Re:CmdrTaco is a far left liberal
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 2
Conservatives tend to support laws based on traditional Judeo-Christian morality: laws against abortion, laws against homosexuality, laws against adultry, laws against what your body may ingest, etc. "Liberals" tend to support laws based on New Age morality: laws against smoking, laws against guns, laws against your use of your own property, laws against freedom of association, etc.
First, let me say that yours was a very well-written and argued post. I do think that there is an important distinction to be made between liberal and conservative regulation of personal freedoms:
Liberals tend to limit personal freedom to protect others from things like secondhand smoke and gun-violence.
Conservatives pass laws to impose their religious and moral beliefs on others.
The latter is indefensible in a society that purports to have a separation of church and state.
I believe collective punishments are illegal. You don't pre-fine every car owner only because statistically people illegally park and get away with it.
Despite what the GOP has been telling you, taxes and fines are not the same thing. A tax can be burdensome, unfair, ill-conceived, and unreasonably high but that does not make it into a fine or form of punishment.
Let's look at it another way: Since your local tax dollars pay to repair vandalism at public buildings, does that mean that everyone who lives in your locality is facing a pre-fine or collective punishment for vandalism? Of course not.
Re:cellphone, schmellphone... if you're so clever.
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 3
what kind of a dumb-ass are you? If you tell your local post office to repackage ALL envelopes...
Hey dumb fuck, my cell phone has an e-mail address. I don't have to forward anything. If e-mail is sent to that address, it appears on my phone. Because of spammers, I dare not give that address out -- but what right do spammers have to render useless a feature included with my cell phone service?
You also act like the spammers have a right to waste my time by making me set up filters and compression so that I can access my own e-mail. Maybe your time is worthless, but mine is not.
By the way, Mr. Wizard, do you know that your ISP is passing the costs of spam on to you and every other subscriber?
(try using exim and its filter forward rules)
I use VAMP (Very Advanced Mail Processor). Exim only runs under Unix/Linux and that's not what I use on my mail server/firewall/ftp server/etc. machine.
P.S. If you are so skilled at filtering your e-mail, why doesn't your e-mail address appear with your posting?
Re:CmdrTaco is a far left liberal
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 1
Liberals don't give a hoot about others personal freedoms, only thier own...Regulations are bad. It puts more goverment in peoples lives...
Most of the government regulation of personal lives comes from conservatives. They are the ones that are pushing for the government to regulate and/or outlaw abortion. They fight against needle-exchange programs so that drug addicts don't spread HIV. The conservatives are the ones that launched the whole "War On Drugs" and have fought for mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related convictions.
While conservatives are perfectly comfortable regulating people's personal lives, they are far less willing to regulate big business. With the Direct Marketing Association fighting anti-spam laws, it's unlikely that we will have effective laws against spam any time soon.
I mean, everyone always talks about freedom on the Internet, keeping it unregulated, etc. Why should this be different?
This is not "different." In fact, it is much like a denial of service attack in that it can paralyze smaller ISPs and companies when they serve as the inadvertent origin, relay, or forged "From:" domain for spam. It is also like many forms of computer fraud which are already illegal. Spammers go to great lengths to forge and mask sender information, routing information, and even web page addresses in their spam. While recipients are seldom left helpless by it, it drastically limits the way that they can use the Internet. Many will not use real addresses in Usenet postings, put a link to their e-mail address on web pages, or otherwise publically publish their e-mail address for fear of being deluged with spam.
Take the case of someone who wishes to forward his e-mail to his/her cell-phone. Spam has basically made this impossible, as spammers send huge, complex HTML messages on a regular basis. Add to that the interruptions to the recipients day as the phone goes off for one spam after another and you have a situation where a person cannot receive their e-mail in the manner that they want.
Lastly, it is theft. In the case of e-mail delivered to cell phones, it costs the recipient for each received message. When people pay for Internet use by the minute or byte, it costs them money for each piece of spam received. In this way, it is no different than the already illegal "junk faxes."
We already have legislation to protect us from other computer crimes and adding spam to that list is long overdue.
If this tax is to compensate artists for lost sales due to copyright infringement...then the assumption is being made that YOU, Joe Consumer, are a pirate.
The assumption being made is that some percentage of consumers are pirates. The tax is on everyone because the authorities can catch and prosecute only a tiny percentage of the pirates. I don't agree with this reasoning, but I understand it.
The CD tax going to compensate the music companies for copying that may or may not be occurring is for the good of non-people.
