I've always wondered why people ask questions like this.
First, much of evil is subjective. Sure, most might agree that genocide and such are pretty evil, but it's in the middle ground where the confusion arises.
On the other hand, we must remember that one of the greatest advantages evil has over good (other than good being stupid) is that evil has no compunctions about lying. Evil will never tell you it's evil unless it can manage to find some advantage in doing so.
I don't know the reason for this one, but the company I work for uses a FreeBSD virus scanner running on our FreeBSD mail server to scan incoming and outgoing mail for virus attachments.
Just this year, our moderately sized company has stopped over 12,000 virus attachments being sent to our employees.
That's not just putting the fox in charge of guarding the henhouse -- It's putting him in charge of the henhouse while giving him a Foreman grill and a book entitled "1001 ways to steal and cook a chicken".
Does anyone else see a problem with using a weapon that can be blocked by the shiny side of tin-foil?
I'm sure some here have read ringworld. There's a brief discussion of the difficulties of using a laser against someone wearing clothes of the same color as the laser.
When something is a certain color, what does that mean? It means it reflects light of that wavelength. If the US army were to use it you know it would have a standard color... what's to keep an enemy force from charging wearing surplus santa suits? "AIM FOR WHITE FRINGE! THAT'S THEIR VULNERABLE PART!"
While e-stamps seem like a good idea, I still prefer the hashcash solution. The solution is basically the sender has to show that they've done a certain amount of computational work for a mail to be accepted.
It has several advantages that pay solutions don't.
It doesn't require a micropayment solution
It doesn't require a central registry
An additional benefit is that for small senders the cost remains negligibly small -- perhaps 2 seconds per e-mail address sent to. For spammers 2 seconds per e-mail address is a huge burden. If you're trying to mail to 10 million addresses, you need 231 hours of processor time to compute the hashcash "stamp" required for all the address. It's not an impossible feat, but if a spammer needs to set up server farms just to compute stamps their profit margins shrink signifigantly.
Anyone who has read the fact knows full well that this is likely to happen. So I wouldn't call it "unwittingly." That's like saying that a firing squad isn't responsible for killing someone because only one of the guns is randomly selected to hold the bullet.
Perhaps I'm being overly pedantic, but typical firing squad procedure involves all the guns except one to have live bullets.Wouldn't want one person's sloppy aim to ruin the whole execution.
The one blank is to give the shooter the possibility that he didn't do it -- not liklihood.
They can't find out who initially contributed what, but it's quite easy to find out who is hosting what. Just look at the IP address of whoever is connecting to you.
Not true. For any particular freenet request you cannot be sure if the node contacting you is requesting the file, or is just passing along a request from a previous node.
The reverse is also true. For any particular file you're requesting, you can't tell if the file you're getting is from the node you're contacting or if it's passing on your request to another node.
It's a double blind. You MAY be getting the files from that node, then again by the very nature of freenet, and the large amount of information in it it is extremely unlikely that the information you recieved was actually on the node you requested it from.
Further, if the goverment finds something unsavory, and manages to somehow prove (don't ask me how) it was on your computer the caching nature of Freenet allows you to say "There's a damn good chance that file wasn't on my computer until the government requested it". At that point you have the dual defenses of reasonable doubt and entrapment.
Even something as seemingly trivial as requiring spam to be uniformly labeled as such is probably impermissible, precisely because automated filters would use the effect of this legislation to stop all spam, which would be denying spammers the right to send people advertisements, i.e. banning their speech due to the commercial content thereof.
Not true. It has never been found unconstitutional for the government to require disclaimers. What people do with those disclaimers is neither the government's problem, or concern.
Do you think Cigarette companies would put those Surgeon General's warnings on their packages if they could claim that the effect of those warnings is that people stop buying their cigarettes, and is infringing upon their legal enterprise?
Hell, the government could just as easily argue that the effect is that more people read the ads since their easier to find in the inbox. The truth is what people do with the disclaimer is their own business and not a matter of law.
there's absolutely no hard data that I can find to go along with this, so if you find anything more on it, plz. post below - somehow 1500 lines of code per day, "every media player" built in doesn't ring true for me.
Twits who make up bullshit stories like this thrive on attention. By posting it on a major site like slashdot, you give him exactly what he wants. Just use a little restraint, and try not to post the stories that are obvioulsy fake -- like this one, and the one about Masters of Orion 3 beign out soon (grin).
Not that it's germane to the discussion, but trademarks take into acount the field of endeavour for each trademark. There may be hundreds of different companies all trademarking the same word, as long as there isn't another company claiming prior trademark use within that field there's typically not a problem registering. The fact that Microsoft registered the Windows name in the computer software domain doesn't mean nobody else has used that word ever in the history of the world, instead that nobody else used that word to describe or name a product in the limited domain of computer software.
