You are not forced to use the Qt event loop. You can use all blocking I/O and lots of threads if you really want. I personally find the event loop approach to result in more elegant code, and this concept is not unique to Qt. The logical mechanism of the event code is transferable to other frameworks, even if the actual code is not.
There is no way to use a framework without writing code that is specific to that framework. My advice is to just pick one and drink the kool-aid. One way to get crappy code is to use a framework incorrectly.
If done correctly signals and slots make very maintainable code. They allow you to decouple classes (remove dependencies from classes upon eachother), as opposed to mechanisms like callbacks/handlers. This leads to more modular code.
I've seen memory allocated via new and then the pointer passed into emit only to be deleted on the other end of a signal/slot chain.
That's a c/c++ problem, not a Qt problem. You can't stop people from writing bad code, but you can make it harder.
As far as memory management goes, Qt provides both QSharedPointers, which will perform reference counting and delete themselves upon the reference count reacing zero. They also provide a way to use their COW (copy on write) mechanism, so that you can treat references as values and the data is only copied when it is modified from the original (lazy copying).
Memory management in C/C++ is error prone. Using reference counting pointers and COW makes it easy to do correctly.
It wasn't intended to be humorous, but I'm not surprised that you have again failed to grasp what I am saying. My day job *is* computer science, and I am well compensated for the skills I provide.
It's too bad you walked away from an opportunity to actually learn something
Now that's fucking hilarious.
What was I supposed to learn? How to use English words improperly? How to lack reading comprehension? How to make arguments based on flawed premises? How to draw the wrong conclusions from facts that aren't even relevant?
Airplanes don't really exist. There is absolutely no evidence that they exist. There are numerous scientific studies showing that the things that people commonly see rolling around at airports don't actually fly. They merely roll around and people are fooled into thinking that they are going to far off places.
If you are too lazy to google the evidence showing that airplanes aren't real, then I am not going to help you.
You have already proven your blind faith to the false belief that airplanes are real by claiming to have been on one that went to another city.
I have presented very logical and reasonable arguments, while your arguments fall flat on their face
I think I pay $30 per year to have a company do that for me. And if I don't like that company, I can switch companies and keep the same domain and email addresses.
The fact that you don't understand the things I am saying doesn't make them incorrect. Simply repeating your ridiculous illogical arguments doesn't make them correct. It's like you are trying to explain that airplanes don't really exist to someone who flies on them everyday. It just makes you look foolish.
That is debatable, at best. The more people who are using filters, the more CPU time and storage space is consumed by the filtering processes. Meanwhile, global spam volume continues to increase, which only further increases that resource consumption.
CPU time and disk space continue to get exponentially cheaper. Furthermore, disk space is freed up by effective filtering.
No, I am pointing out that filters don't actually help the long term problem at all. You then react by shoving your fingers in your ears and pretending otherwise.
No I am saying the long term problem you are describing doesn't actually appear to exist. Of all the seemingly intractable problems our society is facing, one of the few that actually seems solved is spam filtering.
First of all, filters will never bring about an end to spam. I've stated exactly why that is more than once in this discussion. Second, it is well documented that the global volume of spam year-to-year is still up, not down. Spammers are not getting close to giving up by any sane metric.
I don't consider "an end to spam" to be a realistic goal. I consider "reducing the amount of spam I see to a very low level" to be perfectly acceptable. I don;t care about the volume of spam that is sent. I only care about how much I actually have to see, which is negligible.
Considering there is spam sent to advertise shoddy anti-spam software, you are simply not correct in that statement. While the lion's share does not go to the spammers, some of it does.
I don't actually get any of this spam.
If you think it's getting better you aren't paying attention. It is actually getting worse on many important metrics.
And what metrics are those?
It has been discussed on the front page of this very site. If you can't search for it yourself I'm not going to do it for you.
I'm not interested in what I can find. I am interested in the particular evidence that you find convincing.
That is an oversimplification. I already described how and why they are winning. Are you reading what I am writing?
Yes, and I described why I reject the validity of your metrics, and suggested better metrics.
No, but it needs to make the situation - particularly the long-term situation - better. Filters cannot do that.
Filters quite clearly make things better now. I don;t think your claim that things will be much worse in the future is supported. It certainly isn't convincing to me.
And how long are messages retained in your junk mail folder? I've heard some online services with auto-filtering only retain messages in junk for a month, which means the majority of what goes in there you never see. This also means you have absolutely no idea what your FP rate is.
