It's in the f'ing contract that, at the end of service, terminated by either you or them, you return the gateway or pay 500 bucks. This is hardly newsworthy.
NEWSFLASH! Company wants to enforce its contract! Film at 11.
At one stage, the US military designed a dirty no-holds-barred nuclear-propelled missile named (IIRC) Pluton. The main objection to that one was that the shockwave and radiation effects killed everything within a large number of kilometers of the flight path.
That was Project Pluto, which was, as you note, a hell of a lot more "dirty" than what NASA is proposing. The project started in 1957, and was canceled in 1964, after the USAF had determined that there was no need for such a missile, as well as the political fallout (sometimes puns are actually appropriate) considerations. As for the radioactivity, part of the plan was to have the missile drop its bombs where needed, then fly patterns over the target country (fUSSR, primarily) to irradiate it. Nasty stuff, that.
National Air and Space Magazine had an article on the project, but for the life of me I can't remember when it was published, other than over a decade ago. Their online site doesn't have a way of searching back copies for specific articles, and I don't presently have access to a library for more traditional research.
There's not too much of actual use on the web, from a "quick and dirty" Google search. I did, however find this, about the history of Lawrence Livermore National Labratory, which was involved with just about every nuclear program the US had. --
R_V_Winkle says: If your ISP is purchased by EarthLink then I welcome you to sample the services. From the most reliable mail servers in the industry to full-service and online management for almost all account features. Award winning technical support and customer service are only the beginning.
Yeah, there's also spam friendliness that will get you blocked from various networks all around the planet, thanks to ELN's habit of only replying to complaints of abuse from their network when their supposed anti-spam stance (from back when they took Sanford Wallace to court, mind you, quite a few years back) is threatened with exposure, or they're threatened with a listing on the RBL (auto-ignorebots don't count as replies).
And, at least in Florida (where a good friend has first-hand experience), in the Tampa area, the solidity of their dialups is somewhat dubious itself, dropping connections at random intervals, and providing slow connect speeds even when the local copper is in good shape.
That kind of crap is why I dumped my Mindspring address (well, that, and TigerDirect wouldn't stop spamming my address, after repeated bitchgrams to both TD and BellSouth, their upstream provider). Funding spammers and/or spam enablers is not something that sits well with me. (This post, ironically, coming from a town where UUNet dialups, like the one I'm using, are essentially the only game, if you want access to the rest of the world via a modem.)
SubtleNuance sez: It takes real scum (like you) to foist this kind of crap on the public, just to fill the corporate coffers -- You'll First Against The Wall when the revolution comes. It may even be soon - and trust me: it will come - it always does..
I seriously doubt there will be any "revolution" in the lifetimes of any/. reader or their descendants. Pople, for the most part, are lazy slobs. Revolutions take work, and of course "rock the boat," making life difficult. Lord knows we can't have that, as it'd keep people from enjoying their fat, dumb, happy spoonfed life brought to them by $MEGACORP.
I've seen the future. You know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin, sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing, "I'm an Oscar Meyer wiener." (brought to you, of course, by the same folks that get a European teen arrested and his equipment confiscated because the kid threatens their pseudo-monopoly.)
I suppose a discussion of the 2001 wouldn't be complete without someone bringing up that tired old saw about "HAL" being 1 letter ahead of "IBM".
Even if it's a load of crap that pretty much everyone involved with the story (both movie and book) has been trying to dispell since its initial release, over 30 years ago.
Yes, a lot of what's in the movie doesn't exist in reality, but, save for an artificially intelligent computer, all of those COULD have been if politicians had the courage to say "Let's climb that mountain, because it's there!" (like Kennedy did with Apollo), or enough citizens were unslothful enough to prod their elected officials into action ("action," in this case, being to take the fscking foot off the break pedal and ditch the governmental space oligopoly that keeps us on the ground as effectively as gravity does). That neither has happened isn't a fault of the technology, or the dreamers, but the status quo (maybe even intentionally, if you're a conspiratorial sort).
As a misanthropic sort, I can't say I'm terribly surprised that it's people who've let humanity down. I just pray there will never come a day where humanity dies out because we never bothered to leave the cradle.
