Get rid of the captcha by implementing the one verification scheme more annoying than a captcha! Good job!
Email validation requires people to give you something -- their email address -- that may consider more valuable that the ability to post on your forum. You'll lose all those people, who are probably rather more numerous than those who would be turned away by an annoying captcha.
In addition, email response is far more automatable than captchas. I am currently experimenting with an automated confirm-link-clicker script serving all email addresses at a domain. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have done this -- it really makes interacting with web forums about a million times more pleasant. Next step: A firefox extension...
Oh man. I heard that "War. War never changes..." and it just brought back so many memories right there.
They may yet screw this game up. But keeping that chilling and evocative opening tells me that they aren't completely untouched by the magic -- and utter despair -- of Fallout.
(1) Every year, a patent recipient names the price of an unencumbered license, $X. (2) Every year, to renew the patent, the patentor pays $X*(2^r) for r being the number of previous renewals. (3) As soon as a patent is not renewed for a year, it ends.
What this means:
(a) It is not practical in the long term to use a patent to prevent something from being built -- a high $X means a high renewal fee. (b) Patents that are genuinely useful get renewed; patents that are just so much legal cow-dung will not be profitable to renew for as long.
Problems with this scheme: The exponent constant might need to vary by field; the scheme would have to be revised for design patents and plant patents; might conflict with various treaties; might be preferable to restrict the ability to use a small X one year and a larger one the next year (require X to be non-increasing?).
Instead of getting dates of their own, Saturday and subsequent days will be known as "Pentium", "Pentium II", "Pentium IV", "Pentium 5", "Pentium 6", and of course "Xeon".
The big problem with shooting things into space is the acceleration required over any reasonable distance is enough to melt the electronics of anything you're firing. I don't have the numbers, but I think that above 100 Gs or so you start to melt some metal components, and beyond 200 Gs you can start kissing things like the silicon in integrated circuits goodbye.
A gun powerful enough to fire something into orbit from a barrel of earthbound length is likely to liquefy whatever you meant to launch.
Angband (I have to delete this from machines I use or I'd never get any work done) Star Control 2 (Recently reborn! I'm getting addicted to this all over again!) Loom (Can't find my old copy, probably couldn't run it on modern OSes anyway) Fallout (I keep coming back to this! And the sequel wasn't bad, either.) System Shock 2 ("Why do you serve the machine mother?") Thief (Oh man, this series has consumed more of my hours than any other, period.)
One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME.
How about, instead of that, they try to make their own phones have full support for J2ME? Nokia wouldn't know a standard-compliant MIDP implementation if it bit them in the ass, and they actually charge you a couple hundred bucks to report bugs in their phones to anyone with a clue.
I appreciate Eclipse, but none of my company's code can use it. Know why? Because of the huge piles of conditional compilation and build scripts that we need to build separate applications for each of Nokia's phones, because no two have the same set of gross standards-noncompliances; Nokia has done more than any company I know of to make "write once run anywhere" the joke that it is.
Nokia should get their own house in order before they try to grub up open-source PR.
For all the people who said, "campaign finance reform doesn't threaten free speech; it's just about getting money out of politics," I have a nice big pile of FUCK YOU for you.
And for all the people who opposed it right up until it looked popular, and then signed off on it, I have a double helping of EAT SHIT AND DIE with your name on it.
I hate to admit it, but I use Linux because I can't figure Windows out. It baffles me. Configuration hidden in a million different places (where's the place to change your workgroup name in XP? Not in Control panels, that's for sure. Why, it's in the "properties" panel accessed by right-clicking "my computer"). Accessing even the simplest things is a nightmare. How on earth do those "shortcuts" work, anyway? Where do I go to get standard out and standard error? What's up with those drive letters, anyway?
Linux is just plain simpler these days. Fewer bizarre interface quirks. I can understand an editable configuration file in/etc. I can't even _find_, much less understand, half of the configuration in Windows. And it's getting worse: While configuration on Linux is gradually migrating to common locations and formats, configuration on Windows is migrating out of the "control panels" and other such findable places. Don't even talk to me about the registry.
