Sorry if this has been covered already in an earlier post - I didn't attempt to read all 949 postings listed as of this moment.
I bought a Dell a few years ago and, after installing a desktop firewall, discovered that it comes installed with a program called "Encompass Monitor" (encmon.exe). Encmon was attempting to call out something on the order of 20 times per minute, and I blocked the program. A friend advised me that this program is well-known Dell spyware and I should uninstall it. It is not hard to uninstall. You just locate the program on the Control Panel/Add Remove programs and remove it.
Behold - a week or two after I removed Encompass Monitor, I began seeing daily probes INCOMING in the desktop firewall logs from various DSL-identified addresses associated with Dell Computer, Inc. So, the people in Texas who were receiving the log files from this spyware suddenly realized their baby was not phoning home any more and began sending probe packets to my machine to find out why. I am really not sure what Dell was tracking, but I suspect it may have been my web-surfing habits, in an attempt to do data mining for sales to other companies who could target my "interests." If anyone has any better intelligence on what data is sent to Dell by Encmon.exe, I'd appreciate a reply, just out of curiosity.
Yes, I saw this site a couple of years ago, which was the original impetus behind my idea of mapping the FSU. It's largely born out of frustration with the current state of atlases (Nat'l Geo, Times, etc.). I was impressed with some prototype maps of Austria that were zoomable down to a certain level of detail but still lacked the real meat - detail down to village, river, and road.
I agree with the comment above about "using the proper mapping software." Any way you start, you have to begin with the basic outline of the map. After you have the whole drawn within the gridlines, then you fill in the topographic color areas, rivers, roads, railroads, and names of cities, towns and villages. In other words, you almost HAVE to start with a bitmap overlay to draw in the detail. Best commercial apps for doing vector graphics with an easy conversion to SVG are Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw 11 - either one has pretty much the same ability to export to SVG.
I too fail to see all the repeated comparisons of SVG to Flash. I agree that SVG can and should be used for animation where that's appropriate and makes sense. But one of the best cases to be made for SVG is in the field of mapmaking - 2D vector graphics for scalable, accurate, zoomable topographical maps, that are also clickable for even more detailed views.
For the past year and a half I've been working in spare time on fleshing out maps of Russia and the former Soviet Union republics, one map for each oblast/province. Check out either Mappoint or the equivalent views on Expedia? At the detailed view, these are the most beautiful maps in the world, 100% better and more detailed than any National Geographic Atlas. But there's a catch. You can only see tiny little patches of the whole map at a time. Therefore, in order to see a detailed view of a whole oblast, you have to stitch together a quilting project, grid by grid along a north to south baseline, and then move across east and west, doing repeated screen shots and piecing the grid together carefully. One little hitch, though. As you move up and down and across the grid, the details change because of their ridiculous javascript-based map generating engine. Thus in one view of a grid you might see two villages; in the gridpoints three degrees west, they should still be there sitting on x:y coordinates by such-and-such river, but they are GONE! In other words, details get wiped out at the edges of the grid views.
If you are perseverant enough to stitch the whole together, taking into account rotations for each patch of the quilt as you move from the baseline east and west, you end up with a beautiful bit map view of the whole oblast, a collosal file size, and with lots of defects because of the problems along seam lines where the screenshots (the quilt patches) overlap. Along N/S grids, you can wipe out 20% of the villages, and even names of major cities (because of the problem of shifting positioning of text). File sizes make them all but useless for the publishing on the web (largest maps are upwards of 10 MB even when compressed to PDF).
The obvious solution is to remap all the topographic detail using SVG so that you end up with a seamless map showing the same detail level, down to villages and rivers, that has the whole oblast in one snapshot, zoomable down to the detail you need to see roads, railroads, and national parks. This would reside in a text file that is probably going to be large for some of the geographically large areas (Chukotia, Khabavarosk, Taymyr, Buryatia, etc.), but by comparison with bitmaps - tiny, and viewable in a browser. For detail areas, you add clickable links to city maps too. So, for example, if you want to look at Sverdlovsk oblast, you can click on Ekaterinburg or Nizhniy Tagil and zoom right down to a city map showing street names, monuments, parks, and other features.
