I've done this, so nobody need quip me with any "thats easy for you to say".
The biggest problem I see here is that the people are looking for a job. But its not that simple. They're not looking for A job, they're looking for a job that pays them what they're used to with the skills and qualifications they have to offer.
Instead of swallowing their pride and picking up a job, ANY job to pay the bills, and in the mean time cutting way WAY back on their expenses so they can survive on that job, meager as it might be, at least they will be able to keep a roof over their heads.
Oh.. but nobody can afford rent of $1800 a month. Option, if you're living in your car anyways, it really doesn't matter WHERE you live. Rent is much cheaper elsewhere. In fact, its cheaper pretty much ANYWHERE else than smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley. Move. Fill
up your tank with gas and drive somewhere else.
This also falls to the issue of living beyond one's means. Just because you're banking $100,000 a year doesn't mean you have to spend all of it. It might be nice to think that everything is on the up and up and nobody will ever have to suffer again, but thats just sadly not the case. Be prepared for the bottom to fall out beneath you. At least if you're prepared you can cushion the fall. And when you're out of a job, get into another one. If you spend 2 weeks looking for something in your field and you're simply not getting anything, GET A JOB. McDonalds, UPS, mow lawns, stock a grocery store. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that you'll have a steady revenue stream. It might not be able to meet your expenses, but it will make your saftey net last MUCH longer, and when you finally find a job you can leave your temporary job with little to no notice.
Anyone else notice the heavy concentration in that article about the efficiency of mailing out large numbers of email messages. Now, I'm certain there are many MANY legitimate reasons why someone would have a "test list" of 200,000 email addresses, its just that I can't seem to think of any at the moment.
Step 1: Disconnect the network cable.
Step 2: Disconnect the keyboard
Step 3: Disconnect the mouse
Step 4: Disconnect the monitor
Step 5: Turn the computer off
Step 6: Unplug it
Step 7: Remove the harddrive and lock it in a safe somewhere where nobody will ever think to look for it, then promptly forget where you left it.
Step 8: Kill yourself just to be sure you don't accidently ever remember
I think you just hit on the point here. IF Myspace.com had been charging for its services, it would probably still be in business. Nothing is free. Just because I might be able to access content for free, SOMEONE has to pay for those resources. It might be venture capital, IPO funding, advertising, or out of the back pocket of whoever is sponsoring it. For a small project,
this loss is not significant enough to warrant a
change. I can host a few free webpages indefinitely on my servers, as I'm not even using all the bandwidth I have available.
However, if a site of mine suddenly exploded to the popularity level of slashdot.org, I'd suddenly be in trouble. I couldn't afford to increase the bandwidth without some type of revenue stream. When banner ads were all the rage, this was rather simple. However, banner ads seem to be waning in economic usefulness, so what other revenue source is available?
I could charge people to access my site, but as fun as slashdot is, how many of you would accept being forced to pay to access it? Its a wonderful novelty site, but I seriously doubt they would garner much support in this department.
From the point of view of the consumer, the only price they're really willing to pay is to the ISP for their bloodstream to the internet. In a way, this makes sense too. The more bandwidth they have available, the more bandwidth they'll probably actually use. If somehow some of the connection costs could be funneled to the servers that are getting accessed, this could solve a great deal of the problems, however this would be a micropayment nightmare.
Ultimately, we need a two teir system. We need e-commerce sites that sell ACTUAL PRODUCTS. You know.. those things that I pay REAL money for and when I have it, I can hold it in my hand and call it my very own. Then those sites need to advertise on the other sites that are just trying to pay for their bandwidth. The biggest problem with advertising right now, is that the limited funds available for it are being spread out too thin on sites that don't need it (like for companies that are just using their webpages as a form of advertising)
I was, more or less, addicted to Ultima Online for about the first 6 months after its release. I played it a MINIMUM of 8 hours a day on weekdays, frequently up til 2 in the morning, having to be at work by 8, this was a bit of a challenge. I would also try to sneak in some play time at work if I wasn't being watched. And once I got home, UO is all I did until I went to sleep.
On weekends, it was wake up, UO until I couldn't stay up anymore, then sleep. Thats it. that was my life. Nothing else.
I would wake up thinking of nothing else, I would spend any waking moment that I wasn't on the machine thinking about it. I wrote extensive documents logging activities, trying to come up with new strategies against my foes in the game, researching the online sites about the game, etc.
