Strangely, the FBI took my call and I spoke with a detective, however, they were unwilling to work with me to try and catch this guy, because the amount of money he was scamming wasn't high enough; apparently he has to scam $300,000 before they will allocate any resources toward the case!!!
A minimum scam of $300,000 before the FBI gets involved is +1, Informative, right there. Further to that, any pretense that the cops have about "Crime doesn't pay" is busted right there. Not that I believed them prior to this, but, by itself, that pretty much proves itself right there. Assuming a smart criminal (ok, that's a stretch), you could go out, scam $290,000, and fly under the FBI's radar. That's approximately equivalent to $400,000 at approximately a 25% income tax rate (assuming you don't file with the IRS). If you then lived off that at the median income rate (according to Wikipedia, that's about $50k for a household, before taxes), which means you're doing reasonably well for yourself, until it ran out, you'd be living off the scam for about 8 years before having to do it all over again. The statute of limitations would likely kick in, and you could do it all over again.
A healthy industry is one where two or three (or more!) participants share equal or near equal mind-share (and market-share). A dominated (but not monopolistic) industry is where the #1 supplier has nearly 2/3rds marketshare, the #2 supplier is nearly 1/3rd, and a bunch of niche players round up the rest. A monopolistic industry is where the #1 supplier has 80%+ (or 90%+) of the market, and there is no widely-recognised #2 player (which is why Microsoft was so insistent that Macs were real competition). That doesn't mean that you're alone in the industry (though when you are, it's more obviously a monopoly), just that practically speaking, you are.
Is there a widely-recognised #2 in the search market? If that's Yahoo! (and especially if there is no widely-recognised #3), the marketing campaign would treat the industry as a monopoly - using their combined power monopolistically, and, so alleges the Justice Department, illegally.
Google is not a monopoly (yet). But it is close. However, if you combine Google and Yahoo! into a single marketing campaign, their combined power probably is monopolistic. All the other search engines are niche players that probably don't generate noticable amounts of traffic (relative to Google and Yahoo! combined). The Justice Department merely is saying, it seems, that, no, you two can't gang up and demolish the niche players.
By keeping #1 and #2 at each others' throats, the niche players can be ignored by the big guys and thrive, albeit at a smaller scale. If #1 and #2 play nice with each other, they can turn on the niche players and destroy them. That changes from capitalism/competition to monopoly, and that's what the Justice Department was trying to prevent.
I thought the teacher already did that - he was telling the students the answers for the previous few weeks, all for the cost of tuition (even if that's covered by property taxes).:-P
And before you get the bright idea that automatic reconfiguration of websites based on past behaviour would be a good idea, check whether Amazon has a patent on it. I bet they do.
This is the case where some dick has managed to file down your brake lines such that the next time you try to stop before hitting a pedestrian, your car will sail right through them. The/. solution is to take your spark plugs out and hand them to your mechanic with a note: "Check brake lines."
Your PC is already compromised. All the suggestion does is alert you to it. So you have to bring it in for repair - you had to do that before the vigilantes got a hold of your system, you just didn't know it. You obviously didn't know how to secure your box - and we're all paying for your ignorance (in the true sense of the word). You need the information that the tech is going to give you when you bring in the box, for not just our sake, but for yours as well (you're getting some of the spam you're sending out). You just don't know it yet.
The key point to the proposal is that we're not forcing you to do anything you weren't already supposed to do. We're just changing it from "should, but don't know it" to "have to, and now I know". The cost is not expanded. It's just made known, and made immediate.
That still doesn't make it legal, but, unless you're Reverend Lovejoy, you should know that legal != ethical. Things can be ethical and illegal, or legal and unethical. I'm having a hard time seeing much unethical about this solution. Even the concept of "unauthorised access to a computer" is kind of iffy to me: your computer came to my website, downloaded an update, and ran it. I didn't force your computer to do that. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to do this and then choose a trial by judge alone...
