I'm all for defying the government, unlawfully if necessary -- but always peacefully. Granted, a certain amount of killing might be necessary to overthrow the government, were that one's goal. But it is obvious that Mr. Hawash's goal was not to overthrow the government. Taliban freedom fighters are not going to harm the United States from without.
Generally, a jury of one's peers decides guilt or innocence. The judge's job is to preside over the trial process, ensure all the rules are obeyed, and mete out a sentence. The judge's other job is to decide on the legality of certain police measures, and issue warrants when necessary.
Yes, in their role as the watchdog over the policemen's shoulder, judges can be both our friends and our enemies. Judges are people, and people are either good or bad. Good judges use their power wisely; bad judges abuse their power in order to pursue some private, impartial agenda.
The Patriot Act provides a powerful tool to these bad judges, just as it provides a powerful tool with which good judges may shortcut the legal process a little bit more, in order to save lives. I'm afraid the bad judges are getting more mileage out of the damned thing than the good judges.
He's a bad guy because he was planning to go kill American soldiers. This does not make him a terrorist, true; but in my book, it makes him a very bad guy indeed.
I'm dissatisfied with the United States. I grew exponentially more dissatisfied after Sept 11, as I saw our civil liberties being sucked down the tubes and replaced with FUD, propaganda, and Big Brother-esque invasions of privacy. But you don't see me taking up arms against my fellow citizens.
Frankly, I get sick of Word's retarded layout engine sometimes. What I absolutely cannot live without, however, is outline mode. Outline mode, easy multiple levels of indentation and bullet points, embedded OLE documents with Visio drawings -- all these things keep me tied to Word. And its style-oriented design, where the document's appearance is separate from its content. I know the open-source alternatives have some of these features, but not all of them.
I think you could smooth over some of the bumps by ripping off Word's toolbar icons and putting them into KOffice or Open Office, along with customizable toolbars.
On the whole, however -- at least in the short term -- it's probably less work for all to buy a copy of Word, use under Linux using Crossover Office, and gradually switch to the open source alternatives as they mature.
Comprehensive kitchen-sink solutions like Photoshop will be hard to replace. With 10+ years of development history behind it, and an all-encompassing feature set that makes it useful to everyone from professional photographers to astronomers, Photoshop has created a legacy that's hard to displace.
When an app gets sufficiently complex, learning to use the app effectively is like learning another language. Knowledge of all the app's functions, their associated menu items, options UI and keyboard shortcuts -- all of this know-how becomes background knowledge after using the product for awhile, and requires no thought to apply.
Eventually a good Photoshop (or Word, or 3DS MAX) user gets to the point where he conceives of what he wants to do to the image, and his fingers and eyes just do it, without him thinking much about the task. This is what we mean when we talk about productivity.
The GIMP is every bit as powerful as Photoshop, lacking only some of PS's filters and its more advanced image manipulation features. The Gimp even uses some PS-like constructs, such as layers. Nonetheless, The GIMP doesn't speak precisely the same "language" as Photoshop; thus, people will always complain about how much less intuitive The GIMP is.
In the long run, the best solution to this problem is probably to develop an even more effective UI "language" for The GIMP, and target new users who have no previous experience with Photoshop. In this way, The GIMP could build a solid user base.
Use SMTP over TLS, authenticated at both ends by a certificate. It's not like we all need to go buy expensive VeriSign certificates, either. For private users, you could set up a PHP-style "web of trust" using certificates. For corporations, you could use traditional hierarchical PKI.
Once all email traffic is encrypted, nonrepudiatable and origin-authenticated, where will we be?
We'll be in privacy hell. Because it will be effectively impossible to send email without leaving an unerasable trail. So, if you plan on securing email -- be it through SMTP or another protocol -- you'd better add plenty of support for anonymous pseudonyms!
Have a look at the bets offered by tradesports.com, which is a similar market, only for sports instead of terrorism.
All of their bets involve time -- they have a fixed expiration time. The sports-related bets are over at the end of the ganme, and the politics-related bets are all of the nature "Person X will be governor on D date." The datel limitation is because bets must eventually pay off.
