Yeah, I think the latest rendition of the deadline is around 2006. I think it was supposed to be 2003 at one point, but the networks pointed out that there weren't enough digital TVs for the change-over to work. Expect them to continue to make the same arguments.
If it does happen, then you should be able to buy adapters for your three color and two B&W TVs. I'm hoping it'll be fifty bucks (since it requires no more electronics than a cheap video card), but I bet it'll be closer to $75.
The Watchman, on the other hand, will probably be out of luck, since you're not going to carry around an adapter for it.
How many people actually get HDTV in their area, and how many channels?
Actually, nearly all of the networks in nearly all of the major markets are broadcasting HDTV. If you're not in a major market, coverage is far spottier, but a substantial fraction of the people in the US do live in a major market.
The number of people actually receiving the signals is pretty low, since the TVs are expensive, but the digital signal is there, in lower resolution. The actual high-definition content is pretty low, since it's expensive to produce (requiring new cameras and other equipment), and so people aren't buying the very pricey TVs. No content, no viewers; no viewers, no content.
It also doesn't help that we're still waiting on standards like high-definition DVDs. Supposedly that's busily being resolved. They're also finally starting to put out the high-definition content over cable wires (which many people in the major markets have) and satellite systems (which are immensely popular among people too far from a major market to get cable, and also among those who find the cable companies obnoxious).
Me, I'm waiting on a cheap digital-to-analog converter so I can watch the new signal on my old TV, since the signal is clearer than analog.
Re:The problem with HDTV right now...
on
CableCARDs and HDTV
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Look at it the other way: if the government were to declare that new TVs would have only 240 scan lines rather than 480, would your TV experience be substantially diminshed?
Picture quality does matter, especially as TVs get larger. It probably doesn't matter enough to junk an entire infrastructure, but this is a lot more about reclaiming bandwidth than it is about resolution. The new standard reclaims valuable spectrum and replaces it with a format that makes better use of the bandwidth.
Or alternatively, it's a way for the existing networks to grab additional bandwidth while fighting tooth-and-nail to keep from giving up the old one. Either way, the new picture is really, really pretty, when you can get it.
Interesting point. How much of those 3,800 spams are "legal" spam (valid opt-out lists, non-falsified headers, snail-mail addresses) under the MAY-SPAM (er, CAN-SPAM) act?
Those spams are rather easy to filter out, but I suspect it is a fairly small number of those 3,800, and the least annoying ones (because the filters take care of it). This law addresses the illegal spams, which have taken pains to make themselves hard to filter.
Thus far nobody's been prosecuted, and it's only recently that the punishments have even been defined. You won't see any reduction of spam, or even significant conversion to "legal" spam, at least until this case is over.
Maybe a few convictions will throw enough of a scare into most of the remaining ones that they'll comply with the law and be filtered out. I'm a bit surprised they don't already: anybody smart enough to install a spam filter isn't going to buy your v1@gra, so save yourself the risk of prosecution. There appear to be more than enough fools left.
Then the really tricky part begins, dealing with the most malicious of spammers, the ones using hijacked computers, who are very hard to trace. I'm afraid such people will launch a DOS on the entire mail system, relaying so much random but non-commercial mail (maybe even just resending previously sent message to other people) to make it hard to filter out the intended message by hand. Only a moron would click through such a spam, but it appears that the Internet is populated by a sufficiency of morons.
And he should go back and reread the book, too. 1984 is about propaganda and thought-control, not privacy per se. The government in 1984 didn't just invade your privacy; it made you like it through manipulation of the language. It changed history, made you believe that less is more and black is white, and ultimately made itself the sole purveyor of truth. The invasion of privacy is a small matter after that.
Strictly, they're not suing Google over the search. They're suing Google over the ad.
The difference is crucial. Google makes money directly from the sale of Axa's trademarked keyword. Google makes no money from the search itself. They've been sued over search results before, and won every single time, precisely because the search results are fair.
If Google had been asked to cease associating Axa's trademark with Axa's competitor, and refused, that may well constitute trademark violation. Frankly, I'm surprised Google is even letting this go to court; they should probably have removed the ad and refunded the money.
