial product (a battery backup software installation CD-ROM) installed one of those "sleepers". Otherwise firewalls and knowledge have kept my gear safe.
My antivirus has legitimately kicked in only once: a Word virus on a resume. I'll give the AV software credit, even though I have auto-run macros disabled and would not have been infected. The only other times my antivirus software has anything to do is when I do suspicious stuff myself, like create my own root authority certificates. It's nice to see it working when that happens.
It's not the concept they don't grasp. It's the zero-tolerance world which the extremists among us have created for ourselves.
If a teacher allows any violations of the rules in his or her class, you can be sure that more than one nutjob parent is going to be filing a complaint with the school board. Doesn't seem to matter if it's a complaint about Junior reading Richard Dawkins or Sally reading the Holy Bible, there's going to be some asshole soccer mom who will threaten to take the issue to court. Right or wrong, firing a teacher is a whole lot cheaper than defending the district in a lawsuit.
And of course a fired teacher is another way of saying "homeless person." No other school board will risk hiring a controversial teacher. Hope that fallback career of "painter's assistant" pans out.
You may wish your teacher showed some balls, but your teacher really just wants to collect a paycheck next month. Standing up for your rights isn't going to help accomplish that goal.
Actually, technology has made quite a leap forward from when my teachers used to stand in front of a blackboard and address us.
Today's teachers stand in front of a whiteboard.
Yes, the NSA weakened Lucifer by reducing the key size. No argument there. But they changed two other aspects of the algorithm -- the complete redoing of the values of the S boxes, of course, and they also added the staggering of the permutation step. Both changes were made without public explanation, and were the fuel for the paranoia surrounding DES.
But as you say, that's a pretty old story, and it long ago was given an ending. After the civilian cryptography community discovered two "new" attacks, in 1994 an IBMer by the name of Don Coppersmith revealed the actual reasons for keeping the changes secret.
It wasn't until Biham and Shamir discovered differential cryptanalysis in the late '80s that the value of the S box and permutation schedule became apparent -- the values provided maximum uncertainty increasing the amount of chosen plaintext required to successfully attack a key. Later, Mitsuru Matsui discovered an more powerful variant of differential analysis called linear analysis, but careful selection of the S box values minimized the amount of information revealed by this attack, too.
After the public announcement of the discovery of differential and linear analysis, Coppersmith released a paper detailing the strength of DES against these exact attacks. In it, he says "After discussions with NSA, it was decided that disclosure of the design considerations would reveal the technique of differential cryptanalysis, a powerful technique that could be used against many ciphers. This in turn would weaken the competitive advantage the United States enjoyed over other countries in the field of cryptography." So the secrecy was not that DES was weakened, but to hide the reasons why it was strengthened!
As Schneier once pointed out, the NSA's biggest mistake was allowing DES to be made public. It taught civilians (and therefore potential enemies) a great deal about strong cryptography. Coppersmith's paper confirmed his assumption. Without DES, who knows what cryptography would look like today? We might all still be thinking Enigma machines are secure.
- Mounted speakers? Flex is an attribute that only needs to be considered during installation. Minimum bending radius is likely to be the limiting factor. Solid conductors should work very well in this installation.
- Concert speaker stacks that are set up and taken down at each venue? Flex and durability are of paramount importance, but as with anything mobile there is a maintenance aspect. They will wear and they will break. Regardless of the choice of fine strands or coarse, spare cables will be more important than any individual cable choice.
- Free-standing floor speakers? That depends on the room situation. If you're constantly reconfiguring the room to support different listening modes, then flexibility becomes more important, but if you have a fairly static listening area, it's just not critical. Coarse strands would probably suit most installations quite well.
Corrosion, thermal stresses, and vibration at the terminals will likely be the bigger enemies for just about any cable. Maximizing contact area and mechanically reinforcing the connections (strain relief) will help prevent these losses. Corrosion resistant plating on the terminals (i.e. gold plating) will help with longevity of an installation. But unless your speakers are mounted on a moving trolley, superflex is likely a poor choice.99.999% of the current U.S. population (about 300,000,000) leaves 3,000 people. If you can get all three thousand of them to believe you so they spend $7,000 each on speaker cables, you'll make $21 million dollars (minus the actual cost of the wire, so about $20,997,000 dollars.)
Nice work if you can get it.
Not that I think any more highly of the current islamic fundamentalists than I do of the xtian fundies, but Islam was not an impediment.
For me, it started when Zonk invoked "Goodwin's Law".
-1, wrong.
If humans could tell spam from ham, spam wouldn't be a problem because it wouldn't exist. Spam advertising wouldn't result in a single sale. No stock prices would change as a result of spam-based pump and dump schemes. Nobody would fall for phishing attacks. But because spam does sell products, and stock prices do change as a result of spam, and people constantly enter their PINs into 0wned servers because a phish speared them, we know that great numbers of human operators cannot successfully identify spam.
What is and isn't spam is not a machine based problem, it's a human categorization problem. And machines are still bad at it.
Cognitive pattern recognition is still definitely not a solved problem, despite many advances in the field. Look at the Department of Homeland Security facial recognition scanners they've been testing in airports: 30% accuracy in tests, no actual terrorists caught, high false positive rates, and fooled with little effort. Look at CAPTCHAs, which are quite effective at protecting low-value targets from automated attacks. Or look at Phishtank which has acknowledged that machine recognition doesn't work and is using volunteer humans to solve the problem.
Remember that spam is a numbers game: if 99% of people can identify spam, then it makes sense that filters that are as good as humans might be able to decrease 99% of the spam. But all a spammer has to do is identify the characteristics that allowed the 1% of spam to get through, and evolve the rest of their spam to use whatever worked at bypassing the filters. Any automated large-scale "solution" to spam is going to fail because of this evolution. At some point spam filters become too sensitive, incorrectly blocking valid email messages and causing user complaints. And we've already reached this point.
