The solution is exceptionally simple: When you hear a song you want, go to the store or whatever source, and buy it. You will have no problems.
This is actually my number one argument for online music sharing. I own hundreds of CDs, all legally purchased, that would otherwise still be sitting on the store shelves if I hadn't "pirated" the first few samples. By downloading a few songs for free, I was able to find arists that I liked and bought their CDs. Most of these artists are not played on the radio or MTV or anything else. Are there kiddies out there who download terabytes of music and never buy a single CD? Of course. But the rest of us are reasonable people and will respect the artists enough to pay them for their work when they deserve it. The kiddies certainly wouldn't have, whether music sharing existed or not, so it's no big loss to the artist or music publishers anyway.
RFID tags are really the worst of my worries anymore at Wal-Mart.
My wife went out last night to buy some toiletries that forgot to bring with me for the weekend. She went to pay for the stuff and found that she could not pay for the items with our bank card without giving them our PIN. We have been using our bank card to pay for things for years and this was the first time we've ever needed a PING for what is essentially a credit card transaction. Also, last time I checked, you weren't supposed to give your bank card PIN out to anyone that's not an ATM machine.
Then she tried to pay with a check. Turns out they don't take checks anymore either. What they do is have you fill out the check, scan it as an image into their register, pull out the important information, and then make an electronic deduction from the account right then and there. They then hand the paper check back to you. At least, that's how the clerk explained it.
So this is great. The nation's largest retailer is leading the way with a) requiring a PIN for a credit card transaction b) electronic funds deduction from your checking accoung (with no paper trail) and c) RFID tags. I don't forsee myself doing much more business with Wal-Mart.
I half wonder when they're going to stop accepting cash as payment because it's too anonymous.
Quick question. I recall a few years back that peltier coolers were all the rage because they kept the CPU really cool and were totally silent. They were rather expensive but everyone predicted that they would be the next big phase in CPU cooling once they came down in price.
Now you have these guargantuan active heat sinks that are so heavy they require their own bracket. Oh, and they're noisy as hell. Meanwhile, you don't hear *any* talk of peliers anymore. What happened?
You're seeming to neglect just how large the open source community is. For every project you listed above as being well thought out, I could list a dozen more. However, the vast majority of open source projects *are* ill conceived and thrown together with little or no thought given to structure. For a very large sample that follows this norm just browse around freshmeat and sourceforge for awhile.
BUT... the linux kernel developers need to get over their fanaticism about open-source drivers.
Sorry, but this "fanatacism" that you speak of is the whole reason that the open-source movement is going as strong as it is today. Closed-source proprietary software sucks, but it *really* sucks when it's the operating system kernel and drivers.
I think it was Rob Malda who said at Penguicon that his personal picture of ideal software licensing looks something like an inverted pyramid. At the lowest level you have firmware and the OS kernel, which should be as open and free as humanly possible. As you go higher, you have a whole lot more software that depends on the lower levels but gets more and more specialized and is used by fewer and fewer people. At the very top, you have ultra-specialized apps that are closed-source and the developers can charge whatever they want for them because they tend to serve extremely narrow markets and the companies that have the cash to spend on them.
Closed-source kernel modules have no place on this map. In my opinion, GPL'd kernel modules don't even have a place on this map, but I can tolerate it to some extent. I see little difference between closing wireless drivers to prevent FCC violations and banning the possession of knives to prevent stab wounds. Those who have a strong desire to violate either most often find a way to do so, and those with a legitimate reason to have access to them just have to suffer.
Also note that this isn't just fanaticism, it's also about legality. Technically, you are violating the GPL by loading closed-source modules into GPL'd software (e.g. the Linux kernel). Read Linus's take on it.
Not at all. I am of the same opinion. I've got WinXP Home that came with my laptop. The only thing that ever gets that machine down is some crufty USB drivers. My workstation is FreeBSD, which never needs to be reinstalled due to the extreme ease of upgrading. (Ran 5.1 on it for the longest time.) My server, however, still runs Slackware 8.0. Primarily because a) I haven't had to time to upgrade it b) it's Slackware, so it's extra easy to maintain c) it does so many different things that getting them all going again on a new OS would break my network for a week and d) it sits there under the desk doing its thing and *never* complains.