In order to make money from their own activities, terrorists would need to place bets of the form "Calamity C will happen on or before date D." They would either need to place these bets themselves, or they would need to choose from a number of bets (targets) provided to them by the Pentagon.
In either case, the terrorists' bet would raise the market asking price of the given event -- this means the "odds" of the event happening, as seen by the price, would rise. All of the other traders, and the Pentagon, would take notice of the higher price.
So...if the terrorists want to make money off of their actions, they need to publish advance notice of every action, complete with a date range.
In the end, a policy analysis market might even save lives. If it became good at predicting disasters, people would monitor it and steer cleer of trouble zones.
I started the Hacker's Diet in June of 1999. At that time I weighed 290 lbs. For you metric junkies out there, that's 130kg.
During the first summer I followed a strict regimen of 1,500 calories per day, trying to avoid empty calories (sugars, simple carbohydrates) and eating plenty of vegetables. I lost 40lbs within the first three months. Cutting candy and bread almost completely from my diet and switching to diet soda pop helped me to meet my stringent goal of 1,500 daily calories.
Encouraged by my success, I stuck to the Hacker's Diet for the next 15 months, although I relaxed my rules a bit and allowed myself 2,000 calories per day. During that time, I lost a further 70lbs.
As of January 2001 I weighed 180lbs (81kg), and I have maintained that weight ever since. I no longer count calories on a daily basis; rather, I eat sensible amounts of reasonably healthy foods, I allow myself a treat every few days, and I weigh myself once a week.
These days I'm concentrating on becoming fit as well as thin -- I try to do 30 minutes of aerobic exercise at least twice a week, and train with weights to tone the muscles.
I cannot endorse the Hacker's Diet enough, for scientifically-minded people looking for a simple model to understand how their bodies handle nutrition, and how best to lose weight.
If the technology gets good enough, I imagine air resistance will become a problem, which will necessitate a pilot laser whose beam path lies along the barrel. The pilot laser flickers on, ionizes all of the air in the barrel and creates a semi-vacuum inside the barrel and along the bullet's flight path. Then the bullet fires, attaining higher top speeds because of the negligible air resistance.
Maybe eventually the laser will grow powerful enough to vaporize the bullet before it hits the target...so it turns from a gauss gun into a pulse plasma gun!
I'm sure power supplies will need to improve by four or more orders of magnitude before any of this happens. They'll need to get smaller as well, and generate far less heat.
Do you have an idea of the mass of any of those? The conical bullet model sounds like it might pack a wallop.
I've always thought the most effective pellet would be one with a needle tip. You could use it to deliver a drug, and since the air gun is more of a nuisance weapon that a lethal weapon, tiny pellets sticking into the target would be a very effective nuisance.
He's claiming that an air rifle pellet travels at ~250 m/s.
The problem is, pellets are light, hollow structures. An air gun pellet masses much less than a metal sphere. Low mass means less inertia, which means less hurtiness.
I don't know about air guns, but I know that an 8mm paintball travels at no greater than 100 m/s (and that's a very fast paintball indeed). Those things hurt! Furthermore, they hurt the most when they fail to break; their breaking gelatin shells dissipate some of the energy. The most painful paintballs are those frozen by sadistic fucks to deliberately cause more pain.
I imagine a metal BB hitting you travelling at 33 m/s would at the very least sting something fearsome.
Right; I misspoke. If you jump up a few levels you'll see where I corrected my mistake in the next post.
I imagine that the sailors -- or whichever westerners first cut open a sperm whale -- assumed the viscous white substance in the whale's head was semen. I doubt they were Latin-speaking sailors, so they probably used the word for semen in their own vernacular.
By the time natural philosophers investigated the mystery, the term had stuck (no pun intended) and the natural philosophers translated the term into Latin, which gave them spermaceti -- whale spooge. Thus, whether they actually believed the stuff to be sperm or not, it was the natural philosophers who gave spermaceti its name, and not the sailors.
They had obviously been investigating the properties of semen for some time (those kinky ur-scientists) and were aware of its function even before they knew of its specific composition. This is evident in the passage because the "seminal humour" of an animal is equated to its "spawn."
