For the RIAA to be in violation of antitrust law, it'd have to (for instance) make secret agreements between major labels about what new acts get signed, or set industry-wide prohibitions on how they distribute music over the internet.
How about price fixing? Because the RIAA has settled a federal lawsuit over price fixing (The CD Minimum Advertized Price antitrust case), which certainly sounds like the behavior of an illegal trust to me. Of course, given recent behavior on the part of the Justice Department there's no actual risk of anything other than civil lawsuits over that kind of thing. The US government seems uninterested in enforcing anti-trust laws.
No I'm not saying he should be personally endangered, but if anyone that received spam from him was allowed to send him one catalog per piece or call him once per piece, I'd imagine that to be quite fair.
It goes on further than that too doesn't it? Who's paying for all this bandwidth?
Yes, and who pays for the catalogs that you're suggesting that people send him? That's right, an innocent third party. If he's scum for using other peoples' resources, then the people who ask a company to send him an unsolicited catalog are at least as bad. I can accept the idea of sending him a return email, or even sending him a letter telling him how much you dislike his business. But getting a third party to do it for you- and pay for it for you- is exactly the kind of sleazy behavior that you're claiming is so terrible on his part.
I'm going to leave aside the argument about whether or not privacy is a right (there are good arguments both pro- and con-).
There are actually several wrinkles on the issue of the right to privacy. Even if you accept that there is a right to privacy, there's a question of where exactly that right applies. I've never seen anyone, even the most determined privacy advocate, suggest that people have an absolute right to privacy of every detail of their lives. There are some aspects of your life that are inherently public, like your personal appearance. Once you step out your door, you can't expect for people not to know what you look like. You can make a very strong case that your home address and phone number are in the same category. They're inherently public information and you have not expectation that they will remain private. The bulk mail and telemarketing businesses seem to be built around this point of view.
A second important consideration is that there's an issue of fairness in this case. This spammer is trying claim that it's OK for him to send others unsolicited messages, but that he should be protected when others try to send him unsolicited messages. That's an inherently unreasonable position. If he has a right to privacy to protect him from responding emails, other people should have a right to privacy as protection against his spam. If we don't have a right to protection from his spam, he doesn't have a right to protection from return messages. He can't reasonably ask to have it both ways, though.
I will agree, though, that rights are most important to unpopular people. The majority doesn't need protection in a democracy; the minority does.
As a right-thinking person, I can't support human rights for spammers.
Of course not. Spammers would only deserve human rights if they were human. Since their behavior clearly shows that they are inhuman monsters, talking about human rights is silly.
I strongly disagree for two reasons. One is that the paper already had a stated policy of no alterations, period. Once that policy has been adopted, they have to follow it. Two is that they chose the right policy. There has to be a bright, obvious line between what is allowable and what isn't. If you let a photographer alter things for artistic effect then somebody has to sit there and decide in each case whether the changes are just artistic or if they've distorted the truth. Only by having an objective standard of no alterations at all can you avoid that problem.
Prices rise as demand increases relative to supply and fall as demand decreases.
In the short term, yes. In the long term not necessarily so. That's because supply and demand curves are not fixed in time. If a company realizes that there's a big demand- and hence a high selling price- for a product, they tend to invest money in being able to make more of that good. That increases the supply and brings the price back down. In a lot of cases it winds up that the unit price goes down as production goes up, so that goods that are in higher demand wind up being cheaper than ones that are in lower demand.
Not quite correct. A "flamebait" is a subcategory of troll. A troll is any post that's attempting to provoke a predictable set of responses, but those responses need not be flames. If you post some types of misinformations (like a popular urban legend), for instance, you can predictably provoke calm, rational refutations. The easiest type of predictable response is a flame, though, so trolling for flames is the most commonly observed variety.
That said, you're absolutely correct that the moderation should be "-1 Flame" rather than "-1 Flamebait". I suppose that most flames are also effectively trolls for counterflames, though.
So will Castle in the Sky. (That's "Tenku no Shiro Rapyuta" for those who know it by its Japanese name.) I'm eagerly waiting for announcements about Nausicaa.
a) What is the same as "the developers must do my bidding"?
I think that's called a work for hire. If you're the one paying the developer, you have the right to call the shots. If somebody else is paying him (or he's doing it out of the kindness of his heart) you'd better ask nicely.
Eek! What a terrible concept; too bad you can't take it back now that you've mentioned it. The biggest single problem with this approach is that it could potentially compromise the spammer. The author would need to be very careful to include several degrees of indirection, or interested parties could track him down via the place that the addresses were sent. It might be best to have the worm post the addresses to some third party site, where they could then be harvested by the worm's originator in relative obscurity, rather than having them emailed to any other address.
