I can turn your argument on it's head by applying it directly to commercial software licenses, you know. Those license terms confiscate my rights to my code based on the commercial code by preventing me from distributing my work based on it. By your logic, then, the licenses for commercial software contain unconscionable terms.
I think the problem is that you're assuming that your rights to use my code supersede my rights to control the use of my code, while trying at the same time to hold that my rights don't supersede yours. That doesn't work. The poison pill in the GPL is designed, deliberately, to insure that you can never ever release anything based on GPL code under any other terms. This ensures that, if I use the GPL, you can never ever release my code ( anything you write that would cause the GPL to apply to your code neccesarily has to contain some of my code ) under any terms other than the ones I applied to it. This is precisely and exactly what the licenses on the software you write are intended to do, isn't it? The GPL is probably the purest form of open-source license, guaranteeing that the code and any code derived from it will always remain open and accessible by everyone regardless of what anyone else wants. That's not compatible with most commercial uses, which require that the code not be accessible by anyone, but that simply means that the commercial uses require non-open source, not that the GPL isn't open source.
Of course, you do have one option. You can always go to the creator(s) of the code you need to use and license it under terms that are compatible with the licenses you need to apply to it. You might have a hard time convincing them unless you're willing to pony up some dollars to compensate them, though.
They're no more forcing their morality on you than you are forcing your morality on your customers by your licenses. It's their code, they're entitled to place whatever conditions on it's use they want. You then have the choice of whether to abide by those conditions or not use the code. No, the conditions they set aren't compatible with most commercial licenses. That's deliberate. They specifically want to ensure that code they released under non-commercial terms is never co-opted and placed under commercial terms.
And actually, I think the deal for the GPL is more: I'll let you benefit from my work, but only if you in turn let everyone else benefit from your work in the same way. It's the same thing as most commercial software, really, except that you're paying in kind for the right to use someone else's code, instead of paying in dollars. If you can't pay their price, then you'll have to put their code back on the shelf and not use it. You certainly wouldn't argue that you should be able to use any commercial library you wanted even if you couldn't pay for it, would you?
Pardon me, but this sounds an awful lot like: I want to benefit from somebody else's code without worrying about minor details like whether they've authorized my use of it or licensed me to use it. The technical term for this is 'theft'. Frankly if I release software under the GPL, I specifically want it to do exactly what it does to you: make it impossible for you to use my code under anything other than the GPL. The licenses of the code you produce for your employer do exactly the same thing.
Actually that isn't correct. Under copyright law, if you haven't seen the original you can't be guilty of copying it even if what you produced is identical to the original. Any published author or their agent or an editor can give you chapter and verse on it. Witness the policy of never reading unsolicited manuscripts or manuscripts that don't have the appropriate releases and contracts signed, specifically to provide a defense against charges of copying a work someone sent in to them.
Frankly, I'd rather that the courts avoided the First Amendment entirely in favor of determining what copyright actually applies and does not apply to. For example, ruling that the copyright on something doesn't cover discussions about or descriptions of that something that do not copy it, or ruling that you cannot use technical means to deny people rights to use the material that they would legally be entitled to under copyright law.
I don't know about triumphant. I think what he's doing is making them jump through the legal hoops they helped create. He's saying "The DMCA says you have to include this information in your notice, so provide the specified information for each and every single URL you want taken down, individually.". If they fail to comply and push it, you can then cite their own law back at them in court, claiming as a defense that they simply didn't notify you as specified in the very law they're trying to use against you. More importantly, it makes them spell out their reasons in writing, which makes them more vulnerable to having those reasons refuted since they can't keep rewriting their demands to suit the moment.
It also lets you make them respond in your terms, as he does by bringing up the scholarly research and journal aspect of things. A judge might be influenced by a group trying to force scholars not to publish research when they weren't under NDAs or other agreements not to discuss it, for instance.
I see three problems with subscriptionware that should ultimately doom it:
Bandwidth. The vast majority of the users on the Internet are still connected by 56K modems or slower. Packages like Office run in the 20 to 100 megabyte range. You think Joe SixPack's going to accept having his computer sit there for 3-4 days downloading software?
Reliability. Everyone can point to a situation where a company screwed up and flubbed crediting one of your payments, or where they had to let a payment go for a few days to a week to let the paycheck hit the checking account. When a flub or being a bit short this week makes your computer shut down at the beginning of the month, Joe SixPack willl scream bloody murder.
