If it's as bad as Windows Media Player 10, don't bother. What kind of crappy media player doesn't allow you to jump back and forth in the video/audio with keyboard controls? Whose stupid idea was it to make pause be CTRL-P? VLC's controls are the best, you can zip around with CTRL, ALT, or SHIFT- arrow keys to skip one minute, ten seconds, or one second respectively. Plus the space bar pauses and resumes.
Or maybe you'd rather try to slide a tiny dark slider along a tiny dark track and skip around that way.
Didn't *anyone* at microsoft take an HCI class in college?
I think not. Google's plans for YouTube and are bigger than most people imagine. They now control THE internet video domain name. Nobody went to Google Video, so they changed their strategy. They will undoubtedly negotiate mutually beneficial deals with various copyright owners to host TV content. I for one will happily watch my Colbert Report on YouTube, on demand, legally, in higher def with guaranteed quality, rather than have to hunt down a torrent or wait for somebody to upload some fragment of the show with inconsistent quality and unpredictable keywords. Heck, they can still allow people to upload snippets of the shows as long as they've negotiated ahead of time. So as long as I have Internet access, I don't need cable anymore, and I won't need to download shows illegally.
I think the Google acquisition of YouTube is actually a big win. Think about it -- Google knows you intimately based on your searches, even more so if you have a Google account and gmail. Tie that to your video viewing habits, and Google effortlessly blows away the whole Neilsen rating system. They can provide cheaper bandwidth and hosting than the networks themselves, and they can track everything you watch and every ad you see. And you won't see ads for things you wouldn't want to buy anyway. This represents a potentially huge efficiency/productivity gain for advertisers, and they will pay well for it.
Google has big plans to be a major player in the media industry, whose future is increasingly Internet-based. Don't underestimate them.
Or do you really think they bought YouTube cuz it was "cool" and they had the spare cash? Google isn't stupid. You can believe Page and Brin and Eric Schmidt do some deep thinking about companies they choose to acquire, and what they plan to do with them.
Which is that we don't have an independent media anymore.
Yes we do. It's called the Internet. You and I and everyone who creates Slashdot content are participants in the new independent media revolution. Have you noticed that (1) many large newspapers are losing money; (2) the major broadcast TV networks have been bleeding viewers for years; (3) even the cable news networks are now bleeding viewers as people watch TV via self-selected clips downloaded from YouTube or BitTorrent. The entire media landscape is changing and users are becoming more capable of generating their own content and exchanging it with like-minded people, as well as debating those with opposing views. As long as net neutrality is maintained (that's a big IF), this process will continue.
Personally, after watching 911mysteries and other films on related topics, and reviewing the scientific facts for myself, I'm convinced that we already live in 1984...
You've just certified yourself as just another nitwit conspiracy theorist. Get a clue. At worst 9/11 was LIHOP due to incompetence. Please read this or just learn how to think better. 9/11 conspiracy theorists are about as respected by the vast majority of the scientific community as are intelligent design proponents.
Wikipedia regularly dumps the entire database, which is available to download. However, It looks like they're having trouble getting them out lately (link is to a September 25 English dump, which hasn't yet successfully completed).
The compressed dump files are huge, and I wouldn't want to even attempt downloading them without wget or unless a torrent were provided directly by Wikipedia (why is this not being done yet?)
In 2009 slinging 100 GB data files across the net or between devices should be trivial, but not yet.
However, I have a truly marvelous demonstration of how to compress Wikipedia, which the margin of this comment is just barely large enough to contain:
Call somebody with Internet access and ask them. P.S. Wow, this also works for compressing Google... Hey, this margin is not as narrow as I thought.
The deal with these things is, they work with Google Desktop Search, and they pop up when you hit SHIFT-SHIFT.
Some of them are pretty cool, and some are a pain in the ass. Several I've tried are downright buggy, and I have some serious questions about security.
You really don't know what you're getting into when you download and allow random code to freely run on your PC. I would assume the gadgets run with the same privileges as GDS itself. Or are they sandboxed?
