Personally, I don't see how they were baiting anyone with the name. The way I look at it, the name makes it perfectly clear that the specific intent of the law was to legitimise spam (or at least to define legitimate spam, which may or may not be the same thing depending on your point of view).
Maybe if they called it CANT-SPAM I might have believed that it was at least a token attempt at preventing spam...
SPAM has nothing to do with free speech. A politician can't stand on my front lawn with a bull horn at night telling me why I should vote for him. Email is no different. Just because someone has a right to express themselves doesn't mean they are guaranteed an audience.
well, somebody already pointed out that many countries that have significantly more left leaning governments than the U.S. have very high incidences of toxoplasma infection (france being among the highest) so i suspect that toxoplasma (if it is politically motivated) must sense some sort of evolutionary advantage in a welfare state. which leaves us with only one possible course of action...
everyone go out and buy pet cats for all of your republican friends.
Where are the flying cars we were all supposed to have? Flying cars are a fun idea, but inherently impractical. Suppose you are on one side of the bottom of a ravine and you want to get to the other side. You can either walk across the ravine floor, or climb up one side, walk across a suspension bridge and then climb back down. Sure, that bridge may be a lot nicer than the ravine floor, but was it really worth the extra work. Also, you would then have to trust a bunch of idiots who can barely drive a car properly to learn how to fly safely. Moreover, while the effects of a car accident are (usually) limited to cars in the vicinity of the accident when it happens, the potential effects of aircraft accidents is much more severe, as was demonstrated not only in the 9/11 attacks but several past incidents where planes have accidentally collided with buildings in New York City. The technology to build a flying car is there now, but there are a lot of good reasons why it has never happened.
Where's our fusion energy? (Other than that big fiery lamp out in the Big Room) Good question.
Where's our moonbase? Where's our Mars colony? Where's the benefit? We achieved little by putting a man on the moon other than stroking our national ego, but at the time, that was a major political priority. If there was a strong incentive for us to esablish long term bases on either the moon or Mars, I've no doubt it would have either happened by now or be well underway.
Where's my fucking robot sex toy? I'm not going to touch that one...
I seem to remember thinking that DVD prices were fairly reasonable when they first came out. I bought a first generation Sony DVD player for about $500, and as I recall, the movies tended to be in the $15-$20 range. It wasn't until almost a year later that the prices suddenly jumped to the point where $25 was common and a $20 for a movie was a good find. I'm not sure exactly when that was, but I seem to remember thinking at the time that the price jumps corresponded suspiciously closely to the initial announcement of DeCSS. Or maybe it was that Apex DVD player that allowed you to disable macrovision/region coding. Whatever it was, I think something happened that made the DVD consortium realize how ineffective their content protection mechanisms were.
Before the shuttle NASA had a perfect inflight record.
That's a neat little way you have of disqualifying their previous accident(s?). The way I see it, if astronauts died on a NASA mission, then they died on a mission, regardless of whether it happened inflight or on the launchpad.
NASA's safety record wasn't perfect before the shuttle, and I doubt it will be after the shuttle. We've been building cars for a hundred years, and people still die in them every day. Do you really expect space exploration to be different? (Granted, the shuttle may bear more of a resemblance to an old pickup with saddle tanks than a modern Volvo. I'm not saying that the shuttle accidents were unavoidable, but I do think your statement was unfair.)
Is it just me, or are the Opera widgets just a lame gimmick? They don't seem to offer any benefit over the multiple other widget packages out there (konfabulator, dashboard, etc.) and they don't stay open when you close your browser. So why would I want to use these as opposed to some other widget implementation that runs independently of my browser? If they would separate them out, for example, so that they used all of the Opera rendering libraries but ran in a separate process (that could be set to start automatically at login) I think it might be a really neat idea, but from what information they have available on the site, they look pretty lame.
So if BMW had hired 'professional' spammers to send emails to everyone in Europe about their new line of cars, would you blame the spammer and let BMW off the hook? Yes, if an accountant gives you bad advice, they can be held liable, (although that doesn't always get you off the hook) but if you get caught soliciting a prostitute, you're going to be the one who gets in trouble, not the prositute.
Maybe I've been playing too much Alpha Centauri over the years, but can't we just launch the Solar Shade? And then vote every 20 years whether to increase it or decrease it?
If it's true, you have to wonder why the massive cultural shift at Lockheed is happening just now...
