The article makes it sound like IR-illuminated nanoshells in normal tissue would not cause damage. But this is untrue. The nanoshells must somehow be delivered to the tumor where IR-illumination makes them hot and kills all the neighboring cells.
The nanoshells are a good idea, but they do rely on some antibody/target/delivery mechanism to get the nanoshells into the right place. If the nanoshells migrate into the wrong location, they will kill healthy tissue.
BTW, there are other cancer therapies based on migrate-and-kill strategies. Some use chemicals that are preferentially taken up by cancer cells that can be made extremely toxic when exposed to light.
I suggest that nerds everywhere strip off their clothes and go outside. The resulting flare of brightness should knock those coronal mass ejections away from the Earth.
Either we do that or we cover the planet in SPF 45 lotion.
Re:Bluetooth directional antennas: 2-way gain
on
Spammed by Bluetooth
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· Score: 2, Informative
You are right and the grand-parent post is wrong. A directional antenna is bidirectional -- it both directs power to toward the distant reciever and amplifies power from a distant transmitter. If this was not true, then cantennas would not work for Wifi because Wifi, like bluetooth, requires bidirectional communications.
Bluetooth directional antennas.
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Spammed by Bluetooth
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· Score: 4, Interesting
As bluetooth operates in the same 2.4 GHz band as WiFi, I'd bet some people are hooking up Bluetooth devices to cantennas for greater bluejacking range.
I thought sking the government to control spam was a legitimate thing to do.
This, we agree on! But I disagree that a tax is an effective way to do it. I also, like you, suspect that government will have a hard time really enforcing spam laws.
Doesn't it make sense to have the people who are making use of most of the bandwidth of the internet simply pay taxes to support its infrastructure?
Yes it does (but the money should go to the telecomm companies that maintain the backbone, not the government). But bandwidth tax is not what you want, is it? Does this mean there should be a tax on file sharing or web surfing? I'm sure it only takes a few music files, flash animations, or a streaming video clip to equal a ton of spam. What you are talking about is usage pricing - charging the sender (or initiator) of a data transfer on a per-megabyte basis. This would not solve the problem, the cost of spam to the infrastructure is not that great on a per-spam basis.
Sure, taxes are blunt, but they are also relatively simple.
Hmmm... I'm not so sure about that. Where do you levy the tax? It would have to be at the sender's end so spam can't get on the network without paying the tax. How do you create a governmentally-recognized exhaustive list of internet gateways. If I get a domain name and set up a neighbor wireless LAN or server in my home, do I need to inform the government and start collecting taxes?
I could also see people setting up hundreds of inviting email addresses to harvest all the spam micro-payments.
A very good point and a very good idea! This would further ruin the economics of spam and drive spammers out of business. Dummy addresses would kill the response rate that spammers depend on (no click-throughs, no referal commissions, no revenues for spammers). I love it!
I don't think charging for spam, whether in a tax or in micropayments will ever stop it.
I agree,but micropayments will provide 4 advantages. 1) Recipient-controlled micropayments (in the $0.25 to $2.00 range) will cut the volume of spam, which is a good thing. 2) But the real advantage is that micropayments will compensate the recipient for having to deal with spam. 3) Micropayments also cope with the international dimension of spam -- it does not matter where you, you still have to pay to reach the recipient. 4) Micropayment can also help support the infrastruture because I would assume that the micropayment network provider would take a modest cut of the micropayment (say a 10% with a $0.01 minimum?).
national do-not-spam list
If it is anything like the national do-not-call list, it would contain too many exceptions to be useful (like exempting charities, political groups, and businesses that have a pre-existing relationship with you). If Congress wouldn't cut out those sources of spam telephone calls, I doubt they will cut out those sources of spam emails.
If Microsoft wants to create backward compatibility between XBox and XBox2, then they must find a way to run MS Pentium code on the G5 architecture. Unfortunately, the G5 lacks the big-endian/little-endian flexibility of the previous PPC processers and this makes the x86 hard to emulate on a G5. That is why Virtual PC won't run on the G5.
But with a motivated Microsoft, we might see Windows on a G5 with the coming of XBox2 (strange thought, that!)
Its common knowledge that tomatos can be grafted on to a wide range of plants in the Solanum family including potatoes, tobacco, Datura, etc. In fact the Russians made a tomacco back in 1956 (See Glavinic, R., 1956 (Vegetative hybridization between tomato and tobacco). Priroda (Nature), Leningrad No. 11: 98-100. (Russian)).
Now if we only had only had slashdot back in 1956.....
Yup, this is the biggie. Out-of-system senders would get an odious "join and pay-up" message just as you have described. But it is not as bad as it could be since once a person joins a micropayment network, they would never get another "join and pay-up" bounce message again. This is unlike some filtering/intelligent reply systems in which you might recieve a new hassle-factor bounce with every new recipient.
Re: What about the hiring manager who just got my resume from some recruiting firm?
This is a really cool scenario since it highlights the power of the micropayments system. If I were a hiring manager, I would set some modest, but significant, payment level (like $1 per resume). I would not whitelist anyone and I would tell all the recruiting companies to send "1 resume per e-mail". Now, it falls on the recruiting manager to actually filter the resumes and not send every resume in response to every job posting. Likewise, individual job seekers would become more selective. As a hiring manager, I would rebate payments to recruiters and individuals that sent in highly qualified resumes and keep payments from resume spammers. As a job seeker you might think that pay-to-apply really sucks, but if reduces the number of junk resumes that your resume ends up covered by, then I suspect it actually improves your chances.
