You are absolutely right. The problem is highly asymmetrical : the spammer needs spambots and webservers worth a few thousand $, and can flood the Internet with crap. If every recipient is to spend a few minutes to do a mDOS (manual denial of service), it sums up to tens of millions of lost minutes, or millions of $ in lost productivity. We need an automated descentralized P2P network to attack the spammers and the spam-friendly ISPs.
It takes me less than 5 minutes to forward the 5000-7000 emails in my catchall account each day. I use Thunderbird with the Blue Frog plugin, and forward about 400 messages at a time - I could do it all in a minute if I could attach all the messages at once but that ends up to be too large a message... Doing it manually would take *far* longer - I've enough time sinks as it is!
According to my Blue Security statistics, my Blue Frog has sent 11,152 "opt-out" requests in the past 7 days. (which also points out that every spam doesn't generate an opt-out) Blue Security's idea is to be enough of a thorn that it's easier to not send to the Blue Frog list than to fight it. (one of the spammer tools has recently added a "clean emails of Blue Security registered names" button - making it trivially easy to remove the registered names. This implies that Blue Security is having an effect.
Right now there are 471,000 names in the list - surely not all are really active, and not all are sending opt-out messages, but it seems spammers are sitting up and noticing now. According to Blue Security's blog, in the past month several spammers have negotiated with them and agreed to clean their lists. If I remember right they generate something like 8% or so of spam volume. Not a *lot* but I'd expect more in the coming months. Spammers are in it to make money - once they get over the initial irritation, it'll just be easier to clean their lists than to try to fight back. Which also makes sense - the list is people who won't buy from them in the first place, so in the end it's a waste of time to send spam to them.
In my opinion (everyone's got em!:) this is the best shot I've seen at drastically reducing spam. Laws aren't as helpful as they could be - especially against spam from other countries. And it takes a long time to catch and convict a single spammer. Do you *really* want your tax dollars used that way? (we don't even need to get into how gosh-darn *wonderful* CAN-SPAM is...) Filters help, but that's not stopping the spam, it's just preventing you from seeing it. Killing spammers might have an effect but seems a bit severe. (although there are days...:) Baysian filters help - but a business can't lose a mail to false positives, so they need to check the spam anyway. Challenge-response is ugly and annoying. And I sure don't want to go down the pay-for-email road! RBLs are too dangerous - throwing out the good with the bad. (one listed the entire Comcast.net domain, for example) Greylisting isn't a bad idea, but it does use extra computing power, and delays some email. Seems to me that being a thorn in the side of a spammer has a decent chance of working. They're not stupid, not even necessarily lazy. They're just taking advantage of the way things work. (excepting those who use trojans etc to take over other's machines - they're evil!) Once they reach the point where it's easier to accept and comply, and recognize they're not losing any revenue (because those emails won't become customers anyway) they'll clean their lists - and spam will go down. It won't disappear, but hopefully be significantly reduced.
I was hit by a joe job a few years ago. I tracked down the spammer and called their toll-free number every time I received their spam bouncing back to me. It was an answering machine, so I just left a very nice message telling them what they had done and requesting that they not use my domain in their From headers. Alas, I never told them my domain. (I'm not stupid:)
I figured it was a bit of my time, but I wasted their toll-free line (hopefully a per-call charge - and yes, I do know they have my phone number from those calls) and they had to wade through a bunch of messages - after all, they might have been real.
One spam, one phone call.
I look at Blue Security as doing the same thing.
I *could* investigate each spam and respond myself. This would take a lot of time that I'm not willing to put out. (I get 6000+ spams/day to my catchall account) Or I could hire someone to do this work for me. That's effectively what I've done - I've hired Blue Security to wade through my email, figure out who's sending it, verify that it *is* spam, and send the spammer a message requesting they not spam me any more.
The advantage is they have economy of scale - they only have to analyze a particular spam once regardless of how many hundreds of thousands of copies they receive. Then it's one "don't spam me" request for SOME of those spams - they throttle the requests so they *don't* DOS the spammer. They send a *maximum* of one message per spam; in reality they send far fewer.
