I fly pretty regularly with a Kyocera 6035 Smartphone and I've never been hassled. In case you do get hassled, you can always show them the screen that says "Phone is OFF". Someone somewhere probably has been unreasonably hassled, but 99.9% of the time you're set.
In fact, as PDA/phones get more popular, I think the awareness among flight attendents will increase.
Check out the Mozilla Mouse Gestures project. I don't use Opera, so I'm not sure if it reproduces all Opera gestures, but knowing Mozilla, there will be a very awkward but powerful way to customize it the way you like...
- Eric
I completely agree. It's the unsung hero of Mozilla and the only part of Mozilla I'm using now (Fire, Eudora, and Safari rule my desktop now), as I like to take meeting notes in HTML tables. I use BBEdit on the Mac for more of my HTML needs, but tables are too much of a pain in the neck for a text editor.
Wouldn't it be cool if Composer started outputting clean CSS formatted pages? Maybe as a stop gap they can pipe output to HTML Tidy. I'll always remember Tidy as the program that nagged me into awareness of summary tags, etc. for the disabled audience...
- Eric
ps. Actually, what I'd really like is to have a GUI HTML editor I can hand to my less-technical friends that will edit HTML pages on their web sites. FTP is too much for them to cope with. Composer is almost there, with its Publish to Web features...
Composer was renamed El Dorado Convertible, Chatzilla was renamed Dart Swinger and Camino, of course, remained unchanged.
In another surprise sequence of events, GCC was renamed GNU Caprice Classic and Emacs was renamed Pontiac Catalina.
Apparently as part of an prior agreement, the Chevy Tahoe was immediately renamed the GNU/Chevy Tahoe.
- Eric
Why so mad at Cut and Paste in Finder?
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From the article:
Furthermore, as astute readers have already figured out, the shelf eliminates any need for the perversion of interface metaphors that is the use of copy and paste for files. The "Edit -> Copy File" command now becomes "File -> Place on Shelf", and the "Edit -> Paste File" command now splits into two commands, "File -> Copy from Shelf" and "File -> Move from Shelf", making it more powerful that copy/paste (since "cut" is not an option) in addition to being more sane and consistent with the rest of the UI.
Why the hostility? The "Cut" feature is practically the only thing from Windows that I miss in OS X. It's annoying to not be able to move files in OS X without dragging. Often you know you want to move some files, but say you get to the destination and want to make a new folder for them. This is incredibly annoying to do with OS X, but would be way easier with keyboard Cut as well as Copy/Paste.
What is the down side to having a "Cut"? I assume there's some usability study that shows users messing up more with Cut around. But I find this hard to believe. Cut and Paste to a hidden clipboard is so ingrained in computer users that introducing an explicit "shelf" makes things more, not less complicated. In fact, OS X is going in the opposite direction... nowadays you can cut and paste almost everything to a hidden clipboard and it tries to sort out what you meant (e.g. copy a file and paste it into a text editor, or drag a file onto a terminal window).
You can get an OS X version of the shelf mentioned (a kind of visible clipboard) at XShelf today. I have it around as a kludge for moving files more easily. But it would all be solved by having a "Cut" option as well as Copy and Paste.
Yep, that darned magnetic catch is a pain. Mine broke on my old 500 MHz TiBook 15". Someone else I know also had his break and he had to send it in for repairs (I think the sleep mechanism got messed up). If you close the lid just wrong (not quite sure what the pattern is), you can bang the latch against something hard.
I follow all the five listed hints except for turning off my modem. How exactly do you do that?
With the other four and reduced CPU usage I get around 3 hours on a 1 GHz TiBook. This is noticeably better than my 500MHz TiBook, by the way, which usually hit the wall at 2 hours and a bit.
