Let me explain: Large ISPs are going to start to clue in that they can shape the Net by imposing restrictions on their users. As long as most people can surt the Web (through a proxy) and send/read mail (through approved servers), then this will work for said ISPs.
Thankfully, while such things (and the later changes that will doubtless be made such as proprieterizing the protocols) will break the Internet as we've known it for the last few years, the Internet as we've known it for the last 20 years will continue on. MIT isn't going to roll over and play ball with AOL, ripping up the IP infrastructure that they've maintained for 20 years. You will still be able to run a Linux or BSD or Darwin box and connect to anyone who wants to talk IP with you.
A few major revolutions like de-centralizing the DNS root might be required, but that's actually not much of a challenge, and there's no reason at all that universities world-wide could not get together and start Internet-prime and once again be the seed from which net Net grows.
IP is your friend. Open standards are your friend.
For the military: tracking down wounded soldiers to bring them back to medical facilities or locating captured/MIAs.
Think about that for a second. Right now, when someone is taken as a hostage, they're usually beaten and interrogated. Not Geneva, but certainly SOP, even for the U.S. (though *we* know better than to leave marks):-/
So, what you're guaranteeing here is that not only will they be beaten, but someone's going to whip out a knife and go digging for the tracking chip; a procedure from which you will suffer a great deal of pain and could possibly die of infection. Great.
Of course, if your captors are smart, until they locate the chip or after they kill you, they will just keep you in a wire-mesh cell of the appropriate guage and density to block the signal.
For explorers or other remote personel: tracking down wounded or missing explorers (people still die in jungles, the outback, while hiking in the mountains, etc.)
Carry a cell in a zipped pocket. If you're paranoid, carry an extra in your bed-roll. No need to go in for surgery (which, I guarantee will cost more than that backup cell).
For legal defense: a lot of people are worried that the government will be able to track them; this is a good thing if you are falsely accused and can prove that you were somewhere else.
Legitimize that database as evidence and the risks are gigantic. Want to convict someone you don't like of any old arbitrary crime? All you need is a friend on the inside. Talk about the world's most powerful DBA!
For epidemic tracking and prevention: with diseases like SARS, it might be possible to trace back and find all the people that were exposed to a pathogen or even find a common source when non is obvious by cross referencing the paths of the victims.
Let me re-phrase that:
For epidemic tracking and prevention: with diseases like
homosexuality, it might be possible ot trace back and find all the people that...
Need I go on? Please don't tell me that you are naive enough to think that this would never happen. Look at the rape-rooms in Iraq. Look at the mass exterminations in Serbia. Look at the abuses of Central and South American countries (Argentina and El Salvador make for particularly brutal examples). Some minority group that enough people hate will be first. Gays? Arabs? Blacks? Jews? Hispanics? Socialists? It won't matter. When it comes, and it will someday, even if it's not this decade or even this century, the tools that those people have will make all the difference. Nazi Germany's abuses would not have been "practical" pre-industrial revolution. Saddam's total control was mostly based on fear, and I'm sure listening devices and advanced optics helped breed that fear (of course, randomly killing half of his own power structure helped).
What tools would you like to add to that arsenal? Choose wisely.
For disasters: this may help locate victims of floods, avalanches, collapsed buildings, etc., especially those that aren't even known to be missing or in danger.
Again, carry a cell. We don't have to keep a database of where anyone has been (though, we probably do...) in order to find them in a crunch. We also do not have to have our cells turned on all day, ever day in order to have this work well in general. Risk vs. reward is the concept that we should be applying.
Russ complains a lot, but he never offers any solutions to the problem.
Ok, I'll bite. Solutions:
Move away from Windows by converting to Apple's MacOS/X-based systems
Move away from Windows by converting to IBM's Linux-based systems
Move away from Windows by converting to Sun's Java-based systems
Move away from Windows to Sun's Linux-based systems (not yet released, AFAIK, but still a viable plan for the future)
Move away from Windows to a white-box dekstop on which you install whatever you please
Or were you asking about solutions that Microsoft could implement? If that was what you were asking for, then I have no real recommendations other than they should issue a press release advising their users not to visit non-MSN Web sites for fear of finding out what a mess they've gotten themselves into by running Windows in the first place. Is there a good reason left in the world to run Windows? For the most part it seems to be all momentum-based. MS-Office apps for MacOS lag because MS sells less units for Mac-OS. Replacement apps for Office lag on other platforms because there's no one putting a billion dollars into funding developers to work full-time on it (though IBM has spent that much overall on all of Linux, no one spends this much on just the office apps, which are, next to the browser, and mail client, the most important for desktops). That money isn't flowing because there are a lot of inter-dependencies that lock people to Windows. For example, I'm going to have to run Windows under VMware so that I can talk to my new phone once a day. I run XP at home to play a video game. It's not an OS, it's a legacy app-platform much like DOS was for a decade (and still is to some extent).
As migration (that has already begun in dozens of niches) away from Windows begins to pick up steam, more of these dependencies will be met for other platforms. Linux has had amazing ramp-up in that area over the last 5 years. I'm always stunned to see major hardware and software vendors coming into the fold and making their stuff work right with Linux. Now the business-side of that is starting to gain ground, and for example, Fujitsu is partnering with Red Hat. I see MacOS coming out on top though, but there's always going to be a much bigger piece of the pie allocated to other OSes than Microsoft ever had to deal with while it was on top. This is a good thing. We should never go back to a world so dominated by one vendor's software. Software has become too important for that.
Once MS can't rely on self-sustaining market-share to keep them going, they'll be forced to make substantive changes to the way they view customers. This too is a good thing. Who knows, perhaps in 20 years, we'll all be happily running Windows 2XXYbeta1, and it will work well, have real standards compliance, open specifications for key OS features and APIs and actaully be supported. It could happen, and if anything is going to make it happen, it will be compeition.
Since the topic at hand (yet another spurious patent coming out of the USPTO that will stand forever because we have no system for removing bogus patents without someone actively suing) is way over-done on /. I thought I'd take your sig on instead...;-)
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I just watched that movie for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I don't think I've ever spent a full day trying to decide if I thought a movie was a "good film" or not before, which in itself is a good sign, IMHO.
