This is moot anyway since spammers don't actually provide return email addresses.
Oh, I'm sure they'd start using actual return addresses... at yahoo, hotmail, etc. As long as they (the free email accounts) last long enough to collect some challenges that's all they need. Even if the accounts are closed by hotmail you can still send email "from" that account.
C/R doesn't even have a chance of working large-scale while there are free email providers such as Yahoo.
And even if it does, as someone else said, you just start sending spam with email addresses that have a high chance of being whitelisted. orders@amazon.com, orders@cdnow.com. So now instead of sending 1 spam to each user they'll send the same message 100+ different times from different addresses that they have concluded are more likely to be whitelisted in the hopes that one of them actually is whitelisted.
At best, C/R doubles spam traffic by generating a C/R request for each spam sent--now instead of just getting bounces sent to some poor innocent victim, the innocent victim will get bounces plus thousands of C/R requests. At worst, spammers will take the brute-force approach mentioned above of sending hundreds of copies of the same spam to every user using different "common" whitelisted email addresses. Either way the spam problem arguably gets worse, not better.
ISP's don't use it because it massively increases the load on their mail servers,
I've recently implemented my own Bayesian system on my server. While my first-cut was very CPU intensive, very straight-forward techniques can be made to make it extremely CPU-friendly. In fact, I'll bet my current Bayesian system is less CPU-intensive than a simple keyword-filter that has 5000 "keywords" in its database.
I don't use SpamAssassin and can't comment on its toll on the CPU, but there is no inherent reason why a Bayesian system can't be deployed by ISPs. About the only drawback I see is that you have to store a corpus for each user and that ends up being between 1MB and 2MB per user. But disk space is cheap...
I don't know why more people/ISPs aren't using this. This system seems to be the most effective because it doesn't have silly little measures
I agree. It's so simple yet so effective. It really makes me wonder why people invest time and money in silly, less-friendly and potentially less-effective solutions such as C/R.
it seems to rate the spam based on its content, which no spammer can get around.
They're starting to try. When they start breaking up words so that "cock" is "c.o.c.k" they're making an effort to avoid filters, but also are addressing the Bayesian filters since that will normally get broken up into 4 tokens, one for each letter. Of course, if they do it enough then a single token "c" might actually become a commomn characteristic of spam for that user.
Anyway, Bayesian works great now. I think spammers will evolve to deal with it, but all that is necessary is to implement new token-identifying logic in the Bayesian filter... the Bayesian approach itself is very solid.
It's a hell of a lot faster to do than actually placing calls to people and talking to them, and people
I agree. I suspect you will see spammers actually analyzing the C/R responses. If it's something the software has seen before and is capable of responding automatically, it will. Those that it can't will be forwarded to someone to quickly deal with it. If some of the megaspammers make as much as they supposedly do, hiring a teenage kid at $6/hr to spend the day answering C/R responses is not a huge investment.
That's what my mailing list does automatically. Basically, my mailing list sends out about 4000 emails per night to people that previously signed up (which requires signing up, receiving a single email, and confirming that you want to sign up). My mailing list does NOT expect any reply back. If it gets a reply back it assumes it's a bounce and the email address is invalid and they are automatically removed from the mailing list.
If Earthlink starts bouncing my mailing list messages, no problem. I don't have to do anything--my mailing list software will automatically turn off every Earthlink user that sends a C/R response back.
I don't make a dime with my mailing list so I'm certainly not going to make an effort to make sure that everyone with a poorly-designed anti-spam solution can receive it.
Point being that each individual state in the US doesn't really map to separate countries in Europe.
Oh, I'll agree with you there. Perhaps in size maybe, but that's about it.
I've been to several of the ones you mentioned though. And I couldnt' tell that much of a difference between them....
But are you comparing the cultural differences or the physical appearance? Yes, you can go just about anywhere in the U.S. and it will appear quite similar. But we were talking about culture, right?
In Southern California you have a very heavy hispanic influence, as you do in Miami. Seattle has its own underground music scene while in Texas you'll see a lot of country music and dance halls. In Montana you have the rugged, independent outdoorsman attitude. In Hawaii you have the polynesian influence. I've only been to the east coast a few times but they basically rub me the wrong way and, to me, are "yankees." So different is the lifestyle on the east coast that I would never even consider a job east of the Mississippi river.
So while U.S. states may not equate to entire European countries I would say that it is inaccurate to say that all U.S. states are identical or, worse, have no culture at all... Except Nebraska.:)
the article implies that an image would be part of the response
An image? So now to stop spam you'll have Earthlink "spamming" senders with image-laden emails? Or perhaps they will display an image that is loaded from their server? The latter won't work because I (and many) people don't allow our email clients to load anything off of remote servers. And it really pisses me off when I get images embedded in emails.
I know someone once sent me an email as I run a niche technical website and someone was asking me for some advice. I don't always have time, but in this case I did make the effort to reply and actually wrote up a pretty decent answer. Sent it off and a few minutes later I got a challenge-response mail saying that if I wanted to email the user that I'd have to verify that I was human. Screw that, I just deleted the challenge message. Who knows if the guy ever got my response.