As I said in another post, personal spam filters can be quite effective, as long as they're not distributed widely. A spammer won't bother trying to get past your personal filter -- 99% of the people don't have spam filters, so his spam will reach his target audience. But if your filter is sold to ISPs, the "evolutionary pressure" of dodging the commercial filters will result in the spam dodging your own personal filters, making your filters less and less effective as time progresses.
The only 100% answer to spam is new email protocols with perfectly secured end-user machines that prevent zombies from sending spam. When both of those things are rolled out to every machine on the internet, spam will be a "solved" problem. Until then, everything that is proposed to "solve" the problem is at best a temporary stopgap that will not long endure.
The spam problem is not that any new anti-spam idea is "unproven" or "untested" or "novel." The true underlying problem is that the mail protocols in place are not securable, never having been designed to be secured. Any true anti-spam change will require a protocol change and the total securing of every box on the net, and like the form letter also points out, that's not going to happen.
Spam filters are the modern equivalent of patent applications for perpetual motion. Eventually, the patent office realized that it had to reject them out of hand, because they were claiming to solve an unsolvable problem. Spam filters fall in that same category, and this form letter is a nerdy way of rejecting them out of hand. "We gotta try new things" is a fine attitude that solves a lot of problems that do have solutions. But it can't solve a problem whose only solution can not exist -- a new protocol relying on perfectly secured endpoint computers.
There is one place where spam filtering does work, and it's part of why I dislike these ideas: private filters can be very effective. That means if you invent a novel spam filter and want to enjoy its benefits for as long as possible, the best way to do it is to keep it quiet. My old simple perl scripts full of regexps worked great up until someone decided to mass-market spam blockers and apply the same principles at the ISP level. At that point my scripts were useless. Spammers really don't care if a handful of nerds block their stuff, but they are out of business if the blocking process can be automated and applied at the ISP or corporate levels. At that point they invent a workaround, rendering the previously working ideas useless.
For contrast, compare that number to how many Reagan was selling to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Just a single figure from page 50 of the "Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair" by Lee H. Hamilton and Daniel K. Inouye (the count is from Oliver North's personal notebook) shows that on May 8, 1985, North confirmed delivery of 40,000 working M-79 grenade launchers. (Many other weapons were delivered on many other days including notes about 10,000 AK-47 rifles, plus other unspecified quantities of RPG-7 rocket launchers, light machine guns, and SA-7 surface to air missiles; I wasn't able to identify exact numbers directly from that report without the references.)
I'll say it again: delivering weapons to other countries may be a good short-to-medium term tactic, but in the last 50 years it has proven time and again to be counterproductive to our strategic interests. If we want U.S. weapons delivered and used anywhere else, it should be American soldiers wielding them, keeping them out of the hands of the locals. That way when we want to pick up our ball and go home, all that's left is for the locals to throw rocks and insults at each other. I can live with that.
That's the approach we successfully employed in Afghanistan. We taught the mujaheddin how to resist the Soviet invaders and taught them the principles of insurgency, which they haven't seem to have forgotten yet. And in Iraq, we sold peace-lovin' Saddam Hussein the weapons to defend himself against Persian aggression, which he peacefully used to help the Kurds avoid an uprising, and peacefully used to liberate Kuwait... and now we're rearming the Iraqi police to defend against those same weapons.
So if at any point you continue to think it is a good idea for us to keep providing arms to other people, just start flipping through your history books or your newspaper. Seriously, I think a U.S. invasion would be better than a weapons deal, simply because we wouldn't leave the weapons behind after the fighting is done.
Of course, what I did do was unfavorably compare their customers to vulnerable adults. If their customers feel like suing me they might have a case, except for the part where I didn't personally identify any of them. It's really no different than claiming people who voted for Candidate X are stupid: not likely to win me friends or influence people, but hardly illegal.
Not too long ago I heard Windows Vista referred to as "XP, Millennium Edition." Pretty much summed it up right there.
Don't you think the circumstances are somehow different when it's an education company aimed at selling their product to complete and total idiots? I mean in order to buy one of those discs, you've pretty much ducked under the sign that reads "YOU MUST BE --THIS STUPID-- TO ORDER". So given that his clientèle has already demonstrated an inability to read the large print, there's virtually no chance they'll be able to read the fine print. Isn't this akin to swindling vulnerable adults?
While I agree with this sentiment on principle, in practice this has proven to yield unworkable solutions. Different people bring different skillsets to the table. You may have a dozen developers who all have C++ in common, but to varying degrees. One may be more skilled in Perl, another in smalltalk, another in Python, and three more in Java. Divvy up the specs and tell each one to "Write your code using the best tool for the job." Then spend another year trying to integrate the pieces, and when they quit try to hire someone who can maintain the hydra.
Picking a single language for a project (at least at the component level) is pretty much a requirement.
Even though they try to hand-wave it away, this has been a big problem in the Microsoft .NET world. When it was introduced, Microsoft promised that all .NET languages were equal, first-class languages (my interpretation at the time was that C# programmers were instantly demoted to VB programmers :-( ) and that a developer could write in whichever .NET language they were most comfortable. But there are C# programmers and VB.NET programmers who don't really speak each other's language, even though they all compile down to the same MSIL. Trying to get them to maintain each others code leads to a lot of squabbling.
It's easy to say "A good programmer can write in any of these languages" but in reality it's much harder to find a lot of good programmers that are both willing and able to competently do maintenance in all of the languages you might end up with.
I'm not all that old either (45). I just got an early start, learning BASIC on a state-run Honeywell 6000 at age 11.