Re:Ummmm...
on
42-Volt Autos
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Finally, how does 42V DC convert much easier to 120V AC? Don't you still have to use an inverter?
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. You can already get a pretty beefy inverter for under $100 to run equipment from your car. I think this is just another case of the big auto manufacturers tacking another $1000 on to the price of a car instead of giving us really innovative vehicles like this.
Cultures make up lots of shit, that doesn't necessarily make it true.
I never argued that any of this had to do with truth. It's still at the stage of logical consistency, which atheism fails to satisfy just as certainly as theism does.
It's not enough to just explain things, they must be explained rationally.
Again, this has nothing to do with my position. I brought up Heisenberg precisedly to point out that it may well be beyond our abilities to explain everything rationally. What is certain is that, for all our knowledge, we are still pretty stupid about the answers to big questions. If religion has made a mistake, it is in saying it knows the answers without evidence. In that way, atheism is a religion.
I've never seen a purple unicorn, and there is no "trustworthy record" of a purple unicorn.
Then as an educated and rational person, you couldn't come to the conclusion there are no purple unicorns. You could say you didn't believe there where any, but the atheist doesn't stop there. They go all the way and proclaim that their belief is the correct belief which, as I stated, is essentially what the "godhead" people do.
You always start out with a default assumption, based on what you know about the world. The natural/logical default is to believe that there is no god.
That is not the case. Every culture has created belief systems to explain the unknown. As I said before, the default is faith, which is really just a way of relating what is unknown to what is known. That is not idiotic, unless you believe the scientific method to be idiotic as well, since it has it's foundation in the same desire to understand. Or are you saying you're beyond such things, and have a perfect understanding of the universe? Are you that much more certain than Heisenberg was?
Other dictionaries say similar things. I think it's pretty clear that I am, indeed, an atheist. Just not a doctrinaire (or dogmatic) one.
I don't think you are. There is a difference between not believing something exists and believing something does not exist. Webster's gives what I find a better definition: one who denies the existence of God. In that, it is clearer the atheist has already reached a conclusion independent of any evidence, which is as unscientific an approach as those who believe without evidence.
On the other hand, the definitions of "agnostic" and "agnosticism" are a little more vague.
Well, you may not exactly be agnostic either.:-) What does seem significant is that you are willing to re-weigh new evidence and change your mind. If you were an atheist, I would instead expect you to recast the evidence to fit within the framework of your belief.
Anyway, the fact that you know some dogmatic atheists does not mean that all atheists are dogmatic.
Dogma isn't the factor I take issue with, it's the inconsistency. An individual should feel free to deny the existence of anything they like, but they should do so with the foundation of their person not a the whim of what that represents. For what ever reason they might say there is no god, they should also say there is no iPod (or whatever). That's never been the case in my experience; they always seem to maintain the inconsistency.
Not necessarily. I don't believe in purple unicorns. Of course, I can't prove there aren't any purple unicorns, 'cause you can't prove a negative, but I don't care - I still don't believe in 'em.
But the atheist position isn't about individual belief in a religion's particular god. Instead they assert there is no god. They take the absolute position "against" in the absence of evidence, just as the believers take the absolute position "for". They simply declare there is no purple unicorn because they've never seen one.
It's not unscientific to chose what seems like a sensible set of beliefs based on available evidence.
Again, that is not the case. If their belief system were to say nothing exists unless they "know" it, that would be fine. Instead of that, though, the ones I know seem quite comfortable acknowledging the existence of things like iPods though they've never seen or touched one in person. There is an inconsistency that they never seem able to explain.
I don't believe in god(s), but I'm not trying to claim that it's a proven fact that there are no gods. I just don't believe it, that's all.
Then you are agnostic, not an atheist. Like the purple unicorn, you simply don't believe because you haven't got a reason to believe.
The logic that 'you must believe to deny' is flawed... it assumes that faith is the default.
