It looks like a cool device for $25. But it's really a $100 device that didn't sell (so maybe it wasn't all that cool, or at least not enough cooler than a Palm to get market share.) That doesn't mean you can mass-produce it at a profit for $25 - it means that somebody's got pallet-loads of the things that they're selling off to get back some money for them, and when the pallets are empty, they're not building any more.
It's kind of like all of those Internet Appliance things that didn't sell back during the boom, but were fun for hackers to pick up cheap and modify.
The Simputer folks designed some really cool software for use with low-horsepower machines where people use a wide variety of languages and alphabets and village-appropriate applications. It was cool stuff, and apparently they were better at that than they were at hardware design. Sounds like it's a good time for them to recognize what they're good at and what they're not good at, and port the software to newer commercial PDA platforms and/or open it so other people can port it.
I can't tell if that $199 Dell can support USB adequately or not - too many PDA devices know how to be a USB slave that can be updated by a computer, but don't know how to be a USB master than can drive printers, modems, etc. But it wouldn't be surprising to see hardware that can do that well in a similar price range - if not now, then wait 3-6 months.
If your ISP had to guarantee that they didn't have any infected machines on it, you wouldn't be able to get service for anything like the price you're getting it today, and you can bet that they wouldn't let you install unapproved software on your machine, because that would expose them to too much liability. And you can also be sure that you wouldn't be able to run a Linux mail server natively - they'd definitely block Port 25, probably in both directions, and might very well block some of the SMTP-submission ports except to their own mail servers. Basically, that would suck.
That doesn't mean that most ISPs shouldn't try to detect and reduce most of their zombie and spammer problems - one reason I don't use cable modems is that they're mostly cluelessly fascist about not letting you run arbitrary servers. There are cable and DSL ISPs that have a policy that by default you can't run Port 25 and maybe a couple of popular MS Windows ports unless you fill out a form saying that you want to enable it (with a Turing-Test Captcha on the form so zombies can't enable it for you), and that's really just fine, because you've got a choice if you want it, but you're less of a security risk if you don't.
Got any spare CDs of Easy To Use Removal Software you'd recommend? (Knoppix doesn't count:-) Once a machine gets infected, if it doesn't have a Decent Operating System on it, the malware can infect almost everything, in ways that are often hard to detect. McAfee and Symantec anti-virus software are a good start, and reinstalling your OS and any applications from scratch from CD-ROM helps, but sometimes you just can't tell what's infected. A lot of people could do just fine running Knoppix instead of Windows, which is a lot more secure not only because it's Unix but because the executables are on a read-only medium, but that doesn't support kids who want to run the latest games, and obviously Microsoft doesn't want most people doing that so they'll keep coming out with new Office features or whatever.
Spamhaus's list of the top 200 spammers mostly has US-based operations. The spam itself may get sent from Zombieland advertising web sites hosted in China, but the spammer gangs are US based, and most of the products they're selling are shipped from the US. Zapping the big US operations would cut down on that spam significantly, and it's not clear that they'd be rapidly replaced.
Phishers, on the other hand, can operate from anywhere; they're popularly blamed on Russian Mafia, but I haven't seen any real statistics. But until banks start running SPF or similar protocols that make it easy to filter out forgeries, phishing won't go away that fast. Banks and credit card companies also need to start running stings on phishers - things like setting up dummy accounts that instantly flag anyone who accesses them, sending this information to the phisher's traps, and then nailing them when they try to get them money.
This isn't the Windows and Office side of Microsoft going after them. This is the ISP side of Microsoft, including MSN and Hotmail, who have the same kinds of problems with spam that other ISPs do. Spam costs them money, annoys their customers, and encourages annoyed customers to find ISPs with better spam prevention, so they have to do anything within reason to reduce the spam.
Filters and Lawsuits hit different ends of the spammer market. Lawsuits aren't very useful against the little spammers - it's a whack-a-mole game, where any spammer you bankrupt has two or three more following in his footsteps. They're much more effective against the big spammers - Spamhaus estimates that 200 spammers put out 80% of the spam, and putting any of them out of business can make a big dent - and most of them are based in the US, where you can sue them, even if their infrastructure is mostly in China or Zombieland. The nice thing about whack-a-mole lawsuits is that they're usually easy to win - you don't make any money off of it, because most of them aren't making much money compared to the amount they're costing the Internet as a whole, but if you've got a collection of 200 heads nailed up on your office's front gate, it starts to get their attention.
Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook Express do get spam filter technology added to them - it makes the users happy, and if it implements spam-reporting capabilities well, it can help the ISP side of MS improve their filters. But the main filtering happens at the ISP level, because that's what most customers want.
Do most of the log files have a sufficiently standard format that Google could detect and ignore? That would cut down on the effectiveness of that spamming.
