Functional Programming is a Very Good Thing to learn.
After being interested in functional programming languages for a while I had the opportunity to spend some time reviewing a textbook using ML. I figured that was the time to learn the language. Got frustrated quickly, I got several ML systems (including the one mentioned in the book) and no two worked alike. Hell, the syntax varies enough that there are ML dialects that look like completely different languages.
A while later I decided that perhaps it was time to spend some energy seriously learning Haskell. I got and installed Hugs (Haskell.org is a wonderful resource with several Haskell systems listed, tutorials, documentation, libraries and so on). Hugs implemented pretty much all of the Haskell described in the manual I found and the tutorials. (Today, I'd probably use the interactive GHC.)
It took a while, some dedication and a lot of grumbling to figure out how things worked and I'm still learning bits and pieces of the language and associated libraries and stuff.
Now Haskell is one of my favorite languages and I want to use functional tools (higher order functions, laziness, and so on) in every language I use. I'd say that Haskell changed my ideas about programming, my approach to problems, and my toolset both deeply and widely - and for the better. Probably as deep a shift in technology and technique for me as OOP (I started programming in Fortran, APL, Algol...) - but then OOP just always seemed Right to me.
Part of what made the learning process so effective was that Haskell makes it very hard to have side effects - so where in ML the books/tutorials often introduce mechanisms for building variable that work more or less like those in C - in Haskell this is very difficult.
So, while F# may be an interesting language, if you want to learn a new language, try Haskell. You may have to be obstinate. And if it works with you as it did me, it will drive you crazy until it clicks (and I remember exactly the problem that did it) and then you'll just kind do one of those quiet awestruck "wow"s and watch your view of programming change.
Haskell isn't the right language for everything. I also use Java, C and Python (and a few others) often - but for lots of problems, for doing a quick model of something to try it out, for just helping your mind think about a problem a bit differently... Haskell is great.
But remember - you may well have to be stubborn about persisting till it clicks.
And on a related note...
Does anyone know if anything ever came out of the development of the functional scripting language "Sheep" for the amiga?
A quick scan at dictionary.com shows all kinds of definitions for hack and hacker. Leaving aside the definitions in question and the Jargon file entries we have for hacker :
One who enthusiastically pursues a game or sport
someohw who plays golf poorly
an expert or enthusiast of any kind
For hack (much more fun - but certainly related) :
a carriage or hackney for hire
a horse used for riding or driving, a hackney
a worn-out horse for hire, a jade
a writer hired to produce routine or commercial writing
a procuress (!!)
Re:Open Relays and an Immodest Proposal
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The plusses and minusses of this have been wandering through my brain for a day or two now and a couple more facets of this kind of thing have surfaced and floated around long enough to be worth mentioning.
Open relays could have interesting uses - both anti-spam and pro-spam.
An organization wanting to curb spam could operate an open relay set to run very, very slowly. This has (I read it in/., so it must be true) been done.
More interestingly, such a machine could forward only some of the spam moved through it. Maybe only one message out of a thousand. Spammers would still get a response, but the total amount of spam would be reduced substantially.
Or, if the idea of dropping mail does not agree with you, the mail could be wrapped in another message, forwarded, with whois and contact information (to the extent it is available) from the originating host, and a message explaining that it is spam.
This has the nice side effect of being able to also collect spammer origination IP addresses for use in future blocking. Or to collect spammer websites.
But the most intriguing notion to me is that spammers themselves could do the same thing, dropping mail - which would make their spam service look better than their competitors. Better still, at the same time, it could be harvesting the
email addresses for use in their own spam
delivery. Such a machine could clearly cull out
the "I'm trying every three letter id possible." email addresses.
Or, you could do the wrapper thing above and.... but I've likely said too much already. ("You've yourselves to blame if its too long, you should never have let me begin.")
