I recall the story of a brothel owner in the US who was only prosecuted for running a brothel. She paid her taxes, had a good working environment for the workers,
Yeah, I guess, except for the fact that she required her employees to have sex with strangers or they'd be terminated.
Well, our tanks rolled into Poland today, and let me tell you, it went even better than I thought it would. Got a bunch of military stuff to handle tonight, so I can't post much for a few days, but it let me just say, I expect a lot more Vaterland and a lot less Juden, if you know what I mean;-)
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Perhaps we should have given him Luxembourg too... posted at Peace with Honor
Space travel I can understand, but don't you dare try to pin processor speed limits on the speed of light. If you want a fast computer, you can do it just fine under the present model. Simply compress 1 kg of matter into a black hole of radius 1.485e-27 m. In the 1e-19 seconds before evaportion due to Hawking radiation, you can perform 5e50 operations per second. It only gets you 1e32 total operations on 1e16 total bits, but it's fast. If you can't do that, you only have yourself to blame.
I wonder if we could get kids to run in hamster wheels hooked up to generators. "Um, yeah Bobby, running in the big wheel is FUN! [and saves on energy costs] Oh, and uh, God likes it when you do that, too. [Hope this doesn't mess up his theological views later in life...]"
Sad. Well, next year you might try, "My parents asked that I attempt to qualify on my own. I can go back to them and ask if they'd be willing to cosign for another year, but every time I talk housing with them they encourage me to move.";) See if that gets this bozo's attention.
It wouldn't. You give them way too much credit. Maybe if I went to one of the partners of the firms that owns it...
From your LL's perspective, he's currently got another party he can go after should you flake out and not pay rent, for whatever reason. They're not going to give it up if they don't think they have to. It's like a security blanket that helps us sleep at night.;)
I'm going to tell you what I've told every other potential creditor: if it's just a matter of you worrying about not getting paid, I can escrow cash or securities. And every one of them has a mental breakdown when that happens.
This should be sufficient for just about any landlord.
Wrong. I made about the same 2 years ago (~3% less), about the same ratio, and it wasn't enough.
Go ahead: falsely assume I had a history of non-payment at the time.
This is less important, since you could blow it all on a car or trip to Vegas tomorrow.;)
See bolded.
You forgot to add "At this price".
Actually, I didn't. This is the highest quality apartment in the area, *and* the highest price. Now, if you want to talk about house rentals, they're generally way too much space, or older. Plus, they're generally not much better in quality, yet require more maintenance.
At any rate, a thinly-veiled threat to move should take care of that cosigner issue next go-around.
Unfortunately, you were talking to a low-level leasing agent who gets a bonus when you renew and lacks the authority do what you requested.
Nope, the head manager.
the flip side, it's more a matter of principle whether or not your parents are cosigning your lease.
Yes, it is.
As long as you pay your rent, that is.
Yes, I do.
Again, it shouldn't even be an issue when I have steady, well-documented employment (earning over 6x rental payment) and rental history there, plus assets sufficient to pay 55 months of rent if I felt like it.
The problem is, I guess, you work in a more liquid market, whereas I'm renting in a town, metro area ~200,000, and there aren't many apartments this high quality.
I don't even know why they're legal. I mean, I can't think of any meaningful use of them in a car that doesn't annoy the hell out of other drivers. What assholes. Any way to get back at them without getting shot?
Nah, not when I can use my pre-existing, legally-purchased track of those songs, using a "really great fingering arrangement" (I don't know GH's term for "stepchart") that my friend suggested, at no additional cost, by playing Frets on Fire.
I was going to leave this alone, since it's clear you have no idea what you're talking about, but since apparently you're writing a paper on this and kept getting modded up, I'm not going to let it go as easily (though I doubt I'll match your persistence.)
no you didn't, and if you had, it would have represented an unrealistic scenario
Well, it was unrealistic to interpret my challenge as "break this one, specific, question", but whatever.
