How can this guy forget that the internet is not contained entirely within the jurusduction of the US?
It's nor like the spammers need to move elsewhere anyways, all they need is some non-logging proxy outside US borders and they can post with impunity.
Let's not forget the number of spammers already located outside of the US, either.
The internet just does not work the way this guy thinks it does: there is never going to be a day when everyone just follows the rules and plays fair
The way to handle spam is not with laws, it's with technology. Legislative bodies move too slowly and don't understand the technology, nor the scope of the internet.
What needs to be used is a combination of many different technologies: filtering, blacklists, whitelist, etc.
The internet is a huge shared network. So big, that prentending that you can trust every node on it is moronic. Software needs to be designed to recognize when a node is misbehaving and deal with it as well as possible. This goes for not just spam but other types of internet abuse, such as DOS attacks, trying 100 passwords in a row, etc. If a computer is going to be connected to an untrusted network it needs to be able to properly handle all kinds of unwanted data. To me that's just common sense.
Fraud laws don't stop me from getting Nigerian scam emails, do they?
The best way to fight spam is to develop software that isn't vulnerable to it, just like we fix other vulnerabilities. The reason we have spam is because our software isn't good enough.
Think of an unfiltered email systen as accepting input from a web form without doing any checking on the data it's recieving. It leaves you open to tons of really easy attacks. (If someone puts a meg of text in a field and submits it, your cgi scripts are probably going to go apeshit.) It's just bad design and it's about time we fixed it.
I am the unhappy owner of one of those AIW cards, specfically and AIW pro. There drivers for that card were horrible. I couldn't play any decent game for a reasonable amount of time without the damn drivers locking my computer. They never fixed the drivers, either. I tried every set I could get my hands on and they all had something wrong with them. I'm not going to buy an ATI card again unless they can actually go a few years without releasing awful drivers for any of thier cards and I don't see this happening soon.
I got rid of that damn AIW pro and bought a Gainward GF2 Ti golden sample (ships overclocked) card with VIVO. Now I have working (and stable) 3d, tv-in and tv-out under Linux, as well as Windows.
You had me all excited when you said we should be able to "hunt" spammers. I though you meant really hunt them. I was all ready to go get my hunting license and a buy a gun.
They definatly seem to have overpopulated, given the volume of spam I've been getting. Don't you think it's time we thinned the herd;)? What better way is there to 'opt-out'?
The Turing test is where a human talks to a computer and tries to decide if the backend that's answering him is a human or a computer program.
This is more of a reverse turing test, where the computer asks questions to try and find out if it's interacting with a person or a program.
It would be possible to write a program to beat this system, but it would not qualify as having passed the Turing test, because it would have only fooled another computer program, not a real person. Of course maybe said program could go on to pass the Turing test.
Wouldn't it be weird if spam was the driving force behind the creation of the first real AI?
Skynet began learning at a geometric rate.......by 1800 hours every mailbox in the world was jammed with unfilterable spam.
Great. I can sum up your whole post in one sentance "I know more than you do"
Well good for you. Did you do a thesis on arrogance?
Look, you're not the only person on the planet who can judge how well someone is learning calculus. You're not going to teach everything you know in 1 semester. Try and wrap your brain around this one: Some people learn better by reading than by listening. Some people would rathed read a chapter in their calc book than listen to you lecture. They learn better that way. They may choose to zone out and just read the chapter later. I'm one of those people.
What you should be doing is teaching calc and giving fair tests on material from the sylabus. I'll judge the best way for me to learn it, and this way may not be the same for everyone else. As long as I don't interfere with your lectures, and I learn the material, I should be able to use my judgement.
It's neat that you know all kinds of esoteric math that I probably don't, but that doesn't matter very much if it's not what you're teaching. Your actual policies would be a lot more relevant to the discussion. For instance: Do I still have to suffer through your lectures, if I'm doing fine getting the info elsewhere (do you take attendence)?
BTW, all these "have you?" questions just make you look bad. If you have good ideas, they should be able to stand on their own, without any attempts at intimidation. You sound like one of those people who just has to bring up where they went to school in an arguement, instead of sticking to the topic.
If you said, "By teaching thousands of students, I've discovered..." you might make it sound like you learned something and it would be a less confrontational, more constructive way of speaking with people. Instead you have these rhetorical questions that are specfically meant to try and make people afraid to argue with you.
Have you? Is not a good supporting arguement. Doing something does not necessarily mean you have gained insight into what you just did. (You can teach thousands of students and still be a lousy teacher.) If you actually gained insight into what you were doing it should show in your ideas. They should appear well thought out and insightful.
Profs are there to teach you.
on
Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 3, Insightful
First off: (The on-topic stuff)
Not every class is a super-imortant, don't know it already class.
Example: I took ECON101, attended 5 lectures the entire semester and recieved an A. How did I do it? I did the required work and already understood the material. Why was I in the class?...to statisfy degree requirements. Luckily, they didn't take attendance, so I didn't have to go sit through lectures about this I already understood.
That's right, there are classes that you are actually required to take, even if you already know the material.
Not paying attention in class doesn't necessarily mean you're lost. Sometimes those kids who aren't paying attention, already know the material, and are just there becuase the prof. likes to give quizzes.
