It's only 5 pages long and generously spaced, so it shouldn't take you long (on the off chance you'd rather read the actual bill rather than than just arguing based on the posting.)
The article doesn't mention mascara, only the Slashdot posting. As another commenter said, I think it's just color for the post, at the expense of accuracy.
I hope we're not sending makeup into space. It's not so much for the weight (it takes a lot of mascara to equal a teddy bear) but for the personalities. Makeup is a mask. It doesn't just make you beautiful. It allows you to paint your own face and present the face you want.
Which works fine here on earth, but when you spend all day every day with a crew, you'd better take off the masks early or you're going to get very cranky keeping them on all the time.
The odds of it happening twice in the same solar system strain credibility.
I wouldn't go that far. The odds on the particular reactions occuring at any given time are low, but we're talking about extraordinary time scales: hundreds of millions or billions of years. Even very unlikely things happen several times during a period that long.
The trick with life processes is that once it happens, it tends to replicate, so it "sticks". Once you have life, it's really, really hard to get rid of it entirely. That's one unique feature of life that makes it distinct from non-living processes. (The other is change, the key element of evolution and distinct from, say, growing crystals, but the exact defintion of life isn't the purpose here.)
None of this comprises proof, of course. Working out the exact odds involves way too many assumptions for me (or anybody else) to be specific. But it does not, to me, strain credibility that somewhere in the hundred-million-year history of "wet Mars", the reactions that kick off life to have started.
Nor does it conclusively rule out intelligent creation or many of the other competing theories. But the discovery of some sort of life on Mars would tend to suggest that evolutionary theory has good explanatory power, which is all you can ask of a theory.
Actually, it is related. One of the reasons given in the article is that coins don't always actually flip, even if precession makes it look like they do.
I've actually been a devoted Kernighanist my whole life, but I have nothing against the Plaugerists. We might join together in our fight against the Ritchieists!
To be slashdotted, you really need to have the link in the main story, because an awful lot of people really do try to RT(F)A. You don't get slashdotted just because you're in somebody's comment, even a well-moderated one.
I was in a Maryland high school the other day, and there was a pile of black containers labeled "Diebold" addressed to the voting board, sitting unattended in the cafeteria.
Each case was held closed by a wire lockout, available only to those elite groups who receive electrical supply catalogs.
I of course chose not to mess with them. Any come-from-behind victory I make on Tuesday will be purely coincidental.
Actually, the articles you cite go to his point. "new security flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer which could let hackers..."
"A security hole in Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer could prove devastating."
"7 new security holes for Internet Explorer have been discovered by a Chinese researcher; however, there apparantly aren't any attacks on IE yet."
He's not saying that there aren't flaws in IE; he's saying that the flaws are discovered by researchers and patches released before exploits are done. At which point he's blaming you for failing to upgrade.
The skepticism of most articles in this thread appears to be well justified with respect to Outlook, though these days the "bugs" are more human interface issues where people are a crucial element of the infection loop: you can't be infected without pushing a button.
I do not have the complete history of IE bugs at my disposal, but I'm pretty sure at least one IE bug has been exploited before a patch was released. However, the articles you cite don't demonstrate that.
I'm not trying to justify MS's security approach. Blaming the user who fails to upgrade is tacky and bad. Even blaming the user who clicks on a virus-ridden attachment is putting the blame in the wrong place, and I'd like to see MS do something about that. So overall this article is rather a non-starter, but it's not actually a lie, at least not that I've seen so far.
I would have to look into her work more deeply to put it into context, but I found her answer to this question insulting. Politics aside, she was asked a serious and important question, and she responded with a bit of propaganda having essentially nothing to do with the question.
I can't imagine why even Wired would run the response, except for the general concept among some artists that "if you can't outthink, outrage." I'm an artist myself and I hate when others in my field make it difficult for people to take me seriously.
It seems to me that when stores were first invented, the earliest proto-Slashdotters looked at the cash register and said, "Why not just stuff the object in your purse and walk out with it?" The goal is to (a) keep honest people honest, and (b) make violators identify themselves to those who happen to be looking.
