What's frightening is that it doesn't look like the bridge has much for side-railing other than standard waist-high burms. Major pants-wetting factor. But if a lot of people would get the creeps driving over it, imagine what it would have been like to be one of the guys building it!
The bridge they're planning on building that crosses from Alaska to Russia (or whatever - I forget) would affect me the same way. It's not high up, but it's not far off of the water-line, either.
What's the difference between private slavery and public slavery?
That's my point.
I don't trust Big-Brother government to keep Big-Brother Private Industry in check with regard to my privacy. That's like putting the mob in charge of cleaning up racketeering. Further, I'm more concerned with government respecting my privacy than I am with private industry. If my government respects my privacy above all else, they will be more effective and more genuine in their persuit of private industries who use our data perversely.
In other words, the argument is "even if you change jobs or companies you deal with, you are still stuck under an oppresive and invasive government that doesn't respect your privacy or civil liberties".
I can't wait until we get news of the first suicide jumper from that bridge. Hopefully someone will catch it on video. Talk about "news that hurts"!
High bridges freak me out. Where I live, we have a lot of bridges - even just downtown (over the Willamette River). The Burnside Bridge is fine. It's very wide and low. But then we have bridges like the Freemont which are very high suspension bridges that make my heart catch in my throat.
I'm not even normally afraid of hights... but stick me in a car with a thousand other cars on the bridge and I get vertigo.
Well, the nice thing about mozilla is you're always encouraged to submit an RFE so the devs can add it. Or you can add it yourself and submit the change to the code. Or you could pay someone to do it. Or you could submit the RFE and then convince people to go to bugzilla and vote for the RFE so it will be included.
You can't do that with MS. You can wish for things all you want but they'll give you what they want you to have.
Cookie, bookmark and history managment could certainly be improved in Mozilla (in all browsers, really) but I can't see how that's enough to make one willing to suffer with MSIE instead.
Shrink-wrap licenses are logistically a different beast. There's a big different between not being able to agree to something until you've been able to read what you're agreeing to - and simply being too lazy or stupid to read the fine print.
"Well, the user agreement was too long for me to read - boo hoo!". That just isn't a good reason to excuse consumers from their responsibility. Do I read every word of every agreement I ever click on? No, not really. Why? Well... because they're usually very long and usually say the same thing and I'm a busy person. That doesn't make me any less responsible for adhering to the things I agreed to, though.
Think of it this way. Ignorance of the law does not excuse one when they break the law. The law books are long and complicated and often require lawyers, judges or even benches of judges to interpret them. We still have to obey laws even if we don't know they exist or understand them.
Clearly, hiding clauses is wrong but that's a different situation. Any clause that exists on the piece of paper I've signed is a clause I should be bound by, no matter how absurd or extreme it is. Just becuase it's worded strangely or written in an 8pt font doesn't change anything. Now, if they spring things on me that were not on that page or later added various qualifications and restrictions to the agreement... that's not right either.
I think you've indicated that you agree with my comments insofar as a difference between "informed" and "too lazy to bother being informed" or "read all the gotchas but these other restrictions weren't anywhere to be seen -- not even in the fine print".
But in the case of google, that isn't what's happening. The government is pre-emptively saying that google can't enter into a contract with customers regardless of how open they are. That's just wrong.
The government has no business regulating privacy practices in private industry until they stop the STASI-like TIA-style/echelon practices of their own.
Remember the 80's when credit card companies would give anyone a credit card at like 50% interest, compounded minutely? Some people were just stupid... some mislead... but either way, it had to stop, because even though there was a mutual agreement, more times then not, people signed away their soul because of other dire situations.
I'm sorry, but you make your choices and you pay your dues. No matter what is happening in your life, you are never forced to sign up for a credit card regardless of the terms.
Government has no place dictating what stupid things I can do to myself and what stupid contracts I can agree to. If I'm so brain dead that I don't know 50% interest is a bad deal and I'm willing to pay that, then I deserve to be eaten alive financially and turned into soilent green.
Protecting stupid people from hurting themselves only worsens the gene pool.
You uninstalled Firefox because you have to use MSIE to install patch updates for your operating system? Did you throw away your car because sometimes you ride a bike, too?
Computers have become a consumer product, but unlike other consumer devices (TVs, VCRs, Microwaves) they can actually fuck things up if they do something wrong, or something different...
