Actually, I didn't start seeing noticable volumes of spam until about 1998-99. At current rates, I typically see about 1 false ham, 20 uncertain and 250 certain spam per day. This compares with about 2 or 3 ham.
The only thing I don't like about Outlook's handling of this is that there isn't a way to download specific image files in the message. It's all or none.
Seems to me that Hormel has an unquestioned trademark in the realm of canned ham. What they need to do is expand into the realm of unsolicted email such that only their brand of UCE can be referred to as spam. It's a longshot, sure. The other thing they could do is to solve the problem of unsolicited email thus removing spam from the marketplace. Don't ask me how they can solve that problem. If I knew, I'd be rich and popular.
To treat a non-free program as a legitimate thing is accept a situation where a developer has power over us. Once you treat this situation as acceptable, it tends to grow.
Yet he sees nothing wrong with shackeling his program with restrictions that inflict his view upon the world. He craves the power to make over the world in his ideology. If it's not public domain, it's not truly free. I really wish he'd stop abusing that word.
Nah, North Korea only had a handful of nukes. Now they have one less. I for one encourage North Korea to test the rest of their bombs. Also, as a matter of practicality, we have verifiable proof that they have nukes. Kim Jong Il may be crazy, but he's not suicidal. This is mostly just leverage for him to extort things from the rest of the world.
Hey, extrapolated over a year, that's like 12 hours! Really, where can I find employees who spend so little time on the web? (like I'm setting a good example right now...)
New anything? From a business perspective, Vista doesn't add anything we care about. We don't use the existing collaboration features in Office. We don't use Sharepoint. Frankly, I don't actually know anyone that does. It's not worth the hassle and overhead. Really the only thing we want to upgrade is the PCs in the dev group to dual core.
Exactly. But apparently credit card companies don't have a right to process your payments to the casino.
This law does, however, bring up a point that I think needs to be addressed by a constitutional amendment: All bills should be reasonably related to a single subject. Also, politicians that tack an amendment like this on to an unrelated bill should be publicly tarred, feathered, and barred from office for life.
Actually, of the 3 lies listed, only one is an actual lie. Vonage will work just fine with the PC turned off. Apart from that, the call quality of Vonage sucks. Comcast Digital voice has fewer hops to get to the analog phone system and will generally have higher call quality. Vonage isn't encrypted and is subject to man in the middle attacks. On the other hand, no one does man in the middle attacks, and certainly not to listen in to your phone calls. Overall, I'd give Comcast a slight edge on QoS, otherwise, it's pretty much a wash.
Actually, a private airline can do a lot of things legally that the government can not. If the airlines were still doing their own screening and they saw a message they didn't like, they could kick the traveller out or harrass them any way they saw fit, provided it didn't violate the contract of the ticket or other applicable law. Any proper reading of the constitution would pretty much prohibit a government agency like the TSA from searching passengers/luggage. Not that I think most judges and governement officials ever actually bother to look at the constitution before making these sorts of decisions.
I spent about 12 years on Ultima 3 before I finally found the damn Mark of the Snake. Sure I took some time off during that span (while beating Ultimas 4 and 5, Bards Tale 3, and several others that took hundreads of hours). On the other hand, I never finished BT1 or Wasteland.
This is much preferable (in most cases) to the crap I've breezed through in half a day (Simon's Quest, Bionic Commando -- they were fun, just too short/easy) or the stuff I've just lost interest in (Morrowind -- level treadmill combined with too much wandering around trying to find some stupid cave in the middle of nowhere). I never really got into it, but Descent was waaayyy ahead of its time.
Makes you wonder who the customer really is. Actually, I know who the customer is, and it certainly ain't who I see in the mirror.
Re:Harris Miller is not a good representative
on
Brave New Ballot
·
· Score: 1
I really don't get this computerize everything mentality. Here in Minnesota, we use optical scan ballots. They're large, easy to read, easy to see if they've been marked correctly. If you make an invalid vote, the machine rejects it immediately so you can make a change. It spits out a tally at the end of the day and all the ballots are saved for easy auditing of results. It works; people get it.