On turning off Airport:There's an interesting thread at macosxhints.com where there is disagreement about it. One person claims:
This doesn't actually work. I've spoken with support techs, and the airport card never actually gets turned off. The menu extra does disable the network interface, but the hardware is not ever powered off unless you remove it. I suppose this is part of the kernel extension and why the Airport Extreme hacks to work with other cards have problems when you remove the 802.11g cards.
Gnucash is great. I converted my old ratty Quicken files to Gnucash (via.qif) and it worked mostly fine. There were some cases where Quicken let me (accidentally) specify a deposit into an account that was categorized as living in that same account (as opposed to coming from Accounts Payable or something), and Gnucash treated those fields literally. After hunting those glitches down, it was smooth sailing.
The only caveat: Gnucash isn't really exporting right now, so don't expect to get your data out for another version or two.
GPL-style educational material has problems similar to GPL-style software: textbook committees like some kind of authority to be responsible for authenticating the material's quality. Someone they can point to and sue if necessary. I'm not saying this is right, but it's the way it is right now.
The funny thing is, many students already take The Internet to be the ultimate authority on matters. When they do reports or projects or homeworks, they'll search their textbook for The Right Answer and if it's not there, they'll go to Google. So it may be that if we can make the OpenWikipediaCourseware site, then they will come whether or not it becomes the official text.
Context: I teach university math. I despise most textbooks but don't have something better to replace them. YET.
... although not as annoying as the lack of a quick & easy way to switch between arbitrary windows when they are obscured from view.
Cmd-` is a big step forward in this. (It switches between an app's windows.) I still find Cmd-Tab unusable.
I use Windows XP, X11 and Mac OS X, now. My biggest complaint with Macs is not the one-button mouse thing (for god's sake, get a $10 usb 2-button mouse and be happy, or better yet a Kensington Orbit trackball); it's not the one-menu-to-rule-them-all-thing (I don't care).
It's the lack of good keyboard bindings for menu navigation. even the "Keyboard Navigation" mode doesn't really do it. I've been doing okay with Youpi Key (the best freeware ever). But I miss the glory days of Now Menus or was it Action Menus... I forget now, whichever one automatically added arrow and key control to all menus.
But when all is said and whinged... I use OS X for everything I can.
- Eric
I like KFJC, which is available on the net. It is a college radio station out of Foothill College in Central Ca. It has great shows and mostly alternative taste.
Diamond Age is by Neil Stephenson. Gibson wrote Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Difference Engine with Bruce Sterling, Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties, FYI.
I love the idea as much as anyone, but a service that is based on sheer voting-by-message cannot last. Right now spammers send out exact copies to everyone, so this works. If this service becomes too effective, wouldn't spammers move to personalizing their e-mails with enough text changes to fool the message matching?
Now if you move to a statistical method, there is the issue of training your filter. By the nature of the statistical method, it may well be more accurate if you train it, as opposed to the masses. Why? Because your pool of Ham (non-Spam) is going to have distinct characteristics that will help avoid false positives for you (but maybe not someone else). If a community trains it, then on average, it may be that the Ham becomes less distinguishable from the Spam.
On the other hand, this second point is an empirical claim. It would probably be relatively easy to do a little study of this. Get some 100 people to share statistics on their Ham and Spam (not the actual messages). The researchers see if the aggregate generated filtering is better than the individual ones. Nobody's privacy is (too) compromised.
This is actually a legitimate question. I believe they can, as distribution of advertising is still covered by copyright. (Witness the sad demise of adcritic.com and people who try to host Apple ads.) The question would be whether this use of spam was "fair use", because it was for research.
The second issue is whether it's covered by the laws that supposedly protect e-mail conversations. I've been socialized on Usenet to believe that it's illegal to publically post pieces of private e-mail. I've never seen this law, so perhaps it's merely socially condemned practice. That would be an interesting question too, to see if spam can be considered "private e-mail". Since the same e-mail is sent to millions, it probably isn't. But what if it were personalized? Would it count then?
Interesting issues to spice up media law...
