Adding a year or two to the human lifespan wouldn't do much to either population or social balance. Adding a full century or two would have a massive impact, and could hasten social revolutions. However, any advance in this area (increasing lifespan, defying aging) requires better developments in the areas of age-related dementia, Alzheimer's, and senility. Otherwise there is really little purpose in keeping someone alive an extra decade or two, if they are incapable of independent life.
On a similar note, overpopulation would not be a problem if there were major advances in birth control and fertility. By this I mean a method for preventing pregnancy unless both parties consciously decide they would like a child - something with a 99.999% success rate that doesn't have a negative impact on later fertility.
Tied together with the above - mental capacity not being lost - humanity could have the time to seek more and better long-term solutions.
The biggest problem for gaming (particularly with games like this or EverQuest aka EverCrack) is the obsession level. It is very easy to "forget" about important occasions or promises in the effort to finish a particular quest. It is also easy to be so social during this period that your time with your SO is spent wanting some solo, quiet time -- the exact opposite of what is needed.
The real question is which do you value more - your SO or your game. If you value your relationship, you can plan "poker nights" -- several hours scheduled in advance for your gaming -- then balance these with "couple nights" -- an equivalent number of hours of activities you enjoy sharing as a couple (sleeping together does not count). If you don't value your relationship, then the problem existed prior to the game and the gaming is simply making it stand out. In this case, the SO may have to take a walk -- leaving you the position of being a gamer who can't maintain a relationship (the supposed M.O. of most/. readers).
Apparently the car manufacturer's fear is that some of their custom parts will be reverse-engineered. I'm not quite sure how knowing whether the "check engine" light means a fuel-injection problem vs. a gas tank cap problem will allow anyone to reverse-engineer anything.
The real purpose of the bill is to ensure that a car owner can maintain their own car or take it to their favorite mechanic rather than the dealer (which often charges over 2x what the independent mechanic charges).
The woman in the article was definitely gullible. By the second visit, she should have demanded a second opinion - either a supervisor or a different dealership. Twelve times to the same dealer tells me she was flat-out stupid and so were the mechanics. By the third or fourth time, the mechanics should have been checking the cap to see if it was loose. If so, having her tighten it so she could see the difference between loose and tight, and they could see if she was doing it wrong or wasn't turning it enough. If it wasn't loose, something else was clearly wrong. In addition, they should have checked to be sure the threads weren't stripped or damaged, which could cause the cap to loosen on its own. The fact that they didn't look further than the easy answer twelve times in a row speaks very poorly for the service standard at that dealership. (I can say this from the perspective of technical support - just because I don't work for MS doesn't mean I won't teach a customer how to navigate in Explorer when that will result in his ability to use our software better. To blow him off by saying he needs to learn to use Windows and it isn't my problem doesn't solve anything. Making him pay each time to be told this would just result in a really upset customer who is unlikely to purchase future software/support from us.)
The entire purpose of independent mechanics or the car owner knowing those codes is to diagnose and handle a problem preventing the car owner from using their car for the purpose it was purchased for -- driving to and from locations. This doesn't compare very well with modding an Xbox (or reverse-engineering it) because neither of those is intended to maintain its usefulness for its original purpose. A better comparison would be trying to get your Xbox, PS2, or Gamecube serviced if it stops working correctly. How difficult (impossible) is it to get your Xbox serviced at the local electronics repair shop if the laser stops functioning or a button jams?
Seems to me this business model has been attempted before. It works well when the pace of improvement in hardware and software is slow enough to allow the subscription time to be worth it. For example, if Cadence' latest version won't run on two-year-old hardware, and the subscription period is five years, guess what's going to happen to the subsciption? It also works well when the cost of the hardware is covered by internal savings - rather than added to the subscription or service fees (think about those little FedEx machines).
It might work well for Sun, whose vision of this is rather narrow. With respect to their servers, based on their current model, we have an appliance (as others have termed it) server - hardware very specifically designed for the task of running their server software. What I can't tell from the news blurb is whether the hardware remains the property of Sun, they have the responsibility of maintaining and upgrading it, or the property of the consumer -- maintenance and upgrade is a service cost. Which scenario seems more likely:
1) Sun or Microsoft replaces hard drives when customers need more file storage space. Sun or Microsoft ships out new memory chips and new CPUs and new cases as necessary to keep up with technology. Sun or Microsoft handles all installation, updating and upgrading of hardware and drivers to keep the "free" hardware current.
