Carrying a gun does not protect you against the person attacking you, because they will have their gun ready and armed.
Flaws in this assertion:
1. The average crook is a pathetic loser who doesn't know the difference between tactics and tic-tac-toe. Thus, the chance of catching him off guard is rather high despite his advantage of picking the time and place for the fight.
2. Doing whatever it is the crook wants to do (commit rape, carry loot, etc) is likely to interfere with effective weapon handling.
3. Even if a victim is taken by surprise in any particular case, an armed population increases the overall risk of crime. Some people will find this risk unacceptable and turn to a life of honest toil, or at least strictly non-violent crime (as verified by the before-and-after stats of US states that have adopted concealed carry reforms).
Carrying an armed gun increases the risk that you will use it to shoot others in a wave of anger
Actually, proper training in the use of arms is more likely to create a "with great power comes great responsibility" attitude.
Secondly, only a fraction of cirminals would carry guns if doing so was prohibited. Guns cost money, which is something most criminals lack
Er, criminals generally do have money after pulling off a robbery. That's sort of the point.
and if carrying guns is illegal, it will cost a lot of money and effort to get one, and increase the chances for criminals to be caught.
Carrying guns is illegal in some American jurisdictions. Those very places tend to be the most infested with armed criminals.
"Guns don't kill people, people do. If guns are outlawed, murderers will find other tools to do their job."
Actually, if guns are outlawed, criminals will get them anyway.
You clearly posted before you thought through the business model he is proposing.
On the contrary, Lonath thought it through perfectly, and correctly concluded that such a model creates a perverse incentive for broadcasters to select the worst available commercials. That way, they maximize the amount paid by subscribers (the lousier the commercial, the more people skip over it) in addition to what they collected in the first place for selling the spot.
That advertiser is not going to pay it unless you watch the commercial.
If advertisers want people to watch their commercials, it is incumbent upon them to create spots that are sufficiently informative and/or entertaining to attract attention. If they can't or won't do so, I fail to see where it's my problem.
These are big problems for the proposed business model. It is possible, however, to address them if you try to think them through in a way that will benefit all involved instead of jump to some socialist knee-jerk reaction.
I suggested that consumers pay 1 cent per commercial skipped (which is about the same as what advertisers pay). That would be equivalent to $10/thousand commercials skipped. I think that's reasonable. I also suggested that targeted advertising could be a win-win for all involved by delivering ads in areas that are of greater interest to the viewer so that there would be less incentive to skip and fewer ads would have to be delivered due to the higher prices paid for the targeted group.
If Lauder is at all sincere in suggesting that advertisers provide actual worthwhile information (which is, ultimately, the only way to save the advertiser sponsorship model), then he wouldn't even bring up the silly notion of extracting payment for not watching the ads.
The proposed charge does not seem very reasonable to me, either practically (a half-dozen ads per break, four times an hour, for four hours a day comes to $28.80/month -- a fairly hefty addition to the typical cable bill) or philosophically (if a given advertisment is so ineffective that people choose to bypass it, then the loss should be borne by the people who created and presented it).
You're right! Millions of people having the utility of their email diminished and having to go through the trouble of finding out which messages are real (and which ones are really trying to look "real") is in no way balanced by a person who is responsible for the misery having to go through some extra physical mail himself. He should, in fact, be receiving millions of letters, phone calls, and knocks on the door each day for the response to be much more proportionate to the damage he causes.
If you want exact proportionality, I like a proposal by a friend of mine. Spammers should be imprisoned in a cell with a computer. The computer would receive a flood of spam, and the spammer would "just hit delete". Every so often, the computer would recieve a legitimate message informing the spammer that he would be let out for a meal, excersize break, potty break, etc. If the spammer accidentally deleted one of those messages, he'd miss that meal (or whatever). Of course, some of the spam would be disguised to look like the legitimate messages (just like "on the outside").
The sentence would end when the spammer deleted a number of messages equal to the spam e-mails he sent or caused to be sent.
Re:I can't believe rational people support this...
on
HOWTO: Annoy a Spammer
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· Score: 2
It is a disproportionate response.
