hrieke wrote:
The Statiz (sp? E. German Secret Police) did something like this once.
Hmm...perhaps you are thinking along the lines of Staats Polizei? State Police would be a fair translation for that phrase. In this case State referring to the national government rather than a State such as New York. The Nazi's Gestapo was such a police force. The word Gestapo being a German acronym coming from the phrase Geheime Staats Polizei or Homeland State Police. Hmm...Homeland Security Office...no I don't like where we are going at all.
More on topic though...this scent sniffer is probably feasible. It may sound silly now, but the idea is not really that screwy, if you consider what most people thought of the idea of human flight 'round about 1890 or so. We know dogs can identify individual people by scent, so it's not as if the idea is just some screwball notion. At first, the equipment might be bulky and expensive, but that is almost always true of any new technology. The idea is far from useless though as some here have mentioned. The only ray of hope I see as far as this not being realized is the measly 3.2 million dollar appropriation. I would worry far more about it if they were willing to put some real capital into the research. Of course, this is just a call for some initial proposals. They may be willing to go whole hog if some of the proposals end up looking promising.
Well, I solved the telemarketer bit a long time ago with an answering machine. Now I only pick up the phone to speak with people I want to speak to.
I also get substantially fewer telemarketing calls now. Eventually, when a company realizes it always gets an answering machine, the number is deleted from the list. Of course, there are always new telemarketing companies starting up too. But I used to get about 13 calls a day, 11 of them from telemarketers. I am now down to only 5 or 6, 3 or 4 of which are telemarketers. And believe me, you can always tell when it's a telemarketer, even if they do use the hush device that blocks out the surronding hubbub in the office.
jjo wrote:
It's hardly original with Bill. For example, in Robert Heinlein's 1966 book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", he outlines a similar scheme.
Hmm...coulda sworn it was in a later book, "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"(1985). The scene I remember was with Colonel Campbell at the door of his lady love, Gwendolyn Novack aka Hazel Stone. He debates briefly with himself whether his message is worth $100.00 to him.
I don't remember any similar scene in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". However, the story in "The Cat..." includes many of the characters from "The Moon..."
Moloch666wrote:
I think the point is a complete computer newbie who has no desire to learn computers the CLI is too much and will always be too much.
Well, yeah I can go along with that. However, I thought we were talking about Linux newbies rather than complete computer newbies. What puzzles me though is the thought of complete computer newbies who don't want to learn computers. Something there is resistant to analysis...
Madfgurtbn wrote:
Newbies do not want to use CLI.
Newbies should not want to use the CLI
Newbies should not be expected by BOFH's to understand command line.
Stuff and nonsense!! The command line and it's flexibility is what drew me to Linux in the first place. It seems to me the Linux command line is far more flexible than the DOS CLI. Plus I got sick of Windows crashes, lockups and illegal operations. I like the command line. I liked the command line when I knew next to nothing about Linux a year ago. I like the command line more the more I learn about Linux. Plus, there is the advantage, with Linux, that when an article is getting slashdotted and Netscape takes forever to to access it, you can switch to the command line and read the article with Lynx. Of course, that advantage vanishes if the whole point of the article is an image...but what is perfect about anything?
My opinion may be a little biased though. My first computer was a lousy 33MHz CPU motherboard with one meg of RAM running MSDOS 4.0 And my first 'net access was a dialup connection with a 2400 bps modem to a Unix shell...so I guess I had a little grounding in CLI use before I "graduated" to Windows.
And oh yes, I think highly of Osborne's Linux: The Complete Reference. I have the Third edition, which is probably obsolete now, but that's okay with me, as the version of Linux I run came on a CD included with the book. I paid $15.99 for my copy of the Complete Reference, marked down from $39.99 in a clearance at B. Dalton.
e8johan wrote: I'd say that 'I, Robot' augth to be far more serious that MIB or any other movie Smith has starred,
More serious even than Enemy of the State? That was Will Smith in that wasn't it? I've read a great deal of Asimov, including the Robot books and stories. Hard to see those as anywhere near as serious as Enemy of the State.
bobobobo wrote: Hell if you have rich people interested and willling to spend their cash, why not?