This is where I see real potential of SVG on the web. At least, it's the project I'm working on for the foreseeable future, which will probably take me well into retirement years.
I have read newspaper stories that the city buses in Seattle have these devices installed on them. But I don't think that's correct. This is based on the observation that at least once or twice a day, I see a city bus run right through a red light (and I don't mean, "It was yellow when I entered the intersection, officer").
Sorry goodbye kitty, sorry/. moderators, but this posting marked "informative" is completely misinformed. I have been fighting off Taiwan spammers for 2 years with my e-mail system's "rules based" filtering all com.tw, org.tw, edu.tw, etc. I have viewed a lot of it just out of curiosity to see what it's advertising. It is all written in Chinese ("Big 5" font), advertising everything from real estate, cell phones, and computers to porn and children's fan sites. Some of it (clearly originating from tw.edu sites) seems to be test messages either coming from enterprising dorm users or from computer science labs where techniques of spamming and exploiting open relays are part of the core curriculum. The spam trap accumulates 30-40 of these messages per day. In the past 2 weeks, however, they have fallen way off so that it's now around 10 per day.
All of the energy industry "experts" have been spouting this same line on CNN/FOX/CNBC/MSNBC since yesterday evening. It's just not convincing. They keep saying "the grid is designed to have failsafes built in to prevent this kind of thing from happening!" When asked why the cascading failure that was engineered not to happen happened, then, they reply with a meowing tone, "We just don't know!?! We have no idea."
It is my distinct recollection that when the Republican congress was pushing through energy deregulation back in the '90s, one of their biggest arguments was that it was going to result in lower prices for all consumers. This certainly has not happened, either, in fact the opposite has resulted. Power rates have steadily escalated upward at a rate far outpacing inflation.
On a side note, is anybody taking bets on whether the result of all the multimillion dollar investigations on the cause of this outage will ultimately find that the grid's computers were crashing from the LoveSan/Winblaster worm? I could imagine this cascade happening while 60-70% of your controlling computers are spontaneously rebooting.
When you were a student (or if you are now), and you wrote a damn good paper, then later you see the contents published somewhere, without attribution, you wouldn't care?
Actually this happens a LOT more often than you would think, and it is your PROFESSOR who is stealing your stuff. It actually did happen to me. My recommendation would be to copyright that term paper and then keep an eye on your professor's publishing record for repeats of your words with no acknowledgements. Then register the copyright and sue.
Case in point: VRML, which I used to mess with. It's now relegated to a small enthusiast niche...
VRML died when SGI killed off support of its Cosmo Player technology circa 1998-9. Oh sure it's still around. But I suspect that SGI got the idea, current at the time, that there was no "big bucks" windfall coming out of selling 3D banner ads. In fact, nobody could think of any use that you could actually sell this technology for, other than gaming, which wasn't the VRML standards guys' real enthusiasm. Besides, it was too slow to use for gaming.
VRML also died because as a standard, it kept changing and increasing in complexity. Back when VRML 2.0 was big news, I wanted to create a virtual art gallery. One year later, 2.0 was no longer the standard and all my careful code writing didn't work the same in the newest VRML players. Then, the big news was about X3D (VRML+XML). Today, I don't bother writing VRML or X3D at all, because there no longer seems to be much interest and there's definitely no market for it.
As an avid follower of many of the W3C standards for more than 8 years (HTML 3.2,4.0,4.01 / XHTML 1.0,2.0, XML 1.0,1.1, CSS1,2,3, etc.) my own opinion is that the standards change faster than anyone can possibly keep up with. Why call them "Standards" at all, when they are an ever-moving target? You learn to design competently clean code, decent looking web sites, only to find out that this year, last year's method has been "deprecated" (and I still don't understand why "expressing disapproval, belittling" should fit into the standards making process).
I know of no browser that has completely supported any W3C standard, and I know of no browser that has NOT introduced proprietary solutions. No browser has implemented complete Unicode support yet, and Unicode has been around for like, how many years? Hacks that I had to use in 1996 to write Greek (font face=symbol) don't work in Mozilla but at least you can still count on IE5.5 to read the tag. Today, I have to write Greek in Ascii escaped characters that only partially work in some browsers (not Netscape 4.X). Mac 9/10 won't read sans-serif fonts in IE 5.0, and won't recognize the break tag. It's absolutely crazy that one Standard was not agreed on 5 years ago and implemented by all the browser vendors. The difference comes between Standards Advocates (free, open, liberal) and Browser Vendors (proprietary, closed, conservative).
