Where did you learn statistics? Bush 'won' the election by only a a few hundred votes out of millions cast in that state. In fact, different sets of requirements for counting ballots actually come up with different results (for example, if you were to count ballots where the person punched a hole for bush/gore/whoever and wrote down the same name in the write-in spot, then gore would have won).
There were over 10,000 votes that were not counted. And yes, different voting districts used different technology. So if districts that used paper ballots or un-hacked electronic ballots were more republican, then more republican votes would be counted correctly.
There would be a lot of collateral damage, and probably throw the bush admin into a hussy fit. A conventional bomb would be fine for blowing up a house. You would need a pretty big one, though.
Wow, the throw-away, automatically generated hotmail account that the spammer check once and forgot about. I bet you sure would feel special knowing that!
The people doing Spam these days aren't stupid, which for some reason a lot of people seem to think. People shouldn't bother to come up with anti-Spam systems if they can figure out an easy way to counter this. The way to counter this is super-easy:
Send one thousand spams, and then one test message. If you don't get the test message, then it's a fake relay. If you do, then you've just successfully sent a thousand spams! I mean, come on. This system would have to at the very least allow one Spam message to get through.
And in any event, most spammers use open proxies now, not open relays. This might have done something if it were implemented in 2000, but now its useless.
I've noticed a massive increase in the amount of Spam I've been getting in the past month or so, I guess in preparation for the "holiday season" or maybe the email apocalypse has finally come?
So what? The spammer could just send a few hundred spams before the actual test message. if the Test Message does go through, so do hundreds, or even thousands, of SPAMs. If it doesn't go through then the spammer gives up on that relay.
This is the most pointless anti-Spam system ever. In fact, its worse then nothing. If everyone was running these things then spammers would have an infinite supply of 'soft' open relays they could use to send hundreds of messages through!
Besides, most Spam is sent through open proxies, not relays now, and hacked machines.
I can't imagine too many business owners liking those odds, but the picture does get darker. If 28 percent of software projects were complete successes in 2000, then 72 percent were at least partial failures. And in software, even partial failure generally means getting absolutely nothing for your money.
What does this mean? If you want a program that does X, Y and Z, and you get one that does X and Y, it could still be useful and worth the money you spend.
I think that when you look at lots of 'business' apps, all it has to do is get it close to right, it doesn't need to work 'perfectly' every time as long as it doesn't corrupt the data, and a lot of the QA work is simply mess with it until it gets stable, rather then having any kind of real proof that it works correctly.
That said, I think a lot of slashdot users, or at least me, noticed a lot of "hackwork" style coding with the Diebold voting system. Especially the use of Microsoft tools and MS access.
Its like they slathered together a bunch of components they already had, did a little debugging, and tried selling the the things.
What's frustrating about it is we all know that it's possible to do this simply, and well, but Diebold chose to do a crappy job and lie about it, rather then doing it right the first time.
Is it not? Thinking back to several semesters of Chemistry, combustion reactions all involve oxygen....so I don't know how explosives would blow up at all without it....
What the hell kind of chemistry were you taking? Mine gave us the exact chemical reaction that caused TNT and other nitrogen based explosives. They are not combustion, but rather a simple change from a higher entropy state to a lower entropy state. They would (and do) work underwater or even in outer space.
Customer service. It really seems like the people who work at the stores are allowed to help you out as best they can, rather then following some canned script or following some protocol. I haven't actually needed much customer service though, but the few times I have (when my phone broke) they've been great. Although the 'signal' insurance took forever to replace my phone.
How does blowing up TNT remove oxygen from the atmosphere? o2 isn't a part of the reaction. Most likely, the dynamite would simply blow everything up, scatter the fuel, and 'knock out' the fire the same way that small flames are put out by people blowing on them.
Normaly phone companies will give you big discounts on the phone to sign up for multi-year contracts, but for most people, those contracts expired long ago (Unless they renewed them to get a new, cheap phone).
In theory, I could get a new phone cheap, but I'd rather keep my old phone and number portability.
