If an area lacks pedestrian- or bike-friendly facilities, why would people use a Segway to make the trip instead of a car?
They wouldn't. But in areas where pedestrian-friendly shops are marginal because of decreased foot-traffic and lack of parking, a Segway-enabled set of customers would make a big impact.
Of course, you're right, it really is a matter of zoning and proper design. Hopefully by strengthening existing ped-friendly communities, we can drive car-centric dinosaurs out of existence, and encourage more efficient mixed-use development. Nothing sickens me more than to drive by strip-mine housing tracts in the middle of nowhere with curvy roads (so no defined intersections for crosswalks), huge 8 lane boulevards (isolating city blocks, so that crossing the street becomes a major chore, and a serious danger for children and older folks), and no sidewalks.
Unfortunately, my local supermarket just went out of business (it was a Pavilions, can you believe it?), so now I have to drive instead of walking the 3 blocks to the store...
I agree. If I lived in a city where you had to drive 7 miles just to buy groceries, I'd shoot the city planner, guy in charge of zoning, and the asshole developers who built the residental areas. Do you even have sidewalks (and if you do, did they plant shade trees?), or mass transit?
This kind of sprawl is the sort of thing the Segway is meant to combat, as sprawl depends on cars. If you get people out of their cars, even up to the 4 or 5 mile limit, smaller stores in a mixed-use environment become more practical, and you can dramatically reduce the imapact that car traffic has on urban environments (stuff like pollution, excessively wide roads that you can't cross safely as a pedestrian, loss of useable space in favor of parking lots or parking garages, etc.)
Sure, you can look at the Segway as another excuse not to walk or ride. But the truth of the matter is, for distances greater than 3 city blocks, most people will hop in their cars and drive. This leads to community designs without sidewalks, an absence of shops that can survive outside of a mall, shopping, strip, or otherwise, and other omissions (shade trees, pedestrian crossings, etc.) that tend to reinforce the impulse to drive.
In this light, the Segway is an ideal tool for getting people who otherwise would have driven the mile or so distance to the grocery store, video rental place, or local strip mall, and putting them on the local streets. Consider this a way of boosting pedestrian traffic by extending the 3-block distance people would choose to walk, and thus displace auto travel. This is what Jobs and other people who saw the Segway meant when they said that cities would be redesigned around them.
Sure, I'll walk, or ride my bike, or ride the bus. But then again, I don't own a car. If a Segway can displace cars for short-distance travel, then all the more power to them, fat lazy Americans be damned!
BTW, 15 miles on a single charge is far more than many people tend to commute, even in their cars, in highly urbanized areas. Hell, I used to bike the 15 miles from West LA to Burbank and back (up the Cahuenga pass and back every day) - that trip took me 1.5 hours (each way). If you're willing to bike that much, more power to you, but complaining 15 miles isn't enough range for a Segway is missing the point - 15 miles is overkill for the purpose the Segway is meant to serve - bridging the gap between the 3 blocks most people are willing to walk, and when they whip out their car keys and start contributing to traffic, pollution, and parking problems.
Also, if you think about it, you get a lot more exercise standing on a Segway than you do sitting in your car...
Re:requisite paranoid response
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 2
Rotary-wing aircraft (ie, helicopters) are harder to fly then fixed-wing aircraft. Not to mention, if your engine goes out in a fixed-wing, you can glide, if the engine goes out in a rotary-wing, you've got maybe a minute to kiss your ass goodbye.
However, last I heard, MIT was working on giving an AI rotary-wing piloting capabilities, so it may happen yet.
It's true they were being creative, but they also were drawing upon a lot of existing material. There are many things that can be taken for granted once you know that this episode is based in the classic Star Trek universe. Also, there's a lot of interest in the episode that simply would not exist, if there wasn't a fan base for the classic Star Trek universe, and if the episode was not set in the classic Star Trek universe.
It's sort of like building a cheaper, better, Apple clone. You're taking an existing item, and making it better, and because the original was a known quantity, you're benefiting from the attention that the original got.
