Everyone repeat after me: "spam with Hotmail in the From line usually is NOT sent from Hotmail". Most spammers are abusing an open relay and forging the From address to deflect attention.
Some spammers might use Hotmail as a drop box, but it's not a very good choice since it will get cancelled in a few days and lose most replies. These days most spams use dedicated spam-friendly domains (like conru.com) for their drop boxes, or don't give you a valid email address at all.
If you aren't your own mail admin, go tell your postmaster to use RBL. When it reaches sufficient density, other admins will work very hard to stay off that list, and spamming will get that much harder.
the wheels of bureacracy only turn so much so far, and this event happened months ago and our sysadmins haven't gotten around to fixing this little nuisance yet.
Aha. This is exactly why Hotmail using RBL is such a good thing. Your local sysadmins may not care much about email being unable to reach a few small domains. But what happens when your company can't contact thousands (or millions) of clients, because your sysadmin is allowing spam?
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and a mountain of refusals from Hotmail will be very squeaky. If another big name like Yahoo or Earthlink joins in, the squeak becomes a roar, and your bureacracy will move quickly indeed. Which is precisely how RBL is supposed to work.
Yes, Redmond is an evil monopoly out to destroy our freedoms. But even a broken clock is right once in a while. Hotmail using RBL is a GREAT thing that will benefit EVERYONE -- an awesome boost for an underused public service.
Hopefully the resulting buzz will be sufficiently positive that the other free email services (like my dear old Yahoo) will follow suit. I've been requesting it for years and Yahoo never replied.
Ah, to imagine the day when I never get another email from Andrew Conru or Sam Khuri...
The Windows version of DeCSS is available in lots of places (for example, DVDtidbits), and other platforms will doubtless follow shortly. It's far Far FAR too late for the cartel to shut down one or two web sites. They really shouldn't even try, it only makes them look stupid. Well, I suppose using the CSS encryption scheme demonstrates quite enough stupidity...
the people who add companies to the Dow are undoubtedly in the know.
Huh? The DJIA is run by the editors of the Wall Street Journal. They're private citizens, business journalists to be precise. Insider information being passed between WSJ and a federal judge would be a securities violation of such insane levels, it staggers the imagination.
At this point, no one except Judge T Jackson and his clerks know the story. And it isn't even the complete story yet. This is just the declaration of facts -- whether MS broke any laws. The penalty phase comes later.
MS was added to the Dow because it's the highest valued stock in the US. That's reason enough. If the Dow disallowed every company that's being investigated or prosecuted, you wouldn't have much to choose from.
The Matrix should stay a one time deal. It was pretty, it was fun. The plot was sufficient to reach the end of the movie, and it didn't have TOO many holes (batteries? don't make me rant about biochemistry). But it was essentially just a light summer flick.
Where can you possibly go with Matrix II (Electric Boogaloo)? Taking us into Zion could only be a letdown compared to what the characters portrayed to us.
The character of Neo only worked because he was SUPPOSED to be wooden and clueless through the first half of the movie, then grim and scowling, and lastly the Messiah. I suppose you could make him start over, and totally void out the original climax. Can you say "Highlander II"? Yes, that's exactly what I forsee -- Keanu on Planet Zeist.
However... a PREQUEL might be interesting. The man/machine war, the programmer founding Zion. No Neo at all. But somehow I don't see that happening.
What about the windowing system?? I'm sure any decent programmer could have thought of that one
In fact, lots of people already have. For one easy example, the Macintosh "Date and Time" control panel has a 1920-2019 window. It's been that way since the original System in 1984 I'm pretty sure.
The really annoying thing about this is that a Y2K century window is a complete algorithm (which I would allow in software patents) rather than a raw concept (which is unfair crap). Instead, it's just a stupid Stupid STUPID case of the patent office not paying any attention to prior art.
I think any Internet user would like more reliable uptime, faster connections, and faster pings. Why is this limited to gaming
Notice your use of the word "faster". What exactly does that mean? For a real world example, let's say you have a choice between an SR-71 (hypersonic spy plane), a 747 (jumbo jet), and the Exxon Valdez (supertanker) travelling from New York to London. Which vehicle would be "faster" to move:
one person?
200 people and their luggage?
the Statue of Liberty?