God, it felt good to use the term "whale spooge" in serious discourse. I hope I get to do that again some day.
I should elucidate -- spermaceti was thought by the commoner to be involved with reproduction of the whale. The scientific types had long since given up on the notion.
Actually, I'm sure it was natural philosophers who coined the actual term "spermaceti"; the sailors called it jizz or cum or whatever one called the male ejaculate, circa 1600.
From Thomas Beale's "The Natural History of the Sperm Whale," 1840:
"What spermaceti is," (says Sir Thomas Brown, in his work published in 1686, third book, chap. xxv. p.139,) "men might justly doubt, since the learned Hofmannus, in his work of thirty years, saith plainly nescio quid sit, and therefore need not wonder at the variety of opinions, while some conceived it to be flos maries, and many a 'bituminous substance floating upon the sea.' That it was not the spawn of the whale, according to vulger conceit or nominal appellation, philosophers have always doubted, not easily conceiving the seminal humour of animals should be inflammable, or of a floating nature.
So you see, even before sperm were known to people, spermaceti (though probably not known by that name) was considered to be somehow involved with the reproduction of the whale, in much the same way that human semen was known to be involved with the reproduction of humans even though its exact nature was unknown.
Actually, I've heard it was sailors who first gave the sperm whale its interesting name.
The sperm whale has a huge reservoir of liquid in its head, with an oily sheen and a translucent, pale white color. The liquid solidifies under pressure (when the whale dives); current scientific thinking has it that the change in the liquid's density helps the whale adjust its buoyancy.
When early whaling crews first killed one of the beasties and slit it open, they encountered the oily stuff in its head but didn't know what it was....being sex-starved sailors, they jumped to conclusions, called the substance spermaceti, and named the whale after his unique feature: gallons and gallons of sperm in its head!
To decide whether to do something QnD ("quick and dirty") or PnP ("prim and proper"), you simply need to estimate the net gain of either approach.
So, for QnD:
gain = productLifetimeProfit + cashFromEarlyAdopters - (productLifetime * costOfMaintainingCrappyProduct)
And for PnP:
gain = productLifetimeProfit - cashFromEarlyAdopters
So...Is cashFromEarlyAdopters >= (productLifetime * costOfMaintainingCrappyProduct) ? If so, then go ahead and do it the quick-and-dirty way for a greater net gain.
Just make sure you have a reasonable estimate for your product lifetime, and also make sure you fully understand the costs of maintaining your crappy product.
Re:You can't copy right fact
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
'Round our pale yellow sun,
Orbit nine heavenly bodies
And each
Reflects the morning light differently
Across its day side
There...I've just come up with some incredibly crappy free-verse poetry that also happens to be factual in nature. Furthermore, I claim copyright on the poetry. Does this mean I've also laid copyright to the fact? Bollocks! Of course not. As you pointed out, it's impossible to copyright fact.
The statement of fact, on the other hand, can be copyrighted. I can copyright the poem as a whole without copyrighting the ideas evoked by the poem. Similarly, the issue at hand was: can a particular wording of the law be claimed as intellectual property? And the Supreme Court's answer was no. The text of a model law, once it has been adopted and recorded into the lawbooks, enters the public domain.
In an ideal world, Bayesian filters would unlearn the suspicious hosts and for those users savvy enough to be set up with one (or for those who use Mozilla), all would be good.
The problem is, once you've got your filter trained to > 99% accuracy and you're simply not accustomed to seeing false positives, you tend to rely on it too much.
My first email address was ads@netcom.com because my initials are ADS, and I've been dealing with spam since 1995 -- needless to say I'm good at manually filtering the stuff, by now. But I receive 500 or more mails per day and 495 of them are spam on any given day. So it's almost not an option for me to oversee my Bayesian filter.
A friend of mine bought a domain of rather dubious parentage and began sending me mail from it; I didn't notice for six weeks that my filter was automatically shitcanning every thing he sent me. Part of that was my fault for not setting up an address-based whitelist and not staying current with my friend's email address. But it was still an unfortunate incident.
