It's not that Americans are richer. I'm British - I can tell you that with 100% certainty.
That's a comfortable excuse but it couldn't be further from the truth. You could maybe use that excuse for people in some third world country - but the Brits, the French, the Germans - are all comparably well off. They aren't jealous - they are angry that the USA doesn't participate in world forums - there have been at least a dozen important international treaties that the US has been the only civilised country not to participate in. These are things that people care about.
One that horrified me in particular was the International Criminal Court. This is the treaty that puts teeth behind the organisation who would punish Saddam Hussein - and other evil dictators. The US refused to sign unless a clause was added to say that US citizens could not be prosecuted by that court.
Can you just *imagine* for one moment how much that would upset everyone else on the entire planet?
One law for us - a different law for you? Geez! How damned arrogant!
This got maybe 10 seconds of US TV coverage. I've yet to speak to an American who'd even heard about it....and that's just one. I could name a dozen others.
Americans currently *hate* the French - but they like my French wife and treat her just fine.
The British people certainly wouldn't hate Americans in any kind of blanket way - it's the country as a whole that they see as the problem.
So, to be explicit:
UK Government likes US Government UK People mostly (IMHO) hate US Government UK People generally like US People
Actually, it's not even the 'government' - electing a Democrat next time around wouldn't immediately heal all wounds - and kicking out the Labor party and electing the Conservatives wouldn't break the ties between UK government and US.
I hate to worry you - but the British Government is on the side of the US. I think it's wrong to assume that the British people are.
It's definitely not just the war.
The US stance on world affairs in general - failure to go with the majority of civilised countries on Kiyoto, the land mine treaty, the international war crimes tribuneral, etc, etc. The inability of the US to rein in pollution. The abandonment (unilaterally) of the ABM treaty, forcing things like the DMCA down other countries throats, not supporting the UN (not even paying their share of the UN fees even!)...heck - the failure to adequately deal with Microsoft!
All of these things chip away at Americas' world standing.
The trouble is that these things are massively under-reported in the US media. I live in the USA - and I find it quite hard to find out about any of these things on TV or the radio without going to sources outside the USA.
I think the average American would be truly horrified at the stinky reputation their beloved country has pretty much anywhere outside their own borders. But they DON'T see that. All they are told is that a few Arab terrorists hate them...and the French.
Here's another one for you: if everyone receiving spam would use their credit card to purchase the product, and subsequently call the credit card company to dispute the charge (honestly, my willy did NOT grow by 2 inches!), then: a) the credit card company would no longer provide services to that business because of the large number of charge-backs b) the spammers would hurt badly because of the incurred cost of charge-backs (around $25 or so, from what I understand).
Right - but if appropriate laws were passed, it would be possible to simply have the credit card companies block these businesses automatically - or even to automatically refund everyone who'd bought something from them. That kind of action would hurt quite a bit. Of course I'm mostly joking, but if done in an organized manner, it would be possible to hurt some of the spammers badly. Possibly enough to make the others think twice about their practice.
I like to think of this as reverse-spamming where we'd inconvenience them by sending them false orders, false payments, etc - just as they inconvenience us by sending bogus email. However, the number of people doing the reverse spamming would have to *far* exceed the number of people who are genuinely trying to buy the spammers products if we wanted to dissuade the spammers.
The trouble is that there are laws against passing bad checks - and relying on a credit card company to refund me seems a little 'iffy'.
1. Most spammers use faked email address, they DO NOT suppose you to answer them. They want you to click the link, they want you to buy something, they want to install some spyware, adware or what-so-ever-ware on your computer!
I agree that the email address they give is likely to be faked - but my point is that in order to make money, SOMETHING in that post has to be real. If not the email address then the postal address, phone number, web site, etc.
2. Who can block the phone call to a certain number, who can block everyone's access to a certain website, and who can block a real physical position (address)?
The government could pass laws requiring phone companies, ISP's and the US mail to block traffic to people who have been logged as advertising illegally via email. It would require an efficient method to collect these addresses and automation to do the banning - but that's within the bounds of technical possibility.
A spammer can change his email address for every spam he sends - but he can't change his web site that often - and he certainly can't keep changing his phone number, physical address or bank account. I read somewhere that 90% of spam comes from just 600 people. It can't be that hard to block the money going back to those 600 people.
Spammers make profit in the hope that 0.000001% of the receivers would click the link, make a phone call, or write a snailmail to that address.
Yes - exactly. But if you can add a couple of zeroes to that 0.0000001% then it won't be worth their while. If every million email spamshot nets them 50 orders (a number I read somewhere as typical) - then they can make just a couple of bucks on each order and they have earned $100 for the time it took to type a single Spam and to run their system to send it. That's good money.
However, if you can get the numbers down to where they have to send several different mailshots to get even one order - then it starts to look like a pretty unprofitable business model and they'll stop doing it.
It seems that you don't understand how spamming works. This is a social problem, and cannot simply be "blocked".
I think I do understand how it works. I absolutely agree that blocking the spam isn't the answer - and that's my entire point. Removing the spammer's motive for sending the spam in the first place is the only answer IMHO.
I think we are attacking Spam from the wrong direction. Attempting to stem the flood of incoming spam is tough - everything about the identity of the incoming spam can be faked. However, we could alternatively attempt to prevent the replies going back the other way.
There are two inevitable facts:
1) In order for spamming to be worth someone's effort, they have to somehow get money from people. If NOBODY replied to them, then spamming would stop overnight.
2) Something in the content of the Spam must be real - a reply address - a web site, a phone number or something. Block traffic to that location and the spammer gets no money and dies.
Hence, I think they may be vulnerable. Educating people not to reply to SPAM would help - it only takes a mere handful of people to respond to a SPAM to make it profitable - but if education could drop that handful to a mere one or two - then we could succeed in putting more spammers out of business simply by cutting their margins to the point where it wasn't worth the hassle.
