I noticed the clothing issue. One of the bullet-time effects was when they were running down a corridor (IIRC) and I was like, "Wow, bullets speeding down a hallway? Great use of effects money there."
I think the first one was good because it starts out with a very narrow focus: the individual. The second movie makes Neo no longer the savior, but just one of a multitude of voices. I am curious if this trend can continue with the next movie.
It's the gnostic appreciation of life and the senses. I found it moving, sensual and erotic. Notice that the machines were willing to even make bombs that are machines. And, when Neo finally finds the machine he has to talk to, everything is just about aborations in the system. It cannot make the jump to the idea that perhaps there is something beyond logic and fact, an appreciation for life is one of t(R7
I just wanted to weigh in on this movie on a few points that I have seen brough up elsewhere. First, the hype over the CG is not as good as they said, in some places. I heard that I was not going to be able to notice any CG, and in many places I'm not sure how they could have done it without it and it looked great. However, in several places they still just do not have the resolution nor physics quite down right. I think the bullet-time was used in a few places that just did not need it. Overall, I was still very impressed with the imagery. Second, overt plot was good and if you think that there isn't going to be a plot twist (just like _The_Matrix_), you'll be suprised. Amusingly enough, while it is a cliff hanger movie, it didn't end where I expected to end. I honestly thought that it would have probably be better to end the movie a little earlier. Frankly though, it cries out to be completed, just like the Lord of the Rings movies. Finally, I feel sorry for a lot of people who thought it was dry. If one has a background in some theology and philosophy, all of the character cry out certain positions: faith, naturalism, determinism, free-will, gnosticism, body/mind problem, etc. I was very, very impressed with the depth of the references in the movie. Unfortunately, I think that is going to be missed on the vast majority of the movie watchers.
My two cents,
Guy didn't do his math..
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
If he had done his math, he would have found that the most balenced form for change is base e, but of course you would need to round it up to 3. With one of every base three coinage, you could always make change for any transaction.
Illston asked Zacharia to explain the conundrum of locking up copyrighted works behind encryption and then making the breaking of that encryption illegal, even after the copyrights on those works expire. The judge wondered if it would effectively extend copyrights to keep such works out of the public domain.
Zacharia said it would not, because the copyright had expired.
"But it's encrypted. If it doesn't stop being encrypted, it's still encrypted," Illston said, adding that such protected works still couldn't be legally copied.
I had never thought of this before. Think about it: If any work now has solely been release to the public in an encrypted form, then if anyone has copied/clipped/fair-use used the item, then the corporation can always go after the individual; therefore, copyright is completely irrelavent since encryption is enforced forever. Maybe I'm the only one who just caught this, but it seems no one has explicitly stated it this way.
I own this book and it's great! While some of the arguments are contrived, it does bring to light many usability issues that appologetics so easily support. Name any other operating system that you can create a file ("-s") that can destroy your operating system? Linux, the kernal, is an amazing beast. The shells and "tools" are amazingly beastly.
I had made a comment that the issue isn't that Fox couldn't/wasn't doing well with Firefly, it was that Fox new that reality T.V. had more bang for the buck. Since it appears that Fox tried to tell Joss what do to and he wouldn't, they were more than prepared to tank the show in favor of all this rubbish that has been coming down the pike. Producing a DVD for an "unviable" series I think proves that Fox knew full well the series had and has a following.
I'd mod you up, if I could. That is the first thing I noticed, as well. They're preventing spam by providing it? Business logic is always interesting..
the hen house. Hense, the hens aren't too interested in sqwuaking or all of a sudden the next CD of their "isn't selling so well, so we'll pay you $40,000 this year and you'll owe us your next 5 releases.."
I always find it interesting that Microsoft gets to announce and shake up the world with "a new feature" that they caused and of which at least one other major OS had long since solved. Versioning the library API? "Who would've thunk it?!?"
In other news, Microsoft invents a journaling file system to prevent data loss.. oh, wait..
4,294,967,296 bytes in 4 gigs divided by 2,592,000 seconds in a month is 1,657 bytes per second or 13,256 bits per second.
