Is it no surprise then that the EU wants to cancel the ISS? Even with the faults the station has, it's still the best way to conduct low gravity experiments. It's intolerable that the Europeans want it over and done with.
If you read the article, you will see this is not a "low gravity experiment". They are placing an interferometer aboard the ISS, above atmospheric distortion. An unmanned rocket would probably do the job more cheaply. But, as long as governemnts are already wasting billions of dollars sending people up to the ISS, we might as well give the interferometer to them and tell them to turn it on, thus sparing a separate rocket launch.
This still doesn't mean the ISS is anything other than a giant orbiting multibillion dollar turkey.
I'm an atheist and this story still troubles me. There are nonreligious reasons you don't want gambling going on. It causes all sorts of problems. Usually these are offset by the additional revenue that gambling brings into an area, so casinos are tolerated. But that isn't the case here since the casinos are based in remote Pacific islands, and presumably those economies will be the only ones to benefit.
The U.S. knew what it was getting into when it signed GATT. We figured the screwing was going to be one-way, as if people in the Third World are too stupid to take advantage of us in return. It hasn't exactly turned out that way.
I lived on the tenth floor of a dorm in college for two years, and I noticed this behavior with almost 100% reliability.
Let's say I would get in the elevator on the ground floor (U.S.A. floor 1), press 10, and the 10 button would light up. Another person would enter, press (say) 5, and 5 would light up. A third person would get in, press 2, and the 2 button lights up.
Now already this floor 2 person has broken one of the unspoken rules: Floor 2 people are not to use the elevator if it means holding up people who live on higher floors and have to wait. The doors would stay open on their floor for about ten seconds after they left, and a common reaction was to make the doors close "faster" by pushing a button. Sometimes this meant the unlit "DOOR CLOSE" button, but more often people pushed the still-lit button of the floor they were going to. So the person still on the elevator with me would inevitably hit 5, but never 10, which was also still lit and would do just as well for placebo door closing purposes.
I guess it would have been an invasion on my "space" if someone did push "my" button instead of theirs. That button is mine. I pushed it. I'm the reason why it's glowing. You can't push it. Push your own damn button.
The government isn't really spying on you, per se.
Of course not.
They are taking all the public information out there, and data mining it to potentially flag and catch criminals and terrorists.
And it won't flag and catch me by mistake. They'd never make an error like that. This technology only affects bad guys.
This actually should be wonderful news for me. I made $92 off of Poindexter's stupid Total Information Awareness program last year by selling this T-shirt protesting it: "I gave up my essential liberties to obtain a little temporary security, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!" [Disclaimer: I might make money off you if you click that link and buy one, but I have a job, honestly don't need your money, would forward it to no worthy cause, and am just showing off my shirt design and bragging about the fact that I made $92 off of Total Information Awareness.]
The crowd here turn into luddites as soon as technology is used by the government, but I think this is a great use for it. The 9/11 hijackers were in plain view, but because of the different agencies and bureaucracies, they fell through. This could be a tool to find the next 9/11 and I am all for it.
Well, let's not get too presumptive about 9/11. It hasn't been demonstrated at all that the only way to prevent this attack would have been to implement a massively connected database with an extensive electronic dossier on each one of us. In fact, it hasn't been demonstrated at all that the attack could not have been prevented simply by people doing their jobs like they were supposed to.
Once the 9/11 commission finishes its report, maybe we will see what improvements can be made short of creating an unAmerican police state.
Having said this, I don't think it's wrong, and I agree wholeheartedly with their conclusions, but I find it silly that they refuse to accept it's a political statement.
So what if it is? That doesn't make it "wrong", if it cites verifiable facts and derives plausible conclusions from them.
There really is a reality out there at some point. You can't just get lazy and accuse all your opponents of "bias" without even offering anything to support it. It leads to a weird sort of "moral relativism" where stupid ideas are considered just as good as good ideas because otherwise you're "biased". Only politically correct facts matter.
Note the rise of "good science" as a political code phrase only recently. It used to mean doing good statistics, designing correct experimental protocols, etc. Now it means you get politically correct or politically convenient results. When the Bush Administration prattles on about "good science" this is what they are really talking about. The same thing happened to "good intelligence"- the spooks are quietly having their own similar problems.
A Department of the Interior scientific advisory panel of sheep industry experts will be announcing their findings later today that sheep bladders may be used to prevent earthquakes.
