What I am saying is that babelfish gives more accurate translations when you provide it with valid source material. The translations aren't perfect, but they're even LESS perfect when the source material "is teh sux0r."
And right now the sky is a dark blue, almost black, speckled with tiny dots of white and yellow.
Everyone can totally bastardize the English language just as long as all the other English speakers can read it? What if the meaning isn't clear to others, though? What about the non-English speakers who make use of babelfish? How often do bad spelling and grammar prevent the exchange of information across language boundaries because those using the source language (English) just straight-up don't know how to use it?
I'll put it to you this way: you've got a programmer who can read Cobol and can code in straight ANSI C. You tell him "Port this app that no longer compiles and runs" and he can, as long as the Cobol is syntactically correct. If it isn't syntactically correct, then you don't get your app ported. Who do you blame? The eighth grader that wrote the Cobol app poorly in the first place.
In short: you can only translate one-for-one when your source material is syntactically valid. English is not the only language on the planet, but it can be translated to and from other languages, assuming that the source language is syntactically valid.
Doing English by the rules isn't just about making the person you're interacting with today understand you now. It's about language standing up to the test of time. It's about 20 years from now, some researcher with too much time on his hands, going through all the old slashdot archives to learn about the youth of the internet. He's going to think we're all idiots if all we're concerned with is understanding one another right now in this very moment. I mean, how narrow-minded and short-sighted is that, really? To think that these words we write which are recorded and unchangeable (slashdot's comment system doesn't allow editing)... to think that these words have only meaning in the context of the current discussion and its current participants... Well, isn't that just the epitome of ignorance? Why would we preserve all of this if it were only pertinent to those participating in the discussion at that very instant? I guess this thought doesn't enter most peoples' minds.
They use a turkey baster or eyedropper of some kind to slowly remove the water from the goldfish's bowl, then when it's totally empty, they pour in a can of (presumably) cold mountain dew. The fish floats to the top, still (dead?). Then they remove the mountain dew with the baster/dropper again, and replace with presumably warm water. The fish floats to the top, still (dead?). Then they poke it with a 9V battery and it springs back to life.
I'm not talking about a moderation system where Joe Schmoe gets to evaluate a patent's merits. I'm talking about a moderation system where people get to decide if the approval of a patent was fair or unfair, but they don't get to pick which patent approvals they are considering, they're presented a random list. They can meta-moderate as much as they want, but they don't get to pick what they meta-moderate.
In a similar vein, rejected patents should also be meta-moderated for fairness.
Yeah, but stupid-ass META moderations? Have you meta-moderated lately?
The meta moderation system doesn't allow you to pick and choose what you moderate. It presents you with a list of moderations and requests that you decide whether those moderations were fair or not.
Meta moderation is a way to police the stupid-ass moderations you speak of.
It is not theft of the work, it is theft of the revenue that the author could expect.
What?
The revenue was never guaranteed. I didn't sign a contract saying I'd pay up and then not pay. I have in no way deceived the author by downloading his works instead of buying them from an authorized distributor.
You don't really understand why people do drugs, do you?
People do drugs to FEEL GOOD. If you take away one path for them to succeed in society by effectively telling them they are not allowed to feel good "in that way", they're going to feel worse and possibly do more (possibly different, possibly harder) drugs. Now think about the consequences to society for expelling all the pot-smokin' mushroom-eatin' college kids who still manage to pull a 2.0 to 4.0. The former good students that were exercising their personal freedom. Think about the tax burden they'll be once they're out there on welfare, because you think they should be robbed of their only chance at success in today's modern America.
Will you expell the cigarette smokers too? How about all those paxil addicts? There should be some kind of consequence to feeling good? What planet are you from?
And it's these criminal hackers that put monetary worth ahead of personal integrity that are giving real hackers a bad name. The word "hacker" gets thrown around so wildly sometimes, without any real distinction that there can be good and bad hackers.
