Yes, he DID break a law. Specifically, the Temporal Interaction Act of 2236, section 7, part 32, paragraph A.
The time cops saw it comming or there is no such law. Then again, the time traveler should also have been able to research his own arrest. If he knew he was going to be arrested, he would not have been. If he was not arrested he would not have been able to research it. The rooster came before the hen and I make no sense.
Notwithstanding language on the CD label for the copies of Visual Studio.NET Professional Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition that you received during your attendance at the Seminar, which appeared to indicate that a separate license document was required in order for you to legally use the software, this letter will confirm that use by you of the software received is governed by the electronic license embedded in the product setup that appears prior to installation.
You are required to agree to accept the terms and conditions of this license prior to proceeding with the products' installation. Acceptance by you of these "Click to Accept" licenses is the only license required for your use of the copies of Visual Studio.NET Professional Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition received. We recommend that you keep a copy of this letter in your personal files for future reference."
So that's it? I've got the letter, all I have to do is burn a coppy of the CD and I'm OK? Qool, doodz, I can't wait to get my hands on that! It's like free software, except it's from M$ so we know it won't work well and it will have all sorts of restrictions on its use and...
Never mind, I don't have an M$ O$ to run the junk, you can keep it.
That is intersting, though I'd never seen it. The system seemed to be working OK three years ago. LSU used to use social security numbers, unfortunately, for everything, printing them in big numbers on your ID card and encoded into the magnetic stripe. with four or five extra numbers. Ordinary card readers from Nothern Computer read them, so I imagine they used some kind of standard. Security nightmare? Well of course it was but it always seemed to work. Did they put in something just as full of holes that did not work as well?
You have a rights outlined in the fourth amendment which strictly circumscribe the power of government. The "right to privacy" is a diluted form of that. When it comes to the fourth amendment, there's really no concensus building to be had. The government either gets a time and place limited warrent from an open court by sworn testimony of real criminal activity or you violate it. TIA, CAPP, Carnivore etc. all violate your right to be secure in your personal effects, house and place of business. Kelly is being hired to justify our violation, not to prevent it.
If they wanted to inspire trust they would have hired someone from the EFF or FSF rather than one of the worst database violators ever who spent her time bullshiting everyone. What do you call someone who takes money to do things they don't believe in? Whore. If there was a single redeeming thing Doubleclick had ever done we might forgive Kelly for working there. Anyone know of such a thing?
Sounds to me like some changes were make by O'Connor Kelly and privacy was improved. I'd say it takes a pretty strong person to go into a company as deep in it as Double Click and improve it.
If you think DHS is hiring someone to keep them from implementing Carnivore, CAPPS and TIA, you might also believe that Doublclick cleaned up their act. Why are people making excuses for that nasty company and the DHS?
So, she ran the privacy clean-up for DoubleClick, and now she's picked to do the same thing, monitoring privacy for the government's latest fad, Homeland Security. Is this a problem? Or is it only a problem because she was picked by a conservative?
How do you "clean up" acts that have not been implemented? How do you know that her work at Double Click was anthing more than "Cheif Bullshitter"? The lady is not there to protect but to put a nice face on your rape. It's very wishful thinking to expect otherwise. The Department of Homeland Security is working fast and furious to get TIA. They are not hiring someone to tell them not to do it. Get real please.
This would illustrate that DoubleClick does care about privacy, after enforced to do so, and this executive happens to care very much about it, as it is her career.
Excellent! After smashing someone for daring to guese the intentions of others, you state them yourself. Did you ever consider alternate ideas?
How do you know that Doubleclick cares about privacy? The indications are that they did not, you know 12 state investigations, a federal investigation and a private class action suit. They settled those suits, but we don't have any real indication they changed what they were doing do we?
Now what would a company that does not care about privacy have to hire someone for? Perhaps to lie for them? We don't know that, all we know from the article is that she was a "consesus builder". What the hell is that? Someone that convinces me that it's OK for double click to sell my credit history if they keep quiet about my dental records? Hmm. Yes indeed, I suspect someone who could work for a company like Double Click is dishonest. Dishonest or a 34 year old puppet.
