Another clue is that they avoided the only question I was really interested in hearing: the issue of instant-runoff voting. Nader is the only one who even touched it. Kerry and Bush's "responses" talked about campaign finance reform (what? the question didn't even mention money)!
I will admit I didn't expect them to actually answer the question, but I am still angry that they didn't. This article is worthless to me.
What I've always been told about LCD tech (someone correct me if I am wrong) is that there is a reason why high-res LCD is so expensive: dead pixels. There are only so many that can be tolerated before the panel is useless, and they have to start over. The screens for phones are tiny, the chance of getting an unacceptable number of dead pixels (and increasing cost) is small.
Yes. We also get a special subscriber-clicky so we can send an email and warn the "on-duty editor" of factual inaccuracies, bad links, and blatant typos before the story goes live. I think the emails get teleported into outer space, though, because nothing ever gets changed.
Maybe/. and Microsoft are more alike than we thought!
Wish I was there. I could have given an example of at least one company that realizes that CDs don't last forever, and you have a right to the game you purchased: Blizzard
Send them the wrecked CD, a note explaining what happened and what you need, along with your contact info and ten bucks to cover shipping costs. They'll replace it. If it hasn't been 90 days yet since purchase and you can prove it, they won't even charge you at all.
Jack Valenti can't have it both ways, and he knows it: he's not an idiot. It's just that he worked for a bunch of greedy bastards, and was a well-paid mouthpiece for them.
It's not only email disclaimers which are annoying and stupid (not to mention a waste of bandwidth) - what about those messages which say "This email has been certified virus free by xxxxx"?
I've always assumed that was just advertising for the virus-scanner more than anything else. You know, to get people to use their product to certify THEIR outgoing email.
To turn that around: as long as Java remains "under strict control", it will be limited to what Sun can do with it. Want Java on a new platform? Wait for Sun to port it and support it. Want an urgent bug fix in JDK? Wait for Sun to do it.
From what I understand, though Sun still controls Java, the language isn't guided wholly by them anymore. There are other folks involved. Little thing called the "Java Community Process", if memory serves. And if you want a VM for your OS, you can make one. The specs are out there, you don't need Sun to hold your hand.
If they are incompatible, they arn't Java! They won't be used. If they are compatible, but better, they become the standard, all try to follow.
You have a point, but I'm not so idealistic. I'm not convinced that people will use something because it's better (IE?), nor that an implementation will better features will also be perfectly compatible. On another note, I'm surprised you mentioned the debacle with Microsoft, since their temporary perversion of Java supports my argument 100%.;)
Meritocrasy.
If anyone complains that I'm posting too much on Slashdot, I'll tell them I learned a new word today.:D
Yes because C/C++ are such unsuccessful disasters. We wouldn't want Java to be anything like those languages.
Are you aiming for +5 Funny, or -1 Flamebait?
Java isn't a purely compiled language, nor is it purely interpreted. It's a hybrid, and Java's similarity to C/C++ doesn't go far beyond syntax. I don't want to find out what happens when all of a sudden you can't rely on the guts of Java to be the same anywhere.
The specs are open, anyway. You can always make your own.
That's a disaster waiting to happen. Java needs to be under strict control, else we'll have a dozen forks that won't play nice with each other. Open Source and Free Software are all well and good, but when it comes to Java, I'm drawing a line in the sand. It's a noble goal, but not worth the risk of shattering the language. The "write once, run anywhere" mantra would go right out the window. It'll be like 1997 again.
Problem I always have with biometric identification is that it lacks something that passwords have: I can change my password, but I can't change my fingerprints. It's both more secure and less secure at the same time. Not better, just different, imo.
The moment X method becomes popular, it is immediately less effective, because crackers will know what to poke at. If there is a world of unfriendly machines out there, one of your best bets is being a moving target. Password studies are interesting, but the results (of how hard they are to crack) can't be valid for long.
Personally I think users should choose their own passwords and the system should limit them to >8 characters and a %age difference from their last 10 passwords. But I don't make up the policies.
I agree, but you do that and then your security will be circumvented by Post-it notes on monitors. We lost that fight before it even began.
My objection is simple, and has nothing to do with their monopoly: they are pissing all over the work of Tim Berners-Lee and anyone else associated with the creation of the web as it was originally envisioned. Hacking apart standards so that you can have control is wrong, period. Either put your content up, or don't. Get out of my browser.
An interesting read, but not exactly an objective review. He's whinging about something trivial that's part of getting accustomed to a new browser. The browser takes getting used to, and it not for everyone, but it's very customizable.
