Your analogy is great if we consider your wife's alcohol-induced infidelities as a one-time thing and thus your response is the product of an emotional shock. However, Mr. Spam Rage (love that title) had been threatening the small-penis spammer over a period of time. What would happen if several months after the incident with your wife, you called the guy and threatened him again? It would cast your response in a totally different light.
If El Rago del Spam snapped one time after asking Penis mailer to quit then I could see this guy owning up and saying, "wow, lost my temper; didn't mean it. Sorry about threating your company, spammers." and let it drop. But he did not, he continued to threaten over a period of time.
Much as I would like ot see rednecks with whichester rifles and Spammer tags, I think it's probably best if we continue to pretend we live in a society governed by the rule of law.
I am in a very similar situation to you (I have read your other posts under this article). I live in a rural area with a large number of wireless providers. Early on, access was fantastic - then mom & pop internet shops figured that by spending $300 a month for tower space and a bit more on equipment they could become "Wireless internet providers."
The story goes just like yours; about half the time my transfer rates are 1Kbps and below. Making matters worse are my neighbors whose shoddy installs leave their PCs polluting what little wireless bandwidth is available with ARP and NETBIOS garbage packets (actually, a signifigant percentage of the total traffic over a given 24-hour period will be arp spam and browser announcements).
The tactic I have taken is to petition the mom & pop providers to clean up their act via a professional organization to which I belong (for network geeks). This has been met with limited success. I have not been at it for long. If this tactic fails, I may go with the other poster's advice about the old microwave.
The next question is should corporations be even doing these sorts of things?
I am not sure.
You pegged me correct; I am a supporter of capitalism. However, I think there are a number of fundamental problems with the form of capitalism we practice today in the US. They all have to do with money and how corporations leverage unfair influence via the expenditure of money. Campaign finance, corporate tax shelters - typically things that you might hear about on the US evening news.
While I agree that these things need to change, to more specifically answer your question, I am not sure that a complete ban on corporate spending in the political sphere (PR included, yes, I agree with you) is a good thing. However, I can tell you that I strongly disagree with the currently US court sanctioned 'money = speech' interpretation of the situation. Corporations, the law be damned, are not people. They do not breathe, eat, feel or die. They do not require old age Medicare; they can go on forever. And they can get fucked if they think they are entitled the same constitutional 'natural rights' afforded to flesh and blood human beings.
It is a gray area.
I can give you an example I respect: Andrew Carnegie. The guy built his fortune with his own intellect; amassed enormous wealth. Towards the end of his career, he sold almost everything and tried to give it all away (he quickly found there was too much to give away - interest alone afforded him enormous wealth to his death). Perhaps this goes along with your 'no ties' train of though - perhaps not.
Non-profits DO gain from these corporations. But is it really worth it? If some company destroys some precious rainforest resulting in hundreads of millions of dollars of damage from an environment point of view (capitalists would consider the cost to be zero), and yet it donates 1 million to PBS, is that any good? Is that even desirable? If you accept the principle that donations are ok, you are indirectly supporting the existence of those enterprises.
My, I should really finish my first cup of coffee before posting in the AM.
I completely agree with your point (in the form of a question) regarding drug cartels and donations. That kind of thing would be totally reprehensible and anyone accepting monies from those types of organizations should subject to public outrage.
I look at the MS situation this way: when did MS make their money? Remember back in the day when they were the good guy? When they first licensed MS-DOS to IBM? In my mind, this move cinched the MS fortune. They stapled themselves to IBM's coat-tails in a way that guaranteed MS great profits for very little further investment.
What I am trying to say is that in the big picture of corporate philanthropy you will always have winners and losers. Large corporations are typically good competitors in the system of capitalism we have in the US. Good competitors mean you have losers. Having people who came up with the short end of the stick will guarantee there will always be questions raised about the legitimacy of corporate donations.
This is invariably a gray area both politically and morally, IMO.