Now what do the Feds want her for? To advocate the Total Information Rape Act? CAPUT? No thanks, I've got better use for my money than another liar.
DogisMyCoprocessor says, Thanks for a voice of sanity. But you forgot to flame the submitter and and chrisd for not bothering to RTFA. without having read the fine article or thinking more than his coprocessor.
If you RTFA you will conclude that the tripple named lady is a pretty face for a nasty company. Doubleclick bought it's way out of the 12 lawsuits and she did her best to sooth everyone. It's not like doubleclick changed what they were doing any more than "real" coke is made with cane sugar. So, yes, she is good for the job but we might not like the job she does. It's like the feds hired a professional liar to run minitruth or Al Capone to run the local liquor licensing office or Kenedy senior to run the SEC.
Doggie brains might like that kind of talk, so long as they have something to eat. The rest of us should demand a little more.
In case you didn't notice, this article is not about software.
Sure it is. The silly tablet is crippled by it's software and that's what the article notices. It requires you to load up XP home addition and recomends that you back up all your files and dual boot your computer if you have older M$ software. Once you manage to make it work (it toook the authors hours), another software issue, no one else can use the desktop the screen hooks into. The authors noted that other software did let people share older versions of M$ in the past and that this is a serious drawback. About the only hardware information had in the article was screen resolution and that it was made less sharp by the touch screen.
If you really think X forwarding with Xfree86 is better than MS's terminal services then I've probably never heard of the drug you're smoking.
Funny, I've never heard of my drug use before either. Yes, for all the reasons I mentioned above I think X is far better than anything M$ puts out for the crippled GUI.
As for the smart display... X has not been doing this for years. X has nothing to do with hardware, let alone lightweight, portal LCD panels with a wireless connection in them.
That's right, X is not hardware dependent and that's why it works so well. X is a generalized interface, network aware, that can be piped through anything. It won't take long for the free software people to make this gadget useful. The authors described what they found in the box a pain in the ass.
Kinda funny seeing major business plans aorund doing remote displaying with all the comments going around on the X-Windows topics saying how remote displaying applications in X is supposedly never used and the root of all slowness in X.
Yeah, I've seen one or two troll posts like that. The ignorance displayed is a work of art. X is not slow. People use X forwarding everyday and it kicks ass. I'm using X forwarding through ssh right now to post this. It's very nice to see Mozilla displayed with good speed through a 10 mbs ethernet onto a 90 MHz Pentium laptop. My wife could export the same program off a dinky 400 MHz K6/2 without much slow down for me. I use Star Office on her machine to get at pesky M$ formats. From the desktop perspective, any of them can share the PCIMCIA adaptor and so look at and store pictures from the compact flash cards I use. One day soon, I'll rig up a wireless card in one of my boxes and I'll be able to cut the ethernet cable.
Thanks for bringing up X, it's a clear example of how free software is much better than nonfree. X was designed to do this kind of thing back in 1993. M$ has decided that they can't tollerate more than one person at a time using their junk so they have never adopted the technology and they never will. They have struck out against VNC, forbiden such use in their EULA, and this is what we can expect from them. Using X, I could care less. As it is, I have the combined power of all of my computers on any of them. Soon enough, someone will port a reasonable OS to those tablets and I'll be able to buy one off ebay for $40. Cool enough for me, it's got a much nicer processor than my laptop does and might be able to run things without much help. You have to wonder why anyone would cripple such a machine with something crappy like WinCE or XP stripped of everything (even the browser? impossible). Crippled, that's the world of closed source software for you.
In most of Dickens work, the author portrayed the negative health effects of spewing bucky balls and other carbon compounds, (aka soot, cinders, smoke) into the air. You should see what the cats leave.
Slashdot won't be getting any more AC posts from Michigan.
People in Michagan will no longer be able to look at Slashdot. The ISPs will no longer be able to carry it, you won't be able to tell anyone about it and the Slashcode can't be read, understood or used in Michigan.
The only forms of communications allowed there now are switched coper networks, broadcast TV and helioscopes, just like Ma Bell and CBS wanted. The rest is just too confusing and had to be scrapped or the Terrorist would have won. The Supreme court of Michigan is at this moment deciding the fate of ventriloquists. Way to go Michingan, you are a state after the hearts of simpletons everywhere. I love you, you love me, we are a happy family.
