Well, I certainly think that. For example, it's perfectly reasonable to expect to be locked out of your computer entirely for installing Ubuntu on a secondary hard drive, right?
Oh, that's right --/.ers only apply their design principles in cases that *don't* involve their precious OS.
So if it were buried on page 18 of the fine print contract no one actually reads anyway, *then* it's okay to have an "off" button that doesn't turn the phone off?
I'm all for disclosure and personal responsibility, but some things you just shouldn't have to watch out for.
(Incidentally, why didn't they leave it home if it were going to be off the whole time? Afraid it would be stolen in a home robbery?)
I'm *pretty* sure there's an established procedure for reporting GPL violations, and I'm *pretty* sure submitting a/. story griping about your experience with that software ain't it.
Why would anyone give this ultra-intelligent machine self-awareness?
Perhaps because that's necessary for ultra-intelligence.
Or even give it arms/legs/options to do anything except communicate via a screen? I don't see them taking over anything unless they have arms/legs/means of replication.
May con artists throughout history have done "bad things" through their ability to fool people through a limited interface. (Nigerian scammers, anyone?) The AI research Eliezer Yudkowsky has proposed and run experiments showing it's possible that a very very intelligent program could "override a human through a text-only terminal". That is, it could convince a human operator to "let the genie out of the bottle".
My armchair reaction was, "Do they even have equipment precise to the nanosecond that you would need to determine that information had traveled one meter, faster than light speed?"
I know a guy who posts on gamefaqs.com, who took a random girl's picture he found and made a profile on a dating site, and just used it to bait and humiliate (all online) guys that messaged him (thinking he was a her). I advised that this was highly unethical (and I say that as a former troll), even if those guys did act really perverted. I said it could mess up that girl's life somehow, but he dismissed as extremely improbable.
So sure, don't just dismiss them as fantasy, but don't just accept them as reality, either. Same as pretty much everything else in the world. Yep, don't dimiss everything in the world as fantasy, but don't accept it as reality either.
I adhere to that by believing we live in a big computer simulation: it's all simulated, but has real impacts for people in the Overworld who are observing us.
That's "wenn y plus 5 gleich 10 dann..." or in English "if y plus 5 equals 10 then..". It's very easy for someone with German as his native language to think with "English words" and should be vice versa.
Yes, but when you say, "wenn y plus 5 gleich 10 dann..." you are no longer using proper German word order. The problem isn't that you're using English words, but that the order of the symbols is different from the order of ordinary speech.
That's my biggest problem in speaking German: you can't actually take the inverted word order seriously. Any time it gets complicated, you have to break the rules in order to avoid forgetting the parts of the sentence before you finish. Look at the first sentence of my response: in German -- if I actually followed the rules -- I would have to say:
Ja, aber wenn man "wenn y plus 5 gleich 10 dann..." sagt... I have to translate the quote in my mind, *then* remember what verb I was using with it. Aua!
Yes, exactly, like when the Ubuntu install process HIGHLY RECOMMENDS that you overwrite the MBR with GRUB when you've put Ubuntu on a secondary hard drive.
Design principles: they don't apply to products that people recommend to me.
So you *don't* think they're a scam, but you also don't think it's odd that
a) you're one of the few people who routinely gets them honored b) you put warnings in the envelope
Naive me, the one time I tried mail-in rebates, I *did* keep copies for that reason, but *didn't* think I'd have to threaten them.
Of the two:
1) No response at all. 2) Sent a little postcard claiming that I needed to try again because the barcode on the proof of purchase (or something like that) wasn't readable. *looks up backup copy* *Could not possibly be clearer* *calls number to complain* *gives up after being on hold for an hour, figuring they don't actually use that line to honor rebates*
The second, as I recall, was a Samsung monitor, and I *really* wish respectable, well-established companies knew better than to associate with such gutter trash.
