The thing about advertising is it should never be your only resource. Targeted advertising is great if you use it purely to discover products. When I'm in the market for a new widgamajig and they notice that I'm looking for a widgamajig and start displaying ads for other types of widjamjigs, that is helpful to me because it shows more options that I might not have thought of.
It's kind of like letting the advertiser choose the keywords that match with their product and then having my keywords meet in the middle. It exposes me to more options and this is a good thing. If I'm dumb and decide not to research the things I see advertised, that isn't a problem that targeted or untargeted advertising is going to fix, it's a problem "not being a freaking retard" is going to fix.
Ehh, a lot of that is just quantity though. I do shoot consistently better images than an amateur, but the name of the game in professional photography is always quantity. Too many factors you can't control. I can do everything perfect, but a last second blink or movement can ruin the shot. At a typical wedding, I'll shoot 3000 or so photos. Maybe 1 in 10 of them will be what I would rate as a really great photo, but that still winds up being 300 great photos. Even if an amateur's rate is more like 1 in 100, that's still 30 great photos as long as they can maintain that success rate at a high speed of capturing images.
For studio work, it does matter more though since the pro is going to understand things about lighting that an amateur won't, so they will get better results in that case. Event photography with largely uncontrolled lighting is mostly just quantity though to guarantee good images.
There are at least one or two smartphone cameras that have image stabilization now. There are also one or two smartphones that include an optical zoom, though they are really more specialty devices. Better lenses I'd say is debatable, on a high end point and shoot, sure, but there are some pretty bad lenses on some point and shoots too. The resolution is less of an issue because diffraction limiting is going to prevent a lot of that gain from being realized with the higher resolution point and shoot, though they do generally still have slightly larger sensors which makes a difference as well.
I agree that there are some advantages to P&S over smartphones, it just isn't enough to justify having one as a separate $400+ device for most people and mirrorless take things much further for only a little bit more without sacrificing the portability. It's more that their market has already been pinched off by smartphones on the one side and mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras on the other.
You are probably right that we'll see some specialty "portable" cameras but I'd also challenge they don't really belong in the point and shoot category at that point since they are, by nature, designed to be more advanced than simply pointing and shooting in most cases and more for portability of an advanced feature set.
I'm saying that focus makes people suck taking photos with DSLRs. Focus on camera phones is comparatively forgiving due to the sensor size producing less background blur (in fact, it makes background blur near impossible.) This results in a wider depth of field, so focus doesn't have to be spot on. When you move to a DSLR, the sensitivity to choosing the proper focal point increases drastically. It allows things like getting bokeh, but it also requires being more careful how you shoot and a beginner isn't at all careful how they shoot.
Also, it isn't just larger aperture=better picture. It's mostly larger sensor size = better picture. Diffraction limiting becomes an issue quicker the smaller the sensor is and the depth of field is also made wider by a smaller sensor, which limits the amount of background blur you can produce. So while you didn't have the full answer, I don't disagree with you for what you are saying, but it isn't what I was saying in my first post, I was speaking on the other side of the same statement, which is how those gains hurt the average non-photographer when using a DSLR.
Hey mjwx, for legacy SLRs I agree with you, but tech has moved forward a bunch since then. A modern DSLR is well capable of handling the metering for a user just as well as a smartphone or point and shoot, so that really isn't what impacts the performance of a beginner using a DSLR. To really make the most of it, you need to understand the exposure triangle, but you can get by using a DSLR and take better photos than a point and shoot with no understanding of exposure triangle. (Also, FYI, ISO is still called ISO, It's not technically film speed anymore, but it is the same sensitivity levels applied to the gain on the sensor, so all the old calculations still work.)
What I meant about focusing is that focus point selection is critical and people are poor at that. With a point and shoot or phone camera, you can touch the general area and depth of field is forgiving enough that you get a decent image and with face detection, even that isn't necessary. With the incredibly shallow depth of fields you get with a DSLR, particularly with a fast lens and a full frame sensor, you have to be focusing on the exact point you want in focus. This is why I say the primary problem for a typical consumer is that the focus is too sensitive. I frequently here people complain about there out of focus shots when moving from a smartphone or point and shoot to a DSLR because of this. It's probably the most frequent complaint because people aren't expecting it since they don't understand optics.
