My boss (a lawyer) gave me a boilerplate employment contract, basically claiming rights to everything I thought during my employment. I asked him to change it to include only work done during paid hours for the company, and to exclude any code covered by the GPL. After a 5-minute explanation of the GPL, he was a little worried.
Then I showed him to source to the CGI and DBI Perl modules, and told him that we'd have to extend our timeframe by 6 months while I rewrote all that funcionality. Then he got it, and I've had no trouble.
You make an excellent point, and I allude to it briefly and obscurely in my rant, but you say it better. The data format argument is a good one.
This is part of what I meant by "software quality." So far MS is lousy at it, and OSS is better. Some companies pick this up and use embedded Linux, but we should mostly count that as a miracle - OSS has to be so much better than MS even to make a dent because MS has such a huge warchest to throw at marketing.
I don't know how to solve this. Some big companies (e.g. IBM) are betting parts of their business on OSS, and their marketing may be enough to combat Microsoft's.
Microsoft is fast, fast, fast, though. Many companies have discovered this to their detriment. Microsoft, once it decides on something, can go after it with more ferocity and better organization than nearly any other entity on the planet. Most of this is thanks to their immense bank account from monopoly profits.
One thing at which they're lousy is grass-roots, and this is where OSS shines. Bottom line: power to the people, baby!
That's my summary of what we need: disclosure and choice. The user must know every single non-required system modification, and have the choice to not install any of them.
But this won't work, of course. Our favorite example is Microsoft, who blithely says, "It's all required; it's all part of the OS; either take the package or don't." Making choices confuses people, see, and we want to avoid that.
Without being elitist at all, some of what they say is true. One reason Microsoft has succeeded is that they remove those scary choices from the users. It's the software equivalent of "bread and circuses" - don't bother people with the details, wow them with flash, and they'll mostly ignore what goes on in the background.
This succeeds because it's what people want. My 72-year-old mother doesn't know about patches and updates and service packs, and for fuck's sake she shouldn't have to. For good or ill, most people view computers as slightly cantankerous, very expensive toasters. They have no idea that they have, sitting on their desks, a little machine that can do very nearly anything. They want to do a couple things, and they want those things to be easy.
I can see a couple ways for this to go:
Special-purpose machines. Instead of one computer, you'll have a few little ones. A web pad in the kitchen that downloads recipies, a glorified word-processor in the study hooked up to a printer, maybe with accounting software. Most people will go to Office Depot and spend a few $hundred on a black box, kind of like a cell phone now days, then throw it away when a newer model appears. Microsoft is set to own this market.
General-purpose machines. Geeks will still want a real, live computer that they can control. This is only going to get harder and harder. Twenty years from now, I bet there'll be fewer general-purpose computers than there were twenty years ago. The after-market parts business will dry up as copy-control gets more and more intrusive. I mean, I can build a box from a bunch of parts, but I can't build a fucking motherboard or hard drive.
Computers have to get easier to use while at the same time getting more complicated and doing more things. The only way to do this is to remove end-user control of the device. Fewer scary options, fewer things to screw up. For the most part this is a good thing. Most people using PCs today are basically helpless aside from a few well-known command sequences.
The hard fight will be to retain control of real computers while consumer boxes get dumbed-down. What will make this possible (IMHO):
No DRM. Period. This will kill general-purpose computing forever.
More standardization. As the parts market shrinks and specialty boxes become more common, it'll be harder for ASUS (e.g.) to sell mobos into the after-market channel. There will be consolidation, but as long as #1 above is avoided it shouldn't be fatal.
Concentration on software quality. The OSS community generally goes a better job of this than closed-source, but it will have to get better. Quality alons isn't enough; as we know, 500% better isn't better enough if you don't have good marketing.
This is a long, winding rant, and has gone a little off-topic. Back to the point: I don't think this situation will get better, or at least not in the way we hope. It's going to be incredibly difficult to hold software manufacturers liable for anything; it'll be even harder to hold them liable and let OSS off the hook.
The best hope, I think, is operating system diversity, which at this point means forced licensing of the Windows source code. If you can use Microsoft Windows that basically bends over for any cute-looking virus or trojan, or (e.g.) IBM Windows that flat-out refuses to install anything that isn't digitally-signed and verified (assume, for the minute, non-DRM verified), what would you pick? What would your mom pick? What would you want your mom to pick?
The honest work and thought that Gary put into the AD&D rules was tremendous. I remember DM'ing in the 80's for a couple friends getting into a firefight with some Wizard or other. The Wizard wasn't that butch, but he did have a Ring of Invisibility.