If there are four propellors with separate tanks, and one empties early, borrow from other tanks so you don't have to throw the whole thing out! What a brilliant idea! I think that's worthy of a patent.
"A process for shifting resources from areas with a surplus to those that have run out... on a satellite."
Hey -- maybe if I act quickly I can get a patent on "sending a refueling pod"!
(I don't know if this should count as funny, flamebait, or insighful.)
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 ( ) 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 (x) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) 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
(x) 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 ( ) 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 (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) 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 ( ) 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 (x) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (x) 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 (x) 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!
Surely it would be clearer to say 'the rover's solar panels have an average power output of about 29 watts'.
Yeah, but how many watt-hours per hour?;-)
(Btw, as others pointed out, I think you meant 700 "joule-hours per second-day" or "joules per second per (day per hour)" or "(joules per second)-(hours per days)es". Recurring isometric units are fun!)
Putting things in useful units is important. But a the same time, some people have bizarre views on what consitutes useful. For example, in fractions relating to money, mainstream media sources usually use "cents per dollar" instead of "percent". Apparently, some people go bonkers if you say,
"California gets back 79% of what its citizens pay in federal taxes"
but will understand if you say,
"For each dollar its citizens pay in federal taxes, California gets back seventy-nine cents."
Spamhaus could have list A, the spammer list. This is what the judge prevented them from putting e360 on.
So then they could have list B, the "list of people we wrongly suspected were spammers and have been ordered not to characterize as such, wink wink".
Then Spamhaus sends everyone lists A and B. Then everyone using Spamhaus's list to filter says, "Hey, why not just block A *and* B?" Spamhaus assists in this process by making the default when you sign up to be that you receive A and B.
But the judge probably wouldn't fall for that.
On a related note, how does spammer litigation ever get this far? I'm not advocating anything, but why haven't vigilantes gone after these guys now that they're visible?
Heheh, sorry, I didn't mean offense, I was just joking because I had the image, as you predicted, that people might not want it to be known that they went to the bar and thus "batted for the other team". But your post clarifies it, thanks.
The reason is, a big factor in determining a researcher's career opportunities is the level of prestige of the journals that they can get their papers published in.
Yes, I'm aware of this. That's the entire point. Researchers want to get into more prestigious journals. But why is big-publisher-endorsed journal X, vetted by scientific committee Y, more prestigious (more respected, more often-cited) than a non-big-publisher-endorsed journal, vetted by the same committee Y? Because scientists perpetuate that practice. Because they (as I said in the original post) refuse to dignify journals that don't have the endorsement of a big publisher, regardless of scientific merit, big publishers are free to extort all the concessions (fees, rights to the work) that they want.
Er, but the practice in question is checking the *receipt* for customers who just walked out of the *checkout* area.
Er, but the *question* in question is what to do about the general case of someone just taking something off the shelf and leaving. Remember? You know, that post you thought you were responding to before you started to fire off about your precious feelings that get hurt whenever someone asks you for a receipt?
What the grandparent post was discussing was a way to remove the receipt check and still have a way to go back and nail people later - if they don't provide ID, no service.
Right, it all makes so much sense now, detective. See, if someone demands to see your ID, obviously, OBVIOUSLY that's in no way a violation of your rights whatsoever and you would never bitch on/. for hours on end about the indignity of having to show an ID "just to buy something". You're not one of *those* weirdos. You take *reasonable* positions, like about how checking for receipts on exits is a totalitarian practice.
I'm so sorry for confusing you with those whiny bitches who complain about the littlest things.
If they do provide ID and are later found (via surveillance video review) to have shoplifted then they can be charged. Not a bad idea really, other than the grandparent-noted likelihood of reduced customer retention.
Or the fact that a thief would just use a fake ID, detective.
By "these limitations" do you mean our rights? Because they aren't "limitations," they're our rights which the founders fought hard to give us.
