You have an application that is presumably a custom job.
bzzzt. You presume wrong. I have one application handling almost a thousand different clients. One core set of code to maintain, designed for an ideal balance between flexibility and stability.
ASSumed safety checks, a supposed "advantage" of Java is a fucking crutch that's only useful to second rate programmers. A good programmer wouldn't assume that Java covers his ass any more than ANY other development environment.
Best of all, I maintain one set of code that I know i can count on. I don't have to worry about Java and the conflict between Microsoft and Sun affecting my business.
Man, I totally respect your idealism, however completely ineffective it would be in our society today.
You: smash a voting machine
Media: some nutball tried to destroy the democratic process - cut to clips of Idaho cult training
next election
You and 20 other people you've convinced: smash a voting machine
Media: Terrorists(tm) try to keep Americans from voting, cut to footage of people wearing turbans with "Al Queda" crawl
assuming the nobility of your crusade at the next election manages to recruit more people:
You and 500 others: smash voting machines
Media: Poignant 30-second segment showing the entrails of battered voting machines (soundtrack provided by the currently popular country music whore) spliced with doctored images out of context of evil-looking, misguided perps, if one of the 500 is Middle Eastern, he will be exclusively focused on, cut to additional segment of children crying, cut to trade center attack, cut to Oklahoma bombing
You: electric chair
Media: congratulates itself for once again, protecting the American way of life(tm)
If you SHOW, to EVERYONE, that the system has problems then that would say something to those in power.
That's good in theory, but in practice, the mainstream media, which is currently the most effective way of disseminating information, has been anything but objective in its selection of what is and isn't worthy of covering. It's worth noting that the media has found an interesting method of injecting its bias by selectively deciding what is and isn't worth covering, which in many cases, is more effective than spinning something in their favor. Either way, the media is becoming progressively more aggressive in employing both methods.
The Internet couldn't have come at a better time in terms of giving more people, more sources of information, but its ability to influence or educate the populace is trivial compared to the major media conglomorates. Notwithstanding the constant quips by the mainstream media designed to undermine the Internet as an alternative source of valid news.
As a result, I don't believe that something like civil disobedience is effective any more. A good example of this can be found in the network coverage of the WTO meetings (in Seattle for example) where thousands protested, and it was covered by the major media, but little more was conveyed than the idea that a bunch of freakazoids smashed some stuff. The agenda of the majority of the protesters, the issues they raised, were all but ignored in favor of 10-second video clips of cars burning and fringe characters acting unruly.
So the current battle isn't to find the truth, it's to figure out how to get the truth to the people through a web of entities which not only will oppose your efforts, but dilligently work to undermine you at every aspect. If your methods involve anything illegal, this gives the media powers that oppose you the evidence they need to dismiss you, and destroy you without any discussion or second thought.
Let's draw a line in the sand...
on
Fault Tolerant Shell
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
All the programmers who need the environment to compensate for their inadequacies, step on one side. All the programmers who want to learn from their mistakes and become better at their craft, get on the other side.
C gives you huge control over your operating environment, without obligatory overhead. This is a tremendous advantage in any scenario where you need stability and performance. Higher-level languages make you much more dependent upon the environment.
I wrote a shopping cart application that uses 23K of RAM and processes more than $2M in transactions online a week. I can handle more than 300 times the traffic than a comparable Windows server with this application and it's rock solid. I don't worry about bugs in the API; I don't worry about stability issues. Things work the way they should.
Then again, I get paid to get things done, not by the hour, so that's why I work with C.
C is a brilliant language. It's beautiful and elegant. I don't need validation from any other entity to legitimize the *world's most successful computer language* that most of the major apps on this planet have been written in.
This whole story is a big troll, and if you're not a serious programmer, you wouldn't know it.
Boo hoo... built-in string boundary checking in newer languages. If anything, C is the catalyst for a plethora of invaluable programming habits that today's programmers seem to take for granted.
What good are more brain cells if they're not properly programmed?
Teachers don't get the respect and remuneration they deserve. The educational system in the U.S. is the pits. You don't make anyone smarter through dietary supplements; you do that with experience and exposure to wisdom.
What a great idea. Let's make it even easier for spam to clog up our mobile devices. It'll take about 50 milliseconds after this domain goes online before spammers are SMS'ing everything in creation.
