Slashback: Bouncing, Taxing, Releasing 343
He also provides this link to the full, uninterrupted text."The layout of our Web page doesn't do a great job of showing that the story continues on a second page. That's where I explain what is up for taxing.Quoting the story now:
'...That brings them under the purview of the proposed rule, which includes computer networks as 'substitute communications systems' -- subject to a 9.17 percent state tax, plus local option taxes.
In Orange County, the local tax typically runs between 5.5 percent and 6.5 percent. That would bring the total tax to between 14-15 percent.
[end of first page, you hafta click to get to the rest of the story]
Computer networks would be taxed at that percent on either annual lease payments or depreciation.'"
Willie Sutton has met his betters.
Syphtor writes "DE Tech has responded to a reporters inquiries as to their patent claims (DE Tech refuses to say why NZ firms were targeted first)
DE Tech appeared previously in the /. article, Australian Gov't Moves To Block E-commerce Patent. Latest: the patent has been just granted in Virginia 'after five years of making changes in the application.'
Legitimate protection of IP or a 'fishing expedition worthy of a Sicilian Mafia protection racket.'?"
Well, not releasing everything, No, not as such, that is, you see ...
An anonymous reader writes "According to this press release from the BBC, the 'BBC creative archive' (earlier on slashdot) will not be as full as previously assumed. As the page says, 'The BBC Creative Archive would make selected BBC material universally available for private not commercial use in the UK.' (my emphasis) Looks like we won't be able to get the Hitchhiker's Guide and complete works of Monty Python after all, folks."
Who, really, is Peter Lynds, and how old is he? evil_one666 writes "You may remember that Slashdot reported a few weeks ago on ground-breaking work in the understanding of time. Well, it appears that it was all a hoax. While the Guardian is running a story that suggests several interesting conspiracy theories (although they seem to think that Peter Lynds is in fact legitimate), Museumofhoaxes.com present some convincing evidence that he is in fact a 17-year-old student at the same radio college at which he claimed to be a 27-year old-lecturer. Astute Slashdot readers rightly pointed out some big red flags, the first time the topic was aired, and Cesar Sirvent, a researcher in the field, has a list of links related to the controversy here."
Outlook Express not yet left out to rot. dr. electron writes "As stated previously on Slashdot, Outlook was to be slaughtered. Now MS says, in a article on Internet Magazine, it won't be, but developed further. They blame communication problem inside the company about the previous press release. Maybe the ongoing development of Outlook Express isn't the biggest news here, I find the reason 'communication problem' a bit odd (It's not a small decision to kill a product)."
Speaking of Outlook and anguish: caseywest, among others, has had enough blame redirected into his email box. He writes "This is my plea, my Public Service Announcement. Please, please stop bouncing email viruses! I don't run any windows computers, and /dev/null'ing viruses are trivial. I cannot, however, say that this problem is only a Windows-only menace. My email address is plastered all over the internet. As a result, I'm receiving thousands of bounced messages claiming I sent a virus. This is costly, let alone wrong! I didn't send you that virus! If you admin an email server, please answer chromatic's one question test. If you're bouncing email viruses, please reconfigure your filters to send viruses to /dev/null, and save us all money on bandwidth, hard disk space, and general anguish. Thank you."
Hows this for slashback news (Score:4, Interesting)
It's likely not going to be posted so here goes my contribution for Slashnack news...
DARPA [darpa.mil] (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [darpa.mil]), is now in full swing with a "Biodefense project [darpa.mil]" that seems to be a mixture of Star Trek meets Private Ryan. In an article featured at Guerrilla News [guerrillanews.com], author Cheryl Seal [newsinsider.org] criticizes the program which seems to have terms like 'Brain Interface Program [darpa.mil]' and 'Engineered Tissue [darpa.mil]', and there is an extensive write up on the ethics of this sort of testing on animals titled 'Roborat Ethics [wireheading.com]'. Browsing over DARPA's site I found BIODYNOTICS [darpa.mil] aka Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robots [slashdot.org]. According to DARPA the BIODYNOTICS Program represents a new thrust area for DSO that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multi-pronged approach with far reaching impact on robotic capabilities for national security applications. Borgs anyone?
