I think an issue here is do we want an open internet where people are allowed to fully express their beliefs, or a closed and moderaterd internet where the truth never comes out fully.
Point noted. Read response below.
The blog was open to the public. And the public responded. If they are going to remove the truth from readers, then the blog was usless.
As I understand it, the newspaper owns the website, and can arbitrarily decide at any time put up or remove any text on any page. What makes it an open Internet is that such actions have no direct effect on what's on any other website.
You can go to godaddy and for just an amazingly few dollars get your very own domain name and hosting, and put up your rants^wFree Speech Writings to be made readable by people all over the world, and there's nothing the Big Bad Newspaper's Website can do about it.
Other websites (including yours) may have commentaries on the newspaper site's contents, or even mirrors of the deleted content (perhaps on a server in a contry not recognizing or only weakly enforcing copyright).
You appear to be arguing that if a newspaper's website solicits comments, that it is somehow a public service and should keep all submitted comments available. Websites aren't public or community property, they are the property of the website owners.
For that matter, even a newspaper would be usless if the truth was blotted out.
A newspaper prints what the editor (and/or owner) allow and decide to be printed. Freedom of the press literally belongs to those who own the presses.
OTOH, Radio and Broadcast Television ARE considered "public property" and are highly regulated by the FCC.
Could proper connectors, not ones designed for copper, make aluminum viable here?
Perhaps, but it may have been decided to just outlaw aluminum wiring rather than trusting electricians and weekend handymen to always use the proper switches and outlets depending on whether the wiring is copper or aluminum. It's just like anything else: one standard is good, several standards can be confusing.
On the other hand the original post talked about low voltage applications as well. Low voltage applications, like data handling, Low voltage house lighting, can run on other materials like aluminum, that will not burn your house down.
These are different applications. Data handling as through Cat-5 cable is not just low voltage, it's LOW POWER. A connector won't heat up if it makes a pad connection, because there's not enough power sent through the wire to heat anything up. It will barely light an LED, if that.
But room lighting is a rather high-power application. Running lighting on lower voltage will take proportionately higher current and thicker wires (relative to presently-used house wiring), and will still have the problem of a loose connection overheating and starting a fire.
I'm pretty sure I remember from my materials science class that pure elements conduct electricy better than any alloy... Am I wrong?
It appears you're talking about conductivity per unit volume (the 'real' way to measure conductivity), and for that, the element silver has about a 10 percent advantage over copper, but of course silver is rarely if ever used for electrical wire because of its much higher cost.
The parent post to yours appears to be addressing conductance vs. weight and/or conductance vs. cost (and also strength - pure elements may conduct better, but alloys can go on longer runs between towers without breaking from their own weight, saving on tower construction), all of which are very pertinent to the long runs of thick wire used for electric power distribution.
Just thinking about all the variables, there appear to be a lot of engineering tradeoffs in the decision of what to use for electrical conductors for power distribution.
...the Iowa court was told the defendants "falsely and illegally" represented that their e-mails originated from the CIS domain...
Was the illegal act the fact that the emails went through the network or that the spam had cis.net in the return address?
In other words was the issue that the spam was tying up CIS' network, or that the spammer was making them look bad by pretending to be one of their users?
Any thoughts?
I think neither, it's simily that the spam law, as written, forbids sending bulk commercial email with a 'deceptive' return address that wasn't the sender's. The return address could have just as well been public.com (bombed out of existence years ago by some spamware program having a hardcoded return address of friend@public.com) or example.com (the one domain name that's truly not available).
If this guy didn't have enough legal troubles, CIS can now sue for civil damages for the reasons you just gave.
... if it was really shown at trial that there is even a 51% chance that this guy did $10 billion in damages then go ahead, nail him--I don't care. But does anyone really think that was the case?
Whether damages are $500,000 (perhaps a reasonable figure, with both the ISP's and the recipients' time involved) or $11 billion, it's pretty clear to me the damage the spammer caused is greater than his net worth, and he'll never be able to repay it.
This takeoff on the title of Alvin Toffler's book from decades ago, combined with Sturgen's Law that 90 percent of everything is crap, inspires the tagline "too much crap in too little time."
I presume, or at least suspect, this word comes from the title of the Robert Cringley book on those who started the personal computer revolution, "Accidental Empires."
Perhaps nothing illustrates the ruthlessness and shameless power plays of the corporate welfare kings than their extortionate demands for state and local subsidies on threat of picking up and moving elsewhere.
So far it sounds like a professional sports team/franchise.
