Yes, there is. In fact, there was just a big case concerning false advertising a couple months ago. Some of those "magic super pill" weight-loss-in-a-bottle companies were fined massive amounts of money and told to pull their commercials and never show them again.
However, this case isn't about false advertising, it's about search engines refusing to advance one idiot's personal views under the guise of advertising. So the judge is using the First Amendment to reinforce the idea that said engines don't have to run those ads if they don't want to, for any reason they don't want to, as opposed to the idiot's claim that they DID have to because he is entitled to due process in a public forum (which was a frivolous claim anyway, since Google is not a government entity and is not a protected public forum).
Yes, and we also have several states that require belief in a Christianish version of God in order to hold public office, and one state that requires it as a prerequisite for equal protection under the law.
Just because the principle of this country is freedom doesn't mean that freedom always exists. People have spent every waking breath fighting for them since the Constitution was signed.
A 30 year old minor drug conviction with a completely clean record since then, like the guy cited in the article, can be safely discounted. Senator or anything else, it's usually safe to say that the person in question has cleaned themselves up. Only in rare cases might that be untrue.
So what's the story...the fact that he's doing the right thing here?
He's suing the correct person for (if the accusations are true - and you've seen Wikipedia troll edits, they probably are) a legitimate reason. So the story is that he's not an idiot suing Wikipedia like the rest of the idiots would?
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Also, let me comment on something you just said. Computer processes are strange to many people. Users who gained an understanding of them by memorizing steps cannot discover changes in these strange processes by learning it themselves. Mostly, these are people who are nearing retirement age at this point. Please note that I'm not disparaging; I think it's just fine that someone chosen a method that, for them, is easiest and best to learn the technology. It took my mom (with my assistance) the better part of a decade to make the transition from having to memorize steps to learning the concepts in question. It all depends on the person.
Do you honestly think that something like hierarchical directory structures are intuitive? Hell, there is a significant number of users, young and old, who do not understand files themselves. The file needs to belong to something: it's a Word file or a Powerpoint file. It can't be an "image" file, because that has no meaning if it's not attached to an application and its associated function.
Ah, but therein lies a problem. You are correct: all of my users can use Office applications just fine. They can get around Windows just fine.
I have three groups of users: those who will attempt to fix a problem themselves before calling me, those who simply cannot, and those who will not try. The first group is great and easy to talk to and handle; most have at least basic technical understanding. We're talking things here like knowing when to reboot to try to fix a problem, and knowing when a reboot didn't or won't fix it. The second group is the largest, and likely always will be. That's just fine. The third group is maddening.
It's that third group that question was addressing.
Of course it is. And companies are starting to get wise to the fact that things could be better - when applying for jobs after college, not one but two of the interviews I had were filling spots of IT admins who'd been fired for this kinda crap. And the interviews were all questions like "What do you think of users who know absolutely nothing about computers?"
Ahhh, I had one of those -yesterday-. We have SPF implemented, and it still doesn't work very well, alas.
I got a call from a sysadmin somewhere in nowheresville USA. The minute I picked up the phone, the guy started berating me, since I was destroying his domain, and it was all my fault, because I'm running Exchange and obviously I was infecting him with Winblows.
After I finally got things sorted out, I walked him through exactly how and why it wasn't our domain a'tall, which would have been obvious had he looked at the headers of any one of the thousands of emails he claimed he recieved. If he knows how to read any of them. When he realized he was wrong, he slammed the phone down midsentence.
Point of the story: SPF is great, proper mail server administration is great, but there will always be jerks who think they know what they're doing when they don't, and they're the bane of the whole system, more like a wolf in sheep's clothing than a known enemy.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
Um...why would you learn any of those? At all? Most people today, including most computer people, don't seem to share your belief that it's evil to place your hand on the mouse. I've never really understood the reasoning behind continuing to use any of these relics. By using a program with a modern interface that follows the same standards as every other modern program, vi fanatics suggest that one loses productivity. I don't see where, how, or why.
