AOL was definitely guilty of arrogance in many things, but I think that with respect to email and spam, they're probably more guilty of ignorance. Some background... (actually, lots of background)
Historically, AOL has viewed itself as an entertainment company. The AOL muckity mucks cared about the big business deals, the marketing drive that will change the world, etc. The media mogul in
Barton Fink is an example of the style of executive that ran the show during the height of the dot.com bubble.
But AOL Email Operations was just another overworked technical dept. The email application didn't bring in any revenue directly. Also, it was an overhead application that couldn't be cleanly assigned into one of the Balkanized divisions at AOL. For years, it had little marketing and little development effort applied to it. Buying Netscape for $4 billion dollars got lots of attention, upgrading the pre-internet AOL email infrastructure didn't.
The top level AOL exec's heard about spam complaints, but they heard lots of complaints about lots of things. Nothing was catching on fire and exploding in email so they assumed it must not have been that bad.
Another reason why AOL business exec's tended to ignore the techies. Keep in mind that hardcore techies had spent years
vehemently ragging on AOL. Inspite of that, AOL became a major business success (well, at least for a few years). So whenever an internet purist gave a lecture on how things were supposed to be done, it triggered a gut level hostile response with many exec's at AOL.
So the result of all of this is, for the past several years, there were only background projects for fighting spam (and handling ISP complaints). Current problems are a result of that legacy.
But I think things might be changing. Remember AOL tried to takeover Time Warner? Well Time Warner has essentially staged a reverse coup and kicked out all the "deal junkies" at AOL.
I think the Time Warner folks are pushing a much more back to basics approach for business deals, financial accounting, and for the AOL online service.
The upcoming AOL 9.0 release is supposed to be a lot better at spam fighting (although I haven't tried it much yet).
I hope that the new exec's really are making spam fighting a strategic priority (which I think they might be). If so, you should see real results in a year or two. Including, hopefully, a lot less false positives for spam (where positive really means negative delivery of mail, whatever) and much higher levels of support for email delivery complaints.
Keep in mind that the
Bravo D1
DVI output is a raw high bit rate data feed that is the result of the decoding of mpeg2 compressed information from the DVD.
To record the DVI output (assuming it's not protected/encrypted via optional HDCP) you'd have to have a system with a mpeg2 encoder to get back down to a reasonable bit rate. (which is basically what's in a PVR for recording off the air)
Plus how many DVD's could you really store on a PVR at a reasonable quality? I'll just rent my DVD's from Netflix.
Also note, the Bravo D1 DVD player enforces Macrovision copy protection.
The subpeonas being talked about here are issued under the
DMCA act
where court involvement is, essentially,
not required.
So if a spammer uses some copyrighted information in the contents of his spam, can the copyright holder use the DMCA "subpeona cause I feel like it" clause to find the spammer?
Also, there's a section in the DMCA (section
1309.c) which says that if you didn't realize it was copy protected, it's not you're fault. Maybe a loophole?
I agree that the current Republican administration would typically side with the established big business interests (ouuu, did I show my liberal bias?), but in this case the FCC also likes the entrenpenurial aspect of the 802.11b mania. From the article:
What enabled the FCC even to consider the idea of an open spectrum has been the unexpected success of Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11 standard) wireless LAN.... Products and services based on the 802.11b standard created a $2.9 billion industry in 2002. The FCC then saw that technology and standards can use spectrum in ways that seem to create more capacity.
Too bad not enough money was spent on research so that a 802.11b has fatally flawed security.
A while back courts ruled that "business process" patents are legal for business methods implemented on computers. The overworked patent office basically said, "ok fine" and started issuing these patents.
Apparently, obviousness in patents is based mostly on previous publications not actual obviousness, and the Patent Office has bizarrely decided that non-computer based business methods don't count as prior art for computer based business methods.
My humble suggestion is that the patent office should change their criteria for obviousness so that real world (non-computer based) business processes count as prior art for computer based business processes that do the same thing.
