The price (NOT COST, but PRICE) of Windows in the Windows+IE package is not the same as the price of Windows as a standalone. They were selling the same product (Windows) for two different prices, one was for $100, and the other was for something less than $100 (100 - IE price). The notion that IE was a free product with no price is silly when it CANNOT STAND ALONE and requires the Windows product to function. (Keep in mind, I'm approaching this from the standpoint of someone who does not already use Windows, and now has to get it in order to use a site designed for IE.)
You can't throw spammers in jail until you can get a fair definition that seperates spam from non-malicious unsolicted e-mail. (ALL e-mail is unsolicited. The recipient doesn't know you are about to send the message, therefore it's unsolicited, even if it's a good friend that wouldn't mind getting mail from you.)
(And your spamhous list only proves that *some* spammers are known. Finding some spammers is not equivilent to spammers being unable to be anonymous. Some are less anonymous than others, and become known because of it.)
A technique that doesn't work if your goal is to authenticate the recpient all the way back to the source, rather than just verify that the sending machine is a real hostname.
I mean, how rude is that? I'm not trying to switch you over, so why do the same to me?
Every time you claim the bible is correct, you are also claiming people should make that switchover, since that's a major portion of the message contained therein. It is not logically possible to say the bible is truth and not also be saying people should become Christians. The two go together.
Instead of making fun of Christians, I implore you to, instead, attack their stupid, superstitious beliefs.
If you have a lot invested in your beliefs, then it's totally impossible for someone to attack your beliefs without it also feeling like an attack on your person. If I think X is true, and you say that X is a stupid thing to believe, then you have just called me stupid, in an indirect fashion. Does this mean I think people should refrain from having that kind of debate? No. Far from it. It just means I think people shouldn't fool themselves into thinking it's possible to have a "toned down" version of that debate in which you attack the argument and not the person. Sometimes the two are inexorably intertwined such that attacking one results in attacking the other.
What you should avoid is arguments where you attack the person *INSTEAD OF* the argument. That's a classic fallacy. But if you end up attacking the person as a *SIDE EFFECT* of attacking the argument, that is still a valid argument and shouldn't be disallowed.
There is only 65000 ports per IP address, and each connection requires it's own port...
I don't think so. If that was the case, then sendmail (and a variety of other classic internet server programs) couldn't work the way it does. You can only have a server *listen* on 65535 unique port numbers, but once a connection is made and a child process of the server is spawned to deal with that one client, a new client can come in on the same port number and get it's own child spawned for it, and so on.)
It's about more than just sleeping a while. The problem with a "sleep" solution is that the sender can still queue up messages to send out elsewhere while waiting for the sleep confirmation messages to come back from the first messages sent, like so:
Thread 1:
for x goes from 1 to 100000, send message number X to a server somewhere.
Thread 2:
In a loop, respond to any 10 second sleep requests that came back from servers being talked to by thread 1.
Thus, the overall additional cost to the spammer is NOT 10 seconds per message, but 10 seconds overall for the whole batch of messages. Not a big deal, really. (The server-side sleeping solution only works for the case where the spammer is talking to a small list of e-mail servers. So long as the spammer is sending 10,000 messages to 10,000 different SMTP servers, each one can sleep 10 seconds and it won't delay the spammer much overall, provided the spamming program is smart enough to start in on the next message before waiting for a reply from the first.)
What microsoft's solution does is make the sender pay a resource cost that is more signifigant than just sleeping a few seconds (which costs almost nothing), so that a long delay is guaranteed. (It also makes it impossible to lie and fake out the message - because it has to be an answer to the math question asked by the recipient's server, and until you see that question, the sending program doesn't know what fake thing to put into the header.)
The idea is sound, so long as the algorithm is well published (not used by MS as a monopoly-enhancer like they usually do), and it's not possible to devise a question which is deliberately problematic for the program to solve. (If there exists a special case of a question to ask the sender which isn't solvable in reasonable time, then a malicious site could set things up so that when you try to send mail to that site your own mail server gets stuck trying to solve an impossible math problem and can't continue.)
