Usually when ISPs block port 25 (ostensibly because of all the botnets sending spam, a wise precaution that I advocate) they will provide a mail relay for their customers to connect to. They might not advertise it as that, but if your ISP (still?) provides a POP3 mail service, then they're going to give you an SMTP one too.
Failing that, why not put a relay on any server you have in a datacenter or colocated? Configure it so only your computers can relay though it and it'll be fine.
Forgive my ignorance (hey, I'm not French), but can someone explain how this works? If it's client-side monitoring software then it means users have to install it themselves, the government cannot force people to use this.
Is it just a utility program that companies can deploy on to their own computers as a means of auditing their own computers? If so, that's perfectly fine and no different to software from the BSA and others that audits product keys. We need more information.
It's erroneous to believe that regulated business directly leads to stagnation. I give you a counter-example: health and safety regulations and regulations that established minimum salaries lead to the removal of manual workers from production lines to be replaced with by robots. That's an innovation caused by regulation.
Also, "freedoms" that can easily be taken advantage of by corporate entities rarely works out in your personal interests. What the Senators are discussing limits Facebook's "freedom" to abuse your information. I feel you're only opposed to this in order to be consistently libertarian. You need a new philosophy.
A few games from the mid to late 1990s had various "Instant Action" modes that created simple levels to play on, MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries had one, for example, that took a selected environment and dumped some structures and nav-points on it according to the mission parameters. It was crude, but provided for hours of amusement for pre-teens such as myself.
XNA is sandboxed on the Xbox 360 (in fact, XNA on the Xbox 360 runs on top of a variant of the Compact Framework and not the full desktop/server Framework distribution).
C-to-CIL compilers already exist, Microsoft includes one as part of VC.
You may remember the case of Craig Philips from the first run of Big Brother, he donated his £70,000 prize money to go towards getting a Downs Syndrome-suffering friend of his a heart+lung transplant performed in the USA, total cost: £250,000 (then tack on the trouble of finding a good heart+lung match).
I remember him giving an interview on TV where he described how the NHS didn't consider her case a priority because she had a bad prognosis (indeed, she died in April 2008, meaning she got about 7 years). By a strict definition this is "rationing" (but please don't throw around the word "socialist" as though it's some derogative, you should know better than name-calling) but I ask how any (seemingly) amoral US-based health insurance company would possibly fund the same operation: fact it they probably wouldn't on account of the "pre-existing" Downs Syndrome so he would have had to shell out at least £250,000 (at least $450,000 in today's money) for the operation.
But in any event: isolated incidents like these do not provide an accurate representation of the system. The NHS saved my life, and countless others, and I'm not bankrupt because of it.
Whilst Microsoft was late to the party (we're talking early-1990s) they never had the impression they could supplant the Internet with something proprietary.
The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet and all included access to the World Wide Web.
So basically MSN (the original one) was Microsoft's competitor to AOL and not "The Internet".
Microsoft didn't include TCP/IP in early versions of Windows because there just wasn't any demand, and third-parties were already making their own add-ons that provided this. Much the same reason IPv6 wasn't added to Windows until Vista even though IPv6's specifications were stable enough by the release of XP SP2 in 2005. I'm sure they had better things at the time for their developers to work on.
The problem with blocking "illegal material" is the definition of "illegal material". For example, at what point is a medical textbook photo of a paediatric condition considered "indecent"? From this you can get into debates about intent, and if there's titillating intent is that a "thought crime"?
Another example is text relating to the formulation of explosive materials: should that be considered "illegal information" too? From this we return to the concept of illegal numbers, then it all starts getting ridiculous.
I believe it's easier to hold the position that no information or data is inherently illegal, neither should possession (which becomes a strict-liability offence, a can of worms) than to get stuck in the debate of what is and isn't illegal. Besides, if you're really after a piece of information or data then you're eventually going to be able get it.
You've been asleep for the past couple of years: The WHATWG was formed in response to the W3C's slow pace on HTML standards development. After a few months of prodding the W3C took the point and subsumed the WHATWG's work on HTML5 (formerly Web Applications 1.0). The W3C has been making fine progress on HTML5 and CSS3 of late; whilst the WHATWG does still exist, it's only working on a handful of less-important specifications that won't impact the majority of web designers and developers.
As for the W3C, it's far from dead. If anything it's the WHATWG that's dying: none of their other projects have anywhere near the same community following HTML5 did.
Microsoft Research has their own Academic Search site, which is pretty useful to me (I hardly ever use Google Scholar). It's more focused on academic research papers and the links between authors than the broader net GScholar casts (there's no Patent search, for example) but it is a free alternative.
