I like my job, but even if i loved it, I love my family more.
A job is inherantly unpleasant, otherwise they wouldn't need to pay you to do it. What you're describing is a vocation, not a job. Priests and nurses, maybe, not IT workers.
Companies have absolutely zero loyalty to their workforce. We are a resource to be exploited like every other. Even if they treat us reasonably well, the day that it comes down to making a profit or firing me, I know damn well I'm out the door.
You want to be an unpaid slave for a company that will give you nothing back when the chips are down? Go ahead, but don't expect me to sacrifice my life and family too because you consider it 'unprofessional' to go home and concentrate on other things.
In terms of GDP, the EU as a whole is now larger than the US, with a higher population to boot.
GDP per capita though is quite a bit lower, partly due to the recent accession of relatively poor eastern european states. Western Europe is virtually as a big a market as the US in terms of sales, and given the price premium charged compared to the US, losing the EU market would absolutely devastate microsoft.
That's basically how it actually works in the UK. BT, the former state-owned tax-funded telecoms monopoly built most of the last mile infrastruture. BT has since been privatised.
The last mile is now run by BT openreach, a heavily regulated business, with equal access available to all UK ADSL ISPs. Even BT's own ISP arm is kept separate at arms length, and treated as just another customer.
It's illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act also, according to several legal experts.
RIPA states: "For the purposes of this Act, but subject to the following provisions of this section, a person intercepts a communication in the course of its transmission by means of a telecommunication system if he... monitors transmissions made by means of the system."
RIPA goes on to allow for interception without a warrant - i.e. by Phorm and your ISP rather than law enforcement agencies - "if the communication is one sent by, or intended for, a person who has consented to the interception". Given that consent wasn't even sought for the technicial trials of 36,000 users, let alone granted, and it isn't in the contract either - they may well be subject to criminal sanctions if the government decide to prosecute.
There are also possible sanctions under the Data Protection Act, as personal data was collected and passed to a 3rd party without proper safeguards. BT and phorm argue that no personal data is collected. Since all unencrypted traffic is recorded, including webmail, and associated with a unique ID and kept for 14 days, it seems they're taking a somewhat optimistic view about that.
If they accessed customer PCs directly with spyware, they could be prosecuted under the computer misuse act but as the interception took place at the ISP level, it probably doesn't apply.
That same law is in effect in the UK due to an EU directive - websites visited, and email addresses sent and received are collected (similar to phone log records) but not the contents, and only available after the fact by warrant.
The difference with this is because it's being passed to a third party company to analyse the traffic in realtime for keyword trends, to be passed to adbanner providers. So when you go to a website using phorm for their ad banners, phorm know where else you've been in the past, and picks the ads on the new site to fit with your previous profile.
I.E. one set of data is collected by government order for the purpose of policing, and is accessible by warrant after the event, the other set of data is collected secretly and probably illegally by a private advertising company for the purposes of spying on you in realtime to better target their adbanners to your history.
BT broadband has about 27% of the UK market, and is the largest single ISP in the UK last I checked. There are fairly strong walls between the broadband business (BT retail/openworld) and the phone line last mile business (openreach), and the trunk network (BT wholesale) these days due to regulation by OFCOM since privatisation, though they are all part of BT group.
The information commisioner, who ensures the data protection act is followed, is investigating BT to see if the law has been broken - there's a strong possibility it has been.
I hope then that the CIO gets to charge things to a departments budget when a clueless user manages to destroy their machine and waste a day of IT support time because of a stupid and preventable action. Hell, when I'm king, IT will be funded directly from the departments that use their services. Want to use helpdesk, corporate email or network resources? Then you get billed for the amount you use, and by the hour for techs on site, just like a private contractor. Departments set up their own policies for internet access, and get billed by bandwidth. Want to buy your own equipment, and run it yourself? Fine! But then you're on your own as far as helldesk goes. VLAN and routers between departments, so if one department screws up the network, it only takes them down, and they get to pay the cleanup bill.
IT departments are almost invariably underfunded and understaffed, as they're only seen as a cost line on the ledger. The policies are generally there to try and contain the damage. Yes, it sucks when a clueful user gets caught in the policy net, and a decent IT department will loosen the strings for those people they can trust, but blaming IT for the slowness of support and restrictiveness of policies is just shooting the messenger.
