Previous replies have pointed out that your formula is wrong. I would also like to point out that not everybody knows the definition of "work" used in physics, and many people have trouble grasping it when it's explained. You may know that work = force * distance, but do you know, conceptually, why this particular formula is how physicists decided to define the word "work"?
My high school physics teacher warned his students of the pitfalls of trying to use this term as if it were intuitive with the following example. When you lift a weight, you do a certain amount of work. When you hold the weight in place at a certain height, are you doing work? Most people will answer "yes", because it's hard to hold the weight there, so they feel that they would be doing some "work" by doing so. The proper answer, from a physics perspective, is "no", because while you're applying a certain force to the weight to hold it up, the distance through which you move it is zero, so that work = force * 0 = 0.
Just a little reminder that the physical definitions of common terms can't always be used intuitively. By the way, if I remember correctly, the answer to the question I posed in the first paragraph is that force * distance has the same units as energy, so that work can be seen as a quantity of energy being transferred.
Please disregard that post. I misread the comment I was replying to. I don't watch the Today Show, so I can't comment on its spin.
On the other hand, I submit, as a liberal, that I would find a liberal spin almost as offensive as a conservative spin. I don't want to be told lies I agree with or lies I disagree with--I want the truth. I can take it for the most part as long as I think I can separate the spin from the truth, but I always worry that some of the spin is slipping through the cracks and affecting my opinions.
Anyway, as others have noted elsewhere in this discussion, all news reporting is biased in some way. All any of us can do get our news from multiple sources and judge for ouselves what should be taken as truth.
The difference between Fox News and The Daily Show is that Fox News' motto is "Fair and Balanced". The Daily Show doesn't claim to be totally accurate, it claims to be funny. They spin the news, laugh at it, then point out the spin and laugh at that as well. They blatantly make stuff up, but they aren't lying--they're joking. Fox News expects you to believe the spin, and many of its viewers do. That's a travesty.
What Real brought to the bargaining table was increased iPod sales. The idea is, the more places people can buy music from to play on their iPods, the more people will buy iPods. So, if someone's looking for a portable music player to buy, they might think "Gee, I like the looks, size, weight, and feature set of this iPod, but I can't play music I've bought from Real on it" and go for a competing device.
Apple probably figures that customers who are discerning enough to see the value of an iPod are also discerning enough not to use Real's service. That's speculation, of course, but I at least hope they have a better reason than the one Jobs was quoted as giving, which amounts to pure arrogance.
What, exactly, does Microsoft have to offer in this area?
WMA? Sure, it's the "standard" for all the other services--whose combined sales pale in comparison to Apple's. It's also the "standard" for the other players, whose--again, combine--sales pale in comparison to the iPod.
What about Microsoft's own music download service? As yet, it's vaporware. When and if it does come out, you can bet it won't hold a candle to the ease of use and quality of service of the iTMS. It will also use WMA--see above. By the time MS is ready to launch it, though, it's likely that most non-iTMS music download services will be failing, and the remaining ones will be consolidating.
Sorry, but in this case Apple has out-Microsofted Microsoft.
To make this explanation less confusing, you might say the Universe is in three dimensions what the Earth's surface is in two. I don't mean to be a pedant, it's just your explanation might not have made sense to someone unfamiliar with the idea, since the Earth is a three-dimensional object.
It trains kids to parrot the line "drugs are bad" rather than think critically about what drugs do, and what the dangers and benefits of different drugs may be. Kids are taught that cannabis is as bad as heroin. They're taught that speed is bad, when what they don't know is that some of them are on it--it's a treatment for ADHD. The most they might be told about psychedelics is that they make you hallucinate, because that's an easy effect to spin as bad--in fact, LSD and mushrooms can give people spiritual experiences, help them change their lives in positive ways, and when used in therapeutic situations can be even more beneficial. The same is true of MDMA, minus the spiritual side.
I'm not saying that kids should be doing drugs--I'm saying that they shouldn't be brainwashed. DARE trains kids in a way that keeps many of them from making intelligent, informed decisions later in life.