I'll be curious to see how the court decides to allocate blame between Google and Axa's competitor. They may well decide the Google is only the (paid) messenger, and that Axa is picking on Google solely because that's where the money is. I'm afraid I don't know much about French courts.
Yeah, it does quite a bit. PEG is used in shampoos and drugs all the time to make them nice and goopy.
EG is toxic because it's metabolized by alcohol dehydrogenase to form glycolic acid, causing acidosis (too much acid in the bloodstream), or various other nasty downstream products. PEG isn't metabolized, so it's safe.
Thing is, I only listen to my portable when I run. That means that there's a lot of ambient noise, which means that good sound quality isn't worth it. So I record things at a really low bit rate (32 kbps for spoken-word files). You can fit a lot of stuff in a little space that way; I can put an 8-hour book on a teeny 128M device.
That's quite an insightful observation: I've never entirely understood why copyright is a property whose rights expire.
It's been suggested that the reason is that intellectual property isn't a right, but rather that ideas (not being physical objects) are community property and that the government establishes the fiction of property rights with a limited term to encourage people to innovate.
If so, IP rights are their own thing, and not bound by any other understanding of property. But there are important things one wants to ensure in your fiction of intellectual property, the most important being the right to trade it and protect it, at least during the term. Otherwise it has no value and the fiction is worthless.
Some would say that's good, and point to Linux as proof that people will innovate in the absence of special property protections. That's a complicated topic which we're sure as hell not going to solve in this forum.
Both ideas and implementation are difficult and important phases of invention. The ideas phase can often be done by people without money; the implementation usually requires investment. The goal of patents is to encourage everybody, not just those with money, to participate in the ideas phase, and provide a way for them to synch up with those in the implementation phase. By giving a patent to a person with an idea, those with money can't just take the idea; legally, they have to buy it.
(You do, of course, have to have the idea fully worked out before it's a saleable item; it's only the rarest ideas which can be considered truly novel without a detailed plan for implementation. The border between novel and not-novel is badly defined and very ugly.)
The same idea applies to copyright. I, as an author, can write a book, but it takes a publisher to actually make money with it, since it takes a lot of money to get a book published (editing, printing, distribution, advertising, and the monetary risk of the fact that all those things happen up front.) The author owns the copyright and sells it (or leases it) to the publisher in exchange for a cut of the sales of the physical books.
The law protects the copyright owner as owning property. Although it isn't like real property in every respect, it shares many common features: the right to sell it, the limitation on who may use it, the ability to sue if ownership is violated.
Such is the concept, at least. In practice, when the law gets involved, money talks. One can certainly quibble with the implementation, even to the point of declaring the flaws in implementation more important that the benefits, but I don't think the concept itself merits being called "bullshit".
The most interesting assertion in the article was that Pagerank was useless. He says Google's real win is its ability to cache a copy of the page and show you a summary including your search terms. I do use that a lot to quickly exclude irrelevant pages.
He said that his internal tests at Infoseek showed that pagerank didn't substantially improve the value of searches over simpler link analysis algorithms. I find that interesting, because I've worked with that algorithm and I know it's a stone bitch to compute.
He might well be right. I like Google over the other search engines because the interface is simple and clean, and I find it pleasant to use. I'm reminded of Donald Norman's book on Emotional Design, about how we can get really attached to things that work for us.
Google sells itself on pagerank, but at the very least it's insufficient against "search engine spam". If pagerank is less important than speed and utility, maybe I'll have something else programmed in to my Firefox seach bar. But not today.
The law was only the first step, authorizing various governmental organizations (like the FTC and the USSC) to come up with the actual regulations. Nothing happened on 1/1/2004 except that those agencies were authorized to begin work.
I'd expect there to be more spam. Is the tripling of spam in six months any faster than it had been? As more and more morons catch spamware, spam grows.
Will the law work? I dunno. There are all the various ways spammers hide (servers in other countries, open relays, relaybots), but many of them are in the US and will likely remain there. Computers are easy to move; people are not.
Personally, I'd hold off on declaring failure until at least one spammer has been sentenced under the guidelines, or it becomes apparent that the Justice Department isn't going to prosecute anybody. As spam is, it's not as obnoxious as a dirty bomb. It may be that spammers go unprosecuted not because of a lack of will, but a lack of time.
