What exactly will be in the notification? Let's say you don't know luser5637883@aol.com, so they could be either someone sending you a valid email or a spammer.
"luser5637883@aol.com has sent you a message. Click _here_ to receive it"
No indication at all of what the message is. You're going to click on it out of curiosity, unless you ignore it totally in which case you're effectively implementing whitelist-only email.
"luser5637883@aol.com has sent you a message ('GET YOUR PEN91S ENLRAGED'). Click _here_ to receive it"
Well, damage done, as far as I can see. I don't want to even see this stuff. Sure, I can tell that this is spam, but what if the hint text were "Account overdue", or "Virus alert from Symantec"? Again you're back to clicking on it out of curiosity.
I don't think that would bother most people. By "most people" I don't of course mean "most slashdotters." I mean all those who are already locked into Windows and don't mind, to whom the vast majority of spam is directed, and which most likely contains all the people who are actually dumb enough to respond to spam. Make spam infeasible for that group of people, and you make spam infeasible full stop.
IHNRTFPA, but as long as they have used the form $TOTALLY_OBVIOUS_PROCESS + 'using a computer' they'll get it.
I was thinking of filing a patent for scratching my arse using a computer, but then I remembered I'm not American and have better things to do with six thousand quid.
It's when it was applied for that matters, not the fact that it was granted only a few weeks ago. If they applied in, say, 1946, then it could have been valid.
(checks doc.) Filed November 23,1999.
Ok, so all Network Solutions need to do is check whether or not Freeserve (or an American version of them) were issuing accounts with URL www.account.freeserve.co.uk and email address account@freeserve.co.uk prior to 23/11/1999. I'm pretty sure I've had my current account of that form since before then, so defeating this patent should be a piece of cake.
Yes but you're not comparing like with like. If you go into Toys R Us and look for Lego you will ONLY find Bionicle and Harry Potter.
A more accurate comparison would be:
1961: Stop selling everything we've sold before and start selling only wheels 1964: Stop selling wheels and only sell kits with instructions 1975: Stop selling kits with instructions and only sell maxi-figures.
You see the difference? None of the previous marketing drives SUBTRACTED from what was already on offer. But where can you now find town sets, castles, pirates, trains, technic and so on? You can't - and THAT is the problem with Lego's current marketing strategy.
(Ok, so perhaps it's all available on-line. But I only found out about that within the last week, and for the last 10 years I've been taking a geek's salary into Toys R Us with a view to finally satisfying my childhood dream of buying unlimited amounts of Lego, and it's all this shitty Harry Potter crap - no trains, no Technic, no nothing.)
Fair enough. The first isn't insurmountable if corporate mail servers can be setup to forward mail from trusted senders - you send mail from somebody664509@aol.com, which is verified by AOL's SPF, to, e.g. forwarding@bindaca-inc.com with the client's email address specified one way or another - client gets email from and reply-to sales@etc. Then it doesn't matter about your reputation because you add somebody664509@next-isp.com to your company's whitelist, then the cycle starts all over again.
Your second point isn't caused by SPF. If the cost to run your own mail server is $50pm, then you should be paying that whether you have SPF or not.
Standard "security" implementation. Make things harder for ordinary people, while making things no more difficult for the villains.
About 12 years ago I tried to open a bank account. They said - sorry, due to security, you need a drivers licence. I asked how a drivers licence would help - if I were a real crim I would just present them with a fake one and they'd be none the wiser. "No licence, no account" was all I could get out of them.
Took my licence to the bank a few days later, got the account, same teller, so I asked her - so how are you better off now? How do you know that licence isn't fake? She couldn't give a shit - they'd done their bit, at that was all that mattered.
It's all about doing stuff for the sake of being seen to do stuff, rather than actually trying to prevent crime, which really pisses me off.
The only truly effective security measures I've seen are those taken where security really matters - at airports and similar - having risk databases, grounding suspect planes and so on.
In my case, one careless post to a newgroup after installing Mozilla for the first time and forgetting to change my newsgroup email address to an antispam one. I can even find that one post by searching Google Groups for my email addy.
That's it - ONE STUPID LOUSY MISTAKE and now I get tons of spam. I got 286 spams on the Monday after the Christmas break (obviously it was accumulating, and isn't 100 a day yet, but it's increasing).