My comment was also meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Notice how I suggested you cut back on drinking--after listing nine of the drugs that I've tried (which, contrary to what I implied, I don't do all of in any given month). Try my policy: If someone says something totally and blatantly unreasonable or silly, assume it's a joke. If it is, then you got the joke; if it isn't, the person isn't worth arguing with anyway. Notice that getting the joke doesn't necessarily imply that you laugh; it could be a bad joke, or one you can't relate to. In that case, it's usually best to ignore it and let the mods decide.
For what they're charging for these things, why doesn't the battery indicator work as well as the one on my two-year-old $49 cell phone?
Maybe because what the iPod does is a lot more complicated, and uses the battery in a less predictable way. Hard drives, with their spinning up and down all the time, can make battery life difficult to estimate.
In particular, every time you select a new song, the hard drive has to spin up for reading, wasting a lot of energy. If you don't skip songs too frequently, your battery will last a lot longer.
As someone whose iPod envy is increasing every day, I'm really getting tired of posts complaining about the things. If you're not satisfied with how it's working, I'd be more than happy to take it off your hands--no charge!
You spent $500 on booze? Man, $500 is more than I pay in a month for booze, pot, mushrooms, adderall, ritalin, ecstasy, ambien, ether, and nitrous--combined! I'd say you need to cut down on your drinking.
The Engim chipset can 'see' all 11 at once, and can use the three non-overlapping ones (1, 6 and 11) in parallel, increasing total throughput and...and destroying any and all other wireless networks within range. Good job, guys! To paraphrase Hobbes (as in "Calvin and", not Thomas), maybe someday we can make wireless a complete impediment to networking.
(Original: "Maybe someday we can make language a complete impediment to understanding." in response to Calvin's "verbing" words.)
I'm sorry, but I don't buy music depending on who "needs the money", I buy music depending on what I think is the most enjoyable/interesting to listen to. And usually, I "steal" it in some manner first, whether by downloading it, or copying it from a friend's collection, or hearing it on the radio...I mean, I need to hear it and know it's good before I'll be willing to spend money on it. I only have so much spending money!
He didn't get the trillion-dollar figure from some quote. He cited estimates ranging from $170-600 billion, noted that the $170 billion figure didn't include the Mars mission, pointed out the past trend of huge budget overruns in the space program (indeed, in most government programs, though he didn't say that), and made an estimate of his own that happened to agree superficially with the misquote you mention.
You use it however you want to. I use it to highlight comments of people whose past comments I've enjoyed reading. You can set a bonus in your user preferences for users who are your friends, and then when you see someone you want that bonus to apply to in the future, you click the circle next to their name and set your relationship. Combine with mod points, and it becomes a powerful tool for bringing about change in the moderation around here...if you're into that sort of thing. Or, you could find a few people who actually write in their journals regularly, and use the friends system to keep up with their new entries. I also like to check people's posting histories and so on who I find in my fans list, though I do this less now that I have trouble keeping track of who my old fans are and who is new. (If you want me to notice you, put yourself on my freaks list...)
Anyway, part of what's great about/. is that there's no need to use all the features to have a good experience. You decide your own level of participation.
Perhaps I should call it a shared personality, not a shared reputation. You could still have a/. karma and perhaps a separate karma for some other major sites, but you could also have a global karma that various other sites would use. It could easily get as complex as different communities having different sorts of relationships and even karma of their own, I think, and still be comprehensible as long as users had a say at each part of the process, if they wanted it. There are people who choose not to moderate on/., presumably feeling that the current moderators are good enough that their contribution isn't worth taking the time to make; likewise, relatively few users would participate in the political games that would develop between communities, but they would be mostly self-selected, and just about anyone who wanted to make a difference could join them.
In time, a system would have to be developed to resolve disputes, so courts would appear, a source of authority would be created, and a Constitution would be designed and implemented. This Constitution would be seen not as a monolithic document, like that of the U.S. or, really, any other country; it would be more of a framework within which to develop constitutions, offering an open-source based method of modifying both the current implementation of the constitution for any one geographic area, and the general Constitution of the Internet.