Web surfing, file downloads, and online gaming all have different speed needs. Most people focus on bandwidth -- getting a 10Mb video in the least time, and who cares about a 2 second delay at the beginning. But for games, you want small blips of data sent without delay, every millisecond counts, and who cares if the overall data rate is lower.
Stuart Cheshire wrote an excellent lecture about this problem years ago. Click here.
A real shame it's taken so long for anyone in the modem business to pay attention. Also, it sounds like 3Com's solution is proprietary on both the user and server ends, meaning you can't just buy a new modem and run.
donors operate on a standard basis--whatever amount of control is standard, they'll probably want a little more
Well, there are two limiting factors here:
The "standard" donations that most people make (through alumni associations, wills, annual fund, etc) are of the "no strings attached" variety. That's not likely to change. Most people who donate are quite satisfied with the institution's goals, which is why they're donating in the first place.
Multi-million dollar donations (like the biotech one) are regulated by the media. The purpose of big grants is to generate good PR for the donor. If Bill Gates set up a foundation solely for the purpose of destroying Linux and installing Win2000 on all campus computers, he'd be soundly reviled. Also, the IRS could disallow it as a deduction.
should donors be able to demand budget parameters? To what degree? Should donations be revokable?
Umm...donors can make whatever demands they want. It's their money, and if the burden is too heavy then the recipient can turn it down. I presume it's basic contract law.
Here's an extreme example. Harvard (I think it's Harvard, I'd have to check with my wife) has at least one ancient endowment that is contingent upon the university maintaining a particular building -- they can't even remove a single brick!
Recently they wanted to put in a sky bridge to the building next door. The solution: The bridge is ramped up to go through a large window, with stairs to come back down.
the world's population reached 1 billion right around 1820. And don't count on it getting that low again.....ever.
Untrue. I guarantee that within 5 to 10 billion years, the world's human population will be very small indeed. The only question is whether we die out, move away, or stop being human...;p
Third world nations practice slash and burn agrigulture. They burn inefficient fuels, with no emissions controls. They dump their garbage and sewage into the local rivers with no thought to what it may be doing down stream.
In other words, all the exact same crap that America & Europe used to do (often still do), then taught other nations to follow by example. And why do they follow? In order to produce goods for our consumption, and build their economies on our model.
The blame is still right here. What happens when the southern nations catch up to us in energy & material consumption?
I've refused to buy any Sandman stuff that isn't written by Gaiman
There's one non-Gaiman Sandman book that I highly recommend: The Book of Dreams, an anthology of prose selected by Gaiman. My favorite story is The Birth Day by B.W. Clough, which was mailed to Neil unsolicited and convinced him to get the ball rolling. That "river of sheep" imagery just strikes me as such a wonderful starting point for human civilization, up there with the bone in 2001.
Of course, don't neglect all the great Gaiman non-Sandman books out there -- Neverwhere, Violent Cases, Miracleman, and...damn, forgot the name... that faerie thing illustrated by Charles Vess. I keep thinking "Startide Rising" but of course that's David Brin.
As a Marylander, I have several friends who work (or worked) for federal agency sub-contractors. Most of the random projects done by "the government" are doled out to Beltway Bandits (this is the actual term used) like them. At the usual cookouts they would often trade tales about classifying documents.
As far as my friends could tell, the most common reason their companies would make an official Secret is so that the low-ranking bureaucrats in charge of their funding would be unable to read exactly how little work had been accomplished. And obviously all this Classified work must be much more important than some public project that any commie or Iraqi could read about in the paper... In other words, 100% pure Dilberting.
I asked for a copy of the crime bill about to be voted on. Their reply? "We wish we had a copy too".
Cute, but I'm sure that bill was never classified, it just wasn't available to anyone outside "the Committee". That's all about stupid congressional politicking (is there any other kind?). More of an Open Source issue, really.
Yes, I realize the basis of this thread was humor, but it seems that many people consider "nanites" to be capable of magical atomic rearrangement to/from any configuration, with no energy cost at all. I'm afraid that just ain't so.
Burn it into its constituent atoms, of course.
Hmm...last time I checked, snot was a non-flammable substance. Even one molecule at a time, you could only get a physically sustainable reaction if the end products have a more stable energy state than the raw materials (or else you have to add a bunch of energy from outside).
Water (the main component of any bodily goo) is an extremely stable & low energy compound. There's just no way to transmute water into anything else without adding a whole lot of energy. Where will that energy come from? And where will it go after it's been wasted into heat?