Software upgrades, including the OS, are only for critical bugfixes and must-have features. Anything else is just wasting your time.
I've read through all the comments at +3, so maybe those that share my view already got modded down as redundant, but here goes.
I have a TI-86 that I bought from a friend for $60. It's a nice little calculator and I've been dragging it with me in course after course at a community college where their "official" calculator is the TI-83. (Like hell I'm going to blow that much money on another calculator when I have an even better one just sitting around.)
Okay, enough yammering. What I want to know is this. Why on earth are they still putting out these, low-resolution, machines with practically no horsepower and a few k of memory? I could see if the price was brought down proportional to the cost of the technology, but it isn't. For the same price as a brand-new TI calculator (even a crappy one like the 83), you can get a GBA or PDA with technology that is quite literally decades ahead. I *want* a higher resolution. I *want* color graphs. I want graphs that don't take their sweet time to draw before my very eyes. Heck, a backlit display would even be useful in many cases.
But even more than that, I just don't want to pay over $100 for a calculator that looks like it was just plucked out of 1985.
Autonomous means that the whole system (detection, destruction, recon) is carried out by the crew in mid-air. They don't have to rely on reports from ground or satellite to spot a missle or target it, though I'm sure they're equipped to.
Additionally, I seem remember reading a very long time ago that it the plane would be escorted at all times by a pair of F-16s for defensive purposes.
By your logic, since sea was easily conquered, space will be just as easily conquered, too.
a) I intended to make no such analogy.
b) Sea was not easily conquered.
c) I said nowhere that getting the 3D desktop right was easy. To the contrary, I stated flat-out that reason they were here already was that there are still problems that nobody has solved yet.
Despite this, I think the generation of 3D desktops is more or less a pipe dream. But don't for a second believe that this is all futile. Ideas from these experiments will, with little doubt, end up in bits and pieces of whatever the next-generation desktop turns out to be.
The rest of your comment takes an interesting angle (no pun intended) that I can't really argue with. But do keep in mind that no future desktop is going to resemble Half Life. There are ways to do 3D without it resembling Half Life and it's just possible that one of them might find its way to your monitor in the next decade.
That said, I just saw the screenshots for Sphere XP for the first time (site was slashdotted until recently) and was pretty impressed. From what I can tell, it looks like the user is in the middle of an opaque sphere and can rotate the sphere around him whilst zooming in and out and moving application windows around on the inside surface of the sphere. Kinda neat, but not much different than what 3DWM has been doing for years.
The downside of these interfaces is the ridiculously high processor and memory requirements. All that extra graphic manipulation comes at a price, and I for one don't see any reason to waste processor cycles.
They also said that "glass teletypes" would be too bulky and difficult to read. They said that color graphics were a perfectly good waste of video RAM. And 2D graphics with a mouse would never catch on because pointing and clicking at rectangles all day long would get much too tedious.
Of course the 3D desktop comes at a price. It's not practical these days anyway, but it might be in the future. That "might" is very much the key. Even if this is all smoke and mirrors (doubtful, but possible), it makes the company look good. It's "innovation." It might become the next trend.
This Sphere XP is not in use right now because there are significant limiting factors. Computing resources, navigation, ease of use, etc. The whole purpose of research like this is to try to find new ways over those hurdles. If they just sat around all day shaking their heads and saying, "this is pointless, why don't we combine OS X and Windows XP instead?" they... well, they'd end up being you.
What I'd much rather see is somebody developing a faster, more lightweight UI that is a nice combination of OSX and Windows XP. One that chews up LESS memory (instead of more, like this), one that speeds things up.
Better get coding, because if what's currently out there doesn't suit your needs, it's highly unlikely that someone's going to rap on your chamber door and volunteer to sit down and start banging out customized software just for you.
I have exactly two blue LEDs, and I had them easily 3 or 4 years ago when they were "expensive". It's a long story, but suffice to say I've been a fan of LEDs and their different colors and uses since childhood. I have a full-tower Antec case and I've never really been a fan of case-modding (I like beige just fine, thankyouverymuch), but I once happened to see some blue LEDs from the same online store that I bought my CPU fan from and bought a pair on a whim.