Any network that transmits spam (or material infringing on copyright) is liable for the spam/infringement. The damaged party is then able to sue up the chain.
OH, MAN! NOOOO! No way! That would be the worst possible solution. When you hold the middleman legally responsible for things he has no control over, he starts enacting draconian poilicies to GET that control so he can cover his ass. These policies end up being overly restrictive out of fear that something might slip through the cracks. This is where a lot of the bullshit in various Terms of Service items in ISPs is already coming from. "Nope, you can only use approved programs on the service". "Nope, if we haven't heard of it, you can't run it." "What's that? Your niche OS has a normal, benign service that we don't understand? Then you can't run it. It's not listed as a typical Windows service, so it must be something illicit."
Actually, the biggest problem with SMTP is that there is no way to assure whom the mail is coming from, and thus there is no accountability. If anonymity was not possible, then spammers would disapper because they'd be found and subjected to their own treatment back on them.
The BBC article doesn't mention one point that's very important to me: How open will the publication of the technique be? I have to be suscpicious of any proposed new internet standard coming from a research foundation funded by Microsoft. Yeah, call that MS bashing, but the fact remains that there's a STRONG precedent here for that suspicion. MS would love to have a new standard adopted that can only work if both the sender and recipient have to use MS products.
In general, the solution they propose is great. Add a slight resource cost to sending an e-mail and it doesn't affect most legitimate e-mails but it does affect massive spam floods. And they came up with a resource cost that will work the same even on a faster computer - so it doesn't get 'fixed' by waiting for faster hardware or by running a bunch of machines in parallel. BUT the really BIG BIG problem here is that it requires that the sender be using a compatable e-mailer. What exactly will it take to be comptable? Is it going to be a published standard that will be easy to implement in the wide variety of mailers out there? Will it be *legal* to do so? If not, will people who reverse engineer it so that they can send e-mails from non-MS platforms be slandered by the industry claiming they are spammers? (In EXACTLY the same way that people trying to view DVD content on non-approved platforms get labelled as DVD pirates.)
The idea at it's core is sound, but I want these questions answered before I would trust that there aren't alterior motives at work here.
When TRON was released, and used a *lot* of (then) state of the art computer graphics (to generate an inside-the-computer fantasy world so the straight lines and polygonal nature of the primitive graphics actaully made sense), it's nomination for a special effects oscar was *rejected* by the Motion Picture Academy before it even went to a vote. The reason for the rejection? They considered it "cheating" to have a computer do the effects for you. Idiots - like there was no human effort involved at all. Damn, they didn't even have modelling software - just rendering. They had to move the lightcycles by actually writing out lists of 6-tuple numbers for each cycle for each frame by hand and feeding them to the animators and looking at the results later. (i.e. they had a list of numbers like: (x1, y1, y2, alpha1, beta1, gamma1) for a single time momemnt, and then wrote them again and again for each frame of animation. The work was all with calculators and pencils.
"Yes, you stupid Academy Award people, that counts as actual work, dammit."
So, yes, this is a common attitude, and has been for quite some time.
An army made up ENTIRELY of cavalry? Or an army made up entirely of foot soldiers? Crap armies, say I.
Good thing then that Rohan and Gondor have a long history of being allies and combined their units together into one army. One was specialized in cavalry and the other in footmen. That was kind of the whole *point* to their alliance, and the whole *point* about why their bitter attitude toward each other in later years was damaging to their communal strength. You are assuming a plot hole where it's actually a deliberate plot element you missed.
What happened to the Orcs holding Frodo prisoner in Mordor is called "Hollywood".
No, it's called "Oxford, 1950's". That part of the movie matched up with the books exactly.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.
on
Message in a Battle
·
· Score: 1
You missed the point. The commentt was that it didn't look real *because* it looked like a movie special effect. The assumption inherent in that is that the person writing the post already knew movie special effects (like the explosions you speak of) are unrealistic, and it was the SIMILARITY with them that made the footage look unreal.
