Musicians with "perfect tone", while not common, are not totally uncommon. Jimi Hendrix, despite all the hours spent awash in 130db spl noise, could tune his guitar by ear as well as his roadie could with tuning gadgets, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a trait good guitartists pick up simply from experience.
But there's a difference between learning the ability to hear sound at a specific frequency and whether one device or another makes a *better* sound.
FWIW, 128k MP3s sound OK to me as well, although I think the difference might be more noticable to me if I listened to it in the right conditions on the right equipment. Most of the time its on headphones outside, or worse, in my car. In both places the noise floor has to be at least 50-60 db spl (more in the car), mitigating the chance to hear noise.
They're part of the same cabal that includes wine experts, except at least the wine people have "I was drunk" as a possible excuse.
I care about the *drunk* not the flavor, which is why I try to buy at least 4-column filtration vodka and mix it with lime-aid. I find that less impurities mean less intense hangovers...
...and is more common than you think in management.
My boss told me that when he took his first CIO job (moving from an operations management job) that not only did his boss encourage and pay for an IT "coach" to give him a crash course in IT, he said it was pretty common for execs to use "coaches" for all kinds of things, including a fair amount of touchy-feely management subjects.
The IT staff exists to service the business, not the other way around.
"Service the business" does NOT mean: "Cater to end-user technology whims." Unless your job description and/or contract include the specification of technology for your job function or that of others, you use the technology that your management has determined is appropriate to do your job.
Yes, work sucks, but the IT department hasn't structured the workplace or its rules. They usually have been given a gatekeeper role, based on their experience with and knowledge of, information technology. The role is there to maintain lower support costs and purchasing costs by minimizing unnecessary hetereodoxy.
You may think that by not providing technology specific to your personal needs or/desires and insisting on a technology standard that you find personally less productive that the IT department is inhibiting business function, but I assure you that's not the case, and I further challenge you to provide documentary evidence from any management study that backs anything BUT standardization of ANY tool or resource in a large organization. Soldiers in the army don't get to choose what gun they use, assembly line workers don't get to choose what tools they'll use or what kinds of fasteners they'll fasten.
You may believe that you're specific workplace needs as a "knowledge worker" are so unique and that the regimine of standardization will infringe on your heroic abilities to innovate, but I assure you, your innovation and deviation from standards *are* the destabilizing force.
I remember running a demo/eval version on a 486-33 and was quite impressed at how well it ran.
I think that Apple really could have made some serious waves had they ported MacOS to x86 and offered Windows application binary compatibility.
But it would have had to have been done in the early 90s, before Win95 was available. The Mac UI was vastly superior to Win31, and there was still a farily substantial Mac foothold in the business world at the time.
People aren't cheap, but they're also not footing the bill. Given a choice between a $1500 emergency room visit paid for out of pocket, and a $15 urgent care visit paid for almost exclusively by their insurance, which do you think they'll choose?
Would you purchase a DVD from your favorite local artist for $10? (Such as the one I'm working on now)
Sure, if I had a favorite local artist. When I was 24 and working two part time jobs (the sum of which didn't equal 40 hours), I had a lot of favorite local artists because I had the time, energy and the soft, pink liver required to go to bars 2-3 nights per week.
Now that I'm old, tired, working 50 hours a week, married, and have a hard, inflamed liver, it's hard to keep track of or be aware of local musicians. Local TV, including the aren't-we-progressive public station, does such a horrible job of presenting even *NEWS* about anything that doesn't have a major beer and pharmaceutical sponsor that it's hard to know what's good.
Local radio might be better, but the local stations that play local music (which excludes all but 2-3 owned by Clear Channel, sigh) are either impossible to pick up (AM, shut down at sundown), take the "community" angle too seriously and seem to be in a foreign language when I tune them in. I think they have something on late on Friday, but see old, tired and married above.
My biggest gripe with local music has always been they're just too fucking caught up in being local musicians caught up with being local musicians. The how-cool-am-I, did-you-get-my-reference-to-that-Partridge-Family- song, we're-just-like-the-White-Stripes-but-different attitude just kind of makes me annoyed enough to throw in a VU album and wish it was Max's Kansas City, circa 1969....
Stars and big-name directors are the studios enemies as much as the pirates. They take huge chunks of the profit margin and in many cases the studio doesn't have a choice but to pay what they want.
