Suits and ties are uncomfortable...
The shoes that go with them are uncomfortable and bad for your feet
Such clothes are overpriced and a horrendous waste of money
I hear a lot of people say this, and I just don't understand it. I find baggy jeans that have to be continuously hitched up ridiculously uncomfortable, but a well tailored suit is just about the most comfortable thing I can think of. If your tie is uncomfortable, then you've tied it too tight. Tied properly, the only thing a tie does, is hide the buttons on your shirt. If your shoes are uncomfortable, then you probably shouldn't have bought them. I don't believe I own any uncomfortable shoes. Sometimes I have to try on four or five pairs before I find a pair that both match the outfit and are comfortable... but it's stupid to buy something that hurts your feet.
Not only that, but dressing in a suit and tie strongly suggests you need to try and use your appearance to give some credibility to what your saying because it can't stand on it's own.
Or maybe you like the way it looks and think it's comfortable. Those auditoriums are always painfully over air conditioned, and I think a jacket would be standard wear, just to keep warm.
And finally, there's also a matter of showing respect to your audience or hosts. If you're invited to a gathering where the invitation says "black tie", then it would be rude to show up in casual dress. Similarly, if you're introducing skateboarders at the X-Games, you can't expect to be taken seriously in a three-piece suit. Personally, if I were famous like RMS and giving a talk at a prestigious Ivy League university, I'd be wearing a suit -- or at least a tweed jacket with elbow patches.
I'm not sure why people today are so afraid of looking nice. I don't buy the argument that nice clothes aren't comfortable. You can get away with the argument that they're expensive, but anyone who is in a situation where nice clothing is merited can afford at least one outfit to match the event.
And now, I'm off to the lab... in jeans and a t-shirt, which are appropriate for crawling around on the floor after a bunch of robots.
As a Linux user for well over a decade, I'm periodically tempted to drop by the local LUG, but every time I do, I find myself annoyed at the, well, nerdiness of the people there. I mean, sure, I know fourteen programming languages, I was a software engineer for a decade, and I'm working on a PhD in Computer Science (after already having studied Physics and Linguistics), but I just don't fit in to "Nerd" culture. This is because when I'm not doing something useful with Computer Science, traveling around the world, or I'm at the gym, or playing the piano, or sitting court-side at an NBA game or at any number of other social events. Your sorority girls are happy to have a smart guy who can fix their computer — but they're going to go for the ones who can function in society before they go to the fat, bespectacled, social outcasts that seem to congregate at LUGs.
I'd just like to point out the gun ownership is compulsory in Switzerland (as all adults males are automatically part of the national guard). They don't have our crime rates, to be sure. Violent crime has far less to do with gun ownership than with poor education and widespread poverty.
I'd also like to point out that one of the jobs of the militia is to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic. The government is potentially one of those domestic threats. It hasn't got so bad yet, and of course armed rebellion is always the last choice... but if you take that choice away, when you need it, you're screwed.
2. Quantum instantaneousness. Two particles can be put into a quantum entanglement, such that their states depend on one another, even though they have not 'picked' a particular state yet. You can separate the two particles (even by a huge distance), collapse one particle into a state and the other particle collapses instantaneously into the corresponding state. This instantaneous effect seems to violate the light-speed rule. However because the experimenter cannot control the state which is selected upon collapse, no "information" is actually transmitted from one location to the other.
Now, I'm not a physicist (I tried once, but gave it up), but I've got to question your assertion that you can't transmit information using quantum entanglement. Yeah, you have no way to control which state it collapses into, but can't you tell if it HAS collapsed into a state? Then couldn't you have a number of entangled particles, and collapse only some of them, and transmit information that way (like flipping bits)? Just curious.
When I was in college, I took a history course in which we read three different books on slavery in the United States — one from the 1860s, one from the 1950s, and another from the 1990s. Obviously, they all had completely different spins on the reality of slavery. The goal of the assignment wasn't so much to learn about slavery as it was to learn about the three different time periods perception of slavery.