2) Sun or Microsoft ships the minimal necessary components to run the package it sells for a price that includes the cost plus profit. Any need for better hardware is routed through to a service department that sells the drivers and installation for a price that includes the "free" hardware.
Sun and Microsoft may find a market niche of consumers and business willing to be tied into a long-term contract in exchange for "free" hardware, but the hardware market in general won't disappear because there are just too many consumers who aren't willing to be assimilated.
Re:Hotmail receives 2 billion spam emails/day
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NYT on Spam Cops
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· Score: 1
Hotmail users are seldom the source of spam. Rather, @hotmail.com is one of the more common spoofed addresses. Microsoft would have done something sooner if that much volume was pouring through their "free" accounts.
These images mostly come from quite some time back. It is funny to see the change in what a 1930s author predicted compared to a 1960s author compared to a 1990s author. More recent science fiction has tended toward a grittier look for cities and earth. No more of the sanitized, everybody happy and everything in its place images of the 1930s and 1940s (back when people though World War I was "the war to end all wars". This was a time when "clean cars" were pictured with white tires (or at least white walls).
I think my favorite image of a futuristic city was in Fifth Element. Fifty years from now I'll have to travel to NY and see if that vision had any merit.
I learned (and still remember) more about history from all the historical fiction books I've read than I ever will from history classes. If they can keep the level of gamer involvement high, this makes great sense.
Imagine playing as Alexander the Great, Julius Cesar, Attilla the Hun, or any other historical figure trying to build an empire. That could be interesting.
There was a recent case with Barbara Streisand related to whether photographs that included private property belonged in the public domain. Her beachfront home was part of a whole series of coastline photos. Basically, she lost. IANAL, but I don't think the principle would be any different.
It is necessary to get permission to publish a picture of a person, but it is not necessary to get the permission of every person in the background of a picture. Often pictures of apartments or businesses include people who happened to walk by at that moment. The line may have to do with the focus of the picture, but IANAL, so I would have to research that further.
A "slow" quake could release stress along a certain section of the plates, but build up pressure along another section further away - thus leading to a large quake along the second section.
A "slow" quake could ramp up to a large quake if the slippage reaches a point where the plates have less friction against each other.
The faults don't only shift when a major earthquake occurs. A "slow" quake may shift the two plates closer to a point that can only shift through a large quake.
Obviously, IANAS or IANAG - and as neither scientist nor geologist - these are mere guesses based on what I do know of earthquakes.
I never liked trying to look through the ads and follow the sales. Driving to several stores to get everything for the lowest price was a waste of time and gas (and made it easy to forget items). Being able to plan out meals and have the needed groceries delivered is wonderful. Gives me more time for my computers, games consoles, reading, or going out to a movie.
They are definitely more interested in false positives, because those can be weeded out. False negatives are those omitted who should have been listed - which in this case could be the rest of us in the U.S. (over 300 million). Those false negatives can be found through other investigative means. As long as there is a full understanding that false negatives and false positives exist, they don't get in much trouble. This list merely gave them one starting point. They looked at what got people on the list - not just the fact that they were on the list - in determining who to investigate further. They also didn't limit their investigations to that group of 120,000. The problem with a database is that many people want absolute answers - i.e. if you are on this list then you are a terrorist and if you aren't on the list you are not a terrorist. Then you simply get a witch hunt.
Good grief. No law suddenly causes all violators to stop their behavior. Laws against monopolies didn't make businesses suddenly see the error of their ways and break up. Laws against racism and segregation haven't ended prejudice. The laws are merely tools allowing some authoritative body to take action against the worst offenders (and sometimes the lesser offenders).
Take laws against racism and segregation. Until the military came along and forced some schools to accept non-white students, they would have gone right on ignoring the law. It took 1) someone reporting the violation, 2) someone investigating the violation, 3) someone enforcing the punishment for the violation, and 4) someone making it know through action that violations would not be acceptable.
The FBI is investigating and getting ready to go after spammers. They have not yet enforced the punishments, but they have the authority to confiscate possessions bought with the proceeds or used in spamming (much as the IRS does for tax evaders), so losing homes and cars and computers should begin to make it less profitable to spam. Until enough spammers lose a lot, the word won't spread that spamming doesn't pay. That doesn't make the law useless - it just means it hasn't had time to make much impact yet. The degree of the impact will depend on the continued enforcement (though I believe the ratio of FBI agents to spammers is a lot better than speeders to cops).
Of course, this won't stop all spammers. There will be the diehard group (likely with mafia-style connections) who go so deep underground that they are hard to find.
