Chances are good if he had chousen a diffrent field (one he maybe knows something about as he never got that harrasing your target market is very stupid marketting) we'd probably not need laws banning junk fax or e-mail and the industry standards would actually respect the target markets fealings by implamenting and enforcing it's own industry standards that come short of banning.
I wouldn't bet on it. There's an endless supply of jerks in the world.
I'm not the world's most intelligent person, but I'm wondering how this will catch on...
Catch on? It doesn't need to catch on. This is not so much a product as a stunt. Think of Sir Richard Branson's balloon trip across the Atlantic.
From TFA: The aim will be to deliberately use the project as a communication platform for the concept of renewable energy, and so generate public enthusiasm in favour of sustainable development.
This is exactly the kind of thing you might do when you're rich and have more money than you know what to do with. And we poor folk occasionally get treated to the spectacle of goofy rich guys stranded in some unpleasant place waiting to be rescued, so it works out for everybody.
Why not just fly the other drection and stay in the sunlight?
It's not often I get to ask this politely... what planet are you on? This one rotates too fast (1670 km/hr at the equator, 670 km/hr at the Artic/Antarctic Circles). I don't know how fast this flimsy looking plane will travel but consider the speed of sound at sea level is 1225 km/hr. You can extend daylight hours by flying in an easterly direction but you probably couldn't avoid the night entirely in this thing.
Ranched cattle would acquire it as they are sometimes feed the brains of previously slaughtered cattle, but how exactly do deer and other wildlife transmit it?
The stuff is persistent. It can stick around on surfaces for a long time. And it survives harsh environments. Surgical implements remain infective for prion diseases even after being autoclaved and sterilized with heat and chemicals.
Scrapie, for example, is a prion disease of sheep. Farms in Iceland that had not had any sheep present at all for three years, in an effort to get rid of scrapie, were ravaged by it all over again as soon as they imported healthy sheep from elsewhere.
One theory went like this. The placenta left over from the birthing process was shown to be highly infectious. So the infected ewe would contaminate the grass and soil, and then the grass was eaten by other sheep (maybe years later, even) on the same farm.
The mechanism of horizontal transmission of CWD in deer is unknown but contact via saliva, urine, and feces are the prime suspects as usual. Of course, given the durability of the agent, there are plenty of conceivable ways it could happen.
And there's lots of literature supporting the idea that predators and scavengers tend to have very good defenses against the diseases that affect their prey. Part of the defenses are powerful digestive systems that leave few cells intact and chop up most proteins and DNA into small pieces. They also have some of the best immune systems on the planet.
You can have the strongest immune system of any known mammal or bird and it will not protect you from prion diseases like spongiform encephalopathies. There is no foreign protein (except for the prion particle that you originally got infected from years ago), just a lot of funny-folded native protein. So what? As amyloid plaques build up in your brain, your immune system has nothing to attack. An infected animal's body can be riddled with prions at death and you will not find a single antibody to them anywhere since they pass the self/non-self test. In fact, to get antibodies, people need to inject massive quantities of prion particles into unrelated animals, whose immune systems will react in the same way they do with any foreign protein.
A strong digestive system doesn't seem to be much help either, as the prion form of the protein is extremely resistant to attack from proteases.
There are many versions of the prion gene, and not all of them are equally prone to malicious folding. Wolves with prion genes whose PrP proteins fold easily into the beta-pleated-sheet prion tend to die after eating lots of prions. Surviving wolves gobble prions and suffer no adverse consequences since their native protein is resistant to the altered conformation. So the wolf is probably OK, because of the selection pressure that has been applied to it.
But you'd think the same thing about cats, and cats get the disease easily. But in fact, it is highly likely that all wolves are immune to transmissable spongiform encephalopathies judging by the mere fact that nobody has ever succeeded in infecting a dog with any sort of TSE. Even when they plonk highly infectious prion material directly into a dog's brain, no TSE develops. TSE of one flavor or another has been successfully transmitted to goats, sheep, monkeys, pigs, mink, cattle, cats, and zoo animals of all types that ate prion-contaminated feed. Never to any breed of dog (or wolf, same thing).
When BSE broke out in England, a number of human victims (who all ate beef) came down with CJD. It was called "new variant" CJD ("nvCJD") because it turned out not to be CJD at all, which attacks the cerebral cortex, but is in fact a closely related disease: the human form of BSE, which attacks the brainstem just like it does in cattle. A prion researcher tried to transmit BSE from cows to transgenic mice which had a human prion gene, via brain injections (the foolproof way to get it- feeding is much less effective). This experiment was eventually watched closely by the British food industry as the mice survived past 300 and 400 days. But meanwhile, study of the first ten victims of nvCJD in Britain showed that all were homozygous for methionine at codon 129. About 38 percent of the human population fits this profile. The mice (which never showed any signs of illness) had a human prion gene that was homozygous for valine, not methionine, at codon 129. So while this is a transmissable disease, susceptibility is genetically determined.
I think they're an example of a self sustaining molecule - one that catalyzes the creation of itself from another molecule.
That's probably the best way to look at it. It's just like Vonnegut's ice-nine, except it works on a particular mammalian brain protein instead of water.
Infective particles pass through 30 nm filters and survive immersion for long periods of time in formaldehyde. They are relatively impervious to radiation and can survive the heat of a rendering plant. Unlike the normal protein, the prion form is not attacked by proteases such as those present in a mammalian digestive system.
