Why the fuck does everyone hate on email spammers when they're easily filtered out (for the most part), Ay, there's the rub. You still have to do a quick scan to make sure your filter didn't misroute a message.
but they're okay allowing credit card companies and other companies to spam our mailboxes? I hit delete when I see a stock scam, whoop-de-fuckin'-do! But when I get credit card offers and magazines and shit I never asked for in my physical mailbox, I not only have to throw it away, I'm not. However, for me, email addresses are far more permanent than meat space addresses. Since I've had my @xemacs.org mailing address (1995), I've had 12 meat space addresses (hey, I'm a contractor and I move around a lot).
My first piece of mail in Japan, once I got a visa and permanent address, was a flyer from an English Conversation school with Celine Dion's picture on it. The horror, the horror...
The US is far, far the worst place I've ever lived for junk mail. I've lost bills while out of town due to my tiny mailslot filling up with junk. The kicker was one time when I was down to check my mail at the same time the garbage^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmail man was delivering and I told him don't give me that crap (he had two big bags, one of real mail, the other of bulk garbage), I don't want it and he basically told me off ("I'm required by law to give this to you, yadda, yadda, yadda"). Wonderful.
Both junk email (taking time away from me to get rid of it) and bulk postal mail are irritating nuisances that take at least as much time to get rid of as smoking supposedly reduces from one's life expectancy, so why shouldn't they both get the same penalties that the US tobacco companies got?
However, physical spam is legal and done continuously with much greater consequences. It's worse, it's required by US law. You cannot opt out.
The couple of years I spent living in the jungles of Mindanao were great. No mail delivery, no junk mail. No landlines, no telemarketers. Sometimes the 3rd world can be bliss...
Erroneus' original question was (which I think is a thought-provoking question):
So REALLY. What makes other crimes worse? and neither did he write anything about punishment nor did you answer his question.
See my earlier post in this thread for my thoughts on a comparison between armed robbery and spamming.
Your question is:
Do you honestly think spamming and murder are morally equal? I wouldn't, unless as a result of the consequences of the spam, someone died. I think with high probability unfortunate engineers in Japanese ISPs (and elsewhere) have died from overwork combatting spam. They call it Karoshi in Japan http://www.apmforum.com/columns/boye51.htm and the Prime Minister around the turn of the century, OBUCHI Keizo, is a recent extremely high-profile victim.
He wasn't offering moral comparisons though, only the amount of intent involved. I would imagine more effort, planning and callousness go into spamming than nearly any premeditated murder.
Think outside the box for a moment. Murder is ending the life of an individual, in effect stealing time from their life away from them and their loved ones. Spamming is stealing time from the lives of millions of individuals and the overall costs to society as a whole may well be greater.
And the more I think about it, the more I want to hear your answer. What makes you think that murder is morally worse than spamming? Just asking.
Hmmm. What is "the one that poses a substantial and unavoidable chance of someone getting killed when it all goes south," Alex. Now you're getting into thought crime, which sadly is becoming most fashionable. Justice is getting punished for what you've done wrong, not for what you might have done wrong.
Wrap your head around this: Armed robberies often involve people getting shot and killed. Wrap your head around this: until they are shot and killed, it really doesn't matter. When they are shot and killed, it's murder and we have fairly severe penalties for that.
Armed robbery is taking advantage of the legally disarmed. Put a big sign outside your store (in English and Spanish) - "WARNING: teller is armed" and I'll bet that will be one store that's skipped even by the most desperate wannabe armed robber. Or better still, do like they do in RP and have a uniformed, badged and openly armed security guard at the entrance.
Spam, to the best of my knowledge never killed anyone. I wouldn't be so sure of that. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were victims of overwork (a fairly common problem in Japan, past PM Obuchi died of it) in Japanese ISPs due to stress and overtime involved with fighting spam. I'd be more surprised though if news of that actually reached a newspaper. And yes, under those circumstances, I would consider it fair to charge spammers with murder.
Let's put them to work deleting spam flagged by the major ISP's for the rest of their lives. Yeah, that sounds about right, but I'd add they should insert one message every so often that has to be printed out and presented to the parole officer. Make the punishment fit the crime.
