You can maintain the current level of resources by recycling the ones we're pulling from the ground. Recycling takes energy. Mining new materials takes energy. Processing materials takes energy. Where does our energy come from? A combination of oil, coal, and nuclear power. All of those materials are limited on this rock we're on. If we stay here, we'll have fewer and fewer resources in the years to come.
So the solution to the problem is to use up our energy even faster by blasting enormous amounts of mass into space? And when we get to space, then what? Are there oil deposits on Mars that only you know about?
The point is, the amount of usable energy elsewhere in the solar system is no greater than it is on earth. In fact, there's probably less - almost certainly, there are no major amounts of hydrocarbons, nothing like coal, and probably no more fissile materials than we have at home. In any case, getting and bringing any potential energy supplies back to earth would be prohibitively expensive.
If nothing else, we have plenty of fission fuel on earth, and given the concept of the breeder reactor, energy is not a factor that forces us into space. The only way any large scale movement into space will happen is if it becomes profitable to do so, and I've never heard any scenario in which it does become profitable.
There are many lessons for Americans to learn from Afghanistan and Iraq. Among these is this: Allowing each household to own a fully automatic AK-47 does not seem to have created an orderly or peaceful society.
Luckily, neither the NRA nor anyone else has actually recommended that everyone in the US obtain a fully automatic AK-47. We're talking about hunting rifles here.
I don't see why these people are getting "quietly arrested".
Per TFA, they're being arrested quietly because they (or their computers) are providing information that's being used to build a case against other spammers. The government don't want to alert other suspects.
...it is only a matter of time before humans remotely control a significant portion of our military might.
If in addition to remote-controlled systems, you include autonomous ones, we're halfway there. Think Tomahawk land-attack missiles. The MK 46/48/50 torpedoes. Phalanx Close-in Weapons Systems. All of these, to one extent or another, only require a human being to turn them on and (maybe) point them in the right direction.
People talk about the time when robots do our fighting for us... not realizing that they already do.
what do outside conditions have to do with anything? If you want your house to be 76 degrees, you set the thermostat for 76+- degrees.
See, it costs MONEY to heat and air condition your house. When it's hot outside, I don't want to pay to air condition the place down to 65 degrees, and when it's cold, I don't want it heated to 75.
This will become clearer to you after you move out of your mom's basement and start paying your own utility bills.
Wouldn't step 1 of your system block anyone running a mail server out of their house? The forward DNS lookup will get you their IP, and the backward DNS lookup will not match their domain, it'll match the ISPs.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
We spend more on defense per capita than the next top three nations combined- do you realize that includes North Korea, widely considered to be a "military state"?
It really looks like the TSA simply doesn't care whether innocent civilians are denied the ability to use the nation's airlines.
Of course they don't care. Caring about false positives isn't part of their job description. In fact, it's not part of ANYONE's job description... which is the problem.
I do seem to recall something about issuing papers to privateers for the specific purpose of harrassing the British fleet.
These were known as "letters of marque", and although they're not considered legal under current laws of armed conflict, they were completely acceptable in those days.
I mean, attacking the enemy on Christmas Day when they were drunk as a skunk? Is this your idea of the proper rules of engagement?
Absolutely. War isn't a game, and if you let down your guard (by getting drunk on the battlefield), you have no right to ask the enemy to wait until you're better prepared.
But the very best companies do not just do what is strictly best for money's sake -
Really?
They have seen the big "Open Source" event horizion off in the distance, and they are placing themselves in the best position possible for a company to survicve (and thrive) in that kind of storm.
You're contradicting yourself. In the second quote above, you're making the point that IBM is positioning itself to make money in the long term out of Open Source. The fact the Open Source is more ideologically pure has nothing to do with it.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
The "make your own browser" article linked in the parent describes how to put a new front end on the MSHTML engine... in other words, it tells you how to put your own skin on IE. Big deal.
Although I'm not from Missouri, you'll still have to show me. Please quote the article/amendment number that gives us the right to travel. And thanks in advance to those who intend to quote Amendments 9 & 10. Even if you interpret 9 and/or 10 to include the right to travel, that doesn't mean you have the right to use the state's roads in an automobile to do it.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a big fan of more surveillance. But this argument is extremely weak.
And who wants to cross-license patents with a GPL project? It seems you'd have to virtually give up your patent to avoid litigation since the GPL requirements are going to force you to free up your "IP."
Without taking a position on the larger issue of whether Free Software and patents go together... it's not at all clear to me that the sentence I quote above is true. Say Acme Software releases software package X. Then they get a letter from the FSF saying "We've patented two of the techniques you use in X. We need to come to an agreement." It's possible that the FSF could ask Acme to release the software under the GPL. But it's also possible, and in my view more likely, that the FSF would allow Acme to use one or more of its (FSF's) patents in exchange for Acme allowing the FSF to do the same with one or more of Acme's. This is the same way that corporations use patent portfolios. By definition, the technique is already publicly disclosed (in the patent application), so there's no issue of company secrets getting out.
What the FSF can't do is FORCE Acme to release package X under the GPL, because the GPL doesn't apply. The GPL is about copyright, not patents.