When the protein mutates to form a prion, a small beta pleated sheet region near the protein's N-terminus nucleates a much larger one that consumes an alpha helix and almost the entire N-terminal half of the protein. Apparently this can happen two ways. A non-mutant form can spontaneously mutate to the prion form. Since the prion's conformational energy appears to be lower from all the beta-pleating, this is thermodynamically possible and there must be high kinetic barriers in the way to prevent it from happening all the time. (While spontaneous cases are extremely rare, they do imply that we will never see these diseases completely eradicated.) The more likely mechanism is exposure to an already-mutant prion particle, which overcomes the kinetic barrier by acting as a catalyst.
The prion's beta pleated sheets apparently give it structural integrity against heat, chemical, and protease attack. They are also what imparts the self-replication ability of the prion to induce the same alpha-helix to beta-pleated-sheet conformational changes in neighboring proteins, in a mechanism that is probably similar to crystal growth. The beta sheet forming peptides aggregate to form amyloid fibrils, and this kills neurons through apoptosis.
Re:Am I the only US person to have Sinclair ZX81?
on
First Computers
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· Score: 1
I had the 16K pack, and the awful ZX printer that I pestered my parents to mail order from England. I think I got cadmium poisoning from that thing.
Long typing sessions on the ZX81 (or the Timex) would result in glitchy behavior. If the 16K RAM pack was on it, and it was good and hot from being on more than 20 minutes, it would crash if it received a completely minor jolt to the exterior. Or a dirty look. And you'd lose everything. Saving to tape was a major pain in the ass because there was no VERIFY, only SAVE, and all the fiddling with the tape player alone would typically make it vibrate enough to crash. I found that you could finish typing in a long listing and save the program to tape if you put a Ziploc bag full of ice cubes on the case. That would calm it down and make it less crash prone. The heat sink inside was a thin little aluminum prong that stuck up from the board.
Save to tape was abysmally slow and unreliable. You had to have the volume knob set just right, and you had to do two saves in a row to be safe (no VERIFY). If you listened to a cassette that had been saved onto, you heard a randomly warbling screeching noise. Except near the end, when it turned into a long buzzing sound interrupted by "clicks" that were about a second apart. This was the video memory you were hearing, and each click noise was actually a screen line terminator! That's how slow the tape I/O was. If you didn't have the 16K memory pack, the ZX81 only had 1KB (referred to in marketing materials as "a full 1024 bytes of random access memory") and it didn't use a flat 2D array for the screen- it played tricks to make it fit and you didn't hear the evenly spaced clicks on saves.
BASIC sucked so hard on the ZX81 that you were practically forced right away to learn Z80 assembler. Except there was no good place to POKE to. You could lower the RAM ceiling and then POKE your program up above it, but then you couldn't save it to tape. The typical way to run machine code was to use a long REM statement:
10 REM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Then you start your POKEs at 16514 and the "A" characters would turn into funny things as you went. (It wasn't even ASCII- it was a completely rinky-dink character set invented by Clive Sinclair.) Then you evaluate USB(16514) and it would run the machine code program that was residing in the REM statement, returning the value of the fake "bc" register upon returning. All commercially available software for the Timex/ZX81 used this trick. This type of behavior (executing code resident in what is supposed to be a human-readable buffer) is nowadays confined to things like buffer overflow attacks, but on the ZX81 it was a commonly accepted way to write programs.
So tax dollars should be wasted on expensive overpaid Americans instead of on cheap Indians thus saving more money to be used on OTHER social programs?
I disagree. I would place the opening of "Saving Private Ryan", the first Coliseum scene in "Gladiator", or the massacre in "Last of the Mohicans" well above this. I'm probably forgetting something too.
OK, it was a bit of an overstatement. Still a decent battle scene, best battle of any fantasy/sci-fi film.
I'm sorry, but the horse mounting in Two Towers fucking rocked, even if every female in the audience simultaneously climaxed. What made it so cool was the whole slo-mo lead-in from Legolas shooting arrows, and that what happens next is totally unexpected.
If I remember right, according to Jackson the reason they put that scene in was that they had forgotten to get footage of Orlando Bloom mounting a horse.
Haven't seen RotK yet. Hopefully it'll be better than The Two Towers.
I went to see RoTK yesterday. Not knowing what sort of crowd to expect, my wife and I arrived 90 mins early for a 3:15 showing, and traded tickets for the 2:15 showing once we noticed (at 2 PM) that the 3:15 line was longer than the 2:15 line!
I was waiting for it to start, and remember some guy two rows behind me muttering about third movies sucking. "I hope it doesn't suck, because it's the third movie, and the third Matrix movie sucked. So this is probably going to suck." Heh heh, dumbass.
I liked the Two Towers more than FoTR, and I liked this even better. It has everything in it that made the Two Towers enjoyable, plus more stuff. I don't consider myself a Tolkien weenie, since I've only read the book once and that was ten years ago when I was in college. So I can sometimes remember something not being in the book, and it irks me when I see deviations from the book, but if they work in the movie then I don't care.
PRO:
The battle scenes. The battle for Minas Tirith in RoTK makes the battle for Helm's Deep in the Two Towers look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The orc army has new beasts and bigger war machines. More varied creatures and men take part in the fighting. More vehicles are used to get there. More people are killed by being carried into the air and dropped from great heights. Larger objects are smashed into castle doors. The Minas Tirith scene is the most amazing battle scene in the history of cinema. (Its only rival is Spartacus, since Kubrick didn't have CGI.) It is a triumph of production design. See it in the theater if you don't have a sixty inch screen.
Gollum continues to become more of a conniving rat bastard. You get to see Andy Serkis in person as Smeagol (with Deagol) at the beginning of the movie, and you see his deterioration into Gollum explained without the need for any cringe-inducing narration. Although it seemed a bit hurried and I have a vague feeling that the Extended Edition DVD will contain a lot of scenes that were cut from here.
