My conspiracy theory of the day is that CNN also inserts subliminal advertising in their news coverage. During some of their special coverage, they have this undulating blue band across the bottom of the screen upon which titles appear. In the midst of the seemingly-random pattern of waves, I once saw a vague silhouette of the Warner Brothers logo appear. The person I was with at the time saw it too, after I pointed it out. It floated around for a few seconds, then disappeared. Has anyone else seen anything like this?
... because everyone knows online polls aren't statistically valid by any stretch of the imagination.
... because their directors weren't behind it. It sounds like it was just an chain letter people passed around saying "go vote for us!"
How many times have I seen a message saying "go vote in this poll"? Slashdot has linked to stories that happened to contain polls, and the results were clearly skewed afterwords. Remember the discussion last week about IMDB being skewed towards sci-fi in the early days? Web polls are inherently untrustworthy. Everyone knows this. No big deal.
Wasn't there an article about this sort of thing a few months ago? It wasn't by a big company -- and they were being threatened with legal action by businesses who didn't like that anyone could leave a message saying something bad about their business.
Just as long as it's not patentable. I mean, even I thought of this one. GPS+Internet gives you all sorts of cool possibilities.
If Microsoft is the only one that can integrate Digital Restrictions Management (not "Rights" by any stretch of the word), then it won't make it into any other operating system. That means everyone else can compete on the basis of an "open" OS.
Hotmail's filter (on the second-highest level) has never worked that well for me. I get messages that have 20 addresses in the To: line, all beginning with the same 4 characters (so it's obviously going to thousands of Hotmail accounts), and an invalid return address such as udp@degree_programs. Even funnier is that I can't add @degree_programs to my filter, because that's an invalid address.
My best weapon has been procmail. I use the scoring feature, where certain phrases are assigned a weight, and anything passing a certain threshold gets saved to a junk mailbox.
For example:
3 points: Certain punctuation, such as $ and !
10 points: remove, money, credit
20 points: opportunity, cash flow
30 points: insurance premium, no obligation
40 points: pyramid scheme, not spam, viagara
60 points: add inches, free.* (video|info)
80 points: commercial email bill section 301, apology as a responsible e.?mailer
20 points: [0-9]@(hotmail|yahoo).com
-100 points: To: my address
-50 points: use of my name or certain login IDs (to prevent false positives, all of which seem to be order confirmations.)
Whenever a spam gets through (i.e. usually whenever someone comes up with something new to sell), I add another phrase, weighted appropriately. Virtually nothing gets through.
I thought spam checking would be easy for a big provider like Hotmail, because they can red-flag every message that's sent to more than one recipient for further inspection. But I've found that a custom solution works best.
This falls under the "I just don't get it" category -- but to question it is to somehow admit that you are uncultured? Like the 1.8 million dollar red stripe purchased by the National Gallery a few years ago. (I've seen this painting in person. It's big. Otherwise, much the same as the picture. I'm not sure why it's worth so much more than "Yellow Edge," which is.... a blank black canvas with one edge painted yellow.)
Who can honestly tell me why something like this is so brilliant? And why, say, an exhibit consisting of two telephones ringing (an idea I just came up with this moment, believe it or not) wouldn't be worthy of a cash prize?
My best guess is that everyone says "oh, yes, it's brilliant" just so they look like a fine art connaisseur. After all, someone thought it was brilliant, and that person is obviously more qualified to judge art than I am... so to question it would be to appear ignorant.
I used to be a fan of AltaVista, until Google came along. However, since Google wasn't so great with phrase handling, I still went back occasionally. That ended when I used AltaVista to find a list of songs on the Snatch soundtrack, and was greeted by two pages of paid advertising for... well, just don't try it at work. (Animations and everything.)
It's interesting to note that AltaVista's search engine did find the results I was looking for; however, this example illustrates quite well the problem with paid placement.
But on Linux, you could still send someone an email starting with "I thought you'd like this new game I found... please run it." And people would run it. And it would email itself to everyone in.addressbook. Or whatever.
It's not as easy to do -- but it's those same usability issues that keep most people from Linux in the first place. (Make anything easy to use, it will probably make it easier to screw up, too.)
Are trojan horses that rely on user ignorance limited exclusively to products created by Microsoft? I don't think so. Idiot users are idiot users no matter what software they use.
Did they say you'd get that rate on a constant basis, or did they say you'd get a 512k burst rate?
It's always on
It's always ready to give you 512k
But they didn't say anything about utilization. You may have assumed they meant you could use it full-on 24/7, but they never actually said this.
