Re: anybody else been spammed by "no-ip.com" yet?
Scott Granados <scott@graphidelix.net> writes:
No I think your message illustrates things pretty well. I guess the fundimental differenc here is not only does it cost usually very little to receive these messages it costs even less infact dramatically to send spam. It seems there is no real reason for the spammer to be concerned with whether the mail is properly targeted or not so a full on flood is possible and the leads generated by this flood percentage wise have to be many factors less than the percentage of success in snailmail.
It does not cost "very little" to recieve spam. At my real job (ie, not seastrom.com), we're running a very nice (but expensive) commercial product to filter this stuff, and in a given time quantum during which we processed 1.9 million messages, spam and virii accounted for about 600k (32% was the last number I saw from our stats script). It's reasonable to assume, since some unwanted messages slip through, that we're over a third of all email being UCE. So we have a choice: pay for the (very nice but expensive) commercial product, or add forty percent to our mail spool disk farm and extra cpus and ram in the mail server farm to deal with the additional influx. In the numbers we're talking about, bandwidth costs become measurable too. Spam is theft, plain and simple. ---Rob
On 4 May 2002, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
It does not cost "very little" to recieve spam.
It costs the end-user very little to recieve spam.
At my real job (ie, not seastrom.com), we're running a very nice (but expensive) commercial product to filter this stuff, and in a given time quantum during which we processed 1.9 million messages, spam and virii accounted for about 600k (32% was the last number I saw from our stats script). It's reasonable to assume, since some unwanted messages slip through, that we're over a third of all email being UCE.
So we have a choice: pay for the (very nice but expensive) commercial product, or add forty percent to our mail spool disk farm and extra cpus and ram in the mail server farm to deal with the additional influx. In the numbers we're talking about, bandwidth costs become measurable too.
Whether we like it or not however, this is a cost of doing business now, and is a normal part of determining your cost of goods sold (at least it *should* be).
Spam is theft, plain and simple.
Spam is a reality that none of us, either alone or in concert, will ever be able to eradicate. That makes the general gnashing of teeth == tilting at windmills. Our time is probably the most expensive part of an ISPs "spam cleanups" budget - automating a filter system (for those who specifically ask for it, of course) via the purchase of services from Vixie or your favorite equivalent is likely to be a reasonably inexpensive alternative to having us spinning our wheels. <asbestos underwear in place ;->
---Rob
-- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org If Governments really want us to behave like civilized human beings, they should give serious consideration towards setting a better example: Ruling by force, rather than consensus; the unrestrained application of unjust laws (which the victim-populations were never allowed input on in the first place); the State policy of justice only for the rich and elected; the intentional abuse and occassionally destruction of entire populations merely to distract an already apathetic and numb electorate... This type of demogoguery must surely wipe out the fascist United States as surely as it wiped out the fascist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The views expressed here are mine, and NOT those of my employers, associates, or others. Besides, if it *were* the opinion of all of those people, I doubt there would be a problem to bitch about in the first place... --------------------------------------------------------------------
Also sprach measl@mfn.org
On 4 May 2002, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
It does not cost "very little" to recieve spam.
It costs the end-user very little to recieve spam.
[...]
Whether we like it or not however, this is a cost of doing business now, and is a normal part of determining your cost of goods sold (at least it *should* be).
COGS gets passed on (eventually) to the end-user, therefore (sorry, can't make the 3 dots in a triangle symbol with ASCII), it does cost the end-user to recieve spam. Those costs may not be *monetary* costs, the industry typical dial-up access price ($19.95) really hasn't changed over the years, but costs can be measured in other ways...lack of other services that might have developed had ISPs not had to bear the brunt of the cost of dealing with spam...for example. Cost (in time) of dealing with the spam themself, cost of other services that the ISP provides may have gone up (web hosting, available disk space, etc.). Costs of development time of ISPs and other developers to develop tools to deal with spam that might have been otherwise used to develop other cool tools for the end-user. IgLou, for example, has put a lot of time and effort into developing a service that we have called "Mailblock" who's whole purpose is to block spam for customers (user various prepackaged tools and pre-defined rules to block common spam characteristics, as well as the ability for the end-user to define their own rules to block spam that they personally are gettings, etc. all from a nice web-based front-end). What sort of services would we have had time to develop if we hadn't had to fart around building Mailblock? Who knows...but the end-user not having whatever services that we might have come up with is rightfully considered a cost. The costs are there, period. They may not be monetary costs, but they are costs, nonetheless.