As long as they only "ask the sender to not spam me" one time for each spam they send to me, I don't see that there's anything wrong - it's the same as I could do by myself. (and the other few hundred thousand people do by theirselves.) But each of us doing it ourselves is massively inefficient.
- Al Weiner - (who received the "stop using Blue Security" spam today - and it just tells me the spammers are scared! If they weren't, they wouldn't *care*!:)
I'm replying to this message (although I could be anywhere in here...) simply because of:
Getting to the gym as well to couteract the fact that I've been sitting at a desk or in a car for 10 hours is much trickier.
I think you've hit the answer right there - used to be we'd walk to school or do errands on foot ('cause we only had one car and that took Dad to work) and more of us worked in physical daily labor - so of course we stayed thinner.
I too drive a desk-bound notebook all day (unless I'm sitting on the sofa with it...) but one of the exercise-things I've done is replace my chair with one of those big exercise balls. Yep, I'm sitting on it right now - if I move, it wobbles. If it wobbles, I have to correct it - meaning I move back into balance with my muscles - mostly core muscles too. So all day I'm working my abs, back, legs, obliques - and as it turns out, the most comfortable positions on it are those with good posture.
There are places selling stands to use these balls as chairs - don't get one! The advantage is *having* it move around so it forces you to correct it.
The only disadvantage is if you try to lean back and put your feet up on your desk - well, you look like an idiot as you fall off...:)
Seriously, I like this $45 heavy-duty burst-resistant ball better than my $600 ergonomic chair. (but that's piled with papers now anyway...)
I'd never even notice. The only times I've run IE in the past month... let's see... I ran Windows Update today (uh, actually it was Office update; switched to new notebook and had to reinstall MS Office - and yes, I use Open Office too) And I ran into a link from MSN that didn't seem to like Firefox - first one it several weeks I think.
(I have my Firefox home page set to www.msn.com - I wish every Firefox user would - it'd be worth it just to see MSN mess their pants over browser stats...:)
As I travel occasionally and enjoy movies, I prefer to buy DVDs; that way I can watch them on my notebook during the airline flight. (I also prefer the DVD's full widescreen image)
I've bought quite a few (about 60) so far. Several have been childrens movies; as a family we travel to my in-laws for Christmas. Watching "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" or "The Iron Giant" makes a long flight -uh- fly by.:)
When we get home, the kids want to watch the movies again and again. But DVDs are fragile, and children don't understand "handle it carefully". In comparison, videotapes are almost indestructable. Shouldn't I be able to copy the DVD to tape so the children can watch the show when they want? It seems quite unreasonable to me that I must pay for a DVD, then pay again for a tape, simply to keep children's fingers from destroying the DVD.
(isn't a backup allowed under the copyright laws???)
...but if you were a programmer/developer/coder of some sort, you have to sign a NDA, which basically prohibits you from doing any development at all outside of your work environment, and if you do, it belongs to them.
Not always true. The company I work for explicitly allows outside work. The rules are pretty sensible and common sense - your off-time work must not directly compete with a project you're on, nor use intellectual property from another project the company's worked on, etc, but if it's on your time: you write it, you own it.
Check out http://www.communica.com - it was started by an engineer, it's an engineer's company, and engineers are treated well. I've got almost as much income and freedom as when I was a contractor. (we're looking for engineers, too - if you're interested in working on Cape Cod [Bourne, MA] call or email - and there is the usual referal bonus, so if you apply, please mention my name...:)
While I *am* a Palm bigot, I make my living on Windows development. I've had a hand in bringing up two Windows CE platforms, so I'm somewhat familiar with them. (although not from the application-software side; in both cases they were being used as embedded OSs and my work was device drivers - but don't get me started on *that*...:)
Being a Palm bigot, of course I'm going to recommend Palm devices...
