Where I really draw the line is in "friending" people that you've never met except via Facebook/Myspace, and that you have no real connection to otherwise. It seems like at that point, you've transformed what's basically a useful online addressbook into ego-boosting wankery.
I really like Facebook, but I guess I'm just not really into "social networking." (Whatever that means, exactly.) To me it's a good way to keep track of people's changing contact information (it was so much better back when they had an automatic export-to-VCard option) and occasionally to browse photos (although, if you have more than a handful there are better places to go, like Flickr).
Ultimately what I want out of Facebook is just a version of 'finger' that's simple enough for non-technical people to use. As they've gotten further away from that core functionality, it's become less compelling.
To be honest I don't really have a strong opinion either way; although I'm probably best described as a libertarian, I'm a registered Republican and plan on voting in that primary. To that end, I've been paying more attention to the Republican candidates than the Democratic ones.
That said, based on what I've seen of him (which isn't insignificant; apparently the media thinks he's Jesus Christ with a tan) he seems far and away to be the most interesting candidate in the running. His foreign policy seems well-reasoned and sane, and I don't get the impression that he would be as much into appeasement as some of the others in his party. In terms of his domestic policy, I don't really have a firm grasp on what his overarching political philosophy is -- but then again, I haven't read any of his books, either. He seems to support free markets and has some people I respect working as his economic advisors, which is always a good sign.
Ultimately though, I find it unnerving that there's scant mention of individual liberties as a primary motivation for policies. That gives me significant pause, because the reason I'm willing to support someone like Ron Paul, who I occasionally disagree with but like anyway, is because I think he's fundamentally driven, or at least constrained, by a desire to protect individual rights and freedoms. Obama, in contrast, seems to be looking for a 'positive outcome' [1], and it's not immediately clear whether or how far he's willing to sacrifice individual rights in order to achieve certain outcomes. While his intentions may be good, there's a reason why the road to hell is said to be paved by them. By not guaranteeing my personal liberties up front, he's asking for a lot more faith than I'm prepared to give to anyone.
That said, he's far and away least frightening of the Democratic candidates (Edwards, with all the Marxist class-warfare rhetoric, seems like a real loose cannon) and I think that's his major advantage. I sincerely hope he can keep himself from self-destructing, because I really think that's about all he has to fear.
[1] "[W]e should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility [...] we should be guided by what works," from Wikipedia.
At its peak in early 2001, right before the beginning of the end, Enron had a market cap of $48B USD. While that's big by normal people's standards, it's only enough to have gotten them to #77 on the top-100 list at the time. (Source, from April 2001.) Enron employed 21,000 people prior to its collapse.
Microsoft, during the same period, was #2 at $370B, and today it's still $281B, almost six times larger than Enron was; Microsoft employs 71,000, or about 3.5 times as many people. Given that Enron's collapse is frequently described using words like "unprecedented" and "disastrous," and led directly to the one of the biggest changes in corporate securities law since the 1930s (Sarbanes-Oxley), not to mention the dismantlement of one of the nation's largest accounting forms (Arthur Anderson), a Congressional investigation, and jail time for most of the people responsible (except for Kenneth Lay, who had the good fortune to die first, to much applause), and speculation that its long-term effects would be greater than 9/11, I'm not sure I'd be so blasé.
Currently, they're ranked #4 in market cap, at $281 Billion USD. They used to be somewhat higher back around 2000/01, IIRC they used to fight for #1 with GE. I think what happened is a combination of their share price slipping a bit, and a dramatic rise in petrochemical/energy stocks in the past few years. (Note #1 is Exxon-Mobil.)
Just to put that figure in perspective, AT&T is #7 at $255, Wal-Mart is #13 at $197B, Cisco is #21 at $169B.
And, on the topic on hand, a Democratic government is *significantly* more likely to break up MS than a Republican government. The notion that this isn't so is extraordinarily absurd.
I'm not sure what you mean by "significantly," given that I think the odds of either party doing it are so vanishingly close to zero that it's hardly worth pretending that it's on the table.
You couldn't disassemble Microsoft, in the current climate (monoculture and dependence), without risking a huge upset in the tech sector. If Redmond catches a cold, the entire economy would feel it. And "it's the economy, stupid." Being 'pro-consumer' doesn't count for much if you're perceived to be bringing on the next dot-bomb.
If anything, Democrats depend far more on the high-tech sector of the economy than Republicans do for support, particularly corporate support. In recent years, Microsoft (and its employees) has been a major Democratic donor (#30 overall -- even bigger than the NRA and just beneath the AFL-CIO); in both '04 and '06 they gave the majority of their donations to Democrats.* Their employees are overwhelmingly Democratic donors and voters as well. Not to mention, Microsoft is also deeply in bed with the entertainment industry, another Democratic stalwart.
