... is to tie up as many open source people under non-compete agreements as they (MSFT) can. Not only can they (open source people) not contribute while working for Microsoft, they can't contribute thereafter, either. And that's for contributions to either OSS or Google (kill two birds with one hire).
Doesn't necessarily need to be just one domain. There could be many domains being handled by one server (or a cluster of servers). All the well known mail servers handle them just fine.
What if someone were to come up with a way to trivially factor the product of two very large primes? This would pretty much ruin RSA. What would be a responsible level of disclosure for something like that? How long until a public announcement without the method? How long until a public announcement with the method? How do you ensure someone doesn't try to snuff you to be sure the method never gets out?
... this week, there was a sudden tripling in the number of downloads of the popular Firefox web browser. Also, adult web site webmaster are reporting that Firefox has become almost the exclusive browser of choice by patrons of their services. Downloads of Firefox are also reportedly being done by gangs and organized criminal syndicates.
I'm forced to make assumptions about the document. Those assumptions are going to be coming from what other people say, after the presumably read it. Unfortunately, I won't be able to tell whether they did or not. Still, it does appear to be mostly negative from those who discuss enough particulars to indicate that they know what it covers. Keep in mind I weigh the judgement of a techie far above the judgement of a business manager (e.g. PHB) type, because the former are almost always right, and the latter are almost always wrong, when it comes to anything about computers. FYI, I know there are exceptions in both groups; I've met some.
As for judging the document on the past of the organization, I cannot agree. The scope of a standard for a cable and the scope of a standard for a data center are worlds apart. The CAT 5 standard is more about manufacturing something that essentially needs to be substitutable from any vendor. I've designed 4 data centers, and none of them were anywhere like any of the others. I didn't touch the cooling system designs on any, but I did the electrical power parts on 2 of them and there I did find a very reasonable document called the National Electrical Code, which at over 700 pages is a much more substantial document than anything you can put in 148 pages. And yet the network and computer configurations were far more complex aspects of the data center design than the electrical power was (though the latter could easily kill since the voltage coming in was 480 volts in one case and 600 volts in the other, both three phase).
So I ask, what the hell can a mere 148 pages cover that would be worthwhile to me?
One big problem is lots of groups do publish lots of documents on how to do things, charge lots of money for them, and they really are worthless for actually doing anything other than giving a PHB a warm and fuzzy feeling that in the end wasn't warranted. Multiply $250 times all the different documents being peddled, and that's a lot of money wasted.
If this document is an exception, and is well worth the money, then I think those who are producing it need to take steps to make their document stand above the noise. They need to convince me theirs is worth it. And I won't fall for the argument that $250 is not too much to just check it out, because that argument would also have to be applied for so many others, too. Since I already know from experience that most documents are worthless, I need something more than just an announcement to warrant spending the $250 for it, especially when other geeks are mostly shouting it down.
As for CAT 5 (and what preceeded it), yeah, I really would have designed it differently than it was designed. But, since the design wasn't going to change, I simply dealt with the mess and moved on. FYI, what I would have made different was the pinouts... which would have needed to be done before CAT 5, anyway.
The $250 is well above the cost of reproduction, so they are obviously trying to recoup costs of something. Could that be the research done to develop this document? Given some description of its applicability (e.g. it's a PHB checklist) I would tend to think a lot of money was wasted ($250 minus about $30 to reproduce and ship times the tens of thousands of copies they would likely sell) to create this. I suspect it's more likely intended to be a revenue generator... and will end up making life more miserable for techies who know what to do (but now have to do more needless paperwork because their PHB bought one of these).
$250 is also excessive to expect to get independent reviews of whether this document is worthwhile. If my PHB brings it up, I want to be able to say it's worthless (if it happens to be) with some foundation for that statement. But without independent review, or being able to review it ahead of time myself, I won't really know. Normally I'm open minded on these things, but for now I'll have to default to it being a worthless document.
