Re:I thought those things were already broken
on
Yahoo CAPTCHA Hacked
·
· Score: 3, Informative
that's why it costs 1 cent per 1 captcha, the overall cost of webhosting the porn for exchange boils down to 1 cent per solved captcha. Er, where did you get that number? At Nearly Free Speech, it only costs $1 / GB (of transfer), and that's how much it would cost nearly anywhere else (or even less!), if you use significant amount of bandwidth.
I don't know exactly how large porn images are, never having looked at them, but if you guess a round number of 0.1 MB per picture, it's only about $0.0001, or 0.01 cent per captcha. I suppose it's better than nothing, but it's not yet very cost-prohibitive.
Take Linux for instance. Don't you mean GNU/Linux? There is already a "theater" fo GNU/Linux: Freedom. We are not just fighting for technical superiority, we are fighting for the freedom of the people—just like a secure e-voting machine would, by the way of allowing fair and efficient election to be held.
Why would you go looking for a "theater", when you have such a ready-made cause (one that's been around for over two decades, no less!) for you? All you have to do is join.
Put it this way: an electric heater is basically designed to waste power by transducing electrical energy into heat and spewing it into the immediate environment. A heater does this with virtually no losses. Have you heard of Heat pumps? These things can put actually more heat into a house than the amount of electrical (anything other than thermal) energy spent.
This is one of the reasons that one shouldn't use the word "efficiency" with any device that actually turns work into heat. The best thing to an accurately representative "efficiency" would be the ratio of heat output per work, with that of Carnot heat pump at the top and that of electric heater at the bottom.
On the topic of the thread though, I do agree that the Bush administration was/is successful in their own way. They got all the tax cuts that they wanted passed, they got two terms (a traditional marking of a "good" president versus a "bad" president), and, heck, because of the spineless Democrats, they might even get scot-free with the NSA warrantless tapping responsibilities.
All in all capitalism with it's "lowest common denominator" economics and decisionmaking is a poor tool against an irrational force like terrorism. I don't see how terrorism is irrational. It is very rational. In fact, it is most rational thing some people can do. It's quite as simple as:
1. We meddle in other countries' affairs. 2. We tick the locals off. 3. The locals want to kill us.
It's as old as the "an eye for an eye." Are you saying that the oldest legal code in the western tradition is irrational? Are you saying that the Bible is irrational?
Well, maybe they are. But, if they are, then these terrorists are not any more irrational than the people held as saints in world's religions (and I don't mean just Islam), well, perhaps with the exception of Buddhism, but I don't know much about that.
If I had two strands of magnets, arranged with random orders of polarity, identical strands would be able to stick together along the entire length in a "head to tail" fashion. Forgive my ignorance, but don't they repel? When you have two magnets where their "north" pole points in the same direction, those two poles repel each other. And since the arrangement is random, unless each individual corresponding magnets attract each other, getting an overall attractive configuration seems hopeless. In nature (well, at least electromagnetism), like things repel each other and unlike things attract.
Even from that perspective, this seems a very different phenomenon.
Avoid NFS unless you want blood on your hands. They provide services to Redwatch - a site where the identities/names/addresses/personal information of libertarian protesters are posted. They're then freely available for use by right wing vigilantes to go and attack them (and it has happened): As a recent customer of NFS, I would have been disappointed if they denied services to Redwatch.
And the evidence you stated is very little: all you have are a handful of anecdotal evidences, with what amounts to as evidence being correlation in time (here's the old chestnut: correlation != causation), and a few alleged anti-left shouts (which may well have had other reasons than Redwatch). If Redwatch is promoting a vigilante justice, then what you are suggesting is yet another form of vigilante justice. Do two wrongs make a right?
I fundamentally believe that standing for "free speech" means allowing everyone to say what they want to say as long as it is not false—one should be able to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, if there really is a fire that's threatening to burn the building down. It doesn't matter if you disagree with the view. It doesn't matter if you think that one particular speech is harmful. If it is truly harmful for the society, that's why we have laws and courts. Such matters are for due process to decide, and it's not the web host's fucking job to decide which types of speech they would allow and which they would not, as long as it is not against the law of the land.
I will repeat one more time: As a new customer to NFS, I would have been very disappointed at NFS, if they did not allow these, perhaps "hate speech" websites on their servers.