Re:Hows this for slashback news (Score:3, Funny)
Governments should tax behavours they want less of (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:5, Insightful)
And what exactly was the point of charging this tax in the first place? Is Florida a little too prosperous for their politicans? Do they feel the need to drive some of their economy to adjoining states?
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:4, Interesting)
Fallible argument (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:4, Interesting)
If I'm a business and I make something that costs me $50 in materials, and I need to make $5 in profit to stay afloat, pay wages, etc. then how much do I sell it for? $55. Now if the government comes in and says I have to pay 10% in taxes on the profit, how much do I have to charge now? $55.56. Because I still need that $5, regardless of whatever else. The only way I won't be able to raise prices is because of market competition, but if everyone is paying the tax and has similar needs then it's a wash. And the only person that pays the extra money is the buyer.
That's the basic argument behind "companies don't pay taxes", and it's true in as far as it goes in the simple model. The real world is much more complex, and so is accounting. I think the assumption that if we removed corporate taxes that prices would magically fall is a falisy, but they would eventually edge back down toward similar profit levels as competitive pressures kicked in.
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:3, Informative)
While I agree that businesses in Florida may be used to it, I'm not so sure about the conclusion.
States without income tax often have to resort to "nuisance" taxes on random shiat, as noted above. There's quite a lot of red tape and bureaucracy involved, for both businesses and government, in enforcing tax compliance.
Not saying that the income tax does not
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:4, Funny)
Uhh... so by your logic, the gov. must want to me to stop working and earning money.
yeah. =)
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:4, Funny)
Uhh... so by your logic, the gov. always does what it should do?
Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Where did this idea that Governments should use taxes as tools of social engineering ever get started?
Governments discourage what they tax (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Governments discourage what they tax (Score:2, Insightful)
And we shouldn't tax only things we want to see less of. Are you kidding?! You want to tax things that you can morally justify cranking the tax-rate through the roof on, but at the same time know (and desire) and increase of. If you tax things you want less of, to reduce those things, then when there are less of those things (as per your plan) there is less revenue, over time!
This is why we tax cigerettes. Not because s
Re:Governments discourage what they tax (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cigarettes & Taxes (Score:3, Insightful)
Did this happen? Not really. I never saw any statistics on the number on smokers, so cannot say whether the number ever dropped. However, the revenue from cigarette tax actually dropped!
So you don't know whether it reduced smoking or not? I'll tell you then: It did.
The drop in revenue from cigarette taxes cannot be intrepreted as a "failure" of the program- it's a mark of success. Such a drop should be the final, victorious stage o
Re:Governments discourage what they tax (Score:5, Funny)
Then why the fsck is there an income tax? Shouldn't we be taxing poverty instead?
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Where did this idea that Governments should use taxes as tools of social engineering ever get started?
I hope the original poster's intent was to point out that the government should think about the ripple effects of taxes, and the resulting net gain in revenue over time. It is not true that raising taxes always increases revenue. In fact, given current taxing I dare say raising taxes will always decrease revenue in the long run as people and businesses leave or generally become less successful.
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
How true that is.
For example, California recently tripled the vehicle registration fees. In our soon-to-be-former Governor's eyes, this was going to triple the revenue from vehicle registrations. In reality, that is threatening to crush new car sales (dealerships are already advertising for sales to beat the Oct 1 increase). And businesses [bpnews.com] are leaving the state rather than pay the extra money.
Contrast that with the Reagan tax cuts [cato.org]. From 1980 when Reagan took office to 1989, nominal federal revenues doubled $517 billion to $1.031 trillion. The tax cuts fueled economic growth.
