Spectrum analysis was used to see which format did the best job of maintaining the shape of the original waveform
I was thinking of doing something like this to compare different mp3 encoders about 3 years ago... and then I actually read about how lossy audio encoding worked.
MP3 encoding (and, I presume, most or all of the other entrants) works by altering the waveform in ways that the human ear won't detect. A computer would notice tons of alterations, but, to a human, it might be indistinguishable from the perfect source.
I could probably make a waveform that, when run through a spectrum analyzer, looks closer to the original than an MP3 would... yet sounded noticably worse than the MP3.
So, the point is that any computer-based comparison of the encoding methods is probably useless. These compression methods work by changing the music in ways that humans aren't supposed to detect, so humans have to be the things doing the comparison.
Hey... now I can drive around town and make calls to China with someone else's WAN connection....
... wait... you mean it's not going to drive their bills sky-high? Pffffff! What's the point, then?:)
Most of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "Oh, great! Let's put the future of the country more in the hands of the unemployed apathetic slackers...".
Maybe it wouldn't turn out that way, though.
Here in the states, the last few times I've seen some big-wig try to push e-voting, the equal-opportunity folks get their undies all bunched up over it, claiming that it discriminates against the lower-class (who don't own as many PC's as the rich people do).
So, you need to kinda ask yourself what there is more of:
A: Apathetic slackers who are too apathetic to go down to their traditional polling place, yet still motivated enough to own a PC or to trek over to visit a friend who does (or to an internet cafe), or...
B: Busy professionals who have plenty of access to PC's, but who are arguably too busy to swing by their polling place.
Personally, I fall into the second category.
Lastly, when I think about it, I'd have to venture that someone who has a PC has got to be, at least marginally, more informed than someone who doesn't. I mean... what kind of hole do you have to be living in to not have (or have access to) a PC?
So, something like this isn't necessarily the end of the world. We'll have to see.
What a novel solution... let's make our systems so that people can't hack them. What a great idea! While we're at it, let's design a freeway system that prevents anyone from ever crashing their cars.
The reality of the situation is that it's pretty much impossible for a developer to anticipate all of the strange ways that a system can be exploited. And considerable thought already does get put into writing secure systems, in spite of what the original post intimates.
And a "redoubling" of efforts to ensure security is pretty pointless unless Microsoft is on board with it... which they won't be because it doesn't make them any more money.
If you really want to approach the problem differently from jail time for hackers, then how about jail time for hackees. If you're the admin for a system that gets hacked and is used to attack another system, you get 1 month in the pokey for every publicly-available security patch that you haven't applied to the system.:)
Of course... then the problem here at our university would be: who the hell will be left to teach classes while the MIS faculty are in jail?
I feel like I have broken the shackles from the schedule.
About three years ago, I started predicting (to friends and anyone who'd listen) that the future of television would be that the shows would be "released" from the producers' server (just like how new issues of magazines come out) and your PC or set-top box would automatically download them and save them.
When you got home, your PC (or box) would notify you that, say, "The latest episode of 'Friends' is now available for viewing". The idea, of course, was that, in the future, everyone will be able to watch whatever they want, on-demand. Other people had been prediciting this sort of thing previously, but the idea had seemed to be that the "on-demand" part meant that you'd be streaming it from some central server at the time that you'd view it. I figured that it would be more practical to have the stuff downloaded to the individual PC's at less-than-realtime speeds and then have them cached locally.
Later, I found out that TiVo, essentially, implemented the idea... only in a way that required much less change to the distribution system. The net effect, I feel, will be the same: the eventual death of the idea of "prime time"... when programming directors no longer worry about timeslots, since shows can just as easily be "delivered" at 4am as at 8pm.
I don't think most hackers hack because they like crime. They like a challenge. The want a way to test their intellectual arsenal against others.
In a way, I guess you could look at hacking the first multi-player online game. It was the first way to pit yourself against a real human opponent online (aside from checkers and chess on Prodigy back in the 80's I guess:) )
The hackers play the "side" of the hackers because that is the side that's most available. If you give them a job as the sysadmin, then being able to read everyone's mail is no longer a challenge and, hence, tends to lose its novelty. Instead, they now have a new adversary: the rest of the hacker world.