I think that these "edits" can provide us an interesting insight into the real issues, and how the public perceives them, and how various invested parties would like the public to perceive them. As long as there is transparency to the edits (and clearly, there is), I think a lot can be learned from the edits themselves.
Um, in my experience, higher IQ led to plenty of sex... but chasing skirts led to lower grades. I could only wish that a higher IQ led to good grades. I've found that excessive subservience and high tolerance to BS lead to good grades a lot more than being smart... something I didn't figure out until I was an adult. And being an adult definitely led to a drop off in sex.
Re:$10/month from the cable company and you're don
on
The Trouble With TiVo
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· Score: 1
Because some of us will happily pay a bit more for a product that does not make me want to gauge my eyes out with a fork. I briefly had Cox's HD DVR and it was so hideous, that I went back to Standard Definition DirecTV with Tivo, just because the Tivo was so much more usable.
For poor people, even the ingredients that they can afford tend to be shit. High in fats, sugars and/or salt. Low quality meat and pre-processed canned/boxed foods are also much cheaper than fresh ingredients. Not to mention that some people's mothers are busy working two or more jobs and don't have time for anything besides a McDonalds quality dinner.
http://foodstampchallenge.typepad.com/ Voluntarily eating at/below the poverty level will change your perspective.
I have to say I disagree... late last year, I changed jobs, and found myself working many, many hours (at a very comfortable salary). Lacking time to cook (or even be at home), I found myself eating my meals at nice restaurants twice a day. During the several months I was at that job, I gained a lot of weight, and was largely miserable. I blame the "good food" and lack of exercise.
Then I left that job. I decided that I was going to take a nice long break from work. But that required some small life-style changes -- like not spending US$30 a day on food. Instead, I gave myself a budget of US$30 a week for food. I went to the grocery store and bought canned vegetables, frozen meat, pre-packaged bread, and so on. These foods cost next to nothing, and most aren't bad for you. The fact that cooking my own meals allowed me to lose ten pounds in two months, and feel much better. And cooking a decent meal can be done in less than a half hour. And if you buy your chicken five pounds at a time, you can cook enough for a few days all at once (in a half hour), and then just re-heat it in minutes for the rest of the week.
Every variety of canned vegetables can be had in the no-salt variety (though, why would you bother?). Even the salt-added varieties contains only a tiny fraction of the sodium you'd find in a McDonalds burger or fries. There are plenty of fast inexpensive options for fruit too -- fresh fruit isn't terribly expensive, but if it's too much, one can get canned fruit, and just opt for the varieties that don't come in a (gross) heavy syrup.
I have to admit, with a US$30 food budget, I have a tendency to splurge and get fancier stuff than I need. If I were really hard up for money, I could probably manage to feed a family of four on the same budget. I've always been fortunate to live comfortably, but it drives me nuts when "poor" people spend their money at McDonalds -- for US$5 at McDonalds, you can get a "good" meal -- a burger, a fries, and a soda. For the same amount at a grocery store, you can get a can of green beans and a can of carrots (@ US$0.50 each), two pounds of chicken (@ US$0.99 per pound), a whole loaf of wheat bread (@ US$1), and a quart of milk (@ US$1). And that would be a decent meal for a family of four, with leftovers (Prices based on Northern Virginia Giant Food grocery store -- it would be even cheaper to buy in larger amounts and to do it at Shoppers Food Warehouse).
There are certainly poor people who would have trouble getting by -- but there is no way that you can claim fast food is cheaper than a half hour a week at the grocery store. Or that you can claim that it is impossible to eat healthfully on a tight budget... the most fundamental foods, like fruits and vegetables, are some of the cheapest things in a grocery store.
On my site, I only count the time on a page when the tab has focus. If it's not the active tab, or if the browser is minimized, I stop the ping-back script. Granted, I don't take that into account when calculating length-of-stay -- my concern was more for not wasting bandwidth for idle users, but it could easily be adapted to to subtract non-focus time from the stats if I needed a more meaningful metric.
