The issue is not limiting spam or fixing any protocols. What MS is creating is trusted spam. In exchange for the spammer solving your little puzzle, the receiver agrees not to filter the spam directly to the trash can. The protocol is no better than traditional filters, and would be very hard to make secure. It will most likely decrease the security of Windows users and increase the amount of ads they must look at.
First, the protocol is overly complex. The receiver sets the puzzle. How does the receiver to this. But sending the puzzle before receiving the email? That is complex, perhaps involving connections that must remain open for tens of seconds, or lists that correlate puzzles to particular senders, and the sender must match the answer. How will the puzzle be generated. Will it be psuedorandom or pad. How will we gauge the strength of the puzzle. I do not see how this is superior to current filtering.
Second, alternate filtering methods will still be needed. Whitelists will have to be kept so that friends, interoffice mail, and current customers will not be challenged. Email that does not meet the challenge will still have to be accepted and filtered. The only advantage is that certain email will be tagged as 'safe' because the sender solved your puzzle. This 'safe' email will still often have to filtered to meet the specific needs of the receiver. For instance, a 'safe' email may still contain graphic sexual content unsuitable for the office.
Third, there may be no way to know whether the calculation was done. If the puzzle is pseudo-random, the sender may exploit some weakness. If the puzzle is off a standard one-time pad, and the number of puzzles are finite, or can be cataloged into a finite number of sets, the sender may have database that already contains complete or partial answers. So, even if the spammer is not using owned hardware, there is no way to know that each email is in fact generating any specific liability.
Again, this is a ploy for MS to sell servers to advertisers. The number of machines, and related number of MS licenses, is going to be non-trivial. The client will be built into outlook and the marketing will convince consumers that anything marked safe is legitimate advertising and not spam. This does nothing to solve the spam problem.
I like the white rectagle thing. The original was not so well built, but still lasted a year. I just purchased the new model, and it much better. Thicker power cord for home use and an extra grommit on the output.
The form fact is not noticible. The reason I prefer this to the saucer adapter is the interchangable power cord. It is usually unnecesary for me to carry the cord, so it is nice to have the small adapter.
The solution to this is called lawyers. A class action can recover shipping fees and other damages. It can also make them pay a fine so they think twice next time before wasting the customers time.
Of course, on/. we are morally opposed to lawyers making any sort of reasonable profit, so we would never participate in such a suit. We just complain and cry over the unfairness of it all, and hope some diety magically fixes the problem.
The comparison of the mars landings and the moon landing (really impacts in the early days) are interesting. In both cases, we sent probes out, and they didn't always succeed. They flyby's were pretty successful. The Ranger program, which really just tried to hit the moon with an object, and hoped it survived, were not so successful. The Russians had better luck, and did manage to crash a human object on the moon.
Landing on planet is harder. For one thing, we are trying to land from the start. We are not, like on the moon, just trying to hit mars with a piece of hardware. We have to navigate the mars climatology to place a spacecraft safely on the planet. This is very hard. And since the spacecraft is unmanned, and mars is so far away, everything has to be set up in advance. There is no chance for last minute corrections. Mission result take longer.
I think this is one of the problems of focusing only on the successes. We forget how hard innovation really is. We expect everything to be easy, and are unable to deal with the necessary frustration. Take a look at the work to get us on the moon. Just the size of the craft was an issue. And then try to tell us we are not doing well with mars.
Since the iPod is meant to be used with iTunes, I think the first thing that needs to be done is to convince Apple to ship iTunes with the ogg plugin installed and enabled. Once the do that, then it would make sense to update the iPod firmware to support it.
What the public belief of the scientific consensus is often different from reality. This is the fault of scientist, the persons who are afraid of the scientists, and the public. It is very easy to lead an untrained mind down a path of illogic, as clearly shown by those that fall for the Nigerian scams. Those that wish to confuse use this to subvert those that wish only honest exploration.
The complexity of a truly logical approach can be illustrated by looking at ETI. Let's break it question up into three parts. First, do they exists. Second, do they exist now. Third, will we meet them. Given the current scientific knowledge and a few reasonable assumptions, we can come up with an answer. The first assumption, of course, is the life is as is most common on earth, carbon based, and would require a sun like star and a earth like planet.
