Maybe a conversion kit? You should be able to replace the front wheel of a trike with an electric kit intended for bicycles. Even without SBiC you should get 20 miles or so per day, charge overnight.
It also means a man who was lying on the ground cooperating with police in Oakland got shot in the back, when the police officer only meant to taze the cooperating gentleman in question. Or when a loudmouth jerk, instead of just getting dragged out of an auditorium, gets tazed before getting dragged out of an auditorium.
I would love to see these weapons get used in the originally intended way. And sometimes they seem to. But there is a very human side of us that seems to equate "non-lethal weapon" with "instant compliance button" rather than "some countries consider these torture."
I do hope that better training, rules of engagement, and consequences for abuse will help counteract that aspect of human nature. Considering that several states have criminalized filming police officers doing their duties, that hope is going to be grounded with a continued cynicism.
You do note the part about having family in the region? I have friends over multiple borders there. Some are wearing uniforms.
Israel remains locked in an ugly conflict with others in the region. Occupying territory from three neighbor states since the six-day war 43 years ago hasn't helped their case. Invading Lebanon in 2006, the sanctions against Palestine, assassinations with civilian casualties, etc...
Israel is fighting a very dirty conflict, in a very dirty way. That's their choice to make. But that doesn't mean we need to support that choice. And that doesn't mean not supporting that choice means supporting Hamas. Hamas's transgressions are terrible, and they need to be rooted out and stopped. But Israel is a government, not a terrorist group, and needs to be held to higher standards. Unless they're being directly invaded, let Israel deal with their problems.
Again, the refrain I hear over and over again from people in the region is that America is hated not because people hate freedom or democracy or bald eagles. But because people feel like this particularly hated state is being propped up by us. That hatred and lack of trust in us made keeping the peace in Iraq far harder than winning the war. It has made Afghanistan a quagmire. And it makes our apparent role as world police much more difficult.
We are not going to get out of Afghanistan when we kill enough bad guys. We're going to get out of Afghanistan when we convince the population that we're maintaining peace for their sake. We're going to be able to leave Afghanistan only when the population trusts us. We're pouring lives and people's souls into the region. We need to start addressing root causes, and two big causes are the perception of Israel in the middle east, and the perception of our support of Israel. Those are not the most pressing issue for our boys on the ground, but they're huge issues that we can't even talk about in this country without being shut down as racist.
I am not anti-Zionist. I just don't want to see any more of our people come back from the middle east broken.
If you're conducting a house-to-house search for malefactors, GET OUT OF THAT WAR. That should be a domestic problem to be handled by local authorities (with assistance if necessary, but it shouldn't be). If the population is harboring the resistance, that means you do not have popular support of the local population. If you do not have support of the local population in a war zone, you are the bad guys.
This is Afghanistan we're talking about here. They're a bit of a mess to begin with. We can give the locals the tools to build their society with (education, experience, seed funding), but we can't make them shape their society in the way that we choose.
And for god's sake stop giving guns to Israel. The promise of sweeping in and stomping North Korea if they invade the south has been a sufficient deterrent for years. Israel is seen as the spoiled brat invader of the middle east, and for good reason. We'd achieve our same objectives in the region, with far less hatred from the locals, if we just promised to defend Israel instead of giving them the helicopters that they kill Palestinians with. Everyone comes out of that conflict smelling like ass, and by sticking our nose into it we're just feeding the hatred.
I have relatives on the east side of the middle east, who are shocked how little Americans realize that Israel is a big part of the anti-American hatred. It's not the jewishness, or the western-ness. But the behavior of Israel as a government interacting with their neighbors, their invasions, their annexations of territory, suppressions of the Palestines, etc. Our goals for winning hearts and minds, and therefore getting out of the middle east faster with less likely of further terrorist attacks against the US, would be much better served by cutting all military and other aid to Israel, and simply promising military support in cases of an unprovoked attack against Israeli soil.
It sounds like they could use it on riot police in cold weather. Keep 'em nice and toasty. Put a foil-lined cocoa packet in your back pocket, and have a tasty snack when you're done.
Don't forget the woman who was bean-bag gunned to death at a Red Socks victory rally.
I liked lethal force. Either it got used, or it didn't. Generally it didn't. All non-lethal force has done is change situations that would have been deflated peacefully into situations where people start firing non-lethal guns at each other. Or, rather, police start firing "non-lethal" guns at unarmed civilians, sometimes maiming and sometimes killing them.