Look at the world around you; faith is the default. I admit he logic is flawed, most in trying to be glib, because the actual statement should be more along the lines that you have to define to disprove. The problem with atheists is that they're just as turned around as the "true believers" because they have nothing with which to disprove. I'd say the agnostic is on better footing because they take the scientific approach and admit they really can't say one way or the other, if only because the definition of god is often simply one that cannot be tested in any reasonable fashion.
I maintain that faith is trained into people, the default is probably to believe nothing (in the sense that we don't know language, social skills, etc. before we are trained.)
I think you're confusing design and implementation.:-) If you equate faith to language, then you'd pretty much have to admit that faith is built into us, but that a primary faith is established in training. Without external influences, people still make up their own belief systems. Interestingly, the bonds of belief seem to be even stronger than the bonds of language because people seem to have no problem with multiple languages, but once you start mixing multiple faiths together people starting killing one another.
Yet another "counter example" that supports my point.:-) SETI and all the other public distributed computing efforts are around precisely because modern computers/software are horribly engineered when it comes to processor usage. They are not the reason you buy a fast computer, they are a reason you use to justify spending so much on a computer that otherwise would be idle, like I said, a good 90% of the time. Faster computers are always nice, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're anywhere close to really using what we already have.
OK, how long does it take your computer to boot from a cold start? If it's not instanteneous (think PalmPilot fast) then it's too slow. How long does Word take to start? How about Mozilla? What about your e-mail program? How long does it take to search through your e-mail archive of 15000 messages? If any of those are not instantenous then it's too slow.
This is funny because your logic would assert that a PalmPilot is faster than a desktop PC; how's that for insanity? Note that the word I used was "over-engineered". I never said a thing about "instantaneous" speed. We're actually on the same side (i.e., over-engineering things often makes them slower than they need to be), but you seem intent on being disagreeable for some reason.
Computers are never fast enough.
My original post to this thread mentioned suitability to a purpose, which you have likewise completely neglected. Your NY-to-CA analogy is better given as a choice between a 500MPH plane and a 500MPH car. For suitability to a given purpose, that car is over-engineered but you're still acting like the gear-head who insists that cars are "never fast enough".
You're actually supporting my point.:-) Anyone doing serious video processing has likely architected a server farm or cluster to do the bulk of the work. That is, or should be, pretty much true for any specialized task that is CPU intensive. It really doesn't take a lot to process the user events themselves, and desktop systems are woefully over-engineered for what people do. This is especially true in a business environment where a machine might be used for little more than reading email and word processing.
Yes there is: you. Everything external to the CPU limits the computer these days, and responding to human events is like idling at a stop light; your raw RPM doesn't make a big difference. According to procinfo and top, my computers are idle a good 90% of the time. Everyone chasing clock speed really needs to take a step back and instead design an architecture that meets the burst processing pattern that most people have.
The other part of the analogy is not about performance, it's about packaging. You don't buy a car on speed alone. There are styling and comfort factors, and suitability to a purpose. What's really amazing is that Apple is one of the few that understands that; you'd think PC builders would be more inclined to do that sort of thing in order to differentiate themselves from all the other clones that are on shelves.
Re:Very nice, humane, but...
on
Chicken Run
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you were (or indeed are) in a country/state with the death penalty, would you rather be hung, gassed, put in the electric chair, or killed by lethal injection? Tip: one is far less painful than the others.
Tip: Chickens are not people. Bonus tip: Dead is dead. Even if you believe in an afterlife, are you going to sit and dwell for eternity about how that last couple seconds/minutes of your life passed?
In just the same way, there is no good reason to cause an animal more pain than necessary when slaughtering it for food.
Of course there is! Humane too often means "in a way that makes humans feel good". How about we kill them in a way that makes the animal feel better, or at least gives them a chance to live another day? I think it is far better to have the chicken killed in a survival-of-the-fittest manner. Realistically, I actually expect animals would/should be killed in a manner that makes their meat most tasty and tender.
