I do have to agree with many other posts I've seen so far in that Star Wars is NOT science fiction. Yes, it takes place in space and makes heavy use of advanced technologies to foster it's appeal, but I've never felt Star Wars to be at all based on reality.
Star Wars is very much science fiction, in the same vein as the original Star Trek. Science fiction does not have to be about science and speculative technology. It simply has to employ it. Gene Roddenberry made a keen observation: In old westerns, the cowboys didn't pull out their guns and then explain how the firing pin struck the bullet, etc. They used them. And that's how he used technology in Trek. Phasers just worked (differently each time though, sometimes making the target vaporize, sometimes making burning a hole through the target, and sometimes rendering the target unconscious with no burning at all). Star Wars did the same thing. It told a compelling story set in an alien landscape using technology as a backdrop.
You will note that some cowardly, childish moderator modded down all of my postings in this thread solely because he disagreed with me. He wasn't man enough to debate the topic, so he tried to hide what I wrote so that others would not see it. What a pussy!
Most of the posts were modded down as "off-topic", yet the person which whom I was conversing received no similar moderation. How can two people talk about one topic and yet only one of them is posting off-topic. That's hard for me to fathom.
Since he wasted all five of his moderator points doing this, and since I have karma to burn, at least he won't be annoying others with his use of moderator points as vandalism.
With junk faxes there is a way to clearly identify the sender, they can be tied to a phone number. With email that is very difficult to do. Unless you can clearly tie the email to an individual you would not be able to prosecute and punish the sender.
Follow the money. Spam is sent to make money. There will be a web page, phone number, etc. attached to it. I've successfully tracked down spammers, gotten their home phone numbers, etc. It's not something that you can do most of the time, but it can be done and you don't have to catch every criminal for laws to be effective. It's the fear of being caught.
I think Comcast recently blocked port 25 on a large portion of their network.
It was my understanding that they were still doing the old whack-a-mole game of only shutting off port 25 after they receive complaints.
Ah! How to foil spammers that adapt to greylisting? That is when the longer delay has to be used in combination with an RBL system. The idea is that when the spammer trys the first time you temporarly reject the message. During that delay the spammer continues on and hits a number of spam traps which gets the IP address added to an RBL system. The next pass at your system you start to let the message in but check it against an RBL which flags it as spam now. The message is then rejected.
I don't doubt that it would have success, but it's fairly compute-intensive and still subjects the RBL lists to DDoS attacks by spammers. That's been a problem up to now and will continue to be.
I really think that the right answer is wide distribution of SPF, legislation with teeth backed up by enforcement and rights of civil action, default blocking of port 25, and DNS redirection of spammers' web sites. That would be a good start.
Legislation if it ever comes to pass, which I doubt, will not have the teeth needed to really solve this problem. Or it will create such a burden on normal usrs of email that it will in itself make email useless.
Why? The junk fax law has teeth, allows for individual right of civil legal action, and has drastically curtailed the number of junk faxes being sent. And it hasn't burdened normal users of faxes at all.
Blocking port 25 outgoing while it would be effective it would also block a large number of people that run their own email servers that are not used for spamming.
AT&T had this correct years ago: Block port 25 by default and, if a customer requested that the block be removed for legitimated (i.e., non-spamming) reasons, then AT&T removed the block. Way less than 1% ever requested that the block be removed. That takes care of Harry Homeowner and his infected PC. But I pay for business class service so that I can have no ports blocked and a static IP. Others can, too.
SPF is a good idea and I would also like to this widely implemented. Hopefully this will eventually catch on.
Agreed. I have an SPF record on my domain.
As to the issue you have with greylisting the benefits can be had with as little as a two minute delay with no real difference to using a 30 minute delay. Also if you are working closely with another group you would most likely have their email server white listed which means there would be no delay.
Good points. I'll have to do some more research and consider this further.
Barring the universal adoption of effective anti-spam measures at the client
-- which we know won't happen --
I think having the ISPs implement greylisting would be the quickest and surest way to deal a massive blow to the spammers.
But for how long? I bet that the spammers would quickly adapt. Greylisting relies on spammers using the "fire-and-forget" methodology, wherein they they attempt to send the spam to one or several MX hosts for a domain, but then never attempt a true retry as a real MTA would. I'd bet that they'd quickly adapt if many ISPs started using this and the end result would be no real reduction in spam, but a significant delay for all users of e-mail.
As a side note, I find the confidentiality statements tacked on to email laughable. I can not see such a thing being held up in court of law as valid in any way.
Agreed, but companies like to tack them on anyway, so they'll resist mediums (like IM) which make that impractical.
Not sure about everyone, but I have seen a significant increase in spam over the last 8 months.
Agreed. The YOU-CAN-SPAM Act has emboldened spammers. Just as individual state laws in Washington, Virginia, and California were starting to put the pinch on the spammers, the YOU-CAN-SPAM Act basically neutered most state laws -- at least in the eyes of the spammers.
So which congress critter do you want to buy?:)
It's a tough call. Boucher is the closest to our views vis-a-vis the DMCA, RIAA, MPAA, etc., meaning that it wouldn't cost as much, but he's already probably voting our way. Orrin Hatch and his ilk have already been bought by big media, so they are no longer on the market. We'd have to find a moderate with no real position in these matters, who looks like he'll have staying power (no sense in buying a one-termer), has some chance to get on important committees, and is actively writing legislation. (Yes, I really do think that our enemy analyzes the situation just that way.)
Well the alternative to that is to do nothing and let email devolve into a largely useless waste of resources and time.
There are many other alternatives.
1. Legislation with real teeth and active enforcement of the legislation is one alternative. 2. Amending the junk fax law to specifically include faxes is another. That would let you sue spammers and get $500-$1500 per message. Sure, you won't catch them often, but $500-$1500makes tracking them down worthwhile to many people. 3. Get ISPs to block port 25 outgoing. That closes off one delivery method. 4. Get the big guys to block overseas IP blocks that host spammers. If Chinanet's traffic was dropped into the bitbucket for hosting spammers, my guess is that there would be a lot of spammers looking for new hosts. 5. Encourage the adoption of SPF. For every domain that adopts SPF, that's one less that the spammers can forge e-mail from. (For those reading along, SPF designates, through DNS, what IP addresses are authorized to send mail from a domain. Thus, if MSN published an SPF record with all of their mail servers and some spammer in Korea tried to forge an MSN sender address, his spam would be rejected by all systems that did SPF testing).
Do you really think people would have a problem with greylisting? email is not instant messaging. There are other applications for that.
Yes, I do. There are countless times that I have been on the phone with someone and we sent a file, while talking, through e-mail. There weren't convenient FTP servers. We did't have instant messaging accounts. Nor did we want to try to move a 1, 2, 3mb, or larger file through IM. Many businesses specifically block IM because it's a distraction, potential source of viruses, and yet another application that they don't want to deal with supporting. The business can automatically tack on confidentiality notices to e-mails, can scan them for spam, can scan for viruses. Those tools are in their infancy for IM -- if they exist at all.
The beauty of e-mail is that it serves the user's schedule. If I am at my computer, I can see, and respond to, messages instantly. If I'm not, the message will be there when I return.
True, with the setup I have at home at the moment I still have to process all the spam. But I don't look at it since it ends up segregated from my regular email and mailing list traffic.
That's great and I'm glad that it's working out for you. But we would need almost universal adoption of effective anti-spam measures at the client side to have that be a solution. Spammers don't care that one in one hundred people has effective anti-spam filtering. They probably weren't going to get clicks from those more savvy users anyway. Until the average user doesn't see the spam, it will still be profitable to send it.
It is amazing how cheap congress critters go for now a days. Maybe we should take up a collection and buy a few for our own use.....
So lets get the ISPs to implement greylisting and spamassassin on their servers.
You do that. And make sure all of the users are satisfied with greylisting too. Let me know how it goes.
I use my ISPs email servers and have implemented spamassassin on my home systems. I get about 5 to 8 spam in my inbox each week. The other 100 to 200 spam a week end up in a holding folder so I don't have to deal with them.
Correction: You get 105-208 per week. Spam filtering the spam into folders and then saying that it's the same as not getting it is really missing the point. That bandwidth, storage, etc. are not free and your ISP is passing on the costs to you and all of the other users.