I guess most computer science majors aren't required to take thermodynamics, otherwise you'd already remember There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
If (for example) the computing power required to render Mr. Ng's smoke rings is so immense that it bears mentioning, then the odds that Hiro can code up SnowSearch and graveyard daemons and an invisible avatar in an afternoon are awful damn slim
Umm... are you a programmer? There's a huge difference between code that's computationally intensive and code that's difficult to write. For example, standard Photoshop tools are actually pretty simple under the hood, only a handful of kb. But to actually perform a Gaussian or a Free Rotate on a large 300dpi image, now that takes serious CPU.
NS was correct in saying that realistic smoke graphics would require heavy computation. Yet the equations of nature that cause smoke to curl are really rather simple and elegant. Nature just happens to have insane amounts of parallel processing.
The value of recommendations
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Peruse the bookstore (virtual or real) and pick up something
If I were immortal, that would be a great idea. But with finite time & resources, I need some tools to narrow things down. The tool that you suggest (the bookstore) is much too broad, and is likely to thrust things at me like Harry Potter or Danielle Steel. Every bookstore has implicit biases -- shelf arrangement, employees, window dressing, etc.
Instead, I choose a more selective tool: recommendations from people whose worldview is similar to my own. From what I saw -- D Adams, D Hofstadter, K Vonnegut, etc, and some others I haven't read yet (aha!) -- this is a good choice for me.
Let's do an analogy: "Why do you pay attention to web sites chosen by Hemos & friends? Isn't that what your mind is for?"
Apologies to all the non-USA/.ers out there, this message ignores you.
While most people would almost never drive a couple of hours to buy out of state, it isn't that hard to click a link.
Don't forget the most common form of out-of-state sales -- mail order. I see no reason why internet sales should be handled any differently.
Of course, I'm not certain how mail order is handled now. What happens when the business is incorporated in one state, phone sales are in another, mailing address in a third, the shipping warehouse and the banking system are in states 4 and 5? When you throw a web server or two into the mix, it really doesn't change the situation all that much.
Many states depend on sales tax for funding, and mail order/web sales are growing every year. If it becomes necessary, I could accept a uniform tax on all out-of-state sales, with the proceeds divided up based on the purchaser locations. The main reason why out-of-state taxes aren't collected now is the bookkeeping hassles of tracking 50 different tax rates.
Think if it as the ultimate in racism. There is a very real possiblity of this happening
Puh-leeze. I guess I was lulled into a false sense of security here on/. Even people who would likely be comfortable with cranial cyberjack implants get all frightened by anything with the word "genetic". How disappointing.
So of course, the thread starts with the worst case scenario: "what if rich people engineered their kids to be 7 foot tall, buff, beautiful Aryan supermen who scorn and subjugate all lower forms of life..." Gee, is anyone going to say that's a good idea? Duh. The only response is "no, that's not how it will happen", which is sheer speculation. Just like the premise.
Now let's try some facts on for size. My wife is a medical doctor, and at dinner we trade tech talk -- computation for biomed. Here's a real-life scenario: "what if doctors engineered an embryo in utero to counteract the gene for Cystic Fibrosis, so that as the child grows older she isn't slowly suffocating to death on her own defective DNA..." So what do you think, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because thisproject isalready underway.
And there are quite a few other congenital diseases now being studied to varying degrees -- here's the American Society for Gene Therapy. Should we condemn children to CF, Muscular Dystrophy, Down's Syndrome, etc, just because you got scared by a mediocre movie?
Yes, there's the slippery slope problem. Things like nearsightedness, intelligence, or height are partly genetic. Don't forget the effects of nutrition, education, exercise, etc. But those genes are being studied too, and they will be found eventually. Do we draw a line on what should be treated/altered? If so, where? Who decides?
And how to enforce it? Once it becomes safe and effective (let's say 50 years from now), can you stop a billionaire from giving his children all the best genes? Can you even stop a middle class professional couple? Some people are already smuggling Pituitary Growth Hormone injections so their kids will be taller. The world you are afraid of is neither Brave nor New.
AOL is going to make OperaMail look like the bad guy in this, when it's their hole that let the whole thing happen.