So "star power" in demanding business decision changes isn't going to go very far. Business managers at studios probably just see this as rich Hollywood employees whining about having to buy DVDs instead of getting them free before anyone else.
Furthermore, since when is the Academy Awards the arbiter elegantiarum of quality filmmaking, and not just a bunch of shills for studio crap?
...on this subject had a quote from some McKinsey study that said 2/3rds of the savings flow back to the US in the form of cheaper goods and "fatter corporate profits which would be used for innvoate businesses in the US."
Why is it the assumption that fatter corporate profits means anything for anyone but corporate executives? Even if they develop innovative new businesses, these businesses almost always are strutured around a small number of high paying marketing and management jobs, and a large number of low-paying jobs....which is really the worst trend; economically, a smaller and smaller number of people gain more and more benefit by squeezing a larger and larger number of people.
You're assuming that the Mexicans would price their cell service so much lower than the Americans that it would provide a meaningful savings differential. This wouldn't happen.
The Mexicans would price their service only marginally lower than American service, but the margin would be negligible, and would not provide meaningful economic benefit to the rest of the economy.
Furthermore, presuming their service was priced low enough to steal signficant customers, the American companies would likely end up merging or consolidating to cut costs and gain economies of scale to remain competitive.
Even if the Mexican service was constantly priced low enough to ultimately take all the subscribers and drive the American companies out of business, as soon as the Mexicans had no competition they would have every incentive to raise prices, since there's no alternative (technology or vendor), and the market has already determined people are willing to pay the original, pre-Mexican service pricing for cell phones.
In the end, you lose some or all of the American jobs, and the savings to consumers is to small to have any meaningful effect on the rest of the economy.
The biggest aspect of corporate hypocracy is the continuation of import barriers in the US due to "unfair trade practices".
If its so fucking cheap to send my job to $developing_nation, at least give me the benefit of buying whatever I want from overseas and not having to have it tarrifed to infinity. If they can do my job as good and cheaper, they certainly can provide goods better and cheaper.
And I'm also curious where the downward pressure on executive salary and benefits packages is? Sure, clear out 100 IT workers whose gross cost is maybe $12 million, but make sure the top 5 exectives clear $100 million in salary and bonuses and other perks?
There really is a "capitalism for the worker, socialism for management" mentality.
For various reasons I've been to the "urgent care" clinic a few times in the past couple of years. Usually it was because the ailment was too trivial to deal with the appointment/timeoff process with my regular doctor.
Each time I've been there, I've been treated by a doctor who was foreign born and in one case, had been in the US less than a year (I asked). One doctor was from Egypt and the other was from Romania. Both appeared to be what I'd call "awkwardly competant" -- they treated my ailments, but their whole interaction with me was really odd. It wasn't exactly confidence inspiring, and was markedly different from the experience I've had with foreign doctors when I've been at the University Hospital.
Anyway, this urgent care clinic is part of a corporation, and urgent care medicine is a lot of schlock work (colds, cuts, burns, etc) at bad hours that a lot of doctors don't like to do...for less than a 'normal' salary of $150-200k.
So why not start a program of importing doctors from overseas? And I think that's exactly what they've done. And it wouldn't surprise me with the cost pressure on the medical system in the US if this didn't become a lot more common, with the lower end of the medical practice getting filled with foreign doctors.
It's not even a joke, it's a rather poor attempt at delivering a political polemic via humor. Obviously Roblimo isn't the "gee, I'm just a simple linux user" he makes himself out to be, and the entire thing just comes off as deliberately disingenuous.
So what if other Linux reviewers didn't think Linux as a GUI environment worked very well? A lot of dyed-in-the-wool *x users* think desktops built on X are a bad joke, would it be any surprise that a reviewer used to Windows wouldn't come to at worst a critical conclusion?
The difference being that Ken Lay and his company are from Texas, where the current President is from and who was Governor. Lay and Enron were big contributers to the GOP and Bush for a long time, and likely circulated in the same social circle as the Bush family (oil/energy, Texas, wealthy, politics, the overlap is massive).
The Enron prosecution isn't done and Lay isn't out of the woods yet. There was just recently a news blurb about Lay refusing to hand over documents in his possession, citing the 5th Ammendment.
Darl is probably the only "name" exec at SCO and is a "name" only for creating this fiasco. While probably "connected" politically in the same way all wealthy CEO types are, I highly doubt he has or can even buy the juice that Lay had with the GOP pre-Enron. Not from the same state or industry as many Bush insiders, nor does he have the non-business political standing.
