Back of a napkin: Using my modest (hypothetical) botnet of about 10,000 hosts, there's a decent (~25%) chance I will find and exploit you inside of a day, and a near-certainty that I will get you within 3 days. Just to be charitable I could throw in a random fudge factor of one week.
I could probably speed it up if I could depend on certain assumptions or if I have a little additional data.
Point being, the internet seems huge but it's not really all that big.
One, my impression has always been that noting species is about aggregation, not division--that these specific organisms were all in one class even though they had superficially different species.
Two, say you are able to further separate them based on features but you get some absurdly high number of "species." What does this do for you, exactly? The idea of "species" is a useful tool, but I think when there are a trillion trillion species each with one member in it you haven't done anything especially "useful."
This may or may not be relevant but government personnel have a really cavalier attitude towards corporate IP. It's an extension of how they look down upon the vendors and contractors who actually make most government operations "work." I recently had a customer get pretty ugly when I refused to give him software he hadn't licensed (just because I can get license-free versions of anything my company produces)...they expect "hookups" all the time, and you just know they will throw that shit up on the torrents as soon as they get home.
This is mainly the lower-echelon govvies as opposed to the higher-ups (who are either smart enough to understand how complicated IP can get, or else aren't savvy enough to try to exploit it).
Yah, I have been trying to get rid of my 160g classic for exactly that reason: I want to go back to the 80g model I had before (forget which generation) so I could hack it and play FLAC.
I think you either have to have a system that is buyer-friendly or customer-friendly, but it can't be both.
It seems like a zero-sum game. Here in Germany, there are a lot of laws that protect people who want to rent properties because it is not easy to buy properties. Any law that helped owners would be at the expense of renters.
Likewise on eBay any rule that helps sellers will negatively impact buyers. I think the vast majority of activity on eBay these days is fraudulent; out of this churn, you still have plenty of happy buyers getting stuff from sellers. At the point where sellers become unable to sell, eBay will lose money and will then take action. Until that time, any sellers who get screwed are just not important enough:\
No kidding. If you ever want a good cry, read through the deliverables on a government contract--any contract. They are basically worded so that if there is not a paper clip provided to bind up a report, then the contractor doesn't have to do anything and still gets to charge for a day of work. Amazing.
That doesn't follow. You're still allowed to tell anyone you want, you just don't get to spend all year doing it.
Say you're limited to 90 days of actual campaigning. If you are at all involved in politics then you have plenty of opportunities to make your views known long before this--at meetings, by giving speeches, writing articles. By the time you want to be considered for office, you and your ideas should already be well-known. If you can't grasp the difference between this and campaigning for office then you have other issues.
Limiting the amount of money candidates can spend on campaigns is also a good idea. Everyone should be limited to the same amount. This removes the benefit of having deep pockets and places more weight on qualifications, viewpoints, voting records, etc.
We run into issues when those systems remain after the threat has passed, and find new things to do with them by redefining things like "crime," "terrorism" and "right and wrong."
This is why ANY time the government asks for more power, people should fight it. Once they get it, they never give it up. Study some freaking history, won't you? I mean, you should have gotten this lesson fed to you during Attack of the Clones, I really don't think you have an excuse for not knowing it yet.
Also: That was a figure plucked from the air by a journalist. It came from counting the number of CCTV cameras in one small section of the main street of a particularly unpleasant part of London, and then scaling that up by the total length of roads in the whole of the UK.
When I took experimental methods it was explained to me that, when we analyse the results of an experiment, we are not proving nor disproving anything, only examining the information to aid in decisionmaking.
So when we think critically we distinguish between "what is really true" and "what do I know that I can use to help me make decisions."
In the case of Iraq, the USA went to war because that's what was thought to be true (well...sorta). In the case of the Maginot line, people believed in the consensus "truth" as if it were bedrock, but the idea did not stand up to any critical analysis since the Germans were able to come up with a counter-strategy fairly quickly. If you think about it as "What do I know about the Maginot line that will help me develop a strategy" vs. "True or not true: If we attack the Maginot line, we will be able to defeat it" then you can see the error in French thinking at the time.
Bottom line what I have learned is that, every so often, I have to stop doing analysis and take a look at how I am analyzing things, what questions I'm asking, and so forth. Drives my bosses mad sometimes but helps me make fewer mistakes.