I soldered them in, replacing the green and amber power and HDD LEDs respectively, and turned it on. Looking, of course, directly into them. BIG MISTAKE. I felt like I was temporarily blinded for several minutes. The HDD one is not a big deal since it only flashes occasionally and never stays continuously lit for more than a second or two, but the power LED is on ALL THE TIME and if I turn off the lights it can illuminate an entire half of the room all by itself.
Fortunately, the LED bezel in the case directs most of the beam straight ahead, so it hasn't been that big a deal, though I've been tempted more than once to figure out the current and voltage and solder a resistor in series just to tone it down a bit.
This is also why the government keeps up the Interstate highways. In theory, in the state of war on the US mainland, the Army could easily control any stretch of Interstate highway so that vital convoys could have a fast and trafic-free mostly-direct path from one metro area to another.
In theory nothing. This is exactly why the U.S. interstate highway system is so well developed. The intent was speficially to allow military vehicles quick access to any part of the country. Interstate highways were also designed such that the government (military, police, or whoever) could quickly take complete control of any given section simply by closing the on-ramps. Many sections were also built to be easily converted into ad-hoc runways for military aircraft.
You might also hear the highway system referred to as the National Defense Highways, but most likely only in your history books. Dwight D. Eisenhower lobbied and eventually convinced congress to pass the the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which would provide for 41,000 miles of road (total) by 1975.
This has been another Slashdot history lesson. Thank you.
I think your description of MIDI might be throwing people off.
MIDI is best thought of as a nothing more than stream of events, usually a series of note beginnings and note endings and some other music-related paraphenalia. No "sounds" at all are in the data stream (though I'd be surprised if some implementations didn't have this as an extention).
Whereas a snippet of SVG might say something like, "draw this curve here with such-and-such an angle at this location in reference to center", a snippet of MIDI might say, "play this note of such-and-such octave for a certain duration."
The quality of both SVG and MIDI will depend on the tool that's being used to render them. It's indeed possible to have an SVG image rendered with no antialiasing in 16 colors by one program (likely a cell phone) and then have the same image rendered in 16 millions colors at 1600x1200 antialiased glory-filled pixels in another. Similarly, you can play a MIDI file on a $2 synth PC sound card and it'll sound just a bit better than an old NES. Play the same well-sequenced MIDI file in a full-blown multi-thousand dollar sound studio and the average Joe would have a hard time believing that it wasn't a real orchestra.
Therefore, I have blocked most networks outside of the US and Canada. The only exception is.mil..mil is for the U.S. military. It is not a network "outside of the US and Canada." Consider also unblocking.gov and.edu since spam rarely flows from those TLDs.
Add to this a Bayesian filter and my spam problem is essentially eliminated.
Won't be for long. Combine the fact that more spammers are using compromised Windows machines within the U.S. with the blurb below for why.
ISPs should filter e-mail according to the user's requests.
They often do, to varying degrees. It's been proven that filtering based on content is good in that it significantly reduces the amount of spam, but filters are becoming less and less effective literally by the day as spammers get better and better at bypassing them.
When you sign up for an account, by default, you can only receive e-mail originating/relaying from the US.... On that site, put one of the many methods to verify a human is actually visiting that site and then deal with the email accordingly.
The biggest problem: You're relying on the intelligence of the user. I mean to say, most of them don't have it. While your process works fine for skilled thinkers and the technically adept, Joe Sixpack can't and won't go through a complicated setup procedure and is even less likely to worry much about a verification response. In order for email to be truly useful to majority of the human population, it needs to be as easy to set up as entering a single login name and password and as easy to use as clicking on 'Send' and 'Get Mail' buttons. Nothing more. It's going to be up to the technologically literate such as you and I to do the hard work of figuring out and implementing a reliable, working solution so that Joe can continue to receive pictures of kittens from his grandmother.
For most users, the only noticeable impact would be less spam.
No. The noticeable impact would be that they have a much more complex setup procedure, mysteriously can't receive emails from certain friends and family in other counties, and get these occasional weird messages that say something about lunchmeat and fake plus signs. If you tell Joe that most spam comes from outside countries and that he should block all mail not originating in the U.S., enough Joes will eventually do it until a large portion of the U.S. can't communicate with other countries. You have just electronically isolated the U.S. from the rest of the world. Good for you. Additionally, the spam would return to normal levels due to compromised machines within the U.S.