Where are the TV adverts: "Replying to Spam is Bad!"....we know that the morons who reply to spam are suckers for advertising - they are as likely to believe a well targetted TV advert as a crappy email shot. If Spam is costing the ISP's as much as they say it does - then funding some TV ads might not be impossible.
What if we made it illegal to respond to an emailed advertisement that was not clearly labelled as such, that would help to deter people from responding. Such a law would be next to impossible to enforce - but we are trying to deter the gullible here - so it might not have to be enforcable - just very well advertised.
Since every SPAM has to either advertise a product that you can buy from somewhere - or direct you to a postal address, a phone number or a web site - then that route for getting money back to the spammer could be blocked.
The return route has to be genuine. There is no point in them sending you a fake phone number or faked web address. If the phone companies (who are often also ISP's - or have at least some cause to want to kill spam) were to block calls to and from phone numbers that were seen in Spam - then the reverse route for the money would be curtailed. Whilst you can afford to change the aparrent source of your spam and fake those addresses for each new mail shot, you can't change your phone number for every couple of dozen orders you take. Similar considerations apply to web sites and postal addresses.
If it was required for credit card companies not to transfer money to businesses that employed spammers to push their goods - then that would also help some.
It wouldn't take many people to deliberately reply to spammers - to lead them on into thinking you want their product - to send them fake cheques or bogus credit card numbers. If they only get a handful of positive responses per million spams - then it wouldn't take more than a few determined people per million (eg ISP employees) to clutter up the the spammer's cash collection mechanism to the point where it's too much hassle for him to sort out the real orders from the bogus ones.
I don't pretend to have all of the answers - but there seems to be far too little creative thinking along these lines.
I design flight sims for the US military - our older products are on IRIX, our newer ones are Linux-based. Not an M$ system in sight - they just don't cut it for flexibility and reliability.
You don't even need lasers - the current generation of desktop projectors use a half inch slab of silicon with a piezo-electric layer and about a million tiny mirrors. That part ought to be cheap. The problem is getting red/green/blue light sources (not lasers) that are bright enough, cheap enough and monochromatic enough. They currently use white light and coloured filters - but those lamps are EXPENSIVE and they break fairly frequently.
Those devices are down to maybe six inches on a side and an inch or two thick.
If we could find suitable (ie more reliable, cheaper and cooler-running) light sources then the existing projector technology would be useful in a lot of places where this matchbox-sized projector is applicable.
The ultra-tiny projector has a place for things like virtual reality though. If they are reasonably light then a couple of these could be mounted into a headset to generate a nice high resolution stereo display projected into a couple of curved mirrors. That technology already exists - but it's hideously expensive.
THe frequency rating of something like a scope refers to the highest frequency sinewave it can reconstruct. Nyquists sampling theorem says that you need MORE than twice the frequency. If you have exactly two samples for one cycle of a sinewave, you can't reconstruct it. However, if you have 2.1 samples - you can.
You are concerned about reconstructing the details of the shape of the waveform - but that's not at issue here. We're only promising that if you look at a fourier transform of your signal - then the highest component of that that we'll reconstruct must be less than half of our sampling frequency.
When we are way up there where we have only two-and-a-bit samples, the only shape we can possibly see is a sine wave because anything else would have higher frequency components - and then we are off the hook - we don't have to reproduce those kinds of waves accurately.
So - the issue is whether you can deduce the phase, amplitude and frequency of a sine wave from just two-and-a-bit samples. Nyquist says you can - and he's right.
Stop thinking about how you'd draw graphics of a sinewave using only three numbers - this is signal processing - not graph plotting.
If you want to see a 40MHz square wave, you may well need a 400MHz scope - but for a 40MHz sine wave, a 40MHz scope (which samples at a little over 80Msamples/sec) should be plenty.
The new ATI cards (those based on R300 and newer, i.e. radeon 9500/9600/9700/9800) have no open-source 3d driver,
Uh - isn't that what I said? The Radion 9500 and 9700 came out in the middle of 2002 for chrissakes. Sure, there are OpenSourced drivers for cards that are a couple of years out of date - but I want fragment shaders, stuff that's MODERN.
This isn't in any way a criticism of the people who write and maintain OpenSource drivers - I fully understand why you can't write drivers for the modern cards unless you get the specs. But from an end-user's perspective, if my product is to be competitive, I need modern ATI and nVidia drivers so unless I want to go closed-source for *EVERYTHING* (ie Windows), I have to swallow my considerable moral objections and use the binary drivers.
So, drivers for modern 3D cards are binary only - and if Y can't use them a-is then it's ruled out without further consideration for a large fraction of the desktop users out there.
Obviously, if it really could take over from X then it might have enough credability to convince ATI and nVidia to release drivers for it...but there is a chicken-and-egg situation here.
For Y to be remotely usable for me, it would need good support for OpenGL on nVidia and ATI graphics cards...for which (annoyingly) we only have binary drivers.
So - my questions would be:
1) Can Y use GLX protocols and work with existing (binary only) OpenGL drivers?
2) There is mention that Y can use hardware accelleration on 3D hardware. My concern about this is how much of the valuable 3D resources such as texture map memory it consumes. Generally, X runs plenty fast enough without using those resources and I wouldn't want to impact my 3D capabilities in order to make the 2D windowing system run ten times faster than it really needs to run.
Certainly X needs updating - it's old and it shows it's age.
This is going to be trivial to circumvent - so the bad guys will continue to drive drunk - and law abiding citizens will pay the cost.
1) How does the car know you are breathing into it's sample tube and not squirting air into it from some other source?
2) Note that breathalyzers only produce a valid reading 15 minutes AFTER you've taken your last drink. For some of that time, the alcohol remaining in your mouth will give a false positive if you have had a drink but are well below the legal limit. For the later part of that time, the alcohol has not yet passed from your stomach into your blood stream and thence into your lungs - so you'll get a false negative for people who are already legally drunk.
So the test that happens as you get into the car could produce either a false positive (making it impossible to drive your car for 15 minutes after you've just finished a single glass of wine with a large meal) - or a false negative (allowing people who will shortly become drunk as a skunk to get their car started before the full effects are noticable in their breath).
