Here is the instroduction from the book from NYTimes (registration req).
The book is a good read, and addresses your point about The Jungle.
If you read this you'll learn that breaking up the beef trust after the publication of the Jungle transformed meatpacking into a safer, better paying job (though safer is a relative term). Also even with the problems described in The Jungle, it was still a good paying high skilled job. However in the 1960s-70s the meatpacking industry reconsolidated into a few large players, broke the meatpacking unions, and reduced the required skill for doing the work. As a result meatpacking is now a low paying highly dangerous job taken by poor and desperate people in rural communities where the meatpacking plant is usually the largest employer.
You'd think though with all our fancy computer systems we'd be able to develop some kind of automated union software that could dramatically simplify unionization and lower the administrative over head costs resulting in higher wages for the employees, less coruption and improved overall efficencies. Granted from a pure free market approach this wouldn't be as effecient as no-union, but then the employer benifits more from these effeciences than workers anyway...
Lets face it the whole market for advertising is in freefall. As we enter a recession, everyone is cutting their marketing departments and reducing the amount of media they buy. This has happened in every recession in history, because when companies look to cut costs the $30 milllion ad budget looks like an easy target to cut. So instead of buying banners, tv, radio, and newspaper ads, they cut TV, scale back the radio, and cut out the banners. I think its also fair to say that advertising agencies are likely to be pushing their customers away from banners, and back into more traditional media because they have more bodies to support that kind of work, and they also make a lot more money. If your an ad executive and your client says, hey we want to cut the budget where should we pull back; I have to think that your thinking, "well cut the $80K ad banner campaign, but keep the $2 million TV buy." The agencies make a lot more $ off of tv and radio than they make off of banners, and they are a lot more sure of its effectivness.
This being said, I think that its safe to say that the economy will recover. When it does people's marketing budgets will rise, and Yahoo will start making gobs of money again. If in the meantime they have developed some premium services that generate additional revenue, bully for them.
It would be a serious mistake for them to completely eliminate, or signifigantly cut back their existing free offerings. Advertising is always going to be the biggest source of revenues from them, and that requires eyeballs.
BTW its still signifigantly more expensive to run a single TV station than a server farm, yet after 50 years we still can get free TV. Maybe what Yahoo really needs to do is cut about 60% of the frivilous staff, and go back to being the lean mean scappy organization that they were when this whole Net thing started.
We may have taken from the Germans but they stole from Goddard first. Yet another example of a great American invention that went on find real usefullness in a foreign land.
Yeah and how long before the filters pick up on the alternate naming system. The inherent difficulty you face is that if a naming system becomes widespread enough to be useful, it will also be easy to write a program that filters based on those mispellings. I have to think the record companies who've already spent big money destroying Napster won't let a simple fact of mispellings stop you. Face it unless someone sets up Napster in some country where its legally untouchable, the days of the free central network of music is over. Gnutella and other P2p models don't scale, so we're pretty much left with a few geeks privately trading MP3s amoungst eachother. Personally I"m a little releived that the Sterling-Stephenson vision of a bleak future of no intellectual property rights has been stayed a little while longer.
Napsters probably dead. Here is a summary of the court's conclusions:
The court must reissue their injuction with the following restrictions on napster:
1. We nevertheless conclude that sufficient knowledge exists to impose contributory liability when linked to demonstrated infringing use of the Napster system.
2. We affirm the district court's conclusion that plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of the contributory copyright infringement claim
3. We conclude that the district court did not err in determining that Napster financially benefits from the availability of protected works on its system.
4. The court can require a $5 million bond on the part of Napster due to the likelyhood they will lose their case
5. If they loose the court can count each instance of someone shareing a file on Napster as a copyright infringement (Damages could be billions at $200K each)
6.As stated, we place the burden on plaintiffs to provide notice to Napster of copyrighted works and files containing such works available on the Napster system before Napster has the duty to disable access to the offending content. Napster, however, also bears the burden of policing the system within the limits of the system. Here, we recognize that this is not an exact science in that the files are user named. In crafting the injunction on remand, the district court should recognize that Napster's system does not currently appear to allow Napster access to users' MP3 files.