Well, current punk scenes have some overlap with free software movements ethically: the do-it-yourself ethic, the desire to avoid conformity, de-emphasizing monetary reward as THE incentive to be creative.
I say current, since we're pretty far away from 1976. And I'm not saying all punks (or free-software types!) live up to those values, but they those are commonly expressed values.
There's also a more intellectual connection via those who consider the Pistols to be the all-time Situationist art piece linked to anarchism linked to certain anarcho-trends on Slashdot.
Anyway, even if you dismiss the Sex Pistols as hype (true enough), you've got to hand it to them:
They did start an amazingly creative movement which influenced music (via 70's British punk, then New Wave, then 90's grunge).
They left behind a pretty polished set of incredible singles. "Anarchy in the UK" still sounds modern, and "God Save the Queen" may still be the best music ever produced in post-Beatles England. Their producer, Chris Thomas, did an amazing job getting a sound out of them that sounded powerful and raw despite the layers of production. And if you read the histories, hype or no hype, most non-punks in England were really pissed off about the Pistols. As opposed to now, when punk is just another fashion choice.
They did allow Johnny Rotten to produce the first two Public Image Limited records, "Public Image" and "Metal Box"/"Second Edition". The best tracks of "Public Image" out-punk the Sex Pistols material. The best tracks of "Metal Box" are still ahead of their time.
Re:we're talking CEOs of large corporations (Re:ju
on
Expose on Insider Loans
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Wow, I cannot believe you were modded insightful.
Your argument: "He deserved his pay. Everyone knows he worked hard." Well, so did lots of people. You need to argue that he deserved what he got. Kenneth Lay probably worked his ass off.
That liberal idiots have managed to convince him to give back that money is a shame.
Yeah, liberal idiots like the Wall Street Journal. Find me a public defender of Jack Welch's compensation package. It stank to high hell. The deal was negotiated in secret and kept secret from investors. It was buried in an obscure place in an SEC filing, and only came out because of his wife's divorce filings. If it was such a clever move for the company financially and if every knows how much he deserves it, then why not allow investors to admire your move?
Here's the big question to the "Go Back To Russia" types. Is there any amount of compensation that is undeserved, if it was negotiated legally? If your answer is "NO", then enjoy your world, this is more about your religion than anything. But even the biggest free-market booster would say, yes, there is, and the market will correct for it. Well, it can't correct for what is kept secret.
>What is [the CEO] responsible for that makes him worth so much money to these companies?
How many corporate CEOS have you seen arrested recently?
That's the risk. Shareholders demand returns. You take risks to achieve those returns. If you fail or are close to failing you may feel pressured to toe the line or cross the line of legality.
Wha--? This is so muddled up. You appear to be saying: CEOs are responsible for their company's performance. They are tempted to commit fraud. They can go to jail for fraud. Therefore we should pay them hundreds of millions of dollars.
That is just plain messed up. First, they should be paid for doing their job which is guiding the company, not for avoiding crime. What next, pay doctors bonus hazard pay so they won't deal speed out of their offices?. Second, they actually have less vulnerability to being jailed compared to the janitor; they can afford a good lawyer, and even if they do go behind bars it will be in minimum security.
And when and if it fails you are the one holding the bag.
Actually, you're not holding any bag. You don't have to pay back your company's debt if it goes down. You go on to another high-paying white-collar job (even another CEO position...), and you probably have a very nice severance package from the company. If you happened to have ripped off the company and investors, and no one buys your claims of ignorance, then it's more complicated.
I think the poor janitor is the one who'll have trouble getting a new job. So by your logic, we ought to pay the janitor more for the risk taken...
we're talking CEOs of large corporations (Re:jump)
on
Expose on Insider Loans
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
So, do you really want to eliminate my incentive? Sure hope you like Junior...
No one is arguing that a CEO shouldn't make MORE money than other workers at a company. The question is why they are being given absurdly high compensation packages compared to every other country in the world.
