I just looked at the source for the page. It's static HTML with the ASCII art defacement poster enclosed in [pre] tags. There isn't any code there with which one could conceivably conduct an attack.
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 (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 (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) 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 (x) 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 (x) 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 ( ) 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 (x) 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 (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!
Your State may be different, but New York's Freedom of Information Law (or FOIL, we like to be different) works like this:
The agency has to respond within five business days, but that response can read something like:
Dear Sexybomber:
We have received your request for public records pursuant to FOIL. Due to the complexity of the records you have requested, it may not be possible to produce them within the standard 20-day statutory period. We anticipate that we will be able to produce the records you have requested within 40 days. If you have questions or concerns, please direct them in writing to the address above.
If they run into a snag, they have to inform you of this and produce the records within a "reasonable period".
So it's not like NYC was under a five-day time crunch here. They could easily have responded and said it would take 40 or 60 days, being as there were several million records requested. That's definitely long enough to bring in a consultant (or even one of the more technically-literate staff members) to properly secure the data.
Sandra Day O'Connor hasn't been on the Supreme Court for eight years now. That glorified shitstain Sam Alito replaced her. While it would certainly be interesting to hear her opinion of the case, such opinion would carry no weight whatsoever.
I hate to break it to you, but you're sorely mistaken. Every State has gotten rid of the marital rape exemption. Some of them maintain differences in exactly how it's prosecuted, but it's still rape.
Oh, it's even more fiendishly perfect than what you describe.
See, at the end of the 10-year repayment period, the remaining balance does, in fact, get wiped, but the amount that's wiped is treated as taxable income. So if you've "racked up all the debt you want" and have $100,000 worth of forgiveness, say hello to a $35,000 tax bill.
What's that? You can't pay the tax on your newfound "wealth"? Well then, men with guns will come to your house, seize your property, and put you in a cage.
How will this shiny new tax be collected and enforced?
One option is to put the onus on the retailers to maintain a database of all the different sales tax rates in the country, so they can collect the appropriate amount on the purchase. At least in New York, sales taxes vary by county -- the State takes 4% and the county takes anywhere from 3-5%. That's 62 lines on the spreadsheet, just for New York. I think NYC adds a point or two as well. This would have to be correlated with a ZIP code table, so the retailer would know which ZIPs are in which jurisdictions. It's tedious, but not impossible. Perhaps the IRS could spend some of our money to draw up the tables and maintain them.
Another avenue is to put the onus on the buyer to calculate and remit the appropriate taxes to the authorities. If I were a sociopath, I'd like this method better. It doesn't burden the retailers and it provides a delicious means of social control, not to mention a wealth of interesting information on what people are buying. Let's take a non-Amazon company as an example, since Amazon has bought exemptions from State sales taxes:
NewEgg is contacted by the NY Department of Taxation and Finance and ordered to turn over their NY sales records. No warrant is required, since the request is for tax compliance purposes. DTF runs the records through their computer system and looks up the tax records of each NewEgg customer. If the customer didn't report the sale, they're in big trouble. If it's a significant amount that they didn't report, or there's a pattern of non-compliance, off to private prison with you!
Cue the naysayers saying I'm a paranoiac and Our Glorious Overlords would never do something so fiendish...
Right. I think people are getting hung up on the GP's incorrect use of "duress". There are a bunch of reasons why a contractual clause might get thrown out: there's the public policy rationale, as you note, there's undue influence (though judging from Wikipedia, that might not work in the U.S., as both cited cases are Australian), and there's my personal favorite:
1. You have to prove that whatever your employer offered you in exchange for signing the contract (viz., a job, at a certain rate of pay, for certain hours) was so grossly inadequate compared to what you had to give up, that to enforce the contractual terms would be unfair.
2. You have to prove that your employer leveraged his greater bargaining power to get you to sign the contract.
Essentially, you have to prove that both the terms of the contract and the manner in which it was negotiated were both grossly unfair. #2 is a lot easier to prove than #1, given the state of the economy and the desperation of many job-seekers, but #2 alone isn't sufficient. In order to break a contract on unconscionability grounds, the terms have to be really, really onerous, on the order of "you agree to give up your firstborn for indentured servitude to this company" or "if you quit, you agree never to work within a fifty-mile radius of this company ever again".
It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of the arabica bean that the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking. The shaking becomes a warning. It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion.
If you have a license to pilot any of them, you have learned how to navigate without.
Right you are. My sextant, watch, Nautical Almanac, and H.O. 249 Sight Reduction Tables laugh at these puny exploits. Let me know when researchers have found flaws in the apparent motion of the celestial spheres.
Fifth Amendment, maybe? "Private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation." It's certainly arguable that patent rights, as a form of IP, constitute some form of "private property". If one takes the position that IP does constitute "property", then it's possible that abolishing existing patents (essentially, releasing those ideas to the public domain) would be considered a taking for Fifth Amendment purposes, requiring compensation. It's iffy, but possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I just looked at the source for the page. It's static HTML with the ASCII art defacement poster enclosed in [pre] tags. There isn't any code there with which one could conceivably conduct an attack.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) 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
( ) 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
(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
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) 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
(x) 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
(x) 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
( ) 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
(x) 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
(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!
"Take the piss" is a British slang term that means roughly the same thing as when we say "give someone shit".
