Indeed. And so do their competitors. If you take the entire team away from a competing company, you kill their entire development process. How long would it take them to restaff, retrain, get a team that works well together and knows the software inside out?
You could easily drive your competitor out of business in one fell swoop.
I can see why they would want to hide the faces of their programmers. But I usually wear a mask to work anyway. ---------------------------
Look, it's all very simple and obvious. Since the UK govt introduced IR35, we Brits have been trying to leave the country in our droves. Americans will not be based here, and therefore not subject to the tax. Why don't we just let Americans take all the jobs in the UK, and we'll all go over there and take contract roles for US market rates?
The face is REAL, it's a sculpture made by the Martians to attract our attention.
And what about Man In The Moon? He's been seen for millenia but STILL people don't believe he's really watching courting couples in the parks! How can people be so blind?? There is obviously a human face in the moon, ergo it was carved by huge alien spacecraft with big laser guns, as a message to all humankind, saying "look, we can make a big face, cool huh?" It's like alien graffiti, man.
Hey, I heard Occam lost his razor - anyone seen it? ---------------------------
The golden rule you're probably thinking of is always get someone else to test your code
Quite so. You can't actually write code without some kind of testing yourself.. I should have been clearer - always get somebody else to do the final (the "unit") test because they will frequently turn up possibilities that you didn't incorperate into your own code.
It's always useful to have something that runs the bit of code that you are writing, in isolation, so that you can easily see what is going on in that bit without worrying about the rest of the system
Yup, but I wouldn't call that a test unit. To me a test unit comprises of:
1) some harness code to call the code being tested
2) a complete set of test data to feed into the test unit (be it by a script or a test dogsbody typing it into a front end, depending on what's being tested)
Of course you can't write code without calling the functions during development; but I wouldn't want to create all the test data, just to throw away huge chunks of it if any parameters change. In addition to which, the development harness can throw up anomolies which you may have missed when creating the unit test harness (case in point: VB/VC booleans, see below)
to clarify.. say you have a function that accepts the following parameters:
date (date of birth to check person is 18)
string (surname)
long (salary - it's a long in case you're a manager)
then something changes and you drop the date of birth check (it's no longer deemed necessary). The following test data is invalid:
Test to check DoB in the future
Test to check the person is 18 yrs 1 day
Test to check peron is 18 yrs exactly
Test to check person is 18 yrs less one day
Sanity check for DoB less than 120 years ago
Oh, and don't forget having to go through your nice pre-prepared test data and eliminate by hand all the instances of DoB that you so carefully put in there before (including the ones that had a strange formt, perhaps, just to check the date conversion worked OK).
A few more changes like that and suddenly you're chucking out a lot of preprepared scripts and test plans. Why do all that work before the implementation is complete? Doesn't make sense to me.. it could waste days on a big system. On a huge system, you could be talking weeks (some systems I have worked on required several people several weeks to craft all the necessary test data.. just a 10% change would involve a huge amount of change to all that.. Why do the work twice?
Why? Only the ones that are testing the bit of code that returns your boolean to VB, surely
My comment was a little sarcy.. in fact, VB and VC++ do treat booleans differently. As a huge project I was part of found. This was discovered during the proof of concept stage when somebody tried to link a VC component to a VB component.
But according to the "do your test unit fist" plan, we would have all sat around creating test units like mad, then done some development, then found out that the 25+ units just developed all had to change because VB was not getting the data we thought it would. We would then have gone back and rewritten all the test units for VB, to make sure they were all doing a "not" on the booleans they got from VC. As it was, we found the problem before any major development began, and when we started cutting major code, we all knew what to do to prevent that great waste of time.
You get rid of them along with your remote access class
In other words, you throw away at least several days worth of work, that was never going to be necessary. Wow. Hope nothing else major changes on that project; the time to develop the test harnesses could be greater than the rest of the project put together!
but again the other unit tests (if written properly) make sure that the remote access classes that you have just removed have not taken some vital functionality for the rest of the system with them
Which they should do in any case, if you write the test units properly, and when the system is ready to be tested so you don't spend lots of time writing units that are never used, and units that change dramatically during development, and units that change slightly (and maybe somebody forgets to change the test data or the test harness so either bugs seem to appear or are overlooked).