The political philosophy of either of the major parties is basically irrelevant; their actions are virtually always predictable by looking solely at their sources of funding and votes. Democrats are funded by the high tech industry, and many of their core constituencies are people who work in the tech industry, or are from areas (major urban centers) that depend on high-tech industries. They're not going to wreck that gravy train.
* Source is here although I'm not sure the deeplink will work. You can just search Opensecrets for Microsoft Corp.
Actually I'm a big Ron Paul fan.:) I don't agree with all of his stances necessarily, but I really like the guy for having a well-thought-out, consistent philosophy and not being afraid to talk about it. That's fairly rare at the national level, even more so for presidential candidates, even long-shot ones.
I don't think that he'll ever make it to the White House, though, so I'm pretty sure my theory is safe. Both the electoral system and national expectations are stacked against someone who's up-front and honest about their beliefs and philosophy, and who isn't reading from a prompter fed by the latest Gallup poll.
But I'm still planning on voting for him in the primary.
Given that it takes something like ~17 hours (based on my rough calculations using the figures on WP) to compress 100MB of data using this algorithm on a reasonably fast computer... I don't think you'd really want to use it for browsing from CD. No decompression figure is given but I don't see any reason why it would be asymmetric. (Although if there's some reason why it would be dramatically asymmetric, it'd be great if someone would fill me in.)
Mobile use is right out too, at least with current-generation equipment.
Looking at the numbers this looks like it's about on target for the usual resources/space tradeoff. It's a bit smaller than other algorithms, but much, much more resource intensive. It's almost as if there's an asymptotic curve as you approach the absolute-minimum theoretical compression ratio, where resources just climb ridiculously.
Maybe the next big challenge should be for someone to achieve compression in a very resource-efficient way; a prize for coming in with a new compressor/decompressor that's significantly beneath the current resource/compression curve...
Right, because lefties aren't influenced by money? Microsoft has billions of dollars in cash, more than enough to buy whatever politicians happen to be in power.
Corruption isn't just a conservative phenomenon. By the time you get to the White House, unless you end up there by mistake, you're already crooked. The process of getting there guarantees it. I'm sure Microsoft slathers its campaign contributions around so that no matter who wins, they owe Redmond a few favors.
The only reason any politician would ever break up Microsoft would be if they thought they could somehow capitalize on its demise, and I don't see any reason why that's possible. You don't win votes by torpedoing one of the crown jewels of the U.S. economy and its economic dominance, even if you're a leftist. There might be some saber-rattling, but it's not going to be anything serious.
Your faith in one batch of weasels over another is cute, but ultimately I think you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.
How do you implement a security system like this in software? Or do you just not do it at all?
Seems like the way that both DVD's CSS and AACS were broken involved software players. Unless Sony simply plans to just prohibit playback on general-purpose PCs, they'll have to create some sort of software implementation of the player hardware, which would mean the VM.
If they only allow playback on dedicated hardware, then I can see how this might make cracking somewhat harder, but that seems like a high price to pay: it eliminates the entire HTPC concept.
what's wrong with a file system? it is pretty much the easiest way to access my music and video.
Using the filesystem as a music browser sucks because (with some exceptions -- BeOS being the only one I'm aware of), the filesystem isn't aware of most of the metadata stored inside the media files themselves. It's fine if you only listen to music by browsing the Artist/Album tree, but if you want to do something more complex -- listen randomly to all songs from a particular genre, or perform some sort of Boolean-AND search -- you're a bit hosed if you've just got your music tucked away in/Artist/Album/nn-SongName.mp3 like most people do.
Support for arbitrary, user-defined metadata on the filesystem level -- or even better, RDBMS-like features -- is pretty cool, but in the past 10 years or so there have been a bunch of attempts to bring it into wide use and none of them have really succeeded very well. And at least for most people, purpose-built metadata browsers (music jukebox programs, which scan metadata and dump it into an index file for speedy browsing sorting, and searching), work pretty well. I don't see that changing too soon.
Also you have to look at how easy it is to steal a plate (not as easy as you think it is, and in truth it would probably just be easier to steal the car)
Huh? Look, I don't know crap about stealing cars, but I have a big screwdriver sitting here on my desk, and that's all you need to take the plate off of most cars. (I've seen some people who use theft-resistant bolts, usually hex or hex-pin, and in high-crime areas smart people keep their plates inside their car, but most American cars just use flathead machine screws.)