Though, in that particular incident, a domain name was the culprit and not an IP address, something similar could easily happen. Thus, I agree that blacklists/blocklists are a much greater problem than Bayesian filters w.r.t. scorched earth addresses, but Bayesian filters are still noticeably affected.
This article raises an interesting point. When a spammer successfuly hijacks address space and uses it to send spam, his IPs are naturally going to appear on various blacklists before too long.
The problem isn't limited to blacklists, either. Bayesian spam filters will quickly learn to recognize Received-From headers bearing the stolen IPs. Collaborative hashing filters will also be affected, to a degree.
So...the spammer steals a subnet, uses it to spam for awhile, and then is either shut down or abandons his activities. He leaves behind a zone of "scorched earth" -- addresses that are effectively cannot host a mail transfer agent. It is now the job of the next legitimate recipient to clean up the spammer's mess. He might not even notice anything's wrong until half his emails have gone missing and the other have are bounced with mysterious messages. Having identified the problem, it is now up to him to track down various blacklists and get his addresses removed. The damage done to the Bayesian and collaborative filters simply cannot be undone. Mail will be lost.
To me, this is the real tragedy. Once an address block has been used for spamming, it's effectively ruined until someone inherits it and puts a great deal of time and effort into restoring its good reputation.
No no, the original poster was correct. The game was Revolution X; not only did Aerosmith provide the sountrack, they were (in some twisted fashion) the protagonists of the game's storyline (as such).
The idea was that anonymous bug-eyed thugs in bad ninja costumes has, for reasons unknown, decided to deploy a huge army whose goal was to enslave everyone -- or perhaps just outlaw rock 'n roll, I was never too clear on this point. The hero (the player) had to blast his way through levels full of these guys and their military hardware, shooting them and occasionally receiving lame guitar riffs as a reward.
Anyhow, the game was a shooter similar to Area 51, only your gun shot CDs, and all of the graphics were pre-rendered live action video on CG backgrounds. Very crude, of a much earlier generation than Area 51 / 52.
Flip-top tablet PCs are ridiculous. They take the sole point of innovation that sets TPCs apart from any other computer -- the fact that it's a portable, fully-featured computer with ONLY a screen and no keyboard, mouse, chassis, etc -- and they ruin it by sticking a keyboard to the bottom. Having added a keyboard, they feel compelled to beef it up with an optical drive, more PCMCIA slots, touchpad, etc.
Madness! Sheer folly! The entire POINT of a tablet PC is that it's small, light, and requires NO peripherals to interact with it other than the unit itself. It won't play your games (yet) but it will play DVDs, browse the web, and run just about any productivity app you can think of. And it's in a form factor that's much more portable than a laptop. So portable, you can use it while you're walking! (Just YOU try walking down the street whilst using your laptop...) The only true tablet PC is one with a slate form factor.
Tablet PCs are failing because 1) End-users don't know what they should be used for
2) No marketing! Hallllo, is this thing on? Where are the tablet PC TV spots?
3) Outrageous prices. These guys aren't quite as powerful as a conventional laptop, and should be priced accordingly. Manufacturers who do not understand this fact, will not see many sales. Sadly, this is most of them.
The reason Toshibas are selling so well is that they're really laptops and not tablet PCs. Talk to Motion Computing if you want to see a successful tablet PC manufacturer.
The market is yet small, but for those with the best products, there is plenty of room to grow.
It's great to see such an innovative approach to litigation. I can see how these MercExchange people got their name -- they're mercenary sons of bitches, and they want to exchange intellectual property!
My only concern is that they will sell their patent portfolio to a big corporation without thinking, and won't get fair market value for their original ideas.
I suggest they put the patent portfolio up for auction on eBay! That should fetch them a good price.
GSM phones generally synchronize their clocks to the network's time. Wherever you go, if there is a GSM cellular network, your cell phone watch will pick up the local time.
Boy, the more I stick my head out in defense of my previous statements, the more I embarrass myself with my own shallow knowledge of the nation's government and institutions.
