There just needs to be a grand extension of the X-prize: The government says, "Here is X billion dollars. You get it all as soon as you...if they aren't going to do this, I'd rather see the government budget going to pure science
Why does it have to be the government? The government is supposed to, well, govern - why do we continue to believe that government should be the source of our leadership in other endeavors? Doing so leads to constant dissapointment - people in government want to be elected/appointed/hired - taking big risks is not the pathway to promotion and reelection in government.
Outside of government, if sufficient people want something, and they can often be convinced they do by those with the vision to be leaders, then it will get promoted and paid for and done.
We should expect - nay, demand - that our government do what it was formed to do - protect us from harm and give us the freedom to pursue our own goals - and to not do all the other things that it has gotten into doing. Allowing the government the authority to do other things at their discretion of how to spend your money only means that you now don't get that choice - 'cuz there's only so much to go around, and the more of it the goverment has then the less you have.
NASA's budget is more than adequate for the governmental purpose it exists for - to keep the United States sufficiently ahead of the competition in aeronautics and space to insure the security of the US. NASA showed us the way to build big rockets to go where we wanted - now we should take that knowledge and "just do it".
Zubrin books all say he could go to Mars (and even back) for a-tenth of what NASA could - and I believe him. Now we just need to find a visionary leader to bring that funding to him. He's certainly having a difficult time doing it, spending the majority of his time trying to make it easier to do near-orbit things, because he can't attract the money he needs for his grander ideas.
If only we each were able to keep more of our own money to invest in things that we could freely choose to invest in...
No, that would be the CURRENT president, what with the tax cuts and high deficit and such.
Hardly.
Giving the money back to those to whom it belongs to (the taxpayer) fits right in with the concept of personal responsibility - the belief is that you know far better how to spend your money than the government with their various (and mostly vote-buying-oriented) agendas - this gives you the ability to spend your money on self improvement of some sort - go to school, get a better job, whatever - or squander it away as you see fit - that 60" plasma screen looks good to me too (that personal respnsibility thing cuts both ways, you see).
As for the deficit - it's just like never being able to default on that student loan (damn, there's that responsibility thing again). By pushing the payment of government services into the future (that is, via deficit spending), one can make sure that future spenders have less wiggle room to spend frivolously - they will be held much closer to having to spend conservatively - the voters will less tolerate the purchase of non-essential things.
It's the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk - you've got the money (that is, more of your own money) - now spend it wisely (or not).
it's also a good idea to keep a card with a lower (i.e. less than $1K) limit so that if your information does get stolen, the crooks can maximally do $1K damage
That doesn't really matter - by law your damages are limited to $50 - all you have to do is notify the credit card company of the false charges.
So the government should force me to pay for a system that I don't want or need so other people can use it?
Ahhh... what do you think the majority of your taxes are for?.... They're for someone else's concpet of doing good with money - unfortunately it's your money they want to do good with and their concept of what should be done with it (in general, that which solicits the most votes).
FWIW, I think this algorithm has some merit. I ran three papers my (bright) 13-yr old son has written through the document - one each that he wrote when he was 11, 12, and 13.
The grades increased as his age did - the score was a 67 on the first, a 75 on the second and an 82 on the third. All the papers were relatively short (300-500 words), and on obscure topics (he'd be a natural slashdotter) which probably doesn't give the algorithm much to chew on for length nor for comparison to word choice, etc. as used in other documents that determined the weightings.
I then took one of the papers others that said they scored near 100 have posted links to here and the algorithm did score it that highly - it was also visibly more maturely written than anything my young son has done to date - though I admit to being pleased at his 80 collegiate-level score for his age.
The value to an essayist in an algorithm such as this, especially as it improves, is not in trying to pipe/dev/urandom to it (monkeys... typewriters) but taking one's own work and seeing how it compares (to whatever rough measure is there) to 1000 other essays - if it compares poorly, then take the time to figure out why and improve the thing - get input from other people that do well - in other words, learn something.
You speak of pro-Dean bias; why then was there no mention in the article that Dean's campaign staff immediately rectified the problem?
If the Dean Campaign hasn't sued the spammer into oblivion for misrepresentation then they have not rectified the problem - they have simply performed a typical political action and left the problem for someone else to clean up and everyone else to suffer with. That action speaks volumes for their campaign.
Security should come because systems are strong, not because those systems are "secret".
That's a nice trite statement often made by those who don't try to understand a given problem or that a generality doesn't apply to every situation.