Challenge-response would be ok if email was used only by people sending and receiving emails from their friends and family. Everyone would just do it once for each of their contacts and bam, you're done. But that's not how email is. Many people contact many (unknown) people regularly. We receive shipping receipts when we order something from a website. We have mailing lists.
A C/R system is the right solution for a certain type of email usage, but I don't think that particular type of email usage is representative of what most people use their email for.
Not to mention one of the biggest problems: Every spam message sent will consume the bandwidth it always has consumed, but will now trigger the C/R system to send a message back. So you have twice the email traffic. And have you ever been the victim of a spammer that used your email address as the From/Return-Path and you received all the bounces? Now imagine a spammer doing this and not only receiving all the bounces but also all the C/R requests.
Challenge-Response is bogus. I don't know of any such systems that have been deployed without significant problems for their users, the people that send mail to their users, and especially mailing lists.
If challenge-response is largely deployed, I suspect spammers will just unite such that one spammer sends a message, gets the challenge, answers it and is then "unlocked" to send message. He'll then distribute that email address in real-time to dozens or hundreds of other spammers who will send their spam immediately with the same newly-unlocked address.
Or, perhaps, spammers will change their tactic from spamming millions of users with 1 spam at a time to spamming 1 user at a time with dozens or hundreds of spam. You unlock the system with a valid response to the challenge and then flood them with spam until the user blocks that address.
I just don't see where challenge-response is anything more than a very stopgap measure. It's not particuarly "clean" now and will become more and more useless in the future.
Almost a year after Paul Graham's "A Plan For Spam" Bayesian is still the easiest system to develop as well as the easiest for the user to use. It is extremely effective (99.5%+) with very few false positives and doesn't require any additional effort for the sender and only requires that the user report false positives and false negatives--and that is mostly only needed at the beginning. Once it is initially tuned it's not necessary to do much of anything--it just keeps learning and working.
Culture? WHAT culture? If you ever been to the states you know it all looks alike, doesn't matter whether you were in Minnesota, Ohio or Nebraska.
I'll grant that Nebraska doesn't have any culture, per se.:) But you named 3 states in the mid-West of the United States. Sure they are similar. But, believe me, if you compare Arizona, California, Washington State, Texas, and New York you better believe you'll see different cultures. You've either only been to Minnesota, Ohio, and Nebraska, or you don't know what you're talking about, or maybe you've never actually been to the States...
I won't argue with you there. I didn't even really mean that they were trying to reach other cultures by doing a multicultural movie with Doom--I simply they wanted to do something that wasn't based on Christian beliefs (the Ark of the Covenant). If they offended Indians and bored many Americans I can see why they went back to a Christian-based theme in Last Crusade.:)
Me: Raiders and Last Crusade are based on things which many people consider historic. I.e., the Ark of the Covenant existed and really is "lost", and the chalice of the last supper obviously existed
You: Well, this is a bit of a stretch. I think the most you can say is that the second film was based on a different mythology than the other two were.
I knew I wasn't going to be able to post that message without someone taking me up on that point. Thank you for not letting Slashdot let me down in that sense.:)
The Thuggee cult and their battle with British colonial forces in India are as much a part of historical fact as Nazi Germany is... Shiva and Kali are as much a part of Indian culture as Yahweh is of Western culture.
I think you need to look at the target market. In the U.S. and most of the Western world, for better or for worse, Christianity is the religion of the majority of the moviegoers while Shiva and Kali are as real to them/us as Zeus and Apollo. Raiders and Crusade are, thus, based on what the majority of Westerners accept to be religious history. Doom is more of a fantasy movie in an unreal world, like Harry Potter attacks Aphrodite or Stargate kills Ra. It's not that it necessarily is a bad movie and I'm sure there are plenty that like that kind of movie (as Harry Potter gross sales shows), but it doesn't go well with the genre of Raiders and Crusade.
I personally think that Doom, in addition to going for gross-out factor, was trying to be multicultural. I think they realized it wasn't as good as the first one and, thus, went back to a Judeo-Christian basis for the third movie... and it worked great!
Are you forgetting the melting faces at the end? Was that really necessary?
I'm not saying Raiders was without some nasty special effects. Melting faces, old Juan impaled on rock spikes at the beginning, a German thug shredded by a propeller. But it all contributed to the movie and were logical consequences of actions in the storyline. Juan got spiked because he ran away with the idol instead of acting intelligent. The German hot shredded because he was too busy pounding on Jones to pay attention. People melted in the end because they opened the Ark and looked into it. It all makes sense.
But eating worms and monkey brains? That didn't contribute anything to the plot and just made me want to stop eating my nachos... That's gross-out factor, not Raiders-style action.
Really, I think the reason that most people are so down on the second film is that it's so "different" from the first one.
The reason I think people are so down on the second one is two things:
1. If you want gross-out factor, you go to see some gross-out movie. Raiders wasn't a gross-out film, it was a fun movie with a decent plot with some special effects to help where necessary. But nothing was done just to be gross and disgusting as was the case in Doom.
2. Raiders and Last Crusade are based on things which many people consider historic. I.e., the Ark of the Covenant existed and really is "lost", and the chalice of the last supper obviously existed (he had to drink out of something!). Wheter they had the powers attributed to them in the movies is certainly open to discussion, but the movies were based on historical artifacts and placed in the Nazi era. Take some historical objects and have fun with them. In Doom we're talking mass child abductions and glowing Shakras that make the fields green. Please...