You can borrow elements of the original (Hollywood does this all the time), but when you copy substantial portions, you start to really lean on the previous body of work. Consider GalaxyQuest, which was meant as a parody of the original Star Trek series and associated community. They borrowed elements (the obsessed fans, the conventions, the now-stereotyped actors, cheesy plotlines in the original episodes) and wove them into an original story. They however, did not actually incorporate names, ships, or elements of the Star Trek universe.
This fan-produced episode is impressive, but between the ship, the props, and the music/soundFX, they clearly want you to know there is a link between their material and the classical Star Trek universe. What would be impressive is if someone could get this much attention by producing an original pilot, distributed online (not a short, but an episode-length pilot.)
So there goes another argument. If they keep spamming blocked addresses, RBLs don't reduce backbone bandwidth usage either.
I would argue that as an incorrect interpretation. The spammer must not only successfully attempt to connect to the target ISP's box, they must be able to mail the text of the entire message. RBLs deny the spammer the ability to mail the text at worst (cutting down the amount of crap that needs to be accepted), and at best totally deny the spammer the ability to connect at all.
Thus, they can still try to send to blocked or bad addresses, but because the delivery handshake is refused, the message isn't sent, and backbone bandwidth is conserved.
Now, the above assumes that the ISP actually blocks based upon an RBL (ie, deny connection or delivery) - if they accept the connection and just filter (ie, tag the received message), then yes, your criticism would be valid, as no bandwidth would have been conserved.
For me the spammers won when I had to install filters to use my e-mail. I still report the bastards, but it's nothing more than a formality now - the ISPs who care about spam have cracked down, and the ISPs who don't care about spam (and who are based in places like China, safe from effective retribution) just ignore your reports. The declining reliability of e-mail (directly and indirectly caused by spam and worms) is an equally bad, if not worse problem - short of re-engineering the SMTP protocols to let you know if your message has been sent and read, I'm not sure what we can do.
At least some of my reports contribute to weighting for IPs when they add new listings to the RBLs.
It's more like refusing to accept cargo outbound to or inbound from certain countries, like say Cuba, Iraq, or Afghanistan (when the Taliban were in power.) Some countries still trade with them, and you're more than welcome to stay there, but don't expect to do any business with the US if you do.
If you're smart, you'll do some checking up on your ISP before you commit money to an operation that is going to hand you IP addresses that have been blackholed, and are now worthless.
I still have an old IBM keyboard. Thing weighs 8 pounds, has a crack in it from when it was thrown in the trash (which is where I rescued it), and is missing a bunch of key caps (the old IBMs had generic blank keys, with the letters printed on a little cap that fit on top.)
I would have yelled "Kill the guy with the cellphone!" and let the people immediately surrounding him take care of the problem. Of course, this would have been during the midnight showing, so the fan base there would have been easier to incite to kill a cellphone wielding idiot.
Pioneer sells a jukebox system for $13,000+, DVD-R drives not included. I was looking at the system as a replacement for tape drives, and the sales rep I talked to basically told me to hold off until the Blue-laser drives get released in the states. Supposedly they'll deliver twice the current capacity for both CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, assuming that they ever get adopted here...
The pioneer rep I talk to recently basically said that double-sided DVD-Rs were used mainly in automated DVD jukeboxes. Because of handling issues (fingerprints, scratches, dust), most people with home burners don't use them - by the time you finished burning the first side, chances are you'd have ruined part of the second side. Either that, or after you finished the dual sided burn, at some point in the future, you'd ruin the side facing the top. In a jukebox, it doesn't matter since it's a controlled environment.
You could probably do this with guns that use electrically activated primers (yes, they exist, and are sold with the idea that without a moving firing pin, your shot should be steadier.) No matching RF tag, no power to the ignition coil. The problem is that there are so many existing conventional guns and so much existing conventional ammo, that very few benefits would be had in general, unless you were selling some really exotic ammo for specific purposes.
I'm curious that nobody's mentioned the smart gun example from the Lost in Space remake, where the "genius" kid turns his gun over to the bad guy, and authorizes him as a user. Socially engineering weapons access...
#1. A pure democracy IS mob rule! That's why we're supposed to have checks and balances - so that we can rein in the tyranny of the majority (and what a woefully undereducated majority it is...)