3) Since there is also the obvious "getting your friend to start the car" trick - the initial test is essentially worthless. The whole thing stands or falls on the 'random retest'. Are we to believe that the car beeps at you and demands that you blow into a tube whilst you are driving along...all day - every day? Isn't that gonna be kinda distracting? Am I going to have to prove I'm not drunk every day I drive to work - or 50 times during a long road trip?
How often does it do it? If it's going to do it once every (say) 10 hours of driving, then that won't be a deterrent to someone who is stupid enough to take the risk of driving drunk. If it does it once an hour - then *maybe* that's a deterrent - but it's also a major pain to have to do this two or three times a day on your daily commute.
This is a stupid law.
Here in Texas, the penalty for drunk driving is pathetic - hardly more than a speeding ticket. In UK, there is a HUGE fine (thousands of dollars) and they automatically take away your driving license for 18 months (more for a second offence) - and of course your insurance premiums are going to be astronomical for the rest of your life.
A year or two ago, porting Office would have been a good thing for Linux because we really needed something like that to make Linux itself more viable.
But the lack of Office has spurred OpenOffice development to the point where it's now we really don't need Microsoft to be able to sell Linux to big business, governments from around the world and John Q Public. All this move does is:
1) Give OpenOffice some competition that will reduce the amount of 'developer itch' needed to keep it growing and improving.
the source codes, or blueprints,
Yuck!
Please: Spokespersons from the FBI and people from the media - learn to say "code" not "codes". It's like the plural of sheep and hair is still sheep and hair. "codes" are encryption algorithms or something.
And the source code for Windows is nothing like a blueprint. Source code is the actual thing we build - a blueprint is a guide for building the thing it describes. For software, the analogous thing to a blueprint would be something like a flowchart.
Re:OpenSource ECU code - a real need.
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Hack Your Car
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My May '03 build car had no such problems.
I'm suprised to hear a May '03 build would be without the problem. But if it was delivered in May, it would have been built in February and probably been one of the last to have the very old software that worked OK.
Alternatively, if you didn't drive the car in hot weather (and we are talking 90 degrees and up) WITH reformulated gas for at least three tankfuls - you'd never have suffered from the problem anyway. Basically, you had to live in Texas or Florida.
All in all, I don't think MINI/BMW screwed up too much. As you know, the ECU in the MINI is complex,
Actually, the ECU in the MINI is made by Siemens - and they used a third party to write the software for it. BMW/MINI don't even have access to the source code - which is something I find quite suprising. I've seen a hex dump of the ECU contents (one of the car 'chippers' extracted it). There seems to be very little actual code. Most of the 64Kbytes is a bunch of lookup tables.
What I think made it hard to fix was the chain of people who had to be convinced that there was a problem - then the problem of a team working in Germany reproducing the conditions of a Texas summer with a kind of gasoline that they would have to import somehow. Add to that the problem that the ECU learns...so the problem is not how to fix the direct problem - but how to prevent it from learning that behaviour....doing all of that without screwing up the algorithms for cold weather running on whatever fuel type you get in Norway...and without breaking the emissions restrictions in any of three dozen countries.
I sure as well wouldn't honor a warranty if I found out my customer reprogrammed the ECU. But at least having it Open Source means the bug would've been found sooner... I agree with that.
Yes - if you mess with the ECU, expect your engine warranty to be toast. The MINI owners who were working on this had already modified the heck out of their cars anyway - so that would have been a moot point.
Anywho, enjoy your MINI. If you want to sell it cheap, let me know, I miss mine:)
sell? SELL? You've gotta be kidding - sell Yoda? He's my baby?!
(He's called "Yoda" - because he's small, green and deceptively powerful).
Re:OpenSource ECU code - a real need.
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Hack Your Car
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· Score: 3, Informative
There is a fixed ECU revision out there (Variously known as v1.3.6, v3.6 and v36). If your car is an '03, your dealer should be able to install the new software in about 20 minutes under warranty.
I did slightly 'abbreviate' the full details for the sake of brevity - in fact, early '03 model year cars from late 2002 or manufactured in Jan/Feb of 2003 were still using the older software and are stumble-free. Also, before the stumble was discovered, many dealerships upgraded cars with the older software to the 1.3.2 and 1.3.3 versions and these guys started to suffer when they'd been working OK beforehand. One reason for doing that was a minor cold-starting problem in non-supercharged MINI Coopers - and also to fix some shift-pattern problem in the CVT MINI Coopers.
So, you DO see '02 cars *with* the stumble problem and there are also '03 cars that don't suffer from it at all (mine is an '03 model built in October 2002 - and I don't have the stumble because I didn't do the upgrade).
The 'warble' you describe has also been well documented - it's more often called the 'yo-yo'. The jury is still out on whether it is fixed by the 1.3.6 software - some people claim it's fixed, others claim it's a little less noticable - other people say it's not there at all. It's a subtle problem though - some people don't notice the problem at all even though other people can clearly feel it in the exact same vehicle.
Overall, there doesn't seem to be any reason NOT to upgrade to 1.3.6 - nobody has yet said it made matters worse.
OpenSource ECU code - a real need.
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Hack Your Car
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· Score: 5, Informative
Let me tell you a true story:
The 2002 MINI Cooper S (a **GREAT** car BTW) was delivered with Engine management (ECU) software V1.3.0. It worked fine.
The 2003 MINI Cooper S was delivered with ECU software V1.3.2. We believe the changes were to accomodate the Diesel version of the MINI that was due to appear in Europe - but there may have been other changes too.
v1.3.2 worked well - EXCEPT when the high ambient temperatures of a Texas summer combined with 'Reformulated Gasoline' (not sold in all US States - and not seen in Europe). With that combination of conditions, the car would roll forwards 10 feet and stall if you accellerated moderatly hard from a standing start. This came to be known as 'the stumbles'. When it strikes, it can actually be quite dangerous because you could in all likelyhood be stalled out right in front of an oncoming vehicle.
