Given the popularity of OpenOffice, and the up and coming KDE officeware project, where does microsoft stand to make any money?
By making a better office suite.
Openoffice has a long way to go before I, or my employer, or my employer's organization, or anyone my employer deals with can seriously consider it.
Given the right circumstnace, MS would "give windows away." Think about it: a 100% DRM media box, with a contractual deal that you pay $1 per file (or even $0.10 per file) that you add into the box...
FrontPage 2000/2002 does, but earlier versions were horrible about mangling code. You could place HTML in, go to design view, go back, garbage. In the first versions no one cared (since FP users tended to rely solely on the design view), but it got bad with FP97 and FP98. FP2000 went a long way to correct this.
I believe that both FP and Moz have a tendency to squish unneeded characters out of a HTML file--things like end-of-line marks and dupliate spaces that are meaningless HTML-wise but necessary for humans to use.
Thankfully, they both have an option to "use original formatting." And they still manage to mess things up sometimes...:) Either one beats making tables by hand, though.
If it's anything as bad as Frontpage then it must be pretty awful. Does it double the size of each page throwing in FONT and DIV tags around everything?
Yep. Annoying, isn't it?
But if your pages are doubled in size simply by the addition of DIV and FONT tags, there's something very wrong with how you've got them set up...
Odd, Frontpage (also a WYSIWYG HTML editor) produces "human readable" code--well, at least as well as Mozilla does...
I'd love to see an OSS Frontpage workalike. I'd even boot into Linux to use it, if necessary.
Re:Per Transaction Fees Suck...
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Why SHOULDN'T a merchant be able to pass on their fees to me?
There is no law against that. However, the merchant's private contract with the CC company usually forces her/him. Not always -- seems like gas stations have (or used to have) a different contract.
That's the rub, actually. CCs are a financial institution that hardly seems regulated, by the gov't or by a sense of fairness.
A merchant's contract with something as ubiquitous as the CCs should be public, fair, and intelligent. Merchants SHOULD be able require minimum purchases / higher prices for CC transactions. The CC company should not be able to dictate unfair terms--there should be some middle ground between "be the CC company's bitch" and "not accept CCs."
The service provided by CCs is banking--access either to a credit or a debit account. They should be treated as an extension of the banks they provide, and regulated as such--treated as something that needs to be regulated as closely as checks or cash.
Private corporations have no business printing money, and they should have no business making money cards, either.
I do not hold my output hostage...i give it freely to the companies, and their use of it is what they will of it, except that they must reference the writer - me - when they use the data. They are not allowed to say "this analysis was done by us" I only ask that they say "this analysis was done by gsfprez".
What else they do with the data, i don't care, and its not my business....I have gotten plenty of work simply from others seeing my output, and they were impressed.
You have decided to take the recurring income from your creative effort in the form of publicity rather than cash; this does not alter that you are getting recurring income from the work.
If you can find a creative (or semicreative) person who gets no credit, no recurring income, and no control over the work they do, and the only thing that they get is in their paycheck, THEN you've found someone who gets "paid for their work."
It's really not all that hard a concept to understand, really. Every transaction carries a certain "recurring" cost; in certain creative aspects, this can be the only cost that the creator recieves for the work, and so it's important to preserve.
But even in non-creative and semi-creative methods of work (everything from planting a field to coding a custom program), there is a certain recurring income to the worker, be it in cash or simply in reputation and goodwill.
but unless I suffer a real financial hardship, or my property is taken away from me without my permission, it's not theft. If he came to my door and caused me to miss a pay-per-view moive, it wouldn't be theft either.
Irrelevant. I didn't give them permission to waste my precious resources on their crap.
As opposed to the amazingly efficient uses your "precious resources" were going to be used for?
Fact is, my resources are being stolen. I am denied the use of them while these fuckwits use them to display their tacky ads. Its like you stealing my car, using it for an hour, then returning it. Sorry, that's still theft and you should go to jail for it. Irrelevant of how small the theft, it still violates my rights.
