The formula is
generated by the receiver and given to the sender by some "secure"
mechanism (which can be as casual as a face-to-face conversation,
phone call, postal mail, facsimile, or even conventional e-mail or
web page).
Okay folks... move along... nothing to see here...
Does the author really think that I'm going to exchange formulae with everyone I want to exchange e-mail with? Even if the client software made it as easy as "pairing" bluetooth devices... ugh!
Every time I see one of these doomed-to-fail spam stopping schemes, I become more and more convinced that the only way that this problem is ever going to get solved, permanently, is with certificate-signed e-mail. Basically, e-mail client software would cryptographically sign each sender's outgoing mail and the receiver's software could check that their cert was signed by a trusted certificate authority. Most software can already do this; all you need to do is go get a certificate.
Ultimately, it would probably be left up to the individual receiver as to which certificate authorities they wanted to trust (ie, PGP's "web of trust"). But, for the most part, I think most people would default to trusting a handful of "big" cert authorities. On the face of it, there is some loss of privacy, but the loss of privacy would be in proportion to the clout of the CA that signed your certificate.... which, in turn, would be in proportion to how reliably you wanted your e-mail to be delivered. So, the sender would still get to pick how much privacy they sacrificed.
But I just see no other way to stop spam than this. Certificates would add a high degree of confidence that the sender could be reached (either by the receiver or by law enforcement)... and "reachability" is the first step towards accountability. Now, for the cases where someone managed to get an certificate with bogus contact info... well, that's what certificate-revocation lists are for. Basically, it's not really different from the IP blacklists that we're using now, except it would (hopefully) be a lot harder to obtain a new certificate than it is to obtain a new IP.
It's probably a little tough to get your lips to sync with the soundtrack just right. I guess it'd be best to pick movies that were originally in a different language.:) Karate movies, here we come!
I seem to recall another slashdot article about a year ago where someone was asking for opinions about using a digital cam in his/her field, which used photos for "important" purposes (insurance claims, I think it was).
The general opinion of the slashdot community was that digital photos are too easy to mess with and should be avoided. However, I've since wondered why someone hasn't come out with some digital camera that can cryptographically sign/watermark the photos that it takes. Not only could you charge a lot more for the cameras, but you'd probably make a decent chunk of change in the expert witness business, as you got called in to testify that the photos hadn't been altered.
Now, in this case, the particular focus of the article is on "enhancement". Now, I think that's perfectly fine for the cops to use in order to narrow their pool of suspects.... AS LONG AS they then go back and make sure that the suspect fits the un-enhanced evidence.
For example, with the finderprint enhancement stuff. Sure... go ahead... if AFIS doen't have enough to search with in the original, use your connect-the-dots program to fill in the blanks. However, if AFIS finds a match, then compare the AFIS print to the un-altered suspect print by hand.
To re-state my point, it's fine for narrowing your pool of suspects. Once you *have* a suspect, however, you should strive to make the best of un-enhanced evidence.
The city passes a law that in order for you to use city streets, you must install a small RFID device in your dash which causes sensors in intersections to send data back to the city planning dept when you drive by. The city swears that according to their current privacy policy, they will not collect the info about the unique ID on your car's transponder.
Okay. But you left out the analog of TiVo's one-time lifetime subscription. Once you buy a lifetime sub for a TiVo, the lifetime service stays with the *TiVo*, not the subscriber. So, if you sell that TiVo, the subscription goes with the unit.
So, ammending your analogy, you'd have to say that the city wouldn't know when you sold your car to someone else or when you bought someone elses. So, there'd be a gradual erosion of the validity of their RFID-to-driver mapping.
Also, a problem with *your* analogy is that there aren't alternatives to using your city streets. If there were 10 sets of streets all overlaying the city, offered by various street "providers" and you could use any set you wanted, then the city (as just one of the providers) would be mindful of public reaction to their policies.... which would decrease their inclination to "right to change their privacy policy at any time".
