The P-40s flown by the Flying Tigers were inferior in turning radius and climbing capabilities. However, their maximum speed was greater, they could absorb much more damage than the Zeroes, and were superior in diving speed to any other japanese airplane built in that time (up to 1943-1944).
Actually, the Zero had a maximum speed of 565 km/h versus the P-40s top speed of 540 km/h. As you say, however, the P-40 was heavier and could dive better as a result - much of the Flying Tiger's success could be attributed to their preferred tactic of gaining higher altitude and using their superior diving ability to suprise the enemy. For almost all other uses, the heavier weight of the P-40 was a liability (ability to take damage being an exception, again as you point out).
The success of the Flying Tigers was based more on pilots capabilities and training (as the P-40s losses were much greater on other theaters of operations against the same Zeroes)
Agreed - as I said originally, experience skill and luck can wring more out of technically inferior equipment.
no other nation in the world can compete with the technology in the US subs
A quick reality check here. In 2003, a "noisy" Australian deisel boat sunk two US nuclear attack subs and an aircraft carrier during joint war games.
The original statement is still true. What you are pointing out is that the experience, skill, and luck of the captain/crew can compensate for differences in equipment capabilities.
This has always been true and will always be true. Consider, for example, the famed "Flying Tigers" of World War II which had astounding results flying P-40s against technically superior Zeroes.
I switched from SpamAssassin (back in 2.62 days) to dspam and have been extremely happy with its accuracy; far less false negatives than spamassassin for me. There are a few false positives but generally predictable enough that I can search my quarantine for them quickly.
My wife, on the other hand, never got good results from dspam. She consistently got troublesome false positives, including mail from my account. We removed and retrained her several times, to no avail. Eventually she had me turn her filtering off because it was too much trouble.
So, yeah, dspam can be great but results vary.
And the other negative about dspam is it doesn't integrate well at the SMTP/MTA layer, it has a marked design preference for the delivery agent layer.
Transmission by electromagnetic means is the most likely means of communication, due to its speed, relative simplicity, etc.
Correction: Transmission by electromagnetic means is the most likely means of communication known to us today. If there is intelligent life out there that has gotten further than us, they probably spent a couple hundred years in this quaint electromagnetic phase, then figured out quantum mechanics a bit better, and found a faster, more efficient way to do it.
Or, to put it another way: If there's a way to do instantaneous communication, then the odds are someone smarter than we are already figured it out, and is either a) patiently sending signals waiting for species like us to grow up and get them, or b) happily using it for themselves and occassionally getting pissed when squirrels like us run around on the transmission medium.
As a corollary to this, maybe we should not spend all our energy looking for radio signs, but instead start looking for patterns of order in places that we're just now realizing exist. We might get the message sooner, and get a leg up on figuring out the universe while we're at it by cribbing off the older guys.
Or, as I'd say without the lame/. subject line limits, Biodiesel is the future if we have the wits to grasp it.
I'm drunk tonight, so I'll speak bare truth and you can make of it what you will. I'm an American and this is my point of view, so if you're euro then I could care less, except to point out that the fucking French have more progressive nuclear and biodiesel policies than we could hope to have here.
Biodiesel is almost as efficient an energy storage medium as dinodiesel (10% lower energy density). Unlike Hydrogen (also an energy STORAGE format, not an energy SOURCE) it can be stored and distributed using EXISTING infrastructure, doesn't require high-pressure or highly expensive storage containment. When some teenage fuckhead wraps his coupe around a tractor-trailer, it's less likely to burn than gas, where a high-pressure hydroden container would be... interesting.
The pollution issues with biodiesel are lower than with standard dinodiesel, and in 2 years when the U.S. legal limits on diesel sulfur content drop to low levels (see bullets below), car manufacturers can filter out biodiesels small issues without the filters being compromised by sulfur.
Biodiesel doesn't release any carbon that didn't recently come out of the atmosphere. It's a net zero fuel in carbon terms, garbage out, but only from garbage recently in. When you burn petrofuels, you release carbon that's been buried for millions of years.
Biodiesel can be manufactured in a number of ways. The original Diesel engine ran on peanut oil; almost any oil seed can be used to generate biodiesel, as can turkey guts and algae. People complain that solution X won't create enough biodiesel to meet the need, but we could make 10% come from source X, 40% from source Y, 50% from source Z and be done with it.
