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User: 1u3hr

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Comments · 8,173

  1. Re:Not going to work on Science Editors Urge Nondisclosure Of Bioterror Info · · Score: 1
    Figuring out, say, how to identify cellular characteristics common among a specific ethnic group and use that to build a target : Priceless.
    This is not even possible. Such characteristics simply do not exist

    The former (Afrikaner) govt of South Africa was working on this, but AFAIK, never got anything workable. But there are some diseases that affect some races much more than others (eg sickle cell anaemia for negroes), but nothing with the precision that would make a useful weapon.

    Remember, though that when Europeans arrived in the Americas that their conquest was made much easier by epidemics of colds, influenza and other diseases lethal to poulations with no resistance. It's much easier to create a disease AND the cure which you give to your own population befoer releasing it.

  2. Re:Maximum size of spam on Spam Catchers Block Latest Crypto-Gram · · Score: 1
    It speeds up my spam filter processing and lets large newsletters (with false triggers like this) through without a problem.

    Yes, it works now. But if your criterion were widely used, spammers would just bulk up their spam. (Now they often add some gibberish to the end, or even within HTML tags, so that it's not normally visible, and breaks up trigger words.)

  3. Re:The problem with content filtering on Spam Catchers Block Latest Crypto-Gram · · Score: 3, Insightful
    In this case, spam doesn't generally run for 21 pages with words like "cryptography," and "full disclosure."

    The problem with that is that if you score mail by the percentage of spam, rather than the absolute amount, the obvious response by spammers is to ADD 21 pages cribbed from a crypto newsletter to the end of their penis-enlarging spam. Maybe even fake the headers to make it look like it came from a respected source.

  4. Re:This is a non-issue.... on Spam Catchers Block Latest Crypto-Gram · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Either you choose to run a spam filtering software and live with thoose limitations or don't ...

    Except if it's done upstream from you, perhaps even without your knowledge (eg a few months ago it was found that Mac.com was aggressively filtering, with a lot of false positives).

  5. Re:hmm on FTP: Better Than HTTP, Or Obsolete? · · Score: 1
    Yes, I thought about wget while I wrote my answer - but left it out, simply because _for John Doe_ wget is too complicated.

    Many (Windows) download assistants, such as Reget can continue interrupted HTTP downloads. Reget tests each connection and displays a happy or frowning face beside each progress line to indicate if the server supports this; almost all seem to.

  6. Re:Forget them both.... on FTP: Better Than HTTP, Or Obsolete? · · Score: 1
    because of those ident lookups that most ftpd's still run by default.

    Why the hell bother to do lookups when you're serving freely available files ... especially annoying for me, in Hong Kong, and all these bigots banning anyone in APNIC from access.

  7. Re:One Time Pad on Israeli Firm Claims Unbreakable Encryption · · Score: 2, Informative
    One time pads are not uncrackable by definition. They have two weak points.
    1) The generation of the pads.

    The article says "Meganet offers a patented non-linear data mapping technology, called VME (Virtual Matrix Encryption), that creates exceptionally random cipher text". So this is how the "onetime pad" is generated, and this has always turned out to have a weakness. "Real" onetime pads are generated by random natural processes, such as cosmic rays, not from a mathematical seed.

  8. Re:One Time Pad on Israeli Firm Claims Unbreakable Encryption · · Score: 1
    One time pads are not uncrackable by definition. They have two weak points.
    1) The generation of the pads.

    The article says "Meganet offers a patented non-linear data mapping technology, called VME (Virtual Matrix Encryption), that creates exceptionally random cipher text". So this is how the "onetime-pad" is generated, and this has always turned out to have a weakness.

  9. Re:Billions of factors... on Mining Asteroids@Home · · Score: 1
    As a matter of fact, if you won't back in time 1 billion years and swished your hands around, and then came back, nothing would be the same. You guys know the Simpson's episode ;-)

    That episode was an homage (or ripoff) of Ray Brabdury's A Sound of Thunder (soon to be a movie.

  10. Re:Illegal? on NYTimes: Tangled Up in Spam · · Score: 1
    The USA isn't going to abandon the rules of evidence in legal procedings,

    Fine, so the prosecution would have to prove it. They couild fairly easily do that, putting Carnivore to some use. Or bring a much worse penalty on the forger.

