How can you be serious??? If a japanese citizen links to something, no matter where it is, that's illegal in japan, of course that would be illegal by their ruling. If a japanese citizen, on the otherhand, hand material that was illegal for viewing in china and a chinese resident linked to his/her page, they'ed be in no trouble unless China and Japan signed into a treaty of sorts...
Use common sense... Even if the law doesn't appear to (though, unfortuatly, I kind of think it does)... The law says "don't link to illegal material from Japan." Very simple sentence. I don't think it would cause much confusion.
If all the Linux users that constantly gloat about how Linux WILL (not might) overthrow Microsoft really wanted to help out, one of the best things in the world that they could do is either start a grass roots movement asking AOL to port it's services to Linux, or at the very least work on Wine to the point where it can run the AOL binaries.
Think about it.... 22 million people out there use AOL as their means to access the internet. They're familliar with it. Many of them probably exclusively use AOL on their computers... If AOL were available to run in some way shape or form on Linux, it'd be a huge win for linux in the consumer arena if AOL came installed (by option) in the many distros.
Because they're all (or many of them) into free as in beer software. Since patents generally cost money to be licensed, it prevents them from using the same technologies as proprietary software. That's at least what I think it is.
How can you argue that they don't? I mean, all you'd have to do is bring forth the BioTech and Pharmaceutical industries to see that they do work... Why else would they work on things like cures for cancer and aids if they couldn't feel assured that they would at least be able to recoup their costs? For the good of humanity? No... that'd work in some socialist atmosphere, but not in the capitalistic society that many of us live in.
Even many software patents, I think, are perfectly valid... QuickTime uses numerous patented compression technologies that Apple has licensed from other companies. Would those companies have even come to life to research such things if they knew that the moment they figured out how to do what they do, every other company would be able to use their technology? I doubt it. RSA also independantly came up with RSA encryption. Yes, it now sounds like using prime's for encryption may have been developed by the British (i think?) intellegence community, but they've had ample time to come forward with proof of that, and never did.
I think the main issue is awarding patents based on business models which are overly broad. People should really sit down and decide if something that's being submitted is really an invention, or just an extension on already existing technologies. Overall though, I think the patent system has really been beneficial as a whole, but with the rate of change these days, the laws need to be reworked to deal with a new society.
The Macintosh still kicks Windows' butt in the publishing arena... So many of the applications over the years have come to the Macintosh first and then windows, to the point that only recently have applications been released simultaneously and with feature parity across the two platforms. Apple has also integrated many things into their operating system that aids publishers... ColorSync (where is Windows' color management), QuickTime (if an app supports quicktime, then it supports all of the file formats that Quicktime does with zero extra effort from the developer).
Many designers learned their trade on the Macintosh these days... Many of the old school ones converted to Macs a long time ago... The MacOS might not be as stable as the Windows platforms (which I'd debate, being a user of both), but it's MUCH easier to setup and maintain, allowing non-technical people to go about being creative, rather than caring about DLL's, the many security flaws in Windows, etc...
Besides that, in case you hadn't noticed, Apple has doubled their market share in the past couple of years... Meaning their market's growing. More macs are being sold, not less... so why do you insist on why should so and so be ported to the Mac?
I do understand your second sentiment a little bit though... Mac users love their desktops, so why would they want to switch to Linux? And then the next question would really be: Why would a mac user want to switch to Linux with OS-X right around the corner? That's a real toughie, I think...
The first answer would be that some mac users are actually curious about other technologies...They use a Mac because they feel it's superior to Windows, but they're not afraid to look at other options available. The second answer? I really don't know... As i said earlier i'm a long time Mac user, though I've also PC with Windows and Linux on it, and i really do have zero interest in installing Linux on a Mac these days... A year ago, I played with MkLinux, but now that OS-X is just about here, i'd rather sit back and wait for that.
What? George Lucas is known to want to have tight control over everything his name's associated with... He's working on episode 2 at this moment, so he released the VHS version of episode 1... People expect more from DVD's... especially one from him. How would all of slashdot feel if he did release a bare minimal DVD - just the movie with the two aspect ratios and cool sound... And then in a few years released a "special edition" version with new scenes, an interactive tour of the sets, interviews with the actors, etc... ? You'd all say he was ripping everyone off to make them all buy the DVD again.