And I, for one, thought that little Chinese kid was just annoying. I think he was placed there for comic relief, like Jar Jar, but I think it failed miserably. Raiders was "funny" because of what Harrison Ford brought to the film, not because of some useless and silly 9-year-old running around saying stupid lines in less-than-understandable English. That's not my idea of funny and I think it further detracted from the second film. You notice a silly character such as that wasn't needed in the first or third movie and they were much funner to watch.
a monkey, a panther and a fish are on the ground, right under a tree; somebody says: "the first to get to the top will get the prize". Obviously, everybody has the same opportunities. Nobody is going to stop the fish from climbing to the top. It just can't do it.
But we're not talking about a human, a monkey, and a fish. These are all beings which are naturally different. The closest thing in the human condition that this example could apply to is an athelete, a light runner, and someone in a wheelchair--and telling them the first person that crosses the finish line will win a million bucks.
There is nothing inherently different about President Bush's abilities than my own (no wise-cracks eh!) other than that he has more money. While I don't deny that makes things easier for him, I don't accept that that means the opportunities don't exist for me.
Eventually, an advanced society should be such that guarantees success (happinness) to all its members.
I think you have your terms mixed up. That's not a society, that's utopia. Looks good in your imagination and on Star Trek, but reality? That's something else...
if helping others is voluntary, we accept that eventually nobody will help (this is the logical part)
Your "logical" assertion is disproven by reality. As I already said, no-one is forced to contribute to charities but tens of millions of Americans do so every year even though that comes out of what the federal government has decided to leave them with. If the federal government left them with more, by what logic do you conclude that nobody or fewer people would want to help?
The rest of the people - eventually most of the people - will go on living, caring only about their personal problems.
While I'll agree that not EVERYONE will help their neighbor, I'd say reality disproves that "most people" will not worry about their neighbor.
In a system like this, it could *theoretically* happen that the people who most beneffit from society - those with a big wealth - are those who are contributing least to guarantee the standard of living.
Hmmm. It seems that in our society those that have the most money are those that contribute the MOST to charities.
I do not suggest that this will be like this, but it could happen.
Yes, it could--if we assume that a reduction in federal taxes would cause a complete turnaround in basic human nature and generosity that is observed on a daily basis in our society.
A system which does not allow for this possibility is based on taxation, and more taxation for those who have most.
It's also dreadfully inefficient and open to evasion. You don't have to evade giving money to a charity. You do it because you want to and you believe it will truly help. The federal government has a history of wasteful spending and social problems with "good intentions" that fail or are so poorly implemented that one wishes that instead of sending a check for $5000 to the federal government, one could just go to the local homeless shelter and give it to them.
I'll even go one step further to meet you half way: Establish the federal tax rates, etc. Declare that of that, 25% MUST be sent to the federal government. The other 75% may, at the taxpayer's option, be given directly to an approved charity of their choice. Presumably "approved charities" would be those that demonstrate to the government that the vast majority (80%+?) of funds collected are used for assistance of the needy in their area or anywhere in the country. That way the government has some operating funds but taxpayers could choose to pay the rest to local charities that they can SEE are working and are almost always more efficient than the federal government since many of those that participate in them are volunteers themselves.
We're getting spanked by Canada. Now there's a densely populated country for you.
Actually, it is densely populated. Sure, if you divide their population over the frozen wastelands of the north, yeah, their density goes down. But since no-one lives there (per se) you don't need to wire it.
I can't remember the percentage, but something like 90% of the Canadian population lives within 50 miles of the U.S. border.
I have a friend who recently went from having a huge office full of programmers to leasing a small amount of office space at another company for him and the other principles as all of the "real" programming is now being done in Vietnam.
Get back to me in a year and let me know how it went. The two cases of outsourcing overseas I know of first-hand were a total money pit. One of them they finally cancelled the whole thing after throwing $2 million towards India. They eventually did the logical thing: Wrote the damn thing themselves.
Funny, I just read today that things are going to the crapper in India, too.
I've believed for some time that "outsourcing offshore" is more an excuse to explain the current situation rather than a real cause. Articles such as the one I just cited only support my belief.
That does not mean that people actually are able to exercise those rights, because their environment is such that they are concerned about a dozen other things (like trying to eat tonight) that prevent them to do so.
Again, if someone is truly not able to eat tonight I would not oppose the government feeding that person, even though I think charities should handle that kind of thing. But the current situation being what it is I would agree with the government making sure everyone is fed.
For people to be able to exercise their rights, they need a minimum standard of living, standard that is guaranteed by social policies.
While I agree that society should--either through government or preferably through charities--make sure everyone can eat, I don't think there is or should be any minimum standard of living that society guarantees anyone. Society guarantees that everyone has the same opportunity. Society cannot guarantee equality of results and can't even guarantee that we all start with the same resources available to us--and yes, that means that some luxuries in life might not be available to everyone. I'd love to have my own Learjet but that just isn't possible right now; but just because I can't have one doesn't mean someone else shouldn't be able to get one. We are all different and are born to different families with different standards of living and that's a fact of life that society can't change.
