The fact is, the amount of porn spam I got dropped dramatically when IBill was forced to change their policy.
MAPS isn't about *blocking* spam. It's about *EDUCATION*.
Once, everyone thought it was excessive to add the hosting company for a web site to the RBL, unless the spam came from there. After all, they're not *sending* the spam, right?
Then we found out that, if you don't take down a spammer's page, the spammer will keep spamming. Forever. So, the page *has* to come down. So, now, if you host web pages for spammers, you can be listed.
Ibill was in the same situation. They chose to provide a service that was being abused. They chose to overlook the damage to *everyone else*, because it was a cash flow for them.
The RBL listing caused them to recognize the costs they were inflicting on everyone else.
There is no such thing as a "vigilante" in this context. We *are* the legitimate authorities, we sysadmins.
I am sorry that innocent people were affected by IBill's listing. However, if you want to blame someone, blame the people (Ed Cherry being the most obvious, of course) who decided that they *couldn't* be listed on the RBL, and who felt that millions of dollars a day of distributed damage to other networks wasn't *their* problem, even though they could stop it.
That's what it comes down to. If you can make someone stop spamming, and you don't, you're going to get listed.
I can't find a single documented case of the RBL blocking someone for more than a day or so without a clear understanding that that entity was willfully supporting spammers.
Consider ibill, who did credit card processing for spammer scams. As long as ibill kept giving the people new credit card service, they could get free web sites, spam them, and collect money. Forever.
As to "the RBL's opinion of how to run an opt-in list", that "opinion" seems to be based on the fundemental truth that, if people are complaining about being added to a list, they must not have opted in. It really is that simple.
The RBL follows its charter excellently. If you'd like to name counterexamples, get specific; name companies, times, dates, and show your evidence that the entity in question did *not* contribute to a significant flow of spam.
You're right, it *is* your choice whether or not you want mail from cyberpromotions, or yesmail, or RealNetworks.
You exercise that choice by deciding whether or not to use the RBL.
You see, the RBL will *not* prevent you from getting mail, unless *YOU* decide to use it.
It's that simple.
Intelligent filtering doesn't solve the problem. The problem is not people *getting* junk mail, it's people *sending* it. This is a network abuse problem.
The internet is a cooperative network; if you don't cooperate, we don't network with you.
I don't know if they run under Windows, but there were a number of DLL's in the installed area too, so I wouldn't be surprised if they did. They might need extra stuff installed, and I doubt anyone could get them to work without a functional installer.
(They even have a Windows-friendly "autostart" program which exists to tell you this is the Linux version, and you can't install it.)
Give them a little time. This is still very hard technology to make cost effective for "small" applications, and there's a lot of active research going on. This has nothing to do with people "buying off" researchers or whatever. It just takes time to get new technology adequately designed, and we still have to figure out distribution networks for hydrogen.
Not that long ago, a fuel cell required several ounces of *PLATINUM*. This is not cheap stuff. They're getting more efficient, but it's still very hard to make it work. I think GM announced that they hoped to have a viable car in production by 2005 or so.
They may not be unmodified, but the ones I got were similar enough that "file" identified them as DOS/Windows executables, not ELF binaries. "wp9.exe". Look closely at it.
But if you look at the actual files on the disk, they're plain old MS executables. "wp9.exe". I asked the Corel people at Comdex, and they confirmed that they are doing everything as Windows binaries in WINE from here on in. At least, that was their plan.
Sheep actually don't do as much damage as goats; one of the big advances in human history was that, when we started using wool, we started keeping sheep instead of goats. Goats rip grass out and eat the roots; sheep graze it to a couple of inches, normally.
The sheep are the solution; goats were the problem.
But RMS *didn't* create the OS. Nor did the FSF. Linus and his friends created an OS. The FSF donated parts.
The credit for "making the OS" has to go to the people who actually produced a usable system.
The whole debate comes down to Stallman's sour grapes as he realizes, years after the fact, that he probably *should* have put the famous Berkeley "advertising" clause in.:)
Hey, everyone remember the big fluff when Earthlink and MSN started having trouble, and remember how the FTC started cracking down on "free" computers?
Do you think that might have figured in to Netpliance's decision, too?
