GEE THANK YOU FOR SETTING ME STRAIGHT! I guess since 99% of the population uses it it MUST be good!
From where I'm sitting there is no significant difference between "APPLE QUICKTIME", "RealPlayer demon spawn" and "Microsoft sleaze". It's the same tune sung by different vocalists.
Silently not using certain players pointless. In my experience not using certain players and requesting media in other formats is not.
Oh, and when you actually take the time out of your busy day to spell out "thanks" you're a lot more convincing when you tell people to grow up.
I'd like to see the results of an IRS audit or some other conclusive proof, please. Until then it is very safe to assume that any claims she makes (particularly money-related ones) are fabricated.
Sure, but does anyone know when the PC version will be out? The Konami site says "TBD" for all of their upcoming PC releases now, however Silent Hill PC used to be marked as "October" and I'm pretty sure Substance at least had a quarter specified.
Oh well, seeing as how Splinter Cell PC is being released this month (a week after the XBox version) I think I'm going to tell Hideo Kojima where he can stick "Vamp the Castlevania reject" and all the five million senseless, unresolved plot twists of MGS2.
I'd publish the entire email she sent to me but there was recent discussion on slashdot about publishing correspondances that has me hesitating
She's an elected official writing to you while in that role to inform you of her official stance on an issue. Doesn't that mean your tax dollars are paying her to not only write those words but take that stance?
So much for "Lawrence Lessig: Superlawyer". Doesn't he realize that by the time his little idea gets passed into law it will have morphed into the Direct Marketing Association's wet dream?! Even the original is a law that fully legitamizes spam! Does anyone think that the $10k fine will make it through? Even if the figure itself is still around there's no chance of anything resembling teeth being left in it!
So what if it forces a majority of the spammers into using the [ADV] tag in their Subject headers? What is that going to accomplish? Yes, most ISPs will instantly block anything with [ADV] in the subject header but the spammers will still be using bandwidth to bounce endless waves of spam off of your filters in an attempt to get at the remaining mail servers which don't filter for one reason or another!
Beyond that, an [ADV] flag is content. As the subject of this post points out: The fight against spam needs to be firmly grounded in a lack of consent -- not the slippery slope which any argument based on content quickly becomes!
Spews.org, for example, blocks without any appeal allowed
Those listed in SPEWS are encouraged to post to news.admin.net-abuse.email with the specifics of their situation. In that froup the claims will be examined, poked, prodded and if possible shot full of holes.
If your claims can stand up to scrutiny in nanae then you can expect to be removed from SPEWS anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
The RBL has made life difficult for many companies. Once you are on their list it is difficult, sometimes impossible to get off.
Are you referring to the MAPS RBL? The RBL that has widely been considered toothless ever since it was sued into unblocking certain spammers? The RBL previously run by the same Paul Vixie who has been caught with his pants down knowingly hosting spammers for the right price? The RBL which previously employed the two patsies who have been "cleaning up" spamhaus PostmasterGeneral/Mindshare Designs for roughly a year now with no results beyond a lot of cashed paychecks?
No? Then perhaps you're talking about the MAPS RBL that patiently strives to list only spammers and works tirelessly to ensure that the owner of every listed IP is given ample notification and opportunity to realize the course they were headed on and avert it? The RBL which is always willing to have secret negotiations with spammers and spam supporters; To work things out and smooth things over; To make exceptions for any number of reasons not given out to the unwashed masses?
Nope, doesn't sound like you're talking about that particular MAPS RBL either. It sounds more like you're talking about an RBL that you have fabricated from whole cloth without any external stimuli.
It's an MMORPG. You think the company running it gives a good god damn about you? Sorry, but they're only interested in seeing how little service they can provide before people start dropping it en masse.
Maybe you should have thought about the possibility of something like this before you wasted all that time. Ever read the EULA?
I think Weisman would make an excellent owner for the RPG parts of WoTC. WizKids seems to be doing fine with Shadowrun -- having the good sense to farm it out to Fantasy Productions which in turn had the good sense to create a US subsidiary (FanPro LLC) and hire back some of the people who were working on it at FASA. WizKid's Classic Battletech miniatures seem to be widely appreciated as well.
On the other hand, Ryan Dancey is the last person I would want to see owning D&D. As someone posted above, the OGL is a real mess.
I'd rather pay $40 up front and never pay another dime again but still enjoy years of gameplay -- the way PC games have been for a while now. MMORPGs are outrageously overpriced and the only reason they're currently successful is because of the addicts.
