It seems successful in Tokyo. Many of the more important commuter train lines here are 100% private[*]. They're apparently pretty profitable too, as they're constantly expanding their infrastructure in major ways.
The Transportation Bureau of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TBTMG) is (according to their website) both operated by the government AND in financial difficulties:
TBTMG is a local public corporation operated by the Tokyo Metropolitann Government. It operates on an independent budget basis that covers its expenses through fare revenue collected from its customers. Although the number of passengers is increasing with the opening of the O - edo Line, the mounting financial burden of subway construction and increased competition resulting from deregulation of the bus business have resulted in financial difficulties.
I live in the burbs and it's at most a 20 minute walk from anywhere to the post office.
Bullshit. I don't know where you live, but there is no major Australian city where every house is less than a 20 minute walk from the closest post office.
Liposuction clinics combined with gas stations You mean, as in using the liposucked fat as fuel for those new-fangled waste-oil-powered automobiles?
I did, but goddamn it, I didn't make my joke obvious enough and got modded insightful instead of funny:-/.
For those who missed it, Sprawl means more space between people, so they're less likely to walk and more likely to drive. This makes them fatter & forces upwards pricing on fuel.
Two birds can be killed with one stone here! Lipo the fat off & use it as fuel!
Success! We can continue to be sedentary fuel wasters!
Where did you live? How far from your workplace? Did you 'live' in Sydney for a long time? In your own place or a corporate funded apartment two doors down from your workplace?
Most particularly - Did you live in a part of Sydney that you would call "sprawl" or "urban"?
Spawl != Less walking opportunities. That's your social conditioning talking. You think Spawl -> pedestrian unfriendliness and pedestrian unfriendliness == people afraid to walk.
Nope, I'm not thinking that at all. You're thinking I'm American, but I'm not.
Compare say the sprawled Australian city of Sydney and the non-sprawled European city of Amsterdam. Both are pedestrian friendly and people would not be afraid to walk in either.
In Sydney, the majority of people drive to work, drive to the Supermarket once a week, drive to their local shopping center for entertainment, etc. In Amsterdam however, there is much less sprawl and much better public transport. People are forced to walk to the tram/train before going to work, entertainment, etc.
Have you ever lived in a non-sprawled city? I've lived in both and believe me, it's not about pedestrian unfriendliness, but about easy accessability to work / entertainment / shops (beyond your local expensive milk-bar) / schools / etc by pedestrians.
These kids have never moved, never had a choice about where they live and are still much fatter.
It's a no brainer really. Less walking opportunities = less energy expenditure = more stored energy (as well as eating crap on those long, boring car journeys to work/school to save on cooking time at home so you can sit in front of the idiot box).
Anyway, the failure of town planners is going to work out by itself in the end. As oil prices skyrocket & people in the suburbs grow fatter, the solution become obvious. Liposuction clinics combined with gas stations;-)
And I remain unconvinced that they are going to actually achieve what they claim
Indeed, FTA:
"I get a little skeptical when somebody thinks they've got a silver bullet for every application, because that's just not consistent with reality," says Andrew Burke, an expert on energy systems for transportation at University of California at Davis.
An example would be an invitation to tender. Anyone can read that along the way, but if I lost out on a tender because my spam filter didn't like the sender's SMTP agent, I'd be pissed.
Also, you'd be amazed what happens in the business world. All sorts of stuff are sent via email that shouldn't be.
if a message smells like spam the smtp server rejects it saying unavailable and waits for the sender to send it again (an hour or so later).
Great. Lots of emails delayed for an hour, lots of emails lost due to non-rfc compliant sender. Doubleverify are welcome to the patent on that utterly useless (in the real world) idea.
YASIGFINFE (Yet Another Spam Idea Good For Individuals, Not For Everyone) - Spammers will change their techniques to be more RFC compliant as soon as (if) Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Gmail adopted this method.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Yes and no. No two snowflakes are exactly identical, down to the precise number of water molecules, spin of electrons, isotope abundance of hydrogen and oxygen, etc. On the other hand, it is possible for two snowflakes to look exactly alike and any given snowflake probably has had a good match at some point in history. Since so many factors affect the structure of a snowflake and since a snowflake's structure is constantly changing in response to environmental conditions, it is improbable that anyone would see two identical snowflakes.
HR-2517, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2003, instructs the FBI to develop a programme to deter online trafficking of copyrighted material. The bureau would also develop a warning, with the FBI seal, that copyright holders could issue to suspected violators. And the bureau would encourage sharing of information on suspected copyright violations among law enforcement, copyright owners and ISPs (Internet service providers).
Thursday, the FBI allied itself with various US entertainment companies to stop the reported billions of dollars lost to piracy. Now, all forms of digital media including DVDs, CDs, and videogames will carry the FBI piracy warning. The warning will be marked by the FBI seal and will read, "The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000."
