An English pic (of all things) called 'Billy Elliot' - a fantastic 1980's period piece about the son of a coal miner in Northern England during a miner's strike. He's in boxing class when a ballet class starts to share the gym space. He gets entranced by the ballet moves, and switches over (secretly, of course) to ballet class. It's a fantastic film - the characters are very unique, and the storyline is good, especially when set amongst the goings-on of the strike and police crackdown on the strikers. The soundtrack is fantastic (half of the songs are by T. Rex).
The actors (especially the kid who plays the title character, and the woman who plays his ballet teacher) are fantastic in their roles. Even the supporting characters such as Billy's best friend, and the teacher's daughter, are done quite well (and they have more than their share of odd moments to delight in).
I've been this movie twice already. When I came back from 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', my first thought was, "It's very good, but it's no Billy Elliot'.
As for 'Dracula 2000' - typical Wes Craven - great idea, bad execution. If you're going to see Jeri Ryan (7 of 9 from Star Trek: Voyager) - don't bother, she's in it very briefly. The movie has an interesting backstory (about how Van Helsing captured Dracula), and also about a new origin for Dracula, but it just can't pull it off. Might be worth watching on TV for some of the interesting ideas, but I was disappointed because it could've been done much better. Some definite inspiration got ruined. *sigh*
There was a fantastic article in Wired a few years ago about the state of cold fusion research. It started with discussing how the Pons & Fleishman (sp?) discovery was correct, but that they didn't understand it yet, and the university they were at prematurely (WAY-prematurely) publicized it to garner the credit. *sigh*
Anyway, that one article was so well-written & researched, I've since stopped bitching about Wired magazine. One article of that quality a year is good enough. Sorry, don't have a link to it (don't know if it's even online).
I've heard of a study done several years ago into the CAUSE of hiccups - apparently it's caused by a change in the pH of the blood, either too alkaline or too acidic.
So, when you have the hiccups - what did you just eat? Something acidic? Something alkaline?
Once you know, then you either eat a spoonful of sugar (if you think your blood is too acidic), or you drink some orange juice (if you think your blood is too alkaline). Voila.
The drug in the article probably stabilizes one's pH, presumably. Either that or it only works for one type of pH imbalance.
Okay, the only bad part of the movie (aside from some fuzzy filming in the very beginning), was the wirework. Yes, it's cool to see people flying in the air, especially when they're doing great martial arts. Unfortunately, it's not so cool when they're flying at speeds and in ways contrary to the laws of gravity. If they had done it 'correctly', though, it probably would've been too fast to do it safely for the actors. They just go way too slowly when coming down.
What I was _really_ impressed with was the following (which I knew going into the movie):
1) Chow Yun Fat is not a sword-guy - he had to learn all that for the movie
2) None of the principle actors had done wire-work before. This looked as good as anything I've seen (except for Matrix), yet all the actors were new to it. THAT'S impressive.
3) The Director was new to both martial arts films AND wirework. Not too bad - no experience, and he creates this film?
4) The film was made in Mandarin. Guess what language the principle actors DIDN'T speak? You guessed it - Mandarin. They were all speaking in a foreign (to them) language! Wow. And I couldn't detect any accents at all (grin).
That said, if I'm going to go see a movie again, it'd be 'Billy Elliot', not this one, though I did like it quite a lot. Especially Zhang Ziyi - she totally stole the movie from Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh (an amazing feat).
1) Open Source the WorkPlace Shell! Every other GUI I've ever used, including Gnome & KDE, feels clumsy by comparison. We could take that, prettyfy it up for the modern world, and watch Steve Jobs turn green with envy.
2) DRIVERS. DRIVERSDRIVERSDRIVERS. Did I mention DRIVERS?
Autodetecting hardware and installing the right drivers. The fantastic WPS GUI. Oh yeah, I'd be in heaven if that was in Linux!
As far as things they could do other than what they already own:
Add more people to the job of auditing the Linux code. There's no reason OpenBSD should be more secure than Linux with all the resources the Linux community has on hand. That's just absurd.
Oh, I just remembered - the OS/2 BootManager was pretty nice. Not sure how it compares to GRUB (probably not well these days), but it'd be nice to have it available...