What I think is going on is that we've got all these funds for technology/connectivity for schools, thanks to a bunch of wasteful spending by the Democrats, and we don't have the funding for teachers or books because they're not the latest or greatest thing. Oh, and they don't benefit big business either.
The democrats, eh? As opposed to insane tax cuts from the republicans? Republicans have had both the Congres and whitehouse for a couple years, if your theory was correct, schools would have plenty of money. Idiot.
ou had do write you program using pen and paper. Then you had to prove (in D. Knuth's way) to the teacher that it works. Only after that you were allowed to type your code in and try compiling it.
At my highschool the macs were so crippled with "security" software that they were a pain to use. We're talking about OS7/8 here, so it was all single-user, non-protected-memory, etc. Just doing simple things like moving files around was a pain. They were crash prone ("Save your work before printing!"), far more so then win95/98 and most people had PCs at home anyway.
So you think kids should spend months memorizing square root and log tables? That's really useful.
So you can figure 3+sqrt(2) in your head, fantastic. Couldn't you think of a more interesting example? Can you setup a triple integral calculating the mass of a volume with a non-homogeneous density? I can, because I spent my time learning something useful rather then learning to do things that my calculator can do for me. I can do simple arithmetic, algebra, and (a wee bit of) calculus in my head, but for anything complex, I can go to my calculator. And know what everything "means", Using a calculator doesn't mean I don't understand the concept of integration, division, the square root, the natural log, and all that other stuff.
And I respond: Fuck you. Yes, I know, classic argument technique, but school shouldn't be about fucking productivity. If you rely on the spell checker to tell you when you make a fucking mistake, what the fuck do you do on paper when you don't have that tool?
No, no, fuck you. You'd think someone so "well educated" would have better manners, but I guess your parents didn't teach you those.
If I don't have a spellchecker, I leave my spelling unchecked. If I do have access to a dictionary, then I'm almost certain to have access to a computer as well. The only places I need to write in pen are 1) essay tests, and 2) notes. Most collage teachers don't grade on spelling these days anyway.
450 computers == 5 teaching positions. How many computers do you think they need over there? They could spend all their money on teachers, and nothing on desks, chairs, books, computers, etc. But that would end up pretty useless. Obviously there is some amount of each you should have, and you need to make tradeoffs.
Assuming about $500 a computer, and $45,000/teacher/year that works out to only 5 more teaching positions, for just one year. If you assume that you can use the computers for five years before they come useless, we're talking about one teaching position that is being lost in order to buy these computers. For an entire city with millions of people! I agree that computers in schools are kind of useless (and I think teaching kids to use PowerPoint should be made illegal in publicly funded schools...), but this one deal is hardly the end of the world, or even really that big of a deal at all.
When I was in elementary school, we all had apple-IIs and we didn't do much with them other then learn to type. I remember once in middle school, learning to use a database, and a word processor on some more apple IIs, and playing around with some Macs in Industrial Tech class.
In High school we had Macs, and they were mostly used for surfing the web, writing email, and writing papers. I don't think they are a substitute for a teacher, and I think we should rely on them less, but that doesn't mean that we should have no computers in the class room.
She was obviously just here to promote her site, while I'm obviously just here because I'm rediculously addicted. In addition, she wasn't even that hot, and her porn was boring!
It certainly makes a lot more sense then censoring pornography the way we do in this country. Why is it so much worse to see someone get blown then to see them get their head blown off?
This country's priorities are all fucked up.
By the way, playing violent video games does make you more aggressive. The affect only lasts an hour though. No long-term effects have ever been measured.
Are you writing hardware drivers or something? Most applications for windows could be written in Java, or to POSIX or something and still work. Unless your program can't work without the undocumented behavior, then it's probably not worth the risk to use undocumented procedures. Why not just avoid the buggy stuff?
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you learn statistics? Bush 'won' the election by only a a few hundred votes out of millions cast in that state. In fact, different sets of requirements for counting ballots actually come up with different results (for example, if you were to count ballots where the person punched a hole for bush/gore/whoever and wrote down the same name in the write-in spot, then gore would have won).