TFA said he had made an estimated $250k in profit. On the one hand, dang, that's a lot of v1agra, on the other hand, it said he bought 200M email addresses a few years ago and had been arrested with 7.5M addresses on his computer, i.e. even with a horrible response rate and a >95% garbage mailing list it can still add up. While the economics of email massively favor the spammer, this problem will never be solved.
A swift kick to the ass on a daily basis might make some spam recipients feel better too. That wouldn't make me feel better (and I have no doubt that my permanent email address was one of those 7.5M "lucky" email addresses), but whatever.
Still, IE is still the worse offender and that combined with the pain of getting CSS to work with it is annoying. I find it remarkable if that really is the current state of affairs of CSS in IE. They were one of the earliest adoptors of CSS, behind Maya the W3C browser that never really worked right and W3. Remarkable that it sounds like they've fallen so far behind the pack when they started out in front.
Cutting things down further, the browser-based NationStates is so trivial it's barely even a game, and there's practically no in-game interaction between players, but 1.9 million nations have been created. It works because it's a nice idea, and it has forums where people roleplay all the things the game ought to include but doesn't. I "played" that for several years. It was fun in a similar sort of way that tinkertoys are fun, you're free to build anything out of the basic structure that you want. The forums and particularly the third party forums, like the Meritocracy, which my NationState was in, were great fun.
World of Warcraft is the biggest name out there precisely because it is fun for a lot of people with multiple playing styles. Grinding with an ax wielding warrior or grinding with a magic user? No, but I've grinded with an ax wielding shaman and you completely miss the point.
For the record, the most unfun part of the game right now are all the idiots who chat in/trade.
That's assuming the angst is directed towards the specific game WOW and not just MMORPGS in general. Slashdot is hardly representative of the world at large. 9 million subscribers and growing says you're wrong.
A good MMORPG can't be made at all. Whatever. I think you're wrong and there are millions of other WoW players who surely disagree with you too.
Besides, we already have MUDs. We already have Rogue and Nethack too. Who cares?
If you have angst towards World of Warcraft, don't play it. Just leave the rest of us alone.
I recently got a new landline from NTT and they charged no fees other... Wow. They were talking for years about eliminating the license fee and doing nothing instead. Once you get beyond the license fee, landlines become most competitive in price.
I don't make all that many calls, and to be honest, find the whole Japanese cellphone culture kind of disgusting. I suppose that's one way of looking at it. When I lived in Tokyo, my apartment was between a women's university and the train station and I regularly had to dodge young women who were riding bicycles to/from campus and talking on cell phones and smoking (and being university students I suppose more than a few of those were also drunk).
I recall one evening when I was at a trendy Izakaya in Shinjuku with a friend and across from us were two young ladies sitting together both carrying on apparently animated cell phone conversations. My friend turned to me and said, "sad, isn't it?"
Still, I miss my (Power|Mega|Hyper) Carrot...
It's definitely handy to have one in certain situations (especially for meeting people), but whatever, I seem to manage OK without. Early in my stay there I tried to meet someone in Tokyo Eki (my first time there and we had never met in meat space before) using only a pay phone and... when I returned with a working visa the first thing I bought was a cell phone for meeting people. The PHS *Carrots were awesome toys too...
I don't make that many calls either, but, I move a lot (between countries), I lived for 3 years in a jungle with cell coverage but no landlines and US landlines don't support SMS text messaging which is a feature I ^H^Hmy wife requires me to have. Different usage patterns.
I have an ancient Western Electric special that was manufactured when they still made real phones - it has the "Property of AT&T/Not for sale" stamped on the bottom that I bought when they were firesaling off the inventory after the break up. Metal casing, tank-solid handset, touchtone... I think I stole it because it only cost something like $10 or $15. When they pry my Western Electric special from my cold, dead hands it will still be working like a champ.
Speaking of pay phones though, are they still using 10 yen coins? I read in the last week or so that taxi fares were raised in Kanegawa and Tokyo, which I found rather shocking.
Amongst the better informed, not having a cell phone is definitely a status symbol Whatever. Cell phones are better than paying the exorbitant NTT license fee for the privilege of paying for a landline, or PLDT if landline coverage is available at all (it isn't in most of Mindanao) since SMS text messages only cost 1 peso. They're valuable for meeting people in large public places like train stations and international airports.
