Combine this with a simpl BOTC(Benefits Outweigh The Costs) effect, and you've got yourself a billion unencrypted hard discs just waiting to be looted.
Try telling that to the families of the 2000+ people that died on 9/11/01.
Ahhh! The corpses of the Twin Towers victims. Being waved around loudly on facist poles since Sep-2001.
I certainly can't think of a more ignoble way to spend the afterlife than being constantly invocated by the living to justify their actions. If a seance ever works, these guys are going to be pissed.
I recently implemented a new CAPTCHA system using Flash as "secure container" on my guestbook.
Forget about blind users! You've just alienated the 10% of the web that doesn't have flash. Not to mention infuriated the quite potion of the rest that cannot stand site content embedded in unnessesary flash.
My own weblog was recently hit by comment spam. I was extremely irritated, and initially considered captchas as a potential solution. But several problems with captchas ultimately lead to me seeking alternate solutions.
The first problem with captchas is the barrier it puts up, however small, between you and the users of your site. Apologies for the corney analogy, but captchas are a speedbump on the information superhighway. People hate running into them.
The impediment to visually disabled users is also a big one to consider. It's not just fully blind people. People can be shortsighted, colour blind, dyslexic or perhaps simply shortsighted users relying on specialist software to read your website. You're letting these people down by adopting this practice and that's something I would really feel bad about doing.
But the biggest reason not to use captchas is spammers increasing abilities to interpret them. At even a five percent success rate in interpreting captchas, a spammer can bombard your site with requests and still get something through. They're just using the same model as they did with email, and it will work.
Instead I chose some other plugins available for Wordpress to help with the spam. Akismet sounds like it could work as a kind of distributed spam check/blacklist of sorts, though I am wary of the fact that a private company is running the service. I also installed Bad Behaviour, though it's clear that eventually some spammers will adapt their behaviours to this.
Ideally what I'd like is a true bayesian comment spam filter plugin for wordpress, but so far I haven't been able to find one. Such filters have done wonders for me in Thunderbird for my email spam, with something like a 99.99% sucess rate and no false positives. Clearly the situation is quite different with comment spam, but all the same it would be nice to have one.
I envisage that the comment spam situation will get a lot worse as time goes by, regardless of any pagerank type algorithm changes. Comment spam will no doubt become as ubiquitous as regualar spam and I can forsee dozens of "splog" post per day in the not too distant futre. My opinion is that Blog software should come with robust, adaptable and self updating anti-spam software on by default before this problem escalates out of control.
When growing up I used to wrestle with other kids. Frequently the match would end when someone scraped up an arm, or hit their head hard enough to make them dizzy, or one of the big guys rolled over the leg of one of the little guys. In college, we sparred quite a few times.
I always hated this. The idea of someone pawing and walloping me was never very appealing. Nonetheless, many, perhaps well meaning, individuals attempted to get me to "join in the fun". That's my bubble you're encroaching on, in a very intimate fashion. It wasn't pleasant. Sweaty palms abounded, and most of the instigators smelled quite poorly. I don't think most people find this prospect very appealing either.
Personally, I suspect that most of these people are closet homosexuals trying to cop a feel, then covering up by thumping the target of their affections. I think the rest are in some way trying to cop a feel too. And all that walking around naked in showers. Come on. Who are they trying to kid?
We live in a free society, but, there are bubbles ok. Some people have bubbles. Please respect that.
It will work from the moment when a consumer will be uniquely identified by a digital certificate(s) thoughout their life and the businesses selling data (including content) get their head out of their arse and start selling to the consumer as identified by this certificate(s).
And who issues these? The Government? Private Companies? What happens if I don't want one, or I lose, mine, or someone breaks mine, or mine is issued twice, or if I happen to think that the concept of needing ID approval to purchace simple items is offensive?
Will you simply say; "well then that's your choice", as laws are passed making the certificates mandatory? Advise me to forgo certain luxuries like music, books and eventually food? Tell me it will never be abused even as marketers drown me in a deluge of obnoxiously targeted commericals or reporters are snooped on to find government leaks?
