A requirement that all commercial email senders provide a valid email address for responses, and the address and telephone number of the company providing the goods/services.
Pass that into law, and POOF! No more spam. Spam only works because the sender can hide in relative anonymity. Of course there are exceptions, but this would rid America of the run-of-the-mill penis enlargement for the purposes of having sex with hot teens and their naughty housewife mothers while sending out envelopes to get rich quick to save money to send to Nigeria emails.
Furthermore, anything pornographic should be OPT-IN!!!!!! $500 fine for the first violation. I'm for free speech, but that doesn't give you the right to put sexually explicit email in front of my kid.
Even furthermore, it should be a jailable offense to hijack a mail server for the purposes of sending out spam. Make the spammers pay for the use of special spamming servers, which we can all blackhole and forget about.
All in all, though, this proposed law is a DAMN sight better than nothing. Congress will enact somthing like this eventually, it's inevitable. They owe nothing to the porn or penis enlargement industries, it's a perfect case of low hanging fruit feel good legislation that everyone will love and costs them nothing politically. They're just slow to act on anything involving technology.
In short, it doesn't go far enough, but if it passes I'll be happier.
Why not look up the IPs in the email in any of the several open relay databases and use the results as virtual words?
I have a program that filters solely based on the IPs in the headers, and it catches most of my spam with very few false positives. That's without even doing any content based filtering.
I use StartupMonitor to let me know when a program tries to install itself on startup (windows). It works like a charm, and I've managed to catch several spyware/adware programs this way. It allows you to decide whether you want to allow the program to install or not.
I highly recommend it, with the following advice: turn it off before installing a service pack!!!! The only way to turn it off, unfortunately, is from task manager.
I found out about a year ago I was infected with adware. I was getting pop-up ads on google and on my bank's website, which seemed rather odd, when Google put up a link on the front page about how they don't use pop-up ads and why. I had not heard of adware before then, but it made me really really angry. I killed the adware with Ad-Aware, got myself a firewall, and installed StartupMonitor, and wrote to the Federal Trade Commission. I got a form letter back from the FTC thanking me for writing to them about unsolicited commercial email, and assuring me that they were going to eventually do something about it. Guess they hadn't written the spyware form letter yet.
I don't use the real player anymore, period. I don't trust a program that tries to contact the internet without telling me what it's going to do. Furthermore, the last time I installed it (quite a while ago), it tried to change my www home page. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with software. Just because I dl your software, I want to change my home page to your crappy website? How does that follow?
What must happen is not System Administrators "hacking" every computer in the internet infected by code red or nimbda. What must happen is legislation that makes every person running a computer personably responsible for the security of that same computer. If people don't secure their server they must be penalized, instead of letting us fix the problem... even if they want us to.
Every computer connected to the internet is a "server". I'm sorry, but my grandmother does not deserve to be put in jail because she didn't know enough about computers to apply the latest Microsoft service pack to her Windows box, to patch a problem that Microsoft created in the first place.
There is probably a good solution to this problem, but making ordinary people "responsible" for the bad coding standards at Redmond is NOT IT! If someone trespasses on your property, then shoots someone else, are you responsible because you failed to secure your property? If you buy a defective coffee pot that you use as directed, yet it catches on fire and burns down your apartment complex, are you responsible?
The answer is no, but perhaps the manufacturer of the coffee pot is.
Who found this game very very boring? I cannot believe so many people liked it! It completely failed to capture my imagination or stump my brain. I played it several times trying to figure out what the big deal was, with no success.
Now, BattleBalls (aka Senkyu in Japan) on the other hand, got many of my quarters in the arcade.
However, this would be illegal or unwise in states where the bar owner is assumed to have liability for the actions of overly inebriated persons. Half of bartending school is how to recognize and handle customers who have had too much. Sad but true, in our litigious society.
Errr, ever hear of a breathalizer? Add that to the barmonkey and you could ruin everybody's fun and fire your waitresses at the same time!
What if gravity has different properties from a long way away, such as intergalactic distances?
I've often wondered lately if perhaps gravity is both a repulsive and an attractive force. For local (i.e. interstellar) distances, the attractive force prevails. But for really vast (intergalactic) distances, it might act as a repulsive force. This could partly explain why the galaxies are accelerating away from each other.