This only applies in the United States, but here is the simple explanation. Some years ago we decided through our bicameral national legislature that the electromagnetic spectrum within our borders was sole property of the US. So they passed a law saying, we own it and you have to pay us to use it. Shortly thereafter radio stations, then later TV stations began paying fees to the government so they could use frequencies on the broadcast medium. At the time no one was sure what the business model would be for recouping the costs of purchasing the license. Ultimately TV and radio became supported through advertising, and so they never got to charge a fee. Then one day people got tired of bad reception and someone said, maybe I can make money by launching a couple of billion dollars in satelights into orbit and then charging customers a monthly fee to get hundreds of channels. But to do this I'll need to use that electromagneticthingamajiggy, so they went to the governmnet and bought a big chunk of it. now they can sell their service and make money. If you don't like it you can call up your congressman and ask them to change the law so that no-one can buy a frequency. Just be prepared to give back the billions of dollars cell phone companies, directTV, TV stations, and everyone else has paid you government for it. Also lacking an economic incentive Hughes will probably stop broadcasting anything to their satalights and deorbit, hopefully right into your living room. Frankly I think people who steal cable or DSS are the worst kind of theives. At least if you steal money you could reasonably say that you might need it to eat, or clothe yourself. If you're stealing so you can have 600+ channels and wack off at 3am to the Spice channel; well thats just the kind of self-centered hedonism that makes me fevently wish some barbarian hordes would come and kill the whole fuckin lot of us.
Well here's a great example of corporate stupidity. Whose going to buy a personal broadband internet connection if they can't download the latest Chasey Lane video rip? Oh wait we could just encrypt the data we send over the network so they will never know. Also what exactly would the legitimate purpose of a port scan be? I can understand running a game server, or sharing a file, but portscanning?
I have to agree. I looked at buying the Nomad but bought the Philips CDR mp3 CD player instead. My main reasons were:
1. 10hrs battery life compared with 4hrs for teh nomad (whats the point of carrying around 200 hours worth of music if you can only play 4 hours at a time).
2. Cost $500 for non-expandable
3. HD size too limited. 6 GB sounds like a lot but I already have a 60GB hard disk full of MP3s. When I travel I don't want to have spend all day synching my nomad, when I can just burn a couple CDs with my favorite tunes.
Seriously there hasn't been an idea this dumb since Ray shouted "Get Her" in Ghostbusters Let's consider the following:
How do they ever enfoce this idea? -- Are they going to block every https site out there? Monitor every website for a shopping cart? Sending threatening letters to merchants in the Caymans who won't fork over the dough?
Is anyone going to subscribe to an on-line service that can't access Amazon? LandsEnd? I mean sh^t a 56k modem is slow, but if I can't reach my favorite merchant who cares, I'll dial in.
The whole value of the Internet is that its a network of networks, where everyone can reach everyone else. Take that away and the thing is worthless.
Whats next charge for each e-mail? Go back to pricing by the kilocharacter?
Even if the merchants decided to pay, why wouldn't they just pass the price onto the customer with a breif statement on their site saying you could save 10% just by switching to AOL/prodigy/whatever.
In summary if this is T's big plan to revive their revenues we should all just start shorting thier stock now because they'll be broke real soon. Even if they never implement this idea, the fact that they even mentioned it, was absolutly stupid. Releasing this idea as a trial ballon only creates negative equity for the AT&T brand, and since it can never be implented; you just make yourself look mean and stupid.
The freedom of contract implies that both parties have a chance to freely negotiate the contract. In this case the seller has essentially a monopoly power over the textbook. In that the school requires you to purchase the textbook, and you can't purchase an alternate. You have no choice but to accept their terms.
The workstations of 2010 (assuming we still have them) will run at 33 Gigahertz on 64bit chips, have 32-64 GB of onboard ram, HDD will be 300-600GB with 1 Terabyte avail on high end systems. You'll probably be running some linux derivitave(probably Microsoft's), but you'll still have to run MS Office and Outlook to satisfy the man. You'll have a wide choice of designs and colors. Much like cars, vendors will seek to use custom cases as a selling point. Some with the coolest designs will go for prices which make the family SUV seem cheap.
And of course my biggest prediction is that in 2005 or so someone will develop a process for mass producing quantum computers. These computers will be packaged as a co-processor with your computer and be used for:
1. Really amazing graphic and sound effects.
2. High speed searching.
3. AI in your favorite computer games.
1. Whats your tolerance for risk? (This company has burned almost 200 million already and they need more to ship their first product. Given Moore's law they will need to release a new product sometime in the next 12-18 months.
2. Are you buying stock because you like Linus, or are you buying an investment you expect to return money?
3. Are you paying a too much of a premium for this company because of the celebrities invovled (Linus, Paul Allen, etc)?
4. Semiconductor stocks have had a pretty good run up in the last year, but are they peaking?
Well all you ahve to do is learn perl then you can use D. Conway's Quantum::Superposition module, a nice OO Module for using quantum computing in everyday code.
