A global opt-out list with one way encryption is still susceptible to dictionary attacks.
Only if the only addresses you add to the list are valid ones. You can also add invalid addresses to the list that are not in use but are being spammed anyway.
But thanks for pointing that out since I had forgotten to mention it in my paper for the legislators.
I don't see a big difference between opt-in and opt-out for the first spam legislation. The majority of spam senders are out and out crooks who do spam to support an ecology of frauds and porno businesses.
Later on we can ram a decent privacy bill down the craw of the DMA. First delegitimize the worst of the worst, then go after the next worst and so on.
Any company I've done business with in the past three years? Does that mean that old gas station I stopped at in the middle of Kansas once is going to send me e-flyers? What is the world coming to?
That is not the main wrecking clause. The wrecking clause is the requirement for individual opt-out from every mailing list. So the spam sender can create a new 'division' once a day and send you new spam no matter how often you opt out.
A global opt-out list is not such a problem, provided it is one-way encrypted (an old MIT suggestion) so the opt-out list can be used to see if a particular email is opted out but not as a source of addresses to spam. Yes we know the spam senders will ignore it, however making people sign up to get a right to sue a spam sender is not a major obstacle.
The real problem is the Republican's attempt to take out the private right of action. AOL and Earthlink have been very effective in suing the spammy bastards into the ground. They have judgements for millions against a lot of spammers. OK they will not collect it all but they will make the spam senders miserable.
In one case they got the spammer's lawyer who set up fake companies for him - now liable jointly and severally for a $6.9 million contempt judgment
Let's be very clear on this. Your first statement is correct. Your second statement, however, seems to claim that it's not spam if the remove address works, which is 100% bullshit.
Jaguar just send me an invite to go and drive their new XJ8 at Lime Rock Park. I don't think that is an exactly unwellcome intrusion. Nor is it exactly unreasonable to think that someone who bought an XK8 three years ago might be interested in an invitation to drive the new model.
The invite came by mail but it would have been OK by email.
I don't think it is unreasonable for a company I do business with to send me occasional mail. At some time perhaps we can get round to deciding exactly what the boundaries are. However first lets get rid of the vast bulk of outright criminal spam sent with fraudulent intent.
If this were to somehow get sent to trial, it would cost $$$ to defend, even if it's just paying for a plane ticket to the US and a lawyer for a few hours to say "ha ha, this is all voluntary on the ISP's side!". So maybe these jerks are trying to take a page from all the large patent lawsuits out there and sue someone small just to intimidate them?
It won't work. Even though AOL and MSN don't use the blacklists they are not going to let the spam senders win this one by default. Both of them are loosing millions through spam and they want to do anything they can to keep the spam senders down.
Expect a motion soon to force Felstein to reveal the names of his members. Also expect AOL to file suit against a certain spam sender in the Boca Raton area.
Would have made more sense to sue in the UK too. The Libel laws are stronger (although listing a "direct marketer" as a spammer is not exactly libelous) and it's easier for the plaintiff to get costs awarded.
The Plaintif also has to pay the costs of the defense when they lose and recent changes to the libel laws have made it very difficult to get a judgement that is more than the non-recoverable part of the costs.
The other problem is that some of the spam senders Felslime has represented in the past have criminal convictions which would pretty much make any UK libel case moot.
A final problem is that the defendants can pay a trivial amount into court, say 50 quid in an offer of settlement. If the Plaintif accepts the money the case is over, if not the defendants reclaim their costs from the plaintif on the much higher indemnity scale.
Given the previous convictions of the probable clients behind this case a UK court would be very likely to allow a defense motion for surety for costs.
One final problem is that the UK bar is not like the US bar. It is much harder to find a solicitor who will take what he knows to be a vexatious case and very likely that a barister will refuse it as well.
They likely listed everyone and their cousins to make it perfectly clear that complete diversity of citizenship exists. If you don't have complete diversity of citizenship then the Federal Court will throw the case out because it's a State Court matter.
IANAL, but I would expect that amongst the first motions put in by the defense would be to have the case dismissed against many if not all of the foreign defendants on the grounds that they have no connection to the alleged events.
I say amongst because the far bigger problem the suit has is that it is filed by a front organization and attempts to claim damages on behalf of a group of anonymous 'members'. You cannot do that under US law, or any other law I am aware of, even in the state of Florida. The defense has an absolute right to know who the real plaintif is.
What slashdot members appear to be referring to is a separate jurisdictional issue however, spamhaus is based in London and conducts its business exclusively in the UK. In order to sue in the US courts the plaintifs have to show that there is a reason that the US courts should attempt to exercise jurisdiction there rather than telling the plaintif to go file the case in the UK courts. There are precedents and long arm statues etc. however the courts tend to put a pretty strict bar on using them.