By phrasing the question the right way, you can imply that net neutrality would limit services and download speed. In that scenario, you'll get an overwhelming response (from those who don't know what net neutrality is) that net neutrality is a bad thing. Phrased another way, you can imply that without net neutrality, Comcast and the baby Bells would be able to make web sites harder to reach. In that second scenario, most respondants would favor net neutrality.
For comparison, Cato has similar things to say about polling for support of school vouchers. When you imply in the question that other countries are doing it with great success, people are in favor. When you imply that it would hurt the public schools, people are against it. Shocking.
Firstly, the word was "improve", not "solve". I think Wikipedia would improve substantially if it added an editorial supervision system. For example, changes were not posted until approved by a randomly assigned editor. The random part is important. Sure, it's still possible to trash the system, but that takes a lot more effort. And then you need a rating system for editors, and so on and so forth. But the Wikipedia is run on a volunteer basis. There are limits to what it can accomplish without resorting to professional oversight, which would change the very nature of the beast. Ultimately, I think we just have to accept that it is what it is.
Gee, I spent a lot of time in front of the ol' TV as a kid. I also got out of the house and played football with the neighbors. And baseball, soccer, hockey, basketball, kick the can, hide and seek and any other game you can imagine. Looking at my own kid and the other kids in the neighborhood today, it seems that they're up to a lot of the same things. Maybe not as much of the football and sports because I now live in a neighborhood with smaller yards, but the kids are always out running around doing something. Frankly, I don't see a big difference between today and 25 years ago.
Reminds me of the worst (best?) red-neck ricer I ever saw: An old (rusty) Honda civic with a giant spolier on the back. The spoiler was made out of plywood. And held on with bungee cords. I was living in Richmond, VA at the time.
>Is online gambling the Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century?"
How about drug prohibition or pornography prohibition? Anytime the governement gets in the way of people and what they want to do, someone will find a way around it.
Actually, higher CO2 levels are great for the biomass movement. Libertarinism brings little to the climate change debate other than skepticism and pragmatism. Reducing carbon emissions by 5% at a cost of trillions of dollars will accomplish nothing. The benefit, if it exists, isn't worth the cost. Most Libertarians expect oil and coal and natural gas to run out eventually. In fact, as predicted, high gas prices have really jacked up the biodiesel and ethanol movements. Likewise, we've also seen an increase in wind, solar, and nuclear power generation as well. People are buying fuel efficient cars without government mandate or tax incentives. Golly, how could that be?
Then you've got the other side dancing, as you say, in the opposite direction. The reports always come out doom and gloom and the sky is falling, because otherwise, if you say things are fine, no more grant funding and you have to find a real job. I'm not sure what, if anything, could have been gained from another 150K worth of ice core samples that wasn't in the 440K they already had. Apparently, it was nothing, but they stressed how important it was and how they needed to do more research. I'm still waiting for something usefull to come out of the global warming crowd. I think I might be waiting for a while.
Quality, dude. With laptops, you pretty much get what you pay for. You need units that are light, durable, have long battery life. Those $500 laptops come with underpowered CPUs, not much RAM, mediocre displays and will probably die if they get dropped or soda spilled on them. They need to be light, since they'll be carried by kids as young as 11.
And don't forget your IT costs, which are probably in the range of $300-$500 per unit per year. When you add it all up, something like 10% of your anual budget is probably going into these laptops. And if anything, the laptops are more of a nuisance than they're worth.
My daughter hasn't started kindergarten yet, but I'm glad that so far at least, our school district hasn't been bitten by this idiotic craze.
and the publishers do nothing of value that a kid in a garage can't do.
Publishers provide 3 things of value: capital, marketing and distribution. In the digital age, distribution isn't as important (though a lot of people still buy their music at Wal-Mart). Most online music stores will stock damn near anything because there is no overhead to deal with. However, without marketing (and the capital to pay for that, to take your act on the road, etc.) no one will find your song and listen to it.
Copyright currently exists to give the content creators a limited exclusive on their created works. That's a good thing. Copyrights also last (effectively) forever. That's a bad thing. Somewhere along the line we got this crazy notion that creating something somehow gave you a "moral right" to the work. That you and your heirs will own that work for eternity. That's a bad thing.