"No problem," said Roger (arrogant, cheated). "I put on my Ring of Invisibility and now I can see the Wizard."
"Bullshit," I said (ever an officious bastard, I spent my free time reading the rule book). "The AD&D rules specifically say that Rings of Power (including Invisibility) confer no benefit other than those explicitly stated." It was true - the example in the book even said (paraphrasing), "A Ring of Invisibility makes you invisible, but doesn't allow you to see other invisible things."
Then I told him that every 60 second he'd been arguing he'd taken 2d8 fire damage from the Wizard:)
You know what Hendrix played? Aside from a couple favorites, like his Angel (the flying-V), he mostly played the cheapest, shittiest Strats he could get his hands on.
But that's extreme - he was a genius. And more to the point, he always sounded like Jimi. Most every great guitarist is as recognizable for his sound and tone as his playing, but keep in mind that most of these people found one guitar, or type of guitar, and stuck with it. I mean shit, what would Angus sound like on a Strat? Anything but AC/DC, that's for sure.
The greatest masters can get more and better sounds out of a guitar than an amateur, or even a very good player, but the guitar does matter.
Yeah, I've got one of these...
on
To The Pain
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· Score: 1, Troll
Briefly (I'm at work) this is exactly why the U.S. shouldn't ban this research. It's bloody inevitable. Our government is caving to a few screaming fundamentalists over one of the most important medical advances in history.
Who's going to pursue this more ethically? The Chinese, who've been alleged to use prisons as organ factories, or us?
I once inherited a smallish network (70 nodes) that was using an NT box as a web gateway and mail server. It was running something called Xtramail, which is a truly bloody horrible piece of software. While I was trying to figure out how to gracefully get rid of this box (a 486 on ISDN), one of the users wanted to create a mailing list.
Ok, no problem. Read the docs, slurp this list, check these buttons, viola. One of the cute little checkboxes was "Only allow owner to send list mail." Duh - I checked it. The guy sent his email (only about 200 list members) and we went home.
I came in the next morning to 20,000 emails just in the queue. That fucker sent our tens of thousands of emails overnight, because the send restrict wasn't working. There were a couple dead addresses on the list, and they of course bounced - and Xtramail politely returned those bounces to the entire list. Wash, rinse, repeat. If that place had had a real server and a real 'net connection, it could have sent millions of emails in that time. As it was, many people on the list were (quite justifiably) pissed.
So I called up whoever owned Xtramail at that time (Artisoft at that time, but a different company now - can you say, "hot potato?") and had a slightly polite shit fit. The guy flat-out refused to acknowledge it was a problem, until I made him go through the same steps on his local copy.
Crickets.
"Uh, looks like that option isn't working. I'll have to file a bug report." Then I spent another 45 minutes trying to get accounting to refund the $200 I'd given them for the support call.
They never did fix the bug, but I gave up my plans to have a graceful transition. I pulled that POS out the same day and installed another little NT mailer, quite a nice one, until I replaced the whole thing with a qmail FreeBSD box.
No moral to the story, really ('cept I should have been more paranoid, and tested the list more). But I bet more than a few readers have had that quick "oh shit" feeling as they saw the queue filling up.
Almost every one of the search engines mentioned makes a very clear distinction between paid placements and search results. This is not about Yahoo sprinkling paid placement links in its search results and pretending they're real. Even the worst offender, Dogpile, lists results by search engine, rather than pretending they're all real searches from the same source.
Yes, they could be clearer, but this isn't nearly as bad as the hysterical submitter wants you to believe. In some ways, it's good. Do a search for Ted Bundy on Yahoo and you'll see a paid link to our site (not gonna tell you which one). Of the people who click that link, most end up pretty happy because we've got some cool stuff.
Overture is the company that puts must of these paid links in searches; we pay them, they pay Yahoo. Overture's standards for search terms are breathtaking - I've spent over a month arguing with them about search terms which are exactly applicable to what we're selling. They go out of their way not to be deceptive.
Of course Google will say that Overture's not a real search engine - Google's competing with them for the same market. Hello! Google isn't some great white knight, immune from the evils of capitalism. They're the best search engine by far, but their AdWords program sucks ass compared with Overture's. This whole article reads like a Google press release. Contrary to what they say, it's much much easier to get a deceptive ad in Google AdWords than in Overture (not that we've tried - it would be a waste of money).
Unless I'm looking to buy something, I avoid Overture and all the sites they sell ads to. If I am looking to buy something, Overture is a great tool to start. For knowledge, and obscure or very specific searches, of course, nothing beats Google.
