It's all about the machines on the end. A couple hundred thousand people will now have a portion of their outgoing email silently dropped with no error message.
Some places bounce spam, some don't. If you have a problem with silent drops, you need to talk to the administrator doing the silent dropping, not SPEWS. It's a choice made my the mail admin one way or another. Although I do tend to favor a bounce, you can seriously screw someone over if they're joe-jobbed.
If my IP was added to SPEWS, I'd blame SPEWS, and its users.
Your ISP doesn't deal with abuse complaints. Ergo, your ISP is a more likely source of SPAM and other abuse. So I score mail from your ISP higher. I do it manually for some ISP's (telefonica.br comes to mind). Spews just automates the process. Seems to be your ISP's fault for being a cesspool, unless you feel that being a customer of an ISP should be a legally protected class like being a minority or disabled.
I've known companies that were royally screwed over by emotionally unstable blacklist maintainers with big egos who thought it was a good idea to teach an ISP a lesson by punishing the users who are locked into their internet service.
I'm not saying this has never happened, but I will say that what I've seen happen a lot more often is that some company representative finds out that his company has been blacklisted for one thing or another and demands to be delisted RIGHT NOW. And you better take his word for it and not do any investigation into whether the block is legit. When they don't delist him RIGHT NOW he starts making cart00ney legal threats about how he's going to "sue them into the ground". Things usually degenerate from there. If this exchange is taking place in nanae, there are usually a lot of offensive comments from the penut gallery on behalf of SPEWS and people don't realize, because they couldn't be bothered to actually read and understand the FAQ at SPEWS.org, that the people they're talking to are mostly bored teenagers and not, in fact, SPEWS.
I sincerely believe that EVERY ISP who's users are purposely and unfairly blacklisted would be doing the right thing to sue the blacklist into the ground.
Whats with the entitlement attitude? Who decided you had some kind of god-given right to deliver mail to my server? SPEWS publishes a list based on publicly available criteria on their web site. So long as they're not lying they're not committing any sort of crime, and I can't see that they're really doing anything unfair.
Meanwhile the SPEWS users are doing their best to block SPAM. If they decided SPEWS listings are a useful metric for judging spaminess they have every right to block or score based on that. It's their server. If you don't like it you can try and convince them they're mistaken, or you can move to an ISP that does something about their abuse problems.
Incidentally, those running SPEWS choose to remain anonymous because of people with your attitude - plantiffs never win these suits because the blacklists _aren't doing anything illegal_, but the costs of defending them will often force them to shut down.
So rather than ban 16000 individual IP's, they figured, "hey, a 60 to 1 false positive rate isn't so bad, lets just block a million IP's worth of subnets."
It's not about the machines on the end, it's about the ISP they're connected to. Any one of those other IP's owned by Telewest could start spewing spam tomorrow and Telewest has conclusively demonstrated they won't do squat about it. So it's listed in spews. SPEWS stands for Spam Prevention EARLY WARNING system. I wouldn't block on spews but I certainly don't mind adding it to a scoring system.
In English law you can only recover for your actual loss; a pre-agreed amount is only enforceable if it represents a genuine pre-estimate of the loss. I suspect it would be very difficult, as a legal matter, to show a significant loss.
I don't know about difficulty of showing a loss - Lost customers, admin and helpdesk time due to spam listings adds up in a hurry. That SPEWS listing probably won't go away soon - the amount of time to get delisted tends to reflect the severity of the problem, and if they blocked that large a range they feel it's a severe problem indeed.
EV1 Servers (the guys that paid SCO and tried to backtrack after the user forums exploded)
To be fair, it would seem that EV1 actually paid SCO for something else, and SCO just sorta tacked on the Linux licenses so they can say "Look, they licensed it!"
I don't like to burn bridges, but I'm pretty sure he's already burned it to the ground, even threatening to withhold my final paycheck if I don't find a replacement before I leave.
You know, strictly speaking, it is his responsibility to find a replacement for your position, not yours. You should remind him of this in no uncertain terms.
Also, while labor laws vary of state to state, theres generally some sort of "Thou shalt deliver the last paycheck within x days" sort of clause.
The great crime in this phishing system is at the Patent and Trademark Office. We fund the office, subsidizing corporate IP owners by defending their IP. But when the PTO could enforce trademark IP to protect the consumer, they do little or nothing. How come Citigroup isn't spending billions to protect its trademark, which is used to con thousands of people a day into phishing scams?
First off, phishers are _hard to catch and prosecute_. They're often located in other countries using and/or using compromised resources such as zombified home machines to serve their pages. They're committing fraud, they're not going to stop because Citigroup sends them a cease and desist. Thats like saying the real crime of the war on drugs is that the IRS hasn't dragged in all of these drug kingpins for not paying taxes.