Check out www.onename.com and www.xns.org for the solution to spam. I've posted this comment many times, and most people don't seem to see it as it's usually on a topic not visible from the main slashdot page (nice design there, Slashdot).
I've also had it rejected as a Slashdot topic. I guess only articles COMPLAINING about spam, as opposed to SOLVING IT get posted.
I'm no longer really in the mood to write up a complete explanation of how it's going to work, but trust me (I used to work for the company), the end of spam is nigh.
IEEE-1394b (note the 'b') may well be finalized at their meeting next month. The speeds it will offer are 800mbps, 1600mbps, with extensions to reach 3200mbps, giving you:
100Meg a second, 200Meg a second, and 400Meg a second. Take *that*, Ultra320 SCSI!:^)
Also note that unlike ATA, SCSI, and SerialATA, FireWire doesn't require a computer - you can hook devices up directly to each other (digital camera to firewire hd, etc.)
And for the overclockers/modders - skinny cables with FireWire, too.
And note to the person who mentioned Apple's FireWire ports on the Mac motherboards - seems Apple has discontinued the internal firewire ports on the latest Macs, from what I hear. Still have the external one(s), though.
Okay, with base 60 numbering, you can divide by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10. Pretty freaking cool!
And if we're renaming the days of the week - let's go back to the original names. Moon's Day, Tiw's Day, Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Freya's Day, Satyr's Day, and Sun's Day. At least, I _think_ that's where they came from.
Back when I ran a BBS (see also: the 'olden days'), I customized my BBS software to use those day names on the messages. Pretty neat, especially for a Paganism-oriented BBS.
But back to reality - I'd just be happy if the U.S. switched over to a 24 hour clock and the metric system, and made daylight savings time the standard time, especially this far north (Seattle) - we need all the daylight we can get during the winter! (it gets dark here around 4pm in the winter - ugh)
Just don't confuse 'pretty' with 'usable'. Those stupid radio button widgets that GTK uses are ridiculously unusable compared to those of Windows. I'm considering learning C just to be able to replace that one thing, I think they're so bad. Not that they invented those crappy radio buttons - I think Motif uses/used them, too. You know the ones I'm talking about - the diamond ones that you can't really tell if they've been selected or not? Gimme a break - that's NOT 'usable', though they do look nice. *shrug*
If I can see a screenshot, I can get an immediate idea of how the interface of the program works. As a UI designer/developer, I'm SUPERPICKY about interfaces on the apps I use.
There are many FTP clients, for instance, and most of them will do everything most people expect them to be able to do. The difference for most of them is in the _interface_.
Downloading a screenshot lets you know right away whether this this looks like the kind of interface you'll be happy with, without the trouble of downloading a full binary and installing it, much less the time and trouble of downloading source to an app, compiling it, installing it, etc. If all you want is an idea of the interface concepts being used, a screenshot is the ONLY sane thing to use.
Mind you, that's about ALL it'll tell you - but the interface is all-important. It doesn't matter what an app is capable of if you can't figure out how to use use it. What kind of life is it you lead if you're willing to put up with annoyingly-designed software all the time?
It could also be used by savvy app developers to find out what people think of their app interface. If you have the binary or source available on your site, and a screenshot or two, take note of how many people check out the screenshot versus how many download the app. Take a look at the ratio and get a clue about your interface. There's a REASON KDE & Gnome exist.
I'm a Diabetic, and I can tell you from my own personal experience that burning fat directly for energy, instead of carbohydrates, leads to BAD THINGS. The chemical byproduct of doing that leads to acetate in the bloodstream (e.g. fingernail polish remover). That makes you feel REALLY REALLY BAD.
Once a person's bloodsugar gets to a high enough level (as in Diabetics who don't have their bloodsugar under control), that happens automatically, and that's when the body starts going downhill very fast. Yes, you lose weight quickly, but it's more like a 'wasting away' type of weightloss. You also have to urinate constantly, and you're always thirsty. You're always tired, and physical exertion can wipe you out, give you the shakes, etc. It's extremely unpleasant! And those are just the short-term effects. Lasting effects include blindness, organ failure, and possible limb amputation. My dad died of Diabetes complications because he didn't take care of himself. It's not a good way to go, folks.