Compaq may do it. 3Com has been pretty good about at least screen-printing revision numbers on boards, so you *can* tell that the 3C905 you got isn't the version listed as supported. Still, all of the vendors have some amount of this, the question is, how incompatible are they willing to be?
I would not have minded if NetGear had introduced the "FA-310TX Rev B".
Can you make an argument showing conclusively that the variety we have today is *not* largely a result of changes that have allowed people to make money selling "music"?
Anyway, frankly, no, people won't tip, they won't pay, they won't do anything for *free* music. If they don't have to, they won't. Do you realize how few people make money at shareware? *NONE* are making a living on shareware that doesn't have an effective nag screen, and that's despite the relative sanity of a market where an individual consumer can pay someone to add a much-valued feature to a piece of software.
I continue to believe that many people make music because they can make a living at it, and would not make much music if they couldn't make a living at it, and I continue to believe that, if we do not provide a reliable framework for them to do this within, we are unlikely to see them succeed.
Normally, the "slippery slope" is held up as an example of a flawed argument, unless you can show that there is, indeed, a tendency for people to follow a certain path.
Unfortunately, that tendency does exist.
People, the question is not "is Napster even distributing BDR". The question is, are people who get used to Napster less likely, or more likely, to be willing to pay BDR for their music?
The answer is: Less likely.
1. We are being told that it is an aberration for us to have to pay for music. True enough. It is also an aberration for us to have the quantity of music available to us that we do now; perhaps we should go back to the situation where we cannot, in general, just decide to hear a given piece of music and do so.
2. People who are saturated with big, well-marketed bands will not waste time looking for obscure indie bands.
I think it's horribly hypocritical of people to complain about how unfair and unusual it is for music to be restricted and controlled, while gleefully taking the results of this control - lots of music in a variety of genres - completely for granted.
Most musicians can't afford to do this professionally if we don't provide them with a mechanism to make money at it. Before we yank this mechanism away, let's think about whether or not this matters. It does to me, and I'm still paying for CD's, whether they're $10 one-shot CD's sold to me by a friend whose band finally got a CD cut, or $17.99 overpriced crap.:)
(This isn't to say I charge money for the crap *I* write, which I give away freely at this point. But I'm not a professional musician, and my music isn't that good, and I'm certainly not about to try to do it full time.)
A port of a window manager with Be-style window decorations?
In addition to the sheer joy of doing something pointless, this leads to a variety of charming practical jokes. Set up a Be system with a Be-style WM running under X, and watch people struggle with a nearly-correct interface.:)
There's no way I'll ever buy from Netgear again. Why? Because the FA-310TX is the model number of their DEC 21140 card. It is blatantly and seriously dishonest of them to continue selling a card with the same model number, which is not compatible with the old card. A driver that works for the old card may not work with the new card.
Can it be gotten to work? Certainly. At least, the NetBSD "tlp" driver should work with it. But I don't care; they owe me a new model number for their new model of card.:)
Support goes beyond "do they provide drivers". The question is, how much thought are they giving to people who are depending on their published information, or who are checking model numbers for compatability? In Netgear's case, it's "screw you, we put drivers on a disk, and that's the end of our responsibility."
I was using the D-Link cards based on the Via Rhine for a while. They're gone now, so I'm probably just gonna spend 2x as much on cards and use Intel EtherExpress cards; the current 10/100 models work in all 4 BSD's, presumably all the Linuxes out there, and probably everything else. They work well, they're cheaper than 3Com's overpriced crap, and the company is pretty good about adding revision #'s when they change hardware.
You said it! Real has had a number of problems. My personal pet peeve is their proud claims of having a mailing list with 53,000,000 people on it. Including such famous RealAudio customers as "ietef@ietf.org", "rbl@mail-abuse.org", and "comments@cauce.org".
Real is a scumbag's scumbag, and I don't see why we should be endorsing and supporting their product. Because it's free as long as you give them at least one email address (possibly even yours)? I thought this was about free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer. If all it takes for us to be happy with a piece of software is that you can have it without paying for it, let's all switch to Internet Explorer.
It's not all about Linux, per se. (If it were, as people have pointed out, Slashdot wouldn't have mentioned Diablo II.) It's also about open standards, open policies, and respect for individuals. Real has none of that.