...an especially-made-for-Allen Washington state referendum to approve $300 million in public subsidies to build a football stadium for his Seattle Seahawks.
Oh, it IS...
I don't condone or defend this action (the private leveraging of public funds) in any way, but this (threatening to leave, "we need better facilities so The Public can better enjoy Major League Sports, it'll make more jobs," bla bla bla) is Standard Operating Procedure for most any major sports team in any major city to get a better stadium and such.
Since there were supposedly more than just one moon landing...
You mean it wasn't just the Apollo 11 mission that was claimed be a hoax?
But I liked this reasoning:
ADAM SAVAGE --... Jamie and I have done the research, and figured that the only way to end the debate about the "myth" of the Apollo moon landing is to go there, and bring back something that was left there during one of the Apollo moon landings.
So, why didn't NASA send one of the later Apollo missions to the Apollo 11 site to bring back an Apollo 11 item, thus proving the Apollo 11 mission was real?
"The more than 50 cases brought to date by the FTC, the Department of Justice, state Attorneys General, and ISPs demonstrate CAN-SPAM's enforcement efficacy."
Well, I suppose that's good. OTOH, I recall reading on SPAM-L a few years ago an estimate that there are 3,000 spammers in the USA. I suppose these cases now leave 2,950 spammers. It's been two years since the Can-Spam Law was passed, and at this rate (arresting 25 spammers per year), it will only take another 114 years to get rid of all the spammers in the USA. Gee, I hope no spammers move outside the USA in that time. Let's close the borders to make sure that doesn't happen, so we can keep these criminals in the US until we can arrest them, or until they die of old age, whichever comes first.
Any comparison of the Can Spam Act to US military actions in Iraq is totally unfair. Even Democrats will admit that the US has done more to bring freedom to Iraq than the Can Spam Act has done to stop spam.
I can type about as fast as I can emit C++ by every method I've ever used. The big problem is symbols: most typing courses treat them as an afterthought,
Excellent point, Mod Parent Up.
And it's not just the typing, it's the keyboard and how the "special" symbols are accessed. A good programming layout needs to be developed, though it's likely to be language-specific and require a different layout for each type of language. Parentheses and curly-brackets are VERY commonly used in modern C-like languages, but one has to press Shift to get to them. Likewise, HTML (as in making the quoted portion above italic) makes extensive use of < > and " but they are also on shifted keys. Perhaps it would be enough to have the most commonly used symbols be UNshifted, and one has to press shift to access the digits keys along the top and rectangular brackets.
APL has/had its own keyboard layout and Selectric typeball, and it wasn't too bad (APL is quite a compact, "dense" language with many single-character functions, each with lots of meaning).
A better alhpabetic keyboard layout would only substantially benefit COBOL programmers, and they all code with the CAPS-LOCK key on...
and a Vibroplex sure has a smaller footprint than a standard computer keyboard. And since the computer will use the speaker to send screen contents back to you, you won't need a monitor either.
This brings up an interesting cross-skills learning exercise, receiving Morse while typing on Dvorak.
My first thought from a letter frequency stand point was that the even division of the alphabet was bound to be off on a frequency stand point, but.. it's more balanced than the QWERTY layout. (The alpha layout is 47.55% on the left hand with the QWERTY as 60.23%)
Just a thought triggered by your post, but it seems that if the most common letter SEQUENCES go back-and-forth between the two sides of the keyboard (so typed letters more often alternate to left-hand, right-hand, left-hand, right-hand...) , this will result in faster typing than if more sequences are to be typed by the fingers of one hand.
There might be an argument for duplicating the most commonly repeated keys (such as ee, tt and mm, as used in the above paragraph) on both sides of the keyboard so the back-and-forth rhythm could be kept going for longer sequences. But this has diminishing returns, as at the limit each hand has to fly over a separate keyboard containing all the alphabet.
Having the letter frequencies balanced may help somewhat with balancing the sequences as well, but I presume it would be best to optimize both.
Surely this isn't an original idea with me. Sure enough, Web-research (google typing alternative keyboard layout "letter sequences") brings up the 'D' layout, with vowels on one side and consonants on the other, supposedly increasing use of alternating hands for consecutive letters:
Oops, sorry for the Webinfomercial. I have no doubt about that page's claimes of Dvorak being better than Qwerty, but how close is Dvorak to an optimum layout? It's a lot easier now to do original research in this area than it was in Dvorak's time (1930's according to that webpage), and anyone who wants to develop and test new keyboard layouts for, say, a Master's thesis, could really do a bang-up job.
As a preface, I'm not giving THIS article any credibility...
