As other people have said, if the monetary fine does not discourage people from continuing to commit the crime, then it's simply not large enough.
What they should do to spammers is a) confiscate ALL the capital they accumulated from their crimes, b) add a sizable extra monetary penalty on top of that, and c) make them do some type of community service directly related to helping their victims (mostly mail admins + abuse departments) clean up after their mess.
Jail time of more than a few months (except maybe for the absolute worst repeat offenders) is just totally inappropriate and unneccesary no matter how big of a spamming operation they're running.
Even if that was true (and I doubt it is since it's not hard to catch spammers... just follow the paper trail), it would be irrelevant. The punishment HAS to fit the crime. Only barbarians still think otherwise.
Let's look at a hypothetical situation where for every one million people shoplifting, it is only possible to catch one of them. Now, if you determined the punishment for this one unlucky shoplifter who was caught based on preventing shoplifting and making the sentence fit the total amount of punishment that would be given to all one million shoplifters if they were caught, you would end up with a highly unfair punishment that would certainly violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
People need to remember that a large part of preventing crime is creating a system that is perceived to be fair and just. If a system is not fair, don't expect people to abide by it.
How did this idiotic post get modded +5 Insightful?
Posting these people's addresses isn't going to destroy their careers or lives. Calling someone a communist in the 1950's was worse than calling them a child molestor. That kind of thing COULD and DID ruins people lives.
Just because you can opt-out of being in the phone book (which is more of a courtesy on your behalf from the telephone company) doesn't mean you have an inherent right to force somebody to desist from publishing your address.
If that was the case, than spammers could force sites like spamhaus.org to be shut down.
IIRC the courts have generally upheld individual's rights to publish someone's address as long as it wasn't in a deliberately threatening form such as making an image of the person in the crosshairs of a rifle and posting their home address next to it (for example the Nuremberg Files website).
While you may be correct as to the reasoning that prompted them to do this, it begs the question...
How fucked up of a society do we live in that people can't provide interesting statistics out of fear of being sued?
This legal bullshit is the same reason that the US Park Service refuses to release any kind of estimates on crowd sizes for protests in Washington D.C..... they were sued by Louis Farakahan when they did a crowd size estimate of the Million Man March, that Farakhan said, was intentionally smaller than it really was.
I don't think there's anything "damning" about that figure at all. We all know gnu/linux is still a niche phenomenon on Desktops, and 1% of all people accessing Google is _millions_ of people. That's pretty a damn respectable figure in my book.
now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 121 * 10^41 ergs. this is enough to power about 2.7 * 10^56 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all its values. if we build a dyson sphere around the sun and captured all of its energy output for 32 years, without any loss, we should power a computer to count up to 2 ^ 192. of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter.
but that's just one star, and a measly one at that. a typical supernova releases something like 10^51 ergs. (about a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but i let them go for now.) if all this energy could be channeled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states.
these numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximum that thermodynamics will allow. and they strongly imply that brute-force attracks against 256-bit keys will be infeasable until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
bruce schneier, applied cryptography, p 158
Okay Bruce, guess I'll have to take your word for it...
Why do you need to do this? What are the websites you regularly go to that block you based on your User-Agent? Have you considered emailing the webmaster and telling them they lost a customer/viewer due to their stupidity, rather than cowardly changing your User-Agent?
No, he works for Opera. He used to be involved
with Mozilla.
And notice that he doesn't say to not use XHTML in that document, he does say that, in his opinion a) it's not worth the trouble at the moment because of the bad support for it in browsers b) don't do it unless you're going to do it correctly (and it's not as easy as many people think it is).
But how do we ever expect to get the browser makers on board if we don't use it?
I'm currently using apache's content negotiation to serve out strict XHTML1 as text/html (for IE) or application/xhtml+xml (for non-IE) as described here, and it works nicely on both gecko based browsers as well as IE6.
Mozilla based browsers are more than just "more" compliant, they're a lot more compliant, at least in regards to CSS support. That they're not 100% compliant is irrelevant.
In almost every section of the excerpt from the CSS TDG book, it introduces some cool CSS feature only to conclude with, "unfortunately IE doesn't implement this", or, "IE doesn't implement this correctly". It's really sad.
Who doesn't need mono? You? You are not the world.