Anyway, it sure is handy to know I've made 219,430 keystrokes and 26,690 mouse clicks since Thursday. Oh, and that it's warm and sunny outside. And that my battery is charged. Well, the scratch pad is nice. It always auto-saves.
Actually, cats are incredibly good pets. My Mittens catches mice and insects that get into the house. They bathe themselves, and they bury their own waste, unlike dogs. They tend to have rather unique personalities. I've known more than a dozen cats in my thirty-odd years, and every single relationship has been rewarding for me, and I hope also for the cats.
But you could clone a neutered hypoallergenic cat. The offspring would not be sterile.
Of course, the "intellectual property" which is represented by the cat's genetic makeup may also be copyrighted or patented.
Now, if you'll excuse me as I entertain Buttons(TM) here with a Laser Pointer(TM) until I go broke from licensing fees or fall asleep in a hypnogogic Benadryl(TM) haze...
la la la la la atchoo atchoo atchoo! bless me dammit i'm an atheist but i do love benadryl and cats
Okay, okay, I'll admit it. Most of those spams you can't read are just backup pieces of my illicit Full House torrents, transmitted via alternate protocols. It's like in that Jodie Foster movie where they factor out the prime numbers and de-interlace the signal and filter the noise and reorient by ninety degrees and then zoom in and there's Hitler broadcasting something about the 1933 Olympics. But it's actually mostly Bob Saget and the Olsen twins. You just need the Primer. Contact Bill Gates on Mir for further instructions.
Google has an ace in the hole: the reverse of the Net Neutrality extortion scheme. First they get everybody to use all their free services, Google account, calendar, mail, search history, desktop search, etc. And then Google says to the big ISPs, hey, your customers want to jack in to our distributed computing network? Better pay up! $x.xx per user per month. Guaranteed revenue from the big telcos/cable companies, the ISPs have to run the billing and collection operations while Google just rakes in the bucks.
The vast majority of content on television nowadays is advertisement. I'm not talking about the commercial breaks, either. Consider your average Tonight Show|Charlie Rose|Meet the Press|Today Show|Good Morning America|20/20 interview.
All of it is just ads for new books, new movies, new albums coming out. Colbert and Stewart aren't immune. They help people sell their movies and books and albums too. Most of the news is advertisement too. All you need is a good publicist. The local news station will happily air pseudoscientific press releases for the latest medical quackery. I'm not sure if money always changes hands, but they love to find cheap way to fill 2 minutes with drivel/garbage.
At least not to common consumer devices. I cannot even count the number of remote controls, microwaves, cellphones, dishwashers, ATMs, and other devices which are seem to be designed completely without thought for the human who will need to use them.
Remote controls - ever heard of making the buttons distinguishable by FEEL, so I don't have to look down to tell whether I'm going to change the volume or accidentally change the channel or stop recording?
Microwaves - make the buttons we use all the time bigger and obvious. I can't use my microwave oven in near dark because the stupid thing's start button is indistinguishable from the power level button. That's just dumb. I don't need two different buttons that say "Fresh vegetable" and "Frozen vegetable" which I never use; and I have to babysit the popcorn anyway, so I don't need a "popcorn" button hardcoded for some random time limit. A microwave should have a keypad for entering time and bigger buttons labeled +1minute, +10seconds, ON, and OFF. That's all 99% of people use anyway.
The people who design interfaces should be made to use them for long enough so that they work out at least the most obvious design flaws.
I keep putting off buying a new cellphone because I know I will have to learn a new interface even to set the freaking alarm clock and it will probably take six menu choices to do it.
This technology, as well as some others I have seen, has a major problem. All the terrorists have to do is spend some time seeding the people in line with small amounts of powdered explosives. Make the detector go off on every one.
How do you do that (seed people in line with small amounts of powder)? If you do that *at the airport*, you're going to get caught on surveillence video somewhere. The FBI will track you down.
A more general point is worth making here: the terrorists aren't stupid, and, like a chess game, they're not going to take your rook without thinking ahead and realizing you'll fork them two moves later.
We hear all this silly criticism of the media (and accusations of treason!?) for reporting on government surveillance programs. The terrorists know their international bank transactions or phone called could be monitored. Please. The ones who are going to pull off the next attack already knew that and won't be caught by it. We will catch the stupid ones who blab to their friends or do something obvious that gives them away.