'Diabetic coma' doesn't necessarily translate into 'hibernation'. Scary.
weblint, for one - this checks your HTML for validity. You'd be surprised how many sites, including really popular ones, use amazingly crappy HTML (*cough* Slashdot *cough*).
Another one is pngcrush - if you're creating png graphics, they're probably not as small as they could be - pngcrush will optimize the compression without messing with the # of colours in the graphic. Nice.
Another useful thing is to get a BUNCH of browsers, really old ones, too, for testing. I test from Navigator 2.x through the current, and MS IE 3.x through the current. With MS IE, that requires either multiple partitions or multiple machines - 3.x and 4.x don't install onto the same machine *sigh*. Also - don't forget Windows & Macs! Macs are very different, especially in how they render fonts, so test on Macs (Nav & IE there, too!). I had one site that wigged-out _only_ on Nav 4.5 for Mac. Weird. And scripting can get strange on different versions of IE - once had a site's javascript break _only_ on a particular version of IE 3.x for Windows _NT_ only. Strange strange strange.
You would do very well to code for XHTML rather than HTML - it forces you to get into good coding habits since it's rather particular (to put it mildly) about what's valid and what isn't. XHTML supposedly works down to second generation browsers.
Another good thing to test with is 'Bobby' - this is a program that tests for accessibility (for those with disabilities). Most of the web is an accessibility nightmare, unfortunately.
"Honey, with this new cryogenics tower computer, I'll be able to get my computing done faster, so I can then spend more time on YOUR needs."
Simple.:^)
Re:There's already a cure for spam. Noone uses it
on
Outbound Spam
·
· Score: 2
Are those procmail rules or something? Nicely done, if so - I wouldn't mind a copy of that.
You mentioned the big point, though - stopping it at the server level rescues bandwidth. That's the real deal - if it's stopped at the mail servers, then the spam industry goes away, and then we get back all that nice bandwidth. I certainly wouldn't mind XNS-enabled NNTP servers, either! That'd rescue about 80% of the traffic, from some figures I've read.
Unfortunately, this topic isn't showing up on the main page of Slashdot, and they've already rejected my submission of this as a news topic. Duh. Guess the Slashdot editors like spam or something. I'm going to have to find another place to post this that will get the attention of the open source developer community. Any suggestions?
The cool thing about open source software is that the kind of funcitonality you've set up in your mail filters can be set up in an open source mail server. I'll have to talk to some of my programmer buddies about adding this to postfix or something.
One can only hope that since MicroSoft is now getting interested in P3P, that more attention will be paid to P3P-enabling technologies like XNS.
There's already a cure for spam. Noone uses it yet
on
Outbound Spam
·
· Score: 3
See my post from a few days ago on the topic of XNS.
The procedure I talked about hardly describes a 'technological wizard'.
Anyway, the more I think about it, the better XNS-enabling the mailing list software sounds - that way things can be automated, along with privacy rules - people could be assured their e-mail address won't be used for various other purposes, etc. Also, with XNS, if their email address changes, the mailing list could be notified automatically, all without any intervention from the user or mailing list manager. There's a LOT of benefits to XNS besides anti-spam (that was really just an afterthought.)
Okay, apparently noone's heard of this yet, which isn't surprising, but here we go.
There IS a cure for spam. A company I used to work for last year came up with some technology based on P3P technology. The idea is you set up an account and get an 'XNS Agent'. XNS is 'eXtensible Name Service'. You get your own 'XNS name' (via OneName.com or some other agency - some are free, some aren't). When you have your OneName, you can set up your XNS Agent to negotiate privacy with whatever online entity understands about XNS.
Here's the spam-killer idea my ex-boss had when we were working on the service: Build XNS into mail servers - the spec is completely open and available at xns.org. Make this like 'Caller ID for e-mail' (my phrase - I'm so proud:) - you as the email user on that mail server can set up a list of people, as well as a privacy-negotiation policy about receiving email. Those who are on your email pass-thru list can send email directly to you, as normal. Those who are not have to meet your privacy rules before the email goes to you. And/or, you could have it email a message back asking for confirmation before it sends the email to you (thus eliminating the mass majority of spammers - their reply-to addresses are almost always fake).
