Well, oil has nothing to do with the U.S. Iraq policy.
Way too many learned people disagree with you on that one. After the Gulf War, guess who was in Iraq rebuilding the oil rigs. Haliburton, with then-CEO Dick Cheney at the helm.
We can start at the top with Ken Lay. Oops. he was a criminal, there goes your theory of poverty and crime.
I never claimed that only the poor committed crimes. However, you won't find someone like Ken Lay having to choose between committing a crime or having his kids go to be hungry. The rich commit crimes out of greed. The poor often do it to keep from starving or freezing.
No, people vote Republican because they believe in national defense,
Translation: Funnelling huge sums of money over in corporate welfare to giant corporations.
in equal rights for all regardless of race,
Translation: Making sure that rich white suburbanites and impoverished minorities get exactly the same level of assistance from the government.
and that people should keep what they work for instead of giving it over greedy elites.
"Greedy elites" being poor families in subsidized housing in this case.
Want to see a good example of giving to "greedy elites." Look at the Bush tax cuts. The latest one he's pushing is elimination of taxes on stock dividends. Does that benefit the lower class? No. They have no stock investments? Does it benefit the middle class? No. The vast majority of them hold stock through mutual funds held in retirement plans. The mutual funds just reinvest the dividends. But the middle class will pay taxes on all of those dividends when they start drawing from the retirement accounts. So who does it help? The greedy elites. Had there been no taxes on stock dividends last year, Dubya would have saved over $40,000 on his taxes while Cheney would have saved over $100,000.
I have family on public assistance. They own three TVs, 2 VCRs, a DVD player.
Oooh! A DVD player. Those are almost $60! They are living in the lap of luxury.
When I was unemployed, the internet was a valuable asset in looking for a job. I paid for it myself (from savings...a novel idea).
You just don't understand what it's like to be truly poor. There are people who have to choose between a new winter coat and rent. Yet there are some who would still find a way to get a second-hand computer if it would help their kids in school.
The slashdot crowd seems to think that the internet is used as a magic wand of education.
Think of everything that a kid can find on the Internet that could help them with school assignments or just exploration. If a kid wants to know about dinosaurs, it's all here. If he wants to learn about the space program, it's here. I'm not saying that the Internet will magically teach someone who doesn't want to learn, but it's an incredibly helpful tool. They will develop computer skills, something that will be very handy when they want to get a job.
Let's not forget the adults. If someone wants to teach themselves web design, programming, or some other skill, the Internet is there for them. If they want to find out what scholarship programs exist for their kids, they can do it online a lot more effectively than they can by asking around the neighborhood. If they have medical questions, the answers can often be found online.
As long as these programs are PRIVATELY FUNDED, I think they are fine. I am just tired of paying for them.
So you are in favor of programs funded by someone else's money, just not yours.
That's why I favor public funding. Then you don't end up with a small percentage of generous people trying to fund every program to help the poor while the "not with my money" crowd just buys themselves more toys.
You can find children in even the poorest of school that excel.
Your talking about outlyers, not the typical kid. On average, the children in the poorest schools perform the poorest. Part of the reason for that is the lack of books, Internet, etc. that the wealthier kids have easy access to. What's wrong with trying to level the playing field a little?
Do the programs work to get people out of dire straits. No, they never have and never will.
Yes, actually, they do. Project HeadStart was a great example, providing preschool children with health, education, and nutrition assistance. It was quite successful.
Tell that to the liberals in Congress who oppose giving the poor vouchers to get better education.
Vouchers are intended to benefit rich suburbanites, not the poor. It's intended to give money back to wealthy yuppies who already put their kids in private schools. That's money that, right now, is going towards educating children in public schools. Under the voucher program, every parent of kids in private schools would get money that's now funding public schools. I haven't seen anything that would limit the tuition that private schools could charge so that the vouchers would fully fund the tuitions of a student. So how does someone living in subsidized housing come up with the difference between the voucher amount and the private school tuition?
Is that why the left loves to tax businesses to hell and pile on regulation after regulation to make sure it is impossible for these people to start their own business?
The biggest cause of business failure is under-capitalization. Some person living in a subsidized housing complex has no way to start their own business regardless of taxes and regulations. These are people who often can't even afford a used car.
As to taxes, the left has the common sense to realize that you have to bring in enough taxes to cover the federal budget. The borrow-and-spend Republicans simply do deficit spending and run up the national debt, leaving the nation wasting its tax dollars on interest. Want a 25% federal tax cut? Pay down the portion of the debt run up under Reagan/Bush(Sr.) because about 1/4 of all of your tax dollars pay interest on that debt.
When you educate a criminal, you get a better-educated criminal.
When you educate a person, you give them a chance to earn a living and support themselves without crime. What the hell is so wrong with a child who lives in poverty getting the same chance to use the Internet as a child born to upper middle class parents? Or are you just trying to make sure that your kid has an advantage when it comes time to do homework?
You are forgetting the real reason they turn to crime: they are mean and/or greedy.
No, that's the reason that people vote Republican.
90% of these poor need to get off their ass and take responsibility for their lives.
Yeah, that's real practical after their inner-city public school "education" and no money for college or trade schools. You were probably happy to have mommy and daddy feed you good meals and provide you with all of the luxuries of life while you went to school.
Broadband internet access is a luxury (hell the internet is a luxury), and if you can't afford it don't place the burden of payment on the working class of this country.
You really enjoy having people to look down on, don't you? You wouldn't want them to learn something. You would not want their kids to be able to use the Internet to do research for their school projects. It's important to keep them and their kids down. To hell with society and a civilization. If someone is born into poverty, we need to make sure that they stay there, right?
do not have a worry. All of this stuff is free. We do not pay for it: the government does.
Why would we spend tax dollars spent trying to improve people's lives when we could spend hundreds of times that much to bomb countries with more oil than we have?
What a screwed up sense of priorities you have. You don't want to spend a few dollars to provide tools to help someone out of ignorance and poverty. But you're probably fine with paying many times that much for police and prisons when, uneducated and unskilled, the person turns to a life of crime.
It was more than a try. It was an insightful comment on my part.
You are mistaking memory address space and instruction size. Everyone agrees that the 8080, Z80, and 8085 were all "8-bit" CPUs, but they had an address space of 16-bits (64K). The reason that 64 bits will be useful is memory bandwidth and CPU speed, not memory capacity.
Mac OS X comes with much more cool and useful software out of the box than Windows.
Agreed. The majority of software that comes with Windows is of limited value. But I'm buying an OS. I really don't want my money paying developers to produce slick programs for graphicsn or HTML editing when the programs will still be substandard when compared to standalone commercial packages.
Ever heard "GHz when you don't need it"? Your P4 may happily idle at 3 GHz, but the built-in thermal control will quietly slow down the chip to avoid overheating when the processor is actively used - what a waste of energy.
I don't have a P4 (I have an AMD in my primary PC), but the P4 thermal control only kicks in when a chip is not properly cooled. On a system with adequate cooling, it never happens.
And a Wintel laptop will never run at full speed when not plugged in, so the battery can last a little longer. But still, you would be lucky if you get 2 hours usage, while an iBook can last 4+ hours.
That is untrue. I have an HP 1.6ghz Celeron-based laptop from HP. The battery life is about 3.5hours and the clock speed is identical regardless of whether the unit is plugged in or running off of battery.
I believe that the laptops you are referring to are those using desktop chips. There was quite a bit about this some months back and it was (rightly) treated as a scandal.
Can you Wintel people ever stop talking about performance?
No. It's key to what a computer does and often determines when a machine needs to be retired. Look how many Macs have had to be upgraded because they were too slow for OS-X. Also, I'm not a "Wintel" person. I'm a computer professional who has probably programmed more different microprocessors than you've heard of. So don't try to write off my opinion as some form of bias.