To the first we note that some scientist have looked at the number of suitable suns, waved their hands to figure out how many might contain planets(lately the hand waving has become more systematic) and the probability that the planet might develop life. The answer seems to be that it is not inconceivable that life like us might appear somewhere.
To the second we note the life of universe, the probably short life span of intelligent life if they cannot colonize other sun systems. Current physics makes it hard to move large numbers of people to other systems. Given these assumptions, the probability that life exist now seems vanishingly small.
To the third we have to look at physics as we know it, the size of the universe, and exceedingly small probability that life exists contemporaneously with us. Given these assumption, it is probably more likely that I would tunnel through my chair than an ETI would appear on our planet.
Obviously the conclusions change with the assumptions. Obviously modification to current theories might change the conclusions. But what we have now is we do not believe people when they say the meet ETI's, just like we don't believe in perpetual motion machines.
So, what did I just say? That ETIs do not exist or that they don't. It would be very easy for an agent of confusion to mince my words and make me look silly. in fact, an average person, with limited understanding of physics and probability, might think I was bonkers. And this is what is happening. It happened with cigarettes, even though research on their dangers go back one hundred years. It happens with food products, even though the reasonable balanced diet is well known and the consensus is that nothing beats consuming a reasonable number of calories with moderate exercise.
Global warming is probably happening. Not all observed effects can be attributed to non-human causes. There is a demonstrable mechanism by which humans might significantly effect the climate of the planet. Technology exists to halt those human generated mechanisms. It may turn out that spending on such technology is not necessary. OTOH, we put our children in the back seat and make them sleep in certain positions, and in the USA we take huge amounts of likely unnecessary supplements, and buy alarms for our houses and cars even though we live in safe neighborhoods. So why not try to do some minimal stuff to that might make our lives and our future better.
I don't understand why he won't admit to being scammed. If he admits his mistake he is just stupid. If he doesn't, then he is admitting criminal behavior. Not only that, but he is admitting that he belives criminal behavior to acceptable. It is bad enough to be greedy enough of a person to think crime is the best path to wealth. But to hang onto that notion even after the evidence is presented is just perverse.
Three things. The laptop will likely consume less power than the pc/lcd combination. The laptop also has batteries. Extra batteries can be purchased and hooked to separate solar powered trickle charger. This means that even if the main system cannot supply enough power, you might still be able to get some work done. The same thing can be done with a UPS, but maybe not as cheaply.
With expandability, unless you have a specific expansion in mind, it may not be an issue. Memory on small form PC is often not more expandable than on a laptop. Often on an efficient PC there may only be one or two available slots, one bay, and the video card is integrated. Also, with USB and Firewire, one can get very efficient external connections to various devices. These devices can be easily removed from the main computer to conserve power.
You didn't mention if you were planning to keep this computer in one place, or move it around. Or if the computer is going to be a good climate controlled environment. In my experience a good portable is much more tolerant of movement and environment. This may or may not be a factor
One the landmark precedences on this is the United States of America v. One book called "Ulysses" Random House, Inc.
In the decision Judge John M. Woolsey spoke specifically to pornographic. He defined pornographic as written for the purpose of exploiting sexuality. In the decision, he defined obscene as "tending to lead to impure and lustful thoughts. With regards to pornographic, the generally accepted interpretation of the ruling is that the book was written as an honest attempt at art, and was the sexual content was part of that art. WRT obscene, he basically said that it was a hard book and no one would read just to glare at the sexual content.
The scary things about the filters it that it has been shown that they are there to filter out information that certain parties find threatening, and not pornographic material. A nearly naked child-girl laying of a car is, by most definition, pornographic and obscene. A site listing definitions a sexual words that a child might here is not. The former can be found everywhere, the later is censored.
I will second this as a very good solution. I bought a sleeve/bag from Apple with my powerbook. It is very sturdy and works well when I am just going to the coffee shop for an hour or so.