There are ways that a lawyer could probably persuade the Florida district court to exercise jurisdiction but Felstein does not appear likely to be able to make them.
I've recently had a tumult with the local tax-office, so input like this is more than welcome, I'll be comming back to slasdot for more of this later when I know how my tax application turns out for this year.
That is not such a great idea. Any attempt to intimidate a federal official is likely to be a criminal offense. Tax officials in particular are protected by specific anti-harassment laws.
Second, most tax offices have addresses that are automatically blacklisted by the catalogue companies along with prisons and such. Signing up the tax office for junk is such an old game that the direct mail operations are onto it.
The turning point is here. Savour the moment and celebrate, but remember the mistakes others have made. This is a wonderful thing to see, equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I have many friends from East Germany who would find the comparison highly offensive.
Enterprises use Microsoft for a simple reason, the alternatives suck. You might think that there is no difference between Microsoft Word and an open source alternative but end users don't.
Open source is hardly immune to buggy unreliable software and many users will even use the legacy unreliable and insecure code long after there is a better alternative. No software that Microsoft makes compares with sendmail for sheer awfulness. Yet sendmail is still hands down the main Unix mailer (unless you believe Prof Bernstein's QMail propaganda). There are much better alternatives, QMail and Exim, have been for years and years but they show no sign of dislodging the obsolete sendmail.
So given this position within the open source world why expect it to be different outside? The cost of Microsoft software is irrelevant if you are paying people to use it.
Further, there is no moral justification for progressive taxation. Of course the richest Americans will benefit most from a reversal of progressive taxation, since they have had to suffer under it the longest.
So far the tax cuts have hurt the richest, not helped them. The current recession has been made far worse because of the deficit. Businesses borrow money at long term rates. Those are high and going to go higher. That is because it is clear that the US is going to have to borrow lots of money or print money and let inflation rip.
The difference between 4% growth over 4 years and 0% growth is a 17% rise in the GDP. That means a 17% rise in the markets as well. That makes me more money than I pay in tax.
The tax cut is to bribe the gulible rich to give campaign dollars. There is a reason that Gates, Buffet and co don't want the tax cuts. Although their taxes will go down significantly they will be poorer off as a result.
The Economy grew by a total of 35% over the Clinton years. It looks like it will turn out to have shrunk or maybe broken even over the first Bush II term.
Laffer was a nincompoop, his curve is not original. His claim that we are on the backwards bending part was never sustained with data. Certainly the tax returns behaved exactly as expected.
"promised not to bust the budget" I'll tell you what. The budget was already worked out a year before 9/11. They weren't anticipating any wars.
They were not anticipating anything. The numbers for the tax cut were phony when the tax cut was proposed, the war and the recession have made the deficit worse but they are not the cause.
A responsible President would have recinded or delayed the tax cuts when it became apparent how serious the deficit was going to be. Even if the tax cuts were redirected from being targetted at the very very rich (1% get over 40% of the benefit) to poor and middle income earners it would at least have had some stimulative effect.
When a guy lies about his criminal record and went AWOL from the army he has forfeited the right to run as a 'character' candidate.
Personally, for my choice as president, I'll rather have a man with an IQ of 129 that has excellent intrapersonal/leadership skills and the abillity (and humillity) to suround himself with advisors smarter than him over an egotistical "I'll do it all myself" type with an IQ of 180.
I would prefer an honest President to either. No IQ score that is above the mean has much significance and if you go more than an SD above the mean there is NO significance. IQ tests were developed to measure the progress of mental patients under various therapies. They were never designed as general purpose tests.
Stephen Jay Gould gives the definitive debunking of IQ tests in The Mismeasure of Man. There is a big history of junk science, mostly in the service of racist theories of eugenics. Lots of untested facts being repeated for decades etc.
One of the many IQ myths is that you can't improve your score with practice. That is absolute rubbish. I had to practice IQ tests every week when I was 10 to take the exam for the senior school. I ended up with perfect scores on the multiple choice questions for several weeks in a row.
Getting back to his fraudulency, the guy has no character and no honesty. He lied to sell his tax cut and he lied to get his war. He promised not to bust the budget and then did exactly that, he even lied about the alleged 'trifecta' of exclusions to his promise. He never told the US people that there were exceptions, it never appeared in any press release of speech. Not only is he a liar, it is a character issue, he is in effect saying 'I had my fingers crossed behind my back'.
Before Bush's war the justification given was scary weapons of mass destruction. After the 'proof' that nuclear material had been bought from Niger was shown to be a fraud he invades anyway (or at least orders the army to). Then afterwards the story changes 'oh it was just regime change all along'. I wonder what the story is going to be once the funddies elect an ayatollah.
I suspect that after he looses the 2004 election the aircraft carrier antics are going to be seen in a different light. He is campaigning on his national guard stint - risky at best when daddy pulled strings to get the place and especially so when you then went AWOL for a year.