If you have experience with sensitive electronics, you would know that even tin foil (yes, tin is better than aluminum) hast are not good enough. You need to ground them. How? By making an electrical connection between the foil and a solid, large piece of metal that is connected to the electrical ground of the building.
You can't make this connection wirelessly, and since you can't walk around with a piece of wire hanging from you, you might as well not get the phone in the first place.
I suppose you could have a really thick box (so that "skin depth" is a tiny fraction of the thickness) to put the cell phone in, but once a cell phone is as large and as heavy as a notebook, would you want to carry it around?
I assume you already know the story about roaming data charge on iPhone (which may or may not have been entirely the user's fault). Oops. Wrong story. This is the one I was thinking of.
They can't track your phone when it's off. It can't be tracked if it's not emitting a radio signal. Maybe you think off means something other than off? However, they can make it very difficult to turn our phone REALLY OFF. I assume you already know the story about roaming data charge on iPhone (which may or may not have been entirely the user's fault). Assuming we can put any stock in anecdote, I had a similar experience with my RAZR (yeah, behind the times, lame):
I had an important meeting with my boss and a few colleagues, so I turned my RAZR off before the meeting. I usually have a bunch of alarms and reminders that go off every couple hours or so. Well, guess what---even though the phone was "off" (as in when you flip the phone on, it doesn't show anything and you can't make an outgoing call (I don't know about incoming call) without pushing the power button for a few seconds), it came back on by itself to blare off a reminder that I had set months ago.
If a phone that's supposedly "off" can do that, why do you think they can't make it so that they can still track you while the phone is "off"? Monitoring battery usage isn't exactly an exact science, and not everyone has access to electronics that can tune to GHz signals that cell phones use (and good luck discriminating it against background noise). For now, we can remove the battery to be doubly sure, but what stops them from installing a "backup battery" that can't be removed short of de-soldering connections?
For the sake of convenience we could just have the people who birthed each child be the ones responsible for them, and if they're not available, we could assign other ones. Any takers? This could solve all our problems! I have a better solution: take all the children, and you put them in a facility where they will be safe from the outside world. Of course, since children are curious beings, you should guard them against their own curiosity. I recommend putting a high wall around the facility to prevent them from getting out. Barbed wires at the top of the wall should help too. Also, to guard against their parents abusing them, we should allow them only limited visiting hours, and they should only be able to talk to their children through a glass with little sound holes. No touching or some such environment where the parent could become a menace to the children.
We probably should go a little bit further, though. Any children these days could use some more exercise. So we should have regular exercise hours, and aside from those hours, we should put them in their own room, which will be locked from outside, again, to protect them from their own curiosity. But, since we shouldn't stifle it altogether, perhaps we can make the doors and some of the walls out of bars instead of solid materials. That way, they can look out without going out.
I wonder what we should call this place. I guess we will put children, i.e. juveniles, there. So, in order to signify that fact, we could name it "juvenile hall."
Oh, won't someone please think of the children, round them all up, and put them all in these juvenile halls, please?
I will deliberately avoid paying for Warner Brothers products next time around. Why stop at one and just "next time"?
I stopped buying any music or going to theaters altogether (at least for MPAA-member-produced movies) ever since the Sony BMG and the MPAA University Kit deal.
When these people "catch a pirate", they don't simply give them $200 fine and let them go (you know, like a speeding ticket). They extort them for thousands, and, if they resist, sue them for hundreds of thousands.
Why should we be "easy on them"?
Stop buying music and movie altogether. There are plenty of free music out there, and chances are, one day there will be some good free video as well.
Make these bastards go out of business. Don't buy their stuff. Ever.
It is pathetic and futile to argue that the word "thief" must given the same meaning in casual usage as it has in criminal law. Perhaps you should define what "thief" means, in casual usage, then. Weaselmancer has the right idea in defining "thief" as it is defined in the criminal law regarding the natural property. At least we have something concrete to talk about.
If you then just blur the word as "thief in casual usage", without defining or even attempting describe consistently what it means, the word itself means as much as "Dieb" or "doduk", at least for the purpose of this thread.
Suggest a reasonable definition for "thief" in casual usage today (and you cannot add "copyright infringer" as a special condition---you are of course right to try and define "thief" so that it includes "copyright infringer", but that should come out of a general principle, so that one can apply it to a situation that does not involve copyrights), then we can talk.
