At the least, they should have made a very real effort to alert the school administration that this was a problem.
In that way, even if they were completely ignored, they'd at least have something to back them up when they make the futile claim that they tried all the normal means to make the school aware of the issue.
Sure, they'd still get in trouble with the school, but at least they'd have some credibility in the public's eye as doing this for a good reason rather than simply because they could.
It's interesting to note that in the switch over to their "No late fees" program, Blockbuster is now managing to annoy people who return on time in addition to those who return their rentals late.
It's obvious that the late return customers will get upset at the idea of being charged the full replacement price of a movie after seven days after the due date, but the extended return grace period has a bigger effect in that people are keeping titles out longer.
I'm currently on the "movie pass" program which allows unlimited rentals for $24.99 a month, but I'm getting to the point where I'm frustrated enough with movies not being in that I'm looking to cancel and go to Netflix. I'm not alone.
Movie passes result in people keeping movies out longer, but it's also guarenteed income, so the stores know to increase stock as they become more popular. The extra seven day grace period for regular rentals, however, means that demand is increased even more as fewer people are returning on time. Unfortunately, most of the Blockbusters I've been to around her haven't increased stock to counteract this, which means even going in during the middle of the week I'll no longer see new releases back after their 3 day rental period is over.
Blockbuster is trying to push people who visit their stores into switching to their mail rental program, but frankly if a customer is going to go that far, why wouldn't they consider Netflix first after the trouble they're having with Blockbuster?
That's something the later Dalek episodes forced upon them, and adding Davros, who usually did most of the speaking for them in his episodes didn't help.
In earlier episodes like The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the Daleks are downright chatty.
Well, given that Netflix really has no late fees for real...
Netflix may not have what is traditionally thought of as a late fee, but you simply can't stop paying for the service and keep the movies forever like some people "fooled" by Blockbuster's program seem to mistakenly believe.
In fact, I believe if you look at Netflix's terms of service, as soon as your account is terminated for lack of payment, you're required to return the movies within seven days or be charged for the replacement of those movies, which is similar to what happens with the "no late fees" program, except that there doesn't seem to be a way to return the movies that you've now bought for a credit.
"Apple's got around, what, 2%-3% of the desktop market, yet no one's calling them a major player."
Apple isn't a major player in the personal computer market by any means, but that doesn't mean that the directions they take their product line in doesn't have a noticeable influence on the industry.
One only has to look at how the physical designs of their product are quickly integrated by others. Remember just how far transluscent blue and green plastic spread after the iMac? Look at the sudden interest in Mac mini sized cases.
From the attempts to create iTune clones to making the default Windows XP interface more "colorful", Apple still has some influence on the direction of the market significantly larger than their marketplace numbers, and in many ways the sudden growth of Firefox is doing the same in the browser world.
You know, sadly enough, my cynical mind believes that the government won't step in with tough regulation of data that these companies handle.
Instead they'll will waste time and money passing more laws against those who misuse these shoddily protected servers in a classic "close the barn door after the horse has escaped" federal maneuver.
IMHO what should be happening (and I have no objection to this) is that the ISP detects compromised hosts on their own network and kicks them off until they're fixed. I don't honestly see a huge advantage in scanning inbound traffic in the same way
The advantage is that it would help prevent hosts on their network from being compromised in the first place.
I don't believe that having a system in place to detect compromised hosts would require any more hardware than scanning incoming emails, so why not look to prevent rather than react to threats whenever possible?
What about those of us not vulnerable to Netsky.P? Why should we pay the cost of the ISP running these services and put up with any false positives that may get rejected?
Even if your computer isn't vulnerable, you're still paying in terms of the bandwidth used up, both from machines outside the ISP sending virus mail into the network, and compromised machines within the network wasting outgoing bandwidth.
Without any hard numbers, I have to wonder if the cost in terms of software and additional processing power to scan for most viruses wouldn't be offset by the savings in outgoing compromised bandwidth being reduced.
Problem is, the most annoying driving habits wouldn't be detected by this device. Backing up traffic by driving 25 in a 35 MPH zone, for example, will only look like someone driving an acceptable speed, despite the fact that such situations are just as likely to cause an accident as driving too fast. Not using a turn-signal probably won't be detected by the device either. Nor would people who pull into the right hand turn only lane even when they intend to go straight, preventing you from making a legal right-on-red turn. As well, the device wouldn't watch for knuckle-heads who never turn on their lights after dark, or when it's raining severely.