Shelob is well done, exactly as I remember picturing her from the book. Jackson could have really messed this one up, too, as do many attempts at giant spiders in movies. Shelob was a mere highlight here, but that alone could have been enough material for a movie. Just think of all the stupid movies devoted to a single special effect like Godzilla.
The signal fire scene. Watch a single bit of information travel across mountaintops all the way from Gondor to Rohan. Remarkably well filmed, and will surely help New Zealand's tourism industry.
The volcano scene. I know the lava is all CGI, who cares. The atmosphere here and in the rest of Mordor is spot on. (Although I was bothered by the way [a certain major character] sinks into the lava. I'm pretty sure he would float. And show signs of being affected by the heat.) But it was really touching, seeing Gollum briefly reunited with his precious. I've never seen such a happy face in my whole life. It gives me the creeps now just remembering that happy face.
CON:
The Aragorn/Arwen/Elrond subplot continues on its course as a slow motion train wreck through all three films. These include the Liv Tyler scenes that you use to check your watch.
Legolas's required stunt scene retains the pornographic character it has in every movie. While they are extremely enjoyable, after you see them you feel stupid for having enjoyed them so much. But I have to admit that this movie has by far the best Legolas stunt scene of all three movies.
Sauraman is already dead. He died an implied death in the movie you already saw last year. Put him out of your mind. Unless, that is, greedy executives at New Line Cinema apply pressure on Jackson to make a Scouring of the Shire "wedge sequel". You could fit the whole thing right in there as
Is the Howard Stern show still on the radio these days? That could get dangerous.
I actually remember Howard Stern talking about this type of receiver for stray heterodyne tuning signals back when someone figured out how to do it and Robin was reporting about it in the "news". (This was years ago. Once he realized he could get women to take their clothes off in his studio, the show really went downhill.)
He loved the idea, since he always maintained that a large number of his listeners don't like him or are ashamed of themselves for listening to him, and this hurts his ratings since such people will not report their true listening habits to Nielsen. He called it the greatest invention in human history.
Re:First Amendment, commercial speech, and porn
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The Life of a Spammer
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· Score: 1
I may not be a lawyer, but you're dead wrong on this. Journalism is almost universally commercial in purpose, yet it enjoys some of the strongest protections available.
Journalism is not purely commercial in purpose or it ceases to be journalism. A news program may be aired by a network for the profit gained from selling advertising time, but in that case the restrictions on commercial speech take place during the commercials themselves.
If you're suggesting people are getting their news from spam, God help us all.
Furthermore, the U.S. legal structure does not officially distiguish between corporations and individuals. In fact, corporations are actually considered individuals with rights and liabilities.
This is completely irrelevant to anything I said in the parent post. Individuals and corporations are equally capable of commercial and non-commercial (protected) speech.
Of course, libelous and fraudulent writings (like spam) are not protected, but that's uniform across humans and corporations.
Although spam is extremely fraudulent, libel in spam is less common (e.g. "See Brittany Spears get porked by a horse on VHS! dafzcxyuq"). But I still don't see where I said anything that made a distinction between individuals and corporations.
Let me explain - The media is based in New York. New Yorkers hate southerners. Anytime one gets in the news for any reason, they want to make them out to be as hateful as possible. Hence, out of all the spammers in the country, the found one in Louisiana, who is a religious nut (wearing a WWJD shirt, nonetheless), and paint her as a hopeless hick living in a shitty southern town. As a result, this is the average northerner's view of the south. Just be glad they didn't portray her as a KKK member.
This is absolutely correct, and you deserve the "Informative" moderation you got for exposing it. Just last week we got the memo from our Jewish media overlords in New York, sent to all media conspiracy field offices across the South. It said, and I quote,
"No more photographs of secular humanist spammers are to be featured in any press publication. From now on, all spammers must be represented as deeply southern and religious, and photographed prominently wearing WWJD shirts."
This caused some problems for our agents at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, our local puppet news outfit, since of course most spam originates from the north of the Mason Dixon line, and the South offers a poor choice of spamming types at best. In fact all spammers to be found in the South are atheist carpetbagger Democrats who originally hail from the North. Luckily a shipment of creepy Jesus portraits and WWJD shirts to fit spammers of all sizes (S, M, L, and XL) was airlifted from Brooklyn and our staffers at the AJC got to work creating a backdrop of a heavily Jesusized trailer home. In fact, they used the same set that the government used to fake the moon landings. Naturally, Mrs. Fox, being a secular humanist and a spammer, has no convictions to uphold and was happy to oblige in aiding the Zionist media conspiracy in its mission of sliming the South in the eyes of Northerners, in return for money- which she promply donated to Dean's presidential campaign.
I wish you the best of luck in unearthing this vast conspiracy to make you look like hicks.
First Amendment, commercial speech, and porn
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The Life of a Spammer
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· Score: 4, Insightful
[Why do I get the feeling the AC who posted the parent is a spammer?]
From the article: But Fox and Connelly have their limits. They don't peddle Viagra, breast enlargement pills or smut, they say. "When I defend what we do, I talk about free speech," says Connelly, a rugged man with silver hair and a full beard.
Spam is commercial speech and as such does not enjoy unfettered First Amendment protection. This is a property rights issue no matter how you slice it, and the First Amendment does not apply to spam any more than it does to spray painted graffiti.
"When it comes to porn, I don't care about [the pornographers'] free speech."
