I think this is the kind of leading edge proof that spam is here to stay and that despite its ridiculous, fraudulent, and often illegal or pornographic content, that big business has figured out how to make money off of spam and spammers and yet keep enough distance from it to not sully their hands with it publicly.
The Star Tribune had an article in it a few months ago about how the email address you put on your product registration or other request to some otherwise legitimate company is getting bundled with your name and address and entering the direct mail list market where they ultimately filter down to the penis spammers and others.
And then there's the banking (don't all spam businesses take credit cards?) industry, the ISPs selling the connectivity that keeps spammers in business, and so on.
I'm kind of reminded of a scene from the end of some thriller movie where our naive but honest to the core hero finally has the horrifying realization that his superiors/hero/idol is behind the awful crime he's been trying to get to the bottom of all along.
Big business doesn't want spam to end, they've figured out how to stay clean and make money.
As sql*kitten pointed out, there are people whose stated desire is not to buy stuff from telemarketers but a percentage of them WILL buy from telemarketers if the telemarketers will give them a shot.
What's missing from that analysis though are the kind of sales tactics required to get DNC members to buy something. I'm guessing that most of the sales would go to the lying, aggressive telemarketers taking advantage of vulnerable or weak-willed people who are taken advantage of.
And it's not like these people are ending up with iPods, plasma TVs or other "desirable" products, they're usually getting substandard products at inflated prices or outright defrauded of their money.
I don't understand why the DMA decided to fight the DNC lists, since the legitimate sales to DNC members (excluding hard sells to the vulnerable) would likely be a fraction of a percent. Either that fraction is a meaninful amount of business, or the reality is that the DMA is really just a brass nameplate on an otherwise very sleazy business that actually counts on hardsells and the vulnerable to make money.
The older I get the more I can't help but see a big percentage of the "business" world made up of pushy, aggressive people with the morals of a jackal and a willingness to lie and steal for their own benefit.
Which is a meaningful critique of Soviet Communism in the era of the gulag, but generally it's a critique that fails because the concept of a prison purposefully implies seperation from society and punishment. How evolved can that concept get without actually being seen as a benefit and not a punishment or preventative?
Basically I see the most civilized prisons as being like the "SuperMax" prisons, where inmates spend 23 hours a day in their cells and are almost entirely seperated from other prisoners. It serves the punishment model well, and overcomes the inmate-on-inmate brutality that is the most demeaning aspect of prison life.
I'm not sure how serious you are, but since even a stopped clock is right twice a day I'll have to agree at least with the literal interpretation of your posting.
If law enforcement generally were applied to the sellers of spamvertised products, spam would become far less of a menace. Most spamvertised products are prima faciae illegal (ie, you can't get prescription medications without a prescription), false advertising (a sugar pill won't give you a 12" penis) or are actually just fraud schemes to take money and not deliver a product.
Tracking down email senders is extremely difficult due to header forgery and the use of zombies and other kinds of compromised systems. But just about all spam will take a credit card, which should enable tracking of a financial trail to the sellers. If the Feds would make a RICO case out of it, they could ensnare just about anyone with their finger in the pie, including the spammers, who I'm sure would be fingered by sellers caught in the net.
A few RICO cases that put the squeeze on ISPs, banks handling their financial transactions, spammers, and most importantly, sellers and suppliers of these products would have a pretty significant effect on the whole "scam 'n' spam" business environment. I think there's probably some otherwise legitimate players (ISPs, banks) participating in this field behind the scenes, and some negative exposure in a few of these cases could close the door to a lot of "operators" who need access to the legitimate economy in order to operate.
It's pretty clear that nobody likes spam, but the fact that there have been no high-profile FBI/Treasury/Commerce investigations into some of these things really puzzles me. It may be that the investigations have been done but this angle was deemed not fruitful (doubtful), resources aren't available due to the war on terror (more likely, but not entirely credible), or political pressure has been applied by heavy corporate players to keep their shady business segments viable (somewhat conspiratorial, but believable) -- yet even these theories don't explain the lack of credible, visible efforts on the part of Federal law enforcment to crack down on internet fraud.
I would think that after 9/11 and the increased hassles in flying in the US, we'd get better train service. An airplane trip has become a real hassle, from both a security perspective to the cattle-car mentality that passengers are treated with.
