Not that long ago one of the most common ways of distributing warez to smucks who weren't part of "the scene" was using a whole bunch of free web host accounts (Yahoo, Geocities, etc.), each hosting one or two of the files from a multi-rar archive. Then you'd have another site which had links to all the files, and you'd use a download manager of some sort to grab all the pieces.
I think this may still happen. My server does a fair amount of traffic from stuff I've downloaded from torrents or "that service that shant be named even though a provider of it is being sued" and happens to sit in a publically-accessible directory. I Googled its hostname and found it listed on a bunch of sites as a source for stuff, so I guess I know where the traffic comes from. (It is actually password-protected, but the l/p is in the realm message; I don't mind sharing with people, just not with bots. Previously it wasn't password protected, so possibly a search engine somehow found it.)
In addition to the moral issues is the legal question. If you rack up massive bandwidth bills for someone by deliberately flooding their server with bogus data, can you be held liable? What if you manage to crash their server, taking out a bunch of other sites hosted on it (by filling up disc space with the logs, for example)? Can they sue you for damages?
While you can make a pretty strong case that you were just using their publically-accessible server as it was intended, I think there's also a pretty strong case to be made that you're making a deliberate, pre-meditated attack on it. You could probably also prove beyond reasonable doubt that the people flooding the contact form knew it wasn't put there by the site owners, but decided to attack the owner's server anyway. It's definitely an iffy proposition from either side, and not something I'd want to be stuck fighting.
Everyone can just stop accepting mail from servers with short TTL and the fast-flux DNS model is no good to spammers.
I don't understand why you think this would prevent them from spamming people. The short TTLs are on domains like omdmfvimcwof.com. These domains are used only for communication within the Storm cloud. Sender addresses for spam emails are nearly always spoofed from 'real' domain names, which have normal TTLs (most spam doesn't require an email reply, so the sender address is almost always either completely bogus or just another random victim's address).
The only other DNS record you could use is the PTR records for the IP addresses of the client (if they even exist), but these will have normal TTLs, because they're not controlled by the spammers.
It's not an option to have matching PTR and A records, it's required by RFC 1912.
Firstly, it is an option. I only bother to get my ISP to add PTR records for my mail servers, and that's it.
Secondly, if everyone does set up properly matching PTR and address records, how will that help?
The distribution vendors don't necessarily write the updates, but they do integrate them. A particularly good example is Debian stable, as the Debian security team backports patches if upstream doesn't. Other distributions may have a similar system in place for their stable or supported releases.
Even when that's not the case, the packager building and testing the package "works for" the vendor of your distribution. Even though they get the code from third parties, they're still integrating it themselves, building the package themselves, and making sure it conforms to the distribution's packaging standards. This essentially means the updates are all coming from the same source.
In a true third-party scenario, that last bit doesn't happen. When you get an update for e.g. Backup Exec, Microsoft hasn't checked that the update operates in the expected manner and doesn't do anything clever/stupid. You're getting an update that's been tested by Symantec in whatever environments they consider to be likely for their customers to be using, and that's it. They don't necessarily understand how Windows fits together, and they certainly don't use the same packaging standards that Altiris or Trend or VMware or HP or Microsoft do (just picking these companies based on what's installed on one of our servers). Most of the time this is fine, as even if multiple vendors do use their own clever but ill-advised hacks they're unlikely to conflict; but it can happen. Hence why dedicating servers to particular tasks is more common amongst Windows folk, because if a conflict does arise it's
While the Linux distribution model doesn't guarantee things won't interfere with each other, the fact that they are using common guidelines for how packages should behave greatly reduces the chances of problems occurring.
If I was working on a bank software and I "taxed" 0.01 cent of each of billions of transactions, do you believe that I would be let go unpunished?
No, but I don't believe that you should be tortured for the rest of your life, either, no matter how much money you managed to steal. Get it? What the hell is wrong with you? I never said spammers should go unpunished, just that subjecting them to torture for the rest of their (artificially extended) lives is a pretty fucked up punishment, and in no way "fair" or "just".
I get what you mean by punishing a spammer for the combined loss suffered by everyone, but what I don't agree with is that a tiny bit of inconvenience can end up deserving of a punishment like this, even when multiplied by an infinite number of people.
