Look what it did for the airlines. At first everyone complained because if you got on a plane you had to sit next to people that previously could only afford to go greyhound.
Unless you live in a state with a smaller population. Then you have to pay way, way more.
Anti-Spam zealots like those at spamhaus have already proven that it's possible to track down spammers without being evil. And anyway, I don't give a fuck who gets rich as long as the Spam stops. What this guy is saying is that I should pay money out of my own pocket to insure that people the author deems 'unscrupulous' don't get rich! How idiotic!
The restrictions on email imposed by such a taxation scheme would be far more then to total amount of restrictions needed to stop Spam. The government would need to register each and every mail server. Try to run your own mail server, and you could end up in the can for tax-evasion. All email server software would need to be modified to report usage statistics to the government.
And of course, it wouldn't do a damn thing to stop international spamming, either, but it would do a lot to silence a lot of legitimate mass emailings from Americans. Things like receipts for online purchases, or software-development mailing lists.
At least most people who think email should be charged for want to see it implemented on a voluntary basis. As in, "if you want to email me, you need to pay me". Not, "everyone needs to pay the government if they want to send an email."
Finally, I think Lessig's Bounty would really help cut down on spam, but the real solution lies in refactoring the email protocol itself to prevent a lot of the abuses. One of my favorite solutions is the 'sender-verification' system. In my vision for it, whenever you got an email for the first time from someone you didn't know, they would get a bounce message with instructions for adding themselves to a 'trusted address'. This would insure that at least the reply-to address was real. If spammers started using bots to respond, we could do things like the 'what's this a picture of' type reverse Turing tests you see sometimes on the web. We could also throw in PGP type signing to prevent spammers from hijacking address used by sites like Amazon or other people who send out large amounts of legitimate, automated, email (for sites like this, the user would need to manually add the address)
If we take Spam to mean 'unrequested automated emails' then such a system would stop all Spam, 100% and the only false positives would be from people who couldn't be bothered to include the correct return address or didn't see the request for verification.
I actualy used active desktop once
on
Eyes on Karamba
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No, you actually are the one controlling what's on the screen with AD, not MS. I actually used AD for a while on my laptop to keep a personal simple task list as an HTML page. It actually worked pretty well, but I stopped using last summer and never started back up, and last semester I switched to an old PDA. (this semester, I did nothing:P)
AD could have been cool, but for some ungodly reason MS set things up so that if you use it, it made the desktop an actual IE window, so it refreshed slow as fuck (and therefore made the system seem amazingly slow when trying to move around windows) And it also made any scaled background images quite ugly by using nearest neighbor interpolation rather then bilinear filtering like the 'standard' background display.
Okay, it may just be the mushrooms I had earlier, but RMS seems very small compared to the others. Perhaps this is the source of his odd psychosis? A short-man syndrome, a Napoleonic complex?
He wants the default screensaver/splash screen to contain credits for the developers, rather then the people who packaged the distro, as is the case today. He's not saying that they should stay that way forever. Damn, learn to read.
People that don't read the source code arent the sort of people who are likely to rember names IMO. (Or care about names generaly for that matter)
Wha? Are you saying that everyone who remembers' Maddona's name, or Bill Gates, or Michal Jordan or Mohamed Saeed Al-Sahhaf are all source code reading geeks?
People will remember a name if they see or hear it often enough.
This might be somewhat cool if you could use a simple digital camera, and you didn't need to worry about angle (this would require an all-angles storage, of course)
Either way, it seems pretty useless for most people. As long as we can tell what an object is we could simply type it's name in and search that way. It could be useful for large museums and scientists, thought.
What you're talking about seems like nothing more then a simple modification of the Black Hole system. which doesn't work at all.
I suppose a 'source trust rank' along with other analysis like baysian filters and other techniques might be slightly more effective, but spammers can simply use these tools to 'check' to see if their messages get through as well.
You don't need an internet-wide identity, just one you share with people you know. A simple signed message would work without a huge totalitarian system set up.
The payment method is idiotic because you're introducing a whole new system into the mix: money. Before, you're dealing with the relationship between two people and their computers. Sender-pays involves getting the ISP, and the banks involved. It's just so complex, and to top it off, you'd still need the same identification system as in simple sender-verification!
Sender-pays is the most idiotic system ever devised for stopping spam.
I mean, you install this thing, and you'll have some random connections be encrypted. But it would still be foolish to 'trust' any regular internet connections. This type of technology might give people a false sense of security.