You quoted "just allow for the fact that it needs to get replaced every so often." and then you said "that's great until it fails in the middle of a shoot." -- did you not read what you quoted? You need to allow for the fact that it needs to get replaced every so often. This means carrying a backup (a spare, if you will) camcorder, just in case, and swapping the two as needed.
And I'm saying that your mentality is that of a coward. If what you have to say is of any real merit, you might get modded down once or twice, but you'll also get modded up a couple times as well.
What you need to do is stand up for what you want to say, knowing that the system itself is unfair and flawed, just to spite those unfair flaws.
There's a reason we call them Anonymous Cowards. A coward is most definitely afraid of what other people think of his opinion, so afraid that he would conceal not his opinion, but that the opinion is his and originated in his own mind.
There's a word for people like you: Coward.
So WHAT if somebody dislikes your opinion and mods you down? Do you know how many people read at -1 for both a good laugh and to mod up those that have unfairly been modded down? What about the meta-moderation system? I've been modded troll or redundant a few times (if you were a subscriber you could go look) but you know what? That's what other people think about my opinion, and no single comment containing a single opinion is wholly representative of who I am. Not until my comments are all modded 90% troll, flamebait, or redundant, will I ever consider commenting as an AC. Since I'm a decent human being however, I don't see this number getting near 10%, let alone going over it.
Stand UP for your opinions because they are your own, and stop hiding behind a cowl of anonymity. At the least, you're totally misrepresenting yourself by concealing your own opinions. Don't back down because you think others will disagree, you need to stand up and say what you think.
I think AC needs to be completely done away with, as fostering cowardice is really not what a site dedicated to nerds needs, as we're cloistered enough as it is.
From TFA: MasterCard said Saturday that 68,000 of its own account numbers were especially at risk because they were in a file found to have actually been "exported from the system."
In other words, 68,000 numbers were in a file exported from the system, but the system still contained 40 million credit card numbers from different credit card companies (Mastercard, Visa, American Express, etc).
Oh, oh, I know! stuff some cotton balls down the neck of the bong, so the water can't pass through. bingo! Plus you get an extra filter stage--what's not to like?! (mild sarcasm)
People who get burned by the bad use of blacklists are usually not the people that know how to fix the problem, and blacklist "message returned" emails are never very helpful with regard to fixing an erroneously blocked email address or IP. This boils down to shitty implementation of a list of blocked IPs created by a group that absolves itself of all responsibility for the validity of the reasoning for blocking those IPs.
Consider for a moment Joe American, who doesn't know what a "mailserver" is and doesn't know that if he's having problems sending mail from one address, he may not have the problem from another address. If he hasn't been shown how to do it by his brother/cousin/friend/neighbor then he doesn't know how to do it, period. You could switch mail servers in an instance like this, certainly. So could I, for that matter. But Joe American is not going to know how to switch mail servers or even consider using hotmail unless he uses hotmail for his primary address.
People keep throwing out these solutions like they're easy for everyone. Easy for US, the people who read slashdot, sure. But everyone else? They aren't so fortunate, and we need to have consideration for them, as they are the significant majority.
Consider that this is irrelevant and NOT what an RBL does. If your home ISP is subscribing to a blacklist that blocks email from your work, as in your example, then WTF would you continue to use that ISP? You could complain to your ISP to fix the problem, or you could get the people at your work to switch to another ISP (the reason your work got blacklisted) or whatever.
You seem to lack understanding just as the others do. I'm not saying this would be a permanent occurence that has always been and would require switching ISPs, it is actually rather infrequent and somewhat "occasional" by nature. But just because it happens a little bit doesn't mean we should ignore the circumstance all together.
It could be that autoforwards from work to home or home to mobile or work to mobile or etc, could have always worked. It could be that one day, they just... stopped, unexplained. Well, it would be explained if the end user knew that the IP had been blacklisted, but since they're away from work (in my example) they can't check their work email and read the rejection message.
