The problem is that MAPS discovers the spam and blocks the ISP faster than the ISP discovers it. So even a conscientious ISP ends up not having enough time to respond before getting blacklisted (and then stuck that way all weekend). MAPS' badness comes from the imbalance between how long it takes to get your domain blacklisted versus how long it takes to get un-blacklisted. A mistake that takes mere minutes to occur (one of your customers starts spewing spam), shouldn't take a whole weekend to rectify.
There's a lot of small towns near the border, on both sides with businesses have become dependant on the very easy and quick ability for people to pass back and forth across the border without the slightest hassle. I wonder if this change will dampen the economies of those small towns. Using a passport is only a small hassle, but it's a small hassle where previously there were none.
When I was a small child my family went on a car trip through the canadian rockies. The border guard was one guy in a booth not much larger than a photomat. There wasn't even a barrier gate across the road that lifted out of the way or anything like that, just a stop sign. This was the full extent of the border crossing questions:
guard (seeing family station-wagon): Hello folks, May I ask your purpose in entering Canada? my Dad: sightseeing camping. (obvious from the car full of supplies). guard: Are you planning on staying long? my Dad: just two weeks. guard: Do you have any guns or fruit? (What an odd combination of of questions) my Dad - a bag of apples we just bought for lunch later. guard: If you just bought them it should be okay. We're worried about the spread of fruit flies from further south but if you just bought them in washington they'll be fine. guard: yup! Welcome to Canada. Have a wonderful trip. my Dad - Don't you need to see some ID? guard: I suppose if it will make you feel better.
The re-entry into the US was even more lax - The guard saw the license plates on the car were from the US, and asked, "Let's see - plates from Wisconsin - car packed for a camping trip - Coming back from a vacation I see? Okay - Welcome back, go on through..."
rational analysis that really indicated he didn't give a shit [...]lots of people were offended
I've heard this kind of claim before from other people and it offends me - I strongly disagree with the notion that one cannot be simultaneously rational and caring.
There's one huge problem with your proposal (there's lots, but I'll just mention the really Big One) - The events that occur when leading a country opver a period of 4 years are not predictable at the start of those four years.
It's the same thing that was flawed with the Soviet's "Five year plans" - you can't centrally drive things that far in advance, even in a place where the government has as much control as it did in the USSR - it's even less possible in a country like the USA.
Both of the big parties lie about what their position is on having a Big Brother government. They'll push for Big Brother = Good when their party is in charge, and Big Brother = Bad when the opposing party is in charge.
Let me clear up your confusion: "conservative" and "liberal" have completely different meanings depending on the subject matter. If you're talking about doling out material, conservative means doling out a minimal amount, and liberal means doling out a really big amount. (i.e. a "I ate a liberal helping of pasta, but you nibbled at yours conservitively." In the area of finances, this translates into "conservative" means "spend very little" and "liberal" means "spend a lot". But when it comes to individual freedom, "conservative" means "hold things back" and liberal means "let them run free". This means that the Political groups that use those names are using them in ways at odds with their non-political meanings, leading to all sorts of dishonest false equivocation fallacies in politics.
when Bill Maher made some tasteless remark about the WTC attackers
When did that happen? What really happened is that he made a truthful comment about the WTC attackers - the comment that people should stop calling them cowards because frankly, performing an act to further a cause when you know it will get you killed is not cowardice in the slightest. That doesn't make it right, and that doesn't justify it. But he pointed out that while there were many reasons that what they did was wrong, cowardice couldn't possible be one of them. And in fact it was wrong because the people involved had way too MUCH conviction and certainty. The point being that conviction and certainty and willingness to die for your cause are not the automatically good and wonderful things people claim they are. It varies depending on what cause it is that you have conviction toward. The 9/11 terrorists are the perfect example of why that is. Blind obedience with utter certainty is not a virtue, but it is not cowardice either.
That's not tasteless. It's right on the mark, and it's important to mention it at a time when people were using the terrorist attacks as an excuse to promote the attitude that more blind obedience to your country is a happy, happy, good goal to shoot for.
Long sessions reading books produces the same kind of eyestrain. So, has anyone studied book-reading strain versus monitor-strain to see if it's really a new phenomenon of the electronic age or just the same old thing it always was?
In the '80s the computers I used had gigantic letters. Today the fonts are tiny (and I prefer it that way - I can fit more on the screen) and that means more time spent focusing on tiny minutia at close range - which leads to nearsightedness. My bad eyesight got worse faster after it became possible to fit 1280x1024 on a screen and the temptation to do so and fit 200 characters across the screen was too good to ignore for mere heatlh reasons. Now I'm beginning to regret it.
