Of course you can not choose an arbitrary value for the object. The value is set by the market and is not what a reasonable person would pay, but rather what you could reasonably expect to be able to sell or exchange the object for.
You can't reasonably expect to sell an imaginary sword for $800+. That someone was stupid enough to pay that once does not mean that it is the market value of the item.
There are people who collect Ford Pintos and pay a premium for ones in very good condition. But that does not mean that your insurance company will pay you as much for the car as a collector would. That's because the insurance company realizes that only a small percentage of people who own Ford Pintos are going to find a sucker, I mean "collector", who will pay them more than a couple of hundred dollars for a Ford Pinto.
Wrong, it was currency which represented labor and has an exchange rate that can be derived from an examination of the market on which that currency is exchanged. Whether the currency was electrons or bits of paper and ink makes no difference, the property was the value the currency represented.
Wrong. If it's "currency" for labor, that's called "income" and it's taxable. Maybe the IRS needs to have a look at your virtual goods that you've "earned" by playing some game. Then they can tax you for $800+ income for an imaginary sword. Would that be okay with you? Why do I bet that you'd be howling about how it's just imaginary and not a "thing" that you own?
A. An item is always worth what one could sell it for, if someone is willing to pay you for something it has value whether you choose to sell it or not. If the friend sold it, Qiu could have sold it as well and therefore it always had value.
I've heard this fallacious line of "reasoning" way too many times. If your car gets stolen, do you think that the insurance company will give you $100,000 for it just because you find some rich lunatic that says he would have paid you that much for it? Of course not. Value is based on what a reasonable person would pay, not what some deranged mental midget would pay.
Your[sic] wrong. Possession is NOT ownership.
No one possessed anything here. It was an imaginary item in a fantasy game. What's next? Trying to get someone convicted of murdering your imaginary friend?
Tell me again why Apple doesn't put FM in the iPod?
I cannot speak for Apple. I can only tell you why I would not buy an iPod with FM.
The audio quality of FM sucks. It has a 19khz subcarrier that, if you still have decent hearing, is in the audio spectrum. It has to be filtered out, lowering the upper frequency limit to about 15khz. In order to have "punch", most stations employ compression and limiting, further reducing the audio quality.
I'd rather that any available space, engineering time, and money go into improving the sound quality and battery life of the existing iPod. I don't want them to put in a cheaper op-amp, smaller capacitors, etc. in order to squeeze in an FM tuner.
The main reason that I buy devices like the iPod is that they give me choice. I don't have to listen to commercials, mindless DJ chatter, and music that I don't like. If I'm in the mood for an up-tempo song, I play it. If I want something more laid-back, I play that. FM does not give me those choices. I can, at best, choose a station by genre.
do you have any idea how much it costs to put one 15 second television commercial on the air??? probalby more than you make in a year...
Let's go back to economics 101:
If the anticipated increase in sales (and hence profit) did not more than offset the price of the ad, then the company would not run the ad.
If it cost your company $100,000 to run an ad and your marketing department, which tracks this kind of thing, told you that the ad would draw in about $50,000 worth of additional profit, would you run the ad?
Staples makes money by selling good. Ads increase the amount that they sell. If they stopped advertising, their sales would drop off to a fraction of what they are now and Staples would probably go bankrupt. How would that help them pay rebates?
QPS wasn't committing fraud at all, they were committing bankruptcy, which is perfectly legal. (In fact, it is a legally defined process.)
No, QPS was committing fraud. They offered rebates and then did not pay on them. This happened before they filed for bankruptcy. Nothing on the rebate said "unless we have a cashflow problem."
Had the whole mess been part of the bankruptcy, the people who sent in the rebates would have received notice that QPS had filed for bankruptcy protection and that they (the consumers who sent in the rebates) were creditors. It is likely that they would have then received some small portion of their rebate (e.g., $20 rebate = $2 payment).
I read the directions and send them in religiously. Got a card back from Belkin saying I hadn't sent in 'some required information'. Not enough info on the card to tell me what information, or what rebate, or when. So what the hell do I do? Stop buying Belkin is about all I can do.