A large power distribution system by its nature has mulitple physical, immovable and fragile weak points. Multiple physical things are hard to hide and multiple fragile things are expensive to protect - one can easily encrypt information and if a good encryption system is used then obtaining the encrypted data provides little value to the wicked. It's quite a different matter to secure physical objects - especially nodes that provide interconnection to multiple further vulnerable systems that pass electrical power and can be destroyed with devices as simple as homemade fertilizer bombs. It's also quite a different matter to secure multiple nodes when it requires multiple individualized security efforts - one can write a good encryption algorithm and apply it everywhere at little additional cost - if it takes x-million dollars to secure a switching node then it will take y times x-million dollars to secure y nodes. The nodes in a power distribution system are not the only weak points - the system can be damaged just as effectively by attacking the interconnections - such attacks can be routed around to a degree in a network but sufficient concurrent (and intentional) attacks will cause tremendous overloads to a power distribution system that requires significant time to recover from - how would you propose securing a million of miles of power lines and a million switching stations affordably?
The power network in North America was built with certain threats in mind - weather, overloaded systems, etc. It works quite well the majority of the time. It is an entirely different matter to build a power distribution system that can survive and recover from intentional and planned manmade attacks. Would you want to start paying ten-times your current power bill for such a system - especially one that can be defeated if one tries hard enough?
Obscurity as a security technique is effective when other techniques are very hard and very expensive - but certainly not bulletproof. Security is a cost-benefits analysis and if hiding some critical information about the sensitive spots in a difficult to secure physical system can provide an immediate benefit, then it's stupid to publish such information so that those who wish you harm can more easily commit it.
Re:What's the power curve on that?
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Even if you have the (extremely impressive) power curves of Paul Graham's Plan for Spam -- and that was on a very well-trained Bayesian filter written by a coding genious -- it is Not Good Enough when missing a legit email could get you sued for millions.
Email is not a guaranteed service - no one is ever going to be sued for millions for not receiving an email. Things that *must* be delivered will continue to be put into a hard copy format and delivered by courier with a signature required.
If they are so good why does the post office need to get into it?
Because there is one within a few miles of everyone in the US? What, would you rather trust the zit-faced idiot at the 7-11 had "verified" the identity of those your correspond with?
I think it would help immensely to put together a deb package that had Firebird / Thunderbird that installed it properly, put it in the menu, integrated it into Gnome, etc. There's plenty of debian users that would run it, at least alongside their other browser/email, but don't want to do an installation themselves. Bug reports and feature requests come from such users.
The SCO section you speak of would quickly be obselete. It is probably not worth the effort.
While I appreciate the humor in what you said, having myself just completed a three-year legal effort regarding the recovery of embezzled money, I can easily expect this court battle to drag out. I think it would be to IBM's advantage to do this - for one thing we might see just how interested M$FT actually is if they decided to renew their license for another dozen years to keep SCO funded to pursue this suit. If that doesn't happen, SCO will be weakened with the continuous cash hemorrhage - and those investors that have decided to short SCO's stock will see a nice steady profit accrue.
But, enough people complain about the SCO postings (why the hell do they bother to comment on them?) that adding its own section for awhile makes sense.
My son has taught himself to program, with only a little guidance from me for learning how to analyze and break a problem into parts, by writing his own text adventure games using a programming language called Inform. This has worked very well - it allows him to express his creativity in the development of a scenario that requires following explicit rules to succeed, and to develop his programming skills in learning to express an algorithm that follows those rules he's created. The Inform community tends to freely share the text adventures they've written - you know a developing programmer is motivated when he spends time pouring over someone else's not-always-well documented source code.
How does one take a story about Oracle's CEO pushing to increase his company's market share and make it a war cry against "foreigners" and the assult on American values?
One can quite easily do this when one's agenda is simply to denigrate America - it is done by choosing the loser in an event and making him out to have Bambi eyes, stalked and killed by the evil hunter.
What about the rest of the world? Doesn't it count?
The rest of the world counts in President Bush's considerations for what is best for the United States when the rest of the world asks and qualifies to join that group. Until then, no it doesn't count, nor should it.
Times in the past when the military pulled its punch led to Vietnam, and the second Gulf War (because George Herbert Walker Bush didn't finish the job the first time).
