Think yourself lucky. On my personal email address alone, I hit a new record on Tuesday - 1219 spam emails in just one day, to just one account. The amount of spam for the last few months has really started to climb rapidly, I expect that I'll be getting in excess of 2000 spam emails to this one account per day within 4 months.
Fortunately, SpamAssassin catches all but a very small handful.
You do (and oil prices were undoubtedly a factor, as overstretched families no longer could afford the mortgages they shouldn't have had). Furthermore, when the economy starts to recover, $150/bbl prices will be back, and we'll probably fit and start between crash and recovery until sufficient alternatives to oil have been developed, as each subsequent return to high oil prices puts us back into negative growth.
But the the financial crisis itself was inevitable even without the high price of oil, it was unsustainable - it's just high oil prices hurried it along a bit.
It has nothing to do with oil QUANTITY but everything to do with RATE.
The problem with the euphemistically named "unconventional sources" is the rate of extraction is terrible. Despite Canada's estimated shale reserves being three orders of magnitude larger than just Mexico's Cantarell field - although the Canadians have spent billions over many years developing these resources - they don't yet provide even the output of the comparatively minuscule amount of oil that Cantarell had. It's also not cheap oil, it's not worth extracting it when the price is less than around $75 per barrel. The problem isn't necessarily a lack of oil, but a lack of *cheap* oil, because our current economy is based not on oil, but *cheap* oil.
You can have 5 trillion barrels of oil, but if you can only extract it at 10% of the rate that Saudi Arabia produces, you're still going to have to make a colossal adjustment to your economy. That's what peak oil is about, not quantity - but rate. Growth in oil extraction doesn't just keep on increasing until the day you're actually empty - it's not like drinking Coke through a straw. Instead, once about half of it has gone, the rate at which you can extract declines.
Well, it's against the laws of thermodynamics to be able to brute force AES-256 for a start. If there were exploitable weaknesses in the algorithm, given that there are open source AES-256 implementations, it would not be possible to keep them quiet. This leaves brute forcing. (Of course, people can choose bad passphrases, but most who go to the bother of using AES-256 will probably use something decent)
One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less than kT, where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the Boltzman constant. (Stick with me; the physics lesson is almost over.)
Given that k = 1.38×10-16 erg/Kelvin, and that the ambient temperature of the universe is 3.2Kelvin, an ideal computer running at 3.2K would consume 4.4×10-16 ergs every time it set or cleared a bit. To run a computer any colder than the cosmic background radiation would require extra energy to run a heat pump.
Now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 1.21×1041 ergs. This is enough to power about 2.7×1056 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all its values. If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2192. Of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter.
But that's just one star, and a measly one at that. A typical supernova releases something like 1051 ergs. (About a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but let them go for now.) If all of this energy could be channeled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states.
These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
My mail server encrypts, indeed - many these days do. Debian's Postfix package uses opportunistic encryption by default. I've recently been contacted by an insurer who wants mandatory encryption between our mail server and theirs.
The mail from the PC is encrypted to the outbound server. Then the mail from one MX is encrypted to the next, and the end user is using IMAP over SSL. It's going to make snooping email very difficult, especially as more and more MTAs have opportunistic encryption on by default, and mail providers use IMAPS/POP3S by default, and submission (authenticated SMTP on port 587 with TLS) for sending by default.
The whole Terrorism Act itself is vile, if you care to read it: it does things like put the onus on the accused to prove they were NOT doing something to prepare for terrorism, and is overly broad - "anything that is likely to be of use to a terrorist" could mean anything. A bread roll could be useful in committing a terrorist act (after all, the terrorists need sustenence). Of course the government would argue "Oh, but it would NEVER be abused like that". How can they possibly guarantee that? How can they possibly guarantee some future government might not use 42 days without charge and overly broad terror laws to intimidate otherwise lawful opposition? Being held for 42 days without charge will, for many people - lead to ruin even if they are just let go at the end of it. In 42 days, many people will have lost their jobs, their homes, and now have a cloud of suspicion hanging over them.
Already the terror laws have been abused - the RIP Act is routinely used to spy on people for the henious crime of putting stuff in the wrong rubbish bin or trying to get their kid into a different school. It has already been used to supress speech from government opponents.
I almost wonder if the purpose of Microsoft R&D is to keep smart people away from other businesses, rather than to develop anything. Give them free reign to do what they want, and publish if they feel like it. So instead of perhaps working for Google and focusing on making a new product that can compete with Microsoft and bringing the world something useful, they are basically highly paid gamers being retained by Microsoft where there's no risk they can upset the applecart.