Make a point of reviewing the content you wish to preserve at least annually, and make sure that a backup exists in a separate geographic location.
If you have any trouble whatsoever accessing it, make sure you recover it and change the storage format if necessary. Don't put it off a year.
And if you don't want to review the content annually yourself, what makes you think your great-great grandchildren will give a hoot about it?
If you really want an idea to last, and you think it's worth saving, write it or sing it or paint it or sculpt it beautifully, and then give away lots of free copies. If people like it, they'll keep it around. As long as the technological infrastructure of our civilization sticks around, anything that's popular enough will be kept by enough people so that it is preserved. It might change culturally over time, but hey, so does everything else.
( ) paranoid ( ) delusional (x) impossible to confirm (x) impossible to refute
Specifically, your theory fails to account for
( ) Stupidity of the general population ( ) Stupidity of the politicians (x) Lack of supporting evidence (x) Plenty of contradictory evidence (x) Lack of a centrally controlling authority for conspiracies (x) The facts can be explained without need for real conspiracy (x) Scientists generally don't participate in conspiracies (x) Failure to mention the Illuminati
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been proven (x) That's what they WANT us to think
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, you're batshit crazy (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!
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 ( ) 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 ( ) 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 ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) 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 ( ) 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 ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo ( ) 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 ( ) 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. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Spammers till have to tell you these two crucial pieces of information. If they're selling Viagra, they have to make that known to you somehow. If they're selling anything (and not just trying to increase brand awareness, which is a separate problem), they have to tell you how to contact them and buy whatever crap they're peddling. They can make this very hard to discern via obfuscation, leet speak, image substitution, etc. But the contact information ultimately has to boil down to something meaningful and unambiguous, or there won't be any sales.
So the solution is to recognize and ignore spam based on either or both of these criteria. Ultimately, a collection of trusted humans need to review a message and say "this is spam, alright", allowing the filters to recognize the contact information (phone number, email address, web site, etc.) as spam.
I'm not too worried about spam that tells me to "Drink Coke!", I don't get much of that.
This is a fucking diaster for AOL. There will be lawsuits, and I'll bet you someone will die because of this (due to stalking, spouse finding out secrets, etc.). Use your imagination. This data is chock full of so much personal information, it's scary. I'm terrified that everything I've ever searched for in google is similarly logged in a data center somewhere and could be just as easily revealed but for whatever security they have in place, along with a dubious "don't be evil" guarantee.
If you're an AOL user you need to zcat this through grep ASAP for one of your unique searches, ASAP, to make sure you're not in the dataset. They can't ever "unrelease" this data.
This could take down AOL quicker than you can say "retention specialist". This is like Merck's VIOXX problem. THIS IS REALLY REALLY BAD. Got TWX? SELL SELL SELL. Holy fucking shit.
This event should be a wake-up call for privacy for everyone.
This is a fucking diaster for AOL. There will be lawsuits, and I'll bet you someone will die because of this (due to stalking, spouse finding out secrets, etc.). Use your imagination. This data is chock full of so much personal information, it's scary. I'm terrified that everything I've ever searched for in google is similarly logged in a data center somewhere and could be just as easily revealed but for whatever security they have in place, along with a dubious "don't be evil" guarantee.
If you're an AOL user you need to zcat this through grep ASAP for one of your unique searches, ASAP, to make sure you're not in the dataset. They can't ever "unrelease" this data.
This could take down AOL quicker than you can say "retention specialist". This is like Merck's VIOXX problem. THIS IS REALLY REALLY BAD. Got TWX? SELL SELL SELL. Holy fucking shit.
My 2.8 GHz Windows MCE 2005 laptop runs utorrent or Azureus like a champ. Video looks fantastic on the widescreen and is easy to control with VLC. I've used the MCE functionality to record only a handful of shows directly from cable. It's easier to download than have to worry about being plugged into a cable connection. Plus there are no commercials.
Slashdot Mirror
If all slashdot posts from the history of Slashdot were sorted into color bins, ...
