Could you say a little more about this? [...] As far as I understand it, chaos theory says small fluctuations in the input result in huge effects on the output. So you can't predict anything... oh, well.
That is one of the (several) popular misconceptions. Technically true, but still misunderstood. A large number of people (particularly in the social sciences) took Chaos as saying "prediction is impossible." While in fact, chaos did exactly the opposite. It says that some appearently random phenomena might have simple underlying models. An enhanced ability to analyze such systems means that more things can be modeled by simple deterministic equations, not fewer.
Another related point about prediction is the observation that the Sun, Moon and Earth form a chaotic system. But we can still predict moonrise and eclipses very well.
I've actually got a rant/published paper on the misunderstanding/abuse of chaos/complexity in one social science: Complex Rhetoric and Simple Games [300K, sorry]. It goes over some of the popular rhetoric about this stuff in one of the worst of social sciences where chaos/complexity was latched onto by anti-scientific people.
One nice footnote quotes the John Maynard Smith (developer of evolutionary game theory) calling some of the slogans behind complexity as "Absolute
fscking crap. But crap with good PR". Now we here all know that chaos and complexity are two very different things, but they have become intertwined in popular lore. So the paper deals with both.
There's been a great deal of real science around
what has unfortunately been popularized as "chaos theory." But the hype and the rhetoric are almost entirely at odds with the real science. Yorke and Mandelbrot are not entirely to blame for the sorry state of affairs, but reading the prize blurb, I see that the misunderstandings of chaos are bound to continue.
I would have liked to see a chaos prize go some some
of the physicists who did more real and solid work in Non-linear dynamical systems, Lorentz or Packard or May or someone like that.
Almost everything that is popularly believed about chaos is wrong.
Sorry for the angry rant about this, but I am sickened to see that some prize is given out this way.
I have only scattered memories from before age 5 (which I can only date as before age 5 due to a house move then). My earliest datable memory is from the 1964 World's Fair in New York. I remember the Disney created Small World exhibit for UNICEF. It was kind of strange (and very different) seeing it years later at Disneyland.
As for the language questions, I would be very surprised if memories of early childhood ever started to flow back. But what you will find is that you will be able to learn those languages (at least the phonology) relatively easily. That is, your psychoacoustic system has learned to make certain distinctions that get lost to most English speakers.
Tyrannosaurus, of course - is there any other kind?
I don't think that even Disney could pull off a biped. Mabye the could have a T. rex use its tail, but my bet is a protoceratops. They look enough like a triceretops to be familiar, but don't have all those horns to get in the way of customer interaction.
But they might surprise us with a less familiar animal. A Maiasaurus would be so cuddly as to destroy the effect of having a dinosaur in the first place, but there are pleny of cool looking obscure things that they could use.
Because I am blocked by bad luck, nothing else. I could change the ISP, but any new ISP might have the same bad luck
That is simply false. It is true that any ISP can end up with spammer by bad luck. But the SPEWS listing spreads beyond the spammer only if the ISP does nothing about about the spammer.
So a non-spammer can only get caught by a listing if their provider fails to deal with abuse reports. Such an ISP has bad policy, not bad luck.
First of all, I don't think most network administrators -- or their bosses -- know what they're getting into when they use Spews to police their network.
You are absolutely right. Although I advocate using things like SPEWS, you must make it clear that it will block mail from legitimate users. You either have to persuade people that this is right (as I believe) or not do it that way.
See this policy statement as an example of using such a policy, while making it clear that it will block mail from legitimate users.
Time and again we see case after case of some provider that
Let some customers spam
ignored abuse complaints
did nothing while when that particular spammer's IP was listed.
Only took action against a spammer when
the SPEWS listing expanded to include non-spamming customers
Whinged that SPEWS was unfair and not the right
way to do things
Every day SPEWS proves itself necessary and effective at getting otherwise unwilling providers to remove their spammers. Note that SPEWS uses an escalation process. The provider has to ignore complaints for a while to have the IP range expanded to include non-spammers
If you can suggest something that is half as effective at raising the cost for spammers as SPEWS, please suggest it. SPEWS forces providers to decide whether they want to host exclusively spammers or host exclusively non-spammers.
But if your goal is merely to filter spam (making life easier for the spammers) then you are right. SPEWS is not the way to do that.
The spam I got was from spammers uu.net wouldn't terminate. However forcing their sales morons to deal with the volume of spam I was getting got me off the spam lists.