It doesn't matter how hard I try, I can never seem to get the Java Chip to turn out right when I attempt it myself. And being addicted to chocolate flavoured coffee, I have no other choice.
So you're the expert I've been looking for. I live in the middle of f'in nowhere, and the only way I get even broadcast TV is via Satellite. Currently I have DirecTV integrated with TiVo and I love it, but I can't get HD without switching to DirecTV's crappy TiVo-knockoff. I'd love to use MythTV... how do I use it with HDTV coming down off a Satellite? Thanks in advance for your advice.
-brian
To get a CCP in the vast majority of states you have to show you are proficient in handling a firearm. I can't speak for other states, but the people who can pass a CCP exam aren't the type that will be shooting wildly.
Virginia isn't one of those states. To get a carry permit, you need to show up at the local courthouse and get one. Some localities have stricter rules -- in Fairfax county (about four hours north of Blacksburg) you have to show that you've taken a gun safety class -- which can be had in an afternoon in the classroom without actually touching a real live gun.
But yeah, one student, teacher or campus police officer with a sidearm might have saved dozens of lives. A CCP isn't a sure thing, but it's clearly better than the alternative.
Nice. Perhaps having rm look at a filename called "-i" and interpret that as a command-line flag is probably the best "bug as feature" offered so far.:-)
While I'm sure you're just saying this with tongue-in-cheek, I'd like to point out for the less savvy that when you say:
$ rm *
The star isn't an argument to the rm command, but rather it is an instruction to the command interpreter (such as bash) to replace the star symbol with the list of files that match your pattern (i.e. all of the files that don't start with a dot). That's why if you have too many files in a directory and you try this, you end up getting an error about the command line being too long -- it's trying to build a command line that has all of the file names listed out as though you'd typed them there yourself.
So the -i isn't a bug-as-feature, but a clever hack within a very well designed and documented framework.
That's a bug? Wow, I couldn't live without that "bug"... I don't do menus, so everything for me is a button -- including my Firefox favorites. Yay for bugs!
I run my own domain, and while I haven't found a good API for checking domain keys yet, one thing I do is check to see if a domain key signature is present in domains that are known to use them -- for example, if a message claims to be from gmail.com or yahoo.com, I just make sure there is a domain key signature header in the message... no need to validate it. Sure a spammer could put a fake signature in, but then it would be block by the major mail providers.
Granted, this is only a short term solution -- I'm hoping that good support for domain keys appears for Exim before too much longer.
I am also using Sender Policy Framework, as one poster suggested, however it does have two significant limitations. The first limitation is that it doesn't work for forwarded account... for example, I use an @acm.org forwarder for some traffic, which means that the host connecting to my mail server is from acm.org, which won't be listed in the SPF entry for iwanttohireyou.com. There have been some proposed methods for re-writing From lines, but it's really not workable. In my case, I know what servers are allowed to forward mail to my domain, and I simply bypass the SPF check in those cases.
The other problem with SPF, that I see more and more, is that most spammers have stopped putting well known domains in their from lines and are instead using garbage domains, which of course do not have SPF entries. If SPF was universal, then the absence of an SPF entry would tell you something, but it isn't, so it doesn't.
Still, between SPF, domain keys, and well monitored RBLs, you can keep spam to a minimum, and I applaud PayPal for trying to get other ISPs to implement these sorts of controls.
agree with his politics or not, he's had an interesting career in linguistics.
Wow. That's like saying, whether or not you're a bongo fan, Dick Feynman did some cool stuff with physics too. Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics and was head of the linguistics department at MIT for years. His theoretical work is the basis for most of what we study in formal syntax in linguistics. It's really a lot of fun going into a graduate linguistics class on syntax, and seeing the same diagrams on the board as in your graduate compilers class. Who cares about his politics?
how... can they justify over 100 years of punishment?