Actually Cowles and the other spammers quoted probably consider this article a slam dunk. Maybe the Direct Marketing Association doesn't care for it, but hardcore spammers like these guys don't give a fuck about what kind of publicity they get. As long as the articles don't question their fabricated profit figures or their claims about how good they are at getting past spam countermeasures they can make vague noises about how sleazy spammers are all day long.
Spammers cater to a clientel which does not care about such PR niceties. When you hire Empire Towers or any of these other hardcore spam gangs you know EXACTLY what you're paying for: Getting your ads out to as many e-mail addresses as possible as quickly as possible by any means necessary.
Congratulations, you have a "criminal". Now just go find all the evidence that all the other spammers in the article are also convcted and you can have the shiny new "s" to put on the end.
The plural was not meant to refer to the other spammers in the article but was meant as more of a general statement. If taking THIS criminal's point of view so seriously that he gets most of the quotes in the article and is never disputed then why not any other criminals? In many cases this isn't an issue, but spamming isn't a widely or easily understood issue. Printing spammer quotes as if they were holy writ is irresponsible journalism no matter how you slice it.
Your assertion that ROKSO is "biased" would be funny if it wasn't so stupid. Have you even looked at the site? It's almost entirely composed of hard facts put together through hours of research. This isn't stuff you can "spin" or fabricate because it can all be independantly verified. Do you consider the phone book or the dictionary to be "biased" as well?
If you're really so fascinated by the spammer point of view you can find it by simply contacting the next person who spams you. Go ahead, try it! It's not too hard as they're almost always selling something and they usually have an 800 number. Give them a ring and quiz them yourself instead of relying on some journalist to spoon-feed you! I'm sure they'll be happy to expound on how your address will be list-washed or how you "must have subscribed and forgot" or how you can go fuck yourself if you don't appreciate getting their spam.
Also, It is questionable at best whether these people are criminals.
Did you read the usenet post I linked to in my original message? Did you even read the article this/. story is about? According to evidence gathered by Spamhaus' Registry of Known Spammers, Thomas Cowles (the spammer quoted more than anyone else in the article) has been convicted of burglary, theft, fraud and passing bad checks. He successfully evaded the law for a while after a warrant was issued for his arrest during the burglary/theft case. When they finally caught him he was trying to hide behind some shelving in an office unit his company was renting.
I don't endorse demonizing spammers. Anyone bothering to do their homework will see that most spammers do more than enough to ruin their reputations without any outside help.
As far as what the journalist can and can't do, a journalist can choose who he will quote and to what extent he will quote them. He can also subtly influence people's opinions by using terms like "spam king" and "vigalante", or by glossing over and failing to mention important facts.
More facts on this are available at here and here. Please read them so as not to waste my time with more worthless conjecture.
I guess you'd also condone it if Time interviewed Linus about Linux on the desktop and then "quietly excised" what he said because, to them, he is obviously wrong/lying
While that's a nice distortion of what I wrote (such integrity!) you know as well as I do that this kind of manipulation has nothing to do with fact checking. If you're doing an article in which you interview a Worldcom executive who tells you that Worldcom is $x billion in the black are you going to simply print that without doing any additional research? Using the headline "Worldcom Doing Fine"?
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth. I never said I wanted to know the author's personal biases and opinions yet you repeatedly have replied as if I'm asking for an editorial. I just want more depth, because it's obvious that examining many of the claims made by the spammers would have revealed some very interesting facts.
If the author could manage to call the spammers "spam kings" who make "millions" and the anti-spammers "vigalantes" who "hound" why couldn't he quote Karen Hoffmann?
I love facts. But save the "just parroting back what they said" excuse for when you're talking about a pure interview. An article where you actually write things in addition to what your sources give you is supposed to have more to it than simply a lot of "he said, she said".
Taking an unbiased view is great, getting the facts is also great. But interviews with spammers are going to render very few facts and just because it's in quotes doesn't give the journalist an excuse to throw up their hands and deny all responsibility. As the link I gave shows, there is a wealth of facts out there that completely shoot holes in what the spammers said. I'm not saying that these facts needed to be included, however I am saying that the journalist should have done his homework then quietly excised the quotes featuring things that turned out to be bald-faced lies.
I never said the article was biased, I did however imply that the article was poorly researched. Is it too much to ask that a journalist check facts before extensively quoting a criminal?