What I did in a similar situation was phone and ask what information was missing. The person said that she could not tell me. I told her that I wanted them to return everything that I sent. She smugly informed me that the rebate says that they can keep everything I send. No, I told her, it does not. It says that they may keep it if they pay the rebate. Since they were not paying the rebate, I wanted it back. Suddenly a supervisor got on the line and said that he was approving payment. I had the check in under a week.
WTF, CompuUSA is the seller, the mfg is responsible for the rebates!
CompUSA was advertising the rebates, as in "$XXX after rebate" pricing. They continued to do that even after they became aware that customers were not receiving the rebates and that the company offering them (QPS) was in bankruptcy. It's not like people went to CompUSA and plopped down $100 for a DVD-R drive only to be surprised to discover a $45 rebate in the box. These people were, by and large, enticed by CompUSA's advertisement, which promised a rebate.
Why would anybody not have their taxes filed already?
Because, unless the government owes you money, there is seldom a reason to rush to file a month or more before the deadline.
Is your life really so boring that you look forward to doing your taxes just so that you will have some way to kill an hour? Hell, the rest of us have jobs, hobbies, social obligations, and families. That means that the taxes get done some time before April 15. But, with your smarmy, self-righteous, holier-than-thou attitude, I feel safe in assuming that your calendar probably isn't filled with social engagements.
I just got a new job where I just sit in one place all day and work for 12 hours at a stretch. This goes on for 4 days a week and I get 3 days off. The journey to and from my office takes up about 3 hours of my day.
You don't have to sit for 12 hours at a stretch. You work for four and then go and walk for twenty minutes. That's an hour of exercise per day. If your employer won't allow it, talk to HR and make it clear that your health is being threatened by the current working conditions. If they fire you, get a good attorney and then take a couple years off on the money that you win.
Go find a single statement from Glenn's columns or radio show that could honestly be considering "right wing".
Have you even read the crap he spews? How about this one:
"Bush Could Usher in Hydrogen Age as Kennedy Did Space Age By Glenn Sacks
George W. Bush today has the opportunity to usher in the Hydrogen Age--the coming era of non-polluting, limitless hydrogen fuel cell power--as John F. Kennedy did the Space Age. In so doing, he would be remembered as one of our nation's greatest leaders.
Much of the rest of his site is about how men are victims of "feminists", how people are blowing the murder of Laci Peterson and Lori Hacking out of proportion, how it's great that Kobe Bryant gets to smear his accuser by bringing up her other sexual partners in court, etc.
RTFA and then STFU.
From the FUCKING ARTICLE:
The
National Organization for Women supports Equal Pay Day...What NOW doesn't recognize...NOW gets 75% by comparing apples and oranges...If NOW were correct that women earn 75% of what men earn...NOW does have some good ideas for families...
So you can SHUT THE FUCK UP. Glen Sacks uses the National Organization for Women as his target because he wants to make his bitter, divorced male audience angry. Sure, he cites a few out-of-context statistics from other organizations to try to support his point, but it's just window dressing as he repeats "NOW" over an over. Why doesn't he quote USA Today, CNN, or The San Francisco Chronicle? I'll tell you why: Because he wants to push those hot buttons of the angry, divorced dads who listen to his radio show.
Men get paid more because they work more, and in more dangerous situations, not because of any sexism. Deal with it.
Okay Danger Boy, tell us how men working in dangerous jobs like coal mining are rewarded so highly for the risk involved with their jobs. The average guy maintaining a database gets a hell of a lot more for his work than some guy risking life and limb in a coal mine -- or on an Alaskan fishing boat.
Despite what some right-wing, admittedly biased (from his web site: "His Side with Glenn Sacks discusses gender and family issues from a perspective unapologetically sympathetic to men and fathers.") radio talk show host claims, it is not a "lie."
I recommend that you start looking at reputable sources like the Census Bureau rather than believing some radio personality who pretends that all such statistics come from the National Organization for Women and other groups he views as representing 'the enemy.'
There is plenty of room in the IT industry, and there always will be... for competent IT workers.