It is really difficult after being lied to to believe anything the man says.
It's nice to see Java stealing something from C# for once;)
Actually they also stole the dotNET concept of metadata. This is much bigger news than the enumerator which is merely syntactic sugar. Metadata is a major advance if you know how to use it.
Hopefully C# will quickly steal the Java concept of what we used to call functional types, so you have List (Foo) is a list of objects of type foo.
I don't like that being made mandatory on introduction as the article seems to suggest though, I would prefer that the default is the bottom type so old stuff compiles and then have a compiler warning. Otherwise switching from an new compiler back to an old one is not possible. Someone please tell me that it is not so!
I would hope that dotNET causes Java to advance and vice versa. Lots of us tried to get Gosling and co to do this sort of stuff back when Java launched but they were not willing to give anyone time of day. So we had to go bug the Microsoft folk instead. BTW the metadata concept is not new to dotNET, there was a similar concept in the Lisp Machine.
Vernon Schryver keyed what is possibly my favorite quote ever on exactly this subject in 1997 in a usenet article posted to news.admin.net-abuse.mail:
Vernon also runs the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (DCC) and is guaranteed to argue against anything that might topple his position as top spamcop.
If Vernon receives email from people he disagrees with he feels free to block their domain and report all emails that are cc'd to him to the DCC. He does this even if he is sending mail to the other people and the messages he is reporting are merely replies.
Vernon is on record advocating that everyone block mail from free ISPs, but he argues against RMX and the Microsoft style proposals as terrible censorship - even though he is the person who uses his own scheme for censorship of views he dislikes. Perhapse one of those C's in DCC should stand for something else.
Basicaly Vernon has almost singlehandedly sunk the IRTF ASRG group by driving away most of the people who were willing to do actual research or write code.
Actually, the ACLU kind of has a lot on their plate these days, what with trying to stop Ashcroft from spying on everyone and locking them up in Gitmo without even being charged and all...
Absolutely, look once the press have walked away the kid's lawyer will turn round to the RIAA and point out that their chance of collecting any judgement on a college kid until he gets out of college are nil. The RIAA will then accept an undisclosed sum in actual settlement. This was not about getting the damages.
Now spam senders on the other hand is a different game. AOL's lawyer definitely wants to put as many of those people under and keep them in debt for the rest of their lives. He is very pround of the fact that none of the defendants he has won judgements against have discharged them in bankruptcy.
The ACLU has enough to do protecting the rights that are not authors of their own misfortunes from the likes of Ashcroft. Heck even Bob Barr is frightened by the guy's behavior!
The only other alternative is PGP but that requires widespread deployment of decent processors and computers that aren't bogged down with spyware and other crap.
PGP is NOT the only alternative, it isn't even the most widely deployed alternative. Pretty much every major email client out there supports S/MIME and has for 5 years. The main problem with both S/MIME and PGP is that you have to accept the whole post before you can check the signature. They are also end-to-end which is not the only way to deal with spam. But that is fixable, writing these protocols is not rocket science.
Most mail servers support STARTTLS. Exchange, Notes and EXIM all do. You can even do it with sendmail if you must.
You can even authenticate on IP address via RMX.
There are a lot of options. But C/R for personal email is not one that most are ready to accept.
I am definitely in favor of a little pain up front in increased traffic from challenge-response to get the spam boys off the net.
Yes, but the pain is not for you, it is for other people. I do not respond to C/R challenges because I find them objectionable. That is not an uncommon attitude.
The first thing that happened on the IRTF anti-spam group list was that someone with a broken C/R filter spammed the list repeatedly with challenges untill he was booted off.
Earthlink really needs to think twice about this one, there are much less intrusive and much more effective means of doing authentication. The consensus in the anti-spam community is that C/R is only acceptable as a last resort if the alternative is bouncing the email. It is not acceptable as a first resort.
To date, I've understood a "Royalty Free" patent license to mean "Available for use for the stated purpose (i.e., to implement the standard) without need to pay royalties".
But there can be other conditions.
Microsoft demonstrated this to Sun recently with an RF license that Sun simply could not sign.
I would rather stick with an IP regime that actually achieves the objectives of an open and unencumbered (including royalty free) standard than have a license whose terms meets the demands of the noisiest OSS advocates but ends up with an encumbered standard.
The IP regime is not a legitimate reason to complain about IETF or W3C. And in any case noone ever said that every standard had to be an open source standard.
This is a case of "if you love me, will you put it in writing?". The point is: when you are developing free software, a RAND licence is the same as no license, so a RAND-encumbered internet standard is the same as no standard: you can't implement it.
Oh who gives a shit about people who will complain even when they are being told that the situation is exactly what they asked for?