It's probably a month. I have lived through a time of no filters, and a time of bad filters. Now I have just come to finally enjoy good filtering. If I am constantly checking my junk mail folder, then I am suffering much of the downside of spam (wasting my time sifting through junk email).
The whole point of spam filtering is that you don't have to sift through junk mail unless you have a good reason to believe you've actually lost something.
Not. Even. Remotely. Close. To. Reality.,br> Again, spam volume is up. Just because you don't see it in your inbox doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Furthermore you are paying to deal with it.
As I said. I think "spam volume" is a bad metric. I think measuring the actual spam that gets through per capita is a better metric. And it's pretty obvious that that is *way* down, given the fact that I rarely see any spam, and have only missed one email I was expecting in the last 2 years or so.
Email is different, in the sense that there is a cost in time and effort with getting all your contacts to update your email address.
There are lots of people still with AOL email addresses because switching email addresses is simply too costly to do.
I don't have any problem using android and apple smart phones. What if one of these fancy new phones came with a stipulation that you *must* continue to use the phone for 5 years, unless you do 100 hours of community service?
I would be very unlikely to use such a phone.
I don't communicate with very many people via email. I don't have a problem switching email addresses. I think it would be about 1 hour of work for me to do so. I accept this cost.
If I had a business with thousands of customers, I may not be willing to pay the cost of switching email addresses, and would therefore take the necessary steps to protect myself from such a cost.
As one of the OPs stated, you can forward your messages to a gmail account if you like their service, without having a public facing gmail address.
That still does not make them free. Someone has to pay for them. They have very real costs.
Yes someone had to use resources to develop them, however the costs are not proportional to the number of people using them. The more people that the filters benefit, the higher the utility/cost ratio becomes.
If filters were truly effective, then spammers would give up.
Like I said, you seem to be conflating "effective" with "100% effective". Some spammers will likely continue to use spam, if there is any utility at all to doing so. If there is a continually smaller ratio of spammers to people using email, then effectively spammers are in the process of giving up, which will continue until the last spam message ever is sent.
Indeed, they - the spammers - realize that they are actually winning this war as the cost of filtering - both in dollars invested as well as in ever-increasing FP and ever-decreasing FN rates - is going up.
The spammers don't get the money spent on filtering technologies. Spammers don't win the war by causing filtering technology to get better. Spammers win the war by getting more messages to get through the spam filters with fewer resources (which they are failing)
Indeed, no reasonable person could look at this and conclude that filtering is a useful long-term strategy or even a relevant strategy to continue working on past a few years ago in history.
once again you seem to be confusing the terms. Does something need to be a perfect solution to be useful? Are cars not useful because they sometimes break down?
That still has a nonzero cost and requires investment of capital and human time. Just because it goes in to training machines to do the sorting doesn't mean it will work right every time, and as the volume shifts towards more spam the FP rate inevitably goes up.
Everything has a nonzero cost. I don't think having truly zero cost is a useful benchmark, due to the fact that nothing can have a truly 0 cost.
Again, if that were the case, then we would see less spam as total % of internet traffic than we saw 20 years ago. Unfortunately the reality is exactly the opposite.
Citation please. I find it very hard to believe that in the age of 4K streaming video, spam email messages are a higher percentage of total internet traffic.
How often do you check the junk mail filter on your inbox?
Maybe twice a year, if I have reason to believe something may have been miscategorized as spam. I can only think of a single time I actually found anything important in the spam folder.
I'm sorry but you are utterly delirious if you think that countermeasures from spammers come after the changes in filters - it is exactly the opposite. If the filters were ever ahead then spammers would come to a screeching halt. Instead the spammers are well aware of what they are doing to the filter results as they continue to change the structure of their messages. The spammers are well aware that they are not far from pushing up the noise to the point where filters fail completely.
Spam *has* come to a screeching halt. It went from being an incredibly problem to not even being a nuisance.
This is like saying "If Usain Bolt is such a great runner, why are there still other runners?". I think you have impractical expectations for what counts as "useful" and "effective".
Your faith is misplaced.
I don't have faith in anything. I am convinced by results. I didn't expect filters to get so good. I was proven wrong. They have.
The main problem with that notion is that the people most likely to pay for a filter are the ones least likely to buy anything as a result of spam anyways. Hence you are not preventing the spammers from reaching their customers.
