approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Granted, security through obscurity isn't really effective, but why should they bother telling spammers how small to make their batches in order to get things through? Because there are lots of legitimate reasons to send an email to more than 10 recepients on a large service like Hotmail, and batching them up (as opposed to sending the whole email, headers and body, to the server multiple times) saves bandwidth.
I would be pissed off if i were subscribed to something and I were the 11th hotmail user on their list.
The "better place" part applies more aptly to laws about speed limits, or signaling, or against me randomly shooting at people who cut me off, etc. While the "randomly" is an issue, I'm not sure the road wouldn't be a better place without the laws preventing you from randomly shooting at people who cut you off. Kind of like how there weren't any more really big wars after the most powerful countries (and France) all got nukes.
no, they're using their own patent: ""A method of arranging for the decimal value 65535, and calculations resulting therein, to be intermittently rendered as 100000 so as to confuse the shit out of those persons performing the calculation"
That's a great answer if you're more anti-MS than pro-consumer. The pros and cons of unbundling for a consumer don't change whether the vendor has 1% of the market or 99%.
Duh!
Of course unbundling doesn't instantly change the percentage of MS-Windows on the desktop. What it does is foster competition and help provent monopolistic control, allowing that percentage to change based on informed (they now know the costs), consumer choice. And THAT is absolutely pro-consumer. You parsed his sentence wrong. What he said can translate to "Regardless of whether the vendor has 1% of the market or 99%, there will be no change to the nature of the pros and cons that the consumer has from unbundling" - i.e. it's the pros and cons that don't change based on the marketshare (i.e. different marketshare of different players unbundling), whereas you thought he said unbundling won't alter the marketshare of a single player.
Much of the value in OS X is everything Just Works.
Except the right mouse button, focus follows mouse, keep window above others... Focus follows mouse doesn't work anywhere - systems that use it are uniformly broken.
It's easier to just draw black boxes over it then save as XCF (since if you try to save in another format it warns you about "flattening" the image, whatever that means)
I forget whether the monarch governs with the consent of the people, or whether she holds her position by divine fiat. Nobody else knows, either, so don't worry too much about it.
Sorry but Microsoft's complete lack of support for a well documented open file format does in no way make it proprietary. Right, but mbox is neither (i.e. neither well-documented nor a file format - most of the mbox-family file formats are more or less open, I guess), so Microsoft can hardly be blamed for not supporting it.
The proper way to interchange email messages between clients is by email; lack of a standard format for on-disk storage does not create vendor lock-in. As far as I know, outlook supports both sending multiple messages as attachments (in a standard format), and uploading messages to an IMAP server; which is more than can be said for many other programs.
Ah. You consider wikipedia an authoritative source. Also - that's an ad hominem (ad wikinem?) attack - that wikipedia says something does not make it false. The wikipedia article I linked describes at least four distinct formats, and gives examples of how different programs accept different formats - you have not refuted any of that information, ANY of which invalidates the claim that mbox is any kind of format at all, or that any 'standard' (nebulous "more complex From line quoting rules." are probably not standardized even if mbox was) is used by Thunderbird.
(I wish slashdot let me edit posts so I didn't have to make three replies)
Ah. You consider wikipedia an authoritative source. No, I consider it a convenient central place to link when the article describes things I otherwise know to be true. Perhaps this would be a better link.
RFC 976 has not been accepted as a standard (neither has HTTP, so that's a weak argument by itself), and, more importantly it does not define any flavor of the mbox format. (it defines the BSMTP format, which is used nowhere for mailbox storage; and describes the single-message format used by many command-line MTAs to allow a text editor to be used - which only contains a single message.) The most interesting thing described (not related to file format per se) in that RFC is the process of stacking "From " lines, which is not used in modern systems (since the "From " line is not used for transport) and whose closest analogue today is the Received: header.
Not only painful, it can actually cause problems if you get close to your quota. (Haven't seen if thunderbird handles this case properly, but a naive implementation wouldn't, and TB doesn't appear to provide a "delete immediately" option)
Question - does copying messages between folders require downloading and uploading the message?
mbox is a standard, false. there's not even an RFC (and an RFC doesn't make something a standard even if there were). Maildir, for its part, only has a spec written by one person and never submitted to become a standard, though I believe the file contents of the individual messages are straight RFC822. So, what we have here is several formats, none of which are the subject of any kind of standard and none of which are universally supported. Now, there is an argument that can legitimately be made that a format with open-source implementations cannot be called proprietary; though, I would say a 'format' with no normative implementations cannot be called a format of any kind.
Thunderbird replaces "> " with "| ". It does no such thing.