Also, the vast majority of high end smart phone users would disagree on the chalk and cheese comparison for point and shoots. (Which btw, I had to look up what that meant, so I did learn something today.) The big thing is that the image quality is comparable because both are very small sensors with miniscule optics. You do get a minor advantage of having some optical zoom capability, but with the vast majority of point and shoots, you have longer or equivalent shutter delay to a good smartphone camera and lack the ease of use to work with the image afterwords that a smartphone affords. There are trade offs and in some cases the P&S may win out, but generally, in those cases, a DSLR or mirrorless wins out even more. At this point I'd say for the majority of people, the smartphone camera is close enough that a P&S isn't worth it for most people, for those people that really need the zoom level in a portable package (a niche group) then mirrorless is best and then for those who want the best image quality possible and don't mind learning about proper camera usage, a DSLR is head and shoulders above in capability if the shooter's ability is on par.
Arguably, the photos most people take with a smartphone are actually better than they would take with a "real" camera. As sensor size increases, sensitivity to focus also increases. If you don't know how to properly use the autofocus of your "real" camera, you'll get a lot of out of focus images. On a camera phone, it's a lot easier and there isn't a whole lot of advantage for a point and shoot over a smartphone.
If you know what you are doing, the difference between a smartphone and a DSLR is night and day, but most people don't. Note, I say this as a professional photographer that shoots weddings with a Canon 5D Mark iii. I do it as a part time gig specifically because the impact on the market is quite real since the images are good enough for most people and even then, people flood in to the market thinking they can shoot weddings because they had some "good" facebook photos and bought an entry level DSLR with a kit lens.
The fact is, the main thing that differentiates professional photographers from the amateur has very little to do with the photography. Even if you know how to use the gear perfectly, doing a good, professional job is far more about making the client comfortable, having the experience to avoid being overly noticeable while capturing the key moments, having the ability to interact with people in such a way to get both good posed and candid shots and the ability to run a business and sell yourself. The actual ability to take photos is the easiest 10% of what it takes to do the job.
Zombies are not actually using the hijacked e-mail account. They simply impersonate anyone and send unauthenticated messages. Sending authenticated messages would work VERY badly for the botnet because it would rapidly kill off nodes. If you log in to send spam with the authenticated account, as soon as that spam is reported back, the bot will be killed. That's way more expensive than what they get for sending the SPAM and if they were dumb enough to do that, it would be great because it would allow mass identification of zombies.
As for the idea of offering the service, people won't take it in sufficient number. There are already some services that offer this, people stay away because they don't like the massive number of false rejects. The chicken and egg exists not because of companies unwilling to offer SPF only delivery, but because you can't attract users because it is too inconvenient. People as a whole would rather deal with SPAM than not get their e-mails that they care about.
Actually, we are already far worse than after WWII. Looking at the debt history article on Wikipedia anyway, the highest % of the GDP as debt previously was 94%. We are currently have a higher national debt than our GDP. And they were looking at ways to fix that at that point, not ways to spend more.
Oh, and some quick back of the napkin math. Someone earlier today was posting about what they saw for subsidies for them (as someone making $62k household income). That's 57% of the country that make that much or less. They were getting around $2 to $3k in subsidy per family member when they were looking at the level of subsidies, per year. Lets assume, just for insanity sake, that the subsidies don't get any bigger than that. That's a whopping half a trillion dollars a year in subsidies and it doesn't even get that great of coverage.
Why is not funding a massively expensive piece of legislation a bad thing? Budgeting is, by definition, deciding what to and not to spend money on. When you are already in debt by more than you will make in the next several years if you put everything towards just your debt, going out and buying a $100,000 sports car isn't good finance. Is the goal of the affordable care act good? Sure. Can we afford the subsidies right now? Hell no we can't, not without making other major sacrifices. As it is, we need to make major sacrifices even without it.
