The quiz lets you see the emails, but there's no way to determine where the links are truly headed because they're disabled. I mean, I can make a link with the text "www.ebay.com" and have it point to "www.ripping-you-off-guy.com" in the HREF tag, and the typical user isn't going to see it.
What we NEED is mail clients that, when the user clicks on a link, will automatically deobfuscate the domain it links to and pop up a warning message to the effect of "Clicking this link will take you to a web page on the Internet domain 'www.ebayscammer.ca'. If this is not where you intended to go, click 'Cancel' now."
The travesty is that this guy took apart a much rarer SNES-2 system, instead of selling that one on eBay and picking up a classic SNES for next to nothing. I realize it's smaller than the classic one, but given the final size of this "console" did it really make a difference?
At least he didn't rip apart an NES-2 toploader. Those things routinely go for $80 or more on the collectors' market.
Ummm... you do realize that DDR is played using a dance pad, right? (I'm not counting the folks that use the controller, in which case you may as well call it Press Press Revolution.) DDR is an extremely aerobic workout, especially if you play marathons of several songs in a row. It's physically taxing enough that, unless your muscles are really toned, you have to start on an easy song and work your way up or risk getting shin splints -- just like other workouts. It's hardly something a "lazy fatass" will play.
You have a good argument, but your attack is misdirected. And the gratuitous name-calling didn't help, either.
I have seen a dozen or so comments echoing this sentiment, that the old computers were excellent to learn on, and so fun to use because you were right down there with the hardware, tweaking registers, peeking and poking at memory. I completely agree with this, and have a suggestion for those who long for those days: go into embedded systems programming! I work at the hardware level on a daily basis, whether it's with a simple eight-bit micro like the Atmel AVR series, or a complex 32-bit ARM7 system. The programming is still typically in C, not assembler, but the visceral interaction with the basic hardware components is there, and I love every minute of it.
Seriously, if you want the closest experience you can get to hacking on an old Atari 400 or Commodore 64, do some design work on an embedded microcontroller; you can even pick up a development board and for under $100. I guarantee you'll love it, and learn a heck of a lot too.
You know, my reply here may never be read seeing as how the article is already three days old, and others have probably addressed some of what you've said. But I have to rebut some of the points in your opinion, because you seem imply that everyone who is complaining is either throwing a "hissy fit" or someone who treats his or her iBook like a drum set. So I will respond to your post a piece at a time.
How many actual logic board failures are there? In total? And how many iBooks have been sold?
To begin with, as someone else noted, this issue is limited to the dual-USB iBook 800MHz G3 model, and not all iBooks. As for the total number of board failures, I can account for three for my wife's iBook alone, all within a year of the unit's purchase.
So what percentage of iBooks have actually failed? Does this percentage actually qualify as an inherent design flaw, or is it a matter that these people (and statisticly, there is no way of avoiding this circumstance) are the unlucky few that got either truly defective machines, or have unknowingly abused their machines to the point of failure or even repeated failure?
What percentage failure rate would you say is acceptable for a laptop? As far as I know, no solid sales figures for this exact iBook model were released. But if we say 500,000 were sold (and I admit I'm pulling that number out of my hat), then even 900 bad units (75% of 1200 as you said) would be a failure rate of 1 in 555 in the first year, which is already pretty high. Plus, many comments talk about multiple successive repairs... and you can bet there are plenty more from people who do not often frequent Mac fan sites or do Google searches for "iBook logic board failure". Besides, if the number of failures is a statistical anomaly, why are there so many stories of repeated failures? Ah yes, "unknowing abuse".
An example of unknowingly causing failure. Shutting down their machines everyday or power cycling their machines at least twice per day of usage.
Are you actually suggesting that a laptop shouldn't be designed to power off and on repeatedly!? I understand leaving a desktop machine on all the time; I do that myself. But if we're never supposed to power down our laptops, I guess those "sleep" and "hibernate" functions never should've been designed, huh?
Hate to break it to you folks, but this kind of usage inherently causes excess strain on your computers components. If you you think about it, every time you power cycle your machine, you are forcibly starting and stopping electrical spikes through your boards.