DVI was nowhere near the quality and cost effectiveness that is possible. HDMI only gets a notch closer, but is still far away. Both have distance limitations and involve complex cabling that limits what can be done with it (such as multi-source switching). Something based on 75-ohm coax, such as the standard used by the broadcast industry (SDI and HD-SDI) could have DRM added and meets a much wider range of needs.
What I am looking for is a way to carry video all over a new house I will be building in a few years. It turns out DVI and HDMI simple cannot run these distances. And besides that, the cabling itself is very expensive.
The traditional analog way to run video is over a 75 ohm coaxial cable, either as a baseband composite video with 2 separate audio cables, or as baseband component video (3 cables for Y, Pr, and Pb channels), or as modulated carriers suitable for cable or over-the-air (OTA) tuners. But the big question is how to advance home video distribution to the digital age. DVI and HDMI simply can't do it. I doubt DisplayPort will be able to do so, either for similar reasons. What could workd is the SDI (Serial Data Interface) and related HD upgrades used by the broadcast industry. The cabling for SDI is simple high grade 75-ohm coax and could even run a kilometer or more. The catch is that SDI is not cheap, despite the fact that technologically, it isn't really any more difficult to do than other digital technologies (it just isn't widely deployed to bring down costs). SDI also does not include any content protection methods (some would say this is a good thing).
This tendency for manufacturers to keep making all new types of connectors, and cables, and pinouts, for each new type of interfacing (USB and Firewire are other examples in a different context) just seems silly. Whatever needs to be sent or exchanged needs to simply be defined in terms of using a data bit stream, which can then be sent or exchanged over any of a number of types of physical interfaces. Follow that up with some simple high speed serial hardware interfaces (a metallic one over twisted pair, another matallic one over coax, and a fiber optic one). Done right, one type of simple and common cabling and connectors can do things from keyboards to video displays to hard drives, and even do so over a few kilometers of distance for point-to-point connections.
The article was light on the details of why the hams are opposed to this, except for the issue of whether or not it will interfere with their signals. If the BPL companies are offering to NOT interfere with the signal, why is there still opposition?
The BPL companies have been saying all along that it will not interfere with ham radio and other HF signals. But in fact in every test conducted in public, there has been substantial interference on the ham bands, shortwave bands, and even some military frequencies. Basically it comes down to spin doctoring (a form of lying) that corporations do. It's hard to tell, now, which players are the liars, and which players are being suckered in by the lies. Clearly the makers of the BPL equipment are among the liars. The news media is most likely among those who are suckered in. Some power companies may be on either end.
Some BPL designs have been improving. BPL is based on frequency division multiplexing, so it is possible to be selective about the frequencies used. But it also comes at a cost of capacity which is reduced each time a frequency is removed. But it is not as simple as just not picking frequencies in the ham bands because they aren't doing that anyway. The problem is intermodulation products, extended sidebands, and "leftover hash" from the digital modulation process (done in DSP).
Additionally, BPL is vulnerable to overload from the ham signals themselves (which are generally clean narrow band signals) that can overload the demodulators unless they have good notch filters to block all the ham bands.
BPL is poised to fail. It will have a lot more technical problems in delivery due to its higher exposure to noise (lacking shielding) and reduced capacity. It will also require particularly trained service technicians due to the work being attached to high voltage power lines (240 volts in the home drop, and 7 kV to 20 kV on the primary distribution lines), raising the costs to deal with it.
And BPL cannot increase its bandwidth to catch up to the increases the other media can do. Cable companies can increase the number of channels for data transmission, and telephone companies are even starting to deploy fiber. What can BPL do to keep up? It would need new and higher frequencies, treading into the ranges used by TV, FM, aircraft, public service two-way radio, and even cellular. And the higher they go, the less effective the power lines are at carrying the signals.
Power companies are just wanting to play the "me too" game with information services. They could do this very effectively if they would install fiber optic cable along their existing right of ways. But apparently they don't have the vision to be leaders in these services, and thus will always be the followers instead, with the lower bandwidth and lower quality of service.
