16C - awesome calculator for programmers, especially embedded work. There is no better number system converter available at any price. No I can't do bin/dec/hex in my head faster than the 16C and neither can you. Expensive due to relatively low numbers produced.
Umm, the best calculator for programmers is... the computer. Last I checked, any reasonable language lets you enter numbers in any base and does the conversions for you. My PC's a ton faster than your 16C, and whenever I'm programming it's right there with me.
Most reasonable debuggers will convert numbers to whatever format you want. Even Strings can be converted to hex, and let's see your 16c do that for even a 15 byte String. Not to mention character encoding...
I haven't owned a calculator in 10 years. Only reason I'd by one is to help with fractional math in the wood shop. Fucking imperial measurements.
... and if you're going to do that, point your browser to one of the world's many open proxies so they can't subpoena yahoo. And keep switching proxies. Better yet, switch proxies and daisy-chain two or more together.
Re:Software Company vs Restaurant
on
Make More Mistakes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Clearly you are speaking of yesterday's market. The software consultancy I work for (which charges at least hundreds of thousands of dollars) is just finishing our best year ever.
Most companies slashed IT spending in 2001-2003, certainly. Most software companies that appeared in the boom died (thankfully, as most of them shouldn't have existed in the first place). 2004 shows every sign of loosening the purse strings, and upgrading all that software that's been getting stale.
As to globalization, we're experiencing the same thing that the US did at the turn of the last century, when 30% of Americans were farmers. Now it's 3%. Guess what? We survived, even though it wasn't a pleasant re-tooling. Sure software jobs are moving overseas, as are manufacturing jobs (even China LOST 15 million manufacturing jobs in the last ten years, to greater efficiency in the plants). If you can't adapt, get the hell out of the market and open a gym, a bar, a restaurant, even a stripe (sic) club.
Certainly, if you provide a mediocre software product or service, 2003 wasn't a good year for you. If you were at the top of the software profession, it was just fine, thank you very much. Don't blame the economy for your own failures.
When I used macs exclusively, I used BBEdit a ton, and sang its praises from the mountaintops. Now that I use every platform imaginable from a Windows box, I broke down and learned vi to exhaustion. It does everything BBEdit does (in terms of editing text), works on every platform, and is free.
lots of valid points
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The authors validate many of my own concerns with the products mentioned, although some of their predictions are already coming true:
Rational Unified Process has contained roadmaps for XP process variants for over a year. RUPs primary purpose in life now is to keep consultants employed, although there's a ton of good stuff in there. Sorting it from the three tons of crap is why you need a consultant.
VB.net appears to have been largely abandoned by IT, and Microsoft's not far behind. That's good, since it just doesn't fit the.Net model, as noted.
I'm not too sure what the joke is behind local interfaces on entity beans, I thought that was what entity beans were supposed to be in the first place. The whole pass-by-value thing just wasn't going to work, even if the caller and callee were in the same VM, so how else should J2EE support container managed persistence?
Finally, yes, Struts is bloated and needs to be either updated with something that has a smaller learning curve (like auto-generated beans and forms) or just something else (like the author's suggestion of JSF, which is probably going to be the thing for Java webapps). However, for organizing your code Struts gets the MVC thing down. It's just over-engineered for most apps.
They claim there's no need for two-phase commit (2pc), as though the only systems they need to interact with are (or will be) prevaylor.
Umm, hello. How about that 50TB database with all our transaction history? You gonna put that in your RAM-based database? No? Well, what happens when you need to do an insert into it, but commit only if the insert and the local transaction succeeds?
Hell, forget the 50TB database, what about the little Oracle database the guys down the hall use? Or the asynchronous queue that you post into?
It's a much bigger world than just your little project, guys, and you have to fit into it. 2PC is not an option. It's a requirement.
The whole "let's keep it in RAM" is cute, and for a lot of projects is probably all you need, but for any kind of large data set you just can't buy enough RAM to hold it all. Once it goes to disk, there's a whole new set of problems.
Also, the fact that you're responsible for defining and managing your transaction boundaries is really lame. It's not that hard to build check-in/check-out logic that can be used.
Come back when you have a real system that can handle real load with real datasets. Until then, I'll keep my RDBMS. You may have performance beat on the tiny systems, but who cares? THEY'RE TINY SYSTEMS!
