Oh, I don't disagree at all that $10 is a lot of money in China. But since the software was developed in America, one has to gauge the profit margin on American prices, IMHO.
Unless the government runs the ISP
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It ain't true censorship, in the freedom sense.
Private property and private, open ended, signed contracts mean that your option is simple: Phone up another ISP and ask them if they will let you receive all the spam you can eat.
You can then transfer your account. No doubt your old ISP will be satisfied that they don't need to pay a developer to add a disable feature (that won't be used by anyone except yourself and one or two other users) rather than get the measly amount most home users pay for internet (about $1-$2 margin per user per month). And your new ISP will be out of business within a year or two as the rest of the ISPs in the world implement filtering and the ones that don't lose users.
But wait! You still have the freedom to get the spam! Just buy a $700/month T1 for your house and again, you have all the spam you can eat.
I'll stick with $20/month internet and run SpamAssassin until my ISP implements filtering for me, because I've never had a false positive from SpamAssassin, ever, except for morons who send HTML-only mail, and I often can't read their crap anyways, and so I summarialy ignore/request ASCII anyways.
Now, if you're in an area with only one ISP, or a government controlled ISP, then I feel for you. But, IMHO, this isn't very common in most free countries (or at least in my corner of the world).
So why no AGP based solutions? There should be far more than enough speed on a good 4x AGP slot to handle this. Of course, it would either entail some kind of video-card pass-through (messy and probably torally impossible) or simply your choice to have a server machine with 4 Gigs of cheap memory and a Trident 8900 videocard.
I think it's about time for this -- 128 MB and 256 MB sticks are dirt cheap... go up past 512 MB and you're creeping towards the double the price per MB mark.
>Linux and Mac machines simply don't have the applications that an Oil Drilling company needs.
This might surprise you, but that strikes me as unusual. From my (albeit limited) experience, much heavy machinery operates on DOS. (Oh, the pains of trying to network some vinyl making machines...)
I would have thought of all things, Oil Rigs would be using it too.
>It's incredibly common in the console industry to sell the hardware below cost and make up for it eventually in game sales and when the hardware drops in production cost.
Which is too bad, because during the height of the NES you could get a Chinese knock-off for a bargain, proving that consoles can easily be sold for more than their cost and still be very popular.
It's just that Sony, Nintendo, and MS have chosen to (foolishly) change their pricing strategies.
>Sure it wasn't just RatShak corupting their own database?:-)
Beats me, but I do know their database is totally screwed up.:-)
I ordered a couple of CDs from them two years ago. One arrived 1 1/2 year ago, the other I'm still waiting for... Probably a deleted line in their database.
>But somehow when I was in Hawaii, there were two Robert Thille's renting a car from the same car rental company the same day... Wierd.
Heh. For a couple of years I had to get Radio Shack to rewrite the info in their name database every time I made a purchase. There was another person with the EXACT same name (middle name included) who bought a lot of stuff there for a while, I guess.
And no, my name isn't particularly common. In my town my family name is the only one of it's spelling in the phone book!
I just searched for my own name (in quotes) on google, and found:
- A wildlife foundation under my name
- A gallery under my name
- A cricket player with my name
- A professor with my name
- A folk singer with my name
- Artists with my name
- About 14,000 other links with my name not related to me personally.
I already knew many companies operated under my last name, but didn't know so many used my full name!
So, how many of you are in danger of losing your names like this?
For every person like you that likes Maxtor, there's people like me with a crappy 10 Gig maxtor drive that craps out at even the near mention of a faster than 33 Mhz speed, can't support UDMA/66 cables, is so slow I don't know how they labelled it as 5400 RPM, and temperature corrects itself enough to ruin various CD-Burns.
It's now sitting in a router with a small Linux install on it -- I just don't trust it to do anything else.:-(
Hey, that's why I said every single other. As in, excepting Norway, Canada beats all european countries for quality of living. IIRC, the last time I checked (could have been a couple of years ago) the charts went Norway, Japan, Canada. But that was a couple of years ago.