BTW, spammers by their very business, want to have someone able to find them -- their "customers". (Hey, perhaps we should go after the users instead of the dealers -- slap a $250 fine on any person who buys from spam. Soon, with no one responding to their offers, spammers would go out of business. Yeah, I know this wouldn't really work.)
Google's principles aren't expected to change the behavior of the worst companies out there. They are designed to set the bar of what the best companies should behave like. If every company making legitimate software clearly stated what their software did and made it clear and easy to install or uninstall, the gulf between "good" software and "bad" software would be very large.
You could divide people and companies into one of four groups -- very ethical, moderately ethical, moderately unethical, and very unethical. Those who are very ethical do not need laws to tell them what is right or wrong. Those who are moderately ethical can usually make the right decision, but are more comfortable with laws that clearly delineate right and wrong. Those who are moderately unethical will routinely take the easy way or the most profitable way with little consideration of whether it is right or wrong, though strong laws with enforced punishments can dissuade them. Those who are very unethical are seldom concerned with right or wrong and often don't even connect their behavior with what is illegal.
What laws or principles do is widen the gap between what the ethical do and what the unethical do. The more difference between a piece of spyware and a piece of legitimate software, the easier it is to identify and avoid spyware. This is much like spam... if every email you send has detailed contact information (I include my full name, company name, phone number, and department as well as the name of our software in every email), it is very easy to distinguish from the majority of spam. We know spammers and spyware companies won't suddenly get ethical, but we can make the unethical nature more obvious by raising our standards for ourselves higher.
According to the web-site information on how e-rater works: "It cannot read or respond to an essay as a teacher would." and "Some of these writers have submitted essays that have tricked e-rater into giving a score even though the essay does not make any sense. The individual words in these "challenge essays" are grammatically correct, but they are strung together in such a way that they create nonsense sentences."
The real point behind the e-rater seems to be giving a general idea of where the author may need improvement. It does not appear to be a replacement for a teacher reading the essay. In fact, it would seem to be more useful for allowing a student to have their rough draft reviewed and determine whether it needs major rewriting or just fine-tuning.
(Did anyone else imagine "Trained Readers" being given rewards when they scored a test the same as the e-rater?)
Dairy prices were going up pre-oil prices
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Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
Actually, if you look back about a month ago there was quite a bit of news about dairy prices going up due to low production. This applies to all dairy products - milk, butter, ice cream, latte', cheese, and so on. This came before, and is not directly related to the rise in oil prices.
Why isn't this showing up in the inflations numbers? Because those include all sorts of things, "from the price of diapers and milk to funeral expenses" (http://www.investopedia.com/university/releases/c pi.asp). How much are housing prices rising? How much are medical costs increasing? How much are technology costs rising? How much more do automobiles costs? All of these higher costs items may be holding the overall inflation rate lower than what we, as consumers, actually see from our wallet.
In fact, Apopo uses rats, in part, because they are lightweight and very unlikely to set off landmines. (Otherwise native wildlife would routinely set off mines.) It would not be a very effective solution if they spent 1/3 of the animal's life training it and then sent it out to be killed the first time it found a mine. The rats that they train have a natural life expectancy of around 8 years - and the handlers want them to live as long as possible to maximize the time and effort. There is even an alternative method they are investigating which involves filters - the rats don't even go near the suspected areas. I can't see much that PETA could complain about here.
All Spamhaus would have to do was include a couple of false spammer names on its officials lists, use those false identities to complain on more generic forums about the ridiculousness of laws like CAN-SPAM, and wait for the invites to show up. Almost every group, no matter how exclusive, has members who are more gullible and willing to make the invite. (C'mon - the only reason spamming is profitable is because the broader group of computer users has so many gullible people who are willing to believe they can gain an inch, lose a pound, and refinance for a much lower rate.)
Evasive, shifty-eyes not recorded
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eyeBlog
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I find that a lot of people do not maintain eye contact during a conversation - particularly in a situation with many people around. First of all, there are those who will make eye contact as they say hello, but from then on their eyes are scanning the crowd for people they haven't greeted. Secondly, those who are shy or uncomfortable tend to meet eyes rarely and look down more than at the person they are speaking to. Finally, some people just don't seem to be able to hold eye contact -- it is threatening, or some such thing -- and might glance once or twice in your direction while talking. Seems like an awful lot of conversations to lose. (OTOH, great-aunt Josephine is fully willing to maintain eye contact - and physical contact - while she tells you all about her physical ailments. Ack!)