So, since the spammers would never take the time to confirm their privacy rules, the emails would never get back to you - and you could have the ability to configure your XNS email agent thingy to either dump those messages that didn't get authroized, or hold them for review, or whatever.
You would, of course, have to take a little more time in setting up your mail account on such an XNS-enabled mail server - set up the email address of those people and mailing lists you're on, so they don't get trashed, or bounce messages back into lists, etc. Small price to pay to actually destroy the entire spam industry, though, I'd think.
The neat thing is - all the specs are open - anyone can add it into their open source mail servers - it's encouraged! It also would mean that people wouldn't have to use special mail clients to use it - it's all server-side, hopefully with a web-based interface to configure your agent.
Pretty slick. Available, open source. Free personal 'OneNames' are available, etc. The OneName people _really_ know and understand privacy - I used to work there, I should know.
It's been frustrating receiving all the spam I have been recently, knowing there's a solution to spam out there, and noone is using it. *sigh*
I've always liked the flexibility that OS/2's WorkPlace Shell afforded me. I could modify the right-mouse-click menu to include links to all the apps I used. This menu popped up anywhere I did a right-mouse click. No need to move the mouse pointer to some silly dock or to the start button on a start menu - always right there wherever my mousepointer already was. Schweet.
I'd rather not have any screenspace taken up by a dock.
They've got some nice beginner scopes now that have a computerized motor attached that has an astronomical database attached - you can just tell it what object to point it. Can't get any simpler than that. Also, the optical quality of the scopes are quite nice from what I've read. They're also small enough to carry around, so you can go out into the country, away from urban light pollution and air pollution, and get a real clear view.
The models are in the ETX-60, 70, 90, and 125 lines, with the 'Autostar Computer Controller'.
Slashdot Mirror
What would be even MORE fun would be to have one in MY car - mounted to fire out the rear of my car. No more worrying about speeding tickets! :)
An English pic (of all things) called 'Billy Elliot' - a fantastic 1980's period piece about the son of a coal miner in Northern England during a miner's strike. He's in boxing class when a ballet class starts to share the gym space. He gets entranced by the ballet moves, and switches over (secretly, of course) to ballet class. It's a fantastic film - the characters are very unique, and the storyline is good, especially when set amongst the goings-on of the strike and police crackdown on the strikers. The soundtrack is fantastic (half of the songs are by T. Rex).
The actors (especially the kid who plays the title character, and the woman who plays his ballet teacher) are fantastic in their roles. Even the supporting characters such as Billy's best friend, and the teacher's daughter, are done quite well (and they have more than their share of odd moments to delight in).
I've been this movie twice already. When I came back from 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', my first thought was, "It's very good, but it's no Billy Elliot'.
As for 'Dracula 2000' - typical Wes Craven - great idea, bad execution. If you're going to see Jeri Ryan (7 of 9 from Star Trek: Voyager) - don't bother, she's in it very briefly. The movie has an interesting backstory (about how Van Helsing captured Dracula), and also about a new origin for Dracula, but it just can't pull it off. Might be worth watching on TV for some of the interesting ideas, but I was disappointed because it could've been done much better. Some definite inspiration got ruined. *sigh*
There was a fantastic article in Wired a few years ago about the state of cold fusion research. It started with discussing how the Pons & Fleishman (sp?) discovery was correct, but that they didn't understand it yet, and the university they were at prematurely (WAY-prematurely) publicized it to garner the credit. *sigh*
Anyway, that one article was so well-written & researched, I've since stopped bitching about Wired magazine. One article of that quality a year is good enough. Sorry, don't have a link to it (don't know if it's even online).
If you want proof that Flash is wonderful, check out WhirlGirl , the baddest superhero in all of SoCal!
I've heard of a study done several years ago into the CAUSE of hiccups - apparently it's caused by a change in the pH of the blood, either too alkaline or too acidic.
So, when you have the hiccups - what did you just eat? Something acidic? Something alkaline?
Once you know, then you either eat a spoonful of sugar (if you think your blood is too acidic), or you drink some orange juice (if you think your blood is too alkaline). Voila.
The drug in the article probably stabilizes one's pH, presumably. Either that or it only works for one type of pH imbalance.