I think I've gotten too old for Windows. It's gotten to the point that only kids raised on it can make sense of it.
--G
Anyone out there setting up a legal defense fund so we can chip in to help these guys fight the good fight? If we don't help out SCO targets today, any of us could be next.
--G
"Then we can stop funding the phone network (which is pretty much maxed out anyway) and sell off the HDTV spectrum for 10s of billions of dollars."
Thereby assuring that fast internet access is delivered over a single-point-of-regulation and allowing government licensure to determine how we get the internet for the next five decades.
The cat locator really would for me be the proof that we have truly Arrived at the era of High Tech. I mean, if we can locate a cat, what can't we do? It's embodying the intelligence of the cat in an electronic device. It's just one jump from Star Trek tech levels ("check the tricorder; scan for life signs!"). And it's finally a link between the two most arbitrary and capricious elements in my life: Cats and computers (they're brothers in spirit, or at least in league with one another, I'm sure).
--G
As the article notes, it is quite likely that someone will die in this endeavor. But private -- the first step to ubiquitous -- space flight is a cause worth risking, and losing, one's life for. If I were given the opportunity, I would accept in an instant.
Our society has lived for 110 years without a frontier, and in that time we have forgotten that there are things more important than human life -- that there are risks worth taking. Living without a frontier has sapped our courage, our will to freedom, and our sense of proportion. But frontiers aren't opened without pain and loss and death. In the end, though, they're worth it, for what they do for us as individuals and for us as a civilsation, and that's as true of the next (never say final!) frontier as of the earthly ones.
Beside the grandeur of the universe and the infinite potential that we unlock when we open it to humanity, what is life? A valuable and unique thing that we must stand ready to sacrifice for the dreams and goals that make humanity worth its place in the world. The last and most valuable coin we have to bet for one more step toward the ultimate prize: A wider and stranger and more glorious human universe.
--G
My top five annoyances with Linux right now are CUPS, CUPS, CUPS, CUPS, and CUPS.
Its features are variously undocumented or vastly overdocumented to the point of utter incomprehensibility. It configuration is totally frickin' opaque. And every day or so it just stops printing anything until I restart both the printer and the server (but only in that order!).
I am baffled that anyone prefers CUPS to the old reliable lpd. It's a nightmarish beast that nearly makes me consider going back to Windows.
--G
As far as I know the only phones that let you get at the camera are Nokia phones which won't let you do networking except through a tremendously buggy http implementation. So your likelihood of success is very, very low.
But not impossible.
If you only need to do this with one phone, try writing your code in C++ for a Symbian phone like the Nokia 3650, so you aren't constrained by the crippled Java on Nokia phones.
--G
Only, be sure to rename it "quack3" first, because they'll have thrown in optimization detections for q3, too.
The problem is that card manufacturers are optimizing for this year's games rather than for the standards that would optimize their performance on next year's games.
--G
FayYourMP's hands-off approach relies on the general politeness and civility of the people using it -- since it doesn't read the contents of the fax, it could easily be abused into oblivion, and it counts on the users' general fitness to live in a civil society.
Such politeness, civility, and general fitness to live is more notably a property of brits than of Americans. Within days of such a general service being set up, every congresscritter would be deluged by millions of "FCK the FCKING [insert law here]! FCK! I leik Pokemon!" and other such delightfully literate missives.
Still, if someone wanted to give it a go, it would be amusing. I'd definitely be interested in trying it if I could see any way to apply effective lameness filtering while still ensuring the confidentiality of the messages.
--G
Slashdot Mirror
...even!
"Spam lefty blogs with righty ranting to win points!" -- it's like someone created Internet Troll: The MMOG.
I'm glad that swearing at work is good for you, because swearing at home is illegal.
Get rid of the captcha by implementing the one verification scheme more annoying than a captcha! Good job!
