Is this something that's limited just to Linux and the ext3 filesystem?
I'm particularly curious as to whether it's an issue on Mac OS X with the HFS filesystem also, and whether it would be possible / advisable to force Mac OS X to mount the root HFS partition as noatime/nodiratime.
OS X doesn't use a traditional UNIX-style fstab, so it's not immediately clear to me how you'd change the mount options (last time I checked disk mounting was all just in/etc/rc, but perhaps it's been moved into that new SystemStarter business since I last checked). It seems like the same things ought to apply to HFS -- it has an attribute that's functionally identical (at least, I think it is -- feel free to correct me on this) to atime, stored in the catalog file -- but I'm not familiar enough with the workings of the filesystems to know if that's actually the case.
If this doesn't occur in other OSes (I picked OS X because it's the other OS that I use frequently, and it uses a default fileystem that's pretty different in design from ext2/3), it seems like it might be worthwhile to look at why that is, and what tradeoffs other OSes have made to avoid the same issue.
Anyone using uTorrent wouldn't be able to connect to people using the new protocol. uTorrent users would have to switch to a new client if its developers refused to update its protocol. This is true. Here's the scenario I see happening: (I'm using 'Bittorrent' to refer to the company, and 'bittorrent' to refer to the protocol as it currently stands)
-Bittorrent creates a new protocol (I'll call it 'bt2') that is completely incompatible with bittorrent as it currently stands. The new protocol offers heavy-duty user authentication and encryption, and is basically designed to distribute pay-to-watch Hollywood movies, in order to save the studios from actually paying their own bandwidth bills. -Bittorrent "updates" uTorrent to use the new bt2 protocol, although it would probably be more of a complete rewrite. They ignore the old open-source 'reference implementation,' announce that it's deprecated, and try to get everyone to download the new client. -People running porn/warez/movies trackers do nothing, keep running the tracker software that they're using right now. -Some idiot users will undoubtedly go and download the "new and improved" uTorrent, fire it up, and realize that they can't connect to anything, and the.torrents that they get from The Pirate Bay do nothing. (Alternately, I suppose it's possible that Bittorrent could make their 'official client' backwards-compatible with bittorrent as well as bt2, in which case users could potentially use the Bittorrent-supplied client to download their warez... though they'd have to be a bit of a retard to use a client supplied by a company that's in bed with the movie studios to download pirated content.) -Users delete new uTorrent, go back to old version, or get Azureus instead.
Going forward, I think that what'll happen is there there will either be a complete fork, with Bittorrent splitting completely from the mainstream community and producing a client that's used only for commercial applications (distributing movies, etc.), and which can't connect to most non-commercial trackers, or they will continue to produce uTorrent and try to play both sides of the street with it: connecting via the new protocol to commercial trackers for pay-to-watch content and the regular protocol to all other trackers so that it doesn't get totally ignored by users.
However, this puts Bittorrent in the unenviable position of having to constantly keep up with the OSS side of things, and doesn't really threaten the openness of the protocol. Any way you cut it, they're going to be following, not leading.
The problem being that when one company has near monopoly, and in the eye of the public is indistinguishable from the product, they can close source, then change the specs (even if the spec is published), and the open source alternatives won't be able to compete. They have a monopoly... how, exactly?
People use Bittorrent -- or more specifically, many people use uTorrent -- to connect to public BT trackers and to other people running similar client programs. Bittorrent (the company) doesn't control either. In fact, I don't think that Bittorrent-the-company's "reference implementation" is particularly popular for trackers, and they're really where the marketshare matters.
I don't think that the majority of bittorent (the protocol) users are just going to bend over and throw away the software that they've liked, just because Bittorrent (the company) decides it would be cool to produce a new, ad-laden, DRM-using, Hollywood-mogul-approved version of their software, that breaks compatibility with older versions. In fact, I strongly suspect that the trackers which drive the more popular torrent aggregation sites would refuse to recognize such a "broken" implementation, and would instead favor free implementations (old versions of uTorrent, Azureus, etc.).
What's happening here is that Bittorrent (the company) has become fully decoupled from bittorrent (the protocol). They have very little leverage over the latter; about all they have is the rights to the name "Bittorrent," and the 'reference implementation,' which won't be worth its weight in electrons once they start messing with it.
