This isn't true scalability in the way that server manufacturers mean. In that, I mean you can't just take MySQL, Apache, Oracle, or any other application and code it to Linux's API's and then install it on a Beowolf cluster and watch it magically take advantage of all the nodes. This is a completely different beast, whose only commonality with the desktop and server Linux OSes is the fact that there is a common kernel running on each machine.
Microsoft could do the same thing, install the NT kernel on a bunch of machines and run a program on top of it to actually pool machine resources, if they felt like it, but that's not at all their target market. Really, no pure OS vendor is going to approach the super computer market. There's no demand for just OSes... people want machines. Since people are kind enough to develop Beowolf and Linux, vendors can play around with the idea of using Linux clusters.
It is funny though, that DVD's cost less to manufacture in quantity than VHS tapes. I'd guess that the cost to manufacture players are probably about even, or maybe DVD players cost more because of all the chips in them, but still. It is nearly identical to the record industry in the move from cassettes to CD's: Sell something that costs less to produce for a higher price.
At least in both cases the digital formats quality (especially across multiple listenings).
Consumers didn't really have much say in the transition from records and cassettes to CD's. The record companies decided to stop allowing stores to return unsold records but let them return unsold CD's for new inventory. No stores wanted to left holding a bunch of records they could do nothing with, so they swapped over to CD's.
And remember how CD's came with extra "bonus" tracks unavailable on the cassette or record versions? Kind of like how DVD's give us toys like multiple picture aspect ratio's, multiple language subtitles, etc...
Just a question... Aren't the american's already messing in australian affairs by broadcasting the code in the first place? A call from the... I forgot the acronymn!... isn't really messing with australian affairs any more than 2600 airing the broadcast in the first place. After all, on their home page, they list their address as being in New York. So... If 2600 airs a broadcast, that's not meddling, while if the MPAA attempts to block it, then it is meddling. What standards you have!
I seem to be alone in this voice, but I'm rather disgusted that if DeCSS is completely legit, as is the sentiment around here, then why must all the developers try to circumvent any rulings by airing code on TV, coming up with an idea of making the code into a T=shirt, etc... It all seems extremely immature.
Just fight the case, and if you lose do something. But with all these pre-emptive acts, it really seems that DeCSS develoepers based in the US feel that they're in the wrong, according to US laws, and rather than stand up for what they believe in, they're just trying anything and everything to get the code. The despricity of it all really doesn't cast a good light on everyone.
I don't think that the line "yes, it will play any game available for Linux" is a good selling point, at this point in time.
And forget about piling on more and more "features". It doesn't need to to anything but play games! Notice how well the WebTV is selling? Didn't think so. People need to realize that the set-top box market and the PC markets are completely different. If someone wanted to have a PC, they'ed have bought one.
Some features are very well suited for inclusion with a set top box... DVD player is a no brainer, as is a CD player, but only because the DVD player will play CD's. Web browsing software? No. Email clients? No. KDE? No. Those are all functions that really don't serve the set top market very well.
Even a "visible" OS is kind of against what a gaming console stands for. Who cares if the underlying OS is Windows, Linux, or any other operating system. You should turn the machine on, insert CD, pick up controller, and press start. The OS should only be there so that developers have a common API to code for in order to use things like the sound chips, graphics chips, and read from the CD.
Because console gamers and pc gamers are two different markets. There's some overlap, yes, but remember, the PC is a rather expensive general purpose machine, as opposed to the consoles, which are cheap specialized pieces of hardware.
There's also a huge amount of people out there that own multiple consoles but not a computer... And then the risk that if any manufacturer got too successful at selling games into the windows market, Microsoft would simply buy them out.
What's to stop a corporation from funding individuals in exchange for exclusive licenses to their patents? Then they've got a 17 years monopoly on the technology, and your new rules do nothing.
I like patents. I think some are dumb, though, but any new strategy has to treat everyone equally, otherwise people and companys will find the loopholes most beneficial to them.
