Actually, if the Dems keep losing to the Republicans due to third party voters, it will ultimately effect a change in the Democratic party-- they will get so tired of losing that they'll start looking for new and better strategies or fade further into irrelevancy. If they try to be more like the Republicans in order to steal votes away from them, they become more and more indistinguishable and provide more impetus for third parties. If they try to be more like some of the third parties to steal away those votes, then a change has been effected in opening up the Democratic party. Third party pressure to the right would have the same effect on the Republicans, but the Republicans are already so far right that the only more-right third parties are likely to be ultra-wackos. Third parties on the left on the other hand, are plentiful and are likely to be more mainstream as the Dems move right in order to capture the Republican borderline. It's the old squeeze play, and frankly the Dems have made such a poor showing of it that they are deservedly in big trouble, IMHO. They are in a lose-lose situation-- if they lose the election they lose, but if they win the election, they have to clean up the mess. And then no matter what they do it's easy to make them look really bad in the process-- either they continue with the current unpopular occupation plan, or pull out of Iraq and leave a vacuum for insurgencies to fill. If the Dems were smart, they wouldn't want the office of President right now, but they're not that smart-- they'll take up the challenge, the mess will continue and they'll get much of the blame for whatever happens.
And there are other problems looming-- Iran's nukes, shortage of available troops (the draft?), North Korea, the deficit. It's too soon to take responsibility for all this away from the Republicans-- that's too easy for them. They made the mess and should take more responsibility for it. Right now, they're only barely being forced to admit that a mess is there-- itself a major breakthru as they avoid any chance of admitting mistakes like the plague (a real Bad Thing in a government, BTW). The only thing voting for the Dems in November will do, if they win you punish the Republicans for being such dimwits-- but you also punish the Dems by making them clean up the impossible mess-- not a bad thing in itself but it then makes it far easier for the Republicans to gain it all back next time via blaming the Dems for the results.
Moderate Republicans actually have the best chance in November, and even if you generally dislike Republicans (as I do), it doesn't hurt to reward the moderates over the reactionaries. No, there couldn't be a better time to vote third party right now...
... in the early versions, if ever, that is sure clear. For many applications you may want to remap the keyboard on a per application basis, which means that it would have to update the display as you change focus from one window to another. For certain multilingual applications, or for calculating with an APL interpreter using it special character set, it will need to switch labels when one of those stupid windows popups arrives and steals away the focus, or anytime you switch the active window. If the thing is dog-slow in doing that (which the 3-button version implies), it just ain't gonna cut the mustard...
So how does the bacteria on a mouse compare with your car keys? The currency in your wallet? Your wallet? The average doorknob? This is just a scam to sell you an expensive mouse. Plus, if it actually does have some kind of chemistry that kills bacteria, I'm not so sure I want to put my hands on it for long periods of time...
I'm sure that slave-owners said the same thing. "Our cost of living is going to go up if we don't have slaves to toil in the fields." However, humam ingenuity came though and machines now do the work (and much more of it) that slaves once did. It was necessity that made progress possible. If slavery was still around today, I'm not sure if we would have all of the farm machines. After all, why go through the trouble to invent something (i.e. R&D costs money) if you can exploit (slaves) what you currently have?
Big difference though-- todays farm workers are not slaves-- they willingly risk their life to cross the desert because the low-wage jobs we offer in the US are better than the no-wage jobs they have in their own country. No-one is forcing them to work for low wages-- most don't see the wages as particularly low as "low" is a relative term.
But I do agree that the situation is problematic. At the same time though, if you could eject all the illegal aliens tomorrow and keep them out permanently, don't be so sure you'd like the result-- it would wreak some havoc in our economy, make no mistake. Lots of small farmers would go out of business, and the costs of several things would likely go up, and such increases have been known to snowball.
I am sick and tired of reading that illegal aliens only do jobs Americans are unwilling to do. In the case of picking crops, sure, I agree, but here in Southern California the rest is bullshit. They are willing to do jobs AT A WAGE Americans are unwilling to.
My point exactly. If the illegals were gone, you'd have to pay Americans more to do it and consequently, your cost of living is going to increase significantly.
Illegals are steadily eroding the wages in many many industries simply because they will ALWAYS be willing to work for less than anybody else.
