The issue here is by what measure to you identify the "spam problem?" Most users consider the spam problem to exclusively revolve around crap in their in-box.
I'm one of those users. If I don't get spam, I'm happy.
My approach to addressing the issue is to stop the exploitation of resources.
If only that were possible! I assume by this that you mean you block all traffic from RBL'd sites. That blocks all the spam they send, but it also blocks all the non-spam. If spammers were polite and didn't use systems used by non-spammers, that would be fine, but they aren't polite.
For me, the most important resource is my time. I don't really care if my server spends a few minutes a day processing email, as long as it does a good job and *I* never see the spam.
Still, I appreciate the fact that RBLs exist, to keep the pressure on ISPs to clean up their acts. I think people like you who use them to block all mail put more pressure on the ISPs than people like me who just use them as input to our filters. Thanks!
When I installed tmda as a last-ditch effort to keep it going. So far it's worked pretty well -- had about 4 spams get though in the past 6 months or so.
That's only one measure of "working well". Have you kept count of the following:
- The number of spams your system has sent in response to forged "From" addresses?
- The number of real emails you've missed, because the sender doesn't feel like jumping through the hoops you've put in place?
RBLs work. Content-based filtering doesn't. This whole study is basically a shill for promoting more ineffective "strip-searching" of e-mail content as a "solution" [sic] to the spam problem.
What makes you say that? I use Spamassassin with several RBLs consulted, but it's often the content filters (especially the adaptive "Bayesian" one) that catches the spam. So far I haven't seen it catch any false positives, whereas I know the more aggressive RBLs do.
Or maybe you're using a different definition of "work"? My filtering isn't any sort of deterrent to the spammers, while an RBL listing really is, because it means that innocent bystanders will start screaming when their mail is blocked too, forcing the ISP to take action.
As lots of people have noted, the patent is on the long filename extensions in VFAT, not on the basic FAT file system.
So why don't cameras, flash drives, etc, just come with FAT file systems installed? Cameras never need to produce long filenames. Flash drives don't need to produce files at all.
If the user's OS chooses to put some long filenames on the device, that's not being done by the device, it's being done by the OS.
The only devices that should need to worry about this patent are things like MP3 players that display the filenames themselves.
Yes, harrassing calls are illegal, but the phone company only can take action AFTER the recipient complains.
So why don't the vendors who have received these fraudulent calls complain to the phone company? Get them tied up dealing with the complaints, explaining why they are unable to ID the caller, and they'll start losing money instead of earning it from the scams.
Then they'll lobby for some protection to be put in place.
If the spammers are sending to someone in the USA, then they are violating the American law. Read it, it applies to "interstate and foreign commerce".
Of course, if the spammer is overseas it's unlikely they'll be convicted, but it would be great if they were forever barred from visiting because they'd be arrested as soon as they showed up.
Simply put, the email is unsolicited which means the recipient has no way to prevent the mail from arriving.
??? That's what filters are for.
Do you honestly think that curious teenagers who receive a sexually explicit content email (and it's labeled as such) aren't going to take a gander at it?
If they're your children and you don't want them to look at such stuff, install filters.
For that matter, I don't want my 10 year old having to sift through this stuff either. Sure, spam filters can do excellent work now but it's still not 100%.
That's the point of this regulation. If the subject line says "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT", then even the crappiest filter is going to be able to filter it.
Sure, spammers will probably ignore this regulation, but then you're no worse off than under the current situation, and maybe better: the spammers are clearly violating the law. You'll just need to track them down and convince someone to prosecute them.
Use a good filter. I get about 500 incoming junk mails each day. About half a dozen junk messages make it past Spamassassin, mostly confirmation requests from people like you, or notices from systems that "I" sent them a virus.
The GPL doesn't use copyright "against itself", it uses copyright the way it was intended: to extract a payment in return for the right to copy. What's interesting about the GPL is that it requires payment in kind rather than cash royalties.
If you go to the CRIA web page, you'll see that CD sales (and gross revenue, though not revenue from CDs) were up over the same month in the preceding year in both January and February. The CRIA is the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA.
DVD sales are way up in all of the months I looked at. VHS and cassette tape sales are down, which isn't too surprising.
