On the community side, black-lists need to be scrapped in favor of informative lists of known, proven spam havens and spammers. What host's are the real problem?
But spammers keep getting new hosts. Viruses on unsecured machines to send mail, and people just buying new servers or server names. Last fall I got a goodly amount of spam over a period of a couple months and always referring to new web sites - mostly in places like Uzbekistan and invariably registered through joker.com with a new
name and address associated with it in the whois info. (Not that I'm saying it was joker.com's problem, it just seemed strange that there were so many, all with essentially the same characteristics and all through the same company.)
Maybe we could get someone to upload a whole boatload of copyrighted music (and movies - the aliens are sure gunna love "The Cat in the Hat") to the universe.
Then when they start downloading, the RIAA will find them all and sue them.
(Parenthetically, I do keep wondering how astronomical distances and times and relativistic effects would affect copyright expiration times. )
First, lets add matching close parens to make error detection easier. (It might be handy to have a way (such as the "/") to indicate an end tag, but we're going for brevity here.)
(html... html)
Now let's add attributes. It is probably most convenient to put these in a list right after the element name. Obviously if there are no attributes we need to put in an empty list so the parsing won't be ambiguous :
(html '() (head '() (style '( type."text/css"...) style) head) html)
(Of course, one could use some special syntax to indicate attribute lists, or even map them into attributes. And then the attribute lists would not be required to follow the element name and the parser could tell the difference easily enough.
(html (attribute-list... attribute-list) html)
Or perhaps :
(html #(... attributes in here )# html)
Now we have the question of attribute lists that might not follow the element name - is that legal?
Better not let it be, I can see several problems with that that would change the semantics - not unusefully, but incompatibly with XML.
OK. That looks like it will work and be (more or less) isomorphic to XML. How much space does it really save? One ">" for each start element and two characters for each end element - but there are the added characters for the empty attribute lists.
I doubt anyone would be terribly bothered if someone built a syntax that was isomorphic to that of XML (meaning that a syntax transformer and its inverse run on a document of either sort would produce the same document).
Go for it - I'm sure there are a lot of people who would like to be able to human-author xml without all the syntax. But wait - there are XML editors that do just that! (Most could do it better, but thats another problem.)
Yup, thats what it looked like to me, but I'm not enough of an OCaml expert to know for sure if that was what he was doing, and I wasn't sure about how to profile it and find out how big the lists were getting. If the lists are always short, there should be no problem, but if they get long, things could get very slow.
Looking at the ocaml code and in particular at the functions that handle the memoizing, I'm wondering how big those memo tables are getting. If they get big it seems quite possible that the overhead of doing the lookup (or if the lookup is fast) of doing the insert might not be a problem. It should be easy enough to just look and see how big the table
is getting.
In the same kind of vein, has the code been profiled? I'd quite like to see where the time is going.
They'd just reword things enough (however barely enough) to make it qualify as a different issue and resubmit over and over. And since the people who are doing this are often paid (sometimes by the public) to do this and nothing else, they have lots of obstinacy (and usually money) to work with.
I know it would be considered vandalism to actually do it (and probably theft of intellectual property if the lawyers really got their two cents (mils?) worth in), but I think that this thing really needs a massive copyright notice indelibly etched into its surface.
I'd have to read some of your Whitespace to see just what your coding style looks like (so to speak).
Your experience in Argh! and BlooP are interesting, but Ook! (however expressive) really shows off your skill as a coder monkey^H^H^H^H^H^H orangutan. Can we pay you in bananas?
I've thought it might be interesting if ICE took a well known painting (public domain, obviously) (or photograph or something) and used that to preset the edges of the tiles. Then after it is done, look to see if you can detect any remnants of the original in the results. Obviously if the edges are preset some large number of pixels into the tile it will have a greater resemblance than if they only go in a pixel or two. All the better if the participants don't know whats going on.
It does not mean that programmers will be typing in straight XML, it means that they'll be using smart IDEs of one sort or another to interact with their code, and probably that XML to (language) and (language) to XML filters will be built.