But back to the original question, is DRM necessary? The answer, is no. There will always be ways to circumvent DRM. The analog hole can not be closed. If someone is infringing your copyright, the burden is (or at least should be) on the copyright holder to take action against the infringer. I suppose if someone only wants to sell their content DRMed, that's their right, but I won't buy it. The only purpose I could see for DRM is for subscription type services.
Actually, they come in varying shades of whiteness now. Most bulbs are more of a yellow on par with a traditional incandescent. They progress from there to "white", "bright white", and "daylight" with daylight being almost slightly bluish. From my experiance, I like the "bright white" the best.
Here's the thing from my perspective: the current DRM regime is flawed as a matter of design. Content that consumers own shouldn't come encumbered. And for subscription services, the best bet is to have some sort of smart card or dongle that does the decryption. Doing everything in software - when the end user inherently must have the decryption key to listen is completely flawed. Of course, working in hardware necessitates a trused hardware chain also. And that infrastructure currently doesn't exist.
Or then we'll see things really get clamped down with the 64-bit version of Vista. Ugh.
There is at least a simple solution for the consumer: Don't use media player. Trite and simplistic, I know, but I doubt the Redmond crowd is going to pay much attention to a few hundread posts on Slashdot. On the other hand, I don't know if the other major players out there will fare much better.
But in finance, there is a "true" value - my bank account has, for example, two hundred dollars and fifty six cents - it is a completely discrete value. No matter how many times I measure it, it will be exactly the same.
All float numbers are discrete values as well. The "problem" is that they're in base 2 when most people are used to looking at numbers in base 10. Left of the decimal point, base2 and base10 convert on a 1 to 1 relationship. Right of the decimal point is where you have problems. You can convert a base2 decimal space is completely coverd by the base10 decimal space, but not the other way around. Thus the example of the linked article -.37 can not be represented in base2 (without a repeating decimal), but only aproximated. However, 1.0101b does convert to 1.3125 without loss.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I didn't start seeing noticable volumes of spam until about 1998-99. At current rates, I typically see about 1 false ham, 20 uncertain and 250 certain spam per day. This compares with about 2 or 3 ham.
The only thing I don't like about Outlook's handling of this is that there isn't a way to download specific image files in the message. It's all or none.
Seems to me that Hormel has an unquestioned trademark in the realm of canned ham. What they need to do is expand into the realm of unsolicted email such that only their brand of UCE can be referred to as spam. It's a longshot, sure. The other thing they could do is to solve the problem of unsolicited email thus removing spam from the marketplace. Don't ask me how they can solve that problem. If I knew, I'd be rich and popular.
He's a hypocritical nutjob. And I quote:
To treat a non-free program as a legitimate thing is accept a situation where a developer has power over us. Once you treat this situation as acceptable, it tends to grow.
Yet he sees nothing wrong with shackeling his program with restrictions that inflict his view upon the world. He craves the power to make over the world in his ideology. If it's not public domain, it's not truly free. I really wish he'd stop abusing that word.
Nah, North Korea only had a handful of nukes. Now they have one less. I for one encourage North Korea to test the rest of their bombs. Also, as a matter of practicality, we have verifiable proof that they have nukes. Kim Jong Il may be crazy, but he's not suicidal. This is mostly just leverage for him to extort things from the rest of the world.
Hey, extrapolated over a year, that's like 12 hours! Really, where can I find employees who spend so little time on the web? (like I'm setting a good example right now...)
New anything? From a business perspective, Vista doesn't add anything we care about. We don't use the existing collaboration features in Office. We don't use Sharepoint. Frankly, I don't actually know anyone that does. It's not worth the hassle and overhead. Really the only thing we want to upgrade is the PCs in the dev group to dual core.
Exactly. But apparently credit card companies don't have a right to process your payments to the casino.
This law does, however, bring up a point that I think needs to be addressed by a constitutional amendment: All bills should be reasonably related to a single subject. Also, politicians that tack an amendment like this on to an unrelated bill should be publicly tarred, feathered, and barred from office for life.