  11. Re:Illegal? on NYTimes: Tangled Up in Spam · · Score: 1
    Because the vast majority of spam is sent by Americans, advertising products sold by other Americans and hoping to sell them to still more Americans.

    Several times a week I get a spam for credit cards, directing you to a site that says "only valid within the US". Yet these stupid assholes are sending this to my account, in Hong Kong, in the .hk TLD.

  12. Project Phase: Development Hell. on Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama going Hollywood? · · Score: 1
    I don't know, but isn't this whole news like very old news?

    Yes, see the Coming Attractions Rama page, which has rumours back to 1997, and lists it currently with "Project Phase: Development Hell."

  13. Re:NO NO NO on NYTimes: Tangled Up in Spam · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Another "no no" to me is the suggestion that all headers and thus senders be verifiable and real. This would mean the end of anonymity, which in some situations, such as ratting out a former business partner, or any number of reasons in countries like China or the US with intolerant governments. Bulk spammers already use real accounts sometimes, and just burn them, this wouldn't slow them down much.

    However, a method to force identification of BULK email (more than, say, 100 similar messages) might have fewer undesirable side-effects.

  14. Re:You don't have to. on NYTimes: Tangled Up in Spam · · Score: 1
    I used a Sneakemail.com address to register with the NYT a year ago. Not one single message came through since the confirmation. The cookies I don't mind, I see nothing sinister in keeping a record of which stories I read, especially as there is no way for them to link it with any identifying information. If it makes their marketing people happy, lets them charge more for ads (which I don't see anyway, having blocked most ad domains), that's fine.

    Better than our local paper which went to a subscription mode. Annoyingly, being in a rural area, I can't get daily delivery either, which would include the web subscription free.

  15. Re:How will RIAA react? on Instant Concert CDs? · · Score: 1

    These are not copies of existing tracks, but new performances. So the copyright belongs to the band, who will have a deal with CC and thus be paid. However, other parties will need to be compensated, eg if a track is a cover, the owner of that song must be paid too -- but that's basically the band's problem. Also, they'd have to sort things out if they have some exclusivity deal with their label.

  16. Re:Chinese et al are thieves on Corporate Espionage Leads To Faulty Motherboards · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Steal our ideas, steal our technologies, and build up products to sell at home.

    Yes, that's exactly what the US did. Look a little into what US companies did in the 19th C, when its companies stole industrial processes, published books, from European countries without permission or compensation.

    Only when it had caught up and started to produce IP that it wanted to sell did it start to make and enforce such laws, and now of course uses massive pressure to force other, poor, countries into line.

    Lets face it, there is a whole different set of morals over there - a whole different idea of what is right to do, and what is wrong to do.

    As for "morality", the US is such an example of self interest in its relations with the rest of the world, that only your countrymen could keep a straight face when you mention it.

  17. Re:No matter how many times I refresh.... on Corporate Espionage Leads To Faulty Motherboards · · Score: 2, Informative
    Hey, if you read the story you will find that there is a new twist to it - as in why the caps failed.

    No, since the last time (Thursday) it referred to the same IEEE article. You're probably thinking of the time before that, in November.

  18. Re:Why is there so much Engrish about? on Engrish LOTR: The Two Towers Captions · · Score: 1
    So why do the Japanese (especially) inflict incomprehensible product manuals on the world? When they could get them checked for maybe $1 per page for an entire product line?

    Because to do that would be to admit that their English was crap, and thus lose face. In Hong Kong I was not allowed to correct appalling English in advertisements because to tell them that this needed to be done would have embarrassed an important client.

  19. Re:Weird.. but possble on Engrish LOTR: The Two Towers Captions · · Score: 1
    So if the translator just did a direct english-asian language-english translation... it will be ugly indeed. No, it's ugly because someone with imperfect language skills who has never heard of Tolkien is trying to transcribe text, probably doing the whole thing in not much more than real time.

