You are making the fantastically gross assumption that my car and her car are the same and therefore I have a $14,000 expense. Two cars...
However, she did trade in her SUV for a diesel car and the difference in fuel savings more than compensated for the newer car insurance and car payments. The difference on trade in value was made up in 5 months. That was two years ago.
I would suggest that when you are writing code that is in excess of 80 columns you might be trying to do too much in one line. Sure I can write almost an entire program in one line with perl, but that doesn't mean anyone can understand what the heck I'm doing with it. But if I don't attempt to make everything fit into one line then I'm also going to tend towards more readable code, not more condensed.
I've been writing my own programs for a while now and have learned one thing from Perl Best Practices and a few other writings. Don't get cute with your code. If you can't read it easily then you can't maintain it either. I suppose you might have an argument for 132 columns if you can find most books and publications written in 132 columns. But I suspect you'll have a hard time with that.
The point in code, IMHO, is to make it readable. That's more important today than just about anything else. Computers are fast enough that you can afford to make some performance sacrifices for the sake of readability or ease of maintenance. If you need the speed, then write the program in machine language.
Nothing to be skeptical about. The temperatures where the ground tanks are stored are stable enough that the water temperature from city water systems (at the same depth) effectively do not vary noticeably. Google water temperature variations underground and see for yourself. I found one article about Mexico with a 0.02% variation at 30cm. These storage tanks are stored meters underground and are significantly better insulated.
Similarly, if these were really true then geothermal systems wouldn't work.
Of course, using this logic, if you live in Minnesota then you should be fined for driving in the winter where the fuel is more dense and therefore you get more driving for your dollar. Or do we just move along with life and call it a wash?
I changed my fuel consumption by a 70% decrease in cost by changing to a diesel engine and bio-diesel. Now I can get 46MPG for $2.79 a gallon. Sure beats my wifes 16MPG at $3.09 in her SUV. Her choice, my savings.
Verizon is not in a position where they feel a need to bargain with anyone. Unfortunately, their coverage or service has declined considerable over the past few years. But what can you do?
How many GSM providers are nationwide in the USA? AT&T, T-Mobile, anyone else?
They couldnt' set up a service with Verizon Wireless (an example) because they just don't do GSM technology.
It's unfortunate that AT&T is so clueless on this coming out of the gate. I think the iPhone has mind numbing potential. GSM is the right choice if you consider a world wide market, but not for US market, because GSM is more widely used globally. Economy of scale in units manufactured dictate that they go with GSM for a global market.
If you look at the techcentric nations of the world, the United States is not the leading country. We don't have the digital high speed cellular networks or internet broad band speeds of other nations. I just don't think you can safely market a product of this type to only the USA when we have a global market to consider.
I think it is ironic that the very mechanism that makes gaming so successful is the same mechanism that makes it so addictive.
It's similar in psychological terms as gambling. There's a reward systemt that is put in place, designed specifically by psychologists, to maximize the retention of the gamer to stay with the game. Originally this meant they would pump quarters into Astroids until they missed their car payments. But it's still the same basic process. All brought to you by the same people who make gambling products.
Face it. It's not an addiction. It's an overly successful implementation of exactly what the gaming company attempted to produce. A game you can't give up and will gladly pay for in the next version.
First, too bad for AT&T and Apple. The only place you can get the iPhone these days is through AT&T and this puts a black mark against AT&T for anything internet related.
Second, you bet your sweet ass they are dismanteling the internet. They've been trying to do it for a decade now and they will succeed unless someone starts making a fight against the asswipes who complain about the internet content or make up stories about it's harmful.
The reality is the Internet is a reflection of society.
As an example...
The only difference is you have to travel farther to get to interact with hookers and dance clubs than you do web pornography. But all the sex is still out there and it's not going away. Same with anything else that someone might want to consider illegal, immoral, or unethical. The key distinction here is that as a society we agree to what is illegal through concensus of the laws and efforts to change it through a legal process. But ethics and morality are not legislatively controlled in this country just yet. If my daughter wants to dress like a three dollar whore there's no law against it except for indecent exposure.
But her dress is only permitted within public areas. She can't go to school like that and probably can't work at Bennigans dressed like that either. These institutions have and extension of the the legal rules of dress that is permitted because the society represented within that institution has agreed to an extended version of the legislative legal limitations (indecent exposure becomes dress code or uniforms). As long as the societal subsection that is the institution understands that their laws of the school or business are not implicitly enforced by government law then everyone is happy.
