With respect, you're horribly oversimplifying the problem to the point where I don't really think you understand the problem at all.
Parsing words and spaces assumes Watson has a list of prepared questions and has been provided with the correct responses. That's trivial. My GPS can do better than that, and it's a small sub-function of my smartphone. I was writing parse-and-differentiate algorithms in high school on an Apple IIe.
Watson isn't given the questions until they are asked. It's not looking up a list of answers from a series of pre-defined questions. It has to parse real-life questions. To make it worse, it's presented with questions that are specifically designed to be misleading.
The categories in Jeopardy are frequently puns, as are the prompts (answers) provided so you can generate a response (question).
Take, for example, one of the categories used in the demonstration game, "Chicks Dig Me". It meant that the questions all had to do with females in the field of archeology. No way in hell is a database going to be able to be pre-loaded for the possible use of this specific bit of wordplay, and yet you have to filter the answers down to events or people or places involving a female archeologist in order to get the right response (as opposed to women who like the subject of the question), and the prompts in that category often have an easy (and wrong) answer that has nothing to do with the category, and a harder (and correct) answer that does involve the category.
"Jeopardy" is almost a perfect shitstorm of how hard non-conversational questions can get, and conversational questions are even harder. The context under which you are operating is frequently a pun. The questions, which are "asked" in the form of providing an answer, are frequently deliberately misleading (or are so simple you think you're being misled when you aren't).
The answers, which must be given in the form of a question, have to take into account both the interpretation of a pun for context and a question that has an answer any simple response engine would want to give, that's always incorrect, except of course when it isn't.
To name a competitor, Google is the result of many very smart brains at work for a very long time. There are thousands and thousands of computers ready to search, and a database pretty much containing the knowledge of planet Earth and its entire history.
Go ask it ten easy questions and click on "I Feel Lucky", then ask those same easy questions of a human.
First, no one who reads this is suddenly going to be convinced either way. Either you feel that making the code obscure makes it harder to find bugs, or you feel that making the code open makes it easier to fix them. Both are true, for various levels of vendor responsiveness in closed-source code and level of active involvement in open-source code.
If you have a vendor who actively solicits and rewards bug/vulnerability reports, puts a lot of time and money into fixing them, and keeps their source closed, you'll probably have about the best security possible. In the real world, it's not so black and white.
Having said all that, this is pure astroturfing. GAAAAAHHHHH!!! THE FUCKING SCARE MONSTER'S GONNA GET YA IF YOU DON'T BUY OUR SHIT!!!! BUY ANTIVIRUS NOW OR JESUS KILLS A PUPPY!!!!
"In the same amount of time" is the biggie. They are talking about using short timeslices of hundreds of computers. The article mentions using 400 GPUs (but isn't very clear on whether 400 GPUs for 20 minutes is what costs $1.68). If that's true, then decoding it with a single GPU would take about 5 1/2 days, assuming you had the same class of hardware Amazon is using.
Not earth-shattering amounts of time, true, but if speed is of the essence you probably don't want to wait the better part of a week.
If you can get physical access to the facility, they're screwed anyway. Your "bug" could be RJ-45 based and cover a lot more of the network.
I think the major point is that containing light is a lot easier than containing the current 802.11x frequency ranges. Light cannot penetrate walls. It can only penetrate air, glass, and other transparent or translucent surfaces.
Of course, electrons on copper are even more secure, assuming your hacker doesn't have building access. Anything that emits any form of radiation can have that radiation "read". Light would be halfway between Wired and current WiFi technologies in terms of the ability to secure it.
I'm not even sure it would necessarily be a problem at night. I'm pretty sure these things would be programmed with maybe a 45-degree cone, and the client computers would be sending their signals back from down inside Cubicle Canyon. You might be able to get some reflection off the ceiling tiles and cubicle tops, but that's going to be a very weak signal.
Plus, there's no real indication of what frequency these use, but it seems to me that it'd be pretty simple to just put up a filter for that frequency on any outside-facing windows. With RF, there's always a chance of a crack in the shielding that has to completely and utterly surround the building allowing leakage. With light, it can only exit through the windows and openings. You know where your gaps are, and can fix them a lot more easily.