It's all about proving that your king-fu is better. Whether you play the black pieces or the white pieces only determines the numbers printed on your paycheck (or your orange jumpsuit, I guess).
Oh great... for when you're starved for attention but you can't look like you're starved for attention. I'll bet he's got a 500W subwoofer and $400 of case-mods, too.
That's what sours me about this kind of thing... it's seems to invariably devolve into a technological pissing match, albeit an implied one.
In the images, I've seen at least three and they looked like females and they weren't being mobbed like moths around a flame. In fact, if you look closedly, not only are there no nerds leering slack-jawed at them... I don't even seen the geeks looking at them, PERIOD.
I can only surmise that those females aren't really there.
Seems to me if you restrict research, not everybody will comply. This will lead to someone other than ourselves having a headstart on the research. The research will be done by SOMEONE so it might as well be us
I think it's also a problem of, as soon as one (or a few) individuals "break rank" and start making great discoveries in those fields, then everyone will cave in. Interestingly, I think that this is partly why there's as much looting going on in Iraq right now. If you were a citizen who didn't really want to see a building looted, but you saw a bunch of your neighbors looting the place anyway, you're probably pretty likely to go get some for yourself because the alternative would still leave the place looted but your neighbors would end up with more stuff and you with less. Same goes with potentially harmful research.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the only solution is a political one. Let me explain...
These days, our (or, at least, my) biggest WMD worry isn't about countries with nukes or countries with nerve agents... it's about individuals with them. There are too many people to keep track of, and the technology is becoming more and more accessible to individuals. The only way to keep them from actually using them in some act of terrorism is to keep them from wanting to.
Terrorism is often an option of last resort. I'm sure that Palestinian suicide bombers would prefer it if they could just make a compelling verbal argument for their cause and actually be listened to. It sure would save all the hassle of getting fitted for a torso-bomb. The problem, of course, is that they don't feel like anyone's really listening to them when they try any of the less-drastic-than-suicide-bombing methods of communication.
So, I think the only way to prevent acts of terrorism is to have everone in the world feel that, for the most part, they are being listened to... that their needs aren't being ignored. Now, I'm not saying that this is necessarily easy to do. I do feel, however, that individual acts of terrorism (whether it is some postal worker going berzerk with a firearm or some dude mailing anthrax to people in Washington D.C....) are going to steadily increase until people stop feeling like they're being treated like cattle....
... and that requires political solutions, not technological ones.
True, it would be easy to ingest (or otherwise innoculate yourself with) nanothings. However, the one saving grace could be that they wouldn't neccesarily self-replicate. So, however little you ingest is "all" you need to worry about. If a few nanowidets "escaped" from the lab and infected someone in the general population, there shouldn't be as urgent of a threat of it spreading, unlike viruses or bacteria.
Of course, the threat that makes me shudder is the idea of weaponizing nanotech. Although it wouldn't necessarily be a weapon of mass destruction, it would certainly have some frightening capabilities... like being able to control just when the actual "attack" on your body took place, how much damage was done, etc. But this was all addressed in an X-Files episode, so there's nothing more to be said.:)
Performance has been the albatross around Java's neck for a long time..
Every time some C/C++ snob snipes Java for being slow, this is what I tell them:
When I write a Java program... if it's too slow today, then, in time, the problem will go away without any more effort on the part of the programmer. In a year from now, we'll certainly have faster computers, which will make up for any speed problems.
On the other hand...
A year from now, we will almost certainly not have CPUs that are suddenly immune from dangling pointers and memory leaks.
In other words, there are not plausible, near-future-forseeable advancements in computing hardware that could fix the worst problems of C/C++. Meanwhile, the near-future advancements in hardware are almost guranteed to fix Java's worst problem.
The same holds true for doing your computing today... regardless of what hardware is available a year from now. Personally, I'd rather have a slow program that could keep running than one that was really fast, but crashed before I could save my work.
Steve Jobs has said that, at the time he visited PARC, they demoed three technologies for him: OO-programming, graphical user interfaces, and LANs.
