If Kleenex had
to call their product "Tissues", and trademarked it, there'd have been a storm of protest if they'd tried to enforce those trademarked. Likewise
Windex isn't called "Glass Cleaner", and if it had been, Windex would never have been able to defend it without substantial opposition.
In fact, Kimberly-Clark does call their product tissues. They're "Kleenex Brand Tissues;" it says so right on their web site. SC Johnson Wax calls their product line "Windex Glass and Surface Cleaners." Just look at their domain name - www.windexglasscleaner.com.
However, that's exactly the point. Adobe's product is called "Adobe Illustrator." That's even how they refer to it themselves. Adobe is like a brand, Illustrator is like a generic product name (an illustration program).
Adobe : Illustrator:: Kleenex : Tissues
A product called KAdobe could clearly be confused with something from Adobe. But if I sold Mistered's Tissues, Kimberly-Clark surely wouldn't care.
Ok, ok, in general when people say "illustrator" when they're talking about computer software, they mean Adobe Illustrator. I just wanted to point out that Kleenex and Windex both do have a common product name associated with them, but it's just not in common use. Also it pisses me off that Adobe or their representative would send a nastygram with a demand for $$$ right off the bat. If I was the author and Adobe said "we think KIllustrator is going to confuse people, do you think you could pick another name?" I'd say sure. However, tell me to destroy it and pay your legal costs, and I'd tell them where to go.
I was thinking about a program that would compute my (mutable) e-dress from the current time and a secret key.
I already do something similar, but much more low-tech, and get on the order of one or two UCEs per week. Every email address that I post on a web site, or on usenet, or even give out to people I don't know well, is disposable and almost unique. I might use the same one to sign up for three or four web sites. As soon as spam starts appearing, the address is terminated. Only my good (trustworthy) friends, work, etc. get my real address.
I've been thinking of a spam removal idea that I'd like to implement (and might actually get around to, now that I've been "transitioned" out of a job). The idea is that if you are on a whitelist (my family, friends, work, school, etc.) your email goes through with no extra work. If you're on MAPS or ORBS or the email looks like spam (i.e. has more than 5 exclamation marks or dollar signs in the subject, or a 5 digit number at the end of the subject line) it is held for special processing. You would get an automated reply, asking for confirmation that you're a real person. Perhaps you'd have a special web site to go to and confirm your identity. The only messages this system would lose are those from fake email addresses that look like spam or are from someone on MAPS or ORBS.
Right now, my mailer puts an X-RBL-WARNING at the top of email from someone in ORBS or MAPS but doesn't delete it. In my case, all mail from RBL'd sites is either spam, or from one person (my girlfriend) who could be whitelisted. With my idea, almost all of my real email goes through, almost all of the spam gets blocked, and it only inconveniences the very few people who are RBL'ed and sending me email for the first time.
Let me know if you have any thoughts on this idea...
First, I would be more than happy to get rid of a lot of the small-time spammers. I'd like to stop getting "30 million addresses!!!!!!!" spams sent from some teenager's basement. I'd like to get rid of the "I'm HOT and WAITING for YOU" spam. I think Hash Cash could help here.
Second, the argument that hardware gets cheaper and faster everyday doesn't negate any benefit of Hash Cash or similar schemes; I'll just charge more every year. Last year you needed 16 bits to send me an email, now I want 25 bits. (Based on Moore's law, inflation should be around 160% / year.)
Third, lets say I require you to use about 10 seconds on a decent current desktop machine. If you want to send me an individual email, I don't think you'd mind waiting the ten seconds. I certainly wouldn't. Once I find out you're not a spammer, I'll let you send me email for free. Now, let's say a spammer wants to send out 1 million emails, and that he's got 10 decent desktop machines solely dedicated to computing hashes. It's going to take him more than a week to send out his email, at which time his angelfire webhosting account and hotmail email address will be long gone.
Even if companies like IBM, Sears or Microsoft want to get a huge farm to compute hashes and send out spam, I'd be reasonably confident that traditional measures (i.e. phone them or email them and tell them to stop bugging you) would be effective.