Skim123 sez: I would bet Hotmail sells the email addresses. Sure, I've given out my email address to several porn sites, but I've always been very sure to uncheck the box that says, "Subscribe me to the prono mailing list." (Everytime, I swear!) And still... I get porn spam! Egad, it must be Microsoft selling my Hotmail email addy....
Umm, let's try to apply a bit of knowledge, hmm?
How much value would Hotmail get from selling its userlist to 2-bit pr0n spambags? Especially considering since many of them are unemployable beyond McDonalds, and even that's doubtful.
There's several ways for someone to get your address, without it ever being exposed.
1) Someone had your username before, and it was snagged for one of those "millions CDs" you see spams for now and again. The previous owner of that username bit-bucketed the account, leaving it open for someone else to take later.
2) As a variation of (1) above, they can take addresses that are known to exist at one domain, and try tacking the username onto another domain name. For example, if there's a "dan@ISP", they try dan@JUNO, dan@HOTMAIL, dan@YAHOO, and so forth. More than a few people recycle usernames on different providers/services, so this isn't as time consuming as one would think at first glance.
3) Dictionary attack. Spambag takes his favorite bit of Spew-O-Matic[tm] crapware and sets it to randomly thump on various common words/phrases by way of either VRFY or RCPT TO commands sent to the target, noting which ones come back as valid usernames. For a service like Hotmail, with millions of users, the value (as spambags see it) is rather high, as they can get a metric butt-tonne of addresses while setting their machine to scan while they sleep at night. (As an added bonus, from a spammer's PoV, late at night many admins aren't around, making for less of a chance of being caught.)
Continuing on with the less likely possibilities (far less likely, at that)...
4) Some low-level droid thought they could make a few bucks on the side, and snuck out a Zip disk full of addresses (even being smaller than a CD, e-mail addresses don't exactly take up a lot of space). They then take this disk and sell the names on it to some "e-commerce expert" (euphemism for a slightly higher-grade spambag), which leads to oh-so-enticing ads for "Hot cunny waiting for your dick!" and so forth.
5) Provider shares the address with another company, and it gets swiped from the second company's machines via the sloppy security implied by (4).
6) Marketing department looks at all those names, and thinks they'll all be interested in their Exciting Offer![tm], even if you said "not a chance would I want your crap" upon signup. (This isn't as much of an issue with Hotmail as it is elsewhere, IME.)
I'm sure there's other ways ones address could be leaked out without it officially seeing the light of day, but those are the biggies.
Dan "Why, yes, I have thought about it a bit. Why do you ask?" Poore
Sir_Winston sez: At least with snail mail I can go to my P.O. Box and weed through all the junk mail pretty easily. But I doubt the USPS is prepared for the onslaught of commercial spam such a scheme would engender. They may be used to delivering tons of the tangible stuff every day, but with spam it's always pointed out that it costs nothing to send spam ads so people send more spam e-mail than they could ever send spam snail-mail.
They'll just jack up the price of pretty much every non-bulk rate service. Why not bulk? Simple. It was the USPS, in conjunction with marketers, that made all mailboxes federal property, regardless of who paid for it. (Hmm... Does shoddy mail service really serve as just compensation as required under the 5th Amendment? ["... nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation."]) What that means, basically, is that you have almost no say over what's put into your mailbox. In essence, it was given over to the marketers, with almost no method of stopping the flow of drek*.
As I see it, this scheme is a combination of trying to find relevance in the 21st century and pandering even further to the marketroids in search of a faster way to shove their crap down everyone's throat. (How much you want to bet mass mailings are made cheaper than 1-to-1 mailings, via this service?)
Dan "Just IMO" Poore
* I wonder if Form 1500 (used to block snail-mailings that the recipient views as obscene; fortunately the interpretation of "obscene" is left solely to the recipient) would also apply to this system? After all, there is a physical paper delivery after the e-mail is transmitted, and that physical object is delivered in the mail like any other bit of junk mail.
CMiYC sez: I'd like to know why this group is so arrogant that they think their project is going to succeed
One could ask the same question about those who claim that they know this project won't work.