OH NOES!!!! I was referring to our RIGHTS the whole time! Gosh, I sure didn't notice that. Unfortunately:
a) Intimidation doesn't work on me. Try logical reasoning instead of name-dropping and bold text. b) If you followed the standard founding-father-indignation script, you're supposed to be careful to phrase the rights as being something we *had all along*, and that the constitution *protects*, but *not* imply that the FFs "gave" them to us. Come on! Everyone knows this! c) A right *is* a limitation.
Let's cut through the bullshit. Your position has nothing to do with "what our rights are". If the constitution were amended tomorrow to permit this stuff, you would *still* oppose it. So try another line. (Unless of course, you're referring to *moral* rather than legal rights, in which case, your appeal is even less true.)
veryone should know what these rights are, but unfortunately such is not the current state of things, or no one would consent to these ridiculous post-checkout inspections.
And if everyone did refuse all these searches -- you know, like rational people OBVIOUSLY would ALWAYS want to do -- then they wouldn't use security measures that relied on that not happening, and whatever they chose, you'd be angrily posting away about it (in between job interviews, of course), whether it was raising prices, or requiring ID-checked club membership to enter, or placing everythingout of reach, or having uniforms swarm the area. Because when it comes to bitching about anti-theft measures, any arrow is good enough for your quiver.
Not "without perfect evidence," but rather WITH NO evidence.
I know, I know, you're not one of those weirdos who has absurdly high standards for what counts as evidence of theft. Got it.
I don't really mean to flame / pick on you specifically, but every time a situation like this comes up I'm sickened by the number of people who will adamantly insist that standing up for your rights is anything less than honorable.
I never said that. I'm posting here because:
a) I don't even actually support those rights. b) I support merchants over whiny bitches who can't bear the thought of being searched in a private establishment. c) The criticisms here ar
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I certainly think that. For example, it's perfectly reasonable to expect to be locked out of your computer entirely for installing Ubuntu on a secondary hard drive, right?
/.ers only apply their design principles in cases that *don't* involve their precious OS.
Oh, that's right --
So if it were buried on page 18 of the fine print contract no one actually reads anyway, *then* it's okay to have an "off" button that doesn't turn the phone off?
I'm all for disclosure and personal responsibility, but some things you just shouldn't have to watch out for.
(Incidentally, why didn't they leave it home if it were going to be off the whole time? Afraid it would be stolen in a home robbery?)
I'm *pretty* sure there's an established procedure for reporting GPL violations, and I'm *pretty* sure submitting a /. story griping about your experience with that software ain't it.
Mixed metaphors: if you don't understand them, please, just don't use them. (tm)
Why would anyone give this ultra-intelligent machine self-awareness?
Perhaps because that's necessary for ultra-intelligence.
Or even give it arms/legs/options to do anything except communicate via a screen? I don't see them taking over anything unless they have arms/legs/means of replication.
May con artists throughout history have done "bad things" through their ability to fool people through a limited interface. (Nigerian scammers, anyone?) The AI research Eliezer Yudkowsky has proposed and run experiments showing it's possible that a very very intelligent program could "override a human through a text-only terminal". That is, it could convince a human operator to "let the genie out of the bottle".
Or, as Maddox puts it:
[stupid lameness filter stupid]iPhone ___ Nokia E70
Screen turns into a smudgy
piece of shit after a few ----------Yes _______ No
minutes of use:
(Formatting fun!)
Appealing to the female demographic, maybe?
My armchair reaction was, "Do they even have equipment precise to the nanosecond that you would need to determine that information had traveled one meter, faster than light speed?"
I know a guy who posts on gamefaqs.com, who took a random girl's picture he found and made a profile on a dating site, and just used it to bait and humiliate (all online) guys that messaged him (thinking he was a her). I advised that this was highly unethical (and I say that as a former troll), even if those guys did act really perverted. I said it could mess up that girl's life somehow, but he dismissed as extremely improbable.
How does it feel that she wont agree to meet in the real world though?