Comparing who purchases the systems has nothing to do with Diebold - that has to do with the national system for handling voting. In the U.S. (irrespective of the company producing the machines), each country handles their voting methods somewhat independently within the bounds of state and federal law. Thus several counties were on contracts with Diebold, but the state could over-ride those.
I'd also like to know where the author gets the idea that illiterate Americans don't get to vote. (Or maybe that was not what he was implying when he mentioned that illiterate Indians use thumbprints rather than signatures.)
Finally, I don't know about other areas, but my polling station is five blocks away from my house. If I wanted to use the one near my work, it wouldn't be that hard to change either. Most difficulty I've heard of comes when people forget to change their voter registration information when they move.
I don't know that Americans would be willing to have their finger stained for two weeks to ensure less chance of fraudulent votes. Of course, with only about half the eligible citizens voting, it could be worn as a badge of honor.
Haven't we already been through all this before? Why does it have to come up every time a new technology appears?
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OTOH, what would work that would allow fair use (backups) while prevent unfair use (sharing content with others who did not buy the right to it)?
Would anyone be happy if these media conglomerates stated a license timeframe up front and charge considerably less for the media? Of course not. I certainly wouldn't buy a DVD that only gave me the right to watch the movie for the next 5 years.
Would anyone want a tracking database that could confirm that you paid for the a particular song or movie and allowed you to get replacements for the cost of the materials plus a minimal handling fee? Privacy advocates would be up in arms. (And who wants anyone knowing they bought a Britney Spears or Milli Vanilli album? )
Would the RIAA or MPAA be willing to offer life-time (human life not media life) warranties? It would need full unconditional replacement of any damaged CD or DVD at any time in the life of the original purchaser. Unfortunately, this would require some sort of registration (or keeping of the original receipts). I highly doubt that they would do this willingly.
My real point is that we need to come up with a solution that works for both sides -- preventing rampant piracy and corporate greed while allowing media to be sold to consumer and allowing consumers to use their media anytime and anywhere.
Even without microphones and acoustical equipment it is easy to recognize when the space bar is used. I should know - my roommate complains when I type at night because he can tell when every single word I type ends because of the sound of the space bar.
I have watched my children being taught with computers in the classroom, computers in a separated "lab", and computers at home. Much of what the author mentions is very real to me.
The amount of time spent changing font types, font sizes, paragraph alignment, etc. is added time they could have avoided. Typing speed is a severe limiter for a long report -- and "teacher says it has to be typed/printed". Spell-check and grammar checks give an impression that they don't need to check their own work. I end up reviewing and marking the errors to make them correct them.
The educational software that they found so fun when they were younger fit into two categories - something they already knew and was easy OR something they hadn't learned yet and had to ask for help with. There was no actual instruction on HOW to do things - just little games using the skills.
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Perhaps the scariest offshoot of this is how computers and software are implemented everywhere else (businesses and government). I've seen people spend hours working on a document that should have taken them 20 minutes. I've seen people who don't bother knowing how to speak or spell because the word-processor will do it for them. I work with people who claim the computer makes them more productive -- when I also know they spend more than 50% of their day online surfing sites completely unrelated to their job and get less done in the 50% they actually do work.
I'm not a Luddite by any means - I use my computers for maximizing my productivity. I even try to teach my children how to avoid the pitfalls by making them hand-write their rough drafts, research from books, and have a preset format that is used for all documents.
Last month I remembered reading an article on a hybrid subject to a "nightmare" road test in New York. It can be found here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/04 09_040409_hybridcars.html
This one wasn't yet given an EPA rating, but was expected to earn a rating of about 35-40MPG for city driving. The road test came down to 38MPG (city driving). It will be interesting to see what the actual EPA rating comes to.
In my 1995 car, I still get MPG equivalent to the original EPA rating (28MPG in the city). I'm not sure I would consider 10 more miles to each gallon worth the increased cost of a hybrid. This should mostly be a lesson to not believe the advertised numbers (3.4 GhZ anyone?) without real-word testing.
The big argument that OptIn is using (and apparently with success) is that they are never being given the email addresses of those people who wish to opt out. SpamCop has existed since long before laws like CAN-SPAM, and its methods were those needed at the time. Now we need to make sure the laws that are being put in place have enough teeth to make a difference.
SpamCop has the data on the largest and worst of the spammers. It has data on the thousands of email addresses that have reported these spammers. Voluntarily sharing this with federal investigators would be a great beginning. Based on CAN-SPAM, there will need to be evidence that spammers are not removing email addresses. SpamCop can be the intermediary who stores a copy of every request to be removed and ever subsequent email with tracking back to the originator. By working with the feds, SpamCop could wipe out several of the hard-core spammers.