Filters are ubiquitous. You get them whether you explicitly pay for them or not. They are like cup holders in cars.
You are ignoring the volume of spam that traverses the internet at any given moment in time. The volume is UP, not down. Just because a lot of it doesn't reach human eyes doesn't mean there is less of it.
The fact that the amount of spam sent is higher, but the amount reaching its destination is vastly lower, is evidence of the effectiveness of filtering.
In fact, ISPs and email providers are inundated with spam traffic more now than ever before.
When humans are inundated with spam, it means that humans must spend their own valuable time sifting through it. When email servers are inundated with spam, it means that incredibly fast machines are using advanced algorithms to sift through it automatically. It's not free, but it's almost free, and certainly much cheaper than the time that it saves humans.
If they were "losing this battle", why would they respond by sending more?
The same technology that has made spam filtering possible, as also lowered the costs of sending spam. If sending spam is cheaper, then you can send more of it for the same amount of money. That's why more is being sent. But a spam message sent today is far less effective than a spam message sent 20 years ago.
A lot of people don't realize that the people losing the battle - at least any time that someone thinks a filter is an effective solution - are the users and not the spammers. The spammers are gradually driving down the TP and FN rates on the implemented filters and making them less useful.
You say that, but the reality of my inbox and junk mail folder tells a different story.
ISPs and email providers who are sold on the foolish gamble of using filters are left with no choice but to counter with more investment of time and hardware. Eventually the walls will come crashing down unless someone actually counters the situation for what it really is.
... or filtering continues to outpace the filter countermeasures.
You can send a lot of spam for a lot less money than the cost of a single google advertisement. That won't change any time soon, and it fits the model of the spamvertised operations much better as well; they don't want to become amazon they just want to pull in some quick money.
Sending a spam is not the same as getting someone to read it (thanks to effective filtering).
You seem to think that filters need to be 100% effective to be "effective". This is obviously not true. In fact I would also like better solutions to spam (like estamps, proof of work, etc), but filtering has gotten so damn good, that there seems to be no demand for a replacement to something that works good enough.
I'm not sure why you inferred that I thought google was an ISP.
I don't think the prediction that gmail may not be your preferred email service for all eternity counts as being "wild unreasonable".
Making good decisions based on good predictions of the future is part of what makes us successful as individuals and as a species. It's called investing.
If you can effectively filter spam, then you *have* prevented them from getting paid (via spam). The fact that we used to be completely inundated with spam, and now it is relatively rare to get spam with a good filter, is a good sign that spammers are losing this battle.
It seems that in 2015 it is far more profitable to sell products through means other than spam (e.g. google advertisements, etc).
I don't think the OP is suggesting gmail is going anywhere soon. I think he is suggesting that they may not be round in the (not soon) future.
There was a time when AOL wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe they still aren't, but that claim is straining credulity. At the very least, being stuck with an AOL email address in 2015 is not an ideal situation to be in. Is it really so hard to imagine that one might not want to be stuck with a gmail email address in 2035?
Even if AT&T didn't have to pay a $100M fine, couldn't they still have raised rates by $100M/number of customers regardless? They don't need to wait for a fine to do that. They should (and probably are) simply charging customers the most they feel they can get away with at any given time, but that has nothing to do with whether they received a fine. It's not as if customers are all of a sudden willing to tolerate higher rates because ATT was fined.
I think all those people are important, but if I had to pick one name ou of that list as the single most influential, I'd probably still have to go with Linus.
I feel like Bill Gates/Steve Jobs and Microsoft/Apple products, have certainly been very popular and made lots of money, I feel like their contributions where ultimately more to their own bottom line than to society as a whole. Linus' contribution was for everyone, and I feel to a large extent, made the contributions of proprietary software as a whole less significant.
Sure we all like the latest greatest gadgets. That's not new. Apple did a great job at creating the latest greatest things. But linux is what made it so we could make our own things.
Which brings us to Stallman. If anyone on the list had a chance at overtaking Linus, it would be Stallman, but I feel like his ideology kind of gets in the way of progress. I really do have a soft spot for idealists, but I feel like Stallman just has a unique set of values that the world (even people "on his side") just doesn't share. Even if you think he agree with Stallman, he will be the first to point out that exactly how he is actually your ideological opponent. I think he has done a lot of good, but I think he could have done a lot more had he been a little more pragmatic and a little less ideological (like Linus).