Most countries don't have capital punishment these days, but even those that do for the most part a) reserve it for truly heinous crimes, like premeditated murder and b) require that the death penalty be carried out as humanely as possible. Those that don't have these sorts of provisions are seen as savage by most of the world. Even places WITH these safeguards are seen as savage by much of the world. How anybody can advocate a sadistic punishment like torture for any crime, much less something as mundane as getting a botnet to send a few million emails, is completely beyond me.
The term "spammer" seems to be used here a lot like "Nazi" (yes, I'm sick of this thread) -- to completely dehumanize those involved and make them into nothing more than monsters whose sole purpose is to generate spam. Sorry folks; spammers are people too, with friends and families. Most spammers are reasonably intelligent people, capable of doing a lot of things besides spamming. Do you really think the best solution we can come up with is to put their families through the kind of hell they'd suffer by having someone they care about taken off to the torture chamber for the rest of their lives?
If your answer is yes -- well, I'm glad the majority of society disagrees with you. Most so-called "civilised" societies these days spend a lot of time and money trying to rehabilitate people who do truly awful things, like, say, kidnapping, torturing and raping children. This is generally seen as a better approach than a "justice" system based on violent retribution, although it certainly has its flaws.
(Almost) nobody here wants death penalty for spammers because of spam in his specific mailbox.
I really think you're mistaken here. This is slashdot: people here boo when the MPAA or RIAA sues people for illegally distributing their copywritten content on P2P networks, and cheer when they fail to enforce their rights to that content. Why? Because P2P benefits the people here, so they're opposed to anything that might stop it. Spam annoys them personally, so they're out for blood. If they didn't receive spam, I bet they wouldn't give one hoot about spammers. You just can't make a reasonable argument that spamming is somehow so awful it's deserving of death (or worse). Anyone saying that is clearly out for revenge, not justice, and not to protect society from the harm caused by spam.
Good point, but considering it at the "overall effect on society's progress" level makes it even more absurd to suggest such a punishment is somehow "fitting" or "just". Spammers are just fulfilling a demand; they and the people who hire them are profiting from it, and our society demands people do things that make a profit. The real problem is that they do profit it from it, but it just goes to show that not everyone hates spam!
I dunno; I really dislike needles, so I don't think "a days worth of spam" is equivalent. I'd liken it more to, say, hearing what Paris Hilton is up to, or seeing pictures of the latest trashy popslut everywhere I go. Oh wait, I see a whole bunch of that because it's what big media produces and it's hard to escape. Strangely though, I don't wish any of the people involved to be tortured for the rest of their lives, even though they're "making" me waste my time on stuff I don't care about.
What insulated lives us slashdotters do lead, such that a bit of spam is enough to make us wish horrible and inhumane things upon other people. No wonder so many people hate the Western world.
How is it "destroying the potential of the internet"? I think the "legitimate" advertising companies are doing far more to destroy the potential of the internet than a bunch of spammers, but even their efforts fail in comparison to the media companies desperately trying to hold onto their outdated business model that depends on the scarcity of a non-scarce resource to survive, or the telcos that are seeing the massive profits they forecast being whittled away by competition as internet bandwidth becomes a commodity item and are fighting to keep everyone else locked out of the game.
Anyway, a lot of what spammers are doing is just bringing the flaws in our practices to the public eye. Modern spammers use vast armies of botnets which seem remarkably easy to construct, despite years of concerted efforts to educate users and make programs and platforms more resistant to attacks. Imagine how vulnerable the average Joe Desktop would be if it wasn't for all the attention these antics have focussed on security?
Even if we get rid of all the spammers, there's still going to be people seeking to exploit computers in order to "get at" people; especially into the future where having control of someone's PC is going to give you access to a hell of a lot of personal information about them and their lives. If you think of it that way, sending a bunch of emails about viagra is a remarkably innocuous way of utilising a computer you've "pwned".
I think spam is a problem that needs to be overcome with smarts, not with psychopathic over-reaction to a few individuals who utilise flaws in our systems to profit. It shouldn't be possible to build these massive botnets, and if it wasn't for the botnets the spam problem would be essentially solved now with simple blacklists and community pressure.
Suppose I raped you with a banana. Would I deserve to be tortured for that? Quite probably, depending on your moral code. But I haven't done so, so what the fuck has that got to do with anything?
made YOU PERSONALLY spend 385 person-years deleting his messages. [...] Would you still feel that the spammer didn't deserve torture?