This is a pretty stupid comment. Outsourcing and offshoring are different things.
Hmmm... I was making an observation about current usage and you come back with an argument ad lexicon?
Outsourcing is when a company subcontracts the work... [explanation of "outsourcing" and "offshoring"]
Yes, I have a dictionary too.
I'm going to go out on a limb and charitably guess that English is your second language? There is a subtle distinction between a word's definition and what its current usage might be. A dictionary is the reference for a definition, and reflects common usage of a word at the time the dictionary was written. Since most word definitions in dictionaries were written more than a few years ago, it is no surprise that usage may differ from the dictionary definition, especially for a word such as "outsourcing" that has taken on new meaning recently. And let's be realistic. Despite what the dictionary says, when an American technology worker in 2004 loses his job because of "outsourcing", everyone knows what just happened.
Dude, "outsourcing" means "out of the company," not "out of the country." You can outsource within the States.
True. My point is that in the U.S., when people say "outsourcing" (especially in political contexts) they are usually referring to what is called "offshoring".
Let's note, from the start, that Prudential does not "outsource" to India. They own their own call center (or centre, depending on your spelling heritage) there. When you speak to someone in their New Delhi office, she -- and it is usually "she" -- is just as much a Prudential employee as someone working in one of their U.S. offices.
When Americans speak of "outsourcing" in this context they mean "out" as in "out of the country". What is being described here is arguably worse than outsourcing per se from our perspective since it represents a more significant investment.
Does this mean that they did not believe Comcast's offer to be legitimate?
Sure, if you take it at face value. The reason Comcast's offer wasn't "legitimate" was because it was not Disney's idea to begin with. Disney's shareholders and officeholders will receive a much better deal in an acquisition where every decision-making individual involved can be sure that he will receive his fair share of the loot that flies up in the air and is up for grabs in these situations. That wasn't the case here, where basically Comcast caught Disney off guard, with their lawyers sleeping.
This is by no means the end of merger-talk between Comcast and Disney. It is the dream of every entertainment conglomerate to someday fuse with every other entertainment conglomerate in existence, and neither Disney nor Comcast can be expected to ignore all that "synergy". Stunts like this are part of the mating ritual. This is the first part of a long mating dance that ends in a new corporate logo, a new round of strange commercials repeating a weird logo that makes no sense, and several thousand layoffs.
How long will it take to cool down far enough that it's no longer emitting enough radiation (of whatever sort) for us to even see it?
About 100 billion years, typically 10-20X as long as the star's pre-dwarf lifetime. The surface temperature is 20X the sun's, so in theory they're 160000 times as radiant per square centimeter than the sun is. But they're about as big as the earth, so an incredible amount of thermal energy has to radiate through a relatively small surface area. In the standard APOD photo you can see what they look like- they have the color of hot blue giant stars but they're very dim for being so small.
Is anyone proposing such a mechanism as an explanation of the dark matter issue?
A white-dwarf-matter theory runs into trouble pretty fast. It predicts things that we don't see, like many more supernovas each year than observed. There are a whole bunch of dark matter theories that try to explain the weird gravitational stuff using ordinary baryonic matter like rocks, dwarfs, or comets. In general they are only seriously brought up when someone is dismissing them.
Probably. When a supercolliders collide two gold nuclei, the density gets pretty damned high, but unfortunately I can't seem to Google any solid numbers up. I'd strongly suspect that the density gets into that range.
Oh in those collisions the density is much much higher- maybe a factor of a thousand times higher, approaching neutron star density. But in fact ALL nuclei have comparable density and as you point out we have no macroscopic quantity of this stuff.
White dwarfs are supported by degenerate electron pressure. So many electrons are crammed into such a small space that the entire star has become something like one giant atom with lots of nuclei in it. All low energy electron quantum states are occupied by electrons. Except at the very highest energy levels near the Fermi energy, which are adjacent to unoccupied levels immediately above, giving the electrons in those states a little freedom of movement.
A white dwarf has no internal energy source- it spends the rest of its life cooling down into a cinder. Since the star is hot (surface temps are commonly 100000 K) there is some spillover into higher energy levels. But as the star cools down, they gradually settle down and fill all available levels below the Fermi energy.
