You have to admit that every time the US Government raises the bar on this kind of law, they still manage to outdo themselves. We shake our heads in awe every time at the hand-over-fist way in which they take rights from the public to grant protections to corporations, but they continue to surpass all previous performances with astounding regularity. I can't even imagine what the future will hold if future proposals are going to outdo this one.
Perhaps legislators that frame and vote for laws which are later found to be unconstitutional should be thrown out of office permanently for failing to uphold the constitution. Enough of this pushing the envelope stuff: turn it into an electric fence, and then see who wants to push it.
Oddly enough, I was thinking earlier today about a feature that I'd like to see in x86-type CPUs that ain't there yet. I've no idea as to its feasibility, and it might not even be useful, but I'll throw it out into the open here in the hopes that someone else will praise it and run with it, or smack it down and stop me wasting further brain cycles on it.
The feature in question is better support for virtualisation. I'm led to understand that half the reason projects like Plex86 and proprietary products like VMWare are so clever is that the x86 doesn't lend itself to virtualisation. You can't necessarily retrofit virtualisation, but I suspect you could wrap it around the existing architecture.
What I imagine this to look like in actual practice is a CPU that boots up in a mode where it's just a typical x86, but has a set of extra commands for creating and managing virtual x86en. A virtualisation-aware OS could then use these (privileged, I suppose) commands to initialise and execute virtual machines. Certain exceptions (configured at VM initialisation) would cause the virtual machine to break right back out to the real machine, dumping the virtual machine status in an appropriate location for later restoration.
Clearly there's a largish book worth of details I've left out, but this is just meant to be a seminal idea. I don't even pretend to have any real knowledge of the x86 architecture, specifically.
How would this help Linux? Well hey -- with a little bit of added tweaking, Linux could have 90% of the functionality of VMWare built into it. There are many other applications of virtualisation, and its addition to the core of Linux could make for some interesting possibilities. One application that springs to mind is the idea of having "multi-root" systems, where users can have their own root access to their own virtual system. If the virtualisation commands were also available in the virtual x86, then "virtual" would be a relative concept, and the root user of a virtual system could create more virtual systems of his own.
I think it's a good idea. Now bring on the applause and the clue-sticks.
...but I doubt that it will under the circumstances. I just wanted to point out that some people think that pay-per-listen is inherently evil. To that idea, I have but one word in answer: JUKEBOX. It would be pretty handy at a party to have a mega-jukebox load of songs available on tap, pay-per-listen. Bandwidh, payments, and steeoopid technological obstruction schemes will be the downfall of any such proposal for the moment, however.
It's astounding the number of complaints you hear about the GST (Goods and Services Tax, being the "universal sales tax" mentioned by the previous poster). All the people I know who work with accounting type stuff think the GST is a good thing because it simplified sales tax immensely. It was just that the sales tax system the GST replaced was a wholesale sales tax that was totally invisible to the average consumer. And bear in mind that John Howard got voted in on a GST platform.
On the other hand, Richard Allston, the Minister for Technological Stuff, has got to go.
The only truly incongruous thing about this post is that BillG himself thinks there are better ways to spend a Sunday than church. Or did Melinda finally make him see things her way?
I've been Zoping for a couple of weeks now, and I'm getting the hang of it slowly. I think it's a damn handy content management system, the kind of which most web developers seem to re-invent every time they do a project, only they don't do it so well as Zope. Having more or less completed a teeth-cutting project on it, I'm of the opinion that it's the best available choice in its class. Maybe I just don't know about the better alternatives — I'm interested in hearing about options. Even so, I'd be game to undertake a small-but-serious project in Zope now, such as an Intranet or simple user-manageable website.
On the other hand, I have issues with Zope. The documentation is incomplete, and the help system has big smokin' holes in it. There's a Zope documentation project, but I have a problem with systems like this where the code is the spec, and the documentation is being written from that — my own particular anal retentiveness factor, I suppose. Zope doesn't behave quite the way I intuited in the getting-to-know you phase of our relationship, and I've had to readjust my think for a number of Zopisms as I go. Also, the naming conventions (plural) suggest to me a certain cobbled-together-ness — an impression which is carried further by the spotty documentation, etc.