Basically, the problem is that there is a certain know-it-all portion of the population, that believes that people should be protected from themselves, even if it means depriving them of essential liberties. Whether they be extremist members of the religious right trying to ban violent games (and short skirts), or the litigious left trying to ban everything (from guns to gasoline engines), these are the people who believe that they have the right to curtail the rights of other people "for their own good."
There have always been these kinds of people, but never have they been given so much currency in our current society, where the people who are supposed to vote are more than content to let "experts" put out what they should think and do. That's why essential liberties are being lost - not because there are people who are willing to take them away, but because we as a people are willing to let them.
Go be a farmer. We need good food, we don't need more guns.
Actually, we need less food. Farming subsidies are artifically depressing the price of staple crops, and depriving farmers in low-income areas such as Africa from being able to make a living. The end result is them needing economic aid, when in reality, they could be producing enough food to feed not only themselves, but neighboring reigons as well. This is aside from the problems created by civil war and diamond/oil cartels in certain regions...
Not to mention, being a farmer even with subsidies is a hard existence. The costs of buying and maintaining equipment, buying seed, irrigation, and farm labor can drive you into bankruptcy within a few growing seasons if you get a run of bad weather. There's a reason that there are far fewer family farmers here in the states now than there were 20 years ago.
There aren't that many handgun makers out there, and they tend to stick together.
There aren't as many shooters anymore, and they tend to stick together as well. Look at what happened to the old Smith and Wesson (now under new management and trying to clear the S&W name) when they tried to cut a preferential deal with the Clinton administration. Everybody boycotted their guns, and they went under.
The only mainstream manufacturer I know of that is looking into smart gun tech is Colt, and that's because they're more or less abandoning the civilian market in favor of strict military/law enforcement. For those markets, smart gun tech sort of makes sense, especially if they can land a big contract.
The argument for handguns is primarily for concealed carry and close-quarter-combat (concealed carry is legal in portions of the US, ie Texas.) Shotguns and rifles are impractical for concealed carry, and rifles have too much penetration within a house. The liberals here in the states would rather you not have rifles or handguns at all, hunting be damned.
As for feeling safe, I'd recommend a good dog over a gun for your first line of defense any day. A gun is no good if you haven't enough warning to be prepared to use it. Set up a security zone around your house. Get a dog. Make sure your windows and doors are secure. Get an alarm. Then get a gun, and make sure you practice on a regular basis so you're able to use it when you need to.
My firearms instructor taught us to handle a gun safely, action open, gun unloaded, and we learned to do it without relying on the safety. Why? Some guns don't have safeties. Some guns have faulty safeties. Safeties are mechanical, and are thus subject to mechanical faults - as such, the resonsibility to keep the firearm safe and pointed in a safe direction is the reponsibility of the firearm handler, not the gun.
What is a Smart Gun? It's essentially one big-ass safety, regulated by some magic mechanism. As such, it's taking the liability for keeping the gun safe out of the hands of the person handling the gun, and putting it in the hands of the gun manufacturer (or inventor of the magic Smart Gun mechanism.) I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be the gun manufacturer or that inventor - the liability is just too high. The gun goes off - and they'll blame it on the gun, and not on the idiot who kept it loaded and pointed in an unsafe direction...
This law is nothing more than an gun ban dressed as a "safety" measure. It's one thing when California mandates electric vehicles, and requires that car manufacturers comply or lose the #1 market for automobiles in the US. It's another thing to ask the handgun industry, which makes very little money, and is continually under threat of liability, to re-tailor their products just for New Jersey. It'll be like when California required every model of handgun to pass "safety standards". To pass these standards, you have to pony up a lot of money to put your gun through their tests. End result: used handguns that were no longer in production became illegal to sell, and newer production handguns had to wait until the respective company paid the money to certify them. Presto - instant gun ban without mentioning the words "gun ban".
That is a very poor analogy since in the vast majority of the US mainland it is perfectly legal to carry a gun.
And which proves that banning guns also brings down crime rates.