Every time they put in a patch, I was disgruntled. BIG TIME. Because every patch meant I had to completely change the way I played the game. Figure that if every 3 weeks you had to move, completely change your diet, change to a new job, and take a pay cut at the same time. After a while, this would get extremely annoying. Thats to some extent what it felt like playing the game after a while.
Server crashes caused a great deal of frustration. That just meant I lost time. Imagine waking up one day, working hard for 14 hours straight, then right before you go to sleep at the end of the night, Everything gets wiped out so you are back where you started at the beginning of the day, the entire day wasted. In UO, this was typical.
Add in to that, I had a bad internet connection that would drop frequently, and always at the most inopportune times, so I died many more times than I should have. Travesty of the greatest, I can assure you.
However, while this game might have been an addiction, it was by no means a dependancy. One day in Feb '98, I was at work thinking about UO, like I usually did, and read a newsgroup post about some hot topic, and I wrote a lenghty reply. I'm not sure exactly what the topic was about, but I got off on a few rants and a tangent and by the time I was done writing it, I had decided to quit playing. I went online that night, gave away all my online stuff, shut it down and never played it again.
And the weird thing is, I never WANTED to play it again. I had no desire whatsoever to play it. I quit thinking about it, I actually accomplished other things, slowly gained a grip on a life again. Never looked back.
And the way I see it, it was like an annoying hobby, one you somehow feel you must participate in, but you never really want to. I can't imagine how I began to feel that way about the game, but by the time it was all over, I never wanted to do it again. Since that time I have hardly played any online games, in fact, I've hardly played any games at all. There was a brief stint with starcraft after I quit UO, but at least with that game, after playing it for 2 hours, I was bored with it and quit for a while. Games could actually be completed (won or lost) and that closure allowed me to go on and do other things, whereas with UO, it never ends. And until it ends, you don't want to stop playing.
I can't say from a marketing standpoint that this wasn't effective. People who had never played an Ultima game played UO. People who had never played ANY computer games were playing it. Scary.
The issue of buying stock in a company is to purchase the stock at a price with the expectation (or gamble if you will) that the company's stock will be worth more in the future.
Now I've also seen posts that recommended just donating. Well, if you're content to donate money, that means that you're content to shell out a certain amount of cash with no expectation of a return on that investment. In that case, why NOT buy stock in the company? If it completely tanks, hey you were content to lose it all anyways. But if it succeeds, your faith will be rewarded.
I don't feel linux companies suffer from the same rap as a lot of the dot com companies did. Linux companies, for the most part, actually HAVE A PRODUCT THAT PEOPLE WANT!!!!!! The problem was, with the collapse of all the worthless dotcoms, the linux companies were effected as well because the industry as a whole took a nosedive. There were no cashhappy corps using linux boxes, purchasing network equipment, etc, and the ripple effect affects the entire industry.
But the strong useful companies can survive. Investors may be wary, but to hell with them. Companies can survive without investors and they're better off in the long run if they have a business plan that does not rely in whole or in part on a large quantity of infused cash. Meaning, the company survives on its own revenue stream. Imagine THAT of all things!:)
Interesting though, consider that the slang term "spam" as applying to UCE *IS* derived from the meat product, and therefore using the image is not misrepresenting.
To say you'll permit one and not the other is a tough sell. The two are mutually exclusive.
Now... had the term "spam" come from something completely unrelated to the meat product, then I can see the issue here.
Boy don't I agree. At least with DS9, they dedicated 10 entire episodes to wrapping up the series, and even then it was a VERY rushed ending. With voyager, they tried to do it all in one episode. Well, they TRIED anyways.
And it appeared from the last few years that they were progressing toward developing an actual technical way to get home. Barclay was responsible for many technological breakthroughs that provided the voyager crew with realtime communication with Earth. I was hoping they were going to lead up to a way to carry transporter buffers over that same medium, so they could slowly transport the entire crew back, but slowly since they only had 11 minutes a day to do so. Then as only a skeleton crew remained, something could go horribly wrong and spend a couple episodes surviving that crisis, resulting in a dramatic ending. That would have worked for me.
Instead... we got....
blah.
A full two hours (minus a few minutes for a
cliffhanger resolution at the beginning of the show) would have been nice. What charges would the Maquis face? how would they and Seven, and Naomi, and Echep integrate into society? Hell, even seeing Kim getting promoted would be SOMETHING.
Actually, for better or worse, I've grown quite accustomed to having an internet connection available anywhere I go so I can check on my house, etc. Perhaps the general public hasn't completely borgified themselves yet, but with the current proliferation of cell phones, I doubt it will be too many years before most people will find it difficult to NOT have an internet connection nearby SOMEWHERE.