There is also the national security risk involved in having power companies spending money developing and deploying a hopeless infrastructure for communications, while neglecting needed improvements to actual power transmission reliability and security. Every dollar spent on BPL is a dollar NOT spent on increased generation capacity or increased transmission capacity. This should be treated as a national security issue (including the issue of having emergency long range communication capability on the HF bands).
The previous reply does cover the reasons well. But despite that, I have in fact gotten spam that was relayed from a major ISP customer machine through the ISP mail servers. So either some zombies are doing this, or the customer is a spammer. But a very distinct possibility (I haven't seen it yet... I do check my logs for this) is that a zombie would detect being blocked via the direct SMTP connection, and fallback to inserting the spam via the ISP mail server. Lots of networks are isolating end-customer addresses (whether they are real mail servers or not) and refusing email from them. I do that on the basis of the ISP's reverse DNS name strategy (so in my case, I don't refuse email from a customer with valid reverse DNS not in the ISP's customer naming strategy).
Many ISPs do block port 25. But the big telco/cable ones don't and that seems to be where most of the spam is coming through these days. The smaller ISPs (more numerous) seem to be doing "the right thing" in a greater percentage.
Because of this threat, I will now refuse to use free FEDEX boxes to build my own furniture, computer cases, awnings, windshield sun reflectors, etc. So I guess FEDEX will lose my... uh... oh wait!
If the telcos want to stop offering a "telecommunication service" the last mile to the home and offer an "information service" instead, then they would have less of a basis for fighting against someone else coming along and offering a "telecommunications service", such as Lafayette, Louisiana. The city has a stronger defense when they are building something that isn't being offered by some company. So in a way, I see this as a good thing. The telcos are tying their own noose.
You are comparing a sender pays system (postal service) to a mostly receipient pays system (email). Such an analogy breaks down over this fundamental difference.
Imagine a postal service in which the sender can send all he wants, and it is the recipient that must pay for it, even if he does not want it, either through direct charges to the recipient, or through taxes if this is a government postal system. To mass marketers, this would be the ideal dream (especially if it also included the cost of printing and stuffing envelopes). Your mailbox would be stuff full every day with great offers from thousands of companies that are sure you will want this (which in reality only a few people do). Because you would be paying for it, not the mass marketer, they have no incentive to limit sending to just those people that really do want it. So you end up having to pay for hundreds of pieces of mail you don't want, and have to spend the time sifting through it all to find what mail you really do want.
As long as there is some means for the marketers to get their message out, they do have free speech. Web ads, TV ads, newspaper ads, radio ads, and those ugly billboards along the roadways, are all valid means of free speech. And so is printing up your message and hiring people to walk around stuffing them in door frames and under windshield wipers (to the extent this does not cause any damage or involves tresspassing).
Email is simply not a medium for free speech, unless the recipient specifically wants (to pay for) it.
Does your right to free speech supercede my property rights? Is your right to free speech so vital and so dominant that I can be forced by you, without even due process, to pay for the material and service needs to carry out your free speech? I think not.
Do you have a right to steal my printing press and paper stocks so you can print your important free speech message (even if it is the kind of political message really envisioned by the founders of the US Constitution)? I think not.
Do you have a right to make use of my email server without paying for the service?
To most email marketers, email is simply a cheaper way to send a message than any previously before. Part of the reason it is cheaper has nothing to do with the efficiency of email; it is because email is more of a receiver pays than it is a sender pays system. There is some cost for both sender and receiver, but the costs for receiver are actually larger considering the processes involved in not only actually receiving the email, but also storing it for longer periods of time until the human comes around to read it, and all the steps needed to access that mail.
What mass-emailing is doing is shifting the costs to the recipient. If the mail is something the recipient actually wants, no one sees a problem with that. But if the mail is not wanted, but still has to be paid for (by someone) anyway, this is a problem. And it's a problem that email marketers (and sadly, too many politicians) are ignoring.