Assuming anything happens on the trademark front Deersoft owning the SpamAssassin trademark is relatively pointless. IIRC Spamassassin was called spamassassin long before deersoft registered the trademark, or even considered a windows version. Use of a trademark prior to it being registered is a vaild defense against a trademark infringement cliam, and can actually should the spamassassin folks choose be grounds to have deersoft's trademark squashed.
I think you'd be in for a rather nasty flight if you were to double the length and width and failed to increase the thickness. You'd probably find that your wings would either no longer be rigid enough to do much of anything, or be so brittle that they'd break the first time you tried to flap them.
Well, first bear in mind that the Martian atmosphere is MUCH less dense than even the air at several km elevation. Standard pressure on earth at sea level is defined as one atmosphere. Standard martian ground level pressure is about 0.01 atm. Even at 20 km elevation (far higher than any insect could fly) earth's atmospheric pressure is still 0.05 atm, or still 5 times that of Mars.
The weight of the wings will increase with the cube of the size of the wings, meanwhile the lifting power of the wings will increase with the square of the size of the wings. It is quite concievable that by the time you get the wings large enough to lift the body in a Martian atomsphere the wings will weigh too much to lift themselves and the body as well.
Plus, just scaling the wings won't work. Any serious increase in the size of the wings will require you to increase the size of the motor, solenoid, dielectric fiber, or whatever is moving the wing.
This is not to say it can't be done. I really have no clue if it's feasable on a Mars. It's just that just scaling the wings won't work.
You'd probably find that the virus was signifigantly less virulent in todays population than it was in 1918. Many people alive today are decended from people who either never caught the disease, or caught and recovered from the disease. The people who carried traits that made them most vulnerable to the disease for the most part died -- 20 to 100 million of them.
The problem with an extremely deadly, extremely virulent disease with high mortality and quick victim demise is that it tends to burn itself out. It uses up all it's best victims and leaves behind a population resistant to it's effects. Even generations later, the disease would find a much harder time gaining a foothold.
There's also a group of old ladies who go to restraunts and pretend that one of them is having a birthday. If one of the employees sings "Happy Birthday" a copywrited song, they sue. This apparently keeps them in bingo money.
Wouldn't claiming it's your birthday without it actuall being your birthday be fraud? I mean they usually bring you out a desert or something. That's obtaining goods and services you're not entitled to through deception. Seems like textbook Fraud to me.
Except that the people who respond to spam (and thus make it worthwhile) are exactly the same ones who aren't going to filter.
I am reminded of a quote -- sadly I can't remember by whom.
"Spam works at a response rate of 1 in 10,000. The general population contains a far higher rate of mental illness, senility, and retardation."
An amusing thought, but still relevant. People will not learn. There will always be someone so stupid, or so mentally infirm that they'll be that one in 10,000 that keeps it profitable. The only true option is to cut them off at the source.
That being said, I heartily endorse Spamassassin for keeping the spam out of my mailbox. It may not eliminate the problem, but it keeps the effects from bothering me.
Actually, I wrote an e-mail to the company developing this when the story ran 2.5 years ago -- I'll quote the response in full (Yes, I'm a packrat):
Thank you for your comments. We have been sharing your frustration as the new reports have failed to report this product will be a recyclable. Just a drop the disc in the bucket next to the butter container and milk bottle. It also eliminates the car pollution of returning the movie to the store. avg. 10 miles and 1/3 gallon of gas.
We appreciate your concern.
SpectraDisc
I still think it's a stupid idea, but it's moved from monumentally stupid to moderately stupid.
His server was set up so poorly that all it took was a forged header saying it was from his domain to get a message through?
Sounds like he should have been blocked. Come on, at the very least do some ip checking. It sounds like his server wasn't a textbook open relay, but it was pretty close.
Fine, you want pedantic. Nowhere does it say "just news", "only news", or even "our news".
And where exactly does it say that front page summaries are supposed to be just news? Is that in the nonexistant faq, or the nonexistant poster responsibility page?
Now, I'm fucking done arguing with an idiot who's too much of a pussy to sign his name to his statements.
I don't think you get it. This isn't a news site. They don't have reporters, they don't write stories. They link to other news stories, it's a meta-site it's about opinion and commentary, that is the value added. There is nothing here other than opinion and commentary that couldn't be found at the various sites they link to.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wondered why people ask questions like this.
First, much of evil is subjective. Sure, most might agree that genocide and such are pretty evil, but it's in the middle ground where the confusion arises.
On the other hand, we must remember that one of the greatest advantages evil has over good (other than good being stupid) is that evil has no compunctions about lying. Evil will never tell you it's evil unless it can manage to find some advantage in doing so.