He said that he was so blown away by just one of the techs (the GUI, of course), that the potential of the other two were completely lost on him.
It boggles my mind how far ahead of the curve the PARC guys were. Imagine going to a demo session and having the demonstrators show you a working quantum computing laptop running from a fuel-cell with a virtual holographic 360-degree 3-D display. It must have been something like that... where each advancement is so groundbreaking that you can only absorb one of them in a sitting.
Searching for the term on Google now brings up his blog and other people talking about his blog for the first several entries. Can Google's power to give information to the people be misused and perverted?
Google merely orders the stuff by which one has the most links to it. Google, itself, didn't drive the inane sites to the top. Rather, other inane sites that chose to link to it are to blame.
And the fact that the stupid stuff got pushed to the top through this democratic process is nothing new. Just like the stupid people seem to out-breed the smart ones, the general populace has an appetite for pseudoinformation; content that is more aimed more at stirring emotions than at informing.
Real information is burried under lots of chaff. As one of the "intelligent" people of this world, you should already understand (and expect) that you have to dig to get to it.
Next week, I guess we'll be treated to an expose' on the dude who wrote Windows' auto-insert notification code?
I mean... we had to use some icons, and those icons had to be made by somebody, and it happened to be her. My guess is that it is most likely one of those "right place, right time" kind of things. I figure she was just the most adept (of the Mac developer team) at making icons moreso than it was a case of Steve Jobs ordaining "Find me the best iconographer on the planet!".
This is much like how people get famous in the music industry. Why did Britney Spears get famous while the thousands of similarly mediocre talent did not? Because, contrary to what Einstein asserted, God does play with dice, and some stuff is due to pure happenstance.
So, now she's parlayed that initial luck into a cult of personality. Good for her.
Now, for something truly interesting to do while we're at the site... how many people think that there was deliberate thought given to which icons you can get on the various bits of clothing that she sells on her site. Specifically, note the women's thong. Among other limitations, you cannot get a thong with:
- The dead fish
- The sushi roll
- The rolling dice (think STD's) - The cherries
So... you gotta ask yourself, did the various icon/clothing combinations go through some deliberate "hidden meaning" censorship?
What I'm wondering about is how you would buy something online where you can't really predict the address that shipping-confirmations will come from
Well, when I was planning to make a system like this, all "non-grata" mail would be held in some "pending" folder. If the sender completed the challenge/response, then it would be released for delivery. However, the owner of the email account would also be able to go into the folder and release individual messages for delivery as well.
So, for purchasing stuff, I figure that the process of registering at a new retail site will become marginally more involved. Currently, many sites send you an email that contains some "activation" link that you must click on. Now, you'll probably have to also go retrieve (and release) it from your "pending" folder. It's not going to be that much more of a hassle, it's just that the world needs to arrive at a standard process for it. This isn't unlike the idea of e-mail verification and account activation hyperlinks. A few years ago, before they were common, they were new, awkward, and perplexing to many people. Now, however, it's almost more rare to find a site that does NOT verify email addresses you give them... so people "know the drill" now.
The same will hold true for challenge/response email filtering. There will be some cases where the receiver of the mail needs to manually release some piece of mail from their "pending" folder. It's just going to take some time for this idea to become part of the normal way of doing things... it needs to become "mainstream".
That's the really promising thing about this new webmail service. Personally, I'm not going to sign up for it. However, I think that enough people will that it will force the "big guys" like eBay, Amazon, Buy.com, etc. to deal with this new reality.
Once that happens... once the net has arrived at some way of making this all go smoothly, it won't be long before the process gets incorporated into sendmail, smail, exim, etc. Sure, this web-based service is probably going to fail (the curse of the "early adopter") but, ultimately, the net will be better for what they've started today.
If you figure most engines like that are 30k rpm with 1:100 gear reduction..
30,000 rpm, hmmm? So, does that mean that only dogs will hear the piercing wail of the two-stroke engine? You wish!
He goes on to say that similar devices in electric form (segway) fail because of their heavy 80lb weight and limited 10-15 mile range...
Great. So this gets to fail because it's noisy as all hell. I can hear him now... "My failure is better than your failure".