Oh, and life expectancies don't work the way you think they do. The average age at death has been increasing somewhat for those who live past 5 (due to medical care in old age mainly) but people in the ancient world didn't drop dead at 30! It reflects very high infant mortality rates, often also killing the mother due to lack of medical care is the cause of that. People in the ancient world regularly lived into their 60's and 70's, if they weren't poor or unlucky, and made it past 5. Life expectancy is a mean average. Just read the paragraph after the numbers on the wiki page!
Assuming 16 is an adult, which is not unreasonable, 11 is not 'almost an adult'. 13 year olds getting married were almost invariably brides being married to an older man, so not exactly a sign of approaching adulthood in terms of responsibility, just the power structure that lead to powerful men getting access to very young wives.
As far as the puberty thing, my malnutrition quote hopefully showed that I meant way back further than the 70's! I'm quite happy to accept sexual maturity hasn't changed much since the 70's. However, I don't think you found many 11 year olds counted as adults in the west in the 1970's either. Going back to 70 say, it's a different story.
"Have you ever actually listened to what your saying?"
At what point did I say that I agreed with it as a teaching method? Or that I employed it? It doesn't happen at my school, perhaps because we're not from the US. I am however cynical enough about it because it's not uncommon in that part of the world. Much of your post is based upon me also being american, which I am not.
Option C - asus pay for a vista licence, but use the downgrade option to put XP on it. Toshiba does XP machines this way now - they come with a vista oem business licence and sticker, vista and XP pro discs, but with the XP pre-installed.
Schools can force students to perform unpaid labour like 'picking up litter' for the same reason they can force students to perform unpaid labour like 'each student must make a perfect copy of what is written on this blackboard'. It's education, not labour. In the case of litter-picking or floor-mopping, it's teaching 'don't be a dick' or 'sit down, shut up and work when told to or you'll end up mopping floors for a living' rather than calculus, but it's still inflicting learning on the unwilling. Can you tell I work in a school?
Yes, they're getting the unpaid services of an IT administrator - but then they're getting the results of an inexperienced 11 year old in his first post who's learning in-situ. Hope they contract out their email services!
"For most of human history, this person would have been on the cusp of adulthood. 11 only sounds young because we artificially retard our population so that most never learn to function until much later." I do however take exception to this. 11 was on the verge of adulthood if you were a pre bronze age child or if you live in a subsistance-poor family at any point, including currently. Children didn't sexually mature until much later than now, even into their 20's, due to malnutrition. In the wealthier sections of society, even in the iron age, children were much older than 11 before taking the full mantle of responsibility.
Children are sexually mature earlier than ever, but lack the reasoning capacity to use it properly it often seems. We also require them to know a hell of a lot more than they used to function in our society - not many jobs down the coal mines or running under the weaving machines any more. We are a more technologically advanced society, though intra-socially we're little different than the romans. I doubt you'd find many roman 11 year olds capable of being a network administrator, even if they could work a shift on the farm.
Oops, my mistake. federal law trumps state law where they conflict. However, the supreme court have decided that the ICJ treaty doesn't count as enforceable federal law? You're right, that does mean that the supreme court have decided that international treaties that are congressional agreements - i.e. most of them - can be violated at will by the states, in direct conflict with the standard federal trumps state ruling. How the hell did that happen?
I assumed the difference was between a congessional-agreement and a real treaty, wheras the actual difference is the supreme court is smoking crack.
There's more than one type of international treaty. Ones which are setup by the president and agreed with 2/3 of the senate are, according to the constitution, as strong as the constitution itself and override any other laws. Treaties agreed with congress are considered a sort of treaty-lite (congressional-executive agreement), and are treated as any other federal law and can be overriden by other laws, generally whichever came later - or of course, by the constitution. The president alone can also sign a treaty without consultation, but that's rare, I think.
By the sounds of it, the treaty that establishes the rights of the ICJ is a congessional-executive agreement, and is equivalent to any other federal law - if it's not a constitutional matter, then the ICJ can be overridden by state law just like any other federal law. This is not a complete collapse of international treaty agreements per se - most countries treat international treaties as domestic laws (or pass a domestic law to implement the treaty) - if the treaty is incompatible with existing domestic law, then in effect that country has to amend it or withdraw from the treaty. The UK is going through similar convulsions over the sweeping changes required by the implementation of the European Human Rights treaty as domestic law, it's had wide-ranging effects on a number of other laws.