Physicists don't have much of an idea what dark energy is... maybe it's just gravity, and Newton's law needs an amendment.
I've never heard this idea proposed, but it would make a certain kind of sense to me if it turned out to be the case.
Speculation is at least reasonable in an area of astrophysics where the practicioners themselves will gladly admit to anyone who won't tell them to shut up because no one likes to talk about his job. This is my opinion, at least.
I have an idea that I've never really read anywhere, and I've always wondered why. What if gravity is a source of both attraction and repulsion, but the attraction affect is much stronger within a certain locus, such as within a galaxy? Now, take that idea and imagine a sort of fractal effect, leading to clusters of galaxies, and clusters of clusters.
So the affect that pushes galaxies away from each other is also gravity, but Newton's law gets bent over intergalactic distances.
I'm stepping all over everyone's toes here, because I've had only basic physics coursework, so I apologize now to any astrophysicists I might have offended.
How about this: patent the creation of an RSA key for the purposes of copy-protection in console gaming systems.
After your patent is unceremoniously granted, Microsoft will have to release their key in order to prove prior art. If not, just sue them. You'll win, of course.
All it came up with was a bunch of stuff I already knew about:
The Rolling Stones (like some) Freddie Mercury (like some) The Who (don't like much) The Doors (who doesn't like them?) Neil Young (bleh) Paul Simon (eh, alright I guess, but was better with Arty) Creedance CR (a little dated, but good) Radiohead (can't stand the little posers)
Thank god it didn't say Oasis. Bottom line, of course somebody who likes pop sixties bands is gonna like other pop sixties bands. Some of them even like Radiohead (I know some, really). I wanna hear about bands I've never heard of. I'd think at least something like The Velvet Underground should come up to make it interesting, but instead I ended up with a lot of chart busters I'd already heard of.
The only people who need to remain convinced are the people who fund the projects: congress. Given their access to classified information, I'm sure they will remain convinced that the moon landing was real, etc.
The American people, by and large, believe in NASA, and not the crackpots. Ignore them, I say.
Combine it with a VR helmet
on
Robocoaster
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· Score: 2
To give you the visual aspect of the ride. What fun is it to get thrown all over the place unless it looks like you're high above the park and about to plummet to your doom? Seems like without this visual experience, it would just be nausea inducing.
With the proper VR setup, you could do lots more than just simulate a coaster. How about controlling a space ship, or flying on a magic carpet to fight against a dragon?
I don't see these things replacing coasters anytime soon.
This is the especially important part, because when your mac can't run two processes at the same time without crashing, you want to be able to throw it as far as possible.
Windows is pretty stable these days. There's really no arguing the point. IIS remains unstable, but you can kill it and restart it without hurting windows. However, security in Windows remains an afterthought, while it is a core part of the UNIX design. I like UNIX very much, I just don't want to see us lose the battle because we're making accusations about stability that just aren't true anymore, in my experience. I leave my windows box up for months without rebooting it.
What no one has mentioned - small claims court
on
Windows Refund Day II
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· Score: 5, Informative
Going to small claims court REALLY isn't that big of a deal, you don't need a lawyer, there's no jury, just you, the company you are suing, and the judge. It costs something to file a claim, no matter where you live, but really not very much, and you can usually get the claim fee back if you win.
Just take your receipt and your laptop with no windows on it to the court, along with the EULA. You've got a good chance of winning, and merely filing the lawsuit will probably prompt the company to settle out of court. Make sure they pay your filing fee, of course.
If you have to miss a day of work to go to court, in some places you can sue for that too (assuming it's an issue where you work).
To reiterate: small claims is really no big deal, and the company probably won't let it get to that point anyway. Too bad you have to sue the vendor, and don't get to drag M$ into small claims court. That would be too cool.
The guy who wrote this article was quite frankly out of his gourd.
We don't need any kind of payment mechanism to stop spam. If we could just make wholesale changes to the protocol such as he is suggesting, fixing the spam problem would be a snap. Why? Because spammers never ever ever use their real email address to spam with. They would get too many bounces, angry replies, and so on.
Back in the early early days of the net, there was no commercial presence, and no world wide web, and no usenet email harvesters, and the net was a much more trusting place. The mail RFC did not contain an authentication protocol, because it was obvious that the vast majority of admins could be trusted to use email appropriately.
