I can't imagine the Supreme Court upholding a law that restricts people's right to political expression, the heart of what the framers intenced to protect, based on the reasoning that people find deleting the messages annoying.
How does saying "You can't send that message via spam to unwilling recipients" inhibit free speech? They can post the message to a newsgroup, stick it on a website, run an ad in a newspaper, or simply get a report for the NYTimes to interview them. They can even use email - as long as they send it to people who are receiving it voluntarily. They have a lot of ways of getting their message out. They've done it for over 200 years in the US, all without having to send email spam.
Spam inhibits free speech because people are afraid to post their email address (you yourself don't have an address available here on/.) It costs ISP's, businesses, and eventually most users both time and money. Legitimate messages get filtered out along with spam - but spam filters are necessary because without them, email becomes useless. (My spam filters toss over 500 spams a day, on average, and the number has been rising fast.)
in your inbox and then have to delete it is directly analogous to the snail-mail equivalent.
If you ignore the fact that sending a million snail-mail ads has a large cost, while sending 20 million email ads has a very low cost, then it's kind of analogous. Of course, if you don't hide from the truth, you have to recognize that the reason you can send 20 million messages cheap is because you are forcing the costs of those messages onto the unwilling recipients.
laws that inhibit speech need to allow an alternative method of expression. A blanket spam ban would offer no alternatives.
TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, newsgroups, opt-in email lists, websites, snail-mail. Claiming there are no alternatives, and that spam is the only way the poor mistreated politicians can tell us lies about how great they are and how slimy the other guy is, is bullshit.
You claim to be a lawyer, so you should understand the issues better than you apparently do.
U.S. Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin: "[Spammers] have come to court not because their freedom of speech is threatened but because their profits are; to dress up their complaints in First Amendment garb demeans the principles for which the First Amendment stands."
Chief Justice Berger, U.S. Supreme Court: "Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person?s domain."
At least this is IMPORTANT spam. Granted, it's still spam, but the fate of our great country depends on it.
No such thing. Every spammer likes to pretend that *his* spam is important. Bull shit. In my mailbox, I decide what is imporant. Bulk email I didn't ask for is spam, and wastes my time and money. I don't care if it's for penis enlargement, George Bush, or some assholes favorite religion.
I call on all Americans to not write spam filters for this. We should read what our candidates have to say.
Why should we have it forced on us? Sure, if we *choose* to join their email lists, we should be able to, and they should take advantage of that. But if we choose to learn about them by reading websites, reading newspapers, watching them debate on TV, or some other method, then they shouldn't be forcing their crap into our email boxes against our will. And if we choose not to keep up with the issues that *they* think are important, that should be *our* choice.
I love my country more than anything else, and want this 2004 election to truly make a differences.
Apparently, you love it more than you love freedom, because you would have our politicians make decisions for all the rest of us, regardless of how we feel.
If you want an US election to make a difference, then give us the right to vote "No". As in "There are no decent candidates on the ballot, so I'm voting No." Then, after they've held several elections where 85% of the people vote no, they'll end up being forced to allow decent human beings to run.
The only question is whether any decent human beings would be willing to deal with modern American politics.
That was enough to worry me about him - he obviously doens't understand the internet as well as he pretends to, or he wouldn't be sending spam. I have never given a spammer my business, so he pretty much shut down his chances of my vote at that time.
But when I read
this article and the
transcript of Dean's talk (.PDF format),
the man really truely started to scare me. Expecting everyone to use an ID card every time they use a computer, or do damn near anything else? Requiring everyone to carry a national ID card? Sorry, no thanks. The man is clueless.
Assuming that AOL actually received his email, what would they have done? By then, the usenet posts had been distributed to lots of servers. The RFC's for newsgroups will explain about how you can "cancel" a message. But many servers do not accept/process cancels. This is because too many groups have been attacked by cancel-bots which go through trying to cancel every message (or something similar). Cancels are easy to forge, just like email "from" lines are easy to forge.
Bottom line, once it's posted to usenet, it gets distributed, and AOL doesn't have much in the way of control. IMO, they should have issued a cancel just to cover their ass, removed the messages from their own usenet servers, and then told Harlan "We did what we could, and it's up to you to locate and contact anyone running another server".