This may come as a shock to you, but music companies are made up of "people." While I do not agree with this tax, it does go to people in the form of wages and compensation.
No, fast computers and high-end peripherals are cool. Light-up cases with acrylic windows remind me of the pathetic losers who put neon lights, air dams, and 5" exhaust tips under their Honda Civics. It's just sad.
There are more RF emissions coming from your CRT monitor than your PC, so don't worry about it.
An unshielded computer emits far more RF than a properly shielded monitor. You should spend a little more time reading and less time practicing your ghetto-boy hand gestures near your light-up computer.
If the government spends your tax money on a shelter for battered women, does that mean that it should be legal for you to beat your wife? If they levy a tax to clean up a waterway, does that mean that you should be legally allowed to dump your trash in it because you paid the tax?
Oh, right. And nobody would notice. Nobody would do anything about it. Loopholes always stay open forever, even when people take advantage of them en masse.
The point is to put the legislators in the position of having to do something about it. What could they do? Would they start taxing recorded computer media and, in the process, tax the very software vendors that they are trying to help with this tax? Would they make subjective decisions about the value of the data on each diskette sold to determine if the diskette should be taxed? Would they ban the sale of software on erasable media (e.g., floppies)?
When the laws are made byzantine and draconian (how about a +1 for "big words"?) enough, they get repealed.
The only way to keep this kind of tax from being levied in the United States is to make out voices heard by voting -- even if it means pushing the chad all of the way out and reading the instructions.
If it's only blank media that gets taxed, record something on it first. Don't sell a box of blank floppies. Sell a box of erasable floppies that each contain a single 1K image file.
If AOL were to start distributing on CD-RW media, they might actually find willing takers in France!
Music CD recorders require the use of blank "Music" CDRs. These CDRs are taxed to pay the RIAA for piracy (and contain something read by the recorder to identify it as being a Music CDR). What it really means is that the RIAA is raking in a bunch of money for what the courts have deemed "fair use."
"Security Through Obscurity" is the way that it's described in the computer security field. While proprietary systems are not always less secure, they have a lower chance of being secure because the software has not been examined by as many people.
That's why crypto-geeks insist on having the source code to any encryption algorithm they use. If there was a hole in Blowfish or DES, it would probably have been found by now. Do you want to trust you SS#, credit card #, and personal information to software put together by one or more random strangers whose qualifications you don't know?
First, the MPAA will bring a lawsuit because the camera can record movies.
Then they will demand that there be a tax on the media because you might record a copyrighted movie on it.
Then they will insist that all of the cameras use Macrovision so that you cannot dub the movie to your VCR once you have recorded it.
In order to keep you from loaning a movie to someone else, the recordings will be encryped using your camera's unique key.
Sony and Philips will introduce a camera that does the same thing and uses identical looking, yet incompatible, media. It will be superior in some way that they cannot communicate in advertising to the general public.
JVC will introduce their own model of digital camcorder. It will require still different media, only record 20 minutes, and will have a goofy-looking adapter that will allow the movie to be played in DVD players. It will be called SuperDVD-C.
Congress will be asked to set a standard to eliminate consumer confusion and they will listen to 3 years of testimony before picking the most technically-inept and expensive design, which will be by a U.S. company. The Asian firms will beat the U.S. company to market anyway.
Consumers will, inexplicably, not embrace this new technology, baffling marketing analysts throughout the electronics industry.
Are they ever going to get their chips actually used somewhere?
The biggest problem that AMD has had was the lack of an all-in-one motherboard support chip to help drive the cost of Duron-equipped systems down. Intel has had such chips for their Celeron line for some time now, which has allowed vendors to create less expensive motherboards that help offset the higher cost of Intel CPUs. Now both SIS and VIA have created such chips for the AMD Thunderbird/Duron CPUs. The chips include:
Video
Sound
Floppy & ATA100 IDE
Keyboard & Mouse ports
56K WinModem
Serial & Parallel ports
USB
Joystick
MIDI
10/100 Ethernet
PCI/RAM/etc. interface.
While most/. users won't give a rat's patootie about integrated video, sound, and WinModems, the market wants cheap PCs. When I needed a cheap system to use as a firewall and mail/web/ftp server, I opted for a $99 motherboard and a $53 650mhz Duron. At under $150 (in qty.), that's a potent and price-attractive core for many home/SOHO systems. I expect many integrators and OEMs to be using similar motherboards in the near future.