Furthermore, he's created enemies at bigger businesses like IBM that have heavier hitters than him, with longer, deeper political connections and from bigger states, mitigating any potential political advantage he *might* have had.
And remember, Sam Waksal from Imclone is *already* in the can, Martha Stewart faces a fraud trial that could land her in the can, too, and the guy from Tyco I believe will likely enjoy the a nice long membership at the Orange Jumpsuit Country Club.
Overall, I think McBride is *just* the kind of sacrificial lamb that the Justice department and SEC would like to see turning on a spit over an open fire. Not politically connected enough to be a threat to them and reaping major political benefits for the overly-pro-corporate Bush administration when he gets a public hanging.
Is there a chance that this could massively implode on SCO?
I'd wager there must have been some "UNIX" code in Linux at one time, albeit not intentionally and perhaps only small chunks for SCO to have made any claim at all.
But let's presume that RH's discovery finds the code was relatively small, inserted accidentally or under false pretenses, and not part of the current development of Linux.
Could SCO then be shown to be grossly misrepresenting their claims and mooting any licensing claims they made and perhaps open SCO's executives to claims of fraud, stock maniplation, or at least highly vulnerable to civil action from companies who could claim their misrepresentation had a chilling effect on their business?
If someone can get the man behind the curtain exposed, this could all come crashing down around the SCO guys..
The FBI, Treasury and the IRS have proven track records for following the most convoluted money trails. There's really no reason why they can't trace credit card transactions and find these people.
A RICO case against them would be great; huge fines, long-ass jail sentences, and virtually anybody that as much shared the same ashtray as these people gets to spend the next 25 years years in a the Federal pen.
Filtering and firewalling are fine, but users should pay *more* for these services, since they take staff time and resources to implement and maintain.
Open connections require ISPs to do nothing, therefore those connections should cost nothing.
It's kind of a no-brainer idea for ISPs to charge extra for some kind of filtering/firewalling anyway, since shedloads of lusers will wet their pants with excitement to get better "protection" and will see it as extra cost for extra value.
I can't say I blame them for arresting this guy (although the idiotic federal multipliers for sentencing are almost silly), but isn't this just another lame PR exercise? This guy was just pissed, not a deliberate long-term spammer -- it was a one off offense, and while deserving of punishment it unfortunately will give the impression the FBI is doing something about it, when it clearly isn't.
High school kids are doing powerpoint presentations instead of writing term papers. Just what our society needs, people that can only think in terms of borrowed images and buzzword phrases.
What's next, getting graded on your choice of on-slide animation effects and transition effects?
I'm glad I'll be dead before we've had more than two generations of these clowns, the spiral into ignorance and incompetance won't be pretty.
I'm sure a system like this will become almost mandatory, as the insurance companies begin to charge triple for bars that don't participate in this system.
Sure, you can have a bar without this system, it's just it won't be financially viable as your montlhy insurance premium will be much higher than your competitors.
What most people fail to recognize is that "good" TV is a pay commodity. If you want to watch good television, you need to have HBO and some pay movie channels. Having a Tivo helps.
Free TV (just the networks) is full of commercials and has been dumbed down to the knuckle-dragging level.
But it wasn't always like that; over its history, television has had some great dramas and excellent programming. But anything good has shifted to pay television these days.
It is broken to wildcard the.com. and.net. -- but what if the right to have the wildcard was auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the proceeds went to IETF or some other body with the goal of improving core protocols like DNS or SMTP and delivering an open source reference implementation of these improved protocols?
The term of the auctioned lease would be six months with no repeat for a minimum of 24 months, registrars and the controller of.com. and.net. and their subsidiaries or related companies automatically excluded, only static HTML could be returned -- no java/javascript/activeX or other scripting technology -- and a fixed banner image returned from a neutral server MUST appear at the top of the sitefinder page indicating that the requested page was unavailable, the A records returned must be fixed and publicly available, and no other protocols than http may listen on those addresses.
We, the users of the internet, get the benefit of a revenue source for internet development. The biggest price we pay is for some breakage to DNS, which isn't to say it wouldn't be a pain, but kludges could be implemented for mail or other apps where a lack of NXDOMAIN is a big problem.
It *might* be worth it, but the benefit (beyond the marketing value of appearing on every unknown domain) should ALL go back to the community. It never should be something that only one company can leverage to their own advantage at everyone else's cost. Anyone with a political bent about it could null route the sitefinder IPs or flip whatever switch ISC puts into named or something else.
