The cinema market may be booming but what about the VHS/DVD market? This is where the piracy is the worst,
While I enjoy the free piracy of movies on the net, I don't pretend that I have a moral rigth to pirate it. I am just a greedy swine that like to get stuff for free.
This guy makes a good point. While the Slashdot community may treat copy protection and anti-piracy legislation with righteous indignation, I think people ignore the fact that the majority of the public are greedy swine.
Legislation and copy protection may not work in principle, but they work in practice because these greedy swine still have a limited sense of morality. Every act of piracy has a cost-benefit tradeoff, with factors such as "is it legal", "does everyone else do it", "is it over-priced", etc.
I know a few people who are anti-copyright advocates who do spend a fair amount of money on DVDs while pirating them at the same time (basically, this way they get to choose their own price). However, these people seem to believe that the whole world shares their perverted morality (or would do if they only had the chance).
I personally don't steal movies or music. But I would do so if it was easy and convenient and there was no chance of being caught. As it is, I make enough money that the risk outweighs the savings. But certainly I pirated stuff as a kid, and I'd do it again if I didn't have an overabundance of money. The self-serving attitude of some slashdotters towards copyright gets on my nerves after a while.
"Canada: it's not just aboot doughnuts anymore, eh?"
You know what's funnier than a Canadian saying about? An American trying to emulate the sound of American saying about.
Honestly, there's a specific sound that Canadians are able to distinguish that Americans can't. It sounds a bit like the word "oat". That is what Eastern Canadians say when they say out. On the other hand, Americans use a diphtong "ow" sound which, frankly, sounds to me like an expression of pain. It sticks out like a sore thumb, or a Bostoner saying the word "car".
I find it typical of American ethnocentrism to assume that Canadians speak funny, when it is in fact Americans who hear funny.
But since you asked, I think yes. People bought record players before you could copy music. People still bought Nintendos before you could pirate video games.
...is that they have the wrong business model. Rather than selling music, they should be selling services and support.
If your CD gets scratches on it, they will should charge you to fix it. Rather than being opposed to song swapping, they should start selling better song swapping software.
Plus, this whole idea of making the average guy pay for music is obsolete. What they need to do is get kings^H^H^H^H^H rich people to commission new works or remixes of old songs that are tailored expressly for them.
I have heard the opinion that Napster actually increases CD sales espoused over and over on Slashdot and I think this attitude is really disingenuous. This argument is over-simplistic and it simply flies in the face of common sense.
Let me illustrate this with a related example. I have often heard people claim that the death penalty does not discourage murder, and statistics prove it. I recently had a chance to see some of those statistics in graphical form at the San Francisco museum of modern art.
What I saw was that there appeared to be an inverse correlation between murder and the death penalty. The murder rate was higher when the death penalty was in effect! Then I realized there are multiple ways to interpret the statistics.
Probably what happened is that the death penalty was introduced while the murder rate was going up. It takes awhile to have an effect (plus there are appeals and delays in carrying out the sentence). Later, when the crime rate goes down, people soften on the death penalty. So a statistic that appears to be showing an inverse correlation is actually shoing a direct correlation with a lag.
I think people who are "wondering" why the studios don't embrace Napster are being a bit short-sighted. The CD sales figures are not determined by one single factor. Certainly the economy has a lot to do with it. I think they realize that file "sharing" systems are going to have a larger and larger impact on sales unless legislative action is taken.
As the article points out, sales of CD burners are increasing. There are new, portable MP3 player devices. And to the guy who's sig complains that the movie studios were initially against VCRs, even though 46% of their revenue now comes from rentals, do you think they would have been against a device that plays tapes but doesn't record them?
This draft (or rather the idea of this draft) was discussed in some detail at the SAAG meeting at the last IETF. A number of people objected to the idea of standardizing stuff like this. The danger is that the MUSTs and SHOULDs could end up in US law. Also there was a previous effort by the GRIP working group which caused a lot of tension with vendors.
While there were a few dissenting opinions, most people agreed that most intelligent thing to do is to notify the vendor, give them some time to fix the problem, and then publish the vulnerabilty. However, no one spoke out in favour of the formalized system as described in the draft.
There are two key principles at work here: Newton's laws (every action has an equal and opposite reaction), and equilibrium (if you disturb one of the pendulums it will tend to act in such a way as to restore the equilibrium).