"This patent needs to be assigned to an individual so we can have control over it for 17 years" or "i need to start a corporation and assign my patent to is so i get other favorable treatments" are both possibilities that will arise if there are two different plateaus for patents to sit on.
And remember, corporations are individuals. They can be sued, own property, etc, and no one owns that property aside from the corporation itself, unless you want to look down the lines and say shareholder A owns 10% of it, B has 5%, C has 2%. I don't think it works that way, in terms of patents, though.
Actually the low end of the first G4's (the 350's) were intially based on the G3's motherboard, because apple couldn't get their hands on enough chips to transition all of their motherboards to Sawtooth at once. They've since upgraded their capacity and have now retired the Yikes motherboard... But for a few months everyone shied away from the G4/350s'
Apple doesn't use ROM chips anymore. They boot using OpenFirmware. Mac's still have ROM file's though, which is how they blocked G4's until they were ready. Released a patch for the OS which incendentally blocked the use of G4's until the folks at Newer and MaxPower could develop software that bypassed that.
Non-competes that last for more than a year are pretty scary things. Nowadays most of them are very specific, as company's realize that they can't ask a programmer not to program for a year after they quit, as what would they do?
But they're still scary for potential employers. When i've spoken to head hunters in the past on of the first things they ask is if I had to sign a non-compete with my current employer, and if so how long does it last and can they read it so they determine exactly what it effects.
Unless you're an ace, most company's will rather pass by someone with NC rather than having to deal with their ex-employer in court or just through lawyers.
No. Other people are making money from it. You can't legitmatately go to work for Company A during the day, working on their OSes sound drivers, go home at night and work on your own open source sound drivers, release them to the world, where upon Company C picks them up and distributes them with their OS, unless Company A states that it's okay.
Non compete agreements hold up. I don't really like working at places that make me sign them, and I love the company's that hire me and explicitly state that they don't care what i do on my off hours.
Windows NT on PReP Solaris on PReP Netware on PReP
and a few others too.
AIX made it there, but that's easy since it was already running on the Power family of processors. The rest of the company's just couldn't see any real motivation to move to PReP. It would have been a move that benefitted almost nobody. There's already a commodity platform available... And for the companies with the most to gain from a stardardized platform, the ones that actually make hardware, PReP would have stood to eat into significant portions of their hardware business, which is where the money is for them.
OpenStep ran on all the platforms you mentioned. Rhapsody DR 1 or 2 was basically Openstep with a "Finder"-ish interface. That OS ran on Power Mac 85/86/95/9600's and some Intel boxes. But that's the last release that ran on intel. Don't believe or hope that OS X will run on anything but apple's boxes.
The kernel may be open-sourced, but OS X is a lot more than just a kernel, to the point that the only people that decide what OS X will be released for are the folks at apple. No amount of coding will get you their binary add-ons, unless someone wants to write a PowerPC emulator for x86.
They have moved to using more industry standard components as a means to keeping costs down and from benefiting from advances that effect the industry at large, but that does not mean that they're going to release their crown jewel for running on commodity hardware.
When people around here talk about heavy duty SMP around here, they're talking about much more than home machines running dual pentiums. Your experiences are in no way comparable to the experiences one will have when running Solaris on a 32 processor Sparc machine.
Solaris on Intel may be available, but where are the highly scalable machines for it? I mean, greater than 4 CPU's? They're few and far between, in my opinion. What about for sparc? Just go to sun's website and click order... There they are - 64 CPU machine? No problem.
That was the decision that THEY MADE when they signed up... They got a cash advance. They got a nice studio to play in. And, oops!, they sold their soles.
Besides that, there's plenty of smaller labels out there that, shock!, let artists decide... It's fun to see some artists with no downloadables, some with MP3's, and some with RealAudio all on the same site.
But if an artist really sees mp3 distribution as a major issue they want their labels to acknoweledge, they can voice these things... If it's a big seller, i'd bet a label would rather accomodate their wishes than see them walk. But you don't see that happening, do you? Very rarely.
