While WeatherBug is not *technically* spyware, it does serve advertisements. But so do a lot of functional websites. Big deal.
To many people, any software that shows an advertisement is "spyware". I don't understand that. To me, spyware and adware are different. Some software will do both, of course, in which case it's still spyware and should be junked. But I have no problem with ad-ware. If the ads take up too much screenspace or or too annoying, then I'll choose not to use the software.
I'm running the free versions of Opera and Eudora right now. Both show ads. Those ads don't bother me.
I think the point is, he didn't specify it either way.
But he did. He signed an agreement with Yahoo that they would not give away his stuff. They are honoring that agreement, and you want them to ignore it. I think that if he didn't give anyone access to his account, it's because he choose not to. When people go to a war zone, they tend to plan for contingencies. The fact that he didn't give anyone the info needed to access the account tells me that he didn't want his private info made public.
No, emails are bits, 1's and 0's, stored on a computer. They are not property - but the computer they are stored on is. And the computer they are stored on doesn't belong to the soldier, or his parents.
Yahoo had an agreement with that soldier, and they are sticking to that agreement. If the soldier wanted his parents to have access to his email account, he could easily have given them the information needed. He choose not to. Let it be his choice.
While I truly respect privacy rights, even after a person is dead, perhaps a little common sense (or adjustment to the appropriate laws) is in order. Why _not_ let the family of this person have access unless that person has a will or last testament that says otherwise? Why proceed from the other direction that assumes the deceased would not want his family to have access even though there is no documentation specifying that?
It doesn't sound like you respect privacy rights, as you are saying "Give his information away, he's dead, what does he care".
He was a soldier in a war zone. His death wasn't a freak occurance - it was a job risk. If he wanted that account to be available to anyone else in the case of his death, he could easily have planned for that. He didn't.
He did agree to the Yahoo policy that they wouldn't give out his information.
So, why do you choose the "Fuck him, fuck what he wanted, he's just a dead soldier" plan? What if he was gay, and his parents didn't know it? What if he had a wife - and a girlfriend. What if his parents are heavy-duty-christians, and he had different religious beliefs that he hadn't discussed with them? What if he had *any* secrets from his family at all, and that's the reason that HE DID NOT GIVE THEM ACCESS TO HIS ACCOUNT!
Oh, but he's just a dead guy. Screw what he wants. His privacy means nothing.
Yes, some people want spam. But do you honestly think that they can't find viagra, porn, fake rolexes, etc without spam? Do you honestly think that because a small percentage want it, the rest of us should have to put up with tons of neverending crap?
Some people want drugs. Some people want gay sex. Do you propose that the rest of us should be forced to take drugs and have gay sex because of those few that want them? Your argume falls apart because you are saying "A few want it, so everyone else should have to do it to". Those that want spam can sign up on every frickin suckers-mailing-list they want. The rest of us shouldn't be forced to get the same msgs.
Do you really want the government regulating speech?
Speech like the illegal junk faxes they already regulate? Speech like that of Telemarketers, who have to respct the DNC list? Speech like yelling "FIRE!" in a theatre?
The government already regulates speech. If they were to try to stop anyone from talking about X, there are few instances where they can justify it. (The "Fire" example would be one example where they can.) However, saying "You can not force anyone to listen to what you want to say" is perfectly reasonable.
So, anyone that disagrees with this usage is a "nutcase" or a "troll"?
Anyone that claims that their definition is right and that all of the dictionaries and people which disagree with them are wrong is either a nutcase, or a troll, or both.
Ehhh... No. More likely there'd be serious free speech issues involved with banning spam entirely
Nope. Courts have sided against the "Free Speach Means I Get To Do Whatever I Want" argument in the past, with no sign of it changing. The fact that you are unfamiliar with the issues doesn't change this fact.
Faxes have had laws against fax spam for awhile. Those have been challeneged in court, and the laws stand. Telemarketing used to be a minor annoyance, and it grew and grew until we ended up with the Do Not Call list. Tele-spammers have tried to argue "Free Speech" in regards to that law, and again they have lost. You would never argue that I had a right to advertise by painting my ad on your car or house without permission, so why would you believe that spammers forcing their unwanted crap onto millions of other peoples computers to be acceptable?
A couple of quotes from judges :
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 persons domain."
So much for the free speech nonsense.