Tell you what, how about instead of a digital certificate or embedded RFID chip, we all walk around instead with barcodes printed on our arms and foreheads? What makes that so different ? In fact it's cheaper and probably more efficient? So why not? Technology is enabling. You don't want to be a luddite now do you?
That's a hardware licencing issue, not a software one. Is the hardware under GPL?
Wrong. It's a software licencing issue. The software must be licenced to run on the hardware. You completely own the hardware, but you need to obtain licences to use software on it.
...but given the smug, supercilious and downright annoying tone of their responses to legal threats...
Given the dishonest, beligerent, outrageous, overbearing and insulting nature of the legal threats in question, thepiratebay's response was completely justified.
I have to say that both are equally bad. The writing is too small and thin, the contrast is gone to shit, the rounded corners are harder on the eyes than quare ones, the articles have been squashed into the middle by all the cruft, it stinks.
These css sheet were obviously designed by people who think that running at 1600x1200 resolution "makes everythiing look better", and for whom javascript is considered as integral to the browser as html. My eyesight is bad bub, I run at 1024x768 like the majority of regular people.
Do you know what's going to happen if they apply this to the comments? I'll tell you. Everytime you load a new page, you're going to have to press Ctrl + to increase the font size because whoever approved this font sits way too close to their screen.
You know what I expected from the new css redesign? The exact same look, tweaked slightly for better( more professional) presentation, and possibly, just possibly, some features like collapsable comments. What did we get instead? An unprofessional harder on the eyes look, and collapsable "menus"!? What the hell would I want to collapse those for?!
Anyone could have done better than this. Anyone. There should be another contest, so this time real people can try, not wannabe arts students jumped up on coffee and "1337ness". It wouldn't take much. Just some effort and a small degree of professionalism in not trying to make the site read better, not look "cooler". Yeah it's cool alright. Cool like a handcoded Myspace site. Kill me now, or buy me a bigger monitor.
As of yet, the 360 isn't selling that well in Japan, and there's little in the future that indicates that will change (regardless of "Dead or Alive Extra Booby Breast Physics)
I was personally insulted by DOA: Beath Volleyball. Insulted. As far as I was concerned, it was insulting to me personally, as a long time game player to have that kind of tripe lauded as a game of the future. If I wanted softcore pornography, I'd buy one of those 3 rags at the newsstand. If I wanted a volleyball game, I'd probably have to kill myself.
Personally, I think a lot of people simply laughed at the game and moved on. I saw so many pre-owned copies after the first week that I knew my suspicions had been confirmed. The games only selling point was titillation, and that's not enough for a 60 game. Not by a long shot.
I think game players need to be given more credit. They're not all slavering idiots. Many crave quality, and simply are not getting it these days. This is due simply to the fact that the too many buy games like DOA, and sell them off after the first week to a retail industry hungry for Pre-owned titles, thus creating a false demand for such titles when in reality, few are avidly interested. This drags down the quality of games as a whole.
Needless to say, no one was too willing to purchace the Beath Volleyball pre-owned copies.
I think every traveller to the US will have to sign a document that allows the Flight Company to pass your personal data to the US (a.k.a. selling your soul).
Interesting, but could easily come under the heading of false advertising.
If BA offer me a flight to New York at a certain price, they're unlikely to include such terms in clear print. Changing the deal by presenting me with a coercive document two minutes before I board the flight is a classic situation that advertising laws were designed to protect against.
On the other side you have the private sector, where every corporation does as it thinks it can get away with. If one oversteps the boundary, they'll declare bankrupt and the same people start another corporation with a different name and the same game.
Exactly. The government retains at least some modcom of accountability, however small. Private companies are accountable to no one except their shareholders, and sometimes not even that. They are larger than nation states and they know it. Don't trust them any more than you would trust a third world dictator.
And yet our entire country gets bent out of shape just beacuse a few thousand people happened to die in the same incident. Honestly, it isn't that big a problem!
YOUR DISHONORING THEIR MEMORY!!! You, you..... TERRORIST!!!
A true patriot worships! those who died, and sacrafices his rights in their name!! Are you a true patriot?