So would constantly moving around your laptop with the hard drive fully powered up. Besides, I'm not sure there's evidence to back this up for solid-state equipment with no moving parts. Yes, I would grant that a hard drive probably suffers wear on spin-up. And certainly power-up and power-down takes its toll on the power supply. But I question the effect it has on the processor, RAM, or chipset. I've seen the waveform of a regulated DC power supply coming up and shutting down; it's typically very clean.
These computers are silicon, metal and plastic. All 3 of those materials wear out over time and use. Heavy extended use will increase the change of breakage.
Yes, but over four months (the average time between logic board failures on our system)? My wife uses our iBook as frequently as I use my Dell laptop and homebuilt PC. Neither of those has had a single component failure.
Apple doesn't know what type of enviornment these complaints are stemming from. Do you work in a heavy industrialized city? Do you carry your iBook everywhere with you?
Isn't that the definition of portable? And the Chicago Loop is hardly heavy industry.
If we're going to split hairs, let's not forget the fact that the mode number is 666 octal, which would actually be 438 decimal -- which, of course, means absolutely nothing, unless you want to postulate that Revelations predicted the use of a base 8 number system.
Wow. Of all the times not to have moderator access... this should seriously be modded "Funny".
And if you were being serious... well, I believe the "do what I want, not what I tell you to do" problem has been present in computer engineering for white a while now, and won't be going away any time soon. If we succeed in building an "intuitive" computer, we will have succeeded in developing artificial intelligence. And as for "bug free", I'm sure that will occur the instant the human race becomes infallible. A brick may be reliable, but bricks don't have millions of lines of code translated into billions of assembly instructions switching trillions of logic gates to keep precisely coordinated.
As others have pointed out, this misses the point. The idea, as it seems to me, is to design something that will give a new generation of aspiring programmers the functional equivalent of the C64's and Apple IIs of our day -- something to learn programming and computer engineering on simultaneously. Programming an SBC through a HAL like DirectX simply isn't the same as seeing the whole computer and knowing precisely why the code you're writing is doing what it does.
If you gaze at the FAQ, the list price for the whole thing is $99. That seems to me to be a reasonable price for what is, in essence, the "100-in-1 Electronics Kit" of the future.
...how about a hot babe with all the nice bits PLUS an actual PERSONALITY?
You mean like Hoshi Sato? Of course, there's really no point to having her on the ship anymore, now that they've ditched the whole "we actually need translators because (gasp) everyone doesn't speak English" idea.
It's a shame, though. Phlox and Hoshi are the only two characters that tend to hold my interest on that show...
This would be an interesting de-evolution of the computer gaming industry. Does anyone else remember the days of the 8088? Some games (Zaxxon was a good example, if I remember correctly) came on bootable floppies that contained their own OS -- no DOS involved. Or, of course, you can go farther back, to C64 and Apple II games that didn't use DOS 3.2 or ProDOS. Of course, bypassing the OS today is a considerably more monumental task; back then, the hardware was more or less standardized, so you'd manipulate it directly. Today, you would need to include all of the various drivers that the OS typically takes care of -- a pretty complicated task for a company that just wants to release a game.
Your comparison would be correct if TiVo actually did push content to systems. However, the Suggestions feature is done entirely locally within the TiVo software: it uses the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down data recorded by the user, determines the types of shows that were voted upon, and tries to find similar shows that match the data. At no time is that information being sent across the network -- and the information being gathered is almost entirely voluntarily supplied by the user him/herself, with the exception being that the system assigns one "Thumbs Up" to anything that is recorded.
Second of all, if she's finding suggestions annoying, there's no need to call TiVo about it; they can't do anything about it anyway. What she needs to do is to go into her preferences and tell the TiVo not to auto-record suggestions, and it won't. It'll still suggest things, but they'll be tucked away in their own little menu, away from those who may consider a TiVo the definitive judge of sexual preference.
