People change email addresses, so it's just cheaper and more efficent to setup some regexs and skim usenet today.
True.
If you can't write a program that takes out NOSPAM, you aren't a real programmer.
It's pretty irrelevant anyway. Anyone who's taken the minimal bother to munge their email address is also likely to be annoyed with spam already, and so is 100% certain not to buy anything from a spam email; so what's the point in bothering to get the address and send one out anyway.
Besides, probably upwards of 95% of people don't bother mungeing their address, either because they can't be bothered or more likely they never thought of it/don't know how. That's plenty of addresses to sell.
I bet the trawlers sell off munged email addresses in the list regardless, anyway.
the RIP bill is actually illegal under the European Human Rights Act - which became law in the UK at the beginning of October IIRC (someone can correct the date, I'm sure)
Which part is RIP made illegal by? Article 8 seems a good bet:
Article 8: Right to privacy
(1) Everyone has the right for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
(2) There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
But second part allows monitoring if there's suspicion of a crime or even 'disorder' involved.
(Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not defending RIP, I'm just wondering whether the Human Rights Act actually does make it illegal.)
www.stand.org.uk has details on how silly/scary (depending on whether you're watching or on the receiving end) the RIP bill is.
Of particular interest is the letter to Jack Straw complete with encrypted confession to an unnamed crime. As it explains, under the RIP bill Jack Straw could be imprisoned unless he can prove that he does not have the decryption key. Proving you do not have something is a little tricky, of course.
And even you can prove that, you're still liable for imprisonment unless you give the police information enabling them to get the key.
A full guide to the implications of the bill is here.
As the previous poster mentioned, press coverage of the bill has been extremely limited, which is surprising given the far reaching effects on the right to privacy it has.
It's pretty funny actually, I get the same thing while cramming for final exams. The night before the exam I usually end up having a nightmare about solving problems, and I never, ever get them right (sometimes I wonder if my dream problems even have correct answers!).
Likewise, except with exam papers full of unreadable symbols/in a foreign language/completely blank. *scream*
Glad I've finished my degree... no more exams:-)
Except of course prospective employers are no doubt going to make me do all sorts of tests:-(
Maybe less money on talk and more money on getting their....
By getting there, do you mean a manned mission? You think it's a sensible use of money to send people instead of probes to find out it's a dead planet (or otherwise)? The logistics of a manned mission are somewhat complicated. What's the latest journey time? Last I heard it was 2 years, each way. Finding people who are stable enough to live in close quarters hurtling through space for minimum four years would be hard enough to start with.
'Less money on talk': Talk? This is research into the results transmitted by the probes. Or do you propose sending probes, saying 'Hurray! They got there!' and then spending more money on more probes, without analysing the data?:-P
It costs a fairly insane amount of money to send craft to other planets, even the closest one. You have to spend a lot of money on talk/research first, to figure out what you're going to equip the probe with, how it's going to get around, and so on and so on.
The approach of sending out hundreds of tiny autonomous probes plus a few 'base stations' to control them seems to be more appealing than the One Big Probe that they usually send; more scope for redundancy in case some of equipment failure, and the possibility of examining more of the surface.
I never heard of that bug. Are you sure that wasn't FUD?
No, it was a real bug.
And it was 49.7 days (the time it takes for a millisecond timer to overflow a 32bit unsigned integer.
It was fixed in one of the service packs.
This puts my comment about the wearable computers to shame.
Now there will be nutcases seemingly communicating with God, who is speaking to them through their fingers, and can hear them if they shout into their watch.
I think I'd better buy shares in a strait-jacket manufacturer or two. It's going to be a busy year for the asylums.
It's bad enough with people wandering around having conversations on their hands-free mobile phone; at a glance (if you can't see the earpiece) it looks like they're a crazy communicating with God or something.
Someone playing a game of Quake III or whatever with one of these in the street would probably get arrested and carted off to the local asylum for shouting "Hahaha! Die! I will frag you with my weapon!" for no apparent reason.