What about automated e-mail, like the MTA bounce message I get for making a typo in the recipient line
Invalid/unknown user, mailbox, or domain bounces are impossible in this system because the recipient must be looked up by the protocol _before_ sending the message. The system must check the records of the recipient to determine the recipient's required payment. Bounces for other reasons (e.g., "quota exceeded", "virus detected") might be handled through a standardized set of return message codes. These bounces would need to be either handled by a code or secure message that prevents spoofing or exploitation (i.e., piggybacking a bounce message with spam).
what happens when the addresses of those senders change
Tricky! In a simple version of the system, when a whitelisted sender changes address, they would have to notify all their friends/business partners about the change and/or "pay-n-rebate" until rewhitelisted. In this way, its not any different from current spam-filters which can dump legitmate e-mails if a trusted sender starts sending from a different address. A more complex protocol would let a sender transmit a whitelist-modifying automated message to change addresses (or piggyback on their trusted "main" email address). This change-of-address/piggyback feature would need to be very secure to prevent hijacking.
I can imagine too many scenarios where I would miss something from a sender that's not on my whitelist
Is this any different from the current situation? My wife gets more than 100 spams per day (she has a 10-year-old e-mail address that some clients have publically posted, bless their hearts). Between aggressive filtering, and the crap that leaks through, she misses too many legitimate e-mails.
But a micropayment system would kill the economics on most spam to reduce the volume of it to a much more managable level. You would not need to rely on the whitelist or aggressive filters to let stuff into the inbox, people who pay would get into the inbox, people who spam would lose their money to you, new-found friends who send useful stuff would get their money back and could be put on the whitelist.
Thanks for forcing me to think more about this stuff!
The other main purpose of taxes tax isn't the government *doing* anything really except encouraging behaviors or industries and discouraging others (in this case spamming)
But this is a terribly crude tool that both fails to deter enough spam and penalizes legitimate uses of e-mail. It fails to deter spam because even if the tax were an outrageous $0.50 an e-mail, we'd still have spam. My snail mail box gets half a dozen pieces of spam (junk mail) per day. The $0.50 cost for printing, stuffing, handling, and mailing a piece of junk mail is no deterent to many marketers such as catalog retailers, timeshare hawkers, charities, mortgage brokers, credit card companies, etc. A $0.01 tax may weed out some spam, but too much of it carries such a high pay-off that it is profitable.
The tax would also punish legitimate uses of e-mail. The members of a family should have the right to send and receive e-mails without paying a spam-tax. A telecommuter should have the right to send/receive e-mail from his employer without paying some silly penalty tax. Innovative uses of e-mail (imagine the engines of long-haul trucks sending wireless e-mails on engine status, maintenance needs, etc.) should not be stifled.
Taxes are a very blunt tool -- no single tax level will balance the diverse uses and opinions about e-mail. That is why I'm suggesting that we give control to the recipient to decide how much spam costs and give control to the recipient to decide who gets free access.
Once you start putting in filtering options like that, I have to wonder if it's really all that better than current ideas.
Filtering, by itself, has three deficiencies.
1) Filtering does not address the bandwidth problem the way micropayments do. Filtering happens after the message arrives, payment occurs before the message is sent.
2) Filters suffer from both false positives (rejecting wanted e-mail) and false negatives (accepting spam).
3) FIlters are also subject to an ongoing arms-race -- spammers keep finding new ways to spell p3nis.
What does a micropayment really serve that a message sent back to the sender requiring an intelligent reply does not?
Micropayments are superior for 2 reasons:
1) Micropayments occur at send-time and incur no delays in reception. If you pay the money when you send the e-mail, then you can be sure the e-mail gets to the addresss (no gaurantee that the recipient opens the e-mail). In contrast, the intelligent reply system involves delays: I send a message, later I check my mail and find that the message did not get delivered because I've got this intelligent replay email from the recipient. If the sender is not online 24x7, the sent message is delayed.
2) But the greater flaw with intelligent reply is that it is potentially defeatable through automated, zero-cost mechanisms. I'm sure spammers are working hard to automatically parse the intelligent response e-mails or recognize the coded image. It may slow them for a time, but it does not solve the root of the problem - communications is too cheap.
Is eBay (and paypal as well, since we're talking micropayments) really a good example? When daily we hear tales of fraud and abuse on the system, and calls for help go unheeded by the administrators?
And there is no fraud in government???? Fraud is endemic to all human institutions. The only issue is what is the rate of fraud and how do you limit its impact on the victims.
Since I would imagine that most people would set a modest sender's fee in the neighborhood of $1 or less and most people send out very few emails per day, most sender accounts would be capped at $5 to $50 per day of charges. Maybe somebody might want to steal your senders account and send themselves money, but it wouldn't be an easy (or untraceable) way to make money. I suppose there is always the risk of someone hacking the account system, but then anyone who uses a credit card or has a bank account faces this risk.
would there be an upper limit to your per mail setting?