Wired is, as many have observed, faster and more secure. But if you need wireless, I could see lightwave wireless as being a pretty viable solution. Especially if you throw some WPA2/AES-level security over it, and maybe illuminate your outside-facing window surfaces with a few well-aimed LEDs sending continuous gibberish.
It's true that IR was slow and cumbersome, but damn was it useful for small-file transfers, and most implementations were a LOT less cumbersome than, say, the simplest bluetooth.
There are several possible advantages to a concept like this.
First, light is a lot harder to intercept unless you can see it. Light cannot penetrate walls. For those applications where you are afraid of RF being intercepted by ne'er-do-wells, using light is pretty brilliant (OK, my only bad pun in this post, I promise. Maybe). All your worker drones are in soulless, windowless cubicles, so there's little to no chance of light escaping the building in readable form. A Pringles can and a few minutes with a Yagi antenna tutorial will yield someone lots of RF lovin', and shielding all that costs serious coin and it's easy to miss an exit vector for RF.
Second, there are 11 US-licensed RF channels with plenty of crosstalk opportunity between adjacent channels. If your worker drones are down in cubes, you could install one of these in every other light fixture and reach every worker drone with their own discrete light channel with no crosstalk.
Third, for those with some sort of sensitivity to RF (or perceived sensitivity), you're flooding them with, well, light. At much lower intensities than the light fixture is already putting out. If they're concerned about exposure to that, allow them to wear a fedora at work. Problem solved.
Obviously the easiest, fastest, and most secure answer is to run sufficient copper to give everyone a network plug (then secure them so your wired traffic is encrypted and no random idiot can plug a sniffer into a port and start watching traffic flow, or plug a non-approved bit of hardware into the LAN and start seeing what resources they can access). But if you want reasonable-speed wireless in a computer-dense environment, light might work pretty well.
The article wouldn't be sufficient in laying out the challenges involved in doing this, though it does give one example of the early problems they ran into.
The problem isn't necessarily in finding the answers to a given set of criteria, it's interpreting the question to lay out the search criteria. I don't know if you've ever watched an episode of "Jeopardy", but obtaining the answers often requires decoding a pun or a riddle, not just "It's what you get when you multiply six times nine." or "He is buried in the largest of the Pyramids in Egypt."
I'd have been far more interested to see a list of the questions to see if any of them contained the usual misleading portions and/or puns.
In fact, I think a flash mob would be most appropriate in this situation. Have a bunch of people show up at the courthouse entrance. No anger, no signs, no threats, no speeches, no derision. At a pre-determined time, everyone simultaneously points at Pitchford, puts on a big red clown nose, and spends 20 seconds having a good belly laugh. At the end of 20 seconds, everyone walks off nonchalantly. Then go home and try desperately to forget that idiots like this exist and validate their idiocy with undue attention.
I'd go for stocks and shunning, but that's become unpopular in this new mollycoddling age. So a flash mob and ignoring him is about the best we can do any more.
Safari can then be installed on Linux, though it's not supported by Apple and you'll find Chrome or Firefox a lot easier.
But, heck, anything's gotta be better than IE5.:)
I'm not dissing MacOS, it's good stuff. Truly. And, of course, you might have software that depends on MacOS. But you might want to at least consider adding a Linux partition and run that when you wanted to do web browsing and stuff with something a tad more modern.
Ten cents a browser sounds really cheap, until you do the math and count the number of downloads each browser has. For example, Firefox 3.6 has had nearly 400 million downloads since January 2010 ( http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/stats/ ). That's nearly $40 million a year to include a third party's software to support a single feature in a product they're giving away for free. I'd rather see that money go into stabilization of the codebase, new features, etc.
I'd actually prefer they went the platform codec route. Setup is a little more complicated, but there's no licensing fee for personal use of MPEG-LA formats ( http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=1977899 ), and if I need a license for non-free media I should just get one for my computer rather than depending on each and every one of my web browser companies to provide one to me.
Yes, on a micro scale it seems silly to "cheap out" by not dropping a dime on each of your users to give them a standard video experience. But when there's a free one available, why not push that? WebM is completely free for anyone to implement and use as they see fit.
