No, he was probably thinking more about concrete shoes in the harbor or just a knife tearing violently through spammer flesh - again and again and again and again...
Fine, then discrimination is not necessarily a bad thing. And the result is that I don't have to improve my authentication method. After all, discrimination isn't a bad thing.
You are watering down "discrimination" to not even be a negative word anymore.
If that's what you want, I'm not going to argue with that, because the nex time someone who does not understand English accuse my site of discriminating against them, I will just smile to them and then ignore them. For example.
"We have tons of spam (a minor inconvenience, if anything) versus discriminating against a group of people."
Damn, my site is in English only. I AM DISCRIMINATING AGAINST THOSE WHO DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH! I am a bad person indeed, and must be flogged in public!
If I run a site, who says I have an obligation to give anyone access to my site? I can block whoever I want to block.
And here you come, Mr. spam apologist, blaming sites for trying to prevent spam. Oh my GOD, it means that some people can't gain access!
Well guess what, the problem isn't the site. The site is just trying to stay in business. The problem is spam. Spam is the very reason this is being done. And here you come:
"We have tons of spam (a minor inconvenience, if anything)"
Spam leads to these countermeasures, which inconveniences blind people. But then you call spam a minor inconvenience. In other words, you are the one trivializing the problems blind people are facing.
And what if the site didn't use anti-spam measures? Maybe it would go out of business. And then no one would be able to use its services. Maybe that is a better option to you?
You look like a big hypocrite and bigot. You call other people selfish and egotistic, but at the same time, you are the one trivializing the spam problem and the problems it leads to, such as sites having to take countermeasures, which again leads to problems for people with disabilities.
If anyone is in favor of discrimination here, it would be you.
I hate it when some spam apologist has the nerve to claim that spam isn't really much of a problem for most people. It is a major problem to me, and also to my ISP when I am at home. At work, it is a huge problem to our network administrator(s). My non-geek friends even comment on the huge amount of junk they receive. And these are people who are part of the "clueless masses" most of the time.
"I don't see why the hell Slashdotters are so upset about spam. It's really not much of a problem for most people, given that we now have fairly nice filters that manage to virtually eliminate it."
Slashdotters and millions of others are upset about spam because it wastes our bandwidth, time and money. When I am on a dialup connection, I pay for the time I am connected. I am appalled by your claim that spam "really isn't a problem".
I get at least 40-50 spam mails a day. Put together, these are often several hundred KB of data which I must download over my dialup. And the amount of spam I receive is limited compared to what other people are getting because I've stopped publishing my address and tried to have it removed from anywhere it can be gathered by a spammer.
If I am away for a few days, I have a lot of spam to deal with - and I do it manually. I have to read through the headers to see which ones are spam before I read my "real" mail. This takes time.
So how can this not be a problem to me? I waste several minutes each day battling spam in my inbox. I waste several minutes downloading it, and it costs me money. I waste several minutes wasting bandwidth on something I could have used for something else.
"Please don't tell me it costs anything extra for the ISP to receive more e-mail. If it did, running a mailing list would be prohibitively expensive."
If the network admins at work had you in front of them right now, they would probably strangle you. Have you any idea how much time they spend battling spam? But since you seem to be fairly clueless about this, I would probably stop them and try to tell you a little thing or two, such as the many stories about spam on Slashdot. These include stories about ISPs almost going out of business because of spam. You didn't read these? Obviously not.
And your mailing list comment is just completely ridiculous. Mailing lists are legitimate traffic, and to reduce the load, the mailing list admin or server admin can limit the size of mails, delay the sending of mails, and so on. How on earth can you even try to compare spam with running a mailing list? If a mailing list takes up too much bandwidth or similar, one can just pull the plug on it. Spam, on the other hand, cannot be controlled without spending a lot of time on it.
Great, maybe you have your shiny new bayesian filter running right now, and there are "no problems" for you. But guess what, spam is increasing the cost of running ISPs. Without spam, your connection might even have been cheaper because bandwidth cost would have gone down! What about your employer? Do you work in an IT company? Does it run its own mail server? I am sure your network admin would be happy to teach you a thing or two about the realities.
If it sounds like I'm pissed off now, it's because I am. You have the nerve to trivialize a problem which wastes millions of people's time, money and bandwidth.
"en you need to go back later and find that really cool site on that topic that just happened to come up again a few days later and ooh, it was so relevant and full of meaty info and if I could just rememeber the keywords I used to find it . .."
Using the Notes feature in Opera, you can select text on the page and add it as a note. You can then search your notes for that text, and open the relevant note to go to the page the text came from.
And the e-mail client in Opera 7, M2, has a new approach to organizing mail: No more boring folder sorting. Every "folder" is really a "search" into a central database where all mail is stored. You can view mail by contact, by mailing list, by attachment, or you can create your own "rules" or access points, or use labels. You have several "angles" to view your mail from. M2 isn't a browser, but it's built into a browser so...