I think your own examples provide supporting evidence that MS' misdeeds are clearly less gray than many other examples we might volunteer. For example, how would we feel about MCI donations. MCI is a company that belches dirty laundry to no ends. Several investigations and still they cannot come clean about their books. Would your non-profit feel comfortable taking their donation?
Okay, I'm rambling a tad. My point is that I agree with you, but I still say that MS is a much more suitable corporate donor than many companies in our midst who do exactly the same thing (think big tobacco or any pharmaceuticals manufacturer).
Similarly, the Gates foundation gave 100 million dollars to the World Health Org. over the past few years.
Comparing Gates Foundation charities to MS business practices is a lot like comparing the J. Paul Ghetty museum in LA to oil drilling in the North Sea.
We may disagree about the morality behind some of the world's larger fortunes ('behind every great fortune, there is a crime'). However, I question the assertion that the nature of these philanthropic ventures is forever tainted by the origins of their corporate sponsors. To say this is to say that Carnagie hall, the Ghetty museum I menioned previously and all the educational institutions the world over who have been the beneficiaries of philanthropic donations by some of the world's wealthies people are suspect and liable to be tained still by the monies that created them. I for one, do not agree that history backs this assertion.
Here's to looking that gift horse square in the mouth,
- RLJ
that even then, Kevin Tolley will still be ranting away in the pages of Network World about how much better Token Ring really is...
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Re:How to fix this problem
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 1
I am afraid you're never going to change the behavior of any large enough group of people to the degree you would need to in order to stop the threat (which is to say, 100%).
A better option is to do exactly what we have been doing: block the attachments at your points of email ingress. If you have to, use a router that does stateful packet in spection and proxy all your HTTP connections as well (to account for the web mail clients).
It sucks, but at least I know my router profiles are 100% reliable as I have configured them, I cannot say the same after user training classes.
I know this may be off-topic to the story, but does anyone have quick tips on how to play these DOS-age games on modern day OS's and hardware?
If you're running an SMP Windows box OR a P4 with "hyperthreading" turned on (and an OS that supports it) you will have serious problems playing most shooter games written for the 16-bit windows era.
This is what you need to do:
- Start your distraction of choice.
- Alt-tab to Windows and open the task manager.
- Select the "Processes" tab and right click on the process that corresponds to your game.
- Select "Set Processor affinity" and select CPU_0 (the first processor - sorry, I'm going from old neurons here).
That should do it - note this trick will not work with ALL games, but it does for some.
On the same off-topic note, there are a number of DOOM engine enhancements since the engine code has been opened. Google JDoom for starters.
The 'control freak' mindset is a good counter point to my original statement. Certainly large companies will have classes of users for whom a locked down solution makes no sense - developer groups, QA tester groups. Regardless, I still think it stands that for *most* user classes a locked down solution is a smart bet for managing security issues within an organization.
If you're a sysadmin wandering around in userland and somebody has totally overwritten the company provided OS with their own OS of choice, you have not been doing your job. Go take a 90 minute timeout and read up how to lock down your boot media on end user PCs.
The first thing that ran through my mind was, why are end users able to boot from anything other than the HDD sitting inside their CPU.
That's really interesting and all that some compnay someplace has users installing some flavor of linux. Whatever. I have a suspicion this has a lot more to do with sloppy admin-ing than it does 'leet end users.
I don't know how much longer I can take mom calling at 6:30 PM on a weekday and saying, "Hello son, how was work? My AOL intraweb is broken and I think it's because the Tivo has a general protection fault."
It is called focus and much like the parent poster said, if you do not have it by the time you reach college you will, with work, probably find it around the time you hit your late 20's.
This is true, but perhaps it illustrates an opportunity for developers of mailing list software more than it exposes a flaw in Earthlink's plan to thwart spam?
As a network admin, many of the remote users I support (sales reps, on-the-road types) use Earthlink dial-up while travelling. At times, some of the program's that Earthlink has used to stop people from using their services to spam have make my job harder. However, I do not begrudge Eartlink for these inconviences, at least they, as a major ISP, are doing *something* about this problem.