>There is no excuse for air-pollution, water-polution, encroaching upon wildlife, tearing down forests willy-nilly, heedlesly diverting natural waterways for irrigation, recklessly wasting our money on inefficient and limited energy supplies and all that other fucking crazy shit that goes on in the world today.
The moral approach to environmentalism (BTW: WTH is up with slashdot this week? I'm going to turn off all the science stories if all I'm going to get is whining environmentalists on my front page all the time).
The problem is, some of us have different morals. Some of us only care about making sure people are safe and happy. Some of us don't care about the feelings of trees, and some of us don't care all that much for wildlife, and a lot of us couldn't care less if we filled the entire arctic with nuclear waste if we get the next 10k years of power without brownouts. [A lot of us know that by the time that becomes a problem it'll be solved anyways]. Canada could use the money, anyways.
The only approach that will actually gel people together is the scientific approach, which is used far too little by people who preach environmentalism. Must be why I get those funny looks when I stare back blank faced after being asked to plant a tree to save the earth.
>Talking of healthcare, I think you'll find many European nations have it better than those in N. America. >And guess which country has the highest standard of living in the world? It's not the USA. It's not Canada. It's Norway.
Well, since you mentioned it, Canada has a higher living standard than _every single other_ european country.
And after being in smalltown UK, in my experience their healthcare system is just as poor as ours, sorry to say.
>>I am damn PROUD that we and the Canunks use the most enegery.. we do the most good for the world too.
>Does that include all those "freedom fighting incursions" that the US is so fond of?
I wouldn't know as Canada, in general, is very pessimistic about America's shiny new wars; although our PM appears to reluctantly support America (over time) with the wars, our measly couple of thousand troops don't really count as freedom fighters in the sense you're thinking of.
>I think alot of the world would rather get on with it than to take the help the US offers.
Agreed -- as a Canadian I think Canada should strive not to depend on the US, but the fact is it's difficult to build an economy by ignoring your neighbours.
>And this love afair Americans have that makes them think they single handedly won WW2 is just laughable.
I know! Canada was fighting the war YEARS before the US joined in! Maybe it's better we don't go around mentioning that right now though...
>Also your premis that your energy use directly relates to "good for the world" is just so...so....American....
Well, if by American you mean North American, maybe...
>It was recently noted that the planting of forests to be carbon sinks is actually detrimental for the first 10 years, as disturbing the soil to do the planting released 10 years worth of carbon dioxide into the air.
Not to mention pretty much useless in the long run, considering trees are known to represent far, far less than even 25% of the worlds CO2 to O2 conversion. Trees just don't give much "bang for the buck" when it comes to CO2 to O2 conversion. But they do look nice, and they certainly make a high-value ecological-bandwagon mascot.
>Dams are actually the major cause of flooding; many countries are ripping them out again. Harmful flooding is most easily avoided by not building in flood plains and by not building dams.
As the AC pointed out (with much vitriol), dams aren't so bad, and help much more than they hinder.
>Decreases in morbidity and mortality have mostly been due to low-tech improvements in public health, not medicine or vaccines. And the threat from many diseases is simply a consequence of high population densities brought about by technology.
High population densities brought about by technology? As a Canadian, I can tell you for sure a _high_ population density is NOT related to technology, unless there are still people who think Canadians live in igloos:-) Japan seems to be the aberration here, but I am more than willing to bet that their population is on the decrease right now, just like most all other technologically-enabled countries.
>We have more than enough food to feed everybody on earth--producing more isn't going to solve famine. The real problem is distribution, as well as the simple fact that with every improvement in productivity, population size increases and people move into more marginal areas.
With every technological improvement population size decreases. Look on your population map at countries with population rising, and those with population decreasing. The correlation is clear.
The other correlation that is clear is that disease and famine go away as technology increases. Only in counrties where there is little technology, or technology is purposely impeded is famine and disease the worst (parts of Africa and parts of the Middle East come to mind).
>But almost all of the serious problems our world is facing are not technological problems and they can't be solved with technology.
Again, I heartily disagree. One only has to correlate the statistics and one can see that countries with the most technology do the best overall.