In 50 years, it will become vital to have an alternative to dinofuels. The question of oil reserves pales next to the socioeconomic pressures that millions of welfare-state arabs will pose. Consider Saudi Arabia. Work is considered "beneath" everyone, so foreigners are imported to do most of the work, and unemployment among the citizens (and I use that term loosely) is rife. Converting to a productive society is almost impossible; the world bank won't fund projects because the state welfare level is too high, and any change to a dynamic (capitalist) society would threaten the current ruling caste. Young men are channeled into madrasses because there is no other path for them. If you think religion is the opiate of the masses, consider a society consisting completely of addicts.. An economist once said that revolution is inevitable once the merchant class exceeds 10% of the population. A fool could tell you that revolution, bloody revolution, is inevitable when the crop of dissatisfied young turks currently being grown ripens, and the natural reserves of oil that support a welfare state begin to wane.
The oil economy will cause bloody flux within our lifetimes. Will it catch us by suprise or will we shift to independence before then? Biodiesel, solar power, nuclear, we've got to turn to it before it becomes a crisis if we want to survive. Of course petrofuels are cheap - they're accepting the investment of dead dinosaurs millions of years ago. You see any dinos volunteering to become fuel today? I didn't think so. It's always cheaper to take advantage of dead shit that's turned into fuel, but you can't always bank on dead shit working for you. Maybe it's more expensive to push for biodiesel today, but in 50 years when the conflagration of the Middle East makes today's wars look like sandbox games, we'll either be glad we pushed for independence or sorry we didn't.
Biodiesel doesn't have anything to do with cutting down emissions. You're still burning hydrocarbons.
Which came from... the air. Directly, recently. Input: 1, Output: 1. As opposed to dinodiesel, whose carbon atoms have been safely interred for millions of years.
Biodiesel is a carbon-neutral solution. No carbons are sent to the atmosphere that weren't pulled out of the atmosphere a handful of months, weeks, or days ago. Don't confuse the carbon that comes out of biodiesel with the shit that dinodiesel lays all over the place.
Most of the plots would be exactly the same (e.g. the train robbery).
I think the train robbery was pretty clearly the hand of the studio at work. We know that it got moved up from something like 10th to replace the planned debut, because the studio wanted something more straightforward (read: predictable) to hook viewers. That alone probably helped doom Firefly; it started in the middle with characters we knew nothing about, but with an episode that presumed a bit was already known.
I think it would have been even better to just do a Western-set "historical" series (with fantasy elements)
You're assuming that the raison d'etre for Firefly was to explore fantasy elements in a western setting. I don't think that's true; I think that Firefly was meant to explore the question of frontiers - with the viewer in a present that is, for the first time in centuries, without convenient frontiers to escape from society to. We've got the ocean and space left, and neither of those is accessible to the types that have historically pushed out frontiers and rewritten society's code.
I think Firefly was meant to think about where we're going rather than where we've been. How well it did that is another question (not terribly well) and it's unclear how much that was Whedon and how much that was studio influence.
So use a "real person" validation technique... like when you sign up for free email and they require you to tell them what the distorted word in the.jpg is...
Three problems off the top with that...
Capchas don't work for spam, because spammers hook them to "free" porn pages to get people to solve them. Again, if it doesn't work to stop spam today, why would it work to stop the people who want to spam despite IIALP?
My mail server blacklists roughly 1000 hosts a day for attempting to send spam to or through it. Are you suggesting that the average user will validate themselves thousands of times a day? I think not. A system like IIALP is predicated on automated analysis of obvious 'attack' trends. If it needs a user, it'll never work (e.g., how many people view, understand, and care about ZoneAlarm popups? Not many).
IIALP must include the input of actual infrastructure - mail servers, web servers, routers, firewalls, etc. etc. - in order to help protect said infrastructure. It won't work if it only gets input from end nodes with no services. Such systems, by definition, already have an overworked, underpaid admin who is not going to have time to 'validate' his systems reports.
I have long thought about a system which has some similarities to IIALP, and have thought through some of the pitfalls. A system can be built which is based on the reports of nodes - but only if the nodes have credibility factors, strong encryption and non-repudiation, and the system is designed to cross-check and distrust node reports until throroughly corroborated. It should weight systems according to their uses, and it should have limited scopes (e.g., what's attack info on my network, may not be on yours).
Having just skimmed the draft, there's a fatal flaw with this solution. To quote:
The idea is that no one person can make a big
impact to the Root IIALP Servers but a million
people all annoyed by the same SPAM can make a
huge impact.
