Gandalf the Grey, mighty wizard, He could stop a charging Balrog; And while falling to the bottom of a deep dark foreboding cavern, attack the Balrog, sword a-stabbing, to take the life o' the evil creature, ere below the two did hit the water.
Gandalf the White, from death arisen, no longer Grey, seems now much stronger, showing up again, when unexpected, in the forests, not far from Gondor, taking arms, against the eye of Morodor, Saving Merry, saving Pippin, from mistaken wrath of Treebeard.
Mighty Gandalf, resurrected, comes now upon the dwarf Gimli, comes now upon the elf Legolas, comes now upon the bearded rider, in bright light, his face is hidden, "Well met, again!", coming towards them, he speaks to them of sheathing weapons, Aragorn, the bearded rider, first to say, "Your name is Gandalf!", and the wizard, now his name is twice repeated, says, indeed, "That was the name"....
Register all trademarks in Turkmenistan... that way, they'll end in ".tm"; you'll be happy that your trademark has been "exported to cyberspace", and we'll be happy that we can ignore you.
Posting credit cards in a wallet you've found is not the same thing as posting trade secrets that you've found.
The reason for this is that trade secrets are not protected by law, but credit cards, which are non-bearer financial instruments, are. Using a credit card that does not belong to you is fraud. Providing the credit card to someone else to use is being an acessory before the fact to a fraud. Using a disclosed trade secret is... nothing.
Consider a classic trade secret.
You are a trucker for a company. That company issues to all its truckers, under non-disclosure, a map of 50 short-cuts. This is a business advantage for the company issuing the list.
Now your cousing from out of town is going to come visit you. He tells you the route he's going to take. You say "Oh, turn left on Cottle Road, instead of going straight, and you will save 40 minutes!".
Now this Trade Secret has been disclosed.
Enough employess share similar information with their own relatives, and all 50 shortcuts become public knowledge. The highway commission periodically measures traffic flow, and repaves all these shortcuts into two-lane routes, to accomodate increased traffic, and this, itself, encourages more people to use it. The entiretly of the trade secret is lost to cometing trucking companies, with no action on the part of those companies.
So... is everyone who turns left on Cottle Road guilty of "receiving stolen property"? Or is it just truckers who turn left? What about truckers who *live* on Cottle Road... are they allowed to turn left to go home?
Trade Secrets maintain value only because of their secrecy. You can't hold the recipient of a disclosure responsible for receiving the disclosure, since at the moment of disclosure, the information is no longer secret -- and therefore no longer a Trade Secret.
The law provides *some* remedy; specifically, it permits collection of estimated damages from the disclosers themselves -- based on a breach of contract, not based on any legal protection for the Trade Secret itself, as a matter of law and public policy.
In point of fact, the law encourages disclosure, as a matter of public policy, and provides legal protections, in the form of copyrights and patents, in trade for such disclosure, in order to encourage it.
Attempts to extend equivalent legal protection to Trade Secrets is *wrong*, as a matter of public policy.
"Oh! Oh! Br'er Bear! Don't! Don't throw me in that briar patch!"
Gee, it's convenient for a company facing a court decision on anti-trust grounds, and a decision on whether or not to be independently pursued at a state level, to have this big, scary, Linux monster under their bed. Isn't it?
This is about the disclosure of a trade secret by an employee of an employee of a company being prosecuted as if it were an act of industrial espionage by a person employed by a foreign power in order to harm the U.S. industrial base relative to foreign competition.
There are several problems here:
1) We don't know if he had legal access to these documents, prior to the disclosure, in the course of his normal work responsibilities, as assigned by his employer.
2) We don't know if he's the original discloser, or if, assuming he did *not* have legitimate access, the original discloser was someone who left a CDROM sitting in the lunch room, instead of maintaining physical control over the information, as required by due dilligence... making them the discloser.
3) Trade Secrets have no constitutional protection. This is on purpose. To obtain constitutional protection, you have to file a patent, and agree to lose that protection after the patent expires. The lack of protection is intentional, to encourage disclosure.