Email validation requires people to give you something -- their email address -- that may consider more valuable that the ability to post on your forum. You'll lose all those people, who are probably rather more numerous than those who would be turned away by an annoying captcha.
In addition, email response is far more automatable than captchas. I am currently experimenting with an automated confirm-link-clicker script serving all email addresses at a domain. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have done this -- it really makes interacting with web forums about a million times more pleasant. Next step: A firefox extension...
Oh man. I heard that "War. War never changes..." and it just brought back so many memories right there.
They may yet screw this game up. But keeping that chilling and evocative opening tells me that they aren't completely untouched by the magic -- and utter despair -- of Fallout.
Here's how I'd approach the problem:
(1) Every year, a patent recipient names the price of an unencumbered license, $X.
(2) Every year, to renew the patent, the patentor pays $X*(2^r) for r being the number of previous renewals.
(3) As soon as a patent is not renewed for a year, it ends.
What this means:
(a) It is not practical in the long term to use a patent to prevent something from being built -- a high $X means a high renewal fee.
(b) Patents that are genuinely useful get renewed; patents that are just so much legal cow-dung will not be profitable to renew for as long.
Problems with this scheme: The exponent constant might need to vary by field; the scheme would have to be revised for design patents and plant patents; might conflict with various treaties; might be preferable to restrict the ability to use a small X one year and a larger one the next year (require X to be non-increasing?).
So you see, not voodoo...
No, just plain old "suffiently advanced technology."
Instead of getting dates of their own, Saturday and subsequent days will be known as "Pentium", "Pentium II", "Pentium IV", "Pentium 5", "Pentium 6", and of course "Xeon".
This was all caused by Galactus, right? I think I read that somewhere...
The big problem with shooting things into space is the acceleration required over any reasonable distance is enough to melt the electronics of anything you're firing. I don't have the numbers, but I think that above 100 Gs or so you start to melt some metal components, and beyond 200 Gs you can start kissing things like the silicon in integrated circuits goodbye.
A gun powerful enough to fire something into orbit from a barrel of earthbound length is likely to liquefy whatever you meant to launch.
Angband (I have to delete this from machines I use or I'd never get any work done)
Star Control 2 (Recently reborn! I'm getting addicted to this all over again!)
Loom (Can't find my old copy, probably couldn't run it on modern OSes anyway)
Fallout (I keep coming back to this! And the sequel wasn't bad, either.)
System Shock 2 ("Why do you serve the machine mother?")
Thief (Oh man, this series has consumed more of my hours than any other, period.)
One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME.
How about, instead of that, they try to make their own phones have full support for J2ME? Nokia wouldn't know a standard-compliant MIDP implementation if it bit them in the ass, and they actually charge you a couple hundred bucks to report bugs in their phones to anyone with a clue.
I appreciate Eclipse, but none of my company's code can use it. Know why? Because of the huge piles of conditional compilation and build scripts that we need to build separate applications for each of Nokia's phones, because no two have the same set of gross standards-noncompliances; Nokia has done more than any company I know of to make "write once run anywhere" the joke that it is.
Nokia should get their own house in order before they try to grub up open-source PR.
For all the people who said, "campaign finance reform doesn't threaten free speech; it's just about getting money out of politics," I have a nice big pile of FUCK YOU for you.
And for all the people who opposed it right up until it looked popular, and then signed off on it, I have a double helping of EAT SHIT AND DIE with your name on it.
Is anyone out there giving any thought to how a programming language should be structured to make it easy to code using a speech recognition engine?
If not, why not?
I hate to admit it, but I use Linux because I can't figure Windows out. It baffles me. Configuration hidden in a million different places (where's the place to change your workgroup name in XP? Not in Control panels, that's for sure. Why, it's in the "properties" panel accessed by right-clicking "my computer"). Accessing even the simplest things is a nightmare. How on earth do those "shortcuts" work, anyway? Where do I go to get standard out and standard error? What's up with those drive letters, anyway?