While you spent some years of your life trying to save to buy a house, he was free to do whatever it pleased him, because he had that necessity already covered.
First, I don't even have a house yet. I'm still renting.
That said, I insist I have the same OPPORTUNITIES that President Bush has or had. No, I don't have the same wealth. But wealth != opportunity. I have the same *opportunity* to run for governor, president, etc. as he did. Society can't stop me. Sure, I might have to work harder than he did but the same opportunities exist. The fact that he has/had it easier doesn't mean he has opportunities I don't, it was just easier for him to take advantage of them.
your starting point in life is extremely different.
So what? I'm sorry, but that's a fact of life. You might not think it's fair (and perhaps it isn't), but it's a fact of life. It's not going to change. Any theory--economic or political--has to be based on realities, and the reality is that we are all born into different families which give us different starting points in life.
All society can do is make sure those that start at zero aren't automatically and legally out of luck. Through hard work I feel I could achieve the same thing as President Bush has, if that were my desire. He had it easier, so what. Basically "baseline" should be that "If you want to be successful in live, it requires a lot of hard work." If certain people are lucky and born into rich families that doesn't mean the general expectation should change. To succeed in life is hard and I don't have a problem with that.
If we accept that charities must help the poor, we accept that this is a voluntary act. If we accept that it is a voluntary act, we must accept that nobody will want to voluntarily help, and that those people in need will starve.
Your assertions are wrong in so many ways.
Many people already donate to charities even though this is a voluntary act and even though they are already paying 15-30% of their income to the federal government. The fact that donating to them is voluntary does NOT mean that no-one will want to help. In fact, I'd be inclined to donate MORE to my local church that I can see is using the money effectively to help the local homeless or hungry than I'd be asked to pay into the black void of the federal budget.
You also assume that the people of the country are too bad and selfish to help their neighbors but that the good, pure, unselfish and helpful people who are our politicians in Washington are nee
It is very difficult to guarantee equal opportunity when you have widely differing social backgrounds.
The opportunities should be the same for everyone. That doesn't mean that everyone can or will take advantage of those opportunities, but the opportunities aren't made unavailable to them due to the nature of their social background.
Did you have the same opportunities as Mr G.W. Bush?
I feel I do. He decided he wanted to be president. Great. I'm a software engineer. But the opportunity to become president is available to me, too, if I'm willing to put up with all the BS that is required of everyone to get there.
It should not be a 'right' to help people from starving, but an obligation.
Hmmm, I think you are probably morally right--but the government isn't the organization that should make that moral decision for me and isn't the organization that should forcefully take my money to pay for what someone else has decided is the morally correct thing to do.
Charities should do this. Charities should feed the poor, and help the homeless. If you have food on the table and a place to sleep you shouldn't be on the government tit, period.
It happens to be called socialism, but that is not very important.
Wrong-o. Socialism failed because it is a dream, a utopia. Even though YOU might think it's the "right" thing to do or just because its GOALS might seem morally right, in reality it doesn't work, is not in-line with real human nature, and comes down to someone else (the government) deciding how others (the people) MUST spend THEIR money. That's wrong.
Why not spend the money on a working spam filter? Bayesian is entirely great.
I am skeptical of any solution that requires a change in protocols--if the new protocol is open and free I'd be happy, but I'm afraid a new protocol could be just another effort for a few companies to take control of the Internet and decide who can and can't send email.
I'm also opposed to anything that charges for email. There are many users that send many, many emails per year. My website has an opt-in mailing list that sends emails to about 4000 people per evening. That's 1460000 per year. If we're charging 1-cent per email that's $14600.00 per year--and guess what, that's more than my website earns in a year. Bye bye mailing list.
Two things:
1. If there's going to be money involved, it has to be a system where the receiver can "return" money to authorized senders and only keep the money from unauthorized spammmers. And the money collected goes to the RECEIVER, not a tax that is kept by the government (which can be later raised, and raised, and you get the idea).
2. Solutions that require laws or massive changes in protocols must be very carefully watched. While it's not impossible there is a solution of that sort that could actually help, it's possible it could be a power-grab where certain companies would be allowed to decide who can and can't send email. Kind of like having a Constitutual convention in the U.S.: The last time it happened they threw out the whole thing and started over which is why sometimes people are afraid to have another Constitutal Convention. Same here, establishing a new protocol could either be extremely great and helpful or could serve the interests of a few and the rest of the world pays a price worse than the spam we're trying to get rid of.
I think the solution is technical. Widespread deployment of effective filters, especially Bayesian, at the ISP level will reduce the amount of spam that makes it to the users lowering even more than response rate. So we reduce how much spam we SEE via technical means and reduce how much spam is sent by taking spammers to court by charging them with theft of service or DoS attacks.
4. Accelerate the death of the big labels and music store chains which will end with their music being sold off to the highest bidders, hopefully to companies that are smarter and more consumer-friendly
Actually, I hope the rights are just GIVEN back to their rightful owners: the artists that made them!
The 5-digit extension encodes the price, optionally. But very few barcode systems really use this to determine sales price. Any decent system will have a database of products and a price to go with it. To change the price you just change the price in the database rather than generating a bunch of new barcode stickers and slapping it on the existing merchandise.