They are keeping YOUR costs low. I agree that it's problematic that the cost of living is as low as it is because we're able to get third-world costs within our own borders, effectively taking advantage of individuals that currently live in a depressed economy, but that's the way things are at the moment, and to change them dramatically by eliminating the low-wage force, is going to increase the costs you pay in a lot of ways, the full extent of which is not that easy to determine. At the very least many small farmers will go out of business, and the cost of produce will go up.
They are also steadily eroding the quality of life in areas they inhabit, simply because they are willing to live in conditions many Americans find unacceptable, and thereby cause the conditions around them to further deteriorate.
That strikes me as a pretty ignorant statement. I live in Los Angeles, have for over 20 years and was born in Santa Ana. I'm of Irish descent, but I know quite a few Mexicans. Many are legal immigrants, though I suppose some are not, I don't generally ask them about that, so I don't know personally. What I've found however, is that most of them have pretty good family values, excellent work ethic, are friendly and considerate-- more so than many of the anglo neighbors I've had. While I don't speak Spanish and often can't understand them (and vice-versa), I treat them with respect and generally that's what I get in return. I don't see any sign of "deteriorating conditions." They do sometimes play their music loud, and it's not what I usually like to listen to, but previous anglo neighbors also played music loud that I wasn't that fond of either-- but I've been known to play the guitar loud too so I'm not inclined to complain about loud music. My Hispanic neighbors keep their place cleaner than the last several anglo tenants and seem to have pride in the houses they are renting. It sounds to me that perhaps you should look to yourself for a source "deteriorating conditions." Perhaps if you'd stop scowling at them and get to know a few you might find that most of them are pretty decent folks, just trying to get along like the rest of us.
You probably live in Vermont or some other place that hasn't been affected by illegal immigration so it is easy to preach tolerance. When the defacto language where you live becomes Spanish, then come talk to me.
As I said, I live in Los Angeles. The city was named by the Spanish when they occupied it in 1769. It was ruled by Spain until 1822 when Mexico assumed jurisdiction. In 1848 it became a US territory. It should be no surprise that many people who live here speak Spanish, as it's been that way for 237 years or so. Get used to it-- that won't change even if they DO find some way to eliminate all illegal aliens.
I happen to like living in a multicultural community. Monocultural communities tend to be narrow minded and foster a myopic "us vs them" atmosphere of paranoia which I think is pretty destructive. I like to hear different languages-- I find it interesting and I learn things about other people that I would otherwise be completely ignorant of. In Southern California there are lots of people who speak Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Farsi, etc...-- and I think it's just great. If I had the time I'd learn some of these languages, it's just there aren't enough hours in the day...
While I may agree that the gang problem is a serious one and the government may not be taking it seriously enough, the statement that "the majority of gang members are illegals or children of illegals," is not the same thing as "the majority of illegals are gang members." At one time I suppose you could say the "majority of mafia members are Italian," but as soon as you then use that to justify going after all Italians you've transcended logic and become racist.
WRT illegal aliens, the complexity that too many people seem to be obvlivious to, is the fact that IF we were able to eliminate the illegal aliens, AND IF American citizens were willing to do the crop-picking and other low wage jobs they are currently doing, YOUR cost of living is going to go way up as products that are the result of these activities are going to get more expensive. Illegals are popular to farm management and other industries because they are willing to work for less than the minimum wage. That's not to say that fostering a marginalized poor class via taking a blind-eye to illegal immigration is a good thing, but it is not quite so simple as just saying that we'll deport them all and shore up our borders and the problems are solved. There are serious side-effects involved that need to be taken into account-- be careful what you wish for.
It also says Lisp is the only computer language that is beautiful, I think that is subjective.
I agree with this-- for me the only computer language that is truly beautiful is APL, though only on the original 2741 typeball terminals, since video screens and keyboards have not kept up with it very well (I find overstrikes more elegant than larger character sets). See http://catpad.net/michael/apl/index.html (Conway's Life in 68 characters).
Well, first off with your analogy is flawed - I'm not the Phone company or the package service, I'm the company mail room or corporate PBX.
At the moment. My point is though, that the analogy shouldn't be flawed and IMHO eventually won't be. The company I work for doesn't deliver any of my personal mail or phone calls, so consequently, if they choose to use (or implement) unreliable mechanisms that's their business. But when I pay for a service, just like when I put a stamp on an envelope-- if I pay for email, I expect that people can mail things to me unhindered-- because that is specifically the service that I am paying for. I'm the one paying for the ability to receive email, and that should include spam if I choose. As I said, opt-out services are fine, but right now an ISP can choose to not allow their users to opt-out and in fact, sometimes do choose that using spam's effect on their bandwidth as an excuse. Again, that's fine if that's made clear up front, but if your ISP of several years suddenly decides to turn on filtering which users can't disable and their email service suddenly turns unreliable, we should make big noises about it and not put up with that crap.