If you want to know about my personal bias in languages, I think Perl is truly amazing in the sense that any language which is so butt-ugly in terms of its syntax and structure (inheriting from C, AWK, and shell scripts???) can be so mind-bogglingly useful and easy to use in practice. On the other hand, all the Perl hackers I've worked with produced utterly vile code. Mind you, they produced pretty damn awful C too. I'd prefer to be working in Python if I had to work with them.
And of course I do work with them, but the powers that be won't let us use Python on the basis that it's not a skill you see on resumes as standard yet. Thank God for The Corporate Mentality, no?
A tad off topic, I guess, but I'm wondering why I can't surf to https://slashdot.org/ instead of the usual "http:". That would make the cheesy, insecure bookmarked login somewhat less insecure, and what with all the stuff and nonsense going on in the world at the moment, especially government snooping (Carnivore/DCS) and nasty attempts at blocking stuff "to protect children", I'm getting keen on the idea of using encrypted protocols at every opportunity. So how's about encrypted Slashdot? If I'm lucky, I might even get past my damn ISP's "transparent" web proxies which dish up stale data more often than not.
Seems like the best thing he can do in that case is go into "Damage Control" mode. What's that? Give them permission to use the trademark. If he changes his tone to "look, I'll give you permission to use my trademark so long as you include a notice in your product that (a) states the trademark is mine, and (b) clearly explains that SSH and OpenSSH are unrelated products." This means that we don't have to go through the confusion of a name change, he gets to look like the good guy, and we can actually work on what he claims to be the problem: customer confusion. I'm sure the OpenSSH guys have no problem with emphasising the distinction between the two, even if it means giving the commercial SSH a bit of free advertising.
Not only does he get to look like the good guy this way, he might even salvage his trademark rights, assuming that they have a chance of being beaten in court as it stands. "Yes, they are using my trademark, but they have my explicit permission to do so."
A bit of cooperation is better than a tonne of coercion and legal sabre-rattling any day.
To the extent that I've used RADIUS protocol, the "reverse caller ID" thing is called DNIS (Dialed Number Incoming String, or something like that), although this might be a vendor-specific term. It's also called "Called-Station-ID", as opposed to "Calling-Station-ID" which is what we call "Caller ID" in common parlance. Needless to say, the ISP I work for actually uses these numbers to determine different classes of service. In principle, it allows you to give a busy signal to one number whilst allowing another number access, because you can actually get access to this info before you tell the other end whether you are willing to accept the call.
That would be great to have at home, wouldn't it? You get a range of 100 telephone numbers, and you can assign them how you like. Based on the incoming number (and the caller ID too, if you like) you can give an engaged signal, direct to a screening service, have the phone ring with one of several identifying tones, etc. The possibilities are endless! Pity it's only available on ISDN-like connections, and usualy only the really high bandwidth ones. Still, sooner or later...
But this whole "identifying marks" thing is something you can use in a broad sense. I'm one of the privileged many (many on Slashdot at least) that can create new email addresses at whim because I have one or more domain names and administrative control over the mail for that domain. But how about physical mail addresses?
I use a PO Box, of course, but that doesn't stop companies sending me junk. But what I make a policy of doing now is tainting every postal address I'm obliged to give out. The address for a PO Box is very short, and it usually gives me one spare line to fill in with irrelevant data. I use this to fill in a "care of" address. Thus, if I'm obliged to give my postal address to buy-a-cd-online.com because my employer gave me credit there as a Christmas gift, I tell them that I'm "Air Supply, c/o C.D.Overmeyer, PO Box blah blah etc". The "C.D.Overmeyer" guff is enough to remind me who I gave that address to, and to write "return to sender" on unpoened envelopes to that address if they start spamming me postally.
As an aside, the most annoying junk mail I get in my PO Box is the stuff that the Post Office puts there, having accepted money from someone else to do so. I think if I'm paying for the box I should be able to say no to this, but I've yet to take it up with the staff. In the meantime, I hurl said junk back through the PO Box onto their floor. Why should I put their junk in the bin for them? Always aim for the bottom line. If everyone did it, they might at least ask us all whether we wanted the junk in the first place instead of stuffing it straight in.
You know, I've just browsed over the comments at level 3 (bite me -- I'm not a moderator, and I tend not to read my own comments unless they get modded up), and I'm pleased to say that they uniformly spank Jamie for calling a corporate decision like this "censorship" as though it were trampling all over our rights as citizens of Planet Earth.
