Let me tell you a story, a true one as it happens. Its about how I became a leftie.
As some folk on the net know I come from a political family. My cousin was chairman of the UK Conservative party. Other members of the family have been in pretty much every movement you can imagine. One of my great aunts chained herself to the gates of Greenham common at the age of 80 or so.
When I arrived at University I knew a couple of things. First I distrusted the jingoism of the Tory party, I thought their economic policy sucked but I thought that whatever their intentions might be on the cold war they did at least stand up for freedom.
First week a member of SUCA, Southampton University conservative Association tells me about the blacklist the party ran through an organization called the Economic League. Circulated to employers in the engineering and defense industries. Anyone who signed up for radical politics would be on it.
Fuck you I thought. Joined the Labour party the same day. When you have a political party resorting to Stalinist tactics its time to get rid of them. Lets have denouncement boxes at every corner like they had in East Germany.
I found out later, when the FCS was wound up by the Tory central office, that this particular Stalinist scheme was one of the reasons. I have no way of knowing if my particular complaint made it through but there were many others.
The list became public after Robert Maxwell bought a copy and dumped it at the Labour party conference. I was not on it, which of course I took as an insult. But every member of the SUCA committee was. They had basically been reporting on each other during their perpetual faction fights.
When a government has as much power as the Bush administration has claimed, when it considers the first ammendment and compliance with the Geneva Conventions optional extras rather than the law of the land, when it starts wars on stovepiped intelligence and dismisses real intelligence that does not comply with its opinions, when prosecutors who charge corrupt politicians of the President's party or refuse to bring trumped up charges against the opposition are dismissed, when other prosecutors who do the reverse keep their jobs, when no member of the Cabinet can give a straight definition of torture, when all of these are true and more, it is time to say that this is a government that must have less power and not more. We must fear the Bush administration far more than any of the bogeymen they keep to scare us.
US interest rates are like what? 4-6% ? hardly what I call soaring. One of the main reasons the usa is heading for a recession is that the interest rates were/are so low, they made ninja (no income, no job, no assets) loans too hard for financial institutions to resist and now they're stuck with the mess.
We have not hit the crunch point, yet, but we will if things continue as they are. The reason the dollar has dropped against the pound and the ECU is that the US is spending more than it earns. That means either higher inflation as import prices rise.
Short term money is cheap, longer term money gets more expensive. It should be the other way round. The markets expect the price of money to rise.
The fed keeps trying to drop rates, but they only set one rate. The rates paid by borrowers are much higher. The sub-prime market is not being driven by greed and carelessness, not mere desperation as you claim. The idea people got into their heads was that 90% of sub-prime loans could somehow be turned into AAA bonds at essentially zero cost (while charging sub-prime interest rates). It was the idea of the perpetual fee unch.
The same idea fuels the deficit: Republicans say that you can cut taxes and revenues will rise, some even believe that. Others know its a crock but say it anyway because they are scared of the club for growth.
Hands up, who would like to swap the Bush tax cuts for the Clinton economy? I would take that any day. Even though I am the type of person that the Bush tax cuts was meant to help.
Tell you what, I'm willing to pay more in taxes to have an internet where the bandwidth provider doesn't give any one packet priority over another. I don't want Google to be able to pay more to AT&T in order to have its pages load faster than Yahoo. Because then the next step is that News Corp pays AT&T to have its pages load faster than CNN, and Mitt Romney's site gets priority over Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul's.,
Why not? It would seem to be an advantage to you if Google pay AT&T to deliver pages to you at a faster rate than you have paid for.
The problem here is 'than you paid for'. The problem is when AT&T try to get Google to pay for the bandwidth that you have already paid for or decide that they can use the VOIP bandwidth you paid for but Vonage cannot, or Google can buy bandwidth but Yahoo cannot or you can watch Fox News but not CNN.
It is almost exclusively a US issue. Other coutries have managed to break up the local access monopoly on the last mile, the US has not. This has in large part been due to the policy of the Bush administration to favor monopolists.
Comcast et al. would be idiots to actually try to leverage their monopoly power in the ways people fear. They put their monopoly at risk. So of course I expect them to do precisely that for the same reason companies spam: the desperate middle manager who has to make their number that quarter. Who cares about the long term consequences.
One of the other things I have discovered over the years is that the position of DC corporate lobbyists frequently bears absolutely no relationship to the corporations they purportedly represent. They serve their own interests and they are desperate to appear relevant. Take that really smart idea of the bankrupcy bill to stop consumers defaulting on their credit card debts. Now they are defaulting on their mortgage instead and so the banks are loosing hundreds of thousands rather than just thousands.
I'm not disputing the racism in the letters. I am disputing that Ron wrote them and that he agrees with those sentiments. Just as he said in his statement above.
Not exactly very big on accountability your chap, is he?
We are expected to beleive that a newsletter went out for over a decade that Ron Paul had absolutely no part in producing, no authority over and did not even read? His denial does not say that at all. He does not deny funding the newsletter or that he read it. Nor does he say who actually did write the articles.
The biggest failures of the Bush administration have been the abject lack of accountability. Bush blames everyone but himself for the mess in Iraq. It is hard to think of a single member of the administration who was sacked for their incompetence rather than the political inconveniences that their incompetence caused.
So now we are to accept the idea that you can publish a political newsletter to promote your thoughts on politics without taking responsibility for the contents? Sorry that simply does not wash. The best spin that can be put on this situation is that your man is a buffoon. That is hardly a recomendation for someone seeking the US Presidency.
Who did he choose to write the newsletter for him? Would they be offered positions in a Ron Paul administration? How can we trust Ron Paul's judgement on other personnel decisions? Failing to make subordinates accountable is as bad as failure to accept personal accountabilty.
It is a somewhat strange set of criteria that is set up by the media as well. Edwards is disqualified for paying too much for a haircut, Hillary because she is a robot. But Ron Paul can have racist drivel put out under his name for over a decade and somehow it does not rate a mention.
The really, really sad thing here is that Ron Paul is in some ways the least crazy of the GOP contenders. He has the least whacked out tax plan (yes really!) and he is the only one to recognize that Iraq is a failure. But when you read the anti-Zionist screeds in his newsletter you pretty soon realize that they go way beyond mere criticism of Israel, they are unambiguously anti-semitic. That does force one to stop and ask if his Iraq policy might be driven by anti-semitism.
