I used to get alot of mail addressed directly to my hotmail account - which I don't give out (its a redirect from a pop3 account).
Someone obviously got a subscriber list from the hotmail site, as you would see 20 or so names alphabetically sorted near your own name in the To or CC list.
These just stopped happening (Maybe the spammers were overwhelmed with a sense of remorse, but I doubt it). I never changed anything in my settings. They aren't in my bulk mail. I think microsoft is filtering them out. Anyone else seen this?
If it is happening, its the most effective thing I've seen so far as a spam filter.
The only practical way to insure that the majority of the "people" want a law is to ditch the representative government model and go to one person - one vote and make voting mandatory. And guess what... that isn't practical.
Kierthos
Australia has 1 vote per person, a directly elected representative house and a proportionally elected house and voting is mandatory.
krenskeoz
With due respect, I have to concur with krenskeoz on this one.
Australia certainly manages to have both compulsorary voting and (close to) one vote - one person. This may come as a surprise to other democracies - I understand it to be one of the few in the world that requires voting. But certainly it is practical, we manage just fine.
It is more likely that it does not suit the current parties in the US to expand the voting base by making it requisite, nor to equalise the votes of a californian to say, that of west virginia. Indeed, it makes it much cheaper to run your campaign if you don't have to concentrate much on many states.
Of when manufacturers altered the BIOS of a computer to report it was faster than it was - mostly by pretending the motherboard had a level 2 cache - back in the days when memory was expensive.
Now that there is alot of money to be made on graphics, it shouldn't be a surprise that something similar was attempted.
This will probably backfire on them now that it is out in the open.
If not, what about Australians who host content overseas? Simple. They still need a local ISP account to connect to the net and maintain their site. If you're hosting unsuitable material abroad, you will be prohibited from getting a local ISP account.
So they are going to trawl every foreign internet site to see if they are maintained by someone who lives in NSW? For real?
The sad thing here will be the first person that the government decides to make a test case of. If we are lucky, they will be hosting some child porn - but most of that is being swapped in things like peer to peer networks that will be hard to track down.
Which leaves some poor sod who will get nailed for publishing something dubious, but probably not that bad.
Hands up anyone who thinks this will make child porn go away
It is an democracy. One of the oldest in the world. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop some idiot from getting elected and passing crazy (and probably unenforcable) legislation.
I wonder if they could use boron instead, which is fairly inert, and a beam of neutrons to accomplish the same task.
Makes sense to me. I guess they started with the napalm when something more specific might be better. Probably isn't in their main line of research, so they didn't think of it. Alternatively, they wanted to start with the napalm approach from a research perspective and remove one less thing from the chain of possible failures.
Cancer cells are cells which multiply indefinatly, as opposed to normal cells, which only multiply for a specified amoutn of time, and then die off (with the exception of stem cells). Correct?
Its a little more complex.
Normal DNA has caps on the end called telomeres, which don't code for anything directly, but act as a lead in type message for DNA replication (The enzymes have to know where to start replicating DNA from).
Each division fails to fully replicate the Telomeres, which shorten and ultimately lead to a form of (cellular) aging where further cell replication cannot occur.
Enzymes called telomerases can repair the DNA, and stem cells express this. Cancer cells also must repair the telomeres or they will die. This (might) be a possible cause for cancers to spontaneously resolve - my guess here on this one but I'd love feedback.
A cell may not have to divide to live on. Brain and muscle cells generally don't divide, which gives you a certain stability in your shape and thinking processes. They can live for 100 years in an arrested (G0) phase of the cell division cycle. They die mostly because of their choice to do so, a process called apoptysis, which clearly has more benefit than you might think at first.
Well' if I am right so far, can someone tell me why more research isn't going into controlling cancer, rather than destroying it?
Lots of research has gone into this. There are drugs currently in use that renormalise cancer cells including retinoids and thiolidamide, to name a few.
Like, I would think, if you could start and stop the cancer effect at will, you could live forever?
We are already living much longer than we were designed for. Average lifespan has increased tremendously over the last few hundred years from 20 years to 70-80 years. Death is no longer a thing that comes from nowhere or in response to the environment. Now it is considered more of an intrinsic clock in a person.
