I've actually been thinking about switching to longer URLs for my own blog. I'm currently using numerical filenames, because it seemed simpler at the time, but the number is basically meaningless to any human looking at the URL. Links within my site always have title tags, but every once in awhile I'll send somebody the URL to one of my blog entries, and it would be nice to see at a glance which entry it is (in case you've read it already).
Churches are tax-exempt for the same reason that other non-profit organizations are tax-exempt, and they're bound by the same laws. Among the restrictions are that a church can't tell its members who to vote for (although they can make publications available that do endorse particular candidates). If you catch a church breaking that rule, report it to the IRS. They'll lose their tax-exempt status.
Gays and people of other religions aren't any more evil than the rest of us, and shouldn't be treated as though they are. They're sinners, but so are the rest of us. In Jesus' day, everybody thought tax collectors were evil, and how did Jesus treat them? He didn't stir up an angry mob, he came over for lunch. People hated the Samaritans; Jesus told a story in which a Samaritan behaved better than a priest.
A Masters in Biblical Studies isn't an imaginary degree; it requires two years of post-graduate study. Here's a list of 81 accredited colleges around the United States that offer that degree.
Well put. I have a friend in that business, and she's told me it's often not very pleasant. Some clients are even abusive. Apparently it pays pretty good though.
Another version of this showed a picture of the Apple campus in Cupertino with a flag blowing in the wind; moving the mouse would change the wind direction and it was possible to get the flag to fly off the flag pole.
Part of the code for this was hidden in the Drag & Drop library (in the Extensions folder, I don't remember the exact name), and I believe part of it was in QuickTime.
Right there, in the "holy" scripture. Errors and goof-ups a 9-year-old would not do.
You've been listening to people who don't know what they're talking about. The Bible is thousands of years old, and understanding all the details is non-trivial; you have to look at the historical context in which it was written, and consider that the very languages it was written in have evolved over time (as all languages do). Yes, the Bible says a lot of things that might look like errors at first glance (pi equals three, bats are birds, insects have four legs!) but the explanations for these are fairly obvious.
Try talking to somebody who has actually studied the Bible in an academic setting, and ask them about your supposed "errors and goof-ups". There are degrees for that sort of thing, you know.
That's part of the problem - I realize that that particular set of questions you ended up with is too complicated for a normal person to figure out easily, but for a computer program running on a botnet, this wouldn't even slow it down that much. If all your program does is identify the six names in the clues, and tries two at random, you've got an 8.3% chance of stumbling on the right answer by sheer coincidence. Multiply that by 100,000 bots, and you can sign up for over 8,000 new accounts on whatever service this thing is supposed to be protecting.
I intend to introduce some more interesting questions, but... it's really hard to come up with good ones.
You happened to hit upon two process-of-elimination questions.
The three women are Lisa, Christine and Lindsay; Lisa and Lindsay are wearing black and brown shirts respectively. Therefore, the correct answer must be Christine.
The three men are Luke, Simon and Steve. Simon and Steve are wearing orange and red shirts respectively, so the correct answer must be Luke.
That Luke happens to also be a ship captain and Christine is lazy are irrelevant data.
If you reload the page, you'll get completely new questions which may be easier to solve.
You seem to have misread my comment. Yes, of course you can prove that the sun exists, but existence alone is not reason for worship. You cannot prove that the sun has intelligence or will; THAT belief must be held on faith, and without that, the sun is clearly not worthy of worship, even though we all know it exists.
You know, I've been wondering - doesn't Sun worship really make the most sense of pretty much any religion?
Unlike Jehova, I can actually prove that the sun is the source of all life on this planet, that it nourishes and sustains me and other living things, and that the world will end because of its actions.
We like to make fun of prehistoric religions, but sometimes I think they're actually pretty rational.
However, do you ascribe any intelligence to the sun? You say the world will end because of its actions, but does the sun actually choose what those actions will be, or is the sun just another player in the grand scheme of things? If the sun has no intelligence or will, it may still deserve our respect, but it does not merit our worship.
You can't prove that Jehovah is the source of all life on this planet, but you also can't prove the sun has intelligence or will. Either belief must be held on faith, therefore, and faith in the sun makes no more sense than faith in Jehovah.