If we look at the 2 pendulum example, when the pendulums are swinging 180 degs out of phase, there is 0 net force on the system. Let's say you apply an impulse which brakes pendulum A while it is on the upswing. This will momentarily slow down pendulum A and cause it to lead pendulum B. When pendulum A reaches its would-be apex, pendulum B will exert a force on it, causing A to go higher and simultaneously lag slightly. Thus, equilibrium is restored.
In the 3 pendulum situation, the momentums again cancel each other out. At one point, pendulum A is at the bottom going right, pendulum B is near the top right going down (left), and pendulum C is near the top left going up (left). Pendulums B & C exert equal and opposite forces at this point, so the net force on A is 0. Say we brake B slightly here. Normally, when B reaches its apex, the forces due to A and C cancel each other out. But B will reach its apex earlier; therefore, A-C will exert a force on it, causing it to go higher as before.
This suggests to me that equilibrium will also be restored in the 3 pendulum case. Of course, I am not a qualified physisist, so I might just be ranting here...
I'm not a manager. I don't like the meetings, the arcane processes and forms, the politics... But I've seen a lot of bad decisions get made + good projects get cancelled, and I think I have some insight into this.
The people who make the seemingly arbitrary decisions that determine a company's future are not trained in math and statistics, even if they use metrics and formulas to assess projects.
Problem 1: All statistics come with a confidence interval.
- Programmers get asked for schedules. Most of the time, these schedules are accurate to within 300%. Management computes a critical path flowchart from these results and actually trusts the results.
- Someone does a very accurate (down to the penny) analysis of how much a widget will cost to build. 2 years later, when the product is actually ready, this data is obsolete and the design decisions look very foolish.
Problem 2: Every decision has an opportunity cost.
- Someone does a business case analysis and this results in the project being cancelled. 6 months later, the project is resurrected, at considerable expense. It's a bad idea to make big decisions when the rationale is borderline.
Pop quiz: You're playing Who Wants to be a Millionaire and you're stuck on the $16,000 question. You've used up all your lifelines, and you're 40% certain that the answer is A. Do you take the money or take a guess? Answer: You take your chances, because even though you have a 60% chance of losing the $16k, you need to factor in the possibility that the $32k question might be easy.
Problem 3: Calculations don't include the intangibles.
- Switching from tool A to tool B will save the company $50,000 per year. This will recoup the initial investment in only 3 years. (This one is particularly prevalent among politicians.)
Meanwhile, all of the employee's are slightly peeved at having to switch. Plus, there are unforseen problems with the new software. And the kicker is that after only 2 years, management replaces tool B with tool C, which promises a similar ROI.
Statistics and metrics can be useful, but the danger is in letting them overrule common sense.
In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond tells us that the open source movement does not endanger our programming jobs because 90% of software is not aimed at desktop PCs. If big retailers like Wal Mart were to go OSS, wouldn't this tend to endanger ESR's premise?
The thrust of Cringely's argument, which he devotes most of his article to, is this: Apple should port OS X to Intel because "it is exactly the competitor Microsoft needs." But what really matters to Apple is: Will porting OS X to Intel make Apple more or less profitable?
Or more directly, Cringely opens the article by stating that Microsoft responds to competition by improving their product and putting their competitor out of business. Then he tells Apple that they should compete with Microsoft in order to make Microsoft stronger. Like lambs to the slaughter... Whether or not there is a business case for Apple here, the business case section of the article was clearly taked on as an afterthought.
If it lost the hardware business it would immediately drop its revenues from $8 billion to around $500 million. Even if its profits went up at the same time (which they might), they would get crucified on Wall Street for this.
No sane company would ever pursue a strategy that involved such a dramatic cut in its revenue stream.
Having a profitable company give back to the community by supporting an open source web site is a good gesture, but Corel needs to focus on more important things at the moment.
Remember way back when "giving back to the community" meant feeding the homeless or supporting the United Way?
Corel was a good company when they focused on graphics products, but for the last 9 years, they have jumped on every bandwagon they could find:
- they were going to compete with MS Office
- they were going to port all their apps to Java
- they were going to build a network computer
- they were going to port all their apps to Linux
The problem with jumping on a bandwagon is that eventually you have to jump back off. Interestingly enough, Corel has a reputation of laying off their experienced workers and replacing them with fresh meat. I think this is how they ensure that their employees remain motivated and indoctrinated with each succesive failure.
It is definitely possible that Cowpland was the problem and that Corel will make a comeback now that he's gone. They offered me a job many years ago. Thankfully, I had other offers.
