Well, I went to the midnight opening on wedensday night, with plans to my 9am lecture the following morning. Woke up to the alarm, way too tired to get up, so I slept till noon. Later that day, I was chatting to someone who went, and it turned out that the lecturer was an hour late as a result of sleeping in, and used the remaining hour to talk about human fallibility (this is an OOP paper).
Makes sense, what would a spammer need to close accounts with ISPs for? As long as they're open, they're useable...its only when the ISP shuts them down that you need a new one
The obvious conclusion: to shut your account down, become a spammer.
I suggest that unless you want to do something quickly, use LaTeX, its not bad to learn (check out the 'Essential LaTeX' guide to get started), and the output looks incrediably professional. Most of the computer science department here insists on it, and I'm slowly converting other people:)
I am looking into doing something involving genetic algorithms as a research project. One idea that was proposed that, the more I think about it, the more intriguing it becomes, is the concept of geography. That is, having distinct sub-populations that rarely cross-breed. I'm thinking about implementing a simulation of this, perhaps with an environment that is similar to one that these real robots work in. It would be interesting to see if several subpopulations that rarely leak across would introduce severly new and effective tactics.
Turns out that Tierra didn't have spatiality (needed to be more restrictive on who could sleep with who) and mutation rates (some power law math that's way over my head) set right.
uhh, in Tierra, the creatures are asexual. There was no concept of one creature sleeping with another, as all their children were clones of themselves.
What is the point of this? So we know when the spam is 'trusted'. We can't just filter everything that is not trusted out, unless all we want is 'trusted' spam. About the closest we can do is filter all stuff marked as 'trusted', and then i can't see any spmming companies going for this idea at all.
After ICQ went pear-shaped, I took a look around for other systems. I'd heard about Jabber, and so thought to give it a try. It claims to have interoperability with AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo. The first two have their fair share of issues (I don't use AIM however). Somewhat ironically, MSN is the only one that has had no real interoperability troubles. The main way that AOL blocks jabber servers from AIM is by blocking the IP address. Last I heard, the servers blocked were Jabber.org, Jabber.com and Theoretic.com. However, the decentralised nature of jabber means that this isn't a huge problem, just a little annoying. Many jabber clients (and its open source, so there are a few) allow you to set it up so that while your jabber server may be one server (say jabber.org), your AIM transport may be on another server (say jabber.cz), and your ICQ one on yet another one. This means that if AOL blocks one server, then there are others that will work OK still. You can even set up your own if you like. My plan when ICQ fell over was to convince all my friends to move (Jabber is a technically superior system, anyway), and most were happy with the change.
From playing with Jabber, I learnt a little bit about how AOL tries to block it. It does this by first of all requiring the client to send in a CRC of its own binary. To combat this, the transport was rewritten to allow for a client binary to be placed with it, and it checksummed that. When AOL cottoned on, they started blocking by IP address. As the AIM and ICQ servers now appear to be the same server, ICQ also has problems. Those who were using older ICQ clients or something like LICQ when ICQ changed protocol will know how all of a sudden the messages stopped going through. The nice thing about Jabber when this happened, was that the transport upgrades were mostly transparent to the user (excepting that it didn't work for a little while). Now the ICQ transport is quite good (where it works), except for a few minor issues.
Generate a script that writes "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", it uses every letter in the english alphabet, over and over just to throw off their stats.
Of course, the result of this is that the conclusion will be that everybody has a broken S key.
While I haven't seriously used borlands C++ (I used to have a really old version around somewhere), i actually still get paid to program in Turbo Pascal 7. I work in the psychology department of a university, where TP7 is the de-facto standard, as there is a lot of already-existing code out there to work on, and a lot of people in that field who only know a little bit of programming and thats in Pascal. (For those unsure, this is TP7 with the text-based IDE writing stuff to run in DOS...IIRC the copyright date is 1991.)
Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today.
Unless I'm mistaken, the purpose of advertising is to reduce costs by causing more of the product to be sold. How can they justify increasing the cost of something to offset advertising? If they stopped advertising, sold less of the product, but made as much or more money, would that not be the same to them, and better to the consumer? (And then, file sharing utilities would be good as they would provide the record companies with cheap advertising for their low-cost albums, and even more people wold buy them).
This is quite a bit fancier than putting "logout" in someones.login when they leave their terminal unguarded.
The problem with doing something like this under a system requiring user accounts is that once the person discovers that they can't just turn it on and get a point-and-drool interface, they'll erase it and start from scratch. Perhaps if you wanted something like this (and had a bit of technical skill) you could have it boot from a small partition (I mean, how many users know much about that?) that checks to see if what its booting into is what it should be (ie has windows been installed where linux should be), and if so alters something on that OS to make it phone home (obviously, something different for every OS that may be installed would have to be done, but this is hypothetical), and then proceeds to boot the new OS normally.
In the case of many Linux machines on dialups with a dedicated phone line, they are told to dialup on boot anyway, so that would give you some oppertunity to trace it, by checking the number that it is calling from. However, that is assuming that someone sets everything up, including the modem cable, before turning it on the first time.
On another note, how come erasing everything didn't remove Timbuktu? Does it live in the System Folder only?