Sure there's a reason. Cost. That sounds prohibitively expensive. Instead of sending up a few multi-billion-dollar satellites, you want to set up thousands of relays - at least one, often more, per airport, to send the data back out. Am I saying each one will cost millions of dollars? No. Hundreds of thousands of dollars would be sufficient to overwhelm the cost of satellites: the satellites can be done without the CEO of each airport signing off. And will benefit smaller airports that couldn't otherwise afford it.
Either way, the data has to be shown to the pilot to be useful. At least with the satellites, there's only one data stream coming in that every HUD vendor can work with, instead of worrying about the twelve companies producing relays, each spitting out their information slightly differently: 6 in XML with slight variations in DTDs, one in a non-standard XML format, another in a compressed XML format, another in a binary XML format, two in entirely different purely-binary formats, and one in Excel. And you just know that three of these will have documentation of their formats that don't actually match the data their devices pump out, two will only share their formats under expensive NDAs, and four will seek ISO approval for their formats as "Open" formats, and a fifth will get in by bribing the ISO panel, even though their open format can't be understood by your average Mensa-card-carrying programmer, and isn't quite what they implemented, either, anyway. Interoperability would be painful.
This way, whether for good or bad, at least gives us a de facto standard that can be designed against (and around) with a relatively non-moving target, allowing vendors to concentrate on real functionality: comprehensive, intuitive displays of that data.
Please don't spread this around. I'm rather hoping that the advertising agencies take this as a "we're going to come down harder on misleading advertising" rebuke rather than a "you didn't use enough weasel words" rebuke. People like you might give them the wrong idea, no matter how true.
It's really the opposite of lynching. After all, the fact that Lori got justice, despite the law, is almost assuredly going to prevent any mob from forming to lynch her (or do anything else to her detriment).
Imagine, for a second, that the jury in the Rodney King trial had actually convicted the police officers of something. Do you think that the riots would have occurred? I quite doubt it. That would have saved 53 lives, according to Wikipedia, if the riots had been averted. Sometimes justice has to happen despite the law, just so the people can keep their ill-placed faith in the system as a whole to be self-correcting.
Not entirely. Yes, the charges were stretched. But the jury apparently agreed enough that Lori was doing something that either is criminal, or should be criminal to give her a conviction. In the same way that a jury has the right to discard a bad law (even if the judge won't tell them they do), they should have the right to mete out a good law.
Psychological abuse resulting in death is what Lori got convicted for, regardless of what the D.A. could get past a judge.
Jocks and athletes have power in secondary schools simply because their ego is fed by the swooning girls who are hardwired to look for guys who can protect them. In secondary school, girls think that big, strong guys provide the daddy-style protection that they covet. It's not until later (20 to 30) that most women figure out it's the nerds that will provide the economic protection that they really want. Of course, by that time, the nerds will have picked up zero in the socialisation department and not know what to do to pick up the chicks.
More software developers should ask themselves "What's the worst that could happen if my customers could modify and redistribute this software"? For proprietary software, it means you can no longer hold customers to ransom and insist on yearly revenue generating "updates". For developers who get paid for hours worked doing actual development and support, this is no problem. I prefer the latter - getting paid for actual work just seems more honest.
Well, that's not entirely how capitalism works anyway. You don't just get paid for actual work, you get paid for actual value. Proprietary software attempts to hold value at the vendor by forcing you to get your fixes from the same vendor, tying you to a support contract in order to get those fixes. Free software entirely changes that value - instead, you get value from not only being able to have many eyes looking over the code, but by being able to hire someone who thus has your interests in mind when reviewing the code. It definitely is much harder for a company to make money this way. Obviously not impossible, but much harder.
What vendors have to start realising is that the software actually has much less value to customers than they think. It's the results that have value. Once you realise that, you can start to capitalise on it, and start selling services which come with free software.