Possibly not, but you've completely changed the scenario. If he was MAKING me do that for my whole life, then he'd have to be physically and violently enforcing it, because it's not something I would choose to do without some very strong persuasion. But then, he'd be doing a lot worse than merely using a botnet to send a whole bunch of emails, making it a completely different situation. Thus, my flippant rebuttal above.
So why do you think it is less bad for the spammer to waste 385 person-years distributed amongst many people?
Partly because for each of those people it's a much smaller burden than that, and partly because nobody is MAKING anybody do anything. If the burden of deleting a couple of spam a day is too much for you, then find some software to help manage it, or stop using email. I don't like wasting my time watching ads on TV either; just think of the person-decades (centuries?) that have been wasted by advertising! Should everyone that pays for ads to be put on TV and radio be subject to torture for the rest of their lives, too?
Overwhelmingly though, the reason is because I'm not a psychopath. While I might be persuaded that society would be overwhelmingly better off if a particular individual was put to death, torturing someone for as long as possible -- even working very hard to keep them alive so they can be tortured for longer -- is completely fucking sadistic. What kind of human actually wants to inflict such things on another, especially for something so trivial as wasting a bit of their time? Or even a lot of it?
Plenty of people waste my time. Marketers calling up to try to sell their product. Users who ask me to show them how to do something for the 100th time because they're too fucking thick (or lazy) to remember how. Hell, you're wasting my time right now! By the far the biggest waster of my time though is me. It's just not that big a deal. Certainly I'd prefer not to receive spam, and not to have to spend time devising methods to make my computers not receive spam on my behalf, but it's not enough to turn me into a psychopath.
In closing, I would just like to say -- and this is coming from a guy who's posting in an utterly pointless thread on/. on a Friday afternoon while the rest of his co-workers have either left or are at the sundowner doing whatever it is normal social people like doing, and who's great plan for the weekend is to play IL-2 -- if you really think that the inconvenience of "having" to delete a bunch of unwanted email every day is somehow comparable to the horror and inhumanity of subjecting someone to torture for their entire life (and some of their unnatural life), then you REALLY need to get a fucking life. Either that, or you need some kind of counselling.
Sure spam sucks, but it's a pretty insignificant price to pay for the convenience and luxury of having something like email in the first place. I definitely advocating measures to catch the spammers; seizing their assets and ensuring they can't spam again (monitoring, imprisonment maybe) is a smashing idea. But torturing them is pretty sick.
in the course of one year that one spammer has wasted 285 person-years of other people's lives
Okay...
A truly just punishment would be to torture him continuously
So wasting a bit of time deleting unwanted email is somehow equivalent to... torture? How do you figure that? How is that "just"? If you really think deleting spam from your inbox is somehow equivalent to being tortured continuously for "as far beyond a normal human life span as possible" then you must live a highly charmed life, indeed. Either that or your email client really, really sucks.
Probably hobbyists avoid it because of the cost; if you're looking for a Unix-alike which runs Apache, there's plenty of free alternatives which will do the job as well as OS X.
Why Apple don't use it... who knows. Possibly NetCraft is mis-identifying it and they are using OS X, but more likely it's simply that they built their site long before OS X was a viable stable choice, and re-engineering everything for no reason other than to say "we run our site on our own platform!" probably isn't that high a priority. Kind of like when Microsoft bought out Hotmail, and for a long time continued to run on FreeBSD.
some obscure and no doubt untraceable company selling a few pirate DVDs
I'm not sure how you figure they'd be "untraceable". I mean, they're selling stuff, ergo there's a money trail. It's pretty damned hard to be untraceable when you're receiving money, at least if you intend to be able to do anything with that money. The best you can hope for is to have the money trail go into a different & unfriendly jurisdiction (or several different jurisdictions) to hamper efforts to trace it to you.
people uploading millions of songs to the internet
I think it's highly unlikely that any individual on the P2P networks is uploading "millions of songs", and it's also highly unlikely the volume an individual on a P2P network uploads even approaches what a for-profit DVD pirateer would be doing. It's certainly not the case for any of the well-publicized cases of individuals being prosecuted for sharing stuff on P2P networks.
The only reason an argument this weak is so popular with the mods is because it justifies them getting free stuff.
I think it's also because it implies corruption, incompetence and/or misplaced priorities on the part of The Man, and everyone likes that.
If you break the law despite knowing the penalties for doing so are severe, you know what to expect.