Sorry, but you'll never convince me that doing that amount of work to prepare for development is a good thing. ---------------------------
A feature does not exist unless there is a test for it
I would hate to annoy anyone by pointing out that this is a basic principle of unit testing. So I won't...:) Actually, though, a feature does not exist unless every conceivable type of input to that feature has been considered and actually input (alphas into numeric fields, negative numbers, strings that are waaaaay too long etc etc etc) I have worked in much that way since I joined the industry - golden rules are never test your own code, and cover every possible input. It shouldn't be possible to smash the stack on any properly tested code... but how many vunerabilities exist out there...?
But I wouldn't want to do the test unit before the real unit.. if the real unit changes half way through development.
Say you find out that VB and VC++ don't represent booleans in the same way (could never happen, of course, but just suppose) and you've got to change your code, then all your unit tests have to be updated. Or, a simpler example: management change the spec and say "no we don't want remote access after all cos the consultant just said it would be a security risk".. what to do with all your remote access unit tests...? ---------------------------
I wonder how often we'd hear about it on Slashdot if it were called Quality and Productivity Assurance Methodology for Software Development
QPAMSD
Think about it. They'd have shortened it to "PAM". Three years ago, you'd have heard about nothing else, and there would have been loads of excuses for providing links to blonde babes in bathing suits. ---------------------------
Take a bunch of requirements, spend months designing a wonderful class library that can do everything that is required, set the code-monkeys loose writing it, and then find that it doesn't do what the customer wanted
Absolutely. Neither one extreme (ahem) nor the other is the "best" way forward. And different approaches work better in different situations. Would I suggest prototyping in an enironment in which you've got roughly 3 hours to prevent a nuclear meltdown? Oh yeah.
But I *never* think it's a Good Thing to ignore all possible future requirements and reuse possibilities, and just concentrate on the "now", which is the impression I gathered from aforementioned article.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction regarding design; yes I do recall something along the lines of design should be done by brainstorming, defining interfaces then going and doing it.. but it still sounds very much like seat-of-the-pants stuff to me... the impression I formed from the article (and I could still be way off here) was that it was designed by techies fed up with doing the ground work, and wanting to do the fun stuff. ---------------------------
The impression I got from a recent Tech journal (don't recall which one) is that you don't bother to design anything, just plough on ahead and do your code. Anything unessential to the task in hand should be ignored. So don't bother identifying potential future needs and requirements, or bothering overmuch about resuse, because it MAY never be necessary.
To me it sounded just like prototyping. Can you say "Software Crisis"? ---------------------------
The system needs a constant series of "nudges" or a "plan" if it is to reach more advanced forms.
Classic case of mis-stating the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin himself stated that if any lifeform, or even a part of a lifeform could ever be found that could not possibly have evolved by a series of simple steps, his whole theory would fall apart and need to be rethought.
Over one hundred years later, with all the "Christian Scientists" in the world trying, not a single example has ever been found and the theory stands (enhanced, but basically the same principles).
And the argument about SETI is not a good analogy either. Order in the midst of randomness is common (rock faces that resemble human features, or pebbles being sorted into size order by waves). SETI is searching for designed signals, which is quite different. No part of any lifeform has ever been found to show any indication of design (the eye, for example, though complex is an incredibly poor organ if it was designed deliberately that way; a first-year undergraduate could design a better system). ---------------------------
It's also a great example of how NOT to provide documentation. All the functions are listed, all the options are shown, but...
1)In places the documentation is simply innacurate (p169 "keyCount indicates the number of keys required to decrypt the message that are not currently available, and these are identified by keyID in the referrenced keyIDArray"should read "keyCount shows how many keys the message was originally encrypted to, regardless of how many of these are in the currently open keyring. Period.")
2) There is a tiny amount of sample code which shows the most basic functions. Everything else is left to your imagination and trial and error...
You want to see good code..?
Check out: http://www.oz.net/~srheller/dpgp/index.html which shows you how to use the API...
It's in Delphi, laid out nicely, with nice comments.
And while I'm on the subject, security is *both* product *and* process. Sure, I'd be stupid not to have the latest patches and train my users. But I'd also be better off not allowing them to use MS Outlook, and IE (remember the scripting bug that allowed one to catch a virus from simply browsing the web?) ---------------------------
Another one tried to sell me discount coupon book to my local mall. I calmly started inquiring about whether she's informed if there are any BDSM items I can purchase
So were there any BDSM items at the mall or not? How much? ---------------------------
Re:I'm Sure the Chinese Will Love This....
on
Norway Bans Spam
·
· Score: 1
The flaw in your reasoning is all contained in one sentance near the end: We live in a free society
We do. The Chinese do not. The difference is that in the western world it is an offense to send somebody a junk fax. In China it is an offense to criticise the government using a fax machine, to somebody you know.