USB, 4.3GB, etc are interesting but what I'm waiting for is something with these specs:
IP addressable/Ethernet support for home networks Built in CD Player/Software for ripping Remote Control Standard Component Outputs Napster Support 20 GB storage
I mean really a review of a film that's been out for more than month. This isn't news for news, it doesn't matter. Its not a very good film. The only way this story should have run is if the site has been hacked.
You can consider this an unfounded rumour. My sources tell me that MS will at announce their version of Linux bye the 4th quarter and may actually begin shipping shortly thereafter. Office and Backoffice will follow shortly thereafter. MS will adopt an "EMBRACE" and "EXTEND" attitude towards Linux.
MS Linux will be released for free (which they will argue is how all Linux distro's are released). However, they will price Office and Backoffice stuff so that they make up the lost Windows revenues.
MS Linux will also support several "Windows" technologies through a plus/addon pack which will be marketed seperatly from MS Linux (though avail by default with OEM distros). This product will not be released under GPL (similiar to what Slade has done to QuakeLives).
If you are paraniod ask the guys at Netscape.
Futher proof of the inevitability of Linux
on
Open Source Africa
·
· Score: 2
This just about settles it. I can't say that the kernel won't split. I can't say that every distro will run every other distro's software; but we are now entering the era where Linux moves out of the early adopter phase, past the major market share phase, and into inevitable market domination. Linux's free nature, it powerful feature set, and plain old nationalism are combining to end the OS market as we have come to know it. Every nation on earth now believes that the high tech cocktail of Internet, software and next generation technology startups is the magic potion to lift them to first world status. Just as they once believed that industrialization would be their salvation in the past. The story of the next few years will be that countries like India, China, etc will push to create a software industry like that which exists in the US. Linux is the software that makes this all possible. Why base your software industry around Microsoft products when you can use Linux and avoid sending money back to the US. The last time we saw a phenomena like this was in the immediate post-colonial era from the 1950s-1970s. Nationalist governments in Egypt, India, China and elsewhere stopped using imported products to spur industrial development at home. The adoption of Linux in African nations and China can be seen as the first wave of a new supply substitution economic policy. This leads to a whole new set of questions. Will the US continue to dominate the software marketplace, or will it go into decline like the US manufacturing sector? Is the US in danger of becoming isolated as the rest of the world adopts Linux and we stay on Microsoft technology, much like the US uses English measurements; while the world goes metric? Finally what are the greater ramifications for the software industry? Will open source movements in databases, web servers, etc lead to the decline of the Enterprise software market?
I have to strongly dissagree with his thinking. Most of the criticism of Linux of late is that its hard to install. Well of course its hard for an average user with limited computer experience to install. Linux is a powerful full featured server operating system with thousands of options for installation. Stripping away these options will make it very unlinux like.
Why should we make the average user install Linux at all. Computers for average users should ship like appliances (as most windows computers already do). That is to say that joe simple user should never have to run the installation program. It should be installed on his/her computer at the OEM, along with the basic office style apps. I mean can you imagine if you bought a VCR and someone said "OK now you have to install the OS before you can play a tape."
Sooner or later soemone at a major computer maker is going to figure out that they can build a very slick GNOME startup screen, license Star Office or Applixware, drop most of the workstation and server packages out of Linux, and distribute a slick internet enabled PC without paying microsoft. My bet is that Sony comes along with this in about 6-9 months.
IANAL but my understanding is that commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment in the US and this includes advertising. Also if the email came from out of state; Colorado probably can't do anything about it as this would probably violate the interstate commerce clause of the Constitition. Finally I just think we should do everything we can to keep the government out of regulating the Internet. Even though I hate spammers (hence my slashdot email), I don't think you will be able to get your $10 bucks out of them. Though it might be worth spending an afternoon in small claims court just to make MegaSpamCorp's lawyer bill a few hours to their client. And of course its always possible that some enterprising firm will collect a few million from a big class action lawsuit, of course then you'll get a lovely coupon in your inbox from MegaSpamCorp. Won't that be ironic....
The article seems to conclude that Python will explode because it has a "killer app" in the Zope application server and that perl lacks such a killer app. I don't think this is correct. mod_perl (the Apache perl module) is certainly an equivalent.