There are more important factors like the overall quality of the system and the productivity of the user.
A user who's waiting for his system to complete the application of a Photoshop filter isn't productive. Taking twice as long (or more) to convert a DVD to SVCD is not productive. Apple markets their product line to graphics professionals, a group that has a greater need for CPU performance than many others, while providing them with CPUs that cannot keep up with a $70 AMD CPU for floating point.
Let's look at some other factors which affect user productivity. How productive is a user if they can't go to a local store and buy the software that they need? How productive is a user who has to settle on a sub-standard package because the size of the Mac market means that the money is not there to support the R&D necessary to make it competitive with the Windows offerings. Not being able to read the CD-ROM that your business associate sent to you does not make you productive.
After all, what's the point of a 3GHz machine that keeps crashing or idles most of the time?
If the 3ghz machine keeps crashing, you need to fix it. Windows XP and 2000 can run for weeks if not months, at a time without rebooting. While your comment about stability would have had some validity in the Windows 9x days, it no longer does.
As to the machine idling, that's a good thing. That it can redraw the screen in a blink of an eye or smoothly drag windows around and then idle means that the UI is crisp and responsive.
The public are mostly morons and since when have they ever done anything but look for the absolute cheapest of [product]? Quality and longevity are of little or no concern.
I can think of plenty of examples. Look at sales of Mercedes Benz cars, Calphalon cookware, Henckel knives, G. Loomis fishing rods, and Maytag dishwashers -- just to name a few.
They don't realize that while the Mac costs twice as much, it also remains a viable computer twice as long (or longer)
The Mac starts out underperforming its Intel architecture rivals and only falls further behind as technology marches on. Mac users, by and large, seem willing to tolerate a sluggishness that would drive me mad.
I got more than six years out of the last brand new desktop Mac
And it would have been outperformed by a six year old Intel-architecture PC. Macs don't magically get faster as the years go by. They start out slower than their contemporary PC counterparts and they end up slower.
Mac users tend to hold on to their computers longer because replacing them is such an expensive proposition. If I was looking at a huge investment to replace my PC, then I guess I would replace it less often, too.
how about T'Pol with Seven-of-Nine... Best of both worlds!
That's been my suggestion for an episode of Enterprise since before the series started. The Borg can time-travel. Seven-of-Nine and T'Pol are both incredibly hot. What could be more obvious? It could be the first X-rated Star Trek movie. And you know that it would have bigger box office sales than Star Trek Nemesis.
Networking professionals and ISPs are often *BSD users. The security, stability, and performance of *BSD makes it an ideal choice in such roles. While Linux has made great strides, it is still not on a par with *BSD in many respects. Conversely, *BSD is certainly not as suitable for use on the average desktop.
I mean, isn't the whole reason that they're evil that they are explicitly taking in revenue?
A good wisecrack, but I think that there are plenty of tech firms taking in revenue that aren't generally considered evil. In general, I think the following examples fit that category:
Sun Microsystems Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Google GoDaddy (the domain registrar) Plextor (the CD-R/W manufacturer) id Software
Sure, you'll find a few people here and there that have a gripe with one of those companies or one of their products, but I don't think that those companies are generally viewed as evil for having a revenue stream.
But you likewise opt-in by accepting the TCP connection request. I think google is an appropriate example, because while there is no one actually opting-in, there is an automated process in place which will transfer and store the data. By putting crap on the internet, you cost google money.
My mail server is passive and Google is active. Google requests a file from a web page and gets it. My mail server requests nothing. It sits there waiting for incoming mail. It has no way to know if a TCP connection will result in spam or will be a "normal" message.
No one is forced to pick up his e-mail via long-distance, etc. In fact, no one is forced to pick up his e-mail at all.
No one is forced to turn on their fax machine, but the law recognizes that it is an unreasonable burden to tell fax owners to turn off their fax machines if they don't want fax spam. Therefore, they made fax spam illegal.
Well, using is different from damaging, and I have your permission, you specifically set up a server to allow people to use your bandwidth and storage!
You do not have my permission to send spam to me. I set up my server specifically to receive personal communications and not mass mailings. I'm sure that you will ask how a spammer could know that. It should be assumed given that the vast majority of Internet users do not wish to receive spam. This has been borne out in many surveys and studies. Even barring that, my domain name makes it clear that I do not wish to receive spam -- as does my web page.
The question then becomes who are you allowing, and for what purpose. This is where I draw analogy to trespassing laws, and suggest a Do Not Email list for those who wish to clarify what permissions they are allowing. Of course the de facto standard is that anything is allowed, so we need to take a few years easing into this.
Given that ISPs almost universally have policies against sending of spam to or from their domains, I don't see how you can say the de facto standard is that anything is allowed.
My mail server does not have AI or enforce my views and I do not sit at a monitor 24/7 hitting "accept" and "reject" buttons as SMTP connections are established.
Nor does google's webcrawler.
That's fine, since I'm not attempting to put anything onto Google's servers. There's a big difference between Google crawling my web site and downloading file after file and my mail server just sitting there waiting for an incoming message.
But there's a huge difference. Your computer accepts messages because you specifically set it up to do so. I didn't set up my car so that people could stencil it.
How do I know why your car is sitting there. Until there is a Do Not Deface list for cars, I think that we should assume that the de facto standard is that anything is allowed.
Well it wasn't meant to be a good solution or anything.
I am relieved to learn that. I believed that you were proposing such whitelists as a practical, reasonable solution.
Email is powerful because it allows anonymous communications. I don't have a whitelist in place, but I see spam as just one of the necessary evils of allowing anonymous communications.
My telephone allows anonymous communications, but I don't consider 2AM telemarketing calls to be a necessary evil. My fax allows anonymous communications, and I don't believe that reams of ads sent via fax are a necessary evil. The government has regulated commercial speech before when it is overly burdensome to the recipient. Spam seems to be a good place for such regulation.
As an aside, I don't think that e-mail is powerful because it allows anonymous communications. I think that it is powerful because it allows you to be easily contacted. I don't feel that it is a particular benefit to me to receive e-mails when the sender is anonymous (forged).
Actually, it's kind of tongue-in-cheek. I mean, yeah, driving SUVs contributes slightly to terrorism, but so does riding the bus.
I think that the Detroit Project makes a much better case for that than the government does with their claims that buying drugs (unless supplied by the CIA) supports terrorism.
I see that, yet again, we find ourselves in disagreement over basic principles, rather than facts, and thus it is unlikely that we will ever see eye-to-eye on this issue. I believe that commercial speech that shifts costs to unwilling recipients should be illegal. You believe that the onus should be upon the intended recipients to use extreme technical measures to prevent the reception of the speech. So we are at an impasse. I will address a few points:
No, but it'll cost google money.
Only if Google chooses to crawl the page. That's the difference: The page does not automatically get fed into Google by the creator. Google goes out and requests it. Google opts-in.
Likewise if you send someone an email.
How do you know if the recipient will be picking up his e-mail via long-distance dial-up, receiving it on a cell phone, or by some other means that has a direct-to-recipient cost?
Only those people that choose to download the email will pay to download it.
And how do they decide whether to download it? They download part of it and then check the sender, subject, etc.? Sounds like downloading to me.
Because the car is my property, and you're not allowed to damage my property without my permission.
My mail server is my property, and you are not allowed to use it's bandwidth and storage without my permission.
The key is that you have no permission.
Spammers have no permission to send me spam.
Email is sent with permission. If you don't want the email, don't accept the email. You are free to do that.