I'm sure the ice beam will be ready for the invasion of the arctic. And the death ray will surely repel the zombie hordes.
Seriously, a heat ray against a desert people? That's like throwing sand and large ocean waves at Hawaii. You might as well invite them back for warm tea in a room without air conditioning.
Having had an officer draw a gun on me, and at other times on friends, I have to say that the officers were always very solid about it. I never felt like my life was in danger, as they were clearly well trained, highly focused, and drawing under an abundance of caution rather than panic.
A friend had a training officer point a gun on him during a traffic stop. At that point her handling officer with more experience stopped her, assessed the situation, apologized to the motorist, and sent him on his way. It happens.
There is a big difference between having a gun pointed at you from a random person on the street, and from a police officer. With the exception of a few bad apples (Oakland, London), a police officer's gun is a shield that keeps them safe during their daily job. It's just a fact of life.
This officer drew his gun, but didn't point. It probably should have remained holstered, but it's possible he wasn't wearing a holster at the time. Also he should have started with "State Police," but he got there reasonably quickly. He stopped the motorcycle at a point that the motorcycle was already stopped, and the road was blocked by other cars. The motorcyclist was speeding and weaving, and weaving really does make the difference between being in a rush and being in an accident. I'd make some recommendations to the officer (start with your credentials, leave the weapon holstered in your pants to reduce the potential for panic ). But overall I can't fault the officer much for this stop.
A big problem is that even seasoned developers think "oh, multiplayer. I like players. That's a great checkbox."
Oh look, we need some dedicated net coders. Oop, the weapons all have to be rebalanced. The normal arenas won't work? Ok, all-new levels. Our character artwork is pushing arenas over polybudget? Alright, let's re-concept the character design to look good in low poly, and implement low poly models. We're over animation budget? Let's cut some bones out, and redo the animation. Oh, right multiplayer game logic. Start and end screens. Victory animations. Parallel power-up logic. Ugly edge cases.
That multiplayer checkbox ultimately is about 30 different check boxes, all of which are sapping tremendous amounts of time from the rest of the game.
Exceptions for acts of god makes sense. After all, should an airline be held responsible for the unknowable, infallible actions of our omnipotent creator?
Of course, they want notarized proof if your sick and need to change planes. I want Southwest to get a note from God that He authorized the act. Also, a xeroxed copy of His driver's license or passport proving His identity. And His signature, which must match the signature card from a local bank.
Also, I want to know why He keeps making the Yankees win.
A big part of microtransactions are lowering the barrier to entry. If you try a bad game, you leave. No money spent. If you try a good game, you stay. Yay for you. This tends to be a more self-regulating system than traditional box sales, where the pee-sale hype determines sales, and a mistake costs the consumer $60.
Also, why is everybody talking about this as if it is new? Asia has had huge microtransactions games for ten years. The US has had some, with Anarchy Online, Puzzle Pirates, and others being microtransactions based for years.
"The owner's technological measure must protect the copyrighted material against an infringement of a right that the Copyright Act protects, not from mere use or viewing."
That's the key line. Sure, not frivolously mixing in DMCA claims is important. For example, garage door openers or toner. However, going as far as to say that a genuinely copyrightable work is not protected by the DMCA if the access granted is not in violation of copyright law is huge. If other courts were to adopt this notion, it would allow for things like bypassing Blu-Ray copyprotection to put movies on your iPhone, or research into copyprotection systems in the US.
Not too long ago we had to beg the government to allow us to unlock our purchased-and-paid-for phones due to the DMCA. To say that the DMCA covers only actions that would go against copyright law is both common sense and an amazing breakthrough.
Let's hope that other courts adopt this interpretation.
I'm just saying when you own the business, you don't need to worry about the business owner embezzling. The less of the overall business each person owns, the less individual success each person sees from group success. Hence, you start having to put up rules to counteract corruption.
The bigger the organization, the more rules have to go up to keep more people from finding creative ways of ripping everyone off. By the time you get to the size of most telcos, very few people have the power to make any decisions for new situations. Otherwise the opportunity for embezzlement is too great.
And, of course, the goal of any commercial organization is to make as much money as possible. This means keeping labor costs low. Most of the people I've interacted with from major telcos were paid less than they were worth.