However, they don't seem to address the idea that one person controlling a million drones that send spam today... can control a million drones that submit IIALP reports about, say, cnn.com tomorrow, resulting in an DOS from all the sites that block based on the IIALP lists. They rely upon the reports of end-users, but do not take into account the fact that massive volumes of "end-user" machines are compromised and usable as drones for whatever nefarious uses their 0wner wants.
In short, their anti-spoof assumes individual malicious user endpoint hosts. If the malicious users on the Internet were limited to individual endpoint hosts, we wouldn't need solutions like IIALP!
I agree about the no dropped messges. 24-48 hour delays are perfectly acceptable for a MTX. If your UUCP connection only connects to your upstream provider once/day and their line is busy half the time, you should expect exactly random 24-48 hour delays.
This is OK. (by the email RFCs)
I agree completely that the SMTP RFCs set no standard for response times, and that SMTP is a best-effort, deliver-when-I-can protocol.
If I was using UUCP... I'd expect UUCP responsiveness. But I'm not. I'm using a cable provider that boasts they're upping the download bandwidth from 1.5 to 3 MBps. The only excuse for extended mail lag is a lack of interest or an inability to scale (the latter of which is, of course, a sign of the former).
Do I blame them for this? Not really. That's their priority, and most of the users will never notice or understand the poor lag they're seeing. However, I do notice, and I choose to work around it, by behaving as a peer on the Internet and not a consumer. As long as they let me do it (subject to me doing it responsibly), we've got a good arrangement. Which takes us back to the beginning of this thread...
Then pay $20/year for a service like No-IP's Alternate-Port SMTP and stop your bitching.
Hey, there's an idea! Allow one set of corporate bastards who try to constrain how I use my IP connection to fit their business model to drive me to another company who makes money by routing around the unnecessary damage caused the first company!
Sorry, I believe in an internet of peers, not consumers. It may be a cable modem, but it should never become cable TV.
The ultimate point where I lost patience was where he claimed that the results were invalid because they didn't conform to accepted, real world knowledge. The study was empirical; it shows something, based on how it was set up; and what it shows is valuable.
But without knowing how the test was set up, how can you trust the test's so-called empirical results?
In medicine, research results aren't generally trusted unless 1) the study was sound, e.g., double-blind and 2) a separate team has recreated equivalent results using the published methodology. If, as Zdziarski says, Cormack is not making his config files available, then that alone should be a reason not to blindly accept the study's results. The methodology is unknown.
I can see not publishing the mail messages - in medicine, for example, you don't want to re-use the same test subjects from the first test, so there's no point to it as well as the privacy issue - but the config files? What possible reason could there be for not making them available?
Well, on my laptop (a different design Inspirion, with little fans out the back), the owners manual specifically states that the bottom of the laptop is part of the heat dissipation design, and that blocking it (such as putting it on the specifically discouraged soft surface) can lead to overheating.
Coincidentally, with heat up into the 90s today and me stress testing a system using three VMWare guests on my laptop, I've had to camp out in front of the air conditioner because my Inspiron kept overheating and shutting itself off when all the machines were hammering on the system at once. So you'll know when it's getting overheated. The question is what, if any, permanent damage is involved...
Lots of things, but unless you never ever drink beverages while using your computer, nothing you should worry about.
If nothing else, remember that your laptop is running on DC which is not as dangerous as AC. I've never seen a laptop that ran on AC (e.g., didn't use a blister pack) because of - wait for it - the heat issues involved with converting in AC to DC in the case.
Cooler laps are well and good, but I note the reviewer didn't do any analysis of what happened to the CPU temperature when using these pads. If the heat is being redirected right back at the laptop, it may be defeating the coolant systems on the laptop.
For example, Dell Inspirons have a fan on the bottom that blows straight down. Not bad on a hard desk where the air will blow away. Not good on a bed comfortor that smothers the airflow. Where will these pads fit in on the spectrum?
I think what's needed is a pad that works to draw the heat away from both lap and laptop, maybe something like the Chillow for laptops.
How does DSPAM compare to other OSS projects like Spamassassin?
In short:
Less false negatives
Slightly more false positives
Slightly less plug-and-play
But overall, worth it.
I am currently running an older version of DSPAM, which I switched to after the last time it hit/. I had been using SpamAssassin for years, and lately my SA false negatives had been creeping up, to the point where I could expect to see 3-10 spam a day in my inbox.
With DSPAM, my false negatives have dropped to a trickle - somethine like 5 messages in the last month. My false positives are a bit higher; it tends to trigger more easily on various kinds of mass email - Daily Shark, alumni association events, Amazon.com email, DOD briefing transcripts. At the moment, that's less of a burden than the high false negatives were with SA.