If you actually use a 56k around the clock, you get three TIMES more bandwidth than 4GB/mon at high speed. They are getting HORNED, dudes, if they are paying anything more than a third LESS than 56k speeds.
This system has worked well. Since it went into effect about two years ago, all the telemarketing calls have stopped save for one long distance company. On the second time they called me, I politely reminded them that what they were doing was illegal in Missouri and if they called again I would hand them over to the Missouri A.G. No more calls since. I'm a happy camper.
I don't understand why you think certifications are necessary since they cannot work. By definition, trusting a third part to not spam you is the problem. The issue can only work if the *user* supplies a ticket that says people who have this ticket may email me. The only solution resides in that the *receiever* must be able to revoke abuse. I couldn't careless whether a domain was trusted or not, I simply need a way to know that *I* originally authorized receipt mail and can track that it has now been abused. Who did the abusing is irrelevant. Where the mail came from is irrelevant. All of that can be spoofed, forged, etc, except my ECN. Follow this?
My arguement is this and I hope you might see value in passing it along or perhaps getting me in contact with someone receptive: Spam is mathmatically impossible to prevent perfectly with email in its present incarnation. It is a negative model, meaning that all email is assumed acceptable and unwanted email is targeted for deletion. This was the basis for Godel's theorem. Until email is flipped on its head to be a positive system (all email is undersirable until proven that wanted), spam will find ways around filters, lawyers and laws. I don't deny that the those three will stop some spam, but in my opinion its like taking baking soda to a three-alarm fire--yes, it will start putting out the fire, but the fire will always spread to new places before you can put the whole fire out.
The point of the ECN is to prevent the need for a unique domains for everyone. The protocal resides within the email system, not the domainname. Secondly, 99% of the people who I email personally I have meet personally or talked over the phone or in some mannor exchanged information. That exchange is a basic aspect of personal communications. Acceptable spam hinges on the that *I* initiated the contact, therefore I am in the position to "open the whole" for spam to filter in. In responce to your arguement that there needs to be criminal penalties, there already are. The cannot work because all you have to do is be offshore and you're not bound by the laws. The only reason why we don't have this problem with telemarketing is that it costs the spammer a lot of money for international calls. Otherwise, we would have that problem too. That's where bouncing mail becomes important. A large part of the financial insentive is trading "good" email lists. That trading will halt if the fear is if I trade my list and someone pisses off all my customers, then I don't have a good list anymore.
I am writing this document with the hopes of proving the viability of a design. Slashdot is a wonderful community to see if something can fly. I also recognize that a successful solution cannot come from a single vender and the more people that see this and implement it the better the possibility of it becoming reality.
As a lead software designer, I am paid to analyze problems in my company and to provide solutions. I attempt to understand relationships, contemplate the results of our actions and generalize our behavior. My personal problem for a while now is that I am sick and tired of spam. It is bad enough that my public email address has been eaten alive by porn ads and pyramid schemes, but even my work address is starting to slowly accumulate items. Getting un-work-related email is bad enough, but I just love getting emails for teen women who willing perform degrading acts with various barnyard animals in my inbox at work. Now of course, I know it is obvious that many companies are untrustworthy. Any free service is just begging to place you on an email list. However, many claim that they will keep you strictly in confidence, or at least allude to that effect. They take advantage of the fact that once you get on a lot of email-lists it becomes impossible to figure out who gave out your email address. An astute friend of mine made an observation about job-seeking sites. Shortly after an email address was in the site, spam started to trickle and then poor in. It is obvious that once your email address goes to just one unscrupulous company, the game is over and you are now in the war for ferreting out anything useful in your in-box. My friend had then made a brilliant suggestion, "Why not create an email account just for the job-seeking site and see what shows up in the box?" I was going to do it to see just how private my email address really was and then it got me thinking. As an analyst, I have learned that the most difficult thing to differentiate sometimes is what is a problem and what is a symptom. In order to start a fire, you have to have three things: oxygen, fuel and heat. If you prevent just of those things from working, then the fire goes out. All too often people attempt to put fires out by dousing the flames. A firefighter knows instead that the goal is to use water to cool the fuel down so that the fire goes out on its own. At one point I came to my first realization, "Spam is not a problem, it is a symptom." The simple truth is that it is very cost effective to spam. Even if you are running some questionable diet pill, if you can email one-tenth of the populous of the U.S. then you can get thirty-five million hits. If only one in a hundred thousand buys the product, then you have 350 people buy the product. Since the cost of the Internet is shared amongst all of its inhabitants and most places just eat the cost of having the Internet available to their location with an always-on connection (email, web-browsing, etc.), the cost of spam is next to nothing in comparison to more traditional mailed advertising. The question then becomes, "how does one make the act of spam no longer cost effective?" It would no longer be cost effective if the vast major of the email sent was rejected automatically because it was unwanted. Therefore, the problem with spam really is, "How do I determine if the email that I am receiving is wanted or not?" If I can make it so that the mail server automatically rejects unwanted mail, then it no longer becomes cost effective to spam.
