Library records are and should be admissable in court -- the issue is that normally the FBI has to get a warrant to seize the records. With the PATRIOT Act, that's no longer the case. Not only do they not need a warrant, the library is prohibited by law from even telling you that your records were looked at by the FBI. So much for any chance of fairness from the government.
Well, fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with trying to convince people of something... as long as you're using logic and reason, not emotion or insults. Saying things like "Your project sucks" isn't likely to win me any converts if I want people to run project A instead of project B, but as long as I'm polite about it, there's nothing wrong with it.
I personally run Folding@Home because I think it will, overall, be more useful than (for example) SETI@Home or PrimeNet. Why? Well, PrimeNet will find large prime numbers, true, but the numbers themselves aren't all that useful. The only other result is an increased understanding of distributed computing projects. Now, that's a good thing, of course, but F@H provides that as well, and the research done by F@H is exactly the kind of large-scale, brute-force scut work that many medical advances are built on.
With regards to SETI@Home, the goal is admirable, but from what I know, it seems far less likely to have any useful output than F@H. Again, it has the "increased understanding of distributed computing" aspect, like most distributed computing projects do, but the chance of any other reward is exceedingly slim. Finding aliens would be a tremendously important achievement, but I think that the likelihood is so small that it more than compensates for any advantage.
Anyway, that's why I run F@H, and encourage others to do so as well. Obviously, the choice is up to the individual--but this is what I think, and I hope it will encourage others, as well.
I'm not so sure about that. You can think that if you want, but we'll agree to disagree on that one.
You're the one who made the positive assertion that the same people are changing their opinions from day to day. It's a matter of facts, not of "agreeing to disagree": either people are changing their views, or they aren't. You brought it up, so you bear the burden of proof.
No, about two thirds of my posts were belittling people who put stupidity into this conversation.
I sure hope you don't think belittling people is a better way to get them to agree with you than is convincing them without rancor. Then there's this post, which was juvenile in the extreme:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=59500&cid=5655 824
I also have a lot of love for Microsoft too though, maybe not their company practices, but I think their products deserve some respect
I'll agree that some of Microsoft's products deserve respect for their quality. I'm sure I'd even approve of SOME of their business practices -- but these merits are so massively dwarfed by the demerits against Microsoft (all the bad software, all the evil, greedy business practices) that, on the whole, I'm not willing to support them.
and c'mon YOU KNOW that people put bullshit here just to be karma whores. Don't deny it.
The fact that some people are liars has nothing to do with the overall opinions of/. members. In fact, it has nothing to do with this conversation at all. Most likely, this is expressing a thought you had, but expressing it so poorly that it looks like a non sequitur.
Besides its more fun to point out other people's mistakes than to fix my own:)
Remind me not to hire you.
That's fine, I didn't say you couldn't have an opinion. It's just important that you don't go pointing to some article like is supposed to invalidate somebody elses opinion.
He wasn't giving an opinion! He claimed as fact that Microsoft is not a monopoly. That fact is provably false. (If he did intend to give his opinion, he did it poorly -- he should have said (to paraphrase) "I don't think MS is a monopoly" rather than "MS is not a monopoly.")
Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn't make them a Troll. See what I mean?
I never said that disagreeing with me makes you a troll; as I pointed out last time, it was his attitude that was trollish (although perhaps a better term would be "unintentional flamebait").
No, the point was that it's an opinion not a court decision that matters here. We're going around in circles I think.
That first sentence doesn't really make sense, which is why I think I must be misunderstanding what you're getting at. (You're not explaining yourself, just repeating yourself.) The court decision certainly does matter, as it can have a material effect on Microsoft's ability to continue abusing their monopoly powers. The original poster's thoughts about whether MS is or should be considered a monopoly are unlikely to have any real effect on MS.
You said: It's bad if people's opinion's don't change.
No, I didn't. The closest I got to this was posing a rhetorical question: "[W]hat's better: Someone whose opinion changes daily, or someone wh
I doubt Ashcroft has "the best of intentions," unless it's "best" that he wants everyone in the U.S. to worship Christ, give up all civil liberties, and basically do whatever he says. His heart may be in the right place (he wants to do good), but what he thinks is "good" curdles my blood.
I'm sorry, I meant that/what they use/ (to back up their opinions) changes daily. One day they will say, "Standards are Good!" and the next day it will be "Standards mean Squat! Blah, Blah, Blah". I think we've seen this recently.
