It's still just a guessing game. They could pick a number from 1 to 10 and ask you to guess it; one person in 10 would get it on the first try. Or maybe their favorite number is 6 and they gave a hint to that effect, so one person in 3 would get it on the first try. Are those people good problem solvers? Not really, unless the problem is anticipating the whims of others. Maybe that's what the Google guys are looking for, someone who can always tell them what they want to hear.
Good puzzles have objective solutions; any answer that meets the requirements inherent in the question is correct, and can be verified correct independently.
No, he's right. The puzzle is equivalent to, "I'm thinking of a number. What is it?" Dumb. It's not problem solving, it's just persistently guessing until you stumble upon whatever they have in mind. Sure, they give you some hints or make use some kind of simple math to generate the answer, so your guessing space is limited and weighted, but it's still a guessing game. Problems that have objective functional solutions are much more interesting.
You'd have to hook procmail into the SMTP daemon instead of the delivery agent. That would be MTA-specific and I have no idea how to do it, which is why I don't use content filtering at all, just sender IP address filtering. I've heard that the postfix MTA has good support for content filtering at SMTP time.
I admit I'm pretty blase about the content-filtering thing because I just don't get any spam -- I've been _that_ careful with my email addresses. If the spam ever overwhelms my defenses and starts rolling in I will definitely upgrade to a more modern MTA and figure this stuff out.
How can Wired be so wide-eyed-credulous about such nonsense? Oh yeah, Wired is a nineties dot-com boom baby....
Of course Freeipods is a scam at some level! Who is paying for those "free" Ipods?
If Freeipods.com is getting them below cost, then Apple is getting ripped off.
If not then Freeipods is coming up with several hundred dollars for each "free" ipod they ship out. If they're not making that much from sponsors, then they've conned someone into investing into their unsustainable business model -- that's a nineties-style "new economy" scam on the investors.
If they are covering the cost of the ipod, then they're getting several hundred dollars from sponsors for this _one_ customer. As I understand it, to be eligible for the "free" ipod you have to buy stuff from the sponsors. If the sponsors are really making enough from you to subsidize an ipod, then either they're ripping you off and you effectively paid for the ipod yourself (scammed? or just dumb?) or they're losing money to get customers (another "new economy" scam, either the sponsor getting ripped off by Freeipods for worthless advertising or the sponsor ripping off investors with "market share" hype).
The last possibility is that the sponsors are making enough money to break even from the _other_ people the "free" ipod winners con into signing up, before those people get their "free" ipods. That, my friend, is a classic pyramid scam.
At some point, _somebody_ had to pay for that "free" ipod with money they could have spent on something else, and that person is getting ripped off. Even if ultimately the "winner" is paying for the ipod indirectly, through the sponsors then through Freeipods, they've still paid somebody to pay somebody to buy them an ipod, which has got to cost more than just buying an ipod directly (with the added benefit of annoying all their friends with "Freeipod mania").
I too see an analogy between spam and P2P, like this: Spam is a few greedy bastards (the spammers) vs hundreds of millions of people who hate them (email users); P2P is a few greedy bastards (the copyright cartels) vs hundreds of millions of people who hold them in contempt (file swappers).
File swappers may be as evil/immoral/unethical/whatever as spammers ("stealing" large amounts a little at a time) but they have the numbers on their side and will eventually win through attrition. For the same reason spammers will eventually lose. Regardless of whether you're right or wrong it's better to have hundreds of millions of people on your side than actively fighting you.
Guns aren't magical, and just having one doesn't automatically protect you. What they do is give you the ability to kill (or at least seriously incapacitate) someone pretty easily. What you have to ask yourself is, how does being able to kill people help protect me? Am I willing to kill someone? Could I -- would I -- use that ability to stop a thief from stealing my stuff?
If your stuff is that important that you'd kill someone who would mess with it, and be ready to pay the price for having killed someone, then getting a gun for that purpose might make sense. Just make sure you know how to use it -- it's a very powerful tool, and the more powerful the tool the more accidental damage it can do when operated improperly. If you're unwilling to kill or unable to shoot in the right direction, then a gun is fairly useless for defense and could even be a liability. But on the other hand, if you're really in a him-or-me type situation it sucks not to have the upper hand.
Obviously there are many other reasons to have a gun besides home defense.