Exactly! Now the thing to do is to get lots of rich people interested enough to spend money on it. This will have the ultimate effect of causing companies to find ways to do this more inexpensively, so more people will be able to afford it. There was nothing unproductive about Tito's "stunt" and I'm sure he knew exactly what he was doing.
We might also keep in mind Sir Francis Bacon's observation on the value of money, to wit:
Money is like manure; not much good except it be spread around.
Look, any measuring system is going to be arbitrary. This is because the concepts of number and measurement are human concepts invented by the human mind. They have no objective source in nature. They are simply ideas that the human mind uses to understand the world around us. Mathematics is not a science, it cannot be, since it has no subject matter. All any mathematical system can do is manipulate numbers. And numbers have no existence outside the human mind. The fact that humans cannot understand the universe without resorting to number and measurement just points out the limitations of the human mind.
erax0r wrote: What did they do that was so dead wrong? They in essence gained access to some extra bandwidth in which they were allowed to use. Consequences should immediate termination of the account end of story.
Hmm...this is interesting. It seems to me just about everyone is missing the point here. One poster suggests this is just a normal consequence of breaking the law, ignoring the fact that the normal consequence in this instance would -and should- simply be termination of service. It leaves me wondering if folks here read the same story I did.
What happened here is nothing new, really. Read up on characters such as Huey Long. Anyone ever hear of Tammany Hall? A local political machine with aspirations of grandeur had their toes stepped on...they are stepping back. I'm not saying this is right, far from it. But everyone seems to have missed that there is a corrupt political machine right in the foreground of the story. Wannabe empire builders, petty kings, whatever you want to call them. It's an old story here in America, and this won't be the last time it is played out either.
Tim Browse wrote: Hmm...I always thought the point of those 'remove me' links was to confirm that the email address was indeed a live one, with a real human being at the end....Am I wrong? I can't imagine that any of these scumbags actually stop sending you spam simply because you ask them to.
Well, if that is the point, whoever has been sending the stuff to me doesn't seem to realize it. About a week ago, I finally got tired of deleting all kinds of junk email every day (inluding, BTW many, many "second warnings" about my name being deleted from their database...this is a threat??) and started clicking those "remove me" links. The volume of email coming to me has dropped dramatically in that time, from dozens a day to one or two. And those from lists and such I actually do want to receive.
In fact, I believe those "remove me" links are to bring the spammers into compliance with some fairly recently enacted State anti-spamming laws. They have to provide such links - and honor them- to avoid being prosecuted under certain laws enacted within the last year or three in some states.
chamenos wrote: as i see it, the only way to rectify this situation is to make spam a legally punishable offence. a jail term, a hefty fine, anything!
Nah, I can't agree with this. Sure, the stuff is annoying, you have to delete dozens of junks all the time and click on dozens of "remove me" links, but it's just a minor annoyance, like rap music music shaking the windows of your house. Heck, the US already keeps more of it's population in jail than any other country in the world, and that, in the "land of the free" strikes me as an outright obscenity.
Besides, there are oddies out there who like spam.
Mr. Shatner,
This has bugged me ever since STII: Wrath of Kahn came out. When Chekhov and his CO are surveying that planet for suitability for the Genesis trial, and they come across the shuttle craft, Chekhov realizes who the thing belongs to and tries to hurry the hell out. Unfortunately, they end up running into the arms of Kahn and his merry crew of castaways. Kahn fails to recognize Chekhov's CO, but he recognizes Chekhov. How can this be? In the episode "Space Seed" in which the Enterprise encounters Kahn and his gang of genetically engineered supermen (and women), Chekhov had not yet joined the crew of the Enterprise. Why couldn't the producers and director of STII take this glaring bit of reality into account???
Mr. Shatner,
As many posters here have pointed out, you will forever be remembered as Captain James T. Kirk. But in the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before", when your old school chum-turned-god-like-telepath created your grave, complete with gravestone, the engraving on the stone had you as James R. Kirk. At what point in the series did you acquire the middle initial T. and why didn't anyone remember that it was supposed to be R.?
