Why spend time and money building a cruise missile [...] when you can send a suicidal maniac with a truck instead?
No reason, especially given that then you wouldn't have to do conspicuous tests of your delivery system to ensure that it'll actually reach its target.
Sounds like North America needs a zillion-dollar Truck Defense System. Just the thing for an election year.
Or maybe one could use psychological trickery:
Sell missiles to bad guys
Build zillion-dollar Missile Defense System
Safety and profit
This all depends on one's enemies not buying in to the concept of sunk costs, of course:
Villain: Launch missiles at our godless enemy! Flunky: Fearless leader, the missile defense system is reportedly impenetrable. Villain: Curses! Foiled again. Flunky: We could send the warhead by ship. Villain: And waste all of these perfectly good missiles!?
Sure, it's far-fetched and cartooney. But can any measure be left untried by a nation in peril? I think not.
I am not anyone's lawyer and no legal actions are being taken. I protect people online, as an unpaid volunteer.
And in partnership with Katie Tarbox, as she proudly announces on her blog. One might have said "her heavily self-promoting blog," but then whose isn't?
No one wants to "take" katie.com.
...just to make it useless to its owner.
Jones is doing this for the publicity, and unfortunately, it's working.
"Jones" explicitly denies this, of course. It's hard to imagine what she would be planning to do with this ill-gotten publicity. I suppose that she might be attempting to whip up sentiment in her favour by pretending to be threatened by a rude lawyer, but it sure wouldn't be my first guess.
Naming a book after someone else's (unrelated) domain name deserves to be a canonical example of Internet-ignorant behaviour. Has anyone yet heard from Penguin on this topic? I suspect that they'll keep their mouths firmly shut.
What kind of acceleration are you imagining? It doesn't look like Apollo astronauts pulled serious Gs after the first stage.
Not saying that I'd like to accelerate even at 1 G upside down, but it's not likely to be lethal. Fighter pilots experience negative Gs in some situations. It can lead to "red out", but I've never heard of broken necks...
...you won't be able to buy a ladder less than ten feet tall, to make room for all the required and liability suit prophylactic warning stickers.
Ten FEET!? Are you mad? Who would be willing to manufacture a product so monstrously high that it's practically certain that someone will plummet from it in a deadly fall? Especially when you consider that those warning labels are so slippery...
Telsa pushed AC for power distribution, but Edison thought DC was the way to go. Edison had more money. Edison ordered the electric chair to be invented to make the public think that AC was more dangerous.
Interesting; I've always heard this as a story of Edison vs. Westinghouse. It seems Westinghouse bought (or licensed) some patents from Tesla.
"Electrocute" is, according to some sources, a verb invented to describe execution by electricity; Edison allegedly considered promoting "Westinghouse" as the verb (perhaps only in jest, but, then again, he did arrange to fry people as a PR stunt, didn't he?).
Edison staged various gruesome demonstrations of the deadly dangers of AC current, of which the electric chair is only one. He killed an elephant in one case -- and filmed it.
That's the part that turned me off on the show. That was so stupid it just boggled my mind. Where is this camera man standing?
Also, there's music playing under the dialogue in many scenes, yet it's never established why invisible musicians are following the characters around every week. Unprecedented and baffling!
Any display system for which DVD is not "good enough" (in terms of image/sound quality) isn't going to deliver much added value if it's just plunked into the corner of Joe Sixpack's living room.
There's a 10-inch Texas Instruments monitor plunked in the corner of my living room, and I can spot DVD compression artifacts on it clear as day. I'm not talking about fiddly little distinctions, I'm talking about people's heads moving and their eyes staying still.
The catch here is that these are DVDs that have multiple hour-long TV series episodes packed on to them. All DVDs don't have the same image quality.
Clearly the original specification for the IBM PC did not anticipate that users would want to make use of more than 640k of memory,
When I first saw the joke, I thought that it was spoiled by the fact that Bill Gates didn't design the IBM PC.
I've been amazed to see it repeated as though it were an actual quotation. Now that I think about it, many of the people who believe that it's true probably don't even know where the number 640 comes from.
If tax dollars are spent, you get a $900 toilet seat, $5 million in wireless equipment that never leaves the loading dock, etc. It's impossible for government to be efficient, because there's no incentive for efficiency. On the other hand, if private dollars are spent, there's a very big incentive to be efficient:
...because the more $900 toilet seats you can con the government into buying, the richer you'll get.
I don't think that you're right about any given dollar being inevitably less efficient in the hands of a government. Getting any large organization to behave in a perfectly efficient and rational manner is apparently quite difficult. Irrational, costly behaviour isn't alien to the private sector, as the tech bubble demonstrated.
In the Soviet Union (which 1984 was meant to represent)... In none of these cases was fear of terrorism at all a factor.
