See, as a smoker, you're a pain in the butt. You smell funny, you stink up the air, and you give cancer to others. This sort of discrimination is ok, as you've earned it. Contrast this with, say, racial discrimination, which is bad because 1) People can't change their race (you can refrain from smoking) and 2) Race has zero practical effect on anything.
So, how about instead of trying to push your smoke on the rest of us you just stop smoking?
In related news, a study has shown that the high price of luxary cars puts them out of reach of large populations in developing countries.
Hell, internet cafe rates put internet access (through a cafe anyway) outside the reach of large populations of AMERICANS. Newsflash: Stuff isn't free, and poor people can't buy non-essential stuff.
Slashdot: The Obvious for Nerds. Stuff any idiot with a little bit of common sense already knows.
Would making the VIN longer for the past 30 years so we didn't have to update it now have been worth the increased costs of data storage, longer VIN printing, data entry, etc, over the past 30 years? Keep in mind that data storage was at a premium in 1980 - every bit counted. Not spending money on that storage in 1980 was probably worth the hassle of expanding the VINs now.
We could make VINs 1,000 digits long, and we'd still be able to use them on starships, but it'd be pretty stupid to do so.
Many, many people have my current email address. I have several other email addresses set up to point to my address. All of my email is in the account, and that account is accessable from anywhere.
Saving $20/year is not worth the hassle of moving to a different account.
the only workable environment involves a combination of Bayesian-style filters coupled with white lists for known good addresses
And that's a pile of "I read it on Slashdot a lot so it must be true!" crap.
Spammers are just putting non-spam words in their spam, or just not putting words in there at all. Now the odd non-spam words the spammers use in their spam are causing false-positives on my legit email (to the tune of 2-5%) while 10-20% of spam is getting through (since it contains words that had only appeared in the non-spam potion of my corpus to that point.)
Gradually, more and more words are showing up in both the spam and non-spam parts of the corpus, making them all useless for making a spam determination and rendering the whole system about as effective as Bob Dole's member without the little blue pill.
And whitelists are a partial solution for many reasons - the first of which being you have to know the address someone is going to send you something from before you can receive it. That's fine when you just get email from your girlfriend (oh, who are we kidding, we mean your mother), but not so great when you actually want to receive your receipts for online purchases or not make potential new clients jump through hoops.
The REAL solution is there needs to be a second class of email - email that you have to pay money to send. The recipient could even refund your "postage" if they like your message. Then we can all set our filters to let paid-for email through and throw the rest in the trash - just like we do with real vs. bulk mail in the post office box.
I've been sitting at 99% usage of my 100 MB for a fewmonths now (and thus having to delete stuff), and itching for the chance to switch to G-Mail.
Now I won't. $40/year for an email addy is chump change.
The only thing that might make me switch is if I hear that searching through your mail is considerably faster on GMail - my one major pet peeve with Yahoo mail (although it's been getting better) is the speed (orlack thereof) when searching for old messages, even just looking in the headers.
And my Plus account is still 100 MB. You'd think thye'd get us paying subscribers first. And as others said, the new font sucks. I like the rest of the new look though.
But, I ain't complaining too much - this'll save me from having to move to GMail. I've been beating my head against the 100 MB limit for quite some time now.
But TW has a relatively high barrier to entry, and requires daily interaction. Might be a nice side-show for a few people on the network, but certainly shouldn't be the main "bait" - nor should a MUD.
KISS - bulliten board, chat area. That's going to be the core of anything community (of the geographic sort) based.
That's like saying the big problem with charging for cars is that only people who buy them will buy them.
AOL has made the determination that given the choice between providing video conferencing for free and not providing it at all, they'd rather not provide it at all - especially if that allows them to also charge other people for it.
Yeah, losing "customers" is bad, but giving away product at less than cost is worse.
And lest you say that the delivery is merely the means to get the content, don't forget that you can get the same content via satallite, and in many cases, on DVD (both by purchase and through blockbuster/netflix).
If I'm writing a program in Perl in 10 minutes that is executed in 10 seconds....
But I can write the same program in C in 20 minutes and it takes only 1 second to execute...
I would have to execute the program 66 times to break even. If perl was 10x as slow as C, which isn't true. More realistically, perl is.1x as slow as C, in which case I'd have to execute the program 6600 times to break even.
*IF* you assume computational time is equal to human time. I cost $60/hr, or $10 per 10 minutes. A $1k computer, appreciated over a year, costs $0.02 per 10 minutes. At those rates, I'd have to execute the program 3300000 times to break even.
Even on a computer that cost $1 million, the program would have to be executed 3,300 times to break even.
Perl is better than C, for the vast majority of cases programs are written for.
They're just not up to the task of preventing the counter from being overwritten, or preventing me from incrementing the counter 1,000 extra times.