There were over 10,000 votes that were not counted. And yes, different voting districts used different technology. So if districts that used paper ballots or un-hacked electronic ballots were more republican, then more republican votes would be counted correctly.
There would be a lot of collateral damage, and probably throw the bush admin into a hussy fit. A conventional bomb would be fine for blowing up a house. You would need a pretty big one, though.
Hormel should be happy, as it applies to both UCE and SPAM lunch meat.
But what if there are millions of these spamholes? That would give em spammers a lot of trouble finding the real holes out there.
Then spammers would send millions of "test messages" that are actually Spam.
Wow, the throw-away, automatically generated hotmail account that the spammer check once and forgot about. I bet you sure would feel special knowing that!
The people doing Spam these days aren't stupid, which for some reason a lot of people seem to think. People shouldn't bother to come up with anti-Spam systems if they can figure out an easy way to counter this. The way to counter this is super-easy:
Send one thousand spams, and then one test message. If you don't get the test message, then it's a fake relay. If you do, then you've just successfully sent a thousand spams! I mean, come on. This system would have to at the very least allow one Spam message to get through.
And in any event, most spammers use open proxies now, not open relays. This might have done something if it were implemented in 2000, but now its useless.
I've noticed a massive increase in the amount of Spam I've been getting in the past month or so, I guess in preparation for the "holiday season" or maybe the email apocalypse has finally come?
So what? The spammer could just send a few hundred spams before the actual test message. if the Test Message does go through, so do hundreds, or even thousands, of SPAMs. If it doesn't go through then the spammer gives up on that relay.
This is the most pointless anti-Spam system ever. In fact, its worse then nothing. If everyone was running these things then spammers would have an infinite supply of 'soft' open relays they could use to send hundreds of messages through!
Besides, most Spam is sent through open proxies, not relays now, and hacked machines.
I can't imagine too many business owners liking those odds, but the picture does get darker. If 28 percent of software projects were complete successes in 2000, then 72 percent were at least partial failures. And in software, even partial failure generally means getting absolutely nothing for your money.
What does this mean? If you want a program that does X, Y and Z, and you get one that does X and Y, it could still be useful and worth the money you spend.
I think that when you look at lots of 'business' apps, all it has to do is get it close to right, it doesn't need to work 'perfectly' every time as long as it doesn't corrupt the data, and a lot of the QA work is simply mess with it until it gets stable, rather then having any kind of real proof that it works correctly.
That said, I think a lot of slashdot users, or at least me, noticed a lot of "hackwork" style coding with the Diebold voting system. Especially the use of Microsoft tools and MS access.
Its like they slathered together a bunch of components they already had, did a little debugging, and tried selling the the things.
What's frustrating about it is we all know that it's possible to do this simply, and well, but Diebold chose to do a crappy job and lie about it, rather then doing it right the first time.
Is it not? Thinking back to several semesters of Chemistry, combustion reactions all involve oxygen....so I don't know how explosives would blow up at all without it....
What the hell kind of chemistry were you taking? Mine gave us the exact chemical reaction that caused TNT and other nitrogen based explosives. They are not combustion, but rather a simple change from a higher entropy state to a lower entropy state. They would (and do) work underwater or even in outer space.
Customer service. It really seems like the people who work at the stores are allowed to help you out as best they can, rather then following some canned script or following some protocol. I haven't actually needed much customer service though, but the few times I have (when my phone broke) they've been great. Although the 'signal' insurance took forever to replace my phone.
How does blowing up TNT remove oxygen from the atmosphere? o2 isn't a part of the reaction. Most likely, the dynamite would simply blow everything up, scatter the fuel, and 'knock out' the fire the same way that small flames are put out by people blowing on them.
Not like you can't just go to another carier
Normaly phone companies will give you big discounts on the phone to sign up for multi-year contracts, but for most people, those contracts expired long ago (Unless they renewed them to get a new, cheap phone).
In theory, I could get a new phone cheap, but I'd rather keep my old phone and number portability.