On the blog post you linked to, there's a comment about 1/3 of the way down by someone named "sas", doing a possible "review" of Firefox in the same manner that Opera was treated. I thought it was pretty on-target (and funny), especially the parts about the extentions.;)
It could have been an honest mistake. They say never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, of course. But some of us remember a few years ago when MSN blocked all non-IE browsers from accessing their site, and even went so far as to redirect people to a page telling them to download their goat-kissing IE browser so it would render properly.
I believe there is a way to make opera be recognized as IE.
Yeah, there is. It's under File->Quick Preferences, Identify as blah. Has Opera, IE, and three flavors of Mozilla. Even two shortcuts: Ctrl-alt-I for IE and Ctrl-alt-O for Opera. Easier than falling out of bed, and less painful.
I'm an Opera zealot if there ever was one. The issue with MSN was absolutely infuriating. For those who didn't RTFA: MSN.com sent a different style sheet to any browser that specifically identified itself as Opera. The style sheet had less content, and broke the layout of the page. It was one of the most asinine things I've ever seen, because it could only have been done intentionally.
I am also suspicious of Microsoft, but I doubt it has anything to do with the MSN debacle. All they did was just send a poorly-rendered page. It's underhanded, but most websites don't comply with W3C spec anyway. I suppose it's possible that Microsoft paid Opera to make it go away, but there's little proof.
Don't stop there. Maybe they could do a study on how obvious bias from independent studies ruin the credibility of legitimate independent studies everywhere. Please excuse the bad grammar in the preceding tongue-twister sentence.
Well, we finally got a Google topic, that's a good start.;)
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have no "faith" in Google. I just haven't been let down yet. If they ever trip, I'll be using another search engine quick as you can blink. That's what Google did to Altavista/etc, and what someone else will do to them if they don't stay smart.
There will be plenty of people throwing down the gauntlet, here, because image ads are evil. So this morning, I'll be the one who says: "no, wait, this is a GOOD thing".
I read the brief write-ups that the the summary linked to (no, I'm not new here). The first thing that came to my mind was: "gee, this is how things should have been done X years ago." It's a fairly brilliant extension of their already successful idea. Snatching words and serving ads isn't perfect (I mentioned earlier that if you did it here, people might think they'd make a killing selling copies of Beowulf), but it's better than the old "cast a huge net and pray" method. I'm curious how they are going to deal with the capability for annoyance when you throw images into the mix (please, please, static images only). I didn't see anything immediately, but I am sure they already have something in mind, given how popular their plain, stripped-down interface has made them.
Makes me wonder how the Internet community would treat banner ads today if they were targetted then the way Google does AdSense now. Maybe there would have never been a Punch the Monkey campaign, or banners disguised like Windows dialog boxes, seizure-inducing flashes, or irritating popups. More likely, my morning tea has not yet kicked in.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (X) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes (X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
I mean in order to comply, OIRB would have to provide identifying characteristics of their e-mails, right? Isn't that just what all the spam filter guys have been looking for?
You only have to look as far as your inbox. True to its name, if you sign up (heh) for OptInRealBig spam, you can be assured you'll get lots more spam from OIRB's "partners".
I think you answered yourself. Sure, it would help for a week, but then the method would become ineffective, and we'd be stuck with it. Useless, and with more overhead to boot. No, Scott Richter just needs to be shut down, period. You can't kill all of the cockroaches, but you can kill the big ones that can't run fast, and like to give TV interviews.
Slashdot Mirror
Another clue is that they avoided the only question I was really interested in hearing: the issue of instant-runoff voting. Nader is the only one who even touched it. Kerry and Bush's "responses" talked about campaign finance reform (what? the question didn't even mention money)!
I will admit I didn't expect them to actually answer the question, but I am still angry that they didn't. This article is worthless to me.
These guys are already on the job:
http://www.liftport.com/carbon.php
What I've always been told about LCD tech (someone correct me if I am wrong) is that there is a reason why high-res LCD is so expensive: dead pixels. There are only so many that can be tolerated before the panel is useless, and they have to start over. The screens for phones are tiny, the chance of getting an unacceptable number of dead pixels (and increasing cost) is small.
Yes. We also get a special subscriber-clicky so we can send an email and warn the "on-duty editor" of factual inaccuracies, bad links, and blatant typos before the story goes live. I think the emails get teleported into outer space, though, because nothing ever gets changed.
/. and Microsoft are more alike than we thought!
Maybe
Doesn't make it right to post spoilers, though. It's still bad form, even if everyone else is doing it to get the scoop.
Wish I was there. I could have given an example of at least one company that realizes that CDs don't last forever, and you have a right to the game you purchased: Blizzard
Send them the wrecked CD, a note explaining what happened and what you need, along with your contact info and ten bucks to cover shipping costs. They'll replace it. If it hasn't been 90 days yet since purchase and you can prove it, they won't even charge you at all.