That all being said, I completely agree with your neighbor. TiVo's 2.x software does a horrible job with suggesting shows; at the moment, mine constantly thinks I watch Spanish-language soap operas. Supposedly the 3.x release is supposed to refine the process considerably.
Yes, this post is starting to go off on a tangent, but I thought it important to note that your information is incorrect. That having been said, I completely agree with the underlying theme of your message. User-identifiable information gathered without the user's knowledge is a horrible invasion of privacy, and if TiVo really did gather that sort of information, you can bet I'd be letting them know how I feel about it.
...if nobody raises any objections to it, they have a voice vote on it, which is very quick...
Question: why do we still even use voice votes? We live in the 21st century now. There's no reason why we couldn't outfit the chambers of the House and the Senate with ludicrously simple "Yea" and "Nay" buttons for each senator/representative that will tally votes for a count. I mean, we're talking 1980's technology here; a high school science student could set it up. It would be quick, and we would have a record of how people voted. All of this "gee, it sounds like the 'yea's have it" is bull.
For those of you who don't know, Escaflowne the movie is considerably different from Escaflowne the television series; people refer to it as an "alternate universe" telling of the story, where Hitomi appears considerably later in Zaibach's war of conquest, and things on Gaia are considerably darker. The most startling difference is that some characters in the movie can use a form of magic, something which did not come up in the series.
Overall, where the series has plenty of humor, political intrigue, romantic subplots and character development, the movie seems to be more for the sake of eye candy than anything else, although the overall "message" seems to be the same. Watch this if you want to see some really cool battles and assassination scenes. Just don't expect it to be anything like the series.
When it comes to a component that's going to be a part of a high-quality stereo system, why bother with MP3 compression at all? MP3's are great for the typical computer speakers, but get into higher-end sound equipment and you can really notice the compression artifacts. Yes, I realize that you can store considerably more music using MP3 compression, but if you're going to spend $999 on something, why not build a dedicated system with twin 80GB hard drives and store the CD tracks directly? You still have the room to store over 230 CDs worth of audio (and that's assuming each CD was filled to capacity, which often doesn't happen with music CDs), and you don't suffer the quality degradation from compression. Add the option to play files over a network link (either compressed or uncompressed), and THEN you have something worth that grand. IMHO, of course.
"EA owns the rights to Ultima and all of its characters, and in this case, no permission was requested or granted," said Jeff Brown, an Electronic Arts spokesman.
"As for Richard Garriott's approval, that's like getting permission from Toto to remake The Wizard of Oz."
No, that's like getting permission from L. Frank Baum to remake The Wizard of Oz. You know, the guy who originally thought it up.
These are fans paying tribute to something they like. AFAIK, they're not looking for profit in it. If only the U.S. media conglomerates were like Japanese anime producers, where fan-created derivative works are not only welcomed but encouraged...
They're an elite band of commandos, protecting Truth, Freedom, and the American Way! They are...
The Super Secret Security Corps of America!
Yes, the SSSCA fight hard to protect children everywhere from the evil forces of the Fiendish Terror Protectorate and the Insidious Razor-Claws, led by a dark and evil overlord known only as the "New Teller". These foes try to corrupt our nation's youth, brainwashing them into stealing Intellectual Property from good, law-abiding corporations everywhere!
Join us, every Saturday morning at 9:00am, as we cheer them on: "Go, go, SSSCA!"
(Note: "Go, go, SSSCA" is a copyrighted phrase owned by the Disney Channel. A fee of 10 cents will be assessed for each utterance of the phrase. The Super Secret Security Corps of America(tm) cannot be timeshifted in any form. The use of a recording device in conjunction with this performance constitutes theft under United States Criminal Law.)
It probably won't catch many 56k'ers attention at all, since WinXP will by default download and install patches in the background, without your explicit approval. Pair this with their EULA and you could wake up one day to find that your MP3s have all suddenly been deleted.
That was hyperbole; I honestly don't think that will happen. But it is possible. If you run WinXP, tell it to inform you of updates, rather than auto-applying them, so you know what your computer is doing when you're not looking!