/etc. I can't even _find_, much less understand, half of the configuration in Windows. And it's getting worse: While configuration on Linux is gradually migrating to common locations and formats, configuration on Windows is migrating out of the "control panels" and other such findable places. Don't even talk to me about the registry.
Linux is just plain simpler these days. Fewer bizarre interface quirks. I can understand an editable configuration file in
I think I've gotten too old for Windows. It's gotten to the point that only kids raised on it can make sense of it.
--G
Wow, this means I can take down other people's web sites by putting them into a message and spamming AOL users with it. Cool!
I'll start with Microsoft, move on to SCO...
--G
Anyone out there setting up a legal defense fund so we can chip in to help these guys fight the good fight? If we don't help out SCO targets today, any of us could be next.
--G
"Then we can stop funding the phone network (which is pretty much maxed out anyway) and sell off the HDTV spectrum for 10s of billions of dollars."
Thereby assuring that fast internet access is delivered over a single-point-of-regulation and allowing government licensure to determine how we get the internet for the next five decades.
And this is supposed to be a good idea?
--G
The cat locator really would for me be the proof that we have truly Arrived at the era of High Tech. I mean, if we can locate a cat, what can't we do? It's embodying the intelligence of the cat in an electronic device. It's just one jump from Star Trek tech levels ("check the tricorder; scan for life signs!"). And it's finally a link between the two most arbitrary and capricious elements in my life: Cats and computers (they're brothers in spirit, or at least in league with one another, I'm sure).
--G
As the article notes, it is quite likely that someone will die in this endeavor. But private -- the first step to ubiquitous -- space flight is a cause worth risking, and losing, one's life for. If I were given the opportunity, I would accept in an instant.
Our society has lived for 110 years without a frontier, and in that time we have forgotten that there are things more important than human life -- that there are risks worth taking. Living without a frontier has sapped our courage, our will to freedom, and our sense of proportion. But frontiers aren't opened without pain and loss and death. In the end, though, they're worth it, for what they do for us as individuals and for us as a civilsation, and that's as true of the next (never say final!) frontier as of the earthly ones.
Beside the grandeur of the universe and the infinite potential that we unlock when we open it to humanity, what is life? A valuable and unique thing that we must stand ready to sacrifice for the dreams and goals that make humanity worth its place in the world. The last and most valuable coin we have to bet for one more step toward the ultimate prize: A wider and stranger and more glorious human universe.
--G
My top five annoyances with Linux right now are CUPS, CUPS, CUPS, CUPS, and CUPS.
Its features are variously undocumented or vastly overdocumented to the point of utter incomprehensibility. It configuration is totally frickin' opaque. And every day or so it just stops printing anything until I restart both the printer and the server (but only in that order!).
I am baffled that anyone prefers CUPS to the old reliable lpd. It's a nightmarish beast that nearly makes me consider going back to Windows.
--G
As far as I know the only phones that let you get at the camera are Nokia phones which won't let you do networking except through a tremendously buggy http implementation. So your likelihood of success is very, very low.
But not impossible.
If you only need to do this with one phone, try writing your code in C++ for a Symbian phone like the Nokia 3650, so you aren't constrained by the crippled Java on Nokia phones.
--G
Only, be sure to rename it "quack3" first, because they'll have thrown in optimization detections for q3, too.
The problem is that card manufacturers are optimizing for this year's games rather than for the standards that would optimize their performance on next year's games.
--G
FayYourMP's hands-off approach relies on the general politeness and civility of the people using it -- since it doesn't read the contents of the fax, it could easily be abused into oblivion, and it counts on the users' general fitness to live in a civil society.
Such politeness, civility, and general fitness to live is more notably a property of brits than of Americans. Within days of such a general service being set up, every congresscritter would be deluged by millions of "FCK the FCKING [insert law here]! FCK! I leik Pokemon!" and other such delightfully literate missives.
Still, if someone wanted to give it a go, it would be amusing. I'd definitely be interested in trying it if I could see any way to apply effective lameness filtering while still ensuring the confidentiality of the messages.
--G