Hell, the Patent Office should change the criteria so if a bunch of college seniors respond with "no duh" to a patent application, it's classified as an obvious idea;)
I have a HP Officejet d135 All-in-One printer/scanner/copier.
One time, while printing out a B&W PDF document, I noticed color fringing on the B&W text. The problem turned out to be a printer head alignment, which was easily fixed. But was the printer using color ink to print B&W documents?
Sure enough, if I force the print setup "Color:" option to greyscale, then a "High Quality" or "Black Only" option appears under a "Color Options" menu (in a different window). If I choose "High Quality" it's using the color ink cartridge to print B&W text, "Black Only" does not use the color ink cartridge.
Ie. when you print black and white documents on a HP d135 officejet, I'm pretty sure it uses the color ink cartridge too.
Even if you specify "Greyscale", it'll still use the color cartridge unless you find the other "Black Only" option.
I've been an HP customer for many years, but this might cause me to change (and change my recommendations to friends/family)
Come on. So you got some hick small claims court to make a silly ruling. You know in your heart that the junk fax law wording just doesn't cover email.
Aren't there better laws for prosecuting spam? Specifically, if the headers are obviously intentionally faked, isn't that a form of hacking?
Lying about your identity for a login is illegal.
Why isn't it illegal for a spammer to use fake RFC 821/822 fields (Return-path, From, and "Received from", Subject) to bypass spam filters?
How about a preemptive innoculation virus? Something which gets distributed a month or two after the patch has been posted, and propagates itself at a slow non-destructive rate. It's payload could send alarm messages to the console.
....note to monitoring security agencies. I'm just joking here, really. I'd never do stuff like this.
Chimera 0.6 is definitely faster than MS-IE 5.2 on my OS X 10.2.1 dual processor machine (G4 w/2 867MHz CPUs, NVidia GeForce4 display card). I'd say maybe twice as fast, but it radically depends on the web page being accessed.
It feels like there's some sort of single threaded bottlneck in MS-IE with respect to opening network connections or rendering graphics. Ie., the slowness of MS-IE seems to get dramatically worse for web pages with lots of little gif's.
I haven't used Chimera 0.6 that much yet, but it seems stable so far. If it remains stable, I'm definitely switching to it as my main browser.
Only digital water logic, why not analog too
on
Water Computing
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Why not extend the metaphor...
Inductance is the same as momentum. You could build a gadget that has a turbine in the water flow with a fly wheel attached. The gadget would resist water flow starting up, and would resist the water flow slowing down once it's moving. (same as an inductor fighting a change in current)
Capacitance is the same as a flexible membrane across the pipe, which will transmit AC changes in pressure, but not DC.
You could build a capacitor/inductor tuned circuit that either filters or passes certain frequency water waves
Also, water transistors should be fun. A small flow or pressure of water controls a larger flow or pressure (in either an analog or digital fashion)
It would be a way fun tool for teaching electronics.
If this solution were to scale up, then people would be growing huge amounts of sugar cane. As with US large scale agriculture, that will require fertilizer, and that will require fossil fuel as an input (for large scale production)
From The Coming Global Oil Crises: "The major energy inputs in U.S. corn production are oil, natural gas, and/or other high grade fuels. Fertilizer production and fuels for mechanization account for about two-thirds of these energy inputs for corn production (Pimentel, 1991)."
The FCC is trying to recreate the migration from B&W to color TV's back in the 60's. Eventhough that was difficult at the time, there was (and still is) complete backward compatibility for B&W TV's.
The migration to HDTV is muddied by the fact that the screen formats are not really compatibile (4 wide by 3 high for regular TV, 16 wide by 8 high for HDTV). Yeah you can smush, stretch, and crop, but that takes explaining, makes it sound complicated, and is really a kludge anyway. So really, you have to buy a new set for HDTV (or buy a weird adapter, etc). This makes the HDTV migration a "hard cutover"... much more difficult than the migration to color.
So instead of a hard cutover migration, taking an early adopter approach makes sense. I.e., hardcore tech junkies pay premium prices for the first few years paving the way for the materialistic masses.