As it sits, it sounds like Harlan contacted them only by email, and if they simply say "Sorry, didn't get it" I don't see how he can prove anything. We've all seen spam filters and software problems eat email, and I doubt a court is going to accept "I emailed them, so they knew!" as a valid argument.
IE *still* goes off to another site in order to display this "error message" though. [snip] It shouldn't go to *any* site, but just display an error dialog!
Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, and in the section titled "Search from the Address Bar" click on "Do not search from the address bar" and you'll get that result.
That works under Win98/IE6.0. I dunno about other OS's or other versions of IE.
Yes, it does. And when you read the page it takes you to it clearly states We can't find "www.randomdomainname.org". That doesn't fit with your previous claim "IE will take you immediately to a search engine without displaying any error message", which was the post that I called BS on.
IE does take you to a search engine - but it does display an error message. And MS doesn't do it to all windows users, as the subject line claims - they do it to IE users, a subset of windows users. Many (most?) of those users probably find it useful.
This is a browser issue that has nothing to do with Verisign/Sitefinder. Don't like how IE handles it? I don't blame you. There are other things I don't like about IE, which is why I use Opera. However, disliking MS or IE is no reason to make up fiction and try to pass it off as truth.
BTW, I'm not a clown - just a juggler.:^) I'm a grown up with a bad attitude about people who just make things up. If you are going to get upset when people point out that what you are posting is, in fact, not true, perhaps you should be a bit more honest when you post in the first place. I'm not trying to piss you off, but what you said is simply not true.
And the text on that page starts with "We can't find "www.randomdomainname.org".
Not to mention, not all MS users are IE users. I, for instance, use Opera, which simply errors on an unknown URL.
Regardless, you're claim is that they redirect and don't even tell you they did it. Quote "IE will take you immediately to a search engine without displaying any error message." - posted by Alien_Blueprint.
Again, I call bullshit. Tell the truth, and you won't get pissed off when people say "That's not true".
I'm running Win98, using Opera for a browser, and you are either guessing (and wrong) or outright lying.
Using IE does redirect to http://search.msn.com/dnserror.aspx?FORM=DNSAS&q=w ww.u90asdfwa.com, but that's hardly what you claimed - and it doesn't apply to all windows users.
It's not an "article." Journalists write articles. This "Rand" thing was some guy's "blog,"
Welcome to the internet. Anyone can write an article (feel free to use a dictionary) about whatever they want. They can publish their own article - you don't have to work for the NYTimes or Washington Post. You're still stuck in an outdated "Only Profession Journalists Can Publish Articles" mentality. Get over it, or you'll fall behind.
Refresh every n minutes. That feature's cool if you're waiting for a website to update
It also works every N seconds. I use that when spammers forge my domain in the headers of their spam. Once I start seeing the bounces, I eat as much of their bandwidth as I can. Am I going to shut them down? No, I'm sure they have more bandwidth than I do. Will it increase their cost? I suspect that I signifigantly drive up the total amount of bandwidth that they have to pay for. Do I feel bad? Not at all - they've implicated me in their spam, so fuck 'em.
I've been asked to sign NDA's at several jobs. Most were acceptable as written. One had "All your code are belong to us" text as you have described. I talked to my potential boss, explained that I do some programming on the side, and have some pet projects that I planned to continue. I told him no development for any of those would take place at work, but that I couldn't sign an NDA that said I that they owned everything I thought or did, even outside of work. He said that he felt the same, and that he hadn't signed the NDA either. It turned out that they had enough previous experience with programmers with that situation to have a seperate NDA which was much more reasonable. That one, I signed.
While working for the same company, a year or year and a half later, the company came up with a new NDA and asked everyone to sign it. I don't know how many people did - but I know that all of the programmers I talked to said that they refused. I never signed it. I sent it back unsigned, with a letter explaining why, and never heard anything back.
Some companies will ask for everything, and accept something more reasonable. Some probably won't. In todays market, with lots of coders out of work, the companies may be harder to talk to than they were in the past.
Theres an unspoken agreement that most companies have regarding that clause. Adhere to the spirit of it, and be sure nobody gets hurt---especially them---and you'll be fine.
I've heard of several cases where the employee developed something on his own time, using his own equipment, and found that when he started making money at it, the company claimed it as theirs.
>i>This of course causes some problems using the Word spell checker (which in norwegian is one word;-P) on norwegian texts.