At the moment, all this stuff is still pretty new. But I think that in the long run business will not put up with such sources of unreliability in communications services. As soon as enough realize that either many of their customers are not getting their legit business or advertising emails (including those that would like to receive them), or that their customers responses are not reaching them because of spam filtering, some big money is going to get thrown at Washington and that sort of spam filtering is gonna be required to provide easy opt-out, or even required to be opt-in. And that is how it should be.
Privacy is another issue that is going to come into play as well-- since right now email is often sent in the clear and can be sniffed off the network, a secure "envelope" of some kind will become routine eventually-- at which point spam filters will not be ABLE to filter as they do now because there will be no point between the sender and the receiver where the message can be interpreted if the receiver doesn't allow it. Spam filtering is in one sense, an invasion of privacy, in that our emails are being scanned. The only reason it hasn't happened more quickly is that the government likes the ability to easily scan emails right now, plus the fact that spam filtering is a laudable goal. But they're likely to have to rethink how they go about that sort of snooping in the long run, because again, its a big security and reliability hole and business will require it. That is one case where email is different from phone or package delivery-- as it's not quite so easy for your neighborhood cracker to pick up insider stock tips by reading your snailmail or listening to your phone conversations (at least now that most cordless phones use encryption)-- not so true with internet email. Suppose the big company CEO's personal email is sniffed by a kid on his block and a few strategic stock purchases placed using some critical insidcer information? Sure, the CEO should know better, but the assumption that everyone is simply OK in the knowledge that their email is not very secure at all is gonna make some people pretty unhappy someday. And even knowing who the sender is, is a potential privacy/security issue-- properly secured email cannot be sniffed for not only the contents, but the sender either. Rest assured, it is in the works.
Anyway, since you like to talk about competence in mail servers so much..I've got about 3000 users and a total message volume coming in (not counting internal email) around 80-100,000 messages a day. Whats you're level of experience?
I've never run an email server, but I've been a user of email since 1983, and I know that most things are subject to change. Eventually, ISPs will lose their ability to access any of their users plaintex
You can filter out ALL the spam and reduce your bandwidth entirely by blocking ALL email. Your problem is solved, eh? But at what expense?
If the phone company or package services had your attitude they'd quickly go out of business. The only reason you haven't is that people have been caught off guard by new technology-- it's only a matter of time IMHO before email services become essentially (if not specifically) common carriers. Net Neutrality is a step in that direction, but even without it the essentials of common carrier status for email is inevitable. You cannot run businesses without reliable email services for everyone, which unfortunately is going to include some form of legalized (non-fraudulent) SPAM once all the dust clears.
Can you avoid the junk mail in your snail mail box? Advertising pointed at you at the grocery store? SPAM is not confined to the internet, and in fact has been around longer than the internet has, only the term for it is new. It makes money, and is perfectly legal in many forms, even though many of us would just as soon see it disappear. Go ahead, postpone the inevitable and concoct some hackneyed argument that email SPAM is somehow different, if it makes you feel any better.
I hate spam even more than you, but for different reasons-- not only do I hate getting all that crap in my inbox and wasting everyone's bandwidth, what I hate the most is that incompetent attempts to deal with it are decreasing email reliability. Incompetence much like the way the US gov has been dealing with terrorism-- the bull-in-a-china-shop-shotgun-approach that in their myopia may help with a few specific problems but makes many others significantly worse...
I'm no lawyer, so can somebody explain to me how a court can say that Spamhaus, a service that customers voluntarily sign up for, cannot index IP addresses theat users wish to block? There is nothing Spamhaus does that a local mail server cannot do, they just already have a blacklist for you. Spamhaus is just, "Hey, don't trust these guys."
I have no problem with this is the customer is the end user, but in most cases it's not the end user who has chosen to block via Spamhaus, but an ISP. And before you say "well, choose another ISP," what if you had an email account established with an ISP for years and then the ISP suddenly decides to start using Spamhaus without consulting you? Does everyone have to host their own SMTP server on their own domain in order to insure a reasonably reliable email service? Would that even insure it, since someone else's ISP might enter a typo and inadvertently block your domain thinking it's a SPAM source? You can only guarantee that you won't bounce incoming email, you have no control over rogue entities who can block your outgoing email however they like and not be held responsible? Does it make a difference that some of these rogue entities have been given some semblance of acceptability merely because an assortment of ISPs have been convinced that using them is actually a good idea?
