He never said any such thing as "don't learn GOTO" or that "GOTO would screw up programmers". He first identified that the quantity of GOTO statements had an inverse correlation with the quality of the programmers and the programs they produced. He then listed several reasons why indiscriminant GOTOs tended to screw up higher level languages. His claim was that its use should be restricted to machine languages.
His paper makes the inference that you know what a GOTO is and what it does, and explains why under most circumstances it's not the best choice.
His paper is very short -- you might want to give it a quick read.
There are many forms of piracy. But the MPAA believes it is in their best interest to plug them all.
The camcorder-pirated movies are going for $4 each on a blanket on a New York sidewalk. They're not worried about HDTV owners for this particular form of piracy -- as you mentioned, you wouldn't lower yourself to watch these things filmed in craptovision. They're mostly being sold to exceedingly poor people who would never pay ticket prices to see a movie in a theater anyway.
However, these same camcorder shots are being digitized and shared. And for reasons I can't fathom, idiots who spend five figures on a 60" plasma HDTV with 1200W 7.1 Dolby surround systems will then spend hours bit-torrenting an almost unwatchable 640x480 craptovision monophonic camcorder copy of the latest theatrical releases.
I think Hollywood's biggest problem with the internet is actually the instant-response time of Freedom of Speech. Many people (and critics too) will agree that most of the movies Hollywood releases really are lame. But now, once the first geek goes to see a bad movie he's likely to post "what a piece of sh!t" on his blog, and send SMS to his friends standing in line warning them away from the latest stinker. Hollywood can no longer count on getting first sales from these people.
[ I apologize in advance for anthropomorphising evolution. It just seems to be the fastest way to phrase my points. ]
You seem to be skipping the fact that evolutionary pressures over time have consistently produced a smarter and smarter animal. Otherwise, we'd still be scratching fleas, trying to figure out where the apple grove is with the ripe fruit.
Yes, we have a blip now. For one thing, our society has come up with this notion of equality (I'm not saying it's bad, but I'm saying it's something evolution hasn't really encountered before.) And we have instant, global communication. Even stupid people can learn "don't stand in the way of a hurricane", thanks to TV. But I doubt these are the first blips evolution has had to overcome.
We also have provided novel "avenues" for evolution to explore. Jet travel is a perfect vector for a fast-moving organism (we just haven't had an overly destructive one take a jet yet. Apart from the Bruce Willis bits, "Twelve Monkeys" is an eerie peek into the near future.) Terrorism or WMDs could change the population-scape of the planet in a moment; the depletion of affordable energy will change it just as quickly (evolutionarily speaking.) But these won't be the first setbacks evolution has encountered, either.
Sure, we have no end of "American Idol" fans today, but we also have a lot of very smart people. I don't imagine every monkey simultaneously recognized the groves with ripe fruit, but I believe that at some point the "smarter monkey" led the others to the red apples. That's our job (if you will.) If some of the monkeys stay behind to watch TV, well, perhaps they won't evolve with the rest of us. Maybe our society will decide to physically fragment itself into two or more populations (go read virtually any near-science-fiction story, esp. Philip K. Dick, Huxley, or even Orwell for plenty of possible scenarios.)
But these are all "short term" observations, none based on an evolutionary time-scale. Overall, sooner or later, some of us will get smarter. Evolution hasn't stopped.
Anyone who figures a good way to really automate that is going to get far richer than they did.
Except that reality is perversely the exact opposite of this. Witness the evolution of Google's PageRank or of any set of spam filters.
What happens is that you have people with bad "stuff" (spam, ignorant ideas, marketing hype vs. facts, or whatever.) And these flat-earth people are filtered out by effective spam filters, or left behind by legitimate search engines. So what do they do? They rig the game. Spammers start quoting Jane Austin in between pictures of Vl4GR4. Casino operators place spam-links in unrelated blogs. Homeopathic quackery is disguised as "medical" advice. And all these idiots have to do is figure out how to splatter spam all over until their Google PageRanks show them to be the world's leading authority on "all-natural cures for cancer" or whatever.
Google tries hard. They really don't want quack medicine to show up as the first hit for "cancer treatments," but they've provided the ultimate testing ground for the shysters. All the flat-earthers have to do is keep trying until they look legitimate.
