There's nothing interesting in this article except that it is Bill Gates who wrote it. There is also a hint that maybe they are implementing Bayesian filters in Hotmail and Outlook--that's the easiest way to make a "learning filter", as he describes it.
Other than that, nothing particularly new or earth-shattering in this article.
The public library as an example seems pretty sound to me, except for the Internet and mail order components, which I assume are part of the patent.
Well right, but are we to believe that every idea that is just slightly different than a current one is worthy of a patent? Just because this is conducted via Internet/mail order rather than walking into a library doesn't seem to me to be fundamentally different.
It doesn't seem any more different than operating an online store that takes orders over the Internet and ships them via the mail system rather than a traditional walk-in store. And as far as I know no-one tried to patent the "online store" method of doing business. What makes this method of renting DVDs so different than the "online store" method of selling product such that the Netflix "method" is patentable whereas the "online store" apparently is not (based on the fact that no-one pays patent licensing fees to run an online store).
There doesn't have to be prior art if the "invention" is obvious or trivial to someone knowledgeable in the field. There might not be prior art for Netflix, but it can hardly be claimed that a small modification to a standard rental scheme is not obvious.
Heck, it's a public library but for a fee and applying to DVDs. Public libraries let you take the books, but usually with some maximum at the same time, and you have to return them before you can get more. What is so "non-obvious" about the Netflix idea?
Remember that Chicago song "Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle!"
Nothing wrong with Razzle Dazzle as long as what's behind the razzle dazzle works, too. I'm all for clean, easy to use GUIs. The problem is when the razzle dazzle gives the appearance of a very mature, stable product and really it is just wrapping paper around a system that is held together with silly putty.
That's the same thing that happened with the dot-com bubble. Lots of razzle dazzle, cool-looking sites that distracted from the fact they had no business plan and no hope of making money. Those that go with "razzle dazzle" will tend to get burned in the long-run; sometimes even the short-run.
Yes, but we're the consumers. Oil companies might want to sell us each a tanker truck of fuel at a time but the consumer is only interested in buying one tank of gas at a time.
It doesn't really matter what the artist wants. If the consumer is in the market for single tracks, single tracks are what are going to be offered.
Companies might not want to install this software, or at most set the retry period to an hour or so. Really six or twelve hours ought to be fine,
The problem is that it doesn't just depend on the "hour or so" period that the company defines. If you reject an email with some kind of "temporarily unavailable" response you depend on the sending system to retry again. It probably will, but WHEN it tries again is completely up to the sending system. It might try again in 5 minutes, or it might try again in a day. Even though you configure your logic to accept it after it retries an hour later you are still dependent on the sender to try again at some point... and when the sender will try again is completely dependent on the configuration of the sender.
the majority of people getting spammed are not selling anything, so why would this be a problem for them?
Even if they're not selling anything, people have come to expect email to be delivered in real-time. With so many anti-spam techniques that don't introduce an unnecessary delay and are more effective I'm just not sure why this method--with lower success and an unnecessary delay--is a worthwhile approach.
The answer, obviously, is that there isn't money to be made in P2P, at least not really.
Or perhaps there is, but just not the billions per year the RIAA Is used to. Times change and many things that were profitable in the past are close to worthless now. The RIAA isn't the first industry to drive down the road of obsolesence and it won't be the last.
Maybe not, but I'm sure people (not me) would go to their concerts. That's where the money in music is to be made in the future, not off mass-copying bits.
Then you're an impatient and have to learn to calm down.
What? I have better things to do than wait for someone to respond to my request to do business with them. An impatient customer ready to buy now is exactly the kind of customer a sales department should want. In this day and age there's really no reason for a sales department to take more than an hour or two to respond to an email if it hits them during business hours.
And it's not that I will wait a day or three to look at other options--I've probably hit you and your competitors within a couple hours. If your competitors have responded and you haven't, guess who gets the business? Call me impatient, but your competition just landed a customer and you didn't.