Also, do the spammers pound a site with multiple requests from the same referrer, or do they do requests for lots of sites (e.g. Search Engine Optimizer scammers doing this as a business?
Artists Against 419 has a few projects to do things to Nigerian 419 scammers, including the Lad Vampire, which displays a set of graphics from scammer's fake bank sites and keeps reloading them to burn their bandwidth. ("The Lads" are the lads from Nigeria running the 419 scams.) There are a few other anti-spammer sites using similar code. They've closed a number of fake bank sites this way.
There are two different mechanisms that this approach uses. One is that many of the scammers run on free or cheap web pages with monthly traffic quotas, so if you burn their quota they're out of business. Another is that many sites charge for bandwidth based on 95th percentile usage, so if everybody gangs up on them for 5% of a month (about a day and a half) you can jack up their bill and then move on to the next target. It's especially effective for the few scammers who are actually running their websites in Nigeria, since that's mostly expensive satellite bandwidth, but they're more likely to be in some random European or Chinese web hosting farm.
Obviously it's only useful to run if you've got a network connection that doesn't have monthly bandwidth quotas of your own, because you don't want to slashdot yourself, but most US cable modem and DSL services don't. (Now if we could only get the Koreans to run this stuff:-)
A technical comment on AA419 - it's not very efficient, because it's simply using a browser to display the illustrations. That's fun to watch, but burns a lot of CPU, so if you're running the various SETI@Home types of CPU sinks, they won't get any work done. It would be really simple to build a shell script that loops wget>/dev/null requests (with caching turned off) which doesn't waste time displaying the targets. On the other hand, using the current site is a no-brainer for times that you're not busy.
There are two different major issues with emissions - carbon dioxide and Nasty Stuff (particulates, nitrogen and sulfur oxides, etc.). The emissions problems with Nasty Stuff are pretty similar, and some materials are cleaner or dirty than others, and may be easier or harder to clean up. It's generally easier to clean up power plant emissions than car/truck emissions, because you have more technical choices, aren't limited by weight, can use water, etc. (Hmmm... cleaning grass smoke by bubbling through water... might be some future to that one...)
Carbon Dioxide emissions are really different, because the problem is greenhouse heating caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Burning oil and coal takes carbon that's been in the ground for a long time and pumps it into the atmosphere, which is a problem. But growing grass or trees for fuel takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, using solar energy and chlorophyll to split it up into various plant compounds, so any carbon dioxide emissions you get from burning the grass are just moving around carbon dioxide you took out of the atmosphere last growing season, so it's no problem.
ObDoperReference: Hemp is a really good grass for applications like this. It grows fast, doesn't need pesticides, you can do useful things with the seeds, the fiber can be used for cloth if you don't feel like burning it, and as a bonus you get a bunch of flowers that you can divert to other applications.
I joined NORML for a while a decade or two ago, but whichever years it was, they tended to be a bit too stoned to actually keep track of a mailing list:-)
Yow - two horsepower just to keep the car warm? Glad I live here in California:-) (Actually, I used to live in upstate New York, where block heaters might have been helpful if I'd had anywhere to plug them in, but that was college, and during the snowy parts of winter, you couldn't park on many of the streets because of snow plowing, so there was no point in driving most days. But even then, most of the block heaters I saw were more like 100 watts.)
Two horsepower idling power might be enough to charge the car enough for short commutes, but it doesn't scale very well toward supporting a large office building with a bunch of cars in it.
Hate to bring up politics in the middle of a good parody, but the next stress pill delivery option is scheduled for January 2009, depending on what happens in the election of November 2008. That doesn't mean that the next Administration will be more or less friendly to non-military applications of space, or to spending big bucks on it, or that I'm predicting which party will win the next election, but we've got a pretty solid guarantee that Hubble isn't part of the Bush League's goals for the military-industrial complex or the US Federal Budget.
Even if I think that taxpayer funding for this project was a mistake in the first place, that's a sunk cost, and we might as well milk it for all we can get now that it's up there. And hey, maybe Virgin Galactic can stop by in that direction by then.
I've had a couple of coworkers who've lived on houseboats in the San Francicsco Bay. Normally this class of boat is an overpriced luxury, e.g. $100-200K for a toy, plus dock rental, etc., but since housing of any kind in the Bay Area is an overpriced luxury, it wasn't really that bad a deal financially, and the lifestyle was cool. Some of them were single (aka divorced - so the boat's also a great midlife-crisis getaway and a fun way to impress babes), some were married couples living on the boat. I've also had a few friends who were techie RV commuters doing what you did, but that's a much lower-cost lifestyle.