Doesn't anyone remember how boring it is to sit through someone drone on about something you already understand? (And I do mean drone, possibly with an unintelligble accent.) One of my favorite things about college is that if a lecture sucks, I can usually get up and leave. I can't always do that though, some classes actually require attendance, even when the lectures are totally passive experiences.
The important thing is not suffering through lousy lectures. The important thing is actually understanding the course material. That's why businesses want a degree: It shows that you've taken tests and passed them. (Or completed projects successfully.)
Second:
I really hate the "spoonfeeding" analogy. It's really a load of BS. I haven't heard that crap since HS. Teachers are there to teach you, not to hand you a book and say "I'm not going to spoonfeed you." I can read a book by my damnself. I do expect the prof. to "spoonfeed" me, as in, break the information into reasonable sized chunks and deliver it to me (a.k.a. lectures). If I have a question, I expect to be given an answer, not to have to suffer through analogies that compare me to an infant. Why do you think I'm paying to go to school? If someone thinks they're too important to answer questions, they shouldn't be involed in teaching. Provided the person isn't asking for test answers, there really isn't much of an excuse not to answer someone's question. Suffering is not equivalent to learing. Teachers should just answer questions, and if they think it was something the student should have been able to figure out on their own, the can ask the student a question about it. This way, they answer the student's question (as opposed to insulting them) and still get to make them think.
In your case it worked out. If you had simply been asked to persuade your ISP to boot the spammer would you have ignored the request? Are you actually so dense that it takes blocking your email to get you to act?
Dense?
Why are you even mentioning the word dense?
He was a friggin customer! His email being blocked was the first indication he had that a spammer was hosted by his isp.
So what next? He asks his isp to boot the spammer. If they refuse, he doesn't want to have an acount with them anyways, so he'll go somewhere else. Seems fine to me.
It's hardly "brutal" anyways. The email bounces, it doesn't just disappear and leave him wondering why no one ever replies.
Finally, if the isp is only partially fixing a spam problem, after booting the spammer, then they're incompetent and you don't want to be working with them anyways. The ip you complain was "wrongly blacklisted" was actually rightly blacklisted. It just wasn't removed from the list, because someone wasn't doing their job.
If an isp gets a notification that an ip has been added to a blacklist, isn't it obvious that they should contact the maintainer of that blacklist when the problem is fixed? The fault in your example does not lie with the blacklist, but with the isp. If you choose a crappy isp, expect problems.
But windows wasn't an OS at first, so my analogy holds.
Yours doesn't make as much sense because MS doesn't just want control over the term windows, when directly talking about an OS.
Yeah a car includes wiper blades, but MS is trying to claim control of the term windows in any computer related sense. Like the whole "Windows Commander" thing. It's not an OS or a windowing system.
It would be like you naming a car "wiper blades" selling it, and then later starting to sell just wiper blades and trying to claim a trademark on both, as well as any other car-related reference to the term wiper blades.
A huge amount of spam is being sent through unsecured relays in Asia and South America. Consequently, an overwhelmingly large percentage of the hosts listed on RBLs are in fact based in these countries (see Wired article: Not All Asian E-Mail Is Spam). This amounts to nothing less than discrimination and isolationism that is being used to slowly cut off countries that have a critical importance in global matters
Obviously, if a huge amount of spam is coming from a huge amount of servers in a country, a huge amount of servers in that country are going to get blocked.
How about we drop the sensationalism here?
It's not some conspiracy to block all mail from Asia.
Look, maybe some people need to get mail from Asia, but I don't have any reason to. I'm not obligated to let anyone on the internet contact me at will. I can pick and choose who to block/accept at will. If people in don't want their servers to get blocked, maybe they should deal with their spam problem. I don't have time to fix it for them.
Look at it this way:
The internet is this huge shared network. It has a finite amount of bandwidth and it works because everyone carries data to its destination.
The question here should not be if any nodes should ever get blocked. The question should be: How much junk traffic should a single node on the network have to generate before it happens?
At some point you have to start blocking people. If I start DOSing an email server (almost what spam is), I can expect to have my traffic blocked at some point. Maybe I have to send a million junk messages, maybe a billion, but at some point it's costing too much to carry and process my traffic. Yes, bandwidth costs money. That's just the way a system like the internet has to work. There have to be mechanisms in block to handle the case were a node starts misbehaving. One of those mechanisms has to be dropping traffic from that node.
Carrying junk traffic costs money. Filtering costs money. At some amount of traffic, the cost becomes too high, and you have to block the traffic. Think of it as a signal to noise ratio. There always needs to be some number, at which you pull the plug, because the data isn't worth dealing with anymore.(And filtering it is too expensive)
Any time you share something you're going to need the ability to do this. If I start driving in the middle of a two lane highway, I can expectect to get pulled over and have my license revoked (eventually). It should be. I'm messing up things for everone else and the sensible way to fix it is to remove me.
Screw the back button, what I want is an intelligent forward button.