Slashdot Mirror
Adding a year or two to the human lifespan wouldn't do much to either population or social balance. Adding a full century or two would have a massive impact, and could hasten social revolutions. However, any advance in this area (increasing lifespan, defying aging) requires better developments in the areas of age-related dementia, Alzheimer's, and senility. Otherwise there is really little purpose in keeping someone alive an extra decade or two, if they are incapable of independent life.
On a similar note, overpopulation would not be a problem if there were major advances in birth control and fertility. By this I mean a method for preventing pregnancy unless both parties consciously decide they would like a child - something with a 99.999% success rate that doesn't have a negative impact on later fertility.
Tied together with the above - mental capacity not being lost - humanity could have the time to seek more and better long-term solutions.
The biggest problem for gaming (particularly with games like this or EverQuest aka EverCrack) is the obsession level. It is very easy to "forget" about important occasions or promises in the effort to finish a particular quest. It is also easy to be so social during this period that your time with your SO is spent wanting some solo, quiet time -- the exact opposite of what is needed.
/. readers).
The real question is which do you value more - your SO or your game. If you value your relationship, you can plan "poker nights" -- several hours scheduled in advance for your gaming -- then balance these with "couple nights" -- an equivalent number of hours of activities you enjoy sharing as a couple (sleeping together does not count). If you don't value your relationship, then the problem existed prior to the game and the gaming is simply making it stand out. In this case, the SO may have to take a walk -- leaving you the position of being a gamer who can't maintain a relationship (the supposed M.O. of most
Apparently the car manufacturer's fear is that some of their custom parts will be reverse-engineered. I'm not quite sure how knowing whether the "check engine" light means a fuel-injection problem vs. a gas tank cap problem will allow anyone to reverse-engineer anything.
The real purpose of the bill is to ensure that a car owner can maintain their own car or take it to their favorite mechanic rather than the dealer (which often charges over 2x what the independent mechanic charges).
The woman in the article was definitely gullible. By the second visit, she should have demanded a second opinion - either a supervisor or a different dealership. Twelve times to the same dealer tells me she was flat-out stupid and so were the mechanics. By the third or fourth time, the mechanics should have been checking the cap to see if it was loose. If so, having her tighten it so she could see the difference between loose and tight, and they could see if she was doing it wrong or wasn't turning it enough. If it wasn't loose, something else was clearly wrong. In addition, they should have checked to be sure the threads weren't stripped or damaged, which could cause the cap to loosen on its own. The fact that they didn't look further than the easy answer twelve times in a row speaks very poorly for the service standard at that dealership. (I can say this from the perspective of technical support - just because I don't work for MS doesn't mean I won't teach a customer how to navigate in Explorer when that will result in his ability to use our software better. To blow him off by saying he needs to learn to use Windows and it isn't my problem doesn't solve anything. Making him pay each time to be told this would just result in a really upset customer who is unlikely to purchase future software/support from us.)
The entire purpose of independent mechanics or the car owner knowing those codes is to diagnose and handle a problem preventing the car owner from using their car for the purpose it was purchased for -- driving to and from locations. This doesn't compare very well with modding an Xbox (or reverse-engineering it) because neither of those is intended to maintain its usefulness for its original purpose. A better comparison would be trying to get your Xbox, PS2, or Gamecube serviced if it stops working correctly. How difficult (impossible) is it to get your Xbox serviced at the local electronics repair shop if the laser stops functioning or a button jams?
Seems to me this business model has been attempted before. It works well when the pace of improvement in hardware and software is slow enough to allow the subscription time to be worth it. For example, if Cadence' latest version won't run on two-year-old hardware, and the subscription period is five years, guess what's going to happen to the subsciption? It also works well when the cost of the hardware is covered by internal savings - rather than added to the subscription or service fees (think about those little FedEx machines).
It might work well for Sun, whose vision of this is rather narrow. With respect to their servers, based on their current model, we have an appliance (as others have termed it) server - hardware very specifically designed for the task of running their server software. What I can't tell from the news blurb is whether the hardware remains the property of Sun, they have the responsibility of maintaining and upgrading it, or the property of the consumer -- maintenance and upgrade is a service cost.
Which scenario seems more likely:
1) Sun or Microsoft replaces hard drives when customers need more file storage space. Sun or Microsoft ships out new memory chips and new CPUs and new cases as necessary to keep up with technology. Sun or Microsoft handles all installation, updating and upgrading of hardware and drivers to keep the "free" hardware current.