Interesting. I had the idea that some star was being used to help focus light from the planet, acting as a gravitational lens and giving us a better view of the planet.
Instead, the planet is lensing some star beyond it, and then (later) so is the star that planet is around, as the planet+star moves past the object being focused.
This shows up as two sharp spikes in the brightness of the star over time (I guess one on each side of the planet, imperfectly aligned?) and one broader curve as it passes the star. The shape of the curves tell you how massive the planet and star are.
It looks like it's about Jupiter's size and a bit nearer in than Jupiter. That's comforting; thus far the only planets we ever seem to detect are bigger than Jupiter and closer than Mercury, which really boggles my mind. This system looks a lot more like ours.
Neat. What will those clever astrophysicists think of next.
It wasn't going to take effect immediately. The law doesn't by itself stop spam, because it doesn't define spam. The law was only the first step.
The second step was for the FTC to define the rules more precisely, and this recent decision is part of that. This ruling makes it easier to go after a specific subset of spammers (those sending out pornographic spam.)
Pornographic spam presents different problems from plain old spam because just looking at it has what many people consider to be a negative effect. There's not much you can send me (34 year old childless male) that can shock me, but there's a lot of stuff I'd just as sure you'd not have your children seeing.
Neither the law nor the regulation actually stop spam, but they now make violations very explicit (as it were). The next step is to start taking violators to court. When violators are convicted and fined or sent to jail, THEN you might start seeing a decrease in spam.
Yeah, I know the usual counterarguments: offshore spammers, morons with relayware, etc. I'd like to see if solving part of the problem decreases spam and then, hopefully, allows regulatory and enforcement efforts to concentrate on what's left.
I'm still waiting for the FTC to issue its designated marking for general spam.
Re:The only way for the RIAA to die is by suicide
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Independent artists exist, many of them, but few are rich. It's hard to get really rich when you don't have a massive support organization making lots of money.
For the money the RIAA spends on one artist, we could fund 1,000 independent artists who would almost certianly make better music. And each of them would make 1/1,000th the total profit.
In fact, those artists are out there, and you've never heard of them. Yeah, you've probably heard of the ones local to your house, but you've never heard this great band in Minneapolis who... the point is, we're talking about the RIAA because you've heard of the RIAA, and the artists the RIAA supports.
There are some resources that are scarce. Not the artists, who are essentially free (if it's not your band it'll be any of ten thousand other bands) but the TV and radio airtime (for both ads and for the music itself), for billboards, for promotional tours. Even the front page of iTunes is a limited commodity. The commodities are limited and they help sell records. Which means that who spends the money, makes the money. That's the RIAA. Those things allow a few bands to get really rich, and a few executives to get really rich.
Who wants to hear it? Well, a lot of people, apparently. Not me, and not you, but an awful, awful lot of other people. So many, in fact, that the RIAA simply doesn't give a rat's ass what you want from music.
Nor do they care much about the independent artists. Let 'em produce, and let them collectively make 1% of the total money spent on music. If you don't think to look for them on iTunes, you don't buy their music. Simple as that.
Spamming is very impolite. The objections aren't really about electricity, or even bandwidth and disk space (for which the costs do begin to mount up) or even the time it takes (which can be a serious imposition.)
The core objection is about impoliteness. Spammers are _very_ impolite on am immense scale. A little bit of impoliteness annoys you. A person pumping out a million pieces of impoliteness an hour...well, that adds up to genuine rage. Especially when it is clear that he knows he is annoying you and hopes you don't care, which is the case with the guy hoping that v1@gr@ will slip past your spam filter.
There's a limit to how loud one is allowed to speak. Beyond that, one is disturbing the peace. A violation of politeness becomes a crime. It's unfortunate when we have to regulate politeness, and it's unfortunate that you can't play your stereo as loud as you'd like, but that's how we live together.
"Courtesy is the lubricant of social interaction," Heinlein said. Spammers are sand in those gears, and that grit is annoying out of proportion to how much actual damage it does.
Is violence justified? No, but I do have to keep reminding myself of that.
Re:LSD runs are out, train faster punk!
on
Running for Geeks
·
· Score: 1
I like to start out slow, and then taper off.
