Since the CAN-SPAM bill, I've been receiving way more spam than before. Before the bill, I was getting an average of 15 - 20 spams/day to my yahoo account; since the bill, I now receive upwards of 80 - 100 spams/day.
I think one of the biggest issues with an opt-out bill like this is that, basically, they have given every business and person in the world permission to send you as many emails as they want until you spefically tell them to stop. This is particular silly since in many cases you can not tell the legitimate commercial spam from the email harvesting spam, so you can not safely respond to any of them which means you will continue to receive spam after spam.
On top of this, who in the fuck has time to respond to every single piece of junk email they get every day to tell these people to fuck off? There aren't enough hours in the day which means that (even though the spammers were already doing it) Congress has given every business on the planet permission to deluge your email with commercial spam and there's nothing you can do about it other than try to filter.
The problem with filtering is that since these spammers are using your bandwidth and your mail server's processing cycles when they send you their message, they are effectively stealing time and effort from you or your business to deal with determining whether the message should be forwared on to your email client.
So, it seems there are a few things that need to be done:
* all non-"traditional" marketing must be opt-in. I don't want spim, spam, junk snail mail, phone spam, etc. TV and Radio? Fine, the advertisers pay for it, I can change the channel, they aren't depriving me of anything but some thumb power to operate the knobs and buttons.
* any commercial email must apply to the domain admin of the target for permission to send email to the domain (this can be automated to some extent), otherwise, no email is accepted from the commercial entity. It wouldn't take much to set up a system which can tell that multiple emails are coming in to a domain from the same sender....if this sender hasn't applied for permission, the mail server does not even allow the messages to be uploaded to the server.
* HUGE penalties for spammers along with HUGE pentalties for the hosting companies and governments if they do not take action to prevent known spammers from continuing to operate.
* a Known Spammers public registry (similar to the Sex Offenders registry), so that hosting companies can have ready access to prevent selling these people account and the public is aware of who these people are and where they are operating
* all sorts of other stuff that I don't have time to go into
Of course, one of the biggest impediments to a lot of this stuff is that congress and the president will never fully fund any of these efforts, so there will be no enforcement:)
Turns out we don't live a democracy or a republic or anything that our founding fathers probably intended. We (the citiz^H^H^H^H^Hconsumers) live in a fascist country:
"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger
of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of
private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
I must have missed the memo about the change-over from being a repbulic.
"I'd like to use it at video rental places and CD stores to get product reviews."
Great, now I can point my phone at a CD and get the same craptacular industry reviews that we get in newspapers, magazines, and tv already for cds, movies, and books that cover up how shitty the cd, movie, or book actually is. You know the ones I'm talkin' about: "This is the best [cd/movie/book] of the year!" or "A tour de force! Simply a great [cd/movie/book]!" or "This summer's hottest [cd/movie/book]!".
Except that now, there will be some additional options after the quote-whore's quote: "Press one to [listen to/read] a sample of this [cd/movie/book]." or "If you do not feel like buying this [cd/movie/book] press two to administer a small electric shock to stimulate your consumer chip implant, then press three to purchase this item."
It'll be like portable Madlibs for citizen-consumers.
As you continue your journey, you discover a charm giving you +5 to your media consolidation attribute. Walking further down the trail, you are confronted by a giant named ClearChannel. Roll the dice to determine the outcome of your battle.... You rolled an 11. ClearChannel delivers a fatal blow with a bone-crushing sound.... Your journey has ended.
Since I'm at work, I don't actually have time to read the article right now, but I'm curious what the implications are for detonating things on the moon. Is there any potential for disrupting the moon's orbit? Sure it's big, but I'd hate to have them fuck up the earth because they end up pushing the moon into a different orbit and disrupting the tides, etc.
If we don't start monitoring every person in the US 24/7/365, eradicate the constitution, and stop questioning authority, the terrorists will have already won.
What's going to happen is, since the MPAA and RIAA have not been able to squash file sharing and get more, tougher legislation passed to protect intellectual property that already has adequate protections under existing and previous laws in the US, after they get some trade policies updated to "combat the terror of piracy", they are going to use this piracy=terrorism funding as a stepping stone to get some legislation passed in the US that will try to kill file sharing as well.
These days, if you can't get what you want by using the standard bullying/lobbying practices to push for stupid new laws, tie it to terrorism and get a law passed by friday.
The most accurate depiction of software developers can be seen in the 1995 movie 'Hackers'. Fisher Stevens as "The Plague" is a spot-on depiction of corporate software developers and their drive to stick-it to The Man(tm). The rest of the cast portrayed typical Open Source developers as they all had cool hacker names like 'Crash Override', 'Zero Cool', and 'Acid Burn' and were constantly using the public telephone system to upload their latest kernel patches to CVS.