Yet its still faster to fly even short distances here on planes than it is to take the train. Even counting security, a flight from Minneapolis to Chicago is about 3 hours door-to-door (my house to a downtown office), including security. You can literally commute via the airlines (I've done several day trips for work), but a train trip is 8-10 hours and nearly as expensive.
I keep hoping that the train's greater energy efficiency, decreased security risk will result in better service and increase demand, but it appears we're just going to end up with horrific air service run by whoever will work cheapest for management. Indian pilots?
I agree, I thought that's what some of this "Adaptive Infrastructure" was about, but I want to know how manufacturers will make money doing this -- ie, how will they cover the real cost of having N*2 CPUs in the field when people are paying most of the time for N CPUs?
I can see some instances for very high end hardware where you can literally plug in new CPUs and integrate them into a running environment dynamically -- in that case, the service arm of the manufacturer only has to keep a small perentage of extra CPUs in stock that they literally overnight or courier to the customer who then plugs 'em in, uses them, and physically returns them when done. But I know when I've read about this in the past, it's been described as far more real-time than that, meaning that there must be physical CPUs already installed that can be switched on right away, which leads me back to my original question -- how do they expect to make money on hardware that smart customers only pay for very occasionally but is actually installed and sitting idle, not earning money?
Sure, on-demand clients pay slightly more for the base hardware (buying an 8 CPU system when they only use 4 90% of the time), the on-demand service and the on-demand CPU cycles, but it would stand to reason that such a system would be expensive to begin with and someone would make sure that they weren't actually paying for 8 CPUs ultimately -- in other words, it has to always be cheaper than buying 8 CPUs up front.
Unless they're relying on accounting gimmicks like our company does, where "expense" dollars are apparently free and capital dollars are very dear, and where we might not care if we're ultimately paying for 8 CPUs so long as the extra 4 are done as on-demand expense dollars and not up front capital dollars.
Or is the goal of this to get us used to "renting" cycles on systems we nominally own so that future systems are *only* rented and paid for by the cycle, knowing that there will be a temptation to always run the system at less than 50% utilization, thus luring people into using bigger systems than they would otherwise? Perhaps a way to get us to think only in terms of cycles for an eventual move towards a network-based NUMA processing model?
So, how do you make money giving away real goods and only making money when -- and if -- the customer actually uses them?
Finally, someone who is on the right track, thinking rationally.
A recent Minneapolis Star Tribune article showed Coleman voting nearly in lockstep with what the White House wanted. Given the Bush administration's generally pro-corporate stances on most issues, it's hard to see Norm Coleman taking a stance on this issue too far out of sync with what corporate leaders typically want (DRM, limited choice, maximimal pricing).
What I find unusual about Norm's initiatives is that Minnesota isn't the constituency of either the media empire (although his erstwhile wife, Laurie, is "pursuing an acting career in Hollywood" -- at least that's what we're told about her living in Hollywood instead of with Norm..), or the consumer electronics companies who on the surface seem to work against the traditional media interests. So it's hard to know what motivates Norm in this regard.
But I personally have a hard time seeing any particularly revolutionary ideas come out of Coleman, at least not any that might anger corporate interests aligned with Bush.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
The British don't see things this way, and they don't have constitutionally guaranteed rights -- they don't even have a constitution (you can take your basic laws and stick it -- it's NOT a constitution). And they're not even CITIZENS, they're SUBJECTS.
Remember, we fought a *war* with the British over these ideas about rights and government. Thankfully we won.
It mimicks the photo of the Americans planting the flag at Iwo Jima, but what's necessarily negative about the US crushing the Imperial Japanese Army? Did I get taught the wrong history? Did the Japanese not invade much of Southeast Asia and commit all manner of atrocities (Bataan Death March, Rape of Nanking) that the Japanese themselves refuse to acknowledge in their own history books to this day?
I know that we have reached rock bottom as a culture when we refuse to acknowledge even our most noble military victories over demonstrably evil and corrupt foes.
I know this is something of a long shot, but given the amount of work shipped overseas these days, could that process or product contribute to problems in "newer" applications such as VoIP?
If you make the assumption that most core network systems we use now were largely coded before shipping work overseas was so widespread but newer protocol implementations like VoIP (yes, I know its more of a "system" than a specific protocol), are those protocols/systems going to be vulnerable to all the usual drawbacks to overseas coding that/.'ers have talked about (bad communications, weak coding, bottom-dollar vendor selection, etc)?