PS: Your analogy doesn't quite hold. Try "I'm to cheap to recommend SyFy shows to friends, because for each show a friend decides to watch, I have to pay SyFy a ten cent referral fee."
I always loved the name "Buffalo Trace" for a Bourbon (really good stuff though).
When I lived in Lexington and drive occasionally north to Cincy, I frequently wished someone would name a Bourbon after one of my favorite place names. "Big Bone Lick". Sadly, I never got a chance to visit Big Bone Lick, but I always loved the name. It never failed to get a chuckle out of me seeing the signs.
I know! If I wanted to monopolize the toy business by eliminating all competition to my line of JarJar Binks figurines, I'd send out spam in the name of all other toymakers.
I have a php-Nuke board that's been around for a while. I not only had a problem with spammers, but the sheer volume of attacks was slowing down my site and filling up my database.
I installed NukeSentinel on my phpbb board, and made people sign up with an email address (with an activation link sent to that address). For a while I set it up so I had to approve each account, but I switched that off about 6 months ago and haven't seen any difference.
I also looked for "attacks" using Sentinel's logging facility and basically blacklisted entire IP address ranges from Romania, Bulgaria, and many other countries with lots of consonants in their names. I also blacklisted tons of addresses from China. This took about a month of half-hour-a-day effort, but now I just check it every few weeks and if I see a really heavy attacker I block the entire address range of their ISP. I have yet to see an attack originating from the US, and my site is very US-centric, so I can get away with that.
Result? Zero spam in over a year. Consistent subsecond response time. Happy user base.
Spam already leads to mail fraud in some cases, and that fraud is generally prosecuted where possible. Very few legitimate companies use spam any more. The illegitimate ones are harder to catch.
There are actually several problems with this:
1. Not all that many shipping operations that use spammers operate under US law. Products are usually shipped from overseas (if any product is shipped at all!) and you can't fine a foreign entity without an agreement with that entity's native government (which, of course, spammers choose carefully to avoid such things). So you'd be limited to the people the police are already prosecuting, and that population is dwindling.
2. "kill your business for good" fines are what got us into multi-million-dollar fines for "casual" copyright infringement (the large fines were originally designed to drain commercial "piracy factories" of their resources, not to bankrupt a person for life because they shared 3 albums on LimeWire). We'd have to be very careful with any law to target the people we want to hurt, rather than opening anyone who posted an actual personal product recommendation somewhere to a $5,000,000 spammer suit.
3. Many of the products sold are actually counterfeit, and are shipped from faked addresses and just dropped off at the post office. Again, if anything was shipped at all. If I wanted to put Symantec out of business, I could very profitably sell pirated Norton Antivirus and drop a few dozen units off at the post office nearest Symantec's corporate HQ, with a return address label that has their address on it. Symantec would be stuck with the burden of proof that they didn't ship the product. You'd have to check ID every time someone sent a letter and make sure the "from" address matches their ID (which means no more mailbox pickup, all letters and packages must be posted individually).
True enough, but a number of colonies failed because it was, to the colonists, a barren wasteland devoid of sustenance they recognized and could take advantage of.
Technologically, in 50 years or so a trip to Mars will be roughly the equivalent that a trip to America was in the 1500s.
In both cases, it's basically a one-way trip.
On the one hand, we have basically no natural resources that we can use as-is on Mars. Details like, say, freely-available oxygen are certainly lacking. Once they figured out what was edible and what had nasty side effects, the early American colonists tended to do pretty well. Colonists on Mars will have to work harder at it, because nothing's free there.
On the other hand, Martian colonists will have lots of information about what resources ARE available, and they can send machinery ahead to prepare the way for them. So even before they are sent out, they should have enough stored food on-site to last until the first harvest or until an unmanned resupply ship can be sent if the harvest fails. A Mars colony should be pretty well-equipped to handle the resources they know are available, because they should have lots of information available to them before the ship takes off and they can pack the right stuff to take advantage of it.
I mean this with the greatest personal respect when I say "bullshit." I know your heart's in the right place, but I think you fundamentally underestimate the next generation and fundamentally misunderstand where their world is going.