I sincerely doubt that the companies that employ spammmers, especially porn spammers, make enough money to make it worth their while to buy a congressman.
Porn is one of the most profitable online businesses. (Offline, too. Sex sells.) Porn showed other companies *how* to use the web to make money. Even so, the porn spammers were obviously not the ones that managed to get the CAN-SPAM law passed, or there would not be additional restrictions for porn spam. And they aren't all small timers. For instance, Columbia House
(you know - the "Get 10 albums for 10 cents!" people) has recently created a porn division.
The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) wrote CAN-SPAM. It has very, very large businesses as members. Visit the link. You'll notice that the top section of the page is nothing but search engine keyword spam.
From their page, some of their members: The DMA membership roster includes companies like AT&T, IBM, AOL Time Warner, Mellon Bank, Microsoft, Home Shopping Network, The New York Times, Rapp Collins, Prudential Insurance, Phillip Morris, Proctor & Gamble, as well as R.R. Donnelley, Acxiom, Experian and DoubleClick.
Now, do you want to stick with your "they can't afford to lobby congress" story? The DMA didn't want spam to be banned, so they managed to get a law past that let congresscritters say "Look, we passed a law against spam!" while actually passing a law that just formalised how to spam legally.
You might want to loosen your tinfoil hat some.
You might want to educate yourself about the issues instead of talking trash just because you don't understand.
Why haven't they gone out all the way and make this spam illegal instead of only capping a small part of it?
Because the lawmakers in the US don't care about right and wrong, and they don't care about the general public, they care about the companies that give them lots of money. The DMA wrote the Can-Spam act to ensure that they could continue to spam, and congress passed to to ensure that the DMA members would continue to bribe them.
Yes, you are. The term isn't going to change because you and a couple of other nutcases don't understand. What you say and what the dictionary says are different.
http://www.whitis.com/mailwiper.htm will give you a lot more detail than you probably want, and a lot more history. Spamford wasn't involved (that I knew of - apparently, though, he was) when I first started this page.
Sure, because we all know that Spamford can be trusted to fulfill his part. Until he's dead or in jail, he'll continue, regardless of any silly little things like laws or morals.
He was forced to start hiding his spamming a few years back. Before that, he just said "Yes, I did it, you don't like it, I dont care, I'm Spamford, King of Spam, and I'll never stop."
Then he lost several major lawsuits and said "I've quit the spam business." But he never quit, he just started hiding it and quit bragging about doing it. He never got out of the business.
He's vermin, and won't stop until he's locked up or dead.
First, your math makes no sense. The dead are dead, and money won't fix that. So dividing the money by the number that died doesn't mean anything. The money is going to help those that survived the initial damage.
Third, the US government already donates more aid to other countries than any other country, and has for a long time.
Forth, individuals from the US will also donate.
Fifth, if our goal in Iraq was simply to kill as many Iraqi's as possible, we would have killed a lot more, and the cost per death would be much lower. Bullets are cheap, bombs are cheap, and we haven't carpetbombed a single town. (That's how I'd have handled Faluja - crumble the whole place and rebuild it later.)
I'm ashamed that you are an American, too. I think you should move to Mexico and bitch about how much money they give to foreign aid. Or Cuba, or Iran, or hell, anywhwere, as long as you leave.
The opinion polls I have seen indicate the Iraqi people are glad Saddam no longer rules them and they want democracy. They also belive the Americans are occupiers.
I've seen those polls too, but I'm not sure I trust them. That isn't to say they are wrong, just that I don't know.
The problem is that polls can be very skewed. If you ask the people who are in relatively "safe" parts of Iraq, you are going to get vastly different answers than if you go until the "unsafe" parts. If you ask people who have been benefitting directly from getting rid of Saddam, vs people who were part of Saddam's power base, you will get different answers. If you ask people who have been receving aid from the US that they can see and hold and eat, they'll be very positive - but that doesn't mean that everyone in the country is positive.
I doubt the poll takers are going into the areas that are still strongly anti-american, the places where the military hasn't already gotten under at least some kind of control. Baghdad still isn't safe, but I bet it's one of the easiest and safest places to take a poll.
And that all assumes that the answers given to the poll taker are honest. If the poll taker is anywhere where he might be protected by the military, then the Iraqi's may not be willing to say "Fuck the US, we'll kill them all, those bastards" even if that's what they feel. In the past, saying something like that about Saddam and crew would lead to repercussions. They aren't likely to want to take that chance.
