It is FUD when you project it as being somehow realistic to fear the Islamists coming to the states and imposing their system upon the US. They simply don't have the ability to do that. Not now, and not any time in the conceivable future.
Have you not heard what these and other Islamic religious extremists have said about the U.S., and seen what they've done to U.S. citizens they've captured?
I have heard about that. I also am aware of the simple fact that they couldn't pull it off here, and that there is no evidence whatsoever to support the notion that they actually want to.
Furthermore I am also aware that "they" are not a unified group, as much as you want to suggest otherwise. "They" do not have a single agenda. "They" do not have the resources to extend their actions beyond a very small part of the world.
Have you not heard the numerous stories about schoolgirls being brutally attacked and maimed or killed for having the audacity to go to school?
So why do we care when it happens in Afghanistan, but not in Africa?
Can you not see that it doesn't take any imagination at all to see what they'd do to us all given carte blanche to do as they please?
... and back straight to FUD you go. How would the very small number of Islamist radicals be able to impose anything at all on "us all"? And how on earth could you possibly see anything I have said as being somehow similar to giving "them" "carte blanche"?
Is your head really buried that deep in the sands of denial?
No. I just dare to view the world based on facts rather than conservative talking points.
I'm not 'conservative' by any stretch of the imagination
Only by slashdot standards - where Reagan is a liberal hippie - are you not conservative.
That's a nice collection of conservative FUD you posted, there. No wonder you were quickly moderated up here on slashdot. You pretty much proved my closing point about the political bend of slashdot, even if that was not your aim.
How do we break the perpetual war cycle we are in?
I would suggest we start by throwing out the lobbyists for the military-industrial complex from DC, as they are the main profiteers of war. Once they are gone I expect the trigger finger will get a lot less itchy.
How about we just stop invading other countries where we know people don't like to see Americans? If we had opted out of the second Iraq war, we could have saved thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and our own collective faces on the international stage. To top it all off we wouldn't need to be having this discussion at all. We didn't accomplish anything with that war.
I know that is not a popular opinion here, but it is the truth.
There are plenty of used 83, 82, and 81 calculators out there. I made it through algebra and calculus just fine with an 81 (thank you very much) and they are dirt cheap on the used market. Unless there is something specific that a class needs from the 84, I would look to the earlier models.
You can't be good at tennis or chess on your first game.
Very true, but it's awfully difficult to learn tennis when you can only play against people who are in the ranks of Djokovic and Federer. Quake, all of its derivatives, and most of its contemporary clones generally had that kind of learning curve for new players. It did make the best players really exceptionally good (because they were always playing against other exceptionally good players) but it never gave anyone else a prayer of getting good.
Instead I just found a server with a nice community who helped me be my best.
Perhaps if I had been able to find such a community I would be looking back fondly upon Quake.
The changes sound like a good idea. I picked up a copy of Q3 a week or two too late and was never able to compete in multiplayer as I would be fragged into oblivion in the first.03 nanoseconds after connecting to a server. I quickly gave up and went to a different genre completely where new players were not punished so severely for not having camped out the night before release at Best Buy to be the first to own a copy (or for not playing 23 hours a day on a steady drip of red bull).
Now, this won't really bring me to the game as my life is different now than it was 15 years ago, but I do think the changes are a good idea.
I was forced (by moving) to switch from TWC to Comcast. I can tell you from experience that everything that is bad about TWC is at least 5x worse with Comcast. TWC fixed this in a matter of hours; if it were Comcast they would have billed the customers for the problem and it wouldn't be working until at least Monday.
Governments don't do that much for internet censorship. The more dramatic censors are the corporate players who are doing everything they can to prevent information from getting out that can harm them.
-22 F temps are normal for us in the winter, and I don't heat my garage
In MN the word "garage" has a rather specific meaning; a minimum of 4 walls (one of which has a door that a car can drive through) and a ceiling. Now, a garage in MN may - or may not - be heated or insulated depending on a wide variety of factors. Many are also attached to houses (or even tucked under houses) which generally makes them a bit less expensive to regulate temperature in.
But nonetheless the poster did specifically mention having a garage.
You dislike these words and refuse to use them. Which signals to management people that you are not management and should not be treated as part of their in-group. "gelling" works exactly as intended, in other words.
You have a valid point. However, slashdot is not intended as a forum for middle management to trade buzzwords. Slashdot is supposed to be for technical discussions. Arguably even if we can't permanently strike "gelling" from the English Language it should be reasonable to present an argument against using it here.
I am really, really, tired of that word. It is pitifully overused by management from one end of our continent to another. I just got used to being on a constant watch for paradigm shifts and now I am told I need to make sure that my team is gelling sufficiently. We need to campaign to have that word striken completely from the English language; gel should not be a verb for that sense.