Actually, most computer users don't know jack about tech. The difference in Mac users is that they're usually more willing to admit they want an "appliance" machine, and that they're more willing to use a machine that is so obviously in the minority. In my dealings with Mac users, they are less moronic than your average Windows drone for those reasons.
One thing that annoys me, well, all over the US, is bikes on the street, right next to a good bike path, and people in the street right next to a good sidewalk.
If people they're intended for aren't using them, how "good" can they be? We have a number of paths around Minneapolis that are "multi-use" paths, not bike paths. They get traffic from people strolling, jogging, blading, and biking. If you were a cyclist, you would understand just how fucking dangerous it is to be on such a path going at 15mph or faster (many even have speed limits of 10 or 12mph posted!), not just for you but for others. People think nothing of stopping mid-stride and stepping across the path to point at some pretty flower or bird. On the street, I can cruise along with traffic and not have to worry about that, and you pretty much don't need to worry about be slamming on the brakes and swerving into your path. Suck it up and go around the bikes, you big baby.
Any packaged string can always be resampled from analog and move out into the wild.
This sort of thing is of great interest to me. The issues here are actually twofold. First is that some generic idea of "content" can be represented by multiple bit streams. Never mind resampling; how many different ways are there to encode a specific song? The combinations of different bit rates, different encoders, and different formats is staggering. Somehow, all those series of ones and zeros are going to be assigned (in theory) to the copyright holder? Maybe, but consider . . .
The second part of the problem is that a series of ones and zeros is meaningless without context. The decoding algorithm comes into play. What do you do if your nice new piece of software just happens to tar+gzip (or in some other way get encoded) into something that can be decoded, in whole or in part, by some music software to an mp3 of the latest manufactured band? It's like the illegal prime. Any laws that get passed regarding digital content without a lot of insight are going to leave things a real mess in the future.
When you send an email to an address, your software has to whitelist the address that you sent it to, and hope that they're replying on the same address.
That only covers email relationships started by you via email. You would never see an order confirmation or a message from a company you snail-mailed your resume to, or any number of other common scenarios.
Alternatively or additionally, it could put a code in the subject, and add that to a subject line whitelist as a once-only rule.
Codes in the subject is something spammers do commonly. Sounds like a way to unintentionally trigger existing filters.
Let's face it, the proposed "response" solution only works if it isn't universally (or even commonly) adopted. We need a solution that scales, and scales better than spam has at that.
Because I didn't get an answer to this the last time someone brought up TMDA as the "solution" to spam, I'll post it again:
Uh, and when your confirmation requesting system sends your confirmation request to my confirmation requesting system, can you confirm you'll see and respond to the confirmation request it sends? If you have a hole to prevent this loop, demonstrate that its exploitation isn't the next great frontier of spam abuse.
Re:T-Shirt Cannons are Old News
on
T-Shirt Cannon
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· Score: 1
Am I supposed to be impressed?
No, I think you're just supposed to be glad you can finally return fire like our undershirt wearing founding fathers intended. Yet another reason to thank the NRA for all their hard work!
The DMCA is so broken that it _is_ very possible to use it against itself.
I've been saying this for the longest time. What most people don't understand or care to understand about copyright is that they can be a copyright holder as much as big, faceless corporations. Any laws they use against you can be used against them. That's why I thought it was hilarious when I heard that they were going to make some hacking legal if it involved protecting your copyright.
In other words dream up a DMCA violation and then dream up a DMCA method for hiding or protecting the original violation. I bet some awesome examples exist.
All I can say is that the massive archives at DataFetish have yet to be the basis for any complaint or action. In some ways, it takes the concept to the extreme and forces you to acknowledge that binary can mean whatever you want it to. It is by giving data a context that it acquires meaning. In my opinion, copyright law and the DCMA don't even begin to get interesting until people start a fight over ownership of an actual sequence of ones and zeros.