This is both untrue and irrelevant:
Untrue: Wasting several hours of one person's time is trivial compared to the cumulative waste of several man-years by the millions of Ralsky's spam victims.
Irrelevant: The use of retaliatory force is not weighed by exact equality to the original offense (though it sometimes happens to come out that way), but rather by its sufficiency to punish the offense and to deter future offenses.
And finally, about the comments regarding the "spammer's lawyer" being some low form of life, just remember that everyone in free nations under the rule of law has the right to legal representation.
And everyone in free nations under the rule of law has the right to form, and express, an opinion about a person's actions (including those of low-life like Ralsky and his lawyer).
He's a question, what happens to some poor sucker when he moves out.
Hey, when you buy a house for $500 (which is about what he'll be able to get for precisely this reason), you have to expect it to be a fixer-upper project.
Several states have specific anti-spam laws, and the applicability of the federal junk-fax law remains to be definitively determined. You might lose, but the case can't be thrown out or penalized as frivolous.
A robot with the zeroth law could easily make the same choice as a member of the KKK or Nazis and label an entire subgroup of humans as non-human. This really works for the first law as well
This was used in one of Asimov's "Lucky Starr" juveniles -- a villain from the Sirian system tells the robots that Lucky's sidekick "Bigman" (a sarcastic-opposite nickname) is not human, so that he can be attacked with murderous intent. Because of the Naziesque "purity" of the Sirian population, the robots have never seen an adult human of such short stature.
If the government really wants to get you, they'll surround you with Tempest vans, put a key sniffer in your keyboard, grab all your traffic through your ISP and monitor your phone calls.
The objective is not to create perfect security (which is, as you correctly say, not possible). The objective is to make your security good enough for most practical purposes.
Yes, the government can use various sorts of surveillance measures to get your messages anyway. However, requiring trained personnel to set up monitoring vans or do black-bag jobs limits the total number of surveillance targets. That makes wide-ranging fishing expeditions impractical, and inhibits abuse by bored or vindictive individuals. Also, it leaves a bigger trail (more memos, more people directly involved) to be traced if -- OK, when -- the government does break the law.
I really doubt thier intention with this is to "stop time" but rather simply offer no one an excuse out of it. "I sent you an email 31 days ago didn't ya get it?" will not cut it.
Fair enough -- if they don't respond in a reasonably timely manner, the license can't prevent that fact from getting out.
You agree that you will not post any information about any bug, problem, deficiency, or weakness in the PGP software on any web site or electronic bulletin board, or otherwise disclose or provide any such information to anyone else, unless you have first reported it to PGP and until at least 30 days after PGP sends its email acknowledgement to you.
I'd be more comfortable with this if there was an absolute cap that did not depend on the acknowledgement. As written, it would seem to allow PGP to freeze the clock indefinitely by simply not responding.
One route would be to check the law of the state where the spam was received. About 15 states have such laws, including populous CA. If the spam broke the law, I would suggest that forfeits copyright, at least as to publicizing the offending communication.
For this reason, the claim should be dismissed with prejudice -- and, preferably, with a hefty penalty for abusing the legal system. It's equivalent to a crooked CEO attempting to use copyright to suppress the documents that prove his dirty deeds.
As a libertarian, I am concerned by the tension between wanting to stamp out the flow of spam, and the two-pronged threat anti-spam forces pose both to free speech and to email anonymity.
If you're a libertarian, then you know perfectly well that you don't have a right to "free" speech on my dime.
The ability to send unsolicited email to practically anyone has long been a valuable online tool for everything from online protests (like filling your Congressman's mailbox with anti-DMCA flames)
Any communication to your Congressman about federal legislation is inherently solicited -- it's part of the job.
Worse, the anti-spam cause could also be used by authoritarian interests to crack down on all unsolicited emails.
The anti-crime* cause in general could be (and is) used by authoritarian interests to attack privacy, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to keep private property, etc. However, nobody in his right mind suggests that crime should be tolerated as the price of liberty.
(*I am referring here to real crimes such as theft and assault, not to politically invented ones such as drug possession. Spam, being a theft of services, properly falls into the former category.)