Actually, we're not really providing an index for them, we're providing to them a list of pages that were updated. The clients don't do much except monitor pages to see when they get updated. Of course, the clients COULD just send all the data to the servers, it makes no difference on the server side, they'll have to archive all the data anyways. The advantage here is they get notified of all the pages that change and can poll them at that time, instead of having to poll their entire index constantly if only 0.01% of those pages change every time.
Ultimately this comes down to the fairness and who owns the database itself. If its open and free to everyone, then this is a good cause, even if they have to generate revenue to support the site that serves the searches. In fact, if they distribute their servers properly, it won't even be necessary to have a large revenue stream as the load could be scattered more or less evenly over the entire volunteer pool.
Unfortunately, due to their somewhat fishy intentions with regards to revenue, it might end up killing the project before it ever takes off.
And it really seems like a good idea too.
I'm pretty sure the university gave fair enough warning. I remember when I went through orientation in college they gave us a pretty extensive explaination of what constituted cheating and what would happen if we were caught. In addition, most of the individual instructors brought the issue up briefly at the beginning of the semester. Of course, each class had a somewhat different definition of what constituted cheating. Group work was generally not frowned upon, expecially in those classes where homework was more or less optional or only counted for a small percentage of the final grade.
Still, acedemic dishonesty was explained quite thouroughly, and I'm sure the university in question was not timid in explaining it either. There may be an "Honor Code" but an honor code requires that you're honest or the system falls apart. Salting the system from time to time doesn't degrade it. Its unnecessary to warn the students that they're going to check for cheating, they shouldn't be cheating in the first place.
And there's a lot to be said about making examples out of others. It only helps to keep the others honest.:)
Of course the program isn't making the accusation. It's only doing pattern matches that MIGHT indicate cheating, after which it will require a human to read over the actual papers to see if its really cheating, or just an unlikely coincidence that a 6 word phrase matched. All the program does is eliminate those that while they might be cheaters, they at least had enough sense to do some paraphrasing.
Ultimately that would be the most dangerous type of program. A program that can take any document and paraphrase it randomly to result in an entirely new document that covers the same information. At the simplest level, a language parser that isn't much more than a glorified word substitution program could be effective. At the more complex level (for reorganizing the entire paper from the outline down) would require fairly sufficient AI to accomplish. THAT would be a fun project though. 500 students could turn in the same paper on the same topic and it would be nearly impossible to accuse any of them of cheating.:)
Well... #2 doesn't really apply. Oh, it used to, back in the day when I could use it.
And #3 is slightly off. I don't download music from napster. I use usenet instead.
And #1. I never never NEVER NEVER *N*E*V*E*R*!!!!!
lend out my CD's to anyone. Anyone is free to come over here and copy them to their hearts content, but the CD's stay here. There is a mystery CD I made once, put a whole bunch of cool stuff on it. Lent it to a friend like 3 years ago. And he's STILL looking for it. Something along the lines of "I lent it to someone and he lent it to someone and that someone's phone got disconnected so we can't get ahold of him....."
But a packrat I am. It hurts to delete anything, unless I know I can easily get it again. I still have copies of all the files from my old BBS days, still preserved (probably not very well) on 3 1/2 inch floppies, and even some on 5 1/4 HD floppies (remember those??:) I've got like 8 boxes of them in my closet. I have absolutely no practical use for them anymore, but dammit!!!! I might NEED them someday and I'll just hate myself if I got rid of them.
However, I will be the first to admit that its truely pathetic that of all the music I have archived, I've only ever listened to about 1/4 of it, and if I someday got the urge to play all of it, end to end, without ever repeating a song, it would take a solid 6 months at this point to go through all of it. And since I accumulate music faster than I can listen to it, this cycle is unlikely to change. But don't expect me to stop saving all of it.:)
I agree, its a joke. The sad thing, however, is that this could have actually happened. How many of these dot-coms were founded by an idea thought up during a drinking binge, for a product that was completely unnessary and in many cases extremely difficult to implement. How many of these products were funded by VC firms with little more than blind faith, then crashed and burned before even getting out of the vaporware phase. How many companies had executives that were hauled off in handcuffs? This story may only be satire, but the true ironic humor to be found here is that this story could be passed off as true and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. Thats sad.
Oh, there was spam. I remember a few chain letters getting posted to public channels.
