Double clicking has been around a *LOT* longer than ATX softpower. It's only been in the past few years that computers have had anything more advanced than a toggle on/off switch.
You're saying that bombing innocent civillians in Iraq was the right thing to do because they might become a threat in the future. In that case, is it ok if I kill you because you might try to attack me sometime in the future (I've got no evidence, but hey, it's possible you might attack, maybe).
The ISPs are unresponsive to emails, some don't have abuse@ addresses
How is that different from a lot of ISPs in the rest of the world?
Here in the UK, NTL still have an abuse@ address... shame they drop all the mail that goes to it into the bitbucket. They also have an abuse form on their website which they dutifully ignore - frankly they just don't give a damn.
We're having this problem at the Swansea University Computer Society, which has been well documented. (Not a spammer, but a virussed windows machine that's spamming the hell out of us).
That's a 700-800 mile range on a single charge, not even Diesel vehicles get that.
But a diesel vehicle can have it's tank refilled in 10 minutes. It'll take several hours to recharge a bunch of Li-S cells. The solution would be to have fuel stations keep stacks of batteries fully charged - rather than going to the fuel station and recharging your own batteries, you could hand in your discharged batteries and pick up some freshly charged ones. The fuel station can then charge your discharged batteries over a few hours and hand them out to someone else. The upshot is that the batteries don't really belong to you and I guess it'd be the fuel station's job to replace them when they wear out.
Of course, the size of the battery to power a car is going to be pretty huge, so there would need to be an easy way of swapping it without heavy lifting.:)
How exactly do you "refurbish" worn out batteries BTW?
I don't think licencing is feasable (although it'd be very nice). However, if you have debt problems you get a bad credit rating and noone will give you a loan - the ISPs could do the same thing, set up a common "credit reference agency" which they all use, if you have really bad security problems then you get a bad rating and no ISP will give you an account (at least not an unrestricted one). This would also help a lot with the spammers themselves since they would get really bad ratings as they get kicked from each ISP for breaking the AUP.
Just set up the mail server to forward all traffic though your ISP's mail server. Not a big deal.
I won't use my ISP's server unless I really have to for 3 very good reasons:
1. I am infinately more capable of running a stable mail server than the ISP (IMHO I'm more clueful than most of the ISPs I've gome across, plus it's far easier to run a mail server for a small number of accounts rather than the whole ISP).
2. If my ISP is running the mail server, that's another point where my email could vanish if it's badly configured, and since I don't run it I can't trace & fix the fault - I'd have to wait days for the ISP to bother fixing it.
3. I publish SPF records for my domain. This means that if someone is running an SPF capable MTA then they cannot receive mail claiming to come from my domain if it didn't originate at my mail server. If I go via the ISP's mail server I would have to publish SPF records that reference that instead - this would mean that anyone using the ISP's mail server could forge mails from my domain, which is something I definately think won't help the fight against spam.
People need to take responsibility for their own computers, I don't see the problem with the ISP kicking someone for running an insecure system. Infact a blacklist would be good so if someone is shown to repeatedly run insecure systems then they can't get an internet connection anywhere in the same way as someone who has a really bad credit rating can't get a loan.
Umm, yeah, like I trust my ISP to run a stable MTA? I run my own MTA for both incoming and outgoing and publish SPF records for my domain. I'll be mightilly pissed if my ISP stops me doing that since my systems are secure and up to date. Instead of applying a blanket block, they should be spotting the excessive traffic from specific hosts and pulling the plug on their *entire* internet connection - if your computer runs as a spambot then it probably doesn't matter so much to you, but if you lose your entire internet connection every time it happens then you might start thinking about your system security.
I'd like to see the same rules applied to worm-infected machines too - kill their internet access completely, maybe redirect all web requests to a page with the cleanup + patch utils on it.
Under capitalist principles, the spammers are doing the right thing. We need to make it unprofitable for them.
So as long as it's profitable, it's ok for me to sell pirated software, videos, etc. And it's ok for me to make kiddie porn and do contract killings? Just so long as I can make money from it...