Okay, the only bad part of the movie (aside from some fuzzy filming in the very beginning), was the wirework. Yes, it's cool to see people flying in the air, especially when they're doing great martial arts. Unfortunately, it's not so cool when they're flying at speeds and in ways contrary to the laws of gravity. If they had done it 'correctly', though, it probably would've been too fast to do it safely for the actors. They just go way too slowly when coming down.
What I was _really_ impressed with was the following (which I knew going into the movie):
1) Chow Yun Fat is not a sword-guy - he had to learn all that for the movie
2) None of the principle actors had done wire-work before. This looked as good as anything I've seen (except for Matrix), yet all the actors were new to it. THAT'S impressive.
3) The Director was new to both martial arts films AND wirework. Not too bad - no experience, and he creates this film?
4) The film was made in Mandarin. Guess what language the principle actors DIDN'T speak? You guessed it - Mandarin. They were all speaking in a foreign (to them) language! Wow. And I couldn't detect any accents at all (grin).
That said, if I'm going to go see a movie again, it'd be 'Billy Elliot', not this one, though I did like it quite a lot. Especially Zhang Ziyi - she totally stole the movie from Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh (an amazing feat).
Only two things:
1) Open Source the WorkPlace Shell! Every other GUI I've ever used, including Gnome & KDE, feels clumsy by comparison. We could take that, prettyfy it up for the modern world, and watch Steve Jobs turn green with envy.
2) DRIVERS. DRIVERSDRIVERSDRIVERS. Did I mention DRIVERS?
Autodetecting hardware and installing the right drivers. The fantastic WPS GUI. Oh yeah, I'd be in heaven if that was in Linux!
As far as things they could do other than what they already own:
Add more people to the job of auditing the Linux code. There's no reason OpenBSD should be more secure than Linux with all the resources the Linux community has on hand. That's just absurd.
Oh, I just remembered - the OS/2 BootManager was pretty nice. Not sure how it compares to GRUB (probably not well these days), but it'd be nice to have it available...
Check out www.onename.com and www.xns.org for the solution to spam. I've posted this comment many times, and most people don't seem to see it as it's usually on a topic not visible from the main slashdot page (nice design there, Slashdot).
I've also had it rejected as a Slashdot topic. I guess only articles COMPLAINING about spam, as opposed to SOLVING IT get posted.
I'm no longer really in the mood to write up a complete explanation of how it's going to work, but trust me (I used to work for the company), the end of spam is nigh.
IEEE-1394b (note the 'b') may well be finalized at their meeting next month. The speeds it will offer are 800mbps, 1600mbps, with extensions to reach 3200mbps, giving you:
:^)
100Meg a second, 200Meg a second, and 400Meg a second. Take *that*, Ultra320 SCSI!
Also note that unlike ATA, SCSI, and SerialATA, FireWire doesn't require a computer - you can hook devices up directly to each other (digital camera to firewire hd, etc.)
And for the overclockers/modders - skinny cables with FireWire, too.
And note to the person who mentioned Apple's FireWire ports on the Mac motherboards - seems Apple has discontinued the internal firewire ports on the latest Macs, from what I hear. Still have the external one(s), though.
Okay, with base 60 numbering, you can divide by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10. Pretty freaking cool!
And if we're renaming the days of the week - let's go back to the original names. Moon's Day, Tiw's Day, Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Freya's Day, Satyr's Day, and Sun's Day. At least, I _think_ that's where they came from.
Back when I ran a BBS (see also: the 'olden days'), I customized my BBS software to use those day names on the messages. Pretty neat, especially for a Paganism-oriented BBS.
But back to reality - I'd just be happy if the U.S. switched over to a 24 hour clock and the metric system, and made daylight savings time the standard time, especially this far north (Seattle) - we need all the daylight we can get during the winter! (it gets dark here around 4pm in the winter - ugh)
Oh yeah, and no more sugar substitutes!
Just don't confuse 'pretty' with 'usable'. Those stupid radio button widgets that GTK uses are ridiculously unusable compared to those of Windows. I'm considering learning C just to be able to replace that one thing, I think they're so bad. Not that they invented those crappy radio buttons - I think Motif uses/used them, too. You know the ones I'm talking about - the diamond ones that you can't really tell if they've been selected or not? Gimme a break - that's NOT 'usable', though they do look nice. *shrug*
If I can see a screenshot, I can get an immediate idea of how the interface of the program works. As a UI designer/developer, I'm SUPERPICKY about interfaces on the apps I use.