As far as the ICJ goes, The United States already withdrew from compulsory jurisdiction in 1986, and so accepts the court's jurisdiction only on a case-to-case basis anyway - mainly to protect its armed forces from ever being called before it. This has attracted wide-spread condemnation from within the UN, but it's not like the US cares about what the UN thinks, until it wants something from it!
If the treaty establishing the ICJ or the WTO had been signed as a treaty in the US sense, i.e. agreed with 2/3 the senate, instead of as a congressional agreement, then it would have the strength of a constitutional amendment. Only about 1 in 10 treaties are signed this way according to wikipedia.
I meant reliable as in identifying porn spam as spam. I run the email system for a school from reception to 18. Porn spam, of which we receive a VAST amount, simply cannot be allowed through the spam filters. Bayes filters do not catch all of it, even with RBL weighting as they struggle with all image mails. The bayes filters also flag legitimate email as spam, which then gets dumped in a spam box and never read. It's better to generate a clear non-receipt message to the sender, so they know it's not been delivered than have legitimate mail high-spam flagged and dumped in a box with a hundred others never to be read. Virtually all our legit email comes from parents or suppliers, all of which have our phone number for out of band communication.
So far, in the 2.5 years we've had RBL's running, we've had one reported false positive from a parent on a pink-ticket spam ISP in korea. They were whitelisted, and problem solved. On the other hand, I've had hundreds of complaints from staff and pupils via staff about obscene spam that made it through the bayes filters. Reliability of detection IS an issue for us.
You also ask about expense. CPU horsepower is not cheap, nor is secure disk space for email storage. Our mail server is limited on both, and we don't have the budget this year to upgrade the mail server again. Being in a rural area, bandwidth to handle the torrent of image spam isn't cheap either. Must be nice to live in a world where you can just throw money at containing the problem.
The manual white and blacklists are first. The RBLs are a front line defence, which generate a clear fault message to the sender. The greylist catches some more, but is less and less effective these days since the spammers keep resending every few seconds until it gets through. They bayes filters are the last line and the least effective filters, both for false positives and negatives, which then flag the mail. Stuff which scores obscenely high (25+) gets redflagged and blocked from final delivery.
If I turned off everything but the bayes filters, the filter server would simply not clear the incoming email fast enough. The users would overnight get up to 10 times the spam, much of it very unsuitable for pre-teens, thus overloading the imap server. Flagging it and moving on may work for you and your mail server, but flagging the (checks) 524, no 528 spam the headmaster would have received in the last 24 hours and dumping them in his inbox instead of blocking them would very quickly put me out of work.
ORDB was a realtime blacklist. I.E. it identified the IP addresses of open relays. Most people use RBL's like zen and njabl to block connections from 'bad' SMTP servers at HELO, they're much more effective at that stage than later as part of bayesian spam filters - context filtering is expensive and unrelaible with the volume of spam these days. Blocking open relays and dynamic ranges* at HELO is often the only practical way to get a handle on 99% spam loads.
Configured that way, there's no email to release, as the server was not allowed to connect in the fiirst place - in effect, ORDB would have caused an admin unaware that they had shut down to have his server block all inbound email at the connection level. Given the amount of sample configs about that still include them, that's not impossible to imagine.
Effective way of getting people to stop querying their servers, but kinda dickish.
*Yes, I know dynamic ranges sometimes host legit personal mail servers. Unfortunately, for every legit user there are hundreds of spam zombies on those dynamic IPs, often dumping dozens of spam at a time, often hitting over and over again until they get past the greylist timeout. I'm watching my log now, and I just blocked 50 odd connection attempts from one 1 pretending to be 50 different email domains. In the time it's taken me to write this footnote, the dynamic range IPs blacklists have blocked a few hundred emails.
Radio stations in the UK have to pay royalties to record labels and artists. UK CD retail prices are £10 minimum at tesco for new releases (biggest supermarket chain). That's $20. Retail prices at music stores are £15, that's $30.
Major record labels gouge the public at every level they can get away with. It's not that long ago they were successfully prosecuted for price-fixing. Prices have barely fallen since.
What I find frustrating is that you should have to renounce the violence of a small set of whahabist fanatics. Christians are not constantly attacked as a group in the media for not denouncing the ethnic and religous cleansing that is still going on in the region of serbia/kosovo, or the falwell or phelps rants, or the oklahoma bombings, or the bombers of anti-abortion clinics.