Which, is precisely the opposite of what you accused him of.
And that's because Microsoft made damn sure you couldn't run Windows without IE.
Actually, no. That's not the point I was addressing. If you give away IE for free, but it can only work on Windows, and you are the company that makes both of them, then that is no different from bundling their costs together, EVEN IF Windows can work without IE. A product that is free, but requires another product to function might as well be bundled with it - there's no big difference in terms of where the money goes.
I already refuted this point in response to someone else's post above. If you bundle A and B together and charge $X for it, that is *exactly* the same, from a "which company gets how much money" point of view, as the situation where you charge $X for just A, and then give away B for free but B requires A or it doesn't work.
Windows 95 with IE cost exactly the same as Windows 95. IE was free.
False. When Windows with IE is priced the same as Windows without IE was, then what has happened is that the collective price of all other parts of Windows went down a little bit, to make room for IE under the same cap.
As an aside, did Microsoft ever charge Mac users for IE?
No, but that's an entirely different product. IE for Windows was never free. IE for Mac was. In fact, NOTHING Microsoft gives for free for Windows is actually really being given away gratis. From a wheres-the-money-going point of view, there is zero difference between bundling A with B and charging $X for the bundle, versus giving A away for free when it requires the non-gratis product B that costs $X. As long as the "free" product requires the purchase of a non-free associated product, it's cost is bundled in with it, and that's where the company is recouping the costs.
I don't think even the most anti-MS zealot could make that claim with a straight face.
Real player sure works a lot better on my computer than Windows Media Player. In fact, it works an infinite percent better becuase WMP won't run at all.
Of course, I'm not using Windows.
Granted, that might look like zealotry, but that just shows ignorance to call it that. The fact of the matter is that one works (although, yes, it really is bad) and the other fails to do anything at all.
Micorosft didn't give it away gratis. It was part of the cost of Windows. It was no more "free" than, say, "WIN.EXE" is, or 'COMMAND.EXE', and so on. It's an app that is part of the OS's suite of standard Apps you can't entirely do without. It's not free - it's just that the cost is carried inside another product.
The model that says there must be a divide between consumer and provider is counter to the way the internet protocols actually work. It's not just historical. It's technical. There is no technical reason that a computer sitting in my house can't be a webserver. So the industry invents fake reasons to make an artificial divide that's not really there except for in buerocracy and paperwork. It makes as much sense as saying, "From now on, let's just make it our company policy that Pi is equal to 3.1 instead of 3.14159....etc. It's simpler that way. Yeah, that's nice, but that's not how the underlying system actually works.
And, just like that, the way the internet actually works, every node is a peer.
Wrong. That was my answer to your flame about BW hogs not being P2P/server users.
1. Here in the real world, I never said that. I said they werent EXCLUSIVLY so.
2. Here in the real world, people are held accountable to *all* things they say, not just the first post with the rest being ignorable.
It's like saying: I like people that eat a lot of rice (Chinese, Indians, etc...).
How is that pointless?
It would be pointless if you believed that every country in the world contains people eating lots of rice. If, on the other hand, you thought that only a limited subset of countries contain people eating a lot of rice, then listing examples would make sense.
It's a perfect analogy - you don't start listing things unless you think the list is a subset of the whole. If *everything* qualifies, you don't bother giving examples. Nobody would say, "I like food (bratwurst, rice, tomatoes, etc..)" or "I like nations (China, India, etc...)"
In over a hundred years of kicking butt, America has not "conlonized" a country we defeated in war.
Gosh, what a convenient cutoff point. Why pick it? Drop it and there's a REALLY HUGE example staring us right in the face....Ever wonder why so many places in the desert southwest have Spanish names?