Say you're looking at the page: http://127.0.0.1/page1.html
and then you go to the page:
http://127.0.0.1/page2.html
At that point I want the browser to request
http://127.0.0.1/page3.html
in the background. If it is availible, the forward button should become clickable and take me there.
The code could check for predictible changes between pages, and if it thinks it's found a pattern, it requests it. If the page is there, it turns on the forward button.
It could also be set up to jump to the next anchor in an HTML document, if any exist.
Media Player sends a unique id number along with the info about what you're watching.
Are you an astroturfer or something or are you just clueless/insane? I don't need to even get into your other points as they're just ridiculous. News flash: MS is worse now than they've even been.
Why exactly should I pretend they aren't?
Re:It's Microsoft, what did you think would happen
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Lindows Legal Challenge
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Okay, you take your proudct, that directly competes with Microsoft's. You change one letter of it, and market it. What do you think is going to happen?
You are not accutately describing the situation. Windows is a generic term. Trademarking windows is like me going and trademarking "wiper blades." It's a generic term already in common use, just like windows was. It shouldn't matter if my wiperblades company gets 90% market share, I picked a generic term.
BTW Xwindows only differs from windows by only letter too, so even with your logic MS should loose their trademark.
The problem was not that you had a calulator, the problem was you not understanding the math you were doing. Your HS teacher wasn't teaching you math, he was teaching you how to use a calculator. There's a huge difference. Your problem was poor teaching, not technology.
It's not that hard to design a test that makes any calulator worthless. Even my wonderful TI-89. Hell, that thing does symbolic integration, and will keep things like pi as pi in the answer instead of replacing it with 3.digitsofprecision. That doesn't help if you don't know how integration works and how to set up the problem.
Given that, I have never been allowed to use a calculator in any college math class I've taken (4 of them). Those classes are about concepts. They don't ask you anything you can't do fairy quickly in your head.
But on the other side of the coin, I have always
been allowed to use a calculator in any of my engineering courses. Most of the time, I don't really need it. They intentionally use numbers that will work out simply. Maybe at the end you punch the final answer into your calculator with all the constants, but by that point you've got 90% of the credit for the problem. They let you use them because you've already learned the concepts by then so if you don't remember the integral of arctan(x) you can just use your calulator, just like d would to "in the real world". If you don't have any idea what that integral is supposed to work out to be, you're going to get it wrong anyways.
I can see the situation you had as being one of two things:
If you went into the test not understanding the math. You probably deserved at 54%.
If you knew the stuff and just used your calulator to save time that should have been fine (unless it said to show your work and you didn't).
Anyways blame the teacher, not the calculator. I used a calc. in all my math classes in H.S. and I didn't feel helpless without one. Calcutors are good, they save me a lot to time, and they make a lot of math problems easier. Kids need to be taught the concepts and the technology. If you're not teaching them the concepts, you aren't teaching the technology, you're teaching button pushing and you may as well let everyone play "Oregon Trail" and call it a computer science course.
Here's my problem with this: They say they'll use the info anonymously and not share it right?
Nothing actually holds them to their word on this. They can say they'll use the info anonmyously, and then change their mind later. Nothing's stopping them, or at least nothing stops gov't officials in the US from doing things like this. "No new taxes" anyone?
I would accept a system like this, if there was actually an assurance that they would hold to their word, say fines and jail time for anyone who shares the confidential info and maybe a contract where they have to trash the whole system if X amount of data gets comprimised.
And of course they would have to be audited, by auditors whose only business is auditing.
Re:'Ol Kevin
on
Kevin Free
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If I were to have my way, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" would be the method for issuing punishments to criminals.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."-Ghandi
Lemme guess, you've never done anything illegal in your entire life?
The world is not black and white. So you would kill murderers? Well, how much evidence do you need to decide to kill someone? Death isn't exactly a revocable punishment, now is it? If the judge makes a wrong decision and sentances an innocent man to death does he get killed too? There are tons of other questions like this that illustrate why "an eye for an eye" doesn't work.
You're also showing your lack of understaning of people in general. Crazy punishments wouldn't do as much as you think to deter criminals. Criminals aren't exactly the most clever, forward-thinking individuals around. That's why they're criminals. If the really thought about their future they'd realize that committing serious crimes is not a good idea, even with our current punishments.
I know europe is really into smartcards. They had half a building full of smartcard related stuff at Cebit last year.
Smartcards are only a partial solution.
You still have to trust others more than you really should have to, given the current level of tech. we have availible. Smartcards do not have any displays or buttons on them. As a result, you don't get one of the key things I was talking about: The ability to only authorize a certain amount of money to be transferred. With a smartcard, the retailer (or whomever) is talking to the smartcard for you, and you have to trust them not to change 20 euros into 200 euros before they send the info to the card.
I suppose it would be possible to put a smartcard into your trusted device and tell in to only authorize up to 20 euros for the next transaction that occurs, but it seems to me that that is not the way smartcard tech. is being implemented, and it would require an additiional trusted device.
Yes, obviously my logic must be wrong, since you only attempt to refute a single point I made (out of many) and fail to understand the point of my post.
Since just about every reply has been someone nitpicking about retinal scanners and failing to get the bigger picture, I might as well respond to everyone all at once.