Using an ISP costs some money. Even if they don't charge you per message, you are still paying for the cost of spam because the fixed costs to you include the cost of scaling up mail servers and the support around them. This also means ISP money that isn't spent on better services to you. Having to hire extra people to help clean up the mess on extra mail servers means not hiring people to provide more support. And that spam is using up some of the trunk bandwidth everyone must share, so your web views and file downloads are slower.
You may be tempted to think a "sender pays" system would fix this. Skip that thought because it won't. The procedures, security, and costs involved to make that work would be even greater than the cost of spam itself.
The best and only real solution is "sender gets permission to send".
The fix is simple enough. Just require (this will need a new law to make it work) that the company that wishes to enforce such an agreement pay the person involved the salary they are offered at their new job. Of course there also needs to be a time limit to this charade; one year seems to be close to consensus.
He's just trying to explain to you why you're wrong, and how much better things will be when your machine is fully available to people who know better than you how to take full advantage of its capabilities.
You mean like the people that have taken over millions of zombie computers to inform me that I should mortgage my house so I can buy pills to make certain body parts grow larger?
When you click on a link to a commercial site, your browser will download code that automatically fills in all the credit-card and address information for you, sends it back.
So my house will be mortgaged and I will get my pills without even having to click on anything. I see now.
How many businesses have been harmed by SCO's miSCOnduct in the courts that diSCOuraged many potential customers from buying Linux based solutions? How many lawsuits could these businesses file to try to recover losses from this fiaSCO? What other smoking guns would these new suits diSCOver?
I, for one, would just like to be the one to eSCOrt Darl and the other SCOundrels and SCOfflaws to jail. But I'll just have to work, like everyone else, to just recover the SCOrched Linux landscape.
Tax filing needs a document format standard based on XML, not government developed software. The government should establish what that standard is, specifying all the fields needed. They should then have their own in-house validation software that checks submissions for compliance and errors. But there is no need for the government to create the actual software users might run to create those filing documents. At least here in the USA, there are lots of private tax preparation programs available on the market. Just publish the standard form and let the market... and the FOSS community... build the software.
The biggest issue I currently see in the USA is that to file taxes electronically, one has to pay a corporation to do so. What we need is direct electronic tax filing. I still file my taxes on paper as a protest against the government forcing people to pay a few dollars and give away private information to some corporation. I'd rather pay the US Postal Service the 37 cents and keep the information private.
Many web sites have a double charge / multi charge mechanism. It's more likely due to stupidity on the part of the designer. If the final click to submit gets no response, people often back up and click again. In many cases you have to because the submission never got there. In other cases, it got there but you never got the response. The second click submission now enters a whole new transaction, double charging your credit card or whatever payment method. It's easy to prevent this in the web programming design, but too many people are too stupid at web programming to figure out this simple logic. Or maybe it really is an intentional way to get some extra money out of some people and have an excuse for the few that try to follow up on it.
It was over 2 decades ago, but the New York Times did this to me. The situation was somewhat different. They were to deliver the papers and then I pay every month as invoiced. Trouble was, I wasn't getting all the papers. I called and complained and nothing got better. Finally, one week with a missed paper every single day, I called once more and told them to cancel. Over the next month I got only 8 papers delivered. So I didn't pay the bill. They continued this for another month and added to the bill as past due, and then finally stopped delivering altogether. After a couple more months, I got some collection letters from the paper, then later started to get some collection letters from a collection agency. At that point I moved out of state, but still got the letters because I forwarded my mail (I've since learned not to have the Post Office do that). Eventually the letters just stopped. About 6 months later I got a billing statement with a line item deleting all my debt citing "written off", and showing a balance of zero. A month after that I got another billing statement showing a months worth of billing for a subscription that was renewed. But I no longer lived in New Jersey (I was then in Ohio), so how could I have been getting the papers, or know if they were really delivering. But I just ignored it as the billing accumulated for 2 more months and it all finally just stopped.