Despite that, take a look at the Handspring Visor. You could develop your app, burn it into a Springboard and have a dandy way to distribute it. Someone drops the Visor and it breaks? Swing by your local store, pick up another, and swap the Springboard into it.
If you build a Springboard with some extra flash, you can save the field data into flash when it's entered. It'll use up the flash's lifetime faster, but you won't lose data even if the batteries wear out. (of course, Palm devices do have a longer battery life...)
Visors are also dirt cheap (in PDA $ terms...:)
One other thought I had - and it applies to whatever platform you go with. How do you protect against someone stealing the device for their own use? (no insult to EMTs intended!)
thanks for posting this - I'm looking at the 2020 and 2500. I've used Olympus Stylus (various models) for years - my original Olympus Stylus Zoom had the best lens I'd ever seen in a "cheap snapshot" camera. Latest is a (Olympus) APS; I like the convenience, but I'd go back to 35mm in an eyeblink... Didn't want to spend the money for a top-quality digital yet, and I couldn't live with a cheapie... A friend just got a great deal on a 2500L - it's biggish for a "toss-around handy snapshot" (for me it's mostly family photos) but much lighter than I expected. I'll probably go the 2020 though...
There are many companies who own the same trademark, just in different industries or different countries.
It is unreasonable to say that only the one with the deepest pockets can own the web site with that trademarked name.
I registered 'ajw.com' years ago, and have been using it for almost all that time. I'm sure that somewhere in the world is a company with a trademark on 'ajw' - should I have to give it up to them? If that's true, there's a whole boatload of domains that are gonna change hands!
Or another example... My father was a magician; he went by the stage name "Mr. Fingers". When he died last year, I registered "mrfingers.org" and "mrfingers.com" (yeah, there's a weak page there right now...:) But there's a musician who goes by "Mr. Fingers" too. Should I lose my father's site because someone else uses the same adopted moniker?
Personally, I don't care what the reason is for registering a domain, I think the domain name should go to the first person (or company) registering it. If Coca-Cola (tm, r, c, whatever) wants all the "coke.xyz" sites, then they can go register them. They're big enough to afford it. Domain squatting? Tough luck!! (or smart thinking, depending on your viewpoint!)
As more and more companies worldwide get connected, there are going to be increasing conflicts. I think that the only reasonable way to handle domain names is first come, first owned.
- ajw -
Re:Cheating? That's what life is about...
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I wouldn't consider what you did cheating. You were given the problem ahead of time so you could think about it.
You came up with a way of solving it - a unique way, given the lack of computer availability in 1975. Using that available tool, you solved it. Yourself. You did the work, you got the answer.
I completely agree with the professor. You deserved the A, and the time to relax.
I don't think this was cheating at all.
- Al -
no way! and... of *course*!
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we are increasingly becoming a connected society - this is both good and bad, but I'm not going to comment upon that (hell, I'm a geek; I carry too much tech-toys around with me!)
Having reference material - whether a calculator, notebook, or wireless notebook - simulates real-world conditions. Most of the time, we have time to stop what we're doing and go look up what we need. This is good - few of us can remember everything we learn (I'm damn jealous of people that remember what they did last week!) but we usually remember that the knowlege exists.
So testing "open-book" makes sense. And is important - it tests the ability to locate information, and use it once located.
At the same time, there are times where we don't have access to references - an ER doc, a surgeon in the middle of surgery, repairing the AE-35 unit on the way to Jupiter, or fixing your motorcycle's carburator on the way through the Sahara. These are extreme examples, but I'm sure we can all come up with other more realistic day-to-day examples.
So testing without reference tools is good too. Especially of recently-learned topics - before you've had time to forget them again.
I don't remember the title, but I have a memory of a SF story where one person got the job because he didn't have access to all the cutting-edge tools and supplies that another person had - he'd had to build pieces that the (wealthier) person just bought. That ability to create a purse from a sow's ear later saved the mission.
Personally, I'd be dead in the water without my references - I quickly forget things I don't use.