If the content pointed to by a domain written in Latin characters points to a site written in Chinese, non-speakers of Chinese still can't actually do anything useful with the site.
ARM was *always* about low power consumption, right from the very first test article.
I went to a talk by Steve Furber in September, where he discussed the BBC Micro, the development of the ARM, and the massively parallel ARM based system (thousands of cores) that he is now working on.
They needed low power to make the chip inexpensive - they wanted the chip to be in plastic packaging which cost perhaps $1 per chip, rather than ceramic, which would cost around $10 per chip. (By then, Intel were already having to use ceramic packages due to the inefficiency of their designs). Not having any way to forecast accurately the power consumption of the chip they were designing, they did everything they could think of to keep power requirements low, desperately hoping it'd meet the 1W maximum they needed to make the chip inexpensive.
When they got the test article back, they were astonished. They had *massively* overachieved - the original ARM had a power consumption of 0.1W.
The original ARM was also specified in 808 lines of BBC BASIC.
If you get the opportunity to see Steve Furber or Sophie Wilson talk about the ARM, take it.
Intel have a huge ball and chain around them regarding the x86 architecture - the bit that just figures out how long the instruction is so it knows where to fetch the next one is the size of an entire ARM core. That is a huge opportunity cost they have to bear with low power designs, especially as even low power designs start to become multicore.
It's not multilayer PCBs and SMD that makes electronics uneconomical to repair, it's the purchase price of a new article that does it. In the past, if your television failed, you got it repaired - because in 1979, a colour TV cost (in 2009 money) over £1000. Having a technician charge you £150 in today's money was worth it.
But when a digital camera costs £150, it's not worth spending £150 to get someone to fix it.
Surface mount components aren't all that difficult to rework with practise. Today, many electronics hobbyists work with SMD, personally I've made my own boards with 0.4mm pitch (that's 0.2mm between the pins) LQFPs, and 0603 chip capacitors/resistors etc (about 1/10th of the size of a grain of rice). Many hobbyists are working with leadless QFNs, and some masochists are using 0201 components (2/1000in by 1/1000th in). (For me 0603 is fine, it's small enough to be able to put where I need them, yet large enough I can assemble a board without a magnifying glass).
Printable PCBs would be the holy grail for homebrew PCBs. We've got close - some people have modified printers to print etch resist directly onto copper clad board, which you can then etch. The rest of us typcially use iron-on toner transfer (shiny paper through a laser printer, then ironed onto copper board with a clothes iron) or UV photo exposure methods.
But please - keep spreading the meme that usenet is dead - thanks to that, many of the spammers have left, as well as many of those with no sense of netiquette, and the groups that are still active now have a good signal-to-noise ratio. It's almost like it was before The September that Never Ended.
It's also unfortunate that web boards have never learned the long lessons of discussion group user interface design. Even tin of 1993 has a better user interface for threading than any version of phpbb or vBulletin.
Just pass all messages through SpamAssassin. Unfortunately, you lose the header checks with non-email, but the body will often fail in spammy URIs, plus match a number of other rules.
SpamAssassin is awesome. My personal email address gets around 1000 spam messages per day. All but two or three get blocked by SA.
If an angry badger lunges at you because you're distracted at Slashdot at your desk, precisely one person gets hurt - you, the participant.
If you're trying to text someone, make a phone call, or whatever, and you stray across the line and hit the motorcyclist coming the other way, you've just killed or injured someone else.
I'm waiting for the anally hidden explosives plot. Terrorists could bring the entire airline industry to its knees if the only way to board a plane was to submit to a medical X-ray or an internal body cavity search. No one would travel by air any more.
Unfortunately for Intel (and happily for everyone else) the x86 arch is going to start haunting them. The bit that just figures out how big the next instruction is on an x86 CPU is as large as an entire ARM core. As things get more and more multicore and want to be more and more low power, this will be a ball and chain for them - already they are having to use considerably more expensive processes to make the Atom compete with the Cortex A9.
Likely to cause confusion in the minds of purchasers? What are they smoking?
I've bought bits off SparkFun in the past. It never even occurred to me that there was a vague similarity between them and SPARC international until I heard about the C&D letter. Not even a moron would confuse Sparc International and SparkFun. Different logos, only tangentally related markets (they both are involved in the pushing around of electrons, but one designs CPUs, the other has instructions on how to solder tricky packages).
I have a Spanish keyboard, it's still QWERTY but with the addition of ñ and ç keys, and some shifted keys like and and the ones to put accents on letters. The French of course have AZERTY.