The last I heard (several months ago, this light emitting polymer stuff has been in the works for years) was that the big problem was with the blue light emitting compound.
Blue's always been a tricky one to get working, and the compound only had an operating life in the order of a few days.
I assume they've considerably improved it since then. The red and green compounds already had reasonable lifetimes (order of months/years).
Even so, surely it could still go either way legally.
Is a quarter of a block of illegal data still illegal data?
Is lack of knowledge of the contents a defence, despite the fact that you knowingly allowed your computer to be used for storage?
Since the location of at least four of the eight blocks has to be found to retrieve a file, doesn't this just mean four to eight people can be sued for illegally hosting one file, instead of the usual one person sued?
Certainly makes the legal issues more complicated, but doesn't seem to remove them entirely.
Can't be too hard to do anyway; just need an IR LED, IR phototransistor positioned to pick up the reflections, clean the signal up into digital and stuff it into a computer for processing.
Or the software way, if you've got a decent enough quality webcam, write some image recognition stuff to read the barcode off frame grabs.
These 'nanoprobes' are just minimalist valid packets, headers with zero data.
The page is full of anthropomorphism and redundant quasi-technical terms just thrown in to make it look impressive. When you actually look for some hard facts, they're fairly lacking.
So what that they're less than half the size of the ping packets produced by MS ping, which always sends 32 bytes of data. Can we say ping -s 1 host? Sends 232-bit packets (224 header + 8 bits data). (It gets 9-byte replies = 224 + 9*8 = 296-bit replies... still not far off the 224-bit of the minimalist packets).
There's no actual evidence presented that the lack of data in the packet causes them to be processed in such a radically different way as is suggested, bypassing any and all firewalls, NAT and proxies.
Looks like sensationalist hype so far. They may have some use in highlighting exception cases in software (who'd expect zero length data anyway), and his customised TCP/IP suite will probably just be used to send more pings per second.
.ORG: The top-level domain originally designated for miscellaneous entities such as non-profit organizations that do not fit under any of the other top-level domains. Any person or organization may now register a domain name in.org, a worldwide top-level domain.
Whilst projects like distributed.net and Seti@Home have clocked up shocking amounts of processor time (410497.11 years on Seti@Home), they're still running on the 'cool factor' of having your machine break codes or search for aliens.
Presumably with the added incentive of cash, the number of computers taking part will rocket. Does anyone have any firm information on the progress of these schemes?
Computer equipment can and is seized when used in connection with a crime, and this isn't exactly the first time computers have been confiscated.
On a different note, the wording of the statement amused me slightly.
"We're doing some forensic review of the hard drive and determining what is there," Eaton said. "After we finish that review, we will evaluate the amount of substance he was distributing."
Amount of substance? They make it sound like he was distributing drugs. Maybe they're checking the hard drive for traces of white powders:-P
This is the exact same situation, not only is the ALT tag reccomended by the standard,
Actually, according to HTML4.01, the ALT tag is mandatory:
<!-- To avoid problems with text-only UAs as well as
to make image content understandable and navigable
to users of non-visual UAs, you need to provide
a description with ALT, and avoid server-side image maps -->
<!ELEMENT IMG - O EMPTY -- Embedded image -->
<!ATTLIST IMG
%attrs; -- %coreattrs, %i18n, %events --
src %URI; #REQUIRED -- URI of image to embed -- alt %Text; #REQUIRED -- short description --
The poster could at least have got the product name right!
But seriously, this iFeel thing seems like a particularly useless gimmick.
Surely things like this just confuse the issue of interaction with the computer; before long we'll be having interfaces where you have to 'squeeze the mouse gently on the smooth part of the button that smells like flowers', or something equally ridiculous.
At what point do the extra 'senses' given by the gimmicks just become a hinderance to using the system?
That would be because the hardware DVD decoder manufacturer has paid the DVD licence fees, and you don't get access to the inner workings of the hardware... so no problem?