He's stuck in a no win situation... But by sticking by his word, at least he's preventing people from having to buy multiple DVD's...
Not many companies will release their core products as open source unless they feel they have nothing left to be gained by keeping them proprietary. Witness Apple. Darwin's open, because it's based on Mach and the BSD's for one, for two, their OS is so much more than a kernel, there's nothing to be gained by keeping it proprietary. But Quartz (their display technology) remains closed, because if it were opened, it could migrate to every other OS and leave apple with no compelling reasons why people should use their particular brand of software.
Be happy for the bones that are thrown... In time, maybe more companies will be more and more willing to hand more important pieces of their product line to the open source community. The chances of that plummet when people thumb their noses at them, insult them, etc...
There's more to many books that simply ASCII text... You'd lose the page breaks, bolds and italices, all those fancy swoosh characters they use in chapter names and numbers, etc... I don't think that many books would stand up very well to being translated to straight ASCII. Yes, the text might all be the same, but there's many other subtleties that would be lost in the process. It might be good enough for some people, but overall, I'd rather wait until all the infrastructure is in place to guarantee that as many people as possible can view the books as originally intended.
Further, I'd hope that books whose copyrights haven't yet expired not be put online via the Library of Congress without the author and/or publisher's permission. When it becomes possible to view electronic books that look identicle to the printed versions, many authors would suffer financially if their works were suddenly available for free... I don't think the mp3 encourages cd sales argument could be applied effectively to making whole books available online. If it seems off base to bring up MP3's in this discussion, sorry!
When Redhat went public not so long ago, many/.ers pointed at RHAT's market cap and triumphantly stated that the first order of business should be acquiring SCO so they could release all of SCO's products under the GPL... Now SCO comes forward and starts releasing their products under even more lenient licenses and they get slapped for it?
Of course they had to attack OpenSource way back when... It was untested in the business world, and all they saw was a competitor to themselves on the x86 turf they'ed chosen to live on... They've now realized that they still have some advantages in some areas, a good name among some of their customers, and are realizing that Linux is mainly headed for a collision course with Windows, and not themselves, so they're arming Linux better for it's battle.
I say good for them! I hope that they can continue to revamp themselves to survive in the 21st century.
Microsoft used to own a piece of SCO via the deal that got SCO Xenix. But Microsoft not so recently divested it's investment in SCO (I think in the past 2 or 3 years). Since then, SCO's been standing on it's own legs... But even before that, Microsofts involvement with SCO was minimal, or even non-existant.... Otherwise, NT would probably have all sorts of nifty gadgets from SCO's products, and vice versa... Unixware and Openserver would have surely included all sorts of licensed Microsoft technologies, making them 100% compatible with Windows services and breaking away from most Unix standards.
It'll cost you money if the judge decides in the spammers favor, though... Generally, you'd have to pay their legal bill if you sue and lose. Otherwise, anyone could bankrupt anyone by just filing lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.
So, if it takes 5 seconds on a Celeron box this year, (720 emails/hr) It'll take 2.5 seconds on an Athlon box this year, (1440 emails/hr) but only 1.25 seconds next year and (2880 emails/hr) then only.625 seconds next year and (5760 emails/hr) then only.3125 seconds the year after that (11520 emails/hr)
and pretty soon we're right back to where we started. Never mind the fact that there are hardware accelerators and SMP machines, both of which would be worth while if the mail was generating a profit, and the fac that you'd need to teach every one in the world how to use PGP that wanted to contact you. I tried to get my mom to use PGP, but she was completely put off by it as being too intrusive. I can only imagine my cousins grappling with computer problems, trying to email me, only to find their cries for help bouncing back at them...
But in the end, you'd inconvience everyone except the spammers, who would just have to spend a little money on the problem. It's not like anyone's sitting there keying in data. The machine's just running. And it doesn't cost them any thing more to leave their computer if their computers on 24/7 already.
The only reason that you might be getting 15+ calls a day on a regular basis, at home, is if you're actually ordering stuff from them. If you're ordering, then obviously they're selling you something you want, so you shouldn't complain. If you don't order, your name and number WILL drift by the way side pretty quickly.