With a power drill/driver you could take a plate off a car in a matter of seconds. If you only stole them from cars that are parked nose-in, and only took the front plates (which complicates getting to it slightly, but also hides you a bit), I suspect a lot of people wouldn't notice until they got home.
[Shrug] That's a different argument. I probably should have put quotes around "liberate." At any rate I don't think it's really about oil; that's too simplistic. (It would have been cheaper just to buy the oil if that's what we had wanted; Saddam would have been more than happy to supply it to us and probably would have kept the Iranians in line.) I think the real cause has to do with the military-industrial-political complex in the U.S. and its desire to have a war every decade or so, and straightforward Machiavellian political maneuvering on the part of the Bush administration, when they realized that the war in Afghanistan wasn't going to occupy the nation's attention for the remainder of their (first) term in office.
I agree. People too often try to evaluate laws in some sort of abstract vacuum; as if it's either a "good law" or a "bad law" in an objective sense. While that may be an interesting intellectual exercise, it serves no purpose in the real world. Laws can only be evaluated within the context they were created and with the enforcement mechanisms that they were supposed to work with.
I can't think of anything that would destroy society faster than universal, omnipresent law enforcement. I really mean that; I don't think it's even a "slippery slope," it's a gaping chasm, where the bottom is complete social collapse.
Bringing in lots of new enforcement technologies is not always good, if they're used to simply enforce the same laws that have always existed, and were created by people who assumed a completely different enforcement scheme. If we really want to bring a lot of new technology into law enforcement, then we need to carefully re-evaluate our laws at the same time. Doing one without the other is a recipe for disaster. (Unfortunately, most people -- myself included -- do not have enough trust in our current government, either on the Federal, State, or local levels, to trust them with any major overhaul of our laws, particularly the criminal code; until this is remedied I don't think anything else can or should occur.)
Seems like, if the PRC is getting uppity and is deploying a lot of anti-carrier weapons (which their 'super-sonic torpedos,' mentioned further up in the thread, seem clearly to be), maybe the U.S. response is to change its posture away from one that requires it to interject itself directly into any cross-straight conflict.
Maybe if we sold the Taiwanese a missile boat or two, it would cause the mainlanders to think twice before doing anything spectacularly stupid; doubtless they really hate Taiwan and all it represents, but I'm not sure they'd be willing to annihilate it, if the cost was going to be their half-dozen largest coastal cities. That's assuming that the Taiwanese are serious enough about their own independence to make MAD a credible threat.
The U.S. has gotten into much trouble in the past by attempting to defend (or, lately, liberate) people or countries who really don't seem to have a whole lot of interest in doing it themselves; selling people the means to defend themselves seems like a much better deal than agreeing to play bodyguard and jump in to take a bullet for them.
Just to clarify, sending back an auto-reply that says "Hi, thanks for writing to postmaster@foo.com; we don't bother to monitor this account, so your message has been deleted," doesn't make you RFC2821 compliant. (Not implying that you thought that, just wanted to make sure everyone is clear.)
Auto-replies that confirm that a message has been received are OK ("Hi, thanks for writing to postmaster@foo.com; your message was received and will be dealt with by a staff member"), but only if there's eventually some followup. The RFC is pretty clear that the abuse and postmaster addresses should be monitored by a person; everything else is just optional window dressing.
Microsoft just blackholes both of those addresses. I've never gotten any further messages from them in response to any of the spam I've ever forwarded their way, but I suppose it's possible, or was possible at one point, that they were looking at it. But I've never gotten jack from them, and they're on the rfc-ignorant.org shitlist. (Which is a tremendously easy shitlist to get removed from, so I doubt it's in error.) What Hotmail/MS would like you to do is apparently go to some page on their site that relates to spam, but I've never visited.
Yahoo is likewise on the rfc-ignorant list, although they apparently just bounce with a "552 mail size or count over quota" error; although I think I've sent them stuff and not gotten a bounce message of any kind. (So either they're reading it and just haven't bothered to click the link to get themselves off the rfc-ignorant list, or they blackhole incoming messages silently, which would be very evil.)
Interestingly, Gmail.com and Google.com are not on the list, and neither is hushmail.com, aim.com, or inbox.com, although Lycos and its subdomains (I didn't even know they were still in business) are.
I think you're right about it not stopping spammers; I don't think it's even going to be much of a speed bump. It doesn't take a brilliant programmer to feed the output of an OCR program into a command-line calculator to evaluate simple mathematical expressions.