Spam is a reality that none of us, either alone or in concert, will ever be able to eradicate.
No, but, in concert, and in concert with legislative bodies, there is the possibility that we can eventually put a serious dent into it and either get the level of spamming back down to a more reasonable level, or have mechanisms in place to where we can recover some of those costs that are incurred (both as ISP's and as end-users). No, we won't ever be able to get rid of all of it, and I wouldn't want to as the steps that would have to be taken to do so would almost assuredly result in abridging First Ammendment rights (for us 'murkin's anyway), but curbing the rampant levels of spam that we're dealing with now will be a benefit to all...*INCLUDING* legitimate mass mailers (ie, people that are sending email to legitimate opt-in lists...few and far between, I know, but they are out there)
automating a filter system (for those who specifically ask for it, of course) via the purchase of services from Vixie or your favorite equivalent is likely to be a reasonably inexpensive alternative to having us spinning our wheels. <asbestos underwear in place ;->
In the short term, yes. And in the short term, ISPs such as us here at IgLou, use those automated systems (such as our MailBlock) as differentiation to draw customers to us. Long term, however, that's not a solution. -- Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456
In the immortal words of measl@mfn.org (measl@mfn.org):
So we have a choice: pay for the (very nice but expensive) commercial product, or add forty percent to our mail spool disk farm and extra cpus and ram in the mail server farm to deal with the additional influx. In the numbers we're talking about, bandwidth costs become measurable too.
Whether we like it or not however, this is a cost of doing business now, and is a normal part of determining your cost of goods sold (at least it *should* be).
We can grit our teeth and make that statement now, when spam is (handwave, guess, maybe) 30% of our incoming mail load. It's going to become a lot harder to make as that percentage approaches 99. Which it will, and probably sooner than any of us want to think about. Even the most naive of IT managers will, after a few rounds of budgeting, notice that red ink is hemorrhaging from a single line-item, and take steps to correct it. We are rapidly approaching the point where ANY alternative to SMTP is going to start looking _very_ attractive to the people who sign our paychecks. When that point is reached, they will very likely grab at the first product available that looks like it will still allow them to communicate with a large fraction of their customers. If we would prefer that product _not_ to be based on MSN, Passport and Hailstorm (or whatever half-baked alternative Sun and AOL cook up), it would behoove us to start work on an open, standardized, IETF-sanctioned solution sooner rather than later. Just sayin, -n -----------------------------------------------------------<memory@blank.org> "`G.I. Jane' is a demeaning, violent, bloody workout video. Some brief nudity, bad language and a false sense of human resilience. Rated R." (--CNN) <http://blank.org/memory/>---------------------------------------------------
> We can grit our teeth and make that statement now, when spam is > (handwave, guess, maybe) 30% of our incoming mail load. > > It's going to become a lot harder to make as that percentage > approaches 99. Which it will, and probably sooner than any of us want > to think about. FWIW, my mother got a new email account a two weeks ago, which I just got around to setting her machine up to log into this afternoon. There were 817 pieces of mail in her inbox, of which seven weren't spam. That comes to 99.14%. I'm sure that'll go down a bit as she begins to use the account more, but I doubt it'll go down much. For it to go down to 30%, she'd need to receive 953 pieces of valid email each week, and I'd guess the actual number, from looking at her prior email account, is closer to 15. Which would still put us at nearly 97% spam. -Bill
I have to say I think you're doing something wrong somewhere.. excluding official role addresses I receive a handful (15ish?) spam mails per day and I've been using some of my email addresses for years. A couple are used on websites so they are published. Perhaps to an extent I'm lucky, but I watch where I put my email address, tend to use a different user when submitting web forms so I can filter if necessary.. I've noticed the worst offenders for taking email addresses and distributing them are things like search engine submits and online games. All 'official/business' type sites seem to be responsible with their email databases.. Steve On Sun, 5 May 2002, Bill Woodcock wrote:
> We can grit our teeth and make that statement now, when spam is > (handwave, guess, maybe) 30% of our incoming mail load. > > It's going to become a lot harder to make as that percentage > approaches 99. Which it will, and probably sooner than any of us want > to think about.