But I do like Amaya and I use it a lot to check my html. So the W3C has produced some good things. But the Standards roller derby should settle down, quit deprecating useful stuff, and concentrate on creating innovative useful stuff in their new projects and ongoing activities.
I have been intermittently working on assembling a detailed atlas of Russia, and the other former soviet republics (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc.) showing level of detail down to villages and riverlets, one individually for each oblast, okrug, respublic. When complete I convert them to SVG.
But Yakutia, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Qaraghandy -- They're SO HUGE! Can't keep the gridlines straight. The horror! The horror!
Support your local post office! Business junk mail helps subsidize the government's insatiable need for tax revenues. Less taxes for you. The end product of a mailstorm is lots of paper for your local recycle centers. Everybody benefits.
You can count on Al Jazeera TV and web site to promote the viewpoint of the "Arab Street." These are the same people you saw dancing in the streets on 09/11/2001. Get a clue folks. For real, objective analytical reporting of the middle east, there is only Debka file.
1980s cult classic, in which an expat Russian film company take on personae of New York punks and heroin addicts being killed off by aliens who suck the seratonin out of their brains. One of the strangest movies I've ever seen since "Nosferatu" and one of the strangest soundtracks ever.
Another: "10,000 Fingers of Doctor T"
Hans Conreid as a deranged piano teacher tormenting a small child who's caught in a dream narrative with the longest keyboard ever constructed.
I have always held out hope the Stephen Spielburg or George Lucas would take an option on John Milton, "Paradise Lost." No author royalties, he's dead! Think of the special effects between heaven and hell scenes! God and Jesus dialoging! Satan prostrate on the continent of ice! Some of you may argue that it's already been done in "What Dreams May Come" but that's another book.
What an absolutely stupid analogy, and leave it up to the Slashdot moderation to send it up to "5" insightful! The Egyptians buried all their "culture" along with the hieroglyphs and art and jewels in the tombs of their idiot kings and queens. They slaughtered the artisans and craftsmen and slave builders who did the work of building the tombs and buried them with the king. Then, later, some tomb robbers ("crackers") came along and robbed most of the gold and jewels and recycled it for their own profit. The only reason we have any "history" at all is that the tomb robbers missed a lot of stuff... WAKE UP AND READ A LITTLE HISTORY, YOU CLONES!
This comment deserves to be reviled. First, "our legal system would become unbalanced."... Our legal system is already unbalanced. 13 years ago 5 minority teenagers whose confessions were coerced under duress by police and prosecutors were convicted of a "rape and murder rampage." 13 years later after they have served their sentences, all are exhonerated and the district attorney "withdraws all charges" because they finally caught the guilty party. The jury, judge, prosecutors, all parties involved in the case ignored the evidence for 13 years and now they say, "Sorry for all the lost years." The judge and prosecutors, who ought to be tried for deriliction of duty and abuse of authority, cannot be sued because of "eminent domain" laws.
Second, "Individuals would place differing penalties based on their own moral judgments"... lest we forget that during the 1990s, the Republican Party as well as a moron named Kenneth Starr relentlessly prosecuted the president of the United States for having an affair. Our legal system is now designed to drive persons into bankruptcy before they have an adequate chance to defend themselves.
Last, "it still makes the act of dispensing justice, without the backing of our legal system, wrong"... which must explain why more than one year later, not a single Enron executive has been indicted for their vicious 'Deathstar' conspiracy, nor all the rest of the 'creative accounting' that caused the company to go into bankruptcy, their stock into the toilet, and drove countless investors into panic. Oh no, NOTHING WRONG here! I am surprised that someone has not yet tried to commit arson at one of Ken Lay's fabulous mansions.
To get back to the topic of what to do with SPAM and spammers, I think we all have a duty to link up all the pro-Al Qaida, pro-Osama bin Laden web sites, and their supporters, with every spammer in the known world and let them choke each other's servers until they both have completely reformatted the other's hard drives with garbage Unicode characters.