I'm supposing an infrequent and yet possible circumstance. Just because it's infrequent doesn't mean it's an unimportant side-effect; it's a FLAW with the use of blacklists and needs to be examined and corrected.
I'm not introducing any bullshit and I'm not missing the point. Blacklists maintained by small groups can be arbitrarily edited and are prone to egotistical vigilanteism over time--that is the point. People who use email in a way that you don't (or don't understand) can be very detrimentally affected by such willy-nilly blacklist editing. What about somebody in communist China or North Korea trying to communicate with the outside world unhindered by using an anonymous open relay to send mail that the Chinese government consideres "sensitive." ? What happens when somebody else using that relay for spamming gets it added to a blacklist and "just switching ISPs" isn't as easy an option as you make it out to be, you ignoramus?
The gravity of any given scenario is variable (hindering work, hindering freedom, etc), but the overall the ability to impact the end user as a result of this egotistical power-tripping vigilante approach to eliminating spam is significant, even if infrequent, amd must be treated seriously.
You need to select their "High" setting for spam control, but they have a blacklist and if you get mail from anything on the blacklist, it instantly goes away into the "known spam" folder and you're never told about it (ie, you only see the "known spam" folder via the webmail system, and mail sent to that folder is not delivered by pop3). I did in-home tech support for a while and I went to a guy's house who was having problems receiving email from a customer of his who had *just switched ISPs*. The man had set his spam control to high when originally setting up his e-mail the year prior, without realising the implications of doing so. See, there's also a "suspect email" folder where stuff that appears to be spam but isn't on the blacklist goes, and a weekly summary message is generated for these mails, which lists the address and subject and a timestamp for all "suspect" messages. The guy thought that this message was wholly representative of all the spam he was getting, and he never saw any valid messages coming in on it so he never fussed with it. But the "known spam" filter was eating (at least one of) his messages and not telling him...
You only asked for one. There you go.
(This was two years ago, but their support page still reads: "Known spam blocking detects messages from known spammers on EarthLink servers and intercepts them before they reach your inbox. These messages are automatically sent to your "Known spam" folder, where you can view the messages before deleting them. This level of protection works regardless of your email program.")
Singletoned didn't claim that RBLs prevent people from sending. He did not make an all-encompassing statement like you did. He claimed that in a given instance, a blacklist was used to prevent the sending of mail. Perhaps "sending" isn't the right word to use, but intercepting mail in transit before it reaches the intended recipient and then not telling the intended recipient of the intercept is kind of getting in the way of sending the mail. I mean, if you put insufficient postage on a letter and stick it in the mailbox and then you get it back with an "INSUFFICIENT POSTAGE" stamp/sticker on it, do you feel like you've been prevented from sending the message? It doesn't matter that the message went out in the mail when you stuck it in the mailbox (or clicked "Send") because it came back before it reached its recipient. It's this not-reaching-the-recipient that would lead somebody to the conclusion that mail is being prevented from being sent. That the block is implemented on the "receiving end" (but not by the receiver, so I don't know how you can call it the "receiving end" as it's more like the "transmission stage" than anything, an in-the-middle place that is neither sender nor recipient) really doesn't matter, as the effect is that the message sent to a given recipient is not received as intended, providing the impression that it did not get sent properly.
Or to put it another way, if the "collateral damage" from RBLs were anything other than insignificant, compared to the benefit they provide, then world+dog wouldn't be using them.
So we have to wait until blacklists become significantly harmful before we'll change our ways? What ever happened to foresight? Just because they're having a small harmful effect now doesn't mean that will always be the case. Waiting until something is broken to fix it gives you massive power outages (Summer 2003, northeast USA, and in Russia recently), huge security holes (anything from Microsoft), and so forth. Don't wait until it's a problem to fix it, FIX IT NOW.