PhysicsScholar wrote: When we're all dead, people will remember us for the kind deeds we did while we were walking the streets and talking the talk.
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones..."
So is quoting Shakespeare in a computer-oriented forum off-topic? I dunno, but in this instance the Bard seems relevant to me.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you're the exception to the rule if you're not thinking "ew! ew!"
Nah, I don't think so. Ants don't "bug" me either. Now the posts about cockroaches are the ones that made me go "Ew! ew! ew!" I don't understand why people put up with them to the point of infestation. I hate those *uckers, and immediately take steps for their removal whenever I move into a new place. They are not that hard to get rid of after all. It just takes a little time, patience and plenty of spray and boric acid powder.
Heh! Looking at the (unslashdotted) JPEG, I noticed off to the right side of my screen there seems to be a somewhat lopsided image of a goat's head, or perhaps a bull's head...and scrolling down a bit, on the left side of the screen there is an image of a man's face with Mephistophelean mustache and goatee. Perhaps this will show up in the National Enquirer under a caption like, "Scientists photograph images from Hell for first time!"
foistboinder wrote: Either scrap the manned program and put the money into unmanned exploration. Or keep the manned program, but do something other than dinking around in low earth orbit.
I don't think scrapping the unmanned program entirely is a good idea. After all, if we are ever going to actually make use of the resources in space we've got to have people up there making decisions in real time. If we ever get to even Mars, things will be happening too quickly for us to be able to afford the lag time for remote control radio signals to get there, do their thing, then wait for the results to make their way back. Unmanned infrastructure work in LEO might be the better way to go, as long as we keep in mind future manned expeditions.
Also, we have to start bringing stuff back that we didn't have before, materials to provide real additional wealth. We know the asteroids contain many tons of iron, for example. We also know they contain an indeterminate amount of far more valuable stuff, like platinum, iridium, etc. And it may not be necessary to get as far as the asteroid belt to exploit these facts either. A few years ago, there was a news story about an asteroid that actually passed between the Moon's orbit and Earth. Some of those suckers are already coming into our neighborhood, it's time we started thinking about how we could use them.
Slashdot Mirror
The Statiz (sp? E. German Secret Police) did something like this once.
Hmm...perhaps you are thinking along the lines of Staats Polizei? State Police would be a fair translation for that phrase. In this case State referring to the national government rather than a State such as New York. The Nazi's Gestapo was such a police force. The word Gestapo being a German acronym coming from the phrase Geheime Staats Polizei or Homeland State Police. Hmm...Homeland Security Office...no I don't like where we are going at all.
More on topic though...this scent sniffer is probably feasible. It may sound silly now, but the idea is not really that screwy, if you consider what most people thought of the idea of human flight 'round about 1890 or so. We know dogs can identify individual people by scent, so it's not as if the idea is just some screwball notion. At first, the equipment might be bulky and expensive, but that is almost always true of any new technology. The idea is far from useless though as some here have mentioned. The only ray of hope I see as far as this not being realized is the measly 3.2 million dollar appropriation. I would worry far more about it if they were willing to put some real capital into the research. Of course, this is just a call for some initial proposals. They may be willing to go whole hog if some of the proposals end up looking promising.
Well, I solved the telemarketer bit a long time ago with an answering machine. Now I only pick up the phone to speak with people I want to speak to. I also get substantially fewer telemarketing calls now. Eventually, when a company realizes it always gets an answering machine, the number is deleted from the list. Of course, there are always new telemarketing companies starting up too. But I used to get about 13 calls a day, 11 of them from telemarketers. I am now down to only 5 or 6, 3 or 4 of which are telemarketers. And believe me, you can always tell when it's a telemarketer, even if they do use the hush device that blocks out the surronding hubbub in the office.
It's hardly original with Bill. For example, in Robert Heinlein's 1966 book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", he outlines a similar scheme.
Hmm...coulda sworn it was in a later book, "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"(1985). The scene I remember was with Colonel Campbell at the door of his lady love, Gwendolyn Novack aka Hazel Stone. He debates briefly with himself whether his message is worth $100.00 to him.