As far as the Segway v. RC-motor bike debate goes, ask yourself these questions:
1 - Which one would give you the best chance of getting laid?
2 - Which one would give you the best chance of getting a wedgie from your high-school's quarterback?
"When it comes to the hobby of model rocketry, size does matter. And in this case, the magic number is 62.5 grams. That's the largest amount of propellant a single model rocket engine can have in it and still be exempt from a new set of federal rules that will go into effect May 24."
Okay... possible loopholes are:
62.5 grams of hydrogen can probably send your rocket a LONG way
They put a limit on propellant. Does the oxydizer get counted in with this weight, or do I get to put all of the liquid O2 that I want?
What about multi-staging rocket engines together? Is that considered one engine?
I wonder if there's a way to re-classify stuff as something other than "propellant". "Well, you see... the payload is a water-vapor dispersal device which creates the vapor by combining hydrogen and oxygen...."
Reappearing on the other side of the universe would happen if the universe were a plain ol' hypersphere (not that 4-dimentional objects of any sort are plain).
Just like a beetle (perceiving the world, essentially, in 2D) crawling on the surface of any 3D object (sphere, doughnut, cylinder, etc.) would eventually return to his starting point, so should we (perceiving the world in 3D) eventually return to our starting point if we travel long enough along the 3D "surface" of a 4D hypersphere, hyperdoughnut, or hypercylinder.
When you think about what most people probably use CD-R's for (making a copy of MP3's or software to pass around to friends), AOL stands to gain by having their installer getting passed around along with those bootlegs.
I'll take 10-to-1 odds that the installer is set to auto-run so that the installer runs every time the disk gets inserted... when all you wanted was to get to the damn mp3's.
In fact, I'll bet that the verbage on the installer will be cleverly phrased to imply that you have to install the software in order to access the other files on the cd.
This dude is hitting a few nails on the head, I think.
Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school
This is something that I didn't realize back then. It's true that, had I known it, I probably still would have made the same choice (like he's asserting), but it didn't even occur to me that popularity has to be constantly nurtured like an orchid for it to thrive.
It seemed to me, at the time, that all that was needed was to be helpful, honest, and genuine with other people. Hah! Thankfully, however, this notion has come true later in life. Several years ago, I was in a Blockbuster and I overheard (former Oakland Raider lineman) Bob Golic lamenting about a problem he was having with his laptop modem. I politely introduced myself, apologised for eavesdropping, and then told him what would probably solve his problem. During this, several people had come up to him asking him for his autograph. After I had helped him, he gave me a sincere "thanks".
It's then that it struck me. A half-dozen people in the store were thanking *him* for his autograph, and then he's thanking *me* for my help. It kinda helped me see my place on the "gratitude food chain" a little clearer, I guess.
I guess the moral of the story is that (as most of us have learned) the dedication to "nerdcraft" in youth bears fruit later... even though most of us didn't understand why it didn't bear any in high-school.
... a 21-year-old man was arrested for "illegally accessing an Internet game server to sell a virtual 'house' owned by a woman to another game participant
Something tells me that, in a few months, someone's going to start offering "virtual title searches" to prove that the parcel being sold is really owned by the seller...
"Well, the Ultima Online administrator certifies that he created grid location (0xA5344BEA,0x83B4A218), hereafter refered to as 'Property', on 02-05-2001. It was then purchased by Gothar the Dwarf on 02-10-2001... who was then slain by Raderian the wizard, hereafter referred to as 'Seller'..."
Slashdot Mirror
MP3 encoding (and, I presume, most or all of the other entrants) works by altering the waveform in ways that the human ear won't detect. A computer would notice tons of alterations, but, to a human, it might be indistinguishable from the perfect source.
I could probably make a waveform that, when run through a spectrum analyzer, looks closer to the original than an MP3 would... yet sounded noticably worse than the MP3.
So, the point is that any computer-based comparison of the encoding methods is probably useless. These compression methods work by changing the music in ways that humans aren't supposed to detect, so humans have to be the things doing the comparison.
Hey... now I can drive around town and make calls to China with someone else's WAN connection....
