Great! Instantly convert Disney flicks into educational films about personal responsibility. Instead of having to squirm through the part where Nemo's mom is killed, they can watch their REAL mother being grilled by police officers!
No, this is exactly the reverse of what happens. The so-called ethical ISP loses customers because it's mailsystem is castrated. The spam-host ISP gains customers because it doesn't have the same problems. Who do you know that checks mail headers trying to see if spammers are sending from their own ISP? When was the last time you even bothered to look at spam headers?
Blacklisting needs to be refined to the point where it eliminates more false positives or at least offers a better way to check your own addresses. Until the system is improved and admins are educated about proper use, it's not going to be used frequently enough to matter, and will die off for lack of interest.
What? Did all other Linux distributions suddenly drop off the face of the planet? And is it SO BAD to use a slightly older version that's proven its worth? There's still Mandrake, Slackware, Debian and Gentoo/BSD. Those are the major ones, and there are how many dozens of small-scale distros that are kept current?
It's cute how so many Linux users smirk knowingly when MS users cry about the lack of alternatives, then turn around and do the exact same thing.
So if someone breaks into your house because the door is unlocked, they aren't at fault at all? What if you did lock up, but they broke in anyway, are you at fault because you didn't try hard enough to keep them out?
I know this is a tired and pathetic analogy, but it's correct here. No amount of encryption will stop someone from breaking the code and selling transmitters. Since there's no legitimate use for them, the only reason to even have one in your car is intent to be a complete asshole.
As to how disruptive these things are, not much info exists, but based on the common demand for radar detectors, these will gain frequent use, quite easily to the point where they totally screw up traffic control. I'm willing to sacrifice my right to wave around IR transmitters in exchange for the right of emergency vehicles to get around me, so I don't mind them being illegal.
"Use us exclusively or pay $50 a piece more for Windows."
This is hugely important, as it's the most enforceable part of the antitrust argument. Dictating who you can or can't have business partnerships with is an unreasonable restriction. Forget browser integration and market dominance, those are too vague anyway. Heck, the browser wars are hardly an argument anymore, users WANT to have pre-installed utilities.
Punishment is a difficult option though. Unless police can adequately prove that YOU are the one triggering the light, there's too much room for pedestrian pranksters. It also adds significant cost which may not be funded by the fines collected. Cameras would definitely be a deterrent, but putting up cameras that can take a large-angle photo at decent resolution, and hiring someone to scan each picture looking for suspect license plates would be outrageously expensive.
Arg, didn't mean to diss the parent, hit the wrong reply level.
Anyway, I have measured it vaguely myself.
Any time I see some jerk weaving up behind me I'll do everything in my power to give him an aneurysm for being so hostile and impatient. I get in the way, I slow down to the speed limit in HOV lanes, anything I can to make them frantically swerve and try to figure out if they'll be able to get past the flow of traffic or not. So I get a pretty good look at the impatient driver, and once they manage to slip past I go back to driving normally, usually to see them take an exit as I go past 10-20 miles later. Even after fighting so hard to get ahead, the act of slowing down for a red light wastes more time than they gained.
Wrong. This idea is most of the hassles of driving. The asshole that weaves in and out of traffic constantly slows down everyone else as they re-adjust around him, but it almost never gets him much farther ahead. Sure, you can shove your way up and be three cars ahead of where you were before, but how much time does that save? 10 seconds?
Traffic moves in bursts, in each lane, on each road, regardless of what's happening. If everyone would just shut up, deal with it, and move along *when it's their turn*, traffic would be a hell of a lot more fluid and everyone would get there faster.
Ugh... how awful, he doesn't even use florid language to try and disguise his ideas as something more interesting.
At least fools like Captain Cyborgthe genius are good for entertainment after their technology bombs out.
How are the nanobots going to store and process their instruction sets?
It's fine to create a tiny robot that does a factory-worker type job, but if it can only do one task repeated indefinitely, it will be drastically less useful. And hardly dangerous at all.
I don't think page hits are going to tank spammers, though it is a nice step toward making them pay some costs associated like postal junkmail. Unfortunately, you still have to pay it too. Granted, it's not much out of my 20GB/mo quota, but it's only making the sender and receiver pay equally.
I'd rather just directly kill any message that tries to open external HTML. Even if we have to pay bandwidth cost equally for the message, the spammers still come out ahead in terms of time wasted.