I had more trouble wedging DSPAM into my configuration, but that's because I didn't want to do it DSPAM's way (e.g., signatures in message body, forward email to an address when it is a false result, web interface for management). I basically want it to update the message headers, then let procmail/maildrop filter accordingly, and if it's a false pos/neg I want to just drop it into an IMAP folder which is emptied via the "learn from this mistake" program on a regular basis. YMMV but I think fitting into the mail pipeline is something DSPAM could do better.
I trained off my existing corpus - e.g., let my SA-generated spam folder build up a bit, removed any false positives, removed SA markups, and ran that into DSPAM as spam corpus; did the same with all the normal mail that came in over a week or so, THEN switched. I've also set my wife up without as much training, and it took DSPAM longer to learn what was spam for her and what wasn't. So I think training it up beforehand with a corpus is a good idea.
Overall, it was worth it to switch, and if I was good about upgrading to the newest I'd hopefully see my false positive rate drop.
4. "too good to be true"? Not according to Merrill Lynch who is a major shareholder, and other institutions desperately trying to get a piece of this company.
At $1.15 a share, not much desparation is called for. In fact, I bet even the little guy investor could get into that! In a big way! Now if only there was some way to reach a large audience of technophiles with disposable income but not much investment savvy, who want to believe that futuristic, green technology is going to be commercially viable in the near-term future.
This is probably one of the best business idea I have read in a while. They stay away from actually producing the products that will make up the car, but they build the packages to transform the car into a HEV. I think that's just brilliant!
Have you considered the drawbacks to this business model?
What does the installation of an aftermarket HEV conversion do to the warranty and service agreements on the fleet?
If this is successful, it will have the direct effect of drawing the automakers to focus on this market. Once buyers can get them from the factory like that, where does Azure fit in? Answer: patents. But see next.
While the article lacks sufficient detail, Azure appears to be relying on their patents in the area of hybrid vehicles. Does this mean they intend to SCO the existing hybrid manufacturers? If not, do the existing hybrid manufacturers represent prior art which will invalidate the patents?
I'd like to believe it too... but this article looks too much like a dot-com press release:
Company value intrinsically tied to patents and "intellectual property"? Check!
Burning through existing capital? Check!
Needs another XX million for the next 2-3 years? Check!
Became tradeable by a reverse merger with an existing defunct operation? Check!
Stock price hanging at a "too good to be true" level? Check!
Or maybe, dare I say, a PV cell press release. "The future, better, cheaper, we'll bring it round tomorrow!...or maybe the day after that..."
I've long held a personal opinion that Jakob Nielsen is the real world equivalent of G.E.B. Kivistik. Finally, someone noted the emporer's lack of clothes, and did it with style and panache.
Whoops. A little googling says that Groom Lake is part of Area 51, and IIRC a lot of the testing did take place at Groom Lake. So, the development wasn't there, but some or all of the testing would have been.
I believe the military installation commonly known as Area 51 is actually an advanced aircraft development center, where they developed craft ranging from the old U2 spy plane to the F-117 stealth fighter.
Actually, both the U2 and the F-117 were developed at Lockheed's Skunk Works plant in Palmdale CA. A lot of information can be found in Skunk Works, a memoir by the guy who ran the place during the F-117 development. He also discusses where some of the testing took place in the book, and if I recall correctly most of it was (for the obvious reasons) well-known radar testing ranges.
Now, for all we know, Area 51 still could be an advanced aircraft development center. If they retired the SR-71 (also a Skunk Works Project) and allowed the F-117 to become public before it was absolutely neccessary, then what do they have that they aren't talking about?
Just go outside, and run. Just go. Don't develop a schedule, don't come up with a "plan." Just get it done. Run as far as you can, then walk, then run some more!
Excellent advice - but for those wanting a slight bit more guidance, consider the rec.running beginners FAQ. It can give you a better idea how much to do at first, how to ramp it up, and what to expect. Overdoing it too quickly will send most people back to the couch with soreness and ultimately discourage them.
But I definitely agree, just get up and do it, get into the habit and it'll pay off.
One last recommendation: If you can afford it, invest in a treadmill.
And, a caveat; try running on a treadmill a few times before you spend money on one. There seems to be an even split between runners who swear by treadmills and runners who swear at treadmills. The lack of movement, airflow, and scenery can make them a bit boring; I'd rather run in a snowstorm than run on a treadmill.