If he went out of his way to steal the documents, that's one thing. If it's simple disclosure, however. which seems likely, then the amount of recourse is (intentionally) limited to damages to the company, recoverable from him personally.
In any case, now that the information is disclosed, it's disclosed: it's in the public domain. The company has the right (in the U.S.) to file patent, up to a year following first public disclosure. Foreign patents, except for Japan, are now impossible -- if they weren't imposssible as software patents everywhere else (except Japan, again), anyway.
Personally, I doubt he had to violate the law to obtain the information, and I doubt that he profitted from the disclosure, and I doubt foreign companies will profit from the disclosure. So this is a likely an attempt to bludgeon him for the disclosure, using an inappropriate law.
On the other hand, it's likely that no one will hire him for an NDA position, ever again, even if he didn't violate NDA through the disclosure (by being a person who picked up a CDROM that was not dilligently stored or protected by someone else). That's as it should be.
In any case...
The reason that makes this about your rights, is that Trade Secrets are not Constitutionally entitled to the level of preotection that is being attempted to be enforced in this case.
We should be wary of any attempts to increase legal protections for Trade Secrets, without some benefit to society, in trade (and that's what Patents and Copyrights are intended to do). Permitting a company to obtain (in effect) patent protection without the disclosure required for patent protection is simply wrong.
"Receiving stolen merchandise" and trade secrets are not reconcilable.
Specifically, trade secrets aren't stolen property, if they are disclosed, they are merely disclosed.
One only obtains intellecutal property protection under the law as a result of self-disclosure of what would, otherwise, be trade secrets. The protection is given in exchange for the disclosure, to ensure, like the secret of making red glass from raw materials, the information is not lost: i.e., to propmote progress in the sciences and useful arts.
The industrial espionage act under which he is charged was not intended to target individuals who were disclosing in order to disclose (e.g. disgruntled ex-employees), but was in fact intended to be brought to bear against people who obtained their positions *in order to* disclose for some other comapnies economic benefit.
Even so, such a law is arguably un-Constitional, on the basis that Trade Secrets are not permitted any Constitutional protection, unless they are disclosed in the form of a Patent.
Therefore, Trade Secrets are not "merchandise", per se.
Remember that the supposed Trade Secrets of AT&T were in fact the bsis of the AT&T/USL lawsuit against BSDI, and, later, BSDI, and the follow-on Cease and Desist letters USL sent to the 386BSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD projects (this was prior to the 1996 Act), and those lawsuits came to nothing, and no "Receiving Stolen Merchandise" charges were ever files against DEC, Apple, IBM, Cisco, etc., who had taken and used the Net/2 sources in the commercial products that form the basis of today's Internet.
IMO, the cause is obvious: most pay phones these days do not permit incoming calls.
This is to stop drug trafficing. Looks like it's really working......about as well as the airport security being raised made it so the armed officers didn't need to come onto American Airlines flight 1731 out of Dallas/Forth Worth last Saturday, and yank people off the plane after it returned to the gate. Yeah, those rights we've given up have really bought us something, haven't they?
It seems to me that the only thing it has done is make pay phones less useful to legitimate callers (for example, I needed to call someone from a pay phone recently, and talk to them for an extended period, but the inability to give them the payphone number so I could call them, give the number, and be called back, made it impossible).
I'm sorry, but I have to insist that you can't add a bunch of PC's together, and end up with the equivalent of a general purpose supercomputer.
These so-called "supercomputers" only have the performance of a supercomputer on the class of problems which are inherently parallelizable. For problems which require serialization, by needing results in hand to go onto the next step in the calculation, these things slow down to the speed of one of the component PC's.
I guess now that Seymore Cray has died, no one else can build real supercomputers. 8-(.
Nanotechnology is a long term investment. Its for people who expect to be around, and have to live with the consequences of their present day actions.
But if you absolutely need an answer on what initial value it's going to have, here's one for you: hydroxyapatite.
Otherwise known as rebuilding your tooth enamel an atom at a time, following tooth decay, instea of putting in these big metal wedges which cause them to crack and which leak mercury, or grinding them down to little nubs and capping them with steel and porcelin.