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but you have to consider the effects of:
1. inflation
2. a growing worldwide economy
3. emergence/growth of industries like hi-tech
4. deficit spending (it generates some tax revenue)
5. shifts is gov't spending (i.e. major increases in defense).
I'll rewrite the parent to your post:
It is not true that anything always happens, except maybe entropy.
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
1. inflation
Ok. Under Reagan, inflation recovered from the Jimmy Carter mess very quickly, and remained very low for the rest of the 80's bottoming out at 1.86% in 1986, so inflation didn't play a very big roll in that (source [eh.net]).
2. a growing worldwide economy
I contend that the Reagan supply side economics helped the economy grow.
3. emergence/growth of industries like hi-tech
Yes- that helped a lot. See #5.
4. deficit spending (it generates some tax revenue)
Actually, public debt as a % of the GDP was higher under Clinton than under Reagan (source [cato.org]).
5. shifts is gov't spending (i.e. major increases in defense).
The defense spending invested heavily in technology, and that helped the hi tech industries grow.
Also note from the Cato [cato.org] article I linked above, all income groups saw an increase in real income under Reagan, but minorities and the poorest quintile saw the biggest increase.
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
based on your inflation figures:
$1000 in 1980 becomes $1708.33 in 1989.
primarily because of these two years
1980 - 13.48
1981 - 10.36
so you can credit inflation for 70% of the revenue growth. I'm not making any comments about reagan, or his economic policy, just that the effect of tax rate changes on tax
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Where did this idea that Governments should use laws as tools of social engineering ever get started?
The gov't has always been a manner of social control (one hopes in accordance with the majority of the population). The continuum of methods ranges from laws to taxes to advisories, all of them useful for different things.
-Ted
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Governments should tax behavours they want less (Score:3, Insightful)
Suppose the government wants to reduce smoking, so it imposes a high tax on cigarettes. This is a small disincentive for smokers to stop smoking. However, the government has just INCREASED its own incentive to INCREASE smoking. In the government's eyes, smokers = tax revenue. If every smoker quit, then the goverment would be very sad. The government is the bigger addict (of tax revenue).
I'm sure my example sounds silly, but these are very real consequences of the nanny state's "good intentions". If the gov
substitute communication systems... (Score:5, Funny)
Florida next to consider taxing... (Score:2)
Re:substitute communication systems... (Score:2)
That's a very good point. A substitute communications systems for what? The US Postal system? Because that's the only communications system the government has any business regulating.
Now to me, it sounds like they're playing favorites with the telecoms. Now what telephone carrier was found guilty of illegialy maintaining their monopoly, was split up, and is slowing reforming? Could it be.... SBC? Might they not benefit from a delayed growth of LANs and WANs?
Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)
To spare you the trouble of reading the article:
1: Outlook Express will not be killed off, to the delight of many of my non/semi computer literate friends.
2: Getting bounced virus messages from mails you never sent is crap. I got one such mail last week from a email adress which is _never_ in use (.forward file in $home). when you are bouncing/retuerning warnings on email borne viruses, someone who is not infected will wake up one day and find 100 "your message contained a virus" mail in the inbox, almost like spam, it creates alot of uneccesary traffic.
Re:Question (Score:2)
Re:Question (Score:2)
Re:Question (Score:2)
I wasn't hit by it, thank god, but the corp I work for was. The Windows admin is seriously thinking about replacing all the desktops with Linux after this fiasco.
Whiner (Score:3, Insightful)
My e-mail address is plastered all over the internet too, and I got 500 Spams this evening. The difference? I don't use crappy software like Outlook. I use Mozilla Messenger, and it ate those Spams and spit them out. All 500 went straight to the junk folder -- including the bounces (which, oddly enough, seem to come primarily from french-speaking countries for me).
So stop your whining, and "invest" in some quality software. If your e-mail system can't handle cruft, you have no-one but yourself to blame.
