Any rational person would view Gilmore's button as a political statement. Any reasonably intelligent person realizes that he can even more damage with his bare hands than a pair of nail clippers.
Can anyone find the errors in the statement above?
I wholeheartedly agree that in the fight against spam, the guy hiring a spammer is our enemy as well. However what's to stop me from hiring a spammer to promote my competitor's business, thereby landing him in legal troubles?
My guess this would be a public relations disaster for any company, and would probably result in massive trademark infringment civil suits and possibly criminal fraud prosecution as well.
I think it is documented that testosterone levels fall for men in stable relationships. (I just Googled for a reference -- the researcher you assumed just "theorizes" is probably aware of the results and how well documented they are.)
OK, I admit I'm not very familiar with hormonal effects of men as they go through their lives, and whether marriage decreases them.
Here is the original quote from the article, not the study:
Dr Kanazawa suggests "a single psychological mechanism" is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women.
That craving drives the all-important male hormone, testosterone.
Dr Kanazawa theorises after a man settles down, the testosterone level falls, as does his creative output.
It doesn't specify if he's thorizing about the drop in testosterone or whether creative output and testosterone are linked.
I still maintain that there's a cultural (and rather Freudian) slant on things in this study. Mainly that human behavior is driven solely by the desire to find a mate, and men are the ones doing the finding while women just sit around and wait for a big, hairy, caveman to come drag them to their cave.
The article is rather short on specifics. The drop in testosterone may simply be due to married men getting more regular sex. The drop in testosterone may also be due to married men getting less regular sex. It may have to do with reduced stress. I don't really know.
That Dr. Kanazawa has found a correlation, I won't dispute. I am just unconvinced that there is a causative effect here, however.
Within five years of making their nuptial vows, nearly a quarter of married scientists had made their last significant contribution to history's hall of fame.
Or to turn a different interpretation on this data, once married, a scientist is less likely to be able to spend 15 hours a day in the lab.
Dr Kanazawa suggests "a single psychological mechanism" is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women.
That craving drives the all-important male hormone, testosterone.
Well, this should be a very easy hypothesis to test. Female scientists should show less of a drop after their marriage, since they should be less affected by the "all-important male hormone."
This guy theorizes that testosterone levels drop after marriage, and therefore so does the competitive drive, and therefore one's level of contribution to science. This seems to be a LOT of interpretation to read into a small amount of data.
I like how Apple does their iPod advertising. They say how many *songs* you can have on it.
The problem with that sort of marketing is that it is very easy to manipulate. I prefer hard, very specific numbers when I'm shopping for something.
For example: "This hard drive will hold 100 songs from your CD collection!" MP3 or raw cd audio? 192 kHz sampling or 32 kHz sampling? Are these 60 second "songs" or something more realistic?
Tell me how big it is, and don't assume you know what I want to do with it. (OK, for an iPod, it's a reasonable assumption that I'm going to record music, but you get my point.)
It's reasons like this that a RAM megabyte is 1024*1024 bytes (too lazy to do the math) but a hard drive "megabyte" is 1000*1000 bytes.
If you're buying a computer, you don't really need to know what a gigabyte is. You need to know that 30 gigs is bigger than 20, (in the context of hard drives) and that fewer than 20 is not enough, and more than 60 is probably more than you need.
... overcharge for the sale of CD's even after courts found them guilty...
If you're talking about the recent case, which is the only one I'm aware of, they were never "found guilty." They settled out-of-court for several tens of millions of dollars. I don't know much about the terms of the settlement, but these things generally come with no admission of guilt.
For example, I have seen people that have signed-up for offers from a company (I saw them do it) turn around and start complaining that they are being spammed.
This is an education problem, not a spam problem. This is why good, confirmed opt-in mailing list techniques are an absolute MUST for anyone sending this sort of email. (Speaking as a user, not an admin, and having never run a mailing list myself.) If people are signing up for email, and calling it spam, then they're nitwits.
For most people, spam is any email that they don't want in their mailbox at that moment in time. If it is something I don't want - even if I set up a relationship and asked for it - then it is spam.
I think there is the danger of a serious "definition creep" in the spam fight in the near future. It's important that people be educated that this sort of thing is NOT spam. Television ads are not spam. Spam complaints are not spam. Pop up windows for a website you voluntarily visited are not spam. (I'll make a concession that the increasing problem of commercial IM and chatroom advertising should probably fall under the "spam" umbrella.) Even penis enlargement techniques, debt refinancing, and offers from the wives of dead Nigerian dictators are not spam, if you signed up for them.