I read a couple short ones, but yeah, the rest are pretty thick. Your point about most people only commenting when they've got something bad to say is well-taken. My argument, in this case implied, is that of the informed population, a far higher percentage have a negative opinion of Microsoft. (That might be bullshit, too, since it's largely anecdotal.)
I bet the true anti-MS zealots are balanced out by the MS "astroturf" campaign.
Well, you've set up a nice little straw man and killed it convincingly, but your comment doesn't address a single thing I said, or counter any part of my post.
Just because Microsoft wasn't shattered into a million tiny pieces does not mean the law as not followed. Your rhetoric indicates your position, but don't confuse your opinion with law.
Interesting, given that I didn't state my position, and since I really haven't made up my own mind yet.
Congratulations on getting a couple karma points, though. Pretty good troll:)
I think that if you polled the whole country you would find a lot more Microsoft sympathizers than these comments would indicate.
Indubitably. You'd also find that most of these people can't tell you the difference between a CPU and a case, or an operating system and a PC. The fact that they're Microsoft sympathizers (boy, that's got an evil ring, doesn't it?) is a testament to Microsoft's PR firm and nothing else.
Not to sound elitist, but the vast majority of people in this country aren't qualified to have an opinion on the settlement. Anyone with a 'net connection could change that for themselves with a couple hours research, but we know how unlikely that is.
The fact is that a lot (not all mind you) of the respondents are either companies that have a vested interest in the destruction of Microsoft (AOL, Oracle, Sun, etc.) or anti-Microsoft zealots.
First, this is wanton speculation on your part, since the comments haven't even been published; I bet you haven't even read the ones in the link (neither have I).
Second, these companies and "zealots" do not have a vested interest in the destruction of Microsoft. Could you even imagine the utter chaos that would insue if Microsoft were to cease to exist? AOL would tank, for one. What these folks do have a vested interest in is a market economy free from the ravaging predation of Microsoft.
What they (and I) are asking for is simple: (a) enforce the laws on the books and (b) try to restore competition. If they'd done it 5 years ago it would have been easier; 5 years from now it'll be harder still.
A friend of mine works for the USPS, and she turned me on to it. It helps pay her salary, plus those business reply envelopes are expensive. She said the key was to get enough crap in the envelope that it weighed over an ounce.
As a bonus, I made little flyers on bright paper: "This complete waste of your time and money was brought to you by [name, address] who would like to be removed from your mailing lists." I'd wrap a flyer around an ounce or so of ripped up paper and stuff that in the envelope.
I viewed it as a lark, just a fun thing to do when I got home every day. But you know, after 6 months of it, my junk mail dropped dramatically. From 3 or 5 pieces a day to just 1 or 2 a week. In short, I'd strongly recommend this to anyone plagued by direct mail.
I love this idea. Really, I love it. But there are some real problems:
First, making and selling these devices will be very hard. Not technologically, but legally and socially. I bet most of the tech work could be done in 6 months and the device could be on the market.
But this isn't Linux - development and sales of these devices will have to be centralized rather than distributed. This means a large corporation. The devices have to be very popular for Metcalfe's Law to make them useful, so they'll have to be marketed. In other words, there'll be one large company for the Feds or RIAA to target and/or intimidate.
Second, this is the farthest thing from unstoppable. How hard would it be for the Feds to setup a listening station in Central Park and flat-out arrest everyone carrying on of these? Just because they're in your pocket doesn't mean they're hidden - they'd have to announce themselves to as much of the world as possible to be of any use. Shit, the RIAA could setup a hidden station in Central Park to perform a DOS (or format) on each one as it wanders by.
Technological solutions are notoriously hard to apply to social problems, and copyright is a social problem. No magical P2P device will sound the death-knell for copyright. It's going to take a sea-change in the way people relate to and value information.
William S Burroughs once said, "Evolution did not come to a reverent halt with homo sapiens." He believed that the human species as is was doomed, and that to survive at all we needed to get into space. His vision of space-faring was different from the popular one - he imagined that humans would undergo radical biological alterations, to become creatures more adapted to the environment of space travel.
This is a pretty common theme in science fiction, from Brave New World forward (perhaps even before) - specialized "models" of human for specific tasks.
Frank Herbert (e.g. in Destination Void) imagined that space travel would first be done by clones. Herbert's future got around the knotty personal identity issues with clones by simply declaring them non-human. Clones were literally chunks of flesh owned by humans or corporations, and there were few restrictions on how they were treated. (Note that Herbert was not at all advocating this attitude, just speculating that it might become dominant.) So the first space travellers were clones, but only because they were disposable.
