get rid of corrupt American politicians that took huge backhanders during the CAN-SPAM fiascoTo my great surprise, it looks like steps are being taken in this direction. Quite a few incumbents got tossed out in the recent election, and the Democrats now in charge are making a fuss about dealing with corruption. Of course I don't expect that to lead anywhere, but at least they're making a fuss.
get the politicians to write legislation with real bite. It can take up to 15 seconds to delete an email e.g. so 15 seconds of prison time for every sent spam email sounds about right; i.e. 8 months in prison for a million emails. On second thoughts 60 seconds in prison, because they knew what they was doing was wrong, so 30 months in prison. A few spam runs, and it's essentially life imprisonment. Yay! (My heart bleeds, but essentially they kill person lifetimes every time they do a spam run).I'm not convinced that increasing the sentences will serve as a significant deterrent. Many spammers go to great lengths to avoid getting caught.
Also, I'm tired of people complaining that CAN-SPAM is worthless because spammers can easily exploit its loopholes and continue spamming. That simply isn't happening. CAN-SPAM isn't being enforced, so nobody's bothering to try to comply with it. This is an enforcement problem, not a legislative problem (although I would argue that the solution is legislative action to address the enforcement problem by allocating more funding). Once spammers actually start complying with CAN-SPAM, we can decide whether the law needs to be changed to close those loopholes, but until then, what's the point of toughening a law that's being ignored anyway?
work out how the spammers get paid, and freeze it out; no dosh, no dodgy email.We know how the spammers get paid.
In the case of penny stock scams, the spammers pick some random company, buy a bunch of shares, spam the crap out of it, and unload. The company being advertised probably had nothing to do with the spam, so punishing them doesn't help. The only solution to this is to use technical means to track down the spammer, then sic the SEC on them.
In the case of most other spam, well, spammers lie, cheat, and steal. They find some shady company, and offer to "promote their business over the Internet using legitimate double-opt-in verified mailing lists" for a fee. They collect the money and send the spam. If all goes well, the client may be pleased enough with the additional revenue that they turn to the dark side and make the same deal again. If not, the spammer takes the money and runs... straight to the next client. Again, punishing the clients may not do much good, because many of them are victims of this as well.
Your crazy. If somone breaks in your house and steals your computer, do you want them to be able to log into all your favorite sites?Of course not, which is why Firefox stores all my passwords in an encrypted database that can't be decrypted without my master password, which they wouldn't get if they stole my computer.
You had actual 'classes' on the history of the Church? I thought you wrote it was a learning institution
You think it's only useful to learn about some of the institutions throughout history that have helped to shape modern society and culture, but not others that you happen to dislike?
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Corollary: "Those who study history are doomed to know it's repeating."
Also: "Those who fail history class are doomed to repeat it."
Saving passwords should not be a browser feature. I am ashamed that such a big bug could make it into firefox.
Saving passwords absolutely should be a browser feature; it's a feature I use all the time.
However, I too am ashamed that such a big bug - or rather, design flaw - could make it into Firefox. I understand the usefulness of being able to use the same saved password information across multiple login forms on one site, but surely someone should have realized the danger here. I mean, these are browser developers. They should have known better.
High school used to be full of extra-curricular activities that could give students an opportunity to participate in things they really enjoyed, and therefore motivate them to continue to suffer through the rest. Due to budget cuts, most of these programs have been cut, and the ones that remain often require the students to shell out extra cash that poorer families may not be able to afford.
(People knowledgable in SMTP will now explain why you still might see only one "Received:" line.;-)
Because the server you sent the message to simply delivered the message to a local mailbox after receiving it, and did not relay it to another system. Seeing only a single Received header is unusual because most people don't want their MUA to deal with the hassle of looking up the MX records for the recipient's domain, figuring out which server they should try to contact, attempting a connection, getting a possible error (e.g. if the destination server happens to be temporarily offline), trying a different server if one is available (based on priority levels in the MX records), adding the message to a queue, waiting a few minutes, trying again, waiting a few more minutes, trying again, getting an error because the sender made a typo in the recipient's username, and reporting that error to the user.