Sorry, I should have quoted you: I was responding to the proposal to do away with income tax. Legalizing drugs would probably have some good effects, but it wouldn't increase the amount of tax you collect from rich people. Once you get beyond basic necessities, it's too easy to do the majority of your spending in ways that aren't taxed.
I'm with you for the web browsing and photo stuff needing a GUI. But I'm a pretty big fan of pine for my email (and latex does some pretty good non-gui page layout).
But pine *is* a GUI. Just one that runs on a very small screen (25x80, even) with fancy shapes for the pixels.
If you want to read your mail without a GUI, use mail.
The primary purpose of the NIF is to study nuclear reactions so that the US nuclear weapon stockpile can be maintained without ongoing nuclear weapon tests.
That doesn't sound very believable. Maybe if you were to say "stockpile can be modernized" it would make sense. But if all you're doing is maintaining the existing stockpile, just use your existing data that says a bomb lasts 20 years (or whatever), then recycle it into a new one using the same design. If the design worked 20 years ago, it will still work now.
If you use a 500 meter radius piece, that's a constant 740 megawatts focused on the pinhead-sized object of your choice.
The sun isn't a point source, so you can't focus it onto a pinhead unless you have a very short focal length. If you're planning to focus in the vicinity of the mirror, (say 1km in front with an f/1 mirror), you can only focus it down to an image that's about 9 metres across. If you were planning to beam the sunlight down to the surface of the earth, multiply that size by the distance you're sending it.
That's who, not whom. Who is on the jury? You are on the jury. You are asking for a subject for the sentence, so you should use who.
I agree completely. It's disgraceful the way "who" and "whom" are confused these days.
And did you notice that other error, replacing "then" with "they"? What really bugs me is that most so-called grammar nazis let this one go by every time.
In fact if the ower of the domain I want were to purchase 100 years I would certainly want my money back from snapnames.
I imagine you'll have as much chance of getting it back as someone who registers for 100 years with Netsol, then decides that Netsol is a crappy spamming registrar and tries to move somewhere else: i.e., zero chance.
You don't need your FAT table to access your files. It keeps track of used sectors, but it doesn't keep track of the files.
You can reconstruct the entire FAT table from the directory structures, which are easily found.
This claim is just as wrong as the grandparent's claim about the location of the backup FAT.
Both copies of the FAT are located near the start of the disk, between the boot sector and the data.
Directories record the starting cluster of a file, and its size. The FAT is the only record of the location of the rest of the clusters. It's often possible to guess their location (clusters are normally allocated sequentially), but not always. Fragmented files are generally pretty hard to recover without having the FAT around to help.
Typical meteor speed is on the order of 40,000 MPH. Typical orbital velocity (Skylab) is about 18,000 MPH. Skylab was going about 1/2 the speed -- 100 times slower would be subsonic.
Your numbers (in real units;-) are about 18 km/s for the meteor, 8 km/s for Skylab. Those sound pretty much right, except that the asteroid is in an orbit pretty similar to the Earth's, with the Earth coming up behind it near its aphelion: so it might be going even slower than that.
Note also that, as good a job as LINEAR and others do, there is a class of asteroids that are damn hard to see form the ground - the "Aten"-class asteroids, which orbit mostly inside earths orbit and thus come at us from out of the sun. These ones also need to be catalogued and a watchfull eye kept out for.
The JPL web page about this asteroid gives a diagram of its orbit, and it is mostly within the Earth's orbit. They don't say whether the picture is the "before" or "after" picture --- the pass near Earth changes its direction by 15 degrees, which will make a noticeable change to its orbit.
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The issue here is by what measure to you identify the "spam problem?" Most users consider the spam problem to exclusively revolve around crap in their in-box.
I'm one of those users. If I don't get spam, I'm happy.
My approach to addressing the issue is to stop the exploitation of resources.
If only that were possible! I assume by this that you mean you block all traffic from RBL'd sites. That blocks all the spam they send, but it also blocks all the non-spam. If spammers were polite and didn't use systems used by non-spammers, that would be fine, but they aren't polite.
For me, the most important resource is my time. I don't really care if my server spends a few minutes a day processing email, as long as it does a good job and *I* never see the spam.