It's amazing how many new technologies get their start at dentists offices... like, oh, say, anesthetics.
If you've read the article or watched the news, you'll know that they are talking about collecting the fee up front.
That way, when it comes time to recycle the Compaq Persario's, you spin off the Presario division into a seperate company, and then it can declare bankruptcy, leaving the consumer holding the bag, as they already are today.
The only way I'd trust something like this is if the money went into an escrow account. Even then, you're not assured ("Gee, we underestimated the disposal costs...").
It's simply not going to work, unless you pay up front, and the people you pay are *guaranteed* to still be around when you go to get rid of the machine, and they are *required* to take it, without charging you more money.
Not going to happen. It's just another boondoggle.
Why is it when you mention any problem, people always think that you can educate the problem away, that it's an inequity in educatrional level that causes people to be out of work?
The truth is that there are more people than we need to have to produce everything that we consume.
Eventually, we will get to the point where one guy named "Bob", living in New Jersey, can produce everything every man, woman, and child on the planet needs.
And then we will get the the point where we don't need Bob.
PS: The reason everyone always things "IT training" when people talk about skill retraining is because that's the area that, according to popular perception, has all the money.
The main reason you need bottled water is the MTBE being added to gasoline. Unless you live in one of the few chip manufacturing areas, you're uninvolved.
The U.S. not ignoring the Geneva Conventsion; they prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay are not prisoners of war, since war has not been declared by a state (either Afghanistan, proper, or the U.S. -- a U.S. Declaration of War requires a passing vote of Atricles of War by the U.S. Congress, followed by a non-veto signature by the President of the United States). They are merely members of a terrorist organization.
The holding in Cuba, rather than the U.S. proper is to ensure that they do not claim civil rights under the U.S. Constitution (forget for the moment that the constitution merely recognizes these rights as existing, it does not grant them, since they are inalienable from the individual). This is also the reason the Coast Guard attempts to prevent economic refugees from Haiti from landing on U.S. shores: if they land, they gain access to a long, expensive, and drawn out deportation process, rather than merely being refused entry.
The alternative would be to hold them in the area where they were captured, which could lead to an attempted rescue, with additional loss of life on both sides. Better to remove the temptation, but not complicate the legal situation.
All the homeless people now have their MCSE certificate to hang on the inside of their cardboard boxes to prove that they can write MS Word Macro Viruses in VBScript.
Failure to attach proper headers is no defense. Just because something lacks a "Precedence: bulk" doesn't mean it's not SPAM. Most SPAM I get does not have that header.
You seem to have bought into this whole "UCE redefinition" thing.
What you are really talking about is the ability to cold-call an individual vs. the ability to telephone solicit everyone on the planet in the middle of them having sex with their wives.
Excuse me, if I think there is a middle ground.
FWIW: You aren't going to get funded by sending business plans to a VC's home email address, particularly if you don't have a preexisting relationship.
The reason it will not solve the problem is because it validates your address, when the email is not rejected by the destination server.
That means that your address is "in play": it gets added to lists, and passed around, until everyone has your address. A percentage of what these people send *will* get through to you: client filtering can only go so far, before it blocks everything.
Client filtering requires that you download the email -- paying for the priviledge, eitheir directly, or indirectly, in term of time and resources.
Client filtering means that any given SPAM can be pre-tested against any set filtering algorithm, and modified so that it does not trigger the filter, before it is ever sent to you directly, in order to get around the filter.
Client filtering is an idea that's appealing only to people who don't really understand email technology, or who are acting willfully ignorant because they have a secondary agenda.
Everyone who keeps suggesting client filtering has one or more of these attributes:
1) They sell client filtering software
2) They are an SMTP service provider, who does not want to burn compute cycles on their server by doing acceptance filtering, and rejecting the email
3) They have a broadband link, and thik that everyone else has one, too
Your right to speak is not the same thing as you having a right to have me listen to you. There is no guarantee of an audience.
Next, you will be telling me that it's illegal for me to wear headphones and listen to music while you are speaking publically, because you have a right to have me hear you.