Re:All should support DVDs *because* they're crack
on
The Dead Media Project
·
· Score: 1
the allow copy bit will be ignored the first time, but if you try to copy your copy, that's where you're going to have many headaches using consumer recorders.
I never bought the punch... I just did it with sicsors or the occasional x-acto knife. Though, i did cut too deep more than a couple times and ruined a few disks that already had some data on them.
I personally believe that the vast majority of viruses on Win systems come from stupid people opening executables in the email attachments. I seriously believe that if EVERY EMAIL CLIENT simply disregarded (throw away) executable attachments, we'd see a HUGE decrease in virulent outbreaks. After all, we have FTP and the web for distributing programs. Using email for that purpose is a complete waste.
A lot of programs are distributed as.exe self extracting archives, and though it's not email's explicit purpose, it's generally much easier to email a small program to someone (I always use my mom as an example for this) than to try to locate it on a ftp server...
Also, I'm quite used to sending files to printers (real ones, think offset, not laser), and often times for some reason or another, they don't have all the same compression programs I use. So again, I'll package my files into a.sea and email them over to them. A lot of companies out there aren't high tech enough to have functional ftp sites...
And besides that, it seems these days most of the virii out there aren't even executable files. They're macro viruses stored inside of word documents. Blocking executables does nothing to stop that. Blocking macros would, but what if i wanted to email a fancy new excel macro to some guy in accounting?
Oh yeah... And >14 years and i've never gotten a virus either... I just read and pay attention to the alerts. With all the humdrum about Melissa the weekend before the outbreak, it was almost humorous to find that people got infected by it. It was announced on the news. They gave a perfect description of how it would appear in your inbox. Yet millions of people disregarded it and opened the files anyways....
So long as many programs need to be installed as root, i'd think that many new users and even some veteran ones will get hosed in the process. Maybe not so much by virii but by trojans. The possibility is great enough that one should not just scoff at it.
I'm sure you'd be annoyed with me if i started thwacking you with a foam, beer soacked mallet without asking first, right?:) Yeah, it may not hurt, but you're going to smell like cheap warm beer all day long... Probably get some form of rash as well, if you lay out in the sun or anything like that.
I just don't think it should be the fan's choice how as to how an artist distributes their music. Granted, they can suggest or request new formats, but they shouldn't go around distributing artists songs in the new formats unless the artist has given their explicit okay.
Artists need the royalty's from their CD's to survive... Only the mega popular acts actually make money on tours. Most artists go on tours to promote their CD's. It's more of an advertising expense than a revenue generator.
If you really at all care for the artists, i strongly encourage you to give this a read. You'll see that there's already plenty of people out there screwing artists over, that fans really shouldn't start as well.
Your T-shirt argument is making less and less sense.
I don't pay a dime for the email i recieve. One flat fee gets me all the email and surfing i want. And sorting through spam amounts to the same inconvience as sorting through real mail for letters and bills and then throwing away what i don't want. I don't mind that... My time's valuable, but spam is a necessary evil, i'd say. Laws could and should be enforced to kick off the trully fraudulent offers, but "legitatmate" spam should be allowed to exist.
I really don't understand where you get the idea that 10 lines of code or less are uncopyrightable/freely borrowable. Does that mean that me and a collective of say 20,000 volunteers can each "borrow" 10 lines of code from linux and devise our own proprietary kernel?
No. You really aren't allowed to steal any code from a gpl'ed project, to my knowledge. It's just a lot of the code out there is so common that no one can rightfully say it's there. But if somehow somewhere i came up with a memory compression algorythim that was contained in 4 lines of code, doubled effective memory with an actual increase in performance and GPLed it, i'd be damn pissed if someone borrowed that for their shareware or commercial product if they weren't abiding by the terms that were set forth in the license.
Look, the internet was born as a place of sharing and community. If you want your servers to be used solely the way you see fit, i would suggest you not leave them connected to a public network.
