Yeah, and Microsoft claims to support file formats that it doesn't really support. Excuse me, but telling the marketing people to claim support doesn't count.
WordStar! Microsoft claims Word can support WordStar files! I've spent some hours trying to make that work, and never could.
Stop laughing. I really do have a bunch of old WordStar files from the early '80s here.
Anyway, at least in theory and if that was my crucial application, I could demand my money back from Microsoft. I suppose I could demand my money back from OpenOffice, too, and they'd probably be glad to refund the full $0 that I paid--with a smile, even.
Oh well. I still think this is a case where you don't get what you pay for. From OpenOffice I think you get much more than you paid for.
In the case of Word, who actually paid for it? Microsoft is mostly too cunning and too good at leveraging their monopoly for most of us to ever see that money--it was bundled with the PC, or our company has a corporate license. Yeah, we paid, but we never see the money, so it feels relatively painless.
In conclusion, if my company would commit to OpenOffice support and use their files as a corporate standard, I'd drop Word in a New York minute! Hmm... I should try to see if OpenOffice can import those old WordStar files?
Well, except maybe for the 1 GB versus 2 GB error everyone is commenting on. A new error is not very interesting. However, I do have two substantive comments to offer:
In spite of Google's business principle against evil and in spite of the my frequent use of gmail, I think it is fundamentally bad and potentially evil. "Possession is nine points of the law", and there is no good reason for Google to be in possession of *MY* email. A few GBs of storage is *NOT* the issue, and I have plenty of free GBs right here in my possession, even including space for the indexes. Perhaps Google really is a good company and they will never abuse the power of possessing someone's email--but the historical evidence does not support that belief. Every power gets abused sooner or later.
In simplest terms, here is the threat of online gmail: Would you want your worst enemy to have access to all of your email? If you have put it into gmail, then all it would take is a single password leak.
The constructive alternative is obvious. Gmail should live primarily on your own disk, preferably integrated with the Google Desktop. The nine points of possession would remain on *YOUR* side, since you would still possess all of your email.
Many extended services could then be built on that model...
Hey, remember that somewhere in Texas there's a village missing its idiot.
Actually the funny part of it is that the Texas Constitution was pretty carefully designed to prevent abuse of power. For example, the governor of Texas is extremely weak and ceremonial, with a tiny staff. That's why Dubya could spend all his time campaigning for the White House. The real power in Texas was pretty widely distributed, with the Lieutenant Governor probably being the single most powerful elected figure. However, there were other weird pockets of political power, like the Texas Railroad Commission.
They even designed the state government to be easily crippled, though even that gets abused these days. The particular example that leaps to my mind is the quorum abuse. That prevents a thin majority from abusing their power if the narrow minority party blocks the quorum. A couple of years ago the Busheviks threw fits until they could force a special redistricting for the last election--gerrymandering of an especially nasty sort....
So now they feel a desperate need to screw the First Amendment? Why am I not surprised? Obviously, the only reason to have power is to abuse it.
Naw, the real problem of the WSJ is that they are mirroring the insane polarization of American society, and especially the political parts of it. They are trying to have a mix of reality-based reporting that reality-based companies need in order to make reasonable decisions, while the editorials are spinning wildly out of control in faith-based crazyland. They can't decide whether to tell people the truth or what they want to hear--and so they wind up confusing everyone about everything. Anyone who would pay for that mix is pretty weird, but apparently someone does.
As Jon Stewart just joked, I'm going to get an angry sign and run around shouting "Let's be REASONABLE!"
Depends on how the postage email system is handled. It's possible the zombie PC will have direct access to a small amount of postage--but that doesn't do much for the spammer. Remember the spammer needs to send millions, not tens.
However, it's more likely the spammer gets nothing so far. For example, one natural implementation would be via a Web-based implementation where the actual postage is on a remote server. Okay, so now we've added another two or three levels of security and the spammer has to add a keyboard logger and try to sniff out the right password and figure out how to log into some other system without getting logged. I admit there's no such thing as perfect security--but in this case we're already way past the point of diminishing returns. For all his effort, the spammer finally captures your postage--and maybe can send a few spam messages until your current postage is used up. This sort of nickel and diming is *NOT* helpful from the spammer's perspective.