So, any spammers out there want to confess? Is anyone doing that? Go ahead, be an anonymous coward and tell us. I promise (on behalf of all the/.'ers) that we won't use it against you.
I'd wonder myself about the people who sell open relay lists - putting a machine or three to harvest emails on it could generate email address lists that they could sell as well.
Open Relays and an Immodest Proposal
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I tend to try to turn problems around and see if there's not a fun backwards approach. (Like instead of trying to stop a bulldozer you find a way to lure it into a swamp.) It doesn't always work and often ends up with people pointing at me and laughing. So be it.
In the case of spamming I've started to wonder about open relay blocking. Most sites that offer information about open relays to facilitate blocking (such as ordb.org) do not make the contents of their open relay lists public. And that made perfect sense to me until yesterday when (while looking into several spam filtering methods) I got curious and started looking for a list of open relays. I found at least one such - but it was clearly aimed at the spammers as it had incomplete information and a way to purchase a subscription.
So, by making open relay lists private and secret, we're actually supporting the spam industry (not necessarily the spammers directly, but the folks who sell them stuff).
Maybe its time to think about releasing the lists.
This could have several interesting effects (positive:) , neutral:| and negative:( ) :
:| The organizations who collect open relay lists would continue to function as they do now, but sites that would like to use the lists heavily could download their own copies.
:) The folks who sell open relay lists would find it harder to do that if the information were freely available. With a bit of luck they'd go out of business.
:) it would become much harder for site admins to ignore open relays they control if everyone used them and the traffic went way up. This would be an incentive to close them. (Of course, it would be unethical to suggest that anyone else route their mail through the relays - that would amount to a denial of service.)
:) As the relays got closed, the traffic on those left open would increase dramatically - thus increasing the pressure on those site admins.
:) Knowing that a site has open relays might prompt users, friends of the site admins and so on to bug them into closing them. Currently it would require rather more work on the part of such buggers to determine that the buggee needing bugging.
:) Eventually, with a bit of luck, the great majority of the open relays would be closed and spammers would end up using very slow machines. Indeed, it might become profitable for major sites to run a couple of open relays on (for example) an old 80286 on a 1200 baud serial line).
:) Eventually, faced with a small pool of (slow?!) open relays, spammers would turn to spam support sites that could send the mail for them. And I'd be willing to bet that such sites would charge nicely for the service. And there's still nothing to prevent a user from blocking those sites.
:( There would be a serious (but I suspect temporary) increase in spam. Current spam filters would not stop working.
:( There would be problems with people forging open relay lists with machines of people they might want to annoy. (This could be handled by digitally signing such lists from trusted sites.)
:) It would keep the congresscritters from meddling in things they dont understand - with what is almost certain to be disasterous effect.
Maybe it wouldn't work, but the stuff written about the spam proposal before congress is seriously scary - it would essentially legitimize whole classes of spam and make it much harder to turn off such "legitimate" spam.
Thats because for the most part they are "Designers" with a "Designer" background.
The Designer (turned out in the thousands by "Design Schools" or art programs and the like) :
Aspires to be doing ads and layouts for Wired and Interview and the like.
Or perhaps is really an Artist who is Unappreciated by the Great Unwashed.
Considers web design to be something kind of icky and (they hope) temporary - but for which they should get paid quite a lot.
Is not interested in readability or usability, only in the right artistic feel.
Is not interested in how long it takes to load or anything else technical or computer geeky.
Is contemptuous of anyone who doesn't immediately understand why their website is compelling, important and wonderful. (See item 2)
Often requires several plugins for the "full effect". Feels that you must download (even pay for) that plugin to be worthy of their talent.
Knows that everyone is missing out by not having heard the latest song "Foo and Bar" by the Metasyntatic Variables, so includes it in wav format with every page on their site.
Believes everyone should be using a monitor like theirs - 32 bit color, 2000 by 2000 pixels. And have a good sound system attached to their computer.