What if I park my car in your yard? Or swim in your pool without asking? Either one is a tort, is probably illegal, and deprives you of the use of your property--but it's not theft.
Let me repeate that: it's WRONG, but it's not THEFT in the way that stealing your car for a joyride is.
Property rights need to be ask-first. That is, you can't just steal my property and then compensate me. You have to ask me if X would compensate me fairly for my property. I'm not making this argument eloquently, but Lessig does.
Lessig's a lawyer; I'm not. However, I'm reasonably sure that he could explain the difference between theft and 'theft-of-service' to you.
Really, man, you're getting all riled up about the wrong reason. Spaming someone should be a felony at least as hardcore as drug dealing. I'm on your side.
I'm just trying to tell you that you're using the wrong word... and getting angry at me about doesn't help our side one bit.
The idea that a corporation should be able to pay the government to defend itself against the rights of the people is completely ridiculous; in fact, it creates a serious conflict of interest.
Not really. Copyright is itself a grant against the public interest to encourage creativity and art. An exponentially-sliding scale fee extension is simply the creator / owner of the work paying for the continuence of their original grant.
I for one would love it if corporate control of copyrights was all but eliminated--there is no greater oxymoron than "corporate art." But given the choice between the oft-suggested "sliding fee scale" and the current "buy an extension via pseudo-bribery," I think I'd rather have the fee.
At least that way it's all above board, honest, and the gov't has some way to let its entrenched corporations (like disney) help pay down the national debt.
The technology that this crook described which would flash pop-ups to people connected to the internet is also illegal -- it steals MY resources (my RAM, my CPU time, my GPU power, etc).
I'm ususally prone to pop up and define colloquial uses of "steal"--but in this case, I've got to speak for the other side.
Your "resources" are not being stolen--they're being used without your permission. That's much more like tresspass than theft--heck, copyright infringement (where you're skipping the purchase you should be making) is more like theft than this.
Your RAM, CPU, and GPU will still be there once you've seen the spam, and you will have no more RAM, CPU, or GPU if you never see the spam than if you do--and if you've got a GPU, chances are that your "resources" have no reasonable expectation of earning you money, either.
Firstly, can anyone envision what could possibly do this?
The MS windows messaging service. With knowledge of an IP, you can send a message a computer that's just sitting on the network, with no software aside from the system + middleware running.
You can turn off the service, use any one of a dozen windows software firewalls, or just uninstall the bugger if you don't use it.
Can you quote a source for that? I've never the claim heard before that.doc is simply a dump of part of the physical memory that MS word uses.
It sounds a little shakey as well, considering that word has a default "fast saves" option which only saves the changes--something that doesn't seem worthwile if the file's a simple memory dump. I mean, is it really THAT much harder to write 2k to a file instead of 20k?
Yes, I can always beat up someone to pulp using a microwave oven. Is that your justification for saying that all microwave oven will definitely hurt people? I can run people down with cars - should they not be used at all? Aspirin in large doses can also kill people - hmm let's ban that too!!
What makes you think that [hurts people] = [must be banned]? I certainly didn't say it.
Some people deserve to be hurt. More people than that deserve to be helped. Sadly, the only sure thing for new inventions is that they can be used to hurt (asprin probably works better for hurting someone by aiding in bleeding them to death.) It is never, even in medical research, sure that a new invention can possibly be used to help people.
And none of it, none of it, justifies putting up roadblocks to research that will, almost certainly, in the not-too-distant future, save lives.
Tell me how is so almost-certain that biological manufacture of organisms will save lives.
I think the only "inevitable" use of technologoy is that it will be used to hurt someone.