If TiVo is only passing along aggregated, anonymized data on user behavior, is there a privacy issue?
I don't think so. To me, this is analogous to when your city planning dept sometimes puts one of those "car counter" cables stretched across the road at an intersection. NEWS FLASH! Big Brother now *knows* how many cars are passing through that intersection. OUR PRIVACY IS IN DANGER! OMIGOD!:)
... and Japanese cigarette lighter maker Tokai will ship a direct methanol fuel cell
A lighter manufaturer? Oh no. I can see it now... fuel cells shaped like little hammers, footballs, wrenches, and whatnot all available at the counter of your local convenience store!
1,400 feet? Your images show that you flew right over LAX. I hope your pilot ascended up to the altitude of the southbound transition corridor... or, by my calculations, he's gonna have his license for about another 2.1 hours.:)
This is probably going to get me totally flamed, even though I'm not a racist myself, but...
Just for spite, I think it would be hillarious if the County IT techs started replacing all of the "Master/Slave" stickers with "Massa/Coon" ones.:)
Actually... since the PR hit would be pretty bad if they had to nuke the project after so few years, I wouldn't be surprised if they blew it up and tried to pin it on some Al-Qaeda suicide space-bomber.
Maybe we'd better have better screening at the Space Shuttle check-in from now on... just to make it harder for the U.S. shadow government to get use to believe that some mid-eastern previously-believed-to-be microgravity expert hijacked a shuttle and flew it into the Hubble.:)
Makes you stop and wonder, though... who'd end up being the head of "HomeSpace Security".
I think the reason many of these techs never went mainstream is because they never offered to:
Make more efficient use of our leisure time, or
Save us money or work time (which would increase leisure time).
For example... flying car? Uses a ton of gas, and you're still going to have trouble finding a place to park when you get there.
Jet pack? How are you going to gab with your friends and buddies on the way to the Yankees game?
Moon colony? Oh yeah, that's going to give you lots of time to goof off... not that there'd be anything to do when you weren't working anyway.
Super-sonic flight? The amount it adds to the monetary cost of your trip exceeds the time it saves you.
Now, compare that to something like... an MP3 player. Now I can have all of my CD's with me in an iPod the size of a pack of cards. Now I can listen to them anywhere. It has extended either the quality or quantity of my leisure time. But also notice how they've stopped at the point where they get inefficient to use. They could make an MP3 player (okay... not an iPod) the size of a fingernail and have it powered by a little hearing-aid battery. In fact, they could probably make a hearing-aid mp3 player... but it would be harder to use than a normal player. So, at that point, they're making it just for the "gee whiz" factor... to get mentioned in Slashdot and to have everyone go "Wow... the wonders of technology..." but nobody would ever buy one.
Now, flying cars, jetpacks, moon colonies.... those all fall into that "wonders of technology" bit... where they're really being done not to make our lives more efficient, but to make ourselves more impressed with our own cleverness and ingenuity.
The only really futuristic notion I can think of (on the order of flying cars and jetpacks) that would grand huge quality-of-life payoffs would be auto-piloted personal transportation. Most people pronounce this "Self-driving cars", but it could be a variety of things. But, like I said, it's one of the few things where the time/money saved in our personal lives would easily exceed the time/money spent as a society to convert to it.
She's going to be in the ROTK movie. You'd know this, had you not been living under a rock.
First off, the spider is "Shelob".
Next, I'd pretty much figured that they'd put her in the third film, since they were pretty much locked into it once Gollum did his soliloqy/agrument-with-self about giving the hobbits to "her".
The problem I have with that is that, to put Shelob in ROTK, they'll have to leave out even more stuff from the actual ROTK *book* than they would have left out otherwise. It's like they're running a deficit and they're borrowing film frames from the next movie.