Remember, the spammer always wants to send millions, not tens. Even trying to account for stolen postage is going to make the system totally unwieldy and useless from the spammer's perspective, so he'll go after the "soft" no-postage targets.
Gee, do you want to be admired for your ad-hominemo delusions.
Actually, I worked for several ISPs over the years, mostly doing technical support, but for one period I was the postmaster of one of the largest free email systems in a very large city. That was actually in the transitional days when PPP service was young, but a system with 12 phone lines (or maybe it was 16?) was heavy duty. It was actually a bizarre proprietary system, but my Windows PC ran a conversion program pulling it out of the Novell network, converted it from and to SMTP, which I then sent out through one of our Suns using regular TCP/IP. I don't think the network support guy every believed the system could work... Spam was already there, of course, though nothing compared to the current floods.
As you noted in your continued delusions, authenticated email has the well known and basically fatal problem of requiring everyone to go along, but I've already addressed that issue and the zombie stuff elsewhere. Hopefully, the entire issue is moot, since it certainly looks like this system at www.cashette.com may be just what the anti-spam doctor ordered.
I think you're reply should be modded up to informative. This http://www.cashette.com looks to be almost exactly what I've been looking for. Kind of a primitive implementation, but they're starting in the right place. They should clean up their registration form some, and it doesn't run perfectly in Opera, but looks good.
Main concern so far is the use of a whitelist. The spammers have an obvious countermeasure against that by linking addresses to make sure your spam seems to come from a friend. However, my intended use is not for my friends, so I won't need any whitelist on the account.
Actually, I was rather shocked to discover this is not true for the portable phones in Japan--at least for KDDI. You pay for all the packets you receive, including the packets of spam email. I was so astounded by this, that I actually called them to doublecheck, and asked them what if my address is harvested, for example by some clumsy friend who clicks on a Beagle variant, and I suddenly get 100 spams. (Actually, one of the first times I got 700, but I think there were probably several sources.) They didn't put it in these terms, but the basic response was "tough titties--you pay for the spam we deliver to you and we profit from it". It annoyed me so much as to contribute greatly to my decision to cancel that service.
In situations like this, a prepaid email system makes absolute sense, and I certainly would enable it if they offered the option. Unfortunately, the market in Japan is controlled by a few companies, and (in the usual Japanese tradition) would never dream of offering any new an innovative service unless everyone (including their competitors) is willing to go along.
By the way, they do offer an unlimited packet service, but at a price I regard as very unreasonable, and nor really unlimited either, but only for certain phone-specific services. If anyone actually does sign up and use those services while staring at that tiny screen, I'm expecting them to go blind.
I don't think they have to flock to make it a success. Actually, in a funny way, it's almost the inverse of the spam problem. If only a very small percentage of email users wanted to opt into this system, it would already be a LOT of people, and I think the percentage of people who hate spam a lot or who just need a truly non-spammable email address is much more than a small percentage.
Unfortunately, there is something keeping me from offering it myself--my career and the company policy against moonlighting. That's the problem with working for big companies... They mostly aren't going to change the world, since they mostly like it the way it is.
Natural solution is you have someone pay in advance--essentially a kind of bond posted by the sender or the senders mail provider. As postage is expended, it can't be reused (though incoming postage could be bartered against it for legitmate and balanced email users). That means that even if a spammer somehow manages to hack into someone's account, he would only be able to send a small amount of spam.
Zombie PCs are no problem, since they won't have any postage to play with. If a zombie sends to a address that requires postage, it just bounces, which is basically the same as now happens with the invalid addresses in the spammers mail boxes.
It was a collective response, and your comment was last. However, your comment itself was basically irrelevant and not worth more direct mention. Do you really insist on having your nose rubbed in the obvious?
As you sort of noted, there is plenty of legitimate advertising, but it never has and never will reach the levels of email spam. My "best" spamtrap address gets 50/day now. In the real world of legitimate business, a certain amount of advertising helps, but if the advertising budget is wasted or misdirected, the company goes down the tubes. Of course it isn't an absolute guarantee, but you really can tell something about a legitimate company based on their advertising.