All that said, Stallman's answer to the last question was a complete non-answer. I've seen less evasion on a question from politicians. Not very often;-), but still... The question asks about individual developers, and Stallman rants about commercial (corporate) power. Way to ignore the little person. And the guy doing the interview.
This was always a concern of mine with binary distros. "DLL Hell" - Linux-style. It's never been as bad for me with RH or SuSE as it ever was for Windows, but my paranoia showed through, and I eventually made my switch to Gentoo. Funny thing is, I get mismatched libraries far more often, but I also upgrade software far more often. However, there is a simple fix: revdep-rebuild. Look for libraries and executables that are missing their libraries and rebuild, which should get them linked against the new library.
Knowing there is a way out was a significant comfort in going to Gentoo. I was never convinced that RH would catch it all. Apparently, neither can Ubuntu. Granted, it's a *hard* problem that isn't easily solvable in a binary distribution.
The idea for committing the crime came from the government agents and not from the person accused of the crime. Offering you narcotics passes this test. Running a site for clearing stolen credit card information, being passive, does not.
The government agents then persuaded or talked the person into committing the crime. Simply giving him the opportunity to commit the crime is not the same as persuading him to commit the crime. Asking you merely once if you want to buy narcotics isn't persuading you. Running a site for clearing stolen credit card information isn't, either.
The person was not ready and willing to commit the crime before the government agents spoke with him. If you weren't willing to buy narcotics, someone asking you to buy some wouldn't get you to do it. If you didn't already have credit card info to sell, or want to buy stolen credit card, you wouldn't be looking for the sting site.
Which is worse: a password that you can remember, or changing passwords every 30/60/90 days to a new password such that you can never keep up, and thus need to write it down *somewhere*?
Sometimes, the very processes intended to make us more secure (by forcing a password change regularly) instead make the entire system less secure (because "I forgot my password" too many times and you'll end up out of a job, so better to write it down than to lose your job!).
I am, unfortunately, not really recommending the above measures for this time because, as you point out, it'll take out too many other people with it. People whose stupidity was their only real fault, whose greed was nearly non-existent (wanting to own your own home isn't greedy - it's a smart move; it's the banks' greed that drove up house prices so fast and so the people hurt here are just the ones that weren't smart enough to realise that they couldn't really afford such a house in that market). There needs to be some repercussions for these people, but I admit that wrecking their lives over it seems to be a disproportional result for their actions.
The only problem with the bailout still is teaching bankers that they can be greedy and still come out ahead even when they screw up because Uncle Sam will help. A constitutional amendment prohibiting such action in the future will, I hope, dissuade them of this notion right quick. Something the Libertarians can cling to and launch a quick court battle should any future presidency desire to do something like this again. Realising that their necks are on the line, they may protect themselves better.
Yes, we need credit. We need the banks to take risks with entrepreneurs. We even need banks to take risks with ordinary people on their houses/condos/whatever. But what we also need is the banks to take reasonable risks. Will some people no longer be able to afford houses? Absolutely. They'll have to keep renting until they can afford a house. It'll keep houses from going absolutely stupid crazy in the first place, which helps keep inflation down. Which is far better than a recession. The banks should have a free hand to make big risks. But, just as they can profit hugely from those risks, they need to know that they can lose big time.
And maybe, just maybe, their insurance companies will pay more attention, too.
* (The real blame lies with the 1990s president who repealed the Glass-Steagall of 1933 which allowed banks to invest in risky stocks, and thereby created the current crisis. But the media is being hush-hush about that. Don't want to risk losing the Obama election.)
Odd, I'd blame the banks for their crisis by investing stupidly. I guess it's like a kid who just turned legal, going out, getting entirely plastered, driving home, and hitting nearly everyone they see on their way. Except that here mommy and daddy have to pay about $700B for bailing them out.
Mind you, I'm on the House and Senate Republicans' side on this one. They took the risk, they should pay for it. If they don't, and see that mommy and daddy will always bail them out, will they ever learn?