>Furthermore, just because we have created the technology to do something and people can be convinced that they want it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
As with anything, without proper controls, technology just runs like chaos. For example, letting the space program run wild got the world plans for the "Space Wars" defence platform, but also got the world the ISS (in the end).
Okay, so it's using an extra 60 watts. Let assume your electricity rates are relatively high (8 cents per kWh) and calculate the cost per year to your company for your "abuse". We'll say that 16 hours a day the machine is unused.
60/1000 = 0.06% of a kWh. 0.06 * 8 = 0.48 cents per hour. 0.48 * 16 * 365 = $28.03 per year, per machine.
Me thinks if they can afford to pay you more than burger-flipping rations, they can afford that per employee.
>Invariably, when I visit vendor tech support pages looking for information, I am looking for some of the most obscure problems.
But hey, don't you want to know how to set a jumper? What a jumper is? Why you can't fit a slot 1 processor in a slot A socket? Why your computer doesn't turn on when the IDE cable is backwards? Why you need a 1.21 GW power supply to power a dual athlon board? Why 10 ns SDRAM doesn't run at 133 Mhz? Where they can get a flash for their Houston Technologies 486 so they can stick their 320 GB drive in it. Why the floppy light stays on all the time? etc, etc.
If I were the webmaster constantly getting complaints from people who actually don't understand the above (and therefore have no business doing what they're trying to do) I'd put flashing beacons on those links too...
>Technology won't solve flooding, disease, or famine, ever, because those are not technological problems.
They aren't?
I thought we were already on the path to solving these problems (although, as with anything, we haven't got the best solutions to any of them, _yet_).
Flooding -- Dams. Disease -- Vaccines. Famine -- GM Food and technology in agriculture.
>If they were, the orders of magnitude increases in productivity and safety we have achieved would keep those things from happening already. Instead, people just push the limits of population and risk to the same level. The only way to change that is to change behavior, not technology.
I strongly disagree. The only way to win is a proper use of technology. Population is not increasing in the most highly technological parts of the world. Therefore, foisting enough technology at these problems will not only help solve them, but also inadvertently solve any population problems that exist at the same time.
The solution to all problems that aren't social often seems to lie with technology. And even many social problems have been solved with technology.
Technology is a good thing. It's only that the very few abuses of it are so well known that people fear it.
- Huge advances in technology as the drowning, disease, salt, and famine problems are quickly worked on and finally solved.
- Unification of people as they struggle to work on these problems.
- Reduced war.
All this is, of course, assuming countries don't get grabby on the resources. I guess I'm just not a big believer that the world is about to end up as one big Mad Max movie.
I think you'll find, strangely enough, some Canadians like me saying they'd enjoy a little global warming (although not many!). If it were actually happening this quickly, it could have prevented this. (Yes, I've heard the suggestion that global warming is just a shift in weather patterns. Well, if it is such a misnomer, let's work on stopping people using it!)
>Think the Canadian government might have something to say about commercial shipping polluting one of the last (semi) pristine environments left on the planet?
Certainly not if tolling passage through the area solves the national debt, and if it can get the GST removed, you'll get an easy landslide of Canadian support.
You know the saying -- money talks, bullshit walks.
Wow, Australia almost passes Canada in anti-free-speech activity!
Ernst Zundel, an active user of hate-speech has for years shown up Canada for what a lack of free-speech we have by hosting it all outside this country.
I'd link to his site so you can all have a good laugh at what kind of a nutter he is, but I don't want special interest groups to suggest I'm promoting hate speech and have me carted off to jail.
IMHO, how can you possibly decide for yourself what is right and wrong thinking if you're never given the opportunity to see what's wrong?
The only difference is that in Canada all speech is limited like this, not just 'net speech.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I don't disagree at all that $10 is a lot of money in China. But since the software was developed in America, one has to gauge the profit margin on American prices, IMHO.
It ain't true censorship, in the freedom sense.
Private property and private, open ended, signed contracts mean that your option is simple: Phone up another ISP and ask them if they will let you receive all the spam you can eat.