If you have real debt and/or collections issues, be sure to visit Bud Hibbs' web site
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... is to tie up as many open source people under non-compete agreements as they (MSFT) can. Not only can they (open source people) not contribute while working for Microsoft, they can't contribute thereafter, either. And that's for contributions to either OSS or Google (kill two birds with one hire).
Doesn't necessarily need to be just one domain. There could be many domains being handled by one server (or a cluster of servers). All the well known mail servers handle them just fine.
What if someone were to come up with a way to trivially factor the product of two very large primes? This would pretty much ruin RSA. What would be a responsible level of disclosure for something like that? How long until a public announcement without the method? How long until a public announcement with the method? How do you ensure someone doesn't try to snuff you to be sure the method never gets out?
... this week, there was a sudden tripling in the number of downloads of the popular Firefox web browser. Also, adult web site webmaster are reporting that Firefox has become almost the exclusive browser of choice by patrons of their services. Downloads of Firefox are also reportedly being done by gangs and organized criminal syndicates.
You've got it mixed up.
I'm forced to make assumptions about the document. Those assumptions are going to be coming from what other people say, after the presumably read it. Unfortunately, I won't be able to tell whether they did or not. Still, it does appear to be mostly negative from those who discuss enough particulars to indicate that they know what it covers. Keep in mind I weigh the judgement of a techie far above the judgement of a business manager (e.g. PHB) type, because the former are almost always right, and the latter are almost always wrong, when it comes to anything about computers. FYI, I know there are exceptions in both groups; I've met some.
As for judging the document on the past of the organization, I cannot agree. The scope of a standard for a cable and the scope of a standard for a data center are worlds apart. The CAT 5 standard is more about manufacturing something that essentially needs to be substitutable from any vendor. I've designed 4 data centers, and none of them were anywhere like any of the others. I didn't touch the cooling system designs on any, but I did the electrical power parts on 2 of them and there I did find a very reasonable document called the National Electrical Code, which at over 700 pages is a much more substantial document than anything you can put in 148 pages. And yet the network and computer configurations were far more complex aspects of the data center design than the electrical power was (though the latter could easily kill since the voltage coming in was 480 volts in one case and 600 volts in the other, both three phase).
So I ask, what the hell can a mere 148 pages cover that would be worthwhile to me?
One big problem is lots of groups do publish lots of documents on how to do things, charge lots of money for them, and they really are worthless for actually doing anything other than giving a PHB a warm and fuzzy feeling that in the end wasn't warranted. Multiply $250 times all the different documents being peddled, and that's a lot of money wasted.
If this document is an exception, and is well worth the money, then I think those who are producing it need to take steps to make their document stand above the noise. They need to convince me theirs is worth it. And I won't fall for the argument that $250 is not too much to just check it out, because that argument would also have to be applied for so many others, too. Since I already know from experience that most documents are worthless, I need something more than just an announcement to warrant spending the $250 for it, especially when other geeks are mostly shouting it down.
As for CAT 5 (and what preceeded it), yeah, I really would have designed it differently than it was designed. But, since the design wasn't going to change, I simply dealt with the mess and moved on. FYI, what I would have made different was the pinouts ... which would have needed to be done before CAT 5, anyway.
Even better!
You forgot:
0) Come up with an obvious idea.
The $250 is well above the cost of reproduction, so they are obviously trying to recoup costs of something. Could that be the research done to develop this document? Given some description of its applicability (e.g. it's a PHB checklist) I would tend to think a lot of money was wasted ($250 minus about $30 to reproduce and ship times the tens of thousands of copies they would likely sell) to create this. I suspect it's more likely intended to be a revenue generator ... and will end up making life more miserable for techies who know what to do (but now have to do more needless paperwork because their PHB bought one of these).
$250 is also excessive to expect to get independent reviews of whether this document is worthwhile. If my PHB brings it up, I want to be able to say it's worthless (if it happens to be) with some foundation for that statement. But without independent review, or being able to review it ahead of time myself, I won't really know. Normally I'm open minded on these things, but for now I'll have to default to it being a worthless document.