I don't remember any similar scene in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". However, the story in "The Cat..." includes many of the characters from "The Moon..."
I think the point is a complete computer newbie who has no desire to learn computers the CLI is too much and will always be too much.
Well, yeah I can go along with that. However, I thought we were talking about Linux newbies rather than complete computer newbies. What puzzles me though is the thought of complete computer newbies who don't want to learn computers. Something there is resistant to analysis...
Newbies do not want to use CLI. Newbies should not want to use the CLI Newbies should not be expected by BOFH's to understand command line.
Stuff and nonsense!! The command line and it's flexibility is what drew me to Linux in the first place. It seems to me the Linux command line is far more flexible than the DOS CLI. Plus I got sick of Windows crashes, lockups and illegal operations. I like the command line. I liked the command line when I knew next to nothing about Linux a year ago. I like the command line more the more I learn about Linux. Plus, there is the advantage, with Linux, that when an article is getting slashdotted and Netscape takes forever to to access it, you can switch to the command line and read the article with Lynx. Of course, that advantage vanishes if the whole point of the article is an image...but what is perfect about anything?
My opinion may be a little biased though. My first computer was a lousy 33MHz CPU motherboard with one meg of RAM running MSDOS 4.0 And my first 'net access was a dialup connection with a 2400 bps modem to a Unix shell...so I guess I had a little grounding in CLI use before I "graduated" to Windows. And oh yes, I think highly of Osborne's Linux: The Complete Reference. I have the Third edition, which is probably obsolete now, but that's okay with me, as the version of Linux I run came on a CD included with the book. I paid $15.99 for my copy of the Complete Reference, marked down from $39.99 in a clearance at B. Dalton.
I'd say that 'I, Robot' augth to be far more serious that MIB or any other movie Smith has starred,
More serious even than Enemy of the State? That was Will Smith in that wasn't it? I've read a great deal of Asimov, including the Robot books and stories. Hard to see those as anywhere near as serious as Enemy of the State.
Any reason to think he won't ??
Well, yeah. The reason is just Hollywood in general. Look at the stupendous mess Hollywood made of Starship Trooper.
Like geological layers, or the layers of a parfait or a Slurpee in one of those cool Strata cups.
Man, I can't believe you left onions and ogres out of this list of examples...
Hell if you have rich people interested and willling to spend their cash, why not?
Exactly! Now the thing to do is to get lots of rich people interested enough to spend money on it. This will have the ultimate effect of causing companies to find ways to do this more inexpensively, so more people will be able to afford it. There was nothing unproductive about Tito's "stunt" and I'm sure he knew exactly what he was doing.
We might also keep in mind Sir Francis Bacon's observation on the value of money, to wit:
Money is like manure; not much good except it be spread around.
Look, any measuring system is going to be arbitrary. This is because the concepts of number and measurement are human concepts invented by the human mind. They have no objective source in nature. They are simply ideas that the human mind uses to understand the world around us. Mathematics is not a science, it cannot be, since it has no subject matter. All any mathematical system can do is manipulate numbers. And numbers have no existence outside the human mind. The fact that humans cannot understand the universe without resorting to number and measurement just points out the limitations of the human mind.
What did they do that was so dead wrong? They in essence gained access to some extra bandwidth in which they were allowed to use. Consequences should immediate termination of the account end of story.
Hmm...this is interesting. It seems to me just about everyone is missing the point here. One poster suggests this is just a normal consequence of breaking the law, ignoring the fact that the normal consequence in this instance would -and should- simply be termination of service. It leaves me wondering if folks here read the same story I did.
What happened here is nothing new, really. Read up on characters such as Huey Long. Anyone ever hear of Tammany Hall? A local political machine with aspirations of grandeur had their toes stepped on...they are stepping back. I'm not saying this is right, far from it. But everyone seems to have missed that there is a corrupt political machine right in the foreground of the story. Wannabe empire builders, petty kings, whatever you want to call them. It's an old story here in America, and this won't be the last time it is played out either.
