hat article was written in February 2003. The CAN-SPAM act was signed into law in December 2003 and took effect on January 1, 2004.
Due to this act, the percent that originates in the US is going to be very small this year and in the future.
Your faith is touching. Was it Nixon who started the first "war on drugs"? How's that going?
The question I have is, how do you know the products are from America? How do you know the spammers are in the US?
When my spam mailbox is full of things offering me credit cards, mortgages and such that are only available or sellable in the US. Same for most of the viagra and diet pills, if I follow the links I usually end up at an American company. A small percentage aren't, of course, mainly Nigerian scams and some local stuff, but 95% is.
This isn't just my opinion. See this in The Guardian: "There are really only 150 spammers doing 90% of all the spam we get in the US and Europe... at least 40 of them are in Boca Raton."
Then bitch at the Chinese ISPs who allowed the problem to exist in the first place.
MY ISP is in Hong Kong, and doesn't. The post I was replying to suggested banning ALL ISPs in China, no regard for their individual policies. And while you're throwing blame, it's your American spammers like Ralski who are reponsible. Why don't you bitch at your congressman to stop Americans from sending this crap all over the world.
As someone who lives in China I get more than a little tired of being filtered out because of the continent I live in. (Especially since the vast majority of spam I get is selling products from America, regardless of what server they're sending them through.) And in this particular case, being a university it's very likely that they have a sizeable number of students from China, and many staff with academic links.
let's stop this charade that they aren't trying to push politics here
I doubt that, more that Sunday is always a slow news day and this is guaranteed to get lots of hits (=ad impressions). Better than the dupes they usually serve up on weekends. But in the longer term it destroys a lot of the community feeling by setting people at each others' throats.
"The idea is to "protect children" isn't it, not be a thought police?"
Agreed. Possession or redistribution of these images is already illegal under US Federal, and virtually every other state in the US.
That sounds very like a thoughtcrime to me.
Yet again I'm inclined to disagree, recent success rates by a severely taxed law enforcement seems to counter your point.
There have been a few dozen or people charged, don't know what the results were. But the fact that this stuff is easily obtained with a few minutes searching (or going through your daily spam) shows that it is just as hopeless as alcohol or drug prohibition.
Anyway, my point was not really about what happens to the images, but how they were made. That is already a crime, a real old fashioned one, and that's where the effort should be, not in chasing bits around the net. As for the net, it is at its core peer-to-peer, not a broadcasting medium, and it is inappropriate and, I believe, futile, to attempt to censor it as if it were.
Even then you are suggesting that somehow child pornography is a freedom of speech
No, what I said was that it was a non-trivial thing to write a program to detect, seeing as how judges can disagree on the definition.
However, the problem of child pornography and it's distribution is at its heart a technical one.
No, it's no more technical than any other crime. If someone is abusing a child and takes images of it, it's the abuse that should be attacked, the sad people downloading resulting images to whack off to is possibly repulsive but the harm has already been done at that point. The idea is to "protect children" isn't it, not be a thought police?
How do you prevent certain types of files from being traded,
Well, basically you can't. (Think encrption, for a start.) It's even more hopeless than alcohol prohibition was, and just as corrupting to society in its side-effects if you try.
How do we prevent child pornography, how do we report it? I would suggest that plugins be provided to automatically scan for these items and forward significant results to the FBI
A "plugin" to detect child porn? The Supreme Court has a hard time defining obscenity, and you think a plugin can do it reliably (or at all)?
Anyway, P2P networks can be scanned by anyone, the Feds included, and they surely are already without the help of your plugin.
In many episodes when the Enterprise is getting too close to a planet's atmosphere there is a danger of crashing and burning in the atmosphere. The only reason it's "Flying" is because there is no gravity in space
I'm afraid there is gravity in space. That's why the moon orbits the earth, for instance. As for the Enterprise, it's design was supposedly for vacuum only (thus the shuttlecraft and transporters), in atmosphere it'd be amazingly unaerodynamic, (and has no landing gear at all), though as other posters have noted, with enough power anything can fly.
Don't moderate up ANY mirrors. The original site is holding up quite well, Tanenbaum comments that it took the first slashdotting without any problems "over 150,000 requests to our server in less than a day, which is still standing despite yesterday being a national holiday..."
if she just carried along a helmet, how did the motorcycle get into some of the pictures
That picture, in Chapter 4, is the last one that shows the bike, and is below a heading "entering Chernobyl area". It looks like that's just outside the restricted area.