I had to listen to the full director's commentary before I could decide, and in the end, I think it's one of the best films so far this decade. If you just walk into it blind and see it as a simple "brain scramble" film, it's not bad at all. If you analyze it to death (as I did, woefully), it's got some serious flaws, but ultimately its flaws indicate a desire to reach for a total connectivity that 99% of stories coming out of Hollywood never dream of.
I would compare it favorably with The Usual Suspects and other classic "what the hell is going on, here?!" movies.
The one that really gets me is when the option of Aetheist is listed as a religion
In that sense, Atheist is being used as a "none of the above", which is a more valid use than some I've seen.
Is atheism a religion? I'm willing to roughly define religion as "a belief system, generaly characterized by the personification of natural forces, worship of same and a system of ritual." In that sense no, atheism is not a religion.
On the other hand, if you simply defined it as, "a set of beliefs concerning a system of one or more deities," then yes, atheism is a religion, at least as practiced by some.
I have a friend, for example who has what I would characterize as a "deep and irrational faith" in the non-existance of all gods and the evils of all religion. This is his core faith in the way the universe works, and I can't really make a strong distinction between that and believing that the Post Office box down the street created the universe in 22 nanoseconds out of the belly-button lint of Winston Churchill.
I, on the other hand am a strict agnostic. I have reached what I consider to be one of only three rational conclusions about religion: that we currently have no conclusive proof that there are any deities, and even if George Burns poped into my living room today and whisked my off to a distant galaxy to show me wonders beyond my imagining, I would still have no proof of anything but a George Burns-looking guy with some amazing abilities (at least to make me see cool stuff, if not actually manifest cool stuff) and a god-complex.
The other two rational conclusions are a) Pascal was a jerk for pointing it out, but he was right... choose a religion based on the degree of the negative outcome it predicts and hope you're right (note, such people are still technically agnostic in my book) and b) There are more important things to wory about. Enjoy the sun-rise and then get back to work.
FWIW: When I was about 10, I realized that I was an atheist (I didn't know the term agnostic, much less "strict agnostic" at the time), and in thinking about what that meant I was perhaps more terrified than I have ever been. It's a big deal for a 10 year old to have to face the insignificance of his own existance all at once, but I got over it and decided that I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted anyway.
I've since refined my sense of ethics based, not on fear of reprisals by a deity, but on the drives that I have in terms of a comfortable society of tolerant peers. Woefully there are too many folks in the world who will never introspect to that degree. For them, religion seems a fair way to deliver a moral and ethical outlook that they'll never have the inclination to generate for themselves.
I've never read the screenplay, and it gives an interesting new perspective. I do buy the Christian angle a bit more now than I did before. Here's one particular exchange that gets me:
Choi: Hallelujah. You're my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ.
Neo: You get caught using that...
Choi: Yeah, I know. This never happened. You don't exist.
Neo: Right.
Choi: Something wrong, man? You look a little whiter than usual.
Neo: My computer, it... You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?
It sure does foreshadow a LOT of the movie and it also makes the point of outright calling Neo "Jesus Christ", which I had forgotten....
If you want to talk about where the ideas in The Matrix came from originally, I'm afraid you have to go further back than Plato. But you don't really need to, since I suspect that a good deal of the movie came from two separate desires: 1) to bring the kind of story telling that Philip K. Dick was famous for to the screen and 2) to show American audiences how watered down their martial arts movies were compared to Hong Kong's.
As for Plato... he's over-credited for everything that bears on the concept of un-reality. Descarte's and Hume's work in that area was far more interesting and thorough, IMHO, and drew on sources including Plato, but also including non-Greek sources that were independant and grew out of northern European though as well as imports from the East.
In the modern day, science fiction authors such as Dick (just to pick one, but you could name Vinge, Ellison, Banks or any number of others) have done quite a good job of taking these ideas into our modern world and exploring their meaning in more detail.
I would credit such works as Eye in the Sky (Dick, 1957) with much more influence over The Matrix than Plato. Here's a sample from a good site that covers such things,
"We're subject to the logic of a religious crank, an old man who picked up a screwball cult in Chicago in the 'thirties. We're in his universe, where all his ignorant and pious superstitions function."
or perhaps you think of it more like The Divine Invasion (Dick, 1981) which has the benefit of even refering to the un-reality as a "matrix"?
"Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?"
So if Plato isn't the beginning or end of any of these ideas, there's really no reason to bring him into the discussion. He, the author(s) of the Bhagvat Gita, Descarte, Dick and many others were the source of The Matrix, directly or indirectly. That makes it no less interesting an exploration of the concepts or the technologies involved.
I'm not sure I buy your take on the name (Neo is named Neo because calling someone "New" just wouldn't sound as cool), but even so, the movie is no more Christian than any other story with a messianic theme. I know this is going to be hard to swallow, but Jesus of Nazareth wasn't the first person in human history (real or fictional) to be called "the one" to fulfill prophesy. That list starts with our earliest recorded works of mythology (which happen to be Indian) and follow in every human society I can think of.
As for the theme of The Matrix being based on the shadowplay in the The Cave, I'm not buying that any more than the poster who claimed that was a Bhuddist concept (which pre-dates Plato, even though I doubt Plato knew of such doctrin). The un-reality of the world, and the extremes to which that concept can be taken are another topic touched on throughout history by many independant authors and philosophers.
In The Matrix, the idea being posed is specifically the tangible manifestation of this concept: a reality that is entirely constructed by known forces, and which exists only to distract those who experience it. It's not very Platonic however, since it is a shared un-reality and those who share it are all real (at least to the level of abstraction that the movie directly explores). Plato's angle was much more focused on the impact that the un-reality of the world had on ethics, rather than as a metaphor for opression of the masses through distraction.
I would think of it more along the lines of Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Cameron (Terminator 2), Descartes (Principia Philosophiae) and Hume (Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding) getting together and re-writing the screenplay for War Games, but that's just MY take on it, and has no more weight than any of the others.
As for Leonard Sweet being one of the consultants for the film, I'm sure there were many. I also doubt that they added much more than the finishing sheen to the story, since the W's are pretty picky about their work, that way.
Context lost, not much you can do there... In-context, the idea of growing up in a virtual world and the extent to which one would be able to accept being told same is, at least to me, quite an interesting topic.
"Woah"
Cheap shot. That line could be pulled from The Matrix or any of a dozen other movies good, bad and indifferent.
The key is, what was that line about and why did it fit in the movie. In this case, Neo is the every-man who gives us perspective (at least at that point in the film) and allows us to understand how overwhelming this experience is. I don't think it's a deep or thoughtful line, but it certainly is hard to imagine conveying that concept to the audience any more appropriately or universally.