When the sleeve is not sufficient, I choose a appropriate larger bag. Mostly i choose either my computer backpack bag, no recommended with a intro physics of calculus book, or my Gap computer bag. I do require that the additional bag has a padded pocket for the computer. There are additional stresses involved when the computer is in the same bag as books.
The federal government is doing very little corporate prosecution. In fact it appears that much of their work is in corporate defense. So it is up to the states, as has been shown by NY. I do not think think SCO has anything to worry about from it's local AG. It will be up to one of the fortune 1000 companies to get pissed enough at the shenanigans and approach their state prosecutors. This, of course, will push it directly into the feds territory, and we will have the same problem.
Just to be clear, this juncture of the game has little to with the lawsuit. It is a diversion created by SCO to create publicity and maybe generate some cash. The lawsuit is between IBM and SCO. It may affect those that distribute *nix code. I see no way it affects those that use *nix code, even if they modified it and distribute it internally. If my company buys 100 ford trucks, modifies the engine for internal use, and then ford gets sued by another company for stealing the engine design, I do not have to pay the third company funds to continue to use that engine. I do not see how this is any different.
So here is a question. If the numbers are the issue, how many programmers used best standards and programmed using only the defined names. How many did not assume that there was an order, or that the list starts with 1, or any of the other mistakes most of us occasionally make. How hard would it be to just change the numbers?
Most of it has been covered in the other responses. We don't know if there is a bonus or what the terms of the bonus would be. What we can speculate, however, is that, because of the langues of the current report, the 9 million might be counted as an extraordinary charge and not against the official profit.
We have to assume that the lawyers have significant costs, just like a mechanic or a software house or salesperson. It takes big wads of cash to send out DCMA notices, hire private investogators to harrass *nix people, and payoff congresspersons and prostitutes. I would suspect that like SCO, the profit will only be made if they win.
And remember, SCO says they would have made 7 million but they were high.
I don't think that Al Qaeda or any other terrorist faction will ever be able to design such weapons. I do however think that with the fall of the soviet union and other countries in massive recession that are in fact nuclear that they may be able to purchase said nuclear weapons of mass destruction. So did this article send us to code level orangish red? Nope, but something sure did.
My understanding is that the weapon itself is not immensely complicated to design. What is complicated is the precision machining of the parts, the acquisition of the fissionable material, and the delivery mechanism. This last is probably the most complicated, and the reason why Soviet technology may not be such a threat. Even if you have a working machine, it takes some level of skill to get it to get it off the launch pad.
In the end nuclear weapons appear to be a means to diplomacy. The cost to benifit ratio for them are just not so good. Countries with nuclear capability must be taken serious. Countries without are not. Parties that actually want to destroy things and impose fear do what terrorist organizations of all stripes do. They go in an bomb with conventional weapons. No one knows where the next hit is going to be. The more convectional bombs you have or can contrive, the more powerful you are.
The funny thing is that for years these were the same complaints that Mac users had about windows. Could not change screen resolution, network protocols without rebooting. Installations were difficult and uninstalls were nonexistant. GUI was slow and stupid.
The MS fanboys response was that these things were not important, and we should just hire a consultant. How the times have changed.
My assumption would be that the survey is about MS creating a product that will keep current customers happy. If a person fills out a survey indicating that they hate MS, or hate proprietary software, or the like, then these respondants are not now and will not be voluntary consumers of MS product. As such, making chages to satisfy these respondents would be of no importance.
These awards shows are so silly. I don' believe they satisfy the reasons for awards, which is to make people try harder to create better things. How is nominating the Hulk anything but a advertising gimmick.
OTOH, such silliness provides good foder for the satiists. A few years ago there was an animation called Thugs on Film. One of the shows was an award show in which the Thugs went to Hollywood to give a best supporting award. The winner of the award was for Julia Roberts bra in Erin Brockovich for best supporting effect. This is an award show I would tune into.
So more jobs leave the US, fewer of us have good jobs and the expendable income that accompanies said jobs, so we become less of a target for Spammers. As many have said, Spamming is profitable because consumers buy the products. No US consumers, no reason to spam the US. Market dies, so the product dies. Spam problem solved. I fail to see a downside to this.