Sorry - you _cannot_ have AI until such time as the computer is capable of generating a truly random number.
We've actually had this for a long time, we've been able to make electrical impulses triggered by nuclear decay, and readable by a computer. What's your point here? That it's not 'generated' within the computer? I don't get it.
And by that I mean when we move to something besides silicon. 0's and 1's are not an intelligence make. Anything else is but a simulation.
Is this anything like the AI researcher who was accused by another of presenting "a fantastic simulation" of anger?
Seriously, I'd like to see a firm argument one way or another that AI can exist, or that it can't. The books I've read, such as "The Emperor's New Mind" and some earlier titles have been interesting but haven't convinced me of anything.
They could use these to drop packages of cargo, building materials, or supplies.
Isn't this also a miliyary use? Wasn't the DARPA Grand Challenge meant to do the same thing with ground-based vehicles to move supplies toward compat positions?
From the FIP (Introductory Paragraph?):
Both prizes are for $250,000, the max Congress is allowing NASA to offer.
I wonder if NASA could subcontract this to DARPA, which could then offer a couple million dollars for each prize.
But then I read this, it makes perfect sense that Microsoft would 'lose' a patent dispute.
New versions of IE will require major changes in the way ActiveX is handled by websites. But then those websites' ActiveX components will be inexcessible by older versions of IE. So to upgrade their web browser, users of Windows 95/98/ME will be forced to buy XP...
Cha-ching!
(see recent Autodesk comments for previous alleged incident of Porcine Aviation)
# Don't touch this unless you know WTF you're doing!
Which, of course, is no comment at all....
No, actually it implies a lot about the intricacy and possible side effects of changing the code. It's roughly equivalent to this 1960's FORTRAN comment:
"...This will allow power to be transmitted to supporting devices through microwaves inside your house. Initial tests have been successfull, however there seam to be some safety concerns.;)"
Slashdot Mirror
Just to set the record straight, and in case anyone was confused by this statement:
ncluding PayPal and other escrow services
I think an issue here is do we want an open internet where people are allowed to fully express their beliefs, or a closed and moderaterd internet where the truth never comes out fully.
Point noted. Read response below.
The blog was open to the public. And the public responded. If they are going to remove the truth from readers, then the blog was usless.
As I understand it, the newspaper owns the website, and can arbitrarily decide at any time put up or remove any text on any page. What makes it an open Internet is that such actions have no direct effect on what's on any other website.
You can go to godaddy and for just an amazingly few dollars get your very own domain name and hosting, and put up your rants^wFree Speech Writings to be made readable by people all over the world, and there's nothing the Big Bad Newspaper's Website can do about it.
Other websites (including yours) may have commentaries on the newspaper site's contents, or even mirrors of the deleted content (perhaps on a server in a contry not recognizing or only weakly enforcing copyright).
You appear to be arguing that if a newspaper's website solicits comments, that it is somehow a public service and should keep all submitted comments available. Websites aren't public or community property, they are the property of the website owners.
For that matter, even a newspaper would be usless if the truth was blotted out.
A newspaper prints what the editor (and/or owner) allow and decide to be printed. Freedom of the press literally belongs to those who own the presses.
OTOH, Radio and Broadcast Television ARE considered "public property" and are highly regulated by the FCC.
Could proper connectors, not ones designed for copper, make aluminum viable here?
Perhaps, but it may have been decided to just outlaw aluminum wiring rather than trusting electricians and weekend handymen to always use the proper switches and outlets depending on whether the wiring is copper or aluminum. It's just like anything else: one standard is good, several standards can be confusing.
On the other hand the original post talked about low voltage applications as well. Low voltage applications, like data handling, Low voltage house lighting, can run on other materials like aluminum, that will not burn your house down.
These are different applications. Data handling as through Cat-5 cable is not just low voltage, it's LOW POWER. A connector won't heat up if it makes a pad connection, because there's not enough power sent through the wire to heat anything up. It will barely light an LED, if that.
But room lighting is a rather high-power application. Running lighting on lower voltage will take proportionately higher current and thicker wires (relative to presently-used house wiring), and will still have the problem of a loose connection overheating and starting a fire.
So, buy stocks in Cu - expect to see 10x increase over a decade
Invest in Ag as well. If Cu goes that high, Ag may well be competitive for use in electrical wire, and will also have higher demand.
I'm pretty sure I remember from my materials science class that pure elements conduct electricy better than any alloy ...
Am I wrong?
It appears you're talking about conductivity per unit volume (the 'real' way to measure conductivity), and for that, the element silver has about a 10 percent advantage over copper, but of course silver is rarely if ever used for electrical wire because of its much higher cost.