Quite a lot is open to interpretation in Article 1. This is why we have the courts, which, as I mentioned in my frist post to this thread, *interpret* the bounds of the constitution.
I'll make it simpler (clearly, the subtle nuance that life is not always black and white is lost on quite a few), here goes:
Does Article 1 allow you to shout "FIRE" in a crowded theatre?
This example should ring a bell as most people educated in the US will hear it as an example of the 'boundaries of article 1' when we are in grade school. At the latest we hear it in high school US history class (provided you're awake).
Thanks for taking the time to bring this discussion back a few squares.
-- RLJ
It has been said so many times in this forum alone...
Commercial speech is not due the same protections as individual speech.
As you are quick to point out, the US Constitution provides a number of checks and ballances for the individual; regardless, the courts have interpreted these rights somewhat differently with respect to business.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheers,
-- RLJ
+1, wishful thinking.
-- RLJ
If El Rago del Spam snapped one time after asking Penis mailer to quit then I could see this guy owning up and saying, "wow, lost my temper; didn't mean it. Sorry about threating your company, spammers." and let it drop. But he did not, he continued to threaten over a period of time.
Much as I would like ot see rednecks with whichester rifles and Spammer tags, I think it's probably best if we continue to pretend we live in a society governed by the rule of law.
Cheers,
- RLJ
The story goes just like yours; about half the time my transfer rates are 1Kbps and below. Making matters worse are my neighbors whose shoddy installs leave their PCs polluting what little wireless bandwidth is available with ARP and NETBIOS garbage packets (actually, a signifigant percentage of the total traffic over a given 24-hour period will be arp spam and browser announcements).
The tactic I have taken is to petition the mom & pop providers to clean up their act via a professional organization to which I belong (for network geeks). This has been met with limited success. I have not been at it for long. If this tactic fails, I may go with the other poster's advice about the old microwave.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Funniest /. post I have read in months.
I am not sure.
You pegged me correct; I am a supporter of capitalism. However, I think there are a number of fundamental problems with the form of capitalism we practice today in the US. They all have to do with money and how corporations leverage unfair influence via the expenditure of money. Campaign finance, corporate tax shelters - typically things that you might hear about on the US evening news.
While I agree that these things need to change, to more specifically answer your question, I am not sure that a complete ban on corporate spending in the political sphere (PR included, yes, I agree with you) is a good thing. However, I can tell you that I strongly disagree with the currently US court sanctioned 'money = speech' interpretation of the situation. Corporations, the law be damned, are not people. They do not breathe, eat, feel or die. They do not require old age Medicare; they can go on forever. And they can get fucked if they think they are entitled the same constitutional 'natural rights' afforded to flesh and blood human beings.
It is a gray area.
I can give you an example I respect: Andrew Carnegie. The guy built his fortune with his own intellect; amassed enormous wealth. Towards the end of his career, he sold almost everything and tried to give it all away (he quickly found there was too much to give away - interest alone afforded him enormous wealth to his death). Perhaps this goes along with your 'no ties' train of though - perhaps not.
Thank you for the interesting discussion!
-- RLJ
My, I should really finish my first cup of coffee before posting in the AM.
I completely agree with your point (in the form of a question) regarding drug cartels and donations. That kind of thing would be totally reprehensible and anyone accepting monies from those types of organizations should subject to public outrage.
I look at the MS situation this way: when did MS make their money? Remember back in the day when they were the good guy? When they first licensed MS-DOS to IBM? In my mind, this move cinched the MS fortune. They stapled themselves to IBM's coat-tails in a way that guaranteed MS great profits for very little further investment.
What I am trying to say is that in the big picture of corporate philanthropy you will always have winners and losers. Large corporations are typically good competitors in the system of capitalism we have in the US. Good competitors mean you have losers. Having people who came up with the short end of the stick will guarantee there will always be questions raised about the legitimacy of corporate donations.
This is invariably a gray area both politically and morally, IMO.
