I tried the local two year olds, but they didn't seem to have attention span enough to wait for me to finish the problem, or they didn't understand the words I was using.
Tough luck. Next time, he should probably go for some better exaggerations.:)
People who don't know much about genetics are always very sure that we don't know enough about genetics to know if it is safe. Very convinced that the people who do know enough about genetics to know what is safe and what is not, really don't know enough.
You seem very sure about this.
I'd say that people skeptical to genetic manipulation have one point on you; even the people who are experts in the field of genetic engineering don't know nearly enough about it to make the perfect food.
If they did, they'd be boasting about it like heck, and maybe we'd have it (for a price), too.
It is a sign of immense hubris to believe that we -- at the current state of human science and technology -- can indeed know everything we need to know in order not to goof up with the building blocks of life.
Heck, even if someone had that knowledge, chances are that many genetic engineers would still dabble with things they don't really know enough about, just like we've seen in virtually every science so far.
In fact, they are SMP limited by the chipsets: If a chipset existed, you could run a box with 1000 Athlon processors - of course, designing such a beast would be impossible...
Why would that be impossible? The Cray T3E managed to make use of that many Alpha processors, although they're using the EV5 and not the EV6 architecture, like the Athlon.
I doubt that designing that beast would be desirable, though. There aren't that many companies who know how to build systems scaling up to 1000+ CPUs. Cray is one such company, and SGI seems to be another (allegedly building a 1024-CPU Origin 3000 on special order).
But impossible? No.
(This is, of course, blatantly ignoring that "chipset" is a very, uhm, simplified way of speaking about multi-CPU support.)
MySQL doesn't support SELECT INTO... as this is not ANSI SQL. MySQL support however the ANSI SQL way to do the same thing: INSERT INTO... SELECT.
Just FYI, I actually know these alleged reasons, which should be evident from my previous comment.
I'm glad that the argument you quote ("this is not ANSI SQL") disappeared from that particular section in the MySQL docs, as the MySQL team themselves have proved that whether something is ANSI SQL or not is not a design criterion for MySQL.
Also, if you read the MySQL docs (and think a little bit about nice uses of SELECT INTO), you'll see why I call it a programming convenience, and that INSERT INTO... SELECT is not the same thing.
If the character column is defined as binary all LIKE operation on it will be case sensitive.
You seem to be missing my point entirely. Allow me to reiterate:
I'd also like to be able to do this without storing stuff as BINARY.
Also, as you should know, BINARY is a MySQL extension, and not ANSI SQL.;)
I realise that adding whitespace as a requirement removes a lot of inconvenience for the implementors of MySQL. However, software is there for the users, not the implementors. Whose convenience should be sacrificed first?
And no, I'm not "worried about incompatibles", I'm annoyed at the lack of programming conveniences. Features, you know. Even a pretty old, bare-bones Sybase 10.3 works from that point of view.
I agree that the lack of transaction support is a great weakness with MySQL, but there are several other things that are important for programming convenience.
If you want to create and maintain databases, you'll certainly appreciate a few things that I think are annoying with MySQL (for a more complete list, I suggest having a look at their own compatibility documentation):
Can't use SELECT INTO (Oracle SQL extension IIRC, also supported by Sybase) for faster table creation
Can't use SELECT within SELECT, or sub-selects (as the article mentions)
Case insensitive string matching without the possibility of choosing case sensitive
'--' is only a comment if followed by whitespace
Lack of stored procedures and triggers
The first one is the one I've found most annoying. It's a very nice thing to have when putting stuff in temporary tables. I recall a different version of their document, where the gist of their argument against SELECT INTO basically was that it wasn't standard SQL. Okay, fine.
The second is also a bugger, and that
in many cases you can rewrite the query without a sub select
doesn't really help in those cases you can't.
Case sensitive string matching is faster than case insensitive string matching, so I'm actually surprised that they didn't make that the constraint instead of the opposite. I'd also like to be able to do this without storing stuff as "BINARY".