As for the Politicians... They get elected, start wars and score political points, and get succeeded. But I don't think any of this stuff really matters in the long term. Some are better some are worse, some stronger, some weaker. It's all the same sort of stuff. The ways in which "world leaders" change the world is through the same crude tools they have used for centuries.
Even bin Laden (certainly influential), is just the latest crazy person willing to murder lots of innocent people. He was quite successful relative to the other crazies, but I think the damage caused by bin laden is dwarfed by the damage that would be caused if you could somehow undo the good that free/open source software has done. Linus is by far not the only person deserving the credit, but neither is bin Laden.
I really feel like the most influential people aren't those that played the game the best. It is the people who changed what game we were playing.
I am not saying Torvalds is "most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years.", but I am struggling to think of one person who is *definitely* more influential.
Who's on your easy list of 20 people? I am very curious.
But when you share your big mac, you lose the opportunity to enjoy the part you gave away. So this sharing is different from music sharing, it's more like cut and distribute.
Hence the difference between intellectual property and physical property.
Suppose you bought a big mac and your family has 5 members including you. You placed the big mac in a food cloning machine and it generated 4 more big macs for the remaining family members. As you'd expect, McDonalds is going to sue you for paying for 1 big mac while consuming 5 big macs.
Thereby turning a physical property issue into an intellectual property issue. Presumably you used your own atoms and energy (i.e. your own physical property) to make copies of the big mac.
If you are going to mix physical and intellectual property rights, let's do it properly.
If you go to McDonalds and buy a big mac, and go home to eat it, but aren't actually that hungry and decide to share it with a family member, McDonalds should be able to sue you for unauthorized distribution of their property. When you purchased your big mac you were only purchasing the right for yourself to eat it, not the public at large. When you shared your big mac with someone who did not pay for it, you deprived McDonalds of a potential big mac sale, and are therefore culpable for restitution owed to McDonalds.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not forced to use the Qt event loop. You can use all blocking I/O and lots of threads if you really want. I personally find the event loop approach to result in more elegant code, and this concept is not unique to Qt. The logical mechanism of the event code is transferable to other frameworks, even if the actual code is not.
There is no way to use a framework without writing code that is specific to that framework. My advice is to just pick one and drink the kool-aid. One way to get crappy code is to use a framework incorrectly.
If done correctly signals and slots make very maintainable code. They allow you to decouple classes (remove dependencies from classes upon eachother), as opposed to mechanisms like callbacks/handlers. This leads to more modular code.
I've seen memory allocated via new and then the pointer passed into emit only to be deleted on the other end of a signal/slot chain.
That's a c/c++ problem, not a Qt problem. You can't stop people from writing bad code, but you can make it harder.
As far as memory management goes, Qt provides both QSharedPointers, which will perform reference counting and delete themselves upon the reference count reacing zero. They also provide a way to use their COW (copy on write) mechanism, so that you can treat references as values and the data is only copied when it is modified from the original (lazy copying).
Memory management in C/C++ is error prone. Using reference counting pointers and COW makes it easy to do correctly.
Qt also abstracts out the filesystem api as well.
I would recommend using Qt for a cross platform framework. I haven't tried every C++ framework, but of the ones I have tried, Qt is by far the best.
It wasn't intended to be humorous, but I'm not surprised that you have again failed to grasp what I am saying. My day job *is* computer science, and I am well compensated for the skills I provide.
It's too bad you walked away from an opportunity to actually learn something
Now that's fucking hilarious.
What was I supposed to learn? How to use English words improperly? How to lack reading comprehension? How to make arguments based on flawed premises? How to draw the wrong conclusions from facts that aren't even relevant?
Airplanes don't really exist. There is absolutely no evidence that they exist. There are numerous scientific studies showing that the things that people commonly see rolling around at airports don't actually fly. They merely roll around and people are fooled into thinking that they are going to far off places.
If you are too lazy to google the evidence showing that airplanes aren't real, then I am not going to help you.
You have already proven your blind faith to the false belief that airplanes are real by claiming to have been on one that went to another city.
I have presented very logical and reasonable arguments, while your arguments fall flat on their face
You are the one who looks foolish.
I think I pay $30 per year to have a company do that for me. And if I don't like that company, I can switch companies and keep the same domain and email addresses.
Sorry I confused you with the person who said "Since when is google an ISP?" to me.