That trust has now been violated. If we are going to change the way email works, all we have to do is add an authentication protocol, and a few other basic security protections. Spam would disappear overnight. However, changing the protocol will be a very major effort, hence the current band-aid solutions which exist.
I am not a member of the NRA and have no immediate intentions of becoming one, but I cannot see how their position can be labeled "extreme".
Well, consider the fact that the only guns available at the time of the writing of the constitution were muzzle-loading muskets, then consider the fact that the NRA is vehement about citizens having the right to carry full auto submachine guns, which could not possibly be used in self-defense, and you might change your mind.
Rates of violent crimes in the United Kingdom have been steadily rising for years, while rates in the United States have been steadily falling. There is a considerable argument to be made that gun control is to blame for an increase in violence in Britain.
It's still less than 200 deaths in the UK, as opposed to over 11,000 here. Put it in perspective.
They must be expecting us to record it
on
Spielberg's Taken
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· Score: 2
I mean, who can commit 2 hours every day for 10 days to watch the show (besides the slashdot crowd, I mean).
I heard a comedy album by Mort Sahl a long time ago, so this is a major paraphrase (BTW, if you like political satire, you should definately check him out).
A friend of mine says that if I named a famous man, he could name something humble about him, so he challenged me, and he's one of those high energy guys, so he says "GO!", like we're starting a race or something. So I say Thomas Edison, and he says "Thomas Edison always remembered the names of everyone he met". And I'm thinking, okay, this is fun, so I say Albert Einstein, and he says "Albert Einstein personally answered all of his own telephone calls".
So I'm thinking it over, and I'm just awesomely impressed with the humility of the man, so important and famous, to answer all of his own calls, but then I think: Wait a second! Who called Einstein?
Their slip is showing here. I'm sure I don't have to point out to anyone that there is more than one distribution of Linux. Where in the article does it give any sort of scientific evidence to back up this claim, and what distribution did they use?
Also, as others have pointed out, Win2k has only been out for three years now, so how could a five year study be anything but conjecture? You could say that they projected the number out a couple of extra years, but then how is it a "five year study"?
It's certainly possible that a windows box would be cheaper to maintain as a print server. Pretty much you just plug it in and forget it. I'm just not convinced this "study" has proven it.
At the risk of being cynical, when did MPG become a consideration in the US? Gas prices are so cheap compared with Europe, so where's the incentive?
At the risk of responding to a troll, the current trend of SUV's in the US which pollute the environment twice as much as a normal car, also support terrorism, because most of our oil comes from Islamic jihadist nations.
Secondly, if we go to war with Iraq, we may find that the price of oil goes up.
Slashdot Mirror
A requirement that all commercial email senders provide a valid email address for responses, and the address and telephone number of the company providing the goods/services.
Pass that into law, and POOF! No more spam. Spam only works because the sender can hide in relative anonymity. Of course there are exceptions, but this would rid America of the run-of-the-mill penis enlargement for the purposes of having sex with hot teens and their naughty housewife mothers while sending out envelopes to get rich quick to save money to send to Nigeria emails.
Furthermore, anything pornographic should be OPT-IN!!!!!! $500 fine for the first violation. I'm for free speech, but that doesn't give you the right to put sexually explicit email in front of my kid.
Even furthermore, it should be a jailable offense to hijack a mail server for the purposes of sending out spam. Make the spammers pay for the use of special spamming servers, which we can all blackhole and forget about.
All in all, though, this proposed law is a DAMN sight better than nothing. Congress will enact somthing like this eventually, it's inevitable. They owe nothing to the porn or penis enlargement industries, it's a perfect case of low hanging fruit feel good legislation that everyone will love and costs them nothing politically. They're just slow to act on anything involving technology.
In short, it doesn't go far enough, but if it passes I'll be happier.
Why not look up the IPs in the email in any of the several open relay databases and use the results as virtual words?
I have a program that filters solely based on the IPs in the headers, and it catches most of my spam with very few false positives. That's without even doing any content based filtering.
I pronounce it as: "I am no a$$hole lawyer".
I use StartupMonitor to let me know when a program tries to install itself on startup (windows). It works like a charm, and I've managed to catch several spyware/adware programs this way. It allows you to decide whether you want to allow the program to install or not.