What "hole" are you referring to? If you mean their target audience of inexperienced users, you're right. If you mean some particular flaw in AOL, I think not. Any ISP connection tool that saves your password to a file in a known location can be compromised. The user open an executable from a stranger, the trojan finds the file and emails it back, done.
Someone with way too much free time could send me an AppleScript that would find the FreePPP prefs file on my home computer, pass it to Eudora, and send it -- if I was dumb enough to open their attachment. The same would hold true for any known combination of an OS and an internet service with a saved password.
Even an encrypted password wouldn't help. Since all copies of AOL would use the same key, it would eventually be solved.
We use Outlook 97 here at work, and the default email "reader" was Word97
That is just so very stupid, I don't know where to start. Use the most virus-prone app on your entire computer as the primary email reader? Whoever made that decision (and any IT person who didn't object to it) should be flipping burgers.
This sort of tightly integrated package, the world definitely does not need. IMO, another data point in favor of breaking up M$.
p.s. Wired didn't mention it, but I presume the attached file was a Win/DOS executable, and couldn't affect other platforms. A good reason organizations should avoid domination by a single OS.
At the turn of the century, nearly everyone was either a farmer or a factory worker. This has changed, as machines have taken over those menial jobs and freed workers for more challenging tasks.
Challenging tasks like survival in a future that no longer needs menial labor, but doesn't provide universal college-level education, and whose economy depends on unemployment to prevent inflation... hmm, that doesn't sound like a good combo.
anyone with any ambition can acquire enough skills that [...] allows them to live comfortably.
You're forgetting that new tech jobs simply don't employ nearly as many people as old labor jobs. Microsoft might generate as much income as Carnegie Steel & Standard Oil, but it concentrates that money in a much smaller number of hands. When there's 10^10 people and only 10^9 jobs, what will the other 90% do?
My predictions for the next 50 years:
No AI, no nanites, no starships, no global e-government, no cold fusion.
Most of Africa, Asia & South America finally develop US-style economies. Consumption of Big Macs, HDTVs & SUVs reach 5 times the already-unsustainable level of the 1990s.
The UN writes a strongly worded condemnation of trash dumping in the oceans, but fails to pass any effective sanctions.
The last few miles of rain forest are preserved as touristy theme parks. Ebola virus and other tropical plagues are quietly defeated as their carrier species go extinct.
Between the completed genome and desktop supercomputing, genetic programming is attainable & expensive. Children of the rich become much taller & blonder.
Global warming is finally confirmed, as Florida and other low-lying areas go under water. Mass extinctions of plant & insect species occur as they are unable to adapt to the new climates in their native territories.
Then we start running out of petroleum and other raw materials. On the bright side, mass starvation and collapsed governments lead to a reduction of demand, and lower emission of pollutants.
I pass away during a winter vacation in the coastal city of Raleigh NC. My final words are "I told you so".
Gee, does that mean my wife's old Mac Plus (which only had a floppy drive until she added an external HD) never existed? ;-) Along with my collection of bootable Disk Tools floppies, ranging from System 7.1 to OS 8.5?
Any Mac prior to the iMac & blue G3 can boot from a floppy. Maybe they can too, I've never tried. Here's a link to a free OS 8.1 download. But any Mac that was built with an internal CD-ROM can boot from CD, and that's the preferred method for non-HD booting.
Of course, none of this changes the fact that floppies are 99% obsolete and not needed by large portions of the iMac target audience.
So, assuming they spent a billion dollars making this 1 chip, they're still getting a 1e144 times better buy on computing power than modern day computers. Excuse me while I cast "Disbelieve" on this article
Please down-moderate the Coward's message, it's flatly wrong. First, QC isn't done on a chip, it uses a super-cooled row of ions in a vacuum sealed chamber. To factor a number with X bits, you need X in the row. The computation is performed by superposition of 2^X simultaneous quantum states, in theory taking only microseconds. Here's a link.
Slashdot Mirror
Some spammers might use Hotmail as a drop box, but it's not a very good choice since it will get cancelled in a few days and lose most replies. These days most spams use dedicated spam-friendly domains (like conru.com) for their drop boxes, or don't give you a valid email address at all.
If you aren't your own mail admin, go tell your postmaster to use RBL. When it reaches sufficient density, other admins will work very hard to stay off that list, and spamming will get that much harder.