The comparisons to Microsoft and RTF aren't really apt, because Microsoft had a way they could easily control the format -- they just made future versions of Word produce output that was incompatible with other vendors' software. But Bittorrent can't really do that, because a bittorrent client is only useful insofar as it can communicate with the swarm. As long as the trackers that drive the most popular torrents (which, let's face it, are the illegal ones; warez and movies) don't start using the new/broken protocols, it seems unlikely that a broken protocol would gain traction.
Yeah I wonder about that from a customer service perspective. However, I think people could get around to liking it.
Initially, I know a lot of people who were very put off by eBay's business model. They were bitter about being outbid at the last minute, or seeing something that sold for $X last week, but now only finding similar items for $Y (where Y is greater than X). However, they don't seem to be going out of business. (Although admittedly they have done more flat-price 'auctions.')
There might be a lot of whining about people who missed prices, but as long as you make it clear to everyone how the pricing works, and initially position it towards 'bargain hunters' (e.g., emphasize the deals to be had on less-popular songs), I think they can still survive, and just tell the whiners to stuff it.
Anyway, it'll be very interesting. I look forward to downloading lots of obscure music at very low prices.
In the United States roughly three times as many people are killed in gun accidents per year than 9/11.
Um, no, there weren't. I'm not arguing with your overall point but you really need to get your numbers straight before you start spouting stuff.
There were only about ~700 accidental gun deaths in the U.S. in 2004. It was slightly higher in 2001, but still only 802. That's slightly more than a third of the number of people killed on 9/11.
Doing a non-anonymous survey is a good way to skew the results the way you want. If you're looking to make the internet seem "safe," do all the interviews with the kids' parents sitting next to them. Nope, no porn on that Internet, no-siree.
Why on earth would you need to teach about sex in school? Isn't it easy enough to pick up outside of school? It's success would indicate that to be true. Easier than using apostrophes, certainly.
Give it time; eventually, Slashdot will be just like Cinemax. Respectably lowbrow during the day, soft-core porn at night, infomercials when everyone's passed out already.
I'm a girl. I build and rip apart computers all the time. And every time I do, MY girlfriend is always bugging me to let her get in there with the screwdriver! Maybe I should write up a story and take some pictures: "The lesbian geek couple mess with computer innards!" Oooohhh. Useless without pics.
Why don't the other provinces just get together in a preemptive strike and kick Quebec out?
Because Quebec controls the St. Lawrence Seaway, which is a major strategic/economic lifeline for a significant part of the Canadian interior. (Because it connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic ocean, and gets used to take grain out.)
Perhaps that's not as big an issue as it once was -- I suspect there are many more grain exports to the U.S. and Asia than there are to Europe, now that the Cold War is over and people in Western Europe can get grain from former Eastern Bloc countries -- but I think that's one of the reasons why the rest of Canada will never just 'let go' of the entire eastern third (or so) of their country.
When Americans wake up and vote for politicians who will enact Free Universal Health Care from cradle to the grave.
I'll consider doing that when I have more faith in my government than I do in my insurance company.
And as bad as my insurance company is, I'll take them every fucking day of the week over Congress. I don't trust those bunch of weasels as far as I could throw them, at once.
The insurance industry is the current whipping boy of the Left, but looking at our current system, I could see a lot of ways that it could get worse in a hurry. Say what you want about the cost of medical care; at least it's not run by the same knuckleheads that run the DMV, or the pissant power-mongers on my local zoning board.
Politicians are in it for the power they wield over others; insurance executives are just in it for the paycheck. I'll take the profit motive over power every time, and that's the choice that we have.
For a couple of mod point, please point to a truly free economy. unencumbered by government regulation, government interference or taxes. I bet you the closer to that ideal you get the more corruption and monopolies you see. In fact I bet the closer to that ideal you get the lower the general standard of living is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
If you were really that worried, you could just give the money to the actual non-profit, and cut out the middleman, or just go camping, and not have such an environmentally unfriendly holiday in the first place.
People who buy into schemes like that aren't "worried," they're feeling guilty.
The purpose of buying credits like that is to alleviate them from the guilt they feel at doing something that they know is environmentally bad. By paying someone to plant some trees, or do some research, they can buy themselves a clean conscience while still doing whatever the hell they want.
