As far as Best Buy, it's to high tech what McDonald's is to cuisine. I've never met anyone in that store that couldn't be more intellectually-challenged by delivering pizza. The store is crap; the selection is crap; the layout is crap, and nobody in the place has a clue.
As I was told by Lenny, the guy at the technical support window in the burnsville.mn.us store, when I tried to explain that a battery which refused to charge was NOT due to an OS setting, "Computers are complex pieces of equipment."
There has always been and will always be people who think that "my way is the only right way", "what I don't think is right is sinful" or "anyone who does not believe/behave/talk the same way as me is Evil and Should Be Re-educated Or Killed". Intolerance is part of how human societies operate, it isn't going anywhere.
Those who preach tolerance must themselves be tolerant of intolerance.
If you don't tolerate any intolerance, you'll vanish in an flash of contradiction.
gzip it and compare the files. a short tracking code will make a negligible difference.
Not necessarily.
Lempel-Ziv based algorithms, like the one used by gzip, build a compression dictionary on the fly. Any "personalization" added to the message will affect the dictionary to varying degrees from then onward. If it's near the beginning, the personalization would greatly skew the selected dictionary identifiers. Though probably this would have little effect on the actual compression of the data, it would radically change the representation of the compressed image. The farther this personalization is from the start of the data to be compressed, the less effect it will have.
The infinitude of primes, my friend, is one of the most basic thing in maths class, have you been sleeping? The prove (attributed to Euclid) is simply that say P(n) is the nth prime and the largest prime, then P(1) * P(2) * P(3) *... P(n) + 1 will give you a even bigger prime (since it is not divisable by any of the other primes), so P(n) can't be the largest prime.
Interestingly, the proof that there exists no largest prime is itself a simple counterexample to the oft-cited assertion that one cannot prove an existential negative.
Re:He seems a dangerous driver (serious)
on
LA to Oregon at Mach 9
·
· Score: 2, Informative
[...] but he's essentially correct for how the TX traffic laws are. I think it's reasonable of me to assume that other states (at least some of them) would be similar. "Slower traffic keep right" is a legal obligation [...]
This varies by state. Some states have no laws to that effect, some at the other end of the spectrum have laws that you cannot be in the leftmost lane on certain roadways unless you're passing, and some are somewhere in the middle.
COOKING IS AN ART. if it wasn't, any regular joe could pick up a copy of the Joy of Cooking and be running a four-star restaurant in a week.
Because as we all know, science is much easier than art. Any regular joe could pick up an OChem textbook and be working as a recombinant geneticist in a week.
I agree that it will not be easy to make everyone switch at once, but that is true for many of the proposed solutions.
SPF, for instance, fights forgery, which happens to make it easier to identify the real origins of spam. Finding the real origins of spam makes it easier to make policy decisions for filtering and blocking common sources of spam.
This can easily be rolled out as needed or desired and doesn't need to be rolled out everywhere for it to start being effective right away. "Difficult" doesn't do justice to something that replaces SMTP outright.
Why do ISPs risk common carrier status?
ISPs may be considered common carriers in your locale, but the laws and regulations in the USA do not consider ISPs to be common carriers. Other locales may vary as well.
Filtering to suppress an undesirable (to them) form of traffic kinda contradicts that and would turn them more into the equivalent of a content provider.
In my opinion the ONLY solution is fixing or replacing the SMTP protocol. Trying to 'patch' it just results in major inconvenience and delay of any real solution.
Trying to convince a large number of users to switch from an entrenched technology to something else is a massive undertaking that won't likely work. Try getting the western world to switch from gasoline/petrol automobiles to something else, it's a similar argument.
Also, it's very easy to state that we need to replace it, but unless you propose what we might replace it with, such a statement is not really worth much.
This suckers sound pretty big. Is it possible that they'll be subsidized by giant ads placed on the blimps? Will the sun be blocked out by the tri-color Pepsi logo?
Only if it's really close to the ground, or relatively close and in line with the sun. At 100,000 feet up, the 175 foot long blimp would only be about 6 arcseconds across, where the Sun is about 30 arcseconds across. At 20,000 feet up, it would be about as wide as the Sun, so it could blot the Sun out to some extent at lower altitudes.