Maybe the US needs a constitutional amendment to make these bailouts illegal. Then maybe corporations will learn to take reasonable risks - ones that, if they should fail, won't put them under. And then pass a law requiring that 95% of board members' pay (and that should include all chief officers) are in the form of stock and stock options: 10% stock, 90% stock options (none of which can vest in less than 5 years). Then they'll take the long-term view of their corporations.
If the questions are truly random *and* you only get one crack at a time (the scenario, question, and thus answer, change each time you hit 'submit'), it might take a bit longer for an AI to learn. Throw in some fun CSS and Java script for generating the actual text such that it doesn't appear verbatim in the actual HTML code, and you make things even more fun. Add to that layers such that the text merely shows up because of overlapping div tags so that even if you do have a CSS and JS engine working on the spam machine, it will basically need screen-reading software to parse it out, and you've gone a long way toward making their lives painful.
Of course, the downside to that is for the visually impaired. *sigh*. Mind you, if the rest of your site is all Flash anyway, that's not really a problem.:-)
Why? Because it's entirely relevant, yet controversial at the same time. It was interesting that it was left out. Either you agree with the idea or not, but either way it was $1B unwisely spent by the Liberals.
Well, given the history of Alberta's deficits and debt, I'd have to say that, no, we had sober monkeys run us into the ground in the first place. It may have required some drunkenness to get us out.
And Klein did that *before* oil hit $80 a barrel. It required fiscal conservatism, and, oddly enough, not only did Klein run on a platform of erasing the debt, he actually fulfilled all his major promises (and most of his minor promises). Not too many Canadian governments have done that (Conservative or Liberal - the NDP do fulfill their promises, but their promises just cause government meltdowns, so that's not a positive thing here).
As to the primary topic, it's unfortunate that Layton comes out in favour of something. It pretty much guarantees that the general populace will see it as a fringe thing, and ignore it or move to quash it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're going to compete with the RIAA?
Strangely, the FBI took my call and I spoke with a detective, however, they were unwilling to work with me to try and catch this guy, because the amount of money he was scamming wasn't high enough; apparently he has to scam $300,000 before they will allocate any resources toward the case!!!
A minimum scam of $300,000 before the FBI gets involved is +1, Informative, right there. Further to that, any pretense that the cops have about "Crime doesn't pay" is busted right there. Not that I believed them prior to this, but, by itself, that pretty much proves itself right there. Assuming a smart criminal (ok, that's a stretch), you could go out, scam $290,000, and fly under the FBI's radar. That's approximately equivalent to $400,000 at approximately a 25% income tax rate (assuming you don't file with the IRS). If you then lived off that at the median income rate (according to Wikipedia, that's about $50k for a household, before taxes), which means you're doing reasonably well for yourself, until it ran out, you'd be living off the scam for about 8 years before having to do it all over again. The statute of limitations would likely kick in, and you could do it all over again.
Sounds like crime pays to me...
A healthy industry is one where two or three (or more!) participants share equal or near equal mind-share (and market-share). A dominated (but not monopolistic) industry is where the #1 supplier has nearly 2/3rds marketshare, the #2 supplier is nearly 1/3rd, and a bunch of niche players round up the rest. A monopolistic industry is where the #1 supplier has 80%+ (or 90%+) of the market, and there is no widely-recognised #2 player (which is why Microsoft was so insistent that Macs were real competition). That doesn't mean that you're alone in the industry (though when you are, it's more obviously a monopoly), just that practically speaking, you are.
Is there a widely-recognised #2 in the search market? If that's Yahoo! (and especially if there is no widely-recognised #3), the marketing campaign would treat the industry as a monopoly - using their combined power monopolistically, and, so alleges the Justice Department, illegally.
Google is not a monopoly (yet). But it is close. However, if you combine Google and Yahoo! into a single marketing campaign, their combined power probably is monopolistic. All the other search engines are niche players that probably don't generate noticable amounts of traffic (relative to Google and Yahoo! combined). The Justice Department merely is saying, it seems, that, no, you two can't gang up and demolish the niche players.
