Because I'm to damn poor to afford a real vacation I have to fake one by lying on some beach in Second Life. While in real life I drop sand down my underwear, dump bucket of salt water over my head, and pretend to have fun.
Its all great until the flying penis show up....
The statement of "before email filters were effective" is delirious at best. Filters will never, in the long term, be an effective anti-spam tool.
Filters where a band aid at best. It seems to me that filters themselves have went along way toward making email next to useless as a communication tool.
In the old days I used to send a nice email to my friends and family but now filters have practically made that useless. Filters also have negated the purpose of a junk mail folder. The idea for that was that filters would throw crap in there and I could delete it with out concern.
Well now my email is so heavily filtered I have to root through it before I can delete it looking for missing email. Which pretty much negates the junk-mail folders purpose. I still have to look through the spam anyway.
Insightful comment. The spammers, revolting subhumans though they are, are simply a symptom of the real problem. And the big "legitimate" marketing companies are signs of the same problem. A sane person would go out of their way to avoid purchasing anything that they saw advertised, and if a significant percentage of the population were sane advertising and marketing would be dead, and all the people currently stuck in those soul-leeching jobs could become productive members of the economy instead.
This article really brings back memories. I remember this douche from so many years back. He is one of the few internet "celebrities" that I can remember from 10 and 15 years ago.
I said this years ago, and I still believe its true now, you will never kill off the spamers as long as the market is there. No matter what laws you pass, or how much you fine them there will always be some willing to take the risk. There is just to much money there, it's like drug dealers. As long as there is money to be made there will always be someone willing to take the risk.
You want to kill this beast you have to kill the market and just like any market there is the supply and there is the demand. The demand side is the innocent people that click on the links that keep the spammers in business. The war against spam seems to always be about eliminating that side of the market. Well people are stupid and we have all clicked on some link that we didn't realize was a spam link. So that side of the argument is a hopeless fight.
Going after the spammers themselves is equally useless for reasons already stated.
So that leaves one side of the market, the supply. People think the spammers are the supply but they are not. They are just the middlemen. You want to put a real dent in the spam problem, you go after the real supplier. Where that link leads, that is who you go after. The person that is paying the spammer to spam.
The people that supply the products that is who you go after. The spammers themselves they have throw away accounts and a never ending revolving door of ipaddress they can use. Things get to hot the states, they just move it overseas. But the people that pay the spammer they have real address, with physical locations. There is your target, that is who you need to go after.
An I've heard the argument that some of these companies are innocent and may not be aware that they are spamming. Well I say that doesn't exempt them. If you are advertising through a company then you should be aware of how that company does its advertising. Ignorance is not an excuse.
Sure they have serial numbers but good luck on tracing a envelope full of random twenty dollar bills that picked up all over the place.
Plus Jesus is more deflationary than Bitcoin since the world supply dropped from one to zero, briefly peaked at one again and then dropped back to zero and stayed there.
That is only because lifes re-spawn rate sucks. It took this Jesus cat three days to do it and he had to be in god mode.
0) Bitcoin transactions aren't magically anonymous.
What is more anonymous than bitcoins? Paying an assassin a wad of cash. That is how these things have been done for centuries.
Bitcoins are harder to trace than say a wire transfer or a bankdraft but they are not perfectly anonymous. A fist full of cash is far more anonymous.
The only reason that bogeyman was brought up was because The Silk Road moron tried to pay for one with bitcoins. As for the rest of it, traditional means of payment have bought more assassins and child porn than all the bitcoin transactions, period.
I don't understand this at all. I've never heard of Charles Stross and after skimming the Wikipedia article about him I fail to see why his opinion on Bitcoin is relevant.
It's not. From skimming the same article about him I see no reason that his opinion on bitcoins should carry any more weight than mine, or anyone elses. An we all know how much my opinion on bitcoins mean, jack and shit. Which is what Charles Stross opinion means on the subject. An I think jack just left town.
Yes, yes, there is always one of you in every crowed. People that want to excuse every negative thing about africa. Want to put the blame and the responsibility to fix it every where but where it belongs.
You probably are just like bono and want to pour endless amounts of money into fixing something that its not our responsibility to fix. You probably think ever culture has value and is great.