It's perfectly reasonable to have different keyboard layouts for different national languages, I think.
How do they know disappointing sales were caused by piracy? Perhaps disappointing sales were caused because, well, not every game is going to be a massive blockbuster.
Also wasting money on DRM isn't going to stop the game from being pirated, it'll be cracked within days (possibly hours). DRM has been a failure since the days of the ZX Spectrum. You'd have thought developers would have learned it's a waste of time by now.
If you re-read my post, you'll see I didn't say that where I live is "perfect", indeed, I said it had plenty of faults. I am under no illusions of the imperfections of where I live.
However, having lived in both places (not just visited, but lived) I can honestly say bigotry is a much bigger problem in all the places I've lived in the United States than it is here. Not just the usual ignorant us-vs-them racism which exists here too, but the intolerant Christian fundamentalism, such that to put a Darwin fish on my car would be to risk being physically attacked.
I worked in the US for a few years. So why did I leave?
Of course, everyone says the grass is greener in the US, but compared to home, really it's not - it's just different. But there were enough downsides to being in the USA which made me eventually leave. In order:
1. Family. I would prefer being close to them, 4800 miles isn't close enough. (I now live 10 minutes walk from my Dad). 2. The INS Dehumanization programme - the Kafkaesque manner in which visas and green cards are processed. I just wasn't willing to go through that any more. I hear it's even worse for people from places like India and China, I guess I'm lucky coming from Europe. 3. Healthcare - I like living somewhere where I never need to ever worry about getting healthcare, even if I fall upon bad times. 4. Bigotry and illiberalism - I lived in Texas. Too many religious people, and when I left, also Bush was President.
Don't get me wrong, I think overall the United States is a good country, and one of the best in the world - despite its faults. Any country has faults. But I just wasn't prepared to go through the unpredictable, abitrary and dehumanizing immigration processes to live somewhere that's just as faulty as my home country, but is also 4800 miles from my family.
You don't need the "www", it's just the hostname. For example, whenever you hear the BBC reading an address on the radio for one of their sites, they always say something like "You can go to BBC.co.uk slash something", because they've set up their DNS such that "bbc.co.uk" resolves to their many web servers.
Not all mammatus clouds look exactly the same. The ones in the cited article most certainly are - just because they don't look exactly like boobies doesn't mean they aren't mammatus.
They are not undocumented, they do indeed have a name and are called "mammatus clouds". They just aren't very common. There are thousands of photos of mammatus on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Think yourself lucky. On my personal email address alone, I hit a new record on Tuesday - 1219 spam emails in just one day, to just one account. The amount of spam for the last few months has really started to climb rapidly, I expect that I'll be getting in excess of 2000 spam emails to this one account per day within 4 months.
Fortunately, SpamAssassin catches all but a very small handful.
You do (and oil prices were undoubtedly a factor, as overstretched families no longer could afford the mortgages they shouldn't have had). Furthermore, when the economy starts to recover, $150/bbl prices will be back, and we'll probably fit and start between crash and recovery until sufficient alternatives to oil have been developed, as each subsequent return to high oil prices puts us back into negative growth.
But the the financial crisis itself was inevitable even without the high price of oil, it was unsustainable - it's just high oil prices hurried it along a bit.
Oil demand has decreased to 2005 levels - quite a sharp decline. Oil prices remain at $80/bbl.
It has nothing to do with oil QUANTITY but everything to do with RATE.
The problem with the euphemistically named "unconventional sources" is the rate of extraction is terrible. Despite Canada's estimated shale reserves being three orders of magnitude larger than just Mexico's Cantarell field - although the Canadians have spent billions over many years developing these resources - they don't yet provide even the output of the comparatively minuscule amount of oil that Cantarell had. It's also not cheap oil, it's not worth extracting it when the price is less than around $75 per barrel. The problem isn't necessarily a lack of oil, but a lack of *cheap* oil, because our current economy is based not on oil, but *cheap* oil.
You can have 5 trillion barrels of oil, but if you can only extract it at 10% of the rate that Saudi Arabia produces, you're still going to have to make a colossal adjustment to your economy. That's what peak oil is about, not quantity - but rate. Growth in oil extraction doesn't just keep on increasing until the day you're actually empty - it's not like drinking Coke through a straw. Instead, once about half of it has gone, the rate at which you can extract declines.
