With all of that orbiting space junk out there, why not salvage it? It seems to me an awful waste to just burn it up in the atmosphere, especially when the average bird is on the order of US$150M.
Yes, it reminds me of reading about Roman emperors who would gorge themselves on food, and then throw up, then gorge on more food, then throw up again, in an unvirtuous cycle. Absolutely sickening behaviour.
I think what's happened is that in the last five years or so the Web has transitioned from Library of Alexandria to a 24/7 larger-than-life television advert. People don't want to read such pabulum for hours on end.
Beyond closing open relays (and not running ludicrously vulnerable daemons like sendmain to begin with), here is my solution: allow people to have, say, 100 recipients for any given email and charge a penny or so for each recipient above the 100. If you have a legitimate reason to email thousands of people at a time (as some very popular mailing-list administrators do), then there should be a way for you to get some type of certification with your provider. Otherwise, make these spammers pay a penny for each recipient over a hundred. At a dollar for every hundred recipients, I guarantee you the money will add up and many spammers will modify their tactics.
This corroborates with the work of Claude Shannon, who said that the value of a message is proportional to its novelty, i.e., its unexpectedness. For example, if someone were to tell me that the sky is blue, that's not information. If someone were to tell me that the sky is red, then I would have to assess the accuracy of *all* my visual perceptions.
I wonder how long it'll take for some intrepid soul to gerry-rig one of these D-VHS VCR's as a (relatively) inexpensive backup medium? Whilst the cassettes are bulkier than DLT and such, 44GB per tape ain't bad at all.
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. One can view a figure of 0.24% as a curse or a blessing. What if we chose the latter? That means there's huge room for growth. Microsoft has begun to realise that the OS market is largely saturated. Sure people upgrade from 95 to 98 to ME to 2000 to XP. But for the most part, the huge growth curve of, say, DOS 5.0 days is gone. That's why we see Microsoft diversifying *out* of operating system sales. This leaves a vacuum for OS's like Linux to fill.
RE: your thing about contracting for business-class service. I agree fully. I think the lack of bandwidth is a situation of artificial scarcity. The telcos don't want to cannibalise their hefty profits on DSx and OCx circuits, so they claim that long-haul bandwidth is scarce. Bullshit. By various estimates, long-haul fibre is between 80% and 99% dark. They could turn up new circuits easily. They just don't want to let high volume drive down costs. They enjoy the gravy train too much.
I wonder if there is much research into multi-layer *superconducting* materials. Such an approach would seem to mitigate any problems with outrageous heat dissipation, as well as provide for more electron mobility (i.e., as a direct result of negligible resistance). Thin-film superconductors have been de rigeur for 15 years, so it probably wouldn't be that much of a conceptual leap, but merely an extrapolation of current lines of research.
Re:Hemp didn't fly, but this might.
on
Electronic Paper
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There's a second lobby that fought against marijuana too -- the printing industry (how ironic). Someone came up with an economical method to produce hemp paper. However, this would mean printers having to retool their presses. William Randolph Hearst (the billionaire media mogul and Patty Hearst's daddy) lobbied Congress to make marijuana illegal because he didn't want to spend a dime in retooling presses that, to him, were perfectly good at what they did.
Re:I'll fight this tooth and nail
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Why are we opposed to paper? For one thing, it has grave environmental costs. Even with all the recycling of paper (and most of it still gets thrown out), trees still need to get cut down to make virgin pulp, because paper has a limit to how many times it can be recycled (eventually the fibres break down). Not to mention the fact that rather nasty chemicals are used in its production. One may counter that the production of ePaper will involve equally nasty and toxic compounds (after all, electronics manufacturing is one of the dirtiest industries on the planet), but if I produce one unit that will last twenty years, I'm using fewer harmful chemicals than if I produce many millions of pieces of paper, and saving trees in the process. Ever since the advent of the electronic computer, the world's consumption of paper has increased exponentially -- meaning large swathes of virgin forest have to be cut down. This is a trend that NEEDS to be reversed or at least stopped dead in its tracks. I mean, get over it. The argument for the 'feel' of paper and all of that sentimental tosh is a strawman. If I had an ePaper medium that was easy on the eyes, I'd gladly abandon paper for it. Are you going to use the same sentimental argument about cuneiform? 'Boy, that new-fangled paper stuff just doesn't have the "feel" of chiselling into hard slate or granite. I need to keep my sanity by etching runes into this stone here.' Nonsense! If our ancestors could abandon the old in favour of the new, so could we.
