The real problem with spam after all is not the spammers but the people who respond to it, if nobody bought from spam
A lot of forum and blog spam is designed to be read by Google's searchbot, to increase the ranking of their links. So even if no human reads, or clicks on it, they've got what they want. I often come across neglected forums where no real posts have been made for months or years, but hundreds or thousands of spam messages are posted.
I think if they simply made an option in the privacy settings...
That would make people feel more comfortable, they'll probably do something like that. But of course their privacy is just as flimsy as ever. People don't care until there are consequences, when it's too late.
There IS a difference between information being publicly available and information being broadcast.
Now you've redefined the argument and made me a straw man. I never mentioned "broadcasting" at all. I said anyone who wanted to know about you could have before. Including "stalkers" or anyone else; the difference now is not what is known but that you know that they know. So you feel more embarrassed. Lame analogy: it's like walking around with your fly unzipped. You're not embarrassed until you notice it. But your reputation suffers regardless.
it's exceedingly unlikely that there's any coal or oil there.
No chance of this administration colonising it then. (It's interesting, and sad, to note that the cost of the occupation of Iraq for one year is more than the highest estimate of a Mars return mission, ca. $100 billion.)
Try explaining to your girlfriend why you won't set your profile to read "in a relationship" with her. I'll give you a hint: as much sense as your argument makes, all she is going to hear is "I'm not that important to you."
Get a tattoo instead. At least you can get rid of that if you really want to.
Then again, I guess most people here would never have that problem
I'm married. With a kid. So I can't back out of that by changing a web profile.
I must admit I'm just speculating. As a chicken might who sees the farmer sharpening his axe. MS probably claims such patents are purely defensive. Nevertheless, they provide a deterrent to smaller players, and it would give leverage if they wanted to buy up some promising technology.
what Microsoft has actually done is patented a specific method
The "specific method" is not very specific, it covers just about any way of doing it. So MS has a big club to beat any small company who makes a widget that achieves the same result, because they have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a patent lawyer to defend themselves, even if it's "obvious" their work was original. Ultimately, it just scares anyone away from even trying.
It's a patent on automatically providing all of the different possible conjugation forms of any verb on the fly, which is something I, for one, haven't seen before...
You're still so damn sure that publicly available and publicly announced are the same thing? There IS a difference, and you're just too damn dense to see it.
I'm not the guy you're abusing, but anyway: the difference between "anounced" and "available" in this case is whether someone bothers to mine the "available" data and make it "announced". That can happen at any time, and it's actually fortunate that it happened in this case in the open, and made everyone aware of it. Lots of your data is "announced" to people you definitely would not like to share it with. Instead of fleeting embarrassment, you would suffer much more from that. The only way to keep any control is not to release it online.
No, you do not understand. It is one thing to have one's profile say "In a Relationship with So and So" one day and "Single" the next, with no way for the viewer to know what it said previously without having viewed that profile earlier.
I don't understand either. You document your "being in a relationship" on a website, change it later, and are surprised that anyone notices. Everyone who you would want to know about this would know from real life (or a personal communication), not a website. Anyone who's "stalking" you online would have noticed the change anyway. So what's different?
Putting your romantic life on a website is an extraordinarily bad and naive idea. Put stuff online, the world knows, forever. Learn that now.
I didn't mod my post up. As for the rest, whatever, I can't be bothered to work through your misspellings, insults and tortured prose to continue a discussion that ended four days ago.
There are hundreds of non-Muslim countries in the world, and few of them suffer attacks by "Muslim terrorists".
It's only for lack of opportunity. In almost every place in the world where Muslim countries border non-Muslim countries, there is strife and terror and bloodshed. This is a fact not open to argumentation.
Perhaps. The US doesn't border any Muslim countries. Yet you are a target.
You are quite wrong. Osama and many other Muslim leaders have stated quite clearly that they intend to conquer the world
Yes, and so has Steve Ballmer. He's gotten further. Osama leads a few dozen or at most a few hundred people.