I consider trusting the polls foolish, because polls can be too easily done in ways that give a predetermined result, and are very hard to do in a balanced way in that kind of situation.
Just because I say don't put them in jail, it doesn't mean you can't monitor and restrict their movements.
If they know that jail time will not occur unless they assault someone, then being told "You can't go here", "You can't leave town", "You must be home between 9:00 PM and 7:00 AM" are all things that they can just ignore, unless you plan to chain them up or have a cop follow them everywhere.
Your pretending that someone taking pens from the office (which I agree you shouldn't do) is the same as robbing a house or stealing a car is nonsense. I won't be responding to whatever you post next. You aren't going to convince me that crooks should be allowed to run free.
You might find this interesting. It doesn't advocate no punishment for nonviolent crime, but it does make a strong argument for removing penalties for "consensual crimes". With it, I agree.
Based on what you've written, there would be no reason not to be a thief. After all, until you physically harm someone, you are allowed to do anything you want.
You claim I'm interested in revenge. I don't give a damn about revenge. But I don't want people feeling like they cna just steal anything they want and get away with it - and that's what your system does.
Without jail for non-physical crimes, they steal, they get caught, they get told "don't do it again", maybe they get put into some kind of rehab program. Then they don't bother to go to rehab, and they go steal again, because they won't ever go to jail for it.
There's a difference between being annoyed and being harmed, and I actually find it a little bit scary that more than one person disputes that.
I don't think anyone disputes that.
What people do dispute is your nonsense claim that spam does no harm. ISP's charge more because they end up paying the bandwidth costs, the costs of extra hard drives, the costs of filtering software, the costs of the abuse-desk-people, etc. Everyone wastes time. Email becomes less useful, and people start hiding their email address to avoid the spam. (You do that yourself, though you pretend there is no harm in spam.)
You, yourself, may not fine that spam causes you noticable harm. If you are a casual user, own no domains, sell nothing online, and hiding your address everywhere you go, then an extra buck or two built into your monthly ISP charge is probably the only harm done to you. But that doesn't change the fact that harm is done - and at much higher levels - to other people.
Do you seriously think that your ISP gets free bandwidth? That they don't have to buy larger hard drives due to spam? That they don't have to pay for any kind of spamfiltering, or hire any abuse-desk people?
Sorry, I can't help anyone who is willfully clueless.
So I'd say all the spam is actually GOOD for society!
Ah. Your trolling. I get it. Have a nice day, spambag.
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To many people, any software that shows an advertisement is "spyware". I don't understand that. To me, spyware and adware are different. Some software will do both, of course, in which case it's still spyware and should be junked. But I have no problem with ad-ware. If the ads take up too much screenspace or or too annoying, then I'll choose not to use the software.
I'm running the free versions of Opera and Eudora right now. Both show ads. Those ads don't bother me.
But he did. He signed an agreement with Yahoo that they would not give away his stuff. They are honoring that agreement, and you want them to ignore it. I think that if he didn't give anyone access to his account, it's because he choose not to. When people go to a war zone, they tend to plan for contingencies. The fact that he didn't give anyone the info needed to access the account tells me that he didn't want his private info made public.
It's too bad you can't respect that.
No, emails are bits, 1's and 0's, stored on a computer. They are not property - but the computer they are stored on is. And the computer they are stored on doesn't belong to the soldier, or his parents.
Yahoo had an agreement with that soldier, and they are sticking to that agreement. If the soldier wanted his parents to have access to his email account, he could easily have given them the information needed. He choose not to. Let it be his choice.
It doesn't sound like you respect privacy rights, as you are saying "Give his information away, he's dead, what does he care".
He was a soldier in a war zone. His death wasn't a freak occurance - it was a job risk. If he wanted that account to be available to anyone else in the case of his death, he could easily have planned for that. He didn't.
He did agree to the Yahoo policy that they wouldn't give out his information.
So, why do you choose the "Fuck him, fuck what he wanted, he's just a dead soldier" plan? What if he was gay, and his parents didn't know it? What if he had a wife - and a girlfriend. What if his parents are heavy-duty-christians, and he had different religious beliefs that he hadn't discussed with them? What if he had *any* secrets from his family at all, and that's the reason that HE DID NOT GIVE THEM ACCESS TO HIS ACCOUNT!