Both ECU electronics and engine mechanics are IDENTICAL between the 2002 and 2003 models - so this had to be a software bug.
It took a LONG time to figure out why some cars were stumbling. The owners' clubs first noticed that only 2003 cars did it - then we discovered this was only happening in the summer - and only in Texas and (IIRC) Florida - but then we heard that it wasn't happening in New Mexico. So we initially ruled out the 'high temperature' theory. However, New Mexico doesn't have reformulated gas.
So when we realised that reformulated Gas is sold in Texas and Florida - but not in New Mexico, we thought that might be the issue...but then we found that it didn't happen in New York (reformulated gas - but no high temperatures).
The whole thing was also confused by the fact that the MINI's ECU has adaptive software. When we had a few days of cool temperatures, the problem DIDN'T go away - and you had to run three tankfuls of non-reformulated gas through the car before the ECU would un-learn the stumble.
It's a tribute to the 'community' spirit of MINI owners (and lots of long threads on several mailing lists) that we ever figured out WTF was happening to our cars at all.
It took six months to pursuade BMW/MINI that there was truly a problem (by which time temperatures had dropped and we couldn't reproduce the problem) - and another 6 months for them to fix it and get a software upgrade out.
Meanwhile, the 2002 MINI's were still running V1.3.0 just fine in all temperatures and all gasoline types - and 2003 MINI's were stumbling all over the place.
Owners of 2003 machines were begging the dealerships to downgrade their cars back to the 2002 code - but dealerships were either unable or unwilling to do that - we're still not quite sure why - but it's likely that the security system in the MINI's ECU somehow prevents that.
This is a CLASSIC case where we'd have *killed* to have an OpenSource solution so we could fix the problem ourselves...either by simply reprogramming our 2003 cars with 2002 software (kindly donated by a 2002 owner)...or by doing a 'diff' and figuring out what was actually wrong.
Even without the source code, it would have been possible to do a binary dump from one car to another - but for the fact that these ECU's are protected by a barrage of 'challenge/response' tests (the details of which are a closely guarded secret). If your laptop fails to provide the correct response to the challenge, the car literally shuts down all software functions for THREE HOURS!! This effectively foils any effort to do a trial-and-error test to reverse-engineer the challenge/response system.
So - whilst it MIGHT be dangerous to allow people to randomly hack their cars, there are also dangers in preventing them from doing so.
Maybe. The only one of those I ever used was on a PDP-ll/20 and I recall having to key the paper tape loader into RAM using the front panel switches and hit the RUN button to start it loading.
But the IBM card reader was completely automated.
(Easier examples are VCR's that play the tape as soon as you push it into the slot)
When considering the huge numbers flying around in government spending, it's instructive to divide by the number of tax payers and pretend the money is coming out of your own pocket. I have no idea what the correct number is - but let's say there are 200,000,000 tax payers in the USA.
Scaling all the numbers down by a factor of 200M and pretending that's what it's going to cost me personally gets this in proportion:
* NASA's budget request for 2005 is $80 per year out of my pocket. * Bush added an extra $5 per year to go to the moon again. * NASA say that going to the moon again will cost me $33 per year. * The war in IRAQ has cost me almost $500 so far. * The government deficit this year alone would require me to pay $2,600 in
extra taxes in order to wipe it out.
Dunno about you - but I'd pay $5 per year to see men on the moon again - that's cheaper than going to a movie. I think I'd happily give them $80 if I thought they'd do a good job of it and didn't blow it all on useless space stations.
$500 to go to war though...I'd have to think very carefully before spending that much money...and spending $2,600 more money than I earned in a year would make me pretty seriously concerned.
I'm fairly sure the IBM mainframe I used back in 1975 would auto-load and execute a deck of punched cards if you just dumped them into the input hopper.
Oh - wait...they're suing Microsoft. Ah. In that case:
Those evil Microsoft guys - always stealing other people's technology. Bastards!
The Moon seems like a very dead and uninteresting place unless it can be confirmed that there are ice deposits in some of the deeper craters. There seems little point in going back there - other than to explore the geology - and we know how to do that with robots like the ones that are doing such great work on Mars right now.
The Mars mission would probably be better served by assembling the craft at a Legrange point - but to do so, we need a better lift capability.
However, I concede the President's desire to get the public excited about space again - and setting up an assembly facility at L5 isn't going to do that...it sounds like just another space station like the hideously expensive waste of vacuum that we are probably about to abandon.
I'd have preferred to see the President putting his weight behind the construction of a space elevator to earth orbit. That is a worthy goal, it's certainly at least as do-able as a manned Mars mission and would have immense benefits for mankind beyond the Mars mission. The likely need for novel materials to build it would also have great spin-off potential for American business - and hence go a long way toward justifying the expense.
Setting up a facility at a Legrange point would also fit nicely with the plans for the Hubble replacement - so there would be synergy in that effort.
Society has still not decided whether TV violence causes actual violence - let alone the lack of conclusive proof for Rap music lyrics-induced violence, Board-game-induced violence (remember Dungeons-and-Dragons?) Cinematically-induced violence, promiscuity after listening to Elvis records, Radio Play-induced violence, Book violence, Bayeux-tapestry-induced violence (have you *seen* that thing? It oughta have at least a 'PG-13' rating), Cave painting violence or racial-memory induced violence.
Until we understand the impact of all of those other things, there is little hope that this issue will ever be conclusively resolved for Video games, Holodeck novellas or any other story-telling media we may come up with in the future.
I work in a military-related business (flight simulation) where security is a reasonably big deal - and like many companies, they don't allow cameras on company property.
If the only phones you could get had cameras, I would be able to own one. Even if I didn't need it at work, the risk of accidentally walking into work with a camera phone in my coat pocket and spending the next 10 years in Guantanamo Bay would be too great.
Fortunately, we aren't at that stage yet - but I can see it coming.
I'm also not overly fond of digital phones. Where I live, cell phone reception is kinda marginal. The digital phones either work completely - or they don't work at all (depending on the phase of the moon or something). With analog phones I can always get a connection - although it may be a little noisy. Better noisy than nothing.