The nuclei, OTOH, still have plenty of room. They are still bouncing around and having collisions in the star like a classical gas because they still have so many unoccupied quantum states to explore. There probably isn't much difference between a carbon-dominated white dwarf and a helium-dominated one, since the behavior of both is mostly determined by what the electrons are doing. The article says that by studying pulsations of the star, they determined that the interior has "solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond". It leaves out some details. What is "solidifying"? The electrons or the embedded nuclei? It could mean a bunch of things. "Diamond" is not really one of them, though. This would be a different sort of diamond than you are used to.
When you hear an astrophysicist claiming that he has found a "girl's best friend" in space, always be skeptical. These physicists know little about what girls really want.
Get a photocopy of Astrophysical Journal Letters from your local library (via interlibrary loan if they don't carry it) and don't be such a snob.
A "snob"? A little skepticism is warranted here.
White dwarfs have densities in the ballpark of one million grams per cc. Have we ever compressed any matter on earth at all to a density of 1 million grams per cc? Do you seriously think that carbon, which as diamond has an invariant density of 3.51 g/cc, would still exist in something resembling its familiar form at a density of 1 million g/cc? As a covalently bonded sp3 tetrahedral diamond lattice?
The internuclear spacing of carbon nuclei in a carbon dwarf is about 1% of what it is in an ordinary diamond. It may be made of carbon, but this is not diamond. I doubt it's even diamondlike. It's something else.
This was a shiny dollar bill on the ground waiting to be picked up, and it didn't occur to anybody to do it. I mean, the claims being made are pretty blatantly falsifiable. Take someone's money and make their penis longer? How hard is it really to verify to the satisfaction of a court that these claims are fraudulent? This is blatant fraud, relying on the fact that nobody wants to file a suit on behalf of guys with small penises who respond to spam. This guy obviously doesn't care what anyone thinks of him and I can really respect that.
I have a question for all you Slashdot lawyers, who are always good for some creative interpretation of the law. Is it possible for me to form and sue on behalf of a class, and name another class as the defendant? Specifically, I would like to sue on behalf of everyone who has received a penis-enlargement spam and did not respond to it, and I would seek damages against the class of individuals who received this spam and did respond to it. And I would specifically like to include in my definition of this latter class those individuals who seek relief in this case, so that I can place a lien on any judgments squeezed out of Ron "Hedgehog" Jeremy for failing to lengthen the members of this class as promised. Part of that money is required to cover my email deletion charges.
You can solve all manner of these types of problems using certificates with high encryption strength.
No you can't. People concentrate on encryption strength as if that's everything. It's like the height of a wall. Doubling it doesn't help if people can walk around the wall. The key length is only one of many vulnerabilities in a system. Think of all the computer security breaches you've heard about. How many happened because an attacker succeeded in brute forcing a key? As opposed to, say, using an easily guessed default password? Unless you're using DES, or crappy exportable encryption, brute forced keyspaces are probably not how you will go down.
What you have here is something that is pretending to be a solution to a problem that is pretending to be a solution in search of a problem. There are really two problems here- the one you are addressing (short key length), and a more fundamental one, which is that there is no reason for we the voting public to be hearing the words "Internet" and "voting" in the same sentence at all, nor is there any reason why we should have to assume a collective responsibility for safeguarding our own votes in this election process when we weren't even the ones who had anything to gain from endangering the democratic process in the first place.
They need to be pampered and babied with one atmosphere of room temperature oxygen for the entire trip.
Whoops, just noticed I wrote this... We learned not to use pure oxygen after the Apollo fire. (In which we incinerated three of our best astronauts right here on Earth.)
We need another space race, CMON people, pilgrims didn't send boats to america to collect soil, they populated it!
Why do we need humans on Mars?
This means less resources for robotic missions, which frankly make a lot more sense than manned missions. From every practical standpoint. What do humans bring to the table? Propaganda value, and local decision-making ability. That is all. They need to be pampered and babied with one atmosphere of room temperature oxygen for the entire trip. And worst of all, they must be guaranteed passage back to Earth. So they have to take a huge rocket for a return trip with them when they go up- which is grossly impractical. It was bad enough when we had to do it from the moon. Mars is a much deeper gravity well to rocket out of. For some reason we are unwilling to accept the notion that we might send someone to another planet like Mars and leave them there or expect them to efficiently commit suicide. But that's because we're hypocrites. With failure rates as high as they are, committing suicide is practically what you're doing when you get on a NASA shuttle or rocket. So why don't we just admit this is a one-way trip and at least junk the requirement for a return trip? Or this is not going to happen.