I'm sure the NSA has badassed retinal scanners. That doesn't mean they're foolproof and the NSA knows this. I'm sure they also have guys that stand near the retinal scanner and make sure there's no funny business going on. This is also why a retinal scanner was only "one of the authorization systems at the entrance."
I wasn't saying that Snipe's character is a genius. I was using a humorous anecdote to illustrate one of the follies of this technology. It was a freakin' movie, sure sticking a pen into and eye is going to mess it up, but it was a funny scene wasn't it?
The point I was making by bring that up was the biometric authentication is fallible. You can steal someone's body part, you can make a fake body part, etc. No one has replied with an answer to the "What do you do when someone steals your fingerprints?" question? That's a real problem with biometrics. They're awfully hard to change. There has already been at least one story on/. about someone figuring out a way to defeat fingerprint readers with gelatin. Once someone has a gelatin copy of your fingerprint, what do you do?
I don't think biometric authentication is a totally bad idea, but I do think it is to use only a single biometric as your authentication scheme (at least for anything more serious than a screensaver password).
Anyone ever see the movie Demolition Man? There's a scene in it the explains very simply why biometric authentication is a bad idea:
Snipes, needs to bust out of this high-tech future prison, but they have a retinal scanner on the door, so he just takes the eye of some guy he just killed, stick it on a pen and holds it in front or the scanner.
No thanks. I'd rather be able to surrender my credit card to a mugger and then make a phone call and have the account shut down. If everything goes biometric I have to be a hostage, or loose a body part for them to get what they want. And then...
What do I do if someone "steals" my fingerprint? I can't exactly go get new ones and shut the old ones down, now can I?
There are lots of other good reasons why this isn't such a wonderful idea, either. I can send my girlfriend out for a pizza with my credit card, but not if everything is fingerprint based. Then there's the false positive/negative rate problems, the what happens if you hurt your thumb problem, etc. And I don't think I'll even get started on the privacy concerns here.
The next "credit card" type of system we need, is one where the cards themselves have computers in them and all transactions use encryption. When someone asks me for $5 I can give them an encrypted message for my bank authorizing a one-time transfer. Then I don't have to trust them not to overcharge me (right now they can say they're charging you $5 and charge you $500), or to keep my number safe from 133thaX0rs (see ford for an example of this problem).
Guns are "life or death" devices, literally.
I don't have a gun myself, but I do know my fair about them. There is no way in hell I would trust one of these guns. Yeah I'm about to defend my life and my property and then "Oh shit! The battery's dead!"
And that's only the tip of the iceberg. What about the sensor they're going to use? Is it one of the cheapass fingerprint readers? Do they have any idea what the false positive and false negative rates on those? Totally unacceptable for a life or death device.
What they really should be doing is throwing people who leave their guns within reach of little kids in jail. It's criminally negligent behavior and should be treated as such. Oh, and don't forget that guns are fairly simple devices. It's probably going to be trivial to remove this thing, but I'm sure they're going to make it a felony to do so. This way the criminal, who is already committing other felonies won't give a shit and can just remove it, but me, Joe public, can't. That way he can shoot me while my gun is still scanning my hand.
I have and rio volt and the baclight died right before the warranty expired. The anti-skip protection is pretty crappy too. The meshanism is just too susceptible to skips, I have to keep my walking under a certain speed, hold it in my hand, or learn to walk like some sort of ninja.
Other than that it's been a very good device. Good battery life, and the new rom offered major improvements over the orignal one too (It boots twice as fast as it used to). Note: Your backlight probably hasn't died because now the backlight defaults to always off unless you press a button. When mine shipped, the backlight defaulted to aways one whenever the unit was plugged into a wall outlet/car adaptor. I don't know if they ever reall did fix this design flaw with the rio volt or if they are just relying on their software workaround to make sure the backlight doesn't die before the warranty expires.
Another side note, the rio volt is actually made by another company. When it came out, the AVC Soul which was availible at mp3playerstore.com was the exact same thing for $10 less.
If he's trying to branch out into the auto business, then he's clearly abusing Nissan-the-car-company's trademark.
Screw that. So what if he's showing car ads, has last name is nissan. He should be able to have a website at nissan.com. He could even start a car company and build cars. He just couldn't call his company nissan motors. He should be able to call it widget motors and have all the info about it on his site. Trademark dillution would be saying something was a nissan (car) when it wasn't. All this is, is using his last name to point to a website.
I have a very common last name, like smith. Does that mean if I had smith.com I could never post any info and anything that a company whose name includes smith is involved in? That's retarded. What names likes smith, jones, etc, that would basically mean you can't post anything, because there are going to be thousands or companies with that name.
Can't they just file a motion to have the case dismissed?
Can't the lawyers for the defense just say something along the lines of "This patent suit is being filed only against small companies, because it's frivolous and they hope we'll settle out of court."
Shit like this should be illegal. It should be considered extortion and these guys should go to jail.
What can the porn guys sue these jerks for? There's gotta be something. Something that will allow them to put this company under, and convince a lawyer to take their case just so he could get x% of the winnings for an afternoon's work.
Slashdot Mirror
that is, even if the law was ever passed.