Upgrades. We all know about the conflicts when upgrading software, and the reasons lots of people can't/dont' upgrade specifically because upgrading would break their systems. Joe SixPack isn't going to be happy when a forced subscription upgrade breaks half his system, and every fix/upgrade breaks other things. He's gonna be even more unhappy when his local geek shrugs and says he can't do anything, Joe doesn't have the older software and the subscription service doesn't provide it.
Frankly, I think this, if implemented, will be the nail in the coffin for the worst of the big software companies. Right now their practices are headaches for the geeks. Under this model, they become a headache for Joe SixPack, and there's a lot more Joes than geeks and various people can't afford to ignore him.
I think someone's pointed this out, but it bears repeating: if an application needs glibc 2.1, then install glibc 2.1. Don't downgrade 2.2, just install 2.1 alongside it. No headers or anything, just the libraries. Then the apps that need 2.1 should find it, and the apps that need 2.2 will find it. If needed, you can set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD to force loading of correct versions. Unlike Windows, Linux allows multiple versions of a library to be installed without stepping on each other.
The problem is that Doubleclick has information about exactly which pages containing Doubleclick ads you visited, in what order and at exactly what time. They now have a way to link that trail to you personally, not as just a unique user ID but to your name, address and phone number. Would you like the idea of anyone willing to pay being able to, for example, get a list of which addresses you visited when, which books and magazines and videotapes and other products you looked at on the shelves, and so on?
Well, there's one difference between the situation described in the summary and your analogy. Verio is not a customer. Phrase the question this way: just because a retail store is publically open to customers, does that give a competing store the right to come in and take copies of all the name/address/telephone info from the sales slips so they can advertise to the customers? I don't think so. That's what Verio's doing, though, and IMHO Register.com's entirely within their rights to kick Verio out.
Although the article linked to in the summary doesn't seem to have anything to do with the situation described. Someone trolling, maybe?
Main difference: snail-mail spam has been pretty much steady in volume for a decade or so now. That's because it costs the sender to send it. Not as much as a regular letter, no, but it still costs so they can't send out unlimited amounts of it.
E-mail spam, OTOH, doesn't cost them a dime to send, and the volume keeps growing every month. Why not, after all there's no reason to not send it, no cost to sending it to people who don't want it. I want my mailbox to be usable.
Of course, some filters do help. For example, one generates a permanent transient delivery error on any mail that isn't addressed to me. That makes a lot of the spam the spammer's problem, but I still have to dispose of a couple dozen pieces every day that get through.
After the 37th e-mail I had to hit the delete key on in one day, is when it became such a difficult task. The straw that broke the camel's back, it was. Once a week from a company times a hundred companies is 14-15 a day.
Then the situation needs to change, Tim. You can get away with it up to a certain point, but past that stupidity simply becomes fatal. This is one such point.
The problem you have, Tim, is that users don't need to know the algorithms and protocols involved to understand the concepts here, any more than they have to understand the internals of a lock to understand that if you don't lock it the buglars can get into your home.
They don't have to read the protocol spec. They need to read either a) the documentation like I did, or b) a tutorial on basic security practices. One doesn't need to learn how to be a locksmith or know the technical details of the insides of a lock to know that you need to turn the key in the lock to lock it, after all.
I'd say it's more like requiring the user to understand that they need to lock the door when they leave and unlock it when they return. If they don't understand that, the door can't be secured period full stop. The SSH documentation was pretty clear on the point that you had to trust the host key and that ignoring the changed message or not verifying the original key was leaving yourself open to someone inpersonating the server, and it's unreasonable to require a security protocol to work when the user essentially ignores the warning to lock the door when leaving.
My two favorites: Rich Text Format (.rtf) and HTML. HTML has obvious advantages, but the disadvantage that it really wasn't designed for word processing as such. RTF was a format that, I believe, DEC came up with as a software-independent storage format for word-processor documents. I've found it does most everything needed to keep formatting and such intact, it's readable and writeable by most WP software ( MSWord, WordPerfect and StarOffice that I've confirmed by use ). It's also a plain-ASCII format, if you've no word processor you can pull it up in a text editor and get at the actual text if you really have to. And it hasn't had changes made to it in many years, stability is a definite plus for a long-term storage format.
Not quite. The advertisers aren't trying to change the model, that's the problem. They're trying to change your behavior to force you into the old model they're used to. What they need to do is wise up and realize that people on the Web aren't looking for glitzy traditional advertisements, they're looking for information. Want to know the fastest way to sell me your product? Give me information about it, when I'm looking for that kind of product. Show me swimsuit-clad girls crawling all over a car when I'm looking for hard drives, I'm likely to file your company under 'clueless' and not do business with them. Show me the specs on your new hard drive, though, without making me wait through huge graphics and Flash animations, and you've likely just made a long-term customer out of me by demonstrating clue.