Re:Whiner (Score:5, Insightful)
don't run any windows computers, and
led you to believe that he runs Outlook? Hell the
Re:Whiner (Score:2)
Not to mention that even if you can handle the load, upstream servers that handle many other users might not - contributing to outages and delays that will affect legitimate e-mails...
Re:Whiner (Score:2)
Read the text you're quoting (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't run any windows computers, and
And then at the end he states:
save us all money on bandwidth, hard disk space, and general anguish.
Your 'email system' is a CLIENT - he is talking about email servers. He never mentions using outlook, the term 'Outlook' was used to describe his opinion/request, as-in 'his outlook on the subject'.
Even if his server is configured to stop the spam and viruses by piping them to
In addition to the extra cost, and it can add up if you run a server that has many email users (all of whom may be being sent the virus, and whom may be recieving bounces from forged virus emails), not only can the virus eat up a lot of bandwidth over time, it can Slow You Down. 100k a virus email or bounce... 200 users... 1 bounce or attempted deliver to one of those users every 40 seconds or so... your pipe is full. Qmail is busy. Its an email slashdot effect. It can slow everything down.
Now, do you still think he's whining?
Get a brain.
Re:Whiner (Score:2)
Insightful? Well I suppose praising Mozilla and badmouthing Microsoft is 'insightful' around here, too bad his post has absolutely nothing to do with what he was responding to. The problem isn't his inbox is full of junk, the problem is that the messages are still being sent, bandwidth and hard disk space still being used. You still have that exact same problem
Re:Whiner (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't. Also, Messenger doesn't have a calendar.
2. Microsoft Outlook is riddled with security holes that are never patched because Microshaft would rather threaten so-called "hackers" under the DCMA.
No, it isn't. If you believe it is, post references.
3. Microsoft Outlook has no spam filter.
Wrong again. It has one built in. It's called a "junkmail filter" though.
4. Microsoft Outlook insists on using HTML and displays all images including web bugs.
No, it doesn't. You can tell it whether to use RTF, HTML or plain text for emails.
5. Microsoft Outlook is closed-source.
Big whoop.
6. Microsoft Outlook requires you to install Microsoft Exchange server, which costs $20,000 per license and is also closed-source. It also runs exclusively under Windows "Server," which is just Windows NT Workstation 2000 (or whatever it's called) with a different registry entry.
No, it's not. And no, it doesn't. Outlook works happily with POP3 and IMAP as well as Exchange. What you get from Exchange is centralized email, centralized contacts handling, and centralized calendaring/scheduling.
7. Microsoft Outlook costs $100 per seat. Netscape Messenger costs $0 per seat.
Ok, you go that right. Kind of. IFF you buy it in a store, it will cost you $109/seat. If you get it elsewhere, it's cheaper. Especially in volume.
In short, I predict that Microsoft Outlook will be dead within 3 months.
Will you be willing to jump up and down and say "I'm an idiot" if you're wrong? Or are you going to be like every other psychic and fraud?
Simon
Re:Whiner (Score:2, Informative)
No, it doesn't. Also, Messenger doesn't have a calendar.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/ [mozilla.org]
Looks like a calendar to me.
Outlook and IMAP (Score:2)
Outlook Express that came with Win2k on the other hand, worked fine. Same settings.
Possibly they fixed this in 2002.
The spec is there... (Score:4, Insightful)
What's necessary is for more e-mail / calendar / address book programs to make that paradigm available so that it can become the standard for doing such things.
Re:Whiner (Score:2)
1. Not all would say so. If nothing else, Mozilla doesn't have MAPI, which like it or not, IS used.
2. Taken care of on a server (w/extra software)
3. Taken care of on a server (w/extra software)
4. HTML is optional, but yes, web views are annoying in Outlook, but since you aren't getting spam from #3, who cares?
5. How many companies develop Extensions to Excha
Re:Whiner (Score:2)
Give me email and a meeting planner. Let the server run on Linux/Unix/BSD (I don't care what it runs on as long as it doesn't require Windows), make clients friendly AND secure out of the box, and you'll have a winner. Expecially if it's open source.
