There most certainly is a technological means to fight spam. It would be a little rough on legitimate mailing lists, but you could whitelist those back in.
It's been suggested here on slashdot and other places, and there are papers available (and their full text is available through scholar.google.com).
The message digest method.
The principle is to make email expensive for mass mailers by requiring a substantial amount of CPU time (to the machine) which is barely noticeable from a human perspective.
You simply require the sending machine to repeatedly hash the message with the header and a variable string tacked on. Varying the string until a certain number of zeros (or an arbitrary sequence of characters) appears in the hash.
It scales well to processing power: as CPU/$ drops, you can simply lengthen the required string, and use longer hash algorithms if you need even more characters.
You would barely notice an extra one second spent sending an email. But do you think a spammer could profit if he could only send out 86,400 messages a day per machine? Even if it's being done with a bot-net, there's a level of requirement that reduces the message rate to a crawl / forces the botnet to use noticeable system resources on the compromised machines. They won't remain compromised for long if they use too much.
Granted, people with older machines will start to notice the time spent hashing, but you can always add them to your no-check whitelist and skip that step.
You don't have to make it impossible to spam. You only have to make it impossible to profit from it.
If you oppose gun ownership, and live in the US, there's really only one rational way to go about it.
You must campaign for an amendment to the constitution allowing the government to regulate arms.
Because there's already an amendment that specifically forbids it from doing the same and if you're willing to just ignore the constitution in this case, then why not some of the other amendments and articles, too? Like, say the first one.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that there is a significant fraction of NRA membership who would support your measure if moderate. Give them the chance.
People keep lauding the Minority Report UI like it's a good idea. Do you really want to have to hold your arms up like that and move them around all day?
People liked a *lot* of things about Minority Report that were disturbing. The whole film was about a dystopian future, but for some reason only the pre-crime unit's accuracy was ever called into question by the audience. The complete lack of trial and the cruel and unusual sentences were completely overlooked!
I know you're being funny, but I never understood trackballs. They always offered MUCH more resistance than a cheap mouse, which did not instill a desire in me to bother working on accuracy, which with trackballs seems to be a skill that needs a small amount of practice.
The thin air is only half the problem. The strong eddies being the other half. A helicopter has barely enough lift to stay aloft at the proper altitude. An airship has far less than enough maneuverability to avoid terrain.
What they need is some kind of cog railway, strong tethers, and the opposite of a JIM suit.
Or, y'know, just leave the bodies up there. The permafrost makes for pretty good preservation, and you could do worse for a tombstone than the rock that reaches furthest above sea level on the planet.
What I find far more concerning is the oxygen bottles these guys are bringing up. Apparently, they're only certified for one use, so they just leave them after they're done. But.. Would you really trust a single-use can in a pack of dozens, ON YOUR BACK? These morons are lucky if no one's died from a freakin' compressed air bomb yet.
I wonder if you could send the media companies a bill for the time spent watching he previews and condescending crap, since they don't let you buy a more expensive version without that advertising:
They're making money off of your time, so shouldn't you be compensated for that? TV has ads, but that's how you pay for it: you pay with your time.
That's really not hair-brained at all. Except for the readable data part. People used to write utilities to draw pictures in CDs in the days before lightscribe. (come to think of it, it's probably where they got their idea from)
I even remember reading somewhere that since the pixels would be so very small (a CD actually makes for a crude diffraction grating) that it might even be possible to write crude holograms to them.
I imagine, as long as your gaps were shorter than a cm or so, that you might be able to do that with regular CDs. Or perhaps someone could modify mkisofs to produce an image that doesn't actually have data around the picture area.
I prefer the one where the researcher evolved a speech recognizer out of FPGAs, and the result took advantage of the nonlinearities inherent in the line of FPGAs he used.
Rehab people who've ruined their lives with chemical injury and need extensive therapy to even be able to function in society semi-normally?
Yeah, that's a tough call.
That is not what people who oppose nationalized health care oppose. (well.. maybe a few) What we fear is that universal health care will inflate the price and result in LESS availability of lifesaving or enhancing treatments. It's already happening with insured health care: the insurance companies get very little ability to choose their costs, so they get reamed. Only they don't get reamed, YOU do.
Yeah, if you want to prevent something, you should make that thing illegal. You don't go way up the chain of potential causality and criminalize things that have a very good chance of not leading to the outcome you're trying to prevent.
You assume you'd be one of the rich, attractve guys with multiple wives. And not, you know, one of the not so rich, less attractive guys who now can't even get a date with the women who'd rather be "number 3" than "number only" to someone like you.
Lemme guess, you're one of those doctors who refuses to wash his hands*, too, because it's somehow demeaning to a man of your stature to do something so ordinary as scrubbing a little suds.