Captchas are designed to be difficult to OCR. Besides there are plenty of OCR apps around already, if you hadn't noticed. I don't think spammers have been holding out for a GPL one.
Who are they trying to catch, the really thick terrorists
All terrorists aren't masterminds.
First WTC bombing, 1993.
On February 23, Salameh went to a Ryder rental agency to rent the van to carry the bomb. On the morning of February 26, the conspirators gathered at a local Shell gas station where they topped up the tank--one last explosive touch--before driving to Manhattan. Shortly after noon, the bomb went off... Salameh looks to have been deliberately left behind by Yousef, not provided with money he needed for a plane ticket.... Needing more money for an adult fare, he tried to get his van deposit back by telling the rental agency that the van had been stolen. With either desperate or inane persistence, he returned three times before he was finally arrested on March 4.
So you're saying we should profile the nervous looking people ?
Basically, that's what Schneier says. You still randomly search, but you also have a few experienced security guys who just follow their instincts. (You do need to get guys smart enough not to just search all the swarthy young men.) The combination of randomness plus human skills should be the best, but this doesn't fit into the usual bureaucratic rule-driven model that is always one step behind current events.
After the 9/11 attacks, we only clobbered the Taliban. Since it was clearly an Islamic oriented attack, backed by numerous Muslims in a handful of countries, we should have nuked Medina
That would have worked real well. For a start, no more oil. And for the next 500 years, a never-ending stream of suicide bombers in your churches, shopping malls, subways, hospitals, schools...
I'm sorry we exist and don't believe in Allah.
Because if we either convert to islam or cease to exist then they won't kill us.
There are hundreds of non-Muslim countries in the world, and few of them suffer attacks by "Muslim terrorists". Some countries have separatists (Basques, Irish, etc), others are targetted because they're seen as butting in to other countries' affairs. Americans persist in saying "They hate us because we're free!" If you were free in California, Osama wouldn't give a shit. It's when you impose regime change on Middle Eastern countries (eg, Iran, 1953), support corrupt monarchies (Saudi Arabia), and of course Israel that you become a target. Whether any of these interventions is moral or sensible or sustainable (well, Iran didn't work out too well) is not in issue here, but you certainly must be ready to face the consequences of playing the Great Game. But losing perhaps one person to terrorism for every 1000 killed by your troops isn't a bad ratio, surely?
Liberals (feminists) have long hated that you have to actually be convicted of a crime (as in, evidence, facts, deliberation) before being considered guilty of rape.
What wacky definition of "Liberal" do you use that this is true of?
mixed case file names that work on Windows but not on a Linux webserver
In my experience, mixed case is respected by Linux but not Windows (e.g. if you're testing links on your Windows box, FILE.HTML is the same as File.html; but on Linux they're distinct), which is I assume is what is meant. I use a tiny DOS app called tolow which makes all filenames lowercase, as Windows apps often do capitalise names spontaneously.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of forum and blog spam is designed to be read by Google's searchbot, to increase the ranking of their links. So even if no human reads, or clicks on it, they've got what they want. I often come across neglected forums where no real posts have been made for months or years, but hundreds or thousands of spam messages are posted.
If "many" did this, the spammers would just use proxies in the US. Though one local board I use does block .ru.
That would make people feel more comfortable, they'll probably do something like that. But of course their privacy is just as flimsy as ever. People don't care until there are consequences, when it's too late.
Now you've redefined the argument and made me a straw man. I never mentioned "broadcasting" at all. I said anyone who wanted to know about you could have before. Including "stalkers" or anyone else; the difference now is not what is known but that you know that they know. So you feel more embarrassed. Lame analogy: it's like walking around with your fly unzipped. You're not embarrassed until you notice it. But your reputation suffers regardless.
Except for slash and burn in the Amazon rainforest. They're destroying 52,000 square kilometers per year.