This makes me hate them even more. Pornographic spam may be more offensive (and politically useful for getting people riled about the issue of spam in general), but strictly speaking, whether or not the spam is pornographic is irrelevant. Spam is not free speech, and your spam gains no legitimacy for not being pornographic. And legitimate free speech doesn't lose its free speech status simply because you don't like pornography. Who are you, a pair of spammers with creepy pictures of Jesus all over your walls, to be announcing which forms of free speech you "don't care about"? What nerve!
Plus, this whole defense of "letting the little guy compete" is just as appropriate for pornography as it is for spam. All you need for pornography is a girl, a camera, and a room! (Plus a T1 and a few other things.) And unlike spam, porn is an honest living- as long as you don't market through spammers. Larry Flynt had way more insight into free speech than these guys. (Although Larry went through his own creepy Jesus pictures phase.)
I have to admit I got a smile when I saw she gets migraines. My poor wife gets migraines and she never spammed anybody. If I had this woman's email address, I'd arrange for her to receive several hundred special offers a day for Imitrex.
Think of thugs standing outside a poor district's voting place demanding to see the identifying key in your example...
Fine, allow just in time rechecking... allowing you to poll and select on the spot an appropriate key to show to the strong arm morons... You vote for Nader... query the system for a key with a vote for gore... write that key down... and show it to the strong arm guy
Sorry, the idea of thugs standing outside a polling place demanding to see votes for Gore is just too funny...
So he's basically saying that the GPL does not in fact destroy profit motive.
Which misses the point, actually. As a copyright holder, my "motive" is actually nobody's business but my own. I am free to copyright something and then sit on it. My copyright is still valid. It is not contingent on me going out and using it to make fistfuls of cash, Darl, nor is it contingent on my receiving free software in return for it, Linus. A right is a right. While rights can be granted with an intended purpose, failing to use the right in accordance with that purpose does not invalidate the right.
It was stupid argument and could have easily been rebutted on a more fundamental level. By attacking it on this level, Linus is partially buying into it. Although Linus is mostly addressing his response to Darl's intended audience, so I can see why a more subtle approach might not work.
How is stopping SMTP abuse, bandwidth theft, and computer time theft "legislating morality?" Are we going to do away with theft laws too? Afterall Bob did forget to lock his door, thus that gives us the right to steal all his stuff, right Mr. Uber-Libertarian? "Legislating morality" is best used when describing victimless crimes like smoking pot.
The FCC ownership restrictions (for a recent example) date back to the thirties. This fact was repeatedly trumpeted in the WSJ and elsewhere (e.g. in Slashdot posts by utopian anarchist libertarians) as justification in itself for relaxing them, as if laws automatically go bad after a while like milk. Ironically, the restrictions against marijuana date back to that time also, but incredibly the WSJ and those who parrot them have refused to acknowledge the age of those laws as a reason for overturning them as well.
Of course, if a corporation ever finds a way to fit a joint into its mouth, we'll quickly see our antimarijuana legislation become "outdated".
When this drug hits the market, and they show commercials with heart transplant recipients dancing in meadows and gathering flowers, the gentle voice doing the voiceover will recite the following disclaimer:
If your immune system is not normal because of advanced HIV disease, make sure your doctor knows this to avoid a potentially serious complication."
OK, well I don't think it was one of my better posts, but if I knew it would float up to "5, Insightful" I would have spent more time on it.
This rate of borrowing might be sustainable until the next election, but it cannot go on forever. Do you know something about macroeconomics that makes huge structural deficits OK?
Yeah, there's a lot of us "South Park Republicans" who aren't happy with lots of Bush's policies, like huge spending increases, blatant pandering with steel tariffs, and corporate welfare in the energy bill. But as long as all the Democrats have to offer is "Bush is a Nazi", they're going to continue to get their asses kicked.
Ever see that episode of the Sopranos, where the gambling addict owes money to the mob and can't pay? So they take over his business and run it into the ground, borrowing money they have no intention of repaying, so they can recoup the loss and leave him in the hole. That's what this is like. The deficit has reached a record level and they keep charging more and more extravagant purchases. They even started a war as a corporate welfare project. We have the mob answering the phone.
Yeah, there's a lot of us "South Park Republicans" who aren't happy with lots of Bush's policies, like huge spending increases, blatant pandering with steel tariffs, and corporate welfare in the energy bill. But as long as all the Democrats have to offer is "Bush is a Nazi", they're going to continue to get their asses kicked.
I don't even care if Bush is a Nazi. Did the Nazis overspend this much? He is running this country into the hole and nobody cares! We have been in uncharted territory for a long time. The deficit has never been this high. How are we ever going to pay for all this shit? Doesn't anybody care about the future anymore? Do you need some sort of song and dance to convince you that the country can't survive four more years of looting on this scale?
When a spammer sends me an email inviting me to visit his site, I don't usually get a qualification of how many times or with what technology I'm allowed to do that. Kinda shoots the laws/police argument.
I think you got confused. The parent post I was replying to had this proposal:
Harvest credit card numbers (with matching delivery and billing addresses, and often with matching CVV's) on one spammer's site, and use them on another's.
You are not the author of that post. Your idea is a simple DDoS attack. These are the boxes on that form that I would check in response to you:
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends
You are making the filtering their problem instead of yours, but this is merely equivalent to playing white instead of black. The arms race will continue as they develop filters that defeat your DDoS attacks, the same way that they develop DDoS attacks that defeat filters now.
I doubt your DDoS would make a dent anyway. The profit margin is too high to water down that way.
(Inevitably, in every thread about spam, someone proposes a solution with one or more flaws. This is a handy form that passes the lameness filter and that can be reused for all such posts to save time! It does not specifically address all possible flaws and may be expanded in future versions.)
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.) ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (x) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked ( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for (x) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook ( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply: ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored (x) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough ( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you: (x) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Besides, the animated version of The Hobbit is already a gem.