To me, what's really scary about this isn't that the idea is counterproductive, bone-headed, and probably illegal. It's that any company would propose something like this... which leads me to think that this is the type of story that is promoted just to get a rise out of people and we've taken the bait.
The company is obviously trying to jump on the media-whore bandwagon by proposing such an idea, but look who they are and where they're from. Texans' historical idea of security hasn't been impressive.
Shame on ZDNet for creating this troll in the first place. Shame on Slashdot for referencing this troll. Shame on us for being so outraged by it and taking the bait.
We know this idea will never fly. But now we've given this loser company 15 minutes of fame. This story belongs on a Darwin Business Awards list or Fark.com, not here.
Why is it that the major broadcasters and Madison Avenue have to turn to other corporate parasites like polling companies to try to understand the dynamics of an issue such as this?
Maybe it's because they don't want to acknowledge the truth? Or are they truly that stupid?
Television used to be about entertaining and educating. Now it's hard to tell what is content and what is advertising. The constant barrage of interruptions and marketing messages have turned off their audience. Things are so bad now, commercial breaks are so long, that when the networks return from a commercial break, they have to recap what the actual show was about!
Hollywood seems to think that shows like, "The Apprentice" or "Survivor: All-Stars" are actually "hits". The truth is we watch those shows to see how much of an ass people can make of themselves, not unlike your average motorist cranks his head out of the window to see a wreck on the Interstate. We don't think the shows are very good; instead we are amused by the extent to which these producers manufacture conflict and make people look like idiots. Yes, it's entertaining, but only in the most shallow way, which means there will be no longevity. Hell yes, it's fun to watch Donald Trump's ego spiral out of control, but make no mistake that at some point this will get incredibly boring if it hasn't already. And then we get to see how creative they'll be in blaming everyone but themselves for the loss of ratings.
In addition to an overwhelming amount of advertising, the content just plain sucks, WHEN you can actually find it. Most shows are little more than superficial Pavlovian plot lines with one-dimensional characters and predictable twists, bad remakes or sequels, or else they're reality programs that are edited out-of-context to over-dramatize every nuance of conflict and embarassement.
Hollywood seems to think that most people, even your average brain-dead couch potato can be played with formulaic programming. And when it doesn't seem to pan out like that, rather than admit their stupid ideas aren't working, they start commissioning research companies to pull another explanation out of thin air. Video games are killing TV. NO. It's just that TV is so bad, it's more desireable than sitting through a zillion SUV commercials.
Spam is NOT a technological problem. It is a political/law-enforcement problem.
The tech community needs a good lobbyist group who will make it their sole purpose to get law enforcement authorities to get off their lazy butts and enforce the laws.
I am a UUNet/Worldcom customer and have multiple pipes to my network from their backbone. I think they have one of the best-performing backbones on the Internet.
Unfortunately, while I am happy with UUNet's performance and stability, I am even more unhappy with their apathy towards their network being clogged by spam traffic. And at least 40% of the bandwidth I pay for is consumed by unwanted UCE, so they actually profit from this crap. As a result, there's not much incentive for them to address it. And I have to grudgingly pass these expenses on to my customers.
But UUNet is not any different from other top-tier ISPs. They hide behind the "common carrier" metaphor, using it as an excuse to justify a large portion of the bandwidth they sell to others which is unuseable due to spamming.
I can't help but think if I ordered a telephone line, and 40-60% of the time I had "noise" interfereing with my ability to communicate, that the phone company would be obligated to resolve the situation. Unfortunately, with ISPs, there doesn't seem to be anyone at the top that really gives a damn, nor any incentive on their part to address the situation.
Comcast is my number one source of domestic spam as well. My largest source of foreign spam is coming from Wanadoo.fr. That's after I was forced to refuse connections from the plethora of Chinese IPs that seem to solely exist to promote penis-enlargement and home mortgage scams.
I agree with you and this is what really, really disturbs me about programmers and development projects these days.
In the classic sense, you select the tools/language best suited for the job. When you're dealing with huge amounts of data and lots of simultaneous usage, performance is going to be the difference between success and failure.
Yet, what do these people do? They choose a set of tools because development would be less problemmatic? Catering to the narrow specialties of their development team is a priority over the long-term performance and stability of the application? Or better yet, let's offload the responsibility for the game being "playable" upon continued development of new technology, which at some point might actually provide the resources necessary to make our badly-designed application perform adequately.
