You don't need some technological trick to harvest emails. Just up a web page with an inane joke, animated gif, etc. and include a button that says, "Email to a Friend!". Voila! You've just harvested the email addresses of everyone who received an email from anyone who though the web page was even faintly amusing.
The only defence, until people start treating other peoples emails with more respect, is to keep two accounts. I personally only give out my work address, except to close and technically aware friends, at least then I get paid to read spam...
I think the biggest problem here is that BIND is *so* widespread (maybe even more so than sendmail?), when a bug breaks, it is immediately a major exploit waiting to happen.
When the latest BIND 4/8 bugs hit, people were reporting attempts to exploit the bug almost immediately. That's really bad.
I agree with your comments and I, also, am not sure this is a bad thing, but take your first paragraph and apply it to the company we all love to hate;) I think the biggest problem here is that Windows is *so* widespread, when a bug breaks, it is immediately a major exploit waiting to happen.
When the latest NT Server bugs hit...
We'd be ALL over MS if they attempted something like this. I realize they are different markets, as a whole, but I would guess the average person who understands BIND is far more technically advanced than the average NT user. (Notice I said "average" in the previous sentence; please no flames...) And therefore are better equipped to take immediate action when a bug is discovered.
The biggest problem is that most people don't know who the good guys are. Are you sure that the latest member added to the member's only list isn't White Hat Admin during the day and the Mad Cracker at night? In addition, if something goes wrong are the good guys opened up to liability? What happened is a Cracker takes advantage of a bug that has been disclosed in the member's only list (whether the Cracker discovered it independently or through a leak from a member). If a lot of money is lost, there is going to be a hell of a lot of blame being thrown around. At least now everyone is responsible for themselves...
Bezos also wins in the court of public opinion if no-one finds a "prior art" for One-Click. As he has been quoted saying; (something like this...) "find the prior art and I'll relinquish the patent but since no one has found prior art the patent is valid. QED"
What bother's most of us is not that we know of an "exact" prior art, but, given the problem, the "obviousness" should have invalidated the patent application. Someone should tell the patent office that just because something has been ported to a web page doesn't make the idea "new".
I think the bounties are posted by competing companies (or companies threatened with patent liscensing lawsuits). I think Micron, Hitachi, etc. would pay a lot more than $10k to find some prior art on Rambus's DDR patens.
This is great that a few people are made $10k for finding prior art. But, in my opinion, it still doesn't address the fundamental problem of the patent office trying to determine what is "obvious".
The AltaVista patent is a good example. Given a problem (i.e. how to search the web) AltaVista claims to have patented a solution. But, as has been mentioned before, it is also the "obvious" solution to any Software Engineer faced with the problem. Hopefully, this patent will be tossed out due to the prior art from the guys who wrote the "gopher" and "archie" search engines, but it should have ever been allowed to be a patent at all.
Remember, its more than just "original" that defines what can be granted a patent. The U.S. Patent Office seems to have forgotten this...
I don't agree with the original poster, but I do think there is a difference between a Troll and an attempt to begin a meaningful dialog about how a specific technology should be used.
The original post borders on trollness due to the strong anit-censorship sentiments on/. and the fact that this thread seems to border on OT based on the original question, but requesting that the original post be moded out of existance is hardly any better.
Not new government programs. Without a change in a desire to learn the government-furnished PC just becomes a surrogate TV.
Not free-reign capitalism. No corporation has a vested interest in an educated population. They would love to have more technical people to hire and drive down salaries but they can get that through H1-B.
The answer is....
BattleBots!!!! This program makes intellegence and education seem cool. I realize many of the bots are nothing more than armored RC cars, but for the first time there is a pointless direction that rewards the kind of technical skills that this thread is discussing.
Compare these two hypothetical conversations:
Jonny, you should learn math and computers so that you can run powerpoint when you enter your bottom-rung corporate job
OR: Jonny, you sould learn math and computers so that you can build that MegaDeathCrusherBot that you were sketching after school.
Nothing is more mysterious in politics than why some issues capture the imagination of idealistic people like college students -- sweatshops in Latin America, for example -- and some don't, like the enormous gap in computer use and Net access between poor and rich kids.