It's really all so silly. $40 for an ink cartridge containing ink that's worth a penny or two? Dare I say that that makes even the RIAA's markup look customer-friendly.
It's also stupid. I have an HP color inkjet printer which I've had 3 years, I think. The color cartridge ran out soon after. I don't print much and don't really need color, but every now and then it's cool to do it. When I saw that cartridge costs as much as a new color printer from Lexmark I said "Screw that." I don't NEED color. I seldom need to print. It'd be nice to have it, but I'm not paying the price of a printer for a cartridge.
With such insane prices they eliminate the "Oh, I'm out of color ink which I don't really need but would be nice to have" market. If it cost $5, yeah, I'd probably have purchased a dozen of them by now on a whim to print pictures in color, etc. But instead I haven't bought a single one and when my blank ink runs out (or expires?!) I'll just buy a Lexmark.
I'd rather pay $40 for a new piece of junk disposable inkjet printer with a black and color cartridge than $40 for a color cartridge for my 3-year-old printer.
First, it may not actually be a UPC that it is covering -- it could be EAN-13 or some other type... Third, a fair number of manufacturers don't always obtain a valid block of UPCs, they just print with a number that they hope to be unique.
Barcodes printed on books are Bookland code, which is really the ISBN number of the book expressed as an EAN-13 barcode. Unless the books don't have valid ISBN numbers it is unlikely that there would be any conflicts between books.
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Oh, I'm sure they'd start using actual return addresses... at yahoo, hotmail, etc. As long as they (the free email accounts) last long enough to collect some challenges that's all they need. Even if the accounts are closed by hotmail you can still send email "from" that account.
C/R doesn't even have a chance of working large-scale while there are free email providers such as Yahoo.
And even if it does, as someone else said, you just start sending spam with email addresses that have a high chance of being whitelisted. orders@amazon.com, orders@cdnow.com. So now instead of sending 1 spam to each user they'll send the same message 100+ different times from different addresses that they have concluded are more likely to be whitelisted in the hopes that one of them actually is whitelisted.
At best, C/R doubles spam traffic by generating a C/R request for each spam sent--now instead of just getting bounces sent to some poor innocent victim, the innocent victim will get bounces plus thousands of C/R requests. At worst, spammers will take the brute-force approach mentioned above of sending hundreds of copies of the same spam to every user using different "common" whitelisted email addresses. Either way the spam problem arguably gets worse, not better.
I've recently implemented my own Bayesian system on my server. While my first-cut was very CPU intensive, very straight-forward techniques can be made to make it extremely CPU-friendly. In fact, I'll bet my current Bayesian system is less CPU-intensive than a simple keyword-filter that has 5000 "keywords" in its database.
I don't use SpamAssassin and can't comment on its toll on the CPU, but there is no inherent reason why a Bayesian system can't be deployed by ISPs. About the only drawback I see is that you have to store a corpus for each user and that ends up being between 1MB and 2MB per user. But disk space is cheap...
I agree. It's so simple yet so effective. It really makes me wonder why people invest time and money in silly, less-friendly and potentially less-effective solutions such as C/R.
it seems to rate the spam based on its content, which no spammer can get around.
They're starting to try. When they start breaking up words so that "cock" is "c.o.c.k" they're making an effort to avoid filters, but also are addressing the Bayesian filters since that will normally get broken up into 4 tokens, one for each letter. Of course, if they do it enough then a single token "c" might actually become a commomn characteristic of spam for that user.
Anyway, Bayesian works great now. I think spammers will evolve to deal with it, but all that is necessary is to implement new token-identifying logic in the Bayesian filter... the Bayesian approach itself is very solid.
It's a hell of a lot faster to do than actually placing calls to people and talking to them, and people
I agree. I suspect you will see spammers actually analyzing the C/R responses. If it's something the software has seen before and is capable of responding automatically, it will. Those that it can't will be forwarded to someone to quickly deal with it. If some of the megaspammers make as much as they supposedly do, hiring a teenage kid at $6/hr to spend the day answering C/R responses is not a huge investment.
If Earthlink starts bouncing my mailing list messages, no problem. I don't have to do anything--my mailing list software will automatically turn off every Earthlink user that sends a C/R response back.
I don't make a dime with my mailing list so I'm certainly not going to make an effort to make sure that everyone with a poorly-designed anti-spam solution can receive it.
Oh, I'll agree with you there. Perhaps in size maybe, but that's about it.
I've been to several of the ones you mentioned though. And I couldnt' tell that much of a difference between them....
But are you comparing the cultural differences or the physical appearance? Yes, you can go just about anywhere in the U.S. and it will appear quite similar. But we were talking about culture, right?
In Southern California you have a very heavy hispanic influence, as you do in Miami. Seattle has its own underground music scene while in Texas you'll see a lot of country music and dance halls. In Montana you have the rugged, independent outdoorsman attitude. In Hawaii you have the polynesian influence. I've only been to the east coast a few times but they basically rub me the wrong way and, to me, are "yankees." So different is the lifestyle on the east coast that I would never even consider a job east of the Mississippi river.