So there is pressure from both sides. I don't mean to sound dogmatic about it. This is just how I've seen the world work. Keep labor costs low by setting up strict regulations about who can do what, making humans interchangeable and less likely to cheat. People with various amounts of education, either struggling to keep up or with enough time and thought to break the rules. Or, of course, the large swath of the middle that's doing just fine. But they don't cause problems
My personal opinion, YMMV: any wing of a government that can be run profitably should probably be private-market. The government in general is supposed to pick up those parts of the economy that benefit everyone in a way that doesn't lend itself to private industry and profit. If there is sufficient profit motive: better to leave it to the general population.
I'm not a free-market fundie (I think they're vastly optimistic about the human condition). Nor do I think government screws everything up and needs to be as small as possible. And I believe the Post Office should be stripped down to mail service on alternating days. But in general, trying to make government services profitable is the wrong way to look at them.
For privitizing to improve efficiency, you'd have to show that overhead from poor mail service management is greater than the profittaking that private companies necessarily must indulge upon. Or rather, you'e have to put up a good argument for why the mess that is the UPS and FedEx is about 50% more efficient than the mess that is the USPS.
I've been wanting this for years here in the US. Some sort of unique identifier to a person, rather than a physical location. Decode the setup, and forward the mail on its merry way.
Move from one location to another (updating the USPS) and the mail follows you. It makes total sense, and would help keep the volume of mail up. The unique identifiers could be chosen in such a way to simplify OCR for poor handwriting and help cut back on human intervention costs.
That's not because of computerized business. It's about big business. When a business owner has a direct vested interest in the profitability of the business, they can be assured to make good decisions. When all of the money funnels back to someone who doesn't want any of their line people taking any share of the profits, the line-people are relegated to process men who aren't allowed to decide things (lest they embezzle everything). It's not a sign of computerized business, but big corporations.
If my understanding is correct, to simplify that language:
Step 1. Look at the headers. Does it tell you anything useful about the sender? Step 2. If it does, use that information to look up other information about the sender somewhere else. Step 3. If it doesn't, scan the message for keywords. Use those keywords to look up other information about the sender.
This covers anti-spam systems, as you gather an IP address from headers, then look up that IP in a database to see if it is from a known spam source.
Of course, this also covers a bloody lot else. Why else would you have headers except to find useful information about a sender? How big of a jump is it to looking for information about a sender from the headers of an e-mail? I wouldn't be surprised if this exactly describes AOL's mail system with additional user information from the late 80's.
Internet connections are grossly oversold. I worked in an ISP once, where the upstream we had was sufficient to cover ONE full-use customer. At any given time, there were 50 online. Because of how people used the connections (net surfing, checking e-mail) the burst was fine. But anyone who tried a sustained transfer was getting garbage. And there were times of day when even the bursty nature of customer usage was too much, and the network was dogg-slow. Of course, we blamed it on DSL routing and old telephone lines. But the fact was the last mile was owned by a telco who re-sold bulk access to us for more than they charged customers directly. So we had to charge as little as possible (which was always more than them, of course), and set up with as small of an overhead buffer as possible.
ISP's are just expensive. Customer service people don't come cheap, compared to how much people pay (if net on each customer is $10 a month, a minimum of 500 customers' worth of income just goes to one person to handle all of the phone calls. With 500 customers, there will be 5 or so that demand attention every hour of every waking bloody day. Add in actual engineers, advertising, the shrinking revenue base... it's tough. One big corner that basically has to be cut is upstream. The question is how deeply you cut. And when you're looking at cutting back something many people wouldn't notice, or cutting your own salary to shreds, most people go for the former.
Don't worry, with the advent of Netflix streaming, soon you'll be an evil video-watcher.
We've hit 50GB this month streaming about 1 hour of television a night + 10 GB offsite backup. Anyone with a full household and netflix can expect to stream much, much more than that.
The more common those usage patterns become, the more high-bandwidth users seem normal. And then hopefully we'll start seeing offsite backup services with the bandwidth to actually support the damned services they sell.
So they take Earth, which has life, and use that to train up an algorithm to detect if other planets have life. Then they test this algorithm against... earth.
This is not how you're supposed to train systems. You need to keep your training and test data separate. Couldn't we have at least thrown one of those self-sustaining fish-globes up into space, and test that for life?
