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Comment Re:What does it matter? (Score 1) 305

by Arker (#47359657) Attached to: How Often Do Economists Commit Misconduct?
"it is a behavioural science, which by nature incorporates a large measure of unpredictibilty and irrationality, because it by default deals with human behaviour."

You need to check that premise. The assumption upon which most scientific progress has been built is that anything which appears to be unpredictable and irrational will eventually resolve as rational and predictable once properly understood. Even chaos math and quantum physics exist within and because of that assumption. As does Psychology, Sociology, Economics, and so forth.

If that assumption were to actually be proven false for any single field (as you appear to believe has happened?) that would really be a quite powerful blow against the scientific worldview itself.

Comment Re:It is Canada's fault! (Score 0) 130

"What it boils down to is this. If you send an un-solicited email to someone you have not done business with in the last 2 years, and they have not opted in before and, and they believe your email to be spam, boom, you are culpable."

Sounds good to me. If you are spamming you should be culpable. I'd prefer to see public hanging brought back as the punishment, but failing that, a fine big enough to matter is not a bad idea.

Comment Re:CASL bad law and affects more than email (Score 0) 145

by Arker (#47343057) Attached to: Microsoft Suspending "Patch Tuesday" Emails
"That phrase is just a shorter way of saying "opt-in plus confirm". If a website gets a request for adding an e-mail address to their list, sends a "confirm that you really wanted this" e-mail to the address, and doesn't send any more e-mail unless you click the link and confirm, they definitely aren't a spammer."

That is opt in. There is no plus, this is the minimum required for an opt in list.

If you just put up a form that says 'add me' and add them that is NOT an effective opt-in, that is simply blind spamming. This is because anyone that knows (or can guess) your email can sign you up for anything without you actually opting for this in any sense of the word. So the 'confirm' is not some sort of extra requirement, above and beyond opt-in, it's *an integral part of the opt-in process*.

"Honestly, anybody who has a true opt-out that really stops e-mail isn't a spammer"

Wrong. Anyone that sends spam is a spammer. Spam is unsolicited bulk email. If you are sending bulk email to people that you do not know for a fact actually signed up to receive it then you are a spammer. An opt-out link after the fact, even if it would hypothetically work should anyone be stupid enough to click it does nothing whatsoever to change that fact.

You know you should never click those, right? that just confirms the address is read. EVEN IF they take you off that one list, they turn around and sell it to the other spammers as a premium address at that point and you get on a dozen other lists instead.

Really, use your brain and think about the consequences if what you said was true. I would be able to sign you up for mailing lists all day, every day, and you couldnt do anything to stop it other than change your address. And as soon as I found your new address it would be in the same shape.

Even if every remove link worked, and even if using it didnt just get you more spam, it would STILL be unreasonable to expect you to spend all day unsubscribing to all the crap I spend all day signing you up for. And it's still absolute nonsense to claim YOU opted in to anything when I put your email in and you were never asked whether or not you actually wanted it in.

Comment Re:CASL bad law and affects more than email (Score 1) 145

by Arker (#47340811) Attached to: Microsoft Suspending "Patch Tuesday" Emails
"I have some double optin subscriber lists"

You sound like a spammer. The nonsensical phrase 'double optin' points strongly in that direction. That is a phrase invented by spammers to describe 'opt-in' while implying that it is an unreasonable burden.

If your lists really are opt-in then the list should not affect you. It does not to the best of my knowledge require you to know or care what country your recipients are in, as long as you are not spamming to any country, then you will also not be spamming to Canada in the process.

Comment Re:The Failure of good intentions. (Score 1) 145

by Arker (#47340781) Attached to: Microsoft Suspending "Patch Tuesday" Emails
From what I have read (and please provide a correction link if you have one) the law only says commercial bulk email has to be requested. My comments presume this is true.

Now, that's the same rule you should have been following from day one anyway, and if you were not, then shame on you, you dirty spammer!

