The testing wasn't much, a few lines of script and a lot of repetitive runs on various terminals, but we had to do it in the dark, by flashlight, in jump suits (with booties, bouffants, and masks), in 90 degree heat, in an ammonia saturated atmosphere, in rooms full of unhappy and flatulent dogs, rats, mice, or monkeys.
The only thing that kept me from quitting on the spot, instead of a month later, was that my boss and his boss were doing it with me.
So, the only thing that kept you from quitting was that... you were in a three-way... having wild monkey sex... in front of... monkeys... withthe sound of farting dogs covering up the noise...
Yes, and then we get to the real mass murderers: atheists (look up Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.).
They're all late-comers - religion always has been, and even today continues to be, the excuse for killing people who don't believe in the same god you do.
I call shenanigans - it was slash, backspace, O, you ignorant clod!
But at least it wasn't soviet russia, which was more dangerous because the O slashed YOU! Explains Chernobyl... kind of hard to avoid typos when you're missing fingers.
Okay, this is Easter, so maybe someone nailed you to a cross and you died and went to heaven or whatever, because you sure aren't living in the real world, with credit card fraud and identity theft.
Credit card fraud and identity theft is a multi-billion-dollar industry. The "money trail" disappears in every case. Your naiveté in insisting that they will always leave a money trail doesn't cut it - estamps are stupid, and are opent to fraud, same as any other financial transaction. Most identity theft is done by rings who specialize in it, and when you "take down" one part, you only get the low-end scumbags, who are expendable.
Also, profitable spammers will have no problem keeping good credit scores - they'll always have "affiliates" to take the blame (just look at the latest twitter spam - "it's affiliates doing it" - but magpie has no problems coming up with more greedy "affiliates").
This seems to be a basic flaw in American culture - greed justifies what would otherwise be wrong. Approximately 10 million Americans engaged in criminal acts related to mortgage fraud during the last 8 years, either as buyers, brokers, , agents or lenders - and yet we don't see any calls to throw the people who obtained mortgages through fraudulent declarations (liars loans) to be thrown in jail or do community service and their assets seized, which would happen if they had obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars through some other criminal activity, such as drug dealing.
Aside from the flaws already pointed out, we can now add credit-card fraud, identity theft, and the associated joe jobs from those two, to the list of reasons why estamps are fucking retarded.
All you've succeeded in doing is creating more failure points, choke points, and vectors of attack, and made those attacks worth more financially. Gee, sounds like a major fail - which is why it was rejected years ago when companies like Microsoft first proposed it - with themselves reaping a cut. Fuck them, and fuck estamps. History has already passed judgment on it - a major FAIL.
Reread the thread and you'll see why estamps are not a viable solution.
You don't have to be a speed-reader. Most of the spams are obvious from the headline.
"Most" isn't good enough.
In life, "most" is good enough, and not just for spam. We will never get 100%. You will go insane - and you will most certainly fail - trying to find a system that blocks all spam without also blocking legit email. If you believe estamps will solve the problem, you're incredibly naive, especially after all the other posters have pointed out some of the more obvious flaws.
I'm not proposing getting rid of the existing system. If you are a speed-reader and the task of deleting 25 spams a day without accidentally wiping out something of importance is not difficult or bothersome for you, then use the old.
You don't have to be a speed-reader. Most of the spams are obvious from the headline. For example, what woman is going to have to read the message for a spam that has "Please her with your enlarged penis?" Even lesbians will prefer a strap-on.
You can also train your email reader to detect spam and bin it, same as the web-mail services.
estamps were an attempt by people to make money by being a middle-man in the process.WE said "Fuck them" then, and we say it now. Give it up. If you can't delete spam in a few seconds, you really shouldn't be using a computer.
i would have to burn several DVDs of backup so i don't lose data
Ah, the naiveté of youth...
Real BSD users set up an rsync box.
Depending on burned dvds for backup is like depending on pulling out to prevent contraception. Ask Bristol Palin how well that form of "safe sex" worked out. When you lose your data, be sure to post the story to fmylife.com so we can all laugh at your angst- and hubris-filled story.