Every time something like this comes up, there is someone boasting about how they will never hurt for good paying work because they are so much more talented, hard-working, and/or knowledgeable than the people in IT who are struggling.
Give it a rest. I've been a software engineer for over 20 years and have worked with some damned talented people who had gone through some very rough times in their careers. But I'm not going to get some smug (but deluded) sense of self-worth out of that. That's because I recognize that success depends a lot on luck.
Whether you land a great job may depend on whether the post office delivers your resume before or after someone else's. Whether you succeed could have as much to do with your boss's personality as your skills. I saw a very talented software engineer (and a good friend) lose his job because he was viewed as being the right-hand-man of his boss -- who was just canned.
The IT sector is not immune to the economics that drive the rest of the world. When there is a surplus of talented IT professionals, the salaries will drop.
With so many PEOPLE unemployed in IT, is it really responsible to encouarge people to take up this profession?
The more unemployed people there are in IT, the lower the wages. The lower the wages are, the more money that companies will have to spend on computers and licenses for Microsoft products. You didn't expect a large corporation to be interested in anything but their own profits, did you?
Letting Microsoft address young children on the "benefits" of going into a field where there is rampant unemployment is like letting RJ Reynolds tell them how cool smoking is. Sure, the latter is worse, but neither corporation is going to be acting in the interests of the students.
I did a quick Google search. I was aware of the basic fact that Noah Webster initiated many of the simplified spellings, but I wanted to have an exact year and a few more examples. I have to admit that I was not aware of the Chicago Tribune's roll until I did the search.
What you also might find interesting is Benjamin Franklin's proposed changes to not only spelling, but even to the alphabet. A bold, but failed, effort.
I can think of no better description of someone who digs back to postings from April of last year just to try to get some "dirt" to use in a current discussion.
But thank you for providing the link. It refreshed my memory and I can speak to it now. In the Apr. '04 post to which you referred, I was making an analogy to show why directors were rightly angered by third-parties butchering their work -- and that simply owning something, whether a DVD or photo, does not give you unlimited rights to modify it and redistribute it. Clearly, it is not an insult for me to say that I can Photoshop a photo. What I was objecting to in our discussion was not "aesthetics." It was having our intellectual debate devolve into name calling and insults.
1) I never claimed that american ISPs are the primary ones supporting spam. True, I may have posted links or articles that attempted or claimed to make that point, but only to counter your assertion that "American ISPs, by and large, don't provide mail service or hosting to spammers".
You wrote: "... and the US heads that list with 2465 out of 4506 listed spam issues - more than three times as many issues as the next country on the list." Are you now trying to tell me that the links and excerpts that you posted were not intended to represent your beliefs? That's odd, to say the least.
2) The foreign language spam which dominates the inboxes of all Yahoo! Groups moderators is strong evidence that spam is not *only* an american on american problem, but it certainly doesn't prove that it is not *primarily* an american on american problem unless you can prove to me that the spam in question is accurately representative of all spam everywhere on the internet.
I did not offer it as "proof." Just "strong evidence" that the spam problem is not primarily an Ameican problem. I also have another piece of information which I had not yet shared: I have been told by Yahoo!'s abuse department that they do not filter any e-mail going through those forwarding addresses. Therefore, what I receive is what is sent.
I manage several domains. They each get far more foreign language spam than English Spam. The domains are in the.org and.com TLDs -- not.cn,.tw,.jp, etc. The yahoogroups.com moderator e-mail forwards more foreign spam to me than English spam. This is strong evidence that spam is not primarily American on American.
3 & 4 - the "spamhaus is just plain wrong" duo, lumped together for my convenience) Fine, I am more than willing to concede that spamhaus' statistics are not representative - but I do claim that they are indicative, and that's all I need to argue my position regarding: american ISPs hosting and supporting spammers.
I never claimed that no American ISPs host and support spammers. I said that "American ISPs, by and large, don't provide mail service or hosting to spammers." "By and large" means "for the most part" or "generally" and that's a fair characterization. A handful of them do, but they are very much in the minority.
As for my contention that most spam is sent by americans to americans, your own source backs me up (at least as far as the "from americans" bit), so, once again, why are you still arguing?
