I've seen how big and heavy the UPS bricks are to keep a 500W computer running for 10-30 minutes, and those cost around $100. CNN says some areas could be out for days to over a week. What does it take to power a tank for that long?
Depends on what powering a tank means. In the Winter running heaters it might not be reasonable, but then again you don't have to run a heater at all if you cn keep the room temperature at a safe temperature for the tank (fireplace, woodstove, or k-1 heaters, and your survival is likely as important to you as that of your fish). But now (or for my friend in Arizona) heaters are not an issue, just running a filter or even an air pump. I don't expect the filters draw much, but one should check the rating on the pumps to be sure. The fish can live quite a while without filters though (the issue to my friend was keeping water running through the filter so the helpful bacteria built up in it would not die, but that wouldn't be a complete tragety). For air, if the tank is not overloaded it's no problem at all; I could kill the filter in my tank and the fish would be fine. But many people put more fish in a tank than it's surface area can support. These people need to run some sort of air pump to keep the tank oxgenated, or a water pump to increase circulation and oxygen exchange. But these little air pumps draw only a few watts, and I expect even a small UPS would keep them running for days. I do know these little UPSs will run for days will minimal load; I have one on my TV, Stereo and VCR (no more flashing 12:00). In an ice storm last year I watched TV for about 45 minutes after the power went out, then turned the set off. The UPS kept running and retained the VCR setting for about 4 days, and it's only a 300 VA unit (about 225 watts). It clearly could last a lot longer if the batteries are not drained by TV watching.
Heaters are usually rated directly in watts, so that should be easy (tricker is that the "Volt-Amp" rating of most UPS's is not watts, even though P=IE, but they usually have a watt rating on the box too). Don't forget a heater will not have a 100% duty cycle, but the UPS must be able to supply the current the heater needs. Motors should not be a big draw, but one should check their pump. Overall if you're expecting the UPS to keep your fish warm you might be asking a lot, but that's hardly today's problem. And the friend I suggested a UPS for is in Arizona, was only concerned about power outages affecting the pumps. By the way, I had a power outage this winter for about 4 days and didn't lose any fish, but the tank isn't over capacity so oxygen exchange was still fine, and I kept the house warm enough with heaters and the fireplace so the fish didn't die of the cold. I expect the original poster on this topic had way too many fish in his tank and knew they were going to die from lack of oxygen, not from lack of heat.
Why is this rated Funny?? I suggested exactly this to a friend who has a large tank and was expressing concerns about power failures just a few weeks ago. She was mostly concerned about the filter shutting down long enough to kill the bacterial from lack of water flow (I think her estimate of how long this would take was very conserative, but the concern about the issue was real, and it certainly can happen, it's just an issue of how long an outage is required). Contrasted to other expenses involved in a large tank, a UPS is an extremely reasonable investment.
I've RTF...website. Even the forums, where others have noted that there isn't a good list of included packages. It's not only lacking from the CD, the information isn't listed in the FAQ on on the website either.
while i would conceed that the older unsupported, very buggy versions of windows MIGHT fit onto a mini-cd i dont
see how XP or 2000 with a UI, and all of the dependancies for the tools that would need to be included would fit
onto a mini-CD.
And Red Hat 9.0 will not fit on a 1.2 Gigabyte hard drive with the GUI (when installed right from the Red Hat install CD's)! So what's your point?
OK, I'm running it right now. I'm not very impressed. The menu does not list all of the included apps (none of the security apps, the very reason for this, as far as I can tell. It (the menu) does have stuff I don't want, including a lame game, a spreadsheet, a winamp clone and some other stuff, but not the security stuff!
I got a shell running, but there seems to be no man command and no documentation for some things in the menu, like the TinyIRC client. Obviously since I'm posting this from the running ISO there must be a web browser, but I had never used "links" before, so it was not easy to find. How I find the security tools supposedly built into this I have no idea. I did get a GUI ethereal running by bringing up a shell and typing in ethereal, but I just don't know what else is here (and what isn't).
By the way, I have network issues when booting Knoppix on this computer, so I booted this ISO with the "Knoppix expert" option. Or at least I tried to. Although it prompted me for the boot option, it ignored it after I typed it in.
Well, as I see it, with Knoppix (and derivatives) you get almost everything you need. If not you can always apt-get what you need as it's based on Debian. Not exactly what you want, but it's easily customizable from this viewpoint.