Whenever a new medium forms it does not take long for it to be colonized by marketers. In fact, it is a sign of how successful Twitter has been that it is being used in this way.
And the easiest way to avoid it is to stop using it. Just as the easiest way to get rid of a lot of spam is to auto-reject email from any freemail servers, such as google, yahoo, or hotmail.
There's a difference between Free (as in F/LOSS) and "free" as in "ad-supported." Advertising companies such as google and yahoo aren't just giving it away - there's a quid pro quo. Same applies to twitter, facebook, and all the other "we're free" crap.
Rainbow tables FTW. Also, the whole estamp infrastructure could be DDoS'd to death, either forcing the email system back into a failsafe mode where the stamps aren't verified, or worse - no mail is delivered. Then there's the question of how soon before someone does a man-in-the-middle/dns poisoning and starts siphoning off valid email stamps for fun and profit? The senders' email never gets sent, but a spam with their paid-for estamp does, and it's tied to their estamp account.
Cattle prods are a much better solution to the spam problem.
estamps are a dumb idea - give it up, already. Just like captchas, if there's a financial incentive, they WILL be broken. Simplest way to break estamps is by sending a flood of spam with bogus etamp crypto keys. The key servers will hork up a hairball - you've DDoS'd them, and killed off the legit email as well.
I know, I know, separate your plastics, papers and aluminum, etc.
Have your municipality investigate other recycling contractors/technologies. We no longer have to sort - the city sent a notice saying as much. It all gets sorted at the recycler.
This not only increases recycling rates - it's cheaper, because now each truck can cover more area in a given time, instead of having to dump the sorted stuff into various hoppers.
Nonsense. Advertising in all its' forms is on the way out in terms of effectiveness. Case in point -
2 years ago, the 2nd-largest advertiser in the entire world was GM. That worked out to be really "effective", didn't it?
People aren't "crazy about gaming" - they're "crazy about a specific game." Advertising to them isn't going to get them to drop their craze for another any more than advertising to slashdot users is going to get them to switch to joeblowtechnewsfornerds.
There are many products that advertising just doesn't work for. You can advertise the shit out of your Chrysler car, but people will stil want a Toyota Camry, because we all know Chrysler has only 2 weeks to live, and Toyota builds quality cars.
Word of mouth beats advertising dollars every time - and when everyone's connected, everyone has access to word-of-mouth, and all advertising will be seen as just astro-turfing by paid shills. Sure, that means that a lot of businesses that are based on dishonesty (manipulating people to buy something because it's "supposed" to be better when it isn't) will die off. I have no problem with that. The current die-off in the print business is just the first step. Funny thing about inflection points - people don't realize they're living through one until years later. We've lived through inflection (or tipping) points with general computing (63 years - ENIAC) and cell phones (36 years - April 3rd, 1973), the global network is at least as big a change, and may take just as long to mature, and the end result will leave a lot of blood on the floor. We may actually end up with "truth in advertising" being the only option.
long as someone is willing to sit and watch someone play a game, why wouldn't there be basis for a pro-gaming? Would you like to advertise directly to 1.000.000 16-25 year old males that play a lot of games, and buy a lot of hardware? Well then pro-gaming is where it is at, and you can get some really cheap well targeted advertising. When the advertising dollars are there, the rest is easy.
Advertising is dying. Look at how decimated the newspapers and magazines are, as ad dollars dry up. The "new media" are going to have the same problem, because, as more and more people get directly connected, and search gets better, people won't need advertising to find what they want. They're already "ad-blind." When I mentioned this to a friend, he asked if gmail still carried ads, since he hasn't noticed one in ages. No, he doesn't use ad-blocking software - he just doesn't notice the ads... guess google succeeded in their goal of making ads "less intrusive".
Quick test - name the sponsors or products of ANY of the last 5 ads you saw... you probably can't. As search engines get better, all advertising becomes worth less - so even google contains the seeds of its' own destruction.