The your bayes implementation isn't working correctly. It's supposed to find the n most spammy and n least spammy words in the message, and use those for doing the math. Including extra common language won't help, since common words won't affect the score one way or the other: "mortgage" will still rank high on my spam list.
See paulgraham.com for a complete description of exactly this attack.
If I was a consumer paying for the service, I might think there's an ulterior motive. Since I can use either one for free, at no cost beyond the inevitable pain of installing an MTA, it's an alternative, not an advertisement.
However, had they listed other alternatives like qmail et al, it would appear lest biased.
All that said, I use sendmail 8.12.9 as my MTA/MDA, which I compile myself and build my own.mc for, and while I agree that it's complex, there's no configuration I can think of that sendmail won't support. I have a fairly simple setup (5 domains, some virtual users, aliases, multiple MXs, procmail, TLS) and the hard part was learning how the internet handles mail (MX records, SMTP, TLS, etc), not learning how to make sendmail do what I want. Google got me what I needed to know, and quickly.
I may switch MDAs soon, so that I don't have to use mbox on the back end (cyrus is looking like the most likely target because of its DB mail store), but I think I'll stick with sendmail since I already know it. It hasn't had a new revision in a fairly long time (3/31), and it's been extremely reliable.
Maybe your problem is that there is no/Library/SystemStartup directory.:-)
If you mean startupitems, I've found it vastly superior to Linux's crappy "sort them by name" method: in OSX, you just tell the system what service you provide, and what service(s) you depend on, and it works out the proper startup order. How much simpler could it be?
Agreed, however, that the total lack of a shutdown sequence (which could easily be derived from the information above) sucks.
I've never had a hard time compiling OSX goodies by hand, but I'm used to doing that: my Linux distro that's running on my iMac isn't supported any more (linuxppc), and I need to keep those services updated.
Okay, first: The password hashes are HASHES. Not encrypted. There's no way to get the original back, no matter how much CPU you have. Agreed that it's still not a great idea to let anyone at them, and I have to admit I was stunned that you could do it. I'll have to see if they use a different salt on each machine though, it adds a small measure of protection (if the passwords aren't simple). Download a copy of john and see how long it takes. My imac (running Linux) has been working on guessing a password to match my pw hash for more than ten days. The users on my system who used insecure p/ws were cracked in minutes.
Now you wanna talk security holes: by default, any DHCP server can send a URL of an LDAP server to OSX, and it'll authenticate users from that LDAP server. Yuck.
Second, you state that "OSX is much harder to work with," but don't explain how. Personally, I've found it much easier to learn than Linux was: I've never felt the need to compile my own OSX kernel, but I've had to do that repeatedly to Linux over the years. The distributed directory stuff in Jaguar rocks, and it integrates with LDAP, AD, whatever (and all of the above, simultaneously). See the macdevcenter at O'Reilly.
Agreed about Cringely: he's an idiot, IMHO. Can you name ANY profession that would recommend a change in their workplace that would remove themselves from being qualified to work there? Sheesh!
A bunch of posters have included thier own ideas about generating random numbers like radio antennas, listening to the LAN, etc. Hell, you could use various portions of the value of pi.
What the article is about (I think, the slashdot effect has kicked in already) is SECURE random numbers, which is a totally different topic. To be secure, the probability of the number cannot be influenced by an attacker (who could overcome any of the methods above).
It's REALLY hard to get secure random information, because you need a source that no one else can read (which takes out radio, LAN, and pi) or influence (which takes out radio, LAN, and a ton of other things). The source of randomness itself needs to be unpredictable and secure from outside monitoring.
IBM worked out a way to get random bits from hard drives, (not from the data on the drive, if memory serves, but from other characteristics like head float height) but to keep it random enough they could only get 6-8 bits per MINUTE from the technique.
The wired article linked to above mentions this problem: intel's RNG built into hardware can only provide about 70kbps of random data. If you over-sample your analog source, the data becomes predictable. The camera CCD is great, because it's so easy to get, and outputs so much data.
Actually, the opposite would happen: since all links in all spams get hit, this technique would make putting UIDs into URLs worthless for the purpose of authenticating users.
Spammers would need another mechanism to attempt to authenticate who reads their messages. I like it.
What do you think about downloading IMG tags? It would hurt the server's bandwidth, but it would hurt my mail server's bandwidth, too. Maybe use one of the many open proxies out there instead, kill their bandwidth, maybe close the open proxy... ooh, that's evil! I really like it!