I seriously doubt that Wal-Mart ever loses money on anything. They may not make a profit, but I guarantee they know where every penny is, and force suppliers and contractors to charge what Wal-Mart needs to pay in order to sell the product at a specific price point.
Given the state of the music industry, and the fact that the music industry allowed all their eggs to be placed in a very very few baskets, I would not be surprised in Wal-Mart was making money on each download. Wal-Mart already gets enough discounts on CDs to sell them below wholesale. Do you believe that they did not demand a 20% discount on what Apple pays. After all, if they had to charge 99 cents a track, a download would cost more than the physical CD.
The DOJ is pretty much doing a lame job supporting any laws. Look at how much work the NY AG has been having to do lately because the federales refuse to do anything but figure ways to not have to enforce the laws, except for the new laws that let them spy on private citizens while the corporations run rampant.
Why does real suck? I use it on OS X and am quite happy with it. I can turn off most of the spy features. Most content I download actually works. Many of my favorite sites support it seamlessly.
OTH, I do not even bother with WMP anymore. Nine times of ten there is a message about a needed update, a needed verification, or some website that must be consulted. WMP is wonderful at delivering eyeballs to advertisers to or 'protecting' digital content. As far as efficiently delivering good enough content to consumers, it fails totally.
And I understand you may be talking about image quality or sound quality, but that is why I have quicktime.
Slashdot Mirror
First, the protocol is overly complex. The receiver sets the puzzle. How does the receiver to this. But sending the puzzle before receiving the email? That is complex, perhaps involving connections that must remain open for tens of seconds, or lists that correlate puzzles to particular senders, and the sender must match the answer. How will the puzzle be generated. Will it be psuedorandom or pad. How will we gauge the strength of the puzzle. I do not see how this is superior to current filtering.
Second, alternate filtering methods will still be needed. Whitelists will have to be kept so that friends, interoffice mail, and current customers will not be challenged. Email that does not meet the challenge will still have to be accepted and filtered. The only advantage is that certain email will be tagged as 'safe' because the sender solved your puzzle. This 'safe' email will still often have to filtered to meet the specific needs of the receiver. For instance, a 'safe' email may still contain graphic sexual content unsuitable for the office.
Third, there may be no way to know whether the calculation was done. If the puzzle is pseudo-random, the sender may exploit some weakness. If the puzzle is off a standard one-time pad, and the number of puzzles are finite, or can be cataloged into a finite number of sets, the sender may have database that already contains complete or partial answers. So, even if the spammer is not using owned hardware, there is no way to know that each email is in fact generating any specific liability.
Again, this is a ploy for MS to sell servers to advertisers. The number of machines, and related number of MS licenses, is going to be non-trivial. The client will be built into outlook and the marketing will convince consumers that anything marked safe is legitimate advertising and not spam. This does nothing to solve the spam problem.
The form fact is not noticible. The reason I prefer this to the saucer adapter is the interchangable power cord. It is usually unnecesary for me to carry the cord, so it is nice to have the small adapter.
Of course, on /. we are morally opposed to lawyers making any sort of reasonable profit, so we would never participate in such a suit. We just complain and cry over the unfairness of it all, and hope some diety magically fixes the problem.
Landing on planet is harder. For one thing, we are trying to land from the start. We are not, like on the moon, just trying to hit mars with a piece of hardware. We have to navigate the mars climatology to place a spacecraft safely on the planet. This is very hard. And since the spacecraft is unmanned, and mars is so far away, everything has to be set up in advance. There is no chance for last minute corrections. Mission result take longer.
I think this is one of the problems of focusing only on the successes. We forget how hard innovation really is. We expect everything to be easy, and are unable to deal with the necessary frustration. Take a look at the work to get us on the moon. Just the size of the craft was an issue. And then try to tell us we are not doing well with mars.
Since the iPod is meant to be used with iTunes, I think the first thing that needs to be done is to convince Apple to ship iTunes with the ogg plugin installed and enabled. Once the do that, then it would make sense to update the iPod firmware to support it.