I think your own examples provide supporting evidence that MS' misdeeds are clearly less gray than many other examples we might volunteer. For example, how would we feel about MCI donations. MCI is a company that belches dirty laundry to no ends. Several investigations and still they cannot come clean about their books. Would your non-profit feel comfortable taking their donation?
Okay, I'm rambling a tad. My point is that I agree with you, but I still say that MS is a much more suitable corporate donor than many companies in our midst who do exactly the same thing (think big tobacco or any pharmaceuticals manufacturer).
Thank you for your thoughts,
-- RLJ
Comparing Gates Foundation charities to MS business practices is a lot like comparing the J. Paul Ghetty museum in LA to oil drilling in the North Sea.
We may disagree about the morality behind some of the world's larger fortunes ('behind every great fortune, there is a crime'). However, I question the assertion that the nature of these philanthropic ventures is forever tainted by the origins of their corporate sponsors. To say this is to say that Carnagie hall, the Ghetty museum I menioned previously and all the educational institutions the world over who have been the beneficiaries of philanthropic donations by some of the world's wealthies people are suspect and liable to be tained still by the monies that created them. I for one, do not agree that history backs this assertion.
Here's to looking that gift horse square in the mouth,
- RLJ
Cheers,
-- RLJ
A better option is to do exactly what we have been doing: block the attachments at your points of email ingress. If you have to, use a router that does stateful packet in spection and proxy all your HTTP connections as well (to account for the web mail clients).
It sucks, but at least I know my router profiles are 100% reliable as I have configured them, I cannot say the same after user training classes.
Cheers,
- RLJ
-- RLJ
Cheers,
-- RLJ
If you're running an SMP Windows box OR a P4 with "hyperthreading" turned on (and an OS that supports it) you will have serious problems playing most shooter games written for the 16-bit windows era.
This is what you need to do:
- Start your distraction of choice.
- Alt-tab to Windows and open the task manager.
- Select the "Processes" tab and right click on the process that corresponds to your game.
- Select "Set Processor affinity" and select CPU_0 (the first processor - sorry, I'm going from old neurons here).
That should do it - note this trick will not work with ALL games, but it does for some.
On the same off-topic note, there are a number of DOOM engine enhancements since the engine code has been opened. Google JDoom for starters.
-- Cheers,
-- RLJ
Thanks for the response!
Cheers,
-- RLJ
-- RLJ
That's really interesting and all that some compnay someplace has users installing some flavor of linux. Whatever. I have a suspicion this has a lot more to do with sloppy admin-ing than it does 'leet end users.
Cheers
-- RLJ
Thank you, that will be all,
-- RLJ
It is called focus and much like the parent poster said, if you do not have it by the time you reach college you will, with work, probably find it around the time you hit your late 20's.
At least, that's how long it has taken me.
-- RLJ
Cheers,
-- RLJ
- RLJ
As a network admin, many of the remote users I support (sales reps, on-the-road types) use Earthlink dial-up while travelling. At times, some of the program's that Earthlink has used to stop people from using their services to spam have make my job harder. However, I do not begrudge Eartlink for these inconviences, at least they, as a major ISP, are doing *something* about this problem.
My two cents,
-- RLJ
ANCHOR: Hey, Jesse, why do you think the government came after you?
JESSE JORDAN, SETTLED LAWSUIT WITH RECORDING INDUSTRY: Well, actually it was the recording industry association.
Kind of hard to tell these days, isn't it?
Cheers,
-- RLJ
I'll make it simpler (clearly, the subtle nuance that life is not always black and white is lost on quite a few), here goes:
Does Article 1 allow you to shout "FIRE" in a crowded theatre?
This example should ring a bell as most people educated in the US will hear it as an example of the 'boundaries of article 1' when we are in grade school. At the latest we hear it in high school US history class (provided you're awake).
Thanks for taking the time to bring this discussion back a few squares.
-- RLJ
Commercial speech is not due the same protections as individual speech.
As you are quick to point out, the US Constitution provides a number of checks and ballances for the individual; regardless, the courts have interpreted these rights somewhat differently with respect to business.
Regards,
-- RLJ
Cheers,
-- RLJ