This would also force spammers to send and/or relay from within the US. Now if they are operating from within the US, we have an IP address within the US's jurisdiction.
History and experience have shown that legislation is not enough to stop greed.
Granted these may be zombie machines, so if your e-mail server does a reverse lookup before allowing e-mail, these would be denied.
This is closer to the mark. I'm not about to say that I can prove it's a workable solution, but I've been thinking about it for awhile and have come to the conclusion that public key authentication (i.e. being able to prove that you are who you say you are when asked) is going to be the main solution for stopping, or at the very least, working around spam in the future. More on that below.
Also, we need to get ISPs to block most ports by default. If you want a port opened, you simply request it from your ISP.
No, that is unacceptable. If I pay money to access the internet, I want the whole internet, inbound and out. I want my machine to *participate* on the global computing network, not just be another random IP that receives a bit of commercialized content every so often. If I want my machine protected from the ne
I know a person who was convinced that dogs in Egypt say 'meow meow' instead of 'bow wow'.
I got one better. (And it's almost on-topic too!) My wife, until a few months ago, honestly had no idea that the moon didn't generate its own light. When I first learned of this, I picked my jaw up off the floor and tried explaining to her that it was really the sun's light reflecting off it. Unfortunately, she couldn't comprehend how it could still be illuminated at night, so true enlightenment didn't come until I made a mockup of the solar system with skittles and a flashlight.
She also didn't know that stars were suns and vice versa. She's a great person and usually has common sense by the truckload, but I've come to the conclusion that her teachers in elementary school must have been Bastard Science Educators From Hell or something.
Slashdot Mirror
You know in my day DOS3.3 still fit on one 1.44 floppy!
In my day, DOS 3.3 fit on a single 720k floppy with room to spare. (Double-density, Hoorah!)
The solution is exceptionally simple: When you hear a song you want, go to the store or whatever source, and buy it. You will have no problems.
This is actually my number one argument for online music sharing. I own hundreds of CDs, all legally purchased, that would otherwise still be sitting on the store shelves if I hadn't "pirated" the first few samples. By downloading a few songs for free, I was able to find arists that I liked and bought their CDs. Most of these artists are not played on the radio or MTV or anything else. Are there kiddies out there who download terabytes of music and never buy a single CD? Of course. But the rest of us are reasonable people and will respect the artists enough to pay them for their work when they deserve it. The kiddies certainly wouldn't have, whether music sharing existed or not, so it's no big loss to the artist or music publishers anyway.
RFID tags are really the worst of my worries anymore at Wal-Mart
Sorry, that should have said, "least of my worries."
RFID tags are really the worst of my worries anymore at Wal-Mart.
My wife went out last night to buy some toiletries that forgot to bring with me for the weekend. She went to pay for the stuff and found that she could not pay for the items with our bank card without giving them our PIN. We have been using our bank card to pay for things for years and this was the first time we've ever needed a PING for what is essentially a credit card transaction. Also, last time I checked, you weren't supposed to give your bank card PIN out to anyone that's not an ATM machine.
Then she tried to pay with a check. Turns out they don't take checks anymore either. What they do is have you fill out the check, scan it as an image into their register, pull out the important information, and then make an electronic deduction from the account right then and there. They then hand the paper check back to you. At least, that's how the clerk explained it.
So this is great. The nation's largest retailer is leading the way with a) requiring a PIN for a credit card transaction b) electronic funds deduction from your checking accoung (with no paper trail) and c) RFID tags. I don't forsee myself doing much more business with Wal-Mart.
I half wonder when they're going to stop accepting cash as payment because it's too anonymous.
Quick question. I recall a few years back that peltier coolers were all the rage because they kept the CPU really cool and were totally silent. They were rather expensive but everyone predicted that they would be the next big phase in CPU cooling once they came down in price.
Now you have these guargantuan active heat sinks that are so heavy they require their own bracket. Oh, and they're noisy as hell. Meanwhile, you don't hear *any* talk of peliers anymore. What happened?
You're seeming to neglect just how large the open source community is. For every project you listed above as being well thought out, I could list a dozen more. However, the vast majority of open source projects *are* ill conceived and thrown together with little or no thought given to structure. For a very large sample that follows this norm just browse around freshmeat and sourceforge for awhile.