The International Herald Tribune site looks pretty good to me on phoenix (0.6) (er, um Mozilla/Firebird - maybe we should just all call it MF). On the other hand it does not use all the width of the browser and resizing the window to be smaller than the text given just hides it.
One of the news articles on the HT front page prompted me to look at the UN page which is worth
looking at for a good example of how not to build
a page :
the UN english page . All the text on the page is in the form of images - usually a sign that the designer has not a clue. (The source says it was done with Adobe GoLive.)
For a good page I'd suggest Arts and Letters Daily which presents a lot of information in a nicely usable format. I would prefer that their banner image be just a tad smaller though. The stuff at the foot is also a bit annoying (expecially the hitbox crap) and not well laid out - but I rarely get that far down.
And if I might indulge my own amusement for a bit I'd recommend my personal webpage as being almost completely unusable. Odd javascript. No navigation. Big (oddly unusable and quite awful) image of me. General overboard hackiness. Serious dependencies on browsers. Here Ya Go
I don't think you're all that paranoid. Exactly the same notion came to my mind when I read the intro.
And this raises all sorts of interesting questions.
This would seem to be legal - has something like this been done before (that is patenting something to prevent someone else from using it) ?
Could such a patent be used with a GPL like (or even more inclusive) license? That is, you can't use the technology covered by this patent in a product unless you release any other technology you use in that product under a similar license?
Could the FSF use this kind of manoeuvre effectively?
How about using a patent as a punitive device? Perhaps by licensing a patent cheaply to a competetitor of a competitor.
WoW is WoW backwards - but theres still IP
on
OSI vs SCO
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· Score: 1, Funny
IP is PI backwards.
So we know (for a change) how the IP story ends : ...95141.3
But now I'm confused about how that story starts. Any clues?
Now if only there were a way to specify (when needed) that I want the background to be white and the text black.
These pages with black background and purple text are rather less than readable on my old monitor (which seems to be slowly seeking a zen like quality of middlin grey for all colors).
Yup, there's a preference to do this uniformly, but I'd rather not do it unless I need to - which often means page specific.
I've been using the phoenix/mozilla "Radial Context" (ie Pie Menu) implementation for a while now and far prefer it to the gestures stuff. And its been solid and well performing for the most part (sometimes a nightly build will kill it, but thats not that common now).
Corporations 1, 2 and 3 buy all the supporting connecting links (the wires or fiber or whatever). They only allow connections from sites or ISP's that go along with their terms of service. Persons putting up web pages on those ISP's must also (by the transitivity property in theorem three) go along with their terms of service. Those terms of service allow only advertising for products they approve of, no critical content whatever, even email is scanned - encrypted content is dropped as is any content that does not pass their acceptance tests (applied automatically by filters of their devising).
Far fetched? Look at what clear channel has done to radio.
Another scenario.
The government passes a law (hmmm, lets call it something silly like the "Communications Decency Act") that forbids web content that might offend anyone. Watch as people get offended at almost everything but the most neutral of pablum and watch personal sites (including blogs), humor sites, sites from foreign countries (after all the French are now by official shrubbish definition offensive) and so on get shut down one by one. Watch the Supremes ("Stop! In the Name of Decency") determine that the web is not print nor speech and thus subject to no constitutional protections.
Misuse of corporate email - usually willful disregard of email netiquette (at least it seems that way to a long time email user (namely me)) is
a non-trivial issue - but is not the major problem for the internet as such.
the Smith Family from Anytown, USA
I visited a personal site the other day that had both flash and java on the front page (neither of which was needed).
It was also very poorly laid out with pictures and captions that had no obvious way to determine what went with what. It had unnecessary (and ugly) frames, the source had font tags scattered around with abandon and general isanity, and (best of all) it was put together by someone who claimed to be a web designer and who was trying to sell his services as such.
Users are not stupid.