Well, it's against the laws of thermodynamics to be able to brute force AES-256 for a start. If there were exploitable weaknesses in the algorithm, given that there are open source AES-256 implementations, it would not be possible to keep them quiet. This leaves brute forcing. (Of course, people can choose bad passphrases, but most who go to the bother of using AES-256 will probably use something decent)
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html
My mail server encrypts, indeed - many these days do. Debian's Postfix package uses opportunistic encryption by default. I've recently been contacted by an insurer who wants mandatory encryption between our mail server and theirs.
The mail from the PC is encrypted to the outbound server. Then the mail from one MX is encrypted to the next, and the end user is using IMAP over SSL. It's going to make snooping email very difficult, especially as more and more MTAs have opportunistic encryption on by default, and mail providers use IMAPS/POP3S by default, and submission (authenticated SMTP on port 587 with TLS) for sending by default.
The whole Terrorism Act itself is vile, if you care to read it: it does things like put the onus on the accused to prove they were NOT doing something to prepare for terrorism, and is overly broad - "anything that is likely to be of use to a terrorist" could mean anything. A bread roll could be useful in committing a terrorist act (after all, the terrorists need sustenence). Of course the government would argue "Oh, but it would NEVER be abused like that". How can they possibly guarantee that? How can they possibly guarantee some future government might not use 42 days without charge and overly broad terror laws to intimidate otherwise lawful opposition? Being held for 42 days without charge will, for many people - lead to ruin even if they are just let go at the end of it. In 42 days, many people will have lost their jobs, their homes, and now have a cloud of suspicion hanging over them.
Already the terror laws have been abused - the RIP Act is routinely used to spy on people for the henious crime of putting stuff in the wrong rubbish bin or trying to get their kid into a different school. It has already been used to supress speech from government opponents.
I almost wonder if the purpose of Microsoft R&D is to keep smart people away from other businesses, rather than to develop anything. Give them free reign to do what they want, and publish if they feel like it. So instead of perhaps working for Google and focusing on making a new product that can compete with Microsoft and bringing the world something useful, they are basically highly paid gamers being retained by Microsoft where there's no risk they can upset the applecart.
How is this any different today?
If the content pointed to by a domain written in Latin characters points to a site written in Chinese, non-speakers of Chinese still can't actually do anything useful with the site.
ARM was *always* about low power consumption, right from the very first test article.
I went to a talk by Steve Furber in September, where he discussed the BBC Micro, the development of the ARM, and the massively parallel ARM based system (thousands of cores) that he is now working on.
They needed low power to make the chip inexpensive - they wanted the chip to be in plastic packaging which cost perhaps $1 per chip, rather than ceramic, which would cost around $10 per chip. (By then, Intel were already having to use ceramic packages due to the inefficiency of their designs). Not having any way to forecast accurately the power consumption of the chip they were designing, they did everything they could think of to keep power requirements low, desperately hoping it'd meet the 1W maximum they needed to make the chip inexpensive.
When they got the test article back, they were astonished. They had *massively* overachieved - the original ARM had a power consumption of 0.1W.
The original ARM was also specified in 808 lines of BBC BASIC.
If you get the opportunity to see Steve Furber or Sophie Wilson talk about the ARM, take it.
Intel have a huge ball and chain around them regarding the x86 architecture - the bit that just figures out how long the instruction is so it knows where to fetch the next one is the size of an entire ARM core. That is a huge opportunity cost they have to bear with low power designs, especially as even low power designs start to become multicore.
It's not multilayer PCBs and SMD that makes electronics uneconomical to repair, it's the purchase price of a new article that does it. In the past, if your television failed, you got it repaired - because in 1979, a colour TV cost (in 2009 money) over £1000. Having a technician charge you £150 in today's money was worth it.
But when a digital camera costs £150, it's not worth spending £150 to get someone to fix it.
Surface mount components aren't all that difficult to rework with practise. Today, many electronics hobbyists work with SMD, personally I've made my own boards with 0.4mm pitch (that's 0.2mm between the pins) LQFPs, and 0603 chip capacitors/resistors etc (about 1/10th of the size of a grain of rice). Many hobbyists are working with leadless QFNs, and some masochists are using 0201 components (2/1000in by 1/1000th in). (For me 0603 is fine, it's small enough to be able to put where I need them, yet large enough I can assemble a board without a magnifying glass).
Printable PCBs would be the holy grail for homebrew PCBs. We've got close - some people have modified printers to print etch resist directly onto copper clad board, which you can then etch. The rest of us typcially use iron-on toner transfer (shiny paper through a laser printer, then ironed onto copper board with a clothes iron) or UV photo exposure methods.
Some of usenet is dead. But not all of it.
But please - keep spreading the meme that usenet is dead - thanks to that, many of the spammers have left, as well as many of those with no sense of netiquette, and the groups that are still active now have a good signal-to-noise ratio. It's almost like it was before The September that Never Ended.