Sure, there's a segment of the population who wouldn't take the risk. Always has been, always will be. They're called "the upper class" and they have a lot to lose. Americans have been lucky for a couple of generations that our "middle class" still has plenty to lose. That's coming to an end soon.
Automation has allowed the new upper class to lay off lots of the middle class by profiting directly from the machines that replaced those workers.
Automation has only benefit the middle class in the short term by giving us cheap TVs to watch American Idol on, so they are cheap enough that we can still afford them as our collective standard of living slowly swirls down the toilet.
In the long term we'll have a LOT more people who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by at least trying for a place where they can get three squares a day if they work hard enough for it.
Right, I agree that the science is speculative at best, but probably more like outright fanciful. However, the volunteer offers appear to have been made based on a chance of survival. In other words, by people accepting the premise of this eventually being possible.
Now, you'll also have a population that would gladly give up a few decades to be the first person to live on Mars, even if that honor (and volunteer) were short-lived. It'd be followed pretty closely by the person with the honor of being the first to die on Mars.
Trouble with something like that is the cost of getting a few people there without any chance of survival is much higher than the cost of getting a few hundred robotic instruments out there.
There's little point sending someone there until they can stay and have a chance of survival. You'd probably have no shortage of volunteers, but what would be the point of sending them there just to die?
Honestly, I doubt the first human will set foot on Mars during my lifetime. But it's a fun dream.
If this were a 100% guaranteed suicide mission, sure. Probably 399 of those 400 people would pull out so fast there'd be a vacuum where they were standing and they'd outrun their own scream. The 400th would only run away at mere superhuman speed and be declared insane for the delay. But the plan is to send up colonists with equipment that gives them a chance at long-term survival on Mars, not human scientific instruments with enough canned air to last a month and let them die off.
The ideal way to approach this, of course, is to send automata and have them set up the habitat, plant the first crops, and start the ball rolling. Have them build out a half-dozen colonies in relatively close proximity, establish a large cache of emergency resources nearby, and then send enough population at first to establish half those colonies. Send the colonists up around harvest time for the first round of crops so they have a head start. If resources get scarce at a colony, you send some or all of the colonists to one of the "spare" habitats. If the resources fall below what can sustain the colonists overall, have them tap into the reserve and go on short rations until a resupply can be arranged.
Once the six colonies are fully populated and have the kinks worked out, build out a few hundred more over time. Then our great-grandkids can talk about terraforming in a century or so.
This is roughly the equivalent of colonizing a new continent back in the days of sailing ships, when overseas voyages were long, hard, and dangerous. Humanity managed that, quite successfully in fact. The colonists faced never seeing anyone from their old country again, and a very real possibility of dying on the journey or after arriving. We did it then, we'll do it again. There will be no shortage of volunteers if and when there's a fair chance of making a go of it.
Because, hell, you get to be a human living on another PLANET. Not just another continent, a whole different PLANET. Life's to short not to grab an opportunity like this by the short-and-curlies and hang on for dear life. Sure, you might die. But you're gonna die in a handful of decades anyway, either sitting in front of the tube watching American Idol or working your ass off so someone further up the food chain can get rich.
The only thing that makes me sad about this is that I'm already well over 40. By the time something like this comes around, if it ever does, I'd never qualify as a colonist. I'll be too old.
But for you lucky young bastages who get to do this, I'm going to hang on long enough to cheer for you, I hope. I'll be jealous, but happy for y'all.
What happens if a north-bound Hawtch-Watcher meets a south-bound Hawtch-Watcher? And do they have stars upon thars? And, finally, are they all named "Dave"?
Slashdot Mirror
http://xkcd.com/793/
With respect, you're horribly oversimplifying the problem to the point where I don't really think you understand the problem at all.
Parsing words and spaces assumes Watson has a list of prepared questions and has been provided with the correct responses. That's trivial. My GPS can do better than that, and it's a small sub-function of my smartphone. I was writing parse-and-differentiate algorithms in high school on an Apple IIe.
Watson isn't given the questions until they are asked. It's not looking up a list of answers from a series of pre-defined questions. It has to parse real-life questions. To make it worse, it's presented with questions that are specifically designed to be misleading.