This is not the economic model used by spammers. Spammers are *NOT* worried about repeat customers for their herbal viagra.
Actually, the economic model I want is an auction. I would be willing to sell a certain amount of my time to advertisers. The well-run businesses are the ones that are going to be able to afford to do things properly, including directing their advertising money to the real customers. I'd be willing to cooperate.
However, actually I would prefer to sit back out of the loop and let a commissioned middleman handle the bids for my time. For example, I might inform my middleman (a new kind of email service provider) that I'm looking for a new apartment in a certain area, and I'm willing to spend 15 minutes a day reading email from realtors. The middleman would aggregate my personal information and handle the bidding for that amount of email--and of course the middleman would also have a sincere interest in protecting my privacy. (If my personal information leaks, the middleman is out of the loop.)
However, anything like this depends on getting a controllable *REAL* economic model wrapped around some part of the email system.
I really can't understand why it is so difficult to get this point accross:
Email is *NOT* free. It has *NEVER* been free. SMTP email pretends to be free and there is no pretense of accounting. That is because the original design of SMTP was the fantasy of fairness and equality and all that wonderful stuff. As long as both of us send and receive about the same amount of email, we can cancel things out without worrying about the exact accounting.
In reality, there are costs of email, and they are simply disguised and paid by all of us.
The spammers are *NOT* playing by those rules. The spammers have noticed that there is no accounting in SMTP, so sending one real message is the same as sending 10 million spams. If you are dividing by zero, then any return on your "investment" looks like an infinite profit. Spammers think: "Another 50 million spams might get one more sucker for herbal viagra? Great!"
You can escalate your Baysian adaptive filters out the wazoo, and as long as the spammers continue to fantasize about striking it rich, they will continue to devise new and despicable strategies to shove their garbage in your face.
No one is telling you to abandon your free email. However, if the option existed for a completely spam-free email system, I would certainly want at least one such address, and I'm sure there are plenty of other people who would figure out a use for it. Obvious example is an address you could use on the newsgroups, and if someone really wants to email you for the post, they'd have to put up the two cents (or dime).
SMTP is working exactly as designed--but the design is broken. You can't fix a fundamentally economic problem with any number of technical tools. It's like adding more epicycles to the earth-centered "perfect spheres" models of the universe.
The article barely mentions economics, and only in terms of the real costs of email--which only shows how much room there is for a real economic model with real business, real email, and *NO* spam.
I really wish one of the major email players would offer an option for prepaid email. That would be an absolutely spam-proof system. It doesn't matter if the postage is two cents, the spammers can't afford it. Two cents against 50,000,000 spams turns out to be *REAL* money. Any email via that address would be at least some kind of real thing.
Sometimes they do. In fact, some of the earliest theorem proving programs found new, short, and even elegant proofs of old theorems. However, after that the field didn't seem to advance very much for quite a while... Perhaps there have been some big breakthroughs lately? At least that's what this discussion seems to suggest.
Actually, I was officially a math major for about a year (before my transition to the much easier computer science). Some parts of it were pretty simple, but the proofs always threw me. I'd spend a couple of pages proving what I thought was the crucial step, and old Professor Bichteler would tell me that it was obvious, but the critical part was over here in the line between these two other steps, where I'd incorrectly thought it was obvious... Also, I had a tendency to prove almost everything by contradiction, and the professors wanted direct proofs. Which leads back to the original topic, since many computerized theorem-proving systems have favored proof by contradiction.
(However, the real reason I didn't become a better mathematician was probably the forced retirement of Professor Greenwood. He was a seriously great teacher, and I've always felt that a couple more classes with him would have made the difference...)
Forgot to mention the big missing feature is handwriting input a la Grafitti. However, when working in Japanese, the predictive input system is quite good, and it greatly reduces the amount of clicking you have to do.
I feel like going deeper into the list of amazing and weird features it does have...