... wait... you mean it's not going to drive their bills sky-high? Pffffff! What's the point, then? :)
Most of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "Oh, great! Let's put the future of the country more in the hands of the unemployed apathetic slackers ...".
Maybe it wouldn't turn out that way, though.
Here in the states, the last few times I've seen some big-wig try to push e-voting, the equal-opportunity folks get their undies all bunched up over it, claiming that it discriminates against the lower-class (who don't own as many PC's as the rich people do).
So, you need to kinda ask yourself what there is more of:
A: Apathetic slackers who are too apathetic to go down to their traditional polling place, yet still motivated enough to own a PC or to trek over to visit a friend who does (or to an internet cafe), or...
B: Busy professionals who have plenty of access to PC's, but who are arguably too busy to swing by their polling place.
Personally, I fall into the second category.
Lastly, when I think about it, I'd have to venture that someone who has a PC has got to be, at least marginally, more informed than someone who doesn't. I mean... what kind of hole do you have to be living in to not have (or have access to) a PC?
So, something like this isn't necessarily the end of the world. We'll have to see.
What a novel solution... let's make our systems so that people can't hack them. What a great idea! While we're at it, let's design a freeway system that prevents anyone from ever crashing their cars.
:)
The reality of the situation is that it's pretty much impossible for a developer to anticipate all of the strange ways that a system can be exploited. And considerable thought already does get put into writing secure systems, in spite of what the original post intimates.
And a "redoubling" of efforts to ensure security is pretty pointless unless Microsoft is on board with it... which they won't be because it doesn't make them any more money.
If you really want to approach the problem differently from jail time for hackers, then how about jail time for hackees. If you're the admin for a system that gets hacked and is used to attack another system, you get 1 month in the pokey for every publicly-available security patch that you haven't applied to the system.
Of course... then the problem here at our university would be: who the hell will be left to teach classes while the MIS faculty are in jail?
Would we have to start over from scratch with new pr0n, too?
:)
It's been such an arduous journey just to get to this point, I don't think I could handle it a second time.
When you got home, your PC (or box) would notify you that, say, "The latest episode of 'Friends' is now available for viewing". The idea, of course, was that, in the future, everyone will be able to watch whatever they want, on-demand. Other people had been prediciting this sort of thing previously, but the idea had seemed to be that the "on-demand" part meant that you'd be streaming it from some central server at the time that you'd view it. I figured that it would be more practical to have the stuff downloaded to the individual PC's at less-than-realtime speeds and then have them cached locally.
Later, I found out that TiVo, essentially, implemented the idea... only in a way that required much less change to the distribution system. The net effect, I feel, will be the same: the eventual death of the idea of "prime time"... when programming directors no longer worry about timeslots, since shows can just as easily be "delivered" at 4am as at 8pm.
I could have done this years ago by using VNC on the PC and then using a web browser on my PDA.
:)
Of course... it would kinda suck having to run my PC at 160x160 resolution so I can read the icon labels, though.
I don't think most hackers hack because they like crime. They like a challenge. The want a way to test their intellectual arsenal against others.
:) )
In a way, I guess you could look at hacking the first multi-player online game. It was the first way to pit yourself against a real human opponent online (aside from checkers and chess on Prodigy back in the 80's I guess
The hackers play the "side" of the hackers because that is the side that's most available. If you give them a job as the sysadmin, then being able to read everyone's mail is no longer a challenge and, hence, tends to lose its novelty. Instead, they now have a new adversary: the rest of the hacker world.
It's all about proving that your king-fu is better. Whether you play the black pieces or the white pieces only determines the numbers printed on your paycheck (or your orange jumpsuit, I guess).
Oh great... for when you're starved for attention but you can't look like you're starved for attention. I'll bet he's got a 500W subwoofer and $400 of case-mods, too.
That's what sours me about this kind of thing... it's seems to invariably devolve into a technological pissing match, albeit an implied one.
Those females must have been photoshopped in.
In the images, I've seen at least three and they looked like females and they weren't being mobbed like moths around a flame. In fact, if you look closedly, not only are there no nerds leering slack-jawed at them... I don't even seen the geeks looking at them, PERIOD.
I can only surmise that those females aren't really there.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the only solution is a political one. Let me explain...