Likewise, anonymous remailers and open relays have been used by people to protect their privacy almost as long as email has existed.
Reputable anonymous remailers have always limited message flow, precisely to prevent them from being used to steal bandwidth from others.
Let us hope that privacy-loving interests will continue to develop technological solutions to the problem of spam
Technological solutions and legal solutions complement one another. We lock our doors and arrest burglars.
Example: the spams that release "market information" about a company and recommend you but stocks in them
With this evidence, investigate the company's investors until you find one whose buying and selling pattern fits the pump-n-dump profile. It should be trivially easy for an outfit so pathetic that it has to resort to these spams -- the pump-n-dump scammer is probably the only significant per-spam stockholder.
The best method is to impose penalties on the companies who BUY this "advertising".
That's the real point of making spam illegal. It's well-established law that hiring someone to commit a crime is itself a crime. Thus, even if the spam is sent offshore, the contact person for the money will still be vulnerable to prosecution.
Here's where I decided I would not use the service again: they recommend that I disabled my firewall (ZoneAlarm) to download it! Even after I did that, it didn't work. The problem seemed to be that I was on my home network on a LinkSys router. They asked me to bypass the router, hook the computer to the cable modem directly and it worked!
There was no Founders' intent. The 14+14 rule laid down in the 1790 act signed by George Washington was lifted verbatim from the 1710 Statute of Anne. So they were just doing it that way because, to them, it had always been done that way.
Er, you're making my case stronger, not weaker, by pointing out that the Founders considered a tradition of eighty years' standing to be the definitive guidance on the matter.
That cuts both ways. Modern works will not be lost or unreadable in 100-150 years (life + 70, that is), barring war or catastrophe or some other unforeseeable event. Acid-free paper, digital storage technology, CDs and whatnot.
First, even if we are extremely generous and assume that most paper documents are on acid-free paper (which hasn't been the case for the better part of a century), the issue of finding a copy of a typical work after 150 years remains. Second, I can't believe that anyone on/. would seriously claim that "digital storage technology" provides archival storage (got an 8" floppy drive? Didn't think so).
I hate government intervention in the markets and involving the FBI should be an absolute nightmare to anyone with even a bit of libertarian in his heart.
Nonsense. It is the FBI's job to arrest thieves when they fall under federal rather than the usual state jurisdiction. The only civil liberties issue is that the investigation and arrest must be made in a manner consistent with the rights of the accused (and anyone else who might be involved).
I propose to you that the term of life + 70 years is not grossly misplaced. If you think it is, you're going to have to tell me why if you want me to believe you. So far all I've heard is, "That's too long!"
Well, then, you haven't been paying attention. Just off the top of my head, two substantive arguments (original intent as evidenced by the copyright laws passed by the Founders, preservation of works by having them mature into the public domain before time causes the extant copies to become lost or unreadable) are regularly made on/.
To which I respond, "No, it's not! Neener, neener!"
I still haven't heard an argument for why we should limit copyrights to a particular and specific duration. Is any period of time ultimately going to just be arbitrary?
You keep saying this as if it were meaningful. The law is necessarily chock full of arbitrary bright lines, which is perfectly reasonable so long as they aren't grossly misplaced (e.g. it would be absurd to set the driving age at ten, or fifty) and mutually consistent (e.g. it's absurd that you can sign up to die for your country but not buy a beer).
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At least you're honest. Good luck persuading others who agree with you to emulate this commendable trait.
Flaws in this assertion:
1. The average crook is a pathetic loser who doesn't know the difference between tactics and tic-tac-toe. Thus, the chance of catching him off guard is rather high despite his advantage of picking the time and place for the fight.
2. Doing whatever it is the crook wants to do (commit rape, carry loot, etc) is likely to interfere with effective weapon handling.
3. Even if a victim is taken by surprise in any particular case, an armed population increases the overall risk of crime. Some people will find this risk unacceptable and turn to a life of honest toil, or at least strictly non-violent crime (as verified by the before-and-after stats of US states that have adopted concealed carry reforms).