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It's not that Americans are richer. I'm British - I can tell you that with 100% certainty.
...and that's just one. I could name a dozen others.
That's a comfortable excuse but it couldn't be further from the truth. You could maybe use that excuse for people in some third world country - but the Brits, the French, the Germans - are all comparably well off. They aren't jealous - they are angry that the USA doesn't participate in world forums - there have been at least a dozen important international treaties that the US has been the only civilised country not to participate in. These are things that people care about.
One that horrified me in particular was the International Criminal Court. This is the treaty that puts teeth behind the organisation who would punish Saddam Hussein - and other evil dictators. The US refused to sign unless a clause was added to say that US citizens could not be prosecuted by that court.
Can you just *imagine* for one moment how much that would upset everyone else on the entire planet?
One law for us - a different law for you? Geez! How damned arrogant!
This got maybe 10 seconds of US TV coverage. I've yet to speak to an American who'd even heard about it.
No - it's never people against people.
Americans currently *hate* the French - but they like my French wife and treat her just fine.
The British people certainly wouldn't hate Americans in any kind of blanket way - it's the country as a whole that they see as the problem.
So, to be explicit:
UK Government likes US Government
UK People mostly (IMHO) hate US Government
UK People generally like US People
Actually, it's not even the 'government' - electing a Democrat next time
around wouldn't immediately heal all wounds - and kicking out the Labor
party and electing the Conservatives wouldn't break the ties between
UK government and US.
I hate to worry you - but the British Government is on the side of the US. I think it's wrong to assume that the British people are.
It's definitely not just the war.
The US stance on world affairs in general - failure to go with the majority of civilised countries on Kiyoto, the land mine treaty, the international war crimes tribuneral, etc, etc. The inability of the US to rein in pollution. The abandonment (unilaterally) of the ABM treaty, forcing things like the DMCA down other countries throats, not supporting the UN (not even paying their share of the UN fees even!)...heck - the failure to adequately deal with Microsoft!
All of these things chip away at Americas' world standing.
The trouble is that these things are massively under-reported in the US media. I live in the USA - and I find it quite hard to find out about any of these things on TV or the radio without going to sources outside the USA.
I think the average American would be truly horrified at the stinky reputation their beloved country has pretty much anywhere outside their own borders. But they DON'T see that. All they are told is that a few Arab terrorists hate them...and the French.
You need to find one of those REALLY tiny PC's - run it on that - then you can pretend it's just an embedded application running on a mere peripheral!
Here's another one for you: if everyone receiving spam would use their credit card to purchase the product, and subsequently call the credit card company to dispute the charge (honestly, my willy did NOT grow by 2 inches!), then:
a) the credit card company would no longer provide services to that business because of the large number of charge-backs
b) the spammers would hurt badly because of the incurred cost of charge-backs (around $25 or so, from what I understand).
Right - but if appropriate laws were passed, it would be possible to simply
have the credit card companies block these businesses automatically - or even to automatically refund everyone who'd bought something from them. That kind of
action would hurt quite a bit.
Of course I'm mostly joking, but if done in an organized manner, it would be possible to hurt some of the spammers badly. Possibly enough to make the others think twice about their practice.
I like to think of this as reverse-spamming where we'd inconvenience them by
sending them false orders, false payments, etc - just as they inconvenience us by sending bogus email. However, the number of people doing the reverse spamming would have to *far* exceed the number of people who are genuinely trying to buy the spammers products if we wanted to dissuade the spammers.
The trouble is that there are laws against passing bad checks - and relying on a credit card company to refund me seems a little 'iffy'.
1. Most spammers use faked email address, they DO NOT suppose you to answer them. They want you to click the link, they want you to buy something, they want to install some spyware, adware or what-so-ever-ware on your computer!
I agree that the email address they give is likely to be faked - but my point is that in order to make money, SOMETHING in that post has to be real. If not the email address then the postal address, phone number, web site, etc.
2. Who can block the phone call to a certain number, who can block everyone's access to a certain website, and who can block a real physical position (address)?
The government could pass laws requiring phone companies, ISP's and the US mail to block traffic to people who have been logged as advertising illegally via email. It would require an efficient method to collect these addresses and automation to do the banning - but that's within the bounds of technical possibility.
A spammer can change his email address for every spam he sends - but he can't change his web site that often - and he certainly can't keep changing his phone number, physical address or bank account. I read somewhere that 90% of spam comes from just 600 people. It can't be that hard to block the money going back to those 600 people.
Spammers make profit in the hope that 0.000001% of the receivers would click the link, make a phone call, or write a snailmail to that address.
Yes - exactly. But if you can add a couple of zeroes to that 0.0000001% then it won't be worth their while. If every million email spamshot nets them 50 orders (a number I read somewhere as typical) - then they can make just a couple of bucks on each order and they have earned $100 for the time it took to type a single Spam and to run their system to send it. That's good money.
However, if you can get the numbers down to where they have to send several different mailshots to get even one order - then it starts to look like a pretty unprofitable business model and they'll stop doing it.
It seems that you don't understand how spamming works. This is a social problem, and cannot simply be "blocked".
I think I do understand how it works. I absolutely agree that blocking the spam isn't the answer - and that's my entire point. Removing the spammer's motive for sending the spam in the first place is the only answer IMHO.
I think we are attacking Spam from the wrong direction. Attempting to stem the flood of incoming spam is tough - everything about the identity of the incoming spam can be faked. However, we could alternatively attempt to prevent the replies going back the other way.
There are two inevitable facts:
1) In order for spamming to be worth someone's effort, they have to somehow get money from people. If NOBODY replied to them, then spamming would stop overnight.
2) Something in the content of the Spam must be real - a reply address - a web site, a phone number or something. Block traffic to that location and the spammer gets no money and dies.
Hence, I think they may be vulnerable. Educating people not to reply to SPAM would help - it only takes a mere handful of people to respond to a SPAM to make it profitable - but if education could drop that handful to a mere one or two - then we could succeed in putting more spammers out of business simply by cutting their margins to the point where it wasn't worth the hassle.