The idea ignores the basic problem and proposes a sinister solution:
a fee set by the Library of Congress.
for all copyright works. No thanks.
The fundamental problem is the power of copyright to begin with. 100 year "protection" makes a mokery of the intention to expand the public domain. Work you have published by any "major" publisher will not enter the public daomain in your lifetime. The vast majority of published work loses it relavancy in 20 years or so. Those works not published by "major" publishers has no chance of ever seeing the shelf in a mall or bookstore. I don't even want to think of how bad things can get with the DMCA. The problem is that government has made copyright much stronger than it needs to be in order to promote the usefull arts and expand the public domain.
The answer is not to give Government more power to screw things up further. A compulory license would eliminate the choices we have which could be used reasonably if copyrights lasted say, fourteen years. What would happen to the General Public License? Would I have to pay some kind of fee in order to copy works which the author explicily states I have the right to copy modify and republish? Who's to say what kind of fee is reasonable? I see a bonanza of licensing fees for all machines that have the ability to act as a press, a clear first amendment violation, requiring an army of inspectors to distribute and enforce. The end result might look like the awful system of licensing and revenue generation that governs liquor today. The FCC's inablility to share the specturm, which belongs to nature, does not inspire confidence in the Federal Government's ability to share my works.
The answer is 180 degrees away from compusory licensing fees. The answer is to get Government out of publishing as much as possible. Protecting copyright in it's current form is not a worthwhile endeavor. There is a certian amount of money people are willing to pay for copyrighted works. As independent music lables continue to grow, we are seeing that money is indeed making it's way more into artists hands despite technology improvements. Reducing the power of copyright will reduce the power of big publishers who have proven to care less about their artists. Their model is so obsolete that current copyright law is unable to prop them up. The super copyright law proposed, with it's requirements of central control, is exactly what the RIAA and it's members would like to manipulate.
DSL and Cable are the new dialup, and should be treated as such, a place where the majority of the customers are clueless idiots who ruin the party for the smart people.
Screw you. It's easy to run Exim on Debian. It comes with reasonable defaults and easy to understand configuration files. There is no reason anyone can't install and use it exctpt for stupid jerks like you not letting them. Why can't "smart" people like you at AOL and Hotmail keep your users from sending so much spam in the first place? Perhaps you should get your own house in order before you start screwing other people and work to make the internet into a puch media with four or five special companies with the privalidge of running a mail server.
Why do you have to run your own SMTP server? That's a pretty elitest thing to do.
and the parent post says:
Ummm, no, acting like it's a hard thing to do is elitist. Exim on Debian comes with reasonable default values and easy to understand configuration files. Next thing you will tell me that no one uses AOL or Hotmail to send spam. Fuck you, asshole.
The best way to block spam is to block spam not innocent people. If everyone does stupid stuff like this, we won't have any open communications service left. The same logic you use can be applied to all kinds of network connections till what we are left with is a host,deny entry of all:paranoid. Even that won't kill spam, it will simply give more leverage to those who "serve" you.
The limit of what you propose will not reduce spam one bit. AOL and other big ass ISPs have blocked email sent from dial-up for some time. That was bad enough for people stuck with something like safepages. Now they are blocking DSL, including those with fixed IPs. Next they will target smaller ISPs themselves. In the end the only "special" folks you would allow to run mail servers would be Microsoft, Government agencies and a few other bit Telcos. The quality of email would, of course, be critically degraded and those few special "broadcasters" of email would make a mint spamming everyone on the plannet.
Don't know where spam comes from? Look to those who have the most to gain from destroying the current free email system. We already know that M$ pays people to spam mail lists with diruptive comments. We can be sure that sending penis elargement mail is not beneath them or other big ISPs and telcos who hate the internet and all it stands for.
There is nothing difficult about running a mail server. I use Exim on Debian. I comes reasonably configured. Configuration files can be made so that users, such as myself, can read them and understand what their options are. This is what free software is all about.
You wonder how Linux could help Sun. The article thinks it knows why Linux could hurt Sun:
Many people who would once have bought expensive Sun boxes running Solaris are now running Linux on cheap, PC-like machines instead.