Extremists of whatever stripe should be called what they are, and leave the tarring of honest ordinary people out of it. I might be an atheist, but I do respect the right of other people to believe what they choose, as long as they respect the same in others.
Baen books demonstrate clearly that DRM free downloads make authors more money, not less, because more people can buy and read the book anywhere on anything. Convenience trumps price for people who might be customers.
Baen books also demonstrate that making some books completely free increases sales of other books by the same author, and even paper versions of the same book. I know I personally have read some of the free ones, then gone on to buy paper versions of those and other books by the same author (I would buy ebooks, but I prefer old fashioned paper for the higher resolution at the moment, given the choice)
Publishers are losing out in the current world, because they've failed to grasp the change in reality, and are mostly engaged in making the online versions more difficult and expensive with less rights than physical distribution in a failing attempt to preserve their physical monopoly, and thus continue to make profit as a middleman at both the author's and audience's expense. Those days are coming to an end. There's still money to made connecting the producer of rare creative and clever work (the author) and the paying audience willing to see more creative and clever works created. Abusing both and keeping most of the money from both of them? That should die as a business model.
The philosophy behind the baen free library sums up much that makes sense about the way forward for the distribution of copyrighted works.
As a mailserver admin, I held out as long as I could, but eventually I had no choice. When 90% odd of all your spam comes from ISP dynamic and home IP ranges, and spam accounts for 98%+ of your email, you know something just has to give. Especially since hotmail, aol and gmail are all likely to block your mail too.
The days of running a trustworthy email server from a home-range IP are just gone. Thank the bloody spammers and their ever-harder to remove botnet crapware for that, not mail admins trying to keep screaming users off their back. Oh, and thank the US and Russian justice departments for not nailing the bastards for fraud, amongst other things. If the US spent a fraction of the time and money it does chasing pot smokers on prosecuting known spammers, email would be a damn sight more usable.
There are any number of fixed-IP known ISP smtp relays you can use if your own adsl ISP SMTP server sucks, there's even free ones like gmail. I'm truly sorry, but when it comes down to it, the spam flood is just too big to handle without harsh triage measures any more.
You and I see 1984 as a warning, of the slide into the 'safety and security' of a fascist police state. The current British Labour government, and the british police see it as a convenient instruction manual.
London, Britain and northern ireland survived decades of IRA bombings and terrorist actions, and brutality from the security services against the civilian population of NI. Yet despite the lessons learned from the peace process there, we see a return to internment; and now fingerprint scanners at airports, plans to fingerprint the entire adult population for passports, the highest number of CCTV cameras per head in the world, police access to numberplate recognition car tracking cameras country wide, soon a country wide vehicle tracking system for per-mile road tax enforcement and even police desire to put the DNA of every adult and child over 5 in the already largest DNA database in the world.
And meanwhile. the population continue to vote labour because they hate the tories, and think the lib-dems aren't a big enough party to be worth voting for.
Britain already is a police state. The general population just hasn't realised it yet. Or if they have; they don't care.
Unfortunately, paying the $5 fee won't protect you from legal threats. It'll be there to 'compensate the labels for their losses from piracy'. I.E. you and I end up paying for the exec's hookers and blow, and get nothing back for it whether we download infringing music or not. Just like the blank media taxes, or the zune fee.
The idea of us paying something voluntarily, and getting something in fair exchange from the music labels? Completely alien to them, no matter how many reasonable ways we come up with.
It kills one of the main reasons to use firefox. IE is a gateway to a lot more things than just html/css. You have activex, windows media DRM and now silverlight (though that is for firefox too). By keeping sufficient windows users using IE, with no incentive to move off the default, some developers will still target sites at windows IE only users. That then keeps the windows lock-in going.
Microsoft always viewed the web as something that threatened their core OS market; apps that run on any platform over the network, via some neutral platform like a browser (which has finally started to happen despite years of feet-dragging by microsoft) means people can function outside windows. First comes firefox, then openoffice, then OSX or linux.
Miicrosoft still wants to keep IE's version of the web separate from everybody else. they've just accepted they've lost the xm/html/css part of that, and need to stay relevent there to keep the rest of their lock-in going.
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I like my job, but even if i loved it, I love my family more.
A job is inherantly unpleasant, otherwise they wouldn't need to pay you to do it. What you're describing is a vocation, not a job. Priests and nurses, maybe, not IT workers.