It is a bad law - not because it won't do any good (infact I think it will do some good), but because it could have done a lot more good. It is also a bad law because it essentially turns some what was a gray area into a completely legal area instead of doing what the rest of the world is doing and outlawing spam entirely.
The good thing about the law is that it should make it easier to filter the spam, and in an effort to save bandwidth it can be filtered as it is delivered (MTA can detect that it's spam and immediately drop the connection outright. Infact, the MTA can also add a firewall rule for that server's IP to drop all future connections into a tarpit. A large number of mail servers dropping spammer's connections into a tarpit would likely hit the spammer's outbound mail server pretty hard, at least until they rewrote their IP stacks to work around it.
I am very much of the opinion that direct marketting of any form (mail, email, phone, SMS etc) should be either opt-in or completely illegal.
Email and SMS spam and phone calls are just plain annoying - SMS spam more so because it is not uncommon for me to get SMS spam in the early hours of the morning and often the senders seem to have bugs in their systems that causes it to repeatedly send the same message to me over and over. A couple of months ago a SMS spammer decided to send the same message to me every 15 minutes for 2 or 3 days streight. I reported every one of them but I was told my the telco (Orange) that there was absolutely nothing they could do to block the spams immediately. How long will it be before I can install SpamAssassin on my P900 to take care of the spam SMS's?
The Telephone Preference Service (opt-out for telesales calls) works pretty well in the UK but still, it should be opt-in, not opt-out.
And being an environmentally concious person, it pisses me off so much to see the shear quantity of paper that comes through my door and goes straight in the recycling. I also get so much completely untargetted hand-delivered stuff: "garden waste recycling service" - great, except none of the properties on the estate actually have gardens. And the classic one was the estate agents asking if I want them to sell my property (this was while there was a "Sold" sign outside the door just after I had bought the place).
Hence the mark isn't the spam targets but the spammers who actually try to sell stuff.
And the number of spams I get trying to sell me address lists... I wonder if spammers get as pissed off with spam as the rest of us......Oh, and I also get a fair number of spams selling anti-spam software...
Think glowing wallpaper, hell it could even display images.
Even more useful would be wallpaper running as a computer display and the computer being able to track you around your home. Want to keep an eye on the TV while doing stuff around the home? fine, the computer can display it on the wall and when you move around the home the TV picture can follow you. Want to do some cooking? bring up a web browser pointing at a recipes site on your kitchen wall.;) Want to look at porn?.. ok, I'll stop now:)
When you are talking about a 1600x1200 display, with 5,760,000 individiual subpixels
Since OLED displays are printed, we will hopefully be able to get *much* higher resolution displays. I long for the days when we'll be able to buy 300dpi displays so you nolonger have to worry about resolution, you'll just care about font sizes, etc. Of course if you have an 18"x32" 300dpi screen, you're talking about 155.5 million sub pixels, and that's a lot of video bandwidth. And at a super high resolution like 300dpi, dead pixels are less of an issue because individual pixels will be small enough not to notice.
I wonder how they are affected by mechanical fatigue? constant, quite extreme flexing of the display (as you describe, rolling and unrolling it) is going to cause some damage and I wonder how many rolls/unrolls it's life is going to be.
BTW, the rolling/unrolling screen concept was also used in the PDA/phone things from Earth: Final Conflict.
Yep, I can confirm that some LCDs are stupidly bright - we've used large (42") LCDs designed for outdoor use at work - they're visible in direct sunlight and are so bright that you really wouldn't want to use them indoors (they're far too bright too look at if your eyes aren't adjusted for outdoor light conditions).
The resolution is quite impressive too - one of the things that's been stopping me buying a TFT panel is the low resolution - I won't buy a flat panel display unless it can do at least 1600x1200 in 19". And this can do 1600x1200 in 17" so imagine the resolution of the 19" displays when they come out.
Hopefully before long we'll see 16:9 ratio (or wider) high resolution flat displays - I use 2 displays running under Xinerama, with the primary monitor being a 21" CRT. I don't want a display any taller than the 21" (I hate looking upwards to see things at the top of the screen), but if I could replace the 2 monitors with a single extra-wide screen then that'd be great.