For either of those approaches, you need to be really good at getting by without accumulating lots of stuff (so it wouldn't work well for me), and at least for the boats you need to be good at keeping your place neat as well (again, not me:-)
It doesn't take a lot of power to keep a car's engine from getting cold enough that it's trouble to restart; recharging the batteries is a lot more power than that.
I worked for the military-industrial complex back in the 80s (but I've rehabilitated myself, thank you:-)
Cost-Plus was a great scam, but one thing it did was meant that the government could engage in technically risky projects developing things that nobody in the world really knew how to develop, because they were basically taking all the risk, so they could get people to work on them. During the 80s, especially the late 80s and especially after Gramm-Rudman, when the government was being pushed towards being "fiscally responsible" or at least accountable, what happened was that they tried to push most of the risk onto contractors. The old system meant that the 80-20 rule usually got you the 80% that was useful, and part of the 20% of speculative stuff, so you'd end up with 85-90% of the original objectives, and kill it off at 100-120% of the cost, and sometimes you could do something useful with the speculative stuff as well. Under the new regime, contractors couldn't really risk that - they were tending to be forced into fixed-cost bids for things when that 20% of ill-defined requirements didn't have a fixed scope or workload or success probability, so they had to either refuse to work on things, or get very aggressive about negotiating scope and finding other ways to extract money out of it, but it was tough to do anything creative - things became excessively bureaucratic.
Another problem was that the Feds, especially the DoD, kept increasing the number of mandatory features without realizing the speculatory nature of them. So it wasn't just fault-tolerant OR cryptographically secure - it was fault-tolerant AND cryptographically secure AND GOSIP-compliant (the OSI protocol stack stuff) AND B1-secure (even though the researchers only barely knew how to do B1 or B2 Orange Book Security, and requiring GOSIP meant you were in Red Book territory) AND written in Ada, of course, AND POSIX-compliant, including the new real-time POSIX features that weren't solidified yet. And it had to be Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) equipment, because that was how you contained costs and prevented businesses from making the Feds pay for all their new speculative development work. While I ran into the worst excesses of that tendency with NASA projects, it was almost as bad for the FAA and the Treasury Department (on desktop-PC-plus-server bids) and even State Department communication networks.
The FAA also tended to require that everything be compatible with every other piece of equipment the FAA had ever deployed, whether than equipment was documented or not or even had cable connectors that anybody made any more, much less knew the protocols for, and they needed far more nines worth of reliability than anything in the commercial world, because if airplanes crash into each other, it's their ass politically. I worked on one FAA project where my company was a subcontractor to the bidders who were the lucky ones that lost - IBM were the poor bastards who won, and burned through billions of their own dollars as well as the FAA's before the project got canned years later.
Dude, the Japanese economic crash was far deeper and more systematic than "a few problems with banking". They haven't really recovered yet.
And most of the "great scientific advancement" coming out of the Japanese MITI bureaucracies funding their research institutions and Fifth Generation Computing project has turned out to have been better Public Relations than actual science. You haven't seen them take back the computer industry. All that Artificial Intelligence research has been pretty much fruitless (though AI suffers from the problem that any time anybody there develops something actually useful, everybody says "that's not Really AI, that's just {pattern matching, text-to-speech, etc.}") and probably more useful AI-like research has been developed to make kick-ass games than for any practical applications.
That's not to say that the US isn't in deep deep economic trouble, because it is. Don't just blame us boomers for hanging out and having too few kids, though - if you want to blame boomers, blame the Bush Administration for running up huge debts they won't be in office to have to pay back, and for putting out bogus statistics about Social Security (which *is* bankrupt, and would be helped radically by private investment, just not the way the Bush League is proposing, and which will be cutting back benefits radically just about the time I would have been retiring, except that my pension will also be cutting back radically if it still exists at all.) The right solution for Social Security's problems starts with not only doing honest statistics, but also with not running up rabidly increasing debt.
The Clinton Administration got away with their economic difficulties partly by having a major economic boom underneath them, and partly by refinancing the US's long-term high-interest debt with short-term low-interest debt, and partly by having a Congress that was a different political party that shot down all the expensive new stuff they *wanted* to do. The Bush Administration hasn't had any of those advantages, so they've been able to irresponsibly drag us deeper into debt.
It probably says lots of things about our schools, actually. But yes, statistically, more than 70% of the people in the world are not from the US (in fact, there are more educated English-speaking Indians than there are Americans of any educational level.) Another factor that's also relevant here is that the students who aren't very good usually aren't going abroad to study - we're mainly getting the cream of the crop.
That's not entirely true, because we're also mostly getting the wealthier students from other countries, so there are very bright students from around the world who can't afford to come to the US to study - but the wealthier students could usually afford a better-than-average education before they get to grad school as well, so that helps increase their quality.
