No, it does work. But it might not work forever I suppose. Your first point is the one I worry about most but I'm pretty sure I don't get spam via that route yet.
I'm also lucky in another way. My surname is almost unique. 95% of searches on my surname find me, 5% find my brother. I'm easy to google. I've always thought that people's names should be unique:-)
what do you do if you're an open source author... I am and don't get spam this way. If I did I'd merely change the email address associated with the project. In the worst case scenario that someone needs to track me down from an ancient piece of code with an old email address they can use the method below...
or if an ex from college wants to hook up again and googles you, and finds your website, but STILL can't contact you... I have an email address on my website. It's in a form that can't easily be harvested so people would have to enter it manually into a spam mailing list. It's rare that spam comes in this way but if it does I change the address on there. Hell, I challenged someone on a/.-like web site to email me recently even though I posted there anonymously. They succeeded without too much hassle.
or you want to sign up for match.com so that random women can email you. Currently I'd deal with this by registering with the email address match@mydomain.com. As soon as spam starts on that email address I'd change to match01@mydomain.com and so on.
Note that a little work is required on my part. In the worst case scenario I need to do one bit of work for each bit of spam I receive. I receive so little spam that this isn't really a burden.
If 'AI' eventually gets good enough to harvest email addresses written in human- but not machine-readable from from web pages then my method is doomed. I can also think of attacks that don't need AIs but they're a bit preposterous - like setting up a porn web site and accepting a strange form of payment for pictures: you tell people they can look at the porn if they type in the email address shown in the picture that comes up before the porn and flash up a picture of a web site from which you want to harvest. I didn't explain that too well - maybe you se what I mean.
...to detect spam can be effective for long. Ultimately the mere fact that it's a system means that intelligent spammers can use the characteristics of the system to engineer a description of mail that isn't identified as spam and hence craft their own spam to fail to fit that description. There's probably some variant of Gödel's Theorem that makes this formal.
There is already a cure for spam - give everyone unlimited email addresses, give out different addresses to different recipients, and delete any email that receives spam (along with possibly sending an email of complaint to whoever you originally have that particular address to). The whole thing could easily be built into mail clients and supported by mail providers. It works fine for me. It costs me $35 to buy my own domain and a one off payment of about $30 to zoneedit to set up the mail forwarding. It works so well, and has worked for the least 3 or 4 years, that I almost suspect that there is some kind of conspiracy to overlook this method in order to promote other dubious methods.
Er...Kant is hard to understand when I'm concentrating my hardest. I can't imagine making sense of it when sweating like a pig and gasping for breath. Are you sure you actually absorbed what you were hearing?
If you want audio books I suggest episodes of This American Life instead. If you pay you can get versions from Audible.
How good am I? Percentile data?
on
Running for Geeks
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd like to know how good I am at running. The only way I know to assess that is to compare with other people. Are there published percentile running speeds so that I can tell what percentage of the population I run faster than for any given distance?
What are you trying to say here? Running with electronica causes you to have ADD? But we're not really talking about kids running here are we? Are you suggesting that by runnning we make our kids suffer from ADD? That's a bizarre claim. Or are you just trying to mention ADD in the same paragraph as running because you're some kind of Puritan who likes to tell other people what to do and thinks we shouldn't mix technology with running and you hope to put us off it through guilt by association?
Getting good at sport has involved cutting edge technology for a long time now.
Hey! Coincidence! My new Forerunner 201...
on
Running for Geeks
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I tested out my new Garmin Forerunner 201 this morning.
My feeling is that the technology isn't 100% there yet. The device logs your position every few seconds and these can be viewed as a map or uploaded to the PC. But at three positions the GPS tracking had clearly failed. For them to be correct I would have had to have dropped 2,500 feet and travelled at 80mph. I don't mind the hardware failing to track accurately because it's easy to fix in software. But with all the experience of this stuff Garmin have they didn't think to filter the data and they provide no way to manually delete the bad data points. Luckily you can export the data to XML and I can write my own code to clear the data up. But it's kinda disappointing because without writing my own code the total distance it thinks I've run is likely to be way off. And their logbook software looks like it was written by a junior developer over 3 or 4 lazy afternoons. Not being able to delete erroneous points is just so dumb. And yet clearly, in order to get a GPS device to work at all, they must have at least some developers who know what they are doing.
So overall I have mixed feelings about the device.
BTW Anyone know what CPU these devices have? I was trying to disassemble the firmware (which you can download in apparently unencrypted, uncompressed form) but I can't tell which disassembler to use. Doesn't look like an ARM. What else might be used on a device like this? Atmel AVR? Something else?
Because then those countries might reverse engineer the code and figure out what a cool idea democracy is. And then the US would no longer have conventient scapegoats to wage war against.
There is some good theory behind it. It's all about the j function which is one of the most amazing functions in existence. But I'll stop now as once I start on how cool it is I won't stop...
Violence is good. Showing violence on TV trains our citizens to be good cannon fodder and lay down their lives to save the helpless people of tyrannies like Iraq.
In an animated Star Trek episode. It's years since I saw that epsiode but I vaguely remember it being quite good and I think Niven was involved with writing the script.