The problem is, of course, that you'd need drivers and/or a client program to tell the hardware DVD decoder card/whatever to play the DVD... whether these exist for Linux or not, I have no idea.
Besides, how common is hardware that does the entire DVD playback process? And how much processing does the software have to do before it's liable for needing a licence -> covered by an NDA -> cannot be released as source... ?
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, probably upwards of 95% of people don't bother mungeing their address, either because they can't be bothered or more likely they never thought of it/don't know how. That's plenty of addresses to sell.
I bet the trawlers sell off munged email addresses in the list regardless, anyway.
Details of the articles are in this BBC News article.
Which part is RIP made illegal by? Article 8 seems a good bet:
But second part allows monitoring if there's suspicion of a crime or even 'disorder' involved.
(Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not defending RIP, I'm just wondering whether the Human Rights Act actually does make it illegal.)
www.stand.org.uk has details on how silly/scary (depending on whether you're watching or on the receiving end) the RIP bill is.
Of particular interest is the letter to Jack Straw complete with encrypted confession to an unnamed crime. As it explains, under the RIP bill Jack Straw could be imprisoned unless he can prove that he does not have the decryption key. Proving you do not have something is a little tricky, of course.
And even you can prove that, you're still liable for imprisonment unless you give the police information enabling them to get the key.
A full guide to the implications of the bill is here.
As the previous poster mentioned, press coverage of the bill has been extremely limited, which is surprising given the far reaching effects on the right to privacy it has.
Then you're doing it wrong.
//wiffle/downloads -U Administrator
.. D 0 Thu Jul 20 23:40:12 2000
andyh@server:~# smbclient
added interface ip=192.168.1.100 bcast=192.168.1.255 nmask=255.255.255.0
Password:
Domain=[INTRANET] OS=[Windows 5.0] Server=[Windows 2000 LAN Manager]
smb: \> ls
. D 0 Thu Jul 20 23:40:12 2000
downloads.log A 524288 Sat Oct 14 14:38:08 2000
Looks like it works to me!
I have directories mounted using smbfs on my Linux box from shares on my Windows 2000 box.
So, what's missing?
Glad I've finished my degree... no more exams
Except of course prospective employers are no doubt going to make me do all sorts of tests
'Less money on talk': Talk? This is research into the results transmitted by the probes. Or do you propose sending probes, saying 'Hurray! They got there!' and then spending more money on more probes, without analysing the data?
It costs a fairly insane amount of money to send craft to other planets, even the closest one. You have to spend a lot of money on talk/research first, to figure out what you're going to equip the probe with, how it's going to get around, and so on and so on.
The approach of sending out hundreds of tiny autonomous probes plus a few 'base stations' to control them seems to be more appealing than the One Big Probe that they usually send; more scope for redundancy in case some of equipment failure, and the possibility of examining more of the surface.
It's available on Windows Update.
And it was 49.7 days (the time it takes for a millisecond timer to overflow a 32bit unsigned integer.
It was fixed in one of the service packs.
See this MS KB entry for details.
... the first link on this story?
This puts my comment about the wearable computers to shame.
Now there will be nutcases seemingly communicating with God, who is speaking to them through their fingers, and can hear them if they shout into their watch.
I think I'd better buy shares in a strait-jacket manufacturer or two. It's going to be a busy year for the asylums.
It's bad enough with people wandering around having conversations on their hands-free mobile phone; at a glance (if you can't see the earpiece) it looks like they're a crazy communicating with God or something.
:-P
Someone playing a game of Quake III or whatever with one of these in the street would probably get arrested and carted off to the local asylum for shouting "Hahaha! Die! I will frag you with my weapon!" for no apparent reason.
The last I heard (several months ago, this light emitting polymer stuff has been in the works for years) was that the big problem was with the blue light emitting compound.
Blue's always been a tricky one to get working, and the compound only had an operating life in the order of a few days.
I assume they've considerably improved it since then. The red and green compounds already had reasonable lifetimes (order of months/years).
Even so, surely it could still go either way legally.
Is a quarter of a block of illegal data still illegal data?