Anyway, if Marc is quoted correctly (and was not only referring to MSIE as it sounded like), he must have been asleep for the past few years. But I don't think he meant browsers in general - just MSIE.
By the way, what about small-screen rendering which reformats a page so it can fit on a smaller screen, or just several pages lined up with SSR in each? What about zooming (both text and graphics)? What about spatial navigation - using the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate around on a page? What about Hotclick which gives you access to several features, including dictionary, translation and searching? What about blocking popups?
Maybe the basic navigation is the same because it works?
And what about user style sheets, letting the user customize the way he sees a page? What about Opera's ability to save sets of web pages and choose between them when it starts? What about the Links panel which shows all links on a page, or the Windows panel which lets you manage your windows? What about Opera's ability to create "notes" that are tied to a web page, where you can jot down whatever information about that page you need, or simply use it as a panel of reminders or whatever? What about FastForward and Rewind (rethinking forward and back navigation)? The Wand where you can simply navigate forward to log in on a site (with the username and password stored in the Wand)?
Separately, these are innovations, but put together in a small package, I'd say that it is a major leap ahead since the days of Netscape 4.
Not at all, not with the amount of spam these days. And you still have to download the spam and review it, wasting time. A TV ad is usually clearly an ad, while spam tries to conceal itself and trick you into reading it.
Also, if you had hundreds of TV sets and had to switch all of them to avoid the commercials, and at the same time, someone tried to prevent you from changing the channel or switching back to the ads again, it might have been more similar to spam.
I've said this before in Slashdot discussions regarding spam, but since you bring it up...
I am actually very surprised that no spammers have been murdered or tortured to death by some psycho. After all, the Internet is large, and there are plenty of psychos out there who would be able to do this.
Why hasn't it happened?
Maybe if known (major) spammers started showing up dead - tortured to death, mutilated bodies - the rest would start thinking twice. And the pictures published all over the Internet of course.
Note that I am not saying that anyone should do this - I am not encouraging anyone to kill anyone. I am just wondering why it hasn't happened.
Television adverts can be skipped or ignored. If you don't want to watch them, switch to another channel. The ads will not follow you from channel to channel and be there no matter what you do.
Spam cannot be skipped or ignored. You are forced to download the spam. They are trying to force you to read it. It would be like advertisers on TV trying to block you from changing the channel during ad breaks.
The only problem is that spammers are actively trying to force spam on me by trying to work around filters. This feels like harassment because they are deliberately forcing something on people they know do not want their spam because they have taken measures specifically not to receive it.
Let me put it this way: If I close one of my windows because I hate it when my neighbor sings in his garden, would it not be harassment if he tried to force me to listen to his song by, for instance opening the window, or perhaps rather moving around to another open window?
Well, one can play WC3 without paying for it. You can download the warez version and even play online - on unofficial servers. Bnetd is put to good use, and will continue to be used no matter how hard Blizzard tries to get rid of it.
As for movies, I know about plenty of people who find cinemas a waste of time, who won't give the entertainment industry a penny if they can prevent it, and simply download the latest movies and play them at home, often with large projectors and similar.
So you see, there are solutions. They may not all be legal or moral, but then again, some may justify these actions by pointing out the immoral actions of the entertainment industry. I'm not saying that it's right, but plenty of people do this. And there are even people who don't give a damn about these things and just downloads stuff illegally because it is convenient and they can't be bothered to waste money when it's so easy to get hold of online.
As for your comment about "the Slashdot crowd", it is rather silly. Slashdot is a site with thousands of individuals who all have different opinions. Some may want to boycott Blizzard, some may not. Some hate Microsoft, some do not.
Amusing to see you to try to raise yourself above "the Slashdot crowd" with unenlightened comments like that, especially since you are part of this crowd yourself. So if everyone else doesn't practice what they preach, neither do you - you have implicitly said so yourself.
Communism is actually about getting rid of the government. A temporary government is needed to crush all those who oppose Communism, but when Communism is fully in place, the government steps down.
"Ripping your CD to MP3 is technically making a copy of it, and therefore is against the copyright, and it is definitely making a copy to burn those songs."
I don't quite see that this statement is proven in any way. Copying to send to others, yes, but surely not for personal use?
Sorry, but I think you are wrong here. You don't buy the right to listen to the physical media. You can't listen to the physical media, you listen to the song. You pay for the right to listen to the song. Further, it means that you pay for the right to listen to that song any way you like, as long as it is for personal use. So you can rip it and add it to your MP3 collection, burn a collection CD with your favorite songs, and so on.
You can't pay for the right to listen to the physical media, because you listen to the songs on the media, not the media itself.