Hey guess what? A dictatorial government lied to cover up the introduction of a law preventing opposition from organising. Nothing to do with spam.
And I'd point out that you no longer get faxes from people sending you adverts, and you've got more ink and more paper in your fax machine as a result. Also, you can use your fax machine, as it doesn't start trying to print another ad whenever you plug it in. I think that's a bonus, and the definition of Junk Fax seemed to work. ---------------------------
Re:Repling to spam is the only sure fire defence!!
on
Norway Bans Spam
·
· Score: 1
This guy's article is about the most flawed thinking I've ever seen concerning spam (apart from the spammers themselves).
If you want to check it out, look at:
the article (safe browse mode via SamSpade.org). It won't be long before this guy gets kicked off his ISP for violation of his TOS, and giving out your home phone number to spammers (especially when there are sooo many reverse lookup systems out there) is suicidal.
Newbies: DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ADVICE! ---------------------------
Yup, that's one of the biggest concerns is that kids don't have to go looking for it. They'll get it sent to them. And the spammer will cry Freedom of speech. There's a good reason certain stores have a "No under 18s allowed" sign on them. I'm sure the bookstore owner would not remove that and display his wares (open) in the window and claim the 1st Amendment (or whatever relevant article in law is concerned) protected his right to do so.
Personally, I sometimes take the view that a server should be set up purely and simply for the purpose of sending spam supporting politicians and businesses endless emails about counter views (you could have a web page set up so all anyone had to do was enter their comments and click "send"). One could also set up a couple of temporary email addresses, make a few usenet postings with it and pop it on a couple of web pages (hidden) and then simply forward anything that arrived there to the same people (hey, it's advertising THEY want the right to see and send, right?). I wonder how many would continue to support the idea then, when their inbox became as useless as everone else's will be in ten years.
But of course, it is just a fantasy of mine. You know, like the one about becoming a vigilante and banging Nazi's heads against brick walls repeatedly. Nice to think about once in a while. But wouldn't actually *do* it... ---------------------------
Personally, I thought The Matrix was one of the best Kung-Fu action movies ever made
Really? I thought it was one of the worst kung-fu movies ever. great Sci-Fi, but c'mon. Laurence Fishbourne and Keanu Reeves spent a few months learning some moves. How on *earth* can that compare with the Wing Chun moves you'll see in any Bruce Lee movie, or the Chinese-Opera based moves you'll see in any (early) Jackie Chan, Sumo Hung (before Hollywood) or virtaully any other movie made in Hong Kong?
The difference was a big budget, but wow, man, you can't compare it as a Kung Fu movie to even "Armour of God" (early JC). I mean JC uses *no* special FX, and doesn't speed up his film, but the action still beats the hell outta anything Hollywood ever produced (or any other western film company for that matter).
Hollywood got to Jackie Chan too late in his career. They should have done something better than "Canonball run" when they had the chance. Ah well.
---------------------------
Side which won previous round in court battle refutes allegations of bias made by side that lost previous round in court battle
...and Microsoft went to the gallows, still proclaiming his innocence. Even today, there are many who claimed that being found holding a bloody knife standing over the body and saying "I'm glad I killed the bastard" was purely circumstantial, and that the 57 witnesses could have been wrong. ---------------------------
Sorry, try again. I voluntarily agree to read my inbox every day as well. E-mail was designed to encourage discussion and I voluntarily go to hotmail to read my messages.
I voluntarily read hotmail. Spam messages are part of hotmail.
The definitive argument about this, as far as I'm concerned is this.. let's paint a picture in which all spam is ALLOWED and PROTECTED under freedom of speech, as the poster appears to support.
I have a new political theory - all countries should be run by the people with the longest hair and the nicest pants. I want to share this theory with everyone. SO I email everyone on a 2 million email address list.
The only problem is, everyone ELSE with a half-baked idea or scheme or a business that needs more customers will ALSO do this.
If spamming was an acceptable way to spread news and adverts and ideas, and everyone who wanted to did it, there would, quite simply, be no possible way to detect the tiny fraction of email that WASN'T spam in your inbox every day.