There are several impediments in the way of acheiving immortality:
The sun will engulf the planet. The universe is finite. You will die, get over it.
Secondly, gene therapy wont help if you stand in front of an oncoming truck. Death can still come from without as well as within.
Thirdly, ageing occurs at many levels. For example, the eye is a largely non living optical instrument. The denaturing of protiens in the lens causes presbyopia (age related long sightedness) in most people in their forties. The treatment for this will probably not be gene therapies (except perhaps to grow whole new eyes), but rather lens implants. Other (mostly) non living parts of your body include tendons, heart valves and teeth, all of which can wear out and do not heal. If it wasn't alive to start with, this technique won't repair it.
Fourthly, other forms of agening occur, such as scarring and stretching. Skin stretching and loss of elasticity has a profound effect on our outward appearance but has little to do with cellular ageing. Similar changes internally lead to blood vessel diseas such as aneurysms.
The specific hardware dependent bits I was thinking of was the mouse pointer (hardware sprite) and the ability to have multiple screens which slid up and down (which could have windows within them). Sort of like workspaces on linux, but actually able to slide over each other. I've never seen an OS do anything like that since. It could be done now, easily, but at the time it was only the hardware that made it possible.
I suppose that the Hold and modify mode of displaying colour graphics could also be described as an efficient graphics compression algorithm that predated other lossy algorithms, and was totally intrinsic to the hardware.
Just shrinking the process size would automatically speed it up.
So would increasing the power (esp if CMOS) or changing the substrate potentially.
Its not a very different question to how do you speed up a 1 GHz Pentium III? Sure you can clock it faster, but ask any overclocker, there is a limit to that (usually thermal as you jack up the power).
To go from a 1 GHz P3 to a 2 GHz P3 isn't just a case of doubling the clock speed either.
Doesn't a "careful clock" design defeat the whole design structure of a modern CPU?
I thought that the whole aim of a EPIC/VLIW/pipelined architecture is to have everything running at once on the chip. Break each instruction into as many steps as possible, pipeline them, execute them all at once. When you would stall from a branch point, build hardware to speculate the outcome and continue on anyway. Where you tend to wait for arithmetic results, build multiple ALU's to work in sychrony and use the EPIC/VLIW instruction set with compiler optomisation to use them all at once.
Am I missing something here, or isn't that part of how you make the CPU's so fast? Don't waste the silicon in the first place?
BTW - IANAEE so I'm just looking for information on this one - correct me if I am wrong.
HDD speed if you are actually using virtual memory. Which is dependent on how much RAM you have.
Operating system overhead - Any GUI will really kill off performance, excepting perhaps BEOS (Pervasive multithreading) and I think the Amiga OS (Which was heavily hardware dependent)
FPU speed and use of processor optomisations for 3d graphic rendering.
Video card speed if you are doing 3d graphics.
CPU function which comprises of many factors including:
CPU speed
Motherboard Speed
Ability of CPU to remain within level 1 and level 2 cache.
Speed of level 2 cache (Level one cache usually runs at the same speed as the CPU)
Network speed / modem speed if you are surfing the web like you are at the moment.
In other words, for most people, CPU speed stopped being an issue about 5 years ago. For most gamers it became much less of an issue about 2 years ago (especially compared with network latency).
Which was around about when the average consumer started to get interested in the number of MHz a system ran at.
When the next major worm breaks out and infects 200 000 machines - and it turns out that microsoft knew about it for 2 weeks.
And when they find out that the worm turns off the autoupdate feature, or even uses windows system restore to force any manual patch out of the system... That's a concept virus - one that self repairs (Is this an original thought?).
And when it happens, people will want to know why the patch didn't happen ASAP when the vulnerability is brought to light.
I seem to remember Intel going out of its way to make IA-64 run under linux.
I think that is because they had no choice. I don't think that there is any good microsoft architecture for IA-64. So if you want to have speed, you need Linux or *nix.
So using native transmeta instructions across the bus could easily slow things down
Yes, but you could compress the instruction set and just use the code morphing software to decompress the instruction codes on the fly to minimise the memory requirements of the software both on disk and in ram/cache.
