"No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state."
It took me two seconds to Google up a copy of the US Constitution, and two more seconds to text-search this clause, and that's with a balky keyboard.
It would be marketing suicide and almost unheard of for any CEO to admit that the SEC filings were in any way truthful about the true state of the company.
There's surprisingly little byte manipulation going on, unless you count header-forging, and I'm not sure if that completely applies.
Why on earth should it not apply? Clearly, the reason spammers forge headers is to avoid being blocked off by their targets.
Also, there are plenty of other cracking methods used to evade filters -- munging of words commonly associated with spam, insertion of random junk to evade identical-message detection, and the like.
OK, first the obvious: You can't tax e-mail sent from out the country.
Even from a strictly legal point of view, the US government can't tax e-mail sent out from the country -- export duties are expressly forbidden by the Constitution.
Just what we need to burnish America's international image: an anti-spam policy that specifically exempts Americans who spam furriners.
The laws are there; they just need to be applied to the fact situation.
Spammers tailor the stream of bytes to get into other people's computers, bypassing various measures the owners have taken to keep them out. Does this sound like "computer cracking". That's because it is. Did you think that computer cracking is illegal? All together now: That's because it is.
It would seem logical to me to assume that at least a large number of (if not a vast majority of?) spammers are ignorant as to why it's a bad idea. They don't know much about the Internet, and some idiot with a spam-software outfit approaches them and tells them about this "Great Marketing Idea", sells them some software (that may or may not do various bad things like hiding headers/etc), and off they go!
Most spam is sent by people who are specically set up to sell spam services (often to the sort of people you describe). They already know what they're doing -- they don't need "education", they need prison time (don't-drop-the-soap prison, not Club Fed).
Boeing now derives over half it's revenue from military equipment, and it doesn't seem to have suffered any public relations damage.
Er, why would it? Most Americans don't have a problem with the US having, and using, military equipment. Even people who object to specific actions (e.g. the current imbroglio in Iraq) generally accept the legitimacy of national defense.
Would you say that putting a flyer on your porch under a rock, so it doesn't blow away, is a form of cracking?
Irrelevant analogy. The act that is analogous to circumventing an anti-spam filter is climbing over my fence, picking my gate lock, or otherwise gaining unauthorized access to my porch. You will note that such acts are unambiguously illegal -- just as circumventing anti-spam filters ought to be (and, arguably, just as it already is if somebody would aggressively apply existing computer-crime law).
The only "irregularity" is that the three terrible candidates (sorry, no names) on the list got over 1000 votes. I could understand one reaching this value as being a fluke, but all three indicates something is wrong - It indicates that 2% of the voting population is either anti-bilingual, wacked with strange delusions, or a white supremesist (and yes, this inference is based in publically available information about those candidates.)
Frankly, it would be surprising if only 2% of the Anglo-Canadian population is sufficiently irritated with the Quebecois to vote against bilingualism. I presume that the baggage from the other two suppressed their votes below what they'd have gotten if they'd stuck to that issue.
Diebold et al are discrediting the entire concept of electronic voting with their refusal to address problems and (especially) their refusal to provide a paper audit trail.
The latter is particularly damning -- they'd make MORE money by selling printers along with electronic voting machines, after all, so one naturally wonders about hidden agendas.
It's also worth mentioning that the AVS machines do in fact have an internal printer to leave a paper trail, although unfortunately it is not voter-verifiable.
It's useless, then.
I'll agree immediately with anyone who says "control guns". I.e. test people who want one (like with cars, unfortunately unlike with computers and dogs and children).
If the problem could be considered out of its historical context, then, yes, it would make perfect sense to test would-be gun owners to make sure they know how to safely handle a gun. It would also make perfect sense to test would-be voters to make sure they have a basic civic education.
However, once you bring back that historical context, and take a look at the actions that have actually been taken under those "testing" pretexts, the idea doesn't look so hot after all.
