I agree; it is possible that the lady in question was not a profitable customer, and the software was right to block her frequent returns because she is a money-losing customer. The market will tell us who's customer-classifying software is doing the best job.
I also agree that there is a social risk of all of us being classified as "good" or "bad", similar to the current risk of the credit rating agencies (those three credit rating agencies being responsible for the identity-theft problem). However, unlike the credit-rating problem, consumers can avoid being rated by stores by paying cash, refusing to give identity when returning goods, and (as a common consequence) accepting store credit instead of cash back when they return something. Observation: if the customer is truthful about being a frequent shopper, then store credit should be acceptable for returns.
Sounds like a great way for retailors to shoot their own feet off. The Linked article makes the case perfectly: a frequent buying customer, who therefore is a frequent returner, gets flagged, gets pissed off, and gets turned off, never to return. By annoying this customer, the Express just lost $2K/year of revenue. Do this often enough, and they will chase off all their high-volume business, doing huge damage to the bottom line.
Computers are powerful tools. Using them foolishly in the cut-throat retail business will quickly show which practices are best.
Hell, no. ISS flies at about 140 miles IIRC, and SSO peaks at 62 miles. Much worse, SSO does not have the power to reach orbital velocity, which (again IIRC) is nearly an order of magnitude more energy than is required to just get up to space altitudes.
People who actually know these numbers are welcome to correct me, they are just rough-order-of-magnitude guesses, and it was just a joke-post in the first place.
Respect yourself, value your time, do not help others with computer problems. Do not feel obligated. You will not get play from girls this way. Charge per hour, say you're too busy, tell them to go to student services and wait in line. Hours will go down the toiliet installing some stupid windows driver for people who will look upon you as a servant after you "helped" them.
I agree with this.
Unfortunately the people doing the hiring will only look at your gpa, and will totally discount any IT skills gained outside of class in a college environment. Stop screwing around with linux and reading slashdot and do your scheme project and cpeg lab. If you were smart enough to pick up linux in high school you can catch up during the summers on changes during the school year.
As an employer I must vehemently disagree with this. I value distinguished open source contribs to real systems above GPAs. Only idiot managers judge by GPA alone, or even primarily.
Get to the gym get in shape, lay off the tripple big grille burgers in the student centers.
... but I do agree with this. I was a geek and hated gym class (regimented jock fascism) in high school, but learned to appreciate and benefit from individual physical activity in college. Go do something, your body and mind will both benefit.
Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
What we need here is some mechanism to make the corporate fictitious person do some jail time. Perhaps by shutting the corporation down for the duration of the sentence.
The flyer that 3 Unsafe Laws wants you to download and hand around is a.doc file:( While they're harping about ethics and artificial life forms, someoneone should explain viruses to these people:)
Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Methane is, at best, a byproduct of oil production.
Sorry, you're just plain wrong. Natural gas exploration, drilling, and extraction is a major activity of the petrolium industry. Alternate sources of methane such as rotting organic matter are a promising way to generate methane without drilling from renewable sources, but that is not the major source today.
Moderate parent mis-informative! The Toshiba fuel cell runs on methanol, not methane.
Sorry, my bad; the article does indeed say methanol.
I made this mistake because fuel cells normally run on hydrogen, and occasionally on methane with a converter unit that in-line converts the methane (CH4) into hydrogen (h2) and carbondioxide (CO2).
While I'm not a fuel cell expert, I'm baffed how a fuel cell can run on methanol. Unless it isn't really a fuel cell (a device that produces electric current directly from the H2 + O2 -> H2O process similar to batteries) but rather is one of those micro-turbine units that is just burning the methanol to spin a turbine and an alternator.
You presumed, without justification, that because I support the use of violence to preclude greater evils, that I necessarily support the Bush war on Iraq. I do not, because IMHO Bush never met the burden of proof that this was a just war.
I probably should have inserted a caveat there: I agree that the war against Iraq was a sham perpetrated by the Bush administration for their own purposes, and had nothing to do with WMD. Of all the times we should have intervened with military force to stop a brutal dictator, this was not the one.