It's also unfortunate that web boards have never learned the long lessons of discussion group user interface design. Even tin of 1993 has a better user interface for threading than any version of phpbb or vBulletin.
Just pass all messages through SpamAssassin. Unfortunately, you lose the header checks with non-email, but the body will often fail in spammy URIs, plus match a number of other rules.
SpamAssassin is awesome. My personal email address gets around 1000 spam messages per day. All but two or three get blocked by SA.
If an angry badger lunges at you because you're distracted at Slashdot at your desk, precisely one person gets hurt - you, the participant.
If you're trying to text someone, make a phone call, or whatever, and you stray across the line and hit the motorcyclist coming the other way, you've just killed or injured someone else.
Think!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDOmwjgKBcI
I'm waiting for the anally hidden explosives plot. Terrorists could bring the entire airline industry to its knees if the only way to board a plane was to submit to a medical X-ray or an internal body cavity search. No one would travel by air any more.
Unfortunately for Intel (and happily for everyone else) the x86 arch is going to start haunting them. The bit that just figures out how big the next instruction is on an x86 CPU is as large as an entire ARM core. As things get more and more multicore and want to be more and more low power, this will be a ball and chain for them - already they are having to use considerably more expensive processes to make the Atom compete with the Cortex A9.
Likely to cause confusion in the minds of purchasers? What are they smoking?
I've bought bits off SparkFun in the past. It never even occurred to me that there was a vague similarity between them and SPARC international until I heard about the C&D letter. Not even a moron would confuse Sparc International and SparkFun. Different logos, only tangentally related markets (they both are involved in the pushing around of electrons, but one designs CPUs, the other has instructions on how to solder tricky packages).
Bah. Remember that SPARC backwards is CRAPS.
I have a Spanish keyboard, it's still QWERTY but with the addition of ñ and ç keys, and some shifted keys like and and the ones to put accents on letters. The French of course have AZERTY.
It's perfectly reasonable to have different keyboard layouts for different national languages, I think.
How do they know disappointing sales were caused by piracy? Perhaps disappointing sales were caused because, well, not every game is going to be a massive blockbuster.
Also wasting money on DRM isn't going to stop the game from being pirated, it'll be cracked within days (possibly hours). DRM has been a failure since the days of the ZX Spectrum. You'd have thought developers would have learned it's a waste of time by now.
Touched a nerve, did I?
If you re-read my post, you'll see I didn't say that where I live is "perfect", indeed, I said it had plenty of faults. I am under no illusions of the imperfections of where I live.
However, having lived in both places (not just visited, but lived) I can honestly say bigotry is a much bigger problem in all the places I've lived in the United States than it is here. Not just the usual ignorant us-vs-them racism which exists here too, but the intolerant Christian fundamentalism, such that to put a Darwin fish on my car would be to risk being physically attacked.
I worked in the US for a few years. So why did I leave?
Of course, everyone says the grass is greener in the US, but compared to home, really it's not - it's just different. But there were enough downsides to being in the USA which made me eventually leave. In order:
1. Family. I would prefer being close to them, 4800 miles isn't close enough. (I now live 10 minutes walk from my Dad).
2. The INS Dehumanization programme - the Kafkaesque manner in which visas and green cards are processed. I just wasn't willing to go through that any more. I hear it's even worse for people from places like India and China, I guess I'm lucky coming from Europe.
3. Healthcare - I like living somewhere where I never need to ever worry about getting healthcare, even if I fall upon bad times.
4. Bigotry and illiberalism - I lived in Texas. Too many religious people, and when I left, also Bush was President.
Don't get me wrong, I think overall the United States is a good country, and one of the best in the world - despite its faults. Any country has faults. But I just wasn't prepared to go through the unpredictable, abitrary and dehumanizing immigration processes to live somewhere that's just as faulty as my home country, but is also 4800 miles from my family.
You don't need the "www", it's just the hostname. For example, whenever you hear the BBC reading an address on the radio for one of their sites, they always say something like "You can go to BBC.co.uk slash something", because they've set up their DNS such that "bbc.co.uk" resolves to their many web servers.
Not all mammatus clouds look exactly the same. The ones in the cited article most certainly are - just because they don't look exactly like boobies doesn't mean they aren't mammatus.
But that's also a known and documented phenomenon - wave clouds (which we get very often here).
They are not undocumented, they do indeed have a name and are called "mammatus clouds". They just aren't very common. There are thousands of photos of mammatus on the internet.