And in their acceptable use policy you agreed to when you signed up, they will have language clarifying the situation. At the very least, they'll have something about degrading the performance of the network, which could be lawyered into a statement about exceess utilization.
I heard that in the modem days, ISPs would oversubscribe on the order of 100 times their actual bandwidth capacity. Internet connections are very expensive for the ISPs -- it's unrealistic to think that you'll be able to stay connected 24/7 downloading MP3s at full steam without paying a price for it.
The point is, they're not being greedy -- the high-speed ISPs aren't exactly rolling in the dough. It's hard to blame them for trying to find ways to deal with the problems new technologies (Napster, home LANs, 802.11b) bring.
when it gets down to the last 3 or 4, it's in the best interests of the other players to vote out the player who is clearly the strongest
I always enjoy it when Anne stresses that the point of the game is to vote out the weakest player. It makes me wonder if the players on the British version don't use the "vote out my enemies" strategy as employed by the U.S. contestants. It appears from this episode that voting out the actual weakest players will get you the most money in the end... so I wonder if that's really a better strategy.
I suppose that's fine for people who like replacing the ROM on their watch with a version that can run Apache. Myself, I've never worried too much about the fact that my Timex probably uses some proprietary closed-source operating system.
Why does everything have to run Linux? Or, more importantly, why does someone always have to point out whether or not product X runs or could potentially Linux?
I think it's much more relevent to discuss the possibilities of setting up a Beowulf cluster of these. You may complain that wristwatch camera doesn't have a big enough resolution, but imagine the quality you'd get with an array of 9 wristwatch cameras.
There are those "implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose." I forget exactly what they mean, but I believe one of them had something to do with being able to use the product for what you'd expect it to be used for. (i.e. if every other CD worked on your computer and this one doesn't, that breaks one of those implied warranties.)
But I could be completely wrong.
Re:Sad, sad commentary
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 1
Since this thing is pretty much a standard PC on the inside, shouldn't that make it much easier to write an emulator for it, so we can run games for the Xbox on the PC?
Or, to write software that runs on the Xbox? What kind of restrictions does this thing have?
I and find it very hard to believe it would take off in the way described by this exteremly one-sided article.
There are a few warning signs, the most obvious one being that this sounds eerily similar to what people were saying about ad-supported content 5 years ago. Why do people continue to seek an internet gold rush that defies the laws of economics? If there's anything the internet bubble should have taught us, it's that ideas that claim to be able to generate vast amounts of cash out of thin air are just as rediculous as they sound. How can shifting the financial burden (and more importantly, the financial decision-making burden) to the end consumer improve anything?
Where is all this money going to come from? Didn't your mother ever tell you that money doesn't grow on trees?
Would you click on as many links as you do now if you had to stop and think each time about whether the content on the other side of that link is worth paying for? No, you'd go somewhere else. It's not so much that you'd decide it's not worth paying for -- you'd decide it isn't worth the effort to think about whether it's worth the money.
This article is pure propaganda -- it only presents one side of the story.
There are a whole lot of web sites I visit today but would stop visiting without a second thought if they started charging per pageview. 95% of the sites I visit probably fall in this category. Slashdot is one. HowStuffWorks is another. I'd stop visiting CNN.com -- I can get the same info for "free" (comparatively) from TV. Actually, the only sites I'd pay to see are the kind of sites that wouldn't be charging in the first place.
If this ever happens, we'll have to create a new network where people can make information freely available without worrying so much about advertising and making money -- oh wait, wasn't that what the internet was in the first place? I miss the Internet of 1995 or so, before all the get rich quick businesspeople started showing up.
Can't you do something similar with seamless branching and the parental controls built in to the DVD player? I could have sworn this is one of the applications that is almost always mentioned in conjunction with the seamless branching feature.
Of course -- you'd still need to submit the full bug report to the company that is capable of fixing the problem, but the rest of the world doesn't need to know so badly.
Is it necessary to publish details on how precicely to exploit the problem? That much info isn't necessarily going to help system admins. All they really need to know is: here's what the problem is, it's caused by a problem in this area, here's some things you can do to reduce the risks. If nobody else has found the bug yet, could it possibly hurt to withold the details for another few days until a solution is available? Is it worth giving the information to all of the people of questionable intentions at the same time? The vast majority of the population does care about this kind of thing. They'll get the patch when Windows XP downloads it automatically for them. By pubilshing this information, you may be helping out a tiny number of people, while putting a much greater proportion of the population at risk.
I seriously wonder if the people publishing these exploits are mainly interested in indirectly harming Microsoft by giving hackers instructions on how to wreak havoc on Microsoft software.
