Were you guys born yesterday? Any reporter in the Bay Area could wallpaper his office with bogus PR releases from Silicon Valley startups.
A quick look at the company website shows two things: 1) no prices are listed for any products; and 2) you can't see the product specs without signing an NDA.
So no one has any possible way of judging whether they *actually* have any solar panels for $1/watt. They can make any damn claim they want.
PR Flack: "Our company invented a car that runs on water!"
Reporter: "Great. Let's see it."
PR Flack: "No."
Reporter: "Well, how does it work?"
PR Flack: "I can't tell you."
Reporter: "Thanks for wasting my time."
Why not use fast-flux against the botnet itself? If I know that a certain website is being hosted by a rotating array of bots, then I just query the IP address of the website every 30 seconds or so and the spammer will, over time, reveal the IP address of every bot in his network. That's got to be useful somehow, especially if you could work with the ISPs to have them notify the owners of the compromised machines, or block them if necessary (although that kind of cooperation may be a vain hope).
At the risk of slashdotting the poor girl, Karen has a website and blog about the whole experience, including some choice observations about Wells Fargo and their fairly useless help on the issue. Website is at http://www.fightingbacknow.com/ and the blog is at http://blog.fightingbacknow.com/. It'll piss you off even more than the article. The DA never even talked with her before making the plea. The judge didn't care what she had to say at the sentencing. Pretty pathetic.
Let's say this idiot bill passes and the FCC promptly requires all DVRs and HDTV cards to listen to a broadcast flag. I wonder how much difference it will make?
Example: I'm an HDTV or DVR manufacturer. I'm required to add a broadcast flag to my hardware. So I do, but I do it through a jumper that, if removed, disables the flag. So I've followed the law, but I've also created a product that's much more desirable than my competitors. Or maybe my DVR has a simple keypad code combination (like Tivo's commercial skip) that disables the flag. Again, I followed the law, but everyone is going to want my DVR over the competition.
Can they actually outlaw incompetence? What would Microsoft do? Can they require that I do a good job of protecting the broadcast flag?
On that score, all of the Intelligent Design advocates on the Pennsylvania Board of Education were just voted out of office! I hope all the other school boards are watching.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/national/09dover .html (free reg required).
But what about the soccer-playing robots? I believe they are each remote controlled, but by an autonomous computer watching the game from above and controlling all 7 players at once. No human intervention.
Does this count as 7 robots or is it just 1 robot in 7 pieces?
The CPU concerns may be overrated for another reason as well: that if the system works, the amount of email to process could go WAY down. If over 1/2 the email sent now is spam, and this system is effective against spam, then a whole lot of CPU cycles may get freed up as spammers leave to get real jobs.
Bullshit. TV and advertisers will adjust. One, advertisers may start making better commercials that people want to watch. Two, networks can reduce the costs of shows by, for example, paying stars less. The cast of Friends makes $1 million each per episode because NBC is willing to pay it. If no network was willing to pay that price, then you can bet your ass that Matt LeBlanc would take what they offered rather than go back to waiting tables.
The networks are just trying to preserve the status quo at all costs. They are welcome to try, but they shouldn't have any help from Congress or the courts.
Right now spam-catchers spend a lot of time designing a system to spot spam, and the spammers spend a tiny fraction of that time defeating the new system. A challenge system, ANY challenge, reverses that equation: the challenger spends a small amount of time creating a new challenge, and the spammer has to spend a lot of time figuring out how to make an automated response. Thus the arms race shifts from the bad guys to the good guys. Don't get hung up on what the challenge is to start with, it can be made harder with little effort.
I taught computer science in a Ghanaian university in the early 80s, and had a number of smart, competent students. But the educational environment didn't give them much of a chance:
We used an IBM 370 with punch cards. The card reader was frequently broken so the students had to write out the programs and I graded them by hand. They were never run.
University students have to apply to a specific department to be admitted, not the university itself. The CS department was considered easier to get in than some others, so some students with no interest in CS applied to that department just to get in the university.
Text books were difficult and expensive to get. And mostly out of date.
Brain drain: the best graduates moved to the U.S. or U.K., leaving the rest back in Ghana.