It's much easier (and far more practical if you're on a dialup or other non-permanent connection) to just send the message to a relay server that trusts you (either because your IP address is on the same LAN, or you've used SMTP authentication, or whatever), and let that server handle the mess I described above.
What about unicorns? Has everyone made the choice to believe or not believe in unicorns? What about the people that never sat down and made a decision one way or another? Or the people that know there aren't unicorns, but still act as if there are?
Yes, at some point you made the choice not to believe in unicorns, just as at some point you made a similar choice about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Perhaps these characters were never presented to you as actually existing, which made it an easy choice not to believe in their existence when you first heard of them. Or perhaps you once believed in them, and at some point you changed your mind. Or perhaps you choose to believe in them still.
If you haven't chosen whether or not to believe in unicorns, it's either because you've never heard of unicorns, or you're still undecided.
Here in Oregon, most drivers aren't assholes like that.
A friend of mine in Arizona told me she once turned on her turn signal expecting the car behind her in the next lane to speed up, so she could change lanes behind it. She couldn't figure out why it slowed down instead, until she noticed it had Oregon license plates.
Here in the Portland area we actually have real bike lanes. One spot I happened to notice tonight: heading eastbound on the Hawthorne Bridge, just past the bridge is an offramp that turns onto MLK southbound. That offramp gets pretty heavy traffic, but cars are required to yield to bikes that continue east. The bike lane is clearly marked and there's a flashing light next to the sign to remind drivers to pay attention.
I've used viper (vi emulation module for emacs) in the past. There may be other, similar modules, too.
That's probably the one I was thinking of. Some quick Googling reveals that Viper is included in the standard distribution of Emacs 19.29 and XEmacs 19.12 and later.
In my opinion, it's not possible for anything involving DRM to be easier or more convenient than anything without it. Simply because I have no control over it, it's infinitely unusable.
And yet, I'm perfectly able to use it exactly the way I want to. Sure, there are plenty of things I don't want to do, that I can't do. And, granted, there are a couple of things that would be kinda nice, that I can't do either, but they're really not a big deal, from a practical standpoint.
There exist closed BitTorrent communities that you can join, that are most likely much more convenient than public sites like TPB. The particular one I'm thinking of even has an RSS feed that integrates into Azureus, so that one could specify exactly which shows he wanted, and new episodes would automatically start downloading as soon as they were posted to the tracker. I would say that's more convenient than iTMS even regardless of the DRM!
I wouldn't say more convenient, but that would certainly be as convenient, and yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. However, since I have no idea where to find these communities you speak of, and finding the iTunes Store is rather easy, Apple gets a bonus point for convenience right there.
Ah, but you've missed a key point: Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he explained the thinking behind the iTunes Music Store when it originally launched. I used to download The Daily Show from BitTorrent every day, but eventually I got tired of that and quit doing it. I'm paying Apple $9.99 per 16 episodes not to assuage my conscience, but because it's the easiest and most convenient way to get them. I don't have to search BitTorrent sites every day, figure out which ones I've already downloaded and which ones I haven't, then check back in a couple of hours because the one I'm looking for hasn't been posted yet, and keep track of when the show takes a two-week vacation so there aren't any new episodes.
I just launch iTunes, and it starts downloading in the background.
I'm not saying iTunes is perfect - there's the DRM, which restricts what software I can use to play it, and there's the fact that Apple typically doesn't make new episodes available until several hours after they become available on BitTorrent.
So unless there's a reliable Daily Show BitTorrent Podcast out there somewhere that I haven't seen yet, and that won't be shut down as soon as I learn of it, I'm sticking with the easy route.
Or I could subscribe to cable TV and record it every night with PVR software, but you want to talk about companies that aren't deserving of my money? I'd rather pay Viacom via Apple than pay Viacom via the local cable monopoly.
If the apple ipod was easy to hack and put a new OS onto there would have been people doing it and making a better ipod without any DRM.