No. But users also don't (all too often) seem to think that its necessary to be smart or to take charge of their computers/browsers/internet experience. Too often they have the attitude that they have no rights and no power(and indeed that seems to be the direction that governments and corporations want to take us) and that they must take whats given and as its given. I keep wanting a button : "Thank you sir, may I have another?"
And the One Cent piece ?
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
Is the one cent coin a disk (with a round edge)?
Or does it have a Mobius strip edge?
Or maybe its a Klien bottle (now if I could make one of these I'd probably not use it for change).
I have had a bunch of spam recently that points to (penis enlargement, naturally) pages on onlinedns.org (".org" !?!? - they should be ".spam" or ".scam", or ".ripoff" or ".shit").
whois onlinedns.org gives all those not available messages, so which host do I use to actually get real information? I've tried a few with no luck.
I agree - but I think this should just be legalized and have someone put an open source program that could selectively do this with http/email/...
After all, in some way the spammers are DOS'ing the internet as a whole, increasing the demand and use of potentially shared resources such as bandwidth, mail servers and so on. As often happens there does not seem to be any reasonable way to actually charge them for these resources.
Legal solutions seem unlikely to work - and given the legal solutions we've seen proposed recently, are likely to even make things worse.
So, what can the average user do? Things like spam filtering on the client don't solve the whole problem.
So, do what you can. Go to any website mentioned and order a dozen or dozen dozen of their product. Don't use your own credit card or real name or address - after all they don't. Send them a couple hundred emails complaining. (Though you'll notice that most spammer products don't have accessible email addresses.) If they're in China send email to each new spammer with addresses of all the previous Chinese spammers and talk about support for Free Tibet and the Falun Gong.
Do such actions feel unethical to me? Yup. And I'll admit that I don't usually do such things myself - although between spammers and telemarketers I'm getting closer and closer to serious nastiness. But do we have a choice? If the choice is to respond to spam with DOS or the recently proposed sleazy way to legalize mass email marketing, which choice will make email usable for people?
Its the prisoner's dilemma (or the tragedy of the commons) over and over again, sadly. The best solution must be to make the payoff for "defectors" lower or make their cost higher.
Back in the 80's I used to listen to WRPI which had station promos advertising itself as "The best radio station..... Ever".
And it was arguably true. Variety, oddness, serious weirdness (one day I listened to better than an hour of their station ID spots which ranged from silly to hilarious to disturbing - My favorite went something like "WRPI - the best radio station... ever. Example number seventeen. Our signoffs." Click - and they were gone. ) How many other radio stations would play one track from every album on their shelves in the order that they're shelved?
And they were perenially under fire from the students for not being a top-40 type station. Sigh.
I think we need more like it. Not more of that pablum crap that clearchannel wants to foist on us. Though I'm waiting for them to buy out NPR and completely destroy radio.
They may have been judged a monopoly, but the penalty they incurred was little more than a slap on the wrist.
They have every reason to believe that any further legal judgements against them will take the same form and incur the same kind of penalty. Furthermore they have every reason to believe that the current (undoubtedly well paid off one way or another) administration will be reluctant to even take them to court again.
So, MS may be a monopoly and the rules may be different. But they can, do and should feel free to do what they like. Welcome to corporate America.
I just want to underscore some of the excellent points made here :
The CRE agrees that marketers must not falsify the sender's domain name or use a non-responsive IP address without implied permission from the recipient or transferred permission from the marketer
Implied permission could come from just using a site with one of those multi-volume "Terms of Use" things with the permission buried in it. Note too that this makes it legal to use a non-responsive IP address (ie faked) under all kinds of conditions.
an option for the recipient to unsubscribe from receiving future messages from that sender, list owner, or list manager, or valid and responsive contact information of the sender, list manager, or list owner.
The narrow opt out is particularly fun. Re-read that sentence to see just how sneaky our "elected representatives" can be.
must inform the respondent upon online collection of the e-mail address for what marketing purpose the respondent's e-mail address will be used. (Inform either online or via e-mail.)