It's functionally identical to "good Christians" in the pre-Reformation days, who used to go out for a good round of drinking and whoring, and then buy themselves a handful of Indulgences from their local priest on Sunday morning. Fork over the cash -- problem solved! -- no guilt, no foul.
You're probably comparing 48% to the 28% that "income tax" tops out around in the US. Unfortunately, that overlooks the separately-listed Social Security and Medicare taxes: add in 15% for SSI and 3% for Medicare, and you're already just about at the total Canadian level cited here. Federal, State and Local taxes (including sales taxes and all payroll taxes, e.g. Social Security) cost the "average household" ($68,605/yr. income) approximately 39.0% of their income in 2000. (Source: http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/137 .html) Some people make out better or worse depending on their income and how well they can structure it around the taxes. The nature of the tax system in the U.S. basically precludes coming up with a straightforward marginal rate, since it varies by income.
I think the burden rate has actually decreased since 2000 due to the Bush administration tax cuts, but that's arguably an artificial decrease since it was more than made up for by deficit financing that will have to be paid off later.
A rather fascinating analysis of tax burden rates as a function of income is available here: http://www.truthandpolitics.org/tax-burden-pechman .php. Note the two very different graphs based on the "progressive" or "regressive" assumptions. However, both are basically in agreement for the middle of the income spectrum, and give marginal rates somewhere in the sub-30% range.
That being fat also means you are more prone to certain health problems is a different issue altogether.
True, but the links between being overweight and many health problems are well established. I don't think any really reputable source is debating that being overweight -- particularly obese -- isn't unhealthy. Obese people tend to have an increased risk of heart disease, blood clots / strokes, diabetes, etc. The list is pretty long.
Every once in a while you'll hear someone talk about correlation vs causation and obesity -- i.e., whether being obese causes you to be unhealthy, or whether there's some sort of underlying cause which causes both obesity and the other health problems that it's correlated with, but to an insurance company that's irrelevant. They just want to find easily measurable risk factors and indicators; whether the relationship is causative doesn't matter a whit (to them).
Damn these custom hex bolts. Are you sure they're not just Torx screws? Apple has traditionally used Torx almost everywhere. (I guess it's easy to automate, plus it's just difficult enough to keep clueless idiots with screwdrivers from prying around inside and zapping things by mistake.)
I'd be a little surprised if it was actually anything custom, since that would mean all the Apple Authorized Service centers have to get new tools; anyone worth his salt who works on Macs already has a full Torx driver set.
I'm just waiting for Apple to make a wireless Extended Keyboard II... so I can get rid of my ADB cable and ADB-to-USB adapter. (It's the only keyboard ever made that comes close to the IBM Model M, but quieter; all the goodness of a buckling spring but without waking the neighbors.)
Reason? Simple. Who would immediately lose their "internet rights"? Let them!!!
Look, if you're stupid enough to get your machine infected like that, you're too stupid to be on the Internet. I'm not disagreeing with you, but did you read the rest of the GP's post? There are reasons why governments and societies protect the stupid.
albeit prestige derived much more from its past authorial and editorial quality than from anything it has now). I'm not sure why you and the submitter seem to think it's some sort of printed-out blog. I suspect for people who can't recall its past editorial quality, it probably does seem about like a printed-out blog...
Have you put both the "From" and the "Reply-To" addresses on the mailing list into your Gmail address book? I've found that seems to keep mail in my Inbox instead of in Spam. (I think it's only the "From" that matters, but you can put both in there to be sure.)
I'm not sure it's an automatic 100% non-spam rating, but it does seem to be worth some points at some point in Google's filtering process.
Re:Need More Exposure to Ideas and Methods
on
The New Yorker On Spam
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is definitely a start in the right direction, but it's not the whole story. I'm convinced that a massive part of the problem is that there's a widespread belief that spammers make millions of dollars.
No doubt, a very few do. A very few have mansions and island retreats in the Bahamas. But these people are like the Michael Jordans of spammers, the people who have spent an incredible amount of time and effort into honing their spamming skills not just into an art, but a lucrative profession. Replace "spammers" with "drug dealers" and the statement is still true.