During the "Cold War", secrecy was all part of the game (whether, as somebody else pointed out, it actually mattered or not). They didn't have to tell anyone what they were working on because their funding was all but guaranteed.
Now it's a little bit tougher on the pocketbooks. The "War on Terrorism" has probably helped some, but overall, I think defense spending is down quite a bit from what it was back when they were working on the SR-71 and the U-2 (in relative terms at least). So they have to do a dog and pony show every now and then about whatever cool new technology is going to make our soldiers lives better and keep the funding from drying up.
That said, I'm sure there are still plenty of other things going on there that are under just as tight of wraps as ever.
Probably helium. Since you can maintain the same air pressure inside and outside an airship, you could use a far less rigid (and therefore lighter) shell to contain it, no matter what material it's made out of. No matter how fantastic this material they are using for the space elevator is, if you need X amount of it to make a rigid enough shell to contain a vaccuum of sufficient size, you could probably hold a sufficient volume of helium gas at atmospheric pressure using X/2 amount of the same material.
Plus, as the parent mentioned, if a helium airship is punctured, very little happens. If your vaccuum gets punctured the results are likely to be quite spectacular.
How many are there who would actually look at the source code of a database, work on it rather than develop new applications based on it?
We used Oracle extensively at my first.com job many years ago. I remember one incident where we would repeatedly (and erroneausly, if my memory serves me correctly) get an Oracle error numer that didn't map to any meaningful description in the Oracle docs. ("Undefined Internal Error", i believe was the text description we got.)
We spent months trying to get an answer from Oracle as to what was causing this error. In the meantime, any time someone encountered it, we had to randomly start changing queries until it worked again. If I remember correctly, Oracle never did tell us what caused the error, they just quietly released an update some months later that made the problem go away (which then took several more weeks to make it up to our production servers).
If we had been using an Open Source database at the time, even if we never modified the source ourselves, I suspect that there's a pretty good chance that somebody would have been able to find out what was causing that error in far less time than we had to wait for Oracle to address the issue. And even if we couldn't fix the problem ourselves, we could have at least known how to avoid it until an official fix was available.
Being able to modify the source yourself isn't the only advantage to using an Open Source product.
I agree with you completely, and I'll add a few points to this.
1) Using stored procedures allows you to update your schema without changing the interface exposed to your applications. Think of it as (very rudimentary) OOP. The database is a black box, and the Stored Procedures are a defined interface to that black box that will not change regardless of what happens inside that black box.
2) Using stored procedures (IMO) actually makes it easier to change databases if you are doing anything remotely complex. SQL implementations vary enough from database to database that it is highly unlikely that all of the queries that you have scattered throughout your application will still work correctly when you change out your database backend (even assuming you use a database agnostic connection layer, e.g. perl DBI or PEAR::DB). Personally I'd rather port a collection of stored procedures with defined interfaces as opposed to hunting down and testing ad hoc SQL queries all throughout the application code.
3) If you have a sufficiently large development team, using stored procedures makes it easier to have people who are good with databases write the SQL queries and people who are good with application code write the application code, instead of requiring everybody to know how to do everything.
I still don't see a difference. If they hired an SEO 'professional' to improve their ranking, then regardless of what he told them of industry practices, I'd say that they are just as guilty as if they did it themselves.
it's like suing the maker of a handgun because you were careless with it.
Well, gee, good thing that never happens.
Ever hear of the Winchester Model 94? It's relatively well known as hunting rifles go. It is a lever action 30-30 rifle that was originally designed and sold in 1894. The same design was sold virtually unmodified for over 90 years. However, they had to change the design for (or shortly before?) the 100th anniversary edition. The change? They added an extra safety because somebody had been injured when the gun went off accidentally and sued the manufacturer.
(Disclaimer: I haven't been able to verify that story myself. That was how the design change was explained to me by the salesman when I was looking at a 100th anniversary Model 94 back in the mid '90s. Take with requisite salt.)
If you're a hard-core Java (or to a lesser extent, C#) developer who thinks Ruby is something that goes on a ring, Pythons will bite you, and Smalltalk is something you have to do at parties, you are in for a rude awakening.
What if I still prefer to program in C?