I think you'll find that an obsession with "sabotage" is prominent in 1984 and, indeed, Animal Farm, which was a closer allegory of the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath.
1984 is about communism, and communism is dead.
There is nothing in 1984 that applies exclusively to Communism. Orwell shows us a totalitarian power using propaganda and paranoia to dehumanize and control the population of a modern industrialized country. You can pick out the parts where he's cribbing from Stalin and the parts where he's cribbing from Hitler, and you can probably find the parts that North Korea has cribbed from him, but the important message is the warning to watch your language.
It's just not very relevant anymore.
Since pigs and sheep can't talk, does that rule out the relevance of Animal Farm?
This may well have been how the provincial government saw things, except of course that teachers have no money to spend. The school board gets the money, and the school board, which consists of staff directed by elected trustees, spends the money. It's an easy thing to confuse for outsiders, and the "Common Sense Revolution" was based on a simple-minded outsider's approach.
As you rightly point out, "tons of money dissapeared from the school system". And it was the provincial government that made it disappear: they were deeply suspicious of the civil service, hated unions, and were anti-intellectual.
Schools were an obvious target for cuts, but the provincial government made very sure that the local boards could be blamed for the results. They used a similar trick when they foisted new costs on the municipalities: they centralized authority and distributed responsibility.
The Ontario Tories were the sorts of people who'd trip you and then call you clumsy.
The filter-poisoning junk appended to spam messages [...] is a perfect terrorist comm channel that is effectively immune to traffic analysis (i.e. there's no way to identify the intended recipient).
I was reluctant to mention this when it first occurred to me, but after thinking it through I'm morally certain that terrorists have already figured this out.
There's an awful lot of overhead in that approach, and it seems to me that it's unreliable. For it to work, you would need:
an agreed-upon set of code words -- could fall into enemy hands.
the ability to send spam reliably -- if you test, you risk getting shut down; if you don't test, you risk failure at an important moment.
an excuse to send spam -- probably not a major problem, since a ficticious product or some random Web site would presumably suffice.
the ability to receive spam reliably -- if your operatives don't see the encoded message, they can't act on it.
Using code spam complicates existing tricks like "numbers stations" on short-wave, coded classified ads in major publications, dead drops, plain old clandestine meetings, and spoken messages passed from a guy who knows a guy who knows somebody.
A few layers of no-tech sneakiness are bound to isolate the people at the top from everyone else, in any case.
book club... books... which I can pass on to my grand-children
Book-club books tend to be produced as cheaply as possible, and their durability and general quality suffers as a result. People who run used-book stores either avoid them entirely or won't pay much for them.
By which I mean to say that you may not be getting something that will last as long as you think it will.
Ultimately, I've yet to see a long-term-workable antispam solution proposed that doesn't involve the use of PKI and a trust system of some sort (probably transparent).
What does this buy me that widely-adopted SPF plus DNS blacklisting doesn't, from a spam-prevention perspective?
In fact, if a trusted PKI signing authority turns evil and starts issuing certs to spammers (or just refusing to revoke spammer certificates), wouldn't you be slighly worse off than you would be with SPF + DNSBL?
And they do. You can use an automatic counting machine if you're impatient, but hand-counts don't seem to take terribly long in Canadian provincial and federal elections. Since we tend to elect only one person at a time in those elections, perhaps more complicated elections (e.g. municipal, with votes for a mayor, councillor, and school-board trustee) should use multiple ballots. They could then be sorted quickly into groups and each ballots for each office could be counted off independently.
Thumbprinting ballots would take care of the many vote/one person problem.
Whose thumbprint? If it's the voter's, that compromises anonymity. If it's a poll-worker's, just use their initials or some other distinctive, hand-made mark -- quicker to verify.
Banks have been counting things for years. Maybe people should ask them.
You mean the banks that are using the Diebold automatic tellers? Maybe not.
Aren't most spams sent using hijacked PCs anyway?
Why wouldn't the spammer be willing to sell cycles on the zombie PCs?
Hush, if you keep talking like that, everyone will realize that making people pay in CPU cycles to send e-mail is
an old idea
a dumb idea
The idea of making them pay in money is older and just as dumb. Not that the mainstream press realize this as they trumpet Mister Bill's exciting total spam solution.
If one legally declares a contract to *not* be valid, one cannot follow it's terms [logical contradition].
It's not a logical contradiction unless the contract includes a (notional) "true and heartfelt belief" clause.
People seem to be assuming that the GPL's requirement that you agree with the license is such a clause. More likely, it simply means that you must agree to abide by the license. And that would most reasonably apply separately to each GPLed work.
(If the SCO Group makes public statements deriding the GPL and claiming it to be invalid, individual GPL licensors are of course prudent in preparing to enforce the licenses that they each have given to the SCO Group.)