Secondly, who the hell is subsidizing anything? The Patent Office takes in more in user fees than it spends - It's a yearly budget battle for them to keep more of what they bring in, not to get more money from congress. They've been totally user fee supported for at least 12 years now.
The only time comments should be in code, is when the effect of the code is different than it appears to be - different than what a reasonably skilled programmer would expect. That is the only reasonable use for comments. For reference, here is a quick list of arguments and my canned responses:
Great for comments about what the code does. It totally ignores another important aspect of commentable stuff which is why the hell you're doing something in the first place.
Hello. I question. Look, if you need comments to explain the code flow because your method spans four screens and has six levels of conditionals in two levels of loops, all the comments in the world won't help you.
Well written code will explain what it is your doing at a fairly basic level. It will not explain _why you're doing it_. And thus, comments are necessary. Things like edge cases are also not always obvious.
I had a co-worker who needed a little help with his program. It was C code, but all the semicolons were in column 80, arranged in a nice column. Yikes. He casually said "what, you've never seen that?".
You know, I can't exactly put my finger on why, but for some reason I hear something screaming FORTRAN-77! FORTRAN-77 was big on column numbers being significant. I've had at least one engineering student flat out not believe me when I told him why....
Turns out that part of his problem was that he was using float to represent a byte position in an extremely large file. He knew enough that UINT32 wouldn't do it, but...
...Say, have you ever checked out www.thedailywtf.com?
hah I also grade as a university TA, and let me tell you what is more annoying than that... people who don't know how to indent their code, and want you to help debug it! Ahhhhh!!!!!
I'm a CS grad student, and the stuff I see from my fellow grad students amazes me. A pretty large percentage of our incoming students are from India, and it's obvious that a lot of them have never written any significant amount of code. (From talking to a few of them, I get the distinct impression that the indian educational system is pretty much memorize-and-regurgitate all the way up).
In one case one of my fellow grad students was working on a fairly trivial assignment - Take the results of a web form and email them somewhere. (Yeah, in a grad level class. What a joke.). This was done in Perl, and he was having trouble getting it working. So he asked me to look at his code.
No indentation. Sometimes two or three statements on a line. Random line spacing. No Comments. No use strict. No use warnings. No variable declarations whatsoever. Variable names like $a, $b, etc. Moreover, he'd turned what is about a 10 line Perl script into a good solid 50+ lines of code. Augh!!
As a long-time PowerBook owner (replete with curves, beveled edges, and round corners) I walked away from the discussion still thinking that the machines were ugly, but recognizing that they were purposely ugly, rather than from trying to look cool and failing miserably.
My TiBook is pretty angular and boxy looking. The corners are rounded, but thats about it.
This is where relativity comes in. The RF signals are traveling at C relative to the transmitter. If the transmitters are moving at C - 5 MPH, then the radio waves are moving at 2C-5 MPH.
Wrong, actually.
Under Galilean Relativity, you would be correct. this isn't usually what people mean when they talk about relativity. The problem facing physics at the end of the 20th century was that we had two really great systems for describing reality - Newtonian mechanics with constant unchanging distances and a universal clock, and Maxwells equations that described electromagnetism. The problem was with light - Light always moves at C relative to you - regardless of your frame of reference. This totally fubars Galilean relativity, because of exactly this situation.
From the POV of the guys in the Air, obviously the radio signals are traveling away at C. However, according to Maxwell, this is also true for the guys on the ground. Einstein resolved this paradox by doing away with a universal clock, and for that matter universal distance and mass.
I have a question: If the skydivers were travelling near the speed of light, would this still have worked? (note: Ignore the detail that they'd punch a Wile E. Coyote-esque hole into the planet.)
Yes. Thats the whole point of relativity. Its just as valid to say that they're still and that the earth is moving near C towards them, in which case why wouldn't it work?
Would someone please tell me WHY these people continue to get elected? Is half the population of the U.S. just completely blind and ignorant to the damage these guys are doing to our country?
Because the other bunch have failed to provide an attractive alternative, and nobody wants to vote for "loony" third parties.
I'm a pretty heavy smoker (I average a pack a day, more on weekends) and I've had no problems with the slot-loading optical drive on my PowerBook, which I've owned for three years. So I'm a little surprised to see all these reports of problems from other people in this thread. Maybe the thick felt lining Apple uses in its slot-loading optical drives keeps dust and smoke particles out?