Slashdot Mirror
So the solution to the problem is to use up our energy even faster by blasting enormous amounts of mass into space? And when we get to space, then what? Are there oil deposits on Mars that only you know about?
The point is, the amount of usable energy elsewhere in the solar system is no greater than it is on earth. In fact, there's probably less - almost certainly, there are no major amounts of hydrocarbons, nothing like coal, and probably no more fissile materials than we have at home. In any case, getting and bringing any potential energy supplies back to earth would be prohibitively expensive.
If nothing else, we have plenty of fission fuel on earth, and given the concept of the breeder reactor, energy is not a factor that forces us into space. The only way any large scale movement into space will happen is if it becomes profitable to do so, and I've never heard any scenario in which it does become profitable.
Sean
Luckily, neither the NRA nor anyone else has actually recommended that everyone in the US obtain a fully automatic AK-47. We're talking about hunting rifles here.
Sean
No, %$#@ it, they're not. They might be IMPLYING it, though.
For God's sake, people. The difference between "infer" and "imply" is not that complicated. We ought to be able to get it straight.
Sean
Per TFA, they're being arrested quietly because they (or their computers) are providing information that's being used to build a case against other spammers. The government don't want to alert other suspects.
Sean
If in addition to remote-controlled systems, you include autonomous ones, we're halfway there. Think Tomahawk land-attack missiles. The MK 46/48/50 torpedoes. Phalanx Close-in Weapons Systems. All of these, to one extent or another, only require a human being to turn them on and (maybe) point them in the right direction.
People talk about the time when robots do our fighting for us... not realizing that they already do.
Sean
The trouble is that live exercises like this are very expensive. As you point out, they can't even afford training ammo.
This kind of simulation can supplement FTXs, even if it can't completely replace them.
Sean
1) Acquire software
2) Decompile
3) Study code
4) Develop countermeasure
5) spam spam spam
It's not like spammers care about the EULA that says they can't look at the code. Oh, and before I forget...
6) ???
7) Profit!
Sean
Hardly a model of clarity? It's one of the few license agreements that IANAL can understand without legal help!
Here's another precious quote:
Where "some people" == "Darl McBride", apparently.
Sean
See, it costs MONEY to heat and air condition your house. When it's hot outside, I don't want to pay to air condition the place down to 65 degrees, and when it's cold, I don't want it heated to 75.
This will become clearer to you after you move out of your mom's basement and start paying your own utility bills.
Sean
Wouldn't step 1 of your system block anyone running a mail server out of their house? The forward DNS lookup will get you their IP, and the backward DNS lookup will not match their domain, it'll match the ISPs.
Or am I making an error here?
Sean
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
The next three nations? Try the next ten: spending comparison link (sorry, a pdf)
Sean
Umm... actually, the overwhelming majority of American citizens are still alive. Sorry, couldn't help myself!
Sean
Of course they don't care. Caring about false positives isn't part of their job description. In fact, it's not part of ANYONE's job description... which is the problem.
Sean
These were known as "letters of marque", and although they're not considered legal under current laws of armed conflict, they were completely acceptable in those days.
Absolutely. War isn't a game, and if you let down your guard (by getting drunk on the battlefield), you have no right to ask the enemy to wait until you're better prepared.
Sean
Really?
You're contradicting yourself. In the second quote above, you're making the point that IBM is positioning itself to make money in the long term out of Open Source. The fact the Open Source is more ideologically pure has nothing to do with it.
Sean
Psst... he coached the Bears. Otherwise, I'm with ya.
Sean
Hard work sometimes pays off in the future. Laziness always pays off NOW.
Sean
I am a government contractor... and I can tell you that we're WAAAY more like the monkeys BEFORE the lazy gene blocking.
Sean
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
The "make your own browser" article linked in the parent describes how to put a new front end on the MSHTML engine... in other words, it tells you how to put your own skin on IE. Big deal.
Sean
Cue the Ben Franklin quote about those who trade off liberty for security in 3... 2... 1... Sean
A distinction without a difference.
Right. In the case of public roadways, it does involve regulation. Deal with it.
Sean
Although I'm not from Missouri, you'll still have to show me. Please quote the article/amendment number that gives us the right to travel. And thanks in advance to those who intend to quote Amendments 9 & 10. Even if you interpret 9 and/or 10 to include the right to travel, that doesn't mean you have the right to use the state's roads in an automobile to do it.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a big fan of more surveillance. But this argument is extremely weak.
Sean
Without taking a position on the larger issue of whether Free Software and patents go together... it's not at all clear to me that the sentence I quote above is true. Say Acme Software releases software package X. Then they get a letter from the FSF saying "We've patented two of the techniques you use in X. We need to come to an agreement." It's possible that the FSF could ask Acme to release the software under the GPL. But it's also possible, and in my view more likely, that the FSF would allow Acme to use one or more of its (FSF's) patents in exchange for Acme allowing the FSF to do the same with one or more of Acme's. This is the same way that corporations use patent portfolios. By definition, the technique is already publicly disclosed (in the patent application), so there's no issue of company secrets getting out.
What the FSF can't do is FORCE Acme to release package X under the GPL, because the GPL doesn't apply. The GPL is about copyright, not patents.
Sean