There are many FTP clients, for instance, and most of them will do everything most people expect them to be able to do. The difference for most of them is in the _interface_.
Downloading a screenshot lets you know right away whether this this looks like the kind of interface you'll be happy with, without the trouble of downloading a full binary and installing it, much less the time and trouble of downloading source to an app, compiling it, installing it, etc. If all you want is an idea of the interface concepts being used, a screenshot is the ONLY sane thing to use.
Mind you, that's about ALL it'll tell you - but the interface is all-important. It doesn't matter what an app is capable of if you can't figure out how to use use it. What kind of life is it you lead if you're willing to put up with annoyingly-designed software all the time?
It could also be used by savvy app developers to find out what people think of their app interface. If you have the binary or source available on your site, and a screenshot or two, take note of how many people check out the screenshot versus how many download the app. Take a look at the ratio and get a clue about your interface. There's a REASON KDE & Gnome exist.
Strange concept.
I'm a Diabetic, and I can tell you from my own personal experience that burning fat directly for energy, instead of carbohydrates, leads to BAD THINGS. The chemical byproduct of doing that leads to acetate in the bloodstream (e.g. fingernail polish remover). That makes you feel REALLY REALLY BAD.
Once a person's bloodsugar gets to a high enough level (as in Diabetics who don't have their bloodsugar under control), that happens automatically, and that's when the body starts going downhill very fast. Yes, you lose weight quickly, but it's more like a 'wasting away' type of weightloss. You also have to urinate constantly, and you're always thirsty. You're always tired, and physical exertion can wipe you out, give you the shakes, etc. It's extremely unpleasant! And those are just the short-term effects. Lasting effects include blindness, organ failure, and possible limb amputation. My dad died of Diabetes complications because he didn't take care of himself. It's not a good way to go, folks.
'Diabetic coma' doesn't necessarily translate into 'hibernation'. Scary.
weblint, for one - this checks your HTML for validity. You'd be surprised how many sites, including really popular ones, use amazingly crappy HTML (*cough* Slashdot *cough*).
Another one is pngcrush - if you're creating png graphics, they're probably not as small as they could be - pngcrush will optimize the compression without messing with the # of colours in the graphic. Nice.
Another useful thing is to get a BUNCH of browsers, really old ones, too, for testing. I test from Navigator 2.x through the current, and MS IE 3.x through the current. With MS IE, that requires either multiple partitions or multiple machines - 3.x and 4.x don't install onto the same machine *sigh*. Also - don't forget Windows & Macs! Macs are very different, especially in how they render fonts, so test on Macs (Nav & IE there, too!). I had one site that wigged-out _only_ on Nav 4.5 for Mac. Weird. And scripting can get strange on different versions of IE - once had a site's javascript break _only_ on a particular version of IE 3.x for Windows _NT_ only. Strange strange strange.
You would do very well to code for XHTML rather than HTML - it forces you to get into good coding habits since it's rather particular (to put it mildly) about what's valid and what isn't. XHTML supposedly works down to second generation browsers.
Another good thing to test with is 'Bobby' - this is a program that tests for accessibility (for those with disabilities). Most of the web is an accessibility nightmare, unfortunately.
Okay, that's it - sorry no URLs right now...
"Honey, with this new cryogenics tower computer, I'll be able to get my computing done faster, so I can then spend more time on YOUR needs."
:^)
Simple.
Are those procmail rules or something? Nicely done, if so - I wouldn't mind a copy of that.
You mentioned the big point, though - stopping it at the server level rescues bandwidth. That's the real deal - if it's stopped at the mail servers, then the spam industry goes away, and then we get back all that nice bandwidth. I certainly wouldn't mind XNS-enabled NNTP servers, either! That'd rescue about 80% of the traffic, from some figures I've read.
Unfortunately, this topic isn't showing up on the main page of Slashdot, and they've already rejected my submission of this as a news topic. Duh. Guess the Slashdot editors like spam or something. I'm going to have to find another place to post this that will get the attention of the open source developer community. Any suggestions?
