But if they re-ask the key, don't you commit a second count of offense by refusing again? If so, can't they trap you in a loop of two years sentences until you give up the key?
No, it's not 62M / 150K per day. First, there's up to one connection per family, not one per individual. More importantly, some addresses will appear multiple times, some others will never appear. Finally, the 150K figure can't stay that high: after a while, either all the pirates will be disconnected, or they will have moved to safer pirating technologies, or the law will have been repelled as a resounding failure (the two last hypotheses aren't mutually incompatible).
I agree with the theory of evolution myself , but does it really
matter if most of the , shall we say, none too bright members of
society don't?
In soviet Russia, it wouldn't. In a democracy, it does, because they're voters who influence the choice of government, politics, and therefore on middle-to-long term our whole culture.
The problem with ID isn't exactly that it's stupid to mistake it as science. The problem is that it's a flag to be potentially proud of, which stands for disregard of science, rationnality, and all what these stuffs brought to us. Which incidentally includes democracy.
Sure, in bizzarro world, someone would pay me to sit on my ass and watch weird movies all day, but I would quickly hate it
A [not so] implicit point of Graham's article is that a successful education will make you thrive for something better than being a couch potato. People who've been educated in such a way that "coolness" chiefly means "watching crappy movies, wanking, wake up late and booze a lot" are out of the author's view, due to plainly assumed elitism: these people won't get anything important done from their lives anyway, esp. in the libertarian world Graham seems to be loving, so they're worth nothing for him, and whether his advices are relevant to them is just an irrelevant question to him.
The age of your address matters
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.
Simply your e-mail address is one year older in '05 than in '04, which augments its chances of having been harvested.
To check the article's assertion, you should compare the amount of spam received in '04 on an address you started to use on year n with the amount of spam received in '05 on an address you started to use on year n+1.
I'd love to see graphic charts, showing how evolves the percentage of people blocking adSense with their favorite ad-blocker. I wouldn't be surprized to see a major loss in tech-savvy, genuinely interested potential customers. Sure, that won't hurt vi@gr@ vendors a lot...
Personnaly, I'll stick to my usual policy: the first time they'll serve me an ad that hurts my eyes, be it through animation or annoying colors, will be the last one, as I'll ad-block on the whole adSense domain name!
That'd be a shame, as it's one of the very last major ad server that I don't block already, and as I'm sometimes genuinely interested by what they serve me.
There's something specific to US justice system here: there is no clear distinction between punitive fine and financial reparation.
Typically, in many countries, if KFC happens to fry a chicken head and serve it as a nugget, you'd have separately:
- a couple hundreds of dollars to indemnify the person who's been alledgedly traumatized by finding the head in their box
- hundreds of thousands of dollars as fine for KFC because that's what it takes to make them being more careful next time. This money goes straight in the state's pockets, not to the plaintif's. Two advantages: first, all the money gathered that way doesn't need to be gathered by regular taxes; second, people aren't pushed to sue wealthy people/corps just as they would play the lottery.
Another common limitation is to forbid "no win-no fees" contracts for lawyers, because some think it's an incentive to gamble on frivolous lawsuits.
One sentence: unwashed masses are unsanely forgetful. Moreover, they expect those who have power (be it commercial compagnies or politicians) to be bastards, and when Rockr II will be out, 75% of them will say "OK they screwed me last time with that piece of shit, but that's the way it works, and anyway all phone companies are the same kind of bastards, and come on, Rockr II is like, soooo cool, I need one".
The other 25%, aka the minority of people who learn and remember when they've been screwed, are just that: a minority, which is 3 times smaller than the 75% of "please fuck me" morons, and who are much more difficult and expensive to satisfy. Most of companies don't want them, consider them as bad (unprofitable) customers, and those few companies which address them consider them as a niche market.
Wouldn't it have made sense to wait just a little while longer and put those in the ROKR?
Maybe it would have made sense for you customer, whose goal is to get a great phone. But for the phone company, it wouldn't. Their job is not to build great phones, it's to make profit, by selling phones regularly. Making great stuff is just one of their possible options to reach that goal. And they;re playing extremely well, since they manage to get most people to change their phone every 18 months or so, without providing any objectiviely useful new functionality.