It doesn't matter. I think there is absolutely zero imagination in this franchise. Star Wars consists of nothing more than the same cookie-cutter characters and overwrought plots, over and over and over again. I am never disappointed by the franchise because this is all I expect of a story idea Lucas got while watching WW2 dogfight movies: a bunch of stories about war, war, war, laser blasters, mystical force powers, etc. (this is why the Star Trek franchise sucks now: Every series is about some kind of war in space. Even the original series, with its cheesy special effects and overacting and thinly-veiled morality plays was preferable to "threat of the week")...
So...for me...this game will be like every other game in the franchise, ie, it will not look any different, the "plot" will be interchangeable, and the gameplay, as with most MMOs, will be mediocre. There will be absolutely nothing to recommend the game unless you are already really into the concept of a Star Wars MMO, and then you and your friends will probably have a blast playing it.
Despite all of this I'm still a fan, but as I said, I have very low expectations. Give me another X-Wing game with a learning curve like Falcon 3.0 and I'll be happy as a pig in shit.
You are woefully uninformed about Africa and you are reading into this venture.
There are places where people are living on next to nothing, but there are also relatively stable places that would benefit immensely from cheap internet as an enabling factor (Ghana, Nairobi, Joburg) for education and business. Look at what hooking up Pune has done for India.
It seems like any time anyone suggests investing in the tech sector anywhere in Africa, some doofus comes along and links to the Onion's "Tribesman uses modem to crush nut" or talks about how we should focus on "feeding people," whatever that means. You're basically arguing that we shouldn't improve the economy because we need to help the poor instead.
If you want to get educated, App+Frica is a good place to start.
Of course Buckley can make that call. Just because someone believes in free will and the importance of critical thinking doesn't mean they will be led directly to the same conclusion as you (in fact it rather guarantees the opposite). I could as easily complain that $liberal_political_candidate talks about ethics in one breath and yet condones the slaughter of the unborn. What either critical thinking or a belief in an ethical process means is that we have meaningful bases to argue about things, nothing more.
This is not really true. I mean, the "Things were never like that" argument is just wrong.
There have been periods in history and in various locations where instead of a very few insanely wealthy individuals (like Walton or Gates) we had a greater amount of individuals who were simply wealthy and yet more who were only "well off." Historically this agreeable state of affairs is countered by the tendency of the very wealthy to squeeze the less wealthy in various ways (e.g. the feudal system, robber baron capitalism, etc.).
And we notice now that in communities where there are lots of smaller businesses, there are lots of economic and social benefits. Competition is what capitalism is about, not what you're talking about...I suppose the easiest indicator of that is that whenever these megabusinesses win their race to the bottom and finally fuck over their client base they run crying to the government to bail them out. THAT is communism: Fannie and Freddie needing tax money to stay afloat.
Doesn't this simply seem like an application of the Pareto Principle (e.g. 20% of your customers make up 80% of your sales).
I don't claim to be an expert but I have read that in business, it can make sense to ditch the 80% of your customers who take up all of your time and generally only cause you ass pain (whining, complaining, demanding) in favor of catering to the minority who actually make up all your business.
Likewise, if the statistics presented are true, then ISPs could simply make high-bandwidth users pay a premium for use--while simultaneously making internet cheap/free for everyone else. That is, they would cater to gamers, bittorent users, and youtube junkies who would essentially subsidize educational and business users.
If you have standards for what is "realistic" or "reasonable" then you need to make sure the list complies with those standards before you sign up. If you don't like the rules then you are not obligated to join the list--nor do you have any "right" to accessing the content via the list (you are of course free to get the content any other way you can). You may as well complain about the content if you fail to look into what the list is about before signing up. It's still on you and will always be on you.
I don't have to provide you with any simple unsubscribe links. The fact remains that you know what a list requires before you sign up, and you accept it by signing up. If you do not accept the rules...don't sign up. You are merely lazy if you do not want to follow the correct procedure and then blame the admin, and not only lazy, but intellectually lazy if you think that "But it's boring and hard to unsubscribe" constitutes a valid argument.
And why bring any other context into this? I don't see what discussing ads has to do with this.