Intel is in a world of hurt. The Thunderbirds are acknowledged to be superb high-end CPUs at a price that Intel cannot match. The Durons are faster, clock for clock, than the Celerons, and, again, are much cheaper. Now with the low-cost, all-in-one motherboards coming out, I expect AMD to clean up in the low-end home/SOHO replacement system market. With the Mobile Durons, AMD will be putting the squeeze on the Mobile Celerons and I expect that you will see many of these in name-brand laptops -- a market where AMD has done well in the past.
Each person has their own personal sense of style and these cases...
Oh, screw that PC (politically correct) crap! Light-up cases with plexiglass windows are just stupid. Don't those morons know that the cases are made of metal for a reason! Haven't they ever heard of RF interference or the FCC? If those idiots keep it up, there will be mandatory (RF) emissions testing stations for PCs. Despite posts to the contrary, modern PC cases have a lot of shielding. Empty drive bays have metal shields behind the plastic filler plates. The plastic fronts on PCs are backed up with metal. Conductive paint is sprayed on the back of many plastic parts. It's all done to reduce RF emissions from the PCs.
I wonder how many of those idiots that have invested all of those dollars and hours in their cases still don't have basic things like DAT tape backups, laser printers, and flatbed scanners.
I am 6'2" 260lbs. worth of nerd. I spent most of high-school turning down offers to join the football and wrestling teams -- because it would take me away from the HP-2000 computer after school.
There are many more computer hobbyists today because of the Apple and there is an industry thriving today that hobbyists can make some money in because of the Apple.
Please! You are grossly overestimating Apple's importance. What Apple did was dumb-down computers and splinter the industry in its infancy, crushing many competitors who were making technically superior products. Personal computers weren't about to fade away without Apple's entrance. All that Apple did was lower the bar so that wimpy power supplies, TV outputs, and flimsy plastic cases were accepted by the general public as "okay."
you are whining because your little club isn't so little and special anymore.
No, you are whining because you aren't in the club.
What this all comes down to is this: I respect technical visionaries and you respect marketing visionaries. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took a substandard, and non-standard, computer and sold the heck out of them to people that lacked the technical skill to deal with the computers of their day.
William Hewlett knew that a product like the Apple had no place in his company's line-up. That he let Wozniak retain rights to it was a kind gesture. Pretending that William Hewlett was anything less than a true visionary was the most offensive part of this whole thread.
Microsoft Corporation hereby disclaims all warranties and conditions with regard to this software, including all implied warranties and conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.
I think you're missing the whole point of IAs. They're not suppose to be PCs.
No, I am not. They are simpler to use than PCs. They are somewhat smaller. They are perfect for computer illiterates with a $400+ desire to have e-mail and web access. Okay, once you sell one to each of those 17 people, then what?
Most people look at Internet Appliances and do the same comparison that I did. That's why Internet Appliances don't sell. And as more and more people are computer-literate, the appeal of Internet Appliances will wane even further.
choosing a stronger encryption does not increase any costs (financial and otherwise) of the software development, or of the software use. So why not use a better alorithm?
Depending on the amount of data to encrypt, mil-strength encryption exacts a toll in CPU usage. Ignoring that, the link provided is a service and if you have need for some privacy in a message you send, the service is valuable and should not be shunned because the encryption is not the strongest available. Besides, the interface is elegant and entry of the key for encode/decode is easy.
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First, let me say that yours was a very well-written and argued post. I do think that there is an important distinction to be made between liberal and conservative regulation of personal freedoms:
Liberals tend to limit personal freedom to protect others from things like secondhand smoke and gun-violence.
Conservatives pass laws to impose their religious and moral beliefs on others.
The latter is indefensible in a society that purports to have a separation of church and state.
Despite what the GOP has been telling you, taxes and fines are not the same thing. A tax can be burdensome, unfair, ill-conceived, and unreasonably high but that does not make it into a fine or form of punishment.
Let's look at it another way: Since your local tax dollars pay to repair vandalism at public buildings, does that mean that everyone who lives in your locality is facing a pre-fine or collective punishment for vandalism? Of course not.
Hey dumb fuck, my cell phone has an e-mail address. I don't have to forward anything. If e-mail is sent to that address, it appears on my phone. Because of spammers, I dare not give that address out -- but what right do spammers have to render useless a feature included with my cell phone service?
You also act like the spammers have a right to waste my time by making me set up filters and compression so that I can access my own e-mail. Maybe your time is worthless, but mine is not.
By the way, Mr. Wizard, do you know that your ISP is passing the costs of spam on to you and every other subscriber?