In fact, I think many, if not most, illegal activities are driven by the same motivation. It's a lottery; people rationally know that their chances of 'winning big' (being the multi-millionaire spammer sitting in the Bahamas, or the drug dealer who becomes a rap star, or whatever) are ridiculously small. But they do it anyway, because they think they can be that one in ten million.
I strongly suspect that if you look at the pay-per-hour of spamming, that it -- like drug dealing -- often turns out to be a sub-minimum-wage job. The people sending spam could probably make more money doing something legitimate, but they're pursuing the (irrational) hope that they can beat the odds and become extremely wealthy without working hard instead. (And, ironically, end up working much harder for the little that they do make.)
Spam wouldn't be such a problem if we had proper verification of senders. Whether that's through some central identity or whatever. I realize this idea is extremely unpopular and is not in the spirit of the original Internet, but heck, if you had to essentially have an ID that verified who you were and if you sent out spam, you'd lose it, how much less spam would there be?
Sure, and while we're at it, if everyone was required under penalty of death to have their name tattooed in large block letters on their forehead, then I wouldn't have to worry about embarrassing myself forgetting people's names at dinner parties.
Some 'solutions' are worse than the problems they purport to solve.
The large damage from theoretically possible asteroid impacts doesn't make it any more likely that they will happen. That's a statistical fallacy.
Huh? Of course the damage it would do doesn't make the event more likely, but it makes the event more serious.
If one event is likely, but has minimal impact if it occurs, it might be worth ignoring, in order to concentrate on a less likely event that has disastrous consequences.
Since a large asteroid impact could be a mass extinction event, something capable of wiping out our entire ecosystem -- not to mention civilization -- even if it's unlikely, it's worth working to prevent. Compared to that, everything except the possibility of nuclear war (or equally disastrous environmental collapse) pales in comparison.
The risk really depends on a lot of factors, chief among them probably being where you life and your relative level of affluence compared to those around you (which I suspect drives how much of a target you are). I also bet that age, sex, and infirmity drive the risk a lot. An elderly person would probably be a much bigger target than a young single person -- the elderly person is at home all the time, might be more likely to have a lot of cash, and isn't going to be perceived as much of a threat by a thief.
I also suspect, although I've never seen a study of it, that there might be a lot of violent confrontations that don't start off with a lot of violent intentions; they just "get out of hand." E.g., the burglars thought you were out of town, but you weren't. Or they were actually going for the next house down the street. Or whatever. Criminals aren't the brightest people in the world anyway, and when you add drugs to the mix it doesn't get a lot better. A perusal of some of the "Armed Citizen" accounts in American Rifleman seems to back up this suspicion, though.
The reason people think about the risk, although it may be small compared to, say, being killed while driving to work in the morning, is that it's a directly controllable risk. Having someone break into your house at night is a situation that you can modify the outcome of; a car wreck is, for the most part anyway, not. (Although you can certainly take steps to reduce the risk of being killed in a wreck, starting with your own driving habits and the car you drive.) And there's also the psychological impact of certain crimes; the fear of being raped and murdered in your home is a much bigger motivator than the fear of dying in your sleep from CO poisoning. And, of course, the media tends to report deaths-by-home-invader more heavily than deaths-by-carbon-monoxide (or some other cause). When you get right down to it, people don't treat all death equally; the idea of dying in an auto accident doesn't scare people the way dying at the hands of some hopped-up lunatic does, and they plan accordingly.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to spend a lot of time obsessing over home invaders, if you haven't spent time thinking about other controllable things that are more likely to kill you -- a smoke detector is almost certainly a better initial investment than a gun, if you have neither -- but that doesn't mean that it's not worth thinking about at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this something that's limited just to Linux and the ext3 filesystem?
/etc/rc, but perhaps it's been moved into that new SystemStarter business since I last checked). It seems like the same things ought to apply to HFS -- it has an attribute that's functionally identical (at least, I think it is -- feel free to correct me on this) to atime, stored in the catalog file -- but I'm not familiar enough with the workings of the filesystems to know if that's actually the case.
I'm particularly curious as to whether it's an issue on Mac OS X with the HFS filesystem also, and whether it would be possible / advisable to force Mac OS X to mount the root HFS partition as noatime/nodiratime.