I'm not suggesting that the overseas *coders* are per se the problem, but the inherent problems associated with a design-here-code-there, maximum-profit model could plague a whole new generation of protocols and systems with all kinds of bugs.
You can make the argument that the original suites of protocols we're all familiar with (smtp, http, ftp, nis, nfs, etc) were plagued with security problems as well, but those applications were largely developed and implemented not for a hostile, worldwide internet, but for a collegial, mostly private "research" network used by a limited number of people in a relatively controlled environment.
New processes and systems (like VoIP) arguably should be developed with the idea of a hostile, worldwide network where the expectation should be that they will almost always come under attack, either accidentally (cf. Cisco 67x DSL routers and the Code Red worm), or deliberately. But they're apparently not, unless simple maturity is what these problems is all about.
Actually, Novell underperformed NASDAQ and S&P indicies for the first half of '03 and outperformed the last half. It's as hard to know what the real reason for the increase over the last six months is as it is to know what business Novell is really in. They're Netware, no, NDS, no, consulting (the Cambridge acquisition), no, Linux, umm, what are they again?
I'd wager their increase has more to do with general stock market speculation of an overall economic recovery and increased business spending on IT infrastructure rather than enthusiasm for Novell's somewhat confusing business strategy.
It just takes a teensy amount of skill with the standard $3 waitron corkscrew. You never see the waitrons cork the wine.
However, there are people (like my wife) who cannot even master that task, which is why they make the rabbit-type screws; put them on the bottle and in three handle motions you have an open bottle of wine and the cork. Even an untrained monkey could do it.
How does that work? I want to guess you did something clever, like drop the 5 liter Mustang motor and transmission into the Volvo, which would be pretty cool. A boring looking car with some serious torque.
I don't quite understand the slashdot "friend" button, but I added you because I don't often see people who get the problems associated with over-use of NAT.
I've run into more than one network/application service vendor who use NAT *and* RFC1918 addresses, including one clown who insisted that 10.0.0.0/24 was "his" address block [neatly rebuked by a FAX to him and his boss of RFC 1918]! I've run into other vendors using both made-up addresses and IANA Reserved blocks as well.
The problem that paypal and other payment systems have is that they're deliberately grey area entities; they're not banks, so they don't have to be subject to banking regulations, but in many respects they work like banks.
I would use paypal and other systems, but I want to make sure that someone is holding them to heel a little and not letting them get away with a "we reserve the right to fuck you over" policy. I know the history of government regulation isn't perfect in this regard, but I don't know where else to turn to provide a check on bank-like services and systems.
So why should they bust them for violating the spam law? The government has totally ignored the absolutely fraudulent nature of spamvertised products, despite the fact that the money trail is easier to follow than the email trail.
I suspect there will be political pressure to "bust" a couple of spammers, and they probably will nail a couple of small-timers and will trumpet it as a success, saying something like "Mr. Spam King sent over one million spam messages" -- the same bogus logic used in drug busts, when they value the drugs based on their smallest-possible-street-transaction value instead of the likely wholesale value.
Part of the reason I think there will be little enforcement, at least from the Bush administration, is that I've read that mainstream businesses are actually profiting from spam indirectly by selling customer lists that include email addresses. They don't sell directly to spammers, but they filter through direct marketers who ultimately DO sell to spammers.
Most US conservatives would consider it "their money" and the idea that its not "their money" to be a corruption of the principals of private property.
We do have protests over road building, but they are on an environmental or citizen advocacy basis and I do not recall seeing one using property rights as a basis for this.
Many moons ago in college, we were told about a guy who sued the government to find out what was in the DOD or CIA budget, which was presented as kind of a black box. He argued that as a tax payer, he had a right to know where his money was going. The Supreme Court ruled that he had a (latin phrase spelled wrong) "de minimus interest" in the specific budget; in other words, his contribution was too small to be meaningful, thus e had no right. I wonder if the same applied to Gates or someone else who pays more in taxes.
I think there's probably a useful balance between the idea that its the governments money and my money. It's very easy to spend a lot of tax dollars without realizing that many of those dollars come from people's hard-earned paychecks, and that if you keep increasing government spending you're taking more and more away from people. Particularly when its being spent on activities that don't return a tangible benefit to those from whom the money was taken, regardless of the "real" benefit.