Of course one sure way to get this problem resolved by our congress critters is to make them deal with their own email accounts for a month or two. Currently they are shielded by a host of assitants who pre screen all their email.
Worse than that, most have gone to web forms so that they have no public e-mail address.
Once they deleted the 5000th viagra ad they would get busy making the spammers life hell by creating a group to track them down and put them in jail.
Don't forget that Senator Bob Dole was hawking Viagra on TV ads...
Now if everyone greylisted the spammers would be out of business. But people here, which should be technologically knowledgable, seem to just complain about spam. Implement greylisting on your servers along with spamassassin! You will not regret it.
As someone who owns several domains and hosts their own mail server, I recognize that I am in the distinct minority -- even at Slashdot. Most people, even those who are technically savvy, rely on others to supply their e-mail service. Many have no choice, living where dial-up with DHCP is the only option. They can't reconfigure the mail server, use greylisting, or any other means at the server to reduce spam.
Even if you get no spam that makes it through your server, you still pay for spam. All ISPs wrap up the cost of dealing with spam into their overhead and that affects what you pay for connectivity. Sure, you may run your own mail server and block most of the spam, which reduces the bandwidth that it uses, but others are getting hundreds, or even thousands, of pieces per day, much of it stored on the ISP's servers.
SPAM will continue to exist until people stop making spam profitable. It's a bad side effect to greed. People will do anything for a buck.
Legislation won't help.
Why do you categorically state that it won't help? Suppose that there was legislation passed that made spamming punishable by a lengthy prison sentence? Are you going to tell us that it would have no measurable effect on the problem? Spammers may be scum, but damned few of them would want to risk being sent to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison (where they could continue to help men increase the size of their penises).
Bank robbery is profitable and you don't see the average bank getting robbed 140 times per day. Mugging is profitable, but, you don't get mugged multiple times per day. Nor do you see anyone saying that we should repeal laws against bank robbery and mugging, either.
Make spamming illegal and punishable by jail time and hefty fines. Figure that the average person takes two seconds to deal with each spam. So make the jail term 2 seconds per e-mail sent plus $.01 per e-mail as a fine. Let's talk about the spammer in the article. He sent 60 million spams over a four day period. Multiply that times 2 seconds and that equals 120 million seconds, which is 1,388 days in dail. That's 3.8 years, and $600,000 in restitution. Now that would dissuade spamming and would make the punishment appropriate for the crime.
Besides those, most of the rest of your complaints are that salesmen are expected to try to sell stuff. Big deal. I may not particularly like being on the receiving end of it, but I recognize that's what they're there for (and getting paid to do).
It's more than that. It's actively trying to mislead the customer. It's the salesman trying to pretend that he's an expert in cables even though he has no idea what capacitance, resistance, and impedence are. It's the salesman and cashier telling the customer that the merchandise can only be brought back if their is a service plan purchase. This is the kind of thing that's wrong.
If the salesman wants to say "you should buy Monster Cable because it's big and thick and might make you feel better if you are insecure about your undersized penis", then I'd have no complaints. If they said "if replacing this $40 DVD player would ruin you financially, then you should buy this $10 service plan", I'd be less inclined to be offended. But when you buy a $79 CD player and they act like Monster cable will make it sound like a piece of high-fidelity audio equipment, that's just wrong. It's wrong to claim that an extended warranty will cover anything that goes wrong when, in fact, it does nothing of the kind.
Re:Keep those damned poor people from getting orga
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Todd Need[ed] a Liver
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I don't know what your ethics entail. Mine say that no life is less worth than an other. This is the main pillar of western morals. So, how do you suppose this fundamental rule is to be reconciled with appointing committees that actually get to decide on factors that will favor one life over an other?
Since you asked, my ethics do not include a belief that all lives are equally valuable. I don't believe that western morals are based upon the principle that all lives are equally valuable. I don't believe that a pedophile, murderer, or rapist's life has the same value as that of, say, someone who dedicates their life to curing disease, helping to reduce world hunger, or protecting the environment.
First off are morals: a price cap is akin to slavery.
How so? Enron was not forced to sell the energy to California. If the price cap was set at, say, 1/100th of the market value, Enron wouldn't have sold there.
As every economics bachelor knows, price caps can have just one consequence: insufficient supply.
Canada caps the price of medicines, but there's no shortage of medicine in Canada. In fact, Americans go there to take advantage of the price caps. We've had price regulations on cable TV, and I never heard of a cable TV company refusing to hook someone up at the price cap. We've had price caps on many utilities and it's not lead to shortages. When you have monopolies or companies acting in lock-step, price caps protect the consumer.
Having the grid burning down is just the logical means to the end that the state government has been, unconsciously I hope, pursuing all along: ending power consumption in CA.
A simpler explanation: No one wants a power plant in their backyard. No one wants their children living under high-tension lines. No one wants that ecology destroyed. Maybe the end result is serious power delivery and production problem, but that's unlikely to be the goal in anyone's conscious or subconscious mind.
I strongly doubt your statement, as I have not seen many homeless people working anywhere.
The fact that four Walmart and McDonald's employees can pool their incomes to rent a one bedroom apartment does not mean that any one of those workers makes enough to afford even the most modest apartment on his/her own.
And about the outsourcing, I wrote a whole paragraph that you just ignored, so please either retort or conceed but don't just keep saying it is the root of all evil and a sign for coporate carelessness.
I assure you that I did not ignore anything that you wrote. I may not have had the time to reply to all of it in depth, but I assure you that I read it.
Labor goes where Labor is cheapest. Due to this process, labor becomes more expensive in that area as demand for labor goes up, and so it goes around. This is the markets way of spreading wealth to dirt poor countries as india and china once where. Meanwhile at home, the same products get either a) cheaper or b) better. Whichever it is, it will have positive effects on capital distribution as money is set free to be used in higher order endeavours that where unaffordable before und thusly creating higher level jobs with better wages and also requiring more qualification.
The problem with outsourcing is that we don't have a level playing field. We believe that U.S. workers should not be exposed to toxic and carcinogenic chemicals and we've passed laws and regulations to prevent that. We've passed laws against 12 year-olds working in factories. Building space costs a huge amount. My company can't even lease the space that I occupy for as little as it would cost them to pay a third-world worker to do my job (assuming that the third-world worker could get a U.S. D.o.D. clearance;-) . The janitors in my building are paid more per year than software engineers in India. The result is that U.S. workers, even if willing to work for $0, are still more expensive than t
I screwed up the link entry. Sorry about that. Here it is.
Re:Keep those damned poor people from getting orga
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Todd Need[ed] a Liver
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Well, of course you know best what your intent was. Still, I just switched the example around to fit it better with the statistics.
But with today's system, someone with liver cancer should get the liver before someone who drank his liver into failure, all else being equal. In a highest-bidder auction, money, not ethics, decides who lives and who dies.
If they did cheat people out of millions of dollars, there surely was a civil law suite for damage where evidence was brought forth and examined after which the defendant was found guilty by an impartial jury. You want to point me to the case? Cause I can't find it.
Here's a link to information about the suit filed by the California Attorney General's office on June 17. In the press release, there is reference to the taped conversations of Enron traders brazenly talking about exporting power and gaming the market. In the conversations, they spew profanity-laced boasts about bringing California to its knees, inflicting financial pain on "Grandma Millie" and Enron's influence with President Bush. That sounds pretty damning to me, but I admit that the suit has not gone to trial yet. On the other hand, I'm not in the judicial branch of government, so I will exercise my right to presume them guilty based on what I know at this time.
Re:Keep those damned poor people from getting orga
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Todd Need[ed] a Liver
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You brought up alcoholism to paint CEOs in a bad light, implying that they brought their liver failure on themselves.
No, I brought that up as *an* example of what would happen if there were pay-for-organs as had been suggested. You are the one who incorrectly assumed that I was implying that all CEOs brought liver failure on themselves. You then used that incorrect assumption as a springboard to launch into your diatribe against the poor and against liberals.
What did Kenneth Lay ever do? Please tell me, because I want to know how it is not morally impeccable to buy the companies stock at a time when it was clear that enron headed for the gutter.