(try using exim and its filter forward rules)
I use VAMP (Very Advanced Mail Processor). Exim only runs under Unix/Linux and that's not what I use on my mail server/firewall/ftp server/etc. machine.
P.S. If you are so skilled at filtering your e-mail, why doesn't your e-mail address appear with your posting?
Most of the government regulation of personal lives comes from conservatives. They are the ones that are pushing for the government to regulate and/or outlaw abortion. They fight against needle-exchange programs so that drug addicts don't spread HIV. The conservatives are the ones that launched the whole "War On Drugs" and have fought for mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related convictions.
While conservatives are perfectly comfortable regulating people's personal lives, they are far less willing to regulate big business. With the Direct Marketing Association fighting anti-spam laws, it's unlikely that we will have effective laws against spam any time soon.
This is not "different." In fact, it is much like a denial of service attack in that it can paralyze smaller ISPs and companies when they serve as the inadvertent origin, relay, or forged "From:" domain for spam. It is also like many forms of computer fraud which are already illegal. Spammers go to great lengths to forge and mask sender information, routing information, and even web page addresses in their spam. While recipients are seldom left helpless by it, it drastically limits the way that they can use the Internet. Many will not use real addresses in Usenet postings, put a link to their e-mail address on web pages, or otherwise publically publish their e-mail address for fear of being deluged with spam.
Take the case of someone who wishes to forward his e-mail to his/her cell-phone. Spam has basically made this impossible, as spammers send huge, complex HTML messages on a regular basis. Add to that the interruptions to the recipients day as the phone goes off for one spam after another and you have a situation where a person cannot receive their e-mail in the manner that they want.
Lastly, it is theft. In the case of e-mail delivered to cell phones, it costs the recipient for each received message. When people pay for Internet use by the minute or byte, it costs them money for each piece of spam received. In this way, it is no different than the already illegal "junk faxes."
We already have legislation to protect us from other computer crimes and adding spam to that list is long overdue.
The assumption being made is that some percentage of consumers are pirates. The tax is on everyone because the authorities can catch and prosecute only a tiny percentage of the pirates. I don't agree with this reasoning, but I understand it.
P.S. In this case is "Jacques Consumer."
There was a time when taxes were not viewed as punishment. This is a tax, not a fine, whether you, I, or the people of France like it.
This may come as a shock to you, but music companies are made up of "people." While I do not agree with this tax, it does go to people in the form of wages and compensation.
No, fast computers and high-end peripherals are cool. Light-up cases with acrylic windows remind me of the pathetic losers who put neon lights, air dams, and 5" exhaust tips under their Honda Civics. It's just sad.
There are more RF emissions coming from your CRT monitor than your PC, so don't worry about it.
An unshielded computer emits far more RF than a properly shielded monitor. You should spend a little more time reading and less time practicing your ghetto-boy hand gestures near your light-up computer.
Sorry, but it's just not that simple.
The point is to put the legislators in the position of having to do something about it. What could they do? Would they start taxing recorded computer media and, in the process, tax the very software vendors that they are trying to help with this tax? Would they make subjective decisions about the value of the data on each diskette sold to determine if the diskette should be taxed? Would they ban the sale of software on erasable media (e.g., floppies)?
When the laws are made byzantine and draconian (how about a +1 for "big words"?) enough, they get repealed.
The only way to keep this kind of tax from being levied in the United States is to make out voices heard by voting -- even if it means pushing the chad all of the way out and reading the instructions.
If AOL were to start distributing on CD-RW media, they might actually find willing takers in France!
Music CD recorders require the use of blank "Music" CDRs. These CDRs are taxed to pay the RIAA for piracy (and contain something read by the recorder to identify it as being a Music CDR). What it really means is that the RIAA is raking in a bunch of money for what the courts have deemed "fair use."
That's why crypto-geeks insist on having the source code to any encryption algorithm they use. If there was a hole in Blowfish or DES, it would probably have been found by now. Do you want to trust you SS#, credit card #, and personal information to software put together by one or more random strangers whose qualifications you don't know?
Great idea! Now when we get a bad ping or lost frames and we die, we can lose money, too! What a brilliant idea...
I would use a parachute...
First, the MPAA will bring a lawsuit because the camera can record movies.
Then they will demand that there be a tax on the media because you might record a copyrighted movie on it.
Then they will insist that all of the cameras use Macrovision so that you cannot dub the movie to your VCR once you have recorded it.
In order to keep you from loaning a movie to someone else, the recordings will be encryped using your camera's unique key.