Ascribing some political agenda to some software corporation is ridiculous. They simply reflect desired censorware categories
Oh, puh-leeze. I'm sure that most parents don't want little Timmy reading the "How To Build A Pipe Bomb From Things You Find At Home" site, and expect this to be the sort of thing blocked by the "Violence" option. The actual blocking done by the Symantec software goes beyond this, effectively censoring (and the word does apply, now that the government has required filtering in some cases) one side of a political debate.
If you buy a product that purports to kill fleas, and it also kills your cat, then you have every reason to sue the manufacturer for false advertising. The fact that it actually did kill the fleas as well would not be a very effective defense.
And sorry to say this, but it is IMPOSSIBLE to make "Spam" illegal because no two people can agree on what it is.
Nonsense. No two people agree about the precise boundary between marketing and fraud, and yet the latter is illegal. No two people agree about the maximum safe speed on a given stretch of road, and yet there are speed limits.
The law often boils down to picking some arbitrary boundary in the middle of the gray area and then treating it as the black-and-white frontier.
For that matter, if a government agent honestly thinks that he has to break the law to get the bad guys before they do something terrible, he can always just do it, knowing and accepting that he'll go to prison if caught. That ought to insure that such measures are taken only in cases of genuine necessity. It will be particularly effective at preventing political misuse of such tools -- too much risk of backlash against the sponsors of the illegal snooping.
Perhaps that isn't fair, but life in general and dirty wars in particular aren't fair.
For example, we have 65 playwrights alive today for every one in Elizabethan England. Yet do we have dozens of Shakespeares? The picture is even more stark when the 12,000 members of the screen Writers Guild are taken into account.
We have a reasonably good count of the writers and actors who are waiting tables for a living while awaiting their big break. We do not have a good count -- I'd be surprised if we have any count at all -- of similar people in Elizabethan England.
Don't remember his statement about Islam being a "backwards" religion?
The plain fact of the matter is that most of the Islamic world has not yet been dragged kicking and screaming into Playing Well With Others (in the way Christendom was during early modern times). It could just be a matter of historical contingencies, such that if a few random events had gone differently Arab troops would be combing the Ozarks looking to catch Pat Robertson and his mass-murdering followers, but the difference is there.
The SCOids have to know this, yet while their lawyers use careful, lawyerly, deniable language the SCO execs continue to say things that "could be used against you in a court of law". That is hard to understand.
I think that they have simply painted themselves into a corner. By the time they realized just what a mess they'd gotten themselves into, they were stuck -- they had to win somehow in order to avoid (at best) losing their shirts or (at worst) going to prison.
Having examined the problem from all angles, they found it to be plainly hopeless. Logic informed them that, under the circumstances, the only possible action would have to be one of desperation.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a PROPERTY RIGHTS issue, not a FREE SPEECH issue. Period.
Er, you do understand the difference between charging for services rendered and levying a tax, right?
"No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state." It took me two seconds to Google up a copy of the US Constitution, and two more seconds to text-search this clause, and that's with a balky keyboard.
I don't think Darl is in any danger of that.
Why on earth should it not apply? Clearly, the reason spammers forge headers is to avoid being blocked off by their targets.
Also, there are plenty of other cracking methods used to evade filters -- munging of words commonly associated with spam, insertion of random junk to evade identical-message detection, and the like.
Even from a strictly legal point of view, the US government can't tax e-mail sent out from the country -- export duties are expressly forbidden by the Constitution.
Just what we need to burnish America's international image: an anti-spam policy that specifically exempts Americans who spam furriners.
Spammers tailor the stream of bytes to get into other people's computers, bypassing various measures the owners have taken to keep them out. Does this sound like "computer cracking". That's because it is. Did you think that computer cracking is illegal? All together now: That's because it is.
I hate it when I come in for lunch and the lab has "Mystery Mesons".
Most spam is sent by people who are specically set up to sell spam services (often to the sort of people you describe). They already know what they're doing -- they don't need "education", they need prison time (don't-drop-the-soap prison, not Club Fed).