Oh, but he's just a dead guy. Screw what he wants. His privacy means nothing.
Give the guy some respect.
Some people want drugs. Some people want gay sex. Do you propose that the rest of us should be forced to take drugs and have gay sex because of those few that want them? Your argume falls apart because you are saying "A few want it, so everyone else should have to do it to". Those that want spam can sign up on every frickin suckers-mailing-list they want. The rest of us shouldn't be forced to get the same msgs.
Speech like the illegal junk faxes they already regulate? Speech like that of Telemarketers, who have to respct the DNC list? Speech like yelling "FIRE!" in a theatre?
The government already regulates speech. If they were to try to stop anyone from talking about X, there are few instances where they can justify it. (The "Fire" example would be one example where they can.) However, saying "You can not force anyone to listen to what you want to say" is perfectly reasonable.
Anyone that claims that their definition is right and that all of the dictionaries and people which disagree with them are wrong is either a nutcase, or a troll, or both.
Nope. Courts have sided against the "Free Speach Means I Get To Do Whatever I Want" argument in the past, with no sign of it changing. The fact that you are unfamiliar with the issues doesn't change this fact.
Faxes have had laws against fax spam for awhile. Those have been challeneged in court, and the laws stand. Telemarketing used to be a minor annoyance, and it grew and grew until we ended up with the Do Not Call list. Tele-spammers have tried to argue "Free Speech" in regards to that law, and again they have lost. You would never argue that I had a right to advertise by painting my ad on your car or house without permission, so why would you believe that spammers forcing their unwanted crap onto millions of other peoples computers to be acceptable?
A couple of quotes from judges :
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 persons domain."
So much for the free speech nonsense.
I sincerely doubt that the companies that employ spammmers, especially porn spammers, make enough money to make it worth their while to buy a congressman.
Porn is one of the most profitable online businesses. (Offline, too. Sex sells.) Porn showed other companies *how* to use the web to make money. Even so, the porn spammers were obviously not the ones that managed to get the CAN-SPAM law passed, or there would not be additional restrictions for porn spam. And they aren't all small timers. For instance, Columbia House (you know - the "Get 10 albums for 10 cents!" people) has recently created a porn division.
The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) wrote CAN-SPAM. It has very, very large businesses as members. Visit the link. You'll notice that the top section of the page is nothing but search engine keyword spam.
From their page, some of their members :
The DMA membership roster includes companies like AT&T, IBM, AOL Time Warner, Mellon Bank, Microsoft, Home Shopping Network, The New York Times, Rapp Collins, Prudential Insurance, Phillip Morris, Proctor & Gamble, as well as R.R. Donnelley, Acxiom, Experian and DoubleClick.
Now, do you want to stick with your "they can't afford to lobby congress" story? The DMA didn't want spam to be banned, so they managed to get a law past that let congresscritters say "Look, we passed a law against spam!" while actually passing a law that just formalised how to spam legally.
You might want to loosen your tinfoil hat some.
You might want to educate yourself about the issues instead of talking trash just because you don't understand.
Because the lawmakers in the US don't care about right and wrong, and they don't care about the general public, they care about the companies that give them lots of money. The DMA wrote the Can-Spam act to ensure that they could continue to spam, and congress passed to to ensure that the DMA members would continue to bribe them.
In other words, you are one of the stupid assholes that responds to porn spam, thus encouraging the bastards to send more of it. Fuck you very much.
In France, there isn't even a clear distinction between bathing and not bathing.
Yes, you are. The term isn't going to change because you and a couple of other nutcases don't understand. What you say and what the dictionary says are different.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=america
or
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Diction ary&va=america&x=0&y=0
Now, go troll elsewhere.
Everyone knows what you are saying. The problem is, you are wrong. Check out the definition. http://dict.die.net/america/
http://www.whitis.com/mailwiper.htm will give you a lot more detail than you probably want, and a lot more history. Spamford wasn't involved (that I knew of - apparently, though, he was) when I first started this page.
Sure, because we all know that Spamford can be trusted to fulfill his part. Until he's dead or in jail, he'll continue, regardless of any silly little things like laws or morals.
He was forced to start hiding his spamming a few years back. Before that, he just said "Yes, I did it, you don't like it, I dont care, I'm Spamford, King of Spam, and I'll never stop."
