I am in South America right now, more precisely in Argentina. There is a thriving expat community here, last night I attended a late dinner at a restaurant with a bunch of Americans. This city (Buenos Aires) is as safe as any US city if not safer. I know dozens of Americans here and never heard of anyone having any problems besides a few being victims of petty theft, just like in any other big city.
Obviously this person does not know what he's talking about. The world outside the US is not as frightening as some people want to make it sound. Warzones, of course, are a different matter.
Re:Can you please explain "third world"?
on
Software Livre, Anyone?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Do you live in the US? I don't agree that the poorest people in the US live better than people in brazilian favelas. Being poor in the US is seen as an individual's fault: you had your opportunity but failed to take advantage of it. The poor are often treated with contempt. That's not the case in Brazil, where there people are more understanding and supportive of the poor.
Whether the extremely poor live better in Brazil or in the US is very questionable.
Re:Stupid, Slightly OT Question
on
X-43A Hits Mach 7
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· Score: 4, Informative
Yes, they did it in the 60s. They reached Mach 7 with a manned plane. This one is unmanned. I don't understand why it is such a big deal.
There seems to be a lot of confusion between the concept of open source and free software. The fact that the source is visible to anyone does not imply that it can be used freely.
Someone should put together a license (if it does not exist yet) that allows a corporation to use an open source software product only after paying a fee to the project owner (an individual, a group, a community, etc).
There is already an open source java compiler. It works pretty well but its missing the UI functionality. It compiles to bytecode or native code on Windows or Linux. It does not support awt or Swing yet.
This should be the obvious starting point for IBM.
By default, your mom would charge $0.00. She would be compatible with the new system, she wouldn't miss any email but she'd still be vulnerable to spam (she could still use old spam filters, of course).
The feature can be very easy to use. There can be an icon representing a cash attachment, indicating the amount. Attached cash could be another sort field. My guess is that if someone could learn to use email and has ever paid a bill or cashed a check, this should be easy.
I remember the original idea being something like this:
1) The user determines how much to charge to read email from someone not on his/her whitelist. For example, I would look at untrusted emails for at least $0.10 a pop.
2) The user can choose not to collect the payment if the unknown sender is someone legitimate, like an old acquaintance, a friend with a new email address, a job offer, etc.
This would effectively kill spam without creating much of an inconvenience to legitimate email.
He obviously would not have disclosed his intentions when he arrived. After 90 days there could have been an arrest warrant in his name for overstaying his visa. There would be no record of what he looks like since he would have gone through without having his picture taken.
Zacarias Moussaoui, supposedly involved in 9/11, is a French citizen.
Richard Reid, the "Shoe bomber" on an AA flight, is British.
There must be more where those came from. All countries should be fingerprinted if this is to be an effective measure.
A phone number is 10 digits in length. Suppose the database was extremely popular and had one phone number for each person in the US. That's 3 GB, without any sort of compression. It fits on a DVD.
It seems that they are comparing relational databases. Search engines use proprietary databases which, among other things, do not allow for live insertion of records, SQL commands, etc.
As for data volume, Google (or Yahoo or MSN, for that matter) are probably in the ballpark. The average html page is around 10k. Google probably stores at least 10^9 raw web pages in their cache(that's 10 TB alone) plus a lot of meta information about links to-from many others.
Read How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time. It shows how someone with real knowledge of computer science and sufficient determination could create a virus far more destructive than anything seen to date.
Perhaps the reason it has not happened yet is that those
with the necessary skill and knowledge would rather spend the effort on something more fulfilling and/or profitable instead of annoying others while risking legal consequences.
That's exactly how I think. Last week I got a vaio z505hs for about $550 including memory upgrade to 256MB, PC-card powered cd-rom drive. It's a 500 Mhz P3 with a 12 Gb disk.
Browse eBay for z505hs/he/js/ls etc.
000: page is spam. Ignore it.
001: page is porn. Porn is all the same, show porn page from disk.
010: page is pop-up ad. Block it.
011: page is a 404.
100: page has javascript. Show random javascript error.
101: page is Slashdot.
110: page is Slashdot.
111: page belongs to the.000001% of uncompressible pages, store it as is (full page follows).
I used to work for a search engine company that was acquired by Yahoo and now I work for another one. Here's the deal:
Most businesses need leads from the yellow pages and other standard means of advertising. The amount of business that they get from leads coming from search engines has been increasing steadily over the years. The problem is that nobody will find you in a search if your site has not been crawled, or if it appears beyond the third or fourth page in the results. There are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies that "optimize" your site for a fee so that it appears more relevant to search engines.