And then you'll tell me it's illegal to change channels when a commercial comes on.
That's just utter BS.
Commercial speech may be protected under the first ammendment, but I'll be damned if that means I have to listen to it.
Before you go off and form PU - The Programmers Union -- realize that it already exists. It's called "IEEE" and "ACM".
It does things to "protect" it's members, the same as any union. Things like lobbying against green cards and H1-B visas, to artificially control the size of the available talent pool, and thereby inflate the cost of their labor.
In general, it's not a bad idea to work to strike some balance between what top management is paid, and what the people "in the trenches" (to strain your metaphor) are paid; in fact, we have punative tax codes to do exactly this, including preventing matching contributions by the company above a certain amount/percentage for 401K and other benefits, to make sure that the people "on top" do not benefit more from the matching than people on the bottom of the pay scale.
On the other hand, it's unlikely that union tactics will be effective in the "at will" and "right to work" states, like California, where most high technology industry is concentrated -- no accident, that.
The communications workers union have been trying, unsuccessfully, to unionize IBM technology workers for 20+ years, now, and they have universally failed, due to their inability to prove that there will be any benefit to the workers, whatsoever, other than the union getting to take over administration of one of the larger private pension funds on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
I am currently powering my computer from a rectenna that captures the energy derived from unsolicited SubSeven and SQL port packets.
8-).
-- Terry
Gandalf the Grey, mighty wizard,
...
He could stop a charging Balrog;
And while falling to the bottom
of a deep dark foreboding cavern,
attack the Balrog, sword a-stabbing,
to take the life o' the evil creature,
ere below the two did hit the water.
Gandalf the White, from death arisen,
no longer Grey, seems now much stronger,
showing up again, when unexpected,
in the forests, not far from Gondor,
taking arms, against the eye of Morodor,
Saving Merry, saving Pippin,
from mistaken wrath of Treebeard.
Mighty Gandalf, resurrected,
comes now upon the dwarf Gimli,
comes now upon the elf Legolas,
comes now upon the bearded rider,
in bright light, his face is hidden,
"Well met, again!", coming towards them,
he speaks to them of sheathing weapons,
Aragorn, the bearded rider, first to say,
"Your name is Gandalf!", and the wizard,
now his name is twice repeated,
says, indeed, "That was the name".
-- Terry
Register all trademarks in Turkmenistan... that way, they'll end in ".tm"; you'll be happy that your trademark has been "exported to cyberspace", and we'll be happy that we can ignore you.
-- Terry
Posting credit cards in a wallet you've found is not the same thing as posting trade secrets that you've found.
... nothing.
The reason for this is that trade secrets are not protected by law, but credit cards, which are non-bearer financial instruments, are. Using a credit card that does not belong to you is fraud. Providing the credit card to someone else to use is being an acessory before the fact to a fraud. Using a disclosed trade secret is
Consider a classic trade secret.
You are a trucker for a company. That company issues to all its truckers, under non-disclosure, a map of 50 short-cuts. This is a business advantage for the company issuing the list.
Now your cousing from out of town is going to come visit you. He tells you the route he's going to take. You say "Oh, turn left on Cottle Road, instead of going straight, and you will save 40 minutes!".
Now this Trade Secret has been disclosed.
Enough employess share similar information with their own relatives, and all 50 shortcuts become public knowledge. The highway commission periodically measures traffic flow, and repaves all these shortcuts into two-lane routes, to accomodate increased traffic, and this, itself, encourages more people to use it. The entiretly of the trade secret is lost to cometing trucking companies, with no action on the part of those companies.
So... is everyone who turns left on Cottle Road guilty of "receiving stolen property"? Or is it just truckers who turn left? What about truckers who *live* on Cottle Road... are they allowed to turn left to go home?
Trade Secrets maintain value only because of their secrecy. You can't hold the recipient of a disclosure responsible for receiving the disclosure, since at the moment of disclosure, the information is no longer secret -- and therefore no longer a Trade Secret.
The law provides *some* remedy; specifically, it permits collection of estimated damages from the disclosers themselves -- based on a breach of contract, not based on any legal protection for the Trade Secret itself, as a matter of law and public policy.
