Trust is a necessity any way you slice it. If the randomization takes place completely on the client, the numbers probably won't be random enough. If the randomization takes place on their end, and you hit a button client-side to 'roll the dice' until you get a set of numbers you are comfortable with, the combined human psychology of those surveyed can mung the randomness (numbers ending in 7, for example, might be favored over numbers ending in 0 because of our subconscious understanding that numbers ending in 0 are easier to work with mathematically and are therefore 'less safe'). If you only get one set of numbers from the remote randomizer, you don't know that they aren't using an intentionally weak pseudorandom generator that they'll be able to reverse and get all the original results from (or simply giving the same set of numbers to everybody).
I'm always a bit skeptical when I'm told I'm about to be surveyed anonymously, and I can't think of a way that this can be implemented (or at least is likely to be implemented) that would reassure me. The non-skeptics are filling in their information already. Perhaps businesses could pick one in five to survey and offer the people who don't want to take it the ability to just skip it; I'll bet a good amount of crap in the databases is coming from people who have to fill in eighty mandatory fields for free e-mail or music or whatever.
Diagnosis is only one of the functions doctors perform. A database has no humanity; how can it console you if it determines you have HIV or cancer? A database does not have five senses; a doctor will always be able to observe at least as much if not more (although I'm a bit hazy on what a doctor would taste to make a diagnosis). Databases are only as good as the information contained within and the algorithms that show the likelihood of a particular ailment; how they would have determined someone had Lyme's disease before its existence was common knowledge is a mystery.
No, make sure you tell your colleague doctors are more than databases. This is a tool, probably capable of making doctors more effective but not a replacement.
Viruses have already been employed in gene therapy, and actually this technique was involved in the first gene-therapy death. So, already been done and already wreaked unforseen havoc on at least one occasion, but the idea is that the virus alters the genes in a person's cells in a beneficial manner rather than in a way that causes the cells to churn out more viruses.
Actually, while that would seem to be the ideal answer, sadly, many stores will happily sell these sorts of games to teenagers without letting parents know. Congress is poised to make this sort of thing a federal crime, which while harsh is an excellent first step towards curbing underage viewing of what I would term 'a pornography of violence'. However, the only long term solution is to follow the more enlightened policies of some European countries and ban this sort of trash outright. Nazi symbolism is outlawed overseas to prevent the most horrible of atrocities from resurfacing in our youth, so why do we permit this promotion of antisocial behavior wrapped in a shiny teen-friendly package?
I honestly don't mean to troll, but am merely providing an alternative opinion that I know won't wash very well here. I never understood why people who ostensibly promote free speech actually just mean free speech that agrees with their thoughts.
I saw Nightline on ABC last night and they did the show on Grand Theft Auto III and its effects on society. It was rather interesting, they had a police officer on there describing how he felt while they showed the main character of the game beating on a cop with a baseball bat and shooting the ones that arrived soon after.
It frightens me that we allow these sort of games to be played by our youth, one of the things that the show focused on. With all of the hate and violence we already have in our society, games like this, Postal, and Doom may be all it takes to trigger a mass murderer. One fellow had a great point: why take the chance when there are already so many great games out there that don't involve going on a killing spree?
I'm not normally one to advocate the government intervening in our lives, but the fact that there were four thirteen year olds on the show playing the game and describing how fun it was to kill the prostitute after her 'sex act' to regain their money frightened me, and makes me think that even though we live in a free society sometimes we need to curb our liberties to guard our safety.
The L7HD stores audio in Sony's own Atrac3 format rather than the more common MP3 format. But since you can copy music only onto the hard drive, never off it, the storage format makes no practical difference.
This seems to be Sony's motif with regard to compressed audio; it goes in, but it never comes out. Do they view themselves as singlehandedly holding back the P2P flood? A bit irritating, because I've got news for them: the shit's out of the horse already, folks, and there's no way I'm gonna dump this kind of cash on a device like this if they're going to cut off what would be its biggest convenience -- autoripping MP3s off of the CDs I play in my stereo so that I can play them at my computer later.