Seriously, I was never fast. I did spend one summer trying to qualify for Boston, training fast to run fast. In the actual race I died at mile 17, and missed the mark by a good half-hour. But I was on pace until mile 17. 'Course, that's where the race begins.
Maybe another year of the same training and I'd have it, but I decided to just deal with being a four-hour marathoner, and wait for the age grouping to catch up with me. Fifty-five, here I come! (In twenty years.)
The way I run, the running is the warmup. I'm a very slow runner. I've never had a problem with the stress on the body, but I do seem to be lucky that way. And that's even after knee surgery (from a fall during a frisbee game, not from running).
You're right that this is the wrong place for the usual flame war. That's for rec.running and rec.cycling. I cycle, too: I'm actually a triathlete.
The great thing about running is that it requires so little preparation. No tires to pump, no pool to drive to, no weights to buy. Just you and your shoes.
I come home and can be out the door, ready to run, in five minutes.
I permit myself one bit of tech: a walkman. In the current case, and actual Walkman-brand walkman, but I'm going to replace it with an MP3-type player. Since I only listen to books on tape, which sound just fine at 32 Kbps, you can fit an awful lot of stuff on an inexpensive player. Perfect for three-hour-long LSD runs. (LSD=Long Slow Distance).
I think that the rules are _very_ different. SpamAssassin has many contextual clues to tell you what spam is: not just the keywords, but the form of the email (HTML is very common), sending through an open relay, fake HELO, coming from a certain sender, URLs to known spam sites.
On those points, an email of interest looks just like any other email. Sure, the keywords are a start, but it leaves an awful lot of email to sort through. Far, far too much, I suspect.
At this point, using encrypted mail makes you stand out as somebody with something to hide. I don't believe that the NSA can easily break commercially-encrypted email, but I believe that if you give them cause to concentrate enough effort on your mail, they'll find a way. Especially since they can probably use various guessed-plaintext attacks. End every email with "Allah be praised" and you're pretty much toast.
Even if they can't break the encryption, the traffic analysis allows them to figure out who is talking to whom, and that allows them to direct other forms of intelligence gathering.
I've heard of small efforts to confuse and annoy the NSA by the regular use of encrypted email by people with nothing to hide, but such things are difficult to use at the moment, what with the key exchanges, the requirements to use particular mailers, and the fact that many people don't particularly want to participate in that little game, especially since it does leave you open to scrutiny.
Combine that with a previous poster's observation that terrorists are more thugs than criminal masterminds, and yeah, I suspect that most of these efforts (at least at the low levels) do in fact use plaintext email.
Not that that makes the NSA's life easy. There's an awful lot of email out there, and just looking for words like "bomb" in an email is going to be worthless.
This case, I suspect, probably started with one email address that they suspected to be used by a terrorist through some other form of intelligence. That allows them to narrow down the search space.
In other words, I doubt they have any techniques that allow them to take the entire firehose of email and sip out a manageable amount based just on the text. Which means that they're almost certainly not really reading your email, and you can include "I'm going to blow up the President" all you like without incurring the slightest notice, unless they've got some other bead on you already.
Which doesn't mean that they couldn't read your email, if they so chose. They're not allowed to, if you're in the United States, but the capability certainly exists. Which is the remarkable part of this story: them admitting the capability. I really don't know why.
Yeah, but both the man who appointed him was elected (as were the hundred people, mostly men, who confirmed the appointment). And according to the latest polls, it appears that the electorate is willing to re-elect the President.
So yeah, Ashcroft does come from the people, even if he wasn't directly elected. When the original poster refers to "these strict politicians", he means Bush and the 50+ Republican members of the Senate.
Footnote: Yes, Bush was elected. It was a close election, and the rules were followed to determine the winner. I'm not happy about the result, and I'm not happy about the rules, but we still have the rule of law in this country. When the divisions are that closely drawn, the result will always be unpleasant.
Actually, there was a skanky movie theater in my town where I walked up to get tickets for Episode I on opening day. When a theater is so bad that they can't even sell out for Episode I, back when there was still hope, you know it's not going to last much longer. Unfortunately, they've knocked down that theater and replaced it with a much more reputable hardware store.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I think the latest rendition of the deadline is around 2006. I think it was supposed to be 2003 at one point, but the networks pointed out that there weren't enough digital TVs for the change-over to work. Expect them to continue to make the same arguments.
