Jailing a spammer is a waste of money--those tens of thousands of dollars would be better spent on funding technological anti-spam measures.
Spam is as much a social problem as anything - it's the willingness of people to buy things from unknown sources, and the willingness of the greedy to make a fast buck, that causes the problem.
Tech hasn't solved spam despite the massive amount of time and effort put in; it's a moving target. If anything, the advance of technology has also made it easier for authorities to invade privacy by scanning the content of *all* emails if they want under the guise of spam detection.
Look, I'm all for spammers getting ass-raped by rhinos or whatever, but to suggest that emailing someone is equivalent to trespass??!? J
spamming steals people's time. if it takes one minute for reach recipient to delete a spam, then he only needs to have sent 4.7M spams to have wasted nine years of people's lives in deleting his crap.
spamming also uses network and computer resources that *could* more usefully have been used (though, I'll admit, chances are it doesn't).
My wife once asked if I could get some smaller speaker to blend in and fit on some shelves (I have some fairly large, if quite old, Tannoy "dual concentrics"). I can't remember my exact reply, but my wife realised she wasn't going to win that battle... we compromised on trying to get the cables better hidden.
Long ago a girlfriend asked if I couldn't tuck these speakers away into the corners to get them out of sight etc; I replied pretty brusquely I'd rather take them outside and burn them. She said "I'll take that as a no, then".
I'm not a hifi snob, but the wife now seems to understand that to get the best sound from the equipment I have means that some aesthetics must suffer!
RTFA: "The government has announced plans to make the possession of violent porn punishable by three years in jail."
The labour gov't in the UK usually make knee-jerk responses promising to do something, and actually take action quite a while later. If the action benefits the people, it's usually postponed many times, if it benefits those in power or the machinery of gov't, it happens more quickly.
I expect this to be argued into the ground, stalled, and then some replacement and probably useless unenforceable idiotic law to replace it, under the guise of protection of children/vulnerable people with the effect of taking away more liberty and achieving NOTHING except incurring big costs for the taxpayer.
As for:
1/ trivial to get started, difficult to do non-standard tasks
and
2/ hard to understand, easy to do your own thing".
Are you serious??
I was talking in general about using computers, whether word process or the bundle of apps that people think is the operating system.
But speaking of linux, in my experience, as soon as you start to manipulate system config files directly instead of using the GUI tools, you can break the gui tools such that they can't understand your changes, and you're then forced to use the command line forever (or restore config files from backup if that's possible). Of course, in Windows, you can hack the registry, and that can lead to the same world of pain!
sorry to be rude, but if you are a real n00b to linux, are you qualified to judge lindows, er, linspire, er, freespire beyond the install and first impressions phase?
sadly, I think computer OS and apps are still polarised into two models:
1/ trivial to get started, difficult to do non-standard tasks
and
2/ hard to understand, easy to do your own thing".
As a simple example, consider the humble Palm.. trivial to use out of the box, doing anything complex with wifi or bluetooth is difficult or impossible. Then take a Zaurus, it quickly becomes non-trivial to use, but immensely rewarding with the full linux tcp/ip stack.
Many have tried and failed to bridge the gap, and it seems only Apple have really had much success.
icann control the root nameservers, which carry a pointer to e.g. the name server which hosts google.com's DNS
very popular sites like google will have their DNS cached almost everywhere, meaning very little actual traffic hitting the root nameservers - there will probably be MORE traffic from typo'd non-existent lookups than real ones.
long ago at university two of us worked on a project to produce a laser raster display. we used mirror-finish metal "drums" with octagonal-cross-section as mirrors, the horizontal scanner being quite smaller and running v fast, the second being relatively larger to provide vertical deflection driven by a stepper motor.
the only difficulty we had was trying to get the horizontal scan to synchronise reliably.
Some people are incredibly productive for 2 hours, and do nothing for the rest. Others work diligently, but slowly, for 8 hours
if I were an employer, I'd not pay the faster worker any more than the slow worker if the former didn't actually do more work in total than the latter. I'd pay people by the amount of useful work they did, if i could, not by their appearance of being busy!
however, I work for an organisation which is very wasteful of money and time, such that it's like swimming in treacle to achieve things, so eventually you learn to "go with the flow" and learn to work in bursts and waste, er, enjoy the slack time that it gives you.
News flash -- blank tapes and many CDs already incorprate such a levey in their price
No, the levy is there to compensate - in theory - the creators of artistic works. In practise I imagine it's completely wasted.