It's hard to know what to "expect" if the law is enforced haphazardly. For example, imagine you're waiting at a pedestrian crossing and there's no cars around (but the "Don't Walk" sign is still lit), and there's a cop standing near you. You decide not to jaywalk -- just in case you get pinged for it. The guy next to you on the sidewalk ignores the cop and crosses the road; the cop sees him, but does nothing. "Fair enough", you think, "obviously that cop isn't enforcing jaywalking laws." So you start to cross... and before you know it, the cop's all over you.
Oh yeah, and the other guy jaywalking somehow made some money off of it while the cops ignored him, but you got busted. What's with that?
I've wondered that myself. Every story seems to have a "Firehose" duplicate of itself in the Related Stories section. It does seem a little redundant. Based on that, I'm assuming the "related stories" thing is generated automagically.
So what? I don't want to use an "open" office suite with a bunch of closed-source add-ons. What's the point of it being open in the first place if you need closed addons to actually do something useful?
It's only an "issue" if you for some reason think there should be closed source add-ons for it. To me, a license which prevents people from doing things the license was designed to prevent them from doing isn't "an issue", it's an expected and desirable outcome.
Very nice. Now what about the rest of it, e.g. the bit where mixing tabs and spaces for indentation stands a very good chance of completely fucking you over if you ever decide to change text editor -- as your very own example makes so very clear -- and therefore it's pretty moot whether the interpreter can deal with it or not? Or the explanation as to why having to indent consistently makes a language an absolute no-go despite the fact you need to do it anyway to maintain readable code?
I really am curious about that last one. While I can kind of understand a gut-level "how dare the damned interpreter tell me how to format my code!" response, in practical terms it's just not a problem. I format the code exactly how I would if Python didn't require consistent indentation, i.e. the same way I do it in C or Perl, which don't give a hoot about whitespace -- because while the C compiler doesn't care about whitespace, I do.
It's part of it in a "the coin came up heads, so we decided to brand it as part of Office" kind of way, but not in the "it comes standard with at least one of the editions of Office 2007" kind of way.
Kind of like saying that SharePoint Portal Server 2007 is "part of" Office now, because they decided to call it "Office SharePoint Server" this year.
Yes, but it *needs* to be defragged because I *hate* seeing red in my disk analysis...
Then don't do a disc analysis!;)
Alternatively, they could update the disc analysis software to know that fragmentation isn't a problem in flash drives, and not show it as red. Then everyone would be happy.
The problem with defragmenting flash drives is that it involves a lot of writing to the drive to shuffle bits around, which reduces the life (each cell is only good for a limited number of write cycles). So, you don't really want to make frivolous writes to the drive, because you're just shortening its life for no actual gain.
even completely disabling swap in all settings, you still have swapping happening
I think this is because Windows counts anything which is backed by a disc copy as being "swapped", which includes executables and DLLs. This wouldn't affect the flash drive though, as Windows isn't actually writing them to a swap area. I think it also lists it as "page file usage" even if the programs are actually resident in physical memory; it's more an indicator of what it could dump from memory if it needed to, because it can just re-load it from disc when it's needed again (which makes it kind of hard to work out if a machine actually needs more memory or not).
Shouldn't that be 8 spaces looks like the same as a tab? Nope, you're right, just checked it - WordPad does indeed use 6 spaces for a tab by default. Odd!
I guess this at least demonstrates why it's considered bad form to mix spaces and tabs for indentation: different editors and display tools have their own notion of what a "tab" looks like. Try opening a document you've formatted in WordPad using a mixture of single-tabs and six-spaces Notepad, and you'll see what I mean (Notepad uses the more common 8 spaces per tab). So, any concerns around mixing tabs and spaces are absurd anyway, because it's such a bad practice.
It's perfectly possible to write Python with any old text editor, just like it's perfectly possible to write Java or C# or Perl or assembly, but using an editor with some basic features like maintaining your indentation level will make it more efficient and enjoyable. Unless, of course, you either never indent your code, or haphazardly indent your code; but in that case, the quality of your code has some serious failings.
I'm not a "whitespace as part of the syntax" fanboy by any means, and it did put me off a little bit when I first played with Python, but the fact is -- it makes absolutely no difference. You indent the code consistently anyway, or it just becomes too unpleasant to read.