Where we get into trouble is when someone steps out of the school and sees someone who is in violation of the school dress code, is not in the school, and is not in violation of the indecent exposure law. They take it upon themselves to declare the individual in violation of a law that doesn't exist. Sure they might look slutty or offensive, but it's not against the law.
Where we get into a lot of trouble is no one has a good argument for stating something that on the surface appears to be, "We support slutty looking girls on the street." because that can be twisted into something it's not. And today's government in the US has a tendency to react to someone complaining loudly enough even when they aren't representing the majority of the society.
This isn't too far from what the sharia law can do to a country. With sufficient effort, a small group of over zealous people can enforce upon the society their ideals of what the law should be and they apply it to non-muslims as well. Taliban did this. They were a small group of people who relied on the ability to make outcries that if you didn't follow sharia law you were an infidile. Western countries might consider this extreme, but Christrians aren't so free of sin that they can cast the first stone either. It's just that sharia law is more current and example.
So where does this make the internet and AT&T important? AT&T has taken it upon themselves to start applying their own ethical regulations, extending the law beyond what they indended to do, without disclosure to the customers, giving customers the option to refuse their ethical extensions, or permitting the affected sites an opportunity to appeal their decisions. They are making up their own opinion of what's right and what's wrong and they are not a government legislature.
They could offer an option in their accounts to allow the consumer to opt-in to a safe-mode account status where they are filtered to death and everything is safe and wonderful. This would give them the ability to appeal to those who want that ethical extension without violating the choices of others to decide for themselves what might be unethical or not.
Everyone I know with a Mac has dropped Safari for Mozilla. If Jobs spends any effort in trying to subvert Mozilla on either Mac or Windows he will only hurt his own company by mismanagement of resources and presenting an inconsistent face to the community.
Safari is OK but Mozilla is much better and is the best candidate for a unified browser across all platforms. I'm not saying it's the only one, but it's the best candidate for it.
First, the money lost in the type of piracy mentioned has subjective dollar figures attached to it. If I steal a song it doesn't mean that no one in the world will purchase the album that it came on. Very difficult to be accurate.
But the real issue when prioritizing crimes is what is the affect upon the human beings who is victimized?
Theft is apparent and easy to measure. Piracy against a Mega_Corp is vague at best. I don't think there is any real damage done to the people who work there below a certain level of piracy activity.
I can't comment on any of that, but I find it difficult to believe that you can have a 3,000 pound bird that is only twice the size of man being capable of flight. Rather it might be capable of plummet, thereby making it extinct.
That's like a flying SUV only the size of a Triumph TR-7. It makes for a very dense bird.
Well, I don't think anyone realistically believes you can save money by cafeteria channel selection. So it's likely a back door project to legalize cafeteria pricing so the channels you purchase today can be even more expensive tomorrow. Personally I like have some non-standard channels around. Sometimes they have really intersting stuff on them. But I don't know about them at the time I make my cafeteria selections.
I don't think I mind the content regulations. I'm getting tired of a show, in order to make ratings, push the boundaries on vulgar unimaginative programming. When you have to be funny without swearing or refering to body parts or body functions, it does require you to be a little more creative.
I was thinking of a similar problem that he is going to face.
Closed source software development has a serious drawback. It's very expensive to manage and develop. I'm working on a project today that I don't feel is worth releasing for others to see -- making it effectively closed source.
As a result, development is slow and difficult because every bug I run into is entirely mine to solve.
All the code changes are done on my time. No one else is spending time on anything: documentation, testing, user interface...
I am not an expert in all things so I have to sit down and spend days learning a lot of detail about things that I just never expected to deal with.
I'm just about ready to try releasing this but for me, I'm not sure how/where to do this. Not sure I want to give my code to sourceforge or if anyone is interested in yet another spam filter. Especially if it runs only on postgresql databases. Transitioning to MySQL is not something I have any interest in doing and with the MySQL Zealotry being almost equal to Linux I don't think I'll find much interest.
Except RSS and Usenet aren't very good for mailing out my phone bill records including all the phone numbers I've dialed in the last month. I would rather have that in a private email that public knowledge.
If you consider Microsoft's Surface is $5,000 so you can place a camera on your table and have it move photos around...