The designs for a uranium laser enrichment plant ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE are not for the fainthearted. YOu've got to have the uranium in a gaseous state.
Yeah. Right there is where the difficulties with this method became most apparent to me. Any method that requires you to have a vaporised metal floating around is probably best left in the laboratory. Just look at all those Mad Hatters!
I predict that if hydrogen can be extracted from regolith close to the surface, then a lot of that oxygen will be burnt down to make water.
I predict that if anything can be extracted from the regolith close to the surface, it will run out so fast that after a few weeks, expensive subsurface mining and/or far flung harvesting will be made necessary, thus defeating the point of the entire excercise.
I don't know about you, but I think ore harvesters on the moon is simply not a feasable option. They cost $1400 a pop after the first!
Though I must say that its much easier to make an independent game using a modification tools.
This is telling us two things.
One, developers are continually reinveting the wheel. Two, game engine licences still cost afr, far too much money.
I think it's only a matter of time before open source game engines and frameworks begin to replace overpriced and overrestrictive proprietary solutions. This will happen first in "basic" areas such as i/o, toolkits, small physics simulations and will work its way up to entire engines. It's in effect already happening with frameworks like OpenGL, OGRE, Wings3D and SDL.
Proprietary engine makers such as id or Valve will have the resources to keep somewhat ahead of the curve for a while, but as moores law outpaces their ability to overtake it, long established concepts and techniques will be all anyone needs to make a sellable game. But like a bulldozer, the open source engine will simply steam past them as they bog themselves down with restrictive licences and things like Steam.
Interestingly, one of the most damning contra-examples was the huge spike in CD sales corresponding to the spike in file sharing at the emergence of the original Napster.
I don't know what kind of high school you went to but in mine the school population was segmented into groups according to academic achievement (grades).
This was the way things were done in my school as well. To be fair, the different groups were being taught subtly different version of the same subject. One class learned Ordinary level X, the other Higher level X.
In theory, this could have been a good idea as resources could then be allocated as appropriate to the different classes. The less proficient could be given specfic assistance to reach a better level, and the more proficient could be given specific assistance in more advanced topics.
In practice however, this wasn't the case. The best teachers were sent to the higher classes, and disciplinarians were sent to the ordinary classes to keep them from starting a riot.
My expierience is that for most students in the ordinary level classes, their main problem was that most of the teachers time was spent keeping trouble makers in check, not teaching the class. The main source of bad grades there was not individual teaching ability, but rather individual class control. Frnakly this was ridiculous.
My opinion is that by the age of 15 or 16, if some students don't want to be in school, they should be shown the door. As it stands, they do little but ruin the education of students who really need it the most. Right now, education of failing students is a leaking ship, and thousands are being lost each year because the system mindlessly makes them suffer the outrages of a few dozen.
You all know that one kid, kid A. The one who was wasting his time, wasting yours, wasting the teachers, wasting the schools, wasting precious hours. You all know that other kid too, kid B. The one that would have made it ok if the first kid hadn't been there. There are kid B's, than kid A's, and I personally feel they are the ones that should get priority. I can't see why it has to take a visit from the wonderous majority fairy before kid A get's kicked out on his ass.
It would be a double tax. SMSers already pay tax on their phone service via VAT in every single bill or top up card.
I am in favour of taxes such as VAT, which impose a flat rate on all goods and services where it would be too complex and cumbersome to evaluate the cost to the government of each individual services. I'm only in favour of additional, specific, taxes when it can be shown that the good or service does actually cost the government more money. Best example is alcohol. Prime target for excise duty.
I'm not in favour of taxes designed solely and completely as an excuse to obtain more public funds. If they really wanted more money, they'd introduce a third tax band.
Slashdot Mirror
Combine this with a simpl BOTC(Benefits Outweigh The Costs) effect, and you've got yourself a billion unencrypted hard discs just waiting to be looted.
Try telling that to the families of the 2000+ people that died on 9/11/01.
Ahhh! The corpses of the Twin Towers victims. Being waved around loudly on facist poles since Sep-2001.