If it does happen, then you should be able to buy adapters for your three color and two B&W TVs. I'm hoping it'll be fifty bucks (since it requires no more electronics than a cheap video card), but I bet it'll be closer to $75.
The Watchman, on the other hand, will probably be out of luck, since you're not going to carry around an adapter for it.
How many people actually get HDTV in their area, and how many channels?
Actually, nearly all of the networks in nearly all of the major markets are broadcasting HDTV. If you're not in a major market, coverage is far spottier, but a substantial fraction of the people in the US do live in a major market.
The number of people actually receiving the signals is pretty low, since the TVs are expensive, but the digital signal is there, in lower resolution. The actual high-definition content is pretty low, since it's expensive to produce (requiring new cameras and other equipment), and so people aren't buying the very pricey TVs. No content, no viewers; no viewers, no content.
It also doesn't help that we're still waiting on standards like high-definition DVDs. Supposedly that's busily being resolved. They're also finally starting to put out the high-definition content over cable wires (which many people in the major markets have) and satellite systems (which are immensely popular among people too far from a major market to get cable, and also among those who find the cable companies obnoxious).
Me, I'm waiting on a cheap digital-to-analog converter so I can watch the new signal on my old TV, since the signal is clearer than analog.
Look at it the other way: if the government were to declare that new TVs would have only 240 scan lines rather than 480, would your TV experience be substantially diminshed?
Picture quality does matter, especially as TVs get larger. It probably doesn't matter enough to junk an entire infrastructure, but this is a lot more about reclaiming bandwidth than it is about resolution. The new standard reclaims valuable spectrum and replaces it with a format that makes better use of the bandwidth.
Or alternatively, it's a way for the existing networks to grab additional bandwidth while fighting tooth-and-nail to keep from giving up the old one. Either way, the new picture is really, really pretty, when you can get it.
The value to be raised is "$2,718,281,828", or $1 billion times e. Cute.
Interesting point. How much of those 3,800 spams are "legal" spam (valid opt-out lists, non-falsified headers, snail-mail addresses) under the MAY-SPAM (er, CAN-SPAM) act?
Those spams are rather easy to filter out, but I suspect it is a fairly small number of those 3,800, and the least annoying ones (because the filters take care of it). This law addresses the illegal spams, which have taken pains to make themselves hard to filter.
Thus far nobody's been prosecuted, and it's only recently that the punishments have even been defined. You won't see any reduction of spam, or even significant conversion to "legal" spam, at least until this case is over.
Maybe a few convictions will throw enough of a scare into most of the remaining ones that they'll comply with the law and be filtered out. I'm a bit surprised they don't already: anybody smart enough to install a spam filter isn't going to buy your v1@gra, so save yourself the risk of prosecution. There appear to be more than enough fools left.
Then the really tricky part begins, dealing with the most malicious of spammers, the ones using hijacked computers, who are very hard to trace. I'm afraid such people will launch a DOS on the entire mail system, relaying so much random but non-commercial mail (maybe even just resending previously sent message to other people) to make it hard to filter out the intended message by hand. Only a moron would click through such a spam, but it appears that the Internet is populated by a sufficiency of morons.
And he should go back and reread the book, too. 1984 is about propaganda and thought-control, not privacy per se. The government in 1984 didn't just invade your privacy; it made you like it through manipulation of the language. It changed history, made you believe that less is more and black is white, and ultimately made itself the sole purveyor of truth. The invasion of privacy is a small matter after that.
Next time you come down to the US, could you bring us some of those cheap prescription drugs? No sense deadheading the trip down.
Strictly, they're not suing Google over the search. They're suing Google over the ad.
The difference is crucial. Google makes money directly from the sale of Axa's trademarked keyword. Google makes no money from the search itself. They've been sued over search results before, and won every single time, precisely because the search results are fair.
If Google had been asked to cease associating Axa's trademark with Axa's competitor, and refused, that may well constitute trademark violation. Frankly, I'm surprised Google is even letting this go to court; they should probably have removed the ad and refunded the money.