If these are workplace phone calls, while they still might be annoying, I don' think they should count in this conversation. After all, you're getting paid to do whatever, including answering the phone. It only takes 15 seconds to realize the call isn't work related. If you're losing much more productivity than that, that's your managers problem, your problem, but not the telemarketers problem.
you don't pay for incoming calls, unless your'e on a cell phone, which i don't think they're calling at all. They pay for their connection charges, for 800 numbers for complaints, etc...
None of those costs exist with spam... it's a free marketing tool, and because it's free, it's being abused to no end.
That the main argument with spam was that using spam, emailers were passing the costs of their advertising efforts to the customer and the servers in between. With telemarketters and direct mailers, they pay for the priveledge of trying to sell you something. That has to be fair. Otherwise, people will start complaining about all the intrusive ads on their television sets.
Besides that, direct marketers and telemarketers are a LOT more regulated than what seems possible for spammers. There are places where you can submit your name, address, and phone number and effectively "opt out" of all of their promotions. Just about all of the legitamate marketers bounce their lists against those lists in order to lessen their costs (why mail to someone who definetly wont' respond) and to keep in the good graces of the DMA.
The marketers that don't use those lists are another matter... But if they're not concerned with happy customers, the odds are they're peddling nothing but scams.
To loop back to the first paragraph of my response... I don't think that any action can really be taken on a large scale against telemarketers, since they pay in order to reach you. Individuals can opt out. And if you get them on the phone, rather than say "i'm not interested" say "take my number off your list and never call me again". It's either federal law or enacted in many states, when you tell a marketer to cease contact with you, they must abide.
I agree that going after the universities is a bit out of line. Universities can not and should not have to monitor all the traffic on their network or be expected to lock certain ports.
Napster is a completely different story in my eyes. Yes, there are some people legitamately using napster. But I'd wager that 95% of people using their service are using it to pirate music. If that's the case, then Napster should be completely revamped to try to stop people from pirating music using their servers as intermediaries. They should do something Beam-It-esque, like keep a central database of which users have access to which songs, and then filter search results based on that criteria. That'd at least make it appear that they were TRYING to combat piracy. Instead they just shrug their shoulders.
Guess what. Landlords can lose their properties if it's found that people are trafficing in drugs with their knowledge. You can go to jail if i kill someone in your house and you don't report it. You can also go to jail if you let someone use heroin in your house. In none of those cases did you do anything wrong, you just looked the other way. Just like napster is doing.
The music industry IS trying to figure out a way to distribute music via the internet. They just haven't figured out a way to do it that makes everyone happy. Right now, fans (or rather, psuedo fans) are happy, because they don't have to pay a dime to access most of the music out there. That doesn't take into account the artists, managers, producers, engineers, artists, etc, who are all trying to eke out a living in the music industry.
If Napster wanted to reduce it's accountability for it's users actions, it should go through more verification steps to be sure that users are who they say they are. After their ID has been trully verified, they could then make up whatever handle they'ed like to use. If for some reason or another, a user is suspected of trading in pirated songs, then that user could be physically tracked down and forced to show that they have the right to possess said songs.
Much as i don't like BeamIt, mainly because it does tend to grind my network to a halt, at least it attempts to verify which songs users should have access to.
Since Napsters network is based entirely on trading MP3's (at least until Wrapster gets integrated into the Napster clients), Napster should either be more forceful in stating and enforcing copyright laws, or simply cease and desist the running of their servers. Mp3.com figured out a way to verify user's rights to given songs... Napster should too. Otherwise they should stop. It's just not fair to the artists.
Like I said in there, let the musicians decide how they their music is distributed. Support the ones who have values you like. Chuck D's that way. Quite a few other artists release their music on the internet.
But when someone steps forward and says they don't want something done to their work, abide by their wishes. Otherwise, why can't I just go over your house and take whatever I'd like? I mean, i want it, so isn't my right to have what i want? No, it isn't, when what i want is someone else's. Then you have to ask permission to borrow it, or buy whatever they're interested in selling to you.