The more I pay in taxes (as a homeowner), the more infuriating government spending seems to be. My property taxes (used to fund city and county government) have gone up around 12% per year for the last 3 years. At this rate the property taxes per month will have eclipsed my P&I payments on the house in 12 years. It's hard not to wonder what they're doing with what was at least once my money.
I've heard one reason 15" LCD TVs are more expensive is that they use fairly expensive electronics to drive the scaler and deinterlacer, even in small TVs, and when coupled with the tuner and other electronics it really does add up to more money than a 15" LCD monitor, but that leaves me wondering why Apex hasn't released a bargain basement one coupling low-budget VGA-out type TV tuners to low-budget LCD panels and delivering a TV in the $500 range.
Another quesiton -- why can't I buy a desktop LCD monitor with the same size and native resolution as they make for laptops? My laptop display is maybe 15" but does 1400 x 1050. All the 15" LCDs I can find are only good for 1024 x 768 (there might be an oddball that does 1280, but usually they soak you for the 17" model).
And speaking of laptops, why haven't the laptop industry made its VGA and video-out ports on its laptops *bi-directional*? I can think of plenty of times when it would have been great to just use my laptops display. And while we're doing that, let's just integrate a TV tuner into the display chip (a laptop with an All-In-Wonder type chipset).
Free local service is a bit of a red herring in the US. In many cases, the cost of delivering the service is higher than the amount paid for it, especially for heavy users. It also contributes to the often inexplicably complicated and expensive telco billing for business services, as they subsidize a lot of the residential services.
I can't say I'm glad we don't have it, since it would only be inexplicably more expensive than it is now (kind of a Murphy's law situation), but it would be nice if we could wipe the slates clean and require telco services to actually have something to do with what it costs to deliver the service, and not some bizarre, tarrif-mandated, cross-subsidized, loss-leader pricing like we have now.
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I think this is the kind of leading edge proof that spam is here to stay and that despite its ridiculous, fraudulent, and often illegal or pornographic content, that big business has figured out how to make money off of spam and spammers and yet keep enough distance from it to not sully their hands with it publicly.
The Star Tribune had an article in it a few months ago about how the email address you put on your product registration or other request to some otherwise legitimate company is getting bundled with your name and address and entering the direct mail list market where they ultimately filter down to the penis spammers and others.
And then there's the banking (don't all spam businesses take credit cards?) industry, the ISPs selling the connectivity that keeps spammers in business, and so on.
I'm kind of reminded of a scene from the end of some thriller movie where our naive but honest to the core hero finally has the horrifying realization that his superiors/hero/idol is behind the awful crime he's been trying to get to the bottom of all along.
Big business doesn't want spam to end, they've figured out how to stay clean and make money.
As sql*kitten pointed out, there are people whose stated desire is not to buy stuff from telemarketers but a percentage of them WILL buy from telemarketers if the telemarketers will give them a shot.
What's missing from that analysis though are the kind of sales tactics required to get DNC members to buy something. I'm guessing that most of the sales would go to the lying, aggressive telemarketers taking advantage of vulnerable or weak-willed people who are taken advantage of.
And it's not like these people are ending up with iPods, plasma TVs or other "desirable" products, they're usually getting substandard products at inflated prices or outright defrauded of their money.
I don't understand why the DMA decided to fight the DNC lists, since the legitimate sales to DNC members (excluding hard sells to the vulnerable) would likely be a fraction of a percent. Either that fraction is a meaninful amount of business, or the reality is that the DMA is really just a brass nameplate on an otherwise very sleazy business that actually counts on hardsells and the vulnerable to make money.
The older I get the more I can't help but see a big percentage of the "business" world made up of pushy, aggressive people with the morals of a jackal and a willingness to lie and steal for their own benefit.
Which is a meaningful critique of Soviet Communism in the era of the gulag, but generally it's a critique that fails because the concept of a prison purposefully implies seperation from society and punishment. How evolved can that concept get without actually being seen as a benefit and not a punishment or preventative?
Basically I see the most civilized prisons as being like the "SuperMax" prisons, where inmates spend 23 hours a day in their cells and are almost entirely seperated from other prisoners. It serves the punishment model well, and overcomes the inmate-on-inmate brutality that is the most demeaning aspect of prison life.
I'm not sure how serious you are, but since even a stopped clock is right twice a day I'll have to agree at least with the literal interpretation of your posting.