There's only one thing you need to make encryption work, and that's the key (or key pair for asymmetric encryption). Where you store the key is the trick. Ideally you want to keep the key separate from the data at all times -- in a separate medium, in the user's brain, whatever. Unfortunately that would mean either carrying around a separate physical key storage device to unlock your storage device (and of course being able to lose them together since you would naturally keep them both on the same keychain) or memorizing a 50-digit number and typing it correctly every time you want to access the device.
So what we usually do in these situations is store the main key in the device itself, encrypted with a smaller key which can be generated from a user-selected password. Why not just use the password-generated key as your main key? Because easily-remembered passwords don't have enough entropy to generate a key strong enough to protect megabytes of data, but they are good enough to protect something small like an encryption key.
Usually such schemes fail when the encryption of the main key is too weak for whatever reason, such that the main key can be recovered without knowing the password. It is indeed bizarre that they would store the password itself on the device in any form, though as we all know the world is full of crappy software "designed" by idiots.
I for one would be immensely happy if the only spam I received was legitimate advertising
If every single business in the world sent you one spam each day then you'd stop being so immensely happy pretty damn quick. You do realize how cheap and easy it is to send spam, right?
And let's not forget that sending out mass emails has to be worth it to companies, otherwise one would think they wouldn't do it.
Not necessarily. They only have to think they can make money by spamming. Sending spam is so cheap that they could afford to do it for years without generating a single sale, as long as they're making sales some other way. Even if they notice that spamming is a waste of money, it's such a small waste that it hardly matters.
I don't know the implementation details, but I know that Matthew Sullivan is a pretty bright guy with a lot of anti-spam experience and a good reputation. If they did it right then false positives don't just disappear into thin air -- the sender gets immediate notification from his own MTA and can use some other means to get his message through.
If they did it right it gives a 5xx response to the DATA command. If it's spam, the sending MTA (spamware) will just drop it on the floor; if it's legit mail the sending MTA will send its own undeliverable notification to the original sender. No bounced spam in any case, which is a very good thing, because the huge volume of spam being bounced "back" to forged sender addresses is a big problem.
If they really did it right it'll reject most spam earlier than the DATA command, based on sender's IP address or RDNS, or the parameters of the HELO, MAIL, or RCPT commands. That way you don't waste bandwidth accepting the entire message (not such a big deal for spam, usually in the 1-4 KB range, but more important for worms, usually in the 20-80 KB range).
If you accept the spam for delivery (as most filters do) you've already lost. All the filter can do is categorize it; a human still has to check each message at some point.
My first reaction to this was "snake oil" and "FUSSP" but if this Matthew Sullivan is the same guy who runs SORBS then it's probably the real thing. (Not necessarily "first" or "revolutionary" but at least very efffective.)
That's a pretty open-and-shut case of the TSA clearly violating the constitution. Heads should roll for that one, literally, but of course nothing will come of it. What exactly is the penalty for a government officer, through intent or gross negligence, violating the constitution? How would it be prosecuted? I can't even think of any example of anyone ever getting in real trouble over breaking their oath to uphold the constitution.
I love slashdot. Where else would you find wild anti-republican conspiracy theories considered insightful?
I love wild conspiracy theories. They're hillarious, and they explain everything! What more could you need? Insight? The good ones are chock-full of it -- read Illuminatus and tell me there's no insight in there! (Factual accuracy is not a prerequisite for insight.)
Holy cow, you're right! Here I am, literally jumping up and down screaming, and I never would have noticed if not for your voice of calm reason. Thank you for letting me know, my knees and voicebox thank you, my cat thanks you.
Why do we have to compromise with extremists? Why do we have to outdo them at their own game? What kind of alternative do we need to propose? How about: airplane passengers and crew all willing to fight to the death to stop hijackers -- check, as of noon 2001-09-11. How about: cursory screening of all baggage for bombs -- check, as of what, 1970? That sure looks like enough air travel security to me.
Man, I still remember the panic I felt on 2001-09-11 when I envisioned the draconian police state of the near future. The hijackings themselves just made me mad as hell but I knew the dictator wannabes in our government would leverage it for all it was worth to ram through the next 50 years worth of encroachment all at once, and that was scary. Don't play along with their sick game, thinking we need to overreact to everything bad that happens.
Make things very easy for criminal and Damn near impossible for law abiding citizens.
