Having spent a fair amount of time with Crane Company (the exclusive manufacturer of paper for the US government since, well, since there was a US government), I can vouch for the fact that the paper is not polyester. You may be thinking of the strip inside the paper, but you can't feel that. The reason the paper feels different is the material it is made from (organic, but not wood pulp), the way it is made, and the finish put on the surface.
You said: With motor-voter you can crank out as many registrations as you want. (There's an illegal immigrant on my street who brags about how he goes from precinct to precinct on election day and shows off his >20 registrations. His reaction to questions about whether this is right: "They don't care. If they cared they'd do something to check.")
This sounds like some Rush Limbaugh FOAF. It doesn't make sense. An illegal immigrant got twenty licenses? From your state DMV? With 20 different addresses? Paid all the license fees 20 times? And each time he took the trouble to register to vote? Man, that's a guy who really wants to screw up the system!
The reason the recount was so confused in Florida was the lack of rules for the recount. The Florida legislature never took the time or effort required to lay out what counted and what didn't. Specifically, they did not include the common mandate "The intent of the voter should take precedence over all other issues."
This mandate is spelled out clearly in most states (ironically, including Texas) and makes perfect sense. For a real world example, a ballot is issued with the holes misaligned. Just looking at the ballot, it would be difficult to tell which candidate someone voted for. But since votes should count (what a concept!) the effort would be made to see what the effect of the misalingnment was and to give credit to those candidates the voter actually pulled the lever for. Obvious, right? Makes perfect sense?
What happened in Florida was that the Republicans argued that since this mandate wasn't included in Florida law, it didn't have to be honored. In the infamous hanging chad firestorm they said that a paper punch which didn't quite fall off should not be counted. So although the voter had obviously punched out the hole, their vote was invalid and shouldn't counted because they hadn't noticed the punch was still hanging by a thread.
The most crucial areas for this strategy were those that contained a large population of the elderly. They tended to vote for Gore, and they tended to suffer from arthritis, making it hard to manipulate the small stylus. The Republicans saw their chance to stop those votes from counting and took it. They then ran a smear campaign about how these old, infirm, probably senile, fogies couldn't even understand how the voting system worked, so how the heck would we even know who they intended to vote for?
And that's the modern Republican party in a nutshell.
IANAL, and therefore must ask: if you take someone to court, you must show damages. If you will not recieve financial compensation for your code, what kind of damages can you show? Or is it enough that SCO will somehow make money off your code, so the money belongs to you?
Oh what the hell. So Your Royal Geekness figured it all out? Those high priced supply chain consultants and technology companies have been wasting billions on what any INTELLIGENT person could have discerned just by reading a slashdot posting. Pardon me while I do a little jig of despair.
I've been involved with the the barcoding industry for a while and there are a plethora of benefits to RFID. And no, the really interesting benefits don't revolve around tracking who bought what. (Which, by the way, they could already do if you regularly pay with credit cards. Unfortunately for the part-time paranoids amongst us, retailers don't bother doing it except in a market research sense.) That geeky and attention grabbing side issue may or may not some day pay off in some small way, but let's face it; it is just so much dot-com hyper-shit. May happen, may not happen, may attract VC, but it will certainly not cause real companies with real business plans to alter the multi-trillion dollar supply chain.
So why are they interested? Well, shrinkage is one big reason and that has been discussed elsewhere. But how about this one: there are two supermarkets in town, and it is 2 pm on a July saturday. One of the supermarkets has a neat shopping cart display that shows your running total for every item in your cart, automatically deducts the coupons you put in there and when you go through the checkout line you only have to pause to sign the receipt. One item or one thousand - it can check you out in ten seconds. The other supermarket has lines backed up to the pantyhose aisle with a 35 minute wait in the best of them (and you never pick the best). Your two year old refuses to go to the bathroom now but you know in twenty minutes she will be screamming "I WANNA GO TEE-TEE!" at the top of her tiny lungs and you will loose your place in line and have to start all over. Quick - which store do you choose?
I think the point here is that the tech field is using these terms to market to the general public. By comparison, the pharmeceutical companies don't talk about how their products mitigate histamine overproduction, they claim that they will relieve sneezing and runny nose. Although the first one may be more accurate, the second is more useful. It is certainly more effective in the marketplace.