I have my own domain, use SpamGourmet, tagged email addresses and so on. I don't get any spam as a result of all that, only as a result of that one stupid error and then only because Moz doesn't warn you that you're about to post your real email where spammers can get at it. (Should it? Maybe. Maybe not. It'd be a nice feature.)
darn lame-o subject box. Rocket science - no longer associated with vast intelligence, ever since they confused inches with centimetres and managed to miss an entire planet.
The quake is going to happen anyway. Tell people - they get a chance to move out of the way of the quake, they don't lose families and other loved ones, they don't lose all they own. Don't tell people - none of that is true.
Also are you honestly saying that if these people called you and said "There's going to be a magnitude 12 quake, epicentre YOUR HOUSE, on the..." that you'd interrupt that statement with "Nooooo! I don't want to know!"
I would. (Proofread: Want to know, that is, not interrupt them.)
I bet the inhabitants of Bam would as well.
They might not have their houses, but I'd bet any money there wouldn't be a death toll of thousands. What is it - 18,000? more? 18000 is SIX SIMULTANEOUS September 11ths. Still sure you want to inflict that on people?
In such a case my honest opinion would be "Bollocks to the local economy". When the quake hits, the economy is stuffed anyway, and further hampered by the rescue effort. If I've moved locations, when the quake strikes I'll still be doing the same job, spending the same cash, living the same life.
The only problems I can see are: what if America (n scientists) had announced a few months ago to Iran that there was going to be a major quake in Bam? I'm sure that would have gone down well.
Also what if they predict a quake by (date) and it doesn't happen? What if it happens after that date? It'll make places like that firework that looks like it has gone out - nobody will approach it for fear that it's about to go off. And, unlike a firework, you can't just wait to the next shower.
Providing you don't make the mistake a friend of mine did - he played with the lego and his kid sat there bored, whenever he picked a piece up daddy only said "no that's wrong". Can anyone hear the words "I hate Lego" approaching? The great thing about Lego for me was that M+D left me to it, Dad helped me out when I was stuck, but it was *me* playing with the Lego, not him.
Unfortunately you don't bother to say how your preferred solutions fix spam.
Pay per email? Pay whom, precisely? The ISP? I've already paid them for my subscription. If that is included in a spammers account, their spam gets through. Pay the recipient? Why should I pay you to send you email that isn't spam? Would you give me the cash back? You say that SPF works against the way the internet works, well, the internet is a free-for-all, so why is paying per email NOT against the way the internet works?
PKI? If Computer A trusts Computer B, does that mean Computer B gets a high ranking? What if Computer A is a spammer? Computer C, which nobody knows, and therefore nobody trusts, how do they get email out to people? They may be the next Slashdot, or have something earth-shatteringly important to say. Are you going to reject their messages because nobody trusts them? If they spam, presumably they get a negative score. But what if someone who has an axe to grind says they've spammed when they haven't?
How do PKI/Pay-for deal with throwaway domains, or compromised machines?
What if a new spammer starts out by sending out useful stuff, thus getting a high Trusted ranking, then starts to spam from it? What if someone who is Trusted gets compromised? Trust also doesn't fix spam.
Just because SPF doesn't fix everything including terrorism and obesity, does that mean it shouldn't be implemented?
I think SPF is a good idea. You get email from aol.com, but aol says "never heard of them" - there's a good chance this will be spam. Therefore spammers stop spoofing aol and spoof someone else. They then get loads of bounces and implement SPF. And so on, and eventually spammers have nowhere left to hide. It won't fix spam overnight, but it will reduce, and eventually remove, places for spammers to hide. The wonderfully double-entendred CAN SPAM act proves we can't rely on politicians, so we need a technical solution.
So you can't validly spoof your own address. What's wrong with setting different From and Reply-To? (other than it not being implemented in mail clients. But that can easily be fixed.) From=my ISP, mail gets validated as not Spam. Reply-To=my work address, so I get to send work email from home. That's why we have distinct From and Reply-To, no?
So you have to ask your ISP if you want to run a mail server. Why exactly is that so difficult?