And, if you really want to get into a discussion about arrogance, how about all the "you suck because you're a Winblows luser!" penguinheads and devil worshipers out there, hmm? If that's not an example of "a feeling or an impression of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or presumptuous claims," I don't know what is. (Merriam-Webster OnLine; unfortunately it doesn't give a viable or obvious way to bookmark the exact query)
For the record, I'm one of those "Winblows lusers," though I am learning BSD on a "lab" box built from assorted fragments of previous systems. I don't use Windows because I believe it to be the best thing since sliced bread; I think there are some areas that truely and honestly suck boulders through a stirring straw, BSODs being the least of my concerns at times. I use Windows because it gets the job done, and without an excessive amount of hassle. Many here may poo-poo GUIs as "point and drool" or something similar, but guess what? It gets the f*cking job done. Most users (which doesn't cover (m)any/. readers) don't care about the legacy cruftage. They don't care about whether Microsoft is stifling competition (I think MS does exactly that, in spite of their NewSpeak-ish "Freedom to Innovate," but that's irrelevant right now), nor about the fact that even if they buy a barebones computer without an OS they're still paying for Windows because of obnoxious alternative-stifling contracts with computer manufacturers.
You want to know what they care about? They care about $POPULAR_GAME. They care about writing letters to grandma, $SIGNIFICANT_OTHER, or others. They care about being able to balance their checkbooks online. And, most importantly, they want to use their computer with little to no effort, instead of taking time to compile source code, install RPMs, or anything else that's part and parcel of UNIX and UNIX-like OSes.
And you know what? What they want does matter, because it's their wishes that drive the market. You (generic "you") can go on about how st00pid they are, how much they're "lusers," and otherwise look down on users who don't toe the $ALTERNATE_OS line (and that is how it looks to many who only use Windows, that the anti-MS people, as a group, are as sheepishly minded as the anti-MS people claim Windows users are), but the fact remains that they're the ones who are putting up the cash, and who create enough of a perceived demand to make companies want to provide a supply.
Now, back to the subject of this story, Open Windows. I'm not up on all the technical aspects, so I can't comment on that. However, I would like to see them continue, and even encourage them to do so. "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Lord Tennyson, Ulysses. Don't yield to the naysayers, folks.
For those of you posting to the general effect of "Why bother?", you should ask themselves a question, and be true to yourself (if no one else) when answering. The question is this: Why do you think it's important to put down the project? If you didn't think it was important, you'd just glance, say "yeah, whatever," then move on. You're not, though. You're taking the time (to varying degrees) to post to the uberthread, whereas just a passing glance takes a small fraction of the time, regardless of how much (or, more accurately, how little) thought and/or effort you put into your post.
doomy sez: What if Napster went off and hosted in Havenco on the territory of Sealand?
How fat a pipe does Sealand have? Even just providing a centralized list (or several, to be more accurate) of people with song X, and not actually CARRYING song X, with several thousand users per server (pre-lawsuit) that's not exactly an insignificant bit of bandwidth.
And, if you'll excuse my paranoia for a moment, how easy is it to pull Sealand's plug if they get deemed "too dangerous"? While the connection from Sealand is by satelite, the signal has to come down at some point and travel on physical wire/fiber.
Backhoe operator says "Oops, I didn't realize that data cable was there!", then goes home with a nice wad of $CONSPIRACY_THEORY_SUBJECT cash to buy little Suzie a new dollhouse.
Dan "Of course, at the threshold=2 I normally browse at I'm not likely to see this post, let alone any replies..." Poore
Anon sez: >Like there are robots exclusion standards in Usenet (x-noarchive), and >on the web (robots.txt), we should probably make some similar standard >for IRC. ---
Umm, sorry to burst your bubble, but those "standards" can be and often are ignored, making them as useful as the proverbial tits on a bull.
The "X" in X-No-Archive:Yes doesn't mean it's a header that MUST be followed/obeyed. There are at least several sites (one example off the top of my head being the one run by the postmaster of Missouri FreeNet) that archive posts marked with the no-archive tag.