The only difference was... we knew who the bastards who posted them were, and they did little more than open themselves up to public ridicule.
Back then, I would typically verify the identity of anyone who gave potentially false information. At the very least I required a real name and phone number, and if I verified that this information was incorrect, I could simply disable the account and never let them back in. Imagine THAT power on the internet as we know it. If that spammer is bothering you, just disconnect him from the internet permanantly. Oh how I wish.
Well, even though my BBS isn't on the list, I have saved practically everything from it all these years, packed in boxes full of floppy disks.
Anal you ask? Probably. But I figured some day it might all be useful. Although a lot of what I had has been lost or was never saved due to HD crashes and the like, I still have some of the useful information.
Most specifically, every year I was running the BBS I would write up a little history file of what had happened. Looking back on it now I feel I was probably an immature, arrogant little brat, but I never remember it being that way....:)
Anyways, while I proudly posted these files while the BBS was still in operation, its practically an embarassment to even read them now, let alone post them for all the world to see. Still, I might put them up someday for posterity.
For anyone who BBS'ed in the Dallas, TX area in the early 90's, I ran the BBS named "Highway to Hell". Perhaps you'll remember.
Credit cards are voluntary. Its very difficult to find a walk-in type store that won't take cash. Sure, Rat shack always asks for your name and address, but I simply decline to give it to them. If you choose to give up that information willingly, you deserve everything you get.
However, if you don't have a choice about revealing your identity and interests to marketers, then this is where the line gets fuzzy. If a store is required to disclose that systems such as these are in use, then thats one thing. You can just avoid shopping there, or can take precautions to prevent them from being useful.
However, there IS a potentially useful side effect here. I ignore advertisements. In fact, I RUTHLESSLY avoid them. I never look at banner ads, I never click on them, I don't look at junk mail, no matter what it might be. The crap people like to hang on my doorknob goes in the trash without a glance. When I go to the store, I know what I'm going to get, and I don't waste much time looking around at subtle advertising to see what I can't live without.
IF these systems pick up my complete lack of interest in ALL advertising, do you think its possible that they might mark me as a lost cause and save their precious marketing dollars by simply not sending me anything? Yeah.. I can hope.:)
Another angle of the same issue.... notice how nobody really cares about intrusion into our lives when its our choice to allow it. How many people have webcams? Now, see how many of those same people would be willing to go along with mandated cameras in their houses. The end result is the same, but in one case, "Big brother is watching you", in the other case, "Bring it on Big Brother".
This newfangled marketing strategy would probably gain public acceptance if not for its secrecy. Just offer it as a free service and everyone wouldn't be able to wait to have it installed everywhere. "Sign up for this free service to automatically notify you when your favorite products go on sale!!!!" Sale of course is an arbitrary term. A store near me has a "temporary lower price" tag on EVERY SINGLE ITEM IN THE STORE, no matter what the price is. The point is... right now, at this instant, its temporarily lower, so you better get it now or the price might go up. People are morons. They don't care. They'd be an easy sale.
But no, they have to conceal it. Hide the identities where these systems are in place. Get the ACLU involved. Way to go there. Way to market your product you bozos. Lets make it extremely obvious that you might have nefarious motivies. At least you're making it easy for us.
no need to load anything from a "master DB", they stated in the article that there are several hundred copies of the index. That means, that if any one server goes out, there are still several hundred servers serving the same data. The point is, if an ecommerce site WAS set up like this, it would still be perfectly functional. However, that would be quite an impressive setup for an ecommerce site.
Although this isn't exactly going to help in his situation, I have a webcam that looks out my front door. Anytime the doorbell is run, 3 pictures are captured and appended to a log, as well as being sent to a remote server. This is far from a perfect solution and I do plan to update this to reflect any dramatic changes with the internal cameras when I'm not at home.
Of course, if anyone is aware of the camera, it would be easy to hide from, and there is always a chance that I won't get a good enough picture to do any good legally, but its a start.
The page that accesses the webcams is at http://alignment.net
Slashdot Mirror
Highlander.
-Restil
I've done this, so nobody need quip me with any "thats easy for you to say".
The biggest problem I see here is that the people are looking for a job. But its not that simple. They're not looking for A job, they're looking for a job that pays them what they're used to with the skills and qualifications they have to offer.
Instead of swallowing their pride and picking up a job, ANY job to pay the bills, and in the mean time cutting way WAY back on their expenses so they can survive on that job, meager as it might be, at least they will be able to keep a roof over their heads.