Slashdot Mirror
The price (NOT COST, but PRICE) of Windows in the Windows+IE package is not the same as the price of Windows as a standalone. They were selling the same product (Windows) for two different prices, one was for $100, and the other was for something less than $100 (100 - IE price). The notion that IE was a free product with no price is silly when it CANNOT STAND ALONE and requires the Windows product to function. (Keep in mind, I'm approaching this from the standpoint of someone who does not already use Windows, and now has to get it in order to use a site designed for IE.)
You can't throw spammers in jail until you can get a fair definition that seperates spam from non-malicious unsolicted e-mail. (ALL e-mail is unsolicited. The recipient doesn't know you are about to send the message, therefore it's unsolicited, even if it's a good friend that wouldn't mind getting mail from you.)
(And your spamhous list only proves that *some* spammers are known. Finding some spammers is not equivilent to spammers being unable to be anonymous. Some are less anonymous than others, and become known because of it.)
Explain to me what this is.
A technique that doesn't work if your goal is to authenticate the recpient all the way back to the source, rather than just verify that the sending machine is a real hostname.
I mean, how rude is that? I'm not trying to switch you over, so why do the same to me?
Every time you claim the bible is correct, you are also claiming people should make that switchover, since that's a major portion of the message contained therein. It is not logically possible to say the bible is truth and not also be saying people should become Christians. The two go together.
Instead of making fun of Christians, I implore you to, instead, attack their stupid, superstitious beliefs.
If you have a lot invested in your beliefs, then it's totally impossible for someone to attack your beliefs without it also feeling like an attack on your person. If I think X is true, and you say that X is a stupid thing to believe, then you have just called me stupid, in an indirect fashion. Does this mean I think people should refrain from having that kind of debate? No. Far from it. It just means I think people shouldn't fool themselves into thinking it's possible to have a "toned down" version of that debate in which you attack the argument and not the person. Sometimes the two are inexorably intertwined such that attacking one results in attacking the other.
What you should avoid is arguments where you attack the person *INSTEAD OF* the argument. That's a classic fallacy. But if you end up attacking the person as a *SIDE EFFECT* of attacking the argument, that is still a valid argument and shouldn't be disallowed.
There is only 65000 ports per IP address, and each connection requires it's own port...
I don't think so. If that was the case, then sendmail (and a variety of other classic internet server programs) couldn't work the way it does. You can only have a server *listen* on 65535 unique port numbers, but once a connection is made and a child process of the server is spawned to deal with that one client, a new client can come in on the same port number and get it's own child spawned for it, and so on.)
It's about more than just sleeping a while. The problem with a "sleep" solution is that the sender can still queue up messages to send out elsewhere while waiting for the sleep confirmation messages to come back from the first messages sent, like so:
Thread 1:
for x goes from 1 to 100000, send message number X to a server somewhere.
Thread 2:
In a loop, respond to any 10 second sleep requests that came back from servers being talked to by thread 1.
Thus, the overall additional cost to the spammer is NOT 10 seconds per message, but 10 seconds overall for the whole batch of messages. Not a big deal, really. (The server-side sleeping solution only works for the case where the spammer is talking to a small list of e-mail servers. So long as the spammer is sending 10,000 messages to 10,000 different SMTP servers, each one can sleep 10 seconds and it won't delay the spammer much overall, provided the spamming program is smart enough to start in on the next message before waiting for a reply from the first.)
What microsoft's solution does is make the sender pay a resource cost that is more signifigant than just sleeping a few seconds (which costs almost nothing), so that a long delay is guaranteed. (It also makes it impossible to lie and fake out the message - because it has to be an answer to the math question asked by the recipient's server, and until you see that question, the sending program doesn't know what fake thing to put into the header.)
The idea is sound, so long as the algorithm is well published (not used by MS as a monopoly-enhancer like they usually do), and it's not possible to devise a question which is deliberately problematic for the program to solve. (If there exists a special case of a question to ask the sender which isn't solvable in reasonable time, then a malicious site could set things up so that when you try to send mail to that site your own mail server gets stuck trying to solve an impossible math problem and can't continue.)