The terms for all the current IETF and W3C specs being worked on are RAND with Zero license fee (RAND-Z). Royalty Free is definitely NOT what you want if you have a brain that works. RF terms allow a patent holder to apply any encumberance they choose so long as there is no cash charge. Well guess what there are worse terms for companies than paying money, handing over your customer lists for example.
The other reason RF is braindead is that it requires everyone to give their patent rights away completely. I have just filed a whole rack of patents for the sole purpose of forcing other parties to offer their technlogy on RAND-Z terms. I don't think anyone wants me to allow the folk who are demanding patent royalties to have access to my patents for free unless they are willing to make their patents available on the same terms.
I think that like many who latch on to the Open Source world you are more interested in purity of ideology than actual objectives.
They've alienated the open source crowd [ietf.org] too. (In case you don't see right away what's happening here, IETF is defending its policy of allowing RAND patent-encumbered standards, which is obviously incompatible with free software implementation of same.)
As with W3C the issue there was purely a theoretical one. Neither the IETF or the W3C ever intended to persue a standard that was encumbered except in the case that there was a problem that could be addressed in no other way. This happened in the case of PEM and RSA, there was no way to do encypted mail without the PKP patents.
In the event there is nothing in this category that anyone wants to persue. DRM is a mess, there are multiple patent claims that conflict and each holder demands ridiculous royalties. So you can't deploy with any confidence.
But only internet-midgets Microsoft and Cisco? Ya sure like they have some sway over what technology gets adopted...
But only Cisco has any influence. Microsoft are only there because they think it might look bad if they don't show up.
At this point the IETF has pretty much alienated everyone but the academics and the open software crowd. And most of the open software people are getting pissed off because the IETF does not move fast enough even for their business.
Every IETF I go to the freeswan people have been complaining about a Denial of Standard attack, and they have a right to given the run around they have had.
It has also become clear that going off and doing your own thing is not an impediment to getting a standard. Phil Z. was in no way hurt by his decision not to build on the PEM standards with PGP.
And no organizations will, at least not until the major software companies *cough*Microsoft*cough* put out full, seamless support for IPv6 networking.
Microsoft is well ahead there. They have been doing IPv6 stuff for years. Of course you still can't do anything with it and there is no DNS support and nobody seems to have a transition plan worth a damn, but you cannot blame Microsoft.
The real blame for IPv6, DNSSEC and IPSEC being nowhere is the IETF. And before ACs come back telling me that IPSEC is widely used for VPNs, yes I know, but a VPN is not what IPSEC is designed for. IPSEC was intended to be INTERNET security.
Rough Consensus and running code may have been fine when the IETF bigwigs were in their 20s and 30s. These days they are in their 50s and 60s and it really shows. The place has been a talking shop for has beens for years.
What is interesting is the number of folk who are NOT involved with IETF anymore. I have not seen Vint Cerf there for years, nor David Clark or Ron Rivest. Tim Berners-Lee has not been there for at least eight years and it is four years since I saw any W3C staff there. The hip venue these days is OASIS, you can get a spec finished in less than 2 years in OASIS - and when it is done it does not look like some shite that came off a teletype.
The folk in charge at the IETF these days are the second stringers, not the visionaries. They simply do not have what it takes to deploy IPv6 and they are scared of making a bad choice so they make no choices at all which is usually the worst choice.
The only major companies still involved in IETF in a big way are CISCO and Microsoft. And Microsoft is only there because they feel they need the cover. There are some Sun engineers still attending, but that seems to be as much as anything to keep their visibility up and their resume looking fresh.
You wont find any signifigant number of persons who dont like SPEWS that dont fall into one or more of those categories, either currently or previously.
There was absolutely nobody at the FTC willing to defend them. The other blacklists were kinda pissed with SPEWS because it is completely out of control.
They were more pissed with the lawyer for the spammers of course and he seemed to be behaving very oddly indeed.
I don't think you really understand Sun's core business. It's got nothing to do with the desktop and everything to do with servers.
That is why they have no chance of survival. The server business is simply not sustainable on its own. Ask DEC or SGI or Symbolics how successfull their 'high end' strategy was.
Sun do not have what it takes to win in that market - raw CPU power that is rock solid reliable at highly competative prices. As for the new low cost 'entry machines' mentioned, they sound exactly like the Multias that DEC made just before getting Compaqed.
Nor do I think that the server market will last long in any case. Most servers will become an appliance, the way that NAT firewall boxes are becomming appliances. You can buy the $30,000 Nokia bok with Checkpoint or the $150 Netgear box. Same thing is happening on the email front, on the storage front, on every front that matters.
Sun made hay in the days when a VC would tout their company as a hot IPO on the back of Java running on Solaris servers, administered by a ponytailed geek sitting in a $1000 Aeron chair. These days the hot configuration is to run perl on Linux, administered by the same ponyhaired geek sitting on the cardboard carton the linux server came in.