I have the same kind of bias you have - I lived in Japan for four years and everywhere else is 3rd world compared to the kind of technology available there. I am kind of ashamed of the AT&T/Cingular garbage I carry around, but it's better than Nokia.
A bed made from plutonium would be awesome infact. Nice warm bed to get into every night? Yes please! I'd rather have the warm body of my wife next to me... oh wait, I must be new here. Never mind.
When you need silence to think (like I do) headphones are far, far worse than cubes or open areas. Maybe you mean earplugs, but those have never worked for me.
If you are in an open area, it is harder to surf the internet, make personal calls, If you're the guy who sits in the cube next to me, rest assured, I hear every word of every one of your many personal calls you make every working day. Moat annoying.
Keeping personal calls separate is always a problem. I had many people who overheard my cellphone conversation with my then-pregnant wife (8 timezones away, thank you stupid legal immigration laws) last February and congratulated me on being a serial father, even though I was (literally) running to a private place as she told me she was going into labor.
It is like in an elementary school lunch where even though people have no assigned seats they still sit in the same general area with the same people. I am guessing the same thing will happen here. This comment deserves a +5 insightful.
The people who need to be together to work most effectively will end up in the same general area. I had grade school classes that allowed students to move desks around the classroom like that. Worked great, from what I recall. I don't know about Intel, I've never worked for them, but cubicle seating is tight in Cisco and I would welcome the opportunity to work in closer proximity to my teammates.
photos, etc? Um, if you don't already have plenty of digital photos of your wife and children to use as wallpaper, maybe you shouldn't be working at a high tech company?
Microsoft could probably destroy every install of every version of Windows as soon as they next went online should they so choose. That would be a dramatic, though effective way of dealing with the Botnet problem.
Unix lost the war because of pricing and lack unified desktop environment. Two words - CDE sucks. I think it sucks less than Microsoft Windows, but obviously I'm in the minority on that.
The pricing issue had to do with external vendors pricing equivalent software double or triple or higher for Unix platforms than Microsoft platforms.
Unix lost a war it could have won, Unix lost a war is should have won
Corrected you on that. Indeed, we killed VMS but weren't looking the other direction.
Stupid marketing (I was once told At&T couldn't market eternal life successfully, and I agree) and bad 3rd party software pricing was most unfortunate. That and a misunderstanding of Moore's law - microcomputers would (very) soon become the equivalent of mini-computers was most tragic. Right now, the VMS guys who had their system defeated by Unix are having the last laugh.
All changes I like, except that they're made now after I and many others went through all the hard effort that now is not needed. Yeah, I understand that, and I especially feel for the guys who bought epic ground mounts before the price was nerfed.
They should at least give a title or something to distinguish between characters who did it the hard way,like my level 70 hunter, or the easier way, like my very soon to be level 70 rogue who somewhat (2.3 patch came when he was mid 40s) did it the easier way.
Really removes the incentive to want to try in any new content (sunwell, WotLK) because you know you could just wait 5 months and do it when it doesnt take as much work. I'm not so sure of that. If WotLK is going to be released soon, I don't have much incentive to do the endgame content of the Outlands, but I do have incentive to get to level 70 so I can level up quick and do the new endgame content. I started late and so have many, many others who are current subscribers. It wouldn't surprise me if the Blizzard developers go on holiday to some tropical island paradise for a month after getting WotLK ready before releasing it just to allow people more time to level up. I don't think that would be wrong, actually.
Why were these companies bothering? Mostly just for professional collaboration via telnet or ftp, right? Mostly email, I'm guessing. Collaboration kinda sorta, email no. UUCP based email worked well enough. The IT guys I talked to in late '87 and beyond (involved in converting the company to an internal company-wide network) were more concerned about propagation speed of Usenet. Before the spammers took over, it was a hugely valuable technical resource.
Email between hybrid systems with bang ("!") addressing and modern domain addressing, which we had at TRW, was a serious pain at first. And yes, I did write a sendmail.cf by hand to do UUCP -> domain address translation - the horror, the horror.