Oh.. but nobody can afford rent of $1800 a month. Option, if you're living in your car anyways, it really doesn't matter WHERE you live. Rent is much cheaper elsewhere. In fact, its cheaper pretty much ANYWHERE else than smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley. Move. Fill
up your tank with gas and drive somewhere else.
This also falls to the issue of living beyond one's means. Just because you're banking $100,000 a year doesn't mean you have to spend all of it. It might be nice to think that everything is on the up and up and nobody will ever have to suffer again, but thats just sadly not the case. Be prepared for the bottom to fall out beneath you. At least if you're prepared you can cushion the fall. And when you're out of a job, get into another one. If you spend 2 weeks looking for something in your field and you're simply not getting anything, GET A JOB. McDonalds, UPS, mow lawns, stock a grocery store. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that you'll have a steady revenue stream. It might not be able to meet your expenses, but it will make your saftey net last MUCH longer, and when you finally find a job you can leave your temporary job with little to no notice.
-Restil
Anyone else notice the heavy concentration in that article about the efficiency of mailing out large numbers of email messages. Now, I'm certain there are many MANY legitimate reasons why someone would have a "test list" of 200,000 email addresses, its just that I can't seem to think of any at the moment.
-Restil
Step 1: Disconnect the network cable.
Step 2: Disconnect the keyboard
Step 3: Disconnect the mouse
Step 4: Disconnect the monitor
Step 5: Turn the computer off
Step 6: Unplug it
Step 7: Remove the harddrive and lock it in a safe somewhere where nobody will ever think to look for it, then promptly forget where you left it.
Step 8: Kill yourself just to be sure you don't accidently ever remember
Ok. Its secure.
-Restil
I think you just hit on the point here. IF Myspace.com had been charging for its services, it would probably still be in business. Nothing is free. Just because I might be able to access content for free, SOMEONE has to pay for those resources. It might be venture capital, IPO funding, advertising, or out of the back pocket of whoever is sponsoring it. For a small project,
this loss is not significant enough to warrant a
change. I can host a few free webpages indefinitely on my servers, as I'm not even using all the bandwidth I have available.
However, if a site of mine suddenly exploded to the popularity level of slashdot.org, I'd suddenly be in trouble. I couldn't afford to increase the bandwidth without some type of revenue stream. When banner ads were all the rage, this was rather simple. However, banner ads seem to be waning in economic usefulness, so what other revenue source is available?
I could charge people to access my site, but as fun as slashdot is, how many of you would accept being forced to pay to access it? Its a wonderful novelty site, but I seriously doubt they would garner much support in this department.
From the point of view of the consumer, the only price they're really willing to pay is to the ISP for their bloodstream to the internet. In a way, this makes sense too. The more bandwidth they have available, the more bandwidth they'll probably actually use. If somehow some of the connection costs could be funneled to the servers that are getting accessed, this could solve a great deal of the problems, however this would be a micropayment nightmare.
Ultimately, we need a two teir system. We need e-commerce sites that sell ACTUAL PRODUCTS. You know.. those things that I pay REAL money for and when I have it, I can hold it in my hand and call it my very own. Then those sites need to advertise on the other sites that are just trying to pay for their bandwidth. The biggest problem with advertising right now, is that the limited funds available for it are being spread out too thin on sites that don't need it (like for companies that are just using their webpages as a form of advertising)
-Restil
Yes yes, I know. Its not funny. But I'm bored so I had to post SOMETHING. :)
-Restil
Ok.. here's how I see it.
I was, more or less, addicted to Ultima Online for about the first 6 months after its release. I played it a MINIMUM of 8 hours a day on weekdays, frequently up til 2 in the morning, having to be at work by 8, this was a bit of a challenge. I would also try to sneak in some play time at work if I wasn't being watched. And once I got home, UO is all I did until I went to sleep.
On weekends, it was wake up, UO until I couldn't stay up anymore, then sleep. Thats it. that was my life. Nothing else.
I would wake up thinking of nothing else, I would spend any waking moment that I wasn't on the machine thinking about it. I wrote extensive documents logging activities, trying to come up with new strategies against my foes in the game, researching the online sites about the game, etc.
Every time they put in a patch, I was disgruntled. BIG TIME. Because every patch meant I had to completely change the way I played the game. Figure that if every 3 weeks you had to move, completely change your diet, change to a new job, and take a pay cut at the same time. After a while, this would get extremely annoying. Thats to some extent what it felt like playing the game after a while.