Kids today.
I don't know the reason for this one, but the company I work for uses a FreeBSD virus scanner running on our FreeBSD mail server to scan incoming and outgoing mail for virus attachments.
Just this year, our moderately sized company has stopped over 12,000 virus attachments being sent to our employees.
That's not just putting the fox in charge of guarding the henhouse -- It's putting him in charge of the henhouse while giving him a Foreman grill and a book entitled "1001 ways to steal and cook a chicken".
Does anyone else see a problem with using a weapon that can be blocked by the shiny side of tin-foil?
I'm sure some here have read ringworld. There's a brief discussion of the difficulties of using a laser against someone wearing clothes of the same color as the laser.
When something is a certain color, what does that mean? It means it reflects light of that wavelength. If the US army were to use it you know it would have a standard color... what's to keep an enemy force from charging wearing surplus santa suits? "AIM FOR WHITE FRINGE! THAT'S THEIR VULNERABLE PART!"
It has several advantages that pay solutions don't.
It doesn't require a micropayment solution
It doesn't require a central registry
An additional benefit is that for small senders the cost remains negligibly small -- perhaps 2 seconds per e-mail address sent to. For spammers 2 seconds per e-mail address is a huge burden. If you're trying to mail to 10 million addresses, you need 231 hours of processor time to compute the hashcash "stamp" required for all the address. It's not an impossible feat, but if a spammer needs to set up server farms just to compute stamps their profit margins shrink signifigantly.
Group working on an implementation of hashcash
Anyone who has read the fact knows full well that this is likely to happen. So I wouldn't call it "unwittingly." That's like saying that a firing squad isn't responsible for killing someone because only one of the guns is randomly selected to hold the bullet.
Perhaps I'm being overly pedantic, but typical firing squad procedure involves all the guns except one to have live bullets.Wouldn't want one person's sloppy aim to ruin the whole execution.
The one blank is to give the shooter the possibility that he didn't do it -- not liklihood.
They can't find out who initially contributed what, but it's quite easy to find out who is hosting what. Just look at the IP address of whoever is connecting to you.
Not true. For any particular freenet request you cannot be sure if the node contacting you is requesting the file, or is just passing along a request from a previous node.
The reverse is also true. For any particular file you're requesting, you can't tell if the file you're getting is from the node you're contacting or if it's passing on your request to another node.
It's a double blind. You MAY be getting the files from that node, then again by the very nature of freenet, and the large amount of information in it it is extremely unlikely that the information you recieved was actually on the node you requested it from.
Further, if the goverment finds something unsavory, and manages to somehow prove (don't ask me how) it was on your computer the caching nature of Freenet allows you to say "There's a damn good chance that file wasn't on my computer until the government requested it". At that point you have the dual defenses of reasonable doubt and entrapment.
We made one in our Physics class in high school. I'm due to go to my 10 year high school reunion in a little more than a year.
Even something as seemingly trivial as requiring spam to be uniformly labeled as such is probably impermissible, precisely because automated filters would use the effect of this legislation to stop all spam, which would be denying spammers the right to send people advertisements, i.e. banning their speech due to the commercial content thereof.
Not true. It has never been found unconstitutional for the government to require disclaimers. What people do with those disclaimers is neither the government's problem, or concern.
Do you think Cigarette companies would put those Surgeon General's warnings on their packages if they could claim that the effect of those warnings is that people stop buying their cigarettes, and is infringing upon their legal enterprise?
Hell, the government could just as easily argue that the effect is that more people read the ads since their easier to find in the inbox. The truth is what people do with the disclaimer is their own business and not a matter of law.
there's absolutely no hard data that I can find to go along with this, so if you find anything more on it, plz. post below - somehow 1500 lines of code per day, "every media player" built in doesn't ring true for me.
Twits who make up bullshit stories like this thrive on attention. By posting it on a major site like slashdot, you give him exactly what he wants. Just use a little restraint, and try not to post the stories that are obvioulsy fake -- like this one, and the one about Masters of Orion 3 beign out soon (grin).
Not that it's germane to the discussion, but trademarks take into acount the field of endeavour for each trademark. There may be hundreds of different companies all trademarking the same word, as long as there isn't another company claiming prior trademark use within that field there's typically not a problem registering. The fact that Microsoft registered the Windows name in the computer software domain doesn't mean nobody else has used that word ever in the history of the world, instead that nobody else used that word to describe or name a product in the limited domain of computer software.
Further, Microsoft's Windows trademark is teneous at best, with at least one federal judge questioning the legitimacy of their trademark claim
And no, I'm not a Lawyer -- yet, although with my newly acquired LSAT scores I may soon remedy that.