My mail server does not have AI or enforce my views and I do not sit at a monitor 24/7 hitting "accept" and "reject" buttons as SMTP connections are established. My mail server cannot distinguish between an ad for a penis enlarger and a stranger replying to a car-for-sale web page. If you are going to say that the mail server should not accept messages from unknown senders, I'll say that your car should start itself and move out of the way if you don't want me to stencil an ad on it.
Rejecting e-mail from unknown senders is unacceptable to me, just as it is to 99.999+% of e-mail users. The law should protect us so that we don't have to decide between crippling our e-mail capabilities or receiving spam.
What whitelisting suggestion? I think you're confusing me with someone else.
I am apparently confusing you, but not with someone else. You wrote:
If you don't want unknown people putting emails in your mailbox, don't accept connections from unknown people.
That's whitelisting: a list of senders from whom you will accept connections.
Even then it would still discourage most people, since John Doe suits generally can not be entered into in small claims court.
We have a law on the books in Virginia that makes forged headers illegal (SB881) and lawsuits can be filed under that. But the discovery cost of such a lawsuit is extremely high so lawsuits are exceedingly rare. First, you have to find the sender. To do this, you need one or more subpeonas to identify who was using a particular IP address at a particular time, who owned a spamvertised web site, phone number, etc. Any of these subpeonas may fail to turn up the actual identity of the spammer. Even if you do get the identity, the chance that you will ever collect on a judgement against the spammer is extremely small. Thus, you have a high cost monetarily and in time for a relatively small potential judgement -- which you may not be able to collect.
That's like saying it's OK for the government to prosecute people for criticising government officials over the internet, as long as it's not illegal for them to criticise them through the mail.
I really don't want to deal with this flawed analogy, but I guess I have to...
If I put up a web page criticizing government officials, it does not force anyone to incur a cost. Only those people that choose to visit the page will pay to download it. It will not cost the government money.
This is more like stating that you can't go to a government building and plug your PA system into an outdoor outlet that they pay for in order to criticize government officials. Or that you can't provide drinking water for protestors by opening a fire hydrant.
That's how free speech works. You can say just about anything that you like, but you cannot do it at someone else's expense.
Actually there's a huge difference in degree. But in any case, you should be allowed to do so.
While the cost per fax is higher, I do believe that the government acted properly in making ads sent via fax illegal. I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one.
Am I free to paint an ad onto your car?
No.
Why should the government limit my free speech like that? Why can't I stencil an ad onto the side of your car? Because it would cost you money to fix, inconvenience you, and reduce the value of something you paid for? Sounds a lot like spam e-mail to me.
Well, first of all, you're not paying for the delivery. You're paying for part of the delivery.
Recipients pay for the vast majority of the delivery of spam through higher ISP fees. Sending it is far cheaper because the sender is not forced to save hundreds of thousands of copies of the message to disk. The spammer will often BCC the spam to 50 or more recipients at a time, so he sends it once and the ISP stores it 50 or more times on their hard drives. Then the users who retrieve it use 50 or more times the bandwidth that the spammer used in delivering it to the ISP.
Secondly, you do get to decide what can be sent to you. If you don't want unknown people putting emails in your mailbox, don't accept connections from unknown people.
First you claim that I can decide what can be sent to me, then you tell me that I can only decide who can send e-mail me.
I want unknown people putting e-mail in my mailbox. I want unknown people to reply to my for-sale ads. I want unknown people to send me offers of employment in response to my resumé. I want unknown people to contact me after a client refers me to them as a good consultant.
By the way, I read your whitelisting suggestion to a professional acquaintance just for a sanity check. You didn't do well...
But most recipients don't pay for email.
Who do you think is paying the cost of the bandwidth, servers, storage, and administration for e-mail if it's not the recipients? Many ISPs, in fact, estimate that spam costs individual higher ISP fees by several dollars each month.
That's like saying that patients don't pay for higher malpractice insurance -- because it isn't a line-item on their doctor bill.
OK, but what about "this guy must want me to tell him about my recruitment service," or "this guy must want me to tell him how to improve his resumé?"
If the recruitment service wants to discuss placing me in a job, yes, I would consider such a response to be reasonable. The resumé service is a wholly different matter. That's like me attending a public lecture you gave and using the question and answer session to tell you that you would be a more effective speaker if you would lose weight, wear nicer clothes, and trim your nose hairs.
Suppose I post a message online that says "please, if you are a lawyer in Virginia, call me collect." I don't see that as an open invitation for random people who see the message to call me to tell me about breast enlargers, free credit reports, refinancing my mortgage, and how to become an Internet millionaire. Do you?
Well, personally I see the mere fact that you have an unrestricted email account as that open invitation. But to answer your question, no, I don't. But the resume case is an example of implied solicitation, not direct solicitation.
My e-mail is hardly unrestricted. My server uses the following blacklists:
Country Blacklists argentina.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Argentina brazil.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Brazil china.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to China hongkong.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Hong Kong korea.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Korea malaysia.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to nigeria.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Malaysia russia.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Russia singapore.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Singapore taiwan.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Taiwan thailand.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Thailand
Other Blacklists orbs.dorkslayers.com -- see http://www.dorkslayers.com for more information list.dsbl.org -- see http://www.dsbl.org for more information relays.ordb.org - see http://www.ordb.org for more information relays.osirusoft.com -- see http://relays.osirusoft.com for more information sbl.spamhaus.org -- see http://www.spamhaus.org for more information cybercon.blackholes.us -- cybercon.com is a notorious spammer haven.
I also publish, on my web page, the e-mail policies for my domain.
But we are making some progress. You agree that posting a message that says "please, if you are a lawyer in Virginia, call me collect" is not an invitation to telephone soliciters to call collect. That raises some interesting questions:
1. Should it be legal for the telephone solicters to call collect after seeing said message? If not, why?
2. Suppose the message said "call my cell phone." Would publishing that number give the telephone soliciters an invitation and legal right to call it?
3. What if it said "call my toll free number", would that be an "open invitation" to telephone soliciters to call that number?
4. How is an "unrestricted email account" an invitation to spammers while an unrestricted cell phone number or unrestricted toll-free number is not an invitation to telephone soliciters?
As to your comment about a government-mandated "no trespassing" sign for e-mail, how would it work? Suppose I posted one. Would that mean that no one could e-mail me? Or would it apply only to commercial solicitations?
I honestly think that the public "no trespassing" signs for e-mail would solve the problem as long as there was a stiff criminal penalty for ignoring said signs. But anything that relies on the general public having to identify, track down, and sue the spammers is destined for failure -- unless there is a guaranteed minimum judgement that makes such lawsuit profitable.
It's one of the prices of living in a free society.
That's like saying that being mugged is one of the prices of living in a free society. Am I free to paint an ad onto your car? Am I free to call you collect at 2:00AM to tell you about my MLM scheme? Am I free to fax ads to your fax machine (no, it's specifically illegal for the same reason that spam should be).
That's nonsense. You're allowing some types of speech to use that delivery method, but you're not allowing others.
It's not nonsense at all. If I'm paying for the delivery, it's only fair that I get to decide what can be sent to me.
That's like saying it's OK for the government to prosecute people for criticising government officials over the internet, as long as it's not illegal for them to criticise them through the mail.
First, you are mistaking commercial speech and non-commercial speech. Secondly, the taxpayers are the ones paying for the government official's e-mail. Very different and therefore a flawed analogy.
It's more like saying that a telephone soliciter can't call cell phones and toll-free numbers (where the recipients pays for the calls) but can call normal telephones. Or it's like saying that you can't send unsolicited ads to fax machines (because the recipients pay for paper, toner, etc.) but that you can send them in the mail with stamps that you buy. Gee, that is how the law works already, isn't it?
