If a 2 channel audio frequency scope is all you need, then Oscilloscope 2.5 for Windows might do the trick. It uses the inputs on a standard sound card to grab 2 channels at up to 20 kHz. Disclaimer: I've not used it and a bit of Googling may find better alternatives.
Its slow, but is free (assuming you have the sound card).
Something tells me these firmware fixes will soon become mandatory when lax manufacturers decide that it easier to require a firmware update than design the product correctly in the first place. But I wonder how many of these firmware updating utilties will be OS-agnostic? I'd bet most will require Windows to fix the broken firmware of many new products.
Soon a new microwave oven will require Windows and an Internet connection. ARGH!
Are there any OSS projects or standards creation efforts for universal, OS-independent, product firmware updaters?
The heart of the problem is that the layered approach to networking separates the costly parts (all those fibers, wires, switches, & routers) from the valuable parts (all the applicaitons and content). The internet does such a good job of running any application on any physical network, that nobody is willing to pay extra for transport. I don't care if I get my broadband via DSL, cabole, wireless, or the powerlines. And since transport involves such high sunk costs, once companies overbuild networks, they find they have no choice but to charge less than their debt payments just to make some money.
What people do value is the applications, software, and the content. Therefore, the only way to make a profit on the transport layer is to own some of the application layer. This is why AOL bought Time Warner, Comcast wants Disney, etc.
Caller-ID for email will help prevent spoofing, but will only increase spammers use of zombies. I wonder if increased exploitation of Microsoft OS weaknesses (to create spammer platforms) will have a long-term detrimental effect on Windows or whether it will hasten adoption of Trusted Computing? I wonder if Microsoft wants ISPs to become so sick of zombie boxen that the ISPs will prohibit all but a few chosen OS options (read the lastest version of Windows) for connection to their networks.
For a very well-entrenched provider, making everyone sick of you old product is a good way to force them to buy your new product.
This may have changed, but Apple has (or had) the largest margins on their machines; something around 25-28% or so. This was the average along their entire line, with laptop having the top margins and iMacs eMacs having the lowest margins.
You are right that Apple's margins are in that range. According to Apple's Annual 10-K report, the company had a gross margin of 27.5%. But that is only their gross margin (the difference between the price of the item and the cost of the materials in that item). That figure leaves out a number of costs that Apple pays. Out of that 27.5% comes the 8.6% of sales that Apple spends on R&D. Another 19.5% of sales is spent on SG&A (Selling, general, and adminsitrative). Note that Apple's 27.5% is not even that high as the average across the S&P 500 is nearly 50%
This leaves Apple with a net profit margin of only 0.4% which works out to about $8 in profit on each of the 3 million computers they sold in 2003 (Compare that to Dell's 6% net margin to see who is really making money off their customers).
I won't excuse Apple for not warning customers about the return policy in more forceful terms. For custom configured purchases they really should have a bold-face warning in the purchase script that is triggered by what Apple considers "custom configured". Yet, nobody can claim that they make to much profit from their computers or fault them trying to contain costs.
If they can use this to measure very small forces on very small objects, they might be able to construct some interesting tests of gravitational fields or of quintessence. We all think gravity changes with 1/r^2 and is irrespective of material composition, but do we really know that this rule works for ALL ranges of mass, distance, and material?
Inquiring physicists want to know and this innovation could help them know it.
From the USPTO abstract: A method for a user to preview multiple virtual desktops in a graphical user interface is described. The method comprises receiving an indication from a user to preview the multiple virtual desktops and displaying multiple panes on the display. Each pane contains a scaled virtual desktop having dimensions that are proportionally less than the dimensions of a corresponding full-size virtual desktop. Each scaled virtual desktop displays with one or more scaled application windows as shadows if the corresponding full-size virtual desktop has one or more corresponding application windows that are active.
This really sounds similar to Apple's Expose with its ability to display multiple windows. And it is Expose if you are running a bunch of emulators on a Mac and each "window" is an emulated desktop.
I wonder if the next step for Qwest is to offer VoIP "phone" service on naked DSL and then claim that subscribers don't have to pay all those nasty federal, state, and local taxes. This tactic could level the playing field between VoIP upstarts like Vonage and RBOC behemouths like Qwest.