Obviously, search engine companies don't like this and developed anti-spam techniques to block as much of it as possible. If you are running a serious business and $100/year or so guarantees a decent placement in a major search engine, it's definitely worth it. For bigger markets (porn, for example), businesses are willing to pay more to get an edge over their competitors. Look at the Yellow Pages (an extremely profitable business) for an older example of this model in action.
If that was the case, you could not make any files readable or writable by other users. You could not have apache read the files in your public_html directory, for example. There are other disadvantages.
Suppose N people decide to vote on an issue. For simplicity, let's assume that the vote is A or B.
You pick a random number that only you know. In order to vote, you add your number and your vote to a list. At the end of the election, the paper trail is shown:
1928787: A
7483978: B
1662656: B ...
etc.
Along with a tally of the votes. Every voter can verify that their number is followed by their vote. You don't know what the other random numbers correspond to, but if yours was 1928787 you know that your vote is there and was counted as 'A'.
This is the basic idea. There's more to it of course, but it can be done.
Patent 6085223 describes the method to look up the very same patent using the USPTO database by clicking on this url! The patent office is violating the patent!
At least, by making patents available on the internet like this they make them sort of "open source" so that stupid patents like this one will be challenged as soon as someone finds out.
1 - Set up a website with a comments form. Never give your email address to anyone. Give your friends the url to your comments form instead of your email. If your website contains your name, Google will pick it up eventually and people who want to get in touch with you will find you. Spammers won't bother going to your website and clicking on your form (unless it's a standard feedback form that's so popular that it's worth writing a script to spam it)
2 - Use captchas as a way to authenticate human beings. Have an email address with a list of authorized contacts. For everyone else, have a bounce message telling them to go to your website and authenticate themselves as humans. After that, you can choose several actions such as adding them to your contact list, accept messages through a feedback form, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I am in South America right now, more precisely in Argentina. There is a thriving expat community here, last night I attended a late dinner at a restaurant with a bunch of Americans. This city (Buenos Aires) is as safe as any US city if not safer. I know dozens of Americans here and never heard of anyone having any problems besides a few being victims of petty theft, just like in any other big city.
Obviously this person does not know what he's talking about. The world outside the US is not as frightening as some people want to make it sound. Warzones, of course, are a different matter.
Do you live in the US? I don't agree that the poorest people in the US live better than people in brazilian favelas. Being poor in the US is seen as an individual's fault: you had your opportunity but failed to take advantage of it. The poor are often treated with contempt. That's not the case in Brazil, where there people are more understanding and supportive of the poor.
Whether the extremely poor live better in Brazil or in the US is very questionable.
Yes, they did it in the 60s. They reached Mach 7 with a manned plane. This one is unmanned. I don't understand why it is such a big deal.
There seems to be a lot of confusion between the concept of open source and free software. The fact that the source is visible to anyone does not imply that it can be used freely.
Someone should put together a license (if it does not exist yet) that allows a corporation to use an open source software product only after paying a fee to the project owner (an individual, a group, a community, etc).
corrected link here.
There is already an open source java compiler. It works pretty well but its missing the UI functionality. It compiles to bytecode or native code on Windows or Linux. It does not support awt or Swing yet. This should be the obvious starting point for IBM.
even on the second bounce, one of the demonstrators had to have himself at least five or six feet above ground
Sounds really cool. I wonder if it comes with a padded helmet for indoor use.
By default, your mom would charge $0.00. She would be compatible with the new system, she wouldn't miss any email but she'd still be vulnerable to spam (she could still use old spam filters, of course).
The feature can be very easy to use. There can be an icon representing a cash attachment, indicating the amount. Attached cash could be another sort field. My guess is that if someone could learn to use email and has ever paid a bill or cashed a check, this should be easy.
I remember the original idea being something like this:
1) The user determines how much to charge to read email from someone not on his/her whitelist. For example, I would look at untrusted emails for at least $0.10 a pop.
2) The user can choose not to collect the payment if the unknown sender is someone legitimate, like an old acquaintance, a friend with a new email address, a job offer, etc.
This would effectively kill spam without creating much of an inconvenience to legitimate email.