It's all about people retaining control over their works... Kinda like the oh-so valuable GPL which is talked about all around here... Yes, it equates to free software... But the developers make a consciounscious decision to GPL their work... I don't see any GPL advocates distributing Photoshop, Windows 2000, or any other copyrighted software under the guise that "software should be free", unless they're just warez kids. Imagine the backlash that would happen here if companies started distributing Linux w/o source? That backlash has happened somewhere else, because in this case it's many of the Napster users that are ignoring the artists rights
It's all about the various "me"'s around here, apparently. Why don't you all just let the musicians decide how to distribute their music? Ooooh, I know. Because they won't do it for free. Yes, musicians get screwed by labels. But the general mentality around here is that since labels are screwing the artists, so should the consumers. What great fans you are.
Who's it going to take to stand up and say Napster isn't all that good for the artists for anyone to listen? First the Labels stood up and said it. Then the RIAA said it. Now the artists are coming forward and saying it. No one's listening. However small amount it is, the artists do get paid by the labels for each CD they sell. Napster fans would rather believe that they make no money and instead that money comes from touring and t-shirt sales... No. Once a band is reasonably large, but not huge, tours are loss leaders to generate more record sales... Small bands make money on shows, as do huge ones, but for the ones stuck firmly in the middle, it's just not the case.
I really don't think that Napster helps unknown bands get coverage... How? One can't do a search for a band they haven't heard of. Nor can one search for a song they haven't heard of. They can only search for things they already know exist.
Let me be straight here. I think MP3's are a great way for consumers to do things like store their music collection on their own, personal, hard drives at work and other places. But I think they're aweful from the standpoint of the musician... They've already decided how they want to distribute their music. They also decided they'ed like to try to make some money from it. That's why they signed up with a label in the first place.
I'm glad metallica's doing this... I only wish that more and more bands would stand up for THEIR RIGHTS, which Napster fans are currently trampelling on.
Why does each device in a house need to have it's own public IP address?
Maybe each house could have a router of sorts, with it's own real IP address, and then send traffic as needed to the "private" subnet inside the house (192.168.0.*), etc... Different classes of devices could just communicate over different ports, a la:
refridgerators use port 919 coffeemakers use port 18339 home security systems use port 683
etc...
If you were at work and wanted to check the status of your refridgerator, you could just open a connection to www.yourhouse.com:919, and then the fridge's webserver could shoot back a picture of it's contents to you....
I kinda sorta think that 4 billion IP addresses are enough, if we were just wiser in how we doled them out and used them...
so what happens if in say 5 years from now, Linux has 40% of the market and each distro includes staroffice which is their big selling point? Would the Consumer OS company have to go before the DOJ to get permission to include an office type suite with their OS, or will it just be that Linux might become more popular than windows because the linux companies can bunldle whatever they want, whereas Microsoft's companies would not be allowed to put more than one function in each software package...
Who's going to decide what features are appropriate for what applications and OS's?
In case you haven't looked recently, the linux bandwagon seems to have crashed into a brick wall... Look at all the linux stock prices today vs 2 months ago... They've been beaten down far more than any other sector.
SGI's just doing what they think makes good business sense, no more, no less. They're adopting Linux as their low-end OS because it runs on commodity hardware. Many of their customers will probably buy those machines. Many of their customers also want machines with B1 ratings. They'ed probably have to violate the GPL in order to implement B1 Security into a Linux distro without releasing the source, so they're doing what's required.
Then the least they could do is get to work on some of their own algorithms to distribute patent free, rather than request that other companies not charge them royalties for using their research...
I hate to reply to my own comment, but I can't figure which one of it's replies this is most appropriate for. My question: If Winmodems suck so badly, why does everyone and their mother around here whine about how they're not open enough? And in a day and age of 500 MHz Celeron chips, GHz Athlons, etc... I seriously doubt that a little cpu drain caused by the CPU emulating a modem would be missed by more than 5% of the people around here. Honestly, most people's machines CPU's aren't pegged at 100% 24/7, unless they're running Distributed.net or Seti clients. At least to me, saving $100 bucks here or there is much nicer than getting an extra 10 blocks per day on distributed.net.
The next question goes that since winmodems suck and are slow, and opensource development is supposed to yield superior results to proprietary schemes, why doesn't anyone bother to show up the winmodem manufacturers by making a driver for the modem that yields better performance while using less CPU cylcles?