I certainly can't think of a more ignoble way to spend the afterlife than being constantly invocated by the living to justify their actions. If a seance ever works, these guys are going to be pissed.
I recently implemented a new CAPTCHA system using Flash as "secure container" on my guestbook.
Forget about blind users! You've just alienated the 10% of the web that doesn't have flash. Not to mention infuriated the quite potion of the rest that cannot stand site content embedded in unnessesary flash.
My own weblog was recently hit by comment spam. I was extremely irritated, and initially considered captchas as a potential solution. But several problems with captchas ultimately lead to me seeking alternate solutions.
The first problem with captchas is the barrier it puts up, however small, between you and the users of your site. Apologies for the corney analogy, but captchas are a speedbump on the information superhighway. People hate running into them.
The impediment to visually disabled users is also a big one to consider. It's not just fully blind people. People can be shortsighted, colour blind, dyslexic or perhaps simply shortsighted users relying on specialist software to read your website. You're letting these people down by adopting this practice and that's something I would really feel bad about doing.
But the biggest reason not to use captchas is spammers increasing abilities to interpret them. At even a five percent success rate in interpreting captchas, a spammer can bombard your site with requests and still get something through. They're just using the same model as they did with email, and it will work.
Instead I chose some other plugins available for Wordpress to help with the spam. Akismet sounds like it could work as a kind of distributed spam check/blacklist of sorts, though I am wary of the fact that a private company is running the service. I also installed Bad Behaviour, though it's clear that eventually some spammers will adapt their behaviours to this.
Ideally what I'd like is a true bayesian comment spam filter plugin for wordpress, but so far I haven't been able to find one. Such filters have done wonders for me in Thunderbird for my email spam, with something like a 99.99% sucess rate and no false positives. Clearly the situation is quite different with comment spam, but all the same it would be nice to have one.
I envisage that the comment spam situation will get a lot worse as time goes by, regardless of any pagerank type algorithm changes. Comment spam will no doubt become as ubiquitous as regualar spam and I can forsee dozens of "splog" post per day in the not too distant futre. My opinion is that Blog software should come with robust, adaptable and self updating anti-spam software on by default before this problem escalates out of control.
Chemistry supports terrorism.
You're not a chemist are you?
When growing up I used to wrestle with other kids. Frequently the match would end when someone scraped up an arm, or hit their head hard enough to make them dizzy, or one of the big guys rolled over the leg of one of the little guys. In college, we sparred quite a few times.
I always hated this. The idea of someone pawing and walloping me was never very appealing. Nonetheless, many, perhaps well meaning, individuals attempted to get me to "join in the fun". That's my bubble you're encroaching on, in a very intimate fashion. It wasn't pleasant. Sweaty palms abounded, and most of the instigators smelled quite poorly. I don't think most people find this prospect very appealing either.
Personally, I suspect that most of these people are closet homosexuals trying to cop a feel, then covering up by thumping the target of their affections. I think the rest are in some way trying to cop a feel too. And all that walking around naked in showers. Come on. Who are they trying to kid?
We live in a free society, but, there are bubbles ok. Some people have bubbles. Please respect that.
It will work from the moment when a consumer will be uniquely identified by a digital certificate(s) thoughout their life and the businesses selling data (including content) get their head out of their arse and start selling to the consumer as identified by this certificate(s).
And who issues these? The Government? Private Companies? What happens if I don't want one, or I lose, mine, or someone breaks mine, or mine is issued twice, or if I happen to think that the concept of needing ID approval to purchace simple items is offensive?
Will you simply say; "well then that's your choice", as laws are passed making the certificates mandatory? Advise me to forgo certain luxuries like music, books and eventually food? Tell me it will never be abused even as marketers drown me in a deluge of obnoxiously targeted commericals or reporters are snooped on to find government leaks?
Tell you what, how about instead of a digital certificate or embedded RFID chip, we all walk around instead with barcodes printed on our arms and foreheads? What makes that so different ? In fact it's cheaper and probably more efficient? So why not? Technology is enabling. You don't want to be a luddite now do you?
That's a hardware licencing issue, not a software one. Is the hardware under GPL?