Not everyone checks their email 37,000 times a day and maybe you missed the window for the day.
The sales department should have their email client open throughout the entire business day. If they want to keep it closed, fine, but I can't imagine why they'd want to do that. One of their competitors probably has theirs open.
Personally I get pissed after 48 hours but at least I give people a few days to reply.
It really depends on who I'm writing to and what the reason is. But a sales department that doesn't have their email program open throughout the entire business day is definitely missing the mark.
It really comes down to competition. If I've contacted 5 companies and no-one has responded to me within a day, well, bummer, I have to wait (or pick up the phone!). But if 2 of those 5 companies have answered me within an hour or two then there's a pretty big chance that they'll ultimately get my business rather than the other 3 just because I'll probably be further along in the discussion by the time the other 3 get around to responding.
Again, we're not talking about personal email here. Sure, someone checking their Yahoo account isn't going to check it 100 times per day. But a sales department? Come on... they're losing sales if they're not responsive.
Bayesian saves you time. (What you would use to hit delete.)
While not discounting bandwidth and disk space costs, the time of the end-user is the single largest cost of spam.
Graylisting saves your ISP money and your money for bandwidth.
Perhaps. At least until spammers start using smarter software to deliver their spam. And they will. History has shown us they evolve and improve their technology to get around anti-spam techniques, and this one is easy to get around. This is nothing more than a stopgap solution.
In a heartbeat a simple solution (for the spammer) is to run sendmail on their box and have their spam software use themselves as the relay. The spam software spams blindly and sendmail takes care of the retries, if necessary. Very simple solution with no new software necessary.
You win because you don't have to set up Bayesian filtering, your ISP wins because it can thwart spam at the gate.
I already have Bayesian and it's catching 99.7% of my spam, which is better than what this approach seems to promise. I also get my email immediately, even first mails, as opposed to some arbitrary amount of delay imposed for first mails with this scheme.
I think the biggest weakness is that, as anti-spam techniques go, this is one of the easiest challenges spammers have had to get around lately. All they have to do is use mail software capable of deliverying mail per spec. It's not that hard and won't take them that much time.
I don't understand what everyone's problem is regarding spam. It is a nonissue for me. Maybe SpamAssassin is just so good that I don't notice how annoyed I might be otherwise.
You answered your own question right there. It's a non-issue for you because someone is taking the time to deal with "everyone's problem" so that it isn't a problem for you. If people stopped considering it "everyone's problem" and stopped doing development to try to can spam I think you'd quickly realize once again just how annoying spam is.
Spam is a non-issue for me, too, in the sense that Bayesian is now catching 99.7% of my spam. So I get a spam making it through about once every 3 or 4 days. But spam is an issue for me because I have to keep looking at anti-spam technologies to make sure that that 99.7% success doesn't go down.
Although I think with Bayesian we're good to go. I've seen some pretty interesting attempts by spammers to get aroudn Bayesian, and they still fail. That's a fun moment to see a filtered message that was obviously written to get around the Bayesian filter... and fail miserably with a 99.6% spam score.:)
Legitimate people first time sending won't really mind the few day wait and most MTAs will try for upto a month.
What? If I send email to someone for the first time and they don't receive and reply within a day I'll probably take my business elsewhere.
This whole concept of anti-spam techniques that have a negative effect on the normal functioning of legitimate email is flawed. We need to get rid of spam but our efforts to do so shouldn't break existing functionality of email. Email is pretty much instantaneous and that has to be preserved.
Let's deal with the spammers without negatively effecting the rest of us. The technology already exists, why implement technologies that are less effective and create more hassle for email users?
is reject the mails on the greylist after holding the connection for, say, 10 minutes. That will help deter spamming software,
I doubt it. I would assume the spam software would have a timeout, and I doubt it's ten minutes. If they want to hit-and-run and aren't even willing to make a second delivery attempt when an error code is returned, I doubt they're going to wait 10 minutes. I'm sure that within 30 seconds or less they'll consider it a dead connection and hang up.