Er...you've missed something here. This isn't an obscure piece of software demanding full and immediate mainstream acceptance. Opera follows open web standards, which are the goal for clean code on ALL web sites. So, in essence, unless someone is still dumb enough to code their site for IE and IE only, ALL web browsers work just fine with it.
Also, you didn't RTFA either: it's not actually Opera, it's just his computer. (See my earlier comment.)
At least 3 other people using Opera 9.0+ comment on the complainer's blog to say they have no problems. Now, that's still no justification or reason for saying "don't use Opera," but I don't think this problem is really with Opera in the first place.
Sorry for the serious comment in an "It's funny. Laugh." story;)
These kinds of things where there are two opposing sides always have the same answer. Unless one side is teh debil or something.
You have to compromise. That's it. Middle ground. There are no other solutions to or ways around this problem. As you describe it, each side has access to and knowledge of half the problem. Half plus half is whole!
So, meet with the guys in Dev. If you want to be beaureaucratic and official about it, create a "deployment team" consisting of an equal number of members from each side that will sit down, discuss, and supervise all necessary changes to production systems. Hell, send someone to a project management class if you need to.
Now, the obstacle you're likely to hit is office politics. People won't want to listen to others and/or won't want to give up their turf or allow others on it. Too bad. To place how serious this issue is in overcoming the political terms: everyone in both departments needs to be cooperating or unemployed.
So there you go. Just like any other relationship, business or otherwise: sit down and talk it over. Problems solved!
I have a remote for a LCD projector that's a good 3 years old that looks almost exactly the same. I'd imagine there are plenty more examples out there. My guess is Interlink is simply banking on the damage they can do before their patent is invalidated.
Parent is +4 insightful? Wtf? The quote specifically says the average was 8-9 lost. Parent is implying that maybe only 1 was lost for the most part, or something similar.
C'mon, can people not even be bothered to read the article SUMMARY any more?
To answer poster's question on comparison: the main advantage (IMO) to having PSTN access is fallback.
I can think of some cases where long distance might be different, and you might want to use VoIP for some numbers and PSTN for others, but we just implemented a new PBX at my office with a feature wherein if our VoIP calls encounter a certain amount of packet loss, if they drop below a certain audio quality (not enough bandwidth available), or if we just plain old feel like it, we can switch our voice access from our T1 to our four old fashioned copper n' wire lines.
The man drives BMWs and Caddies, rides a Harley, sips fine cognac and drinks good scotch, plays with cameras, and relaxes in air conditioning, and his country looks like this.
I think if I could choose to stab anyone in the world in the face, he'd be a finalist for sure.
Just for the record, I had no problem voting this morning in MD on a Diebold machine. It did give me pause, but everything seemed to work just fine. The only "glitch" that happened while I was there was a woman who was screaming her head off that once she touched a candidate, she couldn't change her vote. Problem was that she just didn't read the frickin' instructions on the machine.
Not only that, but this provision requires you to request clearance upon every entrance/exit from the country. With a passport, you just need the passport. You don't have to get your 'papers in order' first.
He scored 55%. Ted Stevens is in a position whereby he can exert direct control over the internet, he's made it clear that he's "for sale" to lobbyists concerning its future (the infamous "tubes" speech), and that he knows absolutely nothing about technology or that over which he is supposed to preside...and he scored better than a ton of other people.
I dismiss this entire study outright on that alone.
Re:Yerp. Figure it Out, Already.
on
Game Breakers
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you want to see how cutscenes should be done, play through Half Life 2 and HL2: Episode One. Pay attention to the commentary in EP1. They addresss how they specifically create "live" cutscenes at several commentary points.
One example is early in EP1. As you approach a T intersection from the south, they have a lone soldier firing at you far off to the right. You can easily pick him off, but then your attention is forced to the right side hallway and a realtime event: a gunship in its final throes, banging into the walls and crashing before exploding. Bam, there's your cutscene, entirely done without even removing control from the player.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there is. In fact, there was just a big case concerning false advertising a couple months ago. Some of those "magic super pill" weight-loss-in-a-bottle companies were fined massive amounts of money and told to pull their commercials and never show them again.