Your "million kids" example? Kids want what their friends have. Always has been that way - always will be.
Third , fourth, fifth, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10 answers:
[_] Future? I didn;t know it had a present or a past?
[br>
[_] It's what I tell my mom every time she nags me about moving out of her basement. I say she's interfering with my "career." I'm 37. And I smell funny.
[_] Isn't "professional gaming" illegal outside of Las Vegas?
[_] If you take away professional gaming from the career pros, only losers will have professional gaming careers... oh wait -
[_] I can't decide which is worse, being a professional gamer or being CowboyNeal'd...
[_] "I guess I'll have to go back to day trading..."
[_] Q: A professional gamer and a human waste of oxygen fall off a building (but I repeat myself)... who hits the ground first? A: Who gives a fuck!
[_] Get a real job!
[_] Q. How many "professional gamers" does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: 5, because they have very very small dicks.
Slashdot Mirror
They may be late comers, but compared to them every religious mass murderer was an amateur.
Then the obvious deduction is that they had good teachers ...
And no, in terms of body count, even Stalin has nothing on christianity.
The testing wasn't much, a few lines of script and a lot of repetitive runs on various terminals, but we had to do it in the dark, by flashlight, in jump suits (with booties, bouffants, and masks), in 90 degree heat, in an ammonia saturated atmosphere, in rooms full of unhappy and flatulent dogs, rats, mice, or monkeys.
The only thing that kept me from quitting on the spot, instead of a month later, was that my boss and his boss were doing it with me.
So, the only thing that kept you from quitting was that ... you were in a three-way ... having wild monkey sex ... in front of ... monkeys ... withthe sound of farting dogs covering up the noise ...
Yes, and then we get to the real mass murderers: atheists (look up Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.).
They're all late-comers - religion always has been, and even today continues to be, the excuse for killing people who don't believe in the same god you do.
You had zeros? We had to use the letter O.
I call shenanigans - it was slash, backspace, O, you ignorant clod!
But at least it wasn't soviet russia, which was more dangerous because the O slashed YOU! Explains Chernobyl ... kind of hard to avoid typos when you're missing fingers.
One of my current clients has me troubleshooting in a literal closet
You should tell him you're already *out*, and that the expression "coming out of the closet" isn't meant to be taken literally ...
I once had to write code with yo Mama! :D
That's not the way I heard it. It was in Soviet Russia and yo Mama "coded" YOU!
We had to code in cesspool while sulfuric acid was dumped all over our bodies and melted our keyboards!
Hey, look at the bright side. You were far enough away that your boss couldn't throw chairs at you ...
I felt so bad for the poor people that had to sit near me on the plane home. No chairs there either.
Standing room only in an airplane - now THAT's rough!
... I'm CURRENTLY maintaining Perl code!
If it's in perl, it isn't current!
Besides, how hard is it to run a randomizer on the alphabet?
Maybe you should move to Soviet Russia, where perl maintains YOU!
Okay, this is Easter, so maybe someone nailed you to a cross and you died and went to heaven or whatever, because you sure aren't living in the real world, with credit card fraud and identity theft.
Credit card fraud and identity theft is a multi-billion-dollar industry. The "money trail" disappears in every case. Your naiveté in insisting that they will always leave a money trail doesn't cut it - estamps are stupid, and are opent to fraud, same as any other financial transaction. Most identity theft is done by rings who specialize in it, and when you "take down" one part, you only get the low-end scumbags, who are expendable.
Also, profitable spammers will have no problem keeping good credit scores - they'll always have "affiliates" to take the blame (just look at the latest twitter spam - "it's affiliates doing it" - but magpie has no problems coming up with more greedy "affiliates").
This seems to be a basic flaw in American culture - greed justifies what would otherwise be wrong. Approximately 10 million Americans engaged in criminal acts related to mortgage fraud during the last 8 years, either as buyers, brokers, , agents or lenders - and yet we don't see any calls to throw the people who obtained mortgages through fraudulent declarations (liars loans) to be thrown in jail or do community service and their assets seized, which would happen if they had obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars through some other criminal activity, such as drug dealing.