I agree with Burroughs (and so many others) that we need to get off this rock if we're to have any long-term future. The biologic alteration route is an interesting one - purposeful evolution. This is an exciting time to be alive.
Thanks for the reply (gotta love this new "mesage waiting" feature, eh?). I wasn't trying to prove conclusively that your idea won't work, just poke some holes in it. Good ideas survive criticism; bad ones don't.
My most important point is the last one: your idea might help on the client side, and save people from hitting the "Delete" button some, but does zero to address theft of servies. If you pay by the minute for 'net access (much of the world), your idea will actually cost people more money. Also, your ISP is still receiving, storing, and relaying the spam to you.
Perhaps spammers will wise up if people use this system, and send less crap that they know will be rejected? I think that's a pipe dream - the response rate from spam is miniscule, anyway. Most of the world would have to use this system before spammers say any signifcant downside from it. Even then, like any threatened species, they'd probably go into a breeding frenzy, and we'd have a net (not 'net:) spam increase.
As a personal solution to keep your inbox cleaner I think your idea is good. As a solution to the spam problem generally, I don't think it will be effective.
I like [Trillian] because people have to get my authorization to see me on-line. Why can't email act like this?
I see what you're thinking here, but I don't think it's a good idea. Here's why:
Traffic. Email traffic would skyrocket if every first-time communication required several back-and-forth messages.
Arms race. Do you really think spammers wouldn't be able to crack this? It's no more difficult a problem than OCR, and that's pretty good already.
Power. If you sent a different JPG every time, you'd need to generate it somehow, or keep a store of them. This means either more CPU alloted to your mail processing, or more storage space. Certainly more bandwidth.
One way it might help is that most spammers use fake return addresses, so your "Please request authorization" message would bounce. For those that have real return addresses (read: "Got a live one!"), you'd just be setting yourself up for more spam.
I know the famous saying that you can't apply a technological solution to a social problem, but I don't think that's true of spam. Science fiction is replete with examples of personal assistants (from smart robots, to dumb door-bots, to unconsciously-controlled implants) - this is what we need. A program that can recognize and internalize some basic rules regarding our communication, and then filter incoming traffic based on those rules.
I think that such a system (in a crude form) is already here - many mail clients (including the much-maligned Outlook) have good support for rules. As these gets better, and easier to use, spam will be less of a perceived problem for users.
But more of a problem for ISPs, I think, since filters only work at the client-level, long after the spam has been routed and processed. It'll be an arms race - spammers sending more and more crap, trying to slip through your filters. This is why ORBS and MAPS and the like are great ideas (with perhaps less-than-great execution).
For those who don't know, Neil Stephenson's 2nd novel is Zodiak, about a drug-abusing, hell-raising, hippie chemist who makes life miserable for polluters in Boston harbor. He also finds monstrous amounts of PCBs in the water, and the story goes on from there.:)
Also, Neil's been mentioned here on/. much more than PCBs.:)
Re:Shouldn't be a surprise
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Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Quoth the poster:
Monsanto is the Microsoft of the ag world.
You need a serious fucking reality check, pal. Monsanto makes Microsoft look like Ben & Jerry's. Monsanto is one of the top 2 or 3 most evil corporations in existence. They are quite, literally and with no exageration, having a negative impact on the survival potential of the human species. As another poster suggested, do a Google search for 'terminator seed.'
Microsoft bashing is one thing, but c'mon. So they swallowed a few companies, crushed some others, and flouted some economic laws. On the scale of 'evil corporations' that barely registers. They don't pay governments to kill their own citizens, or dump toxins into local water supplies. Heck, they don't even strip mine beautiful wilderness.
I don't like Microsoft much either, but let's have some sense of proportion, eh?
Remember the Maginot Line? Impregnable? How easy was it to get around that? Data is useful in direct proportion to its accessibility - cut the connections into this place and it's toast. No frontal attack necessary.
Also, the article says they can expand capacity 300%. Frankly, that sounds like pretty short-term planning to me. In my experience, it's a rare data store that doesn't double in size every year or two.
Still, it sounds like a cool place, and probably has a better climate than Sealand:)
Re:The Lack of an Anti-Spam Lobby
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Crazy Stats on Spam
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Actually, the Direct Marketing Association loves spam. They see that dead-tree mail is going the way of the dodo, and more communication every day is electronic. They see spam as a wonderful way to increase their reach and simultaneously lower their costs.