However, this case isn't about false advertising, it's about search engines refusing to advance one idiot's personal views under the guise of advertising. So the judge is using the First Amendment to reinforce the idea that said engines don't have to run those ads if they don't want to, for any reason they don't want to, as opposed to the idiot's claim that they DID have to because he is entitled to due process in a public forum (which was a frivolous claim anyway, since Google is not a government entity and is not a protected public forum).
Yes, and we also have several states that require belief in a Christianish version of God in order to hold public office, and one state that requires it as a prerequisite for equal protection under the law.
Just because the principle of this country is freedom doesn't mean that freedom always exists. People have spent every waking breath fighting for them since the Constitution was signed.
A 30 year old minor drug conviction with a completely clean record since then, like the guy cited in the article, can be safely discounted. Senator or anything else, it's usually safe to say that the person in question has cleaned themselves up. Only in rare cases might that be untrue.
So what's the story...the fact that he's doing the right thing here?
He's suing the correct person for (if the accusations are true - and you've seen Wikipedia troll edits, they probably are) a legitimate reason. So the story is that he's not an idiot suing Wikipedia like the rest of the idiots would?
Damn, got beat to it. Sorry for the redundant spammy post!
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
First thing I thought of was this.
Also, let me comment on something you just said. Computer processes are strange to many people. Users who gained an understanding of them by memorizing steps cannot discover changes in these strange processes by learning it themselves. Mostly, these are people who are nearing retirement age at this point. Please note that I'm not disparaging; I think it's just fine that someone chosen a method that, for them, is easiest and best to learn the technology. It took my mom (with my assistance) the better part of a decade to make the transition from having to memorize steps to learning the concepts in question. It all depends on the person.
Do you honestly think that something like hierarchical directory structures are intuitive? Hell, there is a significant number of users, young and old, who do not understand files themselves. The file needs to belong to something: it's a Word file or a Powerpoint file. It can't be an "image" file, because that has no meaning if it's not attached to an application and its associated function.
Ah, but therein lies a problem. You are correct: all of my users can use Office applications just fine. They can get around Windows just fine.
I have three groups of users: those who will attempt to fix a problem themselves before calling me, those who simply cannot, and those who will not try. The first group is great and easy to talk to and handle; most have at least basic technical understanding. We're talking things here like knowing when to reboot to try to fix a problem, and knowing when a reboot didn't or won't fix it. The second group is the largest, and likely always will be. That's just fine. The third group is maddening.
It's that third group that question was addressing.
Of course it is. And companies are starting to get wise to the fact that things could be better - when applying for jobs after college, not one but two of the interviews I had were filling spots of IT admins who'd been fired for this kinda crap. And the interviews were all questions like "What do you think of users who know absolutely nothing about computers?"
Ahhh, I had one of those -yesterday-. We have SPF implemented, and it still doesn't work very well, alas.
I got a call from a sysadmin somewhere in nowheresville USA. The minute I picked up the phone, the guy started berating me, since I was destroying his domain, and it was all my fault, because I'm running Exchange and obviously I was infecting him with Winblows.
After I finally got things sorted out, I walked him through exactly how and why it wasn't our domain a'tall, which would have been obvious had he looked at the headers of any one of the thousands of emails he claimed he recieved. If he knows how to read any of them. When he realized he was wrong, he slammed the phone down midsentence.
Point of the story: SPF is great, proper mail server administration is great, but there will always be jerks who think they know what they're doing when they don't, and they're the bane of the whole system, more like a wolf in sheep's clothing than a known enemy.
Um...why would you learn any of those? At all? Most people today, including most computer people, don't seem to share your belief that it's evil to place your hand on the mouse. I've never really understood the reasoning behind continuing to use any of these relics. By using a program with a modern interface that follows the same standards as every other modern program, vi fanatics suggest that one loses productivity. I don't see where, how, or why.
It's not "things we didn't know last year," it's "factoids the Beeb's own magazine liked from their lists this year."
Still interesting, tho, even with a misleading headline.
