It's not about scaring away the spammers -- its the simple fact that if you were to click a link that's supposed to be created by javascript it won't work. I'm sure the spammers take the time to check that their links will, at the very least, work in Outlook Express at the default security level. As I said - what would be the point of sending an email that could not result in a sale?
Just because *you* don't know anyone who doesn't have a spam filter and who doesn't buy from spammers does not mean they aren't out there. A very small fraction of people do buy from spammers. That's unfortunately why it's an economically viable method of marketing... there's no mystery here.
Spam to a million email addresses
Get one sale
Profit!
To change their behavior, it would have to become unprofitable.
The one horrible thing with today's mail protocols is that you can pretend you are someone else. It would have been so easy to add a handshake in there: So you claim you are, af62co@spamking.com, ok, pls verify that, before I even think of showing your mail to the recipient.
I may be missing something here, but I do not know what. Anyone who can tell me where I go wrong?
Handshake's breaks when you have to store and forward. Sure, the server you're connected with might be ok - but you're effectively forcing it to vouch for the integrity of the path it has taken to get there. Intermediate servers could be less trustworthy and would happily ignore the spammer's forgery. Solutions that use DNS, like SPF, are probably going to take off... just a matter of which one becomes more widely used.
My spam folder (for bayesean filtering) has 75k+ messages in it - and I expire after 60 days - so about 1250 per day. The email address that receives the spam hasn't been used in at least 6 years but I keep it around as a honeypot. I may try to unsubscribe from some lists and see if it makes any difference at all. I broke it down once though, seemed only to get about 25% porn, 25% mortgage scams, fake credit card offers, 20% drugs, 10% penis enhancers and the rest was a grab bag of crap. I love SPAM.
Why not just get a few dedicated servers from serverbeach.com? $150/mo gets you a decent server w/700 gig of bandwidth each month. They take care of any hardware failures so you won't have to worry about it... Not to sound like an advertisement, but it's worth a look.
Sure it does. You can CC: to whomever you wish to include, and use "Reply All" to respond to them. Or if you have an nntp server available, you can just add the newsgroup name to the recpient list to move the whole works to nntp.
Yes, of course you can CC anyone you want, but how does a whole tree of message discussion transparently get into your nntp server? Not just a thread, but a whole tree of messages.
I think you're missing something about what this concept consists of. It's like an ad-hoc, invite-only slashdot. Nobody knows that topics exist unless they are informed of them. When you're brought into the fold by someone sending you a message, you get to see the entire tree of history (or at least all of the history that the person who sent you the message can see) that led up to that message being sent to you. And you don't have to trace through endlessly indented quoting, or having to ask for the missing parts that were in replies to other branches of the tree. You get to see it as though it were a message board - formatted any way you please. Privacy & security is completely transparent to the users - just as it is with email (e.g. you can't really stop someone from forwarding a message, but you can limit what you send to them)
I just don't see how you can get that with NNTP, in as long as I've used usenet I don't see how it can work that way - even with private servers. Obviously this whole concept is just an interface design, there's probably no code written yet... so it's all vaporwear. But it's sound logic... and will need new software to support it. NNTP could perhaps be modified to support it, but it's not going to work out of the box.
You see, you CAN have PRIVATE news servers with PRIVATE newsgroups using exsisting usenet technology. You just have to not specify any news peers, and require login/passwords.
No, really it isn't. This concept is that of a discussion that can evolve from a simple email exchange between a small group, to one that grows and grows as more people are invited in. Unless you can automatically and transparently convert an email thread into a private newsgroup - and then only allow admittance to those who are specifically invited by sending them a message (maybe with some sort of key) - then Usenet doesn't accomodate this at all. Sure, having a "department only" usenet group, or server is a handy thing. But it's ad-hoc discussions between a very small subset of people that you're ignoring. Easilly adding people to a discussion who are not necessarily privvy everything else a group discusses is exactly what email gives you and usenet doesn't.
Game companies treat everyone that buys their games like thieves, but the real thieves just crack it, never patch the game and then laugh loudly at the poor bastards that had to spend extra money on a product to subsidise the thieves.