I don't know how they're going to fix this without spilling into *another* movie. Good heavens... if we get ROTK:Reloaded and ROTK:Revolutions I'm gonna hurt somebody.:)
And... for the record, I'm pretty miffed that they left out Tom Bombadill. If I had read the book in print, I probably would have gotten pretty bored. Instead, I listened to the unabridged audiobook with Robert Inglis, and I think he really made Tom a pretty fun character to imagine.
But... oh well. Based on how badly most films stray from their original books, I figure we should just be thankful they left in that Gandalf guy.... and that sub-plot about that "one ring" and all.:)
The thing that really jumped out at me was the "attempted" larceny.
I can see it now. The next step of escalation on the part of the spammers will be that they'll make sure that they really are in touch with the family of some rich Nigerian dead dude. That way, when the authorities come to bust him, he'll have plausible deniability; "What? I really am working with the the widow of the late Mr. Djboutu.... just call her, she'll tell you!".
Of course this might be a coincidence or bad programming on the Apple side...
If you want to talk about bad programming, feast on this. When I used to sync my iPod with MusicMatch, it would promptly gobble up about 700MB of ram as it scanned through about 5,000 mp3's.
I could watch it in the Task Manager's "Performance" tab, as my memory consumption gradually went from about 250MB to 1GB until the sync finished.
Then I found EphPod, which is better than MusicMatch *or* iTunes....
Automated roll taking? "Hey, Johnny, can you keep my ID tag with you?...
Actually, I think what would work here would be some kind of bracelet that only the parents had the key to remove or something. Then, if the parents were more worried about "Big Brother" than scores of pedophiles, then they could choose to let their kid go without the bracelet.
Now, in my opinion, they are going a bit overboard with tracking lots of unnecessary information, such as when they boarded the bus...
Something tells me that this dude doesn't have kids. I don't either, but I interact with enough people who *do* to know that, if the kid goes missing even for a few hours, these people are going to want to know *everything* they can about the kids whereabouts.
I'm going to make a blanket statement here, and I'm sure I'm going to get flamed for it by this audience, but I'm convinced that it's true:
Children need protection (often from their own naive impulses) more than they need privacy
The marketing dept always seems to figure out how to price stuff according to how badly people want a certain feature set.
How much you want to bet that there'll be a nice price jump when you get to the models that can outrun sharks? "And this deluxe model comes with a high-voltage electrostatic defence barrier to ward away predators..."
...and further investigation reveals that, of those signing up for amnesty, 94% of those individuals were unpopular high-schoolers who seem to have also recently:
Subscribed to a whole bunch of lame magazines, asking to be billed later,
Requested enlistment information from all four branches of the armed service, and
Signed up for diaper delivery service.
Seriously... why doesn't the RIAA just make the amnesty form into a business-reply card and put them in all the kids magazines?
I had to get a 28S when I took calculus in college. That was... ummm... 13 years ago. The thing still runs like a champ.
The graphing is a little primitive because it was one of the first-gen ones, but it's great for straight-forward RPN calculations and it has most of the programmability of the later HP models like the 48 series.
What I really love about it is the fact that it closes up to completely protect the fragile parts (and, yes, my phone *is* a Star-Tac). These days, though I still remember some of the calculus, I never need to use it. The calculator now serves its function in my wood shop, where the closing-book design keeps it safe from all of the sawdust.
Frankly, I've seen the 48's that friends have shown me and I don't see the need for anything extra that they did. If my 28S ever broke, I'd go straight to eBay with $50-$60 and grab myself another.
Sometime this morning (Sept. 19) Telstar 4 had a major onboard failure. I just checked a few minutes ago and there are CW carriers up on 11700 MHz V & 12200 MHz H...
So... you sit at home all day and check the status of satellites?
The Loral Skynet site has no mention of this yet...
But I'll bet you've already phoned them up and informed them, huh? I can picture the sense of glee racing through your mind as you punched in the phone number... anticipating the moment you've been waiting for all these long years... the moment when you get to notify one of the "big boys" that their satellite isn't working before they find out themselves.
Well... now that that's over with, nothing left to do but go get a life, I suppose.