If you wish to rip the RFID tag off a can of Spaghetti-Os, you may just just earn yourself a free lunch. With a bit of luck you may win yourself a whole lot of canned, bright-orange pasta. And then the store security will observe you tearing off the tag and you'll have a very, very unpleasant talk with the police. Store managers have a tendency to call police even on small violators.
The goal here is to provide a convenience to the 99% of people who would love to get out of the store faster while simultaneously saving money both on checkout and inventory, AND reducing "shrinkage".
It's hardly perfect, especially with the privacy concerns. RFID tags should be easily removeable because once they've left the store, their job is done, but not so easy as to encourage shoplifting.
I wonder if they'll start selling produce by the item rather than by the pound.
Sure, you can reverse engineer it. But is it worth the effort?
Most of the time it's not even worth reverse engineering unencrypted code, because it's really hard. There are open source projects that go undone because people don't want to expend the effort.
The trick is not to make it impossible, but to make it hard enough that it isn't done. That level is different for different projects, but it's always finite.
I'd love to see if they could reproduce food smells with any kind of fidelity, but I doubt it. You have only three kinds of color receptors, and one kind of sound receptor, but hundreds or thousands of odor receptors. Smell is really, really complicated, and I suspect you'd have to use this in applications where you were making up your own scents rather than reproducing existing ones.
And I certainly hope that your mailer doesn't automatically start playing any smell that comes in over the net, any more than you'd let it run any application.
Well, it would be kind of interesting to add a smell factor to first-person-shooters. "Look out, I smell bad guys", or "I think there's some food over that way."
Artistically, an accompanying scent would serve the same purpose as a soundtrack: to set a mood. The smell of smoke and ozone would be a cool accompaniment to an FPS. Or putting a bit of perfume on a love letter: a distinctive aroma can be highly evocative.
Admittedly, I'm not paying $300 for either of those things.
It depends, I'd say, on just how much those schools really need, or want, those disks.
If these disks were like textbooks, and it saves the schools $5.6M in costs that they'd have to pay anyway, then it really is worth something to the schools and, simultaneously, costs the RIAA money that they would have had coming in. The language CDs by Pimsleur, for example, are expensive but worth the money.
On the other hand, if these are a bunch of remaindered country-funk-ska-polka CDs that are primarily saving the RIAA the cost of shipping them to a landfill, then this really sucks. Even if it's just a bunch of current popular music it could well be a waste, since these CDs will be gathering dust and not fulfilling any real educational mission.
Excellent question, and I really don't know. Robert Heinlein said that the answer to any question beginning with "Why don't they..." is "Money". I guess no local prosecutor has the funds to go after a porn spammer.
I'd contribute to a fund to pay his salary. I'm all in favor of porn, but porn spam is noxious.
Those small "there is a message for you" messages can still be sent by spammers, of course. It decreases some of storage load on your mail server by carrying only small messages, but to distinguish the real message from spam you'd still have to fetch the message. Though I suppose you could save yourself some effort if you can separate spam based solely on the postcard information (e.g. if it comes from known spammers).
What you describe is somewhat similar to using RSS to distribute news. Instead of emailing news out to everybody who subscribes, they poll a central site (not dissimilar to a POP server, except that they maintain it rather than you).
That works for large news feeds, but it would be impractical for me to poll each of my friends every few minutes. Thus, the postcards you describe. Interesting. I'll have to give it more thought.
Seconded. Much of the most obnoxious spam is associated with things that are already crimes. Finding a fraudster from an email is difficult, but certainly not impossible. A certain number of well-publicized prosecutions may cut into the number of spammers substantially.
The MAY^H^H^HCAN-SPAM act should cover a certain othe fraction, such as spam trying to drive web site traffic, particularly to porn sites. That is marketing rather than fraud, and legal in and of itself, except that it's very, very distasteful and (under the new law) illegal.
It may be illegal under pornography statues as well, if you can prove that it was sent to minors (which shouldn't be hard), but it may be more effective to prosecute it under the new law to put some teeth into it.
After that, we can start worrying about the legal spam: companies marketing legitimate products. I care a lot less about Black and Decker telling everybody in the world about their new band saw, interested or not, than in pornographic or fraudulent spam. Especially the kind that goes to deliberate lengths to circumvent my filters.