You know, you're an idiot for suggesting email just vanishes because of blacklists. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Here we go again, another one that doesn't understand... I didn't suggest that email disappears as a result of blacklists. I suggested that infuckingredibly ignorant implementations of blacklists result in mail disappearing into the digital void.
In fact, blocking via blacklisting is the only majorly-used spam fighting method that lets the sender receive notification their email was decided as spam.
And what good does that do, exactly? What do you do to correct it? Mail the admin@whateverhost.com? How do we do that if our e-mail is being blocked? Hmm? Do these "your message has been blocked" e-mails contain a phone number at which you can call somebody to have your address unblocked? I have never, EVER seen a "your message has been blocked" mail that contained a phone number. So while it might be great that a blacklist will notify the sender that the message wasn't transmitted to its intended recipient, they seldom (if ever) provide a means for the sender to easily correct the problem. Again, it's about shitty implementation of blacklists and not the blacklists themselves.
And I have no idea what you mean by 'a blacklist allows any server between the sender and the receipient'...you are aware that no email is forward by random third parties anymore, right? And if you had someone SMTP forwarding your incoming mail, you better damn well be in charge of the spam filtering on them, and it should be right there in the contract. And outgoing smarthosts don't filter mail at all, that doesn't even make sense.
You can't talk about this in absolutes because you don't know how people use e-mail. E-mail is forwarded by third parties, still, to this day. There are instances in which mail does not go directly from point A to point B.
Consider for example an autoforwarding filter that transmits mail from your work address to your home address while you're on vacation. Now the message hits at least two incoming mail servers, the one at work and the one at home. What happens if you're not at your computer at home and you've got the home computer set up to forward to your mobile device (pager, RIM, whatever)? Then there's a third server in the mix, the one your mobile device uses. What about people who have one e-mail address they use in plain text online (and which therefore receives a lot of spam) but they've got a filter set up that auto-forwards mail that contains [Job], [Friend], or [Urgent] in the subject line? What if the address the auto-forwarder points to just upgraded to some new version of a blacklist that blocks the address that received the mail originally (and is thus doing the forwarding)? Then the address that never gets checked because it's full of spam gets a "your message was blocked" message, which is totally useless.
I think you're the idiot. You speak in absolutes and you do so without considering that there are other people out there who use e-mail in a manner that you personally do not. That's a mark of idiocy, as far as I'm concerned.
Okay, let's use that metaphor. The postman has 50 lbs of mail for you every day. 45 lbs are fraudulent or advertising some sort of snake oil/porn site. Your mailbox holds 7 lbs of mail. The postmaster has a list of people who send mail to every email address on the face of the earth and a good number of addresses that don't exist. The postman takes those sending addresses and uses them to weed out roughly 40 lbs of mail, so your mailbox is only half full of crap instead of 90%. Unfortunately, you just lost 30% of your mail because it wouldn't fit.
Then deliver 7 pounds of mail per day over a 7 (and some fraction) day period. This is totally irrelevant though, because if something won't fit in your mailbox, the postman will come to your door and tell you about the package or packages and require you to sign for them because they couldn't be transmitted to their legal receptacle (the mailbox).
Irrelevant. Nobody expects that email is a reliable transport, and sending mail is no proof of receipt. The legal status of email is largely irrelevant to the question.
Um, what?
I did a google search on e-mail site:.gov and came up with tons of results. Here's one: http://www.doiu.nbc.gov/orientation/email.html This page describes the Department of the Interior's email policy. They say: e-mail systems are highly reliable for transmitting messages. They also say: Q4. If my outgoing message is a record, should I ask for a return receipt to make sure that the person I sent it to got it?
A4. It is not necessary to ask for a return receipt or read receipt in e-mail any more than it is necessary in hard copy. We don't send all letters certified mail. If it is important to document for the record the time that a message was opened, then that receipt must be retained along with the message for as long as the message is retained. You also need to have some means of linking the receipt to the message so it is clear what outgoing message the receipt documents.