As an argument against '--' style comments without requiring a following space, the MySQL team claims that
Because 1--1 is legal in SQL, we think it is terrible that `--' means start comment.
The reason that is a problem is of course that one can say something like !payment! and have the value inserted instead of that (meaning: 1-!payment! will become 1--1 if !payment! evaluates to -1). This could be solved if comments were interpreted before other things, like they probably should.
As for stored procedures and triggers, I just find them practical.
I'm satisfied with one thing, at least, and that's the tone of the documentation, which has been improved a bit since the last time I looked. It's slightly less arrogant.
Yet I won't even consider recommending the use of MySQL to anyone who wants a database for any serious work, for the reasons mentioned in the article, the reasons mentioned above, and the incompatibilities not mentioned here, but in their own documentation.
Okay, let's have a look at what a P3 overclocked to 1100 MHz would score in SPECint95 if it is as linear as it is from 450 to 600 MHz.
These are the highest scores these processors have gotten so far, according to the General Processor Information page at Berkeley, along with what they should've gotten if the score was linear with clock speed (l450 means linear to the CPU with 450 MHz clock speed):
As you can see, the 600 MHz version performs less than expected from the 450 MHz version by a margin of 3.7% (projected performance improvement if Deschutes scaled linearly from 450 MHz to 600 MHz). Similar margins are 0.9% for 500 MHz and 3.1% for 550 MHz.
Let's be nice and assume that the reduction won't be more than 4% for a clock speed of 1100 MHz compared to 600 MHz.
That would give us a SPECint95 performance of 42.2, slightly less than a 1100 MHz Willamette would do according to The Register, which is 43.
Without the 4% reduction, Deschutes might do 44, but I sincerely doubt that the architecture scales linearly when it didn't before, and a 2% reduction will bring you pretty close to the projected performance of Willamette.
I suspect, howere, that the reduction for Deschutes may be closer to 5%, and possibly greater, though I have no way of proving that now, of course.:)
As a side note, the projected linear performance (including a 4% reduction) of the 1000 MHz Athlon based on the 700 MHz Athlon would be 43.5, or 44.4 at 2%, or 45.3 at 0%. A 1100 MHz Athlon based on the 600 MHz Athlon would be 48.4% at 4%, 49.4 at 2% and 50.4 at 0%.
A 667 MHz Alpha 21264 processor (it's a pretty old thing now) performs at 44 already, BTW, which really shows how far behind both AMD and Intel still are in the high performance market (though not the bang for bucks market).
I think what you and many others are forgetting is that just because we're masturbating because we think we're seeing a hardware system that solves all our binary compatibility issues, it doesn't mean that the hardware system in question will replace all other hardware systems in existence.
If the best system always won, Intel and Microsoft would never have made it.;)
Also, it would not be prone to allow alien intelligences to patch its kernel just like that, nor would it crash as often, nor would it be easy for Quark to achieve higher security status.
How valid are personality tests considered these days? My personal opinion is that they are pseudo-science, but I'm not a psychology expert.
I think the problem is that psychology itself is having problems being recognized as a science, and that many parts of academentia doesn't even believe that it qualifies as pseudo-science.
After psychology started using scientific methods in research, however, that attitude has slowly started to change, but over-all, psychology is, unfortunately, viewed as a pseudo-science, and that reflects upon the methods used, too.
And of course, personality tests work if you get them from an astrologer.;)
Re:SCO hurting? Naw it can't be..
on
SCO does Linux
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· Score: 1
Ah, yes, the arrogance of SCO.
It's hardly a novelty.
Around two years ago, I was at a convention in Oslo, where both SUN and SCO were two prominent (for different values of prominent) Unix suppliers.
Just out of curiosity, I asked them what they thought about Linux (and I also asked SUN if they would support it soon).
SUN was pretty condescending, considering it a "toy" OS.
SCO was even worse, and started on that line about being the best-selling OS (uhm, Unix) on the Intel platform, and that Linux couldn't count, since Linux didn't sell.
It didn't matter to SCO that their market share (in terms of licenses sold) was lower than the estimated number of Linux users at that time.