Living in Alaska will teach you the following: that the Anchorage Bowl (the city and surrounding area) is packed. And getting more packed. And you can't go east because there are mountains there. You can't go south because there's water there. You can't go north because the military has it staked out. And you can't go west because there's water there. This bridge, however, would let you go west and expand the city more. It actually has a use.
That may be so. Why does that make it the best way for the Federal government to spend over a billion dollars?
Government spending needs to be judged against a more accurate yardstick than which state happens to have the most powerful Senator with the largest mouth. The same money could have a much greater effect to a much larger number of people in much greater need down in New Orleans.
Ted Stephens is not the sort of person you want to make such choices. His son is facing federal corruption charges. He is almost certainly facing charges himself after a contractor benefiting from his earmarks gifted him an extension of his house.
Every earmark made by Ted Stephens should be put on hold. The Vecco relationship looks like a bribe smells like a bribe and should be considered a bribe unless and until proven otherwise.
Who am I supposed to believe - you, or the NAACP president who has known Paul for 20 years? Tough one there, but I think I'll choose the latter.
Beleive what he published under his own name.
Friends make the most unreliable judges of character. If the NAACP president was making an impartial judgement on the basis of the record that might be convincing.
Oswald Mosley had quite a few Jewish friends who were taken completely by surprise when he suddenly turned into a fascist. Some of them even denied that he was an anti-semite after he became a fascist. There was apparently a notorious dinner party at which Mosley stated that he thought it necessary for his party to have a 'hate plank'. He was a racist by opportunity, not conviction.
Nobody disputes the racism of the newsletters published in Ron Paul's name for so many years. Either the newsletters represent Paul's views in which case he is a racist or they do not in which case he is an opportunist which is considerably worse.
Most NAZIs were not anti-semites by conviction, they just found it convienient to join the party and adopt its ideology.
Why do you think that candidates generally include the line, "I am candidate name and I approve of this message." in their ads?
Because it is a legal requirement that they do so. mcCain Feingold introduced that requirement to stop the practice of anonymous attack ads.
Discrimination is one thing, but free speech, even bigoted speech, should be answered with speech, not banned out of hand. Kicking off one's campaign at Bob Jones U or referring to 'states rights' does not make one a racist, one can speak to groups, even groups with values you don't agree with, without becoming part of that group or endorsing their message.
If you have a forum you can invite others without necessarily endorsing their message. But that is not what Bush and Reagan did. They choose the forums they did in order to send an express but coded message of support for those racist institutions.
Whether Ron Paul wrote the articles that appeared under his name is frankly irrelevant. The President of the Oxford Union can invite Gerry Adams or David Irving to speak if he chooses without necessarily endorsing his position. But publishing an written by one of them in a newsletter that only carries his name and has no indication that it is an outside contribution is an express endorsement of the position.
I have yet to hear if Ron Paul is or is not repudiating the positions in the newsletter. If he does not repudiate them he is a racist, lets not waste any more time arguing the point. If he does repudiate the positions we should be told what else he is likely to be repudiating in the future.
OK so where is the ADL saying that his Zionist conspiracy drivel is not anti-semitic or John Aravosis saying that the homophobic drivel is not gay baiting?
We kinda discovered that people looking into other people's souls and pronouncing them pure is not an effective means of quality control on politicians. Didn't work when Bush tried it with Putin.
Don't look at the man, look at what he says and does, in particular look at what he supports and who he seeks support from.
Absolute number one thing, first day on the job: get a blowjob from a cuter intern than Monica, then post pics of it on MySpace. You know, just to get that out of the way.
You americans are so tediously moralistic, the French have their guy on an 'incentive' program. The more manifesto promises he makes, the more 'rewards'. Mitterand had four mistresses.
I don't qualify under current law, but the first thing I would do is to look at how to make the current US problem in Iraq someone else's problem. Over the past five years Iraq has all but destroyed the US army. Whose army do we most want to destroy most (or care least about)? That would be Iran. So the US says to Iran 'your problem now', withdraw to Kuwait, see whether Iran prefers to have a festering civil war on its border or gets sucked in.
Second foreign policy position: Cuba. Eliminate all sanctions with immediate effect. They have not worked in 40 years and it is obvious that they never will. It is equally obvious that the Cuban political system can hardly survive if there is a massive influx of capitalist spending. Close Gitmo while we are at it and sign a retroactive extradition treaty. Let those who committed torture face a criminal system that is no worse than the one they created themselves.
Third position: Al Zawahiri and Bin Laden get a slotting. The US needs to withdraw from lost and irrelevant conflicts to concentrate resources on the conflicts that matter. Al Zawahiri has now had a major role in the murder of two US-friendly world leaders (Sadat, Bhutto). He cannot be allowed to survive. These problems cannot be dealt with by simply creating a bigger military, do that and some idiot neocons will come along and decide to use it for their own pet purposes.
Fourth: halt the deficit spending program. Congress will not lower spending, under the GOP earmarks and spending exploded under the Democrats the difference is that spending is rising less quickly. The deficits are causing interest rates to soar, they are tipping the country into recession. The only way to reduce the deficit is for the country to live within its means and raise revenues. So unless you believe in the tax fairy the choice is between raising taxes and crashing the economy. Don't wait for the Bush tax cuts to expire, repeal them immediately and institute a 2% war tax. Time to remind people that deficit spending is merely a deferred tax rise.
Fifth: comprehensive review of earmark projects, no-bid contracts and other potential graft. It appears that Haliburton and Blackwater owe the government rather a lot of money, we would like it back. Also Alaska can whistle if they think they are getting the idiot Stephens bridge to nowhere.
Sixth: Implement measures to protect the Internet economy against Internet crime and the risk that terrorists use the Internet for fundraising. (Full program described in The dotCrime Manifesto.
The question at issue here is not just whether Ron Paul is a racist personally but what his stand on racism as a poltician is. Given a choice between someone who is a bigott but votes for civil rights and someone who is not a racist but panders to people who are with racism friendly policies and guestures I will take the bigott.
Ron Paul published the racist newsletter in his name for over a decade. It is a hate rag, pure and simple. It is not only racist and homophobic, it is anti-semitic.
I expect politicians to take a stand against racisim and bigotry. Pandering to racism such as appearing at CCC meetings and pretending its not a euphemism for the KKK or making coded references to seggregation such as 'states rights' or kicking your campaign off at Bob Jones U. or Racism county fair, its all functional racism.
How would you think about a candidate who is 'against terrorism' but gives money to terrorist causes?