That same example now requires deployment descriptors, packaging into WAR files, configuration files, etc, etc. For Java developers, this is the norm
I looked into Java several times as a potential replacement for PHP, and I honestly never really made it past this part. Thanks, but I'd rather just put my file in the docroot and be done with it. The only explanation I've ever been able to figure out for this madness is that somewhere along the line, Sun realized that they were pushing to hard on the "Java is easy to program" button. When developers started feeling like their fat paychecks were being threatened, they had to figure out a way to make it more confusing and make the whole process just as complicated as it would be with a "less efficient" language.
I would be overjoyed if tomorrow it went away and they just gave me a lump sum payment back of what I've paid in.
While I agree with you, I also think that if it went away tomorrow and I didn't have to pay into it anymore, I'd be perfectly content to to give up what I've already put in as gone forever.
Because, let's face it, it probably is...
I was told once by a teacher who was technically self-employed that there used to be a way that self employed people could be exempt from paying into Social Security. Anyone know if that still exists?
I'm inclined to believe it. About four years ago, I did a little consulting work with a guy whose full time job was working for the US Treasury Department on a project named "System 89", so named because it was originally scheduled for completion in 1989.
If the name of IBM isn't enough to get some corporate credibility for Linux, I don't think Google is going to do much better. Let's face it, Linux lack of popularity on the desktop may be due to a lot of reasons, but lack of corporate backing isn't one of them, anymore.
Re:This can be used in DoS attacks...
on
Cross Site Cooking
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Maybe in theory, but in practice I can tell you that isn't true. I've known somebody who was experimenting with storing certain non-sensitive user history data in cookies rather than the database, and eventually started getting 500 Internal Server Error from Apache because the cookie was longer than the maximum allowed request header size (for 1.3.x, I believe it is 8k by default, but can be increased at compile time)
XHTML 2.0 may be the future, but it's certainly the very distant future. Especially when you consider that not only the current version, but also the upcoming version, of the worlds most popular web browser doesn't support XHMTL 1.1, and ony supports XHTML 1.0 when it is written in an HTML 4 compatible manner.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I don't see how they were baiting anyone with the name. The way I look at it, the name makes it perfectly clear that the specific intent of the law was to legitimise spam (or at least to define legitimate spam, which may or may not be the same thing depending on your point of view).
Maybe if they called it CANT-SPAM I might have believed that it was at least a token attempt at preventing spam...
SPAM has nothing to do with free speech. A politician can't stand on my front lawn with a bull horn at night telling me why I should vote for him. Email is no different. Just because someone has a right to express themselves doesn't mean they are guaranteed an audience.
well, somebody already pointed out that many countries that have significantly more left leaning governments than the U.S. have very high incidences of toxoplasma infection (france being among the highest) so i suspect that toxoplasma (if it is politically motivated) must sense some sort of evolutionary advantage in a welfare state. which leaves us with only one possible course of action...
everyone go out and buy pet cats for all of your republican friends.
Isn't he also the same guy who asked why "anyone should expect that their cell phone would work in their house?"
Where are the flying cars we were all supposed to have?
Flying cars are a fun idea, but inherently impractical. Suppose you are on one side of the bottom of a ravine and you want to get to the other side. You can either walk across the ravine floor, or climb up one side, walk across a suspension bridge and then climb back down. Sure, that bridge may be a lot nicer than the ravine floor, but was it really worth the extra work. Also, you would then have to trust a bunch of idiots who can barely drive a car properly to learn how to fly safely. Moreover, while the effects of a car accident are (usually) limited to cars in the vicinity of the accident when it happens, the potential effects of aircraft accidents is much more severe, as was demonstrated not only in the 9/11 attacks but several past incidents where planes have accidentally collided with buildings in New York City. The technology to build a flying car is there now, but there are a lot of good reasons why it has never happened.
Where's our fusion energy? (Other than that big fiery lamp out in the Big Room)
Good question.
Where's our moonbase? Where's our Mars colony?
Where's the benefit? We achieved little by putting a man on the moon other than stroking our national ego, but at the time, that was a major political priority. If there was a strong incentive for us to esablish long term bases on either the moon or Mars, I've no doubt it would have either happened by now or be well underway.
Where's my fucking robot sex toy?
I'm not going to touch that one...
...it will get eaten when Google or someone else finally manages to get a viable browser office suite (also a year or two out and moving steadily)
Moving steadily indeed. It's been a year or two out for at least five years now.