Ok, that may be hard to do for a general purpose computer, which, after all, does exactly nothing on its own, but what about mp3 players or bluetooth enabled phones? I can't tell you how many ads and press releases I've seen for bluetooth that buries the lead, or omits it entirely - NO MESSY CABLES NECESSARY! And what's up with Bluetooth anyway? What kind of an industry introduces a whole new technology and uses a name that not only gives no indication of what it does, but calls up images of open mouthed chewing of slabs of blueberry pie?
and pretty much ignored the overall system performance. Back in the days, Byte magazine had a "WinMark" (or something like that) benchmark that ran real world tasks on various machines. For Apple pro machine users, Photoshop and Mathematica are probably pretty good real world benchmarks simply because so many Photoshop users (both PC and Mac) spend so much time sitting in front of their screens waiting for things to happen.
That said, his points about the bogus tweaks for the G5 and the bogus downgrades for the Intel systems seem legitimate. After all, it was Apple who put the SPECmarks out there for comparison.
there is a bit of a bias there. He complains about Apple tweaking its benchmarks. I have no problem with that. Companies should get blasted for running bogus benchmarks. But then he compares Apple's results to Dell's and AMD's without questioning their tweaks.
Perhaps what he meant to say is: "If we are going to use bogus benchmarks, let's compare them to the bogus ones from the competition."
The author of the article makes the point that most programs use a single processor unless specifically written for using two, so we should downplay the dual processor results. A good point on the surface but examine it more deeply and it has two flaws:
1) This is Apple's Pro machine and many of the users are in the Graphic Arts, Audio and Film industry. The most siginificant programs in these fields do get optimized for the Mac platform.
2) I don't know about you, but it is normal for me to be doing several things at once on my computer. Listening to music, downloading email, munging video, plus about a hundred background tasks. The OS itself balances these separate tasks between the processors, so there is a very real and significant advantage to the dual processor even if the individual programs don't take advantage.
This isn't simply hype. This has been charged as fraud. Basically, they made claims about what they could do _today_ and took investor money based on those claims. There's a big difference between saying "Wait till you see my software, it will be ten times faster than the other guys" and "We have a working perpetual motion machine. Give us some money based on that fact".
>if they could keep up their one million songs per week rate (doubtful)
I wouldn't assume they can't keep that rate up. Of course, it may slack off for a while, but bear in mind the service is currently available to only a very, very small segment of the potential market: Apple users (5%) who use iTunes or own an iPod (??%, but certainly less than 100%). When they release their Windows version, it should ramp up sales by at least an order of magnitude. When they get the European and Japanese online, it should double it again. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 18 months from now, they were chugging along at a steady state of $250 million a year, plus whatever they make from the iPods and extra Macs.
Let me get this straight. Your students are using your network to commit a crime. (My point here has nothing to do with whether it should be illegal, the point is, it IS illegal.) As an administrator and employee for your univiersity, you are now going around asking people how to help your students commit the crime without getting caught. I just have one question: does your employees realize they have a walking, talking big-ass-lawsuit magnet working for them? If you worked for me, my only hope to mitigate the damage to the university is to be able to say (during discovery) that I fired your ass the second I heard about it, and called every other employee in and told them why I fired you and made it clear, in writing, anyone else tries to pull the same stupid stunt they will be the next to join the unemployent lines.
This is just a right-wing trope. Two things the government off the top of my head:
1) create the internet
2) Medicare/Medicaid. The government overhead for this program is 3%. It covers the poorest and sickest. The national average for private health insurance is 40%. It does everything it can to not cover the poor and sick. And when the insurance companies lost all their investments in the dot com crash, rates went through the roof.
I have to respectfully disagree. This is really just an example of policy by cult-like chanting (tarrrifffs are baaaddd, taxesss are baaaaaddd....) The idea that tarifs stand in the way of lower cost to consumers may be true, but it is also true that consumers lose their jobs to (literally) slave labor in China or India (before the flames begin, I'm thinking textiles, not software). We know what laissez-faire (now called free-market) economies look like: the US in 1908 with the people burning to death in sweatshops (quick: who said of their workers, "They're cattle, let 'em burn!"?), children hacking their lungs out working 14 hour days in asbestos plants, and the US government sending in troups to shoot union organizers. If you think I am exagerating then you don't know enough about real history to conduct a real discussion.
If you don't think it could happen again, I would like to see your reasoning. It would take a lot to convince me to decide that our progress was in spite of the tariffs and unions you despise, and not because of it.