As for robots.txt? If a company or individual really wanted to see what was on pages which were listed in robots.txt as "don't go there," there's absolutely nothing stopping them from modifying their scanbot to ignore the imposed restrictions. Hell, even spamware programmers can do it with their web harvestbots. What makes you think a company with $BIGNUM budget and loads of generally talented people can't?
I suspect that any such standard agreed on for IRC will run into the same problem: there's no penalty for ignoring the rules. As has been shown in other posts in this thread, the chatbots are already ignoring already-existing rules/protocols like "no bots," and actively dodging present bans/filters instituted by IRC network operators and the Ops in various channels whose main goal, in general, is to keep the available resources useable. What's a few more unenforcable (by the design of the system) rules ignored when on a quest for the almighty $CURRENCY_UNIT ?
Dan "Ok, who wants to start loading up chanel topics with Echelon 'key words'?" Poore
(Sorry if the lateness of the reply contributes to the proverbial beating of a dead horse, folks... my Winshit box died, and I've been knocking heads with it since the 26th due to time constraints.)
>Well the spammers are a happy lot with the $35 payment as Hotmail [as can be attested to by many >users] is the Great Spam Conduit of the Internet. Merry Christmas Spammers.
Actually, the domain doesn't even need to exist for spammers to use it. Anyone remember ybecker.(net|com), before it was registered by FREE (Forum for Responsible and Ethical E-mail, for those who may not know)? Or public.com, which is pretty much a dead domain as far as e-mail is concerned (due to "friend@public.com" forged into the From: header)? Paying for passport.com's registration fee doesn't really effect how often Hotmail is used in a spam run.
Besides, have you actually *used* the HM interface for sending mail? It's an exercise in masochism, even when sending one individual mail, let alone the zillions required to make a spam run worth it (to the spammers, anyhow). Even for the spammers stupid enough to use the HM servers directly, it's practically like painting a bull's eye on their back, thanks to the X-Originating-IP header inserted by Hotmail's servers.
Dan "I don't use M$ products because I like them, but because I need to" Poore
2nd offense: Confiscation of hardware, triple the 1st offense's fine (in line with the TCPA for the sender knowingly violating the law)
[here's where we start to differ]
3rd offense: Spammer locked in a cell with a 386 using a 2400 baud modem (I'd say lower but I don't think you can find 150 baud modems any more), being fed tons of spam to an inbox that only holds about 100KB or so, with bounced messages disappearing completely, never to be seen again. To get fed, the spammer must find the right message (out of thousands of choices) and reply to it, deleting the rest. Note that the 'send food' message won't have any identifying markings in the Subject line or From line to indicate it's the message that must be replied to for the spammer to get food, and may even be buried in a message with the subject of a spam the spammer him/herself sent in the past.
4th offense: Wait a second... how do dead people spam?:)
Dan "To keep this post on-topic with the thread" Poore
>Yes, spam is annoying, and so is junkmail, but >it's better for the environment. And since >junkmail is inevitable, you people who just throw >it away get off your lazy butts and recycle it!
If my snail-mail box gets full, say if I'm on vacation, the post office will hold the mail that doesn't fit. With spam, once my inbox is full, all mail gets bounced, and one doesn't have any indication that there was mail from others that wasn't deliverable.
Spam has not reduced the need for paper for snail-mailings. Almost all of the things I see advertised in spam were stuff that, if sent through the US Postal Service, would get the sender thrown in jail for various varieties of fraud.
Snail-mail ads are paid for by the sender, and help subsidize the postal service. Not so spam. With spam, the sender pays almost nothing, and shifts the costs onto the recipient, plus any servers along the way, particularly with messages relayed through unrelated mail servers that were, for whatever reason, left open to 3rd-party relaying. An estimated 15% of every ISP user's bill goes directly to handling spam, whether it's for better filters/blockers, more mail servers, or more bandwidth, or any combination of the above.
Spam is a threat to freedom of speech (not just the type covered by the US Constitution in the 1st Amendment, either), as people hide away, afraid to say anything on Usenet or a web page because they may get their address harvested by some wanker's spambot. With snail-mail ads, simply speaking in public doesn't get you added onto countless mailing lists and innundated with crap.
Slashdot Mirror
NEWSFLASH! Company wants to enforce its contract! Film at 11.
Sheesh...