It's insiderism, it's a sleazy money grab; they know it's wrong, why else would boards of directors try to hide these compensation packages from their shareholders? See the Jack Welch of GE's compensation scandal for only the latest such example.
You worked your ass off. You took risks, you got rewarded. But you can bet Jack Welch didn't climb any poles or take out the trash. Unless the trash was in Tahiti and he took the company jet. Most CEOs of large companies get a big payday whether or not their companies do well. Tying compensation to stock prices was supposed to fix that; instead they figured out how to fix their own stock prices until they could cash out.
To be fair, I don't agree with the assessments that OpenOffice is so awful a program. The current OS X beta is definitely not for the typical user. It's a sluggish X11 app. But it works, and it (mostly) decodes Office apps and does (mostly) the same things. On a PC I find it's quite comparable to Office 2000, and maybe even XP, except for some of the more exotic features. It's pretty speedy and is a reasonable drop-in replacement.
When it's free from X11, that will be a good step, but it's probably true that it will always feel like a port, even if it's got native drawn widgets.
What we dream about is a Chimera for OpenOffice. To spell it out: Mozilla has brilliant ideas (maybe too many of them), but the key is that the engine decodes most HTML/Jscript found in the wild. However, for Mac users it looks and feels like a port, even with the beautiful Navzilla skin. So, Chimera jumps in, keeping the standards-loving Gecko engine, but adding a beautiful Cocoa front-end.
But I think this is only a fantasy for OO. The OO.org folks explain their choice of porting strategy by saying there isn't good separation between the display code and the rest of it, so we can't hope to bolt on a sweet Cocoa/Aqua front-end.
Maybe in the short term the best we can hope for is a damned good Cocoa MS Office file translator based on OO. After all, the most important thing about OO is that it reads and saves MS Office documents. The only reason I need Office is to read other people's files. I don't use 99% of the bloaty features they have. I wish I could use a simpler word processor, like Mariner Write or Nisus (is it still alive?).
Maybe seamless translation to MS Office is possible a lot sooner than 2004 (OO's native widget due date). Let me dream...
Many of the proponents of this idea suggest that the advantage is creating a non-trivial cost for access to resources.
Can someone spell out the advantages this method has over the "tarpit" strategies that some mailers follow? (I.e. each successive access takes longer, so the first access may take 1 sec, the next 2 sec, the next 4 sec, so soon abusers find themselves timing out.)
Is it fair to consider tarpits a special case of hashcash where the non-trivial cost is time waiting applied server-side?
If so, isn't this a less wasteful approach? (Genuine questions on my part.)
The main problem with spam is fraud and not its unsolicited nature. Okay, we're all geeks on this bus, so we're angry if we people violate the boundaries of our computer in some unsolicited way (I know it, I feel it too). But there's a difference between getting unsolicited mail from, say someone who's interested in a band you wrote an online review about, and some anonymous mailbot trying to scam you.
The problem is fraud. (1) Spammers forge return-addresses and lie in their subjects to trick you. This makes it hard to weed out unwanted mail. (2) Practically all spam comes from fraudsters.
Spam is so despised as a marketing tactic that it cannot be used (openly) regularly by legitimate businesses without them getting a lot of flak.
I hate spam. It drives me crazy. But I believe we will never fully get rid of it, because it makes money. And there may truly be compelling free speech reasons that keep us from banning it (I'm not decided on this point).
But I think three steps would take most of the pain out of spam for me.
Spammers who are criminals (stock-pumpers, penis-mightiers) get arrested and deterred/reformed. The NY AG move is a much-needed start.
Spam must be given a proper subject like "ADV:", and need a legitimate return address. Violators are subject to large fines and jail.
Spammers need to pay for all their bounced mail. Not sure how to enforce this, but it would make me feel better.
Once these things are true, maybe spam will reach the same annoyance level as junk mail in real life: annoying, but not obscene.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, as PDA/phones get more popular, I think the awareness among flight attendents will increase.