By keeping #1 and #2 at each others' throats, the niche players can be ignored by the big guys and thrive, albeit at a smaller scale. If #1 and #2 play nice with each other, they can turn on the niche players and destroy them. That changes from capitalism/competition to monopoly, and that's what the Justice Department was trying to prevent.
I thought the teacher already did that - he was telling the students the answers for the previous few weeks, all for the cost of tuition (even if that's covered by property taxes). :-P
And before you get the bright idea that automatic reconfiguration of websites based on past behaviour would be a good idea, check whether Amazon has a patent on it. I bet they do.
Apparently, Lori should have been brought up on charges of assisting a suicide. Less of a stretch, anyway...
Bad car analogy.
This is the case where some dick has managed to file down your brake lines such that the next time you try to stop before hitting a pedestrian, your car will sail right through them. The /. solution is to take your spark plugs out and hand them to your mechanic with a note: "Check brake lines."
Your PC is already compromised. All the suggestion does is alert you to it. So you have to bring it in for repair - you had to do that before the vigilantes got a hold of your system, you just didn't know it. You obviously didn't know how to secure your box - and we're all paying for your ignorance (in the true sense of the word). You need the information that the tech is going to give you when you bring in the box, for not just our sake, but for yours as well (you're getting some of the spam you're sending out). You just don't know it yet.
The key point to the proposal is that we're not forcing you to do anything you weren't already supposed to do. We're just changing it from "should, but don't know it" to "have to, and now I know". The cost is not expanded. It's just made known, and made immediate.
That still doesn't make it legal, but, unless you're Reverend Lovejoy, you should know that legal != ethical. Things can be ethical and illegal, or legal and unethical. I'm having a hard time seeing much unethical about this solution. Even the concept of "unauthorised access to a computer" is kind of iffy to me: your computer came to my website, downloaded an update, and ran it. I didn't force your computer to do that. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to do this and then choose a trial by judge alone...
Some of the higher priced ones (~$30) are worth it for a signal amplifier.
Especially if they're from AudioQuest. You can get a 3-foot "KE-4" speaker cable for merely $1,800. At that price, you know it must be good.
(And, if you take that as a serious endorsement, you deserve being taken for that ride.)
Sure there's a reason. Cost. That sounds prohibitively expensive. Instead of sending up a few multi-billion-dollar satellites, you want to set up thousands of relays - at least one, often more, per airport, to send the data back out. Am I saying each one will cost millions of dollars? No. Hundreds of thousands of dollars would be sufficient to overwhelm the cost of satellites: the satellites can be done without the CEO of each airport signing off. And will benefit smaller airports that couldn't otherwise afford it.
Either way, the data has to be shown to the pilot to be useful. At least with the satellites, there's only one data stream coming in that every HUD vendor can work with, instead of worrying about the twelve companies producing relays, each spitting out their information slightly differently: 6 in XML with slight variations in DTDs, one in a non-standard XML format, another in a compressed XML format, another in a binary XML format, two in entirely different purely-binary formats, and one in Excel. And you just know that three of these will have documentation of their formats that don't actually match the data their devices pump out, two will only share their formats under expensive NDAs, and four will seek ISO approval for their formats as "Open" formats, and a fifth will get in by bribing the ISO panel, even though their open format can't be understood by your average Mensa-card-carrying programmer, and isn't quite what they implemented, either, anyway. Interoperability would be painful.
This way, whether for good or bad, at least gives us a de facto standard that can be designed against (and around) with a relatively non-moving target, allowing vendors to concentrate on real functionality: comprehensive, intuitive displays of that data.
Please don't spread this around. I'm rather hoping that the advertising agencies take this as a "we're going to come down harder on misleading advertising" rebuke rather than a "you didn't use enough weasel words" rebuke. People like you might give them the wrong idea, no matter how true.