Assuming that Microsoft is using public key crypto to generate the keys (and I can't imagine that they wouldn't), it's amazing to me that someone would be able to crack even one key. It is certainly feasible to create completely uncrackable keys with today's technology (although as the article points out, you can crack the OS by removing the code that checks the keys.)
I would theorize (because I've heard of this happening before) that they wanted to keep the size of the keys short, because the user might need to type it in or read it over a telephone. This would in turn restrict the size of the public key crypto they could use.
Actually, young children are much more likely to take the Internet at face value.
Has anyone actually tried telling them not to?
You can teach a dog to sit and you can teach a dog to roll over, but you can't teach a dog to think critically.
I mention this because folklore science tells us that a dog has about the IQ of a 4 year old. Kids aren't just minature adults with less knowledge; they also have different winring in their brains.
By all means, you need to teach your kids how to think critically, but not until they are ready.
On another note, there is also a difference between computers today and computers when you grew up. When I got my first computer at age 5, you had to type in the programs from a book. It was tedious (and ridiculous, in hindsight), but you did learn something.
I program mostly in C++ but I've done a bit a Java. I found the main problem with Java was the amount of glue code I had to write. Glue code is the programming equivalent of paperwork. It's boring and mindless, but necessary if you want to stay organized.
C++ requires some glue code in order to get good modularity, but in Java the bloat is ridiculous. Having to create a whole new wrapper class just to simulate the effect of a non-const pointer!?
Interfaces are a good feature. I've implemented the equivalent in C++ using either multiple inheritance template classes, but Java interfaces are cleaner (and safer). However, as before, the glue code puts a burden on the programmer. I found myself giving up on code reuse because the burden is just to high.
After declaring an interface which accepts a listner and another which acts as a listener, it occurs to me that I used to write a callback function to do this in one tenth the time, and at no expense to modularity.
I live in Canada. I have noticed that our cd releases are usually delayed by several months as compared to the US. We also pay a lower cost for our cds, when the exchange rate is taken into account.
In the last few years, it seems that there have been fewer domestic album releases, and the net result is that we pay more for music. I think this is probably due to the rise in sales over the Internet.
I'm disapointed because regionally targeted cds were saving me money.
"Don't write software because 'it's cool'. That only leads to burnout. Write it for money. At least you get something back and don't ruin the market for the rest of us."
Um, no, doing stuff you don't like to do just "for the money" is what leads to burnouts. Nobody ever says "Boy am I burned out playing around carefree...
I write closed-source code for money. I enjoy it because I have control over the design of my modules. If, in the future, the only way I can earn money is to become either a code maintainer for GPL software or a glorified sys-admin, then I probably won't enjoy my job as much.
Typical open source geek attitude... destroy all the business models except for selling advertising and then bitch and complain when someone even tries to do that.
The way key escrow is supposed to work is that you break up your key into multiple pieces and submit them to multiple escrow agencies. Then, if the FBI gets a search warrant, they have to get one fragment of the keys from each of the escrow agencies. There are ways of splitting up the key so that you can't deduce any information with all of the fragments (or maybe you only need 2 out of 3 fragments).
FYI, an encryption backdoor or key escrow service that lets the government read e-mail isn't going to let the bad guys hack your bank account. You don't have to escrow your authentication key.
Anyway, key escrow would presumably have to be used in conjunction with a law that makes it illegal to not use the service. Failure to reveal a key would land you in jail for contempt of court. This might work domestically, but I wouldn't count on getting any extradition treaties enforced.
The real danger is not the prospect of face recognition software or increased baggage searches. The real danger is that legislators will take this to extremes.
Alas, it is human nature to not be proactive, but to go overboard when reacting. We already have ridiculous zero-tolerance policies at schools where kids can be expelled for drawing a picture of a gun or pointing their hands in the shape of a gun or bringing a nailfile to class.
Soon, not only will we be arrested for having a razor in our suitcase, we will be forced to eat crappy airline food with rubber knives and forks as we struggle to cope with the confines of our straightjackets.
Royalties collected on consumer digital audio recording devices and blank media:
1992 $118,228.42...
1999 $3,551,030.86
2000 $5,285,246.32
Total: over 13 Million dollars so far....