I can relate. My parents live in the mountains (their closest neighbor is 5 minute's drive away), and if you need constant connection to Internet, not to speak of anything else (cell phone reception, for example, is nonexistent---you need to drive out 10 minutes to get that), you can't live there. It's almost a good thing that my parents don't really use Internet (or the computer, for that matter).
Nowadays, they have satellite (they can't get DSL, or even cable TV/Internet) for the "always-on" connection, but it's not quite reliable either. My brother tried moving in with them for a few months after his long overseas trip, but eventually he gave up, got a job, and moved out to the city.
I'm just glad that I stay at that lonely place for perhaps 2 to 3 weeks a year during the holidays.
That sounds good and all, but are you sure you aren't funding them? Do you go to Blockbusters? Do you have Dish, DirectTV, or cable? Nope, no, and no. I don't even have a TV. TV is for old people.;)
Oh, and my ISP is a telco... although that's not something to be proud of these days.
I would appreciate any suggestion of any other way that I might be funding them somehow, so that I can stop doing it.
I don't think he meant that ALL shell users are of a dying breed. It's a particular kind, mainly (FTFA):
We are an old-fashioned bunch, preferring the warm glow of a green screen full of text over the cold blockiness of a graphical interface. i.e. He's too poor to afford a color LCD, or is allergic to red and blue for some reason. Or he may even be color-blind.
Gosh, it's been a long time since I've seen a true "black and white" CRT with green for "white".
No, everyone stops buying their stuff and they'll just use it to prove that piracy is that bad and they should get paid by the government. While that is true to some extent (such as the media tax on blank CDs in Canada), at some point, they are going to run into a wall—another business cartel/union as large and powerful as themselves. Right now, they are fighting against individual (suspected) copyright violators and occasional universities that refuse to bend over to their demand. When they tick off a larger industry, such as ISPs, with some unreasonable demand of profit-sharing, they will have a real fight then, and, eventually, after a series of compromises, we will have something reasonable like what terrestrial radio has to do to play music (for more detail, check Lessig's Free Culture).
Even if this does not happen, eventually, the public will get sick and tired of their gradually unreasonable demands, and we can hope that something like what happened with DRM in music will happen in the entire content industry.
Perhaps all this is just a pipe dream, but even so, it still feels good not to support an immoral cartel myself.
No it's enough to make you wish you had enough money to buy your own politicians, so you could write the laws you wanted. But we do! Where do you think these MPAA and RIAA guys get their money? Us!
It doesn't matter what kind of laws they write—if we stop buying their stuff, they will eventually go out of business, fascist laws and draconian enforcements notwithstanding.
Ever since I found out more about the copyright industry vs. the public struggle, I made sure I spent absolutely nothing on what's produced by MPAA and RIAA members—no music sold through a major record label, and no movies (I used to go to theater once every month or so—not anymore). Of course, one man not handing money over to MPAA and RIAA may not make a difference, but if you and I stop making them a profit and tell everyone we know not to, one day we just might.
Or there's the Stargate (the TV show) way. You do both at the same time: Yes, you need to open a wormhole for FTL communication, but you are still "transmitted" after having been "broken down into subatomic particles" or some such nonsense.
Larry Niven wrote a bit about the problems with teleportation, such as conservation of momentum and energy. You also have to do two-way teleportation, otherwise you're teleporting into matter (that includes air). If you change elevations, what happens to the potential energy? Does it convert to heat? As far as conservation laws go, you should remember that there is a third system: the teleportation device. Presumably, this device would be able to provide the energy necessary, absorb any additional energy or stray momentum. That's not to say that there are some huge problems, but those problems are not show-stoppers like, "Ha, ha. You violated energy conservation."
And I'm not entirely convinced that the two-way teleportation is a must—why can't you simply displace the air first by creating a vacuum or something?