In some ways, I understand them, but in other ways, what the heck were they thinking?
While issuing email addresses is technologically problematic (now there's a server I don't want to maintain),...
Since we're talking about USA here, it isn't even 300 million people.
It should be possible, given the budget and time, to make a system which would allow and even handle 300 million e-mail addresses. Remember that AOL handles (for your favorite value of "handle") only an order of magnitude less already.
And, BTW, it wouldn't be just one server.
The questions should be: Is this the way you want your tax money to be spent? Are there other, better ways of spending that money?
I'm not claiming that commercial e-mail should be illegal. I'm claiming that unsolicited commercial e-mail should be illegal.
I am sorry that I can't see the major breach of constitutional etiquette, maybe I'm just a stupid Norwegian.
But (being a stupid "euro" and all) my view is that businesses should not be allowed to "expand themselves and advertise" for my money, unless I freely and willingly give them that money, or if it's really solicited.
What constitutional right -- in your country -- do businesses have to use my money without my consent, by the way?
Don't want spam? Then instead of using just one e-mail address for everything, obtain at least two, one for private use between friends, and a public one that you can plaster everywhere if you like, to give to people you don't really know. A throwaway address if you will. If the spam on the public box becomes too intense, throw it away and start another. No loss. But I wager that if you keep the private address private, spam intensity will drop, probably even to zero.
Now you're assuming that all of us have the luxury of just having those two groups of people to choose from.
I can't stop using my public mail addresses just because you think it's a good way of dealing with spam.
And what do you intend to do when your private e-mail address no longer is private, because someone you knew accidentally got a computer virus that spread his/her mail contact list to a few spammers out there?
You're going to tell your university/school/employer that you need a new user name because of spam, right? And then you need to tell all those people who you think may have an interest in knowing your private e-mail address what your new address is. And with any bad luck, another of your friends gets the same virus (or perhaps it was never removed in the first place), and there you go again.
No, I don't think changing e-mail-addresses is the solution, sorry.
The solution is to make unsolicited commercial e-mail illegal, in order to make it possible to stop the companies causing the problem instead of treating the symptoms.
My thanks to the Canadian ruling; let's hope it spreads.
Lotus Notes (under Windows) is one of the less user and newbie user friendly programs I've ever seen.
It is depressing to use.
I wish it would vanish into the bitbucket.
But yet I have to use it every day.
*sigh*
If they fixed their user interface, I'm certain the product would have some merit, but as it is now; no way. What I think is scary, is that this is supposedly the best product of its kind...
Well, perhaps it's about time noticing that "the INTERNET backbone" (as you call it) is continuously being replaced.
BTW, what do you mean by that? What else on the backbone but the routers do you think need converting that will make it so much more expensive ("major stumbling block")?
I've always thought normal DNS naming is rather worthless, anyway. (something being under.COM or.ORG tells me absolutely nothing)
That is not the fault of DNS, but rather of Internic and the way they chose to deal with.com/.org/.net.
I am well aware that at a certain point, they got "too many" applications for domain names to be able to handle this, but applying a sensible level of bureaucracy (and educating people) could have helped.
Myself, I've even helped to add to the confusion by letting a few Norwegian companies get through with registering under.org and.net, even though they don't belong there. So I'm definitely to blame, too.
BTW, how were you planning to guarantee that some dweeb doesn't register his company under the wrong country/region? "Hey, look, we're a multi-national company, and..."
But it would _really_ help a lot of we could have both the system you suggest _and_ the "check boxes" for what kinds of comments we want to read, so that each use can choose which sorting/filtering method to use.
As the moderation system is right now, I find it close to useless again, because far too many posts get the top score. I believe that adding more options to the way we view posts will help a lot.
I'd also LOVE to see some kind of moderation of front page stories.
That would be interesting, sort of, but since we really can't guarantee that a moderator has more of a clue than anybody else (because anybody else can be a moderator, too), it will fail horribly.
What you use your CPU cycles on is of course your choice.