And of course there are destructive tariffs and corrupt unions (believe me, I install stuff in a lot of union plants and unions are definately their own worst enemies). But when the books are balanced, the advances we have made in the US are due to those things, not in spite of them.
What noone has mentioned is that he says he is a director of the company. Now, in reality, people get all kinds of titles and it may not mean what it implies, but a director has legal standing to act as part of management. This includes incurring financial liabilities for the company. Of course you should check out the credit of someone in that capacity.
The Xerox Alto system I first used around 1980 (and it wasn't new that year) had an undo function that worked in every program and could take you all the way back to the beginning of your session. If I remember you could have it work contiuously somehow, and it would undo all your work before your eyes.
BTW, the system was also a WYSIWYG high res windowed display, with three button mouse, laser printer, removable (personal) hard drive, drag and drop file handling, ethernet with an internet (arpanet, actually) connection. The first thing I ever saw on it was someone in Rochester, NY playing a 3-D real-time multiplayer game (mazewars?) with someone in California.
I have never quite recovered from the IBM PC downgrade.
Flood them with responses. A volunteer organization which floods them with answers. Not the answers they want, but answers they nevertheless have to take time to deal with. The trick is not to make spam impossible, but to make it unprofitable.
and a potential solution. Recently, I read an interview with a spammer. She said that she could make a profit with a response rate of.001 percent. That's right,.001 PERCENT. Our anti-spam measures actually help her target the gullible. But what if she had a response rate of 1 percent? She sends out millions of spams per day. Say she got 10,000 replies (or her customers did.) Not buying their dreck, but instead asking for more info or some such. Would they be able to find the legitimate responses in the deluge?
Why Anti-SPAM tactics help the spammers...
on
HOWTO: Annoy a Spammer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
... and a potential solution. Recently, I read an interview with a spammer. She said that she could make a profit with a response rate of.001 percent. That's right,.001 PERCENT. Our anti-spam measures actually help her target the gullible. But what if she had a response rate of 1 percent? She sends out millions of spams per day. Say she got 10,000 replies (or her customers did.) Not buying their dreck, but instead asking for more info or some such. Would they be able to find the legitimate responses in the deluge?
If you are in a city, you probably won't have too much problems, but some things to be careful about:
1) Leave you case tightly zipped when not in use. I once lost a shortwave radio due to an ant colony deciding to use it.
2) Humidity. Air conditioning removes humidity as well as lowers the temperature, so we Americans have lost sight of what humidity can do to things. The Ashanti region in Ghana during the rainy season and anyway on the Fiji islands at any time are humid. I mean really, really mold growing on everything, laminations peeling away before your eyes, humid.
3) Dust. There is a Harmattan season anywhere south of the Sahara (which is big, roughly the size of the continental US). This means a whole lot of dust. I was once a passenger in a bush taxi on a dirt road when the windshield shattered. The driver pulled over, kicked out the windshield and we proceded to drive a couple hundred miles in the dust. You can not imagine what we looked like at the end of the trip. More importantly, every tiny gap in my luggage had served as gate house for the red laderite clay dust. Everything in my zipped bag had to be washed.
4) Weird Bugs. I was visiting someone in a very small village in the Fiji Islands. She lived in a traditional thatched house (she wasn't local. The locals used galvanized steel roofing...) I opened up a book on her shelf. It had different colored print, or rather it used to have. Some mites had eaten all the letters out of the book, except for one color (blue?) It was the neatest thing...
If you read the story, you will see the following: "Although there are more than 30 types of HPV that can infect human beings, one of them -- type 16 -- is responsible for about half of all cervical cancers. The experimental vaccine, made by Merck Research Laboratories, protected only against that one, although future formulations are likely to also protect against the less common HPV types that can cause cervical cancer" So although it is very good news, it does not protect against "the" virus that causes cervical cancer, it protects against the variant of that virus that causes 50% of virus derived cervical cancer. No small feat and better things to come, but not what it says in the Article lead.
In a time when everyone is reviewing all-new-never-been-heard-of Microsoft Windows XP for Tablet Computing, having completely forgotten about the fiasco that was Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing (circa 1992, with as big a launch as MWXPFTC), I can forsee this discussion going on and on and never once mentioning that what Cosmic Dreams proposes is what Newt Gingrich promised the US electorate during his contract-with-America days. Yes, everything would be put online, every transaction instantly available, never-before-seen transparency, blah, blah, blah. A lot of techno-geeks voted for him because he UNDERSTOOD! He saw the LIGHT! But of course, as soon as they got into power, all of that open government stuff was sent off to a committee to die. Remember, these are the guys who swore term-limits were for them, who gave their oath not to serve more than 6 years, who wanted to give back government to the peepuls, who... broke their promises with hardly a stutter six years later. Let's face it. Geeks have no memory. If we demanded more than pretty promises, Linux would be user friendly today...