Whoa! You were all ready to give the CEO credit when his company brings a new invention to market. How about giving the CEO blame when his company cheats people out of millions of dollars in an energy scam? Oh, I see, if the company does something good, then we should shower the CEO with praise and put him to the front of the line for organ transplants. But if his company does horrible things which harm millions of people, then that's not his fault.
Let me tell you, my mom has cancer and when the time comes and they tell her that they didn't get her clean of rampant cells the first time around, she would try everything that spares her the misery of going through an chemo therapy again.
You have my sincere sympathy. I lost a grandfather and my father to cancer. I wish you and your mother the best during her struggle. I also know that people are desperate to find hope in situations like that, looking to every cancer drug that's awaiting approval. Sometimes the approval doesn't come because the drug is not as effective as existing treatments and they don't want people foregoing an existing treatment that may offer more hope.
Companies are foremost committed to their customers, as it should be.
No, companies are, first and foremost, committed to their stockholders. That's why wildly profitable drug companies charge huge sums of money in the U.S. for drugs that treat AIDS, cancer, and other life-threatening diseases while selling the same drugs for a fraction of that in other countries. That's why gas prices skyrocket by 50% or more when oil prices rise by 10-20%. It's why they stay high long after oil prices have dropped back down.
The worker can afford a house. The worker is expandable. The worker can afford a house. The corps don't care. The worker can afford a house. It can't all be true at the same time, you know.
Workers at many jobs can't afford houses or even their own apartments. Ever try to rent an apartment in the New York, Los Angeles, or Washington D.C. areas on what their local Walmart employees earn? It can't be done. Yeah, the guy can make house payments now, but he may lose that house when his job is outsourced to India. And the corporation won't care if that happens.
On this point specifically: It's not like corps can just drag in 'inventors' from the street and make them invent. If he had what it takes to make this invention without this specific company, why didn't he? Why didn't he get rich? I don't know, maybe he is an idiot.
If it takes him three years to come up with the invention, then he probably needs an income during that time. He may need access to expensive lab equipment or machine tools that only a corporation would have. I'm not saying that he should get millions of dollars from the corporation, but it's shameful to see the trivial pittances that many people get after making CEOs and stockholders multi-millionaires. It's even more shameful when they are layed off shortly thereafter.
The donor organ belongs to someone. It is his or her choice. It is his or her property.
When that person ceases to live, they don't own anything. If you are going to claim that the family owns the body, what limits are there on what they can do with it? Can they sell it to be put into do
Re:Keep those damned poor people from getting orga
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Todd Need[ed] a Liver
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you will probably find that alcoholism gets more prevalent at lower income stratas.
That's why the Betty Ford Clinic is just full of poor people, right? Heck, it was even named after some poor woman who didn't even have a job. And I don't suppose you ever considered that many poor people are alcoholics because their lives are so stressful and depressing did it? Oh, but I forgot: You're a right winger, so you believe that all people who are poor choose to be poor or are simply lazy.
So, actually now it works like this: alcoholic bum that beats his wife every night after spending a day at the pub wasting her money gets saved because he was first on the list and the CEO of the very successful company Y whose product made easier the lifes of millions of peoples dies.
Think about the the millions of lives touched by Enron's Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, Tyco's L. Dennis Kozlowski, Imclone's Samual Waksal, and Worldcom's Bernard Ebbers. Most CEOs are money-grubbing scum. They will take an invention, make tens of millions of dollars off of it, and lay off the employee who invented it six months later. They will shut down a U.S. facility, lay off thousands of workers who made the company a success, and then hire people in India or China to replace them. CEOs will mismanage a company, lay off workers who have done nothing wrong, and then take home a paycheck large enough to pay for 100 of the laid off workers.
But its okay, as all lefties know, being poor is a merit and being rich is filthy, so now matter, it's always good when poor people get by at the rich's expense.
Most rich people got that way by abusing poor people. The wealthy executives pay their workers starvation wages, view the workers as disposable, and couldn't care less whether the guy that they just let go will lose his house in six months.
Let's put this in simple terms: If O.J. Simpson and an autoworker each need a heart transplant, why the hell should O.J. Simpson's money mean that he lives and the autoworker dies? Tell me that! Tell me why someone who has more money automatically, in all cases, deserves to live more than a poor person?
This same troll has been posted every time a *BSD story has been run on Slashdot in recent memory. It's always posted anonymously, never identifies the mysterious "500 person company" that has decided to "convert fully to Open Source software and OSes." There is no indication of what their line of business is, what their servers are used for, what the desktop machines are used for, who the users are, etc. The "conclusion" speaks volumes about the intent: "Having considered the above factors, all of which are vitally important when implementing a new system in a company, we decided to go with Linux (primarily Debian for the reasons mentioned)." Yeah. Right. Another Debian Linux fanboy.
Think about it:
1. There are damned few companies converting everything from desktops to multi-cpu servers to open source all at once. That's inviting trouble.
2. What most companies do is identify applications that support their business and then select an OS based on that. You'll note that nowhere here are any specific apps mentioned. There are comments about "Debian's package repository", but how many businesses are concerned about huge numbers of often obscure *nix apps? Yeah, the secretary will be thrilled with the Debian-supplied copies of awk, yacc, grep, etc.
3. The "unbiased" review went into gobs of detail about speed, but, frankly, most desktop machines are so fast now that the average office worker wouldn't know if you removed half of the RAM and cut the CPU clock speed in half.
4. There was no mention about remote administration capabilities. How many corporate IT guys have no concerns about remote administration?
5. There was no mention of ramp-up time for the (presumably) Windows users or courses available for non-technical staff to learn the UI and apps. Like that's not going to be an issue!
6. Any mention of laptop compatability? Gee, that's suspicious, isn't it? How many businesses have no laptops?
7. There was no discussion of moving data, converting data from the existing format to the new format, etc. What a joke!
The whole piece was written by some Linux fanboy trying to pretend that he's in a corporate IT role. Don't fall for it.
Keep those damned poor people from getting organs!
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Todd Need[ed] a Liver
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Hopefully, in the future, we'll be able to just buy the organs directly from the family of the deceased. It would be a lot cheaper and the incentive would ease the shortage of organs and save many lives.
Then we won't have those damned poor people getting organs that could have saved wealthy people. We can have gruesome bidding wars among people clinging to life, where being outbid can be a death sentence. Families with modest means, desperate to save the life of a loved one with liver cancer, can sell their homes, cars, liquidate their life's saving, their retirement accounts, the kids' college tuition accounts, and maybe even turn to crime in an effort to come up with enough money to outbid some CEO or celebrity who drank his liver into failure. "Mommy has to have sex with strangers to buy daddy a new liver."
Yeah, that's a great idea: Give people a huge financial incentive to pull out of the organ donor pool so that their families can sell the organs instead.
Re:You paid for that spam -- enjoy it.
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Spam's U.S. Roots
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· Score: 2, Informative
Over the years I have received more and more spam, and yet paid less and less for my internet connection (adjusted - barely!- for bandwidth).
Over the years, how much have computer costs, adjusted for performance and storage, dropped? The question isn't whether your absolute costs have dropped, it's how much they could have dropped were it not for spam.
Absolutely: spam costs ISPs big bucks. Absolutely: ISPs pass on these costs to their customers. But we're probably talking about cents per month per customer.
According to ISPs, the average cost, per month per customer, is between $2 and $3. That's $24 to $36/year, a significant sum. Businesses spend huge amount dealing with the spam problem. Take a look at NetworkFusionWorld's Spam Calculator" to see just how expensive spam is to businesses.
When you go to Best Buy, a percentage of what you pay for your purchase is to offset the cost of dealing with spam in the corporate offices. When you pay your taxes, a significant sum is paying government workers to deal with spam. When you order from Amazon.com, some of the money you spend there is to cover their costs for spam. I would not be at all surprised to see the total cost of spam per person averaging over $100/year.
BTW: bandwidth, servers, disks - none of these actually cost much money. The extra sysadmin or two to manage all of that... that's what costs money.
In general, I agree with that, but enterprise-class machines with RAID, tape backup, etc. is not the same as home PCs. The cost may be outweighed by the cost of system administrators, but it's still significant -- especially if it means that your connection is slower because their capital equipment budget on another mail server instead of additional broadband routers.
Re:Well, it's an uncomfortable topic...