Most people I know still buy their computers from Best Buy and furrow their brows when I start getting into complex concepts like 'Megahertz' and 'RAM'. They're just concerned that the stuff in the $50 box they purchased the other day will run on the fancy calculator.
I'd love nothing better than to see the geek revolution stop this shit from making it into the hardware, but lots of luck. EULAs are every bit as bad in the legal sense but if there was an overwhelming hue and cry from the masses that convinced the software companies to quit screwing us with them, I must have slept through it. This site will pump the hardware to our crowd as happily as it did Warcraft III; nevermind the fact that they just informed us about how the publisher wants to give the open source community a good legal rogering; and the Slashdot crowd will swallow every bit like a double frappichino. Oh, they'll be bitching about the evil corporate overlords all the way through the checkout line, but we all know what's gonna be in the shopping cart anyway.
If we don't see (or grudgingly tolerate) the problem, what chance does Joe Sixpack have?
While Denmark may seem a good distance away from many of us, the Hague Convention may hold all of us responsible for the silly laws one country imposes. Unfortunate indeed, because it may mean no deep-linking for us and the DMCA for the rest of you, and it seems like a rather convenient but nasty way of sidestepping the controversy surrounding each piece of legislation like this by simply allowing it to take effect without any discussion.
I've read a couple of brochures on this technology (we're looking at high-bandwidth high-availability file clusters for our hybrid AS/400-Solaris data warehousing) and it looks extremely promising.
Basically, they're extending parallel SCSI technology to address next generation I/O and direct attach storage requirements. It uses the (proven) interface from Serial ATA to avoid an unnecessarily proprietary interface and the costs that usually entails. The naming is unfortunate, because one usually thinks of parallel (side-by-side) as being faster than serial (one after the other) when the technology allows you to combine the two tactics much like in LANs. This is the technology that will enable a new generation of dense devices, such as small form factor hard drives, whereas Parallel SCSI can't because of cabling and voltage issues.
So depending on the pricing of the technology when it hits the shelves/junk mail catalogs, we're going to take a serious look at it. Does anybody have any prototype benchmarks?
Excellent points brought up by the article
on
KDEvelopers on KDE Users
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
KDE got a lot of excellent programmers because it hit that certain momentum open source needs to survive (the point where you know the project is going to go on with or without you). I think that a lot gave up over the problems of maintaining backward compatibility, however. It's an ugly task, and one of the ones that doesn't particularly encourage anybody to work on it for the fun of it.
Someone said that Open Source will never effectively work on the desktop, because it's far too unstable; you can't program anything really useful for it without spending a lot of time and money nursing it through the inevitable changes the platforms around it create. I respectfully disagree, because I think that whenever there is a will, there's a way, and that when people need something, they're going to create it or maintain it.
There is a great deal of burnout being created by users demanding features in software that the developer isn't being paid for, too. KDE has mostly escaped this thus far, however there is some speculation that GNOME has more momentum because it's the underdog. Let's hope these two projects can continue to bring great things to the Linux desktop.
Kind of like Prisoners' Dilemma, except that in the end you know no matter what happens the cable company is going to jack up the rates. So yeah, just wget the Internet now and check it out from your hard drives later when the rates go up.
There are apparently serial and joystick port USB emulators out there -- my Gravis XTerminator came with one. We don't run a Citrix environment so I don't know how proprietary these things are and I'm fairly certain that if you're using the USB for anything high speed this approach can't work, but you might be able to kludge low-speed USB devices (keyboards, point-of-scale scanners, mice?) in this way.
Sounds like you're an Amiga fanboy. Care to back up your "Assertions" with real numbers?
The Amiga motherboard circuitry was designed with a bit more logic (pun intended) than our PC motherboards. Until AGP, the PC graphics hardware had more layers of abstraction to pass through because of the distance from the bus. I don't have hard numbers, but I'll bet this is what he's referring to; they got rid of a lot of cruft when we went AGP.