A lot of effort has been placed into attempting to write software that determines if something is spam. The bulk mail folder in many systems attempts to prevent these types of emails from taking up your work time. However, it is actually the human component that decides if something is actually wanted or not. As we can easily see, any automated system can only be an approximation of your requirements because it can never know your needs perfectly. We will always, after the fact, have to add to the rules some new source to omit some new type of unwanted mail. This is known as a negative system. The system assumes everything is ok and one must provide a rule to prevent (a negative act) an undesired behavior. This means identifying spam perfectly will always be a mathematically impossible endeavor. This lead to my second realization, "The problem can not lie in identifying spam, but must lie in identifying the offenders." It is interesting to note that we have already solved this problem with practically every service that is out there--authentication. In order to know if you want to let someone into your FTP server, we authenticate. In we want to know if you want to let someone into your private web server, we authenticate. If want to let someone retrieve their email, we authenticate. But, to send email to someone, we don't require authentication. I propose a simple concept to authenticate email-- a really, really big, unique number to which I propose calling an email certificate number (ECN). In order to not have your email rejected by the server, your ECN must be on the acceptance list of the email server. The scenario would play out like this: I go to site XYZ.com and in order to let me download their free software they want me to give them my email address. They have on their site a button that requests authorization from me to send email to me. The web click automatically pops up a dialog that states that I am giving them my email address and my browser is assigning them a unique ECN. Perhaps it automatically fills out a description for the ECN stating that this ECN is for XYZ.com. After clicking "OK," the web site has my information. Unbeknownest to me, but beknownest to their fine print, is that they are going to trade my email address with "select partners." Translation--the entire friggin' Internet. Spam begins to file on in to my inbox. This time, however, I can do something about it. Each email has my ECN number that is unique to this group of people. This allows me various choices. First, maybe all the mail is useful to me and I can just accept it. Second, I like getting mail from XYZ.com. After all, I choose to sign up to their email and wanted the newsletters. It would be an easy to create an email rule to reject all email from that ECN except for mail from XYZ.com. Finally, I could feel that they have abused my email address and therefore I do not wish to deal with them anymore. Therein, I revoke the ECN entirely and my email address is now useless to them. In short, if a company gave out their email addresses and those affiliates pissed off the customer base with sexual aid products, then it would no longer be cost effective to mass mail. The incentive would be come to treasure good email addresses and to not abuse them.
This of course also allows you to control your personal email. For personal email, you have to take a slightly different approach. You have to preauthorize the email server for the address. As an example, I run into an old friend and we decide that we are going to keep in touch. We exchange email addresses. When I go home, I authorize an ECN to the address. When the first email from the friend comes in, my server automatically responds with an email establishing the ECN. When I email him the first time, I get the same treatment. If whatever reason I wish to break contact, I can just revoke the ECN and that email address can no longer send to me.
The real trick to this system, assuming someone doesn't come up with a serious hole to this design, is usability. A fair percentage of systems will have to implement and require this behavior in order to drive the entire market to behaving this way. It would also have to be very user friendly by being very transparent to end-users so it is simple to implement and control. I think this is one place where the Open Source community could really shine. This would be a real innovation and I figure if people started on it now, enough systems could push the rest of the world to adopt it if they want to continue to be able to send email. I'd say it could probably be in force in two years, which would a wonderful amount of time to see the end of spam.