What, me cynical?
You were probably referring to a technically oriented written test, but if the candidate has to develop any documentation or reports, or even if they will need to consult extensive written documentation, I insist on a written test that proves (or disproves) their writing ability. In the US at least, a high school or college diploma, even one from a decent school, is absolutely no proof that someone can read or write. I broke this rule recently because of the good quality letters and emails the candidate sent me during the interview process. It quickly became apparent he must have had someone else's help on those. It was excruciatingly embarassing whenever anything went out that I had not proofread and extensively altered.
My impression after fifteen years of hiring technical people is that a significant minority (30-40%) should never have received a passing grade in English. In fact, my English-As-A-Second-Language employees usually are better than ones educated in US schools.
I seriously considered one of these systems. Here are some of the reasons I didn't buy one.
Conflicting Standards - It is the norm in the electronics industry to come out with multiple formats in the hope of locking the users into your service. This is true of the Satelite radio services. So, once I buy a radio I am stuck with either the service I originally chose, or a large $500 hockey puck.
Can't Try-Before-Buy - I can't try before I buy, instead I have to shell out 300-500 buck-a-ronis and then pay a monthly fee - all to find out if it is worth having.
Fear of Bankruptcy - Even if I love my new stations, if my particular service goes belly up, my pre-paid time is lost, my radio turns into the hockey puck, and I am out of luck. In this business climate, it is a very real consideration to me.
Fear of Declining service - once they have you, they have you. If they need to actually make money, or failing that, loose less, the first thing to go will be the DJ's. And then all you will hear is the same songs over and over, programmed by Mort (you know, the guy who was once an assistant to the Manager for one of those 80's bands that you kinda recognize their song when it comes on the radio, but never really remember their name.)
Slashdot Mirror
Having spent a fair amount of time with Crane Company (the exclusive manufacturer of paper for the US government since, well, since there was a US government), I can vouch for the fact that the paper is not polyester. You may be thinking of the strip inside the paper, but you can't feel that. The reason the paper feels different is the material it is made from (organic, but not wood pulp), the way it is made, and the finish put on the surface.
You said:
With motor-voter you can crank out as many registrations as you want. (There's an illegal immigrant on my street who brags about how he goes from precinct to precinct on election day and shows off his >20 registrations. His reaction to questions about whether this is right: "They don't care. If they cared they'd do something to check.")
This sounds like some Rush Limbaugh FOAF. It doesn't make sense. An illegal immigrant got twenty licenses? From your state DMV? With 20 different addresses? Paid all the license fees 20 times? And each time he took the trouble to register to vote? Man, that's a guy who really wants to screw up the system!
Sorry, it just doesn't pass the BS test.
The reason the recount was so confused in Florida was the lack of rules for the recount. The Florida legislature never took the time or effort required to lay out what counted and what didn't. Specifically, they did not include the common mandate "The intent of the voter should take precedence over all other issues."
This mandate is spelled out clearly in most states (ironically, including Texas) and makes perfect sense. For a real world example, a ballot is issued with the holes misaligned. Just looking at the ballot, it would be difficult to tell which candidate someone voted for. But since votes should count (what a concept!) the effort would be made to see what the effect of the misalingnment was and to give credit to those candidates the voter actually pulled the lever for. Obvious, right? Makes perfect sense?
What happened in Florida was that the Republicans argued that since this mandate wasn't included in Florida law, it didn't have to be honored. In the infamous hanging chad firestorm they said that a paper punch which didn't quite fall off should not be counted. So although the voter had obviously punched out the hole, their vote was invalid and shouldn't counted because they hadn't noticed the punch was still hanging by a thread.
The most crucial areas for this strategy were those that contained a large population of the elderly. They tended to vote for Gore, and they tended to suffer from arthritis, making it hard to manipulate the small stylus. The Republicans saw their chance to stop those votes from counting and took it. They then ran a smear campaign about how these old, infirm, probably senile, fogies couldn't even understand how the voting system worked, so how the heck would we even know who they intended to vote for?