What he said is that while creation, possesion, and use of tools to circumvent copyright protection may be legal, it's still illegal to traffic (distribute, sell, etc.) in them.
So if you build the tool yourself, you're okay. Just don't give it to anybody else. Give a little bit to them. Have somebody else supply another little bit. And so on.
Individually, the bits don't violate the DMCA. Only when you assemble them do you have a tool, which you can use, but cannot distribute.
The great majority of the code that most applications execute uses integer math. That's not to say that some apps (mostly dealing with a/v) don't make heavy use of FP, but still, integer is where the work gets done.
Consider this: in a typical 1000x100 cell Excel spreadsheet (which is bigger than many), you might have 2/3 of the 100,000 cells containing FP data, which you actually use in a calculation. That's ~70,000 FP ops.
But to render a _portion_ of that to the screen involves several MILLION integer ops to draw the text and numbers, lines, scroll-bars, menus, organize memory, parse formulas, etc. None of which will use FP (except to rasterize the fonts if you're anti-aliased, but that only happens once and gets cached). Even using accellerated video (which offload most graphics primatives to the video h/w), Excel does way more integer math than FP for the vast majority of users.
Now consider web browsers, Word, Oracle, and let's not forget the OS, which uses integer almost exclusively for allocating memory, managing storage, networking, etc.
There's a reason why Intel, IBM, and Motorola optimize for integer: their statistical analysis of real code tells them that's what makes machines faster.
Again, FP is not unimportant: it makes certain high-profile apps really fast. But w/o good integer performance, those apps (and all the others that don't make heavy use of FP) wouldn't have a chance.
I have Qwest, but they're my DSL provider, not my ISP. Being in the Twin Cities, I use visi.com, and they've been great to work with (no, I don't work for visi, etc., I'm just a satisfied customer).
That said, Qwest has done a good job keeping my DSL connection to visi.com running almost continuously for three years.
So I won't be using MSN for Mac OS X any time soon either.
Believe me, right now I'm more worried about the bad guys getting my passwords than law enforcement. The bad guys might know what to do with the data I send around, law enforcement can't touch it without going to jail themselves. I'll keep using SSH, thank you very much.
I do find it interesting that most of the taps had to do with narcotics... what passwords do drug dealers use that are easy to guess?
The bad: I'm in the midst of working through some issues with Apple Store tech support on why I can't download the songs I've purchased.
The good: they've been very responsive, and quick to refund my purchase, asking me to try again. I did, it didn't work, and so I sent them a detailed account of my system and network.
We'll see if the problem gets resolved any time soon, my setup is fairly vanilla.
When I was a kid, I helped my next-door neighbor build one of Rutan's planes (a Vari-Eze: two passengers, canard, and engine in the back). The designs may look wierd, but they sure are functional: the Vari-Eze had a 180 knot cruising speed, and this was plane we built in the garage!
I've met both Burt and Dick Rutan, and they're some smart, smart people who love avionics in a way you just don't see very often. I hope they can get the X-Prize!
It should be pointed out that AOL isn't blocking "All DSL" MTAs but those that have dynamically assigned IP addresses.
I have a static IP address on my DSL at home. When I telnet to mailin-01.mx.aol.com from my home, the MX on the other end never answers. If I go from my company's LAN, I get right in. So much for your theory...
Mathematica, for one, is symbolic: it doesn't convert your result into a number until you tell it to. At that point, it's as precise as you want it to be, so you can have pi be 3, 3.14, 3.14159, if that's accurate enough, or you can just leave it as pi and it will be exact (no rounding errors).
I guess this means I can use the DMCA to force ISPs to give me the IDs of people whose machines have sent me spam. Since there's no due process involved, nor (seemingly) any right to appeal (at least by the ISP, and there doesn't seem to be a provision for user to appeal), I should be able to find out who they are, where they live, and their phone number.
What happens then? Use your imagination.
But what's the DMCA violation with spamming? The spammer has bypassed the technological measures installed on my machine (spam filters) preventing me from copying (receiving) their spam. Remember, the courts don't review this, so I can get their personal info just by asking.
Slashdot Mirror
16C - awesome calculator for programmers, especially embedded work. There is no better number system converter available at any price. No I can't do bin/dec/hex in my head faster than the 16C and neither can you. Expensive due to relatively low numbers produced.