You can then transfer your account. No doubt your old ISP will be satisfied that they don't need to pay a developer to add a disable feature (that won't be used by anyone except yourself and one or two other users) rather than get the measly amount most home users pay for internet (about $1-$2 margin per user per month). And your new ISP will be out of business within a year or two as the rest of the ISPs in the world implement filtering and the ones that don't lose users.
But wait! You still have the freedom to get the spam! Just buy a $700/month T1 for your house and again, you have all the spam you can eat.
I'll stick with $20/month internet and run SpamAssassin until my ISP implements filtering for me, because I've never had a false positive from SpamAssassin, ever, except for morons who send HTML-only mail, and I often can't read their crap anyways, and so I summarialy ignore/request ASCII anyways.
Now, if you're in an area with only one ISP, or a government controlled ISP, then I feel for you. But, IMHO, this isn't very common in most free countries (or at least in my corner of the world).
>It sell for $300, and the cost to produce it is $45.
It's unlikely it even costs that much to produce it.
IIRC, I've been told that legal copies of various MS products in China sell for between 10 - 20 USD, including Office and Windows.
So why no AGP based solutions? There should be far more than enough speed on a good 4x AGP slot to handle this. Of course, it would either entail some kind of video-card pass-through (messy and probably torally impossible) or simply your choice to have a server machine with 4 Gigs of cheap memory and a Trident 8900 videocard.
I think it's about time for this -- 128 MB and 256 MB sticks are dirt cheap... go up past 512 MB and you're creeping towards the double the price per MB mark.
>Linux and Mac machines simply don't have the applications that an Oil Drilling company needs.
This might surprise you, but that strikes me as unusual. From my (albeit limited) experience, much heavy machinery operates on DOS. (Oh, the pains of trying to network some vinyl making machines...)
I would have thought of all things, Oil Rigs would be using it too.
>It's incredibly common in the console industry to sell the hardware below cost and make up for it eventually in game sales and when the hardware drops in production cost.
Which is too bad, because during the height of the NES you could get a Chinese knock-off for a bargain, proving that consoles can easily be sold for more than their cost and still be very popular.
It's just that Sony, Nintendo, and MS have chosen to (foolishly) change their pricing strategies.
>And pirate everything else, no doubt.
Why not? In the case of the X-Box, it appears M$ would be better off if you could pirate the hardware.
>Sure it wasn't just RatShak corupting their own database? :-)
:-)
Beats me, but I do know their database is totally screwed up.
I ordered a couple of CDs from them two years ago. One arrived 1 1/2 year ago, the other I'm still waiting for... Probably a deleted line in their database.
>But somehow when I was in Hawaii, there were two Robert Thille's renting a car from the same car rental company the same day... Wierd.
Heh. For a couple of years I had to get Radio Shack to rewrite the info in their name database every time I made a purchase. There was another person with the EXACT same name (middle name included) who bought a lot of stuff there for a while, I guess.
And no, my name isn't particularly common. In my town my family name is the only one of it's spelling in the phone book!
I think you'll find it interesting.
I just searched for my own name (in quotes) on google, and found:
- A wildlife foundation under my name
- A gallery under my name
- A cricket player with my name
- A professor with my name
- A folk singer with my name
- Artists with my name
- About 14,000 other links with my name not related to me personally.
I already knew many companies operated under my last name, but didn't know so many used my full name!
So, how many of you are in danger of losing your names like this?
"Stay a while... stay FOREVER!"
"Get him my robots"
Help me... must not get bought out by lame-ass company and be folded out of existence...
You see, this is the problem.
:-(
For every person like you that likes Maxtor, there's people like me with a crappy 10 Gig maxtor drive that craps out at even the near mention of a faster than 33 Mhz speed, can't support UDMA/66 cables, is so slow I don't know how they labelled it as 5400 RPM, and temperature corrects itself enough to ruin various CD-Burns.
It's now sitting in a router with a small Linux install on it -- I just don't trust it to do anything else.
Hey, that's why I said every single other. As in, excepting Norway, Canada beats all european countries for quality of living.