So they acknowledge openly that the mail could be intercepted in transit, just as postal mail could, but they still consider it to be highly reliable.
From a state government website (Kentucky): http://www.kdla.ky.gov/recmanagement/tutorial/emai l.htm Electronic Mail (e-mail) is an important communication tool for conducting government business in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Increasingly, government agencies use e-mail systems to distribute memos, circulate drafts, disseminate directives, transfer official documents, send external correspondence, and support various aspects of government operations.
Disseminate directives? Transfer OFFICIAL documents?
The office of the attorney general in New York began accepting document service by email in 2003: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/serviceag/serviceag.htm l Except as set forth in paragraph 2, below, beginning January 1, 2003, the Attorney General's Office will participate in the Court of Claims' Filing by Electronic Means (FBEM) pilot project and will accept service by e-mail of the following documents
Do I need to keep going to illustrate how totally wrong you are not only about the reliability of email, but of the perceived reliability of email? (I shouldn't have to, but this is slashdot, after all)
Slashdot Mirror
I've got some napalm here that would suggest otherwise.
who?
What I am saying is that babelfish gives more accurate translations when you provide it with valid source material. The translations aren't perfect, but they're even LESS perfect when the source material "is teh sux0r."
And right now the sky is a dark blue, almost black, speckled with tiny dots of white and yellow.
Everyone can totally bastardize the English language just as long as all the other English speakers can read it? What if the meaning isn't clear to others, though? What about the non-English speakers who make use of babelfish? How often do bad spelling and grammar prevent the exchange of information across language boundaries because those using the source language (English) just straight-up don't know how to use it?
... to think that these words have only meaning in the context of the current discussion and its current participants... Well, isn't that just the epitome of ignorance? Why would we preserve all of this if it were only pertinent to those participating in the discussion at that very instant? I guess this thought doesn't enter most peoples' minds.
I'll put it to you this way: you've got a programmer who can read Cobol and can code in straight ANSI C. You tell him "Port this app that no longer compiles and runs" and he can, as long as the Cobol is syntactically correct. If it isn't syntactically correct, then you don't get your app ported. Who do you blame? The eighth grader that wrote the Cobol app poorly in the first place.
In short: you can only translate one-for-one when your source material is syntactically valid. English is not the only language on the planet, but it can be translated to and from other languages, assuming that the source language is syntactically valid.
Doing English by the rules isn't just about making the person you're interacting with today understand you now. It's about language standing up to the test of time. It's about 20 years from now, some researcher with too much time on his hands, going through all the old slashdot archives to learn about the youth of the internet. He's going to think we're all idiots if all we're concerned with is understanding one another right now in this very moment. I mean, how narrow-minded and short-sighted is that, really? To think that these words we write which are recorded and unchangeable (slashdot's comment system doesn't allow editing)
They use a turkey baster or eyedropper of some kind to slowly remove the water from the goldfish's bowl, then when it's totally empty, they pour in a can of (presumably) cold mountain dew. The fish floats to the top, still (dead?). Then they remove the mountain dew with the baster/dropper again, and replace with presumably warm water. The fish floats to the top, still (dead?). Then they poke it with a 9V battery and it springs back to life.
It is really worth watching.
I'm not talking about a moderation system where Joe Schmoe gets to evaluate a patent's merits. I'm talking about a moderation system where people get to decide if the approval of a patent was fair or unfair, but they don't get to pick which patent approvals they are considering, they're presented a random list. They can meta-moderate as much as they want, but they don't get to pick what they meta-moderate.
In a similar vein, rejected patents should also be meta-moderated for fairness.
Yeah, but stupid-ass META moderations? Have you meta-moderated lately?
The meta moderation system doesn't allow you to pick and choose what you moderate. It presents you with a list of moderations and requests that you decide whether those moderations were fair or not.