They treat everyone like thieves to protect against casual copiers. If it were trivially easy to copy games then everyone would do it. Instead just the warez kiddies do. Adults have money to buy games, so they're not the ones targetted by this. And I'd say many (not all) 12 year old kids out there don't know how or where to find cracks for games. If they all did, then you'd have one legit copy per school or neighborhood.. instead, because it's not trivially easy to do it, most kids get their parents to buy legit copies for them.
But, as everyone else has been saying, selling the box gets you profit, online play - unless it's fee based - is a drain off the bottom line. So it only makes sense to limit online play to those who have actually purchased the game. I've played through lots of games on single player only to buy the game afterwards because I wanted to play online. All that really needs to be done is to make it difficult to get updates, additional levels, etc without a valid serial number... or just require product activation. Anything other than having to have an original disk. What happens when manufacturers decide to go to electronic distribution? It's so much cheaper, probably would save $5 per unit sold.
But MySQL has had transactions and row-level locking for quite some time now
Sure, row-level locking is nice -- even MSSQL has that. PostgreSQL has MVCC - so that writers never block readers and likewise. Complete data consistency (i.e. repeated reads give the same results) from the start of a transaction to the end of it. Can MySQL do that? (I am actually asking....)
I have no more trolled you than you have trolled the original poster.
Hah.. I didn't troll the original poster - I merely stated the facts as I saw them and really didn't want any response from it at all. I'd hardly call that trolling.
The "constant" part of "1" has nothing to do with this conversion or the failing of the conversion.
Your argument was specious.
I don't think the argument was so specious. Compile it yourself and see the errors:
int x; bool y; if (x=1) {}// Cannot implicitly convert type 'int' to 'bool' if (x) {}// Cannot implicitly convert type 'int' to 'bool' if (1) {}// Constant value '1' cannot be converted to a 'bool' if (y=1) {}// Constant value '1' cannot be converted to a 'bool' if (y=true) {}// Assignment in conditional expression is always constant; did you mean to use == instead of = ?
The first 4 are errors, the last is of course a warning. And 1 is not a constant integer in C#, it's simply a numeric constant. The compiler may decide to put small numeric constants that don't have decimals into integers, but if you were to use a value outside the range of an integer it would pick a type based on whatever it could fit it into (i.e. uint, long, ulong, etc...). It's not uninteresting that 1 is a constant.
Anyway, I'm done. Either you're convinced that I was genuinely trying to help, or you're not.
Ok fine.. I made an assumption. 'x' isn't necessarily an integer, it could be any other type. But 1 is definitely a constant... and even if x were a bool, there's no implicit conversion of constant to bool... so you get a compiler error. If x were bool, and you wrote 'if(x=true)' - it would work - but you would still get a compiler warning asking if you meant to use == instead of = because you're assigning and comparing to a constant value.
So what am I missing? I don't think that I made a poor assumption when I thought that x is probably an integer. But my point was that using c#'s base types that statement would generate a compiler error. And it would still generate a warning even the assignment were valid and x were bool.
Does C# force operator= to return the same type as the right-hand operand?
No.. C# forces a return that's the same as the left-hand operand. So yes you can work around the compiler error and the warning by declaring x to be of a class that you defined to have implicit conversions from int (or any type that can be implicitely converted from a constant) to that type, and another for that type to bool. So yes... in that very special case it would work. But why the hell are we worried about a special case that would never appear in the real world when all I wanted to say is that the original poster was wrong.
Man I love getting trolled and wasting all this time responding... yay for me.
Yes, that's true - in C - but it's not a boolean expression in c# - x is an integer, 1 is a constant - neither can be implicitely converted to boolean.
I can guarantee you that the government when it's working on it's black budget work in general and historically has no regard for paying licenses for patents, and routinely mines the patent office for anything they may need.
But aren't they allowed to mine the patent office? After all they are part of the government - and patents are there only to protect inventors from each other - not to protect inventors from the govt. I've always understood that in exchange for that protection the government is allowed to do whatever they want with your patented inventions.