I understand the importance of selecting tools that are well-supported and easy to use, but some applications, such as MMORPGs really require hard-core performance. As a programmer, I've always felt it was a cop-out to force the companies I develop software for to throw more hardware at the application until it stops burping.
On the other hand, Slashdot is using Perl in real time, so maybe I should just shut up.
Even in the commonplace situation, I would have thought it useful to use overseer-objects
I know this is done to some degree in Everquest. There are NPCs in each zone that exist to augment existing zone-related, PC and NPC situations.
For example, in each zone in EQ, there's an invisible NPC called, "pain and suffering" which appears to inflict damage on a player in certain situations (falling or bleeding to death). I would imagine that similar objects exist to control the weather, which in many cases might signal the client to narrow a player's depth of view and receive less information on objects in the vicinity.
I really think computing power is less significant than the overall game development design when it comes to MMORPGs. After design, bandwidth becomes a factor, and only then is computing power a factor. The only exception I can think of would be requiring power for encryption/decryption.
The notion of parsing datasets for something like guild membership is really trivial. If you want to design a solid MMORPG, it's going to come down to how the world, objects and players are represented.
I continue to be in awe of the capabilities of games like Everquest and SWG. SOE has really created a very robust MMORPG technology -- it's hard for any other game developer to really say they have anything comparable when they can't demonstrate superior performance under the same conditions due to no other MMORPG having anywhere near the quantity of simultaneous players (as Everquest).
IMO, the client side of EQ is pretty straightforward. What makes the game special is the server side and how they manage to manipulate so many players and objects in real time. People complain that too many objects/players per "zone" can lag things down, and that is true, but I have yet to see a better implementation than Everquest. SWG has done away with the concept of "zones" to some degree, but basically, they seem to have implemented some client-side intelligence to indicate at which point additional graphics and information on objects in the distance should be loaded or reported. There are still "zones" in all these games. Some of them implement noticeable loading lags, and others don't.
My outside impression of the technical layout of Everquest is something like this... and I'd love anyone with more info/insight to correct me or elaborate further. I ASSume their system is made up of racks of servers, running Solaris I think. The have some low-level, propietary engine that manages the objects in the world, probably to a back-end database like Oracle. The reason for zones in EQ is that when you enter a new zone, you may actually be switching from one physical server to another. Not only do they have different servers for different shards/worlds, but different servers for different zones. When I see a system message such as, "North Karana, Velketors and Plane of Mischief going down for a brief update", I think that perhaps that's one server they're rebooting, which runs those particular zones. I suspect they stagger high-traffic zones with low-traffic zones on servers, and occasionally when the X number of zones managed by a single server have an unusually high amount of traffic/visitors, you get lag.
What's interesting about MMORPG game design is the balance between handling as much client-side as possible without creating security issues. If the server keeps track of players, NPCs and objects, it's much more difficult for someone to hack, or at least, logs are available to identify issues. The more client-side processing done, the more likely the game can be inappropriately manipulated.
When you take into account the amount of real-time data that goes back and forth, EQ (and SWG) are quite impressive. I don't think database/dataset issues are really the problem as being able to efficiently encapsulate, protect and send/receive the large amounts of data in the real-time world.
Between Comcast's attempted hostile takeover and Eisner's complete alienation of most of the core historical Disney management team, I reluctantly decided to dump all the Disney stock I had and take advantage of the inflated stock price. Eisner may have been able to help Disney over some rough times, but his style and approach is not good for Disney in the long term. Consequently, Comcast having majority ownership in the company would be an even greater disaster. This all signals to me that Disney is in for a dark period.
No matter what, you can expect more than anything, a barrage of deliberately misdirected spam (i.e. a bunch of fake pseudo-pro-democrat e-mail done in such a way to create bad publicity for the party, likely perpetrated by republicans).
Re:Here's a couple I really want to know
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 1
He went into the mechanics of information processing in the brain and the differences between patterns in two different brains, and concluded based on this set of facts that even if you could detect the signal generated by someone else's brain, you wouldn't be able to parse it.
I think the probability of this ultimately comes down to the gender of the subject involved. Man = possible. Woman = unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
You have an application that is presumably a custom job.
bzzzt. You presume wrong. I have one application handling almost a thousand different clients. One core set of code to maintain, designed for an ideal balance between flexibility and stability.