It's really the opposite of lynching. After all, the fact that Lori got justice, despite the law, is almost assuredly going to prevent any mob from forming to lynch her (or do anything else to her detriment).
Imagine, for a second, that the jury in the Rodney King trial had actually convicted the police officers of something. Do you think that the riots would have occurred? I quite doubt it. That would have saved 53 lives, according to Wikipedia, if the riots had been averted. Sometimes justice has to happen despite the law, just so the people can keep their ill-placed faith in the system as a whole to be self-correcting.
Not entirely. Yes, the charges were stretched. But the jury apparently agreed enough that Lori was doing something that either is criminal, or should be criminal to give her a conviction. In the same way that a jury has the right to discard a bad law (even if the judge won't tell them they do), they should have the right to mete out a good law.
Psychological abuse resulting in death is what Lori got convicted for, regardless of what the D.A. could get past a judge.
Um, no.
Jocks and athletes have power in secondary schools simply because their ego is fed by the swooning girls who are hardwired to look for guys who can protect them. In secondary school, girls think that big, strong guys provide the daddy-style protection that they covet. It's not until later (20 to 30) that most women figure out it's the nerds that will provide the economic protection that they really want. Of course, by that time, the nerds will have picked up zero in the socialisation department and not know what to do to pick up the chicks.
sorry there's no room for full analysis
Is that basically saying there's not enough room in this input box for the proof?
More software developers should ask themselves "What's the worst that could happen if my customers could modify and redistribute this software"? For proprietary software, it means you can no longer hold customers to ransom and insist on yearly revenue generating "updates". For developers who get paid for hours worked doing actual development and support, this is no problem. I prefer the latter - getting paid for actual work just seems more honest.
Well, that's not entirely how capitalism works anyway. You don't just get paid for actual work, you get paid for actual value. Proprietary software attempts to hold value at the vendor by forcing you to get your fixes from the same vendor, tying you to a support contract in order to get those fixes. Free software entirely changes that value - instead, you get value from not only being able to have many eyes looking over the code, but by being able to hire someone who thus has your interests in mind when reviewing the code. It definitely is much harder for a company to make money this way. Obviously not impossible, but much harder.
What vendors have to start realising is that the software actually has much less value to customers than they think. It's the results that have value. Once you realise that, you can start to capitalise on it, and start selling services which come with free software.
All that said, Stallman's answer to the last question was a complete non-answer. I've seen less evasion on a question from politicians. Not very often ;-), but still... The question asks about individual developers, and Stallman rants about commercial (corporate) power. Way to ignore the little person. And the guy doing the interview.
This was always a concern of mine with binary distros. "DLL Hell" - Linux-style. It's never been as bad for me with RH or SuSE as it ever was for Windows, but my paranoia showed through, and I eventually made my switch to Gentoo. Funny thing is, I get mismatched libraries far more often, but I also upgrade software far more often. However, there is a simple fix: revdep-rebuild. Look for libraries and executables that are missing their libraries and rebuild, which should get them linked against the new library.
Knowing there is a way out was a significant comfort in going to Gentoo. I was never convinced that RH would catch it all. Apparently, neither can Ubuntu. Granted, it's a *hard* problem that isn't easily solvable in a binary distribution.
The definition of entrapment has three things:
So, no, this is not entrapment.
Which is worse: a password that you can remember, or changing passwords every 30/60/90 days to a new password such that you can never keep up, and thus need to write it down *somewhere*?
Sometimes, the very processes intended to make us more secure (by forcing a password change regularly) instead make the entire system less secure (because "I forgot my password" too many times and you'll end up out of a job, so better to write it down than to lose your job!).
Sorry, just griping about new policies at $work.