The complexity of a truly logical approach can be illustrated by looking at ETI. Let's break it question up into three parts. First, do they exists. Second, do they exist now. Third, will we meet them. Given the current scientific knowledge and a few reasonable assumptions, we can come up with an answer. The first assumption, of course, is the life is as is most common on earth, carbon based, and would require a sun like star and a earth like planet.
To the first we note that some scientist have looked at the number of suitable suns, waved their hands to figure out how many might contain planets(lately the hand waving has become more systematic) and the probability that the planet might develop life. The answer seems to be that it is not inconceivable that life like us might appear somewhere.
To the second we note the life of universe, the probably short life span of intelligent life if they cannot colonize other sun systems. Current physics makes it hard to move large numbers of people to other systems. Given these assumptions, the probability that life exist now seems vanishingly small.
To the third we have to look at physics as we know it, the size of the universe, and exceedingly small probability that life exists contemporaneously with us. Given these assumption, it is probably more likely that I would tunnel through my chair than an ETI would appear on our planet.
Obviously the conclusions change with the assumptions. Obviously modification to current theories might change the conclusions. But what we have now is we do not believe people when they say the meet ETI's, just like we don't believe in perpetual motion machines.
So, what did I just say? That ETIs do not exist or that they don't. It would be very easy for an agent of confusion to mince my words and make me look silly. in fact, an average person, with limited understanding of physics and probability, might think I was bonkers. And this is what is happening. It happened with cigarettes, even though research on their dangers go back one hundred years. It happens with food products, even though the reasonable balanced diet is well known and the consensus is that nothing beats consuming a reasonable number of calories with moderate exercise.
Global warming is probably happening. Not all observed effects can be attributed to non-human causes. There is a demonstrable mechanism by which humans might significantly effect the climate of the planet. Technology exists to halt those human generated mechanisms. It may turn out that spending on such technology is not necessary. OTOH, we put our children in the back seat and make them sleep in certain positions, and in the USA we take huge amounts of likely unnecessary supplements, and buy alarms for our houses and cars even though we live in safe neighborhoods. So why not try to do some minimal stuff to that might make our lives and our future better.
I don't understand why he won't admit to being scammed. If he admits his mistake he is just stupid. If he doesn't, then he is admitting criminal behavior. Not only that, but he is admitting that he belives criminal behavior to acceptable. It is bad enough to be greedy enough of a person to think crime is the best path to wealth. But to hang onto that notion even after the evidence is presented is just perverse.
With expandability, unless you have a specific expansion in mind, it may not be an issue. Memory on small form PC is often not more expandable than on a laptop. Often on an efficient PC there may only be one or two available slots, one bay, and the video card is integrated. Also, with USB and Firewire, one can get very efficient external connections to various devices. These devices can be easily removed from the main computer to conserve power.
You didn't mention if you were planning to keep this computer in one place, or move it around. Or if the computer is going to be a good climate controlled environment. In my experience a good portable is much more tolerant of movement and environment. This may or may not be a factor
In the decision Judge John M. Woolsey spoke specifically to pornographic. He defined pornographic as written for the purpose of exploiting sexuality. In the decision, he defined obscene as "tending to lead to impure and lustful thoughts. With regards to pornographic, the generally accepted interpretation of the ruling is that the book was written as an honest attempt at art, and was the sexual content was part of that art. WRT obscene, he basically said that it was a hard book and no one would read just to glare at the sexual content.
The scary things about the filters it that it has been shown that they are there to filter out information that certain parties find threatening, and not pornographic material. A nearly naked child-girl laying of a car is, by most definition, pornographic and obscene. A site listing definitions a sexual words that a child might here is not. The former can be found everywhere, the later is censored.
When the sleeve is not sufficient, I choose a appropriate larger bag. Mostly i choose either my computer backpack bag, no recommended with a intro physics of calculus book, or my Gap computer bag. I do require that the additional bag has a padded pocket for the computer. There are additional stresses involved when the computer is in the same bag as books.
