Yeah, and there goes my plan for a "Restaurant at the End of the Universe." I'll just have to keep getting by on what I make from my "Big Bang Burger Bar".
(Sorry Douglas. You're probably spinning in your grave right now over this. Kind of like the computer simulation of the couch in Dirk Gently's appartment.)
In some ways, making forged e-mail headers illegal is both a technical and legal approach to at least part of the problem. I currently use SpamCop and the Open Relay databse to filter my incoming mail. This combination does a reasonable job of fordcing all incoming e-mail to my server to have an unforged header. That is, the mail must actually be from who it says its from and can't have been sent through an open relay. SpamCop does a fairly good job of weeding out the spam that still meets these requirements. Making forged headers illegal would allow every U.S. ISP to do the same without someone saying that not being able to send spam with forged headers violates their right to spam. This setup traps and rejects a spam or two (on average) every day for me.
The only problem is, this is done at my expense (sendmail is so much fun and so intuitive to administer) and at the expense of the people who maintain the SpamCop and ORDB databases. Also, I still get the random loser who gets a list of e-mail addresses and fires off a Nigerian money scam e-mail to me from time to time. Nothing will stop idiots from believing that they can get rich quick from something like this including requiring unforged e-mail addresses. My solution to these is to just forward the e-mail to SpamCop and note in my "personal attachment" that the person sending the e-mail should be prosecuted for fraud and that the originating ISP should also be prosecuted if they don't do enough to stop the problem.
I dabble at kernel development. This generally means trying to get the the things I need to work in say the development kernel to work for me. Sometimes this comes down to me firing off an e-mail to the maintainer or others mentioned as contributors to see if a patch is available, report an oops, results from applying a patch, etc. This slows to a crawl if everybody involved has to go through some protocol for making sure that I didn't somehow harvest these e-mail addresses from the source files so I could spam the recipients. Likewise, I either have to pre-add all of the people who might reply to me or put them through the same hassle to send a response to me.
I don't think so.
I live in Colorado. We got on the "do not call" list as soon as we could. We haven't had a commercial telemarketing call since (we still get them from charities and politicians so I guess the phone still works). The local newspapers run a regular article listing the companies that have gotten a friendly reminder from the attorney general reminding them not to call people on the do not call list and a much smaller subset that the AG is going after because they didn't take the hint.
Works! Now, if I could just get the people who want me to give them money as opposed to those who were trying to sell me something to stop calling me, all would be peaceful.
If you like your philosophy lessons short and to the point, I suggest "The Virtue of Selfishness".
If you'd rather have a plot, I'd suggest either "The Fountainhead" or "Atlas Shrugged".
The problem with "Altruism" is determining in whose interest you should act in. Lots of people will perform feats of logical prestidigitation to demonstrate how acting in their interest or in their favorite victim's interst is the most beneficial form of altruism. I contribute to free software because it is IN MY OWN SELFISH BEST INTEREST. I have no delusions about my motivations. I get a better product at a lower price and I learn something in exchange for doing something that I enjoy.
Setting up the required subject lines will simply mean that I will be able to identify incoming commercial e-mail more easily. If I don't wish to look at it, I know which e-mails to delete without opening. I already do that with the subject line since sometimes I like to see what a couple people have for sale and other times they go straight to the bit bucket.
The main thing making SPAM illegal will do is it will make it easier for ISPs to be proactive in preventing SPAM from entering their systems. It will also allow them to make quicky SPAMer accounts harder to get. Right now, they can't really do either at least in the states without supposedly infringing on the SPAMer's right to free speech. Make SPAM illegal and that argument goes away. It also means that ISPs can take other actions such as filtering incoming e-mail again without worrying about complaints about limiting free speech. The ISPs have an incentive to do this to save on bandwidth and storage plus they can probably charge extra for providing the SPAM filter. Think about how many Nigerian money scams you've gotten and you'll get an idea of how much bandwidth and storage we're talking about for stuff that is easily identifiable as pure SPAM.