Speaking from personal experience, you don't get that depressed from a single person posting on a website/sending emails
Wrong. You don't get depressed. Teenage girls who get subjected to calculated harassment like this are probably more likely to fold than you think; and teenagers are in general more likely to take a drastic option out like suicide, because they aren't very mature. These are two truths backed up by years of psychological study. In the future, please try to remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
Also this idea that if someone is depressed, and someone pushes them over the edge, then it's still the depressed person's "fault"--it makes me doubt your story. People are allowed to be depressed. Pushing a depressed person to harm themselves is however not allowed.
Well, at the moment we're discussing users mislabeling legitimate mailing lists as "spam," not spam itself. I don't think anyone would have a problem with you sending v1@gr4 pitches into the bit bucket, but in this case we're discussing a mailing list YOU SIGNED UP FOR that you are too lazy to unsubscribe from. So in effect the person who maintains the list gets punished. Since you AGREED to the ads in order to support the list, you have no grounds for complaint.
This is just another example of people wanting a free lunch. You can get a cheap lunch, you can even get a really GOOD cheap lunch, but you cannot have a free lunch, understand?
But you haven't justified your reaction, only explained your 'laziness' in greater detail.
If you want to unsubscribe from a legitimate list, there is a procedure. It should be clear but simply because it isn't doesn't mean you get to punish the list admin for it. If this is a huge issue for you then you should look into how you unsubscribe BEFORE you subscribe (I know, I know..."as the end user you just want the e-mails to start--you don't want to spend five minutes reading the rules...")
How did they subscribe to the list if the subscribe/unsubscribe features are on an inaccessible system? If someone signed up and failed to unsubscribe before they went into an area with limited access, why do you think the list admins should still get punished?
Sure, making it easy to unsubscribe is good design.
However, what you have described is not spam, but rather a person too lazy to follow the unsubscribe procedures...that is, precisely the type of assclowns who have gotten This is True blacklisted. Your laziness does not relieve you of responsibility.
Cite your sources? The general feeling is that the Roman Catholic Church's main dogma is the "the doctrine is the truth" so if something seems to be the truth outside of the doctrine, it is dangerous and should be fought. This is what apologists refer to gently as "Protestant propaganda," or just "nonsense."
Maybe you're thinking of Southern Baptists? The Bible occupies a much less important position among Catholics; there are the basics we accept out of it and then you have the discussion with coffee and donuts and THERE is where you learn. Ergo archaeological "proof" is not some Holy Grail like it is for the Fundamentalists; we don't need everything to be a true historical event, we don't need the Prodigal Son to have existed to understand what the moral of the story is, etc. See Lorenzo Albacete's talks on Job--Catholics learn things like the concept that shared suffering always ends in an expression of grace and love, whereas...well, Fundies like to quote chapter and verse and then bug out. Slightly different approach.
The author displays profound ignorance about economics.
Eh. This is a little disingenuous because it seems like your entire critique is based on an interpretation of the term "wants" when everyone reading the original article understands it to mean "is willing."
I.e., nobody is willing to pay the entry prices for certain terms, so there will never be any ads for those terms. We are willing to pay >$0 for bread, milk, etc. We want to pay nothing but since you (the seller) demand something we see we have to come to an agreement. The entire argument is about the failure of the sellers to accomodate the consumers sufficiently, so the system has to crash rather drastically.
I have seen this in commercial real estate before. There is a feedback loop between the amount of retail in an area and the success of retail stores. However, quite often you see property owners who bought a storefront outright and are paying, say, $5000/year in taxes on the property trying to charge that much per month. None of the owners on a street will lower their prices, so one by one the businesses die or move...until it's an avalanche and you wind up with a street full of empty storefronts on which NOBODY wants to open a business! The owners don't care because it's not a huge loss TO THEM, and they know that the city will eventually sell bonds and subsidize new business in order to spruce the place up.
The market always adjusts, either gradually, or all at once (spectacularly). This is the OP's Econ 101 lesson.
Slashdot Mirror
Back of a napkin: Using my modest (hypothetical) botnet of about 10,000 hosts, there's a decent (~25%) chance I will find and exploit you inside of a day, and a near-certainty that I will get you within 3 days. Just to be charitable I could throw in a random fudge factor of one week.
I could probably speed it up if I could depend on certain assumptions or if I have a little additional data.