In other words, people are buying enormous numbers of blank CDRs. Most of these CDRs are probably being filled with music. Much of that music probably comes from Napster. So Napster is directly fueling the growth of the DART fund, which, I will remind you, is, by law, paid to artists and songwriters as well as copyright holders. So next time someone says that Napster users don't pay for their music, you have the real answer. They are
Wow, good catch!!! How can the record execs be bitching when the recording industry made over $400 thousand off music piracy last month?!? Why, that's more than *I* make in an *entire year*!!!
Napster must be shut down, if only to punish the idiot investors who sunk their money into a company whose entire purpose in being was theft.
Making matters worse, these email bugs have moved beyond the domain of "get-rich quick" and porn spam. Even companies you might consider legitimate have been doing this. One would think financial institutions would be particularly concerned about privacy, but I have found email bugs lurking in mail from both E*Trade and American Express.
My personal favorite is when I received spam from a company that was trying to sell me intrusion detection software.
Slashdot Mirror
The cinema market may be booming but what about the VHS/DVD market? This is where the piracy is the worst,
While I enjoy the free piracy of movies on the net, I don't pretend that I have a moral rigth to pirate it. I am just a greedy swine that like to get stuff for free.
This guy makes a good point. While the Slashdot community may treat copy protection and anti-piracy legislation with righteous indignation, I think people ignore the fact that the majority of the public are greedy swine.
Legislation and copy protection may not work in principle, but they work in practice because these greedy swine still have a limited sense of morality. Every act of piracy has a cost-benefit tradeoff, with factors such as "is it legal", "does everyone else do it", "is it over-priced", etc.
I know a few people who are anti-copyright advocates who do spend a fair amount of money on DVDs while pirating them at the same time (basically, this way they get to choose their own price). However, these people seem to believe that the whole world shares their perverted morality (or would do if they only had the chance).
I personally don't steal movies or music. But I would do so if it was easy and convenient and there was no chance of being caught. As it is, I make enough money that the risk outweighs the savings. But certainly I pirated stuff as a kid, and I'd do it again if I didn't have an overabundance of money. The self-serving attitude of some slashdotters towards copyright gets on my nerves after a while.
-a
"Canada: it's not just aboot doughnuts anymore, eh?"
You know what's funnier than a Canadian saying about? An American trying to emulate the sound of American saying about.
Honestly, there's a specific sound that Canadians are able to distinguish that Americans can't. It sounds a bit like the word "oat". That is what Eastern Canadians say when they say out. On the other hand, Americans use a diphtong "ow" sound which, frankly, sounds to me like an expression of pain. It sticks out like a sore thumb, or a Bostoner saying the word "car".
I find it typical of American ethnocentrism to assume that Canadians speak funny, when it is in fact Americans who hear funny.
-a
That's not really the point.
But since you asked, I think yes. People bought record players before you could copy music. People still bought Nintendos before you could pirate video games.
-a
...is that they have the wrong business model. Rather than selling music, they should be selling services and support.
If your CD gets scratches on it, they will should charge you to fix it. Rather than being opposed to song swapping, they should start selling better song swapping software.
Plus, this whole idea of making the average guy pay for music is obsolete. What they need to do is get kings^H^H^H^H^H rich people to commission new works or remixes of old songs that are tailored expressly for them.
-a
I have heard the opinion that Napster actually increases CD sales espoused over and over on Slashdot and I think this attitude is really disingenuous. This argument is over-simplistic and it simply flies in the face of common sense.
Let me illustrate this with a related example. I have often heard people claim that the death penalty does not discourage murder, and statistics prove it. I recently had a chance to see some of those statistics in graphical form at the San Francisco museum of modern art.
What I saw was that there appeared to be an inverse correlation between murder and the death penalty. The murder rate was higher when the death penalty was in effect! Then I realized there are multiple ways to interpret the statistics.
Probably what happened is that the death penalty was introduced while the murder rate was going up. It takes awhile to have an effect (plus there are appeals and delays in carrying out the sentence). Later, when the crime rate goes down, people soften on the death penalty. So a statistic that appears to be showing an inverse correlation is actually shoing a direct correlation with a lag.
I think people who are "wondering" why the studios don't embrace Napster are being a bit short-sighted. The CD sales figures are not determined by one single factor. Certainly the economy has a lot to do with it. I think they realize that file "sharing" systems are going to have a larger and larger impact on sales unless legislative action is taken.
As the article points out, sales of CD burners are increasing. There are new, portable MP3 player devices. And to the guy who's sig complains that the movie studios were initially against VCRs, even though 46% of their revenue now comes from rentals, do you think they would have been against a device that plays tapes but doesn't record them?