It proves nothing of the sort. The United States is a big place. Much of the country is undeveloped, or rural. Most of these areas have the least restrictive gun laws, because there isn't any reason to restrict them. Those areas with very high population densities (cities) often have the most restrictive gun laws. They also have most of the murders. Should I then conclude that restrictive gun laws cause murders?
BTW, the reason we have so many convicts, is because we treat drug use (and the associated spilloff of crimnal activity) as a crime. Please factor that into your calculations the next time when you want to compare apples with oranges.
I'm not sure the FCC even got into the picture. The people involved got many complaints from readers who read about the description of their setup, and went ahead and cut their power in response.
And have there been any problems with false positives? What about business that was lost because your auto-ack was never replied to (perhaps because it got filtered at the other end...)
The problem isn't that people aren't taking basic precautions (I agree, there's a lot you can do on the client side), but that the infrastructure is being exploited by criminals for criminal activities, and this abuse is interfering with legitimate communication/commerce. The time I spent to set up SpamAssassin was well worth it, as it saved me time I used to spend dealing with spam manually. However, that time was not billable, and thus becomes part of my overhead. The crap that happens when I reply to a customer, and my reply gets filtered because of a misconfigured filter on their end (either they personally, or their ISP, or a router along the way), is also an example of the degredation of e-mail as a useful service.
The end analysis is that without taking forceful action (ie, illegal vigilante tactics), the next step in the battle against spam is really legal. We've blocked or closed as many open relays as we can. We have blacklists we can subscribe to. We have tools like SpamAssassin to do filtering. Marginally competent people can implement Procmail filters to get rid of e-mail worms, and selectivly build blacklists (or if they want to wall off completely, whitelists.) So either declare spam illegal, or have everyone go to whitelists, and deal with the inefficiencies associated with that...
BTW, do you whitelist customers too? What if they're not a customer yet, and are just e-mailing with questions, or to request a quote? And how much CPU time and disk space would you need if every customer at your ISP had the same spam load, and decided to implement filtering?
Techinical question - when you filter, do you trash, or do you move to a folder? Just wondering how much time you use to review items that have been filtered...
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If an area lacks pedestrian- or bike-friendly facilities, why would people use a Segway to make the trip instead of a car?
They wouldn't. But in areas where pedestrian-friendly shops are marginal because of decreased foot-traffic and lack of parking, a Segway-enabled set of customers would make a big impact.
Of course, you're right, it really is a matter of zoning and proper design. Hopefully by strengthening existing ped-friendly communities, we can drive car-centric dinosaurs out of existence, and encourage more efficient mixed-use development. Nothing sickens me more than to drive by strip-mine housing tracts in the middle of nowhere with curvy roads (so no defined intersections for crosswalks), huge 8 lane boulevards (isolating city blocks, so that crossing the street becomes a major chore, and a serious danger for children and older folks), and no sidewalks.
Unfortunately, my local supermarket just went out of business (it was a Pavilions, can you believe it?), so now I have to drive instead of walking the 3 blocks to the store...
I agree. If I lived in a city where you had to drive 7 miles just to buy groceries, I'd shoot the city planner, guy in charge of zoning, and the asshole developers who built the residental areas. Do you even have sidewalks (and if you do, did they plant shade trees?), or mass transit?
This kind of sprawl is the sort of thing the Segway is meant to combat, as sprawl depends on cars. If you get people out of their cars, even up to the 4 or 5 mile limit, smaller stores in a mixed-use environment become more practical, and you can dramatically reduce the imapact that car traffic has on urban environments (stuff like pollution, excessively wide roads that you can't cross safely as a pedestrian, loss of useable space in favor of parking lots or parking garages, etc.)
Sure, you can look at the Segway as another excuse not to walk or ride. But the truth of the matter is, for distances greater than 3 city blocks, most people will hop in their cars and drive. This leads to community designs without sidewalks, an absence of shops that can survive outside of a mall, shopping, strip, or otherwise, and other omissions (shade trees, pedestrian crossings, etc.) that tend to reinforce the impulse to drive.
In this light, the Segway is an ideal tool for getting people who otherwise would have driven the mile or so distance to the grocery store, video rental place, or local strip mall, and putting them on the local streets. Consider this a way of boosting pedestrian traffic by extending the 3-block distance people would choose to walk, and thus displace auto travel. This is what Jobs and other people who saw the Segway meant when they said that cities would be redesigned around them.
