When a hosting provider provides services to a spammer, he is a spam-supporter
I agree with you, but you are utterly wrong here.
They are not spam supporters. They are SPAMMERS.
'spam supporting' would be, like, washing their windows or doing their taxes.
If you operate a network and knowingly allow spam to exit from it, you are spamming. Doesn't matter who clicked 'send'.
We need to stop this double-speak. If you drive the getaway car for a bank robbery, you are a bank robbery. If you provide a network for spammers to use, you are a spammer.
You know, you're an idiot for suggesting email just vanishes because of blacklists. You have no idea what you're talking about.
In fact, blocking via blacklisting is the only majorly-used spam fighting method that lets the sender receive notification their email was decided as spam.
Every other method accepts the email and runs tests on it, and then maybe the recepient sees it, or not, or they have to go look for it in the 'spam' folder, or whatever. The only options are 'Pester the user with this or not?', and if they guess 'no' wrongly, the mail does vanish.
Blacklisting does not accept the email, and thus the sender's mail server will turn around and say 'Hey, that message you just tried to send? They rejected it, giving this reason: Blah blah blah'. At least then someone knows something went wrong.
Of course, there are milters and whatnot that can do actual content filtering in the mail server at that point, but those are complicated to set up and suck CPU because you have to do all that processing when the message is accepted, instead of whenever you feel like it. They works perfectly for personal servers, possibly work well for huge server farms, and suck ass for a 120-person company operating a mail server on a Unix box. (And the huge email guys don't seem to use anything like that, so I must assume they don't work.)
And those have the fun issue that some mail servers are broken and don't accept rejections after they send the email. So the bastards will just try again and again.
Whereas a DNS blacklist just causes SMTP server to do a quick DNS look up or two and not respond until it's done, which isn't 'quick' but at least doesn't suck CPU.
And I have no idea what you mean by 'a blacklist allows any server between the sender and the receipient'...you are aware that no email is forward by random third parties anymore, right? And if you had someone SMTP forwarding your incoming mail, you better damn well be in charge of the spam filtering on them, and it should be right there in the contract. And outgoing smarthosts don't filter mail at all, that doesn't even make sense.
It's not censorship, it's requiring phone companies to not bill certain types of surcharges to customers who request it. If those charges be for 900 numbers, long distance numbers, or international numbers. You can block any of charges.
It's a billing block, not a content block. Censorship, by definition, restricts access to content. 900 blocks are no more censorship than the forbidding auto repair places from doing unrequested work and billing you for it are censorship. It's just a consumer protection law.
And, BTW, nothing legally prevents a phone company from letting you make 900 calls even if you request them blocked...they're just forbidden from billing for them. They block them on their own initative, because otherwise they'd have to pay for them out of pocket.
For the LAST TIME, 900 blocking has nothing to do with morality.
Can you call up phone psychics via 900 after you get it? No.
Can you call up 'Bill my phone for a random service because I have no credit card' numbers? No.
Could you call up a hypothetic Dial-a-prayer line? No.
Could you call up a free phone sex line? Yes.
1-900 blocking is to stop irresponsible people who have access to your phone from causing you to be billed for services rendered to them, be that phone sex or donating 25 dollars to the Red Cross. That's it, that's all it does.
If the government made a list of 'good newspapers' and 'bad newspapers' and published it, you bet your ass that would be constitional violation.
The problem isn't the required filtering if asked for it. The problem is making the damn list in the first place. There is no way to make such a list that is not a constitional violation, even if enabling the list is purely optional.
Some people say porn objectifies women. And thus teenage boys shouldn't be exposed to it.
This, clearly, is idiotic. Teenage boys objectify women. Why? Who knows, but they do. They do not need porn for that.
In fact, maybe they could use a certain kind of porn. Instead of looking up naked pictures of the current pop sensation, maybe we should give them nice softcore porn movies.
You know, the ones with 'plots'. They don't have to be good plots, but they wouldn't be 'here's a picture of a naked woman, please masturbate now'.
Indeed, many softcode porn movies show women as actual people. Actual people who leap into bed a moment's notice, but actual people, with lives and relationships and all that, which is a great deal better than the normal teenage sophistication about sex and relationships, which is 'I wish J. Random Girl would appear naked in my bedroom tonight'.