You might be able to trip some calculators up by using complex math or logic problems that aren't easily parseable by machines*, but this would also trip up a lot of humans. (Whether that's a bug or a feature I'll leave up to you.)
CAPTCHAs were, and still are, a neat hack, but as you increase their complexity beyond what's trivially solvable by an army of 'mechanical turk' keypunch monkies (either for real money or porn), you start to eliminate broader and broader swaths of humanity from the content. There's no good problem to use, because the criteria conflict with each other. On one hand, you want something that only takes a person a few seconds to figure out, because otherwise, people aren't going to want to go through them all the time. On the other hand, you want something that's non-trivial, because otherwise a spammer can just use an army of people to cut through them as if they weren't there.
I'm not sure that the CAPTCHA avenue has a lot left in it as a general solution.
* E.g., you could write flowery word problems that only involve basic arithmetic, so that the challenge is in natural language processing. This knocks out a lot of non-native language speakers, however. (Which again, could be acceptable if it's a regional website in a monolingual area; it also narrows the pool of 'mechanical turk' workers that can be hired to solve them as well.) But I'm not sure this is anything but a temporary setback, and it would come at too high a cost to be generally useful.
I think this was basically the idea behind BlueFrog; they had a pretty nice, aggressive system for going after the sites that profit from spam, by bouncing spam emails back at them and generally causing them a lot of grief.
It was obviously working, as demonstrated by the concentrated fire they started to take from spammers. Unfortunately, they didn't have the resources (at least, I'd prefer to think it was a resource issue and not one of will) to fight the spammers, and after getting some really terrible legal advice, they got crushed.
Short of brutal vigilante justice (which I'm not opposed to here and there, but it tends to not scale very well), Blue Frog's approach seemed to be the only "supply-side" approach to spam that ever seemed to show a bit of effectiveness.
One of the (many) things I hate about Hotmail is that Microsoft blatantly ignores anything sent to its postmaster and abuse addresses, so there's really no way to notify them of spam being spewed from their system. In fact, if you send a message to postmaster@hotmail.com, they send back a pretty snarky response telling you that nobody reads it.
What a cesspool. Hotmail has always been the ghetto of the internet, but now it's clear that it's infested with criminals, as well as just the technologically illiterate.
Actually I think anything that discourages people from using polyphonic ringtones is GREAT.
I really don't want to hear the first 10 second of the latest pop-crap song repeated over and over, every time I so much as step outside my house. A ringing phone is obnoxious enough to try and ignore; a polyphonic/MP3-playing one is far worse.
That feature by itself is probably going to drive more sales of cellphone-jamming and blocking equipment than anything else.
The government can take patents by eminent domain if it so chooses, but you have to be compensated for them just like any other property.
Given that the government just gobbling up intellectual property would really tick off a bunch of large corporations -- and since large corporations are the ones that the government actually gives a shit about, on both sides of the aisle -- they'll probably exercise more restraint when dealing with them than when dealing with the piddling civil rights of peon---I mean, citizens.
Also: "farther offshore, where people won't see the sliced up birds and complain"?
Pretty much. It's not like a coal or other fossil-fuel plant, which is what these might replace or reduce the need for, don't kill birds and have a big environmental impact, it's just that they do it in a more subtle way than clocking them upside the head. You have acid rain which destroys habitats, other types of air pollution, and other externalities.
The whole bird-killing opposition to wind power just astounds me. Wind power is not perfect, but I don't think anyone ever said it was. It's just better than most of the current alternatives.*
* At least the politically expedient alternatives. Personally I think that nuclear energy, realized as part of a full fuel and reprocessing cycle (yes, with Pu breeders), is probably the best overall near-term solution to our energy needs, if at the same time all the funding and effort that we spend on petrochemical exploration were spent on "generation skipping" advanced research (e.g. very-high-efficiency solar cells, fusion power, etc.).
Well, although I agree with your general point -- that URLs are a whole lot more information than IPs -- however, I think the example of webmail is probably wrong. All non-trivial email systems, and all the public ones that I'm aware of, use some form of authentication besides just having hard-to-guess URLs.
So just knowing that I went to a particular webmail URL wouldn't let someone else gain access to it without also knowing my password, or having some other way to snoop the authentication. (Maybe copying the cookie from my PC, or some other method.)
Anyway, so I agree with you in general, but there are better examples.
Slashdot Mirror
The "family company" is S.E. Johnson & Son, formerly S.E. Johnson Wax.
(Phillip Morris, now named Altria Group, doesn't have a slogan.)
no kid who grew up with an Xbox is getting married 6 years later
You're not from the South, apparently.
