Doesn't this article give the feeling the author has no clue about what he is talking about and has just put together some buzzwords like scalable, self-contained to create a controversial article?
No, the problem is that you aren't being sufficiently proactive in shifting your paradigm to thinking outside the box like the author clearly has. What does scalability mean? I don't know, but I saw an IBM commercial about it during the Super Bowl, so I figure that qualifies me to write an article about it.
But hey, I don't know any Gentoo users, maybe you have a better understanding of how their minds work than me
It's a particular issue of sensitivity with them since in the last year, they over all other linux users routinely pipe up in every linux related topic with "portage has had X longer than that," or "genoo does that better." While the occasional discussion of the merits of various OSs and linuces is great, it's the proselytizing manner and general lack of either topicality or logic to most of the posts that is generally annoying.
Pointing out a link to various places to aquire said item in various formats is useful; pointing out how much longer it's been available for distro X isn't particularly. Escpecially when gentoo's main claim to fame is pushing packages out the door ASAP without a significant focus on stability.
all he did was point out that it's been in portage for some time! How does that make him a zealot? If somebody mentioned that the fedora rpm has been around for a while, would that make him/her a fedora zealot?
Because it had little to do with the story, and that *his* point was to mention that portage has had it for oh-so-long (nevermind that no one's done compiling it from portage, but I digress). The point is you don't see fedora users saying "You could get *name of popular package* from Fedora for a month now." You don't see Slack users saying "I've had that tgz for two weeks!" Because they'd be annoying fanboys if they did.
Writing Microsoft without a $ sign or some mispelling makes you a troll
No it doesn't.
having a mac makes you a fanboy
No, but modding down anyone who dares say Steve jobs shouldn't be canonized does
well why not mentioninng portage makes you a zealot.
mentioning how? Mentioning that it exists is redundant. Mentioning that it has an obvious package is redundant. "Mentioning" that portage has had it longer than other distros in a story that is unrelated to gentoo is annoying, yeah.
Holy shit, you're right. All this time the last dozen or so space flights were just a few bored guys from NASA taking it out for a spin. Dang nabbit. We shoulda been larnin' how to build better space craft insteada pleasure cruisin'.
Honestly? A lot of the "research" missions are pretty close to that. We're not getting anywhere near the bang for our scientific buck that we should with the shuttle.
Damn, boy, I wish we had you around to remind them: 'hey, you all should learn more about space flights so the replacement craft are better design'.
Perhaps someone needs to? Seems to have been little progress, and I doubt very much they're learning much about spacecraft design from using a 20+ year old design.
That is a very insightful observation, except for the fact that most people and countries don't give a damn about internet gambling. It's not like it actively goes spreading gambling-zombie viruses or actively goes forcing people to gamble, or anything.
The US attorney general does. You're right, gambling is not as big a problem. But I'd reiterate, it doesn't matter what we think the problem is, it's the priorities of the government. And spam is a low priority for them compared to gambling. So you're not going to see them "waste" time and political capital on spam. That's just the US, but I haven't seen any country really make an effort to - or even talk about - solving the problem. Unless it becomes a much higher priority, spam cannot be solved internationally.
I'm willing to bet that the people making money from those gambling operation still live comfortably in the USA or EU. If they actually faced a choice like "(A) personally move to a third world country, (B) shut down the operation, or (C) go to jail" I still believe that most would choose B.
I've read about it. They live in Aruba. One guy interviewed fully realizes he'll be arrested if he ever comes back to the US. He's fine with that, because he's 1) rich, and 2) lives in a tropical paradise.
I.e., as I've described before, that country would find itself quickly off the net, and its spammers effectively disconnected from their source of income. Sure, the country may still encourage them. But suddenly they can't actually make money as long as they stay in that country. Are you that sure they wouldn't drop it like a hot potato?
So why is that not happening? Because NO COUNTRY, let alone an ISP, is willing to have the arrogance of completely cutting another country off, even for spam. The question of whether this would work is completely irrelevant because it would cause much bigger problems than it would solve. It would cure spam in much the same way that decapitation would cure acne.