This is often claimed, but nobody ever backs it up -- in other words, people (like you) bitch that people on/. seem to hold contradictory opinions, without realizing that different people have different opinions. Certain people say things like "Standards are good" and then OTHER PEOPLE say things like "Standards mean squat." I don't think it's the SAME people saying both things... at least, not very many of them.
Umm, I have one Troll and one Informative in my last 24 posts, you apparently have had nothing to contribute to the Entertainment or Information areas of this conversation in your past 24 posts. How do you figure?
About two-thirds of your last 24 posts (when I looked at them earlier today) were insulting or, at the very least, excessively sarcastic. You didn't seem to have much interest in a dialogue at any point; merely in belittling those who disagreed with you, and especially mocking anyone who said anything good about Linux.
At this point, I'd like to go back and do a little history. Dirtside said:
how it's a monopoly (which, it isn't)
And you said:
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist [go.com]...
You appear to be confused: I am dirtside. It was cybergibbons who said the "how it's a monopoly (which, it isn't)" line.
pointing at the article like it was the official truth of the matter or something.
No, it was a reference to facts: Namely, that Judge Jackson indeed had ruled that MS had abused its monopoly power and violated the Sherman Act. Whether it was a good ruling is another story, but I'll get to that in a moment...
The point is that court's can come to illogical conclusions and we can see this everyday, and most people will agree.
Indeed, it would be silly of me to argue with this statement: Courts certainly can (and do) come to illogical, silly conclusions. But that says nothing about whether or not THIS PARTICULAR CONCLUSION was illogical or silly. Based on what I know, I think that this particular conclusion (that MS is a monopolist) is valid.
I didn't say you have to disagree with all of them.
No. But it was the obvious implication of your statements, and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise.
The implication is that it doesn't really matter what the court says if the public has a different opinion, especiall here on Slashdot.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, since you seem to think that "60+% of the people here who [sic] are so stuck in their own hatred of Microsoft that they blindly disregard anything of value." So your point there was that those peoples' opinion doesn't matter, since they are disregarding everything of value... but now that their opinion does matter, if it differs from the court's opinion? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, so please clarify.
That's all. I think that just because someone had a different opinion than you, you thought that person was a Troll.
No, it was the way that he was expressing his thoughts that made him sound like a troll.
He wasn't, it was simply a difference of opinion.
It wasn't simply a difference of opinion. It was a difference of opinion coupled with a negative reaction to his hostility.
It only takes as long to "coin the meaning of a new term" as it takes you to think of a term, and think of a meaning. Voila! It's coined. Whether it becomes an accepted part of the language is another thing entirely.
"Second Superpower" was a term apparently invented a month or two ago, and spread rapidly throughout certain communities. I'd never heard it myself until I saw this article, but then there's a lot of words I don't know. (Anyone who thinks ve knows all words, is deluding verself.) The author is not saying that Google defines the word or provides a usage for it -- you didn't read the article, did you? -- but rather that the usage of the term was coopted by Google (probably accidentally), because of the placement of a particular article high in the search results for that term. Moore's usage of the term is now more prevalent, according to Google, than the original usage.
Phrases like "Second Superpower" come and go all the time. Remember "Family Values"? Remember "Mistakes were made"? Neither of those have left English entirely, but they are certainly far less prevalent than they were before. Language is a very fluid thing; it is not defined by dictionaries any more than the species of birds are defined by books on ornithology. The key phrase to remember is, "Dictionaries give usages, not definitions" (see this article and this article).
While there's some truth to your sentiments, I think you may be missing something important (although I certainly could be wrong).
I think the idea is that, yeah, it's all well and good if the U.S. is the sole superpower... except that if we retain that position because we abuse everyone else, then there's going to be serious backlash if we ever lose that position. Other nations can't really abuse the U.S., because we're so powerful. When we're not so powerful, some nations might remember any slights they suffered from us, and act on them. Yes, I want to retain my quality of life, but if doing so now means that in 20 years we're gonna get invaded and abused by other nations, maybe it's not such a good idea. It may not be a likely outcome, but that's where much of the debate lies.
It's a cliche, I know, but with great power comes great responsibility. The U.S. is abusing its power in certain ways, and it's going to bite us in the ass eventually.
I personally think it's stupid for a government to be more concerned about what the U.S. is doing and how they stack up to the U.S. than to be concerned about it's own people.
Some of them are concerned for their own people, namely, how the U.S.'s actions are affecting the quality of life for their own people. When the U.S. wields its economic power to affect the economy of other countries, that's bad for them, so they naturally bitch to us, especially those who have long been our allies.
