Mods, please don't mod me down for being redundant -- this guy is in WAY over his head.
#1 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. #2 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE KNOWS HOW TO PROPERLY LOCKOUT/TAGOUT THE POWER. #3 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE HAS THE PROPER TOOLS FOR THE JOB. #4 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE WILL KNOW EXACTLY HOW TO FIX IT, AND CAN EVEN PROPOSE WAYS TO REPLACE IT TO MAKE IT A LOT SAFER! #5 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE KNOWS THE LOCAL BUILDING CODES; CHANCES ARE A REPAIR OF THIS MAGNITUDE MEANS YOU HAVE TO BRING THE REPAIRED UNIT UP TO TODAY'S CODE, NOT THE CODE OF 20 YEARS AGO.
In short:
HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN.
Don't put your life on the line. I guarantee, as much as the electrician may cost, it is worth it for you to have years left to enjoy this precious gift we call "existence."
Mods, please don't mod me down for being redundant -- this guy is in WAY over his head.
#1 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN.
#2 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE KNOWS HOW TO PROPERLY LOCKOUT/TAGOUT THE POWER.
#3 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE HAS THE PROPER TOOLS FOR THE JOB.
#4 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE WILL KNOW EXACTLY HOW TO FIX IT, AND CAN EVEN PROPOSE WAYS TO REPLACE IT TO MAKE IT A LOT SAFER!
#5 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE KNOWS THE LOCAL BUILDING CODES; CHANCES ARE A REPAIR OF THIS MAGNITUDE MEANS YOU HAVE TO BRING THE REPAIRED UNIT UP TO TODAY'S CODE, NOT THE CODE OF 20 YEARS AGO.
In short:
HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN.
Don't put your life on the line. I guarantee, as much as the electrician may cost, it is worth it for you to have years left to enjoy this precious gift we call "existence."
Consider all the webmail or non-"I run my own" people out there.
Our university allots 10MB. Hotmail allots 2MB.
I went on vacation last February, and hit my quota in three days, not because I did anything, but because the spammers were mass-blasting the accounts.
We pay for it in the fees we pay for access, even if it's just our $10.95/month to the local dialup. We pay for it in LOST MESSAGES when the fucking spammers fill our disk quotas. We pay for it in the fees our ISP incurs on ever-larger disks and on customer support calls to try to deal with it. We pay for it in the lost integrity of our communications system when admins like me decide "fuck it, it's not worth it" and block everything from Asia, period. We pay for it in the time we spend deleting it, or installing filters, teaching the filters to recognize it, deleting it again when they forge addresses. Random people pay for it when someone spoofs the return address and they get a bunch of "fuck you spammer" emails from people.
The spammers should pay for it with something very, very painful. I'd say their lives, but I'd rather they suffer first.
The "unsure" feature directly combats the latest Spammer technique -- filter poisoning.
You've all seen it work; the Spammers don't just send you the same spam once, they send you it 5 to 20 times, and they include a clipping from the headlines or something under their pitch.
They're not doing it to get that one mail past to you. They're actually HOPING that you classify all 20 mails as spam.
Why?
Because every time you classify that mail as spam, EVERY SINGLE WORD of that news clipping is "poisoned" inside the filter, and becomes an indicator of a spam. Then you turn around, and get an email from someone legitimate using those common words... and it gets wrongly classified too.
Enough false positives, and the spammers win, because they'll get you to turn the filter back off.
Enough is enough -- time to establish open hunting season on Spammers.
Hilary Rosen, equating trading music over email, or ICQ, or any other "one on one" to tape trading, despite the fact that the RIAA spent its time in previous decades railing against tapes and trying to stop people from selling technology to record tapes at home.
Who does the bitch think she's kidding? Adapt or perish, RIAA. I hope you perish.
In the test case, they broke their own rules for success:
(A)the quality of their SmartDoc software is suspect (it "only took a couple of days to put together"),
(B)and it's not something people really want/need except a slight niche that very possibly will use it once or twice, and never again, for what it's used for.
Further, there are any number of things that skew the results:
#1 -- shareware that is crippled inevitably gets really bad reviews on shareware sites, while PoNC gets nice reviews, especially when the software is something people tend to want. As far as utilities go, the community has decided that they don't like crippleware. While this attracts more freeloaders, there are many one-shot users, and the reviews will steer those who intend to buy towards non-crippled software unless the crippleware is just completely brilliant.
#2 -- Prevalence of one-shot or "once in a blue moon" users abound. Crippling the features isn't a great way to get them to buy; offering EXTRA above and beyond the functionality, such as shareware games in episodes, was the best way to go about it. Offer a free download, and a pay-for-full download, and see what happens.
Ok... they claim it will keep the RIAA away from your KaZaa files.
Okay... how does this work again?
Security key -> but Windows accesses the data anyways as requested.
