Doesn't work. I get tons of spam from dictionary attacks to accounts that have never been published on the Internet.
And unscrupulous companies like Alexa.com (an Amazon company) have published addresses for domain name holders. Somehow they cross-reference these with some other databases, as they often list personal addresses instead of the address in the WHOIS record.
I'm also sick of reading about everyone's success stories with Spam Assassin. I get about 200 spams a day. SA marks about 80 of them as spam. Even worse, there's occasionally a false-positive in those. I'm having a helluva time finding my real email.
A CHP officer told me that the terminals police officers have in there cars are blamed in lots of rear-end collisions (where a cop rear-ends a civilian). Bored officers are often constantly typing in license plates as they cruise, checking for outstanding warrants, etc.
... the C standard specifies
that names that start with an underscore and a capital letter are "internal" to the library.
Perhaps I have an old copy of the standard. Identifiers beginning with an underscore are reserved the compilers and libraries, but I don't see anything about capital letters.
... in C, where a macro must not use it's argument more than once. So for example, the "obvious" implementation of "isdigit()" (which tests for whether a character is a digit or not) would be:
#define isdigit(x) ((x) >= '0' && (x) <= '9')
but this is not actually allowed by the C standard (because 'x' is used twice).
It's not a good idea to use an argument more than once in a macro definition, but there's nothing in the C standard that prohibits it. I've never even met a compiler or preprocessor that warns about it.
Congress doesn't get it. The President doesn't get it. If businesses get it, it won't matter because their interests aren't aligned with ours. If the voters get it, it may not matter if the votes aren't counted right (paperless voting machines).
The only hope is if the judges get it. For the next few elections, I think judicial appointments will be the key factor in who I vote for.
I don't recall slashes of either variety in VMS file specifications. They used square brackets and dots, like: "DEVICE:[AIDTOPIA.SLASHDOT]COMMENT.TXT;3". I know lots of people hated this syntax, but I found it quite expressive. For one thing, it was easy to distinguish between a directory listing ([FOO]) and the file which stored the directory information (FOO.DIR).
Perhaps they started allowing slashes for POSIX compliance. That was about the time I (sadly) left the VMS world. I recall DEC claims at a DECUS symposium that VMS was the first OS to achieve POSIX compliance, which was quite a feat since it was so non-UNIXy to begin with.
I learned about Shaolin Soccer from a trailer in a theater at least a year ago, and have been eagerly awaiting the release. The preview said "Coming Soon" as did the posters that were displayed in the googleplex lobby way back when. So isn't Miramax falsely advertising this movie by saying "Coming Soon" and then not delivering?
A similar problem: I noticed that Costco (a warehouse club store) includes can and bottle deposit money when calculating sales tax (double taxing?). My grocery store does not. Since I buy my soda by the case, this nonsense adds up.
Also, if you return a can, you get a $0.02 refund, even though you pay a "deposit" of $0.60 per 24 cans. And, of course, nobody stands in line for the half hour that the redemption center is actually open each week, since we all pay for curbside recycling now.
Southern California grocery chain Cardenas Market used to lose $500,000 a year on check-cashing fraud, says Steve Vallance, general manager.... Last November, Cardenas put biometric fingerprint scanners in its nine stores. Fraud has fallen to fewer than 1% of the half-million checks the stores cash in a year.
Give use dollar amounts or percentages. I don't care. But using one metric for before and one for after makes this comparison 100% useless, except for creating impressions in impressionable minds.
And how does this deter fraud? Are the customers required to provide prints? Every other example in the story indicates that it's a voluntary system.
"They decipher the marketing mumbo-jumbo you'll be faced with and explain all that you need to know prior to buying a home theatre projector."
Oh really?
... a high-pressure gas-discharge lamp... generates a substantial amount of heat which must be transported away from the lamp because of risk of melting and imploding
If it's a high-pressure lamp, wouldn't the risk be exploding?
the inside of the lamp is a vacuum, filled with an inert gas
A filled vacuum?
Obviously with these three primary colors every possible color can be displayed....
Not so obvious to those of use who understand device gamuts.