Ugh... My number-one recommendation would be to NEVER trust an Anonymous Coward's advice, though these two seem to be ok. There are a lot of utilities out there which act like spyware protection but will happily infect your machine with all the crap you're trying to prevent.
Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, HijackThis, etc are all good, and most have free and non-free versions depending on your company's policies.
Also, disabling the autoinstall ability and third-party browser extensions in IE help a good amount of userland damage. Just run Windowsupdate once first, so that it can get the ActiveX install done before it's disabled.
Spyware writers who distribute their material as source code are to be commended for honesty, but that's gotta be the stupidest method of distribution possible.
The whole point of spyware is to fool users into installing it, not give full disclosure and explain exactly what they intend to hijack on the system.
"Beginning a technology wave that will define the digital decade"
Hey, why not? If you consider the 'digital decade' to have started around 93 or 94 when the internet took off, the slogan is perfect!
It starts out new and fascinating, but gradually becomes more and more a part of your everyday life. You become dependent on the things that used to be newfangled fluff, and begin to demand more of them. You install a Bonzi Buddy. Then things start to go wrong. It's not entirely clear at first, you know that things shouldn't be quite so easy but you can't let go now. You install Webshots. The teetering crash looms high, and you know it's coming for you soon. In a last effort to stabilize, you shut down unneeded subsystems and plug the drain of resources, but it's too late, and in a psychotic flurry of desperation everything falls apart.
Bitter, disillusioned and poverty-stricken, you start over from nothing...
Fusion of heavier atoms is endothermic, so any waste we'd care to dump into the sun would accelerate its death. Hydrogen fusion generates energy, but uranium *fission* does too. IIRC, the breakpont may even be as low on the periodic table as beryllium.
What if you purchased rural property and wanted to build a cabin there, and there is no bridge crossing a creek along the way. Using a hummer and an appropriate trailer will be very useful in hauling building materials to the site and is cheaper than using helicopters or building a dirt road suitable for larger trucks.
I suppose you couldn't hire a carpenter to build a basic bridge to that remote luxury property? Any path that requires serious 4x4 ability will be off-limits to a trailer anyway, so you'll have to tend to that road for construction trips. Well gee, now that you have a road, there's not much point in an extravagant SUV, is there? A plain pickup truck will do fine for hauling materials, and it'll probably still have air conditioning.
Sorry to beat on the issue even more, but I really don't have any sympathy when it comes to this fake perceived need. It's been created by marketing, obstacles are rarely severe enough to require such a vehicle. I go off-road in my basic 4-door family car, and I worry about my old tires more than the car's clearance.
Only when touted by people who can't pronounce it correctly. There is nothing wrong with nuclear power! Using nuclear reactions as a tool for manipulating other process is fine too, it's a perfectly happy application of science.
Even nuclear waste isn't such a big deal. I don't understand the problem with putting radioactive materials in storage facilities deep underground. Hazardous chemicals and carcinogens can be trouble, but things like stacks of depleted uranium? Underground. Like, where it's naturally located? Or do we mine uranium from the sky?
First, it's not very clear about the 'respond' part. It could be as simple as them requesting clarification of exactly what was offered.
Second, you're overstating the 5%. This isn't saying that the surveyed respond to 5% of their junk mail, it's just that a couple of them have replied at all, even once, in the entire history of their internet usage.
Like the Do-Not-Call database, I fully reject the idea that restricting advertisement is a crippling of free speech. If you want to buy these crazy products, you're easily able to go out and find them without having advertisements pushed to you unwillingly. They can be advertised all over web sites (hello, X10?) without any such legal restrictions, even for illegal products like prescriptions and 419 scams.
This is not a matter of legal tyrrany, users WANT to be able to control this crap but they aren't easily able to on their own without better technical knowledge.
It's certainly both, but you're forgetting dictionary attacks. I see quite a few attempts on my own personal domain, known ISP domains can just be signed up for the whole phonebook using combinations of common first and last names/initials.
My non-dictionary mailbox on a personal domain gets 4 or 5 junk messages a week. My firstinitial/lastname account at my ISP gets at *least* 500 a week.
Part of that can be attributed to whoever had the address in the past, but I see plenty of messages that are CC'd to similar names and there's no ISP directory they could have been harvested from.
No kidding. The Weekly World News is so much better! I do occasionally buy the rags, just to wonder at the horrible photoshopping and 'new scientician evidence!'.