Ok call me a troll if you want, but DON*T TELL ME for fuck sakes that this is for the pro.
You are trolling.
Your complaint seems to be specifically about the GIMP/Photoshop. Fine, many photo professionals use photoshop & won't accept anything else *shrugs*.
However, to conflate all multimedia users with PS users is....stupid.
For instance, users of cinepaint for instance will dismiss photoshop as a "useless toy". They're not correct (its just not the tool for their job) - but neither are you.
t means they've abandoned elegance for ad hoc-ery; transparence for evasion; and trust for tyranny.
In order to abandon something, you have to have it in the first place. I can't recall MS ever being in possession of elegance, transparancy and particularly trust.
Downloading from allofmp3 is about as "moral" as just straight downloading. What's the point in paying for it?
I haven't bought anything from allofmp3, but have read answers to questions such as yours the million or so times they've been posted to slashdot.
Basically, people buy from allofmp3 for three reasons.
1) Convenience. Easy to find songs. 2) Consistent tags (no foo fighter songs with "Christian Rap" as their genre [or spelt as foo fighters, Foo Fighters, Fo Fighters, Foo Fighter]) 3) Reliable song download times. All http, songs will take the same amount of time to download instead of ranging from minutes (for very popular songs) to weeks (for obscure, only shared by one guy in peru on dial-up songs).
Many people don't care about moral issues, but find the above factors worth paying a few cents per song.
Frankly, all of the above should be exceedingly obvious to anyone who's ever downloaded music from p2p.
Respectfully, I have to call bullshit. It's not the US trying to enforce its law on the whole world. Its the US trying to enforce its laws within their borders. Gambling businesses are making money from people living within US borders where that business is illegal. If you violate US law, don't step foot within their borders.
Why doesn't the US just be a bit more honest with its citizens and setup a Chinese style firewall around the entire country?
Much more honest for Americans to see a "The Bush administration is preventing you from gambling for your own good" page then to have the US attempting to enforce it's laws across the entire internet.
Slashdot Mirror
The Transportation Bureau of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TBTMG) is (according to their website) both operated by the government AND in financial difficulties:
I'd look for a better example if I were you.
I live in the burbs and it's at most a 20 minute walk from anywhere to the post office.
Bullshit. I don't know where you live, but there is no major Australian city where every house is less than a 20 minute walk from the closest post office.
Liposuction clinics combined with gas stations You mean, as in using the liposucked fat as fuel for those new-fangled waste-oil-powered automobiles?
:-/.
I did, but goddamn it, I didn't make my joke obvious enough and got modded insightful instead of funny
For those who missed it, Sprawl means more space between people, so they're less likely to walk and more likely to drive. This makes them fatter & forces upwards pricing on fuel.
Two birds can be killed with one stone here! Lipo the fat off & use it as fuel!
Success! We can continue to be sedentary fuel wasters!
Where did you live? How far from your workplace? Did you 'live' in Sydney for a long time? In your own place or a corporate funded apartment two doors down from your workplace?
Most particularly - Did you live in a part of Sydney that you would call "sprawl" or "urban"?
I bet you lived in the Urban part of Sydney.
Spawl != Less walking opportunities. That's your social conditioning talking. You think Spawl -> pedestrian unfriendliness and pedestrian unfriendliness == people afraid to walk.
Nope, I'm not thinking that at all. You're thinking I'm American, but I'm not.
Compare say the sprawled Australian city of Sydney and the non-sprawled European city of Amsterdam. Both are pedestrian friendly and people would not be afraid to walk in either.
In Sydney, the majority of people drive to work, drive to the Supermarket once a week, drive to their local shopping center for entertainment, etc. In Amsterdam however, there is much less sprawl and much better public transport. People are forced to walk to the tram/train before going to work, entertainment, etc.
Have you ever lived in a non-sprawled city? I've lived in both and believe me, it's not about pedestrian unfriendliness, but about easy accessability to work / entertainment / shops (beyond your local expensive milk-bar) / schools / etc by pedestrians.
Correlation != causation
Thank you for your insight.
However, I also gave a reason as well as noting the correlation: Less walking opportunities = less energy expenditure = more stored energy
There, I just made a strong case why sprawl is bad, without resorting to being a health Nazi.
Obesity in suburbanites is just an additional reason why sprawl is bad, not the reason.
In short: put up tolls heavy enough to clear congestion. This creates the financial incentives necessary for market-driven mass transit
Market driven mass transit has been successful nowhere. Transport infrastucture is (or should be) a government problem.