In point of fact, the law encourages disclosure, as a matter of public policy, and provides legal protections, in the form of copyrights and patents, in trade for such disclosure, in order to encourage it.
Attempts to extend equivalent legal protection to Trade Secrets is *wrong*, as a matter of public policy.
-- Terry
"Oh! Oh! Br'er Bear! Don't! Don't throw me in that briar patch!"
Gee, it's convenient for a company facing a court decision on anti-trust grounds, and a decision on whether or not to be independently pursued at a state level, to have this big, scary, Linux monster under their bed. Isn't it?
-- Terry
Here's why this may be about your rights...
This is about the disclosure of a trade secret by an employee of an employee of a company being prosecuted as if it were an act of industrial espionage by a person employed by a foreign power in order to harm the U.S. industrial base relative to foreign competition.
There are several problems here:
1) We don't know if he had legal access to these documents, prior to the disclosure, in the course of his normal work responsibilities, as assigned by his employer.
2) We don't know if he's the original discloser, or if, assuming he did *not* have legitimate access, the original discloser was someone who left a CDROM sitting in the lunch room, instead of maintaining physical control over the information, as required by due dilligence... making them the discloser.
3) Trade Secrets have no constitutional protection. This is on purpose. To obtain constitutional protection, you have to file a patent, and agree to lose that protection after the patent expires. The lack of protection is intentional, to encourage disclosure.
If he went out of his way to steal the documents, that's one thing. If it's simple disclosure, however. which seems likely, then the amount of recourse is (intentionally) limited to damages to the company, recoverable from him personally.
In any case, now that the information is disclosed, it's disclosed: it's in the public domain. The company has the right (in the U.S.) to file patent, up to a year following first public disclosure. Foreign patents, except for Japan, are now impossible -- if they weren't imposssible as software patents everywhere else (except Japan, again), anyway.
Personally, I doubt he had to violate the law to obtain the information, and I doubt that he profitted from the disclosure, and I doubt foreign companies will profit from the disclosure. So this is a likely an attempt to bludgeon him for the disclosure, using an inappropriate law.
On the other hand, it's likely that no one will hire him for an NDA position, ever again, even if he didn't violate NDA through the disclosure (by being a person who picked up a CDROM that was not dilligently stored or protected by someone else). That's as it should be.
In any case...
The reason that makes this about your rights, is that Trade Secrets are not Constitutionally entitled to the level of preotection that is being attempted to be enforced in this case.
We should be wary of any attempts to increase legal protections for Trade Secrets, without some benefit to society, in trade (and that's what Patents and Copyrights are intended to do). Permitting a company to obtain (in effect) patent protection without the disclosure required for patent protection is simply wrong.
-- Terry
"Receiving stolen merchandise" and trade secrets are not reconcilable.
Specifically, trade secrets aren't stolen property, if they are disclosed, they are merely disclosed.
One only obtains intellecutal property protection under the law as a result of self-disclosure of what would, otherwise, be trade secrets. The protection is given in exchange for the disclosure, to ensure, like the secret of making red glass from raw materials, the information is not lost: i.e., to propmote progress in the sciences and useful arts.
The industrial espionage act under which he is charged was not intended to target individuals who were disclosing in order to disclose (e.g. disgruntled ex-employees), but was in fact intended to be brought to bear against people who obtained their positions *in order to* disclose for some other comapnies economic benefit.
Even so, such a law is arguably un-Constitional, on the basis that Trade Secrets are not permitted any Constitutional protection, unless they are disclosed in the form of a Patent.
Therefore, Trade Secrets are not "merchandise", per se.
Remember that the supposed Trade Secrets of AT&T were in fact the bsis of the AT&T/USL lawsuit against BSDI, and, later, BSDI, and the follow-on Cease and Desist letters USL sent to the 386BSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD projects (this was prior to the 1996 Act), and those lawsuits came to nothing, and no "Receiving Stolen Merchandise" charges were ever files against DEC, Apple, IBM, Cisco, etc., who had taken and used the Net/2 sources in the commercial products that form the basis of today's Internet.