This AP article has been making the rounds. It's rather shoddy journalism in that it takes the words of the spammers completely at face value. Seeing as how Rule #1 is "spammers lie" you can imagine how well this approach works.
Consider that there will be no technical support for this software outside community-based support, such as you would find in the Software Colloquium or at Mozilla.org itself. In theory, Netscape Navigator is the finished, polished product, not Mozilla.
Supposedly this is the big reason why businesses should deploy Communicator rather than Mozilla however Netscape hasn't provided support for Navigator/Communicator in many years (probably since they stopped offering a license you could purchase). Since the EULA disclaims any and all responsibility anyway it's not like there's even a legal ass-covering reason to use Communicator over Mozilla.
Where I work we're happily deploying Mozilla 1.0 in place of old Communicator 4 installations. It's working great and since lack of support is par for the course anyway all we're missing out on is a lot of ads and AOL garbage.
Oh sure, everybody bitches about how bad this or that interface is but it seems that the louder they bitch the less they have to offer in the way of a solution -- let alone a solution that will please every other loudmouthed interface snob out there.
So why don't we see more proof-of-concept projects to go along with these rants about how poor every interface ever created is? You can do all kinds of wacky things to the Windows desktop using LiteStep and you don't even need to be a coder! X is even more configurable!
Could it be that most of these whiners are all talk and no walk? Where were they when GNOME and KDE were soliciting ideas for interface designs anyway? The heart of the matter is of course that most of these interface complaints are from people who are supposedly "experts" but at the same time all of their claims as to how inferior this or that interface is are backed by little more than opinion.
I'm sure somewhere there exists the "technically perfect" interface design that is endorsed by all the research and all the statistics. I'm also sure that this interface is worthless in just as many respects as the existing interfaces are.
I only started reading in '91 or so, but AFAICR prior to the release of OS/2 Warp PC Magazine had plausible deniability regarding it's x86 and Microsoft biases: They were an x86 magazine covering the only viable x86 OS. At the time I considered this fair enough, particularly considering the high quality of the information at the time.
Of course after Warp came out it suddenly became clear what side PC Magazine's bread was buttered on. From where I was sitting this was the beginning of the magazine's slide into hard-core whoring, accompanied (conveniently enough) by a switch from a technical focus to a much more vapid "business oriented" style.
Slashdot Mirror
As the Coward pointed out: You're wrong about Nvidia being the gorilla.
Even if ATI was the top financial dog it doesn't matter -- both companies make most of their money on low end cards anyway.
GEE THANK YOU FOR SETTING ME STRAIGHT! I guess since 99% of the population uses it it MUST be good!
From where I'm sitting there is no significant difference between "APPLE QUICKTIME", "RealPlayer demon spawn" and "Microsoft sleaze". It's the same tune sung by different vocalists.
Silently not using certain players pointless. In my experience not using certain players and requesting media in other formats is not.
Oh, and when you actually take the time out of your busy day to spell out "thanks" you're a lot more convincing when you tell people to grow up.
Would it kill them to use a non-proprietary codec??
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
I'd like to see the results of an IRS audit or some other conclusive proof, please. Until then it is very safe to assume that any claims she makes (particularly money-related ones) are fabricated.
Sure, but does anyone know when the PC version will be out? The Konami site says "TBD" for all of their upcoming PC releases now, however Silent Hill PC used to be marked as "October" and I'm pretty sure Substance at least had a quarter specified.
Oh well, seeing as how Splinter Cell PC is being released this month (a week after the XBox version) I think I'm going to tell Hideo Kojima where he can stick "Vamp the Castlevania reject" and all the five million senseless, unresolved plot twists of MGS2.
What FM card do you use?
Well if there's an enable/disable for prefetching it's sure to be accessable via the best Mozilla plug-in ever!
I'd publish the entire email she sent to me but there was recent discussion on slashdot about publishing correspondances that has me hesitating
She's an elected official writing to you while in that role to inform you of her official stance on an issue. Doesn't that mean your tax dollars are paying her to not only write those words but take that stance?
Don't be shy!
Screw those formats. Anybody have a DIVX, XVID or even just plain-jane MPEG copy of this trailer??
So what if it forces a majority of the spammers into using the [ADV] tag in their Subject headers? What is that going to accomplish? Yes, most ISPs will instantly block anything with [ADV] in the subject header but the spammers will still be using bandwidth to bounce endless waves of spam off of your filters in an attempt to get at the remaining mail servers which don't filter for one reason or another!