Doesn't matter. Load a page with images, and before it starts displaying, go make a cup of coffee. Come back, and watch your eyes absorb all the header text first, long before you care about most pictures. (Exception: pr0n will probably catch your eye faster, because that's a reproductive advantage. Or, would be if you were really seeing potential mates.)
Are you trying to imply that TRUSTe certified sites don't break their policies, change them without notice, and/or have sucky policies anyway?
eBay broke their policy, changed it without notice to allow for what they did, then broke the new policy anyway. They still have a seal. I don't think you can consider TRUSTe to mean anything.
As I understand it, there has been some talk of forming a seal program with a funding source other than the companies reviewed. It might mean something.
Honestly, what would surprise me would be if a company that *didn't* have a TRUSTe seal suddenly turned around and broke its policy. For some reason, I've never had privacy problems with a company that doesn't have one of those seals...
Just a side note: Run-time reordering beats the pants off assembly, because the chip knows more about its resources than you do. There's a reason for it to exist, and no amount of coding will ever eliminate the fact that, at the time when the chip really sees the instructions, it knows to the cycle how long it will be before a given bit is available, and you don't.
The "problem" you are encountering is probably a result of one of the popular anti-piracy CD hacks, which are incompatible with some drives. They put these in because most retail stores will order fewer (or no) copies of a game that doesn't have some kind of copy protection good enough to stop casual users.
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The fact is, the amount of porn spam I got dropped dramatically when IBill was forced to change their policy.
MAPS isn't about *blocking* spam. It's about *EDUCATION*.
Once, everyone thought it was excessive to add the hosting company for a web site to the RBL, unless the spam came from there. After all, they're not *sending* the spam, right?
Then we found out that, if you don't take down a spammer's page, the spammer will keep spamming. Forever. So, the page *has* to come down. So, now, if you host web pages for spammers, you can be listed.
Ibill was in the same situation. They chose to provide a service that was being abused. They chose to overlook the damage to *everyone else*, because it was a cash flow for them.
The RBL listing caused them to recognize the costs they were inflicting on everyone else.
There is no such thing as a "vigilante" in this context. We *are* the legitimate authorities, we sysadmins.
I am sorry that innocent people were affected by IBill's listing. However, if you want to blame someone, blame the people (Ed Cherry being the most obvious, of course) who decided that they *couldn't* be listed on the RBL, and who felt that millions of dollars a day of distributed damage to other networks wasn't *their* problem, even though they could stop it.
That's what it comes down to. If you can make someone stop spamming, and you don't, you're going to get listed.
Fair enough.
I can't find a single documented case of the RBL blocking someone for more than a day or so without a clear understanding that that entity was willfully supporting spammers.
Consider ibill, who did credit card processing for spammer scams. As long as ibill kept giving the people new credit card service, they could get free web sites, spam them, and collect money. Forever.
As to "the RBL's opinion of how to run an opt-in list", that "opinion" seems to be based on the fundemental truth that, if people are complaining about being added to a list, they must not have opted in. It really is that simple.
The RBL follows its charter excellently. If you'd like to name counterexamples, get specific; name companies, times, dates, and show your evidence that the entity in question did *not* contribute to a significant flow of spam.
You're right, it *is* your choice whether or not you want mail from cyberpromotions, or yesmail, or RealNetworks.
You exercise that choice by deciding whether or not to use the RBL.
You see, the RBL will *not* prevent you from getting mail, unless *YOU* decide to use it.
It's that simple.
Intelligent filtering doesn't solve the problem. The problem is not people *getting* junk mail, it's people *sending* it. This is a network abuse problem.
The internet is a cooperative network; if you don't cooperate, we don't network with you.
Yeah, people like RealNetworks, who proudly *BRAGGED* about having, get this,
FIFTY THREE FUCKING MILLION ADDRESSES ON THEIR LIST.
You can't get on the RBL just for running an unconfirmed list. *YOU HAVE TO GET COMPLAINTS FROM PEOPLE WHO DID NOT ASK TO BE ON IT*.
I get a blank page. *ALL* of the content is inside an HTML comment.
You can't even get to the *FIRST PAGE* unless your browser has full JavaScript support.