2) Sun or Microsoft ships the minimal necessary components to run the package it sells for a price that includes the cost plus profit. Any need for better hardware is routed through to a service department that sells the drivers and installation for a price that includes the "free" hardware.
Sun and Microsoft may find a market niche of consumers and business willing to be tied into a long-term contract in exchange for "free" hardware, but the hardware market in general won't disappear because there are just too many consumers who aren't willing to be assimilated.
Hotmail users are seldom the source of spam. Rather, @hotmail.com is one of the more common spoofed addresses. Microsoft would have done something sooner if that much volume was pouring through their "free" accounts.
These images mostly come from quite some time back. It is funny to see the change in what a 1930s author predicted compared to a 1960s author compared to a 1990s author. More recent science fiction has tended toward a grittier look for cities and earth. No more of the sanitized, everybody happy and everything in its place images of the 1930s and 1940s (back when people though World War I was "the war to end all wars". This was a time when "clean cars" were pictured with white tires (or at least white walls).
I think my favorite image of a futuristic city was in Fifth Element. Fifty years from now I'll have to travel to NY and see if that vision had any merit.
I learned (and still remember) more about history from all the historical fiction books I've read than I ever will from history classes. If they can keep the level of gamer involvement high, this makes great sense.
Imagine playing as Alexander the Great, Julius Cesar, Attilla the Hun, or any other historical figure trying to build an empire. That could be interesting.
I can't find it on the map. :P
There was a recent case with Barbara Streisand related to whether photographs that included private property belonged in the public domain. Her beachfront home was part of a whole series of coastline photos. Basically, she lost. IANAL, but I don't think the principle would be any different.
It is necessary to get permission to publish a picture of a person, but it is not necessary to get the permission of every person in the background of a picture. Often pictures of apartments or businesses include people who happened to walk by at that moment. The line may have to do with the focus of the picture, but IANAL, so I would have to research that further.
Just some guesses:
A "slow" quake could release stress along a certain section of the plates, but build up pressure along another section further away - thus leading to a large quake along the second section.
A "slow" quake could ramp up to a large quake if the slippage reaches a point where the plates have less friction against each other.
The faults don't only shift when a major earthquake occurs. A "slow" quake may shift the two plates closer to a point that can only shift through a large quake.
Obviously, IANAS or IANAG - and as neither scientist nor geologist - these are mere guesses based on what I do know of earthquakes.
I never liked trying to look through the ads and follow the sales. Driving to several stores to get everything for the lowest price was a waste of time and gas (and made it easy to forget items). Being able to plan out meals and have the needed groceries delivered is wonderful. Gives me more time for my computers, games consoles, reading, or going out to a movie.
They are definitely more interested in false positives, because those can be weeded out. False negatives are those omitted who should have been listed - which in this case could be the rest of us in the U.S. (over 300 million). Those false negatives can be found through other investigative means. As long as there is a full understanding that false negatives and false positives exist, they don't get in much trouble. This list merely gave them one starting point. They looked at what got people on the list - not just the fact that they were on the list - in determining who to investigate further. They also didn't limit their investigations to that group of 120,000. The problem with a database is that many people want absolute answers - i.e. if you are on this list then you are a terrorist and if you aren't on the list you are not a terrorist. Then you simply get a witch hunt.
Good grief. No law suddenly causes all violators to stop their behavior. Laws against monopolies didn't make businesses suddenly see the error of their ways and break up. Laws against racism and segregation haven't ended prejudice. The laws are merely tools allowing some authoritative body to take action against the worst offenders (and sometimes the lesser offenders).
Take laws against racism and segregation. Until the military came along and forced some schools to accept non-white students, they would have gone right on ignoring the law. It took 1) someone reporting the violation, 2) someone investigating the violation, 3) someone enforcing the punishment for the violation, and 4) someone making it know through action that violations would not be acceptable.
The FBI is investigating and getting ready to go after spammers. They have not yet enforced the punishments, but they have the authority to confiscate possessions bought with the proceeds or used in spamming (much as the IRS does for tax evaders), so losing homes and cars and computers should begin to make it less profitable to spam. Until enough spammers lose a lot, the word won't spread that spamming doesn't pay. That doesn't make the law useless - it just means it hasn't had time to make much impact yet. The degree of the impact will depend on the continued enforcement (though I believe the ratio of FBI agents to spammers is a lot better than speeders to cops).
Of course, this won't stop all spammers. There will be the diehard group (likely with mafia-style connections) who go so deep underground that they are hard to find.