That email used to inform you could be part of a spam message itself. In fact that spam message could easily be informing you (after the body of the spam where you'd be unlikely to see it) that the email address is being sold to another spammer who will then use the same trick.
prior business or personal relationship...
is defined as any previous correspondence, transaction activity, customer service activity, personalized marketing message, third party permission use, or proven offline contact.
This is the loophole from hell. "transaction activity" (cookie?), "third party permission use"
-- sounds like if Company A has a business relationship with you that they can sell the right to send spam to you to companies B, and C, and D, and E, and F, and G and.... and AA, and BB, and... AAA, and BBB.... and that by part three you can shut up one of these companies, but not all of them.
Personally, I think that it should be legal to launch a DOS attack against any site connected with spamming (after all they're launching a DOS attack against others on some level). Period. Keep the congresscritters -- with brains that work like the dumbest of critters - one track minds after money and willing to do any trick to get it -- way, way out of it before they sell our rights to the highest bidder. (Not that Scalia would mind, he thinks that we all have too many rights as it is - though I suspect he doesn't think that he has too many rights.)
In theory I hate the notion that whitespace matters in a programming language. Any whitespace (and, yup, that includes end-of-line markers - so the C preprocessor is a pain as are comments that start with// and go to the end of the line).
In practice I quite like the way Python (Haskell too) works and use Python quite a bit and only rarely have trouble with whitespace.
"So I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself." (Thanks to Mr. Whitman for the quote.)
I've never programmed in VB, nor have I spent any amount of time looking at it.
However, I've encountered more than a few people who learned to program in VB and who should be kept away from any programmer who values his/her sanity, and from any programming project that might eventually aspire to affordable maintenance.
Maybe it was just coincidence that a batch of poor programmers with icky(TM) programming habits all happened to have used VB early in their programming experience. But they shared the same kinds of problems : complete misunderstanding of why local variables are a Good Thing, poor selection of variable/procedure names, a serious love of long runs of spaghetti code, inability to pick the right control structure.
Are these poor habits encouraged by VB? (Enquiring minds want to know...)
Slashdot Mirror
Functional Programming is a Very Good Thing to learn.
After being interested in functional programming languages for a while I had the opportunity to spend some time reviewing a textbook using ML. I figured that was the time to learn the language. Got frustrated quickly, I got several ML systems (including the one mentioned in the book) and no two worked alike. Hell, the syntax varies enough that there are ML dialects that look like completely different languages.
A while later I decided that perhaps it was time to spend some energy seriously learning Haskell. I got and installed Hugs (Haskell.org is a wonderful resource with several Haskell systems listed, tutorials, documentation, libraries and so on). Hugs implemented pretty much all of the Haskell described in the manual I found and the tutorials. (Today, I'd probably use the interactive GHC.)
It took a while, some dedication and a lot of grumbling to figure out how things worked and I'm still learning bits and pieces of the language and associated libraries and stuff.
Now Haskell is one of my favorite languages and I want to use functional tools (higher order functions, laziness, and so on) in every language I use. I'd say that Haskell changed my ideas about programming, my approach to problems, and my toolset both deeply and widely - and for the better. Probably as deep a shift in technology and technique for me as OOP (I started programming in Fortran, APL, Algol...) - but then OOP just always seemed Right to me.
Part of what made the learning process so effective was that Haskell makes it very hard to have side effects - so where in ML the books/tutorials often introduce mechanisms for building variable that work more or less like those in C - in Haskell this is very difficult.
So, while F# may be an interesting language, if you want to learn a new language, try Haskell. You may have to be obstinate. And if it works with you as it did me, it will drive you crazy until it clicks (and I remember exactly the problem that did it) and then you'll just kind do one of those quiet awestruck "wow"s and watch your view of programming change.