And that's the modern Republican party in a nutshell.
IANAL, and therefore must ask: if you take someone to court, you must show damages. If you will not recieve financial compensation for your code, what kind of damages can you show? Or is it enough that SCO will somehow make money off your code, so the money belongs to you?
>creative genius is turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, regardless of age."
Lack of regular sex will do that to you...
Try...Not..To..Make...Sarcastic....Comm-
Oh what the hell. So Your Royal Geekness figured it all out? Those high priced supply chain consultants and technology companies have been wasting billions on what any INTELLIGENT person could have discerned just by reading a slashdot posting. Pardon me while I do a little jig of despair.
I've been involved with the the barcoding industry for a while and there are a plethora of benefits to RFID. And no, the really interesting benefits don't revolve around tracking who bought what. (Which, by the way, they could already do if you regularly pay with credit cards. Unfortunately for the part-time paranoids amongst us, retailers don't bother doing it except in a market research sense.) That geeky and attention grabbing side issue may or may not some day pay off in some small way, but let's face it; it is just so much dot-com hyper-shit. May happen, may not happen, may attract VC, but it will certainly not cause real companies with real business plans to alter the multi-trillion dollar supply chain.
So why are they interested? Well, shrinkage is one big reason and that has been discussed elsewhere. But how about this one: there are two supermarkets in town, and it is 2 pm on a July saturday. One of the supermarkets has a neat shopping cart display that shows your running total for every item in your cart, automatically deducts the coupons you put in there and when you go through the checkout line you only have to pause to sign the receipt. One item or one thousand - it can check you out in ten seconds. The other supermarket has lines backed up to the pantyhose aisle with a 35 minute wait in the best of them (and you never pick the best). Your two year old refuses to go to the bathroom now but you know in twenty minutes she will be screamming "I WANNA GO TEE-TEE!" at the top of her tiny lungs and you will loose your place in line and have to start all over. Quick - which store do you choose?
I think the point here is that the tech field is using these terms to market to the general public. By comparison, the pharmeceutical companies don't talk about how their products mitigate histamine overproduction, they claim that they will relieve sneezing and runny nose. Although the first one may be more accurate, the second is more useful. It is certainly more effective in the marketplace.
Ok, that may be hard to do for a general purpose computer, which, after all, does exactly nothing on its own, but what about mp3 players or bluetooth enabled phones? I can't tell you how many ads and press releases I've seen for bluetooth that buries the lead, or omits it entirely - NO MESSY CABLES NECESSARY! And what's up with Bluetooth anyway? What kind of an industry introduces a whole new technology and uses a name that not only gives no indication of what it does, but calls up images of open mouthed chewing of slabs of blueberry pie?
and pretty much ignored the overall system performance. Back in the days, Byte magazine had a "WinMark" (or something like that) benchmark that ran real world tasks on various machines. For Apple pro machine users, Photoshop and Mathematica are probably pretty good real world benchmarks simply because so many Photoshop users (both PC and Mac) spend so much time sitting in front of their screens waiting for things to happen.
That said, his points about the bogus tweaks for the G5 and the bogus downgrades for the Intel systems seem legitimate. After all, it was Apple who put the SPECmarks out there for comparison.
there is a bit of a bias there. He complains about Apple tweaking its benchmarks. I have no problem with that. Companies should get blasted for running bogus benchmarks. But then he compares Apple's results to Dell's and AMD's without questioning their tweaks.
Perhaps what he meant to say is: "If we are going to use bogus benchmarks, let's compare them to the bogus ones from the competition."
The author of the article makes the point that most programs use a single processor unless specifically written for using two, so we should downplay the dual processor results. A good point on the surface but examine it more deeply and it has two flaws:
1) This is Apple's Pro machine and many of the users are in the Graphic Arts, Audio and Film industry. The most siginificant programs in these fields do get optimized for the Mac platform.
2) I don't know about you, but it is normal for me to be doing several things at once on my computer. Listening to music, downloading email, munging video, plus about a hundred background tasks. The OS itself balances these separate tasks between the processors, so there is a very real and significant advantage to the dual processor even if the individual programs don't take advantage.
-I have no Sig yet I must scream...
This isn't simply hype. This has been charged as fraud. Basically, they made claims about what they could do _today_ and took investor money based on those claims. There's a big difference between saying "Wait till you see my software, it will be ten times faster than the other guys" and "We have a working perpetual motion machine. Give us some money based on that fact".