Re:Whiner (Score:2)
Umm... Both Kolab [kde.org] and OpenGroupWare.org [opengroupware.org] are suitable for this purpose. They are freely available, work with quite a number of clients and offer a complete alternative to Exchange (including groupware calendaring features).
Now I admit that there is an investment required for them to be usable with Outlook and, by extension, Evolution, however this is minimal compared with the cost of licensing Exchange.
The biggest expense is time. They are not 'trivial' to set up just yet and do require a decent time inves
Re:Whiner (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do the uninformed have the loudest voice?
Re:Whiner (Score:2)
Why do homeless guys and the mentally disturbed run around the streets screaming gibberish?
Same answer.
wbs.
Um really? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, Exchange Server doesn't work too well in non-Win-NT/2K/2K3 server environments. It doesn't run under Wine. It also needs a whole boat load of other MS services to work properly. I have one Win2K server with ES under an MSDN Universal license (it come to only about $4500, but this is for development, not production). It prefers not to operate w
Re:Whiner (Score:2)
Oh yes.. the file sharing is a great feature too. Granted, it can be done other ways, but since an Exchange server is already setup, having everything in one interface is an extra goodie.
I personally use Evolution at work, and only use outlook to
Re:Whiner (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you, but filtering subject/message for certain text doesn't really count as spam filter... That's just a normal filter that can be used for the task, much like a screwdriver handle can be used as a hammer in certain instances.
Deprecation (Score:5, Funny)
Hey Florida engineers : I have a whole lot of 2BaseT networking equipment for sale, so you can get a tax break! Man, I never thought I'd be able to do something with that crap.
Florida sure knows how to promote the concept of *old*
Re:Deprecation (Score:2)
Well, I meant the network interfaces with the coax cable and BNCs we used to stick a paperclip in to screw the entire LAN and have a good excuse to not do our assignments in college. It's not yesterday, I couldn't quite remember the name of it
Speaking of Outlook and anguish (Score:4, Funny)
And it's not just bounced emails. I get personal responses. Someone actually took the time to write me: "You sent me a virus, you fag."
I thought about making an autoresponder for virus notification bounce-headlines (I'm on a Mac--I'm pretty sure it's not me), but wouldn't sending emails back just add to the net-congestion?
Alex.
Re:Speaking of Outlook and anguish (Score:2, Funny)
Yesssssss... but only in the sense that peeing in a lake when it's raining adds to the water level...
Or that it even pollutes the drinking water supply...
Email Servers with Virus scanners + my $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
This little school system I work for has been beaten to death by these virus notifications lately due primarily to Sobig.F. I'm proud to be one of the people who saw this problem coming up back in June and went and disabled the automatic reply feature...even though I still get an alert myself. What annoys me even more are these virus scanners that "remove" the virus (still may have an executable attached), but go ahead and pass on the email to the "lucky" user.
Moral of the story... The virus writers have gotten "smarter". PLEASE, disable those $#%@ notifications, for they do more harm now than good.
Thanks.
Taxing LANS? (Score:2, Funny)
Then and only then will I believe they might be able to tell the difference between a LAN and a WAN...
apppollogies to the number one Band to come from Florida--Lynard Skynard..
Where's the problem? (Score:5, Funny)
Considering slashdot readers don't do a great job of reading the actual sites that are posted here, I don't see what the problem is.
Wasn't the Florida Legislature's doing (Score:4, Insightful)
So the Florida Dept. of Revenue cooked this up, for reasons that can only make sense to career bureaucrats. The Florida Legislature will smack it down in the unlikely event that the DoR actually tries to implement it.
What should scare people is the degree to which legislatures have deferred tax-writing power to unelected bureaucrats. They are shirking their constitutional responsibilities. It gives the state a way to raise revenue and the legislature a way to pass the buck. "Shucks, it wasn't *our* idea! Honest! We feel your pain..."