Oh, btw, thanks for wrecking the worlds' economy.
That's 9.375 cords (and not those silly "face cords"). Now get off my lawn!
Aside from the flaws already pointed out, we can now add credit-card fraud, identity theft, and the associated joe jobs from those two, to the list of reasons why estamps are fucking retarded.
All you've succeeded in doing is creating more failure points, choke points, and vectors of attack, and made those attacks worth more financially. Gee, sounds like a major fail - which is why it was rejected years ago when companies like Microsoft first proposed it - with themselves reaping a cut. Fuck them, and fuck estamps. History has already passed judgment on it - a major FAIL.
Reread the thread and you'll see why estamps are not a viable solution.
You don't have to be a speed-reader. Most of the spams are obvious from the headline.
"Most" isn't good enough.
In life, "most" is good enough, and not just for spam. We will never get 100%. You will go insane - and you will most certainly fail - trying to find a system that blocks all spam without also blocking legit email. If you believe estamps will solve the problem, you're incredibly naive, especially after all the other posters have pointed out some of the more obvious flaws.
I'm not proposing getting rid of the existing system. If you are a speed-reader and the task of deleting 25 spams a day without accidentally wiping out something of importance is not difficult or bothersome for you, then use the old.
You don't have to be a speed-reader. Most of the spams are obvious from the headline. For example, what woman is going to have to read the message for a spam that has "Please her with your enlarged penis?" Even lesbians will prefer a strap-on.
You can also train your email reader to detect spam and bin it, same as the web-mail services.
estamps were an attempt by people to make money by being a middle-man in the process.WE said "Fuck them" then, and we say it now. Give it up. If you can't delete spam in a few seconds, you really shouldn't be using a computer.
i would have to burn several DVDs of backup so i don't lose data
Ah, the naiveté of youth ...
Real BSD users set up an rsync box.
Depending on burned dvds for backup is like depending on pulling out to prevent contraception. Ask Bristol Palin how well that form of "safe sex" worked out. When you lose your data, be sure to post the story to fmylife.com so we can all laugh at your angst- and hubris-filled story.
Whenever a new medium forms it does not take long for it to be colonized by marketers. In fact, it is a sign of how successful Twitter has been that it is being used in this way.
And the easiest way to avoid it is to stop using it. Just as the easiest way to get rid of a lot of spam is to auto-reject email from any freemail servers, such as google, yahoo, or hotmail.
There's a difference between Free (as in F/LOSS) and "free" as in "ad-supported." Advertising companies such as google and yahoo aren't just giving it away - there's a quid pro quo. Same applies to twitter, facebook, and all the other "we're free" crap.
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
Rainbow tables FTW. Also, the whole estamp infrastructure could be DDoS'd to death, either forcing the email system back into a failsafe mode where the stamps aren't verified, or worse - no mail is delivered. Then there's the question of how soon before someone does a man-in-the-middle/dns poisoning and starts siphoning off valid email stamps for fun and profit? The senders' email never gets sent, but a spam with their paid-for estamp does, and it's tied to their estamp account.
Cattle prods are a much better solution to the spam problem.
estamps are a dumb idea - give it up, already. Just like captchas, if there's a financial incentive, they WILL be broken. Simplest way to break estamps is by sending a flood of spam with bogus etamp crypto keys. The key servers will hork up a hairball - you've DDoS'd them, and killed off the legit email as well.
People will WANT to use e-stamps when the cost of cleaning spam is greater than the cost of E-stamps.
So why should I pay, say, a buck for eStamps when I can delete the spam that gets through in less than a second?
The easiest way to deal with spam:
The program could be funded by having an interactive video feed, and you pay 1 cent for every time you click the "shock the spmammer" button.
I know, I know, separate your plastics, papers and aluminum, etc.