KaZaa -- is a program in memory. Which will request the files. The request goes through the motherboard, which (Hey, Presto!) happily hands over the files to be sent right along your internet connection.
This does nothing to stop the RIAA from scanning you. All it does is make it a tad more difficult for them to prove in court that you were sharing files from that drive.
That is, unless they subpoena the motherboard to acquire the evidence.
You are the exception that proves the statistical rule.
As a statistical rule, if a kid is gonna be pushed ahead, keep the public schools the hell away from him/her.
Reposting with proper formatting -- why the hell "HTML Formatted" keeps popping up as default I'll never know. Doubly so why the hell "HTML Formatted" strips out basic end-of-line characters.
Anyhow: Well no, there are two MAJOR differences between public and private schools.
#1, Private schools have the authority to kick out and/or punish the troublemakers. Being ahead of the curve is actually encouraged, and the teachers who are there have (and tend to exercise) the power to adequately stop any harassment. This includes kicking out the worst.
#2, The parents of the children in a private school, not always but with a much better tendency, have managed to impress on their kids the importance of education, and have taken something of an active hand in raising said children.
Compare these with the public institution; teachers have no enforcement power, if they so much as send a kid off for detention they risk getting sued; the guidance counselors are more interested in punishing the victims, telling them it's all their fault for "attracting attention"; the parents of the bullies and harassers likely don't give a shit or aren't around.
Yes, I was pushed ahead. I actually had a guidance counselor suggest that I deliberately get lower grades than I could on some tests, so that my name wasn't always at the top of the grading list and thus attracting attention.
Rather than punish or correct the bullying students, they were focused on "what can we do to stop them noticing him as a target." This is the effect of letting liberals run the schools. My middle school VP actually said "there is no such thing as a bully." So, when there was a fight, it didn't matter if one student was attacked by three others, and had a broken nose and black eyes while the three had not so much as a scratch; all four got detention. The bullies didn't care, their grades were crap anyways -- the one they attacked had to miss tests and class time. The worst part is that his opinion was commonplace. Everyone wants to "understand" the bullies, make them "respect" the other students, make them "see that the other students are worthwhile individuals too."
My parents had to threaten to sue the school district when they kept throwing one boy into study groups with my sister, despite the fact that he'd attacked her twice.
"But if you teach the kid some social skills they'll probably be alright."
BULLCRAP.
The type of bullies that exist there don't have social skills to start with. All they have is brute force. Why do you think they made us all read Lord of the Flies? It was an allegory for the kind of crap that went on at recess or in the halls. When the entirety of your social structure is based on who can beat up who, no amount of "teach social skills" is gonna protect the kid.
If you skipped a grade and were fine, you either were pushed ahead in the 60s when schools still had disciplinary control, OR you were in a rich neighborhood to begin with that had well-paid teachers and lots of money to throw in to the school system, not to mention a low ratio of bused-in inner city brats whose parents didn't care what they did.
The solution is a certain modicum of force. You can reason with a college age student. The brains of the vast majority of students at grade/middle school level, on the other hand, haven't and may not ever evolve past "might makes right."
Well no, there are two MAJOR differences between public and private schools.
#1, Private schools have the authority to kick out and/or punish the troublemakers. Being ahead of the curve is actually encouraged, and the teachers who are there have (and tend to exercise) the power to adequately stop any harassment. This includes kicking out the worst.
#2, The parents of the children in a private school, not always but with a much better tendency, have managed to impress on their kids the importance of education, and have taken something of an active hand in raising said children.
Compare these with the public institution; teachers have no enforcement power, if they so much as send a kid off for detention they risk getting sued; the guidance counselors are more interested in punishing the victims, telling them it's all their fault for "attracting attention"; the parents of the bullies and harassers likely don't give a shit or aren't around.
Yes, I was pushed ahead. I actually had a guidance counselor suggest that I deliberately get lower grades than I could on some tests, so that my name wasn't always at the top of the grading list and thus attracting attention. Rather than punish or correct the bullying students, they were focused on "what can we do to stop them noticing him as a target."
This is the effect of letting liberals run the schools. My middle school VP actually said "there is no such thing as a bully." So, when there was a fight, it didn't matter if one student was attacked by three others, and had a broken nose and black eyes while the three had not so much as a scratch; all four got detention. The bullies didn't care, their grades were crap anyways -- the one they attacked had to miss tests and class time. The worst part is that his opinion was commonplace. Everyone wants to "understand" the bullies, make them "respect" the other students, make them "see that the other students are worthwhile individuals too."
My parents had to threaten to sue the school district when they kept throwing one boy into study groups with my sister, despite the fact that he'd attacked her twice.
"But if you teach the kid some social skills they'll probably be alright."
BULLCRAP. The type of bullies that exist there don't have social skills to start with. All they have is brute force. Why do you think they made us all read Lord of the Flies? It was an allegory for the kind of crap that went on at recess or in the halls.