That's pretty shoddy.
The table inside the comment just makes it more obvious that it's shoddy work; no one gave any thought to the structure of the page.
I don't know if they run under Windows, but there were a number of DLL's in the installed area too, so I wouldn't be surprised if they did. They might need extra stuff installed, and I doubt anyone could get them to work without a functional installer.
(They even have a Windows-friendly "autostart" program which exists to tell you this is the Linux version, and you can't install it.)
Give them a little time. This is still very hard technology to make cost effective for "small" applications, and there's a lot of active research going on. This has nothing to do with people "buying off" researchers or whatever. It just takes time to get new technology adequately designed, and we still have to figure out distribution networks for hydrogen.
Not that long ago, a fuel cell required several ounces of *PLATINUM*. This is not cheap stuff.
They're getting more efficient, but it's still very hard to make it work. I think GM announced that they hoped to have a viable car in production by 2005 or so.
They may not be unmodified, but the ones I got were similar enough that "file" identified them as DOS/Windows executables, not ELF binaries.
"wp9.exe". Look closely at it.
Of course not, there would be general outrage.
But if you look at the actual files on the disk, they're plain old MS executables. "wp9.exe".
I asked the Corel people at Comdex, and they confirmed that they are doing everything as Windows binaries in WINE from here on in. At least, that was their plan.
Corel actually dropped Linux support in WPO2K; they now only ship Windows executables and WINE.
There is no native Linux version anymore.
Sheep actually don't do as much damage as goats; one of the big advances in human history was that, when we started using wool, we started keeping sheep instead of goats. Goats rip grass out and eat the roots; sheep graze it to a couple of inches, normally.
The sheep are the solution; goats were the problem.
But RMS *didn't* create the OS. Nor did the FSF. Linus and his friends created an OS. The FSF donated parts.
:)
The credit for "making the OS" has to go to the people who actually produced a usable system.
The whole debate comes down to Stallman's sour grapes as he realizes, years after the fact, that he probably *should* have put the famous Berkeley "advertising" clause in.
Hey, everyone remember the big fluff when Earthlink and MSN started having trouble, and remember how the FTC started cracking down on "free" computers?
Do you think that might have figured in to Netpliance's decision, too?
Compaq may do it. 3Com has been pretty good about at least screen-printing revision numbers on boards, so you *can* tell that the 3C905 you got isn't the version listed as supported. Still, all of the vendors have some amount of this, the question is, how incompatible are they willing to be?
I would not have minded if NetGear had introduced the "FA-310TX Rev B".
Can you make an argument showing conclusively that the variety we have today is *not* largely a result of changes that have allowed people to make money selling "music"?
Anyway, frankly, no, people won't tip, they won't pay, they won't do anything for *free* music. If they don't have to, they won't. Do you realize how few people make money at shareware? *NONE* are making a living on shareware that doesn't have an effective nag screen, and that's despite the relative sanity of a market where an individual consumer can pay someone to add a much-valued feature to a piece of software.
I continue to believe that many people make music because they can make a living at it, and would not make much music if they couldn't make a living
at it, and I continue to believe that, if we do not provide a reliable framework for them to do this within, we are unlikely to see them succeed.
Normally, the "slippery slope" is held up as an example of a flawed argument, unless you can show that there is, indeed, a tendency for people to follow a certain path.
:)
Unfortunately, that tendency does exist.
People, the question is not "is Napster even distributing BDR". The question is, are people who get used to Napster less likely, or more likely, to be willing to pay BDR for their music?
The answer is: Less likely.
1. We are being told that it is an aberration for us to have to pay for music. True enough. It is also an aberration for us to have the quantity of music available to us that we do now; perhaps we should go back to the situation where we cannot, in general, just decide to hear a given piece of music and do so.
2. People who are saturated with big, well-marketed bands will not waste time looking for obscure indie bands.
I think it's horribly hypocritical of people to complain about how unfair and unusual it is for music to be restricted and controlled, while gleefully taking the results of this control - lots of music in a variety of genres - completely for granted.
Most musicians can't afford to do this professionally if we don't provide them with a mechanism to make money at it. Before we yank this mechanism away, let's think about whether or not this matters. It does to me, and I'm still paying for CD's, whether they're $10 one-shot CD's sold to me by a friend whose band finally got a CD cut, or $17.99 overpriced crap.