-a
This draft (or rather the idea of this draft) was discussed in some detail at the SAAG meeting at the last IETF. A number of people objected to the idea of standardizing stuff like this. The danger is that the MUSTs and SHOULDs could end up in US law. Also there was a previous effort by the GRIP working group which caused a lot of tension with vendors.
While there were a few dissenting opinions, most people agreed that most intelligent thing to do is to notify the vendor, give them some time to fix the problem, and then publish the vulnerabilty. However, no one spoke out in favour of the formalized system as described in the draft.
-a
Very likely so.
There are two key principles at work here: Newton's laws (every action has an equal and opposite reaction), and equilibrium (if you disturb one of the pendulums it will tend to act in such a way as to restore the equilibrium).
If we look at the 2 pendulum example, when the pendulums are swinging 180 degs out of phase, there is 0 net force on the system. Let's say you apply an impulse which brakes pendulum A while it is on the upswing. This will momentarily slow down pendulum A and cause it to lead pendulum B. When pendulum A reaches its would-be apex, pendulum B will exert a force on it, causing A to go higher and simultaneously lag slightly. Thus, equilibrium is restored.
In the 3 pendulum situation, the momentums again cancel each other out. At one point, pendulum A is at the bottom going right, pendulum B is near the top right going down (left), and pendulum C is near the top left going up (left). Pendulums B & C exert equal and opposite forces at this point, so the net force on A is 0. Say we brake B slightly here. Normally, when B reaches its apex, the forces due to A and C cancel each other out. But B will reach its apex earlier; therefore, A-C will exert a force on it, causing it to go higher as before.
This suggests to me that equilibrium will also be restored in the 3 pendulum case. Of course, I am not a qualified physisist, so I might just be ranting here...
-a
I'm not a manager. I don't like the meetings, the arcane processes and forms, the politics... But I've seen a lot of bad decisions get made + good projects get cancelled, and I think I have some insight into this.
The people who make the seemingly arbitrary decisions that determine a company's future are not trained in math and statistics, even if they use metrics and formulas to assess projects.
Problem 1: All statistics come with a confidence interval.
- Programmers get asked for schedules. Most of the time, these schedules are accurate to within 300%. Management computes a critical path flowchart from these results and actually trusts the results.
- Someone does a very accurate (down to the penny) analysis of how much a widget will cost to build. 2 years later, when the product is actually ready, this data is obsolete and the design decisions look very foolish.
Problem 2: Every decision has an opportunity cost.
- Someone does a business case analysis and this results in the project being cancelled. 6 months later, the project is resurrected, at considerable expense. It's a bad idea to make big decisions when the rationale is borderline.
Pop quiz: You're playing Who Wants to be a Millionaire and you're stuck on the $16,000 question. You've used up all your lifelines, and you're 40% certain that the answer is A. Do you take the money or take a guess? Answer: You take your chances, because even though you have a 60% chance of losing the $16k, you need to factor in the possibility that the $32k question might be easy.
Problem 3: Calculations don't include the intangibles.
- Switching from tool A to tool B will save the company $50,000 per year. This will recoup the initial investment in only 3 years. (This one is particularly prevalent among politicians.)
Meanwhile, all of the employee's are slightly peeved at having to switch. Plus, there are unforseen problems with the new software. And the kicker is that after only 2 years, management replaces tool B with tool C, which promises a similar ROI.
Statistics and metrics can be useful, but the danger is in letting them overrule common sense.
-a
In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond tells us that the open source movement does not endanger our programming jobs because 90% of software is not aimed at desktop PCs. If big retailers like Wal Mart were to go OSS, wouldn't this tend to endanger ESR's premise?
-a
Or more directly, Cringely opens the article by stating that Microsoft responds to competition by improving their product and putting their competitor out of business. Then he tells Apple that they should compete with Microsoft in order to make Microsoft stronger. Like lambs to the slaughter... Whether or not there is a business case for Apple here, the business case section of the article was clearly taked on as an afterthought.
-a
And your point is?
-a
Remember way back when "giving back to the community" meant feeding the homeless or supporting the United Way?