The categories in Jeopardy are frequently puns, as are the prompts (answers) provided so you can generate a response (question).
Take, for example, one of the categories used in the demonstration game, "Chicks Dig Me". It meant that the questions all had to do with females in the field of archeology. No way in hell is a database going to be able to be pre-loaded for the possible use of this specific bit of wordplay, and yet you have to filter the answers down to events or people or places involving a female archeologist in order to get the right response (as opposed to women who like the subject of the question), and the prompts in that category often have an easy (and wrong) answer that has nothing to do with the category, and a harder (and correct) answer that does involve the category.
"Jeopardy" is almost a perfect shitstorm of how hard non-conversational questions can get, and conversational questions are even harder. The context under which you are operating is frequently a pun. The questions, which are "asked" in the form of providing an answer, are frequently deliberately misleading (or are so simple you think you're being misled when you aren't).
The answers, which must be given in the form of a question, have to take into account both the interpretation of a pun for context and a question that has an answer any simple response engine would want to give, that's always incorrect, except of course when it isn't.
To name a competitor, Google is the result of many very smart brains at work for a very long time. There are thousands and thousands of computers ready to search, and a database pretty much containing the knowledge of planet Earth and its entire history.
Go ask it ten easy questions and click on "I Feel Lucky", then ask those same easy questions of a human.
Now make the questions intentionally misleading.
For an extra $5,000 I'll give you one that goes to 12.
First, no one who reads this is suddenly going to be convinced either way. Either you feel that making the code obscure makes it harder to find bugs, or you feel that making the code open makes it easier to fix them. Both are true, for various levels of vendor responsiveness in closed-source code and level of active involvement in open-source code.
If you have a vendor who actively solicits and rewards bug/vulnerability reports, puts a lot of time and money into fixing them, and keeps their source closed, you'll probably have about the best security possible. In the real world, it's not so black and white.
Having said all that, this is pure astroturfing. GAAAAAHHHHH!!! THE FUCKING SCARE MONSTER'S GONNA GET YA IF YOU DON'T BUY OUR SHIT!!!! BUY ANTIVIRUS NOW OR JESUS KILLS A PUPPY!!!!
"In the same amount of time" is the biggie. They are talking about using short timeslices of hundreds of computers. The article mentions using 400 GPUs (but isn't very clear on whether 400 GPUs for 20 minutes is what costs $1.68). If that's true, then decoding it with a single GPU would take about 5 1/2 days, assuming you had the same class of hardware Amazon is using.
Not earth-shattering amounts of time, true, but if speed is of the essence you probably don't want to wait the better part of a week.
Because he probably couldn't manage it? ;)
If you can get physical access to the facility, they're screwed anyway. Your "bug" could be RJ-45 based and cover a lot more of the network.
I think the major point is that containing light is a lot easier than containing the current 802.11x frequency ranges. Light cannot penetrate walls. It can only penetrate air, glass, and other transparent or translucent surfaces.
Of course, electrons on copper are even more secure, assuming your hacker doesn't have building access. Anything that emits any form of radiation can have that radiation "read". Light would be halfway between Wired and current WiFi technologies in terms of the ability to secure it.
I can see how it would be a problem at night
I'm not even sure it would necessarily be a problem at night. I'm pretty sure these things would be programmed with maybe a 45-degree cone, and the client computers would be sending their signals back from down inside Cubicle Canyon. You might be able to get some reflection off the ceiling tiles and cubicle tops, but that's going to be a very weak signal.
Plus, there's no real indication of what frequency these use, but it seems to me that it'd be pretty simple to just put up a filter for that frequency on any outside-facing windows. With RF, there's always a chance of a crack in the shielding that has to completely and utterly surround the building allowing leakage. With light, it can only exit through the windows and openings. You know where your gaps are, and can fix them a lot more easily.
Wired is, as many have observed, faster and more secure. But if you need wireless, I could see lightwave wireless as being a pretty viable solution. Especially if you throw some WPA2/AES-level security over it, and maybe illuminate your outside-facing window surfaces with a few well-aimed LEDs sending continuous gibberish.