I can refresh your site a million times and then work out the way you perform the transformation.
Sure, you can spend a significant fraction of your life trying to beat the current implementation of the algorithm. The critical question is whether it requires more (or about the same) resources than it does to beat a picture captcha. Once you're spending weeks using a fairly intelligent person (how many times does one of the syntax forms have to come up before you detect the pattern?), you're better off hiring thirdworlders/passing them off to other people, than using a human to decipher the algorithm. And then when you finally do it... oops, I switch to a completely different scheme, rendering your first moot.
what's your point?
That you completely trivialized the capabilities of text captchas, and continue to do so through strawman argumentation.
mine is that by reducing a hard AI problem* to a text-processing problem, you've made spamming a fuckload easier.
no, I've changed a hard AI problem into another hard AI problem that a human (through significant effort) can turn into a text-processing problem with evanescent usefulness -- like they can do with picture captchas.
unless you've come up with a program that can ask infinitely-random-yet-humanly-answerable-but-not-c omputer-answerable questions, in which case, go pick up that honorary degree from MIT instead of wasting your time with spambots.
*sigh* Picture captchs don't even meet the standard of "infinitely-random-yet-humanly-answerable-but-not- c omputer-answerable questions", and no, MIT wouldn't give me any award of any kind for making a good-enough text captcha.
"In fact, your algorithm as written doesn't work -- there are two numbers referenced" no, there weren't.
Okay, in the first one, there was only one, but again, you completely missed the point by focusing on an extremely narrow problem.
if it's generated by an algorithm, it can be deconstructed using an algorithm.
Yeah, but P probably isn't NP.
find a representation of a number, find the last word relating to precedence that is not prefaced by a "not" word, do the math, enter the answer.
Yes, you can write an algorithm for *that* particular sentence, and any other with the identical template. But give me a little credit here: I didn't ask you to write an algorithm to beat that template; I asked you to write an algorithm, given a site with that as the first string captcha. You don't yet know how it generates them. You don't know what it's randomizing across. Maybe it randomly chooses to say "that number three, the one that comes after, as differentiated from before, it." Then your algorithm failed -- or did you remember to include "as differentiated from" as a negation?
In fact, your algorithm as written doesn't work -- there are two numbers referenced -- "one" and "three". Which to pick?
But then, my randomizer changes the word order, and the junk words, and whether "ignore the previous sentence" is added. And so on. So your work at coming up with the algorithm gets longer and longer.
Yeah, it does suck, I agree, but you do have an option: for a usurious premium, you can do a month-to-month lease. I don't understand why it's so common in contracts. Why don't they typically have buyout fees as the default exit clause rather than "hahahaha! sucker! you have to pay for the rest, regardless!" clauses. I mean, yeah you can negotiate such a clause before signing. Try it some time, and they're likely too stupid to understand the concept, and the market in some cities is illiquid or small enough that competitors don't deftly scoop up your businesses.
I have a hard time believing my apartment puts everyone in these clauses. There are some real irresponsible idiots, and I don't know how they can possibly manage if they lose their job. I feel like I'm being punished for saving: I actually have significant assets: 55 months' worth of rent at my last count, and I don't get to discharge that debt in bankruptcy like the other idiots because I can actually pay it. (If you're going to respond, PLEASE do not refer to that money as "in the bank". It is *invested*. No one should keep that much in a low-yield account.)
What's worse, most of them have no problems about making you sign a "blank check" contract. Specifically: when renewing, I asked them to give me a new lease that doesn't have my parents attached as co-signers (so as not to be a burden on them). They said, basically, "sign the new lease, and then we'll tell you if they can be removed [due to sufficient credit on your own]." UM, excuse me? I'm signing a contract before the terms are determined? Hey, sounds like a good idea -- it's invalid on its face, so I can't be expected to live up to the full lease, right?