As usual the hogwash and tuppenny conventional wisdom gets moderated up to "insightful" with no foundation. This comment, as well as the follow-up "me too" above are both incorrect. Most asian spam is written in a language such as "BIG-5 CHINESE" and will appear in your mailbox as either garbled SMTP or in Chinese characters. Same for Korean spam. They may be using open relays but the spam originates in Taiwan, Seoul, and Shanghai. Quite a lot originates in educational institutions, as messages from computer science students doing "testing." Most is from people trying to make their yen fortune working from free web-site hosted "home business" opportunities. There are thousands of them hosted on yahoo.tw, hinet, hitron, fetnet, giga.net, seed.net, tpts and tcts.net, hundreds of other ISPs that do free web hosting.
Consider the brilliance of XHTML 2.0 abolishing the /> tag in favor of something that would read like this:
<p>
<line>public class HelloWorld {</line>
<line>public static void main (String[] args){ </line>
<line>System.out.println("Hello world!"); </line>
<line>}</line>
<line>}</line>
</p>
Why in the world should you expect the XML standard to be in complance with the Unicode standard?
Yes. Leave it to the Slashdot genius moderation to score this one "insightful." The "immigration visa" is something issued by the U.S. State Dept. at the Consular Office in the country of origin of a foreign national trying to enter the U.S. The "green card" is a document issued by the INS AFTER you have immigrated to the U.S. which is basically a "right to work permit." The green card is usually conferred on immigrants who have attained "permanent resident alien" status, and in some cases it is granted to "conditional resident alien" status individuals, who are then required to return in two years for a final review before they are granted "permanent resident alien" status. If you are confused and don't know the difference, it is all explained very well at the INS's web site.
Mindless Google Fanatics Run To Cliff's Edge
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 1
Yet another example of the Slashdot community's mindless following of the latest/greatest Open Source project, in this case Google! In my experience with doing a LOT of searching, I find that nearly half of Google's links returned as supposedly "most popular" get you a 404-Not Found when you try to go to the page. And this is what they rank according to popularity? The most popular dead links? ANY search engine service that deliberately ignores META information deserves to be boycotted. ANY search engine that refuses to accept "suggested" links also deserves to be boycotted.
Never cease to be amazed at how shallow and pedantic Slashdot users can be. Don't any of you realize that SPAM can be incredibly useful for defeating the enemies of freedom? There are literally hundreds of JIHAD web sites around preaching the virtue of blowing up children in the name of martyrdom and glorying in the destruction of the WTC. These web sites routinely run propaganda from Osama and his Buddies, and many contain coded messages to sleeper cells and rogue operatives. Some have FLASH movies replaying over and over the airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers with a voiceover stream of anti-west vitriol. Many of these web sites also contain good old PERL and CGI scripts for "Sign me up for your mail list." Flood one or two of them with the e-mail addresses of every spammer in the world (you can find good ones on news.admin.net-abuse.sightings). Watch the site slow to a grinding stop in another week or two. One real nasty from not long ago (www.jehad.net) is now gone, and with it went one mirror of Osama's Streaming Real Video Picture Show.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a Dell a few years ago and, after installing a desktop firewall, discovered that it comes installed with a program called "Encompass Monitor" (encmon.exe). Encmon was attempting to call out something on the order of 20 times per minute, and I blocked the program. A friend advised me that this program is well-known Dell spyware and I should uninstall it. It is not hard to uninstall. You just locate the program on the Control Panel/Add Remove programs and remove it.
Behold - a week or two after I removed Encompass Monitor, I began seeing daily probes INCOMING in the desktop firewall logs from various DSL-identified addresses associated with Dell Computer, Inc. So, the people in Texas who were receiving the log files from this spyware suddenly realized their baby was not phoning home any more and began sending probe packets to my machine to find out why. I am really not sure what Dell was tracking, but I suspect it may have been my web-surfing habits, in an attempt to do data mining for sales to other companies who could target my "interests." If anyone has any better intelligence on what data is sent to Dell by Encmon.exe, I'd appreciate a reply, just out of curiosity.