No, you get all of what the developer thinks you need, but that's hardly always what you need. Knoppix has even been removing things to make space, so you no longer get some things, but you still get three or four different spreadsheets and word processors and at least two power point replacements and such. And apt-get isn't a very reasonalbe solution when you're talking about a CD based system. Clearly Knoppix can be be customized (a customization is why were're talking about it), but it's also clear those customizations are a major effort to do right. The original request, a clean easy way to build true knoppix style CD bootable Linux ISO files would be a great thing. I'll go a step further: If it was scriptable in some way (say you provided a manifest file of everything that needed to be apt-got and then any special burning information), then people could release special Knoppix packages such as Local Area Security Linux or a Game Knoppix or anything else they thought the world needed and were willing to spend the time doing, not as a huge ISO file, but a simple (small) manifest file of what the Knoppix generator needed to put together to build the system. Now that would be slick.
Now, how many tools like this do you see for a windows, or any closed source environment.
Actually, there are a number of tools for windows. Even ethereal is available for windows and works pretty well on it. Part of the problem is that you can't legally make and redistribute a CD that will boot and run windows from CD, so there would be no good way to set up windows with everything that needs installed and run these types of applications from CD, even if you had windows on the computer (plus not being able to plan for what flavor of Windows you had). And while there are a lot of good tools to do these things under windows, and most or all of what is on this CD is open source and certainly could be ported to windows, the people making these tools simply prefer Linux and put them there first. But the tools do exist under windows.
I suggested that the microcharge would only be incurred if the recipient didn't have the sender on their TDMA-like whitelist. It's opt-in with teeth.
And give the micropayment to the recipient, for all I care.
Realistically, a legitimate mailer can not count on all (or even most) of the people who have requested that they be put on a mailing list (or otherwise supplied an e-mail address for a valid reason) will have added that sender to their white list. Heck, your "give the micropayment to the recipient" virtually gaurantees that, the effect of not adding them to your while list would be that you still get the mail you wanted and you get paid. But even if the payment went somewhere else, lots of whitelists wouldn't be updated and it would still have enough of a negative effect on legitimate uses of e-mail to kill some good valid uses. Why not just fix SMTP or replace it with something that is spam resistant? There are a lot of things that can be done to improve SMTP that cost the users nothing, and I believe most users would quickly adopt spam resistant mail systems.
Consider the following changes: Make the sender store the outgoing messages on their system until picked up, with only the header being sent as the initial message. Make sure the sender provides a real and valid reply to or other contact address (as the above system does), and maybe even tie that into geographic locations (preventing US spammers from sending through China or Argentina, or at least giving recipents an easy way to block such spam). Pass some laws against spam like we have against junk faxes (which have been very effective), don't just have those who hate spam stick their heads in the sand with filters and let the spammers continue to prey on the masses.
You just don't get the whole concept of Bayesian spam filtering.
No, I completely understand that. While I said that Bayesian filtering is completely ineffective when installed on your system rather than on the ISP system, I didn't advocate installing it at the ISP, I don't think an ISP based filter will be very effective, and I think there are better ways to fix the problem by moving away from the current version of SMTP and by passing laws that let the spammers face very high fines (or worse).
You clearly miss my point that when you filter only your mail you still let the spam reach the people who will buy the product. But you also seem to think the filter has any effect on you at all. Yet most filter advocates claim they don't want an ISP filtering their mail because they fear false positives, and say they send all of their filtered mail to a special spam inbox so they can checj for any false positives. These people still end up examining every piece of spam they get in just as much detail as they would if they were killing it in their regular e-mail, the only real change to the system is that they put that work off until later, and in doing so they also may delay receiving anything that was a false positive until later also. There is n net gain at all with such filtering.
Whereas I sent out about 2000 messages last year, so I'd only have had to pay $4 for the whole year, even if 100% of my messages were "unwanted". I'd pay $4 a year to make SPAM go away.
Micropayments would in no way stop spam, but they would cause cost and problems for honest users.
Where would those micropayments go? To the ISP? The one that is providing a haven for the spammer? To the spammer itself when it is acting as it's own ISP. In either case the micropayment would be a farce, certainly any service provider who is working with a spammer could wave the micropayments if they are already letting a spammer on the Internet in the first place.