You say SPF increases traffic. How much traffic does SPAM need to be before it becomes a problem? 5%? 10%? Some estimates place Spam at OVER FIFTY PERCENT OF ALL EMAIL. Clearly if the Spam traffic is not a problem at over 50%, the odd little bit of SPF validation traffic isn't going to make much difference.
SPF can reduce the amount of clutter on the network. It doesn't just have to be implemented at the terminal ISP. Clearly if an interim computer getting email bound for ISP X notices that SPF fails, it can drop or bounce the email instead of passing it on. Yes, this takes some CPU time. So does propagating Spam - even that isn't free. Besides, how expensive is CPU time these days? Do mail forwarders really use 100% CPU time or are they IO bound (I don't know the answer to this, so perhaps they really are CPU bound, in which case this paragraph is complete 130110x.)
It's not the options that bother me about the Real player. I know you want to sell a product instead of give one away, but those of us that just want to watch video produced by someone else without doing anything flashy have to sift very carefully through the positively misleading website in order to find the free player. It's like font size=enormous FREE DOWNLOAD; font size=miniscule (but you have to pay after a fortnight); font size=microscopic (damn I suppose we'd better put a link to the free player somewhere. There are plenty of FREE DOWNLOAD links, but the ACTUAL free player is hidden away in a corner somewhere that is very difficult to find.
Then there's the way the program is totally cluttered up with about 1% of the screen area taken up by the actual video, the rest being adverts I don't want to see for products I don't want to buy, then there's the way it jumps up and down on the desktop shouting BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME. No I don't fucking want to buy you. Fuck off. You're only a fucking video player so fucking shut the fuckity fuck up.
Yes, that is the feeling your program generates. I'm not going to touch Real anything until I absolutely have to, and if I'm ever in a position of creating video I certainly won't inflict Real on my audience unless there is absolutely no other choice. I don't give a shit about Real 10 - couldn't care less, won't touch it until absolutely unavoidable. Even if you people say it is millions of times better.
I like the way he touts Linux as a solution to this. Bollocks, say I.
I recently got a new PC on which I planned to install Suse Linux Pro 9.0. It came through the corporate system, so was already loaded with Win2k. The screen was fine. Installed Suse - wouldn't go over 640x480 (it was a 1280x1024 LCD, so this pissed me off somewhat).
FIVE HOURS LATER I finally gave up fiddling and called Suse. TWO WEEKS LATER they bothered to get back to me.
It's a good job I didn't have to wait the fortnight. Eventually I discovered a BIOS setting - the video RAM was set to 1MB which could be changed to 8MB then it worked fine. But Windows didn't need that BIOS setting changing - it JUST WORKED.
Every time I try to do something trivial with a Linux box it's hours and hours of HOWTOs and so on, then dependencies, then making it work with the rest of the system. Figuring out Copy and Paste between applications (using KDE) took ages and I still don't think I have figured it out completely. (Oh, and I'm not a n00b by any means. Progressed from electronics to computers in 1981 with a ZX81, started assembly programming a few months later, upgraded to a C64, went on to get a degree in computer science and I've been working with computers, mostly programming, ever since. So I figure I should be able to work out how to use Linux. And if I can't figure it out, what chance has a total newb got???)
In many ways Windows Just Works. Ok, it crashes a lot, and one of the things I like about Linux is that if it dies it's because I did something stupid not because of some random glitch that can't be explained. You don't have to reboot the whole system just because you've installed a calculator or something trivial. When it is possible to install something on Linux and have it Just Work, then and only then will it make any kind of impact on Windows.
"work from home for 50-80% of their current in-office pay"
Then it'd be "oh, we really need you at this meeting", then more meetings, then a couple of meetings a day, then "as you're here could you just look at...?", then before you know it you're back working full time at reduced pay.
It's legal to make a copy for your own use, and listen to that copy. So if it's also legal to lend out original media, then it's completely legal to pass around the original to several people, all who may or may not make their own copies.
So how about a software equivalent? Add a flag that modifies a music file to say it's been borrowed by someone to listen to (and perhaps copy, but that's not your problem). This doesn't stop you listening to it because you've made a copy for your own use and you're lending out the "original" file, which is disabled when you upload it to someone (this also means there's no point in cracking this software). The flag also locks out uploading, so you can only upload to one person at a time, therefore you're neither distributing nor copying.