Have you ever seen the damned thing? I have to admit I think it got the mood right, but man, those misshapen heads- and they really screwed up the elves! They were like little gremlins! The cartoon creators were obviously thinking of the elves that live up at the North Pole making presents for Santa. That's the wrong kind of elf. Although they did refrain from skateboarding down stairs while shooting arrows. That's one thing they did get right.
I went to Disneyworld 20 years ago and was inside the big golf ball- Epcot's "Spaceship Earth"- when there was a mechanical failure of some sort and the cars stopped moving. They sent someone to run down the track and tell everyone to stay in their seats. We were stuck there for almost an hour. When it happened we were passing by the Renaissance scene. There was an animatronic setup where a bunch of Renaissance Italians were gathered on some steps, and one of them was teaching the others from a book. The other was nodding like if he was listening- nod, nod, shift down, nod, nod, shift up, repeat. If you see less than one cycle of that, it looks convincing, but after a few hundred cycles it starts to look fake, like the guy isn't really listening or learning anything.
I felt bad for the people a bunch of cars behind us. They were trapped in the Dark Ages. But the real victims must have been whoever was passing by the animatronics of the 19th century telegraphist- with the telegraph rattling up and down and the guy spelling out letters of nonsense. They must have lost their minds.
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are good if he had chousen a diffrent field (one he maybe knows something about as he never got that harrasing your target market is very stupid marketting) we'd probably not need laws banning junk fax or e-mail and the industry standards would actually respect the target markets fealings by implamenting and enforcing it's own industry standards that come short of banning.
I wouldn't bet on it. There's an endless supply of jerks in the world.
I'm not the world's most intelligent person, but I'm wondering how this will catch on...
Catch on? It doesn't need to catch on. This is not so much a product as a stunt. Think of Sir Richard Branson's balloon trip across the Atlantic.
From TFA:
The aim will be to deliberately use the project as a communication platform for the concept of renewable energy, and so generate public enthusiasm in favour of sustainable development.
This is exactly the kind of thing you might do when you're rich and have more money than you know what to do with. And we poor folk occasionally get treated to the spectacle of goofy rich guys stranded in some unpleasant place waiting to be rescued, so it works out for everybody.
Why not just fly the other drection and stay in the sunlight?
It's not often I get to ask this politely... what planet are you on? This one rotates too fast (1670 km/hr at the equator, 670 km/hr at the Artic/Antarctic Circles). I don't know how fast this flimsy looking plane will travel but consider the speed of sound at sea level is 1225 km/hr. You can extend daylight hours by flying in an easterly direction but you probably couldn't avoid the night entirely in this thing.
Ranched cattle would acquire it as they are sometimes feed the brains of previously slaughtered cattle, but how exactly do deer and other wildlife transmit it?
The stuff is persistent. It can stick around on surfaces for a long time. And it survives harsh environments. Surgical implements remain infective for prion diseases even after being autoclaved and sterilized with heat and chemicals.
Scrapie, for example, is a prion disease of sheep. Farms in Iceland that had not had any sheep present at all for three years, in an effort to get rid of scrapie, were ravaged by it all over again as soon as they imported healthy sheep from elsewhere.
One theory went like this. The placenta left over from the birthing process was shown to be highly infectious. So the infected ewe would contaminate the grass and soil, and then the grass was eaten by other sheep (maybe years later, even) on the same farm.
The mechanism of horizontal transmission of CWD in deer is unknown but contact via saliva, urine, and feces are the prime suspects as usual. Of course, given the durability of the agent, there are plenty of conceivable ways it could happen.
And there's lots of literature supporting the idea that predators and scavengers tend to have very good defenses against the diseases that affect their prey. Part of the defenses are powerful digestive systems that leave few cells intact and chop up most proteins and DNA into small pieces. They also have some of the best immune systems on the planet.
You can have the strongest immune system of any known mammal or bird and it will not protect you from prion diseases like spongiform encephalopathies. There is no foreign protein (except for the prion particle that you originally got infected from years ago), just a lot of funny-folded native protein. So what? As amyloid plaques build up in your brain, your immune system has nothing to attack. An infected animal's body can be riddled with prions at death and you will not find a single antibody to them anywhere since they pass the self/non-self test. In fact, to get antibodies, people need to inject massive quantities of prion particles into unrelated animals, whose immune systems will react in the same way they do with any foreign protein.
A strong digestive system doesn't seem to be much help either, as the prion form of the protein is extremely resistant to attack from proteases.
There are many versions of the prion gene, and not all of them are equally prone to malicious folding. Wolves with prion genes whose PrP proteins fold easily into the beta-pleated-sheet prion tend to die after eating lots of prions. Surviving wolves gobble prions and suffer no adverse consequences since their native protein is resistant to the altered conformation. So the wolf is probably OK, because of the selection pressure that has been applied to it.
But you'd think the same thing about cats, and cats get the disease easily. But in fact, it is highly likely that all wolves are immune to transmissable spongiform encephalopathies judging by the mere fact that nobody has ever succeeded in infecting a dog with any sort of TSE. Even when they plonk highly infectious prion material directly into a dog's brain, no TSE develops. TSE of one flavor or another has been successfully transmitted to goats, sheep, monkeys, pigs, mink, cattle, cats, and zoo animals of all types that ate prion-contaminated feed. Never to any breed of dog (or wolf, same thing).