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Spam's U.S. Roots
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Wouldn't it be a better use of your and your coworkers time if you could actually be doing something *useful* instead of just cleaning up the dung heaps of the internet?
In 99% of the cases, if the spam went away, people handling spam would be terminated. Businesses aren't looking for ways to employ people. They are looking for ways to maximize their profits. If Bob's Online Motorcyle Parts company has all of the people that they need to process orders, ship goods, track inventory, etc., then what are they going to do with two extra bodies that used to handle spam filtering? Most companies aren't wanting for people. They are wanting for customers.
Re:Well, it's an uncomfortable topic...
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Spam's U.S. Roots
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A lot of us in the IT world owe our jobs in some way to spam
That's why the vast majority of NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email Usenet group) participants would rather play Whack-A-Mole by trading IP addresses to block rather than taking meaningful action. They don't want to publish the names, addresses, and phone numbers of users who spam. They want to help hide spammers citing the "privacy policies" at the ISPs where they work. They don't want to rewrite the privacy policies, AUPs, or contracts to allow the disclosure of information about spammers.
That's why most abuse departments take days or even weeks to shut down spamvertised web sites (if they ever do). It's why you can complain about spam on a Tuesday and get another copy of the same spam on Friday advertising the same web site at the same IP address. In many cases, it's even sent from the same IP address space. It's why abuse departments "warn" spammers rather than kicking them off and turning their names over to the company attorney for legal action (like there is anyone alive today who is spamming and doesn't know that it's not acceptable).
As long as there are people employed to deal with the spam problem, those people will have an economic incentive to make sure that the problem doesn't go away.
You paid for that spam -- enjoy it.
on
Spam's U.S. Roots
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· Score: 1
They are right in my spam folder. I think I had one false negative since I've began running it a couple of months ago.
ISPs pass on the cost of receiving spam (bandwidth and additional mail servers), storing spam (RAID arrays), and transmitting the spam to customers when they pick up their e-mail. Spam filtering software which works at the client end might save you some time in dealing with the spam, but the spam has already cost you money by the time it gets to your filtering software.
I just looked up some of your other postings and I discovered that you and I share political beliefs, values, etc. You've posted some insightful, intelligent comments.
Which brings me to the point: We're both way too intelligent to continue this kind of childish behavior. If anyone other than us is still reading this, they probably think that we are two of the biggest jackasses that ever roamed the planet. What do you say we just drop this whole thing, stop the inane, convoluted accusations, put an end to the name calling, and just walk away from this whole idiotic thread? If you're willing to, I am.
Make it really short and admit that you lied.
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
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Unless you can find at least a single quotation from me that says that spam increased 50% on the day the zombies were deployed (as implied by you in this specific quote) then you have lied.
I have explained this to you over and over. Let's try it again:
I wrote the entire paragraph (not just one sentence that you like to quote out of context), to show that there was not some great pent-up demand for spam delivery when zombies became available and that killing zombies won't reduce spam by 50% as you had claimed. The lack of a pent-up demand shows that spammers have other options for the delivery of their spam and that they can go back to those options.
There. A simple, perfectly logical explanation. Now either accept it or explain how that explanation could not possibly be correct.
The analogy I made about people going to a mall was dead-nuts-on and you know it. That's why you didn't mention it in your reply. I'll reprint it here just to piss you off more:
John: If we block Maple Street, only half as many people will go to the mall, because half of the people use Maple Street to get there.
Bob: But they only built Maple Street last year and the number of people in the mall didn't double the day Maple Street opened.
John: I didn't say that the number doubled the day that they opened Maple Street. You implied that I said that! Liar! You are a pathological liar! I caught you in a lie! You lie! You are a liar! Liar, Liar, Liar, Liar!!! AAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bob: Calm down, John. I just meant that people could take the old roads that were there before Maple Street.
John: If you can't prove that I said that the number doubled that day, then you are a liar! I never said that! Liar! You lie! I caught you lying! You know that I did! You are a liar...[etc., etc., etc.]
I wrote: "Spam did not increase by 50% the day that zombie machines came into existence." Your replied: "Not that day, but that week."
Now that was a lie and a whopper of one at that! That was a lie, wasn't it? Admit it.
To quote you again. "His idea of a mail server is something that he set up under Windows for himself and two buddies."
Another lie.
I also said you were a "fucking idiot" and you never told me that, either. I figured it our on my own because you don't even know the difference between a lie and an insult.
Lie: "He said that his idea of a mail server is something that he set up under Windows for himself and two buddies." Insult: "His idea of a mail server is something that he set up under Windows for himself and two buddies."
Lie: "He said that his idea of hot sex involves a gerbil and a bottle of Crisco." Insult: "His idea of hot sex involves a gerbil and a bottle of Crisco."
See the difference? One claims that you said something while the other is an insult.
By the way, I'd love to continue this discussion in person.
You're making it short to avoid admitting to lying
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
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Then why did you say that it did not increase by 50% the first day? I mean, if I didn't say it did and you didn't say it did, then why are you saying that it did not?
To show that there was not some great pent-up demand for spam delivery when zombies became available and that killing zombies won't reduce spam by 50% as you had claimed. It shows that spammers have other options for the delivery of their spam and that they can go back to those options.
Let's use an analogy to make this easier for you:
John: If we block Maple Street, only half as many people will go to the mall, because half of the people use Maple Street to get there.
Bob: But they only built Maple Street last year and the number of people in the mall didn't double the day Maple Street opened.
John: I didn't say that the number doubled the day that they opened Maple Street. You implied that I said that! Liar! You are a pathological liar! I caught you in a lie! You lie! You are a liar! Liar, Liar, Liar, Liar!!! AAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bob: Calm down, John. I just meant that people could take the old roads that were there before Maple Street.
John: If you can't prove that I said that the number doubled that day, then you are a liar! I never said that! Liar! You lie! I caught you lying! You know that I did! You are a liar...[etc., etc., etc.]
Does that little analogy make it easier for you?
You were attempting to imply that I had said that.
No, you inferred that incorrectly. It's not my job to justify hidden, imaginary meanings that you read into my messages.
You are caught in a lie. You are a liar.
So when you say "lie", you mean that you believe that something I wrote could be interpreted to imply something untrue? Wow, you really are grasping for straws now that I've caught you in multiple outright lies.
Quit trying to cover up for your lies.
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
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You made your reply short because I caught you in numerous lies and you're not man enough to admit that you lied.
Unless you can find at least a single quotation from me that says that spam increased 50% on the day the zombies were deployed (as implied by you in this specific quote) then you have lied.
That quote didn't imply anything of the kind, so quit your damned lying. Here's the excerpt:
You wrote: Well, what they did BEFORE they had the zombies was SEND OUT LESS SPAM!
I replied: Spam did not increase by 50% the day that zombie machines came into existence. It's stayed on a steady increase and some of the spammers simply shifted from open relays to zombie machines for economic reasons. It was cheaper to steal bandwidth from some numb-nuts user than pay for it themselves.
I did not say, or imply, that you had made a statement that spam increased by 50% in one day. It's not my job to answer for you inferring things that aren't there.
Here's a simplified version for you:
Spam remained on a steady increase both before and after the advent of zombie machines to send spam. There was no sudden, massive increase in the quantity of spam being sent when zombie machines came online. That shows that there was no pent-up demand by spammers that was not being met through open relays, throw-away accounts, and overseas spam-friendly ISPs. Thus it is reasonable to assume that closing down zombie machines would just lead many spammers to go back to their previous methods of sending spam. Since open relays and spam-friendly foreign ISPs are readily available, spammers will switch back to those methods.
P.S. Do you need a light down there in that hole you dug?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=117150&cid=991 0443 I said: "Technological solution: ISP's block outgoing port 25 service from their networks, except for their mailservers."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=117150&cid=9 93 0150 You said: "Spam did not increase by 50% the day that zombie machines came into existence."
So you admit that you took your words from one message and then mine from another and falsely claimed that mine were written as a counter to yours. Finally, something we agree on.
I did not say that it did. You are trying to imply that I said that. Since I did not say that, you have lied.
Your reply to the above statement by me was:
Not that day, but that week. So it would seem that you're INCORRECT AGAIN!
Gee, looks like you did make the claim that spam went up 50% in one week as a direct result of the zombie machines. Care to cite any statistics for that?
I quoted you DIRECTLY.