I adhere to that by believing we live in a big computer simulation: it's all simulated, but has real impacts for people in the Overworld who are observing us.
Yes, but when you say, "wenn y plus 5 gleich 10 dann
That's my biggest problem in speaking German: you can't actually take the inverted word order seriously. Any time it gets complicated, you have to break the rules in order to avoid forgetting the parts of the sentence before you finish. Look at the first sentence of my response: in German -- if I actually followed the rules -- I would have to say: Ja, aber wenn man "wenn y plus 5 gleich 10 dann
You mean create a single point of failure?
Yes, exactly, like when the Ubuntu install process HIGHLY RECOMMENDS that you overwrite the MBR with GRUB when you've put Ubuntu on a secondary hard drive.
Design principles: they don't apply to products that people recommend to me.
I don't know what that's a reference to, but I definitely would pay top dollar to have a computer interface I can control with my mind.
Any news on when I can buy one of these things and use it for computer input?
So you *don't* think they're a scam, but you also don't think it's odd that
a) you're one of the few people who routinely gets them honored
b) you put warnings in the envelope
Naive me, the one time I tried mail-in rebates, I *did* keep copies for that reason, but *didn't* think I'd have to threaten them.
Of the two:
1) No response at all.
2) Sent a little postcard claiming that I needed to try again because the barcode on the proof of purchase (or something like that) wasn't readable. *looks up backup copy* *Could not possibly be clearer* *calls number to complain* *gives up after being on hold for an hour, figuring they don't actually use that line to honor rebates*
The second, as I recall, was a Samsung monitor, and I *really* wish respectable, well-established companies knew better than to associate with such gutter trash.
If there are four propellors with separate tanks, and one empties early, borrow from other tanks so you don't have to throw the whole thing out! What a brilliant idea! I think that's worthy of a patent.
... on a satellite."
"A process for shifting resources from areas with a surplus to those that have run out
Hey -- maybe if I act quickly I can get a patent on "sending a refueling pod"!
(I don't know if this should count as funny, flamebait, or insighful.)
The downside? Well, in case anyone's still reading:
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) 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
( ) 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
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) 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
(x) 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
( ) 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
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) 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
( ) 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
(x) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) 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
(x) 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!
Surely it would be clearer to say 'the rover's solar panels have an average power output of about 29 watts'.
;-)
Yeah, but how many watt-hours per hour?
(Btw, as others pointed out, I think you meant 700 "joule-hours per second-day" or "joules per second per (day per hour)" or "(joules per second)-(hours per days)es". Recurring isometric units are fun!)
Putting things in useful units is important. But a the same time, some people have bizarre views on what consitutes useful. For example, in fractions relating to money, mainstream media sources usually use "cents per dollar" instead of "percent". Apparently, some people go bonkers if you say,
"California gets back 79% of what its citizens pay in federal taxes"
but will understand if you say,
"For each dollar its citizens pay in federal taxes, California gets back seventy-nine cents."
I want to kill those people.
In Soviet Russia, world is u.
Yeah ... then that would be an iPod, a phone,
AND A PORTABLE INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS DEVICE! OMG!!!!!!!1111 lim(x->0,sin(x)/x)
(Someone link the Maddox piece)
An idea I had a while ago was this:
Spamhaus could have list A, the spammer list. This is what the judge prevented them from putting e360 on.
So then they could have list B, the "list of people we wrongly suspected were spammers and have been ordered not to characterize as such, wink wink".
Then Spamhaus sends everyone lists A and B. Then everyone using Spamhaus's list to filter says, "Hey, why not just block A *and* B?" Spamhaus assists in this process by making the default when you sign up to be that you receive A and B.
But the judge probably wouldn't fall for that.
On a related note, how does spammer litigation ever get this far? I'm not advocating anything, but why haven't vigilantes gone after these guys now that they're visible?