But this is one of the things that I keep asking myself:
Why SETI? If there is intelligent life out there, somewhere, why is it important to search for it _now_? The way I see it, it is only a matter of time, and humanity can probably survive well without discovering ET.
I would rather suggest that we focus that energy on a search for potentially threatening objects in our own solar system; objects that could destroy our civilizations in one terrible smash.
We know for a fact that such objects exist, we just don't know how many of them there are, if their orbits will take them on a collision course with Earth, etc.
I think spending CPU time on analyzing images of the solar system, searching for such objects, would be much more worthwhile _now_ than SETI. SETI is fine. Let's do that when we are pretty sure that there are no 1 km or larger objects out there, coming at us. Maybe there are none. Great! But we don't know that.
I judge the continued existence of our civilizations to be more important than finding an ET somewhere, who we almost certainly won't be able to have direct contact with in less than a hundred years. Finding ET is all fine, but it won't help us much if -- in the worst case scenario -- we're all dead.:)
I suppose I should be running to NASA or something right now, asking for help with such a project, but my schedule is all filled up, so I'll just be cracking RC5-64 for now. It's just as useful as SETI@home, IMHO.
I can't imagine why anyone would even _think_ about having one's finger pricked for a drop of blood should be good enough for determining identity anyway.
That must be one of the most insecure ways of identification, except for the From field in e-mail messages or news articles.
If you believe that DNA is good enough to identify you, and at the same time think it is scary that virtually anybody can pick up the scraps of your own body you leave behind to _track_ you down, I'm really, really surprised that you can't connect the two to:
The same virtually anybodies can take those scraps of skin, hair, blood remains etc from your garbage, hotel room, car, whatever _and put it somewhere else_, pretending that you were there. But of course you weren't there, just some minor parts of you somebody else stole.
You don't have to see "Conspiracy Theory" and believe in it to think that these things can happen. They can happen because someone has thought about it, and because there tend to be people who abuse every new thing they can come across. That can be your everyday psychopathical specimen, it can be a super-secret government agency (for which government?), it can be organized crime, it can be a prankster, it could be an accident.
So don't go around trusting DNA to be of any help.
What are the alternatives, then, if you don't believe an iris or retina scan is good enough?
Well, you can apply some modern image recognition software. Today, it's possible to recognize a person from her facial features, even through physical changes such as minor injuries (swollen eye, fresh cut across the face, etc), with a precision similar to that of fingerprints (I honestly cannot remember which way is more sure, except for fingerprints having lots of "proven" technology behind it).
This makes it possible to recognize that person's most common facial expressions.
Take this one step further, into recognizing several facial expressions in succession (that is, the way your face changes).
Use cameras from several angles to make sure that it is a real person, and not some face superimposed on a dummy/robot.
Require that your voice is synchronized with (and matches) your facial movements when you say "I want to withdraw some money" (or whatever your not-so-secret passphrase is).
Feel free to combine this with some other method that can be performed simultaneously, such as measuring iris response to varying light level, blood pressure and pulse, perhaps even the fingerprint (but that can be faked more easily).
The bonus for the customer is that this would take less energy and time than remembering a PIN code and punching it in, and/or leaning towards a scanner to measure the exact retina, but would still be at least as secure.
The downer is that this technology has yet to be actually implemented, tested and "proven" in a real user environment, and that it'll probably be a bit expensive for the next five years or so, until technology catches up and becomes really cheap.
This doesn't prevent someone from threatening you or your family to force you to withdraw money, buy a Corvette or whatever, but what does? Maybe sometime in the future, we can actually determine for sure whether someone is under pressure for doing things, and that she shouldn't be doing it. I somehow doubt that, but we'll hopefully live to see.
Slashdot Mirror
(I'm not a lawyer, but I've had a minor part in the forming of the law.)
The Norwegian legislation covers Norwegian jurisdiction.
There is no exception in the law for redirection services, as the law doesn't concern itself as much with exactly how things are marketed.
Whether you pretend to send from abroad or not is irrelevant, as long as what you do is within Norwegian jurisdiction.