However, unlike those things the only possible way to fuck things up beyond repair is if you spill coffee on the componants inside of the case. Computers offer absolute freedom to explore and self-educate and play around. The most damaging thing you'll ever do is screw up your installation in which case you whip out the install disk.
And why do these people who are "afraid to install a browser that didn't come with their operating system" always download every fucking thing they come across on the internet, from Bonzai Buddy and WeatherBug to MySearch and a half dozen instant messaging clients?
But honestly if I'm running windows, what real motiviation is there to download a replacement browser when IE is already installed, and works?
* I like having a pop-up blocker.
* I like the regex-based content filtering of the adblock extension which eliminates almost all advertising, including flash animation.
* I like tabbed browsing.
* I like fast rendering.
* I like the advanced bookmark, history and cookie handling.
* I like the CTRL+K google search tab (which is also expandable to other engines) in Firefox.
* I like the livehttpheaders plugin that lets me see the http header content for debugging stuff.
* I like the web developer extension with all the useful tools.
* I like the "open this page in MSIE" extension that lets me quickly launch MS-proprietary coded crap-pages in IE that won't render right in Mozilla.
* I like not having to worry about Active-X and other security concerns.
* I like mouse gestures.
* I like the reloadevery extension that lets me set a tab's page to reload at whatever interval I want (great for slashdot and other forums as well as the drudgereports.com news site!).
* I like the better CSS support and ability to customize CSS from my end-user side.
Those are just things that came off the top of my head. Notice that almost all of them are with regard to the end-user experience and not my "I'm a web designer (because I'm not) and prefer Mozilla and wish all my visitors used it". And I won't even get into all the wonderful reasons to install Thunderbird as an email client.
I'm not sure why Microsoft would even want to stay in the browser business anymore. There was a time where the leverage was useful but it seems like it might be time to close-up shop on the MSIE development group and just start bundling Mozilla with the operating system as the default browser. This pushes the bad publicity of security issues off of them partially and gives them a world-class web browser while saving the cost of having a huge development team of their own.
I understand the point of Microsoft pushing MSIE in 1999, but I don't see those same reasons today.
As a man, I am just waiting for a SIMS Serial Killer edition. One where you can raise your sim from a young simling burning cats and torturing flies and beating up neighborhood kids to a grown adult commiting serial murders and tortures and evading the law and building a complete basement.
Stats would have to vary, of course. Insanity meter. Perversion meter and so on.
I'll take that over a dull relationship sims any day!:)
I played for about three hours and mine walked around in their underwear at the most. They even shower in it them. I didn't play long enough to see any "action" as the game really just bored me. I thought there might be some signficant twist on the Sims idea, but there wasn't. The "relationship" stuff was so cardboard that I can't see women playing it and otherwise than porn, I can't see any guys seriously wanting to play the game since managing relationships isn't typically a male interest.
Ties had a minor comeback with the recent bad job market, but hopefully that's behind us.
Clearly, you must be living in India.
Apart from the obvious that neckties are uncomfortable, useless, in-the-way
Useless? And what exactly do you plan to cover your shirt buttons with if not a tie? I don't wear ties and I never will. Period. I'll wear a dress shirt on occasion but unless I'm an executive, a tie is really overboard and hints at a tendancy to ass-kiss.
Actually, I believe you are incorrect about refusing service if you do not give a company your SSN. Social Security Numbers are for employment and government use only and are not supposed to be used for any other purpose. The only people you are required to give your SSN to is some government agents, your employer and your banking institution.
Whenever anyone else asks for your SSN, simply tell them you wish to use another password or unique identification number.
I do not give out my SSN. It's a significant part of being able to steal your identity and there is no reason to not use another number. Nobody has ever refused to give me service because of this. I simply say "I don't give my SSN out - but I'll gladly give you another passcode if that's what you want".
See the ACLU and EFF websits for more information on your rights with regard to social security identification numbers.
Out of curiosity after seing a lot of articles about the game, I played Singles a little bit one evening. I'm not sure what the big deal is. Aside from it being a boring version of Sims, there was no nudity (not that I was hoping for it or anything). In fact, when your sims use the bathroom, huge toilet paper icons are plastered over them so youy only see their feet, neck and head. When they change clothes or shower, they are still in their underwear.