Problem is, I used to have my sendmail HANG UP in real-time on an incoming connection as soon as it realized a message was spam. I.e., the incoming message was filtered in the DATA phase and if it was spam I hung up immediately. It worked great and it felt good, but there were many spam programs that took the disconnection as some kind of TCP/IP failure and immediatelty tried again. So I had one day where a single message was attempted to be delivered about 30,000 times as the spammer connected, I hung up, spammer software said "Oops, let me try again!" About one delivery attempt every second or so.
I'd be willing to bet if you put a 10 minute timeout in sendmail you'll see lots of spammer software disconnecting sooner and just trying again. It takes more of their resources, but takes more of yours, too.
Yep. This is one of those things that depend on few people using it to be successful. If only a few people use this greylisting technique than the spammers won't bother to write or use software that "properly" retries mail delivery. If any significant percentage started using greylisting you better believe it'd be dealt with in the next version of spam software.
A couple other thoughts:
1. This does not solve spam problems going through open relays. Open relays will usually retry delivery since they are normally operating MTAs, not spam software. So this might just push more spammers to use open relays again.
2. That "first mail" is going to be delayed. So if you tell a new contact to send you some information via email, or whatever, that's going to be delayed. How long it is delayed depends on the SENDER MTA. It might be configured to try again in a minute... or perhaps an hour or a day later. The thing is, it's something the user of greylisting can't define--they depend on the other side to retry delivery in a reasonable amount of time.
3. This method claims a 97% success rate. So what? Bayesian has already been demonstrated to be 99.5% successful with very few false positives and legitimate email is delivered right away; likewise, spam mail is immediately available to see if there were any false positives whereas the greylisting "bounces" it back to the sending MTA where the receiver can't even check to see if it should have been delivered.
I'm all for improved anti-spam techniques, but this seems to be weak in too many ways to be useful.
The difference is that the intent of GPL is to make sure that open code stays that way. The intent of copyrighted music is to keep it "closed" and create scarcity.
Basically, many people want everything here to be free. It's not that they're inconsistent, it's just that in a world where some individuals and corporations would take the free product of open-sources and turn it into closed-source products you use their same copyright laws against them to make sure it doesn't happen.
I am interested in this product because my small company has two apps (Quickbooks Pro and niche VB app) that aren't available on Linux.
Then why wait? I use both QuickBooks and VB under Win4Lin and they both work just fine. Granted, I don't know if QuickBooks Pro requires XP or something, but QuickBooks certainly works fine under Win4Lin.
Heck, even Goldwave (sound editing program) works great under Win4Lin. That surprised the heck out of me when I tried it.
VMware works much better than Win4Lin. It's costs more but it's worth it.
Depends what you want to do. Win4Lin blows VMWare away in terms of speed. If you truly need to emulate your computer at the hardware level and need to be able to test stuff under multiple OSs, VMWare makes sense. If, however, you just need to run some Windows apps reliably then Win4Lin is the best choice. There is no comparison when it comes to speed.
Win4Lin runs my Windows applications (QuickBooks, Word, VB and VC++, etc.) *FASTER* under Win4Lin+Win98 than WinXP did on the same exact computer. I.e., my Windows apps run faster now that I use Linux+Win4Lin instead of WinXP.
Before purchasing Win4Lin I also evaluated VMWare and decided that for my needs Win4Lin made more sense. And was cheaper, too.
No, you can't. I personally use Win98 under Win4Lin.
Say what you will but the only reason I ever used XP was because it came preloaded on my laptop. When I upgraded my laptop to Linux and purchased Win4Lin, I went with Win98 because it's what I had been using until I was forced to XP by it being preinstalled on the laptop. The following apps all run faster under Win4Lin/Win98 than they did on the same exact laptop running XP: Microsoft Office (Word specifically), Adobe, QuickBooks, DevStudio (VB and VC++ specifically). Basically, I got Win4Lin to support legacy Windows apps and I ended up getting better performance!