Where are the TV adverts: "Replying to Spam is Bad!"....we know that the morons who reply to spam are suckers for advertising - they are as likely to believe a well targetted TV advert as a crappy email shot. If Spam is costing the ISP's as much as they say it does - then funding some TV ads might not be impossible.
What if we made it illegal to respond to an emailed advertisement that was not clearly labelled as such, that would help to deter people from responding. Such a law would be next to impossible to enforce - but we are trying to deter the gullible here - so it might not have to be enforcable - just very well advertised.
Since every SPAM has to either advertise a product that you can buy from somewhere - or direct you to a postal address, a phone number or a web site - then that route for getting money back to the spammer could be blocked.
The return route has to be genuine. There is no point in them sending you a fake phone number or faked web address. If the phone companies (who are often also ISP's - or have at least some cause to want to kill spam) were to block calls to and from phone numbers that were seen in Spam - then the reverse route for the money would be curtailed. Whilst you can afford to change the aparrent source of your spam and fake those addresses for each new mail shot, you can't change your phone number for every couple of dozen orders you take. Similar considerations apply to web sites and postal addresses.
If it was required for credit card companies not to transfer money to businesses that employed spammers to push their goods - then that would also help some.
It wouldn't take many people to deliberately reply to spammers - to lead them on into thinking you want their product - to send them fake cheques or bogus credit card numbers. If they only get a handful of positive responses per million spams - then it wouldn't take more than a few determined people per million (eg ISP employees) to clutter up the the spammer's cash collection mechanism to the point where it's too much hassle for him to sort out the real orders from the bogus ones.
I don't pretend to have all of the answers - but there seems to be far too little creative thinking along these lines.
I design flight sims for the US military - our older products are on IRIX, our newer ones are Linux-based. Not an M$ system in sight - they just don't cut it for flexibility and reliability.
You don't even need lasers - the current generation of desktop projectors use a half inch slab of silicon with a piezo-electric layer and about a million tiny mirrors. That part ought to be cheap. The problem is getting red/green/blue
light sources (not lasers) that are bright enough, cheap enough and monochromatic enough. They currently use white light and coloured filters - but those lamps are EXPENSIVE and they break fairly frequently.
Those devices are down to maybe six inches on a side and an inch or two thick.
If we could find suitable (ie more reliable, cheaper and cooler-running) light
sources then the existing projector technology would be useful in a lot of places
where this matchbox-sized projector is applicable.
The ultra-tiny projector has a place for things like virtual reality though. If they are reasonably light then a couple of these could be mounted into a headset to generate a nice high resolution stereo display projected into a couple of curved mirrors. That technology already exists - but it's hideously expensive.
THe frequency rating of something like a scope refers to the highest frequency sinewave it can reconstruct. Nyquists sampling theorem says that you need MORE than twice the frequency. If you have exactly two samples for one cycle of a sinewave, you can't reconstruct it. However, if you have 2.1 samples - you can.
You are concerned about reconstructing the details of the shape of the waveform - but that's not at issue here. We're only promising that if you look at a fourier transform of your signal - then the highest component of that that we'll reconstruct must be less than half of our sampling frequency.
When we are way up there where we have only two-and-a-bit samples, the only shape we can possibly see is a sine wave because anything else would have higher frequency components - and then we are off the hook - we don't have to reproduce those kinds of waves accurately.
So - the issue is whether you can deduce the phase, amplitude and frequency of a sine wave from just two-and-a-bit samples. Nyquist says you can - and he's right.
Stop thinking about how you'd draw graphics of a sinewave using only three numbers - this is signal processing - not graph plotting.
If you want to see a 40MHz square wave, you may well need a 400MHz scope - but for a 40MHz sine wave, a 40MHz scope (which samples at a little over 80Msamples/sec) should be plenty.
Uh - isn't that what I said? The Radion 9500 and 9700 came out in the middle of 2002 for chrissakes. Sure, there are OpenSourced drivers for cards that are a couple of years out of date - but I want fragment shaders, stuff that's MODERN.
This isn't in any way a criticism of the people who write and maintain OpenSource drivers - I fully understand why you can't write drivers for the modern cards unless you get the specs. But from an end-user's perspective, if my product is to be competitive, I need modern ATI and nVidia drivers so unless I want to go closed-source for *EVERYTHING* (ie Windows), I have to swallow my considerable moral objections and use the binary drivers.
So, drivers for modern 3D cards are binary only - and if Y can't use them a-is then it's ruled out without further consideration for a large fraction of the desktop users out there.
Obviously, if it really could take over from X then it might have enough credability to convince ATI and nVidia to release drivers for it...but there is a chicken-and-egg situation here.
For Y to be remotely usable for me, it would need good support for OpenGL on nVidia and ATI graphics cards...for which (annoyingly) we only have binary drivers.
So - my questions would be:
1) Can Y use GLX protocols and work with existing (binary only) OpenGL drivers?
2) There is mention that Y can use hardware accelleration on 3D hardware. My concern about this is how much of the valuable 3D resources such as texture map memory it consumes. Generally, X runs plenty fast enough without using those resources and I wouldn't want to impact my 3D capabilities in order to make the 2D windowing system run ten times faster than it really needs to run.
Certainly X needs updating - it's old and it shows it's age.
1) How does the car know you are breathing into it's sample tube and not squirting air into it from some other source?
2) Note that breathalyzers only produce a valid reading 15 minutes AFTER you've taken your last drink. For some of that time, the alcohol remaining in your mouth will give a false positive if you have had a drink but are well below the legal limit. For the later part of that time, the alcohol has not yet passed from your stomach into your blood stream and thence into your lungs - so you'll get a false negative for people who are already legally drunk.
So the test that happens as you get into the car could produce either a false positive (making it impossible to drive your car for 15 minutes after you've just finished a single glass of wine with a large meal) - or a false negative (allowing people who will shortly become drunk as a skunk to get their car started before the full effects are noticable in their breath).