Sure, I'll walk, or ride my bike, or ride the bus. But then again, I don't own a car. If a Segway can displace cars for short-distance travel, then all the more power to them, fat lazy Americans be damned!
BTW, 15 miles on a single charge is far more than many people tend to commute, even in their cars, in highly urbanized areas. Hell, I used to bike the 15 miles from West LA to Burbank and back (up the Cahuenga pass and back every day) - that trip took me 1.5 hours (each way). If you're willing to bike that much, more power to you, but complaining 15 miles isn't enough range for a Segway is missing the point - 15 miles is overkill for the purpose the Segway is meant to serve - bridging the gap between the 3 blocks most people are willing to walk, and when they whip out their car keys and start contributing to traffic, pollution, and parking problems.
Also, if you think about it, you get a lot more exercise standing on a Segway than you do sitting in your car...
Rotary-wing aircraft (ie, helicopters) are harder to fly then fixed-wing aircraft. Not to mention, if your engine goes out in a fixed-wing, you can glide, if the engine goes out in a rotary-wing, you've got maybe a minute to kiss your ass goodbye.
However, last I heard, MIT was working on giving an AI rotary-wing piloting capabilities, so it may happen yet.
It's true they were being creative, but they also were drawing upon a lot of existing material. There are many things that can be taken for granted once you know that this episode is based in the classic Star Trek universe. Also, there's a lot of interest in the episode that simply would not exist, if there wasn't a fan base for the classic Star Trek universe, and if the episode was not set in the classic Star Trek universe.
It's sort of like building a cheaper, better, Apple clone. You're taking an existing item, and making it better, and because the original was a known quantity, you're benefiting from the attention that the original got.
You can borrow elements of the original (Hollywood does this all the time), but when you copy substantial portions, you start to really lean on the previous body of work. Consider GalaxyQuest, which was meant as a parody of the original Star Trek series and associated community. They borrowed elements (the obsessed fans, the conventions, the now-stereotyped actors, cheesy plotlines in the original episodes) and wove them into an original story. They however, did not actually incorporate names, ships, or elements of the Star Trek universe.
This fan-produced episode is impressive, but between the ship, the props, and the music/soundFX, they clearly want you to know there is a link between their material and the classical Star Trek universe. What would be impressive is if someone could get this much attention by producing an original pilot, distributed online (not a short, but an episode-length pilot.)
So there goes another argument. If they keep spamming blocked addresses, RBLs don't reduce backbone bandwidth usage either.
I would argue that as an incorrect interpretation. The spammer must not only successfully attempt to connect to the target ISP's box, they must be able to mail the text of the entire message. RBLs deny the spammer the ability to mail the text at worst (cutting down the amount of crap that needs to be accepted), and at best totally deny the spammer the ability to connect at all.
Thus, they can still try to send to blocked or bad addresses, but because the delivery handshake is refused, the message isn't sent, and backbone bandwidth is conserved.
Now, the above assumes that the ISP actually blocks based upon an RBL (ie, deny connection or delivery) - if they accept the connection and just filter (ie, tag the received message), then yes, your criticism would be valid, as no bandwidth would have been conserved.
Given then the AGIS netblocks are effectively black holes now, which ISP do I avoid in order to not get assigned one of these cured IPs?
For me the spammers won when I had to install filters to use my e-mail. I still report the bastards, but it's nothing more than a formality now - the ISPs who care about spam have cracked down, and the ISPs who don't care about spam (and who are based in places like China, safe from effective retribution) just ignore your reports. The declining reliability of e-mail (directly and indirectly caused by spam and worms) is an equally bad, if not worse problem - short of re-engineering the SMTP protocols to let you know if your message has been sent and read, I'm not sure what we can do.
At least some of my reports contribute to weighting for IPs when they add new listings to the RBLs.
It's more like refusing to accept cargo outbound to or inbound from certain countries, like say Cuba, Iraq, or Afghanistan (when the Taliban were in power.) Some countries still trade with them, and you're more than welcome to stay there, but don't expect to do any business with the US if you do.