It's much the same as from half the world you can't make a credit card purchase any more. There was no political decree to start blocking those countries' citizens from online purchases. It's the banks themselves who eventually just had enough of those countries' encouraging fraud.
And why aren't ISP's doing this now? Maybe a few do, but because enough spam comes from, say, Korea, and that's a big country, cutting it off isn't an option. Hell, we can't even catch people spamming in *this* country easily because of the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy, jurisdictional problems, and the difficulty of tracing spam back to its actual sender.
Basically, your plan requires every country of any significant size to simultanuously solve the spam problem. That's why it won't happen. Ideas like yours sound great in a bottle, but when you actually go to implement them, it gets messy. The place where it falls apart is the same as with air pollution laws, a significant portion of the countries will balk at implementing the plan if there's anyone who won't, as all it takes is a few bad apples to make the entire effort pointless. So unless you can solve the problem internationally all at the same time, it won't work. And since that'll never happen, that's why legislating spam away won't be successful.
Bottom line, if the govs/ISPs want to solve the problem, and your idea is implementable, why aren't they doing it? I can assure you, it isn't because they haven't thought of it.
Most civilized countries are sick and tired of SPAM too. E.g., most European countries. So there is enough scope for a spam free zone, if the USA does want to get its act together and cooperate. It's not like you're alone against the world on the SPAM issue, except for the fact that:
I realize that. But Europe isn't the real problem either, it's Asia. And it only takes a few jurisdictions who don't care to keep spam rolling. And it's also easy to find cracks in jurisdictional entanglements even if everyone works together. Look, if we were talking about murder, they might get it together. But I don't see the FBI and Interpol getting their braintrusts together to solve spam.
It's mostly your spam that's dumped upon the rest of the world. USA is currently _the_ biggest source of spam, followed by... offshored operations paid for by someone from the USA.
Don't know why you're making this a US issue. If I were to bite, I'd also say we have more people connected, and I haven't seen stats that say we spam inordinately given our internet presence. But this is an international problem regardless, it doesn't matter.
Once you have secured an EU+North America treaty on that issue, the rest of the world should IMHO be actually pretty easy.
I wish. China will pay lip service but they don't have the resources now to solve a problem they don't really see as a problem. Look at copy protection as an example. They'll sign the treaty and smile, and that'll be that.
We're talking some major combined economic power there. Any country who doesn't want to play ball with that kind of a behemoth can be whacked into submission in a variety of ways, ranging from economic sanctions to just disconnecting them from the Internet.
You only have so much political capital, and I don't think nations are willing to use it on spam. Really, it's not enough of a priority. So no one's going to make that level of a threat against China. China would be insulted, it would set back relations severely, and they're doing worse things (like dumping product against WTO rules). So again, not happening. If our Attorney General went into a cabinet meeting and said that if China didn't cooperate on spam that we'd disconnect them and sanction them, he'd be laughed at. If we don't sanction them for unfair trade and human rights violations, we aren't doing it for spam.
But I don't think the spammers want to move to Elbonia or East Bumfuckistan and run their operation from there anyway. They might pay some local 5 bucks to run a server for them there, but they don't want to go live in a third world country. Those countries aren't that much fun.
No? How about Aruba, where all the internet gambling sites run? Bottom line is there will always be enough places that don't play ball, and that aren't worth shutting off from the net. And there will always be spambots, so that wouldn't help anyway. And there will always be enough jurisdictions that don't have enough time/money to pursue this problem that really doesn't hit the radar of (for example) our Department of Justice which generally has bigger problems. So you can forget about the nations of the world getting together to hammer out a solution to this problem. I don't plan to sit on my hands waiting for governments to solve the problem.
Utimately, yes, this problem could be solved if everyone worked together. But if you think that'll happen, you're truly naive.
The convenient thing here is that jurisdictional boundaries are often accompanied by physical boundaries, such as the atlantic ocean. There is a known number of internet links into the United States. If we can use legislative means to ensure that spam originates outside the U.S., that has the potential to make technical solutions to the spam problem vastly easier.