Forget using this filter crap and start requiring that unrecognized senders go through a confirmation step.
Uh, and when your confirmation requesting system sends your confirmation request to my confirmation requesting system, can you confirm you'll see and respond to the confirmation request it sends? If you have a hole to prevent this loop, demonstrate that its exploitation isn't the next great frontier of spam abuse.
However, the individual urge is the side-effect of the species collective desire to procreate, which was selected for evolutionarily.
You are very, very wrong about this. Here's the thought experiment to work through. Sex is nice. Hell, it's better than nice, it's fucking awesome. Now if the "collective desire" was to procreate, would that be necessary? I mean, if we were really intelligent being that had a reasonable desire to perpetuate the species, why would it be necessary to make sex the ultimate non-drug-induced pleasure you can have?
We have basic needs like eating that provide a certain level of satisfaction, but nowhere near orgasm (despite how orgasmic someone might say something tastes), and if it weren't for food not only would we die, but the species would die out, so basic things like eating and breathing should actually be more pleasurable than sex.
So why would we have to have sex be so wonderful? There are all sorts of species that produce asexually or sexually based on some simple hormonal trigger. Humans, on the other hand, have gone so far as to create a pill that fucks with a woman's hormones to keep "the natural urge" from turning into babies. At the other extreme, we have places women can go to get impregnated sans sex and without even meeting the sperm donor.
Re:First, human self-knowledge
on
AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 1
So what's the research-program you're suggesting? Try random combinations of circuitry, and when one shows interesting behavior, duplicate and modify it many times?
Let me just point out that this is beyond mere suggestion and is already an AI subfield: genetic algorithms.
What you are saying is in direct contradiction of several controlled studies I have participated in. My information comes from actual human studies and post-mortem analysis of the problem at hand; so I wonder what your basis is for comments like "voice command would make a wonderful optional addition." Could it be..pure imagination?
You know what? If you are unwilling to consider that your studies themselves are flawed then you are a very poor researcher. If your stop watches show it takes as long to get up and walk across a room to hit as switch as it does to just say "lights on", then there are factors involved that I would say are quite a bit out of the ordinary. Please post links to these studies so that we can all view the methodologies you used.
Oh sure, there are a few people who appreciate techno-gadgets like "the clapper", but the majority of people do not, and in fact ridicule it.
The Clapper is rightly derided because it is a "grunt" control. With it, one thing is toggled by a loud noise. Also, like I said, such control should be optional, whereas I believe the Clapper is a choke point of control. With a proper voice control, you essentially set up a menu where all things in the environment could be adjusted with fine control. I'd think of it more like a programmable remote control than anything you've mentioned.
One system we built was similar to the house in "Minority Report". You could talk to the lights and query the room about various information, that sort of thing. In the end, the idea was hopelessly misguided.
Actually, the idea as you give it is not misguided so much as misapplied, and that is not the doing of any Sci-Fi reading/watching.
For example, a "lights on" command requires concious thought in order to get lights, and some linguistic processing. The alternative light switch technology is less so, even automatic [you might notice this when the power goes out you still hit switches]. Also, humans are pre-programmed to talk to humans, talking to the wall is an unpleasant experience for most people. Finally, speech is really quite slow. Flicking a light switch is much faster than saying the words.
Of course, you assume that the person is standing right at the light switch any time they otherwise want the lights on. Your "pre-programmed" remark is off, too, because you completely neglect the fact that people love to feel powerful by ordering servants (of whatever kind) about and have done so for centuries. And, finally, while a switch may indeed be handy if it is at hand, not every control for every possible aspect of one's environment can be at hand unless you're going to make every available surface a control console.
Used properly, voice command would make a wonderful optional addition to the current home. The reasons your demos failed is the classic: you were more enamored by what could be done than by what should be done.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, how does 42V DC convert much easier to 120V AC? Don't you still have to use an inverter?