At some point in this post I was being silly, and then I realized I was serious at the end. Maybe we need more porn, but of certain kind, so there'd be less objectivifying women.
Kids are going to find porn. The best thing you can do for a teenage boy is give him a subscription of Penthouse. At least that way he won't be expose to some of the nasty shit that's on the Internet.
So you've given your kids access to 'nice' porn, right? So they don't go searching for it on the net?
The government of Utah wants the ability to publish an official list of 'immoral' stuff, and require ISPs to filter on that if customers want.
If you can't see the problem with the government deciding what is and isn't moral, and publishing a list of it, even if usage of that lsit is voluntary, I'm just glad you're not a supreme court justice.
900 blocking, OTOH, has nothing to do with the content of the number. All 900 numbers are blocked, because they are toll calls. It's no different than long-distance blocking, which you can also get. (Which is not the same as not having a long distance company.)
Of course, one of that '14', was the ACLU defending the right of Nazis to march, which cost them over 25% of their membership. Which demonstrates that a lot of the members are liberal, but apparently not the organization itself.
Anyone who thinks the ACLU only stands up for liberal causes is a fucktard who's been reading too much propganda. The ACLU stands up when certain rights of anyone are trampled by the government. Specifically their 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendment rights, and probably some others I have forgotten. (Yes, yes, not the 2nd. We know that, they're wrong, stop harping on it.)
And, yes, that even includes when the 1st amendment is trampled in the other direction. I found some here and here easily enough, and there have been a few others recently that I can't find.
The reason the ACLU is most often against the 'religious' side? Because, for some reason, various governments in this nation inexplicably and somewhat randomly decide to promote Christianity, often in unconstitional and stupid ways. Don't blame the ACLU for that.
Yes, but the laws to block 900 services have a justification besides 'morality'. They cost money. You'll note they don't block 'phone-sex lines', they block all 900 numbers equally, whereas if there was a free phone sex line, that would not be blocked.
You're not paying attention. The ACLU is liberal, and thus everything they do must be liberal.
Please ignore everything they've done to help people on the right who had their rights trampled on.
Also, ignore that time in 1978 where they defended the right for friggin Nazis to march through Skokie. Actual Nazis, with the ACLU representing them.
The ACLU is an evil left organization, and would never do something that cost them 30,000 members, made them out to be villians, and helped Nazis because it was the right thing to do, because Nazis have the right to free speech as much as anyone.
Yes, the consumers now have the option to require ISPs to use a government-sanctioned (Read: Mormon) 'morality' list.
Consumers already had the option to do whatever they want. This law, however, requires companies to provide 'moral' filtering, based on religion, even though it's called 'harmful to children'.
If I ran an ISP in Utah, I'd be tempted to offer a 'filtered' internet that consisted of...my servers. Nothing else. They can get their email, they can browse my web pages, that's it.
Nothing says I can't filter more, does it?
In fact, doesn't every ISP offer a filtered mode? I believe it's called 'disconnected'. If someone requests filtering turned on on their account, the ISP can just turn off their access, and, presto, all offensive web sites filtered.
You spend 99% of your time doing little but going in a line at a constant speed.
Um, first of all, no, you don't. Almost no automobile travel can be considered 'moving in a straight line at a constant speed' for a period over, say, 5 seconds. (Of course, all lines are straight and all speeds constant if you measure short enough time intervals, like a hundredth of a second.)
You might drive at a constant speed on the interstate using cruise control, but it's rarely a 'staight line' in any meaningful sense, because you still have to steer. The road may be perfectly straight, but the path the car takes along it is not. There are constant directional adjustments. As evidenced by the fact you drift out of your lane if you do not steer.
Anyway, the space shuttle does not move 'in a line at a constant speed' for millions of those miles, it is PARKED in place. It's not 'moving' at all. The parking place is 'orbit' instead of 'the ground', but it is in fact parked. That's what 'stable orbit' means.
For a better analog, it is like a car parked on the back of a car carrier moving down the highway. It may move hundreds of miles, but it's not, in itself, very likely to get in an accident, because it is parked. Yes, it could roll off the truck, and yes a space shuttle could blow itself up, but these things are unlikely. (But look at Apollo 13 for the singular instance of that in the American space program.)