But in this case it worked out right and they made things damn near impossible for the criminal. Now if only they could keep him out of the driver's seat and out of congress.
(Note to partisans: Kennedy is not much better or worse than any other senator.)
What is my time worth? Maybe... the existence of the software I produce! That is, I'm paid back for the time I spent writing the software by the fact that such software now exists. And if I couldn't develop and maintain it all by myself, then I need some kind of collaboration agreement with other programmers, like, say, the GPL. To put it another way: I can pay for the software I need/want with money, or I can pay for it with time spent programming.
No, and professional programmers don't work for free either. But that doesn't mean their employer can't give away the software for free. Get it?
(In case not: Company A hires Programmer B to write some software, A pays B a nice salaray, B writes the software, A gives away software for free to Customer C with the expectation that there will be some associated (paid-for) business between A and C.)
Most of the non- cache transistors in modern x86 CPUs go towards the out-of-order control logic (re-order buffers, schedulers, highly-ported register files, memory ordering buffers etc...) which attempt to extract instruction level parallelism from the program. High performance CPUs need this logic whether they are RISC or not.
Itanium doesn't. Look how much power and die space they saved by getting rid of all that stuff!:)
From what I understand there's not all that much difference between P2 and P3, but P3 and P4 are pretty different
Intel "Pentium" x86 generations:
P5 - "586" - Pentium, Pentium MMX
P6 - "686" - Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium M (and some Celerons and Xeons)
P7 - "786" - Pentium IV (and some Celerons and Xeons)
Nobody (especially not Intel) ever calls them "586" etc but if they had stuck with the original generational numbering system (86, 186, 286, 386, 486) that's what they would have been called.
The P5 is characterized by dual-pipeline in-order execution; the P6 by out-of-order micro-op execution; the P7 by the trace cache and double-clocked ALUs.
Slashdot Mirror
Good puzzles have objective solutions; any answer that meets the requirements inherent in the question is correct, and can be verified correct independently.
I admit I'm pretty blase about the content-filtering thing because I just don't get any spam -- I've been _that_ careful with my email addresses. If the spam ever overwhelms my defenses and starts rolling in I will definitely upgrade to a more modern MTA and figure this stuff out.
Of course Freeipods is a scam at some level! Who is paying for those "free" Ipods?
If Freeipods.com is getting them below cost, then Apple is getting ripped off.
If not then Freeipods is coming up with several hundred dollars for each "free" ipod they ship out. If they're not making that much from sponsors, then they've conned someone into investing into their unsustainable business model -- that's a nineties-style "new economy" scam on the investors.
If they are covering the cost of the ipod, then they're getting several hundred dollars from sponsors for this _one_ customer. As I understand it, to be eligible for the "free" ipod you have to buy stuff from the sponsors. If the sponsors are really making enough from you to subsidize an ipod, then either they're ripping you off and you effectively paid for the ipod yourself (scammed? or just dumb?) or they're losing money to get customers (another "new economy" scam, either the sponsor getting ripped off by Freeipods for worthless advertising or the sponsor ripping off investors with "market share" hype).
The last possibility is that the sponsors are making enough money to break even from the _other_ people the "free" ipod winners con into signing up, before those people get their "free" ipods. That, my friend, is a classic pyramid scam.
At some point, _somebody_ had to pay for that "free" ipod with money they could have spent on something else, and that person is getting ripped off. Even if ultimately the "winner" is paying for the ipod indirectly, through the sponsors then through Freeipods, they've still paid somebody to pay somebody to buy them an ipod, which has got to cost more than just buying an ipod directly (with the added benefit of annoying all their friends with "Freeipod mania").
That's why they call it the "(you) CAN SPAM (all you want!) Act" over on news.admin.net-abuse.email.
Mod parent up! Post-SMTP filtering to /dev/null is a bad idea -- 5xx reject at SMTP-time instead!
File swappers may be as evil/immoral/unethical/whatever as spammers ("stealing" large amounts a little at a time) but they have the numbers on their side and will eventually win through attrition. For the same reason spammers will eventually lose. Regardless of whether you're right or wrong it's better to have hundreds of millions of people on your side than actively fighting you.