It's true that IR was slow and cumbersome, but damn was it useful for small-file transfers, and most implementations were a LOT less cumbersome than, say, the simplest bluetooth.
There are several possible advantages to a concept like this.
First, light is a lot harder to intercept unless you can see it. Light cannot penetrate walls. For those applications where you are afraid of RF being intercepted by ne'er-do-wells, using light is pretty brilliant (OK, my only bad pun in this post, I promise. Maybe). All your worker drones are in soulless, windowless cubicles, so there's little to no chance of light escaping the building in readable form. A Pringles can and a few minutes with a Yagi antenna tutorial will yield someone lots of RF lovin', and shielding all that costs serious coin and it's easy to miss an exit vector for RF.
Second, there are 11 US-licensed RF channels with plenty of crosstalk opportunity between adjacent channels. If your worker drones are down in cubes, you could install one of these in every other light fixture and reach every worker drone with their own discrete light channel with no crosstalk.
Third, for those with some sort of sensitivity to RF (or perceived sensitivity), you're flooding them with, well, light. At much lower intensities than the light fixture is already putting out. If they're concerned about exposure to that, allow them to wear a fedora at work. Problem solved.
Obviously the easiest, fastest, and most secure answer is to run sufficient copper to give everyone a network plug (then secure them so your wired traffic is encrypted and no random idiot can plug a sniffer into a port and start watching traffic flow, or plug a non-approved bit of hardware into the LAN and start seeing what resources they can access). But if you want reasonable-speed wireless in a computer-dense environment, light might work pretty well.
From the summary:
This then transmits coded binary messages to the special modems attached to computers, which also respond via light waves."
The article wouldn't be sufficient in laying out the challenges involved in doing this, though it does give one example of the early problems they ran into.
The problem isn't necessarily in finding the answers to a given set of criteria, it's interpreting the question to lay out the search criteria. I don't know if you've ever watched an episode of "Jeopardy", but obtaining the answers often requires decoding a pun or a riddle, not just "It's what you get when you multiply six times nine." or "He is buried in the largest of the Pyramids in Egypt."
I'd have been far more interested to see a list of the questions to see if any of them contained the usual misleading portions and/or puns.
It's a free country. You certainly may.
In fact, I think a flash mob would be most appropriate in this situation. Have a bunch of people show up at the courthouse entrance. No anger, no signs, no threats, no speeches, no derision. At a pre-determined time, everyone simultaneously points at Pitchford, puts on a big red clown nose, and spends 20 seconds having a good belly laugh. At the end of 20 seconds, everyone walks off nonchalantly. Then go home and try desperately to forget that idiots like this exist and validate their idiocy with undue attention.
I'd go for stocks and shunning, but that's become unpopular in this new mollycoddling age. So a flash mob and ignoring him is about the best we can do any more.
I fear for the republic.
You should sue Ms. Palin, then, under the same grounds this guy is suing WikiLeaks. ;)
OT, and probably not the solution you are looking for, but you can run current Linux on that Mac.
http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/10/revive-your-old-mac-g3-g4-or-g5-with-linux/ (there are plenty more tutorials out there on the subject)
Safari can then be installed on Linux, though it's not supported by Apple and you'll find Chrome or Firefox a lot easier.
But, heck, anything's gotta be better than IE5. :)
I'm not dissing MacOS, it's good stuff. Truly. And, of course, you might have software that depends on MacOS. But you might want to at least consider adding a Linux partition and run that when you wanted to do web browsing and stuff with something a tad more modern.
Ten cents a browser sounds really cheap, until you do the math and count the number of downloads each browser has. For example, Firefox 3.6 has had nearly 400 million downloads since January 2010 ( http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/stats/ ). That's nearly $40 million a year to include a third party's software to support a single feature in a product they're giving away for free. I'd rather see that money go into stabilization of the codebase, new features, etc.
I'd actually prefer they went the platform codec route. Setup is a little more complicated, but there's no licensing fee for personal use of MPEG-LA formats ( http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=1977899 ), and if I need a license for non-free media I should just get one for my computer rather than depending on each and every one of my web browser companies to provide one to me.