I would imagine that the micropayment service provider would cap the max payment to reduce the chance of fraud or limit liability in the event of fraud. Or the service provider might cap the max payment on the sender's side -- not letting a sender send an email to a $500 address if the sender's credit is poor or their account is under-funded. On the other hand, I could see some interesting business models come out of this service -- the tech support of a software company might publish a $20 email address (a good way to fund shareware too).
Could people I send email to be added to the white list for a one time reply?
The sophistication of the rules would be up the network service provider. If the system was based on open standards and an open network for transfering funds, then I could imagine multiple service providers offering different terms. For example one cut-rate provider might demand only a 5% cut of the micropayment (with a $0.01 mininum) for bare-mininum service. Another provider could offer very sophisticated sender analysis with continguent price tables, but charge 25% and a 0.10 minium.
but we still need the gov.
Absolutely! But government would play the same role as it does with the current credit card system or PayPal -- ensuring fair treatment, regulating abusive practices, mandating minium financial standards for service providers and providing a venue of ajudicating disputes.
"Wow, a cease and desist letter. This mail truly isn't worth it, I'm keeping the senders money. Good thing I put the payment level at $50."
LOL! And then the lawyers would just bill the client for it.
On the other hand, they could just send you the C&D via snail mail. Also, any new friends that aren't yet on your whitelist might balk at putting up $50 just to send that first e-mail to you.
Spammers when caught should have internet bans placed on them
I agree, but it would not do much good. For better or worse, the curent internet does not require proof of identity to get an account, set up a server, or send e-mail. And I'm sure privacy advocates would never allow that kind of traceablity to happen.
But if e-mail senders were forced to deposit money into a escrow account prior to sending an e-mail, they would have to steal the money (a definite crime) or pay the money to get their spam delivered.
This product was already out in a device called SoundBug. back in 2002.
I seem to recall that SoundBug had poor sound quality because most surfaces and structures have strange acoustic response patterns. But I'm sure that with a bit of clever processing (a microphone and a bit of FFT magic), one could estimate the transfer function of the speaker surface, create a inverse filter that corrects for its properties, and then apply the filter to the any sound for better output.
I am still sceptical when it comes to a private organization handling the transactions
Agreed! I am not 100% comfortable with the idea, either. The thought of Microsoft becoming the micropayment manager for the majority of the world's e-mail gives me the willies. I only think that private companies will do a better job than government -- whether they do a good job is another matter.
Perhaps private companies might form and administer these networks, but government might define minimum standards and create interoperablity requirements. To me, that leverages the strengths of both groups -- private companies are relatively good at creating some level of value that people are willing to pay for. Government is relatively good at creating some level of fairness that people are willing to vote for.
Many systems would be better than the current system in which the cost of communication is so low that people are encouraged to spam the system with communications that are worth nothing.
And how do you implement such a system without backing it up with government-level machinery such as laws, law enforcement and judicial process?
I agree that government and law form the underpinnings of our economic system. But government did not create eBay or credit cards. Government is moderately good at creating a regulatory context in which rights and responsibilities are balanced for the average and common good. Government is generally bad at creating innovative systems that are customized to the needs of individuals. Finally, government is ill suited to standardizing/regulating international phenomena like spam and e-mail.
No, it's better to make it a government controlled operation from the start so that the standards are set the same for everyone.
The point is that not everyone wants the same standards. Some people may not value their time or not care about spam and thus chose a low hurdle (and a 0.01 tax is a very very low hurdle for spam, IMO). Others might place an extreme value on their time or loath spam so much that they place a high value of their time. So the recipient should set the payment.
Moreover, it is not the government that bears the cost of spam, it is the recipient. The recipient's "labor cost" far exceeds the cost to the internet infrastructure. Therefore the recipient should get the payment.
Since the recipient should set the payment and the recipient should get the payment and the issue is international, I would think an organization like VISA would be better at running the program than any of the Earth's 180-some-odd governments.
Instead of a tax (why do some people always look to government for everything), why not use a micropayment system in which the sender must pay the recipient for delivery. If the sender is a friend or the e-mail is truly worth it, then the recipient rebates the sender's money. The recipient would set the payment level and publish it to the public.
For example, I would probably set my payment level at about 0.50 or $1.00, but if I stil get too many spams, then I would boost the charge to $2. I would also create a whitelist of people (friends, clients, mailing lists, and a few select businesses) who are automatically exempted. When somebody tries to send me an email, the MicroPayment Mail Transfer Protocol (MPMTP) would automatically inform the sender of the charge when they hit the send button. People not on the system would get automated return e-mail requesting that they join the system to complete the sending of their e-mail.
The point is that each person can decide how valuable their time is. Spammers (including those in Hong Kong) would be forced to target e-mails to only those people who would appreciate them.
I saw a similar botched attempt to hide info in a document from a networking company. It was intended to illustrate some web-based employee-finding application. Various sensitive information was "X"-ed out.
But on an older computer there was a delay between rendering the sensitive info and rendering the overlaid "X"s. The "hidden" data was in plain sight for a readable fraction of a second. A quick screen-grab at the right time could easily capture a static image of the employee data on the CEO and other employees listed in the figure.
Re: What makes you think the human brain cna handle living 20 years?