My proposal was to add, basically, a insurance tax fee onto all blank media in order to protect the person buying it from being sued for exercising their fair rights by copying legally purchased music/video onto it.
one must group together. Just like a Workers Union (in their original form), the only way to defend yourself is safety in numbers. Lets not forget that the RIAA is essentially a union for the already powerful music companies
Bingo! We need to form the MCAA - Media Consumer's Association of America, get Congress to insist on a levy on blank tapes and CDs and DVDs etc in order to to allow the members to participate in [rampant piracy] exercising their rights and be indemnified for all their legal costs!
2. The computer had the IBM label on it. These days, the IBM label does not carry the same cachet that the IBM name carried in the 1980s. At that time, IBM dominated the mindshare in the computer industry. People often said, "No one was ever fired for buying an IBM computer."
IBM's previous attempts at a home or personal/small-business were laughable. And the first PCs were pretty crap compared in features and performance - whilst the first 8088 or 8086 IBMs and compatibles struggled on with 80x25 character displays, a beeper and crude user interfaces, the Mac + Atari + Amiga people had bitmapped colour displays, digital audio and WIMP.
The only thing that made them interesting was the modularity and standard expansion slots; the rivals tended to be single-board devices which cost a lot more to expand.
It was only when the higher end 386DXs were around and bit-mapped displays that PCs even came close to rivalling the capabilities (hardware wise) of their rivals. It's a sad sad footnote in history that so much investment in time by both developers and third parties into Amiga, Atari & BeOS software has been "lost".
also.be,.nl and many other European countries have no second-level sub-division
the UK is unusual in that it should really have used.gb
most things in the UK live under.co.uk,.org.uk and.gov.uk; there's also.nhs.uk and.police.uk; due to various cockups far back in history there have been a few directly delegated domains under.uk.
I was told by an expert that it "costs" twice as much to cool air as to heat it, and the higher the surrounding air, the harder the air coolers have to work.
So, why don't we build big data centres in the arctic circle, and then just use lots of air vents to suck in cold air rather than use heat pumps to make cold air?
And when you want to really overclock, just tow a glacier in and feed it into the water-cooling system!
until I find a laptop that packs 1gb of ram, something between 1.5 and 2ghz of processing power (seriously, anything more is stupid overkill), 8 hours battery life
the Sony TX series come close, although you do need good eyesight to run windows with standard sized icons and fonts... even though I'm used to PDAs (Zaurus, Palm T3) I had to use "large icons" and "big fonts" settings (which makes windows quite fugly IMHO as it's never understood device resolution independent display). I've only had it a few days, so once I install linux it'll be far better as KDE makes everything scalable.
I hope it's as successful and lucrative as the Xbox.
You must be running Windows as it posted the above instead of what you typed:
I hope it's as hackable and cheap as the Xbox.
I was flying on Singapore Airlines when the spoof movie HotShots came out; they removed quite a lot of the flying scenes especially the plane crashes; made large parts of the movie incomprehensible as the plot no longer worked!
Slashdot Mirror
Spam is as much a social problem as anything - it's the willingness of people to buy things from unknown sources, and the willingness of the greedy to make a fast buck, that causes the problem.
Tech hasn't solved spam despite the massive amount of time and effort put in; it's a moving target. If anything, the advance of technology has also made it easier for authorities to invade privacy by scanning the content of *all* emails if they want under the guise of spam detection.
spamming steals people's time. if it takes one minute for reach recipient to delete a spam, then he only needs to have sent 4.7M spams to have wasted nine years of people's lives in deleting his crap.
spamming also uses network and computer resources that *could* more usefully have been used (though, I'll admit, chances are it doesn't).
AMD also win - they own ATI, who make video chipsets.
Long ago a girlfriend asked if I couldn't tuck these speakers away into the corners to get them out of sight etc; I replied pretty brusquely I'd rather take them outside and burn them. She said "I'll take that as a no, then".
I'm not a hifi snob, but the wife now seems to understand that to get the best sound from the equipment I have means that some aesthetics must suffer!
get those mother-f*ck*ng anacondas off my mother-f*ck*ng wikipedia!
so, was the Man In The Moon a member of Al Qaeda? We the people demand to know!
you can run tcp/ip over usb - check out module g_ether and usbnet in the linux kernel
The labour gov't in the UK usually make knee-jerk responses promising to do something, and actually take action quite a while later. If the action benefits the people, it's usually postponed many times, if it benefits those in power or the machinery of gov't, it happens more quickly.
I expect this to be argued into the ground, stalled, and then some replacement and probably useless unenforceable idiotic law to replace it, under the guise of protection of children/vulnerable people with the effect of taking away more liberty and achieving NOTHING except incurring big costs for the taxpayer.
1/ trivial to get started, difficult to do non-standard tasks and 2/ hard to understand, easy to do your own thing".
Are you serious??
I was talking in general about using computers, whether word process or the bundle of apps that people think is the operating system.