Point being, the internet seems huge but it's not really all that big.
I think it makes perfect sense for two reasons.
One, my impression has always been that noting species is about aggregation, not division--that these specific organisms were all in one class even though they had superficially different species.
Two, say you are able to further separate them based on features but you get some absurdly high number of "species." What does this do for you, exactly? The idea of "species" is a useful tool, but I think when there are a trillion trillion species each with one member in it you haven't done anything especially "useful."
This may or may not be relevant but government personnel have a really cavalier attitude towards corporate IP. It's an extension of how they look down upon the vendors and contractors who actually make most government operations "work." I recently had a customer get pretty ugly when I refused to give him software he hadn't licensed (just because I can get license-free versions of anything my company produces)...they expect "hookups" all the time, and you just know they will throw that shit up on the torrents as soon as they get home.
This is mainly the lower-echelon govvies as opposed to the higher-ups (who are either smart enough to understand how complicated IP can get, or else aren't savvy enough to try to exploit it).
Yah, I have been trying to get rid of my 160g classic for exactly that reason: I want to go back to the 80g model I had before (forget which generation) so I could hack it and play FLAC.
Nobody wants to buy the damned thing :\
OK so let me understand this correctly...
You sell me a PSP. It arrives but I claim that it does not and make Visa get me my money back.
You as the seller are fucked.
Is this about how it works? Why does anyone sell big-ticket items on eBay? Or anything for that matter?
Like I have said before...eBay is an idea whose time has come and gone.
I think you either have to have a system that is buyer-friendly or customer-friendly, but it can't be both.
It seems like a zero-sum game. Here in Germany, there are a lot of laws that protect people who want to rent properties because it is not easy to buy properties. Any law that helped owners would be at the expense of renters.
Likewise on eBay any rule that helps sellers will negatively impact buyers. I think the vast majority of activity on eBay these days is fraudulent; out of this churn, you still have plenty of happy buyers getting stuff from sellers. At the point where sellers become unable to sell, eBay will lose money and will then take action. Until that time, any sellers who get screwed are just not important enough :\
No kidding. If you ever want a good cry, read through the deliverables on a government contract--any contract. They are basically worded so that if there is not a paper clip provided to bind up a report, then the contractor doesn't have to do anything and still gets to charge for a day of work. Amazing.
Why would there be a penalty for that? And how exactly does what other people say fall under your First Amendment rights?
That doesn't follow. You're still allowed to tell anyone you want, you just don't get to spend all year doing it.
Say you're limited to 90 days of actual campaigning. If you are at all involved in politics then you have plenty of opportunities to make your views known long before this--at meetings, by giving speeches, writing articles. By the time you want to be considered for office, you and your ideas should already be well-known. If you can't grasp the difference between this and campaigning for office then you have other issues.
Limiting the amount of money candidates can spend on campaigns is also a good idea. Everyone should be limited to the same amount. This removes the benefit of having deep pockets and places more weight on qualifications, viewpoints, voting records, etc.
So long as candidates are given a reasonable amount of time to get their message out, limiting that time is not a violation of the 1st amendment.
We run into issues when those systems remain after the threat has passed, and find new things to do with them by redefining things like "crime," "terrorism" and "right and wrong."
This is why ANY time the government asks for more power, people should fight it. Once they get it, they never give it up. Study some freaking history, won't you? I mean, you should have gotten this lesson fed to you during Attack of the Clones, I really don't think you have an excuse for not knowing it yet.
Also:
That was a figure plucked from the air by a journalist. It came from counting the number of CCTV cameras in one small section of the main street of a particularly unpleasant part of London, and then scaling that up by the total length of roads in the whole of the UK.
[Citation Needed]. Just sayin'.
When I took experimental methods it was explained to me that, when we analyse the results of an experiment, we are not proving nor disproving anything, only examining the information to aid in decisionmaking.
So when we think critically we distinguish between "what is really true" and "what do I know that I can use to help me make decisions."
In the case of Iraq, the USA went to war because that's what was thought to be true (well...sorta). In the case of the Maginot line, people believed in the consensus "truth" as if it were bedrock, but the idea did not stand up to any critical analysis since the Germans were able to come up with a counter-strategy fairly quickly. If you think about it as "What do I know about the Maginot line that will help me develop a strategy" vs. "True or not true: If we attack the Maginot line, we will be able to defeat it" then you can see the error in French thinking at the time.