The cool thing about open source software is that the kind of funcitonality you've set up in your mail filters can be set up in an open source mail server. I'll have to talk to some of my programmer buddies about adding this to postfix or something.
One can only hope that since MicroSoft is now getting interested in P3P, that more attention will be paid to P3P-enabling technologies like XNS.
See my post from a few days ago on the topic of XNS.
The procedure I talked about hardly describes a 'technological wizard'.
Anyway, the more I think about it, the better XNS-enabling the mailing list software sounds - that way things can be automated, along with privacy rules - people could be assured their e-mail address won't be used for various other purposes, etc. Also, with XNS, if their email address changes, the mailing list could be notified automatically, all without any intervention from the user or mailing list manager. There's a LOT of benefits to XNS besides anti-spam (that was really just an afterthought.)
Well, one could also XNS-enable the mailing list software so that wouldn't happen.
Another thought - do you really want people that dumb on your mailing list? I sure wouldn't.
I think it's a remarkably small price to pay for getting rid of spam once and for all, without having to modify all the e-mail clients in the world.
Okay, apparently noone's heard of this yet, which isn't surprising, but here we go.
:) - you as the email user on that mail server can set up a list of people, as well as a privacy-negotiation policy about receiving email. Those who are on your email pass-thru list can send email directly to you, as normal. Those who are not have to meet your privacy rules before the email goes to you. And/or, you could have it email a message back asking for confirmation before it sends the email to you (thus eliminating the mass majority of spammers - their reply-to addresses are almost always fake).
:)
There IS a cure for spam. A company I used to work for last year came up with some technology based on P3P technology. The idea is you set up an account and get an 'XNS Agent'. XNS is 'eXtensible Name Service'. You get your own 'XNS name' (via OneName.com or some other agency - some are free, some aren't). When you have your OneName, you can set up your XNS Agent to negotiate privacy with whatever online entity understands about XNS.
Here's the spam-killer idea my ex-boss had when we were working on the service: Build XNS into mail servers - the spec is completely open and available at xns.org. Make this like 'Caller ID for e-mail' (my phrase - I'm so proud
So, since the spammers would never take the time to confirm their privacy rules, the emails would never get back to you - and you could have the ability to configure your XNS email agent thingy to either dump those messages that didn't get authroized, or hold them for review, or whatever.
You would, of course, have to take a little more time in setting up your mail account on such an XNS-enabled mail server - set up the email address of those people and mailing lists you're on, so they don't get trashed, or bounce messages back into lists, etc. Small price to pay to actually destroy the entire spam industry, though, I'd think.
The neat thing is - all the specs are open - anyone can add it into their open source mail servers - it's encouraged! It also would mean that people wouldn't have to use special mail clients to use it - it's all server-side, hopefully with a web-based interface to configure your agent.
Pretty slick. Available, open source. Free personal 'OneNames' are available, etc. The OneName people _really_ know and understand privacy - I used to work there, I should know.
It's been frustrating receiving all the spam I have been recently, knowing there's a solution to spam out there, and noone is using it. *sigh*
=Tumbleweed (that's my OneName
I've always liked the flexibility that OS/2's WorkPlace Shell afforded me. I could modify the right-mouse-click menu to include links to all the apps I used. This menu popped up anywhere I did a right-mouse click. No need to move the mouse pointer to some silly dock or to the start button on a start menu - always right there wherever my mousepointer already was. Schweet.
I'd rather not have any screenspace taken up by a dock.
They've got some nice beginner scopes now that have a computerized motor attached that has an astronomical database attached - you can just tell it what object to point it. Can't get any simpler than that. Also, the optical quality of the scopes are quite nice from what I've read. They're also small enough to carry around, so you can go out into the country, away from urban light pollution and air pollution, and get a real clear view.
The models are in the ETX-60, 70, 90, and 125 lines, with the 'Autostar Computer Controller'.
Pretty sweet. Check them out at www.meade.com.
Considering the quality of the Mars movies released recently, any 'home movies' NASA makes could easily do much better.
I've never been able to find out much info comparing BSD/OS and FreeBSD - can anyone give a quick overview of what the major differences are?
A polar orbit usually indicates something that's taking a lot of pictures of the whole planet. For sneaky purposes or not. :^)