Meta moderation is a way to police the stupid-ass moderations you speak of.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
(I don't normally post non-contributing comments like this, but I had to make an exception)
I like the idea of patent meta-moderation.
What interface are you using? USB? ATA? other? Maybe you're encountering a bottleneck that has little to do with the card technology itself?
What?
The revenue was never guaranteed. I didn't sign a contract saying I'd pay up and then not pay. I have in no way deceived the author by downloading his works instead of buying them from an authorized distributor.
You don't really understand why people do drugs, do you?
People do drugs to FEEL GOOD. If you take away one path for them to succeed in society by effectively telling them they are not allowed to feel good "in that way", they're going to feel worse and possibly do more (possibly different, possibly harder) drugs. Now think about the consequences to society for expelling all the pot-smokin' mushroom-eatin' college kids who still manage to pull a 2.0 to 4.0. The former good students that were exercising their personal freedom. Think about the tax burden they'll be once they're out there on welfare, because you think they should be robbed of their only chance at success in today's modern America.
Will you expell the cigarette smokers too? How about all those paxil addicts? There should be some kind of consequence to feeling good? What planet are you from?
And it's these criminal hackers that put monetary worth ahead of personal integrity that are giving real hackers a bad name. The word "hacker" gets thrown around so wildly sometimes, without any real distinction that there can be good and bad hackers.
I'm holding out for a Dakota Digital disposable camcorder hack that takes smartmedia (or similar) cards.
You quoted "just allow for the fact that it needs to get replaced every so often." and then you said "that's great until it fails in the middle of a shoot." -- did you not read what you quoted? You need to allow for the fact that it needs to get replaced every so often. This means carrying a backup (a spare, if you will) camcorder, just in case, and swapping the two as needed.
And I'm saying that your mentality is that of a coward. If what you have to say is of any real merit, you might get modded down once or twice, but you'll also get modded up a couple times as well.
What you need to do is stand up for what you want to say, knowing that the system itself is unfair and flawed, just to spite those unfair flaws.
There's a reason we call them Anonymous Cowards. A coward is most definitely afraid of what other people think of his opinion, so afraid that he would conceal not his opinion, but that the opinion is his and originated in his own mind.
There's a word for people like you: Coward.
So WHAT if somebody dislikes your opinion and mods you down? Do you know how many people read at -1 for both a good laugh and to mod up those that have unfairly been modded down? What about the meta-moderation system? I've been modded troll or redundant a few times (if you were a subscriber you could go look) but you know what? That's what other people think about my opinion, and no single comment containing a single opinion is wholly representative of who I am. Not until my comments are all modded 90% troll, flamebait, or redundant, will I ever consider commenting as an AC. Since I'm a decent human being however, I don't see this number getting near 10%, let alone going over it.
Stand UP for your opinions because they are your own, and stop hiding behind a cowl of anonymity. At the least, you're totally misrepresenting yourself by concealing your own opinions. Don't back down because you think others will disagree, you need to stand up and say what you think.
I think AC needs to be completely done away with, as fostering cowardice is really not what a site dedicated to nerds needs, as we're cloistered enough as it is.
From TFA:
MasterCard said Saturday that 68,000 of its own account numbers were especially at risk because they were in a file found to have actually been "exported from the system."
In other words, 68,000 numbers were in a file exported from the system, but the system still contained 40 million credit card numbers from different credit card companies (Mastercard, Visa, American Express, etc).
Oh, oh, I know! stuff some cotton balls down the neck of the bong, so the water can't pass through. bingo! Plus you get an extra filter stage--what's not to like?! (mild sarcasm)
People who get burned by the bad use of blacklists are usually not the people that know how to fix the problem, and blacklist "message returned" emails are never very helpful with regard to fixing an erroneously blocked email address or IP. This boils down to shitty implementation of a list of blocked IPs created by a group that absolves itself of all responsibility for the validity of the reasoning for blocking those IPs.