Server crashes caused a great deal of frustration. That just meant I lost time. Imagine waking up one day, working hard for 14 hours straight, then right before you go to sleep at the end of the night, Everything gets wiped out so you are back where you started at the beginning of the day, the entire day wasted. In UO, this was typical.
Add in to that, I had a bad internet connection that would drop frequently, and always at the most inopportune times, so I died many more times than I should have. Travesty of the greatest, I can assure you.
However, while this game might have been an addiction, it was by no means a dependancy. One day in Feb '98, I was at work thinking about UO, like I usually did, and read a newsgroup post about some hot topic, and I wrote a lenghty reply. I'm not sure exactly what the topic was about, but I got off on a few rants and a tangent and by the time I was done writing it, I had decided to quit playing. I went online that night, gave away all my online stuff, shut it down and never played it again.
And the weird thing is, I never WANTED to play it again. I had no desire whatsoever to play it. I quit thinking about it, I actually accomplished other things, slowly gained a grip on a life again. Never looked back.
And the way I see it, it was like an annoying hobby, one you somehow feel you must participate in, but you never really want to. I can't imagine how I began to feel that way about the game, but by the time it was all over, I never wanted to do it again. Since that time I have hardly played any online games, in fact, I've hardly played any games at all. There was a brief stint with starcraft after I quit UO, but at least with that game, after playing it for 2 hours, I was bored with it and quit for a while. Games could actually be completed (won or lost) and that closure allowed me to go on and do other things, whereas with UO, it never ends. And until it ends, you don't want to stop playing.
I can't say from a marketing standpoint that this wasn't effective. People who had never played an Ultima game played UO. People who had never played ANY computer games were playing it. Scary.
-Restil
And I thought *I* had no life....
:)
I found the comment about "off line PK's" humorously ironic though.
And the bit about sexual favors for in game items... Someone doesn't have their priorities straight, I don't think.
-Restil
The issue of buying stock in a company is to purchase the stock at a price with the expectation (or gamble if you will) that the company's stock will be worth more in the future.
:)
Now I've also seen posts that recommended just donating. Well, if you're content to donate money, that means that you're content to shell out a certain amount of cash with no expectation of a return on that investment. In that case, why NOT buy stock in the company? If it completely tanks, hey you were content to lose it all anyways. But if it succeeds, your faith will be rewarded.
I don't feel linux companies suffer from the same rap as a lot of the dot com companies did. Linux companies, for the most part, actually HAVE A PRODUCT THAT PEOPLE WANT!!!!!! The problem was, with the collapse of all the worthless dotcoms, the linux companies were effected as well because the industry as a whole took a nosedive. There were no cashhappy corps using linux boxes, purchasing network equipment, etc, and the ripple effect affects the entire industry.
But the strong useful companies can survive. Investors may be wary, but to hell with them. Companies can survive without investors and they're better off in the long run if they have a business plan that does not rely in whole or in part on a large quantity of infused cash. Meaning, the company survives on its own revenue stream. Imagine THAT of all things!
-Restil
Interesting though, consider that the slang term "spam" as applying to UCE *IS* derived from the meat product, and therefore using the image is not misrepresenting.
To say you'll permit one and not the other is a tough sell. The two are mutually exclusive.
Now... had the term "spam" come from something completely unrelated to the meat product, then I can see the issue here.
-Restil
Boy don't I agree. At least with DS9, they dedicated 10 entire episodes to wrapping up the series, and even then it was a VERY rushed ending. With voyager, they tried to do it all in one episode. Well, they TRIED anyways.
And it appeared from the last few years that they were progressing toward developing an actual technical way to get home. Barclay was responsible for many technological breakthroughs that provided the voyager crew with realtime communication with Earth. I was hoping they were going to lead up to a way to carry transporter buffers over that same medium, so they could slowly transport the entire crew back, but slowly since they only had 11 minutes a day to do so. Then as only a skeleton crew remained, something could go horribly wrong and spend a couple episodes surviving that crisis, resulting in a dramatic ending. That would have worked for me.
Instead... we got....
blah.
A full two hours (minus a few minutes for a
cliffhanger resolution at the beginning of the show) would have been nice. What charges would the Maquis face? how would they and Seven, and Naomi, and Echep integrate into society? Hell, even seeing Kim getting promoted would be SOMETHING.
Oh well. Its over now. So be it.