That's a theoretical maximum of getting consecutive sentences of for numerous counts... if he attempted to defraud hundreds of people, it is simply possible that he could get hundreds of years. Unfortunately, these sorts of sentences are rarely handed out for the people who really deserve it -- and I mean the spammers, not the murderers. He'll probably be able to serve many of the sentences concurrently, or he'll make some sort of deal to drop the largest part of the charges -- he still gets whatever sentence the prosecuter feels like, but the court doesn't have to spend the extra time and money proving hundreds of individual charges.
I see that a definite split of "Premium Linux" vs. "Unsupported Linux" is coming soon to a vendor near you.
The irony is that the "premium linuxes" of RedHat and SuSe are the ones that suck just as much as Windows... and the "unsupported linuxes" like Debian and Ubuntu just kick all sorts of ass.
As a counter-counter-point... I actually DID drop out of TJ -- or rather my parents were unhappy with a B average after my freshman year and pulled me out. After a year of B's at my base high school, they let me go back to TJ. And I must say that I preferred the environment where I didn't get beat up for being smart, where I didn't have to worry about drug deals going on in the bathrooms.
Oh, and if I'd graduated with a B average from my base high school (and I would have), there's no way I'd have gotten the full ride to college I got, that was only available to a TJ grad. You're a few years older than me, but by the time I graduated, nearly perfect SAT scores meant next to nothing, and all colleges cared about were grades -- I didn't learn to play the game until my second attempt at college.
And you know, being at TJ only had a positive impact on my social life. I did band, choir, a sports (I have varsity letters from both TJ and my base high school), and I am a pretty well rounded, well adjusted adult. I too own an expensive house, and have a stable career. If I hadn't gone to TJ, I'd have had to rely entirely on my college education, and I'd have been graduating right as the economy was collapsing. Instead, I'd been a software engineer for two years already, and while the recent grads (who were a little older than me) were getting laid off, I had job security.
So I guess everyone has their own different experiences. I work with a bunch of people who also went to TJ or whose kids go to TJ, and they are all similarly well adjusted and lead happy productive lives. It's unfortunate that you missed out, but I'm happy you've made the best of it nonetheless.
Oh, one last thing, about AP courses at your base high school being easier than non-AP courses at TJ... that was one of the best things about TJ... see, I was there to learn, not to breeze on through with minimal effort, nor to skip ahead in college. I have always taken the most interesting and advanced courses available. I do better when I'm not bored out of my gourd.
I knew, the second I saw the headline, that it was a TJ grad. I could have easily spent another year at TJ after my senior year, and learned a hell of a lot more than I did during my first year (or two) of college. In fact, in my time at TJ (where I specialized in Physics), I learned more about computer science in passing than I have at the two universities I've attended for most of the past ten years (including a CS degree).
I'll be the first one to admit that chances are he missed out on a lot of fun college life, but sometimes you just have to do something "because you can". He's smart, and I'm sure he'll spend the next three or four years in grad school and law school, and he'll find time to have a little bit of fun while he's at it.
Congratulations to him, and remember, just because he's smarter than you (academically) is no reason to try and take away from his accomplishments just to make you feel better about yourself.
So it's okay for the United States to arrest foreign nationals because they run a business in their own country that is (sort of) illegal in the States.
And yet the American government complains loudly when Freedom Fighters in the Middle East capture and detain members of the American invasion force who are obviously breaking the law by invading those countries?
It would be really nifty if the American government spent as much time trying to provide health-care to its citizens, teaching science in its schools, and waging peace, as it spends on enforcing fear driven puritanical laws at home and waging unjust ideological wars abroad.
Yeah, I love Tivo... unfortunately, my timing isn't perfect and I always seem to end up catching a few seconds of viagra or pro-wrestling ads that drive me batty -- and it's the same two or three annoying ads. If it were just *different* ads every time, I wouldn't be so annoyed.