As I see it, Google is doing exactly what it should be doing. The company has an obligation to obey laws in each country about what material is and is not legal to view. Not every country has the same views about whether censorship is acceptable, and what things should be censored if it is. Google could get in very serious trouble if it chose to show people things that their governments have decided that they shouldn't have access to. At the same time, Google does seem to be trying hard to do the least damage it can in the process. Specifically, it's not censoring material everywhere just because it's considered objectionable in one place. Americans can still see Holocause denial sites (if they have some bizarre desire to do so), Germans can see Chinese dissident sites, etc.
If you really want to build a house that will last for hundreds of years, the most important thing to do is to leave your descendants with enough money to keep it up. Most of the popular building materials are physically good enough to last for a very long time, but it's very tough for a building to stand a long time if it's not maintained. A lot of buildings are also torn down long before they need to be in order to make space for a new building of some type. Money will help there, too, because it will give your descendants the leverage they need to fend off possible threats to the house. Beyond that, just look at what materials were used in existing very old houses in the area and use those, since they've proven their durability under local conditions.
There are two reasons that battery life isn't getting better. One is that there's an inherent competetion between improved battery life and improved features. Whenever somebody comes up with an improvement in energy storage, it can be used either to give you more time or to feed more cool stuff, like more powerful processors, extra storage devices, or a nicer screen. The competetion from cool stuff has a tendency to keep the life from improving as much as you might like.
Equally important, there are serious physical limits to the amount of energy that a battery can hold. For a given mass of battery, the total energy storage is limited by the chemical properties of the materials you can use in the battery. Since those properties are reasonably well known, and people have been making batteries for a couple hundred years now, most of the possible advances have already been made. There just isn't much space for improvement once you've switched to the highest energy materials available. The only way to get radically higher energy density than is currently available is by switching to something other than batteries, like fuel cells.
Ask the Irish. The British government wasn't the worst colonial government, but they had their share of very nasty stretches. Bear in mind also that it's entirely possible that the British decided to change their policies in response to the War for Independence. When one group of colonies decides that you're acting tyranically and launches a successful revolution to throw you out, it might be a good idea not to implement the same policies in your other colonies for fear of a repeat.
When industry lobbyists effectively control governmental decisions, they ARE the government (we just don't get to vote for them).
That's the reason that it's so much scarier. When industy becomes a de-facto government, they have all of the problems that people associate with a normal government, but without any of the restraint that representative government faces. This is (IMO) the biggest problem that I have with the extreme anti-government, pro-business side of the Libertarians. They can't seem to see that eliminating government would just leave a power vacum that would be filled by businesses and others who lack even the nominal obligation to help ordinary people that governments have.
Of course it should be universal. But the brilliant part of sender pays is that you can set the payment low enough that it won't be much of a factor for ordinary users, but will be terrible for spammers. For instance, $0.01 per message is unlikely to break the bank for any ordinary net user, but it's enough to significantly raise costs for somebody who's depending on sending out millions of emails for results. An interesting twist on the basic concept that I've considered is the logical conclusion of the sender pays argument: sender pays and recipient gets paid. That way you'd be fine as long as you receive more emails than you send. As a practical matter, most ISPs would probably implement a policy that you wouldn't get a rebate if you received more mail than you sent, and they'd only pay you if they got payment from the original sender, but it would let the process trickle down to ordinary users without greatly inflating their monthly ISP charges.
This would also potentially be able to save mailing lists. One obvious problem with sender pays is that it would make it prohibitively expensive to run an ordinary mailing list. By giving the money to the recipient, though, you could let the lists recoup most of their sending expenses; users would just return a blank message (or a return receipt) every time they got a message on the mailing list, which would send the penny that it cost the list to mail them back to the person running the list.
I'd at least hope that you'd require three substantiated claims about the user's email. To let people complain without requiring them to back up those complaints is an invitation to abuse. It would let people who don't like a particular user shut him off, either by claiming to have received abusive emails from him, or by forging abusive mails in his name. Not a good policy.
Also bear in mind that your suggestion is going to do little good against the really committed spammers. They're vigorously hiding their email address any way they can, sending their mail through open relays, and generally avoiding the use of their ISP's email services. Just tracking them down to figure out who to complain to is hard enough, and that ignores the possibility that they're getting their service from a disreputable service provider who knows what they're doing and doesn't care.
Who is dumb enough to use Word to write a research paper anyway? This is why there are things like Framemaker and LaTeX.