One can disagree with parts of an article while agreeing with other parts. I've been postmaster and abuse at several domains for too long to believe that most spam is sent by Americans. Unless most Americans have started speaking some language other than English (I admit that I don't get out as much as I should -- has this happened?), the spam problem that I've seen is largely foreign.
Hence my call to clean up your own back yard before looking to your neighbors. That's not a call for you personally to do anything, given that I have reason to doubt your effectiveness. You're a talker, not a doer. Actua
* I'm English, from England, and I know how to spell English words. It's not my fault the founding fathers didn't take a decent dictionary to America.
Interesting that you should say that, since Noah Webster was the person who did the most to reduce the illogical spelling which, like measles, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid fever, dysentery, scarlet fever, diphtheria, bubonic plague, and whooping cough, survived the journey from England. His dictionary of 1821 included the following:
* musick became music (musick spelling is no longer in use today)
* publick became public (publick spelling is no longer in use today)
* cheque became check
* colour became color
* plough became plow
* favour became favor
* phantasy became fantasy (phantasy is now only used as an old-fashioned affectation)
I suppose that you are still mourning the loss of "musick", "publick", and "phantasy"...
Beginning in 1934, the Chicago Tribune adopted many simplified spellings for words, many of which have become widely accepted:
* hiccough became hiccup
* interne became intern
* mediaeval (or mediæval) became medieval
* gramme became gram
* sulphur became sulfur (dominant spelling in American English, IUPAC-adopted spelling)
Unless you think that "hour" rhymes with "whore," there is no logical reason for having a "u" in the word "color."
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you can not choose an arbitrary value for the object. The value is set by the market and is not what a reasonable person would pay, but rather what you could reasonably expect to be able to sell or exchange the object for.
You can't reasonably expect to sell an imaginary sword for $800+. That someone was stupid enough to pay that once does not mean that it is the market value of the item.
There are people who collect Ford Pintos and pay a premium for ones in very good condition. But that does not mean that your insurance company will pay you as much for the car as a collector would. That's because the insurance company realizes that only a small percentage of people who own Ford Pintos are going to find a sucker, I mean "collector", who will pay them more than a couple of hundred dollars for a Ford Pinto.
Wrong, it was currency which represented labor and has an exchange rate that can be derived from an examination of the market on which that currency is exchanged. Whether the currency was electrons or bits of paper and ink makes no difference, the property was the value the currency represented.
Wrong. If it's "currency" for labor, that's called "income" and it's taxable. Maybe the IRS needs to have a look at your virtual goods that you've "earned" by playing some game. Then they can tax you for $800+ income for an imaginary sword. Would that be okay with you? Why do I bet that you'd be howling about how it's just imaginary and not a "thing" that you own?
Telling people on Slashdot the way they like to listen to music is wrong through bad analogies is like being a pedantic dick.
You are a dick, and an uncultured one at that.
A. An item is always worth what one could sell it for, if someone is willing to pay you for something it has value whether you choose to sell it or not. If the friend sold it, Qiu could have sold it as well and therefore it always had value.
I've heard this fallacious line of "reasoning" way too many times. If your car gets stolen, do you think that the insurance company will give you $100,000 for it just because you find some rich lunatic that says he would have paid you that much for it? Of course not. Value is based on what a reasonable person would pay, not what some deranged mental midget would pay.
Your[sic] wrong. Possession is NOT ownership.
No one possessed anything here. It was an imaginary item in a fantasy game. What's next? Trying to get someone convicted of murdering your imaginary friend?
I have $90 earbuds because I like bass, but I bet you I can't tell the difference.
That's probably true. Most people who listen to high-SPL, boosted bass through headphones have significant hearing loss.
I don't like bass. I don't like treble. I like music. I like accuracy. Boosting the bass to unnatural levels is like coloring an Ansel Adams photo.
Tell me again why Apple doesn't put FM in the iPod?
I cannot speak for Apple. I can only tell you why I would not buy an iPod with FM.