It would be my impression that people who grew up with PC's (and look at PC's as just another tool as opposed to a hobby) are just now starting to be the norm in college age students.
I'm 30 now. When I was an undergrad, I'd say that the percentage of students that had computers in the dorm was about 15% as of 1990. Among grade-school aged children (who are in college now) the number of families with "family-computers" must have been even less.
My point is... When the kids that grew up thinking of computers as in indespensible tool reach college-age (probably about 4-8 years) we'll start to see this issue have more resonance among those that don't read/. regularly.
In my own defense, I was responding to a typical right-wing kook who equates scientific thought with radical, left-wing agendas. Perhaps, instead of being sarcastic, I could have tried a point-by-point refutal of the original rant:
Actually, many of the "scientists" who constantly harp on global warming were predicting an ice age as recently as the 1970's.
Scientists, unlike right-wing kooks, are liable to change their minds based upon evidence that their theories are incorrect. If a theory that better explains the current climatalogical trends than the current theory of Global Warming then most scientists will convert their views.
There as yet is NO scientific proof.
I am curious what kind of proof many of the anti-environmental posters on the/. need? A flaming Bush? The voice of God?
There has not been accurate climatilogical data kept for the entire Earth for long enough to make ANY projections.
I.e. don't do anything until we have accumulated an eon's worth of climatological data. Our great x 10^5 grandchildren will then be able to make the perfect decision about what steps to take...
And as others have pointed out, this is one of the coldest winters on record. Here in SE North Carolina, we just had the coldest December on record, and we're working on the coldest January on record.
And my grandma has smoked for fifty years and she doesn't have cancer...
To find the truth to anyone's "facts" on something such as this, you have to follow the money.
As I attempted to protray using sarcasm, if you "follow the money" Exxon has a hell of a lot more money than ADM. And just about any international corporation engaged in the search, use, or processing of fossil fuels has a shitload more money than the Environmental Sciences Department at any univeristy. Remember, just because Rush said it doesn't mean its true. Don't be a rube.
Her iMac has the original 32mb. The impression I'm getting from the Ars Technica article and the responses is that it might be a bit of a stretch to get OS X up and running smoothly on this maching.
Priority, get her machine more memory before putting down the cash for the OS? Sound right?
Follow the money, dude. If those super rich "enviro-nazi" groups don't get their way by convincing the stoopid "scientists" and "educated" people that there is "global warming", then they'll just pool thier money and, like, buy the oil companies, and the car companies, and the volcano companies and just shut them down, man.
With the current stock price of that "enviro-fascist" group Greenpeace hovering around $45,694 a share they could buy Exxon tommorrow. Man, and, like, Sea Sheppard could buy Texaco and put all of those under-paid, working-man CEO's out of business. But they don't want to spend their own money, they just want us to like not use oil and shit.
The thing that makes me really mad, man, is that the "scientist" so easily fall into the major "enviro-conglomorates" trap. Don't these so-called "educated scientists" realize we are just leaving the Ice Age that only happened 10,000 years ago. Man, they are stooopid. What did they get their PhD's in, anyway, "Doctorate of Stoopidity". Jeez.
And don't they know about Mt. Pinatubo??? The volcanoes cause global warming. Even Reagan said that that trees cause polution. And he said it on television so it must be correct. Don't "scientists" watch television. Maybe if they did they wouldn't be so stoopid. Dumb, wits.
They probably watch that "left-wing", SOCIALIST PBS or something.
And don't get me started on cigs causing cancer; bull! I bet the "scientists" think that they found PROOF, just so they could shut down the hard-working businessmen. I had an great-uncle that smoked till he was 102 and he never had any problems. I bet the "scientists" never heard about that!
I have to admit the thing that I really like about this is the integration of PDF. As a format it has some problems (at least some of the older PS->PDF conversions seemed to be iffy), but from a digital imaging and digital printing background I know I would have loved this when I was spending days trying to fix people's WYSI(not)WYG problems.
I'll be getting OSX for my fiance's (original) iMac, and my biggest worry is that it will require a lot more memory and processing power than the iMac currently needs. We shall see...