Certainly a possibilty, but smoking is in general hell on computers. The smoke tends to get sucked into the ventilation system on computers and the tar combines with dust from the air to create this gooey sludge that coats everything. I've not experienced this with a laptop, but some of the desktops I've worked on have been exceedingly nasty inside.
So using AMD processors can cause more crashes than using Intel processors. It may be the fault of third party drivers, but that still means systems with AMD processors are more unstable than system with Intel processors, which is a bad thing. You may be willing to blow this off but the average user isn't. Just like people blame Windows for crahses caused by programs, spyware, viruses, and third party drivers, they blame AMD when a system with their processors crashes because it has the processor in it. Sure, it's Joe Blow Companies fault for the bad drivers, but they don't crash in an Intel machine.
No, the important lesson here is "Buy a crap chipset, have a crap system". Doesn't matter whether you go AMD or Intel. I've seen plenty of crap Intel MB's and systems that won't stay up for 4 minutes at a time as a result.
Then why is the ACLU considered a liberal organization by most? Which philosophy gives you a better chance at:
Because the ACLU has a long history of being more interested in certain freedoms that others.
Which philosophy gives you a better chance at:
Retaining your constitutionally protected right to bear arms?
Retaining the ability of you and your neighbors to to decide what your children should be taught in the schools your money pays for?
Letting you keep and spend the money you earn as you choose?
Which one has historically? I'll give you a hint, it doesn't start with a L. It doesn't really start with an R these days either, but my point is that Liberals aren't the only ones concerned with freedoms.
I actually liked Xcode and Objective-C and see nothing wrong with the GUI. Besides, you can always do KDE or Gnome if you like that better.
and the command line feels roughly like SunOS used to: it's an OK set of UNIX commands, but somewhat behind the times.
Some people actually like the BSD command line tools. If you don't, just compile the GNU set. Nobody's stopping you, and quite frankly it's trivial to do. What I'd like is to see cp and mv support resource forks.
I had to do a major upgrade to a 25 gig database last week. The server was aging, and had no free space to pull it off, so I had to migrate it all to my laptop, with a 160 gig external drive, and do it there. Even though it has a gig of ram, it still choked (created 7 gigs of swap) and took 2 days to pull it off. I left it sitting on the hotel air conditioner overnight, for fear of the poor little guy melting.
So what you're saying is "I need a very high end machine, so anything else is obsolete". Never mind that the Mac Mini undoubtably cost far less than your uberlaptop with external drive.
Yeah, I'd love to be able to pull off the "switch", mainly because I hate working 16 hour days on the road and would love to be able to shrug clients off and say "my computer doesn't do computer stuff, you can only buy music with it"
This is frankly just stupid. OS X is a full featured Unix. Outside of the very high end environment its capable of doing pretty much anything that another unix based os such as linux is. I do systems administration work on a Powerbook G4, and it's frankly far more up to the task than a PC. If you'd had a Powerbook you could have just put it in target disk mode and copied your DB over, no need for the external drive at all.:) Or booted off of it. I've yet to see a PC do anything nearly that useful.
As someone who's never read it, it sounds from your description like there isn't any story whatsoever. Surely there's something to it other than just notes? Is there enough of a story there to even make one movie out of it?
Nope, thats about it. Seriously, it reads like a Cliffs notes history of middle earth. It wasn't published by Tolkien but by his family post death, if I recall correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Some places bounce spam, some don't. If you have a problem with silent drops, you need to talk to the administrator doing the silent dropping, not SPEWS. It's a choice made my the mail admin one way or another. Although I do tend to favor a bounce, you can seriously screw someone over if they're joe-jobbed.
If my IP was added to SPEWS, I'd blame SPEWS, and its users.
Your ISP doesn't deal with abuse complaints. Ergo, your ISP is a more likely source of SPAM and other abuse. So I score mail from your ISP higher. I do it manually for some ISP's (telefonica.br comes to mind). Spews just automates the process. Seems to be your ISP's fault for being a cesspool, unless you feel that being a customer of an ISP should be a legally protected class like being a minority or disabled.
I've known companies that were royally screwed over by emotionally unstable blacklist maintainers with big egos who thought it was a good idea to teach an ISP a lesson by punishing the users who are locked into their internet service.
I'm not saying this has never happened, but I will say that what I've seen happen a lot more often is that some company representative finds out that his company has been blacklisted for one thing or another and demands to be delisted RIGHT NOW. And you better take his word for it and not do any investigation into whether the block is legit. When they don't delist him RIGHT NOW he starts making cart00ney legal threats about how he's going to "sue them into the ground". Things usually degenerate from there. If this exchange is taking place in nanae, there are usually a lot of offensive comments from the penut gallery on behalf of SPEWS and people don't realize, because they couldn't be bothered to actually read and understand the FAQ at SPEWS.org, that the people they're talking to are mostly bored teenagers and not, in fact, SPEWS.