Possible flaw in this: it's legal to borrow an original medium of course, but if it is copied for personal use and the original locked away somewhere safe - offsite backup for instance - is it legal to lend your working copy to a friend? If not, this won't work.
Exactly what I thought. By closing the court they reduce the ability of the Open Source community to reduce their claims to the nonsense they are, as has already been done, more than once IIRC.
However, presumably IBM will be invited, and be given some time to prepare a defence to the specific claims, including hiring experts where necessary? So perhaps the entire OSS community could be persuaded to work for IBM on this case for, say, a contribution to FSF...
That way SCO gets their closed court; the OSSC gets to see the code (although not to discuss it in public), IBM gets off a $3e9 bill, everyone's happy.
I don't see why faith/religion should stop us doing cloning. God already gave us a way of creating new human beings, we just came up with another. It's not as if he said "Thou shalt not create new human beings" (in fact he quite explicitly stated the opposite with his famous "fuck off" comment). God gave us a way of getting around - a pair of legs - so should cars be abandoned on religious grounds as well? Just because God gave us one way of doing something doesn't automatically make all other ways of doing the same thing immoral.
My concern is how clones would be treated. If they have all the rights and privileges of a "naturally conceived" person (whether through AI, TT or plain DIF), then I have no problem. But I suspect one of clones' first purposes will be as organ farms, which IMO is just as unethical as harvesting organs of babies "born for that purpose."
I don't buy "life is re-created by an act of God through the union of man and woman" - if that were the case then babies would ONLY develop within the womb and test-tube babies just wouldn't happen. The fact that they do means at most that "life is re-created by an act of God through the union of sperm and ovum".
Logitech are still selling 3 button mice with balls, and they are VERY cheap - around 10-15 quid in PC World (UK), last time I looked.
I don't like the scrolly-wheel clicks because the springs are usually quite tight (to prevent accidental clicking when scrolling, presumably). Generally I don't have a need for a scrolly wheel because I use the keyboard most of the time and PgUp/PgDn/cursor keys work do the grunt work of my scrolling requirements, and I find the scroll bars usually more accurate than the scrolly wheel anyway. I map the middle button on my Windows PCs to double-click - consequently it gets used all the time and a strong spring is very tedious.
However I would like to upgrade to optical, as I'm sick of cleaning my balls. For any company that wants to produce 3 button optical mice at a reasonable price, say about 20-25UKP, I, PERSONALLY, have an instant market of 7 mice (1 for each of 5 computers plus two spare.) Multiply that by the number of geeks in the world - business opportunity anyone?
Re:Unfortunately much spam originates from the US.
on
UK Spam Law Goes Live
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· Score: 1
That's not a problem. "Excuse me sir, your car was used in a bank robbery yesterday. We'd like you to answer some questions." One alibi later - that person is not guilty of a crime.
Similarly "Excuse me sir, your computer was used to deliver illegal spam yesterday. We'd like you to answer some questions." One locked down computer later - that person is not guilty of a crime.
The requirement for you to defend yourself when something of yours was used in a crime is not a new problem. The only problem is if the cops decide you should have known - if you work with computers it could be hard to argue that you don't know how to stop it being used for sending spam, just as if the bank robber was your housemate and was on your car insurance. Again this is not a new problem.
This may even bounce back to Microsoft - if the security of their OS is shown in many cases to be the source of the problem - raw sockets and all that sort of stuff - then they may find themselves (a) having to produce a more secure OS to protect their consumers from crims or (b) in the dock.
Not that (b) need necessarily hold any fears for them if it's an American dock of course.
Business has been going ok for a while, you have several employees who depend on you including one with a sick kid, but now you have a desert experience. Cash reserves are almost exhausted, there is no sight of a customer for miles and you're about to bite the dust.
Then Customer X turns up and offers you wads of cash. The company will be sorted for at least the next ten years, everyone will get pay rises, little Jimmy will get his kidney and so on.
The problem: Customer X requires you to break little tiny insignificant Ethic Y.
Do you take the cash, do the job, get Jimmy his kidney, and give everyone pay rises, or do you go out of business?
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly will be in the notification? Let's say you don't know luser5637883@aol.com, so they could be either someone sending you a valid email or a spammer.