They're thinking long-term: in 25 years, they want to be able to legally send anything to anyone, ideally with little or no cost to themselves. Science fiction is replete with examples of this thinking: intelligent door agents or house-bots who spend (too) much of their time filtering what we've come to think of as spam (i.e. unsolicited electronic communication).
The DMA sees the Internet as a "push" medium, with themselves as the prime pusher. "We'll tell you what you need, and want," they say.
In summary, this is sadly not as much a no-brainer for Congress as you'd think or hope. The DMA has been throwing huge money at this problem for years, and will continue to do so. Don't trust Congress to do the Right Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
My boss (a lawyer) gave me a boilerplate employment contract, basically claiming rights to everything I thought during my employment. I asked him to change it to include only work done during paid hours for the company, and to exclude any code covered by the GPL. After a 5-minute explanation of the GPL, he was a little worried.
Then I showed him to source to the CGI and DBI Perl modules, and told him that we'd have to extend our timeframe by 6 months while I rewrote all that funcionality. Then he got it, and I've had no trouble.
You make an excellent point, and I allude to it briefly and obscurely in my rant, but you say it better. The data format argument is a good one.
This is part of what I meant by "software quality." So far MS is lousy at it, and OSS is better. Some companies pick this up and use embedded Linux, but we should mostly count that as a miracle - OSS has to be so much better than MS even to make a dent because MS has such a huge warchest to throw at marketing.
I don't know how to solve this. Some big companies (e.g. IBM) are betting parts of their business on OSS, and their marketing may be enough to combat Microsoft's.
Microsoft is fast, fast, fast, though. Many companies have discovered this to their detriment. Microsoft, once it decides on something, can go after it with more ferocity and better organization than nearly any other entity on the planet. Most of this is thanks to their immense bank account from monopoly profits.
One thing at which they're lousy is grass-roots, and this is where OSS shines. Bottom line: power to the people, baby!
But this won't work, of course. Our favorite example is Microsoft, who blithely says, "It's all required; it's all part of the OS; either take the package or don't." Making choices confuses people, see, and we want to avoid that.
Without being elitist at all, some of what they say is true. One reason Microsoft has succeeded is that they remove those scary choices from the users. It's the software equivalent of "bread and circuses" - don't bother people with the details, wow them with flash, and they'll mostly ignore what goes on in the background.
This succeeds because it's what people want. My 72-year-old mother doesn't know about patches and updates and service packs, and for fuck's sake she shouldn't have to. For good or ill, most people view computers as slightly cantankerous, very expensive toasters. They have no idea that they have, sitting on their desks, a little machine that can do very nearly anything. They want to do a couple things, and they want those things to be easy.
I can see a couple ways for this to go:
- Special-purpose machines. Instead of one computer, you'll have a few little ones. A web pad in the kitchen that downloads recipies, a glorified word-processor in the study hooked up to a printer, maybe with accounting software. Most people will go to Office Depot and spend a few $hundred on a black box, kind of like a cell phone now days, then throw it away when a newer model appears. Microsoft is set to own this market.
- General-purpose machines. Geeks will still want a real, live computer that they can control. This is only going to get harder and harder. Twenty years from now, I bet there'll be fewer general-purpose computers than there were twenty years ago. The after-market parts business will dry up as copy-control gets more and more intrusive. I mean, I can build a box from a bunch of parts, but I can't build a fucking motherboard or hard drive.
Computers have to get easier to use while at the same time getting more complicated and doing more things. The only way to do this is to remove end-user control of the device. Fewer scary options, fewer things to screw up. For the most part this is a good thing. Most people using PCs today are basically helpless aside from a few well-known command sequences.The hard fight will be to retain control of real computers while consumer boxes get dumbed-down. What will make this possible (IMHO):
- No DRM. Period. This will kill general-purpose computing forever.
- More standardization. As the parts market shrinks and specialty boxes become more common, it'll be harder for ASUS (e.g.) to sell mobos into the after-market channel. There will be consolidation, but as long as #1 above is avoided it shouldn't be fatal.
- Concentration on software quality. The OSS community generally goes a better job of this than closed-source, but it will have to get better. Quality alons isn't enough; as we know, 500% better isn't better enough if you don't have good marketing.
This is a long, winding rant, and has gone a little off-topic. Back to the point: I don't think this situation will get better, or at least not in the way we hope. It's going to be incredibly difficult to hold software manufacturers liable for anything; it'll be even harder to hold them liable and let OSS off the hook.The best hope, I think, is operating system diversity, which at this point means forced licensing of the Windows source code. If you can use Microsoft Windows that basically bends over for any cute-looking virus or trojan, or (e.g.) IBM Windows that flat-out refuses to install anything that isn't digitally-signed and verified (assume, for the minute, non-DRM verified), what would you pick? What would your mom pick? What would you want your mom to pick?