Okay, so Yahoo (exclamation point, TM, etc.) has decided to cowtow to the Frogs on this one. That's their business. You don't have to like them for being an amoral corporate entity that made a decision based on the Almighty Buck as opposed to our inalienable right to sell whatsoever we damn please on their service, but stop harping about censorship. Either that, or come up with a good way of distinguishing between the times it's okay to say "no" and the times it's not. Harping about "censorship" and injustice every time someone says "no, you can't print that here" makes you look like a fringe loon and detracts from the important issues.
But then again, I'm talking crap, because "importance" is a culturally relative concept. Apparently in Germany it's more important to keep Nazi stuff hidden than to be allowed to talk about it, and who am I to say they're wrong about that?
See? Now I'm confused about censorship. Damn! You'd better moderate this down, or something.
5. So why is Microsoft against this, if it prevents wholesale "piracy" of its software in developing nations?
Um, can you ask us another...?
Gee guys, you don't play strategy games like Civilization enough. When your society is pulling in an excess of 10,000 gold per turn, you don't care about small expenses, you use your money as a weapon.
If Microsoft had a really effective way of stamping out piracy, wouldn't they jump at the opportunity? My guess is hell, no! What does piracy cost Microsoft? Money. Well, lost potential revenue is a more accurate way of putting it, but it's not like piracy results in actual stuff being taken from their warehouse. If you're going to be a victim of theft, this is the absolute nicest kind of theft to cop, because you haven't lost anything that you actually had in the first place.
And anyhow: Microsoft has more money than God. What do they care about a bit of lost revenue here and there? They'll go after counterfeiters with gusto, but as for ordinary piracy, they'll stick to big fish and let the little ones go.
But why not solve the problem if a technological solution exists? Why go after individual fish when you can poison the water? Because, my friend, every machine running a Microsoft OS helps Microsoft whether it was paid for or not. Bill's no dill: he knows how important ubiquity is.
Think about it: assume for a moment that China has a 90% piracy rate on Windows (a figure I'm pulling out of the air). If Microsoft were able to make that piracy impossible, what would happen? People would either pay up, give up, or go elsewhere. From Microsoft's perspective, pay up is good, give up is undesirable, and go elsewhere is really bad news.
In the "give up" option, people stop upgrading. After all, there are zillions of copies of unprotected Microsoft OSen out there -- just use an old OS. I think Microsoft would prefer (even if they wouldn't admit it) that people would migrate to newer versions of their OS and not pay for it than stick with the old ones. Notice how cheap "upgrade" packs tend to be relative to the "full version"?
But in the "go elsewhere" option, people start taking desparate measures like using Linux or something! Imagine if, say, 50% of the Chinese market suddenly decided that switching to Linux was a better option than paying way too much for Windows. With that kind of market, people might write software for Linux, and then more people might start using it, and Microsoft would lose their monopoly!
"God forbid!" thinks Bill. "Let them pirate it, but just don't let them get the idea that we condone it!"
This is intended more as a response to the other posts at this level rather than the original. I would thread it properly, but then I'd have to respond to each other post individually. Nuts to that.
Duffbeer703 starts by saying "there is no such thing as 'nonconsensual' speech" and then gives examples of nonconsensual speech. His (valid) point is that not all nonconsensual speech is bad. Okay, that's fair. We can then narrow the discussion as to whether spam is bad nonconsensual speech that should be outlawed like junk fax (anyone want to call anti-junk-fax-laws censorship?) or not.
In the same post we are asked to accept that "Spam, paper junkmail, and Jerry Springer are the prices that we pay to communicate in better and faster ways." I wish spam were so easy to avoid! If paper junk mail pisses me off, I can put a "no junk mail" sign on my letterbox, and where I come from, that works. If Jerry Springer walked past me in the street, I wouldn't recognise him because I've never watched the show, although I did see him parodied on The Simpsons once. As for spam -- well, if I could find a way to stop it from getting into my inbox once and for all (without going to the extreme of nuking every mail account I own), then I don't care whether it continues to exist out there like this Jerry Springer guy or not.