Are they tryng to see just how much crazy shit they can get away with? Is it a subtle way of insulting their own readers? Do they expect anyone to believe it at all, or are they just having fun?
Nope, doesn't work. There are a lot of problems that the sci-fi writes happily ignore.
You're forgetting the factor of yourself. Sure, you can race to the end of the universe and all time, but what happens to you when the big-crunch event arrives? Hopefully you've thought far enough ahead that you don't get sucked back into single-point mass and die. But then you're sitting outside in an alternate or subatomic existence. Conservation of matter/energy fails. So either the universe never completely implodes, or when it re-emerges, conditions are slightly different and the universe is completely rearranged.
Even taking the leap of assuming that everything will be ok, how will you ever gauge time in the new universe to know when to come out of stasis? How will you find Earth? (objects in space do move, after all)
Maybe you haven't noticed, but platters tend to be extremely brittle. Not terribly easy to initially break, but once they do it'll change from a game of frisbee to a game of Operation.
Decent method, but if you're already in there adding pieces, why not just go for a regular keylock? Turning the lock to an open position connects a circuit between the power button and the PSU.
Heck, on some cases you might as well just rip out the power button and bore it out to a circular hole for the lock. Rip a pair of spring-tabs out of the battery compartment from whatever you can find in the nearest dumpster. Glue one tab to the lock tongue, the and other to a point where it will rotate and make contact. Save yourself the tedium of even pushing a button, just turn the key on like a car ignition and set it back to the inactive position.
For the extra geek mile, find some little sound unit that can be wired into the completed circuit and trigger a car-revving sound effect.
You'd need a pretty good swinging arm to really destroy data with a hammer. Unless the drive is spinning, you might make some pits where the write-heads are sitting but nothing more.
If you're serious about data wipes, just wire a little strip of homebrew plastic explosive onto the top read-arm and seal the drive back up. Fully broken drive platters should be far beyond recoverable no matter how patient someone is.
The over-paranoid shouldn't have massive incendiary devices on standby when someone prank-calls a pizza delivery at 1 AM.
Slashdot Mirror
Just think how much more unpopular these images would be if Chandra's photos caused cancer.
Great! Instantly convert Disney flicks into educational films about personal responsibility. Instead of having to squirm through the part where Nemo's mom is killed, they can watch their REAL mother being grilled by police officers!
No, this is exactly the reverse of what happens. The so-called ethical ISP loses customers because it's mailsystem is castrated. The spam-host ISP gains customers because it doesn't have the same problems. Who do you know that checks mail headers trying to see if spammers are sending from their own ISP? When was the last time you even bothered to look at spam headers?
Blacklisting needs to be refined to the point where it eliminates more false positives or at least offers a better way to check your own addresses. Until the system is improved and admins are educated about proper use, it's not going to be used frequently enough to matter, and will die off for lack of interest.
What? Did all other Linux distributions suddenly drop off the face of the planet? And is it SO BAD to use a slightly older version that's proven its worth? There's still Mandrake, Slackware, Debian and Gentoo/BSD. Those are the major ones, and there are how many dozens of small-scale distros that are kept current?
It's cute how so many Linux users smirk knowingly when MS users cry about the lack of alternatives, then turn around and do the exact same thing.
So if someone breaks into your house because the door is unlocked, they aren't at fault at all? What if you did lock up, but they broke in anyway, are you at fault because you didn't try hard enough to keep them out?
I know this is a tired and pathetic analogy, but it's correct here. No amount of encryption will stop someone from breaking the code and selling transmitters. Since there's no legitimate use for them, the only reason to even have one in your car is intent to be a complete asshole.
As to how disruptive these things are, not much info exists, but based on the common demand for radar detectors, these will gain frequent use, quite easily to the point where they totally screw up traffic control. I'm willing to sacrifice my right to wave around IR transmitters in exchange for the right of emergency vehicles to get around me, so I don't mind them being illegal.
"Use us exclusively or pay $50 a piece more for Windows."
This is hugely important, as it's the most enforceable part of the antitrust argument. Dictating who you can or can't have business partnerships with is an unreasonable restriction. Forget browser integration and market dominance, those are too vague anyway. Heck, the browser wars are hardly an argument anymore, users WANT to have pre-installed utilities.