The fact that you don't understand the things I am saying doesn't make them incorrect. Simply repeating your ridiculous illogical arguments doesn't make them correct. It's like you are trying to explain that airplanes don't really exist to someone who flies on them everyday. It just makes you look foolish.
That is debatable, at best. The more people who are using filters, the more CPU time and storage space is consumed by the filtering processes. Meanwhile, global spam volume continues to increase, which only further increases that resource consumption.
CPU time and disk space continue to get exponentially cheaper. Furthermore, disk space is freed up by effective filtering.
No, I am pointing out that filters don't actually help the long term problem at all. You then react by shoving your fingers in your ears and pretending otherwise.
No I am saying the long term problem you are describing doesn't actually appear to exist. Of all the seemingly intractable problems our society is facing, one of the few that actually seems solved is spam filtering.
First of all, filters will never bring about an end to spam. I've stated exactly why that is more than once in this discussion. Second, it is well documented that the global volume of spam year-to-year is still up, not down. Spammers are not getting close to giving up by any sane metric.
I don't consider "an end to spam" to be a realistic goal. I consider "reducing the amount of spam I see to a very low level" to be perfectly acceptable. I don;t care about the volume of spam that is sent. I only care about how much I actually have to see, which is negligible.
Considering there is spam sent to advertise shoddy anti-spam software, you are simply not correct in that statement. While the lion's share does not go to the spammers, some of it does.
I don't actually get any of this spam.
If you think it's getting better you aren't paying attention. It is actually getting worse on many important metrics.
And what metrics are those?
It has been discussed on the front page of this very site. If you can't search for it yourself I'm not going to do it for you.
I'm not interested in what I can find. I am interested in the particular evidence that you find convincing.
That is an oversimplification. I already described how and why they are winning. Are you reading what I am writing?
Yes, and I described why I reject the validity of your metrics, and suggested better metrics.
No, but it needs to make the situation - particularly the long-term situation - better. Filters cannot do that.
Filters quite clearly make things better now. I don;t think your claim that things will be much worse in the future is supported. It certainly isn't convincing to me.
And how long are messages retained in your junk mail folder? I've heard some online services with auto-filtering only retain messages in junk for a month, which means the majority of what goes in there you never see. This also means you have absolutely no idea what your FP rate is.
It's probably a month. I have lived through a time of no filters, and a time of bad filters. Now I have just come to finally enjoy good filtering. If I am constantly checking my junk mail folder, then I am suffering much of the downside of spam (wasting my time sifting through junk email).
The whole point of spam filtering is that you don't have to sift through junk mail unless you have a good reason to believe you've actually lost something.
Not. Even. Remotely. Close. To. Reality. ,br> Again, spam volume is up. Just because you don't see it in your inbox doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Furthermore you are paying to deal with it.
As I said. I think "spam volume" is a bad metric. I think measuring the actual spam that gets through per capita is a better metric. And it's pretty obvious that that is *way* down, given the fact that I rarely see any spam, and have only missed one email I was expecting in the last 2 years or so.
I never implied anyone was or was not an ISP by anything I said as far as I can tell.
Email is different, in the sense that there is a cost in time and effort with getting all your contacts to update your email address.
There are lots of people still with AOL email addresses because switching email addresses is simply too costly to do.
I don't have any problem using android and apple smart phones. What if one of these fancy new phones came with a stipulation that you *must* continue to use the phone for 5 years, unless you do 100 hours of community service?
I would be very unlikely to use such a phone.
I don't communicate with very many people via email. I don't have a problem switching email addresses. I think it would be about 1 hour of work for me to do so. I accept this cost.
If I had a business with thousands of customers, I may not be willing to pay the cost of switching email addresses, and would therefore take the necessary steps to protect myself from such a cost.
As one of the OPs stated, you can forward your messages to a gmail account if you like their service, without having a public facing gmail address.
That still does not make them free. Someone has to pay for them. They have very real costs.
Yes someone had to use resources to develop them, however the costs are not proportional to the number of people using them. The more people that the filters benefit, the higher the utility/cost ratio becomes.
If filters were truly effective, then spammers would give up.
Like I said, you seem to be conflating "effective" with "100% effective". Some spammers will likely continue to use spam, if there is any utility at all to doing so. If there is a continually smaller ratio of spammers to people using email, then effectively spammers are in the process of giving up, which will continue until the last spam message ever is sent.
Indeed, they - the spammers - realize that they are actually winning this war as the cost of filtering - both in dollars invested as well as in ever-increasing FP and ever-decreasing FN rates - is going up.