--
That was Project Pluto, which was, as you note, a hell of a lot more "dirty" than what NASA is proposing. The project started in 1957, and was canceled in 1964, after the USAF had determined that there was no need for such a missile, as well as the political fallout (sometimes puns are actually appropriate) considerations. As for the radioactivity, part of the plan was to have the missile drop its bombs where needed, then fly patterns over the target country (fUSSR, primarily) to irradiate it. Nasty stuff, that.
National Air and Space Magazine had an article on the project, but for the life of me I can't remember when it was published, other than over a decade ago. Their online site doesn't have a way of searching back copies for specific articles, and I don't presently have access to a library for more traditional research.
There's not too much of actual use on the web, from a "quick and dirty" Google search. I did, however find this, about the history of Lawrence Livermore National Labratory, which was involved with just about every nuclear program the US had.
--
To which G-funk replied: :-)
So it would seem
You (and lw54) call yourselves geeks, and you don't even recognize a Star Trek (specifically, ST4: The Voyage Home) reference? For shame!
--
If your ISP is purchased by EarthLink then I welcome you to sample the services. From the most reliable mail servers in the industry to full-service and online management for almost all account features. Award winning technical support and customer service are only the beginning.
Yeah, there's also spam friendliness that will get you blocked from various networks all around the planet, thanks to ELN's habit of only replying to complaints of abuse from their network when their supposed anti-spam stance (from back when they took Sanford Wallace to court, mind you, quite a few years back) is threatened with exposure, or they're threatened with a listing on the RBL (auto-ignorebots don't count as replies).
And, at least in Florida (where a good friend has first-hand experience), in the Tampa area, the solidity of their dialups is somewhat dubious itself, dropping connections at random intervals, and providing slow connect speeds even when the local copper is in good shape.
That kind of crap is why I dumped my Mindspring address (well, that, and TigerDirect wouldn't stop spamming my address, after repeated bitchgrams to both TD and BellSouth, their upstream provider). Funding spammers and/or spam enablers is not something that sits well with me. (This post, ironically, coming from a town where UUNet dialups, like the one I'm using, are essentially the only game, if you want access to the rest of the world via a modem.)
It takes real scum (like you) to foist this kind of crap on the public, just to fill the corporate coffers -- You'll First Against The Wall when the revolution comes. It may even be soon - and trust me: it will come - it always does..
I seriously doubt there will be any "revolution" in the lifetimes of any /. reader or their descendants. Pople, for the most part, are lazy slobs. Revolutions take work, and of course "rock the boat," making life difficult. Lord knows we can't have that, as it'd keep people from enjoying their fat, dumb, happy spoonfed life brought to them by $MEGACORP.
I've seen the future. You know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin, sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing, "I'm an Oscar Meyer wiener." (brought to you, of course, by the same folks that get a European teen arrested and his equipment confiscated because the kid threatens their pseudo-monopoly.)
Even if it's a load of crap that pretty much everyone involved with the story (both movie and book) has been trying to dispell since its initial release, over 30 years ago.
Yes, a lot of what's in the movie doesn't exist in reality, but, save for an artificially intelligent computer, all of those COULD have been if politicians had the courage to say "Let's climb that mountain, because it's there!" (like Kennedy did with Apollo), or enough citizens were unslothful enough to prod their elected officials into action ("action," in this case, being to take the fscking foot off the break pedal and ditch the governmental space oligopoly that keeps us on the ground as effectively as gravity does). That neither has happened isn't a fault of the technology, or the dreamers, but the status quo (maybe even intentionally, if you're a conspiratorial sort).
As a misanthropic sort, I can't say I'm terribly surprised that it's people who've let humanity down. I just pray there will never come a day where humanity dies out because we never bothered to leave the cradle.
I would bet Hotmail sells the email addresses. Sure, I've given out my email address to several porn sites, but I've always been very sure to uncheck the box that says, "Subscribe me to the prono mailing list." (Everytime, I swear!) And still... I get porn spam! Egad, it must be Microsoft selling my Hotmail email addy....
Umm, let's try to apply a bit of knowledge, hmm?