Now, I don't find any moral concerns with biological research that doesn't involve harming people, nor do I find any ethical problems if they're honest. I don't think that we're "playing God" if we create new life or alter extant life--
I'm getting really tired of people equating copying information with 'theft.' Copyright breach it may be (an entirely different kettle of fish, as anyone who understand copyright knows [slashdot.org]), but theft it is not. The two circumstances are not even remotely similar enough to warrant such a comparison, and anyone who argues otherwise is committing a False Analogy [datanation.com] fallacy. (Going into a store and "five-finger discounting" the actual CD is both theft and copyright breach, just to be sure we're clear on that.)
If you come up with a brilliant novel, and I take your manuscript and publish it as my own, I haven't committted "copyright infringement" in the vernacular--I've stolen your manuscript.
"Taking something that doesn't belong to you" is theft, and anyone who tells you otherwise is getting hung up on the details. Or, rather, they're arguing over a word to try and get moral high ground.
Oh, and if you're just stealing the CD, you haven't committeed copyright infringement unless you copy it--you've just stolen a copy.
According to The Next Generation Technical Manual, phaser blasts travel at c, or the speed of light, as a phaser is a directed energy weapon.
Then either the book is wrong, or the observed effects are wrong.
Considering that the characters DO dodge phaser blasts, in person and in ships, directed energy weapons obviously don't travel at even a very high fraction of c.
If you care to rebut, can you answer me a question: if the phasers are all energy, how come we can see them from the side?
(I think phasers are more like "high-tech lightning" than "deadly lasers", myself.)
because this is so much easier than just lowering prices to achieve the same effect.
No, it isn't. It's entirely different.
I don't bother to try and exchange tapes of anime--even the legal ones--beause it's more convenient to buy it at the store or watch it on TV.
I _do_ exchange song files, and I try to be legal and buy the CD--but it's so much more hassle to buy the CDs and record the MP3s so they're how I use them than to go out and get the files from someone who's allready done it.
If RIAA could make a delivery mechanism that was as convenient as Napster was and some P2P networks are, they'd win even if the other network was still cheaper. At least, they'd win this battle, and then they could start fighting the next one.
As long as we can get the encoded version (on the disc) and decoded version (out the speaker or monitor) of media (music, movies) then copy protection is doomed.
You misunderstand. RIAA doesn't need to make copying impossible--they just need to raise sufficient barriers so that an equal-copy version is harder to get than walking to the store and buying one.
They don't even have to worry about price right now--they just need to make the most convenient method of getting a copy of re-listenable (as opposed to broadcast) music to get it from them.
(Yeah, and online delivery would be the best way to get it--but that sorta requires DRM at the moment...)
yeah. like calculating the precise angle and velocity to jump in order to avoid a phaser shot that was just fired. Damn but if I could move faster than the speed of light as well as Mr Shatner did (regularly) on Star Trek...
Not quite...
A phaser's energy pulse doesn't travel at c--if it did, we'd never see even a little streak in any scale small enough to see the crew or the enterprise. The directed-energy weapon has at least some mass to contain the energy.
And even if the phasers did move at c, to dodge one you don't need to get out of the way of the ray--you need to get out of the way of the person pointing it. It's much easier to dodge reaction time than the speed of light.;)
It's also probably simpler for a brain to calc. the likely target of the phaser, and then NOT to be there, than to try and find the optimum hiding place. Act first, and think in the half-second while your body is going "wow, we're not dead!"
Re:Per Transaction Fees Suck...
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What about the competition between the service providers? Is it no longer a good thing?..
No. They don't provide a service--banks do. Visa, Mastercard, et al are effectively monopolies. They should be standardized and treated like any other natural monopoly. A decade or so of government control will inject a modicum of fair use into the system.
Why SHOULDN'T a merchant be able to pass on their fees to me?
'sides which, weren't MC and Visa written up for being a trust a while back?
Re:Per Transaction Fees Suck...
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If the customer doesn't understand the difference and says a debit card is credit (since they look very similar) and doesnt enter their PIN than a transaction fee higher than a credit card is charged.
If I use my Fleet "Total Access" card as a debit card, I get charged a fee. If i use it as a "credit card", I don't.