I guess I'll take a lesson from poker and cut my losses. If I could walk away I'd do that too, but I don't want to miss the afternoon's crop of headlines!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for defying the government, unlawfully if necessary -- but always peacefully. Granted, a certain amount of killing might be necessary to overthrow the government, were that one's goal. But it is obvious that Mr. Hawash's goal was not to overthrow the government. Taliban freedom fighters are not going to harm the United States from without.
Err, Terribly sorry. Substitute "biased" for "impartial." I had a temporary brain outage.
Generally, a jury of one's peers decides guilt or innocence. The judge's job is to preside over the trial process, ensure all the rules are obeyed, and mete out a sentence. The judge's other job is to decide on the legality of certain police measures, and issue warrants when necessary.
Yes, in their role as the watchdog over the policemen's shoulder, judges can be both our friends and our enemies. Judges are people, and people are either good or bad. Good judges use their power wisely; bad judges abuse their power in order to pursue some private, impartial agenda.
The Patriot Act provides a powerful tool to these bad judges, just as it provides a powerful tool with which good judges may shortcut the legal process a little bit more, in order to save lives. I'm afraid the bad judges are getting more mileage out of the damned thing than the good judges.
He's a bad guy because he was planning to go kill American soldiers. This does not make him a terrorist, true; but in my book, it makes him a very bad guy indeed.
I'm dissatisfied with the United States. I grew exponentially more dissatisfied after Sept 11, as I saw our civil liberties being sucked down the tubes and replaced with FUD, propaganda, and Big Brother-esque invasions of privacy. But you don't see me taking up arms against my fellow citizens.
Frankly, I get sick of Word's retarded layout engine sometimes. What I absolutely cannot live without, however, is outline mode. Outline mode, easy multiple levels of indentation and bullet points, embedded OLE documents with Visio drawings -- all these things keep me tied to Word. And its style-oriented design, where the document's appearance is separate from its content. I know the open-source alternatives have some of these features, but not all of them.
I think you could smooth over some of the bumps by ripping off Word's toolbar icons and putting them into KOffice or Open Office, along with customizable toolbars.
On the whole, however -- at least in the short term -- it's probably less work for all to buy a copy of Word, use under Linux using Crossover Office, and gradually switch to the open source alternatives as they mature.
Comprehensive kitchen-sink solutions like Photoshop will be hard to replace. With 10+ years of development history behind it, and an all-encompassing feature set that makes it useful to everyone from professional photographers to astronomers, Photoshop has created a legacy that's hard to displace.
When an app gets sufficiently complex, learning to use the app effectively is like learning another language. Knowledge of all the app's functions, their associated menu items, options UI and keyboard shortcuts -- all of this know-how becomes background knowledge after using the product for awhile, and requires no thought to apply.
Eventually a good Photoshop (or Word, or 3DS MAX) user gets to the point where he conceives of what he wants to do to the image, and his fingers and eyes just do it, without him thinking much about the task. This is what we mean when we talk about productivity.
The GIMP is every bit as powerful as Photoshop, lacking only some of PS's filters and its more advanced image manipulation features. The Gimp even uses some PS-like constructs, such as layers. Nonetheless, The GIMP doesn't speak precisely the same "language" as Photoshop; thus, people will always complain about how much less intuitive The GIMP is.
In the long run, the best solution to this problem is probably to develop an even more effective UI "language" for The GIMP, and target new users who have no previous experience with Photoshop. In this way, The GIMP could build a solid user base.
Use SMTP over TLS, authenticated at both ends by a certificate. It's not like we all need to go buy expensive VeriSign certificates, either. For private users, you could set up a PHP-style "web of trust" using certificates. For corporations, you could use traditional hierarchical PKI.
Once all email traffic is encrypted, nonrepudiatable and origin-authenticated, where will we be?
We'll be in privacy hell. Because it will be effectively impossible to send email without leaving an unerasable trail. So, if you plan on securing email -- be it through SMTP or another protocol -- you'd better add plenty of support for anonymous pseudonyms!
Have a look at the bets offered by tradesports.com, which is a similar market, only for sports instead of terrorism.
All of their bets involve time -- they have a fixed expiration time. The sports-related bets are over at the end of the ganme, and the politics-related bets are all of the nature "Person X will be governor on D date." The datel limitation is because bets must eventually pay off.