The newsletter was a southern strategy attempt to mine the racist vote. Ron Paul put it out in his name. That makes him a racist.
Apparently this guy has never worked in a production firmware environment before: there are fewer checks and balances than you might think, especially because embedded-system guys generally don't have much awareness of Windows malware issues. Unfortunately, more and more embedded devices are being plugged into desktop machines, and with auto-run enabled... well. This whole scenario is hardly surprising.
There is a responsibility problem here. Do we blame the hardware manufacturers for producing faulty products or the users for leaving autorun turned on or the O/S providers for implementing such a brain-damaged feature?
Internet crime is not really Internet crime at all. Phishing is exploiting weaknesses in the financial infrastructure, not the Internet at all. If credit card payment systems security depends on the secrecy of the card number printed on the front it is going to fail.
One way to deal with this problem would be to make sure every device has a clearly marked reset button that performs a hard-reset and returns the system to its initial state. Most equipment has this but some does not.
A better way is to turn off autorun, only run a program if the code is signed by a trusted root. [Ob Disclosure, yes I work for VeriSign] A trusted root need not mean a public trusted root. It is possible to establish a mechanism for signing open source code, just make sure the user has control over the choice of roots.
Well said, clearly these guys are complaining that their ivory tower devised business plan is tanking and taking it out on CS programs. Some of the things that they complain about like profiling, and GUI-centric design (what?) can easily be accounted for in Java though the commentary about pointers holds a bit of water.
And they are from the ivory tower!
Yes, there is a demand for the skills they seek, but that is a constant in pretty much all the computer industry. Someone learning Java can hope to work at any number of exciting forward thinking companies on the cutting edge of technology. Someone who learns COBOL can pretty much expect to spend their time maintaining someone else's code at a bank.
It isn't the function of universities to turn out cannon fodder for companies with decrepit IT infrastructures.
Last week I needed to install a codec, the gnome media player (I forgot its name, can you imagine) sent me to the correct opensuse webpage concerning the missing codec, I there went to the 'community' solution and clicked an automatic yast install link. This opened yast and I had just to press some buttons. But then, a dependency conflict! Well, actually, it didn't tell me what the conflict was, I just got a pop-up with the possibilities: "find an optimal solution for everything" (this normally gets in an endless loop), "install packet a.23.3.0b (this may affect your system)", "ignore for this instance", "don't install packet a.23.3.0b".
Thing that getsme about these debates is the fact that all computer systems give this type of trouble, yes even Macs. The only real difference between the O/S is how fast people forget about the difficulty.
Systems fail for many reasons, chief amongst them is buggy drivers. But they also fail because the information you need to solve your problem is either not available or difficult to find.
For example, many system lockups occur because of a resource conflict. I have never used any O/S that provided an easy to interpret tool that tells the user why a program is blocked. In windows the cause is frequently some programmer who just does not understand the locking scheme. But the same problem certainly used to occur on UNIX, plenty of programs used to write out lock files that they failled to correctly clean up.
This problem is worst on the Mac, when the Mac works it is great. When it does not you are totally hosed as the programmers make sure you have no tools at all to find out the cause.
And when you have network issues, well you are really on your own. Your problem might be the cable modem is out, or the wireless router, or maybe the broadband provider is down. But you are on your own when it comes to fix it. That is acceptable if you are a techie, but thats not acceptable for the typical user.
That said, the article headline is based on an idiotic calculation. Gates did not give the percentage, nor did he give a hard number for the number of copies of Vista that shipped. He simply said that it was over 100 million. So if the headline was truthfull it would state Vista shipped on at least 39% of computers shipped, or to be more accurate still, Vista shipped on 69% of machines sold +/- 30%. Gates was clearly not giving a precise figure and to use it in this way is more than dishonest, it is deliberately deceptive. I really wish Slashdot could avoid these partisan snipes using statistics about as reliable as those used by politicians.
It's like taking a bunch of guys who want to be strong into a weight room, putting them on the bench, and then kicking out everyone who can't bench press 225 pounds the first day. Just because some of the trainees aren't strong yet, it does not mean they lack the genetic potential to ever be strong.
No, its worse, its like kicking folk out for not being able to sprint 100m in a certain time.
I have coded FORTRAN, its not that difficult. But developing a system of any size in it is dreadful and the system just kicks you in the teeth constantly when it comes to debug. I have also hand assembled plenty of machine code. I would see that as an essential skill for microprocessor design, but it isn't a programming skill any more than coding microcode is.
Ada on the other hand is not a language that I have ever used, but for a singular reason: my Oxford college tutor famously left the design committee telling them that the language they were building was so hopelessly complex that they would not complete it in any meaningful time. And he was right.
The reason I bring this up is that the hook in the article is that ADA is presented as being on the cutting edge of Formal methods. Well I know something about that, my college tutor was Tony Hoare, pretty much the dean of the formal methods brigade. Although Ada does have some features that make it easier to support formal methods it has even more features that make it impossible to produce a formal definition of the language, let alone prove a compiler correct. It is much easier to add formal methods features to a language like Java or C# than to remove the ugly and unnecessary complexities of Ada.
I used to teach the AP comp sci class at my high school, but it's been dropped due to lack of interest. If you think industry has skewed what the universities are doing, you ought to see how the unis have skewed what we are doing. My school boasts that we have something like 80-90% of students graduating with A-G (A-G is the list of requirements to go to a UC or CSU, California public universities) complete. We send like 25% of our graduating seniors to a 4 year yet prepare almost all of them? This basically ensures that foreign language, which is technically an "elective" is a required course. And the list goes on...
I think you are missing the mark here, the profs who wrote the original architects are both principals at a company that sells Ada tools. What they are complaining of really is the lack of demand for their stuff. Treating the argument seriously is a mistake.
I don't think that there was ever a time when Ada was a popular teaching language for any purpose other than coding in Ada. Same goes for COBOL, Fortran and such at this point.
Nobody would claim that there was a desperate need to teach CPL or BCPL, Pascal, or the like these days. They had their moment, they were found wanting. There are much better teaching languages these days and much better production languages.
These days I would probably teach either Java or C# as the intro language, depending on which is ahead at the time. I might teach C# to comp sci students simply to force the students to acknowledge the fact that they need to be able to adapt to new languages. Most other cases Java is most likely to be the most useful language.