The whole darn system should be federalized, IMO. Cut the fees to the bone, play fair, and kill/absorb the middlemen.
How much of a Geek are you, anway?
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Will Wheaton has showed up on/. several times, and proved himself to be as geeky as any of the slashdot editorial staff.
How much of a geek are you, Mr. Shater? Do you build your own PC from scratch and put Linux on it, or do you not even pay attention if your PC is Windows or Mac?
I'm not USian, so I may be entirely wrong here... but isn't it possible to prosecute someone privately? Ie, you think they've broken the law, the police don't want to file charges, so you file them yourself (and take the place of public prosecutor)?
IANAL--but I don't think so.
Unless the crime is also a tort against you, I don't think you have standing to sue.
However, if you're harmed by the crime and the DA doesn't prosecute--and they've got ample evidence to convict--you might be able to take the DA to court to force the issue.
'course, that was something I saw on Law & Order, so i have no idea if it's true or not...
It would be perfectly good enough if third parties could take an ISP and a spammer to court and get the court to order the ISP to enforce their abuse policy.
If you get spammed via an ISP's misconduct and suffer damages (lost work, wasted time, etc.) you probably have standing to take the ISP to court to force them to properly secure their system.
Unfortunately, if you've got the kind of money/time to be taking ISPs to court for a nuciance, you probably can just get real spam blocking installed...
Isn't the present-day country where Babylonia was centered Iraq?
Yes, actually.
But the compulsions we have to smite Iraq are secular, not religious.
Were we in the USA guided by a religious compulsion to "smite babylon", we'd have nuked them in the Gulf War, in response to the first whiff of chemical weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the popularity of OpenOffice, and the up and coming KDE officeware project, where does microsoft stand to make any money?
By making a better office suite.
Openoffice has a long way to go before I, or my employer, or my employer's organization, or anyone my employer deals with can seriously consider it.
Given the right circumstnace, MS would "give windows away." Think about it: a 100% DRM media box, with a contractual deal that you pay $1 per file (or even $0.10 per file) that you add into the box...
Yeah, I could see them giving windows away.
FrontPage 2000/2002 does, but earlier versions were horrible about mangling code. You could place HTML in, go to design view, go back, garbage. In the first versions no one cared (since FP users tended to rely solely on the design view), but it got bad with FP97 and FP98. FP2000 went a long way to correct this.
:) Either one beats making tables by hand, though.
I believe that both FP and Moz have a tendency to squish unneeded characters out of a HTML file--things like end-of-line marks and dupliate spaces that are meaningless HTML-wise but necessary for humans to use.
Thankfully, they both have an option to "use original formatting." And they still manage to mess things up sometimes...
If it's anything as bad as Frontpage then it must be pretty awful. Does it double the size of each page throwing in FONT and DIV tags around everything?
Yep. Annoying, isn't it?
But if your pages are doubled in size simply by the addition of DIV and FONT tags, there's something very wrong with how you've got them set up...
The code it produces is human readable!
Odd, Frontpage (also a WYSIWYG HTML editor) produces "human readable" code--well, at least as well as Mozilla does...
I'd love to see an OSS Frontpage workalike. I'd even boot into Linux to use it, if necessary.
Why SHOULDN'T a merchant be able to pass on their fees to me?
There is no law against that. However, the merchant's private contract with the CC company usually forces her/him. Not always -- seems like gas stations have (or used to have) a different contract.
That's the rub, actually. CCs are a financial institution that hardly seems regulated, by the gov't or by a sense of fairness.
A merchant's contract with something as ubiquitous as the CCs should be public, fair, and intelligent. Merchants SHOULD be able require minimum purchases / higher prices for CC transactions. The CC company should not be able to dictate unfair terms--there should be some middle ground between "be the CC company's bitch" and "not accept CCs."
The service provided by CCs is banking--access either to a credit or a debit account. They should be treated as an extension of the banks they provide, and regulated as such--treated as something that needs to be regulated as closely as checks or cash.