-Restil
Uhh... so what's your point exactly? :)
Actually, for better or worse, I've grown quite accustomed to having an internet connection available anywhere I go so I can check on my house, etc. Perhaps the general public hasn't completely borgified themselves yet, but with the current proliferation of cell phones, I doubt it will be too many years before most people will find it difficult to NOT have an internet connection nearby SOMEWHERE.
-Restil
Actually, we're not really providing an index for them, we're providing to them a list of pages that were updated. The clients don't do much except monitor pages to see when they get updated. Of course, the clients COULD just send all the data to the servers, it makes no difference on the server side, they'll have to archive all the data anyways. The advantage here is they get notified of all the pages that change and can poll them at that time, instead of having to poll their entire index constantly if only 0.01% of those pages change every time.
Ultimately this comes down to the fairness and who owns the database itself. If its open and free to everyone, then this is a good cause, even if they have to generate revenue to support the site that serves the searches. In fact, if they distribute their servers properly, it won't even be necessary to have a large revenue stream as the load could be scattered more or less evenly over the entire volunteer pool.
Unfortunately, due to their somewhat fishy intentions with regards to revenue, it might end up killing the project before it ever takes off.
And it really seems like a good idea too.
Oh well.
-Restil
I'm pretty sure the university gave fair enough warning. I remember when I went through orientation in college they gave us a pretty extensive explaination of what constituted cheating and what would happen if we were caught. In addition, most of the individual instructors brought the issue up briefly at the beginning of the semester. Of course, each class had a somewhat different definition of what constituted cheating. Group work was generally not frowned upon, expecially in those classes where homework was more or less optional or only counted for a small percentage of the final grade.
:)
Still, acedemic dishonesty was explained quite thouroughly, and I'm sure the university in question was not timid in explaining it either. There may be an "Honor Code" but an honor code requires that you're honest or the system falls apart. Salting the system from time to time doesn't degrade it. Its unnecessary to warn the students that they're going to check for cheating, they shouldn't be cheating in the first place.
And there's a lot to be said about making examples out of others. It only helps to keep the others honest.
-Restil
Of course the program isn't making the accusation. It's only doing pattern matches that MIGHT indicate cheating, after which it will require a human to read over the actual papers to see if its really cheating, or just an unlikely coincidence that a 6 word phrase matched. All the program does is eliminate those that while they might be cheaters, they at least had enough sense to do some paraphrasing.
:)
Ultimately that would be the most dangerous type of program. A program that can take any document and paraphrase it randomly to result in an entirely new document that covers the same information. At the simplest level, a language parser that isn't much more than a glorified word substitution program could be effective. At the more complex level (for reorganizing the entire paper from the outline down) would require fairly sufficient AI to accomplish. THAT would be a fun project though. 500 students could turn in the same paper on the same topic and it would be nearly impossible to accuse any of them of cheating.
-Restil
HEEEEEEYYY!!!!!
Wait just a damn minute.....
:)
-Restil
Well... #2 doesn't really apply. Oh, it used to, back in the day when I could use it.
:) I've got like 8 boxes of them in my closet. I have absolutely no practical use for them anymore, but dammit!!!! I might NEED them someday and I'll just hate myself if I got rid of them.
:)
And #3 is slightly off. I don't download music from napster. I use usenet instead.
And #1. I never never NEVER NEVER *N*E*V*E*R*!!!!!
lend out my CD's to anyone. Anyone is free to come over here and copy them to their hearts content, but the CD's stay here. There is a mystery CD I made once, put a whole bunch of cool stuff on it. Lent it to a friend like 3 years ago. And he's STILL looking for it. Something along the lines of "I lent it to someone and he lent it to someone and that someone's phone got disconnected so we can't get ahold of him....."
But a packrat I am. It hurts to delete anything, unless I know I can easily get it again. I still have copies of all the files from my old BBS days, still preserved (probably not very well) on 3 1/2 inch floppies, and even some on 5 1/4 HD floppies (remember those??
However, I will be the first to admit that its truely pathetic that of all the music I have archived, I've only ever listened to about 1/4 of it, and if I someday got the urge to play all of it, end to end, without ever repeating a song, it would take a solid 6 months at this point to go through all of it. And since I accumulate music faster than I can listen to it, this cycle is unlikely to change. But don't expect me to stop saving all of it.
-Restil
I agree, its a joke. The sad thing, however, is that this could have actually happened. How many of these dot-coms were founded by an idea thought up during a drinking binge, for a product that was completely unnessary and in many cases extremely difficult to implement. How many of these products were funded by VC firms with little more than blind faith, then crashed and burned before even getting out of the vaporware phase. How many companies had executives that were hauled off in handcuffs? This story may only be satire, but the true ironic humor to be found here is that this story could be passed off as true and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. Thats sad.