Drinkypoo has the understanding that the RBL and MAPS don't block web pages. Right! You can use it to block SMTP or everything at the IP level. If you do the latter, it blocks everything, and if you're a transit network (one which passes through packets which are sourced and destined for networks other than your own), you create an IP black hole into which packets arrive and never leave. That's where the name comes from, and that's what the fuss is over in this case.
In the same post, drinkypoo raises the good point that it's more like nonconsensual use of your bandwidth and hard disk space, etc. Great! Another reason to separate it from freedom of speech issues! Well put. That whole "property" aspect is pretty important, and it's probably the key issue in junk fax laws. The idiot in the cafe with the cellphone is only doing the wrong thing from a strictly legal perspective (I would suppose) if the owner of the cafe doesn't allow cell phones to be used on his premise. The analogy would seem to hold for spam.
Finally, tstorm clouds the issue, confusing IP blocking with censorship again. You seem to have missed the thrust of the original poster's argument, tstorm. The IP blocking of the ISP is done in reaction to the fact that the ISP has an acceptable use policy which is not acceptable to the other network users. I think it's entirely fair (if drastic) to cut communications with a disruptive network. It's not censorship because it's a reaction to network behaviour, not information content. They'd do the same for people with Subgenius web pages spamming about Bob, or conspiracy theorists spamming about black helicopters. It's about the spam, stupid!
I'm really dubious of censorship, and I positively despise spam. These two sentiments are entirely compatible, so long as you don't oversimplify matters in either direction. Some of the points raised by the above posters have helped make this distinction, some have clouded it. Let's work on the former and learn to detect and avoid the latter.
So, your free software project has copped some stupid remarks in the press? You don't know what to do about it? Fret no more! Spinmeister AirSupply is here to help. Follow these simple steps.
Arrange for a discussion on the matter amongst the offended parties, and then summarise the most clueful points raised in that discussion. Also include counterarguments to points raised in the offending article; reasons why your project is a Good Thing.
Get a team member that is a good wordsmith (yes, they do exist, even in hacker circles) to put together a press release explaining in the politest and most eloquent terms why the offending article is a crock. Let this press release go through at least one round of peer review.
Distribute said press release to all major competitors of the journal that published the offending article, and let nature take its course.
I'd love to have read this interview, but I'm afraid the fourth time I had to click on the "No" button to say that I don't want to install the freaking Macromedia Flash plugin -- well, I just snapped.
Failure -- as your name, so your website.
Several naughty words were removed from this post, but no electrons were harmed.
Lawyers are bringing a class action suit against the perpetrators of this prank on behalf of cuckoos. In a statement released earlier, the lawyers said, "although we appreciate that the technique is being used in an attempt to uphold copyright, we find it intolerable that the cuckoos used in this exercise are not being reimbursed for the use of their music."
In related news, an argument has broken out in the alt.fan.fingerbang newsgroup as to whether the "new mixes" are an improvement or not.
In reference to your proposal for a.gnu TLD, we are currently examining rules and policies for extending the TLD namespace, not accepting individual applications for new TLDs. Rest assured your suggestion that we permit expansion of the namespace is being taken with all seriousness: indeed, I can go so far as to guarantee that we will not be considering any policies which reduce the existing namespace, and we would consider no change to be no progress.
On the other hand, although we are familiar with the Free Software Foundation and its not unsubstantial contribution to the public good in terms of free software, we would like some clarification on your proposal. We note that there are a substantial number of free software projects released by individuals and organisations other than the FSF, and although a substantial number of these identify with GNU in spirit, many do not. A number of questions arise from this.
Must software be released under the GPL specifically in order to qualify for a.gnu TLD name?
If so, then why should the GPL be granted such special treatment compared to other licenses?
If not, then what criteria do you propose?
In either case, do you think it fair that other free licenses (such as BSD) will be either excluded or offered a GNU name, as opposed to having their own TLD?
Do you propose that all licenses be given their own TLD?
Why should free software be given such special treatment, when most such projects already have domain names in.com,.org, or.net? Why.gnu when you already have.gnu.org?
Your clarification on these issues will be appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps legislators that frame and vote for laws which are later found to be unconstitutional should be thrown out of office permanently for failing to uphold the constitution. Enough of this pushing the envelope stuff: turn it into an electric fence, and then see who wants to push it.