Now days, that should be 'PTFM'.
DVI was nowhere near the quality and cost effectiveness that is possible. HDMI only gets a notch closer, but is still far away. Both have distance limitations and involve complex cabling that limits what can be done with it (such as multi-source switching). Something based on 75-ohm coax, such as the standard used by the broadcast industry (SDI and HD-SDI) could have DRM added and meets a much wider range of needs.
What I am looking for is a way to carry video all over a new house I will be building in a few years. It turns out DVI and HDMI simple cannot run these distances. And besides that, the cabling itself is very expensive.
The traditional analog way to run video is over a 75 ohm coaxial cable, either as a baseband composite video with 2 separate audio cables, or as baseband component video (3 cables for Y, Pr, and Pb channels), or as modulated carriers suitable for cable or over-the-air (OTA) tuners. But the big question is how to advance home video distribution to the digital age. DVI and HDMI simply can't do it. I doubt DisplayPort will be able to do so, either for similar reasons. What could workd is the SDI (Serial Data Interface) and related HD upgrades used by the broadcast industry. The cabling for SDI is simple high grade 75-ohm coax and could even run a kilometer or more. The catch is that SDI is not cheap, despite the fact that technologically, it isn't really any more difficult to do than other digital technologies (it just isn't widely deployed to bring down costs). SDI also does not include any content protection methods (some would say this is a good thing).
This tendency for manufacturers to keep making all new types of connectors, and cables, and pinouts, for each new type of interfacing (USB and Firewire are other examples in a different context) just seems silly. Whatever needs to be sent or exchanged needs to simply be defined in terms of using a data bit stream, which can then be sent or exchanged over any of a number of types of physical interfaces. Follow that up with some simple high speed serial hardware interfaces (a metallic one over twisted pair, another matallic one over coax, and a fiber optic one). Done right, one type of simple and common cabling and connectors can do things from keyboards to video displays to hard drives, and even do so over a few kilometers of distance for point-to-point connections.
The BPL companies have been saying all along that it will not interfere with ham radio and other HF signals. But in fact in every test conducted in public, there has been substantial interference on the ham bands, shortwave bands, and even some military frequencies. Basically it comes down to spin doctoring (a form of lying) that corporations do. It's hard to tell, now, which players are the liars, and which players are being suckered in by the lies. Clearly the makers of the BPL equipment are among the liars. The news media is most likely among those who are suckered in. Some power companies may be on either end.
Some BPL designs have been improving. BPL is based on frequency division multiplexing, so it is possible to be selective about the frequencies used. But it also comes at a cost of capacity which is reduced each time a frequency is removed. But it is not as simple as just not picking frequencies in the ham bands because they aren't doing that anyway. The problem is intermodulation products, extended sidebands, and "leftover hash" from the digital modulation process (done in DSP).
Additionally, BPL is vulnerable to overload from the ham signals themselves (which are generally clean narrow band signals) that can overload the demodulators unless they have good notch filters to block all the ham bands.
BPL is poised to fail. It will have a lot more technical problems in delivery due to its higher exposure to noise (lacking shielding) and reduced capacity. It will also require particularly trained service technicians due to the work being attached to high voltage power lines (240 volts in the home drop, and 7 kV to 20 kV on the primary distribution lines), raising the costs to deal with it.
And BPL cannot increase its bandwidth to catch up to the increases the other media can do. Cable companies can increase the number of channels for data transmission, and telephone companies are even starting to deploy fiber. What can BPL do to keep up? It would need new and higher frequencies, treading into the ranges used by TV, FM, aircraft, public service two-way radio, and even cellular. And the higher they go, the less effective the power lines are at carrying the signals.
Power companies are just wanting to play the "me too" game with information services. They could do this very effectively if they would install fiber optic cable along their existing right of ways. But apparently they don't have the vision to be leaders in these services, and thus will always be the followers instead, with the lower bandwidth and lower quality of service.
