I still think being able to say "So-and-so got *exactly* 8,192 votes" is much better than "So-and-so got 8,200 votes with a 95% confidance interval with a radius of 10", even if the next runner up is obviously behind.
Except that you have a degree of uncertainty with any measurement system; at least with paper ballots you have an opportunity to recount.
Outside of fraud, I think that you can rest assured that the vote would be recorded correctly, especially if the code was audited by professors and other independent sources. It'd take a really really bad bug or a deliberate fraudulant attempt from within the company to do it otherwise.
Even if the code is audited, you have no guarantee that the compiled code the machines are running is the same as the code that was audited. Diebold has been regularly caught running uncertified versions of their software on voting machines, for instance.
And anyway, a paper trail wouldn't add any assurances in that situation anyway....
Sure it would. I said a voter-verifiable paper trail, remember. A machine prints out a ballot with your selections in plain text, which you then fold and put in the ballot box. Further, I trust the average election worker to be able to monitor and understand the security requirements to maintain a cardboard ballot box. I don'y trust those people to be able to manage an electronic voting system. You're quite right that a record that couldn't be verified by the voter is pointless. Further, a system that just recorded the votes in sequence on a paper tape could compromise the secrecy of the ballot.
Except you wouldn't handcount all votes. Take a random selection of maybe 10% of the precincts to count. If the count differs from the electronic totals by more than the margin of error of the counting system, or if the two methods yield different outcomes of the elections, recount the state.
On the other hand, you've gone to all the trouble to hire all those election workers to operate and monitor the polling stations. Why not have them stay for an extra hour to count ballots? It's not that difficult a task, and again it is something that is easily understood, monitored, and verified. Considering what it costs to buy, distribute, maintain, and repair the specialized hardware for an electronic voting system and the parallel paper handling to verify it, paying your election staff for an extra hour or two starts to look pretty cost-effective.
Speed. We're an impatient country. If we can be told the vote totals right after elections close, we're happier.
In the recent Canadian election, vote counts started appearing almost immediately after the close of polls on the east coast. With the exception of a few extremely close rates, the winner in each district was decided within an hour. How impatient do you want to be?
Now look at Canada. Count the votes 5 times. Do you think you'll get one result, or five? I'm betting on the five.
On the other hand, if the five are tightly distributed around a mean, then we're still in good shape. Recounts are mandatory in Canadian federal elections when the margin of victory is smaller than 0.1% of votes cast; candidates may also request recounts. (In the 1993 federal election, Anne "Landslide Annie" MacLellan won in her district (riding) by 11 votes after the final recount. This year, she won by a relatively large 721 votes--a whopping 1.4% margin.)
...you can rest assured that the machine recorded it correctly.
Presuming the system generates a paper trail. Otherwise, all bets are off. Of course, to maintain anonymity and voter verifiability, the paper trail would probably take the form of a human-readable paper ballot printed and deposited in a sealed box, which could then be hand-counted to verify...wait, that sounds awfully familiar...
If lenses were stygmatic, then the concept of 'depth of field' would not exist: everything in the picture would always be in focus.
Minor nitpick. Stigmatic--or more commonly anastigmatic--lenses don't have an infinite depth of field. Rather, an ideal anastigmatic lens properly focuses light all the way across the focal plane. Astigmatic lenses (lenses with astigmatism) will produce images that are blurry as you move further from the primary axis of the lens. That is, even if you focus your camera correctly, stuff near the edges won't be as sharp as stuff in the middle of the frame. In practice, most camera lenses try to minimize astigmatism through the use of multiple lens elements and other tricks; some are better at it than others.
Depth of field considerations will still exist--even though the entire focal plane of an anastigmatic lens should be sharp, stuff in front or behind will be out of focus. If you want more depth of field, you have to stop down your aperture. If you want large depth of field and no astigmatism, get a camera obscura ('pinhole camera').
Nope--it was the other way around, at least in February of 2000.
Here's an interesting(?) review of the sites of the Presidential candidates' websites.
Here's another review and commentary about the websites, including a count of the number of errors in the HTML.