I seem to remember thinking that DVD prices were fairly reasonable when they first came out. I bought a first generation Sony DVD player for about $500, and as I recall, the movies tended to be in the $15-$20 range. It wasn't until almost a year later that the prices suddenly jumped to the point where $25 was common and a $20 for a movie was a good find. I'm not sure exactly when that was, but I seem to remember thinking at the time that the price jumps corresponded suspiciously closely to the initial announcement of DeCSS. Or maybe it was that Apex DVD player that allowed you to disable macrovision/region coding. Whatever it was, I think something happened that made the DVD consortium realize how ineffective their content protection mechanisms were.
Before the shuttle NASA had a perfect inflight record.
That's a neat little way you have of disqualifying their previous accident(s?). The way I see it, if astronauts died on a NASA mission, then they died on a mission, regardless of whether it happened inflight or on the launchpad.
NASA's safety record wasn't perfect before the shuttle, and I doubt it will be after the shuttle. We've been building cars for a hundred years, and people still die in them every day. Do you really expect space exploration to be different? (Granted, the shuttle may bear more of a resemblance to an old pickup with saddle tanks than a modern Volvo. I'm not saying that the shuttle accidents were unavoidable, but I do think your statement was unfair.)
Is it just me, or are the Opera widgets just a lame gimmick? They don't seem to offer any benefit over the multiple other widget packages out there (konfabulator, dashboard, etc.) and they don't stay open when you close your browser. So why would I want to use these as opposed to some other widget implementation that runs independently of my browser? If they would separate them out, for example, so that they used all of the Opera rendering libraries but ran in a separate process (that could be set to start automatically at login) I think it might be a really neat idea, but from what information they have available on the site, they look pretty lame.
So if BMW had hired 'professional' spammers to send emails to everyone in Europe about their new line of cars, would you blame the spammer and let BMW off the hook? Yes, if an accountant gives you bad advice, they can be held liable, (although that doesn't always get you off the hook) but if you get caught soliciting a prostitute, you're going to be the one who gets in trouble, not the prositute.
Maybe I've been playing too much Alpha Centauri over the years, but can't we just launch the Solar Shade? And then vote every 20 years whether to increase it or decrease it?
If it's true, you have to wonder why the massive cultural shift at Lockheed is happening just now...
During the "Cold War", secrecy was all part of the game (whether, as somebody else pointed out, it actually mattered or not). They didn't have to tell anyone what they were working on because their funding was all but guaranteed.
Now it's a little bit tougher on the pocketbooks. The "War on Terrorism" has probably helped some, but overall, I think defense spending is down quite a bit from what it was back when they were working on the SR-71 and the U-2 (in relative terms at least). So they have to do a dog and pony show every now and then about whatever cool new technology is going to make our soldiers lives better and keep the funding from drying up.
That said, I'm sure there are still plenty of other things going on there that are under just as tight of wraps as ever.
Probably helium. Since you can maintain the same air pressure inside and outside an airship, you could use a far less rigid (and therefore lighter) shell to contain it, no matter what material it's made out of. No matter how fantastic this material they are using for the space elevator is, if you need X amount of it to make a rigid enough shell to contain a vaccuum of sufficient size, you could probably hold a sufficient volume of helium gas at atmospheric pressure using X/2 amount of the same material.
Plus, as the parent mentioned, if a helium airship is punctured, very little happens. If your vaccuum gets punctured the results are likely to be quite spectacular.
How many are there who would actually look at the source code of a database, work on it rather than develop new applications based on it?
.com job many years ago. I remember one incident where we would repeatedly (and erroneausly, if my memory serves me correctly) get an Oracle error numer that didn't map to any meaningful description in the Oracle docs. ("Undefined Internal Error", i believe was the text description we got.)
We used Oracle extensively at my first
We spent months trying to get an answer from Oracle as to what was causing this error. In the meantime, any time someone encountered it, we had to randomly start changing queries until it worked again. If I remember correctly, Oracle never did tell us what caused the error, they just quietly released an update some months later that made the problem go away (which then took several more weeks to make it up to our production servers).
If we had been using an Open Source database at the time, even if we never modified the source ourselves, I suspect that there's a pretty good chance that somebody would have been able to find out what was causing that error in far less time than we had to wait for Oracle to address the issue. And even if we couldn't fix the problem ourselves, we could have at least known how to avoid it until an official fix was available.