For people that have had a chance to use it, what are the first impressions?
Its the second rule ("non-obvious to someone skilled in the art") that confuses me.
Given a task to "index the web" it seems very likely that just about any programmer would at least start with a spider type (or, as mentioned by other posters, a "breadth-first" search).
Is the fact that someone at AltaVista claims to have asked that question first enough to make the method used patentable?
This seems to be the question in a lot of "stupid patent" stories. Sometimes they get business practice patents -- like "one click shopping" -- and sometimes -- like this case -- they try for technology patents. In this case, at least, it seems like a business practice patent would have been more appropriate.
If (and I doubt this...) AltaVista were the first to think of the idea (maybe 1993 or so??) that the population would be interested in getting a indexed list of existing web pages then maybe they should have patented that idea not the obvious method for how to gather that index. Maybe they even deserved to be rewarded that patent due to the utility of having an index of web pages....
One thing to keep in mind is that most Americans don't necessarily look at privacy issues in the same way as many posters on/. do. I was shocked to see my fiance actually take the time to send in the warranty card on a $40 blender she bought. Her thinking (i.e. "it may break and I may need to get it replaced") was obviously not the same as mine (i.e. "we are going to get even more junk mail than we already get."). I'm of the opinion, if you have a receipt and your blender's broken and it's worth more than the cost to ship the damn thing to Cuisinart, then you can get it fixed. If you don't have a receipt it doesn't matter if you sent in the warrantly card or not. Okay, so much for that rant.
The next thing I noticed, however, was that all the personal information was incorrect. Salary was different, personal interests were different, etc. etc.. Her name and address were correct (i.e. if we needed a replacement blender, we could get it), but all the marketing info was BS.
I do this as a matter of principal; keep seperate web-based email addresses, my "salary" ranges from 0-10,000 to 250-500,000 depending on my mood at any given time, my job title similarly varies, etc. etc.
In other words, businesses may be getting more and more info, but is any of it any good. And, what is the cost of seperating the good info from the bad?.
I'd like to add one more point, however, any information we are forced to give accurately (for a driver's liscense, bank loan, etc.) should be strictly protected.
I'm not going to disagree with you. I think its been a tactic since the Nixon years to try and discredit the messanger (i.e. journalists) whenever someone wants to duck an issue. Nevertheless, there are a couple of other issues.
MS has nice, clean, non-geeky P.R. people to send nicely formatted press releases perfectly set up to be placed into newspapers, magazines, web sites without all that time-consuming editing. It sure is easier than sending an investigative reporter or setting up an impartial technology testing lab (expecially for any non-technical publication.) Read just about any technical article in your local Big City Times and ask where they got the information.
If you're getting preferential treatment because of your position as a journalist, can you remain impartial? Can you even understand what the average user goes through if a programmer isn't available to want him or her through the problem? Who is more likely to have a P.R. person/programmer available at your beck and call; MicroSoft, Adobe, or a 10 person software company?
Of course journalists arn't on the take, but like everyone else, if a nice company is willing to make thier lives easier by providing guidance and mechandise and even stories how many have the integrity to ignore it? I don't think most (any?) Senators take bags of money in exchange for votes, but they sure do enjoy that all-expense paid week-long trip to Tahiti to take part in the "Forest Products and Voter's Jobs" symposium put on by the Forest Products Coalition.
Current ethits seem to say that all of these methods are legitimate, but do they result in the factual imformation making it to the general populous?
Great, thanks for your anonymous yet oh so insightful comment.
For those who have a little bit of imagination -- of course it's probably a planet or whatever the professional astronomers choose to catagorize it as -- however, look at it with a little bit of creativity.
The mass of 1 Jupiter (1JM) could create a shell 100 Jupiter Diamters (100JD) with a thickness of about 700 meters.
The interior of this shell is (very roughly) 6.4 x 10^13 km^2
Earth receives approximately 1395 watts/m^2 energy from the son.
A technology that could transform 1JM of mass into a shell has probably developed fusion technology. If I understood a basic web site I saw on the Sun, it converts approximately 7 x 10^8 tons of hydrogen to helium every second which creates 3.86 x 10^26 watts.