The ISP is, as I said, essentially in the position of the dealership that buys cars and parts from the chop-shop. MAPS is identifying not only the dealer, but all the people who buy cars from the dealer. When I agree with MAPS, I'm essentially telling everyone who buys cars from a dealer who is buying cars from the chop-shop that, until they stop doing business with a supporter of and accessory to unacceptable things, I'm not going to do business with them. And whether spamming is illegal or not depends on whether you consider forcing me to pay for your mail to be theft or not. And whether or not it is doesn't affect whether I consider spamming and supporting spammers acceptable behavior or not.
Targetting just the spammer would be nice, but then there's no incentive for the ISP to shut them down. They'll just move their site around, the spammer doesn't suffer financially since they're still reachable, and the ISP doesn't suffer from hosting the spammer since they still get both the spammer's money and all their other customers' money. What MAPS does, and what I do by using their RBL, is force the ISP's customers into choosing between doing business with a spammer-friendly ISP and doing business with me. Which hopefully will force the ISP into a choice between keeping the business of the spammers or the rest of their customers.
Yes, it's a denial of service. And yes, it will prevent spam. What's been done by just attacking the e-mail accounts the spammers use to send their mail is the equivalent of going after a car-theft ring by trying to nail down the little guys who nick the cars. What MAPS is doing is attacking the other end of the problem, the dealers who buy the stolen cars from the ring, knowingly or otherwise, and resell them to the public ( ie. the ISPs who host the spammer's Web sites ). Yes it'll be a problem for everyone, because shutting down those dealers also stops them from selling legitimate, not-stolen cars. Tough. If hosting spammer Web sites starts costing ISPs larger amounts of legitimate business, maybe they'll stop hosting spammer Web sites, and the spammers will have a lot more trouble staying in business with nowhere to receive contacts. Certainly nothing less seems to have gotten rid of the spammers, and I find it hard to have much sympathy for Media3 who I consider an accessory after the fact. As for Peacefire and the others, the best suggestion I can give is this: tell Media3 that they'll have to decide whether they want to stop doing business with the spammers or stop doing business with you.
Point out to him the multitude of Windows viruses out there, and that this virus depends on Microsoft's attitude towards security in their software, and ask him why, if he has so many objections to an OS based on one user of it writing this virus, he is tolerating an OS where hundreds of thousands more users write even worse viruses?
Personally, I'd say the proper response by Yahoo is to request that the court provide them with a definition of 'French IP address' that the court will accept ( ie. if an IP address fails to meet it, it is deemed not an French IP address for purposes of obeying the court's order ). Barring that, apply the Compuserve solution: request that the French backbone providers block all traffic to and from all of eBay's servers so that nobody served by or through a French provider could access any eBay content. Then let the French judge and government deal with the backlash.
That's odd, I just tried it and top-level folders drag-n-drop just fine. Left-click on the folder icon to the left of the name, drag where I want it, release, it's there. Are you sure you aren't using PR3?
For arranging the bookmarks, look at the "Manage Bookmarks" item at the top of the bookmarks menu. For adding things to the toolbar, use "Manage Bookmarks" and move or copy the appropriate items into the "Personal Toolbar" folder. For the icons, every windows program tends to add those. Drag 'em to the wastebasket and get rid of them if they bother you. Sorry, but I find every Windows product leaves cruft on my desktop I need to clean off, so Netscape doesn't bother me any more than any other one.
The analogy fails to hold up. With 3rd-class bulk mail, the mailer pays the postage on it. With spam, I end up paying the postage. I pay for the phone time to download it. I pay the disk storage fees when some idjit spammers decide to dump a couple dozen messages with 50-100k worth of attachments into my mailbox and overrun the 500k quota. I pay in higher charges for the bigger pipes for my ISP ( around 4-5 thousand spam attempts a day ). Sorry, the correct analogy for spam isn't 3rd-class mail, it's sending 1st-class mail postage due.
Immediate thought: routing table sizes won't increase in proportion to the IPv6 address size increase, because IPv6 aggregates most of those addresses into prefixes and it's only the prefix that needs a route. In fact, with the IPv6 capability to put more networks under a single provider's network number, it may even reduce the number of routes.
