If the odds of a species ending natural event were really 1 in 455 every 100 years, one would have happened, on average, every 45,500 years throughout history. Since we know this isn't the case, the claim is utter rubbish.
I wonder if Young has a job lined up with Microsfot bashing Linux, and is just practicing.
If spam is coming from their machine (and it is, in the scenario above), they are not innocent. They are either willfully participating, or so fucking stupid they shouldn't be allowed to breed.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it (x) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes (x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? (x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Several spammers have gotten prison sentences in the US in last few months. There is no reason to think this won't continue.
Not for the right reasons, but it's progress.
China, on the other hand, has made it clear they will do anything for hard western currency, and if it pisses off Americans, so much the better. I don't believe they don't care. I think they care very much.
That only works until you run out of new IPs. The spammers will continue to send to the old IP, plus the new one, for years. Many people have seen it happen.
Indeed. I think we should all send complaints to the FCC that there's not enough profanity, violence and sexual content on television. If we encourage more and more offensive content on television, especially in the after-school hours, eventually, more and more parents will simply get rid of the television, forcing their children to get off their (grossly obeses) asses and go outside and socialize with other children, or maybe even, gasp, read. Imagine a world where children are active in their play, well socialized with other children, and read regularly.
So, in the end, more sex and violence is definitely for the children.
Be amusing if the FCC got a few hundred thousand letters telling them that.
You seem to be under the impression that city engineers (and their political bosses) would implement this if they thought it worked. That assumes they want to reduce traffic congestion. I see no reason to believe that is their goal.
The line gets drawn at web sites run by people who can sue them for it. Spammers can't, really. The moment that they do, they open themselves up to subpeonas for their business records, which then become public record. Every time a spammer has reached that point, so far, they've dropped their lawsuit like a hot potato and run and hid in the bushes.
And even if they do go to a judgement, there's the concept of unclean hands. Juries get to decide how much damage was done, and what percentage of it was caused by various parties - Lycos, the spammer, the pink ISP who hosts them, etc - and the judgement is adjusted by those percentages. $1,000,000 in damage? OK, fine. The spammer is 90% responsible, and the pink ISP is 9.9999% responsible, leaving a judgement of $1.00.
Not that I like spam, but this is a bad way to combat it.
Yes, it is. But it may not be more bad than any other.
Are the spammers breaking the law? The arrest them and haul them into court.
Nearly all spam is outright criminal. Products that don't, and can't work as advertised, drugs sold illegally over the internet, porn marketed to children, child porn, you name it. Nearly all spam is criminal.
And the feds know it. And flatly refuse to even take a report.
Your method has been tried, and failed.
It's time to move on to a new method.
If not... well, people are just DDOSing them because they don't like them, or what they do.
And?
If that's fine, then whats to stop the Right from putting out a screensaver that'll DDOS Michael Moores website? Or the Sierra club from putting out one that slams Exxon? Or Barnes & Noble paying people to run a screensaver that attacks Amazon? Heck, B&N could let you earn credits towards your next purchase by letting your computer slam the Amazon website.
What's to stop spammers from making email totally useless because it's 99.99999% spam, and you can't find real messages in amongs all the viagra, breast enlargement, child porn and mortage spame? Nothing, so far. Absolutely nothing. You cetainly haven't suggested anything that will.
don't like spam anymore than anyone else but my advice to you is to install a spam filter and shut up.
That's because you don't run a server. You don't get complaints from your users about the viruses, phish attacks, and 90%+ of all email coming in being spam.
And you don't pay for the bandwidth that spam uses.
If you worked at Disneyland, in California, they didn't do you any favors. Everything you describe is explicitly required by California law.
If you work over eight hours in one day, all hours over eight must be paid at time and a half (or more).
If you work more than twelve hours in one day, all hours over twelve must be paid at double time (or more).
If you work all seven days in a given work week (as defined by the employer), the seventh day must be at time and a half (or more).
If you work more than eight hours on the seventh day of a given work week, all hours over eight must be paid at double time (or more).
You must be given a break of at least ten minutes (for which you will be paid) every two hours.