And if 200 million out of 300 million Americans are already convinced that a police state is an improvement, then what?
Well, I guess you will have to wait for the rebound on all the abuses. I think that the Fed already gets the odd wrong person with fairly disasterous consequences (for the person, not the Fed).
Unless of course they get the press to stop reporting these little problems also.
I hope for everyones sake that people realise how futile alot of this sort of legislation would be - none of it would actually have stopped 9/11 or the anthrax stuff either.
The priciple here is that even if you do something wrong, you generally are and could be again a useful member of society.
Most crimes are pretty low level, inconsequential stuff. A few are major.
Even if the person is guilty of somthing serious, eg., major theft, doesn't mean that they should lose all their rights.
I'm sure you understand this too. You aren't seriously suggesting that it would be ok to, for example, break the arms and legs of someone because they stole some money, are you?
Really, only the worst of offences deserve the worst of punishments.
Very few people have never broken the law. Probably no one by the time they become adult. I mean, you have never run a red light? Always returned the extra money back when you were given too much change back from a purchase? (If you did this knowingly, its pretty close to theft!).
But these are MINOR crimes, and we would have to lock up everyone to deal with them. For which there is no need, and no real threat to society. Except if you try and introduce a police state to deal with it.
Think it through.
Even if you commit a crime, you should still have rights.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to get alot of mail addressed directly to my hotmail account - which I don't give out (its a redirect from a pop3 account).
Someone obviously got a subscriber list from the hotmail site, as you would see 20 or so names alphabetically sorted near your own name in the To or CC list.
These just stopped happening (Maybe the spammers were overwhelmed with a sense of remorse, but I doubt it). I never changed anything in my settings. They aren't in my bulk mail. I think microsoft is filtering them out. Anyone else seen this?
If it is happening, its the most effective thing I've seen so far as a spam filter.
Michael
The only practical way to insure that the majority of the "people" want a law is to ditch the representative government model and go to one person - one vote and make voting mandatory. And guess what... that isn't practical.
Kierthos
Australia has 1 vote per person, a directly elected representative house and a proportionally elected house and voting is mandatory.
krenskeoz
With due respect, I have to concur with krenskeoz on this one.
Australia certainly manages to have both compulsorary voting and (close to) one vote - one person. This may come as a surprise to other democracies - I understand it to be one of the few in the world that requires voting. But certainly it is practical, we manage just fine.
It is more likely that it does not suit the current parties in the US to expand the voting base by making it requisite, nor to equalise the votes of a californian to say, that of west virginia. Indeed, it makes it much cheaper to run your campaign if you don't have to concentrate much on many states.
Michael
Just a question (slightly but not badly offtopic).
Has microsoft actually improved their spam filters lately for hotmail? I seem to be getting alot less spam through them.
Michael
Of when manufacturers altered the BIOS of a computer to report it was faster than it was - mostly by pretending the motherboard had a level 2 cache - back in the days when memory was expensive.
Now that there is alot of money to be made on graphics, it shouldn't be a surprise that something similar was attempted.
This will probably backfire on them now that it is out in the open.
If not, what about Australians who host content overseas?
Simple. They still need a local ISP account to connect to the net and maintain their site. If you're hosting unsuitable material abroad, you will be prohibited from getting a local ISP account.
So they are going to trawl every foreign internet site to see if they are maintained by someone who lives in NSW? For real?
Michael
The sad thing here will be the first person that the government decides to make a test case of. If we are lucky, they will be hosting some child porn - but most of that is being swapped in things like peer to peer networks that will be hard to track down.
Which leaves some poor sod who will get nailed for publishing something dubious, but probably not that bad.
Hands up anyone who thinks this will make child porn go away
Michael.
It is an democracy. One of the oldest in the world. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop some idiot from getting elected and passing crazy (and probably unenforcable) legislation.
Michael
Just a little difficult, isn't it?
How do you define unsuitable for children?
Will we be sending the storm troops around to the US to bring the rogue publishers back to justice?
If not, what about Australians who host content overseas?
How exactly are they going to enforce this?
Michael
Well, its not a bad bet in the short run - if the technology was available. At least you could make a backup.