While I know that various search engines use various core ideas in search, I would think that a better way to search would use multiple approaches. Some combination of link-based analysis, keyword analysis, expert analysis, cluster-analysis, etc. rather than a single "this-is-how-we-do-it-here" algorithm.
The first big challenge in search is in disambiguating what the searcher really wants without requiring a long string of inputs. A multiple-algoithmic approach would let a search engine serve up hits gathered in multiple ways (e.g., hit number 1 was top ranked using mehtod 1, hit #2 was top ranked using methd 2, etc.). The search company could then see which algorithm provides the best hits for a given search (i.e., by watching which hits the searcher clicks on).
The second big challenge is all the nasty spammers and SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) who will try to use knowledge of any search algorithm to game the system and artificially raise their page rank for commerical purposes. This is probably one reason why Google cannot maintain dominance - any dominant search enegine attracts the concerted efforts of SEOs, thus ruining its search quality, thus ruining its dominance.
Yet a multi-algorithmic search engine could create a moving target that frustrates SEOs. By rotating the algorithms and even using negative weights on some algorithm results, a multi-algorithmic search company could cause high-ranked pages to plummet in rank over time. One week, a heavily keyworded site (e.g., one listing every possible keyword in metadata) might be at the top of the list, the next week it is at the bottom of the list. This raises the cost to sites trying to game the system. (The search company might even reward or penalize sites that change structure to often to either find the freshest sites or penalize the efforts of SEO).
Back in college, I used to love synthetic programming in an HP-41C. When it was first discovered, one had to use various evil processes (yanking a memory modules, corrupting a magnetic card). The result was programming instructions that HP never intended. With synthetic programming, one could access hidden memory locations, display strange characters, and emit unusual sounds (just be careful with "STO c"). I spent way to much time exploring all of the tricks and documenting what did what.
My favorite little synthetic program made the machine tick ominously like a Geiger counter.
Thanks for bringing back fond memories from 20 years ago.
IANAL, but why can't the Apache people add a clause to their license that explicitly proclaims compatibility with some rev of GPL? If the compatiblity clause supercedes other clauses in Apache's license, then there really is no legal grounds for anyone later proclaiming that they are incompatible.
I never trust people that say "trust me, the contract can be interpreted in the way that you want it to." If someone wants a legal document to have a particular property, then the document should explicitly state that it has that property. But again, IANAL.
Since BPL tramples on other RF applications, it suggests that one could sniff the packets. It looks like the adapters (like this one) do use encryption, but it is only 56-bit DES. Given that these connections are always-on, I wonder how long it would take to accumulate enough data to break the code. And if you know the email address of the victim, could one send a structured email that helps uncover the key?
I've always enjoyed the superior edit-rerun cycle that comes with many interpreted languages. You bang out a few lines of code, hit return and see the results immediately.
Compiled languages may be faster for silicon hardware, but interpreted languages are often faster for neural wetware. Given the decreasing cost of silicon and the increasing cost of labor, interpretted langauges should see increase usage for many "small" programming tasks.
Microwaving chocolate is a fun way to both measure the speed of light and get some edible artifacts of the patterns of the electromagnetic fields inside a microwave oven.
I can only hope and pray that wireless USB will be very very secure. The thought of someone with a nice high-gain cantenna and a datalogger is none to comforting.
I can also see all many nasty opportunities for system flakyness when a computer gets intermitt-tt-ttant contacts with other wireless USB devices and tries to establish a connection.
Optical gets bypassed by other denser tech?
on
Storing Light In Chips
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I wonder if optical will simply be bypassed by other, already denser technologies. Semiconductor feature sizes are an order of magnitude smaller than a wavelength of light -- giving them at least a 100-fold advantage (assuming the an optical computer could even have useful feature sizes at wavelength scales). Commerically available HD densities are over 100 bits per micron-square. And this does not even count on any new nanotechnologies in circuits or storage.
I'm sure that optical will have a role in the future. The ability to send ultrahigh bandwidth signals over long-distance fibers is extremely valuable. All-optical switching/routing would certainly improve latency. The ability of light beams to nondestructively pass through other light beams also makes it ideal for denser chip-to-chip and device-to-device interconnects. Finally, holographic memory storage migth have a future (although it would not surprise me if current HD densities are probably on par with expected future holographic information densities)
That's why I doubt that we will see an all-optical future. Other technologies already provide better densities in circuits and storage. Only in the realm of communications, does optical really shine.