I was wondering about the problem of neighborhood size myself.
The "New Neighborhood Guidelines" list the following suggestions for any new neighborhood creation:
A real, geographic neighborhood.
Smaller than a city or town. Even a well-known name for a section of a city may be too large.
An area of fewer than 500 households, or a single apartment complex.
The problem for me is that on most other sites that attempt to create a social network, be it Friendster, Livejournal, whatever, I've seen at most ten other people from the same 17,503 person, 6,933 household, 6.7 square miles of small-town suburbia.
Now, this site would be great for larger cities where more people are packed closer to each other, but what about those of us who will be lucky to see just-barely double-digits online in our entire zip-code? Should we still be trying for a small-neighborhood area, or just move on to the larger city-scale?
I have to wonder just how much of a killer app it is, though.
The idea of being able to play another person wirelessly is a good one, obviously, but outside of young adults, are there really that many opportunities for the rest of us to use this feature all that often?
Your social group may be different from mine, but rarely do I find myself in situations where I have multiple friends around who want to play a game, but don't have a console or pc LAN involved.
Most of the times I'm using my GBA, it's when on a commute, where I'm not quite convinced I'd fell the need to play random strangers.
Most of the cable companies provide their own PVR hardware to users, with the twin advantage of being a few dollars cheaper and coming from the people who provide you with the service.
Sure, we here know that their hardware is generally rather simplistic in their features compared to TiVo, but your average person doesn't realize that TiVo is more than just a glorified digital VCR, so the three dollars they save a month seems like a good deal.
Now that DirecTV has plans to switch to one of TiVo's competitors in the form of NDS Group Plc, I fear we're going to see the same happen in the world of satellite as well.
So, in the future, TiVo and Microsoft will be competing against products provided by the people who bring them their cable/dish service, who will have the home-field advantage.
Looking at the image they have for the "flying-saucer bus", one would think that a slight part of that dream is alive in the form of "park-n-ride" bus services that many suburbs offer for their work commuters looking to get into the city without the wear on their cars and frustration of rush-hour traffic.
Sure, the buses don't fly, but the end result is somewhat similar in a "it's 2004, but no weekend trips to the moon" kind of way.
Isn't not having water more important than food?
on
Just Add, Umm, Water
·
· Score: 1
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you run out of water, aren't you in far more danger of death by dehydration than lack of food?
The original post mentions a "combination of two unpatched IE security holes", but both the US-CERT and Internet Storm Center only mention javascript and not a specific browser as being able to be compromised by the infected IIS servers.
My question is, how do we know this is an IE-only problem? I ask this because I have several friends whom I'm trying to convince try an alternative browser for security reasons but I don't want to be that guy we all know who goes off about "IE exploits" that turn out to be nothing of the sort.
I eventually found myself doing exactly that, and running POPFile as an anti-spam proxy POP3 server, which can be run on multiple operating systems including Windows and Linux, and allows you to run use your email client of choice.
I've also heard good things about K9 on the Windows side, which supposedly has a smaller memory footprint than POPFile, but can only be run on the one OS.
You said: "They're telling her 'Don't do it on broadcast television.' (Note: It'd be fine on cable tv.)"
Just an honest question here, but why is cable acceptable and broadcast not? I know the obvious answer is that "anyone" can see it on broadcast, but that's not true, at least in the sense that "anyone" could see it as easily if they were flipping through the cable channels as they would through the regular broadcast channels.
It's not like a television broadcast forces the images it caries straight into your brain, you still have to actively purchase a television, actively turn it on and actively turn it to the channel in question.
So why is cable so radically different than broadcast television that you would allow something on one, but not the other?
The original posting wasn't in regards to the actual TechTV channel, but of the website.
While there is a G4TechTV website, it's missing a good deal of content that used to be contained on the TechTV site, as is mentioned in the original posting, much of which came in very useful to search through, particularly older Screensaver episodes and any of the Call For Help series.
I started using Thunderbird a long time ago, much like you did, and found myself in a similar situation to yours.
In the beginning, the included spam filtering worked wonders, but after time more and more spam began to leak through no matter how much "training" I did.