If your stuff is that important that you'd kill someone who would mess with it, and be ready to pay the price for having killed someone, then getting a gun for that purpose might make sense. Just make sure you know how to use it -- it's a very powerful tool, and the more powerful the tool the more accidental damage it can do when operated improperly. If you're unwilling to kill or unable to shoot in the right direction, then a gun is fairly useless for defense and could even be a liability. But on the other hand, if you're really in a him-or-me type situation it sucks not to have the upper hand.
Obviously there are many other reasons to have a gun besides home defense.
So what we usually do in these situations is store the main key in the device itself, encrypted with a smaller key which can be generated from a user-selected password. Why not just use the password-generated key as your main key? Because easily-remembered passwords don't have enough entropy to generate a key strong enough to protect megabytes of data, but they are good enough to protect something small like an encryption key.
Usually such schemes fail when the encryption of the main key is too weak for whatever reason, such that the main key can be recovered without knowing the password. It is indeed bizarre that they would store the password itself on the device in any form, though as we all know the world is full of crappy software "designed" by idiots.
Summary: SPAM is canned meat; spam is unsolicited bulk email.
Cue the Vikings.
I don't know the implementation details, but I know that Matthew Sullivan is a pretty bright guy with a lot of anti-spam experience and a good reputation. If they did it right then false positives don't just disappear into thin air -- the sender gets immediate notification from his own MTA and can use some other means to get his message through.
If they really did it right it'll reject most spam earlier than the DATA command, based on sender's IP address or RDNS, or the parameters of the HELO, MAIL, or RCPT commands. That way you don't waste bandwidth accepting the entire message (not such a big deal for spam, usually in the 1-4 KB range, but more important for worms, usually in the 20-80 KB range).
If you accept the spam for delivery (as most filters do) you've already lost. All the filter can do is categorize it; a human still has to check each message at some point.
My first reaction to this was "snake oil" and "FUSSP" but if this Matthew Sullivan is the same guy who runs SORBS then it's probably the real thing. (Not necessarily "first" or "revolutionary" but at least very efffective.)
"The CSS license pact has aided the success of DVDs because it has provided protection against illegal copying..."
"The MPAA, recognizing the damage the advent of digital file-sharing did to the music industry, ..."
That's a pretty open-and-shut case of the TSA clearly violating the constitution. Heads should roll for that one, literally, but of course nothing will come of it. What exactly is the penalty for a government officer, through intent or gross negligence, violating the constitution? How would it be prosecuted? I can't even think of any example of anyone ever getting in real trouble over breaking their oath to uphold the constitution.
Why do we have to compromise with extremists? Why do we have to outdo them at their own game? What kind of alternative do we need to propose? How about: airplane passengers and crew all willing to fight to the death to stop hijackers -- check, as of noon 2001-09-11. How about: cursory screening of all baggage for bombs -- check, as of what, 1970? That sure looks like enough air travel security to me.
Man, I still remember the panic I felt on 2001-09-11 when I envisioned the draconian police state of the near future. The hijackings themselves just made me mad as hell but I knew the dictator wannabes in our government would leverage it for all it was worth to ram through the next 50 years worth of encroachment all at once, and that was scary. Don't play along with their sick game, thinking we need to overreact to everything bad that happens.
(Note to partisans: Kennedy is not much better or worse than any other senator.)
I might also mention that it is possible (and potentially profitable) to hire programmers (and pay them) to produce free (as in gratis) software.
What is my time worth? Maybe... the existence of the software I produce! That is, I'm paid back for the time I spent writing the software by the fact that such software now exists. And if I couldn't develop and maintain it all by myself, then I need some kind of collaboration agreement with other programmers, like, say, the GPL. To put it another way: I can pay for the software I need/want with money, or I can pay for it with time spent programming.
(In case not: Company A hires Programmer B to write some software, A pays B a nice salaray, B writes the software, A gives away software for free to Customer C with the expectation that there will be some associated (paid-for) business between A and C.)
P5 - "586" - Pentium, Pentium MMX
P6 - "686" - Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium M (and some Celerons and Xeons)
P7 - "786" - Pentium IV (and some Celerons and Xeons)
Nobody (especially not Intel) ever calls them "586" etc but if they had stuck with the original generational numbering system (86, 186, 286, 386, 486) that's what they would have been called.
The P5 is characterized by dual-pipeline in-order execution; the P6 by out-of-order micro-op execution; the P7 by the trace cache and double-clocked ALUs.