This still won't eliminate overseas SPAM but it will make it much less profitable and that is all it takes to cut down on how much of it is generated.
This is old data but probably still pertinent. When I was at Ohio State (BSc '78, MSc '80) the student paper published the average grade given in the various schools. This ranged from a low of just barely over 2.0 in Math and Chemistry to a high of something like 3.64 in Education. You can chalk some of this up to everyone having a math prerequisite which tends to drag down the math average but give me a break on the AVERAGE grade given in the college of education being an "A".
The joke among those of us majoring in Math was, "But you could be an honors student in education now," whenever someone got nailed by one of the "ball buster" senior level math exams. A degree from a college or university should mean the same regardless of discipline as far as the standards the student is held to. Based on the people I ran across majoring in education, this most assuredly wasn't the case.
Re:Rampant Age Discrimination--at Age 35
on
Lifetime Careers in IT?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Maybe I'm just a young looking 46 but I'm still at it in a technical role in a software company. And before you say, "Doing what? Writing Cobol?" we make a Linux based network monitoring appliance. Just to remind everyone of the depth of experience I bring to my job, I've got a punch card hanging on the wall at the back of my cubicle and an IBM System 370 reference summary beside it!
People like to blame <your-personal-subpopulation-here> discrimination for there own short-comings and lack of willingness to keep current. The way not to be a victim of age discrimination is to embrace change and stay current. Employers will pay for experience as long as you can apply it to current technology and the problems to be solved NOW.
The ONLY football game that mattered
on
Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 1
Was played on January 3rd! Who needs to watch a bunch of overpaid whiners play what's supposed to be a game?
The Ohio State Buckeyes are the national champions and any other game doesn't matter. And just because I went there (B.Sc. '78 and M.Sc. '80 both in Math) and I'm just a little bit prejudiced when it comes to this subject doesn't matter!
What's really strange about this argument ("protecting the image of Mickey Mouse") is that parody is recognized as a form of free speech. That is, a porno version of "Steamboat Willie" is probably legal as long as it is done as a parody of the original. This just came up recently (past year or so) with George Lucas losing a ruling against a parody of Star Wars if I remember correctly.
Gee, my Sunday paper (Rocky Mountain News) had the results of several polls one of which had 83% of the population supporting war with Iraq as long as it is in a coalition with other countries and approved by the U.N. The poll also asked a variety of questions as to how many people would support going to war with Iraq without other countries support or without a U.N. mandate and support dropped.
Get real. This is a representative democracy; not a pure democracy. We elect representatives who then (supposedly) act in our interest. Doesn't always work that way but in this case, it seems to be. I see very liitle support on capitol hill for a unilateral war with Iraq and a media that is usually hostile to Repulicans reporting the same.
Rightly or wrongly "the system" is working the way it supposed to. That the result is not what you think should be done is not a reason to blame the system. For myself, I tend to go along with Winston Churchill who once said, "Democracy is the worst of all possible forms of governement, save all the others." (I think this was on the occaision of him being turned out of office)
In order for someone to be a prisoner of war there has to be a war. In order for a state of war to exist there must be at least TWO internationally recognized nations which are at war. The closest we got to this was with Taliban governement of Afganistan where all of three or four countries (the U.S. was not one of them) recognized the Taliban as the legitimate governement of the country. (Note: This is why diplomatic recognition of a government is significant.)
Given that there was no internationally recognized government in Afganistan, any force or person opposing coalition forces could (and should) be considered "unlawful combatants". As to any U.S. citizen amoung those opposing coalition forces, they should be glad they were not executed for treason. Unfortunately, we will probably feed them and house them at Guantanamo Bay until we turn them loose to do other mischief (including getting a lawyer and filing suit).
So this isn't scandalous. Those nations that abide by the Geneva convention have nothing to fear and everything to gain by continuing to abide by it with regard to prisoners of war. Those people who privately make war against another country now know that they can not hide behind the rights that that same country gives to its citizens and they can not expect even to be treated as prisoners of war. They are unlawful combatants.