As much as I personally value education, the organizations in the education arena (from K to PhD) do a very poor job of justifying their existence (and high tuitions or high taxpayer subsidies). Common sense and aggregate data does certainly suggest that salary correlates with education, but nobody seems to be able to routinely show that a particular school leads to a particular boost in success (except for some highly debatable test score schemes in K-12 education).
What are students paying for when they get degree X from school Y? And what are they really getting?
What about using colored contact lenses to change identities. The only way to make brown eyes look blue is with a fake iris. A less suspicious person gets a passport wearing a pair of these and then gives that pair of contacts to another less-reputable person. I wonder if German authorities would even look twice at a nice artificially blond, artificially blue-eyed disguised terrorist.
Halophiles vs. Viking Landers
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This raises the possiblities of halophiles living on Mars. On Earth, halophiles can live in up to 35% salt solutions. Pure water would kill these creatures --causing them to aborb water until they burst.
Its no wonder that Viking found no clear evidence of life on Mars, the low-salt water in Viking's nutirent broth probably killed any halophiles.
Or, for a more software interpretation, it's a function that takes a bunch of boolean parameters and returns a boolean. Anyone who's ever done any programmation or computer architecture should see why you can easily process anything with this.
Excellent point. You are right about the computational flexibility of neurons. They can represent a wide range of logical functions, although I believe that the single neuron is incapable of doing an XOR.
But a neuron is more that a Boolean circuit. Although a neuron seems like a two-state device (its either quiesent or its firing), it is more of an N-state analog device in which the pulse-rate encodes a numerical quantity (probably the equivalent of an 8 to 16 bit floating point number). That is why the dendrite field is like a giant numerical multiply-accumulate.
Neurons are much larger than transistors, but the two aren't really comparable. The main body of a neuron is usually around 25 microns (25000 nm) in diameter and runs at a clockspeed only in the kilohertz max.
A neuron is much more than a transistor-like switch. On the one side of the neuron's central body is a set of dendrites that connect to and gather input from other neurons. The average neuron might have a thousand of these dendrites.
The synapse at the end of each dendrite acts like part of a multiply-accumulate term -- taking the signal from an other neuron, multiplying it by a numerical coefficient and summing it into the total excitation level of the neuron's body. I suspect that the precision of this multiply -accumulate process is fairly low -- perhaps 8 to 16 bits.
Next, the body of the neuron has a long axon extending from it that sends the output of the neuron to other neurons (connecting to the dendrites of other neurons). This axon can be quite long, millimeters, even inches, in length. Thus, the axon is like an off-chip line driver with the potential to have a very high fanout (of a 1000 or more). (On a modern microchip, these off-chip connections are driven by much larger transistors than the small 65 nm ones used in computation).
Third, a neuron is not a static multiply-accumulate system. The coefficients on each synapse change in response to long-term adaptive processes. This process is computationally complex and includes cross-correlation of inputs between synapses and processing of other chemical signals in the brain. Cross-correlation alone could require the equivalent of several kilobytes to several megabyts of RAM. (We won't even get into the adaptive processes that include physical growth and removal of dendrites as this has no easy analog in hardware)
In summary, a neuron is more than a transistor-like switch. Its a free-running 1000 register multiply-accumulator with an off-chip line driver and a statistical processing engine that updates the coefficients on each of the multiply-accumulate terms. Thus, emulating a single neuron would require hundreds of thouands to millions of transistors.
You'll see them come up to some guy who seems like he's just minding his own business, and they'll totally abuse his rights -- although in their defense, in the end, the guy always ends up being guilty of something.
No one sees the COPS footage were the innocent person was abused, found to be innocent, and then let go -- that would not make good TV.
Although interesting, the system would seem to need access to a centralized database of senders and recipients (visibility only a large segment of email traffic). If the system does not have enough records on each sender's other e-mails' it cannot construct an estimate of the social network.
The scheme might work for people inside a very big network, like AOL. The system would easily notice that one address (either inside or ouside AOL) has sent inordinate numbers of emails to AOL addresses without prior traffic from those AOL addresses to that spammer/sender.
Bottomline - this is a ISP level solution and wil never be usueful to individuals or small businesses (unless they sell subcriptions to the blacklist).
