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 ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (x) 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 (x) Microsoft will not put up with it (x) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) 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
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) 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 (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (x) 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 (x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) 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 (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome (x) I don't want the government reading my email (x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Microsoft's recent thing about "the cloud" might have something to do with their recent purchase of FrontBridge, an "in-the-cloud" traffic filtering company. (Note the 'E' word is in the titles of most of those articles though it's not in the search...)
So that makes your number (+44) 0207 (inner London code) 946 0347... but that's giving "the number you dialled has not been recognised"! (yes I tried it... I am that sad.)
Actually 946 wouldn't be the code for Islington anyway... I've friends just down the road and they're 0207 836.
And let's not forget Event Horizon. (Hey! I wish I could forget EH... my friend had Sam Neill's decapitated bonce, with realistic gory holes where he'd supposedly torn out his own eyes, on her (street-facing) windowsill for months after working on the effects at Cinesite in London (next door to the Private Eye offices, trivia fans!) I believe he was usually used as a stand for sunglasses during the daytime... but I like to think he freaked a few people out after dark:)
Oh god have I got to spell it out for you... I don't think *anyone* can "dominate space" in some sort of geo-political, military/industrial sense, for any value of space further out that geo-sync orbits. Does China "dominate" the Gobi Desert? They do. Who cares? It's nothing but what the Australians call "GAFA" - great areas of fuck-all. There's nothing to dominate!! You people all seem obsessed with the idea that Space == the US West in the 18th and 19th centuries. Guess what - they're fundamentally different. There's no reason at all to go to Mars (or anywhere else) apart from scientific curiousity and simple prestige value.
This comment comes from a GNU-powered Lenovo R60, and apart from the quality of the plastic being a teensy bit less satisfying texture (to me at least) and the R40 I had before, which got lovely smooth palm-prints worn in slab in front of the keyboard, it's great - but I wish I could make the wifi work without recompiling the kernel, which admittedly is Intel's fault for not releasing the schematics, but... hey, use another on-board wifi supplier. *shrug*
What would be really fabulous -- and I've been waiting for this day for five years or more,m now - is the day the first mainstream vendor starts selling OpenBSD-powered machines. That will show a genuine commitment to open standards and Freedom. Too many corporates are jumping on the Linux bandwagon thinking they can happily sell black-box software (or hardware) that they write Linux drivers or kernel modules for, and just take the money -- indeed that doesn't look like a bad strategey -- but supporting OpenBSD will reveal an actual interest in Freedom, as opposted to just making as much money as possible. (yes, yes, I know what you're thinking, spare me ok... )
[Vogon Guard] All right, but what's the alternative?
[Ford Prefect] Well, stop doing it of course! Tell them you're not going to do it any more. Stand up to them!
[Vogon Guard] Doesn't sound that great to me!
[Ford Prefect] Oh, but that's just the start. There's more to it than that, you see...
[Vogon Guard] No, if it's all the same to you, I think I'll just get you two shoved out, and then get on with some other piece of shouting I've got to do. RESISTANCE IS USELESS!
Not likely - if you look at the Netcraft charts, you can see the decline's been steady and consistent for several months (6-9-12 or so IIRC. No, I haven't read the article yet because I was only looking at the Netcraft survey & getting depressed a couple of months back, and I know that I'll be mightily cheered up by the comments in a few hours' time -- the lame humour, I-for-one, accusations of M$-funded FUD, assertions that it's because Windows shops are all full of fules and madmen... and so on. That really gives me hope that Free software will triumph in the end.
Ahhh someone who has a faint idea what they're talking about. Excellent! Yes you're right, the famous sub-prime mortgage markets (specifically, the complex derivatives & options products that encompass the ownership of those mortgage debts) looks like being a bit of bust. What most people here don't seem to have understood is the concept of a Keynesian recession or contraction. If people have no money to spend because every cent is going to pay the mortgage (because interest rates are sky high, because the dollar is collapsing) they've got no money to spend on anything, whether it's bought over the net or bricks & mortar. And that reduces the value of businesses who's fundamental model is publishing ("come see our cool content, plus a sprinkle of ads") -- which is most of them -- because those ads are suddenly not working, so their value drops.