Hmm...I always thought the point of those 'remove me' links was to confirm that the email address was indeed a live one, with a real human being at the end....Am I wrong? I can't imagine that any of these scumbags actually stop sending you spam simply because you ask them to.
Well, if that is the point, whoever has been sending the stuff to me doesn't seem to realize it. About a week ago, I finally got tired of deleting all kinds of junk email every day (inluding, BTW many, many "second warnings" about my name being deleted from their database...this is a threat??) and started clicking those "remove me" links. The volume of email coming to me has dropped dramatically in that time, from dozens a day to one or two. And those from lists and such I actually do want to receive.
In fact, I believe those "remove me" links are to bring the spammers into compliance with some fairly recently enacted State anti-spamming laws. They have to provide such links - and honor them- to avoid being prosecuted under certain laws enacted within the last year or three in some states.
as i see it, the only way to rectify this situation is to make spam a legally punishable offence. a jail term, a hefty fine, anything!
Nah, I can't agree with this. Sure, the stuff is annoying, you have to delete dozens of junks all the time and click on dozens of "remove me" links, but it's just a minor annoyance, like rap music music shaking the windows of your house. Heck, the US already keeps more of it's population in jail than any other country in the world, and that, in the "land of the free" strikes me as an outright obscenity.
Besides, there are oddies out there who like spam.
This has bugged me ever since STII: Wrath of Kahn came out. When Chekhov and his CO are surveying that planet for suitability for the Genesis trial, and they come across the shuttle craft, Chekhov realizes who the thing belongs to and tries to hurry the hell out. Unfortunately, they end up running into the arms of Kahn and his merry crew of castaways. Kahn fails to recognize Chekhov's CO, but he recognizes Chekhov. How can this be? In the episode "Space Seed" in which the Enterprise encounters Kahn and his gang of genetically engineered supermen (and women), Chekhov had not yet joined the crew of the Enterprise. Why couldn't the producers and director of STII take this glaring bit of reality into account???
Oh, wait....(sheepish grin)
Yeah, maybe I should get a life, huh?
As many posters here have pointed out, you will forever be remembered as Captain James T. Kirk. But in the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before", when your old school chum-turned-god-like-telepath created your grave, complete with gravestone, the engraving on the stone had you as James R. Kirk. At what point in the series did you acquire the middle initial T. and why didn't anyone remember that it was supposed to be R.?
Oh yeah, and BTW, Cu vi parolas Esperante?
When we're all dead, people will remember us for the kind deeds we did while we were walking the streets and talking the talk.
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones..."
So is quoting Shakespeare in a computer-oriented forum off-topic? I dunno, but in this instance the Bard seems relevant to me.
Nah, I don't think so. Ants don't "bug" me either. Now the posts about cockroaches are the ones that made me go "Ew! ew! ew!" I don't understand why people put up with them to the point of infestation. I hate those *uckers, and immediately take steps for their removal whenever I move into a new place. They are not that hard to get rid of after all. It just takes a little time, patience and plenty of spray and boric acid powder.
Either scrap the manned program and put the money into unmanned exploration. Or keep the manned program, but do something other than dinking around in low earth orbit.
I don't think scrapping the unmanned program entirely is a good idea. After all, if we are ever going to actually make use of the resources in space we've got to have people up there making decisions in real time. If we ever get to even Mars, things will be happening too quickly for us to be able to afford the lag time for remote control radio signals to get there, do their thing, then wait for the results to make their way back. Unmanned infrastructure work in LEO might be the better way to go, as long as we keep in mind future manned expeditions.
Also, we have to start bringing stuff back that we didn't have before, materials to provide real additional wealth. We know the asteroids contain many tons of iron, for example. We also know they contain an indeterminate amount of far more valuable stuff, like platinum, iridium, etc. And it may not be necessary to get as far as the asteroid belt to exploit these facts either. A few years ago, there was a news story about an asteroid that actually passed between the Moon's orbit and Earth. Some of those suckers are already coming into our neighborhood, it's time we started thinking about how we could use them.