Sometimes the project manager gives you a week to code something that would take 3 weeks to code properly in C, and 2 weeks to code properly in Java. The Java implementation, while still fundamentally broken, will be significantly less broken in the overall foreshortened schedule. Perl does a heck of a lot for you, and does it kind of slowly. Why? Because Perl is a great language for job-specific write-once-and-be-done-with-it applications. Or situations where the application isn't the bottleneck in getting more data through. Sometimes (mostly, I'm guessing) in the real world the optimization point is for development budget, rather than processor budget.
Also, I remember back in the day when the grey-in-the-hair people were complaining that comp-sci students were coming out and weren't coding entirely in assembly. They were learning easy languages like C! And Pascal! And... well, that was mostly it. Quite frankly, there were just fewer programming languages out then. Now, to be reasonably grounded, people need to know C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, PHP, and not-quite-languages like Javascript, Actionscript, and CSS. But back in the day, you could even get a degree without any assembly! The shame that these lazy C coders brought to the world. The shame.
Sorry, but 99% of programming is plumbing. Get a bank's financial projections moved around a network correctly. Extend an intranet to include temp who don't have default access. Most of the time you want to guarantee that things went from point A to point B, got there correctly, and didn't get attacked along the way. If your code is too slow, take it off fileshare / Outlook / intranet server, and give it hardware. Not breaking and being implemented quickly in a lot of ways is more important than running quickly. You can throw another processor at a problem for a few hundred dollars, which would speed up the implementation more than a few hundred dollars (one more day) of a coder's time. And sure you shouldn't rely upon garbage collection. But I've seen co-workers spend months chasing that elusive memory leak. Or that pointer going towards the wrong address. Or the buffer overflow crash when things happened simultaneously. And you know what? That didn't make the code any better. I'm a game developer, and we try to eeek out every last bit of power from code as possible. But in the grand scheme of things, running 30% slower due to a higher-level language would have been a great tradeoff for the ridiculous amount of time lost to things which modern languages do automatically. Again, compared to a good group of coders, hardware is nearly free.
I'm actually a little disheartened by the lack of legal torrent distribution. It's a great medium for getting your content out there, people! If you're doing a straight HTTP server for your files, you could be saving a lot on bandwidth (and helping people to get your content faster) by setting it up as a torrent.
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Maybe a conversion kit? You should be able to replace the front wheel of a trike with an electric kit intended for bicycles. Even without SBiC you should get 20 miles or so per day, charge overnight.
It also means a man who was lying on the ground cooperating with police in Oakland got shot in the back, when the police officer only meant to taze the cooperating gentleman in question. Or when a loudmouth jerk, instead of just getting dragged out of an auditorium, gets tazed before getting dragged out of an auditorium.
I would love to see these weapons get used in the originally intended way. And sometimes they seem to. But there is a very human side of us that seems to equate "non-lethal weapon" with "instant compliance button" rather than "some countries consider these torture."
I do hope that better training, rules of engagement, and consequences for abuse will help counteract that aspect of human nature. Considering that several states have criminalized filming police officers doing their duties, that hope is going to be grounded with a continued cynicism.
You do note the part about having family in the region? I have friends over multiple borders there. Some are wearing uniforms.
Israel remains locked in an ugly conflict with others in the region. Occupying territory from three neighbor states since the six-day war 43 years ago hasn't helped their case. Invading Lebanon in 2006, the sanctions against Palestine, assassinations with civilian casualties, etc...
Israel is fighting a very dirty conflict, in a very dirty way. That's their choice to make. But that doesn't mean we need to support that choice. And that doesn't mean not supporting that choice means supporting Hamas. Hamas's transgressions are terrible, and they need to be rooted out and stopped. But Israel is a government, not a terrorist group, and needs to be held to higher standards. Unless they're being directly invaded, let Israel deal with their problems.
Again, the refrain I hear over and over again from people in the region is that America is hated not because people hate freedom or democracy or bald eagles. But because people feel like this particularly hated state is being propped up by us. That hatred and lack of trust in us made keeping the peace in Iraq far harder than winning the war. It has made Afghanistan a quagmire. And it makes our apparent role as world police much more difficult.
We are not going to get out of Afghanistan when we kill enough bad guys. We're going to get out of Afghanistan when we convince the population that we're maintaining peace for their sake. We're going to be able to leave Afghanistan only when the population trusts us. We're pouring lives and people's souls into the region. We need to start addressing root causes, and two big causes are the perception of Israel in the middle east, and the perception of our support of Israel. Those are not the most pressing issue for our boys on the ground, but they're huge issues that we can't even talk about in this country without being shut down as racist.