Another thing you have to bear in mind is the psychology of the market. Dvorak's right about one thing -- there IS a growing consensus that we're overdue a significant correction. If you haven't heard that yet, you're talking to the wrong people and this would be a good time to get out of equities and into T-bonds and commodities. Another dead giveaway here is the recent volatility of both NA and European markets. When you're getting daily changes measurable in integer percentages, you've got a big problem. A lot of people are hanging on for the last possible minute, banking that they'll somehow manage to cash out juuusssstttt before the market tanks. There's a word for people like this: deadmeat!
The other interesting aspect is China. China's been growing at an average rate of about 10% a year for the last 20 years or so. They have no cultural memory of a recession or depression. It's going to be interesting to see how Chinese society responds when it happens...
Hint: China is a massive growth area for (a) raw commodities, and (b) luxury goods and services. Everything else, they build themselves.
> Who Cares? I have no wish for my grandchildren to be dominated by a space faring, space mining China.
>
Relax. Firstly, it ain't gonna happen. Secondly... you'll be dead by then.
Until we get humanity out of the solar system, the true future of mankind is doomed. Oh noessss, humans iz just like all other species!!1!
It is certain that an extinction event will happen to the earth, and to the solar system. Yes it may take eons for these events to happen, but why not get our asses off this minuscule planet and spread out? ...because it's a futile waste of time and resources?
Re:Doesn't matter - the Chinese will get there fir
on
Can Space Nerds Get Along?
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
If China wants to go to Mars, my advice is: let 'em. Who cares? It's their money, they can piss it away on useless boondoggles if they want to. *shrug*
yeah,.. that was me, too. "Register? What, give my name and email address to some random website?? You're kidding me, right?" *sigh*;)
The power expression is the one used by JPL / Caltech when speaking of the power the panels generate. I'm nowhere near EE enough to be able to debate the pros and cons of alternatives...
I doubt they'll know how much dust has accumulated on the panels as a result of this storm till it's over. What's worrying us rover-watchers are the twin problems of (a) Odyssey may not see the rovers on the next downlink pass (or the one after that, or..) and (b) that even if they're still alive when the storm ends, there's now a lot of dust in the atmosphere with nothing to keep it up - at which point the rovers could die from the dust fallout.
Not quite. Oppy's been running for around 1200 Sols, compared to a design life of 90 sols - so that's "only" twelve-and-a-bit times longer than expected.
Oh god, how lame am I.
the fake flamebait stories and tabloidesque subs I meant to say -- buggy code on slashdot is like flamebait and subheads on The Register -- part of the charm.
Wohh hohh hoh!! Everything's speeded up again, back to normal. Did y'all pull the so-called "beta" code by any chance?
Ahhhhhh c'mon, stop moaning, you love it really!! Lemme tell you, from someone who was there back in the day (with a 10xxx UID. Oh yes) this really IS like being back in the glory days of the late 90s... incredibly slow page load, random HTTP errors (I got '302 Service Unavailable', which is much better than 500 anyway.) No wait, I just got 500: Internal Server Error whilst composing this comment!:)
Look, Slashdot is SAD - Special And Different - and buggy code, appeals for assistance with testing and feedback, etc, is like the fake flamebait stories and tabloidesque subs -- it's all part of the charm, it's what makes it stand out from a lot of glossy corporate crap out there. And you know it'll work eventually, so then we can all start moaning about how it was better when everything was static HTML.
That said - "go easy on the beta code"? C'mon, get real... beta? the firehose UI is incredible confusing & slow, appears to be making dozens of dynamic database calls per page view, and understanding which subset of the firehose you're looking it is difficult. Click something and they all churn up and down for a bit... what's that all about, then? As it happens I submitted a story a few hours back, so I went hunting for it to see how it's faring -- took me 20 mins to find it!
SLASHBOT: Look at him. Taco's headed for that small beta.
KDAWSON: I think I can get him before he gets there...he's almost in
range.
SLASHBOT: That's no beta! It's an alpha.