Regardless, being visible by the naked eye in the daylight, even 100,000 feet up, is still pretty impressive.
What is the terminal velocity of a strand of ribbon? Do you have a one story building's roof available to demonstrate this to yourself?
While I tend to agree with your overall claim, this particular comparison doesn't seem all that straightforward. That's the terminal velocity of an infinitesimal fragment of the overall tether.
Small pieces tend to flutter in the breeze. Would a mile's length of tether also flutter? Much less so, at least in the middle, since any given small length of the tether would need to pull on the parts above and below it to move out of position. I'd be interesting to see a computer simulation of this.
Besides, whats next? blocking all traffic to known p2p related ports? and then filter USENET?
Straw man argument. Blocking *outbound* port 25 does not break email, so long as the blocking ISP provides an SMTP server for submission of outbound email for delivery.
The way I'd approach this would be to cut port outbound port 25 to everyone by default, then selectively enable it (if possible) for customers who signed something agreeing that they'd be held responsible if their machine(s) got zombied and started spewing wormspam. This would allow hobbiests who know what they're doing to get this turned back on, but the majority of people (who run insecure, unpatched operating systems) would be forced to use the ISP's smarthost.
(Inbound SMTP is another issue entirely, so I'm ignoring it for this discussion.)
Perhaps Air? Sorry, you have to have a license to breathe that air! Patenting genes and software are just baaaaad ideas IMHO.
More like someone patenting a particular fragrance and trying to charge you money for enjoying the smell when it wafts up your nose. (At least if the claim that it invaded his field without his intervention is to be believed.)
I've heard that it's better to say "please put me on your 'do not call' list", instead. Asking to be removed from the company's calling list may result in your number being added back to the database later while being explicitly added to the company's own DNC list will keep them from calling you for as long as they're required to keep the entry.
I believe you are correct. Although IANAL, asking to be removed from their list does not seem equivalent to asking them to not call again. The law, the FTC regulations regarding telemarketing, and (I believe) the FCC regulations regarding use of telephone equipment usually refer to "do not call" requests, not "remove from list" requests, so that would seem to be the prudent approach.
Keep logs. On the second violation, you can sue them for $500 per violation based on 47 USC 227, with treble damages ($1500) per violation if you can show they knowingly and willfully violated the statute.
Don't let them claim your DNC request will take X number of days to take, either. IIRC, the law and the supporting regulations state that they must honor your request from the time of the request. I argued with a telemarketing supervisor for a number of minutes about this on one occasion. Curiously, the copy of their Do Not Call procedures they sent me at my request (another legal right you have) DID NOT support that claim.
The Do Not Call list could not have applied to cell phones because previously, telemarketers were barred from calling any phone where the receiver of the call could be charged for it (i.e. cell phone minutes). I guess that law has changed since inception, or otherwise, the cell phone companies have found a way to make incoming telemarketer calls "free."
I don't think the The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (quoted here) has been repealed or amended to remove the prohibition on calling numbers where the consumer would pay for the call. However, that prohibition only restricts *autodialers*, not humans. How is someone supposed to prove without a subpoena that this has occurred?
Plus, very, very few people actually use the private right-of-action supported by that statute, so the telemarketers who do break the law get away with it. My workplace receives tons of unsolicited faxed advertisements, but the company's legal department doesn't want to pursue them and says the equivalent of "Just Hit Delete".
For a slightly different take on Christianity as it collides with the concept of extra-terrestrial life, there's always Arthur C. Clarke's The Star, which became a Twilight Zone episode, from the mid-1980's revival of that series.
The basis of the story is the wavering faith of a priest who has to come to terms with God sacrificing a entire civilization with a peaceful, rich culture, so that a star would shine over Bethlehem.
It seems to me that one can only advance the theory that God tests people if at the same time one advances the concept of God having limited power. A God with infinite power does not need to test anyone.
This is one of the reasons I find the Minbari concept, that we are the universe trying to understand itself, so compelling.
(Yes, I understand that's fiction. It's at least self-consistent, interesting fiction.)