Then he lost several major lawsuits and said "I've quit the spam business." But he never quit, he just started hiding it and quit bragging about doing it. He never got out of the business.
He's vermin, and won't stop until he's locked up or dead.
As long as you can get your movies and music and software for free, you aren't greedy at all.
First, your math makes no sense. The dead are dead, and money won't fix that. So dividing the money by the number that died doesn't mean anything. The money is going to help those that survived the initial damage.
Third, the US government already donates more aid to other countries than any other country, and has for a long time.
Forth, individuals from the US will also donate.
Fifth, if our goal in Iraq was simply to kill as many Iraqi's as possible, we would have killed a lot more, and the cost per death would be much lower. Bullets are cheap, bombs are cheap, and we haven't carpetbombed a single town. (That's how I'd have handled Faluja - crumble the whole place and rebuild it later.)
I'm ashamed that you are an American, too. I think you should move to Mexico and bitch about how much money they give to foreign aid. Or Cuba, or Iran, or hell, anywhwere, as long as you leave.
I've seen those polls too, but I'm not sure I trust them. That isn't to say they are wrong, just that I don't know.
The problem is that polls can be very skewed. If you ask the people who are in relatively "safe" parts of Iraq, you are going to get vastly different answers than if you go until the "unsafe" parts. If you ask people who have been benefitting directly from getting rid of Saddam, vs people who were part of Saddam's power base, you will get different answers. If you ask people who have been receving aid from the US that they can see and hold and eat, they'll be very positive - but that doesn't mean that everyone in the country is positive.
I doubt the poll takers are going into the areas that are still strongly anti-american, the places where the military hasn't already gotten under at least some kind of control. Baghdad still isn't safe, but I bet it's one of the easiest and safest places to take a poll.
And that all assumes that the answers given to the poll taker are honest. If the poll taker is anywhere where he might be protected by the military, then the Iraqi's may not be willing to say "Fuck the US, we'll kill them all, those bastards" even if that's what they feel. In the past, saying something like that about Saddam and crew would lead to repercussions. They aren't likely to want to take that chance.
I consider trusting the polls foolish, because polls can be too easily done in ways that give a predetermined result, and are very hard to do in a balanced way in that kind of situation.
If they know that jail time will not occur unless they assault someone, then being told "You can't go here", "You can't leave town", "You must be home between 9:00 PM and 7:00 AM" are all things that they can just ignore, unless you plan to chain them up or have a cop follow them everywhere.
Your pretending that someone taking pens from the office (which I agree you shouldn't do) is the same as robbing a house or stealing a car is nonsense. I won't be responding to whatever you post next. You aren't going to convince me that crooks should be allowed to run free.
You might find this interesting. It doesn't advocate no punishment for nonviolent crime, but it does make a strong argument for removing penalties for "consensual crimes". With it, I agree.
http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/books/aint/toc.htm
Because they've seen it work so many times before.
You claim I'm interested in revenge. I don't give a damn about revenge. But I don't want people feeling like they cna just steal anything they want and get away with it - and that's what your system does.
Without jail for non-physical crimes, they steal, they get caught, they get told "don't do it again", maybe they get put into some kind of rehab program. Then they don't bother to go to rehab, and they go steal again, because they won't ever go to jail for it.
This is your plan - yet I'm a troll? Jeeze.
I did read your whole post. I conclude that you are either an idiot, or a criminal who doesn't want to go to jail.
I don't think anyone disputes that.
What people do dispute is your nonsense claim that spam does no harm. ISP's charge more because they end up paying the bandwidth costs, the costs of extra hard drives, the costs of filtering software, the costs of the abuse-desk-people, etc. Everyone wastes time. Email becomes less useful, and people start hiding their email address to avoid the spam. (You do that yourself, though you pretend there is no harm in spam.)
You, yourself, may not fine that spam causes you noticable harm. If you are a casual user, own no domains, sell nothing online, and hiding your address everywhere you go, then an extra buck or two built into your monthly ISP charge is probably the only harm done to you. But that doesn't change the fact that harm is done - and at much higher levels - to other people.
Sorry, I can't help anyone who is willfully clueless. So I'd say all the spam is actually GOOD for society!
Ah. Your trolling. I get it. Have a nice day, spambag.