BUT... the linux kernel developers need to get over their fanaticism about open-source drivers.
Sorry, but this "fanatacism" that you speak of is the whole reason that the open-source movement is going as strong as it is today. Closed-source proprietary software sucks, but it *really* sucks when it's the operating system kernel and drivers.
I think it was Rob Malda who said at Penguicon that his personal picture of ideal software licensing looks something like an inverted pyramid. At the lowest level you have firmware and the OS kernel, which should be as open and free as humanly possible. As you go higher, you have a whole lot more software that depends on the lower levels but gets more and more specialized and is used by fewer and fewer people. At the very top, you have ultra-specialized apps that are closed-source and the developers can charge whatever they want for them because they tend to serve extremely narrow markets and the companies that have the cash to spend on them.
Closed-source kernel modules have no place on this map. In my opinion, GPL'd kernel modules don't even have a place on this map, but I can tolerate it to some extent. I see little difference between closing wireless drivers to prevent FCC violations and banning the possession of knives to prevent stab wounds. Those who have a strong desire to violate either most often find a way to do so, and those with a legitimate reason to have access to them just have to suffer.
Also note that this isn't just fanaticism, it's also about legality. Technically, you are violating the GPL by loading closed-source modules into GPL'd software (e.g. the Linux kernel). Read Linus's take on it.
Am I odd?
Not at all. I am of the same opinion. I've got WinXP Home that came with my laptop. The only thing that ever gets that machine down is some crufty USB drivers. My workstation is FreeBSD, which never needs to be reinstalled due to the extreme ease of upgrading. (Ran 5.1 on it for the longest time.) My server, however, still runs Slackware 8.0. Primarily because a) I haven't had to time to upgrade it b) it's Slackware, so it's extra easy to maintain c) it does so many different things that getting them all going again on a new OS would break my network for a week and d) it sits there under the desk doing its thing and *never* complains.
Software upgrades, including the OS, are only for critical bugfixes and must-have features. Anything else is just wasting your time.
I've read through all the comments at +3, so maybe those that share my view already got modded down as redundant, but here goes.
I have a TI-86 that I bought from a friend for $60. It's a nice little calculator and I've been dragging it with me in course after course at a community college where their "official" calculator is the TI-83. (Like hell I'm going to blow that much money on another calculator when I have an even better one just sitting around.)
Okay, enough yammering. What I want to know is this. Why on earth are they still putting out these, low-resolution, machines with practically no horsepower and a few k of memory? I could see if the price was brought down proportional to the cost of the technology, but it isn't. For the same price as a brand-new TI calculator (even a crappy one like the 83), you can get a GBA or PDA with technology that is quite literally decades ahead. I *want* a higher resolution. I *want* color graphs. I want graphs that don't take their sweet time to draw before my very eyes. Heck, a backlit display would even be useful in many cases.
But even more than that, I just don't want to pay over $100 for a calculator that looks like it was just plucked out of 1985.
Yea.. but do your "books" run Linux? =)
Only NetBSD at the moment...
In English: The VERY POWERFUL laser just blasts a hole in the missle's fuel tank.
Autonomous means that the whole system (detection, destruction, recon) is carried out by the crew in mid-air. They don't have to rely on reports from ground or satellite to spot a missle or target it, though I'm sure they're equipped to.
Additionally, I seem remember reading a very long time ago that it the plane would be escorted at all times by a pair of F-16s for defensive purposes.
I guess you can always tell the 2600 from the NES people by a 10-year difference in age.
I guess you can always tell an elitist from his sweeping overgeneralizations.
Or, in other words, space is curved.
By your logic, since sea was easily conquered, space will be just as easily conquered, too.
a) I intended to make no such analogy.
b) Sea was not easily conquered.
c) I said nowhere that getting the 3D desktop right was easy. To the contrary, I stated flat-out that reason they were here already was that there are still problems that nobody has solved yet.
Despite this, I think the generation of 3D desktops is more or less a pipe dream. But don't for a second believe that this is all futile. Ideas from these experiments will, with little doubt, end up in bits and pieces of whatever the next-generation desktop turns out to be.