No chance of this administration colonising it then. (It's interesting, and sad, to note that the cost of the occupation of Iraq for one year is more than the highest estimate of a Mars return mission, ca. $100 billion.)
Get a tattoo instead. At least you can get rid of that if you really want to.
Then again, I guess most people here would never have that problem
I'm married. With a kid. So I can't back out of that by changing a web profile.
RTFA.
Not even that. They're only showing 11 of the 15 episodes.
I must admit I'm just speculating. As a chicken might who sees the farmer sharpening his axe. MS probably claims such patents are purely defensive. Nevertheless, they provide a deterrent to smaller players, and it would give leverage if they wanted to buy up some promising technology.
The "specific method" is not very specific, it covers just about any way of doing it. So MS has a big club to beat any small company who makes a widget that achieves the same result, because they have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a patent lawyer to defend themselves, even if it's "obvious" their work was original. Ultimately, it just scares anyone away from even trying.
Look in a dictionary.
I'm not the guy you're abusing, but anyway: the difference between "anounced" and "available" in this case is whether someone bothers to mine the "available" data and make it "announced". That can happen at any time, and it's actually fortunate that it happened in this case in the open, and made everyone aware of it. Lots of your data is "announced" to people you definitely would not like to share it with. Instead of fleeting embarrassment, you would suffer much more from that. The only way to keep any control is not to release it online.
I don't understand either. You document your "being in a relationship" on a website, change it later, and are surprised that anyone notices. Everyone who you would want to know about this would know from real life (or a personal communication), not a website. Anyone who's "stalking" you online would have noticed the change anyway. So what's different?
Putting your romantic life on a website is an extraordinarily bad and naive idea. Put stuff online, the world knows, forever. Learn that now.
I didn't mod my post up. As for the rest, whatever, I can't be bothered to work through your misspellings, insults and tortured prose to continue a discussion that ended four days ago.
It's only for lack of opportunity. In almost every place in the world where Muslim countries border non-Muslim countries, there is strife and terror and bloodshed. This is a fact not open to argumentation.
Perhaps. The US doesn't border any Muslim countries. Yet you are a target.
You are quite wrong. Osama and many other Muslim leaders have stated quite clearly that they intend to conquer the world
Yes, and so has Steve Ballmer. He's gotten further. Osama leads a few dozen or at most a few hundred people.
Captchas are designed to be difficult to OCR. Besides there are plenty of OCR apps around already, if you hadn't noticed. I don't think spammers have been holding out for a GPL one.
All terrorists aren't masterminds. First WTC bombing, 1993.
Basically, that's what Schneier says. You still randomly search, but you also have a few experienced security guys who just follow their instincts. (You do need to get guys smart enough not to just search all the swarthy young men.) The combination of randomness plus human skills should be the best, but this doesn't fit into the usual bureaucratic rule-driven model that is always one step behind current events.
That would have worked real well. For a start, no more oil. And for the next 500 years, a never-ending stream of suicide bombers in your churches, shopping malls, subways, hospitals, schools...
There are hundreds of non-Muslim countries in the world, and few of them suffer attacks by "Muslim terrorists". Some countries have separatists (Basques, Irish, etc), others are targetted because they're seen as butting in to other countries' affairs. Americans persist in saying "They hate us because we're free!" If you were free in California, Osama wouldn't give a shit. It's when you impose regime change on Middle Eastern countries (eg, Iran, 1953), support corrupt monarchies (Saudi Arabia), and of course Israel that you become a target. Whether any of these interventions is moral or sensible or sustainable (well, Iran didn't work out too well) is not in issue here, but you certainly must be ready to face the consequences of playing the Great Game. But losing perhaps one person to terrorism for every 1000 killed by your troops isn't a bad ratio, surely?
Maybe you shouldn't have made a wall-to-wall generalization then.
So the feminists control the judicial system? I thought that was the Jews? I must be out of touch.
What wacky definition of "Liberal" do you use that this is true of?