Sigh. It never fails. Every time a SCO story is posted, someone has to complain.
Every single SCO story on Slashdot gets a lot of comments - far higher than average. This means that these stories are very, very popular to the readers. Why, pray tell, should Slashdot stop posting popular stories? It doesn't make sense.
As for a new IBM vs. SCO topic - this thing is time limited. When IBM has utterly devastated SCO, there will be nothing more to report.
Please, stop the whining about the SCO stories. They are obviously very popular, so you are a tiny minority. And as the saying goes, if you don't like what's posted on Slashdot, go somewhere else. Simple.
Does Windows really have more software than Linux? Hmm, I always found it difficult to pick between the 30 or so editors, browsers, and so on that come with any distribution of Linux.
Spyware? How can it be "spying" on the user when the installer practically assaults the user with warnings that it will send the URL to Google so it can return the pagerank. How exactly is it supposed to send the pagerank if it can't send the URL to Google anyway?
Ridiculous. You "anti"-spyware freaks are more dangerous than most spyware because you stir up shit and cause hysteria by accusing everything and everyone for spyware. You remove the focus from the actual spyware and sleazeware out there.
You are actually helping spyware companies by causing hysteria and confusion.
Does this really surprise you? Every single action SCO takes shows that the company is run by a bunch of loonies. Either that, or they are just trying to inflate SCO stock to sell it off and get the hell out when the thing collapses.
SCO is obviously grasping for straws here, so it is not at all surprising that they haven't actually thought their actions through. They make things up on the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, then discrimination is not necessarily a bad thing. And the result is that I don't have to improve my authentication method. After all, discrimination isn't a bad thing.
You are watering down "discrimination" to not even be a negative word anymore.
If that's what you want, I'm not going to argue with that, because the nex time someone who does not understand English accuse my site of discriminating against them, I will just smile to them and then ignore them. For example.
If I run a site, who says I have an obligation to give anyone access to my site? I can block whoever I want to block.
And here you come, Mr. spam apologist, blaming sites for trying to prevent spam. Oh my GOD, it means that some people can't gain access!
Well guess what, the problem isn't the site. The site is just trying to stay in business. The problem is spam. Spam is the very reason this is being done. And here you come:
Spam leads to these countermeasures, which inconveniences blind people. But then you call spam a minor inconvenience. In other words, you are the one trivializing the problems blind people are facing.And what if the site didn't use anti-spam measures? Maybe it would go out of business. And then no one would be able to use its services. Maybe that is a better option to you?
You look like a big hypocrite and bigot. You call other people selfish and egotistic, but at the same time, you are the one trivializing the spam problem and the problems it leads to, such as sites having to take countermeasures, which again leads to problems for people with disabilities.
If anyone is in favor of discrimination here, it would be you.
I get at least 40-50 spam mails a day. Put together, these are often several hundred KB of data which I must download over my dialup. And the amount of spam I receive is limited compared to what other people are getting because I've stopped publishing my address and tried to have it removed from anywhere it can be gathered by a spammer.
If I am away for a few days, I have a lot of spam to deal with - and I do it manually. I have to read through the headers to see which ones are spam before I read my "real" mail. This takes time.
So how can this not be a problem to me? I waste several minutes each day battling spam in my inbox. I waste several minutes downloading it, and it costs me money. I waste several minutes wasting bandwidth on something I could have used for something else.
If the network admins at work had you in front of them right now, they would probably strangle you. Have you any idea how much time they spend battling spam? But since you seem to be fairly clueless about this, I would probably stop them and try to tell you a little thing or two, such as the many stories about spam on Slashdot. These include stories about ISPs almost going out of business because of spam. You didn't read these? Obviously not.And your mailing list comment is just completely ridiculous. Mailing lists are legitimate traffic, and to reduce the load, the mailing list admin or server admin can limit the size of mails, delay the sending of mails, and so on. How on earth can you even try to compare spam with running a mailing list? If a mailing list takes up too much bandwidth or similar, one can just pull the plug on it. Spam, on the other hand, cannot be controlled without spending a lot of time on it.
Great, maybe you have your shiny new bayesian filter running right now, and there are "no problems" for you. But guess what, spam is increasing the cost of running ISPs. Without spam, your connection might even have been cheaper because bandwidth cost would have gone down! What about your employer? Do you work in an IT company? Does it run its own mail server? I am sure your network admin would be happy to teach you a thing or two about the realities.
If it sounds like I'm pissed off now, it's because I am. You have the nerve to trivialize a problem which wastes millions of people's time, money and bandwidth.
And the e-mail client in Opera 7, M2, has a new approach to organizing mail: No more boring folder sorting. Every "folder" is really a "search" into a central database where all mail is stored. You can view mail by contact, by mailing list, by attachment, or you can create your own "rules" or access points, or use labels. You have several "angles" to view your mail from. M2 isn't a browser, but it's built into a browser so...