Have your municipality investigate other recycling contractors/technologies. We no longer have to sort - the city sent a notice saying as much. It all gets sorted at the recycler.
This not only increases recycling rates - it's cheaper, because now each truck can cover more area in a given time, instead of having to dump the sorted stuff into various hoppers.
I don't get the cards in the mail, but I get lots of postage paid envelopes, these I fill with twigs and dirt before posting.
I don't get the cards in the mail, but I get lots of postage paid envelopes, these I fill with powdered sugar or corn starch before posting.
There, fixed it for you.
They'll either try to snort it, or think it's anthrax.
Nonsense. Advertising in all its' forms is on the way out in terms of effectiveness. Case in point - 2 years ago, the 2nd-largest advertiser in the entire world was GM. That worked out to be really "effective", didn't it?
People aren't "crazy about gaming" - they're "crazy about a specific game." Advertising to them isn't going to get them to drop their craze for another any more than advertising to slashdot users is going to get them to switch to joeblowtechnewsfornerds.
There are many products that advertising just doesn't work for. You can advertise the shit out of your Chrysler car, but people will stil want a Toyota Camry, because we all know Chrysler has only 2 weeks to live, and Toyota builds quality cars.
Word of mouth beats advertising dollars every time - and when everyone's connected, everyone has access to word-of-mouth, and all advertising will be seen as just astro-turfing by paid shills. Sure, that means that a lot of businesses that are based on dishonesty (manipulating people to buy something because it's "supposed" to be better when it isn't) will die off. I have no problem with that. The current die-off in the print business is just the first step. Funny thing about inflection points - people don't realize they're living through one until years later. We've lived through inflection (or tipping) points with general computing (63 years - ENIAC) and cell phones (36 years - April 3rd, 1973), the global network is at least as big a change, and may take just as long to mature, and the end result will leave a lot of blood on the floor. We may actually end up with "truth in advertising" being the only option.
He's left now, and has started Pelago, a company that wants to help mobile users turn their lives into stories they can share on the web.
I have a solution that kills 2 birds with one stone, but it involves him meeting up with a bucket of tar, some feathers, and a very angry chicken!
long as someone is willing to sit and watch someone play a game, why wouldn't there be basis for a pro-gaming? Would you like to advertise directly to 1.000.000 16-25 year old males that play a lot of games, and buy a lot of hardware? Well then pro-gaming is where it is at, and you can get some really cheap well targeted advertising. When the advertising dollars are there, the rest is easy.
Advertising is dying. Look at how decimated the newspapers and magazines are, as ad dollars dry up. The "new media" are going to have the same problem, because, as more and more people get directly connected, and search gets better, people won't need advertising to find what they want. They're already "ad-blind." When I mentioned this to a friend, he asked if gmail still carried ads, since he hasn't noticed one in ages. No, he doesn't use ad-blocking software - he just doesn't notice the ads ... guess google succeeded in their goal of making ads "less intrusive".
Quick test - name the sponsors or products of ANY of the last 5 ads you saw ... you probably can't. As search engines get better, all advertising becomes worth less - so even google contains the seeds of its' own destruction.
Your "million kids" example? Kids want what their friends have. Always has been that way - always will be.
Third , fourth, fifth, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10 answers:
[_] Future? I didn;t know it had a present or a past? [br> [_] It's what I tell my mom every time she nags me about moving out of her basement. I say she's interfering with my "career." I'm 37. And I smell funny. ... oh wait -
...
..."
... who hits the ground first? A: Who gives a fuck!
[_] Isn't "professional gaming" illegal outside of Las Vegas?
[_] If you take away professional gaming from the career pros, only losers will have professional gaming careers
[_] I can't decide which is worse, being a professional gamer or being CowboyNeal'd
[_] "I guess I'll have to go back to day trading
[_] Q: A professional gamer and a human waste of oxygen fall off a building (but I repeat myself)
[_] Get a real job!
[_] Q. How many "professional gamers" does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: 5, because they have very very small dicks.