I realize the point is just to get more encrypted data out on the net, but this just seems pointless to me.
How many purchasers of projectors are going to use them non-stop? Just imagine such a stress-test of your Intel or AMD processor - 8000 straight hours of 100% CPU activity. I
Before windows 2000, almost everyone ran windows 98, which didn't halt the processor during the idle loop. It literally just sat and executed one loop over and over again. Obviously it wasn't a problem. CPUs are designed to run continuously forever.
What do you mean "not being used"? Not being used by whome, you? I suppose if someone wants to try something 'new' that comes out, they'll need to wait for the BOFH to bless it?
6) Set up your own caching server. I would recommend using Squid.
This should be optional. It'll help speed things up, but cache operators can make mistakes that can be very annoying for web designers.
7) Force all outbound port 25 (SMTP) through your mail server.
8) Run a virus scanner on your mail server. Scan all incoming AND outgoing mail.
I suppose simply filtering outbound mail won't cause any problems, but you shouldn't disallow incoming 25. People deserve to be able to run their own mail servers, as long as they aren't wide-open relays. A less totalitarian solution would be to use traffic shaping on 25 to prevent spamming.
9) Don't route the Microsoft file sharing ports
or Apple Rendezvous ports between units.
Yeah, can't have file sharing between apartments! That would just be evil. LANs are not fun at all, and you wouldn't want to get in trouble with the RIAA!!!
13) Routinely sniff around for WAPs. Handle them as you see fit - disconnect, or verify they are set up sanely. Don't ignore them.
Yeah, just imagine if people used wifi to get around your file sharing restrictions!
Slashdot Mirror
decades of declining education proves that the more money you throw at it, the worse it gets
Oh, that explains why inner-city schools with recive way less money then rich suburban shools do so much better!
Look what it did for the airlines. At first everyone complained because if you got on a plane you had to sit next to people that previously could only afford to go greyhound.
Unless you live in a state with a smaller population. Then you have to pay way, way more.
our company is sending 9000 legit emails per year.
Well, that would only be $90/year under this scheme. Not to much money, although I do agree this scheme is idiotic.
Anti-Spam zealots like those at spamhaus have already proven that it's possible to track down spammers without being evil. And anyway, I don't give a fuck who gets rich as long as the Spam stops. What this guy is saying is that I should pay money out of my own pocket to insure that people the author deems 'unscrupulous' don't get rich! How idiotic!
The restrictions on email imposed by such a taxation scheme would be far more then to total amount of restrictions needed to stop Spam. The government would need to register each and every mail server. Try to run your own mail server, and you could end up in the can for tax-evasion. All email server software would need to be modified to report usage statistics to the government.
And of course, it wouldn't do a damn thing to stop international spamming, either, but it would do a lot to silence a lot of legitimate mass emailings from Americans. Things like receipts for online purchases, or software-development mailing lists.
At least most people who think email should be charged for want to see it implemented on a voluntary basis. As in, "if you want to email me, you need to pay me". Not, "everyone needs to pay the government if they want to send an email."
Finally, I think Lessig's Bounty would really help cut down on spam, but the real solution lies in refactoring the email protocol itself to prevent a lot of the abuses. One of my favorite solutions is the 'sender-verification' system. In my vision for it, whenever you got an email for the first time from someone you didn't know, they would get a bounce message with instructions for adding themselves to a 'trusted address'. This would insure that at least the reply-to address was real. If spammers started using bots to respond, we could do things like the 'what's this a picture of' type reverse Turing tests you see sometimes on the web. We could also throw in PGP type signing to prevent spammers from hijacking address used by sites like Amazon or other people who send out large amounts of legitimate, automated, email (for sites like this, the user would need to manually add the address)
If we take Spam to mean 'unrequested automated emails' then such a system would stop all Spam, 100% and the only false positives would be from people who couldn't be bothered to include the correct return address or didn't see the request for verification.
No, you actually are the one controlling what's on the screen with AD, not MS. I actually used AD for a while on my laptop to keep a personal simple task list as an HTML page. It actually worked pretty well, but I stopped using last summer and never started back up, and last semester I switched to an old PDA. (this semester, I did nothing :P)
AD could have been cool, but for some ungodly reason MS set things up so that if you use it, it made the desktop an actual IE window, so it refreshed slow as fuck (and therefore made the system seem amazingly slow when trying to move around windows) And it also made any scaled background images quite ugly by using nearest neighbor interpolation rather then bilinear filtering like the 'standard' background display.