War is a condition between nations; not between an individual and a nation. When an *individual* attacks a nation (and, hopefully, especially anyone who attacks the U.S.), the individual can expect the full power of that nation to be brought against them. This is the most basic reason for the existence of the nation state: to protect its citizens from attack regardless of whether the attack comes from another nation or an individual or group. Attacks by other nations are acts of war; attacks by individuals are criminal acts and it is at the discretion of the attacked country which IF ANY of the rights it grants its citizens in a criminal case to grant to the individual attackers.
Let's say that the FSF has an annurism, and releases a VB workalike, with common controls and librarys and whatnot, and releases the whole sheebang with the GPL.
Anyone using these common controls or libraries has to now use the GPL.
This is the whole problem with the "calling a GPL library means you have to GPL the calling program's code" definition of derivative work. Any program that now calls these GPLed libraries must also be GPLed even if they were originally written to call the proprietary Microsoft originated VB libraries. I would most definitely call this "viral" licensing.
I don't think M$ (or a lot of other people with lots of $) will let this definition of derivative work stand for this reason. FSF and other fellow travelers would do better to invest their legal $ in something less obviously false.
Which definition trumps which here? The GPL has it's own definition of a "derivative work". Current copyright law (at least in the US) also defines the term "derivative work", if only vaguely.
That's easy to answer: the one upheld by case law. Like it or not, this is the only definition that matters when attempting to extend copyright law through a license. Absconding with a legally recognized principle (derivative work) and attempting to apply it where a license chooses doesn't usually work. RMS may not like this but neither does Microsoft since it is all that stop M$ from taking your first born in exchange for their buggy software.
Note: Most legal terms are deliberately vague so that case law can evolve (this also keep lawyers employed). Thus, the U.S. constitution can still be applicable to running the country 220 years after it was ratified with only a few amendments. The framers didn't try to incorporate into the constitution the foibles of the day. Instead they did a fairly good job of putting the principles they believed in into a algorithm for government. I would strongly oppose including nuances such as what method of linking is used into copyright law based on the same principle.
Licenses assert restrictions on the use of a copyrighted work. The question comes down to whether any shrink-wrap, click-wrap, or "embedded" (e.g., the GPL-ish) license that asserts "unusual" use restrictions is enforceable.
IANAL (but I find this subject interesting) so take what I say with a grain of salt. While the RMSs of the world may wish to sweep away proprietary software with "viral" licensing, the courts will be loath to support such activism. Proprietary software and the legality of creating even competing products using someone else's libraries is a well established precedent. Given this, most judges would probably agree with Larry Rosen's interpretation of what constitutes a derivative work and only extend GPL disclosure requirements to those who actually modify GPLed code and not to people who create works that use GPLed code unmodified.
On the other side of this issue, a judge is also unlikely to uphold some of the unusual requirements folks like Microsoft have been ptting into their EULAs. Interpretation of law is based on precendent which is another way of saying that laws are *usually*interpreted to mean what people think they mean.
The story: I left a job at a dot bomb that was imploding to go to work for a company that made a physical product that I could see a market for. The day I started I got fired... along with everyone else. Our next round of funding hadn't happenned. Everyone got the same offer: come back to work writing perl for minimum wage ($4.75/hour so I guess Java still pays better then perl) and the hope that things would get better. About four months later we managed to land a round of VC funding.
I stuck it out because this all started in December (bad time to look for work) and my wife was making decent money plus the folks I would be working with seemed really decent (turned out to be true). Everyone who stuck it out got a "loyalty bonus" that just happenned to make up the difference between the $4.75/hr and what we originally signed on for. We just completed our third round of venture funding with an "up" round and clean terms. No guarantees, but things look good.
Moral of the story: Some chance at real money still beats stock options. Look at the product and whether there is a market for it. If there isn't a market, there won't be funding and the stock options won't be worth squat. Due to wages and hours laws, no one can promise you in writing that they will make it up but, if you can't trust the management's word, maybe working there isn't a good idea anyway.