People around here defend hackers breaking into computers saying that they should have been secured better. But should a spammer use an extra 12 megabytes of diskspace/traffic - by golly, lets lynch them!
On the next hand, the rallying call of slashdot and e-commerce is: "Keep the government out!" but then with one issue, such as spam, all of a sudden the rallying call is for more laws. Go one way or the other, I'd say."
And again on another hand it goes like this "The internet is a cheaper place to do business. Nowadays anyone can start a business that looks as big and as successful as anyother business. Everything costs less, so people can charge less, etc. No longer do people need to incorporate, find a store front, etc. They just need to register a domain and promote their site. Unless that promotion entails sending email."
Spamming isn't theft. No more so than me saying that such and such slashdotter wasted my time by making me read their first post or ode to natelie portman having sex in a bowl of hot grits and suing over that fact. They're using the internet for what it was meant to do. Communicate.
Now... How would this all get cleaned up? If we did prosecute each and every spammer who:
* Misrepresents themselves * Sends mail to people who have specifically asked to not receive mail anymore * Promotes pyramid scams * Contains false advertising * Says it was requested when it wasn't
That'd go a long way towards cleaning out everyone's mailboxes. The spammers left standing after the illegal ones were taken care of would be more than willing to abide by the same rules that snail-mailers live with.
The point is, we have laws out there that should be able to handle the issues that a lot of spam is bringing up. They're just not being enforced. If those ones aren't, then there's not much point in making new laws.
By the way, how would you phrase a law to prevent spam?
If i found someone online that i went to highschool with and emailed them "hello!" would that be spam, since it wasn't solicited?
If i sent a notice of a class reunion to my entire high school class, again is that spam or not? Could it be spam for the people that didn't like me, but not in the case of the ones that did? If i were sued, since i could show that since some people didn't mind it, i wasn't at fault, or since i emailed the thing to the class bully, would i be completely screwed?
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't true scalability in the way that server manufacturers mean. In that, I mean you can't just take MySQL, Apache, Oracle, or any other application and code it to Linux's API's and then install it on a Beowolf cluster and watch it magically take advantage of all the nodes. This is a completely different beast, whose only commonality with the desktop and server Linux OSes is the fact that there is a common kernel running on each machine.
Microsoft could do the same thing, install the NT kernel on a bunch of machines and run a program on top of it to actually pool machine resources, if they felt like it, but that's not at all their target market. Really, no pure OS vendor is going to approach the super computer market. There's no demand for just OSes... people want machines. Since people are kind enough to develop Beowolf and Linux, vendors can play around with the idea of using Linux clusters.
It is funny though, that DVD's cost less to manufacture in quantity than VHS tapes. I'd guess that the cost to manufacture players are probably about even, or maybe DVD players cost more because of all the chips in them, but still. It is nearly identical to the record industry in the move from cassettes to CD's: Sell something that costs less to produce for a higher price.
At least in both cases the digital formats quality (especially across multiple listenings).
Consumers didn't really have much say in the transition from records and cassettes to CD's. The record companies decided to stop allowing stores to return unsold records but let them return unsold CD's for new inventory. No stores wanted to left holding a bunch of records they could do nothing with, so they swapped over to CD's.
And remember how CD's came with extra "bonus" tracks unavailable on the cassette or record versions? Kind of like how DVD's give us toys like multiple picture aspect ratio's, multiple language subtitles, etc...
Just a question... Aren't the american's already messing in australian affairs by broadcasting the code in the first place? A call from the ... I forgot the acronymn! ... isn't really messing with australian affairs any more than 2600 airing the broadcast in the first place. After all, on their home page, they list their address as being in New York. So... If 2600 airs a broadcast, that's not meddling, while if the MPAA attempts to block it, then it is meddling. What standards you have!
I seem to be alone in this voice, but I'm rather disgusted that if DeCSS is completely legit, as is the sentiment around here, then why must all the developers try to circumvent any rulings by airing code on TV, coming up with an idea of making the code into a T=shirt, etc... It all seems extremely immature.