KDAWSON: It's too big a site to be an alpha!
SLASHBOT: I have a very bad feeling about this...
KDAWSON: Yeah... I think you're right. Full reverse! CowboyNeal, lock in the
failover cluster!
Heh, well it had to happen one day I guess... finally I meet someone who can answer a question that's been keeping me awake at night since 1985! This was my last year at secondary school, and as part of a futile attempt to prepare us for the real world we had a computerised careers guidance service. As I recall there was a multiple choice questionnaire about your interests, personality and whatnot which we all did one week. A week later the chap from the council came back with a lot of brown envelopes containing the unique, computer-selected career that was the best fit for our scientifically assessed personality profile. You guessed it, my top recommendation was Loadmaster in the RAF. (AFAIK, C-130s are the only aircraft the RAF fly that require a dedicated loadmaster, or were in those days anyway.)
Naturally I didn't do so, neither did I take the second recommendation (forestry work, though as luck would have it I did end up doing that for three months on summer a few years later, and in retrospect it was brilliant - after a week being supervised, at the age of 18 the bloke employing me left me the keys for his (then, purely functional) Toyota 4x4, I got up at 4am each morning to go chop the branches off the trees he'd felled the previous evening; and the Wye Valley at dawn is just astonishingly beautiful, and utterly devoid of anyone else... but I digress!) Anyway I went to college, left without the bit of paper but a lot more life skills (esp. regarding sex & drugs & rock'n'roll), worked in a music company for a few years, did shadow IT and then predictably fell into a career as a developer and now security stuff.
My question, therefore, is: So... being a loadmaster... what's it like? is it any good?
Slashdot Mirror
You have suggested a solution to the spam problem. Your idea advocates a
(x) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based (x) 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
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) 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
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) 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
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) 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
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) 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
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) 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
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Microsoft's recent thing about "the cloud" might have something to do with their recent purchase of FrontBridge, an "in-the-cloud" traffic filtering company. (Note the 'E' word is in the titles of most of those articles though it's not in the search...)
Actually 946 wouldn't be the code for Islington anyway... I've friends just down the road and they're 0207 836.
Aaaand now back to the topic....
And let's not forget Event Horizon. (Hey! I wish I could forget EH... my friend had Sam Neill's decapitated bonce, with realistic gory holes where he'd supposedly torn out his own eyes, on her (street-facing) windowsill for months after working on the effects at Cinesite in London (next door to the Private Eye offices, trivia fans!) I believe he was usually used as a stand for sunglasses during the daytime... but I like to think he freaked a few people out after dark :)
Oh god have I got to spell it out for you... I don't think *anyone* can "dominate space" in some sort of geo-political, military/industrial sense, for any value of space further out that geo-sync orbits. Does China "dominate" the Gobi Desert? They do. Who cares? It's nothing but what the Australians call "GAFA" - great areas of fuck-all. There's nothing to dominate!! You people all seem obsessed with the idea that Space == the US West in the 18th and 19th centuries. Guess what - they're fundamentally different. There's no reason at all to go to Mars (or anywhere else) apart from scientific curiousity and simple prestige value.
What would be really fabulous -- and I've been waiting for this day for five years or more,m now - is the day the first mainstream vendor starts selling OpenBSD-powered machines. That will show a genuine commitment to open standards and Freedom. Too many corporates are jumping on the Linux bandwagon thinking they can happily sell black-box software (or hardware) that they write Linux drivers or kernel modules for, and just take the money -- indeed that doesn't look like a bad strategey -- but supporting OpenBSD will reveal an actual interest in Freedom, as opposted to just making as much money as possible. (yes, yes, I know what you're thinking, spare me ok... )
[Vogon Guard] All right, but what's the alternative?
[Ford Prefect] Well, stop doing it of course! Tell them you're not going to do it any more. Stand up to them!
[Vogon Guard] Doesn't sound that great to me!
[Ford Prefect] Oh, but that's just the start. There's more to it than that, you see
[Vogon Guard] No, if it's all the same to you, I think I'll just get you two shoved out, and then get on with some other piece of shouting I've got to do. RESISTANCE IS USELESS!