Good question. I ran an interesting experiment in this space. For about six months, I PGP-signed all my e-mail. No apparent change in how anyone interacts with me. Then I upgraded my mail client and did not upgrade the GPG module because I was too lazy, and started sending non-signed e-mail. I got zero complaints from people asking if this new, non-authenticated traffic was actually authentic.
Conclusion: PGP signing is completely ineffective, because even in extreme cases, users ignore the absence of signatures.
Furthermore, this is all irrelevant to the point of spam. Spam prevention requires authentication at a different level:
PGP authenticates that this mail did in fact originate from the hands of Crispin Cowan
SMTP-layer authentication would authenticate that the mail did in fact come from immunix.com (and not some trivially forged "From:" header) and if SMTP AUTH was a required part of the protocol, could authenticate that "crispin" was in fact authorized to send mail via immunix.com
The difference is that the former is presented to users, possibly with a "bad/no signature" flag on the e-mail if the authentication fails. The latter is just never delivered at all without authentication, because your server would not accept mail from immunix.com without a signature matching immunix.com, and the immunix.com MTA would not let me send any mail without a valid password (that last part is actually true thanks to SMTP AUTH).
Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
On one hand, you are correct: I am not actually serious in suggesting torture and cruelty as punishments for spammers. That was just hype to suggest that if the penalties were much more severe (on par with grand theft, which it is) instead of might-get-sued-but-probably-not wussy penalties we sort-of have now, then a lot fewer people would spam.
On the other hand, I fundamentally disagree with your naive plea for peace and harmony. That first-order desire for peace at any cost is what lead Nevill Chamberlin to cave in to Hitler's demands. Similarly, ten years of genocide in the Balkans could have been prevented by a forceful NATO response to Milosevic. Similarly the genocide of Cambodia could have been stopped if anyone had cared enough to stop Pol Pot.
There is a word for people who are completely unwilling to use violence to stop aggression: victims.
The costs these fucktards incur upon everyone else leaves us with a wasteland. If it weren't for vigilant individuals spending their free time trying to fight the problem, the internet would probably die
And praise be to those vigilant individuals. However, it is not that the Internet would die; more like this crappy insecure non-authenticated protocol called SMTP would die. The only problem with just pre-emptorily killing it ourselves is that it would cost many $billions to replace it.
My favorite alternative to replacing SMTP is to adjust the penalty for activities like this guy S.Pammer to be "head mounted on a stick". There is lots of data that says that a majorit of all spam is sent by the top 200 spammers; kill them all in greusome ways, and they are unlikely to have followers:-)
Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Profit ratio is the same as performance improvement. You both divide and subtract. The expressions I wrote were too simplistic; it is really (revenue - cost)/cost. Deep Impact did better because the investors had to invest (risk) just half as much money to make 2/3 as much profit.
Deep Impact did 2/3 of the business, which is hardly "destroyed". It did it on 1/2 the money, which is arguably a better investment.
And IMHO, Deep Impact was a much better movie; the plot was much more believable. IMDB somewhat concurs, in that the viewer rating for Deep Impact is 5.9 and Armagedon is 5.7. I cannot confirm or refute the claim of which film was rushed to market, but the Deep Impact people clearly did a better job.
Back to video games: anyone have data on how much Sony spent developing PS/2 vs. what MS spent developing XBox?
C++ has the safety of C, and the performance of SmallTalk:(
There is no excuse for writing anything in C++ in this day and age:
If you are writing a kernel or an embedded bit whacker or a real-time thing, use C. C++ is too slow.
If you are writing an application, be it desktop, server, whatever, use Java or C#. C++ is far too unsafe.
If you are writing a rapid prototype, use PERL, or Python, or Ruby.
My condolances to the KDE kommunity. It's a cool desktop & all (I'm typing on it) but bolting your whole framework on a C++ basis was a really unfortunate choice. It dooms KDE to long-term security vulnerabilities.
Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Slashdot Mirror
I also agree that there is a social risk of all of us being classified as "good" or "bad", similar to the current risk of the credit rating agencies (those three credit rating agencies being responsible for the identity-theft problem). However, unlike the credit-rating problem, consumers can avoid being rated by stores by paying cash, refusing to give identity when returning goods, and (as a common consequence) accepting store credit instead of cash back when they return something. Observation: if the customer is truthful about being a frequent shopper, then store credit should be acceptable for returns.