/dev/null is unacceptable (Score:5, Insightful)
Want a better idea? Try _blocking_ the message. When I see any executable attachment in a message, my server does not accept the message. It returns a 5xx series message and tells the person to resend it without the attachment. I do the same thing for common virus Subject: lines. The message is rejected with a 5xx error and the user is told to change the subject line.
Although I agree that bouncing a message with a virus sucks, entirely too many legitimate messages are already bounced for various reasons. If a sender can not be sure an email was received or rejected, then email will become as useless as usenet.
One thing that should never happen is notifying the postmaster of a domain that a message contained a virus. I get this all the time. Some anti-virus gateway receives a message claiming to be from someone at a domain that I administer. Instead of just bouncing the message, their software also notifies postmaster@mydomain.com to let _ME_ know that my user has a virus.
The only problem being that the original message was a forgery and has nothing to do with me or my domains. These people take a bad problem, (a virus) and make it worse by DOUBLING the number of messages sent. How idiotic is that? Anytime I see one of those messages, I put that persons entire domain in my blacklist and I will not remove it until I am notified that they have stopped such a stupid practice.
-sirket
Re:/dev/null is unacceptable (Score:3, Informative)
Re:/dev/null is unacceptable (Score:2)
What good does notifying postmaster@mydomain.com do about an email virus that is (potentially) on one of my users computers? Notify my user. If they have a virus or think that they do, they will contact me and I will help th
Re:/dev/null is unacceptable (Score:2)
The possibility of knowing one of them had a virus (presumably that I may not yet be aware of, or I'd have already blocked it), seems a damn good idea to me.
But this just doesn't work when you have tens of thousands of users.
Blacklisting seems a far more drastic step to take.
I do not see it as being drastic. They get an error messages which clearly explains why their email is being refused. If the domain is important, then I only blacklist their anti-virus software address.
Meant to say previously
Re:/dev/null is unacceptable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:/dev/null is unacceptable (Score:2)
My mail servers messages with executables with 5xx also.
Re:/dev/null is unacceptable (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is, the sender was forged. Since the virus scanner knows the message was a virus and correctly identifies it as such, shouldn't it know that the virus uses forged headers? And since it should know the header was forged, it should NOT return the message.
Further, the virus scanner should not send the whole fucking virus back. That's just retarded.
Re:/dev/null is unacceptable (Score:2)
This would require the anti-virus software to be a lot smarter than it currently is. The antivirus definitions would need to include a flag that says "Always uses forged addresses" and then not return a bounce for those messages. This would make s
Ugh. Leaky bucket will discard email first. (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, you have the Two Armies Problem. Two armies are on opposite sides of a common enemy. If they attack that common enemy on their own, they will lose, so they must attack at the same time. How do you send messages to each other with knowledge of receipt? You can't. If I send the "Go" and you send the "OK", how do you know that I got the "OK"? I send an ACK. How do I know you got the "ACK"? You send me ano
I think you misunderstand email. (Score:2)
In short, if a server is not sure that the message has been passed along to another server, it assumes it has not been, and will try again / return to sender / etc.
There are a few misleading facts people are throwing around here.
1 - The traditional method of rejecting email is to return a message to the sender if the user cannot be found. Exactly how this is done depends on the mail servers involved.
2 - The article is referring to messages blocked because the
Re:Ugh. Leaky bucket will discard email first. (Score:2)
I _completely_ agree. Now just convince the corporate world of that and we are set. Seriously though, the corporate world believes email to be reliable. Until that attitude changes, we are stuck with doing whatever it takes to ensure that a message gets through.
First of all, you have the Two Armies Problem. Two armies are on opposite sides of a common enemy. If they attack that common enemy on their own, they will lose, so they must attack at the same time.
For those listening in... (Score:5, Informative)
For the benefit of less SMTP-savy, here are a couple of things you need to keep in mind.