Of course, there's the question of why so many of the best schools are in the US; there are also outstanding schools in England and continental Europe (and in lots of other places, but American snobbery mostly doesn't recognize them:-), and an Oxford or Cambridge education is still just as good and just as high a reputation even though the American empire has mostly supplanted the British empire, and I assume that the Sorbonne is still as good now as when my grandfather went there. I suspect a lot of it is not just the quality of the school, but the relevance to the modern economy, and people around the world are following the money just as people around the US do (and until recently, it was here.) And universities are self-reinforcing institutions - if you've got a lot of good people there, that tends to improve the quality of the education, and the reputation of the school, so more good people get there, and the university gets to keep the best of them, increasing the extent to which that improves the quality of the education...
A lot of that research came out of the Strategic Computing Initiative that was part of the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars.) Mainframes and PCs could be funded quite adequately by the private sector (though some fraction of that was selling mainframes or mainframe-based services to government bureaucracies as well as to the real world). But developing speculative weird architectures is much harder to get funded in the real world, and SDI needed immense amounts of computing capability to solve control problems and image processing as well as to deal with the fact that efficient targeting turned out to be an NP-hard problem.
Government-funded research almost always works on the wrong problems - it's inherently working on problems the government wants solved, rather than on problems that Real People want solved. This not only takes tax money out of citizens' pockets, which they would have spent on things they wanted instead of things the government wants, but it also has the far worse effect that it takes bright researchers who could have been working on problems that the real world wanted solved and directs them toward problems that the government wants solved - partly the military, partly the military-industrial complex that feeds off the military, and in general toward directions that support big centralized businesses that support big governments.
We do occasionally get good things out of it, and it does let bright people develop ideas and technologies that have broader uses, but mostly it develops better and better technology for killing people. Sure, we've gotten communications satellites, and the Internet does things that UUCP-net didn't do. But there's a huge amount of solar energy research that simply didn't get done because the college kids who were good at thermodynamics went to work developing aerospace technology instead. And while that aerospace technology has civilian applications, much more of it is for jumbo jets than for small private aircraft and free-flight navigation that would make air travel more practical and decentralized. (I *still* want my flying car:-)
Some of the agricultural research has been seriously useful. But too much of it has been directed in ways that support big agribusiness quasi-industrial farms instead of family farms, and towards pesticides that enable mass production, toward genetically modifying plants to make them more resistant to pesticides so that they're more practical for pesticide-based farming, and towards monocultures rather than increased diversity. And if you thought software patents were nasty, you should go look at the biological patent explosions of the last 20-30 years.
Medical research seems like it wouldn't have this problem, and while it's nowhere near as bad, it's still a mixed bag. Most medical techniques that are useful on battlefields are useful on other trauma, and more Americans are still killed every year by the side-effects of the War on Drugs than the wars for oil, and far more by car accidents than either one. But government-funded medical research has unfortunate interactions with the FDA's regulation of new drug development - the regulatory barriers make it economically difficult to develop drugs that have less than a billion-dollar market, and the government funding tends to encourage large labs, and make up for some of the regulatory problems by funding universities which can avoid the regulatory barriers rather than fixing the regulatory barriers.
Short-term military-focused research is far more of an interference to the evolution of our economy than long-term mixed-use research. But they're both bad.
You're getting benefits in both places - maybe your healthcare only gets paid by where you live, but you're getting access to streets where you work (or trains if you're commuting by train), you're getting fire and police protection when you're at work as well as when you're at home, etc. What your employer is paying isn't relevant - if you worked for an employer in the same town that you live in, your employer would be paying that province and/or town for services too, but you'd be getting police and fire protection from your own province while you're at work, and you'd be driving on streets maintained by that province or town.
In the US, states have agreements to pro-rate the taxes based on how much of your time or money you're earning in one place or the other, and that applies whether you're doing physical commuting or whether you move in the middle of the year or whatever. The effect to the taxpayer is that you end up paying the higher state income tax rate (which is annoying if the state where you work gets more money from income taxes and the state where you live gets more money from property taxes or whatever.) One big problem here is that New York almost always has the higher income taxes. So if you're working in New York and living in New Jersey, you're paying more tax than if you were living and working in New Jersey. Another big problem is that the court decision sounds irresponsibly vague.
Oh, yeah, I guess you could interpret it that way. Hmmm. I was running into the signature length limit because the Lad Vampire's URL was too long, but since that URL's no longer working, I could go edit it.
If there's a problem with the registration for my computer, the registrar needs to be able to contact me, or take alternative action. Typically this means that either they need to charge my credit card, or else let me know my credit card bounced.
If there's a problem with my computer, my upstream provider needs to be able to contact me, or else possibly my machine will be shut down (either because it crashed itself or because they had to cut off my access.)
