We can't even have a proper conversation with the animals of this planet, where we are supposedly many orders of magnitude more intelligent... what makes us think we can effectively communicate with anyone outside of humans?
A teen's parents are suing attorney Jack Thompson and The Tuscaloosa News for blatantly publicising a story where a teenager shot two police officers and a dispatcher to death in 2003. After reading this story, their son Billy went out and did the same in their small sleepy town.
"A gamer could buy a starter disc for 10 euros. When he goes home he goes online and he could buy AI and levels as you go. It's much smarter if you can get levels as you go."
Sounds like another subscription service, which is definitely smarter for the manufacturers. Smarter for us? While it does mean that we can constantly get new levels, it also means that the game may not work without being able to go online to download the levels, or will be sold with crappy levels to encourage you to sign up.
Because its the best system yet defined to get your work out to a wide audience along with the message "In the opinion of knowledgeable people in this field, this work is probably not wrong." Sticking a PDF on the web does the former; we're nowhere near finding a better way to perform the latter.
How about using a ratio system, or something similar? Want to publish something? You'll need to have reviewed at least one article on the site first. You could judge the worth of an article based on an aggregate score of all the reviews it has received.
Laughing stock? I've been using Grocery Gateway (www.grocerygateway.com) for many years now in Toronto, Canada, and they are great. They deliver good food and have _awesome_ customer service if you ever have any issues (I had two incidences where they mixed up items in my order). The delivery guys are pleasant, and don't act as though they are rushing to the next delivery. I'm moving out to the west coast of Canada in a couple years, and I hope that this company expands beyond this city by that time so I can keep using them.
I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.
It's funny how people seem to think that if the code isn't open source, you can't see it. It's still protected by copyright, so what's the problem with having people look at it? Copyright is also what protects GPL'd work from being blatantly copied, and anyone who wishes can look at it.
e-voting doesn't have to be open source (although that is what I'd prefer), but it should have it's source code available to be seen by all.
I can't get to the site at the moment, so I can't say how this app credits you for the work, although some have said it is based on CPU time. Since this is spam that is being sent out, why not just setup a box that does the spamming, behind another box that accepts these spams and tries to relay them on to your firewall, at which point, your firewall drops everything coming from the relay box? As far as the spam app is concerned, the email was sent, and it was accepted for delivery. Also, since all these boxes would be located on a local segment of your home network, the spamming machine wouldnt waste time in io wait, but instead would be able to churn out mail at a pretty good pace, all for nothing (except money in your pocket)
Every time the subject of spam comes up here on SlashDot, everyone rushes to come up with a technical solution to the problem. In the case of spam, I think the solution is not a technical one, but a social one. Spammers are driven by greed, and do their 'bulk marketing' on behalf of other companies. Instead of targeting the spammers, target the companies that are sponsoring these campaigns. I'm sure that some negative publicity will cause them to think twice about using this method to get their message out. Once people don't want to use spammers to send out bulk mailings, the spammers will move on to some other get rich scheme, and the spam will at least subside somewhat.
Instead of shooting the messenger (the spammers), go after the one who is paying to have the spam sent.
So will the insurance companies be willing to undergo lie detector tests themselves? If they are going to dish it out, they should be willing to take it.
How does one get on this list of 'traders'? If enough people belonging to a common organization join, they could collectively 'mod' up or down the likelihood of an event occurring to suit their agenda.
For example, terrorist group XYZ plans to bomb a US embassy. They have many members on the traders list, who then mod down the likelihood of this event happening, hoping that the US govt will then reduce security at this embassy.
This is the avenue we should be pursuing when trying to stop spam. Instead of trying to stop the spammers themselves, go after the source (advertiser) instead. If enough advertisers are convinced/shamed/etc that spamming is a bad thing, they will go elsewhere to get their message out, and the spammers will magically disappear.
Why not put in place some sort of system similar to k5 where the _users_ decide what the best stories are? Then, if you don't like it, mod the story down.
The spam problem is huge no doubt, but the answer is not some silly anti-spam law.
The answer is a technical one.
I believe the answer lies not in making new laws or programs to stop spam, but in removing the incentive to spam altogether. Don't go after the spammers themselves, go after the people who _pay_ the spammers to send out all this crap. Once there is no one left who is willing to pay spammers to do what they do, the spammers will move on, and your inbox will become more manageable. Spammers can work around laws and technical solutions, they can't work around not having any paying customers.
Idiots, yes, but I think a lot of their sales come from the elderly.
Unfortunately, I must agree with this. When I was younger, I took a job doing telemarketing calls. On my first day they gave me a list of numbers and a script to follow. After about an hour, I started to notice that most of the voices on the other end of the phone sounded fairly old. Unfortunately, the older folks were the ones going for the script too, which made me feel pretty crappy, so I threw out the list of 'leads' I had gathered so far and quit the same day.
We need to put pressure on the companies that hire these types of firms. Without any money to support them, these telemarketing/spam/etc companies will simply go away, as they are motivated by greed.