"I know Kung Fu"
Now, you've totally lost me. This was one of the things that my friends and I came away talking a great deal about, and really spurred some interesting conversation about biology and technology. "uploading" knowledge into a human brain as long been a staple of SF, but this movie made it a topic that could be discussed in mainstream company (which, to some extent, Total Recall did too).
The Matrix rocks, but it's a silly sci fi super action movie-not some kind of brilliantly thought out metaphor for reality
I find it very interesting that those two are mutually exclusive for you. To mis-quote the film in question, "Do you think that's entertainment you're watching?... hmm."
For me, they're most certainly not exclusive! Think about this: you're a screenwriter, and you've got some ideas that you want to kick-start discussion about with the widest audience possible. Do you you write a movie that makes your point, presents as much detail on it as possible and explores it to a depth that will satisfy accedemics, or you you boil it down to its simplest terms, make it shiny and exciting and make your point in the margins?
I got the distinct impression that the W's wanted to get a point across: the future is what you make it, not what anyone tells you it is. Remember that this movie was envisioned and filmed during the rise of The Internet, so looking at the Matrix as a reaction to hundreds of companies telling you that the future is the Net, doesn't seem that far-fetched to me.
They clearly also had some things to say about the power of the individual to change the world. Neo can do this because he's The One, but Trinity was able to do quite a bit before Neo arived on the scene, and Morpheus before her.... The message is clear and simple enough for anyone to absorb: fighting the system isn't pointless as long as someone is willing to do it.
But none of that has anything to do with what you responded to... let me grab the bit you quoted:
this is a movie that... captures people's intellectual imagination.
So, DID this movie capture people's intellectual imagination? Based on the number of articles like this one, I would have to say yes. Some of the people who got to thinking were idiots; some were too biased to see anything but their world-view; but some were kicked awake a bit and began to question what dream world they were living in. This is a good thing, and I don't think that it has much to do with how fun, silly or super-heroic the movie was.
After all, Alice in Wonderland was just a silly book about a girl having a fantastic day-dream... but it was, in fact the story of the evils of the day and the corruption of the government under which it was written in the only venue that didn't result in the author being thrown in jail or worse.
The fact that The Matrix begins with a reference to this story is, IMHO, no accident.
I'm not upset at all, and the price doesn't bother me in the least. I pay a comparitively nominal fee for OS support, and in environments where I rely heavily on my database, I would usually buy an additinal support contract with the vendor of the database. All of that is, of course, regardless of the database. MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2, SAP DB, whatever... I don't really care as long as the things I need are there and the price is right for what I'm doing. The thing that usually makes me stay with MySQL is that it's one of the simplest to install and use, which means that I do all of my prototyping with it.
Woefully, with just about every database out there, the price includes a hefty TCO based on the fact that the database administration is black magic. This is less true with PostgreSQL and Sybase (is Sybase still around, I loved that database...) than it is with Oracle, but EVEN LESS SO with MySQL. The database relies on the OS to provide caching, storage growth, etc and the DB just worries about parsing and executing queries and structuring data for fast, reliable access. I love being able to just "mv" a table (or even JUST THE INDEXES) to a new disk array when I need to and then create a link. Beats the hell out of having to grok the "alter tablespace" command... *shudder*
This is, IMHO, the right way to go because UNIX/Linux admins already know how to tune their OS and filesystem, so there's no reason for MySQL to go outside of a database's core expertise. Generally, I find that MySQL's performance win over a DB like Oracle is most often a result of not trying to re-implement the OS. Caching is a really good example, since the OS is much better at filesystem cache managment than the DB can be. Why? Lots of reasons from cache management semantics in the processor, bus and disk controlers to the fact that for sufficiently beefy NAS or SAN environemnts, caching may not be a good plan.
And filesystems are databases too (some moreso than others, ClearCase for example was actually a relational fileystem with revision control semantics).
However, the comparison of MySQL to a filesystem falls short in several respects:
Filesystems are typically single-key (e.g. like DBM)
Filesystems are typically comprised of a small number of tables (usually 2-5 depending on the FS complexity) that map pre-defined data fields (e.g. the "superblock" and other fileystem meta-data; "directories", "inodes", to use the UNIX terms) where relational databases such as MySQL provide an infrastrucutre for building such a layout, or any other...
Filesystems are most often quite limited in the data types that they can support and the query semantics that can be used to access them. Most modern databases support a common subset/superset of the SQL datatypes. MySQL has its own types as well as the SQL types. I think there are one or two missing simply because they haven't been high-demand items.
The whole "MySQL is just a filesystem" thing got a little tired about 5 years ago....
The new Sparc chip was supposed to have some nifty way of massively boosting RAM access times. Without that sort of advance, RAM-resident databases aren't much of a win over RAM-cached DBs (what everyone does now), sicne the win for fully resident DBs (which Oracle can do if you force it) is that you can lock huge sections of RAM for just the database, but that leads to the problem that for very large amounts of RAM the latency is starting to get too large.
Excuse me, since when is RAM not subjected to constant unyeilding load?!
Or are you talking about the stability of RAM-resident databases (which is NOT what the line you quoted was talking about, it was purely about RAM failure rates).
It's true MySQL is not a real database. After all, it rarely has press releases, the support contracts don't cost nearly enough and what's more it's so easy to administer that your average UNIX guy with a basic RDMS background can get by. It's the freakin' anti-christ!!!
Seriously, can we all just get over size comparisons? MySQL runs a lot of very useful databases from my dinky little statistics systems that are less than 10MB to giant multi-TB DBs. When you talk about the latter being RAM-resident, you're usually not talking about ALL of the data, but rather indexes and as much of the indexed columns as possible. In that sense a database can be fully RAM-resident on a 4-16GB machine and still have many more TB on disk.
It looks very much like a mushroom! Just because it happens to look like the male sexual organ as well is no reason to go disparaging it's mushroomness.;-)
The fun thing about hunting mushrooms and fungus in general is the amazing variety of shapes, sizes and colors you get to see. That's one of the things I've really tried to capture with my photograps, not so much any one mushroom, but thier variety.