Being able to modify the source yourself isn't the only advantage to using an Open Source product.
I agree with you completely, and I'll add a few points to this.
1) Using stored procedures allows you to update your schema without changing the interface exposed to your applications. Think of it as (very rudimentary) OOP. The database is a black box, and the Stored Procedures are a defined interface to that black box that will not change regardless of what happens inside that black box.
2) Using stored procedures (IMO) actually makes it easier to change databases if you are doing anything remotely complex. SQL implementations vary enough from database to database that it is highly unlikely that all of the queries that you have scattered throughout your application will still work correctly when you change out your database backend (even assuming you use a database agnostic connection layer, e.g. perl DBI or PEAR::DB). Personally I'd rather port a collection of stored procedures with defined interfaces as opposed to hunting down and testing ad hoc SQL queries all throughout the application code.
3) If you have a sufficiently large development team, using stored procedures makes it easier to have people who are good with databases write the SQL queries and people who are good with application code write the application code, instead of requiring everybody to know how to do everything.
Well, you could always go for the plastic bottle variety...
Then you wouldn't need special tools to cut it open either.
I still don't see a difference. If they hired an SEO 'professional' to improve their ranking, then regardless of what he told them of industry practices, I'd say that they are just as guilty as if they did it themselves.
Semantec has set their goal to 'Security 2.0' which is proposed to be 'a new age of trust on the Internet.'
Yes, Symantec is certainly the first company that pops into my mind when I hear the word "trust"...
it's like suing the maker of a handgun because you were careless with it.
Well, gee, good thing that never happens.
Ever hear of the Winchester Model 94? It's relatively well known as hunting rifles go. It is a lever action 30-30 rifle that was originally designed and sold in 1894. The same design was sold virtually unmodified for over 90 years. However, they had to change the design for (or shortly before?) the 100th anniversary edition. The change? They added an extra safety because somebody had been injured when the gun went off accidentally and sued the manufacturer.
(Disclaimer: I haven't been able to verify that story myself. That was how the design change was explained to me by the salesman when I was looking at a 100th anniversary Model 94 back in the mid '90s. Take with requisite salt.)
If you're a hard-core Java (or to a lesser extent, C#) developer who thinks Ruby is something that goes on a ring, Pythons will bite you, and Smalltalk is something you have to do at parties, you are in for a rude awakening.
What if I still prefer to program in C?
That same example now requires deployment descriptors, packaging into WAR files, configuration files, etc, etc. For Java developers, this is the norm
I looked into Java several times as a potential replacement for PHP, and I honestly never really made it past this part. Thanks, but I'd rather just put my file in the docroot and be done with it. The only explanation I've ever been able to figure out for this madness is that somewhere along the line, Sun realized that they were pushing to hard on the "Java is easy to program" button. When developers started feeling like their fat paychecks were being threatened, they had to figure out a way to make it more confusing and make the whole process just as complicated as it would be with a "less efficient" language.
I would be overjoyed if tomorrow it went away and they just gave me a lump sum payment back of what I've paid in.
While I agree with you, I also think that if it went away tomorrow and I didn't have to pay into it anymore, I'd be perfectly content to to give up what I've already put in as gone forever.
Because, let's face it, it probably is...
I was told once by a teacher who was technically self-employed that there used to be a way that self employed people could be exempt from paying into Social Security. Anyone know if that still exists?
I'm inclined to believe it. About four years ago, I did a little consulting work with a guy whose full time job was working for the US Treasury Department on a project named "System 89", so named because it was originally scheduled for completion in 1989.
If the name of IBM isn't enough to get some corporate credibility for Linux, I don't think Google is going to do much better. Let's face it, Linux lack of popularity on the desktop may be due to a lot of reasons, but lack of corporate backing isn't one of them, anymore.
Maybe in theory, but in practice I can tell you that isn't true. I've known somebody who was experimenting with storing certain non-sensitive user history data in cookies rather than the database, and eventually started getting 500 Internal Server Error from Apache because the cookie was longer than the maximum allowed request header size (for 1.3.x, I believe it is 8k by default, but can be increased at compile time)
XHTML 2.0 may be the future, but it's certainly the very distant future. Especially when you consider that not only the current version, but also the upcoming version, of the worlds most popular web browser doesn't support XHMTL 1.1, and ony supports XHTML 1.0 when it is written in an HTML 4 compatible manner.