Consider for a moment Joe American, who doesn't know what a "mailserver" is and doesn't know that if he's having problems sending mail from one address, he may not have the problem from another address. If he hasn't been shown how to do it by his brother/cousin/friend/neighbor then he doesn't know how to do it, period. You could switch mail servers in an instance like this, certainly. So could I, for that matter. But Joe American is not going to know how to switch mail servers or even consider using hotmail unless he uses hotmail for his primary address.
People keep throwing out these solutions like they're easy for everyone. Easy for US, the people who read slashdot, sure. But everyone else? They aren't so fortunate, and we need to have consideration for them, as they are the significant majority.
You seem to lack understanding just as the others do. I'm not saying this would be a permanent occurence that has always been and would require switching ISPs, it is actually rather infrequent and somewhat "occasional" by nature. But just because it happens a little bit doesn't mean we should ignore the circumstance all together.
It could be that autoforwards from work to home or home to mobile or work to mobile or etc, could have always worked. It could be that one day, they just... stopped, unexplained. Well, it would be explained if the end user knew that the IP had been blacklisted, but since they're away from work (in my example) they can't check their work email and read the rejection message.
I'm supposing an infrequent and yet possible circumstance. Just because it's infrequent doesn't mean it's an unimportant side-effect; it's a FLAW with the use of blacklists and needs to be examined and corrected.
I'm not introducing any bullshit and I'm not missing the point. Blacklists maintained by small groups can be arbitrarily edited and are prone to egotistical vigilanteism over time--that is the point. People who use email in a way that you don't (or don't understand) can be very detrimentally affected by such willy-nilly blacklist editing. What about somebody in communist China or North Korea trying to communicate with the outside world unhindered by using an anonymous open relay to send mail that the Chinese government consideres "sensitive." ? What happens when somebody else using that relay for spamming gets it added to a blacklist and "just switching ISPs" isn't as easy an option as you make it out to be, you ignoramus?
The gravity of any given scenario is variable (hindering work, hindering freedom, etc), but the overall the ability to impact the end user as a result of this egotistical power-tripping vigilante approach to eliminating spam is significant, even if infrequent, amd must be treated seriously.
Earthlink.
You need to select their "High" setting for spam control, but they have a blacklist and if you get mail from anything on the blacklist, it instantly goes away into the "known spam" folder and you're never told about it (ie, you only see the "known spam" folder via the webmail system, and mail sent to that folder is not delivered by pop3). I did in-home tech support for a while and I went to a guy's house who was having problems receiving email from a customer of his who had *just switched ISPs*. The man had set his spam control to high when originally setting up his e-mail the year prior, without realising the implications of doing so. See, there's also a "suspect email" folder where stuff that appears to be spam but isn't on the blacklist goes, and a weekly summary message is generated for these mails, which lists the address and subject and a timestamp for all "suspect" messages. The guy thought that this message was wholly representative of all the spam he was getting, and he never saw any valid messages coming in on it so he never fussed with it. But the "known spam" filter was eating (at least one of) his messages and not telling him...
You only asked for one. There you go.
(This was two years ago, but their support page still reads: "Known spam blocking detects messages from known spammers on EarthLink servers and intercepts them before they reach your inbox. These messages are automatically sent to your "Known spam" folder, where you can view the messages before deleting them. This level of protection works regardless of your email program.")
So we have to wait until blacklists become significantly harmful before we'll change our ways? What ever happened to foresight? Just because they're having a small harmful effect now doesn't mean that will always be the case. Waiting until something is broken to fix it gives you massive power outages (Summer 2003, northeast USA, and in Russia recently), huge security holes (anything from Microsoft), and so forth. Don't wait until it's a problem to fix it, FIX IT NOW.
Here we go again, another one that doesn't understand... I didn't suggest that email disappears as a result of blacklists. I suggested that infuckingredibly ignorant implementations of blacklists result in mail disappearing into the digital void.