Here's an idea: I've got to wonder if anything that Disney/RIAA has used something that if applied to their own greed would place them in violation. In other words, before fourty years ago the right was twenty years (or whatever it was). Find someone's work that fell into the public domain and should have "fallen back" if they had the same rules that the companies today have granted themselves. After all, it's only fair that they deserve the same benefit and attempt to sue the hell out of companies for "legalized theft." I know it's a long shot, but it would be great to see Disney's greed bite back.
The Gnostic "Heresy" was termed that way simply because they were the loser in the theological debate. At the time shortly after J.C.'s death, attempts to understand the events and their relevance to humanity cause many different groups to share common views. Mary Magdalene either wrote the Gospel of Mary was said to have been hers. Her interpretation of what Jesus said and wanted was quite different than accepted orthodoxy today. At any rate, the whole demiurge thing came in for all sides through Platonic thought. It was posed that there was "The One," the perfect representation of perfection. From The One, the farther one got from The One, the more imperfect that idea or thing was. A demiurge was a movement of "One-ness" from The One up and down this metaphysical world. Plato suggested that perhaps the panoply of gods where each aspects of a single god of which man was only destined to know only each aspects because as a man you are too small to even understand the whole. It was suggested, thinking of an elephant in a room without light. You might say the elephant felt like a tail, while another said it felt like a big wall, while another might say it felt like a truck of a tree. Each are true, but none are the whole story. Plato's idea was common thought for many, especially in Alexandria, Egypt. So, people attempted to adapt it. One of the early issues with Christianity was the problem that God at first seems like a god of nothing be good but then turns into a scolding god whom introduces pain/death/evil into the world through wrath. Gnostic's took the view that perhaps there is the The One and different demiurges came forth as what we perceived as God at the time. The first Logos (Demiurge) came and created this wonderful world. Being nearly perfect, she had little interest ruling man. From her came a more fallen Logos that refused to accept that there was any greater power in the world and ignored his "mother." This god was vengeful and wanted to prove his power and worth. Those that disagreed formed many arguments against it (the classic is that Christianity must be purely monotheistic in representation) and those arguments were used by the groups that eventually would become call the Orthodoxy. It's important to remember that the Orthodoxy is nothing more than the group of people who are generally accepted as having won the theological arguments. Gnostism was, in fact, the dominant form of Christianity by the 300's and in my humble opinion the group that became Orthodoxy later rewrote and destroyed history, books, and people since they were so furious about winning. An integral aspect of Gnostic idea was that Jesus wasn't here to teach literal meaning, hence the self-enlighten aspect. Jesus was cryptic on purpose to people he knew who weren't ready to be mature about religious ideas. They should have to fathom and work on the ideas themselves until they reached enlightenment. A noted point was that Jesus never created (what we today would call a church) and in fact in Gnostic texts was quoted as saying organized attending places weren't needed. This didn't sit well with those who wanted to make a power structure (Why? That's a whole another story.) behind the religion. Gnostism was an interesting period of time and it is said so much of it was destroyed. If anyone is interested on more of this, check out "The Gnostic Gospels" and the "Nag Hammadi Library."
Because this ain't "it," from what I've heard. Seems Steve Jobs (if I remember correctly) was asked if that was what was demostrated to him and he said no. The rumor was that he made a version of Ginger that used maglev for support, instead of wheels, that was stabilized by the gyro system he developed. To make sense of it, I figure the statement would be that they would need to lay down metal for the scooter off of which to repulse.
I never thought I would see in my own lifetime a copyright expire. Honestly, this is an interesting feeling that I can legally use some music of my culture I grew up with without being charged with a crime to do so? Except, this probably doesn't help me much since I live in America, eh? *sigh*
Your math on that isn't quite right. There is going to be a certain amount of error on the serial line. If it can be shown that the error rate is say an average of a 1-bit error for every 100 packets (which would seem to be a pretty high packet failure rate to me) then all of those would be caught. If the average of the 2-bit error rate is 1 per 2000 packets, it would mean there is an even higher amount of average packets that would be before multi-bit packet errors would make it through. Therefore it would about 50,000 times the number of average packets per multi-bit errors before you would likely see an erroneous packet make its way across. A little math on my part shows that they are using a feable 16-bit CRC (1 in 65,535 or 99.998%). I'm not too impressed with that, either. I hope their multi-bit error rate is excedingly low, too.