What they missed is that free software has brought many more people into the world of Unix. Those people don't mind making the jump to Solaris when they feel the need for better hardware. Sun will continue to reap the benfits of their excellent hardware even when people buy that hardware and then load it with free software. Sun is far from doomed because Sun has many clues.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has not got a chance thanks to free software. They have been unable to penetrate the server market with their inferior wares because Linux is easier to use than all the point and drool tools. Microsoft can expect hardware makers to revolt soon and they will lose the desktop. Most Linux distros are already "good enough" for the desktop. With enough a little more hardware support, there will be few people who want Microsoft's wimpy, DRM crippled stuff. There's no way this user could ever go back and there's nothing special about me. The only thing Microsoft has to offer is a bullying monopoly. "You have to learn it because its there," people have told me. Without that, poof, nothing left to offer but stuff that's losing money and depends on monoply rents.
Woops, I mispelled a word. Here is what a meant to say:
As big as Google is, it's a shock that anyone can mirror the internet. 54,000 machines, that's all it takes to mirror the whole world.
This is a dramatic result of the purest censorship. The majority of the millions of people who connect to the internet are forbiden to serve by their stupid ISP. Even the IP4 space has room for 16 million. With IP6 there is no reason for anyone to be given a dynamic IP number again. The real censorship is one of deciding who can serve.
This primary censorship makes other kinds of censorship trivial. If you don't like someone's opinion, you can shut them down. A good example of this is Al Jazeera [wired.com]. This would be impossible to do if anyone and everyone could mirror content or simply have their own say with their own computers.
Dead Kenedys eat your heart out.
on
DMCA, Auf Deutsch
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Jerry Brown might have wanted California Uber Ales, but it looks like Hollywood over all.
As big as Google is, it's a shock that anyone can mirror the internet. 54,000 machines, that's all it takes to mirror the whole world.
This is a dramatic result of the purest censorship. The majority of the millions of people who connect to the internet are forbiden to serve by their stupid ISP. Even the IP4 space has room for 16 million. With IP6 there is no reason anyone whould ever be given a dynamic IP number again. The real censorship is one of deciding who can serve.
This primary censorship makes other kinds of censorship trivial. If you don't like someone's opinion, you can shut them down. A good example of this is Al Jazeera. This would be impossible to do if anyone and everyone could mirror content or simply have their own say with their own computers.
I think longer cables for your mouse, keyboard, monitor, and speakers would be better -- then you could get the entire noisy machine, fans and all, out of your room and into the attic.
The only long wire you need is ethernet. As many have noticed, you can put all the noisy things in a room by themselves. All you need for a terminal is an old P90 laptop. X forward via ssh and never worry about noise again. Long wires for keyboards and VGA and all only useful if you are running an OS that has poor networking software or lack a quiet one.
On the other hand you could just buy one of these $500 gizmos and never fool with boxes in a closet again. If I were stupid rich, I might.
My choice is neither! I've already got the boxes. I'm too cheap to buy a replacement and too lazy to move them into a closet. I do, however have my laptop set up in another room on a desk where I can read and write to dead trees. Quiet is nice from time to time, but the machine noise does not bother me.
Slashdot Mirror
The time cops saw it comming or there is no such law. Then again, the time traveler should also have been able to research his own arrest. If he knew he was going to be arrested, he would not have been. If he was not arrested he would not have been able to research it. The rooster came before the hen and I make no sense.
How about people who not only read such articles but post about how much the article and Slashdot sucks?
It's funny, laugh.
You are required to agree to accept the terms and conditions of this license prior to proceeding with the products' installation. Acceptance by you of these "Click to Accept" licenses is the only license required for your use of the copies of Visual Studio.NET Professional Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition received. We recommend that you keep a copy of this letter in your personal files for future reference."
So that's it? I've got the letter, all I have to do is burn a coppy of the CD and I'm OK? Qool, doodz, I can't wait to get my hands on that! It's like free software, except it's from M$ so we know it won't work well and it will have all sorts of restrictions on its use and ...
Never mind, I don't have an M$ O$ to run the junk, you can keep it.