The big change that came with Java is that when Java appeared it was the first time that a mainstream language was an acceptable teaching language. Pascal was popular in universities but the architecture was bjorked (arrays of ten elements are not a different type to arrays with eleven). The functional languages had dreadful performance and pawky support libs.
Not to detract from the general truth of your comments, but if doing business with Saudi Arabia were a deal-breaker for Israel, where would that leave the US? The Israelis wouldn't let ties to the Saudis stop them dealing with BAE for a microsecond.
Selling an Israeli weapons system would probably be a deal breaker for the Saudis.
This is the work of the Israeli lobby. The technology used is designed by and used on El-Al (the national Israeli airline). They've been heavily campaigning in the US for a contract. Quite frankly those $11 billion dollars belong somewhere else.
The article says that the system being tested was developed by BAE which is a British company.
Hard to see how BAE could be very close to an Israeli defense company given that 1) the largest single contract BAE has outside NATO is to supply aircraft to Saudi Arabia and 2) the UK government imposed a partial embargo on sales of military equipment to Israel after Israel broke a previous undertaking not to use UK supplied arms in the occupied territories.
This is not about pork, that will come later on. Its about trying to create the illusion of safety and quite likely give a pump to the start wars boondoggle.
Its a pretty idiotic idea regardless. The way to stop people shooting down planes is to hand out a slotting to anyone who does: an accountability approach.
What special criteria doe someone have to meet to be considered an expert witness?
Depends on the field and the country. Basically you have to have some specialist expertise.
In the UK you would probably need to be at least a Chartered Engineer, being a fellow would be better. There isn't an equivalent professional qualification in the US but to be credible you would probably need to have at least a doctorate (professorship better) and some domain specific work experience.
There are also people who might not have the ideal qualifications to give testimony but know the domain knowledge backwards and can find the prior art very quickly.
WFW 3.11 had Hearts actually, and I'm pretty sure earlier alpha/beta versions did too, since it was one of the major marketing points in the included WFW literature besides Exchange/Mail and Chat.
I am pretty sure we could take it back much further. Like the 1970s or so. There were many multiplayer games on the first generation timeshare systems. I played a tank maze game on a Cyber mainframe in '74.
I know that WFW had hearts but I can't remember if that version worked on a network.
Um, two button mice have been standard with Macs for a while, and I have yet to find a two-button mouse that didn't work right off when plugged into a Mac running OS X. Extra buttons may need a driver, though. And appliances? You're unbelievably full of shit. Tell that to the many businesses using Macs for productivity. Tell that to the scientific community, where you'll find a large number of Macs running number-crunching software, often in clusters. Tell that to video production shops using Final Cut Studio and Shake. Tell that to audio gurus using Pro Tools or Logic Studio. Yeah, it's just a home appliance. Pull your head out of your ass
Oh yes, now I remember why I won't buy a Mac.
Its this type of attitude.
Yes I know that you can do an add on mouse, bit of a kludge on a laptop though, particularly on a plane.
The point about appliances is that the appliance strategy is what is driving the expansion in Apple market share. I have been expecting Apple to start making inroads to the business market for Unix machines for years. They are nicely built, come with a service and support plan, work out of the box. Much better than solaris. But it hasn't quite happened that way.
The appliance strategy is visionary. Jobs is building for the next generation computer market. And it is going to be hard for Microsoft to keep up now that Gates is gone. I don't think Balmer has the same depth of vision, he is a money man. He does not have the same passion.
The technical case has been there for Mac to make inroads in the scientific market for five years. It didn't happen. apple is making inroads now but that is secondary. Its the critical mass created by the Mac mini. iMac and the appliance approach that makes the upper end market expansion possible.
What costs? Last time I checked my MacBook Pro compared pretty well with a similar Dell on both price and features. How many PC laptops can you get with fast video, 802.11n, Firewire 800, DVI-out, and a solid aluminum case for under $2,000? 2nd and 3rd gen MBPs are easily worth the cost (first gen had problems). I wouldn't trade mine for 3 flimsy plastic Dell pieces of crap.
The cost of rewriting all my existing C# code in something else. The cost of learning yet another platform instead of doing useful work.
I use C# because it has the features I liked in Objective C which Tim Berners-Lee had me using in 1993. No question Objective C was better than C++. But it lost. At the time I was coding C# had the metadata features I was used to coding with, Java did not.
My policy is that I try pretty much every development tool but I very rarely change my production coding tool. C++ added nothing to what I already had in my C environment (my own personal memory management scheme was much better) so I stayed with it. Thanks to Sun there is no version of Java that is nicely integrated into the Windows APIs. Visual Studio is the better tool in my opinion.
Those are the costs I was referring to. The machine I actually bought was a Voodoo Omen for $7,800 (excluding monitors). I could certainly have bought a similarly high spec Mac for less. But the cost of my time spent learning a different environment would have cost many times more.
Kinda difficult using a separate mouse on the plane.
So Apple is to blame because you are using a proprietary IDE that only works on one OS and don't feel like switching?
Who said anything about blame? The cost of switching platforms is significant. Apple simply does not deliver enough to me for the switch to be worthwhile.
Matched feature for feature, Macs are sometimes cheaper than PCs.
The costs I was referring to were the time it would have taken to learn a new system. I am not a price sensitive buyer by any measure. The machine I actually bought cost very much more than the most expensive Mac on sale at the time.
The point I was making here was precisely the fact that the differences between Mac and Windows are now pretty much a matter of style and taste. And the Apple home market is getting to the point where I would definitely support Mac if I was selling desktop software.
Now five years ago the reason I would not even have considered a Mac was that they were overpriced and my experience of using pre-OS/X Macs have been very very bad. The hardware was shoddy, the software worse. Jobs certainly deserves credit for turning the company around.
Because the claims don't read on a single-player card game.
But Hearts is a multiplayer, network card game.
The troll might not want to go after Microsoft with a patent filed in 2001 for a game that has been in Windows since '95. Might be a teensy bit difficult to prove priority, lack of obviousness etc.
If I was looking for prior art that is where I would probably start. But there are entire histories of networked computer games.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. Although I am qualified to act as an expert witness I am not your expert witness. This post should not be relied on by anyone for any reason.
This is flatly wrong. Nobody actually WANTS mass-emailed advertisements in their inbox. In the past, relatively large corporations would send spam for their products ex. HP advertising a new desktop, and say it wasn't spam.
True, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that what some of the anti-spam zealots saw as legitimate tactics was not what other people considered acceptable. In particular Paul Vixie's idea of 'collateral damage'. His idea was that if you happened to have XCorp as an ISP and another customer at XCorp sent some message that came under his definition of spam it was OK for him to blacklist every customer of the ISP because it was your responsibility as a customer to make sure that your ISP policed their customers to his personal satisfaction.
People can agree on the desired outcome but disagree as to the desirability of a particular solution.
Nobody uses blacklists in that way any more in a commercial anti-spam solution.
The "little Hitlers" you're talking about are the sysops who wanted the spammers to stop fucking with their email servers. They were 100% absolutely right to say that if you do anything that even remotely hints at acting like spam you should be auto-banned permanently because 99% of people "on the edge" were spammers trying to game the system. Nobody has a divine right to send email, especially if it interferes with REAL customers.
What if blocking legitimate email interferes with REAL customers. Or do you think that you are the spam pope and thus infallible?
There have been more than a few cases where folk have signed up for mailing lists so that they can report the sender as a spammer. Pretty much every political list has faced that problem from time to time. And some people have used that approach to block competitors.
Spam control is a security problem and you have to approach it as such. You have to ask how every part of the system might be abused by someone and determine the controls that prevent that occurring.
Spam is a social problem. It is very easy to solve pretty much every social problem if you assume that there is some group of perfectly trustworthy folk you can rely on to solve it. So some folk think the answer to crime is a police state, only then the state itself becomes a criminal enterprise. There was plenty of graft in Soviet Russia, the state merely extended its monopoly of force to become a monopoly of graft as well. Don't like police, yea! vigilantes! Only then you have the problem of controlling the vigilantes. The folk out in Iraq who murder women who might dare to go outside without covering their heads call themselves vigilantes. Most of us would think they are part of the problem there, not the solution.
One guy running a blacklist tried to blacklist his ISP for shutting off his accounts for unpaid bills. And I am not the only person who has asked how we can tell if the SPEWS list was not being run by a spammer so that he could reduce the number of messages from competitors and make sure his own got out.
I am a security person. I ask questions of this sort. Those people never gave me answers. Instead they responded as you did by accusing people who might object to their methods as being in league with the spammers or failing to accept the righteousness of their cause.
There are some reasonable blacklists out there today, but they don't run in anything like the same autocratic manner that used to be the norm. They don't attempt to employ collateral damage, they try to avoid subjective criteria, they respond to complaints. In short they are accountable.
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As some folk on the net know I come from a political family. My cousin was chairman of the UK Conservative party. Other members of the family have been in pretty much every movement you can imagine. One of my great aunts chained herself to the gates of Greenham common at the age of 80 or so.
When I arrived at University I knew a couple of things. First I distrusted the jingoism of the Tory party, I thought their economic policy sucked but I thought that whatever their intentions might be on the cold war they did at least stand up for freedom.
First week a member of SUCA, Southampton University conservative Association tells me about the blacklist the party ran through an organization called the Economic League. Circulated to employers in the engineering and defense industries. Anyone who signed up for radical politics would be on it.
Fuck you I thought. Joined the Labour party the same day. When you have a political party resorting to Stalinist tactics its time to get rid of them. Lets have denouncement boxes at every corner like they had in East Germany.
I found out later, when the FCS was wound up by the Tory central office, that this particular Stalinist scheme was one of the reasons. I have no way of knowing if my particular complaint made it through but there were many others.
The list became public after Robert Maxwell bought a copy and dumped it at the Labour party conference. I was not on it, which of course I took as an insult. But every member of the SUCA committee was. They had basically been reporting on each other during their perpetual faction fights.
When a government has as much power as the Bush administration has claimed, when it considers the first ammendment and compliance with the Geneva Conventions optional extras rather than the law of the land, when it starts wars on stovepiped intelligence and dismisses real intelligence that does not comply with its opinions, when prosecutors who charge corrupt politicians of the President's party or refuse to bring trumped up charges against the opposition are dismissed, when other prosecutors who do the reverse keep their jobs, when no member of the Cabinet can give a straight definition of torture, when all of these are true and more, it is time to say that this is a government that must have less power and not more. We must fear the Bush administration far more than any of the bogeymen they keep to scare us.
We have not hit the crunch point, yet, but we will if things continue as they are. The reason the dollar has dropped against the pound and the ECU is that the US is spending more than it earns. That means either higher inflation as import prices rise.
Short term money is cheap, longer term money gets more expensive. It should be the other way round. The markets expect the price of money to rise.
The fed keeps trying to drop rates, but they only set one rate. The rates paid by borrowers are much higher. The sub-prime market is not being driven by greed and carelessness, not mere desperation as you claim. The idea people got into their heads was that 90% of sub-prime loans could somehow be turned into AAA bonds at essentially zero cost (while charging sub-prime interest rates). It was the idea of the perpetual fee unch.
The same idea fuels the deficit: Republicans say that you can cut taxes and revenues will rise, some even believe that. Others know its a crock but say it anyway because they are scared of the club for growth.
Hands up, who would like to swap the Bush tax cuts for the Clinton economy? I would take that any day. Even though I am the type of person that the Bush tax cuts was meant to help.
Why not? It would seem to be an advantage to you if Google pay AT&T to deliver pages to you at a faster rate than you have paid for.
The problem here is 'than you paid for'. The problem is when AT&T try to get Google to pay for the bandwidth that you have already paid for or decide that they can use the VOIP bandwidth you paid for but Vonage cannot, or Google can buy bandwidth but Yahoo cannot or you can watch Fox News but not CNN.
It is almost exclusively a US issue. Other coutries have managed to break up the local access monopoly on the last mile, the US has not. This has in large part been due to the policy of the Bush administration to favor monopolists.
Comcast et al. would be idiots to actually try to leverage their monopoly power in the ways people fear. They put their monopoly at risk. So of course I expect them to do precisely that for the same reason companies spam: the desperate middle manager who has to make their number that quarter. Who cares about the long term consequences.
One of the other things I have discovered over the years is that the position of DC corporate lobbyists frequently bears absolutely no relationship to the corporations they purportedly represent. They serve their own interests and they are desperate to appear relevant. Take that really smart idea of the bankrupcy bill to stop consumers defaulting on their credit card debts. Now they are defaulting on their mortgage instead and so the banks are loosing hundreds of thousands rather than just thousands.
Not exactly very big on accountability your chap, is he?