The reply to my question was woefully breif, but if you're interested, check out Bad Signal. The upshot was that in his column, he had said something along the lines that one of the critical things that changed after he stopped writing "The Authority" was that Apollo and Midnighter were "outed" as it were as a gay couple. That then lead to a number of plot indulgences where opponents had to "react" to their homosexuality and various "issues" of hate crime had to be addressed.
Early in the series when Ellis was writing it, such topics as rape camps, drug abuse, and all manner of other "difficult topics" were covered, so doing stories that involved hate crimes was tame by the series' standards. However, to DWELL on any of these topics was certainly not The Authority's style, and it slowed the book down and turned it into something that was far from its core story.
That said, I felt that the book took a nose-dive after Ellis left. It went from being the story of what happens when the super heros are several orders of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the planet to being the tale of thier humanity and flaws. Nice idea, wrong take on that book, IMHO. These heros were much more than just human. The story was interesting because the issues that they dealt with were on a whole other scope.
To give you an example, let me SPOIL a bit of the early story. Our heros get embroiled into a combat with an alternate earth where the world is ruled by a half-breed alien whose corrupt family has litterally been raping the planet for resources, breeding stock and slave labor since they were marooned here several hundred years ago.
In the end, our heros are suck with a decision: they've beaten them back and killed the leader, but if they leave now, the planet will still be enslaved and the half-breeds will still be in power. They struggle for a beat and then one of them holds the Italian peninsula still for a second. That doesn't seem like a big deal until you think about how fast the planet is spinning and how fast it's orbiting the sun.... From our vantage in space, the only change is that Italy gets a little thinner... on the surface, of course, no one could have lived through the devistation.
In most books you could not walk away from such wholesale carnage thinking of these people as heroes, but that was the point to The Authority. They weren't above the law, they simply represented a very different law... one that acted on a the scale of nations and of worlds and realities. When dealing with individual people, The Authority simply treated them as representitives of larger systems.
This made The Authority interesting (though not always morally defensible), and IMHO, that was lost when Ellis went away because the people who took it over didn't understand that that's what made it different from Stormwatch or The JLA or any number of other super-team books.
The "fetish gear" didn't really do anything for me;-)
No, the Slashdot take is correct. MS has been pushing VERY hard over the last couple years to expand in Asia.
They finally clued in to the idea that all of the piracy was due to the fact that MS had so little presence and support in Asia that it wasn't worth PAYING for their products. They've launched a large campaign to change that.
Linux is starting to suffer a fate that I feared was coming for a long time. It's no longer cool.
It was, for a time, cool to run Linux because it was the only fully POSIX (depending on how rigorous your POSIX definition was) OS for home computers that had all of the usual bells and whistles (X, GNU tools, etc) that also had freely available source.
386BSD came along at about the same time, but was really only usable a bit after Linux so Linux got a bit of a mind-share head start (otherwise we'd all be running one of the BSDs by now).
Today, progress on Mach still continues under Darwin; HURD is moving to a new Microkernel that's much smaller and "hipper"; Open/NetBSD have adopted a very promising new VM model; and worst of all (in terms of Linux's geek appeal) Linux is a massive corporate success in dozens of large niches.
This is a huge win for the Free Software cause, but for Linux it means that the now super-broad OS is starting to show its faults. There are very few people who currently seem to be thinking about the big picture in terms of how the whole OS works in any given incarnation. Worse, the hack-value of making the bettter diver for hardware XYZ has reduced significantly, and most of the kernel work I see happening is not on tuning older drivers for new versions so much as incorporating brand new and interesting hardware, or working on kernel-wide systems like VM, security or scheduling
Red Hat's partnership with hardware companies like Fujitsu (maker of laptops, hard drives and more) is excellent because it brings the hardware vendors to the table to pick up some of that slack and frees Red Hat developers to focus on the big picture. Much as they've taken heat for it, RH has done a lot of good in thinking of the dekstop as a whole rather than as a potential spot to plug in vendors A, B or C (or should I say G, K or W). What they need to do now is keep moving down the chain. Standardize all of the system documentation on ONE format and convert everything to it (personally, I recommend a modified POD, which is what Perl uses, and could easily be modified to produce useful texi and Gnome SGML, while it already produces man, text and HTML). IMHO "man foo" and "info foo" and bringing up the Gnome help viewer should all give access in one, consistent (though UI-distinct) way with the same, complete documentation. Why isn't that the case? Because no one has time to work at that level (Kudos to the LFS people for taking up my challenge on that point last week, and starting to work on a port of the OpenBSD man pages to the Linux tools!)
It only applies to reverse engineering that circumvents a copyright protection measure. Unless MS wanted to try to claim that that's what they were doing (kind of hard, and silly for them to bother given the deep pockets likely to get involved...)
You missed the point. An X-Box is not a general-purpose system, that's just not what it's designed for.
If someone's shipping a GP system that won't run a free OS, then it's in the interests of all of the Linux, BSD, etc. distributions to get around it and fully specify the required modifications for OEMs and home users who which to use the platform.
You *know* that you'll be able to buy a dual-boot MSWhiteBox off of ebay a week after it comes out. The question is not how many people will run it, but how much, if at all, it slows or stops the growth of free OSen on the desktop.
Ok, you're editing what I say with a very biased skew (e.g. keeping the part about gated communities, and deleting the bit about how that plays in the real world), so I wish you luck. Personally, I'm not going to charge my friends to send me mail....
The software industry has a successful tradition of easily disclaiming any liablity regardless of charging huge fees.
And the software industry does that by requiring a specfic EULA be accepted... are you suggesting that I will have to click-through on your Web site in order to send you mail?!
Micropayment based mail is a fiction. It simply cannot work on a large scale for the following reasons:
* It requires that incoming mail be able to generate a financial transaction. Picture the exchange exploit of the month having access to an electronic payment system. Oh baby, those are going to be some rich script kiddies!
* It allows for many forms of attack like spam (marked as refuse-to-pay) whose return address charges $0.25 per message. Of course, most users will not accept it, and even more will never reply, but then there's those few, and that's a business model. Your system will suffer a PR meltdown before you can get everyone to correctly configure their systems to avoid this, and some implementations will never be free of it.
* It's the "don't come into my neighborhood unless you pay at the gate" approach, and that creates closed communities. Sure, perhaps closed communities are cool at first, but when you find out how many people there are that you actually want to interact with, but who will never pay at the gate... you leave your little community and go downtown where the action is.
