Are we supposed to let the average IQ Wal-Mart worker just get sick and die?
If it's a choice between that and forcing your average/. to pay an extra 50% for his legos and console games, forcing your average WASPer mom to pay an extra 30% for her kids' Frosted Sugar Bombs, and forcing your average collage frat to pay an extra 75% for the 12 cases of Bud Light, guess which way the American public is going to choose? Besides, it's not like actual people are getting hurt. Well, not people we care about anyways, the ones who could afford to keep all their teeth and live in decent suburbs anyway - just pariahs.
Our culture only operates if it has a disenfranchized underclass. Try to raise that bar, and you doom your own children to living in squalor alongside them. People are ultimately too smart to be that altruistic, and too dumb to listen to real solutions until it's nearly too late (like poor Bucky Fuller).
It'll be interesting to see how wars are conducted when both populations exist in an inhospitable wasteland that can't support their existance for more than 30 seconds without critical and easily-targeted infrastructure.
Okay. I have mod points today. I have a personal, stated policy: Never mod *DOWN*, only mod *UP*. And especially never mod down a potentially legitimate discussion, no matter how inciteful or off-topic it might be.
I have come very close to breaking this rule in this threat, and modding as many root posts as I can 'off-topic'. Instead, I am going to post the following little diatribe:
We're witnessing a medical miracle here, guys - and all you asshats can do is argue politics! Bush this, bush that, fetus this, abortion that - sort it out on Usenet, or on some YRO thread. Can we please talk about the technology, here? This is an amazing triumph of technology over the limitations of nature; something that can potentially save millions of lives - and just as importantly, restore millions more to full capacity from severely disabled states! We're talking longevity, health, disease eradication, all the quality-of-life improvements that have allowed further progress in the past two centuries. We're talking about influences over the next MILLENIUM of human prograss, and all we're doing is squabbling about politics that are potentially irrelevant in 4 years, and almost certainly irrelevant in 20. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!?
This is future-of-humanity stuff, here. This political whining is about minor details in the grand scheme of things, and we'll work them out sooner or later. Get a grip and get a little perspective.
In fact, let me take a direct go at it (feel free to cross-examine):
The functional process of a modern Von Neumann computer is to take a sequence of numbers that we call "machine code", and interpret them as instructions to perform. These instructions comprise a discrete-state transform function: simply put, a "computer" is a mathematical equation for doing mathematical equations. Alan Turing managed to demonstrate the minimum necessary transform necessary to perform computation, which is called "turing-completeness", but most modern computers tend to use a larger set than that, because the minimalist 'turing-complete' set isn't very practical for getting anything done. However, machine code is basically a mathematical algorithm - a transform - between that base turing-complete instruction set and something that engineers can actually work with in a reasonable amount of time and effort. On top of that, you have actual source code - human-readable algorithms - that people like me write. The computer takes our algorithms, which are just human-understandable descriptions of the mathematics we want the computer to perform, and converts them into the machine-code version of that algorithm. Then the machine executes that code, performing the function that the algorithm dictates. The only "invention" is the Von Neumann computer itself, and the purpose of the Von Neumann computer is to take any given mathematical algorithm, and perform functional work with it. Ergo, any code that a computer operates upon is necessarily a mathematical function, because that's what a computer *DOES*.
ALL software algorithms are mathematical. Ultimately, these things are Von Neumann state machines. No matter how clever your algorithm, at some point it's just a string of mathematic and logical decisions. Any good computer scientist, when called as an "expert witness", should be able to demonstrate that.
Except it's not just the level of privacy that the children collectively expect themselves to have; it's also the level of privacy that their parents collectively expect the children to have, and the level of privacy that everyone else collectively expects the children to have. And unfortunately, most adults believe that kids have no right to privacy ANYWHERE, and kids don't vote, and so the law tends to reflect that.
Privacy laws are based on a reasonable expectation. Kids don't have the same expectations of privacy from their parents that adults do from other adults.
I'd like everyone to think long and hard about this one, please. Privacy laws are based on a *reasonable expectation* of privacy. So if OTHER people stop expecting a certain level of privacy, that level of privacy ceases to be 'reasonable', and YOU can no longer expect it. Your level of allowed privacy is dependent on how much your fellow Americans care about privacy.
My point was not to push things in an ugly direction; merely to dissuade people from painting a particularly rosy view of a particular species' predatory activities merely because one happens to be a member of that species.
Humans are no different than other species; we'll fight our own just as eagerly and just as savagely as we'll fight our predators and prey.
So yeah, it DOES make it okay - in the grand scheme of things. In a more humanist sense, maybe not; but that humanist sense only counts until something bigger and more vicious comes along to dominate it.