My uncle, who made a shitpile of money, actually had that as an operating philosophy. Messages, mail, and so on often went unread/unaswered into a box on his desk. Periodically he'd chuck the bottom half of the pile.
Only when he got several requests did he actually do anything about them, since the presumption was these were the actually important ones.
It makes some sense. I know I've wasted a ton of time trying to be "responsive" to people who wanted something, only to find out they weren't that serious, it wasn't very important, etc.
I'd like to see those things come back, or at least see someone try.
Motion would be the most interesting. Since "car chase" is a genre unto itself for movies and a significant component to many action films, why not build theaters everywhere with motion-capable seating that could be incorporated into the movie (and impossible to duplicate in HT)? Its not like its going to go away as a genre.
When at Disney's California Adventure, they had a ride ("Soarin' Over California"), which, while kind of lame from a content perspective coupled a movie with some pretty basic movement to provide a really compelling flying sensation -- much better than IMAX.
There's no reason that this kind of technology couldn't be incorporated into a theater to provide a movie+ride experience, and it'd be a sensation applicable to many, many films.
Add in a restaurant, and you win back the social aspect of it -- food and a whole evening built around an attraction you can't get on a 70" Sony.
Yes, it'd be great if it was that simple, but you have to remember that once lawmakers and marketers and everyone else gets their hands on it, you'll have to come up with real specific definitions of "spam", "opt-in", "requested" and so on. Don't tell me these are any more immediate and obvious than things like "obscenity" and "pornography", which we STILL can't figure out how to define.
And don't belive for a second that they'll criminalize this anymore than the do-not-call list was criminalized; it will only be a civil violation, with plenty of corporate shells to take the blame, default on the fines, and so on. A couple of spammers might get nailed for ducking the law via corporate shell games, but you can bet the violations will be other laws (tax, corporate governance, etc), not the "spam law".
Besides, most of what spam is is already *illegal*, we're just not working very hard at enforcing the criminal fraud laws we have now. More laws to layer on top of the laws we don't/won't enforce now isn't the answer. That's the big government way and it leads to madness.
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Musicians with "perfect tone", while not common, are not totally uncommon. Jimi Hendrix, despite all the hours spent awash in 130db spl noise, could tune his guitar by ear as well as his roadie could with tuning gadgets, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a trait good guitartists pick up simply from experience.
But there's a difference between learning the ability to hear sound at a specific frequency and whether one device or another makes a *better* sound.
FWIW, 128k MP3s sound OK to me as well, although I think the difference might be more noticable to me if I listened to it in the right conditions on the right equipment. Most of the time its on headphones outside, or worse, in my car. In both places the noise floor has to be at least 50-60 db spl (more in the car), mitigating the chance to hear noise.
They're part of the same cabal that includes wine experts, except at least the wine people have "I was drunk" as a possible excuse.
I care about the *drunk* not the flavor, which is why I try to buy at least 4-column filtration vodka and mix it with lime-aid. I find that less impurities mean less intense hangovers...
...and is more common than you think in management.
My boss told me that when he took his first CIO job (moving from an operations management job) that not only did his boss encourage and pay for an IT "coach" to give him a crash course in IT, he said it was pretty common for execs to use "coaches" for all kinds of things, including a fair amount of touchy-feely management subjects.
The IT staff exists to service the business, not the other way around.
"Service the business" does NOT mean: "Cater to end-user technology whims." Unless your job description and/or contract include the specification of technology for your job function or that of others, you use the technology that your management has determined is appropriate to do your job.
Yes, work sucks, but the IT department hasn't structured the workplace or its rules. They usually have been given a gatekeeper role, based on their experience with and knowledge of, information technology. The role is there to maintain lower support costs and purchasing costs by minimizing unnecessary hetereodoxy.
You may think that by not providing technology specific to your personal needs or/desires and insisting on a technology standard that you find personally less productive that the IT department is inhibiting business function, but I assure you that's not the case, and I further challenge you to provide documentary evidence from any management study that backs anything BUT standardization of ANY tool or resource in a large organization. Soldiers in the army don't get to choose what gun they use, assembly line workers don't get to choose what tools they'll use or what kinds of fasteners they'll fasten.
You may believe that you're specific workplace needs as a "knowledge worker" are so unique and that the regimine of standardization will infringe on your heroic abilities to innovate, but I assure you, your innovation and deviation from standards *are* the destabilizing force.