I am not anti-Zionist. I just don't want to see any more of our people come back from the middle east broken.
If you're conducting a house-to-house search for malefactors, GET OUT OF THAT WAR. That should be a domestic problem to be handled by local authorities (with assistance if necessary, but it shouldn't be). If the population is harboring the resistance, that means you do not have popular support of the local population. If you do not have support of the local population in a war zone, you are the bad guys.
This is Afghanistan we're talking about here. They're a bit of a mess to begin with. We can give the locals the tools to build their society with (education, experience, seed funding), but we can't make them shape their society in the way that we choose.
And for god's sake stop giving guns to Israel. The promise of sweeping in and stomping North Korea if they invade the south has been a sufficient deterrent for years. Israel is seen as the spoiled brat invader of the middle east, and for good reason. We'd achieve our same objectives in the region, with far less hatred from the locals, if we just promised to defend Israel instead of giving them the helicopters that they kill Palestinians with. Everyone comes out of that conflict smelling like ass, and by sticking our nose into it we're just feeding the hatred.
I have relatives on the east side of the middle east, who are shocked how little Americans realize that Israel is a big part of the anti-American hatred. It's not the jewishness, or the western-ness. But the behavior of Israel as a government interacting with their neighbors, their invasions, their annexations of territory, suppressions of the Palestines, etc. Our goals for winning hearts and minds, and therefore getting out of the middle east faster with less likely of further terrorist attacks against the US, would be much better served by cutting all military and other aid to Israel, and simply promising military support in cases of an unprovoked attack against Israeli soil.
It sounds like they could use it on riot police in cold weather. Keep 'em nice and toasty. Put a foil-lined cocoa packet in your back pocket, and have a tasty snack when you're done.
Don't forget the woman who was bean-bag gunned to death at a Red Socks victory rally.
I liked lethal force. Either it got used, or it didn't. Generally it didn't. All non-lethal force has done is change situations that would have been deflated peacefully into situations where people start firing non-lethal guns at each other. Or, rather, police start firing "non-lethal" guns at unarmed civilians, sometimes maiming and sometimes killing them.
I'm sure the ice beam will be ready for the invasion of the arctic. And the death ray will surely repel the zombie hordes.
Seriously, a heat ray against a desert people? That's like throwing sand and large ocean waves at Hawaii. You might as well invite them back for warm tea in a room without air conditioning.
Having had an officer draw a gun on me, and at other times on friends, I have to say that the officers were always very solid about it. I never felt like my life was in danger, as they were clearly well trained, highly focused, and drawing under an abundance of caution rather than panic.
A friend had a training officer point a gun on him during a traffic stop. At that point her handling officer with more experience stopped her, assessed the situation, apologized to the motorist, and sent him on his way. It happens.
There is a big difference between having a gun pointed at you from a random person on the street, and from a police officer. With the exception of a few bad apples (Oakland, London), a police officer's gun is a shield that keeps them safe during their daily job. It's just a fact of life.
This officer drew his gun, but didn't point. It probably should have remained holstered, but it's possible he wasn't wearing a holster at the time. Also he should have started with "State Police," but he got there reasonably quickly. He stopped the motorcycle at a point that the motorcycle was already stopped, and the road was blocked by other cars. The motorcyclist was speeding and weaving, and weaving really does make the difference between being in a rush and being in an accident. I'd make some recommendations to the officer (start with your credentials, leave the weapon holstered in your pants to reduce the potential for panic ). But overall I can't fault the officer much for this stop.
A big problem is that even seasoned developers think "oh, multiplayer. I like players. That's a great checkbox."
Oh look, we need some dedicated net coders. Oop, the weapons all have to be rebalanced. The normal arenas won't work? Ok, all-new levels. Our character artwork is pushing arenas over polybudget? Alright, let's re-concept the character design to look good in low poly, and implement low poly models. We're over animation budget? Let's cut some bones out, and redo the animation. Oh, right multiplayer game logic. Start and end screens. Victory animations. Parallel power-up logic. Ugly edge cases.
That multiplayer checkbox ultimately is about 30 different check boxes, all of which are sapping tremendous amounts of time from the rest of the game.
Exceptions for acts of god makes sense. After all, should an airline be held responsible for the unknowable, infallible actions of our omnipotent creator?