Check out the Mozilla Mouse Gestures project. I don't use Opera, so I'm not sure if it reproduces all Opera gestures, but knowing Mozilla, there will be a very awkward but powerful way to customize it the way you like... - Eric
Wouldn't it be cool if Composer started outputting clean CSS formatted pages? Maybe as a stop gap they can pipe output to HTML Tidy. I'll always remember Tidy as the program that nagged me into awareness of summary tags, etc. for the disabled audience...
- Eric
ps. Actually, what I'd really like is to have a GUI HTML editor I can hand to my less-technical friends that will edit HTML pages on their web sites. FTP is too much for them to cope with. Composer is almost there, with its Publish to Web features...
In another surprise sequence of events, GCC was renamed GNU Caprice Classic and Emacs was renamed Pontiac Catalina.
Apparently as part of an prior agreement, the Chevy Tahoe was immediately renamed the GNU/Chevy Tahoe.
- Eric
Furthermore, as astute readers have already figured out, the shelf eliminates any need for the perversion of interface metaphors that is the use of copy and paste for files. The "Edit -> Copy File" command now becomes "File -> Place on Shelf", and the "Edit -> Paste File" command now splits into two commands, "File -> Copy from Shelf" and "File -> Move from Shelf", making it more powerful that copy/paste (since "cut" is not an option) in addition to being more sane and consistent with the rest of the UI.
Why the hostility? The "Cut" feature is practically the only thing from Windows that I miss in OS X. It's annoying to not be able to move files in OS X without dragging. Often you know you want to move some files, but say you get to the destination and want to make a new folder for them. This is incredibly annoying to do with OS X, but would be way easier with keyboard Cut as well as Copy/Paste.
What is the down side to having a "Cut"? I assume there's some usability study that shows users messing up more with Cut around. But I find this hard to believe. Cut and Paste to a hidden clipboard is so ingrained in computer users that introducing an explicit "shelf" makes things more, not less complicated. In fact, OS X is going in the opposite direction... nowadays you can cut and paste almost everything to a hidden clipboard and it tries to sort out what you meant (e.g. copy a file and paste it into a text editor, or drag a file onto a terminal window).
You can get an OS X version of the shelf mentioned (a kind of visible clipboard) at XShelf today. I have it around as a kludge for moving files more easily. But it would all be solved by having a "Cut" option as well as Copy and Paste.
- Eric
Very cool, but fragile.
- Eric
With the other four and reduced CPU usage I get around 3 hours on a 1 GHz TiBook. This is noticeably better than my 500MHz TiBook, by the way, which usually hit the wall at 2 hours and a bit.
On turning off Airport:There's an interesting thread at macosxhints.com where there is disagreement about it. One person claims:
This doesn't actually work. I've spoken with support techs, and the airport card never actually gets turned off. The menu extra does disable the network interface, but the hardware is not ever powered off unless you remove it. I suppose this is part of the kernel extension and why the Airport Extreme hacks to work with other cards have problems when you remove the 802.11g cards.
So, your mileage may vary. - Eric
The only caveat: Gnucash isn't really exporting right now, so don't expect to get your data out for another version or two.
- Eric
GPL-style educational material has problems similar to GPL-style software: textbook committees like some kind of authority to be responsible for authenticating the material's quality. Someone they can point to and sue if necessary. I'm not saying this is right, but it's the way it is right now.
The funny thing is, many students already take The Internet to be the ultimate authority on matters. When they do reports or projects or homeworks, they'll search their textbook for The Right Answer and if it's not there, they'll go to Google. So it may be that if we can make the OpenWikipediaCourseware site, then they will come whether or not it becomes the official text.
Context: I teach university math. I despise most textbooks but don't have something better to replace them. YET.
- Eric
Cmd-` is a big step forward in this. (It switches between an app's windows.) I still find Cmd-Tab unusable.