I remember running a demo/eval version on a 486-33 and was quite impressed at how well it ran.
I think that Apple really could have made some serious waves had they ported MacOS to x86 and offered Windows application binary compatibility.
But it would have had to have been done in the early 90s, before Win95 was available. The Mac UI was vastly superior to Win31, and there was still a farily substantial Mac foothold in the business world at the time.
People aren't cheap, but they're also not footing the bill. Given a choice between a $1500 emergency room visit paid for out of pocket, and a $15 urgent care visit paid for almost exclusively by their insurance, which do you think they'll choose?
Would you purchase a DVD from your favorite local artist for $10? (Such as the one I'm working on now)
- song, we're-just-like-the-White-Stripes-but-different attitude just kind of makes me annoyed enough to throw in a VU album and wish it was Max's Kansas City, circa 1969....
Sure, if I had a favorite local artist. When I was 24 and working two part time jobs (the sum of which didn't equal 40 hours), I had a lot of favorite local artists because I had the time, energy and the soft, pink liver required to go to bars 2-3 nights per week.
Now that I'm old, tired, working 50 hours a week, married, and have a hard, inflamed liver, it's hard to keep track of or be aware of local musicians. Local TV, including the aren't-we-progressive public station, does such a horrible job of presenting even *NEWS* about anything that doesn't have a major beer and pharmaceutical sponsor that it's hard to know what's good.
Local radio might be better, but the local stations that play local music (which excludes all but 2-3 owned by Clear Channel, sigh) are either impossible to pick up (AM, shut down at sundown), take the "community" angle too seriously and seem to be in a foreign language when I tune them in. I think they have something on late on Friday, but see old, tired and married above. My biggest gripe with local music has always been they're just too fucking caught up in being local musicians caught up with being local musicians. The how-cool-am-I, did-you-get-my-reference-to-that-Partridge-Family
Stars and big-name directors are the studios enemies as much as the pirates. They take huge chunks of the profit margin and in many cases the studio doesn't have a choice but to pay what they want.
So "star power" in demanding business decision changes isn't going to go very far. Business managers at studios probably just see this as rich Hollywood employees whining about having to buy DVDs instead of getting them free before anyone else.
Furthermore, since when is the Academy Awards the arbiter elegantiarum of quality filmmaking, and not just a bunch of shills for studio crap?
...on this subject had a quote from some McKinsey study that said 2/3rds of the savings flow back to the US in the form of cheaper goods and "fatter corporate profits which would be used for innvoate businesses in the US."
...which is really the worst trend; economically, a smaller and smaller number of people gain more and more benefit by squeezing a larger and larger number of people.
Why is it the assumption that fatter corporate profits means anything for anyone but corporate executives? Even if they develop innovative new businesses, these businesses almost always are strutured around a small number of high paying marketing and management jobs, and a large number of low-paying jobs.
You're assuming that the Mexicans would price their cell service so much lower than the Americans that it would provide a meaningful savings differential. This wouldn't happen.
The Mexicans would price their service only marginally lower than American service, but the margin would be negligible, and would not provide meaningful economic benefit to the rest of the economy.
Furthermore, presuming their service was priced low enough to steal signficant customers, the American companies would likely end up merging or consolidating to cut costs and gain economies of scale to remain competitive.
Even if the Mexican service was constantly priced low enough to ultimately take all the subscribers and drive the American companies out of business, as soon as the Mexicans had no competition they would have every incentive to raise prices, since there's no alternative (technology or vendor), and the market has already determined people are willing to pay the original, pre-Mexican service pricing for cell phones.
In the end, you lose some or all of the American jobs, and the savings to consumers is to small to have any meaningful effect on the rest of the economy.
The biggest aspect of corporate hypocracy is the continuation of import barriers in the US due to "unfair trade practices".
If its so fucking cheap to send my job to $developing_nation, at least give me the benefit of buying whatever I want from overseas and not having to have it tarrifed to infinity. If they can do my job as good and cheaper, they certainly can provide goods better and cheaper.
And I'm also curious where the downward pressure on executive salary and benefits packages is? Sure, clear out 100 IT workers whose gross cost is maybe $12 million, but make sure the top 5 exectives clear $100 million in salary and bonuses and other perks?
There really is a "capitalism for the worker, socialism for management" mentality.