There's plenty of reasons to dislike Python, but saying "omg I'm not using that language because it requires consistent indentation of code!" just seems really bizarre. It doesn't make it harder, 'cos you're already doing it!
Slashdot Mirror
Not that long ago one of the most common ways of distributing warez to smucks who weren't part of "the scene" was using a whole bunch of free web host accounts (Yahoo, Geocities, etc.), each hosting one or two of the files from a multi-rar archive. Then you'd have another site which had links to all the files, and you'd use a download manager of some sort to grab all the pieces.
I think this may still happen. My server does a fair amount of traffic from stuff I've downloaded from torrents or "that service that shant be named even though a provider of it is being sued" and happens to sit in a publically-accessible directory. I Googled its hostname and found it listed on a bunch of sites as a source for stuff, so I guess I know where the traffic comes from. (It is actually password-protected, but the l/p is in the realm message; I don't mind sharing with people, just not with bots. Previously it wasn't password protected, so possibly a search engine somehow found it.)
In addition to the moral issues is the legal question. If you rack up massive bandwidth bills for someone by deliberately flooding their server with bogus data, can you be held liable? What if you manage to crash their server, taking out a bunch of other sites hosted on it (by filling up disc space with the logs, for example)? Can they sue you for damages?
While you can make a pretty strong case that you were just using their publically-accessible server as it was intended, I think there's also a pretty strong case to be made that you're making a deliberate, pre-meditated attack on it. You could probably also prove beyond reasonable doubt that the people flooding the contact form knew it wasn't put there by the site owners, but decided to attack the owner's server anyway. It's definitely an iffy proposition from either side, and not something I'd want to be stuck fighting.
I don't understand why you think this would prevent them from spamming people. The short TTLs are on domains like omdmfvimcwof.com. These domains are used only for communication within the Storm cloud. Sender addresses for spam emails are nearly always spoofed from 'real' domain names, which have normal TTLs (most spam doesn't require an email reply, so the sender address is almost always either completely bogus or just another random victim's address).
The only other DNS record you could use is the PTR records for the IP addresses of the client (if they even exist), but these will have normal TTLs, because they're not controlled by the spammers.
It's not an option to have matching PTR and A records, it's required by RFC 1912.Firstly, it is an option. I only bother to get my ISP to add PTR records for my mail servers, and that's it.
Secondly, if everyone does set up properly matching PTR and address records, how will that help?
The distribution vendors don't necessarily write the updates, but they do integrate them. A particularly good example is Debian stable, as the Debian security team backports patches if upstream doesn't. Other distributions may have a similar system in place for their stable or supported releases.
Even when that's not the case, the packager building and testing the package "works for" the vendor of your distribution. Even though they get the code from third parties, they're still integrating it themselves, building the package themselves, and making sure it conforms to the distribution's packaging standards. This essentially means the updates are all coming from the same source.
In a true third-party scenario, that last bit doesn't happen. When you get an update for e.g. Backup Exec, Microsoft hasn't checked that the update operates in the expected manner and doesn't do anything clever/stupid. You're getting an update that's been tested by Symantec in whatever environments they consider to be likely for their customers to be using, and that's it. They don't necessarily understand how Windows fits together, and they certainly don't use the same packaging standards that Altiris or Trend or VMware or HP or Microsoft do (just picking these companies based on what's installed on one of our servers). Most of the time this is fine, as even if multiple vendors do use their own clever but ill-advised hacks they're unlikely to conflict; but it can happen. Hence why dedicating servers to particular tasks is more common amongst Windows folk, because if a conflict does arise it's
While the Linux distribution model doesn't guarantee things won't interfere with each other, the fact that they are using common guidelines for how packages should behave greatly reduces the chances of problems occurring.
No, but I don't believe that you should be tortured for the rest of your life, either, no matter how much money you managed to steal. Get it? What the hell is wrong with you? I never said spammers should go unpunished, just that subjecting them to torture for the rest of their (artificially extended) lives is a pretty fucked up punishment, and in no way "fair" or "just".
I get what you mean by punishing a spammer for the combined loss suffered by everyone, but what I don't agree with is that a tiny bit of inconvenience can end up deserving of a punishment like this, even when multiplied by an infinite number of people.
Most countries don't have capital punishment these days, but even those that do for the most part a) reserve it for truly heinous crimes, like premeditated murder and b) require that the death penalty be carried out as humanely as possible. Those that don't have these sorts of provisions are seen as savage by most of the world. Even places WITH these safeguards are seen as savage by much of the world. How anybody can advocate a sadistic punishment like torture for any crime, much less something as mundane as getting a botnet to send a few million emails, is completely beyond me.