The whole argument over mandatory encryption backdoors, or even banning the use of encryption by citizens, seems ludicrous to me. Chances are that terrorists and spies are more often using techniques such as steganography to hide their messages; and if they aren't now, they would if such encryption laws were passed. Why bother using encryption when you can hide 50KB of attack instructions in a 400KB GIF file of a basket of puppies? Hiding a message inside another, seemingly innocuous one would be more effective than sending clearly encrypted files. I suppose you could say we should then outlaw steganography, but you might as well try to outlaw calligraphy.
I was afraid I would come off that way, but I don't see another way to get my point across. (This is why I rarely post on Slashdot; too easy to be misinterpreted.) I didn't mean to imply I advocate any attack against foreign civilians. On the contrary, I absolutely hate it; it would simply be killing more innocents. What I wanted to say is that whether or not we condone it, it will most probably happen anyway, because that's what Joe USA will push for. The average person is not going to see that it's a non-state terrorist entity, or that bombing someone else in retaliation makes us as bad as they are. They'll just see a lot of Americans dead, and want payback. What any of us in particular thinks isn't going to make a difference; it will be the mob that speaks.
If the Palestinians truly were to blame for this, then damn it, this is not the way for them to make their point. This isn't the way for anyone to make their point. Do you realize what this will accomplish? The hatred of the entire United States against them? They'll be bombed into oblivion if they were responsible. Not only have hundreds of our civilians died, but they've decimated two landmark buildings on the NYC skyline... Americans tend to be very proud of things like that, as a nation.
I abhor what both sides have done in their "conflict", but if the Palestinians were truly behind this, they've just given our government a green light to massively increase defense (and offense) spending and completely obliterate them, because the average American citizen will want exactly that. Not a smart move.
Case in point: I tend to think of myself as a rational person, and someone who hates the "eye for an eye" solution to things. But when I see things like this happen, I don't deny that there's a part of me that wants blood for what was done. I'm willing to bet that a whole lot of US citizens won't be so restrained.
I highly doubt that the average spammer has any more knowledge of what RFCs are than a fish knows what wings are. From what I can tell, the majority of these people obtain bulk e-mailing software, an ISP willing to ignore spam complaints against them and/or a misconfigured open relay, and enough greed to make Ted Turner blush, and set their ill-concieved plans into action.
Now, an RFC proposing a protocol to electrocute spammers over a TCP/IP link -- there's a Request I wouldn't mind Commenting on.
Of course, since neural nets are trained by the input they take in, enough teenagers with enough time on their hands could train the net to reject everything except pr0n.
Slashdot Mirror
The quiz lets you see the emails, but there's no way to determine where the links are truly headed because they're disabled. I mean, I can make a link with the text "www.ebay.com" and have it point to "www.ripping-you-off-guy.com" in the HREF tag, and the typical user isn't going to see it.
What we NEED is mail clients that, when the user clicks on a link, will automatically deobfuscate the domain it links to and pop up a warning message to the effect of "Clicking this link will take you to a web page on the Internet domain 'www.ebayscammer.ca'. If this is not where you intended to go, click 'Cancel' now."
The travesty is that this guy took apart a much rarer SNES-2 system, instead of selling that one on eBay and picking up a classic SNES for next to nothing. I realize it's smaller than the classic one, but given the final size of this "console" did it really make a difference?
At least he didn't rip apart an NES-2 toploader. Those things routinely go for $80 or more on the collectors' market.
Ummm... you do realize that DDR is played using a dance pad, right? (I'm not counting the folks that use the controller, in which case you may as well call it Press Press Revolution.) DDR is an extremely aerobic workout, especially if you play marathons of several songs in a row. It's physically taxing enough that, unless your muscles are really toned, you have to start on an easy song and work your way up or risk getting shin splints -- just like other workouts. It's hardly something a "lazy fatass" will play.
You have a good argument, but your attack is misdirected. And the gratuitous name-calling didn't help, either.