Am I claiming that we need to completely give in to all of the sundry demands by other nations? No, of course not. But I do think we should rethink our stance on foreign relations. We may be more powerful than any other country, but we're not more powerful than all of them.
The key phrase in your post is "certain terms." It seems to me that in order for 20 or so people to "effectively dictate" the order of search results for a term, that term has to be in pretty narrow usage, and mostly among only those people. Jargon would be susceptible (try searching for the word "jurples" -- has exactly 1 hit, because it's a made-up word), but only if it was EXTREMELY narrow.
I don't think this shows that PageRank is, on the whole, any less democratic than was previously thought. Also note that Google's page about PageRank doesn't claim that PageRank itself is democratic; it says that it takes advantage of the democratic nature of the web. It's a subtle but important difference.
And I'm so sure that you've blindly agreed with *EVERY* other judicial decision handed down over the years.
I don't agree with Judge Jackson's ruling because I hate Microsoft; I agree with it because it's valid on its own merits. Your implied logic is that if I disagree with one element of some set, I must disagree with all of them. This is patently false.
OJ SIMPSON was judged as innocent, do you agree with that one or do you have your own personal opinion about it?
Had I been on that jury, I might have a different opinion (or were I to go through all the available evidence again, now). I have neither the time nor the inclination to do that, so my current position is that, based on what I do know, I think he probably was guilty, but I'd certainly be willing to alter that opinion based on the available facts. I don't know enough to hold fast to an opinion on the matter, and I have no motivation to do so in absence of such facts.
The thing about/.er's is that they only use what works for their opinion at the time, and it can change daily.
The vast majority of humans do this, all the time. It's not just people on Slashdot. Tangentially, what's better: Someone whose opinion changes daily, or someone whose opinion never changes?
So tell me, who's the troll?
Well, it was him, but now it's you. Your own posting history indicates this rather well.
I know you're a troll, but I'll bite. I need the practice.
how it's a monopoly (which, it isn't)
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Regardless, it's eminently reasonable to expect that they might try to leverage their monopoly power to further abuse other markets.
"And just as Captain Picard ordered self destruct, the movie paused. A gray box appeared on the screen with the words 'A Windows Media Update is now available, would you like to download it now?"
Oddly, audience members reported that the movie was more entertaining with the gray box than without.
First of all, "they" do not exist at this time. There is no existing free market system in the world as far as I know.
Maybe it's silly of me to ask, but then how do you know that a free market would be so much better, if there aren't any? HAVE there ever been any?
Silly question, of course: There have been situations that, if not a completely free market, were quite close, e.g. the U.S. economy in the latter part of the 19th century. The robber barons spring to mind, a direct result of this system. I certainly hope you don't think the robber barons were a good thing (what's a little price-fixing between non-competing monopolies?).
Here in the US, for example, the average citizen loses over 40% of their yearly earnings to taxes (between federal, state, and local governments combined). This is hardly representative of free market economics, which requires that each individual citizen have the ability to make their own choices on where and when to spend thier money (or not spend the money). When nearly 1 out of every 2 dollars you earn is taken by government, you're giving up nearly half your spending power -- and hence, nearly half your influence on the market.
True or not, this entire paragraph is unrelated to my question. I certainly hope you're capable of a constructive debate without introducing further non-sequiturs.
So if the free market is so much better than (as far as I can tell from what you're saying) a market with any government controls, why are they so susceptible to abuse? Why do they inevitably end up with brutal, greedy oligopolies and monopolies running everything?
Mostly (as I recall) dual P3-900s or thereabouts, on 1 GB of RAM per box. I don't know what "size" they are; I'm guessing you mean rack space size. About four inches high?:) I haven't been to the cage in well over a year, I don't really know... besides, I'm a PHP games programmer for the site, not a sysadmin. (Thank god!;))
I work for Neopets. We range between 180 million and 260 million page views a day, on around a hundred Red Hat web servers. All our pages are PHP. However, the pages are all very database-intensive (anywhere from 3-10 Oracle DB queries per page, plus occasional MySQL stuff), and we send a shitload of image data as well. The other thing is that our site usage flows very much in parallel with "prime-time" usage; basically when the first U.S. kids get out of school (~3pm EST) to when the last U.S. kids go to bed (~10pm PST, about a 10-hour window) we have around four times the number of page views and bandwidth usage per second that we do during off-peak. Our servers are underutilized at night and slammed during the day. Our daily outgoing bandwidth averages around 600 Mbps (about 6.5 terabytes daily).