You claimed that it was my "counter" to a statement when, in fact, it was from a totally separate message.
If you can find a quote from me where I said that spam went up 50% on the day the zombies were deployed, then you will be right.
I never claimed that you said that. I, alone, asserted that spam did not go up by 50% the day that zombies were deployed. I never said, implied, or thought that you believed that it went up by 50% in one day. But I was amazed and amused when you actually claimed, in your reply, that spam went up by 50% the week that zombies came online. That was funny.
You said: "His idea of a mail server is something that he set up under Windows for himself and two buddies."
Again, find where I said that. If you cannot, then you have lied. You are a liar.
You didn't say it. I did. I surmised that from your impractical suggestions that don't scale and your claims that your server only gets hit by about 100 open relays. Just like you surmised (incorrectly), that I lack professional experience.
And since we're digging through older postings... When you grow up a bit and get out into the business world, you'll learn what the real situation is.
Yeah, when I get a job like yours working at some insurance company, then I'll really be in the know about networking and high-tech!:P
Slashdot Mirror
I do have to agree with many other posts I've seen so far in that Star Wars is NOT science fiction. Yes, it takes place in space and makes heavy use of advanced technologies to foster it's appeal, but I've never felt Star Wars to be at all based on reality.
Star Wars is very much science fiction, in the same vein as the original Star Trek. Science fiction does not have to be about science and speculative technology. It simply has to employ it. Gene Roddenberry made a keen observation: In old westerns, the cowboys didn't pull out their guns and then explain how the firing pin struck the bullet, etc. They used them. And that's how he used technology in Trek. Phasers just worked (differently each time though, sometimes making the target vaporize, sometimes making burning a hole through the target, and sometimes rendering the target unconscious with no burning at all). Star Wars did the same thing. It told a compelling story set in an alien landscape using technology as a backdrop.
You will note that some cowardly, childish moderator modded down all of my postings in this thread solely because he disagreed with me. He wasn't man enough to debate the topic, so he tried to hide what I wrote so that others would not see it. What a pussy!
Most of the posts were modded down as "off-topic", yet the person which whom I was conversing received no similar moderation. How can two people talk about one topic and yet only one of them is posting off-topic. That's hard for me to fathom.
Since he wasted all five of his moderator points doing this, and since I have karma to burn, at least he won't be annoying others with his use of moderator points as vandalism.
With junk faxes there is a way to clearly identify the sender, they can be tied to a phone number. With email that is very difficult to do. Unless you can clearly tie the email to an individual you would not be able to prosecute and punish the sender.
Follow the money. Spam is sent to make money. There will be a web page, phone number, etc. attached to it. I've successfully tracked down spammers, gotten their home phone numbers, etc. It's not something that you can do most of the time, but it can be done and you don't have to catch every criminal for laws to be effective. It's the fear of being caught.
I think Comcast recently blocked port 25 on a large portion of their network.
It was my understanding that they were still doing the old whack-a-mole game of only shutting off port 25 after they receive complaints.
Ah! How to foil spammers that adapt to greylisting? That is when the longer delay has to be used in combination with an RBL system. The idea is that when the spammer trys the first time you temporarly reject the message. During that delay the spammer continues on and hits a number of spam traps which gets the IP address added to an RBL system. The next pass at your system you start to let the message in but check it against an RBL which flags it as spam now. The message is then rejected.
I don't doubt that it would have success, but it's fairly compute-intensive and still subjects the RBL lists to DDoS attacks by spammers. That's been a problem up to now and will continue to be.
I really think that the right answer is wide distribution of SPF, legislation with teeth backed up by enforcement and rights of civil action, default blocking of port 25, and DNS redirection of spammers' web sites. That would be a good start.
Legislation if it ever comes to pass, which I doubt, will not have the teeth needed to really solve this problem. Or it will create such a burden on normal usrs of email that it will in itself make email useless.
:)
Why? The junk fax law has teeth, allows for individual right of civil legal action, and has drastically curtailed the number of junk faxes being sent. And it hasn't burdened normal users of faxes at all.
Blocking port 25 outgoing while it would be effective it would also block a large number of people that run their own email servers that are not used for spamming.
AT&T had this correct years ago: Block port 25 by default and, if a customer requested that the block be removed for legitimated (i.e., non-spamming) reasons, then AT&T removed the block. Way less than 1% ever requested that the block be removed. That takes care of Harry Homeowner and his infected PC. But I pay for business class service so that I can have no ports blocked and a static IP. Others can, too.
SPF is a good idea and I would also like to this widely implemented. Hopefully this will eventually catch on.
Agreed. I have an SPF record on my domain.
As to the issue you have with greylisting the benefits can be had with as little as a two minute delay with no real difference to using a 30 minute delay. Also if you are working closely with another group you would most likely have their email server white listed which means there would be no delay.
Good points. I'll have to do some more research and consider this further.
Barring the universal adoption of effective anti-spam measures at the client
-- which we know won't happen --
I think having the ISPs implement greylisting would be the quickest and surest way to deal a massive blow to the spammers.
But for how long? I bet that the spammers would quickly adapt. Greylisting relies on spammers using the "fire-and-forget" methodology, wherein they they attempt to send the spam to one or several MX hosts for a domain, but then never attempt a true retry as a real MTA would. I'd bet that they'd quickly adapt if many ISPs started using this and the end result would be no real reduction in spam, but a significant delay for all users of e-mail.
As a side note, I find the confidentiality statements tacked on to email laughable. I can not see such a thing being held up in court of law as valid in any way.
Agreed, but companies like to tack them on anyway, so they'll resist mediums (like IM) which make that impractical.
Not sure about everyone, but I have seen a significant increase in spam over the last 8 months.
Agreed. The YOU-CAN-SPAM Act has emboldened spammers. Just as individual state laws in Washington, Virginia, and California were starting to put the pinch on the spammers, the YOU-CAN-SPAM Act basically neutered most state laws -- at least in the eyes of the spammers.
So which congress critter do you want to buy?
It's a tough call. Boucher is the closest to our views vis-a-vis the DMCA, RIAA, MPAA, etc., meaning that it wouldn't cost as much, but he's already probably voting our way. Orrin Hatch and his ilk have already been bought by big media, so they are no longer on the market. We'd have to find a moderate with no real position in these matters, who looks like he'll have staying power (no sense in buying a one-termer), has some chance to get on important committees, and is actively writing legislation. (Yes, I really do think that our enemy analyzes the situation just that way.)
Well the alternative to that is to do nothing and let email devolve into a largely useless waste of resources and time.
There are many other alternatives.
1. Legislation with real teeth and active enforcement of the legislation is one alternative.
2. Amending the junk fax law to specifically include faxes is another. That would let you sue spammers and get $500-$1500 per message. Sure, you won't catch them often, but $500-$1500makes tracking them down worthwhile to many people.
3. Get ISPs to block port 25 outgoing. That closes off one delivery method.
4. Get the big guys to block overseas IP blocks that host spammers. If Chinanet's traffic was dropped into the bitbucket for hosting spammers, my guess is that there would be a lot of spammers looking for new hosts.
5. Encourage the adoption of SPF. For every domain that adopts SPF, that's one less that the spammers can forge e-mail from. (For those reading along, SPF designates, through DNS, what IP addresses are authorized to send mail from a domain. Thus, if MSN published an SPF record with all of their mail servers and some spammer in Korea tried to forge an MSN sender address, his spam would be rejected by all systems that did SPF testing).
Do you really think people would have a problem with greylisting? email is not instant messaging. There are other applications for that.
Yes, I do. There are countless times that I have been on the phone with someone and we sent a file, while talking, through e-mail. There weren't convenient FTP servers. We did't have instant messaging accounts. Nor did we want to try to move a 1, 2, 3mb, or larger file through IM. Many businesses specifically block IM because it's a distraction, potential source of viruses, and yet another application that they don't want to deal with supporting. The business can automatically tack on confidentiality notices to e-mails, can scan them for spam, can scan for viruses. Those tools are in their infancy for IM -- if they exist at all.
The beauty of e-mail is that it serves the user's schedule. If I am at my computer, I can see, and respond to, messages instantly. If I'm not, the message will be there when I return.
True, with the setup I have at home at the moment I still have to process all the spam. But I don't look at it since it ends up segregated from my regular email and mailing list traffic.