Considering the cameras are starting to do blue tooth on their own, not sure that you need all that much more for moving files around. But who ami I? I'm not a marketing dick, I'm just Joe User when it comes to interconnecting devices. It's awfully convenient that all the devices are now starting to use a single common form for USB connectors -- means I only really need one cable for everything.
The confirmation of an email address isn't valuable anymore. It's too easy to get real addresses en masse without anyone confirming the address. There once was a time when people would pay big money for lists of confirmed email addresses as a list for spamming. I don't know that there is much value in this anymore.
The process of sending spam is basically Fire and Forget so there's no added value to having a confirmation to the address. I have many records where people try to send email to random names or even characters on my domain and none of them could have ever been confirmed. And they keep coming. Add to that the back-scatter spam and you've no need for addresses being confirmed.
Go ahead, confirm your address. The spammers already have it and they don't really care if it's confirmed or not. They'll keep using it for months to come. And at least it gives the legitimate mailings a chance to play honest and opt you out without getting punched in the nose.
For legitimate purposes, if the sender provides and opt-out mechanism then it's the consumers responsiblity to use it and the marketers responsibility to honor it without qualification. But if you don't provide this mechanism then you should be labelled spam and prosecuted.
Detroit DSL coverage resembles swiss cheese. T1 costs $100/month. It's the previous posters options of Pay, Dial, Fuck Yourself.
And we're supposed to act surprised that America is trailing in internet connectivity and bandwidth? Between the lack of free market and the government manipulations of the entire industry I suspect we'll quickly fall behind everyone and then go on a spree of "regime change".
Maybe we would have been better off if the Constitution called for a seperation of Corporate and State instead of a seperation of Church and State. Or maybe we need both...
I was thinking of the repercussion as something you would experience if you were using a bayesian filter.
If you tag indiscriminantly everything that you don't want delivered for any reason, they you will start getting more false positives because it's an adaptive AI process. There is a little care and feeding of the whole filtering process you have to pay attention to.
I don't believe that AOL is going to use something like this. If you tag email as spam, AOL takes it upon themselves to send you a warning email and if you don't opt them out they black list you (eventually). What would be a repercussion to the consumer is the eventual increase in false positives -- giving the consumer a repercussion to their indiscriminant feedbacks. No one is made aware that there is an effect.
And just to clarify -- I'm not talking here about the obviously unsolicited email, but the email that is solicited but no longer wanted. The consumer took a positive action to get the email and now no longer wants it. What I am definitely not talking about here is the email that you never asked for, or where opted-in by means of fine print that few can even read at light grey and 6pt font.
They didn't. They can't. They have to verbally get the email address from the consumer as part of the verbal conversation of "Would you like our monthly newsletter?" Kind of difficult to hide something like that in a fine print. I suppose they could whisper...
More likely they don't default everyone in and more likely that they did exactly what they described because that is exactly what we saw happening.
More likely you aren't thinking of how users might behave.
I think part of the problem is that spam filters are generally broken and don't work that well. Part of the problem is that no one has seriously thought about how crappy the approach is. The other part of the problem is that their is little or no personal ownership of the filtering of spam.
When the ISP/customer have no relationship on identification of what is spam the ISP has to aim really high and take the approach that anything that is obviously spam is not delivered and everything else is. The net effect is the ISP might not deliver porn spam, but they'll deliver many other things with impunity. If there was a more aggressive involvement of the customer/consumer of the email then you could better tune the filters to match each user better.
SpamAssassin is the worse offender. It's origination was to do static regex checks and add points for each hit. And when you were done, the points put you either IN or OUT. But in order for SA to work you have to tune the number of points added for each regex test. And this is constantly changing. But for it to work, you have to be constantly monitoring the results. No one does this on a consistent basis.
A critical drawback with their approach is the constant game of catch-up they have to play in order to get the filtering to work correctly and then someone has to run some update script to hopefully get everything working correctly. Again, this has to be done continually like the tuning or it will start to fail.
Bayesian filters offered a great alternative but they quickly turned into their own problems. SA uses Bayes, but it's not effective because of the lack of feedback from the consumer (in most cases). It's also prone to over-rides by their own auto-whitelisting. Convenient, but deadly. Where Bayes lacks goes back to the original problems of non-customized feedback and involvement. It's very inconvenient to try and set up something like bogofilter to run for every individual in a group of 1000's so the mail admin makes one file for everyone thereby generalizing the statistics and making them less effective because they have to be good enough for everyone but not so good they remove any of the really serious spam.