For your example to be valid, you have to support that not funding a majorly expensive program while the budget is already horribly in the red is actually unreasonable. I don't see how that is possible, since you don't make your debt and deficit go away by spending more money. Like I said, I'm sure if the situation was reversed, then the republicans would be trying to spend, spend, spend and the democrats would be saying we are spending to much, but that doesn't mean those saying we are spending too much are wrong in either situation. The federal government should not be spending almost 40% of our GDP every year. That's insane.
If the sending host is a zombie, it won't get through. There won't be any reason to have a zombie send mail because it won't ever be delivered. Without any hope of delivery, there would be no financial incentive to pay someone to send it, and thus we can free up botnet resources for other more nefarious criminal activities.
Your view that SPF can simply be "turned on" is naive though. Anyone who does that will start losing customers in droves because they stop getting important e-mails and even any single major party turning it on isn't going to be enough to convince the rest of the world to follow suite and do the same. There are technical hurdles such as scripts that act as non-authoritative senders producing their own direct SMTP traffic.
There is a massive amount of real cost in getting SPF implemented and required and nobody is going to commit the customer satisfaction suicide of blocking all mail from non-SPF senders for quite some time. It's a chicken and egg problem with no obvious solution since the Internet lacks the ability to "require" any particular participation.
And if you notice, The house actually changed position to try and compromise but the senate didn't. Neither party is innocent in this. Both are equally guilty. I say that as a moderate who hasn't cast a vote on republican or democrat lines for all but maybe the very first election I could vote in. The idea of spending a crapload more money while we are already over our heads and sinking fast in debt IS a legitimate budget concern.
If the roles were reversed, sure they would have no problem spending us in to oblivion, but that doesn't mean the concern isn't legitimate. And to the person who said that's been the claim since at least Regan, that doesn't mean it is any less true now than it was then, it just means the house of cards hasn't fallen yet. Some day we will hit the hard ceiling if things continue the way they have been going for almost half a century and the further we go before it hits, the harder it is going to hurt.
Not disagreeing with anything you said, though if what Google does currently for pulling meaning out of the e-mails is the same as the SPAM filtering and the courts find that they can't do that for marketing, then we can't do that for SPAM anywhere since it would be a violation of wiretap laws, so my original point stands.
Also, yes, stopping SPAM at the source would be great, but it isn't going to happen any time soon. You can't make a charge for e-mails as it would be impossible to bill and would open the door to micropayment everything on the Internet. Why not charge for accessing a webpage, or sending a picture, or entering your password? That's not a road we want to go down and it isn't practical anyway since E-mail is server to server connections.
The second solution is likely to be more expensive than the cure and again would be difficult to implement. You'd need everyone to agree with it and it increases the burden on legitimate systems while only minorly impacting giant botnets. The penalty to bad behaviors is equal to that to good (proportionally) so you don't get anything other than more resources being consumed rather than less.
The third situation is simply impossible. Any easy key exchange is going to make it easier, not harder to gather e-mail addresses as it would provide verification if the address was valid. This is effectively no better than a whitelist sender concept, but requires universal agreement on it rather than being able to be implemented at the local level.
None of these solutions you proposed are even remotely practical or effective and there are far better ideas (I'll be it still impractical from an implementation standpoint) out there. In fact, the technology already exists, but isn't currently implemented universally enough to be turned on. Thinks like authenticated mail servers would allow for mail to be required to be sent from the authoritative server for that domain with cryptographic verification that the server is authentic, (based on the DNS records for the domain). A SPAM server would not have access to these and would have to setup their own domain (which could then be trivially blocked). The reason it isn't used is that not enough domains have it setup and we don't want to block a significant portion of the legitimate mail traffic on the Internet.
Does Google do something more advanced than this for marketing purposes? Do we really want to limit the ability to use a better SPAM filter in the future?
You have to extract meaning to perform SPAM filtering. The irony is we may prevent targeted advertising on GMail and instead get blown away by SPAM everywhere.