We don't code in a particularly well-structured way, so I'm sure there's a lot more efficiency that could be gained, but everything seems to work rather well.
It doesn't matter what my console "runs," because it'll run any title I put into it.
This is a total non-sequitur. You said that DOOM won't run on modern hardware/software. I proved you wrong. You brought up Linux, to wit, the reason you couldn't run DOOM was because you were using Linux. I had assumed you were using some version of Windows up until that point.
At that point I might as well buy a new computer every 5 years and live with each one as its own gaming console.
Now I'm beginning to think the confusion is coming from the fact that you keep misusing terminology; I think you're talking about one thing (computers) but it turns out you're talking about another (consoles). Which is it? And when did I say anything about consoles?
Even old DirectX games don't work on new DirectX.
I've run DirectX 2.0 games on DX8 and DX9, perfectly fine. Maybe it's just you?
100% accurate filters? It's possible to have software that's pretty damn good, but the best filter is a sentient human, and even they aren't 100%. Nonintelligent software cannot adapt the way humans can; when the spammers think up new ways to disguise their email, the software isn't going to adapt itself. Only when (if) we have sentient, general-purpose AIs will we be able to have something that's close enough to 100% so that we can leave it running and never have to maintain it... except that it'll probably get bored, as intelligences do.
At any rate, it doesn't cost UUnet anything for the spam. They're paid for the bandwidth by other ISPs who lease or connect to their lines; they don't give a rat's ass what kind of data is sent. It's the downstream ISPs, the ones who actually run mail servers, that care.
Stop the FUD. Spam sucks, but don't pretend it costs us more than a few seconds of our time or a few dollars of extra IT work.
It costs more than that. I don't particularly want to see pictures of women covered in horse semen when I get home from work and check my email -- or worse yet, when I'm at work and my screen is visible to a half dozen other people.
If their time is so valuable, how come they spend so much time planted in front of the TV or surfing useless websites?
Because then they're spending time in the way that they chose. Having to go through spam -- even for only a few seconds per day -- is an unwanted intrusion on my time. It's not (usually) the amount of time involved; it's that that time is being wasted without my consent. You can certainly argue that I "consented" to being spammed when I decided to participate on the Internet, but that's about the same as claiming I "consent" to being carjacked whenever I drive to work.
My wife got into the There beta, and was all set to install the software, when it informed her that Internet Explorer was required to play the game. She let them know (in an email sent from Mozilla) that she had no intention of installing using IE just to play a game.
I wouldn't really consider typing "virii" instead of "viruses" to be a typo; that's more of a factual error.
Nonetheless, you're right in that you certainly shouldn't judge someone solely based on things like grammar and spelling; but the form of a message is going to be noticed before the content is absorbed, and if the form is too hard to read (or is harder to read than necessary), then the content might be ignored, even unjustly... and sometimes, that reality supersedes the "live and let live" mentality. Prospective employers and college admissions boards aren't going to forgive such things, even if you might consider them "condescending jerks" for caring.
Yeah, on a place like Slashdot, where any given post (or body of posts) isn't really going to affect your life, it doesn't *actually* matter... but if you're posting here, then you probably do want people to take you seriously (unless you're just trolling), and proper presentation can only help.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using 1.3 (specifically Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312), and it does appear to be fixed.
Library records are and should be admissable in court -- the issue is that normally the FBI has to get a warrant to seize the records. With the PATRIOT Act, that's no longer the case. Not only do they not need a warrant, the library is prohibited by law from even telling you that your records were looked at by the FBI. So much for any chance of fairness from the government.
Well, fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with trying to convince people of something... as long as you're using logic and reason, not emotion or insults. Saying things like "Your project sucks" isn't likely to win me any converts if I want people to run project A instead of project B, but as long as I'm polite about it, there's nothing wrong with it.
I personally run Folding@Home because I think it will, overall, be more useful than (for example) SETI@Home or PrimeNet. Why? Well, PrimeNet will find large prime numbers, true, but the numbers themselves aren't all that useful. The only other result is an increased understanding of distributed computing projects. Now, that's a good thing, of course, but F@H provides that as well, and the research done by F@H is exactly the kind of large-scale, brute-force scut work that many medical advances are built on.
With regards to SETI@Home, the goal is admirable, but from what I know, it seems far less likely to have any useful output than F@H. Again, it has the "increased understanding of distributed computing" aspect, like most distributed computing projects do, but the chance of any other reward is exceedingly slim. Finding aliens would be a tremendously important achievement, but I think that the likelihood is so small that it more than compensates for any advantage.