It's not JUST the fact that the spammer makes the ISP (and their customers) pay for the advertising. It's also VOLUME - give everyone in the world a way to communicate with everyone else, with no way of deciding what you do or do not want to read, and all you'll do is render the medium useless.
An accurate analagy would be if you could mail a million letters for free, and the recipient and the service that delivers the letter pay. Then extend the example to allow everyone in the world to send you anything they want through the mail, you'll pay for it, and when you try to locate that letter from your parents you're expected... well, good luck. It's been dealyed and maybe lost because there was too much other stuff in the sack. ---------------------------
Nothing good can come of us meddling in offworldly affairs
Couldn't agree more. Extrapolating this concept, I shall now spend the rest of my life locked in a small box. Nothing good can happen from meddling in outboxly affairs.
1) We find them hostile. And we upset them, and trigger the apocolypse.
2) (More likely) We find them doctile, and attempt to colonize their world, or somehow make "them" inferior to "us".
Missed out:
3) We find them, but are unable to engage in interstellar travel for decades/centuries and instead get some interesting (if very, very) long information exchanges that benefit both cultures very much indeed
4) Another possibility...
n) Yet another possibility
resources could be much better spent searching Earth for a new deposit of fossil fuel
Wow. Just wow. Yeah, that's a good alternative. Not looking for a non-polluting source of fuel then. Just another way of ruining God's Glorious Creation in a new and unique fashion. ---------------------------
I *was* going to claim that the little-known but much-played "Colony" on the Speccy was my all-time addiction, but then I read this thread and somebody up above there talking about buying a HD to boot Civ reminded me that I spent a month or two putting together a reset-proof RAMdisk for my AtariST that intercepted calls to the A drive, only so I could preload Civ.
Yes, I know the links on my homepage are all buggered cos they've gone into CAPS. I will fix it. One day. I promise. Maybe. ---------------------------
Oh yeah, and we also need real training for the people who leave their bleeding SMTP servers open for relaying to the whole damn world, or leave their wallets on the bar while they go to the bathroom. ---------------------------
Slashdot Mirror
Companies look at employees as a resource
Indeed. And so do their competitors. If you take the entire team away from a competing company, you kill their entire development process. How long would it take them to restaff, retrain, get a team that works well together and knows the software inside out?
You could easily drive your competitor out of business in one fell swoop.
I can see why they would want to hide the faces of their programmers. But I usually wear a mask to work anyway.
---------------------------
Look, it's all very simple and obvious. Since the UK govt introduced IR35, we Brits have been trying to leave the country in our droves. Americans will not be based here, and therefore not subject to the tax. Why don't we just let Americans take all the jobs in the UK, and we'll all go over there and take contract roles for US market rates?
Everyone's a winner.
---------------------------
No, no no!!!
The face is REAL, it's a sculpture made by the Martians to attract our attention.
And what about Man In The Moon? He's been seen for millenia but STILL people don't believe he's really watching courting couples in the parks! How can people be so blind?? There is obviously a human face in the moon, ergo it was carved by huge alien spacecraft with big laser guns, as a message to all humankind, saying "look, we can make a big face, cool huh?" It's like alien graffiti, man.
Hey, I heard Occam lost his razor - anyone seen it?
---------------------------
Keep your nose clean, be patient, and you can be a citizen again
Am I the only one that thinks this sounds earily like something Judge Dredd would say?
---------------------------
The golden rule you're probably thinking of is always get someone else to test your code
Quite so. You can't actually write code without some kind of testing yourself.. I should have been clearer - always get somebody else to do the final (the "unit") test because they will frequently turn up possibilities that you didn't incorperate into your own code.
It's always useful to have something that runs the bit of code that you are writing, in isolation, so that you can easily see what is going on in that bit without worrying about the rest of the system
Yup, but I wouldn't call that a test unit. To me a test unit comprises of:
1) some harness code to call the code being tested
2) a complete set of test data to feed into the test unit (be it by a script or a test dogsbody typing it into a front end, depending on what's being tested)
Of course you can't write code without calling the functions during development; but I wouldn't want to create all the test data, just to throw away huge chunks of it if any parameters change.