Already it's become hard to convince my wife that the top hit on a search engine isn't necessarily the most honest or accurate place to get advice. Looking at Google's results, even I might get caught by a sham site at the top named mayo-clinic.com (the real site is mayoclinic.com) Fortunately, many of the stupid sites (alternative-medicine-and-health.com, for example) are self-announcing.
On the bright side, it's possible that intelligence is going to be subject to evolutionary pressures. If the people who fall for the flat-earther's scams run out and try to cure their cancer with laetrile (or whatever the 2000's equivalent is,) then Charles Darwin's theories suggest that they are going to be a self-limiting lot.
Thanks to the electoral college system, all it takes is one state to cheat. As long as it's the right state.
Then, within that one state you just have to swing enough votes to tip the scales.
That means flipping half the difference. Using a made-up example, if the state of Bushsylvania has 10 million likely voters and polls show they'll vote 49% D and 47% R, you have to reverse just over 1% of the votes to push it to the R column. That's only 100,000 fraudulent vote reversals, or 110,000 if you include a 10% safety factor. Hell, it wouldn't even take much money to outright BUY that many votes, much less rig the voting machines. (Note that "ballot box stuffing" is less efficient than "flipping" -- to win Bushsylvania, for example, would require 220,000 phony ballots to be added, which is a much bigger task.)
And you might not even have to spend that much. If there are (say) four undecided states with the power to affect the outcome, go to the two with the narrowest margins, and twiddle theirs.
Remember to limit your exposure as much as possible. Restrict tampering to as few districts as you can. Prefer those with the highest numbers of voters, but with historically low turnouts. (Poverty stricken areas are ideal for this kind of tampering.) You don't even have to make every tampered-with district put in "wins" for your candidate -- you just have to reverse a total of 110,000 votes.
You want to keep it local as much as possible. Run it like a terrorist cell -- tiny groups of insiders who each know very little about the overall plan or about other people. Choose your fall-guys in advance, maybe plant some evidence 'in reserve'; in case someone turns coat you can blame a few overzealous campaign workers, and cut them loose before they start reporting further up the chain.
Wow, your comment just made me "complete the circle" (in my mind, anyway.)
A commonly held prejudice of Americans is that they "look down on" scholastic degrees from developing nations, because they believe those school systems are only designed to produce "test-passers," while Americans have always seen themselves as "innovators" and "free-thinkers." (Please, I'm not trying to start any flamewars with this statement, I'm just pointing out an ignorant prejudice that is held by many Americans.) But the same is going on here. My son knows that his AP teachers are teaching him exactly what is required to pass the AP tests, and are not necessarily teaching him that which is required to succeed in a given field.
We Americans have turned our schools into exactly that which we've always despised -- education factories producing "test-passers". Innovation is completely gone from our education, mostly because there's no incentive. There is no standardized test for innovation, and there can never be one.
It's going to take more than money, regardless of how much. It's going to take time and attrition.
Timing is going to be a huge problem for Microsoft, and it's why they're frantically cutting features in order to make their 2006 date. The big computer makers (Dell, HP, etc.) are today selling dirt cheap PCs (~$299) that are perfectly adequate for the home users. They may completely saturate the home market with these cheap XP machines before Vista hits the shelves. Anyone willing to settle for one of these today is not the type of customer who upgrades every two years. And they are indeed "good enough" -- they surf the web, write their school reports, and send email pictures of Junior to Grandma. And they'll have no reason to upgrade for a long time. They're not power gamers; fact is nobody's developed a killer app for the home that requires major CPU.
Once the market is full of these home machines that are "good enough", there will be another PC slump. And if Microsoft can't beat the home users' slump, they're going to have to rely on corporate sales.
The problem here is that Microsoft is their own biggest competitor. Businesses who have XP are "mostly satisfied." Their corporate drones can type up Word documents, create PowerPoint presentations, and read their email right now, and I don't know if Microsoft can convince them to spend major $$$ to migrate to Vista. I believe the business world already sees XP as "good enough," and most of them would question the wisdom of pumping millions of dollars into an "upgrade" that buys them no tangible advantage.