Okay, so I don't necessarily like having records of my browsing habits stored by databases that can later be subpoenaed by the government, but it's basically unavoidable -- I know I keep extensive records of my site's visitors. And the privacy issue is largely secondary -- Amazon isn't interested in stalking you, they're interested in learning your buying habits to improve their own profits. The funny thing is that the best way for them to improve their profits is to sell you more stuff, and that means out of their millions of products, they need to choose carefully to show you the few products you're going to buy.
I wish that marketing was even more strongly targeted than it is. I like being shown advertisements for products that I actually want. I don't need to see ads for Viagra, Women's Hygiene, or the latest carbon fiber golf clubs. Amazon knows to show me ads for wireless routers, the latest Harry Potter books, and Armani tuxedos. I can't wait for TV to catch up with my online experience.
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I hear a lot of people say this, and I just don't understand it. I find baggy jeans that have to be continuously hitched up ridiculously uncomfortable, but a well tailored suit is just about the most comfortable thing I can think of. If your tie is uncomfortable, then you've tied it too tight. Tied properly, the only thing a tie does, is hide the buttons on your shirt. If your shoes are uncomfortable, then you probably shouldn't have bought them. I don't believe I own any uncomfortable shoes. Sometimes I have to try on four or five pairs before I find a pair that both match the outfit and are comfortable... but it's stupid to buy something that hurts your feet.
Or maybe you like the way it looks and think it's comfortable. Those auditoriums are always painfully over air conditioned, and I think a jacket would be standard wear, just to keep warm.
And finally, there's also a matter of showing respect to your audience or hosts. If you're invited to a gathering where the invitation says "black tie", then it would be rude to show up in casual dress. Similarly, if you're introducing skateboarders at the X-Games, you can't expect to be taken seriously in a three-piece suit. Personally, if I were famous like RMS and giving a talk at a prestigious Ivy League university, I'd be wearing a suit -- or at least a tweed jacket with elbow patches.
I'm not sure why people today are so afraid of looking nice. I don't buy the argument that nice clothes aren't comfortable. You can get away with the argument that they're expensive, but anyone who is in a situation where nice clothing is merited can afford at least one outfit to match the event.
And now, I'm off to the lab... in jeans and a t-shirt, which are appropriate for crawling around on the floor after a bunch of robots.
As a Linux user for well over a decade, I'm periodically tempted to drop by the local LUG, but every time I do, I find myself annoyed at the, well, nerdiness of the people there. I mean, sure, I know fourteen programming languages, I was a software engineer for a decade, and I'm working on a PhD in Computer Science (after already having studied Physics and Linguistics), but I just don't fit in to "Nerd" culture. This is because when I'm not doing something useful with Computer Science, traveling around the world, or I'm at the gym, or playing the piano, or sitting court-side at an NBA game or at any number of other social events. Your sorority girls are happy to have a smart guy who can fix their computer — but they're going to go for the ones who can function in society before they go to the fat, bespectacled, social outcasts that seem to congregate at LUGs.
-brian
I'd just like to point out the gun ownership is compulsory in Switzerland (as all adults males are automatically part of the national guard). They don't have our crime rates, to be sure. Violent crime has far less to do with gun ownership than with poor education and widespread poverty.
I'd also like to point out that one of the jobs of the militia is to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic. The government is potentially one of those domestic threats. It hasn't got so bad yet, and of course armed rebellion is always the last choice... but if you take that choice away, when you need it, you're screwed.
Freakin' Heisenberg.
Now, I'm not a physicist (I tried once, but gave it up), but I've got to question your assertion that you can't transmit information using quantum entanglement. Yeah, you have no way to control which state it collapses into, but can't you tell if it HAS collapsed into a state? Then couldn't you have a number of entangled particles, and collapse only some of them, and transmit information that way (like flipping bits)? Just curious.
When I was in college, I took a history course in which we read three different books on slavery in the United States — one from the 1860s, one from the 1950s, and another from the 1990s. Obviously, they all had completely different spins on the reality of slavery. The goal of the assignment wasn't so much to learn about slavery as it was to learn about the three different time periods perception of slavery.