When the entirety of your social structure is based on who can beat up who, no amount of "teach social skills" is gonna protect the kid.
If you skipped a grade and were fine, you either were pushed ahead in the 60s when schools still had disciplinary control, OR you were in a rich neighborhood to begin with that had well-paid teachers and lots of money to throw in to the school system, not to mention a low ratio of bused-in inner city brats whose parents didn't care what they did.
The solution is a certain modicum of force. You can reason with a college age student. The brains of the vast majority of students at grade/middle school level, on the other hand, haven't and may not ever evolve past "might makes right."
No, the Jocks are definitely harder.
Ever been stuffed into a locker?
Ever had your bag shredded?
Ever had to try to explain to a teacher that these pieces of paper *were* your report, until the captain of the football team got ahold of them, and watch as the dumb fuck gets off with just a warning because your school needs him around to win games?
The worst of it is: do not EVER, EVER let your kid get pushed ahead a grade in public schools. I guarantee, any kid pushed ahead, will STILL be bright enough to break the grading curve in his/her new grade. Plus, they'll be smaller, so the all-important things (gym class, how hard you can hit a baseball, if you can so much as lift a finger to fight back) will be against them. If you ever have that chance, put the kid into a private school pronto, where the teachers at least give a fuck about the students' welfare.
1. Robots, even at that point, will not be cheaper than humans. Consider the price point; you have to have an entire robotic assembly at the burger place, you have to pay a mechanic to be on-call at all hours of the day to fix it at moment's notice, if something breaks down likely the entire thing is shut down instead of "Oh, I'm sorry, we're all out of chicken nuggets today, can I offer you a chicken sandwich instead?" or even, "I'm sorry, our fryer is broken down right now, but we can still give you your sandwich and a discount since we don't have fries."
2. Human adaptability. Even the DUMBEST of humans understands the phrase "hold the lettuce." (well, at least the dumbest that still have the motor control and aptitude to convince someone to hire them.) They may get it wrong, but they understand the phrasing. With a robot you have to code in every possible specialty order, or else it's just not allowed. Given the number of people out there who hate mayonnaise, or have a tomato allergy, or don't like pickles, or have other odd tastes, coding in specialty orders is not a mundane task, and it's going to make people nuts.
3. After-hours cleanup. One of the "nice" things about having a human staff is that you can make them do multiple jobs; the guy closing the shop, for example, cleans up the restuarant as well as serving orders for the first 90% of his shift. When times get slow they kick one or two of the order takers out to wipe down tables.
You could try, but I'm guessing that by 2050 it will still cost more overall to use robots than it will to simply pay humans. Food service is an adaptable task, unlike making cars or putting together electronics, which is a task done millions of times with absolutely no changes.
That works IF the mail is being sent through the ISP's mail servers.
However, most spammers run their own mail server. All the ISP sees is a high-traffic data stream heading out into the void. Chances are it bounces off half a dozen places before it reaches the myriad of open relays the spammer is working with.
Chances are further that the spammer is using multiple open relays and multiple or just forged return accounts.
Now if the ISP were intercepting everyone's datastream and analyzing it, realtime, that theoretically COULD be done... but the processing power just isn't there.
For example, I accept emails from Amazon. Why? Because I buy books from them. When something comes up that I might be interested in, I like hearing. Likewise, I accept the occasional email from online computer parts stores I've bought from. Chances are I am not buying again, but if the right offer came along I might, and I have been a customer of theirs.
However, two things need to happen:
Fraudulent email (porn, penis junk, get rich quick, etc...) needs to be stopped, except for people who bought from those people before. It should be all opt-in.
Sales of customer lists, of lists of emails, should be ILLEGAL. I have bought a service or product from you, and only from you. I have no business relationship with your cousin, your "partner" business down the street, or anyone else you might think to send my information to.
If this happened, we wouldn't mind nearly as much. Legitimate mail, from companies I legitimately have dealt with, is fine. The problem is, for every one of those emails I get, there are 5,000 fraudulent spams.
The trick is: the Spammer, him/her/itself (well he/she WILL be an "it" if I ever find them), wants to be completely transparent.
They send mail. You see mail. In their depraved mind, you then deal with company that commissioned mail.
First of all, I want to strangle the people who commissioned said mail, especially mr. "Free golf wedge, best in world" and the fuck from K-Mart marketing who bought a cd full of email addresses and added them to K-Mart's bluelight email list.
However, that's not the point.
Think about how we filter. In order to have a realistic opt-out sequence, we have to be able to reach the spammer back. Either by email, or clicking a link, or something of that sort.
The MOMENT something that static is in the email, however, ISP filters will catch it and promptly ban any email that they send with that indicator tag in it.
See the trick? It's all based on evading filters. You can't legitimately provide an opt-out solution, because then that becomes an identifying tag for people to filter you away.