Another problem for Microsoft is that corporations will demand that XP remain under ongoing maintenance for several years after the arrival of Vista. Hell, they just cut support for NT only in the last year or two, and XP is far more popular than NT ever was.
I'm sure their current strategy is to convince the corporate "infrastructure architects" that Vista is way better than XP. Not sure how they're going to do it, but try they will. They'll probably start by offering better management tools than SMS and/or MOM. Then they'll throw out some stability numbers, tell a few worm-proof and virus-proof lies, and start replacing a few corporate servers (first one's always free;-). But with the DRM in place, very few of the corporate Windows fanbois I know are going to leap to Vista personally, and these are the absolute most critical people for Microsoft to sell to. There simply is no incentive. I'm imagining Vista may end up being a free upgrade to a few corporate giants, just to get visibility out there.
All versions of Vista will be crippled -- by DRM. In order to play DRMd media, it will only play through the Protected Media Path (PiMP).
XP is the last version of Windows I will personally own, or will support for friends and family (work, however, will continue to be work, whatever it is.) I have no personal need for any of the supposed "features" that would be inflicted on me by Vista.
If it's a choice between a "forced downsizing" or a "voluntary early retirement to go teach", the long term investment incentives would probably be overridden by the more immediate need to find a job. And the more people they can encourage to voluntarily leave, the fewer they have to force out.
Yeah, they're not going to get a livable wage from the school's retirement fund, and they know that. Most of the retiring IBMmers I know (mid 50s) already have pretty nice pensions and retirement packages set up from their 30 years of service. If they didn't, they'd be working till age 65 like ordinary people.
it involves dealing with a lot of hassles from the 50% of the students who don't want to be there, and are just being warehoused by the government until they turn 18.
Depends on the classes you end up teaching. My son is in four AP courses this year, and way more than half of those AP kids want to be in them (competition being what it is.) I suppose if you're stuck teaching remedial math or the "required-to-pass-the-grad-standards-Science-class " you're going to encounter a lot of unhappy kids. But if you've got a career specialty (programming, for example) you'll hopefully be put to use where your experience lies.
I'd love it if my company offered to pay for my doctorate and said "here, go teach high school kids." (At least I'd love it in about 10 or 15 years, after I had more savings and no kid in college.)
This is a really, really smart program. Too bad my old IBM buddy retired two weeks ago -- I'd ask him if he'd heard about this program. I'll just have to ask his replacement.
Re:the C. P. Snow Divide of Sciences and Humanitie
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
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· Score: 1
Commenting that "Flash and Powerpoint are bad things" is to me indicative of a parochial, extremely narrow-minded worldview; a view that is completely ignorant of half of the world's desires and life-cultures.
Loathing Microsoft, their products, and what they're doing to our culture is most certainly not a "Slashdot-only" perspective. Whenever I get someone who says to me "Powerpoint is a good thing", I like to forward them to The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation. (Trust me, you will laugh, but you may also cry.)
This was not written by a Microsoft-hater, but rather by someone who fears the ill-effects of what software like Powerpoint is doing to human communication, and how it's shaping our thoughts. I strongly suggest reading his why did I do this? article, too.
Re:How can you vouche for the security of this?
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
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· Score: 1
People sign up and get a one-shot email address.
Mostly correct. It's technically not "one-shot" unless you use it that way.
The first email sent to this address is forwarded to another address, and all subsequent ones are considered spam.
Mostly incorrect.
All inbound email is simply saved for 24 hours, and is never forwarded anywhere. If you need to see it, you can go to the mailinator web site and read it. Typically, I use it to sign up for a download from a site that wants an email address before letting me through. Some sites just want an email address. Others want you to read the email and click a link to confirm that you're most likely human, and that they have a valid email address. Sure, I can click the link, but I promise I'm never going to check qwer9780qewth@mailinator.com again. They can spam or market there till the cows come home.
Anyway, the reason apple would show up frequently is lots of people never want to give out their address for any reason, yet end up at sites that require it. If apple even looks like it requires an email address, so what? Why bother decyphering a bunch of "Are you sure you don't want to not avoid receiving special offers from us and our marketing partners? Just uncheck the box to reverse our default decision!" Just cave in and give them someone else's email every time. If they later whine "you need to read your email to complete your registration" then fine -- head over to mailinator and click their stupid link.