Netcraft says that Bush actually was running Apache for a while before the election, but switched to IIS by October (at the latest) and has been stuck there ever since.
So, wait. The mpaa has millions to spend on this new way to prevent piracy? I thought they were losing money out the ass!
Er...that's slightly faulty logic. Even though I don't believe that the movie industry is losing money through copyright infringement* this particular scheme doesn't prove it.
If the convenience store on the corner is getting robbed every week, the owner might decide to install a safe. Aha! you say. He must not really have been losing money; after all, he can afford to install that shiny new safe.
*Escaped screeners may cut into the opening weekend take for weakly-scripted action movies that are trying to be blockbusters...but there's a strong argument that the financial disincentive to produce expensive, crappy movies is of net benefit to society.
Point taken, though most of the interest in the Hubble comes from the pretty pictures it gives us using the visible portion of the spectrum. No one cares about the other stuff, hence why the proposed Webb scope isn't that popular with the public.
The recent Hubble Ultra Deep Field images--which were very popular with the public--were generated using the ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys) and NICMOS (Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer). As the name implies, NICMOS is an infrared camera. ACS is sensitive from deep in the UV through visible wavelengths up into the near infrared.
In other words, the Hubble Deep (and Ultra Deep) Field images are false-colour images. Indeed, most of the most impressive Hubble images are false-colour. The famous 'Pillars of Creation' would actually appear pinkish and relatively unremarkable in a photograph.
SOHO images of the Sun are almost exclusively false-colour. Once again, some of them are quite eye-catching. COBE's measurements of the microwave background are also (obviously) false-colour--but they still made headlines.
As long as you can take a picture of something at some wavelength, it can be represented in the visible. With a little bit of talent, that representation can be made 'pretty'. There are many arguments for and against the JWST and its specific instrumentation choices--but an inability to produce newsworthy pictures is not one of them.
Might be better to wait ten minutes on the runway than hours or days for your luggage.
Better for whom? The hundred and fifty other passengers who are left cooling their heels, and were already going to have to rush to make a connection at O'Hare? The pilot who ends up in a later spot in the queue for takeoff? The airline, which needs that plane to be on the ground, cleaned, turned around, and ready to load a fresh batch of passengers half an hour after wheels-down at its destination? The airport, that is waiting for you to clear the gate for another bird?
Nope--it sucks for all those people. The airline is going to send your bag on the next flight (in one to twenty-four hours, depending on the destination) and have it couriered to your hotel or home.
I dont know whether its such an issue here, but outside US, anyone or anything can walk in to a baggage terminal and walk off with someone else's bag with out being stopped.
This is true in many U.S. airports, too. I arrived on an international flight into St. Louis (I precleared customs in Canada) and the baggage claim was outside of the secure area. Not that I had any problems with my luggage, but it is definitely possible.
For those considering installing Firefox on Win2k PCs they don't have 'administrator' accounts on, I can report that it installs and works perfectly well from a 'power user' account. Perfect for those considering an installation on a work PC.
I'm pleased to report that I have had similar success with Opera, over the years. Successful installs under W2K and XP without admin privileges.
A challenge for/. readers -- go buy some gasoline in graduated containers, and check for yourself [avoid 1,5, and 10 gallon sizes; many states use these for testing purposes and the computers inside the pumps 'catch up' temporarily at these intervals].
Look, I know this is Slashdot, and I know that we like a good conspiracy theory--but come on.
If the story submitter can't be bothered to even submit a link to a third-rate blog with this theory, why the hell is it here? (Please, no 'you must be new here' remarks.) Now we're going to have scores of Slashdot readers linking back to here and polluting the meme pool with this 'fact'.
As others have noted, yes--the pumps tested were out of spec, but the tolerance is on the order of 0.25%. Yes, some retailers might try to keep their pumps calibrated on the low end of the acceptable range, but it's a discrepancy that can also be easily explained by old-fashioned wear and tear. Interestingly, the first article on pump error indicates that in Iowa, roughly equal numbers of pumps deliver more fuel than spec as deliver less.