Marginally if at all. What are you going to do, turn off the pacific rim (it would be nice, but not feasible)? It's also quite easy for foreigners, then, to hijack a spambot in the US. What do you do, bust the bot owner? Not likely, those sorts of actions would make the RIAA look warm and fuzzy.
Spam is not a technological problem. It is a commercial problem taking advantage of imperfection in technology. You probably can't solve the spam problem through purely technical means, since supply and demand-- the thing that's actually driving spam-- has shown itself adept at surmounting technical barriers. You can, however, if you target spam's commercial nature, make relatively sure at least that at no point does their cashflow come from within the U.S..
Sounds nice. How do you do that? How do you examine their cashflow if they're foreign? Subpoena? Not happening. That's where those jurisdictional boundaries get ugly. That's why internet gambling still works, because all these places are based in Aruba and the US has no way to shut them down, and no way to peek at their books to make sure Americans aren't patronizing them. If our government can't shut down internet gambling - and it would like to - the same techniques will also fail for spam.
The problem is that when you reduce any of these non-technical spam solutions to actual details, they don't work. If the problem were so easy to solve, it would have BEEN solved.
Have you seen a decent link to the burst/extinction relationship? Being the Guardian, they left out any messy details like "evidence." The article says the effects on Earth would look rather like an ice age; I'm wondering how they could ultimately tell the difference or if they're just making it up.;)
Sorry this is a bit off-thread, but you seemed like the only hope for someone who actually knew what they were tailing about.
No, all routers in the USA can be forced to reject all email, unless it comes on a specific port, with specific identifiers. For example, maybe have a ISP program that you must instal on your machine that identifies your email. If the hash made by that program is wrong, they drop the email. Like what microsoft does when you try and instal software, you have to validate that you own the software and it is running on one machine.
None of those "let's redefine the SMTP standard" crackpot schemes are going to work. Remember, any solution has to be implementable for a billion internet users, and none of those hash schemes are. When the cost of implementation is higher than the cost of spam, the solution becomes a problem.
So basically the law says consolidated business has to deal with the labor that consolidated to even the playing field and prevent abuse of the power of big business.
That's conclusionary - whether the playing field is level is quite open for debate. Who checks abuse of power of the big labor unions (ie, Teamsters)?
As a result big business obeyed the laws, but did their best to get around them and move their labor to places with governments less interested in the welfare of the people.
Or one could say they wanted to operate in jurisdictions that didn't put artificial constraints on the labor market. Or they wanted to operate in a market where they could be profitable. Remember, they're *businesses*, not welfare machines.
This may be a problem that the unions have to deal with (difficult since although they have the voting numbers, big business has the money which is more important in our twisted psuedo-republic).
Unions have a lot of cash that they extort from their members, who more often than not would rather not be members.
t is not, however, a inherent problem with unions but merely that businesses can move to where there are no unions, and unions have trouble forming in places with corrupt governments that don't mind shooting protesters.
Or...because unionized labor becomes more expensive than their unskilled members are worth? Labor is a commodity. If you demand more for it than it is worth, you'll be out of a job. This should not be surprising.
What amazes me is that people in more developed countries who are consumers put up with it. The whole "Made in America" label campaign should have been funded by unions and revamped to show all the horrible things companies are doing overseas and name companies by name. Now it is damn near impossible to find American made goods of many types.
Because American labor is too expensive to be able to use American workers and sell things at the prices the market will bear. Would you prefer lower wages? America is not a commodity producing nation, like it or not that's left to the 3rd world until they catch up economically.
As an aside, where's Jimmy Hoffa sleeping right about now?
Legislate against spam. As long as spam is legal, or the penalties against it are too low, or it is too easy to do, people will continue to try and make a quick buck.
First, I guess you didn't see the guy in VA who just got something like 9 years in jail.
That said, spam doesn't obey jurisdictional boundaries. Any single country can only solve a small part of the problem, and any spam incident often involves over 3 jusrisdictions that may be in separate countries (sender, spambot, recipient, etc). That's a logistical nightmare that isn't soluble outside of a dream world.