Any network that transmits spam (or material infringing on copyright) is liable for the spam/infringement. The damaged party is then able to sue up the chain.
OH, MAN! NOOOO! No way! That would be the worst possible solution. When you hold the middleman legally responsible for things he has no control over, he starts enacting draconian poilicies to GET that control so he can cover his ass. These policies end up being overly restrictive out of fear that something might slip through the cracks. This is where a lot of the bullshit in various Terms of Service items in ISPs is already coming from. "Nope, you can only use approved programs on the service". "Nope, if we haven't heard of it, you can't run it." "What's that? Your niche OS has a normal, benign service that we don't understand? Then you can't run it. It's not listed as a typical Windows service, so it must be something illicit."
Actually, the biggest problem with SMTP is that there is no way to assure whom the mail is coming from, and thus there is no accountability. If anonymity was not possible, then spammers would disapper because they'd be found and subjected to their own treatment back on them.
The BBC article doesn't mention one point that's very important to me: How open will the publication of the technique be? I have to be suscpicious of any proposed new internet standard coming from a research foundation funded by Microsoft. Yeah, call that MS bashing, but the fact remains that there's a STRONG precedent here for that suspicion. MS would love to have a new standard adopted that can only work if both the sender and recipient have to use MS products.
In general, the solution they propose is great. Add a slight resource cost to sending an e-mail and it doesn't affect most legitimate e-mails but it does affect massive spam floods. And they came up with a resource cost that will work the same even on a faster computer - so it doesn't get 'fixed' by waiting for faster hardware or by running a bunch of machines in parallel. BUT the really BIG BIG problem here is that it requires that the sender be using a compatable e-mailer. What exactly will it take to be comptable? Is it going to be a published standard that will be easy to implement in the wide variety of mailers out there? Will it be *legal* to do so? If not, will people who reverse engineer it so that they can send e-mails from non-MS platforms be slandered by the industry claiming they are spammers? (In EXACTLY the same way that people trying to view DVD content on non-approved platforms get labelled as DVD pirates.)
The idea at it's core is sound, but I want these questions answered before I would trust that there aren't alterior motives at work here.
Is this a common attitude?
When TRON was released, and used a *lot* of (then) state of the art computer graphics (to generate an inside-the-computer fantasy world so the straight lines and polygonal nature of the primitive graphics actaully made sense), it's nomination for a special effects oscar was *rejected* by the Motion Picture Academy before it even went to a vote. The reason for the rejection? They considered it "cheating" to have a computer do the effects for you. Idiots - like there was no human effort involved at all. Damn, they didn't even have modelling software - just rendering. They had to move the lightcycles by actually writing out lists of 6-tuple numbers for each cycle for each frame by hand and feeding them to the animators and looking at the results later. (i.e. they had a list of numbers like: (x1, y1, y2, alpha1, beta1, gamma1) for a single time momemnt, and then wrote them again and again for each frame of animation. The work was all with calculators and pencils.
"Yes, you stupid Academy Award people, that counts as actual work, dammit."
So, yes, this is a common attitude, and has been for quite some time.
An army made up ENTIRELY of cavalry? Or an army made up entirely of foot soldiers? Crap armies, say I.
Good thing then that Rohan and Gondor have a long history of being allies and combined their units together into one army. One was specialized in cavalry and the other in footmen. That was kind of the whole *point* to their alliance, and the whole *point* about why their bitter attitude toward each other in later years was damaging to their communal strength. You are assuming a plot hole where it's actually a deliberate plot element you missed.
What happened to the Orcs holding Frodo prisoner in Mordor is called "Hollywood".
No, it's called "Oxford, 1950's". That part of the movie matched up with the books exactly.
You missed the point. The commentt was that it didn't look real *because* it looked like a movie special effect. The assumption inherent in that is that the person writing the post already knew movie special effects (like the explosions you speak of) are unrealistic, and it was the SIMILARITY with them that made the footage look unreal.
Which, is precisely the opposite of what you accused him of.
My bad. I'm loosing patience explaining to you that 2+2=4.