Problem with twinks is that they are willing to pay money for someone else's account who has spent the time get the 1337 character. Mature accounts go for big bucks.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed the clothing issue. One of the bullet-time effects was when they were running down a corridor (IIRC) and I was like, "Wow, bullets speeding down a hallway? Great use of effects money there."
I think the first one was good because it starts out with a very narrow focus: the individual. The second movie makes Neo no longer the savior, but just one of a multitude of voices. I am curious if this trend can continue with the next movie.
WARNING: Plot Spoiler
WARNING: Plot Spoiler
WARNING: Plot Spoiler
It's the gnostic appreciation of life and the senses. I found it moving, sensual and erotic. Notice that the machines were willing to even make bombs that are machines. And, when Neo finally finds the machine he has to talk to, everything is just about aborations in the system. It cannot make the jump to the idea that perhaps there is something beyond logic and fact, an appreciation for life is one of t(R7
My two cents,
If he had done his math, he would have found that the most balenced form for change is base e, but of course you would need to round it up to 3. With one of every base three coinage, you could always make change for any transaction.
Illston asked Zacharia to explain the conundrum of locking up copyrighted works behind encryption and then making the breaking of that encryption illegal, even after the copyrights on those works expire. The judge wondered if it would effectively extend copyrights to keep such works out of the public domain. Zacharia said it would not, because the copyright had expired. "But it's encrypted. If it doesn't stop being encrypted, it's still encrypted," Illston said, adding that such protected works still couldn't be legally copied.
I had never thought of this before. Think about it: If any work now has solely been release to the public in an encrypted form, then if anyone has copied/clipped/fair-use used the item, then the corporation can always go after the individual; therefore, copyright is completely irrelavent since encryption is enforced forever. Maybe I'm the only one who just caught this, but it seems no one has explicitly stated it this way.
I own this book and it's great! While some of the arguments are contrived, it does bring to light many usability issues that appologetics so easily support. Name any other operating system that you can create a file ("-s") that can destroy your operating system? Linux, the kernal, is an amazing beast. The shells and "tools" are amazingly beastly.
I had made a comment that the issue isn't that Fox couldn't/wasn't doing well with Firefly, it was that Fox new that reality T.V. had more bang for the buck. Since it appears that Fox tried to tell Joss what do to and he wouldn't, they were more than prepared to tank the show in favor of all this rubbish that has been coming down the pike. Producing a DVD for an "unviable" series I think proves that Fox knew full well the series had and has a following.
I'd mod you up, if I could. That is the first thing I noticed, as well. They're preventing spam by providing it? Business logic is always interesting..
the hen house. Hense, the hens aren't too interested in sqwuaking or all of a sudden the next CD of their "isn't selling so well, so we'll pay you $40,000 this year and you'll owe us your next 5 releases.."
I always find it interesting that Microsoft gets to announce and shake up the world with "a new feature" that they caused and of which at least one other major OS had long since solved. Versioning the library API? "Who would've thunk it?!?"
In other news, Microsoft invents a journaling file system to prevent data loss.. oh, wait..
4,294,967,296 bytes in 4 gigs divided by 2,592,000 seconds in a month is 1,657 bytes per second or 13,256 bits per second.
If you actually use a 56k around the clock, you get three TIMES more bandwidth than 4GB/mon at high speed. They are getting HORNED, dudes, if they are paying anything more than a third LESS than 56k speeds.
I'm curious to how many BTUs that thing is rated for..
This system has worked well. Since it went into effect about two years ago, all the telemarketing calls have stopped save for one long distance company. On the second time they called me, I politely reminded them that what they were doing was illegal in Missouri and if they called again I would hand them over to the Missouri A.G. No more calls since. I'm a happy camper.