Neither of those means they need to know where I sleep, or how to send an ICBM or cop to my address, or what my True Name and Mother's Maiden Name and Birthdate are, extract fingerprints, DNA, retina scans, the number tattooed on my arm, the RFID under my skin, or what protection service I've sworn fealty to.
My cellphone is much more useful to them than the wired phone in my kitchen or on the desk in the office that I'm not in, and it works just as well whether it's a pre-paid 7-11 phone or registered to my employer's purchasing department as opposed to registered in my True Name and Social Security Number.
A working email address is important (usually much more important than the cell phone, unless something is Terribly Wrong), but it can just as well be MyDomainDotComDNSadmin@yahoo.com as opposed to my main home or work email address - and if it's a business-related domain, it's much more important to have the address be a generic address because I might not be the domain administrator next year when the renewal happens, or I might sell the business to someone else.
"Valid" DNS is a fiction made up by the Intellectual Property Protection Mafia, and adopted by the Anti-Privacy Politicians. Since the only IP that ICANN cares about is Intellectual Property, they've tried very hard to insist that domain registrars collect legal jurisdiction information and True Names and True Contact Info, because if there's a trademark disagreement about a domain name or somebody's sharing music at your domain, they want the purported IP owner to be able to send a subpoena to the domain name holder instead of bothering the registrar or ICANN about it. And the politicians want to be able to send out a SWAT team to your house if you publish UnAmerican Material on your web site.
It's especially hypocritical for the trademark/copyright folks to insist on it, because most of them are corporations, which are fictitious legal persons to start with.
It can be frustrating to have non-useful contact information for a domain - I've occasionally tried to track down spammers using their DNS information, and bogus information slows that down. But at least once I've found that the spammer's address was a mailbox in the same building as The Company Corporation, which is the canonical agent for setting up a Delaware Corporation - so even if I were to haul the spammer into court and sue them into bankruptcy, that just means I get to seize whatever's in their mailbox, and they get to spend another $100 to set up a new corporation to do their spamming.
If you mean "That signature is old and boring and has used up its 15 minutes of fame", that's probably true, but I haven't had anything useful to replace it with lately;-) I actually am somewhat frustrated with AA419's web page code, because it burns unnecessarily huge amounts of CPU. I ran it for a while anyway, but I've been downloading music from E-Tree with BitTorrent lately (legitimately downloadable jam-band music.)
If you're trying to say something about Slashdot signatures being an unfair promotion method for the Artists Against 419 project, I disagree. It's not my project; it's something I actually found interesting. (Also, Slashdot signatures seem to be dynamically generated; I'm not sure if Google finds them or not, and if it does, I'm not sure if Google searches always find your most recent signature, or find the signature that was current at the time you posted an article, or don't re-scan pages so it's irrelevant - probably the latter.)
If it causes too many links to point to Nigerian-Scammer-Bank.com, that's not a big deal; anybody who's looking for legitimate banks in Nigeria by using search engines has a hard problem ahead of them, and finding a small number of links from a popular site (if aa419.org manages to be popular) is less likely to help a bank's pagerank as much as pounding on their web server is likely to hurt them.
I've recently been looking for information about some medications I've been taking, and whether they have side effects and whether they interact with each other. It's become really difficult to get decent information from search engines for several reasons, some legitimate and some annoying.
Many legitimate sites that have medical information have information for lots of drugs on the same page, so drug1 drug2 "side effects" will get you lots of pages like [Side effect of Drug3] [list of other drugs including drug1 and drug2], so the information you want gets lost in the legitimate noise. Some kind of editing could help (i.e. an actual legitimate SEO job if any of them wanted to bother.)
Many sites sell lots of medicines, and provide information about them, so the page that tells you about [Side effects of drug1] will also have lists of prices / ordering links for drug0...drug9999. Some of these pages are legitimate, some of them aren't.
Sites with legitimate drug information that have advertising for other sites that sell drugs. Besides SEO-spammish sites, this is especially common for the legitimate popular medical information sites, which have a business model of selling advertising. It's less of a problem when the ads are all images than when they're unobtrusive text-link ads (e.g. Google AdWords or similar non-annoying styles seem to poison the content more, which is ironic.) But even image ads can have URLs with the drug name or manufacturer name in them. This problem would obviously be much worse if I were looking for information on drugs that are widely sold on the web to (ahem) men of a certain age bracket (/ahem), but it turns out that there are a really wide variety of drugs that get lots of web advertising, including many of the new antihistamines.
I've heard that people occasionally call in rude drivers' license plates to the police non-emergency numbers to report them as drunk, or to the state DMV Smog Police to report them as badly smoking vehicles, but involving the police is rude. And police are like vampires - they're not supposed to come in your house unless they've been invited, but once you've done that you often can't get them to leave.