So, from a distance the site would blur into an ugly pastiche resembling lime green?
Or maybe you'd rather try to slide a tiny dark slider along a tiny dark track and skip around that way.
Didn't *anyone* at microsoft take an HCI class in college?
Google got had.
I think not. Google's plans for YouTube and are bigger than most people imagine. They now control THE internet video domain name. Nobody went to Google Video, so they changed their strategy. They will undoubtedly negotiate mutually beneficial deals with various copyright owners to host TV content. I for one will happily watch my Colbert Report on YouTube, on demand, legally, in higher def with guaranteed quality, rather than have to hunt down a torrent or wait for somebody to upload some fragment of the show with inconsistent quality and unpredictable keywords. Heck, they can still allow people to upload snippets of the shows as long as they've negotiated ahead of time. So as long as I have Internet access, I don't need cable anymore, and I won't need to download shows illegally.
I think the Google acquisition of YouTube is actually a big win. Think about it -- Google knows you intimately based on your searches, even more so if you have a Google account and gmail. Tie that to your video viewing habits, and Google effortlessly blows away the whole Neilsen rating system. They can provide cheaper bandwidth and hosting than the networks themselves, and they can track everything you watch and every ad you see. And you won't see ads for things you wouldn't want to buy anyway. This represents a potentially huge efficiency/productivity gain for advertisers, and they will pay well for it.
Google has big plans to be a major player in the media industry, whose future is increasingly Internet-based. Don't underestimate them.
Or do you really think they bought YouTube cuz it was "cool" and they had the spare cash? Google isn't stupid. You can believe Page and Brin and Eric Schmidt do some deep thinking about companies they choose to acquire, and what they plan to do with them.
Which is that we don't have an independent media anymore.
Yes we do. It's called the Internet. You and I and everyone who creates Slashdot content are participants in the new independent media revolution. Have you noticed that (1) many large newspapers are losing money; (2) the major broadcast TV networks have been bleeding viewers for years; (3) even the cable news networks are now bleeding viewers as people watch TV via self-selected clips downloaded from YouTube or BitTorrent. The entire media landscape is changing and users are becoming more capable of generating their own content and exchanging it with like-minded people, as well as debating those with opposing views. As long as net neutrality is maintained (that's a big IF), this process will continue.
Personally, after watching 911mysteries and other films on related topics, and reviewing the scientific facts for myself, I'm convinced that we already live in 1984...
You've just certified yourself as just another nitwit conspiracy theorist. Get a clue. At worst 9/11 was LIHOP due to incompetence. Please read this or just learn how to think better. 9/11 conspiracy theorists are about as respected by the vast majority of the scientific community as are intelligent design proponents.
"Don't Panic" written in large, friendly letters on the cover
Thank you, I really didn't get the "Don't Panic" reference until suddenly now. You geeks and your in-jokes and your fscking jargon...
Wikipedia regularly dumps the entire database, which is available to download. However, It looks like they're having trouble getting them out lately (link is to a September 25 English dump, which hasn't yet successfully completed).
The compressed dump files are huge, and I wouldn't want to even attempt downloading them without wget or unless a torrent were provided directly by Wikipedia (why is this not being done yet?)
In 2009 slinging 100 GB data files across the net or between devices should be trivial, but not yet.
However, I have a truly marvelous demonstration of how to compress Wikipedia, which the margin of this comment is just barely large enough to contain:
Call somebody with Internet access and ask them. P.S. Wow, this also works for compressing Google... Hey, this margin is not as narrow as I thought.
The deal with these things is, they work with Google Desktop Search, and they pop up when you hit SHIFT-SHIFT.
Some of them are pretty cool, and some are a pain in the ass. Several I've tried are downright buggy, and I have some serious questions about security.
You really don't know what you're getting into when you download and allow random code to freely run on your PC. I would assume the gadgets run with the same privileges as GDS itself. Or are they sandboxed?
Anyway, it sure is handy to know I've made 219,430 keystrokes and 26,690 mouse clicks since Thursday. Oh, and that it's warm and sunny outside. And that my battery is charged. Well, the scratch pad is nice. It always auto-saves.