It is only becoming clearer that it is impossible to find a better way to compensate artists.
To me, the reason that this proposal won't fly isn't really because of technical difficulties, but because of what it leaves out: The record company.
With the whole RIAA-suing-my-12-year-old-neighbor hooplah going around, many people are getting the mistaken impression that the record companies oppose the notion of listeners not paying artists.
The record companies don't care at all about that. They care about listeners paying the *record* *companies*. The distinction here is important in that the RIAA will vehemently oppose any system which takes them out of the loop, no matter how equitably, generously, or efficiently it compensates the artists, themselves.
Unitl the record companies start to weaken, I don't see any system gaining any real strength because the RIAA will just throw more and more lawyers at it.
There's a D? What's next? Eb? Technology is moving at an incredible rate, indeed!
Actually, depending upon who you ask, "D" shouldn't be the next in the series. I remember reading somewhere that the "C" got its name because it came after "B"... not in the alphabet, but in the acronym "BCPL", which supposedly stood for "basic combined programming language". (For more info, go read "BCPL to B to C" here.
So, with that line of thinking, C++ should have been "P" (insert favorite "P Object-Oriented Programming" acronym joke here), and C# (although it shouldn't have been created at all, but was) should have been "L".
I think, in order to combat the rapidly-waning public interest that cut short the original Apollo program, they'd have to plan some wacky-n-captivating things to do in.16g and zero air resistance.... something like having a paintball game at 1-mile distances or something.
Or how about Survivor? Now *that* is something I'd watch... especially if the reward challeges were competing for, say, extra oxygen.:P
Part of the power of what you think are excessively large address spaces comes from the fact that they stay sparsely populated...
One possible IPv6 allocation...
Actually, if my calculations are correct, IPv6 gives you roughly 10^19 addresses per square inch on the earth (including the oceans).
This kinda thing makes me look at this/. thread about giving a barcode number to every tangible object and just yawn.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay folks... move along... nothing to see here...
Does the author really think that I'm going to exchange formulae with everyone I want to exchange e-mail with? Even if the client software made it as easy as "pairing" bluetooth devices... ugh!
Every time I see one of these doomed-to-fail spam stopping schemes, I become more and more convinced that the only way that this problem is ever going to get solved, permanently, is with certificate-signed e-mail. Basically, e-mail client software would cryptographically sign each sender's outgoing mail and the receiver's software could check that their cert was signed by a trusted certificate authority. Most software can already do this; all you need to do is go get a certificate.
Ultimately, it would probably be left up to the individual receiver as to which certificate authorities they wanted to trust (ie, PGP's "web of trust"). But, for the most part, I think most people would default to trusting a handful of "big" cert authorities. On the face of it, there is some loss of privacy, but the loss of privacy would be in proportion to the clout of the CA that signed your certificate.... which, in turn, would be in proportion to how reliably you wanted your e-mail to be delivered. So, the sender would still get to pick how much privacy they sacrificed.
But I just see no other way to stop spam than this. Certificates would add a high degree of confidence that the sender could be reached (either by the receiver or by law enforcement)... and "reachability" is the first step towards accountability. Now, for the cases where someone managed to get an certificate with bogus contact info... well, that's what certificate-revocation lists are for. Basically, it's not really different from the IP blacklists that we're using now, except it would (hopefully) be a lot harder to obtain a new certificate than it is to obtain a new IP.
It's probably a little tough to get your lips to sync with the soundtrack just right. I guess it'd be best to pick movies that were originally in a different language. :) Karate movies, here we come!
I seem to recall another slashdot article about a year ago where someone was asking for opinions about using a digital cam in his/her field, which used photos for "important" purposes (insurance claims, I think it was).
The general opinion of the slashdot community was that digital photos are too easy to mess with and should be avoided. However, I've since wondered why someone hasn't come out with some digital camera that can cryptographically sign/watermark the photos that it takes. Not only could you charge a lot more for the cameras, but you'd probably make a decent chunk of change in the expert witness business, as you got called in to testify that the photos hadn't been altered.