And yes, SA does user specific Bayes filtering. I used it for three months and it sucked. It was not a very effective spam filtering system even with user specific bayesian filtering included. It's also getting pretty darn slow. Slow enough to become a consideration.
DSpam is effective, customized, and slower than molasses in january. It will also lose email. But YMMV and I don't really care to hear about how great it is. I lost a lot of email and a lot of money as the result of it. Perhaps some day they can get their act together, but there will always be a severe performance penalty for CRM114. But Bayesian filtering can still compete with CRM statistical success with 100X performance increase.
So what do you do about spam filtering?
The technology exists to effectively and efficiently filter spam. But that's not the problem. The technology that is used today is relatively lame because there are shortcomings abound that prevent a good solution for someone really large (like an ISP).
The problem is to redefine how the consumer is going to own their own spam filtering effectiveness. No more auto-whitelist. No more auto-blacklist, No more auto-update of Bayesian tokens. All of these can be carefully manipulated to taint the statistics and allow delivery in droves. The consumer must take ownership of their mailbox in the same manner that they are expected to take ownership of their credit card information on the internet.
Might be more effective if we killed the assholes who actually bought this stuff
They're probably responsible for a lot of stupidity in the world. Buying herbal "Biggus Dickus" cream is only one of them. Hell, if you want your dick bigger, try Jergens and rub it on thoroughly...
If he tags what you sent as confirmation to his request, what do you think the chances are that they will also tag your newsletter?
A lot of AOL users tag messages as SPAM when they don't want to see them anymore. It's easier than opting-out and so they abuse the process. They have no repercussions to their actions.
But a lot of users do this. I see it in my house where I run my own mail server and my own spam filter. It's a bayesian filter so you have to tell it when it was wrong. Wife won't tell it anything but she complains about the spam she's getting. Can't help her. She's being obstinant and dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
You are making the fantastically gross assumption that my car and her car are the same and therefore I have a $14,000 expense. Two cars...
However, she did trade in her SUV for a diesel car and the difference in fuel savings more than compensated for the newer car insurance and car payments. The difference on trade in value was made up in 5 months. That was two years ago.
I would suggest that when you are writing code that is in excess of 80 columns you might be trying to do too much in one line. Sure I can write almost an entire program in one line with perl, but that doesn't mean anyone can understand what the heck I'm doing with it. But if I don't attempt to make everything fit into one line then I'm also going to tend towards more readable code, not more condensed.
I've been writing my own programs for a while now and have learned one thing from Perl Best Practices and a few other writings. Don't get cute with your code. If you can't read it easily then you can't maintain it either. I suppose you might have an argument for 132 columns if you can find most books and publications written in 132 columns. But I suspect you'll have a hard time with that.
The point in code, IMHO, is to make it readable. That's more important today than just about anything else. Computers are fast enough that you can afford to make some performance sacrifices for the sake of readability or ease of maintenance. If you need the speed, then write the program in machine language.
Nothing to be skeptical about. The temperatures where the ground tanks are stored are stable enough that the water temperature from city water systems (at the same depth) effectively do not vary noticeably. Google water temperature variations underground and see for yourself. I found one article about Mexico with a 0.02% variation at 30cm. These storage tanks are stored meters underground and are significantly better insulated.
Similarly, if these were really true then geothermal systems wouldn't work.
Of course, using this logic, if you live in Minnesota then you should be fined for driving in the winter where the fuel is more dense and therefore you get more driving for your dollar. Or do we just move along with life and call it a wash?
I changed my fuel consumption by a 70% decrease in cost by changing to a diesel engine and bio-diesel. Now I can get 46MPG for $2.79 a gallon. Sure beats my wifes 16MPG at $3.09 in her SUV. Her choice, my savings.
Verizon is not in a position where they feel a need to bargain with anyone. Unfortunately, their coverage or service has declined considerable over the past few years. But what can you do?
How many GSM providers are nationwide in the USA? AT&T, T-Mobile, anyone else?
They couldnt' set up a service with Verizon Wireless (an example) because they just don't do GSM technology.
It's unfortunate that AT&T is so clueless on this coming out of the gate. I think the iPhone has mind numbing potential. GSM is the right choice if you consider a world wide market, but not for US market, because GSM is more widely used globally. Economy of scale in units manufactured dictate that they go with GSM for a global market.