IIRC, the last time I checked (could have been a couple of years ago) the charts went Norway, Japan, Canada. But that was a couple of years ago.
>Campaigns against general purpose PC's are the best way to control intellectual property
Not really...
>There is no excuse for air-pollution, water-polution, encroaching upon wildlife, tearing down forests willy-nilly, heedlesly diverting natural waterways for irrigation, recklessly wasting our money on inefficient and limited energy supplies and all that other fucking crazy shit that goes on in the world today.
The moral approach to environmentalism (BTW: WTH is up with slashdot this week? I'm going to turn off all the science stories if all I'm going to get is whining environmentalists on my front page all the time).
The problem is, some of us have different morals. Some of us only care about making sure people are safe and happy. Some of us don't care about the feelings of trees, and some of us don't care all that much for wildlife, and a lot of us couldn't care less if we filled the entire arctic with nuclear waste if we get the next 10k years of power without brownouts. [A lot of us know that by the time that becomes a problem it'll be solved anyways]. Canada could use the money, anyways.
The only approach that will actually gel people together is the scientific approach, which is used far too little by people who preach environmentalism. Must be why I get those funny looks when I stare back blank faced after being asked to plant a tree to save the earth.
>Talking of healthcare, I think you'll find many European nations have it better than those in N. America.
>And guess which country has the highest standard of living in the world? It's not the USA. It's not Canada. It's Norway.
Well, since you mentioned it, Canada has a higher living standard than _every single other_ european country.
And after being in smalltown UK, in my experience their healthcare system is just as poor as ours, sorry to say.
>>I am damn PROUD that we and the Canunks use the most enegery.. we do the most good for the world too.
>Does that include all those "freedom fighting incursions" that the US is so fond of?
I wouldn't know as Canada, in general, is very pessimistic about America's shiny new wars; although our PM appears to reluctantly support America (over time) with the wars, our measly couple of thousand troops don't really count as freedom fighters in the sense you're thinking of.
>I think alot of the world would rather get on with it than to take the help the US offers.
Agreed -- as a Canadian I think Canada should strive not to depend on the US, but the fact is it's difficult to build an economy by ignoring your neighbours.
>And this love afair Americans have that makes them think they single handedly won WW2 is just laughable.
I know! Canada was fighting the war YEARS before the US joined in! Maybe it's better we don't go around mentioning that right now though...
>Also your premis that your energy use directly relates to "good for the world" is just so...so....American....
Well, if by American you mean North American, maybe...
>It was recently noted that the planting of forests to be carbon sinks is actually detrimental for the first 10 years, as disturbing the soil to do the planting released 10 years worth of carbon dioxide into the air.
Not to mention pretty much useless in the long run, considering trees are known to represent far, far less than even 25% of the worlds CO2 to O2 conversion. Trees just don't give much "bang for the buck" when it comes to CO2 to O2 conversion. But they do look nice, and they certainly make a high-value ecological-bandwagon mascot.
>Dams are actually the major cause of flooding; many countries are ripping them out again. Harmful flooding is most easily avoided by not building in flood plains and by not building dams.
:-) Japan seems to be the aberration here, but I am more than willing to bet that their population is on the decrease right now, just like most all other technologically-enabled countries.
As the AC pointed out (with much vitriol), dams aren't so bad, and help much more than they hinder.
>Decreases in morbidity and mortality have mostly been due to low-tech improvements in public health, not medicine or vaccines. And the threat from many diseases is simply a consequence of high population densities brought about by technology.
High population densities brought about by technology? As a Canadian, I can tell you for sure a _high_ population density is NOT related to technology, unless there are still people who think Canadians live in igloos
>We have more than enough food to feed everybody on earth--producing more isn't going to solve famine. The real problem is distribution, as well as the simple fact that with every improvement in productivity, population size increases and people move into more marginal areas.
With every technological improvement population size decreases. Look on your population map at countries with population rising, and those with population decreasing. The correlation is clear.