Actually, of the 3 lies listed, only one is an actual lie. Vonage will work just fine with the PC turned off. Apart from that, the call quality of Vonage sucks. Comcast Digital voice has fewer hops to get to the analog phone system and will generally have higher call quality. Vonage isn't encrypted and is subject to man in the middle attacks. On the other hand, no one does man in the middle attacks, and certainly not to listen in to your phone calls. Overall, I'd give Comcast a slight edge on QoS, otherwise, it's pretty much a wash.
Actually, a private airline can do a lot of things legally that the government can not. If the airlines were still doing their own screening and they saw a message they didn't like, they could kick the traveller out or harrass them any way they saw fit, provided it didn't violate the contract of the ticket or other applicable law. Any proper reading of the constitution would pretty much prohibit a government agency like the TSA from searching passengers/luggage. Not that I think most judges and governement officials ever actually bother to look at the constitution before making these sorts of decisions.
I spent about 12 years on Ultima 3 before I finally found the damn Mark of the Snake. Sure I took some time off during that span (while beating Ultimas 4 and 5, Bards Tale 3, and several others that took hundreads of hours). On the other hand, I never finished BT1 or Wasteland.
This is much preferable (in most cases) to the crap I've breezed through in half a day (Simon's Quest, Bionic Commando -- they were fun, just too short/easy) or the stuff I've just lost interest in (Morrowind -- level treadmill combined with too much wandering around trying to find some stupid cave in the middle of nowhere). I never really got into it, but Descent was waaayyy ahead of its time.
Makes you wonder who the customer really is. Actually, I know who the customer is, and it certainly ain't who I see in the mirror.
I really don't get this computerize everything mentality. Here in Minnesota, we use optical scan ballots. They're large, easy to read, easy to see if they've been marked correctly. If you make an invalid vote, the machine rejects it immediately so you can make a change. It spits out a tally at the end of the day and all the ballots are saved for easy auditing of results. It works; people get it.
By phrasing the question the right way, you can imply that net neutrality would limit services and download speed. In that scenario, you'll get an overwhelming response (from those who don't know what net neutrality is) that net neutrality is a bad thing. Phrased another way, you can imply that without net neutrality, Comcast and the baby Bells would be able to make web sites harder to reach. In that second scenario, most respondants would favor net neutrality.
For comparison, Cato has similar things to say about polling for support of school vouchers. When you imply in the question that other countries are doing it with great success, people are in favor. When you imply that it would hurt the public schools, people are against it. Shocking.
Firstly, the word was "improve", not "solve". I think Wikipedia would improve substantially if it added an editorial supervision system. For example, changes were not posted until approved by a randomly assigned editor. The random part is important. Sure, it's still possible to trash the system, but that takes a lot more effort. And then you need a rating system for editors, and so on and so forth. But the Wikipedia is run on a volunteer basis. There are limits to what it can accomplish without resorting to professional oversight, which would change the very nature of the beast. Ultimately, I think we just have to accept that it is what it is.
Gee, I spent a lot of time in front of the ol' TV as a kid. I also got out of the house and played football with the neighbors. And baseball, soccer, hockey, basketball, kick the can, hide and seek and any other game you can imagine. Looking at my own kid and the other kids in the neighborhood today, it seems that they're up to a lot of the same things. Maybe not as much of the football and sports because I now live in a neighborhood with smaller yards, but the kids are always out running around doing something. Frankly, I don't see a big difference between today and 25 years ago.
Reminds me of the worst (best?) red-neck ricer I ever saw: An old (rusty) Honda civic with a giant spolier on the back. The spoiler was made out of plywood. And held on with bungee cords. I was living in Richmond, VA at the time.
>Is online gambling the Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century?"
How about drug prohibition or pornography prohibition? Anytime the governement gets in the way of people and what they want to do, someone will find a way around it.