Maybe the working dogs have been neutered, to improve their temperament?
Seconded.
Where I really draw the line is in "friending" people that you've never met except via Facebook/Myspace, and that you have no real connection to otherwise. It seems like at that point, you've transformed what's basically a useful online addressbook into ego-boosting wankery.
I really like Facebook, but I guess I'm just not really into "social networking." (Whatever that means, exactly.) To me it's a good way to keep track of people's changing contact information (it was so much better back when they had an automatic export-to-VCard option) and occasionally to browse photos (although, if you have more than a handful there are better places to go, like Flickr).
Ultimately what I want out of Facebook is just a version of 'finger' that's simple enough for non-technical people to use. As they've gotten further away from that core functionality, it's become less compelling.
Quoth the AC: "What are your thoughts on Obama?"
To be honest I don't really have a strong opinion either way; although I'm probably best described as a libertarian, I'm a registered Republican and plan on voting in that primary. To that end, I've been paying more attention to the Republican candidates than the Democratic ones.
That said, based on what I've seen of him (which isn't insignificant; apparently the media thinks he's Jesus Christ with a tan) he seems far and away to be the most interesting candidate in the running. His foreign policy seems well-reasoned and sane, and I don't get the impression that he would be as much into appeasement as some of the others in his party. In terms of his domestic policy, I don't really have a firm grasp on what his overarching political philosophy is -- but then again, I haven't read any of his books, either. He seems to support free markets and has some people I respect working as his economic advisors, which is always a good sign.
Ultimately though, I find it unnerving that there's scant mention of individual liberties as a primary motivation for policies. That gives me significant pause, because the reason I'm willing to support someone like Ron Paul, who I occasionally disagree with but like anyway, is because I think he's fundamentally driven, or at least constrained, by a desire to protect individual rights and freedoms. Obama, in contrast, seems to be looking for a 'positive outcome' [1], and it's not immediately clear whether or how far he's willing to sacrifice individual rights in order to achieve certain outcomes. While his intentions may be good, there's a reason why the road to hell is said to be paved by them. By not guaranteeing my personal liberties up front, he's asking for a lot more faith than I'm prepared to give to anyone.
That said, he's far and away least frightening of the Democratic candidates (Edwards, with all the Marxist class-warfare rhetoric, seems like a real loose cannon) and I think that's his major advantage. I sincerely hope he can keep himself from self-destructing, because I really think that's about all he has to fear.
[1] "[W]e should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility [...] we should be guided by what works," from Wikipedia.
At its peak in early 2001, right before the beginning of the end, Enron had a market cap of $48B USD. While that's big by normal people's standards, it's only enough to have gotten them to #77 on the top-100 list at the time. (Source, from April 2001.) Enron employed 21,000 people prior to its collapse.
Microsoft, during the same period, was #2 at $370B, and today it's still $281B, almost six times larger than Enron was; Microsoft employs 71,000, or about 3.5 times as many people. Given that Enron's collapse is frequently described using words like "unprecedented" and "disastrous," and led directly to the one of the biggest changes in corporate securities law since the 1930s (Sarbanes-Oxley), not to mention the dismantlement of one of the nation's largest accounting forms (Arthur Anderson), a Congressional investigation, and jail time for most of the people responsible (except for Kenneth Lay, who had the good fortune to die first, to much applause), and speculation that its long-term effects would be greater than 9/11, I'm not sure I'd be so blasé.
Currently, they're ranked #4 in market cap, at $281 Billion USD. They used to be somewhat higher back around 2000/01, IIRC they used to fight for #1 with GE. I think what happened is a combination of their share price slipping a bit, and a dramatic rise in petrochemical/energy stocks in the past few years. (Note #1 is Exxon-Mobil.)
Just to put that figure in perspective, AT&T is #7 at $255, Wal-Mart is #13 at $197B, Cisco is #21 at $169B.
And, on the topic on hand, a Democratic government is *significantly* more likely to break up MS than a Republican government. The notion that this isn't so is extraordinarily absurd.
I'm not sure what you mean by "significantly," given that I think the odds of either party doing it are so vanishingly close to zero that it's hardly worth pretending that it's on the table.
You couldn't disassemble Microsoft, in the current climate (monoculture and dependence), without risking a huge upset in the tech sector. If Redmond catches a cold, the entire economy would feel it. And "it's the economy, stupid." Being 'pro-consumer' doesn't count for much if you're perceived to be bringing on the next dot-bomb.