Hey, thanks a lot for Mailinator! I love that I can just toss out any old random blob as a name at any time, then come back to it later. With sneakemail, I have to go to their website first and create a new one.
So, what do you really do with all that spam (besides mapping it?) Do you aggregate it, identify zombies, notify authorities, or just plonk every little byte of it? What kind of hardware/software do you run? What do you get out of it besides a bunch of very satisfied geeks?
Unfortunately, the Singaporean government can just look north to see how effective China has been using their censorship tools. While it may not be perfect, in their short-sighted vision it looks like censorship is working as a deterrent to thoughtcrime.
What I fear more is that the current U.S. government isn't ignoring the effectiveness of the Great Firewall. They're chipping away at all of our freedoms bit by bit (including Freedom of Speech), but I believe they still consider outright censorship of private speech to be just one step over the line.
Don't get your hopes up at knowing what the acronym really means. Siebel is to "Customer Relationship Management" exactly as much as Microsoft is to "Secure Systems Initiative." Neither title has anything to do with reality, but rather how they're perceived by the Gartner Group.
When they were still in business, AT&T Wireless used to use Siebel CRM in their phone stores. They did everything in their power to lose all the customers they could. A one hour wait and two hours with a cashier to sell me three phones, all spent waiting for the cashier to click, drag, type, badger and bully my information into that worthless CRM system. Servers that took minutes to deliver the pages needed. And it wasn't the fault of the poor schmucks who worked at the store. Just imagine trying to do your job on a site that was being permanently slashdotted -- that's what I saw of Siebel CRM, every time I went in there.
And now Larry is sticking them in his cap like a feather. Well, good for them. I'm sure the Gartner Group is pleased as punch.
You might want to check them out again. They must have slapped their editor-in-chief hard over this issue. He's been apolitical now for about a year.
That said, I personally believe science should have some effect on politics. Our current administration does not have a good track record when it comes to scientific issues. If editors don't stand up and publish "hey, government, you're ignoring these facts" then who will? What other fora exist for such discussion?
Cool. They even advertise checking Amazon for competitive pricing* right up front on the splash (*for books only.)
OK, so in this one Slashdot article, people have identified at least three prior art patent applications floating around. Will the real patent holder please stand up so we can mock you the least?
The applications reach as far as your imagination: price comparison shopping in a retail shop
Amazon could have lifted that straight from their web page and placed it in their patent claim. However, it's always a question of "who got there first." Since Amazon filed their patent application in 2003, and neomedia filed theirs in 2004, neomedia might not be in the driver's seat any more. Hmm...neomedia's patent refers to a previous patent of theirs dated June 6, 2003. Amazon's patent wasn't filed until December 31, 2003.
Sounds like a legal quagmire to me. However, if neomedia can successfullly sue Amazon for a violation of a really stupid patent, I believe the karmic balance of the universe can be restored.
Slashdot Mirror
His paper makes the inference that you know what a GOTO is and what it does, and explains why under most circumstances it's not the best choice.
His paper is very short -- you might want to give it a quick read.
"C-Jump STILL considered harmful."
The camcorder-pirated movies are going for $4 each on a blanket on a New York sidewalk. They're not worried about HDTV owners for this particular form of piracy -- as you mentioned, you wouldn't lower yourself to watch these things filmed in craptovision. They're mostly being sold to exceedingly poor people who would never pay ticket prices to see a movie in a theater anyway.
However, these same camcorder shots are being digitized and shared. And for reasons I can't fathom, idiots who spend five figures on a 60" plasma HDTV with 1200W 7.1 Dolby surround systems will then spend hours bit-torrenting an almost unwatchable 640x480 craptovision monophonic camcorder copy of the latest theatrical releases.
I think Hollywood's biggest problem with the internet is actually the instant-response time of Freedom of Speech. Many people (and critics too) will agree that most of the movies Hollywood releases really are lame. But now, once the first geek goes to see a bad movie he's likely to post "what a piece of sh!t" on his blog, and send SMS to his friends standing in line warning them away from the latest stinker. Hollywood can no longer count on getting first sales from these people.