In order to make money from their own activities, terrorists would need to place bets of the form "Calamity C will happen on or before date D." They would either need to place these bets themselves, or they would need to choose from a number of bets (targets) provided to them by the Pentagon.
In either case, the terrorists' bet would raise the market asking price of the given event -- this means the "odds" of the event happening, as seen by the price, would rise. All of the other traders, and the Pentagon, would take notice of the higher price.
So...if the terrorists want to make money off of their actions, they need to publish advance notice of every action, complete with a date range.
In the end, a policy analysis market might even save lives. If it became good at predicting disasters, people would monitor it and steer cleer of trouble zones.
I started the Hacker's Diet in June of 1999. At that time I weighed 290 lbs. For you metric junkies out there, that's 130kg.
During the first summer I followed a strict regimen of 1,500 calories per day, trying to avoid empty calories (sugars, simple carbohydrates) and eating plenty of vegetables. I lost 40lbs within the first three months. Cutting candy and bread almost completely from my diet and switching to diet soda pop helped me to meet my stringent goal of 1,500 daily calories.
Encouraged by my success, I stuck to the Hacker's Diet for the next 15 months, although I relaxed my rules a bit and allowed myself 2,000 calories per day. During that time, I lost a further 70lbs.
As of January 2001 I weighed 180lbs (81kg), and I have maintained that weight ever since. I no longer count calories on a daily basis; rather, I eat sensible amounts of reasonably healthy foods, I allow myself a treat every few days, and I weigh myself once a week.
These days I'm concentrating on becoming fit as well as thin -- I try to do 30 minutes of aerobic exercise at least twice a week, and train with weights to tone the muscles.
I cannot endorse the Hacker's Diet enough, for scientifically-minded people looking for a simple model to understand how their bodies handle nutrition, and how best to lose weight.
If the technology gets good enough, I imagine air resistance will become a problem, which will necessitate a pilot laser whose beam path lies along the barrel. The pilot laser flickers on, ionizes all of the air in the barrel and creates a semi-vacuum inside the barrel and along the bullet's flight path. Then the bullet fires, attaining higher top speeds because of the negligible air resistance.
Maybe eventually the laser will grow powerful enough to vaporize the bullet before it hits the target...so it turns from a gauss gun into a pulse plasma gun!
I'm sure power supplies will need to improve by four or more orders of magnitude before any of this happens. They'll need to get smaller as well, and generate far less heat.
Do you have an idea of the mass of any of those? The conical bullet model sounds like it might pack a wallop.
I've always thought the most effective pellet would be one with a needle tip. You could use it to deliver a drug, and since the air gun is more of a nuisance weapon that a lethal weapon, tiny pellets sticking into the target would be a very effective nuisance.
He's claiming that an air rifle pellet travels at ~250 m/s.
The problem is, pellets are light, hollow structures. An air gun pellet masses much less than a metal sphere. Low mass means less inertia, which means less hurtiness.
I don't know about air guns, but I know that an 8mm paintball travels at no greater than 100 m/s (and that's a very fast paintball indeed). Those things hurt! Furthermore, they hurt the most when they fail to break; their breaking gelatin shells dissipate some of the energy. The most painful paintballs are those frozen by sadistic fucks to deliberately cause more pain.
I imagine a metal BB hitting you travelling at 33 m/s would at the very least sting something fearsome.
Right; I misspoke. If you jump up a few levels you'll see where I corrected my mistake in the next post.
I imagine that the sailors -- or whichever westerners first cut open a sperm whale -- assumed the viscous white substance in the whale's head was semen. I doubt they were Latin-speaking sailors, so they probably used the word for semen in their own vernacular.
By the time natural philosophers investigated the mystery, the term had stuck (no pun intended) and the natural philosophers translated the term into Latin, which gave them spermaceti -- whale spooge. Thus, whether they actually believed the stuff to be sperm or not, it was the natural philosophers who gave spermaceti its name, and not the sailors.