I agree with the comment above about "using the proper mapping software." Any way you start, you have to begin with the basic outline of the map. After you have the whole drawn within the gridlines, then you fill in the topographic color areas, rivers, roads, railroads, and names of cities, towns and villages. In other words, you almost HAVE to start with a bitmap overlay to draw in the detail. Best commercial apps for doing vector graphics with an easy conversion to SVG are Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw 11 - either one has pretty much the same ability to export to SVG.
For the past year and a half I've been working in spare time on fleshing out maps of Russia and the former Soviet Union republics, one map for each oblast/province. Check out either Mappoint or the equivalent views on Expedia? At the detailed view, these are the most beautiful maps in the world, 100% better and more detailed than any National Geographic Atlas. But there's a catch. You can only see tiny little patches of the whole map at a time. Therefore, in order to see a detailed view of a whole oblast, you have to stitch together a quilting project, grid by grid along a north to south baseline, and then move across east and west, doing repeated screen shots and piecing the grid together carefully. One little hitch, though. As you move up and down and across the grid, the details change because of their ridiculous javascript-based map generating engine. Thus in one view of a grid you might see two villages; in the gridpoints three degrees west, they should still be there sitting on x:y coordinates by such-and-such river, but they are GONE! In other words, details get wiped out at the edges of the grid views.
If you are perseverant enough to stitch the whole together, taking into account rotations for each patch of the quilt as you move from the baseline east and west, you end up with a beautiful bit map view of the whole oblast, a collosal file size, and with lots of defects because of the problems along seam lines where the screenshots (the quilt patches) overlap. Along N/S grids, you can wipe out 20% of the villages, and even names of major cities (because of the problem of shifting positioning of text). File sizes make them all but useless for the publishing on the web (largest maps are upwards of 10 MB even when compressed to PDF).
The obvious solution is to remap all the topographic detail using SVG so that you end up with a seamless map showing the same detail level, down to villages and rivers, that has the whole oblast in one snapshot, zoomable down to the detail you need to see roads, railroads, and national parks. This would reside in a text file that is probably going to be large for some of the geographically large areas (Chukotia, Khabavarosk, Taymyr, Buryatia, etc.), but by comparison with bitmaps - tiny, and viewable in a browser. For detail areas, you add clickable links to city maps too. So, for example, if you want to look at Sverdlovsk oblast, you can click on Ekaterinburg or Nizhniy Tagil and zoom right down to a city map showing street names, monuments, parks, and other features.
This is where I see real potential of SVG on the web. At least, it's the project I'm working on for the foreseeable future, which will probably take me well into retirement years.
I have read newspaper stories that the city buses in Seattle have these devices installed on them. But I don't think that's correct. This is based on the observation that at least once or twice a day, I see a city bus run right through a red light (and I don't mean, "It was yellow when I entered the intersection, officer").
Sorry goodbye kitty, sorry /. moderators, but this posting marked "informative" is completely misinformed. I have been fighting off Taiwan spammers for 2 years with my e-mail system's "rules based" filtering all com.tw, org.tw, edu.tw, etc. I have viewed a lot of it just out of curiosity to see what it's advertising. It is all written in Chinese ("Big 5" font), advertising everything from real estate, cell phones, and computers to porn and children's fan sites. Some of it (clearly originating from tw.edu sites) seems to be test messages either coming from enterprising dorm users or from computer science labs where techniques of spamming and exploiting open relays are part of the core curriculum. The spam trap accumulates 30-40 of these messages per day. In the past 2 weeks, however, they have fallen way off so that it's now around 10 per day.
It is my distinct recollection that when the Republican congress was pushing through energy deregulation back in the '90s, one of their biggest arguments was that it was going to result in lower prices for all consumers. This certainly has not happened, either, in fact the opposite has resulted. Power rates have steadily escalated upward at a rate far outpacing inflation.
On a side note, is anybody taking bets on whether the result of all the multimillion dollar investigations on the cause of this outage will ultimately find that the grid's computers were crashing from the LoveSan/Winblaster worm? I could imagine this cascade happening while 60-70% of your controlling computers are spontaneously rebooting.
The only stuff my son has downloaded is about 40 GB of Black Metal bands.