Modules are an extension of the kernel... Political, yes.
No, not political. Practical.
The point of module 'taint' is that, when a kernel oopses, the developers who are asked to debug the problem should know up front whether they have all the source required to debug the problem. If the kernel is tainted, they do not have all the source, and many of them will (quite reasonably) decline to do the work of tracking down a problem that may belong to someone who isn't sharing their source.
The conexant people are trying to avoid the consequence of their decision to keep source closed - that they inherit the support burden which, for open source modules, is more easily shared among the rest of the kernel hackers.
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The P-40s flown by the Flying Tigers were inferior in turning radius and climbing capabilities. However, their maximum speed was greater, they could absorb much more damage than the Zeroes, and were superior in diving speed to any other japanese airplane built in that time (up to 1943-1944).
Actually, the Zero had a maximum speed of 565 km/h versus the P-40s top speed of 540 km/h. As you say, however, the P-40 was heavier and could dive better as a result - much of the Flying Tiger's success could be attributed to their preferred tactic of gaining higher altitude and using their superior diving ability to suprise the enemy. For almost all other uses, the heavier weight of the P-40 was a liability (ability to take damage being an exception, again as you point out).
The success of the Flying Tigers was based more on pilots capabilities and training (as the P-40s losses were much greater on other theaters of operations against the same Zeroes)
Agreed - as I said originally, experience skill and luck can wring more out of technically inferior equipment.
no other nation in the world can compete with the technology in the US subs
A quick reality check here. In 2003, a "noisy" Australian deisel boat sunk two US nuclear attack subs and an aircraft carrier during joint war games.
The original statement is still true. What you are pointing out is that the experience, skill, and luck of the captain/crew can compensate for differences in equipment capabilities.
This has always been true and will always be true. Consider, for example, the famed "Flying Tigers" of World War II which had astounding results flying P-40s against technically superior Zeroes.
I switched from SpamAssassin (back in 2.62 days) to dspam and have been extremely happy with its accuracy; far less false negatives than spamassassin for me. There are a few false positives but generally predictable enough that I can search my quarantine for them quickly. My wife, on the other hand, never got good results from dspam. She consistently got troublesome false positives, including mail from my account. We removed and retrained her several times, to no avail. Eventually she had me turn her filtering off because it was too much trouble. So, yeah, dspam can be great but results vary. And the other negative about dspam is it doesn't integrate well at the SMTP/MTA layer, it has a marked design preference for the delivery agent layer.
Transmission by electromagnetic means is the most likely means of communication, due to its speed, relative simplicity, etc.
Correction: Transmission by electromagnetic means is the most likely means of communication known to us today. If there is intelligent life out there that has gotten further than us, they probably spent a couple hundred years in this quaint electromagnetic phase, then figured out quantum mechanics a bit better, and found a faster, more efficient way to do it.
Or, to put it another way: If there's a way to do instantaneous communication, then the odds are someone smarter than we are already figured it out, and is either a) patiently sending signals waiting for species like us to grow up and get them, or b) happily using it for themselves and occassionally getting pissed when squirrels like us run around on the transmission medium.
As a corollary to this, maybe we should not spend all our energy looking for radio signs, but instead start looking for patterns of order in places that we're just now realizing exist. We might get the message sooner, and get a leg up on figuring out the universe while we're at it by cribbing off the older guys.
Or, as I'd say without the lame /. subject line limits, Biodiesel is the future if we have the wits to grasp it.
I'm drunk tonight, so I'll speak bare truth and you can make of it what you will. I'm an American and this is my point of view, so if you're euro then I could care less, except to point out that the fucking French have more progressive nuclear and biodiesel policies than we could hope to have here.
Biodiesel is almost as efficient an energy storage medium as dinodiesel (10% lower energy density). Unlike Hydrogen (also an energy STORAGE format, not an energy SOURCE) it can be stored and distributed using EXISTING infrastructure, doesn't require high-pressure or highly expensive storage containment. When some teenage fuckhead wraps his coupe around a tractor-trailer, it's less likely to burn than gas, where a high-pressure hydroden container would be... interesting.
The pollution issues with biodiesel are lower than with standard dinodiesel, and in 2 years when the U.S. legal limits on diesel sulfur content drop to low levels (see bullets below), car manufacturers can filter out biodiesels small issues without the filters being compromised by sulfur.
Biodiesel doesn't release any carbon that didn't recently come out of the atmosphere. It's a net zero fuel in carbon terms, garbage out, but only from garbage recently in. When you burn petrofuels, you release carbon that's been buried for millions of years.