Beyond that, an [ADV] flag is content. As the subject of this post points out: The fight against spam needs to be firmly grounded in a lack of consent -- not the slippery slope which any argument based on content quickly becomes!
Those listed in SPEWS are encouraged to post to news.admin.net-abuse.email with the specifics of their situation. In that froup the claims will be examined, poked, prodded and if possible shot full of holes.
If your claims can stand up to scrutiny in nanae then you can expect to be removed from SPEWS anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
Are you referring to the MAPS RBL? The RBL that has widely been considered toothless ever since it was sued into unblocking certain spammers? The RBL previously run by the same Paul Vixie who has been caught with his pants down knowingly hosting spammers for the right price? The RBL which previously employed the two patsies who have been "cleaning up" spamhaus PostmasterGeneral/Mindshare Designs for roughly a year now with no results beyond a lot of cashed paychecks?
No? Then perhaps you're talking about the MAPS RBL that patiently strives to list only spammers and works tirelessly to ensure that the owner of every listed IP is given ample notification and opportunity to realize the course they were headed on and avert it? The RBL which is always willing to have secret negotiations with spammers and spam supporters; To work things out and smooth things over; To make exceptions for any number of reasons not given out to the unwashed masses?
Nope, doesn't sound like you're talking about that particular MAPS RBL either. It sounds more like you're talking about an RBL that you have fabricated from whole cloth without any external stimuli.
Quit talking out of your ass.
It's an MMORPG. You think the company running it gives a good god damn about you? Sorry, but they're only interested in seeing how little service they can provide before people start dropping it en masse.
Maybe you should have thought about the possibility of something like this before you wasted all that time. Ever read the EULA?
I think Weisman would make an excellent owner for the RPG parts of WoTC. WizKids seems to be doing fine with Shadowrun -- having the good sense to farm it out to Fantasy Productions which in turn had the good sense to create a US subsidiary (FanPro LLC) and hire back some of the people who were working on it at FASA. WizKid's Classic Battletech miniatures seem to be widely appreciated as well.
On the other hand, Ryan Dancey is the last person I would want to see owning D&D. As someone posted above, the OGL is a real mess.
I'd rather pay $40 up front and never pay another dime again but still enjoy years of gameplay -- the way PC games have been for a while now. MMORPGs are outrageously overpriced and the only reason they're currently successful is because of the addicts.
Actually Cowles and the other spammers quoted probably consider this article a slam dunk. Maybe the Direct Marketing Association doesn't care for it, but hardcore spammers like these guys don't give a fuck about what kind of publicity they get. As long as the articles don't question their fabricated profit figures or their claims about how good they are at getting past spam countermeasures they can make vague noises about how sleazy spammers are all day long.
Spammers cater to a clientel which does not care about such PR niceties. When you hire Empire Towers or any of these other hardcore spam gangs you know EXACTLY what you're paying for: Getting your ads out to as many e-mail addresses as possible as quickly as possible by any means necessary.
Congratulations, you have a "criminal". Now just go find all the evidence that all the other spammers in the article are also convcted and you can have the shiny new "s" to put on the end.
The plural was not meant to refer to the other spammers in the article but was meant as more of a general statement. If taking THIS criminal's point of view so seriously that he gets most of the quotes in the article and is never disputed then why not any other criminals? In many cases this isn't an issue, but spamming isn't a widely or easily understood issue. Printing spammer quotes as if they were holy writ is irresponsible journalism no matter how you slice it.
Your assertion that ROKSO is "biased" would be funny if it wasn't so stupid. Have you even looked at the site? It's almost entirely composed of hard facts put together through hours of research. This isn't stuff you can "spin" or fabricate because it can all be independantly verified. Do you consider the phone book or the dictionary to be "biased" as well?
If you're really so fascinated by the spammer point of view you can find it by simply contacting the next person who spams you. Go ahead, try it! It's not too hard as they're almost always selling something and they usually have an 800 number. Give them a ring and quiz them yourself instead of relying on some journalist to spoon-feed you! I'm sure they'll be happy to expound on how your address will be list-washed or how you "must have subscribed and forgot" or how you can go fuck yourself if you don't appreciate getting their spam.
Also, It is questionable at best whether these people are criminals.
Did you read the usenet post I linked to in my original message? Did you even read the article this /. story is about? According to evidence gathered by Spamhaus' Registry of Known Spammers, Thomas Cowles (the spammer quoted more than anyone else in the article) has been convicted of burglary, theft, fraud and passing bad checks. He successfully evaded the law for a while after a warrant was issued for his arrest during the burglary/theft case. When they finally caught him he was trying to hide behind some shelving in an office unit his company was renting.