How much value would Hotmail get from selling its userlist to 2-bit pr0n spambags? Especially considering since many of them are unemployable beyond McDonalds, and even that's doubtful.
There's several ways for someone to get your address, without it ever being exposed.
1) Someone had your username before, and it was snagged for one of those "millions CDs" you see spams for now and again. The previous owner of that username bit-bucketed the account, leaving it open for someone else to take later.
2) As a variation of (1) above, they can take addresses that are known to exist at one domain, and try tacking the username onto another domain name. For example, if there's a "dan@ISP", they try dan@JUNO, dan@HOTMAIL, dan@YAHOO, and so forth. More than a few people recycle usernames on different providers/services, so this isn't as time consuming as one would think at first glance.
3) Dictionary attack. Spambag takes his favorite bit of Spew-O-Matic[tm] crapware and sets it to randomly thump on various common words/phrases by way of either VRFY or RCPT TO commands sent to the target, noting which ones come back as valid usernames. For a service like Hotmail, with millions of users, the value (as spambags see it) is rather high, as they can get a metric butt-tonne of addresses while setting their machine to scan while they sleep at night. (As an added bonus, from a spammer's PoV, late at night many admins aren't around, making for less of a chance of being caught.)
Continuing on with the less likely possibilities (far less likely, at that)...
4) Some low-level droid thought they could make a few bucks on the side, and snuck out a Zip disk full of addresses (even being smaller than a CD, e-mail addresses don't exactly take up a lot of space). They then take this disk and sell the names on it to some "e-commerce expert" (euphemism for a slightly higher-grade spambag), which leads to oh-so-enticing ads for "Hot cunny waiting for your dick!" and so forth.
5) Provider shares the address with another company, and it gets swiped from the second company's machines via the sloppy security implied by (4).
6) Marketing department looks at all those names, and thinks they'll all be interested in their Exciting Offer![tm], even if you said "not a chance would I want your crap" upon signup. (This isn't as much of an issue with Hotmail as it is elsewhere, IME.)
I'm sure there's other ways ones address could be leaked out without it officially seeing the light of day, but those are the biggies.
Dan "Why, yes, I have thought about it a bit. Why do you ask?" Poore
At least with snail mail I can go to my P.O. Box and weed through all the junk mail pretty easily. But I doubt the USPS is prepared for the onslaught of commercial spam such a scheme would engender. They may be used to delivering tons of the tangible stuff every day, but with spam it's always pointed out that it costs nothing to send spam ads so people send more spam e-mail than they could ever send spam snail-mail.
They'll just jack up the price of pretty much every non-bulk rate service. Why not bulk? Simple. It was the USPS, in conjunction with marketers, that made all mailboxes federal property, regardless of who paid for it. (Hmm... Does shoddy mail service really serve as just compensation as required under the 5th Amendment? ["... nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation."]) What that means, basically, is that you have almost no say over what's put into your mailbox. In essence, it was given over to the marketers, with almost no method of stopping the flow of drek*.
As I see it, this scheme is a combination of trying to find relevance in the 21st century and pandering even further to the marketroids in search of a faster way to shove their crap down everyone's throat. (How much you want to bet mass mailings are made cheaper than 1-to-1 mailings, via this service?)
Dan "Just IMO" Poore
* I wonder if Form 1500 (used to block snail-mailings that the recipient views as obscene; fortunately the interpretation of "obscene" is left solely to the recipient) would also apply to this system? After all, there is a physical paper delivery after the e-mail is transmitted, and that physical object is delivered in the mail like any other bit of junk mail.
I'd like to know why this group is so arrogant that they think their project is going to succeed
One could ask the same question about those who claim that they know this project won't work.