I have seen a dozen or so comments echoing this sentiment, that the old computers were excellent to learn on, and so fun to use because you were right down there with the hardware, tweaking registers, peeking and poking at memory. I completely agree with this, and have a suggestion for those who long for those days: go into embedded systems programming! I work at the hardware level on a daily basis, whether it's with a simple eight-bit micro like the Atmel AVR series, or a complex 32-bit ARM7 system. The programming is still typically in C, not assembler, but the visceral interaction with the basic hardware components is there, and I love every minute of it.
Seriously, if you want the closest experience you can get to hacking on an old Atari 400 or Commodore 64, do some design work on an embedded microcontroller; you can even pick up a development board and for under $100. I guarantee you'll love it, and learn a heck of a lot too.
You know, my reply here may never be read seeing as how the article is already three days old, and others have probably addressed some of what you've said. But I have to rebut some of the points in your opinion, because you seem imply that everyone who is complaining is either throwing a "hissy fit" or someone who treats his or her iBook like a drum set. So I will respond to your post a piece at a time.
To begin with, as someone else noted, this issue is limited to the dual-USB iBook 800MHz G3 model, and not all iBooks. As for the total number of board failures, I can account for three for my wife's iBook alone, all within a year of the unit's purchase.
What percentage failure rate would you say is acceptable for a laptop? As far as I know, no solid sales figures for this exact iBook model were released. But if we say 500,000 were sold (and I admit I'm pulling that number out of my hat), then even 900 bad units (75% of 1200 as you said) would be a failure rate of 1 in 555 in the first year, which is already pretty high. Plus, many comments talk about multiple successive repairs... and you can bet there are plenty more from people who do not often frequent Mac fan sites or do Google searches for "iBook logic board failure". Besides, if the number of failures is a statistical anomaly, why are there so many stories of repeated failures? Ah yes, "unknowing abuse".
Are you actually suggesting that a laptop shouldn't be designed to power off and on repeatedly!? I understand leaving a desktop machine on all the time; I do that myself. But if we're never supposed to power down our laptops, I guess those "sleep" and "hibernate" functions never should've been designed, huh?
So would constantly moving around your laptop with the hard drive fully powered up. Besides, I'm not sure there's evidence to back this up for solid-state equipment with no moving parts. Yes, I would grant that a hard drive probably suffers wear on spin-up. And certainly power-up and power-down takes its toll on the power supply. But I question the effect it has on the processor, RAM, or chipset. I've seen the waveform of a regulated DC power supply coming up and shutting down; it's typically very clean.
Yes, but over four months (the average time between logic board failures on our system)? My wife uses our iBook as frequently as I use my Dell laptop and homebuilt PC. Neither of those has had a single component failure.
Isn't that the definition of portable? And the Chicago Loop is hardly heavy industry.
If we're going to split hairs, let's not forget the fact that the mode number is 666 octal, which would actually be 438 decimal -- which, of course, means absolutely nothing, unless you want to postulate that Revelations predicted the use of a base 8 number system.
"instant on... stateless... totally responsive... bug free... intuitive"
Wow. Of all the times not to have moderator access... this should seriously be modded "Funny".
And if you were being serious... well, I believe the "do what I want, not what I tell you to do" problem has been present in computer engineering for white a while now, and won't be going away any time soon. If we succeed in building an "intuitive" computer, we will have succeeded in developing artificial intelligence. And as for "bug free", I'm sure that will occur the instant the human race becomes infallible. A brick may be reliable, but bricks don't have millions of lines of code translated into billions of assembly instructions switching trillions of logic gates to keep precisely coordinated.
As others have pointed out, this misses the point. The idea, as it seems to me, is to design something that will give a new generation of aspiring programmers the functional equivalent of the C64's and Apple IIs of our day -- something to learn programming and computer engineering on simultaneously. Programming an SBC through a HAL like DirectX simply isn't the same as seeing the whole computer and knowing precisely why the code you're writing is doing what it does.
If you gaze at the FAQ, the list price for the whole thing is $99. That seems to me to be a reasonable price for what is, in essence, the "100-in-1 Electronics Kit" of the future.
...how about a hot babe with all the nice bits PLUS an actual PERSONALITY?