ASSumed safety checks, a supposed "advantage" of Java is a fucking crutch that's only useful to second rate programmers. A good programmer wouldn't assume that Java covers his ass any more than ANY other development environment.
Best of all, I maintain one set of code that I know i can count on. I don't have to worry about Java and the conflict between Microsoft and Sun affecting my business.
Piece of mind: priceless
Congratulations!
You guys have figured out that every insecure person on the planet is secretly in need of validation.
Pat yourselves on the back.
Man, I totally respect your idealism, however completely ineffective it would be in our society today.
You: smash a voting machine
Media: some nutball tried to destroy the democratic process - cut to clips of Idaho cult training
next election
You and 20 other people you've convinced: smash a voting machine
Media: Terrorists(tm) try to keep Americans from voting, cut to footage of people wearing turbans with "Al Queda" crawl
assuming the nobility of your crusade at the next election manages to recruit more people:
You and 500 others: smash voting machines
Media: Poignant 30-second segment showing the entrails of battered voting machines (soundtrack provided by the currently popular country music whore) spliced with doctored images out of context of evil-looking, misguided perps, if one of the 500 is Middle Eastern, he will be exclusively focused on, cut to additional segment of children crying, cut to trade center attack, cut to Oklahoma bombing
You: electric chair
Media: congratulates itself for once again, protecting the American way of life(tm)
If you SHOW, to EVERYONE, that the system has problems then that would say something to those in power.
That's good in theory, but in practice, the mainstream media, which is currently the most effective way of disseminating information, has been anything but objective in its selection of what is and isn't worthy of covering. It's worth noting that the media has found an interesting method of injecting its bias by selectively deciding what is and isn't worth covering, which in many cases, is more effective than spinning something in their favor. Either way, the media is becoming progressively more aggressive in employing both methods.
The Internet couldn't have come at a better time in terms of giving more people, more sources of information, but its ability to influence or educate the populace is trivial compared to the major media conglomorates. Notwithstanding the constant quips by the mainstream media designed to undermine the Internet as an alternative source of valid news.
As a result, I don't believe that something like civil disobedience is effective any more. A good example of this can be found in the network coverage of the WTO meetings (in Seattle for example) where thousands protested, and it was covered by the major media, but little more was conveyed than the idea that a bunch of freakazoids smashed some stuff. The agenda of the majority of the protesters, the issues they raised, were all but ignored in favor of 10-second video clips of cars burning and fringe characters acting unruly.
So the current battle isn't to find the truth, it's to figure out how to get the truth to the people through a web of entities which not only will oppose your efforts, but dilligently work to undermine you at every aspect. If your methods involve anything illegal, this gives the media powers that oppose you the evidence they need to dismiss you, and destroy you without any discussion or second thought.
All the programmers who need the environment to compensate for their inadequacies, step on one side. All the programmers who want to learn from their mistakes and become better at their craft, get on the other side.
Most of us know where this line is located.
C gives you huge control over your operating environment, without obligatory overhead. This is a tremendous advantage in any scenario where you need stability and performance. Higher-level languages make you much more dependent upon the environment.
I wrote a shopping cart application that uses 23K of RAM and processes more than $2M in transactions online a week. I can handle more than 300 times the traffic than a comparable Windows server with this application and it's rock solid. I don't worry about bugs in the API; I don't worry about stability issues. Things work the way they should.
Then again, I get paid to get things done, not by the hour, so that's why I work with C.
C is a brilliant language. It's beautiful and elegant. I don't need validation from any other entity to legitimize the *world's most successful computer language* that most of the major apps on this planet have been written in.
This whole story is a big troll, and if you're not a serious programmer, you wouldn't know it.
Boo hoo... built-in string boundary checking in newer languages. If anything, C is the catalyst for a plethora of invaluable programming habits that today's programmers seem to take for granted.
Time to move dude.
I agree.
What good are more brain cells if they're not properly programmed?
Teachers don't get the respect and remuneration they deserve. The educational system in the U.S. is the pits. You don't make anyone smarter through dietary supplements; you do that with experience and exposure to wisdom.
no television...
a healthy non-supplement.
What a great idea. Let's make it even easier for spam to clog up our mobile devices. It'll take about 50 milliseconds after this domain goes online before spammers are SMS'ing everything in creation.
To me, what's really scary about this isn't that the idea is counterproductive, bone-headed, and probably illegal. It's that any company would propose something like this... which leads me to think that this is the type of story that is promoted just to get a rise out of people and we've taken the bait.