>if they could keep up their one million songs per week rate (doubtful)
I wouldn't assume they can't keep that rate up. Of course, it may slack off for a while, but bear in mind the service is currently available to only a very, very small segment of the potential market: Apple users (5%) who use iTunes or own an iPod (??%, but certainly less than 100%). When they release their Windows version, it should ramp up sales by at least an order of magnitude. When they get the European and Japanese online, it should double it again. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 18 months from now, they were chugging along at a steady state of $250 million a year, plus whatever they make from the iPods and extra Macs.
Let me get this straight. Your students are using your network to commit a crime. (My point here has nothing to do with whether it should be illegal, the point is, it IS illegal.) As an administrator and employee for your univiersity, you are now going around asking people how to help your students commit the crime without getting caught. I just have one question: does your employees realize they have a walking, talking big-ass-lawsuit magnet working for them? If you worked for me, my only hope to mitigate the damage to the university is to be able to say (during discovery) that I fired your ass the second I heard about it, and called every other employee in and told them why I fired you and made it clear, in writing, anyone else tries to pull the same stupid stunt they will be the next to join the unemployent lines.
This is just a right-wing trope. Two things the government off the top of my head:
1) create the internet
2) Medicare/Medicaid. The government overhead for this program is 3%. It covers the poorest and sickest. The national average for private health insurance is 40%. It does everything it can to not cover the poor and sick. And when the insurance companies lost all their investments in the dot com crash, rates went through the roof.
I have to respectfully disagree. This is really just an example of policy by cult-like chanting (tarrrifffs are baaaddd, taxesss are baaaaaddd....) The idea that tarifs stand in the way of lower cost to consumers may be true, but it is also true that consumers lose their jobs to (literally) slave labor in China or India (before the flames begin, I'm thinking textiles, not software). We know what laissez-faire (now called free-market) economies look like: the US in 1908 with the people burning to death in sweatshops (quick: who said of their workers, "They're cattle, let 'em burn!"?), children hacking their lungs out working 14 hour days in asbestos plants, and the US government sending in troups to shoot union organizers. If you think I am exagerating then you don't know enough about real history to conduct a real discussion.
If you don't think it could happen again, I would like to see your reasoning. It would take a lot to convince me to decide that our progress was in spite of the tariffs and unions you despise, and not because of it.
And of course there are destructive tariffs and corrupt unions (believe me, I install stuff in a lot of union plants and unions are definately their own worst enemies). But when the books are balanced, the advances we have made in the US are due to those things, not in spite of them.
What noone has mentioned is that he says he is a director of the company. Now, in reality, people get all kinds of titles and it may not mean what it implies, but a director has legal standing to act as part of management. This includes incurring financial liabilities for the company. Of course you should check out the credit of someone in that capacity.
The Xerox Alto system I first used around 1980 (and it wasn't new that year) had an undo function that worked in every program and could take you all the way back to the beginning of your session. If I remember you could have it work contiuously somehow, and it would undo all your work before your eyes.
BTW, the system was also a WYSIWYG high res windowed display, with three button mouse, laser printer, removable (personal) hard drive, drag and drop file handling, ethernet with an internet (arpanet, actually) connection. The first thing I ever saw on it was someone in Rochester, NY playing a 3-D real-time multiplayer game (mazewars?) with someone in California.
I have never quite recovered from the IBM PC downgrade.
Flood them with responses. A volunteer organization which floods them with answers. Not the answers they want, but answers they nevertheless have to take time to deal with. The trick is not to make spam impossible, but to make it unprofitable.
.001 percent. That's right, .001 PERCENT. Our anti-spam measures actually help her target the gullible. But what if she had a response rate of 1 percent? She sends out millions of spams per day. Say she got 10,000 replies (or her customers did.) Not buying their dreck, but instead asking for more info or some such. Would they be able to find the legitimate responses in the deluge?
and a potential solution. Recently, I read an interview with a spammer. She said that she could make a profit with a response rate of
... and a potential solution. Recently, I read an interview with a spammer. She said that she could make a profit with a response rate of .001 percent. That's right, .001 PERCENT. Our anti-spam measures actually help her target the gullible. But what if she had a response rate of 1 percent? She sends out millions of spams per day. Say she got 10,000 replies (or her customers did.) Not buying their dreck, but instead asking for more info or some such. Would they be able to find the legitimate responses in the deluge?