Andrew
Corel was a good company when they focused on graphics products, but for the last 9 years, they have jumped on every bandwagon they could find:
- they were going to compete with MS Office
- they were going to port all their apps to Java
- they were going to build a network computer
- they were going to port all their apps to Linux
The problem with jumping on a bandwagon is that eventually you have to jump back off. Interestingly enough, Corel has a reputation of laying off their experienced workers and replacing them with fresh meat. I think this is how they ensure that their employees remain motivated and indoctrinated with each succesive failure.
It is definitely possible that Cowpland was the problem and that Corel will make a comeback now that he's gone. They offered me a job many years ago. Thankfully, I had other offers.
-a
Assuming that Microsoft is using public key crypto to generate the keys (and I can't imagine that they wouldn't), it's amazing to me that someone would be able to crack even one key. It is certainly feasible to create completely uncrackable keys with today's technology (although as the article points out, you can crack the OS by removing the code that checks the keys.)
I would theorize (because I've heard of this happening before) that they wanted to keep the size of the keys short, because the user might need to type it in or read it over a telephone. This would in turn restrict the size of the public key crypto they could use.
-a
You can teach a dog to sit and you can teach a dog to roll over, but you can't teach a dog to think critically.
I mention this because folklore science tells us that a dog has about the IQ of a 4 year old. Kids aren't just minature adults with less knowledge; they also have different winring in their brains.
By all means, you need to teach your kids how to think critically, but not until they are ready.
On another note, there is also a difference between computers today and computers when you grew up. When I got my first computer at age 5, you had to type in the programs from a book. It was tedious (and ridiculous, in hindsight), but you did learn something.
-a
I program mostly in C++ but I've done a bit a Java. I found the main problem with Java was the amount of glue code I had to write. Glue code is the programming equivalent of paperwork. It's boring and mindless, but necessary if you want to stay organized.
C++ requires some glue code in order to get good modularity, but in Java the bloat is ridiculous. Having to create a whole new wrapper class just to simulate the effect of a non-const pointer!?
Interfaces are a good feature. I've implemented the equivalent in C++ using either multiple inheritance template classes, but Java interfaces are cleaner (and safer). However, as before, the glue code puts a burden on the programmer. I found myself giving up on code reuse because the burden is just to high.
After declaring an interface which accepts a listner and another which acts as a listener, it occurs to me that I used to write a callback function to do this in one tenth the time, and at no expense to modularity.
I live in Canada. I have noticed that our cd releases are usually delayed by several months as compared to the US. We also pay a lower cost for our cds, when the exchange rate is taken into account.
In the last few years, it seems that there have been fewer domestic album releases, and the net result is that we pay more for music. I think this is probably due to the rise in sales over the Internet.
I'm disapointed because regionally targeted cds were saving me money.
Andrew
Typical open source geek attitude... destroy all the business models except for selling advertising and then bitch and complain when someone even tries to do that.
-a
The way key escrow is supposed to work is that you break up your key into multiple pieces and submit them to multiple escrow agencies. Then, if the FBI gets a search warrant, they have to get one fragment of the keys from each of the escrow agencies. There are ways of splitting up the key so that you can't deduce any information with all of the fragments (or maybe you only need 2 out of 3 fragments).
-a
FYI, an encryption backdoor or key escrow service that lets the government read e-mail isn't going to let the bad guys hack your bank account. You don't have to escrow your authentication key.
Anyway, key escrow would presumably have to be used in conjunction with a law that makes it illegal to not use the service. Failure to reveal a key would land you in jail for contempt of court. This might work domestically, but I wouldn't count on getting any extradition treaties enforced.
-a
The real danger is not the prospect of face recognition software or increased baggage searches. The real danger is that legislators will take this to extremes.
Alas, it is human nature to not be proactive, but to go overboard when reacting. We already have ridiculous zero-tolerance policies at schools where kids can be expelled for drawing a picture of a gun or pointing their hands in the shape of a gun or bringing a nailfile to class.
Soon, not only will we be arrested for having a razor in our suitcase, we will be forced to eat crappy airline food with rubber knives and forks as we struggle to cope with the confines of our straightjackets.
-a
Napster must be shut down, if only to punish the idiot investors who sunk their money into a company whose entire purpose in being was theft.
Andrew
My personal favorite is when I received spam from a company that was trying to sell me intrusion detection software.
There's just something ironic about that.
I don't think the US postal rate increase (and Canadian as well) is due to junk mail (a more likely target is fuel prices).
After all, higher volume is supposed to give you an economy of scale.
P.S. Doesn't the post office give discounts (the bulk rate) to companies who send a large volume of mail? I wonder who those companies might be...