Now, in this case, the particular focus of the article is on "enhancement". Now, I think that's perfectly fine for the cops to use in order to narrow their pool of suspects.... AS LONG AS they then go back and make sure that the suspect fits the un-enhanced evidence.
For example, with the finderprint enhancement stuff. Sure... go ahead... if AFIS doen't have enough to search with in the original, use your connect-the-dots program to fill in the blanks. However, if AFIS finds a match, then compare the AFIS print to the un-altered suspect print by hand.
To re-state my point, it's fine for narrowing your pool of suspects. Once you *have* a suspect, however, you should strive to make the best of un-enhanced evidence.
So, ammending your analogy, you'd have to say that the city wouldn't know when you sold your car to someone else or when you bought someone elses. So, there'd be a gradual erosion of the validity of their RFID-to-driver mapping.
Also, a problem with *your* analogy is that there aren't alternatives to using your city streets. If there were 10 sets of streets all overlaying the city, offered by various street "providers" and you could use any set you wanted, then the city (as just one of the providers) would be mindful of public reaction to their policies.... which would decrease their inclination to "right to change their privacy policy at any time".
Of course, next year, her nipples will have little stickers that say "Drink Pepsi!" on them... but hey, life's full of compromises.
1,400 feet? Your images show that you flew right over LAX. I hope your pilot ascended up to the altitude of the southbound transition corridor... or, by my calculations, he's gonna have his license for about another 2.1 hours. :)
This is probably going to get me totally flamed, even though I'm not a racist myself, but... Just for spite, I think it would be hillarious if the County IT techs started replacing all of the "Master/Slave" stickers with "Massa/Coon" ones. :)
Actually... since the PR hit would be pretty bad if they had to nuke the project after so few years, I wouldn't be surprised if they blew it up and tried to pin it on some Al-Qaeda suicide space-bomber.
:)
Maybe we'd better have better screening at the Space Shuttle check-in from now on... just to make it harder for the U.S. shadow government to get use to believe that some mid-eastern previously-believed-to-be microgravity expert hijacked a shuttle and flew it into the Hubble.
Makes you stop and wonder, though... who'd end up being the head of "HomeSpace Security".
- Make more efficient use of our leisure time, or
- Save us money or work time (which would increase leisure time).
For example... flying car? Uses a ton of gas, and you're still going to have trouble finding a place to park when you get there.Jet pack? How are you going to gab with your friends and buddies on the way to the Yankees game?
Moon colony? Oh yeah, that's going to give you lots of time to goof off... not that there'd be anything to do when you weren't working anyway.
Super-sonic flight? The amount it adds to the monetary cost of your trip exceeds the time it saves you.
Now, compare that to something like... an MP3 player. Now I can have all of my CD's with me in an iPod the size of a pack of cards. Now I can listen to them anywhere. It has extended either the quality or quantity of my leisure time. But also notice how they've stopped at the point where they get inefficient to use. They could make an MP3 player (okay... not an iPod) the size of a fingernail and have it powered by a little hearing-aid battery. In fact, they could probably make a hearing-aid mp3 player... but it would be harder to use than a normal player. So, at that point, they're making it just for the "gee whiz" factor... to get mentioned in Slashdot and to have everyone go "Wow... the wonders of technology..." but nobody would ever buy one.
Now, flying cars, jetpacks, moon colonies.... those all fall into that "wonders of technology" bit... where they're really being done not to make our lives more efficient, but to make ourselves more impressed with our own cleverness and ingenuity.
The only really futuristic notion I can think of (on the order of flying cars and jetpacks) that would grand huge quality-of-life payoffs would be auto-piloted personal transportation. Most people pronounce this "Self-driving cars", but it could be a variety of things. But, like I said, it's one of the few things where the time/money saved in our personal lives would easily exceed the time/money spent as a society to convert to it.