BTW, spammers by their very business, want to have someone able to find them -- their "customers". (Hey, perhaps we should go after the users instead of the dealers -- slap a $250 fine on any person who buys from spam. Soon, with no one responding to their offers, spammers would go out of business. Yeah, I know this wouldn't really work.)
Google's principles aren't expected to change the behavior of the worst companies out there. They are designed to set the bar of what the best companies should behave like. If every company making legitimate software clearly stated what their software did and made it clear and easy to install or uninstall, the gulf between "good" software and "bad" software would be very large.
... if every email you send has detailed contact information (I include my full name, company name, phone number, and department as well as the name of our software in every email), it is very easy to distinguish from the majority of spam. We know spammers and spyware companies won't suddenly get ethical, but we can make the unethical nature more obvious by raising our standards for ourselves higher.
You could divide people and companies into one of four groups -- very ethical, moderately ethical, moderately unethical, and very unethical. Those who are very ethical do not need laws to tell them what is right or wrong. Those who are moderately ethical can usually make the right decision, but are more comfortable with laws that clearly delineate right and wrong. Those who are moderately unethical will routinely take the easy way or the most profitable way with little consideration of whether it is right or wrong, though strong laws with enforced punishments can dissuade them. Those who are very unethical are seldom concerned with right or wrong and often don't even connect their behavior with what is illegal.
What laws or principles do is widen the gap between what the ethical do and what the unethical do. The more difference between a piece of spyware and a piece of legitimate software, the easier it is to identify and avoid spyware. This is much like spam
According to the web-site information on how e-rater works: "It cannot read or respond to an essay as a teacher would." and "Some of these writers have submitted essays that have tricked e-rater into giving a score even though the essay does not make any sense. The individual words in these "challenge essays" are grammatically correct, but they are strung together in such a way that they create nonsense sentences."
The real point behind the e-rater seems to be giving a general idea of where the author may need improvement. It does not appear to be a replacement for a teacher reading the essay. In fact, it would seem to be more useful for allowing a student to have their rough draft reviewed and determine whether it needs major rewriting or just fine-tuning.
(Did anyone else imagine "Trained Readers" being given rewards when they scored a test the same as the e-rater?)
Actually, if you look back about a month ago there was quite a bit of news about dairy prices going up due to low production. This applies to all dairy products - milk, butter, ice cream, latte', cheese, and so on. This came before, and is not directly related to the rise in oil prices.
c pi.asp). How much are housing prices rising? How much are medical costs increasing? How much are technology costs rising? How much more do automobiles costs? All of these higher costs items may be holding the overall inflation rate lower than what we, as consumers, actually see from our wallet.
Why isn't this showing up in the inflations numbers? Because those include all sorts of things, "from the price of diapers and milk to funeral expenses" (http://www.investopedia.com/university/releases/
In fact, Apopo uses rats, in part, because they are lightweight and very unlikely to set off landmines. (Otherwise native wildlife would routinely set off mines.) It would not be a very effective solution if they spent 1/3 of the animal's life training it and then sent it out to be killed the first time it found a mine. The rats that they train have a natural life expectancy of around 8 years - and the handlers want them to live as long as possible to maximize the time and effort. There is even an alternative method they are investigating which involves filters - the rats don't even go near the suspected areas. I can't see much that PETA could complain about here.
All Spamhaus would have to do was include a couple of false spammer names on its officials lists, use those false identities to complain on more generic forums about the ridiculousness of laws like CAN-SPAM, and wait for the invites to show up. Almost every group, no matter how exclusive, has members who are more gullible and willing to make the invite. (C'mon - the only reason spamming is profitable is because the broader group of computer users has so many gullible people who are willing to believe they can gain an inch, lose a pound, and refinance for a much lower rate.)
I find that a lot of people do not maintain eye contact during a conversation - particularly in a situation with many people around. First of all, there are those who will make eye contact as they say hello, but from then on their eyes are scanning the crowd for people they haven't greeted. Secondly, those who are shy or uncomfortable tend to meet eyes rarely and look down more than at the person they are speaking to. Finally, some people just don't seem to be able to hold eye contact -- it is threatening, or some such thing -- and might glance once or twice in your direction while talking. Seems like an awful lot of conversations to lose. (OTOH, great-aunt Josephine is fully willing to maintain eye contact - and physical contact - while she tells you all about her physical ailments. Ack!)
Comparing who purchases the systems has nothing to do with Diebold - that has to do with the national system for handling voting. In the U.S. (irrespective of the company producing the machines), each country handles their voting methods somewhat independently within the bounds of state and federal law. Thus several counties were on contracts with Diebold, but the state could over-ride those.