It's not pretty. Essentially there's a big list of subroutines to generate different kinds of questions based on the data I've entered. Here are three subroutines that generate questions related to colors, in three different ways:
sub {
# colors 1
my @Color=GetColor();
my $cname=shift @Color; # name of color
my $cdesc=PickOne(\@Color); # description
AddQuestion("Which $gender is wearing something the color of ".PickOne(\@Color)."?",$name);
AddClue("$name is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList,$cname));
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList,(GetColor())[0]));
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList,(GetColor())[0]));
},
sub {
# colors 2
my @Color=GetColor();
my $cname=shift @Color; # name of color
my $cdesc=PickOne(\@Color); # description
AddQuestion("Which $gender is wearing something $cname?",$name);
AddClue("$name is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList)." the color of $cdesc");
@Color=GetColor();
$cname=shift @Color;
$cdesc=PickOne(\@Color);
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList)." the color of $cdesc");
@Color=GetColor();
$cname=shift @Color;
$cdesc=PickOne(\@Color);
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList)." the color of $cdesc");
},
sub {
# colors 3: one person is doing something irrelevant, the other two wear the wrong color shirts
# ISSUE: police officer is wearing a red shirt? Not a great combination.
my @Color=GetColor();
my $cname=shift @Color; # name of color
my $cdesc=PickOne(\@Color); # description
AddQuestion("Which $gender is wearing a shirt the color of $cdesc?",$name);
AddClue(Any("$name is $job","$name is $singledesc","$name ".PickOne(\@actions)));
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing(["a _shirt"],(GetColor())[0]));
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing(["a _shirt"],(GetColor())[0]));
},
What if we used this idea--that the computers can't come up with questions which are intuitive for humans-- to solve the captcha problem?
Uhhh... what?
CAPTCHAs have to be generated by a computer, AND have the answer verified by a computer. Otherwise there's too much human interaction needed and it doesn't scale up. You can't ask your visitors to come up with an intuitive question that a computer can't answer but a human can, because you have no way to evaluate their submission without manually checking each one (in theory you could test whether a computer could answer it, but you can't test whether a human could answer it).
...until AI gets smart enough to answer questions intuitively.
It's REALLY HARD to automatically generate random questions that an average human can answer easily, but that current AI technology can't answer just as easily. Of course you can come up with questions yourself, and compile a list of them, but if you've only got a list of a hundred questions, then all the spammer has to do is figure out the answers to your hundred questions, and then he has free reign to do whatever he wants. Or, come up with the answer to ONE of them, and he has free reign to do whatever he wants at 1% the speed he could otherwise, which is still a hell of a lot of spam.
If you don't believe me, you try writing software that will generate random questions. Here's my stab at it, which would barely slow a spammer down.
I have suggested a solution more times than I care to count:
There's your first clue that maybe your solution isn't the be-all-end-all you think it is.
impose default caps on sent emails per account, IP, whatever, until the sender has been established as a legit sender of mass mails.
OK, but who are you suggesting should impose these default caps? ISPs? That's fine, but the only way an ISP can do this is by firewalling outbound port 25 and requiring all their customers to relay mail through the ISP's mail server. A lot of ISPs do this and I wish more of them would, but it can cause problems for customers (if you're required to relay through your company's SMTP server instead and they haven't configured an alternate port such as 587, or if the ISP's SMTP server is poorly configured/overloaded/hacked/broken, then the user can't send mail and the resulting customer service calls are pretty expensive for the ISP and could drive the customer to leave).
On top of that, a lot of people are migrating away from traditional POP3/IMAP/SMTP e-mail accounts, and just using webmail services instead. Webmail services, of course, can impose all kinds of limits on the activities of their users, but these limits only make sense on a per-account basis. You can't put limits on the number of messages sent from one IP address regardless of who's logged in, because there could be 300 different users all connecting through a proxy server on one IP, and you have no way to tell the difference.
So, you have to limit each account. But a spammer can easily sign up for multiple accounts, using an automated program! Then they can get around your restrictions, by logging in on 300 different accounts and sending one e-mail from each of them. How do you prevent this?
This is why we have a separation of powers. It's not just "the government", it's the legislative branch, and NOT the executive. Congress makes the laws; the President cannot. Also, any law passed by Congress that violates the Constitution can be struck down by the Supreme Court, if they want to, which in this case they unfortunately don't.
A lot of them would, if they understood what was happening, but they're uninformed.
And a lot of them wouldn't see a problem with it at all. Because so many on both sides don't understand the issue, it's difficult to guess how people would think about it if they did.
Just imagine, it could be cheaper to buy a netbook with Windows, and then use the Windows license on your full-powered PC
Except, of course, that Windows OEM licenses are not transferrable between machines, so you can't legally run the copy of Windows that came with your netbook on anything other than the netbook it came with.