And the truck could get in an accident, and thus the car could end up in one sheerly by location...just like a meteor could strike the shuttle. That's not the fault of the shuttle, because there's not a damn thing anyone could do to protect against it, just like someone riding in the car on the truck couldn't stop the truck from crashing.
Of course, once you include 'orbital distance', the safest damn thing in existence are the Apollo landing modules we left on the moon. Apollo 11 alone has probably gone trillions of miles around the earth.
That's an idiotic statistic. 99% of that '200 million miles' is doing nothing. Of course there are no accidents, it's just sitting in orbit.
There are only four places you can have accidents in space flight...sitting on the pad, takeoff, landing, and docking/launching/reparing satellites. (Aka, hooking up with other things in space.) An accident while travelling though space is about likely as having one in a parked car.
If you want to compare that to cars, you have to include them sitting in the garage. Yes, in theory, a meteor could hit a shuttle, but it could hit a car in a garage, too. Or a plane could crash into the garage. Those aren't car accidents, and a meteor hitting a shuttle isn't a space flight accident, it's just an accident happening in space.
Don't tell the Europeans that, now we can't stroll into their locked houses!
Also, if the door opens outward, that means that, unlike inward doors, you can slide something in to slide back the latch. It's hard to visualize, but look at your front door...part of the frame stops the door from swinging too far and incidentally stops people on one side from fiddling with the latch. If the door opens inward, that part is on the outside, if it opens outward, the part is on the inside.
In addition to those things, almost all houses in the US have a 'screen door' on at least the front door, which is either literally a wood frame with a fine screen in it, or a glass door that part of it can slide en, presenting a screen. Which opens outward, thus making the complaint 'You have to step back' idiotic...you have to step back in the US, too, for the screen door.
So there are three good, sound reasons for having the door open inward: People can't take the hinges off, people can't slide a credit card in and open the door, and you can put a screen door on there.
I can't think of any for outward opening doors, except 'they take up less space', but that's jsut silly...they take up exactly the same amount of space, they just take it up outside.
The alumni association has exactly however much power the school thinks their 'support' is worth, which is entirely due to donations from them.
I've seen them cause roads to be built and whatnot, but, yes, they normally don't have any 'power' over education.
OTOH, if the alumni association of a college officially complains about their own school to the newspapers, it looks very bad. But the 'alumni' association, in reality, almost always translates to 'football club'. They'll complain about coaches, and when a teacher gives a student a bad grade and keeps them from playing, but never a word about the actual purpose of the college, which is teaching.
In fact, you can tell if a college has a football team by the size of the alumni association.
If there is no football team, the 'alumni association' will consist of 20 people, and their primary goal is to raise money to support themselves, because they have no money. They'll met in a classroom the school donates the use of, twice a year. Their budget will consist of printing flyers to hand out to graduates during graduation, and they'll have to take up a donation to do it.
If there is a football team, they will rent a large hall from the school, every month, and meet. They'll have 'award banquets' for athletes (and maybe some teachers, for the look of it.) They will have licensed the team logo and sell t-shirts, mugs, etc. Sometimes they have their own offices.
Yeah, that's it, blame the liberals. The liberal teachers, of all things.
Here's a hint for you: Most teachers are very conservative. Oh, yes, sometimes a liberal will get fired up and leap into the fray, but they will not be fired up over math or spelling.
They'll end up teaching world history or art or humanities or...what am I saying? We don't teach those things anymore. Maybe they are teaching math by default, now.
Anyway, the reason education is doing so poorly has nothing to do with liberals. I was about blame 'No Child Left Behind', that George Bush piece of idiocy that is better named as 'All Children Proceed at Slow as Possible', but, to be honest, that is just the final touch in the insanity that's been plaging education for two decades, as testing has taken over teaching.
In Georgia, the Democrats were responsible for stupid shit like that, causing them to be ousted from the state government for the first time since we got back in the Union. (Calling Georgia Democrats 'liberal', however, is a bit silly.) Sadly, the Republicans are apparently just as stupid.
And testing kids sans calculators won't help the slightest bit more than testing them with, because the problem isn't the lack of knowledge, it's the lack of teaching them how to think, perfecting instead they memorize what will be on the standardize test so the school doesn't lose funding.