How can this guy forget that the internet is not contained entirely within the jurusduction of the US?
It's nor like the spammers need to move elsewhere anyways, all they need is some non-logging proxy outside US borders and they can post with impunity.
Let's not forget the number of spammers already located outside of the US, either.
The internet just does not work the way this guy thinks it does: there is never going to be a day when everyone just follows the rules and plays fair
The way to handle spam is not with laws, it's with technology. Legislative bodies move too slowly and don't understand the technology, nor the scope of the internet.
What needs to be used is a combination of many different technologies: filtering, blacklists, whitelist, etc.
The internet is a huge shared network. So big, that prentending that you can trust every node on it is moronic. Software needs to be designed to recognize when a node is misbehaving and deal with it as well as possible. This goes for not just spam but other types of internet abuse, such as DOS attacks, trying 100 passwords in a row, etc. If a computer is going to be connected to an untrusted network it needs to be able to properly handle all kinds of unwanted data. To me that's just common sense.
Fraud laws don't stop me from getting Nigerian scam emails, do they?
The best way to fight spam is to develop software that isn't vulnerable to it, just like we fix other vulnerabilities. The reason we have spam is because our software isn't good enough.
Think of an unfiltered email systen as accepting input from a web form without doing any checking on the data it's recieving. It leaves you open to tons of really easy attacks. (If someone puts a meg of text in a field and submits it, your cgi scripts are probably going to go apeshit.) It's just bad design and it's about time we fixed it.
I am the unhappy owner of one of those AIW cards, specfically and AIW pro. There drivers for that card were horrible. I couldn't play any decent game for a reasonable amount of time without the damn drivers locking my computer. They never fixed the drivers, either. I tried every set I could get my hands on and they all had something wrong with them. I'm not going to buy an ATI card again unless they can actually go a few years without releasing awful drivers for any of thier cards and I don't see this happening soon.
I got rid of that damn AIW pro and bought a Gainward GF2 Ti golden sample (ships overclocked) card with VIVO. Now I have working (and stable) 3d, tv-in and tv-out under Linux, as well as Windows.
Happy new year!
You had me all excited when you said we should be able to "hunt" spammers. I though you meant really hunt them. I was all ready to go get my hunting license and a buy a gun. ;)? What better way is there to 'opt-out'?
They definatly seem to have overpopulated, given the volume of spam I've been getting. Don't you think it's time we thinned the herd
Makes you wonder.....do spammers taste like spam?
An "autonated Turing test" is an oxymoron.
The Turing test is where a human talks to a computer and tries to decide if the backend that's answering him is a human or a computer program.
This is more of a reverse turing test, where the computer asks questions to try and find out if it's interacting with a person or a program.
It would be possible to write a program to beat this system, but it would not qualify as having passed the Turing test, because it would have only fooled another computer program, not a real person. Of course maybe said program could go on to pass the Turing test.
Wouldn't it be weird if spam was the driving force behind the creation of the first real AI?
Skynet began learning at a geometric rate.......by 1800 hours every mailbox in the world was jammed with unfilterable spam.
Great. I can sum up your whole post in one sentance "I know more than you do"
Well good for you. Did you do a thesis on arrogance?
Look, you're not the only person on the planet who can judge how well someone is learning calculus. You're not going to teach everything you know in 1 semester. Try and wrap your brain around this one:
Some people learn better by reading than by listening. Some people would rathed read a chapter in their calc book than listen to you lecture. They learn better that way. They may choose to zone out and just read the chapter later. I'm one of those people.
What you should be doing is teaching calc and giving fair tests on material from the sylabus. I'll judge the best way for me to learn it, and this way may not be the same for everyone else. As long as I don't interfere with your lectures, and I learn the material, I should be able to use my judgement.
It's neat that you know all kinds of esoteric math that I probably don't, but that doesn't matter very much if it's not what you're teaching. Your actual policies would be a lot more relevant to the discussion. For instance: Do I still have to suffer through your lectures, if I'm doing fine getting the info elsewhere (do you take attendence)?
BTW, all these "have you?" questions just make you look bad. If you have good ideas, they should be able to stand on their own, without any attempts at intimidation. You sound like one of those people who just has to bring up where they went to school in an arguement, instead of sticking to the topic.
If you said, "By teaching thousands of students, I've discovered..." you might make it sound like you learned something and it would be a less confrontational, more constructive way of speaking with people. Instead you have these rhetorical questions that are specfically meant to try and make people afraid to argue with you.
Have you? Is not a good supporting arguement. Doing something does not necessarily mean you have gained insight into what you just did. (You can teach thousands of students and still be a lousy teacher.) If you actually gained insight into what you were doing it should show in your ideas. They should appear well thought out and insightful.
First off: (The on-topic stuff)
Not every class is a super-imortant, don't know it already class.
Example: I took ECON101, attended 5 lectures the entire semester and recieved an A. How did I do it? I did the required work and already understood the material. Why was I in the class?...to statisfy degree requirements. Luckily, they didn't take attendance, so I didn't have to go sit through lectures about this I already understood.
That's right, there are classes that you are actually required to take, even if you already know the material.