You must be given at least thirty minutes for lunch, which does not have to be paid, every four hours.
Any two shifts with less than (I think) eight hours between them (might be four) is considered a single shift. This is cumulative, of course; three shifts with three hours between them is a single shift. All overtime rules for a given single shift apply.
This is all California law. Most of it is federal law, as well.
IANAL, so if any of this actually matters to you, you'd be a damn fool to take my word for it. Consult a local attorney who specializes in labor law.
There are minimum federal standards on such things, but it varies somewhat by state. The only way to really know what your rights are is to consult a local attorney who knows labor law.
In general, there are three categories of employees: hourly, salaried, and salaried/exempt.
Hourly employees get paid for the work they actually do, at overtime rates for work over (at the federal level) 40 hours a week (in some states, like California, also for work over 8 hours a day, regardless of weekly total). There are other rules, too, and the details do vary considerably by state.
Salaried employees get paid per day or week (or sometimes, per month). They get paid their full salary regardless of number of hours worked (though they can be docked for missing full days of work, if there is a policy of doing so). If they they qualify for overtime (over 8/over 40, or whatever), they get overtime.
Salaraied/exempt employees get paid a set rate, but are exempt from overtime requirements.
It is not entirely up to the employer which category an employee fall in, despite what many employers seem to believe. Only certain types of employees are allowed to be salaried exempt, even if the employees would willingly be classified that away. Again, the rules vary by state, but in general, only management and executive staff, and in many states, state regulated professionals (like doctors and lawyers, but not programmers) can be classified as salaried exempt. The key criteria is that the employee must either be licensed by the state, or must have discretion in how he does his job, and spend the majority of his time supervising others.
One dodge that many employers try is to make professionals who are not supposed to be salaried exempt "contractors." They do not hire the employee, they contract with an indepenent contractor to provide certain services. This, too, is badly abused, because, to be a contractor (and thus exempt from overtime laws), the contractor must have complete control over how he does his job, and the hours he works. There are other requirements, as well, but those are the major ones. Even something as simple as requiring the contractor to use tools provided by the employer can make them an employee, and thus subject to overtime laws. Many software companies, including Microsoft, have been burned badly for abusing contractor status.
Again, all this is governed by a mininum set of federal standards, but many states give employees additional rights, so all of it varies by state. Again, if it really matters to you, consult a local attorney who specializes in labor law.
But, in general, if you are not licensed by the state, and do not spend most of your time supervising others, and have little discretion in how you do your job, you should probably be getting overtime.
Actually, from what I understand, Playboy v. Welles involved more than just trademarks vs. free speech. It also involved the right one has to put work experience on a resume, basically. Among performing artists of any kind - actors, models, and such - there is an explicit legal right to list previous work in one's portfolio.
Which is to say, Playboy were (and probably still are) even bigger shitheads than Nintendo, but that's hardly news either.
Trademarks explicitly do not protect from commentary or criticism (of the literary variety). The trademark holder cannot stop you from saying "this is my favorite game" or even "this game sucks donkey dick," so long as you make it clear it's your opinion.
In short, no, there's no legal basis for the email, and Nintendo should be crucified for extortion, and hit with substantial SLAPP sanctions if they file a lawsuit.
I wish I bought their crap, just so I could stop. But then, this is nothing new from Nintendo. They've been dicks for a long, long time.
If you have to get your money back from PayPal, you'll have to sue them (or hire mercenaries to raid their headquarters).
I think you'd win, but it would cost you a hundred grand in legal fees to do it.
Your best bet, since the thief is local, is to track him down and file charges against him. But file a complaint with whatever state agency regulates banks against PayPal, too. When enough people do, they'll act.
Personally, I think you have to be fairly clueless to give PayPal access to a bank acount in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
If the odds of a species ending natural event were really 1 in 455 every 100 years, one would have happened, on average, every 45,500 years throughout history. Since we know this isn't the case, the claim is utter rubbish.
I wonder if Young has a job lined up with Microsfot bashing Linux, and is just practicing.
I think you're on to something. Obviously, using Linux will be a sign of criminal intent, so anyone who uses Linux would be a criminal.