The company is obviously trying to jump on the media-whore bandwagon by proposing such an idea, but look who they are and where they're from. Texans' historical idea of security hasn't been impressive.
Shame on ZDNet for creating this troll in the first place. Shame on Slashdot for referencing this troll. Shame on us for being so outraged by it and taking the bait.
We know this idea will never fly. But now we've given this loser company 15 minutes of fame. This story belongs on a Darwin Business Awards list or Fark.com, not here.
Symbiot, a Texas-based security firm
Ok, it makes sense now.
Why is it that the major broadcasters and Madison Avenue have to turn to other corporate parasites like polling companies to try to understand the dynamics of an issue such as this?
Maybe it's because they don't want to acknowledge the truth? Or are they truly that stupid?
Television used to be about entertaining and educating. Now it's hard to tell what is content and what is advertising. The constant barrage of interruptions and marketing messages have turned off their audience. Things are so bad now, commercial breaks are so long, that when the networks return from a commercial break, they have to recap what the actual show was about!
Hollywood seems to think that shows like, "The Apprentice" or "Survivor: All-Stars" are actually "hits". The truth is we watch those shows to see how much of an ass people can make of themselves, not unlike your average motorist cranks his head out of the window to see a wreck on the Interstate. We don't think the shows are very good; instead we are amused by the extent to which these producers manufacture conflict and make people look like idiots. Yes, it's entertaining, but only in the most shallow way, which means there will be no longevity. Hell yes, it's fun to watch Donald Trump's ego spiral out of control, but make no mistake that at some point this will get incredibly boring if it hasn't already. And then we get to see how creative they'll be in blaming everyone but themselves for the loss of ratings.
In addition to an overwhelming amount of advertising, the content just plain sucks, WHEN you can actually find it. Most shows are little more than superficial Pavlovian plot lines with one-dimensional characters and predictable twists, bad remakes or sequels, or else they're reality programs that are edited out-of-context to over-dramatize every nuance of conflict and embarassement.
Hollywood seems to think that most people, even your average brain-dead couch potato can be played with formulaic programming. And when it doesn't seem to pan out like that, rather than admit their stupid ideas aren't working, they start commissioning research companies to pull another explanation out of thin air. Video games are killing TV. NO. It's just that TV is so bad, it's more desireable than sitting through a zillion SUV commercials.
It's the content, stupid.
Absolutely correct sir.
Spam is NOT a technological problem. It is a political/law-enforcement problem.
The tech community needs a good lobbyist group who will make it their sole purpose to get law enforcement authorities to get off their lazy butts and enforce the laws.
I sure hope the SEC is investigating this. The whole movement of SCOX is extremely suspicious.
Then again, perhaps the SEC is busy checking to see if Anna Nicole Smith is doing any insider trading.
I am a UUNet/Worldcom customer and have multiple pipes to my network from their backbone. I think they have one of the best-performing backbones on the Internet.
Unfortunately, while I am happy with UUNet's performance and stability, I am even more unhappy with their apathy towards their network being clogged by spam traffic. And at least 40% of the bandwidth I pay for is consumed by unwanted UCE, so they actually profit from this crap. As a result, there's not much incentive for them to address it. And I have to grudgingly pass these expenses on to my customers.
But UUNet is not any different from other top-tier ISPs. They hide behind the "common carrier" metaphor, using it as an excuse to justify a large portion of the bandwidth they sell to others which is unuseable due to spamming.
I can't help but think if I ordered a telephone line, and 40-60% of the time I had "noise" interfereing with my ability to communicate, that the phone company would be obligated to resolve the situation. Unfortunately, with ISPs, there doesn't seem to be anyone at the top that really gives a damn, nor any incentive on their part to address the situation.
Comcast is my number one source of domestic spam as well. My largest source of foreign spam is coming from Wanadoo.fr. That's after I was forced to refuse connections from the plethora of Chinese IPs that seem to solely exist to promote penis-enlargement and home mortgage scams.
I agree with you and this is what really, really disturbs me about programmers and development projects these days.
In the classic sense, you select the tools/language best suited for the job. When you're dealing with huge amounts of data and lots of simultaneous usage, performance is going to be the difference between success and failure.