Actually, higher CO2 levels are great for the biomass movement. Libertarinism brings little to the climate change debate other than skepticism and pragmatism. Reducing carbon emissions by 5% at a cost of trillions of dollars will accomplish nothing. The benefit, if it exists, isn't worth the cost. Most Libertarians expect oil and coal and natural gas to run out eventually. In fact, as predicted, high gas prices have really jacked up the biodiesel and ethanol movements. Likewise, we've also seen an increase in wind, solar, and nuclear power generation as well. People are buying fuel efficient cars without government mandate or tax incentives. Golly, how could that be?
Then you've got the other side dancing, as you say, in the opposite direction. The reports always come out doom and gloom and the sky is falling, because otherwise, if you say things are fine, no more grant funding and you have to find a real job. I'm not sure what, if anything, could have been gained from another 150K worth of ice core samples that wasn't in the 440K they already had. Apparently, it was nothing, but they stressed how important it was and how they needed to do more research. I'm still waiting for something usefull to come out of the global warming crowd. I think I might be waiting for a while.
Quality, dude. With laptops, you pretty much get what you pay for. You need units that are light, durable, have long battery life. Those $500 laptops come with underpowered CPUs, not much RAM, mediocre displays and will probably die if they get dropped or soda spilled on them. They need to be light, since they'll be carried by kids as young as 11.
And don't forget your IT costs, which are probably in the range of $300-$500 per unit per year. When you add it all up, something like 10% of your anual budget is probably going into these laptops. And if anything, the laptops are more of a nuisance than they're worth.
My daughter hasn't started kindergarten yet, but I'm glad that so far at least, our school district hasn't been bitten by this idiotic craze.
and the publishers do nothing of value that a kid in a garage can't do.
Publishers provide 3 things of value: capital, marketing and distribution. In the digital age, distribution isn't as important (though a lot of people still buy their music at Wal-Mart). Most online music stores will stock damn near anything because there is no overhead to deal with. However, without marketing (and the capital to pay for that, to take your act on the road, etc.) no one will find your song and listen to it.
Copyright currently exists to give the content creators a limited exclusive on their created works. That's a good thing. Copyrights also last (effectively) forever. That's a bad thing. Somewhere along the line we got this crazy notion that creating something somehow gave you a "moral right" to the work. That you and your heirs will own that work for eternity. That's a bad thing.
But back to the original question, is DRM necessary? The answer, is no. There will always be ways to circumvent DRM. The analog hole can not be closed. If someone is infringing your copyright, the burden is (or at least should be) on the copyright holder to take action against the infringer. I suppose if someone only wants to sell their content DRMed, that's their right, but I won't buy it. The only purpose I could see for DRM is for subscription type services.
Actually, they come in varying shades of whiteness now. Most bulbs are more of a yellow on par with a traditional incandescent. They progress from there to "white", "bright white", and "daylight" with daylight being almost slightly bluish. From my experiance, I like the "bright white" the best.
Here's the thing from my perspective: the current DRM regime is flawed as a matter of design. Content that consumers own shouldn't come encumbered. And for subscription services, the best bet is to have some sort of smart card or dongle that does the decryption. Doing everything in software - when the end user inherently must have the decryption key to listen is completely flawed. Of course, working in hardware necessitates a trused hardware chain also. And that infrastructure currently doesn't exist.
Or then we'll see things really get clamped down with the 64-bit version of Vista. Ugh.
There is at least a simple solution for the consumer: Don't use media player. Trite and simplistic, I know, but I doubt the Redmond crowd is going to pay much attention to a few hundread posts on Slashdot. On the other hand, I don't know if the other major players out there will fare much better.
But in finance, there is a "true" value - my bank account has, for example, two hundred dollars and fifty six cents - it is a completely discrete value. No matter how many times I measure it, it will be exactly the same.
.37 can not be represented in base2 (without a repeating decimal), but only aproximated. However, 1.0101b does convert to 1.3125 without loss.
All float numbers are discrete values as well. The "problem" is that they're in base 2 when most people are used to looking at numbers in base 10. Left of the decimal point, base2 and base10 convert on a 1 to 1 relationship. Right of the decimal point is where you have problems. You can convert a base2 decimal space is completely coverd by the base10 decimal space, but not the other way around. Thus the example of the linked article -