Private corporations have no business printing money, and they should have no business making money cards, either.
I do not hold my output hostage.. .i give it freely to the companies, and their use of it is what they will of it, except that they must reference the writer - me - when they use the data. They are not allowed to say "this analysis was done by us" I only ask that they say "this analysis was done by gsfprez".
What else they do with the data, i don't care, and its not my business....I have gotten plenty of work simply from others seeing my output, and they were impressed.
You have decided to take the recurring income from your creative effort in the form of publicity rather than cash; this does not alter that you are getting recurring income from the work.
If you can find a creative (or semicreative) person who gets no credit, no recurring income, and no control over the work they do, and the only thing that they get is in their paycheck, THEN you've found someone who gets "paid for their work."
It's really not all that hard a concept to understand, really. Every transaction carries a certain "recurring" cost; in certain creative aspects, this can be the only cost that the creator recieves for the work, and so it's important to preserve.
But even in non-creative and semi-creative methods of work (everything from planting a field to coding a custom program), there is a certain recurring income to the worker, be it in cash or simply in reputation and goodwill.
I hope he does go to jail...
but unless I suffer a real financial hardship, or my property is taken away from me without my permission, it's not theft. If he came to my door and caused me to miss a pay-per-view moive, it wouldn't be theft either.
(IANAL, but see sig.)
Irrelevant. I didn't give them permission to waste my precious resources on their crap.
As opposed to the amazingly efficient uses your "precious resources" were going to be used for?
Fact is, my resources are being stolen. I am denied the use of them while these fuckwits use them to display their tacky ads. Its like you stealing my car, using it for an hour, then returning it. Sorry, that's still theft and you should go to jail for it. Irrelevant of how small the theft, it still violates my rights.
What if I park my car in your yard? Or swim in your pool without asking? Either one is a tort, is probably illegal, and deprives you of the use of your property--but it's not theft.
Let me repeate that: it's WRONG, but it's not THEFT in the way that stealing your car for a joyride is.
Property rights need to be ask-first. That is, you can't just steal my property and then compensate me. You have to ask me if X would compensate me fairly for my property. I'm not making this argument eloquently, but Lessig does.
Lessig's a lawyer; I'm not. However, I'm reasonably sure that he could explain the difference between theft and 'theft-of-service' to you.
Really, man, you're getting all riled up about the wrong reason. Spaming someone should be a felony at least as hardcore as drug dealing. I'm on your side.
I'm just trying to tell you that you're using the wrong word... and getting angry at me about doesn't help our side one bit.
The idea that a corporation should be able to pay the government to defend itself against the rights of the people is completely ridiculous; in fact, it creates a serious conflict of interest.
Not really. Copyright is itself a grant against the public interest to encourage creativity and art. An exponentially-sliding scale fee extension is simply the creator / owner of the work paying for the continuence of their original grant.
I for one would love it if corporate control of copyrights was all but eliminated--there is no greater oxymoron than "corporate art." But given the choice between the oft-suggested "sliding fee scale" and the current "buy an extension via pseudo-bribery," I think I'd rather have the fee.
At least that way it's all above board, honest, and the gov't has some way to let its entrenched corporations (like disney) help pay down the national debt.
The technology that this crook described which would flash pop-ups to people connected to the internet is also illegal -- it steals MY resources (my RAM, my CPU time, my GPU power, etc).
I'm ususally prone to pop up and define colloquial uses of "steal"--but in this case, I've got to speak for the other side.
Your "resources" are not being stolen--they're being used without your permission. That's much more like tresspass than theft--heck, copyright infringement (where you're skipping the purchase you should be making) is more like theft than this.
Your RAM, CPU, and GPU will still be there once you've seen the spam, and you will have no more RAM, CPU, or GPU if you never see the spam than if you do--and if you've got a GPU, chances are that your "resources" have no reasonable expectation of earning you money, either.
