Of course, there wouldn't be such a volume of spam were it not for the anti's getting their panties all in a knot and thus the requirement of navigating around filters to get the messages through.
Why would any legitimate advertiser want to navigate around filters? Surely if somebody is using a spam filter, they don't want to receive the messages?
Interesting use of 'anti's', by the way. Quite apart from the misplaced apostrophe, the only people I've seen use that term are people on nanae whining about how we're hurting their legitimit bisneses and infringing their frea speach rites. Getting frustrated with the filters, are we, sir?
that monarchs did not systematically engage in social spending and internal improvements probably means they don't increase tax revenues, which mean they probably don't increase the health of the economy, else they would lead to more tax revenues.
Careful with that argument. It seems to have as an implicit assumption that monarchs know what's best. Absolute monarchy - is that the kind of government you favour?
Cheap shots about Gentoo and Doom 3 aside, this is cool to see. I imagine it warms the heart of a lot of us old AMD fanboys. Plus, with a bit of luck the extra volume will bring down the prices of the Athlon 64s we stick in our gaming boxen. Right?... Right?
I put it in my computer, tried to play it, and saw a message about failed authentication. None of my players worked. They all said that the DVD could not be played because of DRM.
Huh? What kind of Slashdotter would receive an error like that? Don't we all use mplayer, or xine with libdvdcss? No way do we ever run into copyprotection issues with a DVD! j00 s|_|X0R, l4m3r!
Oh, hang on...
last night, I found myself curled up with comfy blankets, half a bottle of rum, a DVD, and this beautiful, brilliant, and generally amazing girl I had recently met.
The whole concept of time travel to prior times is mind-bending, such as the "kill your father as a child" paradox.
Here's a possible solution.
In 2005, I complete my time machine. I go back in time to, shall we say, 1935. I kill my grandfather. Very well: now the twentieth century continues, minus Grandad. 2005 arrives, and I'm not in it. No time machine is built. Nobody goes back in time. In 1935, Grandad survives.
Paradox? No. Again, it's 1935, and the twentieth century continues with Grandad in it. But now the fun starts.
Uncertainty's a real troublemaker. Why should the twentieth century work the same way twice? Maybe Hitler wins; that screws everything up nicely. Maybe when Grandad leaves Ireland he goes to America, not England. Maybe the wrong sperm wins the race and my father is never born. Maybe the crucial microchip I need for my time machine never quite works properly, or never gets invented in the first place... There are countless ways that the intervening history might have gone in which the time machine was never built and the paradox never arose.
Result: if some idiot goes back in time and does something paradoxical, time loops around until it hits on a consistent history and can then settle. Attempting the murder of your grandfather won't hurt him, but the odds are good that you get edited out of continuity...
hey this would take 75% less time/effort if it only read input from a text file... I did end up turning it over to the tools team, after I refined it for a year and made it as bug-free as I could. I did enjoy turning over a large amount of C++ to a team primarily focuses on VB/script-driven tools. It still makes me laugh.
Um... getting a VB program to read input from a text file isn't all that hard. Open Somethingorother For Input, or maybe open a CSV file as a recordset... Plenty of ways. I know we hate all things MS here, but maybe if you'd gone with the Dark Side just this once it wouldn't have taken you a year to get done?
I wouldn't mind being launched into our own sun, neat way to go out:)
That would actually be more expensive than being sent to another star. Remember, you're already in orbit around the Sun, moving along with the Earth. That gives you a big boost towards the energy you'd need to escape the Sun altogether.
If you want to actually send something into the Sun, you have to lose all that speed and basically drop straight down. That turns out to be a bigger job than just speeding up even more to escape completely. We're nearer to escaping the Sun than falling in:-)
I'm sick of people throwing well founded science out the window because they don't understand it. Many species have literally thousands of transitional fossils, almost looking like a flip book of evolution, and to hear intelligent design people say that there are no transitional fossils found makes me cringe because it is just a blatant lie, or an uninformed statement.
The reason creationists love the whole 'transitional fossils' thing is that you can keep going forever.
Suppose we have fossil A, and also fossil E. E looks a lot like A, but with modifications, and was found in a later rock layer. We reckon E is a descendant of A.
Right, now to satisfy these creationists we need to find a transitional fossil between the two, do we? Very well. Here's fossil C, found in a rock layer intermediate in time between where we found A and E, and it looks a lot like A, with some of the modifications we saw in E, but not all. Perfect, right?
Nope. Now we've got two missing transitionals, instead of just one! Gotta find B and D now!
This can, of course, go on forever. Which is why they love it so much.
Thus far, smaller scale operations have gotten around this by claiming that they're just selling their time
Interesting way to view it...
Suppose I have an uber high level character. This guy is powerful enough that he can stroll right through the Quest for the +2 Dagger of Extra Niftiness without the slightest difficulty.