Patents have a purpose - to provide incentive for innovation, reward creativity, promote examination of new procedures and processes.
Sometimes those things are an overnight "a-ha!" - other times they're the result of years of work and millions of dollars. Few individuals can afford spending a fortune, only to lose the patent long before they've recovered their costs.
To limit all patents to a short time reduces the reward for long-term hard work - possibly to the point that many things would never happen. The profit motive is very powerful. Don't eliminate it! Use it to spur progress!
well, as another libertarian (in thinking; not in party) I *would* say "privatize it" - the same response I'd give to 90% of government. (other than military and judicial functions, there's not much else that the government should be doing, IMO) But I'd happily toss my own money at a Mars rocket. Or a space station. Or a Lunar base. Which, after all, is how I think it should be - I spend my money where I want progress. Btw, my wife and I saw Mission to Mars last night. It was better (more fun) than I expected - she felt the same way. It was like a "more fun" 2001, A Space Odyssey. (less thinking, just enjoy) Recommended. - Al -
The Di Laurentiis movie started out with voiceover narration - and went downhill from there. What they did with Baron Harkonnen is unforgivable. When I walked out of it, my comment to the people I went with (who agreed with the above assessment...) that it would've made a terrific mini-series. Almost certainly this new version will be better. (so would six hours of blank screen...) However, Di Laurentiis did bring us Barbarella, so he's not entirely a waste of oxygen...
good point... I meant "BAD" from the viewpoint of competition. Lack of competition is almost guaranteed to be bad for the consumer. (compare NT before the OS/2 fiasco and after - NT moved sluggardly before, but once there was the OS/2 competition, NT got way better very quickly.) While I sometimes get paralyzed from too many choices (just which distro should I run???:) overall, I think competition spurs innovation (I'm not looking for a "MS doesn't innovate" rwar here! whether they innovate or aquire and steal others innovations, the innovations exist) - Al -
I've argued this point for months - and as I see it it's a double-edge sword.
Picture this: MS allows source to be downloaded, but still requires a binary license to run it. So you're free to look at the sources, free to compile them, but you can't legally run that version - and you certainly can't sell it.
Sure, there's lots of individuals who'll build their own version, and won't pay for the binary. (like you don't already have 15 licensed copies from buying hardware, eh?) So maybe MS loses revenue from a million or so copies. So what? It's not going to hurt their bottom line much at all.
Few companies - and no big companies - will build their own versions and run those sans binary licenses. And most people will still buy a binary with their new Dells, Gateways, and Joe's Hobby Shop Computers... So Microsoft still gets tons o' revenues. Anyone that tries to build their own and sell it gets hauled into pirate court, just like now...
BUT - and it's a big but - what does opening the source do for Microsoft and Windows?
Well, say you're building an app (or a device driver)... and under some bizzare circumstances it fails... In the past you'd poke and prod and eventually make things work - but without necessarily knowning why. There's lots of Undiscovered Country in there! Far too many projects I see enter poorly, partially, or just plain undocumented areas. So now, you've got this almost-working app... but now you can trace into the source code and figure out exactly why it's failing.
Result: more solid apps.
And some people (lots no doubt!!:) will find and fix bugs in Windows. And submit those fixes back to Microsoft. Now, instead of having to debug Windows, MS "just" needs to qualify fixes. So what if 90% are no good? The other 10% make Windows more solid.
Now imagine: Windows 2003... Sold by a company with the arrogance of Microsoft, the -uh- aggressive and successful marketing of Microsoft. And because of all that peer review and user-submitted bug fixes, the rock-solidness of Linux.
Why would (most people) choose anything else? How would another OS compete? really compete...
Slashdot Mirror
You are absolutely right. The problem is highly asymmetrical : the spammer needs spambots and webservers worth a few thousand $, and can flood the Internet with crap. If every recipient is to spend a few minutes to do a mDOS (manual denial of service), it sums up to tens of millions of lost minutes, or millions of $ in lost productivity.