The feature in question is better support for virtualisation. I'm led to understand that half the reason projects like Plex86 and proprietary products like VMWare are so clever is that the x86 doesn't lend itself to virtualisation. You can't necessarily retrofit virtualisation, but I suspect you could wrap it around the existing architecture.
What I imagine this to look like in actual practice is a CPU that boots up in a mode where it's just a typical x86, but has a set of extra commands for creating and managing virtual x86en. A virtualisation-aware OS could then use these (privileged, I suppose) commands to initialise and execute virtual machines. Certain exceptions (configured at VM initialisation) would cause the virtual machine to break right back out to the real machine, dumping the virtual machine status in an appropriate location for later restoration.
Clearly there's a largish book worth of details I've left out, but this is just meant to be a seminal idea. I don't even pretend to have any real knowledge of the x86 architecture, specifically.
How would this help Linux? Well hey -- with a little bit of added tweaking, Linux could have 90% of the functionality of VMWare built into it. There are many other applications of virtualisation, and its addition to the core of Linux could make for some interesting possibilities. One application that springs to mind is the idea of having "multi-root" systems, where users can have their own root access to their own virtual system. If the virtualisation commands were also available in the virtual x86, then "virtual" would be a relative concept, and the root user of a virtual system could create more virtual systems of his own.
I think it's a good idea. Now bring on the applause and the clue-sticks.
...but I doubt that it will under the circumstances. I just wanted to point out that some people think that pay-per-listen is inherently evil. To that idea, I have but one word in answer: JUKEBOX. It would be pretty handy at a party to have a mega-jukebox load of songs available on tap, pay-per-listen. Bandwidh, payments, and steeoopid technological obstruction schemes will be the downfall of any such proposal for the moment, however.
On the other hand, Richard Allston, the Minister for Technological Stuff, has got to go.
The only truly incongruous thing about this post is that BillG himself thinks there are better ways to spend a Sunday than church. Or did Melinda finally make him see things her way?
On the other hand, I have issues with Zope. The documentation is incomplete, and the help system has big smokin' holes in it. There's a Zope documentation project, but I have a problem with systems like this where the code is the spec, and the documentation is being written from that — my own particular anal retentiveness factor, I suppose. Zope doesn't behave quite the way I intuited in the getting-to-know you phase of our relationship, and I've had to readjust my think for a number of Zopisms as I go. Also, the naming conventions (plural) suggest to me a certain cobbled-together-ness — an impression which is carried further by the spotty documentation, etc.
If you want to know about my personal bias in languages, I think Perl is truly amazing in the sense that any language which is so butt-ugly in terms of its syntax and structure (inheriting from C, AWK, and shell scripts???) can be so mind-bogglingly useful and easy to use in practice. On the other hand, all the Perl hackers I've worked with produced utterly vile code. Mind you, they produced pretty damn awful C too. I'd prefer to be working in Python if I had to work with them.
And of course I do work with them, but the powers that be won't let us use Python on the basis that it's not a skill you see on resumes as standard yet. Thank God for The Corporate Mentality, no?
A tad off topic, I guess, but I'm wondering why I can't surf to https://slashdot.org/ instead of the usual "http:". That would make the cheesy, insecure bookmarked login somewhat less insecure, and what with all the stuff and nonsense going on in the world at the moment, especially government snooping (Carnivore/DCS) and nasty attempts at blocking stuff "to protect children", I'm getting keen on the idea of using encrypted protocols at every opportunity. So how's about encrypted Slashdot? If I'm lucky, I might even get past my damn ISP's "transparent" web proxies which dish up stale data more often than not.
Not only does he get to look like the good guy this way, he might even salvage his trademark rights, assuming that they have a chance of being beaten in court as it stands. "Yes, they are using my trademark, but they have my explicit permission to do so."
A bit of cooperation is better than a tonne of coercion and legal sabre-rattling any day.
That would be great to have at home, wouldn't it? You get a range of 100 telephone numbers, and you can assign them how you like. Based on the incoming number (and the caller ID too, if you like) you can give an engaged signal, direct to a screening service, have the phone ring with one of several identifying tones, etc. The possibilities are endless! Pity it's only available on ISDN-like connections, and usualy only the really high bandwidth ones. Still, sooner or later...