Also, force all ISP's to monitor how much bandwith a source has. If you get too much usage per day, say 200 megabytes or more, then that person has to explain why they need that much bandwith. If someone gets the RIAA on board, with their lobbyists, that should pass very quickly.
That's fantastic. Trade a bad problem for one that's much worse. Get the RIAA to legitimize their practices by using a guise of stopping spam? Let's not.
Also, force all email to have some element which identifies the source. Not just a header that can be forged, but something that can't be hacked.
Now by force, what do you do if they don't? Enforement issues again here.
Ultimately, legislative solutions for spam DO NOT and CAN NOT work for much but a small part of the problem. It's satistfying when some moron is clumsy enough to get caught (as with the guy in VA), but mostly these days the spammers aren't that stupid. Technological solutions work far better.
Well, according to your list, the University of Cambridge (in the UK) ranks higher than both MIT and Caltech.
Yeah, I took a gamble poster wasn't British. I'll obviously concede Oxford and Cambridge are both great universities. Though I would contend that after that, things fall quickly.
Main point stands, though. The majority of the world's best universities, especially at the top, are in the US.
I hope that changes, honestly, and I say that as an American. Not because the world sends its best and brightest here (I actually like how multicultural that works out), but because more education is good for everybody. Europe is quickly falling behind - particularly the Continent - and India is quickly gaining. China will too, and Japan is already there.
Compare this to before WWII years ago, when Britain and Germany were dominant, America had a few good world-class schools, and India, China and Japan weren't on the map.
The only failure the unions had in factory jobs moving is that they weren't able to stop it. Blaming globalization on collective bargaining is absurd.
Not entirely. They drove their wages far above what similar non-unionized labor was getting in this country, and constantly threatened strikes if they didn't get to push it ever-higher. You could say they have a right to try to get what they can. You could also say they should have had some foresight to realize that doing so too many times would lose their jobs. Ultimately, it did.
The problem with striking is that you put the company in a position that it's better in the short term to give in to demands, yet better long term to simply do away with you. Since labor laws in this country forbid firing a striking work force, in general, the result was that jobs moved overseas. You had a lot of companies realizing they had to give in to unions or else go under, but at the same time putting plans in effect to ultimately rid themselves of unionized labor.
Today, after lots of plant closings, the UAW has realized that they need to work together with the company to find solutions that build the business as a whole while maintaining a fair cut for them. Watch the airline shakeout now - the only airlines that are profitable are non-unionized. You think that's a coincidence? Not by a longshot.
That doesn't mean organized labor is inherently bad. But I've got to say that it doesn't have a good name in the US, because of 1) the role it played in killing some US industries earlier than they otherwise would have died, and 2) its ties to organized crime. As I said, neither of those have to go with unionization, but they did here in the US.
Now that's just steroetypical American arrogance rearing its ugly head again. And you wonder why the rest of the world hates you.
Is it still arrogant if it's true?
FYI, there are actually a lot of other countries out there as good or better than MIT or Caltech. Of course, they're found in obscure, little-known countries like India, China, Britain, and Canada, but they're out there.
Names? As for England, Cambridge and Oxford are very good, both in the top 10 in a lot of fields. But Britain goes down fast after that. China's rising but not there yet, same for India. Canada doesn't have that many good schools, none of their best would top our top 20. That includes, for example, UToronto. You failed to mention Germany and Japan which would likely provide the best competition to the US, actually, after Britain.
Here's a list of the top schools compiled by a Chinese university: ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/top500(1-100).pdf. I deliberately chose a non-American source to prevent any "bias.". Of the top 25, 18 are American. That's not the only authority, of course, but I'd love to see any measure in which well over half the world's top universities weren't in the US.
Perhaps if your "super-elite, best-in-the-world" US colleges focused a little more on their geography classes instead of their patriotism classes, you'd know that.