The term "spammer" seems to be used here a lot like "Nazi" (yes, I'm sick of this thread) -- to completely dehumanize those involved and make them into nothing more than monsters whose sole purpose is to generate spam. Sorry folks; spammers are people too, with friends and families. Most spammers are reasonably intelligent people, capable of doing a lot of things besides spamming. Do you really think the best solution we can come up with is to put their families through the kind of hell they'd suffer by having someone they care about taken off to the torture chamber for the rest of their lives?
If your answer is yes -- well, I'm glad the majority of society disagrees with you. Most so-called "civilised" societies these days spend a lot of time and money trying to rehabilitate people who do truly awful things, like, say, kidnapping, torturing and raping children. This is generally seen as a better approach than a "justice" system based on violent retribution, although it certainly has its flaws.
(Almost) nobody here wants death penalty for spammers because of spam in his specific mailbox.I really think you're mistaken here. This is slashdot: people here boo when the MPAA or RIAA sues people for illegally distributing their copywritten content on P2P networks, and cheer when they fail to enforce their rights to that content. Why? Because P2P benefits the people here, so they're opposed to anything that might stop it. Spam annoys them personally, so they're out for blood. If they didn't receive spam, I bet they wouldn't give one hoot about spammers. You just can't make a reasonable argument that spamming is somehow so awful it's deserving of death (or worse). Anyone saying that is clearly out for revenge, not justice, and not to protect society from the harm caused by spam.
Good point, but considering it at the "overall effect on society's progress" level makes it even more absurd to suggest such a punishment is somehow "fitting" or "just". Spammers are just fulfilling a demand; they and the people who hire them are profiting from it, and our society demands people do things that make a profit. The real problem is that they do profit it from it, but it just goes to show that not everyone hates spam!
I dunno; I really dislike needles, so I don't think "a days worth of spam" is equivalent. I'd liken it more to, say, hearing what Paris Hilton is up to, or seeing pictures of the latest trashy popslut everywhere I go. Oh wait, I see a whole bunch of that because it's what big media produces and it's hard to escape. Strangely though, I don't wish any of the people involved to be tortured for the rest of their lives, even though they're "making" me waste my time on stuff I don't care about.
What insulated lives us slashdotters do lead, such that a bit of spam is enough to make us wish horrible and inhumane things upon other people. No wonder so many people hate the Western world.
How is it "destroying the potential of the internet"? I think the "legitimate" advertising companies are doing far more to destroy the potential of the internet than a bunch of spammers, but even their efforts fail in comparison to the media companies desperately trying to hold onto their outdated business model that depends on the scarcity of a non-scarce resource to survive, or the telcos that are seeing the massive profits they forecast being whittled away by competition as internet bandwidth becomes a commodity item and are fighting to keep everyone else locked out of the game.
Anyway, a lot of what spammers are doing is just bringing the flaws in our practices to the public eye. Modern spammers use vast armies of botnets which seem remarkably easy to construct, despite years of concerted efforts to educate users and make programs and platforms more resistant to attacks. Imagine how vulnerable the average Joe Desktop would be if it wasn't for all the attention these antics have focussed on security?
Even if we get rid of all the spammers, there's still going to be people seeking to exploit computers in order to "get at" people; especially into the future where having control of someone's PC is going to give you access to a hell of a lot of personal information about them and their lives. If you think of it that way, sending a bunch of emails about viagra is a remarkably innocuous way of utilising a computer you've "pwned".
I think spam is a problem that needs to be overcome with smarts, not with psychopathic over-reaction to a few individuals who utilise flaws in our systems to profit. It shouldn't be possible to build these massive botnets, and if it wasn't for the botnets the spam problem would be essentially solved now with simple blacklists and community pressure.
Suppose I raped you with a banana. Would I deserve to be tortured for that? Quite probably, depending on your moral code. But I haven't done so, so what the fuck has that got to do with anything?
made YOU PERSONALLY spend 385 person-years deleting his messages. [...] Would you still feel that the spammer didn't deserve torture?Possibly not, but you've completely changed the scenario. If he was MAKING me do that for my whole life, then he'd have to be physically and violently enforcing it, because it's not something I would choose to do without some very strong persuasion. But then, he'd be doing a lot worse than merely using a botnet to send a whole bunch of emails, making it a completely different situation. Thus, my flippant rebuttal above.