An equivalent fusion reaction to provide earth-like energy to the interior of the sphere would require 8.9 x 10^23 watts.
This means that the "alien fusion" technology would have to convert 3.5 x 10^5 tons per second of hydrogen out of the potential 16JM of material (2.7 x 10^28 kg (2.9 x 10^25 tons) of hydrogen if approx. 90% hydrogen -- similar to Jupitor) to generate earth-like energy on the inside of the sphere. 1.2 x 10^20 seconds (2.6 x 10^13 years) of a nice warm and bright interior to the sphere.
I realize of course that there are huge problems and questions with all of this including:
Occum's Razor (it's probably a planet)
My math is rusty and probably off by an order of magnitude or more in multiple places
Even if my math is generally correct, I've ruthless rounded numbers whenever I felt like it...
Could any material be strong enough (even at 700 meters thick) to not crack under the various pressures.
The things I don't know about physics, math, and astronomy could probably fill a shell 100 Jupiters in diameter.
In any case, enjoy, open your mind, prove me wrong, tell me why I'm wrong, engage in dialog, etc. etc...
Have a good day.
P.S. Maybe its an egg laid by the Great Turtle upon which the Earth itself rest;)
Since they haven't actually seen it, it could be a really light Dyson's Sphere (of nearly any diameter -- maybe 100 times the diameter of Jupiter -- but 1 Jupiter in weight) around a really, really small star or large planet (16 Jupiters of mass). Even if it isn't producing energy in visible light, I bet a celestial body of that size would produce energy; possibly enough to support a civilization on the inside of the sphere.
Could a small star fit inside a a sphere 17 times larger than Jupiter? I guess the question is whether it's 17 times larger by volumn or diameter.
Re:My Guess, Sealed Personal Dirigibles.
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What is 'IT'?
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I like the idea, but we've been have gusts here to 30 mph today. With a personal dirigible, I could start out my morning commute and end up in West Virgina before dinner.
Nevertheless, I'd buy it just for the days when peddling could actually keep up with the wind.
I bet it's cold fusion. He just whipped his bell jar, a strip of palidium, and some heavy water out of his duffle bag and voila!! Electricity!
Now, if only the utilities don't silence him before he makes it public...;)
Re:And the 90% asians at my school still "minority
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Racism At Microsoft?
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Yeah, and cops want murders, rapes, and robbery to keep happening, because they'd be out of a job if they ended it.
And Republicans want welfare cheats to keep cheating so they can write inspiring speaches to get Rush's "dittoheads" to vote for them.
Envronmentalists want endangered species to become extinct so they can keep getting donations and they are positively giddy over the possibility of global-warming.
Slashdot readers wants our government to pass stupid anti-privacy and anti-encryption laws so we have something to get worked up over.
Linux needs Microsoft to be the big bad company to fight against.
Finally, Anonymous Cowards need controversial/. threads without a complicated technical component so they can continue to spout off inane arguments that don't require them to RTFM.
A. Microsoft's operating systems suck (check any/. thread which even remotely compares Linux to Windows for proof -- this statment can be taken as a TRUTH;)
B. They have billions of dollars.
C. The ability and desire to hire the best and brightest programmers is a function of money.
D. If C and B then: they have the best and brightest programmers.
E. The best and brightest programmers can create an OS that doesn't suck.
F. If A and B and C and E then not D; i.e. Microsoft doesn't have the best and brightest and the fact that they don't have the best and brightest is not a function of money.
G. If F and C: Microsoft hires on a criteria other than "best and brightest" (i.e. they hire the not best and not brightest.)
H. not E: the not best and not brightest programmers can make an OS that sucks.
Q.E.D: Ok, by this point I'm kinda lost, I think I've proven that Microsoft is a racist company, but don't beat me up too much, its been many, many years since my logic class...:)
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need some technological trick to harvest emails. Just up a web page with an inane joke, animated gif, etc. and include a button that says, "Email to a Friend!". Voila! You've just harvested the email addresses of everyone who received an email from anyone who though the web page was even faintly amusing.