Despite these errors, I found the comparison useful, but I'm still confused as to their methods. In one place, the author says:
We've adjusted the lumen output, the contrast and the color balance as well as the sharpness of the individual projectors to get as close to the [reference image] as possible.... If we had not done so we'd have ended up with the factory defaults that in some cases did not do the projector justice.
But a few screens later:
We've used the default factory settings for all projectors so we get a fair comparison between them.
Perhaps for some measurements they used defaults and some they adjusted to match the reference image, but that's far from clear.
Please point me to a link to one recount effort by the press that would have resulted in a Gore victory in Florida.
The recounts were a distraction from the real problem: the butterfly ballot. My memory fades, but as I recall the race came down to something like 1900 votes. The confusion on the butterfly ballot resulted in something like 3000 votes cast for Buchanen (sp?) that were probably intended for Gore. Even Buchanen admitted that much.
Of course, there was no procedure to challenge a usability problem on a ballot. There were indications that there were other significant voting irregularities in the state (like the temporary -16,022 votes for Gore). So Gore and his supporters latched their hope onto a recount. That spiraled out of control in the media until the actual problem was forgotten. True, the recounts did not change the result. But I've never seen a serious denial that the butterfly ballot didn't cost Gore Florida.
Since the anthrax nonsense, snail mail to congressional representatives sits in quarantine for a while before being delivered. Their fax machines are typically out-of-paper and/or toner. To get heard in a timely manner, your best bet is email....
Actually, I've seen interviews with Pixar folks (John Lasseter?) who praised Disney's contributions to the Toy Story script. They claimed that while the animation would have been just as superb, the story would have suffered without Disney, and thus the movie would not have been as good. I think it's misleading to claim that Disney was merely a distributor.
Microsoft allegedly fired him because he created a security risk. But if that were the real reason, then they should have happily accepted his offer to remove the posting. By firing him, they've ensured that the posting stays public and that it gets more publicity. That doesn't seem to correct the security problem.
I'm not sure what MS's real reason was. The security concern seems exaggerated, and the publicity problem is minor. My guess is MS has some other beef with this guy and they saw this as an opportunity to get rid of him. Then again, if he was a temp, it shouldn't have been that hard to unload him.
So it does make me wonder what the real reason is.
That's BS, it's not like copyright infringement has been or was any worse than it was before the digital age.
While I agree with much of what you said, I doubt this claim. I think of two general categories of copyright infringement: large scale knock offs for profit, and small scale copying for friends and family. So let's look at each of the major tangible media:
Music. There have always been bootlegs. I don't have any data on whether there's more large-scale infringement of CDs than there was of tapes and vinyl albums, but consider the small-scale stuff. There's something like 60+ million US P2P file sharers who are trading lots of songs, as opposed to the casual analog infringer who probably made a few copies of a few albums a year. I seriously doubt any measurement of music infringement hasn't climbed dramatically.
Videos. Small scale probably hasn't changed that much. There aren't enough DVD burners to make a big impact--yet. I suspect large scale knock-offs of DVDs are probably comparable to those of yesteryear's VHS dupes. So we'll call this a tie.
Books. In the small scale, physical books (generally) aren't worth copying--duplicating fees often exceed the cost of a legit copy. Though technology is changing this, it probably hasn't made a big impact, especially since ebooks haven't caught on (yet?). In the large scale, I've never heard of a big bust of somebody making copies of a bestseller. Most literary copyright infringement cases are probably of the Tanya Grotter (imitative, derivative works) sort and thus probably haven't been affected either way by the dawn of the digital age. So we'll call this one a tie as well.
Software. Of course, software is only possible in the digital age, so any infringement here represents an increase brought on by the digital age. And I don't think you need me to point out that software copyrights are routinely violated both in the small and large scales. Whether you believe the BSA's numbers are grossly exaggerated or not, there's no denying that there's a lot of illegal copying out there.
If you've got some data that proves otherwise, I'd like to see it.
I agree with the original AC poster when he lays some of the blame for the DMCA at the feet of the copyright infringers. If you deny that they provided the lobbyists with ammunition that helped push this law through, then I think you're kidding yourself.