The spammers don't get the money spent on filtering technologies. Spammers don't win the war by causing filtering technology to get better. Spammers win the war by getting more messages to get through the spam filters with fewer resources (which they are failing)
Indeed, no reasonable person could look at this and conclude that filtering is a useful long-term strategy or even a relevant strategy to continue working on past a few years ago in history.
once again you seem to be confusing the terms. Does something need to be a perfect solution to be useful? Are cars not useful because they sometimes break down?
That still has a nonzero cost and requires investment of capital and human time. Just because it goes in to training machines to do the sorting doesn't mean it will work right every time, and as the volume shifts towards more spam the FP rate inevitably goes up.
Everything has a nonzero cost. I don't think having truly zero cost is a useful benchmark, due to the fact that nothing can have a truly 0 cost.
Again, if that were the case, then we would see less spam as total % of internet traffic than we saw 20 years ago. Unfortunately the reality is exactly the opposite.
Citation please. I find it very hard to believe that in the age of 4K streaming video, spam email messages are a higher percentage of total internet traffic.
How often do you check the junk mail filter on your inbox?
Maybe twice a year, if I have reason to believe something may have been miscategorized as spam. I can only think of a single time I actually found anything important in the spam folder.
I'm sorry but you are utterly delirious if you think that countermeasures from spammers come after the changes in filters - it is exactly the opposite. If the filters were ever ahead then spammers would come to a screeching halt. Instead the spammers are well aware of what they are doing to the filter results as they continue to change the structure of their messages. The spammers are well aware that they are not far from pushing up the noise to the point where filters fail completely.
Spam *has* come to a screeching halt. It went from being an incredibly problem to not even being a nuisance.
This is like saying "If Usain Bolt is such a great runner, why are there still other runners?". I think you have impractical expectations for what counts as "useful" and "effective".
Your faith is misplaced.
I don't have faith in anything. I am convinced by results. I didn't expect filters to get so good. I was proven wrong. They have.
The main problem with that notion is that the people most likely to pay for a filter are the ones least likely to buy anything as a result of spam anyways. Hence you are not preventing the spammers from reaching their customers.
Filters are ubiquitous. You get them whether you explicitly pay for them or not. They are like cup holders in cars.
You are ignoring the volume of spam that traverses the internet at any given moment in time. The volume is UP, not down. Just because a lot of it doesn't reach human eyes doesn't mean there is less of it.
The fact that the amount of spam sent is higher, but the amount reaching its destination is vastly lower, is evidence of the effectiveness of filtering.
In fact, ISPs and email providers are inundated with spam traffic more now than ever before.
When humans are inundated with spam, it means that humans must spend their own valuable time sifting through it. When email servers are inundated with spam, it means that incredibly fast machines are using advanced algorithms to sift through it automatically. It's not free, but it's almost free, and certainly much cheaper than the time that it saves humans.
If they were "losing this battle", why would they respond by sending more?
The same technology that has made spam filtering possible, as also lowered the costs of sending spam. If sending spam is cheaper, then you can send more of it for the same amount of money. That's why more is being sent. But a spam message sent today is far less effective than a spam message sent 20 years ago.
A lot of people don't realize that the people losing the battle - at least any time that someone thinks a filter is an effective solution - are the users and not the spammers. The spammers are gradually driving down the TP and FN rates on the implemented filters and making them less useful.
You say that, but the reality of my inbox and junk mail folder tells a different story.
ISPs and email providers who are sold on the foolish gamble of using filters are left with no choice but to counter with more investment of time and hardware. Eventually the walls will come crashing down unless someone actually counters the situation for what it really is.
... or filtering continues to outpace the filter countermeasures.
You can send a lot of spam for a lot less money than the cost of a single google advertisement. That won't change any time soon, and it fits the model of the spamvertised operations much better as well; they don't want to become amazon they just want to pull in some quick money.
Sending a spam is not the same as getting someone to read it (thanks to effective filtering).
You seem to think that filters need to be 100% effective to be "effective". This is obviously not true. In fact I would also like better solutions to spam (like estamps, proof of work, etc), but filtering has gotten so damn good, that there seems to be no demand for a replacement to something that works good enough.
I'm not sure why you inferred that I thought google was an ISP.
I don't think the prediction that gmail may not be your preferred email service for all eternity counts as being "wild unreasonable".