I don't understand why you think certifications are necessary since they cannot work. By definition, trusting a third part to not spam you is the problem. The issue can only work if the *user* supplies a ticket that says people who have this ticket may email me. The only solution resides in that the *receiever* must be able to revoke abuse. I couldn't careless whether a domain was trusted or not, I simply need a way to know that *I* originally authorized receipt mail and can track that it has now been abused. Who did the abusing is irrelevant. Where the mail came from is irrelevant. All of that can be spoofed, forged, etc, except my ECN. Follow this?
I wish I could have been there.
My arguement is this and I hope you might see value in passing it along or perhaps getting me in contact with someone receptive: Spam is mathmatically impossible to prevent perfectly with email in its present incarnation. It is a negative model, meaning that all email is assumed acceptable and unwanted email is targeted for deletion. This was the basis for Godel's theorem. Until email is flipped on its head to be a positive system (all email is undersirable until proven that wanted), spam will find ways around filters, lawyers and laws. I don't deny that the those three will stop some spam, but in my opinion its like taking baking soda to a three-alarm fire--yes, it will start putting out the fire, but the fire will always spread to new places before you can put the whole fire out.
Sincerely,
The point of the ECN is to prevent the need for a unique domains for everyone. The protocal resides within the email system, not the domainname. Secondly, 99% of the people who I email personally I have meet personally or talked over the phone or in some mannor exchanged information. That exchange is a basic aspect of personal communications. Acceptable spam hinges on the that *I* initiated the contact, therefore I am in the position to "open the whole" for spam to filter in. In responce to your arguement that there needs to be criminal penalties, there already are. The cannot work because all you have to do is be offshore and you're not bound by the laws. The only reason why we don't have this problem with telemarketing is that it costs the spammer a lot of money for international calls. Otherwise, we would have that problem too. That's where bouncing mail becomes important. A large part of the financial insentive is trading "good" email lists. That trading will halt if the fear is if I trade my list and someone pisses off all my customers, then I don't have a good list anymore.
I am writing this document with the hopes of proving the viability of a design. Slashdot is a wonderful community to see if something can fly. I also recognize that a successful solution cannot come from a single vender and the more people that see this and implement it the better the possibility of it becoming reality.
As a lead software designer, I am paid to analyze problems in my company and to provide solutions. I attempt to understand relationships, contemplate the results of our actions and generalize our behavior. My personal problem for a while now is that I am sick and tired of spam. It is bad enough that my public email address has been eaten alive by porn ads and pyramid schemes, but even my work address is starting to slowly accumulate items. Getting un-work-related email is bad enough, but I just love getting emails for teen women who willing perform degrading acts with various barnyard animals in my inbox at work. Now of course, I know it is obvious that many companies are untrustworthy. Any free service is just begging to place you on an email list. However, many claim that they will keep you strictly in confidence, or at least allude to that effect. They take advantage of the fact that once you get on a lot of email-lists it becomes impossible to figure out who gave out your email address. An astute friend of mine made an observation about job-seeking sites. Shortly after an email address was in the site, spam started to trickle and then poor in. It is obvious that once your email address goes to just one unscrupulous company, the game is over and you are now in the war for ferreting out anything useful in your in-box. My friend had then made a brilliant suggestion, "Why not create an email account just for the job-seeking site and see what shows up in the box?" I was going to do it to see just how private my email address really was and then it got me thinking.
As an analyst, I have learned that the most difficult thing to differentiate sometimes is what is a problem and what is a symptom. In order to start a fire, you have to have three things: oxygen, fuel and heat. If you prevent just of those things from working, then the fire goes out. All too often people attempt to put fires out by dousing the flames. A firefighter knows instead that the goal is to use water to cool the fuel down so that the fire goes out on its own. At one point I came to my first realization, "Spam is not a problem, it is a symptom." The simple truth is that it is very cost effective to spam. Even if you are running some questionable diet pill, if you can email one-tenth of the populous of the U.S. then you can get thirty-five million hits. If only one in a hundred thousand buys the product, then you have 350 people buy the product. Since the cost of the Internet is shared amongst all of its inhabitants and most places just eat the cost of having the Internet available to their location with an always-on connection (email, web-browsing, etc.), the cost of spam is next to nothing in comparison to more traditional mailed advertising. The question then becomes, "how does one make the act of spam no longer cost effective?" It would no longer be cost effective if the vast major of the email sent was rejected automatically because it was unwanted. Therefore, the problem with spam really is, "How do I determine if the email that I am receiving is wanted or not?" If I can make it so that the mail server automatically rejects unwanted mail, then it no longer becomes cost effective to spam.