The only defence, until people start treating other peoples emails with more respect, is to keep two accounts. I personally only give out my work address, except to close and technically aware friends, at least then I get paid to read spam...
I think the biggest problem here is that BIND is *so* widespread (maybe even more so than sendmail?), when a bug breaks, it is immediately a major exploit waiting to happen. When the latest BIND 4/8 bugs hit, people were reporting attempts to exploit the bug almost immediately. That's really bad.
I agree with your comments and I, also, am not sure this is a bad thing, but take your first paragraph and apply it to the company we all love to hate ;) I think the biggest problem here is that Windows is *so* widespread, when a bug breaks, it is immediately a major exploit waiting to happen.
When the latest NT Server bugs hit...
We'd be ALL over MS if they attempted something like this. I realize they are different markets, as a whole, but I would guess the average person who understands BIND is far more technically advanced than the average NT user. (Notice I said "average" in the previous sentence; please no flames...) And therefore are better equipped to take immediate action when a bug is discovered.
The biggest problem is that most people don't know who the good guys are. Are you sure that the latest member added to the member's only list isn't White Hat Admin during the day and the Mad Cracker at night? In addition, if something goes wrong are the good guys opened up to liability? What happened is a Cracker takes advantage of a bug that has been disclosed in the member's only list (whether the Cracker discovered it independently or through a leak from a member). If a lot of money is lost, there is going to be a hell of a lot of blame being thrown around. At least now everyone is responsible for themselves...
When MOO2 was out I was in college! I had no girlfriend! I had a part time job! I could afford to spend 36 hours straight playing computer games!
I'm going to lose my job, my girlfriend, my dog...
Exactly...
Bezos also wins in the court of public opinion if no-one finds a "prior art" for One-Click. As he has been quoted saying; (something like this...) "find the prior art and I'll relinquish the patent but since no one has found prior art the patent is valid. QED"
What bother's most of us is not that we know of an "exact" prior art, but, given the problem, the "obviousness" should have invalidated the patent application. Someone should tell the patent office that just because something has been ported to a web page doesn't make the idea "new".
I think the bounties are posted by competing companies (or companies threatened with patent liscensing lawsuits). I think Micron, Hitachi, etc. would pay a lot more than $10k to find some prior art on Rambus's DDR patens.
This is great that a few people are made $10k for finding prior art. But, in my opinion, it still doesn't address the fundamental problem of the patent office trying to determine what is "obvious".
The AltaVista patent is a good example. Given a problem (i.e. how to search the web) AltaVista claims to have patented a solution. But, as has been mentioned before, it is also the "obvious" solution to any Software Engineer faced with the problem. Hopefully, this patent will be tossed out due to the prior art from the guys who wrote the "gopher" and "archie" search engines, but it should have ever been allowed to be a patent at all.
Remember, its more than just "original" that defines what can be granted a patent. The U.S. Patent Office seems to have forgotten this...
I don't agree with the original poster, but I do think there is a difference between a Troll and an attempt to begin a meaningful dialog about how a specific technology should be used.
The original post borders on trollness due to the strong anit-censorship sentiments on /. and the fact that this thread seems to border on OT based on the original question, but requesting that the original post be moded out of existance is hardly any better.
The solution is...
Not new government programs. Without a change in a desire to learn the government-furnished PC just becomes a surrogate TV.
Not free-reign capitalism. No corporation has a vested interest in an educated population. They would love to have more technical people to hire and drive down salaries but they can get that through H1-B.
The answer is....
BattleBots!!!! This program makes intellegence and education seem cool. I realize many of the bots are nothing more than armored RC cars, but for the first time there is a pointless direction that rewards the kind of technical skills that this thread is discussing.
Compare these two hypothetical conversations:
Jonny, you should learn math and computers so that you can run powerpoint when you enter your bottom-rung corporate job
OR: Jonny, you sould learn math and computers so that you can build that MegaDeathCrusherBot that you were sketching after school.
Nothing is more mysterious in politics than why some issues capture the imagination of idealistic people like college students -- sweatshops in Latin America, for example -- and some don't, like the enormous gap in computer use and Net access between poor and rich kids.