BTW, I've got over 20 years professional programming experience and a M.Sc. in math.
Spam is not currently illegal except in a couple of states (e.g., Washington and maybe a couple of others). One of the things the spammers do is raise their supposed constitutional rights to spam people whenever an ISP attempts to limit incoming spam. The Washington law was only recently upheld against a spammer in Oregon (story was carried on slashdot, dig it out if your interested).
By making spam illegal this barrier is removed and ISPs can use a number of effective spam filters and blacklists without having to engage in expensive court fights over whether they are limiting the spammer's "free speech". Besides being a service to their customers, ISPs would rather not have to invest in the additional capacity to store and carry this trash which gives them a economic incentive to filter it if they're allowed. Likewise, ISPs could then require well-formed mail headers for any traffic generated by their subscribers. These two actions together would probably cut out more than 95% of all spam.
Unfortunately, it probably won't stop the loosers who continue to send things like the Nigerian money scam.
Re:Some interesting quotes about the flick...
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 2
CNN had some real zingers too:
...Sauron's henchman Saruman (Christopher Lee -- looking remarkably like Cher in her last video).
and
Between the lightsaber-wielding Yoda in the latest "Star Wars," the quivering Dobby in the latest "Harry Potter," and now the pop-eyed Gollum, the powers-that-be may have to announce a new category for the Academy Awards: maybe something like Best Non-Human/Computer Generated Performance of the Year. And no, neither Madonna nor Keanu Reeves could be considered... although it would be tempting.
Interesting that they didn't include Micael Jackson in the list of candidates for "Best Non-Human/Computer Generated Performance of the Year" but I guess he's an artificial life form.
Needed to test something with regard to how it handled a web posting. Figured I either use a lame "first post" or some luser's "In Soviet Russia" post. Thanks for keeping my search for something appropriate short.
The correct quote is: "If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck then its probably a duck." I used to use "If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck,... then it would probably taste good with an orange sauce." as my sig.
Look on the bright side: at least it wasn't some lame "first post" shit. Instead, it was lame "In Soviet Russia" shit. I'm not sure if this is an improvement but at least its different.
BTW, USSR = Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which was the official name for the country when it had a communist government. So "Soviet USSR" is definitely redundant and "communist USSR" is only slightly less so. "Soviet Russia" and "Communist Russia" are somewhat cold war relics since Russia was the name for the czarist country that was replaced by the USSR and the west continuing to call the country "Russia" rankled the rulers of the USSR. Its kind of like when the Brits refer to the U.S.A. as "the colonies".
Slashdot Mirror
Its worth noting because its fun to be somewhat of a troll when you post an article. It definitely stirred the conversation
Oops. Did I say that?
Yeah, and there goes my plan for a "Restaurant at the End of the Universe." I'll just have to keep getting by on what I make from my "Big Bang Burger Bar".
(Sorry Douglas. You're probably spinning in your grave right now over this. Kind of like the computer simulation of the couch in Dirk Gently's appartment.)
In some ways, making forged e-mail headers illegal is both a technical and legal approach to at least part of the problem. I currently use SpamCop and the Open Relay databse to filter my incoming mail. This combination does a reasonable job of fordcing all incoming e-mail to my server to have an unforged header. That is, the mail must actually be from who it says its from and can't have been sent through an open relay. SpamCop does a fairly good job of weeding out the spam that still meets these requirements. Making forged headers illegal would allow every U.S. ISP to do the same without someone saying that not being able to send spam with forged headers violates their right to spam. This setup traps and rejects a spam or two (on average) every day for me.
The only problem is, this is done at my expense (sendmail is so much fun and so intuitive to administer) and at the expense of the people who maintain the SpamCop and ORDB databases. Also, I still get the random loser who gets a list of e-mail addresses and fires off a Nigerian money scam e-mail to me from time to time. Nothing will stop idiots from believing that they can get rich quick from something like this including requiring unforged e-mail addresses. My solution to these is to just forward the e-mail to SpamCop and note in my "personal attachment" that the person sending the e-mail should be prosecuted for fraud and that the originating ISP should also be prosecuted if they don't do enough to stop the problem.