But if the cost is your complaint then you have to make illegal the messages offering to hire you along with the ones that want to sell you something.
I'm willing to pay the cost to receive job and interview offers, not spam. The former is implied when I post the resumé. Heck, I might even state it outright. There's no way that any "reasonable person" could view my resumé online and think "this guy must want me to tell him about herbal Viagra."
Suppose I post a message online that says "please, if you are a lawyer in Virginia, call me collect." I don't see that as an open invitation for random people who see the message to call me to tell me about breast enlargers, free credit reports, refinancing my mortgage, and how to become an Internet millionaire. Do you?
I don't make technology decisions based on "old grudges".
Then don't bring up crap about what Sun was doing back in '93.
Also, if the pisspoor 3rd party vendor support that plagued Solaris in '97 has changed I would be receptive to any genuine updates on this matter. However, Linux is already filling that void.
Always the plug for Linux. As I said before, you are simply a Linux shill who is using this discussion to tout Linux and put down Solaris, a competitor.
If I want to run a high-volume mail server or e-commerce web site, why should I care if there is a third-party port of Tux Racer? If I am running satellite simulation and control software on Solaris, why would I care about the existence of third-party browser plug-ins?
1)Your reasoning is ass-backwards. IDE was the more standard configuration in those days. In all likelihood it would have been the cheaper option to support and would have allowed for PC economies of scale to be exploited.
IDE was not the "standard configuration in those days" for scientific workstations and servers -- because IDE performed so poorly. "Market demand" for IDE support in Solaris has nothing to do with the peripherals on your home PC. It has to do with the peripherals run by their market segment -- scientific workstations and servers. I said that the decision was based on "market demand, engineering costs, and performance." In '93, it would not have made sense for Sun to incur the "engineering costs" to produce a feature for which there was little "market demand" (in their market segments) and that would have resulted in poor "performance."
Your claim is also made absurd by the fact that Sun did infact eventually manage to support IDE.
Again, I'll try to make this easier for you. The IDE drives of today are much faster than they were in '93. As a result, many scientific workstations and low-end servers now use IDE, so there is a market demand that was not there in '93. That justifies the engineering costs to support it.
Also, if various collections of hobbyists could support IDE hardware, the cost argument is really absurd and unsupportable.
Hobbyists are donating their time and not doing it for profit. By your twisted line of reasoning, Sun should have been able to write their whole OS for free because hobbyists developed Linux for free.
2) You are highly naieve.
And you are illiterate. Buy a dictionary.
Most information collected in such forced registration procedures is total garbage.
The information that I supplied was true. You are assuming that your willingness to lie is typical. I doubt it.
Point 4 is blatantly false because Sun doesn't need to host the files and it's got one of the biggest fattest pipes on the planet.
You don't know whether Sun needs to host the files or not. You have not discussed the matter with their lawyers. You do not know how allowing sites to mirror the files would affect the IP rights. You don't know if Sun is trying to keep open the option of removing the OS from distribution at some future date. Having it on mirrors makes that a lot harder to do. While Sun has a lot of bandwidth, they are actually using it. That's why they bought it. You seem to think that it is limitless. It's not.
You can now go lie in bed and stare up at the picture of Linus Torvalds on your bedroom ceiling. Sorry to upset you by discussing a non-Linux OS.
Then the only way to stop spam is to make your resumé "confidential."
Kind of an ugly choice: Make your contact information less accessible to potential employers or be prepared for a deluge of spam.
Do you really want a judge deciding that "I saw your resumé so I decided to offer you this job" is OK but "I saw your resumé so I decided to offer you this penis enlargement" isn't?
Yes. Without question.
What about "I saw your resumé so I decided to offer you this recruitment service," or "this resumé writing service?"
Again, yes. If I feel the need to use such services, I can seek them out.
Seems to me like a prior restraint on speech based on content.
It's not the speech that is being restrained, just the delivery method. If those same advertisers wanted to use my postal mailing address to send me ads via the USPS, then I'd have no legitimate complaint. They would be paying the cost to deliver the ads to me. It would cost me nothing.
The "false headers" laws have different problems.
The main one being that they serve little useful purpose. False headers are not the problem and I'm sure that you, like me and millions of others, are quite capable of tracking e-mail even when it has falsified headers.
If an SMTP server receives a connection from 1.2.3.4 with a message whose Received: header says 5.6.7.8, then the server would reject the message, possibly logging a non-compliant server.
Let's disect an example Received: header:
Received: from smtp-server.cox.rr.com ([24.163.111.127]) by Mail6.mgfairfax.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.537.53);
Sun, 31 Dec 2000 09:13:39 -0500
The server name smtp-server.cox.rr.com is supplied by the server that sends the message. It does so in the HELO/EHLO portion of the SMTP protocol exchange:
HELO smtp-server.cox.rr.com
The IP address ([24.163.111.127]) is the actual IP address that delivered the message to the server that wrote the Received: header. In this case, the server that wrote the header was Mail6.mgfairfax.rr.com.
So, do we have a match? The only way to tell is to do a DNS lookup on the address and see if the name matches what the server said its name was.
But that's where things can get ugly. There may be no DNS entry for the server. So a lookup on the IP address results in no name found. There are simple configuration issues where the SMTP server is configured to use a different name than what is shown by DNS. For example, suppose that an ISP had 20 mail servers with names of smtp1.isp.com through smtp20.isp.com. The servers might all be configured to report their identity as smtp.isp.com. The ISP might do this to hide the number of servers that they run or just as a convenience so that all servers are configured the same.
So, was the message from a spammer? Nope. It was a listserver at CNET which sent it to my bigfoot.com address which forwarded it to an e-mail address at my ISP. You will note that the topmost Received: header says nothing about CNET or bigfoot. Why? Because it is showing a relay within my ISP where the mail is transferred from a national server to a local one.
Besides, most spam is sent with no forged Received: headers. So it does little good to look for forgeries there. Sorry. I wish you had a winner there, but I am afraid that you don't.
That fly by night ISP must get its internet connection from somewhere.
So what if the fly-by-night ISP in Gangdong-gu, Korea gets their connection from some larger ISP in Gangdong-gu, Korea? It might be easier to tell that without forged headers, but what good would the knowledge do? The spam will keep coming and you'll complain to ISPs that may not read English and probably do not care.
Besides, forged headers have nothing to do with how the average person responds to spam. They would have no idea as to how to interpret headers, forged or not. Those of us who fight the spam problem every day are seldom fooled by forged headers. The only thing we don't have is the throwaway e-mail address of the sender, but that hardly matters. We have the IP address and the time the spam was sent, so that's good enough.
I must need education on pobox.com. If they originate the first Received-From: header, isn't that good enough?
pobox.com does not handle outgoing mail. They only handle incoming mail. If you sign up for their service, you continue to use your ISP's SMTP and POP server, but you list your From: address as the one supplied by pobox.com. When a message comes into pobox.com for you, it is forwarded by them to the address of your choice.
You initially asked:
Why can't SMTP relays reject mail whose most recent Received-From: header does not match the the sender?
Suppose you had a pobox.com account and your ISP was Earthlink. The most recent Received-From line in e-mails sent from you would be some mail server at Earthlink while the sender would be your pobox.com address. Thus the mismatch -- even though the e-mail is perfectly legit.
Another example: When I would send personal e-mail from one of my client sites, they had a firewall configuration that would not let me access outside SMTP servers (but I could access my POP3 server). So I would use their SMTP server for outgoing e-mail even though my return address would be my normal personal e-mail address.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, oil has nothing to do with the U.S. Iraq policy.
