I got a handful of Acceptable Use Policy violation notices from @Home for messages I had posted to Usenet, and even had my service cut off completely once. All this despite the fact that I was complying with the posting guidelines in the relevant newsgroups.
@Home made no effort to check the validity of the claims against me. They (both the complainant and @Home) said I was "spamming and disrupting the group", even though I was doing neither.
The kicker is that I didn't even receive notice of these violations until my pipe got shut off, because they emailed the notices to an email address THAT DIDN'T EXIST. My username was (mumblemumble)1@home.com, they sent them to (mumblemumble)2@home.com, an account I never created. They apparently created it FOR me after the first message bounced, I guess -- later on I was able to log into the POP server using that account name and get my mail.
The content was coming over @Home's own network, not the Internet. All the pipes were there to be used anyway, whether anyone visited the homepage or not.
For values of "cool" equaling "a waste of time and a duplication of effort"...
Know your audience and try to reach as many of them as possible. This doesn't mean that you have to support every combination of browser/platform/plugins/options, etc.
But this is RUDIMENTARY sh-t we're talking about here. If I can't trust a professor to understand why buffer overruns and memory leaks are undesirable, how am I supposed to trust anything that the professor says?
Shrek on on sale for like $14.99. That's not "expensive" to anyone except children on fixed allowances. They've made it very very easy for anyone who wants a legitimate copy of the movie to own one.
There are some people who trade warez files simply for the thrill of trading warez files.
they are raising our children to appreciate tasteless music.
Like hell they are. They're simply trying to make as much money as possible. And what they're doing today is no different than what they have ever done -- if it's not Britney Spears, then it's Nirvana, or Michael Jackson, or KISS, or the Beatles, or Elvis Presley, or Frankie Valli.
they will have been trained to not like any particular music. There will be no impetus for creative expression once there is no example of creative expression.
I wasn't aware it was the RIAA's duty to provide any of that. You want to expose your kids to creative expression? TAKE THEM TO A DAMN ART GALLERY. Or a concert hall, or an independent film festival, or whatever. Don't rely on media profiteers to teach your kids culture.
THE RIAA IS CAUSING MORE HARM TO THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE THAN ANY TERRORIST ORGANIZATION COULD EVER DREAM TO.
Absurd. Even putting aside the fact that terrorists have caused and will continue you to cause more people to DIE than the RIAA ever will, your statement is utterly absurd.
If your idea of "the American way of life" involves nothing more than being able to make fair-use copies of the music you buy, you might have a point. But look at all the IMPORTANT civil liberties that our own goverment is trying to reduce, in DIRECT reaction to terrorist activity.
Bah.
Re:We need technical measures, not laws, for spam
on
FTC Goes After Spammers
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I don't think laws against spam will succeed in having a preventative effect on the behavior, but perhaps they could have a punitive effect. Most laws are already like this--just because the laws say that you're not supposed to kill people, drive over the speed limit, doesn't mean you won't be able to do those things. But if you do, and you get caught, you're going to have hell to pay.
Cypherspace.org seems to be/.ed so I can't read the Hash Cash proposal itself, so I'm going based on your summary of it.
The problems I see with such a system:
1. Requires two-way communication between sender and recipient to establish a one-directional message transfer. Potentially could waste more bandwidth than blindly sending out spam does today.
2. Requires end-users to set up "scorefiles" to dictate how much they trust every sender in the world. At best, provides users with no more functionality than existing score-based mail filters/readers.
3. Ties senders' ability to get their message out to the CPU power of their machine. Owners of dual-10GHz Pentathlon systems should not have a louder voice than the hobbyist running sendmail on an old 286.
4. Spammers HAVE CPU cycles to burn--like most of us, their machines rarely run anywhere near 100% load. They will learn to send out their garbage in a slow,steady stream rather than in huge batches so that their machines can handle it--simultaneously making bulk-mailing harder to identify.
You don't want to pursue the "copyright violation" argument on this one. If you win, you risk setting the precedent that computers cannot replicate copyrighted data (not even loading bits from disk into RAM) without breaking the law.
Just because guys like you are only willing to pay $0 for the Donkey Kong ROM code, does not mean it has a value of $0, nor should Midway offer it for sale at $0.
It means you and the copyright owner do not have an agreement to let you use their property. YOU, the consumer, are not the sole arbiter of what a reasonable sale price is.
You seem to be under the mpression [sic] that consumers have no say in the market. If the publishers try to force everyone to pay $10 for a one-use disc, they will see their profits plummet immediately and rush to get unlimited-play discs back on the shelves.