I think that these "edits" can provide us an interesting insight into the real issues, and how the public perceives them, and how various invested parties would like the public to perceive them. As long as there is transparency to the edits (and clearly, there is), I think a lot can be learned from the edits themselves.
—brian
Are you by chance running for office? Would you like to? I wish more people felt the way you do.
Um, in my experience, higher IQ led to plenty of sex... but chasing skirts led to lower grades. I could only wish that a higher IQ led to good grades. I've found that excessive subservience and high tolerance to BS lead to good grades a lot more than being smart... something I didn't figure out until I was an adult. And being an adult definitely led to a drop off in sex.
Because some of us will happily pay a bit more for a product that does not make me want to gauge my eyes out with a fork. I briefly had Cox's HD DVR and it was so hideous, that I went back to Standard Definition DirecTV with Tivo, just because the Tivo was so much more usable.
I have to say I disagree... late last year, I changed jobs, and found myself working many, many hours (at a very comfortable salary). Lacking time to cook (or even be at home), I found myself eating my meals at nice restaurants twice a day. During the several months I was at that job, I gained a lot of weight, and was largely miserable. I blame the "good food" and lack of exercise.
Then I left that job. I decided that I was going to take a nice long break from work. But that required some small life-style changes -- like not spending US$30 a day on food. Instead, I gave myself a budget of US$30 a week for food. I went to the grocery store and bought canned vegetables, frozen meat, pre-packaged bread, and so on. These foods cost next to nothing, and most aren't bad for you. The fact that cooking my own meals allowed me to lose ten pounds in two months, and feel much better. And cooking a decent meal can be done in less than a half hour. And if you buy your chicken five pounds at a time, you can cook enough for a few days all at once (in a half hour), and then just re-heat it in minutes for the rest of the week.
Every variety of canned vegetables can be had in the no-salt variety (though, why would you bother?). Even the salt-added varieties contains only a tiny fraction of the sodium you'd find in a McDonalds burger or fries. There are plenty of fast inexpensive options for fruit too -- fresh fruit isn't terribly expensive, but if it's too much, one can get canned fruit, and just opt for the varieties that don't come in a (gross) heavy syrup.
I have to admit, with a US$30 food budget, I have a tendency to splurge and get fancier stuff than I need. If I were really hard up for money, I could probably manage to feed a family of four on the same budget. I've always been fortunate to live comfortably, but it drives me nuts when "poor" people spend their money at McDonalds -- for US$5 at McDonalds, you can get a "good" meal -- a burger, a fries, and a soda. For the same amount at a grocery store, you can get a can of green beans and a can of carrots (@ US$0.50 each), two pounds of chicken (@ US$0.99 per pound), a whole loaf of wheat bread (@ US$1), and a quart of milk (@ US$1). And that would be a decent meal for a family of four, with leftovers (Prices based on Northern Virginia Giant Food grocery store -- it would be even cheaper to buy in larger amounts and to do it at Shoppers Food Warehouse).
There are certainly poor people who would have trouble getting by -- but there is no way that you can claim fast food is cheaper than a half hour a week at the grocery store. Or that you can claim that it is impossible to eat healthfully on a tight budget... the most fundamental foods, like fruits and vegetables, are some of the cheapest things in a grocery store.
On my site, I only count the time on a page when the tab has focus. If it's not the active tab, or if the browser is minimized, I stop the ping-back script. Granted, I don't take that into account when calculating length-of-stay -- my concern was more for not wasting bandwidth for idle users, but it could easily be adapted to to subtract non-focus time from the stats if I needed a more meaningful metric.
-brian
...and get the barista to do it.
It doesn't matter how hard I try, I can never seem to get the Java Chip to turn out right when I attempt it myself. And being addicted to chocolate flavoured coffee, I have no other choice.