Still, I appreciate the fact that RBLs exist, to keep the pressure on ISPs to clean up their acts. I think people like you who use them to block all mail put more pressure on the ISPs than people like me who just use them as input to our filters. Thanks!
When I installed tmda as a last-ditch effort to keep it going. So far it's worked pretty well -- had about 4 spams get though in the past 6 months or so.
That's only one measure of "working well". Have you kept count of the following:
- The number of spams your system has sent in response to forged "From" addresses?
- The number of real emails you've missed, because the sender doesn't feel like jumping through the hoops you've put in place?
Duncan Murdoch
RBLs work. Content-based filtering doesn't. This whole study is basically a shill for promoting more ineffective "strip-searching" of e-mail content as a "solution" [sic] to the spam problem.
What makes you say that? I use Spamassassin with several RBLs consulted, but it's often the content filters (especially the adaptive "Bayesian" one) that catches the spam. So far I haven't seen it catch any false positives, whereas I know the more aggressive RBLs do.
Or maybe you're using a different definition of "work"? My filtering isn't any sort of deterrent to the spammers, while an RBL listing really is, because it means that innocent bystanders will start screaming when their mail is blocked too, forcing the ISP to take action.
As lots of people have noted, the patent is on the long filename extensions in VFAT, not on the basic FAT file system.
So why don't cameras, flash drives, etc, just come with FAT file systems installed? Cameras never need to produce long filenames. Flash drives don't need to produce files at all.
If the user's OS chooses to put some long filenames on the device, that's not being done by the device, it's being done by the OS.
The only devices that should need to worry about this patent are things like MP3 players that display the filenames themselves.
Yes, harrassing calls are illegal, but the phone company only can take action AFTER the recipient complains.
So why don't the vendors who have received these fraudulent calls complain to the phone company?
Get them tied up dealing with the complaints, explaining why they are unable to ID the caller, and they'll start losing money instead of earning it from the scams.
Then they'll lobby for some protection to be put in place.
If the spammers are sending to someone in the USA, then they are violating the American law. Read it, it applies to "interstate and foreign commerce".
Of course, if the spammer is overseas it's unlikely they'll be convicted, but it would be great if they were forever barred from visiting because they'd be arrested as soon as they showed up.
Simply put, the email is unsolicited which means the recipient has no way to prevent the mail from arriving.
??? That's what filters are for.
Do you honestly think that curious teenagers who receive a sexually explicit content email (and it's labeled as such) aren't going to take a gander at it?
If they're your children and you don't want them to look at such stuff, install filters.
For that matter, I don't want my 10 year old having to sift through this stuff either. Sure, spam filters can do excellent work now but it's still not 100%.
That's the point of this regulation. If the subject line says "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT", then even the crappiest filter is going to be able to filter it.
Sure, spammers will probably ignore this regulation, but then you're no worse off than under the current situation, and maybe better: the spammers are clearly violating the law. You'll just need to track them down and convince someone to prosecute them.
Use a good filter. I get about 500 incoming junk mails each day. About half a dozen junk messages make it past Spamassassin, mostly confirmation requests from people like you, or notices from systems that "I" sent them a virus.
The submitter of the article writes:
Correction
The study was done by Monk et al. Nielsen's story is merely an abstract.
So what made you decide to read it?
Just like the GPL uses copyright against itself,
The GPL doesn't use copyright "against itself", it uses copyright the way it was intended: to extract a payment in return for the right to copy. What's interesting about the GPL is that it requires payment in kind rather than cash royalties.
See this good article for a non-technical discussion of this.
If you go to the CRIA web page, you'll see that CD sales (and gross revenue, though not revenue from CDs) were up over the same month in the preceding year in both January and February. The CRIA is the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA.
DVD sales are way up in all of the months I looked at. VHS and cassette tape sales are down, which isn't too surprising.
So you're the jerk that sends confirmations to the Netsky forgeries of my email address. Thanks a lot.
why not make known spammer servers get 3rd rate service from our owns servers?
Why would you want to give known spammer servers any service at all?
Your suggestion might be good if you applied it to any untrusted server. If a server sends you enough non-spam, they get to speed up.