And I'm losing patience having it explained to me with a condescending tone that 2+2=5 and how I'm an idiot for not seeing it.
[The lying mischaracterization of what transpired has been snipped]
Please don't reply.
Translation: please allow me to slander you and please roll over and take it.
And that's because Microsoft made damn sure you couldn't run Windows without IE.
Actually, no. That's not the point I was addressing. If you give away IE for free, but it can only work on Windows, and you are the company that makes both of them, then that is no different from bundling their costs together, EVEN IF Windows can work without IE. A product that is free, but requires another product to function might as well be bundled with it - there's no big difference in terms of where the money goes.
I already refuted this point in response to someone else's post above. If you bundle A and B together and charge $X for it, that is *exactly* the same, from a "which company gets how much money" point of view, as the situation where you charge $X for just A, and then give away B for free but B requires A or it doesn't work.
Windows 95 with IE cost exactly the same as Windows 95. IE was free.
False. When Windows with IE is priced the same as Windows without IE was, then what has happened is that the collective price of all other parts of Windows went down a little bit, to make room for IE under the same cap.
As an aside, did Microsoft ever charge Mac users for IE?
No, but that's an entirely different product. IE for Windows was never free. IE for Mac was. In fact, NOTHING Microsoft gives for free for Windows is actually really being given away gratis. From a wheres-the-money-going point of view, there is zero difference between bundling A with B and charging $X for the bundle, versus giving A away for free when it requires the non-gratis product B that costs $X. As long as the "free" product requires the purchase of a non-free associated product, it's cost is bundled in with it, and that's where the company is recouping the costs.
I don't think even the most anti-MS zealot could make that claim with a straight face.
Real player sure works a lot better on my computer than Windows Media Player. In fact, it works an infinite percent better becuase WMP won't run at all.
Of course, I'm not using Windows.
Granted, that might look like zealotry, but that just shows ignorance to call it that. The fact of the matter is that one works (although, yes, it really is bad) and the other fails to do anything at all.
Micorosft didn't give it away gratis. It was part of the cost of Windows. It was no more "free" than, say, "WIN.EXE" is, or 'COMMAND.EXE', and so on. It's an app that is part of the OS's suite of standard Apps you can't entirely do without. It's not free - it's just that the cost is carried inside another product.
also available in some other form.
Which is, unfortunately, usually WMP.
The model that says there must be a divide between consumer and provider is counter to the way the internet protocols actually work. It's not just historical. It's technical. There is no technical reason that a computer sitting in my house can't be a webserver. So the industry invents fake reasons to make an artificial divide that's not really there except for in buerocracy and paperwork. It makes as much sense as saying, "From now on, let's just make it our company policy that Pi is equal to 3.1 instead of 3.14159....etc. It's simpler that way. Yeah, that's nice, but that's not how the underlying system actually works.
And, just like that, the way the internet actually works, every node is a peer.
Wrong. That was my answer to your flame about BW hogs not being P2P/server users.
1. Here in the real world, I never said that. I said they werent EXCLUSIVLY so.
2. Here in the real world, people are held accountable to *all* things they say, not just the first post with the rest being ignorable.
It's like saying: I like people that eat a lot of rice (Chinese, Indians, etc...).
How is that pointless?
It would be pointless if you believed that every country in the world contains people eating lots of rice. If, on the other hand, you thought that only a limited subset of countries contain people eating a lot of rice, then listing examples would make sense.
It's a perfect analogy - you don't start listing things unless you think the list is a subset of the whole. If *everything* qualifies, you don't bother giving examples. Nobody would say, "I like food (bratwurst, rice, tomatoes, etc..)" or "I like nations (China, India, etc...)"
In over a hundred years of kicking butt, America has not "conlonized" a country we defeated in war.
Gosh, what a convenient cutoff point. Why pick it? Drop it and there's a REALLY HUGE example staring us right in the face....Ever wonder why so many places in the desert southwest have Spanish names?