Your pithy, quotable wisdom notwithstanding, that's why you have a locking drawer in the desk :D
Your State may be different, but New York's Freedom of Information Law (or FOIL, we like to be different) works like this:
The agency has to respond within five business days, but that response can read something like:
If they run into a snag, they have to inform you of this and produce the records within a "reasonable period".
So it's not like NYC was under a five-day time crunch here. They could easily have responded and said it would take 40 or 60 days, being as there were several million records requested. That's definitely long enough to bring in a consultant (or even one of the more technically-literate staff members) to properly secure the data.
Sandra Day O'Connor hasn't been on the Supreme Court for eight years now. That glorified shitstain Sam Alito replaced her. While it would certainly be interesting to hear her opinion of the case, such opinion would carry no weight whatsoever.
I just took a nuclear shit. It was the bomb.
(Am I doing it right?)
You seem pretty concerned about OP's alleged hate speech.
What the fuck did I just read?
I'll bite. Please present evidence supporting your claim that "that research has since been disproven".
I hate to break it to you, but you're sorely mistaken. Every State has gotten rid of the marital rape exemption. Some of them maintain differences in exactly how it's prosecuted, but it's still rape.
Who's writing Linux these days? One can only hope it's not the same people who are responsible for the abomination that is Slashdot Beta.
I have a better idea. It can be accomplished by deleting the last nine words of the sentence: "Classic Slashdot isn't going away."
It ain't broke. Don't fix it.
Oh, it's even more fiendishly perfect than what you describe.
See, at the end of the 10-year repayment period, the remaining balance does, in fact, get wiped, but the amount that's wiped is treated as taxable income. So if you've "racked up all the debt you want" and have $100,000 worth of forgiveness, say hello to a $35,000 tax bill.
What's that? You can't pay the tax on your newfound "wealth"? Well then, men with guns will come to your house, seize your property, and put you in a cage.
It's not feudalism, it's something rather worse.
I'm a little drunk, so I read that as "the efficient conduit for the transmission of God's word to earth". Which still kind of works.
I haven't much to say, other than from one New York lawyer to another, BIG UPS. Keep doing your thing, Ray. You'll wear the bastards down eventually!
How will this shiny new tax be collected and enforced?
One option is to put the onus on the retailers to maintain a database of all the different sales tax rates in the country, so they can collect the appropriate amount on the purchase. At least in New York, sales taxes vary by county -- the State takes 4% and the county takes anywhere from 3-5%. That's 62 lines on the spreadsheet, just for New York. I think NYC adds a point or two as well. This would have to be correlated with a ZIP code table, so the retailer would know which ZIPs are in which jurisdictions. It's tedious, but not impossible. Perhaps the IRS could spend some of our money to draw up the tables and maintain them.
Another avenue is to put the onus on the buyer to calculate and remit the appropriate taxes to the authorities. If I were a sociopath, I'd like this method better. It doesn't burden the retailers and it provides a delicious means of social control, not to mention a wealth of interesting information on what people are buying. Let's take a non-Amazon company as an example, since Amazon has bought exemptions from State sales taxes:
NewEgg is contacted by the NY Department of Taxation and Finance and ordered to turn over their NY sales records. No warrant is required, since the request is for tax compliance purposes. DTF runs the records through their computer system and looks up the tax records of each NewEgg customer. If the customer didn't report the sale, they're in big trouble. If it's a significant amount that they didn't report, or there's a pattern of non-compliance, off to private prison with you!
Cue the naysayers saying I'm a paranoiac and Our Glorious Overlords would never do something so fiendish...
Along with being able to turn off the telescreen?
Right. I think people are getting hung up on the GP's incorrect use of "duress". There are a bunch of reasons why a contractual clause might get thrown out: there's the public policy rationale, as you note, there's undue influence (though judging from Wikipedia, that might not work in the U.S., as both cited cases are Australian), and there's my personal favorite:
Unconscionability. It's a two-prong attack:
1. You have to prove that whatever your employer offered you in exchange for signing the contract (viz., a job, at a certain rate of pay, for certain hours) was so grossly inadequate compared to what you had to give up, that to enforce the contractual terms would be unfair.
2. You have to prove that your employer leveraged his greater bargaining power to get you to sign the contract.
Essentially, you have to prove that both the terms of the contract and the manner in which it was negotiated were both grossly unfair. #2 is a lot easier to prove than #1, given the state of the economy and the desperation of many job-seekers, but #2 alone isn't sufficient. In order to break a contract on unconscionability grounds, the terms have to be really, really onerous, on the order of "you agree to give up your firstborn for indentured servitude to this company" or "if you quit, you agree never to work within a fifty-mile radius of this company ever again".
It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of the arabica bean that the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking. The shaking becomes a warning. It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion.
Right you are. My sextant, watch, Nautical Almanac, and H.O. 249 Sight Reduction Tables laugh at these puny exploits. Let me know when researchers have found flaws in the apparent motion of the celestial spheres.
In that case, you could use one of the manual ones at diybookscanner.com and turn the pages yourself, trading speed for safety.
29,025 and presumably climbing. I say, great. Good riddance.
Fifth Amendment, maybe? "Private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation." It's certainly arguable that patent rights, as a form of IP, constitute some form of "private property". If one takes the position that IP does constitute "property", then it's possible that abolishing existing patents (essentially, releasing those ideas to the public domain) would be considered a taking for Fifth Amendment purposes, requiring compensation. It's iffy, but possible.
I thought you'd said "autism is the new red-headed step-child" and was very confused upon reading the article.