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/
Some 'adblocker detection' services may flag your client if they see you've downloaded the page, but not the associated ad content, so they know your browser isn't displaying the ad, but if the client does download it they have no way of knowing if it's being rendered or not, short of using a DOM-inspection script.
With the exception of Flash video adverts, I've never had any bandwidth problems with banners, except for those off-site advert scripts that delay the page loading.
I quite them over the 'Virgin Killers' debacle of 2008 (this wasn't the first time I had issues with their IWF implementation either), and like so many other customers I have issues with their customer support department. I wrote it up here: http://www.w3bbo.com/demonsucks.htm.
It's a shame, because their network is actually alright, I didn't get that much downtime and had no limits or caps for what I felt was a reasonable monthly fee (I was on their HomeOffice 8000 plan, the one with the static IP address).
Their full name is "Powerbocking Stilts" actually, and they use a bow-spring as well, they've been around since 2004. I think CMU needs to move with the times. The claims about 9-foot jumps seems about right, the world record for a bock-assisted jump is just over 7 feet.
I was at a bocking event in London last weekend, actually. (Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/w3bbo/sets/72157622131665912/ )
In my head I equated orbit length to "width of the year" since I was thinking of a timeline, and a timeline has width (from 1st Jan to Dec 31st) and at each point on the timeline the earth is at a certain point on its orbit which corresponds to a distance from its initial position.
The DNS RFCs advise that zone nameservers should be in separate subnets. Specifically RFC 2182 recomends that secondary DNS services be spread around geographically.
Having just installed the x64 3.0 binaries for Windows and given Windows 7 and Windows Vista a spin in VirtualBox I can say that both OSes fail to recognise the 3D capabilities since the driver isn't WDDM-compatible. So Media Center, Aero Glass, and the new games in Vista/Win7 all fail to show in their fully accelerated glory.
Interestingly, VirtualPC 7 in Windows 7 does support Aero Glass when you have Vista as a guest.
The way the email was written (a bunch of short paragraphs) makes me think it's a kind of running commentary of the process he was following to download the software to begin with. I occasionally make similar notes as well, which often don't resemble my writing style at all.
As for not knowing there's a download center, I think he's acting in the character of a typical user who just wants to download the software, not something many software developers tend to do these days whilst they shovel in useless gimmicks in websites that distract from the main purpose.
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 ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) 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 ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) 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 users (*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (*) CPU costs that are involved with cryptography (*) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) 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. ( ) 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!
Okay, so it's only for Managed Assemblies (C#, VB.NET, J#, etc), but it does spell-checking, acronym-checking, and case-checking, which is nifty. Along with the other slew of introspection rules (some of which are a PITA to implement, even if it does increase the quality of the finished product).
The $$$ version of Visual Studio (the Team Suite version) comes with an introspection engine for VC++ though, it's not as flexible as FxCop but does the basics.
Then there's the countless "Spellchecker" plugins available for IDEs everywhere, VS, Eclipse, NetBeans, etc...
There's no need to troll. Windows Server R2 does actually implement POSIX, it's a very complete implementation too. Look up "Windows Services for UNIX". Microsoft has everything to gain from interopability with *NIX applications, it means more marketshare for them. Consider what Apple is doing with Windows is what Microsoft is doing with *NIX: "allow them to run their programs on our OS, but not vice-versa".
And FYI, there's a massive section in MSDN on advice for porting programs from *NIX to Windows, including XWindows.
AFAIK... it was the "Can Spam" act in California (not that it's done much for us really) and that government-funded university (ALITIW) that refused to disclose information about RIAA-targeted users.
But there's much more the US government has done to protect your rights and computers on the internet than ours has... I'm surprised none of the "Big 3" (Lab, Lib, Con) have mentioned anything about what they plan to do with spam in their election manfestos. (And it's only 7 days away too)
Don't the Linux developers working from IBM get paid though?
Although subsidized via IBM's other ventures.
Consider Zend... the platform (PHP) is OSS, but the IDE is expensive (more expensive than VisualStudio in certain circumstances)
Speaking of VS... the 2005 "Visual Express" products from MS are supposidly available as freeware downloads (or $45 in the shops).
I think this is a weird reverse trend we're seeing.
Slashdot Mirror
Usually when ISPs block port 25 (ostensibly because of all the botnets sending spam, a wise precaution that I advocate) they will provide a mail relay for their customers to connect to. They might not advertise it as that, but if your ISP (still?) provides a POP3 mail service, then they're going to give you an SMTP one too. Failing that, why not put a relay on any server you have in a datacenter or colocated? Configure it so only your computers can relay though it and it'll be fine.