I sincerely believe that EVERY ISP who's users are purposely and unfairly blacklisted would be doing the right thing to sue the blacklist into the ground.
Whats with the entitlement attitude? Who decided you had some kind of god-given right to deliver mail to my server? SPEWS publishes a list based on publicly available criteria on their web site. So long as they're not lying they're not committing any sort of crime, and I can't see that they're really doing anything unfair.
Meanwhile the SPEWS users are doing their best to block SPAM. If they decided SPEWS listings are a useful metric for judging spaminess they have every right to block or score based on that. It's their server. If you don't like it you can try and convince them they're mistaken, or you can move to an ISP that does something about their abuse problems.
Incidentally, those running SPEWS choose to remain anonymous because of people with your attitude - plantiffs never win these suits because the blacklists _aren't doing anything illegal_, but the costs of defending them will often force them to shut down.
It's not about the machines on the end, it's about the ISP they're connected to. Any one of those other IP's owned by Telewest could start spewing spam tomorrow and Telewest has conclusively demonstrated they won't do squat about it. So it's listed in spews. SPEWS stands for Spam Prevention EARLY WARNING system. I wouldn't block on spews but I certainly don't mind adding it to a scoring system.
I don't know about difficulty of showing a loss - Lost customers, admin and helpdesk time due to spam listings adds up in a hurry. That SPEWS listing probably won't go away soon - the amount of time to get delisted tends to reflect the severity of the problem, and if they blocked that large a range they feel it's a severe problem indeed.
To be fair, it would seem that EV1 actually paid SCO for something else, and SCO just sorta tacked on the Linux licenses so they can say "Look, they licensed it!"
You know, strictly speaking, it is his responsibility to find a replacement for your position, not yours. You should remind him of this in no uncertain terms.
Also, while labor laws vary of state to state, theres generally some sort of "Thou shalt deliver the last paycheck within x days" sort of clause.
First off, phishers are _hard to catch and prosecute_. They're often located in other countries using and/or using compromised resources such as zombified home machines to serve their pages. They're committing fraud, they're not going to stop because Citigroup sends them a cease and desist. Thats like saying the real crime of the war on drugs is that the IRS hasn't dragged in all of these drug kingpins for not paying taxes.
Secondly, who the hell is subsidizing anything? The Patent Office takes in more in user fees than it spends - It's a yearly budget battle for them to keep more of what they bring in, not to get more money from congress. They've been totally user fee supported for at least 12 years now.
Great for comments about what the code does. It totally ignores another important aspect of commentable stuff which is why the hell you're doing something in the first place.
Well written code will explain what it is your doing at a fairly basic level. It will not explain _why you're doing it_. And thus, comments are necessary. Things like edge cases are also not always obvious.
You know, I can't exactly put my finger on why, but for some reason I hear something screaming FORTRAN-77! FORTRAN-77 was big on column numbers being significant. I've had at least one engineering student flat out not believe me when I told him why....
...
Turns out that part of his problem was that he was using float to represent a byte position in an extremely large file. He knew enough that UINT32 wouldn't do it, but
...Say, have you ever checked out www.thedailywtf.com?
I'm a CS grad student, and the stuff I see from my fellow grad students amazes me. A pretty large percentage of our incoming students are from India, and it's obvious that a lot of them have never written any significant amount of code. (From talking to a few of them, I get the distinct impression that the indian educational system is pretty much memorize-and-regurgitate all the way up).
In one case one of my fellow grad students was working on a fairly trivial assignment - Take the results of a web form and email them somewhere. (Yeah, in a grad level class. What a joke.). This was done in Perl, and he was having trouble getting it working. So he asked me to look at his code.
No indentation. Sometimes two or three statements on a line. Random line spacing. No Comments. No use strict. No use warnings. No variable declarations whatsoever. Variable names like $a, $b, etc. Moreover, he'd turned what is about a 10 line Perl script into a good solid 50+ lines of code. Augh!!
My TiBook is pretty angular and boxy looking. The corners are rounded, but thats about it.
This is where relativity comes in. The RF signals are traveling at C relative to the transmitter. If the transmitters are moving at C - 5 MPH, then the radio waves are moving at 2C-5 MPH.
Wrong, actually.
Under Galilean Relativity, you would be correct. this isn't usually what people mean when they talk about relativity. The problem facing physics at the end of the 20th century was that we had two really great systems for describing reality - Newtonian mechanics with constant unchanging distances and a universal clock, and Maxwells equations that described electromagnetism. The problem was with light - Light always moves at C relative to you - regardless of your frame of reference. This totally fubars Galilean relativity, because of exactly this situation.