So if they can sell a rough prototype that sucks then moreover a well designed product 18 months later, that's much better for them than simply selling the latter.
You periodically get that kind of guys, on nerd-oriented forums like/., who says "fsck off with maths and theoretical stuff, what I want to learn is LAMP/AJAX hacking or writing big chunks of Java for big chunky compagnies". WRONG.
First: the school's main purpose is not to teach you your job; it's to teach you the parts of the job you wouldn't be able to learn by yourself. Mastering a couple of languages and patterns is something you'll learn at your first professional position, every code monkey can do that by himself. You'll be allowed to think of yourself as fully trained when applying for your 2nd or 3rd job.
What you won't be able to learn under the pression of real-job-conditions is more fundamental: it's about having those abstraction capabilities, which allow to understand a problem, turn it into a formal model, find appropriate algorithms to handle this model. That's maths. Indeed, you'll probably never write a computer-vision system or a ray-tracer for a compagny. But by having been drilled on such problems at school, you'll [hopefully] have acquired some skills in complex problem modelisation and solving, that you'll need to write everything but dumb PHP interface to a DB. And you know what? These dumb code monkey jobs are going to become Indian or Chinese long before Duke Nukem Forever is released, so you'd better be able to work on smarter stuff.
I know, it hurts to admit that mathematical thinking abilities are a must for decent programmers when you're yourself mathematically-challenged. It must be unpleasnt to realize that a lot of tough training is required to acquire these skills. But just translate this attitude to an other field and you'll see how stupid it is: "I want to become a novel writer, so I don't see the point of studying ancient authors: nobody speaks/writes that way these days. I don't want to read war stories or poetry either, as I don't plan to write any. I don't want to hear about mythology, classical litterature theories, or whatever. What I want to be trained at is grammar (spelling is useless now that we have decent spell checkers) and type-writing".
I would guess that regeneration ability leads more often to cells going wild and reproducing themselves anarchically, i.e. cancer. Probably, the more complex the organism, the more likely such a misfunction, and at some point the advantage of regrowing limbs/organs was not worth the increased cancer rate; but that's just a random guess from a non-biologist.
If money is being exchanged or made from my opinion then the one individual that most deverves some or all of that financial gain is the original owner of the opinion/preference (me).
Seems to me that if you go to that cookie-stuffed website, that's because you find an interest, i.e. value, to do so. The salesman (here called a webmaster) thinks it's better to charge you with information than with bucks. If you don't feel the same, go to another salesman. If you feel that you pay too much information for too little service, choose another salesman as well. That's called free market.
Let's face it: IT is just experiencing the same phenomenon as other fields: robots have been automatizing physical work, leaving many less qualified manual workers unemployed as economically unfit. IT has been doing the same to many clerck jobs.
Now, better IT automation/rationalization is doing the same to lesser qualified IT workers: better frameworks, methodologies, freely available codebases, integrated solutions etc. make some brute force, dumb coding useless, ditho for those whose job it was. Just as many operators have been replaced by OCR, electronic form submissions, etc.
Technical progress always means that less qualified people become less useful, economically speaking. If we don't want them to become socially worthless as well, we're going to have to find *social* solutions to it, and free market won't find them spontaneously.
Only thing you forget: 95% of people already paid for their windows OEM version when they bought their PC (OEM licence price to manufacturer is a trade secret and probably highly volatile,but expect it often isn't more than than $44.95). And PC vendors are not willing to put linspire INSTEAD OF windows on their computers , especially if prices are so comparable.
So for your average Wallmart-PC-owner, who's got his windows copy without even realizing he paid for that, the equation is: cedega+game=x+44.95, or the_windows_they_already_have_anyway+game=just x.
The USA seems to have a pretty fixed image of a president - white, male, married to an acceptable wife, couple of acceptable kids, professing an acceptable form of christianity.So, when one of them [...] makes more of a fuss about religion than average...
...it might well be to make people forget about not-so-acceptible children, not-so-acceptible drug record, etc. Indeed.
Either some states in Europe have an official religion, or contrarily there is a real defiance toward religion in politics. Typically in France, 15 centuries of history finally taught people that mixing religion and politics is a *very* bad idea, easily inducing some more-or-less dictatorial laws, the occasionnal mass slaughter or whatever hate variant you can name that will only result into nasty stuff.