Star Wars had a lot of fantasy elements like magic, knights, trolls, princesses, etc, and had a lot less scientific jargon than something like Star Trek. I would still consider Star Wars a blend of sci fi and fantasy, but definitely more in the future fantasy camp.
Star Wars also had lightsabers, blasters, giant robot walker things, space ships that can jump to hyperspace, a planet in a binary system where moisture farming is a legitimate occupation, an army of clones let by an evil villain kept alive by the technology in his suit, and let's not forget all the droids. Oh, and it didn't really have trolls in the fantasy sense, it had aliens. But the Force is definitely a fantasy thing, not a sci-fi thing (midichlorians be damned); I'll grant you that.
The great thing about Star Wars was that all the technological stuff wasn't pristine and shiny, it was old and beat-up. The droids each have a function and serve a purpose (although C3PO never seemed especially useful). Futuristic technology was used as common tools, rather than something impressive to be marveled at. This, combined with a non-futuristic musical score, shifted the focus away from the technology and to the story, which is what great science fiction is about anyway.
No matter how advanced a civilization is, their space fighter's engines won't make noise in vacuum nor will move like an atmospheric plane.
You know, very few sci-fi TV shows get this right. Firefly did. Stargate SG-1 occasionally tried (they didn't have that many space battles, but although I remember a few times when they tried to get it right, they often didn't). Babylon 5 made a deliberate choice to have sounds for dramatic effect, but they were VERY good at paying attention to physics otherwise.
On the other hand, it *can't* be sci-fi. All we know sci-fi is about the future, while Star Wars is about a long time ago, in a far far distant galaxy (grin).
That would rule out Stargate as well, since that's set in the present.
Bonjour is great, but what you've suggested doesn't meet his needs at all. One of the stated requirements is that there MUST be centralized logging of all conversations, and what you've proposed is direct client-to-client chats with no centralized server.
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually been thinking about switching to longer URLs for my own blog. I'm currently using numerical filenames, because it seemed simpler at the time, but the number is basically meaningless to any human looking at the URL. Links within my site always have title tags, but every once in awhile I'll send somebody the URL to one of my blog entries, and it would be nice to see at a glance which entry it is (in case you've read it already).
To hell with Twitter. :-P
You seem to have confused "Biblical scholars" with "corrupt politicians". Jesus didn't like them either.
Churches are tax-exempt for the same reason that other non-profit organizations are tax-exempt, and they're bound by the same laws. Among the restrictions are that a church can't tell its members who to vote for (although they can make publications available that do endorse particular candidates). If you catch a church breaking that rule, report it to the IRS. They'll lose their tax-exempt status.
Gays and people of other religions aren't any more evil than the rest of us, and shouldn't be treated as though they are. They're sinners, but so are the rest of us. In Jesus' day, everybody thought tax collectors were evil, and how did Jesus treat them? He didn't stir up an angry mob, he came over for lunch. People hated the Samaritans; Jesus told a story in which a Samaritan behaved better than a priest.
A Masters in Biblical Studies isn't an imaginary degree; it requires two years of post-graduate study. Here's a list of 81 accredited colleges around the United States that offer that degree.
Well put. I have a friend in that business, and she's told me it's often not very pleasant. Some clients are even abusive. Apparently it pays pretty good though.
Another version of this showed a picture of the Apple campus in Cupertino with a flag blowing in the wind; moving the mouse would change the wind direction and it was possible to get the flag to fly off the flag pole.
Part of the code for this was hidden in the Drag & Drop library (in the Extensions folder, I don't remember the exact name), and I believe part of it was in QuickTime.
I cannot lie either. If you haven't heard this version, click the "Play the song" button.
Right there, in the "holy" scripture. Errors and goof-ups a 9-year-old would not do.
You've been listening to people who don't know what they're talking about. The Bible is thousands of years old, and understanding all the details is non-trivial; you have to look at the historical context in which it was written, and consider that the very languages it was written in have evolved over time (as all languages do). Yes, the Bible says a lot of things that might look like errors at first glance (pi equals three, bats are birds, insects have four legs!) but the explanations for these are fairly obvious.
Try talking to somebody who has actually studied the Bible in an academic setting, and ask them about your supposed "errors and goof-ups". There are degrees for that sort of thing, you know.
That's part of the problem - I realize that that particular set of questions you ended up with is too complicated for a normal person to figure out easily, but for a computer program running on a botnet, this wouldn't even slow it down that much. If all your program does is identify the six names in the clues, and tries two at random, you've got an 8.3% chance of stumbling on the right answer by sheer coincidence. Multiply that by 100,000 bots, and you can sign up for over 8,000 new accounts on whatever service this thing is supposed to be protecting.