I think these senators don't comprehend the reality with spam; that is, 99% of it has false origin information and has an opt-out scheme that doesn't work or only results in more spam.
However, I don't believe in making laws against spam. They'll always be outdated and interfere with legimate uses of email, since it can be very hard to define exactly what is spam. (Someone taking my address from a newsgroup posting and trying to sell me printer toner is spamming, but how about an email from a company I bought something from a year ago?)
Adam Back has an interesting proposal called Hash Cash. The idea is that if you want to send me an email, you have to burn some CPU cycles to compute a partial hash collision. I choose how many bits are required. Friends and family can send me email for free. I'll charge a few bits for the store I shooped at last week, and even more for people I don't know. If you're in ORBS or MAPS, perhaps I'll charge even more.
There are 3 hats, but two colours. This means that out of 12 possible combinations
There are three hats, and each has two possible colours. Thus there are 2 * 2 * 2 = 8 possible combinations, not 12, and there's a 2/8 chance of them being all the same colour.
Re:What I don't get about the Monty Hall Problem
on
The Three Hat Problem
·
· Score: 1
Before opening any doors, you have a 1/3 chance of picking the prize, and there's a 2/3 chance the prize is in one of the other doors. One of those doors is opened, and it doesn't have the prize. Now there's a 2/3 chance it's in the door you didn't pick. It relies on the host's knowledge of where the prize is.
What's so interesting about it? In a vacuum they would fall at the same speed, but there's a lot more air resistance on the feather than the ball so the ball hits first.
No, you can get a 75% chance of winning. Read the article again - the rules say each player has to guess at the same time (or pass). It's the passing that improves the odds. Because only the player that see two hats of the same colour is guessing, they've got a greater chance of getting it right.
I'll second that. Wind River has gotten better, but they're still in a "what can free software do for us" rather than "how can we use free software to help our customers and everyone else?"
They use GCC extensively as their cross-compiler, but are not great contributors to GCC development.
Well, actually only the idiot spammers let you see anyone else on their list. Since the To: field has no relationship to where the message is actually delivered, any spammer that lets you see other addresses is a total moron.
So it's so reliable that you need to do the same calculation five times and take the most popular result?
Assuming that the processing demands of current and future space flights are increasing beyond what a dozen 286s can accomplish, what would you have NASA, ESA et. al. do? Use more and more 286s? Use a higher end PC processor? Use a normal workstation processor? Or use a radiation-hardened processor that is compatible with a popular, well tested processor? (SPARC)
The article is talking about a processor, not code that runs on the processor. What about the problems faced by commercial, closed processors? I think this is a great step in the right direction; a synthesizable VHDL processor that can target FPGAs.
That coal plant is there for a reason. Have a look at this graph.
The problem is that many types of electricity generating plants cannot be "turned on" and "off" quickly. Things like nuclear plants and hydroelectric are great for supplying the base load but for the peaks you need something you can bring online quickly and take off just as quickly. Natural gas and coal are the most popular choices here. Bad Things (tm) happen if you have more or less generating capacity than the load you're trying to supply.
Currently they sell you both a fourth-level domain (whatever.newTLD.new.net) and a second-level domain using their DNS. People who don't know any better (i.e. people using a "plugin"), can just have a ".new.net" added automatically. In fact, their
Linux instructions suggest adding ".new.net" to the search line in resolv.conf
Note that if you use one of several large ISPs like EarthLink, @Home, or NetZero, you already have new.net TLDs on a trial basis! I just gave it a try, and sure enough disney.xxx resolves on my box (Rogers @Home).
It depends on your browser: my Communicator 4.73 waits for the images to load before rendering the page. Google doesn't cache the images, so nothing happens until I hit "stop," and then the page renders.
IE 4.0 renders as it goes, so it displays the whole page but continues trying to load the images until I hit "stop."
Also a friendly reminder, use those width= and height= tags on your images, thanks!
You wrote: The code in the boot block is copywrited.
I shall present this mysterious, "copywrited" boot code for you: SCEA. That's it. Four letters. I doubt it's possible to copyright four letters.