As far as hardware goes, we're still maintaining backwards compatibility with the 16-bit days (80286). The Amiga is cut loose from that type of restriction because they can use emulation and still achieve a closer compatibility mesh than we can with flipping between our 16-bit and 32-bit registers.
Basically, we're cranking up raw speed in our components, but they're designing for efficiency, after which they can throw money into faster components and end up well ahead of the game. If you've followed the Amiga demoscene, I'm surprised you didn't pick up on this.
If anyone would care to reply with their musical preferences, I'll even recommend some artists (as best I can for some genres).
Actually, I'd appreciate that quite a bit. Can you think of anything that would fit into a CD rack that already has Pink Floyd, The Who, Grateful Dead, AC/DC, Motorhead, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, and Brian Eno?
I don't normally do this, but in honor of Independence Day and the start of my three-day drunk I'm going to deviate from my normal ontopicness to take this opportunity to thank those who have worked to free all of us from our oppressive overlords long ago. People who even today are seldom appreciated, and oft maligned for what they stand for until they're needed most.
This one goes out to the trolls. They are condemned to fight their war in perpetuity, but you can feel free to raise their spirits by posting the following open source lyrics where you deem appropriate.
SEND IN THE TROLLS sung to the tune of Send In The Clowns Isn't it brown? Gigantic and round? You know it's distended when it no longer makes a sound. Where are the trolls?
They tick you off (you stupid asshole.) Tilting your monitor with PWP is their goal. Where are the trolls? There ought to be trolls.
Just when I stopped giving a shit they send news of hot grits and petrified chicks exquisite. We all should remember Junis the Afghan or my favorite OOG THE CAVEMAN.
Where'd the time go? Troll Tuesday's near; a guaranteed free-for-all. I like cold beer. And where are the trolls? Quick, send in the trolls. Don't bother, they're here.
? ! More laughs than you can possibly fit in your palm. And where are the trolls? There ought to be trolls. Just ask your mom.
The saying, I think, was meant to demonstrate the gap between the average citizen and Bernays. It's an egotistical statement, certainly, but he probably uses it by way of explaining what I see as one of the fundamental principles of public relations: the masses are generally ignorant about most subject matters, and the intelligent can take advantage of this with shiny imagery or smooth talk. It's one of the reasons the evening news sucks.
I wanted to play on the idea that the masses usually don't know or care which way they're supposed to go by demonstrating that there is already an industry that is booming off of this situation and pointing out that this is probably the reason businesses are adopting massively irritating policies or operating procedures. But yeah, I don't want to assign any scientific credence to his statement -- just point out that in a broader sense it seems right on the money.
If you're dissatisfied with the quality of the product you're being served, find a different store. Or station. Or website.
I used to think the same way, but the following concepts I've only recently started to consider don't let this option sit well with me as a way of improving the situation in general:
Edward Bernays, the creator of the field of public relations, pointed out in an interview that the average IQ of the American public is 100. It's definitely one of those "Well, of course it is" type of things, but it is going to be the factor in any decision made about or by the majority (resulting in sitcoms or depressingly stupid 'save the children' legislation). Anybody smarter than average is, on average, going to have the benefit of the additional intelligence watered down at the end of the day.
I've noticed a fair number of people -- at least in America and/or sharing online forums with me -- lack any form of willpower whatsoever. On a number of occasions I've seen people roundly chew out a business that in the same post they say they're still planning to buy from. I've seen union members walk through protests to save a few bucks shopping at a non-union store. Certainly the free market is delivering on its promise to reward the businesses that are best able to compete, but when people pick quantity over quality all the quality businesses die off.
People who are in the know about the general worthlessness of the news have the option of going elsewhere. But what about the average Joe who thinks he's getting the full story off of CNN or Fox News? The scariest thing to me is the "Choose or Lose" campaigns MTV runs to push the section of their demographic of voting age out to the polls with 1/5th of the story. Sure, you or I can (and do) visit websites we think are feeding us a more reliable stream of news, but what about the majority? In order to really have an alternative, you have to know about and have access to the alternative in the first place... and somehow, I think the alternatives aren't newsworthy enough for even cable TV.