The upgrade to VS.Net 2003 is/was only $30 (yes, thirty) for anyone with a copy of Visual Studio.Net
And the upgrade for the.NET Framework from 1.0 to 1.1 was FREE for, well, anyone. There is/was nothing stopping anyone from using.NET 1.1 with the original VS.Net. Heck... I guess if you wanted to, you could use the Mono compiler with Visual Studio. The IDE is not the Framework - and while their releases coincide, you don't need to spend money to get the benefits.
if(x = 1)... still not even a compiler warning.. *sigh*
Nope... that'll give you an error because (x = 1) is not a boolean expression. But I guess I wouldn't be surprised if 'if(x = true)' compiled without a warning.
they are generally rigged. you aren't playing 'real' random game anymore.
Naa, they're not rigged. There are strict laws in Nevada anyway, and most gaming laws in the US are modelled after Nevada's simply because they have stood the test of time. That's not to say that the odds aren't stacked heavilly toward the casino -- but it is a purely random game. When you trigger the start of the game (button, handle, etc...) the machine loads a different odds table based strictly on the amount of money you put in, then it grabs a random number and finds the point in the table where that number falls and generates a result on screen to give you that payout.
And of course the casino can load new odds tables whenever they want to give the illusion of 'hot' machines. The 'edge' the submitter was talking about just comes from the fact that you can move from machine to machine in the hopes of finding those that are in fact paying out at a higher rate -- and he's worried about the casino operators pulling a switch behind the scenes when they're tracking you're behavior.
I wouldn't worry about it though.. I think they have better things to do.
But doesn't that add up to 110%? Are you one of the last 10%? Either that or there must be some overlap! So, do some of the Zealots spout insane bullshit? And are the ??? Profit jokes being proliferated by people who actually have something to say on the subject?
But it wasn't a sig he was replying to... it was a joke, funny, ha ha, laugh already, and his reply shows that he didn't get it... but it still wasn't a sig.
Over a year... over four is more like it. The 49G+ is cool though - way faster and a larger screen, but it's too bad that it's got a cheap painted plastic casing.
Maybe the story submitter should have read the article he submitted...
ActiveState's product lines for open source programmers will continue to be developed and sold under the ActiveState brand. As a division of Sophos, the existing ActiveState team is committed to continuing its support of the open source language community.
I'm jealous of my cat. He gets the same food all the time, and it's probably 10 times better for him than the crap I eat. He loves his food, won't eat anything else. I could put some turkey, or fish, or whatever in his dish, and he won't touch it. I wish there was such a thing as "people food". Man, would I be down for that. Open up a pouch, scarf it, and you're good for 8 hours. Mmmm.
Hell yeah - I'd be first in line to buy Science Diet for People. Indoor cats on good diets (and good enough dental hygene so that they still have teeth) are living into their 30's these days. Think about that for a minute -- 'in the wild' cats have an average lifespan of around 2 years.
I think if we had food that was 100% nutritious in and of itself there would be demand. As it stands all the so called health food still requires you to eat lots of other things. And then there's the whole problem with knowing the composition of what you're eating - carbs, protein, fat, total calories, vitamins, etc... If there was a uniform mixture you could determine your serving size without even thinking just based on your height and weight. So easy...
Of course... if you're going to go as far as eating a uniform mixture of food just to live longer.. you might as well just drink blood and be a vampire.
such a worm won't propagate very quickly because the number of packages it'll have to download.
Or not... see tiny cc. The compiler comes in at a whopping 80k and it stands all on its own. Combine that with diet-libc and you've basically got the ability to spread a worm across any x86 based unix.
Really what it all boils down to is this: It's best practice to avoid installing any software that is not essential to the operation of a production server, even if that means no c compilers, interpretors, mail/web/ftp/database servers, extraneous libraries, etc... will be available.
I'm not disagreeing with the fact that security is implemented in layers. Leaving a compiler off a system is a simple way to prevent some amount of problems. But that really depends on your application - taking it to the extreme your application may be a compile farm like sourceforge. You can't really take the compilers off those machines, now can you? And compilers do have uses on production systems - and a competant system administrator knows when it's appropriate and when it isn't to install ANY type of software. My point was really to leave the compiler off, but don't assume that doing it saved you from anything at all.