Aha. This is exactly why Hotmail using RBL is such a good thing. Your local sysadmins may not care much about email being unable to reach a few small domains. But what happens when your company can't contact thousands (or millions) of clients, because your sysadmin is allowing spam?
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and a mountain of refusals from Hotmail will be very squeaky. If another big name like Yahoo or Earthlink joins in, the squeak becomes a roar, and your bureacracy will move quickly indeed. Which is precisely how RBL is supposed to work.
Yes, Redmond is an evil monopoly out to destroy our freedoms. But even a broken clock is right once in a while. Hotmail using RBL is a GREAT thing that will benefit EVERYONE -- an awesome boost for an underused public service.
Hopefully the resulting buzz will be sufficiently positive that the other free email services (like my dear old Yahoo) will follow suit. I've been requesting it for years and Yahoo never replied.
Ah, to imagine the day when I never get another email from Andrew Conru or Sam Khuri...
The Windows version of DeCSS is available in lots of places (for example, DVDtidbits), and other platforms will doubtless follow shortly. It's far Far FAR too late for the cartel to shut down one or two web sites. They really shouldn't even try, it only makes them look stupid. Well, I suppose using the CSS encryption scheme demonstrates quite enough stupidity...
Huh? The DJIA is run by the editors of the Wall Street Journal. They're private citizens, business journalists to be precise. Insider information being passed between WSJ and a federal judge would be a securities violation of such insane levels, it staggers the imagination.
At this point, no one except Judge T Jackson and his clerks know the story. And it isn't even the complete story yet. This is just the declaration of facts -- whether MS broke any laws. The penalty phase comes later.
MS was added to the Dow because it's the highest valued stock in the US. That's reason enough. If the Dow disallowed every company that's being investigated or prosecuted, you wouldn't have much to choose from.
The Matrix should stay a one time deal. It was pretty, it was fun. The plot was sufficient to reach the end of the movie, and it didn't have TOO many holes (batteries? don't make me rant about biochemistry). But it was essentially just a light summer flick.
Where can you possibly go with Matrix II (Electric Boogaloo)? Taking us into Zion could only be a letdown compared to what the characters portrayed to us.
The character of Neo only worked because he was SUPPOSED to be wooden and clueless through the first half of the movie, then grim and scowling, and lastly the Messiah. I suppose you could make him start over, and totally void out the original climax. Can you say "Highlander II"? Yes, that's exactly what I forsee -- Keanu on Planet Zeist.
However... a PREQUEL might be interesting. The man/machine war, the programmer founding Zion. No Neo at all. But somehow I don't see that happening.
In fact, lots of people already have. For one easy example, the Macintosh "Date and Time" control panel has a 1920-2019 window. It's been that way since the original System in 1984 I'm pretty sure.
The really annoying thing about this is that a Y2K century window is a complete algorithm (which I would allow in software patents) rather than a raw concept (which is unfair crap). Instead, it's just a stupid Stupid STUPID case of the patent office not paying any attention to prior art.
Notice your use of the word "faster". What exactly does that mean? For a real world example, let's say you have a choice between an SR-71 (hypersonic spy plane), a 747 (jumbo jet), and the Exxon Valdez (supertanker) travelling from New York to London. Which vehicle would be "faster" to move:
Web surfing, file downloads, and online gaming all have different speed needs. Most people focus on bandwidth -- getting a 10Mb video in the least time, and who cares about a 2 second delay at the beginning. But for games, you want small blips of data sent without delay, every millisecond counts, and who cares if the overall data rate is lower.
Stuart Cheshire wrote an excellent lecture about this problem years ago. Click here .
A real shame it's taken so long for anyone in the modem business to pay attention. Also, it sounds like 3Com's solution is proprietary on both the user and server ends, meaning you can't just buy a new modem and run.
Well, there are two limiting factors here:
Umm...donors can make whatever demands they want. It's their money, and if the burden is too heavy then the recipient can turn it down. I presume it's basic contract law.
Here's an extreme example. Harvard (I think it's Harvard, I'd have to check with my wife) has at least one ancient endowment that is contingent upon the university maintaining a particular building -- they can't even remove a single brick!
Recently they wanted to put in a sky bridge to the building next door. The solution: The bridge is ramped up to go through a large window, with stairs to come back down.