There is going to be an increasingly large amount of ISVs in the future who will want to achieve cross-platform compatibility, and Mono is going to be one of their options, just like Java is right now. Look at eclipse, for example.
The guy who found and reported the libpng vulnerability is an author/maintainer of libpng. Maintaining core libraries like libpng is a mostly thankless job that all the big commercial distros profit off of while the maintainer (usually) doesn't make shit.
This is in not simply a single sign-on system like MS Passport, where only they manager/control your identity. This is just an API for identity and authentication, and the "identity provider" can be anybody such as the company you work for, the government, or a third party identification service like Thawte.
1) Suse came out on top of that one in 64-bit mode.
2) (Wolfenstien ET benchmark) The anandtech guys said that even though Windows won, it was only because the nvidia drivers are alot better on Windows (and it is implied that it is video card bound).
I donated $100 to the Mozilla Foundation not because I like their browser (I like epiphany better), but because I see them as an organization which has -- through the rather arbitrary and random nature of the history of the Internet -- been given the responsibility of guarding and furthering the integrity of the Internet (something I'm definitely willing to contribute to), rather than as just another producer of a Web Browser.
Uh, hello -- The Bush <=> Nazi comparison is not about gas chambers. It is about systematically exploiting public anger/fear (9/11 anyone?) to push through their ultra-Nationalist war-mongering agenda.
Re:What out for Michael Moore lawsuits through....
on
Fahrenheit 9/11 Discussion
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
While Disney got rocked from the left for claims of "censorship" for not releasing Moore's movie, would the left had reacted the same if Disney produced a documentary prasing Bush and making Saddam look like Hitler?
Who needs a documentary when this very message is broadcast 24x7 on Fox News (and to a slightly lesser extent CNN)?
What makes a left-wing corporate-propaganda film wonderful and thought-provoking and a right-wing corporate-propaganda film evil?
And based on what evidence have you concluded that Moore's film is "left wing corporate propoganda"? Sorry, but linking to a review which says there some "inaccuracies" in one of his films doesn't exactly mean something is propaganda.
He never harasses anyone in any of his films I have seen. Can you please provide proof of this? No? Didn't think so. Maybe you're one of those spineless types who thinks that making someone feel uncomfortable is "harassment".
I have been harassed many times at anti-war protests, and what Moore does in his films doesn't even come close to harassment. What he does do is politely but forcefully ask to talk to the people in charge (and if he didn't demand it they would never bother to talk to him).
You say this with the assumption that Microsoft's goal is to keep their customer's computers safe, but it's not.
Their goal is the same goal as any monopolist: makeing you completely dependent on them so that it's more difficult to switch to a competing product. Once you understand that you can begin to understand the rest of their actions.
Slashdot Mirror
As other people have said, if the monetary fine does not discourage people from continuing to commit the crime, then it's simply not large enough.
What they should do to spammers is a) confiscate ALL the capital they accumulated from their crimes, b) add a sizable extra monetary penalty on top of that, and c) make them do some type of community service directly related to helping their victims (mostly mail admins + abuse departments) clean up after their mess.
Jail time of more than a few months (except maybe for the absolute worst repeat offenders) is just totally inappropriate and unneccesary no matter how big of a spamming operation they're running.
Even if that was true (and I doubt it is since it's not hard to catch spammers... just follow the paper trail), it would be irrelevant. The punishment HAS to fit the crime. Only barbarians still think otherwise.
Let's look at a hypothetical situation where for every one million people shoplifting, it is only possible to catch one of them. Now, if you determined the punishment for this one unlucky shoplifter who was caught based on preventing shoplifting and making the sentence fit the total amount of punishment that would be given to all one million shoplifters if they were caught, you would end up with a highly unfair punishment that would certainly violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
People need to remember that a large part of preventing crime is creating a system that is perceived to be fair and just. If a system is not fair, don't expect people to abide by it.
What KDE bashing? Looks to me like you're the one spreading FUD.
The way I read it is that Linus shit out a Real Time patch, certainly a ground breaking technological achievement.
How did this idiotic post get modded +5 Insightful?
Posting these people's addresses isn't going to destroy their careers or lives. Calling someone a communist in the 1950's was worse than calling them a child molestor. That kind of thing COULD and DID ruins people lives.
What a horrible, ignorant, analogy.