Umm, the best calculator for programmers is... the computer. Last I checked, any reasonable language lets you enter numbers in any base and does the conversions for you. My PC's a ton faster than your 16C, and whenever I'm programming it's right there with me.
Most reasonable debuggers will convert numbers to whatever format you want. Even Strings can be converted to hex, and let's see your 16c do that for even a 15 byte String. Not to mention character encoding...
I haven't owned a calculator in 10 years. Only reason I'd by one is to help with fractional math in the wood shop. Fucking imperial measurements.
... and if you're going to do that, point your browser to one of the world's many open proxies so they can't subpoena yahoo. And keep switching proxies. Better yet, switch proxies and daisy-chain two or more together.
Clearly you are speaking of yesterday's market. The software consultancy I work for (which charges at least hundreds of thousands of dollars) is just finishing our best year ever.
Most companies slashed IT spending in 2001-2003, certainly. Most software companies that appeared in the boom died (thankfully, as most of them shouldn't have existed in the first place). 2004 shows every sign of loosening the purse strings, and upgrading all that software that's been getting stale.
As to globalization, we're experiencing the same thing that the US did at the turn of the last century, when 30% of Americans were farmers. Now it's 3%. Guess what? We survived, even though it wasn't a pleasant re-tooling. Sure software jobs are moving overseas, as are manufacturing jobs (even China LOST 15 million manufacturing jobs in the last ten years, to greater efficiency in the plants). If you can't adapt, get the hell out of the market and open a gym, a bar, a restaurant, even a stripe (sic) club.
Certainly, if you provide a mediocre software product or service, 2003 wasn't a good year for you. If you were at the top of the software profession, it was just fine, thank you very much. Don't blame the economy for your own failures.
When I used macs exclusively, I used BBEdit a ton, and sang its praises from the mountaintops. Now that I use every platform imaginable from a Windows box, I broke down and learned vi to exhaustion. It does everything BBEdit does (in terms of editing text), works on every platform, and is free.
The authors validate many of my own concerns with the products mentioned, although some of their predictions are already coming true:
.Net model, as noted.
Rational Unified Process has contained roadmaps for XP process variants for over a year. RUPs primary purpose in life now is to keep consultants employed, although there's a ton of good stuff in there. Sorting it from the three tons of crap is why you need a consultant.
VB.net appears to have been largely abandoned by IT, and Microsoft's not far behind. That's good, since it just doesn't fit the
I'm not too sure what the joke is behind local interfaces on entity beans, I thought that was what entity beans were supposed to be in the first place. The whole pass-by-value thing just wasn't going to work, even if the caller and callee were in the same VM, so how else should J2EE support container managed persistence?
Finally, yes, Struts is bloated and needs to be either updated with something that has a smaller learning curve (like auto-generated beans and forms) or just something else (like the author's suggestion of JSF, which is probably going to be the thing for Java webapps). However, for organizing your code Struts gets the MVC thing down. It's just over-engineered for most apps.
These folks are either very naive, or very silly.
They claim there's no need for two-phase commit (2pc), as though the only systems they need to interact with are (or will be) prevaylor.
Umm, hello. How about that 50TB database with all our transaction history? You gonna put that in your RAM-based database? No? Well, what happens when you need to do an insert into it, but commit only if the insert and the local transaction succeeds?
Hell, forget the 50TB database, what about the little Oracle database the guys down the hall use? Or the asynchronous queue that you post into?
It's a much bigger world than just your little project, guys, and you have to fit into it. 2PC is not an option. It's a requirement.
The whole "let's keep it in RAM" is cute, and for a lot of projects is probably all you need, but for any kind of large data set you just can't buy enough RAM to hold it all. Once it goes to disk, there's a whole new set of problems.
Also, the fact that you're responsible for defining and managing your transaction boundaries is really lame. It's not that hard to build check-in/check-out logic that can be used.
Come back when you have a real system that can handle real load with real datasets. Until then, I'll keep my RDBMS. You may have performance beat on the tiny systems, but who cares? THEY'RE TINY SYSTEMS!
The your bayes implementation isn't working correctly. It's supposed to find the n most spammy and n least spammy words in the message, and use those for doing the math. Including extra common language won't help, since common words won't affect the score one way or the other: "mortgage" will still rank high on my spam list. See paulgraham.com for a complete description of exactly this attack.