My girlfriend's from the south, and having visited her folks two weeks ago, I can assert emphatically that Sega could make a killing - at least in that regional market - selling a football game based on *COLLEGE* teams.
It's another prisoner's dilemna, though - it doesn't serve anyone well, but at the same time it causes any OTHER behavior to serve people even LESS well.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (x) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Re:Next can some enterprising physics student do..
on
Build Your Own Cyclotron
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I used to think that, too - then I started really paying attention to some odd hunger cravings I would get from time to time. Seeing specific corporate logos (Burger King, Wendy's, or Sonic) will cause me to crave their food, if I see the logo out of the corner of my eye and don't consciously recognize that I saw the logo.
I discovered this after the third time I craved a particular brand of fast food, only to discover we had JUST passed it. After that, I started looking around more whenever I had a fast food craving, and could usually find a logo that had been within my line-of-sight, unnoticed, within the past 90 seconds.
Most software patents are process patents, not product patents.
I.e., when you watch a DVD, you aren't using a product (a MPEG/CSS decoder), you're initiating the patented CSS decoding process using a DVD reader as the specific implementation mechanism - which is no different, in the law's eyes, than initiating a patented chip-die manufacturing process using a factory as the specific implementation mechanism.
That's "Wild Cards", not "Watchmen". "The Watchmen" was a 12-part series, complete unto itself. There won't be any more, because the story is completely told in those 12 comics (which you can now buy as a single, excellent graphic novel).
You forgot step 6, which is 'make sure the implementation which meets the customer's original requirements, meets the customer's current requirements'. Most projects I've seen fail at this crucial step, because the customer's requirements have often changed - in ways like "must accept that I cannot now afford to pay for it" or "must accept that I did not ever intend for this project to be completed, and was in fact being set up for failure by my own superiors". Things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Are we supposed to let the average IQ Wal-Mart worker just get sick and die?
/. to pay an extra 50% for his legos and console games, forcing your average WASPer mom to pay an extra 30% for her kids' Frosted Sugar Bombs, and forcing your average collage frat to pay an extra 75% for the 12 cases of Bud Light, guess which way the American public is going to choose? Besides, it's not like actual people are getting hurt. Well, not people we care about anyways, the ones who could afford to keep all their teeth and live in decent suburbs anyway - just pariahs.
If it's a choice between that and forcing your average
Our culture only operates if it has a disenfranchized underclass. Try to raise that bar, and you doom your own children to living in squalor alongside them. People are ultimately too smart to be that altruistic, and too dumb to listen to real solutions until it's nearly too late (like poor Bucky Fuller).
They're waiting for a 27b/6.
It'll be interesting to see how wars are conducted when both populations exist in an inhospitable wasteland that can't support their existance for more than 30 seconds without critical and easily-targeted infrastructure.
shoulda used the 'preview' button. s/prograss/progress; s/threat/thread; I can spell; I apparently just can't type.
Okay. I have mod points today. I have a personal, stated policy: Never mod *DOWN*, only mod *UP*. And especially never mod down a potentially legitimate discussion, no matter how inciteful or off-topic it might be.
I have come very close to breaking this rule in this threat, and modding as many root posts as I can 'off-topic'. Instead, I am going to post the following little diatribe:
We're witnessing a medical miracle here, guys - and all you asshats can do is argue politics! Bush this, bush that, fetus this, abortion that - sort it out on Usenet, or on some YRO thread. Can we please talk about the technology, here? This is an amazing triumph of technology over the limitations of nature; something that can potentially save millions of lives - and just as importantly, restore millions more to full capacity from severely disabled states! We're talking longevity, health, disease eradication, all the quality-of-life improvements that have allowed further progress in the past two centuries. We're talking about influences over the next MILLENIUM of human prograss, and all we're doing is squabbling about politics that are potentially irrelevant in 4 years, and almost certainly irrelevant in 20. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!?
This is future-of-humanity stuff, here. This political whining is about minor details in the grand scheme of things, and we'll work them out sooner or later. Get a grip and get a little perspective.