And the last thing spammers want to see is people actually opt out anyways, because if they WERE honoring it, they couldn't claim to be mailing to 50 million people. They make their cash partially on the claim that they reach a huge number of people in order to get responses from a smaller number, just as TV shows do with ratings and ads.
Yes, it assesses the email on the basis of "15 bad words", but it also assesses on the "15 good words" or words that indicate it's legitimate.
Chances are they have only one or two of the "bad" words (penis, viagra, v*i*a*g*r*a, etc...). Perhaps less once they munge it so that things are broken up into pieces. The HTML tricks are all designed so that the filter doesn't realize that you have one of the "bad" words split up into sections.
The insertion of "good" text is designed to try to trip 2-3 "nonspam" indicators, thus causing the filter to pass the mail as "good".
The insertion of the "good" text also serves, if you use a bayesian filter, to "poison" your filter so that legitimate mail using those same words has a tendency to get tagged as spam.
It's a three-pronged attack: #1 -- munge out the bad words #2 -- drop in "innocent" text to make it look legit #3 -- send in such volume that the "innocent" text gets poisoned in the filter and starts causing false positives.
What they're really after, of course, is number 3; if they can cause enough false positives, people will turn off the filters again. That's why they think nothing of sending the same spam 500 times to the same person in three days: when they are using a technique like this, every spam that gets filtered and tagged as spam furthers goal #3.
I still say the best way to deal with spammers is with a good old non-technical solution: a two-by-four upside the head.
Come on -- the whole neo-Luddite "cars destroy our environment" bullcrap is just that, bullcrap, like the rest of the story.
Lest we forget, the automobile was supposed to eliminate the troubles large cities had with pollution in their days. What pollution you say? HORSE CRAP. HORSE PISS. TONS OF IT. ALL OVER THE STREETS.
Anyone who bitches about cars and how polluting they are, I invite you to go visit a horse farm somedays and step around to the barn right before they muck it out. Now remember that the STREETS of New York used to look like that.
Faustian bargain? Please.
It's more likely that they want to do more COMPLEX shots in the same amount of time it used to take to do a simpler version of the same shot.
Think about it this way -- it took the same amount of time to create Toy Story as it did to create Monsters, Inc. (roughly).
But, Toy Story doesn't spend a whole lot of time dealing with difficult to render stuff like fur. Sully walks into the scene on the other hand, watch the rendering have to keep pace with all that hair.
The trick isn't really to get it to photorealistic real-time, anyhow, for what Hollywood needs. The trick is to balance the following things:
1. Renderable in a decent time frame (e.g. a couple hours to render a 10-minute or so scene). The main point here is to get it rendering quick enough that (a) you can fix bugs and (b) you can fix bugs in time to meet the deadlines.
2. Ramp the quality as high as it can go.
In all honesty, Hollywood won't give us realtime photorealistic rendering. That's being left to the gaming computer companies so we have to wait another 5-10 years.
Why? Hollywood just doesn't need it. They can render the scene or tape it from live actors, either way they have to go in and someone has to play editor to fit all the pieces together anyways.
Isn't it obvious? Hacking is an expression of our inner need. And the inner need we are expressing is for Knowledge, pure and simple.
The people who hack, today, are the people who would have been working on their cars 30 years ago.:)
Playing a marathon game, co-op with a friend... got to the Flood at 4AM on a stormy night.
Geez, that was crazy.
Likewise w/ Eternal Darkness... the sanity stat was the craziest thing I ever saw. That and the fact that most of the sanity effects were geared at the PLAYER.
I still remember seeing a BSOD come up... man that was wierd. That and the fact that I got so into it that I actually went and answered the knocking door... not in game but at my house...
The reason American McGee goes after the PARTICULAR public domain works he does, is that WE ALL GREW UP WATCHING THEM. Think about it -- until two years after Home Alone was out, what movie was played EVERY SINGLE THANKSGIVING? Why, the Wizard of Oz of course. What was one of the fundamental Disney movies that everyone loves seeing and showing kids to this day? Their take on Alice in Wonderland, naturally.
American McGee makes his living raping the public domain (er... actually literally) just as Disney does, and he goes after the things that we STILL remember that are in the public domain. Without something we all remember, the gag doesn't work. Further, it has to be something he can twist really, really far.
Parodying Disney stuff might have worked, but that's inviting legal action far more surely than parodying some piece of crap like Strawberry Shortcake. Besides, there are artists who already make a living drawing Disney toons having sex, so that's been done.
So they parodied something we've all been taught was "sweet" and "innocent." American Greetings, on the other hand, happen to be a bunch of stiffs who can't take a joke.
Hell, even the Hormel people realized after their first court filing that Monty Python had done a pretty good job with the spam song and got a sense of humor. Time to ring the phones of American Greetings off the hook to give them a whack with the metaphorical cluebat.
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Mods, please don't mod me down for being redundant -- this guy is in WAY over his head.