The honest work and thought that Gary put into the AD&D rules was tremendous. I remember DM'ing in the 80's for a couple friends getting into a firefight with some Wizard or other. The Wizard wasn't that butch, but he did have a Ring of Invisibility.
:)
"No problem," said Roger (arrogant, cheated). "I put on my Ring of Invisibility and now I can see the Wizard."
"Bullshit," I said (ever an officious bastard, I spent my free time reading the rule book). "The AD&D rules specifically say that Rings of Power (including Invisibility) confer no benefit other than those explicitly stated." It was true - the example in the book even said (paraphrasing), "A Ring of Invisibility makes you invisible, but doesn't allow you to see other invisible things."
Then I told him that every 60 second he'd been arguing he'd taken 2d8 fire damage from the Wizard
You know what Hendrix played? Aside from a couple favorites, like his Angel (the flying-V), he mostly played the cheapest, shittiest Strats he could get his hands on.
But that's extreme - he was a genius. And more to the point, he always sounded like Jimi. Most every great guitarist is as recognizable for his sound and tone as his playing, but keep in mind that most of these people found one guitar, or type of guitar, and stuck with it. I mean shit, what would Angus sound like on a Strat? Anything but AC/DC, that's for sure.
The greatest masters can get more and better sounds out of a guitar than an amateur, or even a very good player, but the guitar does matter.
It's called carpal tunnel ...
I hope he patents this before Google steals his idea!
Joke
Briefly (I'm at work) this is exactly why the U.S. shouldn't ban this research. It's bloody inevitable. Our government is caving to a few screaming fundamentalists over one of the most important medical advances in history.
Who's going to pursue this more ethically? The Chinese, who've been alleged to use prisons as organ factories, or us?
I once inherited a smallish network (70 nodes) that was using an NT box as a web gateway and mail server. It was running something called Xtramail, which is a truly bloody horrible piece of software. While I was trying to figure out how to gracefully get rid of this box (a 486 on ISDN), one of the users wanted to create a mailing list.
Ok, no problem. Read the docs, slurp this list, check these buttons, viola. One of the cute little checkboxes was "Only allow owner to send list mail." Duh - I checked it. The guy sent his email (only about 200 list members) and we went home.
I came in the next morning to 20,000 emails just in the queue. That fucker sent our tens of thousands of emails overnight, because the send restrict wasn't working. There were a couple dead addresses on the list, and they of course bounced - and Xtramail politely returned those bounces to the entire list. Wash, rinse, repeat. If that place had had a real server and a real 'net connection, it could have sent millions of emails in that time. As it was, many people on the list were (quite justifiably) pissed.
So I called up whoever owned Xtramail at that time (Artisoft at that time, but a different company now - can you say, "hot potato?") and had a slightly polite shit fit. The guy flat-out refused to acknowledge it was a problem, until I made him go through the same steps on his local copy.
Crickets.
"Uh, looks like that option isn't working. I'll have to file a bug report." Then I spent another 45 minutes trying to get accounting to refund the $200 I'd given them for the support call.
They never did fix the bug, but I gave up my plans to have a graceful transition. I pulled that POS out the same day and installed another little NT mailer, quite a nice one, until I replaced the whole thing with a qmail FreeBSD box.
No moral to the story, really ('cept I should have been more paranoid, and tested the list more). But I bet more than a few readers have had that quick "oh shit" feeling as they saw the queue filling up.
Almost every one of the search engines mentioned makes a very clear distinction between paid placements and search results. This is not about Yahoo sprinkling paid placement links in its search results and pretending they're real. Even the worst offender, Dogpile, lists results by search engine, rather than pretending they're all real searches from the same source.
Yes, they could be clearer, but this isn't nearly as bad as the hysterical submitter wants you to believe. In some ways, it's good. Do a search for Ted Bundy on Yahoo and you'll see a paid link to our site (not gonna tell you which one). Of the people who click that link, most end up pretty happy because we've got some cool stuff.
Overture is the company that puts must of these paid links in searches; we pay them, they pay Yahoo. Overture's standards for search terms are breathtaking - I've spent over a month arguing with them about search terms which are exactly applicable to what we're selling. They go out of their way not to be deceptive.