FWIW, my mother got a new email account a two weeks ago, which I just got around to setting her machine up to log into this afternoon. There were 817 pieces of mail in her inbox, of which seven weren't spam. That comes to 99.14%. I'm sure that'll go down a bit as she begins to use the account more, but I doubt it'll go down much. For it to go down to 30%, she'd need to receive 953 pieces of valid email each week, and I'd guess the actual number, from looking at her prior email account, is closer to 15. Which would still put us at nearly 97% spam.
-Bill
On 4 May 2002, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
Scott Granados <scott@graphidelix.net> writes:
No I think your message illustrates things pretty well. I guess the fundimental differenc here is not only does it cost usually very little to receive these messages it costs even less infact dramatically to send spam. It seems there is no real reason for the spammer to be concerned with whether the mail is properly targeted or not so a full on flood is possible and the leads generated by this flood percentage wise have to be many factors less than the percentage of success in snailmail.
It does not cost "very little" to recieve spam. At my real job (ie, not seastrom.com), we're running a very nice (but expensive) commercial product to filter this stuff, and in a given time quantum during which we processed 1.9 million messages, spam and virii accounted for about 600k (32% was the last number I saw from our stats script). It's reasonable to assume, since some unwanted messages slip through, that we're over a third of all email being UCE.
<trollishly> I'd like the costs quantified.. Servers and disks are expensive, but if they handle a ten million messages during their lifetime, the amortized cost PER MESSAGE is cheap. How cheap is it? I bullshitted about $.00022/message with Emails's are 10kb. $1/gig (bandwidth) and $10/gig (disk capacity, falsly assuming email is never deleted.) $0 (for the server, cause I can't guess within an order of magnitude.) I bullshitted about $.00022/spam with Spams's are 10kb. $1/gig (bandwidth) and $10/gig (disk capacity, falsly assuming spam is never deleted.) $0 (for the server, cause I can't guess within an order of magnitude.) What do you guess for the amortized cost/spam? ``A modern email infrastructure costing $XXX/day (amortized over 2 years) can handle YYY messages, thus the average cost/message is $XXX/YYY.'' </trollishly> I've not seen quantified numbers bandied about in the past NANOG spam-flamewars, so maybe this isn't beating a dead horse. I do find it amusing that nobody responded to my more relevant and intended thrust, about how putting a 'sender pays receiver for email' could cause a variety of new abuses of the email system. Scott
Yo Scott! On Sat, 4 May 2002, Scott A Crosby wrote:
I'd like the costs quantified.. Servers and disks are expensive, but if they handle a ten million messages during their lifetime, the amortized cost PER MESSAGE is cheap.
I guess at a school you get free labor for setup, admin, backup, tech support, etc. FOr the rest of us those are major costs you left out. RGDS GARY --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gary E. Miller Rellim 20340 Empire Blvd, Suite E-3, Bend, OR 97701 gem@rellim.com Tel:+1(541)382-8588 Fax: +1(541)382-8676
On Sat, May 04, 2002 at 11:57:04AM -0700, Gary E. Miller wrote:
Yo Scott!
On Sat, 4 May 2002, Scott A Crosby wrote:
I'd like the costs quantified.. Servers and disks are expensive, but if they handle a ten million messages during their lifetime, the amortized cost PER MESSAGE is cheap.