But this whole "identifying marks" thing is something you can use in a broad sense. I'm one of the privileged many (many on Slashdot at least) that can create new email addresses at whim because I have one or more domain names and administrative control over the mail for that domain. But how about physical mail addresses?
I use a PO Box, of course, but that doesn't stop companies sending me junk. But what I make a policy of doing now is tainting every postal address I'm obliged to give out. The address for a PO Box is very short, and it usually gives me one spare line to fill in with irrelevant data. I use this to fill in a "care of" address. Thus, if I'm obliged to give my postal address to buy-a-cd-online.com because my employer gave me credit there as a Christmas gift, I tell them that I'm "Air Supply, c/o C.D.Overmeyer, PO Box blah blah etc". The "C.D.Overmeyer" guff is enough to remind me who I gave that address to, and to write "return to sender" on unpoened envelopes to that address if they start spamming me postally.
As an aside, the most annoying junk mail I get in my PO Box is the stuff that the Post Office puts there, having accepted money from someone else to do so. I think if I'm paying for the box I should be able to say no to this, but I've yet to take it up with the staff. In the meantime, I hurl said junk back through the PO Box onto their floor. Why should I put their junk in the bin for them? Always aim for the bottom line. If everyone did it, they might at least ask us all whether we wanted the junk in the first place instead of stuffing it straight in.
I hate spam, in all its forms.
Okay, so Yahoo (exclamation point, TM, etc.) has decided to cowtow to the Frogs on this one. That's their business. You don't have to like them for being an amoral corporate entity that made a decision based on the Almighty Buck as opposed to our inalienable right to sell whatsoever we damn please on their service, but stop harping about censorship. Either that, or come up with a good way of distinguishing between the times it's okay to say "no" and the times it's not. Harping about "censorship" and injustice every time someone says "no, you can't print that here" makes you look like a fringe loon and detracts from the important issues.
But then again, I'm talking crap, because "importance" is a culturally relative concept. Apparently in Germany it's more important to keep Nazi stuff hidden than to be allowed to talk about it, and who am I to say they're wrong about that?
See? Now I'm confused about censorship. Damn! You'd better moderate this down, or something.
Gee guys, you don't play strategy games like Civilization enough. When your society is pulling in an excess of 10,000 gold per turn, you don't care about small expenses, you use your money as a weapon.
If Microsoft had a really effective way of stamping out piracy, wouldn't they jump at the opportunity? My guess is hell, no! What does piracy cost Microsoft? Money. Well, lost potential revenue is a more accurate way of putting it, but it's not like piracy results in actual stuff being taken from their warehouse. If you're going to be a victim of theft, this is the absolute nicest kind of theft to cop, because you haven't lost anything that you actually had in the first place.
And anyhow: Microsoft has more money than God. What do they care about a bit of lost revenue here and there? They'll go after counterfeiters with gusto, but as for ordinary piracy, they'll stick to big fish and let the little ones go.
But why not solve the problem if a technological solution exists? Why go after individual fish when you can poison the water? Because, my friend, every machine running a Microsoft OS helps Microsoft whether it was paid for or not. Bill's no dill: he knows how important ubiquity is.
Think about it: assume for a moment that China has a 90% piracy rate on Windows (a figure I'm pulling out of the air). If Microsoft were able to make that piracy impossible, what would happen? People would either pay up, give up, or go elsewhere. From Microsoft's perspective, pay up is good, give up is undesirable, and go elsewhere is really bad news.
In the "give up" option, people stop upgrading. After all, there are zillions of copies of unprotected Microsoft OSen out there -- just use an old OS. I think Microsoft would prefer (even if they wouldn't admit it) that people would migrate to newer versions of their OS and not pay for it than stick with the old ones. Notice how cheap "upgrade" packs tend to be relative to the "full version"?
But in the "go elsewhere" option, people start taking desparate measures like using Linux or something! Imagine if, say, 50% of the Chinese market suddenly decided that switching to Linux was a better option than paying way too much for Windows. With that kind of market, people might write software for Linux, and then more people might start using it, and Microsoft would lose their monopoly!
"God forbid!" thinks Bill. "Let them pirate it, but just don't let them get the idea that we condone it!"
Or maybe I've let Civ-playing go to my head.