Uhh, you realize that removing the iPod's ability to play DRM'd content would be a reduction in functionality, right?
Actually, the ability to play DRM'd content in iTunes is the main reason I'm currently running Windows Vista RC2 instead of MythTV on Linux in my living room. I haven't decided what I'll do permanently, but unless I can play video from the iTunes Store via WINE, I'll be sticking with Windows. Although I might dual-boot; there's a TON of stuff that's horribly broken in Windows that I don't know how to fix.
I thought the main idea was to send equipment, not people? If we can get one in place (which doesn't seem particularly likely any time soon), it'd be far cheaper to send tons of heavy stuff into orbit via a tether than via a rocket.
When did it happen that something as seemingly simple as turning a startup sound on or off in a Mac required anything more than a couple of mouse clicks on a GUI?
About 1984 or so. Of course, now that the Terminal is available, it's much easier to do that sort of thing than it used to be.
At work we use spam assassin with a gpl OCR plugin, however, it's getting foiled by intentional added noise in the images. I propose we come up with a way to detect these non-character elements (noise) in the associated spam images instead of just trying to OCR the text. The noise I've seen seems to be like it should be easily detectable.
I use a plugin called FuzzyOcr, and it handles animation and noise very well. Unfortunately the OCR itself isn't great, so it reads a lot of gibberish. FuzzyOCR compensates for this by being very liberal with its string matching (hence the name). The nice thing is, it correctly identifies the vast majority of the image-based spam I receive. Unfortunately, it's very easy for it to identify false positives. So far I haven't had this problem, but you might, especially if people often send you screen shots.
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We could always bomb them! :DRight, because that always results in the people in the bombed country wanting to stop doing anything we don't like.
get rid of corrupt American politicians that took huge backhanders during the CAN-SPAM fiascoTo my great surprise, it looks like steps are being taken in this direction. Quite a few incumbents got tossed out in the recent election, and the Democrats now in charge are making a fuss about dealing with corruption. Of course I don't expect that to lead anywhere, but at least they're making a fuss. get the politicians to write legislation with real bite. It can take up to 15 seconds to delete an email e.g. so 15 seconds of prison time for every sent spam email sounds about right; i.e. 8 months in prison for a million emails. On second thoughts 60 seconds in prison, because they knew what they was doing was wrong, so 30 months in prison. A few spam runs, and it's essentially life imprisonment. Yay! (My heart bleeds, but essentially they kill person lifetimes every time they do a spam run).I'm not convinced that increasing the sentences will serve as a significant deterrent. Many spammers go to great lengths to avoid getting caught.
Also, I'm tired of people complaining that CAN-SPAM is worthless because spammers can easily exploit its loopholes and continue spamming. That simply isn't happening. CAN-SPAM isn't being enforced, so nobody's bothering to try to comply with it. This is an enforcement problem, not a legislative problem (although I would argue that the solution is legislative action to address the enforcement problem by allocating more funding). Once spammers actually start complying with CAN-SPAM, we can decide whether the law needs to be changed to close those loopholes, but until then, what's the point of toughening a law that's being ignored anyway? work out how the spammers get paid, and freeze it out; no dosh, no dodgy email.We know how the spammers get paid.
In the case of penny stock scams, the spammers pick some random company, buy a bunch of shares, spam the crap out of it, and unload. The company being advertised probably had nothing to do with the spam, so punishing them doesn't help. The only solution to this is to use technical means to track down the spammer, then sic the SEC on them.
In the case of most other spam, well, spammers lie, cheat, and steal. They find some shady company, and offer to "promote their business over the Internet using legitimate double-opt-in verified mailing lists" for a fee. They collect the money and send the spam. If all goes well, the client may be pleased enough with the additional revenue that they turn to the dark side and make the same deal again. If not, the spammer takes the money and runs... straight to the next client. Again, punishing the clients may not do much good, because many of them are victims of this as well.
This is deeply troubling. What can be done to stop it?
Why do you think they're beige, instead of white?