It was quite stupid.
Okay, it may just be the mushrooms I had earlier, but RMS seems very small compared to the others. Perhaps this is the source of his odd psychosis? A short-man syndrome, a Napoleonic complex?
I wonder.
I don't know if many courts would hold someone liable for something they did unintentionally in this way.
ESR, in it, discusses how ego boosting is by nature frowned upon
Wow, now THATS ironic!!
He wants the default screensaver/splash screen to contain credits for the developers, rather then the people who packaged the distro, as is the case today. He's not saying that they should stay that way forever. Damn, learn to read.
People that don't read the source code arent the sort of people who are likely to rember names IMO. (Or care about names generaly for that matter)
Wha? Are you saying that everyone who remembers' Maddona's name, or Bill Gates, or Michal Jordan or Mohamed Saeed Al-Sahhaf are all source code reading geeks?
People will remember a name if they see or hear it often enough.
This might be somewhat cool if you could use a simple digital camera, and you didn't need to worry about angle (this would require an all-angles storage, of course)
Either way, it seems pretty useless for most people. As long as we can tell what an object is we could simply type it's name in and search that way. It could be useful for large museums and scientists, thought.
Wifi uses far less power then cellphones do.
What you're talking about seems like nothing more then a simple modification of the Black Hole system. which doesn't work at all.
I suppose a 'source trust rank' along with other analysis like baysian filters and other techniques might be slightly more effective, but spammers can simply use these tools to 'check' to see if their messages get through as well.
You don't need an internet-wide identity, just one you share with people you know. A simple signed message would work without a huge totalitarian system set up.
The payment method is idiotic because you're introducing a whole new system into the mix: money. Before, you're dealing with the relationship between two people and their computers. Sender-pays involves getting the ISP, and the banks involved. It's just so complex, and to top it off, you'd still need the same identification system as in simple sender-verification!
Sender-pays is the most idiotic system ever devised for stopping spam.
I mean, you install this thing, and you'll have some random connections be encrypted. But it would still be foolish to 'trust' any regular internet connections. This type of technology might give people a false sense of security.
I realize the point is just to get more encrypted data out on the net, but this just seems pointless to me.
probably one of these...
The whole "Terrorist fly planes full of explosves" concept had been floating around the pentagon for quite awhile
There is no way some kid could synthesize opium after taking a HS chem class. Crystal Meth, maybe... but opium?
Just when does this become illegal or a threat to the public?
Never. You know that thing... freedom of speech?
God forbid anyone have a hobby and share with people how to do it! It's just immoral.
Especialy when it's obvious that terrorists are way to stupid to figure any of this stuff out themselves.
or at work (forget bringing a newspaper, go for an hour-long Slashdot posting spree)
Good god man!
are those who write their own stuff!
How many purchasers of projectors are going to use them non-stop? Just imagine such a stress-test of your Intel or AMD processor - 8000 straight hours of 100% CPU activity. I
Before windows 2000, almost everyone ran windows 98, which didn't halt the processor during the idle loop. It literally just sat and executed one loop over and over again. Obviously it wasn't a problem. CPUs are designed to run continuously forever.
If they hadn't been changing the bulbs in these things regularly you might have had a point...
4) Lock down the ports that aren't being used.
What do you mean "not being used"? Not being used by whome, you? I suppose if someone wants to try something 'new' that comes out, they'll need to wait for the BOFH to bless it?
6) Set up your own caching server. I would recommend using Squid.
This should be optional. It'll help speed things up, but cache operators can make mistakes that can be very annoying for web designers.
7) Force all outbound port 25 (SMTP) through your mail server.
8) Run a virus scanner on your mail server. Scan all incoming AND outgoing mail.
I suppose simply filtering outbound mail won't cause any problems, but you shouldn't disallow incoming 25. People deserve to be able to run their own mail servers, as long as they aren't wide-open relays. A less totalitarian solution would be to use traffic shaping on 25 to prevent spamming.
9) Don't route the Microsoft file sharing ports or Apple Rendezvous ports between units.
Yeah, can't have file sharing between apartments! That would just be evil. LANs are not fun at all, and you wouldn't want to get in trouble with the RIAA!!!
13) Routinely sniff around for WAPs. Handle them as you see fit - disconnect, or verify they are set up sanely. Don't ignore them.
Yeah, just imagine if people used wifi to get around your file sharing restrictions!