Eventually, the Internet Government will subsume local governments and create a World Government that would be a direct democracy, truly by and for the people, and your say in how it worked would depend on your level of involvement in the community. Karma would become currency, but it would remain the case that beyond a certain amount, the amount of karma you had wouldn't help you be heard. If you had excess, you could splurge on something expensive or give some to people you like or people who need it, but you couldn't just buy more airtime for campaign commercials--campaigns would, naturally, be restricted to the medium that people would, after all, be campaigning for control of, namely the Web. And of course, the elected officials would have the task only of implementing the whims of the people. Laws would be passed by direct vote from the populace, but the votes would not be permanent. They would be stored in a database separate from the main user database, with an entry in the vote database being untraceable back to its associated entry in the user database; however the user database would contain, decryptable only with the user's private key, which even the government wouldn't have, the primary key of the user's entry in the vote database, allowing all previous votes to be changed at any time. Thus if a new argument came up in the forums, i might change my mind on the most recent statement of principle i voted for, say, that individual rights should in all reasonable cases triumph--or maybe i would just go back and offer an amendment to the definition of "reasonable", and vote for it as a way of putting some money in the tip jar, so to speak, then write a quick post to head the forum that would open up for debate of the amendment. A certain threshold of votes would have to be met, before it could pass just for lack of opposition, but events like the initial passing (pending review before being implemented, of course) of some law would push those issues closer to the front page. But this would also be a matter of preference--one could choose what sort of news one wanted to read, concentrating maybe on law regarding technology, communications, flight regulation, laws that have just been passed by a narrow margin, laws that were passed previously that have recently been reversed by people changing their votes--and everywhere would be discussion about everything that mattered enough to someone that they commented on it.
Sorry...you got me started, now look where I've gone.
You're right--look to see what the people who brought you the news have to gain by your getting that particular news. The same idea extends to/., which has been a social networking site from the beginning, and is trying to push the whole social networking concept. What people don't get is that while the social networking makes/. much better at what it does--the friend/fans/foes/freaks system makes it that much more fun for those of us who participate in it--it's not something to base a site on to begin with. Social networking sites require a certain critical mass to become interesting, and at the moment, there aren't enough people interesting in engaging in this sort of activity online to achieve that critical mass solely by attracting people to the social networking aspect of a site. If, like/., a site has something to it that tends to get it a lot of repeat visitors anyway, and if it allows repeat visitors to interact and build reputations, then a social networking scheme is a natural add-on so that people can declare their associations with others, thereby risking their own reputations to add to that of someone else.
This is why--and I've said this before--Orkut and similar sites won't take off until they can interface with/. and similar sites, and have a standard API for Web programmers wanting to make online communities that are tied to the social network. If there were a single other reputation-based site that I used as much as/., I would pay for a way to combine my reputations from the two sites into one, and have one interface between the two for keeping track of friends and so on. (As a broke college student I pay for virtually nothing online, so that's a rather emphatic way of saying I'd like such a site.) Even as someone who only uses one social networking site, a site allowing me to bring together different online personalities in one place would encourage me to participate more in a site like ~. (pronounced "smoke-dot", in case you're too lazy to mouse over the link--for those who don't know, it's a site that was originally based on/code and is sort of "news for stoners, stuff that doesn't matter as much as we'd like it to")--it's not that interesting to post there in comparison to/., but if I were surfing it and saw a post by someone I'd marked as a friend on/., I might be a bit more interested. Multiply by thousands, and ~. might actually become interesting again.
Of course, right now the only viable candidate for the aforementioned standard API would be/code, which is horribly bloated already (so I hear--I don't read Perl) and therefore may not be the best candidate for adding lots of fun new features.
I like the Carlin quote, but Google's ads are not the typical annoying pop-ups--they're text-only, unobtrusive, clearly separated from non-paid search results, and as a consequence of these things, they're some of the most effective ads left on the 'net. That's in terms of click-throughs, conversions into sales for the advertiser, and revenue for Google. Seeing as how the Internet briefly thrived on advertising commissions until the ads became so ineffective that nobody would pay for them, any method that promises to return the value to online advertising holds the potential to bring back the.com boom in a more sustainable (and sensible) way. Google does this by seeing the value that ads can provide to the advertisee; sometimes, especially when looking for a place to buy something, Google's paid results are more relevant than the normal PageRank-based ones. Anything that threatens Google's ability to deliver good value both for the advertiser's money and the customer's time threatens, at least in principle, all that this new model promises for the Internet economy.