And, if you really want to get into a discussion about arrogance, how about all the "you suck because you're a Winblows luser!" penguinheads and devil worshipers out there, hmm? If that's not an example of "a feeling or an impression of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or presumptuous claims," I don't know what is. (Merriam-Webster OnLine; unfortunately it doesn't give a viable or obvious way to bookmark the exact query)
For the record, I'm one of those "Winblows lusers," though I am learning BSD on a "lab" box built from assorted fragments of previous systems. I don't use Windows because I believe it to be the best thing since sliced bread; I think there are some areas that truely and honestly suck boulders through a stirring straw, BSODs being the least of my concerns at times. I use Windows because it gets the job done, and without an excessive amount of hassle. Many here may poo-poo GUIs as "point and drool" or something similar, but guess what? It gets the f*cking job done. Most users (which doesn't cover (m)any /. readers) don't care about the legacy cruftage. They don't care about whether Microsoft is stifling competition (I think MS does exactly that, in spite of their NewSpeak-ish "Freedom to Innovate," but that's irrelevant right now), nor about the fact that even if they buy a barebones computer without an OS they're still paying for Windows because of obnoxious alternative-stifling contracts with computer manufacturers.
You want to know what they care about? They care about $POPULAR_GAME. They care about writing letters to grandma, $SIGNIFICANT_OTHER, or others. They care about being able to balance their checkbooks online. And, most importantly, they want to use their computer with little to no effort, instead of taking time to compile source code, install RPMs, or anything else that's part and parcel of UNIX and UNIX-like OSes.
And you know what? What they want does matter, because it's their wishes that drive the market. You (generic "you") can go on about how st00pid they are, how much they're "lusers," and otherwise look down on users who don't toe the $ALTERNATE_OS line (and that is how it looks to many who only use Windows, that the anti-MS people, as a group, are as sheepishly minded as the anti-MS people claim Windows users are), but the fact remains that they're the ones who are putting up the cash, and who create enough of a perceived demand to make companies want to provide a supply.
Now, back to the subject of this story, Open Windows. I'm not up on all the technical aspects, so I can't comment on that. However, I would like to see them continue, and even encourage them to do so. "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Lord Tennyson, Ulysses. Don't yield to the naysayers, folks.
For those of you posting to the general effect of "Why bother?", you should ask themselves a question, and be true to yourself (if no one else) when answering. The question is this: Why do you think it's important to put down the project? If you didn't think it was important, you'd just glance, say "yeah, whatever," then move on. You're not, though. You're taking the time (to varying degrees) to post to the uberthread, whereas just a passing glance takes a small fraction of the time, regardless of how much (or, more accurately, how little) thought and/or effort you put into your post.
Dan "Think about it" Poore
What if Napster went off and hosted in Havenco on the territory of Sealand?
How fat a pipe does Sealand have? Even just providing a centralized list (or several, to be more accurate) of people with song X, and not actually CARRYING song X, with several thousand users per server (pre-lawsuit) that's not exactly an insignificant bit of bandwidth.
And, if you'll excuse my paranoia for a moment, how easy is it to pull Sealand's plug if they get deemed "too dangerous"? While the connection from Sealand is by satelite, the signal has to come down at some point and travel on physical wire/fiber.
Backhoe operator says "Oops, I didn't realize that data cable was there!", then goes home with a nice wad of $CONSPIRACY_THEORY_SUBJECT cash to buy little Suzie a new dollhouse.
Dan "Of course, at the threshold=2 I normally browse at I'm not likely to see this post, let alone any replies..." Poore
Anon sez:
>Like there are robots exclusion standards in Usenet (x-noarchive), and
>on the web (robots.txt), we should probably make some similar standard
>for IRC.
---
Umm, sorry to burst your bubble, but those "standards" can be and often are ignored, making them as useful as the proverbial tits on a bull.
The "X" in X-No-Archive:Yes doesn't mean it's a header that MUST be followed/obeyed. There are at least several sites (one example off the top of my head being the one run by the postmaster of Missouri FreeNet) that archive posts marked with the no-archive tag.
As for robots.txt? If a company or individual really wanted to see what was on pages which were listed in robots.txt as "don't go there," there's absolutely nothing stopping them from modifying their scanbot to ignore the imposed restrictions. Hell, even spamware programmers can do it with their web harvestbots. What makes you think a company with $BIGNUM budget and loads of generally talented people can't?
I suspect that any such standard agreed on for IRC will run into the same problem: there's no penalty for ignoring the rules. As has been shown in other posts in this thread, the chatbots are already ignoring already-existing rules/protocols like "no bots," and actively dodging present bans/filters instituted by IRC network operators and the Ops in various channels whose main goal, in general, is to keep the available resources useable. What's a few more unenforcable (by the design of the system) rules ignored when on a quest for the almighty $CURRENCY_UNIT ?