Sony and Philips will introduce a camera that does the same thing and uses identical looking, yet incompatible, media. It will be superior in some way that they cannot communicate in advertising to the general public.
JVC will introduce their own model of digital camcorder. It will require still different media, only record 20 minutes, and will have a goofy-looking adapter that will allow the movie to be played in DVD players. It will be called SuperDVD-C.
Congress will be asked to set a standard to eliminate consumer confusion and they will listen to 3 years of testimony before picking the most technically-inept and expensive design, which will be by a U.S. company. The Asian firms will beat the U.S. company to market anyway.
Consumers will, inexplicably, not embrace this new technology, baffling marketing analysts throughout the electronics industry.
The biggest problem that AMD has had was the lack of an all-in-one motherboard support chip to help drive the cost of Duron-equipped systems down. Intel has had such chips for their Celeron line for some time now, which has allowed vendors to create less expensive motherboards that help offset the higher cost of Intel CPUs. Now both SIS and VIA have created such chips for the AMD Thunderbird/Duron CPUs. The chips include:
Video
Sound
Floppy & ATA100 IDE
Keyboard & Mouse ports
56K WinModem
Serial & Parallel ports
USB
Joystick
MIDI
10/100 Ethernet
PCI/RAM/etc. interface.
While mostIntel is in a world of hurt. The Thunderbirds are acknowledged to be superb high-end CPUs at a price that Intel cannot match. The Durons are faster, clock for clock, than the Celerons, and, again, are much cheaper. Now with the low-cost, all-in-one motherboards coming out, I expect AMD to clean up in the low-end home/SOHO replacement system market. With the Mobile Durons, AMD will be putting the squeeze on the Mobile Celerons and I expect that you will see many of these in name-brand laptops -- a market where AMD has done well in the past.
Oh, screw that PC (politically correct) crap! Light-up cases with plexiglass windows are just stupid. Don't those morons know that the cases are made of metal for a reason! Haven't they ever heard of RF interference or the FCC? If those idiots keep it up, there will be mandatory (RF) emissions testing stations for PCs. Despite posts to the contrary, modern PC cases have a lot of shielding. Empty drive bays have metal shields behind the plastic filler plates. The plastic fronts on PCs are backed up with metal. Conductive paint is sprayed on the back of many plastic parts. It's all done to reduce RF emissions from the PCs.
I wonder how many of those idiots that have invested all of those dollars and hours in their cases still don't have basic things like DAT tape backups, laser printers, and flatbed scanners.
I am 6'2" 260lbs. worth of nerd. I spent most of high-school turning down offers to join the football and wrestling teams -- because it would take me away from the HP-2000 computer after school.
There are many more computer hobbyists today because of the Apple and there is an industry thriving today that hobbyists can make some money in because of the Apple.
Please! You are grossly overestimating Apple's importance. What Apple did was dumb-down computers and splinter the industry in its infancy, crushing many competitors who were making technically superior products. Personal computers weren't about to fade away without Apple's entrance. All that Apple did was lower the bar so that wimpy power supplies, TV outputs, and flimsy plastic cases were accepted by the general public as "okay."
you are whining because your little club isn't so little and special anymore.
No, you are whining because you aren't in the club.
What this all comes down to is this: I respect technical visionaries and you respect marketing visionaries. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took a substandard, and non-standard, computer and sold the heck out of them to people that lacked the technical skill to deal with the computers of their day.
William Hewlett knew that a product like the Apple had no place in his company's line-up. That he let Wozniak retain rights to it was a kind gesture. Pretending that William Hewlett was anything less than a true visionary was the most offensive part of this whole thread.
Well, that's encouraging...
No, I am not. They are simpler to use than PCs. They are somewhat smaller. They are perfect for computer illiterates with a $400+ desire to have e-mail and web access. Okay, once you sell one to each of those 17 people, then what?
Most people look at Internet Appliances and do the same comparison that I did. That's why Internet Appliances don't sell. And as more and more people are computer-literate, the appeal of Internet Appliances will wane even further.
At a computer show, but if you need support, try Dell, Gateway, or other such vendors.
You may pay another hundred dollars, but look at what you have compared to an Internet Appliance.
Depending on the amount of data to encrypt, mil-strength encryption exacts a toll in CPU usage. Ignoring that, the link provided is a service and if you have need for some privacy in a message you send, the service is valuable and should not be shunned because the encryption is not the strongest available. Besides, the interface is elegant and entry of the key for encode/decode is easy.