I use Windows XP, X11 and Mac OS X, now. My biggest complaint with Macs is not the one-button mouse thing (for god's sake, get a $10 usb 2-button mouse and be happy, or better yet a Kensington Orbit trackball); it's not the one-menu-to-rule-them-all-thing (I don't care).
It's the lack of good keyboard bindings for menu navigation. even the "Keyboard Navigation" mode doesn't really do it. I've been doing okay with Youpi Key (the best freeware ever). But I miss the glory days of Now Menus or was it Action Menus... I forget now, whichever one automatically added arrow and key control to all menus.
But when all is said and whinged... I use OS X for everything I can. - Eric
I like KFJC, which is available on the net. It is a college radio station out of Foothill College in Central Ca. It has great shows and mostly alternative taste.
Diamond Age is by Neil Stephenson. Gibson wrote Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Difference Engine with Bruce Sterling, Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties, FYI.
Now if you move to a statistical method, there is the issue of training your filter. By the nature of the statistical method, it may well be more accurate if you train it, as opposed to the masses. Why? Because your pool of Ham (non-Spam) is going to have distinct characteristics that will help avoid false positives for you (but maybe not someone else). If a community trains it, then on average, it may be that the Ham becomes less distinguishable from the Spam.
On the other hand, this second point is an empirical claim. It would probably be relatively easy to do a little study of this. Get some 100 people to share statistics on their Ham and Spam (not the actual messages). The researchers see if the aggregate generated filtering is better than the individual ones. Nobody's privacy is (too) compromised.
The second issue is whether it's covered by the laws that supposedly protect e-mail conversations. I've been socialized on Usenet to believe that it's illegal to publically post pieces of private e-mail. I've never seen this law, so perhaps it's merely socially condemned practice. That would be an interesting question too, to see if spam can be considered "private e-mail". Since the same e-mail is sent to millions, it probably isn't. But what if it were personalized? Would it count then? Interesting issues to spice up media law...
I say current, since we're pretty far away from 1976. And I'm not saying all punks (or free-software types!) live up to those values, but they those are commonly expressed values.
There's also a more intellectual connection via those who consider the Pistols to be the all-time Situationist art piece linked to anarchism linked to certain anarcho-trends on Slashdot.
Anyway, even if you dismiss the Sex Pistols as hype (true enough), you've got to hand it to them:
Your argument: "He deserved his pay. Everyone knows he worked hard." Well, so did lots of people. You need to argue that he deserved what he got. Kenneth Lay probably worked his ass off.
That liberal idiots have managed to convince him to give back that money is a shame.
Yeah, liberal idiots like the Wall Street Journal. Find me a public defender of Jack Welch's compensation package. It stank to high hell. The deal was negotiated in secret and kept secret from investors. It was buried in an obscure place in an SEC filing, and only came out because of his wife's divorce filings. If it was such a clever move for the company financially and if every knows how much he deserves it, then why not allow investors to admire your move?
Here's the big question to the "Go Back To Russia" types. Is there any amount of compensation that is undeserved, if it was negotiated legally? If your answer is "NO", then enjoy your world, this is more about your religion than anything. But even the biggest free-market booster would say, yes, there is, and the market will correct for it. Well, it can't correct for what is kept secret.
Here's a decent more critical summary.
How many corporate CEOS have you seen arrested recently?
That's the risk. Shareholders demand returns. You take risks to achieve those returns. If you fail or are close to failing you may feel pressured to toe the line or cross the line of legality.
Wha--? This is so muddled up. You appear to be saying: CEOs are responsible for their company's performance. They are tempted to commit fraud. They can go to jail for fraud. Therefore we should pay them hundreds of millions of dollars.
That is just plain messed up. First, they should be paid for doing their job which is guiding the company, not for avoiding crime. What next, pay doctors bonus hazard pay so they won't deal speed out of their offices?. Second, they actually have less vulnerability to being jailed compared to the janitor; they can afford a good lawyer, and even if they do go behind bars it will be in minimum security.