Actually this happens a LOT more often than you would think, and it is your PROFESSOR who is stealing your stuff. It actually did happen to me. My recommendation would be to copyright that term paper and then keep an eye on your professor's publishing record for repeats of your words with no acknowledgements. Then register the copyright and sue.
1. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcoln.
2. Laurence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet.
3. Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf.
4. David Christian, The History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia, Volume I.
5. Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don.
VRML died when SGI killed off support of its Cosmo Player technology circa 1998-9. Oh sure it's still around. But I suspect that SGI got the idea, current at the time, that there was no "big bucks" windfall coming out of selling 3D banner ads. In fact, nobody could think of any use that you could actually sell this technology for, other than gaming, which wasn't the VRML standards guys' real enthusiasm. Besides, it was too slow to use for gaming.
VRML also died because as a standard, it kept changing and increasing in complexity. Back when VRML 2.0 was big news, I wanted to create a virtual art gallery. One year later, 2.0 was no longer the standard and all my careful code writing didn't work the same in the newest VRML players. Then, the big news was about X3D (VRML+XML). Today, I don't bother writing VRML or X3D at all, because there no longer seems to be much interest and there's definitely no market for it.
I know of no browser that has completely supported any W3C standard, and I know of no browser that has NOT introduced proprietary solutions. No browser has implemented complete Unicode support yet, and Unicode has been around for like, how many years? Hacks that I had to use in 1996 to write Greek (font face=symbol) don't work in Mozilla but at least you can still count on IE5.5 to read the tag. Today, I have to write Greek in Ascii escaped characters that only partially work in some browsers (not Netscape 4.X). Mac 9/10 won't read sans-serif fonts in IE 5.0, and won't recognize the break tag. It's absolutely crazy that one Standard was not agreed on 5 years ago and implemented by all the browser vendors. The difference comes between Standards Advocates (free, open, liberal) and Browser Vendors (proprietary, closed, conservative).
But I do like Amaya and I use it a lot to check my html. So the W3C has produced some good things. But the Standards roller derby should settle down, quit deprecating useful stuff, and concentrate on creating innovative useful stuff in their new projects and ongoing activities.
But Yakutia, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Qaraghandy -- They're SO HUGE! Can't keep the gridlines straight. The horror! The horror!
Support your local post office! Business junk mail helps subsidize the government's insatiable need for tax revenues. Less taxes for you. The end product of a mailstorm is lots of paper for your local recycle centers. Everybody benefits.
You can count on Al Jazeera TV and web site to promote the viewpoint of the "Arab Street." These are the same people you saw dancing in the streets on 09/11/2001. Get a clue folks. For real, objective analytical reporting of the middle east, there is only Debka file.
Another: "10,000 Fingers of Doctor T" Hans Conreid as a deranged piano teacher tormenting a small child who's caught in a dream narrative with the longest keyboard ever constructed.
I have always held out hope the Stephen Spielburg or George Lucas would take an option on John Milton, "Paradise Lost." No author royalties, he's dead! Think of the special effects between heaven and hell scenes! God and Jesus dialoging! Satan prostrate on the continent of ice! Some of you may argue that it's already been done in "What Dreams May Come" but that's another book.
And what perverts (macphiliacs?) do with Macs?... They still fantasize on their old Lisa's.
What an absolutely stupid analogy, and leave it up to the Slashdot moderation to send it up to "5" insightful! The Egyptians buried all their "culture" along with the hieroglyphs and art and jewels in the tombs of their idiot kings and queens. They slaughtered the artisans and craftsmen and slave builders who did the work of building the tombs and buried them with the king. Then, later, some tomb robbers ("crackers") came along and robbed most of the gold and jewels and recycled it for their own profit. The only reason we have any "history" at all is that the tomb robbers missed a lot of stuff... WAKE UP AND READ A LITTLE HISTORY, YOU CLONES!
This comment deserves to be reviled. First, "our legal system would become unbalanced." ... Our legal system is already unbalanced. 13 years ago 5 minority teenagers whose confessions were coerced under duress by police and prosecutors were convicted of a "rape and murder rampage." 13 years later after they have served their sentences, all are exhonerated and the district attorney "withdraws all charges" because they finally caught the guilty party. The jury, judge, prosecutors, all parties involved in the case ignored the evidence for 13 years and now they say, "Sorry for all the lost years." The judge and prosecutors, who ought to be tried for deriliction of duty and abuse of authority, cannot be sued because of "eminent domain" laws.