I highly recommend it, with the following advice: turn it off before installing a service pack!!!! The only way to turn it off, unfortunately, is from task manager.
I found out about a year ago I was infected with adware. I was getting pop-up ads on google and on my bank's website, which seemed rather odd, when Google put up a link on the front page about how they don't use pop-up ads and why. I had not heard of adware before then, but it made me really really angry. I killed the adware with Ad-Aware, got myself a firewall, and installed StartupMonitor, and wrote to the Federal Trade Commission. I got a form letter back from the FTC thanking me for writing to them about unsolicited commercial email, and assuring me that they were going to eventually do something about it. Guess they hadn't written the spyware form letter yet.
I don't use the real player anymore, period. I don't trust a program that tries to contact the internet without telling me what it's going to do. Furthermore, the last time I installed it (quite a while ago), it tried to change my www home page. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with software. Just because I dl your software, I want to change my home page to your crappy website? How does that follow?
Same goes for ICQ.
Every computer connected to the internet is a "server". I'm sorry, but my grandmother does not deserve to be put in jail because she didn't know enough about computers to apply the latest Microsoft service pack to her Windows box, to patch a problem that Microsoft created in the first place.
There is probably a good solution to this problem, but making ordinary people "responsible" for the bad coding standards at Redmond is NOT IT! If someone trespasses on your property, then shoots someone else, are you responsible because you failed to secure your property? If you buy a defective coffee pot that you use as directed, yet it catches on fire and burns down your apartment complex, are you responsible?
The answer is no, but perhaps the manufacturer of the coffee pot is.
Who found this game very very boring? I cannot believe so many people liked it! It completely failed to capture my imagination or stump my brain. I played it several times trying to figure out what the big deal was, with no success.
Now, BattleBalls (aka Senkyu in Japan) on the other hand, got many of my quarters in the arcade.
However, this would be illegal or unwise in states where the bar owner is assumed to have liability for the actions of overly inebriated persons. Half of bartending school is how to recognize and handle customers who have had too much. Sad but true, in our litigious society.
Errr, ever hear of a breathalizer? Add that to the barmonkey and you could ruin everybody's fun and fire your waitresses at the same time!
Why is it when I submit a story, it always gets rejected then posted the next day?
I know, I know, no grousing, but I wish there was at least a way for the editor to comment about why the article was rejected.
What if gravity has different properties from a long way away, such as intergalactic distances?
I've often wondered lately if perhaps gravity is both a repulsive and an attractive force. For local (i.e. interstellar) distances, the attractive force prevails. But for really vast (intergalactic) distances, it might act as a repulsive force. This could partly explain why the galaxies are accelerating away from each other.
Physicists don't have much of an idea what dark energy is... maybe it's just gravity, and Newton's law needs an amendment.
I've never heard this idea proposed, but it would make a certain kind of sense to me if it turned out to be the case.
Speculation is at least reasonable in an area of astrophysics where the practicioners themselves will gladly admit to anyone who won't tell them to shut up because no one likes to talk about his job. This is my opinion, at least.
I have an idea that I've never really read anywhere, and I've always wondered why. What if gravity is a source of both attraction and repulsion, but the attraction affect is much stronger within a certain locus, such as within a galaxy? Now, take that idea and imagine a sort of fractal effect, leading to clusters of galaxies, and clusters of clusters.
So the affect that pushes galaxies away from each other is also gravity, but Newton's law gets bent over intergalactic distances.
I'm stepping all over everyone's toes here, because I've had only basic physics coursework, so I apologize now to any astrophysicists I might have offended.
How about this: patent the creation of an RSA key for the purposes of copy-protection in console gaming systems.
After your patent is unceremoniously granted, Microsoft will have to release their key in order to prove prior art. If not, just sue them. You'll win, of course.
Hmm... I just tried it.
I entered The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Ween
All it came up with was a bunch of stuff I already knew about:
The Rolling Stones (like some)
Freddie Mercury (like some)
The Who (don't like much)
The Doors (who doesn't like them?)
Neil Young (bleh)
Paul Simon (eh, alright I guess, but was better with Arty)
Creedance CR (a little dated, but good)
Radiohead (can't stand the little posers)
Thank god it didn't say Oasis. Bottom line, of course somebody who likes pop sixties bands is gonna like other pop sixties bands. Some of them even like Radiohead (I know some, really). I wanna hear about bands I've never heard of. I'd think at least something like The Velvet Underground should come up to make it interesting, but instead I ended up with a lot of chart busters I'd already heard of.