I guess at a school you get free labor for setup, admin, backup, tech support, etc. FOr the rest of us those are major costs you left out.
Correct, The people that call in and say "Please delete my mailbox as i can't download anything from it because my mail client freaks out". that costs real $$$, since they want an 800# to dial, and those support costs are not directly tangible to spam but it's very complicated to add up. Most providers needed to build a custom mail system to get past 30-50k users as you can't run that on one beefy system. You need to keep duplicates away, reliable delivery and good responses for checking your mail. Then at this size you need to be integrated into your billing system otherwise your required resources to manage your isp grow very quickly. the costs of smtp() and pop3() are all related here. If you go back 10 years ago, you did not need a dedicated abuse/security staff to police your users. These are all intereleated. - jared -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.
<trollishly>
What do you guess for the amortized cost/spam?
</trollishly>
a cost that you are forced to pay in order to enrich somebody else is theft, no matter how microscopic the payment might be. "we all know what (they) are, now we're just arguing about the price."
I do find it amusing that nobody responded to my more relevant and intended thrust, about how putting a 'sender pays receiver for email' could cause a variety of new abuses of the email system.
on the one hand, you're right that any micropayment system would have to be very carefully thought out and even more carefully implemented, lest it open the door to many and varied forms of microabuse. on the other hand, that doesn't disprove the case, since even in your example it would merely cause people to become a LOT more careful about they mail they sent. that CAN'T be a bad thing. bill washburn's XNS effort, while nowhere near ready for critical review, shows some of the throught that needs to occur to make micropayments not be a bad deal for one or both parties. www.xns.org has an overview and www.onename.com goes so far as to say With an OneName solution, you control and manage all relevant identity data, with no need to involve a third party in your business relationships. You can customize authentication and permission structures for every business relationship and automate specific types of data exchange, both within and across the corporate firewall. These same permission structures provide an easy way for customers to provide consent for the usage of their personal data. note that i'm not advocating the approach, but rather, holding it up as one example of how personal messaging will have to work at "full scale."
*blink* So far, other than Jared Mauch <jared@puck.Nether.net>'s calculation where he neither confirmed nor disputed $.02/email, I've yet to see *one* quantified per-message price bandied about.. Are you also unsure of the per-message costs of email? I'd thought I'd find *someone* who could quantify a cost.... I certainly don't know and I want enlightenment too! I'm surprised you can't quantify the per-message costs either. On 4 May 2002, Paul Vixie wrote:
I do find it amusing that nobody responded to my more relevant and intended thrust, about how putting a 'sender pays receiver for email' could cause a variety of new abuses of the email system.
on the one hand, you're right that any micropayment system would have to be very carefully thought out and even more carefully implemented, lest it open the door to many and varied forms of microabuse.
Leading to more subtle abuses...... or benefits? Will we have arbitrage trading by sending email through an intermediary for a lower fee. Say, A charges $.03 email from B.. A charges $.01 email from C.. C charges B $.025 per email and forwards it A. C spends $.005 in overhead and keeps the $.010 difference as profit.
on the other hand, that doesn't disprove the case, since even in your example it would merely cause people to become a LOT more careful about they mail they sent. that CAN'T be a bad thing.
Apart from the balkanization of the lifeblood of the internet's communication systes, there's things like viruses, worms, zombie computers, etc. There's also the transactional cost.. If a computer gets infected by a worm, who pays for the email it sends out? Who pays for the argument of who's responsible for the costs? Who's responsible for the tech support? What if the user can't pay... Will ISP's have to insure themselves against email worms? Will people with insecure email clients be subsidized by those with more secure clients? Is that theft too?
bill washburn's XNS effort, while nowhere near ready for critical review, shows some of the throught that needs to occur to make micropayments not be a bad deal for one or both parties. www.xns.org has an overview and www.onename.com goes so far as to say
Interesting.. Reading it over now. Thanks!
<trollishly>
What do you guess for the amortized cost/spam?