If law enforcement generally were applied to the sellers of spamvertised products, spam would become far less of a menace. Most spamvertised products are prima faciae illegal (ie, you can't get prescription medications without a prescription), false advertising (a sugar pill won't give you a 12" penis) or are actually just fraud schemes to take money and not deliver a product.
Tracking down email senders is extremely difficult due to header forgery and the use of zombies and other kinds of compromised systems. But just about all spam will take a credit card, which should enable tracking of a financial trail to the sellers. If the Feds would make a RICO case out of it, they could ensnare just about anyone with their finger in the pie, including the spammers, who I'm sure would be fingered by sellers caught in the net.
A few RICO cases that put the squeeze on ISPs, banks handling their financial transactions, spammers, and most importantly, sellers and suppliers of these products would have a pretty significant effect on the whole "scam 'n' spam" business environment. I think there's probably some otherwise legitimate players (ISPs, banks) participating in this field behind the scenes, and some negative exposure in a few of these cases could close the door to a lot of "operators" who need access to the legitimate economy in order to operate.
It's pretty clear that nobody likes spam, but the fact that there have been no high-profile FBI/Treasury/Commerce investigations into some of these things really puzzles me. It may be that the investigations have been done but this angle was deemed not fruitful (doubtful), resources aren't available due to the war on terror (more likely, but not entirely credible), or political pressure has been applied by heavy corporate players to keep their shady business segments viable (somewhat conspiratorial, but believable) -- yet even these theories don't explain the lack of credible, visible efforts on the part of Federal law enforcment to crack down on internet fraud.
I would think that after 9/11 and the increased hassles in flying in the US, we'd get better train service. An airplane trip has become a real hassle, from both a security perspective to the cattle-car mentality that passengers are treated with.
Yet its still faster to fly even short distances here on planes than it is to take the train. Even counting security, a flight from Minneapolis to Chicago is about 3 hours door-to-door (my house to a downtown office), including security. You can literally commute via the airlines (I've done several day trips for work), but a train trip is 8-10 hours and nearly as expensive.
I keep hoping that the train's greater energy efficiency, decreased security risk will result in better service and increase demand, but it appears we're just going to end up with horrific air service run by whoever will work cheapest for management. Indian pilots?
I agree, I thought that's what some of this "Adaptive Infrastructure" was about, but I want to know how manufacturers will make money doing this -- ie, how will they cover the real cost of having N*2 CPUs in the field when people are paying most of the time for N CPUs?
I can see some instances for very high end hardware where you can literally plug in new CPUs and integrate them into a running environment dynamically -- in that case, the service arm of the manufacturer only has to keep a small perentage of extra CPUs in stock that they literally overnight or courier to the customer who then plugs 'em in, uses them, and physically returns them when done. But I know when I've read about this in the past, it's been described as far more real-time than that, meaning that there must be physical CPUs already installed that can be switched on right away, which leads me back to my original question -- how do they expect to make money on hardware that smart customers only pay for very occasionally but is actually installed and sitting idle, not earning money?
Sure, on-demand clients pay slightly more for the base hardware (buying an 8 CPU system when they only use 4 90% of the time), the on-demand service and the on-demand CPU cycles, but it would stand to reason that such a system would be expensive to begin with and someone would make sure that they weren't actually paying for 8 CPUs ultimately -- in other words, it has to always be cheaper than buying 8 CPUs up front.
Unless they're relying on accounting gimmicks like our company does, where "expense" dollars are apparently free and capital dollars are very dear, and where we might not care if we're ultimately paying for 8 CPUs so long as the extra 4 are done as on-demand expense dollars and not up front capital dollars.
Or is the goal of this to get us used to "renting" cycles on systems we nominally own so that future systems are *only* rented and paid for by the cycle, knowing that there will be a temptation to always run the system at less than 50% utilization, thus luring people into using bigger systems than they would otherwise? Perhaps a way to get us to think only in terms of cycles for an eventual move towards a network-based NUMA processing model?
So, how do you make money giving away real goods and only making money when -- and if -- the customer actually uses them?
Finally, someone who is on the right track, thinking rationally.
A recent Minneapolis Star Tribune article showed Coleman voting nearly in lockstep with what the White House wanted. Given the Bush administration's generally pro-corporate stances on most issues, it's hard to see Norm Coleman taking a stance on this issue too far out of sync with what corporate leaders typically want (DRM, limited choice, maximimal pricing).