Your crazy. If somone breaks in your house and steals your computer, do you want them to be able to log into all your favorite sites?Of course not, which is why Firefox stores all my passwords in an encrypted database that can't be decrypted without my master password, which they wouldn't get if they stole my computer.
You had actual 'classes' on the history of the Church? I thought you wrote it was a learning institution
You think it's only useful to learn about some of the institutions throughout history that have helped to shape modern society and culture, but not others that you happen to dislike?
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Corollary: "Those who study history are doomed to know it's repeating."
Also: "Those who fail history class are doomed to repeat it."
Saving passwords should not be a browser feature. I am ashamed that such a big bug could make it into firefox.
Saving passwords absolutely should be a browser feature; it's a feature I use all the time.
However, I too am ashamed that such a big bug - or rather, design flaw - could make it into Firefox. I understand the usefulness of being able to use the same saved password information across multiple login forms on one site, but surely someone should have realized the danger here. I mean, these are browser developers. They should have known better.
Hopefully they'll figure out a solution soon.
High school used to be full of extra-curricular activities that could give students an opportunity to participate in things they really enjoyed, and therefore motivate them to continue to suffer through the rest. Due to budget cuts, most of these programs have been cut, and the ones that remain often require the students to shell out extra cash that poorer families may not be able to afford.
(People knowledgable in SMTP will now explain why you still might see only one "Received:" line. ;-)
Because the server you sent the message to simply delivered the message to a local mailbox after receiving it, and did not relay it to another system. Seeing only a single Received header is unusual because most people don't want their MUA to deal with the hassle of looking up the MX records for the recipient's domain, figuring out which server they should try to contact, attempting a connection, getting a possible error (e.g. if the destination server happens to be temporarily offline), trying a different server if one is available (based on priority levels in the MX records), adding the message to a queue, waiting a few minutes, trying again, waiting a few more minutes, trying again, getting an error because the sender made a typo in the recipient's username, and reporting that error to the user.
It's much easier (and far more practical if you're on a dialup or other non-permanent connection) to just send the message to a relay server that trusts you (either because your IP address is on the same LAN, or you've used SMTP authentication, or whatever), and let that server handle the mess I described above.
What about unicorns? Has everyone made the choice to believe or not believe in unicorns? What about the people that never sat down and made a decision one way or another? Or the people that know there aren't unicorns, but still act as if there are?
Yes, at some point you made the choice not to believe in unicorns, just as at some point you made a similar choice about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Perhaps these characters were never presented to you as actually existing, which made it an easy choice not to believe in their existence when you first heard of them. Or perhaps you once believed in them, and at some point you changed your mind. Or perhaps you choose to believe in them still.
If you haven't chosen whether or not to believe in unicorns, it's either because you've never heard of unicorns, or you're still undecided.
If you specifically believe that there is no God, then you're an atheist. Nobody is born this way; it's a choice you make.
If you don't know and don't really care one way or the other, then you're agnostic.
Here in Oregon, most drivers aren't assholes like that.
A friend of mine in Arizona told me she once turned on her turn signal expecting the car behind her in the next lane to speed up, so she could change lanes behind it. She couldn't figure out why it slowed down instead, until she noticed it had Oregon license plates.
Here in the Portland area we actually have real bike lanes. One spot I happened to notice tonight: heading eastbound on the Hawthorne Bridge, just past the bridge is an offramp that turns onto MLK southbound. That offramp gets pretty heavy traffic, but cars are required to yield to bikes that continue east. The bike lane is clearly marked and there's a flashing light next to the sign to remind drivers to pay attention.
I've used viper (vi emulation module for emacs) in the past. There may be other, similar modules, too.
That's probably the one I was thinking of. Some quick Googling reveals that Viper is included in the standard distribution of Emacs 19.29 and XEmacs 19.12 and later.
I would use emacs. The only thing is, it lacks a decent text editor.
This is no longer true. I can't find the link at the moment, but someone has ported vim to it, as a module.
In my opinion, it's not possible for anything involving DRM to be easier or more convenient than anything without it. Simply because I have no control over it, it's infinitely unusable.