#1 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN.
#2 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE KNOWS HOW TO PROPERLY LOCKOUT/TAGOUT THE POWER.
#3 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE HAS THE PROPER TOOLS FOR THE JOB.
#4 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE WILL KNOW EXACTLY HOW TO FIX IT, AND CAN EVEN PROPOSE WAYS TO REPLACE IT TO MAKE IT A LOT SAFER!
#5 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE KNOWS THE LOCAL BUILDING CODES; CHANCES ARE A REPAIR OF THIS MAGNITUDE MEANS YOU HAVE TO BRING THE REPAIRED UNIT UP TO TODAY'S CODE, NOT THE CODE OF 20 YEARS AGO.
In short:
HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN.
Don't put your life on the line. I guarantee, as much as the electrician may cost, it is worth it for you to have years left to enjoy this precious gift we call "existence."
Mods, please don't mod me down for being redundant -- this guy is in WAY over his head. #1 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. #2 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE KNOWS HOW TO PROPERLY LOCKOUT/TAGOUT THE POWER. #3 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE HAS THE PROPER TOOLS FOR THE JOB. #4 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE WILL KNOW EXACTLY HOW TO FIX IT, AND CAN EVEN PROPOSE WAYS TO REPLACE IT TO MAKE IT A LOT SAFER! #5 -- HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. HE KNOWS THE LOCAL BUILDING CODES; CHANCES ARE A REPAIR OF THIS MAGNITUDE MEANS YOU HAVE TO BRING THE REPAIRED UNIT UP TO TODAY'S CODE, NOT THE CODE OF 20 YEARS AGO. In short: HIRE A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN. Don't put your life on the line. I guarantee, as much as the electrician may cost, it is worth it for you to have years left to enjoy this precious gift we call "existence."
You moron.
Consider all the webmail or non-"I run my own" people out there.
Our university allots 10MB. Hotmail allots 2MB.
I went on vacation last February, and hit my quota in three days, not because I did anything, but because the spammers were mass-blasting the accounts.
We pay for it in the fees we pay for access, even if it's just our $10.95/month to the local dialup.
We pay for it in LOST MESSAGES when the fucking spammers fill our disk quotas.
We pay for it in the fees our ISP incurs on ever-larger disks and on customer support calls to try to deal with it.
We pay for it in the lost integrity of our communications system when admins like me decide "fuck it, it's not worth it" and block everything from Asia, period.
We pay for it in the time we spend deleting it, or installing filters, teaching the filters to recognize it, deleting it again when they forge addresses.
Random people pay for it when someone spoofs the return address and they get a bunch of "fuck you spammer" emails from people.
The spammers should pay for it with something very, very painful. I'd say their lives, but I'd rather they suffer first.
The "unsure" feature directly combats the latest Spammer technique -- filter poisoning.
You've all seen it work; the Spammers don't just send you the same spam once, they send you it 5 to 20 times, and they include a clipping from the headlines or something under their pitch.
They're not doing it to get that one mail past to you. They're actually HOPING that you classify all 20 mails as spam.
Why?
Because every time you classify that mail as spam, EVERY SINGLE WORD of that news clipping is "poisoned" inside the filter, and becomes an indicator of a spam. Then you turn around, and get an email from someone legitimate using those common words... and it gets wrongly classified too.
Enough false positives, and the spammers win, because they'll get you to turn the filter back off.
Enough is enough -- time to establish open hunting season on Spammers.
Hilary Rosen, equating trading music over email, or ICQ, or any other "one on one" to tape trading, despite the fact that the RIAA spent its time in previous decades railing against tapes and trying to stop people from selling technology to record tapes at home.
Who does the bitch think she's kidding? Adapt or perish, RIAA. I hope you perish.
Look at the experiments.
In the test case, they broke their own rules for success:
(A)the quality of their SmartDoc software is suspect (it "only took a couple of days to put together"),
(B)and it's not something people really want/need except a slight niche that very possibly will use it once or twice, and never again, for what it's used for.
Further, there are any number of things that skew the results:
#1 -- shareware that is crippled inevitably gets really bad reviews on shareware sites, while PoNC gets nice reviews, especially when the software is something people tend to want. As far as utilities go, the community has decided that they don't like crippleware. While this attracts more freeloaders, there are many one-shot users, and the reviews will steer those who intend to buy towards non-crippled software unless the crippleware is just completely brilliant.
#2 -- Prevalence of one-shot or "once in a blue moon" users abound. Crippling the features isn't a great way to get them to buy; offering EXTRA above and beyond the functionality, such as shareware games in episodes, was the best way to go about it. Offer a free download, and a pay-for-full download, and see what happens.
Ok... they claim it will keep the RIAA away from your KaZaa files.
Okay... how does this work again?
Security key -> but Windows accesses the data anyways as requested.