I learned coding at the ripe old age of 5. When other's were playing with the turtle paint program, I was teaching myself to write some simple code on the Apple IIe. In retrospect, I'm grateful that my teachers let me play around with the computer and didn't try to keep me on task with Turtle Paint. By 7, I was teaching adults how to do basic coding at the public library's programing courses. When the teacher got stumped, she'd call me over to help figure it out.
It's never too early to start kids on programming.
Not to rain on your parade, and not to take sides, but if it was a hoax, then the insurance companies would love to get in. It makes risk go up, which means they can justify premiums going up. That's more money in their pocket as long as the entire industry plays along. (And we see that happen all the time in the petroleum industry.)
You provide your information by going to their sites. If you don't want to give them your info, don't give your info. If that means not going to sites, then don't go to sites. They don't come in to your house and interrogate you until you tell them about yourself. They get the information as a result of YOUR actions. If you don't like it, don't use the service.
This is the same issue as with pirating music because "record companies are bad". If they are bad, the answer is don't consume their product, not take it at will because you are too lazy or spoiled to go without the product made by whatever "big evil" company. Sony pissed me off with their changes to remove Other OS. Guess how many games I have played for my PS3 since then? About 1 (when it otherwise would have been about 30+). It cost me money to go and build a PC that could play games better than the PS3 and there are some exclusive titles that I had to go without, but that is how REAL protest works.
If you take the product anyway, it tells them they have a product you want and are simply too selfish to care about paying for it. If you want to make a statement, don't use the product at all. Then they HAVE to ask themselves why people aren't consuming the product and fix the problem. Otherwise, they will simply continue to try to address the issue of people not wanting to pay for a product they still want to consume.
That isn't even what I'm talking about though. You can present watered down versions of actual interesting and current subjects, but lately it's been pure fantasy instead of actual simplified science topics. Instead of writing dumbed down content about actual scientific and technical progress that makes it accessible, they have switched to doing pure fantasy like articles on what old time travel concepts might looks like or paid content from some not particularly innovative advance for some commercial product.
Pop Sci used to be a great way to get a quick overview of what has happening in the science and tech world without having to get mathy, but now it's more or less useless propoganda for advertising dollars or random fluffy crap that doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in the field. There's normally still one or two ok articles, but the quality has dropped substantially and has been getting worse.
This would matter a lot more if the quality of comments weren't better than the quality of half the trash that Popular Science prints now. Used to love it, but I don't think I'll be renewing again due to the constantly falling "standard" for articles and the blatant paid articles. The "Best of What's New" section in the last issue I read had 2, maybe 3 actual innovative new products. The rest (about 10 or so) were all uninteresting, non-innovative, paid trash. I don't even read half to 3/4 of the articles in an issue anymore because they are so pointless. I used to read every article from front to back. Sad to see my once favorite periodical going the way of the dino.
Exactly, that's why our system is currently going the way it is. People have bought in to the idea that voting for a third party means making it less likely to get their way, so they vote for one of the two people that will do the same basic things to take away freedoms and create more abuse of power. There is no incentive to try to do what people as a mass populace want when they are too busy fighting amongst each other to say that things need to change. The more people vote for a third party, the more it forces the major parties to play ball in the middle territory to try and reclaim those "lost" votes. My point was that third party votes actually do more to impact politics as a whole than voting for either party, but people seem to have forgotten that or fear what will happen if they don't vote for their guy.
Put another way, honestly the best thing that someone like Ron Paul can do is get like 30 or 40% of the vote and make the parties that are made up of people that aren't fanatical to a fault realize that they need to change if they want to hold on to power. That way, you avoid the crazy people in power but still get the change that is needed. This was the realization that made me switch to voting third party. Winning doesn't matter, showing the amount of loss does.
I realize this and still vote that way. Why? Because it will put fear of the people back in the main parties. Large scale abuse of power can only occur when people who are going to do the abusing are comfortable with their power. If they realize that they will lose the power if they abuse it too much, they don't abuse it. Showing politicians that we would prefer batshit crazy to abusively corrupt, it forces them back to the table.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about advertising is it should never be your only resource. Targeted advertising is great if you use it purely to discover products. When I'm in the market for a new widgamajig and they notice that I'm looking for a widgamajig and start displaying ads for other types of widjamjigs, that is helpful to me because it shows more options that I might not have thought of.