You mean like Hoshi Sato? Of course, there's really no point to having her on the ship anymore, now that they've ditched the whole "we actually need translators because (gasp) everyone doesn't speak English" idea.
It's a shame, though. Phlox and Hoshi are the only two characters that tend to hold my interest on that show...
This would be an interesting de-evolution of the computer gaming industry. Does anyone else remember the days of the 8088? Some games (Zaxxon was a good example, if I remember correctly) came on bootable floppies that contained their own OS -- no DOS involved. Or, of course, you can go farther back, to C64 and Apple II games that didn't use DOS 3.2 or ProDOS. Of course, bypassing the OS today is a considerably more monumental task; back then, the hardware was more or less standardized, so you'd manipulate it directly. Today, you would need to include all of the various drivers that the OS typically takes care of -- a pretty complicated task for a company that just wants to release a game.
Your comparison would be correct if TiVo actually did push content to systems. However, the Suggestions feature is done entirely locally within the TiVo software: it uses the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down data recorded by the user, determines the types of shows that were voted upon, and tries to find similar shows that match the data. At no time is that information being sent across the network -- and the information being gathered is almost entirely voluntarily supplied by the user him/herself, with the exception being that the system assigns one "Thumbs Up" to anything that is recorded.
Second of all, if she's finding suggestions annoying, there's no need to call TiVo about it; they can't do anything about it anyway. What she needs to do is to go into her preferences and tell the TiVo not to auto-record suggestions, and it won't. It'll still suggest things, but they'll be tucked away in their own little menu, away from those who may consider a TiVo the definitive judge of sexual preference.
That all being said, I completely agree with your neighbor. TiVo's 2.x software does a horrible job with suggesting shows; at the moment, mine constantly thinks I watch Spanish-language soap operas. Supposedly the 3.x release is supposed to refine the process considerably.
Yes, this post is starting to go off on a tangent, but I thought it important to note that your information is incorrect. That having been said, I completely agree with the underlying theme of your message. User-identifiable information gathered without the user's knowledge is a horrible invasion of privacy, and if TiVo really did gather that sort of information, you can bet I'd be letting them know how I feel about it.
Question: why do we still even use voice votes? We live in the 21st century now. There's no reason why we couldn't outfit the chambers of the House and the Senate with ludicrously simple "Yea" and "Nay" buttons for each senator/representative that will tally votes for a count. I mean, we're talking 1980's technology here; a high school science student could set it up. It would be quick, and we would have a record of how people voted. All of this "gee, it sounds like the 'yea's have it" is bull.
For those of you who don't know, Escaflowne the movie is considerably different from Escaflowne the television series; people refer to it as an "alternate universe" telling of the story, where Hitomi appears considerably later in Zaibach's war of conquest, and things on Gaia are considerably darker. The most startling difference is that some characters in the movie can use a form of magic, something which did not come up in the series.
Overall, where the series has plenty of humor, political intrigue, romantic subplots and character development, the movie seems to be more for the sake of eye candy than anything else, although the overall "message" seems to be the same. Watch this if you want to see some really cool battles and assassination scenes. Just don't expect it to be anything like the series.
Of course, this is just my opinion. YMMV.
When it comes to a component that's going to be a part of a high-quality stereo system, why bother with MP3 compression at all? MP3's are great for the typical computer speakers, but get into higher-end sound equipment and you can really notice the compression artifacts. Yes, I realize that you can store considerably more music using MP3 compression, but if you're going to spend $999 on something, why not build a dedicated system with twin 80GB hard drives and store the CD tracks directly? You still have the room to store over 230 CDs worth of audio (and that's assuming each CD was filled to capacity, which often doesn't happen with music CDs), and you don't suffer the quality degradation from compression. Add the option to play files over a network link (either compressed or uncompressed), and THEN you have something worth that grand. IMHO, of course.
Quote (emphasis mine):
No, that's like getting permission from L. Frank Baum to remake The Wizard of Oz. You know, the guy who originally thought it up.
These are fans paying tribute to something they like. AFAIK, they're not looking for profit in it. If only the U.S. media conglomerates were like Japanese anime producers, where fan-created derivative works are not only welcomed but encouraged...