Way too many learned people disagree with you on that one. After the Gulf War, guess who was in Iraq rebuilding the oil rigs. Haliburton, with then-CEO Dick Cheney at the helm.
We can start at the top with Ken Lay. Oops. he was a criminal, there goes your theory of poverty and crime.
I never claimed that only the poor committed crimes. However, you won't find someone like Ken Lay having to choose between committing a crime or having his kids go to be hungry. The rich commit crimes out of greed. The poor often do it to keep from starving or freezing.
No, people vote Republican because they believe in national defense,
Translation: Funnelling huge sums of money over in corporate welfare to giant corporations.
in equal rights for all regardless of race,
Translation: Making sure that rich white suburbanites and impoverished minorities get exactly the same level of assistance from the government.
and that people should keep what they work for instead of giving it over greedy elites.
"Greedy elites" being poor families in subsidized housing in this case.
Want to see a good example of giving to "greedy elites." Look at the Bush tax cuts. The latest one he's pushing is elimination of taxes on stock dividends. Does that benefit the lower class? No. They have no stock investments? Does it benefit the middle class? No. The vast majority of them hold stock through mutual funds held in retirement plans. The mutual funds just reinvest the dividends. But the middle class will pay taxes on all of those dividends when they start drawing from the retirement accounts. So who does it help? The greedy elites. Had there been no taxes on stock dividends last year, Dubya would have saved over $40,000 on his taxes while Cheney would have saved over $100,000.
I have family on public assistance. They own three TVs, 2 VCRs, a DVD player.
Oooh! A DVD player. Those are almost $60! They are living in the lap of luxury.
When I was unemployed, the internet was a valuable asset in looking for a job. I paid for it myself (from savings...a novel idea).
You just don't understand what it's like to be truly poor. There are people who have to choose between a new winter coat and rent. Yet there are some who would still find a way to get a second-hand computer if it would help their kids in school.
The slashdot crowd seems to think that the internet is used as a magic wand of education.
Think of everything that a kid can find on the Internet that could help them with school assignments or just exploration. If a kid wants to know about dinosaurs, it's all here. If he wants to learn about the space program, it's here. I'm not saying that the Internet will magically teach someone who doesn't want to learn, but it's an incredibly helpful tool. They will develop computer skills, something that will be very handy when they want to get a job.
Let's not forget the adults. If someone wants to teach themselves web design, programming, or some other skill, the Internet is there for them. If they want to find out what scholarship programs exist for their kids, they can do it online a lot more effectively than they can by asking around the neighborhood. If they have medical questions, the answers can often be found online.
As long as these programs are PRIVATELY FUNDED, I think they are fine. I am just tired of paying for them.
So you are in favor of programs funded by someone else's money, just not yours.
That's why I favor public funding. Then you don't end up with a small percentage of generous people trying to fund every program to help the poor while the "not with my money" crowd just buys themselves more toys.
You can find children in even the poorest of school that excel.
Your talking about outlyers, not the typical kid. On average, the children in the poorest schools perform the poorest. Part of the reason for that is the lack of books, Internet, etc. that the wealthier kids have easy access to. What's wrong with trying to level the playing field a little?
Do the programs work to get people out of dire straits. No, they never have and never will.
Yes, actually, they do. Project HeadStart was a great example, providing preschool children with health, education, and nutrition assistance. It was quite successful.
Tell that to the liberals in Congress who oppose giving the poor vouchers to get better education.
Vouchers are intended to benefit rich suburbanites, not the poor. It's intended to give money back to wealthy yuppies who already put their kids in private schools. That's money that, right now, is going towards educating children in public schools. Under the voucher program, every parent of kids in private schools would get money that's now funding public schools. I haven't seen anything that would limit the tuition that private schools could charge so that the vouchers would fully fund the tuitions of a student. So how does someone living in subsidized housing come up with the difference between the voucher amount and the private school tuition?
Is that why the left loves to tax businesses to hell and pile on regulation after regulation to make sure it is impossible for these people to start their own business?
The biggest cause of business failure is under-capitalization. Some person living in a subsidized housing complex has no way to start their own business regardless of taxes and regulations. These are people who often can't even afford a used car.
As to taxes, the left has the common sense to realize that you have to bring in enough taxes to cover the federal budget. The borrow-and-spend Republicans simply do deficit spending and run up the national debt, leaving the nation wasting its tax dollars on interest. Want a 25% federal tax cut? Pay down the portion of the debt run up under Reagan/Bush(Sr.) because about 1/4 of all of your tax dollars pay interest on that debt.
Oil has nothing to do with it.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
When you educate a criminal, you get a better-educated criminal.
When you educate a person, you give them a chance to earn a living and support themselves without crime. What the hell is so wrong with a child who lives in poverty getting the same chance to use the Internet as a child born to upper middle class parents? Or are you just trying to make sure that your kid has an advantage when it comes time to do homework?
You are forgetting the real reason they turn to crime: they are mean and/or greedy.
No, that's the reason that people vote Republican.
90% of these poor need to get off their ass and take responsibility for their lives.
Yeah, that's real practical after their inner-city public school "education" and no money for college or trade schools. You were probably happy to have mommy and daddy feed you good meals and provide you with all of the luxuries of life while you went to school.
Broadband internet access is a luxury (hell the internet is a luxury), and if you can't afford it don't place the burden of payment on the working class of this country.
You really enjoy having people to look down on, don't you? You wouldn't want them to learn something. You would not want their kids to be able to use the Internet to do research for their school projects. It's important to keep them and their kids down. To hell with society and a civilization. If someone is born into poverty, we need to make sure that they stay there, right?
do not have a worry. All of this stuff is free. We do not pay for it: the government does.
Why would we spend tax dollars spent trying to improve people's lives when we could spend hundreds of times that much to bomb countries with more oil than we have?
What a screwed up sense of priorities you have. You don't want to spend a few dollars to provide tools to help someone out of ignorance and poverty. But you're probably fine with paying many times that much for police and prisons when, uneducated and unskilled, the person turns to a life of crime.
Nice try.
It was more than a try. It was an insightful comment on my part.
You are mistaking memory address space and instruction size. Everyone agrees that the 8080, Z80, and 8085 were all "8-bit" CPUs, but they had an address space of 16-bits (64K). The reason that 64 bits will be useful is memory bandwidth and CPU speed, not memory capacity.
There's no need whatsoever
I see that you are another visionary, much like Bill Gates who once said about RAM "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Mac OS X comes with much more cool and useful software out of the box than Windows.
Agreed. The majority of software that comes with Windows is of limited value. But I'm buying an OS. I really don't want my money paying developers to produce slick programs for graphicsn or HTML editing when the programs will still be substandard when compared to standalone commercial packages.
Ever heard "GHz when you don't need it"? Your P4 may happily idle at 3 GHz, but the built-in thermal control will quietly slow down the chip to avoid overheating when the processor is actively used - what a waste of energy.
I don't have a P4 (I have an AMD in my primary PC), but the P4 thermal control only kicks in when a chip is not properly cooled. On a system with adequate cooling, it never happens.
And a Wintel laptop will never run at full speed when not plugged in, so the battery can last a little longer. But still, you would be lucky if you get 2 hours usage, while an iBook can last 4+ hours.
That is untrue. I have an HP 1.6ghz Celeron-based laptop from HP. The battery life is about 3.5hours and the clock speed is identical regardless of whether the unit is plugged in or running off of battery.
I believe that the laptops you are referring to are those using desktop chips. There was quite a bit about this some months back and it was (rightly) treated as a scandal.
Can you Wintel people ever stop talking about performance?