Unlikely: the virus will be detected within days so the infection speed must be high to gain momentum.
If the infection speed is low, it may also take longer for the worm to be detected. Furthermore, anti-virus vendors are less likely to assign a high threat rating to a slow infector, which could cause them and their clients to react more slowly.
If you want your worm to be long-lived rather than famous, a low infection rate might be advantageous.
Terrorism's only purpose is widespread FUD by involving innocents.
I disagree -- a terrorist act is likely to have an objective, and the examples that you give for war are likely ones.
With a war, you're more likely to be trying to accomplish your objective directly. With terrorism, you are by definition trying to scare people into doing what you want (probably because you haven't the resources to take what you want directly).
Until someone sets a precedent to show that activities like this will end up hurting you, everyone will (and SHOULD) keep doing it.
When the behaviour is obviously annoying others and very likely to end up hurting you, you're saying that you should keep doing it until it actually does hurt you?
I did that simple test before I posted. Works for me -- the text starts black and stays black. The only text that's white is the tiny About/Privacy/etc. stuff at the bottom.
And yes, I poked throught the HTML and the CSS to confirm that. I'm running Mozilla 1.4b on Linux, here. You?
When IPv6 takes off, ISPs will be able to give out as many addresses as they like without incurring significant costs.
Of course they'll incur a significant cost -- more hosts per customer means more traffic per customer. Some ISPs already forbid attaching more than one machine. IPv6 will not cause them to become more agreeable.
Slashdot Mirror
No reason, especially given that then you wouldn't have to do conspicuous tests of your delivery system to ensure that it'll actually reach its target.
Sounds like North America needs a zillion-dollar Truck Defense System. Just the thing for an election year.
Or maybe one could use psychological trickery:
This all depends on one's enemies not buying in to the concept of sunk costs, of course:
Villain: Launch missiles at our godless enemy!
Flunky: Fearless leader, the missile defense system is reportedly impenetrable.
Villain: Curses! Foiled again.
Flunky: We could send the warhead by ship.
Villain: And waste all of these perfectly good missiles!?
Sure, it's far-fetched and cartooney. But can any measure be left untried by a nation in peril? I think not.
And in partnership with Katie Tarbox, as she proudly announces on her blog. One might have said "her heavily self-promoting blog," but then whose isn't?
"Jones" explicitly denies this, of course. It's hard to imagine what she would be planning to do with this ill-gotten publicity. I suppose that she might be attempting to whip up sentiment in her favour by pretending to be threatened by a rude lawyer, but it sure wouldn't be my first guess.
Naming a book after someone else's (unrelated) domain name deserves to be a canonical example of Internet-ignorant behaviour. Has anyone yet heard from Penguin on this topic? I suspect that they'll keep their mouths firmly shut.
What kind of acceleration are you imagining? It doesn't look like Apollo astronauts pulled serious Gs after the first stage.
Not saying that I'd like to accelerate even at 1 G upside down, but it's not likely to be lethal. Fighter pilots experience negative Gs in some situations. It can lead to "red out", but I've never heard of broken necks...
Ten FEET!? Are you mad? Who would be willing to manufacture a product so monstrously high that it's practically certain that someone will plummet from it in a deadly fall? Especially when you consider that those warning labels are so slippery...
Minus the moral about the importance of good computer security, apparently. But with bonus dome-city dystopia.
Interesting; I've always heard this as a story of Edison vs. Westinghouse. It seems Westinghouse bought (or licensed) some patents from Tesla.
"Electrocute" is, according to some sources, a verb invented to describe execution by electricity; Edison allegedly considered promoting "Westinghouse" as the verb (perhaps only in jest, but, then again, he did arrange to fry people as a PR stunt, didn't he?). Edison staged various gruesome demonstrations of the deadly dangers of AC current, of which the electric chair is only one. He killed an elephant in one case -- and filmed it.
Also, there's music playing under the dialogue in many scenes, yet it's never established why invisible musicians are following the characters around every week. Unprecedented and baffling!
There's a 10-inch Texas Instruments monitor plunked in the corner of my living room, and I can spot DVD compression artifacts on it clear as day. I'm not talking about fiddly little distinctions, I'm talking about people's heads moving and their eyes staying still.
The catch here is that these are DVDs that have multiple hour-long TV series episodes packed on to them. All DVDs don't have the same image quality.
When I first saw the joke, I thought that it was spoiled by the fact that Bill Gates didn't design the IBM PC.
I've been amazed to see it repeated as though it were an actual quotation. Now that I think about it, many of the people who believe that it's true probably don't even know where the number 640 comes from.
I don't think that you're right about any given dollar being inevitably less efficient in the hands of a government. Getting any large organization to behave in a perfectly efficient and rational manner is apparently quite difficult. Irrational, costly behaviour isn't alien to the private sector, as the tech bubble demonstrated.