Have a look here for some modchip details. If you look around you can also find the source code for a number of modchips if you're into doing it yourself. It would be trivially easy to remove the alleged "copywrited" SCEA and distribute the source without it. You then could add any boot code you liked and put it in your own machine. (Obviously only the "SCEA" would make any sense.)
Note that modchips also have a legitimate purpose: allowing you to play import games. Asian consoles look for SCEI, European ones look for SCEE and NA ones look for SCEA. If the modchip is inserting these "codes" then the playstation will play discs from any region. Note that anti-piracy modchips are also possible, by letting through the first three letters from the disc and inserting a fourth. This type of modchip only allows one to play import games, but not CDRs. (Figuring out what SCEA stands for is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Mackie makes some really nice gear, but for an application like this it might be overkill. Behringer makes a wide variety of Mackie knock-offs at much lower prices.
I'm personally using Behringer's MX802A for two sound cards as well as some various other sources.
Assembly language is pretty much a straight one for one conversion into machine code
Indeed, on some processors the assembler does even more including expanding one assembly instruction into multiple machine instructions. On a MIPS for example there's even a register reserved for the assembler (at - assembler temporary) to use when expanding instructions.
Calling 1-800 numbers, or filling out bogus information on web sites, is relatively safe and it's an activity I sometimes enjoy. However, never fill out your real email address on a spammer's website or reply to a postmaster@ or abuse@ address that you aren't sure belongs to a trusted ISP.
The problem isn't with one spammer knowing your email address is valid. It's the fact that once one spammer knows this, it doesn't take long for your address to make it onto a CD with millions of email addresses for other spammers to use. Such CDs are often spamvertized. Once your email address gets on to one of these, you can count on a great increase in your spam volume.
I run my own mailserver, so I just create throw-away accounts as I please when filling out web-forms, etc. My spam-reporting from: address is also such a throw-away alias. So far I haven't received any spam through it, but as soon as I do it disappears and I move on to another.
1. Just because you have to "push a button," it doesn't mean that the email is not spam. Websites that allow an email address to be added to the list or be sent mail without some verification can be construed as spamming. If someone else puts my email address in such a form and as a result I get added to a list, I would complain to the site's administrators. See also greeting-card spam.
2. Spamcop only looks up address from email pasted into its form, and clearly states "Please make sure this email IS spam" and "Report only email addresses and web sites which you think are used by the spammer. If you are unsure, do not check any
boxes which default off. This will send mail to a network administrator. Please do not waste their time if this is not spam. The last thing we
want is for administrators to stop taking these spam reports seriously." There's nothing to stop me from putting non-spam into SpamCop and complaining to random admins, other than the possibility SpamCop will disable my account.
I generally agree fully with what MAPS does, and I don't know the full details of this issue but I have an issue with them listing IPs of non-spamming and non-spam-hosting sites that happen to use the same provider. I believe it's wrong if they're listing IPs of sites not associated with spam in any way, if it's only to pressure the provider into dumping another customer.
Well, it wouldn't really be right for him to comment on what any ISP is doing with the IP lists. He didn't tell them to blackhole either just mail or everything from this host, that was their choice and they're the ones that should explain it to the press if they want.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, Kimberly-Clark does call their product tissues. They're "Kleenex Brand Tissues;" it says so right on their web site. SC Johnson Wax calls their product line "Windex Glass and Surface Cleaners." Just look at their domain name - www.windexglasscleaner.com.
However, that's exactly the point. Adobe's product is called "Adobe Illustrator." That's even how they refer to it themselves. Adobe is like a brand, Illustrator is like a generic product name (an illustration program).
Adobe : Illustrator :: Kleenex : Tissues
A product called KAdobe could clearly be confused with something from Adobe. But if I sold Mistered's Tissues, Kimberly-Clark surely wouldn't care.
Ok, ok, in general when people say "illustrator" when they're talking about computer software, they mean Adobe Illustrator. I just wanted to point out that Kleenex and Windex both do have a common product name associated with them, but it's just not in common use. Also it pisses me off that Adobe or their representative would send a nastygram with a demand for $$$ right off the bat. If I was the author and Adobe said "we think KIllustrator is going to confuse people, do you think you could pick another name?" I'd say sure. However, tell me to destroy it and pay your legal costs, and I'd tell them where to go.