Actually I've been doing a lot of research on this topic in the last couple of weeks. The PDA market has basically collapsed in Japan, so I've been planning my move to a portable phone ("keitai denwa" in Japanese, hence the Subject). A few comments and observations:
The hardware is amazing. I'm using a Sanyo device with an amazing range of features. Latest ones I just discovered are the zoom for the camera and the quick switch for image size.
Some models (like Kyocera's) can work as a kind of high speed modem for your computer.
Some companies, such as KDDI, don't want you to do that.
KDDI also makes a profit by delivering spam email. I dislike that so much I'm probably going to cancel my contract even though the phone is so amazing.
Cancelling the contract in the first year charges about an extra month as a penalty.
More directly on the topic of this article, none of the systems I've looked at includes the e-book software, and the USB cable is also extra. You might be able to live through the infrared port without the cable, but you'd still need software.
KDDI recommends two packages, a minimal function one for 1,050 yen, and a medium-high function package that runs almost 5,000 yen.
The best package is called Keitai Bannou, and it's the only one that seems to include the modem functions for those phones which support it.
The most popular package is Keitai Denwa from SourceNext, with various versions and medium-high functionality.
There are also data-centric networks like Air Edge, where the phone service is the minor part of it.
English support is spotty (as was to be expected).
In conclusion, I'd really like to hear from someone who knows more about what is going on here...
Okay, I give up. I can't recognize any of these except for the last one, which in somewhat rude Japanese says "My hovercraft is full of eels." The third one is probably German, and the fourth is almost surely French. I can sort of guess it's saying something about a small room full of ammonia?
Naw, Dubya doesn't read, and I'm sure that includes not reading (or writing) on Wikipedia.
With regards to the other replies in defense of the Simpsons: The replies are so unitelligible as to practically serve as proof of my point. However, to make it more clear as I perceive it, the "heros" are apparently glorified for being non-intellectual (which brings us back to Dubya, eh?). That someone can get on a pedestal and claim to see the program from a higher intellectual perspective of sarcasm doesn't change that glorification of dumbness. "D'oh!" This is distinctly different from the levels of humor embedded in the ancient Rocky and Bullwinkle show, where you'd look back and recognize obvious jokes that could not have possibly be understood by children.
However, I certainly admit that I could be mistaken. I should study the evidence firsthand--but I still find the Simpsons too nauseating to watch.
Trying to think of something profound to say, but the grammar checker is pretty short of profound. I use Word for hours most days, and I certainly feel like the grammar checker is of limited utility. The simple spelling checking part of it delivers far and away the most bang for the buck. The grammar checker only contributes slightly, and that's usually by recognizing ambiguities. It doesn't help fix them, but if I can simplify the grammar to the point where the grammar checker stops complaining, then the passage is often rendered more clearly.
I think doing more would require a level of semantic understanding which is still far, far above the capabilities of our PCs, even given their gigahertz frequencies. Trying to substitute for real intelligence is difficult. The only thing I can imagine might be a very large database of examples of good and bad grammar examples, accessed via the Internet. The problem of deciding good and bad would still remain. Perhaps a Wikipedia-style approach with volunteer evaluators?
You're addressing a difficult problem there. You have to decide which dimension you want to consider, and then you have to provide data that spans the dimension in a meaningful way. The samples given were apparently picked mostly for their heavy activity resulting in "pretty pictures", but that isn't a particularly relevant or significant dimension.
My own interest would be in visualizations that identify zealots of various stripes violating the basic neutral POV philosophy. Something that would show the behavioral similarities in their behavior. I must be too interested in deviant behavior? For example, there was some recent ruckus about the "online poker" entry, where some commercial zealot was trying to use Wikipedia as free advertising to flog his poker Web sites. Before that, I remember a similar incident involving a religious crazy who wanted to use Wikipedia to manufacture some credibility for his cult. I'm sure there must be some tranplanted Newsgroup Charlies wandering around Wikipedia, too. (Don't look at me--I'm just a harmless grammar Nazi.)
In practical terms, if you can identify patterns associated with such problematic behavior, it will make it much easier to create automated alarms to help people notice. However, I'm kind of skeptical about the idealistic approach of trusting people's common sense. I'm given to understand that the Simpsons is a popular program, but it is so profoundly anti-intellectual that I can't stand it at all. Then consider some of Dubya's knuckle-dragging supporters and their primitive belief systems...