"But we're running out of space for all these people on Earth!" I hear you say. May I point out that sending a man to Mars will deplete far more of the Earth's resources than merely allowing him to quietly live here in a crappy apartment. This probably implies that sending people into space will not be a practical method of relieving Earthbound congestion.
There has been a lot of talk about replacing SMTP with something better. Except I think "something better" will turn out to be as exploitable as SMTP if we ever try it, as long as messages can be sent for free. Any messaging protocol is susceptible to spam if transmission is free and sending a message to someone merely requires knowledge of a fixed, relatively stable piece of information such as an email address. People come up with ways to complicate SMTP and they often don't realize that the replacement protocols they are devising will largely suffer the same problems. SMTP does make spam easy, but any protocol with these properties will make spam possible, and spam merely needs to be possible for the world to go to hell. The spam being so egregiously easy on top of being possible is very noticeable with SMTP, but in a practical sense it's irrelevant. The spam would arrive even if SMTP didn't make it so easy.
So it appears we have no choice but to charge for it. But most people, if given the chance of free, spam-infested email, and pay-per-send email, will opt for the free email, or at least elect to have it available. Who wants to get financial information involved? If I can manage to keep the address secret (yeah right, but I can hope!) I can get away with no spam and be able to send messages for free! Plus I will continue to need an SMTP account for the mailing lists I'm on, who cannot participate in this new pay scheme and send me mail at my Microsoft address.
We are all going to be receiving spam for the rest of our lives. Solutions to spam should be viewed as suspiciously as blueprints for perpetual motion machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it no surprise then that the EU wants to cancel the ISS? Even with the faults the station has, it's still the best way to conduct low gravity experiments. It's intolerable that the Europeans want it over and done with.
If you read the article, you will see this is not a "low gravity experiment". They are placing an interferometer aboard the ISS, above atmospheric distortion. An unmanned rocket would probably do the job more cheaply. But, as long as governemnts are already wasting billions of dollars sending people up to the ISS, we might as well give the interferometer to them and tell them to turn it on, thus sparing a separate rocket launch.
This still doesn't mean the ISS is anything other than a giant orbiting multibillion dollar turkey.
I'm an atheist and this story still troubles me. There are nonreligious reasons you don't want gambling going on. It causes all sorts of problems. Usually these are offset by the additional revenue that gambling brings into an area, so casinos are tolerated. But that isn't the case here since the casinos are based in remote Pacific islands, and presumably those economies will be the only ones to benefit.
The U.S. knew what it was getting into when it signed GATT. We figured the screwing was going to be one-way, as if people in the Third World are too stupid to take advantage of us in return. It hasn't exactly turned out that way.
I searched through Linux for SCO's intellectual property and found these purloined lines!
{
}
int i;
j++
static char buf[1024];
} else {
if (!status) {
for(;;)
int error;
void* addr;
return 0;
And anyone manage to find this in System V?
panic("bad_user_access_length executed (not cool, dude)");
I'm still looking for where it was stolen from, but man is that Wingdings hard to read!
The only thing that would be against the law is defacing currency and attempting to use it in commerce.
What if I draw moustaches on the presidents and sell the doctored notes as artistic portraits of Saddam Hussein?
I lived on the tenth floor of a dorm in college for two years, and I noticed this behavior with almost 100% reliability.
Let's say I would get in the elevator on the ground floor (U.S.A. floor 1), press 10, and the 10 button would light up. Another person would enter, press (say) 5, and 5 would light up. A third person would get in, press 2, and the 2 button lights up.
Now already this floor 2 person has broken one of the unspoken rules: Floor 2 people are not to use the elevator if it means holding up people who live on higher floors and have to wait. The doors would stay open on their floor for about ten seconds after they left, and a common reaction was to make the doors close "faster" by pushing a button. Sometimes this meant the unlit "DOOR CLOSE" button, but more often people pushed the still-lit button of the floor they were going to. So the person still on the elevator with me would inevitably hit 5, but never 10, which was also still lit and would do just as well for placebo door closing purposes.
I guess it would have been an invasion on my "space" if someone did push "my" button instead of theirs. That button is mine. I pushed it. I'm the reason why it's glowing. You can't push it. Push your own damn button.
What is the matter with an Apache/BSD license? Why must it be GPL?
The government isn't really spying on you, per se.
Of course not.
They are taking all the public information out there, and data mining it to potentially flag and catch criminals and terrorists.