</trollishly>
a cost that you are forced to pay in order to enrich somebody else is theft, no matter how microscopic the payment might be. "we all know what (they) are, now we're just arguing about the price."
Its a cost of doing business. Its like restrooms in restraunts, a necessary evil. You can try to minimize the costs and stop abuse. But the only way to avoid it is to leave the business entirely. Will you, like Donald Knuth, be giving up your email address? I'm still hoping somone out there can quantify those per-message costs of email and spam. Scott
On Sat, May 04, 2002 at 04:36:40PM -0400, Scott A Crosby wrote:
*blink*
So far, other than Jared Mauch <jared@puck.Nether.net>'s calculation where he neither confirmed nor disputed $.02/email, I've yet to see *one* quantified per-message price bandied about..
Are you also unsure of the per-message costs of email? I'd thought I'd find *someone* who could quantify a cost.... I certainly don't know and I want enlightenment too!
I'm surprised you can't quantify the per-message costs either.
Well, my system (puck.nether.net) only gets upgraded about once every 1.5-2 years. It's not a pure e-mail server, but let me give you an idea of my costs based on current replacement cost: Operating System: $0 machine: case $65 disks $150 (aproximite cost today) (1x4g ide, 1x45g ide, 1x40g ide[7200rpm]) cpu $100 moterboard $100 memory $250 video, ethernet, etc.. $150 --- cost: $815 Now, i'll take a stab in the dark and say that I could (if i wanted to) support 5000 users (mail) on this system with no problems. I've processed 6153 e-mail messages today with an average size of 5k for my current 186 users. (this includes sending out mail for lists i host as well as delivery to mailboxes of nanog and lists they are on). The system costs me (over 2 years) ~$1.116/day To instantly deliver one message would take 40Kb/s at an estimated 8204 messages/day that doesn't count that much for overall cost, but it is there. That's .09 msgs/sec average. Be sure to scale this for your local site of course. So, lets scale this up: (assume Using 40g of disk for mail) So multiply by ~26.88 to take my 186 users up to 5k. That takes me to 2.55 messages/sec and 104Kb/s constant bit rate. 104Kb/s @ $100/Mb= $10.4 in bandwidth costs. (or ~$0.0000004/msg) If on average, my users fetch their mail once every two days and fetch it all at that point, I'm looking at needing to store ~440k messages on disk, and on backup media also. (I'll leave that cost out right now). Storage cost/msg = ~$0.000005 (system cost per day / 864000)/2.55 Taking these two into account, it has a low cost/day/msg. I don't have any support staff. Add in a few (3) people @ 65k/yr to answer phones for my 5k users that increases costs by $534/day or $0.00242135/msg You can see where the real costs come in. By needing someone to go in and clear out their mailboxes when there are problems, it increases costs drastically. There are system costs, mine is very cheap. If I were to price it more realistically with some scsi disk, controller, etc.. the cost/msg goes up based on that. There are some obvious user-number bars that are created when you require more than one system to handle mail. Assume 1 mail server per 10-15k users (depending on mail load) at $1500/system (about double my costs, but serving 3x users) and you do easily see where these costs/msg of the spammer start to hurt you.
On 4 May 2002, Paul Vixie wrote:
I do find it amusing that nobody responded to my more relevant and intended thrust, about how putting a 'sender pays receiver for email' could cause a variety of new abuses of the email system.
on the one hand, you're right that any micropayment system would have to be very carefully thought out and even more carefully implemented, lest it open the door to many and varied forms of microabuse.
Leading to more subtle abuses...... or benefits?
Will we have arbitrage trading by sending email through an intermediary for a lower fee.
Say, A charges $.03 email from B.. A charges $.01 email from C..
C charges B $.025 per email and forwards it A. C spends $.005 in overhead and keeps the $.010 difference as profit.
The billing PIC in your new backbone router? It'll tell the difference between streaming video udp packets and voice to make sure the various people get charged the correct long-distance rate too?
on the other hand, that doesn't disprove the case, since even in your example it would merely cause people to become a LOT more careful about they mail they sent. that CAN'T be a bad thing.