If you're smart, you'll do some checking up on your ISP before you commit money to an operation that is going to hand you IP addresses that have been blackholed, and are now worthless.
I still have an old IBM keyboard. Thing weighs 8 pounds, has a crack in it from when it was thrown in the trash (which is where I rescued it), and is missing a bunch of key caps (the old IBMs had generic blank keys, with the letters printed on a little cap that fit on top.)
Works great for Counter Strike though...
I would have yelled "Kill the guy with the cellphone!" and let the people immediately surrounding him take care of the problem. Of course, this would have been during the midnight showing, so the fan base there would have been easier to incite to kill a cellphone wielding idiot.
Pioneer sells a jukebox system for $13,000+, DVD-R drives not included. I was looking at the system as a replacement for tape drives, and the sales rep I talked to basically told me to hold off until the Blue-laser drives get released in the states. Supposedly they'll deliver twice the current capacity for both CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, assuming that they ever get adopted here...
The pioneer rep I talk to recently basically said that double-sided DVD-Rs were used mainly in automated DVD jukeboxes. Because of handling issues (fingerprints, scratches, dust), most people with home burners don't use them - by the time you finished burning the first side, chances are you'd have ruined part of the second side. Either that, or after you finished the dual sided burn, at some point in the future, you'd ruin the side facing the top. In a jukebox, it doesn't matter since it's a controlled environment.
Mod me down, mod the parent up. I've got karma to burn, and the AC made some great points.
You could probably do this with guns that use electrically activated primers (yes, they exist, and are sold with the idea that without a moving firing pin, your shot should be steadier.) No matching RF tag, no power to the ignition coil. The problem is that there are so many existing conventional guns and so much existing conventional ammo, that very few benefits would be had in general, unless you were selling some really exotic ammo for specific purposes.
I'm curious that nobody's mentioned the smart gun example from the Lost in Space remake, where the "genius" kid turns his gun over to the bad guy, and authorizes him as a user. Socially engineering weapons access...
#1. A pure democracy IS mob rule! That's why we're supposed to have checks and balances - so that we can rein in the tyranny of the majority (and what a woefully undereducated majority it is...)
Basically, the problem is that there is a certain know-it-all portion of the population, that believes that people should be protected from themselves, even if it means depriving them of essential liberties. Whether they be extremist members of the religious right trying to ban violent games (and short skirts), or the litigious left trying to ban everything (from guns to gasoline engines), these are the people who believe that they have the right to curtail the rights of other people "for their own good."
There have always been these kinds of people, but never have they been given so much currency in our current society, where the people who are supposed to vote are more than content to let "experts" put out what they should think and do. That's why essential liberties are being lost - not because there are people who are willing to take them away, but because we as a people are willing to let them.
Go be a farmer. We need good food, we don't need more guns.
Actually, we need less food. Farming subsidies are artifically depressing the price of staple crops, and depriving farmers in low-income areas such as Africa from being able to make a living. The end result is them needing economic aid, when in reality, they could be producing enough food to feed not only themselves, but neighboring reigons as well. This is aside from the problems created by civil war and diamond/oil cartels in certain regions...
Not to mention, being a farmer even with subsidies is a hard existence. The costs of buying and maintaining equipment, buying seed, irrigation, and farm labor can drive you into bankruptcy within a few growing seasons if you get a run of bad weather. There's a reason that there are far fewer family farmers here in the states now than there were 20 years ago.
There aren't that many handgun makers out there, and they tend to stick together.
There aren't as many shooters anymore, and they tend to stick together as well. Look at what happened to the old Smith and Wesson (now under new management and trying to clear the S&W name) when they tried to cut a preferential deal with the Clinton administration. Everybody boycotted their guns, and they went under.
The only mainstream manufacturer I know of that is looking into smart gun tech is Colt, and that's because they're more or less abandoning the civilian market in favor of strict military/law enforcement. For those markets, smart gun tech sort of makes sense, especially if they can land a big contract.