Well, good luck in getting it registered, if that's all you've got to go buy.
.no is not quite as easy as registering under .com. Yet.
Registering a domain under
See NORID's guide for first-time applicants.
Fine, someone go fetch me a two year old child.
:)
I tried the local two year olds, but they didn't seem to have attention span enough to wait for me to finish the problem, or they didn't understand the words I was using.
Tough luck. Next time, he should probably go for some better exaggerations.
People who don't know much about genetics are always very sure that we don't know enough about genetics to know if it is safe. Very convinced that the people who do know enough about genetics to know what is safe and what is not, really don't know enough.
You seem very sure about this.
I'd say that people skeptical to genetic manipulation have one point on you; even the people who are experts in the field of genetic engineering don't know nearly enough about it to make the perfect food.
If they did, they'd be boasting about it like heck, and maybe we'd have it (for a price), too.
It is a sign of immense hubris to believe that we -- at the current state of human science and technology -- can indeed know everything we need to know in order not to goof up with the building blocks of life.
Heck, even if someone had that knowledge, chances are that many genetic engineers would still dabble with things they don't really know enough about, just like we've seen in virtually every science so far.
Oh, then you post was just off-topic and irrelevant. Sorry.
I had an old sofa I didn't want any more. I decided to give it to Goodwill.
Your analogy is flawed.
A better analogy would be:
I designed a new sofa. I decided to share my design with others, so I gave a copy of that design to Goodwill.
And then continue along the same road with the 50 bucks and all that.
If that works for you, fine, I have a sofa design to sell you.
(The analogy isn't perfect, but analogies never are.)
In fact, they are SMP limited by the chipsets: If a chipset existed, you could run a box with 1000 Athlon processors - of course, designing such a beast would be impossible...
Why would that be impossible? The Cray T3E managed to make use of that many Alpha processors, although they're using the EV5 and not the EV6 architecture, like the Athlon.
I doubt that designing that beast would be desirable, though. There aren't that many companies who know how to build systems scaling up to 1000+ CPUs. Cray is one such company, and SGI seems to be another (allegedly building a 1024-CPU Origin 3000 on special order).
But impossible? No.
(This is, of course, blatantly ignoring that "chipset" is a very, uhm, simplified way of speaking about multi-CPU support.)
Just FYI, I actually know these alleged reasons, which should be evident from my previous comment.
I'm glad that the argument you quote ("this is not ANSI SQL") disappeared from that particular section in the MySQL docs, as the MySQL team themselves have proved that whether something is ANSI SQL or not is not a design criterion for MySQL.
Also, if you read the MySQL docs (and think a little bit about nice uses of SELECT INTO), you'll see why I call it a programming convenience, and that INSERT INTO ... SELECT is not the same thing.
You seem to be missing my point entirely. Allow me to reiterate:
Also, as you should know, BINARY is a MySQL extension, and not ANSI SQL. ;)
I realise that adding whitespace as a requirement removes a lot of inconvenience for the implementors of MySQL. However, software is there for the users, not the implementors. Whose convenience should be sacrificed first?
And no, I'm not "worried about incompatibles", I'm annoyed at the lack of programming conveniences. Features, you know. Even a pretty old, bare-bones Sybase 10.3 works from that point of view.
I agree that the lack of transaction support is a great weakness with MySQL, but there are several other things that are important for programming convenience.
If you want to create and maintain databases, you'll certainly appreciate a few things that I think are annoying with MySQL (for a more complete list, I suggest having a look at their own compatibility documentation):
The first one is the one I've found most annoying. It's a very nice thing to have when putting stuff in temporary tables. I recall a different version of their document, where the gist of their argument against SELECT INTO basically was that it wasn't standard SQL. Okay, fine.
The second is also a bugger, and that
doesn't really help in those cases you can't.
Case sensitive string matching is faster than case insensitive string matching, so I'm actually surprised that they didn't make that the constraint instead of the opposite. I'd also like to be able to do this without storing stuff as "BINARY".