I'll be curious to see how the court decides to allocate blame between Google and Axa's competitor. They may well decide the Google is only the (paid) messenger, and that Axa is picking on Google solely because that's where the money is. I'm afraid I don't know much about French courts.
Yeah, it does quite a bit. PEG is used in shampoos and drugs all the time to make them nice and goopy.
EG is toxic because it's metabolized by alcohol dehydrogenase to form glycolic acid, causing acidosis (too much acid in the bloodstream), or various other nasty downstream products. PEG isn't metabolized, so it's safe.
Thing is, I only listen to my portable when I run. That means that there's a lot of ambient noise, which means that good sound quality isn't worth it. So I record things at a really low bit rate (32 kbps for spoken-word files). You can fit a lot of stuff in a little space that way; I can put an 8-hour book on a teeny 128M device.
That's quite an insightful observation: I've never entirely understood why copyright is a property whose rights expire.
It's been suggested that the reason is that intellectual property isn't a right, but rather that ideas (not being physical objects) are community property and that the government establishes the fiction of property rights with a limited term to encourage people to innovate.
If so, IP rights are their own thing, and not bound by any other understanding of property. But there are important things one wants to ensure in your fiction of intellectual property, the most important being the right to trade it and protect it, at least during the term. Otherwise it has no value and the fiction is worthless.
Some would say that's good, and point to Linux as proof that people will innovate in the absence of special property protections. That's a complicated topic which we're sure as hell not going to solve in this forum.
Both ideas and implementation are difficult and important phases of invention. The ideas phase can often be done by people without money; the implementation usually requires investment. The goal of patents is to encourage everybody, not just those with money, to participate in the ideas phase, and provide a way for them to synch up with those in the implementation phase. By giving a patent to a person with an idea, those with money can't just take the idea; legally, they have to buy it.
(You do, of course, have to have the idea fully worked out before it's a saleable item; it's only the rarest ideas which can be considered truly novel without a detailed plan for implementation. The border between novel and not-novel is badly defined and very ugly.)
The same idea applies to copyright. I, as an author, can write a book, but it takes a publisher to actually make money with it, since it takes a lot of money to get a book published (editing, printing, distribution, advertising, and the monetary risk of the fact that all those things happen up front.) The author owns the copyright and sells it (or leases it) to the publisher in exchange for a cut of the sales of the physical books.
The law protects the copyright owner as owning property. Although it isn't like real property in every respect, it shares many common features: the right to sell it, the limitation on who may use it, the ability to sue if ownership is violated.
Such is the concept, at least. In practice, when the law gets involved, money talks. One can certainly quibble with the implementation, even to the point of declaring the flaws in implementation more important that the benefits, but I don't think the concept itself merits being called "bullshit".
The most interesting assertion in the article was that Pagerank was useless. He says Google's real win is its ability to cache a copy of the page and show you a summary including your search terms. I do use that a lot to quickly exclude irrelevant pages.
He said that his internal tests at Infoseek showed that pagerank didn't substantially improve the value of searches over simpler link analysis algorithms. I find that interesting, because I've worked with that algorithm and I know it's a stone bitch to compute.
He might well be right. I like Google over the other search engines because the interface is simple and clean, and I find it pleasant to use. I'm reminded of Donald Norman's book on Emotional Design, about how we can get really attached to things that work for us.
Google sells itself on pagerank, but at the very least it's insufficient against "search engine spam". If pagerank is less important than speed and utility, maybe I'll have something else programmed in to my Firefox seach bar. But not today.
The law was only the first step, authorizing various governmental organizations (like the FTC and the USSC) to come up with the actual regulations. Nothing happened on 1/1/2004 except that those agencies were authorized to begin work.
I'd expect there to be more spam. Is the tripling of spam in six months any faster than it had been? As more and more morons catch spamware, spam grows.
Will the law work? I dunno. There are all the various ways spammers hide (servers in other countries, open relays, relaybots), but many of them are in the US and will likely remain there. Computers are easy to move; people are not.