Indifferent or incompetent professors. I was just out of school myself and, while I worked hard, I just didn't have the experience to be a good teacher. Other lecturers were more interested in their next "educational" trip to London to bother teaching students.
With that kind of education it's amazing anyone there can program at all.
By fighting a device that cleans up movies, Hollywood may go a long way towards convincing some of the more pro-business members of Congress to support consumer fair use legislation. Those guys are generally all for big business rights over the consumer, UNLESS that business is forcing decent people to watch smut.
Here's a problem with a whitelist account: you buy something at Amazon.com and Amazon helpfully sends you an email confirmation. A challenge will bounce back to Amazon who has no capability to respond to it. Sure you could add amazon.com to your whitelist, but after a while every spam you get will be from xxx@amazon.com. To make whitelists work Amazon needs to tell you at purchase time: "we will send you a confirmation email from shipping889034@amazon.com", so you can add it to your whitelist. And hopefully they use a unique sender address for each customer.
Without this everyone will still need a non-whitelist account for their purchases; an account that will soon be flooded with spam.
Actually, there's an easier way to do it: add unique random characters or words to the bottom (or top, or middle) of the message. That way the checksum signature of every individual spam email is unique. A little extra work for the spammer, but the messages will get through. I've already seen this on the bottom of some spams.
You'll get no argument from me about the Peace Corps bureaucracy; it does manage a unique combination of U.S. and host country inefficiency. That said, however, the poster clearly stated that he had no savings, certainly not $4000. Peace Corps does pay your way out and back, provide free medical coverage, and some money when you come home; which *does* coincide with poster's desires. Furthermore, I think there is a very real difference between backpacking through a country vs. living and working there.
I taught computer science in Africa in 1981 with the Peace Corps. Probably one of the first volunteers to do it. I had a great time, but every Peace Corps situation is completely different; there's a lot of luck involved.
Peace Corps does have a number of things going for it: 1) medical care and a good connection to the US Embassy, if things get messy; 2) a readjustment allowance that I believe is about $225 for every month you spend abroad (this is over and above your living stipend); 3) non-competitive eligibility for civil service jobs if you complete your service; 4) an actual reason to be in the country you're in, you're not just a tourist; 5) student loan deferrment; 6) I found that both employers and grad schools respected Peace Corps service; I'm convinced it helped me get into grad school.
Your mileage may vary, but all told I'm very glad I did it.
Slashdot Mirror
Were you guys born yesterday? Any reporter in the Bay Area could wallpaper his office with bogus PR releases from Silicon Valley startups.
A quick look at the company website shows two things: 1) no prices are listed for any products; and 2) you can't see the product specs without signing an NDA.
So no one has any possible way of judging whether they *actually* have any solar panels for $1/watt. They can make any damn claim they want.
PR Flack: "Our company invented a car that runs on water!"
Reporter: "Great. Let's see it."
PR Flack: "No."
Reporter: "Well, how does it work?"
PR Flack: "I can't tell you."
Reporter: "Thanks for wasting my time."
Why not use fast-flux against the botnet itself? If I know that a certain website is being hosted by a rotating array of bots, then I just query the IP address of the website every 30 seconds or so and the spammer will, over time, reveal the IP address of every bot in his network. That's got to be useful somehow, especially if you could work with the ISPs to have them notify the owners of the compromised machines, or block them if necessary (although that kind of cooperation may be a vain hope).
At the risk of slashdotting the poor girl, Karen has a website and blog about the whole experience, including some choice observations about Wells Fargo and their fairly useless help on the issue. Website is at http://www.fightingbacknow.com/ and the blog is at http://blog.fightingbacknow.com/. It'll piss you off even more than the article. The DA never even talked with her before making the plea. The judge didn't care what she had to say at the sentencing. Pretty pathetic.
Let's say this idiot bill passes and the FCC promptly requires all DVRs and HDTV cards to listen to a broadcast flag. I wonder how much difference it will make?