Companies have absolutely zero loyalty to their workforce. We are a resource to be exploited like every other. Even if they treat us reasonably well, the day that it comes down to making a profit or firing me, I know damn well I'm out the door.
You want to be an unpaid slave for a company that will give you nothing back when the chips are down? Go ahead, but don't expect me to sacrifice my life and family too because you consider it 'unprofessional' to go home and concentrate on other things.
In terms of GDP, the EU as a whole is now larger than the US, with a higher population to boot.
GDP per capita though is quite a bit lower, partly due to the recent accession of relatively poor eastern european states. Western Europe is virtually as a big a market as the US in terms of sales, and given the price premium charged compared to the US, losing the EU market would absolutely devastate microsoft.
This only applies in Paris, but there they hate everyone, not just you. The accent is the excuse.
Paris is to France as London is to the UK, or New York is to the USA. I.E. full of assholes that hate everyone else.
That's basically how it actually works in the UK. BT, the former state-owned tax-funded telecoms monopoly built most of the last mile infrastruture. BT has since been privatised.
The last mile is now run by BT openreach, a heavily regulated business, with equal access available to all UK ADSL ISPs. Even BT's own ISP arm is kept separate at arms length, and treated as just another customer.
It's illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act also, according to several legal experts.
RIPA states: "For the purposes of this Act, but subject to the following provisions of this section, a person intercepts a communication in the course of its transmission by means of a telecommunication system if he... monitors transmissions made by means of the system."
RIPA goes on to allow for interception without a warrant - i.e. by Phorm and your ISP rather than law enforcement agencies - "if the communication is one sent by, or intended for, a person who has consented to the interception".
Given that consent wasn't even sought for the technicial trials of 36,000 users, let alone granted, and it isn't in the contract either - they may well be subject to criminal sanctions if the government decide to prosecute.
There are also possible sanctions under the Data Protection Act, as personal data was collected and passed to a 3rd party without proper safeguards. BT and phorm argue that no personal data is collected. Since all unencrypted traffic is recorded, including webmail, and associated with a unique ID and kept for 14 days, it seems they're taking a somewhat optimistic view about that.
If they accessed customer PCs directly with spyware, they could be prosecuted under the computer misuse act but as the interception took place at the ISP level, it probably doesn't apply.
That same law is in effect in the UK due to an EU directive - websites visited, and email addresses sent and received are collected (similar to phone log records) but not the contents, and only available after the fact by warrant.
The difference with this is because it's being passed to a third party company to analyse the traffic in realtime for keyword trends, to be passed to adbanner providers. So when you go to a website using phorm for their ad banners, phorm know where else you've been in the past, and picks the ads on the new site to fit with your previous profile.
I.E. one set of data is collected by government order for the purpose of policing, and is accessible by warrant after the event, the other set of data is collected secretly and probably illegally by a private advertising company for the purposes of spying on you in realtime to better target their adbanners to your history.
BT broadband has about 27% of the UK market, and is the largest single ISP in the UK last I checked. There are fairly strong walls between the broadband business (BT retail/openworld) and the phone line last mile business (openreach), and the trunk network (BT wholesale) these days due to regulation by OFCOM since privatisation, though they are all part of BT group.
The information commisioner, who ensures the data protection act is followed, is investigating BT to see if the law has been broken - there's a strong possibility it has been.
I hope then that the CIO gets to charge things to a departments budget when a clueless user manages to destroy their machine and waste a day of IT support time because of a stupid and preventable action.
Hell, when I'm king, IT will be funded directly from the departments that use their services. Want to use helpdesk, corporate email or network resources? Then you get billed for the amount you use, and by the hour for techs on site, just like a private contractor. Departments set up their own policies for internet access, and get billed by bandwidth. Want to buy your own equipment, and run it yourself? Fine! But then you're on your own as far as helldesk goes. VLAN and routers between departments, so if one department screws up the network, it only takes them down, and they get to pay the cleanup bill.
IT departments are almost invariably underfunded and understaffed, as they're only seen as a cost line on the ledger. The policies are generally there to try and contain the damage. Yes, it sucks when a clueful user gets caught in the policy net, and a decent IT department will loosen the strings for those people they can trust, but blaming IT for the slowness of support and restrictiveness of policies is just shooting the messenger.