* By creating a payment system, you also impose a veneer of legitimacy. $0.01 per recipient? Well, that seems kind of high for your average fire-hose spammer, but it just forces folks to become more aware of demographics, etc. If you can get up around the 2% response rate that even average targetted, physical bulk mail enjoys, then you start profiting even if your product costs only $1! Turn on the TV after 2AM and watch carefully. All of those products will be the ones that fill your inbox as soon as micro-payments make it seem less like a den of hustlers and degenerates.
Slashdot Mirror
Woefully, it's likely to happen.
Let me explain: Large ISPs are going to start to clue in that they can shape the Net by imposing restrictions on their users. As long as most people can surt the Web (through a proxy) and send/read mail (through approved servers), then this will work for said ISPs.
Thankfully, while such things (and the later changes that will doubtless be made such as proprieterizing the protocols) will break the Internet as we've known it for the last few years, the Internet as we've known it for the last 20 years will continue on. MIT isn't going to roll over and play ball with AOL, ripping up the IP infrastructure that they've maintained for 20 years. You will still be able to run a Linux or BSD or Darwin box and connect to anyone who wants to talk IP with you.
A few major revolutions like de-centralizing the DNS root might be required, but that's actually not much of a challenge, and there's no reason at all that universities world-wide could not get together and start Internet-prime and once again be the seed from which net Net grows.
IP is your friend. Open standards are your friend.
Until you explain to parents that this guarntees that the first thing an abductor will do is take out a knife... ick.
Think about that for a second. Right now, when someone is taken as a hostage, they're usually beaten and interrogated. Not Geneva, but certainly SOP, even for the U.S. (though *we* know better than to leave marks)
So, what you're guaranteeing here is that not only will they be beaten, but someone's going to whip out a knife and go digging for the tracking chip; a procedure from which you will suffer a great deal of pain and could possibly die of infection. Great.
Of course, if your captors are smart, until they locate the chip or after they kill you, they will just keep you in a wire-mesh cell of the appropriate guage and density to block the signal.
For explorers or other remote personel: tracking down wounded or missing explorers (people still die in jungles, the outback, while hiking in the mountains, etc.)
Carry a cell in a zipped pocket. If you're paranoid, carry an extra in your bed-roll. No need to go in for surgery (which, I guarantee will cost more than that backup cell).
For legal defense: a lot of people are worried that the government will be able to track them; this is a good thing if you are falsely accused and can prove that you were somewhere else.
Legitimize that database as evidence and the risks are gigantic. Want to convict someone you don't like of any old arbitrary crime? All you need is a friend on the inside. Talk about the world's most powerful DBA!
For epidemic tracking and prevention: with diseases like SARS, it might be possible to trace back and find all the people that were exposed to a pathogen or even find a common source when non is obvious by cross referencing the paths of the victims.
Let me re-phrase that:Need I go on? Please don't tell me that you are naive enough to think that this would never happen. Look at the rape-rooms in Iraq. Look at the mass exterminations in Serbia. Look at the abuses of Central and South American countries (Argentina and El Salvador make for particularly brutal examples). Some minority group that enough people hate will be first. Gays? Arabs? Blacks? Jews? Hispanics? Socialists? It won't matter. When it comes, and it will someday, even if it's not this decade or even this century, the tools that those people have will make all the difference. Nazi Germany's abuses would not have been "practical" pre-industrial revolution. Saddam's total control was mostly based on fear, and I'm sure listening devices and advanced optics helped breed that fear (of course, randomly killing half of his own power structure helped).
What tools would you like to add to that arsenal? Choose wisely.
For disasters: this may help locate victims of floods, avalanches, collapsed buildings, etc., especially those that aren't even known to be missing or in danger.
Again, carry a cell. We don't have to keep a database of where anyone has been (though, we probably do...) in order to find them in a crunch. We also do not have to have our cells turned on all day, ever day in order to have this work well in general. Risk vs. reward is the concept that we should be applying.
Ok, I'll bite. Solutions:
- Move away from Windows by converting to Apple's MacOS/X-based systems
- Move away from Windows by converting to IBM's Linux-based systems
- Move away from Windows by converting to Sun's Java-based systems
- Move away from Windows to Sun's Linux-based systems (not yet released, AFAIK, but still a viable plan for the future)
- Move away from Windows to a white-box dekstop on which you install whatever you please
Or were you asking about solutions that Microsoft could implement? If that was what you were asking for, then I have no real recommendations other than they should issue a press release advising their users not to visit non-MSN Web sites for fear of finding out what a mess they've gotten themselves into by running Windows in the first place. Is there a good reason left in the world to run Windows? For the most part it seems to be all momentum-based. MS-Office apps for MacOS lag because MS sells less units for Mac-OS. Replacement apps for Office lag on other platforms because there's no one putting a billion dollars into funding developers to work full-time on it (though IBM has spent that much overall on all of Linux, no one spends this much on just the office apps, which are, next to the browser, and mail client, the most important for desktops). That money isn't flowing because there are a lot of inter-dependencies that lock people to Windows. For example, I'm going to have to run Windows under VMware so that I can talk to my new phone once a day. I run XP at home to play a video game. It's not an OS, it's a legacy app-platform much like DOS was for a decade (and still is to some extent).As migration (that has already begun in dozens of niches) away from Windows begins to pick up steam, more of these dependencies will be met for other platforms. Linux has had amazing ramp-up in that area over the last 5 years. I'm always stunned to see major hardware and software vendors coming into the fold and making their stuff work right with Linux. Now the business-side of that is starting to gain ground, and for example, Fujitsu is partnering with Red Hat. I see MacOS coming out on top though, but there's always going to be a much bigger piece of the pie allocated to other OSes than Microsoft ever had to deal with while it was on top. This is a good thing. We should never go back to a world so dominated by one vendor's software. Software has become too important for that.
Once MS can't rely on self-sustaining market-share to keep them going, they'll be forced to make substantive changes to the way they view customers. This too is a good thing. Who knows, perhaps in 20 years, we'll all be happily running Windows 2XXYbeta1, and it will work well, have real standards compliance, open specifications for key OS features and APIs and actaully be supported. It could happen, and if anything is going to make it happen, it will be compeition.
Since the topic at hand (yet another spurious patent coming out of the USPTO that will stand forever because we have no system for removing bogus patents without someone actively suing) is way over-done on /. I thought I'd take your sig on instead... ;-)
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I just watched that movie for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I don't think I've ever spent a full day trying to decide if I thought a movie was a "good film" or not before, which in itself is a good sign, IMHO.