What market are we trying to share? Can Linux survive without the non-techies? Well in point of fact it has. It has thrived. I would love for Linux to be the dominant operating system in the world; but I don't think it is a necessity. Maybe OS's should be like cars. Some people want a family sedan; maybe that's windows. Others want a five speed sports car maybe that's Linux. Now maybe its not such a good idea to make linux "easier" to use. Easier for whom? The novice user? Then what about the techies. Whats left for us.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the instroduction from the book from NYTimes (registration req). The book is a good read, and addresses your point about The Jungle. If you read this you'll learn that breaking up the beef trust after the publication of the Jungle transformed meatpacking into a safer, better paying job (though safer is a relative term). Also even with the problems described in The Jungle, it was still a good paying high skilled job. However in the 1960s-70s the meatpacking industry reconsolidated into a few large players, broke the meatpacking unions, and reduced the required skill for doing the work. As a result meatpacking is now a low paying highly dangerous job taken by poor and desperate people in rural communities where the meatpacking plant is usually the largest employer.
You'd think though with all our fancy computer systems we'd be able to develop some kind of automated union software that could dramatically simplify unionization and lower the administrative over head costs resulting in higher wages for the employees, less coruption and improved overall efficencies. Granted from a pure free market approach this wouldn't be as effecient as no-union, but then the employer benifits more from these effeciences than workers anyway...
Lets face it the whole market for advertising is in freefall. As we enter a recession, everyone is cutting their marketing departments and reducing the amount of media they buy. This has happened in every recession in history, because when companies look to cut costs the $30 milllion ad budget looks like an easy target to cut. So instead of buying banners, tv, radio, and newspaper ads, they cut TV, scale back the radio, and cut out the banners. I think its also fair to say that advertising agencies are likely to be pushing their customers away from banners, and back into more traditional media because they have more bodies to support that kind of work, and they also make a lot more money. If your an ad executive and your client says, hey we want to cut the budget where should we pull back; I have to think that your thinking, "well cut the $80K ad banner campaign, but keep the $2 million TV buy." The agencies make a lot more $ off of tv and radio than they make off of banners, and they are a lot more sure of its effectivness. This being said, I think that its safe to say that the economy will recover. When it does people's marketing budgets will rise, and Yahoo will start making gobs of money again. If in the meantime they have developed some premium services that generate additional revenue, bully for them. It would be a serious mistake for them to completely eliminate, or signifigantly cut back their existing free offerings. Advertising is always going to be the biggest source of revenues from them, and that requires eyeballs. BTW its still signifigantly more expensive to run a single TV station than a server farm, yet after 50 years we still can get free TV. Maybe what Yahoo really needs to do is cut about 60% of the frivilous staff, and go back to being the lean mean scappy organization that they were when this whole Net thing started.
We may have taken from the Germans but they stole from Goddard first. Yet another example of a great American invention that went on find real usefullness in a foreign land.
See the whole point of the song is that nothing in the song entitled "Ironic" is in fact ironic. So the song itself is in fact quite ironic.
Yeah and how long before the filters pick up on the alternate naming system. The inherent difficulty you face is that if a naming system becomes widespread enough to be useful, it will also be easy to write a program that filters based on those mispellings. I have to think the record companies who've already spent big money destroying Napster won't let a simple fact of mispellings stop you. Face it unless someone sets up Napster in some country where its legally untouchable, the days of the free central network of music is over. Gnutella and other P2p models don't scale, so we're pretty much left with a few geeks privately trading MP3s amoungst eachother. Personally I"m a little releived that the Sterling-Stephenson vision of a bleak future of no intellectual property rights has been stayed a little while longer.
Napsters probably dead. Here is a summary of the court's conclusions:
The court must reissue their injuction with the following restrictions on napster:
1. We nevertheless conclude that sufficient knowledge exists to impose contributory liability when linked to demonstrated infringing use of the Napster system.
2. We affirm the district court's conclusion that plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of the contributory copyright infringement claim
3. We conclude that the district court did not err in determining that Napster financially benefits from the availability of protected works on its system.
4. The court can require a $5 million bond on the part of Napster due to the likelyhood they will lose their case
5. If they loose the court can count each instance of someone shareing a file on Napster as a copyright infringement (Damages could be billions at $200K each)
6.As stated, we place the burden on plaintiffs to provide notice to Napster of copyrighted works and files containing such works available on the Napster system before Napster has the duty to disable access to the offending content. Napster, however, also bears the burden of policing the system within the limits of the system. Here, we recognize that this is not an exact science in that the files are user named. In crafting the injunction on remand, the district court should recognize that Napster's system does not currently appear to allow Napster access to users' MP3 files.