I expect his file was probably indexed by a search engine (he does talk about it fairly often in his blog) and the botnet found it there. The botnet isn't smart enough to know that the email addresses aren't real - it only knows they are valid - so it went ahead and went for it. Hell if you were looking to compromise email addresses for your own nefarious purposes and had a small army of compromised PCs to attempt the password hacking, you wouldn't care if you were attempting to access valid addresses or not.
Online job applications are designed to make it as easy as possible for employers to trim the list of applicants quickly. There are a lot of people looking for not-a-lot of jobs. The logic here is that if someone can't fill out the application correctly they probably wouldn't be a very good fit for the job.
Now, whether or not that logic is valid is another question to ask.
You also cannot solve the problem by exposing, jailing, or murdering spammers (regardless of whether or not it makes you feel better) as it does not resolve the profit motive.
Increasing the expected cost reduces the expected profit.
And which of those actually increase the expected cost to the spammers? Most spammers are in second and third world countries that have no enforced laws against this anyways. In the highly unlikely event that one is actually jailed or killed, there are plenty more in the same country who aspire to follow in that person's footsteps.
Filtering only encourages spammers to craft ever-more-obfuscated spam to drive down the signal-to-noise ratio and improve the chances of their spam getting through.
Which takes resources, thus increasing costs, thus reducing the expected profit.
The investment for the spammer is trivial.
And does preventing people from seeing spam not "disrupt the flow of money"?
In many cases, no. Spammers are often paid for the number of messages they send out, regardless of how many turn into sales or are even read. The destination addresses generally need to be only valid for the spammers to get paid.
anything which makes the spammers' efforts a little bit more difficult or a little bit less effective contributes toward minimizing the industry.
If that were the case then why does the volume of spam - and the wealth of the largest spammers - continue to rise with every passing year? The only times that spam volumes have ever gone down are when botnets are disrupted (which causes a few days' stagnation) or when payments are interrupted (which causes a much longer stagnation).
They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees. They earn at the top of federal pay scale, with the highest taking home $148,000 a year.
I hadn't even considered applying for a patent office job before, but now they are definitely on my radar...
I agree, but the problem with spam is that it is just so goddamn cheap to send.
That is part of it...
It's not an economic problem like drugs are
I will argue that at the root they actually are the same. A spammer and a drug dealer have in common the motivation to make money. A spammer cares no more - or less - about the condition of the customer than does a drug dealer. For that matter, plenty of spammers effectively are drug dealers, spamvertising for sites that sell (often counterfeit) drugs online.
because it doesn't require the massive resources a successful drug empire does
While spam does not require much for resources, it does require an economic motivator. Spammers very rarely are webmasters themselves, they usually are paid by other companies to send out spam.
it's almost impossible to keep these guys down.
That's not entirely true. As I mentioned before, spammers do what they do for money. If they don't get paid, there is no incentive for them to send out spam. Disrupt the money enough and the spam rapidly drops. When we instead keep trying to come up with alternative hardware and/or algorithms for spam filtering and detection, we just encourage the spammers to find new ways around it so they can get paid.
They need to stop encouraging filtering. Filtering email will never resolve the spam epidemic. Filtering only encourages spammers to craft ever-more-obfuscated spam to drive down the signal-to-noise ratio and improve the chances of their spam getting through.
Spamcop and others, if they actually want to perform a valuable service, need to put their profits elsewhere. Namely, they need to start working on disrupting the flow of money to the spammers themselves. Spam is an economic problem. Treating it otherwise is just stupid. Spammers don't do what they do to piss you off (regardless of how some may feel otherwise), they do it to make money. You also cannot solve the problem by exposing, jailing, or murdering spammers (regardless of whether or not it makes you feel better) as it does not resolve the profit motive.
There are demonstrated avenues where one can disrupt the flow of (often illegal) money. If Spammers don't get paid, they don't send spam.
I've tried the free wifi at a number of Panera locations in different states over the years and generally found theirs to be amongst the worst of all free wifi setups. Half the time I couldn't even get a google search to work after logging in.
A week or so ago I recieved an email from microsoft telling me I needed to upgrade Skype on my smart phone; and that the version I was using would no longer be supported. I attempted to upgrade, only to find that the new version is too large to download and install on my phone as an upgrade. I then uninstalled the old version, and still didn't have enough space.
My solution at that point was to just stop using Skype.
That probably wasn't what Microsoft was aiming for, but it did change my behavior. Thanks, guys.
ICANN's primary objective - at least for the last 10 or so years - has been profit maximization. They have done everything they can to help registrars make more money without concern for the long-term consequences of atrociously bad decisions (such as selling gTLDs).
Slashdot Mirror
How is anything I've said FUD?
It is FUD when you project it as being somehow realistic to fear the Islamists coming to the states and imposing their system upon the US. They simply don't have the ability to do that. Not now, and not any time in the conceivable future.