Suppose the US Mail service suddenly started using a blocking system to try to eliminate junk mail. Then that important letter is sent telling you that your Aunt Bessie died and left you 3.1M providing you stay overnight in her old haunted mansion on the next Halloween after her death or forfeit the whole thing. The US Mail system misrecognizes the letter as junk mail and blocks it. Would you just say "oh well, it's a reasonable sacrifice in exhange for blocking all that junk mail?"
Suppose your phone company decided that in the interest of blocking phone solicitation they would electronically block incoming calls to your number from a maintained list, and you're Aunt Bessie's lawyer's number inadvertenly and erroneously made it onto the list. Feeling better about blocking those phone solicitors?
On the other hand, if YOU ask the phone company to block calls from a list of numbers, or if YOU ask the mail service to block letters from certain addresses (and they would actually agree to it), I have no problem with it because YOU decided, not the carrier.
ISPs should be treated as common carriers (http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archiv ed_issues/ipj_5-3/uncommon_carrier.html), IMHO, and not allowed to pick-and-choose what they will deliver and what they will not. If they'd like to see spam reduced, then they should implement blocking services that their users can choose to enable, or NOT. The shotgun approach to spam simply produces unacceptable collateral damage.
It's a "nuisance lawsuit" if the company is in fact spamming, but in any case I think the suit could keep overzealous spam filtering in check. Any spam filtering company that is capable of producing false positives should be subject to such suits, as their "technology" is contributing to the unreliability of legitimate email and is IMHO unacceptable. Better to let a few million extra spams through than to risk blocking a single legitimate email, and if this is a sign the court would support that position, it is a Good Thing(TM)...
Perhaps a more interesting math/logic puzzle might be to ask them to come up with the dimensions of a circle where both the circumference and diameter are whole numbers...
The security market should dry up as soon as Microsoft creates an operating system that doesn't need it-- not when they create one that won't allow for it.
the sad part is what ms is doing is how it should be. critical security services should be locked down.
Should be I suppose in the utopia where no critical security services ever have any flaws. Is that where you live? Must be nice. Unfortunately, in my universe, locked down security means all its flaws are locked down as well.
Problem: third party applications are prevented from working with the OS, to "prevent weakening the built in security".
And coincidentally, to prevent strengthening the built in security. Nothing like keeping all your security eggs not just in one basket, but in one basket that you don't really have any control over.
The real question you should be asking yourself is why, when Western democracies have long since discarded the concept of hereditary political power do we still allow the inheritance of wealth? So your parents worked hard and amassed a vast fortune, so what? You already benefit from being able to go to any college, being given a nice car etc. Paris Hilton is the poster child for this kind of problem. What has she contributed to the family business? Why should she profit from it?
Better Paris Hilton gets it than George Bush, IMHO. Considering what they're likely to spend it on, anyway...
They had the only OS that ran on the cheapest hardware at a time when hardware was the most expensive part of the system.
However, they are no longer the only OS that runs on the cheapest hardware, and hardware is often not the most expensive part of the system anymore. The equation has changed, but the interesting question is, has or will Microsoft change sufficiently to adapt to the new equation. From looking at their Vista strategy, I have serious doubts about that.
...(unique in a useful way, that is)... they'd have no need to pull all that proprietary-closed-format- incompatibility-lock-in funnybusiness in order to keep their customer base from bolting...
Every time you run a sheet though a printer, it wrinkles slightly. To say nothing of how much you wrinkle it by reading it. Just like running the old sheets through again to print on the other side, this greatly increases the probability that the paper will jam. This "transient document" sounds like a printer maintenance person's worst nightmare!
Only if they're on contract. Otherwise, it's billable hours and job security.
Oh, we don't care if our email is unreliable, we're BLOCKING SPAM. RBLs are largely counter productive in that regard-- avoid them.
Email reliability essentially *means* that some spam will get through. GET USED TO IT. Do not trade reliability away to be spam free. False positives are unacceptable, PERIOD. If a filtering system is subject to false positives, it's worse than the problem it is trying to solve.