Of course Google will say that Overture's not a real search engine - Google's competing with them for the same market. Hello! Google isn't some great white knight, immune from the evils of capitalism. They're the best search engine by far, but their AdWords program sucks ass compared with Overture's. This whole article reads like a Google press release. Contrary to what they say, it's much much easier to get a deceptive ad in Google AdWords than in Overture (not that we've tried - it would be a waste of money).
Unless I'm looking to buy something, I avoid Overture and all the sites they sell ads to. If I am looking to buy something, Overture is a great tool to start. For knowledge, and obscure or very specific searches, of course, nothing beats Google.
I read a couple short ones, but yeah, the rest are pretty thick. Your point about most people only commenting when they've got something bad to say is well-taken. My argument, in this case implied, is that of the informed population, a far higher percentage have a negative opinion of Microsoft. (That might be bullshit, too, since it's largely anecdotal.)
I bet the true anti-MS zealots are balanced out by the MS "astroturf" campaign.
Interesting, given that I didn't state my position, and since I really haven't made up my own mind yet.
Congratulations on getting a couple karma points, though. Pretty good troll
Not to sound elitist, but the vast majority of people in this country aren't qualified to have an opinion on the settlement. Anyone with a 'net connection could change that for themselves with a couple hours research, but we know how unlikely that is.
First, this is wanton speculation on your part, since the comments haven't even been published; I bet you haven't even read the ones in the link (neither have I).
Second, these companies and "zealots" do not have a vested interest in the destruction of Microsoft. Could you even imagine the utter chaos that would insue if Microsoft were to cease to exist? AOL would tank, for one. What these folks do have a vested interest in is a market economy free from the ravaging predation of Microsoft.
What they (and I) are asking for is simple: (a) enforce the laws on the books and (b) try to restore competition. If they'd done it 5 years ago it would have been easier; 5 years from now it'll be harder still.
A friend of mine works for the USPS, and she turned me on to it. It helps pay her salary, plus those business reply envelopes are expensive. She said the key was to get enough crap in the envelope that it weighed over an ounce.
As a bonus, I made little flyers on bright paper: "This complete waste of your time and money was brought to you by [name, address] who would like to be removed from your mailing lists." I'd wrap a flyer around an ounce or so of ripped up paper and stuff that in the envelope.
I viewed it as a lark, just a fun thing to do when I got home every day. But you know, after 6 months of it, my junk mail dropped dramatically. From 3 or 5 pieces a day to just 1 or 2 a week. In short, I'd strongly recommend this to anyone plagued by direct mail.
I love this idea. Really, I love it. But there are some real problems:
First, making and selling these devices will be very hard. Not technologically, but legally and socially. I bet most of the tech work could be done in 6 months and the device could be on the market.
But this isn't Linux - development and sales of these devices will have to be centralized rather than distributed. This means a large corporation. The devices have to be very popular for Metcalfe's Law to make them useful, so they'll have to be marketed. In other words, there'll be one large company for the Feds or RIAA to target and/or intimidate.
Second, this is the farthest thing from unstoppable. How hard would it be for the Feds to setup a listening station in Central Park and flat-out arrest everyone carrying on of these? Just because they're in your pocket doesn't mean they're hidden - they'd have to announce themselves to as much of the world as possible to be of any use. Shit, the RIAA could setup a hidden station in Central Park to perform a DOS (or format) on each one as it wanders by.
Technological solutions are notoriously hard to apply to social problems, and copyright is a social problem. No magical P2P device will sound the death-knell for copyright. It's going to take a sea-change in the way people relate to and value information.
William S Burroughs once said, "Evolution did not come to a reverent halt with homo sapiens." He believed that the human species as is was doomed, and that to survive at all we needed to get into space. His vision of space-faring was different from the popular one - he imagined that humans would undergo radical biological alterations, to become creatures more adapted to the environment of space travel.
This is a pretty common theme in science fiction, from Brave New World forward (perhaps even before) - specialized "models" of human for specific tasks.
Frank Herbert (e.g. in Destination Void) imagined that space travel would first be done by clones. Herbert's future got around the knotty personal identity issues with clones by simply declaring them non-human. Clones were literally chunks of flesh owned by humans or corporations, and there were few restrictions on how they were treated. (Note that Herbert was not at all advocating this attitude, just speculating that it might become dominant.) So the first space travellers were clones, but only because they were disposable.
I agree with Burroughs (and so many others) that we need to get off this rock if we're to have any long-term future. The biologic alteration route is an interesting one - purposeful evolution. This is an exciting time to be alive.
Thanks for the reply (gotta love this new "mesage waiting" feature, eh?). I wasn't trying to prove conclusively that your idea won't work, just poke some holes in it. Good ideas survive criticism; bad ones don't.