If anything, Democrats depend far more on the high-tech sector of the economy than Republicans do for support, particularly corporate support. In recent years, Microsoft (and its employees) has been a major Democratic donor (#30 overall -- even bigger than the NRA and just beneath the AFL-CIO); in both '04 and '06 they gave the majority of their donations to Democrats.* Their employees are overwhelmingly Democratic donors and voters as well. Not to mention, Microsoft is also deeply in bed with the entertainment industry, another Democratic stalwart.
The political philosophy of either of the major parties is basically irrelevant; their actions are virtually always predictable by looking solely at their sources of funding and votes. Democrats are funded by the high tech industry, and many of their core constituencies are people who work in the tech industry, or are from areas (major urban centers) that depend on high-tech industries. They're not going to wreck that gravy train.
* Source is here although I'm not sure the deeplink will work. You can just search Opensecrets for Microsoft Corp.
Actually I'm a big Ron Paul fan. :) I don't agree with all of his stances necessarily, but I really like the guy for having a well-thought-out, consistent philosophy and not being afraid to talk about it. That's fairly rare at the national level, even more so for presidential candidates, even long-shot ones.
I don't think that he'll ever make it to the White House, though, so I'm pretty sure my theory is safe. Both the electoral system and national expectations are stacked against someone who's up-front and honest about their beliefs and philosophy, and who isn't reading from a prompter fed by the latest Gallup poll.
But I'm still planning on voting for him in the primary.
Given that it takes something like ~17 hours (based on my rough calculations using the figures on WP) to compress 100MB of data using this algorithm on a reasonably fast computer ... I don't think you'd really want to use it for browsing from CD. No decompression figure is given but I don't see any reason why it would be asymmetric. (Although if there's some reason why it would be dramatically asymmetric, it'd be great if someone would fill me in.)
Mobile use is right out too, at least with current-generation equipment.
Looking at the numbers this looks like it's about on target for the usual resources/space tradeoff. It's a bit smaller than other algorithms, but much, much more resource intensive. It's almost as if there's an asymptotic curve as you approach the absolute-minimum theoretical compression ratio, where resources just climb ridiculously.
Maybe the next big challenge should be for someone to achieve compression in a very resource-efficient way; a prize for coming in with a new compressor/decompressor that's significantly beneath the current resource/compression curve...
Right, because lefties aren't influenced by money? Microsoft has billions of dollars in cash, more than enough to buy whatever politicians happen to be in power.
Corruption isn't just a conservative phenomenon. By the time you get to the White House, unless you end up there by mistake, you're already crooked. The process of getting there guarantees it. I'm sure Microsoft slathers its campaign contributions around so that no matter who wins, they owe Redmond a few favors.
The only reason any politician would ever break up Microsoft would be if they thought they could somehow capitalize on its demise, and I don't see any reason why that's possible. You don't win votes by torpedoing one of the crown jewels of the U.S. economy and its economic dominance, even if you're a leftist. There might be some saber-rattling, but it's not going to be anything serious.
Your faith in one batch of weasels over another is cute, but ultimately I think you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.
Question for you, since you seem knowledgeable:
How do you implement a security system like this in software? Or do you just not do it at all?
Seems like the way that both DVD's CSS and AACS were broken involved software players. Unless Sony simply plans to just prohibit playback on general-purpose PCs, they'll have to create some sort of software implementation of the player hardware, which would mean the VM.
If they only allow playback on dedicated hardware, then I can see how this might make cracking somewhat harder, but that seems like a high price to pay: it eliminates the entire HTPC concept.
what's wrong with a file system? it is pretty much the easiest way to access my music and video.
/Artist/Album/nn-SongName.mp3 like most people do.
Using the filesystem as a music browser sucks because (with some exceptions -- BeOS being the only one I'm aware of), the filesystem isn't aware of most of the metadata stored inside the media files themselves. It's fine if you only listen to music by browsing the Artist/Album tree, but if you want to do something more complex -- listen randomly to all songs from a particular genre, or perform some sort of Boolean-AND search -- you're a bit hosed if you've just got your music tucked away in
Support for arbitrary, user-defined metadata on the filesystem level -- or even better, RDBMS-like features -- is pretty cool, but in the past 10 years or so there have been a bunch of attempts to bring it into wide use and none of them have really succeeded very well. And at least for most people, purpose-built metadata browsers (music jukebox programs, which scan metadata and dump it into an index file for speedy browsing sorting, and searching), work pretty well. I don't see that changing too soon.