I'm familiar with many institutions across the world (and quite good at geography). And I've never seen one that profs in the sciences would routinely choose a job at as opposed to any of the top 5 US schools (say MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford). The only ones that would offer competition would be Oxford and Cambridge. And I'm quite familiar with this situation. Probably different in liberal arts, but not science.
perhaps we can chat about what the school in Eastern Timor did this weekend, or maybe the University in Argentina, maybe read about those wacky people at Mumbai uni are up to this weekend
Then start your own website. FWIW, your country doesn't have a single university as good as Caltech OR MIT. And I don't even have to ask where you're from before making that determination.
I can't see a company that size buying boxes from Dell. They could save quite a bit of money if they didn't have their head's in their asses. But I guess that's what makes the (capitalist) world go round.
Problem is for midsize companies, they're big enough to have bureaucracy but not big enough to reap the rewards of defining their own standards. They'd rather pay Dell and MS their tax and support 1000 of basically the same machine than support 1000 different kinds of beige boxes with 10 different linux and windows versions. And there's some sense to that.
Larger companies would roll their own version of linux with custom apps, saving tons of money. But you have to be big enough to make the initial cost outlay pay you back.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the problem is that you aren't being sufficiently proactive in shifting your paradigm to thinking outside the box like the author clearly has. What does scalability mean? I don't know, but I saw an IBM commercial about it during the Super Bowl, so I figure that qualifies me to write an article about it.
It's a particular issue of sensitivity with them since in the last year, they over all other linux users routinely pipe up in every linux related topic with "portage has had X longer than that," or "genoo does that better." While the occasional discussion of the merits of various OSs and linuces is great, it's the proselytizing manner and general lack of either topicality or logic to most of the posts that is generally annoying.
Pointing out a link to various places to aquire said item in various formats is useful; pointing out how much longer it's been available for distro X isn't particularly. Escpecially when gentoo's main claim to fame is pushing packages out the door ASAP without a significant focus on stability.
Because it had little to do with the story, and that *his* point was to mention that portage has had it for oh-so-long (nevermind that no one's done compiling it from portage, but I digress). The point is you don't see fedora users saying "You could get *name of popular package* from Fedora for a month now." You don't see Slack users saying "I've had that tgz for two weeks!" Because they'd be annoying fanboys if they did.
Writing Microsoft without a $ sign or some mispelling makes you a troll
No it doesn't.
having a mac makes you a fanboy
No, but modding down anyone who dares say Steve jobs shouldn't be canonized does
well why not mentioninng portage makes you a zealot.
mentioning how? Mentioning that it exists is redundant. Mentioning that it has an obvious package is redundant. "Mentioning" that portage has had it longer than other distros in a story that is unrelated to gentoo is annoying, yeah.
It'll do that. I've never had RP installed and *not* had it do that by default.
Btw, how'd it sound? ;)
Oddly enough, none of us care. I want my "-1, User is a Gentoo Zealot" mod.
Good God, you idiot! Now they'll have your DNA!!!
Netcraft confirms: Moore's law is dying.
Reminds me of "Don't be a Menace to South Central..." where some old man is hassling a kid, and the kid says "You aren't my daddy!....Are you?"
:)
Yeah! And when .cx sites start being about Christmas Island!
Of course if those sites are about Christmas Island, I can tell you I'm never going there. One hell of a hazing ritual for the new guy...
...when it turned out your paternal line came from the mailman? ;)
Honestly? A lot of the "research" missions are pretty close to that. We're not getting anywhere near the bang for our scientific buck that we should with the shuttle.
Damn, boy, I wish we had you around to remind them: 'hey, you all should learn more about space flights so the replacement craft are better design'.
Perhaps someone needs to? Seems to have been little progress, and I doubt very much they're learning much about spacecraft design from using a 20+ year old design.
The US attorney general does. You're right, gambling is not as big a problem. But I'd reiterate, it doesn't matter what we think the problem is, it's the priorities of the government. And spam is a low priority for them compared to gambling. So you're not going to see them "waste" time and political capital on spam. That's just the US, but I haven't seen any country really make an effort to - or even talk about - solving the problem. Unless it becomes a much higher priority, spam cannot be solved internationally.