Biodiesel can be manufactured in a number of ways. The original Diesel engine ran on peanut oil; almost any oil seed can be used to generate biodiesel, as can turkey guts and algae. People complain that solution X won't create enough biodiesel to meet the need, but we could make 10% come from source X, 40% from source Y, 50% from source Z and be done with it.
In 50 years, it will become vital to have an alternative to dinofuels. The question of oil reserves pales next to the socioeconomic pressures that millions of welfare-state arabs will pose. Consider Saudi Arabia. Work is considered "beneath" everyone, so foreigners are imported to do most of the work, and unemployment among the citizens (and I use that term loosely) is rife. Converting to a productive society is almost impossible; the world bank won't fund projects because the state welfare level is too high, and any change to a dynamic (capitalist) society would threaten the current ruling caste. Young men are channeled into madrasses because there is no other path for them. If you think religion is the opiate of the masses, consider a society consisting completely of addicts.. An economist once said that revolution is inevitable once the merchant class exceeds 10% of the population. A fool could tell you that revolution, bloody revolution, is inevitable when the crop of dissatisfied young turks currently being grown ripens, and the natural reserves of oil that support a welfare state begin to wane.
The oil economy will cause bloody flux within our lifetimes. Will it catch us by suprise or will we shift to independence before then? Biodiesel, solar power, nuclear, we've got to turn to it before it becomes a crisis if we want to survive. Of course petrofuels are cheap - they're accepting the investment of dead dinosaurs millions of years ago. You see any dinos volunteering to become fuel today? I didn't think so. It's always cheaper to take advantage of dead shit that's turned into fuel, but you can't always bank on dead shit working for you. Maybe it's more expensive to push for biodiesel today, but in 50 years when the conflagration of the Middle East makes today's wars look like sandbox games, we'll either be glad we pushed for independence or sorry we didn't.
Okay, you
Biodiesel doesn't have anything to do with cutting down emissions. You're still burning hydrocarbons.
Which came from... the air. Directly, recently. Input: 1, Output: 1. As opposed to dinodiesel, whose carbon atoms have been safely interred for millions of years.
Biodiesel is a carbon-neutral solution. No carbons are sent to the atmosphere that weren't pulled out of the atmosphere a handful of months, weeks, or days ago. Don't confuse the carbon that comes out of biodiesel with the shit that dinodiesel lays all over the place.
Most of the plots would be exactly the same (e.g. the train robbery).
I think the train robbery was pretty clearly the hand of the studio at work. We know that it got moved up from something like 10th to replace the planned debut, because the studio wanted something more straightforward (read: predictable) to hook viewers. That alone probably helped doom Firefly; it started in the middle with characters we knew nothing about, but with an episode that presumed a bit was already known.
I think it would have been even better to just do a Western-set "historical" series (with fantasy elements)
You're assuming that the raison d'etre for Firefly was to explore fantasy elements in a western setting. I don't think that's true; I think that Firefly was meant to explore the question of frontiers - with the viewer in a present that is, for the first time in centuries, without convenient frontiers to escape from society to. We've got the ocean and space left, and neither of those is accessible to the types that have historically pushed out frontiers and rewritten society's code.
I think Firefly was meant to think about where we're going rather than where we've been. How well it did that is another question (not terribly well) and it's unclear how much that was Whedon and how much that was studio influence.
So use a "real person" validation technique... like when you sign up for free email and they require you to tell them what the distorted word in the .jpg is...
Three problems off the top with that...
I have long thought about a system which has some similarities to IIALP, and have thought through some of the pitfalls. A system can be built which is based on the reports of nodes - but only if the nodes have credibility factors, strong encryption and non-repudiation, and the system is designed to cross-check and distrust node reports until throroughly corroborated. It should weight systems according to their uses, and it should have limited scopes (e.g., what's attack info on my network, may not be on yours).
Having just skimmed the draft, there's a fatal flaw with this solution. To quote:
However, they don't seem to address the idea that one person controlling a million drones that send spam today... can control a million drones that submit IIALP reports about, say, cnn.com tomorrow, resulting in an DOS from all the sites that block based on the IIALP lists. They rely upon the reports of end-users, but do not take into account the fact that massive volumes of "end-user" machines are compromised and usable as drones for whatever nefarious uses their 0wner wants.
In short, their anti-spoof assumes individual malicious user endpoint hosts. If the malicious users on the Internet were limited to individual endpoint hosts, we wouldn't need solutions like IIALP!