If you look at the techcentric nations of the world, the United States is not the leading country. We don't have the digital high speed cellular networks or internet broad band speeds of other nations. I just don't think you can safely market a product of this type to only the USA when we have a global market to consider.
Gee, and Microsoft never did this? Give me a break. What a bunch of whining dorks.
Apple has never had much success with trying to work with Microsoft, why should they start now?
Maybe this will give you enough reason to at least try a Mac to find out what you've been missing.
I think it is ironic that the very mechanism that makes gaming so successful is the same mechanism that makes it so addictive.
It's similar in psychological terms as gambling. There's a reward systemt that is put in place, designed specifically by psychologists, to maximize the retention of the gamer to stay with the game. Originally this meant they would pump quarters into Astroids until they missed their car payments. But it's still the same basic process. All brought to you by the same people who make gambling products.
Face it. It's not an addiction. It's an overly successful implementation of exactly what the gaming company attempted to produce. A game you can't give up and will gladly pay for in the next version.
First, too bad for AT&T and Apple. The only place you can get the iPhone these days is through AT&T and this puts a black mark against AT&T for anything internet related.
Second, you bet your sweet ass they are dismanteling the internet. They've been trying to do it for a decade now and they will succeed unless someone starts making a fight against the asswipes who complain about the internet content or make up stories about it's harmful.
The reality is the Internet is a reflection of society.
As an example...
The only difference is you have to travel farther to get to interact with hookers and dance clubs than you do web pornography. But all the sex is still out there and it's not going away. Same with anything else that someone might want to consider illegal, immoral, or unethical. The key distinction here is that as a society we agree to what is illegal through concensus of the laws and efforts to change it through a legal process. But ethics and morality are not legislatively controlled in this country just yet. If my daughter wants to dress like a three dollar whore there's no law against it except for indecent exposure.
But her dress is only permitted within public areas. She can't go to school like that and probably can't work at Bennigans dressed like that either. These institutions have and extension of the the legal rules of dress that is permitted because the society represented within that institution has agreed to an extended version of the legislative legal limitations (indecent exposure becomes dress code or uniforms). As long as the societal subsection that is the institution understands that their laws of the school or business are not implicitly enforced by government law then everyone is happy.
Where we get into trouble is when someone steps out of the school and sees someone who is in violation of the school dress code, is not in the school, and is not in violation of the indecent exposure law. They take it upon themselves to declare the individual in violation of a law that doesn't exist. Sure they might look slutty or offensive, but it's not against the law.
Where we get into a lot of trouble is no one has a good argument for stating something that on the surface appears to be, "We support slutty looking girls on the street." because that can be twisted into something it's not. And today's government in the US has a tendency to react to someone complaining loudly enough even when they aren't representing the majority of the society.
This isn't too far from what the sharia law can do to a country. With sufficient effort, a small group of over zealous people can enforce upon the society their ideals of what the law should be and they apply it to non-muslims as well. Taliban did this. They were a small group of people who relied on the ability to make outcries that if you didn't follow sharia law you were an infidile. Western countries might consider this extreme, but Christrians aren't so free of sin that they can cast the first stone either. It's just that sharia law is more current and example.
So where does this make the internet and AT&T important? AT&T has taken it upon themselves to start applying their own ethical regulations, extending the law beyond what they indended to do, without disclosure to the customers, giving customers the option to refuse their ethical extensions, or permitting the affected sites an opportunity to appeal their decisions. They are making up their own opinion of what's right and what's wrong and they are not a government legislature.
They could offer an option in their accounts to allow the consumer to opt-in to a safe-mode account status where they are filtered to death and everything is safe and wonderful. This would give them the ability to appeal to those who want that ethical extension without violating the choices of others to decide for themselves what might be unethical or not.
And if you reply to this posting tha
Everyone I know with a Mac has dropped Safari for Mozilla. If Jobs spends any effort in trying to subvert Mozilla on either Mac or Windows he will only hurt his own company by mismanagement of resources and presenting an inconsistent face to the community.
Safari is OK but Mozilla is much better and is the best candidate for a unified browser across all platforms. I'm not saying it's the only one, but it's the best candidate for it.
It's a bogus argument.
First, the money lost in the type of piracy mentioned has subjective dollar figures attached to it. If I steal a song it doesn't mean that no one in the world will purchase the album that it came on. Very difficult to be accurate.