You seem to be skipping the fact that evolutionary pressures over time have consistently produced a smarter and smarter animal. Otherwise, we'd still be scratching fleas, trying to figure out where the apple grove is with the ripe fruit.
Yes, we have a blip now. For one thing, our society has come up with this notion of equality (I'm not saying it's bad, but I'm saying it's something evolution hasn't really encountered before.) And we have instant, global communication. Even stupid people can learn "don't stand in the way of a hurricane", thanks to TV. But I doubt these are the first blips evolution has had to overcome.
We also have provided novel "avenues" for evolution to explore. Jet travel is a perfect vector for a fast-moving organism (we just haven't had an overly destructive one take a jet yet. Apart from the Bruce Willis bits, "Twelve Monkeys" is an eerie peek into the near future.) Terrorism or WMDs could change the population-scape of the planet in a moment; the depletion of affordable energy will change it just as quickly (evolutionarily speaking.) But these won't be the first setbacks evolution has encountered, either.
Sure, we have no end of "American Idol" fans today, but we also have a lot of very smart people. I don't imagine every monkey simultaneously recognized the groves with ripe fruit, but I believe that at some point the "smarter monkey" led the others to the red apples. That's our job (if you will.) If some of the monkeys stay behind to watch TV, well, perhaps they won't evolve with the rest of us. Maybe our society will decide to physically fragment itself into two or more populations (go read virtually any near-science-fiction story, esp. Philip K. Dick, Huxley, or even Orwell for plenty of possible scenarios.)
But these are all "short term" observations, none based on an evolutionary time-scale. Overall, sooner or later, some of us will get smarter. Evolution hasn't stopped.
Except that reality is perversely the exact opposite of this. Witness the evolution of Google's PageRank or of any set of spam filters.
What happens is that you have people with bad "stuff" (spam, ignorant ideas, marketing hype vs. facts, or whatever.) And these flat-earth people are filtered out by effective spam filters, or left behind by legitimate search engines. So what do they do? They rig the game. Spammers start quoting Jane Austin in between pictures of Vl4GR4. Casino operators place spam-links in unrelated blogs. Homeopathic quackery is disguised as "medical" advice. And all these idiots have to do is figure out how to splatter spam all over until their Google PageRanks show them to be the world's leading authority on "all-natural cures for cancer" or whatever.
Google tries hard. They really don't want quack medicine to show up as the first hit for "cancer treatments," but they've provided the ultimate testing ground for the shysters. All the flat-earthers have to do is keep trying until they look legitimate.
Already it's become hard to convince my wife that the top hit on a search engine isn't necessarily the most honest or accurate place to get advice. Looking at Google's results, even I might get caught by a sham site at the top named mayo-clinic.com (the real site is mayoclinic.com) Fortunately, many of the stupid sites (alternative-medicine-and-health.com, for example) are self-announcing.
On the bright side, it's possible that intelligence is going to be subject to evolutionary pressures. If the people who fall for the flat-earther's scams run out and try to cure their cancer with laetrile (or whatever the 2000's equivalent is,) then Charles Darwin's theories suggest that they are going to be a self-limiting lot.
Then, within that one state you just have to swing enough votes to tip the scales.
That means flipping half the difference. Using a made-up example, if the state of Bushsylvania has 10 million likely voters and polls show they'll vote 49% D and 47% R, you have to reverse just over 1% of the votes to push it to the R column. That's only 100,000 fraudulent vote reversals, or 110,000 if you include a 10% safety factor. Hell, it wouldn't even take much money to outright BUY that many votes, much less rig the voting machines. (Note that "ballot box stuffing" is less efficient than "flipping" -- to win Bushsylvania, for example, would require 220,000 phony ballots to be added, which is a much bigger task.)
And you might not even have to spend that much. If there are (say) four undecided states with the power to affect the outcome, go to the two with the narrowest margins, and twiddle theirs.
Remember to limit your exposure as much as possible. Restrict tampering to as few districts as you can. Prefer those with the highest numbers of voters, but with historically low turnouts. (Poverty stricken areas are ideal for this kind of tampering.) You don't even have to make every tampered-with district put in "wins" for your candidate -- you just have to reverse a total of 110,000 votes.