Could you *maybe* entertain the possibility that I'm an otherwise intelligent, well-meaning non-troll who got unjustifiably burned on an Ubuntu install despite following the instructions, and has a valid crticism of its design process?
Isn't that the same principle behind PGP? Correct me if I'm wrong (and I freely admit encryption is not my area of expertise), but to crack (in reasonable time) PGP-encrypted data, you have to solve a problem no one in the world has been able to solve yet (quick solution for a certain class of problems). Similarly, if captchas get to the point where you need a major theoretical advance to beat them, thanks to wide use of OCR-type programs, that would either foil all spammers, or cause them to solvea mathematically/AI significant problem.
Yeah, it was always kind of obvious to me. With a desktop client, you don't have to load a web browers, go the page, and click on inbox. It doesn't have to reload a bunch of stuff to bring up an email. Deleting is easier. Attaching is easier.
What's the big deal???? Are you high? Why do you think tax-managed mutual funds exist at all? I won't go through the ones you listed before your #5 (i.e. the one where you inflate the apparent size of the set), except to say that yes, you do have to declare dividends from offshore investments, and if you haven't been, you're in deep trouble if they find out.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall the story of a brothel owner in the US who was only prosecuted for running a brothel. She paid her taxes, had a good working environment for the workers,
Yeah, I guess, except for the fact that she required her employees to have sex with strangers or they'd be terminated.
In Ontario, for example, everyone is required to send a cheque for PST to the Ontario finance minister for all sales of goods
You have to send a check? Canada's treasury hasn't adapted to allow electronic payment?
And it's off
;-)
01 Sept 39_____posted by: Adolf
Well, our tanks rolled into Poland today, and let me tell you, it went even better than I thought it would. Got a bunch of military stuff to handle tonight, so I can't post much for a few days, but it let me just say, I expect a lot more Vaterland and a lot less Juden, if you know what I mean
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Perhaps we should have given him Luxembourg too... posted at Peace with Honor
*As* secure as a fax? Wouldn't a PGP-encrypted email be *more* secure than a fax? Or do faxes use a kind of private key as well?
Then maybe I can use it to power my infinite miles-per-gallon-of-gasoline car!
Space travel I can understand, but don't you dare try to pin processor speed limits on the speed of light. If you want a fast computer, you can do it just fine under the present model. Simply compress 1 kg of matter into a black hole of radius 1.485e-27 m. In the 1e-19 seconds before evaportion due to Hawking radiation, you can perform 5e50 operations per second. It only gets you 1e32 total operations on 1e16 total bits, but it's fast. If you can't do that, you only have yourself to blame.
(Yeah, yeah, borrowed from here.)
I wonder if we could get kids to run in hamster wheels hooked up to generators. "Um, yeah Bobby, running in the big wheel is FUN! [and saves on energy costs] Oh, and uh, God likes it when you do that, too. [Hope this doesn't mess up his theological views later in life...]"
Well, your landlord is behaving irrationally. Not sure what else we can say about him.
;)
:-P
Except that that behavior is typical in my (ever atypical) experience.
Anyhow, if you ever move out to the east coast, look me up. I'd rent to you.
I don't think I'd still be making 6x your rent charge for any job I'd find on the east coast
I'm pretty deaf. A lot of people (like my wife, yeah, I'm not a real slashtard) find my music loud enough to be annoying.
You're also not very good at this whole "cause-and-effect" thing, are you?
Sad. Well, next year you might try, "My parents asked that I attempt to qualify on my own. I can go back to them and ask if they'd be willing to cosign for another year, but every time I talk housing with them they encourage me to move." ;) See if that gets this bozo's attention.
;)
;)
It wouldn't. You give them way too much credit. Maybe if I went to one of the partners of the firms that owns it...
From your LL's perspective, he's currently got another party he can go after should you flake out and not pay rent, for whatever reason. They're not going to give it up if they don't think they have to. It's like a security blanket that helps us sleep at night.