And thus, Microsoft will conquer the world.
Simple historical truth.
I left out one item:
[x] You are an idiot. Report for sterlization immediately. Bring any living children with you.
But none of them would be in prison if they hadn't spammed.
If spam is coming from their machine (and it is, in the scenario above), they are not innocent. They are either willfully participating, or so fucking stupid they shouldn't be allowed to breed.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Several spammers have gotten prison sentences in the US in last few months. There is no reason to think this won't continue.
Not for the right reasons, but it's progress.
China, on the other hand, has made it clear they will do anything for hard western currency, and if it pisses off Americans, so much the better. I don't believe they don't care. I think they care very much.
A lot of people do block the entire country. I certainly do, and will until the heat death of the universe.
That only works until you run out of new IPs. The spammers will continue to send to the old IP, plus the new one, for years. Many people have seen it happen.
Once the knife fight is over, trust will no longer be relevant.
Indeed. I think we should all send complaints to the FCC that there's not enough profanity, violence and sexual content on television. If we encourage more and more offensive content on television, especially in the after-school hours, eventually, more and more parents will simply get rid of the television, forcing their children to get off their (grossly obeses) asses and go outside and socialize with other children, or maybe even, gasp, read. Imagine a world where children are active in their play, well socialized with other children, and read regularly.
So, in the end, more sex and violence is definitely for the children.
Be amusing if the FCC got a few hundred thousand letters telling them that.
You seem to be under the impression that city engineers (and their political bosses) would implement this if they thought it worked. That assumes they want to reduce traffic congestion. I see no reason to believe that is their goal.
The line gets drawn at web sites run by people who can sue them for it. Spammers can't, really. The moment that they do, they open themselves up to subpeonas for their business records, which then become public record. Every time a spammer has reached that point, so far, they've dropped their lawsuit like a hot potato and run and hid in the bushes.
And even if they do go to a judgement, there's the concept of unclean hands. Juries get to decide how much damage was done, and what percentage of it was caused by various parties - Lycos, the spammer, the pink ISP who hosts them, etc - and the judgement is adjusted by those percentages. $1,000,000 in damage? OK, fine. The spammer is 90% responsible, and the pink ISP is 9.9999% responsible, leaving a judgement of $1.00.
Not that I like spam, but this is a bad way to combat it.
Yes, it is. But it may not be more bad than any other.
Are the spammers breaking the law? The arrest them and haul them into court.
Nearly all spam is outright criminal. Products that don't, and can't work as advertised, drugs sold illegally over the internet, porn marketed to children, child porn, you name it. Nearly all spam is criminal.
And the feds know it. And flatly refuse to even take a report.
Your method has been tried, and failed.
It's time to move on to a new method.
If not... well, people are just DDOSing them because they don't like them, or what they do.
And?
If that's fine, then whats to stop the Right from putting out a screensaver that'll DDOS Michael Moores website? Or the Sierra club from putting out one that slams Exxon? Or Barnes & Noble paying people to run a screensaver that attacks Amazon? Heck, B&N could let you earn credits towards your next purchase by letting your computer slam the Amazon website.
What's to stop spammers from making email totally useless because it's 99.99999% spam, and you can't find real messages in amongs all the viagra, breast enlargement, child porn and mortage spame? Nothing, so far. Absolutely nothing. You cetainly haven't suggested anything that will.
don't like spam anymore than anyone else but my advice to you is to install a spam filter and shut up.
That's because you don't run a server. You don't get complaints from your users about the viruses, phish attacks, and 90%+ of all email coming in being spam.
And you don't pay for the bandwidth that spam uses.
. . . this demonstrates why women are smarter than men.
http://www.thewineclip.com/
prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions
Given how incredibly unreliable both are, that is a good thing.
If you worked at Disneyland, in California, they didn't do you any favors. Everything you describe is explicitly required by California law.
If you work over eight hours in one day, all hours over eight must be paid at time and a half (or more).
If you work more than twelve hours in one day, all hours over twelve must be paid at double time (or more).
