You forgot the loan/mortgage, pharmacy, and ringtone concessions:
"Plus... we'll include a FREE SAMPLE of your choice of viagra or cialis while we send a free RINGTONE that's _guaranteed_ to reduce your interest rate!"
I wouldn't mind paying for the few IEEE docs I've wanted - if the prices were reasonable. I'm willing to bet that if they'd just lower the prices to something approximating reasonable, they'd see sales improve.
I mean, once they've converted them to binary format for download, what are their expenses really?
You mean that calmly and rationally pointing out the benefits of something accomplishes more that foaming-at-the-mouth, in-your-face, mine-is-the-One-True-Way evangelism?
Nah, can't be. If things really worked that way, just think of all the time thats been wasted...
I started out running Redhat - but when they dropped us Real People(tm) in favor of their Enterprise users, I decided I didn't want any part of them OR their distro. Switched to Suse, and been happy for the last couple of years; I'm not about to switch back just because they finally realized they pi55ed off a bunch of their user base and want (need?) them back again.
"spamming" their system with fake packets that match some/all of the fingerprint? Basically, just generate so many false positives that it becomes useless to them...
In a lot of cases, people don't mind a nuke power plant - as long as it's (all together now) Not In My Back Yard. I worked for a company that did nuclear dosimetry, and was in and out of power plants all over the country; believe me, they are very physically secure.
Most of Californicate's troubles with insufficient energy is that almost nobody in the state is willing to be anywhere near ANY kind of power plant, nuke or not. So the plants get built elsewhere, and Calif. pays premium rates to import it (when they can get it). Dumbasses.
FYI, the state of Texas is effectively isolated from the grid the rest of the country uses - they generate enough power for "internal" usage, and that's pretty much it. Take a look at a power distribution map some time, you'll see.
it's another way to get signed/encrypted email into the hands of more people - whether they're geeks, or not. If it gets a few more people using some kind of authentication for email, then it's another strike against spammers/VXers; surely, it can't be all that bad, then, can it?
Sure, it isn't GPG, PGP, or any of the more "traditional" encryption programs. But then, how many Joe/Jane Sixpacks do you know that use those, either? From reading the article, it seems to greatly simplify the process of installing and using email signing/encryption, and that's something that I've run into trying to get people to use GPG/PGP: "It's too complicated; I have to remember too much stuff".
It looks like the security of it is being vetted, even if the source isn't as open as some would like (yet). Fine, it isn't "perfect" from a geek point of view, and it still has a way to go before it'll work on more email clients - but it's a start at de-geeking email crypto, which is something that can only help.
that folks are (again) distinguishing between the quality needed for casual use (having background noise) and sit-and-listen-to-it quality (CD/live).
One of my peeves about broadcasting over the net is that so many people want perfect signal, regardless of what they're using the broadcast for. The added bandwidth needed for studio-quality everything just means ever fatter pipes are demanded, raising the cost/price of the whole infrastructure and adding to the net congestion.
I think that if the person that sent out the email had ginned up a Hotmail account and sent it from there, they'd have reason to claim parody/satire and have a basis for claiming anonymity. But creating an account under the target's name, they stepped over the line into fraud.
And, using your example, if the parachute were packed by another robot, then the two of them would communicate (as is noted in several instances in Asimov's books) that it was packed correctly and there wouldn't be any conflict.
As you may recall, the premise for Asimov's laws is the Positronic brain, constructed such that the Three Laws are immutably impressed in it's functionality; a non-3-Law robot would be "impossible" to manufacture under _Asimov's_ premises - which isn't to say that it would be impossible in the Real World using current/anticipated technology. None the less, I still think the Three Laws make a good foundation for self-aware robotics.
Speaking just for myself, I never saw any point in jumping out of a perfectly functional airplane.:-)
In the article (yes, I actually read it!), he states that he doesn't think of robots as actually implementing Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics.
I'd suggest that using those three laws would be an excellent place to start - such as with the question he raises of autonomous robots being armed, which would be resolved by the First Law. As for the rest of his questions, I would expect that technology improvements would address the majority of them (the dung-eating robot, for example, could conceivably be developed to output sanitized waste that was suitable for use as crop fertilizer, for example.
He may be an academic asking "real world" questions - better to ask them now, than later, I think. (Think: design of SMTP "then", and what is needed now. If they'd conceived of spam at the time, we might well have fewer problems today.)
Slashdot Mirror
for giving me my rights back.[/sarcasm]
Hey! I already patented that idea!
Considering the poverty of N. Korea, I don't think 3 WinXP purchases is going to help MS all that much...
Now to get a few more governments to see the light!
And what do skiers tend to do?
Crash!! (which may well be what IE7 does - or so we can hope)
Hey, even moose need lovin' every now and then...
You forgot the loan/mortgage, pharmacy, and ringtone concessions:
"Plus... we'll include a FREE SAMPLE of your choice of viagra or cialis while we send a free RINGTONE that's _guaranteed_ to reduce your interest rate!"