OS X doesn't use a traditional UNIX-style fstab, so it's not immediately clear to me how you'd change the mount options (last time I checked disk mounting was all just in
If this doesn't occur in other OSes (I picked OS X because it's the other OS that I use frequently, and it uses a default fileystem that's pretty different in design from ext2/3), it seems like it might be worthwhile to look at why that is, and what tradeoffs other OSes have made to avoid the same issue.
-Bittorrent creates a new protocol (I'll call it 'bt2') that is completely incompatible with bittorrent as it currently stands. The new protocol offers heavy-duty user authentication and encryption, and is basically designed to distribute pay-to-watch Hollywood movies, in order to save the studios from actually paying their own bandwidth bills.
-Bittorrent "updates" uTorrent to use the new bt2 protocol, although it would probably be more of a complete rewrite. They ignore the old open-source 'reference implementation,' announce that it's deprecated, and try to get everyone to download the new client.
-People running porn/warez/movies trackers do nothing, keep running the tracker software that they're using right now.
-Some idiot users will undoubtedly go and download the "new and improved" uTorrent, fire it up, and realize that they can't connect to anything, and the
-Users delete new uTorrent, go back to old version, or get Azureus instead.
Going forward, I think that what'll happen is there there will either be a complete fork, with Bittorrent splitting completely from the mainstream community and producing a client that's used only for commercial applications (distributing movies, etc.), and which can't connect to most non-commercial trackers, or they will continue to produce uTorrent and try to play both sides of the street with it: connecting via the new protocol to commercial trackers for pay-to-watch content and the regular protocol to all other trackers so that it doesn't get totally ignored by users.
However, this puts Bittorrent in the unenviable position of having to constantly keep up with the OSS side of things, and doesn't really threaten the openness of the protocol. Any way you cut it, they're going to be following, not leading.
People use Bittorrent -- or more specifically, many people use uTorrent -- to connect to public BT trackers and to other people running similar client programs. Bittorrent (the company) doesn't control either. In fact, I don't think that Bittorrent-the-company's "reference implementation" is particularly popular for trackers, and they're really where the marketshare matters.
I don't think that the majority of bittorent (the protocol) users are just going to bend over and throw away the software that they've liked, just because Bittorrent (the company) decides it would be cool to produce a new, ad-laden, DRM-using, Hollywood-mogul-approved version of their software, that breaks compatibility with older versions. In fact, I strongly suspect that the trackers which drive the more popular torrent aggregation sites would refuse to recognize such a "broken" implementation, and would instead favor free implementations (old versions of uTorrent, Azureus, etc.).
What's happening here is that Bittorrent (the company) has become fully decoupled from bittorrent (the protocol). They have very little leverage over the latter; about all they have is the rights to the name "Bittorrent," and the 'reference implementation,' which won't be worth its weight in electrons once they start messing with it.
The comparisons to Microsoft and RTF aren't really apt, because Microsoft had a way they could easily control the format -- they just made future versions of Word produce output that was incompatible with other vendors' software. But Bittorrent can't really do that, because a bittorrent client is only useful insofar as it can communicate with the swarm. As long as the trackers that drive the most popular torrents (which, let's face it, are the illegal ones; warez and movies) don't start using the new/broken protocols, it seems unlikely that a broken protocol would gain traction.
Yeah I wonder about that from a customer service perspective. However, I think people could get around to liking it.
Initially, I know a lot of people who were very put off by eBay's business model. They were bitter about being outbid at the last minute, or seeing something that sold for $X last week, but now only finding similar items for $Y (where Y is greater than X). However, they don't seem to be going out of business. (Although admittedly they have done more flat-price 'auctions.')
There might be a lot of whining about people who missed prices, but as long as you make it clear to everyone how the pricing works, and initially position it towards 'bargain hunters' (e.g., emphasize the deals to be had on less-popular songs), I think they can still survive, and just tell the whiners to stuff it.
Anyway, it'll be very interesting. I look forward to downloading lots of obscure music at very low prices.
Homicides and suicides (and 'legal interventions,' the polite term for police shootings) are not "accidental."
(Not sure if I'm misunderstanding your post though, in terms of who you're agreeing or disagreeing with.)
In the United States roughly three times as many people are killed in gun accidents per year than 9/11.
Um, no, there weren't. I'm not arguing with your overall point but you really need to get your numbers straight before you start spouting stuff.