I'd also like to know where the author gets the idea that illiterate Americans don't get to vote. (Or maybe that was not what he was implying when he mentioned that illiterate Indians use thumbprints rather than signatures.)
Finally, I don't know about other areas, but my polling station is five blocks away from my house. If I wanted to use the one near my work, it wouldn't be that hard to change either. Most difficulty I've heard of comes when people forget to change their voter registration information when they move.
I don't know that Americans would be willing to have their finger stained for two weeks to ensure less chance of fraudulent votes. Of course, with only about half the eligible citizens voting, it could be worn as a badge of honor.
Haven't we already been through all this before? Why does it have to come up every time a new technology appears?
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OTOH, what would work that would allow fair use (backups) while prevent unfair use (sharing content with others who did not buy the right to it)?
Would anyone be happy if these media conglomerates stated a license timeframe up front and charge considerably less for the media? Of course not. I certainly wouldn't buy a DVD that only gave me the right to watch the movie for the next 5 years.
Would anyone want a tracking database that could confirm that you paid for the a particular song or movie and allowed you to get replacements for the cost of the materials plus a minimal handling fee? Privacy advocates would be up in arms. (And who wants anyone knowing they bought a Britney Spears or Milli Vanilli album? )
Would the RIAA or MPAA be willing to offer life-time (human life not media life) warranties? It would need full unconditional replacement of any damaged CD or DVD at any time in the life of the original purchaser. Unfortunately, this would require some sort of registration (or keeping of the original receipts). I highly doubt that they would do this willingly.
My real point is that we need to come up with a solution that works for both sides -- preventing rampant piracy and corporate greed while allowing media to be sold to consumer and allowing consumers to use their media anytime and anywhere.
Even without microphones and acoustical equipment it is easy to recognize when the space bar is used. I should know - my roommate complains when I type at night because he can tell when every single word I type ends because of the sound of the space bar.
I have watched my children being taught with computers in the classroom, computers in a separated "lab", and computers at home. Much of what the author mentions is very real to me.
The amount of time spent changing font types, font sizes, paragraph alignment, etc. is added time they could have avoided. Typing speed is a severe limiter for a long report -- and "teacher says it has to be typed/printed". Spell-check and grammar checks give an impression that they don't need to check their own work. I end up reviewing and marking the errors to make them correct them.
The educational software that they found so fun when they were younger fit into two categories - something they already knew and was easy OR something they hadn't learned yet and had to ask for help with. There was no actual instruction on HOW to do things - just little games using the skills.
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Perhaps the scariest offshoot of this is how computers and software are implemented everywhere else (businesses and government). I've seen people spend hours working on a document that should have taken them 20 minutes. I've seen people who don't bother knowing how to speak or spell because the word-processor will do it for them. I work with people who claim the computer makes them more productive -- when I also know they spend more than 50% of their day online surfing sites completely unrelated to their job and get less done in the 50% they actually do work.
I'm not a Luddite by any means - I use my computers for maximizing my productivity. I even try to teach my children how to avoid the pitfalls by making them hand-write their rough drafts, research from books, and have a preset format that is used for all documents.
Last month I remembered reading an article on a hybrid subject to a "nightmare" road test in New York. It can be found here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/04 09_040409_hybridcars.html
This one wasn't yet given an EPA rating, but was expected to earn a rating of about 35-40MPG for city driving. The road test came down to 38MPG (city driving). It will be interesting to see what the actual EPA rating comes to.
In my 1995 car, I still get MPG equivalent to the original EPA rating (28MPG in the city). I'm not sure I would consider 10 more miles to each gallon worth the increased cost of a hybrid. This should mostly be a lesson to not believe the advertised numbers (3.4 GhZ anyone?) without real-word testing.
The big argument that OptIn is using (and apparently with success) is that they are never being given the email addresses of those people who wish to opt out. SpamCop has existed since long before laws like CAN-SPAM, and its methods were those needed at the time. Now we need to make sure the laws that are being put in place have enough teeth to make a difference.
SpamCop has the data on the largest and worst of the spammers. It has data on the thousands of email addresses that have reported these spammers. Voluntarily sharing this with federal investigators would be a great beginning. Based on CAN-SPAM, there will need to be evidence that spammers are not removing email addresses. SpamCop can be the intermediary who stores a copy of every request to be removed and ever subsequent email with tracking back to the originator. By working with the feds, SpamCop could wipe out several of the hard-core spammers.