"luser5637883@aol.com has sent you a message. Click _here_ to receive it"
No indication at all of what the message is. You're going to click on it out of curiosity, unless you ignore it totally in which case you're effectively implementing whitelist-only email.
"luser5637883@aol.com has sent you a message ('GET YOUR PEN91S ENLRAGED'). Click _here_ to receive it"
Well, damage done, as far as I can see. I don't want to even see this stuff. Sure, I can tell that this is spam, but what if the hint text were "Account overdue", or "Virus alert from Symantec"? Again you're back to clicking on it out of curiosity.
I don't think that would bother most people. By "most people" I don't of course mean "most slashdotters." I mean all those who are already locked into Windows and don't mind, to whom the vast majority of spam is directed, and which most likely contains all the people who are actually dumb enough to respond to spam. Make spam infeasible for that group of people, and you make spam infeasible full stop.
IHNRTFPA, but as long as they have used the form $TOTALLY_OBVIOUS_PROCESS + 'using a computer' they'll get it.
I was thinking of filing a patent for scratching my arse using a computer, but then I remembered I'm not American and have better things to do with six thousand quid.
It's when it was applied for that matters, not the fact that it was granted only a few weeks ago. If they applied in, say, 1946, then it could have been valid.
(checks doc.) Filed November 23,1999.
Ok, so all Network Solutions need to do is check whether or not Freeserve (or an American version of them) were issuing accounts with URL www.account.freeserve.co.uk and email address account@freeserve.co.uk prior to 23/11/1999. I'm pretty sure I've had my current account of that form since before then, so defeating this patent should be a piece of cake.
Yes but you're not comparing like with like. If you go into Toys R Us and look for Lego you will ONLY find Bionicle and Harry Potter.
A more accurate comparison would be:
1961: Stop selling everything we've sold before and start selling only wheels
1964: Stop selling wheels and only sell kits with instructions
1975: Stop selling kits with instructions and only sell maxi-figures.
You see the difference? None of the previous marketing drives SUBTRACTED from what was already on offer. But where can you now find town sets, castles, pirates, trains, technic and so on? You can't - and THAT is the problem with Lego's current marketing strategy.
(Ok, so perhaps it's all available on-line. But I only found out about that within the last week, and for the last 10 years I've been taking a geek's salary into Toys R Us with a view to finally satisfying my childhood dream of buying unlimited amounts of Lego, and it's all this shitty Harry Potter crap - no trains, no Technic, no nothing.)
Brilliant. Now R+D can be shipped out to India as well, with the usual complexity of scientific research reduced to when to change a machine's oil.
Fair enough. The first isn't insurmountable if corporate mail servers can be setup to forward mail from trusted senders - you send mail from somebody664509@aol.com, which is verified by AOL's SPF, to, e.g. forwarding@bindaca-inc.com with the client's email address specified one way or another - client gets email from and reply-to sales@etc. Then it doesn't matter about your reputation because you add somebody664509@next-isp.com to your company's whitelist, then the cycle starts all over again.
Your second point isn't caused by SPF. If the cost to run your own mail server is $50pm, then you should be paying that whether you have SPF or not.
What would you suggest as a solution to spam?
Standard "security" implementation. Make things harder for ordinary people, while making things no more difficult for the villains.
About 12 years ago I tried to open a bank account. They said - sorry, due to security, you need a drivers licence. I asked how a drivers licence would help - if I were a real crim I would just present them with a fake one and they'd be none the wiser. "No licence, no account" was all I could get out of them.
Took my licence to the bank a few days later, got the account, same teller, so I asked her - so how are you better off now? How do you know that licence isn't fake? She couldn't give a shit - they'd done their bit, at that was all that mattered.
It's all about doing stuff for the sake of being seen to do stuff, rather than actually trying to prevent crime, which really pisses me off.
The only truly effective security measures I've seen are those taken where security really matters - at airports and similar - having risk databases, grounding suspect planes and so on.
In my case, one careless post to a newgroup after installing Mozilla for the first time and forgetting to change my newsgroup email address to an antispam one. I can even find that one post by searching Google Groups for my email addy.
That's it - ONE STUPID LOUSY MISTAKE and now I get tons of spam. I got 286 spams on the Monday after the Christmas break (obviously it was accumulating, and isn't 100 a day yet, but it's increasing).