If you are in a city, you probably won't have too much problems, but some things to be careful about: 1) Leave you case tightly zipped when not in use. I once lost a shortwave radio due to an ant colony deciding to use it. 2) Humidity. Air conditioning removes humidity as well as lowers the temperature, so we Americans have lost sight of what humidity can do to things. The Ashanti region in Ghana during the rainy season and anyway on the Fiji islands at any time are humid. I mean really, really mold growing on everything, laminations peeling away before your eyes, humid. 3) Dust. There is a Harmattan season anywhere south of the Sahara (which is big, roughly the size of the continental US). This means a whole lot of dust. I was once a passenger in a bush taxi on a dirt road when the windshield shattered. The driver pulled over, kicked out the windshield and we proceded to drive a couple hundred miles in the dust. You can not imagine what we looked like at the end of the trip. More importantly, every tiny gap in my luggage had served as gate house for the red laderite clay dust. Everything in my zipped bag had to be washed. 4) Weird Bugs. I was visiting someone in a very small village in the Fiji Islands. She lived in a traditional thatched house (she wasn't local. The locals used galvanized steel roofing...) I opened up a book on her shelf. It had different colored print, or rather it used to have. Some mites had eaten all the letters out of the book, except for one color (blue?) It was the neatest thing...
If you read the story, you will see the following:
"Although there are more than 30 types of HPV that can infect human beings, one of them -- type 16 -- is responsible for about half of all cervical cancers. The experimental vaccine, made by Merck Research Laboratories, protected only against that one, although future formulations are likely to also protect against the less common HPV types that can cause cervical cancer" So although it is very good news, it does not protect against "the" virus that causes cervical cancer, it protects against the variant of that virus that causes 50% of virus derived cervical cancer. No small feat and better things to come, but not what it says in the Article lead.
In a time when everyone is reviewing all-new-never-been-heard-of Microsoft Windows XP for Tablet Computing, having completely forgotten about the fiasco that was Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing (circa 1992, with as big a launch as MWXPFTC), I can forsee this discussion going on and on and never once mentioning that what Cosmic Dreams proposes is what Newt Gingrich promised the US electorate during his contract-with-America days. Yes, everything would be put online, every transaction instantly available, never-before-seen transparency, blah, blah, blah. A lot of techno-geeks voted for him because he UNDERSTOOD! He saw the LIGHT! But of course, as soon as they got into power, all of that open government stuff was sent off to a committee to die. Remember, these are the guys who swore term-limits were for them, who gave their oath not to serve more than 6 years, who wanted to give back government to the peepuls, who... broke their promises with hardly a stutter six years later. Let's face it. Geeks have no memory. If we demanded more than pretty promises, Linux would be user friendly today... What, me cynical?
You were probably referring to a technically oriented written test, but if the candidate has to develop any documentation or reports, or even if they will need to consult extensive written documentation, I insist on a written test that proves (or disproves) their writing ability. In the US at least, a high school or college diploma, even one from a decent school, is absolutely no proof that someone can read or write. I broke this rule recently because of the good quality letters and emails the candidate sent me during the interview process. It quickly became apparent he must have had someone else's help on those. It was excruciatingly embarassing whenever anything went out that I had not proofread and extensively altered. My impression after fifteen years of hiring technical people is that a significant minority (30-40%) should never have received a passing grade in English. In fact, my English-As-A-Second-Language employees usually are better than ones educated in US schools.
I seriously considered one of these systems. Here are some of the reasons I didn't buy one.
Conflicting Standards - It is the norm in the electronics industry to come out with multiple formats in the hope of locking the users into your service. This is true of the Satelite radio services. So, once I buy a radio I am stuck with either the service I originally chose, or a large $500 hockey puck.
Can't Try-Before-Buy - I can't try before I buy, instead I have to shell out 300-500 buck-a-ronis and then pay a monthly fee - all to find out if it is worth having.
Fear of Bankruptcy - Even if I love my new stations, if my particular service goes belly up, my pre-paid time is lost, my radio turns into the hockey puck, and I am out of luck. In this business climate, it is a very real consideration to me.
Fear of Declining service - once they have you, they have you. If they need to actually make money, or failing that, loose less, the first thing to go will be the DJ's. And then all you will hear is the same songs over and over, programmed by Mort (you know, the guy who was once an assistant to the Manager for one of those 80's bands that you kinda recognize their song when it comes on the radio, but never really remember their name.)
Computers Without Clocks