Actually, Bush the Elder made the unfortunate mistake of actually listening to the U.N. in some mistaken belief that stopping as per the U.N. accord was to the advantage of the U.S. We all saw how ridiculous that action was over the next decade, especially with a follow-on administration more interested in appeasement and wag-the-dog deflection of attention. Fortunately, the ineffectiveness of the U.N. did not paralyze Bush the Junior and a horrid dictator has been removed (hopefully from the face of the earth). Perhaps we have learned our lesson and the future leaders of the U.S. will remember that the safety of the American people comes first - but the American people have a great tendency to forget the cost of their freedom and instead elect those promising pots full of chicken.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does it have to be the government? The government is supposed to, well, govern - why do we continue to believe that government should be the source of our leadership in other endeavors? Doing so leads to constant dissapointment - people in government want to be elected/appointed/hired - taking big risks is not the pathway to promotion and reelection in government.
Outside of government, if sufficient people want something, and they can often be convinced they do by those with the vision to be leaders, then it will get promoted and paid for and done.
We should expect - nay, demand - that our government do what it was formed to do - protect us from harm and give us the freedom to pursue our own goals - and to not do all the other things that it has gotten into doing. Allowing the government the authority to do other things at their discretion of how to spend your money only means that you now don't get that choice - 'cuz there's only so much to go around, and the more of it the goverment has then the less you have.
NASA's budget is more than adequate for the governmental purpose it exists for - to keep the United States sufficiently ahead of the competition in aeronautics and space to insure the security of the US. NASA showed us the way to build big rockets to go where we wanted - now we should take that knowledge and "just do it".
Zubrin books all say he could go to Mars (and even back) for a-tenth of what NASA could - and I believe him. Now we just need to find a visionary leader to bring that funding to him. He's certainly having a difficult time doing it, spending the majority of his time trying to make it easier to do near-orbit things, because he can't attract the money he needs for his grander ideas.
If only we each were able to keep more of our own money to invest in things that we could freely choose to invest in...
Hardly.
Giving the money back to those to whom it belongs to (the taxpayer) fits right in with the concept of personal responsibility - the belief is that you know far better how to spend your money than the government with their various (and mostly vote-buying-oriented) agendas - this gives you the ability to spend your money on self improvement of some sort - go to school, get a better job, whatever - or squander it away as you see fit - that 60" plasma screen looks good to me too (that personal respnsibility thing cuts both ways, you see).
As for the deficit - it's just like never being able to default on that student loan (damn, there's that responsibility thing again). By pushing the payment of government services into the future (that is, via deficit spending), one can make sure that future spenders have less wiggle room to spend frivolously - they will be held much closer to having to spend conservatively - the voters will less tolerate the purchase of non-essential things.
It's the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk - you've got the money (that is, more of your own money) - now spend it wisely (or not).
So, stay? ...
That doesn't really matter - by law your damages are limited to $50 - all you have to do is notify the credit card company of the false charges.
All of 'em - they all stand out just fine reading it on a(n analog) voltmeter.
Ahhh ... what do you think the majority of your taxes are for? .... They're for someone else's concpet of doing good with money - unfortunately it's your money they want to do good with and their concept of what should be done with it (in general, that which solicits the most votes).
The grades increased as his age did - the score was a 67 on the first, a 75 on the second and an 82 on the third. All the papers were relatively short (300-500 words), and on obscure topics (he'd be a natural slashdotter) which probably doesn't give the algorithm much to chew on for length nor for comparison to word choice, etc. as used in other documents that determined the weightings.
I then took one of the papers others that said they scored near 100 have posted links to here and the algorithm did score it that highly - it was also visibly more maturely written than anything my young son has done to date - though I admit to being pleased at his 80 collegiate-level score for his age.
The value to an essayist in an algorithm such as this, especially as it improves, is not in trying to pipe /dev/urandom to it (monkeys ... typewriters) but taking one's own work and seeing how it compares (to whatever rough measure is there) to 1000 other essays - if it compares poorly, then take the time to figure out why and improve the thing - get input from other people that do well - in other words, learn something.
If the Dean Campaign hasn't sued the spammer into oblivion for misrepresentation then they have not rectified the problem - they have simply performed a typical political action and left the problem for someone else to clean up and everyone else to suffer with. That action speaks volumes for their campaign.
That's a nice trite statement often made by those who don't try to understand a given problem or that a generality doesn't apply to every situation.