...should offer to buy them. At a ridiculously low price. Turnabout, being fair play, and all.:-)
Please no! They might win the auction.
Apple are in prime spot to displace Sun these days. They are the only UNIX vendor committed to a proprietary UNIX that is likely to still be on offer in ten years time. IBM has already all but said it has thrown in with Linux. HPUX, Digital Unix, Irix etc are already niche market plays.
I don't think solaris can survive, simply too few seats to be viable except as a niche. It is bound to a single hardware platform which is itself starting to look old and tired with not much hope of fending of Pentium long term, let alone Itanium.
Apple on the other hand have a really strong desktop business by any measure but Microsoft. They have probably shiped more UNIX systems by now than any other vendor, their kit is robust and mature. Sorry Sun, you never did crack the quality manufacturing thing the way DEC did. So now you charge DEC prices for FIAT reliability.
The other major problem Sun has is Scott. Unless he is gone by the end of the year Sun is dead. Scott has been spending his time on futile rants about Microsoft who don't even make hardware - his core market while Linux, IBM and now HP eat his lunch.
I was eating with a senior exec of a major (F100) company who used to be a Sun shop. Scott had gone out to talk to them and his answer to everything was about stopping Microsoft. So the company concluded that they better switch from Sun quick. I then heard the exact same story a couple days later from another F100 company exec.
The single best thing Jobs did at Apple was bury the animosity with Microsoft. He told Apple that they were going to be something so different from anyone else that what happened at Redmond did not matter. He was right, he realised that the 'Network Computer' that had been developed would flop in that market but had the potential to be a killer entry price machine with a few cosmetic tweaks - and the iMac was born.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if the only addresses you add to the list are valid ones. You can also add invalid addresses to the list that are not in use but are being spammed anyway.
But thanks for pointing that out since I had forgotten to mention it in my paper for the legislators.
I don't see a big difference between opt-in and opt-out for the first spam legislation. The majority of spam senders are out and out crooks who do spam to support an ecology of frauds and porno businesses.
Later on we can ram a decent privacy bill down the craw of the DMA. First delegitimize the worst of the worst, then go after the next worst and so on.
That is not the main wrecking clause. The wrecking clause is the requirement for individual opt-out from every mailing list. So the spam sender can create a new 'division' once a day and send you new spam no matter how often you opt out.
A global opt-out list is not such a problem, provided it is one-way encrypted (an old MIT suggestion) so the opt-out list can be used to see if a particular email is opted out but not as a source of addresses to spam. Yes we know the spam senders will ignore it, however making people sign up to get a right to sue a spam sender is not a major obstacle.
The real problem is the Republican's attempt to take out the private right of action. AOL and Earthlink have been very effective in suing the spammy bastards into the ground. They have judgements for millions against a lot of spammers. OK they will not collect it all but they will make the spam senders miserable.
In one case they got the spammer's lawyer who set up fake companies for him - now liable jointly and severally for a $6.9 million contempt judgment
Jaguar just send me an invite to go and drive their new XJ8 at Lime Rock Park. I don't think that is an exactly unwellcome intrusion. Nor is it exactly unreasonable to think that someone who bought an XK8 three years ago might be interested in an invitation to drive the new model.
The invite came by mail but it would have been OK by email.
I don't think it is unreasonable for a company I do business with to send me occasional mail. At some time perhaps we can get round to deciding exactly what the boundaries are. However first lets get rid of the vast bulk of outright criminal spam sent with fraudulent intent.
It won't work. Even though AOL and MSN don't use the blacklists they are not going to let the spam senders win this one by default. Both of them are loosing millions through spam and they want to do anything they can to keep the spam senders down.
Expect a motion soon to force Felstein to reveal the names of his members. Also expect AOL to file suit against a certain spam sender in the Boca Raton area.
The Plaintif also has to pay the costs of the defense when they lose and recent changes to the libel laws have made it very difficult to get a judgement that is more than the non-recoverable part of the costs.
The other problem is that some of the spam senders Felslime has represented in the past have criminal convictions which would pretty much make any UK libel case moot.
A final problem is that the defendants can pay a trivial amount into court, say 50 quid in an offer of settlement. If the Plaintif accepts the money the case is over, if not the defendants reclaim their costs from the plaintif on the much higher indemnity scale.
Given the previous convictions of the probable clients behind this case a UK court would be very likely to allow a defense motion for surety for costs.
One final problem is that the UK bar is not like the US bar. It is much harder to find a solicitor who will take what he knows to be a vexatious case and very likely that a barister will refuse it as well.
IANAL, but I would expect that amongst the first motions put in by the defense would be to have the case dismissed against many if not all of the foreign defendants on the grounds that they have no connection to the alleged events.