Science hasn't teleported squat. They've just caused one particle to mimic the quantum state of another. The number of particles at the source hasn't changed. The number of particles at the destination hasn't changed. So in what way was anything "teleported"? In those experiments, you have to realize that all protons are identical. This may not be the intuitive way to look at it, but you can look at those entanglement experiments in this way: You have one proton at point A, in state X. You have another proton at point B, in state Y. After a given amount of time, you have a proton at point B, in state X, and you have a proton at point A, in state Z (Z may be equal to Y, but frankly, I don't know enough about these experiments to say whether the quantum state of particle at point B gets preserved elsewhere). Then, you can say that the "proton at A" was transported to point B. It doesn't matter if you could actually follow a trajectory (classical trajectories are meaningless in quantum mechanical sense, since you cannot determine a particle's position at all times anyway), or whether the proton that ends up at point B is "really" the proton that was at point A (this statement is meaningless because, other than being in different quantum mechanical states, those two protons were and are REALLY IDENTICAL).
Yes, this is quite far from actually "teleporting" macroscopic objects, and it's not even clear if this process of entanglement can even be used for such teleportation. Regardless, according to some very widely accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics, a true teleportation of a proton did happen.
I think this would escalate to a whole new level if you teleported someone and failed to erase the original, and the two got together and were told to argue it out who needs to live and who needs to die. They'd both have the same conscious train of thought and would probably both want to live and would both believe they were "the real one" etc. In the world of fiction, anything can happen, and except for a few extraordinary cases, it quite doesn't matter here in the real world.
In the real world, you can rest assured, that as far as we know, the "transportation" process destroys the original quantum state (No cloning theorem), so it is not possible to "fail to erase the original"—because existence of the original would mean that you made an "imperfect copy" of what you were trying to transport, and in this case, it's fairly clear which one needs to be incinerated.
I had a crappy GPA in high school. I took the hardest courses I could find. I learned a lot, but it made getting into a good college next to impossible. Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "good college", but here's something I remember from a FAQ of a good college (probably MIT) when I was considering going to college (mostly paraphrased, as I don't want to search for source): ==== Q: For admission to MIT, is it better to take honors course and get a B, or take regular courses and get an A? A: Students who are admitted to MIT are able to take honors courses and get an A. ====
I suppose things become quite simple at either end of the spectrum---if you are really stupid, no matter what course you take, you'll get a C average, and if you are indeed talented, then no matter what course you take, you ought to get an A or A+. For everyone else, well, it's just knowing yourself---after all, that's half the battle.
Oh, I'm not saying that the double standard is wrong. In fact, as a domestic student who would benefit from such a double standard, I heartily endorse it, for what it's worth.
I am just saying, that there is such a double standard. I'm simply stating a fact.
And by the way, foreign students are not eligible for much of the federal funding, they only "get" federal funding in the secondary sense---international students get private grants that are available for everyone, which forces some domestic students who might have gotten that private funding to be supported through federal funding. And there are a lot more restrictions on international students with F-1 visa, such as the amount of hours they can work (as TA) and so on.
I am not saying all these discriminations are either wrong, or entirely unfair, but if only to keep ourselves honest, we ought to acknowledge that it exists.
And what's more amazing is the level of standards they need to reach. There is a perhaps understandable double standard in place for almost every institution. For example, in the matter of subject GRE tests, if a domestic student gets a score over a 90% percentile, it's pretty decent. However, for international students, they will often need to get a perfect score even to be considered for admission.
I have heard explanations as "It's because they practice for the test over and over; it's not really indicative of their aptitude," which may be true. But nonetheless, a significant fraction of graduate students are in U.S. with the admissions standards stacked against them.
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I don't know exactly how large porn images are, never having looked at them, but if you guess a round number of 0.1 MB per picture, it's only about $0.0001, or 0.01 cent per captcha. I suppose it's better than nothing, but it's not yet very cost-prohibitive.
Why would you go looking for a "theater", when you have such a ready-made cause (one that's been around for over two decades, no less!) for you? All you have to do is join.
This is one of the reasons that one shouldn't use the word "efficiency" with any device that actually turns work into heat. The best thing to an accurately representative "efficiency" would be the ratio of heat output per work, with that of Carnot heat pump at the top and that of electric heater at the bottom.
On the topic of the thread though, I do agree that the Bush administration was/is successful in their own way. They got all the tax cuts that they wanted passed, they got two terms (a traditional marking of a "good" president versus a "bad" president), and, heck, because of the spineless Democrats, they might even get scot-free with the NSA warrantless tapping responsibilities.