Instead of moving to a different email program as you did, however, I simply kept Thunderbird and used POPFile as a spam-filtering proxy. Because of this, I can actually directly compare the in-program filtering of Thunderbird to an outside bayesian client. Right now, according to the built-in statistics of POPFile, it's at a 99.36% accuracy rate, even with the large number of random-word spam attacks I get daily, yet Thunderbird only catches about half of them.
So I have no doubt that you are correct in your argument that SpamBayes isn't being caught by the same random-word techniques that are currently ruining the effectiveness of Spamassassin or Thunderbird's built in filtering.
Bayesian spam filtering doesn't mark an email as spam simply because of the presence of one single word, but using a mathematical equation based on the likelyhood of each of the words being in the message being symptoms of spam. What you're talking about is simply a spam filter based on a blacklist of words. Bayesian spam filtering uses mathematics to consider how those words are used in the context of the rest of the message, and do a surprisingly good job of it.
Therefore, "viagra" in your grandmother's email might have a high indication of spamminess, but all the other words will lower the score below the rather high threshold needed to be considered spam.
That's why training your bayesian spam filter on the email you receive is so important, as it learns what you consider spam from the type of email you receive.
I worry that a number of people are going to only read the summary listed above and not realize that this if for their "Adsense" program which allows you to place Google ads on your website. Nothing has been said about putting image ads on Google's own search engine site.
Re:You can't walk around the house with these.
on
Videophones Revisited
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
... and yet cell phones already have still photo cameras built in, and people seem to use them on a semi-regular basis.
It's more just a mere limit to current technology than anything else preventing the idea from spreading to a cell-phone.
If anything, having a video camera in the phone would encourage people to hold it out and away from their head and use earpiece/microphones, helping to lower all those EM waves crashing through their head.
The thing that somewhat confuses me is why linking the virus to Linux would be worth it, being that the majority of Joe Public really has no clue that such a thing as alternative operating systems exist.
When a good number of the public believe that MS Windows runs on everything, including Macs, isn't merely blaming the virus on the usual "nefarious hackers" sufficient?
I'm actually somewhat surprised to see VHS not being listed. Despite large chains like Circuit City and Best Buy having gotten out of VHS sales, people still refuse to upgrade even to a $40 WalMart DVD player. These same people will complain to any employee at a store that sells or rents DVDs about how they don't have enough VHS tapes, but won't even consider the idea that times have moved on from the format.
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At the least, they should have made a very real effort to alert the school administration that this was a problem.
In that way, even if they were completely ignored, they'd at least have something to back them up when they make the futile claim that they tried all the normal means to make the school aware of the issue.
Sure, they'd still get in trouble with the school, but at least they'd have some credibility in the public's eye as doing this for a good reason rather than simply because they could.
It's interesting to note that in the switch over to their "No late fees" program, Blockbuster is now managing to annoy people who return on time in addition to those who return their rentals late.
It's obvious that the late return customers will get upset at the idea of being charged the full replacement price of a movie after seven days after the due date, but the extended return grace period has a bigger effect in that people are keeping titles out longer.
I'm currently on the "movie pass" program which allows unlimited rentals for $24.99 a month, but I'm getting to the point where I'm frustrated enough with movies not being in that I'm looking to cancel and go to Netflix. I'm not alone.
Movie passes result in people keeping movies out longer, but it's also guarenteed income, so the stores know to increase stock as they become more popular. The extra seven day grace period for regular rentals, however, means that demand is increased even more as fewer people are returning on time. Unfortunately, most of the Blockbusters I've been to around her haven't increased stock to counteract this, which means even going in during the middle of the week I'll no longer see new releases back after their 3 day rental period is over.
Blockbuster is trying to push people who visit their stores into switching to their mail rental program, but frankly if a customer is going to go that far, why wouldn't they consider Netflix first after the trouble they're having with Blockbuster?
That's something the later Dalek episodes forced upon them, and adding Davros, who usually did most of the speaking for them in his episodes didn't help.
In earlier episodes like The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the Daleks are downright chatty.
Netflix may not have what is traditionally thought of as a late fee, but you simply can't stop paying for the service and keep the movies forever like some people "fooled" by Blockbuster's program seem to mistakenly believe.