On a promising note, most people I've taken the time to demonstrate easy news- and information-finding techniques to on the Internet use it to supplement their more conventional news sources. It's the same with researching information on candidates before elections. People who are motivated enough to vote seem to be willing to learn more about the issues or people on the ballot if they can just get their hands on the information. So I've kind of taken it upon myself to try to teach others how to access this information then get them to do the same with people they know, which kind of goes hand in hand with the occasional computer tutoring/fixing/tuneups I find myself doing in the community.
I'd put him up there with Jon Postel (unfortunately deceased) as being one of those who really 'gets it' as far as the Internet goes. He's originated or been part of most great things (including the EFF, the alt.* newsgroups, and Cypherpunks). I don't agree with all of his concepts, such as spam being free speech, but he's been funding a project to permit intelligent spam filtering at the mailbox by comparing incoming mail's content to other mail you've said you liked/disliked.
He's right on the money with ICANN, too, although I'm sure I don't need to go into a spiel as to why. But if you aren't familiar with him, you might want to take a look at his other work if you want to see some cutting-edge concepts that are in need of an innovator.
I don't think I would have gone with a software solution. I like Linux and all, but we've got enough nonstandard systems at work
that a predecessor assembled that we've all got to reverse-engineer since he left us in the lurch. The boss probably wouldn't
appreciate my request to add to our collection.
The pro-spam people in Congress use the same rationale for their position. Funny that, given that few among their group give a tin shit about our freedom of speech at any other point during their careers. I'm certainly not trying to imply anything about your rationale by bringing this up, of course; John Gilmore is of the same opinion, and he's certainly not profiting from the junk e-mail getting crammed down our throats.
If this country actually ran on the idea that all speech is protected speech, I would agree with the position that spam could be protected. However, one of the principles that we seem to apply in our society is that speech is not sacroscant. Think slander, libel, obscenity, and harassment laws, and the famous "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" rule of thumb. By these standards, spam absolutely should not be considered to be protected speech.
Spam relies a great deal of public and private resources -- resources that the spammer can never adequately pay for -- and by simply receiving spam I am cost time and money for the privilege of reading somebody's advertisement. Obscenity supposedly causes harm. Slander and libel obviously cause harm. Harassment causes harm. Does spam somehow get a free pass because it involves money changing hands?
Real hackers are more clever than you suspect.
on
H2K2 Conference
·
· Score: 1
See, your average person would expect the same thing you do. However, the most elite hackers are quite aware that simply by showing up at a couple of 2600 meetings and attending a convention they get crossed off the 'Hackers To Worry About' list the MiB have been assembling for over a decade.
Really, hackers are a lot like ninjas -- just in much worse physical shape and without the psychotic killing mentality and stealthy skills of your average masked 11th century Japanese assassin.
I never actually owned one, but the Apple IIe systems at my school had an interesting bug in the BASIC parser that only showed up for me in the following case:
10 FOR C=A TO B
Would be interpreted (and shown with a LIST command) to be:
As mentioned elsewhere in here, as we pack greater densities into the medium the effect of heat on the data is easier to notice.
However, another concern I have is with magnetics. Larger capacities mean that more magnetic signals are being clustered into smaller spaces, which would seem to make them more prone to distortion by magnetic forces external (the Earth, electric outlets, sunspots) and internal (SDRAM, the laptop monitor, and nearby signals on the drive itself). It's all well and good that the signals can be packed into the drive, but simultaneous advances in read/write head technology and nanoferris combinatorics in the drive wheel need to occur before we can start realizing data densities of the type we'd seriously drool over.
Although, to tell you the truth, I never thought we'd reach a gigabyte in a desktop system either. However, the economic incentives just don't seem to be a driving force in any PC technology development lately, so I'm guessing it will be a while before we can pick this up at Best Buy.