Have you not heard what these and other Islamic religious extremists have said about the U.S., and seen what they've done to U.S. citizens they've captured?
I have heard about that. I also am aware of the simple fact that they couldn't pull it off here, and that there is no evidence whatsoever to support the notion that they actually want to.
Furthermore I am also aware that "they" are not a unified group, as much as you want to suggest otherwise. "They" do not have a single agenda. "They" do not have the resources to extend their actions beyond a very small part of the world.
Have you not heard the numerous stories about schoolgirls being brutally attacked and maimed or killed for having the audacity to go to school?
So why do we care when it happens in Afghanistan, but not in Africa?
Can you not see that it doesn't take any imagination at all to see what they'd do to us all given carte blanche to do as they please?
Is your head really buried that deep in the sands of denial?
No. I just dare to view the world based on facts rather than conservative talking points.
I'm not 'conservative' by any stretch of the imagination
Only by slashdot standards - where Reagan is a liberal hippie - are you not conservative.
That's a nice collection of conservative FUD you posted, there. No wonder you were quickly moderated up here on slashdot. You pretty much proved my closing point about the political bend of slashdot, even if that was not your aim.
How do we break the perpetual war cycle we are in?
I would suggest we start by throwing out the lobbyists for the military-industrial complex from DC, as they are the main profiteers of war. Once they are gone I expect the trigger finger will get a lot less itchy.
How about we just stop invading other countries where we know people don't like to see Americans? If we had opted out of the second Iraq war, we could have saved thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and our own collective faces on the international stage. To top it all off we wouldn't need to be having this discussion at all. We didn't accomplish anything with that war.
I know that is not a popular opinion here, but it is the truth.
There are plenty of used 83, 82, and 81 calculators out there. I made it through algebra and calculus just fine with an 81 (thank you very much) and they are dirt cheap on the used market. Unless there is something specific that a class needs from the 84, I would look to the earlier models.
You can't be good at tennis or chess on your first game.
Very true, but it's awfully difficult to learn tennis when you can only play against people who are in the ranks of Djokovic and Federer. Quake, all of its derivatives, and most of its contemporary clones generally had that kind of learning curve for new players. It did make the best players really exceptionally good (because they were always playing against other exceptionally good players) but it never gave anyone else a prayer of getting good.
Instead I just found a server with a nice community who helped me be my best.
Perhaps if I had been able to find such a community I would be looking back fondly upon Quake.
The changes sound like a good idea. I picked up a copy of Q3 a week or two too late and was never able to compete in multiplayer as I would be fragged into oblivion in the first .03 nanoseconds after connecting to a server. I quickly gave up and went to a different genre completely where new players were not punished so severely for not having camped out the night before release at Best Buy to be the first to own a copy (or for not playing 23 hours a day on a steady drip of red bull).
Now, this won't really bring me to the game as my life is different now than it was 15 years ago, but I do think the changes are a good idea.
This is *the* stupidest thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
You must be new here. What sites were you reading yesterday before you stumbled into slashdot for the first time?
I was forced (by moving) to switch from TWC to Comcast. I can tell you from experience that everything that is bad about TWC is at least 5x worse with Comcast. TWC fixed this in a matter of hours; if it were Comcast they would have billed the customers for the problem and it wouldn't be working until at least Monday.
Considering how awful QC and MTBF have been with Seagate in the past 10 years or so, I really can't think of a good reason to buy this drive.
Governments don't do that much for internet censorship. The more dramatic censors are the corporate players who are doing everything they can to prevent information from getting out that can harm them.
You are making the assumption that his garage is connected to his house and that he has an insulated garage door.
And you all are making the assumption that he even has a garage
Actually, in the comment that got this part going the author said
-22 F temps are normal for us in the winter, and I don't heat my garage
In MN the word "garage" has a rather specific meaning; a minimum of 4 walls (one of which has a door that a car can drive through) and a ceiling. Now, a garage in MN may - or may not - be heated or insulated depending on a wide variety of factors. Many are also attached to houses (or even tucked under houses) which generally makes them a bit less expensive to regulate temperature in.
But nonetheless the poster did specifically mention having a garage.
You dislike these words and refuse to use them. Which signals to management people that you are not management and should not be treated as part of their in-group. "gelling" works exactly as intended, in other words.
You have a valid point. However, slashdot is not intended as a forum for middle management to trade buzzwords. Slashdot is supposed to be for technical discussions. Arguably even if we can't permanently strike "gelling" from the English Language it should be reasonable to present an argument against using it here.
I am really, really, tired of that word. It is pitifully overused by management from one end of our continent to another. I just got used to being on a constant watch for paradigm shifts and now I am told I need to make sure that my team is gelling sufficiently. We need to campaign to have that word striken completely from the English language; gel should not be a verb for that sense.