The electric field and magnetic field that make up what we call "light" have both a magnitude and direction. This is independent (somewhat) of the direction of travel.
If you imagine a dipole flying through space, in the area around it for instance, the magnetic field at each point has a magnitude and direction, and the whole thing has a direction of travel. This not light, but I hope you can visualize that the direction of an electric property is *not* the same as the direction of travel EM radiation.
Now, I say somewhat, because the varying electric field can also be described as varying magnetic field perpendicular to the electric field, and the direction of travel is perpendicular to both of those.
So you can see that for any given direction of travel, there is a locus of orientations for plane described by the E and B vectors, that can be described by an angle of rotation from some reference orientation.
Now hand waving here.
There is a class of materials that preferentially pass photons that have a specific orientation angle. Or rather, they pass the component of those photons in the preferred direction, so you see a range of attenuation up to the maximum where the E vector is perpendicular to the preferred E vector.
So.. you get the exact same security as NAT, by implementing NAT on IPv6?
That's exactly why people are slow to switch. They're not thinking, "I want to keep using IPv4, so I'll use NAT" they're thinking, "I'm going to NAT anyway, and it kinda solves the IPv4 problem, so why bother going the extra step?"
What protection should journalists get the "regular people" do not?
If you mean protecting their sources, I say, bollocks. You can't know until they've actually done it just how far a journalist will go to protect their source. Prison time isn't a punishment for a journalist, it's a resume builder.
Plus, there is the question of what the journalist is protecting his source from. Retribution for leaking, certainly, but crimes committed? gray.
It gets even muddier when the leak is the crime. Certainly you don't want the authorities to be able to avenge embarrassment, but what if the leak amounts to jury tampering by releasing tainted or out of context evidence before a trial?
Although, if what they write in that blog results in them getting arrested, there's a pretty good chance they're journalists. Hell, there are an awful lot of "real" journalists without the dedication to risk prison.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. You don't want to accidentally outlaw smoke detectors, for instance.
There most certainly is a technological means to fight spam. It would be a little rough on legitimate mailing lists, but you could whitelist those back in.
It's been suggested here on slashdot and other places, and there are papers available (and their full text is available through scholar.google.com).
The message digest method.
The principle is to make email expensive for mass mailers by requiring a substantial amount of CPU time (to the machine) which is barely noticeable from a human perspective.
You simply require the sending machine to repeatedly hash the message with the header and a variable string tacked on. Varying the string until a certain number of zeros (or an arbitrary sequence of characters) appears in the hash.
It scales well to processing power: as CPU/$ drops, you can simply lengthen the required string, and use longer hash algorithms if you need even more characters.
You would barely notice an extra one second spent sending an email. But do you think a spammer could profit if he could only send out 86,400 messages a day per machine? Even if it's being done with a bot-net, there's a level of requirement that reduces the message rate to a crawl / forces the botnet to use noticeable system resources on the compromised machines. They won't remain compromised for long if they use too much.
Granted, people with older machines will start to notice the time spent hashing, but you can always add them to your no-check whitelist and skip that step.
You don't have to make it impossible to spam. You only have to make it impossible to profit from it.
If you oppose gun ownership, and live in the US, there's really only one rational way to go about it.
You must campaign for an amendment to the constitution allowing the government to regulate arms.
Because there's already an amendment that specifically forbids it from doing the same and if you're willing to just ignore the constitution in this case, then why not some of the other amendments and articles, too? Like, say the first one.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that there is a significant fraction of NRA membership who would support your measure if moderate. Give them the chance.
People liked a *lot* of things about Minority Report that were disturbing. The whole film was about a dystopian future, but for some reason only the pre-crime unit's accuracy was ever called into question by the audience. The complete lack of trial and the cruel and unusual sentences were completely overlooked!
I know you're being funny, but I never understood trackballs. They always offered MUCH more resistance than a cheap mouse, which did not instill a desire in me to bother working on accuracy, which with trackballs seems to be a skill that needs a small amount of practice.
The thin air is only half the problem. The strong eddies being the other half. A helicopter has barely enough lift to stay aloft at the proper altitude. An airship has far less than enough maneuverability to avoid terrain.
What they need is some kind of cog railway, strong tethers, and the opposite of a JIM suit.
Or, y'know, just leave the bodies up there. The permafrost makes for pretty good preservation, and you could do worse for a tombstone than the rock that reaches furthest above sea level on the planet.
What I find far more concerning is the oxygen bottles these guys are bringing up. Apparently, they're only certified for one use, so they just leave them after they're done. But.. Would you really trust a single-use can in a pack of dozens, ON YOUR BACK? These morons are lucky if no one's died from a freakin' compressed air bomb yet.
