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and here is the final nail in the coffin, that i was hoping jobs would get in leopard. but it does make more sense coming from parallels, from a legal standpoint if nothing else.
update: probably won't be built-in to leopard.
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do the means justify the end? i think not. mostly because there really isn't an end. the end is almost always just a means to a different end. but it works both ways - the means can be broken down into sub-goals, so the means itself is an end. and if you can't justify the end, how can you justify the means? see what i mean? :)
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so i was thinking more about the spam problem, and i realized that one of the things i didn't fully realize before was how much spam just follows economic theory. the problem isn't that spammers are trying to sell blue pills and gold watches; it's that the market for said blue pills and gold watches is hugely inefficient. there's a legitimate supply, and there's a legitimate demand. what there isn't, is an easy way of the suppliers finding the demanders. spam is just a byproduct of this inefficient market.
think about it this way: if the market for the blue pills were efficient, it would be no different than the market for books or clothes. the people selling the products would be easily able to find the people likely to buy the product, and send only those people the ads. nobody else would get the ads, since the sellers would know that they weren't interested in buying. of course, it wouldn't be called spam then, it would be called targeted advertising. but the point is that in this situation, everybody wins: the spammers, because their mail-to-sale ratio goes way up; the people with erectile dysfunctional problems, because they get their blue pills; and the rest of us, who don't get the spam anymore.
the question, then, is: why is the market for blue pills so inefficient? i think the main reason this happens with viagra and not with books or clothes is simply the social stigma factor: people buying viagra presumably don't want anybody else to know. this means they don't really want to buy it through traditional channels, which lack anonymity; buying it online solves that problem. i think there's also the fact that the people who want the pills are reluctant to actually go out and actively buy them; therefore, the demand is muted, and it's up to the suppliers to be aggressive in finding the demand for their market. there might be other factors here that i'm overlooking, but this is the only one that i can think of now that makes sense.
and finally, how to fix the spam problem? make the market efficient. ironically, this involves helping spammers achieve their goal. they want to sell viagra. if we (where "we" == "society") make it easy for them to find the people who want to be sold viagra, then it is actually in their benefit to stop spamming the rest of us (since it costs them some tiny fraction of a cent per spam, and they know it's not going to result in a sale).
i haven't thought about this fully yet, but it seems like one of those problems where the counter-intuitive, backwards-ass solution is actually the correct one. by actually helping the spammers find their target market more easily, we can make it beneficial to them to stop spamming the world, and therefore stop the spam problem. well, at least the v1agra and c1al1s ones. nigerian scams are a whole 'nother cup of tea.
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i just "discovered" (i.e. used for the first time) opera's content-blocking feature. boy, is it amazing! i've always hated the tall ad on the right side of arstechnica.com articles, and the large ad that appears between a slashdot blurb and the comments. but now, thanks to opera's amazingly easy-to-use content-blocking thingamajig, they bother me no more!
on a related note, opera mini 3.0 is out for those of you who like surfing on your cellphones. and it now supports content folding, which is really cool. around 70-80% of most webpages is usually just bloat - layout and navigation bars and those cute/annoying little icons and sidebars and footers and stuff. the real "meat" of the page (i.e. the thing you went there to see) is almost always less than 20% of the html that gets downloaded. content folding detects all the bloat (which is a non-trivial task - believe me, I know) and folds it away under a little "+" sign. the end result is much faster and a much cleaner surfing experience on a cellphone. kudos to the opera developers for getting this working.
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from der spiegel, via slashdot: Controlled Chaos. seems like a really cool idea, and one that i wholeheartedly support. rules and regulations tend to get lives of their own after a while, and the spirit of the law ends up taking a back seat to the letter of the law, which is the opposite of the way things should be. throwing out those rules every once in a while and starting from scratch is a good way to knock some sense back into the people, and show them that the rules are really just guidelines to encourage the greater good.
of course, taking steps like this have to be done carefully. i can't imagine it working in larger towns, particularly when there are larger vehicles and more impatient people involved. but that's not really the point, anyway.
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today was the ACM regional contest for the ECNA region. final scoreboard is at http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/ecna06.html - waterloo black came in third. this doesn't bode too well for the finals..
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stakface.com is going to be down for a few hours later as the site is being moved to another server. yay! for more disk space and PHP 5.
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did a bunch of code refactoring and cleanup for this website yesterday and today. if you see anything that's broken, or isn't working as it was before, let me know.
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according to the IEEE article regurgitated by slashdot, blake ross (aka "the firefox guy") is up to his old tricks again.. trying to change the world and all that :)
parakey seems like the sort of thing that doesn't sound all that cool or revolutionary from a developer's point of view, but is definitely so for the end user (or rather, can be, if it's done right). there's still a huge gap between the computer and the internet, and there's lots of demand for a bridge. here's to hoping he can build one.
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have you noticed a surge in spam recently? i know i have. the spam filters at work break down now and then, letting through a flood of spam. even while they're up, i still get a few spam making it out to my blackberry every day.
the weird thing is, most of the spam i get isn't even advertising-based. it's just random garbage to get the bayesian filters messed up, so that the real spam can get through. what i'm wondering is how it can still be cost-efficient for the spammers to do this. an increase in non-advertising spam (let's call it spoofing spam) costs them more not only because of the extra bandwidth, but also because people who get spoofing spam are less likely to read the real spam. or so i would assume - if you get one viagra email every once in a while, i would think you'd be more likely to read it than if you got one viagra email mixed in with a dozen spoofing spams.
i guess the first point (more bandwidth, hence more cost) isn't really valid though, given that they're using botnets to spread the spam. in fact, it probably makes it cheaper, since we're doing the work to spam ourselves. go us!
as much as i would love for some cracker to write a virus to take the spammers down by force, i don't think that that's a long-term solution - as long as it's economically beneficial for the spammers to keep spamming, well, they're going to keep at it. taking down a handful of spammers will only give room for others to grow. and of course, the laws of evolution still applies - the spammers that survive will be the fittest of the lot.
so how do we get rid of spam? we need to make it economically detrimental to send spam. assume it's free to send an email (which, for the spammers with botnets, it is). zero cost, so we need to reduce the benefit to zero as well. that's hard to do. according to various sources, spammers seem to be making money not from actual product sales, but from per-impression ad views. they also seem to be recycling money by selling email addresses to each other, which doesn't seem to be too lucrative, so we can probably ignore that.
so, my conclusion is that per-impression ad payments should be abolished. either that, or IE should be outfitted with some sort of decent ad-blocking technology, turned ON by default. i'm not sure which is harder :)
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