I expect his file was probably indexed by a search engine (he does talk about it fairly often in his blog) and the botnet found it there. The botnet isn't smart enough to know that the email addresses aren't real - it only knows they are valid - so it went ahead and went for it. Hell if you were looking to compromise email addresses for your own nefarious purposes and had a small army of compromised PCs to attempt the password hacking, you wouldn't care if you were attempting to access valid addresses or not.
Online job applications are designed to make it as easy as possible for employers to trim the list of applicants quickly. There are a lot of people looking for not-a-lot of jobs. The logic here is that if someone can't fill out the application correctly they probably wouldn't be a very good fit for the job.
Now, whether or not that logic is valid is another question to ask.
You also cannot solve the problem by exposing, jailing, or murdering spammers (regardless of whether or not it makes you feel better) as it does not resolve the profit motive.
Increasing the expected cost reduces the expected profit.
And which of those actually increase the expected cost to the spammers? Most spammers are in second and third world countries that have no enforced laws against this anyways. In the highly unlikely event that one is actually jailed or killed, there are plenty more in the same country who aspire to follow in that person's footsteps.
Filtering only encourages spammers to craft ever-more-obfuscated spam to drive down the signal-to-noise ratio and improve the chances of their spam getting through.
Which takes resources, thus increasing costs, thus reducing the expected profit.
The investment for the spammer is trivial.
And does preventing people from seeing spam not "disrupt the flow of money"?
In many cases, no. Spammers are often paid for the number of messages they send out, regardless of how many turn into sales or are even read. The destination addresses generally need to be only valid for the spammers to get paid.
anything which makes the spammers' efforts a little bit more difficult or a little bit less effective contributes toward minimizing the industry.
If that were the case then why does the volume of spam - and the wealth of the largest spammers - continue to rise with every passing year? The only times that spam volumes have ever gone down are when botnets are disrupted (which causes a few days' stagnation) or when payments are interrupted (which causes a much longer stagnation).
They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees. They earn at the top of federal pay scale, with the highest taking home $148,000 a year.
I hadn't even considered applying for a patent office job before, but now they are definitely on my radar...
I agree, but the problem with spam is that it is just so goddamn cheap to send.
That is part of it...
It's not an economic problem like drugs are
I will argue that at the root they actually are the same. A spammer and a drug dealer have in common the motivation to make money. A spammer cares no more - or less - about the condition of the customer than does a drug dealer. For that matter, plenty of spammers effectively are drug dealers, spamvertising for sites that sell (often counterfeit) drugs online.
because it doesn't require the massive resources a successful drug empire does
While spam does not require much for resources, it does require an economic motivator. Spammers very rarely are webmasters themselves, they usually are paid by other companies to send out spam.
it's almost impossible to keep these guys down.
That's not entirely true. As I mentioned before, spammers do what they do for money. If they don't get paid, there is no incentive for them to send out spam. Disrupt the money enough and the spam rapidly drops. When we instead keep trying to come up with alternative hardware and/or algorithms for spam filtering and detection, we just encourage the spammers to find new ways around it so they can get paid.
They need to stop encouraging filtering. Filtering email will never resolve the spam epidemic. Filtering only encourages spammers to craft ever-more-obfuscated spam to drive down the signal-to-noise ratio and improve the chances of their spam getting through.
Spamcop and others, if they actually want to perform a valuable service, need to put their profits elsewhere. Namely, they need to start working on disrupting the flow of money to the spammers themselves. Spam is an economic problem. Treating it otherwise is just stupid. Spammers don't do what they do to piss you off (regardless of how some may feel otherwise), they do it to make money. You also cannot solve the problem by exposing, jailing, or murdering spammers (regardless of whether or not it makes you feel better) as it does not resolve the profit motive.
There are demonstrated avenues where one can disrupt the flow of (often illegal) money. If Spammers don't get paid, they don't send spam.
I've tried the free wifi at a number of Panera locations in different states over the years and generally found theirs to be amongst the worst of all free wifi setups. Half the time I couldn't even get a google search to work after logging in.
A week or so ago I recieved an email from microsoft telling me I needed to upgrade Skype on my smart phone; and that the version I was using would no longer be supported. I attempted to upgrade, only to find that the new version is too large to download and install on my phone as an upgrade. I then uninstalled the old version, and still didn't have enough space.
My solution at that point was to just stop using Skype.
That probably wasn't what Microsoft was aiming for, but it did change my behavior. Thanks, guys.
This must have been discovered by a Benz mechanic. Soda cans are far too proletariat for S-class owners.
Shouldn't there be something along the lines of
it hasn't taken much more than a text message to get inside Paris Hilton for years
By now?
ICANN's primary objective - at least for the last 10 or so years - has been profit maximization. They have done everything they can to help registrars make more money without concern for the long-term consequences of atrociously bad decisions (such as selling gTLDs).