I think the people who report on Singles have failed to do their homework (or have clearly made it much further in the game than I bothered to - but if you were going to have a game with nudity why would you bother to cover up going to the bathroom or shower?). It strikes me as being very similar to all the idiot journalists covering the "underage and pre-teen children wearing colored jelly bracelets to indicate sexual activities they're willing to do" whenever they need a news story in 2004. Clearly it's overstated or possibly even entirely made-up -- but they still run with it because it gets eyeballs.
I don't mind nudity in games anyway. Nobody's forced to buy a game and there is probably a market for quality game play that includes some degree of sex or nudity beyond the old Leisure Suit Larry and Strip Poker products.
No kidding. This is the stupidest "Ask Slashdot" ever - and that's saying a lot.
Why would anyone expect a company they have done business with to delete all records of having done business with them after they're no longer a customer? For one thing, companies are often required by law to retain certain documentation and for another - who the hell cares?
Why should an ISP be expected to delete their records any more than the electric company, phone company, Amazon.com or the IRS?
Of all the things to get your panties in a bunch over...
I wonder how many players are still playing today and have been playing for the full seven years? I also wonder what type of people they are, in general. I've played a lot of MMORPGs in the last few years - hoping that each one would be the magic bullet that has the right mix of story, world, graphics, community, player-base-size, in-depth-play, imagination and compelling play that would keep my attention and not turn into a boring gold-hording click-fest.
So far, after playing about two dozen MMORPGs, including A Tale In The Desert, Anarchy Online, Rubies of Eventide, Shadowbane, The Sims Online (ick), Neocron, City of Heroes, Planetside and Dark Ages of Camelot - none have held my interest for more than a month and very few have held my interest for more than one or two weeks.
This new plant creates plasma, which is akin to creating a star on Earth. Interesting to note that 1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels."
Bah. It sounds like these guys are just on a fruitless scientific fision-expidition./cute hi-hat
Of course you know you have them. You can rule out a significant portion of messages based on the type of file attachments they have. You can rule out another significant portion based on the sender addresses. Another huge chunk is ruled out because it's wanted mail from whitelisted senders.
This reduces the amount of mail that you need to pay any attention to at all by a large portion. Additionally, the STATISTICS.TXT file with spamassassin shows tests against corpuses at set score levels and anything over something like 16 is likely to produce a false positives so infrequently that it doesn't even register (going by memory here). At any rate, you can confidently seperate out any messages with an extremely high spamassassin score. For my case, anything over 25 which is actually a large portion of my spam since I've written and customized plenty of spamassassin rule sets.
Using procmail, you have potentially questionable positives seperated into a SPAM_LOW mbox. You can set the low spam bar conservatively high just to be safe. You've now reduced the quantity of email that needs manual verification by about 95%.
The remaining spam that exists in the SPAM_LOW mbox is scripted out into a list of subject lines only which you can eyeball with much success.
In addition, you run the same statistical rule analysis that the spambayes devs use against your manually verified corpus occasionally to see how successful it is working. This gives you solid evidence of the quality of your filtering.
And, again, the fact that I am the only person who has an account on this server solidifies the effectiveness of all taken measures as what I want and do not want is not muddled with a global deployment shared with hundreds or thousands of other accounts who are training a server-wide bayes as well.
The idea of having to sort through 2.9 million messages by hand just to prove that there are no false positives is idiotic. Do you really think any message containing an attachment called 'your_profile.scr.pif' is ever going to be non-spam? Clearly not.
You can increase the threshhold at which you declare spam to be spam. Allows for more misses, but reduces the false positives to, essentially, nothing.
Or, you can just tag likely spam with ***SPAM*** in the subject and let the user deal with it.
Or even better, you can direct likely spam into a specific IMAP folder on the server that the user's client can subscribe to and they can glance at their personal SPAM folder on the server whenever they want without having to download all the bodies.
As someone who personally uses postfix+procmail+spamassassin+razor and recieves 4,000 emails per day, I am currently filtering out 98% of the spam on the server and have had ZERO false positives in two years and 2.9million messages.
Statistically, you will eventually get some false positives - especially if you have a large userbase (as opposed to just one or two accounts). But if one out of every few million messages isn't acceptable, you can just use one of the previously suggested methods.
I was specifically speaking to the claims of the company I have heard on the radio as I quoted in my post. That is, a company that not only claims to tell you the information the original article's company does - but to allow you to also have full control over your message. Meaning that you could delete the email and any attachments from all mankind with a simple keystroke - which is clearly fraudulent and absurd.