Even better than Ginger...
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1
...a device that has been around for hundreds of millions of years, can support weights of up to several tonnes, is very energy-efficient, and lasts for decades. It's called a FOOT. And guess what! It's free! You're born with a set of them!
RE: Yahoo, I think Yahoo does a much better job of filtering spam than Hotmail. Whilst Hotmail lets spam into my inbox and filters legitimate mailing-list posts (which I have added to the safe list, BTW), Yahoo seems to get it right and mostly filter only spam.
I forgot to add two suggestions for all the SMTP admins out there:
CLOSE YOUR FUCKING OPEN RELAYS!!!!!!!!! -- and --
REQUIRE USERS TO LOG IN TO SMTP SERVERS!!!!!!!!!!
In this day and age, there's NO compelling reason to use open relays anymore!
About the second point, all potential users of an email server should have a legitimate account on it. Users shouldn't bitch because with any decent client, you can automatically set it up to log you on. But this would cut out a lot of spam. Ditto for news servers. Require users to log in.
I lay some of the blame for the spam pandemic on lazy, incompetent system administrators. They should be earning their large salaries and reading up on CERT advisories and implementing those little fixes that, in the aggregrate, can really make a difference in making systems more secure.
My problem with spam is not that it's unsolicited, but that it's mostly irrelevant. After all, when a buddy asks you to join him at the pub for a drink, that is an unsolicited invitation. But most spam is for products and services I care not one jot about. Spammers take the lazy, brute-force approach, instead of doing market research and finding out the interests and wants of potential customers. The result is that I, a male, get constantly bombarded with requests to buy cosmetics, feminine hygiene products, purses, and other shit that I could care less about. And I don't have a girlfriend or wife, so I have nobody else for whom to buy the stuff, either. But this is the more innocuous kind. The truly awful (and majority) portion of spam is for downright illegal or deceptive products. How many emails have we all received about '36% returns on gold futures,' or 'a completely safe, imported marijuana alternative' lately? I know I get those at least once a day. But I guess my big problem with this is that these filters seem to be Band-Aids. We should be stemming the flow of spam at the source, because even with filters, spam still clogs up servers and routers with its detritus.
I use good old OE. Whilst it's not very featureful, a lot of the other free newsreaders seem to have stagnated. (Free)Agent hasn't really changed in several years and is looking quite stale. I have not tried Zeonews yet.
Re:Why are /.'ers even READING Cringely?!?!
on
C# To Crush Java?
·
· Score: 1
Correction. Philippe Kahn (founder of Borland) originally wrote Turbo Pascal. Anders didn't grab hold of TP until version 4.0 or 5.0, I believe.
When I had digital telephony installed by AT&T Broadband, they gave me this cool device. It was a Cablespan RISU (remote integrated service unit?) with a coax input and a couple of RJ-11 ports for conventional phones. What really piqued my curiosity, though, was the two RJ-45 ports. I asked the technician what could be plugged into them, and he said IP phones. Apparently the box has support for IP telephony right from the start. Although I cancelled service with AT&T Broadband because it was lacklustre, I look forward to applications like this in future.
COnsidering that the quality of code produced by GCC is generally inferior to that produced by closed-source alternatives, I welcome an alternative. If the licence Sybase chooses is friendly, maybe sections can be lifted out to make GCC better, or maybe a hybrid that contains best-of-breeds. And this is by no means meant to be a troll or flamebait. I admire the many people who maintain the GCC codebase, but the general consensus amongst many is that its emitted code is not yet on a par with such compilers as Watcom and Borland (hence the importance of Kylix in its C++ version).
Their desperate embrace of Compaq and a willingless to let so much human capital fly out the window is more evidence that HP is a company fading into obscurity just like Digital several years ago. Maybe someone will buy THEM, cherry-pick what IP is worth salvaging, and then put this sad company out of its misery.
As with most things in this imperfect universe, money rules. The sad reality is that New York real-estate is some of the priciest in the world, and despite the loss of lives, nobody can afford to let a couple dozen acres lie in economically unproductive use. Whilst I agree about a monument somewhere (maybe in Central Park), I don't think that turning the entire complex into a monument is the best answer. I would see it as an admission of defeat.
I think you would be singing a different tune if you had lost friends or loved ones in the attack. I have. Since you embrace death, why not volunteer yourself to be a martyr?