There are already live-action versions of three of the Narnia books "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", "The Silver Chair", and "Prince Caspian". See here.
They aren't master works of film by any means, but they aren't too bad and are probably available at your local public library (if you're in the states). I and my younger sister both enjoyed them.
With today's current politcal/corporate climate in regard to privacy, it seems fairly obvious that pretty much any information collected on someone (be it biometric or otherwise) will invariably end up being shared in one form or another. As soon as one entity decides a particular pieces of information is handy for keeping track of someone, others will follow; and where others follow, sharing begins. I expect to see an Iris.Net module out soon for Passport and I think my dog's pant pattern has been captured by bugged pellet in his dogfood which authorizes only him to eat that bowl of food.
While I was in grad school, I was able to get a job as a sys admin for a research lab as well as a job doing programming for the lab. I was able to work with really nifty equipment in support of some really interesting work. Was able to hone my skills by really being in control of the systems in the lab which you won't get as a junior admin. As a junior, you won't be doing any planning, policy making, or any other "high-level" admin stuff, so you won't be exposed to a lot of important activities and skill-builders like trying to figure out how to make end-users' ideas work from planning through to deployment.
On top of working as an admin in a relatively low-stress environment (deadlines are nowhere near what they are in commercial enterprises), you also have the opportunuity to work with cutting-edge research and really smart folks in wide variety of disciplines. In commercial enterprise, you're likely to get pigeon-holed _real_ quick and not get exposure to a lot of things that will come in handy later.
After following the link in the above article to the Yahoo! site, I browsed the story posted there and through several of the "News Stories" listed below it and was unable to come across the ad. As a caveat, I browse with JavaScript turn off, since there are too many web sites out there that misuse it.
If we look at the source to the news page, you'll notice that the X-10 ad is appended to references and there's probably some scripting that refreshes and reloads to get them to pop up every now and again as you click on various stories.
As I go through each of the links to the other stories, it doesn't look to me that Yahoo! has done anything sinister since many of them lead off-site. I'm guessing that it's just a scripting trick and if you don't want the stupid ads, just turn off JavaScript. *shrug*
At the university I attend there is already a Software Engineering curriculum, and if you take a look at places like the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, you'll see that this concept has been around for a little while now.
Why don't we just employ a few wardialers like those telemarketing systems to play a message to every member of congress and the executive branch outlining exactly what is wrong with current policy. Additionally, since legislators appear to favor giving businesses and spammers the benefit of end-user having to opt-out rather than opt-in, I suggest we also hire a couple spammers to specifically target congress and the white house with something like:
Dear Congressman/Congresswoman,
You have been specially selected to receive this free newletter informing you of the many great opportunities in your area for making a difference...
It certainly seems like the same thing is happening with XML that happens with any new toy: "my friend told me XML was cool for stuff, so I'm going to convert everything to XML so I can be cool too."
I was pretty sure that XML was useful in that it was a human-readable data-encoding mechanism that "average" users could get a grip on and utilize in sharing information between heterogenous systems, but it seems like people are completely missing the point these days in how to use XML effectively.
A lot of the benefit of using XML is quickly becoming negated by everyone coming up with their own DTDs and the lack of standard formats for encoding data that is to be shared. As an example, here at the university I attend, there is a project for sharing information about biological species' population data amongst sister organizations. The goal is make the information possessed by all these organizations available to all the others. The trouble is that they have all come up with their own format for storing the data they collect and can not agree on what standard should be used, so each organization is encoding all their information with a different XML labeling scheme. My first questions was: "Why in the heck are you using XML to encode the data anyway?" Seems easier and saner to just store it in your relational database and make the database accessible to sister organization who can then encode the information however they want for their end-users through their client applications rather than the organization holding the information imposing order on people wanting access to the information.
To make a long story short, XML encoding doesn't help you store the information more efficiently at all and with the state of the "formatting standards" today doesn't even really provide an efficient way of sharing information between organization or an efficient way of encoding the information for transmittal to other organizations. It seems as if people are missing the forest for the trees in how XML can be useful in its relation to data encoding and we should stick with our trusty ole relational and object-oriented database models as they have shown their usefulness and efficiency.
Unfortunately, all it would take would be one zealot reporting your site to get you fried.
I know tons of freaky parents that don't have anything better to do during the day than cause trouble for other people. These are the folks that are going to be surfing the Net looking for content that they don't find appropriate for their children. Never mind that it takes them eight hours searching links that are buried at depth four on a site to find content they don't like that their children would never see anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean, Zathras? It's a subtle difference in pronounciation, but important.
ies
Since the CAN-SPAM bill, I've been receiving way more spam than before. Before the bill, I was getting an average of 15 - 20 spams/day to my yahoo account; since the bill, I now receive upwards of 80 - 100 spams/day.