I intend to introduce some more interesting questions, but... it's really hard to come up with good ones.
You happened to hit upon two process-of-elimination questions.
The three women are Lisa, Christine and Lindsay; Lisa and Lindsay are wearing black and brown shirts respectively. Therefore, the correct answer must be Christine.
The three men are Luke, Simon and Steve. Simon and Steve are wearing orange and red shirts respectively, so the correct answer must be Luke.
That Luke happens to also be a ship captain and Christine is lazy are irrelevant data.
If you reload the page, you'll get completely new questions which may be easier to solve.
You seem to have misread my comment. Yes, of course you can prove that the sun exists, but existence alone is not reason for worship. You cannot prove that the sun has intelligence or will; THAT belief must be held on faith, and without that, the sun is clearly not worthy of worship, even though we all know it exists.
You know, I've been wondering - doesn't Sun worship really make the most sense of pretty much any religion?
Unlike Jehova, I can actually prove that the sun is the source of all life on this planet, that it nourishes and sustains me and other living things, and that the world will end because of its actions.
We like to make fun of prehistoric religions, but sometimes I think they're actually pretty rational.
However, do you ascribe any intelligence to the sun? You say the world will end because of its actions, but does the sun actually choose what those actions will be, or is the sun just another player in the grand scheme of things? If the sun has no intelligence or will, it may still deserve our respect, but it does not merit our worship.
You can't prove that Jehovah is the source of all life on this planet, but you also can't prove the sun has intelligence or will. Either belief must be held on faith, therefore, and faith in the sun makes no more sense than faith in Jehovah.
It's not pretty. Essentially there's a big list of subroutines to generate different kinds of questions based on the data I've entered. Here are three subroutines that generate questions related to colors, in three different ways:
sub {
# colors 1
my @Color=GetColor();
my $cname=shift @Color; # name of color
my $cdesc=PickOne(\@Color); # description
AddQuestion("Which $gender is wearing something the color of ".PickOne(\@Color)."?",$name);
AddClue("$name is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList,$cname));
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList,(GetColor())[0]));
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList,(GetColor())[0]));
},
sub {
# colors 2
my @Color=GetColor();
my $cname=shift @Color; # name of color
my $cdesc=PickOne(\@Color); # description
AddQuestion("Which $gender is wearing something $cname?",$name);
AddClue("$name is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList)." the color of $cdesc");
@Color=GetColor();
$cname=shift @Color;
$cdesc=PickOne(\@Color);
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList)." the color of $cdesc");
@Color=GetColor();
$cname=shift @Color;
$cdesc=PickOne(\@Color);
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing($ClothingList)." the color of $cdesc");
},
sub {
# colors 3: one person is doing something irrelevant, the other two wear the wrong color shirts
# ISSUE: police officer is wearing a red shirt? Not a great combination.
my @Color=GetColor();
my $cname=shift @Color; # name of color
my $cdesc=PickOne(\@Color); # description
AddQuestion("Which $gender is wearing a shirt the color of $cdesc?",$name);
AddClue(Any("$name is $job","$name is $singledesc","$name ".PickOne(\@actions)));
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing(["a _shirt"],(GetColor())[0]));
AddClue(GetName($gender)." is wearing ".Clothing(["a _shirt"],(GetColor())[0]));
},
Yucky stuff. It's all very experimental.
On the other hand, there are plenty of movies that are not set in space that are science fiction.
28 Days Later comes to mind as an example. It's sci-fi/horror, but the sci-fi part is definitely sci-fi.
What if we used this idea--that the computers can't come up with questions which are intuitive for humans-- to solve the captcha problem?
Uhhh... what?
CAPTCHAs have to be generated by a computer, AND have the answer verified by a computer. Otherwise there's too much human interaction needed and it doesn't scale up. You can't ask your visitors to come up with an intuitive question that a computer can't answer but a human can, because you have no way to evaluate their submission without manually checking each one (in theory you could test whether a computer could answer it, but you can't test whether a human could answer it).
...until AI gets smart enough to answer questions intuitively.
It's REALLY HARD to automatically generate random questions that an average human can answer easily, but that current AI technology can't answer just as easily. Of course you can come up with questions yourself, and compile a list of them, but if you've only got a list of a hundred questions, then all the spammer has to do is figure out the answers to your hundred questions, and then he has free reign to do whatever he wants. Or, come up with the answer to ONE of them, and he has free reign to do whatever he wants at 1% the speed he could otherwise, which is still a hell of a lot of spam.