Heheh, sorry, I didn't mean offense, I was just joking because I had the image, as you predicted, that people might not want it to be known that they went to the bar and thus "batted for the other team". But your post clarifies it, thanks.
Yeah, good point, I can't think of any reason why someone would feel uncomfortable presenting an ID at a bar popular with gays.
The reason is, a big factor in determining a researcher's career opportunities is the level of prestige of the journals that they can get their papers published in.
Yes, I'm aware of this. That's the entire point. Researchers want to get into more prestigious journals. But why is big-publisher-endorsed journal X, vetted by scientific committee Y, more prestigious (more respected, more often-cited) than a non-big-publisher-endorsed journal, vetted by the same committee Y? Because scientists perpetuate that practice. Because they (as I said in the original post) refuse to dignify journals that don't have the endorsement of a big publisher, regardless of scientific merit, big publishers are free to extort all the concessions (fees, rights to the work) that they want.
The problem is scientists, not big publishers.
Er, but the practice in question is checking the *receipt* for customers who just walked out of the *checkout* area.
Er, but the *question* in question is what to do about the general case of someone just taking something off the shelf and leaving. Remember? You know, that post you thought you were responding to before you started to fire off about your precious feelings that get hurt whenever someone asks you for a receipt?
What the grandparent post was discussing was a way to remove the receipt check and still have a way to go back and nail people later - if they don't provide ID, no service.
Right, it all makes so much sense now, detective. See, if someone demands to see your ID, obviously, OBVIOUSLY that's in no way a violation of your rights whatsoever and you would never bitch on /. for hours on end about the indignity of having to show an ID "just to buy something". You're not one of *those* weirdos. You take *reasonable* positions, like about how checking for receipts on exits is a totalitarian practice.
I'm so sorry for confusing you with those whiny bitches who complain about the littlest things.
If they do provide ID and are later found (via surveillance video review) to have shoplifted then they can be charged. Not a bad idea really, other than the grandparent-noted likelihood of reduced customer retention.
Or the fact that a thief would just use a fake ID, detective.
By "these limitations" do you mean our rights? Because they aren't "limitations," they're our rights which the founders fought hard to give us.
OH NOES!!!! I was referring to our RIGHTS the whole time! Gosh, I sure didn't notice that. Unfortunately:
a) Intimidation doesn't work on me. Try logical reasoning instead of name-dropping and bold text.
b) If you followed the standard founding-father-indignation script, you're supposed to be careful to phrase the rights as being something we *had all along*, and that the constitution *protects*, but *not* imply that the FFs "gave" them to us. Come on! Everyone knows this!
c) A right *is* a limitation.
Let's cut through the bullshit. Your position has nothing to do with "what our rights are". If the constitution were amended tomorrow to permit this stuff, you would *still* oppose it. So try another line. (Unless of course, you're referring to *moral* rather than legal rights, in which case, your appeal is even less true.)
veryone should know what these rights are, but unfortunately such is not the current state of things, or no one would consent to these ridiculous post-checkout inspections.
And if everyone did refuse all these searches -- you know, like rational people OBVIOUSLY would ALWAYS want to do -- then they wouldn't use security measures that relied on that not happening, and whatever they chose, you'd be angrily posting away about it (in between job interviews, of course), whether it was raising prices, or requiring ID-checked club membership to enter, or placing everythingout of reach, or having uniforms swarm the area. Because when it comes to bitching about anti-theft measures, any arrow is good enough for your quiver.
Not "without perfect evidence," but rather WITH NO evidence.
I know, I know, you're not one of those weirdos who has absurdly high standards for what counts as evidence of theft. Got it.
I don't really mean to flame / pick on you specifically, but every time a situation like this comes up I'm sickened by the number of people who will adamantly insist that standing up for your rights is anything less than honorable.
I never said that. I'm posting here because:
a) I don't even actually support those rights.
b) I support merchants over whiny bitches who can't bear the thought of being searched in a private establishment.
c) The criticisms here ar