There are lots of people who don't want to learn how to use those programs but who already know how to use a word processor. The journals that I've published in, for instance, require that documents be submitted in Word or a similar format, rather than something like LaTeX. Of course those journals don't expect that the authors will try to format everything in Word. You write everything in Word but leave it in a very plain format and let the professional typesetter at the journal worry about getting it into the perfect format for publication.
To a substantial extent, I think that this is the real longterm goal of the USB/Firewire design. They're supposed to have enough speed on an easy to use external bus that you can plug all kinds of peripherals- CD burners, hard drives, sound cards, and networking devices- into without ever having to open up the case. About the only thing that nobody seems to be trying to plug into them is graphics cards, which makes sense technically. Of course you pay a premium for those external devices, but that's likely to be true of something like a PCMCIA based system, too.
You're talking about end notes; he's talking about EndNote, which is a completely different thing. EndNote is almost mandatory for anyone who writes any kind of document that requires a serious bibliography. It can import and store lists of references, reorganize them so that they're easy to find, and automatically format them into whatever exact format is required by the publisher. Every serious scientist I know has a huge library of EndNote references ready to put into their documents, and I assume that the same thing is true of scholars in other fields, lawyers, and just about anyone else who needs bibliographies.
Go google for "mandatory access control" vs "discretionary access control". Basically, if you have clearance to create top-secret documents, you CAN'T (the OS won't let you) create documents at a lower clearance level; sure, you can cut and paste, but only into another top-secret document.
Yeah, but how are they going to get that into Windows? AFAIK, WinXP does not have mandatory access controls, and that's going to be the primary platform for Office 2003. Without OS level support, MAC aren't possible. Microsoft could write all of their own software so that it respects other software's request not to let you copy something, and I assume that they could probably disable the clipboard if the user isn't allowed to copy the document, but they're going to have a lot of trouble beyond that. There's just no way that they can, for instance, prevent a third-party screen capture utility from looking at a document without completely rewriting the Windows security model.
It should be pointed out that this is a problem in the UK, but the US has saner legal rules. The article mentions that Citibank lost a similar case in the US, so apparently the US doesn't think that "our system is secure; it must be the user's fault" is sufficient defense.
Why should it be.gb instead of.uk? The full and proper name of the country is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland. People are more likely to call it The United Kingdom (which fully includes the whole country) rather than Great Britain (which excludes the people in North Ireland, many of whom most certainly want to assert that they are part of the UK rather than their neighbor to the south). I've certainly heard lots of people talk about "The UK", but I've never heard them talk about "GB". There's certainly no reason not to use.uk rather than.gb.
Why should I be at a video store? I already have mine pre-ordered on-line, and with a substantial discount, to boot. The only remaining question is when Nausicaa and Porco Roso are going to be out.
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How about price fixing? Because the RIAA has settled a federal lawsuit over price fixing (The CD Minimum Advertized Price antitrust case), which certainly sounds like the behavior of an illegal trust to me. Of course, given recent behavior on the part of the Justice Department there's no actual risk of anything other than civil lawsuits over that kind of thing. The US government seems uninterested in enforcing anti-trust laws.
Yes, and who pays for the catalogs that you're suggesting that people send him? That's right, an innocent third party. If he's scum for using other peoples' resources, then the people who ask a company to send him an unsolicited catalog are at least as bad. I can accept the idea of sending him a return email, or even sending him a letter telling him how much you dislike his business. But getting a third party to do it for you- and pay for it for you- is exactly the kind of sleazy behavior that you're claiming is so terrible on his part.
There are actually several wrinkles on the issue of the right to privacy. Even if you accept that there is a right to privacy, there's a question of where exactly that right applies. I've never seen anyone, even the most determined privacy advocate, suggest that people have an absolute right to privacy of every detail of their lives. There are some aspects of your life that are inherently public, like your personal appearance. Once you step out your door, you can't expect for people not to know what you look like. You can make a very strong case that your home address and phone number are in the same category. They're inherently public information and you have not expectation that they will remain private. The bulk mail and telemarketing businesses seem to be built around this point of view.
A second important consideration is that there's an issue of fairness in this case. This spammer is trying claim that it's OK for him to send others unsolicited messages, but that he should be protected when others try to send him unsolicited messages. That's an inherently unreasonable position. If he has a right to privacy to protect him from responding emails, other people should have a right to privacy as protection against his spam. If we don't have a right to protection from his spam, he doesn't have a right to protection from return messages. He can't reasonably ask to have it both ways, though.