I can convert any decimal into a fraction trivially.
Take.5932.
Now put it over 1, like this:
.5932
----
1
Look! It's a fraction!
Do people actually think there is such a thing as 'fractions'? Come on people, we're supposed to be intelligent on this site, and we're talking like 14 year olds with no actual grasp of math. 'Fractions' are just numbers represented as a division of two numbers. (And, despite my silly example, usually integers.)
'Converting' them is not a skill independant of reducing equations.
Who the hell wants to go 'Well, the answer is 93954 divided by 234...which is....um, okay, that's a 3, so multiples to 12, carry the 1, multiples to 9, plus 1, so 0 carry the 1, multiples to 6 plus the 1, so 703, ah, crap, it goes in another time...' while the clock is ticking past.
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I agree with you, but you are utterly wrong here.
They are not spam supporters. They are SPAMMERS.
'spam supporting' would be, like, washing their windows or doing their taxes.
If you operate a network and knowingly allow spam to exit from it, you are spamming. Doesn't matter who clicked 'send'.
We need to stop this double-speak. If you drive the getaway car for a bank robbery, you are a bank robbery. If you provide a network for spammers to use, you are a spammer.
In fact, blocking via blacklisting is the only majorly-used spam fighting method that lets the sender receive notification their email was decided as spam.
Every other method accepts the email and runs tests on it, and then maybe the recepient sees it, or not, or they have to go look for it in the 'spam' folder, or whatever. The only options are 'Pester the user with this or not?', and if they guess 'no' wrongly, the mail does vanish.
Blacklisting does not accept the email, and thus the sender's mail server will turn around and say 'Hey, that message you just tried to send? They rejected it, giving this reason: Blah blah blah'. At least then someone knows something went wrong.
Of course, there are milters and whatnot that can do actual content filtering in the mail server at that point, but those are complicated to set up and suck CPU because you have to do all that processing when the message is accepted, instead of whenever you feel like it. They works perfectly for personal servers, possibly work well for huge server farms, and suck ass for a 120-person company operating a mail server on a Unix box. (And the huge email guys don't seem to use anything like that, so I must assume they don't work.)
And those have the fun issue that some mail servers are broken and don't accept rejections after they send the email. So the bastards will just try again and again.
Whereas a DNS blacklist just causes SMTP server to do a quick DNS look up or two and not respond until it's done, which isn't 'quick' but at least doesn't suck CPU.
And I have no idea what you mean by 'a blacklist allows any server between the sender and the receipient'...you are aware that no email is forward by random third parties anymore, right? And if you had someone SMTP forwarding your incoming mail, you better damn well be in charge of the spam filtering on them, and it should be right there in the contract. And outgoing smarthosts don't filter mail at all, that doesn't even make sense.
It's a billing block, not a content block. Censorship, by definition, restricts access to content. 900 blocks are no more censorship than the forbidding auto repair places from doing unrequested work and billing you for it are censorship. It's just a consumer protection law.
And, BTW, nothing legally prevents a phone company from letting you make 900 calls even if you request them blocked...they're just forbidden from billing for them. They block them on their own initative, because otherwise they'd have to pay for them out of pocket.
Can you call up phone psychics via 900 after you get it? No.
Can you call up 'Bill my phone for a random service because I have no credit card' numbers? No.
Could you call up a hypothetic Dial-a-prayer line? No.
Could you call up a free phone sex line? Yes.
1-900 blocking is to stop irresponsible people who have access to your phone from causing you to be billed for services rendered to them, be that phone sex or donating 25 dollars to the Red Cross. That's it, that's all it does.
No it's not. They can get any porn they want, right now. It's plenty available.
The problem isn't the required filtering if asked for it. The problem is making the damn list in the first place. There is no way to make such a list that is not a constitional violation, even if enabling the list is purely optional.
This, clearly, is idiotic. Teenage boys objectify women. Why? Who knows, but they do. They do not need porn for that.
In fact, maybe they could use a certain kind of porn. Instead of looking up naked pictures of the current pop sensation, maybe we should give them nice softcore porn movies.
You know, the ones with 'plots'. They don't have to be good plots, but they wouldn't be 'here's a picture of a naked woman, please masturbate now'.