The pump computers are deliberately topping off the volume at 1, 5, and 10 gallons? You must be kidding--the station owners would have to be both incredibly clever and incredibly stupid to do such a thing. Clever, because they'd have to rewrite and replace the firmware on their pumps. Stupid, because instead of providing any sort of plausible deniability ("wear and tear"; "inadvertent miscalibration") there's be hard evidence of deliberate fraud. Again reiterating the advice of other posters, if you're really afraid of this, only pump gas five or ten gallons at a time.
Thanks, Timothy. Please keep your tinfoil hat away from the pumps; we wouldn't want any inadvertent sparking.
randomly searched for "baseball" on both... Microsoft's #1 results was the mlb.com website (which is what i would expect)... Google's #1 result was baseball-almanac.com doesn't really mean anything, just thought that was interesting...
I suspect it means that Google's algorithm is better, still. The baseball almanac site has a tremendous quantity of baseball trivia, statistics, and anecdotes. Records on the site date back to the nineteenth century.
The Major League Baseball site (Google's second result, by the way) is certainly an important result, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if the real baseball addicts found the almanac site more useful, and linked to it more often.
I note that Google (correctly) returns the Major League Baseball site as the first result for searches for 'major league baseball' or 'mlb'.
Incidentally, it seems that Microsoft is continuing to update their index and/or tweak their algorithm. The current top results are now to The Baseball Archive, Baseball Prospectus...and so forth. The Major League Baseball page is actually on the second page of hits, after a number of significantly less relevant results....
Of note--if you click on a result, you get bounced through msn.com servers first. I presume that they're using that information to refine their search algorithm.
Of course, the cynical might note that the timing of this lawsuit is awfully close to a Google IPO. It's possible that the plaintiffs are hoping for a quick settlement by Google to avoid IP issues hurting their stock price.
No, I'm asking this question, because AFAIK there's a multi-million USD bounty on their heads today. Yet they're still hiding.
Yeah, but they're not sending out millions of emails on the public Internet. They don't process credit card transactions. They don't chat on IRC.There are lots of men with guns protecting and concealing them, if they're even still alive.
I can track down a spammer without leaving my office. Searching the hills of Afghanistan is a wee bit more difficult.
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
This is rather the problem that this technique aims to solve, I thought. Compensate directly the people with the skills to find spammers.
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
If there's always a reward, there will always be people working to try to collect it.
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
Why would Microsoft be upset that someone is fighting spammers? They'd probably be pleased at the reduction in junk traffic through Hotmail.
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
If the FTC is considering it, then they probably have lawyers looking into this. Quite frankly, I'm more likely to believe the FTC than a/. IANAL.
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
This isn't a weird new tax. This is a reward for providing information about a criminal. This is not a new concept.
(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
You mean...cash?
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
This makes bounty hunting more lucrative. The fines (and corresponding bounties) can be larger.
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
This proposal involves turning over information to the relevant government agency (apparently, the FTC) so that they can pursue law enforcement action. This is not a vigilante approach, per se, in that the actual punishment isn't carried out by the bounty hunter.
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
I give up--you're going to have to explain this one. I'm pretty sure the GPL doesn't have a clause that prevents disclosure of incriminating details of spammers....
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
It's not just a feel-good measure if the FTC actually pushes prosecutions based on this evidence. And the public will be motivated to push the FTC--we want our bounties!
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
I agree, but I think taking their money through criminal prosecution, and using that money to fund further anti-spam action isn't such a bad start.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
I guess this is where the (X) Asshats in part 2 come in. Is the proposal a panacea? Of course not. Is the proposal deserving of contemptuous rejection out of hand? Don't be a...stupid person.
Just because something's hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Otherwise, why would you go to the moon or do those other things?
Yes, but how many people have gone to the moon? And how much did it cost?
If everyone wanted to go to the moon, and you had a Saturn V launching from the pad down the street every few hours...I hope that's not regular glass in your windows.