Dan "Ok, who wants to start loading up chanel topics with Echelon 'key words'?" Poore
(Sorry if the lateness of the reply contributes to the proverbial beating of a dead horse, folks... my Winshit box died, and I've been knocking heads with it since the 26th due to time constraints.)
>Well the spammers are a happy lot with the $35 payment as Hotmail [as can be attested to by many
>users] is the Great Spam Conduit of the Internet. Merry Christmas Spammers.
Actually, the domain doesn't even need to exist for spammers to use it. Anyone remember ybecker.(net|com), before it was registered by FREE (Forum for Responsible and Ethical E-mail, for those who may not know)? Or public.com, which is pretty much a dead domain as far as e-mail is concerned (due to "friend@public.com" forged into the From: header)? Paying for passport.com's registration fee doesn't really effect how often Hotmail is used in a spam run.
Besides, have you actually *used* the HM interface for sending mail? It's an exercise in masochism, even when sending one individual mail, let alone the zillions required to make a spam run worth it (to the spammers, anyhow). Even for the spammers stupid enough to use the HM servers directly, it's practically like painting a bull's eye on their back, thanks to the X-Originating-IP header inserted by Hotmail's servers.
Dan "I don't use M$ products because I like them, but because I need to" Poore
My 2 bits, WRT punishment of spammers:
:)
1st offense: Fine, say $1000 or local equivalent
2nd offense: Confiscation of hardware, triple the 1st offense's fine (in line with the TCPA for the sender knowingly violating the law)
[here's where we start to differ]
3rd offense: Spammer locked in a cell with a 386 using a 2400 baud modem (I'd say lower but I don't think you can find 150 baud modems any more), being fed tons of spam to an inbox that only holds about 100KB or so, with bounced messages disappearing completely, never to be seen again. To get fed, the spammer must find the right message (out of thousands of choices) and reply to it, deleting the rest. Note that the 'send food' message won't have any identifying markings in the Subject line or From line to indicate it's the message that must be replied to for the spammer to get food, and may even be buried in a message with the subject of a spam the spammer him/herself sent in the past.
4th offense: Wait a second... how do dead people spam?
Dan "To keep this post on-topic with the thread" Poore
>Eagle
Nah, not offing lusers. Just rm -rf'ing them.
Dan "Now
- that
is a LART" Poore>[T]he main difference I see between postal junkmail and
>Spam is the relevance of the material.
Does 5KB of porno spam take up any less bandwidth than 5KB of M$ spam?
Dan "The answer is left as an exercise for the reader" Poore
>Yes, spam is annoying, and so is junkmail, but
>it's better for the environment. And since
>junkmail is inevitable, you people who just throw
>it away get off your lazy butts and recycle it!
If my snail-mail box gets full, say if I'm on vacation, the post office will hold the mail that doesn't fit. With spam, once my inbox is full, all mail gets bounced, and one doesn't have any indication that there was mail from others that wasn't deliverable.
Spam has not reduced the need for paper for snail-mailings. Almost all of the things I see advertised in spam were stuff that, if sent through the US Postal Service, would get the sender thrown in jail for various varieties of fraud.
Snail-mail ads are paid for by the sender, and help subsidize the postal service. Not so spam. With spam, the sender pays almost nothing, and shifts the costs onto the recipient, plus any servers along the way, particularly with messages relayed through unrelated mail servers that were, for whatever reason, left open to 3rd-party relaying. An estimated 15% of every ISP user's bill goes directly to handling spam, whether it's for better filters/blockers, more mail servers, or more bandwidth, or any combination of the above.
Spam is a threat to freedom of speech (not just the type covered by the US Constitution in the 1st Amendment, either), as people hide away, afraid to say anything on Usenet or a web page because they may get their address harvested by some wanker's spambot. With snail-mail ads, simply speaking in public doesn't get you added onto countless mailing lists and innundated with crap.
Need I go on, Mr. "Just Hit Delete"?
Dan "Lumber Cartel (tinlc) Agent #571" Poore