In addition to which, the development harness can throw up anomolies which you may have missed when creating the unit test harness (case in point: VB/VC booleans, see below)
to clarify.. say you have a function that accepts the following parameters:
date (date of birth to check person is 18)
string (surname)
long (salary - it's a long in case you're a manager)
then something changes and you drop the date of birth check (it's no longer deemed necessary). The following test data is invalid:
Test to check DoB in the future
Test to check the person is 18 yrs 1 day
Test to check peron is 18 yrs exactly
Test to check person is 18 yrs less one day
Sanity check for DoB less than 120 years ago
Oh, and don't forget having to go through your nice pre-prepared test data and eliminate by hand all the instances of DoB that you so carefully put in there before (including the ones that had a strange formt, perhaps, just to check the date conversion worked OK).
A few more changes like that and suddenly you're chucking out a lot of preprepared scripts and test plans. Why do all that work before the implementation is complete? Doesn't make sense to me.. it could waste days on a big system. On a huge system, you could be talking weeks (some systems I have worked on required several people several weeks to craft all the necessary test data.. just a 10% change would involve a huge amount of change to all that.. Why do the work twice?
Why? Only the ones that are testing the bit of code that returns your boolean to VB, surely
My comment was a little sarcy.. in fact, VB and VC++ do treat booleans differently. As a huge project I was part of found. This was discovered during the proof of concept stage when somebody tried to link a VC component to a VB component.
But according to the "do your test unit fist" plan, we would have all sat around creating test units like mad, then done some development, then found out that the 25+ units just developed all had to change because VB was not getting the data we thought it would. We would then have gone back and rewritten all the test units for VB, to make sure they were all doing a "not" on the booleans they got from VC. As it was, we found the problem before any major development began, and when we started cutting major code, we all knew what to do to prevent that great waste of time.
You get rid of them along with your remote access class
In other words, you throw away at least several days worth of work, that was never going to be necessary. Wow. Hope nothing else major changes on that project; the time to develop the test harnesses could be greater than the rest of the project put together!
but again the other unit tests (if written properly) make sure that the remote access classes that you have just removed have not taken some vital functionality for the rest of the system with them
Which they should do in any case, if you write the test units properly, and when the system is ready to be tested so you don't spend lots of time writing units that are never used, and units that change dramatically during development, and units that change slightly (and maybe somebody forgets to change the test data or the test harness so either bugs seem to appear or are overlooked).
Sorry, but you'll never convince me that doing that amount of work to prepare for development is a good thing.
---------------------------
A feature does not exist unless there is a test for it
:) Actually, though, a feature does not exist unless every conceivable type of input to that feature has been considered and actually input (alphas into numeric fields, negative numbers, strings that are waaaaay too long etc etc etc)
I would hate to annoy anyone by pointing out that this is a basic principle of unit testing. So I won't...
I have worked in much that way since I joined the industry - golden rules are never test your own code, and cover every possible input. It shouldn't be possible to smash the stack on any properly tested code... but how many vunerabilities exist out there...?
But I wouldn't want to do the test unit before the real unit.. if the real unit changes half way through development.
Say you find out that VB and VC++ don't represent booleans in the same way (could never happen, of course, but just suppose) and you've got to change your code, then all your unit tests have to be updated. Or, a simpler example: management change the spec and say "no we don't want remote access after all cos the consultant just said it would be a security risk".. what to do with all your remote access unit tests...?
---------------------------
I wonder how often we'd hear about it on Slashdot if it were called Quality and Productivity Assurance Methodology for Software Development
QPAMSD
Think about it. They'd have shortened it to "PAM". Three years ago, you'd have heard about nothing else, and there would have been loads of excuses for providing links to blonde babes in bathing suits.
---------------------------
Take a bunch of requirements, spend months designing a wonderful class library that can do everything that is required, set the code-monkeys loose writing it, and then find that it doesn't do what the customer wanted
Absolutely. Neither one extreme (ahem) nor the other is the "best" way forward. And different approaches work better in different situations. Would I suggest prototyping in an enironment in which you've got roughly 3 hours to prevent a nuclear meltdown? Oh yeah.
But I *never* think it's a Good Thing to ignore all possible future requirements and reuse possibilities, and just concentrate on the "now", which is the impression I gathered from aforementioned article.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction regarding design; yes I do recall something along the lines of design should be done by brainstorming, defining interfaces then going and doing it.. but it still sounds very much like seat-of-the-pants stuff to me... the impression I formed from the article (and I could still be way off here) was that it was designed by techies fed up with doing the ground work, and wanting to do the fun stuff.
---------------------------
Your first post is dangerously close to being on topic to the article. Don't let it happen again.