The audio quality of FM sucks. It has a 19khz subcarrier that, if you still have decent hearing, is in the audio spectrum. It has to be filtered out, lowering the upper frequency limit to about 15khz. In order to have "punch", most stations employ compression and limiting, further reducing the audio quality.
I'd rather that any available space, engineering time, and money go into improving the sound quality and battery life of the existing iPod. I don't want them to put in a cheaper op-amp, smaller capacitors, etc. in order to squeeze in an FM tuner.
The main reason that I buy devices like the iPod is that they give me choice. I don't have to listen to commercials, mindless DJ chatter, and music that I don't like. If I'm in the mood for an up-tempo song, I play it. If I want something more laid-back, I play that. FM does not give me those choices. I can, at best, choose a station by genre.
Typo: That should have read "Staples make money by selling goods." Sorry for the sloppy proofreading.
do you have any idea how much it costs to put one 15 second television commercial on the air??? probalby more than you make in a year...
Let's go back to economics 101:
If the anticipated increase in sales (and hence profit) did not more than offset the price of the ad, then the company would not run the ad.
If it cost your company $100,000 to run an ad and your marketing department, which tracks this kind of thing, told you that the ad would draw in about $50,000 worth of additional profit, would you run the ad?
Staples makes money by selling good. Ads increase the amount that they sell. If they stopped advertising, their sales would drop off to a fraction of what they are now and Staples would probably go bankrupt. How would that help them pay rebates?
QPS wasn't committing fraud at all, they were committing bankruptcy, which is perfectly legal. (In fact, it is a legally defined process.)
No, QPS was committing fraud. They offered rebates and then did not pay on them. This happened before they filed for bankruptcy. Nothing on the rebate said "unless we have a cashflow problem."
Had the whole mess been part of the bankruptcy, the people who sent in the rebates would have received notice that QPS had filed for bankruptcy protection and that they (the consumers who sent in the rebates) were creditors. It is likely that they would have then received some small portion of their rebate (e.g., $20 rebate = $2 payment).
That's a good tip, thanks. It would be even more useful and informative if you gave the name of the company.
If I wasn't old and senile, I would be able to remember which of my several hundred rebates that was. Sorry.
... so speaks a man with 3742 slashdot comments to his name.
This is an example of a hobby of mine -- something I'd rather be doing than taxes.
seems to me that if staples would spend less on television advertising then they could afford to hire more manpower to handle these rebates...
Fewer advertisements = fewer sales. If a store is selling less, how can it afford to hire more manpower?
I read the directions and send them in religiously. Got a card back from Belkin saying I hadn't sent in 'some required information'. Not enough info on the card to tell me what information, or what rebate, or when. So what the hell do I do? Stop buying Belkin is about all I can do.
What I did in a similar situation was phone and ask what information was missing. The person said that she could not tell me. I told her that I wanted them to return everything that I sent. She smugly informed me that the rebate says that they can keep everything I send. No, I told her, it does not. It says that they may keep it if they pay the rebate. Since they were not paying the rebate, I wanted it back. Suddenly a supervisor got on the line and said that he was approving payment. I had the check in under a week.
WTF, CompuUSA is the seller, the mfg is responsible for the rebates!
CompUSA was advertising the rebates, as in "$XXX after rebate" pricing. They continued to do that even after they became aware that customers were not receiving the rebates and that the company offering them (QPS) was in bankruptcy. It's not like people went to CompUSA and plopped down $100 for a DVD-R drive only to be surprised to discover a $45 rebate in the box. These people were, by and large, enticed by CompUSA's advertisement, which promised a rebate.
Why would anybody not have their taxes filed already?
Because, unless the government owes you money, there is seldom a reason to rush to file a month or more before the deadline.
Is your life really so boring that you look forward to doing your taxes just so that you will have some way to kill an hour? Hell, the rest of us have jobs, hobbies, social obligations, and families. That means that the taxes get done some time before April 15. But, with your smarmy, self-righteous, holier-than-thou attitude, I feel safe in assuming that your calendar probably isn't filled with social engagements.