They had obviously been investigating the properties of semen for some time (those kinky ur-scientists) and were aware of its function even before they knew of its specific composition. This is evident in the passage because the "seminal humour" of an animal is equated to its "spawn."
God, it felt good to use the term "whale spooge" in serious discourse. I hope I get to do that again some day.
I should elucidate -- spermaceti was thought by the commoner to be involved with reproduction of the whale. The scientific types had long since given up on the notion.
Actually, I'm sure it was natural philosophers who coined the actual term "spermaceti"; the sailors called it jizz or cum or whatever one called the male ejaculate, circa 1600.
From Thomas Beale's "The Natural History of the Sperm Whale," 1840:
"What spermaceti is," (says Sir Thomas Brown, in his work published in 1686, third book, chap. xxv. p.139,) "men might justly doubt, since the learned Hofmannus, in his work of thirty years, saith plainly nescio quid sit, and therefore need not wonder at the variety of opinions, while some conceived it to be flos maries, and many a 'bituminous substance floating upon the sea.' That it was not the spawn of the whale, according to vulger conceit or nominal appellation, philosophers have always doubted, not easily conceiving the seminal humour of animals should be inflammable, or of a floating nature.
So you see, even before sperm were known to people, spermaceti (though probably not known by that name) was considered to be somehow involved with the reproduction of the whale, in much the same way that human semen was known to be involved with the reproduction of humans even though its exact nature was unknown.
Actually, I've heard it was sailors who first gave the sperm whale its interesting name.
The sperm whale has a huge reservoir of liquid in its head, with an oily sheen and a translucent, pale white color. The liquid solidifies under pressure (when the whale dives); current scientific thinking has it that the change in the liquid's density helps the whale adjust its buoyancy.
When early whaling crews first killed one of the beasties and slit it open, they encountered the oily stuff in its head but didn't know what it was....being sex-starved sailors, they jumped to conclusions, called the substance spermaceti, and named the whale after his unique feature: gallons and gallons of sperm in its head!
To decide whether to do something QnD ("quick and dirty") or PnP ("prim and proper"), you simply need to estimate the net gain of either approach.
So, for QnD:
gain = productLifetimeProfit + cashFromEarlyAdopters - (productLifetime * costOfMaintainingCrappyProduct)
And for PnP:
gain = productLifetimeProfit - cashFromEarlyAdopters
So...Is cashFromEarlyAdopters >= (productLifetime * costOfMaintainingCrappyProduct) ? If so, then go ahead and do it the quick-and-dirty way for a greater net gain.
Just make sure you have a reasonable estimate for your product lifetime, and also make sure you fully understand the costs of maintaining your crappy product.
Orbit nine heavenly bodies
And each
Reflects the morning light differently
Across its day side
There...I've just come up with some incredibly crappy free-verse poetry that also happens to be factual in nature. Furthermore, I claim copyright on the poetry. Does this mean I've also laid copyright to the fact? Bollocks! Of course not. As you pointed out, it's impossible to copyright fact.
The statement of fact, on the other hand, can be copyrighted. I can copyright the poem as a whole without copyrighting the ideas evoked by the poem. Similarly, the issue at hand was: can a particular wording of the law be claimed as intellectual property? And the Supreme Court's answer was no. The text of a model law, once it has been adopted and recorded into the lawbooks, enters the public domain.
In an ideal world, Bayesian filters would unlearn the suspicious hosts and for those users savvy enough to be set up with one (or for those who use Mozilla), all would be good.
The problem is, once you've got your filter trained to > 99% accuracy and you're simply not accustomed to seeing false positives, you tend to rely on it too much.
My first email address was ads@netcom.com because my initials are ADS, and I've been dealing with spam since 1995 -- needless to say I'm good at manually filtering the stuff, by now. But I receive 500 or more mails per day and 495 of them are spam on any given day. So it's almost not an option for me to oversee my Bayesian filter.
A friend of mine bought a domain of rather dubious parentage and began sending me mail from it; I didn't notice for six weeks that my filter was automatically shitcanning every thing he sent me. Part of that was my fault for not setting up an address-based whitelist and not staying current with my friend's email address. But it was still an unfortunate incident.