I say amongst because the far bigger problem the suit has is that it is filed by a front organization and attempts to claim damages on behalf of a group of anonymous 'members'. You cannot do that under US law, or any other law I am aware of, even in the state of Florida. The defense has an absolute right to know who the real plaintif is.
What slashdot members appear to be referring to is a separate jurisdictional issue however, spamhaus is based in London and conducts its business exclusively in the UK. In order to sue in the US courts the plaintifs have to show that there is a reason that the US courts should attempt to exercise jurisdiction there rather than telling the plaintif to go file the case in the UK courts. There are precedents and long arm statues etc. however the courts tend to put a pretty strict bar on using them.
There are ways that a lawyer could probably persuade the Florida district court to exercise jurisdiction but Felstein does not appear likely to be able to make them.
That is not such a great idea. Any attempt to intimidate a federal official is likely to be a criminal offense. Tax officials in particular are protected by specific anti-harassment laws.
Second, most tax offices have addresses that are automatically blacklisted by the catalogue companies along with prisons and such. Signing up the tax office for junk is such an old game that the direct mail operations are onto it.
I have many friends from East Germany who would find the comparison highly offensive.
Enterprises use Microsoft for a simple reason, the alternatives suck. You might think that there is no difference between Microsoft Word and an open source alternative but end users don't.
Open source is hardly immune to buggy unreliable software and many users will even use the legacy unreliable and insecure code long after there is a better alternative. No software that Microsoft makes compares with sendmail for sheer awfulness. Yet sendmail is still hands down the main Unix mailer (unless you believe Prof Bernstein's QMail propaganda). There are much better alternatives, QMail and Exim, have been for years and years but they show no sign of dislodging the obsolete sendmail.
So given this position within the open source world why expect it to be different outside? The cost of Microsoft software is irrelevant if you are paying people to use it.
So far the tax cuts have hurt the richest, not helped them. The current recession has been made far worse because of the deficit. Businesses borrow money at long term rates. Those are high and going to go higher. That is because it is clear that the US is going to have to borrow lots of money or print money and let inflation rip.
The difference between 4% growth over 4 years and 0% growth is a 17% rise in the GDP. That means a 17% rise in the markets as well. That makes me more money than I pay in tax.
The tax cut is to bribe the gulible rich to give campaign dollars. There is a reason that Gates, Buffet and co don't want the tax cuts. Although their taxes will go down significantly they will be poorer off as a result.
The Economy grew by a total of 35% over the Clinton years. It looks like it will turn out to have shrunk or maybe broken even over the first Bush II term.
Laffer was a nincompoop, his curve is not original. His claim that we are on the backwards bending part was never sustained with data. Certainly the tax returns behaved exactly as expected.
They were not anticipating anything. The numbers for the tax cut were phony when the tax cut was proposed, the war and the recession have made the deficit worse but they are not the cause.
A responsible President would have recinded or delayed the tax cuts when it became apparent how serious the deficit was going to be. Even if the tax cuts were redirected from being targetted at the very very rich (1% get over 40% of the benefit) to poor and middle income earners it would at least have had some stimulative effect.
When a guy lies about his criminal record and went AWOL from the army he has forfeited the right to run as a 'character' candidate.
The fact that you read and apparently believe stories in Fox News tells us what YOUR IQ is.
I would prefer an honest President to either. No IQ score that is above the mean has much significance and if you go more than an SD above the mean there is NO significance. IQ tests were developed to measure the progress of mental patients under various therapies. They were never designed as general purpose tests.
Stephen Jay Gould gives the definitive debunking of IQ tests in The Mismeasure of Man. There is a big history of junk science, mostly in the service of racist theories of eugenics. Lots of untested facts being repeated for decades etc.
One of the many IQ myths is that you can't improve your score with practice. That is absolute rubbish. I had to practice IQ tests every week when I was 10 to take the exam for the senior school. I ended up with perfect scores on the multiple choice questions for several weeks in a row.
Getting back to his fraudulency, the guy has no character and no honesty. He lied to sell his tax cut and he lied to get his war. He promised not to bust the budget and then did exactly that, he even lied about the alleged 'trifecta' of exclusions to his promise. He never told the US people that there were exceptions, it never appeared in any press release of speech. Not only is he a liar, it is a character issue, he is in effect saying 'I had my fingers crossed behind my back'.
Before Bush's war the justification given was scary weapons of mass destruction. After the 'proof' that nuclear material had been bought from Niger was shown to be a fraud he invades anyway (or at least orders the army to). Then afterwards the story changes 'oh it was just regime change all along'. I wonder what the story is going to be once the funddies elect an ayatollah.
I suspect that after he looses the 2004 election the aircraft carrier antics are going to be seen in a different light. He is campaigning on his national guard stint - risky at best when daddy pulled strings to get the place and especially so when you then went AWOL for a year.
It is really difficult after being lied to to believe anything the man says.