(I worked at TRW across the time they registered trw.com, one of the 1st 100.coms)
Would there be any other reason to post something like this to/.? Well, look who registered on September 3rd, 1987, about two months after my first company (trw.com) was registered.
I demand blood alcohol content tests! Hmmm, considering the number of times I've seen college students vomiting in train stations on Friday and Saturday nights, that might not be such a bad idea...
However, this research was done at Kyodai and everyone knows the best and the brightest go to Toudai (Tokyo University) or Soudai (Waseda University in Tokyo). Only the kids with lower test scores go to Kyoto University.
What if I told you that we have Linux today as a viable alternative to Windows because of the Monopoly of Microsoft. Meaning that part of the reason for Linux's success can be placed upon Microsoft, and its monopoly. I call you on that. Unix, the predecessor of Linux, won the war of ideas long before Microsoft had anything remotely resembling an operating system. Preferential pricing (an order of magnitude difference in cost between MS-anything and Unix versions of the same program) and then enforced preloading overcame that.
Personally, the reason why I started work on software that eventually made it into Linux had *nothing* to do with Microsoft, because then as now, I just don't care. Microsoft doesn't make anything I remotely care about.
As I've started playing WoW I've actually found Blizzard to be extremely insightful in what they do with the game.... Blizzard didn't just make a good game, they're keeping it a good game. As the player base evolves, the game evolves. (Email me with your slashdot login name so I can add you to my fans list.)
I agree and the more I play it, the more I appreciate their insight into balancing the game. However much I hated the elite murlocs in the Vile Reef in STV, I've done quests there before and after patch 2.3 and Blizzard's original judgment was correct, however much I used to hate those murlocs. The 2.3 changes to ranged weapons was the correct thing to do, too.
I'm a noob at gaming sorts of things, but I've made my career out of trouble shooting large programs, often without full access to source. The program itself seems fairly sound.
Half of me wants to read the source, just because reading source code to programs I like is enjoyable and the other half says "never mind, just go out and kill as many Blood Elves as you can".
Since 2.3 half the quests have degenerated into 'hunt the questionmark' and it's insanely easy to level.. in fact it's more of a task to *not* level before half your unfinished quests go grey. Yeah, that's what I meant. Besides that, they've also cut the "armor repairs tax" in half because you now get a 20% discount from vendors where you're exalted. (I like that change a lot more than I like the Azeroth nerfing).
It's not all bad. There's no reason whatsoever to pay someone to "powerlevel" your character and with the revered and exalted additional discounts + decreased time at low levels, it's easier to save up mount money so there's less reason to pay for gold, less reason to pay exorbitant prices for epic drops below level 60 and much, much harder to keep a twinkie. And really, is it that much fun to have to squint, search hard, resort to things like Thottbot to find quest givers and quest items on the ground? Those are all desired features for me, your mileage may vary.
I bought the game because a) it was available on Macintosh (and hence Linux); b) it was very popular and I've kept playing because I find it most entertaining. So long as the Blizzard spirit I've come to know and enjoy remains intact, I'll continue supporting them by being a loyal customer.
Preparation for Activision perhaps? They're big in consoles and the relative complexity of a PC game wouldn't go down well on the average Wii. I don't like consoles in general and especially Xbox/MS-Windows-only games. I hope that's not the direction they're headed.
in a sufficiently expressive language like Perl, Python or APL, I'm pretty sure it would be fair game to register said algorithm and make a claim against the people who automatically copy and publish it without notification. It didn't work for the US government when it was trying to apply export restrictions on encryption in the 1990's (the 'net was flooded with the RSA in 1 line of perl.signature and later t-shirts with the same) and it won't work now.
More recently, remember the magic decryption key that suddenly had millions of google hits within a few days of it being discovered? Cease and desist didn't work for that, did it?
Slashdot Mirror
My first piece of mail in Japan, once I got a visa and permanent address, was a flyer from an English Conversation school with Celine Dion's picture on it. The horror, the horror
The US is far, far the worst place I've ever lived for junk mail. I've lost bills while out of town due to my tiny mailslot filling up with junk. The kicker was one time when I was down to check my mail at the same time the garbage^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmail man was delivering and I told him don't give me that crap (he had two big bags, one of real mail, the other of bulk garbage), I don't want it and he basically told me off ("I'm required by law to give this to you, yadda, yadda, yadda"). Wonderful.