What I think is going on is that we've got all these funds for technology/connectivity for schools, thanks to a bunch of wasteful spending by the Democrats, and we don't have the funding for teachers or books because they're not the latest or greatest thing. Oh, and they don't benefit big business either.
The democrats, eh? As opposed to insane tax cuts from the republicans? Republicans have had both the Congres and whitehouse for a couple years, if your theory was correct, schools would have plenty of money. Idiot.
ou had do write you program using pen and paper. Then you had to prove (in D. Knuth's way) to the teacher that it works. Only after that you were allowed to type your code in and try compiling it.
Now that, is retarded.
At my highschool the macs were so crippled with "security" software that they were a pain to use. We're talking about OS7/8 here, so it was all single-user, non-protected-memory, etc. Just doing simple things like moving files around was a pain. They were crash prone ("Save your work before printing!"), far more so then win95/98 and most people had PCs at home anyway.
So you think kids should spend months memorizing square root and log tables? That's really useful.
So you can figure 3+sqrt(2) in your head, fantastic. Couldn't you think of a more interesting example? Can you setup a triple integral calculating the mass of a volume with a non-homogeneous density? I can, because I spent my time learning something useful rather then learning to do things that my calculator can do for me. I can do simple arithmetic, algebra, and (a wee bit of) calculus in my head, but for anything complex, I can go to my calculator. And know what everything "means", Using a calculator doesn't mean I don't understand the concept of integration, division, the square root, the natural log, and all that other stuff.
And I respond: Fuck you. Yes, I know, classic argument technique, but school shouldn't be about fucking productivity. If you rely on the spell checker to tell you when you make a fucking mistake, what the fuck do you do on paper when you don't have that tool?
No, no, fuck you. You'd think someone so "well educated" would have better manners, but I guess your parents didn't teach you those.
If I don't have a spellchecker, I leave my spelling unchecked. If I do have access to a dictionary, then I'm almost certain to have access to a computer as well. The only places I need to write in pen are 1) essay tests, and 2) notes. Most collage teachers don't grade on spelling these days anyway.
450 computers == 5 teaching positions. How many computers do you think they need over there? They could spend all their money on teachers, and nothing on desks, chairs, books, computers, etc. But that would end up pretty useless. Obviously there is some amount of each you should have, and you need to make tradeoffs.
Assuming about $500 a computer, and $45,000/teacher/year that works out to only 5 more teaching positions, for just one year. If you assume that you can use the computers for five years before they come useless, we're talking about one teaching position that is being lost in order to buy these computers. For an entire city with millions of people! I agree that computers in schools are kind of useless (and I think teaching kids to use PowerPoint should be made illegal in publicly funded schools...), but this one deal is hardly the end of the world, or even really that big of a deal at all.
When I was in elementary school, we all had apple-IIs and we didn't do much with them other then learn to type. I remember once in middle school, learning to use a database, and a word processor on some more apple IIs, and playing around with some Macs in Industrial Tech class.
In High school we had Macs, and they were mostly used for surfing the web, writing email, and writing papers. I don't think they are a substitute for a teacher, and I think we should rely on them less, but that doesn't mean that we should have no computers in the class room.
She was obviously just here to promote her site, while I'm obviously just here because I'm rediculously addicted. In addition, she wasn't even that hot, and her porn was boring!
It certainly makes a lot more sense then censoring pornography the way we do in this country. Why is it so much worse to see someone get blown then to see them get their head blown off?
This country's priorities are all fucked up.
By the way, playing violent video games does make you more aggressive. The affect only lasts an hour though. No long-term effects have ever been measured.
Presumably, a manufacture would be able to give the user the option to turn the TCPA core on or off. in fact, I believe that's part of the TCPA spec.
Then do hash(salt1 + hash(salt2 + password)) if you really want to.
Are you writing hardware drivers or something? Most applications for windows could be written in Java, or to POSIX or something and still work. Unless your program can't work without the undocumented behavior, then it's probably not worth the risk to use undocumented procedures. Why not just avoid the buggy stuff?