So while U.S. states may not equate to entire European countries I would say that it is inaccurate to say that all U.S. states are identical or, worse, have no culture at all... Except Nebraska. :)
An image? So now to stop spam you'll have Earthlink "spamming" senders with image-laden emails? Or perhaps they will display an image that is loaded from their server? The latter won't work because I (and many) people don't allow our email clients to load anything off of remote servers. And it really pisses me off when I get images embedded in emails.
I know someone once sent me an email as I run a niche technical website and someone was asking me for some advice. I don't always have time, but in this case I did make the effort to reply and actually wrote up a pretty decent answer. Sent it off and a few minutes later I got a challenge-response mail saying that if I wanted to email the user that I'd have to verify that I was human. Screw that, I just deleted the challenge message. Who knows if the guy ever got my response.
Challenge-response would be ok if email was used only by people sending and receiving emails from their friends and family. Everyone would just do it once for each of their contacts and bam, you're done. But that's not how email is. Many people contact many (unknown) people regularly. We receive shipping receipts when we order something from a website. We have mailing lists.
A C/R system is the right solution for a certain type of email usage, but I don't think that particular type of email usage is representative of what most people use their email for.
Not to mention one of the biggest problems: Every spam message sent will consume the bandwidth it always has consumed, but will now trigger the C/R system to send a message back. So you have twice the email traffic. And have you ever been the victim of a spammer that used your email address as the From/Return-Path and you received all the bounces? Now imagine a spammer doing this and not only receiving all the bounces but also all the C/R requests.
No, C/R is just wrong in so many ways.
If challenge-response is largely deployed, I suspect spammers will just unite such that one spammer sends a message, gets the challenge, answers it and is then "unlocked" to send message. He'll then distribute that email address in real-time to dozens or hundreds of other spammers who will send their spam immediately with the same newly-unlocked address.
Or, perhaps, spammers will change their tactic from spamming millions of users with 1 spam at a time to spamming 1 user at a time with dozens or hundreds of spam. You unlock the system with a valid response to the challenge and then flood them with spam until the user blocks that address.
I just don't see where challenge-response is anything more than a very stopgap measure. It's not particuarly "clean" now and will become more and more useless in the future.
Almost a year after Paul Graham's "A Plan For Spam" Bayesian is still the easiest system to develop as well as the easiest for the user to use. It is extremely effective (99.5%+) with very few false positives and doesn't require any additional effort for the sender and only requires that the user report false positives and false negatives--and that is mostly only needed at the beginning. Once it is initially tuned it's not necessary to do much of anything--it just keeps learning and working.
I'll grant that Nebraska doesn't have any culture, per se. :) But you named 3 states in the mid-West of the United States. Sure they are similar. But, believe me, if you compare Arizona, California, Washington State, Texas, and New York you better believe you'll see different cultures. You've either only been to Minnesota, Ohio, and Nebraska, or you don't know what you're talking about, or maybe you've never actually been to the States...
They bought the software, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash. :)
You: Well, this is a bit of a stretch. I think the most you can say is that the second film was based on a different mythology than the other two were.
I knew I wasn't going to be able to post that message without someone taking me up on that point. Thank you for not letting Slashdot let me down in that sense. :)
The Thuggee cult and their battle with British colonial forces in India are as much a part of historical fact as Nazi Germany is... Shiva and Kali are as much a part of Indian culture as Yahweh is of Western culture.
I think you need to look at the target market. In the U.S. and most of the Western world, for better or for worse, Christianity is the religion of the majority of the moviegoers while Shiva and Kali are as real to them/us as Zeus and Apollo. Raiders and Crusade are, thus, based on what the majority of Westerners accept to be religious history. Doom is more of a fantasy movie in an unreal world, like Harry Potter attacks Aphrodite or Stargate kills Ra. It's not that it necessarily is a bad movie and I'm sure there are plenty that like that kind of movie (as Harry Potter gross sales shows), but it doesn't go well with the genre of Raiders and Crusade.
I personally think that Doom, in addition to going for gross-out factor, was trying to be multicultural. I think they realized it wasn't as good as the first one and, thus, went back to a Judeo-Christian basis for the third movie... and it worked great!
I'm not saying Raiders was without some nasty special effects. Melting faces, old Juan impaled on rock spikes at the beginning, a German thug shredded by a propeller. But it all contributed to the movie and were logical consequences of actions in the storyline. Juan got spiked because he ran away with the idol instead of acting intelligent. The German hot shredded because he was too busy pounding on Jones to pay attention. People melted in the end because they opened the Ark and looked into it. It all makes sense.
But eating worms and monkey brains? That didn't contribute anything to the plot and just made me want to stop eating my nachos... That's gross-out factor, not Raiders-style action.
The reason I think people are so down on the second one is two things:
1. If you want gross-out factor, you go to see some gross-out movie. Raiders wasn't a gross-out film, it was a fun movie with a decent plot with some special effects to help where necessary. But nothing was done just to be gross and disgusting as was the case in Doom.
2. Raiders and Last Crusade are based on things which many people consider historic. I.e., the Ark of the Covenant existed and really is "lost", and the chalice of the last supper obviously existed (he had to drink out of something!). Wheter they had the powers attributed to them in the movies is certainly open to discussion, but the movies were based on historical artifacts and placed in the Nazi era. Take some historical objects and have fun with them. In Doom we're talking mass child abductions and glowing Shakras that make the fields green. Please...