I was going to make this point, but looks like you beat me to it by a fair margin. I'm kind of surprised you weren't moderated up for it.
Important notice to everybody in California: if you value the Internet or fair use rights, your Senators and Representatives could use a good flushing. It's obvious that this fellow has no respect for or understanding of the Internet, even assuming he's right about the idea that P2P services need to be eliminated, and frankly expressing this type of thinking alone should have Silicon Valley up in arms. Get these people out of our government -- they have no business representing anybody but those who are already entrenched and extremely rich.
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't heard about this before. Randomized Response
I'm always a bit skeptical when I'm told I'm about to be surveyed anonymously, and I can't think of a way that this can be implemented (or at least is likely to be implemented) that would reassure me. The non-skeptics are filling in their information already. Perhaps businesses could pick one in five to survey and offer the people who don't want to take it the ability to just skip it; I'll bet a good amount of crap in the databases is coming from people who have to fill in eighty mandatory fields for free e-mail or music or whatever.
No, make sure you tell your colleague doctors are more than databases. This is a tool, probably capable of making doctors more effective but not a replacement.
Viruses have already been employed in gene therapy, and actually this technique was involved in the first gene-therapy death. So, already been done and already wreaked unforseen havoc on at least one occasion, but the idea is that the virus alters the genes in a person's cells in a beneficial manner rather than in a way that causes the cells to churn out more viruses.
I honestly don't mean to troll, but am merely providing an alternative opinion that I know won't wash very well here. I never understood why people who ostensibly promote free speech actually just mean free speech that agrees with their thoughts.
It frightens me that we allow these sort of games to be played by our youth, one of the things that the show focused on. With all of the hate and violence we already have in our society, games like this, Postal, and Doom may be all it takes to trigger a mass murderer. One fellow had a great point: why take the chance when there are already so many great games out there that don't involve going on a killing spree?
I'm not normally one to advocate the government intervening in our lives, but the fact that there were four thirteen year olds on the show playing the game and describing how fun it was to kill the prostitute after her 'sex act' to regain their money frightened me, and makes me think that even though we live in a free society sometimes we need to curb our liberties to guard our safety.
This seems to be Sony's motif with regard to compressed audio; it goes in, but it never comes out. Do they view themselves as singlehandedly holding back the P2P flood? A bit irritating, because I've got news for them: the shit's out of the horse already, folks, and there's no way I'm gonna dump this kind of cash on a device like this if they're going to cut off what would be its biggest convenience -- autoripping MP3s off of the CDs I play in my stereo so that I can play them at my computer later.
I'd love nothing better than to see the geek revolution stop this shit from making it into the hardware, but lots of luck. EULAs are every bit as bad in the legal sense but if there was an overwhelming hue and cry from the masses that convinced the software companies to quit screwing us with them, I must have slept through it. This site will pump the hardware to our crowd as happily as it did Warcraft III; nevermind the fact that they just informed us about how the publisher wants to give the open source community a good legal rogering; and the Slashdot crowd will swallow every bit like a double frappichino. Oh, they'll be bitching about the evil corporate overlords all the way through the checkout line, but we all know what's gonna be in the shopping cart anyway.
If we don't see (or grudgingly tolerate) the problem, what chance does Joe Sixpack have?
While Denmark may seem a good distance away from many of us, the Hague Convention may hold all of us responsible for the silly laws one country imposes. Unfortunate indeed, because it may mean no deep-linking for us and the DMCA for the rest of you, and it seems like a rather convenient but nasty way of sidestepping the controversy surrounding each piece of legislation like this by simply allowing it to take effect without any discussion.
Basically, they're extending parallel SCSI technology to address next generation I/O and direct attach storage requirements. It uses the (proven) interface from Serial ATA to avoid an unnecessarily proprietary interface and the costs that usually entails. The naming is unfortunate, because one usually thinks of parallel (side-by-side) as being faster than serial (one after the other) when the technology allows you to combine the two tactics much like in LANs. This is the technology that will enable a new generation of dense devices, such as small form factor hard drives, whereas Parallel SCSI can't because of cabling and voltage issues.