Everytime I see an article about spam, it always seems to be trying to stop spam after the fact (closing relays, using spamassassin, etc). Why not go after the source instead? If you do get spam, don't bother trying to hunt through email headers and all that, look for contact numbers/emails in the spam that are listed for the 'product' in question. Call them and complain. Sometimes, the company selling the product may not know their promotion is being carried out via spamming, and won't pay that company to spam again. If enough companies realize they are pissing off their potential customers, they just might stop paying the spammers. Once there is no money left in spamming, it will naturally stop on its own.
Of course, this doesn't address those who don't care or already know they are getting their message out via spam, but at least it would make a good start to reducing my inbox total.
Why not use IRC for all your instant messaging needs? Sure there are splits from time to time because of the WAr3z d00dz, but overall, I still use only IRC. It has offline messaging etc if they use services, and there are open-source clients for all sorts of operating systems. If need be, you can even write your own client program to make it resemble (insert IM program here), as the RFC is available.
Anybody notice how "Honey pots" backwards is "Stop yenoh!". A quick google [google.com] of the word reveals it to have to do with food, so "honey pots" is code for "Stop food!". This madness must be ended!
You have illegally reverse engineered our encryption scheme in violation of the DMCA. Expect a visit from our thugs^H^H^H^Hassociates any minute now.
The yenoh group
Tired of your legislators not doing anything about spam? Then perhaps they need to see just how much fun it is... send an email with their return address to several of those "remove me from your mailing list" links, and see how long till they come around. Of course, you should only do this where it is legal to do so, but I'm sure if you repeat this many times over, that should change soon enough:)
There is a very easy way to at least slow down the amount of leeching that occurs on P2P... charge people for the amount of bandwidth they use. Here in North America, we can download many gigabytes of data on cable/dsl before our ISP's will say anything, so we will happily download everything in sight. However, if we had to pay for the amount of traffic that we downloaded, I'm sure little Johnny would be put in his place by his dad after the first month's ISP bill arrived.
This of course does not address the issue of who pays if you are hit with a DDoS attack (perhaps you could be relieved of the responsibility of paying if you call the ISP when the attack is detected?) but it would definitely stop a large amount of P2P leeching, and would not affect those of us who download Linux isos from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you post the URLs for any of sites to buy this new music you found?
We can't even have a proper conversation with the animals of this planet, where we are supposedly many orders of magnitude more intelligent... what makes us think we can effectively communicate with anyone outside of humans?
A teen's parents are suing attorney Jack Thompson and The Tuscaloosa News for blatantly publicising a story where a teenager shot two police officers and a dispatcher to death in 2003. After reading this story, their son Billy went out and did the same in their small sleepy town.
"A gamer could buy a starter disc for 10 euros. When he goes home he goes online and he could buy AI and levels as you go. It's much smarter if you can get levels as you go."
Sounds like another subscription service, which is definitely smarter for the manufacturers. Smarter for us? While it does mean that we can constantly get new levels, it also means that the game may not work without being able to go online to download the levels, or will be sold with crappy levels to encourage you to sign up.
Because its the best system yet defined to get your work out to a wide audience along with the message "In the opinion of knowledgeable people in this field, this work is probably not wrong." Sticking a PDF on the web does the former; we're nowhere near finding a better way to perform the latter.
How about using a ratio system, or something similar? Want to publish something? You'll need to have reviewed at least one article on the site first. You could judge the worth of an article based on an aggregate score of all the reviews it has received.
Laughing stock? I've been using Grocery Gateway (www.grocerygateway.com) for many years now in Toronto, Canada, and they are great. They deliver good food and have _awesome_ customer service if you ever have any issues (I had two incidences where they mixed up items in my order). The delivery guys are pleasant, and don't act as though they are rushing to the next delivery. I'm moving out to the west coast of Canada in a couple years, and I hope that this company expands beyond this city by that time so I can keep using them.
I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.
It's funny how people seem to think that if the code isn't open source, you can't see it. It's still protected by copyright, so what's the problem with having people look at it? Copyright is also what protects GPL'd work from being blatantly copied, and anyone who wishes can look at it.
e-voting doesn't have to be open source (although that is what I'd prefer), but it should have it's source code available to be seen by all.
I can't get to the site at the moment, so I can't say how this app credits you for the work, although some have said it is based on CPU time. Since this is spam that is being sent out, why not just setup a box that does the spamming, behind another box that accepts these spams and tries to relay them on to your firewall, at which point, your firewall drops everything coming from the relay box? As far as the spam app is concerned, the email was sent, and it was accepted for delivery. Also, since all these boxes would be located on a local segment of your home network, the spamming machine wouldnt waste time in io wait, but instead would be able to churn out mail at a pretty good pace, all for nothing (except money in your pocket)
Would this also affect the ability of law enforcement to sniff email, which could also be considered a type of conversation?
greed is the primary motivator in our economic system.