But more importantly, micropayments will ruin some current valid used of e-mail and prevent some future ones. Think of the many mailing lists that are run by very low budget groups to communicate with hundreds or thousands of members. These would be destroyed if each time they were to send out a message to all members they invoked a micropayment on every single e-mail. Heck, Slashdot sends me an e-mail when someone responds to one of my posts; how long do you think that nice service would last when Slashdot started to have to pay a micropayment for every single response that was posted??? I would certainly see that this would completely kill any new uses of e-mail as well. Imagine a school that was considering using e-mail to keep the parents more current on their child's ststus; perhaps weekly or even daily report cards rather than end of the quarter suprises. It would be a system welcome by many partent, and could be easily done if integrated into an electronic grading system, but would be killed instantly if there were a unit cost on sending e-mail, even a small micropayment. There are lots of other useful things that e-mail might do for us in the future; do you really think we should give them up an adopt a payment system that really isn't going to stop spam in the first place?
And I still maintain that it will not stop spam, even if the payments are not to the original ISP. Many spammers manage to inject their spam into the net through badly configured servers or other exploits. While I'm all in favor of making someone who improperly sets up a server pay for letting spammers have a doorway to the net, I'm not as likely to advocate a system that encourages more trojans and backdoors so that spammers can pass their costs on to unsuspecting in-duh-viduals. There are simply better ways to fix the problem (by changing the fundamental flaws in SMTP) than by approaches that will harm valid e-mail uses.
The only thing that can truly save email is to switch to a service that requires authentication of senders.
I agree with everything that you said about filters being ineffective. But I strongly disagree with your "only thing" statement. Particularly if you mean it as any of the systems I've ever heard about, such as "If it's not in the address book, the sender must acknowledge a challange message" type of approaches. The problem with such systems is that many of us get quite a bit of e-mail each day from people who are not in our regular address books, some of it quite important to us. We do not want that mail lost because the system at the other end was not in out address book and did not waste their time responding to a challange and response type system. For example, say I purchased something on-line from a vendor I had never dealt with before. Their e-mail system may automatically kick out an e-mail that informs me the product was shipped and give me an important Fed-ex or UPS tracking number. I'm glad they do such things with their shipping systems, and I don't expect them to manually respond to every challange they get back; realistically they will send any such challanges to the bit bucket and people who want e-mail that is important to them will end up never getting it.
So I do not believe that Authentication of senders, at least in any of the traditionally suggested ways, is the correct approach. Much of the spam problem we have is due to what I consider flaws in SMTP. I would very much like to see a replacement for SMTP that considered the spam problems (as well as other problems inherent in SMTP). As an example, another post here mentioned a system where the mail is held, not on your ISP or upstream provider's system until you download it, but rather is held on the sender's or sender's ISP's system. The recipent would presumably receive only a very short indicator of where they have mail waiting, and would fetch it themselves when they are ready to receive it. The puts the burden of storage on the sender or the service provider for the sender, and avoids considerable bandwidth wasted by senders who supposedly send out e-mail with addresses generated to match all combinations of up to x characters (the excuse Mindspring gave to me when addresses that I created but never gave out or used started getting spam, not that I believe them). In addition to putting this burden on the sender, it would insure that there was a good address in the e-mail to fetch the mail from, so spammers would have a much harder time injecting their spam into the system and would be much more traceable. And while I'm not foolish enough to think that laws could completely stop spam, we've seen how laws did drastically curtail fax spam, and some fax spammers have recently been made to pay serious fines. I do think laws would have a big effect on spammers; ther are a lot of spammers who just don't want to have to move out of the country to keep up spamming, and those of us who hate spam will track the spam back to US sources if we have a law with teeth in it to impose fines (or worse) on them when we do.
Of course, and change to or replacement of SMTP must be phased in over time. It's not a short term solution to spam. But I expect SMTP would quickly go the way of gopher or archie or the rest if a viable new protocol was presented that addressed these problems effectively, and this is where I think out greatest chances for sucess are.
You make a good argument for killing them rather than throwing them in already overcrowded jails. I'm sure if we killed just a few thousand that most of the rest would get the message and the spam problem would be reduced greatly (something that doesn't happen at all with number 5).
I like your way of thinking. It's much like my approach of defending myself with deadly force when I'm attacked with the deadly weapon of second hand smoke.
Realistically, I don't give a damn how much spam _you_ get, I care that _I_ don't get any.