I dabble at kernel development. This generally means trying to get the the things I need to work in say the development kernel to work for me. Sometimes this comes down to me firing off an e-mail to the maintainer or others mentioned as contributors to see if a patch is available, report an oops, results from applying a patch, etc. This slows to a crawl if everybody involved has to go through some protocol for making sure that I didn't somehow harvest these e-mail addresses from the source files so I could spam the recipients. Likewise, I either have to pre-add all of the people who might reply to me or put them through the same hassle to send a response to me.
I don't think so.
I live in Colorado. We got on the "do not call" list as soon as we could. We haven't had a commercial telemarketing call since (we still get them from charities and politicians so I guess the phone still works). The local newspapers run a regular article listing the companies that have gotten a friendly reminder from the attorney general reminding them not to call people on the do not call list and a much smaller subset that the AG is going after because they didn't take the hint.
Works! Now, if I could just get the people who want me to give them money as opposed to those who were trying to sell me something to stop calling me, all would be peaceful.
I'm a Randite so I can't resist....
If you like your philosophy lessons short and to the point, I suggest "The Virtue of Selfishness".
If you'd rather have a plot, I'd suggest either "The Fountainhead" or "Atlas Shrugged".
The problem with "Altruism" is determining in whose interest you should act in. Lots of people will perform feats of logical prestidigitation to demonstrate how acting in their interest or in their favorite victim's interst is the most beneficial form of altruism. I contribute to free software because it is IN MY OWN SELFISH BEST INTEREST. I have no delusions about my motivations. I get a better product at a lower price and I learn something in exchange for doing something that I enjoy.
(So there)
Setting up the required subject lines will simply mean that I will be able to identify incoming commercial e-mail more easily. If I don't wish to look at it, I know which e-mails to delete without opening. I already do that with the subject line since sometimes I like to see what a couple people have for sale and other times they go straight to the bit bucket.
The main thing making SPAM illegal will do is it will make it easier for ISPs to be proactive in preventing SPAM from entering their systems. It will also allow them to make quicky SPAMer accounts harder to get. Right now, they can't really do either at least in the states without supposedly infringing on the SPAMer's right to free speech. Make SPAM illegal and that argument goes away. It also means that ISPs can take other actions such as filtering incoming e-mail again without worrying about complaints about limiting free speech. The ISPs have an incentive to do this to save on bandwidth and storage plus they can probably charge extra for providing the SPAM filter. Think about how many Nigerian money scams you've gotten and you'll get an idea of how much bandwidth and storage we're talking about for stuff that is easily identifiable as pure SPAM.
This still won't eliminate overseas SPAM but it will make it much less profitable and that is all it takes to cut down on how much of it is generated.
Also keep in mind that Civil Engineers build targets; Aerospace Engineers build ways to remove targets.
I doubt if the CE profs mentioned this little fact either.
This is old data but probably still pertinent. When I was at Ohio State (BSc '78, MSc '80) the student paper published the average grade given in the various schools. This ranged from a low of just barely over 2.0 in Math and Chemistry to a high of something like 3.64 in Education. You can chalk some of this up to everyone having a math prerequisite which tends to drag down the math average but give me a break on the AVERAGE grade given in the college of education being an "A".
The joke among those of us majoring in Math was, "But you could be an honors student in education now," whenever someone got nailed by one of the "ball buster" senior level math exams. A degree from a college or university should mean the same regardless of discipline as far as the standards the student is held to. Based on the people I ran across majoring in education, this most assuredly wasn't the case.
People like to blame <your-personal-subpopulation-here> discrimination for there own short-comings and lack of willingness to keep current. The way not to be a victim of age discrimination is to embrace change and stay current. Employers will pay for experience as long as you can apply it to current technology and the problems to be solved NOW.