And I, for one, thought that little Chinese kid was just annoying. I think he was placed there for comic relief, like Jar Jar, but I think it failed miserably. Raiders was "funny" because of what Harrison Ford brought to the film, not because of some useless and silly 9-year-old running around saying stupid lines in less-than-understandable English. That's not my idea of funny and I think it further detracted from the second film. You notice a silly character such as that wasn't needed in the first or third movie and they were much funner to watch.
But we're not talking about a human, a monkey, and a fish. These are all beings which are naturally different. The closest thing in the human condition that this example could apply to is an athelete, a light runner, and someone in a wheelchair--and telling them the first person that crosses the finish line will win a million bucks.
There is nothing inherently different about President Bush's abilities than my own (no wise-cracks eh!) other than that he has more money. While I don't deny that makes things easier for him, I don't accept that that means the opportunities don't exist for me.
Eventually, an advanced society should be such that guarantees success (happinness) to all its members.
I think you have your terms mixed up. That's not a society, that's utopia. Looks good in your imagination and on Star Trek, but reality? That's something else...
if helping others is voluntary, we accept that eventually nobody will help (this is the logical part)
Your "logical" assertion is disproven by reality. As I already said, no-one is forced to contribute to charities but tens of millions of Americans do so every year even though that comes out of what the federal government has decided to leave them with. If the federal government left them with more, by what logic do you conclude that nobody or fewer people would want to help?
The rest of the people - eventually most of the people - will go on living, caring only about their personal problems.
While I'll agree that not EVERYONE will help their neighbor, I'd say reality disproves that "most people" will not worry about their neighbor.
In a system like this, it could *theoretically* happen that the people who most beneffit from society - those with a big wealth - are those who are contributing least to guarantee the standard of living.
Hmmm. It seems that in our society those that have the most money are those that contribute the MOST to charities.
I do not suggest that this will be like this, but it could happen.
Yes, it could--if we assume that a reduction in federal taxes would cause a complete turnaround in basic human nature and generosity that is observed on a daily basis in our society.
A system which does not allow for this possibility is based on taxation, and more taxation for those who have most.
It's also dreadfully inefficient and open to evasion. You don't have to evade giving money to a charity. You do it because you want to and you believe it will truly help. The federal government has a history of wasteful spending and social problems with "good intentions" that fail or are so poorly implemented that one wishes that instead of sending a check for $5000 to the federal government, one could just go to the local homeless shelter and give it to them.
I'll even go one step further to meet you half way: Establish the federal tax rates, etc. Declare that of that, 25% MUST be sent to the federal government. The other 75% may, at the taxpayer's option, be given directly to an approved charity of their choice. Presumably "approved charities" would be those that demonstrate to the government that the vast majority (80%+?) of funds collected are used for assistance of the needy in their area or anywhere in the country. That way the government has some operating funds but taxpayers could choose to pay the rest to local charities that they can SEE are working and are almost always more efficient than the federal government since many of those that participate in them are volunteers themselves.
Actually, it is densely populated. Sure, if you divide their population over the frozen wastelands of the north, yeah, their density goes down. But since no-one lives there (per se) you don't need to wire it.
I can't remember the percentage, but something like 90% of the Canadian population lives within 50 miles of the U.S. border.
Get back to me in a year and let me know how it went. The two cases of outsourcing overseas I know of first-hand were a total money pit. One of them they finally cancelled the whole thing after throwing $2 million towards India. They eventually did the logical thing: Wrote the damn thing themselves.
Vietnam? Like I said, let me know how it goes.
I've believed for some time that "outsourcing offshore" is more an excuse to explain the current situation rather than a real cause. Articles such as the one I just cited only support my belief.
Again, if someone is truly not able to eat tonight I would not oppose the government feeding that person, even though I think charities should handle that kind of thing. But the current situation being what it is I would agree with the government making sure everyone is fed.
For people to be able to exercise their rights, they need a minimum standard of living, standard that is guaranteed by social policies.
While I agree that society should--either through government or preferably through charities--make sure everyone can eat, I don't think there is or should be any minimum standard of living that society guarantees anyone. Society guarantees that everyone has the same opportunity. Society cannot guarantee equality of results and can't even guarantee that we all start with the same resources available to us--and yes, that means that some luxuries in life might not be available to everyone. I'd love to have my own Learjet but that just isn't possible right now; but just because I can't have one doesn't mean someone else shouldn't be able to get one. We are all different and are born to different families with different standards of living and that's a fact of life that society can't change.
While you spent some years of your life trying to save to buy a house, he was free to do whatever it pleased him, because he had that necessity already covered.
First, I don't even have a house yet. I'm still renting.
That said, I insist I have the same OPPORTUNITIES that President Bush has or had. No, I don't have the same wealth. But wealth != opportunity. I have the same *opportunity* to run for governor, president, etc. as he did. Society can't stop me. Sure, I might have to work harder than he did but the same opportunities exist. The fact that he has/had it easier doesn't mean he has opportunities I don't, it was just easier for him to take advantage of them.
your starting point in life is extremely different.