Then there are 26 characters in the english language. That would only allow 26! domains
There are at least 200 characters in the English language. Upper, lower case, punctuation, accented letters, figures. But for domain names case isn't distinguished, accents aren't allowed (yet) and the only punctuation allowed is the hyphen. So that's {a-z, -, 0-9} = 37. Unicode is soon to make this several thousand, but we'll ignore that for now. Also I have no idea why you use factorial (implying each character can only be used once) it should be simply a power, and thus to a length of 26.
Even routinely changing passwords monthly or so and only notifying paying members.
Any asshole could change the password and not tell anyone, and/or delete any or all files. And you know there are lots of jerks who love to do stuff like that. So you could only use this amongst a small trusted group.
you would need a really fast/expensive box to get good speeds with this kind of emulation, so at that point, you're better off buying a real mac.
I picked up a G3 Mac for nothing (had to buy some RAM and hard disks though). With a KVM I can switch to Mac OS instantly. If I needed to, could put both machines on a LAN to exchange files (haven't needed to do that much so far). Funnily enough I have vMac on the Mac to emulate older Mac OSs (7 and earlier).
A: The amount of time it will take Apple Computer to sue the living hell out of this project.;)
Unlike earlier Mac emulators which ran into legal problems because the ROM code is copyright, "New World" Macs running OS 9 and X just need hardware emulation.
In fact, Linux distributions do have a price: the price of the hardware you'd have to buy to replace the scanners, printers, modems, video cards, etc. whose manufacturers publish Windows binary drivers but refuse to publish specifications to let members of the free software community make their own drivers.
On the other hand, I'm happy with a nice 17" CRT monitor for 1/10th the new price, an HP4M laser for $50 (new $1800), and other hardware that's a few months or a year old, all with no Linux issues, all dirt cheap because it's not bleeding edge.
Hear, hear Meaning: A shout of support or agreement. Origin:Originated in the British parliament in the 18th century as a contraction of 'hear him, hear him'. It is still often heard there although sometimes used ironically these days.
Since it's just PlayFair, does this mean we can count this as a duplicate against the editors?
It's a "howto". It explains that you 1) install the app 2) drag and drop protected iTunes files into it. It's newsworthy, in spite of this being the third or fourth time this app has been mentioned, because now it's got a new name (hymn). If you recall the earth-shaking story a few weeks ago that Darth Vader was going to have a new costume in the next SW pre/se/quel, though we didn't actually have an image or description, you know how low the bar is.
Last week a friend of mine needed his Word document converted to post script, the catch was it had to be exactly the same layout for publication. Easy right?... not really... so Adobe post script driver on windows mangled the document, but Acrobat did a nice job, so why not use pdf2ps or pdftops on solaris to convert? Well pdf2ps screwed up the formatting so the document was almost unrecognizable, and pdftops did a great job save for the fact that it mangled the greek letters in the equations...back on the windows side we installed HP's post script drivers and they worked wonderfully on the text and greek characters, but screwed up the parenthesis for the equations.
Firstly I think for most uses that you could just submit a PDF file. Most prepress now uses PDFs pretty early in the workflow; they most likely are just going to redistill your PS back to PDF. Secondly, when making EPS files I found the cleanest code was first to make a PDF, then use Acrobat to save as PS. Your problems sound basically like font encoding ones, I had things like that (scrambled punctuation when using an unconventional font encoding) with early versions of Adobe Distiller, but since version 4 it's been fine. Of course the root problem is trying to use Word as a layout app. As you've seen, it's just a nightmare doing anything with it other than printing on your local printer.
Sorry, but Zone Alarm, Black Ice, etc. are all PIECES OF SHIT... The sole purpose of those software packages is to annoy you every time it blocks a connection and try and convince you to pay money for the enhanced version of the nagware.
I've had ZA running on Win98 for a couple of years. I start it with the command line:
Turn off other things like "always on top" and it's completely unobtrusive. Only pops up when I start a new Internet app for the first time and it asks me if I want to give it permission. Every few weeks I delete the log files which accumulate, I could disable that too but I leave them on the off chance I might want to look at them.
It basically removes the urgency for getting all the Windows updates by blocking all the worm probes. Probably helps I use Opera rather than IE.
God I hate seeing ignorant fucks blaming the software vendor for their own ignorance
Maybe you could spend five minutes looking up how to use Zone Alarm before flaming it.
John Ashcroft should lay off the Internet bong sellers and the purveyors of porn. If he wants to hit the terrorists in the wallet, he'll close down all the money laundering possibilities that exist. Spam operations are a huge gaping hole that everyone seems to be ignoring.
Why would anyone trust a spammer to "launder" their money? The basic idea of laundering is to use a respectable or at least legal business (real estate, restaurants, etc, etc) where the extra cashflow will go unnoticed. Spammers don't fit this profile in any way.