Unless you want to open yourself to the rumplestiltskin attack, you must accept every message for delivery, and THEN decide on the action.
In fact, returning a 5XX is a bounce. It's not blocking them from sending it. You have still received the data, and nothing is going to undo that.
Beware TPB
Re:For those listening in... (Score:3, Interesting)
No it is not a bounce. It is a rejection of the email by my server. By returning a 5xx error, I have refused to accept responsibility for the message. If I were to actually accept the message (250) then I would be responsible for either delivering it or generating a bounce.
When I return a 5xx error I have told the server on the other side of the connection tha
Re:For those listening in... (Score:3, Informative)
No, there are other ways around this attack. (He's talking about an attacker guessing the names of your users by trying a lot of combinations.) You can simply enforce a delay before sending a 5xx response, as Postfix does. This slows down the attack, as accepting and then bouncing would.
In fact, returning a 5XX is a bounce. It's not blocking them from sending it.
Re:Bet you dont get much email, do you asshole? [n (Score:2)
-sirket
Re:/dev/null is unacceptable (Score:2)
I have pushed the problem back to the server that accepted the message in the first place. Why should I have to deal with it? If they accepted the email then either a) it is one of their customers or b) their server is completely misconfigured. Either way it is u
IANAL but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IANAL but... (Score:2)
Probably not.
Gas, cigarettes are probably both double (multiple) taxed.
What's so bad about double taxation? (Score:3, Interesting)
taxes are taxes. there is no such concept as "double taxation".
the only important thing about taxation is to realize it can be also used as a policy tool. As a rule one should seek to minimize its influence on societal decisions,
Re:What's so bad about double taxation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is too. The most glaring example is with dividends: corporations pay them with aftertax income, investors pay taxes again on the dividends when they receive them. That's why dividend payouts plummeted and investors took the much riskier route of investing exclusively for share price appreciation, and we all know how that turned out. The dividend tax cut that was passed trimmed the double-tax problem but didn't eliminate it. It was enough to get Microsoft to
Re: Well, not releasing everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, sarcasm aside - until bandwidth is free (or as close to free as possible) why should we expect an unexpurgated feed? Not only that, but why should US citizens (for example) expect to be able to freely download programme archives paid for by the British taxpayer at no cost to themselves?
Whilst I hope and pray this project comes to fruition (don't vote tory! [bbc.co.uk]), there are a lot of questions that need to be answered before such a service might be considered practical...
Re: Well, not releasing everything (Score:3, Informative)
Is this case really any different?
Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
Re: Well, not releasing everything (Score:3, Interesting)
You've heard of P2P right? And local caching? It makes absolutely no sense (except from an old authoritarian C&C viewpoint) to directly serve this content broadcast style. BitTorrent [bitconjurer.org] is ideal in this case, as would be FreeNet if it didn't blow chunks so hard.
combined with the cost of potential future licensing.
Is it standard BBC practice to repackage and resell what the public already paid for? A
UUCP! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hrm, could this have been one of the hidden advantages we lost when we switched from bang-path
addressing to DNS based ?
Under the old "route it took to get here" method,
were addresses forgeable? Sure, you could pretend
you were only a relay rather than the originator,
but you'd still get the bounces.
- MugginsM
Re:UUCP! (Score:3, Interesting)
It was fun to experiment with different paths
to find the fastest way to get mail to your pals.
How do you figure the tax on... (Score:2, Interesting)
How the hell will they enforce this?
What about home networking?
Why not just add a tax on routers? Or better yet, maybe they could just raise their sales tax rate.
I'm glad the BBC archive is UK only (Score:4, Interesting)
Why should we foot the (substantial) bill to serve up our programming to other countries in the world?
If they want to see the programmes they should subscribe to BBC World or BBC Prime.
Re:I'm glad the BBC archive is UK only (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm glad the BBC archive is UK only (Score:2)
Re:I'm glad the BBC archive is UK only (Score:2)
If they want to see the programmes they should subscribe to BBC World or BBC Prime.