Indeed, many softcode porn movies show women as actual people. Actual people who leap into bed a moment's notice, but actual people, with lives and relationships and all that, which is a great deal better than the normal teenage sophistication about sex and relationships, which is 'I wish J. Random Girl would appear naked in my bedroom tonight'.
At some point in this post I was being silly, and then I realized I was serious at the end. Maybe we need more porn, but of certain kind, so there'd be less objectivifying women.
So you've given your kids access to 'nice' porn, right? So they don't go searching for it on the net?
The government of Utah wants the ability to publish an official list of 'immoral' stuff, and require ISPs to filter on that if customers want.
If you can't see the problem with the government deciding what is and isn't moral, and publishing a list of it, even if usage of that lsit is voluntary, I'm just glad you're not a supreme court justice.
900 blocking, OTOH, has nothing to do with the content of the number. All 900 numbers are blocked, because they are toll calls. It's no different than long-distance blocking, which you can also get. (Which is not the same as not having a long distance company.)
The government should not be making such lists, period.
Anyone who thinks the ACLU only stands up for liberal causes is a fucktard who's been reading too much propganda. The ACLU stands up when certain rights of anyone are trampled by the government. Specifically their 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendment rights, and probably some others I have forgotten. (Yes, yes, not the 2nd. We know that, they're wrong, stop harping on it.)
And, yes, that even includes when the 1st amendment is trampled in the other direction. I found some here and here easily enough, and there have been a few others recently that I can't find.
The reason the ACLU is most often against the 'religious' side? Because, for some reason, various governments in this nation inexplicably and somewhat randomly decide to promote Christianity, often in unconstitional and stupid ways. Don't blame the ACLU for that.
I would be a member of both if I could afford it.
Yes, but the laws to block 900 services have a justification besides 'morality'. They cost money. You'll note they don't block 'phone-sex lines', they block all 900 numbers equally, whereas if there was a free phone sex line, that would not be blocked.
Please ignore everything they've done to help people on the right who had their rights trampled on.
Also, ignore that time in 1978 where they defended the right for friggin Nazis to march through Skokie. Actual Nazis, with the ACLU representing them.
The ACLU is an evil left organization, and would never do something that cost them 30,000 members, made them out to be villians, and helped Nazis because it was the right thing to do, because Nazis have the right to free speech as much as anyone.
Consumers already had the option to do whatever they want. This law, however, requires companies to provide 'moral' filtering, based on religion, even though it's called 'harmful to children'.
Yes. And that's all you get to wear. Just the hat.
Nothing says I can't filter more, does it?
In fact, doesn't every ISP offer a filtered mode? I believe it's called 'disconnected'. If someone requests filtering turned on on their account, the ISP can just turn off their access, and, presto, all offensive web sites filtered.
Um, first of all, no, you don't. Almost no automobile travel can be considered 'moving in a straight line at a constant speed' for a period over, say, 5 seconds. (Of course, all lines are straight and all speeds constant if you measure short enough time intervals, like a hundredth of a second.)
You might drive at a constant speed on the interstate using cruise control, but it's rarely a 'staight line' in any meaningful sense, because you still have to steer. The road may be perfectly straight, but the path the car takes along it is not. There are constant directional adjustments. As evidenced by the fact you drift out of your lane if you do not steer.
Anyway, the space shuttle does not move 'in a line at a constant speed' for millions of those miles, it is PARKED in place. It's not 'moving' at all. The parking place is 'orbit' instead of 'the ground', but it is in fact parked. That's what 'stable orbit' means.
For a better analog, it is like a car parked on the back of a car carrier moving down the highway. It may move hundreds of miles, but it's not, in itself, very likely to get in an accident, because it is parked. Yes, it could roll off the truck, and yes a space shuttle could blow itself up, but these things are unlikely. (But look at Apollo 13 for the singular instance of that in the American space program.)
And the truck could get in an accident, and thus the car could end up in one sheerly by location...just like a meteor could strike the shuttle. That's not the fault of the shuttle, because there's not a damn thing anyone could do to protect against it, just like someone riding in the car on the truck couldn't stop the truck from crashing.
Of course, once you include 'orbital distance', the safest damn thing in existence are the Apollo landing modules we left on the moon. Apollo 11 alone has probably gone trillions of miles around the earth.