You wouldn't expect Microsoft (or any other company for that matter) to publish details on how to exploit their software before a patch was available. That would be irresponsible. So why is it so wonderful for other people to do it, except that you like seeing Microsoft suffer? Not to mention all of the innocent people who are affected by the problem because someone decided to hand out loaded weapons to every 12 year old hacker on the planet. Thanks, but I'll do without this kind of "community service."
Many modern TVs now show you the name of the channel along with the channel number. I don't know how it works, but it's more helpful than the little logos because 1) it's still there during the commercials, and 2) it goes away after 3 seconds.
I'm sorry, but this article lost all credibility for me by the following statement:
In fact, until 2GHz desktop PCs become commonplace, we have a hard time recommending widespread adoption of Windows XP at all.
Two GIGahertz? For the average office worker who is running little office applications? I can only imagine the look of horror that would appear on the author's face if I told him that I dared run Windows XP on a paltry 2-year old Athlon 500. (Not only that, I could swear it runs more speedily than the 933 MHz Pentium on NT4 I've got at work, but I'm not sure why that could be.) There is only one place my system tends to get strained, and that's memory. If you like running 10 apps at once, it's probably not a bad idea to have 256 MB of RAM.
That 53 extra minutes a day they're talking about represents, I can only imaging, an office worker whose CPU is sitting at 100% utilization performing exclusively operations that are slowed by Windows XP. I would guess that my CPU's average load over the course of a day is somewhere under 1%. It has been quite a while since I remember spending time waiting for something that was within the control of the OS. There is no processor bottleneck for the majority of people -- and you certainly don't need a 2 GHz machine to run Windows XP.
None of those symbols has any meaning on their own. Thumbs up is good. Star of David is good. Skull and crossbones is a standard indication of toxic chemicals. So, are we agreed that it's okay for Microsoft to have included those three symbols in Wingdings? Good.
Now let's consider more than just these three symbols. How about a happy face, an "OK" sign, a Christian cross, the bomb, and so on.
Take every combination of all of those symbols and the character codes that correspond to them. Is it surprising that at least one of those combinations happens to correspond to a word in the English language, or an acronym, of any number of letters? Why are the letters "NYC" significant here?
If those three symbols corresponded to the letters "JEW" on the keyboard, then it might be suspicious, but I think the conspiracy theorists lose on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
My conspiracy theory of the day is that CNN also inserts subliminal advertising in their news coverage. During some of their special coverage, they have this undulating blue band across the bottom of the screen upon which titles appear. In the midst of the seemingly-random pattern of waves, I once saw a vague silhouette of the Warner Brothers logo appear. The person I was with at the time saw it too, after I pointed it out. It floated around for a few seconds, then disappeared. Has anyone else seen anything like this?
... because everyone knows online polls aren't statistically valid by any stretch of the imagination.
... because their directors weren't behind it. It sounds like it was just an chain letter people passed around saying "go vote for us!"
How many times have I seen a message saying "go vote in this poll"? Slashdot has linked to stories that happened to contain polls, and the results were clearly skewed afterwords. Remember the discussion last week about IMDB being skewed towards sci-fi in the early days? Web polls are inherently untrustworthy. Everyone knows this. No big deal.
Wasn't there an article about this sort of thing a few months ago? It wasn't by a big company -- and they were being threatened with legal action by businesses who didn't like that anyone could leave a message saying something bad about their business.
Just as long as it's not patentable. I mean, even I thought of this one. GPS+Internet gives you all sorts of cool possibilities.
On the bright side...
If Microsoft is the only one that can integrate Digital Restrictions Management (not "Rights" by any stretch of the word), then it won't make it into any other operating system. That means everyone else can compete on the basis of an "open" OS.
Hotmail's filter (on the second-highest level) has never worked that well for me. I get messages that have 20 addresses in the To: line, all beginning with the same 4 characters (so it's obviously going to thousands of Hotmail accounts), and an invalid return address such as udp@degree_programs. Even funnier is that I can't add @degree_programs to my filter, because that's an invalid address.
My best weapon has been procmail. I use the scoring feature, where certain phrases are assigned a weight, and anything passing a certain threshold gets saved to a junk mailbox.
For example:
3 points: Certain punctuation, such as $ and !
10 points: remove, money, credit
20 points: opportunity, cash flow
30 points: insurance premium, no obligation
40 points: pyramid scheme, not spam, viagara
60 points: add inches, free.* (video|info)
80 points: commercial email bill section 301, apology as a responsible e.?mailer
20 points: [0-9]@(hotmail|yahoo).com
-100 points: To: my address
-50 points: use of my name or certain login IDs (to prevent false positives, all of which seem to be order confirmations.)