Yeah, heard it all before. So by all means lets continue to pour endless amounts of money down the cesspit that is africa while dissolving the governments and the people of any form of responsibility to help themselves. At least you will be able to sleep better knowing its all everyone else fault but the poor little africans.
I would say its better to put the money into getting people fresh water, sewage treatment, waste disposal and training/equipment for sustainable farming. They have to learn to crawl before they can walk.
I've been saying that for years. Instead of spending limited resources on pie in the sky programs that never go anywhere, the money should be spent on projects that will have a long term benefit. But for some reason people think that every village must have a space program and every mud hut must have 100 jiggabit internet.
What africa needs is serous cultural and political reform. The leaders need to realize they are responsible for the people. An the common people need to get over the rape culture they have and stop looking for the next hand out from the west. In short, they need to get their shit together and solve their own damn problems.
The wife and I broke several years ago. I still have the C64.
Ahh yes, the old wife mate vs the machine issue. Probably been an issue since the first caveman banged out the first wheel. I bet the wife of the first cave monkey to discover fire probably rode his ass over that too.
Don't worry, many of us have had that issue, having to chose between our computer and a mate. Many of us made the same choice you did. Good thing the internet came a long and is filled with porn!
Oh my god, its full of porn!!
While they're probably not nice people, and they may not even be good people, it's not fair or reasonable to assign karmic penalties based on a worst-case what-if scenario. If you're going to play that game, you might as well say that all carjackers deserve slow, painful death because they could use the stolen vehicle to run over kittens and baby seals.
Looks like your wrong too. I didn't assign karmic penalties for anything. The fates did. If karma decides that aall car jackers deserve slow, painful deaths to keep them from running over kittens and baby seals, guess what, they do. That is the thing about karma, its always right.
Maybe karma didn't decide these two where to die for stealing the cobalt-60. Maybe it just decided that was how they where to die for other reasons. But it doesn't matter, they are dead and karma decided that. Just like my karma will decide when its my time and so will yours.
The karma in this case seems rather disproportional. Yeah, what they did was horrible, but death, esp such an ugly death, seems a bit out of balance.
I don't agree. I think the karma is spot on. The karma is not for what they did but what they could have done with it. They could have been intending to use it to make dirty bomb what could have exposed hundreds, if not thousands to such an ugly death.
I would agree with you if they had just stolen a truck load of money or just about anything else. Karma is a bitch though. An I'm sure glad that I'm not them.
That everything you've said concerning Bitcoin should be said of Dollars, too.
Not really. Dollars have one thing behind them that bitcoins do not. The force of law and government backing. People often over look these words on money.
this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private
Do you know what those words mean? It means if I have a debit and I offer you a US Dollar in the US you have to take it as payment. Bitcoins don't have that protection. That fact is one of the key things bitcoin people over look. The fact that the dollar is legal tender where bitcoins are not.
There is no ulterior motive or even sour grapes, just pure speculation at this point. Even most bitcoin "investers" believe that bitcoins are over priced. An they would be correct.
People are hording them like stocks hoping the value will keep going up and up. While bitcoins maybe be a virtual currency and not subject to the whims and regulations of any government they are still affected by the laws of economics, human greed, and insecurity.
The higher the value that bitcoins go the more people will start to get nervous about it and start wanting to sell. When this happens more people will sell and then the market will become over saturated with sellers and not enough buyers. Then the value will crash, free fall is a better word for it.
An since bitcoins are not regulated by any government there are no safety nets in place to stop a bitcoin freefall. I don't even know if it can be stopped because of the way they work.
I'm not just pulling these theories out of my ass ether. There is precedent for just such a collapse. The stock market collapse in the late '20 and early '30 that brought on the great depression. The things that caused it are currently all in place to cause a "great bitcoin depression."
Now I'm not saying that a bitcoin free fall will cause any kind of global economic collapse. Bitcoins are not that popular or even well known to cause that. In reality a bitcoin collapse will probably be barely noticed by most people.
Man, when this cash cow comes crashing to the ground its going to make a huge ass hole. Yes, it will come crashing down and I think it will be soon.
Bitcoins are a nice idea but people are not treating them like money. They are treating them like stocks and commodities. They are not commodities, they are coins and coins are supposed to be spent.
So when the fall does happen, and it will, then maybe we can start using them for what they are supposed to be used for. An not hording them like bunch of fucking dragons.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