Yes, on a micro scale it seems silly to "cheap out" by not dropping a dime on each of your users to give them a standard video experience. But when there's a free one available, why not push that? WebM is completely free for anyone to implement and use as they see fit.
PS: Your analogy doesn't quite hold. Try "I'm to cheap to recommend SyFy shows to friends, because for each show a friend decides to watch, I have to pay SyFy a ten cent referral fee."
I always loved the name "Buffalo Trace" for a Bourbon (really good stuff though).
When I lived in Lexington and drive occasionally north to Cincy, I frequently wished someone would name a Bourbon after one of my favorite place names. "Big Bone Lick". Sadly, I never got a chance to visit Big Bone Lick, but I always loved the name. It never failed to get a chuckle out of me seeing the signs.
Really? I haven't shipped parcels USPS recently, so I honestly don't know... are they actually checking photo ID against the printed return address?
Hmm, good point.
Let me rephrase that.
If I wanted to put Microsoft...
Nope, still not working...
Umm, If I wanted to put Apple...
Drat.
I know! If I wanted to monopolize the toy business by eliminating all competition to my line of JarJar Binks figurines, I'd send out spam in the name of all other toymakers.
Is that better?
I have a php-Nuke board that's been around for a while. I not only had a problem with spammers, but the sheer volume of attacks was slowing down my site and filling up my database.
I installed NukeSentinel on my phpbb board, and made people sign up with an email address (with an activation link sent to that address). For a while I set it up so I had to approve each account, but I switched that off about 6 months ago and haven't seen any difference.
I also looked for "attacks" using Sentinel's logging facility and basically blacklisted entire IP address ranges from Romania, Bulgaria, and many other countries with lots of consonants in their names. I also blacklisted tons of addresses from China. This took about a month of half-hour-a-day effort, but now I just check it every few weeks and if I see a really heavy attacker I block the entire address range of their ISP. I have yet to see an attack originating from the US, and my site is very US-centric, so I can get away with that.
Result? Zero spam in over a year. Consistent subsecond response time. Happy user base.
Spam already leads to mail fraud in some cases, and that fraud is generally prosecuted where possible. Very few legitimate companies use spam any more. The illegitimate ones are harder to catch.
There are actually several problems with this:
1. Not all that many shipping operations that use spammers operate under US law. Products are usually shipped from overseas (if any product is shipped at all!) and you can't fine a foreign entity without an agreement with that entity's native government (which, of course, spammers choose carefully to avoid such things). So you'd be limited to the people the police are already prosecuting, and that population is dwindling.
2. "kill your business for good" fines are what got us into multi-million-dollar fines for "casual" copyright infringement (the large fines were originally designed to drain commercial "piracy factories" of their resources, not to bankrupt a person for life because they shared 3 albums on LimeWire). We'd have to be very careful with any law to target the people we want to hurt, rather than opening anyone who posted an actual personal product recommendation somewhere to a $5,000,000 spammer suit.
3. Many of the products sold are actually counterfeit, and are shipped from faked addresses and just dropped off at the post office. Again, if anything was shipped at all. If I wanted to put Symantec out of business, I could very profitably sell pirated Norton Antivirus and drop a few dozen units off at the post office nearest Symantec's corporate HQ, with a return address label that has their address on it. Symantec would be stuck with the burden of proof that they didn't ship the product. You'd have to check ID every time someone sent a letter and make sure the "from" address matches their ID (which means no more mailbox pickup, all letters and packages must be posted individually).
True enough, but a number of colonies failed because it was, to the colonists, a barren wasteland devoid of sustenance they recognized and could take advantage of.
Technologically, in 50 years or so a trip to Mars will be roughly the equivalent that a trip to America was in the 1500s.
In both cases, it's basically a one-way trip.
On the one hand, we have basically no natural resources that we can use as-is on Mars. Details like, say, freely-available oxygen are certainly lacking. Once they figured out what was edible and what had nasty side effects, the early American colonists tended to do pretty well. Colonists on Mars will have to work harder at it, because nothing's free there.