Well, FWIW, my phone (Nokia 6800) already has an FM radio, though inexplicably you can only use it if you attach a headset, it won't play over the built-in speakerphone.
past the development process though, what part of using the network to trade pirated music and software is research? I thought thought the point he made was pretty clear.
What part of "file sharing" implies pirating? Music and software pirates may use file-sharing mechanisms to distribute their warez, but that doesn't mean there aren't non-infringing ways to use that technology.
Just because armed thieves usually use cars, and substantially benefit from them when they try to escape, doesn't mean that cars in general are a bad thing.
C# and the.NET CLI are ECMA standards. Web Services/WSDL is a W3C standard. Java is uhhhh.... not a standard.
C# and the CLI were ECMA standards before the CDs were even cool. Java has the Community Process, there are multiple vendors of compliant JVMs, they have stable, well-designed, WELL-DOCUMENTED specifications, and so on.
If C#/CLI is a standard and Java isn't, standards can take a long walk off a short pier, as my dad used to say.
That's exactly the attitude that has lead us to where we are now with this, and all of the other DMCA issues. "Why should I pay for it when I can just get it for free?" Because it's illegal.
If by "it" you mean DVD content, I think you're confused: the parents to your article were discussing DVDs that someone already bought and wants to play under Linux.
If by "it" you mean the software to play the DVD, why should free software that plays something you've already bought be illegal? Why should a hammer be illegal just because it can be used to break glass during a burglary? The criminal act should be illegal, not the multi-purpose tools used in performing the act.
The discovery of these headstones comes with a burden - we cannot remove them or modify them (by chiseling off a piece) for carbon-14 dating because of local governmental restrictions on how headstones are to be treated.
Ignoring the fact that carbon-14 dating wouldn't work, how would measuring the age of a rock determine when it was carved into a particular shape?
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As far as Best Buy, it's to high tech what McDonald's is to cuisine. I've never met anyone in that store that couldn't be more intellectually-challenged by delivering pizza. The store is crap; the selection is crap; the layout is crap, and nobody in the place has a clue.
As I was told by Lenny, the guy at the technical support window in the burnsville.mn.us store, when I tried to explain that a battery which refused to charge was NOT due to an OS setting, "Computers are complex pieces of equipment."
There has always been and will always be people who think that "my way is the only right way", "what I don't think is right is sinful" or "anyone who does not believe/behave/talk the same way as me is Evil and Should Be Re-educated Or Killed". Intolerance is part of how human societies operate, it isn't going anywhere.
Those who preach tolerance must themselves be tolerant of intolerance.
If you don't tolerate any intolerance, you'll vanish in an flash of contradiction.
Even Dr. Evil gets to keep the "Dr." in his name, regardless of how many meteors he's tried to pull towards the earth with tractor beams.
Perhaps that's because he went to Evil Medical School. Perhaps he'd get his Doctorate pulled if he did something good.
gzip it and compare the files. a short tracking code will make a negligible difference.
Not necessarily.
Lempel-Ziv based algorithms, like the one used by gzip, build a compression dictionary on the fly. Any "personalization" added to the message will affect the dictionary to varying degrees from then onward. If it's near the beginning, the personalization would greatly skew the selected dictionary identifiers. Though probably this would have little effect on the actual compression of the data, it would radically change the representation of the compressed image. The farther this personalization is from the start of the data to be compressed, the less effect it will have.
The infinitude of primes, my friend, is one of the most basic thing in maths class, have you been sleeping? The prove (attributed to Euclid) is simply that say P(n) is the nth prime and the largest prime, then P(1) * P(2) * P(3) * ... P(n) + 1 will give you a even bigger prime (since it is not divisable by any of the other primes), so P(n) can't be the largest prime.
Interestingly, the proof that there exists no largest prime is itself a simple counterexample to the oft-cited assertion that one cannot prove an existential negative.
[...] but he's essentially correct for how the TX traffic laws are. I think it's reasonable of me to assume that other states (at least some of them) would be similar. "Slower traffic keep right" is a legal obligation [...]
This varies by state. Some states have no laws to that effect, some at the other end of the spectrum have laws that you cannot be in the leftmost lane on certain roadways unless you're passing, and some are somewhere in the middle.