If that was the case, than spammers could force sites like spamhaus.org to be shut down.
IIRC the courts have generally upheld individual's rights to publish someone's address as long as it wasn't in a deliberately threatening form such as making an image of the person in the crosshairs of a rifle and posting their home address next to it (for example the Nuremberg Files website).
... until after the movie inevitably bombs. At which point he'll turn into a junkie again.
While you may be correct as to the reasoning that prompted them to do this, it begs the question...
.... they were sued by Louis Farakahan when they did a crowd size estimate of the Million Man March, that Farakhan said, was intentionally smaller than it really was.
How fucked up of a society do we live in that people can't provide interesting statistics out of fear of being sued?
This legal bullshit is the same reason that the US Park Service refuses to release any kind of estimates on crowd sizes for protests in Washington D.C.
Insanity.
I don't think there's anything "damning" about that figure at all. We all know gnu/linux is still a niche phenomenon on Desktops, and 1% of all people accessing Google is _millions_ of people. That's pretty a damn respectable figure in my book.
Why do you need to do this? What are the websites you regularly go to that block you based on your User-Agent? Have you considered emailing the webmaster and telling them they lost a customer/viewer due to their stupidity, rather than cowardly changing your User-Agent?
And notice that he doesn't say to not use XHTML in that document, he does say that, in his opinion a) it's not worth the trouble at the moment because of the bad support for it in browsers b) don't do it unless you're going to do it correctly (and it's not as easy as many people think it is).
But how do we ever expect to get the browser makers on board if we don't use it? I'm currently using apache's content negotiation to serve out strict XHTML1 as text/html (for IE) or application/xhtml+xml (for non-IE) as described here, and it works nicely on both gecko based browsers as well as IE6.
In almost every section of the excerpt from the CSS TDG book, it introduces some cool CSS feature only to conclude with, "unfortunately IE doesn't implement this", or, "IE doesn't implement this correctly". It's really sad.
God you're an idiot.
Who doesn't need mono? You? You are not the world.
There is going to be an increasingly large amount of ISVs in the future who will want to achieve cross-platform compatibility, and Mono is going to be one of their options, just like Java is right now. Look at eclipse, for example.
They should give him the reward anyway.
The guy who found and reported the libpng vulnerability is an author/maintainer of libpng. Maintaining core libraries like libpng is a mostly thankless job that all the big commercial distros profit off of while the maintainer (usually) doesn't make shit.
This is in not simply a single sign-on system like MS Passport, where only they manager/control your identity. This is just an API for identity and authentication, and the "identity provider" can be anybody such as the company you work for, the government, or a third party identification service like Thawte.
Ha. I can get your Civic to do that without modifying it at all. Just push it off a cliff.
Of the two links you posted:
1) Suse came out on top of that one in 64-bit mode.
2) (Wolfenstien ET benchmark) The anandtech guys said that even though Windows won, it was only because the nvidia drivers are alot better on Windows (and it is implied that it is video card bound).
I donated $100 to the Mozilla Foundation not because I like their browser (I like epiphany better), but because I see them as an organization which has -- through the rather arbitrary and random nature of the history of the Internet -- been given the responsibility of guarding and furthering the integrity of the Internet (something I'm definitely willing to contribute to), rather than as just another producer of a Web Browser.
Uh, hello -- The Bush <=> Nazi comparison is not about gas chambers. It is about systematically exploiting public anger/fear (9/11 anyone?) to push through their ultra-Nationalist war-mongering agenda.
Who needs a documentary when this very message is broadcast 24x7 on Fox News (and to a slightly lesser extent CNN)?
And based on what evidence have you concluded that Moore's film is "left wing corporate propoganda"? Sorry, but linking to a review which says there some "inaccuracies" in one of his films doesn't exactly mean something is propaganda.
I have been harassed many times at anti-war protests, and what Moore does in his films doesn't even come close to harassment. What he does do is politely but forcefully ask to talk to the people in charge (and if he didn't demand it they would never bother to talk to him).
Dear retard, Please loop up the definition of analogy.
I'm pretty sure he's safe now because he doesn't know how to install anything.
Their goal is the same goal as any monopolist: makeing you completely dependent on them so that it's more difficult to switch to a competing product. Once you understand that you can begin to understand the rest of their actions.