Personally, I'd hold off on declaring failure until at least one spammer has been sentenced under the guidelines, or it becomes apparent that the Justice Department isn't going to prosecute anybody. As spam is, it's not as obnoxious as a dirty bomb. It may be that spammers go unprosecuted not because of a lack of will, but a lack of time.
Interesting. I had the idea that some star was being used to help focus light from the planet, acting as a gravitational lens and giving us a better view of the planet.
Instead, the planet is lensing some star beyond it, and then (later) so is the star that planet is around, as the planet+star moves past the object being focused.
This shows up as two sharp spikes in the brightness of the star over time (I guess one on each side of the planet, imperfectly aligned?) and one broader curve as it passes the star. The shape of the curves tell you how massive the planet and star are.
It looks like it's about Jupiter's size and a bit nearer in than Jupiter. That's comforting; thus far the only planets we ever seem to detect are bigger than Jupiter and closer than Mercury, which really boggles my mind. This system looks a lot more like ours.
Neat. What will those clever astrophysicists think of next.
It wasn't going to take effect immediately. The law doesn't by itself stop spam, because it doesn't define spam. The law was only the first step.
The second step was for the FTC to define the rules more precisely, and this recent decision is part of that. This ruling makes it easier to go after a specific subset of spammers (those sending out pornographic spam.)
Pornographic spam presents different problems from plain old spam because just looking at it has what many people consider to be a negative effect. There's not much you can send me (34 year old childless male) that can shock me, but there's a lot of stuff I'd just as sure you'd not have your children seeing.
Neither the law nor the regulation actually stop spam, but they now make violations very explicit (as it were). The next step is to start taking violators to court. When violators are convicted and fined or sent to jail, THEN you might start seeing a decrease in spam.
Yeah, I know the usual counterarguments: offshore spammers, morons with relayware, etc. I'd like to see if solving part of the problem decreases spam and then, hopefully, allows regulatory and enforcement efforts to concentrate on what's left.
I'm still waiting for the FTC to issue its designated marking for general spam.
Independent artists exist, many of them, but few are rich. It's hard to get really rich when you don't have a massive support organization making lots of money.
For the money the RIAA spends on one artist, we could fund 1,000 independent artists who would almost certianly make better music. And each of them would make 1/1,000th the total profit.
In fact, those artists are out there, and you've never heard of them. Yeah, you've probably heard of the ones local to your house, but you've never heard this great band in Minneapolis who... the point is, we're talking about the RIAA because you've heard of the RIAA, and the artists the RIAA supports.
There are some resources that are scarce. Not the artists, who are essentially free (if it's not your band it'll be any of ten thousand other bands) but the TV and radio airtime (for both ads and for the music itself), for billboards, for promotional tours. Even the front page of iTunes is a limited commodity. The commodities are limited and they help sell records. Which means that who spends the money, makes the money. That's the RIAA. Those things allow a few bands to get really rich, and a few executives to get really rich.
Who wants to hear it? Well, a lot of people, apparently. Not me, and not you, but an awful, awful lot of other people. So many, in fact, that the RIAA simply doesn't give a rat's ass what you want from music.
Nor do they care much about the independent artists. Let 'em produce, and let them collectively make 1% of the total money spent on music. If you don't think to look for them on iTunes, you don't buy their music. Simple as that.
Spamming is very impolite. The objections aren't really about electricity, or even bandwidth and disk space (for which the costs do begin to mount up) or even the time it takes (which can be a serious imposition.)
The core objection is about impoliteness. Spammers are _very_ impolite on am immense scale. A little bit of impoliteness annoys you. A person pumping out a million pieces of impoliteness an hour...well, that adds up to genuine rage. Especially when it is clear that he knows he is annoying you and hopes you don't care, which is the case with the guy hoping that v1@gr@ will slip past your spam filter.
There's a limit to how loud one is allowed to speak. Beyond that, one is disturbing the peace. A violation of politeness becomes a crime. It's unfortunate when we have to regulate politeness, and it's unfortunate that you can't play your stereo as loud as you'd like, but that's how we live together.
"Courtesy is the lubricant of social interaction," Heinlein said. Spammers are sand in those gears, and that grit is annoying out of proportion to how much actual damage it does.
Is violence justified? No, but I do have to keep reminding myself of that.
I like to start out slow, and then taper off.