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How can you be serious??? If a japanese citizen links to something, no matter where it is, that's illegal in japan, of course that would be illegal by their ruling. If a japanese citizen, on the otherhand, hand material that was illegal for viewing in china and a chinese resident linked to his/her page, they'ed be in no trouble unless China and Japan signed into a treaty of sorts...
Use common sense... Even if the law doesn't appear to (though, unfortuatly, I kind of think it does)... The law says "don't link to illegal material from Japan." Very simple sentence. I don't think it would cause much confusion.
No... It's just the final link, making 99.9999% of the pages out there that don't themselves contain illegal information still legal.
If all the Linux users that constantly gloat about how Linux WILL (not might) overthrow Microsoft really wanted to help out, one of the best things in the world that they could do is either start a grass roots movement asking AOL to port it's services to Linux, or at the very least work on Wine to the point where it can run the AOL binaries.
Think about it.... 22 million people out there use AOL as their means to access the internet. They're familliar with it. Many of them probably exclusively use AOL on their computers... If AOL were available to run in some way shape or form on Linux, it'd be a huge win for linux in the consumer arena if AOL came installed (by option) in the many distros.
Because they're all (or many of them) into free as in beer software. Since patents generally cost money to be licensed, it prevents them from using the same technologies as proprietary software. That's at least what I think it is.
How can you argue that they don't? I mean, all you'd have to do is bring forth the BioTech and Pharmaceutical industries to see that they do work... Why else would they work on things like cures for cancer and aids if they couldn't feel assured that they would at least be able to recoup their costs? For the good of humanity? No... that'd work in some socialist atmosphere, but not in the capitalistic society that many of us live in.
Even many software patents, I think, are perfectly valid... QuickTime uses numerous patented compression technologies that Apple has licensed from other companies. Would those companies have even come to life to research such things if they knew that the moment they figured out how to do what they do, every other company would be able to use their technology? I doubt it. RSA also independantly came up with RSA encryption. Yes, it now sounds like using prime's for encryption may have been developed by the British (i think?) intellegence community, but they've had ample time to come forward with proof of that, and never did.
I think the main issue is awarding patents based on business models which are overly broad. People should really sit down and decide if something that's being submitted is really an invention, or just an extension on already existing technologies. Overall though, I think the patent system has really been beneficial as a whole, but with the rate of change these days, the laws need to be reworked to deal with a new society.
The Macintosh still kicks Windows' butt in the publishing arena... So many of the applications over the years have come to the Macintosh first and then windows, to the point that only recently have applications been released simultaneously and with feature parity across the two platforms. Apple has also integrated many things into their operating system that aids publishers... ColorSync (where is Windows' color management), QuickTime (if an app supports quicktime, then it supports all of the file formats that Quicktime does with zero extra effort from the developer).
Many designers learned their trade on the Macintosh these days... Many of the old school ones converted to Macs a long time ago... The MacOS might not be as stable as the Windows platforms (which I'd debate, being a user of both), but it's MUCH easier to setup and maintain, allowing non-technical people to go about being creative, rather than caring about DLL's, the many security flaws in Windows, etc...
Besides that, in case you hadn't noticed, Apple has doubled their market share in the past couple of years... Meaning their market's growing. More macs are being sold, not less... so why do you insist on why should so and so be ported to the Mac?
I do understand your second sentiment a little bit though... Mac users love their desktops, so why would they want to switch to Linux? And then the next question would really be: Why would a mac user want to switch to Linux with OS-X right around the corner? That's a real toughie, I think...
The first answer would be that some mac users are actually curious about other technologies...They use a Mac because they feel it's superior to Windows, but they're not afraid to look at other options available. The second answer? I really don't know... As i said earlier i'm a long time Mac user, though I've also PC with Windows and Linux on it, and i really do have zero interest in installing Linux on a Mac these days... A year ago, I played with MkLinux, but now that OS-X is just about here, i'd rather sit back and wait for that.
What? George Lucas is known to want to have tight control over everything his name's associated with... He's working on episode 2 at this moment, so he released the VHS version of episode 1... People expect more from DVD's... especially one from him. How would all of slashdot feel if he did release a bare minimal DVD - just the movie with the two aspect ratios and cool sound... And then in a few years released a "special edition" version with new scenes, an interactive tour of the sets, interviews with the actors, etc... ? You'd all say he was ripping everyone off to make them all buy the DVD again.