:)
I think one of the biggest issues with an opt-out bill like this is that, basically, they have given every business and person in the world permission to send you as many emails as they want until you spefically tell them to stop. This is particular silly since in many cases you can not tell the legitimate commercial spam from the email harvesting spam, so you can not safely respond to any of them which means you will continue to receive spam after spam.
On top of this, who in the fuck has time to respond to every single piece of junk email they get every day to tell these people to fuck off? There aren't enough hours in the day which means that (even though the spammers were already doing it) Congress has given every business on the planet permission to deluge your email with commercial spam and there's nothing you can do about it other than try to filter.
The problem with filtering is that since these spammers are using your bandwidth and your mail server's processing cycles when they send you their message, they are effectively stealing time and effort from you or your business to deal with determining whether the message should be forwared on to your email client.
So, it seems there are a few things that need to be done:
* all non-"traditional" marketing must be opt-in. I don't want spim, spam, junk snail mail, phone spam, etc. TV and Radio? Fine, the advertisers pay for it, I can change the channel, they aren't depriving me of anything but some thumb power to operate the knobs and buttons.
* any commercial email must apply to the domain admin of the target for permission to send email to the domain (this can be automated to some extent), otherwise, no email is accepted from the commercial entity. It wouldn't take much to set up a system which can tell that multiple emails are coming in to a domain from the same sender....if this sender hasn't applied for permission, the mail server does not even allow the messages to be uploaded to the server.
* HUGE penalties for spammers along with HUGE pentalties for the hosting companies and governments if they do not take action to prevent known spammers from continuing to operate.
* a Known Spammers public registry (similar to the Sex Offenders registry), so that hosting companies can have ready access to prevent selling these people account and the public is aware of who these people are and where they are operating
* all sorts of other stuff that I don't have time to go into
Of course, one of the biggest impediments to a lot of this stuff is that congress and the president will never fully fund any of these efforts, so there will be no enforcement
or my personal teeth grinder: NIC card
One last one:
I just got my new pre-installed harddrive and it is working gre&*^*&#$NO CARRIER
I must have missed the memo about the change-over from being a repbulic.
Great, now I can point my phone at a CD and get the same craptacular industry reviews that we get in newspapers, magazines, and tv already for cds, movies, and books that cover up how shitty the cd, movie, or book actually is. You know the ones I'm talkin' about: "This is the best [cd/movie/book] of the year!" or "A tour de force! Simply a great [cd/movie/book]!" or "This summer's hottest [cd/movie/book]!".
Except that now, there will be some additional options after the quote-whore's quote: "Press one to [listen to/read] a sample of this [cd/movie/book]." or "If you do not feel like buying this [cd/movie/book] press two to administer a small electric shock to stimulate your consumer chip implant, then press three to purchase this item."
It'll be like portable Madlibs for citizen-consumers.
As you continue your journey, you discover a charm giving you +5 to your media consolidation attribute. Walking further down the trail, you are confronted by a giant named ClearChannel. Roll the dice to determine the outcome of your battle. ... You rolled an 11. ClearChannel delivers a fatal blow with a bone-crushing sound. ... Your journey has ended.
Since I'm at work, I don't actually have time to read the article right now, but I'm curious what the implications are for detonating things on the moon. Is there any potential for disrupting the moon's orbit? Sure it's big, but I'd hate to have them fuck up the earth because they end up pushing the moon into a different orbit and disrupting the tides, etc.
It clearly says at the bottom:
If we don't start monitoring every person in the US 24/7/365, eradicate the constitution, and stop questioning authority, the terrorists will have already won.
What's going to happen is, since the MPAA and RIAA have not been able to squash file sharing and get more, tougher legislation passed to protect intellectual property that already has adequate protections under existing and previous laws in the US, after they get some trade policies updated to "combat the terror of piracy", they are going to use this piracy=terrorism funding as a stepping stone to get some legislation passed in the US that will try to kill file sharing as well.
These days, if you can't get what you want by using the standard bullying/lobbying practices to push for stupid new laws, tie it to terrorism and get a law passed by friday.
...that Caldera is trying to SCO-rew IBM?
The most accurate depiction of software developers can be seen in the 1995 movie 'Hackers'. Fisher Stevens as "The Plague" is a spot-on depiction of corporate software developers and their drive to stick-it to The Man(tm). The rest of the cast portrayed typical Open Source developers as they all had cool hacker names like 'Crash Override', 'Zero Cool', and 'Acid Burn' and were constantly using the public telephone system to upload their latest kernel patches to CVS.
or at leas, Leto II: The Electric Boogaloo
Since we're talking about president bush, it's more likely the public response would be, "oh no! did he say 'nucular'?!"