Terrorists get their money from wealthy (usually from oil) individuals and businesses who can just give them wads of cash or use any number of institutions that will happily transfer their money, that never report to any government. And terrorists don't need much money anyway; the whole 9/11 project came in at under $1 million, too small an amount to be tracked.
A lot of the time, many people forget that there are ways of communicating OTHER than the internet, but I think that if push came to shove, internet users could deal without.
Most companies still have a few fax machines, not to mention many printer/scanners that can be made to act like one. So we'd just go back to fax, phone, snail mail. Actually, unless you're Amazon or a similar web-centric company, most would find they were more productive for not pissing away time reading Slashdot, porn, sending chain mail and jokes, deleting spam.
the idea of democracy for the most part (arguably) first flourished in the US, and now it's among the least democratic countries that claim a democracy...
If by "arguably", you mean that everyone with any knowledge of history would argue with it; yes.
Ancient Greece, the Icelandic Althing (930AD), Magna Carta (1215), etc... If you want to argue about degrees of democracy, when did all adults, of any race and gender get the vote in the US?
Aside from that, no argument with the rest of your post.
The article says that the system can have 16 candidates, and machines can be chained for a max of 64.
That wouldn't exactly work over here.
135 or more candidates in one race for office....
Obviously they chose 16 as it was enough for their purpose.
It would be trivial to upgrade from 16 to 256 or 1024 or how many were needed. Maybe they'd need one more LED display digit.
Slashdot Mirror
Your faith is touching. Was it Nixon who started the first "war on drugs"? How's that going?
When my spam mailbox is full of things offering me credit cards, mortgages and such that are only available or sellable in the US. Same for most of the viagra and diet pills, if I follow the links I usually end up at an American company. A small percentage aren't, of course, mainly Nigerian scams and some local stuff, but 95% is.
This isn't just my opinion. See this in The Guardian: "There are really only 150 spammers doing 90% of all the spam we get in the US and Europe... at least 40 of them are in Boca Raton."
MY ISP is in Hong Kong, and doesn't. The post I was replying to suggested banning ALL ISPs in China, no regard for their individual policies. And while you're throwing blame, it's your American spammers like Ralski who are reponsible. Why don't you bitch at your congressman to stop Americans from sending this crap all over the world.
As someone who lives in China I get more than a little tired of being filtered out because of the continent I live in. (Especially since the vast majority of spam I get is selling products from America, regardless of what server they're sending them through.) And in this particular case, being a university it's very likely that they have a sizeable number of students from China, and many staff with academic links.
I doubt that, more that Sunday is always a slow news day and this is guaranteed to get lots of hits (=ad impressions). Better than the dupes they usually serve up on weekends. But in the longer term it destroys a lot of the community feeling by setting people at each others' throats.
Agreed. Possession or redistribution of these images is already illegal under US Federal, and virtually every other state in the US.
That sounds very like a thoughtcrime to me.
Yet again I'm inclined to disagree, recent success rates by a severely taxed law enforcement seems to counter your point.
There have been a few dozen or people charged, don't know what the results were. But the fact that this stuff is easily obtained with a few minutes searching (or going through your daily spam) shows that it is just as hopeless as alcohol or drug prohibition.
Anyway, my point was not really about what happens to the images, but how they were made. That is already a crime, a real old fashioned one, and that's where the effort should be, not in chasing bits around the net. As for the net, it is at its core peer-to-peer, not a broadcasting medium, and it is inappropriate and, I believe, futile, to attempt to censor it as if it were.
No, what I said was that it was a non-trivial thing to write a program to detect, seeing as how judges can disagree on the definition.
However, the problem of child pornography and it's distribution is at its heart a technical one.
No, it's no more technical than any other crime. If someone is abusing a child and takes images of it, it's the abuse that should be attacked, the sad people downloading resulting images to whack off to is possibly repulsive but the harm has already been done at that point. The idea is to "protect children" isn't it, not be a thought police?
How do you prevent certain types of files from being traded,
Well, basically you can't. (Think encrption, for a start.) It's even more hopeless than alcohol prohibition was, and just as corrupting to society in its side-effects if you try.
A "plugin" to detect child porn? The Supreme Court has a hard time defining obscenity, and you think a plugin can do it reliably (or at all)?
Anyway, P2P networks can be scanned by anyone, the Feds included, and they surely are already without the help of your plugin.
I'm afraid there is gravity in space. That's why the moon orbits the earth, for instance. As for the Enterprise, it's design was supposedly for vacuum only (thus the shuttlecraft and transporters), in atmosphere it'd be amazingly unaerodynamic, (and has no landing gear at all), though as other posters have noted, with enough power anything can fly.