Bottom line what I have learned is that, every so often, I have to stop doing analysis and take a look at how I am analyzing things, what questions I'm asking, and so forth. Drives my bosses mad sometimes but helps me make fewer mistakes.
It doesn't matter. I think there is absolutely zero imagination in this franchise.
Star Wars consists of nothing more than the same cookie-cutter characters and overwrought plots, over and over and over again. I am never disappointed by the franchise because this is all I expect of a story idea Lucas got while watching WW2 dogfight movies: a bunch of stories about war, war, war, laser blasters, mystical force powers, etc. (this is why the Star Trek franchise sucks now: Every series is about some kind of war in space. Even the original series, with its cheesy special effects and overacting and thinly-veiled morality plays was preferable to "threat of the week")...
So...for me...this game will be like every other game in the franchise, ie, it will not look any different, the "plot" will be interchangeable, and the gameplay, as with most MMOs, will be mediocre. There will be absolutely nothing to recommend the game unless you are already really into the concept of a Star Wars MMO, and then you and your friends will probably have a blast playing it.
Despite all of this I'm still a fan, but as I said, I have very low expectations. Give me another X-Wing game with a learning curve like Falcon 3.0 and I'll be happy as a pig in shit.
You are woefully uninformed about Africa and you are reading into this venture.
There are places where people are living on next to nothing, but there are also relatively stable places that would benefit immensely from cheap internet as an enabling factor (Ghana, Nairobi, Joburg) for education and business. Look at what hooking up Pune has done for India.
It seems like any time anyone suggests investing in the tech sector anywhere in Africa, some doofus comes along and links to the Onion's "Tribesman uses modem to crush nut" or talks about how we should focus on "feeding people," whatever that means. You're basically arguing that we shouldn't improve the economy because we need to help the poor instead.
If you want to get educated, App+Frica is a good place to start.
Of course Buckley can make that call. Just because someone believes in free will and the importance of critical thinking doesn't mean they will be led directly to the same conclusion as you (in fact it rather guarantees the opposite). I could as easily complain that $liberal_political_candidate talks about ethics in one breath and yet condones the slaughter of the unborn. What either critical thinking or a belief in an ethical process means is that we have meaningful bases to argue about things, nothing more.
This is not really true. I mean, the "Things were never like that" argument is just wrong.
There have been periods in history and in various locations where instead of a very few insanely wealthy individuals (like Walton or Gates) we had a greater amount of individuals who were simply wealthy and yet more who were only "well off." Historically this agreeable state of affairs is countered by the tendency of the very wealthy to squeeze the less wealthy in various ways (e.g. the feudal system, robber baron capitalism, etc.).
And we notice now that in communities where there are lots of smaller businesses, there are lots of economic and social benefits. Competition is what capitalism is about, not what you're talking about...I suppose the easiest indicator of that is that whenever these megabusinesses win their race to the bottom and finally fuck over their client base they run crying to the government to bail them out. THAT is communism: Fannie and Freddie needing tax money to stay afloat.
Doesn't this simply seem like an application of the Pareto Principle (e.g. 20% of your customers make up 80% of your sales).
I don't claim to be an expert but I have read that in business, it can make sense to ditch the 80% of your customers who take up all of your time and generally only cause you ass pain (whining, complaining, demanding) in favor of catering to the minority who actually make up all your business.
Likewise, if the statistics presented are true, then ISPs could simply make high-bandwidth users pay a premium for use--while simultaneously making internet cheap/free for everyone else. That is, they would cater to gamers, bittorent users, and youtube junkies who would essentially subsidize educational and business users.
If you have standards for what is "realistic" or "reasonable" then you need to make sure the list complies with those standards before you sign up. If you don't like the rules then you are not obligated to join the list--nor do you have any "right" to accessing the content via the list (you are of course free to get the content any other way you can). You may as well complain about the content if you fail to look into what the list is about before signing up. It's still on you and will always be on you.