3) Since there is also the obvious "getting your friend to start the car" trick - the initial test is essentially worthless. The whole thing stands or falls on the 'random retest'. Are we to believe that the car beeps at you and demands that you blow into a tube whilst you are driving along...all day - every day? Isn't that gonna be kinda distracting? Am I going to have to prove I'm not drunk every day I drive to work - or 50 times during a long road trip?
How often does it do it? If it's going to do it once every (say) 10 hours of driving, then that won't be a deterrent to someone who is stupid enough to take the risk of driving drunk. If it does it once an hour - then *maybe* that's a deterrent - but it's also a major pain to have to do this two or three times a day on your daily commute.
This is a stupid law.
Here in Texas, the penalty for drunk driving is pathetic - hardly more than a speeding ticket. In UK, there is a HUGE fine (thousands of dollars) and they automatically take away your driving license for 18 months (more for a second offence) - and of course your insurance premiums are going to be astronomical for the rest of your life.
Now *that* is a deterrent.
A year or two ago, porting Office would have been a good thing for Linux because we really needed something like that to make Linux itself more viable.
But the lack of Office has spurred OpenOffice development to the point where it's now we really don't need Microsoft to be able to sell Linux to big business, governments from around the world and John Q Public. All this move does is:
1) Give OpenOffice some competition that will reduce the amount of 'developer itch' needed to keep it growing and improving.
2) Give Microsoft another revenue stream.
3) Allow email virii to attack Linux boxes.
the source codes, or blueprints, Yuck! Please: Spokespersons from the FBI and people from the media - learn to say "code" not "codes". It's like the plural of sheep and hair is still sheep and hair. "codes" are encryption algorithms or something. And the source code for Windows is nothing like a blueprint. Source code is the actual thing we build - a blueprint is a guide for building the thing it describes. For software, the analogous thing to a blueprint would be something like a flowchart.
I'm suprised to hear a May '03 build would be without the problem. But if it was delivered in May, it would have been built in February and probably been one of the last to have the very old software that worked OK.
Alternatively, if you didn't drive the car in hot weather (and we are talking 90 degrees and up) WITH reformulated gas for at least three tankfuls - you'd never have suffered from the problem anyway. Basically, you had to live in Texas or Florida.
All in all, I don't think MINI/BMW screwed up too much. As you know, the ECU in the MINI is complex,
Actually, the ECU in the MINI is made by Siemens - and they used a third party to write the software for it. BMW/MINI don't even have access to the source code - which is something I find quite suprising. I've seen a hex dump of the ECU contents (one of the car 'chippers' extracted it). There seems to be very little actual code. Most of the 64Kbytes is a bunch of lookup tables.
What I think made it hard to fix was the chain of people who had to be convinced that there was a problem - then the problem of a team working in Germany reproducing the conditions of a Texas summer with a kind of gasoline that they would have to import somehow. Add to that the problem that the ECU learns...so the problem is not how to fix the direct problem - but how to prevent it from learning that behaviour....doing all of that without screwing up the algorithms for cold weather running on whatever fuel type you get in Norway...and without breaking the emissions restrictions in any of three dozen countries.
I sure as well wouldn't honor a warranty if I found out my customer reprogrammed the ECU. But at least having it Open Source means the bug would've been found sooner... I agree with that.
Yes - if you mess with the ECU, expect your engine warranty to be toast. The MINI owners who were working on this had already modified the heck out of their cars anyway - so that would have been a moot point.
Anywho, enjoy your MINI. If you want to sell it cheap, let me know, I miss mine :)
sell? SELL? You've gotta be kidding - sell Yoda? He's my baby?! (He's called "Yoda" - because he's small, green and deceptively powerful).
There is a fixed ECU revision out there (Variously known as v1.3.6, v3.6 and v36). If your car is an '03, your dealer should be able to install the new software in about 20 minutes under warranty.
I did slightly 'abbreviate' the full details for the sake of brevity - in fact, early '03 model year cars from late 2002 or manufactured in Jan/Feb of 2003 were still using the older software and are stumble-free. Also, before the stumble was discovered, many dealerships upgraded cars with the older software to the 1.3.2 and 1.3.3 versions and these guys started to suffer when they'd been working OK beforehand. One reason for doing that was a minor cold-starting problem in non-supercharged MINI Coopers - and also to fix some shift-pattern problem in the CVT MINI Coopers.
So, you DO see '02 cars *with* the stumble problem and there are also '03 cars that don't suffer from it at all (mine is an '03 model built in October 2002 - and I don't have the stumble because I didn't do the upgrade).
The 'warble' you describe has also been well documented - it's more often called the 'yo-yo'. The jury is still out on whether it is fixed by the 1.3.6 software - some people claim it's fixed, others claim it's a little less noticable - other people say it's not there at all. It's a subtle problem though - some people don't notice the problem at all even though other people can clearly feel it in the exact same vehicle.
Overall, there doesn't seem to be any reason NOT to upgrade to 1.3.6 - nobody has yet said it made matters worse.
Let me tell you a true story:
The 2002 MINI Cooper S (a **GREAT** car BTW) was delivered with Engine management (ECU) software V1.3.0. It worked fine.
The 2003 MINI Cooper S was delivered with ECU software V1.3.2. We believe the changes were to accomodate the Diesel version of the MINI that was due to appear in Europe - but there may have been other changes too.
v1.3.2 worked well - EXCEPT when the high ambient temperatures of a Texas summer combined with 'Reformulated Gasoline' (not sold in all US States - and not seen in Europe). With that combination of conditions, the car would roll forwards 10 feet and stall if you accellerated moderatly hard from a standing start. This came to be known as 'the stumbles'. When it strikes, it can actually be quite dangerous because you could in all likelyhood be stalled out right in front of an oncoming vehicle.
Both ECU electronics and engine mechanics are IDENTICAL between the 2002 and 2003 models - so this had to be a software bug.