Atmel's AVR series was developed by some Europeans (Finland?) and I think A V and R are the designer's initials.
I already do something similar, but much more low-tech, and get on the order of one or two UCEs per week. Every email address that I post on a web site, or on usenet, or even give out to people I don't know well, is disposable and almost unique. I might use the same one to sign up for three or four web sites. As soon as spam starts appearing, the address is terminated. Only my good (trustworthy) friends, work, etc. get my real address.
I've been thinking of a spam removal idea that I'd like to implement (and might actually get around to, now that I've been "transitioned" out of a job). The idea is that if you are on a whitelist (my family, friends, work, school, etc.) your email goes through with no extra work. If you're on MAPS or ORBS or the email looks like spam (i.e. has more than 5 exclamation marks or dollar signs in the subject, or a 5 digit number at the end of the subject line) it is held for special processing. You would get an automated reply, asking for confirmation that you're a real person. Perhaps you'd have a special web site to go to and confirm your identity. The only messages this system would lose are those from fake email addresses that look like spam or are from someone on MAPS or ORBS.
Right now, my mailer puts an X-RBL-WARNING at the top of email from someone in ORBS or MAPS but doesn't delete it. In my case, all mail from RBL'd sites is either spam, or from one person (my girlfriend) who could be whitelisted. With my idea, almost all of my real email goes through, almost all of the spam gets blocked, and it only inconveniences the very few people who are RBL'ed and sending me email for the first time.
Let me know if you have any thoughts on this idea...
Several points.
First, I would be more than happy to get rid of a lot of the small-time spammers. I'd like to stop getting "30 million addresses!!!!!!!" spams sent from some teenager's basement. I'd like to get rid of the "I'm HOT and WAITING for YOU" spam. I think Hash Cash could help here.
Second, the argument that hardware gets cheaper and faster everyday doesn't negate any benefit of Hash Cash or similar schemes; I'll just charge more every year. Last year you needed 16 bits to send me an email, now I want 25 bits. (Based on Moore's law, inflation should be around 160% / year.)
Third, lets say I require you to use about 10 seconds on a decent current desktop machine. If you want to send me an individual email, I don't think you'd mind waiting the ten seconds. I certainly wouldn't. Once I find out you're not a spammer, I'll let you send me email for free. Now, let's say a spammer wants to send out 1 million emails, and that he's got 10 decent desktop machines solely dedicated to computing hashes. It's going to take him more than a week to send out his email, at which time his angelfire webhosting account and hotmail email address will be long gone.
Even if companies like IBM, Sears or Microsoft want to get a huge farm to compute hashes and send out spam, I'd be reasonably confident that traditional measures (i.e. phone them or email them and tell them to stop bugging you) would be effective.
However, I don't believe in making laws against spam. They'll always be outdated and interfere with legimate uses of email, since it can be very hard to define exactly what is spam. (Someone taking my address from a newsgroup posting and trying to sell me printer toner is spamming, but how about an email from a company I bought something from a year ago?)
Adam Back has an interesting proposal called Hash Cash. The idea is that if you want to send me an email, you have to burn some CPU cycles to compute a partial hash collision. I choose how many bits are required. Friends and family can send me email for free. I'll charge a few bits for the store I shooped at last week, and even more for people I don't know. If you're in ORBS or MAPS, perhaps I'll charge even more.
Except that this is a different puzzle.
There are 3 hats, but two colours. This means that out of 12 possible combinations
There are three hats, and each has two possible colours. Thus there are 2 * 2 * 2 = 8 possible combinations, not 12, and there's a 2/8 chance of them being all the same colour.
Before opening any doors, you have a 1/3 chance of picking the prize, and there's a 2/3 chance the prize is in one of the other doors. One of those doors is opened, and it doesn't have the prize. Now there's a 2/3 chance it's in the door you didn't pick. It relies on the host's knowledge of where the prize is.
What's so interesting about it? In a vacuum they would fall at the same speed, but there's a lot more air resistance on the feather than the ball so the ball hits first.