Actually, cats are incredibly good pets. My Mittens catches mice and insects that get into the house. They bathe themselves, and they bury their own waste, unlike dogs. They tend to have rather unique personalities. I've known more than a dozen cats in my thirty-odd years, and every single relationship has been rewarding for me, and I hope also for the cats.
But you could clone a neutered hypoallergenic cat. The offspring would not be sterile.
Of course, the "intellectual property" which is represented by the cat's genetic makeup may also be copyrighted or patented.
Now, if you'll excuse me as I entertain Buttons(TM) here with a Laser Pointer(TM) until I go broke from licensing fees or fall asleep in a hypnogogic Benadryl(TM) haze...
la la la la la atchoo atchoo atchoo! bless me dammit i'm an atheist but i do love benadryl and cats
Okay, okay, I'll admit it. Most of those spams you can't read are just backup pieces of my illicit Full House torrents, transmitted via alternate protocols. It's like in that Jodie Foster movie where they factor out the prime numbers and de-interlace the signal and filter the noise and reorient by ninety degrees and then zoom in and there's Hitler broadcasting something about the 1933 Olympics. But it's actually mostly Bob Saget and the Olsen twins. You just need the Primer. Contact Bill Gates on Mir for further instructions.
(Sorry, Carl. :)
Google has an ace in the hole: the reverse of the Net Neutrality extortion scheme. First they get everybody to use all their free services, Google account, calendar, mail, search history, desktop search, etc. And then Google says to the big ISPs, hey, your customers want to jack in to our distributed computing network? Better pay up! $x.xx per user per month. Guaranteed revenue from the big telcos/cable companies, the ISPs have to run the billing and collection operations while Google just rakes in the bucks.
Yeah, but the dang scroll knobs don't work.
The vast majority of content on television nowadays is advertisement. I'm not talking about the commercial breaks, either. Consider your average Tonight Show|Charlie Rose|Meet the Press|Today Show|Good Morning America|20/20 interview.
All of it is just ads for new books, new movies, new albums coming out. Colbert and Stewart aren't immune. They help people sell their movies and books and albums too. Most of the news is advertisement too. All you need is a good publicist. The local news station will happily air pseudoscientific press releases for the latest medical quackery. I'm not sure if money always changes hands, but they love to find cheap way to fill 2 minutes with drivel/garbage.
At least not to common consumer devices. I cannot even count the number of remote controls, microwaves, cellphones, dishwashers, ATMs, and other devices which are seem to be designed completely without thought for the human who will need to use them.
Remote controls - ever heard of making the buttons distinguishable by FEEL, so I don't have to look down to tell whether I'm going to change the volume or accidentally change the channel or stop recording?
Microwaves - make the buttons we use all the time bigger and obvious. I can't use my microwave oven in near dark because the stupid thing's start button is indistinguishable from the power level button. That's just dumb. I don't need two different buttons that say "Fresh vegetable" and "Frozen vegetable" which I never use; and I have to babysit the popcorn anyway, so I don't need a "popcorn" button hardcoded for some random time limit. A microwave should have a keypad for entering time and bigger buttons labeled +1minute, +10seconds, ON, and OFF. That's all 99% of people use anyway.
The people who design interfaces should be made to use them for long enough so that they work out at least the most obvious design flaws.
I keep putting off buying a new cellphone because I know I will have to learn a new interface even to set the freaking alarm clock and it will probably take six menu choices to do it.
How do you do that (seed people in line with small amounts of powder)? If you do that *at the airport*, you're going to get caught on surveillence video somewhere. The FBI will track you down.
A more general point is worth making here: the terrorists aren't stupid, and, like a chess game, they're not going to take your rook without thinking ahead and realizing you'll fork them two moves later.
We hear all this silly criticism of the media (and accusations of treason!?) for reporting on government surveillance programs. The terrorists know their international bank transactions or phone called could be monitored. Please. The ones who are going to pull off the next attack already knew that and won't be caught by it. We will catch the stupid ones who blab to their friends or do something obvious that gives them away.