This only applies in the United States, but here is the simple explanation. Some years ago we decided through our bicameral national legislature that the electromagnetic spectrum within our borders was sole property of the US. So they passed a law saying, we own it and you have to pay us to use it. Shortly thereafter radio stations, then later TV stations began paying fees to the government so they could use frequencies on the broadcast medium. At the time no one was sure what the business model would be for recouping the costs of purchasing the license. Ultimately TV and radio became supported through advertising, and so they never got to charge a fee. Then one day people got tired of bad reception and someone said, maybe I can make money by launching a couple of billion dollars in satelights into orbit and then charging customers a monthly fee to get hundreds of channels. But to do this I'll need to use that electromagneticthingamajiggy, so they went to the governmnet and bought a big chunk of it. now they can sell their service and make money. If you don't like it you can call up your congressman and ask them to change the law so that no-one can buy a frequency. Just be prepared to give back the billions of dollars cell phone companies, directTV, TV stations, and everyone else has paid you government for it. Also lacking an economic incentive Hughes will probably stop broadcasting anything to their satalights and deorbit, hopefully right into your living room. Frankly I think people who steal cable or DSS are the worst kind of theives. At least if you steal money you could reasonably say that you might need it to eat, or clothe yourself. If you're stealing so you can have 600+ channels and wack off at 3am to the Spice channel; well thats just the kind of self-centered hedonism that makes me fevently wish some barbarian hordes would come and kill the whole fuckin lot of us.
Well here's a great example of corporate stupidity. Whose going to buy a personal broadband internet connection if they can't download the latest Chasey Lane video rip? Oh wait we could just encrypt the data we send over the network so they will never know. Also what exactly would the legitimate purpose of a port scan be? I can understand running a game server, or sharing a file, but portscanning?
I have to agree. I looked at buying the Nomad but bought the Philips CDR mp3 CD player instead. My main reasons were: 1. 10hrs battery life compared with 4hrs for teh nomad (whats the point of carrying around 200 hours worth of music if you can only play 4 hours at a time). 2. Cost $500 for non-expandable 3. HD size too limited. 6 GB sounds like a lot but I already have a 60GB hard disk full of MP3s. When I travel I don't want to have spend all day synching my nomad, when I can just burn a couple CDs with my favorite tunes.
Clearly this is just another evil plot by Mojo Jojo to control us all with remote control cybernetic robots.
- How do they ever enfoce this idea? -- Are they going to block every https site out there? Monitor every website for a shopping cart? Sending threatening letters to merchants in the Caymans who won't fork over the dough?
- Is anyone going to subscribe to an on-line service that can't access Amazon? LandsEnd? I mean sh^t a 56k modem is slow, but if I can't reach my favorite merchant who cares, I'll dial in.
- The whole value of the Internet is that its a network of networks, where everyone can reach everyone else. Take that away and the thing is worthless.
- Whats next charge for each e-mail? Go back to pricing by the kilocharacter?
- Even if the merchants decided to pay, why wouldn't they just pass the price onto the customer with a breif statement on their site saying you could save 10% just by switching to AOL/prodigy/whatever.
In summary if this is T's big plan to revive their revenues we should all just start shorting thier stock now because they'll be broke real soon. Even if they never implement this idea, the fact that they even mentioned it, was absolutly stupid. Releasing this idea as a trial ballon only creates negative equity for the AT&T brand, and since it can never be implented; you just make yourself look mean and stupid.The freedom of contract implies that both parties have a chance to freely negotiate the contract. In this case the seller has essentially a monopoly power over the textbook. In that the school requires you to purchase the textbook, and you can't purchase an alternate. You have no choice but to accept their terms.
The workstations of 2010 (assuming we still have them) will run at 33 Gigahertz on 64bit chips, have 32-64 GB of onboard ram, HDD will be 300-600GB with 1 Terabyte avail on high end systems. You'll probably be running some linux derivitave(probably Microsoft's), but you'll still have to run MS Office and Outlook to satisfy the man. You'll have a wide choice of designs and colors. Much like cars, vendors will seek to use custom cases as a selling point. Some with the coolest designs will go for prices which make the family SUV seem cheap. And of course my biggest prediction is that in 2005 or so someone will develop a process for mass producing quantum computers. These computers will be packaged as a co-processor with your computer and be used for: 1. Really amazing graphic and sound effects. 2. High speed searching. 3. AI in your favorite computer games.