The overwhelming fact is that most of the people that install RedHat on a server choose the default for the category of server they're installing. They end up with so much software that they typically don't need and open up security holes that they may not be aware of simply because they don't realize they have the affected packages installed. So to say that RedHat is a better choice because you can pay for support is naive. What's your limitation on liability with that support? Ah yes, the purchase price of the product. And how do you get security updates with RedHat? By either a) paying for the redhat network either with $$ or by periodically filling out a survey for each box you operate or b) updating everything manually when you are informed of a fix. And you get the joy that your servers get to run whichever version of RedHat they were originally installed with. And to upgrade to the latest version of the distribution you have to take the boxes offline for the entire process and hope the upgrade works -- unlike Gentoo and Debian where you can fully upgrade a live system and come out clean on the other side.
Gentoo, Debian, RedHat, SuSE, etal... all end up with the same quality of software because it's all open source. Bug fixes in one distribution trickle to all the rest. And from what I've seen fixes are much quicker to market in Gentoo than the rest, but as always YMMV. I don't implicitly trust everything that RedHat puts out just because they pay a staff to produce it - and you shouldn't either.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because *you* don't know anyone who doesn't have a spam filter and who doesn't buy from spammers does not mean they aren't out there. A very small fraction of people do buy from spammers. That's unfortunately why it's an economically viable method of marketing... there's no mystery here.
To change their behavior, it would have to become unprofitable.
I'm not aware of any (modern) mail clients that execute javascript, so what would be the point of sending an email with js links?
The unattainable is unknown at Zombo.com
The one horrible thing with today's mail protocols is that you can pretend you are someone else. It would have been so easy to add a handshake in there: So you claim you are, af62co@spamking.com, ok, pls verify that, before I even think of showing your mail to the recipient.
I may be missing something here, but I do not know what. Anyone who can tell me where I go wrong?
Handshake's breaks when you have to store and forward. Sure, the server you're connected with might be ok - but you're effectively forcing it to vouch for the integrity of the path it has taken to get there. Intermediate servers could be less trustworthy and would happily ignore the spammer's forgery. Solutions that use DNS, like SPF, are probably going to take off... just a matter of which one becomes more widely used.My spam folder (for bayesean filtering) has 75k+ messages in it - and I expire after 60 days - so about 1250 per day. The email address that receives the spam hasn't been used in at least 6 years but I keep it around as a honeypot. I may try to unsubscribe from some lists and see if it makes any difference at all. I broke it down once though, seemed only to get about 25% porn, 25% mortgage scams, fake credit card offers, 20% drugs, 10% penis enhancers and the rest was a grab bag of crap. I love SPAM.
Why not just get a few dedicated servers from serverbeach.com? $150/mo gets you a decent server w/700 gig of bandwidth each month. They take care of any hardware failures so you won't have to worry about it... Not to sound like an advertisement, but it's worth a look.
Yes, of course you can CC anyone you want, but how does a whole tree of message discussion transparently get into your nntp server? Not just a thread, but a whole tree of messages.
I think you're missing something about what this concept consists of. It's like an ad-hoc, invite-only slashdot. Nobody knows that topics exist unless they are informed of them. When you're brought into the fold by someone sending you a message, you get to see the entire tree of history (or at least all of the history that the person who sent you the message can see) that led up to that message being sent to you. And you don't have to trace through endlessly indented quoting, or having to ask for the missing parts that were in replies to other branches of the tree. You get to see it as though it were a message board - formatted any way you please. Privacy & security is completely transparent to the users - just as it is with email (e.g. you can't really stop someone from forwarding a message, but you can limit what you send to them)
I just don't see how you can get that with NNTP, in as long as I've used usenet I don't see how it can work that way - even with private servers. Obviously this whole concept is just an interface design, there's probably no code written yet... so it's all vaporwear. But it's sound logic... and will need new software to support it. NNTP could perhaps be modified to support it, but it's not going to work out of the box.
Actually it is STILL just usenet.
You see, you CAN have PRIVATE news servers with PRIVATE newsgroups using exsisting usenet technology. You just have to not specify any news peers, and require login/passwords.
No, really it isn't. This concept is that of a discussion that can evolve from a simple email exchange between a small group, to one that grows and grows as more people are invited in. Unless you can automatically and transparently convert an email thread into a private newsgroup - and then only allow admittance to those who are specifically invited by sending them a message (maybe with some sort of key) - then Usenet doesn't accomodate this at all. Sure, having a "department only" usenet group, or server is a handy thing. But it's ad-hoc discussions between a very small subset of people that you're ignoring. Easilly adding people to a discussion who are not necessarily privvy everything else a group discusses is exactly what email gives you and usenet doesn't.