We are expected to beleive that a newsletter went out for over a decade that Ron Paul had absolutely no part in producing, no authority over and did not even read? His denial does not say that at all. He does not deny funding the newsletter or that he read it. Nor does he say who actually did write the articles.
The biggest failures of the Bush administration have been the abject lack of accountability. Bush blames everyone but himself for the mess in Iraq. It is hard to think of a single member of the administration who was sacked for their incompetence rather than the political inconveniences that their incompetence caused.
So now we are to accept the idea that you can publish a political newsletter to promote your thoughts on politics without taking responsibility for the contents? Sorry that simply does not wash. The best spin that can be put on this situation is that your man is a buffoon. That is hardly a recomendation for someone seeking the US Presidency.
Who did he choose to write the newsletter for him? Would they be offered positions in a Ron Paul administration? How can we trust Ron Paul's judgement on other personnel decisions? Failing to make subordinates accountable is as bad as failure to accept personal accountabilty.
It is a somewhat strange set of criteria that is set up by the media as well. Edwards is disqualified for paying too much for a haircut, Hillary because she is a robot. But Ron Paul can have racist drivel put out under his name for over a decade and somehow it does not rate a mention.
The really, really sad thing here is that Ron Paul is in some ways the least crazy of the GOP contenders. He has the least whacked out tax plan (yes really!) and he is the only one to recognize that Iraq is a failure. But when you read the anti-Zionist screeds in his newsletter you pretty soon realize that they go way beyond mere criticism of Israel, they are unambiguously anti-semitic. That does force one to stop and ask if his Iraq policy might be driven by anti-semitism.
That may be so. Why does that make it the best way for the Federal government to spend over a billion dollars?
Government spending needs to be judged against a more accurate yardstick than which state happens to have the most powerful Senator with the largest mouth. The same money could have a much greater effect to a much larger number of people in much greater need down in New Orleans.
Ted Stephens is not the sort of person you want to make such choices. His son is facing federal corruption charges. He is almost certainly facing charges himself after a contractor benefiting from his earmarks gifted him an extension of his house.
Every earmark made by Ted Stephens should be put on hold. The Vecco relationship looks like a bribe smells like a bribe and should be considered a bribe unless and until proven otherwise.
Friends make the most unreliable judges of character. If the NAACP president was making an impartial judgement on the basis of the record that might be convincing.
Oswald Mosley had quite a few Jewish friends who were taken completely by surprise when he suddenly turned into a fascist. Some of them even denied that he was an anti-semite after he became a fascist. There was apparently a notorious dinner party at which Mosley stated that he thought it necessary for his party to have a 'hate plank'. He was a racist by opportunity, not conviction.
Nobody disputes the racism of the newsletters published in Ron Paul's name for so many years. Either the newsletters represent Paul's views in which case he is a racist or they do not in which case he is an opportunist which is considerably worse.
Most NAZIs were not anti-semites by conviction, they just found it convienient to join the party and adopt its ideology.
Because it is a legal requirement that they do so. mcCain Feingold introduced that requirement to stop the practice of anonymous attack ads.
Discrimination is one thing, but free speech, even bigoted speech, should be answered with speech, not banned out of hand. Kicking off one's campaign at Bob Jones U or referring to 'states rights' does not make one a racist, one can speak to groups, even groups with values you don't agree with, without becoming part of that group or endorsing their message.
If you have a forum you can invite others without necessarily endorsing their message. But that is not what Bush and Reagan did. They choose the forums they did in order to send an express but coded message of support for those racist institutions.
Whether Ron Paul wrote the articles that appeared under his name is frankly irrelevant. The President of the Oxford Union can invite Gerry Adams or David Irving to speak if he chooses without necessarily endorsing his position. But publishing an written by one of them in a newsletter that only carries his name and has no indication that it is an outside contribution is an express endorsement of the position.
I have yet to hear if Ron Paul is or is not repudiating the positions in the newsletter. If he does not repudiate them he is a racist, lets not waste any more time arguing the point. If he does repudiate the positions we should be told what else he is likely to be repudiating in the future.
OK so where is the ADL saying that his Zionist conspiracy drivel is not anti-semitic or John Aravosis saying that the homophobic drivel is not gay baiting?
We kinda discovered that people looking into other people's souls and pronouncing them pure is not an effective means of quality control on politicians. Didn't work when Bush tried it with Putin.
Don't look at the man, look at what he says and does, in particular look at what he supports and who he seeks support from.
Ron Paul published racist screeds for decades. He might as well have joined the Klan. He want's to be President. That means that the bar is rather higher than 'not proven to have racist beliefs'
You americans are so tediously moralistic, the French have their guy on an 'incentive' program. The more manifesto promises he makes, the more 'rewards'. Mitterand had four mistresses.
I don't qualify under current law, but the first thing I would do is to look at how to make the current US problem in Iraq someone else's problem. Over the past five years Iraq has all but destroyed the US army. Whose army do we most want to destroy most (or care least about)? That would be Iran. So the US says to Iran 'your problem now', withdraw to Kuwait, see whether Iran prefers to have a festering civil war on its border or gets sucked in.
Second foreign policy position: Cuba. Eliminate all sanctions with immediate effect. They have not worked in 40 years and it is obvious that they never will. It is equally obvious that the Cuban political system can hardly survive if there is a massive influx of capitalist spending. Close Gitmo while we are at it and sign a retroactive extradition treaty. Let those who committed torture face a criminal system that is no worse than the one they created themselves.
Third position: Al Zawahiri and Bin Laden get a slotting. The US needs to withdraw from lost and irrelevant conflicts to concentrate resources on the conflicts that matter. Al Zawahiri has now had a major role in the murder of two US-friendly world leaders (Sadat, Bhutto). He cannot be allowed to survive. These problems cannot be dealt with by simply creating a bigger military, do that and some idiot neocons will come along and decide to use it for their own pet purposes.
Fourth: halt the deficit spending program. Congress will not lower spending, under the GOP earmarks and spending exploded under the Democrats the difference is that spending is rising less quickly. The deficits are causing interest rates to soar, they are tipping the country into recession. The only way to reduce the deficit is for the country to live within its means and raise revenues. So unless you believe in the tax fairy the choice is between raising taxes and crashing the economy. Don't wait for the Bush tax cuts to expire, repeal them immediately and institute a 2% war tax. Time to remind people that deficit spending is merely a deferred tax rise.