So it's absolutely socially unacceptible to back up political views on religious grounds, and anyone doing so would be instantly considered as american or nuts (often both). Having a president saying an equivalent of "God bless France" would not only be hardly imaginable, but would be an instant political suicide. Of course he has the right to believe whatever he wants, as everyone has, but certainly not to put it on the public place. Even well-know catholic fundamentalist politicians as Philippe de Villiers would never make a public religious statement, although their convictions are no secret.
Orkut is still extremely beta, and couldn't properly handle the charge it alreasy has.
So if they have to limit the number of users, their strategy is great. They create a lot of hype, people need it if only to aknowledge their hype (if with a geekish twist) status, and now many people who wouldn't have given a sh*t about it, maybe including you, would jump on the first occasion to use it.
They just reused GMail's succesful trick.
OCaml as been offering timestamps and backward debugging for years, in addition of a great programming language (backward debugger's implementation is based on Unix's forking and copy-on-write, so running it on windows requires cygwin). Simply compile your stuff to byte-code rather than with the native optimizing compiler, run the debugger and use backstep/backward just as you used to do with step/forward. Breakpoints block execution in both directions.
And what about GUI and other side effects? Debugging a program in which such side-effects are deeply interleaved with algorithmics can be tricky indeed, although smart timestamping from the debugger will reduce glitches. But if you don't know better than randomly mixing algo and front-end in the first place, then you'd better fix the programmer than the program...
It depends, I bet WMD could cause global warming, and they're planning to find some Real Soon Now (tm) in the middle East.
I mean, they have to find them, they've spent $80,000,000,000 extra taxpayers money on that, more than 1000 US lives (roughly worth one extra WTC tower I guess), a top-secret number of 100,000s Iraqi lives, the US's international reputation, and they've been reelected : it must mean they've been somewhat successful, right?
Imagine this actually happens: people can actually live as long as they wish. It'd obviously completely change the way we consider society and death, and esp. suicide.
(Disclaimer: I'm going to be bashed by many christian devots, but the hell with it)
We human beings get bored of everything, and the only reasons why some of us don't get bored of life is that it's too short and we're always at risk to lose it. Try to imagine how you would enjoy life after having seen every releases from DOOM I to DOOM CLXII, (XOR) fscked thousands of chicks, visited every holyday places a dozen of times, having reached and kept the best professional position your skills can afford 150 years ago... I mean, all of those stuffs are enjoyable because they're difficult to get, because we've got too few time to enjoy them, and more generally because our lifetime in structured into relatively short and radically different periods corresponding to radically different experiences.
All of you who have been students know it: when there's no time pressure, nothing gets done. And if the normal way to terminate a life is to suicide oneself when still healthy but globally bored, then people will do that. If a couple of us need an incentive to make their lives more boring, and it happens to be socially useful, don't worry we'll find a way. Another way to deal with boreness would be to have riskier leisure: a society where the first cause of mortality is base jump rather than getting stuffed in one's own fat doesn't sound bad to me. A couple of healthy wars to renew the generations doesn't seem unlikely either; it might even become the favorite "exit door" for those power-whores who will constitute the oligarchy.
To make a nerdy metaphor, remember last time you played a game with a cheat code giving you infinite life: it eventually spoiled the game, and sure you weren't killed by aliens anymore, but after a while you gave up the game, which is just the equivalent of suicide in the real life. Real life might be a much funnier game which takes longer to be spoiled, but eventually it will, esp. if you know there's virtually no risk anymore.
About reproduction, I guess that losing the fear of death, together with an adequate social pressure, will lower it to an acceptible level. Once again, some properly enforced laws can help if required. But trust people to find ways to limit it, and trust them as well to get bored enough to eventually give up their lives, if only to the profit of their children.
So, sure this kind of technical advances will make the society look radically different, the average lifespan might be dramatically increased, but I'm quite confident that reproduction rates will be adapted and generation turnover will still happen one way or the other.
My first reflex wouuld be to rant about this hardly being related to *online* rights.
But think again: is it really a story about laser beams, or even about the right to be a complete jackass? Or rather about a blatant abuse of PATRIOT act?