Except that there's little HDTV source material available for the tech junkies. A few hard to receive over the air broadcasts, a few heavily compressed satellite channels, virtually no cable channels, and virtually no prerecorded material (except for a handful of mostly non-blockbuster DVHS releases, Fight Club being the exception)
The cable companies complain about the bandwidth it takes to broadcast full quality HDTV, but at the same time, they're broadcasting huge numbers of "public access" channels, often displaying static graphics and low quality audio. These public access channels are just silly plain silly, now that the web is around.
If the cable companies could toss these amazingly useless public access channels (requiring law changes), and use the bandwidth for super primo (expensive) HDTV channels, early adopters would get their hi-res fix, the cable companies would get their money, and slowly, the technology would become cheaper.
Yeah, blue laser HD-DVD's are coming, but they're 5-7 years away (widescreenreview.com, not free). DVHS would be great, if all the studios decide to support it.
Everybody likes DVD's because they look better. The same could someday be true for HDTV, if early adopters just had something to adopt.
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Historically, AOL has viewed itself as an entertainment company. The AOL muckity mucks cared about the big business deals, the marketing drive that will change the world, etc. The media mogul in Barton Fink is an example of the style of executive that ran the show during the height of the dot.com bubble.
But AOL Email Operations was just another overworked technical dept. The email application didn't bring in any revenue directly. Also, it was an overhead application that couldn't be cleanly assigned into one of the Balkanized divisions at AOL. For years, it had little marketing and little development effort applied to it. Buying Netscape for $4 billion dollars got lots of attention, upgrading the pre-internet AOL email infrastructure didn't.
The top level AOL exec's heard about spam complaints, but they heard lots of complaints about lots of things. Nothing was catching on fire and exploding in email so they assumed it must not have been that bad.
Another reason why AOL business exec's tended to ignore the techies. Keep in mind that hardcore techies had spent years vehemently ragging on AOL. Inspite of that, AOL became a major business success (well, at least for a few years). So whenever an internet purist gave a lecture on how things were supposed to be done, it triggered a gut level hostile response with many exec's at AOL.
So the result of all of this is, for the past several years, there were only background projects for fighting spam (and handling ISP complaints). Current problems are a result of that legacy.
But I think things might be changing. Remember AOL tried to takeover Time Warner? Well Time Warner has essentially staged a reverse coup and kicked out all the "deal junkies" at AOL. I think the Time Warner folks are pushing a much more back to basics approach for business deals, financial accounting, and for the AOL online service.
The upcoming AOL 9.0 release is supposed to be a lot better at spam fighting (although I haven't tried it much yet).
I hope that the new exec's really are making spam fighting a strategic priority (which I think they might be). If so, you should see real results in a year or two. Including, hopefully, a lot less false positives for spam (where positive really means negative delivery of mail, whatever) and much higher levels of support for email delivery complaints.
To record the DVI output (assuming it's not protected/encrypted via optional HDCP) you'd have to have a system with a mpeg2 encoder to get back down to a reasonable bit rate. (which is basically what's in a PVR for recording off the air)
Plus how many DVD's could you really store on a PVR at a reasonable quality? I'll just rent my DVD's from Netflix.
Also note, the Bravo D1 DVD player enforces Macrovision copy protection.
So if a spammer uses some copyrighted information in the contents of his spam, can the copyright holder use the DMCA "subpeona cause I feel like it" clause to find the spammer?
Also, there's a section in the DMCA (section 1309.c) which says that if you didn't realize it was copy protected, it's not you're fault. Maybe a loophole?
From what I can see, the Patent Office isn't enforcing the non-obvious to a person skilled in the (relevant) art part of the patent criteria in a way that normal people would expect.
Apparently, obviousness in patents is based mostly on previous publications not actual obviousness, and the Patent Office has bizarrely decided that non-computer based business methods don't count as prior art for computer based business methods.
My humble suggestion is that the patent office should change their criteria for obviousness so that real world (non-computer based) business processes count as prior art for computer based business processes that do the same thing.