Just fight the case, and if you lose do something. But with all these pre-emptive acts, it really seems that DeCSS develoepers based in the US feel that they're in the wrong, according to US laws, and rather than stand up for what they believe in, they're just trying anything and everything to get the code. The despricity of it all really doesn't cast a good light on everyone.
My cents. Two of them, i think.
I don't think that the line "yes, it will play any game available for Linux" is a good selling point, at this point in time.
And forget about piling on more and more "features". It doesn't need to to anything but play games! Notice how well the WebTV is selling? Didn't think so. People need to realize that the set-top box market and the PC markets are completely different. If someone wanted to have a PC, they'ed have bought one.
Some features are very well suited for inclusion with a set top box... DVD player is a no brainer, as is a CD player, but only because the DVD player will play CD's. Web browsing software? No. Email clients? No. KDE? No. Those are all functions that really don't serve the set top market very well.
Even a "visible" OS is kind of against what a gaming console stands for. Who cares if the underlying OS is Windows, Linux, or any other operating system. You should turn the machine on, insert CD, pick up controller, and press start. The OS should only be there so that developers have a common API to code for in order to use things like the sound chips, graphics chips, and read from the CD.
Because console gamers and pc gamers are two different markets. There's some overlap, yes, but remember, the PC is a rather expensive general purpose machine, as opposed to the consoles, which are cheap specialized pieces of hardware.
There's also a huge amount of people out there that own multiple consoles but not a computer... And then the risk that if any manufacturer got too successful at selling games into the windows market, Microsoft would simply buy them out.
What's to stop a corporation from funding individuals in exchange for exclusive licenses to their patents? Then they've got a 17 years monopoly on the technology, and your new rules do nothing.
I like patents. I think some are dumb, though, but any new strategy has to treat everyone equally, otherwise people and companys will find the loopholes most beneficial to them.
"This patent needs to be assigned to an individual so we can have control over it for 17 years" or "i need to start a corporation and assign my patent to is so i get other favorable treatments" are both possibilities that will arise if there are two different plateaus for patents to sit on.
And remember, corporations are individuals. They can be sued, own property, etc, and no one owns that property aside from the corporation itself, unless you want to look down the lines and say shareholder A owns 10% of it, B has 5%, C has 2%. I don't think it works that way, in terms of patents, though.
Actually the low end of the first G4's (the 350's) were intially based on the G3's motherboard, because apple couldn't get their hands on enough chips to transition all of their motherboards to Sawtooth at once. They've since upgraded their capacity and have now retired the Yikes motherboard... But for a few months everyone shied away from the G4/350s'
Apple doesn't use ROM chips anymore. They boot using OpenFirmware. Mac's still have ROM file's though, which is how they blocked G4's until they were ready. Released a patch for the OS which incendentally blocked the use of G4's until the folks at Newer and MaxPower could develop software that bypassed that.
Non-competes that last for more than a year are pretty scary things. Nowadays most of them are very specific, as company's realize that they can't ask a programmer not to program for a year after they quit, as what would they do?
But they're still scary for potential employers. When i've spoken to head hunters in the past on of the first things they ask is if I had to sign a non-compete with my current employer, and if so how long does it last and can they read it so they determine exactly what it effects.
Unless you're an ace, most company's will rather pass by someone with NC rather than having to deal with their ex-employer in court or just through lawyers.
No. Other people are making money from it. You can't legitmatately go to work for Company A during the day, working on their OSes sound drivers, go home at night and work on your own open source sound drivers, release them to the world, where upon Company C picks them up and distributes them with their OS, unless Company A states that it's okay.
Non compete agreements hold up. I don't really like working at places that make me sign them, and I love the company's that hire me and explicitly state that they don't care what i do on my off hours.
Same thing that happened to:
Windows NT on PReP
Solaris on PReP
Netware on PReP
and a few others too.