In fact, I believe if you look at Netflix's terms of service, as soon as your account is terminated for lack of payment, you're required to return the movies within seven days or be charged for the replacement of those movies, which is similar to what happens with the "no late fees" program, except that there doesn't seem to be a way to return the movies that you've now bought for a credit.
"Apple's got around, what, 2%-3% of the desktop market, yet no one's calling them a major player."
Apple isn't a major player in the personal computer market by any means, but that doesn't mean that the directions they take their product line in doesn't have a noticeable influence on the industry.
One only has to look at how the physical designs of their product are quickly integrated by others. Remember just how far transluscent blue and green plastic spread after the iMac? Look at the sudden interest in Mac mini sized cases.
From the attempts to create iTune clones to making the default Windows XP interface more "colorful", Apple still has some influence on the direction of the market significantly larger than their marketplace numbers, and in many ways the sudden growth of Firefox is doing the same in the browser world.
You know, sadly enough, my cynical mind believes that the government won't step in with tough regulation of data that these companies handle.
Instead they'll will waste time and money passing more laws against those who misuse these shoddily protected servers in a classic "close the barn door after the horse has escaped" federal maneuver.
The advantage is that it would help prevent hosts on their network from being compromised in the first place.
I don't believe that having a system in place to detect compromised hosts would require any more hardware than scanning incoming emails, so why not look to prevent rather than react to threats whenever possible?
Even if your computer isn't vulnerable, you're still paying in terms of the bandwidth used up, both from machines outside the ISP sending virus mail into the network, and compromised machines within the network wasting outgoing bandwidth.
Without any hard numbers, I have to wonder if the cost in terms of software and additional processing power to scan for most viruses wouldn't be offset by the savings in outgoing compromised bandwidth being reduced.
Problem is, the most annoying driving habits wouldn't be detected by this device. Backing up traffic by driving 25 in a 35 MPH zone, for example, will only look like someone driving an acceptable speed, despite the fact that such situations are just as likely to cause an accident as driving too fast. Not using a turn-signal probably won't be detected by the device either. Nor would people who pull into the right hand turn only lane even when they intend to go straight, preventing you from making a legal right-on-red turn. As well, the device wouldn't watch for knuckle-heads who never turn on their lights after dark, or when it's raining severely.
The "New Neighborhood Guidelines" list the following suggestions for any new neighborhood creation:
The problem for me is that on most other sites that attempt to create a social network, be it Friendster, Livejournal, whatever, I've seen at most ten other people from the same 17,503 person, 6,933 household, 6.7 square miles of small-town suburbia.
Now, this site would be great for larger cities where more people are packed closer to each other, but what about those of us who will be lucky to see just-barely double-digits online in our entire zip-code? Should we still be trying for a small-neighborhood area, or just move on to the larger city-scale?
I have to wonder just how much of a killer app it is, though.
The idea of being able to play another person wirelessly is a good one, obviously, but outside of young adults, are there really that many opportunities for the rest of us to use this feature all that often?
Your social group may be different from mine, but rarely do I find myself in situations where I have multiple friends around who want to play a game, but don't have a console or pc LAN involved.
Most of the times I'm using my GBA, it's when on a commute, where I'm not quite convinced I'd fell the need to play random strangers.
... cable and satellite companies.
Most of the cable companies provide their own PVR hardware to users, with the twin advantage of being a few dollars cheaper and coming from the people who provide you with the service.
Sure, we here know that their hardware is generally rather simplistic in their features compared to TiVo, but your average person doesn't realize that TiVo is more than just a glorified digital VCR, so the three dollars they save a month seems like a good deal.
Now that DirecTV has plans to switch to one of TiVo's competitors in the form of NDS Group Plc, I fear we're going to see the same happen in the world of satellite as well.
So, in the future, TiVo and Microsoft will be competing against products provided by the people who bring them their cable/dish service, who will have the home-field advantage.
Looking at the image they have for the "flying-saucer bus", one would think that a slight part of that dream is alive in the form of "park-n-ride" bus services that many suburbs offer for their work commuters looking to get into the city without the wear on their cars and frustration of rush-hour traffic.
Sure, the buses don't fly, but the end result is somewhat similar in a "it's 2004, but no weekend trips to the moon" kind of way.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you run out of water, aren't you in far more danger of death by dehydration than lack of food?