I would say that the current world state suggests that the answer is probably yes. As screwed up as some parts of the world are, much of the world does OK. Admittedly, the effective sample size of one -- we could have a nuclear exchange tomorrow, a nasty biological epidemic, or irretrievably trash the environment. Whether such an event could be ascribed to the brain not handling X years of life, or the brain not handling X billion people living together is another matter.
Re: Does having too many 30 year old hold back progress?
Some might argue that some of the Internet boom and bust rested on giving too much money to too many young people with too little experience. I would not go that far because I think society needs to have an emphasis on both dynamic exploration of new high-risk ideas and stable, standardized processes. Generally speaking, youth seems to advocate for trying new paths, while age tends to advocate for sticking to the tried-and-true paths. Both are needed (although a life-extended drug could shift the balance between the two groups for better or for worse).
As for objective/subjective reality -- most of science and engineering is fairly objective while most of human affairs is fairly subjective. The sticky part is the Nature vs. Nurture dividing line -- will a life extension drug be 100% likely to create undesirable biochemical changes in people's brains that create unavoidable, undesirable impacts on behavior. Or will our minds and society adapt to these changes and nuture new-found extended lifespan for the good of the many?
Re: Plato's cave my friend.
It is definitely is like Plato's cave. Science and extrapolation combine to project very fuzzy shadows in the minds of our future-facing eyes. Worse, different people hold the candle in different locations and thus see different shaped shadows. It then becomes up to the policy makers and scientists/engineers to navigate between "what should be" and "what can be."
I find the proliferation of Linux-based devices interesting. It would seem to suggest a growing base of devices that will attract application developers and create more reasons for both users and platform manufacturers to adopt Linux.
But I wonder if a common kernel is sufficient from the perspective of the end-user. In particular, I wonder how compatible the various flavors of Linux are when it comes to GUI-based applications that most people want to use. Unless all these various devices can run some common GUI, most of the real applications that people want to use will will be impossible to port between all these devices or hard to use if they get ported but use different interface guidelines.
Perhaps the volume of devices running Linux is less important than the volume of devices running a standardized UI layer and set of interface guidelines on Linux.
As I thought about this topic more, I came to suspect that it comes down to the brain remembering the top ranked memories in life (I'm not sure if N is 1,000 or 1,000,000 or more). The higher the rank of the memory, the more vivid and detailed that memory is. In childhood, everything is new and so every experience is a top-ranked memory. But at some point, new and intense memories start competing for the top-ranked spots (your wedding competes with your 6th birthday party). Formerly high-ranking memories get forced down the rankings by new memories. Unless you actively take the time to remember and refresh those old memories, they will fade (just like you suggested). Of course, the more time you spend on memory lane, the less time you spend out in the world creating new memories!
I agree with you about the switch between juvenile and adult modes -- its not that memory formation system breaks down as we age, its that it has been turned down by genetic switches. Regarding living til 500, I wonder if we can turn the learning mode back on every 50 or a 100 years so we can catch up on the latest technologies and cultural patterns? I also wonder what effects this would have-- would it obliterate many early memories or create new (and multiple) personalities?
I do believe that the brain has a finite capacity, but that people can take steps to improve memory efficiency. One tantalizing bit of brain research showed that the brains of smarter people actually consume less energy in thinking about a given problem than do the brains of others. Smart people don't think harder or have more brain power, they think more efficiently. I'm sure the same phenomenon applies to memory.
I don't know what one can do to improve memory efficiency. Is it like chosing a smaller block size for a filesystem (ala Apple's HFS+ vs. HFS for large hard disks) to reduce wasted space? Or is it more like using a better compression algorithm to remove redundancy in the memory? Or is it like a better directory structure or indexing system that improves retrieval with better organization? Or is it like defragmentation that reorganizes the storage media to open up larger blocks of contiguous free space for more memories? Or is like garbage collection that frees up resources that are being used by obsolete stuff? Or is it like none of these computer-oriented analogies because storing stuff in a neural net bears no resemblance to storing stuff on a hard disk?
This just goes to show the hideous complexity of all the myriad permutations of software, platforms, and peripherals that defines modern computing environments. All software for a mainstream platform is beta when it is first released because it is impossible for the maker to test every possible combination (or even most of the common ones). Even with lead user groups and the developer community testing the so-called "betas", there are always missed combinations of equipment. Only when millions of people try something do you see the real problems appear.
So don't buy new software the day it appears. Wait and see what problems it causes and then buy the x.x.1 update after a suitable wait to see if that's safe.
BTW, this rule applies to new pharmaceuticals. I'd recommend waiting at least 10 to 100 million doses and 5-20 years before taking any "new" medication unless it is a total blockbusting lifesaver.
Exactly! The young and old are very different, from a cognitive standpoint. The switch-over from the learning-oriented, creative brain of youth to the execution-oriented, robotic brain of age is set by our current lifespan. If we live for 500 years we will either need to delay that switch or face a very very very long life as a less-than-adaptable adult.
I also, like Kim Stanley Robinson (good books, BTW), wonder about the total capacity of the brain and whether it would be forced to dump early memories to store each successive lifespan of experience. I'm probably more pessimistic than KSR -- I suspect that the capacity of the brain is probably much less than a century.