Those who would sacrifice a little email reliability for spam security deserve neither.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if the Dems keep losing to the Republicans due to third party voters, it will ultimately effect a change in the Democratic party-- they will get so tired of losing that they'll start looking for new and better strategies or fade further into irrelevancy. If they try to be more like the Republicans in order to steal votes away from them, they become more and more indistinguishable and provide more impetus for third parties. If they try to be more like some of the third parties to steal away those votes, then a change has been effected in opening up the Democratic party. Third party pressure to the right would have the same effect on the Republicans, but the Republicans are already so far right that the only more-right third parties are likely to be ultra-wackos. Third parties on the left on the other hand, are plentiful and are likely to be more mainstream as the Dems move right in order to capture the Republican borderline. It's the old squeeze play, and frankly the Dems have made such a poor showing of it that they are deservedly in big trouble, IMHO. They are in a lose-lose situation-- if they lose the election they lose, but if they win the election, they have to clean up the mess. And then no matter what they do it's easy to make them look really bad in the process-- either they continue with the current unpopular occupation plan, or pull out of Iraq and leave a vacuum for insurgencies to fill. If the Dems were smart, they wouldn't want the office of President right now, but they're not that smart-- they'll take up the challenge, the mess will continue and they'll get much of the blame for whatever happens.
And there are other problems looming-- Iran's nukes, shortage of available troops (the draft?), North Korea, the deficit. It's too soon to take responsibility for all this away from the Republicans-- that's too easy for them. They made the mess and should take more responsibility for it. Right now, they're only barely being forced to admit that a mess is there-- itself a major breakthru as they avoid any chance of admitting mistakes like the plague (a real Bad Thing in a government, BTW). The only thing voting for the Dems in November will do, if they win you punish the Republicans for being such dimwits-- but you also punish the Dems by making them clean up the impossible mess-- not a bad thing in itself but it then makes it far easier for the Republicans to gain it all back next time via blaming the Dems for the results.
Moderate Republicans actually have the best chance in November, and even if you generally dislike Republicans (as I do), it doesn't hurt to reward the moderates over the reactionaries. No, there couldn't be a better time to vote third party right now...
... in the early versions, if ever, that is sure clear. For many applications you may want to remap the keyboard on a per application basis, which means that it would have to update the display as you change focus from one window to another. For certain multilingual applications, or for calculating with an APL interpreter using it special character set, it will need to switch labels when one of those stupid windows popups arrives and steals away the focus, or anytime you switch the active window. If the thing is dog-slow in doing that (which the 3-button version implies), it just ain't gonna cut the mustard...
So how does the bacteria on a mouse compare with your car keys? The currency in your wallet? Your wallet? The average doorknob? This is just a scam to sell you an expensive mouse. Plus, if it actually does have some kind of chemistry that kills bacteria, I'm not so sure I want to put my hands on it for long periods of time...
Though you seem to be headed in that direction...
I'm sure that slave-owners said the same thing. "Our cost of living is going to go up if we don't have slaves to toil in the fields." However, humam ingenuity came though and machines now do the work (and much more of it) that slaves once did. It was necessity that made progress possible. If slavery was still around today, I'm not sure if we would have all of the farm machines. After all, why go through the trouble to invent something (i.e. R&D costs money) if you can exploit (slaves) what you currently have?
Big difference though-- todays farm workers are not slaves-- they willingly risk their life to cross the desert because the low-wage jobs we offer in the US are better than the no-wage jobs they have in their own country. No-one is forcing them to work for low wages-- most don't see the wages as particularly low as "low" is a relative term.
But I do agree that the situation is problematic. At the same time though, if you could eject all the illegal aliens tomorrow and keep them out permanently, don't be so sure you'd like the result-- it would wreak some havoc in our economy, make no mistake. Lots of small farmers would go out of business, and the costs of several things would likely go up, and such increases have been known to snowball.
I am sick and tired of reading that illegal aliens only do jobs Americans are unwilling to do. In the case of picking crops, sure, I agree, but here in Southern California the rest is bullshit. They are willing to do jobs AT A WAGE Americans are unwilling to.
My point exactly. If the illegals were gone, you'd have to pay Americans more to do it and consequently, your cost of living is going to increase significantly.
Illegals are steadily eroding the wages in many many industries simply because they will ALWAYS be willing to work for less than anybody else.
They are keeping YOUR costs low. I agree that it's problematic that the cost of living is as low as it is because we're able to get third-world costs within our own borders, effectively taking advantage of individuals that currently live in a depressed economy, but that's the way things are at the moment, and to change them dramatically by eliminating the low-wage force, is going to increase the costs you pay in a lot of ways, the full extent of which is not that easy to determine. At the very least many small farmers will go out of business, and the cost of produce will go up.