When BSE broke out in England, a number of human victims (who all ate beef) came down with CJD. It was called "new variant" CJD ("nvCJD") because it turned out not to be CJD at all, which attacks the cerebral cortex, but is in fact a closely related disease: the human form of BSE, which attacks the brainstem just like it does in cattle. A prion researcher tried to transmit BSE from cows to transgenic mice which had a human prion gene, via brain injections (the foolproof way to get it- feeding is much less effective). This experiment was eventually watched closely by the British food industry as the mice survived past 300 and 400 days. But meanwhile, study of the first ten victims of nvCJD in Britain showed that all were homozygous for methionine at codon 129. About 38 percent of the human population fits this profile. The mice (which never showed any signs of illness) had a human prion gene that was homozygous for valine, not methionine, at codon 129. So while this is a transmissable disease, susceptibility is genetically determined.
I think they're an example of a self sustaining molecule - one that catalyzes the creation of itself from another molecule.
That's probably the best way to look at it. It's just like Vonnegut's ice-nine, except it works on a particular mammalian brain protein instead of water.
Infective particles pass through 30 nm filters and survive immersion for long periods of time in formaldehyde. They are relatively impervious to radiation and can survive the heat of a rendering plant. Unlike the normal protein, the prion form is not attacked by proteases such as those present in a mammalian digestive system.
When the protein mutates to form a prion, a small beta pleated sheet region near the protein's N-terminus nucleates a much larger one that consumes an alpha helix and almost the entire N-terminal half of the protein. Apparently this can happen two ways. A non-mutant form can spontaneously mutate to the prion form. Since the prion's conformational energy appears to be lower from all the beta-pleating, this is thermodynamically possible and there must be high kinetic barriers in the way to prevent it from happening all the time. (While spontaneous cases are extremely rare, they do imply that we will never see these diseases completely eradicated.) The more likely mechanism is exposure to an already-mutant prion particle, which overcomes the kinetic barrier by acting as a catalyst.
The prion's beta pleated sheets apparently give it structural integrity against heat, chemical, and protease attack. They are also what imparts the self-replication ability of the prion to induce the same alpha-helix to beta-pleated-sheet conformational changes in neighboring proteins, in a mechanism that is probably similar to crystal growth. The beta sheet forming peptides aggregate to form amyloid fibrils, and this kills neurons through apoptosis.
See this page on transmissable spongiform encephalopathies for more info. There is a decent animation of the folding event here.
I had the 16K pack, and the awful ZX printer that I pestered my parents to mail order from England. I think I got cadmium poisoning from that thing.
Long typing sessions on the ZX81 (or the Timex) would result in glitchy behavior. If the 16K RAM pack was on it, and it was good and hot from being on more than 20 minutes, it would crash if it received a completely minor jolt to the exterior. Or a dirty look. And you'd lose everything. Saving to tape was a major pain in the ass because there was no VERIFY, only SAVE, and all the fiddling with the tape player alone would typically make it vibrate enough to crash. I found that you could finish typing in a long listing and save the program to tape if you put a Ziploc bag full of ice cubes on the case. That would calm it down and make it less crash prone. The heat sink inside was a thin little aluminum prong that stuck up from the board.
Save to tape was abysmally slow and unreliable. You had to have the volume knob set just right, and you had to do two saves in a row to be safe (no VERIFY). If you listened to a cassette that had been saved onto, you heard a randomly warbling screeching noise. Except near the end, when it turned into a long buzzing sound interrupted by "clicks" that were about a second apart. This was the video memory you were hearing, and each click noise was actually a screen line terminator! That's how slow the tape I/O was. If you didn't have the 16K memory pack, the ZX81 only had 1KB (referred to in marketing materials as "a full 1024 bytes of random access memory") and it didn't use a flat 2D array for the screen- it played tricks to make it fit and you didn't hear the evenly spaced clicks on saves.
BASIC sucked so hard on the ZX81 that you were practically forced right away to learn Z80 assembler. Except there was no good place to POKE to. You could lower the RAM ceiling and then POKE your program up above it, but then you couldn't save it to tape. The typical way to run machine code was to use a long REM statement:
10 REM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Then you start your POKEs at 16514 and the "A" characters would turn into funny things as you went. (It wasn't even ASCII- it was a completely rinky-dink character set invented by Clive Sinclair.) Then you evaluate USB(16514) and it would run the machine code program that was residing in the REM statement, returning the value of the fake "bc" register upon returning. All commercially available software for the Timex/ZX81 used this trick. This type of behavior (executing code resident in what is supposed to be a human-readable buffer) is nowadays confined to things like buffer overflow attacks, but on the ZX81 it was a commonly accepted way to write programs.
So tax dollars should be wasted on expensive overpaid Americans instead of on cheap Indians thus saving more money to be used on OTHER social programs?
(Score: -1, Cheap Labor Conservative)
I disagree. I would place the opening of "Saving Private Ryan", the first Coliseum scene in "Gladiator", or the massacre in "Last of the Mohicans" well above this. I'm probably forgetting something too.
OK, it was a bit of an overstatement. Still a decent battle scene, best battle of any fantasy/sci-fi film.
I'm sorry, but the horse mounting in Two Towers fucking rocked, even if every female in the audience simultaneously climaxed. What made it so cool was the whole slo-mo lead-in from Legolas shooting arrows, and that what happens next is totally unexpected.
If I remember right, according to Jackson the reason they put that scene in was that they had forgotten to get footage of Orlando Bloom mounting a horse.
I went to see RoTK yesterday. Not knowing what sort of crowd to expect, my wife and I arrived 90 mins early for a 3:15 showing, and traded tickets for the 2:15 showing once we noticed (at 2 PM) that the 3:15 line was longer than the 2:15 line!
I was waiting for it to start, and remember some guy two rows behind me muttering about third movies sucking. "I hope it doesn't suck, because it's the third movie, and the third Matrix movie sucked. So this is probably going to suck." Heh heh, dumbass.