Both junk email (taking time away from me to get rid of it) and bulk postal mail are irritating nuisances that take at least as much time to get rid of as smoking supposedly reduces from one's life expectancy, so why shouldn't they both get the same penalties that the US tobacco companies got? However, physical spam is legal and done continuously with much greater consequences. It's worse, it's required by US law. You cannot opt out.
The couple of years I spent living in the jungles of Mindanao were great. No mail delivery, no junk mail. No landlines, no telemarketers. Sometimes the 3rd world can be bliss...
See my earlier post in this thread for my thoughts on a comparison between armed robbery and spamming.
Your question is: Do you honestly think spamming and murder are morally equal? I wouldn't, unless as a result of the consequences of the spam, someone died. I think with high probability unfortunate engineers in Japanese ISPs (and elsewhere) have died from overwork combatting spam. They call it Karoshi in Japan http://www.apmforum.com/columns/boye51.htm and the Prime Minister around the turn of the century, OBUCHI Keizo, is a recent extremely high-profile victim.
He wasn't offering moral comparisons though, only the amount of intent involved. I would imagine more effort, planning and callousness go into spamming than nearly any premeditated murder.
Think outside the box for a moment. Murder is ending the life of an individual, in effect stealing time from their life away from them and their loved ones. Spamming is stealing time from the lives of millions of individuals and the overall costs to society as a whole may well be greater.
And the more I think about it, the more I want to hear your answer. What makes you think that murder is morally worse than spamming? Just asking.
Armed robbery is taking advantage of the legally disarmed. Put a big sign outside your store (in English and Spanish) - "WARNING: teller is armed" and I'll bet that will be one store that's skipped even by the most desperate wannabe armed robber. Or better still, do like they do in RP and have a uniformed, badged and openly armed security guard at the entrance. Spam, to the best of my knowledge never killed anyone. I wouldn't be so sure of that. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were victims of overwork (a fairly common problem in Japan, past PM Obuchi died of it) in Japanese ISPs due to stress and overtime involved with fighting spam. I'd be more surprised though if news of that actually reached a newspaper. And yes, under those circumstances, I would consider it fair to charge spammers with murder.
TFA said he had made an estimated $250k in profit. On the one hand, dang, that's a lot of v1agra, on the other hand, it said he bought 200M email addresses a few years ago and had been arrested with 7.5M addresses on his computer, i.e. even with a horrible response rate and a >95% garbage mailing list it can still add up. While the economics of email massively favor the spammer, this problem will never be solved. A swift kick to the ass on a daily basis might make some spam recipients feel better too. That wouldn't make me feel better (and I have no doubt that my permanent email address was one of those 7.5M "lucky" email addresses), but whatever.
For the record, the most unfun part of the game right now are all the idiots who chat in
If you have angst towards World of Warcraft, don't play it. Just leave the rest of us alone.
I recall one evening when I was at a trendy Izakaya in Shinjuku with a friend and across from us were two young ladies sitting together both carrying on apparently animated cell phone conversations. My friend turned to me and said, "sad, isn't it?"
Still, I miss my (Power|Mega|Hyper) Carrot
I don't make that many calls either, but, I move a lot (between countries), I lived for 3 years in a jungle with cell coverage but no landlines and US landlines don't support SMS text messaging which is a feature I ^H^Hmy wife requires me to have. Different usage patterns.
I have an ancient Western Electric special that was manufactured when they still made real phones - it has the "Property of AT&T/Not for sale" stamped on the bottom that I bought when they were firesaling off the inventory after the break up. Metal casing, tank-solid handset, touchtone
Speaking of pay phones though, are they still using 10 yen coins? I read in the last week or so that taxi fares were raised in Kanegawa and Tokyo, which I found rather shocking.
is definitely a status symbol Whatever. Cell phones are better than paying the exorbitant NTT license fee for the privilege of paying for a landline, or PLDT if landline coverage is available at all (it isn't in most of Mindanao) since SMS text messages only cost 1 peso. They're valuable for meeting people in large public places like train stations and international airports.