Untrue. I guarantee that within 5 to 10 billion years, the world's human population will be very small indeed. The only question is whether we die out, move away, or stop being human... ;p
In other words, all the exact same crap that America & Europe used to do (often still do), then taught other nations to follow by example. And why do they follow? In order to produce goods for our consumption, and build their economies on our model.
The blame is still right here. What happens when the southern nations catch up to us in energy & material consumption?
There's one non-Gaiman Sandman book that I highly recommend: The Book of Dreams, an anthology of prose selected by Gaiman. My favorite story is The Birth Day by B.W. Clough, which was mailed to Neil unsolicited and convinced him to get the ball rolling. That "river of sheep" imagery just strikes me as such a wonderful starting point for human civilization, up there with the bone in 2001.
Of course, don't neglect all the great Gaiman non-Sandman books out there -- Neverwhere, Violent Cases, Miracleman, and ...damn, forgot the name... that faerie thing illustrated by Charles Vess. I keep thinking "Startide Rising" but of course that's David Brin.
As a Marylander, I have several friends who work (or worked) for federal agency sub-contractors. Most of the random projects done by "the government" are doled out to Beltway Bandits (this is the actual term used) like them. At the usual cookouts they would often trade tales about classifying documents.
As far as my friends could tell, the most common reason their companies would make an official Secret is so that the low-ranking bureaucrats in charge of their funding would be unable to read exactly how little work had been accomplished. And obviously all this Classified work must be much more important than some public project that any commie or Iraqi could read about in the paper... In other words, 100% pure Dilberting.
I asked for a copy of the crime bill about to be voted on. Their reply? "We wish we had a copy too".Cute, but I'm sure that bill was never classified, it just wasn't available to anyone outside "the Committee". That's all about stupid congressional politicking (is there any other kind?). More of an Open Source issue, really.
Yes, I realize the basis of this thread was humor, but it seems that many people consider "nanites" to be capable of magical atomic rearrangement to/from any configuration, with no energy cost at all. I'm afraid that just ain't so.
Burn it into its constituent atoms, of course.Hmm...last time I checked, snot was a non-flammable substance. Even one molecule at a time, you could only get a physically sustainable reaction if the end products have a more stable energy state than the raw materials (or else you have to add a bunch of energy from outside).
Water (the main component of any bodily goo) is an extremely stable & low energy compound. There's just no way to transmute water into anything else without adding a whole lot of energy. Where will that energy come from? And where will it go after it's been wasted into heat?
I guess most computer science majors aren't required to take thermodynamics, otherwise you'd already remember There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Umm... are you a programmer? There's a huge difference between code that's computationally intensive and code that's difficult to write. For example, standard Photoshop tools are actually pretty simple under the hood, only a handful of kb. But to actually perform a Gaussian or a Free Rotate on a large 300dpi image, now that takes serious CPU.
NS was correct in saying that realistic smoke graphics would require heavy computation. Yet the equations of nature that cause smoke to curl are really rather simple and elegant. Nature just happens to have insane amounts of parallel processing.
If I were immortal, that would be a great idea. But with finite time & resources, I need some tools to narrow things down. The tool that you suggest (the bookstore) is much too broad, and is likely to thrust things at me like Harry Potter or Danielle Steel. Every bookstore has implicit biases -- shelf arrangement, employees, window dressing, etc.
Instead, I choose a more selective tool: recommendations from people whose worldview is similar to my own. From what I saw -- D Adams, D Hofstadter, K Vonnegut, etc, and some others I haven't read yet (aha!) -- this is a good choice for me.
Let's do an analogy: "Why do you pay attention to web sites chosen by Hemos & friends? Isn't that what your mind is for?"
Apologies to all the non-USA /.ers out there, this message ignores you.
While most people would almost never drive a couple of hours to buy out of state, it isn't that hard to click a link.Don't forget the most common form of out-of-state sales -- mail order. I see no reason why internet sales should be handled any differently.
Of course, I'm not certain how mail order is handled now. What happens when the business is incorporated in one state, phone sales are in another, mailing address in a third, the shipping warehouse and the banking system are in states 4 and 5? When you throw a web server or two into the mix, it really doesn't change the situation all that much.
Many states depend on sales tax for funding, and mail order/web sales are growing every year. If it becomes necessary, I could accept a uniform tax on all out-of-state sales, with the proceeds divided up based on the purchaser locations. The main reason why out-of-state taxes aren't collected now is the bookkeeping hassles of tracking 50 different tax rates.