Apart from the balkanization of the lifeblood of the internet's communication systes, there's things like viruses, worms, zombie computers, etc.
There's also the transactional cost.. If a computer gets infected by a worm, who pays for the email it sends out? Who pays for the argument of who's responsible for the costs? Who's responsible for the tech support?
What if the user can't pay... Will ISP's have to insure themselves against email worms? Will people with insecure email clients be subsidized by those with more secure clients? Is that theft too?
Communisim :)
Its a cost of doing business. Its like restrooms in restraunts, a necessary evil. You can try to minimize the costs and stop abuse. But the only way to avoid it is to leave the business entirely. Will you, like Donald Knuth, be giving up your email address?
I'm still hoping somone out there can quantify those per-message costs of email and spam.
Scott
-- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.
So far, other than Jared Mauch <jared@puck.Nether.net>'s calculation where he neither confirmed nor disputed $.02/email, I've yet to see *one* quantified per-message price bandied about..
I didn't even try. As a matter of principle, I reject the possibility that others ought to be allowed to shift their "cost of goods sold" to me without my permission. And as a matter of scale, spam is something that everyone on the net can't do -- and I'm not interested in learning the equilibrium where adding one more spammer would not increase the total profitability of spam because noone anywhere can stand the stench of their own inbox any more.
Are you also unsure of the per-message costs of email? I'd thought I'd find *someone* who could quantify a cost.... I certainly don't know and I want enlightenment too!
I'm surprised you can't quantify the per-message costs either.
Because it makes no difference to the argument at hand, I just don't care. I'll pay whatever it costs to make personal messaging work for me. I will not sit quietly and have stolen from me what it costs to make spam work for others. The amount does not matter unless it's provably zero.
on the other hand, that doesn't disprove the case, since even in your example it would merely cause people to become a LOT more careful about they mail they sent. that CAN'T be a bad thing.
Apart from the balkanization of the lifeblood of the internet's communication systes, there's things like viruses, worms, zombie computers, etc.
Then, folks will be more careful about what mail client they use, right?
There's also the transactional cost.. If a computer gets infected by a worm, who pays for the email it sends out? Who pays for the argument of who's responsible for the costs? Who's responsible for the tech support?
Then, folks will be more careful about what mail client they use, right?
What if the user can't pay... Will ISP's have to insure themselves against email worms? Will people with insecure email clients be subsidized by those with more secure clients? Is that theft too?
Then, folks will be more careful about what mail client they use, right?
But the only way to avoid it is to leave the business entirely. Will you, like Donald Knuth, be giving up your email address?
Once there's a way to provably know that the sender agrees to my terms (which includes forfeiting a guaranteed bond if they send mail in violation of those terms) then I'll be giving up SMTP as it exists today, yes. (Sort of like I had to give up TELNET, and for very similar reasons.)
I'm still hoping somone out there can quantify those per-message costs of email and spam.
Don't hole your breath while you wait, you could turn blue. Because unless the costs are provably zero or unless you intend to pay those costs for the rest of us, then the costs only matter when proving damages against spammers in court. Spam will still be unilateral cost shifting ("theft") no matter what number you calculate.
In a message written on Sat, May 04, 2002 at 04:36:40PM -0400, Scott A Crosby wrote:
So far, other than Jared Mauch <jared@puck.Nether.net>'s calculation where he neither confirmed nor disputed $.02/email, I've yet to see *one* quantified per-message price bandied about..