The parent post to yours appears to be addressing conductance vs. weight and/or conductance vs. cost (and also strength - pure elements may conduct better, but alloys can go on longer runs between towers without breaking from their own weight, saving on tower construction), all of which are very pertinent to the long runs of thick wire used for electric power distribution.
Just thinking about all the variables, there appear to be a lot of engineering tradeoffs in the decision of what to use for electrical conductors for power distribution.
Was the illegal act the fact that the emails went through the network or that the spam had cis.net in the return address?
In other words was the issue that the spam was tying up CIS' network, or that the spammer was making them look bad by pretending to be one of their users?
Any thoughts?
I think neither, it's simily that the spam law, as written, forbids sending bulk commercial email with a 'deceptive' return address that wasn't the sender's. The return address could have just as well been public.com (bombed out of existence years ago by some spamware program having a hardcoded return address of friend@public.com) or example.com (the one domain name that's truly not available).
If this guy didn't have enough legal troubles, CIS can now sue for civil damages for the reasons you just gave.
Whether damages are $500,000 (perhaps a reasonable figure, with both the ISP's and the recipients' time involved) or $11 billion, it's pretty clear to me the damage the spammer caused is greater than his net worth, and he'll never be able to repay it.
Translation: "Our ass needed covering even earlier than anticipated."
This takeoff on the title of Alvin Toffler's book from decades ago, combined with Sturgen's Law that 90 percent of everything is crap, inspires the tagline "too much crap in too little time."
accidental.
I presume, or at least suspect, this word comes from the title of the Robert Cringley book on those who started the personal computer revolution, "Accidental Empires."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Nader/CutCorpWel fare_Nader.html
...an especially-made-for-Allen Washington state referendum to approve $300 million in public subsidies to build a football stadium for his Seattle Seahawks.
Hijacking local democracy
Perhaps nothing illustrates the ruthlessness and shameless power plays of the corporate welfare kings than their extortionate demands for state and local subsidies on threat of picking up and moving elsewhere.
So far it sounds like a professional sports team/franchise.
Oh, it IS...
I don't condone or defend this action (the private leveraging of public funds) in any way, but this (threatening to leave, "we need better facilities so The Public can better enjoy Major League Sports, it'll make more jobs," bla bla bla) is Standard Operating Procedure for most any major sports team in any major city to get a better stadium and such.
Since there were supposedly more than just one moon landing...
... Jamie and I have done the research, and figured that the only way to end the debate about the "myth" of the Apollo moon landing is to go there, and bring back something that was left there during one of the Apollo moon landings.
You mean it wasn't just the Apollo 11 mission that was claimed be a hoax?
But I liked this reasoning:
ADAM SAVAGE --
So, why didn't NASA send one of the later Apollo missions to the Apollo 11 site to bring back an Apollo 11 item, thus proving the Apollo 11 mission was real?
"The more than 50 cases brought to date by the FTC, the Department of Justice, state Attorneys General, and ISPs demonstrate CAN-SPAM's enforcement efficacy."
Well, I suppose that's good. OTOH, I recall reading on SPAM-L a few years ago an estimate that there are 3,000 spammers in the USA. I suppose these cases now leave 2,950 spammers. It's been two years since the Can-Spam Law was passed, and at this rate (arresting 25 spammers per year), it will only take another 114 years to get rid of all the spammers in the USA. Gee, I hope no spammers move outside the USA in that time. Let's close the borders to make sure that doesn't happen, so we can keep these criminals in the US until we can arrest them, or until they die of old age, whichever comes first.
Any comparison of the Can Spam Act to US military actions in Iraq is totally unfair. Even Democrats will admit that the US has done more to bring freedom to Iraq than the Can Spam Act has done to stop spam.
I can type about as fast as I can emit C++ by every method I've ever used. The big problem is symbols: most typing courses treat them as an afterthought,
Excellent point, Mod Parent Up.
And it's not just the typing, it's the keyboard and how the "special" symbols are accessed. A good programming layout needs to be developed, though it's likely to be language-specific and require a different layout for each type of language. Parentheses and curly-brackets are VERY commonly used in modern C-like languages, but one has to press Shift to get to them. Likewise, HTML (as in making the quoted portion above italic) makes extensive use of < > and " but they are also on shifted keys. Perhaps it would be enough to have the most commonly used symbols be UNshifted, and one has to press shift to access the digits keys along the top and rectangular brackets.
APL has/had its own keyboard layout and Selectric typeball, and it wasn't too bad (APL is quite a compact, "dense" language with many single-character functions, each with lots of meaning).