Slashdot Mirror
If a 2 channel audio frequency scope is all you need, then Oscilloscope 2.5 for Windows might do the trick. It uses the inputs on a standard sound card to grab 2 channels at up to 20 kHz. Disclaimer: I've not used it and a bit of Googling may find better alternatives.
Its slow, but is free (assuming you have the sound card).
Something tells me these firmware fixes will soon become mandatory when lax manufacturers decide that it easier to require a firmware update than design the product correctly in the first place. But I wonder how many of these firmware updating utilties will be OS-agnostic? I'd bet most will require Windows to fix the broken firmware of many new products.
Soon a new microwave oven will require Windows and an Internet connection. ARGH!
Are there any OSS projects or standards creation efforts for universal, OS-independent, product firmware updaters?
The heart of the problem is that the layered approach to networking separates the costly parts (all those fibers, wires, switches, & routers) from the valuable parts (all the applicaitons and content). The internet does such a good job of running any application on any physical network, that nobody is willing to pay extra for transport. I don't care if I get my broadband via DSL, cabole, wireless, or the powerlines. And since transport involves such high sunk costs, once companies overbuild networks, they find they have no choice but to charge less than their debt payments just to make some money.
What people do value is the applications, software, and the content. Therefore, the only way to make a profit on the transport layer is to own some of the application layer. This is why AOL bought Time Warner, Comcast wants Disney, etc.
More than a few organisms use silica to create microscopic structual elements. These include horsetails (Equisetum), the stinging tree of Queensland and diatoms.
Caller-ID for email will help prevent spoofing, but will only increase spammers use of zombies. I wonder if increased exploitation of Microsoft OS weaknesses (to create spammer platforms) will have a long-term detrimental effect on Windows or whether it will hasten adoption of Trusted Computing? I wonder if Microsoft wants ISPs to become so sick of zombie boxen that the ISPs will prohibit all but a few chosen OS options (read the lastest version of Windows) for connection to their networks.
For a very well-entrenched provider, making everyone sick of you old product is a good way to force them to buy your new product.
This may have changed, but Apple has (or had) the largest margins on their machines; something around 25-28% or so. This was the average along their entire line, with laptop having the top margins and iMacs eMacs having the lowest margins.
You are right that Apple's margins are in that range. According to Apple's Annual 10-K report, the company had a gross margin of 27.5%. But that is only their gross margin (the difference between the price of the item and the cost of the materials in that item). That figure leaves out a number of costs that Apple pays. Out of that 27.5% comes the 8.6% of sales that Apple spends on R&D. Another 19.5% of sales is spent on SG&A (Selling, general, and adminsitrative). Note that Apple's 27.5% is not even that high as the average across the S&P 500 is nearly 50%
This leaves Apple with a net profit margin of only 0.4% which works out to about $8 in profit on each of the 3 million computers they sold in 2003 (Compare that to Dell's 6% net margin to see who is really making money off their customers).
I won't excuse Apple for not warning customers about the return policy in more forceful terms. For custom configured purchases they really should have a bold-face warning in the purchase script that is triggered by what Apple considers "custom configured". Yet, nobody can claim that they make to much profit from their computers or fault them trying to contain costs.
If they can use this to measure very small forces on very small objects, they might be able to construct some interesting tests of gravitational fields or of quintessence. We all think gravity changes with 1/r^2 and is irrespective of material composition, but do we really know that this rule works for ALL ranges of mass, distance, and material?
Inquiring physicists want to know and this innovation could help them know it.
From the USPTO abstract:
A method for a user to preview multiple virtual desktops in a graphical user interface is described. The method comprises receiving an indication from a user to preview the multiple virtual desktops and displaying multiple panes on the display. Each pane contains a scaled virtual desktop having dimensions that are proportionally less than the dimensions of a corresponding full-size virtual desktop. Each scaled virtual desktop displays with one or more scaled application windows as shadows if the corresponding full-size virtual desktop has one or more corresponding application windows that are active.
This really sounds similar to Apple's Expose with its ability to display multiple windows. And it is Expose if you are running a bunch of emulators on a Mac and each "window" is an emulated desktop.
I wonder if the next step for Qwest is to offer VoIP "phone" service on naked DSL and then claim that subscribers don't have to pay all those nasty federal, state, and local taxes. This tactic could level the playing field between VoIP upstarts like Vonage and RBOC behemouths like Qwest.