I'm willing to bet that the people making money from those gambling operation still live comfortably in the USA or EU. If they actually faced a choice like "(A) personally move to a third world country, (B) shut down the operation, or (C) go to jail" I still believe that most would choose B.
I've read about it. They live in Aruba. One guy interviewed fully realizes he'll be arrested if he ever comes back to the US. He's fine with that, because he's 1) rich, and 2) lives in a tropical paradise.
I.e., as I've described before, that country would find itself quickly off the net, and its spammers effectively disconnected from their source of income. Sure, the country may still encourage them. But suddenly they can't actually make money as long as they stay in that country. Are you that sure they wouldn't drop it like a hot potato?
So why is that not happening? Because NO COUNTRY, let alone an ISP, is willing to have the arrogance of completely cutting another country off, even for spam. The question of whether this would work is completely irrelevant because it would cause much bigger problems than it would solve. It would cure spam in much the same way that decapitation would cure acne.
It's much the same as from half the world you can't make a credit card purchase any more. There was no political decree to start blocking those countries' citizens from online purchases. It's the banks themselves who eventually just had enough of those countries' encouraging fraud.
And why aren't ISP's doing this now? Maybe a few do, but because enough spam comes from, say, Korea, and that's a big country, cutting it off isn't an option. Hell, we can't even catch people spamming in *this* country easily because of the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy, jurisdictional problems, and the difficulty of tracing spam back to its actual sender.
Basically, your plan requires every country of any significant size to simultanuously solve the spam problem. That's why it won't happen. Ideas like yours sound great in a bottle, but when you actually go to implement them, it gets messy. The place where it falls apart is the same as with air pollution laws, a significant portion of the countries will balk at implementing the plan if there's anyone who won't, as all it takes is a few bad apples to make the entire effort pointless. So unless you can solve the problem internationally all at the same time, it won't work. And since that'll never happen, that's why legislating spam away won't be successful.
Bottom line, if the govs/ISPs want to solve the problem, and your idea is implementable, why aren't they doing it? I can assure you, it isn't because they haven't thought of it.
I realize that. But Europe isn't the real problem either, it's Asia. And it only takes a few jurisdictions who don't care to keep spam rolling. And it's also easy to find cracks in jurisdictional entanglements even if everyone works together. Look, if we were talking about murder, they might get it together. But I don't see the FBI and Interpol getting their braintrusts together to solve spam.
It's mostly your spam that's dumped upon the rest of the world. USA is currently _the_ biggest source of spam, followed by... offshored operations paid for by someone from the USA.
Don't know why you're making this a US issue. If I were to bite, I'd also say we have more people connected, and I haven't seen stats that say we spam inordinately given our internet presence. But this is an international problem regardless, it doesn't matter.
Once you have secured an EU+North America treaty on that issue, the rest of the world should IMHO be actually pretty easy.
I wish. China will pay lip service but they don't have the resources now to solve a problem they don't really see as a problem. Look at copy protection as an example. They'll sign the treaty and smile, and that'll be that.
We're talking some major combined economic power there. Any country who doesn't want to play ball with that kind of a behemoth can be whacked into submission in a variety of ways, ranging from economic sanctions to just disconnecting them from the Internet.
You only have so much political capital, and I don't think nations are willing to use it on spam. Really, it's not enough of a priority. So no one's going to make that level of a threat against China. China would be insulted, it would set back relations severely, and they're doing worse things (like dumping product against WTO rules). So again, not happening. If our Attorney General went into a cabinet meeting and said that if China didn't cooperate on spam that we'd disconnect them and sanction them, he'd be laughed at. If we don't sanction them for unfair trade and human rights violations, we aren't doing it for spam.
But I don't think the spammers want to move to Elbonia or East Bumfuckistan and run their operation from there anyway. They might pay some local 5 bucks to run a server for them there, but they don't want to go live in a third world country. Those countries aren't that much fun.
No? How about Aruba, where all the internet gambling sites run? Bottom line is there will always be enough places that don't play ball, and that aren't worth shutting off from the net. And there will always be spambots, so that wouldn't help anyway. And there will always be enough jurisdictions that don't have enough time/money to pursue this problem that really doesn't hit the radar of (for example) our Department of Justice which generally has bigger problems. So you can forget about the nations of the world getting together to hammer out a solution to this problem. I don't plan to sit on my hands waiting for governments to solve the problem.