The data exists, whether you like it or not. Your ISP knows who you email, and who emails you. As long as it bills you, it has some sort of meatspace link back to you. I'm not sure if it's legal for them to be saving that data, but I suspect that it is. Encrypting the contents of your messages is easy, but developing truly anonymous drop-boxes relies on trust.
Even anonymizing services leave some traces to you: they can record your IP address. Access it from home or the office and you can be traced. It all depends on just how hard the governments wish to work.
I monitor several info@... addresses, which receive mail on spec. Such addresses can't afford whitelists. Unfortunately, these addresses are also generally posted to web sites where they can be scraped. (I'm currently experimenting with putting them up as images, which is inconvenient and probably costs me business, but I'll see what kind of feedback I get.)
I use Bayes filters on these addresses, they do a pretty good job, though hardly perfect. I would be interested in a technique that halved the spam and halved the false-positives. (Though I doubt it would be quite that high.)
It is, as you point out, only a band-aid, but a band-aid keeps you from bleeding while serious medical help arrives. (OK, the analogy sucks, but you get the gist.) I have high hopes for serious help some day (SPF, prosecution of the MAY^H^H^HCAN-SPAM act, various payment systems), but in the meantime I'll take partial solutions.
As another poster pointed out, SpamAssassin should look into this.
However, the difference between SpamAssassin and an ISP is that SpamAssassin usually gets only incoming emails. My emails to you don't necessarily go through SA unless you also happen to subscribe. Perhaps SA could offer an authenticated, SPF'ed SMTP server (which would have other advantages for whitelisting, too) to individuals and small businesses whose ISPs don't participate.
Of course, at that point the line between SpamAssassin and the ISPs begins to blur.
Slashdot Mirror
I accidentally linked to an otherwise fascinating bill awarding congressional gold medal to Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. The correct links:
Text
PDF
The actual text of the bill.
And in PDF
It's only 5 pages long and generously spaced, so it shouldn't take you long (on the off chance you'd rather read the actual bill rather than than just arguing based on the posting.)
I can't top it, but man, reading all of the griping about the price of _laptop_ RAM was starting to make me feel OLD. Glad I'm not the only one.
Good point. I'd forgotten the publicity angle.
The article doesn't mention mascara, only the Slashdot posting. As another commenter said, I think it's just color for the post, at the expense of accuracy.
I hope we're not sending makeup into space. It's not so much for the weight (it takes a lot of mascara to equal a teddy bear) but for the personalities. Makeup is a mask. It doesn't just make you beautiful. It allows you to paint your own face and present the face you want.
Which works fine here on earth, but when you spend all day every day with a crew, you'd better take off the masks early or you're going to get very cranky keeping them on all the time.
The odds of it happening twice in the same solar system strain credibility.
I wouldn't go that far. The odds on the particular reactions occuring at any given time are low, but we're talking about extraordinary time scales: hundreds of millions or billions of years. Even very unlikely things happen several times during a period that long.
The trick with life processes is that once it happens, it tends to replicate, so it "sticks". Once you have life, it's really, really hard to get rid of it entirely. That's one unique feature of life that makes it distinct from non-living processes. (The other is change, the key element of evolution and distinct from, say, growing crystals, but the exact defintion of life isn't the purpose here.)
None of this comprises proof, of course. Working out the exact odds involves way too many assumptions for me (or anybody else) to be specific. But it does not, to me, strain credibility that somewhere in the hundred-million-year history of "wet Mars", the reactions that kick off life to have started.
Nor does it conclusively rule out intelligent creation or many of the other competing theories. But the discovery of some sort of life on Mars would tend to suggest that evolutionary theory has good explanatory power, which is all you can ask of a theory.
Actually, it is related. One of the reasons given in the article is that coins don't always actually flip, even if precession makes it look like they do.
I've actually been a devoted Kernighanist my whole life, but I have nothing against the Plaugerists. We might join together in our fight against the Ritchieists!
To be slashdotted, you really need to have the link in the main story, because an awful lot of people really do try to RT(F)A. You don't get slashdotted just because you're in somebody's comment, even a well-moderated one.