The argument for handguns is primarily for concealed carry and close-quarter-combat (concealed carry is legal in portions of the US, ie Texas.) Shotguns and rifles are impractical for concealed carry, and rifles have too much penetration within a house. The liberals here in the states would rather you not have rifles or handguns at all, hunting be damned.
As for feeling safe, I'd recommend a good dog over a gun for your first line of defense any day. A gun is no good if you haven't enough warning to be prepared to use it. Set up a security zone around your house. Get a dog. Make sure your windows and doors are secure. Get an alarm. Then get a gun, and make sure you practice on a regular basis so you're able to use it when you need to.
My firearms instructor taught us to handle a gun safely, action open, gun unloaded, and we learned to do it without relying on the safety. Why? Some guns don't have safeties. Some guns have faulty safeties. Safeties are mechanical, and are thus subject to mechanical faults - as such, the resonsibility to keep the firearm safe and pointed in a safe direction is the reponsibility of the firearm handler, not the gun.
What is a Smart Gun? It's essentially one big-ass safety, regulated by some magic mechanism. As such, it's taking the liability for keeping the gun safe out of the hands of the person handling the gun, and putting it in the hands of the gun manufacturer (or inventor of the magic Smart Gun mechanism.) I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be the gun manufacturer or that inventor - the liability is just too high. The gun goes off - and they'll blame it on the gun, and not on the idiot who kept it loaded and pointed in an unsafe direction...
This law is nothing more than an gun ban dressed as a "safety" measure. It's one thing when California mandates electric vehicles, and requires that car manufacturers comply or lose the #1 market for automobiles in the US. It's another thing to ask the handgun industry, which makes very little money, and is continually under threat of liability, to re-tailor their products just for New Jersey. It'll be like when California required every model of handgun to pass "safety standards". To pass these standards, you have to pony up a lot of money to put your gun through their tests. End result: used handguns that were no longer in production became illegal to sell, and newer production handguns had to wait until the respective company paid the money to certify them. Presto - instant gun ban without mentioning the words "gun ban".
Thanks for the replies. I'm still fine-tuning my anti-spam strategies, every little bit of info helps.
It proves nothing of the sort. The United States is a big place. Much of the country is undeveloped, or rural. Most of these areas have the least restrictive gun laws, because there isn't any reason to restrict them. Those areas with very high population densities (cities) often have the most restrictive gun laws. They also have most of the murders. Should I then conclude that restrictive gun laws cause murders?
BTW, the reason we have so many convicts, is because we treat drug use (and the associated spilloff of crimnal activity) as a crime. Please factor that into your calculations the next time when you want to compare apples with oranges.
I'm not sure the FCC even got into the picture. The people involved got many complaints from readers who read about the description of their setup, and went ahead and cut their power in response.
And have there been any problems with false positives? What about business that was lost because your auto-ack was never replied to (perhaps because it got filtered at the other end...)
The problem isn't that people aren't taking basic precautions (I agree, there's a lot you can do on the client side), but that the infrastructure is being exploited by criminals for criminal activities, and this abuse is interfering with legitimate communication/commerce. The time I spent to set up SpamAssassin was well worth it, as it saved me time I used to spend dealing with spam manually. However, that time was not billable, and thus becomes part of my overhead. The crap that happens when I reply to a customer, and my reply gets filtered because of a misconfigured filter on their end (either they personally, or their ISP, or a router along the way), is also an example of the degredation of e-mail as a useful service.
The end analysis is that without taking forceful action (ie, illegal vigilante tactics), the next step in the battle against spam is really legal. We've blocked or closed as many open relays as we can. We have blacklists we can subscribe to. We have tools like SpamAssassin to do filtering. Marginally competent people can implement Procmail filters to get rid of e-mail worms, and selectivly build blacklists (or if they want to wall off completely, whitelists.) So either declare spam illegal, or have everyone go to whitelists, and deal with the inefficiencies associated with that...
BTW, do you whitelist customers too? What if they're not a customer yet, and are just e-mailing with questions, or to request a quote? And how much CPU time and disk space would you need if every customer at your ISP had the same spam load, and decided to implement filtering?
Techinical question - when you filter, do you trash, or do you move to a folder? Just wondering how much time you use to review items that have been filtered...