We interrupt your regularly scheduled philosophical rant to bring you this lolcat, which presents a rather poor pun relying on the knowledge of an obscure philosophical term.
Enjoy!
Like, Python
#!usr/bin/python
uh from sys import exit
# Grab the user's name.
ok so like name = raw_input("yo! what's your name?") right
# Make sure they entered something, then say hi.
if name.strip() is actually like "":
toootally just exit()
else:
um yeah
print like "Hi %s, nice to meet you." % name
Somebody actually implemented this dialect of Python.
The joy of being a writer today is that you can claim your work’s flaws are all there by design. Plot doesn’t add up? It was never meant to; you were playfully reworking the conventions of traditional narrative. Your philosophizing makes no sense? Well, we live in an incoherent age. The dialogue is implausible? Comedy often is. But half the jokes fall flat? Ah! Those were the serious bits.
— B.R. Meyers (via Julia Galef)
Spam is hard.
(found on Slashdot)
Your post advocates a
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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?
( ) Incompatibility 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:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
The Case of the 500-Mile Email
"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.
Dream Captcha
Philosophy Referee Hand Signals
Dictionary Paradox
The dictionary entry for “paradox” contains two contradictory definitions.
2a. An apparently absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition, or a strongly counter-intuitive one, which investigation, analysis, or explanation may nevertheless prove to be well-founded or true.
2b. A proposition or statement that is actually self-contradictory, absurd, or intrinsically unreasonable.
Oh, the irony.
Source: oed.com
Old radar systems never die, they just phase-array
— Unknown
Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
— Charles Elmer Hires (creator of Hires Root Beer, the longest continuously made soft drink in the U.S.)
- Saul Griffith: I don't know how to optimize for fashion...
- Neil Gershenfeld: I think it depends on the model.
“So now you all know the value of gah.” -Avanti Shrikumar