But speaking of linux, in my experience, as soon as you start to manipulate system config files directly instead of using the GUI tools, you can break the gui tools such that they can't understand your changes, and you're then forced to use the command line forever (or restore config files from backup if that's possible). Of course, in Windows, you can hack the registry, and that can lead to the same world of pain!
sorry to be rude, but if you are a real n00b to linux, are you qualified to judge lindows, er, linspire, er, freespire beyond the install and first impressions phase?
sadly, I think computer OS and apps are still polarised into two models:
1/ trivial to get started, difficult to do non-standard tasks
and
2/ hard to understand, easy to do your own thing".
As a simple example, consider the humble Palm.. trivial to use out of the box, doing anything complex with wifi or bluetooth is difficult or impossible. Then take a Zaurus, it quickly becomes non-trivial to use, but immensely rewarding with the full linux tcp/ip stack.
Many have tried and failed to bridge the gap, and it seems only Apple have really had much success.
very popular sites like google will have their DNS cached almost everywhere, meaning very little actual traffic hitting the root nameservers - there will probably be MORE traffic from typo'd non-existent lookups than real ones.
long ago at university two of us worked on a project to produce a laser raster display. we used mirror-finish metal "drums" with octagonal-cross-section as mirrors, the horizontal scanner being quite smaller and running v fast, the second being relatively larger to provide vertical deflection driven by a stepper motor. the only difficulty we had was trying to get the horizontal scan to synchronise reliably.
if I were an employer, I'd not pay the faster worker any more than the slow worker if the former didn't actually do more work in total than the latter. I'd pay people by the amount of useful work they did, if i could, not by their appearance of being busy!
however, I work for an organisation which is very wasteful of money and time, such that it's like swimming in treacle to achieve things, so eventually you learn to "go with the flow" and learn to work in bursts and waste, er, enjoy the slack time that it gives you.
No, the levy is there to compensate - in theory - the creators of artistic works. In practise I imagine it's completely wasted.
My proposal was to add, basically, a insurance tax fee onto all blank media in order to protect the person buying it from being sued for exercising their fair rights by copying legally purchased music/video onto it.
Bingo! We need to form the MCAA - Media Consumer's Association of America, get Congress to insist on a levy on blank tapes and CDs and DVDs etc in order to to allow the members to participate in [rampant piracy] exercising their rights and be indemnified for all their legal costs!
IBM's previous attempts at a home or personal/small-business were laughable. And the first PCs were pretty crap compared in features and performance - whilst the first 8088 or 8086 IBMs and compatibles struggled on with 80x25 character displays, a beeper and crude user interfaces, the Mac + Atari + Amiga people had bitmapped colour displays, digital audio and WIMP.
The only thing that made them interesting was the modularity and standard expansion slots; the rivals tended to be single-board devices which cost a lot more to expand.
It was only when the higher end 386DXs were around and bit-mapped displays that PCs even came close to rivalling the capabilities (hardware wise) of their rivals. It's a sad sad footnote in history that so much investment in time by both developers and third parties into Amiga, Atari & BeOS software has been "lost".
a simple home computer in the UK called the Jupiter Ace was entirely forth based; it still has a fan club today!
shhh! don't let any women read that post otherwise the fundamental secret life of the /. reader will have been revealed!
the UK is unusual in that it should really have used .gb
most things in the UK live under .co.uk, .org.uk and .gov.uk; there's also .nhs.uk and .police.uk; due to various cockups far back in history there have been a few directly delegated domains under .uk.
I was told by an expert that it "costs" twice as much to cool air as to heat it, and the higher the surrounding air, the harder the air coolers have to work. So, why don't we build big data centres in the arctic circle, and then just use lots of air vents to suck in cold air rather than use heat pumps to make cold air? And when you want to really overclock, just tow a glacier in and feed it into the water-cooling system!
ok, so if two wrongs don't make a right, try three!
a Zaurus with an extended battery would probably fit the bill.
until I find a laptop that packs 1gb of ram, something between 1.5 and 2ghz of processing power (seriously, anything more is stupid overkill), 8 hours battery life
the Sony TX series come close, although you do need good eyesight to run windows with standard sized icons and fonts... even though I'm used to PDAs (Zaurus, Palm T3) I had to use "large icons" and "big fonts" settings (which makes windows quite fugly IMHO as it's never understood device resolution independent display). I've only had it a few days, so once I install linux it'll be far better as KDE makes everything scalable.
I hope it's as successful and lucrative as the Xbox.
You must be running Windows as it posted the above instead of what you typed:
I hope it's as hackable and cheap as the Xbox.
I was flying on Singapore Airlines when the spoof movie HotShots came out; they removed quite a lot of the flying scenes especially the plane crashes; made large parts of the movie incomprehensible as the plot no longer worked!