Utimately, yes, this problem could be solved if everyone worked together. But if you think that'll happen, you're truly naive.
Marginally if at all. What are you going to do, turn off the pacific rim (it would be nice, but not feasible)? It's also quite easy for foreigners, then, to hijack a spambot in the US. What do you do, bust the bot owner? Not likely, those sorts of actions would make the RIAA look warm and fuzzy.
Spam is not a technological problem. It is a commercial problem taking advantage of imperfection in technology. You probably can't solve the spam problem through purely technical means, since supply and demand-- the thing that's actually driving spam-- has shown itself adept at surmounting technical barriers. You can, however, if you target spam's commercial nature, make relatively sure at least that at no point does their cashflow come from within the U.S..
Sounds nice. How do you do that? How do you examine their cashflow if they're foreign? Subpoena? Not happening. That's where those jurisdictional boundaries get ugly. That's why internet gambling still works, because all these places are based in Aruba and the US has no way to shut them down, and no way to peek at their books to make sure Americans aren't patronizing them. If our government can't shut down internet gambling - and it would like to - the same techniques will also fail for spam.
The problem is that when you reduce any of these non-technical spam solutions to actual details, they don't work. If the problem were so easy to solve, it would have BEEN solved.
Sorry this is a bit off-thread, but you seemed like the only hope for someone who actually knew what they were tailing about.
None of those "let's redefine the SMTP standard" crackpot schemes are going to work. Remember, any solution has to be implementable for a billion internet users, and none of those hash schemes are. When the cost of implementation is higher than the cost of spam, the solution becomes a problem.
That's conclusionary - whether the playing field is level is quite open for debate. Who checks abuse of power of the big labor unions (ie, Teamsters)?
As a result big business obeyed the laws, but did their best to get around them and move their labor to places with governments less interested in the welfare of the people.
Or one could say they wanted to operate in jurisdictions that didn't put artificial constraints on the labor market. Or they wanted to operate in a market where they could be profitable. Remember, they're *businesses*, not welfare machines.
This may be a problem that the unions have to deal with (difficult since although they have the voting numbers, big business has the money which is more important in our twisted psuedo-republic).
Unions have a lot of cash that they extort from their members, who more often than not would rather not be members.
t is not, however, a inherent problem with unions but merely that businesses can move to where there are no unions, and unions have trouble forming in places with corrupt governments that don't mind shooting protesters.
Or...because unionized labor becomes more expensive than their unskilled members are worth? Labor is a commodity. If you demand more for it than it is worth, you'll be out of a job. This should not be surprising.
What amazes me is that people in more developed countries who are consumers put up with it. The whole "Made in America" label campaign should have been funded by unions and revamped to show all the horrible things companies are doing overseas and name companies by name. Now it is damn near impossible to find American made goods of many types.
Because American labor is too expensive to be able to use American workers and sell things at the prices the market will bear. Would you prefer lower wages? America is not a commodity producing nation, like it or not that's left to the 3rd world until they catch up economically.
As an aside, where's Jimmy Hoffa sleeping right about now?
First, I guess you didn't see the guy in VA who just got something like 9 years in jail.
That said, spam doesn't obey jurisdictional boundaries. Any single country can only solve a small part of the problem, and any spam incident often involves over 3 jusrisdictions that may be in separate countries (sender, spambot, recipient, etc). That's a logistical nightmare that isn't soluble outside of a dream world.
Also, force all ISP's to monitor how much bandwith a source has. If you get too much usage per day, say 200 megabytes or more, then that person has to explain why they need that much bandwith. If someone gets the RIAA on board, with their lobbyists, that should pass very quickly.
That's fantastic. Trade a bad problem for one that's much worse. Get the RIAA to legitimize their practices by using a guise of stopping spam? Let's not.
Also, force all email to have some element which identifies the source. Not just a header that can be forged, but something that can't be hacked.