:) this is the best shot I've seen at drastically reducing spam. Laws aren't as helpful as they could be - especially against spam from other countries. And it takes a long time to catch and convict a single spammer. Do you *really* want your tax dollars used that way? (we don't even need to get into how gosh-darn *wonderful* CAN-SPAM is...) Filters help, but that's not stopping the spam, it's just preventing you from seeing it. Killing spammers might have an effect but seems a bit severe. (although there are days... :) Baysian filters help - but a business can't lose a mail to false positives, so they need to check the spam anyway. Challenge-response is ugly and annoying. And I sure don't want to go down the pay-for-email road! RBLs are too dangerous - throwing out the good with the bad. (one listed the entire Comcast.net domain, for example) Greylisting isn't a bad idea, but it does use extra computing power, and delays some email. Seems to me that being a thorn in the side of a spammer has a decent chance of working. They're not stupid, not even necessarily lazy. They're just taking advantage of the way things work. (excepting those who use trojans etc to take over other's machines - they're evil!) Once they reach the point where it's easier to accept and comply, and recognize they're not losing any revenue (because those emails won't become customers anyway) they'll clean their lists - and spam will go down. It won't disappear, but hopefully be significantly reduced.
We need an automated descentralized P2P network to attack the spammers and the spam-friendly ISPs.
It takes me less than 5 minutes to forward the 5000-7000 emails in my catchall account each day. I use Thunderbird with the Blue Frog plugin, and forward about 400 messages at a time - I could do it all in a minute if I could attach all the messages at once but that ends up to be too large a message...
Doing it manually would take *far* longer - I've enough time sinks as it is!
According to my Blue Security statistics, my Blue Frog has sent 11,152 "opt-out" requests in the past 7 days. (which also points out that every spam doesn't generate an opt-out) Blue Security's idea is to be enough of a thorn that it's easier to not send to the Blue Frog list than to fight it. (one of the spammer tools has recently added a "clean emails of Blue Security registered names" button - making it trivially easy to remove the registered names. This implies that Blue Security is having an effect.
Right now there are 471,000 names in the list - surely not all are really active, and not all are sending opt-out messages, but it seems spammers are sitting up and noticing now. According to Blue Security's blog, in the past month several spammers have negotiated with them and agreed to clean their lists. If I remember right they generate something like 8% or so of spam volume. Not a *lot* but I'd expect more in the coming months. Spammers are in it to make money - once they get over the initial irritation, it'll just be easier to clean their lists than to try to fight back. Which also makes sense - the list is people who won't buy from them in the first place, so in the end it's a waste of time to send spam to them.
In my opinion (everyone's got em!
- Al Weiner -
I view this differently...
:)
:)
I was hit by a joe job a few years ago. I tracked down the spammer and called their toll-free number every time I received their spam bouncing back to me. It was an answering machine, so I just left a very nice message telling them what they had done and requesting that they not use my domain in their From headers. Alas, I never told them my domain. (I'm not stupid
I figured it was a bit of my time, but I wasted their toll-free line (hopefully a per-call charge - and yes, I do know they have my phone number from those calls) and they had to wade through a bunch of messages - after all, they might have been real.
One spam, one phone call.
I look at Blue Security as doing the same thing.
I *could* investigate each spam and respond myself. This would take a lot of time that I'm not willing to put out. (I get 6000+ spams/day to my catchall account) Or I could hire someone to do this work for me. That's effectively what I've done - I've hired Blue Security to wade through my email, figure out who's sending it, verify that it *is* spam, and send the spammer a message requesting they not spam me any more.
The advantage is they have economy of scale - they only have to analyze a particular spam once regardless of how many hundreds of thousands of copies they receive. Then it's one "don't spam me" request for SOME of those spams - they throttle the requests so they *don't* DOS the spammer. They send a *maximum* of one message per spam; in reality they send far fewer.
As long as they only "ask the sender to not spam me" one time for each spam they send to me, I don't see that there's anything wrong - it's the same as I could do by myself. (and the other few hundred thousand people do by theirselves.) But each of us doing it ourselves is massively inefficient.