So depending on the pricing of the technology when it hits the shelves/junk mail catalogs, we're going to take a serious look at it. Does anybody have any prototype benchmarks?
Someone said that Open Source will never effectively work on the desktop, because it's far too unstable; you can't program anything really useful for it without spending a lot of time and money nursing it through the inevitable changes the platforms around it create. I respectfully disagree, because I think that whenever there is a will, there's a way, and that when people need something, they're going to create it or maintain it.
There is a great deal of burnout being created by users demanding features in software that the developer isn't being paid for, too. KDE has mostly escaped this thus far, however there is some speculation that GNOME has more momentum because it's the underdog. Let's hope these two projects can continue to bring great things to the Linux desktop.
Kind of like Prisoners' Dilemma, except that in the end you know no matter what happens the cable company is going to jack up the rates. So yeah, just wget the Internet now and check it out from your hard drives later when the rates go up.
There are apparently serial and joystick port USB emulators out there -- my Gravis XTerminator came with one. We don't run a Citrix environment so I don't know how proprietary these things are and I'm fairly certain that if you're using the USB for anything high speed this approach can't work, but you might be able to kludge low-speed USB devices (keyboards, point-of-scale scanners, mice?) in this way.
The Amiga motherboard circuitry was designed with a bit more logic (pun intended) than our PC motherboards. Until AGP, the PC graphics hardware had more layers of abstraction to pass through because of the distance from the bus. I don't have hard numbers, but I'll bet this is what he's referring to; they got rid of a lot of cruft when we went AGP.
As far as hardware goes, we're still maintaining backwards compatibility with the 16-bit days (80286). The Amiga is cut loose from that type of restriction because they can use emulation and still achieve a closer compatibility mesh than we can with flipping between our 16-bit and 32-bit registers.
Basically, we're cranking up raw speed in our components, but they're designing for efficiency, after which they can throw money into faster components and end up well ahead of the game. If you've followed the Amiga demoscene, I'm surprised you didn't pick up on this.
Actually, I'd appreciate that quite a bit. Can you think of anything that would fit into a CD rack that already has Pink Floyd, The Who, Grateful Dead, AC/DC, Motorhead, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, and Brian Eno?
This one goes out to the trolls. They are condemned to fight their war in perpetuity, but you can feel free to raise their spirits by posting the following open source lyrics where you deem appropriate.
SEND IN THE TROLLS
sung to the tune of Send In The Clowns
Isn't it brown?
Gigantic and round?
You know it's distended when it
no longer makes a sound.
Where are the trolls?
They tick you off
(you stupid asshole.)
Tilting your monitor with PWP
is their goal.
Where are the trolls?
There ought to be trolls.
Just when I stopped
giving a shit
they send news of hot grits
and petrified chicks exquisite.
We all should remember
Junis the Afghan
or my favorite
OOG THE CAVEMAN.
Where'd the time go?
Troll Tuesday's near;
a guaranteed free-for-all.
I like cold beer.
And where are the trolls?
Quick, send in the trolls.
Don't bother, they're here.
?
!
More laughs than you can possibly
fit in your palm.
And where are the trolls?
There ought to be trolls.
Just ask your mom.
I wanted to play on the idea that the masses usually don't know or care which way they're supposed to go by demonstrating that there is already an industry that is booming off of this situation and pointing out that this is probably the reason businesses are adopting massively irritating policies or operating procedures. But yeah, I don't want to assign any scientific credence to his statement -- just point out that in a broader sense it seems right on the money.
I used to think the same way, but the following concepts I've only recently started to consider don't let this option sit well with me as a way of improving the situation in general:
- Edward Bernays, the creator of the field of public relations, pointed out in an interview that the average IQ of the American public is 100. It's definitely one of those "Well, of course it is" type of things, but it is going to be the factor in any decision made about or by the majority (resulting in sitcoms or depressingly stupid 'save the children' legislation). Anybody smarter than average is, on average, going to have the benefit of the additional intelligence watered down at the end of the day.