I don't miss anything from XP. I never had any problems with Win98 when I was running it native nor under Win4Lin. Of course, I never play graphic intensive games nor did I play them when I had a Windows box. I suppose if that's really what you use Windows for then you'd have to factor that into your decision. But for any business and most non-game users that want to move to Linux but have some Windows legacy apps, Win4Lin works great.
Now if they could just solve my "reset problem" that started two days ago.
I've been using Win4Lin since about March. It works great is all I can say. I find myself in Linux about 95% of the time, except during some projects where I have to do Windows development when I enter Win4Lin and can do development under DevStudio or whatever. I also do my accounting using Quicken and QuickBooks, so that works too. And, of course, Word works fine so that helps when I need 100% compatability.
That said, just two days ago I decided my Win98 install within Win4Lin had gotten messy (Win4Lin works, but can't make Windows work any better than it would when DLLs start getting unorganized, etc.). So I decided to do a clean Win98 install. For some reason, since then, Win4Lin is causing my entire Linux machine to reboot. I have no idea why and it's very bothersome. I trust they'll answer my support issue soon because I can't use Win4Lin with the thing rebooting Linux. It's worked great for months so I'm sure there's just some paramter or something that needs to be updated. But the fact that anything within Windows or Win4Lin itself is causing a Linux reboot is worrisome.
Am I the only one who thinks 300ft is a mite bit too far to look ahead to get reliable results?
No, I seriously doubt it takes any action at 300ft. But if you see an object at 300 ft and 1 second later you see it at 200ft then that object is approaching real fast. It's not that it brakes at 300ft, it's that it can start assessing threats at 300ft and determine whether action is going to be necessary in another second or two. And at 50mph that's about 4 seconds reaction time.
I still don't think it is a good idea, but not because 300ft is looking "too far away."
What if it brakes unnecessarily because of a false positive of an anticipated crash, and you get smashed by the semi following you? It only takes one false positive to potentially END your life.
3-10 ft at 50mph is about.04-.13 seconds. Even a computer needs more time to brake than that. With the object at 300 feet there's about 4 seconds reaction time to determine if the object is a potential threat and then to brake if necessary.
That said I see too many problems with this in terms of many driving conditions resulting in conditions that might look like a potential crash that are really "normal"--and I don't see how such a system could distinguish between the two.
Actually, we're at #16 of 102 ranked countries. I.e., only 15 ranked countries are perceived to be less corrupt than we are. About 80 are more corrupt. So, no, we aren't all that corrupt relatively speaking.
the problem[s] with our government are unfixable, short of tearing the whole thing down and starting over from scratch.
You, my dear sir, are one of those people that are so cynical and negative as to be useless in providing any solution.
The "problems" in our government are directly related to voter apathy. But you can't blame that on the government. As soon as we, the people, decide we've had enough and start voting the problems will be very fixable.
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Other than that, nothing particularly new or earth-shattering in this article.
Well right, but are we to believe that every idea that is just slightly different than a current one is worthy of a patent? Just because this is conducted via Internet/mail order rather than walking into a library doesn't seem to me to be fundamentally different.
It doesn't seem any more different than operating an online store that takes orders over the Internet and ships them via the mail system rather than a traditional walk-in store. And as far as I know no-one tried to patent the "online store" method of doing business. What makes this method of renting DVDs so different than the "online store" method of selling product such that the Netflix "method" is patentable whereas the "online store" apparently is not (based on the fact that no-one pays patent licensing fees to run an online store).
There doesn't have to be prior art if the "invention" is obvious or trivial to someone knowledgeable in the field. There might not be prior art for Netflix, but it can hardly be claimed that a small modification to a standard rental scheme is not obvious.
