You're pandering to ignorance. You're part of the problem. The people you are trying to help won't come away with an informed scepticism of ghosts. They'll come away remembering they went on a "serious" ghost hunt which didn't prove that the ghosts don't exist. You're asking about "sensible metrics" when finding ghosts. Think about what you're doing.
Look, it's harsh to say, but sometimes the best and most effective way to deal with massive ignorance is to simply ridicule or dismiss it. Even the most cursory glance at the evolution.intelligent design debate will confirm that careful, informed investigations in isolation do not work as a persuasive tool. You should calmly say flat out that ghosts do not exist and their beliefs are mistaken. That will help your friends and family far more that taking them on a ghost hunt, or at least it will do less damage.
You can cower behind that narrow-mindedness if it helps you protect your worldview from the terrible (to you) risk of being altered to accept new possibilities if that pleases you.
It's narrow minded not to believe in ghosts now? Are we all 8 years old again?
I had noticed that reason and critical thinking were fading in the world of late, but I never thought that the rot would get so bad that the foremost geek site on the internet would be giving credence to this sort of rubbish. What the hell were the editors thinking? What should I even have to say that ghosts don't exist and that this "investigation" may as well be looking for invisible green unicorns?
After all, shouldn't you be allowed to drive whatever vehicle you like, anywhere you like, without any kind of licensing?
There is no constitution in any country that gives anyone the automatic right to propel one ton lumps of metal, glass and rubber at thirty kilometres an hour within inches of other such machines and pedestrians--on public or private roads.
It seems like a lot of countries are going on a slide towards dictatorships and totalitarianism,
The world in general is abandoning liberal democracy; largely because liberal democracy is a failed project which has simply degenerated into plutocracy, demagoguery, oligarchy, and market worship.
Democracy is supposed to be about freedom, progress, opportunity, and education. But since the end of the Cold War, "liberal democracy" became all about the money. Freedom meant "economic freedom", not the freedom to protest. Progress meant market growth, not social or scientific progress. Opportunity meant creating new markets, not offering people a chance to fulfil their potential. Education was to exist only in service to the economy. The dogma of the free market became the religion of democracies, economists its high priests, and the three piece suit its national dress.
But, lo and behold, the markets have collapsed. The West's economy lies in ruins and China--an autocratic state--is now the industrial powerhouse of the world. Since the main reason given to become a democracy was to become wealthy, it's no surprise whatsoever that democracy has lost its lustre, and will continue to do so so long as it is seen solely as a vehicle for making money, rather than a social, cultural, and political system.
Liberal democracy has failed; it's not making people rich anymore. Hence, countries will seek out alterantive systems of government and society. China, Russia, and indeed Saudi Arabia offer such alternatives, by example, persuasion, and propaganda. Countries and societies are choosing these alternatives because the only lauded benefit for democracy rings rather hollow these days. And the noticeable decline in enlightenment principles in most democracies is not helping the alternative arguments.
If democracy is to survive this century, it must divorce itself decisively from its deadbeat room-mate, Laise-Faire economics, whose feckless arrogance has repeatedly brought ruin to the household. It must also clean up its own image and try to regain some of the ideals it has abandoned in the last 30 years. If WWIII does happen this century, it isn't going to be about which empire rules which countries. It's going to be about which system of government the world will be run by. A democratic world in 2100 is not guaranteed, or even likely the way things are going.
I imagine it would be quite difficult for any self respecting intellectual not to be disgusted by Amazon's actions here. Since most geeks claim to be intellectual in some sense, I would infer that most geeks in fact regard this censorship as contemptful.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (*) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (*) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (*) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(*) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (*) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (*) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck (*) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Why didn't they just use base36 addresses instead? At least those would be nice and short.
Correction: shorter. The basic problem here is that there are 2^128 addresses, and even for a large base system like, say 36, you're still going to need 25 digits to represent the whole space. It's time for some mathematics.
Let the desired base be b (b symbols), and let the required number of digits be n. Then, if these digits can represent the whole space, they must be able to represent the same amount of numbers as the base 2 system. So
2^128=b^n
Taking the log of both sides and using log power rules(do it!), it follows that
n=128*log(2)/log(b)
The larger we make b, the smaller n becomes. But the catch is that log(b) doesn't grow very fast. For b=10, n~=38.532. For b=16, the hexadecimal base system, n=32, and we have the well known monstrosity of the standard IPv6 addressing system.