Punishment is a difficult option though. Unless police can adequately prove that YOU are the one triggering the light, there's too much room for pedestrian pranksters. It also adds significant cost which may not be funded by the fines collected. Cameras would definitely be a deterrent, but putting up cameras that can take a large-angle photo at decent resolution, and hiring someone to scan each picture looking for suspect license plates would be outrageously expensive.
Arg, didn't mean to diss the parent, hit the wrong reply level.
Anyway, I have measured it vaguely myself.
Any time I see some jerk weaving up behind me I'll do everything in my power to give him an aneurysm for being so hostile and impatient. I get in the way, I slow down to the speed limit in HOV lanes, anything I can to make them frantically swerve and try to figure out if they'll be able to get past the flow of traffic or not. So I get a pretty good look at the impatient driver, and once they manage to slip past I go back to driving normally, usually to see them take an exit as I go past 10-20 miles later. Even after fighting so hard to get ahead, the act of slowing down for a red light wastes more time than they gained.
Wrong. This idea is most of the hassles of driving. The asshole that weaves in and out of traffic constantly slows down everyone else as they re-adjust around him, but it almost never gets him much farther ahead. Sure, you can shove your way up and be three cars ahead of where you were before, but how much time does that save? 10 seconds?
Traffic moves in bursts, in each lane, on each road, regardless of what's happening. If everyone would just shut up, deal with it, and move along *when it's their turn*, traffic would be a hell of a lot more fluid and everyone would get there faster.
Ugh... how awful, he doesn't even use florid language to try and disguise his ideas as something more interesting.
At least fools like Captain Cyborg the genius are good for entertainment after their technology bombs out.
You forgor a biggie:
How are the nanobots going to store and process their instruction sets?
It's fine to create a tiny robot that does a factory-worker type job, but if it can only do one task repeated indefinitely, it will be drastically less useful. And hardly dangerous at all.
I don't think page hits are going to tank spammers, though it is a nice step toward making them pay some costs associated like postal junkmail. Unfortunately, you still have to pay it too. Granted, it's not much out of my 20GB/mo quota, but it's only making the sender and receiver pay equally.
I'd rather just directly kill any message that tries to open external HTML. Even if we have to pay bandwidth cost equally for the message, the spammers still come out ahead in terms of time wasted.
Ugh... My number-one recommendation would be to NEVER trust an Anonymous Coward's advice, though these two seem to be ok. There are a lot of utilities out there which act like spyware protection but will happily infect your machine with all the crap you're trying to prevent.
Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, HijackThis, etc are all good, and most have free and non-free versions depending on your company's policies.
Also, disabling the autoinstall ability and third-party browser extensions in IE help a good amount of userland damage. Just run Windowsupdate once first, so that it can get the ActiveX install done before it's disabled.
Spyware writers who distribute their material as source code are to be commended for honesty, but that's gotta be the stupidest method of distribution possible.
The whole point of spyware is to fool users into installing it, not give full disclosure and explain exactly what they intend to hijack on the system.
"Beginning a technology wave that will define the digital decade"
Hey, why not? If you consider the 'digital decade' to have started around 93 or 94 when the internet took off, the slogan is perfect!
It starts out new and fascinating, but gradually becomes more and more a part of your everyday life. You become dependent on the things that used to be newfangled fluff, and begin to demand more of them. You install a Bonzi Buddy. Then things start to go wrong. It's not entirely clear at first, you know that things shouldn't be quite so easy but you can't let go now. You install Webshots. The teetering crash looms high, and you know it's coming for you soon. In a last effort to stabilize, you shut down unneeded subsystems and plug the drain of resources, but it's too late, and in a psychotic flurry of desperation everything falls apart.
Bitter, disillusioned and poverty-stricken, you start over from nothing...
Uh, no.
Fusion of heavier atoms is endothermic, so any waste we'd care to dump into the sun would accelerate its death. Hydrogen fusion generates energy, but uranium *fission* does too. IIRC, the breakpont may even be as low on the periodic table as beryllium.
What if you purchased rural property and wanted to build a cabin there, and there is no bridge crossing a creek along the way. Using a hummer and an appropriate trailer will be very useful in hauling building materials to the site and is cheaper than using helicopters or building a dirt road suitable for larger trucks.
I suppose you couldn't hire a carpenter to build a basic bridge to that remote luxury property? Any path that requires serious 4x4 ability will be off-limits to a trailer anyway, so you'll have to tend to that road for construction trips. Well gee, now that you have a road, there's not much point in an extravagant SUV, is there? A plain pickup truck will do fine for hauling materials, and it'll probably still have air conditioning.