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. You can already get a pretty beefy inverter for under $100 to run equipment from your car. I think this is just another case of the big auto manufacturers tacking another $1000 on to the price of a car instead of giving us really innovative vehicles like this.
You missed the whole fucking point.
One of us is definitely missing the point.
Cultures make up lots of shit, that doesn't necessarily make it true.
I never argued that any of this had to do with truth. It's still at the stage of logical consistency, which atheism fails to satisfy just as certainly as theism does.
It's not enough to just explain things, they must be explained rationally.
Again, this has nothing to do with my position. I brought up Heisenberg precisedly to point out that it may well be beyond our abilities to explain everything rationally. What is certain is that, for all our knowledge, we are still pretty stupid about the answers to big questions. If religion has made a mistake, it is in saying it knows the answers without evidence. In that way, atheism is a religion.
Dumbass.
One of us is definitely being a dumbass.
I've never seen a purple unicorn, and there is no "trustworthy record" of a purple unicorn.
Then as an educated and rational person, you couldn't come to the conclusion there are no purple unicorns. You could say you didn't believe there where any, but the atheist doesn't stop there. They go all the way and proclaim that their belief is the correct belief which, as I stated, is essentially what the "godhead" people do.
You always start out with a default assumption, based on what you know about the world. The natural/logical default is to believe that there is no god.
That is not the case. Every culture has created belief systems to explain the unknown. As I said before, the default is faith, which is really just a way of relating what is unknown to what is known. That is not idiotic, unless you believe the scientific method to be idiotic as well, since it has it's foundation in the same desire to understand. Or are you saying you're beyond such things, and have a perfect understanding of the universe? Are you that much more certain than Heisenberg was?
Other dictionaries say similar things. I think it's pretty clear that I am, indeed, an atheist. Just not a doctrinaire (or dogmatic) one.
I don't think you are. There is a difference between not believing something exists and believing something does not exist. Webster's gives what I find a better definition: one who denies the existence of God. In that, it is clearer the atheist has already reached a conclusion independent of any evidence, which is as unscientific an approach as those who believe without evidence.
On the other hand, the definitions of "agnostic" and "agnosticism" are a little more vague.
Well, you may not exactly be agnostic either. :-) What does seem significant is that you are willing to re-weigh new evidence and change your mind. If you were an atheist, I would instead expect you to recast the evidence to fit within the framework of your belief.
Anyway, the fact that you know some dogmatic atheists does not mean that all atheists are dogmatic.
Dogma isn't the factor I take issue with, it's the inconsistency. An individual should feel free to deny the existence of anything they like, but they should do so with the foundation of their person not a the whim of what that represents. For what ever reason they might say there is no god, they should also say there is no iPod (or whatever). That's never been the case in my experience; they always seem to maintain the inconsistency.
Not necessarily. I don't believe in purple unicorns. Of course, I can't prove there aren't any purple unicorns, 'cause you can't prove a negative, but I don't care - I still don't believe in 'em.
But the atheist position isn't about individual belief in a religion's particular god. Instead they assert there is no god. They take the absolute position "against" in the absence of evidence, just as the believers take the absolute position "for". They simply declare there is no purple unicorn because they've never seen one.
It's not unscientific to chose what seems like a sensible set of beliefs based on available evidence.
Again, that is not the case. If their belief system were to say nothing exists unless they "know" it, that would be fine. Instead of that, though, the ones I know seem quite comfortable acknowledging the existence of things like iPods though they've never seen or touched one in person. There is an inconsistency that they never seem able to explain.
I don't believe in god(s), but I'm not trying to claim that it's a proven fact that there are no gods. I just don't believe it, that's all.
Then you are agnostic, not an atheist. Like the purple unicorn, you simply don't believe because you haven't got a reason to believe.
The logic that 'you must believe to deny' is flawed... it assumes that faith is the default.