Wrong. It's a software licencing issue. The software must be licenced to run on the hardware. You completely own the hardware, but you need to obtain licences to use software on it.
...but given the smug, supercilious and downright annoying tone of their responses to legal threats...
Given the dishonest, beligerent, outrageous, overbearing and insulting nature of the legal threats in question, thepiratebay's response was completely justified.
I have to say that both are equally bad. The writing is too small and thin, the contrast is gone to shit, the rounded corners are harder on the eyes than quare ones, the articles have been squashed into the middle by all the cruft, it stinks.
These css sheet were obviously designed by people who think that running at 1600x1200 resolution "makes everythiing look better", and for whom javascript is considered as integral to the browser as html. My eyesight is bad bub, I run at 1024x768 like the majority of regular people.
Do you know what's going to happen if they apply this to the comments? I'll tell you. Everytime you load a new page, you're going to have to press Ctrl + to increase the font size because whoever approved this font sits way too close to their screen.
You know what I expected from the new css redesign? The exact same look, tweaked slightly for better( more professional) presentation, and possibly, just possibly, some features like collapsable comments. What did we get instead? An unprofessional harder on the eyes look, and collapsable "menus"!? What the hell would I want to collapse those for?!
Anyone could have done better than this. Anyone. There should be another contest, so this time real people can try, not wannabe arts students jumped up on coffee and "1337ness". It wouldn't take much. Just some effort and a small degree of professionalism in not trying to make the site read better, not look "cooler". Yeah it's cool alright. Cool like a handcoded Myspace site. Kill me now, or buy me a bigger monitor.
Thanks Taco. Thanks a lot.
As of yet, the 360 isn't selling that well in Japan, and there's little in the future that indicates that will change (regardless of "Dead or Alive Extra Booby Breast Physics)
I was personally insulted by DOA: Beath Volleyball. Insulted. As far as I was concerned, it was insulting to me personally, as a long time game player to have that kind of tripe lauded as a game of the future. If I wanted softcore pornography, I'd buy one of those 3 rags at the newsstand. If I wanted a volleyball game, I'd probably have to kill myself.
Personally, I think a lot of people simply laughed at the game and moved on. I saw so many pre-owned copies after the first week that I knew my suspicions had been confirmed. The games only selling point was titillation, and that's not enough for a 60 game. Not by a long shot.
I think game players need to be given more credit. They're not all slavering idiots. Many crave quality, and simply are not getting it these days. This is due simply to the fact that the too many buy games like DOA, and sell them off after the first week to a retail industry hungry for Pre-owned titles, thus creating a false demand for such titles when in reality, few are avidly interested. This drags down the quality of games as a whole.
Needless to say, no one was too willing to purchace the Beath Volleyball pre-owned copies.
I think every traveller to the US will have to sign a document that allows the Flight Company to pass your personal data to the US (a.k.a. selling your soul).
Interesting, but could easily come under the heading of false advertising.
If BA offer me a flight to New York at a certain price, they're unlikely to include such terms in clear print. Changing the deal by presenting me with a coercive document two minutes before I board the flight is a classic situation that advertising laws were designed to protect against.
On the other side you have the private sector, where every corporation does as it thinks it can get away with. If one oversteps the boundary, they'll declare bankrupt and the same people start another corporation with a different name and the same game.
Exactly. The government retains at least some modcom of accountability, however small. Private companies are accountable to no one except their shareholders, and sometimes not even that. They are larger than nation states and they know it. Don't trust them any more than you would trust a third world dictator.
And yet our entire country gets bent out of shape just beacuse a few thousand people happened to die in the same incident. Honestly, it isn't that big a problem!
YOUR DISHONORING THEIR MEMORY !!! You, you..... TERRORIST!!!
A true patriot worships! those who died, and sacrafices his rights in their name!! Are you a true patriot?
"....improperly-slaughtered..."
Oh the ironies.
The designs for a uranium laser enrichment plant ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE are not for the fainthearted. YOu've got to have the uranium in a gaseous state.