I have the same kind of bias you have - I lived in Japan for four years and everywhere else is 3rd world compared to the kind of technology available there. I am kind of ashamed of the AT&T/Cingular garbage I carry around, but it's better than Nokia.
Nice warm bed to get into every night? Yes please! I'd rather have the warm body of my wife next to me
When you need silence to think (like I do) headphones are far, far worse than cubes or open areas. Maybe you mean earplugs, but those have never worked for me.
Keeping personal calls separate is always a problem. I had many people who overheard my cellphone conversation with my then-pregnant wife (8 timezones away, thank you stupid legal immigration laws) last February and congratulated me on being a serial father, even though I was (literally) running to a private place as she told me she was going into labor.
The people who need to be together to work most effectively will end up in the same general area. I had grade school classes that allowed students to move desks around the classroom like that. Worked great, from what I recall. I don't know about Intel, I've never worked for them, but cubicle seating is tight in Cisco and I would welcome the opportunity to work in closer proximity to my teammates.
The pricing issue had to do with external vendors pricing equivalent software double or triple or higher for Unix platforms than Microsoft platforms. Unix lost a war it could have won, Unix lost a war is should have won
Corrected you on that. Indeed, we killed VMS but weren't looking the other direction.
Stupid marketing (I was once told At&T couldn't market eternal life successfully, and I agree) and bad 3rd party software pricing was most unfortunate. That and a misunderstanding of Moore's law - microcomputers would (very) soon become the equivalent of mini-computers was most tragic. Right now, the VMS guys who had their system defeated by Unix are having the last laugh.
They should at least give a title or something to distinguish between characters who did it the hard way
Email between hybrid systems with bang ("!") addressing and modern domain addressing, which we had at TRW, was a serious pain at first. And yes, I did write a sendmail.cf by hand to do UUCP -> domain address translation - the horror, the horror.
(I worked at TRW across the time they registered trw.com, one of the 1st 100
It's a nice bit of nostalgia for us old folk.
However, this research was done at Kyodai and everyone knows the best and the brightest go to Toudai (Tokyo University) or Soudai (Waseda University in Tokyo). Only the kids with lower test scores go to Kyoto University.
Personally, the reason why I started work on software that eventually made it into Linux had *nothing* to do with Microsoft, because then as now, I just don't care. Microsoft doesn't make anything I remotely care about.
Blizzard didn't just make a good game, they're keeping it a good game. As the player base evolves, the game evolves. (Email me with your slashdot login name so I can add you to my fans list.)
I agree and the more I play it, the more I appreciate their insight into balancing the game. However much I hated the elite murlocs in the Vile Reef in STV, I've done quests there before and after patch 2.3 and Blizzard's original judgment was correct, however much I used to hate those murlocs. The 2.3 changes to ranged weapons was the correct thing to do, too.
I'm a noob at gaming sorts of things, but I've made my career out of trouble shooting large programs, often without full access to source. The program itself seems fairly sound.
Half of me wants to read the source, just because reading source code to programs I like is enjoyable and the other half says "never mind, just go out and kill as many Blood Elves as you can".
It's not all bad. There's no reason whatsoever to pay someone to "powerlevel" your character and with the revered and exalted additional discounts + decreased time at low levels, it's easier to save up mount money so there's less reason to pay for gold, less reason to pay exorbitant prices for epic drops below level 60 and much, much harder to keep a twinkie. And really, is it that much fun to have to squint, search hard, resort to things like Thottbot to find quest givers and quest items on the ground? Those are all desired features for me, your mileage may vary.
I bought the game because a) it was available on Macintosh (and hence Linux); b) it was very popular and I've kept playing because I find it most entertaining. So long as the Blizzard spirit I've come to know and enjoy remains intact, I'll continue supporting them by being a loyal customer. Preparation for Activision perhaps? They're big in consoles and the relative complexity of a PC game wouldn't go down well on the average Wii. I don't like consoles in general and especially Xbox/MS-Windows-only games. I hope that's not the direction they're headed.
More recently, remember the magic decryption key that suddenly had millions of google hits within a few days of it being discovered? Cease and desist didn't work for that, did it?