I think you'll find that an obsession with "sabotage" is prominent in 1984 and, indeed, Animal Farm, which was a closer allegory of the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath.
There is nothing in 1984 that applies exclusively to Communism. Orwell shows us a totalitarian power using propaganda and paranoia to dehumanize and control the population of a modern industrialized country. You can pick out the parts where he's cribbing from Stalin and the parts where he's cribbing from Hitler, and you can probably find the parts that North Korea has cribbed from him, but the important message is the warning to watch your language.
Since pigs and sheep can't talk, does that rule out the relevance of Animal Farm?
This may well have been how the provincial government saw things, except of course that teachers have no money to spend. The school board gets the money, and the school board, which consists of staff directed by elected trustees, spends the money. It's an easy thing to confuse for outsiders, and the "Common Sense Revolution" was based on a simple-minded outsider's approach.
As you rightly point out, "tons of money dissapeared from the school system". And it was the provincial government that made it disappear: they were deeply suspicious of the civil service, hated unions, and were anti-intellectual.
Schools were an obvious target for cuts, but the provincial government made very sure that the local boards could be blamed for the results. They used a similar trick when they foisted new costs on the municipalities: they centralized authority and distributed responsibility.
The Ontario Tories were the sorts of people who'd trip you and then call you clumsy.
There's an awful lot of overhead in that approach, and it seems to me that it's unreliable. For it to work, you would need:
Using code spam complicates existing tricks like "numbers stations" on short-wave, coded classified ads in major publications, dead drops, plain old clandestine meetings, and spoken messages passed from a guy who knows a guy who knows somebody.
A few layers of no-tech sneakiness are bound to isolate the people at the top from everyone else, in any case.
Book-club books tend to be produced as cheaply as possible, and their durability and general quality suffers as a result. People who run used-book stores either avoid them entirely or won't pay much for them.
By which I mean to say that you may not be getting something that will last as long as you think it will.
What does this buy me that widely-adopted SPF plus DNS blacklisting doesn't, from a spam-prevention perspective?
In fact, if a trusted PKI signing authority turns evil and starts issuing certs to spammers (or just refusing to revoke spammer certificates), wouldn't you be slighly worse off than you would be with SPF + DNSBL?
And they do. You can use an automatic counting machine if you're impatient, but hand-counts don't seem to take terribly long in Canadian provincial and federal elections. Since we tend to elect only one person at a time in those elections, perhaps more complicated elections (e.g. municipal, with votes for a mayor, councillor, and school-board trustee) should use multiple ballots. They could then be sorted quickly into groups and each ballots for each office could be counted off independently.
Whose thumbprint? If it's the voter's, that compromises anonymity. If it's a poll-worker's, just use their initials or some other distinctive, hand-made mark -- quicker to verify.
You mean the banks that are using the Diebold automatic tellers? Maybe not.
Hush, if you keep talking like that, everyone will realize that making people pay in CPU cycles to send e-mail is
The idea of making them pay in money is older and just as dumb. Not that the mainstream press realize this as they trumpet Mister Bill's exciting total spam solution.
It's not a logical contradiction unless the contract includes a (notional) "true and heartfelt belief" clause.
People seem to be assuming that the GPL's requirement that you agree with the license is such a clause. More likely, it simply means that you must agree to abide by the license. And that would most reasonably apply separately to each GPLed work.
(If the SCO Group makes public statements deriding the GPL and claiming it to be invalid, individual GPL licensors are of course prudent in preparing to enforce the licenses that they each have given to the SCO Group.)
If the infection speed is low, it may also take longer for the worm to be detected. Furthermore, anti-virus vendors are less likely to assign a high threat rating to a slow infector, which could cause them and their clients to react more slowly.
If you want your worm to be long-lived rather than famous, a low infection rate might be advantageous.
Not at all, which is why I don't run open relays.
I disagree -- a terrorist act is likely to have an objective, and the examples that you give for war are likely ones.
With a war, you're more likely to be trying to accomplish your objective directly. With terrorism, you are by definition trying to scare people into doing what you want (probably because you haven't the resources to take what you want directly).
When the behaviour is obviously annoying others and very likely to end up hurting you, you're saying that you should keep doing it until it actually does hurt you?
Rude, irresponsible, and short-sighted? Could be.
I did that simple test before I posted. Works for me -- the text starts black and stays black. The only text that's white is the tiny About/Privacy/etc. stuff at the bottom.
And yes, I poked throught the HTML and the CSS to confirm that. I'm running Mozilla 1.4b on Linux, here. You?
The first thing that the JS does is turn the text white. The text is black before the JS runs.
Of course they'll incur a significant cost -- more hosts per customer means more traffic per customer. Some ISPs already forbid attaching more than one machine. IPv6 will not cause them to become more agreeable.