Look at the world around you; faith is the default. I admit he logic is flawed, most in trying to be glib, because the actual statement should be more along the lines that you have to define to disprove. The problem with atheists is that they're just as turned around as the "true believers" because they have nothing with which to disprove. I'd say the agnostic is on better footing because they take the scientific approach and admit they really can't say one way or the other, if only because the definition of god is often simply one that cannot be tested in any reasonable fashion.
I maintain that faith is trained into people, the default is probably to believe nothing (in the sense that we don't know language, social skills, etc. before we are trained.)
I think you're confusing design and implementation. :-) If you equate faith to language, then you'd pretty much have to admit that faith is built into us, but that a primary faith is established in training. Without external influences, people still make up their own belief systems. Interestingly, the bonds of belief seem to be even stronger than the bonds of language because people seem to have no problem with multiple languages, but once you start mixing multiple faiths together people starting killing one another.
Excuse me, I'm an atheist.
To deny Him, you must first believe in Him.
One word: SETI.
Yet another "counter example" that supports my point. :-) SETI and all the other public distributed computing efforts are around precisely because modern computers/software are horribly engineered when it comes to processor usage. They are not the reason you buy a fast computer, they are a reason you use to justify spending so much on a computer that otherwise would be idle, like I said, a good 90% of the time. Faster computers are always nice, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're anywhere close to really using what we already have.
OK, how long does it take your computer to boot from a cold start? If it's not instanteneous (think PalmPilot fast) then it's too slow. How long does Word take to start? How about Mozilla? What about your e-mail program? How long does it take to search through your e-mail archive of 15000 messages? If any of those are not instantenous then it's too slow.
This is funny because your logic would assert that a PalmPilot is faster than a desktop PC; how's that for insanity? Note that the word I used was "over-engineered". I never said a thing about "instantaneous" speed. We're actually on the same side (i.e., over-engineering things often makes them slower than they need to be), but you seem intent on being disagreeable for some reason.
Computers are never fast enough.
My original post to this thread mentioned suitability to a purpose, which you have likewise completely neglected. Your NY-to-CA analogy is better given as a choice between a 500MPH plane and a 500MPH car. For suitability to a given purpose, that car is over-engineered but you're still acting like the gear-head who insists that cars are "never fast enough".
Try doing video processing sometime.
You're actually supporting my point. :-) Anyone doing serious video processing has likely architected a server farm or cluster to do the bulk of the work. That is, or should be, pretty much true for any specialized task that is CPU intensive. It really doesn't take a lot to process the user events themselves, and desktop systems are woefully over-engineered for what people do. This is especially true in a business environment where a machine might be used for little more than reading email and word processing.
In the computer world, there is no speed limit.
Yes there is: you. Everything external to the CPU limits the computer these days, and responding to human events is like idling at a stop light; your raw RPM doesn't make a big difference. According to procinfo and top, my computers are idle a good 90% of the time. Everyone chasing clock speed really needs to take a step back and instead design an architecture that meets the burst processing pattern that most people have.
The other part of the analogy is not about performance, it's about packaging. You don't buy a car on speed alone. There are styling and comfort factors, and suitability to a purpose. What's really amazing is that Apple is one of the few that understands that; you'd think PC builders would be more inclined to do that sort of thing in order to differentiate themselves from all the other clones that are on shelves.
If you were (or indeed are) in a country/state with the death penalty, would you rather be hung, gassed, put in the electric chair, or killed by lethal injection? Tip: one is far less painful than the others.
Tip: Chickens are not people. Bonus tip: Dead is dead. Even if you believe in an afterlife, are you going to sit and dwell for eternity about how that last couple seconds/minutes of your life passed?
In just the same way, there is no good reason to cause an animal more pain than necessary when slaughtering it for food.
Of course there is! Humane too often means "in a way that makes humans feel good". How about we kill them in a way that makes the animal feel better, or at least gives them a chance to live another day? I think it is far better to have the chicken killed in a survival-of-the-fittest manner. Realistically, I actually expect animals would/should be killed in a manner that makes their meat most tasty and tender.