He's stuck in a no win situation... But by sticking by his word, at least he's preventing people from having to buy multiple DVD's...
Not many companies will release their core products as open source unless they feel they have nothing left to be gained by keeping them proprietary. Witness Apple. Darwin's open, because it's based on Mach and the BSD's for one, for two, their OS is so much more than a kernel, there's nothing to be gained by keeping it proprietary. But Quartz (their display technology) remains closed, because if it were opened, it could migrate to every other OS and leave apple with no compelling reasons why people should use their particular brand of software.
Be happy for the bones that are thrown... In time, maybe more companies will be more and more willing to hand more important pieces of their product line to the open source community. The chances of that plummet when people thumb their noses at them, insult them, etc...
There's more to many books that simply ASCII text... You'd lose the page breaks, bolds and italices, all those fancy swoosh characters they use in chapter names and numbers, etc... I don't think that many books would stand up very well to being translated to straight ASCII. Yes, the text might all be the same, but there's many other subtleties that would be lost in the process. It might be good enough for some people, but overall, I'd rather wait until all the infrastructure is in place to guarantee that as many people as possible can view the books as originally intended.
Further, I'd hope that books whose copyrights haven't yet expired not be put online via the Library of Congress without the author and/or publisher's permission. When it becomes possible to view electronic books that look identicle to the printed versions, many authors would suffer financially if their works were suddenly available for free... I don't think the mp3 encourages cd sales argument could be applied effectively to making whole books available online. If it seems off base to bring up MP3's in this discussion, sorry!
When Redhat went public not so long ago, many /.ers pointed at RHAT's market cap and triumphantly stated that the first order of business should be acquiring SCO so they could release all of SCO's products under the GPL... Now SCO comes forward and starts releasing their products under even more lenient licenses and they get slapped for it?
Of course they had to attack OpenSource way back when... It was untested in the business world, and all they saw was a competitor to themselves on the x86 turf they'ed chosen to live on... They've now realized that they still have some advantages in some areas, a good name among some of their customers, and are realizing that Linux is mainly headed for a collision course with Windows, and not themselves, so they're arming Linux better for it's battle.
I say good for them! I hope that they can continue to revamp themselves to survive in the 21st century.
Microsoft used to own a piece of SCO via the deal that got SCO Xenix. But Microsoft not so recently divested it's investment in SCO (I think in the past 2 or 3 years). Since then, SCO's been standing on it's own legs... But even before that, Microsofts involvement with SCO was minimal, or even non-existant.... Otherwise, NT would probably have all sorts of nifty gadgets from SCO's products, and vice versa... Unixware and Openserver would have surely included all sorts of licensed Microsoft technologies, making them 100% compatible with Windows services and breaking away from most Unix standards.
My opinion.
It'll cost you money if the judge decides in the spammers favor, though... Generally, you'd have to pay their legal bill if you sue and lose. Otherwise, anyone could bankrupt anyone by just filing lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.
So, if it takes 5 seconds on a Celeron box this year, (720 emails/hr) .625 seconds next year and (5760 emails/hr) .3125 seconds the year after that (11520 emails/hr)
It'll take 2.5 seconds on an Athlon box this year, (1440 emails/hr)
but only 1.25 seconds next year and (2880 emails/hr)
then only
then only
and pretty soon we're right back to where we started. Never mind the fact that there are hardware accelerators and SMP machines, both of which would be worth while if the mail was generating a profit, and the fac that you'd need to teach every one in the world how to use PGP that wanted to contact you. I tried to get my mom to use PGP, but she was completely put off by it as being too intrusive. I can only imagine my cousins grappling with computer problems, trying to email me, only to find their cries for help bouncing back at them...
But in the end, you'd inconvience everyone except the spammers, who would just have to spend a little money on the problem. It's not like anyone's sitting there keying in data. The machine's just running. And it doesn't cost them any thing more to leave their computer if their computers on 24/7 already.
The only reason that you might be getting 15+ calls a day on a regular basis, at home, is if you're actually ordering stuff from them. If you're ordering, then obviously they're selling you something you want, so you shouldn't complain. If you don't order, your name and number WILL drift by the way side pretty quickly.