There were only about ~700 accidental gun deaths in the U.S. in 2004. It was slightly higher in 2001, but still only 802. That's slightly more than a third of the number of people killed on 9/11.
(Sources: for accidental gun deaths go to the very slick CDC Fatal Injury Reports Calculator and put in "Unintentional," "Firearm," and the year of your choice. 9/11 casualties are from NyMag's "September 11th By the Numbers".)
Who says they wanted the truth?
Doing a non-anonymous survey is a good way to skew the results the way you want. If you're looking to make the internet seem "safe," do all the interviews with the kids' parents sitting next to them. Nope, no porn on that Internet, no-siree.
To be honest I have no idea why it's not. It's such a blisteringly good idea, it seems ridiculously stupid to not include it in a browser.
I mean, popup blocking is included in the browser, why not NoScript?
It's the user's computer, not the advertiser's; the user should have full control over what goes on.
Give it time; eventually, Slashdot will be just like Cinemax. Respectably lowbrow during the day, soft-core porn at night, infomercials when everyone's passed out already.
Why don't the other provinces just get together in a preemptive strike and kick Quebec out?
Because Quebec controls the St. Lawrence Seaway, which is a major strategic/economic lifeline for a significant part of the Canadian interior. (Because it connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic ocean, and gets used to take grain out.)
Perhaps that's not as big an issue as it once was -- I suspect there are many more grain exports to the U.S. and Asia than there are to Europe, now that the Cold War is over and people in Western Europe can get grain from former Eastern Bloc countries -- but I think that's one of the reasons why the rest of Canada will never just 'let go' of the entire eastern third (or so) of their country.
When Americans wake up and vote for politicians who will enact Free Universal Health Care from cradle to the grave.
I'll consider doing that when I have more faith in my government than I do in my insurance company.
And as bad as my insurance company is, I'll take them every fucking day of the week over Congress. I don't trust those bunch of weasels as far as I could throw them, at once.
The insurance industry is the current whipping boy of the Left, but looking at our current system, I could see a lot of ways that it could get worse in a hurry. Say what you want about the cost of medical care; at least it's not run by the same knuckleheads that run the DMV, or the pissant power-mongers on my local zoning board.
Politicians are in it for the power they wield over others; insurance executives are just in it for the paycheck. I'll take the profit motive over power every time, and that's the choice that we have.
Thanks for playing.
If you were really that worried, you could just give the money to the actual non-profit, and cut out the middleman, or just go camping, and not have such an environmentally unfriendly holiday in the first place.
People who buy into schemes like that aren't "worried," they're feeling guilty.
The purpose of buying credits like that is to alleviate them from the guilt they feel at doing something that they know is environmentally bad. By paying someone to plant some trees, or do some research, they can buy themselves a clean conscience while still doing whatever the hell they want.
It's functionally identical to "good Christians" in the pre-Reformation days, who used to go out for a good round of drinking and whoring, and then buy themselves a handful of Indulgences from their local priest on Sunday morning. Fork over the cash -- problem solved! -- no guilt, no foul.
I think the burden rate has actually decreased since 2000 due to the Bush administration tax cuts, but that's arguably an artificial decrease since it was more than made up for by deficit financing that will have to be paid off later.
A rather fascinating analysis of tax burden rates as a function of income is available here: http://www.truthandpolitics.org/tax-burden-pechma
That being fat also means you are more prone to certain health problems is a different issue altogether.
True, but the links between being overweight and many health problems are well established. I don't think any really reputable source is debating that being overweight -- particularly obese -- isn't unhealthy. Obese people tend to have an increased risk of heart disease, blood clots / strokes, diabetes, etc. The list is pretty long.
Every once in a while you'll hear someone talk about correlation vs causation and obesity -- i.e., whether being obese causes you to be unhealthy, or whether there's some sort of underlying cause which causes both obesity and the other health problems that it's correlated with, but to an insurance company that's irrelevant. They just want to find easily measurable risk factors and indicators; whether the relationship is causative doesn't matter a whit (to them).
I'd be a little surprised if it was actually anything custom, since that would mean all the Apple Authorized Service centers have to get new tools; anyone worth his salt who works on Macs already has a full Torx driver set.