This greatly facilitates a number of things that are currently difficult - here are a random few (not all I can think of and in no particular order) :
Easy reformatting of the source code (including syntax highlighting) on the fly for those who prefer a different code layout. SOme have commented that this is already available - undoubtedly the same folks who complain about Python using whitespace for control nesting. With
this kind of markup you could change the viewed syntax to match your notions of what is nicer.
The ability to embed much nicer comments (this is a major step toward literate programming environments) including pictures and even animations if needed.
Much smarter revision control - instead of being line based, the revision history could track xml subtrees. The editor could be set to turn on or off viewing of previous revisions.
Smarter editing, including all the fancy stuff in the visual studio type environment and more. Hover over a variable and see its type and any comments on its declaration - also see every use of the variable in your current window. Autofill field names. In a C type environment with #if's, turn off the #if's that dont apply to your environment.
Aspect oriented programming and generative programming gets much cheaper and smarter.
Easy to annotate programs with asserts or pre and post conditions - even in languages that do not support them natively.
And more.
To some extent this stuff is available today in one place or another. Using an XML based markup for the language would make such things much easier to implement and much more under the control of programmers.
Absolutely. In fact George R. R. Martin's page on how "A Feast For Crows" is coming along is one of the few web pages I check regularly. Maybe done by the end of the year he says now. Ah, anticipation.
I agreee completely.
OpenOffice starts slowly enough that a splash screen does help indicate that it is really doing something, but honestly I'd rather not have to watch it. Often I start OpenOffice to open a MS word document that someone sent me in my mail and I'd rather keep reading my mail than have to watch the progress bar creep across (slow machine) the screen.
Make it optional at least and make it easy to find the preference to turn it off (if there is one now I can't locate it).
What bothers me when people credit prayer is that for every "success" there are probably many "failures". "God answered my prayers and saved my child." is an implicit claim that God didn't answer someone else's prayers. Thus someone who dies must either themselves be un-favored by God or the person doing the praying must be somehow lacking. From God's point of view ("Point Of View"?) it may make sense, but it seems less than comforting for those who've suffered a loss.
Actually in a single iteration of the PD, the best strategy is always to defect. Indeed, defecting is the best strategy on any Iterated Prisoners Dilemma where the number of iterations is known. It is only over time, with an unknown number of iterated plays with the same opponent that tit-for-tat (or tit-for-two-tats which I think I remember is slightly more robust) that the game becomes interesting.
And however hypothetical it may seem, the IPD is an interesting model for the development of trust, of social behavior and for things like negotiations between mistrustful software agents.
It is friday (here at least) so its not terrorists, its child pornographers. Terrorists are Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday is communists (though we're thinking about eliminating them), Thursday is Identity Thieves (except for the 15 minutes after noon when its spammers), Friday and Saturday are child pornographers.
Its important to remember this, otherwise our plan to take over the world will fail. (Oops, did I say that out loud?)
Kiosks and the like would be better locked down by putting up only the display for the public to get at, and by keeping the guts of the machine (especially the disk) out of the way (behind a wall, locked up in a box etc). If I can reboot the machine from the access given to the public, I suspect I can do quite a bit - even with trusted computing infrastructure.
It looks to me like any object-oriented programming system violates the spirit of one of the patents - the only difference is that the patent specifies something outside the current application. Though that seems pretty obvious to me.
More interestingly, I'd suspect that any program using mime-type information (like a browser that accepts html, jpg, pdf files - perhaps with a plugin) violates it.
Finally, it looks to me like the "read the extension and invoke a helper..." behavior violates the patent as well. So why didn't they go after microsoft?
It will be interesting to see if Google actually does build its own browser and how it is distributed. If it really provides information management capabilities for both networked (what is beginning to look like ubiquitous) computing and for personal computer use, it could be the application that defines computing in the future.
Of course it might end up windows specific, in which case it will have a tough fight against MS providing the same capabilities. If it is truly multi-platform and uses a shared datastore (like gmail only for all kinds of data) it could be Really Cool and might end up shaping the way we all deal with information.