1. We meddle in other countries' affairs.
2. We tick the locals off.
3. The locals want to kill us.
It's as old as the "an eye for an eye." Are you saying that the oldest legal code in the western tradition is irrational? Are you saying that the Bible is irrational?
Well, maybe they are. But, if they are, then these terrorists are not any more irrational than the people held as saints in world's religions (and I don't mean just Islam), well, perhaps with the exception of Buddhism, but I don't know much about that.
Even from that perspective, this seems a very different phenomenon.
I don't know much about U.K. politics, and I probably do not particularly care for their political views. But in any case, on their website, they state that "Redwatch does not encourage violence against political opponents - we never have done, we never will do", for what it's worth (probably not much, but IMHO, enough for a web host).
And the evidence you stated is very little: all you have are a handful of anecdotal evidences, with what amounts to as evidence being correlation in time (here's the old chestnut: correlation != causation), and a few alleged anti-left shouts (which may well have had other reasons than Redwatch). If Redwatch is promoting a vigilante justice, then what you are suggesting is yet another form of vigilante justice. Do two wrongs make a right?
I fundamentally believe that standing for "free speech" means allowing everyone to say what they want to say as long as it is not false—one should be able to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, if there really is a fire that's threatening to burn the building down. It doesn't matter if you disagree with the view. It doesn't matter if you think that one particular speech is harmful. If it is truly harmful for the society, that's why we have laws and courts. Such matters are for due process to decide, and it's not the web host's fucking job to decide which types of speech they would allow and which they would not, as long as it is not against the law of the land.
I will repeat one more time: As a new customer to NFS, I would have been very disappointed at NFS, if they did not allow these, perhaps "hate speech" websites on their servers.
If you have experience with sensitive electronics, you would know that even tin foil (yes, tin is better than aluminum) hast are not good enough. You need to ground them. How? By making an electrical connection between the foil and a solid, large piece of metal that is connected to the electrical ground of the building.
You can't make this connection wirelessly, and since you can't walk around with a piece of wire hanging from you, you might as well not get the phone in the first place.
I suppose you could have a really thick box (so that "skin depth" is a tiny fraction of the thickness) to put the cell phone in, but once a cell phone is as large and as heavy as a notebook, would you want to carry it around?
I had an important meeting with my boss and a few colleagues, so I turned my RAZR off before the meeting. I usually have a bunch of alarms and reminders that go off every couple hours or so. Well, guess what---even though the phone was "off" (as in when you flip the phone on, it doesn't show anything and you can't make an outgoing call (I don't know about incoming call) without pushing the power button for a few seconds), it came back on by itself to blare off a reminder that I had set months ago.
If a phone that's supposedly "off" can do that, why do you think they can't make it so that they can still track you while the phone is "off"? Monitoring battery usage isn't exactly an exact science, and not everyone has access to electronics that can tune to GHz signals that cell phones use (and good luck discriminating it against background noise). For now, we can remove the battery to be doubly sure, but what stops them from installing a "backup battery" that can't be removed short of de-soldering connections?
We probably should go a little bit further, though. Any children these days could use some more exercise. So we should have regular exercise hours, and aside from those hours, we should put them in their own room, which will be locked from outside, again, to protect them from their own curiosity. But, since we shouldn't stifle it altogether, perhaps we can make the doors and some of the walls out of bars instead of solid materials. That way, they can look out without going out.
I wonder what we should call this place. I guess we will put children, i.e. juveniles, there. So, in order to signify that fact, we could name it "juvenile hall."
Oh, won't someone please think of the children, round them all up, and put them all in these juvenile halls, please?
I stopped buying any music or going to theaters altogether (at least for MPAA-member-produced movies) ever since the Sony BMG and the MPAA University Kit deal.
When these people "catch a pirate", they don't simply give them $200 fine and let them go (you know, like a speeding ticket). They extort them for thousands, and, if they resist, sue them for hundreds of thousands.
Why should we be "easy on them"?
Stop buying music and movie altogether. There are plenty of free music out there, and chances are, one day there will be some good free video as well.
Make these bastards go out of business. Don't buy their stuff. Ever.
42.
If you then just blur the word as "thief in casual usage", without defining or even attempting describe consistently what it means, the word itself means as much as "Dieb" or "doduk", at least for the purpose of this thread.