A lot of effort has been placed into attempting to write software that determines if something is spam. The bulk mail folder in many systems attempts to prevent these types of emails from taking up your work time. However, it is actually the human component that decides if something is actually wanted or not. As we can easily see, any automated system can only be an approximation of your requirements because it can never know your needs perfectly. We will always, after the fact, have to add to the rules some new source to omit some new type of unwanted mail. This is known as a negative system. The system assumes everything is ok and one must provide a rule to prevent (a negative act) an undesired behavior. This means identifying spam perfectly will always be a mathematically impossible endeavor. This lead to my second realization, "The problem can not lie in identifying spam, but must lie in identifying the offenders."
It is interesting to note that we have already solved this problem with practically every service that is out there--authentication. In order to know if you want to let someone into your FTP server, we authenticate. In we want to know if you want to let someone into your private web server, we authenticate. If want to let someone retrieve their email, we authenticate. But, to send email to someone, we don't require authentication. I propose a simple concept to authenticate email-- a really, really big, unique number to which I propose calling an email certificate number (ECN). In order to not have your email rejected by the server, your ECN must be on the acceptance list of the email server. The scenario would play out like this:
I go to site XYZ.com and in order to let me download their free software they want me to give them my email address. They have on their site a button that requests authorization from me to send email to me. The web click automatically pops up a dialog that states that I am giving them my email address and my browser is assigning them a unique ECN. Perhaps it automatically fills out a description for the ECN stating that this ECN is for XYZ.com. After clicking "OK," the web site has my information. Unbeknownest to me, but beknownest to their fine print, is that they are going to trade my email address with "select partners." Translation--the entire friggin' Internet. Spam begins to file on in to my inbox. This time, however, I can do something about it. Each email has my ECN number that is unique to this group of people. This allows me various choices. First, maybe all the mail is useful to me and I can just accept it. Second, I like getting mail from XYZ.com. After all, I choose to sign up to their email and wanted the newsletters. It would be an easy to create an email rule to reject all email from that ECN except for mail from XYZ.com. Finally, I could feel that they have abused my email address and therefore I do not wish to deal with them anymore. Therein, I revoke the ECN entirely and my email address is now useless to them. In short, if a company gave out their email addresses and those affiliates pissed off the customer base with sexual aid products, then it would no longer be cost effective to mass mail. The incentive would be come to treasure good email addresses and to not abuse them.
This of course also allows you to control your personal email. For personal email, you have to take a slightly different approach. You have to preauthorize the email server for the address. As an example, I run into an old friend and we decide that we are going to keep in touch. We exchange email addresses. When I go home, I authorize an ECN to the address. When the first email from the friend comes in, my server automatically responds with an email establishing the ECN. When I email him the first time, I get the same treatment. If whatever reason I wish to break contact, I can just revoke the ECN and that email address can no longer send to me.
The real trick to this system, assuming someone doesn't come up with a serious hole to this design, is usability. A fair percentage of systems will have to implement and require this behavior in order to drive the entire market to behaving this way. It would also have to be very user friendly by being very transparent to end-users so it is simple to implement and control. I think this is one place where the Open Source community could really shine. This would be a real innovation and I figure if people started on it now, enough systems could push the rest of the world to adopt it if they want to continue to be able to send email. I'd say it could probably be in force in two years, which would a wonderful amount of time to see the end of spam.
Here's an idea: I've got to wonder if anything that Disney/RIAA has used something that if applied to their own greed would place them in violation. In other words, before fourty years ago the right was twenty years (or whatever it was). Find someone's work that fell into the public domain and should have "fallen back" if they had the same rules that the companies today have granted themselves. After all, it's only fair that they deserve the same benefit and attempt to sue the hell out of companies for "legalized theft." I know it's a long shot, but it would be great to see Disney's greed bite back.