Forgive my ignorance (hey, I'm not French), but can someone explain how this works? If it's client-side monitoring software then it means users have to install it themselves, the government cannot force people to use this. Is it just a utility program that companies can deploy on to their own computers as a means of auditing their own computers? If so, that's perfectly fine and no different to software from the BSA and others that audits product keys. We need more information.
It's erroneous to believe that regulated business directly leads to stagnation. I give you a counter-example: health and safety regulations and regulations that established minimum salaries lead to the removal of manual workers from production lines to be replaced with by robots. That's an innovation caused by regulation.
Also, "freedoms" that can easily be taken advantage of by corporate entities rarely works out in your personal interests. What the Senators are discussing limits Facebook's "freedom" to abuse your information. I feel you're only opposed to this in order to be consistently libertarian. You need a new philosophy.
A few games from the mid to late 1990s had various "Instant Action" modes that created simple levels to play on, MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries had one, for example, that took a selected environment and dumped some structures and nav-points on it according to the mission parameters. It was crude, but provided for hours of amusement for pre-teens such as myself.
XNA is sandboxed on the Xbox 360 (in fact, XNA on the Xbox 360 runs on top of a variant of the Compact Framework and not the full desktop/server Framework distribution).
C-to-CIL compilers already exist, Microsoft includes one as part of VC.
Anyway, Silverlight actually disables unsafe code, so C# is gimped in this regard on Windows Phone 7 ( http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/2983/182246.aspx ).
You may remember the case of Craig Philips from the first run of Big Brother, he donated his £70,000 prize money to go towards getting a Downs Syndrome-suffering friend of his a heart+lung transplant performed in the USA, total cost: £250,000 (then tack on the trouble of finding a good heart+lung match).
I remember him giving an interview on TV where he described how the NHS didn't consider her case a priority because she had a bad prognosis (indeed, she died in April 2008, meaning she got about 7 years). By a strict definition this is "rationing" (but please don't throw around the word "socialist" as though it's some derogative, you should know better than name-calling) but I ask how any (seemingly) amoral US-based health insurance company would possibly fund the same operation: fact it they probably wouldn't on account of the "pre-existing" Downs Syndrome so he would have had to shell out at least £250,000 (at least $450,000 in today's money) for the operation.
But in any event: isolated incidents like these do not provide an accurate representation of the system. The NHS saved my life, and countless others, and I'm not bankrupt because of it.
Not quite so true, I'm afraid.
Whilst Microsoft was late to the party (we're talking early-1990s) they never had the impression they could supplant the Internet with something proprietary.
The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet and all included access to the World Wide Web.
So basically MSN (the original one) was Microsoft's competitor to AOL and not "The Internet".
Microsoft didn't include TCP/IP in early versions of Windows because there just wasn't any demand, and third-parties were already making their own add-ons that provided this. Much the same reason IPv6 wasn't added to Windows until Vista even though IPv6's specifications were stable enough by the release of XP SP2 in 2005. I'm sure they had better things at the time for their developers to work on.
The problem with blocking "illegal material" is the definition of "illegal material". For example, at what point is a medical textbook photo of a paediatric condition considered "indecent"? From this you can get into debates about intent, and if there's titillating intent is that a "thought crime"?
Another example is text relating to the formulation of explosive materials: should that be considered "illegal information" too? From this we return to the concept of illegal numbers, then it all starts getting ridiculous.
I believe it's easier to hold the position that no information or data is inherently illegal, neither should possession (which becomes a strict-liability offence, a can of worms) than to get stuck in the debate of what is and isn't illegal. Besides, if you're really after a piece of information or data then you're eventually going to be able get it.
Was it GenesReunited? I can't say I've had the same problems you described (but then, I never really put in any information about myself).
You've been asleep for the past couple of years: The WHATWG was formed in response to the W3C's slow pace on HTML standards development. After a few months of prodding the W3C took the point and subsumed the WHATWG's work on HTML5 (formerly Web Applications 1.0). The W3C has been making fine progress on HTML5 and CSS3 of late; whilst the WHATWG does still exist, it's only working on a handful of less-important specifications that won't impact the majority of web designers and developers.
As for the W3C, it's far from dead. If anything it's the WHATWG that's dying: none of their other projects have anywhere near the same community following HTML5 did.