What I find unusual about Norm's initiatives is that Minnesota isn't the constituency of either the media empire (although his erstwhile wife, Laurie, is "pursuing an acting career in Hollywood" -- at least that's what we're told about her living in Hollywood instead of with Norm..), or the consumer electronics companies who on the surface seem to work against the traditional media interests. So it's hard to know what motivates Norm in this regard.
But I personally have a hard time seeing any particularly revolutionary ideas come out of Coleman, at least not any that might anger corporate interests aligned with Bush.
...and you don't have a constitution.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
The British don't see things this way, and they don't have constitutionally guaranteed rights -- they don't even have a constitution (you can take your basic laws and stick it -- it's NOT a constitution). And they're not even CITIZENS, they're SUBJECTS.
Remember, we fought a *war* with the British over these ideas about rights and government. Thankfully we won.
It mimicks the photo of the Americans planting the flag at Iwo Jima, but what's necessarily negative about the US crushing the Imperial Japanese Army? Did I get taught the wrong history? Did the Japanese not invade much of Southeast Asia and commit all manner of atrocities (Bataan Death March, Rape of Nanking) that the Japanese themselves refuse to acknowledge in their own history books to this day?
I know that we have reached rock bottom as a culture when we refuse to acknowledge even our most noble military victories over demonstrably evil and corrupt foes.
I know this is something of a long shot, but given the amount of work shipped overseas these days, could that process or product contribute to problems in "newer" applications such as VoIP?
/.'ers have talked about (bad communications, weak coding, bottom-dollar vendor selection, etc)?
If you make the assumption that most core network systems we use now were largely coded before shipping work overseas was so widespread but newer protocol implementations like VoIP (yes, I know its more of a "system" than a specific protocol), are those protocols/systems going to be vulnerable to all the usual drawbacks to overseas coding that
I'm not suggesting that the overseas *coders* are per se the problem, but the inherent problems associated with a design-here-code-there, maximum-profit model could plague a whole new generation of protocols and systems with all kinds of bugs.
You can make the argument that the original suites of protocols we're all familiar with (smtp, http, ftp, nis, nfs, etc) were plagued with security problems as well, but those applications were largely developed and implemented not for a hostile, worldwide internet, but for a collegial, mostly private "research" network used by a limited number of people in a relatively controlled environment.
New processes and systems (like VoIP) arguably should be developed with the idea of a hostile, worldwide network where the expectation should be that they will almost always come under attack, either accidentally (cf. Cisco 67x DSL routers and the Code Red worm), or deliberately. But they're apparently not, unless simple maturity is what these problems is all about.
How about CRAM? Card Random Access Memory -- basically flexible magnetic cards that could be wrapped around a drum and read and written.
Actually, Novell underperformed NASDAQ and S&P indicies for the first half of '03 and outperformed the last half. It's as hard to know what the real reason for the increase over the last six months is as it is to know what business Novell is really in. They're Netware, no, NDS, no, consulting (the Cambridge acquisition), no, Linux, umm, what are they again?
I'd wager their increase has more to do with general stock market speculation of an overall economic recovery and increased business spending on IT infrastructure rather than enthusiasm for Novell's somewhat confusing business strategy.
It just takes a teensy amount of skill with the standard $3 waitron corkscrew. You never see the waitrons cork the wine.
However, there are people (like my wife) who cannot even master that task, which is why they make the rabbit-type screws; put them on the bottle and in three handle motions you have an open bottle of wine and the cork. Even an untrained monkey could do it.
And their cheese is pretty good, too.
How does that work? I want to guess you did something clever, like drop the 5 liter Mustang motor and transmission into the Volvo, which would be pretty cool. A boring looking car with some serious torque.
I don't quite understand the slashdot "friend" button, but I added you because I don't often see people who get the problems associated with over-use of NAT.
I've run into more than one network/application service vendor who use NAT *and* RFC1918 addresses, including one clown who insisted that 10.0.0.0/24 was "his" address block [neatly rebuked by a FAX to him and his boss of RFC 1918]! I've run into other vendors using both made-up addresses and IANA Reserved blocks as well.
The problem that paypal and other payment systems have is that they're deliberately grey area entities; they're not banks, so they don't have to be subject to banking regulations, but in many respects they work like banks.