And it won't flag and catch me by mistake. They'd never make an error like that. This technology only affects bad guys.
This actually should be wonderful news for me. I made $92 off of Poindexter's stupid Total Information Awareness program last year by selling this T-shirt protesting it: "I gave up my essential liberties to obtain a little temporary security, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!" [Disclaimer: I might make money off you if you click that link and buy one, but I have a job, honestly don't need your money, would forward it to no worthy cause, and am just showing off my shirt design and bragging about the fact that I made $92 off of Total Information Awareness.]
The crowd here turn into luddites as soon as technology is used by the government, but I think this is a great use for it. The 9/11 hijackers were in plain view, but because of the different agencies and bureaucracies, they fell through. This could be a tool to find the next 9/11 and I am all for it.
Well, let's not get too presumptive about 9/11. It hasn't been demonstrated at all that the only way to prevent this attack would have been to implement a massively connected database with an extensive electronic dossier on each one of us. In fact, it hasn't been demonstrated at all that the attack could not have been prevented simply by people doing their jobs like they were supposed to.
Once the 9/11 commission finishes its report, maybe we will see what improvements can be made short of creating an unAmerican police state.
How do you figure "Sign up for Cisco and Microsoft training!" implies that they are the same company?
I guess they could say "Sign up for Cisco training and Microsoft training" but that would make the commercial longer.
Having said this, I don't think it's wrong, and I agree wholeheartedly with their conclusions, but I find it silly that they refuse to accept it's a political statement.
So what if it is? That doesn't make it "wrong", if it cites verifiable facts and derives plausible conclusions from them.
There really is a reality out there at some point. You can't just get lazy and accuse all your opponents of "bias" without even offering anything to support it. It leads to a weird sort of "moral relativism" where stupid ideas are considered just as good as good ideas because otherwise you're "biased". Only politically correct facts matter.
Note the rise of "good science" as a political code phrase only recently. It used to mean doing good statistics, designing correct experimental protocols, etc. Now it means you get politically correct or politically convenient results. When the Bush Administration prattles on about "good science" this is what they are really talking about. The same thing happened to "good intelligence"- the spooks are quietly having their own similar problems.
A Department of the Interior scientific advisory panel of sheep industry experts will be announcing their findings later today that sheep bladders may be used to prevent earthquakes.
This is a pretty stupid comment. Outsourcing and offshoring are different things.
/. newbie: scolding the moderators and telling them how they should be doing their job. One soon learns not to do that!
Hmmm... I was making an observation about current usage and you come back with an argument ad lexicon?
Outsourcing is when a company subcontracts the work... [explanation of "outsourcing" and "offshoring"]
Yes, I have a dictionary too.
I'm going to go out on a limb and charitably guess that English is your second language? There is a subtle distinction between a word's definition and what its current usage might be. A dictionary is the reference for a definition, and reflects common usage of a word at the time the dictionary was written. Since most word definitions in dictionaries were written more than a few years ago, it is no surprise that usage may differ from the dictionary definition, especially for a word such as "outsourcing" that has taken on new meaning recently. And let's be realistic. Despite what the dictionary says, when an American technology worker in 2004 loses his job because of "outsourcing", everyone knows what just happened.
Technically we should say "offshoring" but that word is relatively unknown.
Please stop modding up ignorance as "Insightful."
One of the hallmarks of a
Dude, "outsourcing" means "out of the company," not "out of the country." You can outsource within the States.
True. My point is that in the U.S., when people say "outsourcing" (especially in political contexts) they are usually referring to what is called "offshoring".
Let's note, from the start, that Prudential does not "outsource" to India. They own their own call center (or centre, depending on your spelling heritage) there. When you speak to someone in their New Delhi office, she -- and it is usually "she" -- is just as much a Prudential employee as someone working in one of their U.S. offices.
When Americans speak of "outsourcing" in this context they mean "out" as in "out of the country". What is being described here is arguably worse than outsourcing per se from our perspective since it represents a more significant investment.
Does this mean that they did not believe Comcast's offer to be legitimate?
Sure, if you take it at face value. The reason Comcast's offer wasn't "legitimate" was because it was not Disney's idea to begin with. Disney's shareholders and officeholders will receive a much better deal in an acquisition where every decision-making individual involved can be sure that he will receive his fair share of the loot that flies up in the air and is up for grabs in these situations. That wasn't the case here, where basically Comcast caught Disney off guard, with their lawyers sleeping.