Whether the numbers are spot-on or grossly exaggerated is irrelevant. The song swappers and other copiers helped to create a perception that infringement was rampant in the music and software industries and that they were poised to do the same to video industry and that the fledgling ebook market was threatened. The DMCA was an unsurprising response to that perception.
Was the DMCA an over-reaction? Of course, just like the PATRIOT ACT was an opportunistic power grab that's going to take decades to undo.
Use of copyright to restrict redistribution is actually immoral, unethical, and illegitimate....
Who the hell wrote that?
According to your link, it was written by Denis Howe, and, ironically, he copyrighted it. Well, he intended to anyway. A C in parentheses is not a legally recognized copyright symbol.
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, (C) 1993-2003 Denis Howe
More and more public restrooms have those infrared detectors to flush toilets and run the faucets. I bet they all have batteries in them. Batteries run down, disposal of them is an environmental problem, etc.
If this gizmo provides enough power to run the detector and the valve, it may be a perfect application. You already have water running through the device.
Am I the only one who can't read the bottom two examples in the figure captioned "Baffletext?" I occasionally fail some of the more sophisticated CAPTCHAs. As this arms race escalates, how many of us will be cut off?
If only it were this simple. Unfortunately, spammers also use dictionary attacks.
I started a new job just three months ago. My address has been given to nobody outside the company. Now about 75% of the mail in my inbox is spam, and the spam filter manages to tag about half of it.
I've had similar experiences with personal addresses.
Polarized projection. Carefully crop your images to form a proper stereo window. Convert your digital stills to slides using a film printer. (Preferrably, you can just shoot slides to begin with, since you'll get better resolution, color saturation, and dynamic range without any of the mismatched JPG artifacts.) Place the slides into a pair of slide projectors. Project through polarizing filters oriented at 45 and 135 degrees onto a silver screen. Don a standard pair of polarized glasses, and you've got stunning in-home 3D that rivals Caption EO. Optionally, you can add a couple more pairs of projectors and some sync equipment for beautiful automated slide shows.
It's tempting to try this with modern digital projectors, but that's difficult. Many LCD projectors send out polarized light, making it impossible to use cross polarizers. And even DLP projectors would have trouble matching the brightness of a cheap, reliable Kodak Ektagraphic.
It's fifty million phone numbers that have been registered, not customers. Many (most?) customers register more than one phone number, so there are probably fewer than 50 million customers, but certainly more than 5 million.
This is not universally true. I used to write firmware for disk drives (for a now-defunct company). Our capacity was reported neither in the decimal nor the binary system (as the author uses those terms). For our purposes, a megabyte was 1000 * 1024 kilobytes. The drive was less than a gigabyte, but I assume they would have used 1000 * 1000 * 1024 for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't work. I get tons of spam from dictionary attacks to accounts that have never been published on the Internet.
And unscrupulous companies like Alexa.com (an Amazon company) have published addresses for domain name holders. Somehow they cross-reference these with some other databases, as they often list personal addresses instead of the address in the WHOIS record.
I'm also sick of reading about everyone's success stories with Spam Assassin. I get about 200 spams a day. SA marks about 80 of them as spam. Even worse, there's occasionally a false-positive in those. I'm having a helluva time finding my real email.
This suggests that techniques to fill spammer lists with bogus addresses is pointless. The break-even point is too low to be effective.
A CHP officer told me that the terminals police officers have in there cars are blamed in lots of rear-end collisions (where a cop rear-ends a civilian). Bored officers are often constantly typing in license plates as they cruise, checking for outstanding warrants, etc.
Linus Torvalds says:
Perhaps I have an old copy of the standard. Identifiers beginning with an underscore are reserved the compilers and libraries, but I don't see anything about capital letters.
It's not a good idea to use an argument more than once in a macro definition, but there's nothing in the C standard that prohibits it. I've never even met a compiler or preprocessor that warns about it.
DMCA. PATRIOT ACT. CAN-SPAM. Infinite copyright extension.
Congress doesn't get it. The President doesn't get it. If businesses get it, it won't matter because their interests aren't aligned with ours. If the voters get it, it may not matter if the votes aren't counted right (paperless voting machines).
The only hope is if the judges get it. For the next few elections, I think judicial appointments will be the key factor in who I vote for.