I suppose it would be pointless to mention that Word is designed to handle english. This isn't a problem with Word, it's a problem with trying to force a tool to do a job it isn't designed for. Blaming Word, or English, just makes you look clueless.
Sadly, they're just doing what everyone else in the computer industry is doing
You look at the spammers, the idiots trying to force pop-ups on everyone, and the spyware folks, and then paint everyone in the computer business with the same brush. That's sort of like looking at people hanging out in the red-light area of San Francisco at 1:00 am and saying "American's don't think of anything but sex."
I'm not defending spammers, but the people that spam are essentially the same low-lifes we've always had. Trying to claim that because some software companies use sleazy tactics that they are a fair representation of the entire software industry is, IMO, a bit far fetched.
I don't know what kind of taxes he pays. But there is a theory that spamming could be used to launder money from drug sales or whatever they wanted. They spam (legally, thanks to our most esteemed congress), file taxes saying "We made all this money" and then nobody asks where the money came from - obviously, they just sold a lot of crap via spam. But did they? Or did the money come from elsewhere and they just needed some way to make it look "legitimate".
Many spammers have dubious backgrounds. Eddy Marin, for instance, has a history of cocaine trafficing, amoung other things.
I didn't read it as "most spammers are based overseas" which would, IMO, be wrong. I read it as "Scott is the one they sued because he's easy to find and he's in the US."
I don't understand why they tell blatent "You signed up to our list" lies either. It isn't, as someone suggested, because it's illegal if you didn't sign up - it isn't (at least in the US.) The Can Spam law was very clear - they can legally spam you until you beg them to quit. Regardless, they were making that claim for a long, long time before any laws about spam were in place.
Spammers have a different mindset from normal people.
They are trying to sell a product, but they usually tell lies in the subject field and/or the From line. Most of us wouldn't think "Hey, I want to sell to people, so I'll start out by making it clear that I'm lying to them and can't be trusted." But spammers think that way. And some people are apparently dumb enough to buy from them.
Would a group like this be able to beat a high ranking player?
I seriously doubt that the group would win. Some of the moves suggested by individuals in the group would likely be the best choice. But more votes would probably come in for another move - one which doesn't hold up as well.
Some time back, I saw an average or slightly above average player play "everyone at the event" by allowing anyone who wanted to make one move in the game. Many people felt this put him at a disadvantage. But it actually gave him a huge advantage. 10 people make make reasonable moves - but all it takes is one guy to make a really stupid move, and now the individual has a big advantage over the "group".
Chess is a game of mistakes. If neither side makes a mistake, draws are very common. That's why when you see games between two GM's, you see a lot of draws. In games where both are "average" players (not serious chess players) then mistakes are common, and generally the guy that made the last mistake is going to lose. (Not always - especially if he already had a demanding lead at the time.)
Things that look very minor - or which are not noticable at all to the average player - are very important to top players. Letting 5,000 average players vote on each move pretty much guarantees that any slightly-above average player would win.
Slashdot Mirror
How does saying "You can't send that message via spam to unwilling recipients" inhibit free speech? They can post the message to a newsgroup, stick it on a website, run an ad in a newspaper, or simply get a report for the NYTimes to interview them. They can even use email - as long as they send it to people who are receiving it voluntarily. They have a lot of ways of getting their message out. They've done it for over 200 years in the US, all without having to send email spam.
Spam inhibits free speech because people are afraid to post their email address (you yourself don't have an address available here on /.) It costs ISP's, businesses, and eventually most users both time and money. Legitimate messages get filtered out along with spam - but spam filters are necessary because without them, email becomes useless. (My spam filters toss over 500 spams a day, on average, and the number has been rising fast.)
in your inbox and then have to delete it is directly analogous to the snail-mail equivalent.
If you ignore the fact that sending a million snail-mail ads has a large cost, while sending 20 million email ads has a very low cost, then it's kind of analogous. Of course, if you don't hide from the truth, you have to recognize that the reason you can send 20 million messages cheap is because you are forcing the costs of those messages onto the unwilling recipients.
laws that inhibit speech need to allow an alternative method of expression. A blanket spam ban would offer no alternatives.
TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, newsgroups, opt-in email lists, websites, snail-mail. Claiming there are no alternatives, and that spam is the only way the poor mistreated politicians can tell us lies about how great they are and how slimy the other guy is, is bullshit.
You claim to be a lawyer, so you should understand the issues better than you apparently do.
U.S. Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin:
"[Spammers] have come to court not because their freedom of speech is threatened but because their profits are; to dress up their complaints in First Amendment garb demeans the principles for which the First Amendment stands."
Chief Justice Berger, U.S. Supreme Court:
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person?s domain."
No such thing. Every spammer likes to pretend that *his* spam is important. Bull shit. In my mailbox, I decide what is imporant. Bulk email I didn't ask for is spam, and wastes my time and money. I don't care if it's for penis enlargement, George Bush, or some assholes favorite religion.
I call on all Americans to not write spam filters for this. We should read what our candidates have to say.
Why should we have it forced on us? Sure, if we *choose* to join their email lists, we should be able to, and they should take advantage of that. But if we choose to learn about them by reading websites, reading newspapers, watching them debate on TV, or some other method, then they shouldn't be forcing their crap into our email boxes against our will. And if we choose not to keep up with the issues that *they* think are important, that should be *our* choice.
I love my country more than anything else, and want this 2004 election to truly make a differences.
Apparently, you love it more than you love freedom, because you would have our politicians make decisions for all the rest of us, regardless of how we feel.
If you want an US election to make a difference, then give us the right to vote "No". As in "There are no decent candidates on the ballot, so I'm voting No." Then, after they've held several elections where 85% of the people vote no, they'll end up being forced to allow decent human beings to run.
The only question is whether any decent human beings would be willing to deal with modern American politics.
Dean's "team" got busted several times for sending email spam.
http://www.spamvertized.org/2004/dean.html.
That was enough to worry me about him - he obviously doens't understand the internet as well as he pretends to, or he wouldn't be sending spam. I have never given a spammer my business, so he pretty much shut down his chances of my vote at that time.
But when I read this article and the transcript of Dean's talk (.PDF format), the man really truely started to scare me. Expecting everyone to use an ID card every time they use a computer, or do damn near anything else? Requiring everyone to carry a national ID card? Sorry, no thanks. The man is clueless.
Excuse me, but what anti-spam law are you talking about? Are you refering to the "can spam" act which *never* says that you can't advertsie by spam?
Bottom line, once it's posted to usenet, it gets distributed, and AOL doesn't have much in the way of control. IMO, they should have issued a cancel just to cover their ass, removed the messages from their own usenet servers, and then told Harlan "We did what we could, and it's up to you to locate and contact anyone running another server".
As it sits, it sounds like Harlan contacted them only by email, and if they simply say "Sorry, didn't get it" I don't see how he can prove anything. We've all seen spam filters and software problems eat email, and I doubt a court is going to accept "I emailed them, so they knew!" as a valid argument.
Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, and in the section titled "Search from the Address Bar" click on "Do not search from the address bar" and you'll get that result.
That works under Win98/IE6.0. I dunno about other OS's or other versions of IE.
Yes, it does. And when you read the page it takes you to it clearly states We can't find "www.randomdomainname.org". That doesn't fit with your previous claim "IE will take you immediately to a search engine without displaying any error message", which was the post that I called BS on.
IE does take you to a search engine - but it does display an error message. And MS doesn't do it to all windows users, as the subject line claims - they do it to IE users, a subset of windows users. Many (most?) of those users probably find it useful.
This is a browser issue that has nothing to do with Verisign/Sitefinder. Don't like how IE handles it? I don't blame you. There are other things I don't like about IE, which is why I use Opera. However, disliking MS or IE is no reason to make up fiction and try to pass it off as truth.
BTW, I'm not a clown - just a juggler. :^) I'm a grown up with a bad attitude about people who just make things up. If you are going to get upset when people point out that what you are posting is, in fact, not true, perhaps you should be a bit more honest when you post in the first place. I'm not trying to piss you off, but what you said is simply not true.
Not to mention, not all MS users are IE users. I, for instance, use Opera, which simply errors on an unknown URL.
Regardless, you're claim is that they redirect and don't even tell you they did it. Quote "IE will take you immediately to a search engine without displaying any error message." - posted by Alien_Blueprint.
Again, I call bullshit. Tell the truth, and you won't get pissed off when people say "That's not true".