Carrying an armed gun increases the risk that you will use it to shoot others in a wave of anger
Actually, proper training in the use of arms is more likely to create a "with great power comes great responsibility" attitude.
Secondly, only a fraction of cirminals would carry guns if doing so was prohibited. Guns cost money, which is something most criminals lack
Er, criminals generally do have money after pulling off a robbery. That's sort of the point.
and if carrying guns is illegal, it will cost a lot of money and effort to get one, and increase the chances for criminals to be caught.
Carrying guns is illegal in some American jurisdictions. Those very places tend to be the most infested with armed criminals.
"Guns don't kill people, people do. If guns are outlawed, murderers will find other tools to do their job."
Actually, if guns are outlawed, criminals will get them anyway.
Well, the T-Shirt for the last one is out there (but probably OOP).
On the contrary, Lonath thought it through perfectly, and correctly concluded that such a model creates a perverse incentive for broadcasters to select the worst available commercials. That way, they maximize the amount paid by subscribers (the lousier the commercial, the more people skip over it) in addition to what they collected in the first place for selling the spot.
That advertiser is not going to pay it unless you watch the commercial.
If advertisers want people to watch their commercials, it is incumbent upon them to create spots that are sufficiently informative and/or entertaining to attract attention. If they can't or won't do so, I fail to see where it's my problem.
These are big problems for the proposed business model. It is possible, however, to address them if you try to think them through in a way that will benefit all involved instead of jump to some socialist knee-jerk reaction.
See previous comment.
If Lauder is at all sincere in suggesting that advertisers provide actual worthwhile information (which is, ultimately, the only way to save the advertiser sponsorship model), then he wouldn't even bring up the silly notion of extracting payment for not watching the ads.
The proposed charge does not seem very reasonable to me, either practically (a half-dozen ads per break, four times an hour, for four hours a day comes to $28.80/month -- a fairly hefty addition to the typical cable bill) or philosophically (if a given advertisment is so ineffective that people choose to bypass it, then the loss should be borne by the people who created and presented it).
I'd do that if they didn't know what their boss was doing. If they did know, I'd throw them out into the snow on Christmas Eve.
-1 Redundant: We already know that Ralsky embodies essence of criminal behaviour.
In Malakye's world, ISPs are Glorious People's Collective Communes.
If you want exact proportionality, I like a proposal by a friend of mine. Spammers should be imprisoned in a cell with a computer. The computer would receive a flood of spam, and the spammer would "just hit delete". Every so often, the computer would recieve a legitimate message informing the spammer that he would be let out for a meal, excersize break, potty break, etc. If the spammer accidentally deleted one of those messages, he'd miss that meal (or whatever). Of course, some of the spam would be disguised to look like the legitimate messages (just like "on the outside").
The sentence would end when the spammer deleted a number of messages equal to the spam e-mails he sent or caused to be sent.
This is both untrue and irrelevant:
Untrue: Wasting several hours of one person's time is trivial compared to the cumulative waste of several man-years by the millions of Ralsky's spam victims.
Irrelevant: The use of retaliatory force is not weighed by exact equality to the original offense (though it sometimes happens to come out that way), but rather by its sufficiency to punish the offense and to deter future offenses.
And finally, about the comments regarding the "spammer's lawyer" being some low form of life, just remember that everyone in free nations under the rule of law has the right to legal representation.
And everyone in free nations under the rule of law has the right to form, and express, an opinion about a person's actions (including those of low-life like Ralsky and his lawyer).
Hey, when you buy a house for $500 (which is about what he'll be able to get for precisely this reason), you have to expect it to be a fixer-upper project.
Several states have specific anti-spam laws, and the applicability of the federal junk-fax law remains to be definitively determined. You might lose, but the case can't be thrown out or penalized as frivolous.
This was used in one of Asimov's "Lucky Starr" juveniles -- a villain from the Sirian system tells the robots that Lucky's sidekick "Bigman" (a sarcastic-opposite nickname) is not human, so that he can be attacked with murderous intent. Because of the Naziesque "purity" of the Sirian population, the robots have never seen an adult human of such short stature.