There is also the national security risk involved in having power companies spending money developing and deploying a hopeless infrastructure for communications, while neglecting needed improvements to actual power transmission reliability and security. Every dollar spent on BPL is a dollar NOT spent on increased generation capacity or increased transmission capacity. This should be treated as a national security issue (including the issue of having emergency long range communication capability on the HF bands).
The previous reply does cover the reasons well. But despite that, I have in fact gotten spam that was relayed from a major ISP customer machine through the ISP mail servers. So either some zombies are doing this, or the customer is a spammer. But a very distinct possibility (I haven't seen it yet ... I do check my logs for this) is that a zombie would detect being blocked via the direct SMTP connection, and fallback to inserting the spam via the ISP mail server. Lots of networks are isolating end-customer addresses (whether they are real mail servers or not) and refusing email from them. I do that on the basis of the ISP's reverse DNS name strategy (so in my case, I don't refuse email from a customer with valid reverse DNS not in the ISP's customer naming strategy).
Many ISPs do block port 25. But the big telco/cable ones don't and that seems to be where most of the spam is coming through these days. The smaller ISPs (more numerous) seem to be doing "the right thing" in a greater percentage.
Because of this threat, I will now refuse to use free FEDEX boxes to build my own furniture, computer cases, awnings, windshield sun reflectors, etc. So I guess FEDEX will lose my ... uh ... oh wait!
If the telcos want to stop offering a "telecommunication service" the last mile to the home and offer an "information service" instead, then they would have less of a basis for fighting against someone else coming along and offering a "telecommunications service", such as Lafayette, Louisiana. The city has a stronger defense when they are building something that isn't being offered by some company. So in a way, I see this as a good thing. The telcos are tying their own noose.
You are comparing a sender pays system (postal service) to a mostly receipient pays system (email). Such an analogy breaks down over this fundamental difference.
Imagine a postal service in which the sender can send all he wants, and it is the recipient that must pay for it, even if he does not want it, either through direct charges to the recipient, or through taxes if this is a government postal system. To mass marketers, this would be the ideal dream (especially if it also included the cost of printing and stuffing envelopes). Your mailbox would be stuff full every day with great offers from thousands of companies that are sure you will want this (which in reality only a few people do). Because you would be paying for it, not the mass marketer, they have no incentive to limit sending to just those people that really do want it. So you end up having to pay for hundreds of pieces of mail you don't want, and have to spend the time sifting through it all to find what mail you really do want.
As long as there is some means for the marketers to get their message out, they do have free speech. Web ads, TV ads, newspaper ads, radio ads, and those ugly billboards along the roadways, are all valid means of free speech. And so is printing up your message and hiring people to walk around stuffing them in door frames and under windshield wipers (to the extent this does not cause any damage or involves tresspassing).
Email is simply not a medium for free speech, unless the recipient specifically wants (to pay for) it.
Does your right to free speech supercede my property rights? Is your right to free speech so vital and so dominant that I can be forced by you, without even due process, to pay for the material and service needs to carry out your free speech? I think not.
Do you have a right to steal my printing press and paper stocks so you can print your important free speech message (even if it is the kind of political message really envisioned by the founders of the US Constitution)? I think not.
Do you have a right to make use of my email server without paying for the service?
To most email marketers, email is simply a cheaper way to send a message than any previously before. Part of the reason it is cheaper has nothing to do with the efficiency of email; it is because email is more of a receiver pays than it is a sender pays system. There is some cost for both sender and receiver, but the costs for receiver are actually larger considering the processes involved in not only actually receiving the email, but also storing it for longer periods of time until the human comes around to read it, and all the steps needed to access that mail.
What mass-emailing is doing is shifting the costs to the recipient. If the mail is something the recipient actually wants, no one sees a problem with that. But if the mail is not wanted, but still has to be paid for (by someone) anyway, this is a problem. And it's a problem that email marketers (and sadly, too many politicians) are ignoring.