That's great and I'm glad that it's working out for you. But we would need almost universal adoption of effective anti-spam measures at the client side to have that be a solution. Spammers don't care that one in one hundred people has effective anti-spam filtering. They probably weren't going to get clicks from those more savvy users anyway. Until the average user doesn't see the spam, it will still be profitable to send it.
It is amazing how cheap congress critters go for now a days. Maybe we should take up a collection and buy a few for our own use.....
Sadly, that's not a bad idea.
So lets get the ISPs to implement greylisting and spamassassin on their servers.
You do that. And make sure all of the users are satisfied with greylisting too. Let me know how it goes.
I use my ISPs email servers and have implemented spamassassin on my home systems. I get about 5 to 8 spam in my inbox each week. The other 100 to 200 spam a week end up in a holding folder so I don't have to deal with them.
Correction: You get 105-208 per week. Spam filtering the spam into folders and then saying that it's the same as not getting it is really missing the point. That bandwidth, storage, etc. are not free and your ISP is passing on the costs to you and all of the other users.
Of course one sure way to get this problem resolved by our congress critters is to make them deal with their own email accounts for a month or two. Currently they are shielded by a host of assitants who pre screen all their email.
Worse than that, most have gone to web forms so that they have no public e-mail address.
Once they deleted the 5000th viagra ad they would get busy making the spammers life hell by creating a group to track them down and put them in jail.
Don't forget that Senator Bob Dole was hawking Viagra on TV ads...
Now if everyone greylisted the spammers would be out of business. But people here, which should be technologically knowledgable, seem to just complain about spam. Implement greylisting on your servers along with spamassassin! You will not regret it.
As someone who owns several domains and hosts their own mail server, I recognize that I am in the distinct minority -- even at Slashdot. Most people, even those who are technically savvy, rely on others to supply their e-mail service. Many have no choice, living where dial-up with DHCP is the only option. They can't reconfigure the mail server, use greylisting, or any other means at the server to reduce spam.
Even if you get no spam that makes it through your server, you still pay for spam. All ISPs wrap up the cost of dealing with spam into their overhead and that affects what you pay for connectivity. Sure, you may run your own mail server and block most of the spam, which reduces the bandwidth that it uses, but others are getting hundreds, or even thousands, of pieces per day, much of it stored on the ISP's servers.
That's why so many continue to gripe about it.
SPAM will continue to exist until people stop making spam profitable. It's a bad side effect to greed. People will do anything for a buck.
Legislation won't help.
Why do you categorically state that it won't help? Suppose that there was legislation passed that made spamming punishable by a lengthy prison sentence? Are you going to tell us that it would have no measurable effect on the problem? Spammers may be scum, but damned few of them would want to risk being sent to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison (where they could continue to help men increase the size of their penises).
Bank robbery is profitable and you don't see the average bank getting robbed 140 times per day. Mugging is profitable, but, you don't get mugged multiple times per day. Nor do you see anyone saying that we should repeal laws against bank robbery and mugging, either.
Make spamming illegal and punishable by jail time and hefty fines. Figure that the average person takes two seconds to deal with each spam. So make the jail term 2 seconds per e-mail sent plus $.01 per e-mail as a fine. Let's talk about the spammer in the article. He sent 60 million spams over a four day period. Multiply that times 2 seconds and that equals 120 million seconds, which is 1,388 days in dail. That's 3.8 years, and $600,000 in restitution. Now that would dissuade spamming and would make the punishment appropriate for the crime.
Besides those, most of the rest of your complaints are that salesmen are expected to try to sell stuff. Big deal. I may not particularly like being on the receiving end of it, but I recognize that's what they're there for (and getting paid to do).
It's more than that. It's actively trying to mislead the customer. It's the salesman trying to pretend that he's an expert in cables even though he has no idea what capacitance, resistance, and impedence are. It's the salesman and cashier telling the customer that the merchandise can only be brought back if their is a service plan purchase. This is the kind of thing that's wrong.
If the salesman wants to say "you should buy Monster Cable because it's big and thick and might make you feel better if you are insecure about your undersized penis", then I'd have no complaints. If they said "if replacing this $40 DVD player would ruin you financially, then you should buy this $10 service plan", I'd be less inclined to be offended. But when you buy a $79 CD player and they act like Monster cable will make it sound like a piece of high-fidelity audio equipment, that's just wrong. It's wrong to claim that an extended warranty will cover anything that goes wrong when, in fact, it does nothing of the kind.
I don't know what your ethics entail. Mine say that no life is less worth than an other. This is the main pillar of western morals. So, how do you suppose this fundamental rule is to be reconciled with appointing committees that actually get to decide on factors that will favor one life over an other?
;-) . The janitors in my building are paid more per year than software engineers in India. The result is that U.S. workers, even if willing to work for $0, are still more expensive than t
Since you asked, my ethics do not include a belief that all lives are equally valuable. I don't believe that western morals are based upon the principle that all lives are equally valuable. I don't believe that a pedophile, murderer, or rapist's life has the same value as that of, say, someone who dedicates their life to curing disease, helping to reduce world hunger, or protecting the environment.
First off are morals: a price cap is akin to slavery.
How so? Enron was not forced to sell the energy to California. If the price cap was set at, say, 1/100th of the market value, Enron wouldn't have sold there.
As every economics bachelor knows, price caps can have just one consequence: insufficient supply.
Canada caps the price of medicines, but there's no shortage of medicine in Canada. In fact, Americans go there to take advantage of the price caps. We've had price regulations on cable TV, and I never heard of a cable TV company refusing to hook someone up at the price cap. We've had price caps on many utilities and it's not lead to shortages. When you have monopolies or companies acting in lock-step, price caps protect the consumer.
Having the grid burning down is just the logical means to the end that the state government has been, unconsciously I hope, pursuing all along: ending power consumption in CA.
A simpler explanation: No one wants a power plant in their backyard. No one wants their children living under high-tension lines. No one wants that ecology destroyed. Maybe the end result is serious power delivery and production problem, but that's unlikely to be the goal in anyone's conscious or subconscious mind.
I strongly doubt your statement, as I have not seen many homeless people working anywhere.
The fact that four Walmart and McDonald's employees can pool their incomes to rent a one bedroom apartment does not mean that any one of those workers makes enough to afford even the most modest apartment on his/her own.
And about the outsourcing, I wrote a whole paragraph that you just ignored, so please either retort or conceed but don't just keep saying it is the root of all evil and a sign for coporate carelessness.
I assure you that I did not ignore anything that you wrote. I may not have had the time to reply to all of it in depth, but I assure you that I read it.
Labor goes where Labor is cheapest. Due to this process, labor becomes more expensive in that area as demand for labor goes up, and so it goes around. This is the markets way of spreading wealth to dirt poor countries as india and china once where. Meanwhile at home, the same products get either a) cheaper or b) better. Whichever it is, it will have positive effects on capital distribution as money is set free to be used in higher order endeavours that where unaffordable before und thusly creating higher level jobs with better wages and also requiring more qualification.
The problem with outsourcing is that we don't have a level playing field. We believe that U.S. workers should not be exposed to toxic and carcinogenic chemicals and we've passed laws and regulations to prevent that. We've passed laws against 12 year-olds working in factories. Building space costs a huge amount. My company can't even lease the space that I occupy for as little as it would cost them to pay a third-world worker to do my job (assuming that the third-world worker could get a U.S. D.o.D. clearance
I screwed up the link entry. Sorry about that. Here it is.
Well, of course you know best what your intent was. Still, I just switched the example around to fit it better with the statistics.
But with today's system, someone with liver cancer should get the liver before someone who drank his liver into failure, all else being equal. In a highest-bidder auction, money, not ethics, decides who lives and who dies.
If they did cheat people out of millions of dollars, there surely was a civil law suite for damage where evidence was brought forth and examined after which the defendant was found guilty by an impartial jury. You want to point me to the case? Cause I can't find it.
Here's a link to information about the suit filed by the California Attorney General's office on June 17. In the press release, there is reference to the taped conversations of Enron traders brazenly talking about exporting power and gaming the market. In the conversations, they spew profanity-laced boasts about bringing California to its knees, inflicting financial pain on "Grandma Millie" and Enron's influence with President Bush. That sounds pretty damning to me, but I admit that the suit has not gone to trial yet. On the other hand, I'm not in the judicial branch of government, so I will exercise my right to presume them guilty based on what I know at this time.