I don't have to provide you with any simple unsubscribe links. The fact remains that you know what a list requires before you sign up, and you accept it by signing up. If you do not accept the rules...don't sign up. You are merely lazy if you do not want to follow the correct procedure and then blame the admin, and not only lazy, but intellectually lazy if you think that "But it's boring and hard to unsubscribe" constitutes a valid argument.
And why bring any other context into this? I don't see what discussing ads has to do with this.
Speaking from personal experience, you don't get that depressed from a single person posting on a website/sending emails
Wrong. You don't get depressed. Teenage girls who get subjected to calculated harassment like this are probably more likely to fold than you think; and teenagers are in general more likely to take a drastic option out like suicide, because they aren't very mature. These are two truths backed up by years of psychological study. In the future, please try to remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
Also this idea that if someone is depressed, and someone pushes them over the edge, then it's still the depressed person's "fault"--it makes me doubt your story. People are allowed to be depressed. Pushing a depressed person to harm themselves is however not allowed.
Well, at the moment we're discussing users mislabeling legitimate mailing lists as "spam," not spam itself.
I don't think anyone would have a problem with you sending v1@gr4 pitches into the bit bucket, but in this case we're discussing a mailing list YOU SIGNED UP FOR that you are too lazy to unsubscribe from. So in effect the person who maintains the list gets punished. Since you AGREED to the ads in order to support the list, you have no grounds for complaint.
This is just another example of people wanting a free lunch. You can get a cheap lunch, you can even get a really GOOD cheap lunch, but you cannot have a free lunch, understand?
But you haven't justified your reaction, only explained your 'laziness' in greater detail.
If you want to unsubscribe from a legitimate list, there is a procedure. It should be clear but simply because it isn't doesn't mean you get to punish the list admin for it. If this is a huge issue for you then you should look into how you unsubscribe BEFORE you subscribe (I know, I know..."as the end user you just want the e-mails to start--you don't want to spend five minutes reading the rules...")
How did they subscribe to the list if the subscribe/unsubscribe features are on an inaccessible system?
If someone signed up and failed to unsubscribe before they went into an area with limited access, why do you think the list admins should still get punished?
Sure, making it easy to unsubscribe is good design.
However, what you have described is not spam, but rather a person too lazy to follow the unsubscribe procedures...that is, precisely the type of assclowns who have gotten This is True blacklisted. Your laziness does not relieve you of responsibility.
Cite your sources?
The general feeling is that the Roman Catholic Church's main dogma is the "the doctrine is the truth" so if something seems to be the truth outside of the doctrine, it is dangerous and should be fought.
This is what apologists refer to gently as "Protestant propaganda," or just "nonsense."
Maybe you're thinking of Southern Baptists? The Bible occupies a much less important position among Catholics; there are the basics we accept out of it and then you have the discussion with coffee and donuts and THERE is where you learn. Ergo archaeological "proof" is not some Holy Grail like it is for the Fundamentalists; we don't need everything to be a true historical event, we don't need the Prodigal Son to have existed to understand what the moral of the story is, etc. See Lorenzo Albacete's talks on Job--Catholics learn things like the concept that shared suffering always ends in an expression of grace and love, whereas...well, Fundies like to quote chapter and verse and then bug out. Slightly different approach.
The author displays profound ignorance about economics.
Eh. This is a little disingenuous because it seems like your entire critique is based on an interpretation of the term "wants" when everyone reading the original article understands it to mean "is willing."
I.e., nobody is willing to pay the entry prices for certain terms, so there will never be any ads for those terms.
We are willing to pay >$0 for bread, milk, etc. We want to pay nothing but since you (the seller) demand something we see we have to come to an agreement. The entire argument is about the failure of the sellers to accomodate the consumers sufficiently, so the system has to crash rather drastically.
I have seen this in commercial real estate before. There is a feedback loop between the amount of retail in an area and the success of retail stores. However, quite often you see property owners who bought a storefront outright and are paying, say, $5000/year in taxes on the property trying to charge that much per month. None of the owners on a street will lower their prices, so one by one the businesses die or move...until it's an avalanche and you wind up with a street full of empty storefronts on which NOBODY wants to open a business! The owners don't care because it's not a huge loss TO THEM, and they know that the city will eventually sell bonds and subsidize new business in order to spruce the place up.
The market always adjusts, either gradually, or all at once (spectacularly). This is the OP's Econ 101 lesson.