It's kind of like letting the advertiser choose the keywords that match with their product and then having my keywords meet in the middle. It exposes me to more options and this is a good thing. If I'm dumb and decide not to research the things I see advertised, that isn't a problem that targeted or untargeted advertising is going to fix, it's a problem "not being a freaking retard" is going to fix.
Ehh, a lot of that is just quantity though. I do shoot consistently better images than an amateur, but the name of the game in professional photography is always quantity. Too many factors you can't control. I can do everything perfect, but a last second blink or movement can ruin the shot. At a typical wedding, I'll shoot 3000 or so photos. Maybe 1 in 10 of them will be what I would rate as a really great photo, but that still winds up being 300 great photos. Even if an amateur's rate is more like 1 in 100, that's still 30 great photos as long as they can maintain that success rate at a high speed of capturing images.
For studio work, it does matter more though since the pro is going to understand things about lighting that an amateur won't, so they will get better results in that case. Event photography with largely uncontrolled lighting is mostly just quantity though to guarantee good images.
There are at least one or two smartphone cameras that have image stabilization now. There are also one or two smartphones that include an optical zoom, though they are really more specialty devices. Better lenses I'd say is debatable, on a high end point and shoot, sure, but there are some pretty bad lenses on some point and shoots too. The resolution is less of an issue because diffraction limiting is going to prevent a lot of that gain from being realized with the higher resolution point and shoot, though they do generally still have slightly larger sensors which makes a difference as well.
I agree that there are some advantages to P&S over smartphones, it just isn't enough to justify having one as a separate $400+ device for most people and mirrorless take things much further for only a little bit more without sacrificing the portability. It's more that their market has already been pinched off by smartphones on the one side and mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras on the other.
You are probably right that we'll see some specialty "portable" cameras but I'd also challenge they don't really belong in the point and shoot category at that point since they are, by nature, designed to be more advanced than simply pointing and shooting in most cases and more for portability of an advanced feature set.
I'm saying that focus makes people suck taking photos with DSLRs. Focus on camera phones is comparatively forgiving due to the sensor size producing less background blur (in fact, it makes background blur near impossible.) This results in a wider depth of field, so focus doesn't have to be spot on. When you move to a DSLR, the sensitivity to choosing the proper focal point increases drastically. It allows things like getting bokeh, but it also requires being more careful how you shoot and a beginner isn't at all careful how they shoot.
Also, it isn't just larger aperture=better picture. It's mostly larger sensor size = better picture. Diffraction limiting becomes an issue quicker the smaller the sensor is and the depth of field is also made wider by a smaller sensor, which limits the amount of background blur you can produce. So while you didn't have the full answer, I don't disagree with you for what you are saying, but it isn't what I was saying in my first post, I was speaking on the other side of the same statement, which is how those gains hurt the average non-photographer when using a DSLR.
Hey mjwx, for legacy SLRs I agree with you, but tech has moved forward a bunch since then. A modern DSLR is well capable of handling the metering for a user just as well as a smartphone or point and shoot, so that really isn't what impacts the performance of a beginner using a DSLR. To really make the most of it, you need to understand the exposure triangle, but you can get by using a DSLR and take better photos than a point and shoot with no understanding of exposure triangle. (Also, FYI, ISO is still called ISO, It's not technically film speed anymore, but it is the same sensitivity levels applied to the gain on the sensor, so all the old calculations still work.)
What I meant about focusing is that focus point selection is critical and people are poor at that. With a point and shoot or phone camera, you can touch the general area and depth of field is forgiving enough that you get a decent image and with face detection, even that isn't necessary. With the incredibly shallow depth of fields you get with a DSLR, particularly with a fast lens and a full frame sensor, you have to be focusing on the exact point you want in focus. This is why I say the primary problem for a typical consumer is that the focus is too sensitive. I frequently here people complain about there out of focus shots when moving from a smartphone or point and shoot to a DSLR because of this. It's probably the most frequent complaint because people aren't expecting it since they don't understand optics.