Oh, and life expectancies don't work the way you think they do. The average age at death has been increasing somewhat for those who live past 5 (due to medical care in old age mainly) but people in the ancient world didn't drop dead at 30! It reflects very high infant mortality rates, often also killing the mother due to lack of medical care is the cause of that. People in the ancient world regularly lived into their 60's and 70's, if they weren't poor or unlucky, and made it past 5. Life expectancy is a mean average. Just read the paragraph after the numbers on the wiki page!
Assuming 16 is an adult, which is not unreasonable, 11 is not 'almost an adult'. 13 year olds getting married were almost invariably brides being married to an older man, so not exactly a sign of approaching adulthood in terms of responsibility, just the power structure that lead to powerful men getting access to very young wives.
As far as the puberty thing, my malnutrition quote hopefully showed that I meant way back further than the 70's! I'm quite happy to accept sexual maturity hasn't changed much since the 70's. However, I don't think you found many 11 year olds counted as adults in the west in the 1970's either. Going back to 70 say, it's a different story.
"Have you ever actually listened to what your saying?"
At what point did I say that I agreed with it as a teaching method? Or that I employed it? It doesn't happen at my school, perhaps because we're not from the US. I am however cynical enough about it because it's not uncommon in that part of the world. Much of your post is based upon me also being american, which I am not.
Option C - asus pay for a vista licence, but use the downgrade option to put XP on it. Toshiba does XP machines this way now - they come with a vista oem business licence and sticker, vista and XP pro discs, but with the XP pre-installed.
Schools can force students to perform unpaid labour like 'picking up litter' for the same reason they can force students to perform unpaid labour like 'each student must make a perfect copy of what is written on this blackboard'. It's education, not labour. In the case of litter-picking or floor-mopping, it's teaching 'don't be a dick' or 'sit down, shut up and work when told to or you'll end up mopping floors for a living' rather than calculus, but it's still inflicting learning on the unwilling. Can you tell I work in a school?
Yes, they're getting the unpaid services of an IT administrator - but then they're getting the results of an inexperienced 11 year old in his first post who's learning in-situ. Hope they contract out their email services!
"For most of human history, this person would have been on the cusp of adulthood. 11 only sounds young because we artificially retard our population so that most never learn to function until much later."
I do however take exception to this. 11 was on the verge of adulthood if you were a pre bronze age child or if you live in a subsistance-poor family at any point, including currently. Children didn't sexually mature until much later than now, even into their 20's, due to malnutrition. In the wealthier sections of society, even in the iron age, children were much older than 11 before taking the full mantle of responsibility.
Children are sexually mature earlier than ever, but lack the reasoning capacity to use it properly it often seems. We also require them to know a hell of a lot more than they used to function in our society - not many jobs down the coal mines or running under the weaving machines any more. We are a more technologically advanced society, though intra-socially we're little different than the romans. I doubt you'd find many roman 11 year olds capable of being a network administrator, even if they could work a shift on the farm.
Oops, my mistake. federal law trumps state law where they conflict. However, the supreme court have decided that the ICJ treaty doesn't count as enforceable federal law? You're right, that does mean that the supreme court have decided that international treaties that are congressional agreements - i.e. most of them - can be violated at will by the states, in direct conflict with the standard federal trumps state ruling. How the hell did that happen?
I assumed the difference was between a congessional-agreement and a real treaty, wheras the actual difference is the supreme court is smoking crack.
There's more than one type of international treaty. Ones which are setup by the president and agreed with 2/3 of the senate are, according to the constitution, as strong as the constitution itself and override any other laws. Treaties agreed with congress are considered a sort of treaty-lite (congressional-executive agreement), and are treated as any other federal law and can be overriden by other laws, generally whichever came later - or of course, by the constitution. The president alone can also sign a treaty without consultation, but that's rare, I think.
By the sounds of it, the treaty that establishes the rights of the ICJ is a congessional-executive agreement, and is equivalent to any other federal law - if it's not a constitutional matter, then the ICJ can be overridden by state law just like any other federal law. This is not a complete collapse of international treaty agreements per se - most countries treat international treaties as domestic laws (or pass a domestic law to implement the treaty) - if the treaty is incompatible with existing domestic law, then in effect that country has to amend it or withdraw from the treaty. The UK is going through similar convulsions over the sweeping changes required by the implementation of the European Human Rights treaty as domestic law, it's had wide-ranging effects on a number of other laws.