Publishers may want to control the way we use their content, yes, but more importantly than that they want to stay in business.
You do remember the videotape-rental fad of the mid-1980's, don't you? You could rent movies from just about anywhere -- video store, supermarket, drug store, even the convenience store on the corner.
How many of those places still rent videos? Provably just your neighborhood Blockbuster.
It costs a lot of money to:
a) set aside retail space for movies
b) keep the section stocked with the latest and most popular movies
c) produce and distribute the media containing the movies
You won't ever see these degradable discs next to the magazine rack at the local 7-11.
I think you're reading way too much into the intentions of prosecutors when they go after 'scumbags, Rod. Well, maybe I shouldn't say "go after" because that implies malice. They're just doing what they're paid to do.
They go after kiddie-pornographers first because they want to punish monsters who try to profit from the abuse of children.
They go after terrorists first because they want to prevent terrorists from killing people.
They go after self-confessed promotors of the violation of copyrights first because violating copyright is against the law and they already have a confession, so it's an open-and-shut case.
There's a reason that usenet servers almost
never respect cancels, and that's frivolous
cancelling.
Actually, in my experience every news server I've used respects 'cancel' control-messages, provided they appear to actually be from the sender of the message to be cancelled (i.e., not forgeries). This is extremely useful -- everyone occasionally sends out a message that they wish they hadn't.
The problem in the case with Ellison and Remarq is that they're letting him cancel ANY message posted by ANYONE, provided Ellison claims that the message contains his copyrighted content. That's a dangerous precedent to set.
And to be honest, I wouldn't cry if copyright holders destroyed the binary groups of Usenet forever--it's a rare file that makes it to my news server with all parts intact anyway, and far rarer for that file not to be a copyright violation.
Columbia: 2 billion dollars to fight leftist guerillas who are trying to win better conditions for the poor while the right wing wealthy landowners who they're opposing pump drugs into America and bullets into peasants.
Gosh, I had no idea what conditions at that Ivy school in upper Manhattan was really like...!
IM - is a world of divided standards, so you can only talk to AOL users if you're an AOL user, MSN if your an MSN user, etc.
What was the formerly compelling IM client that was replaced by all of these? talk(1)?
Okay, I got it, everyone running different clients is bad.
email - is a world where you need to sift through 20 spam messages to find your one message. Also the monoculture of email clients created a nightmare reality of viruses.
Okay, I got it, everyone running the same client is bad.
nntp - spam is certainly a problem, as is the bulk of news services no longer carrying binaries.
On Usenet, binaries ARE the problem. Massive, MASSIVE amounts of bandwidth and disk space are wasted on the binary groups. The content is almost all there in violation of copyright, MIME-Multipart encoding takes up more bytes than the original binaries, and if your server doesn't get 1 part out of 10,000, the entire thing is worthless.
By your reasoning, the DMCA is not newsworthy because no one has been convicted under it. Yeah, that Dmitri guy was arrested, but he cut a deal with the DA so it doesn't count. Be proactive. If it's not worth talking about until the damage has already been done, then you'll always be trying to catch up.
And Comcast doesn't have to send packets to your firewall to find out if you're likely to be running a NAT. You're sending packets to them ALL THE TIME.
What you're doing is measuring the Amazon workforce based on the number of names on the payroll*, not the amount of work performed over the course of the year.
Most temp employees are not employed year-round, because there's not a need for them year-round. I would guesstimate that temporary workers account for maybe 20% of the total man-hours worked in Amazon's warehouses.
-Poot
(* not strictly true if temporary help is contracted through an outside staffing agency.)
Slashdot Mirror
Every day is Editor-troll-and-flamebait Day here at Slashdot Dot Org!
Incidentally, the dept. line was a reference from the South Park movie.
I got a handful of Acceptable Use Policy violation notices from @Home for messages I had posted to Usenet, and even had my service cut off completely once. All this despite the fact that I was complying with the posting guidelines in the relevant newsgroups.
@Home made no effort to check the validity of the claims against me. They (both the complainant and @Home) said I was "spamming and disrupting the group", even though I was doing neither.
The kicker is that I didn't even receive notice of these violations until my pipe got shut off, because they emailed the notices to an email address THAT DIDN'T EXIST. My username was (mumblemumble)1@home.com, they sent them to (mumblemumble)2@home.com, an account I never created. They apparently created it FOR me after the first message bounced, I guess -- later on I was able to log into the POP server using that account name and get my mail.
Horrible, horrible, unfair behavior.
What delivery costs?