They are also steadily eroding the quality of life in areas they inhabit, simply because they are willing to live in conditions many Americans find unacceptable, and thereby cause the conditions around them to further deteriorate.
That strikes me as a pretty ignorant statement. I live in Los Angeles, have for over 20 years and was born in Santa Ana. I'm of Irish descent, but I know quite a few Mexicans. Many are legal immigrants, though I suppose some are not, I don't generally ask them about that, so I don't know personally. What I've found however, is that most of them have pretty good family values, excellent work ethic, are friendly and considerate-- more so than many of the anglo neighbors I've had. While I don't speak Spanish and often can't understand them (and vice-versa), I treat them with respect and generally that's what I get in return. I don't see any sign of "deteriorating conditions." They do sometimes play their music loud, and it's not what I usually like to listen to, but previous anglo neighbors also played music loud that I wasn't that fond of either-- but I've been known to play the guitar loud too so I'm not inclined to complain about loud music. My Hispanic neighbors keep their place cleaner than the last several anglo tenants and seem to have pride in the houses they are renting. It sounds to me that perhaps you should look to yourself for a source "deteriorating conditions." Perhaps if you'd stop scowling at them and get to know a few you might find that most of them are pretty decent folks, just trying to get along like the rest of us.
You probably live in Vermont or some other place that hasn't been affected by illegal immigration so it is easy to preach tolerance. When the defacto language where you live becomes Spanish, then come talk to me.
As I said, I live in Los Angeles. The city was named by the Spanish when they occupied it in 1769. It was ruled by Spain until 1822 when Mexico assumed jurisdiction. In 1848 it became a US territory. It should be no surprise that many people who live here speak Spanish, as it's been that way for 237 years or so. Get used to it-- that won't change even if they DO find some way to eliminate all illegal aliens.
I happen to like living in a multicultural community. Monocultural communities tend to be narrow minded and foster a myopic "us vs them" atmosphere of paranoia which I think is pretty destructive. I like to hear different languages-- I find it interesting and I learn things about other people that I would otherwise be completely ignorant of. In Southern California there are lots of people who speak Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Farsi, etc...-- and I think it's just great. If I had the time I'd learn some of these languages, it's just there aren't enough hours in the day...
Southern C
While I may agree that the gang problem is a serious one and the government may not be taking it seriously enough, the statement that "the majority of gang members are illegals or children of illegals," is not the same thing as "the majority of illegals are gang members." At one time I suppose you could say the "majority of mafia members are Italian," but as soon as you then use that to justify going after all Italians you've transcended logic and become racist.
WRT illegal aliens, the complexity that too many people seem to be obvlivious to, is the fact that IF we were able to eliminate the illegal aliens, AND IF American citizens were willing to do the crop-picking and other low wage jobs they are currently doing, YOUR cost of living is going to go way up as products that are the result of these activities are going to get more expensive. Illegals are popular to farm management and other industries because they are willing to work for less than the minimum wage. That's not to say that fostering a marginalized poor class via taking a blind-eye to illegal immigration is a good thing, but it is not quite so simple as just saying that we'll deport them all and shore up our borders and the problems are solved. There are serious side-effects involved that need to be taken into account-- be careful what you wish for.
It also says Lisp is the only computer language that is beautiful, I think that is subjective.
I agree with this-- for me the only computer language that is truly beautiful is APL, though only on the original 2741 typeball terminals, since video screens and keyboards have not kept up with it very well (I find overstrikes more elegant than larger character sets). See http://catpad.net/michael/apl/index.html (Conway's Life in 68 characters).
Well, first off with your analogy is flawed - I'm not the Phone company or the package service, I'm the company mail room or corporate PBX.
At the moment. My point is though, that the analogy shouldn't be flawed and IMHO eventually won't be. The company I work for doesn't deliver any of my personal mail or phone calls, so consequently, if they choose to use (or implement) unreliable mechanisms that's their business. But when I pay for a service, just like when I put a stamp on an envelope-- if I pay for email, I expect that people can mail things to me unhindered-- because that is specifically the service that I am paying for. I'm the one paying for the ability to receive email, and that should include spam if I choose. As I said, opt-out services are fine, but right now an ISP can choose to not allow their users to opt-out and in fact, sometimes do choose that using spam's effect on their bandwidth as an excuse. Again, that's fine if that's made clear up front, but if your ISP of several years suddenly decides to turn on filtering which users can't disable and their email service suddenly turns unreliable, we should make big noises about it and not put up with that crap.
