- While I doubt the sky is the same color in Mr. Granderson's world as it is in mine, I have to admit that some of his suggestions in this column made me go "Hmmmm..."
- I do not like malingerers, nor either do I like frauds. Neither does friend Ambulance Driver, as this post will so richly attest. Slip'n'fall thespians like the one in his tale are what made my dealings with insurance companies such a pain when I actually had bones hanging out of my leg. Negotiate settlements for too many "soft tissue injuries" and even multiple compound fractures become suspect, I guess.
- To those of you who hit the tip jar recently, many thanks. It would have been a Ramen-flavored month after my excessive exuberance with the Smith. I'm going to take a group portrait of it with the other domestic pocket pistols today if it gets warm enough. There's an interesting story in there if I can figure the right angle, about how all the US gun companies got into self-loaders and all save Colt got out again by the end of the twenties and America was revolverville for another thirty-plus years.
- Since Jay G didn't turn into a pillar of salt, I'm going to toy with turning off the verdammt word verification as well. If I'm not buried under waves of spambots, it will be good riddance. (ETA: It took less than twenty minutes for the first Cyrillic bot-generated spam to hit the filter...)
Friday, April 06, 2012
Tab Clearing...
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26 comments:
testing testing... hey you just capped off a great week for me
That's me, trailblazer. Although I have a sneaking suspicion I'm high in cholesterol...
Oh, and what I've noticed is that spam goes through the roof - *BUT* it's all caught by Blogger's spam filter.
I've got it set so that I have to approve comments on posts > 2 weeks old. This combination seems to weed out spam from getting posted...
Re:'Hmmm." Since there's about 1-1.5 Million Military in Uniform right now (including Guard and Reserve), and there's about 22-23 Million Veterans, that would limit your eligibility pool. Add in the 45-70 Age Bracket, I'm guesstimating that would give you about 5 million, since the WW2/Korean War/Cold War/early Nam Vets would be ineligible due to being too old.
But keep this in mind: Just because one served, doesn't make one decent Presidential material. Remember, Nixon and Carter were Navy Officers.
And this STILL doesn't address the Federal Judiciary and the Congress.
But I nominate OldNFO for President!
Bubblehead Les, I think I could get behind that candidacy.
Most spam I get is caught by the spam filter, and seems to be attached to very old posts. I follow a strategy close to what JayG does, and it seems to work pretty well.
hmmmm
I've had WV off for over 3 weeks now. Everything has been caught in the spam filter except for one comment that even I'm not entirely sure is spam.
All in all, it's a pretty impressive display of filtering.
I've also noticed that the new CAPTCHA seems to rely on some sort of "close enough" matching - I *know* that I haven't gotten some of them quite right, but they went through anyway. What I suspect is that the intent is to slow down the commenter (in a literal wall time sense), because there's a whole industry in the 3rd world where rooms full of low-paid drudges are paid to click CAPTCHAs for the spambots. Slowing this down raises the cost to the spammers.
And no, I'm not making that all up. ;-)
"I've also noticed that the new CAPTCHA seems to rely on some sort of "close enough" matching - I *know* that I haven't gotten some of them quite right, but they went through anyway."
Kinda sorta. Of the two words, one is the actual captcha, the other is the blurry scanned text you're deciphering for Google. (You'll note that one is almost always more legible.)
I think the captchas work best against low-paid drudges whose native alpbabet was not the Latin one. When they're all smooshed up, I have a lot harder time telling Љ from Њ than I do R from B.
"Please prove you can read muddy gibberish."
You'll be buried in spam, make no mistake. But it does seem to all find its way into the spam locker reliably. Now if blogger would only stop sending the legit comments there too...
The second change: a requirement that no person could be elected president without prior military combat experience.
Fixed that for him. It's my understanding that bullets flying all around you concentrates the mind wonderfully. The last thing we need is some REMF in the Oval Office.
I require moderation on all comments older than two days, which seems to catch the spammers toiling away in Manila and Bangalore.