I had to listen to the full director's commentary before I could decide, and in the end, I think it's one of the best films so far this decade. If you just walk into it blind and see it as a simple "brain scramble" film, it's not bad at all. If you analyze it to death (as I did, woefully), it's got some serious flaws, but ultimately its flaws indicate a desire to reach for a total connectivity that 99% of stories coming out of Hollywood never dream of.
I would compare it favorably with The Usual Suspects and other classic "what the hell is going on, here?!" movies.
The one that really gets me is when the option of Aetheist is listed as a religion
In that sense, Atheist is being used as a "none of the above", which is a more valid use than some I've seen.
Is atheism a religion? I'm willing to roughly define religion as "a belief system, generaly characterized by the personification of natural forces, worship of same and a system of ritual." In that sense no, atheism is not a religion.
On the other hand, if you simply defined it as, "a set of beliefs concerning a system of one or more deities," then yes, atheism is a religion, at least as practiced by some.
I have a friend, for example who has what I would characterize as a "deep and irrational faith" in the non-existance of all gods and the evils of all religion. This is his core faith in the way the universe works, and I can't really make a strong distinction between that and believing that the Post Office box down the street created the universe in 22 nanoseconds out of the belly-button lint of Winston Churchill.
I, on the other hand am a strict agnostic. I have reached what I consider to be one of only three rational conclusions about religion: that we currently have no conclusive proof that there are any deities, and even if George Burns poped into my living room today and whisked my off to a distant galaxy to show me wonders beyond my imagining, I would still have no proof of anything but a George Burns-looking guy with some amazing abilities (at least to make me see cool stuff, if not actually manifest cool stuff) and a god-complex.
The other two rational conclusions are a) Pascal was a jerk for pointing it out, but he was right... choose a religion based on the degree of the negative outcome it predicts and hope you're right (note, such people are still technically agnostic in my book) and b) There are more important things to wory about. Enjoy the sun-rise and then get back to work.
FWIW: When I was about 10, I realized that I was an atheist (I didn't know the term agnostic, much less "strict agnostic" at the time), and in thinking about what that meant I was perhaps more terrified than I have ever been. It's a big deal for a 10 year old to have to face the insignificance of his own existance all at once, but I got over it and decided that I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted anyway.
I've since refined my sense of ethics based, not on fear of reprisals by a deity, but on the drives that I have in terms of a comfortable society of tolerant peers. Woefully there are too many folks in the world who will never introspect to that degree. For them, religion seems a fair way to deliver a moral and ethical outlook that they'll never have the inclination to generate for themselves.
As for Plato... he's over-credited for everything that bears on the concept of un-reality. Descarte's and Hume's work in that area was far more interesting and thorough, IMHO, and drew on sources including Plato, but also including non-Greek sources that were independant and grew out of northern European though as well as imports from the East.
In the modern day, science fiction authors such as Dick (just to pick one, but you could name Vinge, Ellison, Banks or any number of others) have done quite a good job of taking these ideas into our modern world and exploring their meaning in more detail.
I would credit such works as Eye in the Sky (Dick, 1957) with much more influence over The Matrix than Plato. Here's a sample from a good site that covers such things,or perhaps you think of it more like The Divine Invasion (Dick, 1981) which has the benefit of even refering to the un-reality as a "matrix"?So if Plato isn't the beginning or end of any of these ideas, there's really no reason to bring him into the discussion. He, the author(s) of the Bhagvat Gita, Descarte, Dick and many others were the source of The Matrix, directly or indirectly. That makes it no less interesting an exploration of the concepts or the technologies involved.
I'm not sure I buy your take on the name (Neo is named Neo because calling someone "New" just wouldn't sound as cool), but even so, the movie is no more Christian than any other story with a messianic theme. I know this is going to be hard to swallow, but Jesus of Nazareth wasn't the first person in human history (real or fictional) to be called "the one" to fulfill prophesy. That list starts with our earliest recorded works of mythology (which happen to be Indian) and follow in every human society I can think of.
As for the theme of The Matrix being based on the shadowplay in the The Cave, I'm not buying that any more than the poster who claimed that was a Bhuddist concept (which pre-dates Plato, even though I doubt Plato knew of such doctrin). The un-reality of the world, and the extremes to which that concept can be taken are another topic touched on throughout history by many independant authors and philosophers.
In The Matrix, the idea being posed is specifically the tangible manifestation of this concept: a reality that is entirely constructed by known forces, and which exists only to distract those who experience it. It's not very Platonic however, since it is a shared un-reality and those who share it are all real (at least to the level of abstraction that the movie directly explores). Plato's angle was much more focused on the impact that the un-reality of the world had on ethics, rather than as a metaphor for opression of the masses through distraction.
I would think of it more along the lines of Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Cameron (Terminator 2), Descartes (Principia Philosophiae) and Hume (Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding) getting together and re-writing the screenplay for War Games, but that's just MY take on it, and has no more weight than any of the others.
As for Leonard Sweet being one of the consultants for the film, I'm sure there were many. I also doubt that they added much more than the finishing sheen to the story, since the W's are pretty picky about their work, that way.
Ok, I'll bite.
"Noone can be told what the Matrix is"
Context lost, not much you can do there... In-context, the idea of growing up in a virtual world and the extent to which one would be able to accept being told same is, at least to me, quite an interesting topic.
"Woah"
Cheap shot. That line could be pulled from The Matrix or any of a dozen other movies good, bad and indifferent.
The key is, what was that line about and why did it fit in the movie. In this case, Neo is the every-man who gives us perspective (at least at that point in the film) and allows us to understand how overwhelming this experience is. I don't think it's a deep or thoughtful line, but it certainly is hard to imagine conveying that concept to the audience any more appropriately or universally.
"I know Kung Fu"
Now, you've totally lost me. This was one of the things that my friends and I came away talking a great deal about, and really spurred some interesting conversation about biology and technology. "uploading" knowledge into a human brain as long been a staple of SF, but this movie made it a topic that could be discussed in mainstream company (which, to some extent, Total Recall did too).
The Matrix rocks, but it's a silly sci fi super action movie-not some kind of brilliantly thought out metaphor for reality
I find it very interesting that those two are mutually exclusive for you. To mis-quote the film in question, "Do you think that's entertainment you're watching?