I have my own domain, use SpamGourmet, tagged email addresses and so on. I don't get any spam as a result of all that, only as a result of that one stupid error and then only because Moz doesn't warn you that you're about to post your real email where spammers can get at it. (Should it? Maybe. Maybe not. It'd be a nice feature.)
darn lame-o subject box. Rocket science - no longer associated with vast intelligence, ever since they confused inches with centimetres and managed to miss an entire planet.
Ever heard the phrase "lesser of two evils"?
The quake is going to happen anyway. Tell people - they get a chance to move out of the way of the quake, they don't lose families and other loved ones, they don't lose all they own. Don't tell people - none of that is true.
Also are you honestly saying that if these people called you and said "There's going to be a magnitude 12 quake, epicentre YOUR HOUSE, on the..." that you'd interrupt that statement with "Nooooo! I don't want to know!"
I would. (Proofread: Want to know, that is, not interrupt them.)
I bet the inhabitants of Bam would as well.
They might not have their houses, but I'd bet any money there wouldn't be a death toll of thousands. What is it - 18,000? more? 18000 is SIX SIMULTANEOUS September 11ths. Still sure you want to inflict that on people?
In such a case my honest opinion would be "Bollocks to the local economy". When the quake hits, the economy is stuffed anyway, and further hampered by the rescue effort. If I've moved locations, when the quake strikes I'll still be doing the same job, spending the same cash, living the same life.
The only problems I can see are: what if America (n scientists) had announced a few months ago to Iran that there was going to be a major quake in Bam? I'm sure that would have gone down well.
Also what if they predict a quake by (date) and it doesn't happen? What if it happens after that date? It'll make places like that firework that looks like it has gone out - nobody will approach it for fear that it's about to go off. And, unlike a firework, you can't just wait to the next shower.
Providing you don't make the mistake a friend of mine did - he played with the lego and his kid sat there bored, whenever he picked a piece up daddy only said "no that's wrong". Can anyone hear the words "I hate Lego" approaching? The great thing about Lego for me was that M+D left me to it, Dad helped me out when I was stuck, but it was *me* playing with the Lego, not him.
Unfortunately you don't bother to say how your preferred solutions fix spam.
Pay per email? Pay whom, precisely? The ISP? I've already paid them for my subscription. If that is included in a spammers account, their spam gets through. Pay the recipient? Why should I pay you to send you email that isn't spam? Would you give me the cash back? You say that SPF works against the way the internet works, well, the internet is a free-for-all, so why is paying per email NOT against the way the internet works?
PKI? If Computer A trusts Computer B, does that mean Computer B gets a high ranking? What if Computer A is a spammer? Computer C, which nobody knows, and therefore nobody trusts, how do they get email out to people? They may be the next Slashdot, or have something earth-shatteringly important to say. Are you going to reject their messages because nobody trusts them? If they spam, presumably they get a negative score. But what if someone who has an axe to grind says they've spammed when they haven't?
How do PKI/Pay-for deal with throwaway domains, or compromised machines?
What if a new spammer starts out by sending out useful stuff, thus getting a high Trusted ranking, then starts to spam from it? What if someone who is Trusted gets compromised? Trust also doesn't fix spam.
Just because SPF doesn't fix everything including terrorism and obesity, does that mean it shouldn't be implemented?
I think SPF is a good idea. You get email from aol.com, but aol says "never heard of them" - there's a good chance this will be spam. Therefore spammers stop spoofing aol and spoof someone else. They then get loads of bounces and implement SPF. And so on, and eventually spammers have nowhere left to hide. It won't fix spam overnight, but it will reduce, and eventually remove, places for spammers to hide. The wonderfully double-entendred CAN SPAM act proves we can't rely on politicians, so we need a technical solution.
So you can't validly spoof your own address. What's wrong with setting different From and Reply-To? (other than it not being implemented in mail clients. But that can easily be fixed.) From=my ISP, mail gets validated as not Spam. Reply-To=my work address, so I get to send work email from home. That's why we have distinct From and Reply-To, no?
So you have to ask your ISP if you want to run a mail server. Why exactly is that so difficult?