Er, why would it? Most Americans don't have a problem with the US having, and using, military equipment. Even people who object to specific actions (e.g. the current imbroglio in Iraq) generally accept the legitimacy of national defense.
Irrelevant analogy. The act that is analogous to circumventing an anti-spam filter is climbing over my fence, picking my gate lock, or otherwise gaining unauthorized access to my porch. You will note that such acts are unambiguously illegal -- just as circumventing anti-spam filters ought to be (and, arguably, just as it already is if somebody would aggressively apply existing computer-crime law).
True, though it's unfortunate that the government hasn't already done so on the grounds that circumventing an anti-spam filter is a form of cracking.
Frankly, it would be surprising if only 2% of the Anglo-Canadian population is sufficiently irritated with the Quebecois to vote against bilingualism. I presume that the baggage from the other two suppressed their votes below what they'd have gotten if they'd stuck to that issue.
The latter is particularly damning -- they'd make MORE money by selling printers along with electronic voting machines, after all, so one naturally wonders about hidden agendas.
Ha! It's my cat that has fleas, so that password doesn't apply to me.
It's also worth mentioning that the AVS machines do in fact have an internal printer to leave a paper trail, although unfortunately it is not voter-verifiable. It's useless, then.
If the problem could be considered out of its historical context, then, yes, it would make perfect sense to test would-be gun owners to make sure they know how to safely handle a gun. It would also make perfect sense to test would-be voters to make sure they have a basic civic education.
However, once you bring back that historical context, and take a look at the actions that have actually been taken under those "testing" pretexts, the idea doesn't look so hot after all.
Oh, puh-leeze. I'm sure that most parents don't want little Timmy reading the "How To Build A Pipe Bomb From Things You Find At Home" site, and expect this to be the sort of thing blocked by the "Violence" option. The actual blocking done by the Symantec software goes beyond this, effectively censoring (and the word does apply, now that the government has required filtering in some cases) one side of a political debate.
If you buy a product that purports to kill fleas, and it also kills your cat, then you have every reason to sue the manufacturer for false advertising. The fact that it actually did kill the fleas as well would not be a very effective defense.
I would really feel more comfortable if I could teleport instead of having to risk traffic accidents and plane crashes.
That ain't gonna happen in the real world, either.
Nonsense. No two people agree about the precise boundary between marketing and fraud, and yet the latter is illegal. No two people agree about the maximum safe speed on a given stretch of road, and yet there are speed limits.
The law often boils down to picking some arbitrary boundary in the middle of the gray area and then treating it as the black-and-white frontier.
For that matter, if a government agent honestly thinks that he has to break the law to get the bad guys before they do something terrible, he can always just do it, knowing and accepting that he'll go to prison if caught. That ought to insure that such measures are taken only in cases of genuine necessity. It will be particularly effective at preventing political misuse of such tools -- too much risk of backlash against the sponsors of the illegal snooping.
Perhaps that isn't fair, but life in general and dirty wars in particular aren't fair.
We have a reasonably good count of the writers and actors who are waiting tables for a living while awaiting their big break. We do not have a good count -- I'd be surprised if we have any count at all -- of similar people in Elizabethan England.
The plain fact of the matter is that most of the Islamic world has not yet been dragged kicking and screaming into Playing Well With Others (in the way Christendom was during early modern times). It could just be a matter of historical contingencies, such that if a few random events had gone differently Arab troops would be combing the Ozarks looking to catch Pat Robertson and his mass-murdering followers, but the difference is there.
I think that they have simply painted themselves into a corner. By the time they realized just what a mess they'd gotten themselves into, they were stuck -- they had to win somehow in order to avoid (at best) losing their shirts or (at worst) going to prison.
Having examined the problem from all angles, they found it to be plainly hopeless. Logic informed them that, under the circumstances, the only possible action would have to be one of desperation.