For various reasons I've been to the "urgent care" clinic a few times in the past couple of years. Usually it was because the ailment was too trivial to deal with the appointment/timeoff process with my regular doctor.
Each time I've been there, I've been treated by a doctor who was foreign born and in one case, had been in the US less than a year (I asked). One doctor was from Egypt and the other was from Romania. Both appeared to be what I'd call "awkwardly competant" -- they treated my ailments, but their whole interaction with me was really odd. It wasn't exactly confidence inspiring, and was markedly different from the experience I've had with foreign doctors when I've been at the University Hospital.
Anyway, this urgent care clinic is part of a corporation, and urgent care medicine is a lot of schlock work (colds, cuts, burns, etc) at bad hours that a lot of doctors don't like to do...for less than a 'normal' salary of $150-200k.
So why not start a program of importing doctors from overseas? And I think that's exactly what they've done. And it wouldn't surprise me with the cost pressure on the medical system in the US if this didn't become a lot more common, with the lower end of the medical practice getting filled with foreign doctors.
It's not even a joke, it's a rather poor attempt at delivering a political polemic via humor. Obviously Roblimo isn't the "gee, I'm just a simple linux user" he makes himself out to be, and the entire thing just comes off as deliberately disingenuous.
So what if other Linux reviewers didn't think Linux as a GUI environment worked very well? A lot of dyed-in-the-wool *x users* think desktops built on X are a bad joke, would it be any surprise that a reviewer used to Windows wouldn't come to at worst a critical conclusion?
The difference being that Ken Lay and his company are from Texas, where the current President is from and who was Governor. Lay and Enron were big contributers to the GOP and Bush for a long time, and likely circulated in the same social circle as the Bush family (oil/energy, Texas, wealthy, politics, the overlap is massive).
The Enron prosecution isn't done and Lay isn't out of the woods yet. There was just recently a news blurb about Lay refusing to hand over documents in his possession, citing the 5th Ammendment.
Darl is probably the only "name" exec at SCO and is a "name" only for creating this fiasco. While probably "connected" politically in the same way all wealthy CEO types are, I highly doubt he has or can even buy the juice that Lay had with the GOP pre-Enron. Not from the same state or industry as many Bush insiders, nor does he have the non-business political standing.
Furthermore, he's created enemies at bigger businesses like IBM that have heavier hitters than him, with longer, deeper political connections and from bigger states, mitigating any potential political advantage he *might* have had.
And remember, Sam Waksal from Imclone is *already* in the can, Martha Stewart faces a fraud trial that could land her in the can, too, and the guy from Tyco I believe will likely enjoy the a nice long membership at the Orange Jumpsuit Country Club.
Overall, I think McBride is *just* the kind of sacrificial lamb that the Justice department and SEC would like to see turning on a spit over an open fire. Not politically connected enough to be a threat to them and reaping major political benefits for the overly-pro-corporate Bush administration when he gets a public hanging.
Is there a chance that this could massively implode on SCO?
I'd wager there must have been some "UNIX" code in Linux at one time, albeit not intentionally and perhaps only small chunks for SCO to have made any claim at all.
But let's presume that RH's discovery finds the code was relatively small, inserted accidentally or under false pretenses, and not part of the current development of Linux.
Could SCO then be shown to be grossly misrepresenting their claims and mooting any licensing claims they made and perhaps open SCO's executives to claims of fraud, stock maniplation, or at least highly vulnerable to civil action from companies who could claim their misrepresentation had a chilling effect on their business?
If someone can get the man behind the curtain exposed, this could all come crashing down around the SCO guys..
The FBI, Treasury and the IRS have proven track records for following the most convoluted money trails. There's really no reason why they can't trace credit card transactions and find these people.
A RICO case against them would be great; huge fines, long-ass jail sentences, and virtually anybody that as much shared the same ashtray as these people gets to spend the next 25 years years in a the Federal pen.
Filtering and firewalling are fine, but users should pay *more* for these services, since they take staff time and resources to implement and maintain.
Open connections require ISPs to do nothing, therefore those connections should cost nothing.
It's kind of a no-brainer idea for ISPs to charge extra for some kind of filtering/firewalling anyway, since shedloads of lusers will wet their pants with excitement to get better "protection" and will see it as extra cost for extra value.