But you still do get spam. Exactly as much of not more because you use Bayesian filtering. Spam still wastes your bandwidth to download that spam before it can be filtered. Spam still wastes any inbox size limits your ISP might impose. Spam cuts into any quota a forwarding service might now or in the future impose on your account, or it could take you to a higher charge level if you pay for a forwarding service. It costs your ISP money, costs that one way or another are eventually paid by you. Even the processing power for that Bayesian filtering costs you CPU cycles, while having no negative effect on the spammers whatsoever.
While you might not think you care how much spam I get, you might care if dozens, hundreds or thousands of other users at your work also get tons of spam, particularly when all of that spam significantly cuts into your bandwidth. And you will care when overload from spam on your mail server is so bad that it causes failures, effectively causing a D.O.S. situation.
And as long as geeks happly play with their little Bayesian filters, they stop seeing spam and so stop complaining to the providers that are letting spam get through. They stop doing other things that might make spammer's life difficult. Heck, I fully expect some spam haters with an additude like yours to say within earshot of a congressman or Senator something like "Oh, I never get any Spam. Spam can be filtered easily and nothing should be done about it". The spammers should love Bayesian filtering, it takes the presure off them while allowing them to reach exactly the same number of marks with a mailing.
None of these spam filters will have any effect on spam at all if they are just installed on the systems of people who hate spam and would never buy from a spammer anyway. Hell, they might even have the opposite effect; I will never buy something if I get spam for it. But if I personally filter my spam and don't even see subject lines, I might end up buying the product without knowing they also marketed it by spam.
Spam is effective because it reaches millions of people who are not installing these filters on their systems. Until ISP's start applying these filters to all spam by default, then the spam filters will have no effect at all, exactly the same number of marks will be reached and respond no matter if the people who know better than to respond to spam go ahead and filter their e-mail or not!
Amen. But here is one thing I've been completely unable to understand; I'm hoping that some lashdot reader will either be able to explain it or at least come up with a viable theory. This year's episodes are said to be episodes that were already in the can from last year. So why did they not show them during the regular viewing season, showing lame reruns of the Simpsons or other shows instead, and then show these new episodes in the summer when there are traditionally less viewers? I understand not showing a new Futurama when it's time slot is likely to be per-empted by a long sparts event (which just shows how hated Futurama was by Fox to have been put there in the first place), but it seems there were other weeks when these episodes could have been shown. They even used later time slots for some truely awful programming in the regular season; why were these episodes held nack until now?
the smoke ring gun that ThinkGeek (among others) sell.
So can anyone tell me who the among others are? Particularly anyone who might sell this toy from a retail store front? I would rather not mail order one and pay a steep shipping charge, and I do resent the Think Geek website approach of trying to make me "register" before I can even find out what the shipping cost is. (For all I know they might even be like other sites that make me give a credit card number before they will tell me the shipping charges, but I never got that far. I do buy on-line, but I never register or give a credit card number before I find out if I want to do business with the company, and for those that require it, I take my business elsewhere.
So a NetApp storage system is two separate pieces, the hardware and the software. If I decide to sell my old NetApp, does this mean I can sell the hardware to someone, and the software to someone else? That doesn't sound like something that NetApp would like.
More importantly, when you bought it (perhaps from someone like CDW) you bought the entire thing, there wasn't even an option to buy just the hardware. Now they want to claim they are two different parts???!!! That's completely bogus; if CDW can sell it to you then you can sell it to someone else. Also, if you did decide to sell the hardware and then sell the software to someone else, the legal principle known as Right of First Sale pretty much says that you indeed can sell the parts, even if NetApp doesn't like it.
I don't think we're talking about government's taking over OSS projects, but instead paying some developer to work on it. Personally I'm all for government entities paying OSS developers instead closed-source developers.
If it was a question of "Should the government, which clearly already does a fair amount of programming, put their effort into closed source programs or open sourced programs?" then I would certainly agree that more of that effort should go to open source (although clearly a lot of government programming is going to be "classified", even much that should not be). But the original issues was not that, but a suggestion that the government should see work that it would not otherwise need to be doing because some bureaucrat wants to claim the software will be something the public wants and then shell out money for it. That is a very different issue, and there are many problems with it.
It should read: "If James Bond were into wardriving..."
