In my precalculus class in high school, my teacher said "The more you know the more you learn." Most of the kids in the class didn't get it, but it's definitely true. As you learn more, it seems like you learn at a much faster rate how much for there is to left to learn. While a lot of us will be happy with learning enough to do our job, like a lot of it kids in that class who didn't see the need to continue in math, for those of us who want to keep pursuing it, there will always be plenty more.
In computer science, we still haven't figured out P vs NP. We still haven't managed to build a quantum computer, which is right now probably more in the realm of physicists, but there's a need for algorithms to run on a Quantum computer as well. As we keep trying to organize more and more information, we're going to have to figure our some way to make it accessible. There's more to Google than their giant server farm, someone has to figure out a way to make it work efficiently. As much better as Google is than anything that came before it, it still gives pretty bad search results. We haven't managed to build a machine that can pass the Turing test yet. There is definitely plenty more to be working on, and plenty of work for the scientists to do.
I don't like the idea of moving all the world's e-mail onto a central database. The Internet is meant to be lots of independent servers collaborating through open standards, not one massive server of everything.
For Spam to be very effective, it's going to have to eventually get to a non-local mail server. I guess I shouldn't have specified when you connect to the SMTP server, since the micropayment can happen at any point in the chain, or maybe even several times.
I've read about some micropayment schemes as a way of combatting spam. The idea is that spam basically costs the spammers nothing, so you add a computational cost to it. When you a mail client connects to the mail server and requests to send a message, the server responds "Okay, but first you have to give me the answer to this computational problem." It would be some problem that's relatively difficult to solve, but easy to check so the server doesn't incur a huge cost giving these out. It'd be a small cost, so it's hardly noticeable for legitimate e-mails, but when sending bulk e-mails, the spammers would at least be forced to buy a very powerful computer to solve all of these payment problems.
I get that sense where I'm working now. In meetings developers will talk of open source like it's a dirty word. For example, we have a system that used to have a C client, but they've started using SSL and dropped support for the C client because they didn't think there was a suitable C library for SSL. One developer made a comment along the lines of "There is an open-source library called OpenSSL, but that looks like its development is pretty disorganized, even for open source projects."
The company seems to prefer spending lots of money on proprietary solutions when there are open source solutions that are probably better and more cost effective.
That being said, most of the developers use Eclipse as their development IDE, and I'm sure we are using more open source tools than they realize.
Except in this case the press release is directed specifically at BitTorrent for facilitating the distribution of Episode III. They are not attacking piracy, but blaming BitTorrent for it.
A kid at my college was suspended from school a few years ago, for this, among other things (the main issue was copyright infringement). He sent a joke e-mail out to all campus by impersonating someone who actually had access to the all campus mailing list. The administration here deemed it identity theft, although no one filed criminal charges or anything.
Think of how many people at Google probably read slashdot. To think that now that it's on slashdot everybody knows except Google is kind of silly. Also, at least one person on here reported that it seems they fixed the bug already, which doesn't surprise me.
I'm working on the Aerial Robotics Team at my college. We compete in the International Aerial Robotics Competition and this year the prize for successfully completing the mission is $40,000. It's interesting that although we are competing with the other teams, we are also all very cooperative. Teams that have solved some of the problems we are working on are more than happy to tell us about there solution and how we could implement the same thing. Competition does not rule out cooperation.
Slashdot Mirror
In my precalculus class in high school, my teacher said "The more you know the more you learn." Most of the kids in the class didn't get it, but it's definitely true. As you learn more, it seems like you learn at a much faster rate how much for there is to left to learn. While a lot of us will be happy with learning enough to do our job, like a lot of it kids in that class who didn't see the need to continue in math, for those of us who want to keep pursuing it, there will always be plenty more. In computer science, we still haven't figured out P vs NP. We still haven't managed to build a quantum computer, which is right now probably more in the realm of physicists, but there's a need for algorithms to run on a Quantum computer as well. As we keep trying to organize more and more information, we're going to have to figure our some way to make it accessible. There's more to Google than their giant server farm, someone has to figure out a way to make it work efficiently. As much better as Google is than anything that came before it, it still gives pretty bad search results. We haven't managed to build a machine that can pass the Turing test yet. There is definitely plenty more to be working on, and plenty of work for the scientists to do.
I don't like the idea of moving all the world's e-mail onto a central database. The Internet is meant to be lots of independent servers collaborating through open standards, not one massive server of everything.
For Spam to be very effective, it's going to have to eventually get to a non-local mail server. I guess I shouldn't have specified when you connect to the SMTP server, since the micropayment can happen at any point in the chain, or maybe even several times.
I've read about some micropayment schemes as a way of combatting spam. The idea is that spam basically costs the spammers nothing, so you add a computational cost to it. When you a mail client connects to the mail server and requests to send a message, the server responds "Okay, but first you have to give me the answer to this computational problem." It would be some problem that's relatively difficult to solve, but easy to check so the server doesn't incur a huge cost giving these out. It'd be a small cost, so it's hardly noticeable for legitimate e-mails, but when sending bulk e-mails, the spammers would at least be forced to buy a very powerful computer to solve all of these payment problems.
I get that sense where I'm working now. In meetings developers will talk of open source like it's a dirty word. For example, we have a system that used to have a C client, but they've started using SSL and dropped support for the C client because they didn't think there was a suitable C library for SSL. One developer made a comment along the lines of "There is an open-source library called OpenSSL, but that looks like its development is pretty disorganized, even for open source projects." The company seems to prefer spending lots of money on proprietary solutions when there are open source solutions that are probably better and more cost effective. That being said, most of the developers use Eclipse as their development IDE, and I'm sure we are using more open source tools than they realize.
Except in this case the press release is directed specifically at BitTorrent for facilitating the distribution of Episode III. They are not attacking piracy, but blaming BitTorrent for it.
A kid at my college was suspended from school a few years ago, for this, among other things (the main issue was copyright infringement). He sent a joke e-mail out to all campus by impersonating someone who actually had access to the all campus mailing list. The administration here deemed it identity theft, although no one filed criminal charges or anything.
Think of how many people at Google probably read slashdot. To think that now that it's on slashdot everybody knows except Google is kind of silly. Also, at least one person on here reported that it seems they fixed the bug already, which doesn't surprise me.
I'm working on the Aerial Robotics Team at my college. We compete in the International Aerial Robotics Competition and this year the prize for successfully completing the mission is $40,000. It's interesting that although we are competing with the other teams, we are also all very cooperative. Teams that have solved some of the problems we are working on are more than happy to tell us about there solution and how we could implement the same thing. Competition does not rule out cooperation.