Not paying attention in class doesn't necessarily mean you're lost. Sometimes those kids who aren't paying attention, already know the material, and are just there becuase the prof. likes to give quizzes.
Doesn't anyone remember how boring it is to sit through someone drone on about something you already understand? (And I do mean drone, possibly with an unintelligble accent.) One of my favorite things about college is that if a lecture sucks, I can usually get up and leave. I can't always do that though, some classes actually require attendance, even when the lectures are totally passive experiences.
The important thing is not suffering through lousy lectures. The important thing is actually understanding the course material. That's why businesses want a degree: It shows that you've taken tests and passed them. (Or completed projects successfully.)
Second:
I really hate the "spoonfeeding" analogy. It's really a load of BS. I haven't heard that crap since HS. Teachers are there to teach you, not to hand you a book and say "I'm not going to spoonfeed you." I can read a book by my damnself. I do expect the prof. to "spoonfeed" me, as in, break the information into reasonable sized chunks and deliver it to me (a.k.a. lectures). If I have a question, I expect to be given an answer, not to have to suffer through analogies that compare me to an infant. Why do you think I'm paying to go to school? If someone thinks they're too important to answer questions, they shouldn't be involed in teaching. Provided the person isn't asking for test answers, there really isn't much of an excuse not to answer someone's question. Suffering is not equivalent to learing. Teachers should just answer questions, and if they think it was something the student should have been able to figure out on their own, the can ask the student a question about it. This way, they answer the student's question (as opposed to insulting them) and still get to make them think.
In your case it worked out. If you had simply been asked to persuade your ISP to boot the spammer would you have ignored the request? Are you actually so dense that it takes blocking your email to get you to act?
Dense?
Why are you even mentioning the word dense?
He was a friggin customer! His email being blocked was the first indication he had that a spammer was hosted by his isp.
So what next? He asks his isp to boot the spammer. If they refuse, he doesn't want to have an acount with them anyways, so he'll go somewhere else. Seems fine to me.
It's hardly "brutal" anyways. The email bounces, it doesn't just disappear and leave him wondering why no one ever replies.
Finally, if the isp is only partially fixing a spam problem, after booting the spammer, then they're incompetent and you don't want to be working with them anyways. The ip you complain was "wrongly blacklisted" was actually rightly blacklisted. It just wasn't removed from the list, because someone wasn't doing their job.
If an isp gets a notification that an ip has been added to a blacklist, isn't it obvious that they should contact the maintainer of that blacklist when the problem is fixed? The fault in your example does not lie with the blacklist, but with the isp. If you choose a crappy isp, expect problems.
But windows wasn't an OS at first, so my analogy holds.
Yours doesn't make as much sense because MS doesn't just want control over the term windows, when directly talking about an OS.
Yeah a car includes wiper blades, but MS is trying to claim control of the term windows in any computer related sense. Like the whole "Windows Commander" thing. It's not an OS or a windowing system.
It would be like you naming a car "wiper blades" selling it, and then later starting to sell just wiper blades and trying to claim a trademark on both, as well as any other car-related reference to the term wiper blades.
A huge amount of spam is being sent through unsecured relays in Asia and South America. Consequently, an overwhelmingly large percentage of the hosts listed on RBLs are in fact based in these countries (see Wired article: Not All Asian E-Mail Is Spam). This amounts to nothing less than discrimination and isolationism that is being used to slowly cut off countries that have a critical importance in global matters
Obviously, if a huge amount of spam is coming from a huge amount of servers in a country, a huge amount of servers in that country are going to get blocked.
How about we drop the sensationalism here?
It's not some conspiracy to block all mail from Asia.
Look, maybe some people need to get mail from Asia, but I don't have any reason to. I'm not obligated to let anyone on the internet contact me at will. I can pick and choose who to block/accept at will. If people in don't want their servers to get blocked, maybe they should deal with their spam problem. I don't have time to fix it for them.
Look at it this way:
The internet is this huge shared network. It has a finite amount of bandwidth and it works because everyone carries data to its destination.
The question here should not be if any nodes should ever get blocked. The question should be: How much junk traffic should a single node on the network have to generate before it happens?
At some point you have to start blocking people. If I start DOSing an email server (almost what spam is), I can expect to have my traffic blocked at some point. Maybe I have to send a million junk messages, maybe a billion, but at some point it's costing too much to carry and process my traffic. Yes, bandwidth costs money. That's just the way a system like the internet has to work. There have to be mechanisms in block to handle the case were a node starts misbehaving. One of those mechanisms has to be dropping traffic from that node.
Carrying junk traffic costs money. Filtering costs money. At some amount of traffic, the cost becomes too high, and you have to block the traffic. Think of it as a signal to noise ratio. There always needs to be some number, at which you pull the plug, because the data isn't worth dealing with anymore.(And filtering it is too expensive)
Any time you share something you're going to need the ability to do this. If I start driving in the middle of a two lane highway, I can expectect to get pulled over and have my license revoked (eventually). It should be. I'm messing up things for everone else and the sensible way to fix it is to remove me.
Wrong.
The id# is unique to your machine.
Read the damn links I posted.
Do you even know what an astroturfer is?