No, if you're going to correct someone you should get your facts right. The original sentence was right, you are incorrect. Was is singular. I was into wardriving. He was into wardriving. James Bond was into wardriving . Were is plural. We were into wardriving. They were into wardriving. James Bond and Miss Moneypenny were into wardriving. You wouldn't say "I were into wardriving" or "we was into wardriving" and since James Bond is singular (or a collective noun if you count both Lazerby and Dalton and those other guys, but it's still a singular collective noun) you use the singular was and not the plural were.
Of course, things are a little different if you were talking about ebonics (or, in ebonics, if yous was talkin' 'bout ebonics), but you used the word subjective and there is no such word in ebonics (a.k.a. eubonics).
There's no valid reason that the government should make me pay taxes and then take that money and give it to people who are now quite willing to do the work for free. And I sure don't want the government deciding and telling us what the public wants, and I'm not even sure I want the public telling us what the public wants. The developers should code what they want to code, if there is a need the system has shown that it gets filled under the current modes of open source development pretty well.
And who do you suggest gets that special funding for what the "public wants"? Once you pay some 14 year old kid who just happens to be the child of a Chicago democrat party official, how do you avoid paying every open source developer out there, particularly those of core key components? Or do you just thumb your nose at them and tell them you expect them to keep contributing their efforts for free while their taxes are being given to projects
that they don't consider worthy of effort?
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what powering a tank means. In the Winter running heaters it might not be reasonable, but then again you don't have to run a heater at all if you cn keep the room temperature at a safe temperature for the tank (fireplace, woodstove, or k-1 heaters, and your survival is likely as important to you as that of your fish). But now (or for my friend in Arizona) heaters are not an issue, just running a filter or even an air pump. I don't expect the filters draw much, but one should check the rating on the pumps to be sure. The fish can live quite a while without filters though (the issue to my friend was keeping water running through the filter so the helpful bacteria built up in it would not die, but that wouldn't be a complete tragety). For air, if the tank is not overloaded it's no problem at all; I could kill the filter in my tank and the fish would be fine. But many people put more fish in a tank than it's surface area can support. These people need to run some sort of air pump to keep the tank oxgenated, or a water pump to increase circulation and oxygen exchange. But these little air pumps draw only a few watts, and I expect even a small UPS would keep them running for days. I do know these little UPSs will run for days will minimal load; I have one on my TV, Stereo and VCR (no more flashing 12:00). In an ice storm last year I watched TV for about 45 minutes after the power went out, then turned the set off. The UPS kept running and retained the VCR setting for about 4 days, and it's only a 300 VA unit (about 225 watts). It clearly could last a lot longer if the batteries are not drained by TV watching.
Heaters are usually rated directly in watts, so that should be easy (tricker is that the "Volt-Amp" rating of most UPS's is not watts, even though P=IE, but they usually have a watt rating on the box too). Don't forget a heater will not have a 100% duty cycle, but the UPS must be able to supply the current the heater needs. Motors should not be a big draw, but one should check their pump. Overall if you're expecting the UPS to keep your fish warm you might be asking a lot, but that's hardly today's problem. And the friend I suggested a UPS for is in Arizona, was only concerned about power outages affecting the pumps. By the way, I had a power outage this winter for about 4 days and didn't lose any fish, but the tank isn't over capacity so oxygen exchange was still fine, and I kept the house warm enough with heaters and the fireplace so the fish didn't die of the cold. I expect the original poster on this topic had way too many fish in his tank and knew they were going to die from lack of oxygen, not from lack of heat.
Why is this rated Funny?? I suggested exactly this to a friend who has a large tank and was expressing concerns about power failures just a few weeks ago. She was mostly concerned about the filter shutting down long enough to kill the bacterial from lack of water flow (I think her estimate of how long this would take was very conserative, but the concern about the issue was real, and it certainly can happen, it's just an issue of how long an outage is required). Contrasted to other expenses involved in a large tank, a UPS is an extremely reasonable investment.
I've RTF...website. Even the forums, where others have noted that there isn't a good list of included packages. It's not only lacking from the CD, the information isn't listed in the FAQ on on the website either.
OK, You might be wrong.
And Red Hat 9.0 will not fit on a 1.2 Gigabyte hard drive with the GUI (when installed right from the Red Hat install CD's)! So what's your point?
I got a shell running, but there seems to be no man command and no documentation for some things in the menu, like the TinyIRC client. Obviously since I'm posting this from the running ISO there must be a web browser, but I had never used "links" before, so it was not easy to find. How I find the security tools supposedly built into this I have no idea. I did get a GUI ethereal running by bringing up a shell and typing in ethereal, but I just don't know what else is here (and what isn't).