The company is called BigString.com and they claim their email is:
* recallable * erasable * changeable * allow time delay of sending emails * time out of sent emails * report of when your messages are opened * the ability to only alow images to be viewed once and not allowed to be forwarded * ability to prevent messages from being printed * ability to prevent messages from being saved
I have not researched the company because it is either entirely bullshit or proprietary as I can clearly access any email, save it and then do whatever I want with it - BigString be damned.
The only way I can see this working is if the sender has to hav an account on their server and the recipient has to have an account on their server and then they employ some form of scripting with custom external (non mailstore) storage of messages and images tied together with a key or webbug/htmlbug.
If you ask me, these claims and offerings are far above and beyond that of the USA Today article or this Slashdot article.
They also claim that the technology is "patent-pending" and that sending email is the same as any regular email.
Bigstring is the sole provider of fully Erasable-Recallable Email. Pioneering the field with our unique patent-pending technology, we empower our users with the ability to take control of their email. The best part is that it is easy to use - in fact there is no difference from regular email. Three years ago, the Bigstring founders set out to build the best Spam fighting email system on the planet, and then, quite by accident, they invented the world's first fully erasable email and didn't even realize it. A few months ago, one of the founders, Darin, sent an important new client an email with the wrong attachment. Upset, he asked his partners if there was any way that you could recall an email; the immediate answer was "No"!!! Then, Dave scratched his head... and said, "Well, if we modify the new system just a little, you can erase your mail, edit it, change attachments, set it to expire at a certain time and even know when it's been read." Darin said, "So, it's like you have a big string on your email and pull it back"...and Bigstring was born.
Slashdot Mirror
What's frightening is that it doesn't look like the bridge has much for side-railing other than standard waist-high burms. Major pants-wetting factor. But if a lot of people would get the creeps driving over it, imagine what it would have been like to be one of the guys building it!
The bridge they're planning on building that crosses from Alaska to Russia (or whatever - I forget) would affect me the same way. It's not high up, but it's not far off of the water-line, either.
What's the difference between private slavery and public slavery?
That's my point.
I don't trust Big-Brother government to keep Big-Brother Private Industry in check with regard to my privacy. That's like putting the mob in charge of cleaning up racketeering. Further, I'm more concerned with government respecting my privacy than I am with private industry. If my government respects my privacy above all else, they will be more effective and more genuine in their persuit of private industries who use our data perversely.
In other words, the argument is "even if you change jobs or companies you deal with, you are still stuck under an oppresive and invasive government that doesn't respect your privacy or civil liberties".
I can't wait until we get news of the first suicide jumper from that bridge. Hopefully someone will catch it on video. Talk about "news that hurts"!
High bridges freak me out. Where I live, we have a lot of bridges - even just downtown (over the Willamette River). The Burnside Bridge is fine. It's very wide and low. But then we have bridges like the Freemont which are very high suspension bridges that make my heart catch in my throat.
I'm not even normally afraid of hights... but stick me in a car with a thousand other cars on the bridge and I get vertigo.
Well, the nice thing about mozilla is you're always encouraged to submit an RFE so the devs can add it. Or you can add it yourself and submit the change to the code. Or you could pay someone to do it. Or you could submit the RFE and then convince people to go to bugzilla and vote for the RFE so it will be included.
You can't do that with MS. You can wish for things all you want but they'll give you what they want you to have.
Cookie, bookmark and history managment could certainly be improved in Mozilla (in all browsers, really) but I can't see how that's enough to make one willing to suffer with MSIE instead.
Shrink-wrap licenses are logistically a different beast. There's a big different between not being able to agree to something until you've been able to read what you're agreeing to - and simply being too lazy or stupid to read the fine print.
"Well, the user agreement was too long for me to read - boo hoo!". That just isn't a good reason to excuse consumers from their responsibility. Do I read every word of every agreement I ever click on? No, not really. Why? Well... because they're usually very long and usually say the same thing and I'm a busy person. That doesn't make me any less responsible for adhering to the things I agreed to, though.
Think of it this way. Ignorance of the law does not excuse one when they break the law. The law books are long and complicated and often require lawyers, judges or even benches of judges to interpret them. We still have to obey laws even if we don't know they exist or understand them.
Clearly, hiding clauses is wrong but that's a different situation. Any clause that exists on the piece of paper I've signed is a clause I should be bound by, no matter how absurd or extreme it is. Just becuase it's worded strangely or written in an 8pt font doesn't change anything. Now, if they spring things on me that were not on that page or later added various qualifications and restrictions to the agreement... that's not right either.