Vigilante Paintball Gunning, on the other hand, doesn't suffer from these problems. Somebody who drives badly gets an ugly paint-splattered car, and the only problem is that the paint's mostly on the back of their car and not on the front.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of like all of those Internet Appliance things that didn't sell back during the boom, but were fun for hackers to pick up cheap and modify.
I can't tell if that $199 Dell can support USB adequately or not - too many PDA devices know how to be a USB slave that can be updated by a computer, but don't know how to be a USB master than can drive printers, modems, etc. But it wouldn't be surprising to see hardware that can do that well in a similar price range - if not now, then wait 3-6 months.
That doesn't mean that most ISPs shouldn't try to detect and reduce most of their zombie and spammer problems - one reason I don't use cable modems is that they're mostly cluelessly fascist about not letting you run arbitrary servers. There are cable and DSL ISPs that have a policy that by default you can't run Port 25 and maybe a couple of popular MS Windows ports unless you fill out a form saying that you want to enable it (with a Turing-Test Captcha on the form so zombies can't enable it for you), and that's really just fine, because you've got a choice if you want it, but you're less of a security risk if you don't.
Got any spare CDs of Easy To Use Removal Software you'd recommend? (Knoppix doesn't count :-) Once a machine gets infected, if it doesn't have a Decent Operating System on it, the malware can infect almost everything, in ways that are often hard to detect. McAfee and Symantec anti-virus software are a good start, and reinstalling your OS and any applications from scratch from CD-ROM helps, but sometimes you just can't tell what's infected. A lot of people could do just fine running Knoppix instead of Windows, which is a lot more secure not only because it's Unix but because the executables are on a read-only medium, but that doesn't support kids who want to run the latest games, and obviously Microsoft doesn't want most people doing that so they'll keep coming out with new Office features or whatever.
Phishers, on the other hand, can operate from anywhere; they're popularly blamed on Russian Mafia, but I haven't seen any real statistics. But until banks start running SPF or similar protocols that make it easy to filter out forgeries, phishing won't go away that fast. Banks and credit card companies also need to start running stings on phishers - things like setting up dummy accounts that instantly flag anyone who accesses them, sending this information to the phisher's traps, and then nailing them when they try to get them money.
Filters and Lawsuits hit different ends of the spammer market. Lawsuits aren't very useful against the little spammers - it's a whack-a-mole game, where any spammer you bankrupt has two or three more following in his footsteps. They're much more effective against the big spammers - Spamhaus estimates that 200 spammers put out 80% of the spam, and putting any of them out of business can make a big dent - and most of them are based in the US, where you can sue them, even if their infrastructure is mostly in China or Zombieland. The nice thing about whack-a-mole lawsuits is that they're usually easy to win - you don't make any money off of it, because most of them aren't making much money compared to the amount they're costing the Internet as a whole, but if you've got a collection of 200 heads nailed up on your office's front gate, it starts to get their attention.
Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook Express do get spam filter technology added to them - it makes the users happy, and if it implements spam-reporting capabilities well, it can help the ISP side of MS improve their filters. But the main filtering happens at the ISP level, because that's what most customers want.
Also, do the spammers pound a site with multiple requests from the same referrer, or do they do requests for lots of sites (e.g. Search Engine Optimizer scammers doing this as a business?
There are two different mechanisms that this approach uses. One is that many of the scammers run on free or cheap web pages with monthly traffic quotas, so if you burn their quota they're out of business. Another is that many sites charge for bandwidth based on 95th percentile usage, so if everybody gangs up on them for 5% of a month (about a day and a half) you can jack up their bill and then move on to the next target. It's especially effective for the few scammers who are actually running their websites in Nigeria, since that's mostly expensive satellite bandwidth, but they're more likely to be in some random European or Chinese web hosting farm.
Obviously it's only useful to run if you've got a network connection that doesn't have monthly bandwidth quotas of your own, because you don't want to slashdot yourself, but most US cable modem and DSL services don't. (Now if we could only get the Koreans to run this stuff :-)
A technical comment on AA419 - it's not very efficient, because it's simply using a browser to display the illustrations. That's fun to watch, but burns a lot of CPU, so if you're running the various SETI@Home types of CPU sinks, they won't get any work done. It would be really simple to build a shell script that loops wget>/dev/null requests (with caching turned off) which doesn't waste time displaying the targets. On the other hand, using the current site is a no-brainer for times that you're not busy.
Carbon Dioxide emissions are really different, because the problem is greenhouse heating caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Burning oil and coal takes carbon that's been in the ground for a long time and pumps it into the atmosphere, which is a problem. But growing grass or trees for fuel takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, using solar energy and chlorophyll to split it up into various plant compounds, so any carbon dioxide emissions you get from burning the grass are just moving around carbon dioxide you took out of the atmosphere last growing season, so it's no problem.