Never underestimate the power of organized knuckle-dragging.
Yeah,it's absurd, but we're at the point where no one seems to care about reality or integrity anymore. At least none of the politicians making the decisions, and they seem to have enough voters who are willing to go along. Most blogs are nothing more than silly personal diaries writ large for all the world to see--and why should anyone care? And now the politicians and their appointed lackeys think blogs need to be regulated and controlled? Bizarro world.
All I can imagine is that it's related to the JG (Jim/Jeff Gannon/Guckert) fiasco, which they'd apparently like to blame on a few crazed muckracking bloggers. However, the "big story" isn't that someone with such a crazy and blackmailable past and no writing or journalistic skills was wandering around the White House. The real story is that he could pass for a "real journalist" for a couple of years. That's the real metric of how low America has sunk. Famous sense of humor notwithstanding, Benjamin Franklin would not be amused.
Well, not sure how far they'll really go with it, but I feel like their motivations are suspect. The Japanese government has pretty much made peace with Microsoft. The only reason I can see for them supporting OSS is because the Chinese seem to be going away from MS, and Japan is thinking about who's going to be most important to Japan a few years down the road.
Think of it as another form of distributing their investments away from dollars...
So old, and so wrong, too. Sometimes funny, but not in this case, mostly because of your total lack of originality. That's what happens when you blather away without knowing what you are talking about.
Suffice it to say that each of the problems you so "thoughtfully" selected does not apply to the system I described. Go back and *READ* what I wrote. The only specific "objection" that was not already addressed fairly directly was Microsoft. I admit that it's dangerous to ignore them, because that company has shown remarkable diabolical ingenuity in the past, but since this approach is existing transparently on top of the existing SMTP infrastructure, it's hard to see how Microsoft could sabotage it without taking down SMTP, too.
However, it's one of those problems that will solve itself soon enough, so I don't really care. If I was a desperate entrepreneur, I suppose I would be interested in how to make money from it, but I'm just another person waiting for the opportunity to say good bye to spam--and there are certainly enough people like me to support a viable option that really works.
Slashdot Mirror
WordStar! Microsoft claims Word can support WordStar files! I've spent some hours trying to make that work, and never could.
Stop laughing. I really do have a bunch of old WordStar files from the early '80s here.
Anyway, at least in theory and if that was my crucial application, I could demand my money back from Microsoft. I suppose I could demand my money back from OpenOffice, too, and they'd probably be glad to refund the full $0 that I paid--with a smile, even.
Oh well. I still think this is a case where you don't get what you pay for. From OpenOffice I think you get much more than you paid for.
In the case of Word, who actually paid for it? Microsoft is mostly too cunning and too good at leveraging their monopoly for most of us to ever see that money--it was bundled with the PC, or our company has a corporate license. Yeah, we paid, but we never see the money, so it feels relatively painless.
In conclusion, if my company would commit to OpenOffice support and use their files as a corporate standard, I'd drop Word in a New York minute! Hmm... I should try to see if OpenOffice can import those old WordStar files?
In spite of Google's business principle against evil and in spite of the my frequent use of gmail, I think it is fundamentally bad and potentially evil. "Possession is nine points of the law", and there is no good reason for Google to be in possession of *MY* email. A few GBs of storage is *NOT* the issue, and I have plenty of free GBs right here in my possession, even including space for the indexes. Perhaps Google really is a good company and they will never abuse the power of possessing someone's email--but the historical evidence does not support that belief. Every power gets abused sooner or later.
In simplest terms, here is the threat of online gmail: Would you want your worst enemy to have access to all of your email? If you have put it into gmail, then all it would take is a single password leak.
The constructive alternative is obvious. Gmail should live primarily on your own disk, preferably integrated with the Google Desktop. The nine points of possession would remain on *YOUR* side, since you would still possess all of your email.
Many extended services could then be built on that model...