Fifth: comprehensive review of earmark projects, no-bid contracts and other potential graft. It appears that Haliburton and Blackwater owe the government rather a lot of money, we would like it back. Also Alaska can whistle if they think they are getting the idiot Stephens bridge to nowhere.
Sixth: Implement measures to protect the Internet economy against Internet crime and the risk that terrorists use the Internet for fundraising. (Full program described in The dotCrime Manifesto.
Seventh: New Orleans, remember?
Eighth: Healthcare.
Ron Paul published the racist newsletter in his name for over a decade. It is a hate rag, pure and simple. It is not only racist and homophobic, it is anti-semitic.
I expect politicians to take a stand against racisim and bigotry. Pandering to racism such as appearing at CCC meetings and pretending its not a euphemism for the KKK or making coded references to seggregation such as 'states rights' or kicking your campaign off at Bob Jones U. or Racism county fair, its all functional racism.
How would you think about a candidate who is 'against terrorism' but gives money to terrorist causes?
The newsletter was a southern strategy attempt to mine the racist vote. Ron Paul put it out in his name. That makes him a racist.
There is a responsibility problem here. Do we blame the hardware manufacturers for producing faulty products or the users for leaving autorun turned on or the O/S providers for implementing such a brain-damaged feature?
Internet crime is not really Internet crime at all. Phishing is exploiting weaknesses in the financial infrastructure, not the Internet at all. If credit card payment systems security depends on the secrecy of the card number printed on the front it is going to fail.
One way to deal with this problem would be to make sure every device has a clearly marked reset button that performs a hard-reset and returns the system to its initial state. Most equipment has this but some does not.
A better way is to turn off autorun, only run a program if the code is signed by a trusted root. [Ob Disclosure, yes I work for VeriSign] A trusted root need not mean a public trusted root. It is possible to establish a mechanism for signing open source code, just make sure the user has control over the choice of roots.
Guess that means that my idea for a commercial product might face some price pressure.
Must spend less time working and more time reading Slashdot.
And they are from the ivory tower!
Yes, there is a demand for the skills they seek, but that is a constant in pretty much all the computer industry. Someone learning Java can hope to work at any number of exciting forward thinking companies on the cutting edge of technology. Someone who learns COBOL can pretty much expect to spend their time maintaining someone else's code at a bank.
It isn't the function of universities to turn out cannon fodder for companies with decrepit IT infrastructures.
Thing that getsme about these debates is the fact that all computer systems give this type of trouble, yes even Macs. The only real difference between the O/S is how fast people forget about the difficulty.
Systems fail for many reasons, chief amongst them is buggy drivers. But they also fail because the information you need to solve your problem is either not available or difficult to find.
For example, many system lockups occur because of a resource conflict. I have never used any O/S that provided an easy to interpret tool that tells the user why a program is blocked. In windows the cause is frequently some programmer who just does not understand the locking scheme. But the same problem certainly used to occur on UNIX, plenty of programs used to write out lock files that they failled to correctly clean up.
This problem is worst on the Mac, when the Mac works it is great. When it does not you are totally hosed as the programmers make sure you have no tools at all to find out the cause.
And when you have network issues, well you are really on your own. Your problem might be the cable modem is out, or the wireless router, or maybe the broadband provider is down. But you are on your own when it comes to fix it. That is acceptable if you are a techie, but thats not acceptable for the typical user.
That said, the article headline is based on an idiotic calculation. Gates did not give the percentage, nor did he give a hard number for the number of copies of Vista that shipped. He simply said that it was over 100 million. So if the headline was truthfull it would state Vista shipped on at least 39% of computers shipped, or to be more accurate still, Vista shipped on 69% of machines sold +/- 30%. Gates was clearly not giving a precise figure and to use it in this way is more than dishonest, it is deliberately deceptive. I really wish Slashdot could avoid these partisan snipes using statistics about as reliable as those used by politicians.
No, its worse, its like kicking folk out for not being able to sprint 100m in a certain time.
I have coded FORTRAN, its not that difficult. But developing a system of any size in it is dreadful and the system just kicks you in the teeth constantly when it comes to debug. I have also hand assembled plenty of machine code. I would see that as an essential skill for microprocessor design, but it isn't a programming skill any more than coding microcode is.
Ada on the other hand is not a language that I have ever used, but for a singular reason: my Oxford college tutor famously left the design committee telling them that the language they were building was so hopelessly complex that they would not complete it in any meaningful time. And he was right.
The reason I bring this up is that the hook in the article is that ADA is presented as being on the cutting edge of Formal methods. Well I know something about that, my college tutor was Tony Hoare, pretty much the dean of the formal methods brigade. Although Ada does have some features that make it easier to support formal methods it has even more features that make it impossible to produce a formal definition of the language, let alone prove a compiler correct. It is much easier to add formal methods features to a language like Java or C# than to remove the ugly and unnecessary complexities of Ada.
I think you are missing the mark here, the profs who wrote the original architects are both principals at a company that sells Ada tools. What they are complaining of really is the lack of demand for their stuff. Treating the argument seriously is a mistake.
I don't think that there was ever a time when Ada was a popular teaching language for any purpose other than coding in Ada. Same goes for COBOL, Fortran and such at this point.
Nobody would claim that there was a desperate need to teach CPL or BCPL, Pascal, or the like these days. They had their moment, they were found wanting. There are much better teaching languages these days and much better production languages.
These days I would probably teach either Java or C# as the intro language, depending on which is ahead at the time. I might teach C# to comp sci students simply to force the students to acknowledge the fact that they need to be able to adapt to new languages. Most other cases Java is most likely to be the most useful language.
The big change that came with Java is that when Java appeared it was the first time that a mainstream language was an acceptable teaching language. Pascal was popular in universities but the architecture was bjorked (arrays of ten elements are not a different type to arrays with eleven). The functional languages had dreadful performance and pawky support libs.
Not to detract from the general truth of your comments, but if doing business with Saudi Arabia were a deal-breaker for Israel, where would that leave the US? The Israelis wouldn't let ties to the Saudis stop them dealing with BAE for a microsecond. Selling an Israeli weapons system would probably be a deal breaker for the Saudis.
The article says that the system being tested was developed by BAE which is a British company.
Hard to see how BAE could be very close to an Israeli defense company given that 1) the largest single contract BAE has outside NATO is to supply aircraft to Saudi Arabia and 2) the UK government imposed a partial embargo on sales of military equipment to Israel after Israel broke a previous undertaking not to use UK supplied arms in the occupied territories.