- Al Weiner -
(who received the "stop using Blue Security" spam today - and it just tells me the spammers are scared! If they weren't, they wouldn't *care*!
and now it's on the Internet - that confirms it's true.
I think you've hit the answer right there - used to be we'd walk to school or do errands on foot ('cause we only had one car and that took Dad to work) and more of us worked in physical daily labor - so of course we stayed thinner.
I too drive a desk-bound notebook all day (unless I'm sitting on the sofa with it...) but one of the exercise-things I've done is replace my chair with one of those big exercise balls. Yep, I'm sitting on it right now - if I move, it wobbles. If it wobbles, I have to correct it - meaning I move back into balance with my muscles - mostly core muscles too. So all day I'm working my abs, back, legs, obliques - and as it turns out, the most comfortable positions on it are those with good posture.
There are places selling stands to use these balls as chairs - don't get one! The advantage is *having* it move around so it forces you to correct it.
The only disadvantage is if you try to lean back and put your feet up on your desk - well, you look like an idiot as you fall off...
Seriously, I like this $45 heavy-duty burst-resistant ball better than my $600 ergonomic chair. (but that's piled with papers now anyway...)
- Al -
I'd never even notice. The only times I've run IE in the past month... let's see... I ran Windows Update today (uh, actually it was Office update; switched to new notebook and had to reinstall MS Office - and yes, I use Open Office too)
:)
And I ran into a link from MSN that didn't seem to like Firefox - first one it several weeks I think.
(I have my Firefox home page set to www.msn.com - I wish every Firefox user would - it'd be worth it just to see MSN mess their pants over browser stats...
- Al -
99% Firefox, 1% IE, testing Thunderbird...
from a safety sign (a long time ago - yeah, in a galaxy far far away...)
Do not look at laser with other eye.
As I travel occasionally and enjoy movies, I prefer to buy DVDs; that way I can watch them on my notebook during the airline flight. (I also prefer the DVD's full widescreen image) :)
I've bought quite a few (about 60) so far. Several have been childrens movies; as a family we travel to my in-laws for Christmas. Watching "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" or "The Iron Giant" makes a long flight -uh- fly by.
When we get home, the kids want to watch the movies again and again. But DVDs are fragile, and children don't understand "handle it carefully". In comparison, videotapes are almost indestructable. Shouldn't I be able to copy the DVD to tape so the children can watch the show when they want? It seems quite unreasonable to me that I must pay for a DVD, then pay again for a tape, simply to keep children's fingers from destroying the DVD.
(isn't a backup allowed under the copyright laws???)
- ajw -
...but if you were a programmer/developer/coder of some sort, you have to sign a NDA, which basically prohibits you from doing any development at all outside of your work environment, and if you do, it belongs to them.
:)
Not always true. The company I work for explicitly allows outside work. The rules are pretty sensible and common sense - your off-time work must not directly compete with a project you're on, nor use intellectual property from another project the company's worked on, etc, but if it's on your time: you write it, you own it.
Check out http://www.communica.com - it was started by an engineer, it's an engineer's company, and engineers are treated well. I've got almost as much income and freedom as when I was a contractor. (we're looking for engineers, too - if you're interested in working on Cape Cod [Bourne, MA] call or email - and there is the usual referal bonus, so if you apply, please mention my name...
- ajw -
While I *am* a Palm bigot, I make my living on Windows development. I've had a hand in bringing up two Windows CE platforms, so I'm somewhat familiar with them. (although not from the application-software side; in both cases they were being used as embedded OSs and my work was device drivers - but don't get me started on *that*... :)
:)
Being a Palm bigot, of course I'm going to recommend Palm devices...
Despite that, take a look at the Handspring Visor. You could develop your app, burn it into a Springboard and have a dandy way to distribute it. Someone drops the Visor and it breaks? Swing by your local store, pick up another, and swap the Springboard into it.