Try LyX for a week and then tell us what you think of OO.org's equation editor.
good to know.
That's what I get for using words I've heard and not read.
I wonder if you could send the media companies a bill for the time spent watching he previews and condescending crap, since they don't let you buy a more expensive version without that advertising:
They're making money off of your time, so shouldn't you be compensated for that? TV has ads, but that's how you pay for it: you pay with your time.
That's really not hair-brained at all. Except for the readable data part. People used to write utilities to draw pictures in CDs in the days before lightscribe. (come to think of it, it's probably where they got their idea from)
I even remember reading somewhere that since the pixels would be so very small (a CD actually makes for a crude diffraction grating) that it might even be possible to write crude holograms to them.
I imagine, as long as your gaps were shorter than a cm or so, that you might be able to do that with regular CDs. Or perhaps someone could modify mkisofs to produce an image that doesn't actually have data around the picture area.
Corn only makes sense as a biofuel because of the HUGE government subsidies and mandates, and because the oil that you need to make it is so cheap.
Ditch the subsidies and mandates OR require that the production of ethanol use no oil and you solve the problem.
Myth No. 1 really hurts to read. I'm not sure there is a single instance there where the units of power and energy are used correctly.
I prefer the one where the researcher evolved a speech recognizer out of FPGAs, and the result took advantage of the nonlinearities inherent in the line of FPGAs he used.
I'm confused. Do you have a secretary for your home? Or are you conducting personal business on company time?
Out of what? Depression at how small the number really is?
I know I find it depressing just how many people still hate the Jews.
Are you angry because you might have to pay more to get more service, or because some other people don't?
Rehab people who've ruined their lives with chemical injury and need extensive therapy to even be able to function in society semi-normally?
Yeah, that's a tough call.
That is not what people who oppose nationalized health care oppose. (well.. maybe a few) What we fear is that universal health care will inflate the price and result in LESS availability of lifesaving or enhancing treatments. It's already happening with insured health care: the insurance companies get very little ability to choose their costs, so they get reamed. Only they don't get reamed, YOU do.
Yeah, if you want to prevent something, you should make that thing illegal. You don't go way up the chain of potential causality and criminalize things that have a very good chance of not leading to the outcome you're trying to prevent.
You assume you'd be one of the rich, attractve guys with multiple wives. And not, you know, one of the not so rich, less attractive guys who now can't even get a date with the women who'd rather be "number 3" than "number only" to someone like you.
Lemme guess, you're one of those doctors who refuses to wash his hands*, too, because it's somehow demeaning to a man of your stature to do something so ordinary as scrubbing a little suds.
*it's on the rise, WTF?
The electric field and magnetic field that make up what we call "light" have both a magnitude and direction. This is independent (somewhat) of the direction of travel.
If you imagine a dipole flying through space, in the area around it for instance, the magnetic field at each point has a magnitude and direction, and the whole thing has a direction of travel. This not light, but I hope you can visualize that the direction of an electric property is *not* the same as the direction of travel EM radiation.
Now, I say somewhat, because the varying electric field can also be described as varying magnetic field perpendicular to the electric field, and the direction of travel is perpendicular to both of those.
So you can see that for any given direction of travel, there is a locus of orientations for plane described by the E and B vectors, that can be described by an angle of rotation from some reference orientation.
Now hand waving here.
There is a class of materials that preferentially pass photons that have a specific orientation angle. Or rather, they pass the component of those photons in the preferred direction, so you see a range of attenuation up to the maximum where the E vector is perpendicular to the preferred E vector.
And it just get weirder from here.
So.. you get the exact same security as NAT, by implementing NAT on IPv6?
That's exactly why people are slow to switch. They're not thinking, "I want to keep using IPv4, so I'll use NAT" they're thinking, "I'm going to NAT anyway, and it kinda solves the IPv4 problem, so why bother going the extra step?"
"It's so stupid that it hurts: The CPU has to execute it in a un-encrypted form"
Shut uuuup. They're just going to push for CPUs with an inline crypto unit so the instruction will only be decrypted *right* before they're executed.
What protection should journalists get the "regular people" do not?
If you mean protecting their sources, I say, bollocks. You can't know until they've actually done it just how far a journalist will go to protect their source. Prison time isn't a punishment for a journalist, it's a resume builder.
Plus, there is the question of what the journalist is protecting his source from. Retribution for leaking, certainly, but crimes committed? gray.
It gets even muddier when the leak is the crime. Certainly you don't want the authorities to be able to avenge embarrassment, but what if the leak amounts to jury tampering by releasing tainted or out of context evidence before a trial?
Although, if what they write in that blog results in them getting arrested, there's a pretty good chance they're journalists. Hell, there are an awful lot of "real" journalists without the dedication to risk prison.