If these are workplace phone calls, while they still might be annoying, I don' think they should count in this conversation. After all, you're getting paid to do whatever, including answering the phone. It only takes 15 seconds to realize the call isn't work related. If you're losing much more productivity than that, that's your managers problem, your problem, but not the telemarketers problem.
My opinion.
you don't pay for incoming calls, unless your'e on a cell phone, which i don't think they're calling at all. They pay for their connection charges, for 800 numbers for complaints, etc...
None of those costs exist with spam... it's a free marketing tool, and because it's free, it's being abused to no end.
That the main argument with spam was that using spam, emailers were passing the costs of their advertising efforts to the customer and the servers in between. With telemarketters and direct mailers, they pay for the priveledge of trying to sell you something. That has to be fair. Otherwise, people will start complaining about all the intrusive ads on their television sets.
Besides that, direct marketers and telemarketers are a LOT more regulated than what seems possible for spammers. There are places where you can submit your name, address, and phone number and effectively "opt out" of all of their promotions. Just about all of the legitamate marketers bounce their lists against those lists in order to lessen their costs (why mail to someone who definetly wont' respond) and to keep in the good graces of the DMA.
The marketers that don't use those lists are another matter... But if they're not concerned with happy customers, the odds are they're peddling nothing but scams.
To loop back to the first paragraph of my response... I don't think that any action can really be taken on a large scale against telemarketers, since they pay in order to reach you. Individuals can opt out. And if you get them on the phone, rather than say "i'm not interested" say "take my number off your list and never call me again". It's either federal law or enacted in many states, when you tell a marketer to cease contact with you, they must abide.
I agree that going after the universities is a bit out of line. Universities can not and should not have to monitor all the traffic on their network or be expected to lock certain ports.
Napster is a completely different story in my eyes. Yes, there are some people legitamately using napster. But I'd wager that 95% of people using their service are using it to pirate music. If that's the case, then Napster should be completely revamped to try to stop people from pirating music using their servers as intermediaries. They should do something Beam-It-esque, like keep a central database of which users have access to which songs, and then filter search results based on that criteria. That'd at least make it appear that they were TRYING to combat piracy. Instead they just shrug their shoulders.
Guess what. Landlords can lose their properties if it's found that people are trafficing in drugs with their knowledge. You can go to jail if i kill someone in your house and you don't report it. You can also go to jail if you let someone use heroin in your house. In none of those cases did you do anything wrong, you just looked the other way. Just like napster is doing.
The music industry IS trying to figure out a way to distribute music via the internet. They just haven't figured out a way to do it that makes everyone happy. Right now, fans (or rather, psuedo fans) are happy, because they don't have to pay a dime to access most of the music out there. That doesn't take into account the artists, managers, producers, engineers, artists, etc, who are all trying to eke out a living in the music industry.
If Napster wanted to reduce it's accountability for it's users actions, it should go through more verification steps to be sure that users are who they say they are. After their ID has been trully verified, they could then make up whatever handle they'ed like to use. If for some reason or another, a user is suspected of trading in pirated songs, then that user could be physically tracked down and forced to show that they have the right to possess said songs.
Much as i don't like BeamIt, mainly because it does tend to grind my network to a halt, at least it attempts to verify which songs users should have access to.
Since Napsters network is based entirely on trading MP3's (at least until Wrapster gets integrated into the Napster clients), Napster should either be more forceful in stating and enforcing copyright laws, or simply cease and desist the running of their servers. Mp3.com figured out a way to verify user's rights to given songs... Napster should too. Otherwise they should stop. It's just not fair to the artists.
Like I said in there, let the musicians decide how they their music is distributed. Support the ones who have values you like. Chuck D's that way. Quite a few other artists release their music on the internet.
But when someone steps forward and says they don't want something done to their work, abide by their wishes. Otherwise, why can't I just go over your house and take whatever I'd like? I mean, i want it, so isn't my right to have what i want? No, it isn't, when what i want is someone else's. Then you have to ask permission to borrow it, or buy whatever they're interested in selling to you.