How can such an uninformed post get marked informative?
Screw the back button, what I want is an intelligent forward button.
Say you're looking at the page:
http://127.0.0.1/page1.html
and then you go to the page:
http://127.0.0.1/page2.html
At that point I want the browser to request
http://127.0.0.1/page3.html
in the background. If it is availible, the forward button should become clickable and take me there.
The code could check for predictible changes between pages, and if it thinks it's found a pattern, it requests it. If the page is there, it turns on the forward button.
It could also be set up to jump to the next anchor in an HTML document, if any exist.
Too bad you have no idea what you're talking about.
You should read more about what media player really does:
Media Player sends a unique id number along with the info about what you're watching.
Are you an astroturfer or something or are you just clueless/insane? I don't need to even get into your other points as they're just ridiculous.
News flash: MS is worse now than they've even been.
Why exactly should I pretend they aren't?
Okay, you take your proudct, that directly competes with Microsoft's. You change one letter of it, and market it. What do you think is going to happen?
You are not accutately describing the situation. Windows is a generic term. Trademarking windows is like me going and trademarking "wiper blades." It's a generic term already in common use, just like windows was. It shouldn't matter if my wiperblades company gets 90% market share, I picked a generic term.
BTW Xwindows only differs from windows by only letter too, so even with your logic MS should loose their trademark.
It's not that hard to design a test that makes any calulator worthless. Even my wonderful TI-89. Hell, that thing does symbolic integration, and will keep things like pi as pi in the answer instead of replacing it with 3.digitsofprecision. That doesn't help if you don't know how integration works and how to set up the problem.
Given that, I have never been allowed to use a calculator in any college math class I've taken (4 of them). Those classes are about concepts. They don't ask you anything you can't do fairy quickly in your head.
But on the other side of the coin, I have always been allowed to use a calculator in any of my engineering courses. Most of the time, I don't really need it. They intentionally use numbers that will work out simply. Maybe at the end you punch the final answer into your calculator with all the constants, but by that point you've got 90% of the credit for the problem. They let you use them because you've already learned the concepts by then so if you don't remember the integral of arctan(x) you can just use your calulator, just like d would to "in the real world". If you don't have any idea what that integral is supposed to work out to be, you're going to get it wrong anyways.
I can see the situation you had as being one of two things:
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If you went into the test not understanding the math. You probably deserved at 54%.
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If you knew the stuff and just used your calulator to save time that should have been fine (unless it said to show your work and you didn't).
Anyways blame the teacher, not the calculator. I used a calc. in all my math classes in H.S. and I didn't feel helpless without one. Calcutors are good, they save me a lot to time, and they make a lot of math problems easier. Kids need to be taught the concepts and the technology. If you're not teaching them the concepts, you aren't teaching the technology, you're teaching button pushing and you may as well let everyone play "Oregon Trail" and call it a computer science course.Here's my problem with this:
They say they'll use the info anonymously and not share it right?
Nothing actually holds them to their word on this. They can say they'll use the info anonmyously, and then change their mind later. Nothing's stopping them, or at least nothing stops gov't officials in the US from doing things like this. "No new taxes" anyone?
I would accept a system like this, if there was actually an assurance that they would hold to their word, say fines and jail time for anyone who shares the confidential info and maybe a contract where they have to trash the whole system if X amount of data gets comprimised.
And of course they would have to be audited, by auditors whose only business is auditing.
If I were to have my way, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" would be the method for issuing punishments to criminals.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."-Ghandi
Lemme guess, you've never done anything illegal in your entire life?
The world is not black and white. So you would kill murderers? Well, how much evidence do you need to decide to kill someone? Death isn't exactly a revocable punishment, now is it? If the judge makes a wrong decision and sentances an innocent man to death does he get killed too? There are tons of other questions like this that illustrate why "an eye for an eye" doesn't work.
You're also showing your lack of understaning of people in general. Crazy punishments wouldn't do as much as you think to deter criminals. Criminals aren't exactly the most clever, forward-thinking individuals around. That's why they're criminals. If the really thought about their future they'd realize that committing serious crimes is not a good idea, even with our current punishments.
I followed the link in your sig and skimmed the text.
It seems like what you want is basically this right?
I know europe is really into smartcards. They had half a building full of smartcard related stuff at Cebit last year.
Smartcards are only a partial solution. You still have to trust others more than you really should have to, given the current level of tech. we have availible. Smartcards do not have any displays or buttons on them. As a result, you don't get one of the key things I was talking about: The ability to only authorize a certain amount of money to be transferred.
With a smartcard, the retailer (or whomever) is talking to the smartcard for you, and you have to trust them not to change 20 euros into 200 euros before they send the info to the card.
I suppose it would be possible to put a smartcard into your trusted device and tell in to only authorize up to 20 euros for the next transaction that occurs, but it seems to me that that is not the way smartcard tech. is being implemented, and it would require an additiional trusted device.
Yes, obviously my logic must be wrong, since you only attempt to refute a single point I made (out of many) and fail to understand the point of my post.
/. about someone figuring out a way to defeat fingerprint readers with gelatin. Once someone has a gelatin copy of your fingerprint, what do you do?