Example: I'm an HDTV or DVR manufacturer. I'm required to add a broadcast flag to my hardware. So I do, but I do it through a jumper that, if removed, disables the flag. So I've followed the law, but I've also created a product that's much more desirable than my competitors. Or maybe my DVR has a simple keypad code combination (like Tivo's commercial skip) that disables the flag. Again, I followed the law, but everyone is going to want my DVR over the competition.
Can they actually outlaw incompetence? What would Microsoft do? Can they require that I do a good job of protecting the broadcast flag?
On that score, all of the Intelligent Design advocates on the Pennsylvania Board of Education were just voted out of office! I hope all the other school boards are watching. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/national/09dover .html (free reg required).
But what about the soccer-playing robots? I believe they are each remote controlled, but by an autonomous computer watching the game from above and controlling all 7 players at once. No human intervention.
Does this count as 7 robots or is it just 1 robot in 7 pieces?
The CPU concerns may be overrated for another reason as well: that if the system works, the amount of email to process could go WAY down. If over 1/2 the email sent now is spam, and this system is effective against spam, then a whole lot of CPU cycles may get freed up as spammers leave to get real jobs.
Then again, I may just be dreaming.
Bullshit. TV and advertisers will adjust. One, advertisers may start making better commercials that people want to watch. Two, networks can reduce the costs of shows by, for example, paying stars less. The cast of Friends makes $1 million each per episode because NBC is willing to pay it. If no network was willing to pay that price, then you can bet your ass that Matt LeBlanc would take what they offered rather than go back to waiting tables.
The networks are just trying to preserve the status quo at all costs. They are welcome to try, but they shouldn't have any help from Congress or the courts.
Right now spam-catchers spend a lot of time designing a system to spot spam, and the spammers spend a tiny fraction of that time defeating the new system. A challenge system, ANY challenge, reverses that equation: the challenger spends a small amount of time creating a new challenge, and the spammer has to spend a lot of time figuring out how to make an automated response. Thus the arms race shifts from the bad guys to the good guys. Don't get hung up on what the challenge is to start with, it can be made harder with little effort.
With that kind of education it's amazing anyone there can program at all.
By fighting a device that cleans up movies, Hollywood may go a long way towards convincing some of the more pro-business members of Congress to support consumer fair use legislation. Those guys are generally all for big business rights over the consumer, UNLESS that business is forcing decent people to watch smut.
Here's a problem with a whitelist account: you buy something at Amazon.com and Amazon helpfully sends you an email confirmation. A challenge will bounce back to Amazon who has no capability to respond to it. Sure you could add amazon.com to your whitelist, but after a while every spam you get will be from xxx@amazon.com. To make whitelists work Amazon needs to tell you at purchase time: "we will send you a confirmation email from shipping889034@amazon.com", so you can add it to your whitelist. And hopefully they use a unique sender address for each customer. Without this everyone will still need a non-whitelist account for their purchases; an account that will soon be flooded with spam.
Actually, there's an easier way to do it: add unique random characters or words to the bottom (or top, or middle) of the message. That way the checksum signature of every individual spam email is unique. A little extra work for the spammer, but the messages will get through. I've already seen this on the bottom of some spams.
You'll get no argument from me about the Peace Corps bureaucracy; it does manage a unique combination of U.S. and host country inefficiency. That said, however, the poster clearly stated that he had no savings, certainly not $4000. Peace Corps does pay your way out and back, provide free medical coverage, and some money when you come home; which *does* coincide with poster's desires. Furthermore, I think there is a very real difference between backpacking through a country vs. living and working there.
I taught computer science in Africa in 1981 with the Peace Corps. Probably one of the first volunteers to do it. I had a great time, but every Peace Corps situation is completely different; there's a lot of luck involved. Peace Corps does have a number of things going for it: 1) medical care and a good connection to the US Embassy, if things get messy; 2) a readjustment allowance that I believe is about $225 for every month you spend abroad (this is over and above your living stipend); 3) non-competitive eligibility for civil service jobs if you complete your service; 4) an actual reason to be in the country you're in, you're not just a tourist; 5) student loan deferrment; 6) I found that both employers and grad schools respected Peace Corps service; I'm convinced it helped me get into grad school. Your mileage may vary, but all told I'm very glad I did it.