Or we could just go P2P, where I got all the Hitchhiker's, all the Red Dwarf's, and a couple of Python movies (haven't gone after the rest + tv show yet). I don't know if the BBC is in the same class of evil that the MPAA is, though, I'll admit.
Re:I'm glad the BBC archive is UK only (Score:2)
Then you obviously have never seen Doctor Who
(*ducks*)
Re:I'm glad the BBC archive is UK only (Score:3, Interesting)
Yea, that makes a lot of sense. Maybe we in the U.S. should set up a nice firewall to keep the damn brits out of our country's data too. Better yet, go to the EU and file a claim against the UK using the Internet, after all, WE paid to develope it.
That's what the world needs, lots of little I want to share your IP but keep mine additudes all over the Internet. Perhaps the Brits can st
email virus notifications: almost as bad as spam (Score:4, Interesting)
Better than /dev/null (Score:5, Interesting)
At the very worst, it will end up in the hands of an ISP that now knows that they have to deal with an open relay on their network.
The Peter Lynds thing seemed a little dubious (Score:5, Insightful)
Much to the science world's astonishment, the work also appears to provide solutions to Zeno of Elea's famous motion paradoxes, almost 2500 years after they were originally conceived by the ancient Greek philosopher.
Okay, I'm not up on the details of these paradoxes, but would anyone really still be stumped by them without this astonishing new theory? I wouldn't have thought so.
Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived.
This statement sounded incorrect to me from the start. The Achilles/Tortise paradox is simple enough to resolve so I hardly think it's something that needs some amazing new theory to deal with. To be honest, I don't quite understand why it was ever such a big deal. The tortise starts out 10 meters ahead and runs 1/10 as fast as Achilles. If Achilles runs 10 meters per second, for example, he'll catch up with the tortise in 10/9 seconds. The only way you'd have difficulty calculating the exact time and place where Achilles catches up is if you can't use fractions (10/9 seconds is 1.111111...etc. seconds--impossible to express precisely with a decimal number). Basically this "paradox" just says "if Achilles runs to where the tortise was when he started running, but the tortise moves too, he won't catch up to the tortise no matter how many times they repeat that". Seems kinda obvious when you say it that way.
He comments, "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."
This was the comment that really seemed ridiculous to me. An "instant" is not an infinitely small slice of time, it is a dimensionless position in time. Just as a point has no dimension at all (not just infinitely small dimensions), a line has no width nor height, and a plane has no height, an instant in space-time has no time in it, not infinitely little time. That there is no motion within an instant is obvious because motion is a space-time concept, and an instant only contains space, not time. And just as you can't stack a bunch of planes and make 3 dimensions, you can't stack a bunch of instants and make space time. When we speak of an instant, we throw out all aspects of reality that have to do with quantities of time, but we can still speak of the position in time where the instant is located.
Another one-question test... (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you positive that your virus scanning software only blocks mail that your users don't want?
Chromatic's suggestion works great if we assume that all virus email is from worms that forge from addresses. After that, it starts to fall apart.
Let's say that your boss or a large consulting client gets their computer infected with an MS Word macro virus, then sends you an important new project to start working on right away as a Word document. Whoops, we discarded that message, and the sender will never know that it was discarded. More importantly, they won't know why it was discarded, and when they find out you didn't receive it will likely send the same document again.
It also fails if you receive an important message which your virus software misidentifies as a virus. This doesn't happen often in practice, but it's a possibility that should be taken into account.
That's why RFC 2821, which defines SMTP, requires that, after receiving the message, the MTA either deliver it or generate a bounce:
In another thread, somebody suggested that virus scanning software have a special flag for viruses which spread by sending mail themselves using a false sender, in which case the MTA should make a special exception and discard the mail, since all other options are useless. This is a good idea.
SpamAssassin rules to filter bounces (Score:3, Informative)