I agree about the no dropped messges. 24-48 hour delays are perfectly acceptable for a MTX. If your UUCP connection only connects to your upstream provider once/day and their line is busy half the time, you should expect exactly random 24-48 hour delays.
This is OK. (by the email RFCs)
I agree completely that the SMTP RFCs set no standard for response times, and that SMTP is a best-effort, deliver-when-I-can protocol.
If I was using UUCP... I'd expect UUCP responsiveness. But I'm not. I'm using a cable provider that boasts they're upping the download bandwidth from 1.5 to 3 MBps. The only excuse for extended mail lag is a lack of interest or an inability to scale (the latter of which is, of course, a sign of the former).
Do I blame them for this? Not really. That's their priority, and most of the users will never notice or understand the poor lag they're seeing. However, I do notice, and I choose to work around it, by behaving as a peer on the Internet and not a consumer. As long as they let me do it (subject to me doing it responsibly), we've got a good arrangement. Which takes us back to the beginning of this thread...
Then pay $20/year for a service like No-IP's Alternate-Port SMTP and stop your bitching.
Hey, there's an idea! Allow one set of corporate bastards who try to constrain how I use my IP connection to fit their business model to drive me to another company who makes money by routing around the unnecessary damage caused the first company!
Sorry, I believe in an internet of peers, not consumers. It may be a cable modem, but it should never become cable TV.
Don't talk directly to their mail servers.. talk to the outgoing mailserver provided to you by your ISP. Sheesh.
I'm always amazed at how many people "run my own mailserver" yet have no idea how mail is supposed to work.
No, thanks. I prefer my mail without random 24-48 hour delays and invisibly dropped messages. That's not how mail is "supposed to work."
The ultimate point where I lost patience was where he claimed that the results were invalid because they didn't conform to accepted, real world knowledge. The study was empirical; it shows something, based on how it was set up; and what it shows is valuable.
But without knowing how the test was set up, how can you trust the test's so-called empirical results?
In medicine, research results aren't generally trusted unless 1) the study was sound, e.g., double-blind and 2) a separate team has recreated equivalent results using the published methodology. If, as Zdziarski says, Cormack is not making his config files available, then that alone should be a reason not to blindly accept the study's results. The methodology is unknown.
I can see not publishing the mail messages - in medicine, for example, you don't want to re-use the same test subjects from the first test, so there's no point to it as well as the privacy issue - but the config files? What possible reason could there be for not making them available?
Well, on my laptop (a different design Inspirion, with little fans out the back), the owners manual specifically states that the bottom of the laptop is part of the heat dissipation design, and that blocking it (such as putting it on the specifically discouraged soft surface) can lead to overheating.
Coincidentally, with heat up into the 90s today and me stress testing a system using three VMWare guests on my laptop, I've had to camp out in front of the air conditioner because my Inspiron kept overheating and shutting itself off when all the machines were hammering on the system at once. So you'll know when it's getting overheated. The question is what, if any, permanent damage is involved...
What could go wrong here? :)
Lots of things, but unless you never ever drink beverages while using your computer, nothing you should worry about.
If nothing else, remember that your laptop is running on DC which is not as dangerous as AC. I've never seen a laptop that ran on AC (e.g., didn't use a blister pack) because of - wait for it - the heat issues involved with converting in AC to DC in the case.
Cooler laps are well and good, but I note the reviewer didn't do any analysis of what happened to the CPU temperature when using these pads. If the heat is being redirected right back at the laptop, it may be defeating the coolant systems on the laptop.
For example, Dell Inspirons have a fan on the bottom that blows straight down. Not bad on a hard desk where the air will blow away. Not good on a bed comfortor that smothers the airflow. Where will these pads fit in on the spectrum?
I think what's needed is a pad that works to draw the heat away from both lap and laptop, maybe something like the Chillow for laptops.
How does DSPAM compare to other OSS projects like Spamassassin?
In short:
I am currently running an older version of DSPAM, which I switched to after the last time it hit /. I had been using SpamAssassin for years, and lately my SA false negatives had been creeping up, to the point where I could expect to see 3-10 spam a day in my inbox.
With DSPAM, my false negatives have dropped to a trickle - somethine like 5 messages in the last month. My false positives are a bit higher; it tends to trigger more easily on various kinds of mass email - Daily Shark, alumni association events, Amazon.com email, DOD briefing transcripts. At the moment, that's less of a burden than the high false negatives were with SA.