I can't say I blame them for arresting this guy (although the idiotic federal multipliers for sentencing are almost silly), but isn't this just another lame PR exercise? This guy was just pissed, not a deliberate long-term spammer -- it was a one off offense, and while deserving of punishment it unfortunately will give the impression the FBI is doing something about it, when it clearly isn't.
High school kids are doing powerpoint presentations instead of writing term papers. Just what our society needs, people that can only think in terms of borrowed images and buzzword phrases.
What's next, getting graded on your choice of on-slide animation effects and transition effects?
I'm glad I'll be dead before we've had more than two generations of these clowns, the spiral into ignorance and incompetance won't be pretty.
I'm sure a system like this will become almost mandatory, as the insurance companies begin to charge triple for bars that don't participate in this system.
Sure, you can have a bar without this system, it's just it won't be financially viable as your montlhy insurance premium will be much higher than your competitors.
Free TV is full of garbage most of the time.
What most people fail to recognize is that "good" TV is a pay commodity. If you want to watch good television, you need to have HBO and some pay movie channels. Having a Tivo helps.
Free TV (just the networks) is full of commercials and has been dumbed down to the knuckle-dragging level.
But it wasn't always like that; over its history, television has had some great dramas and excellent programming. But anything good has shifted to pay television these days.
It is broken to wildcard the .com. and .net. -- but what if the right to have the wildcard was auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the proceeds went to IETF or some other body with the goal of improving core protocols like DNS or SMTP and delivering an open source reference implementation of these improved protocols?
.com. and .net. and their subsidiaries or related companies automatically excluded, only static HTML could be returned -- no java/javascript/activeX or other scripting technology -- and a fixed banner image returned from a neutral server MUST appear at the top of the sitefinder page indicating that the requested page was unavailable, the A records returned must be fixed and publicly available, and no other protocols than http may listen on those addresses.
The term of the auctioned lease would be six months with no repeat for a minimum of 24 months, registrars and the controller of
We, the users of the internet, get the benefit of a revenue source for internet development. The biggest price we pay is for some breakage to DNS, which isn't to say it wouldn't be a pain, but kludges could be implemented for mail or other apps where a lack of NXDOMAIN is a big problem.
It *might* be worth it, but the benefit (beyond the marketing value of appearing on every unknown domain) should ALL go back to the community. It never should be something that only one company can leverage to their own advantage at everyone else's cost. Anyone with a political bent about it could null route the sitefinder IPs or flip whatever switch ISC puts into named or something else.
My uncle, who made a shitpile of money, actually had that as an operating philosophy. Messages, mail, and so on often went unread/unaswered into a box on his desk. Periodically he'd chuck the bottom half of the pile.
Only when he got several requests did he actually do anything about them, since the presumption was these were the actually important ones.
It makes some sense. I know I've wasted a ton of time trying to be "responsive" to people who wanted something, only to find out they weren't that serious, it wasn't very important, etc.
I'd like to see those things come back, or at least see someone try.
Motion would be the most interesting. Since "car chase" is a genre unto itself for movies and a significant component to many action films, why not build theaters everywhere with motion-capable seating that could be incorporated into the movie (and impossible to duplicate in HT)? Its not like its going to go away as a genre.
When at Disney's California Adventure, they had a ride ("Soarin' Over California"), which, while kind of lame from a content perspective coupled a movie with some pretty basic movement to provide a really compelling flying sensation -- much better than IMAX.
There's no reason that this kind of technology couldn't be incorporated into a theater to provide a movie+ride experience, and it'd be a sensation applicable to many, many films.
Add in a restaurant, and you win back the social aspect of it -- food and a whole evening built around an attraction you can't get on a 70" Sony.
Yes, it'd be great if it was that simple, but you have to remember that once lawmakers and marketers and everyone else gets their hands on it, you'll have to come up with real specific definitions of "spam", "opt-in", "requested" and so on. Don't tell me these are any more immediate and obvious than things like "obscenity" and "pornography", which we STILL can't figure out how to define.
And don't belive for a second that they'll criminalize this anymore than the do-not-call list was criminalized; it will only be a civil violation, with plenty of corporate shells to take the blame, default on the fines, and so on. A couple of spammers might get nailed for ducking the law via corporate shell games, but you can bet the violations will be other laws (tax, corporate governance, etc), not the "spam law".
Besides, most of what spam is is already *illegal*, we're just not working very hard at enforcing the criminal fraud laws we have now. More laws to layer on top of the laws we don't/won't enforce now isn't the answer. That's the big government way and it leads to madness.