Also you have to look at how easy it is to steal a plate (not as easy as you think it is, and in truth it would probably just be easier to steal the car)
Huh? Look, I don't know crap about stealing cars, but I have a big screwdriver sitting here on my desk, and that's all you need to take the plate off of most cars. (I've seen some people who use theft-resistant bolts, usually hex or hex-pin, and in high-crime areas smart people keep their plates inside their car, but most American cars just use flathead machine screws.)
With a power drill/driver you could take a plate off a car in a matter of seconds. If you only stole them from cars that are parked nose-in, and only took the front plates (which complicates getting to it slightly, but also hides you a bit), I suspect a lot of people wouldn't notice until they got home.
[Shrug] That's a different argument. I probably should have put quotes around "liberate." At any rate I don't think it's really about oil; that's too simplistic. (It would have been cheaper just to buy the oil if that's what we had wanted; Saddam would have been more than happy to supply it to us and probably would have kept the Iranians in line.) I think the real cause has to do with the military-industrial-political complex in the U.S. and its desire to have a war every decade or so, and straightforward Machiavellian political maneuvering on the part of the Bush administration, when they realized that the war in Afghanistan wasn't going to occupy the nation's attention for the remainder of their (first) term in office.
I agree. People too often try to evaluate laws in some sort of abstract vacuum; as if it's either a "good law" or a "bad law" in an objective sense. While that may be an interesting intellectual exercise, it serves no purpose in the real world. Laws can only be evaluated within the context they were created and with the enforcement mechanisms that they were supposed to work with.
I can't think of anything that would destroy society faster than universal, omnipresent law enforcement. I really mean that; I don't think it's even a "slippery slope," it's a gaping chasm, where the bottom is complete social collapse.
Bringing in lots of new enforcement technologies is not always good, if they're used to simply enforce the same laws that have always existed, and were created by people who assumed a completely different enforcement scheme. If we really want to bring a lot of new technology into law enforcement, then we need to carefully re-evaluate our laws at the same time. Doing one without the other is a recipe for disaster. (Unfortunately, most people -- myself included -- do not have enough trust in our current government, either on the Federal, State, or local levels, to trust them with any major overhaul of our laws, particularly the criminal code; until this is remedied I don't think anything else can or should occur.)
Do the Taiwanese have a sub fleet?
Seems like, if the PRC is getting uppity and is deploying a lot of anti-carrier weapons (which their 'super-sonic torpedos,' mentioned further up in the thread, seem clearly to be), maybe the U.S. response is to change its posture away from one that requires it to interject itself directly into any cross-straight conflict.
Maybe if we sold the Taiwanese a missile boat or two, it would cause the mainlanders to think twice before doing anything spectacularly stupid; doubtless they really hate Taiwan and all it represents, but I'm not sure they'd be willing to annihilate it, if the cost was going to be their half-dozen largest coastal cities. That's assuming that the Taiwanese are serious enough about their own independence to make MAD a credible threat.
The U.S. has gotten into much trouble in the past by attempting to defend (or, lately, liberate) people or countries who really don't seem to have a whole lot of interest in doing it themselves; selling people the means to defend themselves seems like a much better deal than agreeing to play bodyguard and jump in to take a bullet for them.
Just to clarify, sending back an auto-reply that says "Hi, thanks for writing to postmaster@foo.com; we don't bother to monitor this account, so your message has been deleted," doesn't make you RFC2821 compliant. (Not implying that you thought that, just wanted to make sure everyone is clear.)
Auto-replies that confirm that a message has been received are OK ("Hi, thanks for writing to postmaster@foo.com; your message was received and will be dealt with by a staff member"), but only if there's eventually some followup. The RFC is pretty clear that the abuse and postmaster addresses should be monitored by a person; everything else is just optional window dressing.
Microsoft just blackholes both of those addresses. I've never gotten any further messages from them in response to any of the spam I've ever forwarded their way, but I suppose it's possible, or was possible at one point, that they were looking at it. But I've never gotten jack from them, and they're on the rfc-ignorant.org shitlist. (Which is a tremendously easy shitlist to get removed from, so I doubt it's in error.) What Hotmail/MS would like you to do is apparently go to some page on their site that relates to spam, but I've never visited.
Yahoo is likewise on the rfc-ignorant list, although they apparently just bounce with a "552 mail size or count over quota" error; although I think I've sent them stuff and not gotten a bounce message of any kind. (So either they're reading it and just haven't bothered to click the link to get themselves off the rfc-ignorant list, or they blackhole incoming messages silently, which would be very evil.)
Interestingly, Gmail.com and Google.com are not on the list, and neither is hushmail.com, aim.com, or inbox.com, although Lycos and its subdomains (I didn't even know they were still in business) are.