As far as the ICJ goes, The United States already withdrew from compulsory jurisdiction in 1986, and so accepts the court's jurisdiction only on a case-to-case basis anyway - mainly to protect its armed forces from ever being called before it. This has attracted wide-spread condemnation from within the UN, but it's not like the US cares about what the UN thinks, until it wants something from it!
If the treaty establishing the ICJ or the WTO had been signed as a treaty in the US sense, i.e. agreed with 2/3 the senate, instead of as a congressional agreement, then it would have the strength of a constitutional amendment. Only about 1 in 10 treaties are signed this way according to wikipedia.
It's a shortened expression. The long way to read it is "money has almost all disappeared, but not quite yet."
I meant reliable as in identifying porn spam as spam. I run the email system for a school from reception to 18. Porn spam, of which we receive a VAST amount, simply cannot be allowed through the spam filters. Bayes filters do not catch all of it, even with RBL weighting as they struggle with all image mails. The bayes filters also flag legitimate email as spam, which then gets dumped in a spam box and never read. It's better to generate a clear non-receipt message to the sender, so they know it's not been delivered than have legitimate mail high-spam flagged and dumped in a box with a hundred others never to be read. Virtually all our legit email comes from parents or suppliers, all of which have our phone number for out of band communication.
So far, in the 2.5 years we've had RBL's running, we've had one reported false positive from a parent on a pink-ticket spam ISP in korea. They were whitelisted, and problem solved.
On the other hand, I've had hundreds of complaints from staff and pupils via staff about obscene spam that made it through the bayes filters. Reliability of detection IS an issue for us.
You also ask about expense. CPU horsepower is not cheap, nor is secure disk space for email storage. Our mail server is limited on both, and we don't have the budget this year to upgrade the mail server again. Being in a rural area, bandwidth to handle the torrent of image spam isn't cheap either. Must be nice to live in a world where you can just throw money at containing the problem.
The manual white and blacklists are first. The RBLs are a front line defence, which generate a clear fault message to the sender. The greylist catches some more, but is less and less effective these days since the spammers keep resending every few seconds until it gets through. They bayes filters are the last line and the least effective filters, both for false positives and negatives, which then flag the mail. Stuff which scores obscenely high (25+) gets redflagged and blocked from final delivery.
If I turned off everything but the bayes filters, the filter server would simply not clear the incoming email fast enough. The users would overnight get up to 10 times the spam, much of it very unsuitable for pre-teens, thus overloading the imap server. Flagging it and moving on may work for you and your mail server, but flagging the (checks) 524, no 528 spam the headmaster would have received in the last 24 hours and dumping them in his inbox instead of blocking them would very quickly put me out of work.
ORDB was a realtime blacklist. I.E. it identified the IP addresses of open relays. Most people use RBL's like zen and njabl to block connections from 'bad' SMTP servers at HELO, they're much more effective at that stage than later as part of bayesian spam filters - context filtering is expensive and unrelaible with the volume of spam these days. Blocking open relays and dynamic ranges* at HELO is often the only practical way to get a handle on 99% spam loads.
Configured that way, there's no email to release, as the server was not allowed to connect in the fiirst place - in effect, ORDB would have caused an admin unaware that they had shut down to have his server block all inbound email at the connection level. Given the amount of sample configs about that still include them, that's not impossible to imagine.
Effective way of getting people to stop querying their servers, but kinda dickish.
*Yes, I know dynamic ranges sometimes host legit personal mail servers. Unfortunately, for every legit user there are hundreds of spam zombies on those dynamic IPs, often dumping dozens of spam at a time, often hitting over and over again until they get past the greylist timeout. I'm watching my log now, and I just blocked 50 odd connection attempts from one 1 pretending to be 50 different email domains. In the time it's taken me to write this footnote, the dynamic range IPs blacklists have blocked a few hundred emails.
Radio stations in the UK have to pay royalties to record labels and artists. UK CD retail prices are £10 minimum at tesco for new releases (biggest supermarket chain). That's $20. Retail prices at music stores are £15, that's $30.
Major record labels gouge the public at every level they can get away with. It's not that long ago they were successfully prosecuted for price-fixing. Prices have barely fallen since.
What I find frustrating is that you should have to renounce the violence of a small set of whahabist fanatics. Christians are not constantly attacked as a group in the media for not denouncing the ethnic and religous cleansing that is still going on in the region of serbia/kosovo, or the falwell or phelps rants, or the oklahoma bombings, or the bombers of anti-abortion clinics.
