Thursday, October 23, 2003

Spam Throttle. I've written on this before, but it's worth repeating: My feeling is that the internet as a whole is going to evolve towards a trusted/untrusted scenario.  Big vendors like AOL and MSN will be "in the club", so to speak -- their mail systems will "trust" each other, and accept email at full speed. Other systems, particularly those connecting for the first time, will be untrusted.  Those systems will be severly limited in the number of emails that will be accepted.  A Bayesian filter can be applied to the email coming in from any new connection.  The filter doesn't stop the email; rather, it builds an approximation of how much spam is coming in over that particular connection.  The odd false positive isn't going to hurt, that way. As the system gains trust, which can happen only by having time elapse and by having a low spam percentage, trust will gradually accrue, and email traffic will be permitted to have progressively higher volumes. The beauty of this situation is that you still accept email from just about anywhere, but you don't _trust_ that source, until that source proves itself. It doesn't take very much to implement a solution like this.  Any organization that failed to implement it or have a strong anti-spam policy would find itself being on a lot of untrusted lists, and unable to send very much email.  Simply being a transfer point for spam will also get you untrusted, which means that you'll have to pay attention. 5:38:59 PM     | comment [] | trackback []

Terri Schiavo. In response to Dave's comment: Consider this possibility: The court system got it right.  I've read medical opinions on this case, which state that the statistical probabilities of coming out of a coma like that are essentially nil.  She will never come out of it, and that's that.  In addition, the behaviors that are described as "lifelike" are the hallmark of her condition.  Scans of her brain show that there really isn't much left of it, in a physical sense.  Most of it has atrophied, except for the autonomic systems. So the court may have gotten it right. That being said, I completely do not understand why the trust fund would revert to her husband.  If the trust fund was established to handle her care and feeding and it is no longer required, it should revert to an appropriate charity.  I can't understand why he gets it. I get the sense that he just wants her dead so he can have the money.  That part is obvious.  But it's not the real question.  If you set him aside completely, and even set her parents aside, and look simply at the medical situation, what is the right thing to do? The answer is probably exactly what the court ended up deciding...that removing the feed tube is the only humane thing to do.  She once was a person.  She isn't any more. And dude?  You need to be a little more careful about slinging around the old "Nazi" insult.  That's a pretty big gun to pull out.  Are you sure you want to get into that?  I'll let it go. For those that didn't realize it, the entry in question was about El Presidente's habit of executing people like crazy in Texas.  I just found it ironic that a Bush governor would intervene in a case like this, where there is a difficult balance of ethical issues, and not give a crap about the twenty or so innocents that, if you know anything about probability, have been executed in Texas under GW's "leadership", which apparently consisted of not even reading the clemency petitions put before him.  Given the known error rate of our court system vis-a-vis capital cases, we must do better... Yes, I realize the double irony of writing about the errors in the court system in a post that asks that you consider that the court got it right. 5:08:15 PM     | comment [] | trackback []