These days, our (or, at least, my) biggest WMD worry isn't about countries with nukes or countries with nerve agents... it's about individuals with them. There are too many people to keep track of, and the technology is becoming more and more accessible to individuals. The only way to keep them from actually using them in some act of terrorism is to keep them from wanting to.
Terrorism is often an option of last resort. I'm sure that Palestinian suicide bombers would prefer it if they could just make a compelling verbal argument for their cause and actually be listened to. It sure would save all the hassle of getting fitted for a torso-bomb. The problem, of course, is that they don't feel like anyone's really listening to them when they try any of the less-drastic-than-suicide-bombing methods of communication.
So, I think the only way to prevent acts of terrorism is to have everone in the world feel that, for the most part, they are being listened to... that their needs aren't being ignored. Now, I'm not saying that this is necessarily easy to do. I do feel, however, that individual acts of terrorism (whether it is some postal worker going berzerk with a firearm or some dude mailing anthrax to people in Washington D.C....) are going to steadily increase until people stop feeling like they're being treated like cattle....
True, it would be easy to ingest (or otherwise innoculate yourself with) nanothings. However, the one saving grace could be that they wouldn't neccesarily self-replicate. So, however little you ingest is "all" you need to worry about. If a few nanowidets "escaped" from the lab and infected someone in the general population, there shouldn't be as urgent of a threat of it spreading, unlike viruses or bacteria.
:)
Of course, the threat that makes me shudder is the idea of weaponizing nanotech. Although it wouldn't necessarily be a weapon of mass destruction, it would certainly have some frightening capabilities... like being able to control just when the actual "attack" on your body took place, how much damage was done, etc. But this was all addressed in an X-Files episode, so there's nothing more to be said.
When I write a Java program... if it's too slow today, then, in time, the problem will go away without any more effort on the part of the programmer. In a year from now, we'll certainly have faster computers, which will make up for any speed problems.
On the other hand...
A year from now, we will almost certainly not have CPUs that are suddenly immune from dangling pointers and memory leaks.
In other words, there are not plausible, near-future-forseeable advancements in computing hardware that could fix the worst problems of C/C++. Meanwhile, the near-future advancements in hardware are almost guranteed to fix Java's worst problem.
The same holds true for doing your computing today... regardless of what hardware is available a year from now. Personally, I'd rather have a slow program that could keep running than one that was really fast, but crashed before I could save my work.
Steve Jobs has said that, at the time he visited PARC, they demoed three technologies for him: OO-programming, graphical user interfaces, and LANs.
He said that he was so blown away by just one of the techs (the GUI, of course), that the potential of the other two were completely lost on him.
It boggles my mind how far ahead of the curve the PARC guys were. Imagine going to a demo session and having the demonstrators show you a working quantum computing laptop running from a fuel-cell with a virtual holographic 360-degree 3-D display. It must have been something like that... where each advancement is so groundbreaking that you can only absorb one of them in a sitting.
And the fact that the stupid stuff got pushed to the top through this democratic process is nothing new. Just like the stupid people seem to out-breed the smart ones, the general populace has an appetite for pseudoinformation; content that is more aimed more at stirring emotions than at informing.
Real information is burried under lots of chaff. As one of the "intelligent" people of this world, you should already understand (and expect) that you have to dig to get to it.
Next week, I guess we'll be treated to an expose' on the dude who wrote Windows' auto-insert notification code?
I mean... we had to use some icons, and those icons had to be made by somebody, and it happened to be her. My guess is that it is most likely one of those "right place, right time" kind of things. I figure she was just the most adept (of the Mac developer team) at making icons moreso than it was a case of Steve Jobs ordaining "Find me the best iconographer on the planet!".
This is much like how people get famous in the music industry. Why did Britney Spears get famous while the thousands of similarly mediocre talent did not? Because, contrary to what Einstein asserted, God does play with dice, and some stuff is due to pure happenstance.
So, now she's parlayed that initial luck into a cult of personality. Good for her.