Anyway, that's why I run F@H, and encourage others to do so as well. Obviously, the choice is up to the individual--but this is what I think, and I hope it will encourage others, as well.
You're the one who made the positive assertion that the same people are changing their opinions from day to day. It's a matter of facts, not of "agreeing to disagree": either people are changing their views, or they aren't. You brought it up, so you bear the burden of proof.
I sure hope you don't think belittling people is a better way to get them to agree with you than is convincing them without rancor. Then there's this post, which was juvenile in the extreme: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=59500&cid=5655 824
"Mac fag"? Wow.
Really? http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=59500&cid=5655 960 Referring to Linux as "Sucknix" is supposed to make me believe that you "*LOVE* Linux"?
I'll agree that some of Microsoft's products deserve respect for their quality. I'm sure I'd even approve of SOME of their business practices -- but these merits are so massively dwarfed by the demerits against Microsoft (all the bad software, all the evil, greedy business practices) that, on the whole, I'm not willing to support them.
The fact that some people are liars has nothing to do with the overall opinions of /. members. In fact, it has nothing to do with this conversation at all. Most likely, this is expressing a thought you had, but expressing it so poorly that it looks like a non sequitur.
Remind me not to hire you.
He wasn't giving an opinion! He claimed as fact that Microsoft is not a monopoly. That fact is provably false. (If he did intend to give his opinion, he did it poorly -- he should have said (to paraphrase) "I don't think MS is a monopoly" rather than "MS is not a monopoly.")
I never said that disagreeing with me makes you a troll; as I pointed out last time, it was his attitude that was trollish (although perhaps a better term would be "unintentional flamebait").
That first sentence doesn't really make sense, which is why I think I must be misunderstanding what you're getting at. (You're not explaining yourself, just repeating yourself.) The court decision certainly does matter, as it can have a material effect on Microsoft's ability to continue abusing their monopoly powers. The original poster's thoughts about whether MS is or should be considered a monopoly are unlikely to have any real effect on MS.
No, I didn't. The closest I got to this was posing a rhetorical question: "[W]hat's better: Someone whose opinion changes daily, or someone wh
I doubt Ashcroft has "the best of intentions," unless it's "best" that he wants everyone in the U.S. to worship Christ, give up all civil liberties, and basically do whatever he says. His heart may be in the right place (he wants to do good), but what he thinks is "good" curdles my blood.
It's a fun quote, but Apache violates it :)
It only takes as long to "coin the meaning of a new term" as it takes you to think of a term, and think of a meaning. Voila! It's coined. Whether it becomes an accepted part of the language is another thing entirely.
"Second Superpower" was a term apparently invented a month or two ago, and spread rapidly throughout certain communities. I'd never heard it myself until I saw this article, but then there's a lot of words I don't know. (Anyone who thinks ve knows all words, is deluding verself.) The author is not saying that Google defines the word or provides a usage for it -- you didn't read the article, did you? -- but rather that the usage of the term was coopted by Google (probably accidentally), because of the placement of a particular article high in the search results for that term. Moore's usage of the term is now more prevalent, according to Google, than the original usage.
Phrases like "Second Superpower" come and go all the time. Remember "Family Values"? Remember "Mistakes were made"? Neither of those have left English entirely, but they are certainly far less prevalent than they were before. Language is a very fluid thing; it is not defined by dictionaries any more than the species of birds are defined by books on ornithology. The key phrase to remember is, "Dictionaries give usages, not definitions" (see this article and this article).
I think the idea is that, yeah, it's all well and good if the U.S. is the sole superpower... except that if we retain that position because we abuse everyone else, then there's going to be serious backlash if we ever lose that position. Other nations can't really abuse the U.S., because we're so powerful. When we're not so powerful, some nations might remember any slights they suffered from us, and act on them. Yes, I want to retain my quality of life, but if doing so now means that in 20 years we're gonna get invaded and abused by other nations, maybe it's not such a good idea. It may not be a likely outcome, but that's where much of the debate lies.
It's a cliche, I know, but with great power comes great responsibility. The U.S. is abusing its power in certain ways, and it's going to bite us in the ass eventually.
Some of them are concerned for their own people, namely, how the U.S.'s actions are affecting the quality of life for their own people. When the U.S. wields its economic power to affect the economy of other countries, that's bad for them, so they naturally bitch to us, especially those who have long been our allies.Am I claiming that we need to completely give in to all of the sundry demands by other nations? No, of course not. But I do think we should rethink our stance on foreign relations. We may be more powerful than any other country, but we're not more powerful than all of them.