Heck, it's a public library but for a fee and applying to DVDs. Public libraries let you take the books, but usually with some maximum at the same time, and you have to return them before you can get more. What is so "non-obvious" about the Netflix idea?
Nothing wrong with Razzle Dazzle as long as what's behind the razzle dazzle works, too. I'm all for clean, easy to use GUIs. The problem is when the razzle dazzle gives the appearance of a very mature, stable product and really it is just wrapping paper around a system that is held together with silly putty.
That's the same thing that happened with the dot-com bubble. Lots of razzle dazzle, cool-looking sites that distracted from the fact they had no business plan and no hope of making money. Those that go with "razzle dazzle" will tend to get burned in the long-run; sometimes even the short-run.
Streets, cars, Puget Sound, tall buildings and the Space Needle. And Mt. Rainier in the background. Quite beautiful the 4 days a year it isn't cloudy.
Yes, but we're the consumers. Oil companies might want to sell us each a tanker truck of fuel at a time but the consumer is only interested in buying one tank of gas at a time.
It doesn't really matter what the artist wants. If the consumer is in the market for single tracks, single tracks are what are going to be offered.
The problem is that it doesn't just depend on the "hour or so" period that the company defines. If you reject an email with some kind of "temporarily unavailable" response you depend on the sending system to retry again. It probably will, but WHEN it tries again is completely up to the sending system. It might try again in 5 minutes, or it might try again in a day. Even though you configure your logic to accept it after it retries an hour later you are still dependent on the sender to try again at some point... and when the sender will try again is completely dependent on the configuration of the sender.
the majority of people getting spammed are not selling anything, so why would this be a problem for them?
Even if they're not selling anything, people have come to expect email to be delivered in real-time. With so many anti-spam techniques that don't introduce an unnecessary delay and are more effective I'm just not sure why this method--with lower success and an unnecessary delay--is a worthwhile approach.
Or perhaps there is, but just not the billions per year the RIAA Is used to. Times change and many things that were profitable in the past are close to worthless now. The RIAA isn't the first industry to drive down the road of obsolesence and it won't be the last.
What? I have better things to do than wait for someone to respond to my request to do business with them. An impatient customer ready to buy now is exactly the kind of customer a sales department should want. In this day and age there's really no reason for a sales department to take more than an hour or two to respond to an email if it hits them during business hours.
And it's not that I will wait a day or three to look at other options--I've probably hit you and your competitors within a couple hours. If your competitors have responded and you haven't, guess who gets the business? Call me impatient, but your competition just landed a customer and you didn't.
Not everyone checks their email 37,000 times a day and maybe you missed the window for the day.
The sales department should have their email client open throughout the entire business day. If they want to keep it closed, fine, but I can't imagine why they'd want to do that. One of their competitors probably has theirs open.
Personally I get pissed after 48 hours but at least I give people a few days to reply.
It really depends on who I'm writing to and what the reason is. But a sales department that doesn't have their email program open throughout the entire business day is definitely missing the mark.
It really comes down to competition. If I've contacted 5 companies and no-one has responded to me within a day, well, bummer, I have to wait (or pick up the phone!). But if 2 of those 5 companies have answered me within an hour or two then there's a pretty big chance that they'll ultimately get my business rather than the other 3 just because I'll probably be further along in the discussion by the time the other 3 get around to responding.
Again, we're not talking about personal email here. Sure, someone checking their Yahoo account isn't going to check it 100 times per day. But a sales department? Come on... they're losing sales if they're not responsive.
While not discounting bandwidth and disk space costs, the time of the end-user is the single largest cost of spam.
Graylisting saves your ISP money and your money for bandwidth.
Perhaps. At least until spammers start using smarter software to deliver their spam. And they will. History has shown us they evolve and improve their technology to get around anti-spam techniques, and this one is easy to get around. This is nothing more than a stopgap solution.