I just got a new job where I just sit in one place all day and work for 12 hours at a stretch. This goes on for 4 days a week and I get 3 days off. The journey to and from my office takes up about 3 hours of my day.
You don't have to sit for 12 hours at a stretch. You work for four and then go and walk for twenty minutes. That's an hour of exercise per day. If your employer won't allow it, talk to HR and make it clear that your health is being threatened by the current working conditions. If they fire you, get a good attorney and then take a couple years off on the money that you win.
Have you even read the crap he spews? How about this one:
Much of the rest of his site is about how men are victims of "feminists", how people are blowing the murder of Laci Peterson and Lori Hacking out of proportion, how it's great that Kobe Bryant gets to smear his accuser by bringing up her other sexual partners in court, etc.
RTFA and then STFU.
From the FUCKING ARTICLE:
So you can SHUT THE FUCK UP. Glen Sacks uses the National Organization for Women as his target because he wants to make his bitter, divorced male audience angry. Sure, he cites a few out-of-context statistics from other organizations to try to support his point, but it's just window dressing as he repeats "NOW" over an over. Why doesn't he quote USA Today, CNN, or The San Francisco Chronicle? I'll tell you why: Because he wants to push those hot buttons of the angry, divorced dads who listen to his radio show.
Men get paid more because they work more, and in more dangerous situations, not because of any sexism. Deal with it.
Okay Danger Boy, tell us how men working in dangerous jobs like coal mining are rewarded so highly for the risk involved with their jobs. The average guy maintaining a database gets a hell of a lot more for his work than some guy risking life and limb in a coal mine -- or on an Alaskan fishing boat.
Despite what some right-wing, admittedly biased (from his web site: "His Side with Glenn Sacks discusses gender and family issues from a perspective unapologetically sympathetic to men and fathers.") radio talk show host claims, it is not a "lie."
I recommend that you start looking at reputable sources like the Census Bureau rather than believing some radio personality who pretends that all such statistics come from the National Organization for Women and other groups he views as representing 'the enemy.'
There is plenty of room in the IT industry, and there always will be... for competent IT workers.
Every time something like this comes up, there is someone boasting about how they will never hurt for good paying work because they are so much more talented, hard-working, and/or knowledgeable than the people in IT who are struggling.
Give it a rest. I've been a software engineer for over 20 years and have worked with some damned talented people who had gone through some very rough times in their careers. But I'm not going to get some smug (but deluded) sense of self-worth out of that. That's because I recognize that success depends a lot on luck.
Whether you land a great job may depend on whether the post office delivers your resume before or after someone else's. Whether you succeed could have as much to do with your boss's personality as your skills. I saw a very talented software engineer (and a good friend) lose his job because he was viewed as being the right-hand-man of his boss -- who was just canned.
The IT sector is not immune to the economics that drive the rest of the world. When there is a surplus of talented IT professionals, the salaries will drop.
With so many PEOPLE unemployed in IT, is it really responsible to encouarge people to take up this profession?
The more unemployed people there are in IT, the lower the wages. The lower the wages are, the more money that companies will have to spend on computers and licenses for Microsoft products. You didn't expect a large corporation to be interested in anything but their own profits, did you?
Letting Microsoft address young children on the "benefits" of going into a field where there is rampant unemployment is like letting RJ Reynolds tell them how cool smoking is. Sure, the latter is worse, but neither corporation is going to be acting in the interests of the students.
Wednesday Microsoft Canada's vice president of developer and platform evangelism encouraged 9th grade girls to head for an IT career
In a related story, Microsoft was seeking ways to reduce its IT costs by about 25%.
For the record, I'm employed in the modeling and simulation business
He said "simulation", not "stimulation." Male lingerie models are not what George Box was talking about.
I did a quick Google search. I was aware of the basic fact that Noah Webster initiated many of the simplified spellings, but I wanted to have an exact year and a few more examples. I have to admit that I was not aware of the Chicago Tribune's roll until I did the search.
What you also might find interesting is Benjamin Franklin's proposed changes to not only spelling, but even to the alphabet. A bold, but failed, effort.
and...
*djdead became jackass
(as shown in parent post)
Your "stalker friend"?