Game companies treat everyone that buys their games like thieves, but the real thieves just crack it, never patch the game and then laugh loudly at the poor bastards that had to spend extra money on a product to subsidise the thieves.
They treat everyone like thieves to protect against casual copiers. If it were trivially easy to copy games then everyone would do it. Instead just the warez kiddies do. Adults have money to buy games, so they're not the ones targetted by this. And I'd say many (not all) 12 year old kids out there don't know how or where to find cracks for games. If they all did, then you'd have one legit copy per school or neighborhood.. instead, because it's not trivially easy to do it, most kids get their parents to buy legit copies for them.
But, as everyone else has been saying, selling the box gets you profit, online play - unless it's fee based - is a drain off the bottom line. So it only makes sense to limit online play to those who have actually purchased the game. I've played through lots of games on single player only to buy the game afterwards because I wanted to play online. All that really needs to be done is to make it difficult to get updates, additional levels, etc without a valid serial number... or just require product activation. Anything other than having to have an original disk. What happens when manufacturers decide to go to electronic distribution? It's so much cheaper, probably would save $5 per unit sold.
Sure, row-level locking is nice -- even MSSQL has that. PostgreSQL has MVCC - so that writers never block readers and likewise. Complete data consistency (i.e. repeated reads give the same results) from the start of a transaction to the end of it. Can MySQL do that? (I am actually asking....)
ROFL! Thanks!
Hah.. I didn't troll the original poster - I merely stated the facts as I saw them and really didn't want any response from it at all. I'd hardly call that trolling.
The "constant" part of "1" has nothing to do with this conversion or the failing of the conversion.
Your argument was specious.
I don't think the argument was so specious. Compile it yourself and see the errors:
The first 4 are errors, the last is of course a warning. And 1 is not a constant integer in C#, it's simply a numeric constant. The compiler may decide to put small numeric constants that don't have decimals into integers, but if you were to use a value outside the range of an integer it would pick a type based on whatever it could fit it into (i.e. uint, long, ulong, etc...). It's not uninteresting that 1 is a constant.
Anyway, I'm done. Either you're convinced that I was genuinely trying to help, or you're not.
Ok fine.. I made an assumption. 'x' isn't necessarily an integer, it could be any other type. But 1 is definitely a constant... and even if x were a bool, there's no implicit conversion of constant to bool... so you get a compiler error. If x were bool, and you wrote 'if(x=true)' - it would work - but you would still get a compiler warning asking if you meant to use == instead of = because you're assigning and comparing to a constant value.
So what am I missing? I don't think that I made a poor assumption when I thought that x is probably an integer. But my point was that using c#'s base types that statement would generate a compiler error. And it would still generate a warning even the assignment were valid and x were bool.
Does C# force operator= to return the same type as the right-hand operand?
No.. C# forces a return that's the same as the left-hand operand. So yes you can work around the compiler error and the warning by declaring x to be of a class that you defined to have implicit conversions from int (or any type that can be implicitely converted from a constant) to that type, and another for that type to bool. So yes... in that very special case it would work. But why the hell are we worried about a special case that would never appear in the real world when all I wanted to say is that the original poster was wrong.
Man I love getting trolled and wasting all this time responding... yay for me.
Yes, that's true - in C - but it's not a boolean expression in c# - x is an integer, 1 is a constant - neither can be implicitely converted to boolean.
But aren't they allowed to mine the patent office? After all they are part of the government - and patents are there only to protect inventors from each other - not to protect inventors from the govt. I've always understood that in exchange for that protection the government is allowed to do whatever they want with your patented inventions.
And the upgrade for the .NET Framework from 1.0 to 1.1 was FREE for, well, anyone. There is/was nothing stopping anyone from using .NET 1.1 with the original VS.Net. Heck... I guess if you wanted to, you could use the Mono compiler with Visual Studio. The IDE is not the Framework - and while their releases coincide, you don't need to spend money to get the benefits.
Nope... that'll give you an error because (x = 1) is not a boolean expression. But I guess I wouldn't be surprised if 'if(x = true)' compiled without a warning.