The rest of your comment takes an interesting angle (no pun intended) that I can't really argue with. But do keep in mind that no future desktop is going to resemble Half Life. There are ways to do 3D without it resembling Half Life and it's just possible that one of them might find its way to your monitor in the next decade.
That said, I just saw the screenshots for Sphere XP for the first time (site was slashdotted until recently) and was pretty impressed. From what I can tell, it looks like the user is in the middle of an opaque sphere and can rotate the sphere around him whilst zooming in and out and moving application windows around on the inside surface of the sphere. Kinda neat, but not much different than what 3DWM has been doing for years.
The downside of these interfaces is the ridiculously high processor and memory requirements. All that extra graphic manipulation comes at a price, and I for one don't see any reason to waste processor cycles.
They also said that "glass teletypes" would be too bulky and difficult to read. They said that color graphics were a perfectly good waste of video RAM. And 2D graphics with a mouse would never catch on because pointing and clicking at rectangles all day long would get much too tedious.
Of course the 3D desktop comes at a price. It's not practical these days anyway, but it might be in the future. That "might" is very much the key. Even if this is all smoke and mirrors (doubtful, but possible), it makes the company look good. It's "innovation." It might become the next trend.
This Sphere XP is not in use right now because there are significant limiting factors. Computing resources, navigation, ease of use, etc. The whole purpose of research like this is to try to find new ways over those hurdles. If they just sat around all day shaking their heads and saying, "this is pointless, why don't we combine OS X and Windows XP instead?" they... well, they'd end up being you.
What I'd much rather see is somebody developing a faster, more lightweight UI that is a nice combination of OSX and Windows XP. One that chews up LESS memory (instead of more, like this), one that speeds things up.
Better get coding, because if what's currently out there doesn't suit your needs, it's highly unlikely that someone's going to rap on your chamber door and volunteer to sit down and start banging out customized software just for you.
I have exactly two blue LEDs, and I had them easily 3 or 4 years ago when they were "expensive". It's a long story, but suffice to say I've been a fan of LEDs and their different colors and uses since childhood. I have a full-tower Antec case and I've never really been a fan of case-modding (I like beige just fine, thankyouverymuch), but I once happened to see some blue LEDs from the same online store that I bought my CPU fan from and bought a pair on a whim.
I soldered them in, replacing the green and amber power and HDD LEDs respectively, and turned it on. Looking, of course, directly into them. BIG MISTAKE. I felt like I was temporarily blinded for several minutes. The HDD one is not a big deal since it only flashes occasionally and never stays continuously lit for more than a second or two, but the power LED is on ALL THE TIME and if I turn off the lights it can illuminate an entire half of the room all by itself.
Fortunately, the LED bezel in the case directs most of the beam straight ahead, so it hasn't been that big a deal, though I've been tempted more than once to figure out the current and voltage and solder a resistor in series just to tone it down a bit.
This is also why the government keeps up the Interstate highways. In theory, in the state of war on the US mainland, the Army could easily control any stretch of Interstate highway so that vital convoys could have a fast and trafic-free mostly-direct path from one metro area to another.
In theory nothing. This is exactly why the U.S. interstate highway system is so well developed. The intent was speficially to allow military vehicles quick access to any part of the country. Interstate highways were also designed such that the government (military, police, or whoever) could quickly take complete control of any given section simply by closing the on-ramps. Many sections were also built to be easily converted into ad-hoc runways for military aircraft.
You might also hear the highway system referred to as the National Defense Highways, but most likely only in your history books. Dwight D. Eisenhower lobbied and eventually convinced congress to pass the the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which would provide for 41,000 miles of road (total) by 1975.
This has been another Slashdot history lesson. Thank you.
I think your description of MIDI might be throwing people off.
MIDI is best thought of as a nothing more than stream of events, usually a series of note beginnings and note endings and some other music-related paraphenalia. No "sounds" at all are in the data stream (though I'd be surprised if some implementations didn't have this as an extention).
Whereas a snippet of SVG might say something like, "draw this curve here with such-and-such an angle at this location in reference to center", a snippet of MIDI might say, "play this note of such-and-such octave for a certain duration."