In a heartbeat a simple solution (for the spammer) is to run sendmail on their box and have their spam software use themselves as the relay. The spam software spams blindly and sendmail takes care of the retries, if necessary. Very simple solution with no new software necessary.
You win because you don't have to set up Bayesian filtering, your ISP wins because it can thwart spam at the gate.
I already have Bayesian and it's catching 99.7% of my spam, which is better than what this approach seems to promise. I also get my email immediately, even first mails, as opposed to some arbitrary amount of delay imposed for first mails with this scheme.
I think the biggest weakness is that, as anti-spam techniques go, this is one of the easiest challenges spammers have had to get around lately. All they have to do is use mail software capable of deliverying mail per spec. It's not that hard and won't take them that much time.
You answered your own question right there. It's a non-issue for you because someone is taking the time to deal with "everyone's problem" so that it isn't a problem for you. If people stopped considering it "everyone's problem" and stopped doing development to try to can spam I think you'd quickly realize once again just how annoying spam is.
Spam is a non-issue for me, too, in the sense that Bayesian is now catching 99.7% of my spam. So I get a spam making it through about once every 3 or 4 days. But spam is an issue for me because I have to keep looking at anti-spam technologies to make sure that that 99.7% success doesn't go down.
Although I think with Bayesian we're good to go. I've seen some pretty interesting attempts by spammers to get aroudn Bayesian, and they still fail. That's a fun moment to see a filtered message that was obviously written to get around the Bayesian filter... and fail miserably with a 99.6% spam score. :)
What? If I send email to someone for the first time and they don't receive and reply within a day I'll probably take my business elsewhere.
This whole concept of anti-spam techniques that have a negative effect on the normal functioning of legitimate email is flawed. We need to get rid of spam but our efforts to do so shouldn't break existing functionality of email. Email is pretty much instantaneous and that has to be preserved.
Let's deal with the spammers without negatively effecting the rest of us. The technology already exists, why implement technologies that are less effective and create more hassle for email users?
I doubt it. I would assume the spam software would have a timeout, and I doubt it's ten minutes. If they want to hit-and-run and aren't even willing to make a second delivery attempt when an error code is returned, I doubt they're going to wait 10 minutes. I'm sure that within 30 seconds or less they'll consider it a dead connection and hang up.
Problem is, I used to have my sendmail HANG UP in real-time on an incoming connection as soon as it realized a message was spam. I.e., the incoming message was filtered in the DATA phase and if it was spam I hung up immediately. It worked great and it felt good, but there were many spam programs that took the disconnection as some kind of TCP/IP failure and immediatelty tried again. So I had one day where a single message was attempted to be delivered about 30,000 times as the spammer connected, I hung up, spammer software said "Oops, let me try again!" About one delivery attempt every second or so.
I'd be willing to bet if you put a 10 minute timeout in sendmail you'll see lots of spammer software disconnecting sooner and just trying again. It takes more of their resources, but takes more of yours, too.
A couple other thoughts:
1. This does not solve spam problems going through open relays. Open relays will usually retry delivery since they are normally operating MTAs, not spam software. So this might just push more spammers to use open relays again.
2. That "first mail" is going to be delayed. So if you tell a new contact to send you some information via email, or whatever, that's going to be delayed. How long it is delayed depends on the SENDER MTA. It might be configured to try again in a minute... or perhaps an hour or a day later. The thing is, it's something the user of greylisting can't define--they depend on the other side to retry delivery in a reasonable amount of time.
3. This method claims a 97% success rate. So what? Bayesian has already been demonstrated to be 99.5% successful with very few false positives and legitimate email is delivered right away; likewise, spam mail is immediately available to see if there were any false positives whereas the greylisting "bounces" it back to the sending MTA where the receiver can't even check to see if it should have been delivered.
I'm all for improved anti-spam techniques, but this seems to be weak in too many ways to be useful.