Slashdot Mirror
The article makes it sound like IR-illuminated nanoshells in normal tissue would not cause damage. But this is untrue. The nanoshells must somehow be delivered to the tumor where IR-illumination makes them hot and kills all the neighboring cells.
The nanoshells are a good idea, but they do rely on some antibody/target/delivery mechanism to get the nanoshells into the right place. If the nanoshells migrate into the wrong location, they will kill healthy tissue.
BTW, there are other cancer therapies based on migrate-and-kill strategies. Some use chemicals that are preferentially taken up by cancer cells that can be made extremely toxic when exposed to light.
I suggest that nerds everywhere strip off their clothes and go outside. The resulting flare of brightness should knock those coronal mass ejections away from the Earth.
Either we do that or we cover the planet in SPF 45 lotion.
You are right and the grand-parent post is wrong. A directional antenna is bidirectional -- it both directs power to toward the distant reciever and amplifies power from a distant transmitter. If this was not true, then cantennas would not work for Wifi because Wifi, like bluetooth, requires bidirectional communications.
As bluetooth operates in the same 2.4 GHz band as WiFi, I'd bet some people are hooking up Bluetooth devices to cantennas for greater bluejacking range.
I thought sking the government to control spam was a legitimate thing to do.
This, we agree on! But I disagree that a tax is an effective way to do it. I also, like you, suspect that government will have a hard time really enforcing spam laws.
Doesn't it make sense to have the people who are making use of most of the bandwidth of the internet simply pay taxes to support its infrastructure?
Yes it does (but the money should go to the telecomm companies that maintain the backbone, not the government). But bandwidth tax is not what you want, is it? Does this mean there should be a tax on file sharing or web surfing? I'm sure it only takes a few music files, flash animations, or a streaming video clip to equal a ton of spam. What you are talking about is usage pricing - charging the sender (or initiator) of a data transfer on a per-megabyte basis. This would not solve the problem, the cost of spam to the infrastructure is not that great on a per-spam basis.
Sure, taxes are blunt, but they are also relatively simple.
Hmmm... I'm not so sure about that. Where do you levy the tax? It would have to be at the sender's end so spam can't get on the network without paying the tax. How do you create a governmentally-recognized exhaustive list of internet gateways. If I get a domain name and set up a neighbor wireless LAN or server in my home, do I need to inform the government and start collecting taxes?
I could also see people setting up hundreds of inviting email addresses to harvest all the spam micro-payments.
A very good point and a very good idea! This would further ruin the economics of spam and drive spammers out of business. Dummy addresses would kill the response rate that spammers depend on (no click-throughs, no referal commissions, no revenues for spammers). I love it!
I don't think charging for spam, whether in a tax or in micropayments will ever stop it.
I agree,but micropayments will provide 4 advantages. 1) Recipient-controlled micropayments (in the $0.25 to $2.00 range) will cut the volume of spam, which is a good thing. 2) But the real advantage is that micropayments will compensate the recipient for having to deal with spam. 3) Micropayments also cope with the international dimension of spam -- it does not matter where you, you still have to pay to reach the recipient. 4) Micropayment can also help support the infrastruture because I would assume that the micropayment network provider would take a modest cut of the micropayment (say a 10% with a $0.01 minimum?).
national do-not-spam list
If it is anything like the national do-not-call list, it would contain too many exceptions to be useful (like exempting charities, political groups, and businesses that have a pre-existing relationship with you). If Congress wouldn't cut out those sources of spam telephone calls, I doubt they will cut out those sources of spam emails.
If Microsoft wants to create backward compatibility between XBox and XBox2, then they must find a way to run MS Pentium code on the G5 architecture. Unfortunately, the G5 lacks the big-endian/little-endian flexibility of the previous PPC processers and this makes the x86 hard to emulate on a G5. That is why Virtual PC won't run on the G5.
But with a motivated Microsoft, we might see Windows on a G5 with the coming of XBox2 (strange thought, that!)
Its common knowledge that tomatos can be grafted on to a wide range of plants in the Solanum family including potatoes, tobacco, Datura, etc. In fact the Russians made a tomacco back in 1956 (See Glavinic, R., 1956 (Vegetative hybridization between tomato and tobacco). Priroda (Nature), Leningrad No. 11: 98-100. (Russian)).
Now if we only had only had slashdot back in 1956.....
You raise some very legitmate issues.
Re: Hassle Factor & Chicken-n-egg
Yup, this is the biggie. Out-of-system senders would get an odious "join and pay-up" message just as you have described. But it is not as bad as it could be since once a person joins a micropayment network, they would never get another "join and pay-up" bounce message again. This is unlike some filtering/intelligent reply systems in which you might recieve a new hassle-factor bounce with every new recipient.
Re: What about the hiring manager who just got my resume from some recruiting firm?
This is a really cool scenario since it highlights the power of the micropayments system. If I were a hiring manager, I would set some modest, but significant, payment level (like $1 per resume). I would not whitelist anyone and I would tell all the recruiting companies to send "1 resume per e-mail". Now, it falls on the recruiting manager to actually filter the resumes and not send every resume in response to every job posting. Likewise, individual job seekers would become more selective. As a hiring manager, I would rebate payments to recruiters and individuals that sent in highly qualified resumes and keep payments from resume spammers. As a job seeker you might think that pay-to-apply really sucks, but if reduces the number of junk resumes that your resume ends up covered by, then I suspect it actually improves your chances.