If I simply didn't want to see the spam, I could arrange list-washing on my own and use a combination of filters. But that, of course, just makes life easier
for the spammers. Instead, I wish to have spammers actually pay a fair price for their advertising instead of shifting the cost onto the recipient systems.
Providers may make an honest choice on these sorts of questions (eg, "we do/don't host porn", "we do/don't host spammers", "we do/don't host those engaged in fraud", etc) and a customer can make a choice based on what the provider says.
But in UUNet's case, they are not saying
"we want to pretend to some misunderstanding of common carrier notion, so we won't interfer with customers who spam from us." Their Acceptable Use Policy says that they don't allow spammers on their net.
The simple fact of the matter is that they lying about their policy. They do allow spammers (but claim otherwise), as long as those spammers pay a premium for "bullet proof hosting". (No, I don't have specific evidence of this in UU.net's case. But there is evidence of these kinds of contracts in general and it is the only way to explain the pattern of UU.net's selective enforcement of their AUP.) Also consider the fact that UU.net collaborates with spammers that they host to reduce complaints without reducing the spam.
You missed the point. I'm not complaining about spam advertising uu.net. (I never got any of that.) I'm talking about all of the spammers that UU.Net hosts. These are spammers whom other providers have
already expelled for network abuse.
Follow the shameless plug in my previous post, and follow links there to the the spamhaus report on uu.net.
Kinda hard to get money from a bankrupt corporation.
They are in chapter 11, not chapter 13. Anyone who
acquires UUNet will have some responsibility for their liabilites. This makes UUNet even more "damaged goods".
But yes. I wouldn't expect to recover much money from them.
What about the big providers that knowingly and willings host spam gangs? Surely the next target of a suit should be UU.Net. See my Boycott MCI rant for why we should go after UUNet.
Consider what you write, and not just on the web
on
Googling For Dates?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
why would I put up a page saying something that I may regret later?
Don't just consider web pages, but if you post news non-anonymously (or to/. non-anonymouly) it isn't just the carefully considered rant that is archived forever more, but every ill-considered flamage as well. Having posted to news from well before "dejanews", I was a bit surprised, and not entirely pleased that my posting history back to 1996 is available.
On the otherhand, I do choose to post non-anoymously. While that has some problems, it does mean that not only do I consider what I might regret later, anybody reading my posts can expect that I consider what I might regret later. That might add a smidgen of credibility (which of course can be squandered easily).
Thanks for your (and others) corrections and elaborations on building codes.
I appear to have been wrong about the details of local building codes, but you do acknowledge that
local authorties do manipulate things to protect the local building industry. Some of these things mean that we won't see certain sorts of potential economies of scale and large scale competition in
house building.
Local building codes and restraint of trade
on
Open Source Housing
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In the US every locality has a series of local
building codes. These are often (deliberately)
incompatable with other locality's codes. The
purpose is to protect the local building industry from statewide or even national competition.
Until that nut is cracked, the rest of this stuff is
just a pipe dream.
Mod parent up, please (OK, it is already at 5, but if there are lots of things at max mod, I'd like to say that this is the question I was going to ask before I did a "redundency" check. So I hope that editors will include some variant of this question.)
So to rephrase: Where will be get the most gains in accessiblity for the least effort? I'm not saying that we should put little effort into
accessibility, but in persuading others to, we should be looking at what can have the biggest improvement.
Moderators: You can burn some moderation capability modding me redundent, but remember, this is, in part, a poll to see which questions
to ask. The fact that I want to see this
question asked is not redundent.
How does Pine's IMAP client implementation compare to Mutt's?
Pine is IMAP. For a very long time, other clients (including mutt) just treated IMAP as a form
of POP. Pine, on the other hand, did IMAP before it
did POP. (A principle pine developer is also a principle force behind IMAP.)
I've been thinking of setting up my own IMAP server....
Look at the UW IMAP server. The chief complaint
about it is that it is be slow and a memory hog for large mail boxes. But that is only true if
you use the unix/mbox mail box format. If you use
the recommend mbx format, access is quick, you
can have multiple sessions open to the same mailbox (with this, I get around the "single view" problem of pine, by running multiple instances.
I also store my.pinerc on an IMAP server as well.)
Anyway, I'm obviously a pine fan (and was a tester for this release. I haven't yet installed 4.50, so I'm still running 4.49.9999).