You want to keep it local as much as possible. Run it like a terrorist cell -- tiny groups of insiders who each know very little about the overall plan or about other people. Choose your fall-guys in advance, maybe plant some evidence 'in reserve'; in case someone turns coat you can blame a few overzealous campaign workers, and cut them loose before they start reporting further up the chain.
A commonly held prejudice of Americans is that they "look down on" scholastic degrees from developing nations, because they believe those school systems are only designed to produce "test-passers," while Americans have always seen themselves as "innovators" and "free-thinkers." (Please, I'm not trying to start any flamewars with this statement, I'm just pointing out an ignorant prejudice that is held by many Americans.) But the same is going on here. My son knows that his AP teachers are teaching him exactly what is required to pass the AP tests, and are not necessarily teaching him that which is required to succeed in a given field.
We Americans have turned our schools into exactly that which we've always despised -- education factories producing "test-passers". Innovation is completely gone from our education, mostly because there's no incentive. There is no standardized test for innovation, and there can never be one.
Timing is going to be a huge problem for Microsoft, and it's why they're frantically cutting features in order to make their 2006 date. The big computer makers (Dell, HP, etc.) are today selling dirt cheap PCs (~$299) that are perfectly adequate for the home users. They may completely saturate the home market with these cheap XP machines before Vista hits the shelves. Anyone willing to settle for one of these today is not the type of customer who upgrades every two years. And they are indeed "good enough" -- they surf the web, write their school reports, and send email pictures of Junior to Grandma. And they'll have no reason to upgrade for a long time. They're not power gamers; fact is nobody's developed a killer app for the home that requires major CPU.
Once the market is full of these home machines that are "good enough", there will be another PC slump. And if Microsoft can't beat the home users' slump, they're going to have to rely on corporate sales.
The problem here is that Microsoft is their own biggest competitor. Businesses who have XP are "mostly satisfied." Their corporate drones can type up Word documents, create PowerPoint presentations, and read their email right now, and I don't know if Microsoft can convince them to spend major $$$ to migrate to Vista. I believe the business world already sees XP as "good enough," and most of them would question the wisdom of pumping millions of dollars into an "upgrade" that buys them no tangible advantage.
Another problem for Microsoft is that corporations will demand that XP remain under ongoing maintenance for several years after the arrival of Vista. Hell, they just cut support for NT only in the last year or two, and XP is far more popular than NT ever was.
I'm sure their current strategy is to convince the corporate "infrastructure architects" that Vista is way better than XP. Not sure how they're going to do it, but try they will. They'll probably start by offering better management tools than SMS and/or MOM. Then they'll throw out some stability numbers, tell a few worm-proof and virus-proof lies, and start replacing a few corporate servers (first one's always free ;-). But with the DRM in place, very few of the corporate Windows fanbois I know are going to leap to Vista personally, and these are the absolute most critical people for Microsoft to sell to. There simply is no incentive. I'm imagining Vista may end up being a free upgrade to a few corporate giants, just to get visibility out there.
All versions of Vista will be crippled -- by DRM. In order to play DRMd media, it will only play through the Protected Media Path (PiMP).
XP is the last version of Windows I will personally own, or will support for friends and family (work, however, will continue to be work, whatever it is.) I have no personal need for any of the supposed "features" that would be inflicted on me by Vista.
Yeah, they're not going to get a livable wage from the school's retirement fund, and they know that. Most of the retiring IBMmers I know (mid 50s) already have pretty nice pensions and retirement packages set up from their 30 years of service. If they didn't, they'd be working till age 65 like ordinary people.
Depends on the classes you end up teaching. My son is in four AP courses this year, and way more than half of those AP kids want to be in them (competition being what it is.) I suppose if you're stuck teaching remedial math or the "required-to-pass-the-grad-standards-Science-class " you're going to encounter a lot of unhappy kids. But if you've got a career specialty (programming, for example) you'll hopefully be put to use where your experience lies.
I was unaware that the pharmaceutical firms were selling crack.