So that is half of anything Intel currently makes, right?
The federal government is doing very little corporate prosecution. In fact it appears that much of their work is in corporate defense. So it is up to the states, as has been shown by NY. I do not think think SCO has anything to worry about from it's local AG. It will be up to one of the fortune 1000 companies to get pissed enough at the shenanigans and approach their state prosecutors. This, of course, will push it directly into the feds territory, and we will have the same problem.
Just to be clear, this juncture of the game has little to with the lawsuit. It is a diversion created by SCO to create publicity and maybe generate some cash. The lawsuit is between IBM and SCO. It may affect those that distribute *nix code. I see no way it affects those that use *nix code, even if they modified it and distribute it internally. If my company buys 100 ford trucks, modifies the engine for internal use, and then ford gets sued by another company for stealing the engine design, I do not have to pay the third company funds to continue to use that engine. I do not see how this is any different.
So here is a question. If the numbers are the issue, how many programmers used best standards and programmed using only the defined names. How many did not assume that there was an order, or that the list starts with 1, or any of the other mistakes most of us occasionally make. How hard would it be to just change the numbers?
Most of it has been covered in the other responses. We don't know if there is a bonus or what the terms of the bonus would be. What we can speculate, however, is that, because of the langues of the current report, the 9 million might be counted as an extraordinary charge and not against the official profit.
And remember, SCO says they would have made 7 million but they were high.
My understanding is that the weapon itself is not immensely complicated to design. What is complicated is the precision machining of the parts, the acquisition of the fissionable material, and the delivery mechanism. This last is probably the most complicated, and the reason why Soviet technology may not be such a threat. Even if you have a working machine, it takes some level of skill to get it to get it off the launch pad.
In the end nuclear weapons appear to be a means to diplomacy. The cost to benifit ratio for them are just not so good. Countries with nuclear capability must be taken serious. Countries without are not. Parties that actually want to destroy things and impose fear do what terrorist organizations of all stripes do. They go in an bomb with conventional weapons. No one knows where the next hit is going to be. The more convectional bombs you have or can contrive, the more powerful you are.
The MS fanboys response was that these things were not important, and we should just hire a consultant. How the times have changed.
My assumption would be that the survey is about MS creating a product that will keep current customers happy. If a person fills out a survey indicating that they hate MS, or hate proprietary software, or the like, then these respondants are not now and will not be voluntary consumers of MS product. As such, making chages to satisfy these respondents would be of no importance.
OTOH, such silliness provides good foder for the satiists. A few years ago there was an animation called Thugs on Film. One of the shows was an award show in which the Thugs went to Hollywood to give a best supporting award. The winner of the award was for Julia Roberts bra in Erin Brockovich for best supporting effect. This is an award show I would tune into.
So more jobs leave the US, fewer of us have good jobs and the expendable income that accompanies said jobs, so we become less of a target for Spammers. As many have said, Spamming is profitable because consumers buy the products. No US consumers, no reason to spam the US. Market dies, so the product dies. Spam problem solved. I fail to see a downside to this.
OTOH, I guess that would be a hard one call!
Given the state of the music industry, and the fact that the music industry allowed all their eggs to be placed in a very very few baskets, I would not be surprised in Wal-Mart was making money on each download. Wal-Mart already gets enough discounts on CDs to sell them below wholesale. Do you believe that they did not demand a 20% discount on what Apple pays. After all, if they had to charge 99 cents a track, a download would cost more than the physical CD.
The DOJ is pretty much doing a lame job supporting any laws. Look at how much work the NY AG has been having to do lately because the federales refuse to do anything but figure ways to not have to enforce the laws, except for the new laws that let them spy on private citizens while the corporations run rampant.
OTH, I do not even bother with WMP anymore. Nine times of ten there is a message about a needed update, a needed verification, or some website that must be consulted. WMP is wonderful at delivering eyeballs to advertisers to or 'protecting' digital content. As far as efficiently delivering good enough content to consumers, it fails totally.
And I understand you may be talking about image quality or sound quality, but that is why I have quicktime.