But the real issue when prioritizing crimes is what is the affect upon the human beings who is victimized?
Theft is apparent and easy to measure. Piracy against a Mega_Corp is vague at best. I don't think there is any real damage done to the people who work there below a certain level of piracy activity.
I can't comment on any of that, but I find it difficult to believe that you can have a 3,000 pound bird that is only twice the size of man being capable of flight. Rather it might be capable of plummet, thereby making it extinct.
That's like a flying SUV only the size of a Triumph TR-7. It makes for a very dense bird.
Well, I don't think anyone realistically believes you can save money by cafeteria channel selection. So it's likely a back door project to legalize cafeteria pricing so the channels you purchase today can be even more expensive tomorrow. Personally I like have some non-standard channels around. Sometimes they have really intersting stuff on them. But I don't know about them at the time I make my cafeteria selections.
I don't think I mind the content regulations. I'm getting tired of a show, in order to make ratings, push the boundaries on vulgar unimaginative programming. When you have to be funny without swearing or refering to body parts or body functions, it does require you to be a little more creative.
I was thinking of a similar problem that he is going to face.
Closed source software development has a serious drawback. It's very expensive to manage and develop. I'm working on a project today that I don't feel is worth releasing for others to see -- making it effectively closed source.
As a result, development is slow and difficult because every bug I run into is entirely mine to solve.
All the code changes are done on my time. No one else is spending time on anything: documentation, testing, user interface...
I am not an expert in all things so I have to sit down and spend days learning a lot of detail about things that I just never expected to deal with.
I'm just about ready to try releasing this but for me, I'm not sure how/where to do this. Not sure I want to give my code to sourceforge or if anyone is interested in yet another spam filter. Especially if it runs only on postgresql databases. Transitioning to MySQL is not something I have any interest in doing and with the MySQL Zealotry being almost equal to Linux I don't think I'll find much interest.
Forward your email through your ISP or pay for a static IP address that isn't in the DHCP subnet
Except RSS and Usenet aren't very good for mailing out my phone bill records including all the phone numbers I've dialed in the last month. I would rather have that in a private email that public knowledge.
If you consider Microsoft's Surface is $5,000 so you can place a camera on your table and have it move photos around...
Considering the cameras are starting to do blue tooth on their own, not sure that you need all that much more for moving files around. But who ami I? I'm not a marketing dick, I'm just Joe User when it comes to interconnecting devices. It's awfully convenient that all the devices are now starting to use a single common form for USB connectors -- means I only really need one cable for everything.
Ten years ago I would agree. But now I don't.
The confirmation of an email address isn't valuable anymore. It's too easy to get real addresses en masse without anyone confirming the address. There once was a time when people would pay big money for lists of confirmed email addresses as a list for spamming. I don't know that there is much value in this anymore.
The process of sending spam is basically Fire and Forget so there's no added value to having a confirmation to the address. I have many records where people try to send email to random names or even characters on my domain and none of them could have ever been confirmed. And they keep coming. Add to that the back-scatter spam and you've no need for addresses being confirmed.
Go ahead, confirm your address. The spammers already have it and they don't really care if it's confirmed or not. They'll keep using it for months to come. And at least it gives the legitimate mailings a chance to play honest and opt you out without getting punched in the nose.
For legitimate purposes, if the sender provides and opt-out mechanism then it's the consumers responsiblity to use it and the marketers responsibility to honor it without qualification. But if you don't provide this mechanism then you should be labelled spam and prosecuted.
Detroit DSL coverage resembles swiss cheese. T1 costs $100/month. It's the previous posters options of Pay, Dial, Fuck Yourself.
And we're supposed to act surprised that America is trailing in internet connectivity and bandwidth? Between the lack of free market and the government manipulations of the entire industry I suspect we'll quickly fall behind everyone and then go on a spree of "regime change".
Maybe we would have been better off if the Constitution called for a seperation of Corporate and State instead of a seperation of Church and State. Or maybe we need both...
I was thinking of the repercussion as something you would experience if you were using a bayesian filter.
If you tag indiscriminantly everything that you don't want delivered for any reason, they you will start getting more false positives because it's an adaptive AI process. There is a little care and feeding of the whole filtering process you have to pay attention to.