---------------------------
The impression I got from a recent Tech journal (don't recall which one) is that you don't bother to design anything, just plough on ahead and do your code. Anything unessential to the task in hand should be ignored. So don't bother identifying potential future needs and requirements, or bothering overmuch about resuse, because it MAY never be necessary.
To me it sounded just like prototyping. Can you say "Software Crisis"?
---------------------------
The system needs a constant series of "nudges" or a "plan" if it is to reach more advanced forms.
Classic case of mis-stating the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin himself stated that if any lifeform, or even a part of a lifeform could ever be found that could not possibly have evolved by a series of simple steps, his whole theory would fall apart and need to be rethought.
Over one hundred years later, with all the "Christian Scientists" in the world trying, not a single example has ever been found and the theory stands (enhanced, but basically the same principles).
And the argument about SETI is not a good analogy either. Order in the midst of randomness is common (rock faces that resemble human features, or pebbles being sorted into size order by waves). SETI is searching for designed signals, which is quite different. No part of any lifeform has ever been found to show any indication of design (the eye, for example, though complex is an incredibly poor organ if it was designed deliberately that way; a first-year undergraduate could design a better system).
---------------------------
It's also a great example of how NOT to provide documentation. All the functions are listed, all the options are shown, but...
1)In places the documentation is simply innacurate (p169 "keyCount indicates the number of keys required to decrypt the message that are not currently available, and these are identified by keyID in the referrenced keyIDArray" should read "keyCount shows how many keys the message was originally encrypted to, regardless of how many of these are in the currently open keyring. Period.")
2) There is a tiny amount of sample code which shows the most basic functions. Everything else is left to your imagination and trial and error...
You want to see good code..? Check out:
http://www.oz.net/~srheller/dpgp/index.html which shows you how to use the API... It's in Delphi, laid out nicely, with nice comments.
</flame PGP SDK>
James
---------------------------
I know about computers.
What would I want a lady for??
And while I'm on the subject, security is *both* product *and* process. Sure, I'd be stupid not to have the latest patches and train my users. But I'd also be better off not allowing them to use MS Outlook, and IE (remember the scripting bug that allowed one to catch a virus from simply browsing the web?)
---------------------------
Another one tried to sell me discount coupon book to my local mall. I calmly started inquiring about whether she's informed if there are any BDSM items I can purchase
So were there any BDSM items at the mall or not? How much?
---------------------------
The flaw in your reasoning is all contained in one sentance near the end:
We live in a free society
We do. The Chinese do not. The difference is that in the western world it is an offense to send somebody a junk fax. In China it is an offense to criticise the government using a fax machine, to somebody you know.
Hey guess what? A dictatorial government lied to cover up the introduction of a law preventing opposition from organising. Nothing to do with spam.
And I'd point out that you no longer get faxes from people sending you adverts, and you've got more ink and more paper in your fax machine as a result. Also, you can use your fax machine, as it doesn't start trying to print another ad whenever you plug it in. I think that's a bonus, and the definition of Junk Fax seemed to work.
---------------------------
This guy's article is about the most flawed thinking I've ever seen concerning spam (apart from the spammers themselves).
If you want to check it out, look at: the article (safe browse mode via SamSpade.org). It won't be long before this guy gets kicked off his ISP for violation of his TOS, and giving out your home phone number to spammers (especially when there are sooo many reverse lookup systems out there) is suicidal.
Newbies: DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ADVICE!
---------------------------
Although seriously...
Yup, that's one of the biggest concerns is that kids don't have to go looking for it. They'll get it sent to them. And the spammer will cry Freedom of speech. There's a good reason certain stores have a "No under 18s allowed" sign on them. I'm sure the bookstore owner would not remove that and display his wares (open) in the window and claim the 1st Amendment (or whatever relevant article in law is concerned) protected his right to do so.
Personally, I sometimes take the view that a server should be set up purely and simply for the purpose of sending spam supporting politicians and businesses endless emails about counter views (you could have a web page set up so all anyone had to do was enter their comments and click "send"). One could also set up a couple of temporary email addresses, make a few usenet postings with it and pop it on a couple of web pages (hidden) and then simply forward anything that arrived there to the same people (hey, it's advertising THEY want the right to see and send, right?). I wonder how many would continue to support the idea then, when their inbox became as useless as everone else's will be in ten years.
But of course, it is just a fantasy of mine. You know, like the one about becoming a vigilante and banging Nazi's heads against brick walls repeatedly. Nice to think about once in a while. But wouldn't actually *do* it...