You say SPF increases traffic. How much traffic does SPAM need to be before it becomes a problem? 5%? 10%? Some estimates place Spam at OVER FIFTY PERCENT OF ALL EMAIL. Clearly if the Spam traffic is not a problem at over 50%, the odd little bit of SPF validation traffic isn't going to make much difference.
SPF can reduce the amount of clutter on the network. It doesn't just have to be implemented at the terminal ISP. Clearly if an interim computer getting email bound for ISP X notices that SPF fails, it can drop or bounce the email instead of passing it on. Yes, this takes some CPU time. So does propagating Spam - even that isn't free. Besides, how expensive is CPU time these days? Do mail forwarders really use 100% CPU time or are they IO bound (I don't know the answer to this, so perhaps they really are CPU bound, in which case this paragraph is complete 130110x.)
It's not the options that bother me about the Real player. I know you want to sell a product instead of give one away, but those of us that just want to watch video produced by someone else without doing anything flashy have to sift very carefully through the positively misleading website in order to find the free player. It's like font size=enormous FREE DOWNLOAD; font size=miniscule (but you have to pay after a fortnight); font size=microscopic (damn I suppose we'd better put a link to the free player somewhere. There are plenty of FREE DOWNLOAD links, but the ACTUAL free player is hidden away in a corner somewhere that is very difficult to find.
Then there's the way the program is totally cluttered up with about 1% of the screen area taken up by the actual video, the rest being adverts I don't want to see for products I don't want to buy, then there's the way it jumps up and down on the desktop shouting BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME. No I don't fucking want to buy you. Fuck off. You're only a fucking video player so fucking shut the fuckity fuck up.
Yes, that is the feeling your program generates. I'm not going to touch Real anything until I absolutely have to, and if I'm ever in a position of creating video I certainly won't inflict Real on my audience unless there is absolutely no other choice. I don't give a shit about Real 10 - couldn't care less, won't touch it until absolutely unavoidable. Even if you people say it is millions of times better.
No interaction? I would have thought you would at least need to put your finger on it.
I like the way he touts Linux as a solution to this. Bollocks, say I.
I recently got a new PC on which I planned to install Suse Linux Pro 9.0. It came through the corporate system, so was already loaded with Win2k. The screen was fine. Installed Suse - wouldn't go over 640x480 (it was a 1280x1024 LCD, so this pissed me off somewhat).
FIVE HOURS LATER I finally gave up fiddling and called Suse. TWO WEEKS LATER they bothered to get back to me.
It's a good job I didn't have to wait the fortnight. Eventually I discovered a BIOS setting - the video RAM was set to 1MB which could be changed to 8MB then it worked fine. But Windows didn't need that BIOS setting changing - it JUST WORKED.
Every time I try to do something trivial with a Linux box it's hours and hours of HOWTOs and so on, then dependencies, then making it work with the rest of the system. Figuring out Copy and Paste between applications (using KDE) took ages and I still don't think I have figured it out completely. (Oh, and I'm not a n00b by any means. Progressed from electronics to computers in 1981 with a ZX81, started assembly programming a few months later, upgraded to a C64, went on to get a degree in computer science and I've been working with computers, mostly programming, ever since. So I figure I should be able to work out how to use Linux. And if I can't figure it out, what chance has a total newb got???)
In many ways Windows Just Works. Ok, it crashes a lot, and one of the things I like about Linux is that if it dies it's because I did something stupid not because of some random glitch that can't be explained. You don't have to reboot the whole system just because you've installed a calculator or something trivial. When it is possible to install something on Linux and have it Just Work, then and only then will it make any kind of impact on Windows.
"work from home for 50-80% of their current in-office pay"
Then it'd be "oh, we really need you at this meeting", then more meetings, then a couple of meetings a day, then "as you're here could you just look at...?", then before you know it you're back working full time at reduced pay.
It's legal to make a copy for your own use, and listen to that copy. So if it's also legal to lend out original media, then it's completely legal to pass around the original to several people, all who may or may not make their own copies.
So how about a software equivalent? Add a flag that modifies a music file to say it's been borrowed by someone to listen to (and perhaps copy, but that's not your problem). This doesn't stop you listening to it because you've made a copy for your own use and you're lending out the "original" file, which is disabled when you upload it to someone (this also means there's no point in cracking this software). The flag also locks out uploading, so you can only upload to one person at a time, therefore you're neither distributing nor copying.