The key phrase in your post is "certain terms." It seems to me that in order for 20 or so people to "effectively dictate" the order of search results for a term, that term has to be in pretty narrow usage, and mostly among only those people. Jargon would be susceptible (try searching for the word "jurples" -- has exactly 1 hit, because it's a made-up word), but only if it was EXTREMELY narrow.
I don't think this shows that PageRank is, on the whole, any less democratic than was previously thought. Also note that Google's page about PageRank doesn't claim that PageRank itself is democratic; it says that it takes advantage of the democratic nature of the web. It's a subtle but important difference.
Silly question, of course: There have been situations that, if not a completely free market, were quite close, e.g. the U.S. economy in the latter part of the 19th century. The robber barons spring to mind, a direct result of this system. I certainly hope you don't think the robber barons were a good thing (what's a little price-fixing between non-competing monopolies?).
True or not, this entire paragraph is unrelated to my question. I certainly hope you're capable of a constructive debate without introducing further non-sequiturs.So if the free market is so much better than (as far as I can tell from what you're saying) a market with any government controls, why are they so susceptible to abuse? Why do they inevitably end up with brutal, greedy oligopolies and monopolies running everything?
Eh, it's a good movie, but I liked the prequel better. (Bottom of the page.)
Mostly (as I recall) dual P3-900s or thereabouts, on 1 GB of RAM per box. I don't know what "size" they are; I'm guessing you mean rack space size. About four inches high? :) I haven't been to the cage in well over a year, I don't really know... besides, I'm a PHP games programmer for the site, not a sysadmin. (Thank god! ;))
Stupid IE-only dithering! When will Microsoft learn to conform to steganographic porn standards?
Bastards.
I work for Neopets. We range between 180 million and 260 million page views a day, on around a hundred Red Hat web servers. All our pages are PHP. However, the pages are all very database-intensive (anywhere from 3-10 Oracle DB queries per page, plus occasional MySQL stuff), and we send a shitload of image data as well. The other thing is that our site usage flows very much in parallel with "prime-time" usage; basically when the first U.S. kids get out of school (~3pm EST) to when the last U.S. kids go to bed (~10pm PST, about a 10-hour window) we have around four times the number of page views and bandwidth usage per second that we do during off-peak. Our servers are underutilized at night and slammed during the day. Our daily outgoing bandwidth averages around 600 Mbps (about 6.5 terabytes daily).
We don't code in a particularly well-structured way, so I'm sure there's a lot more efficiency that could be gained, but everything seems to work rather well.
Because it's not possible.
100% accurate filters? It's possible to have software that's pretty damn good, but the best filter is a sentient human, and even they aren't 100%. Nonintelligent software cannot adapt the way humans can; when the spammers think up new ways to disguise their email, the software isn't going to adapt itself. Only when (if) we have sentient, general-purpose AIs will we be able to have something that's close enough to 100% so that we can leave it running and never have to maintain it... except that it'll probably get bored, as intelligences do.
At any rate, it doesn't cost UUnet anything for the spam. They're paid for the bandwidth by other ISPs who lease or connect to their lines; they don't give a rat's ass what kind of data is sent. It's the downstream ISPs, the ones who actually run mail servers, that care.
My wife got into the There beta, and was all set to install the software, when it informed her that Internet Explorer was required to play the game. She let them know (in an email sent from Mozilla) that she had no intention of installing using IE just to play a game.
Ah, I think I see the confusion.
It would be due to the fact that you completely forgot to mention you're running Linux. Good job.
I guess WinXP just blows then; I'm still running Win98 on my Windows box, and DOOM/DOOM II work perfectly there.
I wouldn't really consider typing "virii" instead of "viruses" to be a typo; that's more of a factual error.
Nonetheless, you're right in that you certainly shouldn't judge someone solely based on things like grammar and spelling; but the form of a message is going to be noticed before the content is absorbed, and if the form is too hard to read (or is harder to read than necessary), then the content might be ignored, even unjustly... and sometimes, that reality supersedes the "live and let live" mentality. Prospective employers and college admissions boards aren't going to forgive such things, even if you might consider them "condescending jerks" for caring.
Yeah, on a place like Slashdot, where any given post (or body of posts) isn't really going to affect your life, it doesn't *actually* matter... but if you're posting here, then you probably do want people to take you seriously (unless you're just trolling), and proper presentation can only help.