By the way, I have network issues when booting Knoppix on this computer, so I booted this ISO with the "Knoppix expert" option. Or at least I tried to. Although it prompted me for the boot option, it ignored it after I typed it in.
No, you get all of what the developer thinks you need, but that's hardly always what you need. Knoppix has even been removing things to make space, so you no longer get some things, but you still get three or four different spreadsheets and word processors and at least two power point replacements and such. And apt-get isn't a very reasonalbe solution when you're talking about a CD based system. Clearly Knoppix can be be customized (a customization is why were're talking about it), but it's also clear those customizations are a major effort to do right. The original request, a clean easy way to build true knoppix style CD bootable Linux ISO files would be a great thing. I'll go a step further: If it was scriptable in some way (say you provided a manifest file of everything that needed to be apt-got and then any special burning information), then people could release special Knoppix packages such as Local Area Security Linux or a Game Knoppix or anything else they thought the world needed and were willing to spend the time doing, not as a huge ISO file, but a simple (small) manifest file of what the Knoppix generator needed to put together to build the system. Now that would be slick.
Actually, there are a number of tools for windows. Even ethereal is available for windows and works pretty well on it. Part of the problem is that you can't legally make and redistribute a CD that will boot and run windows from CD, so there would be no good way to set up windows with everything that needs installed and run these types of applications from CD, even if you had windows on the computer (plus not being able to plan for what flavor of Windows you had). And while there are a lot of good tools to do these things under windows, and most or all of what is on this CD is open source and certainly could be ported to windows, the people making these tools simply prefer Linux and put them there first. But the tools do exist under windows.
And give the micropayment to the recipient, for all I care.
Realistically, a legitimate mailer can not count on all (or even most) of the people who have requested that they be put on a mailing list (or otherwise supplied an e-mail address for a valid reason) will have added that sender to their white list. Heck, your "give the micropayment to the recipient" virtually gaurantees that, the effect of not adding them to your while list would be that you still get the mail you wanted and you get paid. But even if the payment went somewhere else, lots of whitelists wouldn't be updated and it would still have enough of a negative effect on legitimate uses of e-mail to kill some good valid uses. Why not just fix SMTP or replace it with something that is spam resistant? There are a lot of things that can be done to improve SMTP that cost the users nothing, and I believe most users would quickly adopt spam resistant mail systems.
Consider the following changes: Make the sender store the outgoing messages on their system until picked up, with only the header being sent as the initial message. Make sure the sender provides a real and valid reply to or other contact address (as the above system does), and maybe even tie that into geographic locations (preventing US spammers from sending through China or Argentina, or at least giving recipents an easy way to block such spam). Pass some laws against spam like we have against junk faxes (which have been very effective), don't just have those who hate spam stick their heads in the sand with filters and let the spammers continue to prey on the masses.
No, I completely understand that. While I said that Bayesian filtering is completely ineffective when installed on your system rather than on the ISP system, I didn't advocate installing it at the ISP, I don't think an ISP based filter will be very effective, and I think there are better ways to fix the problem by moving away from the current version of SMTP and by passing laws that let the spammers face very high fines (or worse).
You clearly miss my point that when you filter only your mail you still let the spam reach the people who will buy the product. But you also seem to think the filter has any effect on you at all. Yet most filter advocates claim they don't want an ISP filtering their mail because they fear false positives, and say they send all of their filtered mail to a special spam inbox so they can checj for any false positives. These people still end up examining every piece of spam they get in just as much detail as they would if they were killing it in their regular e-mail, the only real change to the system is that they put that work off until later, and in doing so they also may delay receiving anything that was a false positive until later also. There is n net gain at all with such filtering.
Micropayments would in no way stop spam, but they would cause cost and problems for honest users.
Where would those micropayments go? To the ISP? The one that is providing a haven for the spammer? To the spammer itself when it is acting as it's own ISP. In either case the micropayment would be a farce, certainly any service provider who is working with a spammer could wave the micropayments if they are already letting a spammer on the Internet in the first place.