Assuming anything happens on the trademark front Deersoft owning the SpamAssassin trademark is relatively pointless. IIRC Spamassassin was called spamassassin long before deersoft registered the trademark, or even considered a windows version. Use of a trademark prior to it being registered is a vaild defense against a trademark infringement cliam, and can actually should the spamassassin folks choose be grounds to have deersoft's trademark squashed.
I think you'd be in for a rather nasty flight if you were to double the length and width and failed to increase the thickness. You'd probably find that your wings would either no longer be rigid enough to do much of anything, or be so brittle that they'd break the first time you tried to flap them.
Well, first bear in mind that the Martian atmosphere is MUCH less dense than even the air at several km elevation. Standard pressure on earth at sea level is defined as one atmosphere. Standard martian ground level pressure is about 0.01 atm. Even at 20 km elevation (far higher than any insect could fly) earth's atmospheric pressure is still 0.05 atm, or still 5 times that of Mars.
The weight of the wings will increase with the cube of the size of the wings, meanwhile the lifting power of the wings will increase with the square of the size of the wings. It is quite concievable that by the time you get the wings large enough to lift the body in a Martian atomsphere the wings will weigh too much to lift themselves and the body as well.
Plus, just scaling the wings won't work. Any serious increase in the size of the wings will require you to increase the size of the motor, solenoid, dielectric fiber, or whatever is moving the wing.
This is not to say it can't be done. I really have no clue if it's feasable on a Mars. It's just that just scaling the wings won't work.
You'd probably find that the virus was signifigantly less virulent in todays population than it was in 1918. Many people alive today are decended from people who either never caught the disease, or caught and recovered from the disease. The people who carried traits that made them most vulnerable to the disease for the most part died -- 20 to 100 million of them.
The problem with an extremely deadly, extremely virulent disease with high mortality and quick victim demise is that it tends to burn itself out. It uses up all it's best victims and leaves behind a population resistant to it's effects. Even generations later, the disease would find a much harder time gaining a foothold.
There's also a group of old ladies who go to restraunts and pretend that one of them is having a birthday. If one of the employees sings "Happy Birthday" a copywrited song, they sue. This apparently keeps them in bingo money.
Wouldn't claiming it's your birthday without it actuall being your birthday be fraud? I mean they usually bring you out a desert or something. That's obtaining goods and services you're not entitled to through deception. Seems like textbook Fraud to me.
Except that the people who respond to spam (and thus make it worthwhile) are exactly the same ones who aren't going to filter.
I am reminded of a quote -- sadly I can't remember by whom.
"Spam works at a response rate of 1 in 10,000. The general population contains a far higher rate of mental illness, senility, and retardation."
An amusing thought, but still relevant. People will not learn. There will always be someone so stupid, or so mentally infirm that they'll be that one in 10,000 that keeps it profitable. The only true option is to cut them off at the source.
That being said, I heartily endorse Spamassassin for keeping the spam out of my mailbox. It may not eliminate the problem, but it keeps the effects from bothering me.
Actually, I wrote an e-mail to the company developing this when the story ran 2.5 years ago -- I'll quote the response in full (Yes, I'm a packrat):
Thank you for your comments. We have been sharing your frustration as the new reports have failed to report this product will be a recyclable. Just a drop the disc in the bucket next to the butter container and milk bottle. It also eliminates the car pollution of returning the movie to the store. avg. 10 miles and 1/3 gallon of gas.
We appreciate your concern.
SpectraDisc
I still think it's a stupid idea, but it's moved from monumentally stupid to moderately stupid.
At which point you have just tied up $900 in capital on something you don't actually expect to sell. Not good business sense.
Urgent -- Need Help [stop]
Send Sweedish Bikini Team [stop]
His server was set up so poorly that all it took was a forged header saying it was from his domain to get a message through?
Sounds like he should have been blocked. Come on, at the very least do some ip checking. It sounds like his server wasn't a textbook open relay, but it was pretty close.
>> Who should be the members of such a crew if it were to be launched?
>Oh, too easy! The MPAA and the RIAA, of course!
No, no that's for the mission to the sun.
Oooh. I've been called a pedantic fuckwit.
Fine, you want pedantic. Nowhere does it say "just news", "only news", or even "our news".
And where exactly does it say that front page summaries are supposed to be just news? Is that in the nonexistant faq, or the nonexistant poster responsibility page?
Now, I'm fucking done arguing with an idiot who's too much of a pussy to sign his name to his statements.
I don't think you get it. This isn't a news site. They don't have reporters, they don't write stories. They link to other news stories, it's a meta-site it's about opinion and commentary, that is the value added. There is nothing here other than opinion and commentary that couldn't be found at the various sites they link to.
They infect or have infected 7.2% of all computers. (more than any other virii)
Do you have a source to back up these numbers?