Actually they also stole the dotNET concept of metadata. This is much bigger news than the enumerator which is merely syntactic sugar. Metadata is a major advance if you know how to use it.
Hopefully C# will quickly steal the Java concept of what we used to call functional types, so you have List (Foo) is a list of objects of type foo.
I don't like that being made mandatory on introduction as the article seems to suggest though, I would prefer that the default is the bottom type so old stuff compiles and then have a compiler warning. Otherwise switching from an new compiler back to an old one is not possible. Someone please tell me that it is not so!
I would hope that dotNET causes Java to advance and vice versa. Lots of us tried to get Gosling and co to do this sort of stuff back when Java launched but they were not willing to give anyone time of day. So we had to go bug the Microsoft folk instead. BTW the metadata concept is not new to dotNET, there was a similar concept in the Lisp Machine.
Vernon also runs the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (DCC) and is guaranteed to argue against anything that might topple his position as top spamcop.
If Vernon receives email from people he disagrees with he feels free to block their domain and report all emails that are cc'd to him to the DCC. He does this even if he is sending mail to the other people and the messages he is reporting are merely replies.
Vernon is on record advocating that everyone block mail from free ISPs, but he argues against RMX and the Microsoft style proposals as terrible censorship - even though he is the person who uses his own scheme for censorship of views he dislikes. Perhapse one of those C's in DCC should stand for something else.
Basicaly Vernon has almost singlehandedly sunk the IRTF ASRG group by driving away most of the people who were willing to do actual research or write code.
Absolutely, look once the press have walked away the kid's lawyer will turn round to the RIAA and point out that their chance of collecting any judgement on a college kid until he gets out of college are nil. The RIAA will then accept an undisclosed sum in actual settlement. This was not about getting the damages.
Now spam senders on the other hand is a different game. AOL's lawyer definitely wants to put as many of those people under and keep them in debt for the rest of their lives. He is very pround of the fact that none of the defendants he has won judgements against have discharged them in bankruptcy.
The ACLU has enough to do protecting the rights that are not authors of their own misfortunes from the likes of Ashcroft. Heck even Bob Barr is frightened by the guy's behavior!
PGP is NOT the only alternative, it isn't even the most widely deployed alternative. Pretty much every major email client out there supports S/MIME and has for 5 years. The main problem with both S/MIME and PGP is that you have to accept the whole post before you can check the signature. They are also end-to-end which is not the only way to deal with spam. But that is fixable, writing these protocols is not rocket science.
Most mail servers support STARTTLS. Exchange, Notes and EXIM all do. You can even do it with sendmail if you must. You can even authenticate on IP address via RMX.
There are a lot of options. But C/R for personal email is not one that most are ready to accept.
Yes, but the pain is not for you, it is for other people. I do not respond to C/R challenges because I find them objectionable. That is not an uncommon attitude.
The first thing that happened on the IRTF anti-spam group list was that someone with a broken C/R filter spammed the list repeatedly with challenges untill he was booted off.
Earthlink really needs to think twice about this one, there are much less intrusive and much more effective means of doing authentication. The consensus in the anti-spam community is that C/R is only acceptable as a last resort if the alternative is bouncing the email. It is not acceptable as a first resort.
But there can be other conditions.
Microsoft demonstrated this to Sun recently with an RF license that Sun simply could not sign.
I would rather stick with an IP regime that actually achieves the objectives of an open and unencumbered (including royalty free) standard than have a license whose terms meets the demands of the noisiest OSS advocates but ends up with an encumbered standard.
The IP regime is not a legitimate reason to complain about IETF or W3C. And in any case noone ever said that every standard had to be an open source standard.
Oh who gives a shit about people who will complain even when they are being told that the situation is exactly what they asked for?
The terms for all the current IETF and W3C specs being worked on are RAND with Zero license fee (RAND-Z). Royalty Free is definitely NOT what you want if you have a brain that works. RF terms allow a patent holder to apply any encumberance they choose so long as there is no cash charge. Well guess what there are worse terms for companies than paying money, handing over your customer lists for example.
The other reason RF is braindead is that it requires everyone to give their patent rights away completely. I have just filed a whole rack of patents for the sole purpose of forcing other parties to offer their technlogy on RAND-Z terms. I don't think anyone wants me to allow the folk who are demanding patent royalties to have access to my patents for free unless they are willing to make their patents available on the same terms.
I think that like many who latch on to the Open Source world you are more interested in purity of ideology than actual objectives.
As with W3C the issue there was purely a theoretical one. Neither the IETF or the W3C ever intended to persue a standard that was encumbered except in the case that there was a problem that could be addressed in no other way. This happened in the case of PEM and RSA, there was no way to do encypted mail without the PKP patents.