ObDoperReference: Hemp is a really good grass for applications like this. It grows fast, doesn't need pesticides, you can do useful things with the seeds, the fiber can be used for cloth if you don't feel like burning it, and as a bonus you get a bunch of flowers that you can divert to other applications.
I joined NORML for a while a decade or two ago, but whichever years it was, they tended to be a bit too stoned to actually keep track of a mailing list :-)
Two horsepower idling power might be enough to charge the car enough for short commutes, but it doesn't scale very well toward supporting a large office building with a bunch of cars in it.
Even if I think that taxpayer funding for this project was a mistake in the first place, that's a sunk cost, and we might as well milk it for all we can get now that it's up there. And hey, maybe Virgin Galactic can stop by in that direction by then.
For either of those approaches, you need to be really good at getting by without accumulating lots of stuff (so it wouldn't work well for me), and at least for the boats you need to be good at keeping your place neat as well (again, not me :-)
It doesn't take a lot of power to keep a car's engine from getting cold enough that it's trouble to restart; recharging the batteries is a lot more power than that.
Cost-Plus was a great scam, but one thing it did was meant that the government could engage in technically risky projects developing things that nobody in the world really knew how to develop, because they were basically taking all the risk, so they could get people to work on them. During the 80s, especially the late 80s and especially after Gramm-Rudman, when the government was being pushed towards being "fiscally responsible" or at least accountable, what happened was that they tried to push most of the risk onto contractors. The old system meant that the 80-20 rule usually got you the 80% that was useful, and part of the 20% of speculative stuff, so you'd end up with 85-90% of the original objectives, and kill it off at 100-120% of the cost, and sometimes you could do something useful with the speculative stuff as well. Under the new regime, contractors couldn't really risk that - they were tending to be forced into fixed-cost bids for things when that 20% of ill-defined requirements didn't have a fixed scope or workload or success probability, so they had to either refuse to work on things, or get very aggressive about negotiating scope and finding other ways to extract money out of it, but it was tough to do anything creative - things became excessively bureaucratic.
Another problem was that the Feds, especially the DoD, kept increasing the number of mandatory features without realizing the speculatory nature of them. So it wasn't just fault-tolerant OR cryptographically secure - it was fault-tolerant AND cryptographically secure AND GOSIP-compliant (the OSI protocol stack stuff) AND B1-secure (even though the researchers only barely knew how to do B1 or B2 Orange Book Security, and requiring GOSIP meant you were in Red Book territory) AND written in Ada, of course, AND POSIX-compliant, including the new real-time POSIX features that weren't solidified yet. And it had to be Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) equipment, because that was how you contained costs and prevented businesses from making the Feds pay for all their new speculative development work. While I ran into the worst excesses of that tendency with NASA projects, it was almost as bad for the FAA and the Treasury Department (on desktop-PC-plus-server bids) and even State Department communication networks.
The FAA also tended to require that everything be compatible with every other piece of equipment the FAA had ever deployed, whether than equipment was documented or not or even had cable connectors that anybody made any more, much less knew the protocols for, and they needed far more nines worth of reliability than anything in the commercial world, because if airplanes crash into each other, it's their ass politically. I worked on one FAA project where my company was a subcontractor to the bidders who were the lucky ones that lost - IBM were the poor bastards who won, and burned through billions of their own dollars as well as the FAA's before the project got canned years later.
And most of the "great scientific advancement" coming out of the Japanese MITI bureaucracies funding their research institutions and Fifth Generation Computing project has turned out to have been better Public Relations than actual science. You haven't seen them take back the computer industry. All that Artificial Intelligence research has been pretty much fruitless (though AI suffers from the problem that any time anybody there develops something actually useful, everybody says "that's not Really AI, that's just {pattern matching, text-to-speech, etc.}") and probably more useful AI-like research has been developed to make kick-ass games than for any practical applications.
That's not to say that the US isn't in deep deep economic trouble, because it is. Don't just blame us boomers for hanging out and having too few kids, though - if you want to blame boomers, blame the Bush Administration for running up huge debts they won't be in office to have to pay back, and for putting out bogus statistics about Social Security (which *is* bankrupt, and would be helped radically by private investment, just not the way the Bush League is proposing, and which will be cutting back benefits radically just about the time I would have been retiring, except that my pension will also be cutting back radically if it still exists at all.) The right solution for Social Security's problems starts with not only doing honest statistics, but also with not running up rabidly increasing debt.
The Clinton Administration got away with their economic difficulties partly by having a major economic boom underneath them, and partly by refinancing the US's long-term high-interest debt with short-term low-interest debt, and partly by having a Congress that was a different political party that shot down all the expensive new stuff they *wanted* to do. The Bush Administration hasn't had any of those advantages, so they've been able to irresponsibly drag us deeper into debt.