Don't moderate up ANY mirrors. The original site is holding up quite well, Tanenbaum comments that it took the first slashdotting without any problems "over 150,000 requests to our server in less than a day, which is still standing despite yesterday being a national holiday..."
Which photos? I just ran through the lot at kiddofspeed.com and didn't see any of the bike in the actual town.
That picture, in Chapter 4, is the last one that shows the bike, and is below a heading "entering Chernobyl area". It looks like that's just outside the restricted area.
There are at least 200 characters in the English language. Upper, lower case, punctuation, accented letters, figures. But for domain names case isn't distinguished, accents aren't allowed (yet) and the only punctuation allowed is the hyphen. So that's {a-z, -, 0-9} = 37. Unicode is soon to make this several thousand, but we'll ignore that for now. Also I have no idea why you use factorial (implying each character can only be used once) it should be simply a power, and thus to a length of 26.
Any asshole could change the password and not tell anyone, and/or delete any or all files. And you know there are lots of jerks who love to do stuff like that. So you could only use this amongst a small trusted group.
I picked up a G3 Mac for nothing (had to buy some RAM and hard disks though). With a KVM I can switch to Mac OS instantly. If I needed to, could put both machines on a LAN to exchange files (haven't needed to do that much so far). Funnily enough I have vMac on the Mac to emulate older Mac OSs (7 and earlier).
Unlike earlier Mac emulators which ran into legal problems because the ROM code is copyright, "New World" Macs running OS 9 and X just need hardware emulation.
On the other hand, I'm happy with a nice 17" CRT monitor for 1/10th the new price, an HP4M laser for $50 (new $1800), and other hardware that's a few months or a year old, all with no Linux issues, all dirt cheap because it's not bleeding edge.
Not quite (or maybe you'd say "not quiet").
It's a "howto". It explains that you 1) install the app 2) drag and drop protected iTunes files into it. It's newsworthy, in spite of this being the third or fourth time this app has been mentioned, because now it's got a new name (hymn). If you recall the earth-shaking story a few weeks ago that Darth Vader was going to have a new costume in the next SW pre/se/quel, though we didn't actually have an image or description, you know how low the bar is.
Firstly I think for most uses that you could just submit a PDF file. Most prepress now uses PDFs pretty early in the workflow; they most likely are just going to redistill your PS back to PDF. Secondly, when making EPS files I found the cleanest code was first to make a PDF, then use Acrobat to save as PS. Your problems sound basically like font encoding ones, I had things like that (scrambled punctuation when using an unconventional font encoding) with early versions of Adobe Distiller, but since version 4 it's been fine. Of course the root problem is trying to use Word as a layout app. As you've seen, it's just a nightmare doing anything with it other than printing on your local printer.
I've had ZA running on Win98 for a couple of years. I start it with the command line:
Turn off other things like "always on top" and it's completely unobtrusive. Only pops up when I start a new Internet app for the first time and it asks me if I want to give it permission. Every few weeks I delete the log files which accumulate, I could disable that too but I leave them on the off chance I might want to look at them.It basically removes the urgency for getting all the Windows updates by blocking all the worm probes. Probably helps I use Opera rather than IE.
God I hate seeing ignorant fucks blaming the software vendor for their own ignorance
Maybe you could spend five minutes looking up how to use Zone Alarm before flaming it.
Why would anyone trust a spammer to "launder" their money? The basic idea of laundering is to use a respectable or at least legal business (real estate, restaurants, etc, etc) where the extra cashflow will go unnoticed. Spammers don't fit this profile in any way.
Terrorists get their money from wealthy (usually from oil) individuals and businesses who can just give them wads of cash or use any number of institutions that will happily transfer their money, that never report to any government. And terrorists don't need much money anyway; the whole 9/11 project came in at under $1 million, too small an amount to be tracked.
Most companies still have a few fax machines, not to mention many printer/scanners that can be made to act like one. So we'd just go back to fax, phone, snail mail. Actually, unless you're Amazon or a similar web-centric company, most would find they were more productive for not pissing away time reading Slashdot, porn, sending chain mail and jokes, deleting spam.
If by "arguably", you mean that everyone with any knowledge of history would argue with it; yes.
Ancient Greece, the Icelandic Althing (930AD), Magna Carta (1215), etc... If you want to argue about degrees of democracy, when did all adults, of any race and gender get the vote in the US?
Aside from that, no argument with the rest of your post.
Obviously they chose 16 as it was enough for their purpose. It would be trivial to upgrade from 16 to 256 or 1024 or how many were needed. Maybe they'd need one more LED display digit.