There's one more issue you're missing: With banking, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, life support, transport and airline computers, the people who manufacture, maintain and control the computers have an interest in making sure the computer functions in the way it is advertised to function.
The people responsible for the manufacture and maintenence of the voting computers may have a greater interest in having the computers function not in the way they are advertised to function, but in a way that selects the manufacturer's prefered candidate.
Security isn't just about the mechanics of a system, it's also about the environment that controls how those mechanics are operated. For example, an auction works very well for establishing the fair price of an item when multiple buyers bid on the item. The mechanics of an auction don't work so well if you change the environment to allow the seller to also secretly bid on their own item.
Security isn't just about the mechanics of a system, it's also about the environment that controls how those mechanics are operated. Computers become much less trustworthy when the people in control of the computers may not want the computers to do what they're supposed to be doing.
Last time I voted for Nader. Not because I really wanted to vote for Nader, but because I wanted to vote for the viability of a third party.
But, now I know just how evil Bush is, so voting for a third party will just have to wait until 2008. Right now it's more important to make sure we're not down to one party by the time 2008 rolls around.
Do you want a vote that counts, or do you just want to feel like you have a vote that counts?
If it's the former, than we need a paper trail. If it's the latter, I'll put up a web page where they can cast their ballot. They won't know if their vote actually counted or not, but it wouldn't have been any better with a paperless electronic voting machine, and the rest of us can continue to have real elections.
Do you think someone is sitting around listenting to people's cell conversations until they hit on one where someone is placing an order, and then write down your information?
If that actually worries you, do you ever actually use your credit card?
Credit cards are not secure. Any clerk at pretty much any place you use it has access to your number, as does any IS employee at any internet company you've ever placed an order with.
The time and money you spent calling T-Mobile to ask about their network was greater than the time/money lost if your call had been intercepted times the chance your call was intercepted. Now, stop driving up my cell phone bill by making T-Mobile pay people to field your stupid questions.
Slashdot Mirror
See, as a smoker, you're a pain in the butt. You smell funny, you stink up the air, and you give cancer to others. This sort of discrimination is ok, as you've earned it. Contrast this with, say, racial discrimination, which is bad because 1) People can't change their race (you can refrain from smoking) and 2) Race has zero practical effect on anything.
So, how about instead of trying to push your smoke on the rest of us you just stop smoking?
In related news, a study has shown that the high price of luxary cars puts them out of reach of large populations in developing countries.
Hell, internet cafe rates put internet access (through a cafe anyway) outside the reach of large populations of AMERICANS. Newsflash: Stuff isn't free, and poor people can't buy non-essential stuff.
Slashdot: The Obvious for Nerds. Stuff any idiot with a little bit of common sense already knows.
How long should the VIN have been?
Would making the VIN longer for the past 30 years so we didn't have to update it now have been worth the increased costs of data storage, longer VIN printing, data entry, etc, over the past 30 years? Keep in mind that data storage was at a premium in 1980 - every bit counted. Not spending money on that storage in 1980 was probably worth the hassle of expanding the VINs now.
We could make VINs 1,000 digits long, and we'd still be able to use them on starships, but it'd be pretty stupid to do so.
Those things have, like, hundreds of really sharp pins! They really hurt, especially if you mash yourself in the forehead with it.
That's what you get for talking to girls.
(three ascending tones) Message 5972 - The country you are trying to reach has been disconnected.
You'd use a device pretending to be a blackberry with access to the information.
I trust 99.9% of cops. But not ALL of them. Here, we're putting a VERY powerful tool into the hands of any state police officer.
The question is, do they need instant, portable, unrestricted access to such a tool? And the answer is, no, they do not.
This is the equivalent of giving everyone who needs to use your computer access to the root account.
Many, many people have my current email address. I have several other email addresses set up to point to my address. All of my email is in the account, and that account is accessable from anywhere.
Saving $20/year is not worth the hassle of moving to a different account.
the only workable environment involves a combination of Bayesian-style filters coupled with white lists for known good addresses
And that's a pile of "I read it on Slashdot a lot so it must be true!" crap.
Spammers are just putting non-spam words in their spam, or just not putting words in there at all. Now the odd non-spam words the spammers use in their spam are causing false-positives on my legit email (to the tune of 2-5%) while 10-20% of spam is getting through (since it contains words that had only appeared in the non-spam potion of my corpus to that point.)
Gradually, more and more words are showing up in both the spam and non-spam parts of the corpus, making them all useless for making a spam determination and rendering the whole system about as effective as Bob Dole's member without the little blue pill.
And whitelists are a partial solution for many reasons - the first of which being you have to know the address someone is going to send you something from before you can receive it. That's fine when you just get email from your girlfriend (oh, who are we kidding, we mean your mother), but not so great when you actually want to receive your receipts for online purchases or not make potential new clients jump through hoops.