It took a LONG time to figure out why some cars were stumbling. The owners' clubs first noticed that only 2003 cars did it - then we discovered this was only happening in the summer - and only in Texas and (IIRC) Florida - but then we heard that it wasn't happening in New Mexico. So we initially ruled out the 'high temperature' theory. However, New Mexico doesn't have reformulated gas.
So when we realised that reformulated Gas is sold in Texas and Florida - but not in New Mexico, we thought that might be the issue...but then we found that it didn't happen in New York (reformulated gas - but no high temperatures).
The whole thing was also confused by the fact that the MINI's ECU has adaptive software. When we had a few days of cool temperatures, the problem DIDN'T go away - and you had to run three tankfuls of non-reformulated gas through the car before the ECU would un-learn the stumble.
It's a tribute to the 'community' spirit of MINI owners (and lots of long threads on several mailing lists) that we ever figured out WTF was happening to our cars at all.
It took six months to pursuade BMW/MINI that there was truly a problem (by which time temperatures had dropped and we couldn't reproduce the problem) - and another 6 months for them to fix it and get a software upgrade out.
Meanwhile, the 2002 MINI's were still running V1.3.0 just fine in all temperatures and all gasoline types - and 2003 MINI's were stumbling all over the place.
Owners of 2003 machines were begging the dealerships to downgrade their cars back to the 2002 code - but dealerships were either unable or unwilling to do that - we're still not quite sure why - but it's likely that the security system in the MINI's ECU somehow prevents that.
This is a CLASSIC case where we'd have *killed* to have an OpenSource solution so we could fix the problem ourselves...either by simply reprogramming our 2003 cars with 2002 software (kindly donated by a 2002 owner)...or by doing a 'diff' and figuring out what was actually wrong.
Even without the source code, it would have been possible to do a binary dump from one car to another - but for the fact that these ECU's are protected by a barrage of 'challenge/response' tests (the details of which are a closely guarded secret). If your laptop fails to provide the correct response to the challenge, the car literally shuts down all software functions for THREE HOURS!! This effectively foils any effort to do a trial-and-error test to reverse-engineer the challenge/response system.
So - whilst it MIGHT be dangerous to allow people to randomly hack their cars, there are also dangers in preventing them from doing so.
Maybe. The only one of those I ever used was on a PDP-ll/20 and I recall having to key the paper tape loader into RAM using the front panel switches and hit the RUN button to start it loading.
But the IBM card reader was completely automated.
(Easier examples are VCR's that play the tape as soon as you push it into the slot)
When considering the huge numbers flying around in government spending, it's instructive to divide by the number of tax payers and pretend the money is coming out of your own pocket. I have no idea what the correct number is - but let's say there are 200,000,000 tax payers in the USA.
Scaling all the numbers down by a factor of 200M and pretending that's what it's going to cost me personally gets this in proportion:
* NASA's budget request for 2005 is $80 per year out of my pocket.
* Bush added an extra $5 per year to go to the moon again.
* NASA say that going to the moon again will cost me $33 per year.
* The war in IRAQ has cost me almost $500 so far.
* The government deficit this year alone would require me to pay $2,600 in
extra taxes in order to wipe it out.
Dunno about you - but I'd pay $5 per year to see men on the moon again - that's cheaper than going to a movie. I think I'd happily give them $80 if I thought they'd do a good job of it and didn't blow it all on useless space stations.
$500 to go to war though...I'd have to think very carefully before spending that much money...and spending $2,600 more money than I earned in a year would make me pretty seriously concerned.
The irony is that 57% of Americans also believe that the Apollo moon missions were faked here on earth. Those must be the 'other' 57%. :-)
I'm fairly sure the IBM mainframe I used back in 1975 would auto-load and execute a deck of punched cards if you just dumped them into the input hopper.
Oh - wait...they're suing Microsoft. Ah. In that case:
Those evil Microsoft guys - always stealing other people's technology. Bastards!
The Moon seems like a very dead and uninteresting place unless it can be confirmed that there are ice deposits in some of the deeper craters. There seems little point in going back there - other than to explore the geology - and we know how to do that with robots like the ones that are doing such great work on Mars right now.
The Mars mission would probably be better served by assembling the craft at a Legrange point - but to do so, we need a better lift capability.
However, I concede the President's desire to get the public excited about space again - and setting up an assembly facility at L5 isn't going to do that...it sounds like just another space station like the hideously expensive waste of vacuum that we are probably about to abandon.
I'd have preferred to see the President putting his weight behind the construction of a space elevator to earth orbit. That is a worthy goal, it's certainly at least as do-able as a manned Mars mission and would have immense benefits for mankind beyond the Mars mission. The likely need for novel materials to build it would also have great spin-off potential for American business - and hence go a long way toward justifying the expense.
Setting up a facility at a Legrange point would also fit nicely with the plans for the Hubble replacement - so there would be synergy in that effort.
Society has still not decided whether TV violence causes actual violence - let alone the lack of conclusive proof for Rap music lyrics-induced violence, Board-game-induced violence (remember Dungeons-and-Dragons?) Cinematically-induced violence, promiscuity after listening to Elvis records, Radio Play-induced violence, Book violence, Bayeux-tapestry-induced violence (have you *seen* that thing? It oughta have at least a 'PG-13' rating), Cave painting violence or racial-memory induced violence.
Until we understand the impact of all of those other things, there is little hope that this issue will ever be conclusively resolved for Video games, Holodeck novellas or any other story-telling media we may come up with in the future.
I work in a military-related business (flight simulation) where security is a reasonably big deal - and like many companies, they don't allow cameras on company property.
If the only phones you could get had cameras, I would be able to own one. Even if I didn't need it at work, the risk of accidentally walking into work with a camera phone in my coat pocket and spending the next 10 years in Guantanamo Bay would be too great.
Fortunately, we aren't at that stage yet - but I can see it coming.
I'm also not overly fond of digital phones. Where I live, cell phone reception is kinda marginal. The digital phones either work completely - or they don't work at all (depending on the phase of the moon or something). With analog phones I can always get a connection - although it may be a little noisy. Better noisy than nothing.