Of course, they want notarized proof if your sick and need to change planes. I want Southwest to get a note from God that He authorized the act. Also, a xeroxed copy of His driver's license or passport proving His identity. And His signature, which must match the signature card from a local bank.
Also, I want to know why He keeps making the Yankees win.
A big part of microtransactions are lowering the barrier to entry. If you try a bad game, you leave. No money spent. If you try a good game, you stay. Yay for you. This tends to be a more self-regulating system than traditional box sales, where the pee-sale hype determines sales, and a mistake costs the consumer $60.
Also, why is everybody talking about this as if it is new? Asia has had huge microtransactions games for ten years. The US has had some, with Anarchy Online, Puzzle Pirates, and others being microtransactions based for years.
"The owner's technological measure must protect the copyrighted material against an infringement of a right that the Copyright Act protects, not from mere use or viewing."
That's the key line. Sure, not frivolously mixing in DMCA claims is important. For example, garage door openers or toner. However, going as far as to say that a genuinely copyrightable work is not protected by the DMCA if the access granted is not in violation of copyright law is huge. If other courts were to adopt this notion, it would allow for things like bypassing Blu-Ray copyprotection to put movies on your iPhone, or research into copyprotection systems in the US.
Not too long ago we had to beg the government to allow us to unlock our purchased-and-paid-for phones due to the DMCA. To say that the DMCA covers only actions that would go against copyright law is both common sense and an amazing breakthrough.
Let's hope that other courts adopt this interpretation.
I'm just saying when you own the business, you don't need to worry about the business owner embezzling. The less of the overall business each person owns, the less individual success each person sees from group success. Hence, you start having to put up rules to counteract corruption.
The bigger the organization, the more rules have to go up to keep more people from finding creative ways of ripping everyone off. By the time you get to the size of most telcos, very few people have the power to make any decisions for new situations. Otherwise the opportunity for embezzlement is too great.
And, of course, the goal of any commercial organization is to make as much money as possible. This means keeping labor costs low. Most of the people I've interacted with from major telcos were paid less than they were worth.
So there is pressure from both sides. I don't mean to sound dogmatic about it. This is just how I've seen the world work. Keep labor costs low by setting up strict regulations about who can do what, making humans interchangeable and less likely to cheat. People with various amounts of education, either struggling to keep up or with enough time and thought to break the rules. Or, of course, the large swath of the middle that's doing just fine. But they don't cause problems
Sometimes I'm a bit pessimistic about people.
My personal opinion, YMMV: any wing of a government that can be run profitably should probably be private-market. The government in general is supposed to pick up those parts of the economy that benefit everyone in a way that doesn't lend itself to private industry and profit. If there is sufficient profit motive: better to leave it to the general population.
I'm not a free-market fundie (I think they're vastly optimistic about the human condition). Nor do I think government screws everything up and needs to be as small as possible. And I believe the Post Office should be stripped down to mail service on alternating days. But in general, trying to make government services profitable is the wrong way to look at them.
You mail cash?
For privitizing to improve efficiency, you'd have to show that overhead from poor mail service management is greater than the profittaking that private companies necessarily must indulge upon. Or rather, you'e have to put up a good argument for why the mess that is the UPS and FedEx is about 50% more efficient than the mess that is the USPS.
I've been wanting this for years here in the US. Some sort of unique identifier to a person, rather than a physical location. Decode the setup, and forward the mail on its merry way.
Move from one location to another (updating the USPS) and the mail follows you. It makes total sense, and would help keep the volume of mail up. The unique identifiers could be chosen in such a way to simplify OCR for poor handwriting and help cut back on human intervention costs.
That's not because of computerized business. It's about big business. When a business owner has a direct vested interest in the profitability of the business, they can be assured to make good decisions. When all of the money funnels back to someone who doesn't want any of their line people taking any share of the profits, the line-people are relegated to process men who aren't allowed to decide things (lest they embezzle everything). It's not a sign of computerized business, but big corporations.
If my understanding is correct, to simplify that language:
Step 1. Look at the headers. Does it tell you anything useful about the sender?
Step 2. If it does, use that information to look up other information about the sender somewhere else.
Step 3. If it doesn't, scan the message for keywords. Use those keywords to look up other information about the sender.
This covers anti-spam systems, as you gather an IP address from headers, then look up that IP in a database to see if it is from a known spam source.