Now things may have changes since when I was a lad. But when I worked at IBM many years ago we used 3278 terminals. They practically are web browsers, invented decades before Mosaic. The form based approach 3278s use is much more powerful than the character-at-a-time nonsense like vt100 and its successors. Once great advantage is that things like text editors were still quite usable when the mainframe was being hammered.
what has been glossed over in Physics as a minor detail, the decoherence of the superposition of states, is actually quite fundamental to Quantum computing
This has never been a minor detail in quantum computing. People who think quantum computers won't go anywhere (like me) have been arguing that decoherence will kill any quantum computer with more than a handfull of bits. On the other hand, most (maybe even nearly all) papers I've seen on quantum computing recently have been about using error-correcting codes to fight decoherence.
Slashdot Mirror
I switched to K5 ages ago because I thought it was less geeky than /.
I'm also lucky in another way. My surname is almost unique. 95% of searches on my surname find me, 5% find my brother. I'm easy to google. I've always thought that people's names should be unique :-)
And some people want to return to the horse and cart. That's their problem!
Note that a little work is required on my part. In the worst case scenario I need to do one bit of work for each bit of spam I receive. I receive so little spam that this isn't really a burden.
If 'AI' eventually gets good enough to harvest email addresses written in human- but not machine-readable from from web pages then my method is doomed. I can also think of attacks that don't need AIs but they're a bit preposterous - like setting up a porn web site and accepting a strange form of payment for pictures: you tell people they can look at the porn if they type in the email address shown in the picture that comes up before the porn and flash up a picture of a web site from which you want to harvest. I didn't explain that too well - maybe you se what I mean.
There is already a cure for spam - give everyone unlimited email addresses, give out different addresses to different recipients, and delete any email that receives spam (along with possibly sending an email of complaint to whoever you originally have that particular address to). The whole thing could easily be built into mail clients and supported by mail providers. It works fine for me. It costs me $35 to buy my own domain and a one off payment of about $30 to zoneedit to set up the mail forwarding. It works so well, and has worked for the least 3 or 4 years, that I almost suspect that there is some kind of conspiracy to overlook this method in order to promote other dubious methods.
- Mission of Gravity
- Humans
- Ilium
- Paladin of Souls
- Blind Lake
Or were you hoping not to pay?It's not trashy enough for Hugos and Nebulas which seem to be more slanted more towards pulp science fiction.
If we're talking guns, on the other hand, I think you mean 'caliber' or 'calibre'.
I thought these were Science Fiction awards.
That's about the most useful link anyone has posted on Slashdot in reply to something I've asked. Thanks!
But my complaint is not that the GPS is poor. It's the fact that they didn't apply a trivial filtering procedure to fix the result.
If you want audio books I suggest episodes of This American Life instead. If you pay you can get versions from Audible.
I'd like to know how good I am at running. The only way I know to assess that is to compare with other people. Are there published percentile running speeds so that I can tell what percentage of the population I run faster than for any given distance?
Getting good at sport has involved cutting edge technology for a long time now.
My feeling is that the technology isn't 100% there yet. The device logs your position every few seconds and these can be viewed as a map or uploaded to the PC. But at three positions the GPS tracking had clearly failed. For them to be correct I would have had to have dropped 2,500 feet and travelled at 80mph. I don't mind the hardware failing to track accurately because it's easy to fix in software. But with all the experience of this stuff Garmin have they didn't think to filter the data and they provide no way to manually delete the bad data points. Luckily you can export the data to XML and I can write my own code to clear the data up. But it's kinda disappointing because without writing my own code the total distance it thinks I've run is likely to be way off. And their logbook software looks like it was written by a junior developer over 3 or 4 lazy afternoons. Not being able to delete erroneous points is just so dumb. And yet clearly, in order to get a GPS device to work at all, they must have at least some developers who know what they are doing.
So overall I have mixed feelings about the device.
BTW Anyone know what CPU these devices have? I was trying to disassemble the firmware (which you can download in apparently unencrypted, uncompressed form) but I can't tell which disassembler to use. Doesn't look like an ARM. What else might be used on a device like this? Atmel AVR? Something else?
Because then those countries might reverse engineer the code and figure out what a cool idea democracy is. And then the US would no longer have conventient scapegoats to wage war against.
There is some good theory behind it. It's all about the j function which is one of the most amazing functions in existence. But I'll stop now as once I start on how cool it is I won't stop...
Violence is good. Showing violence on TV trains our citizens to be good cannon fodder and lay down their lives to save the helpless people of tyrannies like Iraq.
More like Episode III: The Oversaturated Matte Painting.
Actually, most people aware of Caribbean accents made the connection pretty quickly. I think you're a bit of an exception.
In an animated Star Trek episode. It's years since I saw that epsiode but I vaguely remember it being quite good and I think Niven was involved with writing the script.
Well, do you remember a few years ago? George Lucas made a movie called Episode One. Well they're thinking of using the actor who played Jar-Jar...
That sounds about right. Before then it seemed to even more people that decoherence would make quantum computing impossible.