I'm going to tell you what I've told every other potential creditor: if it's just a matter of you worrying about not getting paid, I can escrow cash or securities. And every one of them has a mental breakdown when that happens.
This should be sufficient for just about any landlord.
Wrong. I made about the same 2 years ago (~3% less), about the same ratio, and it wasn't enough.
Go ahead: falsely assume I had a history of non-payment at the time.
This is less important, since you could blow it all on a car or trip to Vegas tomorrow.
See bolded.
You forgot to add "At this price".
Actually, I didn't. This is the highest quality apartment in the area, *and* the highest price. Now, if you want to talk about house rentals, they're generally way too much space, or older. Plus, they're generally not much better in quality, yet require more maintenance.
At any rate, a thinly-veiled threat to move should take care of that cosigner issue next go-around.
Yes, for anyone else in the world.
Unfortunately, you were talking to a low-level leasing agent who gets a bonus when you renew and lacks the authority do what you requested.
Nope, the head manager.
the flip side, it's more a matter of principle whether or not your parents are cosigning your lease.
Yes, it is.
As long as you pay your rent, that is.
Yes, I do.
Again, it shouldn't even be an issue when I have steady, well-documented employment (earning over 6x rental payment) and rental history there, plus assets sufficient to pay 55 months of rent if I felt like it.
The problem is, I guess, you work in a more liquid market, whereas I'm renting in a town, metro area ~200,000, and there aren't many apartments this high quality.
Give it to relatives with Parkinson's. (-1, Not Funny Dude)
I don't even know why they're legal. I mean, I can't think of any meaningful use of them in a car that doesn't annoy the hell out of other drivers. What assholes. Any way to get back at them without getting shot?
Why haven't the FoF programmers been able to match that functionality (the tremelo bar and halting music at failure)?
Nah, not when I can use my pre-existing, legally-purchased track of those songs, using a "really great fingering arrangement" (I don't know GH's term for "stepchart") that my friend suggested, at no additional cost, by playing Frets on Fire.
I was going to leave this alone, since it's clear you have no idea what you're talking about, but since apparently you're writing a paper on this and kept getting modded up, I'm not going to let it go as easily (though I doubt I'll match your persistence.)
... oops, I switch to a completely different scheme, rendering your first moot.
c omputer-answerable questions, in which case, go pick up that honorary degree from MIT instead of wasting your time with spambots.
- c omputer-answerable questions", and no, MIT wouldn't give me any award of any kind for making a good-enough text captcha.
no you didn't, and if you had, it would have represented an unrealistic scenario
Well, it was unrealistic to interpret my challenge as "break this one, specific, question", but whatever.
I can refresh your site a million times and then work out the way you perform the transformation.
Sure, you can spend a significant fraction of your life trying to beat the current implementation of the algorithm. The critical question is whether it requires more (or about the same) resources than it does to beat a picture captcha. Once you're spending weeks using a fairly intelligent person (how many times does one of the syntax forms have to come up before you detect the pattern?), you're better off hiring thirdworlders/passing them off to other people, than using a human to decipher the algorithm. And then when you finally do it
what's your point?
That you completely trivialized the capabilities of text captchas, and continue to do so through strawman argumentation.
mine is that by reducing a hard AI problem* to a text-processing problem, you've made spamming a fuckload easier.
no, I've changed a hard AI problem into another hard AI problem that a human (through significant effort) can turn into a text-processing problem with evanescent usefulness -- like they can do with picture captchas.
unless you've come up with a program that can ask infinitely-random-yet-humanly-answerable-but-not-
*sigh* Picture captchs don't even meet the standard of "infinitely-random-yet-humanly-answerable-but-not
"In fact, your algorithm as written doesn't work -- there are two numbers referenced"
no, there weren't.
Okay, in the first one, there was only one, but again, you completely missed the point by focusing on an extremely narrow problem.
if it's generated by an algorithm, it can be deconstructed using an algorithm.