I think you've indicated that you agree with my comments insofar as a difference between "informed" and "too lazy to bother being informed" or "read all the gotchas but these other restrictions weren't anywhere to be seen -- not even in the fine print".
But in the case of google, that isn't what's happening. The government is pre-emptively saying that google can't enter into a contract with customers regardless of how open they are. That's just wrong.
The government has no business regulating privacy practices in private industry until they stop the STASI-like TIA-style/echelon practices of their own.
Remember the 80's when credit card companies would give anyone a credit card at like 50% interest, compounded minutely? Some people were just stupid... some mislead... but either way, it had to stop, because even though there was a mutual agreement, more times then not, people signed away their soul because of other dire situations.
I'm sorry, but you make your choices and you pay your dues. No matter what is happening in your life, you are never forced to sign up for a credit card regardless of the terms.
Government has no place dictating what stupid things I can do to myself and what stupid contracts I can agree to. If I'm so brain dead that I don't know 50% interest is a bad deal and I'm willing to pay that, then I deserve to be eaten alive financially and turned into soilent green.
Protecting stupid people from hurting themselves only worsens the gene pool.
where's my option to always allow session cookies regardless? IE has had this functionality for quite a while now.
Do you mean this?
tools-->options-->privacy-->cookies-->enable cookies-->for the current session only
Actually, I'd rather install things on linux than MSIE.
If I want to switch browsers on Windows, I have to:
+ Launch MSIE.
+ Go to mozilla.org
+ Go to the download page.
+ Click on the download.
+ Launch the downloaded file.
+ Walk through the installation.
If I'm using linux:
# apt-get install mozilla
I sure know what I prefer.
Firefox is the popular Mozilla Browser, because it follows windows and IE conventions (e.g. shortcuts) and is fast (not bloatware)
Riiiight. That grand Microsoft and Windows tradition of speed and non-bloatware...
Huh? What do you mean "IE gets in the way"?
You uninstalled Firefox because you have to use MSIE to install patch updates for your operating system? Did you throw away your car because sometimes you ride a bike, too?
Computers have become a consumer product, but unlike other consumer devices (TVs, VCRs, Microwaves) they can actually fuck things up if they do something wrong, or something different...
However, unlike those things the only possible way to fuck things up beyond repair is if you spill coffee on the componants inside of the case. Computers offer absolute freedom to explore and self-educate and play around. The most damaging thing you'll ever do is screw up your installation in which case you whip out the install disk.
And why do these people who are "afraid to install a browser that didn't come with their operating system" always download every fucking thing they come across on the internet, from Bonzai Buddy and WeatherBug to MySearch and a half dozen instant messaging clients?
But honestly if I'm running windows, what real motiviation is there to download a replacement browser when IE is already installed, and works?
* I like having a pop-up blocker.
* I like the regex-based content filtering of the adblock extension which eliminates almost all advertising, including flash animation.
* I like tabbed browsing.
* I like fast rendering.
* I like the advanced bookmark, history and cookie handling.
* I like the CTRL+K google search tab (which is also expandable to other engines) in Firefox.
* I like the livehttpheaders plugin that lets me see the http header content for debugging stuff.
* I like the web developer extension with all the useful tools.
* I like the "open this page in MSIE" extension that lets me quickly launch MS-proprietary coded crap-pages in IE that won't render right in Mozilla.
* I like not having to worry about Active-X and other security concerns.
* I like mouse gestures.
* I like the reloadevery extension that lets me set a tab's page to reload at whatever interval I want (great for slashdot and other forums as well as the drudgereports.com news site!).
* I like the better CSS support and ability to customize CSS from my end-user side.
Those are just things that came off the top of my head. Notice that almost all of them are with regard to the end-user experience and not my "I'm a web designer (because I'm not) and prefer Mozilla and wish all my visitors used it". And I won't even get into all the wonderful reasons to install Thunderbird as an email client.
I'm not sure why Microsoft would even want to stay in the browser business anymore. There was a time where the leverage was useful but it seems like it might be time to close-up shop on the MSIE development group and just start bundling Mozilla with the operating system as the default browser. This pushes the bad publicity of security issues off of them partially and gives them a world-class web browser while saving the cost of having a huge development team of their own.