If I was a consumer paying for the service, I might think there's an ulterior motive. Since I can use either one for free, at no cost beyond the inevitable pain of installing an MTA, it's an alternative, not an advertisement.
.mc for, and while I agree that it's complex, there's no configuration I can think of that sendmail won't support. I have a fairly simple setup (5 domains, some virtual users, aliases, multiple MXs, procmail, TLS) and the hard part was learning how the internet handles mail (MX records, SMTP, TLS, etc), not learning how to make sendmail do what I want. Google got me what I needed to know, and quickly.
However, had they listed other alternatives like qmail et al, it would appear lest biased.
All that said, I use sendmail 8.12.9 as my MTA/MDA, which I compile myself and build my own
I may switch MDAs soon, so that I don't have to use mbox on the back end (cyrus is looking like the most likely target because of its DB mail store), but I think I'll stick with sendmail since I already know it. It hasn't had a new revision in a fairly long time (3/31), and it's been extremely reliable.
Maybe your problem is that there is no /Library/SystemStartup directory.:-)
If you mean startupitems, I've found it vastly superior to Linux's crappy "sort them by name" method: in OSX, you just tell the system what service you provide, and what service(s) you depend on, and it works out the proper startup order. How much simpler could it be?
Agreed, however, that the total lack of a shutdown sequence (which could easily be derived from the information above) sucks.
I've never had a hard time compiling OSX goodies by hand, but I'm used to doing that: my Linux distro that's running on my iMac isn't supported any more (linuxppc), and I need to keep those services updated.
Okay, first:
The password hashes are HASHES. Not encrypted. There's no way to get the original back, no matter how much CPU you have. Agreed that it's still not a great idea to let anyone at them, and I have to admit I was stunned that you could do it. I'll have to see if they use a different salt on each machine though, it adds a small measure of protection (if the passwords aren't simple). Download a copy of john and see how long it takes. My imac (running Linux) has been working on guessing a password to match my pw hash for more than ten days. The users on my system who used insecure p/ws were cracked in minutes.
Now you wanna talk security holes: by default, any DHCP server can send a URL of an LDAP server to OSX, and it'll authenticate users from that LDAP server. Yuck.
Second, you state that "OSX is much harder to work with," but don't explain how. Personally, I've found it much easier to learn than Linux was: I've never felt the need to compile my own OSX kernel, but I've had to do that repeatedly to Linux over the years. The distributed directory stuff in Jaguar rocks, and it integrates with LDAP, AD, whatever (and all of the above, simultaneously). See the macdevcenter at O'Reilly.
Agreed about Cringely: he's an idiot, IMHO. Can you name ANY profession that would recommend a change in their workplace that would remove themselves from being qualified to work there? Sheesh!
A bunch of posters have included thier own ideas about generating random numbers like radio antennas, listening to the LAN, etc. Hell, you could use various portions of the value of pi.
What the article is about (I think, the slashdot effect has kicked in already) is SECURE random numbers, which is a totally different topic. To be secure, the probability of the number cannot be influenced by an attacker (who could overcome any of the methods above).
It's REALLY hard to get secure random information, because you need a source that no one else can read (which takes out radio, LAN, and pi) or influence (which takes out radio, LAN, and a ton of other things). The source of randomness itself needs to be unpredictable and secure from outside monitoring.
IBM worked out a way to get random bits from hard drives, (not from the data on the drive, if memory serves, but from other characteristics like head float height) but to keep it random enough they could only get 6-8 bits per MINUTE from the technique.
The wired article linked to above mentions this problem: intel's RNG built into hardware can only provide about 70kbps of random data. If you over-sample your analog source, the data becomes predictable. The camera CCD is great, because it's so easy to get, and outputs so much data.
This sig isn't here.
Actually, the opposite would happen: since all links in all spams get hit, this technique would make putting UIDs into URLs worthless for the purpose of authenticating users.
Spammers would need another mechanism to attempt to authenticate who reads their messages. I like it.
What do you think about downloading IMG tags? It would hurt the server's bandwidth, but it would hurt my mail server's bandwidth, too. Maybe use one of the many open proxies out there instead, kill their bandwidth, maybe close the open proxy... ooh, that's evil! I really like it!
If there were a sig here, would you read it?
You're missing the (admittedly subtle) point.