Duffbeer703 starts by saying "there is no such thing as 'nonconsensual' speech" and then gives examples of nonconsensual speech. His (valid) point is that not all nonconsensual speech is bad. Okay, that's fair. We can then narrow the discussion as to whether spam is bad nonconsensual speech that should be outlawed like junk fax (anyone want to call anti-junk-fax-laws censorship?) or not.
In the same post we are asked to accept that "Spam, paper junkmail, and Jerry Springer are the prices that we pay to communicate in better and faster ways." I wish spam were so easy to avoid! If paper junk mail pisses me off, I can put a "no junk mail" sign on my letterbox, and where I come from, that works. If Jerry Springer walked past me in the street, I wouldn't recognise him because I've never watched the show, although I did see him parodied on The Simpsons once. As for spam -- well, if I could find a way to stop it from getting into my inbox once and for all (without going to the extreme of nuking every mail account I own), then I don't care whether it continues to exist out there like this Jerry Springer guy or not.
Drinkypoo has the understanding that the RBL and MAPS don't block web pages. Right! You can use it to block SMTP or everything at the IP level. If you do the latter, it blocks everything, and if you're a transit network (one which passes through packets which are sourced and destined for networks other than your own), you create an IP black hole into which packets arrive and never leave. That's where the name comes from, and that's what the fuss is over in this case.
In the same post, drinkypoo raises the good point that it's more like nonconsensual use of your bandwidth and hard disk space, etc. Great! Another reason to separate it from freedom of speech issues! Well put. That whole "property" aspect is pretty important, and it's probably the key issue in junk fax laws. The idiot in the cafe with the cellphone is only doing the wrong thing from a strictly legal perspective (I would suppose) if the owner of the cafe doesn't allow cell phones to be used on his premise. The analogy would seem to hold for spam.
Finally, tstorm clouds the issue, confusing IP blocking with censorship again. You seem to have missed the thrust of the original poster's argument, tstorm. The IP blocking of the ISP is done in reaction to the fact that the ISP has an acceptable use policy which is not acceptable to the other network users. I think it's entirely fair (if drastic) to cut communications with a disruptive network. It's not censorship because it's a reaction to network behaviour, not information content. They'd do the same for people with Subgenius web pages spamming about Bob, or conspiracy theorists spamming about black helicopters. It's about the spam, stupid!
I'm really dubious of censorship, and I positively despise spam. These two sentiments are entirely compatible, so long as you don't oversimplify matters in either direction. Some of the points raised by the above posters have helped make this distinction, some have clouded it. Let's work on the former and learn to detect and avoid the latter.
Swedes like, say, Linus Torvalds for example?
Bad troll. No biscuit.
"Hello, chief? You're where?"
I think the way I misread this on my first glance is more interesting.
Not perfect english, but this is Slashdot, right?
I'd like to take this moment to remind you all that you shouldn't look at the sun during an eclipse either. Play safe, kids!
A handful of Canadian quarters says it's not an open-source product.
Were these Canadian quarters a reliable source?
Failure -- as your name, so your website.
Several naughty words were removed from this post, but no electrons were harmed.
Lawyers are bringing a class action suit against the perpetrators of this prank on behalf of cuckoos. In a statement released earlier, the lawyers said, "although we appreciate that the technique is being used in an attempt to uphold copyright, we find it intolerable that the cuckoos used in this exercise are not being reimbursed for the use of their music."
In related news, an argument has broken out in the alt.fan.fingerbang newsgroup as to whether the "new mixes" are an improvement or not.
Dear Mr Stallman,
In reference to your proposal for a .gnu TLD, we are currently examining rules and policies for extending the TLD namespace, not accepting individual applications for new TLDs. Rest assured your suggestion that we permit expansion of the namespace is being taken with all seriousness: indeed, I can go so far as to guarantee that we will not be considering any policies which reduce the existing namespace, and we would consider no change to be no progress.
On the other hand, although we are familiar with the Free Software Foundation and its not unsubstantial contribution to the public good in terms of free software, we would like some clarification on your proposal. We note that there are a substantial number of free software projects released by individuals and organisations other than the FSF, and although a substantial number of these identify with GNU in spirit, many do not. A number of questions arise from this.
Your clarification on these issues will be appreciated.
Regards,
ICANN