Making good decisions based on good predictions of the future is part of what makes us successful as individuals and as a species. It's called investing.
If you can effectively filter spam, then you *have* prevented them from getting paid (via spam). The fact that we used to be completely inundated with spam, and now it is relatively rare to get spam with a good filter, is a good sign that spammers are losing this battle.
It seems that in 2015 it is far more profitable to sell products through means other than spam (e.g. google advertisements, etc).
I don't think the OP is suggesting gmail is going anywhere soon. I think he is suggesting that they may not be round in the (not soon) future.
There was a time when AOL wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe they still aren't, but that claim is straining credulity. At the very least, being stuck with an AOL email address in 2015 is not an ideal situation to be in. Is it really so hard to imagine that one might not want to be stuck with a gmail email address in 2035?
Why didn't they add this line item on their bill before the fine? Why wait until you get a fine to make more money than you otherwise would have?
Even if AT&T didn't have to pay a $100M fine, couldn't they still have raised rates by $100M/number of customers regardless? They don't need to wait for a fine to do that. They should (and probably are) simply charging customers the most they feel they can get away with at any given time, but that has nothing to do with whether they received a fine. It's not as if customers are all of a sudden willing to tolerate higher rates because ATT was fined.
I think all those people are important, but if I had to pick one name ou of that list as the single most influential, I'd probably still have to go with Linus.
I feel like Bill Gates/Steve Jobs and Microsoft/Apple products, have certainly been very popular and made lots of money, I feel like their contributions where ultimately more to their own bottom line than to society as a whole. Linus' contribution was for everyone, and I feel to a large extent, made the contributions of proprietary software as a whole less significant.
Sure we all like the latest greatest gadgets. That's not new. Apple did a great job at creating the latest greatest things. But linux is what made it so we could make our own things.
Which brings us to Stallman. If anyone on the list had a chance at overtaking Linus, it would be Stallman, but I feel like his ideology kind of gets in the way of progress. I really do have a soft spot for idealists, but I feel like Stallman just has a unique set of values that the world (even people "on his side") just doesn't share. Even if you think he agree with Stallman, he will be the first to point out that exactly how he is actually your ideological opponent. I think he has done a lot of good, but I think he could have done a lot more had he been a little more pragmatic and a little less ideological (like Linus).
As for the Politicians... They get elected, start wars and score political points, and get succeeded. But I don't think any of this stuff really matters in the long term. Some are better some are worse, some stronger, some weaker. It's all the same sort of stuff. The ways in which "world leaders" change the world is through the same crude tools they have used for centuries.
Even bin Laden (certainly influential), is just the latest crazy person willing to murder lots of innocent people. He was quite successful relative to the other crazies, but I think the damage caused by bin laden is dwarfed by the damage that would be caused if you could somehow undo the good that free/open source software has done. Linus is by far not the only person deserving the credit, but neither is bin Laden.
I really feel like the most influential people aren't those that played the game the best. It is the people who changed what game we were playing.
The point of my post was to highlight the absurdity of treating physical and intellectual property as interchangeable.
Until that day, all hail Linus of house Torvalds, first of his name.
I am not saying Torvalds is "most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years.", but I am struggling to think of one person who is *definitely* more influential.
Who's on your easy list of 20 people? I am very curious.
We should move Linux to D.
But when you share your big mac, you lose the opportunity to enjoy the part you gave away. So this sharing is different from music sharing, it's more like cut and distribute.
Hence the difference between intellectual property and physical property.
Suppose you bought a big mac and your family has 5 members including you. You placed the big mac in a food cloning machine and it generated 4 more big macs for the remaining family members. As you'd expect, McDonalds is going to sue you for paying for 1 big mac while consuming 5 big macs.
Thereby turning a physical property issue into an intellectual property issue. Presumably you used your own atoms and energy (i.e. your own physical property) to make copies of the big mac.
IOW, your analogy is flawed.
Woosh. It was supposed to be.
If you are going to mix physical and intellectual property rights, let's do it properly.
If you go to McDonalds and buy a big mac, and go home to eat it, but aren't actually that hungry and decide to share it with a family member, McDonalds should be able to sue you for unauthorized distribution of their property. When you purchased your big mac you were only purchasing the right for yourself to eat it, not the public at large. When you shared your big mac with someone who did not pay for it, you deprived McDonalds of a potential big mac sale, and are therefore culpable for restitution owed to McDonalds.