I was in a Maryland high school the other day, and there was a pile of black containers labeled "Diebold" addressed to the voting board, sitting unattended in the cafeteria.
Each case was held closed by a wire lockout, available only to those elite groups who receive electrical supply catalogs.
I of course chose not to mess with them. Any come-from-behind victory I make on Tuesday will be purely coincidental.
Actually, the articles you cite go to his point. "new security flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer which could let hackers..."
"A security hole in Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer could prove devastating."
"7 new security holes for Internet Explorer have been discovered by a Chinese researcher; however, there apparantly aren't any attacks on IE yet."
He's not saying that there aren't flaws in IE; he's saying that the flaws are discovered by researchers and patches released before exploits are done. At which point he's blaming you for failing to upgrade.
The skepticism of most articles in this thread appears to be well justified with respect to Outlook, though these days the "bugs" are more human interface issues where people are a crucial element of the infection loop: you can't be infected without pushing a button.
I do not have the complete history of IE bugs at my disposal, but I'm pretty sure at least one IE bug has been exploited before a patch was released. However, the articles you cite don't demonstrate that.
I'm not trying to justify MS's security approach. Blaming the user who fails to upgrade is tacky and bad. Even blaming the user who clicks on a virus-ridden attachment is putting the blame in the wrong place, and I'd like to see MS do something about that. So overall this article is rather a non-starter, but it's not actually a lie, at least not that I've seen so far.
I would have to look into her work more deeply to put it into context, but I found her answer to this question insulting. Politics aside, she was asked a serious and important question, and she responded with a bit of propaganda having essentially nothing to do with the question.
I can't imagine why even Wired would run the response, except for the general concept among some artists that "if you can't outthink, outrage." I'm an artist myself and I hate when others in my field make it difficult for people to take me seriously.
It shouldn't have taken so long, but they claim that it's coming.
Because they can catch you doing it.
It seems to me that when stores were first invented, the earliest proto-Slashdotters looked at the cash register and said, "Why not just stuff the object in your purse and walk out with it?" The goal is to (a) keep honest people honest, and (b) make violators identify themselves to those who happen to be looking.
If you wish to rip the RFID tag off a can of Spaghetti-Os, you may just just earn yourself a free lunch. With a bit of luck you may win yourself a whole lot of canned, bright-orange pasta. And then the store security will observe you tearing off the tag and you'll have a very, very unpleasant talk with the police. Store managers have a tendency to call police even on small violators.
The goal here is to provide a convenience to the 99% of people who would love to get out of the store faster while simultaneously saving money both on checkout and inventory, AND reducing "shrinkage".
It's hardly perfect, especially with the privacy concerns. RFID tags should be easily removeable because once they've left the store, their job is done, but not so easy as to encourage shoplifting.
I wonder if they'll start selling produce by the item rather than by the pound.
Sure, you can reverse engineer it. But is it worth the effort?
Most of the time it's not even worth reverse engineering unencrypted code, because it's really hard. There are open source projects that go undone because people don't want to expend the effort.
The trick is not to make it impossible, but to make it hard enough that it isn't done. That level is different for different projects, but it's always finite.
I'd love to see if they could reproduce food smells with any kind of fidelity, but I doubt it. You have only three kinds of color receptors, and one kind of sound receptor, but hundreds or thousands of odor receptors. Smell is really, really complicated, and I suspect you'd have to use this in applications where you were making up your own scents rather than reproducing existing ones.
And I certainly hope that your mailer doesn't automatically start playing any smell that comes in over the net, any more than you'd let it run any application.
Sadly, the realaroma.com site is down, but the wayback machine still has it.
The picture of the SmellU-SmellMe software is priceless.
Good lord, does this really date to 1996? "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." -- T.S. Eliot.
Well, it would be kind of interesting to add a smell factor to first-person-shooters. "Look out, I smell bad guys", or "I think there's some food over that way."
Artistically, an accompanying scent would serve the same purpose as a soundtrack: to set a mood. The smell of smoke and ozone would be a cool accompaniment to an FPS. Or putting a bit of perfume on a love letter: a distinctive aroma can be highly evocative.