So why do you think it is less bad for the spammer to waste 385 person-years distributed amongst many people?Partly because for each of those people it's a much smaller burden than that, and partly because nobody is MAKING anybody do anything. If the burden of deleting a couple of spam a day is too much for you, then find some software to help manage it, or stop using email. I don't like wasting my time watching ads on TV either; just think of the person-decades (centuries?) that have been wasted by advertising! Should everyone that pays for ads to be put on TV and radio be subject to torture for the rest of their lives, too?
Overwhelmingly though, the reason is because I'm not a psychopath. While I might be persuaded that society would be overwhelmingly better off if a particular individual was put to death, torturing someone for as long as possible -- even working very hard to keep them alive so they can be tortured for longer -- is completely fucking sadistic. What kind of human actually wants to inflict such things on another, especially for something so trivial as wasting a bit of their time? Or even a lot of it?
Plenty of people waste my time. Marketers calling up to try to sell their product. Users who ask me to show them how to do something for the 100th time because they're too fucking thick (or lazy) to remember how. Hell, you're wasting my time right now! By the far the biggest waster of my time though is me. It's just not that big a deal. Certainly I'd prefer not to receive spam, and not to have to spend time devising methods to make my computers not receive spam on my behalf, but it's not enough to turn me into a psychopath.
In closing, I would just like to say -- and this is coming from a guy who's posting in an utterly pointless thread on /. on a Friday afternoon while the rest of his co-workers have either left or are at the sundowner doing whatever it is normal social people like doing, and who's great plan for the weekend is to play IL-2 -- if you really think that the inconvenience of "having" to delete a bunch of unwanted email every day is somehow comparable to the horror and inhumanity of subjecting someone to torture for their entire life (and some of their unnatural life), then you REALLY need to get a fucking life. Either that, or you need some kind of counselling.
Sure spam sucks, but it's a pretty insignificant price to pay for the convenience and luxury of having something like email in the first place. I definitely advocating measures to catch the spammers; seizing their assets and ensuring they can't spam again (monitoring, imprisonment maybe) is a smashing idea. But torturing them is pretty sick.
Okay...
A truly just punishment would be to torture him continuouslySo wasting a bit of time deleting unwanted email is somehow equivalent to... torture? How do you figure that? How is that "just"? If you really think deleting spam from your inbox is somehow equivalent to being tortured continuously for "as far beyond a normal human life span as possible" then you must live a highly charmed life, indeed. Either that or your email client really, really sucks.
Probably hobbyists avoid it because of the cost; if you're looking for a Unix-alike which runs Apache, there's plenty of free alternatives which will do the job as well as OS X.
Why Apple don't use it... who knows. Possibly NetCraft is mis-identifying it and they are using OS X, but more likely it's simply that they built their site long before OS X was a viable stable choice, and re-engineering everything for no reason other than to say "we run our site on our own platform!" probably isn't that high a priority. Kind of like when Microsoft bought out Hotmail, and for a long time continued to run on FreeBSD.
That may be the best post I've ever read. Thank you, AC.
How is this flamebait? Inquiring minds seriously do want to know if the GP really is that dense!
I'm not sure how you figure they'd be "untraceable". I mean, they're selling stuff, ergo there's a money trail. It's pretty damned hard to be untraceable when you're receiving money, at least if you intend to be able to do anything with that money. The best you can hope for is to have the money trail go into a different & unfriendly jurisdiction (or several different jurisdictions) to hamper efforts to trace it to you.
people uploading millions of songs to the internetI think it's highly unlikely that any individual on the P2P networks is uploading "millions of songs", and it's also highly unlikely the volume an individual on a P2P network uploads even approaches what a for-profit DVD pirateer would be doing. It's certainly not the case for any of the well-publicized cases of individuals being prosecuted for sharing stuff on P2P networks.
The only reason an argument this weak is so popular with the mods is because it justifies them getting free stuff.I think it's also because it implies corruption, incompetence and/or misplaced priorities on the part of The Man, and everyone likes that.