IMHO the key point in this story is the misuse of PATRIOT act, and I'm affraid that such misuse won't take long before happening online.
So maybe we should stop with the "WTF does this story do in YRO?"...
"So many people like driving that the concept of a completely autonomous car might be delayed for psychological reasons"
Well, OTOH, so many people liked riding horses... They still can in dedicated circumstances, but they usually don't: part of the pleasure is spoiled by the fact that it's now objectively pointless to ride, do to technical advances.
It might just be the same for driving: once it's become objectively pointless and expensive (car insurance will be *MUCH* more expensive for human wannabe-Schumachers than for reliable, testosterone-free electronic stuff), most of them will forget about it and find another activity in which expressing their virility.
For that you'd need the hardware to be USB master, whereas H1xx only have USB slave hardware. OTOH, you can buy a USB bridge whose purpose is to connect to slaves together, e.g. there
price(H1xx)+price(bridge)<price(H3xx), that's why I finally chose H1xx.
Programming is about building an abstract model of real life stuff.
Maths is about building abstract models, and ensuring them some properties through formal proofs.
Therefore if your way of thinking is not mathematically oriented, you are likely to design false algorithms as soon as you will be asked more than building GUI with m$-visual-whatever.
And being exposed to various kind of mathematics is the least unefficient way we know to give one a more mathematically way of thinking.
If you are affraid by maths, chances are that you will be affraid by designing quality software.
Slashdot Mirror
But if they re-ask the key, don't you commit a second count of offense by refusing again? If so, can't they trap you in a loop of two years sentences until you give up the key?
No, it's not 62M / 150K per day. First, there's up to one connection per family, not one per individual. More importantly, some addresses will appear multiple times, some others will never appear. Finally, the 150K figure can't stay that high: after a while, either all the pirates will be disconnected, or they will have moved to safer pirating technologies, or the law will have been repelled as a resounding failure (the two last hypotheses aren't mutually incompatible).
In soviet Russia, it wouldn't. In a democracy, it does, because they're voters who influence the choice of government, politics, and therefore on middle-to-long term our whole culture.
The problem with ID isn't exactly that it's stupid to mistake it as science. The problem is that it's a flag to be potentially proud of, which stands for disregard of science, rationnality, and all what these stuffs brought to us. Which incidentally includes democracy.
A [not so] implicit point of Graham's article is that a successful education will make you thrive for something better than being a couch potato. People who've been educated in such a way that "coolness" chiefly means "watching crappy movies, wanking, wake up late and booze a lot" are out of the author's view, due to plainly assumed elitism: these people won't get anything important done from their lives anyway, esp. in the libertarian world Graham seems to be loving, so they're worth nothing for him, and whether his advices are relevant to them is just an irrelevant question to him.
Simply your e-mail address is one year older in '05 than in '04, which augments its chances of having been harvested.
To check the article's assertion, you should compare the amount of spam received in '04 on an address you started to use on year n with the amount of spam received in '05 on an address you started to use on year n+1.
Personnaly, I'll stick to my usual policy: the first time they'll serve me an ad that hurts my eyes, be it through animation or annoying colors, will be the last one, as I'll ad-block on the whole adSense domain name!
That'd be a shame, as it's one of the very last major ad server that I don't block already, and as I'm sometimes genuinely interested by what they serve me.
At least France, and I'd say most of EU countries although I'm not certain.
Another common limitation is to forbid "no win-no fees" contracts for lawyers, because some think it's an incentive to gamble on frivolous lawsuits.
One sentence: unwashed masses are unsanely forgetful. Moreover, they expect those who have power (be it commercial compagnies or politicians) to be bastards, and when Rockr II will be out, 75% of them will say "OK they screwed me last time with that piece of shit, but that's the way it works, and anyway all phone companies are the same kind of bastards, and come on, Rockr II is like, soooo cool, I need one".
The other 25%, aka the minority of people who learn and remember when they've been screwed, are just that: a minority, which is 3 times smaller than the 75% of "please fuck me" morons, and who are much more difficult and expensive to satisfy. Most of companies don't want them, consider them as bad (unprofitable) customers, and those few companies which address them consider them as a niche market.