A large power distribution system by its nature has mulitple physical, immovable and fragile weak points. Multiple physical things are hard to hide and multiple fragile things are expensive to protect - one can easily encrypt information and if a good encryption system is used then obtaining the encrypted data provides little value to the wicked. It's quite a different matter to secure physical objects - especially nodes that provide interconnection to multiple further vulnerable systems that pass electrical power and can be destroyed with devices as simple as homemade fertilizer bombs. It's also quite a different matter to secure multiple nodes when it requires multiple individualized security efforts - one can write a good encryption algorithm and apply it everywhere at little additional cost - if it takes x-million dollars to secure a switching node then it will take y times x-million dollars to secure y nodes. The nodes in a power distribution system are not the only weak points - the system can be damaged just as effectively by attacking the interconnections - such attacks can be routed around to a degree in a network but sufficient concurrent (and intentional) attacks will cause tremendous overloads to a power distribution system that requires significant time to recover from - how would you propose securing a million of miles of power lines and a million switching stations affordably?
The power network in North America was built with certain threats in mind - weather, overloaded systems, etc. It works quite well the majority of the time. It is an entirely different matter to build a power distribution system that can survive and recover from intentional and planned manmade attacks. Would you want to start paying ten-times your current power bill for such a system - especially one that can be defeated if one tries hard enough?
Obscurity as a security technique is effective when other techniques are very hard and very expensive - but certainly not bulletproof. Security is a cost-benefits analysis and if hiding some critical information about the sensitive spots in a difficult to secure physical system can provide an immediate benefit, then it's stupid to publish such information so that those who wish you harm can more easily commit it.
Email is not a guaranteed service - no one is ever going to be sued for millions for not receiving an email. Things that *must* be delivered will continue to be put into a hard copy format and delivered by courier with a signature required.
So, when will these anti-piracy commercials be available on Gnutella?
What features would need to be added to gnumeric run a spreadsheet such as this configuration aid at IBM?
Because there is one within a few miles of everyone in the US? What, would you rather trust the zit-faced idiot at the 7-11 had "verified" the identity of those your correspond with?
They will when all their correspondents start bouncing their non-certed mail.
I think it would help immensely to put together a deb package that had Firebird / Thunderbird that installed it properly, put it in the menu, integrated it into Gnome, etc. There's plenty of debian users that would run it, at least alongside their other browser/email, but don't want to do an installation themselves. Bug reports and feature requests come from such users.
While I appreciate the humor in what you said, having myself just completed a three-year legal effort regarding the recovery of embezzled money, I can easily expect this court battle to drag out. I think it would be to IBM's advantage to do this - for one thing we might see just how interested M$FT actually is if they decided to renew their license for another dozen years to keep SCO funded to pursue this suit. If that doesn't happen, SCO will be weakened with the continuous cash hemorrhage - and those investors that have decided to short SCO's stock will see a nice steady profit accrue.
But, enough people complain about the SCO postings (why the hell do they bother to comment on them?) that adding its own section for awhile makes sense.
Screw that idea!
It's the way of the world - somebody always thinks you should pick up their beer tab.
My son has taught himself to program, with only a little guidance from me for learning how to analyze and break a problem into parts, by writing his own text adventure games using a programming language called Inform . This has worked very well - it allows him to express his creativity in the development of a scenario that requires following explicit rules to succeed, and to develop his programming skills in learning to express an algorithm that follows those rules he's created. The Inform community tends to freely share the text adventures they've written - you know a developing programmer is motivated when he spends time pouring over someone else's not-always-well documented source code.
One can quite easily do this when one's agenda is simply to denigrate America - it is done by choosing the loser in an event and making him out to have Bambi eyes, stalked and killed by the evil hunter.
It is an organization quite likely to not survive.
The rest of the world counts in President Bush's considerations for what is best for the United States when the rest of the world asks and qualifies to join that group. Until then, no it doesn't count, nor should it.
I can think of over 3000 recent reasons you're wrong.
Actually, Bush the Elder made the unfortunate mistake of actually listening to the U.N. in some mistaken belief that stopping as per the U.N. accord was to the advantage of the U.S. We all saw how ridiculous that action was over the next decade, especially with a follow-on administration more interested in appeasement and wag-the-dog deflection of attention. Fortunately, the ineffectiveness of the U.N. did not paralyze Bush the Junior and a horrid dictator has been removed (hopefully from the face of the earth). Perhaps we have learned our lesson and the future leaders of the U.S. will remember that the safety of the American people comes first - but the American people have a great tendency to forget the cost of their freedom and instead elect those promising pots full of chicken.