Er...you've missed something here. This isn't an obscure piece of software demanding full and immediate mainstream acceptance. Opera follows open web standards, which are the goal for clean code on ALL web sites. So, in essence, unless someone is still dumb enough to code their site for IE and IE only, ALL web browsers work just fine with it.
Also, you didn't RTFA either: it's not actually Opera, it's just his computer. (See my earlier comment.)
At least 3 other people using Opera 9.0+ comment on the complainer's blog to say they have no problems. Now, that's still no justification or reason for saying "don't use Opera," but I don't think this problem is really with Opera in the first place.
;)
Sorry for the serious comment in an "It's funny. Laugh." story
These kinds of things where there are two opposing sides always have the same answer. Unless one side is teh debil or something.
You have to compromise. That's it. Middle ground. There are no other solutions to or ways around this problem. As you describe it, each side has access to and knowledge of half the problem. Half plus half is whole!
So, meet with the guys in Dev. If you want to be beaureaucratic and official about it, create a "deployment team" consisting of an equal number of members from each side that will sit down, discuss, and supervise all necessary changes to production systems. Hell, send someone to a project management class if you need to.
Now, the obstacle you're likely to hit is office politics. People won't want to listen to others and/or won't want to give up their turf or allow others on it. Too bad. To place how serious this issue is in overcoming the political terms: everyone in both departments needs to be cooperating or unemployed.
So there you go. Just like any other relationship, business or otherwise: sit down and talk it over. Problems solved!
I have a remote for a LCD projector that's a good 3 years old that looks almost exactly the same. I'd imagine there are plenty more examples out there. My guess is Interlink is simply banking on the damage they can do before their patent is invalidated.
Parent is +4 insightful? Wtf? The quote specifically says the average was 8-9 lost. Parent is implying that maybe only 1 was lost for the most part, or something similar.
C'mon, can people not even be bothered to read the article SUMMARY any more?
To answer poster's question on comparison: the main advantage (IMO) to having PSTN access is fallback.
;)
I can think of some cases where long distance might be different, and you might want to use VoIP for some numbers and PSTN for others, but we just implemented a new PBX at my office with a feature wherein if our VoIP calls encounter a certain amount of packet loss, if they drop below a certain audio quality (not enough bandwidth available), or if we just plain old feel like it, we can switch our voice access from our T1 to our four old fashioned copper n' wire lines.
It provides security. Bosses like security.
The man drives BMWs and Caddies, rides a Harley, sips fine cognac and drinks good scotch, plays with cameras, and relaxes in air conditioning, and his country looks like this.
I think if I could choose to stab anyone in the world in the face, he'd be a finalist for sure.
Just for the record, I had no problem voting this morning in MD on a Diebold machine. It did give me pause, but everything seemed to work just fine. The only "glitch" that happened while I was there was a woman who was screaming her head off that once she touched a candidate, she couldn't change her vote. Problem was that she just didn't read the frickin' instructions on the machine.
:)
So, that was my experience. Judge as you will
Not only that, but this provision requires you to request clearance upon every entrance/exit from the country. With a passport, you just need the passport. You don't have to get your 'papers in order' first.
I call BS on jo7hs2.
He scored 55%. Ted Stevens is in a position whereby he can exert direct control over the internet, he's made it clear that he's "for sale" to lobbyists concerning its future (the infamous "tubes" speech), and that he knows absolutely nothing about technology or that over which he is supposed to preside...and he scored better than a ton of other people.
I dismiss this entire study outright on that alone.
If you want to see how cutscenes should be done, play through Half Life 2 and HL2: Episode One. Pay attention to the commentary in EP1. They addresss how they specifically create "live" cutscenes at several commentary points.
One example is early in EP1. As you approach a T intersection from the south, they have a lone soldier firing at you far off to the right. You can easily pick him off, but then your attention is forced to the right side hallway and a realtime event: a gunship in its final throes, banging into the walls and crashing before exploding. Bam, there's your cutscene, entirely done without even removing control from the player.
Or the good image it generates will help their sales elsewhere. There's always more than just the direct way to make money.