If you build a Springboard with some extra flash, you can save the field data into flash when it's entered. It'll use up the flash's lifetime faster, but you won't lose data even if the batteries wear out. (of course, Palm devices do have a longer battery life...)
Visors are also dirt cheap (in PDA $ terms...
One other thought I had - and it applies to whatever platform you go with. How do you protect against someone stealing the device for their own use? (no insult to EMTs intended!)
- Al Weiner -
www.ajw.com
Everything that can be invented has been invented. Charles H. Duell US Commissioner of Patents (in 1899)
thanks for posting this - I'm looking at the 2020 and 2500. I've used Olympus Stylus (various models) for years - my original Olympus Stylus Zoom had the best lens I'd ever seen in a "cheap snapshot" camera. Latest is a (Olympus) APS; I like the convenience, but I'd go back to 35mm in an eyeblink... Didn't want to spend the money for a top-quality digital yet, and I couldn't live with a cheapie... A friend just got a great deal on a 2500L - it's biggish for a "toss-around handy snapshot" (for me it's mostly family photos) but much lighter than I expected. I'll probably go the 2020 though...
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
:)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "I wish I had a nickel..."
Ohh! cool! Recursion!
- Al -
I'd rather know who CSM is... - Al -
Albert Einstein also believed in communism. (see his FBI freedom-of-information file...)
He also considered himself a failure - he wanted to be a concert violinist.
Just proves that one can be brilliant in one area and stupid as fertilizer in another.
- Al -
There are many companies who own the same trademark, just in different industries or different countries.
:) But there's a musician who goes by "Mr. Fingers" too. Should I lose my father's site because someone else uses the same adopted moniker?
It is unreasonable to say that only the one with the deepest pockets can own the web site with that trademarked name.
I registered 'ajw.com' years ago, and have been using it for almost all that time. I'm sure that somewhere in the world is a company with a trademark on 'ajw' - should I have to give it up to them? If that's true, there's a whole boatload of domains that are gonna change hands!
Or another example... My father was a magician; he went by the stage name "Mr. Fingers". When he died last year, I registered "mrfingers.org" and "mrfingers.com" (yeah, there's a weak page there right now...
Personally, I don't care what the reason is for registering a domain, I think the domain name should go to the first person (or company) registering it. If Coca-Cola (tm, r, c, whatever) wants all the "coke.xyz" sites, then they can go register them. They're big enough to afford it. Domain squatting? Tough luck!! (or smart thinking, depending on your viewpoint!)
As more and more companies worldwide get connected, there are going to be increasing conflicts. I think that the only reasonable way to handle domain names is first come, first owned.
- ajw -
I wouldn't consider what you did cheating. You were given the problem ahead of time so you could think about it.
You came up with a way of solving it - a unique way, given the lack of computer availability in 1975. Using that available tool, you solved it. Yourself. You did the work, you got the answer.
I completely agree with the professor. You deserved the A, and the time to relax.
I don't think this was cheating at all.
- Al -
we are increasingly becoming a connected society - this is both good and bad, but I'm not going to comment upon that (hell, I'm a geek; I carry too much tech-toys around with me!)
Having reference material - whether a calculator, notebook, or wireless notebook - simulates real-world conditions. Most of the time, we have time to stop what we're doing and go look up what we need. This is good - few of us can remember everything we learn (I'm damn jealous of people that remember what they did last week!) but we usually remember that the knowlege exists.
So testing "open-book" makes sense. And is important - it tests the ability to locate information, and use it once located.
At the same time, there are times where we don't have access to references - an ER doc, a surgeon in the middle of surgery, repairing the AE-35 unit on the way to Jupiter, or fixing your motorcycle's carburator on the way through the Sahara.
These are extreme examples, but I'm sure we can all come up with other more realistic day-to-day examples.
So testing without reference tools is good too. Especially of recently-learned topics - before you've had time to forget them again.