Seeing you here, on a news site dedicated to free software and Linux, I wonder if you have grown up a little since saying, "This is the list of all that is lame ... 2. This whole philosophy of "open source"... does communism ring a bell?" while boasting about t-shirts earned through being such a great M$ bug reporter. Clasic! I got a reasonable laugh out of that.
If they wanted to inspire trust they would have hired someone from the EFF or FSF rather than one of the worst database violators ever who spent her time bullshiting everyone. What do you call someone who takes money to do things they don't believe in? Whore. If there was a single redeeming thing Doubleclick had ever done we might forgive Kelly for working there. Anyone know of such a thing?
If you think DHS is hiring someone to keep them from implementing Carnivore, CAPPS and TIA, you might also believe that Doublclick cleaned up their act. Why are people making excuses for that nasty company and the DHS?
How do you "clean up" acts that have not been implemented? How do you know that her work at Double Click was anthing more than "Cheif Bullshitter"? The lady is not there to protect but to put a nice face on your rape. It's very wishful thinking to expect otherwise. The Department of Homeland Security is working fast and furious to get TIA. They are not hiring someone to tell them not to do it. Get real please.
Excellent! After smashing someone for daring to guese the intentions of others, you state them yourself. Did you ever consider alternate ideas?
How do you know that Doubleclick cares about privacy? The indications are that they did not, you know 12 state investigations, a federal investigation and a private class action suit. They settled those suits, but we don't have any real indication they changed what they were doing do we?
Now what would a company that does not care about privacy have to hire someone for? Perhaps to lie for them? We don't know that, all we know from the article is that she was a "consesus builder". What the hell is that? Someone that convinces me that it's OK for double click to sell my credit history if they keep quiet about my dental records? Hmm. Yes indeed, I suspect someone who could work for a company like Double Click is dishonest. Dishonest or a 34 year old puppet.
Now what do the Feds want her for? To advocate the Total Information Rape Act? CAPUT? No thanks, I've got better use for my money than another liar.
If you RTFA you will conclude that the tripple named lady is a pretty face for a nasty company. Doubleclick bought it's way out of the 12 lawsuits and she did her best to sooth everyone. It's not like doubleclick changed what they were doing any more than "real" coke is made with cane sugar. So, yes, she is good for the job but we might not like the job she does. It's like the feds hired a professional liar to run minitruth or Al Capone to run the local liquor licensing office or Kenedy senior to run the SEC.
Doggie brains might like that kind of talk, so long as they have something to eat. The rest of us should demand a little more.
Sure it is. The silly tablet is crippled by it's software and that's what the article notices. It requires you to load up XP home addition and recomends that you back up all your files and dual boot your computer if you have older M$ software. Once you manage to make it work (it toook the authors hours), another software issue, no one else can use the desktop the screen hooks into. The authors noted that other software did let people share older versions of M$ in the past and that this is a serious drawback. About the only hardware information had in the article was screen resolution and that it was made less sharp by the touch screen.
If you really think X forwarding with Xfree86 is better than MS's terminal services then I've probably never heard of the drug you're smoking.
Funny, I've never heard of my drug use before either. Yes, for all the reasons I mentioned above I think X is far better than anything M$ puts out for the crippled GUI.
As for the smart display... X has not been doing this for years. X has nothing to do with hardware, let alone lightweight, portal LCD panels with a wireless connection in them.
That's right, X is not hardware dependent and that's why it works so well. X is a generalized interface, network aware, that can be piped through anything. It won't take long for the free software people to make this gadget useful. The authors described what they found in the box a pain in the ass.
Yeah, I've seen one or two troll posts like that. The ignorance displayed is a work of art. X is not slow. People use X forwarding everyday and it kicks ass. I'm using X forwarding through ssh right now to post this. It's very nice to see Mozilla displayed with good speed through a 10 mbs ethernet onto a 90 MHz Pentium laptop. My wife could export the same program off a dinky 400 MHz K6/2 without much slow down for me. I use Star Office on her machine to get at pesky M$ formats. From the desktop perspective, any of them can share the PCIMCIA adaptor and so look at and store pictures from the compact flash cards I use. One day soon, I'll rig up a wireless card in one of my boxes and I'll be able to cut the ethernet cable.