There are a lot of struggling newbies, however, who haven't a prayer of getting that dagger for a long time yet. One of them therefore approaches me and says 'if you will take your character and go fetch me the +2 Dagger of Extra Niftiness, I will pay you twenty quid.' I go - it's easy, takes a matter of minutes, I'm so uber I can teleport right to the final boss and instakill him with my +5 Axe of Even Greater Niftiness - and get the dagger, hand it over, get paid real money.
Have I sold this guy the virtual dagger, or have I sold him my personal services as a mercenary subcontractor?
This is Sicily. You know who's going to be providing the local labour? The construction firms you're going to find down there are, shall we say, family businesses.
Might not work out all that cheap, but at least they won't have to worry about union trouble;-)
The guys getting all the airtime and press are busy furiously digging a trench back to the fourteenth century, and yelling at full volume about how great the view is from said trench.
It occurs to me that literalist fundamentalism could easily be viewed as a form of idolatry.
No, wait - hear me out. Don't stone me to death just yet.
The classical idolaters of the Old Testament made gods for themselves, gods of silver and gold and marble and stone, and prayed to them. They ignored God, the god revealed in nature, the god of the thunderstorm and of the mountain, and worshipped their lifeless metal gods that did nobody any good at all.
Quite rightly, the ancient Hebrews condemned this kind of nonsense.
Yet today we see the same thing in a different, perhaps more sophisticated form. What god do the Bible-inerrant creationists worship? They worship an idol made of words. A god defined by and confined to the text of a single, politically biased and rather dodgy English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of the original Hebrew. They completely ignore the god revealed in nature, the god of the quasar and the supernova, of the dinosaur and the sabretooth, and worship their petty prudish sex-obsessed Bronze Age war-god.
I really see no difference between the creationist lobby and the Pharisees and the idolaters of old. They've all fallen into the same intellectual trap. They're worshipping the structure, the crust of religion that forms around any authentic belief, and underneath it all the god has long since died and they haven't even noticed...
You're saying that in the future there will be a way to improve the Daily Mail?
There is already; it's called a match.
I just thought that Mail readers would appreciate Lemonparty. It's the right demographic, you know?... Elderly Tory types with repressed perverted impulses. Perfect.
... the profit motive rules all. What, you think our companies should worry about the lot of the ordinary citizen, the workers, the guy in the street? That's not American, that's not the Western way, that's communism! You're not a Communist, are you? Why do you hate America so much?
Has it ever occurred to you that there are technical differences between operating systems, and that the design of UNIX makes it much harder to run spyware which can spy a lot, or viruses which can spread that easy (remember "I LOVE YOU"?)?
Bah. If we woke up tomorrow to find that Linux had miraculously taken a 90% marketshare overnight, I could write some spyware within an hour to pwn most of those new Linux users.
The security hole here is between the keyboard and the chair. Joe Sixpack with his friendly ready-for-the-desktop Linux distribution will soon discover that it's easy to install software: you just type the 'root' password into any box that asks for it. Once he does that, then the spyware author has decades of rootkit techniques to draw upon. That machine will never be disinfected.
These are the people who click on banner ads and fake-dialog-box popups, say 'OK' to everything and agree to every EULA that you shove in front of their fat stupid faces. You think they won't also hand over their root passwords as well to anyone who asks?
Age does not beget quality. By that virture octogenarians should be the best quality people around, and they aren't! Someone insert some witty windows-creaks-like-an-old-person comment.
We use UNIX. We shouldn't be making cracks about using an ancient OS.
Re:DISGUSTED!
on
Space Tourism?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How many people could $20 M help in OUR country? Forget helping the Russiona economy!!!! Help OUR American citizens!!!
The guy's Japanese. What difference does it make to him whether he spends his money in Russia or America?
I often wondered about this. Douglas Adams wasn't a scientist, but he had a decent layman's knowledge of scientific ideas. Did he realise that 'missing the ground' is exactly how, for instance, a Soyuz manages to stay up?
I never understood this. OK, creationists are by definition not especially bright, but why do they consistently misspell 'prove', and always in the same way?
Perhaps there is some classic, standard work of creationist material that they all memorise and regurgitate as required, and which contains this error of spelling? Has this small mutation of the language propagated itself in this isolated and self-contained colony, and are we seeing a case of linguistic speciation here?
I can't wait for the first OS hack for one of these ePapers, imagine linux/bsd running on your newspaper!
I can't wait for the first remote root hack for one of these ePapers.
Picture it. It's 2013. You're sitting on the Tube on your way to work reading the paper. A hundred other people are doing the same thing. At the other end of the carriage sits a geek with a laptop and some wireless kit. He's tapping away and grinning.
Next thing you know the page contents change.