Of course, this also covers a bloody lot else. Why else would you have headers except to find useful information about a sender? How big of a jump is it to looking for information about a sender from the headers of an e-mail? I wouldn't be surprised if this exactly describes AOL's mail system with additional user information from the late 80's.
This seems to have been a major operating theory of the patent system since the early 90's. And yet, here it still is.
Internet connections are grossly oversold. I worked in an ISP once, where the upstream we had was sufficient to cover ONE full-use customer. At any given time, there were 50 online. Because of how people used the connections (net surfing, checking e-mail) the burst was fine. But anyone who tried a sustained transfer was getting garbage. And there were times of day when even the bursty nature of customer usage was too much, and the network was dogg-slow. Of course, we blamed it on DSL routing and old telephone lines. But the fact was the last mile was owned by a telco who re-sold bulk access to us for more than they charged customers directly. So we had to charge as little as possible (which was always more than them, of course), and set up with as small of an overhead buffer as possible.
ISP's are just expensive. Customer service people don't come cheap, compared to how much people pay (if net on each customer is $10 a month, a minimum of 500 customers' worth of income just goes to one person to handle all of the phone calls. With 500 customers, there will be 5 or so that demand attention every hour of every waking bloody day. Add in actual engineers, advertising, the shrinking revenue base... it's tough. One big corner that basically has to be cut is upstream. The question is how deeply you cut. And when you're looking at cutting back something many people wouldn't notice, or cutting your own salary to shreds, most people go for the former.
Don't worry, with the advent of Netflix streaming, soon you'll be an evil video-watcher.
We've hit 50GB this month streaming about 1 hour of television a night + 10 GB offsite backup. Anyone with a full household and netflix can expect to stream much, much more than that.
The more common those usage patterns become, the more high-bandwidth users seem normal. And then hopefully we'll start seeing offsite backup services with the bandwidth to actually support the damned services they sell.
So they take Earth, which has life, and use that to train up an algorithm to detect if other planets have life. Then they test this algorithm against... earth.
This is not how you're supposed to train systems. You need to keep your training and test data separate. Couldn't we have at least thrown one of those self-sustaining fish-globes up into space, and test that for life?
Sometimes the project manager gives you a week to code something that would take 3 weeks to code properly in C, and 2 weeks to code properly in Java. The Java implementation, while still fundamentally broken, will be significantly less broken in the overall foreshortened schedule. Perl does a heck of a lot for you, and does it kind of slowly. Why? Because Perl is a great language for job-specific write-once-and-be-done-with-it applications. Or situations where the application isn't the bottleneck in getting more data through. Sometimes (mostly, I'm guessing) in the real world the optimization point is for development budget, rather than processor budget.
Also, I remember back in the day when the grey-in-the-hair people were complaining that comp-sci students were coming out and weren't coding entirely in assembly. They were learning easy languages like C! And Pascal! And... well, that was mostly it. Quite frankly, there were just fewer programming languages out then. Now, to be reasonably grounded, people need to know C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, PHP, and not-quite-languages like Javascript, Actionscript, and CSS. But back in the day, you could even get a degree without any assembly! The shame that these lazy C coders brought to the world. The shame.
Sorry, but 99% of programming is plumbing. Get a bank's financial projections moved around a network correctly. Extend an intranet to include temp who don't have default access. Most of the time you want to guarantee that things went from point A to point B, got there correctly, and didn't get attacked along the way. If your code is too slow, take it off fileshare / Outlook / intranet server, and give it hardware. Not breaking and being implemented quickly in a lot of ways is more important than running quickly. You can throw another processor at a problem for a few hundred dollars, which would speed up the implementation more than a few hundred dollars (one more day) of a coder's time. And sure you shouldn't rely upon garbage collection. But I've seen co-workers spend months chasing that elusive memory leak. Or that pointer going towards the wrong address. Or the buffer overflow crash when things happened simultaneously. And you know what? That didn't make the code any better. I'm a game developer, and we try to eeek out every last bit of power from code as possible. But in the grand scheme of things, running 30% slower due to a higher-level language would have been a great tradeoff for the ridiculous amount of time lost to things which modern languages do automatically. Again, compared to a good group of coders, hardware is nearly free.
I'm actually a little disheartened by the lack of legal torrent distribution. It's a great medium for getting your content out there, people! If you're doing a straight HTTP server for your files, you could be saving a lot on bandwidth (and helping people to get your content faster) by setting it up as a torrent.