Second, "Individuals would place differing penalties based on their own moral judgments"... lest we forget that during the 1990s, the Republican Party as well as a moron named Kenneth Starr relentlessly prosecuted the president of the United States for having an affair. Our legal system is now designed to drive persons into bankruptcy before they have an adequate chance to defend themselves.
Last, "it still makes the act of dispensing justice, without the backing of our legal system, wrong"... which must explain why more than one year later, not a single Enron executive has been indicted for their vicious 'Deathstar' conspiracy, nor all the rest of the 'creative accounting' that caused the company to go into bankruptcy, their stock into the toilet, and drove countless investors into panic. Oh no, NOTHING WRONG here! I am surprised that someone has not yet tried to commit arson at one of Ken Lay's fabulous mansions.
To get back to the topic of what to do with SPAM and spammers, I think we all have a duty to link up all the pro-Al Qaida, pro-Osama bin Laden web sites, and their supporters, with every spammer in the known world and let them choke each other's servers until they both have completely reformatted the other's hard drives with garbage Unicode characters.
As usual the hogwash and tuppenny conventional wisdom gets moderated up to "insightful" with no foundation. This comment, as well as the follow-up "me too" above are both incorrect. Most asian spam is written in a language such as "BIG-5 CHINESE" and will appear in your mailbox as either garbled SMTP or in Chinese characters. Same for Korean spam. They may be using open relays but the spam originates in Taiwan, Seoul, and Shanghai. Quite a lot originates in educational institutions, as messages from computer science students doing "testing." Most is from people trying to make their yen fortune working from free web-site hosted "home business" opportunities. There are thousands of them hosted on yahoo.tw, hinet, hitron, fetnet, giga.net, seed.net, tpts and tcts.net, hundreds of other ISPs that do free web hosting.
Consider the brilliance of XHTML 2.0 abolishing the/> tag in favor of something that would read like this:
<p>
<line>public class HelloWorld {</line>
<line>public static void main (String[] args){ </line>
<line>System.out.println("Hello world!"); </line>
<line>}</line>
<line>}</line>
</p>
Why in the world should you expect the XML standard to be in complance with the Unicode standard?
Yes. Leave it to the Slashdot genius moderation to score this one "insightful." The "immigration visa" is something issued by the U.S. State Dept. at the Consular Office in the country of origin of a foreign national trying to enter the U.S. The "green card" is a document issued by the INS AFTER you have immigrated to the U.S. which is basically a "right to work permit." The green card is usually conferred on immigrants who have attained "permanent resident alien" status, and in some cases it is granted to "conditional resident alien" status individuals, who are then required to return in two years for a final review before they are granted "permanent resident alien" status. If you are confused and don't know the difference, it is all explained very well at the INS's web site.
Yet another example of the Slashdot community's mindless following of the latest/greatest Open Source project, in this case Google! In my experience with doing a LOT of searching, I find that nearly half of Google's links returned as supposedly "most popular" get you a 404-Not Found when you try to go to the page. And this is what they rank according to popularity? The most popular dead links? ANY search engine service that deliberately ignores META information deserves to be boycotted. ANY search engine that refuses to accept "suggested" links also deserves to be boycotted.
Never cease to be amazed at how shallow and pedantic Slashdot users can be. Don't any of you realize that SPAM can be incredibly useful for defeating the enemies of freedom? There are literally hundreds of JIHAD web sites around preaching the virtue of blowing up children in the name of martyrdom and glorying in the destruction of the WTC. These web sites routinely run propaganda from Osama and his Buddies, and many contain coded messages to sleeper cells and rogue operatives. Some have FLASH movies replaying over and over the airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers with a voiceover stream of anti-west vitriol. Many of these web sites also contain good old PERL and CGI scripts for "Sign me up for your mail list." Flood one or two of them with the e-mail addresses of every spammer in the world (you can find good ones on news.admin.net-abuse.sightings). Watch the site slow to a grinding stop in another week or two. One real nasty from not long ago (www.jehad.net) is now gone, and with it went one mirror of Osama's Streaming Real Video Picture Show.