Make a point of reviewing the content you wish to preserve at least annually, and make sure that a backup exists in a separate geographic location.
If you have any trouble whatsoever accessing it, make sure you recover it and change the storage format if necessary. Don't put it off a year.
And if you don't want to review the content annually yourself, what makes you think your great-great grandchildren will give a hoot about it?
If you really want an idea to last, and you think it's worth saving, write it or sing it or paint it or sculpt it beautifully, and then give away lots of free copies. If people like it, they'll keep it around. As long as the technological infrastructure of our civilization sticks around, anything that's popular enough will be kept by enough people so that it is preserved. It might change culturally over time, but hey, so does everything else.
I swear to god I tried, the lameness filter prevented me from posting in all caps.
Go ahead and track me down, I use AOL SO I AM SAFE!!!1
Your post advocates a conspiracy theory which is
( ) paranoid
( ) delusional
(x) impossible to confirm
(x) impossible to refute
Specifically, your theory fails to account for
( ) Stupidity of the general population
( ) Stupidity of the politicians
(x) Lack of supporting evidence
(x) Plenty of contradictory evidence
(x) Lack of a centrally controlling authority for conspiracies
(x) The facts can be explained without need for real conspiracy
(x) Scientists generally don't participate in conspiracies
(x) Failure to mention the Illuminati
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been proven
(x) That's what they WANT us to think
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, you're batshit crazy
(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!
where it's not even worth filling this out anymore...
You advocate a
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) 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
( ) 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.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Spammers till have to tell you these two crucial pieces of information. If they're selling Viagra, they have to make that known to you somehow. If they're selling anything (and not just trying to increase brand awareness, which is a separate problem), they have to tell you how to contact them and buy whatever crap they're peddling. They can make this very hard to discern via obfuscation, leet speak, image substitution, etc. But the contact information ultimately has to boil down to something meaningful and unambiguous, or there won't be any sales.
So the solution is to recognize and ignore spam based on either or both of these criteria. Ultimately, a collection of trusted humans need to review a message and say "this is spam, alright", allowing the filters to recognize the contact information (phone number, email address, web site, etc.) as spam.
I'm not too worried about spam that tells me to "Drink Coke!", I don't get much of that.
This is a fucking diaster for AOL. There will be lawsuits, and I'll bet you someone will die because of this (due to stalking, spouse finding out secrets, etc.). Use your imagination. This data is chock full of so much personal information, it's scary. I'm terrified that everything I've ever searched for in google is similarly logged in a data center somewhere and could be just as easily revealed but for whatever security they have in place, along with a dubious "don't be evil" guarantee.
If you're an AOL user you need to zcat this through grep ASAP for one of your unique searches, ASAP, to make sure you're not in the dataset. They can't ever "unrelease" this data.
This could take down AOL quicker than you can say "retention specialist". This is like Merck's VIOXX problem. THIS IS REALLY REALLY BAD. Got TWX? SELL SELL SELL. Holy fucking shit.
This event should be a wake-up call for privacy for everyone.
This is a fucking diaster for AOL. There will be lawsuits, and I'll bet you someone will die because of this (due to stalking, spouse finding out secrets, etc.). Use your imagination. This data is chock full of so much personal information, it's scary. I'm terrified that everything I've ever searched for in google is similarly logged in a data center somewhere and could be just as easily revealed but for whatever security they have in place, along with a dubious "don't be evil" guarantee.
If you're an AOL user you need to zcat this through grep ASAP for one of your unique searches, ASAP, to make sure you're not in the dataset. They can't ever "unrelease" this data.
This could take down AOL quicker than you can say "retention specialist". This is like Merck's VIOXX problem. THIS IS REALLY REALLY BAD. Got TWX? SELL SELL SELL. Holy fucking shit.
My 2.8 GHz Windows MCE 2005 laptop runs utorrent or Azureus like a champ. Video looks fantastic on the widescreen and is easy to control with VLC. I've used the MCE functionality to record only a handful of shows directly from cable. It's easier to download than have to worry about being plugged into a cable connection. Plus there are no commercials.
Clearly this comment is a direct consequence of the Big Bong.