I am, unfortunately, not really recommending the above measures for this time because, as you point out, it'll take out too many other people with it. People whose stupidity was their only real fault, whose greed was nearly non-existent (wanting to own your own home isn't greedy - it's a smart move; it's the banks' greed that drove up house prices so fast and so the people hurt here are just the ones that weren't smart enough to realise that they couldn't really afford such a house in that market). There needs to be some repercussions for these people, but I admit that wrecking their lives over it seems to be a disproportional result for their actions.
The only problem with the bailout still is teaching bankers that they can be greedy and still come out ahead even when they screw up because Uncle Sam will help. A constitutional amendment prohibiting such action in the future will, I hope, dissuade them of this notion right quick. Something the Libertarians can cling to and launch a quick court battle should any future presidency desire to do something like this again. Realising that their necks are on the line, they may protect themselves better.
Yes, we need credit. We need the banks to take risks with entrepreneurs. We even need banks to take risks with ordinary people on their houses/condos/whatever. But what we also need is the banks to take reasonable risks. Will some people no longer be able to afford houses? Absolutely. They'll have to keep renting until they can afford a house. It'll keep houses from going absolutely stupid crazy in the first place, which helps keep inflation down. Which is far better than a recession. The banks should have a free hand to make big risks. But, just as they can profit hugely from those risks, they need to know that they can lose big time.
And maybe, just maybe, their insurance companies will pay more attention, too.
* (The real blame lies with the 1990s president who repealed the Glass-Steagall of 1933 which allowed banks to invest in risky stocks, and thereby created the current crisis. But the media is being hush-hush about that. Don't want to risk losing the Obama election.)
Odd, I'd blame the banks for their crisis by investing stupidly. I guess it's like a kid who just turned legal, going out, getting entirely plastered, driving home, and hitting nearly everyone they see on their way. Except that here mommy and daddy have to pay about $700B for bailing them out.
Mind you, I'm on the House and Senate Republicans' side on this one. They took the risk, they should pay for it. If they don't, and see that mommy and daddy will always bail them out, will they ever learn?
Maybe the US needs a constitutional amendment to make these bailouts illegal. Then maybe corporations will learn to take reasonable risks - ones that, if they should fail, won't put them under. And then pass a law requiring that 95% of board members' pay (and that should include all chief officers) are in the form of stock and stock options: 10% stock, 90% stock options (none of which can vest in less than 5 years). Then they'll take the long-term view of their corporations.
If the questions are truly random *and* you only get one crack at a time (the scenario, question, and thus answer, change each time you hit 'submit'), it might take a bit longer for an AI to learn. Throw in some fun CSS and Java script for generating the actual text such that it doesn't appear verbatim in the actual HTML code, and you make things even more fun. Add to that layers such that the text merely shows up because of overlapping div tags so that even if you do have a CSS and JS engine working on the spam machine, it will basically need screen-reading software to parse it out, and you've gone a long way toward making their lives painful.
Of course, the downside to that is for the visually impaired. *sigh*. Mind you, if the rest of your site is all Flash anyway, that's not really a problem. :-)
And you're participating in slashdot because...?
(Oh, I suppose that there probably is no such forum...)
Why? Because it's entirely relevant, yet controversial at the same time. It was interesting that it was left out. Either you agree with the idea or not, but either way it was $1B unwisely spent by the Liberals.
ooooo... I wanna hear your opinions on the gun registry. :-P
Well, given the history of Alberta's deficits and debt, I'd have to say that, no, we had sober monkeys run us into the ground in the first place. It may have required some drunkenness to get us out.
And Klein did that *before* oil hit $80 a barrel. It required fiscal conservatism, and, oddly enough, not only did Klein run on a platform of erasing the debt, he actually fulfilled all his major promises (and most of his minor promises). Not too many Canadian governments have done that (Conservative or Liberal - the NDP do fulfill their promises, but their promises just cause government meltdowns, so that's not a positive thing here).
As to the primary topic, it's unfortunate that Layton comes out in favour of something. It pretty much guarantees that the general populace will see it as a fringe thing, and ignore it or move to quash it.