-- Terry
"Bob! Bob! HEY Bob! So which hopper does the ``Estrogen'' go in?"
-- Anonymous 18 year old grocery clerk
-- Terry
IMO, the cause is obvious: most pay phones these days do not permit incoming calls.
...about as well as the airport security being raised made it so the armed officers didn't need to come onto American Airlines flight 1731 out of Dallas/Forth Worth last Saturday, and yank people off the plane after it returned to the gate. Yeah, those rights we've given up have really bought us something, haven't they?
This is to stop drug trafficing. Looks like it's really working...
It seems to me that the only thing it has done is make pay phones less useful to legitimate callers (for example, I needed to call someone from a pay phone recently, and talk to them for an extended period, but the inability to give them the payphone number so I could call them, give the number, and be called back, made it impossible).
-- Terry
I'm sorry, but I have to insist that you can't add a bunch of PC's together, and end up with the equivalent of a general purpose supercomputer.
These so-called "supercomputers" only have the performance of a supercomputer on the class of problems which are inherently parallelizable. For problems which require serialization, by needing results in hand to go onto the next step in the calculation, these things slow down to the speed of one of the component PC's.
I guess now that Seymore Cray has died, no one else can build real supercomputers. 8-(.
-- Terry
Ask me again in 1000 years.
Nanotechnology is a long term investment. Its for people who expect to be around, and have to live with the consequences of their present day actions.
But if you absolutely need an answer on what initial value it's going to have, here's one for you: hydroxyapatite.
Otherwise known as rebuilding your tooth enamel an atom at a time, following tooth decay, instea of putting in these big metal wedges which cause them to crack and which leak mercury, or grinding them down to little nubs and capping them with steel and porcelin.
It's amazing how many new technologies get their start at dentists offices... like, oh, say, anesthetics.
-- Terry
If you've read the article or watched the news, you'll know that they are talking about collecting the fee up front.
That way, when it comes time to recycle the Compaq Persario's, you spin off the Presario division into a seperate company, and then it can declare bankruptcy, leaving the consumer holding the bag, as they already are today.
The only way I'd trust something like this is if the money went into an escrow account. Even then, you're not assured ("Gee, we underestimated the disposal costs...").
It's simply not going to work, unless you pay up front, and the people you pay are *guaranteed* to still be around when you go to get rid of the machine, and they are *required* to take it, without charging you more money.
Not going to happen. It's just another boondoggle.
-- Terry
This is the "there's a job for everyone" fallacy.
Why is it when you mention any problem, people always think that you can educate the problem away, that it's an inequity in educatrional level that causes people to be out of work?
The truth is that there are more people than we need to have to produce everything that we consume.
Eventually, we will get to the point where one guy named "Bob", living in New Jersey, can produce everything every man, woman, and child on the planet needs.
And then we will get the the point where we don't need Bob.
PS: The reason everyone always things "IT training" when people talk about skill retraining is because that's the area that, according to popular perception, has all the money.
-- Terry
The main reason you need bottled water is the MTBE being added to gasoline. Unless you live in one of the few chip manufacturing areas, you're uninvolved.
-- Terry
The U.S. not ignoring the Geneva Conventsion; they prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay are not prisoners of war, since war has not been declared by a state (either Afghanistan, proper, or the U.S. -- a U.S. Declaration of War requires a passing vote of Atricles of War by the U.S. Congress, followed by a non-veto signature by the President of the United States). They are merely members of a terrorist organization.
The holding in Cuba, rather than the U.S. proper is to ensure that they do not claim civil rights under the U.S. Constitution (forget for the moment that the constitution merely recognizes these rights as existing, it does not grant them, since they are inalienable from the individual). This is also the reason the Coast Guard attempts to prevent economic refugees from Haiti from landing on U.S. shores: if they land, they gain access to a long, expensive, and drawn out deportation process, rather than merely being refused entry.
The alternative would be to hold them in the area where they were captured, which could lead to an attempted rescue, with additional loss of life on both sides. Better to remove the temptation, but not complicate the legal situation.