This is by no means the end of merger-talk between Comcast and Disney. It is the dream of every entertainment conglomerate to someday fuse with every other entertainment conglomerate in existence, and neither Disney nor Comcast can be expected to ignore all that "synergy". Stunts like this are part of the mating ritual. This is the first part of a long mating dance that ends in a new corporate logo, a new round of strange commercials repeating a weird logo that makes no sense, and several thousand layoffs.
How long will it take to cool down far enough that it's no longer emitting enough radiation (of whatever sort) for us to even see it?
About 100 billion years, typically 10-20X as long as the star's pre-dwarf lifetime. The surface temperature is 20X the sun's, so in theory they're 160000 times as radiant per square centimeter than the sun is. But they're about as big as the earth, so an incredible amount of thermal energy has to radiate through a relatively small surface area. In the standard APOD photo you can see what they look like- they have the color of hot blue giant stars but they're very dim for being so small.
Is anyone proposing such a mechanism as an explanation of the dark matter issue?
A white-dwarf-matter theory runs into trouble pretty fast. It predicts things that we don't see, like many more supernovas each year than observed. There are a whole bunch of dark matter theories that try to explain the weird gravitational stuff using ordinary baryonic matter like rocks, dwarfs, or comets. In general they are only seriously brought up when someone is dismissing them.
Probably. When a supercolliders collide two gold nuclei, the density gets pretty damned high, but unfortunately I can't seem to Google any solid numbers up. I'd strongly suspect that the density gets into that range.
Oh in those collisions the density is much much higher- maybe a factor of a thousand times higher, approaching neutron star density. But in fact ALL nuclei have comparable density and as you point out we have no macroscopic quantity of this stuff.
White dwarfs are supported by degenerate electron pressure. So many electrons are crammed into such a small space that the entire star has become something like one giant atom with lots of nuclei in it. All low energy electron quantum states are occupied by electrons. Except at the very highest energy levels near the Fermi energy, which are adjacent to unoccupied levels immediately above, giving the electrons in those states a little freedom of movement.
A white dwarf has no internal energy source- it spends the rest of its life cooling down into a cinder. Since the star is hot (surface temps are commonly 100000 K) there is some spillover into higher energy levels. But as the star cools down, they gradually settle down and fill all available levels below the Fermi energy.
The nuclei, OTOH, still have plenty of room. They are still bouncing around and having collisions in the star like a classical gas because they still have so many unoccupied quantum states to explore. There probably isn't much difference between a carbon-dominated white dwarf and a helium-dominated one, since the behavior of both is mostly determined by what the electrons are doing. The article says that by studying pulsations of the star, they determined that the interior has "solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond". It leaves out some details. What is "solidifying"? The electrons or the embedded nuclei? It could mean a bunch of things. "Diamond" is not really one of them, though. This would be a different sort of diamond than you are used to.
When you hear an astrophysicist claiming that he has found a "girl's best friend" in space, always be skeptical. These physicists know little about what girls really want.
Get a photocopy of Astrophysical Journal Letters from your local library (via interlibrary loan if they don't carry it) and don't be such a snob.
A "snob"? A little skepticism is warranted here.
White dwarfs have densities in the ballpark of one million grams per cc. Have we ever compressed any matter on earth at all to a density of 1 million grams per cc? Do you seriously think that carbon, which as diamond has an invariant density of 3.51 g/cc, would still exist in something resembling its familiar form at a density of 1 million g/cc? As a covalently bonded sp3 tetrahedral diamond lattice?
The internuclear spacing of carbon nuclei in a carbon dwarf is about 1% of what it is in an ordinary diamond. It may be made of carbon, but this is not diamond. I doubt it's even diamondlike. It's something else.
This was a shiny dollar bill on the ground waiting to be picked up, and it didn't occur to anybody to do it. I mean, the claims being made are pretty blatantly falsifiable. Take someone's money and make their penis longer? How hard is it really to verify to the satisfaction of a court that these claims are fraudulent? This is blatant fraud, relying on the fact that nobody wants to file a suit on behalf of guys with small penises who respond to spam. This guy obviously doesn't care what anyone thinks of him and I can really respect that.
