They have absolutely done a cost/benefit analysis. It works like this: "If it does not benefit me personally, directly and financially, then it costs too much."
We can't stop it. All we can do is try to stay alive until they are satisfied they have extracted everything of value, and then rebuild from whatever is left.
You may be surprised to learn that spammers, being criminals, have no issue with stealing money from others to spend on email delivery fees.
Edit: Proof-of-work "email postage" schemes are similarly doomed - The botnet that zero-day'd your mail servers does not care how much electricity they use.
The point to sending the spam is to enable further crime. Do you really think they don't stand to profit from what they promote? Spam is a business like any other, they aren't going to magically disappear just because their advertising costs suddenly become non-zero. Just like how they found ways of shifting the costs of hosting mail servers onto others, they will find ways of shifting the costs of any "email postage" scheme onto others.
This is very basic mathematics. If they have to do other crime to get their hands on the cash it would cost for them to spam, then why spam at all instead of only focusing on the other, more profitable crime?
Spam by definition is mass messaging. If the price per message is higher than the expected return per message, it becomes pointless.
Spam is advertising for their other more profitable criminal enterprises. It's a means to an end, not an end itself. If the goal were simply to send messages, there would be no content.
And the efficiency of spam is so low, that with a high enough cost per message, it would not be a net gain for the spammers. If you pay a million dollars to send a million messages, but only gain $100 000 from the subsequent scams, then it's a bad venture.
Not yet for many tasks. Humans are more flexible, easier to replace (nothing to install etc) and one fte in this type of work is 10 years of robot. Hope it will change soon, but it's not there yet.
Because there are still a lot of things robots simply can't do, like picking items and packaging them. Seems incredibly simple, right? It's not. It's also the reason we won't have self driving vehicles before the collapse of western society.
But then if everyone is out of their job and unemployed ? who will buy the stuff if noone has the money.
I think there is a balance.
Otherwise its going to be 1984 in more than one way (the spying part is already there) (it would also do of that the countries are ready to produce things as much but they won't and limit it to create that constant mood of war to make people not question them / make them weak.)
I think capitalism has fallen. Capitalism is a good system but to its degrees. If you push the accelerator too hard , you get fuedalism.
and we are at feudalism. I am not sure if we can undo this. Let this sink in, the american dream , all our thinkng that capitalism being good and communism being bad fundamentally doesn't matter because we have entered a system where the lines of division are so blurry that they are practically nonexistent.
Having a "job" is not some universal good. What people need is resources/needs met. Refusing to buy factory shoes because it puts cobblers out of business is a losing strategy. Better to support the former cobblers needs than to keep forcing them to make shoes.
Except I just want to say that we don't support the cobblers ?
Would they even be cobblers if they are out of business / are heavily impacted by it (like it wipes out 90% cobblers , making their lives actively worse , forcing them to go into the factory lives which actively sucks for them)
> But then if everyone is out of their job and unemployed ? who will buy the stuff if noone has the money.
Last time I tried to say something like that I got plenty comments calling me for reading too many sci-fi books... I guess some people just lack imagination and experience with exponentials.
It's a motto used by American law enforcement to justify extrajudicial punishment. Since they are the "thin blue line" that separates the public from anarchy, they are justified in acting independently to "protect" us when judges and juries do not "cooperate".
Not just extrajudicial punishment, but overlooking corrupt acts and crimes from fellow officers. That it's more important to maintain the 'brotherhood' than to arrest an officer caught driving home drunk.
Directly, "the thin blue line" expresses the idea that the police are what separates society from chaos.
It doesn't inherently suggest police are justified in acting outside the law themselves, though, of course, various people have suggested this (interestingly, from both a pro-police and anti-police perspective).
It seems obvious to me that the post was using this phrase in the sense of being a thin shield from chaos.
That is a very strange take. The phrase isn't American and has no negative connotation. It has nothing to do with "extrajudicial punishment". It simply refers to the (obvious) fact that what separates societies from anarchy is the "thin blue line" of law enforcement.
Rowan Atkinson had a sitcom set in a London police station in the 90s called "The Thin Blue Line". Are you under the impression he was dogwhistling about extrajudicial violence?
This is what really confused me about the article. I read the mailing list post and had no idea what was controversial about thin blue line. In fact, I thought most of that post was fairly reasonable.
I'd never heard of the extrajudicial punishment aspect of the phrase (though I had heard the phrase itself) and it didn't show up when I googled, but I'm not American, so maybe there's some cultural differences.
"Thin blue line" is a popular phrase of the so called "American culture war". During the heyday of the Black Lives Matter movement, it was used as a self-identification by those who did not agree with criticisms of the nations policing and justice systems. A closely related symbol is the Punisher[0] skull from Marvel comics.
All in all, this could just be another instance of the "culture war" inflaming every other minor disagreement with Ted playfully using the phrase and Marcan misinterpreting it. Or it could be Ted slipping up with their politics. From what I know about Marcan and what can be inferred from his post, they do seem like someone the alt-right would persecute.
Wow, hadn't heard of the punisher skull association either! It seems that it hasn't really traveled that much outside of America.
I had a look, and it seems that Ted Ts'o is American, so I guess we should assume he understands the cultural significance of the phrase (even though I didn't).
All the extrajudicial stuff is pure political and ideological wank by a subset of ideological extremists. Pay no attention to any of it. It's an attempt to redefine the term for narrative creation purposes.
No, not at all. I have several games on my "I Wasted My Money" pile where IAPs or in-game advertisements were added in patches well after release.
Edit: This practice is why policies such as this one being enacted are now necessary. Were it not for policies preventing these sort of practices, they would be far more common.
Hmm it only happened to me once. When EA bought popcap and the turned my plants vs zombies for iOS into an IAP fest. That made me notice that most mobile games have turned free to play and I simply stopped looking for them. No more gaming on my iPad.
Would you mind naming and shaming your own "I Wasted My Money" pile if it's PC titles?
The problem is that I would have to remember them all; It's a metaphorical pile, not a literal one. A large majority are games where the DRM no longer works for whatever reason (Silent Hunter 3 and 4 come to mind), but games where malware/microtransactions/etc. were added after release or not disclosed prior to release included Civilization 6 and Red Orchestra 2. IIRC the latter game specifically is why Valve added the ability to read the EULA prior to purchase, as the ads were only disclosed in the EULA and the EULA was available only after purchase.
(Edit: I don't consider piracy/cracks a solution to DRM. Solutions solve problems. Piracy and cracks are workarounds at best. The problem is still there.)
It may be to your amusement that it is entirely possible to run an ITS KS10 directly on the unfiltered Internet without major issue. I did not even have to run PWORD. It seems that modern automated internet scanners are completely confused that DDT does not produce anything resembling a login prompt, so they either sit and wait for one that never comes (and get killed off by the gunner) or disconnect.
The machine is running right now, but is presently isolated from the internet while a hardware issue is worked on.
SE ITS 1652 Peek 632 1/21/2025 07:38:37 Up time = 1:10:37:08
You worked at Imagen? I had to write a partial Impress emulator a little while ago so I could make waste paper from my lispm. It only supported the image format since that was the only thing the lispm sent when printing the screen, but it beat the heck out of taking photos of a CRT.
Yes, helped start it (first or second employee back in 1980(?)).
Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.
reply