Anyway, if Marc is quoted correctly (and was not only referring to MSIE as it sounded like), he must have been asleep for the past few years. But I don't think he meant browsers in general - just MSIE.
...and so on...
And what about user style sheets, letting the user customize the way he sees a page? What about Opera's ability to save sets of web pages and choose between them when it starts? What about the Links panel which shows all links on a page, or the Windows panel which lets you manage your windows? What about Opera's ability to create "notes" that are tied to a web page, where you can jot down whatever information about that page you need, or simply use it as a panel of reminders or whatever? What about FastForward and Rewind (rethinking forward and back navigation)? The Wand where you can simply navigate forward to log in on a site (with the username and password stored in the Wand)?
Separately, these are innovations, but put together in a small package, I'd say that it is a major leap ahead since the days of Netscape 4.
Innovation lives.
Also, if you had hundreds of TV sets and had to switch all of them to avoid the commercials, and at the same time, someone tried to prevent you from changing the channel or switching back to the ads again, it might have been more similar to spam.
Not only that, but TV ads are regulated by law.
I am actually very surprised that no spammers have been murdered or tortured to death by some psycho. After all, the Internet is large, and there are plenty of psychos out there who would be able to do this.
Why hasn't it happened?
Maybe if known (major) spammers started showing up dead - tortured to death, mutilated bodies - the rest would start thinking twice. And the pictures published all over the Internet of course.
Note that I am not saying that anyone should do this - I am not encouraging anyone to kill anyone. I am just wondering why it hasn't happened.
Spam cannot be skipped or ignored. You are forced to download the spam. They are trying to force you to read it. It would be like advertisers on TV trying to block you from changing the channel during ad breaks.
Let me put it this way: If I close one of my windows because I hate it when my neighbor sings in his garden, would it not be harassment if he tried to force me to listen to his song by, for instance opening the window, or perhaps rather moving around to another open window?
What about the massacre of 1000-2000 Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila, under the command of Ariel Sharon?
As for movies, I know about plenty of people who find cinemas a waste of time, who won't give the entertainment industry a penny if they can prevent it, and simply download the latest movies and play them at home, often with large projectors and similar.
So you see, there are solutions. They may not all be legal or moral, but then again, some may justify these actions by pointing out the immoral actions of the entertainment industry. I'm not saying that it's right, but plenty of people do this. And there are even people who don't give a damn about these things and just downloads stuff illegally because it is convenient and they can't be bothered to waste money when it's so easy to get hold of online.
As for your comment about "the Slashdot crowd", it is rather silly. Slashdot is a site with thousands of individuals who all have different opinions. Some may want to boycott Blizzard, some may not. Some hate Microsoft, some do not.
Amusing to see you to try to raise yourself above "the Slashdot crowd" with unenlightened comments like that, especially since you are part of this crowd yourself. So if everyone else doesn't practice what they preach, neither do you - you have implicitly said so yourself.
Communism is actually about getting rid of the government. A temporary government is needed to crush all those who oppose Communism, but when Communism is fully in place, the government steps down.
I don't quite see that this statement is proven in any way. Copying to send to others, yes, but surely not for personal use?
You can't pay for the right to listen to the physical media, because you listen to the songs on the media, not the media itself.
Every single SCO story on Slashdot gets a lot of comments - far higher than average. This means that these stories are very, very popular to the readers. Why, pray tell, should Slashdot stop posting popular stories? It doesn't make sense.
As for a new IBM vs. SCO topic - this thing is time limited. When IBM has utterly devastated SCO, there will be nothing more to report.
Please, stop the whining about the SCO stories. They are obviously very popular, so you are a tiny minority. And as the saying goes, if you don't like what's posted on Slashdot, go somewhere else. Simple.
Did you contact him with your question? Do let us know if you did, and what his answer is.
What is needed isn't quantity, but quality.
If you can't see the huge differences between a PC and a TV, maybe you are better off using Windows after all ;)
Ridiculous. You "anti"-spyware freaks are more dangerous than most spyware because you stir up shit and cause hysteria by accusing everything and everyone for spyware. You remove the focus from the actual spyware and sleazeware out there.
You are actually helping spyware companies by causing hysteria and confusion.
Great job, mister spyware posterboy.
SCO is obviously grasping for straws here, so it is not at all surprising that they haven't actually thought their actions through. They make things up on the way.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=67838&cid=6216 461
Doesn't this say something to you? Maybe you should stop reading them if they don't interest you. But don't push your crap on everyone else.
Please, SCO story whiners, you are a minority. SCO stories are obviously extremely popular on Slashdot. The editors would be fools not to post them.