Haskell isn't the right language for everything. I also use Java, C and Python (and a few others) often - but for lots of problems, for doing a quick model of something to try it out, for just helping your mind think about a problem a bit differently ... Haskell is great.
But remember - you may well have to be stubborn about persisting till it clicks.
And on a related note...
Does anyone know if anything ever came out of the development of the functional scripting language "Sheep" for the amiga?
For hack (much more fun - but certainly related) :
Open relays could have interesting uses - both anti-spam and pro-spam.
An organization wanting to curb spam could operate an open relay set to run very, very slowly. This has (I read it in /., so it must be true) been done.
More interestingly, such a machine could forward only some of the spam moved through it. Maybe only one message out of a thousand. Spammers would still get a response, but the total amount of spam would be reduced substantially.
Or, if the idea of dropping mail does not agree with you, the mail could be wrapped in another message, forwarded, with whois and contact information (to the extent it is available) from the originating host, and a message explaining that it is spam.
This has the nice side effect of being able to also collect spammer origination IP addresses for use in future blocking. Or to collect spammer websites.
But the most intriguing notion to me is that spammers themselves could do the same thing, dropping mail - which would make their spam service look better than their competitors. Better still, at the same time, it could be harvesting the email addresses for use in their own spam delivery. Such a machine could clearly cull out the "I'm trying every three letter id possible." email addresses.
Or, you could do the wrapper thing above and.... but I've likely said too much already. ("You've yourselves to blame if its too long, you should never have let me begin.")
So, any spammers out there want to confess? Is anyone doing that? Go ahead, be an anonymous coward and tell us. I promise (on behalf of all the /.'ers) that we won't use it against you.
I'd wonder myself about the people who sell open relay lists - putting a machine or three to harvest emails on it could generate email address lists that they could sell as well.
In the case of spamming I've started to wonder about open relay blocking. Most sites that offer information about open relays to facilitate blocking (such as ordb.org) do not make the contents of their open relay lists public. And that made perfect sense to me until yesterday when (while looking into several spam filtering methods) I got curious and started looking for a list of open relays. I found at least one such - but it was clearly aimed at the spammers as it had incomplete information and a way to purchase a subscription.
So, by making open relay lists private and secret, we're actually supporting the spam industry (not necessarily the spammers directly, but the folks who sell them stuff).
Maybe its time to think about releasing the lists. This could have several interesting effects (positive :) , neutral :| and negative :( ) :
Maybe it wouldn't work, but the stuff written about the spam proposal before congress is seriously scary - it would essentially legitimize whole classes of spam and make it much harder to turn off such "legitimate" spam.
The Designer (turned out in the thousands by "Design Schools" or art programs and the like) :
For a nicely impressive look at what CSS can go for you try the Zen Garden of CSS.
One of the news articles on the HT front page prompted me to look at the UN page which is worth looking at for a good example of how not to build a page : the UN english page . All the text on the page is in the form of images - usually a sign that the designer has not a clue. (The source says it was done with Adobe GoLive.)
For a good page I'd suggest Arts and Letters Daily which presents a lot of information in a nicely usable format. I would prefer that their banner image be just a tad smaller though. The stuff at the foot is also a bit annoying (expecially the hitbox crap) and not well laid out - but I rarely get that far down.
And if I might indulge my own amusement for a bit I'd recommend my personal webpage as being almost completely unusable. Odd javascript. No navigation. Big (oddly unusable and quite awful) image of me. General overboard hackiness. Serious dependencies on browsers. Here Ya Go
I don't think you're all that paranoid. Exactly the same notion came to my mind when I read the intro.
And this raises all sorts of interesting questions.
This would seem to be legal - has something like this been done before (that is patenting something to prevent someone else from using it) ?
Could such a patent be used with a GPL like (or even more inclusive) license? That is, you can't use the technology covered by this patent in a product unless you release any other technology you use in that product under a similar license?
Could the FSF use this kind of manoeuvre effectively?