No. It's key to what a computer does and often determines when a machine needs to be retired. Look how many Macs have had to be upgraded because they were too slow for OS-X. Also, I'm not a "Wintel" person. I'm a computer professional who has probably programmed more different microprocessors than you've heard of. So don't try to write off my opinion as some form of bias.
There are more important factors like the overall quality of the system and the productivity of the user.
A user who's waiting for his system to complete the application of a Photoshop filter isn't productive. Taking twice as long (or more) to convert a DVD to SVCD is not productive. Apple markets their product line to graphics professionals, a group that has a greater need for CPU performance than many others, while providing them with CPUs that cannot keep up with a $70 AMD CPU for floating point.
Let's look at some other factors which affect user productivity. How productive is a user if they can't go to a local store and buy the software that they need? How productive is a user who has to settle on a sub-standard package because the size of the Mac market means that the money is not there to support the R&D necessary to make it competitive with the Windows offerings. Not being able to read the CD-ROM that your business associate sent to you does not make you productive.
After all, what's the point of a 3GHz machine that keeps crashing or idles most of the time?
If the 3ghz machine keeps crashing, you need to fix it. Windows XP and 2000 can run for weeks if not months, at a time without rebooting. While your comment about stability would have had some validity in the Windows 9x days, it no longer does.
As to the machine idling, that's a good thing. That it can redraw the screen in a blink of an eye or smoothly drag windows around and then idle means that the UI is crisp and responsive.
The public are mostly morons and since when have they ever done anything but look for the absolute cheapest of [product]? Quality and longevity are of little or no concern.
I can think of plenty of examples. Look at sales of Mercedes Benz cars, Calphalon cookware, Henckel knives, G. Loomis fishing rods, and Maytag dishwashers -- just to name a few.
They don't realize that while the Mac costs twice as much, it also remains a viable computer twice as long (or longer)
The Mac starts out underperforming its Intel architecture rivals and only falls further behind as technology marches on. Mac users, by and large, seem willing to tolerate a sluggishness that would drive me mad.
I got more than six years out of the last brand new desktop Mac
And it would have been outperformed by a six year old Intel-architecture PC. Macs don't magically get faster as the years go by. They start out slower than their contemporary PC counterparts and they end up slower.
Mac users tend to hold on to their computers longer because replacing them is such an expensive proposition. If I was looking at a huge investment to replace my PC, then I guess I would replace it less often, too.
how about T'Pol with Seven-of-Nine... Best of both worlds!
That's been my suggestion for an episode of Enterprise since before the series started. The Borg can time-travel. Seven-of-Nine and T'Pol are both incredibly hot. What could be more obvious? It could be the first X-rated Star Trek movie. And you know that it would have bigger box office sales than Star Trek Nemesis.
According to the article, Han Hong, named best female artist this year at Channel V's China Music Awards said:
"In China, we have to give so many concerts that we do not have time to rest our voices."
Maybe that's why Chinese pop singers have voices that sound like cats being scalded.
If you want Enterprise porn, you need nude Jolene Blalock (Sub-commander T'Pol) shots.
Networking professionals and ISPs are often *BSD users. The security, stability, and performance of *BSD makes it an ideal choice in such roles. While Linux has made great strides, it is still not on a par with *BSD in many respects. Conversely, *BSD is certainly not as suitable for use on the average desktop.
I mean, isn't the whole reason that they're evil that they are explicitly taking in revenue?
A good wisecrack, but I think that there are plenty of tech firms taking in revenue that aren't generally considered evil. In general, I think the following examples fit that category:
Sun Microsystems
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Google
GoDaddy (the domain registrar)
Plextor (the CD-R/W manufacturer)
id Software
Sure, you'll find a few people here and there that have a gripe with one of those companies or one of their products, but I don't think that those companies are generally viewed as evil for having a revenue stream.
My mail server is passive and Google is active. Google requests a file from a web page and gets it. My mail server requests nothing. It sits there waiting for incoming mail. It has no way to know if a TCP connection will result in spam or will be a "normal" message.
No one is forced to pick up his e-mail via long-distance, etc. In fact, no one is forced to pick up his e-mail at all.
No one is forced to turn on their fax machine, but the law recognizes that it is an unreasonable burden to tell fax owners to turn off their fax machines if they don't want fax spam. Therefore, they made fax spam illegal.
Well, using is different from damaging, and I have your permission, you specifically set up a server to allow people to use your bandwidth and storage!
You do not have my permission to send spam to me. I set up my server specifically to receive personal communications and not mass mailings. I'm sure that you will ask how a spammer could know that. It should be assumed given that the vast majority of Internet users do not wish to receive spam. This has been borne out in many surveys and studies. Even barring that, my domain name makes it clear that I do not wish to receive spam -- as does my web page.
The question then becomes who are you allowing, and for what purpose. This is where I draw analogy to trespassing laws, and suggest a Do Not Email list for those who wish to clarify what permissions they are allowing. Of course the de facto standard is that anything is allowed, so we need to take a few years easing into this.
Given that ISPs almost universally have policies against sending of spam to or from their domains, I don't see how you can say the de facto standard is that anything is allowed. Nor does google's webcrawler.
That's fine, since I'm not attempting to put anything onto Google's servers. There's a big difference between Google crawling my web site and downloading file after file and my mail server just sitting there waiting for an incoming message.
But there's a huge difference. Your computer accepts messages because you specifically set it up to do so. I didn't set up my car so that people could stencil it.
How do I know why your car is sitting there. Until there is a Do Not Deface list for cars, I think that we should assume that the de facto standard is that anything is allowed.
Well it wasn't meant to be a good solution or anything.
I am relieved to learn that. I believed that you were proposing such whitelists as a practical, reasonable solution.
Email is powerful because it allows anonymous communications. I don't have a whitelist in place, but I see spam as just one of the necessary evils of allowing anonymous communications.
My telephone allows anonymous communications, but I don't consider 2AM telemarketing calls to be a necessary evil. My fax allows anonymous communications, and I don't believe that reams of ads sent via fax are a necessary evil. The government has regulated commercial speech before when it is overly burdensome to the recipient. Spam seems to be a good place for such regulation.
As an aside, I don't think that e-mail is powerful because it allows anonymous communications. I think that it is powerful because it allows you to be easily contacted. I don't feel that it is a particular benefit to me to receive e-mails when the sender is anonymous (forged).
Actually, it's kind of tongue-in-cheek. I mean, yeah, driving SUVs contributes slightly to terrorism, but so does riding the bus.
I think that the Detroit Project makes a much better case for that than the government does with their claims that buying drugs (unless supplied by the CIA) supports terrorism.
For that matter, so does writing this message.
That's why I have a wood-burning PC.
I see that, yet again, we find ourselves in disagreement over basic principles, rather than facts, and thus it is unlikely that we will ever see eye-to-eye on this issue. I believe that commercial speech that shifts costs to unwilling recipients should be illegal. You believe that the onus should be upon the intended recipients to use extreme technical measures to prevent the reception of the speech. So we are at an impasse. I will address a few points:
No, but it'll cost google money.
Only if Google chooses to crawl the page. That's the difference: The page does not automatically get fed into Google by the creator. Google goes out and requests it. Google opts-in.
Likewise if you send someone an email.
How do you know if the recipient will be picking up his e-mail via long-distance dial-up, receiving it on a cell phone, or by some other means that has a direct-to-recipient cost?
Only those people that choose to download the email will pay to download it.
And how do they decide whether to download it? They download part of it and then check the sender, subject, etc.? Sounds like downloading to me.
Because the car is my property, and you're not allowed to damage my property without my permission.
My mail server is my property, and you are not allowed to use it's bandwidth and storage without my permission.
The key is that you have no permission.
Spammers have no permission to send me spam.