The original post mentions a "combination of two unpatched IE security holes", but both the US-CERT and Internet Storm Center only mention javascript and not a specific browser as being able to be compromised by the infected IIS servers.
My question is, how do we know this is an IE-only problem? I ask this because I have several friends whom I'm trying to convince try an alternative browser for security reasons but I don't want to be that guy we all know who goes off about "IE exploits" that turn out to be nothing of the sort.
I eventually found myself doing exactly that, and running POPFile as an anti-spam proxy POP3 server, which can be run on multiple operating systems including Windows and Linux, and allows you to run use your email client of choice.
I've also heard good things about K9 on the Windows side, which supposedly has a smaller memory footprint than POPFile, but can only be run on the one OS.
You said: "They're telling her 'Don't do it on broadcast television.' (Note: It'd be fine on cable tv.)"
Just an honest question here, but why is cable acceptable and broadcast not? I know the obvious answer is that "anyone" can see it on broadcast, but that's not true, at least in the sense that "anyone" could see it as easily if they were flipping through the cable channels as they would through the regular broadcast channels.
It's not like a television broadcast forces the images it caries straight into your brain, you still have to actively purchase a television, actively turn it on and actively turn it to the channel in question.
So why is cable so radically different than broadcast television that you would allow something on one, but not the other?
The original posting wasn't in regards to the actual TechTV channel, but of the website.
While there is a G4TechTV website, it's missing a good deal of content that used to be contained on the TechTV site, as is mentioned in the original posting, much of which came in very useful to search through, particularly older Screensaver episodes and any of the Call For Help series.
I started using Thunderbird a long time ago, much like you did, and found myself in a similar situation to yours.
In the beginning, the included spam filtering worked wonders, but after time more and more spam began to leak through no matter how much "training" I did.
Instead of moving to a different email program as you did, however, I simply kept Thunderbird and used POPFile as a spam-filtering proxy. Because of this, I can actually directly compare the in-program filtering of Thunderbird to an outside bayesian client. Right now, according to the built-in statistics of POPFile, it's at a 99.36% accuracy rate, even with the large number of random-word spam attacks I get daily, yet Thunderbird only catches about half of them.
So I have no doubt that you are correct in your argument that SpamBayes isn't being caught by the same random-word techniques that are currently ruining the effectiveness of Spamassassin or Thunderbird's built in filtering.
Bayesian spam filtering doesn't mark an email as spam simply because of the presence of one single word, but using a mathematical equation based on the likelyhood of each of the words being in the message being symptoms of spam. What you're talking about is simply a spam filter based on a blacklist of words. Bayesian spam filtering uses mathematics to consider how those words are used in the context of the rest of the message, and do a surprisingly good job of it.
Therefore, "viagra" in your grandmother's email might have a high indication of spamminess, but all the other words will lower the score below the rather high threshold needed to be considered spam.
That's why training your bayesian spam filter on the email you receive is so important, as it learns what you consider spam from the type of email you receive.
I worry that a number of people are going to only read the summary listed above and not realize that this if for their "Adsense" program which allows you to place Google ads on your website. Nothing has been said about putting image ads on Google's own search engine site.
... and yet cell phones already have still photo cameras built in, and people seem to use them on a semi-regular basis.
It's more just a mere limit to current technology than anything else preventing the idea from spreading to a cell-phone.
If anything, having a video camera in the phone would encourage people to hold it out and away from their head and use earpiece/microphones, helping to lower all those EM waves crashing through their head.
No thanks, I've pretty much ignored anything from the network that killed Farscape so that it could pay for Tremors: The Series.
The thing that somewhat confuses me is why linking the virus to Linux would be worth it, being that the majority of Joe Public really has no clue that such a thing as alternative operating systems exist.
When a good number of the public believe that MS Windows runs on everything, including Macs, isn't merely blaming the virus on the usual "nefarious hackers" sufficient?
I'm actually somewhat surprised to see VHS not being listed. Despite large chains like Circuit City and Best Buy having gotten out of VHS sales, people still refuse to upgrade even to a $40 WalMart DVD player. These same people will complain to any employee at a store that sells or rents DVDs about how they don't have enough VHS tapes, but won't even consider the idea that times have moved on from the format.