(This isn't to say I charge money for the crap *I* write, which I give away freely at this point. But I'm not a professional musician, and my music isn't that good, and I'm certainly not about to try to do it full time.)
A port of a window manager with Be-style window decorations?
:)
In addition to the sheer joy of doing something pointless, this leads to a variety of charming practical jokes. Set up a Be system with a Be-style WM running under X, and watch people struggle with a nearly-correct interface.
There's no way I'll ever buy from Netgear again. Why? Because the FA-310TX is the model number of their DEC 21140 card. It is blatantly and seriously dishonest of them to continue selling a card with the same model number, which is not compatible with the old card. A driver that works for the old card may not work with the new card.
:)
Can it be gotten to work? Certainly. At least, the NetBSD "tlp" driver should work with it. But I don't care; they owe me a new model number for their new model of card.
Support goes beyond "do they provide drivers". The question is, how much thought are they giving to people who are depending on their published information, or who are checking model numbers for compatability? In Netgear's case, it's "screw you, we put drivers on a disk, and that's the end of our responsibility."
I was using the D-Link cards based on the Via Rhine for a while. They're gone now, so I'm probably just gonna spend 2x as much on cards and use Intel EtherExpress cards; the current 10/100 models work in all 4 BSD's, presumably all the Linuxes out there, and probably everything else. They work well, they're cheaper than 3Com's overpriced crap, and the company is pretty good about adding revision #'s when they change hardware.
In other words, we lie to them, and give them bogus addresses - and every so often, one of the bogus addresses belongs to someone.
:)
Better to just avoid these companies.
You said it! Real has had a number of problems. My personal pet peeve is their proud claims of having a mailing list with 53,000,000 people on it. Including such famous RealAudio customers as "ietef@ietf.org", "rbl@mail-abuse.org", and "comments@cauce.org".
Real is a scumbag's scumbag, and I don't see why we should be endorsing and supporting their product. Because it's free as long as you give them at least one email address (possibly even yours)? I thought this was about free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer. If all it takes for us to be happy with a piece of software is that you can have it without paying for it, let's all switch to Internet Explorer.
It's not all about Linux, per se. (If it were, as people have pointed out, Slashdot wouldn't have mentioned Diablo II.) It's also about open standards, open policies, and respect for individuals. Real has none of that.
Doesn't matter. Load a page with images, and before it starts displaying, go make a cup of coffee. Come back, and watch your eyes absorb all the header text first, long before you care about most pictures. (Exception: pr0n will probably catch your eye faster, because that's a reproductive advantage. Or, would be if you were really seeing potential mates.)
Are you trying to imply that TRUSTe certified sites don't break their policies, change them without notice, and/or have sucky policies anyway?
eBay broke their policy, changed it without notice to allow for what they did, then broke the new policy anyway. They still have a seal. I don't think you can consider TRUSTe to mean anything.
As I understand it, there has been some talk of forming a seal program with a funding source other than the companies reviewed. It might mean something.
Honestly, what would surprise me would be if a company that *didn't* have a TRUSTe seal suddenly turned around and broke its policy. For some reason, I've never had privacy problems with a company that doesn't have one of those seals...
Significant figures. Pi is defined, in that context, to be 3, not 3.0, or 3.00. And 3 it is, to one significant figure.
This isn't religion, this is basic engineering. A circle's circumference is three times its diameter.
Welcome to rough numbers. It's not expected to be precise. For crying out loud, it was in *cubits* last I checked.
I'm not saying everything there is literally true, but you have to be pretty wacky to ignore the decimal points.
Just a side note: Run-time reordering beats the pants off assembly, because the chip knows more about its resources than you do. There's a reason for it to exist, and no amount of coding will ever eliminate the fact that, at the time when the chip really sees the instructions, it knows to the cycle how long it will be before a given bit is available, and you don't.
The "problem" you are encountering is probably a result of one of the popular anti-piracy CD hacks, which are incompatible with some drives. They put these in because most retail stores will order fewer (or no) copies of a game that doesn't have some kind of copy protection good enough to stop casual users.