What about automated e-mail, like the MTA bounce message I get for making a typo in the recipient line
Invalid/unknown user, mailbox, or domain bounces are impossible in this system because the recipient must be looked up by the protocol _before_ sending the message. The system must check the records of the recipient to determine the recipient's required payment. Bounces for other reasons (e.g., "quota exceeded", "virus detected") might be handled through a standardized set of return message codes. These bounces would need to be either handled by a code or secure message that prevents spoofing or exploitation (i.e., piggybacking a bounce message with spam).
what happens when the addresses of those senders change
Tricky! In a simple version of the system, when a whitelisted sender changes address, they would have to notify all their friends/business partners about the change and/or "pay-n-rebate" until rewhitelisted. In this way, its not any different from current spam-filters which can dump legitmate e-mails if a trusted sender starts sending from a different address. A more complex protocol would let a sender transmit a whitelist-modifying automated message to change addresses (or piggyback on their trusted "main" email address). This change-of-address/piggyback feature would need to be very secure to prevent hijacking.
I can imagine too many scenarios where I would miss something from a sender that's not on my whitelist
Is this any different from the current situation? My wife gets more than 100 spams per day (she has a 10-year-old e-mail address that some clients have publically posted, bless their hearts). Between aggressive filtering, and the crap that leaks through, she misses too many legitimate e-mails.
But a micropayment system would kill the economics on most spam to reduce the volume of it to a much more managable level. You would not need to rely on the whitelist or aggressive filters to let stuff into the inbox, people who pay would get into the inbox, people who spam would lose their money to you, new-found friends who send useful stuff would get their money back and could be put on the whitelist.
Thanks for forcing me to think more about this stuff!
The other main purpose of taxes tax isn't the government *doing* anything really except encouraging behaviors or industries and discouraging others (in this case spamming)
But this is a terribly crude tool that both fails to deter enough spam and penalizes legitimate uses of e-mail. It fails to deter spam because even if the tax were an outrageous $0.50 an e-mail, we'd still have spam. My snail mail box gets half a dozen pieces of spam (junk mail) per day. The $0.50 cost for printing, stuffing, handling, and mailing a piece of junk mail is no deterent to many marketers such as catalog retailers, timeshare hawkers, charities, mortgage brokers, credit card companies, etc. A $0.01 tax may weed out some spam, but too much of it carries such a high pay-off that it is profitable.
The tax would also punish legitimate uses of e-mail. The members of a family should have the right to send and receive e-mails without paying a spam-tax. A telecommuter should have the right to send/receive e-mail from his employer without paying some silly penalty tax. Innovative uses of e-mail (imagine the engines of long-haul trucks sending wireless e-mails on engine status, maintenance needs, etc.) should not be stifled.
Taxes are a very blunt tool -- no single tax level will balance the diverse uses and opinions about e-mail. That is why I'm suggesting that we give control to the recipient to decide how much spam costs and give control to the recipient to decide who gets free access.
Once you start putting in filtering options like that, I have to wonder if it's really all that better than current ideas.
Filtering, by itself, has three deficiencies.
1) Filtering does not address the bandwidth problem the way micropayments do. Filtering happens after the message arrives, payment occurs before the message is sent.
2) Filters suffer from both false positives (rejecting wanted e-mail) and false negatives (accepting spam).
3) FIlters are also subject to an ongoing arms-race -- spammers keep finding new ways to spell p3nis.
What does a micropayment really serve that a message sent back to the sender requiring an intelligent reply does not?
Micropayments are superior for 2 reasons:
1) Micropayments occur at send-time and incur no delays in reception. If you pay the money when you send the e-mail, then you can be sure the e-mail gets to the addresss (no gaurantee that the recipient opens the e-mail). In contrast, the intelligent reply system involves delays: I send a message, later I check my mail and find that the message did not get delivered because I've got this intelligent replay email from the recipient. If the sender is not online 24x7, the sent message is delayed.
2) But the greater flaw with intelligent reply is that it is potentially defeatable through automated, zero-cost mechanisms. I'm sure spammers are working hard to automatically parse the intelligent response e-mails or recognize the coded image. It may slow them for a time, but it does not solve the root of the problem - communications is too cheap.
Is eBay (and paypal as well, since we're talking micropayments) really a good example? When daily we hear tales of fraud and abuse on the system, and calls for help go unheeded by the administrators?
And there is no fraud in government???? Fraud is endemic to all human institutions. The only issue is what is the rate of fraud and how do you limit its impact on the victims.
Since I would imagine that most people would set a modest sender's fee in the neighborhood of $1 or less and most people send out very few emails per day, most sender accounts would be capped at $5 to $50 per day of charges. Maybe somebody might want to steal your senders account and send themselves money, but it wouldn't be an easy (or untraceable) way to make money. I suppose there is always the risk of someone hacking the account system, but then anyone who uses a credit card or has a bank account faces this risk.
would there be an upper limit to your per mail setting?