For me, they're most certainly not exclusive! Think about this: you're a screenwriter, and you've got some ideas that you want to kick-start discussion about with the widest audience possible. Do you you write a movie that makes your point, presents as much detail on it as possible and explores it to a depth that will satisfy accedemics, or you you boil it down to its simplest terms, make it shiny and exciting and make your point in the margins?
I got the distinct impression that the W's wanted to get a point across: the future is what you make it, not what anyone tells you it is. Remember that this movie was envisioned and filmed during the rise of The Internet, so looking at the Matrix as a reaction to hundreds of companies telling you that the future is the Net, doesn't seem that far-fetched to me.
They clearly also had some things to say about the power of the individual to change the world. Neo can do this because he's The One, but Trinity was able to do quite a bit before Neo arived on the scene, and Morpheus before her.... The message is clear and simple enough for anyone to absorb: fighting the system isn't pointless as long as someone is willing to do it.
But none of that has anything to do with what you responded to... let me grab the bit you quoted:So, DID this movie capture people's intellectual imagination? Based on the number of articles like this one, I would have to say yes. Some of the people who got to thinking were idiots; some were too biased to see anything but their world-view; but some were kicked awake a bit and began to question what dream world they were living in. This is a good thing, and I don't think that it has much to do with how fun, silly or super-heroic the movie was.
After all, Alice in Wonderland was just a silly book about a girl having a fantastic day-dream... but it was, in fact the story of the evils of the day and the corruption of the government under which it was written in the only venue that didn't result in the author being thrown in jail or worse.
The fact that The Matrix begins with a reference to this story is, IMHO, no accident.
If it's price that gets you so upset
I'm not upset at all, and the price doesn't bother me in the least. I pay a comparitively nominal fee for OS support, and in environments where I rely heavily on my database, I would usually buy an additinal support contract with the vendor of the database. All of that is, of course, regardless of the database. MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2, SAP DB, whatever... I don't really care as long as the things I need are there and the price is right for what I'm doing. The thing that usually makes me stay with MySQL is that it's one of the simplest to install and use, which means that I do all of my prototyping with it.
Woefully, with just about every database out there, the price includes a hefty TCO based on the fact that the database administration is black magic. This is less true with PostgreSQL and Sybase (is Sybase still around, I loved that database...) than it is with Oracle, but EVEN LESS SO with MySQL. The database relies on the OS to provide caching, storage growth, etc and the DB just worries about parsing and executing queries and structuring data for fast, reliable access. I love being able to just "mv" a table (or even JUST THE INDEXES) to a new disk array when I need to and then create a link. Beats the hell out of having to grok the "alter tablespace" command... *shudder*
This is, IMHO, the right way to go because UNIX/Linux admins already know how to tune their OS and filesystem, so there's no reason for MySQL to go outside of a database's core expertise. Generally, I find that MySQL's performance win over a DB like Oracle is most often a result of not trying to re-implement the OS. Caching is a really good example, since the OS is much better at filesystem cache managment than the DB can be. Why? Lots of reasons from cache management semantics in the processor, bus and disk controlers to the fact that for sufficiently beefy NAS or SAN environemnts, caching may not be a good plan.
Enjoy!
However, the comparison of MySQL to a filesystem falls short in several respects:
- Filesystems are typically single-key (e.g. like DBM)
- Filesystems are typically comprised of a small number of tables (usually 2-5 depending on the FS complexity) that map pre-defined data fields (e.g. the "superblock" and other fileystem meta-data; "directories", "inodes", to use the UNIX terms) where relational databases such as MySQL provide an infrastrucutre for building such a layout, or any other...
- Filesystems are most often quite limited in the data types that they can support and the query semantics that can be used to access them. Most modern databases support a common subset/superset of the SQL datatypes. MySQL has its own types as well as the SQL types. I think there are one or two missing simply because they haven't been high-demand items.
The whole "MySQL is just a filesystem" thing got a little tired about 5 years ago....The new Sparc chip was supposed to have some nifty way of massively boosting RAM access times. Without that sort of advance, RAM-resident databases aren't much of a win over RAM-cached DBs (what everyone does now), sicne the win for fully resident DBs (which Oracle can do if you force it) is that you can lock huge sections of RAM for just the database, but that leads to the problem that for very large amounts of RAM the latency is starting to get too large.
Hopefully this will be a solved problem soon.
Excuse me, since when is RAM not subjected to constant unyeilding load?!
Or are you talking about the stability of RAM-resident databases (which is NOT what the line you quoted was talking about, it was purely about RAM failure rates).
It's true MySQL is not a real database. After all, it rarely has press releases, the support contracts don't cost nearly enough and what's more it's so easy to administer that your average UNIX guy with a basic RDMS background can get by. It's the freakin' anti-christ!!!
Seriously, can we all just get over size comparisons? MySQL runs a lot of very useful databases from my dinky little statistics systems that are less than 10MB to giant multi-TB DBs. When you talk about the latter being RAM-resident, you're usually not talking about ALL of the data, but rather indexes and as much of the indexed columns as possible. In that sense a database can be fully RAM-resident on a 4-16GB machine and still have many more TB on disk.
It looks very much like a mushroom! Just because it happens to look like the male sexual organ as well is no reason to go disparaging it's mushroomness. ;-)
The fun thing about hunting mushrooms and fungus in general is the amazing variety of shapes, sizes and colors you get to see. That's one of the things I've really tried to capture with my photograps, not so much any one mushroom, but thier variety.
Thanks for checking it out!
The reply to my question was woefully breif, but if you're interested, check out Bad Signal. The upshot was that in his column, he had said something along the lines that one of the critical things that changed after he stopped writing "The Authority" was that Apollo and Midnighter were "outed" as it were as a gay couple. That then lead to a number of plot indulgences where opponents had to "react" to their homosexuality and various "issues" of hate crime had to be addressed.
;-)
Early in the series when Ellis was writing it, such topics as rape camps, drug abuse, and all manner of other "difficult topics" were covered, so doing stories that involved hate crimes was tame by the series' standards. However, to DWELL on any of these topics was certainly not The Authority's style, and it slowed the book down and turned it into something that was far from its core story.
That said, I felt that the book took a nose-dive after Ellis left. It went from being the story of what happens when the super heros are several orders of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the planet to being the tale of thier humanity and flaws. Nice idea, wrong take on that book, IMHO. These heros were much more than just human. The story was interesting because the issues that they dealt with were on a whole other scope.