I don't endorse demonizing spammers. Anyone bothering to do their homework will see that most spammers do more than enough to ruin their reputations without any outside help.
As far as what the journalist can and can't do, a journalist can choose who he will quote and to what extent he will quote them. He can also subtly influence people's opinions by using terms like "spam king" and "vigalante", or by glossing over and failing to mention important facts.
More facts on this are available at here and here. Please read them so as not to waste my time with more worthless conjecture.
I guess you'd also condone it if Time interviewed Linus about Linux on the desktop and then "quietly excised" what he said because, to them, he is obviously wrong/lying
While that's a nice distortion of what I wrote (such integrity!) you know as well as I do that this kind of manipulation has nothing to do with fact checking. If you're doing an article in which you interview a Worldcom executive who tells you that Worldcom is $x billion in the black are you going to simply print that without doing any additional research? Using the headline "Worldcom Doing Fine"?
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth. I never said I wanted to know the author's personal biases and opinions yet you repeatedly have replied as if I'm asking for an editorial. I just want more depth, because it's obvious that examining many of the claims made by the spammers would have revealed some very interesting facts.
If the author could manage to call the spammers "spam kings" who make "millions" and the anti-spammers "vigalantes" who "hound" why couldn't he quote Karen Hoffmann?
I love facts. But save the "just parroting back what they said" excuse for when you're talking about a pure interview. An article where you actually write things in addition to what your sources give you is supposed to have more to it than simply a lot of "he said, she said".
Taking an unbiased view is great, getting the facts is also great. But interviews with spammers are going to render very few facts and just because it's in quotes doesn't give the journalist an excuse to throw up their hands and deny all responsibility. As the link I gave shows, there is a wealth of facts out there that completely shoot holes in what the spammers said. I'm not saying that these facts needed to be included, however I am saying that the journalist should have done his homework then quietly excised the quotes featuring things that turned out to be bald-faced lies.
I never said the article was biased, I did however imply that the article was poorly researched. Is it too much to ask that a journalist check facts before extensively quoting a criminal?
This AP article has been making the rounds. It's rather shoddy journalism in that it takes the words of the spammers completely at face value. Seeing as how Rule #1 is "spammers lie" you can imagine how well this approach works.
Consider that there will be no technical support for this software outside community-based support, such as you would find in the Software Colloquium or at Mozilla.org itself. In theory, Netscape Navigator is the finished, polished product, not Mozilla.
Supposedly this is the big reason why businesses should deploy Communicator rather than Mozilla however Netscape hasn't provided support for Navigator/Communicator in many years (probably since they stopped offering a license you could purchase). Since the EULA disclaims any and all responsibility anyway it's not like there's even a legal ass-covering reason to use Communicator over Mozilla.
Where I work we're happily deploying Mozilla 1.0 in place of old Communicator 4 installations. It's working great and since lack of support is par for the course anyway all we're missing out on is a lot of ads and AOL garbage.
Oh sure, everybody bitches about how bad this or that interface is but it seems that the louder they bitch the less they have to offer in the way of a solution -- let alone a solution that will please every other loudmouthed interface snob out there.
So why don't we see more proof-of-concept projects to go along with these rants about how poor every interface ever created is? You can do all kinds of wacky things to the Windows desktop using LiteStep and you don't even need to be a coder! X is even more configurable!
Could it be that most of these whiners are all talk and no walk? Where were they when GNOME and KDE were soliciting ideas for interface designs anyway? The heart of the matter is of course that most of these interface complaints are from people who are supposedly "experts" but at the same time all of their claims as to how inferior this or that interface is are backed by little more than opinion.
I'm sure somewhere there exists the "technically perfect" interface design that is endorsed by all the research and all the statistics. I'm also sure that this interface is worthless in just as many respects as the existing interfaces are.
I only started reading in '91 or so, but AFAICR prior to the release of OS/2 Warp PC Magazine had plausible deniability regarding it's x86 and Microsoft biases: They were an x86 magazine covering the only viable x86 OS. At the time I considered this fair enough, particularly considering the high quality of the information at the time.
Of course after Warp came out it suddenly became clear what side PC Magazine's bread was buttered on. From where I was sitting this was the beginning of the magazine's slide into hard-core whoring, accompanied (conveniently enough) by a switch from a technical focus to a much more vapid "business oriented" style.