As it is, I keep stuff I'm actively working on towards the bottom of the primary screen, stuff I'm just occasionally referring to at the top and my web browser sits on the secondary, which all works quite well.
Errm... isn't just outright killing power a bad thing? Cutting power is going to cause all the electro magnetic fields put out by anything that's using DC to collapse rather quickly... this is how the ignition coil in your car works to induce a huge voltage and fire the spark plugs.
A rather trashy science program in the UK on Sky, called Braniac: Science Abuse
You're using the term "science" in it's broadist sense here then?:) Braniac was basically an excuse to blow stuff up (don't get me wrong - I/like/ blowing stuff up, but it wasn't a science program:)
However, unlike fossil oil (which is in a finite, non-renewable supply because it takes millions of years to produce), vegetable oil can be produced in a very short space of time, making it a renewable resource. You're right that it's not environmentally friendly in itself, but the whole point is that we have an (essentially) infinite supply of it when the fossil fuels run out. What _does_ make it environmentally friendly is the fact that you can recycle used vegitable oil - how much used oil does your local chip-shop throw out? Just filter it and put it through your biodiesel engine and it'll work as well as brand new oil.
I think probably almost every tech company in the UK happilly uses cell phones near their computers. Whilest some datacentres ban mobile phones, a lot don't and you would've thought that if cell phones really could cause a problem, it would show up when you're wandering around a few thousand machines in a datacentre.
Remember that your computer is in quite a chunky faraday cage - CE approval requires that there isn't much RF radiation leakage from inside the case, so there also shouldn't be much leakage from outside the case.
Of course, if you're running your computer with the case open then it may be a different story.
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Double clicking has been around a *LOT* longer than ATX softpower. It's only been in the past few years that computers have had anything more advanced than a toggle on/off switch.
You're saying that bombing innocent civillians in Iraq was the right thing to do because they might become a threat in the future. In that case, is it ok if I kill you because you might try to attack me sometime in the future (I've got no evidence, but hey, it's possible you might attack, maybe).
The ISPs are unresponsive to emails, some don't have abuse@ addresses
How is that different from a lot of ISPs in the rest of the world?
Here in the UK, NTL still have an abuse@ address... shame they drop all the mail that goes to it into the bitbucket. They also have an abuse form on their website which they dutifully ignore - frankly they just don't give a damn.
We're having this problem at the Swansea University Computer Society, which has been well documented. (Not a spammer, but a virussed windows machine that's spamming the hell out of us).
That's a 700-800 mile range on a single charge, not even Diesel vehicles get that.
:)
But a diesel vehicle can have it's tank refilled in 10 minutes. It'll take several hours to recharge a bunch of Li-S cells. The solution would be to have fuel stations keep stacks of batteries fully charged - rather than going to the fuel station and recharging your own batteries, you could hand in your discharged batteries and pick up some freshly charged ones. The fuel station can then charge your discharged batteries over a few hours and hand them out to someone else. The upshot is that the batteries don't really belong to you and I guess it'd be the fuel station's job to replace them when they wear out.
Of course, the size of the battery to power a car is going to be pretty huge, so there would need to be an easy way of swapping it without heavy lifting.
How exactly do you "refurbish" worn out batteries BTW?
I don't think licencing is feasable (although it'd be very nice). However, if you have debt problems you get a bad credit rating and noone will give you a loan - the ISPs could do the same thing, set up a common "credit reference agency" which they all use, if you have really bad security problems then you get a bad rating and no ISP will give you an account (at least not an unrestricted one). This would also help a lot with the spammers themselves since they would get really bad ratings as they get kicked from each ISP for breaking the AUP.
Just set up the mail server to forward all traffic though your ISP's mail server. Not a big deal.
I won't use my ISP's server unless I really have to for 3 very good reasons:
1. I am infinately more capable of running a stable mail server than the ISP (IMHO I'm more clueful than most of the ISPs I've gome across, plus it's far easier to run a mail server for a small number of accounts rather than the whole ISP).