I'm just waiting for Apple to make a wireless Extended Keyboard II
Look, if you're stupid enough to get your machine infected like that, you're too stupid to be on the Internet. I'm not disagreeing with you, but did you read the rest of the GP's post? There are reasons why governments and societies protect the stupid.
Have you put both the "From" and the "Reply-To" addresses on the mailing list into your Gmail address book? I've found that seems to keep mail in my Inbox instead of in Spam. (I think it's only the "From" that matters, but you can put both in there to be sure.)
I'm not sure it's an automatic 100% non-spam rating, but it does seem to be worth some points at some point in Google's filtering process.
No doubt, a very few do. A very few have mansions and island retreats in the Bahamas. But these people are like the Michael Jordans of spammers, the people who have spent an incredible amount of time and effort into honing their spamming skills not just into an art, but a lucrative profession. Replace "spammers" with "drug dealers" and the statement is still true.
In fact, I think many, if not most, illegal activities are driven by the same motivation. It's a lottery; people rationally know that their chances of 'winning big' (being the multi-millionaire spammer sitting in the Bahamas, or the drug dealer who becomes a rap star, or whatever) are ridiculously small. But they do it anyway, because they think they can be that one in ten million.
I strongly suspect that if you look at the pay-per-hour of spamming, that it -- like drug dealing -- often turns out to be a sub-minimum-wage job. The people sending spam could probably make more money doing something legitimate, but they're pursuing the (irrational) hope that they can beat the odds and become extremely wealthy without working hard instead. (And, ironically, end up working much harder for the little that they do make.)
Sure, and while we're at it, if everyone was required under penalty of death to have their name tattooed in large block letters on their forehead, then I wouldn't have to worry about embarrassing myself forgetting people's names at dinner parties.
Some 'solutions' are worse than the problems they purport to solve.
The large damage from theoretically possible asteroid impacts doesn't make it any more likely that they will happen. That's a statistical fallacy.
Huh? Of course the damage it would do doesn't make the event more likely, but it makes the event more serious.
If one event is likely, but has minimal impact if it occurs, it might be worth ignoring, in order to concentrate on a less likely event that has disastrous consequences.
Since a large asteroid impact could be a mass extinction event, something capable of wiping out our entire ecosystem -- not to mention civilization -- even if it's unlikely, it's worth working to prevent. Compared to that, everything except the possibility of nuclear war (or equally disastrous environmental collapse) pales in comparison.
They're rare, but not unheard of.
The risk really depends on a lot of factors, chief among them probably being where you life and your relative level of affluence compared to those around you (which I suspect drives how much of a target you are). I also bet that age, sex, and infirmity drive the risk a lot. An elderly person would probably be a much bigger target than a young single person -- the elderly person is at home all the time, might be more likely to have a lot of cash, and isn't going to be perceived as much of a threat by a thief.
I also suspect, although I've never seen a study of it, that there might be a lot of violent confrontations that don't start off with a lot of violent intentions; they just "get out of hand." E.g., the burglars thought you were out of town, but you weren't. Or they were actually going for the next house down the street. Or whatever. Criminals aren't the brightest people in the world anyway, and when you add drugs to the mix it doesn't get a lot better. A perusal of some of the "Armed Citizen" accounts in American Rifleman seems to back up this suspicion, though.
The reason people think about the risk, although it may be small compared to, say, being killed while driving to work in the morning, is that it's a directly controllable risk. Having someone break into your house at night is a situation that you can modify the outcome of; a car wreck is, for the most part anyway, not. (Although you can certainly take steps to reduce the risk of being killed in a wreck, starting with your own driving habits and the car you drive.) And there's also the psychological impact of certain crimes; the fear of being raped and murdered in your home is a much bigger motivator than the fear of dying in your sleep from CO poisoning. And, of course, the media tends to report deaths-by-home-invader more heavily than deaths-by-carbon-monoxide (or some other cause). When you get right down to it, people don't treat all death equally; the idea of dying in an auto accident doesn't scare people the way dying at the hands of some hopped-up lunatic does, and they plan accordingly.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to spend a lot of time obsessing over home invaders, if you haven't spent time thinking about other controllable things that are more likely to kill you -- a smoke detector is almost certainly a better initial investment than a gun, if you have neither -- but that doesn't mean that it's not worth thinking about at all.