Michael
I wonder if they could use boron instead, which is fairly inert, and a beam of neutrons to accomplish the same task.
Makes sense to me. I guess they started with the napalm when something more specific might be better. Probably isn't in their main line of research, so they didn't think of it. Alternatively, they wanted to start with the napalm approach from a research perspective and remove one less thing from the chain of possible failures.
Michael
Its a little more complex.
Normal DNA has caps on the end called telomeres, which don't code for anything directly, but act as a lead in type message for DNA replication (The enzymes have to know where to start replicating DNA from).
Each division fails to fully replicate the Telomeres, which shorten and ultimately lead to a form of (cellular) aging where further cell replication cannot occur.
Enzymes called telomerases can repair the DNA, and stem cells express this. Cancer cells also must repair the telomeres or they will die. This (might) be a possible cause for cancers to spontaneously resolve - my guess here on this one but I'd love feedback.
A cell may not have to divide to live on. Brain and muscle cells generally don't divide, which gives you a certain stability in your shape and thinking processes. They can live for 100 years in an arrested (G0) phase of the cell division cycle. They die mostly because of their choice to do so, a process called apoptysis, which clearly has more benefit than you might think at first.
Well' if I am right so far, can someone tell me why more research isn't going into controlling cancer, rather than destroying it?
Lots of research has gone into this. There are drugs currently in use that renormalise cancer cells including retinoids and thiolidamide, to name a few.
Like, I would think, if you could start and stop the cancer effect at will, you could live forever?
We are already living much longer than we were designed for. Average lifespan has increased tremendously over the last few hundred years from 20 years to 70-80 years. Death is no longer a thing that comes from nowhere or in response to the environment. Now it is considered more of an intrinsic clock in a person.
There are several impediments in the way of acheiving immortality:
The sun will engulf the planet. The universe is finite. You will die, get over it.
Secondly, gene therapy wont help if you stand in front of an oncoming truck. Death can still come from without as well as within.
Thirdly, ageing occurs at many levels. For example, the eye is a largely non living optical instrument. The denaturing of protiens in the lens causes presbyopia (age related long sightedness) in most people in their forties. The treatment for this will probably not be gene therapies (except perhaps to grow whole new eyes), but rather lens implants. Other (mostly) non living parts of your body include tendons, heart valves and teeth, all of which can wear out and do not heal. If it wasn't alive to start with, this technique won't repair it.
Fourthly, other forms of agening occur, such as scarring and stretching. Skin stretching and loss of elasticity has a profound effect on our outward appearance but has little to do with cellular ageing. Similar changes internally lead to blood vessel diseas such as aneurysms.
A little long winded, but hope that this helps.
Michael
The specific hardware dependent bits I was thinking of was the mouse pointer (hardware sprite) and the ability to have multiple screens which slid up and down (which could have windows within them). Sort of like workspaces on linux, but actually able to slide over each other. I've never seen an OS do anything like that since. It could be done now, easily, but at the time it was only the hardware that made it possible.
I suppose that the Hold and modify mode of displaying colour graphics could also be described as an efficient graphics compression algorithm that predated other lossy algorithms, and was totally intrinsic to the hardware.
Michael
Just shrinking the process size would automatically speed it up.
So would increasing the power (esp if CMOS) or changing the substrate potentially.
Its not a very different question to how do you speed up a 1 GHz Pentium III? Sure you can clock it faster, but ask any overclocker, there is a limit to that (usually thermal as you jack up the power).
To go from a 1 GHz P3 to a 2 GHz P3 isn't just a case of doubling the clock speed either.
Doesn't a "careful clock" design defeat the whole design structure of a modern CPU?
I thought that the whole aim of a EPIC/VLIW/pipelined architecture is to have everything running at once on the chip. Break each instruction into as many steps as possible, pipeline them, execute them all at once. When you would stall from a branch point, build hardware to speculate the outcome and continue on anyway. Where you tend to wait for arithmetic results, build multiple ALU's to work in sychrony and use the EPIC/VLIW instruction set with compiler optomisation to use them all at once.
Am I missing something here, or isn't that part of how you make the CPU's so fast? Don't waste the silicon in the first place?