Yeah. Right there is where the difficulties with this method became most apparent to me. Any method that requires you to have a vaporised metal floating around is probably best left in the laboratory. Just look at all those Mad Hatters!
I've never seen a 3 year old that has the hand strength to rack a slide or pull a revolver trigger. Much less load a gun.
Neither have I, but the idea isn't so far fetched.
I predict that if hydrogen can be extracted from regolith close to the surface, then a lot of that oxygen will be burnt down to make water.
I predict that if anything can be extracted from the regolith close to the surface, it will run out so fast that after a few weeks, expensive subsurface mining and/or far flung harvesting will be made necessary, thus defeating the point of the entire excercise.
I don't know about you, but I think ore harvesters on the moon is simply not a feasable option. They cost $1400 a pop after the first!
Though I must say that its much easier to make an independent game using a modification tools.
This is telling us two things.
One, developers are continually reinveting the wheel.
Two, game engine licences still cost afr, far too much money.
I think it's only a matter of time before open source game engines and frameworks begin to replace overpriced and overrestrictive proprietary solutions. This will happen first in "basic" areas such as i/o, toolkits, small physics simulations and will work its way up to entire engines. It's in effect already happening with frameworks like OpenGL, OGRE, Wings3D and SDL.
Proprietary engine makers such as id or Valve will have the resources to keep somewhat ahead of the curve for a while, but as moores law outpaces their ability to overtake it, long established concepts and techniques will be all anyone needs to make a sellable game. But like a bulldozer, the open source engine will simply steam past them as they bog themselves down with restrictive licences and things like Steam.
Interestingly, one of the most damning contra-examples was the huge spike in CD sales corresponding to the spike in file sharing at the emergence of the original Napster.
Ahh! But were the CDs blank?
I don't know what kind of high school you went to but in mine the school population was segmented into groups according to academic achievement (grades).
This was the way things were done in my school as well. To be fair, the different groups were being taught subtly different version of the same subject. One class learned Ordinary level X, the other Higher level X.
In theory, this could have been a good idea as resources could then be allocated as appropriate to the different classes. The less proficient could be given specfic assistance to reach a better level, and the more proficient could be given specific assistance in more advanced topics.
In practice however, this wasn't the case. The best teachers were sent to the higher classes, and disciplinarians were sent to the ordinary classes to keep them from starting a riot.
My expierience is that for most students in the ordinary level classes, their main problem was that most of the teachers time was spent keeping trouble makers in check, not teaching the class. The main source of bad grades there was not individual teaching ability, but rather individual class control. Frnakly this was ridiculous.
My opinion is that by the age of 15 or 16, if some students don't want to be in school, they should be shown the door. As it stands, they do little but ruin the education of students who really need it the most. Right now, education of failing students is a leaking ship, and thousands are being lost each year because the system mindlessly makes them suffer the outrages of a few dozen.
You all know that one kid, kid A. The one who was wasting his time, wasting yours, wasting the teachers, wasting the schools, wasting precious hours. You all know that other kid too, kid B. The one that would have made it ok if the first kid hadn't been there. There are kid B's, than kid A's, and I personally feel they are the ones that should get priority. I can't see why it has to take a visit from the wonderous majority fairy before kid A get's kicked out on his ass.
...coming up with an idea that would be a step on the road that will turn u.s. people into slave labor.
But they are only returning americans to the "traditional" values that made their country great.
Why aren't these problems?
Because some people chronically overestimate human engineering capabilities.
For example, there are an infinite number of numbers between three and four, but none of them are five.
Depends on how you define "between". In some geometries, and according to some views on infinity, five is indeed between three and four.
It would be a double tax. SMSers already pay tax on their phone service via VAT in every single bill or top up card.
I am in favour of taxes such as VAT, which impose a flat rate on all goods and services where it would be too complex and cumbersome to evaluate the cost to the government of each individual services. I'm only in favour of additional, specific, taxes when it can be shown that the good or service does actually cost the government more money. Best example is alcohol. Prime target for excise duty.
I'm not in favour of taxes designed solely and completely as an excuse to obtain more public funds. If they really wanted more money, they'd introduce a third tax band.