But more importantly, micropayments will ruin some current valid used of e-mail and prevent some future ones. Think of the many mailing lists that are run by very low budget groups to communicate with hundreds or thousands of members. These would be destroyed if each time they were to send out a message to all members they invoked a micropayment on every single e-mail. Heck, Slashdot sends me an e-mail when someone responds to one of my posts; how long do you think that nice service would last when Slashdot started to have to pay a micropayment for every single response that was posted??? I would certainly see that this would completely kill any new uses of e-mail as well. Imagine a school that was considering using e-mail to keep the parents more current on their child's ststus; perhaps weekly or even daily report cards rather than end of the quarter suprises. It would be a system welcome by many partent, and could be easily done if integrated into an electronic grading system, but would be killed instantly if there were a unit cost on sending e-mail, even a small micropayment. There are lots of other useful things that e-mail might do for us in the future; do you really think we should give them up an adopt a payment system that really isn't going to stop spam in the first place?
And I still maintain that it will not stop spam, even if the payments are not to the original ISP. Many spammers manage to inject their spam into the net through badly configured servers or other exploits. While I'm all in favor of making someone who improperly sets up a server pay for letting spammers have a doorway to the net, I'm not as likely to advocate a system that encourages more trojans and backdoors so that spammers can pass their costs on to unsuspecting in-duh-viduals. There are simply better ways to fix the problem (by changing the fundamental flaws in SMTP) than by approaches that will harm valid e-mail uses.
I agree with everything that you said about filters being ineffective. But I strongly disagree with your "only thing" statement. Particularly if you mean it as any of the systems I've ever heard about, such as "If it's not in the address book, the sender must acknowledge a challange message" type of approaches. The problem with such systems is that many of us get quite a bit of e-mail each day from people who are not in our regular address books, some of it quite important to us. We do not want that mail lost because the system at the other end was not in out address book and did not waste their time responding to a challange and response type system. For example, say I purchased something on-line from a vendor I had never dealt with before. Their e-mail system may automatically kick out an e-mail that informs me the product was shipped and give me an important Fed-ex or UPS tracking number. I'm glad they do such things with their shipping systems, and I don't expect them to manually respond to every challange they get back; realistically they will send any such challanges to the bit bucket and people who want e-mail that is important to them will end up never getting it.
So I do not believe that Authentication of senders , at least in any of the traditionally suggested ways, is the correct approach. Much of the spam problem we have is due to what I consider flaws in SMTP. I would very much like to see a replacement for SMTP that considered the spam problems (as well as other problems inherent in SMTP). As an example, another post here mentioned a system where the mail is held, not on your ISP or upstream provider's system until you download it, but rather is held on the sender's or sender's ISP's system. The recipent would presumably receive only a very short indicator of where they have mail waiting, and would fetch it themselves when they are ready to receive it. The puts the burden of storage on the sender or the service provider for the sender, and avoids considerable bandwidth wasted by senders who supposedly send out e-mail with addresses generated to match all combinations of up to x characters (the excuse Mindspring gave to me when addresses that I created but never gave out or used started getting spam, not that I believe them). In addition to putting this burden on the sender, it would insure that there was a good address in the e-mail to fetch the mail from, so spammers would have a much harder time injecting their spam into the system and would be much more traceable. And while I'm not foolish enough to think that laws could completely stop spam, we've seen how laws did drastically curtail fax spam, and some fax spammers have recently been made to pay serious fines. I do think laws would have a big effect on spammers; ther are a lot of spammers who just don't want to have to move out of the country to keep up spamming, and those of us who hate spam will track the spam back to US sources if we have a law with teeth in it to impose fines (or worse) on them when we do.
Of course, and change to or replacement of SMTP must be phased in over time. It's not a short term solution to spam. But I expect SMTP would quickly go the way of gopher or archie or the rest if a viable new protocol was presented that addressed these problems effectively, and this is where I think out greatest chances for sucess are.
You make a good argument for killing them rather than throwing them in already overcrowded jails. I'm sure if we killed just a few thousand that most of the rest would get the message and the spam problem would be reduced greatly (something that doesn't happen at all with number 5).
I like your way of thinking. It's much like my approach of defending myself with deadly force when I'm attacked with the deadly weapon of second hand smoke.
But you still do get spam. Exactly as much of not more because you use Bayesian filtering. Spam still wastes your bandwidth to download that spam before it can be filtered. Spam still wastes any inbox size limits your ISP might impose. Spam cuts into any quota a forwarding service might now or in the future impose on your account, or it could take you to a higher charge level if you pay for a forwarding service. It costs your ISP money, costs that one way or another are eventually paid by you. Even the processing power for that Bayesian filtering costs you CPU cycles, while having no negative effect on the spammers whatsoever.