Changing the actual content and presenting a lie is good enough reason not to use it, no matter how benign the intent for the change is. But, simply displaying differently (like, a browser displaying slashdot with pretty colored boxes instead of, you know, raw html source) while retaining the actual content is not the same thing.
You can't just re-use my letter. Are you under the impression that copyright law prohibits resale of used books? No? Why, then, would it prevent me from re-sending your letter, if I were for some reason inclined to do so? Copyright law only prevents, you know, COPYING; it doesn't in any way limit property rights that come with physical ownership of something.
All of them were born before scientific medicine was invented, so they had no idea that what they were doing was correct. Science isn't about knowing what's correct, it's about finding out what works.
Considering that nickels are made of copper (75%), as are dimes and quarters (90%), and pennies are not (well, 2.5% - or, if you ask Verizon, that's.025%), the GP has it backwards.
Almost every other piece of software follows the old click-first-item, shift-click-last-item model. (Or ctrl-click individual items.) Yeah, but most of them screw up the ctrl-shift-click aspect for multiple ranges (firefox, for example, supports it for selecting but not deselecting)
That "Wir speichern nicht" site makes the argument (or, appears to, based on google translation) that keeping IP addresses for a ban list isn't useful because an IP address isn't necessarily associated with a single person - yet, if you accept that argument, an IP address isn't "personal data" of any kind at all!
Slashdot Mirror
Your company advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I would be pissed off if i were subscribed to something and I were the 11th hotmail user on their list.
No, but the *SPOILER*Ark*/SPOILER* and the Flood are a pretty clear metaphor
It's already over parity. Which my post was meant to poke fun at.
no, they're using their own patent: ""A method of arranging for the decimal value 65535, and calculations resulting therein, to be intermittently rendered as 100000 so as to confuse the shit out of those persons performing the calculation"
Of course unbundling doesn't instantly change the percentage of MS-Windows on the desktop. What it does is foster competition and help provent monopolistic control, allowing that percentage to change based on informed (they now know the costs), consumer choice. And THAT is absolutely pro-consumer. You parsed his sentence wrong. What he said can translate to "Regardless of whether the vendor has 1% of the market or 99%, there will be no change to the nature of the pros and cons that the consumer has from unbundling" - i.e. it's the pros and cons that don't change based on the marketshare (i.e. different marketshare of different players unbundling), whereas you thought he said unbundling won't alter the marketshare of a single player.
Except the right mouse button, focus follows mouse, keep window above others... Focus follows mouse doesn't work anywhere - systems that use it are uniformly broken.
It's easier to just draw black boxes over it then save as XCF (since if you try to save in another format it warns you about "flattening" the image, whatever that means)
$47,680 Canadian = $50,000 US.
The proper way to interchange email messages between clients is by email; lack of a standard format for on-disk storage does not create vendor lock-in. As far as I know, outlook supports both sending multiple messages as attachments (in a standard format), and uploading messages to an IMAP server; which is more than can be said for many other programs.
(I wish slashdot let me edit posts so I didn't have to make three replies)
RFC 976 has not been accepted as a standard (neither has HTTP, so that's a weak argument by itself), and, more importantly it does not define any flavor of the mbox format. (it defines the BSMTP format, which is used nowhere for mailbox storage; and describes the single-message format used by many command-line MTAs to allow a text editor to be used - which only contains a single message.) The most interesting thing described (not related to file format per se) in that RFC is the process of stacking "From " lines, which is not used in modern systems (since the "From " line is not used for transport) and whose closest analogue today is the Received: header.
Not only painful, it can actually cause problems if you get close to your quota. (Haven't seen if thunderbird handles this case properly, but a naive implementation wouldn't, and TB doesn't appear to provide a "delete immediately" option)
Question - does copying messages between folders require downloading and uploading the message?
will be the year of linux on the desktop.
They make ATM machines, and they actually do quite well. You have probably typed your PIN number into a Diebold ATM machine.
Considering that nickels are made of copper (75%), as are dimes and quarters (90%), and pennies are not (well, 2.5% - or, if you ask Verizon, that's .025%), the GP has it backwards.
Almost every other piece of software follows the old click-first-item, shift-click-last-item model. (Or ctrl-click individual items.) Yeah, but most of them screw up the ctrl-shift-click aspect for multiple ranges (firefox, for example, supports it for selecting but not deselecting)
That "Wir speichern nicht" site makes the argument (or, appears to, based on google translation) that keeping IP addresses for a ban list isn't useful because an IP address isn't necessarily associated with a single person - yet, if you accept that argument, an IP address isn't "personal data" of any kind at all!