On the other hand, Martian colonists will have lots of information about what resources ARE available, and they can send machinery ahead to prepare the way for them. So even before they are sent out, they should have enough stored food on-site to last until the first harvest or until an unmanned resupply ship can be sent if the harvest fails. A Mars colony should be pretty well-equipped to handle the resources they know are available, because they should have lots of information available to them before the ship takes off and they can pack the right stuff to take advantage of it.
I mean this with the greatest personal respect when I say "bullshit." I know your heart's in the right place, but I think you fundamentally underestimate the next generation and fundamentally misunderstand where their world is going.
Sure, there's a segment of the population who wouldn't take the risk. Always has been, always will be. They're called "the upper class" and they have a lot to lose. Americans have been lucky for a couple of generations that our "middle class" still has plenty to lose. That's coming to an end soon.
Automation has allowed the new upper class to lay off lots of the middle class by profiting directly from the machines that replaced those workers.
Automation has only benefit the middle class in the short term by giving us cheap TVs to watch American Idol on, so they are cheap enough that we can still afford them as our collective standard of living slowly swirls down the toilet.
In the long term we'll have a LOT more people who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by at least trying for a place where they can get three squares a day if they work hard enough for it.
Right, I agree that the science is speculative at best, but probably more like outright fanciful. However, the volunteer offers appear to have been made based on a chance of survival. In other words, by people accepting the premise of this eventually being possible.
Now, you'll also have a population that would gladly give up a few decades to be the first person to live on Mars, even if that honor (and volunteer) were short-lived. It'd be followed pretty closely by the person with the honor of being the first to die on Mars.
Trouble with something like that is the cost of getting a few people there without any chance of survival is much higher than the cost of getting a few hundred robotic instruments out there.
There's little point sending someone there until they can stay and have a chance of survival. You'd probably have no shortage of volunteers, but what would be the point of sending them there just to die?
Honestly, I doubt the first human will set foot on Mars during my lifetime. But it's a fun dream.
If this were a 100% guaranteed suicide mission, sure. Probably 399 of those 400 people would pull out so fast there'd be a vacuum where they were standing and they'd outrun their own scream. The 400th would only run away at mere superhuman speed and be declared insane for the delay. But the plan is to send up colonists with equipment that gives them a chance at long-term survival on Mars, not human scientific instruments with enough canned air to last a month and let them die off.
The ideal way to approach this, of course, is to send automata and have them set up the habitat, plant the first crops, and start the ball rolling. Have them build out a half-dozen colonies in relatively close proximity, establish a large cache of emergency resources nearby, and then send enough population at first to establish half those colonies. Send the colonists up around harvest time for the first round of crops so they have a head start. If resources get scarce at a colony, you send some or all of the colonists to one of the "spare" habitats. If the resources fall below what can sustain the colonists overall, have them tap into the reserve and go on short rations until a resupply can be arranged.
Once the six colonies are fully populated and have the kinks worked out, build out a few hundred more over time. Then our great-grandkids can talk about terraforming in a century or so.
This is roughly the equivalent of colonizing a new continent back in the days of sailing ships, when overseas voyages were long, hard, and dangerous. Humanity managed that, quite successfully in fact. The colonists faced never seeing anyone from their old country again, and a very real possibility of dying on the journey or after arriving. We did it then, we'll do it again. There will be no shortage of volunteers if and when there's a fair chance of making a go of it.
Because, hell, you get to be a human living on another PLANET. Not just another continent, a whole different PLANET. Life's to short not to grab an opportunity like this by the short-and-curlies and hang on for dear life. Sure, you might die. But you're gonna die in a handful of decades anyway, either sitting in front of the tube watching American Idol or working your ass off so someone further up the food chain can get rich.
The only thing that makes me sad about this is that I'm already well over 40. By the time something like this comes around, if it ever does, I'd never qualify as a colonist. I'll be too old.
But for you lucky young bastages who get to do this, I'm going to hang on long enough to cheer for you, I hope. I'll be jealous, but happy for y'all.
Administration jobs are that lonely now? :)
What happens if a north-bound Hawtch-Watcher meets a south-bound Hawtch-Watcher? And do they have stars upon thars? And, finally, are they all named "Dave"?