How about using a patent as a punitive device? Perhaps by licensing a patent cheaply to a competetitor of a competitor.
So we know (for a change) how the IP story ends :
...95141.3
But now I'm confused about how that story starts. Any clues?
Now if I only had mod points and hadn't already posted in this topic and.... I'd mod that up about seven times.
These pages with black background and purple text are rather less than readable on my old monitor (which seems to be slowly seeking a zen like quality of middlin grey for all colors).
Yup, there's a preference to do this uniformly, but I'd rather not do it unless I need to - which often means page specific.
I've been using the phoenix/mozilla "Radial Context" (ie Pie Menu) implementation for a while now and far prefer it to the gestures stuff. And its been solid and well performing for the most part (sometimes a nightly build will kill it, but thats not that common now).
Time for all and sundry to go back and re-read (or read) "Shockwave Rider" by John Brunner. Then remember it was written in 1976.
Corporations 1, 2 and 3 buy all the supporting connecting links (the wires or fiber or whatever). They only allow connections from sites or ISP's that go along with their terms of service. Persons putting up web pages on those ISP's must also (by the transitivity property in theorem three) go along with their terms of service. Those terms of service allow only advertising for products they approve of, no critical content whatever, even email is scanned - encrypted content is dropped as is any content that does not pass their acceptance tests (applied automatically by filters of their devising).
Far fetched? Look at what clear channel has done to radio.
Another scenario.
The government passes a law (hmmm, lets call it something silly like the "Communications Decency Act") that forbids web content that might offend anyone. Watch as people get offended at almost everything but the most neutral of pablum and watch personal sites (including blogs), humor sites, sites from foreign countries (after all the French are now by official shrubbish definition offensive) and so on get shut down one by one. Watch the Supremes ("Stop! In the Name of Decency") determine that the web is not print nor speech and thus subject to no constitutional protections.
the Smith Family from Anytown, USA
I visited a personal site the other day that had both flash and java on the front page (neither of which was needed). It was also very poorly laid out with pictures and captions that had no obvious way to determine what went with what. It had unnecessary (and ugly) frames, the source had font tags scattered around with abandon and general isanity, and (best of all) it was put together by someone who claimed to be a web designer and who was trying to sell his services as such.
Users are not stupid.
No. But users also don't (all too often) seem to think that its necessary to be smart or to take charge of their computers/browsers/internet experience. Too often they have the attitude that they have no rights and no power(and indeed that seems to be the direction that governments and corporations want to take us) and that they must take whats given and as its given. I keep wanting a button : "Thank you sir, may I have another?"
Or does it have a Mobius strip edge?
Or maybe its a Klien bottle (now if I could make one of these I'd probably not use it for change).
Or ... ?
gave me "no entries found".
But the big question is still - how do you determine what a good host is for using "whois -h" ?
whois onlinedns.org gives all those not available messages, so which host do I use to actually get real information? I've tried a few with no luck.
I'd like to send them some feedback.
A traceroute does hint that they're in china.
After all, in some way the spammers are DOS'ing the internet as a whole, increasing the demand and use of potentially shared resources such as bandwidth, mail servers and so on. As often happens there does not seem to be any reasonable way to actually charge them for these resources. Legal solutions seem unlikely to work - and given the legal solutions we've seen proposed recently, are likely to even make things worse.
So, what can the average user do? Things like spam filtering on the client don't solve the whole problem.
So, do what you can. Go to any website mentioned and order a dozen or dozen dozen of their product. Don't use your own credit card or real name or address - after all they don't. Send them a couple hundred emails complaining. (Though you'll notice that most spammer products don't have accessible email addresses.) If they're in China send email to each new spammer with addresses of all the previous Chinese spammers and talk about support for Free Tibet and the Falun Gong.