So you're the expert I've been looking for. I live in the middle of f'in nowhere, and the only way I get even broadcast TV is via Satellite. Currently I have DirecTV integrated with TiVo and I love it, but I can't get HD without switching to DirecTV's crappy TiVo-knockoff. I'd love to use MythTV... how do I use it with HDTV coming down off a Satellite? Thanks in advance for your advice. -brian
Virginia isn't one of those states. To get a carry permit, you need to show up at the local courthouse and get one. Some localities have stricter rules -- in Fairfax county (about four hours north of Blacksburg) you have to show that you've taken a gun safety class -- which can be had in an afternoon in the classroom without actually touching a real live gun.
But yeah, one student, teacher or campus police officer with a sidearm might have saved dozens of lives. A CCP isn't a sure thing, but it's clearly better than the alternative.
While I'm sure you're just saying this with tongue-in-cheek, I'd like to point out for the less savvy that when you say:
$ rm *
The star isn't an argument to the rm command, but rather it is an instruction to the command interpreter (such as bash) to replace the star symbol with the list of files that match your pattern (i.e. all of the files that don't start with a dot). That's why if you have too many files in a directory and you try this, you end up getting an error about the command line being too long -- it's trying to build a command line that has all of the file names listed out as though you'd typed them there yourself.
So the -i isn't a bug-as-feature, but a clever hack within a very well designed and documented framework.
--brian
That's a bug? Wow, I couldn't live without that "bug"... I don't do menus, so everything for me is a button -- including my Firefox favorites. Yay for bugs!
I run my own domain, and while I haven't found a good API for checking domain keys yet, one thing I do is check to see if a domain key signature is present in domains that are known to use them -- for example, if a message claims to be from gmail.com or yahoo.com, I just make sure there is a domain key signature header in the message... no need to validate it. Sure a spammer could put a fake signature in, but then it would be block by the major mail providers.
Granted, this is only a short term solution -- I'm hoping that good support for domain keys appears for Exim before too much longer.
I am also using Sender Policy Framework, as one poster suggested, however it does have two significant limitations. The first limitation is that it doesn't work for forwarded account... for example, I use an @acm.org forwarder for some traffic, which means that the host connecting to my mail server is from acm.org, which won't be listed in the SPF entry for iwanttohireyou.com. There have been some proposed methods for re-writing From lines, but it's really not workable. In my case, I know what servers are allowed to forward mail to my domain, and I simply bypass the SPF check in those cases.
The other problem with SPF, that I see more and more, is that most spammers have stopped putting well known domains in their from lines and are instead using garbage domains, which of course do not have SPF entries. If SPF was universal, then the absence of an SPF entry would tell you something, but it isn't, so it doesn't.
Still, between SPF, domain keys, and well monitored RBLs, you can keep spam to a minimum, and I applaud PayPal for trying to get other ISPs to implement these sorts of controls.
-brian
Wow. That's like saying, whether or not you're a bongo fan, Dick Feynman did some cool stuff with physics too. Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics and was head of the linguistics department at MIT for years. His theoretical work is the basis for most of what we study in formal syntax in linguistics. It's really a lot of fun going into a graduate linguistics class on syntax, and seeing the same diagrams on the board as in your graduate compilers class. Who cares about his politics?
--brian
That's a theoretical maximum of getting consecutive sentences of for numerous counts... if he attempted to defraud hundreds of people, it is simply possible that he could get hundreds of years. Unfortunately, these sorts of sentences are rarely handed out for the people who really deserve it -- and I mean the spammers, not the murderers. He'll probably be able to serve many of the sentences concurrently, or he'll make some sort of deal to drop the largest part of the charges -- he still gets whatever sentence the prosecuter feels like, but the court doesn't have to spend the extra time and money proving hundreds of individual charges.
--brian
The irony is that the "premium linuxes" of RedHat and SuSe are the ones that suck just as much as Windows... and the "unsupported linuxes" like Debian and Ubuntu just kick all sorts of ass.