This reminds me of the bit in Jonathan Lethem's book "Gun, With Occasional Music" where a pair of nicely dressed people are going up the street knocking on peoples doors to proselytize Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents". Funny bit in a very fun book.
I suspect thats true. Certainly Bush's response to 9/11 could hardly have pleased Al Qaeda more - we're an ineffectual occupier of Afghanistan (much of the country is controlled by the Taliban, by all accounts), we're stirring up Muslims all over the world by our actions in Iraq and with things like the Cat Stevens deportation. And more - civil liberties are under very real threats in the US, our stature in the rest of the world is dismal, we've put on more dept in three years than anyone could have anticipated.
The only thing that really surprises me is that Al Qaeda has not endorsed one or the other candidate.
Or somebody (guilty or innocent) gets suddenly and seriously poor from having to pay for legal costs.
If you think about it, for any person to be accused of a trial, is already a punishment, as they often need to go into serious debt to pay for their lawyers. But of course, this isn't (since it is clearly their choice to hire a lawyer) a violation of the constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
But spammers keep getting new hosts. Viruses on unsecured machines to send mail, and people just buying new servers or server names. Last fall I got a goodly amount of spam over a period of a couple months and always referring to new web sites - mostly in places like Uzbekistan and invariably registered through joker.com with a new name and address associated with it in the whois info. (Not that I'm saying it was joker.com's problem, it just seemed strange that there were so many, all with essentially the same characteristics and all through the same company.)
Perhaps Mr "Schwab" is selling penny stocks and wants to expand his market?
(Parenthetically, I do keep wondering how astronomical distances and times and relativistic effects would affect copyright expiration times. )
First, lets add matching close parens to make error detection easier. (It might be handy to have a way (such as the "/") to indicate an end tag, but we're going for brevity here.) ... html)
(html
Now let's add attributes. It is probably most convenient to put these in a list right after the element name. Obviously if there are no attributes we need to put in an empty list so the parsing won't be ambiguous : ...) style) head) html)
(html '() (head '() (style '( type."text/css"
(Of course, one could use some special syntax to indicate attribute lists, or even map them into attributes. And then the attribute lists would not be required to follow the element name and the parser could tell the difference easily enough. ... attribute-list) html)
... attributes in here )# html)
(html (attribute-list
Or perhaps :
(html #(
Now we have the question of attribute lists that might not follow the element name - is that legal? Better not let it be, I can see several problems with that that would change the semantics - not unusefully, but incompatibly with XML.
OK. That looks like it will work and be (more or less) isomorphic to XML. How much space does it really save? One ">" for each start element and two characters for each end element - but there are the added characters for the empty attribute lists.
I doubt anyone would be terribly bothered if someone built a syntax that was isomorphic to that of XML (meaning that a syntax transformer and its inverse run on a document of either sort would produce the same document).
Go for it - I'm sure there are a lot of people who would like to be able to human-author xml without all the syntax. But wait - there are XML editors that do just that! (Most could do it better, but thats another problem.)
Yup, thats what it looked like to me, but I'm not enough of an OCaml expert to know for sure if that was what he was doing, and I wasn't sure about how to profile it and find out how big the lists were getting. If the lists are always short, there should be no problem, but if they get long, things could get very slow.
But now it all seems to be about Arrows. AAARRRGGGHHH!
Too bad. Haskell really is one of the coolest languages around.
In the same kind of vein, has the code been profiled? I'd quite like to see where the time is going.
They'd just reword things enough (however barely enough) to make it qualify as a different issue and resubmit over and over. And since the people who are doing this are often paid (sometimes by the public) to do this and nothing else, they have lots of obstinacy (and usually money) to work with.
I know it would be considered vandalism to actually do it (and probably theft of intellectual property if the lawyers really got their two cents (mils?) worth in), but I think that this thing really needs a massive copyright notice indelibly etched into its surface.
On the upside you didn't mention C#.
I'd have to read some of your Whitespace to see just what your coding style looks like (so to speak).
Your experience in Argh! and BlooP are interesting, but Ook! (however expressive) really shows off your skill as a coder monkey^H^H^H^H^H^H orangutan. Can we pay you in bananas?