Most mac users don't know jack about tech.
Actually, most computer users don't know jack about tech. The difference in Mac users is that they're usually more willing to admit they want an "appliance" machine, and that they're more willing to use a machine that is so obviously in the minority. In my dealings with Mac users, they are less moronic than your average Windows drone for those reasons.
Modern, working cars don't pollute enough to make a difference either.
Until you have your car modified so that the exhaust feeds into the cabin, you're a fucking liar and you know it.
One thing that annoys me, well, all over the US, is bikes on the street, right next to a good bike path, and people in the street right next to a good sidewalk.
If people they're intended for aren't using them, how "good" can they be? We have a number of paths around Minneapolis that are "multi-use" paths, not bike paths. They get traffic from people strolling, jogging, blading, and biking. If you were a cyclist, you would understand just how fucking dangerous it is to be on such a path going at 15mph or faster (many even have speed limits of 10 or 12mph posted!), not just for you but for others. People think nothing of stopping mid-stride and stepping across the path to point at some pretty flower or bird. On the street, I can cruise along with traffic and not have to worry about that, and you pretty much don't need to worry about be slamming on the brakes and swerving into your path. Suck it up and go around the bikes, you big baby.
Any packaged string can always be resampled from analog and move out into the wild.
This sort of thing is of great interest to me. The issues here are actually twofold. First is that some generic idea of "content" can be represented by multiple bit streams. Never mind resampling; how many different ways are there to encode a specific song? The combinations of different bit rates, different encoders, and different formats is staggering. Somehow, all those series of ones and zeros are going to be assigned (in theory) to the copyright holder? Maybe, but consider . . .
The second part of the problem is that a series of ones and zeros is meaningless without context. The decoding algorithm comes into play. What do you do if your nice new piece of software just happens to tar+gzip (or in some other way get encoded) into something that can be decoded, in whole or in part, by some music software to an mp3 of the latest manufactured band? It's like the illegal prime. Any laws that get passed regarding digital content without a lot of insight are going to leave things a real mess in the future.
When you send an email to an address, your software has to whitelist the address that you sent it to, and hope that they're replying on the same address.
That only covers email relationships started by you via email. You would never see an order confirmation or a message from a company you snail-mailed your resume to, or any number of other common scenarios.
Alternatively or additionally, it could put a code in the subject, and add that to a subject line whitelist as a once-only rule.
Codes in the subject is something spammers do commonly. Sounds like a way to unintentionally trigger existing filters.
Let's face it, the proposed "response" solution only works if it isn't universally (or even commonly) adopted. We need a solution that scales, and scales better than spam has at that.
Tagged Message Delivery Agent (http://www.tmda.net/).
Because I didn't get an answer to this the last time someone brought up TMDA as the "solution" to spam, I'll post it again:
Uh, and when your confirmation requesting system sends your confirmation request to my confirmation requesting system, can you confirm you'll see and respond to the confirmation request it sends? If you have a hole to prevent this loop, demonstrate that its exploitation isn't the next great frontier of spam abuse.
Am I supposed to be impressed?
No, I think you're just supposed to be glad you can finally return fire like our undershirt wearing founding fathers intended. Yet another reason to thank the NRA for all their hard work!
The DMCA is so broken that it _is_ very possible to use it against itself.
I've been saying this for the longest time. What most people don't understand or care to understand about copyright is that they can be a copyright holder as much as big, faceless corporations. Any laws they use against you can be used against them. That's why I thought it was hilarious when I heard that they were going to make some hacking legal if it involved protecting your copyright.
In other words dream up a DMCA violation and then dream up a DMCA method for hiding or protecting the original violation. I bet some awesome examples exist.
All I can say is that the massive archives at DataFetish have yet to be the basis for any complaint or action. In some ways, it takes the concept to the extreme and forces you to acknowledge that binary can mean whatever you want it to. It is by giving data a context that it acquires meaning. In my opinion, copyright law and the DCMA don't even begin to get interesting until people start a fight over ownership of an actual sequence of ones and zeros.