Actually the funny part of it is that the Texas Constitution was pretty carefully designed to prevent abuse of power. For example, the governor of Texas is extremely weak and ceremonial, with a tiny staff. That's why Dubya could spend all his time campaigning for the White House. The real power in Texas was pretty widely distributed, with the Lieutenant Governor probably being the single most powerful elected figure. However, there were other weird pockets of political power, like the Texas Railroad Commission.
They even designed the state government to be easily crippled, though even that gets abused these days. The particular example that leaps to my mind is the quorum abuse. That prevents a thin majority from abusing their power if the narrow minority party blocks the quorum. A couple of years ago the Busheviks threw fits until they could force a special redistricting for the last election--gerrymandering of an especially nasty sort....
So now they feel a desperate need to screw the First Amendment? Why am I not surprised? Obviously, the only reason to have power is to abuse it.
The Nazis were big on it. Also Dubya's grandfather, though it has became politically awkward to mention it these days.
As Jon Stewart just joked, I'm going to get an angry sign and run around shouting "Let's be REASONABLE!"
However, it's more likely the spammer gets nothing so far. For example, one natural implementation would be via a Web-based implementation where the actual postage is on a remote server. Okay, so now we've added another two or three levels of security and the spammer has to add a keyboard logger and try to sniff out the right password and figure out how to log into some other system without getting logged. I admit there's no such thing as perfect security--but in this case we're already way past the point of diminishing returns. For all his effort, the spammer finally captures your postage--and maybe can send a few spam messages until your current postage is used up. This sort of nickel and diming is *NOT* helpful from the spammer's perspective.
Remember, the spammer always wants to send millions, not tens. Even trying to account for stolen postage is going to make the system totally unwieldy and useless from the spammer's perspective, so he'll go after the "soft" no-postage targets.
Actually, I worked for several ISPs over the years, mostly doing technical support, but for one period I was the postmaster of one of the largest free email systems in a very large city. That was actually in the transitional days when PPP service was young, but a system with 12 phone lines (or maybe it was 16?) was heavy duty. It was actually a bizarre proprietary system, but my Windows PC ran a conversion program pulling it out of the Novell network, converted it from and to SMTP, which I then sent out through one of our Suns using regular TCP/IP. I don't think the network support guy every believed the system could work... Spam was already there, of course, though nothing compared to the current floods.
As you noted in your continued delusions, authenticated email has the well known and basically fatal problem of requiring everyone to go along, but I've already addressed that issue and the zombie stuff elsewhere. Hopefully, the entire issue is moot, since it certainly looks like this system at www.cashette.com may be just what the anti-spam doctor ordered.
Main concern so far is the use of a whitelist. The spammers have an obvious countermeasure against that by linking addresses to make sure your spam seems to come from a friend. However, my intended use is not for my friends, so I won't need any whitelist on the account.
In situations like this, a prepaid email system makes absolute sense, and I certainly would enable it if they offered the option. Unfortunately, the market in Japan is controlled by a few companies, and (in the usual Japanese tradition) would never dream of offering any new an innovative service unless everyone (including their competitors) is willing to go along.
By the way, they do offer an unlimited packet service, but at a price I regard as very unreasonable, and nor really unlimited either, but only for certain phone-specific services. If anyone actually does sign up and use those services while staring at that tiny screen, I'm expecting them to go blind.
Unfortunately, there is something keeping me from offering it myself--my career and the company policy against moonlighting. That's the problem with working for big companies... They mostly aren't going to change the world, since they mostly like it the way it is.
Zombie PCs are no problem, since they won't have any postage to play with. If a zombie sends to a address that requires postage, it just bounces, which is basically the same as now happens with the invalid addresses in the spammers mail boxes.
As you sort of noted, there is plenty of legitimate advertising, but it never has and never will reach the levels of email spam. My "best" spamtrap address gets 50/day now. In the real world of legitimate business, a certain amount of advertising helps, but if the advertising budget is wasted or misdirected, the company goes down the tubes. Of course it isn't an absolute guarantee, but you really can tell something about a legitimate company based on their advertising.
This is not the economic model used by spammers. Spammers are *NOT* worried about repeat customers for their herbal viagra.