As an argument against '--' style comments without requiring a following space, the MySQL team claims that
The reason that is a problem is of course that one can say something like !payment! and have the value inserted instead of that (meaning: 1-!payment! will become 1--1 if !payment! evaluates to -1). This could be solved if comments were interpreted before other things, like they probably should.
As for stored procedures and triggers, I just find them practical.
I'm satisfied with one thing, at least, and that's the tone of the documentation, which has been improved a bit since the last time I looked. It's slightly less arrogant.
Yet I won't even consider recommending the use of MySQL to anyone who wants a database for any serious work, for the reasons mentioned in the article, the reasons mentioned above, and the incompatibilities not mentioned here, but in their own documentation.
Okay, let's have a look at what a P3 overclocked to 1100 MHz would score in SPECint95 if it is as linear as it is from 450 to 600 MHz.
:)
These are the highest scores these processors have gotten so far, according to the General Processor Information page at Berkeley, along with what they should've gotten if the score was linear with clock speed (l450 means linear to the CPU with 450 MHz clock speed):
MHz int95 l450 l500 l550 l600
450 18.7 18.7 18.5 18.2 18.0
500 20.6 20.8 20.6 20.2 20.0
550 22.2 22.9 22.7 22.2 22.0
600 24.0 24.9 24.7 24.2 24.0
As you can see, the 600 MHz version performs less than expected from the 450 MHz version by a margin of 3.7% (projected performance improvement if Deschutes scaled linearly from 450 MHz to 600 MHz). Similar margins are 0.9% for 500 MHz and 3.1% for 550 MHz.
Let's be nice and assume that the reduction won't be more than 4% for a clock speed of 1100 MHz compared to 600 MHz.
That would give us a SPECint95 performance of 42.2, slightly less than a 1100 MHz Willamette would do according to The Register, which is 43.
Without the 4% reduction, Deschutes might do 44, but I sincerely doubt that the architecture scales linearly when it didn't before, and a 2% reduction will bring you pretty close to the projected performance of Willamette.
I suspect, howere, that the reduction for Deschutes may be closer to 5%, and possibly greater, though I have no way of proving that now, of course.
As a side note, the projected linear performance (including a 4% reduction) of the 1000 MHz Athlon based on the 700 MHz Athlon would be 43.5, or 44.4 at 2%, or 45.3 at 0%. A 1100 MHz Athlon based on the 600 MHz Athlon would be 48.4% at 4%, 49.4 at 2% and 50.4 at 0%.
A 667 MHz Alpha 21264 processor (it's a pretty old thing now) performs at 44 already, BTW, which really shows how far behind both AMD and Intel still are in the high performance market (though not the bang for bucks market).
I think what you and many others are forgetting is that just because we're masturbating because we think we're seeing a hardware system that solves all our binary compatibility issues, it doesn't mean that the hardware system in question will replace all other hardware systems in existence.
;)
If the best system always won, Intel and Microsoft would never have made it.
Also, it would not be prone to allow alien intelligences to patch its kernel just like that, nor would it crash as often, nor would it be easy for Quark to achieve higher security status.
Let's all be happy for that.
How valid are personality tests considered these days? My personal opinion is that they are pseudo-science, but I'm not a psychology expert.
;)
I think the problem is that psychology itself is having problems being recognized as a science, and that many parts of academentia doesn't even believe that it qualifies as pseudo-science.
After psychology started using scientific methods in research, however, that attitude has slowly started to change, but over-all, psychology is, unfortunately, viewed as a pseudo-science, and that reflects upon the methods used, too.
And of course, personality tests work if you get them from an astrologer.
Ah, yes, the arrogance of SCO.
It's hardly a novelty.
Around two years ago, I was at a convention in Oslo, where both SUN and SCO were two prominent (for different values of prominent) Unix suppliers.
Just out of curiosity, I asked them what they thought about Linux (and I also asked SUN if they would support it soon).
SUN was pretty condescending, considering it a "toy" OS.
SCO was even worse, and started on that line about being the best-selling OS (uhm, Unix) on the Intel platform, and that Linux couldn't count, since Linux didn't sell.