... All copies of the Times on that carriage just became goatse. All copies of the Sun just became tubgirl. And the Mail? Lemonparty.
A visit to any of the web's free horoscope sites reveals a process that, while whimsical in its foundations, is extremely mathematical and very rigorous in its methodology. Astrology works on the concept of people's personalities depending on a set of attributes that are assigned a pyramidal weightage structure.
Good grief. This text was generated by a robot script, right? It surely wasn't written by a human? It contains slightly less meaning than the average corporate mission statement!
... and they will self-destruct after you read them once. Welcome to the DRM world!
Bad, but it could be so much worse. Imagine this, though: you go back to your newspaper clippings from 2003 to check up on just what the Prime Minister had to say back then. 'Saddam Hussein is evil and must be removed,' you read. 'Whether or not he has weapons of mass destruction is irrelevant; this is a campaign to spread freedom and democracy.'
Hmm. Not what I remember. But it was a long time ago, and there it is in black and white. Guess we weren't lied to after all...
Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Slashdot Mirror
Put that in proportion for me, though. How much did the number of Chinese people total rise last year?
Britain AND the EU? Wow, that _would_ be impressive. Nearly as good as what could be done if we could get California and the USA to cooperate...
Why would any legitimate advertiser want to navigate around filters? Surely if somebody is using a spam filter, they don't want to receive the messages?
Interesting use of 'anti's', by the way. Quite apart from the misplaced apostrophe, the only people I've seen use that term are people on nanae whining about how we're hurting their legitimit bisneses and infringing their frea speach rites. Getting frustrated with the filters, are we, sir?
Bunch of craters named after Russians, IIRC.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have to watch The Wizard of Oz with this cool new soundtrack...
Careful with that argument. It seems to have as an implicit assumption that monarchs know what's best. Absolute monarchy - is that the kind of government you favour?
... k, maybe not. Can't afford one anyway :-(
Huh? What kind of Slashdotter would receive an error like that? Don't we all use mplayer, or xine with libdvdcss? No way do we ever run into copyprotection issues with a DVD! j00 s|_|X0R, l4m3r!
Oh, hang on...
last night, I found myself curled up with comfy blankets, half a bottle of rum, a DVD, and this beautiful, brilliant, and generally amazing girl I had recently met.
Fine. You win...
Here's a possible solution.
In 2005, I complete my time machine. I go back in time to, shall we say, 1935. I kill my grandfather. Very well: now the twentieth century continues, minus Grandad. 2005 arrives, and I'm not in it. No time machine is built. Nobody goes back in time. In 1935, Grandad survives.
Paradox? No. Again, it's 1935, and the twentieth century continues with Grandad in it. But now the fun starts.
Uncertainty's a real troublemaker. Why should the twentieth century work the same way twice? Maybe Hitler wins; that screws everything up nicely. Maybe when Grandad leaves Ireland he goes to America, not England. Maybe the wrong sperm wins the race and my father is never born. Maybe the crucial microchip I need for my time machine never quite works properly, or never gets invented in the first place... There are countless ways that the intervening history might have gone in which the time machine was never built and the paradox never arose.
Result: if some idiot goes back in time and does something paradoxical, time loops around until it hits on a consistent history and can then settle. Attempting the murder of your grandfather won't hurt him, but the odds are good that you get edited out of continuity...
Um... getting a VB program to read input from a text file isn't all that hard. Open Somethingorother For Input, or maybe open a CSV file as a recordset... Plenty of ways. I know we hate all things MS here, but maybe if you'd gone with the Dark Side just this once it wouldn't have taken you a year to get done?
That would actually be more expensive than being sent to another star. Remember, you're already in orbit around the Sun, moving along with the Earth. That gives you a big boost towards the energy you'd need to escape the Sun altogether.
If you want to actually send something into the Sun, you have to lose all that speed and basically drop straight down. That turns out to be a bigger job than just speeding up even more to escape completely. We're nearer to escaping the Sun than falling in :-)
The reason creationists love the whole 'transitional fossils' thing is that you can keep going forever.
Suppose we have fossil A, and also fossil E. E looks a lot like A, but with modifications, and was found in a later rock layer. We reckon E is a descendant of A.
Right, now to satisfy these creationists we need to find a transitional fossil between the two, do we? Very well. Here's fossil C, found in a rock layer intermediate in time between where we found A and E, and it looks a lot like A, with some of the modifications we saw in E, but not all. Perfect, right?
Nope. Now we've got two missing transitionals, instead of just one! Gotta find B and D now!
This can, of course, go on forever. Which is why they love it so much.
Interesting way to view it...
Suppose I have an uber high level character. This guy is powerful enough that he can stroll right through the Quest for the +2 Dagger of Extra Niftiness without the slightest difficulty.