If their controls are so poor they are afraid of this law, then they should really just quit using email at all. Block it at the border router and spare the rest of us your spam.

Comment Re:wtf forced on beta again? (Score -1, Troll) 206

by Arker (#47330639) Attached to: Germany Scores First: Ends Verizon Contract Over NSA Concerns
"It only ever happens to me on mobile, so no no-script there."

Huh? You cant get a functional web browser on your mobile? That's awful!

On my android phone I have two browsers, neither of which is vulnerable to javascript. And a quick google informs me that you can easily do the same thing with an iPhone.

What did you buy, WinCE?

Comment Re:waste of time (Score 0) 380

by Arker (#47328249) Attached to: New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel
Sorry, gotta contradict you on that. Roundabouts scale better with more traffic, not worse. Seen it in action many times. And if you think roundabouts have to be single-lane, think again. I've seen them 5, 6 lanes across, with traffic lights. They are confusing at first if you are not used to them, but they actually work noticeably more smoothly once you become accustomed.

Comment Re:Not a good sales pitch: (Score 0) 138

by Arker (#47327853) Attached to: Former NSA Chief Warned Against Selling NSA Secrets
"THe banking industry is probably wanting a step up in security, while the NSA under Alexander had horrible internal security. Alexander's forte seems to be using brute force to break the security of others, not actually keeping an organization secure."

Perhaps that's his pitch?

The best defense is a good offense. Instead of fixing your security flaws, just make sure that getting to important systems will take some time, and be detected. Then wait for attacks to start, counterattack, and wipe out the attackers before they can get to the goodies.

Unfortunately while that sounds like a great movie plot it sounds like a really bad way to try and secure billions of dollars.

Comment Re:Huge pile of assumptions (Score 1) 151

by Arker (#47326691) Attached to: Neanderthals Ate Their Veggies
I dont know where you got that but I have studied human evolution a bit and dont recall ever seeing such an assertion. Humans are adaptable and certain groups are very good fishermen, but there is no evidence I am aware of that fishing was ever more than a minority lifeway, or a supplemental skill. There was a time when significant human expansions occurred through a 'beach-comber' style of gathering, but that was MUCH too recent to have had anything to do with the evolution of the brain, which was already done long before.

And the other apes HAVE evolved brains very much like ours, btw. Far more like ours than like anything else.

Comment Re:Big "if" (Score 1) 66

by Arker (#47326615) Attached to: Why capitalism works
"This assumes that rich people can't talk to one another."

No, it just assumes that they are (usually) individually more concerned with their individual gains or losses, than they are with class warfare. Occasional reversals here dont matter, this assumption only fails if 'class consciousness' becomes a more powerful motivational force here than individual profit, which seems, how shall we say? ludicrously unlikely.

Now in that context the Marxists seem particularly foolish (or malicious, depending) but that is an aside.

"Second, it also assumes that people are accountable for their failures, and as we have seen with at least one very wealthy family who has ties to the oil business AND ties to the national intelligence infrastructure. that's simply not true."

This is a more telling point. A free market does require a functional legal system, and that is where we are extremely weak.

"Competitive markets do not exist in nature."

Sure they do. In any situation in which there are exchanges, they are either voluntary or forced. It's really a continuum, rather than a binary choice, but it's still true - to the degree that exchanges are voluntary they produce free-market results, to the extent they are coërced they produce rather different results.

Comment Re:Digital vs Physical (Score 2) 560

by Arker (#47325635) Attached to: Mass. Supreme Court Says Defendant Can Be Compelled To Decrypt Data
"If it had been the exact same situation, just a combination lock on on physical file cabinet in his office, once a proper court subpena was issued Law Enforcement might have asked for the combination as a courtesy but would have been perfectly within their rights to simply cut the thing open."

The only difference appears to be that the LE agency involved purports to be incapable of 'cutting the lock.'

Well that and the unwise statements made to police by the defendant voluntarily. It would be interesting if a similar case could be constructed with an un-cuttable physical lock, but of course such things do not exist...

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