Maybe it would have made sense for you customer, whose goal is to get a great phone. But for the phone company, it wouldn't. Their job is not to build great phones, it's to make profit, by selling phones regularly. Making great stuff is just one of their possible options to reach that goal. And they;re playing extremely well, since they manage to get most people to change their phone every 18 months or so, without providing any objectiviely useful new functionality.
So if they can sell a rough prototype that sucks then moreover a well designed product 18 months later, that's much better for them than simply selling the latter.
First: the school's main purpose is not to teach you your job; it's to teach you the parts of the job you wouldn't be able to learn by yourself. Mastering a couple of languages and patterns is something you'll learn at your first professional position, every code monkey can do that by himself. You'll be allowed to think of yourself as fully trained when applying for your 2nd or 3rd job.
What you won't be able to learn under the pression of real-job-conditions is more fundamental: it's about having those abstraction capabilities, which allow to understand a problem, turn it into a formal model, find appropriate algorithms to handle this model. That's maths. Indeed, you'll probably never write a computer-vision system or a ray-tracer for a compagny. But by having been drilled on such problems at school, you'll [hopefully] have acquired some skills in complex problem modelisation and solving, that you'll need to write everything but dumb PHP interface to a DB. And you know what? These dumb code monkey jobs are going to become Indian or Chinese long before Duke Nukem Forever is released, so you'd better be able to work on smarter stuff.
I know, it hurts to admit that mathematical thinking abilities are a must for decent programmers when you're yourself mathematically-challenged. It must be unpleasnt to realize that a lot of tough training is required to acquire these skills. But just translate this attitude to an other field and you'll see how stupid it is: "I want to become a novel writer, so I don't see the point of studying ancient authors: nobody speaks/writes that way these days. I don't want to read war stories or poetry either, as I don't plan to write any. I don't want to hear about mythology, classical litterature theories, or whatever. What I want to be trained at is grammar (spelling is useless now that we have decent spell checkers) and type-writing".
I would guess that regeneration ability leads more often to cells going wild and reproducing themselves anarchically, i.e. cancer. Probably, the more complex the organism, the more likely such a misfunction, and at some point the advantage of regrowing limbs/organs was not worth the increased cancer rate; but that's just a random guess from a non-biologist.
Seems to me that if you go to that cookie-stuffed website, that's because you find an interest, i.e. value, to do so. The salesman (here called a webmaster) thinks it's better to charge you with information than with bucks. If you don't feel the same, go to another salesman. If you feel that you pay too much information for too little service, choose another salesman as well. That's called free market.
Now, better IT automation/rationalization is doing the same to lesser qualified IT workers: better frameworks, methodologies, freely available codebases, integrated solutions etc. make some brute force, dumb coding useless, ditho for those whose job it was. Just as many operators have been replaced by OCR, electronic form submissions, etc.
Technical progress always means that less qualified people become less useful, economically speaking. If we don't want them to become socially worthless as well, we're going to have to find *social* solutions to it, and free market won't find them spontaneously.
Cedega = $44.95
Game X = $40-50
Total = $80-95
Windows Home = $100~
Windows Pro = $130~
Only thing you forget: 95% of people already paid for their windows OEM version when they bought their PC (OEM licence price to manufacturer is a trade secret and probably highly volatile,but expect it often isn't more than than $44.95). And PC vendors are not willing to put linspire INSTEAD OF windows on their computers , especially if prices are so comparable.
So for your average Wallmart-PC-owner, who's got his windows copy without even realizing he paid for that, the equation is: cedega+game=x+44.95, or the_windows_they_already_have_anyway+game=just x.
Doesn't make sense to him.
The USA seems to have a pretty fixed image of a president - white, male, married to an acceptable wife, couple of acceptable kids, professing an acceptable form of christianity.So, when one of them [...] makes more of a fuss about religion than average... ...it might well be to make people forget about not-so-acceptible children, not-so-acceptible drug record, etc. Indeed.
So it's absolutely socially unacceptible to back up political views on religious grounds, and anyone doing so would be instantly considered as american or nuts (often both). Having a president saying an equivalent of "God bless France" would not only be hardly imaginable, but would be an instant political suicide. Of course he has the right to believe whatever he wants, as everyone has, but certainly not to put it on the public place. Even well-know catholic fundamentalist politicians as Philippe de Villiers would never make a public religious statement, although their convictions are no secret.