Seriously, I was never fast. I did spend one summer trying to qualify for Boston, training fast to run fast. In the actual race I died at mile 17, and missed the mark by a good half-hour. But I was on pace until mile 17. 'Course, that's where the race begins.
Maybe another year of the same training and I'd have it, but I decided to just deal with being a four-hour marathoner, and wait for the age grouping to catch up with me. Fifty-five, here I come! (In twenty years.)
The way I run, the running is the warmup. I'm a very slow runner. I've never had a problem with the stress on the body, but I do seem to be lucky that way. And that's even after knee surgery (from a fall during a frisbee game, not from running).
You're right that this is the wrong place for the usual flame war. That's for rec.running and rec.cycling. I cycle, too: I'm actually a triathlete.
The great thing about running is that it requires so little preparation. No tires to pump, no pool to drive to, no weights to buy. Just you and your shoes.
I come home and can be out the door, ready to run, in five minutes.
I permit myself one bit of tech: a walkman. In the current case, and actual Walkman-brand walkman, but I'm going to replace it with an MP3-type player. Since I only listen to books on tape, which sound just fine at 32 Kbps, you can fit an awful lot of stuff on an inexpensive player. Perfect for three-hour-long LSD runs. (LSD=Long Slow Distance).
I think that the rules are _very_ different. SpamAssassin has many contextual clues to tell you what spam is: not just the keywords, but the form of the email (HTML is very common), sending through an open relay, fake HELO, coming from a certain sender, URLs to known spam sites.
On those points, an email of interest looks just like any other email. Sure, the keywords are a start, but it leaves an awful lot of email to sort through. Far, far too much, I suspect.
At this point, using encrypted mail makes you stand out as somebody with something to hide. I don't believe that the NSA can easily break commercially-encrypted email, but I believe that if you give them cause to concentrate enough effort on your mail, they'll find a way. Especially since they can probably use various guessed-plaintext attacks. End every email with "Allah be praised" and you're pretty much toast.
Even if they can't break the encryption, the traffic analysis allows them to figure out who is talking to whom, and that allows them to direct other forms of intelligence gathering.
I've heard of small efforts to confuse and annoy the NSA by the regular use of encrypted email by people with nothing to hide, but such things are difficult to use at the moment, what with the key exchanges, the requirements to use particular mailers, and the fact that many people don't particularly want to participate in that little game, especially since it does leave you open to scrutiny.
Combine that with a previous poster's observation that terrorists are more thugs than criminal masterminds, and yeah, I suspect that most of these efforts (at least at the low levels) do in fact use plaintext email.
Not that that makes the NSA's life easy. There's an awful lot of email out there, and just looking for words like "bomb" in an email is going to be worthless.
This case, I suspect, probably started with one email address that they suspected to be used by a terrorist through some other form of intelligence. That allows them to narrow down the search space.
In other words, I doubt they have any techniques that allow them to take the entire firehose of email and sip out a manageable amount based just on the text. Which means that they're almost certainly not really reading your email, and you can include "I'm going to blow up the President" all you like without incurring the slightest notice, unless they've got some other bead on you already.
Which doesn't mean that they couldn't read your email, if they so chose. They're not allowed to, if you're in the United States, but the capability certainly exists. Which is the remarkable part of this story: them admitting the capability. I really don't know why.
Yeah, but both the man who appointed him was elected (as were the hundred people, mostly men, who confirmed the appointment). And according to the latest polls, it appears that the electorate is willing to re-elect the President.
So yeah, Ashcroft does come from the people, even if he wasn't directly elected. When the original poster refers to "these strict politicians", he means Bush and the 50+ Republican members of the Senate.
Footnote: Yes, Bush was elected. It was a close election, and the rules were followed to determine the winner. I'm not happy about the result, and I'm not happy about the rules, but we still have the rule of law in this country. When the divisions are that closely drawn, the result will always be unpleasant.
Actually, there was a skanky movie theater in my town where I walked up to get tickets for Episode I on opening day. When a theater is so bad that they can't even sell out for Episode I, back when there was still hope, you know it's not going to last much longer. Unfortunately, they've knocked down that theater and replaced it with a much more reputable hardware store.