You babbled on about a bunch of features that are present not only in Windows, but also OS X and a number of Linux distributions,
This is what we disagree on. Do you enjoy looking like an asshole? Then keep right on using phrases like "babble on" to describe people you disagree with. Which one ? I'm not aware of any version of Outlook that has, by design and default, launched external applications without user intervention.
What do you mean by "user intervention" here? What I was referring to was clicking on a message header and having it run content when all you wanted to do was see what the message was down in the message body window. Granted, that's a bit of user intervention needed, but not enough since the user can't tell that the message is an executable from just looking at the header list. Remember the warnings to "not click on messages" you think might not be legit? That warning should be completely unnecessary because running content should require additional steps beyond just wanting to see the body of a message. They finally wised up and turned that off, but for a while that was exactly what it did. Yes, they have. They just did it earlier - with NT for the OS core and Windows 95 for the UI.
I should have been more clear here. By "starting over" I didn't mean "making the same damn mistakes a second time." Windows has no more of "merged UI and OS" than OS X or any number of Linux distributions.
(Not according to their court cases - for example, delete Internet explorer's DLLs and lots of stuff that should have nothing to do with web browsing ends up breaking too. That's eviedence of integration of userland stuff with OS stuff at a level that should not be done if you like security.)
The thing gore started did not create the internet. It EXPANDED it. If you first built your house in the 1970's and then added an expansion to it in the 1980's, would you be correct in referring to that action as "creating the house"? No.
So if you don't like the use of the word Freedom because you think it is an absolute, then that's just changing the label applied to the discussion, not affecting the underlying meat of it.
It is relevent to the discussion, if the discussion is "is it deceptive to use this label or not?" When politicians deceptively talk about freedom that doesn't really exist, and are using the feel-good happy connotation of the word to their advantage, then the choice of labels becomes part of the argument I would have with that person.
And no, it's not true that if a term is absolute and unattainable that we must "turf it" and never use it again. Consider terms like "immortality" and "infinity". We still have them, and still use them, don't we? We just realize that what they mean is an unattainable asymptote that we can only approach without actually achieving - which is exactly how "freedom" should be viewed. It shouldn't be "this country has freedom and that one doesn't", but instead it should be "This country is closer to the theoretical ideal of freedom than that one is."
I think that terminology would be less deceptive - which is why politicians will never use it.
Just like someone who lived to be 100 years old was "closer to immortality" than someone who lived to be 90 years old was, but neither was actually immortal.
No. I adhere to the intelligent reasonable claim that limited freedom is no freedom at all, for the same reason that limited immortality is not immortality at all. It's a word that assumes an absolute, and that absolute is unattainable.
Freedom is a goal. It's a goal of our society that all people should be free. Is it an attainable goal? Of course not. That's like saying that we should all live forever or that the sun should shine every day.
Here's where your analogy fails: if we tried to make people live forever, and only succeeded in making them live to be 200 years old, then nobdoy would go around calling that "immortality". And yet when we try for freedom and only get the pseudofreedom that is actually possible in the real world, people still call that "freedom".
This isn't a complaint about the fact that freedom isn't attainable, like you falsely characterize it as. It's a complaint that people incorrectly label what we have as freedom. It's as incorrect as calling a 200-year lifespan "immortality".
You still haven't addressed the question with regards to the *security models* of OS X and Linux, either.
Yes I did. You just don't agree with what I said when addressing it, which is not the same thing as not addressing it.
No, an e-mail should not automatically launch ANYTHING, ever.
No version of Outlook has ever done this
false.
Like Apple has been trying to do for, oh, ~25 years now, you mean ?
Before OSX? Yes. The difference is that Apple wised up to what this excessive integration between OS and user interface was doing to them and started over with a better model that keeps them VERY far apart from each other. Microsoft hasn't started over. This is what you referred to as "legacy support", but there's more to it than that. It's legacy support of a system that merged UI and OS - which is NOT a secure model.
Would there a legal punishment then for someone putting up a site that should be in.xxx but isn't? For the system to work, there'd have to be. And then all you've done is shift the censorship problem to a new area - there are going to be lots of borderline topics that some people think should be.xxx that other people think should not - like perhaps a website for a pharmacy that advertises their inventory, which includes condoms and "the pill", or a support site giving advice along the lines of "hints for the teenager who's considering coming out of the closet", or medical sites that cover topics like STD's.
Saying that all porn needs to go into.xxx simply moves the censorship to the "does it or doesn't it count as porn' argument.