Possible flaw in this: it's legal to borrow an original medium of course, but if it is copied for personal use and the original locked away somewhere safe - offsite backup for instance - is it legal to lend your working copy to a friend? If not, this won't work.
Exactly what I thought. By closing the court they reduce the ability of the Open Source community to reduce their claims to the nonsense they are, as has already been done, more than once IIRC.
However, presumably IBM will be invited, and be given some time to prepare a defence to the specific claims, including hiring experts where necessary? So perhaps the entire OSS community could be persuaded to work for IBM on this case for, say, a contribution to FSF...
That way SCO gets their closed court; the OSSC gets to see the code (although not to discuss it in public), IBM gets off a $3e9 bill, everyone's happy.
As subject
IAAC.
I don't see why faith/religion should stop us doing cloning. God already gave us a way of creating new human beings, we just came up with another. It's not as if he said "Thou shalt not create new human beings" (in fact he quite explicitly stated the opposite with his famous "fuck off" comment). God gave us a way of getting around - a pair of legs - so should cars be abandoned on religious grounds as well? Just because God gave us one way of doing something doesn't automatically make all other ways of doing the same thing immoral.
My concern is how clones would be treated. If they have all the rights and privileges of a "naturally conceived" person (whether through AI, TT or plain DIF), then I have no problem. But I suspect one of clones' first purposes will be as organ farms, which IMO is just as unethical as harvesting organs of babies "born for that purpose."
I don't buy "life is re-created by an act of God through the union of man and woman" - if that were the case then babies would ONLY develop within the womb and test-tube babies just wouldn't happen. The fact that they do means at most that "life is re-created by an act of God through the union of sperm and ovum".
Logitech are still selling 3 button mice with balls, and they are VERY cheap - around 10-15 quid in PC World (UK), last time I looked.
I don't like the scrolly-wheel clicks because the springs are usually quite tight (to prevent accidental clicking when scrolling, presumably). Generally I don't have a need for a scrolly wheel because I use the keyboard most of the time and PgUp/PgDn/cursor keys work do the grunt work of my scrolling requirements, and I find the scroll bars usually more accurate than the scrolly wheel anyway. I map the middle button on my Windows PCs to double-click - consequently it gets used all the time and a strong spring is very tedious.
However I would like to upgrade to optical, as I'm sick of cleaning my balls. For any company that wants to produce 3 button optical mice at a reasonable price, say about 20-25UKP, I, PERSONALLY, have an instant market of 7 mice (1 for each of 5 computers plus two spare.) Multiply that by the number of geeks in the world - business opportunity anyone?
That's not a problem. "Excuse me sir, your car was used in a bank robbery yesterday. We'd like you to answer some questions." One alibi later - that person is not guilty of a crime.
Similarly "Excuse me sir, your computer was used to deliver illegal spam yesterday. We'd like you to answer some questions." One locked down computer later - that person is not guilty of a crime.
The requirement for you to defend yourself when something of yours was used in a crime is not a new problem. The only problem is if the cops decide you should have known - if you work with computers it could be hard to argue that you don't know how to stop it being used for sending spam, just as if the bank robber was your housemate and was on your car insurance. Again this is not a new problem.
This may even bounce back to Microsoft - if the security of their OS is shown in many cases to be the source of the problem - raw sockets and all that sort of stuff - then they may find themselves (a) having to produce a more secure OS to protect their consumers from crims or (b) in the dock.
Not that (b) need necessarily hold any fears for them if it's an American dock of course.
Ok, answer this.
Business has been going ok for a while, you have several employees who depend on you including one with a sick kid, but now you have a desert experience. Cash reserves are almost exhausted, there is no sight of a customer for miles and you're about to bite the dust.
Then Customer X turns up and offers you wads of cash. The company will be sorted for at least the next ten years, everyone will get pay rises, little Jimmy will get his kidney and so on.
The problem: Customer X requires you to break little tiny insignificant Ethic Y.
Do you take the cash, do the job, get Jimmy his kidney, and give everyone pay rises, or do you go out of business?
Better leave my brain at home then.
Drat, can't get it out.
Oh well, if it's illegal to watch movies then I'd better not watch any more.