This is not about pork, that will come later on. Its about trying to create the illusion of safety and quite likely give a pump to the start wars boondoggle. Its a pretty idiotic idea regardless. The way to stop people shooting down planes is to hand out a slotting to anyone who does: an accountability approach.
Depends on the field and the country. Basically you have to have some specialist expertise.
In the UK you would probably need to be at least a Chartered Engineer, being a fellow would be better. There isn't an equivalent professional qualification in the US but to be credible you would probably need to have at least a doctorate (professorship better) and some domain specific work experience.
There are also people who might not have the ideal qualifications to give testimony but know the domain knowledge backwards and can find the prior art very quickly.
I am pretty sure we could take it back much further. Like the 1970s or so. There were many multiplayer games on the first generation timeshare systems. I played a tank maze game on a Cyber mainframe in '74.
I know that WFW had hearts but I can't remember if that version worked on a network.
Oh yes, now I remember why I won't buy a Mac.
Its this type of attitude.
Yes I know that you can do an add on mouse, bit of a kludge on a laptop though, particularly on a plane.
The point about appliances is that the appliance strategy is what is driving the expansion in Apple market share. I have been expecting Apple to start making inroads to the business market for Unix machines for years. They are nicely built, come with a service and support plan, work out of the box. Much better than solaris. But it hasn't quite happened that way.
The appliance strategy is visionary. Jobs is building for the next generation computer market. And it is going to be hard for Microsoft to keep up now that Gates is gone. I don't think Balmer has the same depth of vision, he is a money man. He does not have the same passion.
The technical case has been there for Mac to make inroads in the scientific market for five years. It didn't happen. apple is making inroads now but that is secondary. Its the critical mass created by the Mac mini. iMac and the appliance approach that makes the upper end market expansion possible.
The cost of rewriting all my existing C# code in something else. The cost of learning yet another platform instead of doing useful work.
I use C# because it has the features I liked in Objective C which Tim Berners-Lee had me using in 1993. No question Objective C was better than C++. But it lost. At the time I was coding C# had the metadata features I was used to coding with, Java did not.
My policy is that I try pretty much every development tool but I very rarely change my production coding tool. C++ added nothing to what I already had in my C environment (my own personal memory management scheme was much better) so I stayed with it. Thanks to Sun there is no version of Java that is nicely integrated into the Windows APIs. Visual Studio is the better tool in my opinion.
Those are the costs I was referring to. The machine I actually bought was a Voodoo Omen for $7,800 (excluding monitors). I could certainly have bought a similarly high spec Mac for less. But the cost of my time spent learning a different environment would have cost many times more.
Kinda difficult using a separate mouse on the plane.
So Apple is to blame because you are using a proprietary IDE that only works on one OS and don't feel like switching?
Who said anything about blame? The cost of switching platforms is significant. Apple simply does not deliver enough to me for the switch to be worthwhile.
Matched feature for feature, Macs are sometimes cheaper than PCs.
The costs I was referring to were the time it would have taken to learn a new system. I am not a price sensitive buyer by any measure. The machine I actually bought cost very much more than the most expensive Mac on sale at the time.
The point I was making here was precisely the fact that the differences between Mac and Windows are now pretty much a matter of style and taste. And the Apple home market is getting to the point where I would definitely support Mac if I was selling desktop software.
Now five years ago the reason I would not even have considered a Mac was that they were overpriced and my experience of using pre-OS/X Macs have been very very bad. The hardware was shoddy, the software worse. Jobs certainly deserves credit for turning the company around.
But Hearts is a multiplayer, network card game.
The troll might not want to go after Microsoft with a patent filed in 2001 for a game that has been in Windows since '95. Might be a teensy bit difficult to prove priority, lack of obviousness etc.
If I was looking for prior art that is where I would probably start. But there are entire histories of networked computer games.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. Although I am qualified to act as an expert witness I am not your expert witness. This post should not be relied on by anyone for any reason.
True, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that what some of the anti-spam zealots saw as legitimate tactics was not what other people considered acceptable. In particular Paul Vixie's idea of 'collateral damage'. His idea was that if you happened to have XCorp as an ISP and another customer at XCorp sent some message that came under his definition of spam it was OK for him to blacklist every customer of the ISP because it was your responsibility as a customer to make sure that your ISP policed their customers to his personal satisfaction.
People can agree on the desired outcome but disagree as to the desirability of a particular solution.
Nobody uses blacklists in that way any more in a commercial anti-spam solution.
The "little Hitlers" you're talking about are the sysops who wanted the spammers to stop fucking with their email servers. They were 100% absolutely right to say that if you do anything that even remotely hints at acting like spam you should be auto-banned permanently because 99% of people "on the edge" were spammers trying to game the system. Nobody has a divine right to send email, especially if it interferes with REAL customers.
What if blocking legitimate email interferes with REAL customers. Or do you think that you are the spam pope and thus infallible?
There have been more than a few cases where folk have signed up for mailing lists so that they can report the sender as a spammer. Pretty much every political list has faced that problem from time to time. And some people have used that approach to block competitors.
Spam control is a security problem and you have to approach it as such. You have to ask how every part of the system might be abused by someone and determine the controls that prevent that occurring.
Spam is a social problem. It is very easy to solve pretty much every social problem if you assume that there is some group of perfectly trustworthy folk you can rely on to solve it. So some folk think the answer to crime is a police state, only then the state itself becomes a criminal enterprise. There was plenty of graft in Soviet Russia, the state merely extended its monopoly of force to become a monopoly of graft as well. Don't like police, yea! vigilantes! Only then you have the problem of controlling the vigilantes. The folk out in Iraq who murder women who might dare to go outside without covering their heads call themselves vigilantes. Most of us would think they are part of the problem there, not the solution.
One guy running a blacklist tried to blacklist his ISP for shutting off his accounts for unpaid bills. And I am not the only person who has asked how we can tell if the SPEWS list was not being run by a spammer so that he could reduce the number of messages from competitors and make sure his own got out.
I am a security person. I ask questions of this sort. Those people never gave me answers. Instead they responded as you did by accusing people who might object to their methods as being in league with the spammers or failing to accept the righteousness of their cause.
There are some reasonable blacklists out there today, but they don't run in anything like the same autocratic manner that used to be the norm. They don't attempt to employ collateral damage, they try to avoid subjective criteria, they respond to complaints. In short they are accountable.