That's not entirely true, because we're also mostly getting the wealthier students from other countries, so there are very bright students from around the world who can't afford to come to the US to study - but the wealthier students could usually afford a better-than-average education before they get to grad school as well, so that helps increase their quality.
Of course, there's the question of why so many of the best schools are in the US; there are also outstanding schools in England and continental Europe (and in lots of other places, but American snobbery mostly doesn't recognize them :-), and an Oxford or Cambridge education is still just as good and just as high a reputation even though the American empire has mostly supplanted the British empire, and I assume that the Sorbonne is still as good now as when my grandfather went there. I suspect a lot of it is not just the quality of the school, but the relevance to the modern economy, and people around the world are following the money just as people around the US do (and until recently, it was here.) And universities are self-reinforcing institutions - if you've got a lot of good people there, that tends to improve the quality of the education, and the reputation of the school, so more good people get there, and the university gets to keep the best of them, increasing the extent to which that improves the quality of the education...
A lot of that research came out of the Strategic Computing Initiative that was part of the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars.) Mainframes and PCs could be funded quite adequately by the private sector (though some fraction of that was selling mainframes or mainframe-based services to government bureaucracies as well as to the real world). But developing speculative weird architectures is much harder to get funded in the real world, and SDI needed immense amounts of computing capability to solve control problems and image processing as well as to deal with the fact that efficient targeting turned out to be an NP-hard problem.
We do occasionally get good things out of it, and it does let bright people develop ideas and technologies that have broader uses, but mostly it develops better and better technology for killing people. Sure, we've gotten communications satellites, and the Internet does things that UUCP-net didn't do. But there's a huge amount of solar energy research that simply didn't get done because the college kids who were good at thermodynamics went to work developing aerospace technology instead. And while that aerospace technology has civilian applications, much more of it is for jumbo jets than for small private aircraft and free-flight navigation that would make air travel more practical and decentralized. (I *still* want my flying car :-)
Some of the agricultural research has been seriously useful. But too much of it has been directed in ways that support big agribusiness quasi-industrial farms instead of family farms, and towards pesticides that enable mass production, toward genetically modifying plants to make them more resistant to pesticides so that they're more practical for pesticide-based farming, and towards monocultures rather than increased diversity. And if you thought software patents were nasty, you should go look at the biological patent explosions of the last 20-30 years.
Medical research seems like it wouldn't have this problem, and while it's nowhere near as bad, it's still a mixed bag. Most medical techniques that are useful on battlefields are useful on other trauma, and more Americans are still killed every year by the side-effects of the War on Drugs than the wars for oil, and far more by car accidents than either one. But government-funded medical research has unfortunate interactions with the FDA's regulation of new drug development - the regulatory barriers make it economically difficult to develop drugs that have less than a billion-dollar market, and the government funding tends to encourage large labs, and make up for some of the regulatory problems by funding universities which can avoid the regulatory barriers rather than fixing the regulatory barriers.
Short-term military-focused research is far more of an interference to the evolution of our economy than long-term mixed-use research. But they're both bad.
In the US, states have agreements to pro-rate the taxes based on how much of your time or money you're earning in one place or the other, and that applies whether you're doing physical commuting or whether you move in the middle of the year or whatever. The effect to the taxpayer is that you end up paying the higher state income tax rate (which is annoying if the state where you work gets more money from income taxes and the state where you live gets more money from property taxes or whatever.) One big problem here is that New York almost always has the higher income taxes. So if you're working in New York and living in New Jersey, you're paying more tax than if you were living and working in New Jersey. Another big problem is that the court decision sounds irresponsibly vague.
Oh, yeah, I guess you could interpret it that way. Hmmm. I was running into the signature length limit because the Lad Vampire's URL was too long, but since that URL's no longer working, I could go edit it.
If you're trying to say something about Slashdot signatures being an unfair promotion method for the Artists Against 419 project, I disagree. It's not my project; it's something I actually found interesting. (Also, Slashdot signatures seem to be dynamically generated; I'm not sure if Google finds them or not, and if it does, I'm not sure if Google searches always find your most recent signature, or find the signature that was current at the time you posted an article, or don't re-scan pages so it's irrelevant - probably the latter.)
If it causes too many links to point to Nigerian-Scammer-Bank.com, that's not a big deal; anybody who's looking for legitimate banks in Nigeria by using search engines has a hard problem ahead of them, and finding a small number of links from a popular site (if aa419.org manages to be popular) is less likely to help a bank's pagerank as much as pounding on their web server is likely to hurt them.
Vigilante Paintball Gunning, on the other hand, doesn't suffer from these problems. Somebody who drives badly gets an ugly paint-splattered car, and the only problem is that the paint's mostly on the back of their car and not on the front.