In practice, of course, I'm sure Google's brilliant engineers can find a workaround and start another technology race with the spammers. Whether or not they stay ahead, they'll surely keep their collective head above water--or we'll see a new business model arise out of Google's ashes, and eventually one of these models will just have to work.
I guess that the fine line between the criminal mind and normal everyday greed.
Exactly. Real criminals use the law to their advantage--see the RIAA for a case study. It's the fools who are too greedy that get caught; if you play it safe, you can get away with murder. As many previous comments have mentioned, imagine if this guy had gone straight to the spammers instead of effectively turning himself in in this manner. As it is, the technology will still get picked up by spammers and it's something that Google will eventually have to deal with--because while it's illegal even without the extortion (it's fraud), it's also not practical to track down all spammers and nail them to the wall.
However, as far as prosecuting spammers, this method, if widely used by them, may give us a new means--it doesn't require that spamming be illegal, since they commit fraud by using this method. Since fraud is illegal pretty much everywhere, there shouldn't be too many offshore havens for this sort of business.
Anyway, it'll be an interesting situation to watch develop, but no more so than the general circus that is our legal/political machine as it gets used to the whole "Internet" thing (or for that matter, the whole "Information Age"/"Third Wave" thing. the second wave is over, people! move on, let it die!).
Slashdot Mirror
Previous replies have pointed out that your formula is wrong. I would also like to point out that not everybody knows the definition of "work" used in physics, and many people have trouble grasping it when it's explained. You may know that work = force * distance, but do you know, conceptually, why this particular formula is how physicists decided to define the word "work"?
My high school physics teacher warned his students of the pitfalls of trying to use this term as if it were intuitive with the following example. When you lift a weight, you do a certain amount of work. When you hold the weight in place at a certain height, are you doing work? Most people will answer "yes", because it's hard to hold the weight there, so they feel that they would be doing some "work" by doing so. The proper answer, from a physics perspective, is "no", because while you're applying a certain force to the weight to hold it up, the distance through which you move it is zero, so that work = force * 0 = 0.
Just a little reminder that the physical definitions of common terms can't always be used intuitively. By the way, if I remember correctly, the answer to the question I posed in the first paragraph is that force * distance has the same units as energy, so that work can be seen as a quantity of energy being transferred.
Please disregard that post. I misread the comment I was replying to. I don't watch the Today Show, so I can't comment on its spin.
On the other hand, I submit, as a liberal, that I would find a liberal spin almost as offensive as a conservative spin. I don't want to be told lies I agree with or lies I disagree with--I want the truth. I can take it for the most part as long as I think I can separate the spin from the truth, but I always worry that some of the spin is slipping through the cracks and affecting my opinions.
Anyway, as others have noted elsewhere in this discussion, all news reporting is biased in some way. All any of us can do get our news from multiple sources and judge for ouselves what should be taken as truth.
The difference between Fox News and The Daily Show is that Fox News' motto is "Fair and Balanced". The Daily Show doesn't claim to be totally accurate, it claims to be funny. They spin the news, laugh at it, then point out the spin and laugh at that as well. They blatantly make stuff up, but they aren't lying--they're joking. Fox News expects you to believe the spin, and many of its viewers do. That's a travesty.
What stuns me is that Apple have managed to create both a geek computer and a home computer that is easy to use.
.sig goes: "Mac OS X--a server-strength operating system that your granny could install and use."
As someone's
What Real brought to the bargaining table was increased iPod sales. The idea is, the more places people can buy music from to play on their iPods, the more people will buy iPods. So, if someone's looking for a portable music player to buy, they might think "Gee, I like the looks, size, weight, and feature set of this iPod, but I can't play music I've bought from Real on it" and go for a competing device.