While I know that various search engines use various core ideas in search, I would think that a better way to search would use multiple approaches. Some combination of link-based analysis, keyword analysis, expert analysis, cluster-analysis, etc. rather than a single "this-is-how-we-do-it-here" algorithm.
The first big challenge in search is in disambiguating what the searcher really wants without requiring a long string of inputs. A multiple-algoithmic approach would let a search engine serve up hits gathered in multiple ways (e.g., hit number 1 was top ranked using mehtod 1, hit #2 was top ranked using methd 2, etc.). The search company could then see which algorithm provides the best hits for a given search (i.e., by watching which hits the searcher clicks on).
The second big challenge is all the nasty spammers and SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) who will try to use knowledge of any search algorithm to game the system and artificially raise their page rank for commerical purposes. This is probably one reason why Google cannot maintain dominance - any dominant search enegine attracts the concerted efforts of SEOs, thus ruining its search quality, thus ruining its dominance.
Yet a multi-algorithmic search engine could create a moving target that frustrates SEOs. By rotating the algorithms and even using negative weights on some algorithm results, a multi-algorithmic search company could cause high-ranked pages to plummet in rank over time. One week, a heavily keyworded site (e.g., one listing every possible keyword in metadata) might be at the top of the list, the next week it is at the bottom of the list. This raises the cost to sites trying to game the system. (The search company might even reward or penalize sites that change structure to often to either find the freshest sites or penalize the efforts of SEO).
There never can be one right way to do search.
Back in college, I used to love synthetic programming in an HP-41C. When it was first discovered, one had to use various evil processes (yanking a memory modules, corrupting a magnetic card). The result was programming instructions that HP never intended. With synthetic programming, one could access hidden memory locations, display strange characters, and emit unusual sounds (just be careful with "STO c"). I spent way to much time exploring all of the tricks and documenting what did what.
My favorite little synthetic program made the machine tick ominously like a Geiger counter.
Thanks for bringing back fond memories from 20 years ago.
IANAL, but why can't the Apache people add a clause to their license that explicitly proclaims compatibility with some rev of GPL? If the compatiblity clause supercedes other clauses in Apache's license, then there really is no legal grounds for anyone later proclaiming that they are incompatible.
I never trust people that say "trust me, the contract can be interpreted in the way that you want it to." If someone wants a legal document to have a particular property, then the document should explicitly state that it has that property. But again, IANAL.
Since BPL tramples on other RF applications, it suggests that one could sniff the packets. It looks like the adapters (like this one) do use encryption, but it is only 56-bit DES. Given that these connections are always-on, I wonder how long it would take to accumulate enough data to break the code. And if you know the email address of the victim, could one send a structured email that helps uncover the key?
I've always enjoyed the superior edit-rerun cycle that comes with many interpreted languages. You bang out a few lines of code, hit return and see the results immediately.
Compiled languages may be faster for silicon hardware, but interpreted languages are often faster for neural wetware. Given the decreasing cost of silicon and the increasing cost of labor, interpretted langauges should see increase usage for many "small" programming tasks.
Microwaving chocolate is a fun way to both measure the speed of light and get some edible artifacts of the patterns of the electromagnetic fields inside a microwave oven.
Speed? 480 Mbps (USB 2.0 equivalent)
Security? unknown (better be good)
Power requirements?100-300 mW
Range? 10 meters
Cost? unknown
Number of Devices? 127
I can only hope and pray that wireless USB will be very very secure. The thought of someone with a nice high-gain cantenna and a datalogger is none to comforting.
I can also see all many nasty opportunities for system flakyness when a computer gets intermitt-tt-ttant contacts with other wireless USB devices and tries to establish a connection.
I wonder if optical will simply be bypassed by other, already denser technologies. Semiconductor feature sizes are an order of magnitude smaller than a wavelength of light -- giving them at least a 100-fold advantage (assuming the an optical computer could even have useful feature sizes at wavelength scales). Commerically available HD densities are over 100 bits per micron-square. And this does not even count on any new nanotechnologies in circuits or storage.
I'm sure that optical will have a role in the future. The ability to send ultrahigh bandwidth signals over long-distance fibers is extremely valuable. All-optical switching/routing would certainly improve latency. The ability of light beams to nondestructively pass through other light beams also makes it ideal for denser chip-to-chip and device-to-device interconnects. Finally, holographic memory storage migth have a future (although it would not surprise me if current HD densities are probably on par with expected future holographic information densities)
That's why I doubt that we will see an all-optical future. Other technologies already provide better densities in circuits and storage. Only in the realm of communications, does optical really shine.