Crispin
Computers are powerful tools. Using them foolishly in the cut-throat retail business will quickly show which practices are best.
Crispin
Crispin
Crispin
People who actually know these numbers are welcome to correct me, they are just rough-order-of-magnitude guesses, and it was just a joke-post in the first place.
Crispin
Crispin
Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Crispin
Crispin
Crispin
Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Crispin
Crispin
I made this mistake because fuel cells normally run on hydrogen, and occasionally on methane with a converter unit that in-line converts the methane (CH4) into hydrogen (h2) and carbondioxide (CO2).
While I'm not a fuel cell expert, I'm baffed how a fuel cell can run on methanol. Unless it isn't really a fuel cell (a device that produces electric current directly from the H2 + O2 -> H2O process similar to batteries) but rather is one of those micro-turbine units that is just burning the methanol to spin a turbine and an alternator.
Crispin
Crispin
You presumed, without justification, that because I support the use of violence to preclude greater evils, that I necessarily support the Bush war on Iraq. I do not, because IMHO Bush never met the burden of proof that this was a just war.
Crispin
Crispin
Crispin
Conclusion: PGP signing is completely ineffective, because even in extreme cases, users ignore the absence of signatures.
Furthermore, this is all irrelevant to the point of spam. Spam prevention requires authentication at a different level:
- PGP authenticates that this mail did in fact originate from the hands of Crispin Cowan
- SMTP-layer authentication would authenticate that the mail did in fact come from immunix.com (and not some trivially forged "From:" header) and if SMTP AUTH was a required part of the protocol, could authenticate that "crispin" was in fact authorized to send mail via immunix.com
The difference is that the former is presented to users, possibly with a "bad/no signature" flag on the e-mail if the authentication fails. The latter is just never delivered at all without authentication, because your server would not accept mail from immunix.com without a signature matching immunix.com, and the immunix.com MTA would not let me send any mail without a valid password (that last part is actually true thanks to SMTP AUTH).Crispin ----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
On the other hand, I fundamentally disagree with your naive plea for peace and harmony. That first-order desire for peace at any cost is what lead Nevill Chamberlin to cave in to Hitler's demands. Similarly, ten years of genocide in the Balkans could have been prevented by a forceful NATO response to Milosevic. Similarly the genocide of Cambodia could have been stopped if anyone had cared enough to stop Pol Pot.
There is a word for people who are completely unwilling to use violence to stop aggression: victims.
Crispin
My favorite alternative to replacing SMTP is to adjust the penalty for activities like this guy S.Pammer to be "head mounted on a stick". There is lots of data that says that a majorit of all spam is sent by the top 200 spammers; kill them all in greusome ways, and they are unlikely to have followers :-)
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Crispin
Crispin
- Deep Impact business
- Box office: $140M
- Rentals: $67M
- Total revenue: $207M
- Budget: $75M
- Profit margin: (140+67)/75 = 176%
- Armagedon business
- Box office: $201M
- Rentals: $104M
- Budget: $140M
- Total revenue: $305M
- Profit margin: (201+104)/140 = 118%
Deep Impact did 2/3 of the business, which is hardly "destroyed". It did it on 1/2 the money, which is arguably a better investment.And IMHO, Deep Impact was a much better movie; the plot was much more believable. IMDB somewhat concurs, in that the viewer rating for Deep Impact is 5.9 and Armagedon is 5.7. I cannot confirm or refute the claim of which film was rushed to market, but the Deep Impact people clearly did a better job.
Back to video games: anyone have data on how much Sony spent developing PS/2 vs. what MS spent developing XBox?
Crispin
There is no excuse for writing anything in C++ in this day and age:
- If you are writing a kernel or an embedded bit whacker or a real-time thing, use C. C++ is too slow.
- If you are writing an application, be it desktop, server, whatever, use Java or C#. C++ is far too unsafe.
- If you are writing a rapid prototype, use PERL, or Python, or Ruby.
My condolances to the KDE kommunity. It's a cool desktop & all (I'm typing on it) but bolting your whole framework on a C++ basis was a really unfortunate choice. It dooms KDE to long-term security vulnerabilities.Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.