It's hard to know what to "expect" if the law is enforced haphazardly. For example, imagine you're waiting at a pedestrian crossing and there's no cars around (but the "Don't Walk" sign is still lit), and there's a cop standing near you. You decide not to jaywalk -- just in case you get pinged for it. The guy next to you on the sidewalk ignores the cop and crosses the road; the cop sees him, but does nothing. "Fair enough", you think, "obviously that cop isn't enforcing jaywalking laws." So you start to cross... and before you know it, the cop's all over you.
Oh yeah, and the other guy jaywalking somehow made some money off of it while the cops ignored him, but you got busted. What's with that?
I've wondered that myself. Every story seems to have a "Firehose" duplicate of itself in the Related Stories section. It does seem a little redundant. Based on that, I'm assuming the "related stories" thing is generated automagically.
So what? I don't want to use an "open" office suite with a bunch of closed-source add-ons. What's the point of it being open in the first place if you need closed addons to actually do something useful?
It's only an "issue" if you for some reason think there should be closed source add-ons for it. To me, a license which prevents people from doing things the license was designed to prevent them from doing isn't "an issue", it's an expected and desirable outcome.
I like that you categorise "Halo 3" and "good games" separately. ;)
There is absolutely no way NTP can help with a timezone change.
Very nice. Now what about the rest of it, e.g. the bit where mixing tabs and spaces for indentation stands a very good chance of completely fucking you over if you ever decide to change text editor -- as your very own example makes so very clear -- and therefore it's pretty moot whether the interpreter can deal with it or not? Or the explanation as to why having to indent consistently makes a language an absolute no-go despite the fact you need to do it anyway to maintain readable code?
I really am curious about that last one. While I can kind of understand a gut-level "how dare the damned interpreter tell me how to format my code!" response, in practical terms it's just not a problem. I format the code exactly how I would if Python didn't require consistent indentation, i.e. the same way I do it in C or Perl, which don't give a hoot about whitespace -- because while the C compiler doesn't care about whitespace, I do.
Well, it would be cool to be sure, but I can't help but think there'd be an easier way to do this if you really wanted to set up a bartenderless bar.
It's part of it in a "the coin came up heads, so we decided to brand it as part of Office" kind of way, but not in the "it comes standard with at least one of the editions of Office 2007" kind of way.
Kind of like saying that SharePoint Portal Server 2007 is "part of" Office now, because they decided to call it "Office SharePoint Server" this year.
Then don't do a disc analysis! ;)
Alternatively, they could update the disc analysis software to know that fragmentation isn't a problem in flash drives, and not show it as red. Then everyone would be happy.
The problem with defragmenting flash drives is that it involves a lot of writing to the drive to shuffle bits around, which reduces the life (each cell is only good for a limited number of write cycles). So, you don't really want to make frivolous writes to the drive, because you're just shortening its life for no actual gain.
I think this is because Windows counts anything which is backed by a disc copy as being "swapped", which includes executables and DLLs. This wouldn't affect the flash drive though, as Windows isn't actually writing them to a swap area. I think it also lists it as "page file usage" even if the programs are actually resident in physical memory; it's more an indicator of what it could dump from memory if it needed to, because it can just re-load it from disc when it's needed again (which makes it kind of hard to work out if a machine actually needs more memory or not).
Shouldn't that be 8 spaces looks like the same as a tab? Nope, you're right, just checked it - WordPad does indeed use 6 spaces for a tab by default. Odd!
I guess this at least demonstrates why it's considered bad form to mix spaces and tabs for indentation: different editors and display tools have their own notion of what a "tab" looks like. Try opening a document you've formatted in WordPad using a mixture of single-tabs and six-spaces Notepad, and you'll see what I mean (Notepad uses the more common 8 spaces per tab). So, any concerns around mixing tabs and spaces are absurd anyway, because it's such a bad practice.
It's perfectly possible to write Python with any old text editor, just like it's perfectly possible to write Java or C# or Perl or assembly, but using an editor with some basic features like maintaining your indentation level will make it more efficient and enjoyable. Unless, of course, you either never indent your code, or haphazardly indent your code; but in that case, the quality of your code has some serious failings.
I'm not a "whitespace as part of the syntax" fanboy by any means, and it did put me off a little bit when I first played with Python, but the fact is -- it makes absolutely no difference. You indent the code consistently anyway, or it just becomes too unpleasant to read.
There's plenty of reasons to dislike Python, but saying "omg I'm not using that language because it requires consistent indentation of code!" just seems really bizarre. It doesn't make it harder, 'cos you're already doing it!