He obviously would not have disclosed his intentions when he arrived. After 90 days there could have been an arrest warrant in his name for overstaying his visa. There would be no record of what he looks like since he would have gone through without having his picture taken.
Zacarias Moussaoui, supposedly involved in 9/11, is a French citizen. Richard Reid, the "Shoe bomber" on an AA flight, is British. There must be more where those came from. All countries should be fingerprinted if this is to be an effective measure.
A phone number is 10 digits in length. Suppose the database was extremely popular and had one phone number for each person in the US. That's 3 GB, without any sort of compression. It fits on a DVD.
It seems that they are comparing relational databases. Search engines use proprietary databases which, among other things, do not allow for live insertion of records, SQL commands, etc. As for data volume, Google (or Yahoo or MSN, for that matter) are probably in the ballpark. The average html page is around 10k. Google probably stores at least 10^9 raw web pages in their cache(that's 10 TB alone) plus a lot of meta information about links to-from many others.
Read How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time. It shows how someone with real knowledge of computer science and sufficient determination could create a virus far more destructive than anything seen to date.
Perhaps the reason it has not happened yet is that those with the necessary skill and knowledge would rather spend the effort on something more fulfilling and/or profitable instead of annoying others while risking legal consequences.
That's exactly how I think. Last week I got a vaio z505hs for about $550 including memory upgrade to 256MB, PC-card powered cd-rom drive. It's a 500 Mhz P3 with a 12 Gb disk. Browse eBay for z505hs/he/js/ls etc.
The key is portability. This notebook is about 3 lbs. Normally you pay a premium for small size, all else being equal. That is why $800 is impressive.
Here's the algorithm:
.000001% of uncompressible pages, store it as is (full page follows).
000: page is spam. Ignore it.
001: page is porn. Porn is all the same, show porn page from disk.
010: page is pop-up ad. Block it.
011: page is a 404.
100: page has javascript. Show random javascript error.
101: page is Slashdot.
110: page is Slashdot.
111: page belongs to the
No one ever expected it to take over the world and run out of address space.
I used to work for a search engine company that was acquired by Yahoo and now I work for another one. Here's the deal:
Most businesses need leads from the yellow pages and other standard means of advertising. The amount of business that they get from leads coming from search engines has been increasing steadily over the years. The problem is that nobody will find you in a search if your site has not been crawled, or if it appears beyond the third or fourth page in the results. There are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies that "optimize" your site for a fee so that it appears more relevant to search engines.
Obviously, search engine companies don't like this and developed anti-spam techniques to block as much of it as possible. If you are running a serious business and $100/year or so guarantees a decent placement in a major search engine, it's definitely worth it. For bigger markets (porn, for example), businesses are willing to pay more to get an edge over their competitors. Look at the Yellow Pages (an extremely profitable business) for an older example of this model in action.
I bet tomorrow the phone directory will contain a lot more people named Fook Yu...
Other suggestions, courtesy of Bart Simpson.
If that was the case, you could not make any files readable or writable by other users. You could not have apache read the files in your public_html directory, for example. There are other disadvantages.
Suppose N people decide to vote on an issue. For simplicity, let's assume that the vote is A or B. You pick a random number that only you know. In order to vote, you add your number and your vote to a list. At the end of the election, the paper trail is shown:
...
1928787: A
7483978: B
1662656: B
etc.
Along with a tally of the votes. Every voter can verify that their number is followed by their vote. You don't know what the other random numbers correspond to, but if yours was 1928787 you know that your vote is there and was counted as 'A'.
This is the basic idea. There's more to it of course, but it can be done.
Making money off the internet was patented by Amazon.
Patent 6085223 describes the method to look up the very same patent using the USPTO database by clicking on this url! The patent office is violating the patent!
At least, by making patents available on the internet like this they make them sort of "open source" so that stupid patents like this one will be challenged as soon as someone finds out.
1 - Set up a website with a comments form. Never give your email address to anyone. Give your friends the url to your comments form instead of your email. If your website contains your name, Google will pick it up eventually and people who want to get in touch with you will find you. Spammers won't bother going to your website and clicking on your form (unless it's a standard feedback form that's so popular that it's worth writing a script to spam it)
2 - Use captchas as a way to authenticate human beings. Have an email address with a list of authorized contacts. For everyone else, have a bounce message telling them to go to your website and authenticate themselves as humans. After that, you can choose several actions such as adding them to your contact list, accept messages through a feedback form, etc.