Admittedly, I'm not paying $300 for either of those things.
It depends, I'd say, on just how much those schools really need, or want, those disks.
If these disks were like textbooks, and it saves the schools $5.6M in costs that they'd have to pay anyway, then it really is worth something to the schools and, simultaneously, costs the RIAA money that they would have had coming in. The language CDs by Pimsleur, for example, are expensive but worth the money.
On the other hand, if these are a bunch of remaindered country-funk-ska-polka CDs that are primarily saving the RIAA the cost of shipping them to a landfill, then this really sucks. Even if it's just a bunch of current popular music it could well be a waste, since these CDs will be gathering dust and not fulfilling any real educational mission.
Excellent question, and I really don't know. Robert Heinlein said that the answer to any question beginning with "Why don't they..." is "Money". I guess no local prosecutor has the funds to go after a porn spammer.
I'd contribute to a fund to pay his salary. I'm all in favor of porn, but porn spam is noxious.
Those small "there is a message for you" messages can still be sent by spammers, of course. It decreases some of storage load on your mail server by carrying only small messages, but to distinguish the real message from spam you'd still have to fetch the message. Though I suppose you could save yourself some effort if you can separate spam based solely on the postcard information (e.g. if it comes from known spammers).
What you describe is somewhat similar to using RSS to distribute news. Instead of emailing news out to everybody who subscribes, they poll a central site (not dissimilar to a POP server, except that they maintain it rather than you).
That works for large news feeds, but it would be impractical for me to poll each of my friends every few minutes. Thus, the postcards you describe. Interesting. I'll have to give it more thought.
Seconded. Much of the most obnoxious spam is associated with things that are already crimes. Finding a fraudster from an email is difficult, but certainly not impossible. A certain number of well-publicized prosecutions may cut into the number of spammers substantially.
The MAY^H^H^HCAN-SPAM act should cover a certain othe fraction, such as spam trying to drive web site traffic, particularly to porn sites. That is marketing rather than fraud, and legal in and of itself, except that it's very, very distasteful and (under the new law) illegal.
It may be illegal under pornography statues as well, if you can prove that it was sent to minors (which shouldn't be hard), but it may be more effective to prosecute it under the new law to put some teeth into it.
After that, we can start worrying about the legal spam: companies marketing legitimate products. I care a lot less about Black and Decker telling everybody in the world about their new band saw, interested or not, than in pornographic or fraudulent spam. Especially the kind that goes to deliberate lengths to circumvent my filters.
The data exists, whether you like it or not. Your ISP knows who you email, and who emails you. As long as it bills you, it has some sort of meatspace link back to you. I'm not sure if it's legal for them to be saving that data, but I suspect that it is. Encrypting the contents of your messages is easy, but developing truly anonymous drop-boxes relies on trust.
Even anonymizing services leave some traces to you: they can record your IP address. Access it from home or the office and you can be traced. It all depends on just how hard the governments wish to work.
I monitor several info@... addresses, which receive mail on spec. Such addresses can't afford whitelists. Unfortunately, these addresses are also generally posted to web sites where they can be scraped. (I'm currently experimenting with putting them up as images, which is inconvenient and probably costs me business, but I'll see what kind of feedback I get.)
I use Bayes filters on these addresses, they do a pretty good job, though hardly perfect. I would be interested in a technique that halved the spam and halved the false-positives. (Though I doubt it would be quite that high.)
It is, as you point out, only a band-aid, but a band-aid keeps you from bleeding while serious medical help arrives. (OK, the analogy sucks, but you get the gist.) I have high hopes for serious help some day (SPF, prosecution of the MAY^H^H^HCAN-SPAM act, various payment systems), but in the meantime I'll take partial solutions.
As another poster pointed out, SpamAssassin should look into this.
However, the difference between SpamAssassin and an ISP is that SpamAssassin usually gets only incoming emails. My emails to you don't necessarily go through SA unless you also happen to subscribe. Perhaps SA could offer an authenticated, SPF'ed SMTP server (which would have other advantages for whitelisting, too) to individuals and small businesses whose ISPs don't participate.
Of course, at that point the line between SpamAssassin and the ISPs begins to blur.