- I've noticed a fair number of people -- at least in America and/or sharing online forums with me -- lack any form of willpower whatsoever. On a number of occasions I've seen people roundly chew out a business that in the same post they say they're still planning to buy from. I've seen union members walk through protests to save a few bucks shopping at a non-union store. Certainly the free market is delivering on its promise to reward the businesses that are best able to compete, but when people pick quantity over quality all the quality businesses die off.
- People who are in the know about the general worthlessness of the news have the option of going elsewhere. But what about the average Joe who thinks he's getting the full story off of CNN or Fox News? The scariest thing to me is the "Choose or Lose" campaigns MTV runs to push the section of their demographic of voting age out to the polls with 1/5th of the story. Sure, you or I can (and do) visit websites we think are feeding us a more reliable stream of news, but what about the majority? In order to really have an alternative, you have to know about and have access to the alternative in the first place... and somehow, I think the alternatives aren't newsworthy enough for even cable TV.
On a promising note, most people I've taken the time to demonstrate easy news- and information-finding techniques to on the Internet use it to supplement their more conventional news sources. It's the same with researching information on candidates before elections. People who are motivated enough to vote seem to be willing to learn more about the issues or people on the ballot if they can just get their hands on the information. So I've kind of taken it upon myself to try to teach others how to access this information then get them to do the same with people they know, which kind of goes hand in hand with the occasional computer tutoring/fixing/tuneups I find myself doing in the community.He's right on the money with ICANN, too, although I'm sure I don't need to go into a spiel as to why. But if you aren't familiar with him, you might want to take a look at his other work if you want to see some cutting-edge concepts that are in need of an innovator.
I don't think I would have gone with a software solution. I like Linux and all, but we've got enough nonstandard systems at work that a predecessor assembled that we've all got to reverse-engineer since he left us in the lurch. The boss probably wouldn't appreciate my request to add to our collection.
If this country actually ran on the idea that all speech is protected speech, I would agree with the position that spam could be protected. However, one of the principles that we seem to apply in our society is that speech is not sacroscant. Think slander, libel, obscenity, and harassment laws, and the famous "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" rule of thumb. By these standards, spam absolutely should not be considered to be protected speech.
Spam relies a great deal of public and private resources -- resources that the spammer can never adequately pay for -- and by simply receiving spam I am cost time and money for the privilege of reading somebody's advertisement. Obscenity supposedly causes harm. Slander and libel obviously cause harm. Harassment causes harm. Does spam somehow get a free pass because it involves money changing hands?
Really, hackers are a lot like ninjas -- just in much worse physical shape and without the psychotic killing mentality and stealthy skills of your average masked 11th century Japanese assassin.
10 FOR C=A TO B
Would be interpreted (and shown with a LIST command) to be:
10 FOR C= AT O B
However, another concern I have is with magnetics. Larger capacities mean that more magnetic signals are being clustered into smaller spaces, which would seem to make them more prone to distortion by magnetic forces external (the Earth, electric outlets, sunspots) and internal (SDRAM, the laptop monitor, and nearby signals on the drive itself). It's all well and good that the signals can be packed into the drive, but simultaneous advances in read/write head technology and nanoferris combinatorics in the drive wheel need to occur before we can start realizing data densities of the type we'd seriously drool over.
Although, to tell you the truth, I never thought we'd reach a gigabyte in a desktop system either. However, the economic incentives just don't seem to be a driving force in any PC technology development lately, so I'm guessing it will be a while before we can pick this up at Best Buy.
Important notice to everybody in California: if you value the Internet or fair use rights, your Senators and Representatives could use a good flushing. It's obvious that this fellow has no respect for or understanding of the Internet, even assuming he's right about the idea that P2P services need to be eliminated, and frankly expressing this type of thinking alone should have Silicon Valley up in arms. Get these people out of our government -- they have no business representing anybody but those who are already entrenched and extremely rich.