You brought up alcoholism to paint CEOs in a bad light, implying that they brought their liver failure on themselves.
No, I brought that up as *an* example of what would happen if there were pay-for-organs as had been suggested. You are the one who incorrectly assumed that I was implying that all CEOs brought liver failure on themselves. You then used that incorrect assumption as a springboard to launch into your diatribe against the poor and against liberals.
What did Kenneth Lay ever do? Please tell me, because I want to know how it is not morally impeccable to buy the companies stock at a time when it was clear that enron headed for the gutter.
Whoa! You were all ready to give the CEO credit when his company brings a new invention to market. How about giving the CEO blame when his company cheats people out of millions of dollars in an energy scam? Oh, I see, if the company does something good, then we should shower the CEO with praise and put him to the front of the line for organ transplants. But if his company does horrible things which harm millions of people, then that's not his fault.
Let me tell you, my mom has cancer and when the time comes and they tell her that they didn't get her clean of rampant cells the first time around, she would try everything that spares her the misery of going through an chemo therapy again.
You have my sincere sympathy. I lost a grandfather and my father to cancer. I wish you and your mother the best during her struggle. I also know that people are desperate to find hope in situations like that, looking to every cancer drug that's awaiting approval. Sometimes the approval doesn't come because the drug is not as effective as existing treatments and they don't want people foregoing an existing treatment that may offer more hope.
Companies are foremost committed to their customers, as it should be.
No, companies are, first and foremost, committed to their stockholders. That's why wildly profitable drug companies charge huge sums of money in the U.S. for drugs that treat AIDS, cancer, and other life-threatening diseases while selling the same drugs for a fraction of that in other countries. That's why gas prices skyrocket by 50% or more when oil prices rise by 10-20%. It's why they stay high long after oil prices have dropped back down.
The worker can afford a house. The worker is expandable. The worker can afford a house. The corps don't care. The worker can afford a house. It can't all be true at the same time, you know.
Workers at many jobs can't afford houses or even their own apartments. Ever try to rent an apartment in the New York, Los Angeles, or Washington D.C. areas on what their local Walmart employees earn? It can't be done. Yeah, the guy can make house payments now, but he may lose that house when his job is outsourced to India. And the corporation won't care if that happens.
On this point specifically: It's not like corps can just drag in 'inventors' from the street and make them invent. If he had what it takes to make this invention without this specific company, why didn't he? Why didn't he get rich? I don't know, maybe he is an idiot.
If it takes him three years to come up with the invention, then he probably needs an income during that time. He may need access to expensive lab equipment or machine tools that only a corporation would have. I'm not saying that he should get millions of dollars from the corporation, but it's shameful to see the trivial pittances that many people get after making CEOs and stockholders multi-millionaires. It's even more shameful when they are layed off shortly thereafter.
The donor organ belongs to someone. It is his or her choice. It is his or her property.
When that person ceases to live, they don't own anything. If you are going to claim that the family owns the body, what limits are there on what they can do with it? Can they sell it to be put into do
you will probably find that alcoholism gets more prevalent at lower income stratas.
That's why the Betty Ford Clinic is just full of poor people, right? Heck, it was even named after some poor woman who didn't even have a job. And I don't suppose you ever considered that many poor people are alcoholics because their lives are so stressful and depressing did it? Oh, but I forgot: You're a right winger, so you believe that all people who are poor choose to be poor or are simply lazy.
So, actually now it works like this: alcoholic bum that beats his wife every night after spending a day at the pub wasting her money gets saved because he was first on the list and the CEO of the very successful company Y whose product made easier the lifes of millions of peoples dies.
Think about the the millions of lives touched by Enron's Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, Tyco's L. Dennis Kozlowski, Imclone's Samual Waksal, and Worldcom's Bernard Ebbers. Most CEOs are money-grubbing scum. They will take an invention, make tens of millions of dollars off of it, and lay off the employee who invented it six months later. They will shut down a U.S. facility, lay off thousands of workers who made the company a success, and then hire people in India or China to replace them. CEOs will mismanage a company, lay off workers who have done nothing wrong, and then take home a paycheck large enough to pay for 100 of the laid off workers.
But its okay, as all lefties know, being poor is a merit and being rich is filthy, so now matter, it's always good when poor people get by at the rich's expense.
Most rich people got that way by abusing poor people. The wealthy executives pay their workers starvation wages, view the workers as disposable, and couldn't care less whether the guy that they just let go will lose his house in six months.
Let's put this in simple terms: If O.J. Simpson and an autoworker each need a heart transplant, why the hell should O.J. Simpson's money mean that he lives and the autoworker dies? Tell me that! Tell me why someone who has more money automatically, in all cases, deserves to live more than a poor person?
Huh? What is wrong with it?
This same troll has been posted every time a *BSD story has been run on Slashdot in recent memory. It's always posted anonymously, never identifies the mysterious "500 person company" that has decided to "convert fully to Open Source software and OSes." There is no indication of what their line of business is, what their servers are used for, what the desktop machines are used for, who the users are, etc. The "conclusion" speaks volumes about the intent: "Having considered the above factors, all of which are vitally important when implementing a new system in a company, we decided to go with Linux (primarily Debian for the reasons mentioned)." Yeah. Right. Another Debian Linux fanboy.
Think about it:
1. There are damned few companies converting everything from desktops to multi-cpu servers to open source all at once. That's inviting trouble.
2. What most companies do is identify applications that support their business and then select an OS based on that. You'll note that nowhere here are any specific apps mentioned. There are comments about "Debian's package repository", but how many businesses are concerned about huge numbers of often obscure *nix apps? Yeah, the secretary will be thrilled with the Debian-supplied copies of awk, yacc, grep, etc.
3. The "unbiased" review went into gobs of detail about speed, but, frankly, most desktop machines are so fast now that the average office worker wouldn't know if you removed half of the RAM and cut the CPU clock speed in half.
4. There was no mention about remote administration capabilities. How many corporate IT guys have no concerns about remote administration?
5. There was no mention of ramp-up time for the (presumably) Windows users or courses available for non-technical staff to learn the UI and apps. Like that's not going to be an issue!
6. Any mention of laptop compatability? Gee, that's suspicious, isn't it? How many businesses have no laptops?
7. There was no discussion of moving data, converting data from the existing format to the new format, etc. What a joke!
The whole piece was written by some Linux fanboy trying to pretend that he's in a corporate IT role. Don't fall for it.
Hopefully, in the future, we'll be able to just buy the organs directly from the family of the deceased. It would be a lot cheaper and the incentive would ease the shortage of organs and save many lives.
Then we won't have those damned poor people getting organs that could have saved wealthy people. We can have gruesome bidding wars among people clinging to life, where being outbid can be a death sentence. Families with modest means, desperate to save the life of a loved one with liver cancer, can sell their homes, cars, liquidate their life's saving, their retirement accounts, the kids' college tuition accounts, and maybe even turn to crime in an effort to come up with enough money to outbid some CEO or celebrity who drank his liver into failure. "Mommy has to have sex with strangers to buy daddy a new liver."
Yeah, that's a great idea: Give people a huge financial incentive to pull out of the organ donor pool so that their families can sell the organs instead.
Over the years I have received more and more spam, and yet paid less and less for my internet connection (adjusted - barely!- for bandwidth).
Over the years, how much have computer costs, adjusted for performance and storage, dropped? The question isn't whether your absolute costs have dropped, it's how much they could have dropped were it not for spam.
Absolutely: spam costs ISPs big bucks. Absolutely: ISPs pass on these costs to their customers. But we're probably talking about cents per month per customer.
According to ISPs, the average cost, per month per customer, is between $2 and $3. That's $24 to $36/year, a significant sum. Businesses spend huge amount dealing with the spam problem. Take a look at NetworkFusionWorld's Spam Calculator" to see just how expensive spam is to businesses.
When you go to Best Buy, a percentage of what you pay for your purchase is to offset the cost of dealing with spam in the corporate offices. When you pay your taxes, a significant sum is paying government workers to deal with spam. When you order from Amazon.com, some of the money you spend there is to cover their costs for spam. I would not be at all surprised to see the total cost of spam per person averaging over $100/year.