No, you can get a 75% chance of winning. Read the article again - the rules say each player has to guess at the same time (or pass). It's the passing that improves the odds. Because only the player that see two hats of the same colour is guessing, they've got a greater chance of getting it right.
They use GCC extensively as their cross-compiler, but are not great contributors to GCC development.
http://3520040376/new_010325/alert/breakingnews.h
Or this one:n gnews.html
http://centralhosting.net/new_010325/alert/breaki
The 3520040376 is the IP address of the machine. Then the stuff before the @ is just a username.
Assuming that the processing demands of current and future space flights are increasing beyond what a dozen 286s can accomplish, what would you have NASA, ESA et. al. do? Use more and more 286s? Use a higher end PC processor? Use a normal workstation processor? Or use a radiation-hardened processor that is compatible with a popular, well tested processor? (SPARC)
The problem is that many types of electricity generating plants cannot be "turned on" and "off" quickly. Things like nuclear plants and hydroelectric are great for supplying the base load but for the peaks you need something you can bring online quickly and take off just as quickly. Natural gas and coal are the most popular choices here. Bad Things (tm) happen if you have more or less generating capacity than the load you're trying to supply.
Note that if you use one of several large ISPs like EarthLink, @Home, or NetZero, you already have new.net TLDs on a trial basis! I just gave it a try, and sure enough disney.xxx resolves on my box (Rogers @Home).
IE 4.0 renders as it goes, so it displays the whole page but continues trying to load the images until I hit "stop."
Also a friendly reminder, use those width= and height= tags on your images, thanks!
You wrote: The code in the boot block is copywrited.
I shall present this mysterious, "copywrited" boot code for you: SCEA. That's it. Four letters. I doubt it's possible to copyright four letters.
Have a look here for some modchip details. If you look around you can also find the source code for a number of modchips if you're into doing it yourself. It would be trivially easy to remove the alleged "copywrited" SCEA and distribute the source without it. You then could add any boot code you liked and put it in your own machine. (Obviously only the "SCEA" would make any sense.)
Note that modchips also have a legitimate purpose: allowing you to play import games. Asian consoles look for SCEI, European ones look for SCEE and NA ones look for SCEA. If the modchip is inserting these "codes" then the playstation will play discs from any region. Note that anti-piracy modchips are also possible, by letting through the first three letters from the disc and inserting a fourth. This type of modchip only allows one to play import games, but not CDRs. (Figuring out what SCEA stands for is left as an exercise for the reader.)
I'm personally using Behringer's MX802A for two sound cards as well as some various other sources.
Indeed, on some processors the assembler does even more including expanding one assembly instruction into multiple machine instructions. On a MIPS for example there's even a register reserved for the assembler ( at - assembler temporary) to use when expanding instructions.
The problem isn't with one spammer knowing your email address is valid. It's the fact that once one spammer knows this, it doesn't take long for your address to make it onto a CD with millions of email addresses for other spammers to use. Such CDs are often spamvertized. Once your email address gets on to one of these, you can count on a great increase in your spam volume.
I run my own mailserver, so I just create throw-away accounts as I please when filling out web-forms, etc. My spam-reporting from: address is also such a throw-away alias. So far I haven't received any spam through it, but as soon as I do it disappears and I move on to another.
1. Just because you have to "push a button," it doesn't mean that the email is not spam. Websites that allow an email address to be added to the list or be sent mail without some verification can be construed as spamming. If someone else puts my email address in such a form and as a result I get added to a list, I would complain to the site's administrators. See also greeting-card spam.
2. Spamcop only looks up address from email pasted into its form, and clearly states "Please make sure this email IS spam" and "Report only email addresses and web sites which you think are used by the spammer. If you are unsure, do not check any boxes which default off. This will send mail to a network administrator. Please do not waste their time if this is not spam. The last thing we want is for administrators to stop taking these spam reports seriously." There's nothing to stop me from putting non-spam into SpamCop and complaining to random admins, other than the possibility SpamCop will disable my account.
Well, it wouldn't really be right for him to comment on what any ISP is doing with the IP lists. He didn't tell them to blackhole either just mail or everything from this host, that was their choice and they're the ones that should explain it to the press if they want.