Yet, what do these people do? They choose a set of tools because development would be less problemmatic? Catering to the narrow specialties of their development team is a priority over the long-term performance and stability of the application? Or better yet, let's offload the responsibility for the game being "playable" upon continued development of new technology, which at some point might actually provide the resources necessary to make our badly-designed application perform adequately.
I understand the importance of selecting tools that are well-supported and easy to use, but some applications, such as MMORPGs really require hard-core performance. As a programmer, I've always felt it was a cop-out to force the companies I develop software for to throw more hardware at the application until it stops burping.
On the other hand, Slashdot is using Perl in real time, so maybe I should just shut up.
Even in the commonplace situation, I would have thought it useful to use overseer-objects
I know this is done to some degree in Everquest. There are NPCs in each zone that exist to augment existing zone-related, PC and NPC situations.
For example, in each zone in EQ, there's an invisible NPC called, "pain and suffering" which appears to inflict damage on a player in certain situations (falling or bleeding to death). I would imagine that similar objects exist to control the weather, which in many cases might signal the client to narrow a player's depth of view and receive less information on objects in the vicinity.
I really think computing power is less significant than the overall game development design when it comes to MMORPGs. After design, bandwidth becomes a factor, and only then is computing power a factor. The only exception I can think of would be requiring power for encryption/decryption.
The notion of parsing datasets for something like guild membership is really trivial. If you want to design a solid MMORPG, it's going to come down to how the world, objects and players are represented.
I continue to be in awe of the capabilities of games like Everquest and SWG. SOE has really created a very robust MMORPG technology -- it's hard for any other game developer to really say they have anything comparable when they can't demonstrate superior performance under the same conditions due to no other MMORPG having anywhere near the quantity of simultaneous players (as Everquest).
IMO, the client side of EQ is pretty straightforward. What makes the game special is the server side and how they manage to manipulate so many players and objects in real time. People complain that too many objects/players per "zone" can lag things down, and that is true, but I have yet to see a better implementation than Everquest. SWG has done away with the concept of "zones" to some degree, but basically, they seem to have implemented some client-side intelligence to indicate at which point additional graphics and information on objects in the distance should be loaded or reported. There are still "zones" in all these games. Some of them implement noticeable loading lags, and others don't.
My outside impression of the technical layout of Everquest is something like this... and I'd love anyone with more info/insight to correct me or elaborate further. I ASSume their system is made up of racks of servers, running Solaris I think. The have some low-level, propietary engine that manages the objects in the world, probably to a back-end database like Oracle. The reason for zones in EQ is that when you enter a new zone, you may actually be switching from one physical server to another. Not only do they have different servers for different shards/worlds, but different servers for different zones. When I see a system message such as, "North Karana, Velketors and Plane of Mischief going down for a brief update", I think that perhaps that's one server they're rebooting, which runs those particular zones. I suspect they stagger high-traffic zones with low-traffic zones on servers, and occasionally when the X number of zones managed by a single server have an unusually high amount of traffic/visitors, you get lag.
What's interesting about MMORPG game design is the balance between handling as much client-side as possible without creating security issues. If the server keeps track of players, NPCs and objects, it's much more difficult for someone to hack, or at least, logs are available to identify issues. The more client-side processing done, the more likely the game can be inappropriately manipulated.
When you take into account the amount of real-time data that goes back and forth, EQ (and SWG) are quite impressive. I don't think database/dataset issues are really the problem as being able to efficiently encapsulate, protect and send/receive the large amounts of data in the real-time world.
Some might argue that Euro Disney is their poison pill. ; )
Between Comcast's attempted hostile takeover and Eisner's complete alienation of most of the core historical Disney management team, I reluctantly decided to dump all the Disney stock I had and take advantage of the inflated stock price. Eisner may have been able to help Disney over some rough times, but his style and approach is not good for Disney in the long term. Consequently, Comcast having majority ownership in the company would be an even greater disaster. This all signals to me that Disney is in for a dark period.
No matter what, you can expect more than anything, a barrage of deliberately misdirected spam (i.e. a bunch of fake pseudo-pro-democrat e-mail done in such a way to create bad publicity for the party, likely perpetrated by republicans).
He went into the mechanics of information processing in the brain and the differences between patterns in two different brains, and concluded based on this set of facts that even if you could detect the signal generated by someone else's brain, you wouldn't be able to parse it.
I think the probability of this ultimately comes down to the gender of the subject involved. Man = possible. Woman = unlikely.