Actually, the economic model I want is an auction. I would be willing to sell a certain amount of my time to advertisers. The well-run businesses are the ones that are going to be able to afford to do things properly, including directing their advertising money to the real customers. I'd be willing to cooperate.
However, actually I would prefer to sit back out of the loop and let a commissioned middleman handle the bids for my time. For example, I might inform my middleman (a new kind of email service provider) that I'm looking for a new apartment in a certain area, and I'm willing to spend 15 minutes a day reading email from realtors. The middleman would aggregate my personal information and handle the bidding for that amount of email--and of course the middleman would also have a sincere interest in protecting my privacy. (If my personal information leaks, the middleman is out of the loop.)
However, anything like this depends on getting a controllable *REAL* economic model wrapped around some part of the email system.
Email is *NOT* free. It has *NEVER* been free. SMTP email pretends to be free and there is no pretense of accounting. That is because the original design of SMTP was the fantasy of fairness and equality and all that wonderful stuff. As long as both of us send and receive about the same amount of email, we can cancel things out without worrying about the exact accounting.
In reality, there are costs of email, and they are simply disguised and paid by all of us.
The spammers are *NOT* playing by those rules. The spammers have noticed that there is no accounting in SMTP, so sending one real message is the same as sending 10 million spams. If you are dividing by zero, then any return on your "investment" looks like an infinite profit. Spammers think: "Another 50 million spams might get one more sucker for herbal viagra? Great!"
You can escalate your Baysian adaptive filters out the wazoo, and as long as the spammers continue to fantasize about striking it rich, they will continue to devise new and despicable strategies to shove their garbage in your face.
No one is telling you to abandon your free email. However, if the option existed for a completely spam-free email system, I would certainly want at least one such address, and I'm sure there are plenty of other people who would figure out a use for it. Obvious example is an address you could use on the newsgroups, and if someone really wants to email you for the post, they'd have to put up the two cents (or dime).
The article barely mentions economics, and only in terms of the real costs of email--which only shows how much room there is for a real economic model with real business, real email, and *NO* spam.
I really wish one of the major email players would offer an option for prepaid email. That would be an absolutely spam-proof system. It doesn't matter if the postage is two cents, the spammers can't afford it. Two cents against 50,000,000 spams turns out to be *REAL* money. Any email via that address would be at least some kind of real thing.
Actually, I was officially a math major for about a year (before my transition to the much easier computer science). Some parts of it were pretty simple, but the proofs always threw me. I'd spend a couple of pages proving what I thought was the crucial step, and old Professor Bichteler would tell me that it was obvious, but the critical part was over here in the line between these two other steps, where I'd incorrectly thought it was obvious... Also, I had a tendency to prove almost everything by contradiction, and the professors wanted direct proofs. Which leads back to the original topic, since many computerized theorem-proving systems have favored proof by contradiction.
(However, the real reason I didn't become a better mathematician was probably the forced retirement of Professor Greenwood. He was a seriously great teacher, and I've always felt that a couple more classes with him would have made the difference...)
I feel like going deeper into the list of amazing and weird features it does have...
- The hardware is amazing. I'm using a Sanyo device with an amazing range of features. Latest ones I just discovered are the zoom for the camera and the quick switch for image size.
- Some models (like Kyocera's) can work as a kind of high speed modem for your computer.
- Some companies, such as KDDI, don't want you to do that.
- KDDI also makes a profit by delivering spam email. I dislike that so much I'm probably going to cancel my contract even though the phone is so amazing.
- Cancelling the contract in the first year charges about an extra month as a penalty.
- More directly on the topic of this article, none of the systems I've looked at includes the e-book software, and the USB cable is also extra. You might be able to live through the infrared port without the cable, but you'd still need software.
- KDDI recommends two packages, a minimal function one for 1,050 yen, and a medium-high function package that runs almost 5,000 yen.
- The best package is called Keitai Bannou, and it's the only one that seems to include the modem functions for those phones which support it.
- The most popular package is Keitai Denwa from SourceNext, with various versions and medium-high functionality.
- There are also data-centric networks like Air Edge, where the phone service is the minor part of it.
- English support is spotty (as was to be expected).