But the slow growth of the log function is causing us problems. For b=36, n~=24.759. For b=62 (26 case sensitive characters + 10 digits), n~=21.497. To get back the familiar IPv4 length of 12 characters, you'd need a base with 1626 characters! That's more than the amount of characters Japanese schoolchildren have to learn in primary school. This is diminishing returns made manifest.
Having said that, there's no law that Unicode characters couldn't be used in IPv6 addresses, and they could even work quite well when regional concerns are taken into account. But the problem is that everyone needs to be able to type addresses into their command lines/dialog boxes at some point. Or at least, it is a problem while that is still the problem.
My privacy should not be subject to whether or not I've taken the seconds/minutes/hours/days/weeks/years necessary to filter through, read and comprehend every line of small print just so I can protect my family from corporate abuse.
IPv6 machines all have to run in dual stack, which means they all need an IPv4 address, which means IPv6 is solving exactly zero problems.
If everyone started the move to IPv6 today, then the internet, from the average joe point of view, will look pretty much the same.
To quote Robert Bolt: "I wish we could all have good luck, all the time! I wish we had wings! I wish rainwater was beer! But it isn't!".
The IPv6 transition plan amounts to--and in fact simply is--wishful thinking. If everyone, everywhere transitions to IPv6, all at once, everything will be OK. And indeed that is the case. However, it is also the case that everyone, everywhere will never transition to IPv6 all at once, in good order, or even in time and in some order.
A critical part of the IPv6 upgrade was the transition plan. The planners of IPv6 have botched this vital part of their standard completely, and as such IPv6 is less than useless. It is in fact a severe hindrance in the effort to find a solution to the IPv4 address space crunch, as it is standing in the way of a real and workable solution to the problem.
So no, IPv6 is not the solution. IPv6 has simply become part of the problem.
If you had kept your dick in your pants, would you be in this situation?
I doubt it. Considering Sweden's current sex laws, if he hadn't put out then he'd probably have been brought up on charges of "sexual fraud" or "failure to deliver".
People in the west have NEVER been as free as they are now.
I don't know. I think we were all a lot freer and happier in the 1990's.
No Cold War, no War on Terror, no internet filters, no monitoring of habits, no Google Maps/Mail/Panopticon, less sex offender scares, less evolution/abortion debates, less religion, less jihad, didn't hear about "markets" half as much, less news pundits, less foreign wars/quagmires, no Super-China, no airport scans, more newspapers, and Star Trek: The Next Generation was still showing on most terrestrial channels. Sure it wasn't perfect, but it was better than it is now--not that the general public actually gives a shit.
Re:What about tags in Assange's arrest records?
on
Cablegate, the Game
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
One witness is said to have stated: "Not only had it been the world's worst screw, it had also been violent."
It's clear to me that this statement and others like it made by the alleged victim are an insult to actual rape victims everywhere. It gets worse:
According to her statement she "tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again". Miss A told police that she didn't want to go any further "but that it was too late to stop Assange as she had gone along with it so far", and so she allowed him to undress her.
Too late to stop because she had gone along with it so far? And later she goes to lunch with him, and afterwards complains only that he was "the world's worst screw". Unbelievable.
Without exaggeration: this statement reads like a stereotypical straw man argument trotted out by misogynists who deride and demean rape allegations. This woman did not even have the decency to simply add a line stating at the very least "I told him to stop and he didn't". Today alone, there are women who have arrived bruised and bloody into rape crisis centres, who have had their integrity questioned in court, who have to live with their attackers not only going free, but re-offending; I can't imagine how those women must feel about these patently ridiculous allegations being taken seriously.
The impact of these farcical complaints in such a high profile sex-offence case is going to set back rape victims' rights by a decade or more. Expect to see the Sweedish Assange case trotted out in every sexual assault legislation debate for twenty years, as the foremost example of how rape allegations can be trivial and how rape victims' testimony is unreliable. I suspect quite a few "mens' rights" groups have made a song and dance over this already.
Unfortunately, the biggest fallout from the entire Cablegate scandal is going to be in justice for rape victims the world over. So congratulations Miss A.; your actions have changed the world. I hope you're proud of yourself.
Scotland Yard has been chasing a bunch of tomfooling teenagers for months, but hasn't even bothered to investigate substantiated investigations of wire fraud by the editor of a national newspaper. It's pretty clear who plays the tunes Scotland Yard dance to.
1. Create laws that no one obeys. 2. Do not enforce said laws. 3. Wait for someone to do something you don't like. 4. Toss them in jail for breaking one of the laws you don't normally enforce. 5. Oppress!
Look at your mirror, then look over your shoulder.