I will agree, though, that rights are most important to unpopular people. The majority doesn't need protection in a democracy; the minority does.
Of course not. Spammers would only deserve human rights if they were human. Since their behavior clearly shows that they are inhuman monsters, talking about human rights is silly.
I strongly disagree for two reasons. One is that the paper already had a stated policy of no alterations, period. Once that policy has been adopted, they have to follow it. Two is that they chose the right policy. There has to be a bright, obvious line between what is allowable and what isn't. If you let a photographer alter things for artistic effect then somebody has to sit there and decide in each case whether the changes are just artistic or if they've distorted the truth. Only by having an objective standard of no alterations at all can you avoid that problem.
In the short term, yes. In the long term not necessarily so. That's because supply and demand curves are not fixed in time. If a company realizes that there's a big demand- and hence a high selling price- for a product, they tend to invest money in being able to make more of that good. That increases the supply and brings the price back down. In a lot of cases it winds up that the unit price goes down as production goes up, so that goods that are in higher demand wind up being cheaper than ones that are in lower demand.
Not quite correct. A "flamebait" is a subcategory of troll. A troll is any post that's attempting to provoke a predictable set of responses, but those responses need not be flames. If you post some types of misinformations (like a popular urban legend), for instance, you can predictably provoke calm, rational refutations. The easiest type of predictable response is a flame, though, so trolling for flames is the most commonly observed variety.
That said, you're absolutely correct that the moderation should be "-1 Flame" rather than "-1 Flamebait". I suppose that most flames are also effectively trolls for counterflames, though.
So will Castle in the Sky. (That's "Tenku no Shiro Rapyuta" for those who know it by its Japanese name.) I'm eagerly waiting for announcements about Nausicaa.
I think that's called a work for hire. If you're the one paying the developer, you have the right to call the shots. If somebody else is paying him (or he's doing it out of the kindness of his heart) you'd better ask nicely.
Eek! What a terrible concept; too bad you can't take it back now that you've mentioned it. The biggest single problem with this approach is that it could potentially compromise the spammer. The author would need to be very careful to include several degrees of indirection, or interested parties could track him down via the place that the addresses were sent. It might be best to have the worm post the addresses to some third party site, where they could then be harvested by the worm's originator in relative obscurity, rather than having them emailed to any other address.
Is that the latest news from dashdot.org?
As I see it, Google is doing exactly what it should be doing. The company has an obligation to obey laws in each country about what material is and is not legal to view. Not every country has the same views about whether censorship is acceptable, and what things should be censored if it is. Google could get in very serious trouble if it chose to show people things that their governments have decided that they shouldn't have access to. At the same time, Google does seem to be trying hard to do the least damage it can in the process. Specifically, it's not censoring material everywhere just because it's considered objectionable in one place. Americans can still see Holocause denial sites (if they have some bizarre desire to do so), Germans can see Chinese dissident sites, etc.
If you really want to build a house that will last for hundreds of years, the most important thing to do is to leave your descendants with enough money to keep it up. Most of the popular building materials are physically good enough to last for a very long time, but it's very tough for a building to stand a long time if it's not maintained. A lot of buildings are also torn down long before they need to be in order to make space for a new building of some type. Money will help there, too, because it will give your descendants the leverage they need to fend off possible threats to the house. Beyond that, just look at what materials were used in existing very old houses in the area and use those, since they've proven their durability under local conditions.
There are two reasons that battery life isn't getting better. One is that there's an inherent competetion between improved battery life and improved features. Whenever somebody comes up with an improvement in energy storage, it can be used either to give you more time or to feed more cool stuff, like more powerful processors, extra storage devices, or a nicer screen. The competetion from cool stuff has a tendency to keep the life from improving as much as you might like.
Equally important, there are serious physical limits to the amount of energy that a battery can hold. For a given mass of battery, the total energy storage is limited by the chemical properties of the materials you can use in the battery. Since those properties are reasonably well known, and people have been making batteries for a couple hundred years now, most of the possible advances have already been made. There just isn't much space for improvement once you've switched to the highest energy materials available. The only way to get radically higher energy density than is currently available is by switching to something other than batteries, like fuel cells.
Ask the Irish. The British government wasn't the worst colonial government, but they had their share of very nasty stretches. Bear in mind also that it's entirely possible that the British decided to change their policies in response to the War for Independence. When one group of colonies decides that you're acting tyranically and launches a successful revolution to throw you out, it might be a good idea not to implement the same policies in your other colonies for fear of a repeat.