Slashdot Mirror
With all of that orbiting space junk out there, why not salvage it? It seems to me an awful waste to just burn it up in the atmosphere, especially when the average bird is on the order of US$150M.
Yes, it reminds me of reading about Roman emperors who would gorge themselves on food, and then throw up, then gorge on more food, then throw up again, in an unvirtuous cycle. Absolutely sickening behaviour.
I think what's happened is that in the last five years or so the Web has transitioned from Library of Alexandria to a 24/7 larger-than-life television advert. People don't want to read such pabulum for hours on end.
Lovely! So now I can turn my AOL CD's into rather *aerodynamic* frisbees!
Beyond closing open relays (and not running ludicrously vulnerable daemons like sendmain to begin with), here is my solution: allow people to have, say, 100 recipients for any given email and charge a penny or so for each recipient above the 100. If you have a legitimate reason to email thousands of people at a time (as some very popular mailing-list administrators do), then there should be a way for you to get some type of certification with your provider. Otherwise, make these spammers pay a penny for each recipient over a hundred. At a dollar for every hundred recipients, I guarantee you the money will add up and many spammers will modify their tactics.
This corroborates with the work of Claude Shannon, who said that the value of a message is proportional to its novelty, i.e., its unexpectedness. For example, if someone were to tell me that the sky is blue, that's not information. If someone were to tell me that the sky is red, then I would have to assess the accuracy of *all* my visual perceptions.
I wonder how long it'll take for some intrepid soul to gerry-rig one of these D-VHS VCR's as a (relatively) inexpensive backup medium? Whilst the cassettes are bulkier than DLT and such, 44GB per tape ain't bad at all.
Nobody mentioned the obvious. Why can't these materials be recycled? Burning on re-entry isn't a very environmentally sound solution.
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. One can view a figure of 0.24% as a curse or a blessing. What if we chose the latter? That means there's huge room for growth. Microsoft has begun to realise that the OS market is largely saturated. Sure people upgrade from 95 to 98 to ME to 2000 to XP. But for the most part, the huge growth curve of, say, DOS 5.0 days is gone. That's why we see Microsoft diversifying *out* of operating system sales. This leaves a vacuum for OS's like Linux to fill.
RE: your thing about contracting for business-class service. I agree fully. I think the lack of bandwidth is a situation of artificial scarcity. The telcos don't want to cannibalise their hefty profits on DSx and OCx circuits, so they claim that long-haul bandwidth is scarce. Bullshit. By various estimates, long-haul fibre is between 80% and 99% dark. They could turn up new circuits easily. They just don't want to let high volume drive down costs. They enjoy the gravy train too much.
I wonder if there is much research into multi-layer *superconducting* materials. Such an approach would seem to mitigate any problems with outrageous heat dissipation, as well as provide for more electron mobility (i.e., as a direct result of negligible resistance). Thin-film superconductors have been de rigeur for 15 years, so it probably wouldn't be that much of a conceptual leap, but merely an extrapolation of current lines of research.
There's a second lobby that fought against marijuana too -- the printing industry (how ironic). Someone came up with an economical method to produce hemp paper. However, this would mean printers having to retool their presses. William Randolph Hearst (the billionaire media mogul and Patty Hearst's daddy) lobbied Congress to make marijuana illegal because he didn't want to spend a dime in retooling presses that, to him, were perfectly good at what they did.
Why are we opposed to paper? For one thing, it has grave environmental costs. Even with all the recycling of paper (and most of it still gets thrown out), trees still need to get cut down to make virgin pulp, because paper has a limit to how many times it can be recycled (eventually the fibres break down). Not to mention the fact that rather nasty chemicals are used in its production. One may counter that the production of ePaper will involve equally nasty and toxic compounds (after all, electronics manufacturing is one of the dirtiest industries on the planet), but if I produce one unit that will last twenty years, I'm using fewer harmful chemicals than if I produce many millions of pieces of paper, and saving trees in the process. Ever since the advent of the electronic computer, the world's consumption of paper has increased exponentially -- meaning large swathes of virgin forest have to be cut down. This is a trend that NEEDS to be reversed or at least stopped dead in its tracks. I mean, get over it. The argument for the 'feel' of paper and all of that sentimental tosh is a strawman. If I had an ePaper medium that was easy on the eyes, I'd gladly abandon paper for it. Are you going to use the same sentimental argument about cuneiform? 'Boy, that new-fangled paper stuff just doesn't have the "feel" of chiselling into hard slate or granite. I need to keep my sanity by etching runes into this stone here.' Nonsense! If our ancestors could abandon the old in favour of the new, so could we.