COOKING IS AN ART. if it wasn't, any regular joe could pick up a copy of the Joy of Cooking and be running a four-star restaurant in a week.
Because as we all know, science is much easier than art. Any regular joe could pick up an OChem textbook and be working as a recombinant geneticist in a week.
Riiiiight.
I agree that it will not be easy to make everyone switch at once, but that is true for many of the proposed solutions.
SPF, for instance, fights forgery, which happens to make it easier to identify the real origins of spam. Finding the real origins of spam makes it easier to make policy decisions for filtering and blocking common sources of spam.
This can easily be rolled out as needed or desired and doesn't need to be rolled out everywhere for it to start being effective right away. "Difficult" doesn't do justice to something that replaces SMTP outright.
Why do ISPs risk common carrier status?
ISPs may be considered common carriers in your locale, but the laws and regulations in the USA do not consider ISPs to be common carriers. Other locales may vary as well.
Filtering to suppress an undesirable (to them) form of traffic kinda contradicts that and would turn them more into the equivalent of a content provider.
Spam is about consent, not content.
In my opinion the ONLY solution is fixing or replacing the SMTP protocol. Trying to 'patch' it just results in major inconvenience and delay of any real solution.
Trying to convince a large number of users to switch from an entrenched technology to something else is a massive undertaking that won't likely work. Try getting the western world to switch from gasoline/petrol automobiles to something else, it's a similar argument.
Also, it's very easy to state that we need to replace it, but unless you propose what we might replace it with, such a statement is not really worth much.
This suckers sound pretty big. Is it possible that they'll be subsidized by giant ads placed on the blimps? Will the sun be blocked out by the tri-color Pepsi logo?
Only if it's really close to the ground, or relatively close and in line with the sun. At 100,000 feet up, the 175 foot long blimp would only be about 6 arcseconds across, where the Sun is about 30 arcseconds across. At 20,000 feet up, it would be about as wide as the Sun, so it could blot the Sun out to some extent at lower altitudes.
Regardless, being visible by the naked eye in the daylight, even 100,000 feet up, is still pretty impressive.
What is the terminal velocity of a strand of ribbon? Do you have a one story building's roof available to demonstrate this to yourself?
While I tend to agree with your overall claim, this particular comparison doesn't seem all that straightforward. That's the terminal velocity of an infinitesimal fragment of the overall tether.
Small pieces tend to flutter in the breeze. Would a mile's length of tether also flutter? Much less so, at least in the middle, since any given small length of the tether would need to pull on the parts above and below it to move out of position. I'd be interesting to see a computer simulation of this.
Besides, whats next? blocking all traffic to known p2p related ports? and then filter USENET?
Straw man argument. Blocking *outbound* port 25 does not break email, so long as the blocking ISP provides an SMTP server for submission of outbound email for delivery.
The way I'd approach this would be to cut port outbound port 25 to everyone by default, then selectively enable it (if possible) for customers who signed something agreeing that they'd be held responsible if their machine(s) got zombied and started spewing wormspam. This would allow hobbiests who know what they're doing to get this turned back on, but the majority of people (who run insecure, unpatched operating systems) would be forced to use the ISP's smarthost.
(Inbound SMTP is another issue entirely, so I'm ignoring it for this discussion.)
Perhaps Air? Sorry, you have to have a license to breathe that air! Patenting genes and software are just baaaaad ideas IMHO.
More like someone patenting a particular fragrance and trying to charge you money for enjoying the smell when it wafts up your nose. (At least if the claim that it invaded his field without his intervention is to be believed.)
I've heard that it's better to say "please put me on your 'do not call' list", instead. Asking to be removed from the company's calling list may result in your number being added back to the database later while being explicitly added to the company's own DNC list will keep them from calling you for as long as they're required to keep the entry.
I believe you are correct. Although IANAL, asking to be removed from their list does not seem equivalent to asking them to not call again. The law, the FTC regulations regarding telemarketing, and (I believe) the FCC regulations regarding use of telephone equipment usually refer to "do not call" requests, not "remove from list" requests, so that would seem to be the prudent approach.