The content was coming over @Home's own network, not the Internet. All the pipes were there to be used anyway, whether anyone visited the homepage or not.
That's not "guaranteed placement in search results", though. Google's query-based advertising is distinct from the list of search results.
two versions of the same website is cool.
For values of "cool" equaling "a waste of time and a duplication of effort"...
Know your audience and try to reach as many of them as possible. This doesn't mean that you have to support every combination of browser/platform/plugins/options, etc.
Making it criminal to support legislature that violates the Constitution would mean that no Amendment could ever be introduced again in history.
One of the strengths of our Constitution is the ability to revise it to accomodate the future.
(THIS IS THE CENTRAL POOTINIZER)
As a Windows user, I object to your assumption that I have never installed the OS!
As a matter of fact, I have to RE-install it every month or so!
The MS Support Tech told me that's what I should do.
But this is RUDIMENTARY sh-t we're talking about here. If I can't trust a professor to understand why buffer overruns and memory leaks are undesirable, how am I supposed to trust anything that the professor says?
Shrek on on sale for like $14.99. That's not "expensive" to anyone except children on fixed allowances. They've made it very very easy for anyone who wants a legitimate copy of the movie to own one.
There are some people who trade warez files simply for the thrill of trading warez files.
they are raising our children to appreciate
tasteless music.
Like hell they are. They're simply trying to make as much money as possible. And what they're doing today is no different than what they have ever done -- if it's not Britney Spears, then it's Nirvana, or Michael Jackson, or KISS, or the Beatles, or Elvis Presley, or Frankie Valli.
they will have been trained to not like any
particular music. There will be no impetus for
creative expression once there is no example of
creative expression.
I wasn't aware it was the RIAA's duty to provide any of that. You want to expose your kids to creative expression? TAKE THEM TO A DAMN ART GALLERY. Or a concert hall, or an independent film festival, or whatever. Don't rely on media profiteers to teach your kids culture.
THE RIAA IS CAUSING MORE HARM TO THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE THAN ANY TERRORIST ORGANIZATION COULD
EVER DREAM TO.
Absurd. Even putting aside the fact that terrorists have caused and will continue you to cause more people to DIE than the RIAA ever will, your statement is utterly absurd.
If your idea of "the American way of life" involves nothing more than being able to make fair-use copies of the music you buy, you might have a point. But look at all the IMPORTANT civil liberties that our own goverment is trying to reduce, in DIRECT reaction to terrorist activity.
Bah.
I don't think laws against spam will succeed in having a preventative effect on the behavior, but perhaps they could have a punitive effect. Most laws are already like this--just because the laws say that you're not supposed to kill people, drive over the speed limit, doesn't mean you won't be able to do those things. But if you do, and you get caught, you're going to have hell to pay.
/.ed so I can't read the Hash Cash proposal itself, so I'm going based on your summary of it.
Cypherspace.org seems to be
The problems I see with such a system:
1. Requires two-way communication between sender and recipient to establish a one-directional message transfer. Potentially could waste more bandwidth than blindly sending out spam does today.
2. Requires end-users to set up "scorefiles" to dictate how much they trust every sender in the world. At best, provides users with no more functionality than existing score-based mail filters/readers.
3. Ties senders' ability to get their message out to the CPU power of their machine. Owners of dual-10GHz Pentathlon systems should not have a louder voice than the hobbyist running sendmail on an old 286.
4. Spammers HAVE CPU cycles to burn--like most of us, their machines rarely run anywhere near 100% load. They will learn to send out their garbage in a slow,steady stream rather than in huge batches so that their machines can handle it--simultaneously making bulk-mailing harder to identify.
You don't want to pursue the "copyright violation" argument on this one. If you win, you risk setting the precedent that computers cannot replicate copyrighted data (not even loading bits from disk into RAM) without breaking the law.
Rubbish.
Just because guys like you are only willing to pay $0 for the Donkey Kong ROM code, does not mean it has a value of $0, nor should Midway offer it for sale at $0.
It means you and the copyright owner do not have an agreement to let you use their property. YOU, the consumer, are not the sole arbiter of what a reasonable sale price is.
You seem to be under the mpression [sic] that consumers have no say in the market. If the publishers try to force everyone to pay $10 for a one-use disc, they will see their profits plummet immediately and rush to get unlimited-play discs back on the shelves.
Publishers may want to control the way we use their content, yes, but more importantly than that they want to stay in business.
You do remember the videotape-rental fad of the mid-1980's, don't you? You could rent movies from just about anywhere -- video store, supermarket, drug store, even the convenience store on the corner.