KaZaa -- is a program in memory. Which will request the files. The request goes through the motherboard, which (Hey, Presto!) happily hands over the files to be sent right along your internet connection.
This does nothing to stop the RIAA from scanning you. All it does is make it a tad more difficult for them to prove in court that you were sharing files from that drive.
That is, unless they subpoena the motherboard to acquire the evidence.
You are the exception that proves the statistical rule. As a statistical rule, if a kid is gonna be pushed ahead, keep the public schools the hell away from him/her.
Reposting with proper formatting -- why the hell "HTML Formatted" keeps popping up as default I'll never know. Doubly so why the hell "HTML Formatted" strips out basic end-of-line characters.
Anyhow:
Well no, there are two MAJOR differences between public and private schools.
#1, Private schools have the authority to kick out and/or punish the troublemakers. Being ahead of the curve is actually encouraged, and the teachers who are there have (and tend to exercise) the power to adequately stop any harassment. This includes kicking out the worst.
#2, The parents of the children in a private school, not always but with a much better tendency, have managed to impress on their kids the importance of education, and have taken something of an active hand in raising said children.
Compare these with the public institution; teachers have no enforcement power, if they so much as send a kid off for detention they risk getting sued; the guidance counselors are more interested in punishing the victims, telling them it's all their fault for "attracting attention"; the parents of the bullies and harassers likely don't give a shit or aren't around.
Yes, I was pushed ahead. I actually had a guidance counselor suggest that I deliberately get lower grades than I could on some tests, so that my name wasn't always at the top of the grading list and thus attracting attention.
Rather than punish or correct the bullying students, they were focused on "what can we do to stop them noticing him as a target." This is the effect of letting liberals run the schools. My middle school VP actually said "there is no such thing as a bully." So, when there was a fight, it didn't matter if one student was attacked by three others, and had a broken nose and black eyes while the three had not so much as a scratch; all four got detention. The bullies didn't care, their grades were crap anyways -- the one they attacked had to miss tests and class time. The worst part is that his opinion was commonplace. Everyone wants to "understand" the bullies, make them "respect" the other students, make them "see that the other students are worthwhile individuals too."
My parents had to threaten to sue the school district when they kept throwing one boy into study groups with my sister, despite the fact that he'd attacked her twice.
"But if you teach the kid some social skills they'll probably be alright."
BULLCRAP.
The type of bullies that exist there don't have social skills to start with. All they have is brute force. Why do you think they made us all read Lord of the Flies? It was an allegory for the kind of crap that went on at recess or in the halls. When the entirety of your social structure is based on who can beat up who, no amount of "teach social skills" is gonna protect the kid.
If you skipped a grade and were fine, you either were pushed ahead in the 60s when schools still had disciplinary control, OR you were in a rich neighborhood to begin with that had well-paid teachers and lots of money to throw in to the school system, not to mention a low ratio of bused-in inner city brats whose parents didn't care what they did.
The solution is a certain modicum of force. You can reason with a college age student. The brains of the vast majority of students at grade/middle school level, on the other hand, haven't and may not ever evolve past "might makes right."
Well no, there are two MAJOR differences between public and private schools. #1, Private schools have the authority to kick out and/or punish the troublemakers. Being ahead of the curve is actually encouraged, and the teachers who are there have (and tend to exercise) the power to adequately stop any harassment. This includes kicking out the worst. #2, The parents of the children in a private school, not always but with a much better tendency, have managed to impress on their kids the importance of education, and have taken something of an active hand in raising said children. Compare these with the public institution; teachers have no enforcement power, if they so much as send a kid off for detention they risk getting sued; the guidance counselors are more interested in punishing the victims, telling them it's all their fault for "attracting attention"; the parents of the bullies and harassers likely don't give a shit or aren't around. Yes, I was pushed ahead. I actually had a guidance counselor suggest that I deliberately get lower grades than I could on some tests, so that my name wasn't always at the top of the grading list and thus attracting attention. Rather than punish or correct the bullying students, they were focused on "what can we do to stop them noticing him as a target." This is the effect of letting liberals run the schools. My middle school VP actually said "there is no such thing as a bully." So, when there was a fight, it didn't matter if one student was attacked by three others, and had a broken nose and black eyes while the three had not so much as a scratch; all four got detention. The bullies didn't care, their grades were crap anyways -- the one they attacked had to miss tests and class time. The worst part is that his opinion was commonplace. Everyone wants to "understand" the bullies, make them "respect" the other students, make them "see that the other students are worthwhile individuals too." My parents had to threaten to sue the school district when they kept throwing one boy into study groups with my sister, despite the fact that he'd attacked her twice. "But if you teach the kid some social skills they'll probably be alright." BULLCRAP. The type of bullies that exist there don't have social skills to start with. All they have is brute force. Why do you think they made us all read Lord of the Flies? It was an allegory for the kind of crap that went on at recess or in the halls. When the entirety of your social structure is based on who can beat up who, no amount of "teach social skills" is gonna protect the kid. If you skipped a grade and were fine, you either were pushed ahead in the 60s when schools still had disciplinary control, OR you were in a rich neighborhood to begin with that had well-paid teachers and lots of money to throw in to the school system, not to mention a low ratio of bused-in inner city brats whose parents didn't care what they did. The solution is a certain modicum of force. You can reason with a college age student. The brains of the vast majority of students at grade/middle school level, on the other hand, haven't and may not ever evolve past "might makes right."