The Gnostic "Heresy" was termed that way simply because they were the loser in the theological debate. At the time shortly after J.C.'s death, attempts to understand the events and their relevance to humanity cause many different groups to share common views. Mary Magdalene either wrote the Gospel of Mary was said to have been hers. Her interpretation of what Jesus said and wanted was quite different than accepted orthodoxy today. At any rate, the whole demiurge thing came in for all sides through Platonic thought. It was posed that there was "The One," the perfect representation of perfection. From The One, the farther one got from The One, the more imperfect that idea or thing was. A demiurge was a movement of "One-ness" from The One up and down this metaphysical world. Plato suggested that perhaps the panoply of gods where each aspects of a single god of which man was only destined to know only each aspects because as a man you are too small to even understand the whole. It was suggested, thinking of an elephant in a room without light. You might say the elephant felt like a tail, while another said it felt like a big wall, while another might say it felt like a truck of a tree. Each are true, but none are the whole story. Plato's idea was common thought for many, especially in Alexandria, Egypt. So, people attempted to adapt it. One of the early issues with Christianity was the problem that God at first seems like a god of nothing be good but then turns into a scolding god whom introduces pain/death/evil into the world through wrath. Gnostic's took the view that perhaps there is the The One and different demiurges came forth as what we perceived as God at the time. The first Logos (Demiurge) came and created this wonderful world. Being nearly perfect, she had little interest ruling man. From her came a more fallen Logos that refused to accept that there was any greater power in the world and ignored his "mother." This god was vengeful and wanted to prove his power and worth. Those that disagreed formed many arguments against it (the classic is that Christianity must be purely monotheistic in representation) and those arguments were used by the groups that eventually would become call the Orthodoxy. It's important to remember that the Orthodoxy is nothing more than the group of people who are generally accepted as having won the theological arguments. Gnostism was, in fact, the dominant form of Christianity by the 300's and in my humble opinion the group that became Orthodoxy later rewrote and destroyed history, books, and people since they were so furious about winning. An integral aspect of Gnostic idea was that Jesus wasn't here to teach literal meaning, hence the self-enlighten aspect. Jesus was cryptic on purpose to people he knew who weren't ready to be mature about religious ideas. They should have to fathom and work on the ideas themselves until they reached enlightenment. A noted point was that Jesus never created (what we today would call a church) and in fact in Gnostic texts was quoted as saying organized attending places weren't needed. This didn't sit well with those who wanted to make a power structure (Why? That's a whole another story.) behind the religion. Gnostism was an interesting period of time and it is said so much of it was destroyed. If anyone is interested on more of this, check out "The Gnostic Gospels" and the "Nag Hammadi Library."
Because this ain't "it," from what I've heard. Seems Steve Jobs (if I remember correctly) was asked if that was what was demostrated to him and he said no. The rumor was that he made a version of Ginger that used maglev for support, instead of wheels, that was stabilized by the gyro system he developed. To make sense of it, I figure the statement would be that they would need to lay down metal for the scooter off of which to repulse.
My take on it, at any rate.
I never thought I would see in my own lifetime a copyright expire. Honestly, this is an interesting feeling that I can legally use some music of my culture I grew up with without being charged with a crime to do so? Except, this probably doesn't help me much since I live in America, eh? *sigh*
Your math on that isn't quite right. There is going to be a certain amount of error on the serial line. If it can be shown that the error rate is say an average of a 1-bit error for every 100 packets (which would seem to be a pretty high packet failure rate to me) then all of those would be caught. If the average of the 2-bit error rate is 1 per 2000 packets, it would mean there is an even higher amount of average packets that would be before multi-bit packet errors would make it through. Therefore it would about 50,000 times the number of average packets per multi-bit errors before you would likely see an erroneous packet make its way across. A little math on my part shows that they are using a feable 16-bit CRC (1 in 65,535 or 99.998%). I'm not too impressed with that, either. I hope their multi-bit error rate is excedingly low, too.
Problem with twinks is that they are willing to pay money for someone else's account who has spent the time get the 1337 character. Mature accounts go for big bucks.
How long until computing powerful enough to render the probability thought patterns of a manager? That's what I want to know..