Yeah, but P probably isn't NP.
find a representation of a number, find the last word relating to precedence that is not prefaced by a "not" word, do the math, enter the answer.
Yes, you can write an algorithm for *that* particular sentence, and any other with the identical template. But give me a little credit here: I didn't ask you to write an algorithm to beat that template; I asked you to write an algorithm, given a site with that as the first string captcha. You don't yet know how it generates them. You don't know what it's randomizing across. Maybe it randomly chooses to say "that number three, the one that comes after, as differentiated from before, it." Then your algorithm failed -- or did you remember to include "as differentiated from" as a negation?
In fact, your algorithm as written doesn't work -- there are two numbers referenced -- "one" and "three". Which to pick?
But then, my randomizer changes the word order, and the junk words, and whether "ignore the previous sentence" is added. And so on. So your work at coming up with the algorithm gets longer and longer.
Yeah, it does suck, I agree, but you do have an option: for a usurious premium, you can do a month-to-month lease. I don't understand why it's so common in contracts. Why don't they typically have buyout fees as the default exit clause rather than "hahahaha! sucker! you have to pay for the rest, regardless!" clauses. I mean, yeah you can negotiate such a clause before signing. Try it some time, and they're likely too stupid to understand the concept, and the market in some cities is illiquid or small enough that competitors don't deftly scoop up your businesses.
I have a hard time believing my apartment puts everyone in these clauses. There are some real irresponsible idiots, and I don't know how they can possibly manage if they lose their job. I feel like I'm being punished for saving: I actually have significant assets: 55 months' worth of rent at my last count, and I don't get to discharge that debt in bankruptcy like the other idiots because I can actually pay it. (If you're going to respond, PLEASE do not refer to that money as "in the bank". It is *invested*. No one should keep that much in a low-yield account.)
What's worse, most of them have no problems about making you sign a "blank check" contract. Specifically: when renewing, I asked them to give me a new lease that doesn't have my parents attached as co-signers (so as not to be a burden on them). They said, basically, "sign the new lease, and then we'll tell you if they can be removed [due to sufficient credit on your own]." UM, excuse me? I'm signing a contract before the terms are determined? Hey, sounds like a good idea -- it's invalid on its face, so I can't be expected to live up to the full lease, right?
Okay, then how would you defeat a text captcha like:
"alright now I want you to tell me basically, that number three, which ever number comes after it, wait, make that before it, what is that again?"
Would google or a knowledge base beat it? And you can arbitrarily increase the complexity like with pictures.
*aims at foot*
This ring a bell? (Lower your mod threshold.)
Could you *maybe* entertain the possibility that I'm an otherwise intelligent, well-meaning non-troll who got unjustifiably burned on an Ubuntu install despite following the instructions, and has a valid crticism of its design process?
Isn't that the same principle behind PGP? Correct me if I'm wrong (and I freely admit encryption is not my area of expertise), but to crack (in reasonable time) PGP-encrypted data, you have to solve a problem no one in the world has been able to solve yet (quick solution for a certain class of problems). Similarly, if captchas get to the point where you need a major theoretical advance to beat them, thanks to wide use of OCR-type programs, that would either foil all spammers, or cause them to solvea mathematically/AI significant problem.
I'm wrong, eh?
Well, I don't welcome reliance on security by obscurity.
Yeah, it was always kind of obvious to me. With a desktop client, you don't have to load a web browers, go the page, and click on inbox. It doesn't have to reload a bunch of stuff to bring up an email. Deleting is easier. Attaching is easier.
Ported from where? Oh, I guess they borrowed from all the Scumm available on the PS3.
What's the big deal???? Are you high? Why do you think tax-managed mutual funds exist at all? I won't go through the ones you listed before your #5 (i.e. the one where you inflate the apparent size of the set), except to say that yes, you do have to declare dividends from offshore investments, and if you haven't been, you're in deep trouble if they find out.