Keep logs. On the second violation, you can sue them for $500 per violation based on 47 USC 227, with treble damages ($1500) per violation if you can show they knowingly and willfully violated the statute.
Don't let them claim your DNC request will take X number of days to take, either. IIRC, the law and the supporting regulations state that they must honor your request from the time of the request. I argued with a telemarketing supervisor for a number of minutes about this on one occasion. Curiously, the copy of their Do Not Call procedures they sent me at my request (another legal right you have) DID NOT support that claim.
The Do Not Call list could not have applied to cell phones because previously, telemarketers were barred from calling any phone where the receiver of the call could be charged for it (i.e. cell phone minutes). I guess that law has changed since inception, or otherwise, the cell phone companies have found a way to make incoming telemarketer calls "free."
I don't think the The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (quoted here) has been repealed or amended to remove the prohibition on calling numbers where the consumer would pay for the call. However, that prohibition only restricts *autodialers*, not humans. How is someone supposed to prove without a subpoena that this has occurred?
Plus, very, very few people actually use the private right-of-action supported by that statute, so the telemarketers who do break the law get away with it. My workplace receives tons of unsolicited faxed advertisements, but the company's legal department doesn't want to pursue them and says the equivalent of "Just Hit Delete".
Do people on this message board reproduce? *shutter*
Want pictures, eh?
For a slightly different take on Christianity as it collides with the concept of extra-terrestrial life, there's always Arthur C. Clarke's The Star, which became a Twilight Zone episode, from the mid-1980's revival of that series.
The basis of the story is the wavering faith of a priest who has to come to terms with God sacrificing a entire civilization with a peaceful, rich culture, so that a star would shine over Bethlehem.
It seems to me that one can only advance the theory that God tests people if at the same time one advances the concept of God having limited power. A God with infinite power does not need to test anyone.
This is one of the reasons I find the Minbari concept, that we are the universe trying to understand itself, so compelling.
(Yes, I understand that's fiction. It's at least self-consistent, interesting fiction.)
yes it has been adressed, new hybrids have lifetime or 125,000 mile pack warrenties.
This addresses a consumer cost issue with the battery packs, not any environmental issue.
3) AM/FM/Weather radio.
Well, FWIW, my phone (Nokia 6800) already has an FM radio, though inexplicably you can only use it if you attach a headset, it won't play over the built-in speakerphone.
past the development process though, what part of using the network to trade pirated music and software is research? I thought thought the point he made was pretty clear.
What part of "file sharing" implies pirating? Music and software pirates may use file-sharing mechanisms to distribute their warez, but that doesn't mean there aren't non-infringing ways to use that technology.
Just because armed thieves usually use cars, and substantially benefit from them when they try to escape, doesn't mean that cars in general are a bad thing.
No, I don't think you should use Internet2 for downloading music. It should, for now, remain a research oriented network.
This seems to imply that the two are mutually exclusive. Research into better file sharing mechanisms isn't real research?
C# and the .NET CLI are ECMA standards. Web Services/WSDL is a W3C standard. Java is uhhhh.... not a standard.
C# and the CLI were ECMA standards before the CDs were even cool. Java has the Community Process, there are multiple vendors of compliant JVMs, they have stable, well-designed, WELL-DOCUMENTED specifications, and so on.
If C#/CLI is a standard and Java isn't, standards can take a long walk off a short pier, as my dad used to say.
That's exactly the attitude that has lead us to where we are now with this, and all of the other DMCA issues. "Why should I pay for it when I can just get it for free?" Because it's illegal.
If by "it" you mean DVD content, I think you're confused: the parents to your article were discussing DVDs that someone already bought and wants to play under Linux.
If by "it" you mean the software to play the DVD, why should free software that plays something you've already bought be illegal? Why should a hammer be illegal just because it can be used to break glass during a burglary? The criminal act should be illegal, not the multi-purpose tools used in performing the act.
The discovery of these headstones comes with a burden - we cannot remove them or modify them (by chiseling off a piece) for carbon-14 dating because of local governmental restrictions on how headstones are to be treated.
Ignoring the fact that carbon-14 dating wouldn't work, how would measuring the age of a rock determine when it was carved into a particular shape?