Thanks for bringing up X, it's a clear example of how free software is much better than nonfree. X was designed to do this kind of thing back in 1993. M$ has decided that they can't tollerate more than one person at a time using their junk so they have never adopted the technology and they never will. They have struck out against VNC, forbiden such use in their EULA, and this is what we can expect from them. Using X, I could care less. As it is, I have the combined power of all of my computers on any of them. Soon enough, someone will port a reasonable OS to those tablets and I'll be able to buy one off ebay for $40. Cool enough for me, it's got a much nicer processor than my laptop does and might be able to run things without much help. You have to wonder why anyone would cripple such a machine with something crappy like WinCE or XP stripped of everything (even the browser? impossible). Crippled, that's the world of closed source software for you.
In most of Dickens work, the author portrayed the negative health effects of spewing bucky balls and other carbon compounds, (aka soot, cinders, smoke) into the air. You should see what the cats leave.
People in Michagan will no longer be able to look at Slashdot. The ISPs will no longer be able to carry it, you won't be able to tell anyone about it and the Slashcode can't be read, understood or used in Michigan.
The only forms of communications allowed there now are switched coper networks, broadcast TV and helioscopes, just like Ma Bell and CBS wanted. The rest is just too confusing and had to be scrapped or the Terrorist would have won. The Supreme court of Michigan is at this moment deciding the fate of ventriloquists. Way to go Michingan, you are a state after the hearts of simpletons everywhere. I love you, you love me, we are a happy family.
Smart enough not to Buy NSync or smart enough to not go to Princeton? Ever heard "U Mass" by the Pixies? Princeton = (UMass)(c)^2.
a fee set by the Library of Congress.
for all copyright works. No thanks.
The fundamental problem is the power of copyright to begin with. 100 year "protection" makes a mokery of the intention to expand the public domain. Work you have published by any "major" publisher will not enter the public daomain in your lifetime. The vast majority of published work loses it relavancy in 20 years or so. Those works not published by "major" publishers has no chance of ever seeing the shelf in a mall or bookstore. I don't even want to think of how bad things can get with the DMCA. The problem is that government has made copyright much stronger than it needs to be in order to promote the usefull arts and expand the public domain.
The answer is not to give Government more power to screw things up further. A compulory license would eliminate the choices we have which could be used reasonably if copyrights lasted say, fourteen years. What would happen to the General Public License? Would I have to pay some kind of fee in order to copy works which the author explicily states I have the right to copy modify and republish? Who's to say what kind of fee is reasonable? I see a bonanza of licensing fees for all machines that have the ability to act as a press, a clear first amendment violation, requiring an army of inspectors to distribute and enforce. The end result might look like the awful system of licensing and revenue generation that governs liquor today. The FCC's inablility to share the specturm, which belongs to nature, does not inspire confidence in the Federal Government's ability to share my works.
The answer is 180 degrees away from compusory licensing fees. The answer is to get Government out of publishing as much as possible. Protecting copyright in it's current form is not a worthwhile endeavor. There is a certian amount of money people are willing to pay for copyrighted works. As independent music lables continue to grow, we are seeing that money is indeed making it's way more into artists hands despite technology improvements. Reducing the power of copyright will reduce the power of big publishers who have proven to care less about their artists. Their model is so obsolete that current copyright law is unable to prop them up. The super copyright law proposed, with it's requirements of central control, is exactly what the RIAA and it's members would like to manipulate.
Think, people, think!
Your like does not work, AC, try this.
Screw you. It's easy to run Exim on Debian. It comes with reasonable defaults and easy to understand configuration files. There is no reason anyone can't install and use it exctpt for stupid jerks like you not letting them. Why can't "smart" people like you at AOL and Hotmail keep your users from sending so much spam in the first place? Perhaps you should get your own house in order before you start screwing other people and work to make the internet into a puch media with four or five special companies with the privalidge of running a mail server.
Why do you have to run your own SMTP server? That's a pretty elitest thing to do.
and the parent post says:
Ummm, no, acting like it's a hard thing to do is elitist. Exim on Debian comes with reasonable default values and easy to understand configuration files. Next thing you will tell me that no one uses AOL or Hotmail to send spam. Fuck you, asshole.