Was played on January 3rd! Who needs to watch a bunch of overpaid whiners play what's supposed to be a game?
The Ohio State Buckeyes are the national champions and any other game doesn't matter. And just because I went there (B.Sc. '78 and M.Sc. '80 both in Math) and I'm just a little bit prejudiced when it comes to this subject doesn't matter!
What's really strange about this argument ("protecting the image of Mickey Mouse") is that parody is recognized as a form of free speech. That is, a porno version of "Steamboat Willie" is probably legal as long as it is done as a parody of the original. This just came up recently (past year or so) with George Lucas losing a ruling against a parody of Star Wars if I remember correctly.
Gee, my Sunday paper (Rocky Mountain News) had the results of several polls one of which had 83% of the population supporting war with Iraq as long as it is in a coalition with other countries and approved by the U.N. The poll also asked a variety of questions as to how many people would support going to war with Iraq without other countries support or without a U.N. mandate and support dropped.
Get real. This is a representative democracy; not a pure democracy. We elect representatives who then (supposedly) act in our interest. Doesn't always work that way but in this case, it seems to be. I see very liitle support on capitol hill for a unilateral war with Iraq and a media that is usually hostile to Repulicans reporting the same.
Rightly or wrongly "the system" is working the way it supposed to. That the result is not what you think should be done is not a reason to blame the system. For myself, I tend to go along with Winston Churchill who once said, "Democracy is the worst of all possible forms of governement, save all the others." (I think this was on the occaision of him being turned out of office)
In order for someone to be a prisoner of war there has to be a war. In order for a state of war to exist there must be at least TWO internationally recognized nations which are at war. The closest we got to this was with Taliban governement of Afganistan where all of three or four countries (the U.S. was not one of them) recognized the Taliban as the legitimate governement of the country. (Note: This is why diplomatic recognition of a government is significant.)
Given that there was no internationally recognized government in Afganistan, any force or person opposing coalition forces could (and should) be considered "unlawful combatants". As to any U.S. citizen amoung those opposing coalition forces, they should be glad they were not executed for treason. Unfortunately, we will probably feed them and house them at Guantanamo Bay until we turn them loose to do other mischief (including getting a lawyer and filing suit).
So this isn't scandalous. Those nations that abide by the Geneva convention have nothing to fear and everything to gain by continuing to abide by it with regard to prisoners of war. Those people who privately make war against another country now know that they can not hide behind the rights that that same country gives to its citizens and they can not expect even to be treated as prisoners of war. They are unlawful combatants.
War is a condition between nations; not between an individual and a nation. When an *individual* attacks a nation (and, hopefully, especially anyone who attacks the U.S.), the individual can expect the full power of that nation to be brought against them. This is the most basic reason for the existence of the nation state: to protect its citizens from attack regardless of whether the attack comes from another nation or an individual or group. Attacks by other nations are acts of war; attacks by individuals are criminal acts and it is at the discretion of the attacked country which IF ANY of the rights it grants its citizens in a criminal case to grant to the individual attackers.
This is the whole problem with the "calling a GPL library means you have to GPL the calling program's code" definition of derivative work. Any program that now calls these GPLed libraries must also be GPLed even if they were originally written to call the proprietary Microsoft originated VB libraries. I would most definitely call this "viral" licensing.
I don't think M$ (or a lot of other people with lots of $) will let this definition of derivative work stand for this reason. FSF and other fellow travelers would do better to invest their legal $ in something less obviously false.
Testing new sig... aren't you lucky to be the first to see it?
Note: Most legal terms are deliberately vague so that case law can evolve (this also keep lawyers employed). Thus, the U.S. constitution can still be applicable to running the country 220 years after it was ratified with only a few amendments. The framers didn't try to incorporate into the constitution the foibles of the day. Instead they did a fairly good job of putting the principles they believed in into a algorithm for government. I would strongly oppose including nuances such as what method of linking is used into copyright law based on the same principle.