:) spam increase.
My most important point is the last one: your idea might help on the client side, and save people from hitting the "Delete" button some, but does zero to address theft of servies. If you pay by the minute for 'net access (much of the world), your idea will actually cost people more money. Also, your ISP is still receiving, storing, and relaying the spam to you.
Perhaps spammers will wise up if people use this system, and send less crap that they know will be rejected? I think that's a pipe dream - the response rate from spam is miniscule, anyway. Most of the world would have to use this system before spammers say any signifcant downside from it. Even then, like any threatened species, they'd probably go into a breeding frenzy, and we'd have a net (not 'net
As a personal solution to keep your inbox cleaner I think your idea is good. As a solution to the spam problem generally, I don't think it will be effective.
- Traffic. Email traffic would skyrocket if every first-time communication required several back-and-forth messages.
- Arms race. Do you really think spammers wouldn't be able to crack this? It's no more difficult a problem than OCR, and that's pretty good already.
- Power. If you sent a different JPG every time, you'd need to generate it somehow, or keep a store of them. This means either more CPU alloted to your mail processing, or more storage space. Certainly more bandwidth.
One way it might help is that most spammers use fake return addresses, so your "Please request authorization" message would bounce. For those that have real return addresses (read: "Got a live one!"), you'd just be setting yourself up for more spam.I know the famous saying that you can't apply a technological solution to a social problem, but I don't think that's true of spam. Science fiction is replete with examples of personal assistants (from smart robots, to dumb door-bots, to unconsciously-controlled implants) - this is what we need. A program that can recognize and internalize some basic rules regarding our communication, and then filter incoming traffic based on those rules.
I think that such a system (in a crude form) is already here - many mail clients (including the much-maligned Outlook) have good support for rules. As these gets better, and easier to use, spam will be less of a perceived problem for users.
But more of a problem for ISPs, I think, since filters only work at the client-level, long after the spam has been routed and processed. It'll be an arms race - spammers sending more and more crap, trying to slip through your filters. This is why ORBS and MAPS and the like are great ideas (with perhaps less-than-great execution).
First, this isn't entrapment - they're not going to prosecute people for trying to give money to these fake sites.
Second, the theoretical FBI tactic you describe sounds very much like entrapment (IANAL), which is very illegal.
Frankly, I'm amazed and gratified to see a government agency making such good use of the web.
One of my favorite The Onion articles:
Stephen Hawking Builds Robotic Exoskeleton . It's got a great photo.
For those who don't know, Neil Stephenson's 2nd novel is Zodiak, about a drug-abusing, hell-raising, hippie chemist who makes life miserable for polluters in Boston harbor. He also finds monstrous amounts of PCBs in the water, and the story goes on from there.:)
/. much more than PCBs. :)
Also, Neil's been mentioned here on
Microsoft bashing is one thing, but c'mon. So they swallowed a few companies, crushed some others, and flouted some economic laws. On the scale of 'evil corporations' that barely registers. They don't pay governments to kill their own citizens, or dump toxins into local water supplies. Heck, they don't even strip mine beautiful wilderness.
I don't like Microsoft much either, but let's have some sense of proportion, eh?
Remember the Maginot Line? Impregnable? How easy was it to get around that? Data is useful in direct proportion to its accessibility - cut the connections into this place and it's toast. No frontal attack necessary.
:)
Also, the article says they can expand capacity 300%. Frankly, that sounds like pretty short-term planning to me. In my experience, it's a rare data store that doesn't double in size every year or two.
Still, it sounds like a cool place, and probably has a better climate than Sealand
Actually, the Direct Marketing Association loves spam. They see that dead-tree mail is going the way of the dodo, and more communication every day is electronic. They see spam as a wonderful way to increase their reach and simultaneously lower their costs.
They're thinking long-term: in 25 years, they want to be able to legally send anything to anyone, ideally with little or no cost to themselves. Science fiction is replete with examples of this thinking: intelligent door agents or house-bots who spend (too) much of their time filtering what we've come to think of as spam (i.e. unsolicited electronic communication).
The DMA sees the Internet as a "push" medium, with themselves as the prime pusher. "We'll tell you what you need, and want," they say.
In summary, this is sadly not as much a no-brainer for Congress as you'd think or hope. The DMA has been throwing huge money at this problem for years, and will continue to do so. Don't trust Congress to do the Right Thing.
If you're ever near Portland, visit! It's flat-out mind-blowing to see the store. It's easier to get lost in Powell's then Disneyland.