Slashdot Mirror
I can turn your argument on it's head by applying it directly to commercial software licenses, you know. Those license terms confiscate my rights to my code based on the commercial code by preventing me from distributing my work based on it. By your logic, then, the licenses for commercial software contain unconscionable terms.
I think the problem is that you're assuming that your rights to use my code supersede my rights to control the use of my code, while trying at the same time to hold that my rights don't supersede yours. That doesn't work. The poison pill in the GPL is designed, deliberately, to insure that you can never ever release anything based on GPL code under any other terms. This ensures that, if I use the GPL, you can never ever release my code ( anything you write that would cause the GPL to apply to your code neccesarily has to contain some of my code ) under any terms other than the ones I applied to it. This is precisely and exactly what the licenses on the software you write are intended to do, isn't it? The GPL is probably the purest form of open-source license, guaranteeing that the code and any code derived from it will always remain open and accessible by everyone regardless of what anyone else wants. That's not compatible with most commercial uses, which require that the code not be accessible by anyone, but that simply means that the commercial uses require non-open source, not that the GPL isn't open source.
Of course, you do have one option. You can always go to the creator(s) of the code you need to use and license it under terms that are compatible with the licenses you need to apply to it. You might have a hard time convincing them unless you're willing to pony up some dollars to compensate them, though.
They're no more forcing their morality on you than you are forcing your morality on your customers by your licenses. It's their code, they're entitled to place whatever conditions on it's use they want. You then have the choice of whether to abide by those conditions or not use the code. No, the conditions they set aren't compatible with most commercial licenses. That's deliberate. They specifically want to ensure that code they released under non-commercial terms is never co-opted and placed under commercial terms.
And actually, I think the deal for the GPL is more: I'll let you benefit from my work, but only if you in turn let everyone else benefit from your work in the same way. It's the same thing as most commercial software, really, except that you're paying in kind for the right to use someone else's code, instead of paying in dollars. If you can't pay their price, then you'll have to put their code back on the shelf and not use it. You certainly wouldn't argue that you should be able to use any commercial library you wanted even if you couldn't pay for it, would you?
Pardon me, but this sounds an awful lot like: I want to benefit from somebody else's code without worrying about minor details like whether they've authorized my use of it or licensed me to use it. The technical term for this is 'theft'. Frankly if I release software under the GPL, I specifically want it to do exactly what it does to you: make it impossible for you to use my code under anything other than the GPL. The licenses of the code you produce for your employer do exactly the same thing.
Actually that isn't correct. Under copyright law, if you haven't seen the original you can't be guilty of copying it even if what you produced is identical to the original. Any published author or their agent or an editor can give you chapter and verse on it. Witness the policy of never reading unsolicited manuscripts or manuscripts that don't have the appropriate releases and contracts signed, specifically to provide a defense against charges of copying a work someone sent in to them.
Frankly, I'd rather that the courts avoided the First Amendment entirely in favor of determining what copyright actually applies and does not apply to. For example, ruling that the copyright on something doesn't cover discussions about or descriptions of that something that do not copy it, or ruling that you cannot use technical means to deny people rights to use the material that they would legally be entitled to under copyright law.
I don't know about triumphant. I think what he's doing is making them jump through the legal hoops they helped create. He's saying "The DMCA says you have to include this information in your notice, so provide the specified information for each and every single URL you want taken down, individually.". If they fail to comply and push it, you can then cite their own law back at them in court, claiming as a defense that they simply didn't notify you as specified in the very law they're trying to use against you. More importantly, it makes them spell out their reasons in writing, which makes them more vulnerable to having those reasons refuted since they can't keep rewriting their demands to suit the moment.
It also lets you make them respond in your terms, as he does by bringing up the scholarly research and journal aspect of things. A judge might be influenced by a group trying to force scholars not to publish research when they weren't under NDAs or other agreements not to discuss it, for instance.
I see three problems with subscriptionware that should ultimately doom it:
- Bandwidth. The vast majority of the users on the Internet are still connected by 56K modems or slower. Packages like Office run in the 20 to 100 megabyte range. You think Joe SixPack's going to accept having his computer sit there for 3-4 days downloading software?
- Reliability. Everyone can point to a situation where a company screwed up and flubbed crediting one of your payments, or where they had to let a payment go for a few days to a week to let the paycheck hit the checking account. When a flub or being a bit short this week makes your computer shut down at the beginning of the month, Joe SixPack willl scream bloody murder.