Bullshit.
Using IE does redirect to http://search.msn.com/dnserror.aspx?FORM=DNSAS&q=w ww.u90asdfwa.com, but that's hardly what you claimed - and it doesn't apply to all windows users.
Welcome to the internet. Anyone can write an article (feel free to use a dictionary) about whatever they want. They can publish their own article - you don't have to work for the NYTimes or Washington Post. You're still stuck in an outdated "Only Profession Journalists Can Publish Articles" mentality. Get over it, or you'll fall behind.
It also works every N seconds. I use that when spammers forge my domain in the headers of their spam. Once I start seeing the bounces, I eat as much of their bandwidth as I can. Am I going to shut them down? No, I'm sure they have more bandwidth than I do. Will it increase their cost? I suspect that I signifigantly drive up the total amount of bandwidth that they have to pay for. Do I feel bad? Not at all - they've implicated me in their spam, so fuck 'em.
While working for the same company, a year or year and a half later, the company came up with a new NDA and asked everyone to sign it. I don't know how many people did - but I know that all of the programmers I talked to said that they refused. I never signed it. I sent it back unsigned, with a letter explaining why, and never heard anything back.
Some companies will ask for everything, and accept something more reasonable. Some probably won't. In todays market, with lots of coders out of work, the companies may be harder to talk to than they were in the past.
I've heard of several cases where the employee developed something on his own time, using his own equipment, and found that when he started making money at it, the company claimed it as theirs.
I wouldn't trust any "unspoken agreement".
I suppose it would be pointless to mention that Word is designed to handle english. This isn't a problem with Word, it's a problem with trying to force a tool to do a job it isn't designed for. Blaming Word, or English, just makes you look clueless.
Marketing Guy: "The nerds are gonna have a party. I'll bet ya $20 bucks I can convince them to do it in Norway!".
I feel sorry for you. You're only options, since you believe that way, are to either become scum so you can do well, or to kill yourself.
You look at the spammers, the idiots trying to force pop-ups on everyone, and the spyware folks, and then paint everyone in the computer business with the same brush. That's sort of like looking at people hanging out in the red-light area of San Francisco at 1:00 am and saying "American's don't think of anything but sex."
I'm not defending spammers, but the people that spam are essentially the same low-lifes we've always had. Trying to claim that because some software companies use sleazy tactics that they are a fair representation of the entire software industry is, IMO, a bit far fetched.
I'm in the market for a camera phone. Care to mention what kind you are using?
So don't solicit. But if you happen to superglue all the doors and windows shut, well, the sign didn't tell you not to do that, did it?
Many spammers have dubious backgrounds. Eddy Marin, for instance, has a history of cocaine trafficing, amoung other things.
More info on Eddy here and a picture here.
Bottom line, even if they pay the taxes, you can't trust where the money came from. Rule # 1 - Spammers Lie.
What laws against spam are you dreaming about?
I didn't read it as "most spammers are based overseas" which would, IMO, be wrong. I read it as "Scott is the one they sued because he's easy to find and he's in the US."
Spammers have a different mindset from normal people.
They are trying to sell a product, but they usually tell lies in the subject field and/or the From line. Most of us wouldn't think "Hey, I want to sell to people, so I'll start out by making it clear that I'm lying to them and can't be trusted." But spammers think that way. And some people are apparently dumb enough to buy from them.
I seriously doubt that the group would win. Some of the moves suggested by individuals in the group would likely be the best choice. But more votes would probably come in for another move - one which doesn't hold up as well.
Some time back, I saw an average or slightly above average player play "everyone at the event" by allowing anyone who wanted to make one move in the game. Many people felt this put him at a disadvantage. But it actually gave him a huge advantage. 10 people make make reasonable moves - but all it takes is one guy to make a really stupid move, and now the individual has a big advantage over the "group".
Chess is a game of mistakes. If neither side makes a mistake, draws are very common. That's why when you see games between two GM's, you see a lot of draws. In games where both are "average" players (not serious chess players) then mistakes are common, and generally the guy that made the last mistake is going to lose. (Not always - especially if he already had a demanding lead at the time.)
Things that look very minor - or which are not noticable at all to the average player - are very important to top players. Letting 5,000 average players vote on each move pretty much guarantees that any slightly-above average player would win.