The other correlation that is clear is that disease and famine go away as technology increases. Only in counrties where there is little technology, or technology is purposely impeded is famine and disease the worst (parts of Africa and parts of the Middle East come to mind).
>But almost all of the serious problems our world is facing are not technological problems and they can't be solved with technology.
Again, I heartily disagree. One only has to correlate the statistics and one can see that countries with the most technology do the best overall.
>Furthermore, just because we have created the technology to do something and people can be convinced that they want it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
As with anything, without proper controls, technology just runs like chaos. For example, letting the space program run wild got the world plans for the "Space Wars" defence platform, but also got the world the ISS (in the end).
Okay, so it's using an extra 60 watts. Let assume your electricity rates are relatively high (8 cents per kWh) and calculate the cost per year to your company for your "abuse". We'll say that 16 hours a day the machine is unused.
60/1000 = 0.06% of a kWh.
0.06 * 8 = 0.48 cents per hour.
0.48 * 16 * 365 = $28.03 per year, per machine.
Me thinks if they can afford to pay you more than burger-flipping rations, they can afford that per employee.
Just my 2 cents...
>Invariably, when I visit vendor tech support pages looking for information, I am looking for some of the most obscure problems.
But hey, don't you want to know how to set a jumper? What a jumper is? Why you can't fit a slot 1 processor in a slot A socket? Why your computer doesn't turn on when the IDE cable is backwards? Why you need a 1.21 GW power supply to power a dual athlon board? Why 10 ns SDRAM doesn't run at 133 Mhz? Where they can get a flash for their Houston Technologies 486 so they can stick their 320 GB drive in it. Why the floppy light stays on all the time? etc, etc.
If I were the webmaster constantly getting complaints from people who actually don't understand the above (and therefore have no business doing what they're trying to do) I'd put flashing beacons on those links too...
>Technology won't solve flooding, disease, or famine, ever, because those are not technological problems.
They aren't?
I thought we were already on the path to solving these problems (although, as with anything, we haven't got the best solutions to any of them, _yet_).
Flooding -- Dams.
Disease -- Vaccines.
Famine -- GM Food and technology in agriculture.
>If they were, the orders of magnitude increases in productivity and safety we have achieved would keep those things from happening already. Instead, people just push the limits of population and risk to the same level. The only way to change that is to change behavior, not technology.
I strongly disagree. The only way to win is a proper use of technology. Population is not increasing in the most highly technological parts of the world. Therefore, foisting enough technology at these problems will not only help solve them, but also inadvertently solve any population problems that exist at the same time.
The solution to all problems that aren't social often seems to lie with technology. And even many social problems have been solved with technology.
Technology is a good thing. It's only that the very few abuses of it are so well known that people fear it.
- Huge advances in technology as the drowning, disease, salt, and famine problems are quickly worked on and finally solved.
- Unification of people as they struggle to work on these problems.
- Reduced war.
All this is, of course, assuming countries don't get grabby on the resources. I guess I'm just not a big believer that the world is about to end up as one big Mad Max movie.
I think you'll find, strangely enough, some Canadians like me saying they'd enjoy a little global warming (although not many!). If it were actually happening this quickly, it could have prevented this. (Yes, I've heard the suggestion that global warming is just a shift in weather patterns. Well, if it is such a misnomer, let's work on stopping people using it!)
>Think the Canadian government might have something to say about commercial shipping polluting one of the last (semi) pristine environments left on the planet?
Certainly not if tolling passage through the area solves the national debt, and if it can get the GST removed, you'll get an easy landslide of Canadian support.
You know the saying -- money talks, bullshit walks.
Wow, Australia almost passes Canada in anti-free-speech activity!
Ernst Zundel, an active user of hate-speech has for years shown up Canada for what a lack of free-speech we have by hosting it all outside this country.
I'd link to his site so you can all have a good laugh at what kind of a nutter he is, but I don't want special interest groups to suggest I'm promoting hate speech and have me carted off to jail.
IMHO, how can you possibly decide for yourself what is right and wrong thinking if you're never given the opportunity to see what's wrong?
The only difference is that in Canada all speech is limited like this, not just 'net speech.