Do such actions feel unethical to me? Yup. And I'll admit that I don't usually do such things myself - although between spammers and telemarketers I'm getting closer and closer to serious nastiness. But do we have a choice? If the choice is to respond to spam with DOS or the recently proposed sleazy way to legalize mass email marketing, which choice will make email usable for people?
Its the prisoner's dilemma (or the tragedy of the commons) over and over again, sadly. The best solution must be to make the payoff for "defectors" lower or make their cost higher.
And it was arguably true. Variety, oddness, serious weirdness (one day I listened to better than an hour of their station ID spots which ranged from silly to hilarious to disturbing - My favorite went something like "WRPI - the best radio station... ever. Example number seventeen. Our signoffs." Click - and they were gone. ) How many other radio stations would play one track from every album on their shelves in the order that they're shelved?
And they were perenially under fire from the students for not being a top-40 type station. Sigh.
I think we need more like it. Not more of that pablum crap that clearchannel wants to foist on us. Though I'm waiting for them to buy out NPR and completely destroy radio.
Allot is only one word. And I've been known to say "belittle". And "b-little" is almost "alittle".
They have every reason to believe that any further legal judgements against them will take the same form and incur the same kind of penalty. Furthermore they have every reason to believe that the current (undoubtedly well paid off one way or another) administration will be reluctant to even take them to court again.
So, MS may be a monopoly and the rules may be different. But they can, do and should feel free to do what they like. Welcome to corporate America.
The CRE agrees that marketers must not falsify the sender's domain name or use a non-responsive IP address without implied permission from the recipient or transferred permission from the marketer
Implied permission could come from just using a site with one of those multi-volume "Terms of Use" things with the permission buried in it. Note too that this makes it legal to use a non-responsive IP address (ie faked) under all kinds of conditions.
an option for the recipient to unsubscribe from receiving future messages from that sender, list owner, or list manager, or valid and responsive contact information of the sender, list manager, or list owner. The narrow opt out is particularly fun. Re-read that sentence to see just how sneaky our "elected representatives" can be.
must inform the respondent upon online collection of the e-mail address for what marketing purpose the respondent's e-mail address will be used. (Inform either online or via e-mail.)
That email used to inform you could be part of a spam message itself. In fact that spam message could easily be informing you (after the body of the spam where you'd be unlikely to see it) that the email address is being sold to another spammer who will then use the same trick.
prior business or personal relationshipis defined as any previous correspondence, transaction activity, customer service activity, personalized marketing message, third party permission use, or proven offline contact.
This is the loophole from hell. "transaction activity" (cookie?), "third party permission use" -- sounds like if Company A has a business relationship with you that they can sell the right to send spam to you to companies B, and C, and D, and E, and F, and G and .... and AA, and BB, and ... AAA, and BBB .... and that by part three you can shut up one of these companies, but not all of them.
Personally, I think that it should be legal to launch a DOS attack against any site connected with spamming (after all they're launching a DOS attack against others on some level). Period. Keep the congresscritters -- with brains that work like the dumbest of critters - one track minds after money and willing to do any trick to get it -- way, way out of it before they sell our rights to the highest bidder. (Not that Scalia would mind, he thinks that we all have too many rights as it is - though I suspect he doesn't think that he has too many rights.)
In practice I quite like the way Python (Haskell too) works and use Python quite a bit and only rarely have trouble with whitespace.
"So I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself." (Thanks to Mr. Whitman for the quote.)
However, I've encountered more than a few people who learned to program in VB and who should be kept away from any programmer who values his/her sanity, and from any programming project that might eventually aspire to affordable maintenance.
Maybe it was just coincidence that a batch of poor programmers with icky(TM) programming habits all happened to have used VB early in their programming experience. But they shared the same kinds of problems : complete misunderstanding of why local variables are a Good Thing, poor selection of variable/procedure names, a serious love of long runs of spaghetti code, inability to pick the right control structure.
Are these poor habits encouraged by VB? (Enquiring minds want to know...)