-Restil
No Spam?
Oh, there was spam. I remember a few chain letters getting posted to public channels.
The only difference was... we knew who the bastards who posted them were, and they did little more than open themselves up to public ridicule.
Back then, I would typically verify the identity of anyone who gave potentially false information. At the very least I required a real name and phone number, and if I verified that this information was incorrect, I could simply disable the account and never let them back in. Imagine THAT power on the internet as we know it. If that spammer is bothering you, just disconnect him from the internet permanantly. Oh how I wish.
-Restil
Well, even though my BBS isn't on the list, I have saved practically everything from it all these years, packed in boxes full of floppy disks.
:)
Anal you ask? Probably. But I figured some day it might all be useful. Although a lot of what I had has been lost or was never saved due to HD crashes and the like, I still have some of the useful information.
Most specifically, every year I was running the BBS I would write up a little history file of what had happened. Looking back on it now I feel I was probably an immature, arrogant little brat, but I never remember it being that way....
Anyways, while I proudly posted these files while the BBS was still in operation, its practically an embarassment to even read them now, let alone post them for all the world to see. Still, I might put them up someday for posterity.
For anyone who BBS'ed in the Dallas, TX area in the early 90's, I ran the BBS named "Highway to Hell". Perhaps you'll remember.
-Restil
Credit cards are voluntary. Its very difficult to find a walk-in type store that won't take cash. Sure, Rat shack always asks for your name and address, but I simply decline to give it to them. If you choose to give up that information willingly, you deserve everything you get.
:)
However, if you don't have a choice about revealing your identity and interests to marketers, then this is where the line gets fuzzy. If a store is required to disclose that systems such as these are in use, then thats one thing. You can just avoid shopping there, or can take precautions to prevent them from being useful.
However, there IS a potentially useful side effect here. I ignore advertisements. In fact, I RUTHLESSLY avoid them. I never look at banner ads, I never click on them, I don't look at junk mail, no matter what it might be. The crap people like to hang on my doorknob goes in the trash without a glance. When I go to the store, I know what I'm going to get, and I don't waste much time looking around at subtle advertising to see what I can't live without.
IF these systems pick up my complete lack of interest in ALL advertising, do you think its possible that they might mark me as a lost cause and save their precious marketing dollars by simply not sending me anything? Yeah.. I can hope.
Another angle of the same issue.... notice how nobody really cares about intrusion into our lives when its our choice to allow it. How many people have webcams? Now, see how many of those same people would be willing to go along with mandated cameras in their houses. The end result is the same, but in one case, "Big brother is watching you", in the other case, "Bring it on Big Brother".
This newfangled marketing strategy would probably gain public acceptance if not for its secrecy. Just offer it as a free service and everyone wouldn't be able to wait to have it installed everywhere. "Sign up for this free service to automatically notify you when your favorite products go on sale!!!!" Sale of course is an arbitrary term. A store near me has a "temporary lower price" tag on EVERY SINGLE ITEM IN THE STORE, no matter what the price is. The point is... right now, at this instant, its temporarily lower, so you better get it now or the price might go up. People are morons. They don't care. They'd be an easy sale.
But no, they have to conceal it. Hide the identities where these systems are in place. Get the ACLU involved. Way to go there. Way to market your product you bozos. Lets make it extremely obvious that you might have nefarious motivies. At least you're making it easy for us.
-Restil
no need to load anything from a "master DB", they stated in the article that there are several hundred copies of the index. That means, that if any one server goes out, there are still several hundred servers serving the same data. The point is, if an ecommerce site WAS set up like this, it would still be perfectly functional. However, that would be quite an impressive setup for an ecommerce site.
-Restil
Hmm.. shock sensors on the door to detect knocks..... of course, it'll probably go off everytime I crank the music...
-Restil
Then I'm screwed. :)
-Restil
Although this isn't exactly going to help in his situation, I have a webcam that looks out my front door. Anytime the doorbell is run, 3 pictures are captured and appended to a log, as well as being sent to a remote server. This is far from a perfect solution and I do plan to update this to reflect any dramatic changes with the internal cameras when I'm not at home.
Of course, if anyone is aware of the camera, it would be easy to hide from, and there is always a chance that I won't get a good enough picture to do any good legally, but its a start.
The page that accesses the webcams is at http://alignment.net
-Restil