...a device that has been around for hundreds of millions of years, can support weights of up to several tonnes, is very energy-efficient, and lasts for decades. It's called a FOOT. And guess what! It's free! You're born with a set of them!
RE: Yahoo, I think Yahoo does a much better job of filtering spam than Hotmail. Whilst Hotmail lets spam into my inbox and filters legitimate mailing-list posts (which I have added to the safe list, BTW), Yahoo seems to get it right and mostly filter only spam.
I forgot to add two suggestions for all the SMTP admins out there: CLOSE YOUR FUCKING OPEN RELAYS!!!!!!!!! -- and -- REQUIRE USERS TO LOG IN TO SMTP SERVERS!!!!!!!!!! In this day and age, there's NO compelling reason to use open relays anymore! About the second point, all potential users of an email server should have a legitimate account on it. Users shouldn't bitch because with any decent client, you can automatically set it up to log you on. But this would cut out a lot of spam. Ditto for news servers. Require users to log in. I lay some of the blame for the spam pandemic on lazy, incompetent system administrators. They should be earning their large salaries and reading up on CERT advisories and implementing those little fixes that, in the aggregrate, can really make a difference in making systems more secure.
My problem with spam is not that it's unsolicited, but that it's mostly irrelevant. After all, when a buddy asks you to join him at the pub for a drink, that is an unsolicited invitation. But most spam is for products and services I care not one jot about. Spammers take the lazy, brute-force approach, instead of doing market research and finding out the interests and wants of potential customers. The result is that I, a male, get constantly bombarded with requests to buy cosmetics, feminine hygiene products, purses, and other shit that I could care less about. And I don't have a girlfriend or wife, so I have nobody else for whom to buy the stuff, either. But this is the more innocuous kind. The truly awful (and majority) portion of spam is for downright illegal or deceptive products. How many emails have we all received about '36% returns on gold futures,' or 'a completely safe, imported marijuana alternative' lately? I know I get those at least once a day. But I guess my big problem with this is that these filters seem to be Band-Aids. We should be stemming the flow of spam at the source, because even with filters, spam still clogs up servers and routers with its detritus.
I use good old OE. Whilst it's not very featureful, a lot of the other free newsreaders seem to have stagnated. (Free)Agent hasn't really changed in several years and is looking quite stale. I have not tried Zeonews yet.
Correction. Philippe Kahn (founder of Borland) originally wrote Turbo Pascal. Anders didn't grab hold of TP until version 4.0 or 5.0, I believe.
When I had digital telephony installed by AT&T Broadband, they gave me this cool device. It was a Cablespan RISU (remote integrated service unit?) with a coax input and a couple of RJ-11 ports for conventional phones. What really piqued my curiosity, though, was the two RJ-45 ports. I asked the technician what could be plugged into them, and he said IP phones. Apparently the box has support for IP telephony right from the start. Although I cancelled service with AT&T Broadband because it was lacklustre, I look forward to applications like this in future.
COnsidering that the quality of code produced by GCC is generally inferior to that produced by closed-source alternatives, I welcome an alternative. If the licence Sybase chooses is friendly, maybe sections can be lifted out to make GCC better, or maybe a hybrid that contains best-of-breeds. And this is by no means meant to be a troll or flamebait. I admire the many people who maintain the GCC codebase, but the general consensus amongst many is that its emitted code is not yet on a par with such compilers as Watcom and Borland (hence the importance of Kylix in its C++ version).
Their desperate embrace of Compaq and a willingless to let so much human capital fly out the window is more evidence that HP is a company fading into obscurity just like Digital several years ago. Maybe someone will buy THEM, cherry-pick what IP is worth salvaging, and then put this sad company out of its misery.
As with most things in this imperfect universe, money rules. The sad reality is that New York real-estate is some of the priciest in the world, and despite the loss of lives, nobody can afford to let a couple dozen acres lie in economically unproductive use. Whilst I agree about a monument somewhere (maybe in Central Park), I don't think that turning the entire complex into a monument is the best answer. I would see it as an admission of defeat.
The federal, state and local governments and their agents may not restrict speech. However, private parties can restrict your speech all they want.
I think you would be singing a different tune if you had lost friends or loved ones in the attack. I have. Since you embrace death, why not volunteer yourself to be a martyr?