Stories like this give me a little hope.
But are they up-to-date with all of the latest security patches?
I don't recall slashes of either variety in VMS file specifications. They used square brackets and dots, like: "DEVICE:[AIDTOPIA.SLASHDOT]COMMENT.TXT;3". I know lots of people hated this syntax, but I found it quite expressive. For one thing, it was easy to distinguish between a directory listing ([FOO]) and the file which stored the directory information (FOO.DIR).
Perhaps they started allowing slashes for POSIX compliance. That was about the time I (sadly) left the VMS world. I recall DEC claims at a DECUS symposium that VMS was the first OS to achieve POSIX compliance, which was quite a feat since it was so non-UNIXy to begin with.
I learned about Shaolin Soccer from a trailer in a theater at least a year ago, and have been eagerly awaiting the release. The preview said "Coming Soon" as did the posters that were displayed in the googleplex lobby way back when. So isn't Miramax falsely advertising this movie by saying "Coming Soon" and then not delivering?
A similar problem: I noticed that Costco (a warehouse club store) includes can and bottle deposit money when calculating sales tax (double taxing?). My grocery store does not. Since I buy my soda by the case, this nonsense adds up.
Also, if you return a can, you get a $0.02 refund, even though you pay a "deposit" of $0.60 per 24 cans. And, of course, nobody stands in line for the half hour that the redemption center is actually open each week, since we all pay for curbside recycling now.
I hate news stories with crap like this:
Give use dollar amounts or percentages. I don't care. But using one metric for before and one for after makes this comparison 100% useless, except for creating impressions in impressionable minds.
And how does this deter fraud? Are the customers required to provide prints? Every other example in the story indicates that it's a voluntary system.
Oh really?
If it's a high-pressure lamp, wouldn't the risk be exploding?
A filled vacuum?
Not so obvious to those of use who understand device gamuts.
Despite these errors, I found the comparison useful, but I'm still confused as to their methods. In one place, the author says:
But a few screens later:
Perhaps for some measurements they used defaults and some they adjusted to match the reference image, but that's far from clear.
The recounts were a distraction from the real problem: the butterfly ballot. My memory fades, but as I recall the race came down to something like 1900 votes. The confusion on the butterfly ballot resulted in something like 3000 votes cast for Buchanen (sp?) that were probably intended for Gore. Even Buchanen admitted that much.
Of course, there was no procedure to challenge a usability problem on a ballot. There were indications that there were other significant voting irregularities in the state (like the temporary -16,022 votes for Gore). So Gore and his supporters latched their hope onto a recount. That spiraled out of control in the media until the actual problem was forgotten. True, the recounts did not change the result. But I've never seen a serious denial that the butterfly ballot didn't cost Gore Florida.
Since the anthrax nonsense, snail mail to congressional representatives sits in quarantine for a while before being delivered. Their fax machines are typically out-of-paper and/or toner. To get heard in a timely manner, your best bet is email....
...or a big contribution.
Another twist: the email address provided on their 404 page for reporting broken links is an "unknown user".
Actually, I've seen interviews with Pixar folks (John Lasseter?) who praised Disney's contributions to the Toy Story script. They claimed that while the animation would have been just as superb, the story would have suffered without Disney, and thus the movie would not have been as good. I think it's misleading to claim that Disney was merely a distributor.
Microsoft allegedly fired him because he created a security risk. But if that were the real reason, then they should have happily accepted his offer to remove the posting. By firing him, they've ensured that the posting stays public and that it gets more publicity. That doesn't seem to correct the security problem.
I'm not sure what MS's real reason was. The security concern seems exaggerated, and the publicity problem is minor. My guess is MS has some other beef with this guy and they saw this as an opportunity to get rid of him. Then again, if he was a temp, it shouldn't have been that hard to unload him.
So it does make me wonder what the real reason is.
While I agree with much of what you said, I doubt this claim. I think of two general categories of copyright infringement: large scale knock offs for profit, and small scale copying for friends and family. So let's look at each of the major tangible media:
Music. There have always been bootlegs. I don't have any data on whether there's more large-scale infringement of CDs than there was of tapes and vinyl albums, but consider the small-scale stuff. There's something like 60+ million US P2P file sharers who are trading lots of songs, as opposed to the casual analog infringer who probably made a few copies of a few albums a year. I seriously doubt any measurement of music infringement hasn't climbed dramatically.