Software to catch students copying the code of others has been in place at the university I am at for quite some time. When I was in second year (2000), all our code (in Pascal) was checked against each others using some sort of comparison system. I'm also currently tutoring a first-year introductory programming paper (in Java) where a similar system has just been put in place to check the students code. This is significantly more effective than having us try to spot people who we think are copying, and allows us to pinpoint people early, before it becomes to the harder labs, so giving those who are cheating a chance to stop, and actually learn the material themselves.
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Vatican 2.0: So easy to use, no wonder it's number 1!
Warez versions of Vatican 1.0 thru Vatican 2.0 are avaliable for download here.
Well, I went to the midnight opening on wedensday night, with plans to my 9am lecture the following morning. Woke up to the alarm, way too tired to get up, so I slept till noon. Later that day, I was chatting to someone who went, and it turned out that the lecturer was an hour late as a result of sleeping in, and used the remaining hour to talk about human fallibility (this is an OOP paper).
Makes sense, what would a spammer need to close accounts with ISPs for? As long as they're open, they're useable...its only when the ISP shuts them down that you need a new one
The obvious conclusion: to shut your account down, become a spammer.
I suggest that unless you want to do something quickly, use LaTeX, its not bad to learn (check out the 'Essential LaTeX' guide to get started), and the output looks incrediably professional. Most of the computer science department here insists on it, and I'm slowly converting other people :)
Well, given the nature of open source, it would only be a matter of time before someone created AbiAntEater
I'm more curious about what someone said about AbiSpread...would that be Ant porn?
Here in New Zealand you won't be allowed to. You would have to use your 'flower and incense holder' instead.
"I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up!"
....has to be NULL!
I am looking into doing something involving genetic algorithms as a research project. One idea that was proposed that, the more I think about it, the more intriguing it becomes, is the concept of geography. That is, having distinct sub-populations that rarely cross-breed. I'm thinking about implementing a simulation of this, perhaps with an environment that is similar to one that these real robots work in. It would be interesting to see if several subpopulations that rarely leak across would introduce severly new and effective tactics.
uhh, in Tierra, the creatures are asexual. There was no concept of one creature sleeping with another, as all their children were clones of themselves.
What is the point of this? So we know when the spam is 'trusted'. We can't just filter everything that is not trusted out, unless all we want is 'trusted' spam. About the closest we can do is filter all stuff marked as 'trusted', and then i can't see any spmming companies going for this idea at all.
From playing with Jabber, I learnt a little bit about how AOL tries to block it. It does this by first of all requiring the client to send in a CRC of its own binary. To combat this, the transport was rewritten to allow for a client binary to be placed with it, and it checksummed that. When AOL cottoned on, they started blocking by IP address. As the AIM and ICQ servers now appear to be the same server, ICQ also has problems. Those who were using older ICQ clients or something like LICQ when ICQ changed protocol will know how all of a sudden the messages stopped going through. The nice thing about Jabber when this happened, was that the transport upgrades were mostly transparent to the user (excepting that it didn't work for a little while). Now the ICQ transport is quite good (where it works), except for a few minor issues.
Of course, the result of this is that the conclusion will be that everybody has a broken S key.
I think you meant jumps.
While I haven't seriously used borlands C++ (I used to have a really old version around somewhere), i actually still get paid to program in Turbo Pascal 7. I work in the psychology department of a university, where TP7 is the de-facto standard, as there is a lot of already-existing code out there to work on, and a lot of people in that field who only know a little bit of programming and thats in Pascal. (For those unsure, this is TP7 with the text-based IDE writing stuff to run in DOS...IIRC the copyright date is 1991.)
Unless I'm mistaken, the purpose of advertising is to reduce costs by causing more of the product to be sold. How can they justify increasing the cost of something to offset advertising? If they stopped advertising, sold less of the product, but made as much or more money, would that not be the same to them, and better to the consumer? (And then, file sharing utilities would be good as they would provide the record companies with cheap advertising for their low-cost albums, and even more people wold buy them).
This is quite a bit fancier than putting "logout" in someones .login when they leave their terminal unguarded.
The problem with doing something like this under a system requiring user accounts is that once the person discovers that they can't just turn it on and get a point-and-drool interface, they'll erase it and start from scratch. Perhaps if you wanted something like this (and had a bit of technical skill) you could have it boot from a small partition (I mean, how many users know much about that?) that checks to see if what its booting into is what it should be (ie has windows been installed where linux should be), and if so alters something on that OS to make it phone home (obviously, something different for every OS that may be installed would have to be done, but this is hypothetical), and then proceeds to boot the new OS normally.
In the case of many Linux machines on dialups with a dedicated phone line, they are told to dialup on boot anyway, so that would give you some oppertunity to trace it, by checking the number that it is calling from. However, that is assuming that someone sets everything up, including the modem cable, before turning it on the first time.
On another note, how come erasing everything didn't remove Timbuktu? Does it live in the System Folder only?
Software to catch students copying the code of others has been in place at the university I am at for quite some time. When I was in second year (2000), all our code (in Pascal) was checked against each others using some sort of comparison system. I'm also currently tutoring a first-year introductory programming paper (in Java) where a similar system has just been put in place to check the students code. This is significantly more effective than having us try to spot people who we think are copying, and allows us to pinpoint people early, before it becomes to the harder labs, so giving those who are cheating a chance to stop, and actually learn the material themselves.