Also, the vast majority of high end smart phone users would disagree on the chalk and cheese comparison for point and shoots. (Which btw, I had to look up what that meant, so I did learn something today.) The big thing is that the image quality is comparable because both are very small sensors with miniscule optics. You do get a minor advantage of having some optical zoom capability, but with the vast majority of point and shoots, you have longer or equivalent shutter delay to a good smartphone camera and lack the ease of use to work with the image afterwords that a smartphone affords. There are trade offs and in some cases the P&S may win out, but generally, in those cases, a DSLR or mirrorless wins out even more. At this point I'd say for the majority of people, the smartphone camera is close enough that a P&S isn't worth it for most people, for those people that really need the zoom level in a portable package (a niche group) then mirrorless is best and then for those who want the best image quality possible and don't mind learning about proper camera usage, a DSLR is head and shoulders above in capability if the shooter's ability is on par.
Arguably, the photos most people take with a smartphone are actually better than they would take with a "real" camera. As sensor size increases, sensitivity to focus also increases. If you don't know how to properly use the autofocus of your "real" camera, you'll get a lot of out of focus images. On a camera phone, it's a lot easier and there isn't a whole lot of advantage for a point and shoot over a smartphone.
If you know what you are doing, the difference between a smartphone and a DSLR is night and day, but most people don't. Note, I say this as a professional photographer that shoots weddings with a Canon 5D Mark iii. I do it as a part time gig specifically because the impact on the market is quite real since the images are good enough for most people and even then, people flood in to the market thinking they can shoot weddings because they had some "good" facebook photos and bought an entry level DSLR with a kit lens.
The fact is, the main thing that differentiates professional photographers from the amateur has very little to do with the photography. Even if you know how to use the gear perfectly, doing a good, professional job is far more about making the client comfortable, having the experience to avoid being overly noticeable while capturing the key moments, having the ability to interact with people in such a way to get both good posed and candid shots and the ability to run a business and sell yourself. The actual ability to take photos is the easiest 10% of what it takes to do the job.
Zombies are not actually using the hijacked e-mail account. They simply impersonate anyone and send unauthenticated messages. Sending authenticated messages would work VERY badly for the botnet because it would rapidly kill off nodes. If you log in to send spam with the authenticated account, as soon as that spam is reported back, the bot will be killed. That's way more expensive than what they get for sending the SPAM and if they were dumb enough to do that, it would be great because it would allow mass identification of zombies.
As for the idea of offering the service, people won't take it in sufficient number. There are already some services that offer this, people stay away because they don't like the massive number of false rejects. The chicken and egg exists not because of companies unwilling to offer SPF only delivery, but because you can't attract users because it is too inconvenient. People as a whole would rather deal with SPAM than not get their e-mails that they care about.
Actually, we are already far worse than after WWII. Looking at the debt history article on Wikipedia anyway, the highest % of the GDP as debt previously was 94%. We are currently have a higher national debt than our GDP. And they were looking at ways to fix that at that point, not ways to spend more.
Oh, and some quick back of the napkin math. Someone earlier today was posting about what they saw for subsidies for them (as someone making $62k household income). That's 57% of the country that make that much or less. They were getting around $2 to $3k in subsidy per family member when they were looking at the level of subsidies, per year. Lets assume, just for insanity sake, that the subsidies don't get any bigger than that. That's a whopping half a trillion dollars a year in subsidies and it doesn't even get that great of coverage.
Why is not funding a massively expensive piece of legislation a bad thing? Budgeting is, by definition, deciding what to and not to spend money on. When you are already in debt by more than you will make in the next several years if you put everything towards just your debt, going out and buying a $100,000 sports car isn't good finance. Is the goal of the affordable care act good? Sure. Can we afford the subsidies right now? Hell no we can't, not without making other major sacrifices. As it is, we need to make major sacrifices even without it.