As a counter-counter-point... I actually DID drop out of TJ -- or rather my parents were unhappy with a B average after my freshman year and pulled me out. After a year of B's at my base high school, they let me go back to TJ. And I must say that I preferred the environment where I didn't get beat up for being smart, where I didn't have to worry about drug deals going on in the bathrooms.
Oh, and if I'd graduated with a B average from my base high school (and I would have), there's no way I'd have gotten the full ride to college I got, that was only available to a TJ grad. You're a few years older than me, but by the time I graduated, nearly perfect SAT scores meant next to nothing, and all colleges cared about were grades -- I didn't learn to play the game until my second attempt at college.
And you know, being at TJ only had a positive impact on my social life. I did band, choir, a sports (I have varsity letters from both TJ and my base high school), and I am a pretty well rounded, well adjusted adult. I too own an expensive house, and have a stable career. If I hadn't gone to TJ, I'd have had to rely entirely on my college education, and I'd have been graduating right as the economy was collapsing. Instead, I'd been a software engineer for two years already, and while the recent grads (who were a little older than me) were getting laid off, I had job security.
So I guess everyone has their own different experiences. I work with a bunch of people who also went to TJ or whose kids go to TJ, and they are all similarly well adjusted and lead happy productive lives. It's unfortunate that you missed out, but I'm happy you've made the best of it nonetheless.
Oh, one last thing, about AP courses at your base high school being easier than non-AP courses at TJ... that was one of the best things about TJ... see, I was there to learn, not to breeze on through with minimal effort, nor to skip ahead in college. I have always taken the most interesting and advanced courses available. I do better when I'm not bored out of my gourd.
--brian
I knew, the second I saw the headline, that it was a TJ grad. I could have easily spent another year at TJ after my senior year, and learned a hell of a lot more than I did during my first year (or two) of college. In fact, in my time at TJ (where I specialized in Physics), I learned more about computer science in passing than I have at the two universities I've attended for most of the past ten years (including a CS degree).
I'll be the first one to admit that chances are he missed out on a lot of fun college life, but sometimes you just have to do something "because you can". He's smart, and I'm sure he'll spend the next three or four years in grad school and law school, and he'll find time to have a little bit of fun while he's at it.
Congratulations to him, and remember, just because he's smarter than you (academically) is no reason to try and take away from his accomplishments just to make you feel better about yourself.
--brian, TJ '96
So it's okay for the United States to arrest foreign nationals because they run a business in their own country that is (sort of) illegal in the States.
And yet the American government complains loudly when Freedom Fighters in the Middle East capture and detain members of the American invasion force who are obviously breaking the law by invading those countries?
It would be really nifty if the American government spent as much time trying to provide health-care to its citizens, teaching science in its schools, and waging peace, as it spends on enforcing fear driven puritanical laws at home and waging unjust ideological wars abroad.
--brian
Yeah, I love Tivo... unfortunately, my timing isn't perfect and I always seem to end up catching a few seconds of viagra or pro-wrestling ads that drive me batty -- and it's the same two or three annoying ads. If it were just *different* ads every time, I wouldn't be so annoyed.
Okay, so I don't necessarily like having records of my browsing habits stored by databases that can later be subpoenaed by the government, but it's basically unavoidable -- I know I keep extensive records of my site's visitors. And the privacy issue is largely secondary -- Amazon isn't interested in stalking you, they're interested in learning your buying habits to improve their own profits. The funny thing is that the best way for them to improve their profits is to sell you more stuff, and that means out of their millions of products, they need to choose carefully to show you the few products you're going to buy.
I wish that marketing was even more strongly targeted than it is. I like being shown advertisements for products that I actually want. I don't need to see ads for Viagra, Women's Hygiene, or the latest carbon fiber golf clubs. Amazon knows to show me ads for wireless routers, the latest Harry Potter books, and Armani tuxedos. I can't wait for TV to catch up with my online experience.
--brian