1. Whats your tolerance for risk? (This company has burned almost 200 million already and they need more to ship their first product. Given Moore's law they will need to release a new product sometime in the next 12-18 months. 2. Are you buying stock because you like Linus, or are you buying an investment you expect to return money? 3. Are you paying a too much of a premium for this company because of the celebrities invovled (Linus, Paul Allen, etc)? 4. Semiconductor stocks have had a pretty good run up in the last year, but are they peaking?
Well all you ahve to do is learn perl then you can use D. Conway's Quantum::Superposition module, a nice OO Module for using quantum computing in everyday code.
Let review the errors:
IP addressable/Ethernet support for home networks
Built in CD Player/Software for ripping
Remote Control
Standard Component Outputs
Napster Support
20 GB storage
MS Linux will be released for free (which they will argue is how all Linux distro's are released). However, they will price Office and Backoffice stuff so that they make up the lost Windows revenues.
MS Linux will also support several "Windows" technologies through a plus/addon pack which will be marketed seperatly from MS Linux (though avail by default with OEM distros). This product will not be released under GPL (similiar to what Slade has done to QuakeLives).
If you are paraniod ask the guys at Netscape.
This just about settles it. I can't say that the kernel won't split. I can't say that every distro will run every other distro's software; but we are now entering the era where Linux moves out of the early adopter phase, past the major market share phase, and into inevitable market domination. Linux's free nature, it powerful feature set, and plain old nationalism are combining to end the OS market as we have come to know it. Every nation on earth now believes that the high tech cocktail of Internet, software and next generation technology startups is the magic potion to lift them to first world status. Just as they once believed that industrialization would be their salvation in the past. The story of the next few years will be that countries like India, China, etc will push to create a software industry like that which exists in the US. Linux is the software that makes this all possible. Why base your software industry around Microsoft products when you can use Linux and avoid sending money back to the US. The last time we saw a phenomena like this was in the immediate post-colonial era from the 1950s-1970s. Nationalist governments in Egypt, India, China and elsewhere stopped using imported products to spur industrial development at home. The adoption of Linux in African nations and China can be seen as the first wave of a new supply substitution economic policy. This leads to a whole new set of questions. Will the US continue to dominate the software marketplace, or will it go into decline like the US manufacturing sector? Is the US in danger of becoming isolated as the rest of the world adopts Linux and we stay on Microsoft technology, much like the US uses English measurements; while the world goes metric? Finally what are the greater ramifications for the software industry? Will open source movements in databases, web servers, etc lead to the decline of the Enterprise software market?
Why should we make the average user install Linux at all. Computers for average users should ship like appliances (as most windows computers already do). That is to say that joe simple user should never have to run the installation program. It should be installed on his/her computer at the OEM, along with the basic office style apps. I mean can you imagine if you bought a VCR and someone said "OK now you have to install the OS before you can play a tape."
Sooner or later soemone at a major computer maker is going to figure out that they can build a very slick GNOME startup screen, license Star Office or Applixware, drop most of the workstation and server packages out of Linux, and distribute a slick internet enabled PC without paying microsoft. My bet is that Sony comes along with this in about 6-9 months.
IANAL but my understanding is that commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment in the US and this includes advertising. Also if the email came from out of state; Colorado probably can't do anything about it as this would probably violate the interstate commerce clause of the Constitition. Finally I just think we should do everything we can to keep the government out of regulating the Internet. Even though I hate spammers (hence my slashdot email), I don't think you will be able to get your $10 bucks out of them. Though it might be worth spending an afternoon in small claims court just to make MegaSpamCorp's lawyer bill a few hours to their client. And of course its always possible that some enterprising firm will collect a few million from a big class action lawsuit, of course then you'll get a lovely coupon in your inbox from MegaSpamCorp. Won't that be ironic....
The article seems to conclude that Python will explode because it has a "killer app" in the Zope application server and that perl lacks such a killer app. I don't think this is correct. mod_perl (the Apache perl module) is certainly an equivalent.
What market are we trying to share? Can Linux survive without the non-techies? Well in point of fact it has. It has thrived. I would love for Linux to be the dominant operating system in the world; but I don't think it is a necessity. Maybe OS's should be like cars. Some people want a family sedan; maybe that's windows. Others want a five speed sports car maybe that's Linux. Now maybe its not such a good idea to make linux "easier" to use. Easier for whom? The novice user? Then what about the techies. Whats left for us.