The spammers (and, to a lesser extent, the DMA) want to redefine spam as something they don't do. It is important that this not be allowed or the fight will have been lost.
All, just remember that the definition of spam is fluid. One person's spam is another's direct marketing.
No. The commonly-accepted definion of spam is (1) unsolicited (2) email that is (3) either commercial or bulk in nature. (1), (2), and (3) must all be present for something to be spam.
In my observation, only spammers try to define spam to anything else.
I wonder if the system takes road conditions into account. If it incorrectly triggers in wet or icy conditions, unnessary braking could cause the driver to lose control of the vehicle entirely. The (very short on details) article doesn't really go into that. Although, since the system is only currently being offered on a rather top of the line vehicle, it may have ABS brakes standard.
When will the Chinese government take into account the lessons of history and realize that the best way to cultivate rumors and suspicion...
But they're not worried about whether or not rumors and suspicion are circulating. They're worried about being able to control the amount and veracity of the information that reaches the public. If the unofficial version of the truth is declared a "rumor" they can crack down on it.
A good point if it were plainly beneficial, but really, we'd only be teaching kids to handwrite for the sake of handwriting.
Yeah, because no one would ever need to write anything down now that the paperless office is upon us.
Come on, writing is one of the simplest and most useful skills kids can learn. It will serve them in every single aspect of their lives for as long as they live.
This isn't a trivial skill. I wonder how many medical mistakes are made each year because a pharmacist fills a prescription for the wrong one of two drugs with similar-looking names? My boss's handwriting is so bad that I usually have to find him to get him to decipher a note he leaves for me; sometimes it's so bad he can't even read his own writing!
Spam is simply not profitable enough to last much longer. It is the last of a dying breed of pioneering Internet money-making schemes like the pyramid scheme emails and banner ads.
Well, that sure explains why offline pyramid schemes are sure dying off real quick. And banner ads? Surely there aren't any sites that use those anymore.
Unless you let a "block-on-sight" spammer sign up, then they just block you without warning.
As well they should. SPEWS is the Spam Early Warning System, after all. Unless you think that a well-known spamming organization should get a few millions free spams with each ISP account? It's not like there are a a lot of block-on-sight spammers out there. And once the block-on-sight spammer is gone, the listing goes away.
The host itself doesn't host any adult content, but the IP that it had recently acquired was listed in the same IP block as pretty much every adult/teen/kiddie porno site you can think of, and most that you can't think of.
Then maybe you should move to an ISP that doesn't tolerate kiddie porn on their servers.
Most of the serious blocklists (SBL, Spamcop, SPEWS) are quick to delist an IP once the spamming problem goes away. And some (SPEWS for example) don't even list an IP block until the ISP has been informed about the spamming, and chosen to ignore it.
Without a serious lobbying group in DC, privacy will continue to be eroded.
From an AP interview with Senator Rick Santorum on Apr. 7, 2003:
... this
right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution...
This isn't some wacko saying this. (Well, not some random wacko, anyway.) This isn't some RIAA or MPAA shill. This is a United States Senator. And we wonder how laws like the DMCA get passed?
I'm sure this has been posted before, but there was an article on how to reduce spam. Basically, don't open it. By not opening it, ever, you stop giving hits to the original SPAM sender.
A gentle reminder, it's "spam," not "SPAM."
Unfortunately, this is totally off-base. This only works if your email client interprets the HTML and displays an off-site image or something that allows the spammer to determine that the email has been read. I, for one, don't use such a client. (Eudora or Pine, depending on where I am.) My spam load is only increasing, never decreasing.
Obligatory antispam link for those not yet aware of it: SpamCop
You can use visual effects that only make it readable to the human eye.
I find that highly unlikely. If a human can read the image, a computer can "see" the image as well. Sure, you could probably come up with a way to make it difficult, and the spammers would need time to adapt. But they would. And once improved OCR software was written, then you're back to square one. Not to mention, anything you do to make the image difficult for a computer to read (e.g. poor contrast, overlapping images, etc.) would make the image difficult for a human, (perhaps vision-impaired, maybe just someone who forgot their reading glasses that morning) to figure out as well.
And "now replaced an email client with a web browser" is pretty much all it takes to do away with spam. You don't have to tell me the obvious.