Whenever a spam gets through (i.e. usually whenever someone comes up with something new to sell), I add another phrase, weighted appropriately. Virtually nothing gets through.
I thought spam checking would be easy for a big provider like Hotmail, because they can red-flag every message that's sent to more than one recipient for further inspection. But I've found that a custom solution works best.
This falls under the "I just don't get it" category -- but to question it is to somehow admit that you are uncultured? Like the 1.8 million dollar red stripe purchased by the National Gallery a few years ago. (I've seen this painting in person. It's big. Otherwise, much the same as the picture. I'm not sure why it's worth so much more than "Yellow Edge," which is.... a blank black canvas with one edge painted yellow.)
Who can honestly tell me why something like this is so brilliant? And why, say, an exhibit consisting of two telephones ringing (an idea I just came up with this moment, believe it or not) wouldn't be worthy of a cash prize?
My best guess is that everyone says "oh, yes, it's brilliant" just so they look like a fine art connaisseur. After all, someone thought it was brilliant, and that person is obviously more qualified to judge art than I am... so to question it would be to appear ignorant.
I used to be a fan of AltaVista, until Google came along. However, since Google wasn't so great with phrase handling, I still went back occasionally. That ended when I used AltaVista to find a list of songs on the Snatch soundtrack, and was greeted by two pages of paid advertising for... well, just don't try it at work. (Animations and everything.)
Try the same search on Google, and you get what you'd expect.
It's interesting to note that AltaVista's search engine did find the results I was looking for; however, this example illustrates quite well the problem with paid placement.
These don't cripple entire systems, either. (yet)
.addressbook. Or whatever.
But on Linux, you could still send someone an email starting with "I thought you'd like this new game I found... please run it." And people would run it. And it would email itself to everyone in
It's not as easy to do -- but it's those same usability issues that keep most people from Linux in the first place. (Make anything easy to use, it will probably make it easier to screw up, too.)
Are trojan horses that rely on user ignorance limited exclusively to products created by Microsoft? I don't think so. Idiot users are idiot users no matter what software they use.
Did they say you'd get that rate on a constant basis, or did they say you'd get a 512k burst rate?
It's always on
It's always ready to give you 512k
But they didn't say anything about utilization. You may have assumed they meant you could use it full-on 24/7, but they never actually said this.
And in their acceptable use policy you agreed to when you signed up, they will have language clarifying the situation. At the very least, they'll have something about degrading the performance of the network, which could be lawyered into a statement about exceess utilization.
Deceptive? Maybe. An outright lie? Nope.
I heard that in the modem days, ISPs would oversubscribe on the order of 100 times their actual bandwidth capacity. Internet connections are very expensive for the ISPs -- it's unrealistic to think that you'll be able to stay connected 24/7 downloading MP3s at full steam without paying a price for it.
The point is, they're not being greedy -- the high-speed ISPs aren't exactly rolling in the dough. It's hard to blame them for trying to find ways to deal with the problems new technologies (Napster, home LANs, 802.11b) bring.
when it gets down to the last 3 or 4, it's in the best interests of the other players to vote out the player who is clearly the strongest
I always enjoy it when Anne stresses that the point of the game is to vote out the weakest player. It makes me wonder if the players on the British version don't use the "vote out my enemies" strategy as employed by the U.S. contestants. It appears from this episode that voting out the actual weakest players will get you the most money in the end... so I wonder if that's really a better strategy.
I suppose that's fine for people who like replacing the ROM on their watch with a version that can run Apache. Myself, I've never worried too much about the fact that my Timex probably uses some proprietary closed-source operating system.
Why does everything have to run Linux? Or, more importantly, why does someone always have to point out whether or not product X runs or could potentially Linux?
I think it's much more relevent to discuss the possibilities of setting up a Beowulf cluster of these. You may complain that wristwatch camera doesn't have a big enough resolution, but imagine the quality you'd get with an array of 9 wristwatch cameras.
There are those "implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose." I forget exactly what they mean, but I believe one of them had something to do with being able to use the product for what you'd expect it to be used for. (i.e. if every other CD worked on your computer and this one doesn't, that breaks one of those implied warranties.)
But I could be completely wrong.
Since this thing is pretty much a standard PC on the inside, shouldn't that make it much easier to write an emulator for it, so we can run games for the Xbox on the PC?
Or, to write software that runs on the Xbox? What kind of restrictions does this thing have?