In the event there is nothing in this category that anyone wants to persue. DRM is a mess, there are multiple patent claims that conflict and each holder demands ridiculous royalties. So you can't deploy with any confidence.
But only Cisco has any influence. Microsoft are only there because they think it might look bad if they don't show up.
At this point the IETF has pretty much alienated everyone but the academics and the open software crowd. And most of the open software people are getting pissed off because the IETF does not move fast enough even for their business.
Every IETF I go to the freeswan people have been complaining about a Denial of Standard attack, and they have a right to given the run around they have had.
It has also become clear that going off and doing your own thing is not an impediment to getting a standard. Phil Z. was in no way hurt by his decision not to build on the PEM standards with PGP.
Microsoft is well ahead there. They have been doing IPv6 stuff for years. Of course you still can't do anything with it and there is no DNS support and nobody seems to have a transition plan worth a damn, but you cannot blame Microsoft.
The real blame for IPv6, DNSSEC and IPSEC being nowhere is the IETF. And before ACs come back telling me that IPSEC is widely used for VPNs, yes I know, but a VPN is not what IPSEC is designed for. IPSEC was intended to be INTERNET security.
Rough Consensus and running code may have been fine when the IETF bigwigs were in their 20s and 30s. These days they are in their 50s and 60s and it really shows. The place has been a talking shop for has beens for years.
What is interesting is the number of folk who are NOT involved with IETF anymore. I have not seen Vint Cerf there for years, nor David Clark or Ron Rivest. Tim Berners-Lee has not been there for at least eight years and it is four years since I saw any W3C staff there. The hip venue these days is OASIS, you can get a spec finished in less than 2 years in OASIS - and when it is done it does not look like some shite that came off a teletype.
The folk in charge at the IETF these days are the second stringers, not the visionaries. They simply do not have what it takes to deploy IPv6 and they are scared of making a bad choice so they make no choices at all which is usually the worst choice.
The only major companies still involved in IETF in a big way are CISCO and Microsoft. And Microsoft is only there because they feel they need the cover. There are some Sun engineers still attending, but that seems to be as much as anything to keep their visibility up and their resume looking fresh.
There was absolutely nobody at the FTC willing to defend them. The other blacklists were kinda pissed with SPEWS because it is completely out of control.
They were more pissed with the lawyer for the spammers of course and he seemed to be behaving very oddly indeed.
That is why they have no chance of survival. The server business is simply not sustainable on its own. Ask DEC or SGI or Symbolics how successfull their 'high end' strategy was.
Sun do not have what it takes to win in that market - raw CPU power that is rock solid reliable at highly competative prices. As for the new low cost 'entry machines' mentioned, they sound exactly like the Multias that DEC made just before getting Compaqed.
Nor do I think that the server market will last long in any case. Most servers will become an appliance, the way that NAT firewall boxes are becomming appliances. You can buy the $30,000 Nokia bok with Checkpoint or the $150 Netgear box. Same thing is happening on the email front, on the storage front, on every front that matters.
Sun made hay in the days when a VC would tout their company as a hot IPO on the back of Java running on Solaris servers, administered by a ponytailed geek sitting in a $1000 Aeron chair. These days the hot configuration is to run perl on Linux, administered by the same ponyhaired geek sitting on the cardboard carton the linux server came in.
Please no! They might win the auction.
Apple are in prime spot to displace Sun these days. They are the only UNIX vendor committed to a proprietary UNIX that is likely to still be on offer in ten years time. IBM has already all but said it has thrown in with Linux. HPUX, Digital Unix, Irix etc are already niche market plays.
I don't think solaris can survive, simply too few seats to be viable except as a niche. It is bound to a single hardware platform which is itself starting to look old and tired with not much hope of fending of Pentium long term, let alone Itanium.
Apple on the other hand have a really strong desktop business by any measure but Microsoft. They have probably shiped more UNIX systems by now than any other vendor, their kit is robust and mature. Sorry Sun, you never did crack the quality manufacturing thing the way DEC did. So now you charge DEC prices for FIAT reliability.
The other major problem Sun has is Scott. Unless he is gone by the end of the year Sun is dead. Scott has been spending his time on futile rants about Microsoft who don't even make hardware - his core market while Linux, IBM and now HP eat his lunch.
I was eating with a senior exec of a major (F100) company who used to be a Sun shop. Scott had gone out to talk to them and his answer to everything was about stopping Microsoft. So the company concluded that they better switch from Sun quick. I then heard the exact same story a couple days later from another F100 company exec.
The single best thing Jobs did at Apple was bury the animosity with Microsoft. He told Apple that they were going to be something so different from anyone else that what happened at Redmond did not matter. He was right, he realised that the 'Network Computer' that had been developed would flop in that market but had the potential to be a killer entry price machine with a few cosmetic tweaks - and the iMac was born.
Sorry Scott, but now it is you or the company.