Extremists of whatever stripe should be called what they are, and leave the tarring of honest ordinary people out of it. I might be an atheist, but I do respect the right of other people to believe what they choose, as long as they respect the same in others.
Baen books demonstrate clearly that DRM free downloads make authors more money, not less, because more people can buy and read the book anywhere on anything. Convenience trumps price for people who might be customers.
Baen books also demonstrate that making some books completely free increases sales of other books by the same author, and even paper versions of the same book. I know I personally have read some of the free ones, then gone on to buy paper versions of those and other books by the same author (I would buy ebooks, but I prefer old fashioned paper for the higher resolution at the moment, given the choice)
Publishers are losing out in the current world, because they've failed to grasp the change in reality, and are mostly engaged in making the online versions more difficult and expensive with less rights than physical distribution in a failing attempt to preserve their physical monopoly, and thus continue to make profit as a middleman at both the author's and audience's expense. Those days are coming to an end. There's still money to made connecting the producer of rare creative and clever work (the author) and the paying audience willing to see more creative and clever works created. Abusing both and keeping most of the money from both of them? That should die as a business model.
The philosophy behind the baen free library sums up much that makes sense about the way forward for the distribution of copyrighted works.
As a mailserver admin, I held out as long as I could, but eventually I had no choice. When 90% odd of all your spam comes from ISP dynamic and home IP ranges, and spam accounts for 98%+ of your email, you know something just has to give. Especially since hotmail, aol and gmail are all likely to block your mail too.
The days of running a trustworthy email server from a home-range IP are just gone. Thank the bloody spammers and their ever-harder to remove botnet crapware for that, not mail admins trying to keep screaming users off their back. Oh, and thank the US and Russian justice departments for not nailing the bastards for fraud, amongst other things. If the US spent a fraction of the time and money it does chasing pot smokers on prosecuting known spammers, email would be a damn sight more usable.
There are any number of fixed-IP known ISP smtp relays you can use if your own adsl ISP SMTP server sucks, there's even free ones like gmail. I'm truly sorry, but when it comes down to it, the spam flood is just too big to handle without harsh triage measures any more.
You and I see 1984 as a warning, of the slide into the 'safety and security' of a fascist police state. The current British Labour government, and the british police see it as a convenient instruction manual.
London, Britain and northern ireland survived decades of IRA bombings and terrorist actions, and brutality from the security services against the civilian population of NI. Yet despite the lessons learned from the peace process there, we see a return to internment; and now fingerprint scanners at airports, plans to fingerprint the entire adult population for passports, the highest number of CCTV cameras per head in the world, police access to numberplate recognition car tracking cameras country wide, soon a country wide vehicle tracking system for per-mile road tax enforcement and even police desire to put the DNA of every adult and child over 5 in the already largest DNA database in the world.
And meanwhile. the population continue to vote labour because they hate the tories, and think the lib-dems aren't a big enough party to be worth voting for.
Britain already is a police state. The general population just hasn't realised it yet. Or if they have; they don't care.
Unfortunately, paying the $5 fee won't protect you from legal threats. It'll be there to 'compensate the labels for their losses from piracy'. I.E. you and I end up paying for the exec's hookers and blow, and get nothing back for it whether we download infringing music or not. Just like the blank media taxes, or the zune fee.
The idea of us paying something voluntarily, and getting something in fair exchange from the music labels? Completely alien to them, no matter how many reasonable ways we come up with.
I'm afraid mushrooms are no longer required to hear CCTV system operators telling you to "stop doing that" when they're watching you.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6524495.stm
It kills one of the main reasons to use firefox. IE is a gateway to a lot more things than just html/css. You have activex, windows media DRM and now silverlight (though that is for firefox too). By keeping sufficient windows users using IE, with no incentive to move off the default, some developers will still target sites at windows IE only users. That then keeps the windows lock-in going.
Microsoft always viewed the web as something that threatened their core OS market; apps that run on any platform over the network, via some neutral platform like a browser (which has finally started to happen despite years of feet-dragging by microsoft) means people can function outside windows. First comes firefox, then openoffice, then OSX or linux.
Miicrosoft still wants to keep IE's version of the web separate from everybody else. they've just accepted they've lost the xm/html/css part of that, and need to stay relevent there to keep the rest of their lock-in going.