Jack Valenti can't have it both ways, and he knows it: he's not an idiot. It's just that he worked for a bunch of greedy bastards, and was a well-paid mouthpiece for them.
Java isn't a purely compiled language, nor is it purely interpreted. It's a hybrid, and Java's similarity to C/C++ doesn't go far beyond syntax. I don't want to find out what happens when all of a sudden you can't rely on the guts of Java to be the same anywhere.
The specs are open, anyway. You can always make your own.
That's a disaster waiting to happen. Java needs to be under strict control, else we'll have a dozen forks that won't play nice with each other. Open Source and Free Software are all well and good, but when it comes to Java, I'm drawing a line in the sand. It's a noble goal, but not worth the risk of shattering the language. The "write once, run anywhere" mantra would go right out the window. It'll be like 1997 again.
Hmm, bottom of the keyboard, I'll have to try that. I'm still trying to figure out how he guessed that my password was "summer1", though.
Problem I always have with biometric identification is that it lacks something that passwords have: I can change my password, but I can't change my fingerprints. It's both more secure and less secure at the same time. Not better, just different, imo.
The moment X method becomes popular, it is immediately less effective, because crackers will know what to poke at. If there is a world of unfriendly machines out there, one of your best bets is being a moving target. Password studies are interesting, but the results (of how hard they are to crack) can't be valid for long.
Thank you for ending the analogy early. ;)
My objection is simple, and has nothing to do with their monopoly: they are pissing all over the work of Tim Berners-Lee and anyone else associated with the creation of the web as it was originally envisioned. Hacking apart standards so that you can have control is wrong, period. Either put your content up, or don't. Get out of my browser.
An interesting read, but not exactly an objective review. He's whinging about something trivial that's part of getting accustomed to a new browser. The browser takes getting used to, and it not for everyone, but it's very customizable.
;)
On the blog post you linked to, there's a comment about 1/3 of the way down by someone named "sas", doing a possible "review" of Firefox in the same manner that Opera was treated. I thought it was pretty on-target (and funny), especially the parts about the extentions.
It could have been an honest mistake. They say never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, of course. But some of us remember a few years ago when MSN blocked all non-IE browsers from accessing their site, and even went so far as to redirect people to a page telling them to download their goat-kissing IE browser so it would render properly.
:P
In this case, I'm calling malice.
I'm an Opera zealot if there ever was one. The issue with MSN was absolutely infuriating. For those who didn't RTFA: MSN.com sent a different style sheet to any browser that specifically identified itself as Opera. The style sheet had less content, and broke the layout of the page. It was one of the most asinine things I've ever seen, because it could only have been done intentionally.
I am also suspicious of Microsoft, but I doubt it has anything to do with the MSN debacle. All they did was just send a poorly-rendered page. It's underhanded, but most websites don't comply with W3C spec anyway. I suppose it's possible that Microsoft paid Opera to make it go away, but there's little proof.
Don't stop there. Maybe they could do a study on how obvious bias from independent studies ruin the credibility of legitimate independent studies everywhere. Please excuse the bad grammar in the preceding tongue-twister sentence.
Well, we finally got a Google topic, that's a good start. ;)
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have no "faith" in Google. I just haven't been let down yet. If they ever trip, I'll be using another search engine quick as you can blink. That's what Google did to Altavista/etc, and what someone else will do to them if they don't stay smart.
There will be plenty of people throwing down the gauntlet, here, because image ads are evil. So this morning, I'll be the one who says: "no, wait, this is a GOOD thing".
I read the brief write-ups that the the summary linked to (no, I'm not new here). The first thing that came to my mind was: "gee, this is how things should have been done X years ago." It's a fairly brilliant extension of their already successful idea. Snatching words and serving ads isn't perfect (I mentioned earlier that if you did it here, people might think they'd make a killing selling copies of Beowulf), but it's better than the old "cast a huge net and pray" method. I'm curious how they are going to deal with the capability for annoyance when you throw images into the mix (please, please, static images only). I didn't see anything immediately, but I am sure they already have something in mind, given how popular their plain, stripped-down interface has made them.
Makes me wonder how the Internet community would treat banner ads today if they were targetted then the way Google does AdSense now. Maybe there would have never been a Punch the Monkey campaign, or banners disguised like Windows dialog boxes, seizure-inducing flashes, or irritating popups. More likely, my morning tea has not yet kicked in.
This is the greatest checklist ever made. I owe the creator a donut and a big cup of coffee.
--
The parent post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
I think you answered yourself. Sure, it would help for a week, but then the method would become ineffective, and we'd be stuck with it. Useless, and with more overhead to boot. No, Scott Richter just needs to be shut down, period. You can't kill all of the cockroaches, but you can kill the big ones that can't run fast, and like to give TV interviews.