Over here (Ireland), my understanding is that when reversing in a car, you cannot simply use the back or side mirrors. You must look over your shoulder. It is even permitted to remove your seatbelt temporarily to allow for this. Placing a hand on the passenger seat is also permitted.
I don't even understand how it is possible to reverse using the rear view or side mirrors. Their field of focus is on objects in the distance, and all you'll see through them is an opposite wall or car mirror. It's impossible to gauge distance to anything close by, let alone outside of their field.
Slashdot Mirror
You're pandering to ignorance. You're part of the problem. The people you are trying to help won't come away with an informed scepticism of ghosts. They'll come away remembering they went on a "serious" ghost hunt which didn't prove that the ghosts don't exist. You're asking about "sensible metrics" when finding ghosts. Think about what you're doing.
Look, it's harsh to say, but sometimes the best and most effective way to deal with massive ignorance is to simply ridicule or dismiss it. Even the most cursory glance at the evolution.intelligent design debate will confirm that careful, informed investigations in isolation do not work as a persuasive tool. You should calmly say flat out that ghosts do not exist and their beliefs are mistaken. That will help your friends and family far more that taking them on a ghost hunt, or at least it will do less damage.
It's narrow minded not to believe in ghosts now? Are we all 8 years old again?
I had noticed that reason and critical thinking were fading in the world of late, but I never thought that the rot would get so bad that the foremost geek site on the internet would be giving credence to this sort of rubbish. What the hell were the editors thinking? What should I even have to say that ghosts don't exist and that this "investigation" may as well be looking for invisible green unicorns?
As a society, we're reverting back to superstition and ignorance. We've even given up on even imagining a better future.
The only question I ask is: where did it all go wrong? When did the world abandon progress?
But then with all the slowdown, how will I run my in browser flash games?!
There is no constitution in any country that gives anyone the automatic right to propel one ton lumps of metal, glass and rubber at thirty kilometres an hour within inches of other such machines and pedestrians--on public or private roads.
The world in general is abandoning liberal democracy; largely because liberal democracy is a failed project which has simply degenerated into plutocracy, demagoguery, oligarchy, and market worship.
Democracy is supposed to be about freedom, progress, opportunity, and education. But since the end of the Cold War, "liberal democracy" became all about the money. Freedom meant "economic freedom", not the freedom to protest. Progress meant market growth, not social or scientific progress. Opportunity meant creating new markets, not offering people a chance to fulfil their potential. Education was to exist only in service to the economy. The dogma of the free market became the religion of democracies, economists its high priests, and the three piece suit its national dress.
But, lo and behold, the markets have collapsed. The West's economy lies in ruins and China--an autocratic state--is now the industrial powerhouse of the world. Since the main reason given to become a democracy was to become wealthy, it's no surprise whatsoever that democracy has lost its lustre, and will continue to do so so long as it is seen solely as a vehicle for making money, rather than a social, cultural, and political system.
Liberal democracy has failed; it's not making people rich anymore. Hence, countries will seek out alterantive systems of government and society. China, Russia, and indeed Saudi Arabia offer such alternatives, by example, persuasion, and propaganda. Countries and societies are choosing these alternatives because the only lauded benefit for democracy rings rather hollow these days. And the noticeable decline in enlightenment principles in most democracies is not helping the alternative arguments.
If democracy is to survive this century, it must divorce itself decisively from its deadbeat room-mate, Laise-Faire economics, whose feckless arrogance has repeatedly brought ruin to the household. It must also clean up its own image and try to regain some of the ideals it has abandoned in the last 30 years. If WWIII does happen this century, it isn't going to be about which empire rules which countries. It's going to be about which system of government the world will be run by. A democratic world in 2100 is not guaranteed, or even likely the way things are going.
I imagine it would be quite difficult for any self respecting intellectual not to be disgusted by Amazon's actions here. Since most geeks claim to be intellectual in some sense, I would infer that most geeks in fact regard this censorship as contemptful.
Your post advocates a
(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (*) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(*) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(*) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(*) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(*) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Actually, Legalism is more to blame.
Correction: shorter. The basic problem here is that there are 2^128 addresses, and even for a large base system like, say 36, you're still going to need 25 digits to represent the whole space. It's time for some mathematics.
Let the desired base be b (b symbols), and let the required number of digits be n. Then, if these digits can represent the whole space, they must be able to represent the same amount of numbers as the base 2 system. So
2^128=b^n
Taking the log of both sides and using log power rules(do it!), it follows that
n=128*log(2)/log(b)
The larger we make b, the smaller n becomes. But the catch is that log(b) doesn't grow very fast. For b=10, n~=38.532. For b=16, the hexadecimal base system, n=32, and we have the well known monstrosity of the standard IPv6 addressing system.