Now, for something truly interesting to do while we're at the site... how many people think that there was deliberate thought given to which icons you can get on the various bits of clothing that she sells on her site. Specifically, note the women's thong. Among other limitations, you cannot get a thong with:
- The dead fish
- The sushi roll
- The rolling dice (think STD's)
- The cherries
So... you gotta ask yourself, did the various icon/clothing combinations go through some deliberate "hidden meaning" censorship?
So, for purchasing stuff, I figure that the process of registering at a new retail site will become marginally more involved. Currently, many sites send you an email that contains some "activation" link that you must click on. Now, you'll probably have to also go retrieve (and release) it from your "pending" folder. It's not going to be that much more of a hassle, it's just that the world needs to arrive at a standard process for it. This isn't unlike the idea of e-mail verification and account activation hyperlinks. A few years ago, before they were common, they were new, awkward, and perplexing to many people. Now, however, it's almost more rare to find a site that does NOT verify email addresses you give them... so people "know the drill" now.
The same will hold true for challenge/response email filtering. There will be some cases where the receiver of the mail needs to manually release some piece of mail from their "pending" folder. It's just going to take some time for this idea to become part of the normal way of doing things... it needs to become "mainstream".
That's the really promising thing about this new webmail service. Personally, I'm not going to sign up for it. However, I think that enough people will that it will force the "big guys" like eBay, Amazon, Buy.com, etc. to deal with this new reality.
Once that happens... once the net has arrived at some way of making this all go smoothly, it won't be long before the process gets incorporated into sendmail, smail, exim, etc. Sure, this web-based service is probably going to fail (the curse of the "early adopter") but, ultimately, the net will be better for what they've started today.
As far as the Segway v. RC-motor bike debate goes, ask yourself these questions:
1 - Which one would give you the best chance of getting laid?
2 - Which one would give you the best chance of getting a wedgie from your high-school's quarterback?
62.5 grams of hydrogen can probably send your rocket a LONG way
They put a limit on propellant. Does the oxydizer get counted in with this weight, or do I get to put all of the liquid O2 that I want?
What about multi-staging rocket engines together? Is that considered one engine?
I wonder if there's a way to re-classify stuff as something other than "propellant". "Well, you see... the payload is a water-vapor dispersal device which creates the vapor by combining hydrogen and oxygen...."
Reappearing on the other side of the universe would happen if the universe were a plain ol' hypersphere (not that 4-dimentional objects of any sort are plain).
Just like a beetle (perceiving the world, essentially, in 2D) crawling on the surface of any 3D object (sphere, doughnut, cylinder, etc.) would eventually return to his starting point, so should we (perceiving the world in 3D) eventually return to our starting point if we travel long enough along the 3D "surface" of a 4D hypersphere, hyperdoughnut, or hypercylinder.
The google algorithm kicked ass right off of the starting blocks and it's still kickin' ass today.
They should have titled the patent "A method of ranking web documents that can't easily be subverted by jerk webmasters solely out for personal gain".
When you think about what most people probably use CD-R's for (making a copy of MP3's or software to pass around to friends), AOL stands to gain by having their installer getting passed around along with those bootlegs.
I'll take 10-to-1 odds that the installer is set to auto-run so that the installer runs every time the disk gets inserted... when all you wanted was to get to the damn mp3's.
In fact, I'll bet that the verbage on the installer will be cleverly phrased to imply that you have to install the software in order to access the other files on the cd.
It seemed to me, at the time, that all that was needed was to be helpful, honest, and genuine with other people. Hah! Thankfully, however, this notion has come true later in life. Several years ago, I was in a Blockbuster and I overheard (former Oakland Raider lineman) Bob Golic lamenting about a problem he was having with his laptop modem. I politely introduced myself, apologised for eavesdropping, and then told him what would probably solve his problem. During this, several people had come up to him asking him for his autograph. After I had helped him, he gave me a sincere "thanks".
It's then that it struck me. A half-dozen people in the store were thanking *him* for his autograph, and then he's thanking *me* for my help. It kinda helped me see my place on the "gratitude food chain" a little clearer, I guess.
I guess the moral of the story is that (as most of us have learned) the dedication to "nerdcraft" in youth bears fruit later... even though most of us didn't understand why it didn't bear any in high-school.