I'd love it if my company offered to pay for my doctorate and said "here, go teach high school kids." (At least I'd love it in about 10 or 15 years, after I had more savings and no kid in college.)
This is a really, really smart program. Too bad my old IBM buddy retired two weeks ago -- I'd ask him if he'd heard about this program. I'll just have to ask his replacement.
Loathing Microsoft, their products, and what they're doing to our culture is most certainly not a "Slashdot-only" perspective. Whenever I get someone who says to me "Powerpoint is a good thing", I like to forward them to The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation. (Trust me, you will laugh, but you may also cry.)
This was not written by a Microsoft-hater, but rather by someone who fears the ill-effects of what software like Powerpoint is doing to human communication, and how it's shaping our thoughts. I strongly suggest reading his why did I do this? article, too.
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Of course, this begs the question: who is going to vouche for Google's accuracy? :-)
Mostly correct. It's technically not "one-shot" unless you use it that way.
The first email sent to this address is forwarded to another address, and all subsequent ones are considered spam.
Mostly incorrect.
All inbound email is simply saved for 24 hours, and is never forwarded anywhere. If you need to see it, you can go to the mailinator web site and read it. Typically, I use it to sign up for a download from a site that wants an email address before letting me through. Some sites just want an email address. Others want you to read the email and click a link to confirm that you're most likely human, and that they have a valid email address. Sure, I can click the link, but I promise I'm never going to check qwer9780qewth@mailinator.com again. They can spam or market there till the cows come home.
Anyway, the reason apple would show up frequently is lots of people never want to give out their address for any reason, yet end up at sites that require it. If apple even looks like it requires an email address, so what? Why bother decyphering a bunch of "Are you sure you don't want to not avoid receiving special offers from us and our marketing partners? Just uncheck the box to reverse our default decision!" Just cave in and give them someone else's email every time. If they later whine "you need to read your email to complete your registration" then fine -- head over to mailinator and click their stupid link.
So, what do you really do with all that spam (besides mapping it?) Do you aggregate it, identify zombies, notify authorities, or just plonk every little byte of it? What kind of hardware/software do you run? What do you get out of it besides a bunch of very satisfied geeks?
DEATH TO ALL INTOLERANT PEOPLE!!!
What I fear more is that the current U.S. government isn't ignoring the effectiveness of the Great Firewall. They're chipping away at all of our freedoms bit by bit (including Freedom of Speech), but I believe they still consider outright censorship of private speech to be just one step over the line.
When they were still in business, AT&T Wireless used to use Siebel CRM in their phone stores. They did everything in their power to lose all the customers they could. A one hour wait and two hours with a cashier to sell me three phones, all spent waiting for the cashier to click, drag, type, badger and bully my information into that worthless CRM system. Servers that took minutes to deliver the pages needed. And it wasn't the fault of the poor schmucks who worked at the store. Just imagine trying to do your job on a site that was being permanently slashdotted -- that's what I saw of Siebel CRM, every time I went in there.
And now Larry is sticking them in his cap like a feather. Well, good for them. I'm sure the Gartner Group is pleased as punch.
That said, I personally believe science should have some effect on politics. Our current administration does not have a good track record when it comes to scientific issues. If editors don't stand up and publish "hey, government, you're ignoring these facts" then who will? What other fora exist for such discussion?
So what's the problem? I mean how long does it take your dog to answer the phone, anyway? I should think he could handle 30 sales calls per day, easy.
OK, so in this one Slashdot article, people have identified at least three prior art patent applications floating around. Will the real patent holder please stand up so we can mock you the least?
It's a pretty cool tool.
The applications reach as far as your imagination: price comparison shopping in a retail shop
Amazon could have lifted that straight from their web page and placed it in their patent claim. However, it's always a question of "who got there first." Since Amazon filed their patent application in 2003, and neomedia filed theirs in 2004, neomedia might not be in the driver's seat any more. Hmm...neomedia's patent refers to a previous patent of theirs dated June 6, 2003. Amazon's patent wasn't filed until December 31, 2003.
Sounds like a legal quagmire to me. However, if neomedia can successfullly sue Amazon for a violation of a really stupid patent, I believe the karmic balance of the universe can be restored.