To give you an example, let me SPOIL a bit of the early story. Our heros get embroiled into a combat with an alternate earth where the world is ruled by a half-breed alien whose corrupt family has litterally been raping the planet for resources, breeding stock and slave labor since they were marooned here several hundred years ago.
In the end, our heros are suck with a decision: they've beaten them back and killed the leader, but if they leave now, the planet will still be enslaved and the half-breeds will still be in power. They struggle for a beat and then one of them holds the Italian peninsula still for a second. That doesn't seem like a big deal until you think about how fast the planet is spinning and how fast it's orbiting the sun.... From our vantage in space, the only change is that Italy gets a little thinner... on the surface, of course, no one could have lived through the devistation.
In most books you could not walk away from such wholesale carnage thinking of these people as heroes, but that was the point to The Authority. They weren't above the law, they simply represented a very different law... one that acted on a the scale of nations and of worlds and realities. When dealing with individual people, The Authority simply treated them as representitives of larger systems.
This made The Authority interesting (though not always morally defensible), and IMHO, that was lost when Ellis went away because the people who took it over didn't understand that that's what made it different from Stormwatch or The JLA or any number of other super-team books.
The "fetish gear" didn't really do anything for me
No, the Slashdot take is correct. MS has been pushing VERY hard over the last couple years to expand in Asia.
They finally clued in to the idea that all of the piracy was due to the fact that MS had so little presence and support in Asia that it wasn't worth PAYING for their products. They've launched a large campaign to change that.
Linux is starting to suffer a fate that I feared was coming for a long time. It's no longer cool.
It was, for a time, cool to run Linux because it was the only fully POSIX (depending on how rigorous your POSIX definition was) OS for home computers that had all of the usual bells and whistles (X, GNU tools, etc) that also had freely available source.
386BSD came along at about the same time, but was really only usable a bit after Linux so Linux got a bit of a mind-share head start (otherwise we'd all be running one of the BSDs by now).
Today, progress on Mach still continues under Darwin; HURD is moving to a new Microkernel that's much smaller and "hipper"; Open/NetBSD have adopted a very promising new VM model; and worst of all (in terms of Linux's geek appeal) Linux is a massive corporate success in dozens of large niches.
This is a huge win for the Free Software cause, but for Linux it means that the now super-broad OS is starting to show its faults. There are very few people who currently seem to be thinking about the big picture in terms of how the whole OS works in any given incarnation. Worse, the hack-value of making the bettter diver for hardware XYZ has reduced significantly, and most of the kernel work I see happening is not on tuning older drivers for new versions so much as incorporating brand new and interesting hardware, or working on kernel-wide systems like VM, security or scheduling
Red Hat's partnership with hardware companies like Fujitsu (maker of laptops, hard drives and more) is excellent because it brings the hardware vendors to the table to pick up some of that slack and frees Red Hat developers to focus on the big picture. Much as they've taken heat for it, RH has done a lot of good in thinking of the dekstop as a whole rather than as a potential spot to plug in vendors A, B or C (or should I say G, K or W). What they need to do now is keep moving down the chain. Standardize all of the system documentation on ONE format and convert everything to it (personally, I recommend a modified POD, which is what Perl uses, and could easily be modified to produce useful texi and Gnome SGML, while it already produces man, text and HTML). IMHO "man foo" and "info foo" and bringing up the Gnome help viewer should all give access in one, consistent (though UI-distinct) way with the same, complete documentation. Why isn't that the case? Because no one has time to work at that level (Kudos to the LFS people for taking up my challenge on that point last week, and starting to work on a port of the OpenBSD man pages to the Linux tools!)
DMCA doesn't apply.
It only applies to reverse engineering that circumvents a copyright protection measure. Unless MS wanted to try to claim that that's what they were doing (kind of hard, and silly for them to bother given the deep pockets likely to get involved...)
You missed the point. An X-Box is not a general-purpose system, that's just not what it's designed for.
If someone's shipping a GP system that won't run a free OS, then it's in the interests of all of the Linux, BSD, etc. distributions to get around it and fully specify the required modifications for OEMs and home users who which to use the platform.
You *know* that you'll be able to buy a dual-boot MSWhiteBox off of ebay a week after it comes out. The question is not how many people will run it, but how much, if at all, it slows or stops the growth of free OSen on the desktop.
I think that answer will be, "not at all."
Heck, they couldn't lock Linux out of their game-console, what makes them think they can lock it out of a desktop PC?!
5.8.1 exists in a pre-release state. It will be the first maintenance release of Perl 5.8. 5.9.0 is also in a pre-release state.
Ok, you're editing what I say with a very biased skew (e.g. keeping the part about gated communities, and deleting the bit about how that plays in the real world), so I wish you luck. Personally, I'm not going to charge my friends to send me mail....
The software industry has a successful tradition of easily disclaiming any liablity regardless of charging huge fees.
And the software industry does that by requiring a specfic EULA be accepted... are you suggesting that I will have to click-through on your Web site in order to send you mail?!
Micropayment based mail is a fiction. It simply cannot work on a large scale for the following reasons:
* It requires that incoming mail be able to generate a financial transaction. Picture the exchange exploit of the month having access to an electronic payment system. Oh baby, those are going to be some rich script kiddies!
* It allows for many forms of attack like spam (marked as refuse-to-pay) whose return address charges $0.25 per message. Of course, most users will not accept it, and even more will never reply, but then there's those few, and that's a business model. Your system will suffer a PR meltdown before you can get everyone to correctly configure their systems to avoid this, and some implementations will never be free of it.
* It's the "don't come into my neighborhood unless you pay at the gate" approach, and that creates closed communities. Sure, perhaps closed communities are cool at first, but when you find out how many people there are that you actually want to interact with, but who will never pay at the gate... you leave your little community and go downtown where the action is.
* By creating a payment system, you also impose a veneer of legitimacy. $0.01 per recipient? Well, that seems kind of high for your average fire-hose spammer, but it just forces folks to become more aware of demographics, etc. If you can get up around the 2% response rate that even average targetted, physical bulk mail enjoys, then you start profiting even if your product costs only $1! Turn on the TV after 2AM and watch carefully. All of those products will be the ones that fill your inbox as soon as micro-payments make it seem less like a den of hustlers and degenerates.