So what? I'm sorry, but that's a fact of life. You might not think it's fair (and perhaps it isn't), but it's a fact of life. It's not going to change. Any theory--economic or political--has to be based on realities, and the reality is that we are all born into different families which give us different starting points in life.
All society can do is make sure those that start at zero aren't automatically and legally out of luck. Through hard work I feel I could achieve the same thing as President Bush has, if that were my desire. He had it easier, so what. Basically "baseline" should be that "If you want to be successful in live, it requires a lot of hard work." If certain people are lucky and born into rich families that doesn't mean the general expectation should change. To succeed in life is hard and I don't have a problem with that.
If we accept that charities must help the poor, we accept that this is a voluntary act. If we accept that it is a voluntary act, we must accept that nobody will want to voluntarily help, and that those people in need will starve.
Your assertions are wrong in so many ways.
Many people already donate to charities even though this is a voluntary act and even though they are already paying 15-30% of their income to the federal government. The fact that donating to them is voluntary does NOT mean that no-one will want to help. In fact, I'd be inclined to donate MORE to my local church that I can see is using the money effectively to help the local homeless or hungry than I'd be asked to pay into the black void of the federal budget.
You also assume that the people of the country are too bad and selfish to help their neighbors but that the good, pure, unselfish and helpful people who are our politicians in Washington are nee
The opportunities should be the same for everyone. That doesn't mean that everyone can or will take advantage of those opportunities, but the opportunities aren't made unavailable to them due to the nature of their social background.
Did you have the same opportunities as Mr G.W. Bush?
I feel I do. He decided he wanted to be president. Great. I'm a software engineer. But the opportunity to become president is available to me, too, if I'm willing to put up with all the BS that is required of everyone to get there.
It should not be a 'right' to help people from starving, but an obligation.
Hmmm, I think you are probably morally right--but the government isn't the organization that should make that moral decision for me and isn't the organization that should forcefully take my money to pay for what someone else has decided is the morally correct thing to do.
Charities should do this. Charities should feed the poor, and help the homeless. If you have food on the table and a place to sleep you shouldn't be on the government tit, period.
It happens to be called socialism, but that is not very important.
Wrong-o. Socialism failed because it is a dream, a utopia. Even though YOU might think it's the "right" thing to do or just because its GOALS might seem morally right, in reality it doesn't work, is not in-line with real human nature, and comes down to someone else (the government) deciding how others (the people) MUST spend THEIR money. That's wrong.
I am skeptical of any solution that requires a change in protocols--if the new protocol is open and free I'd be happy, but I'm afraid a new protocol could be just another effort for a few companies to take control of the Internet and decide who can and can't send email.
I'm also opposed to anything that charges for email. There are many users that send many, many emails per year. My website has an opt-in mailing list that sends emails to about 4000 people per evening. That's 1460000 per year. If we're charging 1-cent per email that's $14600.00 per year--and guess what, that's more than my website earns in a year. Bye bye mailing list.
Two things:
1. If there's going to be money involved, it has to be a system where the receiver can "return" money to authorized senders and only keep the money from unauthorized spammmers. And the money collected goes to the RECEIVER, not a tax that is kept by the government (which can be later raised, and raised, and you get the idea).
2. Solutions that require laws or massive changes in protocols must be very carefully watched. While it's not impossible there is a solution of that sort that could actually help, it's possible it could be a power-grab where certain companies would be allowed to decide who can and can't send email. Kind of like having a Constitutual convention in the U.S.: The last time it happened they threw out the whole thing and started over which is why sometimes people are afraid to have another Constitutal Convention. Same here, establishing a new protocol could either be extremely great and helpful or could serve the interests of a few and the rest of the world pays a price worse than the spam we're trying to get rid of.
I think the solution is technical. Widespread deployment of effective filters, especially Bayesian, at the ISP level will reduce the amount of spam that makes it to the users lowering even more than response rate. So we reduce how much spam we SEE via technical means and reduce how much spam is sent by taking spammers to court by charging them with theft of service or DoS attacks.
Actually, I hope the rights are just GIVEN back to their rightful owners: the artists that made them!
It's also stupid. I have an HP color inkjet printer which I've had 3 years, I think. The color cartridge ran out soon after. I don't print much and don't really need color, but every now and then it's cool to do it. When I saw that cartridge costs as much as a new color printer from Lexmark I said "Screw that." I don't NEED color. I seldom need to print. It'd be nice to have it, but I'm not paying the price of a printer for a cartridge.
With such insane prices they eliminate the "Oh, I'm out of color ink which I don't really need but would be nice to have" market. If it cost $5, yeah, I'd probably have purchased a dozen of them by now on a whim to print pictures in color, etc. But instead I haven't bought a single one and when my blank ink runs out (or expires?!) I'll just buy a Lexmark.
I'd rather pay $40 for a new piece of junk disposable inkjet printer with a black and color cartridge than $40 for a color cartridge for my 3-year-old printer.
Barcodes printed on books are Bookland code, which is really the ISBN number of the book expressed as an EAN-13 barcode. Unless the books don't have valid ISBN numbers it is unlikely that there would be any conflicts between books.