How does "some 'wet behind the ears' kid" become "someone experienced"? Option 1 - work with experienced people for a few years so they can tell him which mistakes to avoid (and why).
Option 2 - work by himself for a few years, making a few thousand (highly educational) mistakes along the way.
In just the last month I've taped a bunch of stuff in the wee hours on nerdly channels like PBS, History Channel, etc:
Himalaya travelogue documentary about Egyptian religion and religious architecture restoring a medieval temple in the mountains of Nepal a series about famous cities - Carthage, Constantinople, Venice archeological investigations of 2 US Civil War battlegrounds some episodes of Rough Science
Also, I never miss the local news. Sometimes it only takes 5 minutes to watch the whole thing since I fast-forward thru bullshit human interest stories, but I get to watch all the bits I care about.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (*) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
If people considered UNIX to be notoriously insecure in 1991, what did they consider to be secure? Surely not MS-DOS. What else was there to compare it to? VMS?
The various IBM mainframe OS choices?
OS/400?
There were a zillion wierd mini architectures/OS combos you could buy in 1991.
If MS intends to give away or sell below cost its AV software - which it would almost have to do in order to drive McAfee et al. out of business - they could be losing a whole lot of money.
How much have they spent propping up XBOX and MSN?
Microsoft isn't afraid to burn a few hundred million bucks if they want to keep a player in a given marketplace.
You can't use the mouse effectively to get to the Start menu since you may need to cross (at worst) two whole desktops. Someone suggested moving the menu to the rightmost display to halve the distance, but this is a kludge. Sure, you can also use the Windows key... But wait, this keyboard doesn't have one...
CTRL-ESC opens the start menu,/me types into my Model M keyboard with no windows keys.
It is that the people lacking social skills that become as good in math as they potentially can. Rather than spending the weekend and evenings in highschool and college partying and getting laid, they study.
There's lots of timewasters for social-skill deprived undergrads - D&D, WoW, etc.
> How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes?
You can't. Even if you could, the changes would happen long after you've left.
> If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way > to teach myself?"
Pick something you want to learn. Download it, RTFM, and play with it.
You'll have better luck if you have a concrete objective in mind, i.e. learn about databases by setting up a simple database to track your comic book collection, run queries against it, make a PHP front end to search it etc.
You don't build on a basement because you're scared of cold floors, you build a basement because you're afraid the frost heaves will crack your slab and maybe tear the house in half.
They build lots of stuff on slabs in Canuckistan too, i.e. commercial and retail. But for residential construction you've got to go down so far that you might as well just build a basement and get the extra space.
Slashdot Mirror
Option 2 - work by himself for a few years, making a few thousand (highly educational) mistakes along the way.
I said the same thing before I bought a DVR.
In just the last month I've taped a bunch of stuff in the wee hours on nerdly channels like PBS, History Channel, etc:
Himalaya travelogue
documentary about Egyptian religion and religious architecture
restoring a medieval temple in the mountains of Nepal
a series about famous cities - Carthage, Constantinople, Venice
archeological investigations of 2 US Civil War battlegrounds
some episodes of Rough Science
Also, I never miss the local news. Sometimes it only takes 5 minutes to watch the whole thing since I fast-forward thru bullshit human interest stories, but I get to watch all the bits I care about.
http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Your post advocates a
(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(*) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
The various IBM mainframe OS choices?
OS/400?
There were a zillion wierd mini architectures/OS combos you could buy in 1991.
Set up an IMAP server. Seriously.
> The Canadians are prudes and just refuse to say what the facts are
Ever been to Montreal?
I didn't get much calculus, statics or dynamics in K-6.
How much have they spent propping up XBOX and MSN?
Microsoft isn't afraid to burn a few hundred million bucks if they want to keep a player in a given marketplace.
CTRL-ESC opens the start menu,
D&D is perhaps unique as a social activity that requires very few social skills.
There's lots of timewasters for social-skill deprived undergrads - D&D, WoW, etc.
> does it work with iTunes? Or, failing that (and it is a big failing) does it have
> something better?
I believe it is fully BitTorrent compatible.
Why not ship a hard drive with the data, and charge a nominal fee?
Don't forget about comic books, less pages/MB and they publish more every month.
That's why we have e-book warez sites.
> How much is land going for up in Canada?
Varies wildly, it's a big country.
There's a lot of cheap land if you don't mind living a little off the beaten path.
> Can foriegners own Canadian land?
Yes.
> How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes?
You can't. Even if you could, the changes would happen long after you've left.
> If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way
> to teach myself?"
Pick something you want to learn. Download it, RTFM, and play with it.
You'll have better luck if you have a concrete objective in mind, i.e. learn about databases by setting up a simple database to track your comic book collection, run queries against it, make a PHP front end to search it etc.
Doesn't mnemonic the Save, though.
ZZ is 2 keystrokes and even less mnemonic.
from TFA:
> The Netstix 200xm-cf is available now, with a 4-Volt wall adapter
Yeah, but :wq is mnemonic, write quit
Heh. Which of those will help you learn APL?
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190516&cid= 15677751
Yeah, but there's precious little genuine innovation in this field.
Teh new hotness always seems to be a rehash of stuff done long ago on some freaky mainframe/mini architecture.
> However, my penis is touched by a woman regularly. I win.
I've told you before, we don't want to hear about the herpes clinic.
You don't build on a basement because you're scared of cold floors, you build a basement because you're afraid the frost heaves will crack your slab and maybe tear the house in half.
They build lots of stuff on slabs in Canuckistan too, i.e. commercial and retail. But for residential construction you've got to go down so far that you might as well just build a basement and get the extra space.