Probably 80 percent of all genuine comments come within two days of a post's going up. (Wild guess)
All the virtue of having an accountable first term president would be eliminated if we did away with the potential reelection.
Imagine: only last term, unaccountable presidents.
I have a different idea. Lower the standard for impeachment conviction to 50%.
REMF?
Eisenhower didn't have much combat experience. Patton and MacArthur did, but it was of the wrong kind, and both had to overcome the lessons learned in WWII to become good commanders.
I prefer Bob Heinlein's comment that the bravest thing that men do is sign up, for a future that you do not control, handing control over to people you do not know.
Everything after that is just following through.
And Lincoln did serve in the Blackhawk war.
Reagan was the ultimate REMF, serving in the armed forces motion picture unit, not permitted to go into combat because of his eyes.
LB Johnson went overseas to investigate a situation, and awarded the silver star for being a passenger on a plane that never came under fire.
Just saying, you can't tell by war records. People are complex, there are no easy way to separate the good from the bad.
Switzerland's constitution is similar to that of the US (It was copied in 1847) but the president is elected annually. Most of the sensible Swiss don't bother to learn his name.
I turned off word verification a couple of months ago, more for LiveJournal login issues a friend was having. Google apparently has spam figured out, because their trap has captured all of it. I've got email notification for all comments on, and that is probably the most irritating aspect - I get an email even when it is spam. Therefore, I get a lot of emails.
The problem with requiring combat experience is that someone with political ambitions and the opportunity to start a war might do so because of it. Consider the fate of Marcus Licinius Crassus (who deserved what he got) and his legions (who did not).
I turned CAPTCHA off a few weeks ago, and while I don't have near the traffic you and Jay have - only 2 pieces of spam have gotten through. I can deal with that.
For about two weeks now I’ve been using no word verification on new posts. Those posts older than a week still require it. I found this combination has (so far) caught every bit of spam. I get 4-6a day, usually on either a brand new post or some very old one.
Yay! I couldn't comment because my firefox combo wouldn't let me read it at all. (need to turn on google analytics I think)
Dude does apparently like his unaccountable young warmongers, I'll have to say...
There are plenty of 45-70 year old combat veterans we could elect just once.
One was defeated by a non veteran three years ago, another four years before that, another eight years before that, another twelve years before that.
We prefer our pretty kings.
Just thinking, in the 20th century-
Direct combat experienced Presidents M'Kinley, T. Roosevelt, Hoover, Truman, Kennedy, Bush I.
More or less non combat veterans Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush II.
Non veterans Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, F. Roosevelt, Clinton, Obama.
In fact Obama and Clinton are the only non veteran Presidents in the last 62 years. 2 out of 10.
Down side of a single 6 year term:
Imagine 6 years of Carter.
No word verification?
I like it, I like it!
In the further spirit of preventing "rule by the (metaphorically, at least) dead," as Jefferson cautioned, how about making any executive order issued by a given President sunset upon that President's leaving office? Yes, hilarity could ensue, but it might make the issuance of same more judicious.
Not entirely original, but here other three planks in my four-point plan:
1. Air conditioning shall not be used in the District of Columbia.
2. The Environmental Protection Agency shall, as its final act, develop a Wetlands Restoration Plan in the District of Columbia, to be executed by the Army Corps of Engineers.
3. The Environmental Protection Agency shall, upon the conclusion of the current Presidential Term, disband.
4. Every elected official, upon expiration of his first term, shall immediately be inducted into one of the armed forces at the lowest rank, where he or she will serve on active duty, without leave, furlough, or promotion, for a time double the length of his or her term of office.
Yeah, not saying I'm wholeheartedly behind the proposed revisions, but as "let's change the Constitution" proposals go, it ain't half bad. There are a few debatable points, and some possible issues around the edges, but at least this guy sounds like he's _tried_ to think through the implications of what he's proposing. Which means that, even when he's wrong, he's probably worth having an argument with.
Also, thanks for jumping on the no-mo-captcha bandwagon. The new ones were just excessively annoying.
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