Sorry to beat on the issue even more, but I really don't have any sympathy when it comes to this fake perceived need. It's been created by marketing, obstacles are rarely severe enough to require such a vehicle. I go off-road in my basic 4-door family car, and I worry about my old tires more than the car's clearance.
Nuclear is a terrible idea!
Only when touted by people who can't pronounce it correctly. There is nothing wrong with nuclear power! Using nuclear reactions as a tool for manipulating other process is fine too, it's a perfectly happy application of science.
Even nuclear waste isn't such a big deal. I don't understand the problem with putting radioactive materials in storage facilities deep underground. Hazardous chemicals and carcinogens can be trouble, but things like stacks of depleted uranium?
Underground.
Like, where it's naturally located? Or do we mine uranium from the sky?
Two points:
First, it's not very clear about the 'respond' part. It could be as simple as them requesting clarification of exactly what was offered.
Second, you're overstating the 5%. This isn't saying that the surveyed respond to 5% of their junk mail, it's just that a couple of them have replied at all, even once, in the entire history of their internet usage.
Like the Do-Not-Call database, I fully reject the idea that restricting advertisement is a crippling of free speech. If you want to buy these crazy products, you're easily able to go out and find them without having advertisements pushed to you unwillingly. They can be advertised all over web sites (hello, X10?) without any such legal restrictions, even for illegal products like prescriptions and 419 scams.
This is not a matter of legal tyrrany, users WANT to be able to control this crap but they aren't easily able to on their own without better technical knowledge.
It's certainly both, but you're forgetting dictionary attacks. I see quite a few attempts on my own personal domain, known ISP domains can just be signed up for the whole phonebook using combinations of common first and last names/initials.
My non-dictionary mailbox on a personal domain gets 4 or 5 junk messages a week. My firstinitial/lastname account at my ISP gets at *least* 500 a week.
Part of that can be attributed to whoever had the address in the past, but I see plenty of messages that are CC'd to similar names and there's no ISP directory they could have been harvested from.
No kidding. The Weekly World News is so much better! I do occasionally buy the rags, just to wonder at the horrible photoshopping and 'new scientician evidence!'.
Are they tryng to see just how much crazy shit they can get away with?
Is it a subtle way of insulting their own readers?
Do they expect anyone to believe it at all, or are they just having fun?
Nope, doesn't work. There are a lot of problems that the sci-fi writes happily ignore.
You're forgetting the factor of yourself. Sure, you can race to the end of the universe and all time, but what happens to you when the big-crunch event arrives? Hopefully you've thought far enough ahead that you don't get sucked back into single-point mass and die. But then you're sitting outside in an alternate or subatomic existence. Conservation of matter/energy fails. So either the universe never completely implodes, or when it re-emerges, conditions are slightly different and the universe is completely rearranged.
Even taking the leap of assuming that everything will be ok, how will you ever gauge time in the new universe to know when to come out of stasis? How will you find Earth? (objects in space do move, after all)
Maybe you haven't noticed, but platters tend to be extremely brittle. Not terribly easy to initially break, but once they do it'll change from a game of frisbee to a game of Operation.
Decent method, but if you're already in there adding pieces, why not just go for a regular keylock? Turning the lock to an open position connects a circuit between the power button and the PSU.
Heck, on some cases you might as well just rip out the power button and bore it out to a circular hole for the lock. Rip a pair of spring-tabs out of the battery compartment from whatever you can find in the nearest dumpster. Glue one tab to the lock tongue, the and other to a point where it will rotate and make contact. Save yourself the tedium of even pushing a button, just turn the key on like a car ignition and set it back to the inactive position.
For the extra geek mile, find some little sound unit that can be wired into the completed circuit and trigger a car-revving sound effect.
You'd need a pretty good swinging arm to really destroy data with a hammer. Unless the drive is spinning, you might make some pits where the write-heads are sitting but nothing more.
If you're serious about data wipes, just wire a little strip of homebrew plastic explosive onto the top read-arm and seal the drive back up. Fully broken drive platters should be far beyond recoverable no matter how patient someone is.
The over-paranoid shouldn't have massive incendiary devices on standby when someone prank-calls a pizza delivery at 1 AM.