Basically, many people want everything here to be free. It's not that they're inconsistent, it's just that in a world where some individuals and corporations would take the free product of open-sources and turn it into closed-source products you use their same copyright laws against them to make sure it doesn't happen.
Nice troll though.
Then why wait? I use both QuickBooks and VB under Win4Lin and they both work just fine. Granted, I don't know if QuickBooks Pro requires XP or something, but QuickBooks certainly works fine under Win4Lin.
Heck, even Goldwave (sound editing program) works great under Win4Lin. That surprised the heck out of me when I tried it.
Depends what you want to do. Win4Lin blows VMWare away in terms of speed. If you truly need to emulate your computer at the hardware level and need to be able to test stuff under multiple OSs, VMWare makes sense. If, however, you just need to run some Windows apps reliably then Win4Lin is the best choice. There is no comparison when it comes to speed.
Win4Lin runs my Windows applications (QuickBooks, Word, VB and VC++, etc.) *FASTER* under Win4Lin+Win98 than WinXP did on the same exact computer. I.e., my Windows apps run faster now that I use Linux+Win4Lin instead of WinXP.
Before purchasing Win4Lin I also evaluated VMWare and decided that for my needs Win4Lin made more sense. And was cheaper, too.
No, you can't. I personally use Win98 under Win4Lin.
Say what you will but the only reason I ever used XP was because it came preloaded on my laptop. When I upgraded my laptop to Linux and purchased Win4Lin, I went with Win98 because it's what I had been using until I was forced to XP by it being preinstalled on the laptop. The following apps all run faster under Win4Lin/Win98 than they did on the same exact laptop running XP: Microsoft Office (Word specifically), Adobe, QuickBooks, DevStudio (VB and VC++ specifically). Basically, I got Win4Lin to support legacy Windows apps and I ended up getting better performance!
I don't miss anything from XP. I never had any problems with Win98 when I was running it native nor under Win4Lin. Of course, I never play graphic intensive games nor did I play them when I had a Windows box. I suppose if that's really what you use Windows for then you'd have to factor that into your decision. But for any business and most non-game users that want to move to Linux but have some Windows legacy apps, Win4Lin works great.
Now if they could just solve my "reset problem" that started two days ago.
That said, just two days ago I decided my Win98 install within Win4Lin had gotten messy (Win4Lin works, but can't make Windows work any better than it would when DLLs start getting unorganized, etc.). So I decided to do a clean Win98 install. For some reason, since then, Win4Lin is causing my entire Linux machine to reboot. I have no idea why and it's very bothersome. I trust they'll answer my support issue soon because I can't use Win4Lin with the thing rebooting Linux. It's worked great for months so I'm sure there's just some paramter or something that needs to be updated. But the fact that anything within Windows or Win4Lin itself is causing a Linux reboot is worrisome.
No, I seriously doubt it takes any action at 300ft. But if you see an object at 300 ft and 1 second later you see it at 200ft then that object is approaching real fast. It's not that it brakes at 300ft, it's that it can start assessing threats at 300ft and determine whether action is going to be necessary in another second or two. And at 50mph that's about 4 seconds reaction time.
I still don't think it is a good idea, but not because 300ft is looking "too far away."
That said I see too many problems with this in terms of many driving conditions resulting in conditions that might look like a potential crash that are really "normal"--and I don't see how such a system could distinguish between the two.
Actually, we're at #16 of 102 ranked countries. I.e., only 15 ranked countries are perceived to be less corrupt than we are. About 80 are more corrupt. So, no, we aren't all that corrupt relatively speaking.
the problem[s] with our government are unfixable, short of tearing the whole thing down and starting over from scratch.
You, my dear sir, are one of those people that are so cynical and negative as to be useless in providing any solution.
The "problems" in our government are directly related to voter apathy. But you can't blame that on the government. As soon as we, the people, decide we've had enough and start voting the problems will be very fixable.