Next, I'd pretty much figured that they'd put her in the third film, since they were pretty much locked into it once Gollum did his soliloqy/agrument-with-self about giving the hobbits to "her".
The problem I have with that is that, to put Shelob in ROTK, they'll have to leave out even more stuff from the actual ROTK *book* than they would have left out otherwise. It's like they're running a deficit and they're borrowing film frames from the next movie.
I don't know how they're going to fix this without spilling into *another* movie. Good heavens... if we get ROTK:Reloaded and ROTK:Revolutions I'm gonna hurt somebody.
And... for the record, I'm pretty miffed that they left out Tom Bombadill. If I had read the book in print, I probably would have gotten pretty bored. Instead, I listened to the unabridged audiobook with Robert Inglis, and I think he really made Tom a pretty fun character to imagine.
But... oh well. Based on how badly most films stray from their original books, I figure we should just be thankful they left in that Gandalf guy.... and that sub-plot about that "one ring" and all.
The thing that really jumped out at me was the "attempted" larceny.
I can see it now. The next step of escalation on the part of the spammers will be that they'll make sure that they really are in touch with the family of some rich Nigerian dead dude. That way, when the authorities come to bust him, he'll have plausible deniability; "What? I really am working with the the widow of the late Mr. Djboutu.... just call her, she'll tell you!".
I could watch it in the Task Manager's "Performance" tab, as my memory consumption gradually went from about 250MB to 1GB until the sync finished.
Then I found EphPod, which is better than MusicMatch *or* iTunes....
I'm going to make a blanket statement here, and I'm sure I'm going to get flamed for it by this audience, but I'm convinced that it's true:
Children need protection (often from their own naive impulses) more than they need privacy
Now... if they could just get it to make that cool "pffft" sound whenever it does a cool karate kick or chop...
The marketing dept always seems to figure out how to price stuff according to how badly people want a certain feature set.
How much you want to bet that there'll be a nice price jump when you get to the models that can outrun sharks? "And this deluxe model comes with a high-voltage electrostatic defence barrier to ward away predators..."
Seriously... why doesn't the RIAA just make the amnesty form into a business-reply card and put them in all the kids magazines?
I had to get a 28S when I took calculus in college. That was... ummm... 13 years ago. The thing still runs like a champ.
The graphing is a little primitive because it was one of the first-gen ones, but it's great for straight-forward RPN calculations and it has most of the programmability of the later HP models like the 48 series.
What I really love about it is the fact that it closes up to completely protect the fragile parts (and, yes, my phone *is* a Star-Tac). These days, though I still remember some of the calculus, I never need to use it. The calculator now serves its function in my wood shop, where the closing-book design keeps it safe from all of the sawdust.
Frankly, I've seen the 48's that friends have shown me and I don't see the need for anything extra that they did. If my 28S ever broke, I'd go straight to eBay with $50-$60 and grab myself another.
Well... now that that's over with, nothing left to do but go get a life, I suppose.
With the whole RIAA-suing-my-12-year-old-neighbor hooplah going around, many people are getting the mistaken impression that the record companies oppose the notion of listeners not paying artists.
The record companies don't care at all about that. They care about listeners paying the *record* *companies*. The distinction here is important in that the RIAA will vehemently oppose any system which takes them out of the loop, no matter how equitably, generously, or efficiently it compensates the artists, themselves.
Unitl the record companies start to weaken, I don't see any system gaining any real strength because the RIAA will just throw more and more lawyers at it.
So, with that line of thinking, C++ should have been "P" (insert favorite "P Object-Oriented Programming" acronym joke here), and C# (although it shouldn't have been created at all, but was) should have been "L".
Or how about Survivor? Now *that* is something I'd watch... especially if the reward challeges were competing for, say, extra oxygen.
This kinda thing makes me look at this
Well, if the word "bit" is a contraction of "binary digit", then I'm all for a move to "ternary digits". We need a lot more of those in this field.