I liked the Two Towers more than FoTR, and I liked this even better. It has everything in it that made the Two Towers enjoyable, plus more stuff. I don't consider myself a Tolkien weenie, since I've only read the book once and that was ten years ago when I was in college. So I can sometimes remember something not being in the book, and it irks me when I see deviations from the book, but if they work in the movie then I don't care.
PRO:
CON:
Is the Howard Stern show still on the radio these days? That could get dangerous.
I actually remember Howard Stern talking about this type of receiver for stray heterodyne tuning signals back when someone figured out how to do it and Robin was reporting about it in the "news". (This was years ago. Once he realized he could get women to take their clothes off in his studio, the show really went downhill.)
He loved the idea, since he always maintained that a large number of his listeners don't like him or are ashamed of themselves for listening to him, and this hurts his ratings since such people will not report their true listening habits to Nielsen. He called it the greatest invention in human history.
I may not be a lawyer, but you're dead wrong on this. Journalism is almost universally commercial in purpose, yet it enjoys some of the strongest protections available.
Journalism is not purely commercial in purpose or it ceases to be journalism. A news program may be aired by a network for the profit gained from selling advertising time, but in that case the restrictions on commercial speech take place during the commercials themselves.
If you're suggesting people are getting their news from spam, God help us all.
Furthermore, the U.S. legal structure does not officially distiguish between corporations and individuals. In fact, corporations are actually considered individuals with rights and liabilities.
This is completely irrelevant to anything I said in the parent post. Individuals and corporations are equally capable of commercial and non-commercial (protected) speech.
Of course, libelous and fraudulent writings (like spam) are not protected, but that's uniform across humans and corporations.
Although spam is extremely fraudulent, libel in spam is less common (e.g. "See Brittany Spears get porked by a horse on VHS! dafzcxyuq"). But I still don't see where I said anything that made a distinction between individuals and corporations.
The media is based in New York. New Yorkers hate southerners. Anytime one gets in the news for any reason, they want to make them out to be as hateful as possible. Hence, out of all the spammers in the country, the found one in Louisiana, who is a religious nut (wearing a WWJD shirt, nonetheless), and paint her as a hopeless hick living in a shitty southern town. As a result, this is the average northerner's view of the south. Just be glad they didn't portray her as a KKK member.
This is absolutely correct, and you deserve the "Informative" moderation you got for exposing it. Just last week we got the memo from our Jewish media overlords in New York, sent to all media conspiracy field offices across the South. It said, and I quote,
This caused some problems for our agents at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, our local puppet news outfit, since of course most spam originates from the north of the Mason Dixon line, and the South offers a poor choice of spamming types at best. In fact all spammers to be found in the South are atheist carpetbagger Democrats who originally hail from the North. Luckily a shipment of creepy Jesus portraits and WWJD shirts to fit spammers of all sizes (S, M, L, and XL) was airlifted from Brooklyn and our staffers at the AJC got to work creating a backdrop of a heavily Jesusized trailer home. In fact, they used the same set that the government used to fake the moon landings. Naturally, Mrs. Fox, being a secular humanist and a spammer, has no convictions to uphold and was happy to oblige in aiding the Zionist media conspiracy in its mission of sliming the South in the eyes of Northerners, in return for money- which she promply donated to Dean's presidential campaign.
I wish you the best of luck in unearthing this vast conspiracy to make you look like hicks.
[Why do I get the feeling the AC who posted the parent is a spammer?]
From the article:
But Fox and Connelly have their limits. They don't peddle Viagra, breast enlargement pills or smut, they say. "When I defend what we do, I talk about free speech," says Connelly, a rugged man with silver hair and a full beard.
Spam is commercial speech and as such does not enjoy unfettered First Amendment protection. This is a property rights issue no matter how you slice it, and the First Amendment does not apply to spam any more than it does to spray painted graffiti.
"When it comes to porn, I don't care about [the pornographers'] free speech."
This makes me hate them even more. Pornographic spam may be more offensive (and politically useful for getting people riled about the issue of spam in general), but strictly speaking, whether or not the spam is pornographic is irrelevant. Spam is not free speech, and your spam gains no legitimacy for not being pornographic. And legitimate free speech doesn't lose its free speech status simply because you don't like pornography. Who are you, a pair of spammers with creepy pictures of Jesus all over your walls, to be announcing which forms of free speech you "don't care about"? What nerve!
Plus, this whole defense of "letting the little guy compete" is just as appropriate for pornography as it is for spam. All you need for pornography is a girl, a camera, and a room! (Plus a T1 and a few other things.) And unlike spam, porn is an honest living- as long as you don't market through spammers. Larry Flynt had way more insight into free speech than these guys. (Although Larry went through his own creepy Jesus pictures phase.)
I have to admit I got a smile when I saw she gets migraines. My poor wife gets migraines and she never spammed anybody. If I had this woman's email address, I'd arrange for her to receive several hundred special offers a day for Imitrex.
Think of thugs standing outside a poor district's voting place demanding to see the identifying key in your example...
Fine, allow just in time rechecking... allowing you to poll and select on the spot an appropriate key to show to the strong arm morons... You vote for Nader... query the system for a key with a vote for gore... write that key down... and show it to the strong arm guy
Sorry, the idea of thugs standing outside a polling place demanding to see votes for Gore is just too funny...
It was stupid argument and could have easily been rebutted on a more fundamental level.
Whoops. Actually Torvalds did spend a paragraph attacking it at this level with that analogy to public universities, so ignore that sentence.
So he's basically saying that the GPL does not in fact destroy profit motive.