It would be my impression that people who grew up with PC's (and look at PC's as just another tool as opposed to a hobby) are just now starting to be the norm in college age students.
I'm 30 now. When I was an undergrad, I'd say that the percentage of students that had computers in the dorm was about 15% as of 1990. Among grade-school aged children (who are in college now) the number of families with "family-computers" must have been even less.
My point is... When the kids that grew up thinking of computers as in indespensible tool reach college-age (probably about 4-8 years) we'll start to see this issue have more resonance among those that don't read /. regularly.
In my own defense, I was responding to a typical right-wing kook who equates scientific thought with radical, left-wing agendas. Perhaps, instead of being sarcastic, I could have tried a point-by-point refutal of the original rant:
Actually, many of the "scientists" who constantly harp on global warming were predicting an ice age as recently as the 1970's.
Scientists, unlike right-wing kooks, are liable to change their minds based upon evidence that their theories are incorrect. If a theory that better explains the current climatalogical trends than the current theory of Global Warming then most scientists will convert their views.
There as yet is NO scientific proof.
I am curious what kind of proof many of the anti-environmental posters on the /. need? A flaming Bush? The voice of God?
There has not been accurate climatilogical data kept for the entire Earth for long enough to make ANY projections.
I.e. don't do anything until we have accumulated an eon's worth of climatological data. Our great x 10^5 grandchildren will then be able to make the perfect decision about what steps to take...
And as others have pointed out, this is one of the coldest winters on record. Here in SE North Carolina, we just had the coldest December on record, and we're working on the coldest January on record.
And my grandma has smoked for fifty years and she doesn't have cancer...
To find the truth to anyone's "facts" on something such as this, you have to follow the money.
As I attempted to protray using sarcasm, if you "follow the money" Exxon has a hell of a lot more money than ADM. And just about any international corporation engaged in the search, use, or processing of fossil fuels has a shitload more money than the Environmental Sciences Department at any univeristy. Remember, just because Rush said it doesn't mean its true. Don't be a rube.
Thanks for all of the responses.
Her iMac has the original 32mb. The impression I'm getting from the Ars Technica article and the responses is that it might be a bit of a stretch to get OS X up and running smoothly on this maching.
Priority, get her machine more memory before putting down the cash for the OS? Sound right?
Follow the money, dude. If those super rich "enviro-nazi" groups don't get their way by convincing the stoopid "scientists" and "educated" people that there is "global warming", then they'll just pool thier money and, like, buy the oil companies, and the car companies, and the volcano companies and just shut them down, man.
With the current stock price of that "enviro-fascist" group Greenpeace hovering around $45,694 a share they could buy Exxon tommorrow. Man, and, like, Sea Sheppard could buy Texaco and put all of those under-paid, working-man CEO's out of business. But they don't want to spend their own money, they just want us to like not use oil and shit.
The thing that makes me really mad, man, is that the "scientist" so easily fall into the major "enviro-conglomorates" trap. Don't these so-called "educated scientists" realize we are just leaving the Ice Age that only happened 10,000 years ago. Man, they are stooopid. What did they get their PhD's in, anyway, "Doctorate of Stoopidity". Jeez.
And don't they know about Mt. Pinatubo??? The volcanoes cause global warming. Even Reagan said that that trees cause polution. And he said it on television so it must be correct. Don't "scientists" watch television. Maybe if they did they wouldn't be so stoopid. Dumb, wits.
They probably watch that "left-wing", SOCIALIST PBS or something.
And don't get me started on cigs causing cancer; bull! I bet the "scientists" think that they found PROOF, just so they could shut down the hard-working businessmen. I had an great-uncle that smoked till he was 102 and he never had any problems. I bet the "scientists" never heard about that!
I have to admit the thing that I really like about this is the integration of PDF. As a format it has some problems (at least some of the older PS->PDF conversions seemed to be iffy), but from a digital imaging and digital printing background I know I would have loved this when I was spending days trying to fix people's WYSI(not)WYG problems.
I'll be getting OSX for my fiance's (original) iMac, and my biggest worry is that it will require a lot more memory and processing power than the iMac currently needs. We shall see...
For people that have had a chance to use it, what are the first impressions?