And yet, I'm perfectly able to use it exactly the way I want to. Sure, there are plenty of things I don't want to do, that I can't do. And, granted, there are a couple of things that would be kinda nice, that I can't do either, but they're really not a big deal, from a practical standpoint.
There exist closed BitTorrent communities that you can join, that are most likely much more convenient than public sites like TPB. The particular one I'm thinking of even has an RSS feed that integrates into Azureus, so that one could specify exactly which shows he wanted, and new episodes would automatically start downloading as soon as they were posted to the tracker. I would say that's more convenient than iTMS even regardless of the DRM!
I wouldn't say more convenient, but that would certainly be as convenient, and yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. However, since I have no idea where to find these communities you speak of, and finding the iTunes Store is rather easy, Apple gets a bonus point for convenience right there.
BlueFrog's attacks against spammers wouldn't work against pump-and-dump stock scams.
Here's a better suggestion:
1. Download the videos you want off BitTorrent
Ah, but you've missed a key point: Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he explained the thinking behind the iTunes Music Store when it originally launched. I used to download The Daily Show from BitTorrent every day, but eventually I got tired of that and quit doing it. I'm paying Apple $9.99 per 16 episodes not to assuage my conscience, but because it's the easiest and most convenient way to get them. I don't have to search BitTorrent sites every day, figure out which ones I've already downloaded and which ones I haven't, then check back in a couple of hours because the one I'm looking for hasn't been posted yet, and keep track of when the show takes a two-week vacation so there aren't any new episodes.
I just launch iTunes, and it starts downloading in the background.
I'm not saying iTunes is perfect - there's the DRM, which restricts what software I can use to play it, and there's the fact that Apple typically doesn't make new episodes available until several hours after they become available on BitTorrent.
So unless there's a reliable Daily Show BitTorrent Podcast out there somewhere that I haven't seen yet, and that won't be shut down as soon as I learn of it, I'm sticking with the easy route.
Or I could subscribe to cable TV and record it every night with PVR software, but you want to talk about companies that aren't deserving of my money? I'd rather pay Viacom via Apple than pay Viacom via the local cable monopoly.
If the apple ipod was easy to hack and put a new OS onto there would have been people doing it and making a better ipod without any DRM.
Uhh, you realize that removing the iPod's ability to play DRM'd content would be a reduction in functionality, right?
Actually, the ability to play DRM'd content in iTunes is the main reason I'm currently running Windows Vista RC2 instead of MythTV on Linux in my living room. I haven't decided what I'll do permanently, but unless I can play video from the iTunes Store via WINE, I'll be sticking with Windows. Although I might dual-boot; there's a TON of stuff that's horribly broken in Windows that I don't know how to fix.
So... where's the MP3?
I thought the main idea was to send equipment, not people? If we can get one in place (which doesn't seem particularly likely any time soon), it'd be far cheaper to send tons of heavy stuff into orbit via a tether than via a rocket.
Sometimes I'll use an address like whatever@NOSPAM.phroggy.com but the beauty of that is, I added DNS records to make the domain resolve as-is. ;-)
When did it happen that something as seemingly simple as turning a startup sound on or off in a Mac required anything more than a couple of mouse clicks on a GUI?
About 1984 or so. Of course, now that the Terminal is available, it's much easier to do that sort of thing than it used to be.
At work we use spam assassin with a gpl OCR plugin, however, it's getting foiled by intentional added noise in the images. I propose we come up with a way to detect these non-character elements (noise) in the associated spam images instead of just trying to OCR the text. The noise I've seen seems to be like it should be easily detectable.
I use a plugin called FuzzyOcr, and it handles animation and noise very well. Unfortunately the OCR itself isn't great, so it reads a lot of gibberish. FuzzyOCR compensates for this by being very liberal with its string matching (hence the name). The nice thing is, it correctly identifies the vast majority of the image-based spam I receive. Unfortunately, it's very easy for it to identify false positives. So far I haven't had this problem, but you might, especially if people often send you screen shots.
Because he's an idiot?
Seems plausible...