Email is sent with permission. If you don't want the email, don't accept the email. You are free to do that.
My mail server does not have AI or enforce my views and I do not sit at a monitor 24/7 hitting "accept" and "reject" buttons as SMTP connections are established. My mail server cannot distinguish between an ad for a penis enlarger and a stranger replying to a car-for-sale web page. If you are going to say that the mail server should not accept messages from unknown senders, I'll say that your car should start itself and move out of the way if you don't want me to stencil an ad on it.
Rejecting e-mail from unknown senders is unacceptable to me, just as it is to 99.999+% of e-mail users. The law should protect us so that we don't have to decide between crippling our e-mail capabilities or receiving spam.
What whitelisting suggestion? I think you're confusing me with someone else.
I am apparently confusing you, but not with someone else. You wrote:
If you don't want unknown people putting emails in your mailbox, don't accept connections from unknown people.
That's whitelisting: a list of senders from whom you will accept connections.
Even then it would still discourage most people, since John Doe suits generally can not be entered into in small claims court.
We have a law on the books in Virginia that makes forged headers illegal (SB881) and lawsuits can be filed under that. But the discovery cost of such a lawsuit is extremely high so lawsuits are exceedingly rare. First, you have to find the sender. To do this, you need one or more subpeonas to identify who was using a particular IP address at a particular time, who owned a spamvertised web site, phone number, etc. Any of these subpeonas may fail to turn up the actual identity of the spammer. Even if you do get the identity, the chance that you will ever collect on a judgement against the spammer is extremely small. Thus, you have a high cost monetarily and in time for a relatively small potential judgement -- which you may not be able to collect.
Driving SUVs supports terrorism
Finally, something upon which we can agree.
That's like saying it's OK for the government to prosecute people for criticising government officials over the internet, as long as it's not illegal for them to criticise them through the mail.
I really don't want to deal with this flawed analogy, but I guess I have to...
If I put up a web page criticizing government officials, it does not force anyone to incur a cost. Only those people that choose to visit the page will pay to download it. It will not cost the government money.
This is more like stating that you can't go to a government building and plug your PA system into an outdoor outlet that they pay for in order to criticize government officials. Or that you can't provide drinking water for protestors by opening a fire hydrant.
That's how free speech works. You can say just about anything that you like, but you cannot do it at someone else's expense.
Actually there's a huge difference in degree. But in any case, you should be allowed to do so.
While the cost per fax is higher, I do believe that the government acted properly in making ads sent via fax illegal. I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one.
No.
Why should the government limit my free speech like that? Why can't I stencil an ad onto the side of your car? Because it would cost you money to fix, inconvenience you, and reduce the value of something you paid for? Sounds a lot like spam e-mail to me.
Well, first of all, you're not paying for the delivery. You're paying for part of the delivery.
Recipients pay for the vast majority of the delivery of spam through higher ISP fees. Sending it is far cheaper because the sender is not forced to save hundreds of thousands of copies of the message to disk. The spammer will often BCC the spam to 50 or more recipients at a time, so he sends it once and the ISP stores it 50 or more times on their hard drives. Then the users who retrieve it use 50 or more times the bandwidth that the spammer used in delivering it to the ISP.
Secondly, you do get to decide what can be sent to you. If you don't want unknown people putting emails in your mailbox, don't accept connections from unknown people.
First you claim that I can decide what can be sent to me, then you tell me that I can only decide who can send e-mail me.
I want unknown people putting e-mail in my mailbox. I want unknown people to reply to my for-sale ads. I want unknown people to send me offers of employment in response to my resumé. I want unknown people to contact me after a client refers me to them as a good consultant.
By the way, I read your whitelisting suggestion to a professional acquaintance just for a sanity check. You didn't do well...
But most recipients don't pay for email.
Who do you think is paying the cost of the bandwidth, servers, storage, and administration for e-mail if it's not the recipients? Many ISPs, in fact, estimate that spam costs individual higher ISP fees by several dollars each month.
That's like saying that patients don't pay for higher malpractice insurance -- because it isn't a line-item on their doctor bill.
OK, but what about "this guy must want me to tell him about my recruitment service," or "this guy must want me to tell him how to improve his resumé?"
If the recruitment service wants to discuss placing me in a job, yes, I would consider such a response to be reasonable. The resumé service is a wholly different matter. That's like me attending a public lecture you gave and using the question and answer session to tell you that you would be a more effective speaker if you would lose weight, wear nicer clothes, and trim your nose hairs.
Well, personally I see the mere fact that you have an unrestricted email account as that open invitation. But to answer your question, no, I don't. But the resume case is an example of implied solicitation, not direct solicitation.
My e-mail is hardly unrestricted. My server uses the following blacklists:
Country Blacklists
argentina.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Argentina
brazil.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Brazil
china.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to China
hongkong.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Hong Kong
korea.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Korea
malaysia.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to
nigeria.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Malaysia
russia.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Russia
singapore.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Singapore
taiwan.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Taiwan
thailand.blackholes.us -- IP addresses assigned to Thailand
Other Blacklists
orbs.dorkslayers.com -- see http://www.dorkslayers.com for more information
list.dsbl.org -- see http://www.dsbl.org for more information
relays.ordb.org - see http://www.ordb.org for more information
relays.osirusoft.com -- see http://relays.osirusoft.com for more information
sbl.spamhaus.org -- see http://www.spamhaus.org for more information
cybercon.blackholes.us -- cybercon.com is a notorious spammer haven.
I also publish, on my web page, the e-mail policies for my domain.
But we are making some progress. You agree that posting a message that says "please, if you are a lawyer in Virginia, call me collect" is not an invitation to telephone soliciters to call collect. That raises some interesting questions:
1. Should it be legal for the telephone solicters to call collect after seeing said message? If not, why?
2. Suppose the message said "call my cell phone." Would publishing that number give the telephone soliciters an invitation and legal right to call it?
3. What if it said "call my toll free number", would that be an "open invitation" to telephone soliciters to call that number?
4. How is an "unrestricted email account" an invitation to spammers while an unrestricted cell phone number or unrestricted toll-free number is not an invitation to telephone soliciters?
As to your comment about a government-mandated "no trespassing" sign for e-mail, how would it work? Suppose I posted one. Would that mean that no one could e-mail me? Or would it apply only to commercial solicitations?
I honestly think that the public "no trespassing" signs for e-mail would solve the problem as long as there was a stiff criminal penalty for ignoring said signs. But anything that relies on the general public having to identify, track down, and sue the spammers is destined for failure -- unless there is a guaranteed minimum judgement that makes such lawsuit profitable.
It's one of the prices of living in a free society.
That's like saying that being mugged is one of the prices of living in a free society. Am I free to paint an ad onto your car? Am I free to call you collect at 2:00AM to tell you about my MLM scheme? Am I free to fax ads to your fax machine (no, it's specifically illegal for the same reason that spam should be).
That's nonsense. You're allowing some types of speech to use that delivery method, but you're not allowing others.
It's not nonsense at all. If I'm paying for the delivery, it's only fair that I get to decide what can be sent to me.
That's like saying it's OK for the government to prosecute people for criticising government officials over the internet, as long as it's not illegal for them to criticise them through the mail.
First, you are mistaking commercial speech and non-commercial speech. Secondly, the taxpayers are the ones paying for the government official's e-mail. Very different and therefore a flawed analogy.
It's more like saying that a telephone soliciter can't call cell phones and toll-free numbers (where the recipients pays for the calls) but can call normal telephones. Or it's like saying that you can't send unsolicited ads to fax machines (because the recipients pay for paper, toner, etc.) but that you can send them in the mail with stamps that you buy. Gee, that is how the law works already, isn't it?