I would use paypal and other systems, but I want to make sure that someone is holding them to heel a little and not letting them get away with a "we reserve the right to fuck you over" policy. I know the history of government regulation isn't perfect in this regard, but I don't know where else to turn to provide a check on bank-like services and systems.
So why should they bust them for violating the spam law? The government has totally ignored the absolutely fraudulent nature of spamvertised products, despite the fact that the money trail is easier to follow than the email trail.
I suspect there will be political pressure to "bust" a couple of spammers, and they probably will nail a couple of small-timers and will trumpet it as a success, saying something like "Mr. Spam King sent over one million spam messages" -- the same bogus logic used in drug busts, when they value the drugs based on their smallest-possible-street-transaction value instead of the likely wholesale value.
Part of the reason I think there will be little enforcement, at least from the Bush administration, is that I've read that mainstream businesses are actually profiting from spam indirectly by selling customer lists that include email addresses. They don't sell directly to spammers, but they filter through direct marketers who ultimately DO sell to spammers.
Most US conservatives would consider it "their money" and the idea that its not "their money" to be a corruption of the principals of private property.
We do have protests over road building, but they are on an environmental or citizen advocacy basis and I do not recall seeing one using property rights as a basis for this.
Many moons ago in college, we were told about a guy who sued the government to find out what was in the DOD or CIA budget, which was presented as kind of a black box. He argued that as a tax payer, he had a right to know where his money was going. The Supreme Court ruled that he had a (latin phrase spelled wrong) "de minimus interest" in the specific budget; in other words, his contribution was too small to be meaningful, thus e had no right. I wonder if the same applied to Gates or someone else who pays more in taxes.
I think there's probably a useful balance between the idea that its the governments money and my money. It's very easy to spend a lot of tax dollars without realizing that many of those dollars come from people's hard-earned paychecks, and that if you keep increasing government spending you're taking more and more away from people. Particularly when its being spent on activities that don't return a tangible benefit to those from whom the money was taken, regardless of the "real" benefit.
The more I pay in taxes (as a homeowner), the more infuriating government spending seems to be. My property taxes (used to fund city and county government) have gone up around 12% per year for the last 3 years. At this rate the property taxes per month will have eclipsed my P&I payments on the house in 12 years. It's hard not to wonder what they're doing with what was at least once my money.
It's exactly like that. It's been an extremely popular thing over in alt.music.replacements for swapping all manner of bootleg Replacements albums.
Umm, isn't that exactly what makes DLP, ah, DLP?
It actually reads more like a reflective instead of a transmissive LCD system.
But I get your point.
I've heard one reason 15" LCD TVs are more expensive is that they use fairly expensive electronics to drive the scaler and deinterlacer, even in small TVs, and when coupled with the tuner and other electronics it really does add up to more money than a 15" LCD monitor, but that leaves me wondering why Apex hasn't released a bargain basement one coupling low-budget VGA-out type TV tuners to low-budget LCD panels and delivering a TV in the $500 range.
Another quesiton -- why can't I buy a desktop LCD monitor with the same size and native resolution as they make for laptops? My laptop display is maybe 15" but does 1400 x 1050. All the 15" LCDs I can find are only good for 1024 x 768 (there might be an oddball that does 1280, but usually they soak you for the 17" model).
And speaking of laptops, why haven't the laptop industry made its VGA and video-out ports on its laptops *bi-directional*? I can think of plenty of times when it would have been great to just use my laptops display. And while we're doing that, let's just integrate a TV tuner into the display chip (a laptop with an All-In-Wonder type chipset).
According to "Narcotics: Pit of Despair", it's free until you get addicted.
Free local service is a bit of a red herring in the US. In many cases, the cost of delivering the service is higher than the amount paid for it, especially for heavy users. It also contributes to the often inexplicably complicated and expensive telco billing for business services, as they subsidize a lot of the residential services.
I can't say I'm glad we don't have it, since it would only be inexplicably more expensive than it is now (kind of a Murphy's law situation), but it would be nice if we could wipe the slates clean and require telco services to actually have something to do with what it costs to deliver the service, and not some bizarre, tarrif-mandated, cross-subsidized, loss-leader pricing like we have now.
Can you show me a map of the DNS caching hierarchy? I didn't realize there was one.
Can you tell me why if this is so damaging to the 'net why Verisign or the root server operators don't block NS queries to the root servers?