The quality of both SVG and MIDI will depend on the tool that's being used to render them. It's indeed possible to have an SVG image rendered with no antialiasing in 16 colors by one program (likely a cell phone) and then have the same image rendered in 16 millions colors at 1600x1200 antialiased glory-filled pixels in another. Similarly, you can play a MIDI file on a $2 synth PC sound card and it'll sound just a bit better than an old NES. Play the same well-sequenced MIDI file in a full-blown multi-thousand dollar sound studio and the average Joe would have a hard time believing that it wasn't a real orchestra.
I'll take a crack.
.mil. .mil is for the U.S. military. It is not a network "outside of the US and Canada." Consider also unblocking .gov and .edu since spam rarely flows from those TLDs.
... On that site, put one of the many methods to verify a human is actually visiting that site and then deal with the email accordingly.
Therefore, I have blocked most networks outside of the US and Canada. The only exception is
Add to this a Bayesian filter and my spam problem is essentially eliminated.
Won't be for long. Combine the fact that more spammers are using compromised Windows machines within the U.S. with the blurb below for why.
ISPs should filter e-mail according to the user's requests.
They often do, to varying degrees. It's been proven that filtering based on content is good in that it significantly reduces the amount of spam, but filters are becoming less and less effective literally by the day as spammers get better and better at bypassing them.
When you sign up for an account, by default, you can only receive e-mail originating/relaying from the US.
The biggest problem: You're relying on the intelligence of the user. I mean to say, most of them don't have it. While your process works fine for skilled thinkers and the technically adept, Joe Sixpack can't and won't go through a complicated setup procedure and is even less likely to worry much about a verification response. In order for email to be truly useful to majority of the human population, it needs to be as easy to set up as entering a single login name and password and as easy to use as clicking on 'Send' and 'Get Mail' buttons. Nothing more. It's going to be up to the technologically literate such as you and I to do the hard work of figuring out and implementing a reliable, working solution so that Joe can continue to receive pictures of kittens from his grandmother.
For most users, the only noticeable impact would be less spam.
No. The noticeable impact would be that they have a much more complex setup procedure, mysteriously can't receive emails from certain friends and family in other counties, and get these occasional weird messages that say something about lunchmeat and fake plus signs. If you tell Joe that most spam comes from outside countries and that he should block all mail not originating in the U.S., enough Joes will eventually do it until a large portion of the U.S. can't communicate with other countries. You have just electronically isolated the U.S. from the rest of the world. Good for you. Additionally, the spam would return to normal levels due to compromised machines within the U.S.
This would also force spammers to send and/or relay from within the US. Now if they are operating from within the US, we have an IP address within the US's jurisdiction.
History and experience have shown that legislation is not enough to stop greed.
Granted these may be zombie machines, so if your e-mail server does a reverse lookup before allowing e-mail, these would be denied.
This is closer to the mark. I'm not about to say that I can prove it's a workable solution, but I've been thinking about it for awhile and have come to the conclusion that public key authentication (i.e. being able to prove that you are who you say you are when asked) is going to be the main solution for stopping, or at the very least, working around spam in the future. More on that below.
Also, we need to get ISPs to block most ports by default. If you want a port opened, you simply request it from your ISP.
No, that is unacceptable. If I pay money to access the internet, I want the whole internet, inbound and out. I want my machine to *participate* on the global computing network, not just be another random IP that receives a bit of commercialized content every so often. If I want my machine protected from the ne
You're too late. The Slashdot editors already wrote one of those a long time ago and called it michael.
Don't expect intelligent discussion on LJ like you would see on here or on kuro5hin.
Er... put down the pipe, sir! That stuff can get addictive after awhile!
You're just jealous because no one's invited you to Orkut yet.
I know a person who was convinced that dogs in Egypt say 'meow meow' instead of 'bow wow'.
I got one better. (And it's almost on-topic too!) My wife, until a few months ago, honestly had no idea that the moon didn't generate its own light. When I first learned of this, I picked my jaw up off the floor and tried explaining to her that it was really the sun's light reflecting off it. Unfortunately, she couldn't comprehend how it could still be illuminated at night, so true enlightenment didn't come until I made a mockup of the solar system with skittles and a flashlight.
She also didn't know that stars were suns and vice versa. She's a great person and usually has common sense by the truckload, but I've come to the conclusion that her teachers in elementary school must have been Bastard Science Educators From Hell or something.