I fail to understand why this is "obvious." A human interfaces with the recipient's webform via a browser. I see no reason that a script can not do the exact same thing. Heck, one of the *current* spamming methods uses insecurities in formail. If a spammer script can interface with that, why couldn't it interface with [web-based email system]?
Basically the system you've described is the guestbook, something that is implemented on any number of personal webpages everywhere. They're spammed all the time.
These days everybody and their dog has a lil website somewhere.
I don't. My parents don't. All but one of my friends doesn't. I believe you overestimate the technical ability of the average person. There are people out there that aren't particularly computer-savvy. AOL exists for a reason. Hell, WebTV exists for a reason.
Furthermore, I suspect that your suggestion would be all but unworkable in a business environment.
Let's say we ditched the email concept, and messaging just involved people going to eachothers websites and dropping a note via webform. To reply, you simply click the link back to the senders message webform etc...
All you've done is now replaced an email client with a web browser. The fundamentals are the same. So the email address has been replaced by the URL of this webform. Big deal.
Then to ensure we don't have web crawling bots auto submitting spam through the forms, you add a dynamically created GIF/jpeg file with a 5 letter code embedded that the subitter needs to type for the form to submit.
Perhaps you've heard of Optical Character Recognition?
What Christians are down on is extra marital sex (specifically, sex outside of a marriage between [1] Man and [1] Woman.. which we believe is how God has instructed us to live, according to the Bible.)
Funny, last time I read the Bible, I'm pretty sure I came across a lot of stuff that made it clear that marriage was between [1] Man and [a lot] of Women.
Plus, there are plenty of devout Christians that believe marriage should include all people, not just heterosexuals.
A CD and a key number don't prove legal ownership.
Why should one have to prove legal ownership, anyway? Should I also have to prove legal ownership of the computer my software is running on? After all, it too, could be stolen.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess this would be a public relations disaster for any company, and would probably result in massive trademark infringment civil suits and possibly criminal fraud prosecution as well.
Here is the original quote from the article, not the study:
It doesn't specify if he's thorizing about the drop in testosterone or whether creative output and testosterone are linked.
I still maintain that there's a cultural (and rather Freudian) slant on things in this study. Mainly that human behavior is driven solely by the desire to find a mate, and men are the ones doing the finding while women just sit around and wait for a big, hairy, caveman to come drag them to their cave.
The article is rather short on specifics. The drop in testosterone may simply be due to married men getting more regular sex. The drop in testosterone may also be due to married men getting less regular sex. It may have to do with reduced stress. I don't really know.
That Dr. Kanazawa has found a correlation, I won't dispute. I am just unconvinced that there is a causative effect here, however.
Or to turn a different interpretation on this data, once married, a scientist is less likely to be able to spend 15 hours a day in the lab.
Well, this should be a very easy hypothesis to test. Female scientists should show less of a drop after their marriage, since they should be less affected by the "all-important male hormone."
This guy theorizes that testosterone levels drop after marriage, and therefore so does the competitive drive, and therefore one's level of contribution to science. This seems to be a LOT of interpretation to read into a small amount of data.
For example: "This hard drive will hold 100 songs from your CD collection!" MP3 or raw cd audio? 192 kHz sampling or 32 kHz sampling? Are these 60 second "songs" or something more realistic? Tell me how big it is, and don't assume you know what I want to do with it. (OK, for an iPod, it's a reasonable assumption that I'm going to record music, but you get my point.)
It's reasons like this that a RAM megabyte is 1024*1024 bytes (too lazy to do the math) but a hard drive "megabyte" is 1000*1000 bytes.
If you're buying a computer, you don't really need to know what a gigabyte is. You need to know that 30 gigs is bigger than 20, (in the context of hard drives) and that fewer than 20 is not enough, and more than 60 is probably more than you need.
This is an education problem, not a spam problem. This is why good, confirmed opt-in mailing list techniques are an absolute MUST for anyone sending this sort of email. (Speaking as a user, not an admin, and having never run a mailing list myself.) If people are signing up for email, and calling it spam, then they're nitwits.
I think there is the danger of a serious "definition creep" in the spam fight in the near future. It's important that people be educated that this sort of thing is NOT spam. Television ads are not spam. Spam complaints are not spam. Pop up windows for a website you voluntarily visited are not spam. (I'll make a concession that the increasing problem of commercial IM and chatroom advertising should probably fall under the "spam" umbrella.) Even penis enlargement techniques, debt refinancing, and offers from the wives of dead Nigerian dictators are not spam, if you signed up for them.