2. If my ISP is running the mail server, that's another point where my email could vanish if it's badly configured, and since I don't run it I can't trace & fix the fault - I'd have to wait days for the ISP to bother fixing it.
3. I publish SPF records for my domain. This means that if someone is running an SPF capable MTA then they cannot receive mail claiming to come from my domain if it didn't originate at my mail server. If I go via the ISP's mail server I would have to publish SPF records that reference that instead - this would mean that anyone using the ISP's mail server could forge mails from my domain, which is something I definately think won't help the fight against spam.
People need to take responsibility for their own computers, I don't see the problem with the ISP kicking someone for running an insecure system. Infact a blacklist would be good so if someone is shown to repeatedly run insecure systems then they can't get an internet connection anywhere in the same way as someone who has a really bad credit rating can't get a loan.
Umm, yeah, like I trust my ISP to run a stable MTA? I run my own MTA for both incoming and outgoing and publish SPF records for my domain. I'll be mightilly pissed if my ISP stops me doing that since my systems are secure and up to date. Instead of applying a blanket block, they should be spotting the excessive traffic from specific hosts and pulling the plug on their *entire* internet connection - if your computer runs as a spambot then it probably doesn't matter so much to you, but if you lose your entire internet connection every time it happens then you might start thinking about your system security.
I'd like to see the same rules applied to worm-infected machines too - kill their internet access completely, maybe redirect all web requests to a page with the cleanup + patch utils on it.
Happilly, after a bit of training my spamassassin filters most of the viruses and bounces from virus scanners.
Under capitalist principles, the spammers are doing the right thing. We need to make it unprofitable for them.
So as long as it's profitable, it's ok for me to sell pirated software, videos, etc. And it's ok for me to make kiddie porn and do contract killings? Just so long as I can make money from it...
90% of all spam originates from countries that are out of the FBI's jurisdiction. What are they going to do about it?
Isn't the usual American tactic to bomb the civilians into oblivion?
I'm sure it must be illegal for the chinese to look at viagra propaganda web sites. ;)
It is a bad law - not because it won't do any good (infact I think it will do some good), but because it could have done a lot more good. It is also a bad law because it essentially turns some what was a gray area into a completely legal area instead of doing what the rest of the world is doing and outlawing spam entirely.
The good thing about the law is that it should make it easier to filter the spam, and in an effort to save bandwidth it can be filtered as it is delivered (MTA can detect that it's spam and immediately drop the connection outright. Infact, the MTA can also add a firewall rule for that server's IP to drop all future connections into a tarpit. A large number of mail servers dropping spammer's connections into a tarpit would likely hit the spammer's outbound mail server pretty hard, at least until they rewrote their IP stacks to work around it.
I am very much of the opinion that direct marketting of any form (mail, email, phone, SMS etc) should be either opt-in or completely illegal.
Email and SMS spam and phone calls are just plain annoying - SMS spam more so because it is not uncommon for me to get SMS spam in the early hours of the morning and often the senders seem to have bugs in their systems that causes it to repeatedly send the same message to me over and over. A couple of months ago a SMS spammer decided to send the same message to me every 15 minutes for 2 or 3 days streight. I reported every one of them but I was told my the telco (Orange) that there was absolutely nothing they could do to block the spams immediately. How long will it be before I can install SpamAssassin on my P900 to take care of the spam SMS's?
The Telephone Preference Service (opt-out for telesales calls) works pretty well in the UK but still, it should be opt-in, not opt-out.
And being an environmentally concious person, it pisses me off so much to see the shear quantity of paper that comes through my door and goes straight in the recycling.
I also get so much completely untargetted hand-delivered stuff: "garden waste recycling service" - great, except none of the properties on the estate actually have gardens. And the classic one was the estate agents asking if I want them to sell my property (this was while there was a "Sold" sign outside the door just after I had bought the place).
Hence the mark isn't the spam targets but the spammers who actually try to sell stuff.