I've thought it might be interesting if ICE took a well known painting (public domain, obviously) (or photograph or something) and used that to preset the edges of the tiles. Then after it is done, look to see if you can detect any remnants of the original in the results. Obviously if the edges are preset some large number of pixels into the tile it will have a greater resemblance than if they only go in a pixel or two. All the better if the participants don't know whats going on.
It does not mean that programmers will be typing in straight XML, it means that they'll be using smart IDEs of one sort or another to interact with their code, and probably that XML to (language) and (language) to XML filters will be built.
This greatly facilitates a number of things that are currently difficult - here are a random few (not all I can think of and in no particular order) :
And more.
To some extent this stuff is available today in one place or another. Using an XML based markup for the language would make such things much easier to implement and much more under the control of programmers.
Syntax highlighting, multiple windows, extensions for all kinds of things and the ability to add your own extensions when you want/need to.
And it works in text mode. And it works the same under MS Windows or X Windows.
Download it here.
Absolutely. In fact George R. R. Martin's page on how "A Feast For Crows" is coming along is one of the few web pages I check regularly. Maybe done by the end of the year he says now. Ah, anticipation.
I agreee completely. OpenOffice starts slowly enough that a splash screen does help indicate that it is really doing something, but honestly I'd rather not have to watch it. Often I start OpenOffice to open a MS word document that someone sent me in my mail and I'd rather keep reading my mail than have to watch the progress bar creep across (slow machine) the screen. Make it optional at least and make it easy to find the preference to turn it off (if there is one now I can't locate it).
What bothers me when people credit prayer is that for every "success" there are probably many "failures". "God answered my prayers and saved my child." is an implicit claim that God didn't answer someone else's prayers. Thus someone who dies must either themselves be un-favored by God or the person doing the praying must be somehow lacking. From God's point of view ("Point Of View"?) it may make sense, but it seems less than comforting for those who've suffered a loss.
And however hypothetical it may seem, the IPD is an interesting model for the development of trust, of social behavior and for things like negotiations between mistrustful software agents.
Its important to remember this, otherwise our plan to take over the world will fail. (Oops, did I say that out loud?)
a bit later...
"The sun is going down."
"No no, you're confused, the horizon is moving up."
Ah, the Firesign Theater....
Kiosks and the like would be better locked down by putting up only the display for the public to get at, and by keeping the guts of the machine (especially the disk) out of the way (behind a wall, locked up in a box etc). If I can reboot the machine from the access given to the public, I suspect I can do quite a bit - even with trusted computing infrastructure.
More interestingly, I'd suspect that any program using mime-type information (like a browser that accepts html, jpg, pdf files - perhaps with a plugin) violates it.
Finally, it looks to me like the "read the extension and invoke a helper..." behavior violates the patent as well. So why didn't they go after microsoft?
Of course it might end up windows specific, in which case it will have a tough fight against MS providing the same capabilities. If it is truly multi-platform and uses a shared datastore (like gmail only for all kinds of data) it could be Really Cool and might end up shaping the way we all deal with information.
This reminds me of the bit in Jonathan Lethem's book "Gun, With Occasional Music" where a pair of nicely dressed people are going up the street knocking on peoples doors to proselytize Freud's
"Civilization and its Discontents". Funny bit in a very fun book.
I suspect thats true. Certainly Bush's response to 9/11 could hardly have pleased Al Qaeda more - we're an ineffectual occupier of Afghanistan (much of the country is controlled by the Taliban, by all accounts), we're stirring up Muslims all over the world by our actions in Iraq and with things like the Cat Stevens deportation. And more - civil liberties are under very real threats in the US, our stature in the rest of the world is dismal, we've put on more dept in three years than anyone could have anticipated.
The only thing that really surprises me is that Al Qaeda has not endorsed one or the other candidate.
If you think about it, for any person to be accused of a trial, is already a punishment, as they often need to go into serious debt to pay for their lawyers. But of course, this isn't (since it is clearly their choice to hire a lawyer) a violation of the constitution.