If you work all seven days in a given work week (as defined by the employer), the seventh day must be at time and a half (or more).
If you work more than eight hours on the seventh day of a given work week, all hours over eight must be paid at double time (or more).
You must be given a break of at least ten minutes (for which you will be paid) every two hours.
You must be given at least thirty minutes for lunch, which does not have to be paid, every four hours.
Any two shifts with less than (I think) eight hours between them (might be four) is considered a single shift. This is cumulative, of course; three shifts with three hours between them is a single shift. All overtime rules for a given single shift apply.
This is all California law. Most of it is federal law, as well.
IANAL, so if any of this actually matters to you, you'd be a damn fool to take my word for it. Consult a local attorney who specializes in labor law.
There are minimum federal standards on such things, but it varies somewhat by state. The only way to really know what your rights are is to consult a local attorney who knows labor law.
In general, there are three categories of employees: hourly, salaried, and salaried/exempt.
Hourly employees get paid for the work they actually do, at overtime rates for work over (at the federal level) 40 hours a week (in some states, like California, also for work over 8 hours a day, regardless of weekly total). There are other rules, too, and the details do vary considerably by state.
Salaried employees get paid per day or week (or sometimes, per month). They get paid their full salary regardless of number of hours worked (though they can be docked for missing full days of work, if there is a policy of doing so). If they they qualify for overtime (over 8/over 40, or whatever), they get overtime.
Salaraied/exempt employees get paid a set rate, but are exempt from overtime requirements.
It is not entirely up to the employer which category an employee fall in, despite what many employers seem to believe. Only certain types of employees are allowed to be salaried exempt, even if the employees would willingly be classified that away. Again, the rules vary by state, but in general, only management and executive staff, and in many states, state regulated professionals (like doctors and lawyers, but not programmers) can be classified as salaried exempt. The key criteria is that the employee must either be licensed by the state, or must have discretion in how he does his job, and spend the majority of his time supervising others.
One dodge that many employers try is to make professionals who are not supposed to be salaried exempt "contractors." They do not hire the employee, they contract with an indepenent contractor to provide certain services. This, too, is badly abused, because, to be a contractor (and thus exempt from overtime laws), the contractor must have complete control over how he does his job, and the hours he works. There are other requirements, as well, but those are the major ones. Even something as simple as requiring the contractor to use tools provided by the employer can make them an employee, and thus subject to overtime laws. Many software companies, including Microsoft, have been burned badly for abusing contractor status.
Again, all this is governed by a mininum set of federal standards, but many states give employees additional rights, so all of it varies by state. Again, if it really matters to you, consult a local attorney who specializes in labor law.
But, in general, if you are not licensed by the state, and do not spend most of your time supervising others, and have little discretion in how you do your job, you should probably be getting overtime.
I don't think there's any confusion at all.
It is the other white meat, after all.
Actually, from what I understand, Playboy v. Welles involved more than just trademarks vs. free speech. It also involved the right one has to put work experience on a resume, basically. Among performing artists of any kind - actors, models, and such - there is an explicit legal right to list previous work in one's portfolio.
Which is to say, Playboy were (and probably still are) even bigger shitheads than Nintendo, but that's hardly news either.
Trademarks explicitly do not protect from commentary or criticism (of the literary variety). The trademark holder cannot stop you from saying "this is my favorite game" or even "this game sucks donkey dick," so long as you make it clear it's your opinion.
In short, no, there's no legal basis for the email, and Nintendo should be crucified for extortion, and hit with substantial SLAPP sanctions if they file a lawsuit.
I wish I bought their crap, just so I could stop. But then, this is nothing new from Nintendo. They've been dicks for a long, long time.
If you have to get your money back from PayPal, you'll have to sue them (or hire mercenaries to raid their headquarters).
I think you'd win, but it would cost you a hundred grand in legal fees to do it.
Your best bet, since the thief is local, is to track him down and file charges against him. But file a complaint with whatever state agency regulates banks against PayPal, too. When enough people do, they'll act.
Personally, I think you have to be fairly clueless to give PayPal access to a bank acount in the first place.