Licenses assert restrictions on the use of a copyrighted work. The question comes down to whether any shrink-wrap, click-wrap, or "embedded" (e.g., the GPL-ish) license that asserts "unusual" use restrictions is enforceable.
IANAL (but I find this subject interesting) so take what I say with a grain of salt. While the RMSs of the world may wish to sweep away proprietary software with "viral" licensing, the courts will be loath to support such activism. Proprietary software and the legality of creating even competing products using someone else's libraries is a well established precedent. Given this, most judges would probably agree with Larry Rosen's interpretation of what constitutes a derivative work and only extend GPL disclosure requirements to those who actually modify GPLed code and not to people who create works that use GPLed code unmodified.
On the other side of this issue, a judge is also unlikely to uphold some of the unusual requirements folks like Microsoft have been ptting into their EULAs. Interpretation of law is based on precendent which is another way of saying that laws are *usually*interpreted to mean what people think they mean.
The story: I left a job at a dot bomb that was imploding to go to work for a company that made a physical product that I could see a market for. The day I started I got fired... along with everyone else. Our next round of funding hadn't happenned. Everyone got the same offer: come back to work writing perl for minimum wage ($4.75/hour so I guess Java still pays better then perl) and the hope that things would get better. About four months later we managed to land a round of VC funding.
I stuck it out because this all started in December (bad time to look for work) and my wife was making decent money plus the folks I would be working with seemed really decent (turned out to be true). Everyone who stuck it out got a "loyalty bonus" that just happenned to make up the difference between the $4.75/hr and what we originally signed on for. We just completed our third round of venture funding with an "up" round and clean terms. No guarantees, but things look good.
Moral of the story: Some chance at real money still beats stock options. Look at the product and whether there is a market for it. If there isn't a market, there won't be funding and the stock options won't be worth squat. Due to wages and hours laws, no one can promise you in writing that they will make it up but, if you can't trust the management's word, maybe working there isn't a good idea anyway.
BTW, I've got over 20 years professional programming experience and a M.Sc. in math.
Spam is not currently illegal except in a couple of states (e.g., Washington and maybe a couple of others). One of the things the spammers do is raise their supposed constitutional rights to spam people whenever an ISP attempts to limit incoming spam. The Washington law was only recently upheld against a spammer in Oregon (story was carried on slashdot, dig it out if your interested).
By making spam illegal this barrier is removed and ISPs can use a number of effective spam filters and blacklists without having to engage in expensive court fights over whether they are limiting the spammer's "free speech". Besides being a service to their customers, ISPs would rather not have to invest in the additional capacity to store and carry this trash which gives them a economic incentive to filter it if they're allowed. Likewise, ISPs could then require well-formed mail headers for any traffic generated by their subscribers. These two actions together would probably cut out more than 95% of all spam.
Unfortunately, it probably won't stop the loosers who continue to send things like the Nigerian money scam.
Interesting that they didn't include Micael Jackson in the list of candidates for "Best Non-Human/Computer Generated Performance of the Year" but I guess he's an artificial life form.
The Dallas Cowboys don't have an opening on their roster?
Needed to test something with regard to how it handled a web posting. Figured I either use a lame "first post" or some luser's "In Soviet Russia" post. Thanks for keeping my search for something appropriate short.
The correct quote is: "If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck then its probably a duck." I used to use "If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, ... then it would probably taste good with an orange sauce." as my sig.
Look on the bright side: at least it wasn't some lame "first post" shit. Instead, it was lame "In Soviet Russia" shit. I'm not sure if this is an improvement but at least its different.
BTW, USSR = Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which was the official name for the country when it had a communist government. So "Soviet USSR" is definitely redundant and "communist USSR" is only slightly less so. "Soviet Russia" and "Communist Russia" are somewhat cold war relics since Russia was the name for the czarist country that was replaced by the USSR and the west continuing to call the country "Russia" rankled the rulers of the USSR. Its kind of like when the Brits refer to the U.S.A. as "the colonies".