Gah! Why is it anytime someone brings up the Al Gore urban legend someone tries to exonerate Gore by pointing out the exact quote which is ALSO AN OBVIOUS LIE and doesn't exonerate Gore in the slightest from the incorrectness of his claim. No only can you not invent something after it already exists, you also can't "take the initiative" in "creating the legislation" that creates it either if it already exists in the first place before you got involved. I can't invent the wheel today. It's been done. I also can't start a committe that invents the wheel, nor can I start funding to have others invent the wheel. The wheel is already here.
And the internet was already there before Gore's legislation. He lied.
That doesn't get the government out of the internet - it just moves the enforcement to a new area - because now you'd have the problem of defining what things need to be put in the.adult category and which don't - a categorization that everyone will disagree over.
This is analogous to saying bittorrent causes piracy.
No. Bittorrent is installed knowingly. There's your difference.
What makes spam work is that the lying bastards that do it won't tell the truth about where they are sending from, so you can't accurately blacklist them. If it was possible for people to click a box that said, "Don't send me spam" and it would actually work correctly without false positives, spam would disappear. The problem is that all it takes is a measely 1 in a 1000 hit from spam to make it economically feasable for the spammer - if 99.9% of users don't buy anything from the spam, that's STILL enough to make it worth the spammer's while.
And the reason is that spammers don't have to admit to who they are. If they did, then no amount of government regulation would be needed to make them stop - the market would decide itself by how many people bounce their messages back at them and say a resounding, "NO THANK YOU, PUTZ". No censorship, no government rules - just simple people saying, "buzz off" and the consequences would be that spammers would reap what they sow and find themselves ostracized from e-mail systems.
Now, why is it that we can't do that? Becuase of spambot machines, who's sole purpose is to make it impossible to figure out who to filter out.
Microsoft's security is better than it used to be - but that's like saying a turtle is faster than a snail.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that MAPS discovers the spam and blocks the ISP faster than the ISP discovers it. So even a conscientious ISP ends up not having enough time to respond before getting blacklisted (and then stuck that way all weekend). MAPS' badness comes from the imbalance between how long it takes to get your domain blacklisted versus how long it takes to get un-blacklisted. A mistake that takes mere minutes to occur (one of your customers starts spewing spam), shouldn't take a whole weekend to rectify.
Yes. The problem is that it's the classic tale of "the idiot light that cried wolf".
There's a lot of small towns near the border, on both sides with businesses have become dependant on the very easy and quick ability for people to pass back and forth across the border without the slightest hassle. I wonder if this change will dampen the economies of those small towns. Using a passport is only a small hassle, but it's a small hassle where previously there were none.
When I was a small child my family went on a car trip through the canadian rockies. The border guard was one guy in a booth not much larger than a photomat. There wasn't even a barrier gate across the road that lifted out of the way or anything like that, just a stop sign. This was the full extent of the border crossing questions:
guard (seeing family station-wagon): Hello folks, May I ask your purpose in entering Canada?
my Dad: sightseeing camping. (obvious from the car full of supplies).
guard: Are you planning on staying long?
my Dad: just two weeks.
guard: Do you have any guns or fruit? (What an odd combination of of questions)
my Dad - a bag of apples we just bought for lunch later.
guard: If you just bought them it should be okay. We're worried about the spread of fruit flies from further south but if you just bought them in washington they'll be fine.
guard: yup! Welcome to Canada. Have a wonderful trip.
my Dad - Don't you need to see some ID?
guard: I suppose if it will make you feel better.
The re-entry into the US was even more lax - The guard saw the license plates on the car were from the US, and asked, "Let's see - plates from Wisconsin - car packed for a camping trip - Coming back from a vacation I see? Okay - Welcome back, go on through..."
Sigh. Those were friendlier times.
rational analysis that really indicated he didn't give a shit
[...]lots of people were offended
I've heard this kind of claim before from other people and it offends me - I strongly disagree with the notion that one cannot be simultaneously rational and caring.
There's one huge problem with your proposal (there's lots, but I'll just mention the really Big One) - The events that occur when leading a country opver a period of 4 years are not predictable at the start of those four years.
It's the same thing that was flawed with the Soviet's "Five year plans" - you can't centrally drive things that far in advance, even in a place where the government has as much control as it did in the USSR - it's even less possible in a country like the USA.
Why do you try to set up terms such that "secularist" and "traditional" are opposed? Secularism dates back to the founding of the country.
Both of the big parties lie about what their position is on having a Big Brother government. They'll push for Big Brother = Good when their party is in charge, and Big Brother = Bad when the opposing party is in charge.