I don't remember the title, but I have a memory of a SF story where one person got the job because he didn't have access to all the cutting-edge tools and supplies that another person had - he'd had to build pieces that the (wealthier) person just bought. That ability to create a purse from a sow's ear later saved the mission.
Personally, I'd be dead in the water without my references - I quickly forget things I don't use.
- Al -
that's stupid.
Patents have a purpose - to provide incentive for innovation, reward creativity, promote examination of new procedures and processes.
Sometimes those things are an overnight "a-ha!" - other times they're the result of years of work and millions of dollars. Few individuals can afford spending a fortune, only to lose the patent long before they've recovered their costs.
To limit all patents to a short time reduces the reward for long-term hard work - possibly to the point that many things would never happen. The profit motive is very powerful. Don't eliminate it! Use it to spur progress!
- Al -
well, as another libertarian (in thinking; not in party) I *would* say "privatize it" - the same response I'd give to 90% of government. (other than military and judicial functions, there's not much else that the government should be doing, IMO) But I'd happily toss my own money at a Mars rocket. Or a space station. Or a Lunar base. Which, after all, is how I think it should be - I spend my money where I want progress. Btw, my wife and I saw Mission to Mars last night. It was better (more fun) than I expected - she felt the same way. It was like a "more fun" 2001, A Space Odyssey. (less thinking, just enjoy) Recommended. - Al -
The Di Laurentiis movie started out with voiceover narration - and went downhill from there. What they did with Baron Harkonnen is unforgivable. When I walked out of it, my comment to the people I went with (who agreed with the above assessment...) that it would've made a terrific mini-series. Almost certainly this new version will be better. (so would six hours of blank screen...) However, Di Laurentiis did bring us Barbarella, so he's not entirely a waste of oxygen...
good point... I meant "BAD" from the viewpoint of competition. Lack of competition is almost guaranteed to be bad for the consumer. (compare NT before the OS/2 fiasco and after - NT moved sluggardly before, but once there was the OS/2 competition, NT got way better very quickly.) While I sometimes get paralyzed from too many choices (just which distro should I run??? :) overall, I think competition spurs innovation (I'm not looking for a "MS doesn't innovate" rwar here! whether they innovate or aquire and steal others innovations, the innovations exist) - Al -
I've argued this point for months - and as I see it it's a double-edge sword.
:) will find and fix bugs in Windows. And submit those fixes back to Microsoft. Now, instead of having to debug Windows, MS "just" needs to qualify fixes. So what if 90% are no good? The other 10% make Windows more solid.
Picture this: MS allows source to be downloaded, but still requires a binary license to run it. So you're free to look at the sources, free to compile them, but you can't legally run that version - and you certainly can't sell it.
Sure, there's lots of individuals who'll build their own version, and won't pay for the binary. (like you don't already have 15 licensed copies from buying hardware, eh?)
So maybe MS loses revenue from a million or so copies. So what? It's not going to hurt their bottom line much at all.
Few companies - and no big companies - will build their own versions and run those sans binary licenses. And most people will still buy a binary with their new Dells, Gateways, and Joe's Hobby Shop Computers...
So Microsoft still gets tons o' revenues.
Anyone that tries to build their own and sell it gets hauled into pirate court, just like now...
BUT - and it's a big but - what does opening the source do for Microsoft and Windows?
Well, say you're building an app (or a device driver)... and under some bizzare circumstances it fails... In the past you'd poke and prod and eventually make things work - but without necessarily knowning why. There's lots of Undiscovered Country in there! Far too many projects I see enter poorly, partially, or just plain undocumented areas.
So now, you've got this almost-working app... but now you can trace into the source code and figure out exactly why it's failing.
Result: more solid apps.
And some people (lots no doubt!!
Now imagine: Windows 2003... Sold by a company with the arrogance of Microsoft, the -uh- aggressive and successful marketing of Microsoft.
And because of all that peer review and user-submitted bug fixes, the rock-solidness of Linux.
Why would (most people) choose anything else? How would another OS compete? really compete...
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
-ajw-