Is lack of knowledge of the contents a defence, despite the fact that you knowingly allowed your computer to be used for storage?
Since the location of at least four of the eight blocks has to be found to retrieve a file, doesn't this just mean four to eight people can be sued for illegally hosting one file, instead of the usual one person sued?
Certainly makes the legal issues more complicated, but doesn't seem to remove them entirely.
These popped up with a trip to Google:
Student's electrial engineering project, includes schematic (scanner + RS232 interface)
And another.
Can't be too hard to do anyway; just need an IR LED, IR phototransistor positioned to pick up the reflections, clean the signal up into digital and stuff it into a computer for processing.
Or the software way, if you've got a decent enough quality webcam, write some image recognition stuff to read the barcode off frame grabs.
These 'nanoprobes' are just minimalist valid packets, headers with zero data.
The page is full of anthropomorphism and redundant quasi-technical terms just thrown in to make it look impressive. When you actually look for some hard facts, they're fairly lacking.
So what that they're less than half the size of the ping packets produced by MS ping, which always sends 32 bytes of data. Can we say ping -s 1 host? Sends 232-bit packets (224 header + 8 bits data). (It gets 9-byte replies = 224 + 9*8 = 296-bit replies... still not far off the 224-bit of the minimalist packets).
There's no actual evidence presented that the lack of data in the packet causes them to be processed in such a radically different way as is suggested, bypassing any and all firewalls, NAT and proxies.
Looks like sensationalist hype so far. They may have some use in highlighting exception cases in software (who'd expect zero length data anyway), and his customised TCP/IP suite will probably just be used to send more pings per second.
There's no such restriction any more... it was lifted some time ago.
From Network Solution's website:
Whilst projects like distributed.net and Seti@Home have clocked up shocking amounts of processor time (410497.11 years on Seti@Home), they're still running on the 'cool factor' of having your machine break codes or search for aliens.
Sites such as ProcessTree, and others, have been talking of paying for your computer time with micropayments, but so far nothing seems to have got off the ground.
Presumably with the added incentive of cash, the number of computers taking part will rocket. Does anyone have any firm information on the progress of these schemes?
Computer equipment can and is seized when used in connection with a crime, and this isn't exactly the first time computers have been confiscated.
:-P
On a different note, the wording of the statement amused me slightly.
"We're doing some forensic review of the hard drive and determining what is there," Eaton said. "After we finish that review, we will evaluate the amount of substance he was distributing."
Amount of substance? They make it sound like he was distributing drugs. Maybe they're checking the hard drive for traces of white powders
(from W3C HTML4.01 Specification)
Is it true that there are only three surviving Sentinels episodes, and the rest were destroyed in a fire?
Or are the remaining episodes out there somewhere?
Painful!
It says on the homepage that it's released under the BSD Licence; there needs to be a BSDM Licence for something that excruciating.
Except for the fact that Cobalt are suing Apple first for cubeness...
Slashdot article, ZDNet article, Cobalt press release about settlement with Cube Computer Corp.
I think I'll have to patent the remaining Euclidean solids... I want some money if someone tries make an icosahedron-shaped computer.
... iFell over.
The poster could at least have got the product name right!
But seriously, this iFeel thing seems like a particularly useless gimmick.
Surely things like this just confuse the issue of interaction with the computer; before long we'll be having interfaces where you have to 'squeeze the mouse gently on the smooth part of the button that smells like flowers', or something equally ridiculous.
At what point do the extra 'senses' given by the gimmicks just become a hinderance to using the system?
That would be because the hardware DVD decoder manufacturer has paid the DVD licence fees, and you don't get access to the inner workings of the hardware... so no problem?
The problem is, of course, that you'd need drivers and/or a client program to tell the hardware DVD decoder card/whatever to play the DVD... whether these exist for Linux or not, I have no idea.
Besides, how common is hardware that does the entire DVD playback process? And how much processing does the software have to do before it's liable for needing a licence -> covered by an NDA -> cannot be released as source... ?