AIX made it there, but that's easy since it was already running on the Power family of processors. The rest of the company's just couldn't see any real motivation to move to PReP. It would have been a move that benefitted almost nobody. There's already a commodity platform available... And for the companies with the most to gain from a stardardized platform, the ones that actually make hardware, PReP would have stood to eat into significant portions of their hardware business, which is where the money is for them.
OpenStep ran on all the platforms you mentioned. Rhapsody DR 1 or 2 was basically Openstep with a "Finder"-ish interface. That OS ran on Power Mac 85/86/95/9600's and some Intel boxes. But that's the last release that ran on intel. Don't believe or hope that OS X will run on anything but apple's boxes.
The kernel may be open-sourced, but OS X is a lot more than just a kernel, to the point that the only people that decide what OS X will be released for are the folks at apple. No amount of coding will get you their binary add-ons, unless someone wants to write a PowerPC emulator for x86.
They have moved to using more industry standard components as a means to keeping costs down and from benefiting from advances that effect the industry at large, but that does not mean that they're going to release their crown jewel for running on commodity hardware.
I'm sorry... I thought you were replying to this comment.
No hard feelings!
:)
When people around here talk about heavy duty SMP around here, they're talking about much more than home machines running dual pentiums. Your experiences are in no way comparable to the experiences one will have when running Solaris on a 32 processor Sparc machine.
Solaris on Intel may be available, but where are the highly scalable machines for it? I mean, greater than 4 CPU's? They're few and far between, in my opinion. What about for sparc? Just go to sun's website and click order... There they are - 64 CPU machine? No problem.
That was the decision that THEY MADE when they signed up... They got a cash advance. They got a nice studio to play in. And, oops!, they sold their soles.
Besides that, there's plenty of smaller labels out there that, shock!, let artists decide... It's fun to see some artists with no downloadables, some with MP3's, and some with RealAudio all on the same site.
But if an artist really sees mp3 distribution as a major issue they want their labels to acknoweledge, they can voice these things... If it's a big seller, i'd bet a label would rather accomodate their wishes than see them walk. But you don't see that happening, do you? Very rarely.
the allow copy bit will be ignored the first time, but if you try to copy your copy, that's where you're going to have many headaches using consumer recorders.
I never bought the punch... I just did it with sicsors or the occasional x-acto knife. Though, i did cut too deep more than a couple times and ruined a few disks that already had some data on them.
I personally believe that the vast majority of viruses on Win systems come from stupid people opening executables in the email attachments. I seriously believe that if EVERY EMAIL CLIENT simply disregarded (throw away) executable attachments, we'd see a HUGE decrease in virulent outbreaks. After all, we have FTP and the web for distributing programs. Using email for that purpose is a complete waste.
.exe self extracting archives, and though it's not email's explicit purpose, it's generally much easier to email a small program to someone (I always use my mom as an example for this) than to try to locate it on a ftp server...
.sea and email them over to them. A lot of companies out there aren't high tech enough to have functional ftp sites...
A lot of programs are distributed as
Also, I'm quite used to sending files to printers (real ones, think offset, not laser), and often times for some reason or another, they don't have all the same compression programs I use. So again, I'll package my files into a
And besides that, it seems these days most of the virii out there aren't even executable files. They're macro viruses stored inside of word documents. Blocking executables does nothing to stop that. Blocking macros would, but what if i wanted to email a fancy new excel macro to some guy in accounting?
Oh yeah... And >14 years and i've never gotten a virus either... I just read and pay attention to the alerts. With all the humdrum about Melissa the weekend before the outbreak, it was almost humorous to find that people got infected by it. It was announced on the news. They gave a perfect description of how it would appear in your inbox. Yet millions of people disregarded it and opened the files anyways....
So long as many programs need to be installed as root, i'd think that many new users and even some veteran ones will get hosed in the process. Maybe not so much by virii but by trojans. The possibility is great enough that one should not just scoff at it.
Just LET THE ARTISTS decide what they want to do.