'consumer' and 'capitalist' are just the slightly nicer terms we use for ourselves.
funny, i thought we were 'customers', not merely 'consumers'
Every time the subject of spam comes up here on SlashDot, everyone rushes to come up with a technical solution to the problem. In the case of spam, I think the solution is not a technical one, but a social one. Spammers are driven by greed, and do their 'bulk marketing' on behalf of other companies. Instead of targeting the spammers, target the companies that are sponsoring these campaigns. I'm sure that some negative publicity will cause them to think twice about using this method to get their message out. Once people don't want to use spammers to send out bulk mailings, the spammers will move on to some other get rich scheme, and the spam will at least subside somewhat.
Instead of shooting the messenger (the spammers), go after the one who is paying to have the spam sent.
So will the insurance companies be willing to undergo lie detector tests themselves? If they are going to dish it out, they should be willing to take it.
Are these Linksys devices counted as part of the installed Linux user base when comparing to the number of Windows machines out there? Should they be?
How does one get on this list of 'traders'? If enough people belonging to a common organization join, they could collectively 'mod' up or down the likelihood of an event occurring to suit their agenda.
For example, terrorist group XYZ plans to bomb a US embassy. They have many members on the traders list, who then mod down the likelihood of this event happening, hoping that the US govt will then reduce security at this embassy.
This is the avenue we should be pursuing when trying to stop spam. Instead of trying to stop the spammers themselves, go after the source (advertiser) instead. If enough advertisers are convinced/shamed/etc that spamming is a bad thing, they will go elsewhere to get their message out, and the spammers will magically disappear.
Neat features include built in PDF and Flash export, better MS Office document filters and more
;)
So now it filters out MS Office documents better?
*drum hit*
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week
Why not put in place some sort of system similar to k5 where the _users_ decide what the best stories are? Then, if you don't like it, mod the story down.
The spam problem is huge no doubt, but the answer is not some silly anti-spam law.
The answer is a technical one.
I believe the answer lies not in making new laws or programs to stop spam, but in removing the incentive to spam altogether. Don't go after the spammers themselves, go after the people who _pay_ the spammers to send out all this crap. Once there is no one left who is willing to pay spammers to do what they do, the spammers will move on, and your inbox will become more manageable. Spammers can work around laws and technical solutions, they can't work around not having any paying customers.
Idiots, yes, but I think a lot of their sales come from the elderly.
Unfortunately, I must agree with this. When I was younger, I took a job doing telemarketing calls. On my first day they gave me a list of numbers and a script to follow. After about an hour, I started to notice that most of the voices on the other end of the phone sounded fairly old. Unfortunately, the older folks were the ones going for the script too, which made me feel pretty crappy, so I threw out the list of 'leads' I had gathered so far and quit the same day.
We need to put pressure on the companies that hire these types of firms. Without any money to support them, these telemarketing/spam/etc companies will simply go away, as they are motivated by greed.
Everytime I see an article about spam, it always seems to be trying to stop spam after the fact (closing relays, using spamassassin, etc). Why not go after the source instead? If you do get spam, don't bother trying to hunt through email headers and all that, look for contact numbers/emails in the spam that are listed for the 'product' in question. Call them and complain. Sometimes, the company selling the product may not know their promotion is being carried out via spamming, and won't pay that company to spam again. If enough companies realize they are pissing off their potential customers, they just might stop paying the spammers. Once there is no money left in spamming, it will naturally stop on its own.
Of course, this doesn't address those who don't care or already know they are getting their message out via spam, but at least it would make a good start to reducing my inbox total.
Why not use IRC for all your instant messaging needs? Sure there are splits from time to time because of the WAr3z d00dz, but overall, I still use only IRC. It has offline messaging etc if they use services, and there are open-source clients for all sorts of operating systems. If need be, you can even write your own client program to make it resemble (insert IM program here), as the RFC is available.
DO NOT TALK ABOUT SCO NDA
Anybody notice how "Honey pots" backwards is "Stop yenoh!". A quick google [google.com] of the word reveals it to have to do with food, so "honey pots" is code for "Stop food!". This madness must be ended!
You have illegally reverse engineered our encryption scheme in violation of the DMCA. Expect a visit from our thugs^H^H^H^Hassociates any minute now. The yenoh group
Tired of your legislators not doing anything about spam? Then perhaps they need to see just how much fun it is... send an email with their return address to several of those "remove me from your mailing list" links, and see how long till they come around. Of course, you should only do this where it is legal to do so, but I'm sure if you repeat this many times over, that should change soon enough :)
There is a very easy way to at least slow down the amount of leeching that occurs on P2P... charge people for the amount of bandwidth they use. Here in North America, we can download many gigabytes of data on cable/dsl before our ISP's will say anything, so we will happily download everything in sight. However, if we had to pay for the amount of traffic that we downloaded, I'm sure little Johnny would be put in his place by his dad after the first month's ISP bill arrived.
This of course does not address the issue of who pays if you are hit with a DDoS attack (perhaps you could be relieved of the responsibility of paying if you call the ISP when the attack is detected?) but it would definitely stop a large amount of P2P leeching, and would not affect those of us who download Linux isos from time to time.