In conclusion, I'd really like to hear from someone who knows more about what is going on here...Okay, I give up. I can't recognize any of these except for the last one, which in somewhat rude Japanese says "My hovercraft is full of eels." The third one is probably German, and the fourth is almost surely French. I can sort of guess it's saying something about a small room full of ammonia?
Yes, I believe that was the one. The name certainly rings a bell. All of his "preachings" were quite forgetable, however.
With regards to the other replies in defense of the Simpsons: The replies are so unitelligible as to practically serve as proof of my point. However, to make it more clear as I perceive it, the "heros" are apparently glorified for being non-intellectual (which brings us back to Dubya, eh?). That someone can get on a pedestal and claim to see the program from a higher intellectual perspective of sarcasm doesn't change that glorification of dumbness. "D'oh!" This is distinctly different from the levels of humor embedded in the ancient Rocky and Bullwinkle show, where you'd look back and recognize obvious jokes that could not have possibly be understood by children.
However, I certainly admit that I could be mistaken. I should study the evidence firsthand--but I still find the Simpsons too nauseating to watch.
Trying to think of something profound to say, but the grammar checker is pretty short of profound. I use Word for hours most days, and I certainly feel like the grammar checker is of limited utility. The simple spelling checking part of it delivers far and away the most bang for the buck. The grammar checker only contributes slightly, and that's usually by recognizing ambiguities. It doesn't help fix them, but if I can simplify the grammar to the point where the grammar checker stops complaining, then the passage is often rendered more clearly.
I think doing more would require a level of semantic understanding which is still far, far above the capabilities of our PCs, even given their gigahertz frequencies. Trying to substitute for real intelligence is difficult. The only thing I can imagine might be a very large database of examples of good and bad grammar examples, accessed via the Internet. The problem of deciding good and bad would still remain. Perhaps a Wikipedia-style approach with volunteer evaluators?
My own interest would be in visualizations that identify zealots of various stripes violating the basic neutral POV philosophy. Something that would show the behavioral similarities in their behavior. I must be too interested in deviant behavior? For example, there was some recent ruckus about the "online poker" entry, where some commercial zealot was trying to use Wikipedia as free advertising to flog his poker Web sites. Before that, I remember a similar incident involving a religious crazy who wanted to use Wikipedia to manufacture some credibility for his cult. I'm sure there must be some tranplanted Newsgroup Charlies wandering around Wikipedia, too. (Don't look at me--I'm just a harmless grammar Nazi.)
In practical terms, if you can identify patterns associated with such problematic behavior, it will make it much easier to create automated alarms to help people notice. However, I'm kind of skeptical about the idealistic approach of trusting people's common sense. I'm given to understand that the Simpsons is a popular program, but it is so profoundly anti-intellectual that I can't stand it at all. Then consider some of Dubya's knuckle-dragging supporters and their primitive belief systems...
Never underestimate the power of organized knuckle-dragging.
All I can imagine is that it's related to the JG (Jim/Jeff Gannon/Guckert) fiasco, which they'd apparently like to blame on a few crazed muckracking bloggers. However, the "big story" isn't that someone with such a crazy and blackmailable past and no writing or journalistic skills was wandering around the White House. The real story is that he could pass for a "real journalist" for a couple of years. That's the real metric of how low America has sunk. Famous sense of humor notwithstanding, Benjamin Franklin would not be amused.
Think of it as another form of distributing their investments away from dollars...
Suffice it to say that each of the problems you so "thoughtfully" selected does not apply to the system I described. Go back and *READ* what I wrote. The only specific "objection" that was not already addressed fairly directly was Microsoft. I admit that it's dangerous to ignore them, because that company has shown remarkable diabolical ingenuity in the past, but since this approach is existing transparently on top of the existing SMTP infrastructure, it's hard to see how Microsoft could sabotage it without taking down SMTP, too.
However, it's one of those problems that will solve itself soon enough, so I don't really care. If I was a desperate entrepreneur, I suppose I would be interested in how to make money from it, but I'm just another person waiting for the opportunity to say good bye to spam--and there are certainly enough people like me to support a viable option that really works.