Suggest a reasonable definition for "thief" in casual usage today (and you cannot add "copyright infringer" as a special condition---you are of course right to try and define "thief" so that it includes "copyright infringer", but that should come out of a general principle, so that one can apply it to a situation that does not involve copyrights), then we can talk.
I can relate. My parents live in the mountains (their closest neighbor is 5 minute's drive away), and if you need constant connection to Internet, not to speak of anything else (cell phone reception, for example, is nonexistent---you need to drive out 10 minutes to get that), you can't live there. It's almost a good thing that my parents don't really use Internet (or the computer, for that matter).
Nowadays, they have satellite (they can't get DSL, or even cable TV/Internet) for the "always-on" connection, but it's not quite reliable either. My brother tried moving in with them for a few months after his long overseas trip, but eventually he gave up, got a job, and moved out to the city.
I'm just glad that I stay at that lonely place for perhaps 2 to 3 weeks a year during the holidays.
Oh, and my ISP is a telco
I would appreciate any suggestion of any other way that I might be funding them somehow, so that I can stop doing it.
Gosh, it's been a long time since I've seen a true "black and white" CRT with green for "white".
Even if this does not happen, eventually, the public will get sick and tired of their gradually unreasonable demands, and we can hope that something like what happened with DRM in music will happen in the entire content industry.
Perhaps all this is just a pipe dream, but even so, it still feels good not to support an immoral cartel myself.
It doesn't matter what kind of laws they write—if we stop buying their stuff, they will eventually go out of business, fascist laws and draconian enforcements notwithstanding.
Ever since I found out more about the copyright industry vs. the public struggle, I made sure I spent absolutely nothing on what's produced by MPAA and RIAA members—no music sold through a major record label, and no movies (I used to go to theater once every month or so—not anymore). Of course, one man not handing money over to MPAA and RIAA may not make a difference, but if you and I stop making them a profit and tell everyone we know not to, one day we just might.
Or there's the Stargate (the TV show) way. You do both at the same time: Yes, you need to open a wormhole for FTL communication, but you are still "transmitted" after having been "broken down into subatomic particles" or some such nonsense.
And I'm not entirely convinced that the two-way teleportation is a must—why can't you simply displace the air first by creating a vacuum or something?
Yes, this is quite far from actually "teleporting" macroscopic objects, and it's not even clear if this process of entanglement can even be used for such teleportation. Regardless, according to some very widely accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics, a true teleportation of a proton did happen.
In the real world, you can rest assured, that as far as we know, the "transportation" process destroys the original quantum state (No cloning theorem), so it is not possible to "fail to erase the original"—because existence of the original would mean that you made an "imperfect copy" of what you were trying to transport, and in this case, it's fairly clear which one needs to be incinerated.
====
Q: For admission to MIT, is it better to take honors course and get a B, or take regular courses and get an A?
A: Students who are admitted to MIT are able to take honors courses and get an A.
====
I suppose things become quite simple at either end of the spectrum---if you are really stupid, no matter what course you take, you'll get a C average, and if you are indeed talented, then no matter what course you take, you ought to get an A or A+. For everyone else, well, it's just knowing yourself---after all, that's half the battle.
Oh, I'm not saying that the double standard is wrong. In fact, as a domestic student who would benefit from such a double standard, I heartily endorse it, for what it's worth.
I am just saying, that there is such a double standard. I'm simply stating a fact.
And by the way, foreign students are not eligible for much of the federal funding, they only "get" federal funding in the secondary sense---international students get private grants that are available for everyone, which forces some domestic students who might have gotten that private funding to be supported through federal funding. And there are a lot more restrictions on international students with F-1 visa, such as the amount of hours they can work (as TA) and so on.
I am not saying all these discriminations are either wrong, or entirely unfair, but if only to keep ourselves honest, we ought to acknowledge that it exists.
And what's more amazing is the level of standards they need to reach. There is a perhaps understandable double standard in place for almost every institution. For example, in the matter of subject GRE tests, if a domestic student gets a score over a 90% percentile, it's pretty decent. However, for international students, they will often need to get a perfect score even to be considered for admission.
I have heard explanations as "It's because they practice for the test over and over; it's not really indicative of their aptitude," which may be true. But nonetheless, a significant fraction of graduate students are in U.S. with the admissions standards stacked against them.