I doubt we'll see Chernobyl pics; they're too recent
for one thing. But it would be fun. Anyone remember the early days of it when the US was reporting the event based, so they said, on spy sat pics, and non-communist central and northern Europe
was reporting contamination in their air. But the line from the USSR was, "No, we don't have any problem. No we don't need your help. BTW, anyone know how to put out a graphite fire?"
In the eastern block, news of the event was only reported about a week afterwards. A joke going around Hungary (which borders the Ukraine) was,
Q: Why do we celebrate the October Revolution in November?A: Because that is when TASS felt fit to report it.
if your name is Nissan and you get the domain name, and then you decide to start selling cars, or car accessories to profit off of the name that is usually associated with another company, that should not be allowed. If on the other hand your name is Nissan and you have a site that shows pictures of your wife, kids, and your dog, then that should be perfectly legal
I fully agree. As a courtesy, I put in a
link and disclaimer about sites
that I'm not. Over the past few months though, I've been getting a lot of mail for a name sake who writes for the New Yorker, but
have failed to find a way to reach him. I've even
put up a note on my contact page saying
I am not the New Yorker journalist.
There is another Jeffrey Goldberg who is a staff writer for the
New Yorker. He and I are separate people. His writing
is extremely well researched, informed and executed. My political
musings are nothing more than musings. I do not wish to exploit or
diminish his credibility through a possible confusion due to our common
name. Also, I do not have a contact address for him
But if I were ever to get a C&D letter from any of those I provide such courtesy for, I would,
well, not be so helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
That is one of the (several) popular misconceptions. Technically true, but still misunderstood. A large number of people (particularly in the social sciences) took Chaos as saying "prediction is impossible." While in fact, chaos did exactly the opposite. It says that some appearently random phenomena might have simple underlying models. An enhanced ability to analyze such systems means that more things can be modeled by simple deterministic equations, not fewer.
Another related point about prediction is the observation that the Sun, Moon and Earth form a chaotic system. But we can still predict moonrise and eclipses very well.
I've actually got a rant/published paper on the misunderstanding/abuse of chaos/complexity in one social science: Complex Rhetoric and Simple Games [300K, sorry]. It goes over some of the popular rhetoric about this stuff in one of the worst of social sciences where chaos/complexity was latched onto by anti-scientific people.
One nice footnote quotes the John Maynard Smith (developer of evolutionary game theory) calling some of the slogans behind complexity as "Absolute fscking crap. But crap with good PR". Now we here all know that chaos and complexity are two very different things, but they have become intertwined in popular lore. So the paper deals with both.
I would have liked to see a chaos prize go some some of the physicists who did more real and solid work in Non-linear dynamical systems, Lorentz or Packard or May or someone like that.
Almost everything that is popularly believed about chaos is wrong.
Sorry for the angry rant about this, but I am sickened to see that some prize is given out this way.
If you are in California, make a fuss about this in your local press.
The AG's office website gives gives some information, but fails to mention that they've let the deadline slide.
OK, a copy is now here, But I pay for excessive outgoing traffic, so if it gets hit to hard I will have to take it down.
So would other people please also mirror it, so that we can distribute the load!
Thanks for that post.
(Is there anyway I can pre-mod this redundent to save the moderators a moderationg point?)
Surely people remember that most excellent O'Reilly book, Numerical Recipes in AWK. Unfortunately the 1998 review of it has disappeared.
Books are great, but what I want is a bathtop computer.
As for the language questions, I would be very surprised if memories of early childhood ever started to flow back. But what you will find is that you will be able to learn those languages (at least the phonology) relatively easily. That is, your psychoacoustic system has learned to make certain distinctions that get lost to most English speakers.
I don't think that even Disney could pull off a biped. Mabye the could have a T. rex use its tail, but my bet is a protoceratops. They look enough like a triceretops to be familiar, but don't have all those horns to get in the way of customer interaction.
But they might surprise us with a less familiar animal. A Maiasaurus would be so cuddly as to destroy the effect of having a dinosaur in the first place, but there are pleny of cool looking obscure things that they could use.
That is simply false. It is true that any ISP can end up with spammer by bad luck. But the SPEWS listing spreads beyond the spammer only if the ISP does nothing about about the spammer.
So a non-spammer can only get caught by a listing if their provider fails to deal with abuse reports. Such an ISP has bad policy, not bad luck.
You are absolutely right. Although I advocate using things like SPEWS, you must make it clear that it will block mail from legitimate users. You either have to persuade people that this is right (as I believe) or not do it that way.