They're an elite band of commandos, protecting Truth, Freedom, and the American Way! They are...
The Super Secret Security Corps of America!
Yes, the SSSCA fight hard to protect children everywhere from the evil forces of the Fiendish Terror Protectorate and the Insidious Razor-Claws, led by a dark and evil overlord known only as the "New Teller". These foes try to corrupt our nation's youth, brainwashing them into stealing Intellectual Property from good, law-abiding corporations everywhere!
Join us, every Saturday morning at 9:00am, as we cheer them on: "Go, go, SSSCA!"
(Note: "Go, go, SSSCA" is a copyrighted phrase owned by the Disney Channel. A fee of 10 cents will be assessed for each utterance of the phrase. The Super Secret Security Corps of America(tm) cannot be timeshifted in any form. The use of a recording device in conjunction with this performance constitutes theft under United States Criminal Law.)
It probably won't catch many 56k'ers attention at all, since WinXP will by default download and install patches in the background, without your explicit approval. Pair this with their EULA and you could wake up one day to find that your MP3s have all suddenly been deleted.
That was hyperbole; I honestly don't think that will happen. But it is possible. If you run WinXP, tell it to inform you of updates, rather than auto-applying them, so you know what your computer is doing when you're not looking!
The whole argument over mandatory encryption backdoors, or even banning the use of encryption by citizens, seems ludicrous to me. Chances are that terrorists and spies are more often using techniques such as steganography to hide their messages; and if they aren't now, they would if such encryption laws were passed. Why bother using encryption when you can hide 50KB of attack instructions in a 400KB GIF file of a basket of puppies? Hiding a message inside another, seemingly innocuous one would be more effective than sending clearly encrypted files. I suppose you could say we should then outlaw steganography, but you might as well try to outlaw calligraphy.
I was afraid I would come off that way, but I don't see another way to get my point across. (This is why I rarely post on Slashdot; too easy to be misinterpreted.) I didn't mean to imply I advocate any attack against foreign civilians. On the contrary, I absolutely hate it; it would simply be killing more innocents. What I wanted to say is that whether or not we condone it, it will most probably happen anyway, because that's what Joe USA will push for. The average person is not going to see that it's a non-state terrorist entity, or that bombing someone else in retaliation makes us as bad as they are. They'll just see a lot of Americans dead, and want payback. What any of us in particular thinks isn't going to make a difference; it will be the mob that speaks.
If the Palestinians truly were to blame for this, then damn it, this is not the way for them to make their point. This isn't the way for anyone to make their point. Do you realize what this will accomplish? The hatred of the entire United States against them? They'll be bombed into oblivion if they were responsible. Not only have hundreds of our civilians died, but they've decimated two landmark buildings on the NYC skyline... Americans tend to be very proud of things like that, as a nation.
I abhor what both sides have done in their "conflict", but if the Palestinians were truly behind this, they've just given our government a green light to massively increase defense (and offense) spending and completely obliterate them, because the average American citizen will want exactly that. Not a smart move.
Case in point: I tend to think of myself as a rational person, and someone who hates the "eye for an eye" solution to things. But when I see things like this happen, I don't deny that there's a part of me that wants blood for what was done. I'm willing to bet that a whole lot of US citizens won't be so restrained.
...which is ironic, since the first Macintoshes were completely monochrome...
From their press release:
Oh... thanks. That, uh, really clears things up.
RFC? Whazzat? Some kinda chemical additive?
I highly doubt that the average spammer has any more knowledge of what RFCs are than a fish knows what wings are. From what I can tell, the majority of these people obtain bulk e-mailing software, an ISP willing to ignore spam complaints against them and/or a misconfigured open relay, and enough greed to make Ted Turner blush, and set their ill-concieved plans into action.
Now, an RFC proposing a protocol to electrocute spammers over a TCP/IP link -- there's a Request I wouldn't mind Commenting on.
Of course, since neural nets are trained by the input they take in, enough teenagers with enough time on their hands could train the net to reject everything except pr0n.