Apple probably figures that customers who are discerning enough to see the value of an iPod are also discerning enough not to use Real's service. That's speculation, of course, but I at least hope they have a better reason than the one Jobs was quoted as giving, which amounts to pure arrogance.
What, exactly, does Microsoft have to offer in this area?
WMA? Sure, it's the "standard" for all the other services--whose combined sales pale in comparison to Apple's. It's also the "standard" for the other players, whose--again, combine--sales pale in comparison to the iPod.
What about Microsoft's own music download service? As yet, it's vaporware. When and if it does come out, you can bet it won't hold a candle to the ease of use and quality of service of the iTMS. It will also use WMA--see above. By the time MS is ready to launch it, though, it's likely that most non-iTMS music download services will be failing, and the remaining ones will be consolidating.
Sorry, but in this case Apple has out-Microsofted Microsoft.
To make this explanation less confusing, you might say the Universe is in three dimensions what the Earth's surface is in two. I don't mean to be a pedant, it's just your explanation might not have made sense to someone unfamiliar with the idea, since the Earth is a three-dimensional object.
It trains kids to parrot the line "drugs are bad" rather than think critically about what drugs do, and what the dangers and benefits of different drugs may be. Kids are taught that cannabis is as bad as heroin. They're taught that speed is bad, when what they don't know is that some of them are on it--it's a treatment for ADHD. The most they might be told about psychedelics is that they make you hallucinate, because that's an easy effect to spin as bad--in fact, LSD and mushrooms can give people spiritual experiences, help them change their lives in positive ways, and when used in therapeutic situations can be even more beneficial. The same is true of MDMA, minus the spiritual side.
I'm not saying that kids should be doing drugs--I'm saying that they shouldn't be brainwashed. DARE trains kids in a way that keeps many of them from making intelligent, informed decisions later in life.
My comment was also meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Notice how I suggested you cut back on drinking--after listing nine of the drugs that I've tried (which, contrary to what I implied, I don't do all of in any given month). Try my policy: If someone says something totally and blatantly unreasonable or silly, assume it's a joke. If it is, then you got the joke; if it isn't, the person isn't worth arguing with anyway. Notice that getting the joke doesn't necessarily imply that you laugh; it could be a bad joke, or one you can't relate to. In that case, it's usually best to ignore it and let the mods decide.
For what they're charging for these things, why doesn't the battery indicator work as well as the one on my two-year-old $49 cell phone?
Maybe because what the iPod does is a lot more complicated, and uses the battery in a less predictable way. Hard drives, with their spinning up and down all the time, can make battery life difficult to estimate.
In particular, every time you select a new song, the hard drive has to spin up for reading, wasting a lot of energy. If you don't skip songs too frequently, your battery will last a lot longer.
As someone whose iPod envy is increasing every day, I'm really getting tired of posts complaining about the things. If you're not satisfied with how it's working, I'd be more than happy to take it off your hands--no charge!
You spent $500 on booze? Man, $500 is more than I pay in a month for booze, pot, mushrooms, adderall, ritalin, ecstasy, ambien, ether, and nitrous--combined! I'd say you need to cut down on your drinking.
With 4 you can at least guarantee that no two adjacent access points are on the same channel.
Is this a consequence of the four-color theorem? It sounds distantly related.
The Engim chipset can 'see' all 11 at once, and can use the three non-overlapping ones (1, 6 and 11) in parallel, increasing total throughput and ...and destroying any and all other wireless networks within range. Good job, guys! To paraphrase Hobbes (as in "Calvin and", not Thomas), maybe someday we can make wireless a complete impediment to networking.
(Original: "Maybe someday we can make language a complete impediment to understanding." in response to Calvin's "verbing" words.)
Proud to be a Linux user who can't code since 1999.
What happened in 1999 that made you unable to code ever since?
I'm sorry, but I don't buy music depending on who "needs the money", I buy music depending on what I think is the most enjoyable/interesting to listen to. And usually, I "steal" it in some manner first, whether by downloading it, or copying it from a friend's collection, or hearing it on the radio...I mean, I need to hear it and know it's good before I'll be willing to spend money on it. I only have so much spending money!
Or use Safari and say, "I will make sure I never use a Microsoft product again!"