The problem would be making this protocol widespread enough to have an effect on the spammers.
Sorry, I should have quoted you: I was responding to the proposal to do away with income tax. Legalizing drugs would probably have some good effects, but it wouldn't increase the amount of tax you collect from rich people. Once you get beyond basic necessities, it's too easy to do the majority of your spending in ways that aren't taxed.
The drug dealers would just take their money out of the country and pay no tax. More or less what they do now, except it would be legal.
Or would you forbid people to transfer money out of the country? How would you import anything?
I'm with you for the web browsing and photo stuff needing a GUI. But I'm a pretty big fan of pine for my email (and latex does some pretty good non-gui page layout).
But pine *is* a GUI. Just one that runs on a very small screen (25x80, even) with fancy shapes for the pixels.
If you want to read your mail without a GUI, use mail.
The primary purpose of the NIF is to study nuclear reactions so that the US nuclear weapon stockpile can be maintained without ongoing nuclear weapon tests.
That doesn't sound very believable. Maybe if you were to say "stockpile can be modernized" it would make sense. But if all you're doing is maintaining the existing stockpile, just use your existing data that says a bomb lasts 20 years (or whatever), then
recycle it into a new one using the same design. If the design worked 20 years ago, it will still work now.
If you use a 500 meter radius piece, that's a constant 740 megawatts focused on the pinhead-sized object of your choice.
The sun isn't a point source, so you can't focus it onto a pinhead unless you have a very short focal length. If you're planning to focus in the vicinity of the mirror, (say 1km in front with an f/1 mirror), you can only focus it down to an image that's about 9 metres across. If you were planning to beam the sunlight down to the surface of the earth, multiply that size by the distance you're sending it.
If not you on the jury, they whom?
That's who, not whom. Who is on the jury? You are on the jury. You are asking for a subject for the sentence, so you should use who.
I agree completely. It's disgraceful the way "who" and "whom" are confused these days.
And did you notice that other error, replacing "then" with "they"? What really bugs me is that most so-called grammar nazis let this one go by every time.
In fact if the ower of the domain I want were to purchase 100 years I would certainly want my money back from snapnames.
I imagine you'll have as much chance of getting it back as someone who registers for 100 years with Netsol, then decides that Netsol is a crappy spamming registrar and tries to move somewhere else: i.e., zero chance.
You don't need your FAT table to access your files. It keeps track of used sectors, but it doesn't keep track of the files.
You can reconstruct the entire FAT table from the directory structures, which are easily found.
This claim is just as wrong as the grandparent's claim about the location of the backup FAT.
Both copies of the FAT are located near the start of the disk, between the boot sector and the data.
Directories record the starting cluster of a file, and its size. The FAT is the only record of the location of the rest of the clusters. It's often possible to guess their location (clusters are normally allocated sequentially), but not always. Fragmented files are generally pretty hard to recover without having the FAT around to help.
Typical meteor speed is on the order of 40,000 MPH. Typical orbital velocity (Skylab) is about 18,000 MPH. Skylab was going about 1/2 the speed -- 100 times slower would be subsonic.
;-) are about 18 km/s for the meteor, 8 km/s for Skylab. Those sound pretty much right, except that the asteroid is in an orbit pretty similar to the Earth's, with the Earth coming up behind it near its aphelion: so it might be going even slower than that.
Your numbers (in real units
But the point of my comment remains: the asteroid was considerably larger than 80 feet before it struck the ground.
And what's the basis of this claim? The NASA web site called it an 80 ft asteroid.
As others have said, probably not, but the effect in the other direction is pretty substantial, changing the asteroid's direction by about 15 degrees.
Note also that, as good a job as LINEAR and others do, there is a class of asteroids that are damn hard to see form the ground - the "Aten"-class asteroids, which orbit mostly inside earths orbit and thus come at us from out of the sun. These ones also need to be catalogued and a watchfull eye kept out for.
The JPL web page about this asteroid gives a diagram of its orbit, and it is mostly within the Earth's orbit. They don't say whether the picture is the "before" or "after" picture --- the pass near Earth changes its direction by 15 degrees, which will make a noticeable change to its orbit.