And what good does that do, exactly? What do you do to correct it? Mail the admin@whateverhost.com? How do we do that if our e-mail is being blocked? Hmm? Do these "your message has been blocked" e-mails contain a phone number at which you can call somebody to have your address unblocked? I have never, EVER seen a "your message has been blocked" mail that contained a phone number. So while it might be great that a blacklist will notify the sender that the message wasn't transmitted to its intended recipient, they seldom (if ever) provide a means for the sender to easily correct the problem. Again, it's about shitty implementation of blacklists and not the blacklists themselves.
You can't talk about this in absolutes because you don't know how people use e-mail. E-mail is forwarded by third parties, still, to this day. There are instances in which mail does not go directly from point A to point B.
Consider for example an autoforwarding filter that transmits mail from your work address to your home address while you're on vacation. Now the message hits at least two incoming mail servers, the one at work and the one at home. What happens if you're not at your computer at home and you've got the home computer set up to forward to your mobile device (pager, RIM, whatever)? Then there's a third server in the mix, the one your mobile device uses. What about people who have one e-mail address they use in plain text online (and which therefore receives a lot of spam) but they've got a filter set up that auto-forwards mail that contains [Job], [Friend], or [Urgent] in the subject line? What if the address the auto-forwarder points to just upgraded to some new version of a blacklist that blocks the address that received the mail originally (and is thus doing the forwarding)? Then the address that never gets checked because it's full of spam gets a "your message was blocked" message, which is totally useless.
I think you're the idiot. You speak in absolutes and you do so without considering that there are other people out there who use e-mail in a manner that you personally do not. That's a mark of idiocy, as far as I'm concerned.
Then deliver 7 pounds of mail per day over a 7 (and some fraction) day period. This is totally irrelevant though, because if something won't fit in your mailbox, the postman will come to your door and tell you about the package or packages and require you to sign for them because they couldn't be transmitted to their legal receptacle (the mailbox).
Um, what?
I did a google search on e-mail site:.gov and came up with tons of results. Here's one:
http://www.doiu.nbc.gov/orientation/email.html
This page describes the Department of the Interior's email policy.
They say: e-mail systems are highly reliable for transmitting messages.
They also say: Q4. If my outgoing message is a record, should I ask for a return receipt to make sure that the person I sent it to got it?
A4. It is not necessary to ask for a return receipt or read receipt in e-mail any more than it is necessary in hard copy. We don't send all letters certified mail. If it is important to document for the record the time that a message was opened, then that receipt must be retained along with the message for as long as the message is retained. You also need to have some means of linking the receipt to the message so it is clear what outgoing message the receipt documents.
So they acknowledge openly that the mail could be intercepted in transit, just as postal mail could, but they still consider it to be highly reliable.
From a state government website (Kentucky):
http://www.kdla.ky.gov/recmanagement/tutorial/emai l.htm
Electronic Mail (e-mail) is an important communication tool for conducting government business in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Increasingly, government agencies use e-mail systems to distribute memos, circulate drafts, disseminate directives, transfer official documents, send external correspondence, and support various aspects of government operations.
Disseminate directives? Transfer OFFICIAL documents?
The office of the attorney general in New York began accepting document service by email in 2003:
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/serviceag/serviceag.htm l
Except as set forth in paragraph 2, below, beginning January 1, 2003, the Attorney General's Office will participate in the Court of Claims' Filing by Electronic Means (FBEM) pilot project and will accept service by e-mail of the following documents
Digging back into the internet stone age, is this article from the year 2000, Judge allows subpoenas delivered via email. If Y2K wasn't your bag though, 2002 saw a different judge uphold the validity of process serving by e-mail.
Do I need to keep going to illustrate how totally wrong you are not only about the reliability of email, but of the perceived reliability of email? (I shouldn't have to, but this is slashdot, after all)
As to the l