No, the Jocks are definitely harder. Ever been stuffed into a locker? Ever had your bag shredded? Ever had to try to explain to a teacher that these pieces of paper *were* your report, until the captain of the football team got ahold of them, and watch as the dumb fuck gets off with just a warning because your school needs him around to win games? The worst of it is: do not EVER, EVER let your kid get pushed ahead a grade in public schools. I guarantee, any kid pushed ahead, will STILL be bright enough to break the grading curve in his/her new grade. Plus, they'll be smaller, so the all-important things (gym class, how hard you can hit a baseball, if you can so much as lift a finger to fight back) will be against them. If you ever have that chance, put the kid into a private school pronto, where the teachers at least give a fuck about the students' welfare.
1. Robots, even at that point, will not be cheaper than humans. Consider the price point; you have to have an entire robotic assembly at the burger place, you have to pay a mechanic to be on-call at all hours of the day to fix it at moment's notice, if something breaks down likely the entire thing is shut down instead of "Oh, I'm sorry, we're all out of chicken nuggets today, can I offer you a chicken sandwich instead?" or even, "I'm sorry, our fryer is broken down right now, but we can still give you your sandwich and a discount since we don't have fries."
2. Human adaptability. Even the DUMBEST of humans understands the phrase "hold the lettuce." (well, at least the dumbest that still have the motor control and aptitude to convince someone to hire them.) They may get it wrong, but they understand the phrasing. With a robot you have to code in every possible specialty order, or else it's just not allowed. Given the number of people out there who hate mayonnaise, or have a tomato allergy, or don't like pickles, or have other odd tastes, coding in specialty orders is not a mundane task, and it's going to make people nuts.
3. After-hours cleanup. One of the "nice" things about having a human staff is that you can make them do multiple jobs; the guy closing the shop, for example, cleans up the restuarant as well as serving orders for the first 90% of his shift. When times get slow they kick one or two of the order takers out to wipe down tables.
You could try, but I'm guessing that by 2050 it will still cost more overall to use robots than it will to simply pay humans. Food service is an adaptable task, unlike making cars or putting together electronics, which is a task done millions of times with absolutely no changes.
That works IF the mail is being sent through the ISP's mail servers.
However, most spammers run their own mail server. All the ISP sees is a high-traffic data stream heading out into the void. Chances are it bounces off half a dozen places before it reaches the myriad of open relays the spammer is working with.
Chances are further that the spammer is using multiple open relays and multiple or just forged return accounts.
Now if the ISP were intercepting everyone's datastream and analyzing it, realtime, that theoretically COULD be done... but the processing power just isn't there.
Legitimate email offers are one thing.
For example, I accept emails from Amazon. Why? Because I buy books from them. When something comes up that I might be interested in, I like hearing. Likewise, I accept the occasional email from online computer parts stores I've bought from. Chances are I am not buying again, but if the right offer came along I might, and I have been a customer of theirs.
However, two things need to happen:
Fraudulent email (porn, penis junk, get rich quick, etc...) needs to be stopped, except for people who bought from those people before. It should be all opt-in.
Sales of customer lists, of lists of emails, should be ILLEGAL. I have bought a service or product from you, and only from you. I have no business relationship with your cousin, your "partner" business down the street, or anyone else you might think to send my information to.
If this happened, we wouldn't mind nearly as much. Legitimate mail, from companies I legitimately have dealt with, is fine. The problem is, for every one of those emails I get, there are 5,000 fraudulent spams.
The trick is: the Spammer, him/her/itself (well he/she WILL be an "it" if I ever find them), wants to be completely transparent.
They send mail. You see mail. In their depraved mind, you then deal with company that commissioned mail.
First of all, I want to strangle the people who commissioned said mail, especially mr. "Free golf wedge, best in world" and the fuck from K-Mart marketing who bought a cd full of email addresses and added them to K-Mart's bluelight email list.
However, that's not the point.
Think about how we filter. In order to have a realistic opt-out sequence, we have to be able to reach the spammer back. Either by email, or clicking a link, or something of that sort.
The MOMENT something that static is in the email, however, ISP filters will catch it and promptly ban any email that they send with that indicator tag in it.
See the trick? It's all based on evading filters. You can't legitimately provide an opt-out solution, because then that becomes an identifying tag for people to filter you away.