There are only four places you can have accidents in space flight...sitting on the pad, takeoff, landing, and docking/launching/reparing satellites. (Aka, hooking up with other things in space.) An accident while travelling though space is about likely as having one in a parked car.
If you want to compare that to cars, you have to include them sitting in the garage. Yes, in theory, a meteor could hit a shuttle, but it could hit a car in a garage, too. Or a plane could crash into the garage. Those aren't car accidents, and a meteor hitting a shuttle isn't a space flight accident, it's just an accident happening in space.
Also, if the door opens outward, that means that, unlike inward doors, you can slide something in to slide back the latch. It's hard to visualize, but look at your front door...part of the frame stops the door from swinging too far and incidentally stops people on one side from fiddling with the latch. If the door opens inward, that part is on the outside, if it opens outward, the part is on the inside.
In addition to those things, almost all houses in the US have a 'screen door' on at least the front door, which is either literally a wood frame with a fine screen in it, or a glass door that part of it can slide en, presenting a screen. Which opens outward, thus making the complaint 'You have to step back' idiotic...you have to step back in the US, too, for the screen door.
So there are three good, sound reasons for having the door open inward: People can't take the hinges off, people can't slide a credit card in and open the door, and you can put a screen door on there.
I can't think of any for outward opening doors, except 'they take up less space', but that's jsut silly...they take up exactly the same amount of space, they just take it up outside.
I've seen them cause roads to be built and whatnot, but, yes, they normally don't have any 'power' over education.
OTOH, if the alumni association of a college officially complains about their own school to the newspapers, it looks very bad. But the 'alumni' association, in reality, almost always translates to 'football club'. They'll complain about coaches, and when a teacher gives a student a bad grade and keeps them from playing, but never a word about the actual purpose of the college, which is teaching.
In fact, you can tell if a college has a football team by the size of the alumni association.
If there is no football team, the 'alumni association' will consist of 20 people, and their primary goal is to raise money to support themselves, because they have no money. They'll met in a classroom the school donates the use of, twice a year. Their budget will consist of printing flyers to hand out to graduates during graduation, and they'll have to take up a donation to do it.
If there is a football team, they will rent a large hall from the school, every month, and meet. They'll have 'award banquets' for athletes (and maybe some teachers, for the look of it.) They will have licensed the team logo and sell t-shirts, mugs, etc. Sometimes they have their own offices.
Here's a hint for you: Most teachers are very conservative. Oh, yes, sometimes a liberal will get fired up and leap into the fray, but they will not be fired up over math or spelling.
They'll end up teaching world history or art or humanities or...what am I saying? We don't teach those things anymore. Maybe they are teaching math by default, now.
Anyway, the reason education is doing so poorly has nothing to do with liberals. I was about blame 'No Child Left Behind', that George Bush piece of idiocy that is better named as 'All Children Proceed at Slow as Possible', but, to be honest, that is just the final touch in the insanity that's been plaging education for two decades, as testing has taken over teaching.
In Georgia, the Democrats were responsible for stupid shit like that, causing them to be ousted from the state government for the first time since we got back in the Union. (Calling Georgia Democrats 'liberal', however, is a bit silly.) Sadly, the Republicans are apparently just as stupid.
And testing kids sans calculators won't help the slightest bit more than testing them with, because the problem isn't the lack of knowledge, it's the lack of teaching them how to think, perfecting instead they memorize what will be on the standardize test so the school doesn't lose funding.
Heh. Assuming you hit one, of course, but if you don't, it wasn't convertable.
Take .5932.
Now put it over 1, like this:
----
1
Look! It's a fraction!
Do people actually think there is such a thing as 'fractions'? Come on people, we're supposed to be intelligent on this site, and we're talking like 14 year olds with no actual grasp of math. 'Fractions' are just numbers represented as a division of two numbers. (And, despite my silly example, usually integers.)
'Converting' them is not a skill independant of reducing equations.
Who the hell wants to go 'Well, the answer is 93954 divided by 234...which is....um, okay, that's a 3, so multiples to 12, carry the 1, multiples to 9, plus 1, so 0 carry the 1, multiples to 6 plus the 1, so 703, ah, crap, it goes in another time...' while the clock is ticking past.