At the moment, all this stuff is still pretty new. But I think that in the long run business will not put up with such sources of unreliability in communications services. As soon as enough realize that either many of their customers are not getting their legit business or advertising emails (including those that would like to receive them), or that their customers responses are not reaching them because of spam filtering, some big money is going to get thrown at Washington and that sort of spam filtering is gonna be required to provide easy opt-out, or even required to be opt-in. And that is how it should be.
Privacy is another issue that is going to come into play as well-- since right now email is often sent in the clear and can be sniffed off the network, a secure "envelope" of some kind will become routine eventually-- at which point spam filters will not be ABLE to filter as they do now because there will be no point between the sender and the receiver where the message can be interpreted if the receiver doesn't allow it. Spam filtering is in one sense, an invasion of privacy, in that our emails are being scanned. The only reason it hasn't happened more quickly is that the government likes the ability to easily scan emails right now, plus the fact that spam filtering is a laudable goal. But they're likely to have to rethink how they go about that sort of snooping in the long run, because again, its a big security and reliability hole and business will require it. That is one case where email is different from phone or package delivery-- as it's not quite so easy for your neighborhood cracker to pick up insider stock tips by reading your snailmail or listening to your phone conversations (at least now that most cordless phones use encryption)-- not so true with internet email. Suppose the big company CEO's personal email is sniffed by a kid on his block and a few strategic stock purchases placed using some critical insidcer information? Sure, the CEO should know better, but the assumption that everyone is simply OK in the knowledge that their email is not very secure at all is gonna make some people pretty unhappy someday. And even knowing who the sender is, is a potential privacy/security issue-- properly secured email cannot be sniffed for not only the contents, but the sender either. Rest assured, it is in the works.
Anyway, since you like to talk about competence in mail servers so much..I've got about 3000 users and a total message volume coming in (not counting internal email) around 80-100,000 messages a day. Whats you're level of experience?
I've never run an email server, but I've been a user of email since 1983, and I know that most things are subject to change. Eventually, ISPs will lose their ability to access any of their users plaintex
You can filter out ALL the spam and reduce your bandwidth entirely by blocking ALL email. Your problem is solved, eh? But at what expense?
If the phone company or package services had your attitude they'd quickly go out of business. The only reason you haven't is that people have been caught off guard by new technology-- it's only a matter of time IMHO before email services become essentially (if not specifically) common carriers. Net Neutrality is a step in that direction, but even without it the essentials of common carrier status for email is inevitable. You cannot run businesses without reliable email services for everyone, which unfortunately is going to include some form of legalized (non-fraudulent) SPAM once all the dust clears.
Can you avoid the junk mail in your snail mail box? Advertising pointed at you at the grocery store? SPAM is not confined to the internet, and in fact has been around longer than the internet has, only the term for it is new. It makes money, and is perfectly legal in many forms, even though many of us would just as soon see it disappear. Go ahead, postpone the inevitable and concoct some hackneyed argument that email SPAM is somehow different, if it makes you feel any better.
I hate spam even more than you, but for different reasons-- not only do I hate getting all that crap in my inbox and wasting everyone's bandwidth, what I hate the most is that incompetent attempts to deal with it are decreasing email reliability. Incompetence much like the way the US gov has been dealing with terrorism-- the bull-in-a-china-shop-shotgun-approach that in their myopia may help with a few specific problems but makes many others significantly worse...
I'm no lawyer, so can somebody explain to me how a court can say that Spamhaus, a service that customers voluntarily sign up for, cannot index IP addresses theat users wish to block? There is nothing Spamhaus does that a local mail server cannot do, they just already have a blacklist for you. Spamhaus is just, "Hey, don't trust these guys."
I have no problem with this is the customer is the end user, but in most cases it's not the end user who has chosen to block via Spamhaus, but an ISP. And before you say "well, choose another ISP," what if you had an email account established with an ISP for years and then the ISP suddenly decides to start using Spamhaus without consulting you? Does everyone have to host their own SMTP server on their own domain in order to insure a reasonably reliable email service? Would that even insure it, since someone else's ISP might enter a typo and inadvertently block your domain thinking it's a SPAM source? You can only guarantee that you won't bounce incoming email, you have no control over rogue entities who can block your outgoing email however they like and not be held responsible? Does it make a difference that some of these rogue entities have been given some semblance of acceptability merely because an assortment of ISPs have been convinced that using them is actually a good idea?