And the last thing spammers want to see is people actually opt out anyways, because if they WERE honoring it, they couldn't claim to be mailing to 50 million people. They make their cash partially on the claim that they reach a huge number of people in order to get responses from a smaller number, just as TV shows do with ratings and ads.
You miss the point.
Yes, it assesses the email on the basis of "15 bad words", but it also assesses on the "15 good words" or words that indicate it's legitimate.
Chances are they have only one or two of the "bad" words (penis, viagra, v*i*a*g*r*a, etc...). Perhaps less once they munge it so that things are broken up into pieces. The HTML tricks are all designed so that the filter doesn't realize that you have one of the "bad" words split up into sections.
The insertion of "good" text is designed to try to trip 2-3 "nonspam" indicators, thus causing the filter to pass the mail as "good".
The insertion of the "good" text also serves, if you use a bayesian filter, to "poison" your filter so that legitimate mail using those same words has a tendency to get tagged as spam.
It's a three-pronged attack:
#1 -- munge out the bad words
#2 -- drop in "innocent" text to make it look legit
#3 -- send in such volume that the "innocent" text gets poisoned in the filter and starts causing false positives.
What they're really after, of course, is number 3; if they can cause enough false positives, people will turn off the filters again. That's why they think nothing of sending the same spam 500 times to the same person in three days: when they are using a technique like this, every spam that gets filtered and tagged as spam furthers goal #3.
I still say the best way to deal with spammers is with a good old non-technical solution: a two-by-four upside the head.
Come on -- the whole neo-Luddite "cars destroy our environment" bullcrap is just that, bullcrap, like the rest of the story. Lest we forget, the automobile was supposed to eliminate the troubles large cities had with pollution in their days. What pollution you say? HORSE CRAP. HORSE PISS. TONS OF IT. ALL OVER THE STREETS. Anyone who bitches about cars and how polluting they are, I invite you to go visit a horse farm somedays and step around to the barn right before they muck it out. Now remember that the STREETS of New York used to look like that. Faustian bargain? Please.
Not sure -- but probably not.
It's more likely that they want to do more COMPLEX shots in the same amount of time it used to take to do a simpler version of the same shot.
Think about it this way -- it took the same amount of time to create Toy Story as it did to create Monsters, Inc. (roughly).
But, Toy Story doesn't spend a whole lot of time dealing with difficult to render stuff like fur. Sully walks into the scene on the other hand, watch the rendering have to keep pace with all that hair.
The trick isn't really to get it to photorealistic real-time, anyhow, for what Hollywood needs. The trick is to balance the following things:
1. Renderable in a decent time frame (e.g. a couple hours to render a 10-minute or so scene). The main point here is to get it rendering quick enough that (a) you can fix bugs and (b) you can fix bugs in time to meet the deadlines.
2. Ramp the quality as high as it can go.
In all honesty, Hollywood won't give us realtime photorealistic rendering. That's being left to the gaming computer companies so we have to wait another 5-10 years.
Why? Hollywood just doesn't need it. They can render the scene or tape it from live actors, either way they have to go in and someone has to play editor to fit all the pieces together anyways.
Isn't it obvious? Hacking is an expression of our inner need. And the inner need we are expressing is for Knowledge, pure and simple. The people who hack, today, are the people who would have been working on their cars 30 years ago. :)
Playing a marathon game, co-op with a friend... got to the Flood at 4AM on a stormy night. Geez, that was crazy. Likewise w/ Eternal Darkness... the sanity stat was the craziest thing I ever saw. That and the fact that most of the sanity effects were geared at the PLAYER. I still remember seeing a BSOD come up... man that was wierd. That and the fact that I got so into it that I actually went and answered the knocking door... not in game but at my house...
Of course it was.
The reason American McGee goes after the PARTICULAR public domain works he does, is that WE ALL GREW UP WATCHING THEM. Think about it -- until two years after Home Alone was out, what movie was played EVERY SINGLE THANKSGIVING? Why, the Wizard of Oz of course. What was one of the fundamental Disney movies that everyone loves seeing and showing kids to this day? Their take on Alice in Wonderland, naturally.
American McGee makes his living raping the public domain (er... actually literally) just as Disney does, and he goes after the things that we STILL remember that are in the public domain. Without something we all remember, the gag doesn't work. Further, it has to be something he can twist really, really far.
Parodying Disney stuff might have worked, but that's inviting legal action far more surely than parodying some piece of crap like Strawberry Shortcake. Besides, there are artists who already make a living drawing Disney toons having sex, so that's been done.
So they parodied something we've all been taught was "sweet" and "innocent." American Greetings, on the other hand, happen to be a bunch of stiffs who can't take a joke.
Hell, even the Hormel people realized after their first court filing that Monty Python had done a pretty good job with the spam song and got a sense of humor. Time to ring the phones of American Greetings off the hook to give them a whack with the metaphorical cluebat.