Firstly, can anyone envision what could possibly do this?
The MS windows messaging service. With knowledge of an IP, you can send a message a computer that's just sitting on the network, with no software aside from the system + middleware running.
You can turn off the service, use any one of a dozen windows software firewalls, or just uninstall the bugger if you don't use it.
Can you quote a source for that? I've never the claim heard before that .doc is simply a dump of part of the physical memory that MS word uses.
It sounds a little shakey as well, considering that word has a default "fast saves" option which only saves the changes--something that doesn't seem worthwile if the file's a simple memory dump. I mean, is it really THAT much harder to write 2k to a file instead of 20k?
Au contraire. The whole thing is built around that 16 bit 8-3 filename DOS shell. It's the GUI part that's an "afterthought".
Was. WAS built around that 16-bit 8.3 quick and dirty operating system.
It was rebuilt in 1995 to a 32-bit 256 filename DOS replacement, and shortly thereafter in a not-really-DOS-at-all OS called NT.
And in NT, I think the command line was an afterthought. There's a lot that can be done with it, but not nearly enough.
If the paper's legit, expect a command-line resurgance for Windows server. Or at least, hope for one.
(And on a totally different note--I think I'd rather have a "GUI first CLI later" structure than a "CLI first GUI later" strucutre like Linux.)
Yes, I can always beat up someone to pulp using a microwave oven. Is that your justification for saying that all microwave oven will definitely hurt people? I can run people down with cars - should they not be used at all? Aspirin in large doses can also kill people - hmm let's ban that too!!
What makes you think that [hurts people] = [must be banned]? I certainly didn't say it.
Some people deserve to be hurt. More people than that deserve to be helped. Sadly, the only sure thing for new inventions is that they can be used to hurt (asprin probably works better for hurting someone by aiding in bleeding them to death.) It is never, even in medical research, sure that a new invention can possibly be used to help people.
And none of it, none of it, justifies putting up roadblocks to research that will, almost certainly, in the not-too-distant future, save lives.
Tell me how is so almost-certain that biological manufacture of organisms will save lives.
I think the only "inevitable" use of technologoy is that it will be used to hurt someone.
Now, I don't find any moral concerns with biological research that doesn't involve harming people, nor do I find any ethical problems if they're honest. I don't think that we're "playing God" if we create new life or alter extant life--
Or, rather, we are, but He wants us to.
I'm getting really tired of people equating copying information with 'theft.' Copyright breach it may be (an entirely different kettle of fish, as anyone who understand copyright knows [slashdot.org]), but theft it is not. The two circumstances are not even remotely similar enough to warrant such a comparison, and anyone who argues otherwise is committing a False Analogy [datanation.com] fallacy. (Going into a store and "five-finger discounting" the actual CD is both theft and copyright breach, just to be sure we're clear on that.)
If you come up with a brilliant novel, and I take your manuscript and publish it as my own, I haven't committted "copyright infringement" in the vernacular--I've stolen your manuscript.
"Taking something that doesn't belong to you" is theft, and anyone who tells you otherwise is getting hung up on the details. Or, rather, they're arguing over a word to try and get moral high ground.
Oh, and if you're just stealing the CD, you haven't committeed copyright infringement unless you copy it--you've just stolen a copy.
According to The Next Generation Technical Manual, phaser blasts travel at c, or the speed of light, as a phaser is a directed energy weapon.
Then either the book is wrong, or the observed effects are wrong.
Considering that the characters DO dodge phaser blasts, in person and in ships, directed energy weapons obviously don't travel at even a very high fraction of c.
If you care to rebut, can you answer me a question: if the phasers are all energy, how come we can see them from the side?
(I think phasers are more like "high-tech lightning" than "deadly lasers", myself.)
because this is so much easier than just lowering prices to achieve the same effect.
No, it isn't. It's entirely different.
I don't bother to try and exchange tapes of anime--even the legal ones--beause it's more convenient to buy it at the store or watch it on TV.