It's all about people retaining control over their works... Kinda like the oh-so valuable GPL which is talked about all around here... Yes, it equates to free software... But the developers make a consciounscious decision to GPL their work... I don't see any GPL advocates distributing Photoshop, Windows 2000, or any other copyrighted software under the guise that "software should be free", unless they're just warez kids. Imagine the backlash that would happen here if companies started distributing Linux w/o source? That backlash has happened somewhere else, because in this case it's many of the Napster users that are ignoring the artists rights
It's all about the various "me"'s around here, apparently. Why don't you all just let the musicians decide how to distribute their music? Ooooh, I know. Because they won't do it for free. Yes, musicians get screwed by labels. But the general mentality around here is that since labels are screwing the artists, so should the consumers. What great fans you are.
Who's it going to take to stand up and say Napster isn't all that good for the artists for anyone to listen? First the Labels stood up and said it. Then the RIAA said it. Now the artists are coming forward and saying it. No one's listening. However small amount it is, the artists do get paid by the labels for each CD they sell. Napster fans would rather believe that they make no money and instead that money comes from touring and t-shirt sales... No. Once a band is reasonably large, but not huge, tours are loss leaders to generate more record sales... Small bands make money on shows, as do huge ones, but for the ones stuck firmly in the middle, it's just not the case.
I really don't think that Napster helps unknown bands get coverage... How? One can't do a search for a band they haven't heard of. Nor can one search for a song they haven't heard of. They can only search for things they already know exist.
Let me be straight here. I think MP3's are a great way for consumers to do things like store their music collection on their own, personal, hard drives at work and other places. But I think they're aweful from the standpoint of the musician... They've already decided how they want to distribute their music. They also decided they'ed like to try to make some money from it. That's why they signed up with a label in the first place.
I'm glad metallica's doing this... I only wish that more and more bands would stand up for THEIR RIGHTS, which Napster fans are currently trampelling on.
Why does each device in a house need to have it's own public IP address?
Maybe each house could have a router of sorts, with it's own real IP address, and then send traffic as needed to the "private" subnet inside the house (192.168.0.*), etc... Different classes of devices could just communicate over different ports, a la:
refridgerators use port 919
coffeemakers use port 18339
home security systems use port 683
etc...
If you were at work and wanted to check the status of your refridgerator, you could just open a connection to www.yourhouse.com:919, and then the fridge's webserver could shoot back a picture of it's contents to you....
I kinda sorta think that 4 billion IP addresses are enough, if we were just wiser in how we doled them out and used them...
so what happens if in say 5 years from now, Linux has 40% of the market and each distro includes staroffice which is their big selling point? Would the Consumer OS company have to go before the DOJ to get permission to include an office type suite with their OS, or will it just be that Linux might become more popular than windows because the linux companies can bunldle whatever they want, whereas Microsoft's companies would not be allowed to put more than one function in each software package...
Who's going to decide what features are appropriate for what applications and OS's?
In case you haven't looked recently, the linux bandwagon seems to have crashed into a brick wall... Look at all the linux stock prices today vs 2 months ago... They've been beaten down far more than any other sector.
SGI's just doing what they think makes good business sense, no more, no less. They're adopting Linux as their low-end OS because it runs on commodity hardware. Many of their customers will probably buy those machines. Many of their customers also want machines with B1 ratings. They'ed probably have to violate the GPL in order to implement B1 Security into a Linux distro without releasing the source, so they're doing what's required.
Then the least they could do is get to work on some of their own algorithms to distribute patent free, rather than request that other companies not charge them royalties for using their research...
I hate to reply to my own comment, but I can't figure which one of it's replies this is most appropriate for. My question: If Winmodems suck so badly, why does everyone and their mother around here whine about how they're not open enough? And in a day and age of 500 MHz Celeron chips, GHz Athlons, etc... I seriously doubt that a little cpu drain caused by the CPU emulating a modem would be missed by more than 5% of the people around here. Honestly, most people's machines CPU's aren't pegged at 100% 24/7, unless they're running Distributed.net or Seti clients. At least to me, saving $100 bucks here or there is much nicer than getting an extra 10 blocks per day on distributed.net.
The next question goes that since winmodems suck and are slow, and opensource development is supposed to yield superior results to proprietary schemes, why doesn't anyone bother to show up the winmodem manufacturers by making a driver for the modem that yields better performance while using less CPU cylcles?