He didn't get the trillion-dollar figure from some quote. He cited estimates ranging from $170-600 billion, noted that the $170 billion figure didn't include the Mars mission, pointed out the past trend of huge budget overruns in the space program (indeed, in most government programs, though he didn't say that), and made an estimate of his own that happened to agree superficially with the misquote you mention.
You use it however you want to. I use it to highlight comments of people whose past comments I've enjoyed reading. You can set a bonus in your user preferences for users who are your friends, and then when you see someone you want that bonus to apply to in the future, you click the circle next to their name and set your relationship. Combine with mod points, and it becomes a powerful tool for bringing about change in the moderation around here...if you're into that sort of thing. Or, you could find a few people who actually write in their journals regularly, and use the friends system to keep up with their new entries. I also like to check people's posting histories and so on who I find in my fans list, though I do this less now that I have trouble keeping track of who my old fans are and who is new. (If you want me to notice you, put yourself on my freaks list...)
/. is that there's no need to use all the features to have a good experience. You decide your own level of participation.
Anyway, part of what's great about
Perhaps I should call it a shared personality, not a shared reputation. You could still have a /. karma and perhaps a separate karma for some other major sites, but you could also have a global karma that various other sites would use. It could easily get as complex as different communities having different sorts of relationships and even karma of their own, I think, and still be comprehensible as long as users had a say at each part of the process, if they wanted it. There are people who choose not to moderate on /., presumably feeling that the current moderators are good enough that their contribution isn't worth taking the time to make; likewise, relatively few users would participate in the political games that would develop between communities, but they would be mostly self-selected, and just about anyone who wanted to make a difference could join them.
In time, a system would have to be developed to resolve disputes, so courts would appear, a source of authority would be created, and a Constitution would be designed and implemented. This Constitution would be seen not as a monolithic document, like that of the U.S. or, really, any other country; it would be more of a framework within which to develop constitutions, offering an open-source based method of modifying both the current implementation of the constitution for any one geographic area, and the general Constitution of the Internet.
Eventually, the Internet Government will subsume local governments and create a World Government that would be a direct democracy, truly by and for the people, and your say in how it worked would depend on your level of involvement in the community. Karma would become currency, but it would remain the case that beyond a certain amount, the amount of karma you had wouldn't help you be heard. If you had excess, you could splurge on something expensive or give some to people you like or people who need it, but you couldn't just buy more airtime for campaign commercials--campaigns would, naturally, be restricted to the medium that people would, after all, be campaigning for control of, namely the Web. And of course, the elected officials would have the task only of implementing the whims of the people. Laws would be passed by direct vote from the populace, but the votes would not be permanent. They would be stored in a database separate from the main user database, with an entry in the vote database being untraceable back to its associated entry in the user database; however the user database would contain, decryptable only with the user's private key, which even the government wouldn't have, the primary key of the user's entry in the vote database, allowing all previous votes to be changed at any time. Thus if a new argument came up in the forums, i might change my mind on the most recent statement of principle i voted for, say, that individual rights should in all reasonable cases triumph--or maybe i would just go back and offer an amendment to the definition of "reasonable", and vote for it as a way of putting some money in the tip jar, so to speak, then write a quick post to head the forum that would open up for debate of the amendment. A certain threshold of votes would have to be met, before it could pass just for lack of opposition, but events like the initial passing (pending review before being implemented, of course) of some law would push those issues closer to the front page. But this would also be a matter of preference--one could choose what sort of news one wanted to read, concentrating maybe on law regarding technology, communications, flight regulation, laws that have just been passed by a narrow margin, laws that were passed previously that have recently been reversed by people changing their votes--and everywhere would be discussion about everything that mattered enough to someone that they commented on it.
Sorry...you got me started, now look where I've gone.