That's the reason that it's so much scarier. When industy becomes a de-facto government, they have all of the problems that people associate with a normal government, but without any of the restraint that representative government faces. This is (IMO) the biggest problem that I have with the extreme anti-government, pro-business side of the Libertarians. They can't seem to see that eliminating government would just leave a power vacum that would be filled by businesses and others who lack even the nominal obligation to help ordinary people that governments have.
Of course it should be universal. But the brilliant part of sender pays is that you can set the payment low enough that it won't be much of a factor for ordinary users, but will be terrible for spammers. For instance, $0.01 per message is unlikely to break the bank for any ordinary net user, but it's enough to significantly raise costs for somebody who's depending on sending out millions of emails for results. An interesting twist on the basic concept that I've considered is the logical conclusion of the sender pays argument: sender pays and recipient gets paid. That way you'd be fine as long as you receive more emails than you send. As a practical matter, most ISPs would probably implement a policy that you wouldn't get a rebate if you received more mail than you sent, and they'd only pay you if they got payment from the original sender, but it would let the process trickle down to ordinary users without greatly inflating their monthly ISP charges.
This would also potentially be able to save mailing lists. One obvious problem with sender pays is that it would make it prohibitively expensive to run an ordinary mailing list. By giving the money to the recipient, though, you could let the lists recoup most of their sending expenses; users would just return a blank message (or a return receipt) every time they got a message on the mailing list, which would send the penny that it cost the list to mail them back to the person running the list.
I'd at least hope that you'd require three substantiated claims about the user's email. To let people complain without requiring them to back up those complaints is an invitation to abuse. It would let people who don't like a particular user shut him off, either by claiming to have received abusive emails from him, or by forging abusive mails in his name. Not a good policy.
Also bear in mind that your suggestion is going to do little good against the really committed spammers. They're vigorously hiding their email address any way they can, sending their mail through open relays, and generally avoiding the use of their ISP's email services. Just tracking them down to figure out who to complain to is hard enough, and that ignores the possibility that they're getting their service from a disreputable service provider who knows what they're doing and doesn't care.
There are lots of people who don't want to learn how to use those programs but who already know how to use a word processor. The journals that I've published in, for instance, require that documents be submitted in Word or a similar format, rather than something like LaTeX. Of course those journals don't expect that the authors will try to format everything in Word. You write everything in Word but leave it in a very plain format and let the professional typesetter at the journal worry about getting it into the perfect format for publication.
To a substantial extent, I think that this is the real longterm goal of the USB/Firewire design. They're supposed to have enough speed on an easy to use external bus that you can plug all kinds of peripherals- CD burners, hard drives, sound cards, and networking devices- into without ever having to open up the case. About the only thing that nobody seems to be trying to plug into them is graphics cards, which makes sense technically. Of course you pay a premium for those external devices, but that's likely to be true of something like a PCMCIA based system, too.
You're talking about end notes; he's talking about EndNote, which is a completely different thing. EndNote is almost mandatory for anyone who writes any kind of document that requires a serious bibliography. It can import and store lists of references, reorganize them so that they're easy to find, and automatically format them into whatever exact format is required by the publisher. Every serious scientist I know has a huge library of EndNote references ready to put into their documents, and I assume that the same thing is true of scholars in other fields, lawyers, and just about anyone else who needs bibliographies.
Yeah, but how are they going to get that into Windows? AFAIK, WinXP does not have mandatory access controls, and that's going to be the primary platform for Office 2003. Without OS level support, MAC aren't possible. Microsoft could write all of their own software so that it respects other software's request not to let you copy something, and I assume that they could probably disable the clipboard if the user isn't allowed to copy the document, but they're going to have a lot of trouble beyond that. There's just no way that they can, for instance, prevent a third-party screen capture utility from looking at a document without completely rewriting the Windows security model.
It should be pointed out that this is a problem in the UK, but the US has saner legal rules. The article mentions that Citibank lost a similar case in the US, so apparently the US doesn't think that "our system is secure; it must be the user's fault" is sufficient defense.
Why should it be .gb instead of .uk? The full and proper name of the country is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland. People are more likely to call it The United Kingdom (which fully includes the whole country) rather than Great Britain (which excludes the people in North Ireland, many of whom most certainly want to assert that they are part of the UK rather than their neighbor to the south). I've certainly heard lots of people talk about "The UK", but I've never heard them talk about "GB". There's certainly no reason not to use .uk rather than .gb.
Why should I be at a video store? I already have mine pre-ordered on-line, and with a substantial discount, to boot. The only remaining question is when Nausicaa and Porco Roso are going to be out.