I would imagine that the micropayment service provider would cap the max payment to reduce the chance of fraud or limit liability in the event of fraud. Or the service provider might cap the max payment on the sender's side -- not letting a sender send an email to a $500 address if the sender's credit is poor or their account is under-funded. On the other hand, I could see some interesting business models come out of this service -- the tech support of a software company might publish a $20 email address (a good way to fund shareware too).
Could people I send email to be added to the white list for a one time reply?
The sophistication of the rules would be up the network service provider. If the system was based on open standards and an open network for transfering funds, then I could imagine multiple service providers offering different terms. For example one cut-rate provider might demand only a 5% cut of the micropayment (with a $0.01 mininum) for bare-mininum service. Another provider could offer very sophisticated sender analysis with continguent price tables, but charge 25% and a 0.10 minium.
but we still need the gov.
Absolutely! But government would play the same role as it does with the current credit card system or PayPal -- ensuring fair treatment, regulating abusive practices, mandating minium financial standards for service providers and providing a venue of ajudicating disputes.
"Wow, a cease and desist letter. This mail truly isn't worth it, I'm keeping the senders money. Good thing I put the payment level at $50."
LOL! And then the lawyers would just bill the client for it.
On the other hand, they could just send you the C&D via snail mail. Also, any new friends that aren't yet on your whitelist might balk at putting up $50 just to send that first e-mail to you.
Spammers when caught should have internet bans placed on them
I agree, but it would not do much good. For better or worse, the curent internet does not require proof of identity to get an account, set up a server, or send e-mail. And I'm sure privacy advocates would never allow that kind of traceablity to happen.
But if e-mail senders were forced to deposit money into a escrow account prior to sending an e-mail, they would have to steal the money (a definite crime) or pay the money to get their spam delivered.
This product was already out in a device called SoundBug. back in 2002.
I seem to recall that SoundBug had poor sound quality because most surfaces and structures have strange acoustic response patterns. But I'm sure that with a bit of clever processing (a microphone and a bit of FFT magic), one could estimate the transfer function of the speaker surface, create a inverse filter that corrects for its properties, and then apply the filter to the any sound for better output.
I am still sceptical when it comes to a private organization handling the transactions
Agreed! I am not 100% comfortable with the idea, either. The thought of Microsoft becoming the micropayment manager for the majority of the world's e-mail gives me the willies. I only think that private companies will do a better job than government -- whether they do a good job is another matter.
Perhaps private companies might form and administer these networks, but government might define minimum standards and create interoperablity requirements. To me, that leverages the strengths of both groups -- private companies are relatively good at creating some level of value that people are willing to pay for. Government is relatively good at creating some level of fairness that people are willing to vote for.
Many systems would be better than the current system in which the cost of communication is so low that people are encouraged to spam the system with communications that are worth nothing.
And how do you implement such a system without backing it up with government-level machinery such as laws, law enforcement and judicial process?
I agree that government and law form the underpinnings of our economic system. But government did not create eBay or credit cards. Government is moderately good at creating a regulatory context in which rights and responsibilities are balanced for the average and common good. Government is generally bad at creating innovative systems that are customized to the needs of individuals. Finally, government is ill suited to standardizing/regulating international phenomena like spam and e-mail.
No, it's better to make it a government controlled operation from the start so that the standards are set the same for everyone.
The point is that not everyone wants the same standards. Some people may not value their time or not care about spam and thus chose a low hurdle (and a 0.01 tax is a very very low hurdle for spam, IMO). Others might place an extreme value on their time or loath spam so much that they place a high value of their time. So the recipient should set the payment.
Moreover, it is not the government that bears the cost of spam, it is the recipient. The recipient's "labor cost" far exceeds the cost to the internet infrastructure. Therefore the recipient should get the payment.
Since the recipient should set the payment and the recipient should get the payment and the issue is international, I would think an organization like VISA would be better at running the program than any of the Earth's 180-some-odd governments.
Instead of a tax (why do some people always look to government for everything), why not use a micropayment system in which the sender must pay the recipient for delivery. If the sender is a friend or the e-mail is truly worth it, then the recipient rebates the sender's money. The recipient would set the payment level and publish it to the public.
For example, I would probably set my payment level at about 0.50 or $1.00, but if I stil get too many spams, then I would boost the charge to $2. I would also create a whitelist of people (friends, clients, mailing lists, and a few select businesses) who are automatically exempted. When somebody tries to send me an email, the MicroPayment Mail Transfer Protocol (MPMTP) would automatically inform the sender of the charge when they hit the send button. People not on the system would get automated return e-mail requesting that they join the system to complete the sending of their e-mail.
The point is that each person can decide how valuable their time is. Spammers (including those in Hong Kong) would be forced to target e-mails to only those people who would appreciate them.
Its now been 3 days and there are only 5 comments. And people wonder why Bill Gates says that "you don't need perfect code for security." Bill knows that nobody cares, so why spend time on security.
I saw a similar botched attempt to hide info in a document from a networking company. It was intended to illustrate some web-based employee-finding application. Various sensitive information was "X"-ed out.
But on an older computer there was a delay between rendering the sensitive info and rendering the overlaid "X"s. The "hidden" data was in plain sight for a readable fraction of a second. A quick screen-grab at the right time could easily capture a static image of the employee data on the CEO and other employees listed in the figure.
Sometimes older computer can be more fun.
Interesting points.
Re: What makes you think the human brain cna handle living 20 years?