...Oh, and I also get a fair number of spams selling anti-spam software...
And the number of spams I get trying to sell me address lists... I wonder if spammers get as pissed off with spam as the rest of us...
Think glowing wallpaper, hell it could even display images.
;) :)
Even more useful would be wallpaper running as a computer display and the computer being able to track you around your home. Want to keep an eye on the TV while doing stuff around the home? fine, the computer can display it on the wall and when you move around the home the TV picture can follow you.
Want to do some cooking? bring up a web browser pointing at a recipes site on your kitchen wall.
Want to look at porn?.. ok, I'll stop now
When you are talking about a 1600x1200 display, with 5,760,000 individiual subpixels
Since OLED displays are printed, we will hopefully be able to get *much* higher resolution displays. I long for the days when we'll be able to buy 300dpi displays so you nolonger have to worry about resolution, you'll just care about font sizes, etc. Of course if you have an 18"x32" 300dpi screen, you're talking about 155.5 million sub pixels, and that's a lot of video bandwidth. And at a super high resolution like 300dpi, dead pixels are less of an issue because individual pixels will be small enough not to notice.
I wonder how they are affected by mechanical fatigue? constant, quite extreme flexing of the display (as you describe, rolling and unrolling it) is going to cause some damage and I wonder how many rolls/unrolls it's life is going to be.
BTW, the rolling/unrolling screen concept was also used in the PDA/phone things from Earth: Final Conflict.
Yep, I can confirm that some LCDs are stupidly bright - we've used large (42") LCDs designed for outdoor use at work - they're visible in direct sunlight and are so bright that you really wouldn't want to use them indoors (they're far too bright too look at if your eyes aren't adjusted for outdoor light conditions).
Except phone screens are off most of the time and only light up for brief periods when you're using them.
The resolution is quite impressive too - one of the things that's been stopping me buying a TFT panel is the low resolution - I won't buy a flat panel display unless it can do at least 1600x1200 in 19". And this can do 1600x1200 in 17" so imagine the resolution of the 19" displays when they come out.
Hopefully before long we'll see 16:9 ratio (or wider) high resolution flat displays - I use 2 displays running under Xinerama, with the primary monitor being a 21" CRT. I don't want a display any taller than the 21" (I hate looking upwards to see things at the top of the screen), but if I could replace the 2 monitors with a single extra-wide screen then that'd be great.
As it is, I keep stuff I'm actively working on towards the bottom of the primary screen, stuff I'm just occasionally referring to at the top and my web browser sits on the secondary, which all works quite well.
Errm... isn't just outright killing power a bad thing? Cutting power is going to cause all the electro magnetic fields put out by anything that's using DC to collapse rather quickly... this is how the ignition coil in your car works to induce a huge voltage and fire the spark plugs.
A rather trashy science program in the UK on Sky, called Braniac: Science Abuse
:) /like/ blowing stuff up, but it wasn't a science program :)
You're using the term "science" in it's broadist sense here then?
Braniac was basically an excuse to blow stuff up (don't get me wrong - I
However, unlike fossil oil (which is in a finite, non-renewable supply because it takes millions of years to produce), vegetable oil can be produced in a very short space of time, making it a renewable resource. You're right that it's not environmentally friendly in itself, but the whole point is that we have an (essentially) infinite supply of it when the fossil fuels run out. What _does_ make it environmentally friendly is the fact that you can recycle used vegitable oil - how much used oil does your local chip-shop throw out? Just filter it and put it through your biodiesel engine and it'll work as well as brand new oil.
Can cellphones really disrupt your average PC
I think probably almost every tech company in the UK happilly uses cell phones near their computers. Whilest some datacentres ban mobile phones, a lot don't and you would've thought that if cell phones really could cause a problem, it would show up when you're wandering around a few thousand machines in a datacentre.
Remember that your computer is in quite a chunky faraday cage - CE approval requires that there isn't much RF radiation leakage from inside the case, so there also shouldn't be much leakage from outside the case.
Of course, if you're running your computer with the case open then it may be a different story.