Though, in that particular incident, a domain name was the culprit and not an IP address, something similar could easily happen. Thus, I agree that blacklists/blocklists are a much greater problem than Bayesian filters w.r.t. scorched earth addresses, but Bayesian filters are still noticeably affected.
This article raises an interesting point. When a spammer successfuly hijacks address space and uses it to send spam, his IPs are naturally going to appear on various blacklists before too long.
The problem isn't limited to blacklists, either. Bayesian spam filters will quickly learn to recognize Received-From headers bearing the stolen IPs. Collaborative hashing filters will also be affected, to a degree.
So...the spammer steals a subnet, uses it to spam for awhile, and then is either shut down or abandons his activities. He leaves behind a zone of "scorched earth" -- addresses that are effectively cannot host a mail transfer agent. It is now the job of the next legitimate recipient to clean up the spammer's mess. He might not even notice anything's wrong until half his emails have gone missing and the other have are bounced with mysterious messages. Having identified the problem, it is now up to him to track down various blacklists and get his addresses removed. The damage done to the Bayesian and collaborative filters simply cannot be undone. Mail will be lost.
To me, this is the real tragedy. Once an address block has been used for spamming, it's effectively ruined until someone inherits it and puts a great deal of time and effort into restoring its good reputation.
No no, the original poster was correct. The game was Revolution X; not only did Aerosmith provide the sountrack, they were (in some twisted fashion) the protagonists of the game's storyline (as such).
The idea was that anonymous bug-eyed thugs in bad ninja costumes has, for reasons unknown, decided to deploy a huge army whose goal was to enslave everyone -- or perhaps just outlaw rock 'n roll, I was never too clear on this point. The hero (the player) had to blast his way through levels full of these guys and their military hardware, shooting them and occasionally receiving lame guitar riffs as a reward.
Anyhow, the game was a shooter similar to Area 51, only your gun shot CDs, and all of the graphics were pre-rendered live action video on CG backgrounds. Very crude, of a much earlier generation than Area 51 / 52.
Flip-top tablet PCs are ridiculous. They take the sole point of innovation that sets TPCs apart from any other computer -- the fact that it's a portable, fully-featured computer with ONLY a screen and no keyboard, mouse, chassis, etc -- and they ruin it by sticking a keyboard to the bottom. Having added a keyboard, they feel compelled to beef it up with an optical drive, more PCMCIA slots, touchpad, etc.
Madness! Sheer folly! The entire POINT of a tablet PC is that it's small, light, and requires NO peripherals to interact with it other than the unit itself. It won't play your games (yet) but it will play DVDs, browse the web, and run just about any productivity app you can think of. And it's in a form factor that's much more portable than a laptop. So portable, you can use it while you're walking! (Just YOU try walking down the street whilst using your laptop...) The only true tablet PC is one with a slate form factor.
Tablet PCs are failing because
1) End-users don't know what they should be used for
2) No marketing! Hallllo, is this thing on? Where are the tablet PC TV spots?
3) Outrageous prices. These guys aren't quite as powerful as a conventional laptop, and should be priced accordingly. Manufacturers who do not understand this fact, will not see many sales. Sadly, this is most of them.
The reason Toshibas are selling so well is that they're really laptops and not tablet PCs. Talk to Motion Computing if you want to see a successful tablet PC manufacturer.
The market is yet small, but for those with the best products, there is plenty of room to grow.
It's great to see such an innovative approach to litigation. I can see how these MercExchange people got their name -- they're mercenary sons of bitches, and they want to exchange intellectual property!
My only concern is that they will sell their patent portfolio to a big corporation without thinking, and won't get fair market value for their original ideas.
I suggest they put the patent portfolio up for auction on eBay! That should fetch them a good price.
GSM phones generally synchronize their clocks to the network's time. Wherever you go, if there is a GSM cellular network, your cell phone watch will pick up the local time.
Boy, the more I stick my head out in defense of my previous statements, the more I embarrass myself with my own shallow knowledge of the nation's government and institutions.
I guess I'll take a lesson from poker and cut my losses. If I could walk away I'd do that too, but I don't want to miss the afternoon's crop of headlines!