Just because something's hard doesn't mean it should be done. BPL seems to fit into that category. Like going to the moon, it may be appropriate to study in isolated areas on a limited basis...but it's not ready to be rolled out to the general public.
And if you're dumb enough to use a bank that works only with the big neon "Hack Me" sign that is IE, you get what you deserve. Find a bank that works with Mozilla or Konqueror and use those for banking instead.
Or use their telephone banking system as an interim measure, and speak politely but firmly to your bank. If you have any local tech-savvy reporters, feel free to bring this to their attention, too. Banks tend to be motivated to action when publically embarrassed about their security.
Quite frankly, for most people it's a nontrivial investment of effort to have new cheques printed, open a new account, transfer all of their funds, change their automated payroll deposits, reenter all the information for online bill payments...saying 'just switch banks' is not going to fly. Not to put too fine a point on it, but people who were comfortable using IE for any sort of secure transaction before this particular malware came to light probably aren't going to switch now.
That's why, according to the Pew Research Group, members of the press are five times more likely to be liberal than conservative.
That reflects their personal opinions, not necessarily their professional bias.
I'm not naively suggesting that news reporters and commentators never let their personal biases slip through into their reporting, but it's downright insulting to presume that individuals can't report objectively because they happen to have their own opinions.
Food for thought--if you have a dozen reporters with a bias in one direction, and one executive producer/editor/owner with a bias the other way, what slant do you think the news outlet will have?
American society in general hates and fears pornography,
Actually, American society is quite fond of pornography. That's why there's so much of it on the Internet.
On the other hand, American society also has any number of hangups about discussing pornography, or sexuality, or even (*gasp*) showing a naked breast on television.
This strategy ensures that Telus is never stuck again, plus, it gives them good PR because it appears that it is looking out for its customers. Yeah right.
In this instance, a company can do something that
protects their bottom line and shareholders;
protects their customers; and
screws the malware writers;
and you're bashing them?
Hey, I'm thrilled that a company is making more money while doing something that's good--even if it is a telephone company. What's wrong with a little enlightened self-interest?
People theorizing about asteroid mining in the past had talked about complicated ways of getting ice out of the rare ice-bearing asteroids. Now that we know Phoebe is icy, I wonder if it ends up being the most practical place in the solar system to get ice.
A variant of this idea was explored by Isaac Asimov way back in the novella, The Martian Way (Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1952; subsequently republished in several collections).
The characters in the novel propose capturing chunks of ice from Saturn's ring system. We don't need to grab a whole moon--there are cubic-mile-sized chunks of ice in the rings. They might be a bit more manageable to manoeuvre. There are lots to choose from, too.
Oh yeah, and double all those amounts. That is the theoretical maximum that could be derived from the fuel. In practice, the best we can achieve is 40 percent.
Are you sure? That's pretty close to true on earth, where the cold side of a Carnot cycle is going to be at around 300 K. Space, however, is mostly a nice, big, cold blackbody at around 3 kelvin or so (cosmic microwave background.) That should help quite a bit.
On the other hand, other posters have noted that the mass calculation neglects the oxidizer that would have to be carried. That works out to being three or so times the mass of the fuel, depending on the specific hydrocarbons chosen.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry...Cartman has prior art.
Except that you have a degree of uncertainty with any measurement system; at least with paper ballots you have an opportunity to recount.
Outside of fraud, I think that you can rest assured that the vote would be recorded correctly, especially if the code was audited by professors and other independent sources. It'd take a really really bad bug or a deliberate fraudulant attempt from within the company to do it otherwise.
Even if the code is audited, you have no guarantee that the compiled code the machines are running is the same as the code that was audited. Diebold has been regularly caught running uncertified versions of their software on voting machines, for instance.
And anyway, a paper trail wouldn't add any assurances in that situation anyway. ...
Sure it would. I said a voter-verifiable paper trail, remember. A machine prints out a ballot with your selections in plain text, which you then fold and put in the ballot box. Further, I trust the average election worker to be able to monitor and understand the security requirements to maintain a cardboard ballot box. I don'y trust those people to be able to manage an electronic voting system. You're quite right that a record that couldn't be verified by the voter is pointless. Further, a system that just recorded the votes in sequence on a paper tape could compromise the secrecy of the ballot.