    You can see that most of the mistakes are words phonetically similar, not scrambled meanings as would be of words translated and retranslated. I remember I once worked on a Vietnamese legal mnaual that talked about "shoes and erasers"; eventaully I worked out they meant "rubber boots"; this obviously had been an English text, translated, modified, then translated back, probably by someone else. Then I had to translate this into intelligible English -- Fortunately I was able to work out what the original English source was and use that to work out the more cryptic text.

  20. Re:smells fishy on Engrish LOTR: The Two Towers Captions · · Score: 1
    I> There are several obvious reasons for this, especially on an Asian DVD

    Another: when my wife and her friends are playing mahjong, smashing the pieces down on the table, while I'm entertaining myself watching a DVD, I usually turn on the English caption so I can follow the dialogue, especially as they usually have the sound tuned to maximum bass and treble for good explosions, but unintelligible speech.

  21. Re:I call BS!!! on Engrish LOTR: The Two Towers Captions · · Score: 1
    If it's an asian video why aren't the subtitles in Japanese or Chinese?

    I've seen several Chinese DVDs. One kind are just dupes of the original DVD, so they have all the original features and subtitles. For bootlegs, such as "The TT", the bootleggers have to make their own subtitles. Like the originals, they usually have several choices, such as Chinese, Malaysian, Korean, Japanese. You might also get an alternate dubbed soundtrack in Chinese. Of course the text of the cover is just random cut and paste, sometimes from the website, sometimes of a completely different movie.

    I bought a batch of Disney cartoons on VCD published, presumably legally, in Taiwan. They have really bad English susbtitles. That was more annoying as you can't turn them off as you can on a DVD.

  22. Re:I would think Hollywood would profit from this. on Hollywood Says No to Filtering DVD Player · · Score: 1
    It is the republishing right that, I would argue, services like this infringe.

    I'd think not. They're not republishing the original disk at all, only their edit program (list of bits to mute or skip). The only infringement I can see is if the edit program is considered a derivative work in a legal sense. Against that might be fair use rights, and possibly the rights of software companies to reverse engineer to create interoperable systems. But here I'm out of my legal depth.

    The closest analogy I can think of are published game cheats/walk throughs. I don't thik these have been challenged legally (successfully).

  23. Re:I disagree completely on Slashback: Spamnation, Long-Distance, Libel · · Score: 1
    Without copyright, the argument goes, people simply wouldn't bother creating the materials. And it's true!

    No, it's not.

    Look for instance at a recent medium, "the Internet". If one investigates this, one finds over one billion pages of free content. True, most of this is legally copyright, as this is created simply by the act of publishing, but since one can simply point anyone to the relevant URL to see it, anyone can access it freely. This includes text, images, music and video, not to mention operating systems.

    Also, speaking as one who worked for a book publisher, authors are so desperate to be published that most would sign away their first-born. My boss screwed (in the biblical sense) several authors, and I doubt this was solely becasue of his charisma. Similarly, any bar that will give a stage for a musician will find no shortage of takers.

    Many people are driven to create or preform, and the doing of it is its own reward. That's why the publishing and shpowbiz industries can get away with being so explotative of almost all their "talent".

  24. Re:I would think Hollywood would profit from this. on Hollywood Says No to Filtering DVD Player · · Score: 1
    The copyright holder of a DVD most certainly have the right to tell you what you can do with that DVD. You may not like it but they do.

    The ONLY rights they have are with regard to public performance, broadcasting, or republishing, NOT to how I use it, whether to play it backwards projected on the ceiling of my toilet, or to use the disk as a drink coaster.

  25. Re:maybe we will learn how to live without them on Hollywood Says No to Filtering DVD Player · · Score: 1
    I'd like to think that the director has the freedom to say "this is the way I want my movie shown" and that the public has the freedom to say "fine, I won't watch that movie because it offends me".

    How about the TV, or even worse, the "airline edit". Movies shown on airlines are really chewed up, expurgated and shown on shitty little screens. And on DVDs you may have the choice of a dub in several languages. Do you think directors even look at all these, let alone approve them? Maybe some of the more anal ones, but most probably just make sure they get their percentage.

    While I do feel that the director (if he's considered the "creator" of a movie, though hundreds of people may have had some creative input) should have some control over how it's released, denying people the option to skip over bits they don't want to see/hear is going too far.