Which misses the point, actually. As a copyright holder, my "motive" is actually nobody's business but my own. I am free to copyright something and then sit on it. My copyright is still valid. It is not contingent on me going out and using it to make fistfuls of cash, Darl, nor is it contingent on my receiving free software in return for it, Linus. A right is a right. While rights can be granted with an intended purpose, failing to use the right in accordance with that purpose does not invalidate the right.
It was stupid argument and could have easily been rebutted on a more fundamental level. By attacking it on this level, Linus is partially buying into it. Although Linus is mostly addressing his response to Darl's intended audience, so I can see why a more subtle approach might not work.
How is stopping SMTP abuse, bandwidth theft, and computer time theft "legislating morality?" Are we going to do away with theft laws too? Afterall Bob did forget to lock his door, thus that gives us the right to steal all his stuff, right Mr. Uber-Libertarian? "Legislating morality" is best used when describing victimless crimes like smoking pot.
The FCC ownership restrictions (for a recent example) date back to the thirties. This fact was repeatedly trumpeted in the WSJ and elsewhere (e.g. in Slashdot posts by utopian anarchist libertarians) as justification in itself for relaxing them, as if laws automatically go bad after a while like milk. Ironically, the restrictions against marijuana date back to that time also, but incredibly the WSJ and those who parrot them have refused to acknowledge the age of those laws as a reason for overturning them as well.
Of course, if a corporation ever finds a way to fit a joint into its mouth, we'll quickly see our antimarijuana legislation become "outdated".
When this drug hits the market, and they show commercials with heart transplant recipients dancing in meadows and gathering flowers, the gentle voice doing the voiceover will recite the following disclaimer:
If your immune system is not normal because of advanced HIV disease, make sure your doctor knows this to avoid a potentially serious complication."
Gee, sounds like a good idea!
OK, well I don't think it was one of my better posts, but if I knew it would float up to "5, Insightful" I would have spent more time on it.
This rate of borrowing might be sustainable until the next election, but it cannot go on forever. Do you know something about macroeconomics that makes huge structural deficits OK?
Yeah, there's a lot of us "South Park Republicans" who aren't happy with lots of Bush's policies, like huge spending increases, blatant pandering with steel tariffs, and corporate welfare in the energy bill. But as long as all the Democrats have to offer is "Bush is a Nazi", they're going to continue to get their asses kicked.
Ever see that episode of the Sopranos, where the gambling addict owes money to the mob and can't pay? So they take over his business and run it into the ground, borrowing money they have no intention of repaying, so they can recoup the loss and leave him in the hole. That's what this is like. The deficit has reached a record level and they keep charging more and more extravagant purchases. They even started a war as a corporate welfare project. We have the mob answering the phone.
Yeah, there's a lot of us "South Park Republicans" who aren't happy with lots of Bush's policies, like huge spending increases, blatant pandering with steel tariffs, and corporate welfare in the energy bill. But as long as all the Democrats have to offer is "Bush is a Nazi", they're going to continue to get their asses kicked.
I don't even care if Bush is a Nazi. Did the Nazis overspend this much? He is running this country into the hole and nobody cares! We have been in uncharted territory for a long time. The deficit has never been this high. How are we ever going to pay for all this shit? Doesn't anybody care about the future anymore? Do you need some sort of song and dance to convince you that the country can't survive four more years of looting on this scale?
When a spammer sends me an email inviting me to visit his site, I don't usually get a qualification of how many times or with what technology I'm allowed to do that. Kinda shoots the laws/police argument.
I think you got confused. The parent post I was replying to had this proposal:
Harvest credit card numbers (with matching delivery and billing addresses, and often with matching CVV's) on one spammer's site, and use them on another's.
You are not the author of that post. Your idea is a simple DDoS attack. These are the boxes on that form that I would check in response to you:
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends
You are making the filtering their problem instead of yours, but this is merely equivalent to playing white instead of black. The arms race will continue as they develop filters that defeat your DDoS attacks, the same way that they develop DDoS attacks that defeat filters now.
I doubt your DDoS would make a dent anyway. The profit margin is too high to water down that way.
(Inevitably, in every thread about spam, someone proposes a solution with one or more flaws. This is a handy form that passes the lameness filter and that can be reused for all such posts to save time! It does not specifically address all possible flaws and may be expanded in future versions.)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked
( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Besides, the animated version of The Hobbit is already a gem.
Have you ever seen the damned thing? I have to admit I think it got the mood right, but man, those misshapen heads- and they really screwed up the elves! They were like little gremlins! The cartoon creators were obviously thinking of the elves that live up at the North Pole making presents for Santa. That's the wrong kind of elf. Although they did refrain from skateboarding down stairs while shooting arrows. That's one thing they did get right.
I went to Disneyworld 20 years ago and was inside the big golf ball- Epcot's "Spaceship Earth"- when there was a mechanical failure of some sort and the cars stopped moving. They sent someone to run down the track and tell everyone to stay in their seats. We were stuck there for almost an hour. When it happened we were passing by the Renaissance scene. There was an animatronic setup where a bunch of Renaissance Italians were gathered on some steps, and one of them was teaching the others from a book. The other was nodding like if he was listening- nod, nod, shift down, nod, nod, shift up, repeat. If you see less than one cycle of that, it looks convincing, but after a few hundred cycles it starts to look fake, like the guy isn't really listening or learning anything.
I felt bad for the people a bunch of cars behind us. They were trapped in the Dark Ages. But the real victims must have been whoever was passing by the animatronics of the 19th century telegraphist- with the telegraph rattling up and down and the guy spelling out letters of nonsense. They must have lost their minds.