Except you wouldn't handcount all votes. Take a random selection of maybe 10% of the precincts to count. If the count differs from the electronic totals by more than the margin of error of the counting system, or if the two methods yield different outcomes of the elections, recount the state.
On the other hand, you've gone to all the trouble to hire all those election workers to operate and monitor the polling stations. Why not have them stay for an extra hour to count ballots? It's not that difficult a task, and again it is something that is easily understood, monitored, and verified. Considering what it costs to buy, distribute, maintain, and repair the specialized hardware for an electronic voting system and the parallel paper handling to verify it, paying your election staff for an extra hour or two starts to look pretty cost-effective.
In the recent Canadian election, vote counts started appearing almost immediately after the close of polls on the east coast. With the exception of a few extremely close rates, the winner in each district was decided within an hour. How impatient do you want to be?
Now look at Canada. Count the votes 5 times. Do you think you'll get one result, or five? I'm betting on the five.
On the other hand, if the five are tightly distributed around a mean, then we're still in good shape. Recounts are mandatory in Canadian federal elections when the margin of victory is smaller than 0.1% of votes cast; candidates may also request recounts. (In the 1993 federal election, Anne "Landslide Annie" MacLellan won in her district (riding) by 11 votes after the final recount. This year, she won by a relatively large 721 votes--a whopping 1.4% margin.)
Presuming the system generates a paper trail. Otherwise, all bets are off. Of course, to maintain anonymity and voter verifiability, the paper trail would probably take the form of a human-readable paper ballot printed and deposited in a sealed box, which could then be hand-counted to verify...wait, that sounds awfully familiar...
Minor nitpick. Stigmatic--or more commonly anastigmatic--lenses don't have an infinite depth of field. Rather, an ideal anastigmatic lens properly focuses light all the way across the focal plane. Astigmatic lenses (lenses with astigmatism) will produce images that are blurry as you move further from the primary axis of the lens. That is, even if you focus your camera correctly, stuff near the edges won't be as sharp as stuff in the middle of the frame. In practice, most camera lenses try to minimize astigmatism through the use of multiple lens elements and other tricks; some are better at it than others.
Depth of field considerations will still exist--even though the entire focal plane of an anastigmatic lens should be sharp, stuff in front or behind will be out of focus. If you want more depth of field, you have to stop down your aperture. If you want large depth of field and no astigmatism, get a camera obscura ('pinhole camera').
Here's an interesting(?) review of the sites of the Presidential candidates' websites.
Here's another review and commentary about the websites, including a count of the number of errors in the HTML.
Netcraft says that Bush actually was running Apache for a while before the election, but switched to IIS by October (at the latest) and has been stuck there ever since.
Er...that's slightly faulty logic. Even though I don't believe that the movie industry is losing money through copyright infringement* this particular scheme doesn't prove it.
If the convenience store on the corner is getting robbed every week, the owner might decide to install a safe. Aha! you say. He must not really have been losing money; after all, he can afford to install that shiny new safe.
*Escaped screeners may cut into the opening weekend take for weakly-scripted action movies that are trying to be blockbusters...but there's a strong argument that the financial disincentive to produce expensive, crappy movies is of net benefit to society.
The recent Hubble Ultra Deep Field images--which were very popular with the public--were generated using the ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys) and NICMOS (Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer). As the name implies, NICMOS is an infrared camera. ACS is sensitive from deep in the UV through visible wavelengths up into the near infrared.
In other words, the Hubble Deep (and Ultra Deep) Field images are false-colour images. Indeed, most of the most impressive Hubble images are false-colour. The famous 'Pillars of Creation' would actually appear pinkish and relatively unremarkable in a photograph.
SOHO images of the Sun are almost exclusively false-colour. Once again, some of them are quite eye-catching. COBE's measurements of the microwave background are also (obviously) false-colour--but they still made headlines.