I think you're right about it not stopping spammers; I don't think it's even going to be much of a speed bump. It doesn't take a brilliant programmer to feed the output of an OCR program into a command-line calculator to evaluate simple mathematical expressions.
You might be able to trip some calculators up by using complex math or logic problems that aren't easily parseable by machines*, but this would also trip up a lot of humans. (Whether that's a bug or a feature I'll leave up to you.)
CAPTCHAs were, and still are, a neat hack, but as you increase their complexity beyond what's trivially solvable by an army of 'mechanical turk' keypunch monkies (either for real money or porn), you start to eliminate broader and broader swaths of humanity from the content. There's no good problem to use, because the criteria conflict with each other. On one hand, you want something that only takes a person a few seconds to figure out, because otherwise, people aren't going to want to go through them all the time. On the other hand, you want something that's non-trivial, because otherwise a spammer can just use an army of people to cut through them as if they weren't there.
I'm not sure that the CAPTCHA avenue has a lot left in it as a general solution.
* E.g., you could write flowery word problems that only involve basic arithmetic, so that the challenge is in natural language processing. This knocks out a lot of non-native language speakers, however. (Which again, could be acceptable if it's a regional website in a monolingual area; it also narrows the pool of 'mechanical turk' workers that can be hired to solve them as well.) But I'm not sure this is anything but a temporary setback, and it would come at too high a cost to be generally useful.
I think this was basically the idea behind BlueFrog; they had a pretty nice, aggressive system for going after the sites that profit from spam, by bouncing spam emails back at them and generally causing them a lot of grief.
It was obviously working, as demonstrated by the concentrated fire they started to take from spammers. Unfortunately, they didn't have the resources (at least, I'd prefer to think it was a resource issue and not one of will) to fight the spammers, and after getting some really terrible legal advice, they got crushed.
Short of brutal vigilante justice (which I'm not opposed to here and there, but it tends to not scale very well), Blue Frog's approach seemed to be the only "supply-side" approach to spam that ever seemed to show a bit of effectiveness.
One of the (many) things I hate about Hotmail is that Microsoft blatantly ignores anything sent to its postmaster and abuse addresses, so there's really no way to notify them of spam being spewed from their system. In fact, if you send a message to postmaster@hotmail.com, they send back a pretty snarky response telling you that nobody reads it.
What a cesspool. Hotmail has always been the ghetto of the internet, but now it's clear that it's infested with criminals, as well as just the technologically illiterate.
Time to blackhole it.
Actually I think anything that discourages people from using polyphonic ringtones is GREAT.
I really don't want to hear the first 10 second of the latest pop-crap song repeated over and over, every time I so much as step outside my house. A ringing phone is obnoxious enough to try and ignore; a polyphonic/MP3-playing one is far worse.
That feature by itself is probably going to drive more sales of cellphone-jamming and blocking equipment than anything else.
The government can take patents by eminent domain if it so chooses, but you have to be compensated for them just like any other property.
Given that the government just gobbling up intellectual property would really tick off a bunch of large corporations -- and since large corporations are the ones that the government actually gives a shit about, on both sides of the aisle -- they'll probably exercise more restraint when dealing with them than when dealing with the piddling civil rights of peon---I mean, citizens.
Also: "farther offshore, where people won't see the sliced up birds and complain"?
Pretty much. It's not like a coal or other fossil-fuel plant, which is what these might replace or reduce the need for, don't kill birds and have a big environmental impact, it's just that they do it in a more subtle way than clocking them upside the head. You have acid rain which destroys habitats, other types of air pollution, and other externalities.
The whole bird-killing opposition to wind power just astounds me. Wind power is not perfect, but I don't think anyone ever said it was. It's just better than most of the current alternatives.*
* At least the politically expedient alternatives. Personally I think that nuclear energy, realized as part of a full fuel and reprocessing cycle (yes, with Pu breeders), is probably the best overall near-term solution to our energy needs, if at the same time all the funding and effort that we spend on petrochemical exploration were spent on "generation skipping" advanced research (e.g. very-high-efficiency solar cells, fusion power, etc.).
Well, although I agree with your general point -- that URLs are a whole lot more information than IPs -- however, I think the example of webmail is probably wrong. All non-trivial email systems, and all the public ones that I'm aware of, use some form of authentication besides just having hard-to-guess URLs.
So just knowing that I went to a particular webmail URL wouldn't let someone else gain access to it without also knowing my password, or having some other way to snoop the authentication. (Maybe copying the cookie from my PC, or some other method.)
Anyway, so I agree with you in general, but there are better examples.