Let me clear up your confusion: "conservative" and "liberal" have completely different meanings depending on the subject matter. If you're talking about doling out material, conservative means doling out a minimal amount, and liberal means doling out a really big amount. (i.e. a "I ate a liberal helping of pasta, but you nibbled at yours conservitively." In the area of finances, this translates into "conservative" means "spend very little" and "liberal" means "spend a lot". But when it comes to individual freedom, "conservative" means "hold things back" and liberal means "let them run free". This means that the Political groups that use those names are using them in ways at odds with their non-political meanings, leading to all sorts of dishonest false equivocation fallacies in politics.
when Bill Maher made some tasteless remark about the WTC attackers
When did that happen? What really happened is that he made a truthful comment about the WTC attackers - the comment that people should stop calling them cowards because frankly, performing an act to further a cause when you know it will get you killed is not cowardice in the slightest. That doesn't make it right, and that doesn't justify it. But he pointed out that while there were many reasons that what they did was wrong, cowardice couldn't possible be one of them. And in fact it was wrong because the people involved had way too MUCH conviction and certainty. The point being that conviction and certainty and willingness to die for your cause are not the automatically good and wonderful things people claim they are. It varies depending on what cause it is that you have conviction toward. The 9/11 terrorists are the perfect example of why that is. Blind obedience with utter certainty is not a virtue, but it is not cowardice either.
That's not tasteless. It's right on the mark, and it's important to mention it at a time when people were using the terrorist attacks as an excuse to promote the attitude that more blind obedience to your country is a happy, happy, good goal to shoot for.
Long sessions reading books produces the same kind of eyestrain. So, has anyone studied book-reading strain versus monitor-strain to see if it's really a new phenomenon of the electronic age or just the same old thing it always was?
The technology is different such that the flicker isn't noticable on LCD's. They look solid.
(Do the video camera test - point a video camera at a CRT and the picture of the screen gets that flicker effect - but it won't with an LCD.)
In the '80s the computers I used had gigantic letters. Today the fonts are tiny (and I prefer it that way - I can fit more on the screen) and that means more time spent focusing on tiny minutia at close range - which leads to nearsightedness. My bad eyesight got worse faster after it became possible to fit 1280x1024 on a screen and the temptation to do so and fit 200 characters across the screen was too good to ignore for mere heatlh reasons. Now I'm beginning to regret it.
The internet of 2005 is vastly different than the internet of 1990. Therefore the internet wasn't created until the 1990's.
When you understand why the above statement is wrong, you will understand why I think you're wrong.
Agreed. Now would you care to reply to what was actually said?
You babbled on about a bunch of features that are present not only in Windows, but also OS X and a number of Linux distributions,
This is what we disagree on. Do you enjoy looking like an asshole? Then keep right on using phrases like "babble on" to describe people you disagree with.
Which one ? I'm not aware of any version of Outlook that has, by design and default, launched external applications without user intervention.
What do you mean by "user intervention" here? What I was referring to was clicking on a message header and having it run content when all you wanted to do was see what the message was down in the message body window. Granted, that's a bit of user intervention needed, but not enough since the user can't tell that the message is an executable from just looking at the header list. Remember the warnings to "not click on messages" you think might not be legit? That warning should be completely unnecessary because running content should require additional steps beyond just wanting to see the body of a message. They finally wised up and turned that off, but for a while that was exactly what it did.
Yes, they have. They just did it earlier - with NT for the OS core and Windows 95 for the UI.
I should have been more clear here. By "starting over" I didn't mean "making the same damn mistakes a second time."
Windows has no more of "merged UI and OS" than OS X or any number of Linux distributions.
(Not according to their court cases - for example, delete Internet explorer's DLLs and lots of stuff that should have nothing to do with web browsing ends up breaking too. That's eviedence of integration of userland stuff with OS stuff at a level that should not be done if you like security.)
And yes, a loose, closed, set of networks refered to informally as "Duh intraweb" existed in the very late eighties.
No. It was the internet well before the "web" was just a sparkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye.
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/chris/think/Early_
The thing gore started did not create the internet.
It EXPANDED it.
If you first built your house in the 1970's and then added an expansion to it in the 1980's, would you be correct in referring to that action as "creating the house"? No.
So if you don't like the use of the word Freedom because you think it is an absolute, then that's just changing the label applied to the discussion, not affecting the underlying meat of it.
It is relevent to the discussion, if the discussion is "is it deceptive to use this label or not?" When politicians deceptively talk about freedom that doesn't really exist, and are using the feel-good happy connotation of the word to their advantage, then the choice of labels becomes part of the argument I would have with that person.