See this policy statement as an example of using such a policy, while making it clear that it will block mail from legitimate users.
- Let some customers spam
- ignored abuse complaints
- did nothing while when that particular spammer's IP was listed.
- Only took action against a spammer when
the SPEWS listing expanded to include non-spamming customers
- Whinged that SPEWS was unfair and not the right
way to do things
Every day SPEWS proves itself necessary and effective at getting otherwise unwilling providers to remove their spammers. Note that SPEWS uses an escalation process. The provider has to ignore complaints for a while to have the IP range expanded to include non-spammersIf you can suggest something that is half as effective at raising the cost for spammers as SPEWS, please suggest it. SPEWS forces providers to decide whether they want to host exclusively spammers or host exclusively non-spammers.
But if your goal is merely to filter spam (making life easier for the spammers) then you are right. SPEWS is not the way to do that.
If I simply didn't want to see the spam, I could arrange list-washing on my own and use a combination of filters. But that, of course, just makes life easier for the spammers. Instead, I wish to have spammers actually pay a fair price for their advertising instead of shifting the cost onto the recipient systems.
But in UUNet's case, they are not saying "we want to pretend to some misunderstanding of common carrier notion, so we won't interfer with customers who spam from us." Their Acceptable Use Policy says that they don't allow spammers on their net.
The simple fact of the matter is that they lying about their policy. They do allow spammers (but claim otherwise), as long as those spammers pay a premium for "bullet proof hosting". (No, I don't have specific evidence of this in UU.net's case. But there is evidence of these kinds of contracts in general and it is the only way to explain the pattern of UU.net's selective enforcement of their AUP.) Also consider the fact that UU.net collaborates with spammers that they host to reduce complaints without reducing the spam.
You missed the point. I'm not complaining about spam advertising uu.net. (I never got any of that.) I'm talking about all of the spammers that UU.Net hosts. These are spammers whom other providers have already expelled for network abuse.
Follow the shameless plug in my previous post, and follow links there to the the spamhaus report on uu.net.
They are in chapter 11, not chapter 13. Anyone who acquires UUNet will have some responsibility for their liabilites. This makes UUNet even more "damaged goods".
But yes. I wouldn't expect to recover much money from them.
What about the big providers that knowingly and willings host spam gangs? Surely the next target of a suit should be UU.Net. See my Boycott MCI rant for why we should go after UUNet.
Don't just consider web pages, but if you post news non-anonymously (or to /. non-anonymouly) it isn't just the carefully considered rant that is archived forever more, but every ill-considered flamage as well. Having posted to news from well before "dejanews", I was a bit surprised, and not entirely pleased that my posting history back to 1996 is available.
On the otherhand, I do choose to post non-anoymously. While that has some problems, it does mean that not only do I consider what I might regret later, anybody reading my posts can expect that I consider what I might regret later. That might add a smidgen of credibility (which of course can be squandered easily).
I appear to have been wrong about the details of local building codes, but you do acknowledge that local authorties do manipulate things to protect the local building industry. Some of these things mean that we won't see certain sorts of potential economies of scale and large scale competition in house building.
Until that nut is cracked, the rest of this stuff is just a pipe dream.
So to rephrase: Where will be get the most gains in accessiblity for the least effort? I'm not saying that we should put little effort into accessibility, but in persuading others to, we should be looking at what can have the biggest improvement.
Moderators: You can burn some moderation capability modding me redundent, but remember, this is, in part, a poll to see which questions to ask. The fact that I want to see this question asked is not redundent.
Pine is IMAP. For a very long time, other clients (including mutt) just treated IMAP as a form of POP. Pine, on the other hand, did IMAP before it did POP. (A principle pine developer is also a principle force behind IMAP.)
Look at the UW IMAP server. The chief complaint about it is that it is be slow and a memory hog for large mail boxes. But that is only true if you use the unix/mbox mail box format. If you use the recommend mbx format, access is quick, you can have multiple sessions open to the same mailbox (with this, I get around the "single view" problem of pine, by running multiple instances. I also store myAnyway, I'm obviously a pine fan (and was a tester for this release. I haven't yet installed 4.50, so I'm still running 4.49.9999).
The most sensible thing I've ever read about this kind of question is crptogram article last year by Bruce Schneier.
In the eastern block, news of the event was only reported about a week afterwards. A joke going around Hungary (which borders the Ukraine) was, Q: Why do we celebrate the October Revolution in November? A: Because that is when TASS felt fit to report it.