Using an ISP costs some money. Even if they don't charge you per message, you are still paying for the cost of spam because the fixed costs to you include the cost of scaling up mail servers and the support around them. This also means ISP money that isn't spent on better services to you. Having to hire extra people to help clean up the mess on extra mail servers means not hiring people to provide more support. And that spam is using up some of the trunk bandwidth everyone must share, so your web views and file downloads are slower.
You may be tempted to think a "sender pays" system would fix this. Skip that thought because it won't. The procedures, security, and costs involved to make that work would be even greater than the cost of spam itself.
The best and only real solution is "sender gets permission to send".
The fix is simple enough. Just require (this will need a new law to make it work) that the company that wishes to enforce such an agreement pay the person involved the salary they are offered at their new job. Of course there also needs to be a time limit to this charade; one year seems to be close to consensus.
You mean like the people that have taken over millions of zombie computers to inform me that I should mortgage my house so I can buy pills to make certain body parts grow larger?
So my house will be mortgaged and I will get my pills without even having to click on anything. I see now.
And in other news, Internet marketers are worried that people don't seem to like the marketing efforts being made towards them.
How many businesses have been harmed by SCO's miSCOnduct in the courts that diSCOuraged many potential customers from buying Linux based solutions? How many lawsuits could these businesses file to try to recover losses from this fiaSCO? What other smoking guns would these new suits diSCOver?
I, for one, would just like to be the one to eSCOrt Darl and the other SCOundrels and SCOfflaws to jail. But I'll just have to work, like everyone else, to just recover the SCOrched Linux landscape.
Tax filing needs a document format standard based on XML, not government developed software. The government should establish what that standard is, specifying all the fields needed. They should then have their own in-house validation software that checks submissions for compliance and errors. But there is no need for the government to create the actual software users might run to create those filing documents. At least here in the USA, there are lots of private tax preparation programs available on the market. Just publish the standard form and let the market ... and the FOSS community ... build the software.
The biggest issue I currently see in the USA is that to file taxes electronically, one has to pay a corporation to do so. What we need is direct electronic tax filing. I still file my taxes on paper as a protest against the government forcing people to pay a few dollars and give away private information to some corporation. I'd rather pay the US Postal Service the 37 cents and keep the information private.
And Slashdot won't let me double submit that comment. I guess it is "Better Design By Real Geeks".
Many web sites have a double charge / multi charge mechanism. It's more likely due to stupidity on the part of the designer. If the final click to submit gets no response, people often back up and click again. In many cases you have to because the submission never got there. In other cases, it got there but you never got the response. The second click submission now enters a whole new transaction, double charging your credit card or whatever payment method. It's easy to prevent this in the web programming design, but too many people are too stupid at web programming to figure out this simple logic. Or maybe it really is an intentional way to get some extra money out of some people and have an excuse for the few that try to follow up on it.
It was over 2 decades ago, but the New York Times did this to me. The situation was somewhat different. They were to deliver the papers and then I pay every month as invoiced. Trouble was, I wasn't getting all the papers. I called and complained and nothing got better. Finally, one week with a missed paper every single day, I called once more and told them to cancel. Over the next month I got only 8 papers delivered. So I didn't pay the bill. They continued this for another month and added to the bill as past due, and then finally stopped delivering altogether. After a couple more months, I got some collection letters from the paper, then later started to get some collection letters from a collection agency. At that point I moved out of state, but still got the letters because I forwarded my mail (I've since learned not to have the Post Office do that). Eventually the letters just stopped. About 6 months later I got a billing statement with a line item deleting all my debt citing "written off", and showing a balance of zero. A month after that I got another billing statement showing a months worth of billing for a subscription that was renewed. But I no longer lived in New Jersey (I was then in Ohio), so how could I have been getting the papers, or know if they were really delivering. But I just ignored it as the billing accumulated for 2 more months and it all finally just stopped.
If you have real debt and/or collections issues, be sure to visit Bud Hibbs' web site