I understand the point of Microsoft pushing MSIE in 1999, but I don't see those same reasons today.
As a man, I am just waiting for a SIMS Serial Killer edition. One where you can raise your sim from a young simling burning cats and torturing flies and beating up neighborhood kids to a grown adult commiting serial murders and tortures and evading the law and building a complete basement.
:)
Stats would have to vary, of course. Insanity meter. Perversion meter and so on.
I'll take that over a dull relationship sims any day!
I played for about three hours and mine walked around in their underwear at the most. They even shower in it them. I didn't play long enough to see any "action" as the game really just bored me. I thought there might be some signficant twist on the Sims idea, but there wasn't. The "relationship" stuff was so cardboard that I can't see women playing it and otherwise than porn, I can't see any guys seriously wanting to play the game since managing relationships isn't typically a male interest.
(Repost in non-anonymous mode -- oops!)
Ties had a minor comeback with the recent bad job market, but hopefully that's behind us.
Clearly, you must be living in India.
Apart from the obvious that neckties are uncomfortable, useless, in-the-way
Useless? And what exactly do you plan to cover your shirt buttons with if not a tie? I don't wear ties and I never will. Period. I'll wear a dress shirt on occasion but unless I'm an executive, a tie is really overboard and hints at a tendancy to ass-kiss.
Actually, I believe you are incorrect about refusing service if you do not give a company your SSN. Social Security Numbers are for employment and government use only and are not supposed to be used for any other purpose. The only people you are required to give your SSN to is some government agents, your employer and your banking institution.
Whenever anyone else asks for your SSN, simply tell them you wish to use another password or unique identification number.
I do not give out my SSN. It's a significant part of being able to steal your identity and there is no reason to not use another number. Nobody has ever refused to give me service because of this. I simply say "I don't give my SSN out - but I'll gladly give you another passcode if that's what you want".
See the ACLU and EFF websits for more information on your rights with regard to social security identification numbers.
Out of curiosity after seing a lot of articles about the game, I played Singles a little bit one evening. I'm not sure what the big deal is. Aside from it being a boring version of Sims, there was no nudity (not that I was hoping for it or anything). In fact, when your sims use the bathroom, huge toilet paper icons are plastered over them so youy only see their feet, neck and head. When they change clothes or shower, they are still in their underwear.
I think the people who report on Singles have failed to do their homework (or have clearly made it much further in the game than I bothered to - but if you were going to have a game with nudity why would you bother to cover up going to the bathroom or shower?). It strikes me as being very similar to all the idiot journalists covering the "underage and pre-teen children wearing colored jelly bracelets to indicate sexual activities they're willing to do" whenever they need a news story in 2004. Clearly it's overstated or possibly even entirely made-up -- but they still run with it because it gets eyeballs.
I don't mind nudity in games anyway. Nobody's forced to buy a game and there is probably a market for quality game play that includes some degree of sex or nudity beyond the old Leisure Suit Larry and Strip Poker products.
No kidding. This is the stupidest "Ask Slashdot" ever - and that's saying a lot.
Why would anyone expect a company they have done business with to delete all records of having done business with them after they're no longer a customer? For one thing, companies are often required by law to retain certain documentation and for another - who the hell cares?
Why should an ISP be expected to delete their records any more than the electric company, phone company, Amazon.com or the IRS?
Of all the things to get your panties in a bunch over...
I wonder how many players are still playing today and have been playing for the full seven years? I also wonder what type of people they are, in general. I've played a lot of MMORPGs in the last few years - hoping that each one would be the magic bullet that has the right mix of story, world, graphics, community, player-base-size, in-depth-play, imagination and compelling play that would keep my attention and not turn into a boring gold-hording click-fest.
So far, after playing about two dozen MMORPGs, including A Tale In The Desert, Anarchy Online, Rubies of Eventide, Shadowbane, The Sims Online (ick), Neocron, City of Heroes, Planetside and Dark Ages of Camelot - none have held my interest for more than a month and very few have held my interest for more than one or two weeks.
This new plant creates plasma, which is akin to creating a star on Earth. Interesting to note that 1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels."
/cute hi-hat
Bah. It sounds like these guys are just on a fruitless scientific fision-expidition.
Since you clearly don't have a clue:
Of course you know you have them. You can rule out a significant portion of messages based on the type of file attachments they have. You can rule out another significant portion based on the sender addresses. Another huge chunk is ruled out because it's wanted mail from whitelisted senders.