The objective is not to create perfect security (which is, as you correctly say, not possible). The objective is to make your security good enough for most practical purposes.
Yes, the government can use various sorts of surveillance measures to get your messages anyway. However, requiring trained personnel to set up monitoring vans or do black-bag jobs limits the total number of surveillance targets. That makes wide-ranging fishing expeditions impractical, and inhibits abuse by bored or vindictive individuals. Also, it leaves a bigger trail (more memos, more people directly involved) to be traced if -- OK, when -- the government does break the law.
Fair enough -- if they don't respond in a reasonably timely manner, the license can't prevent that fact from getting out.
I'd be more comfortable with this if there was an absolute cap that did not depend on the acknowledgement. As written, it would seem to allow PGP to freeze the clock indefinitely by simply not responding.
For this reason, the claim should be dismissed with prejudice -- and, preferably, with a hefty penalty for abusing the legal system. It's equivalent to a crooked CEO attempting to use copyright to suppress the documents that prove his dirty deeds.
If you're a libertarian, then you know perfectly well that you don't have a right to "free" speech on my dime.
The ability to send unsolicited email to practically anyone has long been a valuable online tool for everything from online protests (like filling your Congressman's mailbox with anti-DMCA flames)
Any communication to your Congressman about federal legislation is inherently solicited -- it's part of the job.
Worse, the anti-spam cause could also be used by authoritarian interests to crack down on all unsolicited emails.
The anti-crime* cause in general could be (and is) used by authoritarian interests to attack privacy, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to keep private property, etc. However, nobody in his right mind suggests that crime should be tolerated as the price of liberty.
(*I am referring here to real crimes such as theft and assault, not to politically invented ones such as drug possession. Spam, being a theft of services, properly falls into the former category.)
Likewise, anonymous remailers and open relays have been used by people to protect their privacy almost as long as email has existed.
Reputable anonymous remailers have always limited message flow, precisely to prevent them from being used to steal bandwidth from others.
Let us hope that privacy-loving interests will continue to develop technological solutions to the problem of spam
Technological solutions and legal solutions complement one another. We lock our doors and arrest burglars.
With this evidence, investigate the company's investors until you find one whose buying and selling pattern fits the pump-n-dump profile. It should be trivially easy for an outfit so pathetic that it has to resort to these spams -- the pump-n-dump scammer is probably the only significant per-spam stockholder.
That's the real point of making spam illegal. It's well-established law that hiring someone to commit a crime is itself a crime. Thus, even if the spam is sent offshore, the contact person for the money will still be vulnerable to prosecution.
Sounds like they need to upgrade their spyware.
Er, you're making my case stronger, not weaker, by pointing out that the Founders considered a tradition of eighty years' standing to be the definitive guidance on the matter.
That cuts both ways. Modern works will not be lost or unreadable in 100-150 years (life + 70, that is), barring war or catastrophe or some other unforeseeable event. Acid-free paper, digital storage technology, CDs and whatnot.
First, even if we are extremely generous and assume that most paper documents are on acid-free paper (which hasn't been the case for the better part of a century), the issue of finding a copy of a typical work after 150 years remains. Second, I can't believe that anyone on /. would seriously claim that "digital storage technology" provides archival storage (got an 8" floppy drive? Didn't think so).
Nonsense. It is the FBI's job to arrest thieves when they fall under federal rather than the usual state jurisdiction. The only civil liberties issue is that the investigation and arrest must be made in a manner consistent with the rights of the accused (and anyone else who might be involved).
Well, then, you haven't been paying attention. Just off the top of my head, two substantive arguments (original intent as evidenced by the copyright laws passed by the Founders, preservation of works by having them mature into the public domain before time causes the extant copies to become lost or unreadable) are regularly made on /.
To which I respond, "No, it's not! Neener, neener!"
So I've noticed.
You keep saying this as if it were meaningful. The law is necessarily chock full of arbitrary bright lines, which is perfectly reasonable so long as they aren't grossly misplaced (e.g. it would be absurd to set the driving age at ten, or fifty) and mutually consistent (e.g. it's absurd that you can sign up to die for your country but not buy a beer).