I don't believe that AOL is going to use something like this. If you tag email as spam, AOL takes it upon themselves to send you a warning email and if you don't opt them out they black list you (eventually). What would be a repercussion to the consumer is the eventual increase in false positives -- giving the consumer a repercussion to their indiscriminant feedbacks. No one is made aware that there is an effect.
And just to clarify -- I'm not talking here about the obviously unsolicited email, but the email that is solicited but no longer wanted. The consumer took a positive action to get the email and now no longer wants it. What I am definitely not talking about here is the email that you never asked for, or where opted-in by means of fine print that few can even read at light grey and 6pt font.
They didn't. They can't. They have to verbally get the email address from the consumer as part of the verbal conversation of "Would you like our monthly newsletter?" Kind of difficult to hide something like that in a fine print. I suppose they could whisper...
More likely they don't default everyone in and more likely that they did exactly what they described because that is exactly what we saw happening.
More likely you aren't thinking of how users might behave.
You'll still have to kill her...
I won't tell anybody...
I think part of the problem is that spam filters are generally broken and don't work that well. Part of the problem is that no one has seriously thought about how crappy the approach is. The other part of the problem is that their is little or no personal ownership of the filtering of spam.
When the ISP/customer have no relationship on identification of what is spam the ISP has to aim really high and take the approach that anything that is obviously spam is not delivered and everything else is. The net effect is the ISP might not deliver porn spam, but they'll deliver many other things with impunity. If there was a more aggressive involvement of the customer/consumer of the email then you could better tune the filters to match each user better.
SpamAssassin is the worse offender. It's origination was to do static regex checks and add points for each hit. And when you were done, the points put you either IN or OUT. But in order for SA to work you have to tune the number of points added for each regex test. And this is constantly changing. But for it to work, you have to be constantly monitoring the results. No one does this on a consistent basis.
A critical drawback with their approach is the constant game of catch-up they have to play in order to get the filtering to work correctly and then someone has to run some update script to hopefully get everything working correctly. Again, this has to be done continually like the tuning or it will start to fail.
Bayesian filters offered a great alternative but they quickly turned into their own problems. SA uses Bayes, but it's not effective because of the lack of feedback from the consumer (in most cases). It's also prone to over-rides by their own auto-whitelisting. Convenient, but deadly. Where Bayes lacks goes back to the original problems of non-customized feedback and involvement. It's very inconvenient to try and set up something like bogofilter to run for every individual in a group of 1000's so the mail admin makes one file for everyone thereby generalizing the statistics and making them less effective because they have to be good enough for everyone but not so good they remove any of the really serious spam.
And yes, SA does user specific Bayes filtering. I used it for three months and it sucked. It was not a very effective spam filtering system even with user specific bayesian filtering included. It's also getting pretty darn slow. Slow enough to become a consideration.
DSpam is effective, customized, and slower than molasses in january. It will also lose email. But YMMV and I don't really care to hear about how great it is. I lost a lot of email and a lot of money as the result of it. Perhaps some day they can get their act together, but there will always be a severe performance penalty for CRM114. But Bayesian filtering can still compete with CRM statistical success with 100X performance increase.
So what do you do about spam filtering?
The technology exists to effectively and efficiently filter spam. But that's not the problem. The technology that is used today is relatively lame because there are shortcomings abound that prevent a good solution for someone really large (like an ISP).
The problem is to redefine how the consumer is going to own their own spam filtering effectiveness. No more auto-whitelist. No more auto-blacklist, No more auto-update of Bayesian tokens. All of these can be carefully manipulated to taint the statistics and allow delivery in droves. The consumer must take ownership of their mailbox in the same manner that they are expected to take ownership of their credit card information on the internet.
Might be more effective if we killed the assholes who actually bought this stuff
They're probably responsible for a lot of stupidity in the world. Buying herbal "Biggus Dickus" cream is only one of them. Hell, if you want your dick bigger, try Jergens and rub it on thoroughly...
That's about all I get in my postal mailbox. Where have you been?
If he tags what you sent as confirmation to his request, what do you think the chances are that they will also tag your newsletter?
A lot of AOL users tag messages as SPAM when they don't want to see them anymore. It's easier than opting-out and so they abuse the process. They have no repercussions to their actions.
But a lot of users do this. I see it in my house where I run my own mail server and my own spam filter. It's a bayesian filter so you have to tell it when it was wrong. Wife won't tell it anything but she complains about the spam she's getting. Can't help her. She's being obstinant and dumb.