It didn't matter to SCO that their market share (in terms of licenses sold) was lower than the estimated number of Linux users at that time.
In some ways, I understand them, but in other ways, what the heck were they thinking?
While issuing email addresses is technologically problematic (now there's a server I don't want to maintain), ...
Since we're talking about USA here, it isn't even 300 million people.
It should be possible, given the budget and time, to make a system which would allow and even handle 300 million e-mail addresses. Remember that AOL handles (for your favorite value of "handle") only an order of magnitude less already.
And, BTW, it wouldn't be just one server.
The questions should be: Is this the way you want your tax money to be spent? Are there other, better ways of spending that money?
Read again.
I'm not claiming that commercial e-mail should be illegal. I'm claiming that unsolicited commercial e-mail should be illegal.
I am sorry that I can't see the major breach of constitutional etiquette, maybe I'm just a stupid Norwegian.
But (being a stupid "euro" and all) my view is that businesses should not be allowed to "expand themselves and advertise" for my money, unless I freely and willingly give them that money, or if it's really solicited.
What constitutional right -- in your country -- do businesses have to use my money without my consent, by the way?
Don't want spam? Then instead of using just one e-mail address for everything, obtain at least two, one for private use between friends, and a public one that you can plaster everywhere if you like, to give to people you don't really know. A throwaway address if you will. If the spam on the public box becomes too intense, throw it away and start another. No loss. But I wager that if you keep the private address private, spam intensity will drop, probably even to zero.
Now you're assuming that all of us have the luxury of just having those two groups of people to choose from.
I can't stop using my public mail addresses just because you think it's a good way of dealing with spam.
And what do you intend to do when your private e-mail address no longer is private, because someone you knew accidentally got a computer virus that spread his/her mail contact list to a few spammers out there?
You're going to tell your university/school/employer that you need a new user name because of spam, right? And then you need to tell all those people who you think may have an interest in knowing your private e-mail address what your new address is. And with any bad luck, another of your friends gets the same virus (or perhaps it was never removed in the first place), and there you go again.
No, I don't think changing e-mail-addresses is the solution, sorry.
The solution is to make unsolicited commercial e-mail illegal, in order to make it possible to stop the companies causing the problem instead of treating the symptoms.
My thanks to the Canadian ruling; let's hope it spreads.
I think I agree.
Lotus Notes (under Windows) is one of the less user and newbie user friendly programs I've ever seen.
It is depressing to use.
I wish it would vanish into the bitbucket.
But yet I have to use it every day.
*sigh*
If they fixed their user interface, I'm certain the product would have some merit, but as it is now; no way. What I think is scary, is that this is supposedly the best product of its kind...
Well, perhaps it's about time noticing that "the INTERNET backbone" (as you call it) is continuously being replaced.
BTW, what do you mean by that? What else on the backbone but the routers do you think need converting that will make it so much more expensive ("major stumbling block")?
I've always thought normal DNS naming is rather worthless, anyway. (something being under .COM or .ORG tells me absolutely nothing)
.com/.org/.net.
.org and .net, even though they don't belong there. So I'm definitely to blame, too.
That is not the fault of DNS, but rather of Internic and the way they chose to deal with
I am well aware that at a certain point, they got "too many" applications for domain names to be able to handle this, but applying a sensible level of bureaucracy (and educating people) could have helped.
Myself, I've even helped to add to the confusion by letting a few Norwegian companies get through with registering under
BTW, how were you planning to guarantee that some dweeb doesn't register his company under the wrong country/region? "Hey, look, we're a multi-national company, and..."
You have a good point.
But it would _really_ help a lot of we could have both the system you suggest _and_ the "check boxes" for what kinds of comments we want to read, so that each use can choose which sorting/filtering method to use.
As the moderation system is right now, I find it close to useless again, because far too many posts get the top score. I believe that adding more options to the way we view posts will help a lot.
I'd also LOVE to see some kind of moderation of front page stories.
That would be interesting, sort of, but since we really can't guarantee that a moderator has more of a clue than anybody else (because anybody else can be a moderator, too), it will fail horribly.