A better alhpabetic keyboard layout would only substantially benefit COBOL programmers, and they all code with the CAPS-LOCK key on...
and a Vibroplex sure has a smaller footprint than a standard computer keyboard. And since the computer will use the speaker to send screen contents back to you, you won't need a monitor either.
This brings up an interesting cross-skills learning exercise, receiving Morse while typing on Dvorak.
Another random thought: If you send Morse-over-IP, will the FCC start regulating it?
My first thought from a letter frequency stand point was that the even division of the alphabet was bound to be off on a frequency stand point, but .. it's more balanced than the QWERTY layout. (The alpha layout is 47.55% on the left hand with the QWERTY as 60.23%)
Just a thought triggered by your post, but it seems that if the most common letter SEQUENCES go back-and-forth between the two sides of the keyboard (so typed letters more often alternate to left-hand, right-hand, left-hand, right-hand...) , this will result in faster typing than if more sequences are to be typed by the fingers of one hand.
There might be an argument for duplicating the most commonly repeated keys (such as ee, tt and mm, as used in the above paragraph) on both sides of the keyboard so the back-and-forth rhythm could be kept going for longer sequences. But this has diminishing returns, as at the limit each hand has to fly over a separate keyboard containing all the alphabet.
Having the letter frequencies balanced may help somewhat with balancing the sequences as well, but I presume it would be best to optimize both.
Surely this isn't an original idea with me. Sure enough, Web-research (google typing alternative keyboard layout "letter sequences") brings up the 'D' layout, with vowels on one side and consonants on the other, supposedly increasing use of alternating hands for consecutive letters:
http://www.theworldofstuff.com/dvorak/
Oops, sorry for the Webinfomercial. I have no doubt about that page's claimes of Dvorak being better than Qwerty, but how close is Dvorak to an optimum layout? It's a lot easier now to do original research in this area than it was in Dvorak's time (1930's according to that webpage), and anyone who wants to develop and test new keyboard layouts for, say, a Master's thesis, could really do a bang-up job.
Just like it was 40 years ago.
No, that was 50 years ago.
As a preface, I'm not giving THIS article any credibility...
Sorry - you _cannot_ have AI until such time as the computer is capable of generating a truly random number.
We've actually had this for a long time, we've been able to make electrical impulses triggered by nuclear decay, and readable by a computer. What's your point here? That it's not 'generated' within the computer? I don't get it.
And by that I mean when we move to something besides silicon. 0's and 1's are not an intelligence make. Anything else is but a simulation.
Is this anything like the AI researcher who was accused by another of presenting "a fantastic simulation" of anger?
Seriously, I'd like to see a firm argument one way or another that AI can exist, or that it can't. The books I've read, such as "The Emperor's New Mind" and some earlier titles have been interesting but haven't convinced me of anything.
So they created an AI as smart as a sails representative. Wake me up when they progress up to a fruit fly.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Sales weasels like a drink.
They could use these to drop packages of cargo, building materials, or supplies.
Isn't this also a miliyary use? Wasn't the DARPA Grand Challenge meant to do the same thing with ground-based vehicles to move supplies toward compat positions?
From the FIP (Introductory Paragraph?):
Both prizes are for $250,000, the max Congress is allowing NASA to offer.
I wonder if NASA could subcontract this to DARPA, which could then offer a couple million dollars for each prize.
But then I read this, it makes perfect sense that Microsoft would 'lose' a patent dispute.
New versions of IE will require major changes in the way ActiveX is handled by websites. But then those websites' ActiveX components will be inexcessible by older versions of IE. So to upgrade their web browser, users of Windows 95/98/ME will be forced to buy XP...
Cha-ching!
(see recent Autodesk comments for previous alleged incident of Porcine Aviation)
One could make updating IE a full time job.
Oh, you mean just INSTALLING patches! At first read I thought you meant WRITING the patches.
I suspect Microsoft already has a person assigned to writing IE patches. Maybe they're splurging and have two people assigned.
# Don't touch this unless you know WTF you're doing!
Which, of course, is no comment at all....
No, actually it implies a lot about the intricacy and possible side effects of changing the code. It's roughly equivalent to this 1960's FORTRAN comment:
C DANGER! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
I wrote assembly
and I counted cycles. Can't
one count syllables?
"...This will allow power to be transmitted to supporting devices through microwaves inside your house. Initial tests have been successfull, however there seam to be some safety concerns. ;)"
No problem, just wear a Tin Hat.
Well, wait, perhaps that's not such a good idea:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/