The best way to block spam is to block spam not innocent people. If everyone does stupid stuff like this, we won't have any open communications service left. The same logic you use can be applied to all kinds of network connections till what we are left with is a host,deny entry of all:paranoid. Even that won't kill spam, it will simply give more leverage to those who "serve" you.
The limit of what you propose will not reduce spam one bit. AOL and other big ass ISPs have blocked email sent from dial-up for some time. That was bad enough for people stuck with something like safepages. Now they are blocking DSL, including those with fixed IPs. Next they will target smaller ISPs themselves. In the end the only "special" folks you would allow to run mail servers would be Microsoft, Government agencies and a few other bit Telcos. The quality of email would, of course, be critically degraded and those few special "broadcasters" of email would make a mint spamming everyone on the plannet.
Don't know where spam comes from? Look to those who have the most to gain from destroying the current free email system. We already know that M$ pays people to spam mail lists with diruptive comments. We can be sure that sending penis elargement mail is not beneath them or other big ISPs and telcos who hate the internet and all it stands for.
There is nothing difficult about running a mail server. I use Exim on Debian. I comes reasonably configured. Configuration files can be made so that users, such as myself, can read them and understand what their options are. This is what free software is all about.
What you propose is what Ma Bell was all about.
Many people who would once have bought expensive Sun boxes running Solaris are now running Linux on cheap, PC-like machines instead.
What they missed is that free software has brought many more people into the world of Unix. Those people don't mind making the jump to Solaris when they feel the need for better hardware. Sun will continue to reap the benfits of their excellent hardware even when people buy that hardware and then load it with free software. Sun is far from doomed because Sun has many clues.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has not got a chance thanks to free software. They have been unable to penetrate the server market with their inferior wares because Linux is easier to use than all the point and drool tools. Microsoft can expect hardware makers to revolt soon and they will lose the desktop. Most Linux distros are already "good enough" for the desktop. With enough a little more hardware support, there will be few people who want Microsoft's wimpy, DRM crippled stuff. There's no way this user could ever go back and there's nothing special about me. The only thing Microsoft has to offer is a bullying monopoly. "You have to learn it because its there," people have told me. Without that, poof, nothing left to offer but stuff that's losing money and depends on monoply rents.
As big as Google is, it's a shock that anyone can mirror the internet. 54,000 machines, that's all it takes to mirror the whole world.
This is a dramatic result of the purest censorship. The majority of the millions of people who connect to the internet are forbiden to serve by their stupid ISP. Even the IP4 space has room for 16 million. With IP6 there is no reason for anyone to be given a dynamic IP number again. The real censorship is one of deciding who can serve.
This primary censorship makes other kinds of censorship trivial. If you don't like someone's opinion, you can shut them down. A good example of this is Al Jazeera [wired.com]. This would be impossible to do if anyone and everyone could mirror content or simply have their own say with their own computers.
Jerry Brown might have wanted California Uber Ales, but it looks like Hollywood over all.
This is a dramatic result of the purest censorship. The majority of the millions of people who connect to the internet are forbiden to serve by their stupid ISP. Even the IP4 space has room for 16 million. With IP6 there is no reason anyone whould ever be given a dynamic IP number again. The real censorship is one of deciding who can serve.
This primary censorship makes other kinds of censorship trivial. If you don't like someone's opinion, you can shut them down. A good example of this is Al Jazeera. This would be impossible to do if anyone and everyone could mirror content or simply have their own say with their own computers.
What's the question?
The only long wire you need is ethernet. As many have noticed, you can put all the noisy things in a room by themselves. All you need for a terminal is an old P90 laptop. X forward via ssh and never worry about noise again. Long wires for keyboards and VGA and all only useful if you are running an OS that has poor networking software or lack a quiet one.
On the other hand you could just buy one of these $500 gizmos and never fool with boxes in a closet again. If I were stupid rich, I might.
My choice is neither! I've already got the boxes. I'm too cheap to buy a replacement and too lazy to move them into a closet. I do, however have my laptop set up in another room on a desk where I can read and write to dead trees. Quiet is nice from time to time, but the machine noise does not bother me.