Now by force, what do you do if they don't? Enforement issues again here.
Ultimately, legislative solutions for spam DO NOT and CAN NOT work for much but a small part of the problem. It's satistfying when some moron is clumsy enough to get caught (as with the guy in VA), but mostly these days the spammers aren't that stupid. Technological solutions work far better.
Yeah, I took a gamble poster wasn't British. I'll obviously concede Oxford and Cambridge are both great universities. Though I would contend that after that, things fall quickly.
Main point stands, though. The majority of the world's best universities, especially at the top, are in the US.
I hope that changes, honestly, and I say that as an American. Not because the world sends its best and brightest here (I actually like how multicultural that works out), but because more education is good for everybody. Europe is quickly falling behind - particularly the Continent - and India is quickly gaining. China will too, and Japan is already there.
Compare this to before WWII years ago, when Britain and Germany were dominant, America had a few good world-class schools, and India, China and Japan weren't on the map.
Not entirely. They drove their wages far above what similar non-unionized labor was getting in this country, and constantly threatened strikes if they didn't get to push it ever-higher. You could say they have a right to try to get what they can. You could also say they should have had some foresight to realize that doing so too many times would lose their jobs. Ultimately, it did.
The problem with striking is that you put the company in a position that it's better in the short term to give in to demands, yet better long term to simply do away with you. Since labor laws in this country forbid firing a striking work force, in general, the result was that jobs moved overseas. You had a lot of companies realizing they had to give in to unions or else go under, but at the same time putting plans in effect to ultimately rid themselves of unionized labor.
Today, after lots of plant closings, the UAW has realized that they need to work together with the company to find solutions that build the business as a whole while maintaining a fair cut for them. Watch the airline shakeout now - the only airlines that are profitable are non-unionized. You think that's a coincidence? Not by a longshot.
That doesn't mean organized labor is inherently bad. But I've got to say that it doesn't have a good name in the US, because of 1) the role it played in killing some US industries earlier than they otherwise would have died, and 2) its ties to organized crime. As I said, neither of those have to go with unionization, but they did here in the US.
Is it still arrogant if it's true?
FYI, there are actually a lot of other countries out there as good or better than MIT or Caltech. Of course, they're found in obscure, little-known countries like India, China, Britain, and Canada, but they're out there.
Names? As for England, Cambridge and Oxford are very good, both in the top 10 in a lot of fields. But Britain goes down fast after that. China's rising but not there yet, same for India. Canada doesn't have that many good schools, none of their best would top our top 20. That includes, for example, UToronto. You failed to mention Germany and Japan which would likely provide the best competition to the US, actually, after Britain.
Here's a list of the top schools compiled by a Chinese university: ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/top500(1-100).pdf. I deliberately chose a non-American source to prevent any "bias.". Of the top 25, 18 are American. That's not the only authority, of course, but I'd love to see any measure in which well over half the world's top universities weren't in the US.
Perhaps if your "super-elite, best-in-the-world" US colleges focused a little more on their geography classes instead of their patriotism classes, you'd know that.
I'm familiar with many institutions across the world (and quite good at geography). And I've never seen one that profs in the sciences would routinely choose a job at as opposed to any of the top 5 US schools (say MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford). The only ones that would offer competition would be Oxford and Cambridge. And I'm quite familiar with this situation. Probably different in liberal arts, but not science.
You may not like it - but it IS true.
Then start your own website. FWIW, your country doesn't have a single university as good as Caltech OR MIT. And I don't even have to ask where you're from before making that determination.
Nah, we can always hire someone like you to do it for $22K/yr.
how about 'e'? Also '@' when not part of an email address.
Problem is for midsize companies, they're big enough to have bureaucracy but not big enough to reap the rewards of defining their own standards. They'd rather pay Dell and MS their tax and support 1000 of basically the same machine than support 1000 different kinds of beige boxes with 10 different linux and windows versions. And there's some sense to that.
Larger companies would roll their own version of linux with custom apps, saving tons of money. But you have to be big enough to make the initial cost outlay pay you back.