I would say that the current world state suggests that the answer is probably yes. As screwed up as some parts of the world are, much of the world does OK. Admittedly, the effective sample size of one -- we could have a nuclear exchange tomorrow, a nasty biological epidemic, or irretrievably trash the environment. Whether such an event could be ascribed to the brain not handling X years of life, or the brain not handling X billion people living together is another matter.
Re: Does having too many 30 year old hold back progress?
Some might argue that some of the Internet boom and bust rested on giving too much money to too many young people with too little experience. I would not go that far because I think society needs to have an emphasis on both dynamic exploration of new high-risk ideas and stable, standardized processes. Generally speaking, youth seems to advocate for trying new paths, while age tends to advocate for sticking to the tried-and-true paths. Both are needed (although a life-extended drug could shift the balance between the two groups for better or for worse).
As for objective/subjective reality -- most of science and engineering is fairly objective while most of human affairs is fairly subjective. The sticky part is the Nature vs. Nurture dividing line -- will a life extension drug be 100% likely to create undesirable biochemical changes in people's brains that create unavoidable, undesirable impacts on behavior. Or will our minds and society adapt to these changes and nuture new-found extended lifespan for the good of the many?
Re: Plato's cave my friend.
It is definitely is like Plato's cave. Science and extrapolation combine to project very fuzzy shadows in the minds of our future-facing eyes. Worse, different people hold the candle in different locations and thus see different shaped shadows. It then becomes up to the policy makers and scientists/engineers to navigate between "what should be" and "what can be."
I find the proliferation of Linux-based devices interesting. It would seem to suggest a growing base of devices that will attract application developers and create more reasons for both users and platform manufacturers to adopt Linux.
But I wonder if a common kernel is sufficient from the perspective of the end-user. In particular, I wonder how compatible the various flavors of Linux are when it comes to GUI-based applications that most people want to use. Unless all these various devices can run some common GUI, most of the real applications that people want to use will will be impossible to port between all these devices or hard to use if they get ported but use different interface guidelines.
Perhaps the volume of devices running Linux is less important than the volume of devices running a standardized UI layer and set of interface guidelines on Linux.
As I thought about this topic more, I came to suspect that it comes down to the brain remembering the top ranked memories in life (I'm not sure if N is 1,000 or 1,000,000 or more). The higher the rank of the memory, the more vivid and detailed that memory is. In childhood, everything is new and so every experience is a top-ranked memory. But at some point, new and intense memories start competing for the top-ranked spots (your wedding competes with your 6th birthday party). Formerly high-ranking memories get forced down the rankings by new memories. Unless you actively take the time to remember and refresh those old memories, they will fade (just like you suggested). Of course, the more time you spend on memory lane, the less time you spend out in the world creating new memories!
I agree with you about the switch between juvenile and adult modes -- its not that memory formation system breaks down as we age, its that it has been turned down by genetic switches. Regarding living til 500, I wonder if we can turn the learning mode back on every 50 or a 100 years so we can catch up on the latest technologies and cultural patterns? I also wonder what effects this would have-- would it obliterate many early memories or create new (and multiple) personalities?
I do believe that the brain has a finite capacity, but that people can take steps to improve memory efficiency. One tantalizing bit of brain research showed that the brains of smarter people actually consume less energy in thinking about a given problem than do the brains of others. Smart people don't think harder or have more brain power, they think more efficiently. I'm sure the same phenomenon applies to memory.
I don't know what one can do to improve memory efficiency. Is it like chosing a smaller block size for a filesystem (ala Apple's HFS+ vs. HFS for large hard disks) to reduce wasted space? Or is it more like using a better compression algorithm to remove redundancy in the memory? Or is it like a better directory structure or indexing system that improves retrieval with better organization? Or is it like defragmentation that reorganizes the storage media to open up larger blocks of contiguous free space for more memories? Or is like garbage collection that frees up resources that are being used by obsolete stuff? Or is it like none of these computer-oriented analogies because storing stuff in a neural net bears no resemblance to storing stuff on a hard disk?
This just goes to show the hideous complexity of all the myriad permutations of software, platforms, and peripherals that defines modern computing environments. All software for a mainstream platform is beta when it is first released because it is impossible for the maker to test every possible combination (or even most of the common ones). Even with lead user groups and the developer community testing the so-called "betas", there are always missed combinations of equipment. Only when millions of people try something do you see the real problems appear.
So don't buy new software the day it appears. Wait and see what problems it causes and then buy the x.x.1 update after a suitable wait to see if that's safe.
BTW, this rule applies to new pharmaceuticals. I'd recommend waiting at least 10 to 100 million doses and 5-20 years before taking any "new" medication unless it is a total blockbusting lifesaver.
Exactly! The young and old are very different, from a cognitive standpoint. The switch-over from the learning-oriented, creative brain of youth to the execution-oriented, robotic brain of age is set by our current lifespan. If we live for 500 years we will either need to delay that switch or face a very very very long life as a less-than-adaptable adult.
I also, like Kim Stanley Robinson (good books, BTW), wonder about the total capacity of the brain and whether it would be forced to dump early memories to store each successive lifespan of experience. I'm probably more pessimistic than KSR -- I suspect that the capacity of the brain is probably much less than a century.