Forget using this filter crap and start requiring that unrecognized senders go through a confirmation step.
Uh, and when your confirmation requesting system sends your confirmation request to my confirmation requesting system, can you confirm you'll see and respond to the confirmation request it sends? If you have a hole to prevent this loop, demonstrate that its exploitation isn't the next great frontier of spam abuse.
However, the individual urge is the side-effect of the species collective desire to procreate, which was selected for evolutionarily.
You are very, very wrong about this. Here's the thought experiment to work through. Sex is nice. Hell, it's better than nice, it's fucking awesome. Now if the "collective desire" was to procreate, would that be necessary? I mean, if we were really intelligent being that had a reasonable desire to perpetuate the species, why would it be necessary to make sex the ultimate non-drug-induced pleasure you can have?
We have basic needs like eating that provide a certain level of satisfaction, but nowhere near orgasm (despite how orgasmic someone might say something tastes), and if it weren't for food not only would we die, but the species would die out, so basic things like eating and breathing should actually be more pleasurable than sex.
So why would we have to have sex be so wonderful? There are all sorts of species that produce asexually or sexually based on some simple hormonal trigger. Humans, on the other hand, have gone so far as to create a pill that fucks with a woman's hormones to keep "the natural urge" from turning into babies. At the other extreme, we have places women can go to get impregnated sans sex and without even meeting the sperm donor.
So what's the research-program you're suggesting? Try random combinations of circuitry, and when one shows interesting behavior, duplicate and modify it many times?
Let me just point out that this is beyond mere suggestion and is already an AI subfield: genetic algorithms.
What you are saying is in direct contradiction of several controlled studies I have participated in. My information comes from actual human studies and post-mortem analysis of the problem at hand; so I wonder what your basis is for comments like "voice command would make a wonderful optional addition." Could it be..pure imagination?
You know what? If you are unwilling to consider that your studies themselves are flawed then you are a very poor researcher. If your stop watches show it takes as long to get up and walk across a room to hit as switch as it does to just say "lights on", then there are factors involved that I would say are quite a bit out of the ordinary. Please post links to these studies so that we can all view the methodologies you used.
Oh sure, there are a few people who appreciate techno-gadgets like "the clapper", but the majority of people do not, and in fact ridicule it.
The Clapper is rightly derided because it is a "grunt" control. With it, one thing is toggled by a loud noise. Also, like I said, such control should be optional, whereas I believe the Clapper is a choke point of control. With a proper voice control, you essentially set up a menu where all things in the environment could be adjusted with fine control. I'd think of it more like a programmable remote control than anything you've mentioned.
One system we built was similar to the house in "Minority Report". You could talk to the lights and query the room about various information, that sort of thing. In the end, the idea was hopelessly misguided.
Actually, the idea as you give it is not misguided so much as misapplied, and that is not the doing of any Sci-Fi reading/watching.
For example, a "lights on" command requires concious thought in order to get lights, and some linguistic processing. The alternative light switch technology is less so, even automatic [you might notice this when the power goes out you still hit switches]. Also, humans are pre-programmed to talk to humans, talking to the wall is an unpleasant experience for most people. Finally, speech is really quite slow. Flicking a light switch is much faster than saying the words.
Of course, you assume that the person is standing right at the light switch any time they otherwise want the lights on. Your "pre-programmed" remark is off, too, because you completely neglect the fact that people love to feel powerful by ordering servants (of whatever kind) about and have done so for centuries. And, finally, while a switch may indeed be handy if it is at hand, not every control for every possible aspect of one's environment can be at hand unless you're going to make every available surface a control console.
Used properly, voice command would make a wonderful optional addition to the current home. The reasons your demos failed is the classic: you were more enamored by what could be done than by what should be done.