It doesn't matter. I will suggest that as long as the cost of e-mail advertisements is cheaper than the cost of snail mail advertisements you will get more e-mail advertisements than snail mail ones. Even at $0.18/message (or whatever the bulk rate is these days), plus the cost of paper, printers, machines/people to stuff envelops I still get 2-3 unwanted physical ads in my snail mail box every day. Even if spammers had to pay $0.05, $0.02, $0.0002, or whatever the cost is determined to be you will get spam. Lots of spam. In fact, if the spammers did have to pay it would eliminate the 'theft of resources' argument, and I bet spam would triple as more business consider it a legal and ethical way of doing business. Sadly, I don't see the virtual world working any better than the real world. The only real difference at the moment is the type of products being sold. In the end there will be a mechanism to make spam legal. It may be micro-payments, it may be something else; but business will find a way to do it. Then your spam will change from "Viagra" and "Live xxxx Girls" to "Get your Capitol 1 No Hassel Card" and "Publishers Clearinghouse wants to award you $1 Million!" Maybe that wouldn't be so bad, the spam would be less offensive. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
On 4 May 2002, Paul Vixie wrote:
a cost that you are forced to pay in order to enrich somebody else is theft, no matter how microscopic the payment might be. "we all know what (they) are, now we're just arguing about the price."
"There will be a day when folks will need to pay to transit email" (Paul Vixie, 1998). Still working on that better mouse trap? --Mitch NetSide
"There will be a day when folks will need to pay to transit email" (Paul Vixie, 1998).
Still working on that better mouse trap?
well, other than that i wish i could charge _you_ for the spam i get that's due to the several MAILTO:paul@vix.com's on your www.dotcomeon.com site, no. it's not my mouse of choice.
Hello Randy , On Sat, 4 May 2002, Randy Bush wrote:
a cost that you are forced to pay in order to enrich somebody else is theft
i thought it was called 'taxes' :-)/2
Theft/Taxes nearly the same . ;-) JimL +------------------------------------------------------------------+ | James W. Laferriere | System Techniques | Give me VMS | | Network Engineer | P.O. Box 854 | Give me Linux | | babydr@baby-dragons.com | Coudersport PA 16915 | only on AXP | +------------------------------------------------------------------+
On Sat, 4 May 2002, Mr. James W. Laferriere wrote:
Theft/Taxes nearly the same . ;-) JimL
Really? What's the difference?
+------------------------------------------------------------------+ | James W. Laferriere | System Techniques | Give me VMS | | Network Engineer | P.O. Box 854 | Give me Linux | | babydr@baby-dragons.com | Coudersport PA 16915 | only on AXP | +------------------------------------------------------------------+
-- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org If Governments really want us to behave like civilized human beings, they should give serious consideration towards setting a better example: Ruling by force, rather than consensus; the unrestrained application of unjust laws (which the victim-populations were never allowed input on in the first place); the State policy of justice only for the rich and elected; the intentional abuse and occassionally destruction of entire populations merely to distract an already apathetic and numb electorate... This type of demogoguery must surely wipe out the fascist United States as surely as it wiped out the fascist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The views expressed here are mine, and NOT those of my employers, associates, or others. Besides, if it *were* the opinion of all of those people, I doubt there would be a problem to bitch about in the first place... --------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello J.A. Terranson , On Sat, 4 May 2002 measl@mfn.org wrote:
On Sat, 4 May 2002, Mr. James W. Laferriere wrote:
Theft/Taxes nearly the same . ;-) JimL Really? What's the difference?
I was giving the thief the benefit of doubt ;-) . JimL +------------------------------------------------------------------+ | James W. Laferriere | System Techniques | Give me VMS | | Network Engineer | P.O. Box 854 | Give me Linux | | babydr@baby-dragons.com | Coudersport PA 16915 | only on AXP | +------------------------------------------------------------------+
Theft/Taxes nearly the same . ;-) JimL Really? What's the difference? I was giving the thief the benefit of doubt ;-) . JimL
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm See the part on "public goods" problem and Pareto optimality :) --vadim
participants (15)
-
Bill Woodcock -
Gary E. Miller -
Jared Mauch -
Jeff Mcadams -
Leo Bicknell -
measl＠mfn.org -
Mitch Halmu -
Mr. James W. Laferriere -
Nathan J. Mehl -
Paul Vixie -
Randy Bush -
rs＠seastrom.com -
Scott A Crosby -
Stephen J. Wilcox -
Vadim Antonov