While you might not think you care how much spam I get, you might care if dozens, hundreds or thousands of other users at your work also get tons of spam, particularly when all of that spam significantly cuts into your bandwidth. And you will care when overload from spam on your mail server is so bad that it causes failures, effectively causing a D.O.S. situation.
And as long as geeks happly play with their little Bayesian filters, they stop seeing spam and so stop complaining to the providers that are letting spam get through. They stop doing other things that might make spammer's life difficult. Heck, I fully expect some spam haters with an additude like yours to say within earshot of a congressman or Senator something like "Oh, I never get any Spam. Spam can be filtered easily and nothing should be done about it". The spammers should love Bayesian filtering, it takes the presure off them while allowing them to reach exactly the same number of marks with a mailing.
No, it should be longer, if not all year long.
Spam is effective because it reaches millions of people who are not installing these filters on their systems. Until ISP's start applying these filters to all spam by default, then the spam filters will have no effect at all, exactly the same number of marks will be reached and respond no matter if the people who know better than to respond to spam go ahead and filter their e-mail or not!
Amen. But here is one thing I've been completely unable to understand; I'm hoping that some lashdot reader will either be able to explain it or at least come up with a viable theory. This year's episodes are said to be episodes that were already in the can from last year. So why did they not show them during the regular viewing season, showing lame reruns of the Simpsons or other shows instead, and then show these new episodes in the summer when there are traditionally less viewers? I understand not showing a new Futurama when it's time slot is likely to be per-empted by a long sparts event (which just shows how hated Futurama was by Fox to have been put there in the first place), but it seems there were other weeks when these episodes could have been shown. They even used later time slots for some truely awful programming in the regular season; why were these episodes held nack until now?
So can anyone tell me who the among others are? Particularly anyone who might sell this toy from a retail store front? I would rather not mail order one and pay a steep shipping charge, and I do resent the Think Geek website approach of trying to make me "register" before I can even find out what the shipping cost is. (For all I know they might even be like other sites that make me give a credit card number before they will tell me the shipping charges, but I never got that far. I do buy on-line, but I never register or give a credit card number before I find out if I want to do business with the company, and for those that require it, I take my business elsewhere.
More importantly, when you bought it (perhaps from someone like CDW) you bought the entire thing, there wasn't even an option to buy just the hardware. Now they want to claim they are two different parts???!!! That's completely bogus; if CDW can sell it to you then you can sell it to someone else. Also, if you did decide to sell the hardware and then sell the software to someone else, the legal principle known as Right of First Sale pretty much says that you indeed can sell the parts, even if NetApp doesn't like it.
If it was a question of "Should the government, which clearly already does a fair amount of programming, put their effort into closed source programs or open sourced programs?" then I would certainly agree that more of that effort should go to open source (although clearly a lot of government programming is going to be "classified", even much that should not be). But the original issues was not that, but a suggestion that the government should see work that it would not otherwise need to be doing because some bureaucrat wants to claim the software will be something the public wants and then shell out money for it. That is a very different issue, and there are many problems with it.
You would think that, wouldn't you. But it turns out that, unless you like to see crap in a rebuilt plastic tool case, you would be wrong.
No, if you're going to correct someone you should get your facts right. The original sentence was right, you are incorrect. Was is singular. I was into wardriving. He was into wardriving. James Bond was into wardriving . Were is plural. We were into wardriving. They were into wardriving. James Bond and Miss Moneypenny were into wardriving. You wouldn't say "I were into wardriving" or "we was into wardriving" and since James Bond is singular (or a collective noun if you count both Lazerby and Dalton and those other guys, but it's still a singular collective noun) you use the singular was and not the plural were.
Of course, things are a little different if you were talking about ebonics (or, in ebonics, if yous was talkin' 'bout ebonics), but you used the word subjective and there is no such word in ebonics (a.k.a. eubonics).
And who do you suggest gets that special funding for what the "public wants"? Once you pay some 14 year old kid who just happens to be the child of a Chicago democrat party official, how do you avoid paying every open source developer out there, particularly those of core key components? Or do you just thumb your nose at them and tell them you expect them to keep contributing their efforts for free while their taxes are being given to projects that they don't consider worthy of effort?