How many of those places still rent videos? Provably just your neighborhood Blockbuster.
It costs a lot of money to:
a) set aside retail space for movies
b) keep the section stocked with the latest and most popular movies
c) produce and distribute the media containing the movies
You won't ever see these degradable discs next to the magazine rack at the local 7-11.
I think you're reading way too much into the intentions of prosecutors when they go after 'scumbags, Rod. Well, maybe I shouldn't say "go after" because that implies malice. They're just doing what they're paid to do.
They go after kiddie-pornographers first because they want to punish monsters who try to profit from the abuse of children.
They go after terrorists first because they want to prevent terrorists from killing people.
They go after self-confessed promotors of the violation of copyrights first because violating copyright is against the law and they already have a confession, so it's an open-and-shut case.
Yeah, that's the easy part... the difficult part is getting someone to grant you INSERT privileges!
There's a reason that usenet servers almost
never respect cancels, and that's frivolous
cancelling.
Actually, in my experience every news server I've used respects 'cancel' control-messages, provided they appear to actually be from the sender of the message to be cancelled (i.e., not forgeries). This is extremely useful -- everyone occasionally sends out a message that they wish they hadn't.
The problem in the case with Ellison and Remarq is that they're letting him cancel ANY message posted by ANYONE, provided Ellison claims that the message contains his copyrighted content. That's a dangerous precedent to set.
And to be honest, I wouldn't cry if copyright holders destroyed the binary groups of Usenet forever--it's a rare file that makes it to my news server with all parts intact anyway, and far rarer for that file not to be a copyright violation.
100 X10? Wouldn't that be 1000?
Gosh, I had no idea what conditions at that Ivy school in upper Manhattan was really like...!
Note to Windows users: no, you DON'T have to spend $400 on a full application suite just to read Word documents that people send you.
Microsoft has free-beer document viewers available for most of their Office file formats.
Let's apply the Cashbox time-shrinking algorithms and see what we end up with here...
e .t he.thegallthisguyhas.People,Ican'temphasizethiseno ugh:TheradiostationsaretheretomakemoneyforClearCha nnelstockholders,notassomecharitytoprovidethebestp ossibleexperienceforRush'slisteners.Look,folks,ifR ushdoesn'twantthistechnologyappliedtohisshow,he'sf reetonegotiateacontractwiththeradiostationsthatenf orceshiswishes.Anybodyinthisgreatcountryofourscann egotiateanycontracttheywant.Ihopethathe'snotgoingt otrytogetthegovernmentweeniesattheFCCtomeddlewitht heradiostations'livelyhoods.Sheesh.Sometimes,Ijust don'tknow.We'llbebackafterthis.
<audio style="rush-limbaugh-voice" mime-type="cashbox-audio-compressed>
RushLimbaughdoesn'tlikeit.Folks,Ican'tbelieveth
<riff genre="80's rock" rpm="45">
</audio>
IM - is a world of divided standards, so you can only talk to AOL users if you're an AOL user, MSN if your an MSN user, etc.
What was the formerly compelling IM client that was replaced by all of these? talk(1)?
Okay, I got it, everyone running different clients is bad.
email - is a world where you need to sift through 20 spam messages to find your one message. Also the monoculture of email clients created a nightmare reality of viruses.
Okay, I got it, everyone running the same client is bad.
nntp - spam is certainly a problem, as is the bulk of news services no longer carrying binaries.
On Usenet, binaries ARE the problem. Massive, MASSIVE amounts of bandwidth and disk space are wasted on the binary groups. The content is almost all there in violation of copyright, MIME-Multipart encoding takes up more bytes than the original binaries, and if your server doesn't get 1 part out of 10,000, the entire thing is worthless.
If you want to get binaries, find an FTP server.
By your reasoning, the DMCA is not newsworthy because no one has been convicted under it. Yeah, that Dmitri guy was arrested, but he cut a deal with the DA so it doesn't count. Be proactive. If it's not worth talking about until the damage has already been done, then you'll always be trying to catch up.
And Comcast doesn't have to send packets to your firewall to find out if you're likely to be running a NAT. You're sending packets to them ALL THE TIME.
What you're doing is measuring the Amazon workforce based on the number of names on the payroll*, not the amount of work performed over the course of the year.
Most temp employees are not employed year-round, because there's not a need for them year-round. I would guesstimate that temporary workers account for maybe 20% of the total man-hours worked in Amazon's warehouses.
-Poot
(* not strictly true if temporary help is contracted through an outside staffing agency.)