- Upgrades. We all know about the conflicts when upgrading software, and the reasons lots of people can't/dont' upgrade specifically because upgrading would break their systems. Joe SixPack isn't going to be happy when a forced subscription upgrade breaks half his system, and every fix/upgrade breaks other things. He's gonna be even more unhappy when his local geek shrugs and says he can't do anything, Joe doesn't have the older software and the subscription service doesn't provide it.
Frankly, I think this, if implemented, will be the nail in the coffin for the worst of the big software companies. Right now their practices are headaches for the geeks. Under this model, they become a headache for Joe SixPack, and there's a lot more Joes than geeks and various people can't afford to ignore him.I think someone's pointed this out, but it bears repeating: if an application needs glibc 2.1, then install glibc 2.1. Don't downgrade 2.2, just install 2.1 alongside it. No headers or anything, just the libraries. Then the apps that need 2.1 should find it, and the apps that need 2.2 will find it. If needed, you can set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD to force loading of correct versions. Unlike Windows, Linux allows multiple versions of a library to be installed without stepping on each other.
The problem is that Doubleclick has information about exactly which pages containing Doubleclick ads you visited, in what order and at exactly what time. They now have a way to link that trail to you personally, not as just a unique user ID but to your name, address and phone number. Would you like the idea of anyone willing to pay being able to, for example, get a list of which addresses you visited when, which books and magazines and videotapes and other products you looked at on the shelves, and so on?
Well, there's one difference between the situation described in the summary and your analogy. Verio is not a customer. Phrase the question this way: just because a retail store is publically open to customers, does that give a competing store the right to come in and take copies of all the name/address/telephone info from the sales slips so they can advertise to the customers? I don't think so. That's what Verio's doing, though, and IMHO Register.com's entirely within their rights to kick Verio out.
Although the article linked to in the summary doesn't seem to have anything to do with the situation described. Someone trolling, maybe?
Main difference: snail-mail spam has been pretty much steady in volume for a decade or so now. That's because it costs the sender to send it. Not as much as a regular letter, no, but it still costs so they can't send out unlimited amounts of it.
E-mail spam, OTOH, doesn't cost them a dime to send, and the volume keeps growing every month. Why not, after all there's no reason to not send it, no cost to sending it to people who don't want it. I want my mailbox to be usable.
Of course, some filters do help. For example, one generates a permanent transient delivery error on any mail that isn't addressed to me. That makes a lot of the spam the spammer's problem, but I still have to dispose of a couple dozen pieces every day that get through.
After the 37th e-mail I had to hit the delete key on in one day, is when it became such a difficult task. The straw that broke the camel's back, it was. Once a week from a company times a hundred companies is 14-15 a day.
Then the situation needs to change, Tim. You can get away with it up to a certain point, but past that stupidity simply becomes fatal. This is one such point.
The problem you have, Tim, is that users don't need to know the algorithms and protocols involved to understand the concepts here, any more than they have to understand the internals of a lock to understand that if you don't lock it the buglars can get into your home.
They don't have to read the protocol spec. They need to read either a) the documentation like I did, or b) a tutorial on basic security practices. One doesn't need to learn how to be a locksmith or know the technical details of the insides of a lock to know that you need to turn the key in the lock to lock it, after all.
I'd say it's more like requiring the user to understand that they need to lock the door when they leave and unlock it when they return. If they don't understand that, the door can't be secured period full stop. The SSH documentation was pretty clear on the point that you had to trust the host key and that ignoring the changed message or not verifying the original key was leaving yourself open to someone inpersonating the server, and it's unreasonable to require a security protocol to work when the user essentially ignores the warning to lock the door when leaving.
My two favorites: Rich Text Format (.rtf) and HTML. HTML has obvious advantages, but the disadvantage that it really wasn't designed for word processing as such. RTF was a format that, I believe, DEC came up with as a software-independent storage format for word-processor documents. I've found it does most everything needed to keep formatting and such intact, it's readable and writeable by most WP software ( MSWord, WordPerfect and StarOffice that I've confirmed by use ). It's also a plain-ASCII format, if you've no word processor you can pull it up in a text editor and get at the actual text if you really have to. And it hasn't had changes made to it in many years, stability is a definite plus for a long-term storage format.