BTW: bandwidth, servers, disks - none of these actually cost much money. The extra sysadmin or two to manage all of that... that's what costs money.
In general, I agree with that, but enterprise-class machines with RAID, tape backup, etc. is not the same as home PCs. The cost may be outweighed by the cost of system administrators, but it's still significant -- especially if it means that your connection is slower because their capital equipment budget on another mail server instead of additional broadband routers.
Wouldn't it be a better use of your and your coworkers time if you could actually be doing something *useful* instead of just cleaning up the dung heaps of the internet?
In 99% of the cases, if the spam went away, people handling spam would be terminated. Businesses aren't looking for ways to employ people. They are looking for ways to maximize their profits. If Bob's Online Motorcyle Parts company has all of the people that they need to process orders, ship goods, track inventory, etc., then what are they going to do with two extra bodies that used to handle spam filtering? Most companies aren't wanting for people. They are wanting for customers.
A lot of us in the IT world owe our jobs in some way to spam
That's why the vast majority of NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email Usenet group) participants would rather play Whack-A-Mole by trading IP addresses to block rather than taking meaningful action. They don't want to publish the names, addresses, and phone numbers of users who spam. They want to help hide spammers citing the "privacy policies" at the ISPs where they work. They don't want to rewrite the privacy policies, AUPs, or contracts to allow the disclosure of information about spammers.
That's why most abuse departments take days or even weeks to shut down spamvertised web sites (if they ever do). It's why you can complain about spam on a Tuesday and get another copy of the same spam on Friday advertising the same web site at the same IP address. In many cases, it's even sent from the same IP address space. It's why abuse departments "warn" spammers rather than kicking them off and turning their names over to the company attorney for legal action (like there is anyone alive today who is spamming and doesn't know that it's not acceptable).
As long as there are people employed to deal with the spam problem, those people will have an economic incentive to make sure that the problem doesn't go away.
They are right in my spam folder. I think I had one false negative since I've began running it a couple of months ago.
ISPs pass on the cost of receiving spam (bandwidth and additional mail servers), storing spam (RAID arrays), and transmitting the spam to customers when they pick up their e-mail. Spam filtering software which works at the client end might save you some time in dealing with the spam, but the spam has already cost you money by the time it gets to your filtering software.
I just looked up some of your other postings and I discovered that you and I share political beliefs, values, etc. You've posted some insightful, intelligent comments.
Which brings me to the point: We're both way too intelligent to continue this kind of childish behavior. If anyone other than us is still reading this, they probably think that we are two of the biggest jackasses that ever roamed the planet. What do you say we just drop this whole thing, stop the inane, convoluted accusations, put an end to the name calling, and just walk away from this whole idiotic thread? If you're willing to, I am.
I have explained this to you over and over. Let's try it again: There. A simple, perfectly logical explanation. Now either accept it or explain how that explanation could not possibly be correct.
The analogy I made about people going to a mall was dead-nuts-on and you know it. That's why you didn't mention it in your reply. I'll reprint it here just to piss you off more:I wrote: "Spam did not increase by 50% the day that zombie machines came into existence."
Your replied: "Not that day, but that week."
Now that was a lie and a whopper of one at that! That was a lie, wasn't it? Admit it.
To quote you again.
"His idea of a mail server is something that he set up under Windows for himself and two buddies."
Another lie.
I also said you were a "fucking idiot" and you never told me that, either. I figured it our on my own because you don't even know the difference between a lie and an insult.
Lie: "He said that his idea of a mail server is something that he set up under Windows for himself and two buddies."
Insult: "His idea of a mail server is something that he set up under Windows for himself and two buddies."
Lie: "He said that his idea of hot sex involves a gerbil and a bottle of Crisco."
Insult: "His idea of hot sex involves a gerbil and a bottle of Crisco."
See the difference? One claims that you said something while the other is an insult.
By the way, I'd love to continue this discussion in person.
Then why did you say that it did not increase by 50% the first day? I mean, if I didn't say it did and you didn't say it did, then why are you saying that it did not?
To show that there was not some great pent-up demand for spam delivery when zombies became available and that killing zombies won't reduce spam by 50% as you had claimed. It shows that spammers have other options for the delivery of their spam and that they can go back to those options.
Let's use an analogy to make this easier for you:
John: If we block Maple Street, only half as many people will go to the mall, because half of the people use Maple Street to get there.
Bob: But they only built Maple Street last year and the number of people in the mall didn't double the day Maple Street opened.
John: I didn't say that the number doubled the day that they opened Maple Street. You implied that I said that! Liar! You are a pathological liar! I caught you in a lie! You lie! You are a liar! Liar, Liar, Liar, Liar!!! AAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bob: Calm down, John. I just meant that people could take the old roads that were there before Maple Street.
John: If you can't prove that I said that the number doubled that day, then you are a liar! I never said that! Liar! You lie! I caught you lying! You know that I did! You are a liar...[etc., etc., etc.]
Does that little analogy make it easier for you?
You were attempting to imply that I had said that.
No, you inferred that incorrectly. It's not my job to justify hidden, imaginary meanings that you read into my messages.
You are caught in a lie. You are a liar.
So when you say "lie", you mean that you believe that something I wrote could be interpreted to imply something untrue? Wow, you really are grasping for straws now that I've caught you in multiple outright lies.
You made your reply short because I caught you in numerous lies and you're not man enough to admit that you lied.
Unless you can find at least a single quotation from me that says that spam increased 50% on the day the zombies were deployed (as implied by you in this specific quote) then you have lied.
That quote didn't imply anything of the kind, so quit your damned lying. Here's the excerpt:
You wrote: Well, what they did BEFORE they had the zombies was SEND OUT LESS SPAM!
I replied: Spam did not increase by 50% the day that zombie machines came into existence. It's stayed on a steady increase and some of the spammers simply shifted from open relays to zombie machines for economic reasons. It was cheaper to steal bandwidth from some numb-nuts user than pay for it themselves.
I did not say, or imply, that you had made a statement that spam increased by 50% in one day. It's not my job to answer for you inferring things that aren't there.
Here's a simplified version for you:
Spam remained on a steady increase both before and after the advent of zombie machines to send spam. There was no sudden, massive increase in the quantity of spam being sent when zombie machines came online. That shows that there was no pent-up demand by spammers that was not being met through open relays, throw-away accounts, and overseas spam-friendly ISPs. Thus it is reasonable to assume that closing down zombie machines would just lead many spammers to go back to their previous methods of sending spam. Since open relays and spam-friendly foreign ISPs are readily available, spammers will switch back to those methods.
P.S. Do you need a light down there in that hole you dug?
I said: "Technological solution: ISP's block outgoing port 25 service from their networks, except for their mailservers."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=117150&cid=
You said: "Spam did not increase by 50% the day that zombie machines came into existence."
So you admit that you took your words from one message and then mine from another and falsely claimed that mine were written as a counter to yours. Finally, something we agree on.
I did not say that it did. You are trying to imply that I said that. Since I did not say that, you have lied.
Your reply to the above statement by me was:Gee, looks like you did make the claim that spam went up 50% in one week as a direct result of the zombie machines. Care to cite any statistics for that?
I quoted you DIRECTLY.
You claimed that it was my "counter" to a statement when, in fact, it was from a totally separate message.
If you can find a quote from me where I said that spam went up 50% on the day the zombies were deployed, then you will be right.
I never claimed that you said that. I, alone, asserted that spam did not go up by 50% the day that zombies were deployed. I never said, implied, or thought that you believed that it went up by 50% in one day. But I was amazed and amused when you actually claimed, in your reply, that spam went up by 50% the week that zombies came online. That was funny.
You said: "His idea of a mail server is something that he set up under Windows for himself and two buddies."
Again, find where I said that. If you cannot, then you have lied. You are a liar.
You didn't say it. I did. I surmised that from your impractical suggestions that don't scale and your claims that your server only gets hit by about 100 open relays. Just like you surmised (incorrectly), that I lack professional experience.
And since we're digging through older postings... When you grow up a bit and get out into the business world, you'll learn what the real situation is.
Yeah, when I get a job like yours working at some insurance company, then I'll really be in the know about networking and high-tech!