For your example to be valid, you have to support that not funding a majorly expensive program while the budget is already horribly in the red is actually unreasonable. I don't see how that is possible, since you don't make your debt and deficit go away by spending more money. Like I said, I'm sure if the situation was reversed, then the republicans would be trying to spend, spend, spend and the democrats would be saying we are spending to much, but that doesn't mean those saying we are spending too much are wrong in either situation. The federal government should not be spending almost 40% of our GDP every year. That's insane.
If the sending host is a zombie, it won't get through. There won't be any reason to have a zombie send mail because it won't ever be delivered. Without any hope of delivery, there would be no financial incentive to pay someone to send it, and thus we can free up botnet resources for other more nefarious criminal activities.
Your view that SPF can simply be "turned on" is naive though. Anyone who does that will start losing customers in droves because they stop getting important e-mails and even any single major party turning it on isn't going to be enough to convince the rest of the world to follow suite and do the same. There are technical hurdles such as scripts that act as non-authoritative senders producing their own direct SMTP traffic.
There is a massive amount of real cost in getting SPF implemented and required and nobody is going to commit the customer satisfaction suicide of blocking all mail from non-SPF senders for quite some time. It's a chicken and egg problem with no obvious solution since the Internet lacks the ability to "require" any particular participation.
And if you notice, The house actually changed position to try and compromise but the senate didn't. Neither party is innocent in this. Both are equally guilty. I say that as a moderate who hasn't cast a vote on republican or democrat lines for all but maybe the very first election I could vote in. The idea of spending a crapload more money while we are already over our heads and sinking fast in debt IS a legitimate budget concern.
If the roles were reversed, sure they would have no problem spending us in to oblivion, but that doesn't mean the concern isn't legitimate. And to the person who said that's been the claim since at least Regan, that doesn't mean it is any less true now than it was then, it just means the house of cards hasn't fallen yet. Some day we will hit the hard ceiling if things continue the way they have been going for almost half a century and the further we go before it hits, the harder it is going to hurt.
Not disagreeing with anything you said, though if what Google does currently for pulling meaning out of the e-mails is the same as the SPAM filtering and the courts find that they can't do that for marketing, then we can't do that for SPAM anywhere since it would be a violation of wiretap laws, so my original point stands.
Also, yes, stopping SPAM at the source would be great, but it isn't going to happen any time soon. You can't make a charge for e-mails as it would be impossible to bill and would open the door to micropayment everything on the Internet. Why not charge for accessing a webpage, or sending a picture, or entering your password? That's not a road we want to go down and it isn't practical anyway since E-mail is server to server connections.
The second solution is likely to be more expensive than the cure and again would be difficult to implement. You'd need everyone to agree with it and it increases the burden on legitimate systems while only minorly impacting giant botnets. The penalty to bad behaviors is equal to that to good (proportionally) so you don't get anything other than more resources being consumed rather than less.
The third situation is simply impossible. Any easy key exchange is going to make it easier, not harder to gather e-mail addresses as it would provide verification if the address was valid. This is effectively no better than a whitelist sender concept, but requires universal agreement on it rather than being able to be implemented at the local level.
None of these solutions you proposed are even remotely practical or effective and there are far better ideas (I'll be it still impractical from an implementation standpoint) out there. In fact, the technology already exists, but isn't currently implemented universally enough to be turned on. Thinks like authenticated mail servers would allow for mail to be required to be sent from the authoritative server for that domain with cryptographic verification that the server is authentic, (based on the DNS records for the domain). A SPAM server would not have access to these and would have to setup their own domain (which could then be trivially blocked). The reason it isn't used is that not enough domains have it setup and we don't want to block a significant portion of the legitimate mail traffic on the Internet.
Does Google do something more advanced than this for marketing purposes? Do we really want to limit the ability to use a better SPAM filter in the future?
You have to extract meaning to perform SPAM filtering. The irony is we may prevent targeted advertising on GMail and instead get blown away by SPAM everywhere.