:) Yeah, it may not hurt, but you're going to smell like cheap warm beer all day long... Probably get some form of rash as well, if you lay out in the sun or anything like that.
I'm sure you'd be annoyed with me if i started thwacking you with a foam, beer soacked mallet without asking first, right?
I just don't think it should be the fan's choice how as to how an artist distributes their music. Granted, they can suggest or request new formats, but they shouldn't go around distributing artists songs in the new formats unless the artist has given their explicit okay.
At least get a clue....
Artists need the royalty's from their CD's to survive... Only the mega popular acts actually make money on tours. Most artists go on tours to promote their CD's. It's more of an advertising expense than a revenue generator.
If you really at all care for the artists, i strongly encourage you to give this a read. You'll see that there's already plenty of people out there screwing artists over, that fans really shouldn't start as well.
That's all good. But what you can't do is sign a contract, have it signed, and then start changing terms.
Your T-shirt argument is making less and less sense.
I don't pay a dime for the email i recieve. One flat fee gets me all the email and surfing i want. And sorting through spam amounts to the same inconvience as sorting through real mail for letters and bills and then throwing away what i don't want. I don't mind that... My time's valuable, but spam is a necessary evil, i'd say. Laws could and should be enforced to kick off the trully fraudulent offers, but "legitatmate" spam should be allowed to exist.
I really don't understand where you get the idea that 10 lines of code or less are uncopyrightable/freely borrowable. Does that mean that me and a collective of say 20,000 volunteers can each "borrow" 10 lines of code from linux and devise our own proprietary kernel?
No. You really aren't allowed to steal any code from a gpl'ed project, to my knowledge. It's just a lot of the code out there is so common that no one can rightfully say it's there. But if somehow somewhere i came up with a memory compression algorythim that was contained in 4 lines of code, doubled effective memory with an actual increase in performance and GPLed it, i'd be damn pissed if someone borrowed that for their shareware or commercial product if they weren't abiding by the terms that were set forth in the license.
Look, the internet was born as a place of sharing and community. If you want your servers to be used solely the way you see fit, i would suggest you not leave them connected to a public network.
People around here defend hackers breaking into computers saying that they should have been secured better. But should a spammer use an extra 12 megabytes of diskspace/traffic - by golly, lets lynch them!
On the next hand, the rallying call of slashdot and e-commerce is: "Keep the government out!" but then with one issue, such as spam, all of a sudden the rallying call is for more laws. Go one way or the other, I'd say."
And again on another hand it goes like this "The internet is a cheaper place to do business. Nowadays anyone can start a business that looks as big and as successful as anyother business. Everything costs less, so people can charge less, etc. No longer do people need to incorporate, find a store front, etc. They just need to register a domain and promote their site. Unless that promotion entails sending email."
Spamming isn't theft. No more so than me saying that such and such slashdotter wasted my time by making me read their first post or ode to natelie portman having sex in a bowl of hot grits and suing over that fact. They're using the internet for what it was meant to do. Communicate.
Now... How would this all get cleaned up? If we did prosecute each and every spammer who:
* Misrepresents themselves
* Sends mail to people who have specifically asked to not receive mail anymore
* Promotes pyramid scams
* Contains false advertising
* Says it was requested when it wasn't
That'd go a long way towards cleaning out everyone's mailboxes. The spammers left standing after the illegal ones were taken care of would be more than willing to abide by the same rules that snail-mailers live with.
The point is, we have laws out there that should be able to handle the issues that a lot of spam is bringing up. They're just not being enforced. If those ones aren't, then there's not much point in making new laws.
By the way, how would you phrase a law to prevent spam?
If i found someone online that i went to highschool with and emailed them "hello!" would that be spam, since it wasn't solicited?
If i sent a notice of a class reunion to my entire high school class, again is that spam or not? Could it be spam for the people that didn't like me, but not in the case of the ones that did? If i were sued, since i could show that since some people didn't mind it, i wasn't at fault, or since i emailed the thing to the class bully, would i be completely screwed?