I have a question for all you Slashdot lawyers, who are always good for some creative interpretation of the law. Is it possible for me to form and sue on behalf of a class, and name another class as the defendant? Specifically, I would like to sue on behalf of everyone who has received a penis-enlargement spam and did not respond to it, and I would seek damages against the class of individuals who received this spam and did respond to it. And I would specifically like to include in my definition of this latter class those individuals who seek relief in this case, so that I can place a lien on any judgments squeezed out of Ron "Hedgehog" Jeremy for failing to lengthen the members of this class as promised. Part of that money is required to cover my email deletion charges.
None of your angle brackets are being rendered.
Discussions of generics never seem to get very far on Slashdot.
At last, someone has finally gotten in trouble for bundling spyware in their products!
You can solve all manner of these types of problems using certificates with high encryption strength.
No you can't. People concentrate on encryption strength as if that's everything. It's like the height of a wall. Doubling it doesn't help if people can walk around the wall. The key length is only one of many vulnerabilities in a system. Think of all the computer security breaches you've heard about. How many happened because an attacker succeeded in brute forcing a key? As opposed to, say, using an easily guessed default password? Unless you're using DES, or crappy exportable encryption, brute forced keyspaces are probably not how you will go down.
What you have here is something that is pretending to be a solution to a problem that is pretending to be a solution in search of a problem. There are really two problems here- the one you are addressing (short key length), and a more fundamental one, which is that there is no reason for we the voting public to be hearing the words "Internet" and "voting" in the same sentence at all, nor is there any reason why we should have to assume a collective responsibility for safeguarding our own votes in this election process when we weren't even the ones who had anything to gain from endangering the democratic process in the first place.
They need to be pampered and babied with one atmosphere of room temperature oxygen for the entire trip.
Whoops, just noticed I wrote this... We learned not to use pure oxygen after the Apollo fire. (In which we incinerated three of our best astronauts right here on Earth.)
We need another space race, CMON people, pilgrims didn't send boats to america to collect soil, they populated it!
Why do we need humans on Mars?
This means less resources for robotic missions, which frankly make a lot more sense than manned missions. From every practical standpoint. What do humans bring to the table? Propaganda value, and local decision-making ability. That is all. They need to be pampered and babied with one atmosphere of room temperature oxygen for the entire trip. And worst of all, they must be guaranteed passage back to Earth. So they have to take a huge rocket for a return trip with them when they go up- which is grossly impractical. It was bad enough when we had to do it from the moon. Mars is a much deeper gravity well to rocket out of. For some reason we are unwilling to accept the notion that we might send someone to another planet like Mars and leave them there or expect them to efficiently commit suicide. But that's because we're hypocrites. With failure rates as high as they are, committing suicide is practically what you're doing when you get on a NASA shuttle or rocket. So why don't we just admit this is a one-way trip and at least junk the requirement for a return trip? Or this is not going to happen.
"But we're running out of space for all these people on Earth!" I hear you say. May I point out that sending a man to Mars will deplete far more of the Earth's resources than merely allowing him to quietly live here in a crappy apartment. This probably implies that sending people into space will not be a practical method of relieving Earthbound congestion.
There has been a lot of talk about replacing SMTP with something better. Except I think "something better" will turn out to be as exploitable as SMTP if we ever try it, as long as messages can be sent for free.
Any messaging protocol is susceptible to spam if transmission is free and sending a message to someone merely requires knowledge of a fixed, relatively stable piece of information such as an email address. People come up with ways to complicate SMTP and they often don't realize that the replacement protocols they are devising will largely suffer the same problems. SMTP does make spam easy, but any protocol with these properties will make spam possible, and spam merely needs to be possible for the world to go to hell. The spam being so egregiously easy on top of being possible is very noticeable with SMTP, but in a practical sense it's irrelevant. The spam would arrive even if SMTP didn't make it so easy.
So it appears we have no choice but to charge for it. But most people, if given the chance of free, spam-infested email, and pay-per-send email, will opt for the free email, or at least elect to have it available. Who wants to get financial information involved? If I can manage to keep the address secret (yeah right, but I can hope!) I can get away with no spam and be able to send messages for free! Plus I will continue to need an SMTP account for the mailing lists I'm on, who cannot participate in this new pay scheme and send me mail at my Microsoft address.
We are all going to be receiving spam for the rest of our lives. Solutions to spam should be viewed as suspiciously as blueprints for perpetual motion machines.
The sadest part of your list is that it doesn't have:
:)
( ) I think you might have something here.
Yep...
I figure this "form" post does make a point, and the conspicuous absence of hope is part of it.