There are a lot of struggling newbies, however, who haven't a prayer of getting that dagger for a long time yet. One of them therefore approaches me and says 'if you will take your character and go fetch me the +2 Dagger of Extra Niftiness, I will pay you twenty quid.' I go - it's easy, takes a matter of minutes, I'm so uber I can teleport right to the final boss and instakill him with my +5 Axe of Even Greater Niftiness - and get the dagger, hand it over, get paid real money.
Have I sold this guy the virtual dagger, or have I sold him my personal services as a mercenary subcontractor?
This is Sicily. You know who's going to be providing the local labour? The construction firms you're going to find down there are, shall we say, family businesses.
Might not work out all that cheap, but at least they won't have to worry about union trouble ;-)
It occurs to me that literalist fundamentalism could easily be viewed as a form of idolatry.
No, wait - hear me out. Don't stone me to death just yet.
The classical idolaters of the Old Testament made gods for themselves, gods of silver and gold and marble and stone, and prayed to them. They ignored God, the god revealed in nature, the god of the thunderstorm and of the mountain, and worshipped their lifeless metal gods that did nobody any good at all.
Quite rightly, the ancient Hebrews condemned this kind of nonsense.
Yet today we see the same thing in a different, perhaps more sophisticated form. What god do the Bible-inerrant creationists worship? They worship an idol made of words. A god defined by and confined to the text of a single, politically biased and rather dodgy English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of the original Hebrew. They completely ignore the god revealed in nature, the god of the quasar and the supernova, of the dinosaur and the sabretooth, and worship their petty prudish sex-obsessed Bronze Age war-god.
I really see no difference between the creationist lobby and the Pharisees and the idolaters of old. They've all fallen into the same intellectual trap. They're worshipping the structure, the crust of religion that forms around any authentic belief, and underneath it all the god has long since died and they haven't even noticed...
There is already; it's called a match.
I just thought that Mail readers would appreciate Lemonparty. It's the right demographic, you know?... Elderly Tory types with repressed perverted impulses. Perfect.
... the profit motive rules all. What, you think our companies should worry about the lot of the ordinary citizen, the workers, the guy in the street? That's not American, that's not the Western way, that's communism! You're not a Communist, are you? Why do you hate America so much?
Bah. If we woke up tomorrow to find that Linux had miraculously taken a 90% marketshare overnight, I could write some spyware within an hour to pwn most of those new Linux users.
The security hole here is between the keyboard and the chair. Joe Sixpack with his friendly ready-for-the-desktop Linux distribution will soon discover that it's easy to install software: you just type the 'root' password into any box that asks for it. Once he does that, then the spyware author has decades of rootkit techniques to draw upon. That machine will never be disinfected.
These are the people who click on banner ads and fake-dialog-box popups, say 'OK' to everything and agree to every EULA that you shove in front of their fat stupid faces. You think they won't also hand over their root passwords as well to anyone who asks?
We use UNIX. We shouldn't be making cracks about using an ancient OS.
The guy's Japanese. What difference does it make to him whether he spends his money in Russia or America?
I often wondered about this. Douglas Adams wasn't a scientist, but he had a decent layman's knowledge of scientific ideas. Did he realise that 'missing the ground' is exactly how, for instance, a Soyuz manages to stay up?
I never understood this. OK, creationists are by definition not especially bright, but why do they consistently misspell 'prove', and always in the same way?
Perhaps there is some classic, standard work of creationist material that they all memorise and regurgitate as required, and which contains this error of spelling? Has this small mutation of the language propagated itself in this isolated and self-contained colony, and are we seeing a case of linguistic speciation here?
I can't wait for the first remote root hack for one of these ePapers.
Picture it. It's 2013. You're sitting on the Tube on your way to work reading the paper. A hundred other people are doing the same thing. At the other end of the carriage sits a geek with a laptop and some wireless kit. He's tapping away and grinning.
Next thing you know the page contents change.
... All copies of the Times on that carriage just became goatse. All copies of the Sun just became tubgirl. And the Mail? Lemonparty.
Oh, this is going to be fun!
Good grief. This text was generated by a robot script, right? It surely wasn't written by a human? It contains slightly less meaning than the average corporate mission statement!
Bad, but it could be so much worse. Imagine this, though: you go back to your newspaper clippings from 2003 to check up on just what the Prime Minister had to say back then. 'Saddam Hussein is evil and must be removed,' you read. 'Whether or not he has weapons of mass destruction is irrelevant; this is a campaign to spread freedom and democracy.'
Hmm. Not what I remember. But it was a long time ago, and there it is in black and white. Guess we weren't lied to after all...
Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Actually, the majority of bad movies come from India. Same reason, though.
About the open mail relays in the grandparent, though: try scanning some Korean high schools if you want to know what 'open relay' is all about ;-)