What he said is that while creation, possesion, and use of tools to circumvent copyright protection may be legal, it's still illegal to traffic (distribute, sell, etc.) in them.
So if you build the tool yourself, you're okay. Just don't give it to anybody else. Give a little bit to them. Have somebody else supply another little bit. And so on.
Individually, the bits don't violate the DMCA. Only when you assemble them do you have a tool, which you can use, but cannot distribute.
Get it?
// you probably won't believe my review, so please
// read this guy's
#include otherreview.c
The great majority of the code that most applications execute uses integer math. That's not to say that some apps (mostly dealing with a/v) don't make heavy use of FP, but still, integer is where the work gets done.
Consider this: in a typical 1000x100 cell Excel spreadsheet (which is bigger than many), you might have 2/3 of the 100,000 cells containing FP data, which you actually use in a calculation. That's ~70,000 FP ops.
But to render a _portion_ of that to the screen involves several MILLION integer ops to draw the text and numbers, lines, scroll-bars, menus, organize memory, parse formulas, etc. None of which will use FP (except to rasterize the fonts if you're anti-aliased, but that only happens once and gets cached). Even using accellerated video (which offload most graphics primatives to the video h/w), Excel does way more integer math than FP for the vast majority of users.
Now consider web browsers, Word, Oracle, and let's not forget the OS, which uses integer almost exclusively for allocating memory, managing storage, networking, etc.
There's a reason why Intel, IBM, and Motorola optimize for integer: their statistical analysis of real code tells them that's what makes machines faster.
Again, FP is not unimportant: it makes certain high-profile apps really fast. But w/o good integer performance, those apps (and all the others that don't make heavy use of FP) wouldn't have a chance.
I have Qwest, but they're my DSL provider, not my ISP. Being in the Twin Cities, I use visi.com, and they've been great to work with (no, I don't work for visi, etc., I'm just a satisfied customer).
That said, Qwest has done a good job keeping my DSL connection to visi.com running almost continuously for three years.
So I won't be using MSN for Mac OS X any time soon either.
Believe me, right now I'm more worried about the bad guys getting my passwords than law enforcement. The bad guys might know what to do with the data I send around, law enforcement can't touch it without going to jail themselves. I'll keep using SSH, thank you very much.
I do find it interesting that most of the taps had to do with narcotics... what passwords do drug dealers use that are easy to guess?
The bad: I'm in the midst of working through some issues with Apple Store tech support on why I can't download the songs I've purchased.
.sig
The good: they've been very responsive, and quick to refund my purchase, asking me to try again. I did, it didn't work, and so I sent them a detailed account of my system and network.
We'll see if the problem gets resolved any time soon, my setup is fairly vanilla.
I don't have a
When I was a kid, I helped my next-door neighbor build one of Rutan's planes (a Vari-Eze: two passengers, canard, and engine in the back). The designs may look wierd, but they sure are functional: the Vari-Eze had a 180 knot cruising speed, and this was plane we built in the garage!
I've met both Burt and Dick Rutan, and they're some smart, smart people who love avionics in a way you just don't see very often. I hope they can get the X-Prize!
I have a static IP address on my DSL at home. When I telnet to mailin-01.mx.aol.com from my home, the MX on the other end never answers. If I go from my company's LAN, I get right in. So much for your theory...
... has picked up this post. This is the first time I've seen a /. article make it to the news.google.com "front page"!
That SQL Server worm I've been working on. What bit was that again?
Mathematica, for one, is symbolic: it doesn't convert your result into a number until you tell it to. At that point, it's as precise as you want it to be, so you can have pi be 3, 3.14, 3.14159, if that's accurate enough, or you can just leave it as pi and it will be exact (no rounding errors).
Umm, if you're going to call it "the Mario series," shouldn't Donkey Kong count? And plain old "Mario Brothers?"
/. old enough to remember DK?
Or am I the only one who reads
I guess this means I can use the DMCA to force ISPs to give me the IDs of people whose machines have sent me spam. Since there's no due process involved, nor (seemingly) any right to appeal (at least by the ISP, and there doesn't seem to be a provision for user to appeal), I should be able to find out who they are, where they live, and their phone number.
What happens then? Use your imagination.
But what's the DMCA violation with spamming? The spammer has bypassed the technological measures installed on my machine (spam filters) preventing me from copying (receiving) their spam. Remember, the courts don't review this, so I can get their personal info just by asking.
Here, spammer...