There are already live-action versions of three of the Narnia books "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", "The Silver Chair", and "Prince Caspian". See here.
They aren't master works of film by any means, but they aren't too bad and are probably available at your local public library (if you're in the states). I and my younger sister both enjoyed them.
With today's current politcal/corporate climate in regard to privacy, it seems fairly obvious that pretty much any information collected on someone (be it biometric or otherwise) will invariably end up being shared in one form or another. As soon as one entity decides a particular pieces of information is handy for keeping track of someone, others will follow; and where others follow, sharing begins. I expect to see an Iris.Net module out soon for Passport and I think my dog's pant pattern has been captured by bugged pellet in his dogfood which authorizes only him to eat that bowl of food.
While I was in grad school, I was able to get a job as a sys admin for a research lab as well as a job doing programming for the lab. I was able to work with really nifty equipment in support of some really interesting work. Was able to hone my skills by really being in control of the systems in the lab which you won't get as a junior admin. As a junior, you won't be doing any planning, policy making, or any other "high-level" admin stuff, so you won't be exposed to a lot of important activities and skill-builders like trying to figure out how to make end-users' ideas work from planning through to deployment.
On top of working as an admin in a relatively low-stress environment (deadlines are nowhere near what they are in commercial enterprises), you also have the opportunuity to work with cutting-edge research and really smart folks in wide variety of disciplines. In commercial enterprise, you're likely to get pigeon-holed _real_ quick and not get exposure to a lot of things that will come in handy later.
Short answer: go to college.
You asked for suggestions no speaking to your legislator on his level. You should prepare you remarks as follows:
"Taliban terrorists anthrax terrorists. Donation, path towards peace donation donation. Terrorist lock-box compationate donation taliban."
And don't forget to spritz yoruself with "O'De Money"
After following the link in the above article to the Yahoo! site, I browsed the story posted there and through several of the "News Stories" listed below it and was unable to come across the ad. As a caveat, I browse with JavaScript turn off, since there are too many web sites out there that misuse it.
If we look at the source to the news page, you'll notice that the X-10 ad is appended to references and there's probably some scripting that refreshes and reloads to get them to pop up every now and again as you click on various stories.
As I go through each of the links to the other stories, it doesn't look to me that Yahoo! has done anything sinister since many of them lead off-site. I'm guessing that it's just a scripting trick and if you don't want the stupid ads, just turn off JavaScript. *shrug*
At the university I attend there is already a Software Engineering curriculum, and if you take a look at places like the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, you'll see that this concept has been around for a little while now.
Why don't we just employ a few wardialers like those telemarketing systems to play a message to every member of congress and the executive branch outlining exactly what is wrong with current policy. Additionally, since legislators appear to favor giving businesses and spammers the benefit of end-user having to opt-out rather than opt-in, I suggest we also hire a couple spammers to specifically target congress and the white house with something like:
...
Dear Congressman/Congresswoman,
You have been specially selected to receive this free newletter informing you of the many great opportunities in your area for making a difference
It certainly seems like the same thing is happening with XML that happens with any new toy: "my friend told me XML was cool for stuff, so I'm going to convert everything to XML so I can be cool too."
I was pretty sure that XML was useful in that it was a human-readable data-encoding mechanism that "average" users could get a grip on and utilize in sharing information between heterogenous systems, but it seems like people are completely missing the point these days in how to use XML effectively.
A lot of the benefit of using XML is quickly becoming negated by everyone coming up with their own DTDs and the lack of standard formats for encoding data that is to be shared. As an example, here at the university I attend, there is a project for sharing information about biological species' population data amongst sister organizations. The goal is make the information possessed by all these organizations available to all the others. The trouble is that they have all come up with their own format for storing the data they collect and can not agree on what standard should be used, so each organization is encoding all their information with a different XML labeling scheme. My first questions was: "Why in the heck are you using XML to encode the data anyway?" Seems easier and saner to just store it in your relational database and make the database accessible to sister organization who can then encode the information however they want for their end-users through their client applications rather than the organization holding the information imposing order on people wanting access to the information.
To make a long story short, XML encoding doesn't help you store the information more efficiently at all and with the state of the "formatting standards" today doesn't even really provide an efficient way of sharing information between organization or an efficient way of encoding the information for transmittal to other organizations. It seems as if people are missing the forest for the trees in how XML can be useful in its relation to data encoding and we should stick with our trusty ole relational and object-oriented database models as they have shown their usefulness and efficiency.
Unfortunately, all it would take would be one zealot reporting your site to get you fried.
I know tons of freaky parents that don't have anything better to do during the day than cause trouble for other people. These are the folks that are going to be surfing the Net looking for content that they don't find appropriate for their children. Never mind that it takes them eight hours searching links that are buried at depth four on a site to find content they don't like that their children would never see anyway.