Not quite. The advertisers aren't trying to change the model, that's the problem. They're trying to change your behavior to force you into the old model they're used to. What they need to do is wise up and realize that people on the Web aren't looking for glitzy traditional advertisements, they're looking for information. Want to know the fastest way to sell me your product? Give me information about it, when I'm looking for that kind of product. Show me swimsuit-clad girls crawling all over a car when I'm looking for hard drives, I'm likely to file your company under 'clueless' and not do business with them. Show me the specs on your new hard drive, though, without making me wait through huge graphics and Flash animations, and you've likely just made a long-term customer out of me by demonstrating clue.
The ISP is, as I said, essentially in the position of the dealership that buys cars and parts from the chop-shop. MAPS is identifying not only the dealer, but all the people who buy cars from the dealer. When I agree with MAPS, I'm essentially telling everyone who buys cars from a dealer who is buying cars from the chop-shop that, until they stop doing business with a supporter of and accessory to unacceptable things, I'm not going to do business with them. And whether spamming is illegal or not depends on whether you consider forcing me to pay for your mail to be theft or not. And whether or not it is doesn't affect whether I consider spamming and supporting spammers acceptable behavior or not.
Targetting just the spammer would be nice, but then there's no incentive for the ISP to shut them down. They'll just move their site around, the spammer doesn't suffer financially since they're still reachable, and the ISP doesn't suffer from hosting the spammer since they still get both the spammer's money and all their other customers' money. What MAPS does, and what I do by using their RBL, is force the ISP's customers into choosing between doing business with a spammer-friendly ISP and doing business with me. Which hopefully will force the ISP into a choice between keeping the business of the spammers or the rest of their customers.
Yes, it's a denial of service. And yes, it will prevent spam. What's been done by just attacking the e-mail accounts the spammers use to send their mail is the equivalent of going after a car-theft ring by trying to nail down the little guys who nick the cars. What MAPS is doing is attacking the other end of the problem, the dealers who buy the stolen cars from the ring, knowingly or otherwise, and resell them to the public ( ie. the ISPs who host the spammer's Web sites ). Yes it'll be a problem for everyone, because shutting down those dealers also stops them from selling legitimate, not-stolen cars. Tough. If hosting spammer Web sites starts costing ISPs larger amounts of legitimate business, maybe they'll stop hosting spammer Web sites, and the spammers will have a lot more trouble staying in business with nowhere to receive contacts. Certainly nothing less seems to have gotten rid of the spammers, and I find it hard to have much sympathy for Media3 who I consider an accessory after the fact. As for Peacefire and the others, the best suggestion I can give is this: tell Media3 that they'll have to decide whether they want to stop doing business with the spammers or stop doing business with you.
Point out to him the multitude of Windows viruses out there, and that this virus depends on Microsoft's attitude towards security in their software, and ask him why, if he has so many objections to an OS based on one user of it writing this virus, he is tolerating an OS where hundreds of thousands more users write even worse viruses?
Personally, I'd say the proper response by Yahoo is to request that the court provide them with a definition of 'French IP address' that the court will accept ( ie. if an IP address fails to meet it, it is deemed not an French IP address for purposes of obeying the court's order ). Barring that, apply the Compuserve solution: request that the French backbone providers block all traffic to and from all of eBay's servers so that nobody served by or through a French provider could access any eBay content. Then let the French judge and government deal with the backlash.
That's odd, I just tried it and top-level folders drag-n-drop just fine. Left-click on the folder icon to the left of the name, drag where I want it, release, it's there. Are you sure you aren't using PR3?
For arranging the bookmarks, look at the "Manage Bookmarks" item at the top of the bookmarks menu. For adding things to the toolbar, use "Manage Bookmarks" and move or copy the appropriate items into the "Personal Toolbar" folder. For the icons, every windows program tends to add those. Drag 'em to the wastebasket and get rid of them if they bother you. Sorry, but I find every Windows product leaves cruft on my desktop I need to clean off, so Netscape doesn't bother me any more than any other one.
The analogy fails to hold up. With 3rd-class bulk mail, the mailer pays the postage on it. With spam, I end up paying the postage. I pay for the phone time to download it. I pay the disk storage fees when some idjit spammers decide to dump a couple dozen messages with 50-100k worth of attachments into my mailbox and overrun the 500k quota. I pay in higher charges for the bigger pipes for my ISP ( around 4-5 thousand spam attempts a day ). Sorry, the correct analogy for spam isn't 3rd-class mail, it's sending 1st-class mail postage due.
Immediate thought: routing table sizes won't increase in proportion to the IPv6 address size increase, because IPv6 aggregates most of those addresses into prefixes and it's only the prefix that needs a route. In fact, with the IPv6 capability to put more networks under a single provider's network number, it may even reduce the number of routes.