And no, it's not true that if a term is absolute and unattainable that we must "turf it" and never use it again. Consider terms like "immortality" and "infinity". We still have them, and still use them, don't we? We just realize that what they mean is an unattainable asymptote that we can only approach without actually achieving - which is exactly how "freedom" should be viewed. It shouldn't be "this country has freedom and that one doesn't", but instead it should be "This country is closer to the theoretical ideal of freedom than that one is."
I think that terminology would be less deceptive - which is why politicians will never use it.
Just like someone who lived to be 100 years old was "closer to immortality" than someone who lived to be 90 years old was, but neither was actually immortal.
No. I adhere to the intelligent reasonable claim that limited freedom is no freedom at all, for the same reason that limited immortality is not immortality at all. It's a word that assumes an absolute, and that absolute is unattainable.
Freedom is a goal. It's a goal of our society that all people should be free. Is it an attainable goal? Of course not. That's like saying that we should all live forever or that the sun should shine every day.
Here's where your analogy fails: if we tried to make people live forever, and only succeeded in making them live to be 200 years old, then nobdoy would go around calling that "immortality". And yet when we try for freedom and only get the pseudofreedom that is actually possible in the real world, people still call that "freedom".
This isn't a complaint about the fact that freedom isn't attainable, like you falsely characterize it as. It's a complaint that people incorrectly label what we have as freedom. It's as incorrect as calling a 200-year lifespan "immortality".
There's nothing wrong with speaking accurately.
You still haven't addressed the question with regards to the *security models* of OS X and Linux, either.
Yes I did. You just don't agree with what I said when addressing it, which is not the same thing as not addressing it.
No version of Outlook has ever done this
false.
Like Apple has been trying to do for, oh, ~25 years now, you mean ?
Before OSX? Yes. The difference is that Apple wised up to what this excessive integration between OS and user interface was doing to them and started over with a better model that keeps them VERY far apart from each other. Microsoft hasn't started over. This is what you referred to as "legacy support", but there's more to it than that. It's legacy support of a system that merged UI and OS - which is NOT a secure model.
Demanding that people be honest is not flamebait.
Would there a legal punishment then for someone putting up a site that should be in .xxx but isn't? For the system to work, there'd have to be. And then all you've done is shift the censorship problem to a new area - there are going to be lots of borderline topics that some people think should be .xxx that other people think should not - like perhaps a website for a pharmacy that advertises their inventory, which includes condoms and "the pill", or a support site giving advice along the lines of "hints for the teenager who's considering coming out of the closet", or medical sites that cover topics like STD's.
.xxx simply moves the censorship to the "does it or doesn't it count as porn' argument.
Saying that all porn needs to go into
Gah! Why is it anytime someone brings up the Al Gore urban legend someone tries to exonerate Gore by pointing out the exact quote which is ALSO AN OBVIOUS LIE and doesn't exonerate Gore in the slightest from the incorrectness of his claim. No only can you not invent something after it already exists, you also can't "take the initiative" in "creating the legislation" that creates it either if it already exists in the first place before you got involved. I can't invent the wheel today. It's been done. I also can't start a committe that invents the wheel, nor can I start funding to have others invent the wheel. The wheel is already here.
And the internet was already there before Gore's legislation.
He lied.
That doesn't get the government out of the internet - it just moves the enforcement to a new area - because now you'd have the problem of defining what things need to be put in the .adult category and which don't - a categorization that everyone will disagree over.
This is analogous to saying bittorrent causes piracy.
No. Bittorrent is installed knowingly. There's your difference.
What makes spam work is that the lying bastards that do it won't tell the truth about where they are sending from, so you can't accurately blacklist them. If it was possible for people to click a box that said, "Don't send me spam" and it would actually work correctly without false positives, spam would disappear. The problem is that all it takes is a measely 1 in a 1000 hit from spam to make it economically feasable for the spammer - if 99.9% of users don't buy anything from the spam, that's STILL enough to make it worth the spammer's while.
And the reason is that spammers don't have to admit to who they are. If they did, then no amount of government regulation would be needed to make them stop - the market would decide itself by how many people bounce their messages back at them and say a resounding, "NO THANK YOU, PUTZ". No censorship, no government rules - just simple people saying, "buzz off" and the consequences would be that spammers would reap what they sow and find themselves ostracized from e-mail systems.
Now, why is it that we can't do that? Becuase of spambot machines, who's sole purpose is to make it impossible to figure out who to filter out.
Microsoft's security is better than it used to be - but that's like saying a turtle is faster than a snail.