The spammers (and, to a lesser extent, the DMA) want to redefine spam as something they don't do. It is important that this not be allowed or the fight will have been lost.
No. The commonly-accepted definion of spam is (1) unsolicited (2) email that is (3) either commercial or bulk in nature. (1), (2), and (3) must all be present for something to be spam.
In my observation, only spammers try to define spam to anything else.
I wonder if the system takes road conditions into account. If it incorrectly triggers in wet or icy conditions, unnessary braking could cause the driver to lose control of the vehicle entirely. The (very short on details) article doesn't really go into that. Although, since the system is only currently being offered on a rather top of the line vehicle, it may have ABS brakes standard.
But they're not worried about whether or not rumors and suspicion are circulating. They're worried about being able to control the amount and veracity of the information that reaches the public. If the unofficial version of the truth is declared a "rumor" they can crack down on it.
Yeah, because no one would ever need to write anything down now that the paperless office is upon us.
Come on, writing is one of the simplest and most useful skills kids can learn. It will serve them in every single aspect of their lives for as long as they live.
This isn't a trivial skill. I wonder how many medical mistakes are made each year because a pharmacist fills a prescription for the wrong one of two drugs with similar-looking names? My boss's handwriting is so bad that I usually have to find him to get him to decipher a note he leaves for me; sometimes it's so bad he can't even read his own writing!
Of course, if you asked why software prices were increasing, I bet the BSA would tell you it's because of increasing piracy.
Well, that sure explains why offline pyramid schemes are sure dying off real quick. And banner ads? Surely there aren't any sites that use those anymore.
As well they should. SPEWS is the Spam Early Warning System, after all. Unless you think that a well-known spamming organization should get a few millions free spams with each ISP account? It's not like there are a a lot of block-on-sight spammers out there. And once the block-on-sight spammer is gone, the listing goes away.
Then maybe you should move to an ISP that doesn't tolerate kiddie porn on their servers.
Most of the serious blocklists (SBL, Spamcop, SPEWS) are quick to delist an IP once the spamming problem goes away. And some (SPEWS for example) don't even list an IP block until the ISP has been informed about the spamming, and chosen to ignore it.
From an AP interview with Senator Rick Santorum on Apr. 7, 2003:
This isn't some wacko saying this. (Well, not some random wacko, anyway.) This isn't some RIAA or MPAA shill. This is a United States Senator. And we wonder how laws like the DMCA get passed?
IANAL, but I believe ISP's are not common carriers. In fact, I think they're specifically exempted from that status.
I find that highly unlikely. If a human can read the image, a computer can "see" the image as well. Sure, you could probably come up with a way to make it difficult, and the spammers would need time to adapt. But they would. And once improved OCR software was written, then you're back to square one. Not to mention, anything you do to make the image difficult for a computer to read (e.g. poor contrast, overlapping images, etc.) would make the image difficult for a human, (perhaps vision-impaired, maybe just someone who forgot their reading glasses that morning) to figure out as well.
I fail to understand why this is "obvious." A human interfaces with the recipient's webform via a browser. I see no reason that a script can not do the exact same thing. Heck, one of the *current* spamming methods uses insecurities in formail. If a spammer script can interface with that, why couldn't it interface with [web-based email system]?Basically the system you've described is the guestbook, something that is implemented on any number of personal webpages everywhere. They're spammed all the time.
I don't. My parents don't. All but one of my friends doesn't. I believe you overestimate the technical ability of the average person. There are people out there that aren't particularly computer-savvy. AOL exists for a reason. Hell, WebTV exists for a reason.
Furthermore, I suspect that your suggestion would be all but unworkable in a business environment.
All you've done is now replaced an email client with a web browser. The fundamentals are the same. So the email address has been replaced by the URL of this webform. Big deal.
Perhaps you've heard of Optical Character Recognition?
Funny, last time I read the Bible, I'm pretty sure I came across a lot of stuff that made it clear that marriage was between [1] Man and [a lot] of Women.
Plus, there are plenty of devout Christians that believe marriage should include all people, not just heterosexuals.
Why should one have to prove legal ownership, anyway? Should I also have to prove legal ownership of the computer my software is running on? After all, it too, could be stolen.