The objections quoted in TFS are debunked quite well in the linked science article. Additionally, research earlier this year shows teenagers living in sprawling suburbs were more than twice as likely to be overweight as teens in more compact urban areas
;-)
These kids have never moved, never had a choice about where they live and are still much fatter.
It's a no brainer really. Less walking opportunities = less energy expenditure = more stored energy (as well as eating crap on those long, boring car journeys to work/school to save on cooking time at home so you can sit in front of the idiot box).
Anyway, the failure of town planners is going to work out by itself in the end. As oil prices skyrocket & people in the suburbs grow fatter, the solution become obvious. Liposuction clinics combined with gas stations
Indeed, FTA:
I stole the spam form from craphound (but it's everywhere and has been posted to slashdot many times).
All I actually wrote was the first paragraph & subject. 30 seconds work.
Nonsense.
I didn't say confidential information.
An example would be an invitation to tender. Anyone can read that along the way, but if I lost out on a tender because my spam filter didn't like the sender's SMTP agent, I'd be pissed.
Also, you'd be amazed what happens in the business world. All sorts of stuff are sent via email that shouldn't be.
We have to give Whiney Mac Fanboy props for having that monstrous first post locked-and-loaded so he could post the second the article was released.
Only the first paragraph was mine, the rest was copied & pasted (with X's filled in).
If an SMTP sender is non RFC compliant, I would suggest dropping the message. It is about time we start discouraging the usage of crappy senders.
Fine in principal, not so fine if the non-compliant SMTP sender belongs to a client of yours sending a $important_financial_email.
if a message smells like spam the smtp server rejects it saying unavailable and waits for the sender to send it again (an hour or so later).
Great. Lots of emails delayed for an hour, lots of emails lost due to non-rfc compliant sender. Doubleverify are welcome to the patent on that utterly useless (in the real world) idea.
YASIGFINFE (Yet Another Spam Idea Good For Individuals, Not For Everyone) - Spammers will change their techniques to be more RFC compliant as soon as (if) Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Gmail adopted this method.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
What are you saying? That because a corporation wants to make money that we shouldn't criticise them when they're caught acting unethically?
That's just stupid.
The National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has a pic of the identical (attached) snowflakes on their kid's page.
They look more like nanopumps than snowflakes to me!
From snowflake chemistry
You seem to be saying the FBI does not waste resources because RIAA engages in civil action. This is incorrect.
Example 1: Example 2:
....proper copyright reform (if not complete replacement) is the real victory.
Incorrect.
DRM extends not enforces copyright. A victory against DRM is valuable with or without copyright reform
Ok call me a troll if you want, but DON*T TELL ME for fuck sakes that this is for the pro.
You are trolling.
Your complaint seems to be specifically about the GIMP/Photoshop. Fine, many photo professionals use photoshop & won't accept anything else *shrugs*.
However, to conflate all multimedia users with PS users is....stupid.
For instance, users of cinepaint for instance will dismiss photoshop as a "useless toy". They're not correct (its just not the tool for their job) - but neither are you.
Anyone can plan to do something, but how many of those projects are finished?
Anyone can plan a well-polished gnome based distro, but Ubuntu are one of few who've delivered.
I'd give alot more credence to a well funded organisation with a proven track record than the announcement of YALM project.
If they're announcing, they're probably confident about delivering.
t means they've abandoned elegance for ad hoc-ery; transparence for evasion; and trust for tyranny.
In order to abandon something, you have to have it in the first place. I can't recall MS ever being in possession of elegance, transparancy and particularly trust.
Downloading from allofmp3 is about as "moral" as just straight downloading. What's the point in paying for it?
I haven't bought anything from allofmp3, but have read answers to questions such as yours the million or so times they've been posted to slashdot.
Basically, people buy from allofmp3 for three reasons.
1) Convenience. Easy to find songs.
2) Consistent tags (no foo fighter songs with "Christian Rap" as their genre [or spelt as foo fighters, Foo Fighters, Fo Fighters, Foo Fighter])
3) Reliable song download times. All http, songs will take the same amount of time to download instead of ranging from minutes (for very popular songs) to weeks (for obscure, only shared by one guy in peru on dial-up songs).
Many people don't care about moral issues, but find the above factors worth paying a few cents per song.
Frankly, all of the above should be exceedingly obvious to anyone who's ever downloaded music from p2p.
Respectfully, I have to call bullshit. It's not the US trying to enforce its law on the whole world. Its the US trying to enforce its laws within their borders. Gambling businesses are making money from people living within US borders where that business is illegal. If you violate US law, don't step foot within their borders.
Why doesn't the US just be a bit more honest with its citizens and setup a Chinese style firewall around the entire country?
Much more honest for Americans to see a "The Bush administration is preventing you from gambling for your own good" page then to have the US attempting to enforce it's laws across the entire internet.