Microsoft Research has their own Academic Search site, which is pretty useful to me (I hardly ever use Google Scholar). It's more focused on academic research papers and the links between authors than the broader net GScholar casts (there's no Patent search, for example) but it is a free alternative. http://academic.research.microsoft.com/
Some 'adblocker detection' services may flag your client if they see you've downloaded the page, but not the associated ad content, so they know your browser isn't displaying the ad, but if the client does download it they have no way of knowing if it's being rendered or not, short of using a DOM-inspection script. With the exception of Flash video adverts, I've never had any bandwidth problems with banners, except for those off-site advert scripts that delay the page loading.
I quite them over the 'Virgin Killers' debacle of 2008 (this wasn't the first time I had issues with their IWF implementation either), and like so many other customers I have issues with their customer support department. I wrote it up here: http://www.w3bbo.com/demonsucks.htm.
It's a shame, because their network is actually alright, I didn't get that much downtime and had no limits or caps for what I felt was a reasonable monthly fee (I was on their HomeOffice 8000 plan, the one with the static IP address).
Their full name is "Powerbocking Stilts" actually, and they use a bow-spring as well, they've been around since 2004. I think CMU needs to move with the times. The claims about 9-foot jumps seems about right, the world record for a bock-assisted jump is just over 7 feet. I was at a bocking event in London last weekend, actually. (Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/w3bbo/sets/72157622131665912/ )
In my head I equated orbit length to "width of the year" since I was thinking of a timeline, and a timeline has width (from 1st Jan to Dec 31st) and at each point on the timeline the earth is at a certain point on its orbit which corresponds to a distance from its initial position.
No, that's diameter of the earth's orbit around the sun. A year would be the circumference which is 940 million kilometers.
The DNS RFCs advise that zone nameservers should be in separate subnets. Specifically RFC 2182 recomends that secondary DNS services be spread around geographically.
Having just installed the x64 3.0 binaries for Windows and given Windows 7 and Windows Vista a spin in VirtualBox I can say that both OSes fail to recognise the 3D capabilities since the driver isn't WDDM-compatible. So Media Center, Aero Glass, and the new games in Vista/Win7 all fail to show in their fully accelerated glory. Interestingly, VirtualPC 7 in Windows 7 does support Aero Glass when you have Vista as a guest.
The way the email was written (a bunch of short paragraphs) makes me think it's a kind of running commentary of the process he was following to download the software to begin with. I occasionally make similar notes as well, which often don't resemble my writing style at all.
As for not knowing there's a download center, I think he's acting in the character of a typical user who just wants to download the software, not something many software developers tend to do these days whilst they shovel in useless gimmicks in websites that distract from the main purpose.
It's cliche, but armchair moping about it on Slashdot isn't going to affect the outcome of any vote in this legislation.
Write, phone, or email your MP. I'm doing it, are you?
TFA advocates a
(*) 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
( ) 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
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) 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
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) 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 users
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(*) CPU costs that are involved with cryptography
(*) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) 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.
( ) 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!
Okay, so it's only for Managed Assemblies (C#, VB.NET, J#, etc), but it does spell-checking, acronym-checking, and case-checking, which is nifty. Along with the other slew of introspection rules (some of which are a PITA to implement, even if it does increase the quality of the finished product).
The $$$ version of Visual Studio (the Team Suite version) comes with an introspection engine for VC++ though, it's not as flexible as FxCop but does the basics.
Then there's the countless "Spellchecker" plugins available for IDEs everywhere, VS, Eclipse, NetBeans, etc...
There's no need to troll. Windows Server R2 does actually implement POSIX, it's a very complete implementation too. Look up "Windows Services for UNIX". Microsoft has everything to gain from interopability with *NIX applications, it means more marketshare for them. Consider what Apple is doing with Windows is what Microsoft is doing with *NIX: "allow them to run their programs on our OS, but not vice-versa". And FYI, there's a massive section in MSDN on advice for porting programs from *NIX to Windows, including XWindows.
AFAIK... it was the "Can Spam" act in California (not that it's done much for us really) and that government-funded university (ALITIW) that refused to disclose information about RIAA-targeted users. But there's much more the US government has done to protect your rights and computers on the internet than ours has... I'm surprised none of the "Big 3" (Lab, Lib, Con) have mentioned anything about what they plan to do with spam in their election manfestos. (And it's only 7 days away too)
Don't the Linux developers working from IBM get paid though? Although subsidized via IBM's other ventures. Consider Zend... the platform (PHP) is OSS, but the IDE is expensive (more expensive than VisualStudio in certain circumstances) Speaking of VS... the 2005 "Visual Express" products from MS are supposidly available as freeware downloads (or $45 in the shops). I think this is a weird reverse trend we're seeing.