Its the second rule ("non-obvious to someone skilled in the art") that confuses me.
Given a task to "index the web" it seems very likely that just about any programmer would at least start with a spider type (or, as mentioned by other posters, a "breadth-first" search).
Is the fact that someone at AltaVista claims to have asked that question first enough to make the method used patentable?
This seems to be the question in a lot of "stupid patent" stories. Sometimes they get business practice patents -- like "one click shopping" -- and sometimes -- like this case -- they try for technology patents. In this case, at least, it seems like a business practice patent would have been more appropriate.
If (and I doubt this...) AltaVista were the first to think of the idea (maybe 1993 or so??) that the population would be interested in getting a indexed list of existing web pages then maybe they should have patented that idea not the obvious method for how to gather that index. Maybe they even deserved to be rewarded that patent due to the utility of having an index of web pages....
One thing to keep in mind is that most Americans don't necessarily look at privacy issues in the same way as many posters on /. do. I was shocked to see my fiance actually take the time to send in the warranty card on a $40 blender she bought. Her thinking (i.e. "it may break and I may need to get it replaced") was obviously not the same as mine (i.e. "we are going to get even more junk mail than we already get."). I'm of the opinion, if you have a receipt and your blender's broken and it's worth more than the cost to ship the damn thing to Cuisinart, then you can get it fixed. If you don't have a receipt it doesn't matter if you sent in the warrantly card or not. Okay, so much for that rant.
The next thing I noticed, however, was that all the personal information was incorrect. Salary was different, personal interests were different, etc. etc.. Her name and address were correct (i.e. if we needed a replacement blender, we could get it), but all the marketing info was BS.
I do this as a matter of principal; keep seperate web-based email addresses, my "salary" ranges from 0-10,000 to 250-500,000 depending on my mood at any given time, my job title similarly varies, etc. etc.
In other words, businesses may be getting more and more info, but is any of it any good. And, what is the cost of seperating the good info from the bad?.
I'd like to add one more point, however, any information we are forced to give accurately (for a driver's liscense, bank loan, etc.) should be strictly protected.
Five years, bullshit, try 11 months...
I agree that they'll break every agreement if it suits their purpose, but the purpose they'll be serving will be that quarter's analyst's reports.
In some ways this is needed, short-term flexibility is a good thing... Good analysts reports mean better stock prices, etc...
But, if corporations really looked ahead 5 years, they'd be training their employees not laying them off.
Sure, and Video Toster kept Amiga alive...
...for a while.
I'm not going to disagree with you. I think its been a tactic since the Nixon years to try and discredit the messanger (i.e. journalists) whenever someone wants to duck an issue. Nevertheless, there are a couple of other issues.
MS has nice, clean, non-geeky P.R. people to send nicely formatted press releases perfectly set up to be placed into newspapers, magazines, web sites without all that time-consuming editing. It sure is easier than sending an investigative reporter or setting up an impartial technology testing lab (expecially for any non-technical publication.) Read just about any technical article in your local Big City Times and ask where they got the information.
If you're getting preferential treatment because of your position as a journalist, can you remain impartial? Can you even understand what the average user goes through if a programmer isn't available to want him or her through the problem? Who is more likely to have a P.R. person/programmer available at your beck and call; MicroSoft, Adobe, or a 10 person software company?
Of course journalists arn't on the take, but like everyone else, if a nice company is willing to make thier lives easier by providing guidance and mechandise and even stories how many have the integrity to ignore it? I don't think most (any?) Senators take bags of money in exchange for votes, but they sure do enjoy that all-expense paid week-long trip to Tahiti to take part in the "Forest Products and Voter's Jobs" symposium put on by the Forest Products Coalition.
Current ethits seem to say that all of these methods are legitimate, but do they result in the factual imformation making it to the general populous?
Great, thanks for your anonymous yet oh so insightful comment.
For those who have a little bit of imagination -- of course it's probably a planet or whatever the professional astronomers choose to catagorize it as -- however, look at it with a little bit of creativity.
The mass of 1 Jupiter (1JM) could create a shell 100 Jupiter Diamters (100JD) with a thickness of about 700 meters.