But the slow growth of the log function is causing us problems. For b=36, n~=24.759. For b=62 (26 case sensitive characters + 10 digits), n~=21.497. To get back the familiar IPv4 length of 12 characters, you'd need a base with 1626 characters! That's more than the amount of characters Japanese schoolchildren have to learn in primary school. This is diminishing returns made manifest.
Having said that, there's no law that Unicode characters couldn't be used in IPv6 addresses, and they could even work quite well when regional concerns are taken into account. But the problem is that everyone needs to be able to type addresses into their command lines/dialog boxes at some point. Or at least, it is a problem while that is still the problem.
Communist!
Sometimes the software industry truly disgusts me.
IPv6 machines all have to run in dual stack, which means they all need an IPv4 address, which means IPv6 is solving exactly zero problems.
To quote Robert Bolt: "I wish we could all have good luck, all the time! I wish we had wings! I wish rainwater was beer! But it isn't!".
The IPv6 transition plan amounts to--and in fact simply is--wishful thinking. If everyone, everywhere transitions to IPv6, all at once, everything will be OK. And indeed that is the case. However, it is also the case that everyone, everywhere will never transition to IPv6 all at once, in good order, or even in time and in some order.
A critical part of the IPv6 upgrade was the transition plan. The planners of IPv6 have botched this vital part of their standard completely, and as such IPv6 is less than useless. It is in fact a severe hindrance in the effort to find a solution to the IPv4 address space crunch, as it is standing in the way of a real and workable solution to the problem.
So no, IPv6 is not the solution. IPv6 has simply become part of the problem.
I doubt it. Considering Sweden's current sex laws, if he hadn't put out then he'd probably have been brought up on charges of "sexual fraud" or "failure to deliver".
We have the specifics. No means no and the woman in question never said it.
Let's have fewer grammar griping off you, shall we.
I don't know. I think we were all a lot freer and happier in the 1990's.
No Cold War, no War on Terror, no internet filters, no monitoring of habits, no Google Maps/Mail/Panopticon, less sex offender scares, less evolution/abortion debates, less religion, less jihad, didn't hear about "markets" half as much, less news pundits, less foreign wars/quagmires, no Super-China, no airport scans, more newspapers, and Star Trek: The Next Generation was still showing on most terrestrial channels. Sure it wasn't perfect, but it was better than it is now--not that the general public actually gives a shit.
It's clear to me that this statement and others like it made by the alleged victim are an insult to actual rape victims everywhere. It gets worse:
Too late to stop because she had gone along with it so far? And later she goes to lunch with him, and afterwards complains only that he was "the world's worst screw". Unbelievable.
Without exaggeration: this statement reads like a stereotypical straw man argument trotted out by misogynists who deride and demean rape allegations. This woman did not even have the decency to simply add a line stating at the very least "I told him to stop and he didn't". Today alone, there are women who have arrived bruised and bloody into rape crisis centres, who have had their integrity questioned in court, who have to live with their attackers not only going free, but re-offending; I can't imagine how those women must feel about these patently ridiculous allegations being taken seriously.
The impact of these farcical complaints in such a high profile sex-offence case is going to set back rape victims' rights by a decade or more. Expect to see the Sweedish Assange case trotted out in every sexual assault legislation debate for twenty years, as the foremost example of how rape allegations can be trivial and how rape victims' testimony is unreliable. I suspect quite a few "mens' rights" groups have made a song and dance over this already.
Unfortunately, the biggest fallout from the entire Cablegate scandal is going to be in justice for rape victims the world over. So congratulations Miss A.; your actions have changed the world. I hope you're proud of yourself.
Scotland Yard has been chasing a bunch of tomfooling teenagers for months, but hasn't even bothered to investigate substantiated investigations of wire fraud by the editor of a national newspaper. It's pretty clear who plays the tunes Scotland Yard dance to.
Communist!!
This is why I think Julian Assange will have even more problems when he releases those Bank files.
6. Profit.
Ridiculous. The US has been screwing the entire world for years and loving every minute of it.
Over here (Ireland), my understanding is that when reversing in a car, you cannot simply use the back or side mirrors. You must look over your shoulder. It is even permitted to remove your seatbelt temporarily to allow for this. Placing a hand on the passenger seat is also permitted.
I don't even understand how it is possible to reverse using the rear view or side mirrors. Their field of focus is on objects in the distance, and all you'll see through them is an opposite wall or car mirror. It's impossible to gauge distance to anything close by, let alone outside of their field.