As long as you can take a picture of something at some wavelength, it can be represented in the visible. With a little bit of talent, that representation can be made 'pretty'. There are many arguments for and against the JWST and its specific instrumentation choices--but an inability to produce newsworthy pictures is not one of them.
Better for whom? The hundred and fifty other passengers who are left cooling their heels, and were already going to have to rush to make a connection at O'Hare? The pilot who ends up in a later spot in the queue for takeoff? The airline, which needs that plane to be on the ground, cleaned, turned around, and ready to load a fresh batch of passengers half an hour after wheels-down at its destination? The airport, that is waiting for you to clear the gate for another bird?
Nope--it sucks for all those people. The airline is going to send your bag on the next flight (in one to twenty-four hours, depending on the destination) and have it couriered to your hotel or home.
This is true in many U.S. airports, too. I arrived on an international flight into St. Louis (I precleared customs in Canada) and the baggage claim was outside of the secure area. Not that I had any problems with my luggage, but it is definitely possible.
I'm pleased to report that I have had similar success with Opera, over the years. Successful installs under W2K and XP without admin privileges.
Cheers.
Look, I know this is Slashdot, and I know that we like a good conspiracy theory--but come on.
If the story submitter can't be bothered to even submit a link to a third-rate blog with this theory, why the hell is it here? (Please, no 'you must be new here' remarks.) Now we're going to have scores of Slashdot readers linking back to here and polluting the meme pool with this 'fact'.
As others have noted, yes--the pumps tested were out of spec, but the tolerance is on the order of 0.25%. Yes, some retailers might try to keep their pumps calibrated on the low end of the acceptable range, but it's a discrepancy that can also be easily explained by old-fashioned wear and tear. Interestingly, the first article on pump error indicates that in Iowa, roughly equal numbers of pumps deliver more fuel than spec as deliver less.
The pump computers are deliberately topping off the volume at 1, 5, and 10 gallons? You must be kidding--the station owners would have to be both incredibly clever and incredibly stupid to do such a thing. Clever, because they'd have to rewrite and replace the firmware on their pumps. Stupid, because instead of providing any sort of plausible deniability ("wear and tear"; "inadvertent miscalibration") there's be hard evidence of deliberate fraud. Again reiterating the advice of other posters, if you're really afraid of this, only pump gas five or ten gallons at a time.
Thanks, Timothy. Please keep your tinfoil hat away from the pumps; we wouldn't want any inadvertent sparking.
I suspect it means that Google's algorithm is better, still. The baseball almanac site has a tremendous quantity of baseball trivia, statistics, and anecdotes. Records on the site date back to the nineteenth century.
The Major League Baseball site (Google's second result, by the way) is certainly an important result, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if the real baseball addicts found the almanac site more useful, and linked to it more often.
I note that Google (correctly) returns the Major League Baseball site as the first result for searches for 'major league baseball' or 'mlb'.
Incidentally, it seems that Microsoft is continuing to update their index and/or tweak their algorithm. The current top results are now to The Baseball Archive, Baseball Prospectus...and so forth. The Major League Baseball page is actually on the second page of hits, after a number of significantly less relevant results....
Of note--if you click on a result, you get bounced through msn.com servers first. I presume that they're using that information to refine their search algorithm.
Of course, the cynical might note that the timing of this lawsuit is awfully close to a Google IPO. It's possible that the plaintiffs are hoping for a quick settlement by Google to avoid IP issues hurting their stock price.
Yeah, but they're not sending out millions of emails on the public Internet. They don't process credit card transactions. They don't chat on IRC.There are lots of men with guns protecting and concealing them, if they're even still alive.
I can track down a spammer without leaving my office. Searching the hills of Afghanistan is a wee bit more difficult.
This is rather the problem that this technique aims to solve, I thought. Compensate directly the people with the skills to find spammers.
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
If there's always a reward, there will always be people working to try to collect it.
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
Why would Microsoft be upset that someone is fighting spammers? They'd probably be pleased at the reduction in junk traffic through Hotmail.