But if the cost is your complaint then you have to make illegal the messages offering to hire you along with the ones that want to sell you something.
I'm willing to pay the cost to receive job and interview offers, not spam. The former is implied when I post the resumé. Heck, I might even state it outright. There's no way that any "reasonable person" could view my resumé online and think "this guy must want me to tell him about herbal Viagra."
Suppose I post a message online that says "please, if you are a lawyer in Virginia, call me collect." I don't see that as an open invitation for random people who see the message to call me to tell me about breast enlargers, free credit reports, refinancing my mortgage, and how to become an Internet millionaire. Do you?
I don't make technology decisions based on "old grudges".
Then don't bring up crap about what Sun was doing back in '93.
Also, if the pisspoor 3rd party vendor support that plagued Solaris in '97 has changed I would be receptive to any genuine updates on this matter. However, Linux is already filling that void.
Always the plug for Linux. As I said before, you are simply a Linux shill who is using this discussion to tout Linux and put down Solaris, a competitor.
If I want to run a high-volume mail server or e-commerce web site, why should I care if there is a third-party port of Tux Racer? If I am running satellite simulation and control software on Solaris, why would I care about the existence of third-party browser plug-ins?
1)Your reasoning is ass-backwards. IDE was the more standard configuration in those days. In all likelihood it would have been the cheaper option to support and would have allowed for PC economies of scale to be exploited.
IDE was not the "standard configuration in those days" for scientific workstations and servers -- because IDE performed so poorly. "Market demand" for IDE support in Solaris has nothing to do with the peripherals on your home PC. It has to do with the peripherals run by their market segment -- scientific workstations and servers. I said that the decision was based on "market demand, engineering costs, and performance." In '93, it would not have made sense for Sun to incur the "engineering costs" to produce a feature for which there was little "market demand" (in their market segments) and that would have resulted in poor "performance."
Your claim is also made absurd by the fact that Sun did infact eventually manage to support IDE.
Again, I'll try to make this easier for you. The IDE drives of today are much faster than they were in '93. As a result, many scientific workstations and low-end servers now use IDE, so there is a market demand that was not there in '93. That justifies the engineering costs to support it.
Also, if various collections of hobbyists could support IDE hardware, the cost argument is really absurd and unsupportable.
Hobbyists are donating their time and not doing it for profit. By your twisted line of reasoning, Sun should have been able to write their whole OS for free because hobbyists developed Linux for free.
2) You are highly naieve.
And you are illiterate. Buy a dictionary.
Most information collected in such forced registration procedures is total garbage.
The information that I supplied was true. You are assuming that your willingness to lie is typical. I doubt it.
Point 4 is blatantly false because Sun doesn't need to host the files and it's got one of the biggest fattest pipes on the planet.
You don't know whether Sun needs to host the files or not. You have not discussed the matter with their lawyers. You do not know how allowing sites to mirror the files would affect the IP rights. You don't know if Sun is trying to keep open the option of removing the OS from distribution at some future date. Having it on mirrors makes that a lot harder to do. While Sun has a lot of bandwidth, they are actually using it. That's why they bought it. You seem to think that it is limitless. It's not.
You can now go lie in bed and stare up at the picture of Linus Torvalds on your bedroom ceiling. Sorry to upset you by discussing a non-Linux OS.
Then the only way to stop spam is to make your resumé "confidential."
Kind of an ugly choice: Make your contact information less accessible to potential employers or be prepared for a deluge of spam.
Do you really want a judge deciding that "I saw your resumé so I decided to offer you this job" is OK but "I saw your resumé so I decided to offer you this penis enlargement" isn't?
Yes. Without question.
What about "I saw your resumé so I decided to offer you this recruitment service," or "this resumé writing service?"
Again, yes. If I feel the need to use such services, I can seek them out.
Seems to me like a prior restraint on speech based on content.
It's not the speech that is being restrained, just the delivery method. If those same advertisers wanted to use my postal mailing address to send me ads via the USPS, then I'd have no legitimate complaint. They would be paying the cost to deliver the ads to me. It would cost me nothing.
The "false headers" laws have different problems.
The main one being that they serve little useful purpose. False headers are not the problem and I'm sure that you, like me and millions of others, are quite capable of tracking e-mail even when it has falsified headers.
If an SMTP server receives a connection from 1.2.3.4 with a message whose Received: header says 5.6.7.8, then the server would reject the message, possibly logging a non-compliant server.
Let's disect an example Received: header:
Received: from smtp-server.cox.rr.com ([24.163.111.127]) by Mail6.mgfairfax.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.537.53);
Sun, 31 Dec 2000 09:13:39 -0500
The server name smtp-server.cox.rr.com is supplied by the server that sends the message. It does so in the HELO/EHLO portion of the SMTP protocol exchange:
HELO smtp-server.cox.rr.com
The IP address ([24.163.111.127]) is the actual IP address that delivered the message to the server that wrote the Received: header. In this case, the server that wrote the header was Mail6.mgfairfax.rr.com.
So, do we have a match? The only way to tell is to do a DNS lookup on the address and see if the name matches what the server said its name was.
But that's where things can get ugly. There may be no DNS entry for the server. So a lookup on the IP address results in no name found. There are simple configuration issues where the SMTP server is configured to use a different name than what is shown by DNS. For example, suppose that an ISP had 20 mail servers with names of smtp1.isp.com through smtp20.isp.com. The servers might all be configured to report their identity as smtp.isp.com. The ISP might do this to hide the number of servers that they run or just as a convenience so that all servers are configured the same.
So, was the message from a spammer? Nope. It was a listserver at CNET which sent it to my bigfoot.com address which forwarded it to an e-mail address at my ISP. You will note that the topmost Received: header says nothing about CNET or bigfoot. Why? Because it is showing a relay within my ISP where the mail is transferred from a national server to a local one.
Besides, most spam is sent with no forged Received: headers. So it does little good to look for forgeries there. Sorry. I wish you had a winner there, but I am afraid that you don't.
Your signature reads:
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Don't make fun of edlin. It's probably the last program that they released that did not present a huge security risk.
That fly by night ISP must get its internet connection from somewhere.
So what if the fly-by-night ISP in Gangdong-gu, Korea gets their connection from some larger ISP in Gangdong-gu, Korea? It might be easier to tell that without forged headers, but what good would the knowledge do? The spam will keep coming and you'll complain to ISPs that may not read English and probably do not care.
Besides, forged headers have nothing to do with how the average person responds to spam. They would have no idea as to how to interpret headers, forged or not. Those of us who fight the spam problem every day are seldom fooled by forged headers. The only thing we don't have is the throwaway e-mail address of the sender, but that hardly matters. We have the IP address and the time the spam was sent, so that's good enough.
I must need education on pobox.com. If they originate the first Received-From: header, isn't that good enough?
pobox.com does not handle outgoing mail. They only handle incoming mail. If you sign up for their service, you continue to use your ISP's SMTP and POP server, but you list your From: address as the one supplied by pobox.com. When a message comes into pobox.com for you, it is forwarded by them to the address of your choice.
You initially asked:
Why can't SMTP relays reject mail whose most recent Received-From: header does not match the the sender?
Suppose you had a pobox.com account and your ISP was Earthlink. The most recent Received-From line in e-mails sent from you would be some mail server at Earthlink while the sender would be your pobox.com address. Thus the mismatch -- even though the e-mail is perfectly legit.
Another example: When I would send personal e-mail from one of my client sites, they had a firewall configuration that would not let me access outside SMTP servers (but I could access my POP3 server). So I would use their SMTP server for outgoing e-mail even though my return address would be my normal personal e-mail address.