Puh-leeze. I guess I was lulled into a false sense of security here on /. Even people who would likely be comfortable with cranial cyberjack implants get all frightened by anything with the word "genetic". How disappointing.
So of course, the thread starts with the worst case scenario: "what if rich people engineered their kids to be 7 foot tall, buff, beautiful Aryan supermen who scorn and subjugate all lower forms of life..." Gee, is anyone going to say that's a good idea? Duh. The only response is "no, that's not how it will happen", which is sheer speculation. Just like the premise.
Now let's try some facts on for size. My wife is a medical doctor, and at dinner we trade tech talk -- computation for biomed. Here's a real-life scenario: "what if doctors engineered an embryo in utero to counteract the gene for Cystic Fibrosis, so that as the child grows older she isn't slowly suffocating to death on her own defective DNA..." So what do you think, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because this project is already underway.
And there are quite a few other congenital diseases now being studied to varying degrees -- here's the American Society for Gene Therapy. Should we condemn children to CF, Muscular Dystrophy, Down's Syndrome, etc, just because you got scared by a mediocre movie?
Yes, there's the slippery slope problem. Things like nearsightedness, intelligence, or height are partly genetic. Don't forget the effects of nutrition, education, exercise, etc. But those genes are being studied too, and they will be found eventually. Do we draw a line on what should be treated/altered? If so, where? Who decides?
And how to enforce it? Once it becomes safe and effective (let's say 50 years from now), can you stop a billionaire from giving his children all the best genes? Can you even stop a middle class professional couple? Some people are already smuggling Pituitary Growth Hormone injections so their kids will be taller. The world you are afraid of is neither Brave nor New.
What "hole" are you referring to? If you mean their target audience of inexperienced users, you're right. If you mean some particular flaw in AOL, I think not. Any ISP connection tool that saves your password to a file in a known location can be compromised. The user open an executable from a stranger, the trojan finds the file and emails it back, done.
Someone with way too much free time could send me an AppleScript that would find the FreePPP prefs file on my home computer, pass it to Eudora, and send it -- if I was dumb enough to open their attachment. The same would hold true for any known combination of an OS and an internet service with a saved password.
Even an encrypted password wouldn't help. Since all copies of AOL would use the same key, it would eventually be solved.
That is just so very stupid, I don't know where to start. Use the most virus-prone app on your entire computer as the primary email reader? Whoever made that decision (and any IT person who didn't object to it) should be flipping burgers.
This sort of tightly integrated package, the world definitely does not need. IMO, another data point in favor of breaking up M$.
p.s. Wired didn't mention it, but I presume the attached file was a Win/DOS executable, and couldn't affect other platforms. A good reason organizations should avoid domination by a single OS.
Challenging tasks like survival in a future that no longer needs menial labor, but doesn't provide universal college-level education, and whose economy depends on unemployment to prevent inflation... hmm, that doesn't sound like a good combo.
anyone with any ambition can acquire enough skills that [...] allows them to live comfortably.You're forgetting that new tech jobs simply don't employ nearly as many people as old labor jobs. Microsoft might generate as much income as Carnegie Steel & Standard Oil, but it concentrates that money in a much smaller number of hands. When there's 10^10 people and only 10^9 jobs, what will the other 90% do?
My predictions for the next 50 years:
Gee, does that mean my wife's old Mac Plus (which only had a floppy drive until she added an external HD) never existed? ;-) Along with my collection of bootable Disk Tools floppies, ranging from System 7.1 to OS 8.5?
Any Mac prior to the iMac & blue G3 can boot from a floppy. Maybe they can too, I've never tried. Here's a link to a free OS 8.1 download. But any Mac that was built with an internal CD-ROM can boot from CD, and that's the preferred method for non-HD booting.
Of course, none of this changes the fact that floppies are 99% obsolete and not needed by large portions of the iMac target audience.
Been there, done that. Try the Newton (and its smaller, cheaper, better-marketed cousin the Palm), among others.
Please down-moderate the Coward's message, it's flatly wrong. First, QC isn't done on a chip, it uses a super-cooled row of ions in a vacuum sealed chamber. To factor a number with X bits, you need X in the row. The computation is performed by superposition of 2^X simultaneous quantum states, in theory taking only microseconds. Here's a link.