You're right--look to see what the people who brought you the news have to gain by your getting that particular news. The same idea extends to /., which has been a social networking site from the beginning, and is trying to push the whole social networking concept. What people don't get is that while the social networking makes /. much better at what it does--the friend/fans/foes/freaks system makes it that much more fun for those of us who participate in it--it's not something to base a site on to begin with. Social networking sites require a certain critical mass to become interesting, and at the moment, there aren't enough people interesting in engaging in this sort of activity online to achieve that critical mass solely by attracting people to the social networking aspect of a site. If, like /., a site has something to it that tends to get it a lot of repeat visitors anyway, and if it allows repeat visitors to interact and build reputations, then a social networking scheme is a natural add-on so that people can declare their associations with others, thereby risking their own reputations to add to that of someone else.
/. and similar sites, and have a standard API for Web programmers wanting to make online communities that are tied to the social network. If there were a single other reputation-based site that I used as much as /., I would pay for a way to combine my reputations from the two sites into one, and have one interface between the two for keeping track of friends and so on. (As a broke college student I pay for virtually nothing online, so that's a rather emphatic way of saying I'd like such a site.) Even as someone who only uses one social networking site, a site allowing me to bring together different online personalities in one place would encourage me to participate more in a site like ~. (pronounced "smoke-dot", in case you're too lazy to mouse over the link--for those who don't know, it's a site that was originally based on /code and is sort of "news for stoners, stuff that doesn't matter as much as we'd like it to")--it's not that interesting to post there in comparison to /., but if I were surfing it and saw a post by someone I'd marked as a friend on /., I might be a bit more interested. Multiply by thousands, and ~. might actually become interesting again.
/code, which is horribly bloated already (so I hear--I don't read Perl) and therefore may not be the best candidate for adding lots of fun new features.
This is why--and I've said this before--Orkut and similar sites won't take off until they can interface with
Of course, right now the only viable candidate for the aforementioned standard API would be
I like the Carlin quote, but Google's ads are not the typical annoying pop-ups--they're text-only, unobtrusive, clearly separated from non-paid search results, and as a consequence of these things, they're some of the most effective ads left on the 'net. That's in terms of click-throughs, conversions into sales for the advertiser, and revenue for Google. Seeing as how the Internet briefly thrived on advertising commissions until the ads became so ineffective that nobody would pay for them, any method that promises to return the value to online advertising holds the potential to bring back the .com boom in a more sustainable (and sensible) way. Google does this by seeing the value that ads can provide to the advertisee; sometimes, especially when looking for a place to buy something, Google's paid results are more relevant than the normal PageRank-based ones. Anything that threatens Google's ability to deliver good value both for the advertiser's money and the customer's time threatens, at least in principle, all that this new model promises for the Internet economy.
In practice, of course, I'm sure Google's brilliant engineers can find a workaround and start another technology race with the spammers. Whether or not they stay ahead, they'll surely keep their collective head above water--or we'll see a new business model arise out of Google's ashes, and eventually one of these models will just have to work.
I guess that the fine line between the criminal mind and normal everyday greed.
Exactly. Real criminals use the law to their advantage--see the RIAA for a case study. It's the fools who are too greedy that get caught; if you play it safe, you can get away with murder. As many previous comments have mentioned, imagine if this guy had gone straight to the spammers instead of effectively turning himself in in this manner. As it is, the technology will still get picked up by spammers and it's something that Google will eventually have to deal with--because while it's illegal even without the extortion (it's fraud), it's also not practical to track down all spammers and nail them to the wall.
However, as far as prosecuting spammers, this method, if widely used by them, may give us a new means--it doesn't require that spamming be illegal, since they commit fraud by using this method. Since fraud is illegal pretty much everywhere, there shouldn't be too many offshore havens for this sort of business.
Anyway, it'll be an interesting situation to watch develop, but no more so than the general circus that is our legal/political machine as it gets used to the whole "Internet" thing (or for that matter, the whole "Information Age"/"Third Wave" thing. the second wave is over, people! move on, let it die!).
Somebody has to pay for the development costs.
If you disagree, start an open source replacement.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple is not a convicted monopolist. The rules change when you break them.
Okay my collection now includes:
/. .sigs.
any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced
any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology
any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from government
any sufficiently well-organized government is indistinguishable from bullshit
technology = magic, for sufficiently advanced values of technology and magic
Anyone want to add more? Or for that matter, step forward and take credit--most if not all of these are from