From the POV of the guys in the Air, obviously the radio signals are traveling away at C. However, according to Maxwell, this is also true for the guys on the ground. Einstein resolved this paradox by doing away with a universal clock, and for that matter universal distance and mass.
I have a question: If the skydivers were travelling near the speed of light, would this still have worked? (note: Ignore the detail that they'd punch a Wile E. Coyote-esque hole into the planet.)
Yes. Thats the whole point of relativity. Its just as valid to say that they're still and that the earth is moving near C towards them, in which case why wouldn't it work?
It's called the Spoils system, or at least it was in my history classes. It started with Andrew Jackson...
Would someone please tell me WHY these people continue to get elected? Is half the population of the U.S. just completely blind and ignorant to the damage these guys are doing to our country?
Because the other bunch have failed to provide an attractive alternative, and nobody wants to vote for "loony" third parties.
Certainly a possibilty, but smoking is in general hell on computers. The smoke tends to get sucked into the ventilation system on computers and the tar combines with dust from the air to create this gooey sludge that coats everything. I've not experienced this with a laptop, but some of the desktops I've worked on have been exceedingly nasty inside.
So using AMD processors can cause more crashes than using Intel processors. It may be the fault of third party drivers, but that still means systems with AMD processors are more unstable than system with Intel processors, which is a bad thing. You may be willing to blow this off but the average user isn't. Just like people blame Windows for crahses caused by programs, spyware, viruses, and third party drivers, they blame AMD when a system with their processors crashes because it has the processor in it. Sure, it's Joe Blow Companies fault for the bad drivers, but they don't crash in an Intel machine.
No, the important lesson here is "Buy a crap chipset, have a crap system". Doesn't matter whether you go AMD or Intel. I've seen plenty of crap Intel MB's and systems that won't stay up for 4 minutes at a time as a result.
Within certain limits drunk soldiers can be more userful - They don't call Tequila "Liquid Courage" for nothin.
Then why is the ACLU considered a liberal organization by most? Which philosophy gives you a better chance at:
Because the ACLU has a long history of being more interested in certain freedoms that others.
Which philosophy gives you a better chance at:
Which one has historically? I'll give you a hint, it doesn't start with a L. It doesn't really start with an R these days either, but my point is that Liberals aren't the only ones concerned with freedoms.
Also, just partition the damn hard disk if you can't boot off something larger than 137 gig. However, it sounds like a bios problem to me....
Nope
I actually liked Xcode and Objective-C and see nothing wrong with the GUI. Besides, you can always do KDE or Gnome if you like that better.
and the command line feels roughly like SunOS used to: it's an OK set of UNIX commands, but somewhat behind the times.
Some people actually like the BSD command line tools. If you don't, just compile the GNU set. Nobody's stopping you, and quite frankly it's trivial to do. What I'd like is to see cp and mv support resource forks.
I had to do a major upgrade to a 25 gig database last week. The server was aging, and had no free space to pull it off, so I had to migrate it all to my laptop, with a 160 gig external drive, and do it there. Even though it has a gig of ram, it still choked (created 7 gigs of swap) and took 2 days to pull it off. I left it sitting on the hotel air conditioner overnight, for fear of the poor little guy melting.
So what you're saying is "I need a very high end machine, so anything else is obsolete". Never mind that the Mac Mini undoubtably cost far less than your uberlaptop with external drive.
Yeah, I'd love to be able to pull off the "switch", mainly because I hate working 16 hour days on the road and would love to be able to shrug clients off and say "my computer doesn't do computer stuff, you can only buy music with it"
This is frankly just stupid. OS X is a full featured Unix. Outside of the very high end environment its capable of doing pretty much anything that another unix based os such as linux is. I do systems administration work on a Powerbook G4, and it's frankly far more up to the task than a PC. If you'd had a Powerbook you could have just put it in target disk mode and copied your DB over, no need for the external drive at all. :) Or booted off of it. I've yet to see a PC do anything nearly that useful.
Unless you need to move to a new system where you need that VB6 Runtime engine..
As someone who's never read it, it sounds from your description like there isn't any story whatsoever. Surely there's something to it other than just notes? Is there enough of a story there to even make one movie out of it?
Nope, thats about it. Seriously, it reads like a Cliffs notes history of middle earth. It wasn't published by Tolkien but by his family post death, if I recall correctly.
No shit, Lexis Nexis is the second largest legal publisher in the country after Westlaw.