I _do_ exchange song files, and I try to be legal and buy the CD--but it's so much more hassle to buy the CDs and record the MP3s so they're how I use them than to go out and get the files from someone who's allready done it.
If RIAA could make a delivery mechanism that was as convenient as Napster was and some P2P networks are, they'd win even if the other network was still cheaper. At least, they'd win this battle, and then they could start fighting the next one.
As long as we can get the encoded version (on the disc) and decoded version (out the speaker or monitor) of media (music, movies) then copy protection is doomed.
You misunderstand. RIAA doesn't need to make copying impossible--they just need to raise sufficient barriers so that an equal-copy version is harder to get than walking to the store and buying one.
They don't even have to worry about price right now--they just need to make the most convenient method of getting a copy of re-listenable (as opposed to broadcast) music to get it from them.
(Yeah, and online delivery would be the best way to get it--but that sorta requires DRM at the moment...)
yeah. like calculating the precise angle and velocity to jump in order to avoid a phaser shot that was just fired. Damn but if I could move faster than the speed of light as well as Mr Shatner did (regularly) on Star Trek...
;)
Not quite...
A phaser's energy pulse doesn't travel at c--if it did, we'd never see even a little streak in any scale small enough to see the crew or the enterprise. The directed-energy weapon has at least some mass to contain the energy.
And even if the phasers did move at c, to dodge one you don't need to get out of the way of the ray--you need to get out of the way of the person pointing it. It's much easier to dodge reaction time than the speed of light.
It's also probably simpler for a brain to calc. the likely target of the phaser, and then NOT to be there, than to try and find the optimum hiding place. Act first, and think in the half-second while your body is going "wow, we're not dead!"
What about the competition between the service providers? Is it no longer a good thing?..
No. They don't provide a service--banks do. Visa, Mastercard, et al are effectively monopolies. They should be standardized and treated like any other natural monopoly. A decade or so of government control will inject a modicum of fair use into the system.
Why SHOULDN'T a merchant be able to pass on their fees to me?
'sides which, weren't MC and Visa written up for being a trust a while back?
If the customer doesn't understand the difference and says a debit card is credit (since they look very similar) and doesnt enter their PIN than a transaction fee higher than a credit card is charged.
If I use my Fleet "Total Access" card as a debit card, I get charged a fee. If i use it as a "credit card", I don't.
The whole darn system should be federalized, IMO. Cut the fees to the bone, play fair, and kill/absorb the middlemen.
Will Wheaton has showed up on /. several times, and proved himself to be as geeky as any of the slashdot editorial staff.
How much of a geek are you, Mr. Shater? Do you build your own PC from scratch and put Linux on it, or do you not even pay attention if your PC is Windows or Mac?
I'm not USian, so I may be entirely wrong here... but isn't it possible to prosecute someone privately? Ie, you think they've broken the law, the police don't want to file charges, so you file them yourself (and take the place of public prosecutor)?
IANAL--but I don't think so.
Unless the crime is also a tort against you, I don't think you have standing to sue.
However, if you're harmed by the crime and the DA doesn't prosecute--and they've got ample evidence to convict--you might be able to take the DA to court to force the issue.
'course, that was something I saw on Law & Order, so i have no idea if it's true or not...
It would be perfectly good enough if third parties could take an ISP and a spammer to court and get the court to order the ISP to enforce their abuse policy.
If you get spammed via an ISP's misconduct and suffer damages (lost work, wasted time, etc.) you probably have standing to take the ISP to court to force them to properly secure their system.
Unfortunately, if you've got the kind of money/time to be taking ISPs to court for a nuciance, you probably can just get real spam blocking installed...
Isn't the present-day country where Babylonia was centered Iraq?
Yes, actually.
But the compulsions we have to smite Iraq are secular, not religious.
Were we in the USA guided by a religious compulsion to "smite babylon", we'd have nuked them in the Gulf War, in response to the first whiff of chemical weapons.