[Ford Prefect] But come on now, look!
[Arthur Dent] Ow! Stop that!
...
...
Another thing you have to bear in mind is the psychology of the market. Dvorak's right about one thing -- there IS a growing consensus that we're overdue a significant correction. If you haven't heard that yet, you're talking to the wrong people and this would be a good time to get out of equities and into T-bonds and commodities. Another dead giveaway here is the recent volatility of both NA and European markets. When you're getting daily changes measurable in integer percentages, you've got a big problem. A lot of people are hanging on for the last possible minute, banking that they'll somehow manage to cash out juuusssstttt before the market tanks. There's a word for people like this: deadmeat!
The other interesting aspect is China. China's been growing at an average rate of about 10% a year for the last 20 years or so. They have no cultural memory of a recession or depression. It's going to be interesting to see how Chinese society responds when it happens...
Hint: China is a massive growth area for (a) raw commodities, and (b) luxury goods and services. Everything else, they build themselves.
you're kidding, right?
Irrational Exuberance has some good analyses as well.
> Who Cares? I have no wish for my grandchildren to be dominated by a space faring, space mining China. > Relax. Firstly, it ain't gonna happen. Secondly... you'll be dead by then.
Have you heard of "circular reasoning"?
If China wants to go to Mars, my advice is: let 'em. Who cares? It's their money, they can piss it away on useless boondoggles if they want to. *shrug*
no, and yes.
The power expression is the one used by JPL / Caltech when speaking of the power the panels generate. I'm nowhere near EE enough to be able to debate the pros and cons of alternatives...
Put another way: Mars' surface pressure is approximately the same as earth's at 300,000 feet.
Not quite. Oppy's been running for around 1200 Sols, compared to a design life of 90 sols - so that's "only" twelve-and-a-bit times longer than expected.
Wohh hohh hoh!! Everything's speeded up again, back to normal. Did y'all pull the so-called "beta" code by any chance?
Look, Slashdot is SAD - Special And Different - and buggy code, appeals for assistance with testing and feedback, etc, is like the fake flamebait stories and tabloidesque subs -- it's all part of the charm, it's what makes it stand out from a lot of glossy corporate crap out there. And you know it'll work eventually, so then we can all start moaning about how it was better when everything was static HTML.
That said - "go easy on the beta code"? C'mon, get real... beta? the firehose UI is incredible confusing & slow, appears to be making dozens of dynamic database calls per page view, and understanding which subset of the firehose you're looking it is difficult. Click something and they all churn up and down for a bit... what's that all about, then? As it happens I submitted a story a few hours back, so I went hunting for it to see how it's faring -- took me 20 mins to find it!
SLASHBOT: Look at him. Taco's headed for that small beta.
KDAWSON: I think I can get him before he gets there...he's almost in range.
SLASHBOT: That's no beta! It's an alpha.
KDAWSON: It's too big a site to be an alpha!
SLASHBOT: I have a very bad feeling about this...
KDAWSON: Yeah... I think you're right. Full reverse! CowboyNeal, lock in the failover cluster!
Naturally I didn't do so, neither did I take the second recommendation (forestry work, though as luck would have it I did end up doing that for three months on summer a few years later, and in retrospect it was brilliant - after a week being supervised, at the age of 18 the bloke employing me left me the keys for his (then, purely functional) Toyota 4x4, I got up at 4am each morning to go chop the branches off the trees he'd felled the previous evening; and the Wye Valley at dawn is just astonishingly beautiful, and utterly devoid of anyone else... but I digress!) Anyway I went to college, left without the bit of paper but a lot more life skills (esp. regarding sex & drugs & rock'n'roll), worked in a music company for a few years, did shadow IT and then predictably fell into a career as a developer and now security stuff.
My question, therefore, is: So... being a loadmaster... what's it like? is it any good?
What are the hours like? </spinal_tap>
David Maynor just posted this to Full Disclosure; the post claiming to be from him and asserting that he's LMH was spoofed. Who'd a-thunk it, mail spoofing on a security list... DUH!