The REAL solution is there needs to be a second class of email - email that you have to pay money to send. The recipient could even refund your "postage" if they like your message. Then we can all set our filters to let paid-for email through and throw the rest in the trash - just like we do with real vs. bulk mail in the post office box.
I've been sitting at 99% usage of my 100 MB for a fewmonths now (and thus having to delete stuff), and itching for the chance to switch to G-Mail.
Now I won't. $40/year for an email addy is chump change.
The only thing that might make me switch is if I hear that searching through your mail is considerably faster on GMail - my one major pet peeve with Yahoo mail (although it's been getting better) is the speed (orlack thereof) when searching for old messages, even just looking in the headers.
And my Plus account is still 100 MB. You'd think thye'd get us paying subscribers first. And as others said, the new font sucks. I like the rest of the new look though.
But, I ain't complaining too much - this'll save me from having to move to GMail. I've been beating my head against the 100 MB limit for quite some time now.
If you wanted a buncha nerds using your network.
But TW has a relatively high barrier to entry, and requires daily interaction. Might be a nice side-show for a few people on the network, but certainly shouldn't be the main "bait" - nor should a MUD.
KISS - bulliten board, chat area. That's going to be the core of anything community (of the geographic sort) based.
That's like saying the big problem with charging for cars is that only people who buy them will buy them.
AOL has made the determination that given the choice between providing video conferencing for free and not providing it at all, they'd rather not provide it at all - especially if that allows them to also charge other people for it.
Yeah, losing "customers" is bad, but giving away product at less than cost is worse.
content delivery.
And lest you say that the delivery is merely the means to get the content, don't forget that you can get the same content via satallite, and in many cases, on DVD (both by purchase and through blockbuster/netflix).
If I'm writing a program in Perl in 10 minutes that is executed in 10 seconds....
.1x as slow as C, in which case I'd have to execute the program 6600 times to break even.
But I can write the same program in C in 20 minutes and it takes only 1 second to execute...
I would have to execute the program 66 times to break even. If perl was 10x as slow as C, which isn't true. More realistically, perl is
*IF* you assume computational time is equal to human time. I cost $60/hr, or $10 per 10 minutes. A $1k computer, appreciated over a year, costs $0.02 per 10 minutes. At those rates, I'd have to execute the program 3300000 times to break even.
Even on a computer that cost $1 million, the program would have to be executed 3,300 times to break even.
Perl is better than C, for the vast majority of cases programs are written for.
They're just not up to the task of preventing the counter from being overwritten, or preventing me from incrementing the counter 1,000 extra times.
There's one more issue you're missing: With banking, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, life support, transport and airline computers, the people who manufacture, maintain and control the computers have an interest in making sure the computer functions in the way it is advertised to function.
The people responsible for the manufacture and maintenence of the voting computers may have a greater interest in having the computers function not in the way they are advertised to function, but in a way that selects the manufacturer's prefered candidate.
Security isn't just about the mechanics of a system, it's also about the environment that controls how those mechanics are operated. For example, an auction works very well for establishing the fair price of an item when multiple buyers bid on the item. The mechanics of an auction don't work so well if you change the environment to allow the seller to also secretly bid on their own item.
Security isn't just about the mechanics of a system, it's also about the environment that controls how those mechanics are operated. Computers become much less trustworthy when the people in control of the computers may not want the computers to do what they're supposed to be doing.
Last time I voted for Nader. Not because I really wanted to vote for Nader, but because I wanted to vote for the viability of a third party.
But, now I know just how evil Bush is, so voting for a third party will just have to wait until 2008. Right now it's more important to make sure we're not down to one party by the time 2008 rolls around.
Who says we can't have a simple solution?
RTFA: Women do.
Do you want a vote that counts, or do you just want to feel like you have a vote that counts?
If it's the former, than we need a paper trail. If it's the latter, I'll put up a web page where they can cast their ballot. They won't know if their vote actually counted or not, but it wouldn't have been any better with a paperless electronic voting machine, and the rest of us can continue to have real elections.
Lots of companies buy advertising to convince people to buy stuff they don't need. Why can't record companies do it?
We pay a buncha people in India and China a little bit of money to do all our work, and we all sit around and watch bad TV.
If men are selling their own shirts for $5.
How much would it take to get a woman to sell her shirt?
The set of point totals a team can not get in football is { 1 }.
Who cares if it's encrypted?
Do you think someone is sitting around listenting to people's cell conversations until they hit on one where someone is placing an order, and then write down your information?
If that actually worries you, do you ever actually use your credit card?
Credit cards are not secure. Any clerk at pretty much any place you use it has access to your number, as does any IS employee at any internet company you've ever placed an order with.
The time and money you spent calling T-Mobile to ask about their network was greater than the time/money lost if your call had been intercepted times the chance your call was intercepted. Now, stop driving up my cell phone bill by making T-Mobile pay people to field your stupid questions.