.org and .com TLDs -- not .cn, .tw, .jp, etc. The yahoogroups.com moderator e-mail forwards more foreign spam to me than English spam. This is strong evidence that spam is not primarily American on American.
I can think of no better description of someone who digs back to postings from April of last year just to try to get some "dirt" to use in a current discussion.
But thank you for providing the link. It refreshed my memory and I can speak to it now. In the Apr. '04 post to which you referred, I was making an analogy to show why directors were rightly angered by third-parties butchering their work -- and that simply owning something, whether a DVD or photo, does not give you unlimited rights to modify it and redistribute it. Clearly, it is not an insult for me to say that I can Photoshop a photo. What I was objecting to in our discussion was not "aesthetics." It was having our intellectual debate devolve into name calling and insults.
1) I never claimed that american ISPs are the primary ones supporting spam. True, I may have posted links or articles that attempted or claimed to make that point, but only to counter your assertion that "American ISPs, by and large, don't provide mail service or hosting to spammers".
You wrote: "... and the US heads that list with 2465 out of 4506 listed spam issues - more than three times as many issues as the next country on the list." Are you now trying to tell me that the links and excerpts that you posted were not intended to represent your beliefs? That's odd, to say the least.
2) The foreign language spam which dominates the inboxes of all Yahoo! Groups moderators is strong evidence that spam is not *only* an american on american problem, but it certainly doesn't prove that it is not *primarily* an american on american problem unless you can prove to me that the spam in question is accurately representative of all spam everywhere on the internet.
I did not offer it as "proof." Just "strong evidence" that the spam problem is not primarily an Ameican problem. I also have another piece of information which I had not yet shared: I have been told by Yahoo!'s abuse department that they do not filter any e-mail going through those forwarding addresses. Therefore, what I receive is what is sent.
I manage several domains. They each get far more foreign language spam than English Spam. The domains are in the
3 & 4 - the "spamhaus is just plain wrong" duo, lumped together for my convenience) Fine, I am more than willing to concede that spamhaus' statistics are not representative - but I do claim that they are indicative, and that's all I need to argue my position regarding: american ISPs hosting and supporting spammers.
I never claimed that no American ISPs host and support spammers. I said that "American ISPs, by and large, don't provide mail service or hosting to spammers." "By and large" means "for the most part" or "generally" and that's a fair characterization. A handful of them do, but they are very much in the minority.
As for my contention that most spam is sent by americans to americans, your own source backs me up (at least as far as the "from americans" bit), so, once again, why are you still arguing?
One can disagree with parts of an article while agreeing with other parts. I've been postmaster and abuse at several domains for too long to believe that most spam is sent by Americans. Unless most Americans have started speaking some language other than English (I admit that I don't get out as much as I should -- has this happened?), the spam problem that I've seen is largely foreign.
Hence my call to clean up your own back yard before looking to your neighbors. That's not a call for you personally to do anything, given that I have reason to doubt your effectiveness. You're a talker, not a doer. Actua
* I'm English, from England, and I know how to spell English words. It's not my fault the founding fathers didn't take a decent dictionary to America.
Interesting that you should say that, since Noah Webster was the person who did the most to reduce the illogical spelling which, like measles, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid fever, dysentery, scarlet fever, diphtheria, bubonic plague, and whooping cough, survived the journey from England. His dictionary of 1821 included the following:
* musick became music (musick spelling is no longer in use today)
* publick became public (publick spelling is no longer in use today)
* cheque became check
* colour became color
* plough became plow
* favour became favor
* phantasy became fantasy (phantasy is now only used as an old-fashioned affectation)
I suppose that you are still mourning the loss of "musick", "publick", and "phantasy"...
Beginning in 1934, the Chicago Tribune adopted many simplified spellings for words, many of which have become widely accepted:
* hiccough became hiccup
* interne became intern
* mediaeval (or mediæval) became medieval
* gramme became gram
* sulphur became sulfur (dominant spelling in American English, IUPAC-adopted spelling)
Unless you think that "hour" rhymes with "whore," there is no logical reason for having a "u" in the word "color."