This reduces the amount of mail that you need to pay any attention to at all by a large portion. Additionally, the STATISTICS.TXT file with spamassassin shows tests against corpuses at set score levels and anything over something like 16 is likely to produce a false positives so infrequently that it doesn't even register (going by memory here). At any rate, you can confidently seperate out any messages with an extremely high spamassassin score. For my case, anything over 25 which is actually a large portion of my spam since I've written and customized plenty of spamassassin rule sets.
Using procmail, you have potentially questionable positives seperated into a SPAM_LOW mbox. You can set the low spam bar conservatively high just to be safe. You've now reduced the quantity of email that needs manual verification by about 95%.
The remaining spam that exists in the SPAM_LOW mbox is scripted out into a list of subject lines only which you can eyeball with much success.
In addition, you run the same statistical rule analysis that the spambayes devs use against your manually verified corpus occasionally to see how successful it is working. This gives you solid evidence of the quality of your filtering.
And, again, the fact that I am the only person who has an account on this server solidifies the effectiveness of all taken measures as what I want and do not want is not muddled with a global deployment shared with hundreds or thousands of other accounts who are training a server-wide bayes as well.
The idea of having to sort through 2.9 million messages by hand just to prove that there are no false positives is idiotic. Do you really think any message containing an attachment called 'your_profile.scr.pif' is ever going to be non-spam? Clearly not.
This isn't rocket science.
No, Sendmail:
220 rzcomm5.rz.tu-bs.de ESMTP Sendmail 8.11.1/8.11.1; Mon, 24 May 2004 06:46:39 +0200 (METDST)
Simple problems have simple solutions.
You can increase the threshhold at which you declare spam to be spam. Allows for more misses, but reduces the false positives to, essentially, nothing.
Or, you can just tag likely spam with ***SPAM*** in the subject and let the user deal with it.
Or even better, you can direct likely spam into a specific IMAP folder on the server that the user's client can subscribe to and they can glance at their personal SPAM folder on the server whenever they want without having to download all the bodies.
As someone who personally uses postfix+procmail+spamassassin+razor and recieves 4,000 emails per day, I am currently filtering out 98% of the spam on the server and have had ZERO false positives in two years and 2.9million messages.
Statistically, you will eventually get some false positives - especially if you have a large userbase (as opposed to just one or two accounts). But if one out of every few million messages isn't acceptable, you can just use one of the previously suggested methods.
The worst you can do is nothing at all.
I was specifically speaking to the claims of the company I have heard on the radio as I quoted in my post. That is, a company that not only claims to tell you the information the original article's company does - but to allow you to also have full control over your message. Meaning that you could delete the email and any attachments from all mankind with a simple keystroke - which is clearly fraudulent and absurd.
The company is called BigString.com and they claim their email is:
* recallable
* erasable
* changeable
* allow time delay of sending emails
* time out of sent emails
* report of when your messages are opened
* the ability to only alow images to be viewed once and not allowed to be forwarded
* ability to prevent messages from being printed
* ability to prevent messages from being saved
I have not researched the company because it is either entirely bullshit or proprietary as I can clearly access any email, save it and then do whatever I want with it - BigString be damned.
The only way I can see this working is if the sender has to hav an account on their server and the recipient has to have an account on their server and then they employ some form of scripting with custom external (non mailstore) storage of messages and images tied together with a key or webbug/htmlbug.
If you ask me, these claims and offerings are far above and beyond that of the USA Today article or this Slashdot article.
They also claim that the technology is "patent-pending" and that sending email is the same as any regular email.
Bigstring is the sole provider of fully Erasable-Recallable Email. Pioneering the field with our unique patent-pending technology, we empower our users with the ability to take control of their email. The best part is that it is easy to use - in fact there is no difference from regular email.
Three years ago, the Bigstring founders set out to build the best Spam fighting email system on the planet, and then, quite by accident, they invented the world's first fully erasable email and didn't even realize it. A few months ago, one of the founders, Darin, sent an important new client an email with the wrong attachment. Upset, he asked his partners if there was any way that you could recall an email; the immediate answer was "No"!!! Then, Dave scratched his head... and said, "Well, if we modify the new system just a little, you can erase your mail, edit it, change attachments, set it to expire at a certain time and even know when it's been read." Darin said, "So, it's like you have a big string on your email and pull it back"...and Bigstring was born.