The interior of this shell is (very roughly) 6.4 x 10^13 km^2
Earth receives approximately 1395 watts/m^2 energy from the son.
A technology that could transform 1JM of mass into a shell has probably developed fusion technology. If I understood a basic web site I saw on the Sun, it converts approximately 7 x 10^8 tons of hydrogen to helium every second which creates 3.86 x 10^26 watts.
An equivalent fusion reaction to provide earth-like energy to the interior of the sphere would require 8.9 x 10^23 watts.
This means that the "alien fusion" technology would have to convert 3.5 x 10^5 tons per second of hydrogen out of the potential 16JM of material (2.7 x 10^28 kg (2.9 x 10^25 tons) of hydrogen if approx. 90% hydrogen -- similar to Jupitor) to generate earth-like energy on the inside of the sphere. 1.2 x 10^20 seconds (2.6 x 10^13 years) of a nice warm and bright interior to the sphere.
I realize of course that there are huge problems and questions with all of this including:
Occum's Razor (it's probably a planet)
My math is rusty and probably off by an order of magnitude or more in multiple places
Even if my math is generally correct, I've ruthless rounded numbers whenever I felt like it...
Could any material be strong enough (even at 700 meters thick) to not crack under the various pressures.
The things I don't know about physics, math, and astronomy could probably fill a shell 100 Jupiters in diameter.
In any case, enjoy, open your mind, prove me wrong, tell me why I'm wrong, engage in dialog, etc. etc...
Have a good day.
P.S. Maybe its an egg laid by the Great Turtle upon which the Earth itself rest ;)
OK, so I read the article after I posted....
Since they haven't actually seen it, it could be a really light Dyson's Sphere (of nearly any diameter -- maybe 100 times the diameter of Jupiter -- but 1 Jupiter in weight) around a really, really small star or large planet (16 Jupiters of mass). Even if it isn't producing energy in visible light, I bet a celestial body of that size would produce energy; possibly enough to support a civilization on the inside of the sphere.
Its a Dyson's Sphere around a white dwarf!!!
Could a small star fit inside a a sphere 17 times larger than Jupiter? I guess the question is whether it's 17 times larger by volumn or diameter.
I like the idea, but we've been have gusts here to 30 mph today. With a personal dirigible, I could start out my morning commute and end up in West Virgina before dinner.
Nevertheless, I'd buy it just for the days when peddling could actually keep up with the wind.
I bet it's cold fusion. He just whipped his bell jar, a strip of palidium, and some heavy water out of his duffle bag and voila!! Electricity!
Now, if only the utilities don't silence him before he makes it public... ;)
Yeah, and cops want murders, rapes, and robbery to keep happening, because they'd be out of a job if they ended it.
And Republicans want welfare cheats to keep cheating so they can write inspiring speaches to get Rush's "dittoheads" to vote for them.
Envronmentalists want endangered species to become extinct so they can keep getting donations and they are positively giddy over the possibility of global-warming.
Slashdot readers wants our government to pass stupid anti-privacy and anti-encryption laws so we have something to get worked up over.
Linux needs Microsoft to be the big bad company to fight against.
Finally, Anonymous Cowards need controversial /. threads without a complicated technical component so they can continue to spout off inane arguments that don't require them to RTFM.
A. Microsoft's operating systems suck (check any /. thread which even remotely compares Linux to Windows for proof -- this statment can be taken as a TRUTH ;)
B. They have billions of dollars.
C. The ability and desire to hire the best and brightest programmers is a function of money.
D. If C and B then: they have the best and brightest programmers.
E. The best and brightest programmers can create an OS that doesn't suck.
F. If A and B and C and E then not D; i.e. Microsoft doesn't have the best and brightest and the fact that they don't have the best and brightest is not a function of money.
G. If F and C: Microsoft hires on a criteria other than "best and brightest" (i.e. they hire the not best and not brightest.)
H. not E: the not best and not brightest programmers can make an OS that sucks.
Q.E.D: Ok, by this point I'm kinda lost, I think I've proven that Microsoft is a racist company, but don't beat me up too much, its been many, many years since my logic class... :)