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
If the FTC is considering it, then they probably have lawyers looking into this. Quite frankly, I'm more likely to believe the FTC than a /. IANAL.
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
This isn't a weird new tax. This is a reward for providing information about a criminal. This is not a new concept.
(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
You mean...cash?
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
This makes bounty hunting more lucrative. The fines (and corresponding bounties) can be larger.
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
This proposal involves turning over information to the relevant government agency (apparently, the FTC) so that they can pursue law enforcement action. This is not a vigilante approach, per se, in that the actual punishment isn't carried out by the bounty hunter.
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
I give up--you're going to have to explain this one. I'm pretty sure the GPL doesn't have a clause that prevents disclosure of incriminating details of spammers....
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
It's not just a feel-good measure if the FTC actually pushes prosecutions based on this evidence. And the public will be motivated to push the FTC--we want our bounties!
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
I agree, but I think taking their money through criminal prosecution, and using that money to fund further anti-spam action isn't such a bad start.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
I guess this is where the (X) Asshats in part 2 come in. Is the proposal a panacea? Of course not. Is the proposal deserving of contemptuous rejection out of hand? Don't be a...stupid person.
Yeah, but those are Moon metres. Because of the lower gravity, those rovers were actually ten metres tall and nearly twelve Earth metres across.
Cheers! :)
Yes, but how many people have gone to the moon? And how much did it cost?
If everyone wanted to go to the moon, and you had a Saturn V launching from the pad down the street every few hours...I hope that's not regular glass in your windows.
Just because something's hard doesn't mean it should be done. BPL seems to fit into that category. Like going to the moon, it may be appropriate to study in isolated areas on a limited basis...but it's not ready to be rolled out to the general public.
You have to remember it's a metric ton.
To be fair, the RMS Titanic was built in Belfast.
And the iceberg that sank her was probably Canadian. :D
Or use their telephone banking system as an interim measure, and speak politely but firmly to your bank. If you have any local tech-savvy reporters, feel free to bring this to their attention, too. Banks tend to be motivated to action when publically embarrassed about their security.
Quite frankly, for most people it's a nontrivial investment of effort to have new cheques printed, open a new account, transfer all of their funds, change their automated payroll deposits, reenter all the information for online bill payments...saying 'just switch banks' is not going to fly. Not to put too fine a point on it, but people who were comfortable using IE for any sort of secure transaction before this particular malware came to light probably aren't going to switch now.
That reflects their personal opinions, not necessarily their professional bias.
I'm not naively suggesting that news reporters and commentators never let their personal biases slip through into their reporting, but it's downright insulting to presume that individuals can't report objectively because they happen to have their own opinions.
Food for thought--if you have a dozen reporters with a bias in one direction, and one executive producer/editor/owner with a bias the other way, what slant do you think the news outlet will have?
Actually, American society is quite fond of pornography. That's why there's so much of it on the Internet.
On the other hand, American society also has any number of hangups about discussing pornography, or sexuality, or even (*gasp*) showing a naked breast on television.
In this instance, a company can do something that
protects their bottom line and shareholders;
protects their customers; and
screws the malware writers;
and you're bashing them?
Hey, I'm thrilled that a company is making more money while doing something that's good--even if it is a telephone company. What's wrong with a little enlightened self-interest?
A variant of this idea was explored by Isaac Asimov way back in the novella, The Martian Way (Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1952; subsequently republished in several collections).
The characters in the novel propose capturing chunks of ice from Saturn's ring system. We don't need to grab a whole moon--there are cubic-mile-sized chunks of ice in the rings. They might be a bit more manageable to manoeuvre. There are lots to choose from, too.
Are you sure? That's pretty close to true on earth, where the cold side of a Carnot cycle is going to be at around 300 K. Space, however, is mostly a nice, big, cold blackbody at around 3 kelvin or so (cosmic microwave background.) That should help quite a bit.
On the other hand, other posters have noted that the mass calculation neglects the oxidizer that would have to be carried. That works out to being three or so times the mass of the fuel, depending on the specific hydrocarbons chosen.