Orkut is still extremely beta, and couldn't properly handle the charge it alreasy has. So if they have to limit the number of users, their strategy is great. They create a lot of hype, people need it if only to aknowledge their hype (if with a geekish twist) status, and now many people who wouldn't have given a sh*t about it, maybe including you, would jump on the first occasion to use it. They just reused GMail's succesful trick.
And what about GUI and other side effects? Debugging a program in which such side-effects are deeply interleaved with algorithmics can be tricky indeed, although smart timestamping from the debugger will reduce glitches. But if you don't know better than randomly mixing algo and front-end in the first place, then you'd better fix the programmer than the program...
I mean, they have to find them, they've spent $80,000,000,000 extra taxpayers money on that, more than 1000 US lives (roughly worth one extra WTC tower I guess), a top-secret number of 100,000s Iraqi lives, the US's international reputation, and they've been reelected : it must mean they've been somewhat successful, right?
(Disclaimer: I'm going to be bashed by many christian devots, but the hell with it)
We human beings get bored of everything, and the only reasons why some of us don't get bored of life is that it's too short and we're always at risk to lose it. Try to imagine how you would enjoy life after having seen every releases from DOOM I to DOOM CLXII, (XOR) fscked thousands of chicks, visited every holyday places a dozen of times, having reached and kept the best professional position your skills can afford 150 years ago... I mean, all of those stuffs are enjoyable because they're difficult to get, because we've got too few time to enjoy them, and more generally because our lifetime in structured into relatively short and radically different periods corresponding to radically different experiences.
All of you who have been students know it: when there's no time pressure, nothing gets done. And if the normal way to terminate a life is to suicide oneself when still healthy but globally bored, then people will do that. If a couple of us need an incentive to make their lives more boring, and it happens to be socially useful, don't worry we'll find a way. Another way to deal with boreness would be to have riskier leisure: a society where the first cause of mortality is base jump rather than getting stuffed in one's own fat doesn't sound bad to me. A couple of healthy wars to renew the generations doesn't seem unlikely either; it might even become the favorite "exit door" for those power-whores who will constitute the oligarchy.
To make a nerdy metaphor, remember last time you played a game with a cheat code giving you infinite life: it eventually spoiled the game, and sure you weren't killed by aliens anymore, but after a while you gave up the game, which is just the equivalent of suicide in the real life. Real life might be a much funnier game which takes longer to be spoiled, but eventually it will, esp. if you know there's virtually no risk anymore.
About reproduction, I guess that losing the fear of death, together with an adequate social pressure, will lower it to an acceptible level. Once again, some properly enforced laws can help if required. But trust people to find ways to limit it, and trust them as well to get bored enough to eventually give up their lives, if only to the profit of their children.
So, sure this kind of technical advances will make the society look radically different, the average lifespan might be dramatically increased, but I'm quite confident that reproduction rates will be adapted and generation turnover will still happen one way or the other.
But think again: is it really a story about laser beams, or even about the right to be a complete jackass? Or rather about a blatant abuse of PATRIOT act?
IMHO the key point in this story is the misuse of PATRIOT act, and I'm affraid that such misuse won't take long before happening online.
So maybe we should stop with the "WTF does this story do in YRO?"...
Well, OTOH, so many people liked riding horses... They still can in dedicated circumstances, but they usually don't: part of the pleasure is spoiled by the fact that it's now objectively pointless to ride, do to technical advances.
It might just be the same for driving: once it's become objectively pointless and expensive (car insurance will be *MUCH* more expensive for human wannabe-Schumachers than for reliable, testosterone-free electronic stuff), most of them will forget about it and find another activity in which expressing their virility.
price(H1xx)+price(bridge)<price(H3xx), that's why I finally chose H1xx.
Maths is about building abstract models, and ensuring them some properties through formal proofs.
Therefore if your way of thinking is not mathematically oriented, you are likely to design false algorithms as soon as you will be asked more than building GUI with m$-visual-whatever.
And being exposed to various kind of mathematics is the least unefficient way we know to give one a more mathematically way of thinking.
If you are affraid by maths, chances are that you will be affraid by designing quality software.