Suppose the US Mail service suddenly started using a blocking system to try to eliminate junk mail. Then that important letter is sent telling you that your Aunt Bessie died and left you 3.1M providing you stay overnight in her old haunted mansion on the next Halloween after her death or forfeit the whole thing. The US Mail system misrecognizes the letter as junk mail and blocks it. Would you just say "oh well, it's a reasonable sacrifice in exhange for blocking all that junk mail?"
Suppose your phone company decided that in the interest of blocking phone solicitation they would electronically block incoming calls to your number from a maintained list, and you're Aunt Bessie's lawyer's number inadvertenly and erroneously made it onto the list. Feeling better about blocking those phone solicitors?
On the other hand, if YOU ask the phone company to block calls from a list of numbers, or if YOU ask the mail service to block letters from certain addresses (and they would actually agree to it), I have no problem with it because YOU decided, not the carrier.
ISPs should be treated as common carriers (http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archiv ed_issues/ipj_5-3/uncommon_carrier.html), IMHO, and not allowed to pick-and-choose what they will deliver and what they will not. If they'd like to see spam reduced, then they should implement blocking services that their users can choose to enable, or NOT. The shotgun approach to spam simply produces unacceptable collateral damage.
It's a "nuisance lawsuit" if the company is in fact spamming, but in any case I think the suit could keep overzealous spam filtering in check. Any spam filtering company that is capable of producing false positives should be subject to such suits, as their "technology" is contributing to the unreliability of legitimate email and is IMHO unacceptable. Better to let a few million extra spams through than to risk blocking a single legitimate email, and if this is a sign the court would support that position, it is a Good Thing(TM)...
You're hired.
In the US we have these "islands" all over the place. They're called "senior housing."
Perhaps a more interesting math/logic puzzle might be to ask them to come up with the dimensions of a circle where both the circumference and diameter are whole numbers...
The security market should dry up as soon as Microsoft creates an operating system that doesn't need it-- not when they create one that won't allow for it.
the sad part is what ms is doing is how it should be. critical security services should be locked down.
Should be I suppose in the utopia where no critical security services ever have any flaws. Is that where you live? Must be nice. Unfortunately, in my universe, locked down security means all its flaws are locked down as well.
Problem: third party applications are prevented from working with the OS, to "prevent weakening the built in security".
And coincidentally, to prevent strengthening the built in security. Nothing like keeping all your security eggs not just in one basket, but in one basket that you don't really have any control over.
The real question you should be asking yourself is why, when Western democracies have long since discarded the concept of hereditary political power do we still allow the inheritance of wealth? So your parents worked hard and amassed a vast fortune, so what? You already benefit from being able to go to any college, being given a nice car etc. Paris Hilton is the poster child for this kind of problem. What has she contributed to the family business? Why should she profit from it?
Better Paris Hilton gets it than George Bush, IMHO. Considering what they're likely to spend it on, anyway...
They had the only OS that ran on the cheapest hardware at a time when hardware was the most expensive part of the system.
However, they are no longer the only OS that runs on the cheapest hardware, and hardware is often not the most expensive part of the system anymore. The equation has changed, but the interesting question is, has or will Microsoft change sufficiently to adapt to the new equation. From looking at their Vista strategy, I have serious doubts about that.
...(unique in a useful way, that is)... they'd have no need to pull all that proprietary-closed-format- incompatibility-lock-in funnybusiness in order to keep their customer base from bolting...
Every time you run a sheet though a printer, it wrinkles slightly. To say nothing of how much you wrinkle it by reading it. Just like running the old sheets through again to print on the other side, this greatly increases the probability that the paper will jam. This "transient document" sounds like a printer maintenance person's worst nightmare!
Only if they're on contract. Otherwise, it's billable hours and job security.
Oh, we don't care if our email is unreliable, we're BLOCKING SPAM. RBLs are largely counter productive in that regard-- avoid them.
Email reliability essentially *means* that some spam will get through. GET USED TO IT. Do not trade reliability away to be spam free. False positives are unacceptable, PERIOD. If a filtering system is subject to false positives, it's worse than the problem it is trying to solve.
Those who would sacrifice a little email reliability for spam security deserve neither.
Ah hell, make 'em write an essay on some random topic.
What do these multi-thousand dollar DVD players do anyway?
The case design is really cool...