-- Terry
Yeah, but just think of all the people the rich will be able to hire with that money...
What, you don't think they take it home and bury it under the gazebo, right?
-- Terry
OK, we put the money into training programs.
All the homeless people now have their MCSE certificate to hang on the inside of their cardboard boxes to prove that they can write MS Word Macro Viruses in VBScript.
Uh, then what?
-- Terry
"I believe Mass Drivers are illegal according to the Geneva Convention."
I believe you're wrong, but we could always earmark the first rock for Geneva, if it came down to that...
-- Terry
Failure to attach proper headers is no defense. Just because something lacks a "Precedence: bulk" doesn't mean it's not SPAM. Most SPAM I get does not have that header.
You seem to have bought into this whole "UCE redefinition" thing.
What you are really talking about is the ability to cold-call an individual vs. the ability to telephone solicit everyone on the planet in the middle of them having sex with their wives.
Excuse me, if I think there is a middle ground.
FWIW: You aren't going to get funded by sending business plans to a VC's home email address, particularly if you don't have a preexisting relationship.
-- Terry
Client filtering will not solve the problem.
The reason it will not solve the problem is because it validates your address, when the email is not rejected by the destination server.
That means that your address is "in play": it gets added to lists, and passed around, until everyone has your address. A percentage of what these people send *will* get through to you: client filtering can only go so far, before it blocks everything.
Client filtering requires that you download the email -- paying for the priviledge, eitheir directly, or indirectly, in term of time and resources.
Client filtering means that any given SPAM can be pre-tested against any set filtering algorithm, and modified so that it does not trigger the filter, before it is ever sent to you directly, in order to get around the filter.
Client filtering is an idea that's appealing only to people who don't really understand email technology, or who are acting willfully ignorant because they have a secondary agenda.
Everyone who keeps suggesting client filtering has one or more of these attributes:
1) They sell client filtering software
2) They are an SMTP service provider, who does not want to burn compute cycles on their server by doing acceptance filtering, and rejecting the email
3) They have a broadband link, and thik that everyone else has one, too
4) They are a SPAMmer
-- Terry
Your right to speak is not the same thing as you having a right to have me listen to you. There is no guarantee of an audience.
Next, you will be telling me that it's illegal for me to wear headphones and listen to music while you are speaking publically, because you have a right to have me hear you.
And then you'll tell me it's illegal to change channels when a commercial comes on.
That's just utter BS.
Commercial speech may be protected under the first ammendment, but I'll be damned if that means I have to listen to it.
-- Terry
Yahoo: some "war" against SPAM...
Is it really a war, when you have to manually delete crap out of your "bulk mail" mailbox, instead of having it automatically deleted?
I understand that this is done in order to drive up your total usage, to get you to pay for more disk space, but still...
-- Terry
"But does he have staying power?" asks NASA official.
Good question... is that a mutant power, like telekinesis?
"STAND BACK, Batman, he has STAYING POWER!".
-- Terry
Before you go off and form PU - The Programmers Union -- realize that it already exists. It's called "IEEE" and "ACM".
It does things to "protect" it's members, the same as any union. Things like lobbying against green cards and H1-B visas, to artificially control the size of the available talent pool, and thereby inflate the cost of their labor.
In general, it's not a bad idea to work to strike some balance between what top management is paid, and what the people "in the trenches" (to strain your metaphor) are paid; in fact, we have punative tax codes to do exactly this, including preventing matching contributions by the company above a certain amount/percentage for 401K and other benefits, to make sure that the people "on top" do not benefit more from the matching than people on the bottom of the pay scale.
On the other hand, it's unlikely that union tactics will be effective in the "at will" and "right to work" states, like California, where most high technology industry is concentrated -- no accident, that.
The communications workers union have been trying, unsuccessfully, to unionize IBM technology workers for 20+ years, now, and they have universally failed, due to their inability to prove that there will be any benefit to the workers, whatsoever, other than the union getting to take over administration of one of the larger private pension funds on the planet.
-- Terry
The cool thing about human rights violations is that they are something your political opponents engage in, never something you do.
-- Terry