And when and if it fails you are the one holding the bag.
Actually, you're not holding any bag. You don't have to pay back your company's debt if it goes down. You go on to another high-paying white-collar job (even another CEO position...), and you probably have a very nice severance package from the company. If you happened to have ripped off the company and investors, and no one buys your claims of ignorance, then it's more complicated.
I think the poor janitor is the one who'll have trouble getting a new job. So by your logic, we ought to pay the janitor more for the risk taken...
So, do you really want to eliminate my incentive? Sure hope you like Junior...
No one is arguing that a CEO shouldn't make MORE money than other workers at a company. The question is why they are being given absurdly high compensation packages compared to every other country in the world.
It's insiderism, it's a sleazy money grab; they know it's wrong, why else would boards of directors try to hide these compensation packages from their shareholders? See the Jack Welch of GE's compensation scandal for only the latest such example.
You worked your ass off. You took risks, you got rewarded. But you can bet Jack Welch didn't climb any poles or take out the trash. Unless the trash was in Tahiti and he took the company jet. Most CEOs of large companies get a big payday whether or not their companies do well. Tying compensation to stock prices was supposed to fix that; instead they figured out how to fix their own stock prices until they could cash out.
When it's free from X11, that will be a good step, but it's probably true that it will always feel like a port, even if it's got native drawn widgets.
What we dream about is a Chimera for OpenOffice. To spell it out: Mozilla has brilliant ideas (maybe too many of them), but the key is that the engine decodes most HTML/Jscript found in the wild. However, for Mac users it looks and feels like a port, even with the beautiful Navzilla skin. So, Chimera jumps in, keeping the standards-loving Gecko engine, but adding a beautiful Cocoa front-end.
But I think this is only a fantasy for OO. The OO.org folks explain their choice of porting strategy by saying there isn't good separation between the display code and the rest of it, so we can't hope to bolt on a sweet Cocoa/Aqua front-end.
Maybe in the short term the best we can hope for is a damned good Cocoa MS Office file translator based on OO. After all, the most important thing about OO is that it reads and saves MS Office documents. The only reason I need Office is to read other people's files. I don't use 99% of the bloaty features they have. I wish I could use a simpler word processor, like Mariner Write or Nisus (is it still alive?).
Maybe seamless translation to MS Office is possible a lot sooner than 2004 (OO's native widget due date). Let me dream...
Can someone spell out the advantages this method has over the "tarpit" strategies that some mailers follow? (I.e. each successive access takes longer, so the first access may take 1 sec, the next 2 sec, the next 4 sec, so soon abusers find themselves timing out.)
Is it fair to consider tarpits a special case of hashcash where the non-trivial cost is time waiting applied server-side?
If so, isn't this a less wasteful approach? (Genuine questions on my part.)
... then only criminals will have cell phones in theaters. :)
The problem is fraud. (1) Spammers forge return-addresses and lie in their subjects to trick you. This makes it hard to weed out unwanted mail. (2) Practically all spam comes from fraudsters. Spam is so despised as a marketing tactic that it cannot be used (openly) regularly by legitimate businesses without them getting a lot of flak.
I hate spam. It drives me crazy. But I believe we will never fully get rid of it, because it makes money. And there may truly be compelling free speech reasons that keep us from banning it (I'm not decided on this point).
But I think three steps would take most of the pain out of spam for me.
- Spammers who are criminals (stock-pumpers, penis-mightiers) get arrested and deterred/reformed. The NY AG move is a much-needed start.
- Spam must be given a proper subject like "ADV:", and need a legitimate return address. Violators are subject to large fines and jail.
- Spammers need to pay for all their bounced mail. Not sure how to enforce this, but it would make me feel better.
Once these things are true, maybe spam will reach the same annoyance level as junk mail in real life: annoying, but not obscene.