In fact, let me take a direct go at it (feel free to cross-examine):
The functional process of a modern Von Neumann computer is to take a sequence of numbers that we call "machine code", and interpret them as instructions to perform. These instructions comprise a discrete-state transform function: simply put, a "computer" is a mathematical equation for doing mathematical equations. Alan Turing managed to demonstrate the minimum necessary transform necessary to perform computation, which is called "turing-completeness", but most modern computers tend to use a larger set than that, because the minimalist 'turing-complete' set isn't very practical for getting anything done. However, machine code is basically a mathematical algorithm - a transform - between that base turing-complete instruction set and something that engineers can actually work with in a reasonable amount of time and effort. On top of that, you have actual source code - human-readable algorithms - that people like me write. The computer takes our algorithms, which are just human-understandable descriptions of the mathematics we want the computer to perform, and converts them into the machine-code version of that algorithm. Then the machine executes that code, performing the function that the algorithm dictates. The only "invention" is the Von Neumann computer itself, and the purpose of the Von Neumann computer is to take any given mathematical algorithm, and perform functional work with it. Ergo, any code that a computer operates upon is necessarily a mathematical function, because that's what a computer *DOES*.
Does this make sense?
ALL software algorithms are mathematical. Ultimately, these things are Von Neumann state machines. No matter how clever your algorithm, at some point it's just a string of mathematic and logical decisions. Any good computer scientist, when called as an "expert witness", should be able to demonstrate that.
Except it's not just the level of privacy that the children collectively expect themselves to have; it's also the level of privacy that their parents collectively expect the children to have, and the level of privacy that everyone else collectively expects the children to have. And unfortunately, most adults believe that kids have no right to privacy ANYWHERE, and kids don't vote, and so the law tends to reflect that.
Privacy laws are based on a reasonable expectation. Kids don't have the same expectations of privacy from their parents that adults do from other adults.
I'd like everyone to think long and hard about this one, please. Privacy laws are based on a *reasonable expectation* of privacy. So if OTHER people stop expecting a certain level of privacy, that level of privacy ceases to be 'reasonable', and YOU can no longer expect it. Your level of allowed privacy is dependent on how much your fellow Americans care about privacy.
Sleep well, kids.
Indeed, it is interesting.
My point was not to push things in an ugly direction; merely to dissuade people from painting a particularly rosy view of a particular species' predatory activities merely because one happens to be a member of that species.
Humans are no different than other species; we'll fight our own just as eagerly and just as savagely as we'll fight our predators and prey.
So yeah, it DOES make it okay - in the grand scheme of things. In a more humanist sense, maybe not; but that humanist sense only counts until something bigger and more vicious comes along to dominate it.
My girlfriend's from the south, and having visited her folks two weeks ago, I can assert emphatically that Sega could make a killing - at least in that regional market - selling a football game based on *COLLEGE* teams.
No, the first word is GNU (GNU's not Unix), so it's deliberately ambiguous. ;)
Which would be true, except that it's an acronym, and takes the 'G' pronunciation mode from the pronunciation mode of the first word of the acronym.
It's another prisoner's dilemna, though - it doesn't serve anyone well, but at the same time it causes any OTHER behavior to serve people even LESS well.
Unfortunately, this isn't Flamebait at all. People want houses that look expensive - if a house is cheap, noone can make money off of it.
We're still stuck in a 17th-century mentality, where being 'landed' gives you special status privileges.
*sigh* ok, guys, here we go again:
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Already done.
I used to think that, too - then I started really paying attention to some odd hunger cravings I would get from time to time. Seeing specific corporate logos (Burger King, Wendy's, or Sonic) will cause me to crave their food, if I see the logo out of the corner of my eye and don't consciously recognize that I saw the logo.
I discovered this after the third time I craved a particular brand of fast food, only to discover we had JUST passed it. After that, I started looking around more whenever I had a fast food craving, and could usually find a logo that had been within my line-of-sight, unnoticed, within the past 90 seconds.
I'd like my medula oblongota back, please.
Most software patents are process patents, not product patents.
I.e., when you watch a DVD, you aren't using a product (a MPEG/CSS decoder), you're initiating the patented CSS decoding process using a DVD reader as the specific implementation mechanism - which is no different, in the law's eyes, than initiating a patented chip-die manufacturing process using a factory as the specific implementation mechanism.
Ah. Curse me for browsing at +2. I retract my obviously ill-conceived pendantism.
That's "Wild Cards", not "Watchmen". "The Watchmen" was a 12-part series, complete unto itself. There won't be any more, because the story is completely told in those 12 comics (which you can now buy as a single, excellent graphic novel).
You forgot step 6, which is 'make sure the implementation which meets the customer's original requirements, meets the customer's current requirements'. Most projects I've seen fail at this crucial step, because the customer's requirements have often changed - in ways like "must accept that I cannot now afford to pay for it" or "must accept that I did not ever intend for this project to be completed, and was in fact being set up for failure by my own superiors". Things like that.
Syndrome was indeed pretty good. He would have been perfect, however, had he been played by John Lithgow.
Wonderful idea, if not for the fact that you can only vote in ONE primary, and you often don't know which primary is going to be the important one.