I learned coding at the ripe old age of 5. When other's were playing with the turtle paint program, I was teaching myself to write some simple code on the Apple IIe. In retrospect, I'm grateful that my teachers let me play around with the computer and didn't try to keep me on task with Turtle Paint. By 7, I was teaching adults how to do basic coding at the public library's programing courses. When the teacher got stumped, she'd call me over to help figure it out.
It's never too early to start kids on programming.
What about the airwolf?
Not to rain on your parade, and not to take sides, but if it was a hoax, then the insurance companies would love to get in. It makes risk go up, which means they can justify premiums going up. That's more money in their pocket as long as the entire industry plays along. (And we see that happen all the time in the petroleum industry.)
You provide your information by going to their sites. If you don't want to give them your info, don't give your info. If that means not going to sites, then don't go to sites. They don't come in to your house and interrogate you until you tell them about yourself. They get the information as a result of YOUR actions. If you don't like it, don't use the service.
This is the same issue as with pirating music because "record companies are bad". If they are bad, the answer is don't consume their product, not take it at will because you are too lazy or spoiled to go without the product made by whatever "big evil" company. Sony pissed me off with their changes to remove Other OS. Guess how many games I have played for my PS3 since then? About 1 (when it otherwise would have been about 30+). It cost me money to go and build a PC that could play games better than the PS3 and there are some exclusive titles that I had to go without, but that is how REAL protest works.
If you take the product anyway, it tells them they have a product you want and are simply too selfish to care about paying for it. If you want to make a statement, don't use the product at all. Then they HAVE to ask themselves why people aren't consuming the product and fix the problem. Otherwise, they will simply continue to try to address the issue of people not wanting to pay for a product they still want to consume.
Hey now, I use the right ctrl and alt keys when I need to Ctrl+Alt+Delete with one hand... Oh wait!
That isn't even what I'm talking about though. You can present watered down versions of actual interesting and current subjects, but lately it's been pure fantasy instead of actual simplified science topics. Instead of writing dumbed down content about actual scientific and technical progress that makes it accessible, they have switched to doing pure fantasy like articles on what old time travel concepts might looks like or paid content from some not particularly innovative advance for some commercial product.
Pop Sci used to be a great way to get a quick overview of what has happening in the science and tech world without having to get mathy, but now it's more or less useless propoganda for advertising dollars or random fluffy crap that doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in the field. There's normally still one or two ok articles, but the quality has dropped substantially and has been getting worse.
This would matter a lot more if the quality of comments weren't better than the quality of half the trash that Popular Science prints now. Used to love it, but I don't think I'll be renewing again due to the constantly falling "standard" for articles and the blatant paid articles. The "Best of What's New" section in the last issue I read had 2, maybe 3 actual innovative new products. The rest (about 10 or so) were all uninteresting, non-innovative, paid trash. I don't even read half to 3/4 of the articles in an issue anymore because they are so pointless. I used to read every article from front to back. Sad to see my once favorite periodical going the way of the dino.
Exactly, that's why our system is currently going the way it is. People have bought in to the idea that voting for a third party means making it less likely to get their way, so they vote for one of the two people that will do the same basic things to take away freedoms and create more abuse of power. There is no incentive to try to do what people as a mass populace want when they are too busy fighting amongst each other to say that things need to change. The more people vote for a third party, the more it forces the major parties to play ball in the middle territory to try and reclaim those "lost" votes. My point was that third party votes actually do more to impact politics as a whole than voting for either party, but people seem to have forgotten that or fear what will happen if they don't vote for their guy.
Put another way, honestly the best thing that someone like Ron Paul can do is get like 30 or 40% of the vote and make the parties that are made up of people that aren't fanatical to a fault realize that they need to change if they want to hold on to power. That way, you avoid the crazy people in power but still get the change that is needed. This was the realization that made me switch to voting third party. Winning doesn't matter, showing the amount of loss does.
I realize this and still vote that way. Why? Because it will put fear of the people back in the main parties. Large scale abuse of power can only occur when people who are going to do the abusing are comfortable with their power. If they realize that they will lose the power if they abuse it too much, they don't abuse it. Showing politicians that we would prefer batshit crazy to abusively corrupt, it forces them back to the table.