If the customer buys a computer RIGHT NOW and it comes with a 14.4 modem, that customer has other issues.
I and find it very hard to believe it would take off in the way described by this exteremly one-sided article.
There are a few warning signs, the most obvious one being that this sounds eerily similar to what people were saying about ad-supported content 5 years ago. Why do people continue to seek an internet gold rush that defies the laws of economics? If there's anything the internet bubble should have taught us, it's that ideas that claim to be able to generate vast amounts of cash out of thin air are just as rediculous as they sound. How can shifting the financial burden (and more importantly, the financial decision-making burden) to the end consumer improve anything?
Where is all this money going to come from? Didn't your mother ever tell you that money doesn't grow on trees?
Would you click on as many links as you do now if you had to stop and think each time about whether the content on the other side of that link is worth paying for? No, you'd go somewhere else. It's not so much that you'd decide it's not worth paying for -- you'd decide it isn't worth the effort to think about whether it's worth the money.
This article is pure propaganda -- it only presents one side of the story.
There are a whole lot of web sites I visit today but would stop visiting without a second thought if they started charging per pageview. 95% of the sites I visit probably fall in this category. Slashdot is one. HowStuffWorks is another. I'd stop visiting CNN.com -- I can get the same info for "free" (comparatively) from TV. Actually, the only sites I'd pay to see are the kind of sites that wouldn't be charging in the first place.
If this ever happens, we'll have to create a new network where people can make information freely available without worrying so much about advertising and making money -- oh wait, wasn't that what the internet was in the first place? I miss the Internet of 1995 or so, before all the get rich quick businesspeople started showing up.
Can't you do something similar with seamless branching and the parental controls built in to the DVD player? I could have sworn this is one of the applications that is almost always mentioned in conjunction with the seamless branching feature.
Of course -- you'd still need to submit the full bug report to the company that is capable of fixing the problem, but the rest of the world doesn't need to know so badly.
Is it necessary to publish details on how precicely to exploit the problem? That much info isn't necessarily going to help system admins. All they really need to know is: here's what the problem is, it's caused by a problem in this area, here's some things you can do to reduce the risks. If nobody else has found the bug yet, could it possibly hurt to withold the details for another few days until a solution is available? Is it worth giving the information to all of the people of questionable intentions at the same time? The vast majority of the population does care about this kind of thing. They'll get the patch when Windows XP downloads it automatically for them. By pubilshing this information, you may be helping out a tiny number of people, while putting a much greater proportion of the population at risk.
I seriously wonder if the people publishing these exploits are mainly interested in indirectly harming Microsoft by giving hackers instructions on how to wreak havoc on Microsoft software.
You wouldn't expect Microsoft (or any other company for that matter) to publish details on how to exploit their software before a patch was available. That would be irresponsible. So why is it so wonderful for other people to do it, except that you like seeing Microsoft suffer? Not to mention all of the innocent people who are affected by the problem because someone decided to hand out loaded weapons to every 12 year old hacker on the planet. Thanks, but I'll do without this kind of "community service."
Many modern TVs now show you the name of the channel along with the channel number. I don't know how it works, but it's more helpful than the little logos because 1) it's still there during the commercials, and 2) it goes away after 3 seconds.
That 53 extra minutes a day they're talking about represents, I can only imaging, an office worker whose CPU is sitting at 100% utilization performing exclusively operations that are slowed by Windows XP. I would guess that my CPU's average load over the course of a day is somewhere under 1%. It has been quite a while since I remember spending time waiting for something that was within the control of the OS. There is no processor bottleneck for the majority of people -- and you certainly don't need a 2 GHz machine to run Windows XP.
None of those symbols has any meaning on their own. Thumbs up is good. Star of David is good. Skull and crossbones is a standard indication of toxic chemicals. So, are we agreed that it's okay for Microsoft to have included those three symbols in Wingdings? Good.
Now let's consider more than just these three symbols. How about a happy face, an "OK" sign, a Christian cross, the bomb, and so on.
Take every combination of all of those symbols and the character codes that correspond to them. Is it surprising that at least one of those combinations happens to correspond to a word in the English language, or an acronym, of any number of letters? Why are the letters "NYC" significant here?
If those three symbols corresponded to the letters "JEW" on the keyboard, then it might be suspicious, but I think the conspiracy theorists lose on this one.
Authorizes nationwide service of subpoenas for electronic subscriber information
What does this one mean, and why does it sound like it could apply to more than just terrorism?
Defines terrorist activities
What is that definition, exactly? (I looked here, but that doesn't seem to be it.)