I wouldn't mind paying for the few IEEE docs I've wanted - if the prices were reasonable. I'm willing to bet that if they'd just lower the prices to something approximating reasonable, they'd see sales improve.
I mean, once they've converted them to binary format for download, what are their expenses really?
is "playing leapfrog with a unicorn"...
Considering the number of Linux zealots that I've had the misfortune of meeting, I think not; your comment would tend to prove my point.
And by the way, I'm a Linux user, and have been for some time. I advocate Linux usage - just not rabidly.
You mean that calmly and rationally pointing out the benefits of something accomplishes more that foaming-at-the-mouth, in-your-face, mine-is-the-One-True-Way evangelism?
Nah, can't be. If things really worked that way, just think of all the time thats been wasted...
Except on a teeny, tiny little scale (they are microbes, after all).
that any Martian bacteria would serve as a cure for penicillin?
I started out running Redhat - but when they dropped us Real People(tm) in favor of their Enterprise users, I decided I didn't want any part of them OR their distro. Switched to Suse, and been happy for the last couple of years; I'm not about to switch back just because they finally realized they pi55ed off a bunch of their user base and want (need?) them back again.
to a nicer bunch of people.
SCO = Sans Cranium Operating
You do know they make hairball medicine, don't you?
"spamming" their system with fake packets that match some/all of the fingerprint? Basically, just generate so many false positives that it becomes useless to them...
but that's understandable. He still has a lot of valid points, and does a *fine* job of raking Bill G. over the coals :-)
In a lot of cases, people don't mind a nuke power plant - as long as it's (all together now) Not In My Back Yard. I worked for a company that did nuclear dosimetry, and was in and out of power plants all over the country; believe me, they are very physically secure.
Most of Californicate's troubles with insufficient energy is that almost nobody in the state is willing to be anywhere near ANY kind of power plant, nuke or not. So the plants get built elsewhere, and Calif. pays premium rates to import it (when they can get it). Dumbasses.
FYI, the state of Texas is effectively isolated from the grid the rest of the country uses - they generate enough power for "internal" usage, and that's pretty much it. Take a look at a power distribution map some time, you'll see.it's another way to get signed/encrypted email into the hands of more people - whether they're geeks, or not. If it gets a few more people using some kind of authentication for email, then it's another strike against spammers/VXers; surely, it can't be all that bad, then, can it?
Sure, it isn't GPG, PGP, or any of the more "traditional" encryption programs. But then, how many Joe/Jane Sixpacks do you know that use those, either? From reading the article, it seems to greatly simplify the process of installing and using email signing/encryption, and that's something that I've run into trying to get people to use GPG/PGP: "It's too complicated; I have to remember too much stuff".
It looks like the security of it is being vetted, even if the source isn't as open as some would like (yet). Fine, it isn't "perfect" from a geek point of view, and it still has a way to go before it'll work on more email clients - but it's a start at de-geeking email crypto, which is something that can only help.
that folks are (again) distinguishing between the quality needed for casual use (having background noise) and sit-and-listen-to-it quality (CD/live).
One of my peeves about broadcasting over the net is that so many people want perfect signal, regardless of what they're using the broadcast for. The added bandwidth needed for studio-quality everything just means ever fatter pipes are demanded, raising the cost/price of the whole infrastructure and adding to the net congestion.
Q: How is a lawyer like a whore?
A: For the right money, either one will assume any position.
Q: Why do lawyers wear such tight collars?
A: So the foreskin doesn't show.
Q: What do you give a lawyer before he goes swimming?
A: An anchor.
I think that if the person that sent out the email had ginned up a Hotmail account and sent it from there, they'd have reason to claim parody/satire and have a basis for claiming anonymity. But creating an account under the target's name, they stepped over the line into fraud.
Then again, I just use my sense; IANAL :-)
And, using your example, if the parachute were packed by another robot, then the two of them would communicate (as is noted in several instances in Asimov's books) that it was packed correctly and there wouldn't be any conflict.
As you may recall, the premise for Asimov's laws is the Positronic brain, constructed such that the Three Laws are immutably impressed in it's functionality; a non-3-Law robot would be "impossible" to manufacture under _Asimov's_ premises - which isn't to say that it would be impossible in the Real World using current/anticipated technology. None the less, I still think the Three Laws make a good foundation for self-aware robotics.
Speaking just for myself, I never saw any point in jumping out of a perfectly functional airplane. :-)
In the article (yes, I actually read it!), he states that he doesn't think of robots as actually implementing Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics.
I'd suggest that using those three laws would be an excellent place to start - such as with the question he raises of autonomous robots being armed, which would be resolved by the First Law. As for the rest of his questions, I would expect that technology improvements would address the majority of them (the dung-eating robot, for example, could conceivably be developed to output sanitized waste that was suitable for use as crop fertilizer, for example.
He may be an academic asking "real world" questions - better to ask them now, than later, I think. (Think: design of SMTP "then", and what is needed now. If they'd conceived of spam at the time, we might well have fewer problems today.)