I had more trouble wedging DSPAM into my configuration, but that's because I didn't want to do it DSPAM's way (e.g., signatures in message body, forward email to an address when it is a false result, web interface for management). I basically want it to update the message headers, then let procmail/maildrop filter accordingly, and if it's a false pos/neg I want to just drop it into an IMAP folder which is emptied via the "learn from this mistake" program on a regular basis. YMMV but I think fitting into the mail pipeline is something DSPAM could do better.
I trained off my existing corpus - e.g., let my SA-generated spam folder build up a bit, removed any false positives, removed SA markups, and ran that into DSPAM as spam corpus; did the same with all the normal mail that came in over a week or so, THEN switched. I've also set my wife up without as much training, and it took DSPAM longer to learn what was spam for her and what wasn't. So I think training it up beforehand with a corpus is a good idea.
Overall, it was worth it to switch, and if I was good about upgrading to the newest I'd hopefully see my false positive rate drop.
Just my .02.
4. "too good to be true"? Not according to Merrill Lynch who is a major shareholder, and other institutions desperately trying to get a piece of this company.
At $1.15 a share, not much desparation is called for. In fact, I bet even the little guy investor could get into that! In a big way! Now if only there was some way to reach a large audience of technophiles with disposable income but not much investment savvy, who want to believe that futuristic, green technology is going to be commercially viable in the near-term future.
Know of any sites like that?
This is probably one of the best business idea I have read in a while. They stay away from actually producing the products that will make up the car, but they build the packages to transform the car into a HEV. I think that's just brilliant!
Have you considered the drawbacks to this business model?
I'd like to believe it too... but this article looks too much like a dot-com press release:
Or maybe, dare I say, a PV cell press release. "The future, better, cheaper, we'll bring it round tomorrow! ...or maybe the day after that..."
I've long held a personal opinion that Jakob Nielsen is the real world equivalent of G.E.B. Kivistik. Finally, someone noted the emporer's lack of clothes, and did it with style and panache.
Compare Nielsen's page to a more effective design. Which one would you rather read? If it's the second, then why are you taking style advice from this man?
Whoops. A little googling says that Groom Lake is part of Area 51, and IIRC a lot of the testing did take place at Groom Lake. So, the development wasn't there, but some or all of the testing would have been.
I believe the military installation commonly known as Area 51 is actually an advanced aircraft development center, where they developed craft ranging from the old U2 spy plane to the F-117 stealth fighter.
Actually, both the U2 and the F-117 were developed at Lockheed's Skunk Works plant in Palmdale CA. A lot of information can be found in Skunk Works, a memoir by the guy who ran the place during the F-117 development. He also discusses where some of the testing took place in the book, and if I recall correctly most of it was (for the obvious reasons) well-known radar testing ranges.
Now, for all we know, Area 51 still could be an advanced aircraft development center. If they retired the SR-71 (also a Skunk Works Project) and allowed the F-117 to become public before it was absolutely neccessary, then what do they have that they aren't talking about?
Just go outside, and run. Just go. Don't develop a schedule, don't come up with a "plan." Just get it done. Run as far as you can, then walk, then run some more!
Excellent advice - but for those wanting a slight bit more guidance, consider the rec.running beginners FAQ. It can give you a better idea how much to do at first, how to ramp it up, and what to expect. Overdoing it too quickly will send most people back to the couch with soreness and ultimately discourage them.
But I definitely agree, just get up and do it, get into the habit and it'll pay off.
One last recommendation: If you can afford it, invest in a treadmill.
And, a caveat; try running on a treadmill a few times before you spend money on one. There seems to be an even split between runners who swear by treadmills and runners who swear at treadmills. The lack of movement, airflow, and scenery can make them a bit boring; I'd rather run in a snowstorm than run on a treadmill.
Use a token instead? What's to keep them from using a new token whenever they like?
Nothing - but by doing so, they'll drop down to the unknown/untrusted level, which should damage their impact.
Like browsing with no ACs on /., regular users can filter out people who do that.
Modules are an extension of the kernel... Political, yes.
No, not political. Practical.
The point of module 'taint' is that, when a kernel oopses, the developers who are asked to debug the problem should know up front whether they have all the source required to debug the problem. If the kernel is tainted, they do not have all the source, and many of them will (quite reasonably) decline to do the work of tracking down a problem that may belong to someone who isn't sharing their source.
The conexant people are trying to avoid the consequence of their decision to keep source closed - that they inherit the support burden which, for open source modules, is more easily shared among the rest of the kernel hackers.