If you don't believe me, you try writing software that will generate random questions. Here's my stab at it, which would barely slow a spammer down.
I have suggested a solution more times than I care to count:
There's your first clue that maybe your solution isn't the be-all-end-all you think it is.
impose default caps on sent emails per account, IP, whatever, until the sender has been established as a legit sender of mass mails.
OK, but who are you suggesting should impose these default caps? ISPs? That's fine, but the only way an ISP can do this is by firewalling outbound port 25 and requiring all their customers to relay mail through the ISP's mail server. A lot of ISPs do this and I wish more of them would, but it can cause problems for customers (if you're required to relay through your company's SMTP server instead and they haven't configured an alternate port such as 587, or if the ISP's SMTP server is poorly configured/overloaded/hacked/broken, then the user can't send mail and the resulting customer service calls are pretty expensive for the ISP and could drive the customer to leave).
On top of that, a lot of people are migrating away from traditional POP3/IMAP/SMTP e-mail accounts, and just using webmail services instead. Webmail services, of course, can impose all kinds of limits on the activities of their users, but these limits only make sense on a per-account basis. You can't put limits on the number of messages sent from one IP address regardless of who's logged in, because there could be 300 different users all connecting through a proxy server on one IP, and you have no way to tell the difference.
So, you have to limit each account. But a spammer can easily sign up for multiple accounts, using an automated program! Then they can get around your restrictions, by logging in on 300 different accounts and sending one e-mail from each of them. How do you prevent this?
By using a CAPTCHA.
Which is what we're talking about.
Thanks for playing!
This is why we have a separation of powers. It's not just "the government", it's the legislative branch, and NOT the executive. Congress makes the laws; the President cannot. Also, any law passed by Congress that violates the Constitution can be struck down by the Supreme Court, if they want to, which in this case they unfortunately don't.
Does the public actually give a shit though?
A lot of them would, if they understood what was happening, but they're uninformed.
And a lot of them wouldn't see a problem with it at all. Because so many on both sides don't understand the issue, it's difficult to guess how people would think about it if they did.
Just imagine, it could be cheaper to buy a netbook with Windows, and then use the Windows license on your full-powered PC
Except, of course, that Windows OEM licenses are not transferrable between machines, so you can't legally run the copy of Windows that came with your netbook on anything other than the netbook it came with.
My cell phone (N75) takes about a full minute to boot up.
Star Wars had a lot of fantasy elements like magic, knights, trolls, princesses, etc, and had a lot less scientific jargon than something like Star Trek. I would still consider Star Wars a blend of sci fi and fantasy, but definitely more in the future fantasy camp.
Star Wars also had lightsabers, blasters, giant robot walker things, space ships that can jump to hyperspace, a planet in a binary system where moisture farming is a legitimate occupation, an army of clones let by an evil villain kept alive by the technology in his suit, and let's not forget all the droids. Oh, and it didn't really have trolls in the fantasy sense, it had aliens. But the Force is definitely a fantasy thing, not a sci-fi thing (midichlorians be damned); I'll grant you that.
The great thing about Star Wars was that all the technological stuff wasn't pristine and shiny, it was old and beat-up. The droids each have a function and serve a purpose (although C3PO never seemed especially useful). Futuristic technology was used as common tools, rather than something impressive to be marveled at. This, combined with a non-futuristic musical score, shifted the focus away from the technology and to the story, which is what great science fiction is about anyway.
No matter how advanced a civilization is, their space fighter's engines won't make noise in vacuum nor will move like an atmospheric plane.
You know, very few sci-fi TV shows get this right. Firefly did. Stargate SG-1 occasionally tried (they didn't have that many space battles, but although I remember a few times when they tried to get it right, they often didn't). Babylon 5 made a deliberate choice to have sounds for dramatic effect, but they were VERY good at paying attention to physics otherwise.
On the other hand, it *can't* be sci-fi. All we know sci-fi is about the future, while Star Wars is about a long time ago, in a far far distant galaxy (grin).
That would rule out Stargate as well, since that's set in the present.
Bonjour is great, but what you've suggested doesn't meet his needs at all. One of the stated requirements is that there MUST be centralized logging of all conversations, and what you've proposed is direct client-to-client chats with no centralized server.
I don't consider Star Wars sci fi.
Why not?
"How much for the little girl? How much for the women?
Your women. I want to buy your women. The little girl, your daughters... sell them to me. Sell me your children."
I was unaware that it didn't work in IE, so yeah, I'd say there is some significance to that. :-P