The only people who need to remain convinced are the people who fund the projects: congress. Given their access to classified information, I'm sure they will remain convinced that the moon landing was real, etc.
The American people, by and large, believe in NASA, and not the crackpots. Ignore them, I say.
To give you the visual aspect of the ride. What fun is it to get thrown all over the place unless it looks like you're high above the park and about to plummet to your doom? Seems like without this visual experience, it would just be nausea inducing.
With the proper VR setup, you could do lots more than just simulate a coaster. How about controlling a space ship, or flying on a magic carpet to fight against a dragon?
I don't see these things replacing coasters anytime soon.
This is the especially important part, because when your mac can't run two processes at the same time without crashing, you want to be able to throw it as far as possible.
Windows is pretty stable these days. There's really no arguing the point. IIS remains unstable, but you can kill it and restart it without hurting windows.
However, security in Windows remains an afterthought, while it is a core part of the UNIX design.
I like UNIX very much, I just don't want to see us lose the battle because we're making accusations about stability that just aren't true anymore, in my experience. I leave my windows box up for months without rebooting it.
Going to small claims court REALLY isn't that big of a deal, you don't need a lawyer, there's no jury, just you, the company you are suing, and the judge. It costs something to file a claim, no matter where you live, but really not very much, and you can usually get the claim fee back if you win.
Just take your receipt and your laptop with no windows on it to the court, along with the EULA. You've got a good chance of winning, and merely filing the lawsuit will probably prompt the company to settle out of court. Make sure they pay your filing fee, of course.
If you have to miss a day of work to go to court, in some places you can sue for that too (assuming it's an issue where you work).
To reiterate: small claims is really no big deal, and the company probably won't let it get to that point anyway. Too bad you have to sue the vendor, and don't get to drag M$ into small claims court. That would be too cool.
We don't need any kind of payment mechanism to stop spam. If we could just make wholesale changes to the protocol such as he is suggesting, fixing the spam problem would be a snap. Why? Because spammers never ever ever use their real email address to spam with. They would get too many bounces, angry replies, and so on.
Back in the early early days of the net, there was no commercial presence, and no world wide web, and no usenet email harvesters, and the net was a much more trusting place. The mail RFC did not contain an authentication protocol, because it was obvious that the vast majority of admins could be trusted to use email appropriately.
That trust has now been violated. If we are going to change the way email works, all we have to do is add an authentication protocol, and a few other basic security protections. Spam would disappear overnight. However, changing the protocol will be a very major effort, hence the current band-aid solutions which exist.
Well, consider the fact that the only guns available at the time of the writing of the constitution were muzzle-loading muskets, then consider the fact that the NRA is vehement about citizens having the right to carry full auto submachine guns, which could not possibly be used in self-defense, and you might change your mind.
Then again, you might not.
It's still less than 200 deaths in the UK, as opposed to over 11,000 here. Put it in perspective.
I mean, who can commit 2 hours every day for 10 days to watch the show (besides the slashdot crowd, I mean).
A friend of mine says that if I named a famous man, he could name something humble about him, so he challenged me, and he's one of those high energy guys, so he says "GO!", like we're starting a race or something. So I say Thomas Edison, and he says "Thomas Edison always remembered the names of everyone he met". And I'm thinking, okay, this is fun, so I say Albert Einstein, and he says "Albert Einstein personally answered all of his own telephone calls".
So I'm thinking it over, and I'm just awesomely impressed with the humility of the man, so important and famous, to answer all of his own calls, but then I think: Wait a second! Who called Einstein?
Also, as others have pointed out, Win2k has only been out for three years now, so how could a five year study be anything but conjecture? You could say that they projected the number out a couple of extra years, but then how is it a "five year study"?
It's certainly possible that a windows box would be cheaper to maintain as a print server. Pretty much you just plug it in and forget it. I'm just not convinced this "study" has proven it.
At the risk of responding to a troll, the current trend of SUV's in the US which pollute the environment twice as much as a normal car, also support terrorism, because most of our oil comes from Islamic jihadist nations.
Secondly, if we go to war with Iraq, we may find that the price of oil goes up.