Naa, they're not rigged. There are strict laws in Nevada anyway, and most gaming laws in the US are modelled after Nevada's simply because they have stood the test of time. That's not to say that the odds aren't stacked heavilly toward the casino -- but it is a purely random game. When you trigger the start of the game (button, handle, etc...) the machine loads a different odds table based strictly on the amount of money you put in, then it grabs a random number and finds the point in the table where that number falls and generates a result on screen to give you that payout.
And of course the casino can load new odds tables whenever they want to give the illusion of 'hot' machines. The 'edge' the submitter was talking about just comes from the fact that you can move from machine to machine in the hopes of finding those that are in fact paying out at a higher rate -- and he's worried about the casino operators pulling a switch behind the scenes when they're tracking you're behavior.
I wouldn't worry about it though.. I think they have better things to do.
But doesn't that add up to 110%? Are you one of the last 10%? Either that or there must be some overlap! So, do some of the Zealots spout insane bullshit? And are the ??? Profit jokes being proliferated by people who actually have something to say on the subject?
But it wasn't a sig he was replying to... it was a joke, funny, ha ha, laugh already, and his reply shows that he didn't get it... but it still wasn't a sig.
Over a year... over four is more like it. The 49G+ is cool though - way faster and a larger screen, but it's too bad that it's got a cheap painted plastic casing.
ActiveState's product lines for open source programmers will continue to be developed and sold under the ActiveState brand. As a division of Sophos, the existing ActiveState team is committed to continuing its support of the open source language community.
Hell yeah - I'd be first in line to buy Science Diet for People. Indoor cats on good diets (and good enough dental hygene so that they still have teeth) are living into their 30's these days. Think about that for a minute -- 'in the wild' cats have an average lifespan of around 2 years.
I think if we had food that was 100% nutritious in and of itself there would be demand. As it stands all the so called health food still requires you to eat lots of other things. And then there's the whole problem with knowing the composition of what you're eating - carbs, protein, fat, total calories, vitamins, etc... If there was a uniform mixture you could determine your serving size without even thinking just based on your height and weight. So easy...
Of course... if you're going to go as far as eating a uniform mixture of food just to live longer.. you might as well just drink blood and be a vampire.
Or not... see tiny cc. The compiler comes in at a whopping 80k and it stands all on its own. Combine that with diet-libc and you've basically got the ability to spread a worm across any x86 based unix.
Really what it all boils down to is this: It's best practice to avoid installing any software that is not essential to the operation of a production server, even if that means no c compilers, interpretors, mail/web/ftp/database servers, extraneous libraries, etc... will be available.
I'm not disagreeing with the fact that security is implemented in layers. Leaving a compiler off a system is a simple way to prevent some amount of problems. But that really depends on your application - taking it to the extreme your application may be a compile farm like sourceforge. You can't really take the compilers off those machines, now can you? And compilers do have uses on production systems - and a competant system administrator knows when it's appropriate and when it isn't to install ANY type of software. My point was really to leave the compiler off, but don't assume that doing it saved you from anything at all.
The overwhelming fact is that most of the people that install RedHat on a server choose the default for the category of server they're installing. They end up with so much software that they typically don't need and open up security holes that they may not be aware of simply because they don't realize they have the affected packages installed. So to say that RedHat is a better choice because you can pay for support is naive. What's your limitation on liability with that support? Ah yes, the purchase price of the product. And how do you get security updates with RedHat? By either a) paying for the redhat network either with $$ or by periodically filling out a survey for each box you operate or b) updating everything manually when you are informed of a fix. And you get the joy that your servers get to run whichever version of RedHat they were originally installed with. And to upgrade to the latest version of the distribution you have to take the boxes offline for the entire process and hope the upgrade works -- unlike Gentoo and Debian where you can fully upgrade a live system and come out clean on the other side.
Gentoo, Debian, RedHat, SuSE, etal... all end up with the same quality of software because it's all open source. Bug fixes in one distribution trickle to all the rest. And from what I've seen fixes are much quicker to market in Gentoo than the rest, but as always YMMV. I don't implicitly trust everything that RedHat puts out just because they pay a staff to produce it - and you shouldn't either.