As much as I personally value education, the organizations in the education arena (from K to PhD) do a very poor job of justifying their existence (and high tuitions or high taxpayer subsidies). Common sense and aggregate data does certainly suggest that salary correlates with education, but nobody seems to be able to routinely show that a particular school leads to a particular boost in success (except for some highly debatable test score schemes in K-12 education).
What are students paying for when they get degree X from school Y? And what are they really getting?
What about using colored contact lenses to change identities. The only way to make brown eyes look blue is with a fake iris. A less suspicious person gets a passport wearing a pair of these and then gives that pair of contacts to another less-reputable person. I wonder if German authorities would even look twice at a nice artificially blond, artificially blue-eyed disguised terrorist.
This raises the possiblities of halophiles living on Mars. On Earth, halophiles can live in up to 35% salt solutions. Pure water would kill these creatures --causing them to aborb water until they burst.
Its no wonder that Viking found no clear evidence of life on Mars, the low-salt water in Viking's nutirent broth probably killed any halophiles.
Or, for a more software interpretation, it's a function that takes a bunch of boolean parameters and returns a boolean. Anyone who's ever done any programmation or computer architecture should see why you can easily process anything with this.
Excellent point. You are right about the computational flexibility of neurons. They can represent a wide range of logical functions, although I believe that the single neuron is incapable of doing an XOR.
But a neuron is more that a Boolean circuit. Although a neuron seems like a two-state device (its either quiesent or its firing), it is more of an N-state analog device in which the pulse-rate encodes a numerical quantity (probably the equivalent of an 8 to 16 bit floating point number). That is why the dendrite field is like a giant numerical multiply-accumulate.
Neurons are much larger than transistors, but the two aren't really comparable. The main body of a neuron is usually around 25 microns (25000 nm) in diameter and runs at a clockspeed only in the kilohertz max.
A neuron is much more than a transistor-like switch. On the one side of the neuron's central body is a set of dendrites that connect to and gather input from other neurons. The average neuron might have a thousand of these dendrites.
The synapse at the end of each dendrite acts like part of a multiply-accumulate term -- taking the signal from an other neuron, multiplying it by a numerical coefficient and summing it into the total excitation level of the neuron's body. I suspect that the precision of this multiply -accumulate process is fairly low -- perhaps 8 to 16 bits.
Next, the body of the neuron has a long axon extending from it that sends the output of the neuron to other neurons (connecting to the dendrites of other neurons). This axon can be quite long, millimeters, even inches, in length. Thus, the axon is like an off-chip line driver with the potential to have a very high fanout (of a 1000 or more). (On a modern microchip, these off-chip connections are driven by much larger transistors than the small 65 nm ones used in computation).
Third, a neuron is not a static multiply-accumulate system. The coefficients on each synapse change in response to long-term adaptive processes. This process is computationally complex and includes cross-correlation of inputs between synapses and processing of other chemical signals in the brain. Cross-correlation alone could require the equivalent of several kilobytes to several megabyts of RAM. (We won't even get into the adaptive processes that include physical growth and removal of dendrites as this has no easy analog in hardware)
In summary, a neuron is more than a transistor-like switch. Its a free-running 1000 register multiply-accumulator with an off-chip line driver and a statistical processing engine that updates the coefficients on each of the multiply-accumulate terms. Thus, emulating a single neuron would require hundreds of thouands to millions of transistors.
You'll see them come up to some guy who seems like he's just minding his own business, and they'll totally abuse his rights -- although in their defense, in the end, the guy always ends up being guilty of something. No one sees the COPS footage were the innocent person was abused, found to be innocent, and then let go -- that would not make good TV.
Although interesting, the system would seem to need access to a centralized database of senders and recipients (visibility only a large segment of email traffic). If the system does not have enough records on each sender's other e-mails' it cannot construct an estimate of the social network.
The scheme might work for people inside a very big network, like AOL. The system would easily notice that one address (either inside or ouside AOL) has sent inordinate numbers of emails to AOL addresses without prior traffic from those AOL addresses to that spammer/sender.
Bottomline - this is a ISP level solution and wil never be usueful to individuals or small businesses (unless they sell subcriptions to the blacklist).