Hell, the Patent Office should change the criteria so if a bunch of college seniors respond with "no duh" to a patent application, it's classified as an obvious idea ;)
One time, while printing out a B&W PDF document, I noticed color fringing on the B&W text. The problem turned out to be a printer head alignment, which was easily fixed. But was the printer using color ink to print B&W documents?
Sure enough, if I force the print setup "Color:" option to greyscale, then a "High Quality" or "Black Only" option appears under a "Color Options" menu (in a different window). If I choose "High Quality" it's using the color ink cartridge to print B&W text, "Black Only" does not use the color ink cartridge.
Ie. when you print black and white documents on a HP d135 officejet, I'm pretty sure it uses the color ink cartridge too.
Even if you specify "Greyscale", it'll still use the color cartridge unless you find the other "Black Only" option.
I've been an HP customer for many years, but this might cause me to change (and change my recommendations to friends/family)
Aren't there better laws for prosecuting spam? Specifically, if the headers are obviously intentionally faked, isn't that a form of hacking?
Lying about your identity for a login is illegal.
Why isn't it illegal for a spammer to use fake RFC 821/822 fields (Return-path, From, and "Received from", Subject) to bypass spam filters?
"What would Homer do?"
It feels like there's some sort of single threaded bottlneck in MS-IE with respect to opening network connections or rendering graphics. Ie., the slowness of MS-IE seems to get dramatically worse for web pages with lots of little gif's.
I haven't used Chimera 0.6 that much yet, but it seems stable so far. If it remains stable, I'm definitely switching to it as my main browser.
Inductance is the same as momentum. You could build a gadget that has a turbine in the water flow with a fly wheel attached. The gadget would resist water flow starting up, and would resist the water flow slowing down once it's moving. (same as an inductor fighting a change in current)
Capacitance is the same as a flexible membrane across the pipe, which will transmit AC changes in pressure, but not DC.
You could build a capacitor/inductor tuned circuit that either filters or passes certain frequency water waves
Also, water transistors should be fun. A small flow or pressure of water controls a larger flow or pressure (in either an analog or digital fashion)
It would be a way fun tool for teaching electronics.
From The Coming Global Oil Crises:
"The major energy inputs in U.S. corn production are oil, natural gas, and/or other high grade fuels. Fertilizer production and fuels for mechanization account for about two-thirds of these energy inputs for corn production (Pimentel, 1991)."
The migration to HDTV is muddied by the fact that the screen formats are not really compatibile (4 wide by 3 high for regular TV, 16 wide by 8 high for HDTV). Yeah you can smush, stretch, and crop, but that takes explaining, makes it sound complicated, and is really a kludge anyway. So really, you have to buy a new set for HDTV (or buy a weird adapter, etc). This makes the HDTV migration a "hard cutover"... much more difficult than the migration to color.
So instead of a hard cutover migration, taking an early adopter approach makes sense. I.e., hardcore tech junkies pay premium prices for the first few years paving the way for the materialistic masses.
Except that there's little HDTV source material available for the tech junkies. A few hard to receive over the air broadcasts, a few heavily compressed satellite channels, virtually no cable channels, and virtually no prerecorded material (except for a handful of mostly non-blockbuster DVHS releases, Fight Club being the exception)
The cable companies complain about the bandwidth it takes to broadcast full quality HDTV, but at the same time, they're broadcasting huge numbers of "public access" channels, often displaying static graphics and low quality audio. These public access channels are just silly plain silly, now that the web is around.
If the cable companies could toss these amazingly useless public access channels (requiring law changes), and use the bandwidth for super primo (expensive) HDTV channels, early adopters would get their hi-res fix, the cable companies would get their money, and slowly, the technology would become cheaper.
Yeah, blue laser HD-DVD's are coming, but they're 5-7 years away (widescreenreview.com, not free). DVHS would be great, if all the studios decide to support it.
Everybody likes DVD's because they look better. The same could someday be true for HDTV, if early adopters just had something to adopt.