Videos. Small scale probably hasn't changed that much. There aren't enough DVD burners to make a big impact--yet. I suspect large scale knock-offs of DVDs are probably comparable to those of yesteryear's VHS dupes. So we'll call this a tie.
Books. In the small scale, physical books (generally) aren't worth copying--duplicating fees often exceed the cost of a legit copy. Though technology is changing this, it probably hasn't made a big impact, especially since ebooks haven't caught on (yet?). In the large scale, I've never heard of a big bust of somebody making copies of a bestseller. Most literary copyright infringement cases are probably of the Tanya Grotter (imitative, derivative works) sort and thus probably haven't been affected either way by the dawn of the digital age. So we'll call this one a tie as well.
Software. Of course, software is only possible in the digital age, so any infringement here represents an increase brought on by the digital age. And I don't think you need me to point out that software copyrights are routinely violated both in the small and large scales. Whether you believe the BSA's numbers are grossly exaggerated or not, there's no denying that there's a lot of illegal copying out there.
If you've got some data that proves otherwise, I'd like to see it.
I agree with the original AC poster when he lays some of the blame for the DMCA at the feet of the copyright infringers. If you deny that they provided the lobbyists with ammunition that helped push this law through, then I think you're kidding yourself.
Whether the numbers are spot-on or grossly exaggerated is irrelevant. The song swappers and other copiers helped to create a perception that infringement was rampant in the music and software industries and that they were poised to do the same to video industry and that the fledgling ebook market was threatened. The DMCA was an unsurprising response to that perception.
Was the DMCA an over-reaction? Of course, just like the PATRIOT ACT was an opportunistic power grab that's going to take decades to undo.
According to your link, it was written by Denis Howe, and, ironically, he copyrighted it. Well, he intended to anyway. A C in parentheses is not a legally recognized copyright symbol.
More and more public restrooms have those infrared detectors to flush toilets and run the faucets. I bet they all have batteries in them. Batteries run down, disposal of them is an environmental problem, etc.
If this gizmo provides enough power to run the detector and the valve, it may be a perfect application. You already have water running through the device.
Am I the only one who can't read the bottom two examples in the figure captioned "Baffletext?" I occasionally fail some of the more sophisticated CAPTCHAs. As this arms race escalates, how many of us will be cut off?
If only it were this simple. Unfortunately, spammers also use dictionary attacks.
I started a new job just three months ago. My address has been given to nobody outside the company. Now about 75% of the mail in my inbox is spam, and the spam filter manages to tag about half of it.
I've had similar experiences with personal addresses.
Polarized projection. Carefully crop your images to form a proper stereo window. Convert your digital stills to slides using a film printer. (Preferrably, you can just shoot slides to begin with, since you'll get better resolution, color saturation, and dynamic range without any of the mismatched JPG artifacts.) Place the slides into a pair of slide projectors. Project through polarizing filters oriented at 45 and 135 degrees onto a silver screen. Don a standard pair of polarized glasses, and you've got stunning in-home 3D that rivals Caption EO. Optionally, you can add a couple more pairs of projectors and some sync equipment for beautiful automated slide shows.
It's tempting to try this with modern digital projectors, but that's difficult. Many LCD projectors send out polarized light, making it impossible to use cross polarizers. And even DLP projectors would have trouble matching the brightness of a cheap, reliable Kodak Ektagraphic.
It's fifty million phone numbers that have been registered, not customers. Many (most?) customers register more than one phone number, so there are probably fewer than 50 million customers, but certainly more than 5 million.
For Windows:
Isn't it obscene how much software we need to run just to maintain control of our own machines?
This is not universally true. I used to write firmware for disk drives (for a now-defunct company). Our capacity was reported neither in the decimal nor the binary system (as the author uses those terms). For our purposes, a megabyte was 1000 * 1024 kilobytes. The drive was less than a gigabyte, but I assume they would have used 1000 * 1000 * 1024 for that.