BTW - IANAEE so I'm just looking for information on this one - correct me if I am wrong.
Michael
Well, I guess the techies are too busy posting to this one to moderate. Certainly worked for me.
Michael
HDD speed if you are actually using virtual memory. Which is dependent on how much RAM you have.
Operating system overhead - Any GUI will really kill off performance, excepting perhaps BEOS (Pervasive multithreading) and I think the Amiga OS (Which was heavily hardware dependent)
FPU speed and use of processor optomisations for 3d graphic rendering.
Video card speed if you are doing 3d graphics.
CPU function which comprises of many factors including:
CPU speed
Motherboard Speed
Ability of CPU to remain within level 1 and level 2 cache.
Speed of level 2 cache (Level one cache usually runs at the same speed as the CPU)
Network speed / modem speed if you are surfing the web like you are at the moment.
In other words, for most people, CPU speed stopped being an issue about 5 years ago. For most gamers it became much less of an issue about 2 years ago (especially compared with network latency).
Which was around about when the average consumer started to get interested in the number of MHz a system ran at.
Its all marketing
Michael
It will backfire on Microsoft.
... That's a concept virus - one that self repairs (Is this an original thought?).
When the next major worm breaks out and infects 200 000 machines - and it turns out that microsoft knew about it for 2 weeks.
And when they find out that the worm turns off the autoupdate feature, or even uses windows system restore to force any manual patch out of the system
And when it happens, people will want to know why the patch didn't happen ASAP when the vulnerability is brought to light.
Michael
Well yes, but it couldn't transmit radio waves because that's damn easy to detect,
Actually, spread spectrum technology makes it quite hard to detect transmissions. (To the best of my knowledge).
Michael
I seem to remember Intel going out of its way to make IA-64 run under linux.
I think that is because they had no choice. I don't think that there is any good microsoft architecture for IA-64. So if you want to have speed, you need Linux or *nix.
Michael
So using native transmeta instructions across the bus could easily slow things down
Yes, but you could compress the instruction set and just use the code morphing software to decompress the instruction codes on the fly to minimise the memory requirements of the software both on disk and in ram/cache.
Michael
That is just so low tech - didn't paper notebooks go out sometime last millenium? ;-)
I personally have ditched my watch, as my phone tells the time and I have to have it on me most of the time anyway.
Getting a combined GSM phone plus organiser would be the next logical step. Any good ones available for the palm?
Michael
And if 200 million out of 300 million Americans are already convinced that a police state is an improvement, then what?
Well, I guess you will have to wait for the rebound on all the abuses. I think that the Fed already gets the odd wrong person with fairly disasterous consequences (for the person, not the Fed).
Unless of course they get the press to stop reporting these little problems also.
I hope for everyones sake that people realise how futile alot of this sort of legislation would be - none of it would actually have stopped 9/11 or the anthrax stuff either.
Michael
It could make it into court. Just not the case that is being prosecuted. But it could go into another case against another person, could it not?
Or how about another case subsequently about the same person, even if they have been found innocent against the original crime?
Michael
Even if you are convicted, you have rights.
The priciple here is that even if you do something wrong, you generally are and could be again a useful member of society.
Most crimes are pretty low level, inconsequential stuff. A few are major.
Even if the person is guilty of somthing serious, eg., major theft, doesn't mean that they should lose all their rights.
I'm sure you understand this too. You aren't seriously suggesting that it would be ok to, for example, break the arms and legs of someone because they stole some money, are you?
Really, only the worst of offences deserve the worst of punishments.
Very few people have never broken the law. Probably no one by the time they become adult. I mean, you have never run a red light? Always returned the extra money back when you were given too much change back from a purchase? (If you did this knowingly, its pretty close to theft!).
But these are MINOR crimes, and we would have to lock up everyone to deal with them. For which there is no need, and no real threat to society. Except if you try and introduce a police state to deal with it.
Think it through.
Even if you commit a crime, you should still have rights.
Michael
Actually, you don't know that.
They should have the presumption of innocence.
Those who feel otherwise should try living in a police state.
Those who feel a police state is an improvement should stay there.
Michael