What you use your CPU cycles on is of course your choice.
:)
But this is one of the things that I keep asking myself:
Why SETI? If there is intelligent life out there, somewhere, why is it important to search for it _now_? The way I see it, it is only a matter of time, and humanity can probably survive well without discovering ET.
I would rather suggest that we focus that energy on a search for potentially threatening objects in our own solar system; objects that could destroy our civilizations in one terrible smash.
We know for a fact that such objects exist, we just don't know how many of them there are, if their orbits will take them on a collision course with Earth, etc.
I think spending CPU time on analyzing images of the solar system, searching for such objects, would be much more worthwhile _now_ than SETI. SETI is fine. Let's do that when we are pretty sure that there are no 1 km or larger objects out there, coming at us. Maybe there are none. Great! But we don't know that.
I judge the continued existence of our civilizations to be more important than finding an ET somewhere, who we almost certainly won't be able to have direct contact with in less than a hundred years. Finding ET is all fine, but it won't help us much if -- in the worst case scenario -- we're all dead.
I suppose I should be running to NASA or something right now, asking for help with such a project, but my schedule is all filled up, so I'll just be cracking RC5-64 for now. It's just as useful as SETI@home, IMHO.
I can't imagine why anyone would even _think_ about having one's finger pricked for a drop of blood should be good enough for determining identity anyway.
That must be one of the most insecure ways of identification, except for the From field in e-mail messages or news articles.
If you believe that DNA is good enough to identify you, and at the same time think it is scary that virtually anybody can pick up the scraps of your own body you leave behind to _track_ you down, I'm really, really surprised that you can't connect the two to:
The same virtually anybodies can take those scraps of skin, hair, blood remains etc from your garbage, hotel room, car, whatever _and put it somewhere else_, pretending that you were there. But of course you weren't there, just some minor parts of you somebody else stole.
You don't have to see "Conspiracy Theory" and believe in it to think that these things can happen. They can happen because someone has thought about it, and because there tend to be people who abuse every new thing they can come across. That can be your everyday psychopathical specimen, it can be a super-secret government agency (for which government?), it can be organized crime, it can be a prankster, it could be an accident.
So don't go around trusting DNA to be of any help.
What are the alternatives, then, if you don't believe an iris or retina scan is good enough?
Well, you can apply some modern image recognition software. Today, it's possible to recognize a person from her facial features, even through physical changes such as minor injuries (swollen eye, fresh cut across the face, etc), with a precision similar to that of fingerprints (I honestly cannot remember which way is more sure, except for fingerprints having lots of "proven" technology behind it).
This makes it possible to recognize that person's most common facial expressions.
Take this one step further, into recognizing several facial expressions in succession (that is, the way your face changes).
Use cameras from several angles to make sure that it is a real person, and not some face superimposed on a dummy/robot.
Require that your voice is synchronized with (and matches) your facial movements when you say "I want to withdraw some money" (or whatever your not-so-secret passphrase is).
Feel free to combine this with some other method that can be performed simultaneously, such as measuring iris response to varying light level, blood pressure and pulse, perhaps even the fingerprint (but that can be faked more easily).
The bonus for the customer is that this would take less energy and time than remembering a PIN code and punching it in, and/or leaning towards a scanner to measure the exact retina, but would still be at least as secure.
The downer is that this technology has yet to be actually implemented, tested and "proven" in a real user environment, and that it'll probably be a bit expensive for the next five years or so, until technology catches up and becomes really cheap.
This doesn't prevent someone from threatening you or your family to force you to withdraw money, buy a Corvette or whatever, but what does? Maybe sometime in the future, we can actually determine for sure whether someone is under pressure for doing things, and that she shouldn't be doing it. I somehow doubt that, but we'll hopefully live to see.
How about a reality check?
:):
Do you think ESA should have their books audited because the first Ariane 5 was destroyed on launch?
Mishaps actually happen in this kind of business.
As someone pointed out in another note (not now
This is, after all, rocket science.