---------------------------
why don't we get pornographic junk snail mail
Yeah, why don't we? After all, junk snail mail is free (to me). Hope the publishers are paying attention here...
---------------------------
Personally, I thought The Matrix was one of the best Kung-Fu action movies ever made
Really? I thought it was one of the worst kung-fu movies ever. great Sci-Fi, but c'mon. Laurence Fishbourne and Keanu Reeves spent a few months learning some moves. How on *earth* can that compare with the Wing Chun moves you'll see in any Bruce Lee movie, or the Chinese-Opera based moves you'll see in any (early) Jackie Chan, Sumo Hung (before Hollywood) or virtaully any other movie made in Hong Kong?
The difference was a big budget, but wow, man, you can't compare it as a Kung Fu movie to even "Armour of God" (early JC). I mean JC uses *no* special FX, and doesn't speed up his film, but the action still beats the hell outta anything Hollywood ever produced (or any other western film company for that matter).
Hollywood got to Jackie Chan too late in his career. They should have done something better than "Canonball run" when they had the chance. Ah well.
---------------------------
Nah, it should be titled:
...and Microsoft went to the gallows, still proclaiming his innocence. Even today, there are many who claimed that being found holding a bloody knife standing over the body and saying "I'm glad I killed the bastard" was purely circumstantial, and that the 57 witnesses could have been wrong.
Side which won previous round in court battle refutes allegations of bias made by side that lost previous round in court battle
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Sorry, try again. I voluntarily agree to read my inbox every day as well. E-mail was designed to encourage discussion and I voluntarily go to hotmail to read my messages.
I voluntarily read hotmail. Spam messages are part of hotmail.
The definitive argument about this, as far as I'm concerned is this.. let's paint a picture in which all spam is ALLOWED and PROTECTED under freedom of speech, as the poster appears to support.
I have a new political theory - all countries should be run by the people with the longest hair and the nicest pants. I want to share this theory with everyone. SO I email everyone on a 2 million email address list.
The only problem is, everyone ELSE with a half-baked idea or scheme or a business that needs more customers will ALSO do this.
If spamming was an acceptable way to spread news and adverts and ideas, and everyone who wanted to did it, there would, quite simply, be no possible way to detect the tiny fraction of email that WASN'T spam in your inbox every day.
It's not JUST the fact that the spammer makes the ISP (and their customers) pay for the advertising. It's also VOLUME - give everyone in the world a way to communicate with everyone else, with no way of deciding what you do or do not want to read, and all you'll do is render the medium useless.
An accurate analagy would be if you could mail a million letters for free, and the recipient and the service that delivers the letter pay. Then extend the example to allow everyone in the world to send you anything they want through the mail, you'll pay for it, and when you try to locate that letter from your parents you're expected... well, good luck. It's been dealyed and maybe lost because there was too much other stuff in the sack.
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Nothing good can come of us meddling in offworldly affairs
Couldn't agree more. Extrapolating this concept, I shall now spend the rest of my life locked in a small box. Nothing good can happen from meddling in outboxly affairs.
1) We find them hostile. And we upset them, and trigger the apocolypse.
2) (More likely) We find them doctile, and attempt to colonize their world, or somehow make "them" inferior to "us".
Missed out:
3) We find them, but are unable to engage in interstellar travel for decades/centuries and instead get some interesting (if very, very) long information exchanges that benefit both cultures very much indeed
4) Another possibility...
n) Yet another possibility
resources could be much better spent searching Earth for a new deposit of fossil fuel
Wow. Just wow. Yeah, that's a good alternative. Not looking for a non-polluting source of fuel then. Just another way of ruining God's Glorious Creation in a new and unique fashion.
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There is already a distributed.net worm. More info.
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I abosutely HATE to do this to you guys, but....
Lookie here, it's not dead.
I *was* going to claim that the little-known but much-played "Colony" on the Speccy was my all-time addiction, but then I read this thread and somebody up above there talking about buying a HD to boot Civ reminded me that I spent a month or two putting together a reset-proof RAMdisk for my AtariST that intercepted calls to the A drive, only so I could preload Civ.
Yes, I know the links on my homepage are all buggered cos they've gone into CAPS. I will fix it. One day. I promise. Maybe.
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Oh yeah, and we also need real training for the people who leave their bleeding SMTP servers open for relaying to the whole damn world, or leave their wallets on the bar while they go to the bathroom.
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