The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by James Angove Comment Spam Here!:

Here, about 2.5-3 miles north of Grant Park, I'd swear that we can almost hear the cheering, although my beloved says otherwise.

Communication is a consistent problem for mass-transit agencies. Chicago's CTA has recently gotten quite a bit better; among other things they've joined the CTA_Alerts SMS group, but they still have a hell of a time telling people what's going on in a timely manner, and in my experience both SF Muni and King County Metro (Seattle) have very similar institutional blinders.

Maintenance is a different problem, because its damn near impossible to extract money from the FTA to do something other than build highways, and if you're luck maybe new construction. But funds for capital repairs and upgrades are in damn short supply. Coupled with the way that funding is allocated tends to pull money toward new projects and away from existing infrastructure.

Dave Bell: Actually what this indicates to me is that our parties are getting stronger, which I don't have much of a problem with as such. (That is, where the line falls tells you something about the nature of the parties. But the fact of the line tells you that the parties are getting stronger)

Congresscritter. God I loath that term. If it wasn't born in the one of the "all government is hopeless corrupt" schools of thought, it surely should have been. It serves on every level to demean and dismiss, on the one hand, the idea that government can ever be a tool in which good people can do good things, and on the other, the idea that one ought to expect good things out government generally or the congress specifically. You don't look for help from "critters" and you can hardly hold them to account for not rising above their natures.

Kris Alexander is a Texas Emergency Managment (well, City of Austin, now, but formerly State of Texas) guy, who has a fairly interesting blog.

http://alexandertheaverage.blogspot.com/

There is essentially no possiblity that NO will be moved or abandoned. For all it may be reasonable, it just isn't what happens. Once human beings are in a place, no matter how bad the devestation gets, we become essentially impossible to dislodge. That isn't always a good thing, but it is a thing. We don't leave San Francisco after the great earthquake, and I can't think of any more examples, but they're there.

And since they're staying (or coming back, or whatever) they'll salvage every peice of the old place they can, and graft the new place onto the old one. No matter how little there is to build on, they'll call it rebuilding, and pretend the new place is the same place that the old one was, and sooner or later it'll be true.

David B.:

Didn't Jimmy Breslin already cover that?

Michelle: I'm disappointed because I'd like to feel like there is a place for me in the church, but its become increasingly obvious to me that the church is rejecting everything I value about it.

And as I just obsevered elsewhere, any time I find myself thinking "Well, maybe he'll die soon" as an attempt to hang onto optimism, I get kind of depressed.

Fuck.

At least he's old.

Graydon: Bit hard on the open source folks, I'd imagine. (I can think of several different ways in which it might be hard, and I wouldn't like to guess which one(s) it would be, but I'm sure it would be hard).

Aiglet: I'm not at all sure I want to require people to get their email from only their ISP. I don't run a mail server, but I have a friend who does, and I send port 25 traffic to it all day long. In general I'm really nervous about requiring ISP's to inspect the contents of traffic across their network's. I don't want a small number of very large companies deciding what kind of traffic is acceptable and denying all else. Its not what would have to happen, but I'm fairly confident its what would happen if we create a situation in which they will be punished for allowing the wrong kind of traffic.

Aside, I note that the post that started us off dealt specifically with comment spam. None of the technical solutions I've seen proposed address that kind of spam. Spam is in the end a social (or anti-social) problem, and its not going to be solvable either through purely technical or purely political means.

Greg: you never know. I picked up Matt Hughes latest (Black Brillion) because I know of him as an entertaining and valuable participant in another communications space that I follow. It wasn't just that --I wanted something to read and needed it right then, the jacket copy seemed okay and not especially cliche, and I rather liked the cover painting. But the knowing it was his book helped a lot.

(Although, to be fair, there are a few authors who've managed to be such complete asshats in online forums that I am unlikely to ever purchase a book of theirs again. But more authors have gotten my money by being interesting participants than have lost it by being irritating.)

Graydon: Can you expand on the backbone portion of your statement? I can't see a way to do something like that that doesn't involve taking a much closer look at packets than I would like to do, but the world is full of things I don't know enough about. Optimally you don't even want to do much routing in the network core if you can possibly avoid it, much less detailed stateful examinations.

For what its worth, I actually have a real aversion to purchasing stuff online; I certainly wouldn't purchase soemthing from an unknow author if I haven't been in a position to thumb through it in a book store. (And online samples don't help this. I'm not interesting in you picking the sample(s), I'm interested in me picking the sameple(s)).

Mostly I just like going and looking at the stuff in person vastly better.

Lisa: I'm actually setting up a Flowscan server right now, so I'm well aware its possible. And I know metered bandwidth is common between carriers. I had been under the impression that what was common in Europe was metered connectivity, rather than genuine metered bandwidth. What I think is hard isn't collecting usage data (although I can see some challenges -- are there any metered DSL connections that you're aware of?) as that it would be hard to collect the kind of usage data that you'd need to defeat spammers, which as far as I can tell would either require that you meter on the backbone or that you close the internet to all unmetered connections.

Teresa: As has been observed by others, spam isn't really ameniable to a polical solution. I'm an advocate of preposterously hash penalities, but thats a product of that fact that it pisses me off and I want revenge, not a serious attempt to address the issue.

Kel: I suppose metered bandwidth is possible, but a) its radically at odds with the trend over the last decade. Additionally, while metered email might have worked, maybe (it is at least not wildly unsound in principle) to stop spam without destroying the utility of email, I don't think the same is true of metering bandwidth at the consumer level. Unless the cost is trivial, its going to have a chilling effect on private uses of the internet, and if it is trival, it won't do anything at all.

(I also strongly suspect that it would be hard to implement with current tools; I don't think current netflow standards are quite up to the task).

Brett:

I'm going to be perhaps exessively direct here:

Its not that we don't understand your goals. Its not that we can't understand your methods. Its that your methods are utterly at odds with the underlying realities of the american electoral system. This offends those of us in the reality based community.

(Fundamentally, third parties are non-viable in our system because the formation of our goverment is not closely coupled to the legislative elections. Note that all the nations with mulitple parties have some member of the legislature in a position of serious executive power).

The reason we get so pissy about this is because ignorance held to with sufficent determination qualifies as an act of will.

James:

"Canadian Superpower" was actually a step back from my earlier "Canadian Hegenomy." Just goes to show. But come on. You are actively seeking first and second strike capablity (a move I applaud, don't get me wrong, athough you probably shouldn't mention that in the same letter wherein you suggest strip mining the good bits of the American population for finished units) and, as soon as that's done, grab all of the major population centers north of the Mason-Dixon line. Perhaps being a super power isn't your goal, but it seems to be your destination. I'm okay with that; you couldn't do any worse a job with it than we have.

[incidently this whole subthread, here and elsewhere, has filled me with a strange sort of gallows hopefulness. So, um, thanks]

Xopher:

Hehe. And I was just commenting on electrolite that until I get over the bitter, I've just been dumped feeling, I'm going to hope that James Nicoll's dream of the Canadian superpower comes to success.

Teresa:

As someone just (and quite possible not, after all) outside the draft range, with four siblings who aren't, I want to take this chance to thank you for your support.

Hey, good job! You got way more out of them than I did. I got the same call some days ago (last friday, I think). I wish I could recall if it was the same name that you got. Same sub-contininent, though.

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