Since just about every reply has been someone nitpicking about retinal scanners and failing to get the bigger picture, I might as well respond to everyone all at once.
I'm sure the NSA has badassed retinal scanners. That doesn't mean they're foolproof and the NSA knows this. I'm sure they also have guys that stand near the retinal scanner and make sure there's no funny business going on. This is also why a retinal scanner was only "one of the authorization systems at the entrance."
I wasn't saying that Snipe's character is a genius. I was using a humorous anecdote to illustrate one of the follies of this technology. It was a freakin' movie, sure sticking a pen into and eye is going to mess it up, but it was a funny scene wasn't it?
The point I was making by bring that up was the biometric authentication is fallible. You can steal someone's body part, you can make a fake body part, etc. No one has replied with an answer to the "What do you do when someone steals your fingerprints?" question? That's a real problem with biometrics. They're awfully hard to change. There has already been at least one story on
I don't think biometric authentication is a totally bad idea, but I do think it is to use only a single biometric as your authentication scheme (at least for anything more serious than a screensaver password).
Exactly.
Anyone ever see the movie Demolition Man?
There's a scene in it the explains very simply why biometric authentication is a bad idea:
Snipes, needs to bust out of this high-tech future prison, but they have a retinal scanner on the door, so he just takes the eye of some guy he just killed, stick it on a pen and holds it in front or the scanner.
No thanks. I'd rather be able to surrender my credit card to a mugger and then make a phone call and have the account shut down. If everything goes biometric I have to be a hostage, or loose a body part for them to get what they want. And then...
What do I do if someone "steals" my fingerprint? I can't exactly go get new ones and shut the old ones down, now can I?
There are lots of other good reasons why this isn't such a wonderful idea, either. I can send my girlfriend out for a pizza with my credit card, but not if everything is fingerprint based. Then there's the false positive/negative rate problems, the what happens if you hurt your thumb problem, etc. And I don't think I'll even get started on the privacy concerns here.
The next "credit card" type of system we need, is one where the cards themselves have computers in them and all transactions use encryption. When someone asks me for $5 I can give them an encrypted message for my bank authorizing a one-time transfer. Then I don't have to trust them not to overcharge me (right now they can say they're charging you $5 and charge you $500), or to keep my number safe from 133thaX0rs (see ford for an example of this problem).
Guns are "life or death" devices, literally.
I don't have a gun myself, but I do know my fair about them. There is no way in hell I would trust one of these guns. Yeah I'm about to defend my life and my property and then "Oh shit! The battery's dead!"
And that's only the tip of the iceberg. What about the sensor they're going to use? Is it one of the cheapass fingerprint readers? Do they have any idea what the false positive and false negative rates on those? Totally unacceptable for a life or death device.
What they really should be doing is throwing people who leave their guns within reach of little kids in jail. It's criminally negligent behavior and should be treated as such.
Oh, and don't forget that guns are fairly simple devices. It's probably going to be trivial to remove this thing, but I'm sure they're going to make it a felony to do so. This way the criminal, who is already committing other felonies won't give a shit and can just remove it, but me, Joe public, can't. That way he can shoot me while my gun is still scanning my hand.
I have and rio volt and the baclight died right before the warranty expired. The anti-skip protection is pretty crappy too. The meshanism is just too susceptible to skips, I have to keep my walking under a certain speed, hold it in my hand, or learn to walk like some sort of ninja.
Other than that it's been a very good device. Good battery life, and the new rom offered major improvements over the orignal one too (It boots twice as fast as it used to). Note: Your backlight probably hasn't died because now the backlight defaults to always off unless you press a button. When mine shipped, the backlight defaulted to aways one whenever the unit was plugged into a wall outlet/car adaptor. I don't know if they ever reall did fix this design flaw with the rio volt or if they are just relying on their software workaround to make sure the backlight doesn't die before the warranty expires.
Another side note, the rio volt is actually made by another company. When it came out, the AVC Soul which was availible at mp3playerstore.com was the exact same thing for $10 less.
If he's trying to branch out into the auto business, then he's clearly abusing Nissan-the-car-company's trademark.
Screw that. So what if he's showing car ads, has last name is nissan. He should be able to have a website at nissan.com. He could even start a car company and build cars. He just couldn't call his company nissan motors. He should be able to call it widget motors and have all the info about it on his site. Trademark dillution would be saying something was a nissan (car) when it wasn't. All this is, is using his last name to point to a website.
I have a very common last name, like smith. Does that mean if I had smith.com I could never post any info and anything that a company whose name includes smith is involved in? That's retarded. What names likes smith, jones, etc, that would basically mean you can't post anything, because there are going to be thousands or companies with that name.
Really?
Is there a lawyer in the house?
Can't they just file a motion to have the case dismissed?
Can't the lawyers for the defense just say something along the lines of "This patent suit is being filed only against small companies, because it's frivolous and they hope we'll settle out of court."
Shit like this should be illegal. It should be considered extortion and these guys should go to jail.
What can the porn guys sue these jerks for? There's gotta be something. Something that will allow them to put this company under, and convince a lawyer to take their case just so he could get x% of the winnings for an afternoon's work.